Tabletop Roleplaying Games

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.

Ouroboros: Age of Drowning is an original tabletop roleplaying game with its own setting and unique narrative-focused dice-pool system. Set in a dystopian world after the Meteor Fall, Ouroboros: Age of Drowning combines mystery, forbidden Alchemy, and surreal horror. The technocratic Clockwork Faction enforces a victorian New Order from its industrious Domed Cities, while rising seas consume the world beyond. As members of a League, you make discoveries in a world where Reality is unstable. Investigate strange phenomena, confront Factions with competing agendas, and encounter Aetherika, spirits, folklore made real, and horrors from the Otherworld. Venture into Dreamscapes, where Surreality blurs the boundary between worlds, and confront the Dark Thoughts within yourself as your Shadow grows. The game uses a dice-pool system designed around Traits, Specializations, and Focuses, giving characters different ways to approach problems rather than reducing them to a handful of broad attributes. Investigation, social maneuvering, survival, combat, occult practices, Dreamscapes, and forbidden Alchemy are all handled through the same core system.

SHRINES – A Dark Pilgrimage RPG is a classless dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying game about dangerous pilgrimages through wounded worlds. It combines tactical D6-pool combat, exploration, escalating threats and character growth through Domains with a strong focus on consequence, discovery and gaining knowledge. Description SHRINES – A Dark Pilgrimage RPG is a dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying game in which the players take the roles of the Marked, pilgrims bound to mysterious Shrines and sent into regions scarred by ancient wounds, broken beliefs and hostile forces. The game combines tactical combat with exploration and narrative decision-making while keeping bookkeeping deliberately light. Its core system uses pools of six-sided dice, with characters defined without traditional classes. Instead, they develop through their qualities, talents, maneuvers, equipment and Domains - powerful influences that shape abilities, vulnerabilities and interactions with the world. Shrines form the anchors of every pilgrimage. They provide safety, progression and a place to return to, because death is not the end. When a pilgrimage fails, the Marked may return to their bound Shrine, but failure still carries consequences. Lost Essence, Burden and an increasingly dangerous world ensure that reformation never makes defeat meaningless. Exploration is built around regions, locations and Instances rather than long quest lists. Players uncover Lore, discover competing factions and decide how deeply they are willing to involve themselves in conflicts that rarely offer a simple distinction between good and evil. At the same time, Regional Escalation causes the world to react to the actions and failures of the Marked, making prolonged expeditions increasingly dangerous. SHRINES is designed around the idea of fair cruelty: the world is harsh, combat can be deadly and mistakes matter, but danger is meant to be readable and consequences understandable rather than arbitrary. The game can be played with a group or as a solo pilgrimage. Its free introductory series, SHRINES: INITIATION, guides players step by step through the core ideas of the system across four connected episodes, gradually introducing exploration, combat, navigation, escalation and the consequences of failure. It leads directly into FIRST FRAGMENT, the upcoming Quickstart release, which expands SHRINES into a broader playable region with additional rules, characters, locations, monsters and a complete pilgrimage to undertake.

ChaosWood: Forsaken Tombs is a tabletop role-playing game that consists of a set of core rules, two starting adventures, and all the tools needed to create your own adventure. A fast-paced, perilous experience, set in an immersive dark fantasy world brought to life through rich art and evocative components awaits you!

Trophy is a collection of collaborative storytelling games about doomed and desperate treasure-hunters entering a haunted forest that doesn’t want them there. The games explore the physical, mental, and emotional descent of the treasure-hunters as they move deeper and deeper into the forest, encountering ancient ruins, terrible monstrosities, and the greatest horror of all: themselves. Games rooted in Trophy are built around characters willing to push their luck. The character are often desperate, with something driving them to continue against all odds. The system itself encourages risk taking, so if your game isn’t about risks or characters who push themselves, then Trophy might not be the best foundation. Trophy is also about decline. Characters tend to degrade over time, or have some precious resource that they’re gradually losing (or a negative resource that they’re gaining). If your game is about characters becoming more and more powerful, then you might want to try a different system. There are two versions of the game: Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold. Trophy Dark is designed for single session play, while Trophy Gold is designed for longer campaigns.

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.