Free OSR - Ashes Without Number (Free Edition)

If you didn't already know it, Sine Nomine Publishing offers nearly all of its core rulebooks in a "Free Edition" as well as a "Deluxe Edition". The Free Editions are complete games and truly a gift to the gaming community.

Ashes Without Number (Free Edition) is Sine Nomine's post-apoc ruleset, and as you have already seen, the price is right :) (you can grab the Ashes Without Number Deluxe Edition here)

Ashes Without Number is both a game set after the end and a toolkit to help you build the apocalypse you desire. Just as with its compatible sister-games, Stars Without Number for sci-fi, Worlds Without Number for fantasy, and Cities Without Number for cyberpunk, Ashes Without Number gives you an Old School Renaissance-inspired game chassis and a vast swath of system-agnostic tools for designing tragic destruction and desperate struggles.

Within its pages, you'll find...

• A complete OSR game system for building survivors and sending them to face the horrors of their new world, including guidance on blending other Without Number games into your play.
• Genre-specific support for near-future After the Fall tales of social collapse, invasion, and global disasters, Deadlands games of zombie hordes and beleaguered enclaves, and Mutant Wasteland campaigns of post-nuclear adventure in lands of mutant peril and mysterious tech.
• Enclave rules for system-agnostic modeling of competing outposts, tribal villages, and refugee camps, all struggling to survive a world where there is never enough of anything but death.
• Mysterious devices and lost relics of the old world, strange tech for mutant wanderers to discover and misuse in their exploration of ancient ruins.
• Campaign design tools for both crisis-centered games of immediate survival in the face of total societal collapse, and exploration-centered campaigns of seeking out the old world's remnants and recovering them for your home and allies.
• Myriad tags and random tables for building your post-apocalyptic adventures, flavoring your mutant perils, and building interesting ruins and survivor enclaves for your PCs to encounter, all system-agnostic and built with the Sine Nomine touch.

And all of that is in this free version of this game. In the deluxe version, you'll also get...

• Evil techno-wizard rules for building the mad science-sorcerers who plague so many worlds beneath a shattered moon.
• Ash Sorcerers, a class for PCs in a far-future world of science and magic who wield the sinister arts of a half-damnable path.
• Mentalists, a psychic class for those individuals touched with unearthly powers and strange visions in the midst of ruin. This class can also be used as a substitute for the Psychic in Stars Without Number, for GMs who prefer to have more subtle abilities in their games.
• Modular power armor for those knights of the radioactive dust who bear these mighty relics. Voracious in their demands for power and maintenance materials, they still can tip a battle single-handedly with their myriad weapons and fittings.
• Hub settlement rules for fine-grained development of a single enclave by players who prefer to put more focus on their home. Build individual facilities and resources while keeping your population alive in the face of constant privation.

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Bundle of Holding - Sine Nomine Corebooks

I am a HUGE fan of Kevin Crawford's works. When I look at the titles in this collection, I own all of them - in Print AND PDF. It is simply great stuff, and the quality speaks for itself.

Sine Nomine Coorebooks is currently available as a bundle on Bundle of Holding. The Starter Collection @ 12.95 includes Stars Without Number Revised Deluxe (Sci Fi), Other Dust (Post Apoc), Spears of the Dawn (African Fantasy), and Cities Without Number: Free (Cyberpunk and freely available outside this bundle)

For about 26 bucks total, you get to add in Worlds Without Number Deluxe Edition (Fantasy), Wolves of God: Adventures in Dark Ages England, the one-on-one FRPG toolkit Scarlet Heroes (Fantasy), and the horror RPG Silent Legions.

Adventurer! We've resurrected our November 2023 Sine Nomine Corebooks Bundle featuring the complete Deluxe Editions of Worlds Without Number and Stars Without Number, along with Wolves of God, Silent Legions, and other standalone tabletop roleplaying game rulebooks by acclaimed designer Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing.

