5 free RPGs you can download right now {Free Stuff}

Everyone likes free things, so here are five RPGs you can get your hands on right now for no money whatsoever: 

Renaissance 
Cubicle 7 is one of the great British RPG powerhouses and most of the games I've read are high quality and well-written. Renaissance is a d100 system for historical and fantasy gaming containing gunpowdery explosive goodness. The game uses OpenQuest rules, so if you're familiar with Runequest or Legend you can easily get to grips with Renaissance.

Download here.

Atomic Highway
If post-apocalyptic Mad Max style adventure is what you're looking for, then 2010 Ennie nominee Atomic Highway has a high probability of floating your boat. The system is built on the V6 Engine, which promises action-packed cinematic style gameplay. While you have all your usual stock post-apocalyptic tropes like mutants and salvageable items, the book also details how to create your own unique setting, which I think is pretty damned cool.

Download here.

Kapow!
Over the past few years there have been some great superhero roleplaying games released, such as Icons and Wild Talents 2nd Edition, but in my mind there's always room for more. Kapow! is built with the SFX! System which keeps the game flowing, allowing the players to really feel like heroes. It may not look like much from the cover, but this little game has it where it counts.

Download here.

Novarium
With a positive review from Trollish Delver friend Tenkar's Tavern, you know Novarium is going to be good. While it's set in a fantasy realm, the premise is actually really original. An angel visited the land of Vaena and endowed ever female with magic, turning the tables of what was a patriarchal society into one where women have risen into power. Each player has a primary and secondary character, where the secondary tends to things like research and care for their land while the primary is off on quests. Oh, and the art is smashing!

Download here.

The Age of Shadow: Roleplaying Game
If you want good honest fantasy fun, then you might want to give The Age of Shadows a bash. This is another one based on OpenQuest and has a gritty, deadly feel, where combats are quick and brutal. While not a lot has been changed from the original system, there are a few modifications and for the price of breathing, you'd be silly not to get it.

Download here.

Roleplaying games as art {RPG Philosophy}

The roleplaying game is a strange beast. Right from the get-go we usually have the author of the rulebook describe to us what exactly a roleplaying game is, and it's often along the lines of, 'It's part storytelling, part dice-rolling, where YOU are the hero of the story'. Clearly, the act of weaving a narrative is a traditional art form that dates back to the dawn of humanity; so there's no disparity there. However, a game is not thought of as an art form. You cannot say that basketball or tennis is art, yet there is probably an art to certain aspects of those sports. So are roleplaying games, as part-storytelling, part game, art? 

Firstly, we need to determine the term 'art'. Really, it's an expression of arrangement that evokes emotion and thought. A film constitutes various aspects, such as actors, camera people and the director, arranged in such a way as to present the audience with a product which elicits one or multiple responses. Similarly, a painter arranges her paint of different colours, thicknesses and styles in order to create her painting. The term 'art' has leaked out from these more traditional outlets recently into the digital realm of video games, where the question I'm posing for roleplaying games rages on.

Which bring us to the crux of the matter. If video games can widely be considered an art form, can roleplaying games? After all, they are essentially the same product, just with different modes of interactivity and presentation. A video game is created by a developer who usually creates a story, a character for the audience to control, and interactive elements. Clearly, the main point of the medium is to be a game, like basketball or tennis, but what sets a video game apart from these are the narrative and stylistic aspects.

Roleplaying games are the same. The GM creates a narrative, NPCs and a world. While there is art style in terms of paintings in sourcebooks, most of it comes  from the GM and the players' descriptions of the roleplaying universe they inhabit. Can these games elicit emotion? Of course they can. A player can become sad if a trusted NPC dies, or happy when they finally solve the puzzle. Of course, all good art carries some kind of message, which is something that usually doesn't come into RPG adventures other than 'good is better than evil', unless the game has an integrated setting that is awash with allegory and metaphor.

So yes, the roleplaying game is an art form for all the reasons stated above, but what does this actually mean? To be honest, it doesn't mean much. The reason why the question is such a big one in the video games world is because it's such a massive industry and there are still people who don't see what use it has in comparison to cinema. The artistic integrity of the roleplaying gaming industry is never brought up in the mainstream and really there is no need for it to be. It's just an interesting question where the answer can define how we look at the hobby.

