Looking Back to 2014 - Scarlet Heroes (Sine Nomine)

I can't believe Scarlet Heroes was first released in 2014. Now I find myself desperately looking for my physical copy on my unsorded bookshelves. I backed the Scarlet Heroes Kickstarter back in the day and I so wanted to run this, but I never had a small enough group. Now I'm tempted to try this as a solo RPG. Kevin Crawford simply does great stuff.

Scarlet Heroes is an old-school tabletop role-playing game designed to provide classic sword and sorcery gaming for one player and one gamemaster. Unlike most other RPGs, Scarlet Heroes is built to support one-on-one play, with no need for a full-fledged party of adventurers to provide an evening's entertainment. Whether for a spouse, kid, curious friend, or just as an alternative to boardgames for those nights when only one or two friends can make it to the gaming session, Scarlet Heroes gives you the tools for good old-fashioned skull-cracking adventure.

Scarlet Heroes can be used both as a stand-alone RPG and as an overlay over your favorite old-school game to make its adventures playable for single PCs or very small groups. It shares the same classic statistics and basic game mechanisms as these old-school favorites, but by changing the interpretation of these numbers it makes it possible for a single courageous adventurer to dare perils that would otherwise threaten a half-dozen freebooters. With Scarlet Heroes, a GM can pull out a favorite module, grab a convenient friend, and have a full night's adventure with no tweaking, alteration, or adjustment of the material needed.

Inside the pages of this book, you'll find...

• A full stand-alone RPG system that can also be used as an overlay atop most popular old-school games.
• The Red Tide campaign setting as a default for the game, with a full bestiary of Southeast Asian-inspired monsters, suitable new magic items, and a full list of new cleric and magic-user spells for that setting.
• Sixty new adventure tags of the sort beloved in Stars Without Number and the Red Tide Campaign Setting sourcebook. Mix and match to fashion your own perilous circumstance.
• Solo adventure tools for genuine single-player RPG gaming. Mix your own creativity with table results to create a narrative for your own hero's adventure... or use them as inspiration in crafting something for a group.

 The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

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Bundle of Holding - Sine Nomine Rulebooks

Let me start this by saying I own ALL of Sine Nomine's core rulebooks in Print and PDF. They literally are that good. If you are an improv-style GM, Kevin's rulebooks are the ones you want. Tools for a long and strong campaign? These right here, there are no better. Fantasy, sci-fi, cyberpunk, post-apoc, Lovecraftian horror, quasi-historical - Kevin has them all. 

Stars Without Number Revised Deluxe, Other Dust, Spears of the Dawn, and Cities Without Number: Free Edition are all in the Starter package for 12.95. The Bonus Collection adds Worlds Without Number Deluxe, Wolves of God, Scarlet Heroes, and Silent Legions and comes to about $26 as I type this.

Seriously, you can't go wrong with Sine Nomine's rulesets.

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. The Tavern DOES NOT do "Paid For" Articles and discloses personal connections to products and creators written about when applicable.

DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern.  You can catch the daily Tavern Chat cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar   

Sine Nomine Sale - 20-40% Off Most Titles in PDF

Kevin Crawford simply writes good shit. If you want an OSR game that isn't simply fantasy, that is built from the ground up for sandbox play, pick up a Sine Nomine ruleset. 

Kevin is probably best known for the sci-fi RPG Stars Without Number: Original Core Edition (on sale for 11.99). There are also Silent Legions (Mythos on sale for 11.99), Scarlet Heroes (on sale for 8.99 for one on one swords & sorcery play), Godbound: A Game of Divine Heroes (also on sale for 11.99), and other titles. 

Seriously, it's hard to go wrong with Sine Nomine :)

The Tavern is supported by readers like you. The easiest way to support The Tavern is to shop via our affiliate links. DTRPG, Amazon, and Humble Bundle are affiliate programs that support The Tavern. 

