Deal of the Day - The Sword of Cepheus 2nd Edition (S&S via Cepheus Engine)

Many gamers understand that the Cepheus Engine is an open ruleset based on Mongoose Travellers' open ruleset. As such, the Cepheus 2d6 system can get turned and twisted into interesting directions. The Sword of Cepheus 2e is one of those interesting directions, as it turns a ruleset designed for space opera into one more suited for Swords & Sorcery, Sword & Planet, or even Swords & Sandals.

The Sword of Cepheus 2nd Edition is today's Deal of the Day at DTRPG. Usually priced at $20 in PDF, it is on sale for $10 until tomorrow morning.

The Sword of Cepheus is a roleplaying game in the triple “Sword” genres: Sword and Sorcery, Sword and Planet, and Sword and Sandal. In Sword and Sorcery, often-amoral protagonists face vile sorcery and horrid beasts as they complete awesome adventures for gold and glory. In Sword and Planet, humans finding themselves on barbaric or decadent alien planets use their superior brawn and valiant hearts to win fame, fortune, and the heart of an alien princeling. In Sword and Sandal, often set in a quasi-Biblical or faux-Roman world, men and women with sharp wits and strong sword-arms fight mythological creatures and overthrow tyrants. The common threads of all three genres are the blade-wielding protagonists who use their brawn, as well as brains, to fight foes both supernatural and mundane and undertake hair-raising, violent adventures.

The Sword of Cepheus rules include everything you need to play thrilling sword & sorcery adventures:

• Streamlined skill-based 2d6 task resolution!
• Customizable character generation with 12 archetypal careers for your character to undergo!
• 12 non-human species with their own careers!
• 40 unique character Traits to further personalize your character!
• A wide selection of adventuring equipment and weaponry!
• Simple yet intriguing rules for adventuring and exploring exciting worlds!
• Fast-paced, action-packed combat - whether on foot, from horseback, or on the high seas!
• A skill-based, perilous sorcery system, with 28 powerful Arcane spells and 18 reality-shattering Eldritch spells!
• Risk disastrous magical mishaps and mutate as vast eldritch power flows through your sorcerous body!
• 95 terrible monsters for daring heroes to face!
• A selection of treasures, including a selection of powerful magical artifacts!
• Detailed Encounter Rules to keep adventuring exciting and fresh, for both players and Referees!

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Free OSR - Black Pudding #4 (Zine)

It's challenging to quantify Black Pudding #4. Is it a zine? Is it a rules supplement? Is it a rules substitute? It could be all of the above. All that, and it is priced at PWYW!

Random tables? Check!

New classes? Check!

Old classes with new skins? Check!

New Races? Check!

Potential hirelings? Yep!

A James West character sheet? You bet ya!

The die hits the table... a 1! A sound emanates from 2d6 x 10 feet down the dungeon corridor. What wandering, shlorping oozoid is this? It's a new Black Pudding. Get your torches ready.

In this issue you get new classes, a double helping of Meatshields, and a 15 page OSR play book, complete with the basic classes, rules, and Black Pudding flavor to enhance or replace your current play book. For use with dice of funny sides. Inspired by games such as Labyrinth Lord, The Black Hack, and Swords & Wizardry White Box.

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Free OSR - Against the Darkmaster - Quickstart (RoleMaster/MERPS)

In the late '80s, one of the game systems I played (ran) was Rolemaster, although it was often merged with MERPS. Of course, we always used the critical tables from Rolemaster. Rolling a "66" was always magical. :)

Against the Darkmaster—Quickstart is priced at PWYW and is a love poem to the classic RoleMaster system. You know you want it :)

Return to the Classic Game of Fantasy Adventure!

Against the Darkmaster is an Epic Fantasy role-playing game of high adventures, eldritch magic, and heavy metal combat.

Inspired by the classic fantasy sagas and 80s fantasy movies, Against the Darkmaster is built for heroic action and intense, character driven campaigns.

The Against the Darkmaster Deluxe Quickstart Rules include everything you need to start playing. In fact, it could well be a full RPG! This beautifully illustrated 122-page PDF includes:

Character creation rules and options;

Detailed rules for travels, combat, and adventuring;

A complete magic system, with over 100 spells;

Attack tables and Critical Strikes;

Dozens of creatures for your heroes to face.

