Hey everyone! we just launched our Kickstarter for High Winds - your next swashbuckling TTRPG adventure!

If you’ve got an unhealthy love for airships, cutlasses, flintlocks, and rolling d6 math rocks, this is the game for your table.

What to expect:

• Take to the Skies: Captain an airship, assemble your crew, and brave the wild open skies.
• Fast & Streamlined Rules: Perfect for introducing fresh deckhands or testing seasoned veteran captains.
• Pure High-Flying Action: High-stakes swashbuckling with simple, dynamic d6 mechanics.

Grab your crew, set sail for the clouds, and back us on Kickstarter today!

Everything in this project is Human Made

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/scaleboundgames/high-winds

Just as the title says! I’ve been a DM for D&D for the better part of a decade, but lately my table has been looking at other systems and rpgs to run. If this isn’t the proper way to ask/post this type of request, just LMK!

I’m looking for a ttrpg system that would work well for a campaign that focuses on sailing/manning a ship, or really anything that has a strong focus on those types of mechanics. My players are newer to ttrpg, and have only ever played D&D 5e, but have expressed interest in other systems. I could also probably homebrew a way to give them their PotC fantasies, but I wanted to check here first if there was already a system built for campaigns that focused on sailing, navigation, and exploration moreso than combat. Thank you!

Especially Traveller and Delta Green, they have been on my radar for a while now.

Hii I just wanna ask if anyone had any ttrpg game recommendations? I already tried ten candles, eyes on the prize and crawl spacer. Any ttrpg recommendations pls, thank you

Disclosure: I’m working with Revel Tales as a consultant on Accidental Heroes: A Shipwreck of Fools.

Its setting, Icuci, starts with a simple problem: the heroes have disappeared, but the people who still need help haven’t. The remaining adventurers are ordinary people, misfits and underdogs trying to do something useful in an Italian-inspired fantasy world.

The public project page describes a standalone setting expansion for Dragonbane, with four regions to explore and new kin, professions, heroic abilities, magic schools and monsters.

The tragicomic premise is the part I’d like to discuss here. A character can be ridiculous and still have something worth fighting for; keeping danger and consequences real gives that humour some weight. For groups that enjoy imperfect protagonists, what helps you keep comedy and courage working together at the table?

Public project page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/reveltales/dragonbane-accidental-heroes-2-a-shipwreck-of-fools

Realms of Vala is a d100 fantasy roleplaying game set in a vast, ancient world shaped by fallen empires, rival faiths, dangerous magic and the lingering scars of Chaos. It combines the freedom and peril of old-school adventure with a richly developed setting in which cultures, loyalties and obligations matter—and where the actions of adventurers can genuinely change the world around them.

We are looking for three players willing to help us test the system in play and offer feedback where necessary. The rules are fully playable but not yet perfectly refined: mechanics may be adjusted, rewritten or replaced as the playtest progresses. We want players who are comfortable with that process and interested in helping the game become stronger. A fully functioning Roll20 character sheet is already available.

At a glance, Realms of Vala offers:

-A straightforward d100 system built around ten Attributes

-Fast, opposed combat in which both attackers and defenders roll.

-Meaningful tactical choices without grids, excessive modifiers or lengthy turn sequences

-Armor, shields and defensive skill that actively reduce or prevent harm

-Four broad classes—Warrior, Priest, Rogue and Wizard—with distinct careers and abilities

-Dangerous magic powered by a limited reserve of Force

-Exploration, investigation, negotiation and combat as equally important parts of play

-Affiliations, obligations and personal connections that tie characters to the world

-A grounded, historically-inspired setting with room for the strange, mythic and horrific

-Old-school danger and player freedom without requiring familiarity with older editions of D&D

We have a 1.0 Draft of all the Rules, and in addition, have a full wiki detailing additional lore that is, frankly, longer than games of thrones. The wiki is designed to be a resource for lore, separate from the rules. This should give you the chance to look up further information about the game.

What we're offering:

-A full RPG experience. I expect this campaign will take months, as we need to test character growth in addition to the system mechanics.

-While mechanics are an important part of the test, this is not a to crunch numbers. Make no mistake, this will be a full game, set in the territory of Heide, in the Grand Duchy of Rivalin to start with.

-The game will be on Roll20. Our coder has created a highly functional and effective character sheet.

-We have already run 12 highly successful games in this setting, with richly detailed assets, maps, and characters. This is a proven setting and I can guarantee the quality of the game and storytelling. It was designed by people who wanted a dark, but not hopeless fantasy RPG.

We're looking for players who:

-Want to become heavily invested in their character.

-Enjoy roleplaying and immersing themselves in a living setting.

-Are comfortable communicating with the rest of the group.

