Indie RPGs
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When a customer buys an RPG book published by a participating publisher from McNally Robinson Booksellers (Grant Park location only) and that book is available online as a combined print and PDF bundle, they are entitled to receive a PDF copy of that book at no additional charge.
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Shadow Of The Weird Wizard Rpg Weird Ancestries
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Trade paperback
$26.00
Reader Reward Price: $23.40
Mysterious janni and fierce sphinxes. Flighty sprites and diminutive dragonets—and many more. These remarkable peoples from all corners of the known world have one thing in common: They’re ready to make your campaigns even more unique and memorable.
At last, a collection of characters as fantastical as the world of Shadow of the Weird Wizard! Weird Ancestries gives you the rules and background to play almost any kind of character in the borderlands. Each of the 30 two-page ancestries offers:
• Information about how to play the character as an adventurer, including origins, professions, and paths
• Detailed physical descriptions enhanced with a cool piece of color art
• Full rules for the ancestry’s talents and traits
• Facts about society and culture plus optional ancestry paths to help you build out characters that reflect cultural characteristics
Some of these folks you’ve briefly met in Secrets of the Weird Wizard, and others are brand new. Run them as described or customize them to fit your own vision. You’ll find something here to spark every player’s imagination.
For players and Sages alike. Suitable for all levels of play.
Endling Rpg
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Trade paperback
$30.00
Reader Reward Price: $27.00
You are an endling. You are the endling. You are the last human. You take your journals and any food and gear that remain in the bunker and head south. You have a promise to keep. You just need to get there. Endling is a tarot-driven, solo journaling game. You play the part of the endling, the last human. Using tarot cards to inspire your responses to the story prompts, you tell the story of the endling on their journey to fulfill one final promise. Full play time of 2-4 hours can be divided up over several sessions. Exploration and resource management add a risk of failure to the journey. Tarot-driven storytelling to inspire unique responses to over 50 story prompts. Structured story prompts to increase accessibility for players that are new to journaling games. Multiple pieces of original art and tarot designs to build the atmosphere of the story.
Broken Cities Rpg
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Trade paperback
$22.00
Reader Reward Price: $19.80
BROKEN CITIES is a diceless, GMless tabletop RPG in which players take the role of Travelers coming to a City with adventurous goals in mind, while the City wants to convince them to go through the sacrifice needed to fix it. Its base version requires 2 to 5 players (though the game also includes a solo variant), for one-shots of 3-4 hours requiring very little preparation. You'll like this game if you enjoy surrealism and weird adventures, asymmetrical roles and urban exploration! BROKEN CITIES features a complete game system plus everything you need to create and play adventures within its 88 pages: Diceless, card-based game mechanics: it's always up to the players to decide whether they succeed at a cost or fail A step-by-step guide to create the City and its odd atmosphere, as well as the quirky Travelers visiting it Asymmetrical roles: the City (controlled by 1 to 5 players) describes its streets and give the Travelers (played by 1 to 5 players) hard choices to react to Dozens of examples to help you come up with ideas of NPCs and places on the spot Variant rules to play the game solo And more! The game features a clear and efficient layout by Nicolas Folliot (already responsible for Meanwhile, in the Subway and Two Summers) and a gorgeous cover by Laurent Rivelaygue.
