Draw Steel (2025)

Ishanekon: World Shapers is the (probably) biggest free Indie TTRPG with over 2,500 character options. It has been mainly developed by Jan Luyken, aka Blaze Reason, with the aim of creating a game that can compete (if not surpass) the current biggest games on the market while remaining affordable for anyone. With its easily adaptable rules and wide range of options, from beginner-friendly to highly complex, it is designed to satisfy the needs of almost any story and play style. Description From epic fantasy and sci-fi to mundane humans facing everything from common threats to cosmic horror, Ishanekons: World Shapers’ modular design lets you easily adjust the rules to help you experience your stories. This game is designed with the idea that you bring the flavor, and the mechanics help you bring it to life. The 10 Archetypes with over 200 Sub-Archetypes, 1000+ Abilities, 600+ Talents, 300+ items and upgrades, and more allow you to build anything from a simple cat to a city-destroying kaiju. Role and complexity filters let you find what you need quickly while helping you avoid those features that might be too overwhelming for your liking.

Nimble is a fast, tactical (and 5e compatible), TTRPG. Your game nights are too precious to waste with slow or fiddly rules! Slay the slog using the best elements from the greatest RPGs around. Nimble empowers players and GMs with more interesting choices, less waiting around, and have more fun playing epic stories Description Nimble RPG is designed to prioritize speed, tactical decision-making, and reduced administrative tracking for both players and Game Masters. The system condenses character sheets and streamlines the action economy to prevent long waiting periods between player turns. Its primary design philosophy centers on accelerating combat encounters without sacrificing strategic depth, utilizing highly lethal weapon mechanics and dynamic monster behaviors. The game is offered both as a complete standalone system and as a modular "rules hack" booklet that can be integrated directly into an ongoing Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition campaign. System Overview & Key Features Fast Combat Don’t waste your time rolling to see if you can deal damage, just roll your damage dice! You deal that much damage. Attacks miss on a 1, but rolling the maximum is an EXPLODING Critical Hit! Exploding critical hits Roll the die again and add it to the total. There is no limit to how many times this damage can stack, except your luck! Instant Initiative Get RIGHT into combat with Improved Initiative rules that get players immediately into combat in a way that serves the story without breaking up the flow. Quick to prep Nimble is quick to prep and easy to run. You've got enough going on while GMing—Mechanics are all designed to be easy to manage and track at the table. You can be ready to run an adventure in as little as 5 minutes! And there's no need to for new players to read though endless pages of rules, teach new players as you play. Easy to balance Easy Encounter Creation. No matter the size of your party—whether you play in a cozy group with just 1 or 2 heroes, or a huge group of 8 or more—Encounters are easy and intuitive to build and balance for just the right level of challenge you like. Craft massive scale combat encounters, down to legendary solo encounters. Strategic Weapon System A subtly DEEP weapon system that rewards thoughtful play. No more, “I guess I’ll pick the bigger one...” Every weapon is balanced to have interesting strengths & weaknesses in combat. Additional links nimblerpg.com - Official website and rules repository

Dragonbane is a classic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game published by Free League Publishing in 2023. It is a modern English translation and reimagining of Drakar och Demoner, Scandinavia's first and longest-running TTRPG, originally released in 1982. The game carries over four decades of Swedish gaming heritage into a sleek, accessible package designed around the philosophy of "mirth and mayhem": fast-paced adventures with minimal prep, where danger is real, luck matters, and even a humble merchant can become a legend. Unlike many modern fantasy RPGs, Dragonbane deliberately avoids the power-escalation treadmill of level-based systems. Characters are capable but mortal from session one, and the game works equally well for a single one-shot evening or a sprawling long-term campaign. It was a strong contender for TTRPG of the year on release, praised widely as one of the most accessible entry points into tabletop fantasy roleplaying. Description In Dragonbane, players take on the role of adventurers in the Misty Vale, a hidden mountain valley, ancient and full of ruins from fallen kingdoms, only recently cleared of orc and goblin occupation. The world is shaped by the eternal cosmic struggle between two great powers: the Dragons and the Demons, rival godlike forces whose conflict bleeds into mortal life. Players choose from six playable Kins: Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, the duck-like Mallards, and the feral Wolfkin and one of ten Professions (Fighter, Mage, Hunter, Thief, Artisan, Merchant, Mariner, Scholar, and others), each providing a distinct set of skills and heroic abilities. One player takes the role of the Game Master (GM), who builds the world, voices NPCs, and runs the dangers the adventurers face. The tone balances genuine peril and dark fantasy with moments of levity and absurdity. System Overview & Key Features Roll-Under D20 Skill System Dragonbane uses a clean roll-under mechanic. Every skill has a rating from 1 to 18, and to succeed, the player must roll equal to or below that number on a D20. There is no adding up bonuses or consulting modifiers, a skill of 14 means you need a 14 or lower. This keeps the math fast and intuitive while still creating meaningful differences between a trained and an untrained character. Rolling a Dragon & Rolling a Demon Natural 1s and 20s are not just successes and failures, they're narrative events. Rolling a 1 is "Rolling a Dragon": a critical success that triggers powerful, flavourful special effects. Rolling a 20 is "Rolling a Demon": a critical failure with immediate consequences. This naming convention ties the dice directly into the world's mythology and gives every roll dramatic weight. Push Your Luck If a skill roll fails, the player can choose to Push it, picking up the dice and rolling again. But every die that fails a second time inflicts a Condition. Characters can become Exhausted, Sickly, Dazed, Angry, Scared, or Disheartened, each imposing a specific mechanical penalty. Pushing is rarely free, and the decision of whether to push adds meaningful tension to every uncertain roll.. Willpower Points & Heroic Abilities Each character has a pool of Willpower Points (WP), a resource spent to activate their Profession's Heroic Abilities. A Fighter might spend WP to make a devastating counterattack; a Mage burns it to cast spells. Willpower represents the spark of exceptionalism that separates adventurers from ordinary folk, and managing it carefully is central to play. Card-Based Initiative Combat initiative is determined by drawing from a shuffled deck of initiative tokens. One per character and one per monster group. This creates a genuinely unpredictable turn order every round, keeping both players and GM on their toes and preventing the predictability of fixed initiative lists. Kin & Profession, Not Class & Level Character creation is fast: pick a Kin, pick a Profession, assign starting skills. After play begins, advancement is open: characters grow by spending experience on skills of their choice, unconstrained by class restrictions. This avoids the feeling of "wrong builds" and keeps development tied to what the characters actually do in play. Links freeleaguepublishing.com - Official website freeleaguepublishing.com - Free character sheets and campaign materials forum.frialigan.se - Free League forum

