Ouroboros: Age of Drowning

Get your table playing in minutes, not hours.   GATEWAY RPG is a free, rules-lite d20 system built for zero-prep adventures, sudden one-shots, and seamless intro sessions. Familiar 5E-style mechanics with all the bloat stripped out, so you can run any genre instantly: neon-soaked cyberpunk streets, grit-filled noir alleys, high fantasy, cosmic horror, and everything in between. The Definitive Edition is now the main book. This is the complete, current version of GATEWAY RPG: updated core rules, solo play, a starter bestiary, and homebrew variants, character sheets all combined into one source. New artwork, professional layout, and everything players and GMs need in a single 132 page PDF. Want the history? Every older version of the rulebook, spanning 2017 to 2026, is bundled in the Legacy Zip below for collectors and the curious. Download the complete PDF bundle. AI Disclosure: This Enhanced Edition of Gateway RPG features some AI-generated artwork and layout assistance. The rules were still hand written by me and human proofread/playtested since 2017. As a one-man passion project with $0 budget, and $0 revenue gain from this game, this edition utilizes AI imagery only to provide a visually richer and cohesive experience while keeping the game entirely FREE. The original Classic Edition from 2017, featuring human-created artwork, is included as a bonus in the download files. However, if you are only looking for a gaming experience completely free of AI-generated assets, the standalone Classic Edition can be found exclusively on its own dedicated product page at https://gatewayrpg.itch.io/gateway-rpg-classic-edition. What’s Inside? Definitive Edition (Main Book): The complete game in one volume. Updated rules, solo play engine, starter bestiary, and homebrew variants. Legacy Zipfile (2017-2026): Every prior version of the rulebook, character sheet, supplement preserved as released. For archivists, returning players, and anyone who wants to see how the game evolved. Core Rules: The streamlined engine for players and Game Masters, in both English and Spanish (Reglas en Español). Character Sheets: Multiple Printable and Form Fillable Character Sheets Ready-to-Play Content: Pregenerated characters and one-shot adventure modules spanning multiple genres. Jump straight into the action. Player's Toolkit: Printable and form-fillable character sheets, a one-page quick reference guide, and the d20 Oracle for solo play. Starter Bestiary: 25 adversaries across 11 settings, from High Fantasy to Space Opera to Lovecraftian Horror. Homebrew Variants: Over 20 pages of optional mechanics, including Spark of Heroism (Inspiration), Pushing for Success (partial success), and genre modifiers for Survival and Cosmic Horror. Pocket Character Sheets: Compact sheets designed for portability. Solo Play Quickstart Zine: A portable, zine-style guide for on-the-go solo adventures. NEW: Android Player Companion App Character Builder: Create custom characters or select from 30 curated pre-mades. Pocket Rules: Quickly search core mechanics and references on the fly. Sheet-Integrated Dice: Roll checks directly from your sheet. Solo Engine: Built-in oracle for quick, on-the-go solo adventures. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.aistudio.gatewayrpg.app Designer's Note: GATEWAY RPG grew out of a personal passion for tabletop gaming. Back in 2015, I discovered S. John Ross’s classic 1993 game, Risus: The Anything RPG. It was free, modular, ultra-flexible, and simple to pick up, but as I played more TTRPG's like DND5e, I missed the iconic d20 and the drama of critical hits and misses. I created GATEWAY RPG to capture that same beginner-friendly spirit while bringing back the thrill of the twenty-sided die and being able to use it for any setting. Whether you are running quick one-shots, playing standalone adventures, diving into solo sessions, or modularly introducing advanced rules as your group learns, GATEWAY adapts seamlessly to your table. GATEWAY RPG and Aurican's Lair are a Not-For-Profit Tabletop Roleplaying Game publisher.