Here are the Ennie 2011 nominees

It's that time of year again when the red carpet is rolled out and we celebrate the Ennies - the tabletop RPG industry awards. 

This year's nominees are in and pretty much all of them are well-deserved.

See the full line-up after the jump.

Crazy things you didn't know about 3 RPG companies

Ask anyone familiar with tabletop roleplaying games who make Dungeons and Dragons and they will likely answer Wizards of the Coast.

However, there are some weird things games companies have done that few people know about; and in some cases secrets best left unearthed.

So for you reading pleasure, here are some things you didn't know about three roleplaying companies.

Why we gravitate towards low-level characters

By now the early beta edition of the anticipated Dungeon Crawl Classics has blazed the roleplaying blogosphere like a wildfire. I've had a brief nosey at the rules but I will need to read them in detail before setting out a full-fledged review. 

One aspect that immediately jumped out at me about Goodman's latest effort is the inclusion of 0-level play. Initially, each character begins in XP debt and must endeavour to work her way up to first level via a good old fashioned dungeon bash that, as the author stresses, from which she will be unlikely to return.

4 RPGs to look out for this year

1. Fabled Lands RPG


The Fabled Lands gamebooks have recently been re-released, much to my pleasure, and hot on their tails comes the tabletop version. The Fabled Lands RPG was originally released in 1995 but Cubicle 7 will be re-launching it this month. If you've ever played the gamebooks you will know how detailed the world of Harkuna is, even in gamebook form. There will also be 12 source books released after, detailing the territories covered in the original books (12 were originally in the pipeline, but only 6 were published). The game uses the same simple mechanics as in the books, but expanded for party play, so I expect this to be a relatively rules-lite affair. There's no news yet on a digital version, so until then it'll be places like an Office Depot  retailer will be getting my money for the countless pencils and paper I have to invest in. 

2. Dragon Age RPG: Set 2


Nobody can doubt the popularity of the Dragon Age video games, but few could have predicted how much of a hit the tabletop game would be. Set 2 covers rules for characters level 6-10 and includes rules on playing as a Grey Warden, 40 new spells, exploration stunts and more. I've never played the game, but I've heard many rave reviews, some even saying that this is what 4e should have been.

3. The One Ring


Tolkien's beloved stories and world have had a couple of tabletop renditions already with MERP and The Lord of the Rings RPG by Decipher. Now Cubicle 7 have thrown their hat in the ring (geddit?) and will in August release The One Ring. The first book of an ongoing epic series, called Adventures Over the Edge of the Wild, will focus on the Wilderlands, which includes Mirkwood, the Lonely Mountain and East of the Misty Mountains. It will be set 5 years after the events in The Hobbit and will offer players a rich and immersive setting. Each subsequent release will open up a new geography in Middle-earth and span generations of characters, making this game truly massive in scope.

4. Dungeon Crawl Classics


November will see the release of Dungeon Crawl Classics by Goodman Games, an old-school spin on 3rd edition D&D mechanics. According to the author, it plays like a 1970s D&D session with race-classes such as Elf and Dwarf, but its attributes are slightly different to 3e with the inclusion of 'luck'. Whatever this concoction of new and old school is, you can colour me intrigued and I'll definitely be investing when it's released later this year.

4 awesome minimalist roleplaying games

Sometimes you don't want to have to plough through a 300 page hardcover rulebook in order to play your next one-shot. It's so much easier to pick up a rules-lite RPG and get your improv on. The following games have really gone to town with the 'lite' aspect. Here are the top 4 minimalist roleplaying games:

1. Cthulhu Dark


Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu isn't exactly a crunchy game mechanics-wise. Simply roll a percentile to find out if you succeed in doing something. Of course, there are other rules for phobias, magic and the like, which make it a little more than a proper rules-lite game. Cthulhu Dark is the Call of Cthulhu experience distilled to its bare essentials. Conceived by Graham Walmsley, Cthulhu Dark (a pun on Cthulhu Lite) is a 3 page rules set with freeform character creation and simple d6 task resolution. Dark still keeps a simplified sanity system in which when you see something horrific you roll a d6: if you get higher than your insanity value you increase it by 1. Once it reaches 6 you're incurably insane.