You can catch the daily Tavern Chat podcast on YouTube - Tenkar 

Bundle of Holding - One to One RPGs - Bundle for Two

Yep, tomorrow is Valentine's Day, so we have a bunch of two player / one to one / one on one RPGs in the Bundle for Two.

Starter Collection is $7.95 and includes... nothing I've heard of before.

The Bonus Collection (a hair over 17 bucks) has Scarlet Heroes ( +Kevin Crawford ) which is simply amazing. I've also heard good things about Don't Rest Your Head. The rest? All new to me.

From the BoH page:

About half these games have appeared in past Bundle offers. Most of the new games are in our low-priced Starter Collection, which gives you five titles (retail value $37) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks for just US$7.95:

Romance Trilogy (Black and Green Games, retail price $10): Newly updated versions of Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin, the groundbreaking "Three Quick Games About the Human Heart" by Emily Care Boss.

A Single Moment (TAGSessions, retail $8): A life-and-death narrative battle between samurai, and the past events that brought them here. Additional playsets translate the drama to the Wild West, medieval England, and even romantic comedy. Includes Five Single Playsets (Riverhouse Games, retail $1), which adapts the system to new settings.

Stories From the Grave (Spectrum Games, retail $10): Anthology-based horror (think EC Comics, The Twilight Zone, and Creepshow) for a GM and one foredoomed protagonist.

Mars Colony (TCK Roleplaying, retail $8): A political struggle for the salvation of an isolated outpost. (Originally presented in our September 2013 Indie Treasure Trove.)

And if you pay more than the threshold price of $17.22, you'll level up and also get our entire Bonus Collection with five more games (mostly drawn from past offers) worth an additional $53:

Scarlet Heroes (Sine Nomine Publishing, retail $15): Both a standalone old-school game and an overlay for your favorite retroclone, Scarlet Heroes lets you run any published fantasy adventure, unaltered, with just one player. From Kevin Crawford, designer of Stars Without Number. (From the November 2014 Old School Revival +2.)

Showdown (Dark Omen Games, retail $15): A tense card-based confrontation between longtime enemies where victory always brings great cost. (New in this offer.)

Macabre Tales (Spectrum Games, retail $13): A Cthulhu Mythos experience that uses dominoes to create a tense, fiercely accurate simulation of HP Lovecraft's stories. Dominoes not included. (From the October 2014 Bundle of Tentacles +2.)

Don't Rest Your Head (Evil Hat, retail $5): An insomniac in Mad City struggles against monsters both real and imagined. (From the October 2013 Bundle of Nerves.)

Beast Hunters (Berengad Games, retail $5): Stalk and fight monsters that threaten your people. When you defeat them, use their blood to ink tattoos on your skin and gain their power. (From the March 2014 Fantastic Valor collection.)

Bundle of Holding - Old School Revival +2

This is, admittedly, a very nice collection of OSR gaming in the latest Bundle of Holding:

Dyson's Delves I contains a campaign worth of adventures and maps. You literally would need nothing else but your choice of rules and some dice.

Labyrinth Lord and the Advanced Edition Companion - these are the versions with art. It's B/X D&D with some AD&D added in with the AEC.

People of the Pit - an adventure published by Brave Halfing. I don't know enough to talk about it really.

Death Frost Doom 2e - I enjoyed reading the first edition, although I never ran it. Haven't really looked at the update.

Lesserton & Mor - I found it very reminiscent to the classics Pavis and Big Rubble for the Chaosium edition of RuneQuest, which is a very good thing, as I played the shit out of that.

River Knife Trilogy - Includes Evil Wizards in a Cave, which I have heard of, but never actually read.

Scarlet Heroes - looking for some one on one or perhaps two on one gaming? can't put together a full group? This s the system for you. +Kevin Crawford did an amazing job with this set of rules.

Scarlet Heroes Hard Cover in Hand!

Scarlet Heroes arrived yesterday. I doubt I'll have a chance to run my wife through anything this weekend, as I'm running games both Friday and Saturday nights, but I'm hoping I can put her through here second one on one RPG session (her first was an adapted T&T solo about 3 years ago) in about a week.