From many past offers (mostly 2013-2017) we've assembled seven complete standalone rulebooks with a huge array of system-independent sandbox gaming tools. Easily generate kingdoms and AIs, planets and pantheons, cults and factions, monsters and mechs, dungeons and starships, and tons more. These tools make creation easier for even the most experienced GM – and they make a great gift for a roleplayer new to Sine Nomine games. (To give a Bundle of Holding as a gift, log out of your current browser session, then purchase the offer using the recipient's email address.)

For just US$12.95 you get all three titles in this revived offer's Starter Collection (retail value $50) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Stars Without Number: Revised Edition Deluxe, the post-apocalypse SWN spinoff Other Dust (plus the free supplements Grandfather's Rain, Cult of the Still Lady, and Cult of the Wraith), and the African fantasy Spears of the Dawn. As a convenience, we also include the free version of Kevin's cyberpunk game Cities Without Number.

And if you pay more than the threshold price of $25.41, you'll level up and also get this revival's entire Bonus Collection with four more titles worth an additional $75, including the complete Worlds Without Number Deluxe Edition, Wolves of God: Adventures in Dark Ages England, the one-on-one FRPG toolkit Scarlet Heroes, and the horror RPG Silent Legions.

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Free OSR - Worlds Without Number: Free Edition

Kevin Crawford and his Sine Nomine publishing house are best known for Stars Without Number, Kevin's behemoth of an OSR ruleset that showed you didn't need the OGL and the 3.x SRD to create OSR-compatible material. Kevin plowed his own path, and it has worked very well for him.

In 2021, Kevin published Worlds Without Number, coming perhaps full circle, and giving us OGL free OSR rules for fantasy gaming that feel familiar to old school gamers, and continued using his popular Tag System (to enhance sandbox play).

Worlds Without Number actually comes in three flavors. There is Worlds Without Number: Free Edition, which is totally free to download and use. Then there is the pay-for Worlds Without Number Deluxe Edition (this is also the edition that is POD), and finally, there is the free Worlds Without Number SRD released under CC0.

As an alternative to WotC D&D, Worlds Without Number is an excellent choice. The Tag System should be in every GM's toolkit.

Worlds Without Number is a fantasy role-playing game, one fully compatible with the hit sci-fi game Stars Without Number. It's built from the ground up to provide gritty, hard-edged adventure in the fathomless future of the Latter Earth, a fantastic realm of time-lost sorcery, savage foes, and barbaric splendor. The cold steel in the fists of your heroes and the half-understood sorcery in their tomes must suffice to overcome the monstrous remnants of ancient alien rulers and the present depredations of ruthless lords and hideous beasts alike. The riches of lost ages await in the subterranean Deeps that once held their kingdoms, and even the heavens above are not beyond the reach of the recklessly daring.

(Note: this is the free version of WWN. If you'd like to grab the full deluxe edition with almost fifty extra pages of bonus content, head right over.)

Worlds Without Number isn't just a savage game of steel and sorcery. It's packed solid with system-neutral GM tools and worldbuilding support, with hundreds of pages of useful tools, tags, tables, and practical advice usable by any GM, regardless of their favorite setting or system. The well-loved sci-fi tools of Stars Without Number are reworked here to support fantasy gaming, whether in the provided setting of the Latter Earth or in your own carefully-crafted homebrew world. Even GMs who don't prefer the OSR-compatible game system of WWN will find more than half the book dedicated to tools they can use in the systems they like best.

So what do you get in this book?