Gardens Of Ynn Rpg
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Hardcover
$50.00
Reader Reward Price: $45.00
Find a wall covered in ivy, vines, moss, or similar, and clear that vegetation away. Using chalk and charcoal draw a realistic door (with keyhole, hinges and doorknob) on the surface below. Write upon the door: “Ynn, by way of [the current location]”. Leave, so the drawing is no longer visible, and on return the drawing will be replaced by a real door. When it is opened, the Gardens of Ynn will be on the other side: infinite, overgrown, extradimensional. This realm is full of magic and treasure, worthy of exploration and plunder by sellswords, occultists and adventures. The doorway remains there for a full day, after which it fades away as if it never existed, leaving anybody still on the other side stranded. The Book The Gardens of Ynn is a point-crawl adventure set in an ever-shifting extradimensional garden. Each expedition randomly generates a new route as it explores, resulting in different vistas being unlocked with every visit. The adventure is a perfect zero prep session or campaign for any party of fantasy adventurers, no matter the system or the sub-genre. We found most ‘zero-prep’ adventures to be bland and lacking in colour, so in Gardens of Ynn every room, encounter and monster is popping with vibes. It's a big garden full of whimsy and delight and surreal perils. Gardens of Ynn is statted generically for Old School Systems, but you would have absolutely no trouble using it in a game of 5E if you were comfortable statting up some weird monsters. Included within: Systems for generating locations within the garden, including hothouses, memorial gardens, chess lawns, the Mask Gallery, hypnotic gardens, fleshy gardens and the Splicing Vats. 50 monsters tailored to the Gardens, including myconid composters, rose-maidens, rust-bumblebees, floral spiders, bonsai turtles and the enigatic Sidhe. Details for The Idea Of Thorns and other dream-viruses. Tables for generating treasure, Ynnian mutations, and various other useful details. A unique class of Ynnian Changelings, human survivors adapted to the garden.
Orbital Blues Rpg Wanderer Solo Expansion
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Trade paperback
$25.00
Reader Reward Price: $22.50
This is a solo play supplement for Orbital Blues written by Elliot Davis and references the original text. Using a deck of playing cards and a handful of poker chips, players will reflect on the life of an outlaw and reckon with their Trouble as they attempt to build the best poker hand possible.
Teatime Adventures Rpg Core Rulebook 2e
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Hardcover
$41.00
Reader Reward Price: $36.90
Welcome to the world of the Verdant Isles! This core rulebook contains everything that you need to play Teatime Adventures! Teatime Adventures is a nonviolent roleplaying game full of heartwarming magic, baked goods, and a tea pairing for every adventure. Gather a few friends around the table and imagine yourselves in the whimsical world of the Verdant Isles. Teatime Adventures uses an easy to learn, family-friendly D20 system that's perfect for newcomers and veteran RPG players alike. Will you choose to be a Deerkin or a Hoptop? Will you be aligned to the Storm or to the Twilight? Will you snack on apple turnovers or spicy dragon biscuits? These choices and more await you in Teatime Adventures. This newly revised edition has more art than ever and just as much whimsy. The core rulebook includes all the rules, lore, and recipes that you need to begin your cozy mystery adventures in the world of Teatime Adventures with cozy content and whimsical illustrations, an introductory solo adventure to begin your journeys, and new leveling mechanics to increase your characters’ coziness, harmony, and kitchen magic.
Shadows Of The Weird Wizard Rpg Secrets Of The Weird Wizard
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Hardcover
$75.00
Reader Reward Price: $67.50
Discover the Secrets of the Weird Wizard! All the secrets of the borderlands and beyond stand revealed in the pages of this book. Designed for the Sage, Secrets of the Weird Wizard offers guidance for running the game, creating quests, traps, treasures, and more. The borderlands, the default setting for the game, receive extensive detail, while a robust bestiary gives you a veritable menagerie of monsters with which you can test your players. If you plan to run the game or would learn more about the world, Secrets of the Weird Wizard is the book for you!
Never Going Home Rpg Bile in the Streets
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Hardcover
$26.00
Reader Reward Price: $23.40
1914
The disaster did not happen by accident.
Join Serbian partisans tasked with stirring up trouble for Austria-Hungary. You will have to negotiate a path between the shifting borders of nations and the murky allegiances of your commanders. Plans and counter-plans swirl around an official visit to Sarajevo. Do you know what you’re really doing?
Bile in the Streets
A Campaign Dossier for Never Going Home
Grimoires
Alarm Limits
The Tattered Veil
12 Antagonists mundane and monstrous
6 Connected Adventures
A Copy of Never Going Home is needed to play.