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Deal of the Day - Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations (System Neutral)

I have to say that the entire Sly Flourish catalogue is full of gems for the improv DM. Sly Flourish's Fantastic Locations is a gem that is a bargain today! Normally 9.99 in PDF, Fantastic Locations is on sale for $3 until 11AM ET tomorrow (April 11th).

For those who don't know, I am an improv DM by nature, and material like this is my bread and butter when running a session or campaign.

We RPG game masters have a lot of tools to help us run our roleplaying games. Our monster books and bestiaries give us piles of foes to throw at our adventurers. The various guides for game masters often give us non-player characters, treasures, and story-building tips.

One of the hardest parts of game mastering, however, is coming up with interesting adventure locations for our characters to explore. These locations need to be fantastic, detailed places that capture the minds of our players every session we run. Good locations are hard to improvise and often hard to strip out of a fully-fleshed-out adventure.

Sly Flourish’s Fantastic Locations is a book, available in PDF and print-on-demand, that gives you twenty system-agnostic locations to drop into your favorite fantasy roleplaying game. Each location builds on a fantastic theme, such as a mysterious ancient structure under the ice, a cursed castle of a mad king, a fallen celestial fortress, and a dwarven mine that cracked into the tomb of a dead god. Each location includes artwork by Brian Patterson of D20Monkey. Sometimes this artwork takes the form of maps. Sometimes it's an overlook of a specific location.

These sites and structures aren’t full adventures. Instead, you and your players build your own stories in these fantastic locations, then you populate them with the monsters that fit your story.

Thanks to the support of 779 backers on Kickstarter this book was expanded to include a total of twenty locations each with full color artwork.

This book is system agnostic. You can use it in just about any fantasy roleplaying game.

Please note that this book does not contain maps for these locations. This was done on purpose to give you greater flexibility choosing the chambers you wanted to use for shorter or longer games.

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Free OSR - Castles & Crusades Players Handbook (7th Printing)

Castles & Crusades is one of the granddaddies of the OSR. I often refer to it as proto-OSR, as it still firmly clung to its 3rd edition roots while striving to emulate classic play. In any case, C&C is an excellent choice of system if one is looking to play something that feels much like AD&D 1e. You can use most AD&D books (DMG, MM, FF, etc.) with few or no conversions.

The Castles & Crusades Players Handbook 7th Printing is available in PDF at PWYW pricing. You can grab it for free, and you can always tip later if you feel so inclined.

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Free OSR - Basic Fantasy RPG (Complete Line)

Everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING, released for the Basic Fantasy RPG is free in PDF, and essentially at cost in print. The latest edition of Basic Fantasy is free of the OGL and released under the Creative Commons license.

Whether you play BFRPG or not, the complete line of supplements and adventures are free in PDF and highly compatible with the "classic" rules of your youth and most OSR rulesets.

Print copies can be obtained at cost from both DTRPG and Amazon, with Amazon offering the bonus of free Prime shipping for Prime Members.

Last spring, at our annual gathering, I gave collections of BFRPG core rules and adventures to members of my old gaming group. 

This is the revised 4th Edition of the Basic Fantasy Role-Playing Game, a rules-light game system written with inspiration from early RPG game systems. It is suitable for those who are fans of "old-school" game mechanics, and it's simple enough for children in perhaps second or third grade to play, yet still having enough depth for adults as well. With this edition, the game is now released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license.

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Humble Bundle - Map Making Mega Bundle (Campaign Cartographer plus Many More)

As tabletop gamers, we are generally obsessed with maps to some extent. I love to draw maps for my fantasy campaigns, but I truly suck at it. With a bit of practice - and the Map Making Mega Bundle over at Humble Bundle by ProFantasy, your maps won't suck ;)

30 bucks is all in, but 15 does give you the core software and some fun widgets to use with it.

Campaign Cartographer 3+ is 44.95 at the ProFantasy webstore - just by itself!

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Free OSR - The Lakofka Archive

The Lakofka Archives are the repository of previously unpublished works of Len Lekofka, AKA "Leomund."

Len was best known for AD&D Modules L1-3 and his series of articles in Dragon Magazine, Leomund's Tiny Hut.