It was my birthday recently and my awesome wife made me some NPC Description Tables! <3

They’re some handy tables for generating various physical characteristics and behavioural traits of NPCs on the fly or during prep all contained on a single page. Choose results or roll once for each column. She didn’t design it to make coherent NPCs by reading across the rows, but I think you can get some pretty interesting ones by doing that too.

When rolling, for the large table roll a d6 twice and check the results in order, or roll two different coloured d6s. For the d8 tables, if you happen to have only a d6 handy you can just use that, as the results that a 7 or 8 would bring can easily be ignored as they are the least common.

Also, some results have a few choices, sometimes as opposites or alternatives (hairy/hairless) and sometimes to just give a little more choice (bandaged/stitched). When you get a result like this, choose whichever you like best or whatever seems most appropriate.

If you don’t like a result or it doesn’t make sense with something else you’ve already rolled, simply re-roll or choose something else.

I hope you enjoy this gift as much as I have.

You might also be interested in reading...

• IAYC: Fantasy Newspaper (Free Download)
• Things Role Playing Bloggers Tend Not To Write About
• GMing Cues: Impressions, Aims & Pitfalls
• NPC Motivations Table
• ZILLA! – Free ‘Classic Character Pack’

Full Disclosure: I received a free PDF copy of the Midgard Bestiary after providing feedback and a playtest report of the draft version.

Kobold Quarterly and Open Design should be familiar to a lot of you by now, and those kobolds just keep going! Currently underway is one of their biggest projects ever: the Midgard Campaign Setting. If you’re interested in collaborative worldbuilding and shaping a new setting, you should check it out.

Lots of Open Design projects in the past have been for the Pathfinder RPG, but Green Ronin’s AGE system (used for the Dragon Age RPG) is enjoying a surge of popularity these days too. Hence, the Midgard Bestiary. It’s packed full of 50 monsters and adversaries newly statted up for the AGE system and is a very welcome addition to any AGE GM’s tool kit. I highly recommend it. Read on for the full review.

It’s done!

Life has run away on me this year, but I have finally managed to complete the fantasy newspaper I promised as my contribution for I Am Your Champion. I had some interest, but few donations, and that’s fine. I had fun making it and I hope those who donated to my charity are happy with the result. This isn’t just for them though, it’s a free download for everyone. I’ve made a parchment version and a print-friendly version. I hope you enjoy this and get some use out of it

Game masters can the newspaper for hooks, NPCs, adventures and worldbuilding or even just as a source of random rumours, information and goings-on. I think the best use for it, though, is for GMs to read it, think about it, then next time the PCs are in a tavern tell them “Someone’s left a newsletter on your table. It looks like this…” and then just give them the handout. I love doing this sort of thing in game and I hope you’ll enjoy my attempt at a fantasy newspaper, inspired by a thoughtful present my wife and friends made for me a few years ago.

If I get enough interest I might just make another issue. Enjoy

You might also be interested in reading...

• ZILLA! – Free ‘Classic Character Pack’
• I Am Your Champion: Act for Peace
• Campaign Setting: Hang Ups
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• Fever Dreams – Entertainment Built on Pyres

It’s Free RPG Day again. Last year I released my first roleplaying game on Free RPG Day. It’s called ZILLA! and is a game of destruction, mayhem and love. You’re a giant zilla on a city-smashing rampage. Zillas are powerful and hard to kill, but they are prone to becoming enamoured with humans. Will you fight another zilla, escape the city to a better place, smash the city to the ground, or even… find love?

This year, I have released a free character pack with three pre-generated zillas for you and your friends to take to town. This is the ‘Classic Character Pack’ and it isn’t hard to see the inspiration behind Thoron, the giant lizard with atomic breath, Leoptra, an enormous psychic moth, and Kapparo, a gargantuan magma-infused tortoise.

Download the classic character pack for free. If you don’t yet have the game itself, download ZILLA! for free too.

Happy Free RPG Day, everyone!

You might also be interested in reading...

• ZILLA! – My Free RPG Day Offering
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• Kobold Quarterly #14 for Free!
• NPC Description Tables

In the spirit of Free RPG Day, here is a list of some great RPGs that have been free all along. Some I’ve played, some I haven’t, but they are all great games. Feel free to add more in the comments.

A Terrible Idea has come out with another great idea. I Am Your Champion is a game/challenge played in five rounds that will challenge your existing ideas regarding charitable fundraising. Basically, you choose a charity and support it, but it’s more like you use your creativity to provide rewards or thank you gifts to those who contribute to your charity. Jump over to the website to catch up on the requirements for each round. It’s not too late to join in! I’m participating, and this post is me announcing myself, my cause, my goal and my reward.

Emergency services are inundated with calls that they terminate because they appear to be pranks or non-emergencies. Stuff about aliens and werewolves. That kind of thing.

That’s where Hang Ups comes in.

They’re an independent (and not technically legal) group that intercepts these abandoned calls and sifts through them for seeds of truth. Armed with their knowledge of the paranormal, they respond to potentially legitimate calls to help those that the authorities ignore.

When I present this to my players, I’ll explain most of this as we go. But to get them excited for, it I made this one-page PDF flyer. Feel free to use it with your own group.

In the Demonsea campaign I’m running for my wife, we’re using Savage Worlds. It’s a great system, and one of my new favourites. I like the Hindrances and Edges, but we found that choice there can sometimes be a bit limited and the ones my wife had picked for her character ended up not being very relevant. I know we could have changed them or made up our own, but that didn’t really excite us.

Instead, when we went to advance her character again we decided to try ditching Hindrances and Edges and incorporating Aspects, from FATE-based games like Spirit of the Century and The Dresden Files RPG. Now, I know this may be blasphemy to some, but we wanted to give it a shot. I’ve read a lot about SotC and DRPG, but haven’t yet had the chance to run either, so this was also like a test-run for using Aspects.

If you’d like an offline copy of these house rules, you can download a PDF here.

• Double rainbow! OMG! http://yfrog.com/evr88yj
• I managed to do 623 words at lunch today. That’ll do. I’m still almost two days ahead. Now time for #pathfinder and Chinese!
• This http://bit.ly/d4A1sI made me investigate ICONS then this http://bit.ly/a6iLnb and the currently half-price PDF made me buy it #rpg

I think we’ve stumbled across RPG rules before that we really wished worked differently. And everyone loves free stuff, right? Playtesting RPGs is a great way to get a nearly complete game or supplement for free. It also allows you to provide feedback directly to the creators of the game so that they can consider the problems you find.

That’s the great thing too, it’s not just typos and calculation errors you can report on, it’s how powers and abilities work, how a certain rule plays out in game, how things are balanced, and so on. Right now there are some great free playtest PDFs you can get your hands on, letting you try things out early and help shape the way the final products work. Let’s take a look.