Mothership Rpg Warden's Operations Manual
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Trade paperback
$27.00
Reader Reward Price: $24.30
HOW TO RUN MOTHERSHIP FOR WARDENS
[a Mothership 1E: First Edition Core Rulebook]
A nuts-and-bolts, easy to master, step-by-step approach to teaching new Wardens how to run Mothership.
About the book:
The Warden's Operations Manual takes you from prepping your first Mothership session, to running it, to prepping the rest of your campaign in a simple, easy-to-read format. It's chock full of simple advice to improve your horror game, as well as basic procedures for preparing great scenarios for your players.
Custom fit the game for your table
Generate random horror scenarios
Grow your one-shot to an ongoing campaign
This little toybox can take you from newbie Warden to veteran in 60 pages. With the Warden's Operations Manual in your arsenal, you'll be able to handle common problems like:
How do I prep for a session? How do I know when I'm done prepping?
How do I run a horror game? How do I maintain tension?
What about campaigns? How do I even begin to structure and run one?
The Team:
Written by Sean McCoy
Edited by Jarrett Crader
Developed by Donn Stroud, Nick Reed, Tyler Kimball, Fiona Maeve Geist, and Luke Gearing
Illustrated by Ryan Barry, William Davidson, Daniel Francisco, Ty Garlando, Dan Hawksworth, David Hoskins, Junmin Kim, Sean Mccoy, Nayla, Mykell Pledger, and Zach Hazard Vaupen
60 Page saddle-stitched digest sized zine. Includes PDF.
Mothership Rpg Unconfirmed Contact Reports
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Trade paperback
$27.00
Reader Reward Price: $24.30
THIS ISN'T SOME DUSTY MONSTER ENCYCLOPEDIA.
The Not-So-Classic MONSTER BOOK for Mothership.
[a Mother ship 1E: First Edition Core Rulebook]
Unconfirmed Contact Reports is Mothership's answer to the classic Monster Book, with guidance on creating monsters, aliens, and other terrifying horrors.
About the book:
Unconfirmed Contact Reports is your guide to running terrifying encounters with strange entities and horrendous abominations. It comes complete with a section on designing your own horrors, and over 40 unique, fully illustrated monstrosities
40+ fully illustrated unique horrors
100+ in-world prompts
Guide to designing your own creatures
In Mothership there is a saying: Every monster is a boss monster. That means that each unique horror is a threat that you build 1-3 sessions around, rather than an obstacle meant to be defeated in a single encounter. These horrors are puzzles meant to be solved, ordeals to be survived, or terrors to save innocents from.
Unconfirmed Contact Reports has taken a novel approach to the classic bestiary style guide. It keeps the stat blocks simple, and instead provides you with first-hand accounts of encounters with its strange and terrifying entities.
Each eye-witness account is written to be dropped directly into your game as evidence or clues that you can share directly with your players in game.
The Team:
Written by Izzy Bull, Luke Gearing, Fiona Maeve Geist, Alan Gerding, Tyler Kimball, Wendy Pippin, Donn Stroud and David N. Wilkie
Illustrated by Franck Besançon, Daeva Hotline, William Davidson, Dylan.s, Daniel Francisco, Nick Grant, Dan Hawksworth, Trevor Henderson, Justyna Koziczak, Ben Longoria, Patrick Loveland, Trevor Mccoy, Nayla, Noizevul, Luis Perez-banus, Nick Tofani, Scrap Princess, Theotherwell, Luka Shults, and David N. Wilkie
Edited by Jarrett Crader
56 pages, saddle-stitched digest sized zine. Includes PDF.
Mothership Rpg Shipbreaker's Toolkit
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Trade paperback
$27.00
Reader Reward Price: $24.30
New tools for spacecraft in Mothership
[a Mothership 1E: First Edition Core Rulebook]
The Shipbreaker's Toolkit is a new core rulebook dedicated to building, buying, breaking, and battling ships.
