#free league

[probablyfunrpgideas]

The Alien movie series, and thus the Alien rpg, has a recurring trend of “one of the central characters turns out to be a synthetic person”. This is usually combined with “ingrained programming forces the synthetic to betray their crew for corporate interests”.

I just think it would be funny if you told a whole group of players that they’re the only android on the team, and they have to infect one of their human crewmates with xenomorph to bring it back for study. As the team gets split up and encounters various challenges they eventually find out that they’re part of some kind of experiment. Will they turn against each other, or against their human superiors back on Earth? And what about the poor Aliens with only weird plastic to eat?

[vintagerpg]

This is Death in Space (2021), an RPG about blue collar life (which is often miserable) in space (which is always hostile). In this, it is a cousin of Mothership, Alien, Those Dark Places and all the various other incarnations of industrial, deep space science fiction. Both the regular and the deluxe versions of the book make a good first impression, with a lovely design sense and very nice illustrations. I see a lot of folks shorthand the graphic design (and the play, honestly) as Mork Borg in space. I understand the impulse and there are definitely similarities, but that does the overall experience of the game a disservice.

The system is a minimal and D20-based. Character generation is highly random (there are lots of random tables in general; in this the relationship to Mork Borg is undeniable). The game focuses around the characters and their hub — a ship or station — that they work to maintain, which often requires taking jobs in order to fund or salvage the necessary material for maintenance. For the most part, the game universe — the Tenebrous System — is gritty and prosaic.

It isn’t entirely without mystery, though. Character progression accrues Void Points, which can turn into mutations (limited special abilities) or corruption (weird side-effects that hint at a stranger truth to existence). Likewise, when a character dies, they role on the Death in Space table to have a vision of how they were meant to die, implying something is fundamentally wrong with existence as the character experienced it. That…is extremely interesting!

Unlike the highly orchestrated Coriolis, Death in Space feels like a toy box and no clear indication of the right or wrong way to play with them. Want to play an Expanse-style game? Go for it. Want to do Dead Space? That’s maybe a little trickier, but doable. The implied universe is fascinating on its own merits but, after all, it remains just that: implied.

[commander-ben]

The Kickstarter for Black Powder and Brimstone is now live!

Created by me and pubished by Free League this is an action packed TTRPG packed with Witchcraft and Gunpowder.

You can back the campagn here!

[taritoons]

Our player characters for our new campaign of Lord Of The Rings Roleplaying, officially sponsored by Free League! LotRRP is (more or less) a conversion of The One Ring 2nd Edition into D&D 5e rules, and acts as effectively a second edition of the now discontinued Adventures in Middle-Earth (it’s more of a rebuild from scratch though, to be fair).

The campaign, a run of Shire Adventures, will be livestreamed over on Twitch on Arvan Eleron’s channel, starting on January 31st 2023. Please come check it out!

The unlikely heroes portrayed above are: Titch Applebough, a anxious blob in the shape of a human town’s guard from Bree. Coriander Took, a most cheerful young Hobbit who is incapable of sitting still. Her grandmother, Granny Lavender Hopesinger, the village crazy lady. And last but not least Calloran Fallohide, cosmopolitan extraordinaire!

Our players are Amal El-Mothar, the Hugo Award winning author of This Is How You Lose the Timewar, Trendane Sparks, voice actor and narrator for BattleTech and Shadow Run audio books, Bradley P. Beaulieu, author of the Shattered Sands series, me, who is hopelessly outclassed by everyone else in this group, and of course our wonderful Game Master, Gregory A. Wilson, author of Icarus and Grayshade.

[tygergm]

One Shot Recs

I've either run or played these all as one shots, and are ones I recommended to a friend recently. I also have links at the bottom to a bunch of free quickstarts for more games to look at that might be good for one shots too.

Blue Rose - AGE system from Green Ronin. Romantic fantasy where royalty is chosen by a magical stag and the rich are appropriately taxed. Cool Stunts mechanic to do extra abilities during a turn, easy system to get used to but has that crunchy feel too. Sentient animal race that forms bonds with people is an instant love every time. Free quickstart.