• Sword and sorcery heroes of blade, cunning, and spell. The proven OSR-compatible character creation system of Stars Without Number is redone here for a fantasy world of blade and black magic.
• OSR-compatible rules, allowing you to plunder decades of existing adventure material for your play. You can even pull in Stars Without Number content, as it's fully compatible.
• The Gyre region of the far-future Latter Earth, a premade sandbox for quick play. Venture forth to clash with the sinister powers that gather in the shadow of the waning rule of the Reaping King.
• Worldbuilding tools crafted to the renowned Sine Nomine standard. Did you like the hundred different world tags in SWN? Then have two hundred inspirational tags to help you build ruins, courts, communities, and wilderness points of interest. Grab a wealth of tools for building histories, societies, governments, religions, and geography, all written with a keen eye toward producing good, playable content for your adventuring group.
• Adventure creation tools to soothe the pangs of a working GM, with guides for building adventures out of combat, exploration, social, and investigative challenges. Use the tags you picked in the worldbuilding section to speed up your creation of a good night's gaming.
• Faction rules for fantasy worlds, with dark cults, fierce lords, grasping abbots, and greedy merchants all serving to keep your world in motion even when the PCs aren't on the scene.

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Free OSR - Worlds Without Number (Core Rules and SRD)

Kevin Crawford / Sine Nomine Publishing is well known for the various "Without Number" titles, all of which have a "Free Version."  If you don't yet own Worlds Without Number, Kevin's fantasy ruleset, here ya go ;)

Want the Worlds Without Number SRD so you can design your own ruleset? Look no further.

The stars gutter and the skies fade and the earth grows weary with years. Ages of men and of Outsiders have ascended and been forgotten, and only the bones of their cities and the dust of their dreams remain upon this tired world. The Legacy of their laws is woven deep now, the edicts of dead gods and fallen sorcerer-kings made to trace patterns of power we no longer understand. We are heirs to their unseen empires, and our lives are built upon their ashes.

Worlds Without Number is a fantasy role-playing game, one fully compatible with the hit sci-fi game Stars Without Number. It's built from the ground up to provide gritty, hard-edged adventure in the fathomless future of the Latter Earth, a fantastic realm of time-lost sorcery, savage foes, and barbaric splendor. The cold steel in the fists of your heroes and the half-understood sorcery in their tomes must suffice to overcome the monstrous remnants of ancient alien rulers and the present depredations of ruthless lords and hideous beasts alike. The riches of lost ages await in the subterranean Deeps that once held their kingdoms, and even the heavens above are not beyond the reach of the recklessly daring.

Worlds Without Number isn't just a savage game of steel and sorcery. It's packed solid with system-neutral GM tools and worldbuilding support, with hundreds of pages of useful tools, tags, tables, and practical advice usable by any GM, regardless of their favorite setting or system. The well-loved sci-fi tools of Stars Without Number are reworked here to support fantasy gaming, whether in the provided setting of the Latter Earth or in your own carefully-crafted homebrew world. Even GMs who don't prefer the OSR-compatible game system of WWN will find more than half the book dedicated to tools they can use in the systems they like best.

So what do you get in this book?

• Sword and sorcery heroes of blade, cunning, and spell. The proven OSR-compatible character creation system of Stars Without Number is redone here for a fantasy world of blade and black magic.
• OSR-compatible rules, allowing you to plunder decades of existing adventure material for your play. You can even pull in Stars Without Number content, as it's fully compatible.
• The Gyre region of the far-future Latter Earth, a premade sandbox for quick play. Venture forth to clash with the sinister powers that gather in the shadow of the waning rule of the Reaping King.
• Worldbuilding tools crafted to the renowned Sine Nomine standard. Did you like the hundred different world tags in SWN? Then have two hundred inspirational tags to help you build ruins, courts, communities, and wilderness points of interest. Grab a wealth of tools for building histories, societies, governments, religions, and geography, all written with a keen eye toward producing good, playable content for your adventuring group.
• Adventure creation tools to soothe the pangs of a working GM, with guides for building adventures out of combat, exploration, social, and investigative challenges. Use the tags you picked in the worldbuilding section to speed up your creation of a good night's gaming.
• Faction rules for fantasy worlds, with dark cults, fierce lords, grasping abbots, and greedy merchants all serving to keep your world in motion even when the PCs aren't on the scene.

 

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Kickstarter - Ashes Without Number (Sine Nomine)

I'm a huge fan of Kevin Crawford and his Tag System. I own all of Kevin's core books in print and his non-core books in print and/or PDF. Ashes Without Number brings post-apocalypse roleplaying to the "Without Number" RPG Engine.

