Fate Core

Blades in the Dark is a heist-themed tabletop roleplaying game system about a crew of daring misfits  on the streets of an industrial fantasy city. Published by Evil Hat Productions in 2017 and designed by John Harper, it introduced the highly influential Forged in the Dark rules engine. BitD revolutionized the heist genre in tabletop gaming by pushing players straight into the act, eliminating the "planning phase". The system it loosely evolved from is Apocalypse World Description In Blades in the Dark, players are part of a criminal organization in Doskvol, a grim Victorian era city. The city is protected by a wall of lightning, to keep any threat on the outside. Players create their characters as either smugglers, thieves, assassins or cultists and explore the criminal underworld, perform dangerous heists, manage gang warfare and grow their criminal organization. The game focuses heavily on narrative momentum and failing forward. Characters are competent but flawed, constantly accumulating stress, trauma, and heat from the law as their gang rises to power. System Overview & Key Features Action Roll (d6 Dice Pool) The core mechanic uses a pool of six-sided dice(d6) based on a character's action rating. The highest die result will determine the outcome of the action. 6 is considered a full success, 4-5 is a partial success with a consequence, and 1-3 is a failure. Rolling multiple full successes is considered a critical success. Position and Effect Before every roll, the Game Master explicitly states the character's Position (Controlled, Risky, or Desperate) and Effect (Limited, Standard, or Great). This transparently communicates the exact stakes and potential fallout of the action before the dice hit the table. Stress and Resistance Characters have a Stress track. Players can spend Stress to give themselves for extra dice when rolling. They can also use it to assist an ally, or fuel their special abilities. Players can also spend Stress when facing any situation or consequence the GM throws at them, this makes the characters very skilled, but forces them to consider when to spend it. The Flashback Mechanic Instead of spending hours planning a heist, the crew simply chooses a target, picks a detail, and jumps right into the action. Later, they can use Stress, to envoke a flashback moment, where they explain how they had already planned for such a situation, or had "solved" it beforehand. Progress Clocks The game uses circular progress tracks called Clocks to visually represent approaching danger or the progress of a complex task. A clock might represent the alert level of the city watch, the structural integrity of a safe vault, or the patience of a rival gang leader. The Crew as a Character The criminal organization the players run has its own character sheet. The organization gains experience, levels up, claims territory, and unlocks special abilities, ensuring that the gang's rise to power is just as mechanically significant as the characters' Additional links evilhat.com - Official Evil Hat Productions website bladesinthedark.com - Official System Reference Document and rules database

Forged in the Dark is a tabletop roleplaying game framework and System Reference Document created by John Harper. Released in 2017, it is the underlying engine that powers Blades in the Dark and has since been used by independent designers to build countless other games, such as Scum and Villainy and Band of Blades. It excels at telling stories about capable but flawed groups of people pulling off daring missions against overwhelming odds. The system it directly evolved from is Blades in the Dark Description Instead of being a single game, Forged in the Dark is an open license toolkit. Players form a crew, whether they are space smugglers, military mercenaries, or rebel outcasts, and undertake dangerous missions known as Scores. The system is heavily narrative and focuses on failing forward, meaning a bad dice roll never stalls the story, but instead introduces a new complication. It completely eliminates tedious planning phases by throwing players directly into the action. System Overview & Key Features The d6 Dice Pool To resolve a risky action, a player rolls a pool of six sided dice based on their action rating. The highest single die determines the result. A six is a full success, a four or five is a partial success with a consequence, and a one to three is a bad outcome. Position and Effect Before the dice hit the table, the Game Master establishes the Position (Controlled, Risky, or Desperate) and the Effect (Limited, Standard, or Great). This ensures everyone understands exactly what is at stake and how much impact the action will have. Progress Clocks The game tracks complex threats and long term projects using circular clocks divided into segments. A stealth mission might have a clock for the guards going on high alert, filling up bit by bit as the players roll partial successes or failures. Stress and Resistance Characters have a Stress track that they can spend to push themselves for extra dice or to assist an ally. More importantly, players can spend Stress to resist any consequence the Game Master introduces, allowing characters to survive deadly situations by sheer willpower. Flashbacks Players do not need to spend hours planning a heist or mission. When they encounter an obstacle, they can simply spend Stress to declare a flashback, narrating how their character anticipated the problem and set up a solution in the past. Phases of Play The game flows through specific phases. Free Play is where characters gather information and choose a target. The Score is the actual mission. Finally, Downtime allows the crew to recover from injuries, reduce their heat, and work on personal projects before the cycle begins again. Additional links bladesinthedark.com - Official System Reference Document and rules database evilhat.com - Official Evil Hat Productions website

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.

Mischief is a D12 chaos-driven game of magical mayhem that keeps your TTRPG sessions fast, intense, and unpredictable. Classless character builds offer maximum customization. The Luck system keeps gameplay quick and swingy. Prep is uber-simple and fiction-first. The Mischief engine is designed for easy reflavoring to suit your next campaign or setting!

The World Was Young is a collaborative, worldbuilding card game. By marking a shared map in response to prompts with different combinations of Tones and Verbs, you build the history of a game setting over three Ages, creating lands, peoples, conflicts, and legends together. The end result is a deep setting ready to play in your favorite TTRPG system.  TWWY replaces the GM-generated, seldom-read background doc with a deck of cards and a table full of creative voices. Players and GM share the creative load, and the gap between player knowledge and character knowledge shrinks. Session Negative One Session Zero has improved TTRPGs by increasing communication between players and GMs. It helps ensure that everyone is on the same page about safety, the type of game being played, characters, and more. But it doesn’t solve a major pain point. Even if they’ve read the twenty-page setting background from the GM, players arrive at Session Zero as outsiders. The problem is that players need to create characters that are native to that world. How do we bridge that gap? How do we overcome that outsider status? The World Was Young brings players into the worldbuilding process from the beginning, increasing their investment and ownership of the setting before the game even begins. The twenty-page setting doc is replaced with an hour and a half of group worldbuilding. The result isn’t something that the players read. It’s something that they helped write. Players can weave their characters into threads they helped spin across the history of the world. Maybe their PC is the last of a civilization of Orcs destroyed hundreds of years ago. Or perhaps the descendant of a forgotten monarch. Whatever the choice, the table has an understanding of that character from the beginning. When the GM references the ancient civilization of sentient Axolotls that was destroyed a thousand years prior, she doesn’t have to lore-dump anything; the players already know about that civilization.

Drakar och Demoner ("Dragons and Demons," commonly abbreviated DoD) is Sweden's first and longest-running fantasy tabletop RPG, originally published in 1982 by Äventyrsspel (later renamed Target Games) as a translation and adaptation of Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing system and its Magic World supplement. It occupies roughly the same cultural space in Sweden that Dungeons & Dragons holds in the US - not just a game many Swedish players grew up on, but effectively the game that introduced the country to the hobby before D&D had any real distribution there.  Over four decades and roughly a dozen editions, the game shifted from BRP-style percentile play to a d20-based roll-under "Expert" system, passed through several owners including RiotMinds in the 2000s, and since 2021 has belonged to Free League Publishing, who crowdfunded a reimagined 40th-anniversary edition in 2022 known internationally as Dragonbane. Designed by the team behind Mutant: Year Zero and Forbidden Lands, with art by Vaesen illustrator Johan Egerkrans, this modern edition is what's currently in print and most widely played today.