About the book:
Mothership: Shipbreaker's Toolkit is the ultimate guide to space travel in the Mothership universe. The Shipbreaker's Toolkit gives you all the tools for operating, maintaining, and, if the need arises, battling spacecraft.
Build, buy, break, and battle ships
10 pre-made ships, ready to play and customize
Addresses common issues with space travel and ship combat:
Failure on a ship and its effects on the crew's stress
How ship damage affects the environment, such as life support systems and navigation
Handling ship combat as group choices called "Ship Rounds" in place of individual actions before time returns to normal for players to deal with the issues that arise from any damage sustained.
A Repair & Maintenance table of d100 maintenance issues, made up of major and minor repairs.
The Team:
Written by Sean McCoy
Ships designed by Sam Wildman
Edited by Jarrett Crader
Developed by Donn Stroud, Nick Reed, Tyler Kimball, Fiona Maeve Geist, Luke Gearing, and Sam Wildman
Illustrated by Ryan Barry, Jordan Farquhar, Gil Rodrigo, Sean McCoy, and Sam Wildman
44 page saddle-stitched digest sized zine. Includes PDF.
Mothership Rpg Player's Survival Guide
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Trade paperback
$34.00
Reader Reward Price: $30.60
Award-Winning SCI-FI HORROR!
[a Mothership 1E: First Edition Core Rulebook]
Mothership is built on a rules-lite d100 chassis with custom rules for Stress & Panic, streamlined mechanics for violent encounters, and a world-class easy-to-learn character creation system.
About the book:
The Mothership 1e Player's Survival Guide has all the rules you need to play, including Character Creation, How to Play, Violent Encounters, Stress & Panic, Shore Leave, Weapons and Equipment, and more!
Everything has been streamlined with an eye to being fast and easy for new players to learn.
Mothership: Player's Survival Guide features:
Streamlined Character Creation - The flow-chart character sheet has been upgraded and simplified to make character creation a breeze. All the rules for character creation fit on this one page, so making a character is as easy as 1, 2, 3 (...4, 5, 6, 7).
Back to Brutal Basics - After extensive player feedback a bunch of edge-cases and weird one-off rules were removed to get the game back to its brutal basics.
Dead Simple Rules - So simple, in fact, they're printed on the back of the book. Essentially, Mothership® is a d100 roll-under system, where if you want to do something (or avoid something bad happening) you try and roll d100 under your relevant Stat or Save.
Panic Checks - Whenever you roll doubles over your Stat/Save, that's a Critical Failure, and you have to make a Panic Check. To make a Panic Check you roll a special die only used for Panic Checks: a d20 called the Panic Die. If you roll under your total Stress, you Panic and look up what happens on the Panic Table. If you roll over your current Stress, then you keep your calm... for now.
The Panic table is one of the core elements of the Mothership experience. Every roll has the potential to inflict a permanent Condition, which must be dealt with by seeking treatment during your Shore Leave.
Shore Leave - Mothership is a level-less game. That means characters don't gain XP or level up. Instead, they take Shore Leave whenever they get a chance, blowing their hard earned credits at the closest Port. This allows them to convert their Stress into improved Saves. This means that whatever Stress doesn't kill you, will eventually make you stronger.
Violence - Any encounter that turns violent can completely change the course of a game. Characters are weak by design, and can only take a few Wounds before dying. Avoid violence at all costs, and when it can't be avoided, tilt the odds in your favor as much as humanly possible.
Armor Points - To protect against Wounds and death, players will want to stock up on Armor. Each piece of Armor has a certain number of Armor Points. Any damage you take under your Armor's AP is ignored completely. But as soon as you take damage greater than your AP, your Armor is functionally destroyed and no longer provides protection.
Yet another reason to make violence a last resort.
*Mothership is a horror game for mature audiences. It contains violence, foul language, some sexual content, drug use, and depictions of mental illness, trauma, stress, and panic that may not be suitable for all audiences. Please be advised.