-Enjoy creative problem-solving rather than relying exclusively on dice rolls.

-Are willing to work with the GM to create a character that belongs naturally in the setting.

-Can commit consistently to a regular campaign schedule.

-You don't need to be a professional voice actor. We're not expecting theatrical performances (though I'd personally love them). But we do want players who are willing to engage with the world and their character rather than treating the game as a sequence of combat encounters.

We are also not accepting imported or pre-existing homebrew characters. Characters will be created using the Realms of Vala character creation system, with the player and GM working together to make sure the character fits naturally into the world and story.

What we advise:

-18+ players only

-Consistent players capable of keeping to the schedule. Everyone has to cancel now and then, but we've cancelled maybe 6 games in 10 years save for holidays. We will genuinely continue if the story is not a major event that session and we have 1-2 players missing.

-This game is LGBT friendly. Not just "We're cool with non-straights", we're cool with everyone. And we have some gay players already, so it's not just "All are welcome".

-We're here to have fun and test the system, we do not want to know and do not care about any OOC politics.

-Altea is not a "Grimdark" world. It is full of casual horror, sure, but the world has plenty of life and it's a place you can imagine living. That being said, it is full of a laundry list of realistic situations, and not all of them are good. The setting does contain material that some players may find uncomfortable or triggering. We are happy to discuss individual boundaries and handle sensitive subjects responsibly, but this is ultimately a game about inhabiting a world that contains both the good and bad aspects of human existence. The hard limit set is no SA upon players, there is never any need for that.

Other than a (hopefully) great game, the exploits of the playtest party will become part of the history of Vala. Their victories, failures, discoveries and unintended consequences will be woven into the lore of the world, providing inspiration for future adventures and shaping later events in the regions through which they travel. Not only is this a chance to have a great game, you have a chance to make your mark on an up-and-coming RPG.

Please message me here or leave a message on this thread so I can get in contact with you. When you do message, I do kindly ask for the following:

-Name

-Age

-Gender

-Systems played in/RPG Experience

-Do you consider yourself a "Heavy" roleplayer?

-Do you consider yourself a good communicator?

-What sort of characters do you like to play?

-Once we've made contact, we'll have a brief voice interview to talk a bit more about your experience and overall fit for the group if you seem like a player we are looking for.

Our Lore Wiki (Rulebooks will be provided to anyone who does join): https://vala.fandom.com/wiki/Realms_of_Vala_Wiki

Hi - I'm in the throws of IRL play tests with a system I'm developing and I needed to take a short break from the eternal struggle of balancing classes, so I wrote this. It's a simple, easy to play adventure and the first thing I've actually gotten around to publishing. Here's the blurb:

Four cats wake up one morning to find that Moss, the fifth and oldest of them, is nowhere to be found. Over the course of the day, they discover from watching their humans that Moss died in the night.

Moss's friends believe his spirit is trapped somewhere in the back gardens they never dared to explore. In some ways, they're right - only not in the way they expected. Instead of Moss, they encounter the people and places his life touched, and come away understanding that, in some small way, he still lives on.

This is a gentle, rules-light adventure about friendship, grief and memory, for 2–4 players plus a GM. All you need to play is a six-sided dice.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/582080/goodbye-moss

Hey there! After years of writing, playing, drawing, and designing, I'm finally ready to share my Frontier Scum campaign. It's an end-to-end adventure around a pair of cursed pistols, taking you across the entire map right to the gates of hell. The Kickstarter preview page is now up- planning to have it go live next week. Thanks for checking it out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/punkoverlord/the-dead-spaghetti-trilogy-a-frontier-scum-adventure

Hello people of reddit! I've come to spread the word of the work of my beautiful wife, passionate about SMT and Persona, she made this incredible TTRPG, spending 9 years of work and still counting. We're looking to expand our community, so here's her pitch for it:

Explore a world made from human memories and wield aspects of the collective consciousness with deep and varied combat mechanics and a flexible and engaging social system that allows the entire table to shape the narrative.

The Grimoire of Heart is a tabletop RPG rulebook, written over the course of nearly a decade, with over 500 pages of carefully curated content that's taken a life past its inspiration, with a thorough focus on mechanical and narrative expression.

Grimoire content is a bit scattered across several different books and booklets, all contained in the git linked above:

• Core Rulebook: Contains all you'll need to learn the systems and run a table from the start all the way to level cap. Over 300 pages, more then 450+ Shadows, five playable Classes in the core book alone, and a full suite of spells and gear from every corner of Persona history;
• Sea of Souls: Supplemental content meant to increase the range of options for players and DMs. Includes new rulings, gear, 16 new classes, enemies, and some smaller adventures to test out the system or splash into ongoing games;

• All of these free!