Heart: the City Beneath - Resistance system by Rowan Rook & Decard. A dungeon crawler where the dungeon is an NPC. Take stress until you can't, go out in a blaze of glory with one time Zenith abilities, such as summon a train to wipe out everything in its path - including you. Heart's the love of my life and the first RPG to make me cry(in a good way). It's earnest and grotesque and something about going in knowing you will End, and choosing it, does something to me. Also you can be full of bees(on purpose). Quickstart is PWYW($3ish suggested) but you should give them 1 million dollars actually.

Bones Deep - Troika! system based by @technicalgrimoire. The other love of my life. Be a skeleton on the ocean floor! What happened to your skin? Not important! Do jobs for witches, get credits from the crabs, join the cephalopods in their nefarious plans. The classes are fun(shapeshift your bones, or carve spells into them), and the mix of horror and humor is immaculately weird. Many random tables and a couple scenarios to make it easy to start swimming walking. Also not free($15 for digital), but worth every cent and then some(and the website is awesome resource!).

Index Card RPG - d20 system from Runehammer Games. It's 'simple enough to fit on index card'. There's actually lots of stuff, but it's easy to get a game rolling fast! Be a gerblin, get a bunch of loot. If you're a chronic low roller like me, a nice mechanic is when you fail you get to put points in a pool to use for later rolls. Probably the easiest one on this list to jump to from DnD. Free quickstart.

Wildsea - Wild Words system from Mythworks(took me awhile to find the name for it lol which isn't important just play it xD). You can be a mushroom person piloting a giant whale bone ship with a chainsaw on the front above a sea of trees. The world is so cool and unique. Health is measured in stuff to lose/break and there's a sliding success mechanic(you succeed, you succeed BUT- etc.). Free quickstart.

Tales from the Loop - Year Zero engine by Free League. Be kids in an alternate 80s-90s Scandinavia(or US) setting trying to navigate growing up alongside strange tech and apathetic adults. I really like how they tweaked the system to make it fun being kids for this, with iconic items and luck points, and it's very collab focused. I used this scenario as a one shot. There's a starter's set for $4.99.

Old Gods of Appalachia - Cypher system by Monte Cook. Face horrors man-made and monstrous in the haints and hollers of an alternate 1930ish Appalachia. Based on the podcast(don't know anything about the podcast? Even better imo). Cyphers are neat one-time use items you find during game to make you stronger/invisible/etc. Free quickstart.

Under Hill, By Water - OSR hack by Rise Up Comus. Hobbits! Okay, "halflings" for copyright but...it's hobbits. While some are off saving the world, your greatest worry is finding the lost pig before your wife realizes it's missing. It's not a boring life, just a quiet one. Random table generators for Events to happen each season make this easy to pick up, or come up with your own! $10. We loved this one so much we turned it into a mini campaign.

Mörk Borg - OSR-ish by Free League. Last but not least in the amount of shelf space in my room! The basic rules fit on one piece of paper, but the books are packed with amazing art and delicious disgustingness. It's easy, quick and deadly, with so many random tables for generating baddies, loot, etc., and usually each version of it has a doomsday countdown calendar with horrid new things to add, and then a final horrible event to end the game. It IS very dark and gloom, and I don't normally play it as rough as the OG, which works out fine! You can get a free version of the core book on the website linked, and tons of other free goodies there. My current fav hacks are Pirate Borg and Ork Borg.

List of free Quickstarts I found(and some I'll be playing soon!):

Coriolis

Dune

Fabula Ultima

City of Mist

Rapscallion

Fifth Season

Symbaroum

Dragonbane

SCP

Root

Fantasy AGE

Modern AGE

Myth-Stakes

Dead Air: Seasons

Broken Tales

Legacy: Life Among the Ruins

Heckin' Good Doggos

Star Trek Adventures

Flabbergasted!

Familiars of Terra

Daggerheart

Coyote & Crow

7th Sea

Candela Obscura

Fallout RPG

Happy Gaming!

[tokyofuturnoir]

[oldschoolfrp]

Drakar och Demoner (“Dragons and Demons”) was published by Äventyrsspel (“Adventure Games”) in 1982, becoming Sweden’s first and biggest fantasy RPG, set in its own world of Ereb Altor.  The first edition began as a translation of Chaosium’s Basic Role-Playing and included anthropomorphic ducks borrowed from Glorantha and Runequest.  It has grown and changed through many editions over the decades.  The publisher rebranded as Target Games and introduced the dark fantasy realm of Chronopia in the ‘90s, later spun off into its own miniature wargame.  RiotMinds published several editions in the 2000′s, one translated as Ruin Masters in 2019.  In August 2022 Fria Ligan / Free League launched a new Kickstarter for an edition of Drakar och Demoner with an English translation as Dragonbane.