Shadow of the Demon Lord is a grim dark-fantasy tabletop roleplaying game set during the last, doomed years before an apocalypse, designed by Robert J. Schwalb and published by his own studio, Schwalb Entertainment, in 2015 following a Kickstarter campaign.  It builds a d20-based system deliberately stripped of the modifier-stacking common to games in its weight class, replacing most situational bonuses and penalties with a single abstracted mechanic. Schwalb later returned to the same core system for a lighter, more traditional-fantasy spinoff, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, released via Kickstarter in 2023. Description Characters begin as ordinary commoners rather than destined heroes, in a world where the Demon Lord's return is already underway and survival - not glory - is the realistic goal of most adventures. The Game Master (GM) runs a setting that leans hard into body horror, corruption, and creeping dread, and the game states its demands plainly.  Characters can and do die, sanity can crack under the weight of what they witness, and doing what's necessary to survive can leave a permanent, mechanical stain on a character's soul. It's built for a table that wants D&D-adjacent fantasy combat without D&D's heroic framing - closer in spirit to grimdark fiction than epic fantasy, with character death treated as a real and fairly common outcome rather than an exception.

It's October 13th, 1999 and the world has ended. Someone, no one is sure who, let something into our world. A kind of infection or corruption that affects both the body and the mind. Animals, people, even mundane objects... all became twisted and unnatural. Some speculate it's a kind of demonic possession, others that it's an alien or even transdimensional biological weapon. In the end, it doesn't matter. The whole world fell apart, twisted from within. The survivors cling to their wretched lives in a fallen world, trying to comprehend the horrors and fend them off for just one more day. The world is in tatters, monsters roam around consuming everything they can, strange occult powers spread among the damned, and even the very air seems tainted. Perhaps the rapture happened and the survivors are being punished because they were found wanting. Perhaps this is some kind of strange terrorist attack from another world. Or maybe it's all nothing more than a cosmic accident, a tragedy of happenstance as something never intended for this world found its way in. Can you survive and fight off the horrors coming from within and without? Description October Twilight is a survival horror/dungeon crawler tabletop roleplaying game for 2 or more players. One player must take the role of the Game Master. This game assumes familiarity with other roleplaying games and so much of the basic flow of roleplaying is not explained. The game is meant to feel like a PS1/PS2 era survival horror game and a post apocalyptic survival game. Food is scarce, ammunition is scarcer, and everything is trying to kill you. In the game, your team has a safe house they come back to between excursions. The safe house lives up to it's name, being safer than exploring the ruins of the fallen world outside your door. But, you burn resources like food and water at the safe house and have to go out to find more. You'll never have enough resources to simply hole up and wait out the end of the world. Touchstones and Inspirations: Resident Evil, Silent Hill, The Walking Dead, Darkest Dungeon, and Evil Dead 2.

Professional actors playing unprofessional TTRPG characters. Professionally. Super heroes? Ok. A gang of babies? ...sure. Wait, Shia LeBeouf? And WTF is a Drimbus? Using traditional TTRPG mechanics to tackle non-traditional scenarios, join our cast of professional idiots as they try to roll their way out of the most ridiculous situations.

ADVANTAGE ON ARCANA is the blog of Christian Hendriks, focused on ttrpgs including but not limited to D&D 5e, Fate Core, Chronicles of Darkness, and other people's OSR or rules-light homebrews. Current topics often involve the Planegea setting. Recurring topics include emergent narrative. Former topics included the creation of made-up literary works or scenes for your games.  ADVANTAGE ON ARCANA frequently participates in the RPG Blog Carnival. A fundamental principle behind this blog is that bringing our knowledge and expertise from other areas of our life to the gaming table improves the hobby for everyone.

When Sky and Sea Were Not Named (WSSWNN for short) is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying game. To play, you'll need a set of gaming dice, your imagination, and a few friends. One player, the Guide, narrates the story and sets up challenges for the rest of the group. The other players take on the roles of heroes who set forth upon doomed floating islands, rescue people from their fates, and rebuild civilization. A game of When Sky and Sea Were Not Named might be limited to a single island that players explore in a few hours. Or it can be a sprawling adventure spread out over months of play, with heroes steadily gaining more powerful abilities and technology. Beyond action scenes and combat, WSSWNN is about your heroic characters and their journeys together. You can learn new lore from other characters—perhaps allies you've rescued, or even foes you've graced with mercy. You can invoke your hero's ideals in dramatic moments, potentially turning failure or struggle into success.