Get Cthulhu Dark free

2. Risus: The Anything RPG 


Risus is arguably the most popular rules-lite game out there, with it's simple-yet-brilliant task resolution system involving dice pools and madcap sense of humour. Risus is designed as a system more than a setting in itself, so it can be used for whatever genre you want. Last Halloween I ran a teen slasher flick game with Risus completely on the fly and it went great.

Get Risus free

3. BEAN! D2 RPG


BEAN! Is a game I've been championing for a while I even interviewed creator and artist Jeff Freels about the second edition of his unusual and brilliant system. The D2 system involves using a 2 sided object like a bean or a coin for resolving tasks and combat. Each character has only 3 attributes which have 'beans' assigned to them. The default setting is fantasy, but there are rules for modern and sci-fi too.

Get BEAN! for cheap

4. Zombie D6 Lite


Now this is what I call minimalist. Zombie D6 Lite is merely 1 page in length but offers a really fun zombie apocalypse system. Each character has attributes that have a poor, average or good score. Each score has a related roll to succeed in a task with modifiers depending on the difficulty of the task. Give this a whirl if you're looking for zombie mayhem without the prep time.

Get Zombie D6 Lite for free

Jay and Silent Bob pimp RPGs

Snooch to the nooch all. I've been an ardent listener of the Smodcast Network for sometime now and since cult director Kevin Smith and his comrades launched Smodcast Internet Radio (S.I.R) just 3 weeks ago I've had the likes of Jay, Silent Bob and Jen Schwalbach massaging my ears with their crudely hilarious humour.

Since the show is free they have to run a bunch of ads, but rather get people to send in their own audio ads, the radio hosts read from scripts, which are more often than not deviated from for comic effect.

So what's this got to do with RPGs? Well, the other day they ran an ad for Victoria, a roleplaying game set in Victorian England where players can solve mysteries with Sherlock Holmes, brush shoulders with Captain Nemo or even track down Jack the Ripper. Apparently the game will be shown off at Gen Con too.

This made me smile a lot. Smodcast has a wide array of listeners, so exposing a large audience to roleplaying is really great. I know Jason Mewes (Jay) plays D&D and he was getting pretty excited about it when he was reading the ad.

Unfortunately, I can't find any information online about Victoria, so if you know of a website please shout it out because it sounds intriguing.

Kevin Smith fans would do well to check out Smodcast and SIR, which provides me with constant entertainment throughout my working week. I've just got to practise not laughing out loud like an ass when I'm at my desk.

Paper or PDF?

As the shelves in my house are rapidly running out of space, I've found it an advantage in having the option to download games and supplements as PDFs. I know a lot of people prefer physical copies - including myself - but with the way print media is converging to the digital medium, PDFs may make paper copies obsolete eventually.

What I want to know is, are you a paper, a PDF or both? I've set up a little poll in the sidebar so get your answers in for SCIENCE!

10 free RPGs you must play

Free RPGs are all over the major PDF download sites like DrivethruRPG and RPGNow, but the real task is to sift through the mud and find the best free roleplaying games. Now, I'm not talking about introductory games here, I'm talking about full blown core RPGs for free. You can't go wrong there. So let's take a look at what RPGs the web has to offer our cheap and greasy hands.

CJ Carrella's Witchcraft - If you're looking for modern horror and urban fantasy you need look no further than Witchcraft. Playing out like Buffy and Supernatural, Witchcraft uses an easy system - Unisystem, that allows for a lot of variety in your game.

Labyrinth Lord - One of a couple of OSR games on the list. Labyrinth Lord is a wonderful re-imagining of the Dungeons and Dragons B/X rulesets. As long as you don't mind text-only, this is a free RPG you don't want to miss.

Tales from the Wood - Sure, playing as a vole or ferret doesn't sound like much, but once you get playing Tales from the Wood you'll realise there's a lot more to this little game that meets the eye. Rather than playing humanoid animals, here you take on the role of actual animals in their fight to survive in the woods.

Swords and Wizardry - This is one of my all time favourite games. Swords and Wizardry is a great free roleplaying game that emulates the original D&D edition. This is pure old school mayhem and it doesn't get much better than this.