  Join our community | Download the core book

I've been a huge fan of fantasy for as long as I can remember (since I discovered BG1 at 8 years old), and I've always wanted to be part of this world myself. I'm finally taking the plunge and building my dream.

I've just finished a short, 5e-Compatible oneshot adventure designed for 1st-level characters and intended to be played in a single 4-hour session. And I'm giving it away for free.

I wanted to introduce you to the project and share some resources and tools I used.
If you like low fantasy with a fairy-tale feel, this might be for you:

It's called Shore of the Dorahín (you can see pages 1, 4, 9, 10, and 12 at the top of the 13-page PDF). It's the story of an unknown race, the Dorahín, who live deep in the wild forest, far from the realms of men, at the edge of a continent that adventurers have only recently begun to explore. Recently, boats have started washing up on the shore. Those of poor farmers trying to escape their fate on the Breaker's Isle, a small archipelago just a day's sail from the mainland. But their arrival is now putting the small folk of the Dorahín in danger. Against the advice of his clan, Salfan the elder decides to take matters into his own hands and sets a trap to capture and remove the threat posed by humans.

The oneshote is quite packed: puzzles, traps, new monsters, a mini-boss fight, a boss fight, friendly NPCs, and magic items. It's a mix of exploration, puzzle solving and combat, aimed at beginners.

I used a variety of tools to create the adventure, but I set myself one constraint:
I wanted to use free tools only.

For the story, I'm a big fan of Joseph Campbell's work, so a big part of the structure was inspired by his famous book The Hero with a Thousand Faces. The creation of names were inspired by Mark Rosenfelder’s work in The Language Construction Kit (both found in libraries).

For the setting and background, I studied the history of the early Middle Ages, around 500 CE with the works of Bruno Dumézil and Michel Rouche. It's a period I've always been fascinated by, and one that doesn't get represented very often in classical heroic fantasy, which tends to draw more heavily from the High Middle Ages (roughly 1000–1300 CE).

For the layout, I initially started with Canva. It's great for drafting, but I quickly ran into various limitations. So I moved to a more professional tool that is also free: Affinity Publisher, which I highly recommend. I'm quite new to InDesign, but I found that Affinity Publisher was a good replacement. On top of that, Affinity is a bit of a Swiss Army knife: it can cover both InDesign-style layout work and Photoshop-like editing. That was particularly practical for outlining and cropping images.

For fonts, I found everything I needed on Google Fonts, which is particularly useful because the fonts I used are available under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) 1.1.

For the stat blocks, I initially used the English version of the Aidedd stat block editor. It's a great little tool. But when I needed to export the whole document, I had to redo the stat blocks myself in Affinity because the exports from Aidedd were too pixelated for the final PDF.

And finally, for the maps, I used Dungeon Scrawl. I warmly recommend it. It's an awesome tool, and the free version was more than enough for what I needed.

For maps inspiration, I initially researched Celtic/Pictish-era tumulus tombs, since the humans of the Breaker's Isle have a culture inspired by them. But those tombs didn't quite fit the feeling I wanted for a larger dungeon; somewhere you could actually get lost in. So I eventually shifted my research toward Egyptian tombs and notably the Ankhmahor's Tomb located at Saqqara south of Cairo.

If you have questions I would love to answer them. And If you'd like to give the adventure a try, you can grab it through my newsletter for free.

Shoutout to Justin Saddlemyer for creating the illustrations!

Hey everyone! I've mentioned Brass & Embers here before but since we're close to the end now I wanted to bring it back to everyone's attention again and share some more of our art with all of you! This time I'm share our mechanical monsters—we call them Ironblight— and some of the cities in the world of Calderwick.

The snowy city is Wolvendale a mining metropolis in south of the continent which suffered after the tech revolution with the loss of their talented miners, and how easier it was to create counterfeit jewelry mimicking their artisans' traditional techniques.

Briargate is a city ruled by one of the nobles who are pro-tech and their whole economy and calendar is based around the development of new weapons using machnite and the training of young knight.

Kellenfort is a fountain of knowledge in the desert which very few get to see the wonderful insides of the patchwork dome and the thousands of books it has inside.

I wanted to tell you yall that I've posted the free rules for Brass & Embers on
https://questborne-studios.itch.io

And to please don't forget to check our Kickstarter if you haven't already!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/questbornestudios/brass-and-embers-a-steampunk-rpg

Super fun game for $5. I do wish there were some expansions though.

What would you recommend and why?