It should cover settings from Fallout to The Walking Dead and everything in between.

Ashes Without Number is $25 in PDF, $40 for at-cost POD and PDF, and $80 for PDF, a Smyth-sewn, offset-print hardback copy of the game. I'm in for the latter.

Ashes Without Number is a tabletop role-playing game for the end of the world. Whether as a civil collapse, alien invasion, zombie uprising, or post-apocalyptic wasteland, the game is built to give a GM the tools they need to carve out their own special slice of Hell.

Campaigns set amid radioactive dunes and savage mutant perils are supported in these pages, along with near-future tales of civil collapse, global plagues, and horrific shambling hordes. Just as with all Sine Nomine games, however, the book is built to support a GM in fashioning their own personal apocalypse, building worlds and settings to explore the kind of games they want to run.

Ashes Without Number is built on the same sturdy old-school game system as its sister-games in the Without Number line. Whether the fantasy adventures of Worlds Without Number, the sci-fi explorations of Stars Without Number, or the cyberpunk desperation of Cities Without Number, the game within these pages is built to interface smoothly with all these resources. The old-school framework also allows easy importation of other OSR games and content to help flesh out your own campaign.

A classic framework of six attributes, hit points, saving throws, and other traditional elements is supported by genre-specific rules and tools for bringing the right flavor of ruin to the table. Gritty perils of disease, traumatic stress, lingering wounds, and starvation are pointed up for campaigns set in a tragic near-future chaos, while wasteland marauders have support for mutations, scrap-built gear, and enigmatic ancient tech. These systems are built to snap smoothly into place in your campaign, letting you pick the ones that fit the feel you're aiming to create.

But at its heart, Ashes Without Number is shaped around the same system-neutral Sine Nomine tools that have won the other Without Number games such a warm place in the hearts of working GMs. Tools for building adventures, ruins, survivor enclaves, looming crises, horrible mutant creatures, and a host of other useful content are all designed to be system-neutral and usable with your own game of choice. Need to put an exploration-worthy ruin into your game? Just follow these tables and guidelines to get a quick, playable chunk of gaming fun, from the site's first-glance impression to the useful salvage still left amid the rubble.

Genre-specific rules for supporting three different campaign genres: post-apocalyptic Mutant Wasteland games, zombie-infested Deadlands, and near-future societal collapse in After the Fall campaigns.

 

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Bundle of Holding - Stars Without Number

I'm a huge fan of Kevin Crawford. With every Kickstarter he's done, he's given value back to the gaming community as a whole. Stars Without Number is an awesome system - probably my top two in OSR sci-fi RPGs, standing right next to White Star. I've backed every KS Kevin has run without hesitation. His work is simply that good.

Stars Without Number is currently available over at Bundle of Holding. If you don't have a copy yet, do yourself a favor and snag it.

Adventurer! We've resurrected (for a second time!) our March 2019 Stars Without Number Bundle featuring the 2017 Stars Without Number Revised science-fiction tabletop roleplaying game from Sine Nomine Publishing. SWN sets the standard for "sandbox" roleplaying. Forget pre-packaged, pre-digested plotlines that put the players on railroad tracks. In a sandbox game the setting is wide open for adventure in all directions. The Gamemaster presents situations, not storylines – problems, not plots. The player characters go where they will, do as they wish, forging their own career. And one of the best games for sandbox-style spacefaring is Stars Without Number.

For just US$7.95 you get all three titles in this revived offer's Starter Collection (retail value $32) as DRM-free ebooks, including the complete Deluxe Stars Without Number Revised rulebook; Sixteen Stars (popular sf scene backdrops); and the SWN Revised GM Screen.

Polychrome supplement for Stars Without NumberAnd if you pay more than the threshold price of $20.41, you'll level up and also get this revival's entire Bonus Collection with five more SWN supplements worth an additional $48, including Dead Names: Lost Races and Forgotten Ruins and four system-neutral campaign sourcebooks: Starvation Cheap (ground warfare and mercenary campaigns); Skyward Steel (the Stellar Navy); Suns of Gold (merchants and traders); and Polychrome (cyberpunk).