[theomegadork]

Spoils from my adventure back in my homeland.

[thefandomentals]

Enter the shadowy cyberpunk world of Blade Runner in its first tabletop rpg adaptation courtesy of Free League!

[ahb-writes]

Mara.

"It is a vile creature, as terrible as the plague and fierce as a storm whipped up by the demons of the higher planes. But the mara never takes physical form. It cannot be predicted, understood, or grasped by either human hands or scholarly means. It is a scourge born from nightmares, as elusive and deceptive as the chaos of dreams. Sometimes it appears to its chosen victim in the form of a demonic, scornfully grinning cat, other times as a shriveled corpse, frail-looking and partially covered in thick boar bristles. It is said, however, that the sleeper can always recognize the face of his nemesis in the mara’s twisted features, but whether this is ancient wisdom or mere superstition is anybody’s guess."

Forbidden Lands: Book of Beasts (2023); Andreas Marklund (lead writer); Henrik Rosenborg (lead artist)

[legionofmyth]

MUTANT: Year Zero - Conflict [Part 2] - Armor & Trauma

🎲 MUTANT: Year Zero combat is deadly but offers many methods to protect a character and recover from injury. #MutantYearZero #FreeLeaguePublishing #postapocalyptic #tabletopgames #TTRPG #RPG

MUTANT: Year Zero – [PDF]MUTANT: Year Zero offers a fast-paced combat system with many meaningful options for players and game masters. If you’re looking for a thrilling tabletop RPG that takes you on a journey through a post-apocalyptic world filled with danger, adventure, and mutants, then look no further than MUTANT: Year Zero by Free League Publishing. With its immersive storytelling, rich…

[adventuresandshopping]

Dragonbane is a translation of Drakar och Demoner, Scandinavia's first and biggest tabletop RPG, originally launched in 1982. This new and reimagined edition has one foot firmly planted in the heritage of decades of Swedish gaming and the other in the modern and innovative game design for which Free League Publishing is known worldwide.

[vintagerpg]

Hot damn, what a fantastic book. This is Colonial Marines Operations Manual (2021) for Free League’s Alien RPG. Prior to this, published Alien adventures were designed for the cinematic side of the game — pre-generated characters, secret agendas, fairly linear plots — but this is the first in a series of open world campaign supplements (the plan, I believe, is release a book like this for every primary occupation in the core rulebook).

The player portion of the book is everything you wanted to know about the Colonial Marines for play. There’s stuff on unit structure, specialized roles (with slight mechanical tweaks), heaps of equipment. There’s a good deal of lore and rumors, too, which is an appetizer for the GM section, containing as it does a truckload of lore, details on swaths of the galaxy, the lowdown on the war that just broke out (between the United Americas and the Union of Progressive Peoples) and secrets galore. This section lays out the an open ended military-focused campaign, complete with a ship that serves as home base, NPCs and framing for particular sorts of missions. The final section supplement the open campaign with seven connected scenarios that build off the events of the seemingly unconnected cinematic scenarios and pushes the overall Alien RPG meta forward with some potentially big paradigm shifts.

The thing about this book, and the Alien line in general, that bowls me over is the lore. There is a lot of BAD material in the Alien franchise (Prometheus? Prometheus.). There is also some great stuff that is obscure (lots of comic book stories) or was unproduced (like Gibson’s Alien 3 script). Somehow Andrew Gaska has pulled those thread of varying quality into a tapestry that works as a compelling universe for roleplay. Initially, with the cinematic scenarios, there were big guardrails. Colonial Marines lowers them substantially and beyond them I can see the expanse of thrilling galaxy. More please.

[frozenfancies]

I did a review of the new Blade Runner RPG.

[juddgeeksout]

What is Inspiration Goat precariously balanced upon?

As heard on the Daydreaming about Dragons podcast, the Inspiration Goat helps me process media and take parts that are useful for the gaming table. This isn’t about the hottest new thing or the crowdfunding with the biggest payday; it is just a few geeky things that are inspiring me. It might be weekly; it might be monthly. It all depends on how fast the inspiration goat chews on media and who…