An absurd, over-the-top, comedy/horror D&D Actual Play Podcast starring some of History's most infamous monsters. Join the adventures of The Invisible Man, The Mummy, The Frankenstein Monster, The Phantom of the Opera, The Wolfman, and more as they're forced to ban together to survive the supernatural horrors of the "Engl-ish" Countryside. Table Talk Table Talk is a special interview series on the D&Dark Podcast where the host interviews other tabletop roleplaying game creators, game masters, and actual play podcasters about their shows, design philosophies and creative spaces. Links dndarkpodcast.com - Official website spotify.com - Spotify feed podcasts.apple.com - Apple Podcasts feed

Threadfall is a campaign management platform built for live tabletop role-playing games. It records the session, transcribes speech in real time with speaker diarization, and turns the resulting transcript into a recap, a running campaign codex, and a live screen for the table, so the Game Master can stop taking notes and focus on running the game. The product was built by a Game Master frustrated with the gap between what happened at the table and what survived to the next session. Notebooks, spreadsheets, and post-session memory dumps consistently failed to keep up with multi-session campaigns where NPCs accumulate, loose threads multiply, and the party's choices weeks ago suddenly matter again. Threadfall treats the session itself as the source of truth: whatever was said at the table becomes structured, searchable, and remembered. Description What it does at the table During a live session, Threadfall captures audio, transcribes it in real time using state-of-the-art automatic speech recognition, and identifies who is speaking. A live screen, designed for a second monitor, a tablet at the table, or a shared display, shows the unfolding session in a clean, distraction-free view. The Game Master sees recent dialogue, current scene context, and tracked entities without breaking flow. What it does between sessions When the session ends, Threadfall produces a recap that captures what actually happened, character actions, key dialogue, decisions, and consequences: drawn from the transcript rather than from the GM's memory. It updates the Living Codex: a structured repository of characters, locations, factions, items, and plot threads that grows automatically as the campaign progresses. Entities are extracted, relationships are mapped, and the codex is searchable from the next session onward. Who it's for Game Masters running ongoing campaigns, particularly online or hybrid groups using voice chat, but equally useful for in-person tables with a recording device. It's system-agnostic: nothing in the product assumes Dungeons & Dragons or any specific rule set. It's been built and tested against D&D 5e and 5.24, but works equally well for Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, indie systems, and anything else where a group of people talks for hours and the GM has to remember it all. Free tier New users get two complete live sessions and recaps to try the product, with no credit card required. Founder rate Game Masters who subscribe during the launch window receive a Founder rate of $7.99/month for as long as they remain subscribed, including three campaigns, six AI sessions per month, the full Living Codex, and the live screen. Technical foundation Threadfall is built on real-time speech-to-text with speaker diarization, large-language-model summarization and entity extraction, and a knowledge-graph backend for the campaign codex. The infrastructure is designed for the unusual demands of multi-hour, multi-speaker, jargon-dense sessions where the participants invent proper nouns on the fly. Independent and actively developed Threadfall is built by an independent developer who is also an active Game Master and player. The product is shipped iteratively, with bug fixes and features released as feedback comes in from the founding group of Game Masters using it weekly.

This site covers everything from indie tabletop RPGs to D&D recommendations, tips and tricks, podcasts, reviews, creator interviews, crafts, and more so you can jump in and have fun playing these awesome games with your kids or make a wonderful game to share with the world! Links ttrpgkids.com - Website itch.io - Games for kids itch.io - Free games and resources