 

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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.

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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.

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Kickstarter - Worlds Without Number RPG: Offset Reprint

First, it is Kevin Crawford. So, even if you aren't crazy about his ruleset, the tools he includes for GMs and running a sandbox are prices. Second, Kevin always gives back with his Kickstarters. Initially, it was putting the art commissioned for the project into the public domain. Now, he is releasing SRDs under the CC0 license, essentially the public domain. Wow. Simply wow.

Worlds Without Number is simply a beautiful ruleset. Bringing it back in an offset printing is awesome. A mini Gazetter is even better. An SRD under the CC0 license? Priceless.

Those backers who pledge at $80 or more will get the true prize of the campaign.

The Worlds Without Number offset-print book will be dispatched to them. Unlike the glued-binding print-on-demand books of the present age, these 400-page books have their pages folded into bundles and sewn directly into the spine of the book. The higher-quality printing also allows for richer ink colors, heavier matte paper for the pages, and fully-printed endsheets on the inside of the front and back covers. These books will be entirely identical to those issued as part of the initial offset print run except for the absence of the ribbon bookmark. If the campaign does well enough, I might be able to remedy that absence in the final release.

Offset-print backers within the United States will get their books shipped to a US address at no additional cost. International backers will be prompted for an additional fee for international shipping when they make their pledge. This fee does not include any duty that may be charged on receipt, as international tariffs are sadly too complex for me to manage on my end.

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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Free OSR - Cities Without Number: Free Version

I'm a huge fan of Sine Nomine Publishing. Kevin Crawford's work, Starting with Stars Without Numbers, and the rest of his releases over the years, have been nothing short of inspiring and extremely useful, especially to the sandbox and improv-style GMs.

Kevin is also extremely generous, issuing Free versions of his various "Without Number" rulesets that are complete and extremely playable. These aren't quickstarts or light versions of the rules, they are complete without some of the extras supplied in the pay version.

So, what is Kevin's latest release, Cities Without Number: Free Version?

Cities Without Number is a cyberpunk role-playing game built for sandbox adventures in a dystopia of polished chrome and bitter misery. It's both a full-fledged Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own and an Old School Renaissance-inspired game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them.

In its pages, you'll find...

• An old-school inspired game system that's fully compatible with the sci-fi Stars Without Number game and its fantasy sister-game Worlds Without Number
• Cyberware and sophisticated high-tech gear suitable for chroming the most discriminating cyborg and equipping the most refined of street operators
• Playability-focused hacking rules designed to give hacking-focused PCs useful and important things to do without forcing an entire separate mini-game on the GM
• Gear rules for drones and vehicles, to better equip PCs who want to bring a little extra iron on their next mission
• System-neutral Sine Nomine worldbuilding tools for helping a GM create their own custom cyberpunk world or elaborate the details of existing worlds and settings
• Gang, corp, and city district creation tools for fleshing out your world with people and places that fit
• Fifty Mission Tags for adventure creation, plus guidelines and step-by-step procedures for handling facility infiltrations, managing local heat, selling loot, and other activities beloved of corp-hating street scum everywhere
• The default campaign setting of the City, a premade backdrop to help you get into the game as quickly as possible

And that's just in this free version of the game. In the deluxe edition of Cities Without Number, you'll also be getting...

• Cyberware quirks and features for particular megacorp product lines
• Variant gengineered human types for PCs who don't fit the baseline mold
• Optional rules for the psychological strain of Cyber Alienation
• Optional rules for cheap street cyber, for those campaign settings where every goon with a knife has some wire beneath his skin
• Spellcasting, spirit summoning, and magical items for GMs who want to add a dash of magic into their cyberpunk world

For more than a decade, the Without Number games have given GMs and players the tools they need to forge their own sandbox worlds. Cities Without Number adds to that, so get it now and build a dystopia that's all your own.