The Team:
Written by Sean McCoy
Edited by Jarrett Crader
Developed by Luke Gearing, Fiona Maeve Geist, Tyler Kimball, Nick Reed, Donn Stroud, and Sam Wildman
Illustrated by Ryan Barry, Jan Buragay, Abe Cerda, Jota Cravo, Daniel Francisco, David Hoskins, Patrick Loveland, Sean McCoy, and Zach Hazard Vaupen
44 page digest sized saddle-stitched zine. Includes PDF.
Best Left Buried Rpg Deeper+
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Hardcover
$72.00
Reader Reward Price: $64.80
A hardcover compendium of all three core books from Best Left Buried: The Cryptdigger's Guide to Survival, The Doomsayer's Guide to Horror and The Hunter's Guide to Monsters. ~~~ Best Left Buried: Deeper is a rules-light, fantasy horror roleplaying game – where the monsters are scary, and you are scared. Players take the role of Cryptdiggers; professional dungeon-divers who venture into monster-infested crypts in search of riches. Within those dark tunnels, Cryptdiggers brave threatening environments, solve cryptic puzzles and face terrifying monsters. Those who survive might find themselves richer, but changed by their experience. They are often broken, beaten and diminished – as ruined as the crypts themselves. 328 pages, 6x9, hardcover, sewn binding, black and white throughout. PDF included.
Quartershots Rpg Woodlands & Waterfalls
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Trade paperback
$29.00
Reader Reward Price: $26.10
QUARTERSHOTS (as in, smaller than "one-shot" adventures) Book 3: Woodlands & Waterfalls has adventures that take place in wilderness or water locations. It could be druidic cult mysteries, riverboat battles, or fey mind trickery! QuarterShots is a new type of adventure book: the Game Masters's backup plan. They're packed with system-neutral side quests that can be dropped into any RPG session with ZERO prep! Not enough time to prep for your upcoming session? QuarterShots is your backup plan. Didn't expect your players to leave town mid-session? No problem! Just flip to a fitting two page adventure and seamlessly continue GMing. Each adventure starts with a brief summary, to let you quickly pick out the adventure that best fits your game. The rest of the details are presented in small packets of information, so you can easily skim any adventure to get all you need to know to run it, without slowing down the session. 64 pages of side quests that defy players expectations and fit into any campaign Each adventure is 1 to 2 hours of gameplay - perfect for short sessions or to fill out longer game nights Truly system-neutral - compatible with 5e or any other system - there are no game specific mechanics The perfect GM backup plan for when players decide to do something unexpected Requires no preparation - you don't even need to read the entire adventure before you start running it Quit worrying about being underprepared - your players will never see you sweat! Recommended Ages: 12+
Quartershots Rpg Book 2 Lairs & Labyrinths
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Trade paperback
$28.00
Reader Reward Price: $25.20
QUARTERSHOTS (as in, smaller than "one-shot" adventures) A new type of adventure book packed with system-neutral side quests that can be dropped into any RPG session with ZERO prep! Not enough time to prep for your upcoming session? QuarterShots is your backup plan. Didn't expect your players to leave town mid-session? No problem! Just flip to a fitting two page adventure and seamlessly continue GMing. Each adventure starts with a brief summary, to let you quickly pick out the adventure that best fits your game. The rest of the details are presented in small packets of information, so you can easily skim any adventure to get all you need to know to run it, without slowing down the session. 64 pages of side quests that defy players expectations and fit into any campaign Each adventure is 1 to 2 hours of gameplay - perfect for short sessions or to fill out longer game nights Truly system-neutral - compatible with 5e or any other system - there are no game specific mechanics The perfect GM backup plan for when players decide to do something you have no plan for Requires no preparation - you don't even need to read the entire adventure before you start running it Quit worrying about being underprepared - your players will never see you sweat Book 2: Lairs & Labyrinths covers forays below ground: from hunts inside mountainous lairs to spelunking expeditions below the city. Recommended Ages: 12+
This is a selection of our current Indie RPGs titles. To find other titles or authors, or just to browse, please use the search box.