I'm pretty stoked!

Scarlet Heroes Art Has Been Released to the Public Domain - Crawford Does it Again!

Yep, +Kevin Crawford has done it yet again. This time he's released all of the art from the Scarlet Heroes rulebook into the public domain. You can use it on your blogs, in your projects and it's free.
Kevin previously did this with his first Kickstarter, Spear of the Dawn (art pack here and additional art here).

This time he even got +Dyson Logos to join in. So damn cool!

Below are some samples (and much more in the free art pack)

Scarlet Heroes QuickStart is Released for Free - Time to Get Your Significant Other Corrupted!

I'm a big fan of +Kevin Crawford 's Scarlet Heroes. It's the RPG ruleset I'm going to use to corrupt my wife and turn her into a gamer. Well, maybe not turn her into a gamer, but allow for me to introduce her to RPG play via some one on one gaming.

Kevin has just released the Scarlet Heroes QuickStart - an excellent opportunity to try out the Scarlet Heroes ruleset and see if it works for you and yours. Best part - after considering the fact that it allows you to run the classic modules with the "hack" built into the system - is that Kevin released the Scarlet Heroes QuickStart rules for free.

Grab them. Read them. Run them.

I'm going to try and run a session for my wife two weekends hence. I'll be sure to post a play report (waiting on the printed cop as my wife prefers print over PDF).

From the blurb:

Scarlet Heroes is an old-school tabletop role-playing game designed to provide classic sword and sorcery gaming for one player and one gamemaster. Scarlet Heroes is built to support one-on-one play, with no need for a full-fledged party of adventurers to provide an evening's entertainment. Whether for a spouse, kid, curious friend, or just as an alternative to boardgames for those nights when only one or two friends can make it to the gaming session, Scarlet Heroes gives you the tools for good old-fashioned skull-cracking adventure.

And now with the Scarlet Heroes Quickstart you can have a taste of those possibilities, all wrapped up in a crisp 32-page digest-sized booklet. Have a friend interested in the game? Hand them the DRM-free PDF, or pass them a copy of the eminently affordable print booklet. It's everything they'll need to brew up a hero ready to take on classic modules and new home-brewed adventures that might otherwise require a full party of novice adventurers.

The Scarlet Heroes Quickstart has everything you need to get going with an evening's adventure.

A thumbnail sketch of the Red Tide Campaign Setting used in the full Scarlet Heroes core rulebook.
Character creation rules for fashioning first-level solo heroes.

Stand-alone game systems to allow for lone adventurers, including mechanics compatible with most old-school modules and classic adventures.

Monstrous foes suitable for the challenging of even these fearsome warriors.
Treasures fit for whetting the avarice of the daring.

Adventure creation guidelines for building quick, easy dungeon crawls- plus a two-page mini-adventure for instant play!

So seize this new weapon for your armory of game mastering artifice. The full rules await for those who find worth in its pages, with a legion of new tools, tags, and techniques for delivering the kind of sword & sorcery adventure you want!

Kickstarter Project "Ships" 17 Days After Funding Completes? Must be Kevin Crawford's Scarlet Heroes

+Kevin Crawford just announced that the Scarlet Heroes Kickstarter is officially complete. Supporters of the Kickstarter can now order their "at cost" copies of the book, the final PDF is out and the game is complete. Stretch goals may take a little longer to release, but as his target was June, I suspect he has more than enough time to get them in order.

Oh, and it's on sale for the general public too.

The man is a Kickstarter Gawd! ;)

Did I mention I'll be using Scarlet Heroes to bring my wife up to speed for NTRPG Con?

From the blurb at RPGNow:

Scarlet Heroes is an old-school tabletop role-playing game designed to provide classic sword and sorcery gaming for one player and one gamemaster. Unlike most other RPGs, Scarlet Heroes is built to support one-on-one play, with no need for a full-fledged party of adventurers to provide an evening's entertainment. Whether for a spouse, kid, curious friend, or just as an alternative to boardgames for those nights when only one or two friends can make it to the gaming session, Scarlet Heroes gives you the tools for good old-fashioned skull-cracking adventure.