 

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 - Godbound (OSR)

Kevin Crawford is a "can't miss" RPG Creator.

We've resurrected our April 2020 Godbound Bundle featuring Godbound, Kevin Crawford's tabletop fantasy roleplaying game of heroic demigods forging a new world from the Uncreated Night. The Throne of Heaven stands empty, and a pantheon of mortals newly bound to the Words of Creation faces a land ravaged by madmen and fools. Godbound characters start play as legendary powers, facing fearsome god-monsters, legions of sorcerers, and bitter angels. And using the system-neutral tools like those in Kevin's Stars Without Number, a Gamemaster can create noble courts, lost shards of Heaven, and terrifying foes worthy of these exalted heroes.

This revival helps promote the Kickstarter campaign in progress for Godbound designer Kevin Crawford's new cyberpunk SFRPG Cities Without Number, which promises more of the gamemastering tools that make Kevin's games widely popular.

This comprehensive revival once again brings you the entire Godbound line for an unbeatable bargain price. For just US$5.95 you get both titles in this revived offer's Starter Collection (retail value $25) as DRM-free ebooks: the complete 214-page Godbound Deluxe Edition core rulebook and the introductory adventure Ten Buried Blades.

And if you pay more than the threshold price of $17.13, you'll level up and also get this revival's entire Bonus Collection with four more titles worth an additional $38, including Lexicon of the Throne (new Words of Creation and rules for creating religions), Ancalia: The Broken Towers (gazetteer), and Sixteen Sorrows (a handbook of dire calamities), plus the full-length adventure Storms of Yizhao.

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 cast on Anchor, YouTube,  or wherever you listen to your podcast collection. - Tenkar 

Kickstarter - Cities Without Number (Sine Nomine)

We have a new Kickstarter from Kevin Crawford, Cities Without Number.

A cyberpunk tabletop RPG from the creator of Stars Without Number.

After the sci-fi success of Stars Without Number and the fantastic response to Worlds Without Number, the new cyberpunk age of Cities Without Number is upon us. Within the pages of this tabletop role-playing game, you'll get a full-fledged system-neutral Sine Nomine toolkit for building a cyberpunk world of your own, plus an old-school game system for playing out the reckless adventures of the desperate men and women who live in it. Whether polished metal or flesh and blood, your operators will risk their lives and more to seize those precious things a merciless world would keep from them. In particular, this book contains...

• An old-school inspired game system fully compatible with the sci-fi Stars Without Number game and its fantasy sister-game Worlds Without Number
• Cyberware and sophisticated high-tech gear suitable for chroming the most discriminating cyborg and equipping the most refined of street operators
• Playability-focused hacking rules designed to give hacking-focused PCs useful and important things to do without forcing an entire separate mini-game on the GM
• Gear rules for drones and vehicles, to better equip PCs who want to bring a little extra iron on their next mission
• System-neutral Sine Nomine worldbuilding tools for helping a GM create their own custom cyberpunk world or elaborate the details of existing worlds and settings
• Gang, corp, and city district creation tools for fleshing out your world with people and places that fit
• Fifty Mission Tags for adventure creation, plus guidelines and step-by-step procedures for handling facility infiltrations, managing local heat, fencing loot, and other activities beloved of corp-hating street scum everywhere

And that's just in the free version that will be released on DTRPG for anyone to download. As with SWN and WWN, Cities Without Number will be provided in both a free and a deluxe version, the better to let an interested group jump in and play without having to spend anything. As a backer, you'll be getting the deluxe version, of course, which will also include...

• Variant gengineered human types for PCs who don't fit the baseline mold
• Spellcasting and summoning rules for GMs who want to add a dash of magic into their cyberpunk world
• Additional content creation tools to give an extra boost to a GM's creative efforts
• Several open pages to be filled with the contents that backers seem most interested in having. I've got room to add a little more here, and I'll be listening to backer comments and requests when it comes to filling them.