D6 System - Bundling 3 settings for one great price of nothing, the D6 System is a simple and effective ruleset used in games such as Xena and Star Wars. For diddly squat you get Adventure, Space and Fantasy. You can't ask for much more than that.

Barbarians of Lemuria - This game rocks all kinds of face. BoL is set in a low fantasy, sword and sorcery world and contains some amazing streamlined rules. My favourite part is the freeform magic system, which allows the player to pretty much do whatever they like with their magical powers. Great free game.

Neverwhere 3rd Edition - Based on Neil Gaiman's book and TV series, Neverwhere is an urban fantasy game set in London Below, a magical parallel realm that co-exists with London, or 'London Above'. Check out the source material and get playing.

Mutant Future - Gamma World gets the OSR treatment with Mutant Future, a madcap post-apocalyptic RPG where you can play as a plant. Oh hells yes.

OSRIC - Here's a cleaned up ruleset based on 1st edition Advanced Dungeons and Dragons. Worth a play if you feel like harkening back to the glory days of roleplaying for free.

Four Colour System - Ah, the golden age of comic books, when heroes were heroes and villains were nasty but loveable. 4C has a great set of rules to run a supers game for free!

Interview with BEAN! creator, Jeff Freels

He goes by the name of Grumlahk in the rowdy halls of Trollhalla, but others will know him as Jeff Freels, the artist and writer of BEAN! The D2 Roleplaying Game, which recently released its second edition. Jeff is a stalwart in the industry and has done work for games such as Tunnels and Trolls and his Fabled Worlds system, as well as a bunch of retro videogames.

Aside from RPGs, Jeff has a huge portfolio of art ranging from adverts and business logos to comic strips.

I contacted Jeff to see if he would answer some questions for Trollish Delver and he graciously obliged. Among other things Jeff talks about his love of Tunnels and Trolls, the difficulty of being a blind artist and how he came up with the idea for BEAN!

How did you become involved in Tunnels & Trolls as a player?

I was introduced to RPGs in the 80's, but never had the money to pick up all the different games that were making the scene. My friends and I became pretty adept at modifying the rules of Dungeons & Dragons to be quicker, and more versatile to play the kinds of things we were interested in. Many years later when the Tunnels & Trolls Tin Box came out I picked it up and fell in love with the simple yet versatile rules and the whole DIY liscense to really take off with your own creativity. It really felt like I was home.


What made you decide that you wanted to start doing art for Tunnels & Trolls?

It was that DIY feel of the game where regular people were encouraged to contribute so that everyone could be involved and make the game richer. I contributed a cartoon to a fanzine, and was asked to do more and more illustrations for various projects. People got to know my work, and I've been very fortunate to work with some really talented people bringing their monsters to life on the page.


You're actually legally blind, so how do you manage to do these awesome pieces of artwork? It must be difficult.

I'm guided by spirits... how's that for a short answer? You're right, it's quite difficult. Since my eyes fell apart I've had to relearn how to draw, and I use a computer with super large magnification and special magnifying lenses for my good eye. This is why you'll see a lot of thicker lines in my work. Partially I like the flow of lines that move from thick to thin and the expressiveness therein, but a lot of it is because I just can't work with thin lines anymore. We do what we can, eh?


What is your proudest moment as an artist?

I think the moment when I realized that my game BEAN was taking off. It's really quite validating to have something finally work, and to be appreciated by so many people. Best of all, my artwork makes the game accessable and helps to draw people in while encouraging them to draw on their own creativity. Even the most psychotic Beanfolk have this "come aboard" feeling to them. It's really very difficult for me to think of the artwork and the writing as seperate facets because it just feels like such a holistic project ot me.Because I've been able to create something that can take on this life of its own, this was probably my proudest moment as an artist.

BEAN! to me is a love-letter to Tunnels & Trolls. Would you say that's accurate?

That's very poetic, and a wonderful way to express reverence for that unbridled creativity and community that comes from Tunnels & Trolls, and Risus too for that matter. Gaming is at its most magical when it's about connecting with others and seeing where your collective imaginations can take you. BEAN is of course an expression of those games that came before it and inspired its creation. So yes, I think that's a beautifully accurate description.

A fantasy world inhabited by bean people is pretty unique. What inspired you to come up with the idea for BEAN!?