Scarlet Heroes can be used both as a stand-alone RPG and as an overlay over your favorite old-school game to make its adventures playable for single PCs or very small groups. It shares the same classic statistics and basic game mechanisms as these old-school favorites, but by changing the interpretation of these numbers it makes it possible for a single courageous adventurer to dare perils that would otherwise threaten a half-dozen freebooters. With Scarlet Heroes, a GM can pull out a favorite module, grab a convenient friend, and a have a full night's adventure with no tweaking, alteration, or adjustment of the material needed.

Inside the pages of this book, you'll find...

A full stand-alone RPG system that can also be used as an overlay atop most popular old-school games.

The Red Tide campaign setting as a default for the game, with a full bestiary of Southeast Asian-inspired monsters, suitable new magic items, and a full list of new cleric and magic-user spells for that setting.

Sixty new adventure tags of the sort beloved in Stars Without Number and the Red Tide Campaign Setting sourcebook. Mix and match to fashion your own perilous circumstance.

Solo adventure tools for genuine single-player RPG gaming. Mix your own creativity with table results to create a narrative for your own hero's adventure... or use them as inspiration in crafting something for a group.

Five crisp new maps by +Dyson Logos , unkeyed and ready to be filled by your own creativity.

More than a thousand backers supported the Kickstart that funded the creation of Scarlet Heroes and now the book is available to the wider world. Seize this world of red adventure and be armed against the coming night!

Scarlet Heroes Kickstarter will add 5 Dyson Logos Maps into the Public Domain for All to Use

Did I mention how awesome +Kevin Crawford and +Dyson Logos are?

From the Scarlet Heroes Kickstarter comments section:

Creator Kevin Crawford about 18 hours ago
We do hove nigh to $8K. I've just emailed with Dyson Logos and arranged to pony up enough cash to buy full rights to the five maps he's drawing, so those will be public domain as well. Otherwise, I've mostly been cutting and editing and tweaking to get the layout for the 32-page quickstart in order. The first cut at it has seven pages set, but I'm being obliged to think about exactly how I want it illustrated.

This is a benefit for anyone and everyone that plays RPGs.

You are backing Scarlet Heroes, right?

A Sine Nomine Kickstarter - Scarlet Heroes (If you support just one Kickstarter in 2014...)

Fact - +Kevin Crawford 's first Kickstarter, Spears of the Dawn, was distributed in PDF to backers BEFORE funding closed.

Fact - Stars Without Number is the most successful OSR Sci-Fi RPG on the market - and the base PDF is free.

Fact - +Kevin Crawford 's latest Kickstarter, Scarlet Heroes, funded in less than 18 hrs and has hit it's first stretch goal on only it's second day of funding.

Fact - I am a +Kevin Crawford fanboy ;)

Scarlet Heroes is a set of OSR rules that both stand on their own and easily integrate with other OSR rules that have been released over the years. The rules are intended to enable one on one or two on one gameplay without needing to rework the source material. Want to run Keep on the Borderlands with your non-gamer wife to introduce her to the hobby? These are the rules. Gaming group going to be short the next few weeks but you want to keep gaming? These are the rules. Want to kill some time running through a classic adventure and have no one to play with? These rules enable solo play.

Supporting the Kickstarter gives you immediate access to the current beta of the Scarlet Heroes rules in PDF. Kevin has hinted to me that the PDF may be completed in total before the Kickstarter funding even ends (he is still waiting on some 20 pieces of art).

One of the stretch goals will release the majority of the art into the public domain, just like he did with Spears of the Dawn.

+Kevin Crawford and the few project creators like him are the ones that renew my faith in Kickstarter. If you only back one Kickstarter in 2014, and you are an RPG fan of any kind, Scarlet Heroes should be that one.