Here's a link to the Cities Without Number Beta  (shared with permission)

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Bundle of Holding - Cornucopia 2022 (includes Wolves of God)

Sometimes the collections available at Bundle of Holding make you scratch your head as to how they were bundled. 

The Starter Collection of the Cornucopia 2022 Bundle is 17.95, and worth it for Wolves of God (Kevin Crawford/Sine Nomine Publishing) alone, which goes for 19.99 in PDF on DTRPG. The other titles in the Starter Collection are picks I've never heard of: the family saga of restaurant management and hopping vampires, Jiangshi: Blood in the Banquet Hall (Wet Ink Games); and Jay Dragon's peaceful, pastoral game of animal travelers, Wanderhome.

Yeah, it's a pretty random collection, so YMMV.

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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 :)

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Kickstarter - Wolves of God: Adventures in Dark Ages England

"Experience savage adventures and grim perils in Dark Ages England in this historical fantasy RPG."

When Kevin Crawford releases a new Kickstarter, people pay attention. Kevin never fails to deliver amazing projects. I'd love to see him interviewed on a podcast (hint ;)

The Wolves of God: Adventures in Dark Ages England Kickstarter is Kevin's latest release, and yes, it looks damn good. Dark Ages England is an excellent choice of setting and I'm looking forward to having this project in hand.

Embrace the savage darkness of post-Roman Britain with Wolves of God, a semi-historical tabletop RPG from the creator of Stars Without Number, Godbound, Scarlet Heroes, and other best-selling role-playing games. 

It is the year 710 of our Lord as brother Bede reckons it. The barbaric English have long since swept over Britain, their passage shrouded by the smoke of burning cities. For six generations they have been masters of the best part of the island, driving the native Britons before them with bloody iron or taking them as thralls and subjects, until the wretched heirs of the Roman kings can have refuge only in the western mountains or the cold northern lands. The magnificent Roman cities of old have been thrown down, the roads have grown wild and perilous, and even the kings of the English must live in thatched wooden halls and ride from one royal villa to the next merely to feed their companions. It is an age of darkness, poverty, and unsleeping war. 

Four generations ago the English turned Christian under the ministrations of Roman missionaries and Irish monks. Scattered across their untamed lands are the minsters of these clergy, strongholds of learning and Roman civilization against the hard ways of the English tribes. Only in the minsters can stone buildings be found, with windows of glass and artisan-monks fashioning wonders to adorn their altars and reward the generosity of great lords. Brave abbots and wise abbesses rule these strongholds, always seeking to lift their kinsmen from their cruel ways and iniquities, and always in need of strong heroes to help them in their work. 

Yet there are worse things in the dark than raiding warbands and embittered pagan remnants. The Roman sorcerers, the Artifexes of old, carved cysts into the world where they and their slaves could hide from the fury of the English. These Arxes were sealed until help could come, but help never did; now they canker and rot, old magic gone sour and strange, and those that dwell within them have been terribly changed. The Arxes burst open within the fallen Roman cities, monstrous beasts and twisted men going forth to scourge the innocent and take revenge for the crime of their conquest. The minsters stand fast against their diabolic power, but the abbots and lords need brave heroes to venture into the cities and purge these Arxes of evil before they can swell greater still. 

You are one such hero. Whether a spear-wise gesith, a young ceorl of broad back and stout heart, a wild-eyed waelcyrige-maiden of battle, a charm-muttering galdorman, or even a blessed and pious saint, your ambition is to earn a deathless name of glory and an honored place among your people. Whether offering your aid to warring lords, plundering the riches of fallen Roman cities, delving the dark halls of a festering Arx, or acting as agents of some cunning abbot, you will dare great deeds with your brave warband of companions and win yourself a place in the songs of kings… or a nameless grave in some blighted earth.

20 bucks for the PDF. 60 for POD Print plus PDF. 80 for offset Print plus PDF.

I'm probably going in for 60 bucks.

