Free Role Playing Games
Free Role Playing Games |
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This role playing game of detection lets you solve mysteries with a diverse group of colorful detectives.
Natually I've retained the semi-diceless philosophy pioneered in Lost Souls and Legendary Lives, but I've now replaced the ART with a die rolling mechanic. As a personal preference, I thought the core mechanic would be more fun if it went from cross-referencing values on a table to meaty fistfuls of dice. While it's debatable whether its easier to use, its certainly unique and the probability curves it creates are very pleasing.
The other big change to the system is that all difficulty adjustments are added before the roll is made. That way, what you roll is what you get. A Great roll is always Great with no column shifts to make it something else. Everyone at the table can now anticipate an appropriate outcome based just on the roll.
Front-loading the difficulty also allowed me to simplify opposed rolls. Lost Souls and Legendary Lives had narrators counting the columns between the target and the result and doing math in their heads to figure things out. Now all the narrator needs to do is set the difficultly and interpret the outcome exactly as it is rolled. Good is always good, Poor is always poor.
The new system also allows for simplified NPC management. NPCs don't need a full slate of abilities. They reveal themselves through the difficulty modifiers they present to the players.
Lastly, in an attempt to make the game more collaborative, I've distributed some of the narrator's processes. Players decide when a specialty applies, they get to narrate the best results, and they participate in awarding experience. They can even affect the game environment and what's found in it.
Lost Souls lets you mock death in the comfort of your own home. Return from the dead as a lost soul striving to collect Karma. With daring and wit, you’ll be reborn a higher being. But don’t lose your Will to Live too soon, or you may come back as pond scum! Only an ingenious use of your supernatural powers will see you through the postmortem mayhem of Lost Souls. Intuitive, consistent and highly playable rules make it easy to learn and fun to play. The unique premise and fascinating characters are unlike any other game. With Lost Souls, death is only the beginning. (1999 Edition, includes material from Cemetery Plots)
Author's Note: Lost Souls sold better than any other Marquee Press game, but it was much harder to play than Legendary Lives and it's something of a novelty. Players in Lost Souls are incorporeal ghosts that require supernatural powers to interact with material objects. They can't walk through walls without using a power, so just getting out of a closed room can prove challenging. Many players were put off by the steep difficulties they faced, but at the same time, a good group could do amazing things. The creative use of powers made it so no two groups would ever solve a problem in the same way. The rules presented here incorporate the Lost Souls supplement Cemetery Plots as well as other enhancements and clarifications.
In Legendary Lives, you'll play a hero in a fantastic realm of epic adventure. You'll pit your spells against the magic of powerful sorcerers, wield mighty weapons in battle with mythical creatures, and explore a richly textured world filled with sinister cults and strange societies. Legendary Lives stresses fast action and storytelling, helping you recapture the excitement of your first role-playing experience. (2nd edition rules)
Author's Note: Legendary Lives was always the most popular game that I would run at conventions. It has a generic fantasy setting that anyone with a little D&D experience can relate to, allowing new players to dive in without a lot of explanation about the setting. This is an early GM diceless game, first published in 1990. Rolls are all expressed in words, not numbers, giving any action ten possible results ranging from Catastrophic to Awesome. The enjoyable character creation lured players in, but it was the strength of the system that sold games.
Back in the early 1990’s, I was writing paper & pencil role-playing games for a small publisher called Marquee Press. At the time, video games were just starting to nibble away at the market, appealing mostly to gamers who were interested in fast-paced action and combat. As a result, the focus of role-playing games was starting to shift from combat simulators to storytelling devices. Marquee Press games represent a step in that progression.
In a Marquee Press game, the gamemaster almost never rolls dice. The players roll to resist or influence the game world, and the gamemaster interprets the results of their rolls. This puts the focus of the game on the players and their abilities, while freeing the gamemaster to concentrate on narrating what happens. In modern GNS theory, the games are “narrativist” for the gamemaster and “gamist” for the players (with an emphasis on challenge and not competition).
This melding worked very well. One talented storyteller could entertain an entire group of casual players. Not everyone needed to be a gifted actor or narrator. The games fostered a friendly, playful mood at a time when many other games were striving to be dark and profound.
I ran Lost Souls and Legendary Lives at dozens of conventions across the country. I have many good memories of the people I met and the warm reception they gave me. I also sold a lot of books and made a lot of friends. I was especially impressed by the way the games offered a structured social interaction for people who might otherwise feel awkward or alienated (myself included). They were all about having fun in a group.
I always thought computer games would be the main threat to tabletop role-playing, and I was satisfied that Marquee Press was focusing on elements of gaming that a computer wouldn't soon be able to duplicate. But when collectible card games hit the industry in a big way, our core players and then the entire distribution chain were no longer interested in small role-playing games. Marquee Press games weren't focused enough on storytelling, their settings weren't rich enough, and their production values weren't high enough to compete in this new industry. The company quietly went out of business and I ended up with the rights to the games.
The text files for these games have sat on my various hard drives for years. I’m making these games available online for free in the hope they will bring some enjoyment to someone somewhere. They are an attempt to focus on a feature of role-playing that still hasn’t been duplicated in a computer game: the fun of interactive storytelling within a structured game setting.
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Would you like to see more? Email me and let me know. If there's interest I will continue to post adventures and other free games.
