Old School Renaissance (OSR) (2000)

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

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.

Mothership is an action-packed mixture of sci-fi and horror themes, combined into a streamlined gaming system about surviving in the cold, deadly vacuum of space while everything around you is trying to kill you. All at the same time as you are fighting (or fleeing from) alien creatures who aren't there to make any new friends. Chaos. It was published by Tuesday Knight Games and released in 2024.  It is a survival horror system designed for one-shots and campaigns, inspired by classics like Alien, Event Horizon, and Pandorum. Famous for its streamlined ruleset and award-winning graphic design that prioritizes ease of use at the table. The game, at the same time simplistic and streamlined in design, will challenge the characters at all times, allowing the game to focus on the storytelling and less on having complicated rules. The system it is inspired by is Old School Renaissance Description In Mothership, players take on the roles of blue collar workers in space, such as Teamsters, Scientists, Androids, and Marines. You are not powerful or heroic soldiers; you are vulnerable humans trapped in high pressure environments with alien monsters, failing life support systems and the crushing weight of corporate greed. The game is designed to be fast-paced and unforgiving, where the primary goal is not to win, but often enough - to survive. System Overview & Key Features d100 Percentile Resolution In the core of the game system is the d100 percentile system. Roll two d10 dice and get a number from 00 to 99. Success means rolling a lower result than your character's appropriate stat or skill for the task. Rolling a double, like 11, 22, or 33, is considered a critical success if it succeeds or a critical failure if it fails. Rolling low is the target for survival. Stress and Panic As characters encounter horrors or suffer trauma, they accumulate Stress. When a character experiences a terrifying event or rolls a critical failure they must make a Panic Check. The more Stress they have, the more likely they are to suffer a catastrophic mental breakdown, ranging from a heart attack to a violent psychotic break. The Save System Instead of a long list of saving throws, characters have four primary Saves: Sanity, Fear, Body, and Armor. These are used to resist different types of potential trauma. Fear saves are rolled to keep your cool under pressure, while Sanity saves represent your ability to process alien truths without losing your mind (think lovecraftian horrors). Class Based Skills The game features four distinct classes. Marines are obviously combat focused, Teamsters are pilots and laborers, Scientists are experts in medicine and biology, and Androids are cold calculating, yet efficient machines. Each class has it's unique starting stats and specific triggers for when they gain or lose Stress, which is based on their personality. Lethal Combat and Healing Combat is extremely dangerous and often a last resort. Weapons are likely to deal potentially excessive damage when compared to a character's total healthpool. Healing will be slow and require resources that are hard to come by in the middle of the constant crisis, making every injury feel like a significant threat to the character's chances of making it out alive. Deadly Ship-to-Ship Combat The game includes a streamlined system for starship encounters. Ships have their own stats and modules that are likely to be damaged during a fight. Players must work together to manage various roles and stations, like Engineering or Piloting, to keep the ship's hull from breaching while under fire or fleeing from cosmic anomalies. Additional links tuesdayknightgames.com - Official Tuesday Knight Games website mothershiprpg.com - Official Mothership portal and digital resources

Lore Warden is a battle chronicle tool for tabletop wargamers. After a game, players record the essentials: who fought, the forces involved, the score, which units were destroyed and the MVP.Lore Warden writes the engagement up as a piece of prose they can keep, share, and have read aloud. It is deliberately system-agnostic. Faction and unit names are free text and are echoed back exactly as they were typed, so it serves 40k, Age of Sigmar, Necromunda, Mordheim, historicals, BattleTech or a homebrewed ruleset equally. Army lists can be pasted in whole and unit names are picked out automatically, and added/edited manually. There are three ways to use it. A single battle produces one self-contained tale. A tournament tracks rounds, wins, draws, losses and total points, with Swiss pairings and a recap for each round. An eternal war is an ongoing group campaign, where forces evolve over months, eras are marked, retired armies are given a final entry and honours ledger, and the whole thing can be brought to a close with a finale when the group wants an ending. What separates it from pasting a game into a general chatbot is continuity. Lore Warden holds each commander's force and everything that has already happened to it, so a campaign reads as one narrative rather than a series of unconnected write-ups, and it does not invent units that were never on the table. Commanders who would rather write their own account can do that instead and still have it recited. Opponents do not need accounts. A battle can be shared by code or QR for the other player to attach their force, or entered on their behalf as a guest, and every finished tale gets a public page that anyone can read or listen to without signing up.  Written tales are free, thirty of them, for the lifetime of the account, along with one spoken recital. A subscription lifts the written cap and adds a monthly allowance of spoken recitals.

Encounterra is a free, browser-based D&D 5e (2024) combat encounter simulator that helps Dungeon Masters test and balance encounters. Users can build tactical maps, customize characters and monsters, and run encounters repeatedly using strategic AI to explore outcome statistics, combat logs, and replays. Its public version uses SRD 5.2.1 content and is independent and unofficial.

Progeny is a character creator and play companion for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition. It has a uniquely powerful and complete character creation guidance that helps even newcomers create fully fledged characters in just a few minutes. Then you can use your character right inside Progeny to play or export it to PDF or for other VtM character keepers. Progeny is completely free and open source. Links progeny.odin-matthias.com - Official website github.com - Project Github page ko-fi.com - Support the project