Vagabond // Pulp Fantasy RPG

SHRINES – A Dark Pilgrimage RPG is a classless dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying game about dangerous pilgrimages through wounded worlds. It combines tactical D6-pool combat, exploration, escalating threats and character growth through Domains with a strong focus on consequence, discovery and gaining knowledge. Description SHRINES – A Dark Pilgrimage RPG is a dark fantasy tabletop roleplaying game in which the players take the roles of the Marked, pilgrims bound to mysterious Shrines and sent into regions scarred by ancient wounds, broken beliefs and hostile forces. The game combines tactical combat with exploration and narrative decision-making while keeping bookkeeping deliberately light. Its core system uses pools of six-sided dice, with characters defined without traditional classes. Instead, they develop through their qualities, talents, maneuvers, equipment and Domains - powerful influences that shape abilities, vulnerabilities and interactions with the world. Shrines form the anchors of every pilgrimage. They provide safety, progression and a place to return to, because death is not the end. When a pilgrimage fails, the Marked may return to their bound Shrine, but failure still carries consequences. Lost Essence, Burden and an increasingly dangerous world ensure that reformation never makes defeat meaningless. Exploration is built around regions, locations and Instances rather than long quest lists. Players uncover Lore, discover competing factions and decide how deeply they are willing to involve themselves in conflicts that rarely offer a simple distinction between good and evil. At the same time, Regional Escalation causes the world to react to the actions and failures of the Marked, making prolonged expeditions increasingly dangerous. SHRINES is designed around the idea of fair cruelty: the world is harsh, combat can be deadly and mistakes matter, but danger is meant to be readable and consequences understandable rather than arbitrary. The game can be played with a group or as a solo pilgrimage. Its free introductory series, SHRINES: INITIATION, guides players step by step through the core ideas of the system across four connected episodes, gradually introducing exploration, combat, navigation, escalation and the consequences of failure. It leads directly into FIRST FRAGMENT, the upcoming Quickstart release, which expands SHRINES into a broader playable region with additional rules, characters, locations, monsters and a complete pilgrimage to undertake.

DC20 is a fantasy tabletop RPG designed by Alan Bjorkgren, a former high school math teacher and track coach better known online as The Dungeon Coach, where he spent years producing D&D 5e homebrew content before deciding to build his own system outright - a decision accelerated by Wizards of the Coast's 2023 OGL controversy.  Rather than reinventing fantasy TTRPGs from scratch, DC20 keeps 5e's basic silhouette - classes, levels, a d20 core - while substantially rebuilding the parts Bjorkgren felt were holding the format back: action economy, damage resolution, spellcasting, and character customization. Its June 2024 Kickstarter broke $1 million within its first week, and the game has been in active public beta ever since, currently on Core Rules Beta 0.10.5, with the full Core Rulebook still pending release.

Trophy is a collection of collaborative storytelling games about doomed and desperate treasure-hunters entering a haunted forest that doesn’t want them there. The games explore the physical, mental, and emotional descent of the treasure-hunters as they move deeper and deeper into the forest, encountering ancient ruins, terrible monstrosities, and the greatest horror of all: themselves. Games rooted in Trophy are built around characters willing to push their luck. The character are often desperate, with something driving them to continue against all odds. The system itself encourages risk taking, so if your game isn’t about risks or characters who push themselves, then Trophy might not be the best foundation. Trophy is also about decline. Characters tend to degrade over time, or have some precious resource that they’re gradually losing (or a negative resource that they’re gaining). If your game is about characters becoming more and more powerful, then you might want to try a different system. There are two versions of the game: Trophy Dark and Trophy Gold. Trophy Dark is designed for single session play, while Trophy Gold is designed for longer campaigns.

Nerd Immersion is an entertainment network focused on Dungeons & Dragons. The YouTube Channel currently has over 3,000 D&D videos covering everything from D&D advice, D&D product reviews and unboxings, Top 10 videos, DM's Guild Module reviews, and more. We also have a second gameplay channel, Nerd Immersion Plays, where we have a variety of different D&D/RPG campaigns. Links youtube.com - Youtube channel youtube.com - Nerd Immersion Plays (second channel) patreon.com - Patreon page discord.gg - Discord server

PORK MORT is an old-school fantasy tabletop roleplaying game inspired by Balearic folklore and traditional folktales. Created by Sergio Amat, Mercedes Prats, Jaume Mayans and Daniela Kropeit, the game combines dark fantasy, absurd humor and a distinctive visual style in a strange and dangerous world known simply as The Island. Players take on the roles of unlikely adventurers trying to survive in a land inhabited by witches, giants, demons, talking animals and other bizarre creatures drawn from Mediterranean folklore. Exploration, danger, unpredictable encounters and dark comedy are at the heart of the game.  PORK MORT uses a fast, rules-light system that is fully compatible with MÖRK BORG, allowing characters, monsters and adventures to be easily used between both games. Description In PORK MORT, players take on the roles of disgraced knights, peasants forced into adventure, cursed hunchbacks, outcast bear-men and other kinds of antiheroes trying to survive on The Island, a magical land ruled by the Porkos (pig-men), who govern all its inhabitants with an iron hoof.  As if that were not enough, the Moiras (anthropomorphic spiders who can supposedly predict the future) have foretold that three of the four pillars supporting The Island have collapsed, and that the end is near. The game prioritizes creativity and exploration, with simple rules designed to adapt to any crazy situation the players might encounter on their journey to become something more than mere wanderers, perhaps even the protagonists of the tales of the future.

Thrive to Survive is a tabletop RPG ruleset for a modern day zombie apocalypse. Launched on Kickstarter in 2025, with decades in development this system gives rules both to make one of a kind custom survivors as unique as the player. And intense apocalypse campaigns and encounters for the game master. Combat The combat system for Thrive to Survive is based on the chaos of combat and how enemies react to each other while fighting rather than simple attacks and health pools. As characters get stronger they are able to use more combat maneuvers that manipulate how strikes land in combat and what they do to their enemy, after all in the end you have to destroy the head! While at some points you may want to build a wall to keep out the dead, other times you may need to break one down to escape a situation. Thrive to Survive gives rules for handling buildings, obstacles and construction so that every player can interact with the world how they see fit. Part of what makes a zombie apocalypse game so enticing is the realism of how a person would deal with an apocalypse. Keeping a fine balance of simple rules and realism allows for an easygoing and exciting adventure. Attributes There are an infinite number of ways someone can survive the zombie apocalypse. While the most common thoughts about surviving are how can you kill the most undead as possible, you have to think of thriving as well. From farming for your own food, Creating tools and equipment to help others, Medical knowledge to keep people alive, and even computer skills to access old data or create something new! To capture this the character creation gives you access to skills across the board, abilities your survivor possesses, and other features to make your survivor unique. Each survivor builds from the ground up by picking skills, talents, attributes, disabilities, features, and equipment. These sections are all connected in creating the gameplay of each survivor. Skills While there are a plethora of skills, most of them can be broken into a couple groups, Combat skills that determine your attacks such as the blade skill. Action skills that let you attempt something beyond the mundane such as acrobatics, and Crafting. Crafting allows you to design, build, repair and upgrade any item in Thrive to Survive. The more complex an item is the more time, material and skill is needed to create it. If you want to stick some nails through a baseball bat to cause some extra mayhem, you’ll need some training in weapons crafting. But if you want to hand craft a new design for a 50 caliber machine gun, you’re going to need some specialized skill and a lot of time. Crafting skills also build on each other, meaning that like in the string map shown here you have to have some skill in the previous crafting level in order to get the next. For example to become skilled in crafting explosives you will need a few levels of engineering first.