Ruins & Rogues

Celebrate 50 years of fantasy role-playing with Ruins & Rogues: the jam-packed one-page ruleset that makes adventure more accessible than ever!

When I was a teenager, I couldn’t afford three $50 rulebooks. Hell, I’m 25, and I still can’t afford three $50 rulebooks!

But my first Game Master taught me that you don’t need expensive hardcovers to get started with role-playing. We played with whatever dice we could get our hands on and whatever rules felt right in the moment.

Ruins & Rogues is a love letter to the way we played back then and the culmination of everything I’ve learned as a designer in the years since. It’s the game I wanted to exist in high school, and it's perfect for introducing new players to fantasy role-playing in a pinch.

Features

1. Fast and flavorful character creation with 36 possible starting characters. In thirty seconds or less, you can roll up an evocative character with a classic fantasy ancestry, a suitable name, three evocative starting items, and your choice of one of either 18 skills or 18 spells.
2. Fast and chaotic combat that doesn’t fuss around with armor, weapons, and statistics. Leave mathematical headaches behind — monsters are defined by just one number!
3. A simple XP and leveling system designed for short, 4-6 session mini-campaigns. Earn XP for pursuing your character’s goal!
4. Simple spellcasting rules based on common-sense interpretation of the name of the spell and a roll of the dice. On a 2, something goes horribly wrong; on a 12, you do something amazing!
5. No need to memorize complex rules or flip around to find them — all the rules you need during the game fit on one side of one sheet of paper.
   
6. If you have a family board game laying around, you can start playing Ruins & Rogues right now — all you need are standard six-sided dice!

Accessibility. The core PDF is tagged for screen-reader accessibility, but since I don't trust that I tagged it perfectly, an HTML version is available as well.

Rules-hackers rejoice! Ruins & Rogues is licensed under CC BY 4.0, which means you are free to share and adapt it as long as you give me proper credit. Donate $2 to get the full text of the game in Markdown and its layout files for Affinity Publisher 2 so that making your own version of the game is easy.

What are you still reading this for? Print out the game, grab some dice and some friends, and go have an adventure!

Tim B. is a member and moderator of the NSR Cauldron community on Discord. You can find his blog at Congas.blog and follow him @flyrefi@dice.camp.