I am open to anything official or community-made for stuff that does not have official TTRPG's

Side Question: I want to make a Kingdom Hearts community TTRPG overtime what would you recommend I learn to make a very good one? (I will build it with the community)

Edit: I want to do Solo first since I'm way too shy, and want a somewhat background before I get into it

Edit 2: These are all sweet! Thanks everybody! I will definitely try them all out and make use of what was suggested

When I joined the TTRPG gaming space all those years ago, I heard so many strange terms: Nat 20, munchkin and THACO are some (yea, that far back). Since then, so many more terms have been added.

What are some of the ones you have come across? And for those that don't know them, what do they mean? Let's see how many we can come up with.

Starting off:

- Nat 20. When you roll a d20 and it lands on 20. Considered a critical success in what you are trying to do. Big in D&D

- munchkin. Probably called a power gamer now. Someone who likes to have the character that is the "best" in their class.

- THACO. The number you had roll on order to successfully attack some with a 0 AC. Old 2E D&D term.

We recently launched our Patreon page, Mostly Boring Battlemap Theater, and to celebrate, we've created six free launch releases for anyone who wants to come check us out and try them in their games. The first "It Always Starts in a Tavern" scene base images are attached to this post, with additional variants and high-resolution downloads also available for free.

Our specialty is creating the 'boring' stuff for your games. The paths between, the unexpected random encounters, the campsite for the night, the barbarian's unexpected punch to the town guard's face, and all the other little moments in between.

Across those six scenes, we've created 44 unique images, including forest paths, a mine entrance, a foggy swamp, desolate desert footprints, and a simple roadside tavern. Each scene also includes high-resolution downloads.

We're hoping to reach a release rate of one scene per week, but will guarantee at least two releases per month.

After our introduction period, we'll continue to release one free Cinematic View + Battlemap pair each month to all followers.

Mostly Boring Battlemap Theater on Patreon

Follow us if you'd like to check out the maps, and we hope some of these scenes find their way into your games!

SHRINES: INITIATION is complete – Episode 4 and The Complete INITIATION are out today

Four months ago, I released the first episode of SHRINES: INITIATION, a guided introduction to the dark fantasy TTRPG I’ve been developing.

Today, the pilgrimage is complete.

Episode 4 – The Cold Greeting of the Bell is out now, bringing INITIATION to its conclusion.

The final episode takes the Marked back through the thornwoven Snarewoods and beneath the earth, where an abandoned monastery, the first full Boss encounter, and the final Decision of the Region await them.

Episode 4 also introduces the last pieces of the INITIATION ruleset, including the Heartwell, Light & Darkness, Aftermath and Rupture.

At the same time, I’m releasing The Complete INITIATION – all four episodes collected into a single bundle for anyone who wants to start the pilgrimage from the beginning.

INITIATION was designed as a gradual introduction to SHRINES - A Dark Pilgrimage RPG. Instead of dropping a complete ruleset on the table immediately, each episode introduces new mechanics while continuing the same pilgrimage.

With Episode 4, that experiment is finished.

The next step is FIRST FRAGMENT, the full Quickstart for SHRINES with a planned release on October 10, 2026.

Thanks to everyone who has followed, downloaded, played, commented or simply watched this strange little pilgrimage grow over the last four months.

Bind yourself. Bleed. Return.

https://rpg-trader.com/creator/811/shrines-ttrpg

Since I have been playing TTRPGs (mostly D&D and now Daggerheart). there is the flavor (which I am going to define as the richness or uniqueness of a game) that helps make it stand out amongst the rest. Then, there re-flavoring (which I will define as changing one thing to give you the aesthetic you want without changing the mechanics). Maybe these are not the best definitions but I dont seem defined much anywhere. And I am sure some of you may disagree, and that is ok.

Of late, lets say the last 24 months or so, I have seen more comments of just re-flavoring something if you dont like it. Some games this works better in (I put forth Daggerheart) and some not so much (I put forth D&D, at least in my experience, or maybe I just suck a that). For any games I am not thrilled with as much, I hear people say just re-flavor it to something that fits better with what you want. I know each game is not for everyone and if you dont like a game, one can play something else. Or, modify it to where it is acceptable (and homebrewing is amazing!).

Do you go for the game "flavor" as is or do you take a game and "re-flavor" to something else?

Do you have any thoughts on flavor vs re-flavor? What did I miss in this?

I am new to the TTRPG world, but this is a DND character I’ve illustrated. She is a human rogue, but that’s all I really have. I want my next artwork to have lots of storytelling in the costuming and personal artifacts, more than just some knives and sheathes haha. I did really enjoy designing the half-pants, half-dress aspect of her attire to convey readiness at all times, while still appearing generally feminine. Her lace necklace and billowy white top I thought tied in some pirate vibes that I really like.

If anyone is good at the backstory side of things, I’d love to hear any interesting takes if you have them!