It was a theme that evolved from just muddling over the idea of making a working gaming system with beans. Beans on the table led to beans in the writing, and eventurally to the characters themselves. It just kind of happened, really.


Is BEAN! your game of choice on game night, or do you play others?

BEAN has certainly become my game of choice. The system is so versatile and quick to adapt to absolutely anything you can imagine that it's something you can just pick up and run with for quick sessions or intricately planned scenarios alike, and so it works really well for whatever I want to do.


Who are your roleplaying heroes who inspire you in your work?

Ken St. Andre has been instrumental in making RPGs accessible and fun. I think his influence is obvious in my own work. He's got a big heart and he's been a good friend to me.
S. John Ross, the creator of Risus: The Anything Role Playing Game, showed the world that you can create characters in 30 seconds for a game that's as serious or as silly as you want. He's also a really nice guy.
Dave Arneson expanded wargaming into fantasy gaming with individual characters and did a lot to encourage others to go out and develop their own game systems. He was a pioneer who encouraged others to continue their own explorations and I think we all owe him a lot.


What material are we likely to see released for BEAN! in 2011?

"World of BEAN!" is the next big project I've been working on. It's an atlas of BEANworld that also descrobes the inhabitants and major points of interest in the world. It'll be a fun source of inspiration for those who want a ready made setting for their adventures.

And finally, why would you recommend people give BEAN! a go?

This isn't the kind of game that you have to spend days studying to learn to play, nor is it a system that demands a huge financial commitment. You can play whatever kinds of characters you want to in any setting. BEAN is where it's at!


Many thanks to Jeff for taking part in this interview. You can buy BEAN! Second Edition now and don't forget to check out Escape From Khosht, a free solo illustrated by Jeff.

Visit Jeff's website at Jeffwerks for more of his awesome art.

BEAN! Second Edition is out now

The Second edition of BEAN! The D2 RPG is now available for download. Jeff Freels, Tunnels and Trolls artist extraordinaire and all round nice guy, wrote and illustrated this simple and fun RPG.

This new edition has a streamlined layout along with new rules for archetypes, skills, mounted combat and new monsters and spells.

If you're introducing kids to the wonders of roleplaying, BEAN! is the perfect game to get them started with. Instead of fiddly polyhedrons, the game uses beans, or coins or whatever has two sides that you can chuck onto the table.

But grizzled veterans definitely won't be disappointed, as the rules-lite gameplay allows for focus on roleplaying rather than massive volumes of rules.

So what are you waiting for? Get BEAN! It's way cheap!

Monsters! Monsters! - an overview

I've been posting infrequently lately due to my laptop being in the shop for repair. I hope to have it back today or tomorrow, so I'll be posting more from this weekend.

Saving scantily clad floozies from towers and thwarting the schemes of a sociopathic lich is all in a day's work for the hero. But nobody cares about the monsters whose lives are made hell by these gallant folk, who stride into a cave, tear the guts out of half a family of kobolds while their whimpering sprogs watch in horror as mummy and daddy are kicked around by a twat in a funny cloak; and then stripped of their life savings.

In Ken St Andre's Monsters! Monsters! the roles are reversed and the player gets to take on the role of a Ghoul or Yeti or even a Balrog, each of whom have the sole aim of getting revenge on hero-kind and the evil civilised world by demolishing their towns and cities and eating their most beautiful people. The game uses familiar Tunnels and Trolls rules with some tweaks and a random character generation system using an ordinary deck of cards. For instance, drawing the ace of spades lands you with a Dragon to play with, or the six of diamonds nets you a Shoggoth. Some monsters are ridiculously powerful and others, such as the bland 'Human Scum' gets the average stats of an average human from averageville, averagestonia. Nobody wants to be Human Scum.

Adventures in Monsters! Monsters! usually revolve around going to a town and causing mayhem. Types of wandering enemies range from a cow to a warband of 10 fighters, each having a certain reaction to your monster depending on its charisma score. They could be friendly towards you - offering you chocolate and giving you a massage, they could be indifferent to you, or they could just flat out attack you.

I've yet to play a game of Monsters! Monsters! but I'm looking forward to reviewing it. It has all the humour of Tunnels and Trolls plus the chance to play as a Hydra.