Kevin Crawford responded to Frank Mentzer's Commentary on the Viability of the OSR Market

As the original post with Frank's commentary is 5 days old and hasn't had a comment in 48 hours before +Kevin Crawford 's this afternoon, I'm breaking Kevin's comment into a post of its own. It deserves to be read and commented upon.

I'll be reserving my thoughts to the comments section of this post...

Here's Kevin's comment in text format:

"Speaking purely for myself, the OSR has been a very good market segment to me. In the past two years, I've had gross sales of about a half million dollars worth of Sine Nomine books. That's not mansion money on the post-tax net, but it is an extremely comfortable location-independent living for a single creator. 

And that, I think, is the key. The OSR as a market segment can absolutely provide a comfortable living to more creators than it does now, but those creators have to be able to take a project from inception to print with minimal outside involvement. My per-book profits are huge compared to the royalties I'd get from a publisher. They have to be, because in the last year I've sold 12,000 copies of one title or another, and if I were with a conventional fiction publisher they'd burn my rolodex card if I moved less than 20,000 on one title in a year. I can make a very comfortable living on 12,000 copies sold, but that living gets a whole lot less comfortable if I have to pay authors and layout designers on every product I issue. 

And by the same token, those creators have to _produce_. One swallow does not make a summer and one hit product does not make a living. They have to be able to hit their project deadlines and constantly create new, compelling products that draw new buyers and keep existing fans coming back for more. They can move tremendous amounts of back catalog this way, but only if they _have_ a back catalog. You know what a hit OSR product means? It means the customers are willing to see what else you've got."

Kevin Crawford (Stars Without Number) Did an AMA on Reddit - Interesting piece on Free vs PWYW

I'm an infrequent visitor to Reddit. I find it difficult to navigate and finding value is often a needle in a haystack route. Thankfully, someone else follows closer than me, and I found this link last week on Google Plus:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rpg/comments/6splp1/i_am_kevin_crawford_author_of_stars_without/#bottom-comments

Kevin has a lot to say. Heck, the whole thread makes for interesting reading. The piece that struck me is this:

I'm confident that SWN would've died in its crib if I hadn't released the base game for free. 

When you're a small RPG publisher, your biggest enemy isn't production expense. It's not retail accessibility. It's simply being noticed. Between Amazon and OneBookShelf and Scribus and stock art, anybody with the price of a burger can get a game or a supplement onto the market. And anybody has. Your offering is struggling for notice in a sea of other games, and you haven't got the fanbase to spread word of what you're doing. Your only chance is to pique some casual reader's curiosity enough to get them to download your product and give it a glance. 

It is much, much easier to do that when there's no price attached. From what I've seen, even Pay What You Want products lose downloads because people don't even like the implicit social contract of maybe theoretically having to pay if they like it. They don't want to deal with that, so they just don't download it. A completely-free, fully-playable product that shows what you can do is what a lot of small publishers need to convince readers that they're worth spending money on. 

Of course, that then implies that there is something else they can spend money on. An open door isn't very helpful if there's nothing in the room beyond. And all too often, small publishers work like the devil to make their game and then don't do anything more to support it. It's perfectly fine if that's what they want to do, but if they want to make a modest business out of their work, they need to think beyond the present creation.

I'm pretty sure Swords & Wizardry Light would not have received the same reception without being available for free in PDF and Print.

There is this ongoing discussion of Free vs Pay when it comes to RPGs. The community loves free. The community is willing to pay. How do you get the two to meet?

Kevin's idea of giving away the rules for free and charging for support material has merit. In some ways, its like PWYW with a higher incentive to try because there is no pressure to "buy"

I agree with Kevin that support is where this all comes together. You can offer the best ruleset in the world for free, but without support and follow up products you are leaving money on the table as well as disappointed fans. Might not be much, but something is better than nothing and if you did the right thing with your free rules you'll have a happy market for your not quite free follow up material.

Of course, this doesn't always apply to Frog God Games. I think there is more free support for SWL in PDF and Print in the immediate pipeline...