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Hey all, wanted to share the various PDF (and other) TTRPG bundles that are going on at the moment. Anyone who has some knowledge about the games or adventures, please feel free to share your thoughts.

Disclaimer: I am unaffiliated with any of the below sites and publishers and I have not as of yet read any of the books (unless I mention it). Basically just don't want people to miss out on books and plus I can get recommendations on what to buy.

Humble Bundle

Castles and Crusades

65 items, $20, seems like the 2024 version. Ending soon, only about 2 days and 16 hours left.

My thoughts: I'm a sucker for big numbers, even though I own countless fantasy RPGs already.

Urban Shadows (physical book, GM screen, dice and tray)

4 items, $59, 2nd edition with dice GM screen and stuff, shipping NOT included so know that it could be anywhere between an extra $12 and $49. Ending soon, only about 2 days and 16hours left.

My thoughts: A bit much to commit without having tried/read it before.

Candela Obscura

16 items, $18, some of the items are for the Demuplane VTT. Ending soon, only about 3 days and 16 hours left.

My thoughts: good deal, but I read some general reviews and don't think Candela Obscura is for me.

Beadle and Bard Dice Sets (Physical)

6 items, $84, each is a fancy dice set with a coin and some cards with facts or something. US only, shipping averages $30. About 16 days and 16 hours left.

My thoughts: A good deal, since each is normally $35 and they're effectively around $19 each, but still $114 in total for 6 dice sets is asking a lot.

Bundle of Holding

Yellow King RPG

The four volumes of the Gumshoe Yellow King RPG + music tracks for $17.95. Or $28.40 for an additional compendium of handouts and three fiction novels. Ending soon, only about 1 day and 9 hours left.

My thoughts: I really enjoy Lovecraft stuff, but I already own CoC, Delta Green, and Cthulhu Eternal books. This might be good if I liked the Gumshoe system, but I haven't tried/read it yet.

The Black Ballad

1 item for $9.95. High level 5e campaign about what happens after a TPK. Ending soon, only about 1 day and 9 hours left.

My thoughts: idk seems cool? 5e though.

Cohors Cthulhu

$14.95 for the GM and Player's Guide for the 2d20 Cthulhu system. Or $31.39 for four additional scenarios/supplements. Ending soon, only about 6 days and 9 hours left.

My thoughts: About the same as for Yellow King. Though having Eldritch horrors in ancient Rome is very appealing.

Death in Space

$19.95 for the core rules from Free League Publishing, four third-party scenarios, and three mini-scenarios (mini-scenarios are on itch and not DriveThruRPG). About 13 days and 9 hours left.

My thoughts: It's a Free League ruleset/setting, so seems like an easy pickup but I've been putting it off.

Household

$14.95 for three books in the Household collection from Two Little Mice. About 20 days and 9 hours left.

Household Volume II

Separate bundle. $12.95 for two campaign supplements for Household. About 20 days and 9 hours left.

My thoughts: Playing as miniature people/creatures could be cool. And the art looks nice.

Fanatical

Traveller RPG Ultimate GDW Collection

128 items for $32.99. The GDW version of Traveller, I assume. Only about 8 days and 21 hours left.

My thoughts: I honestly forgot about this. Which sucks, because I bought a previous Fanatical Traveller bundle and I would like to complete my collection. And apparently this bundle includes that previous one and also more stuff of Traveller: The New Era. Great deal, but damn I hate buying things twice. zer0k0ol pointed out that the previous collection is included specifically in the top tier of this bundle, so you can easily just opt out of it and get only the new stuff by buying the 67 items for $19.99. Fantastic from Fanatical.

X-Crawl RPG Bundle

41 items for $17.99. These are the same books that were included in a previous Humble Bundle a while back. About 13 days and 21 hours left.

My thoughts: I bought the aforementioned Humble Bundle and really enjoyed reading some of these modules. Crazy and zany, just overall cool. Could probably be adapted for Dungeon Crawler Carl RPG adventures, since it's a slightly similar premise. Don't quote me on that.

Call of Cthulhu RPG Bundle

33 items for $24.99. A few new additions compared to a previous Humble Bundle, like Children of Fear and Secrets of Tibet. Oddly enough it doesn't seem to have a timer? But the other page says it ends in about 23 days.

My thoughts: Goddamn I hate buying things twice and I'm probably not going to do it this time, even if it's technically worth it and cheaper than buying the individual PDFs. Great deal for anyone wanting to play CoC though.

Mutants and Masterminds Classic RPG Collection

57 items for $19.99. Superhero RPG from Green Ronin Publishing. About 43 days left.

My thoughts: Have not felt the urge to read or try a superhero RPG yet. I glanced over Invincible, but wasn't interested. No idea how this compares.

Old-School Essentials RPG Collection

31 items for $14.99. Basically everything for OSE. About 57 days left.

My thoughts: Just bought the physicals of the main books a couple of months ago. Nice art, okay ruleset (THAC0), and some of the adventures in the first Anthology book are cool. Mildly annoyed that this is a must buy for me, but at least there is plenty of time to delay it.

Welp that's everything.

Edits 1 and 2: Correction about the Traveller bundle and Colors -> Cohors Cthulhu

^{Disclaimer: I was sort-of involved in the creation of this, in terms of giving feedback and proofreading things and the like.}

After months of work, the Community Edition of the cinematic fantasy RPG Grimwild is now complete and fully available, for free digitally (via Itch.io and RPG Trader), and as a paid print-on-demand hardcover book (via Lulu and RPG Trader) around mid-November once the test prints come in.

If you're familiar with the original game, here's a quick rundown of what to expect:

• New layout and organization of the text

• The original rules have been elaborated upon more, with additional play examples and clarifications of how to apply them

• Some rules have been simplified or reworked, including harm and potency

• Many path talents were rebalanced and changed, though old versions remain available as legacy options

• Content from the paid edition of the game (such as extra paths and group-building questions) is dispersed and integrated throughout the whole book instead of relegated to a single chapter in the back

• Some new rules and options (new paths like the Summoner and Witch, expanded downtime in the exploration chapter, and optional rules like level 0 characters)

• New replacement artwork from Per Janke, the same artist who illustrated the original game

For a more complete changelog, go here.

Story time!

Grimwild originally came out in 2025, created by J.D. Maxwell of Oddity Press. Its pitch was simple: a mix of D&D-style classes, monsters, magic items, and adventures, all running on a modern, cinematic-minded rules framework, inspired by games like Blades in the Dark, Fate, and Cortex Prime.

It was kind of a surprise hit, with many articles and reviews praising its design and execution, it won an ENNIE, and was well on the way to becoming the next big indie RPG...

... And then J.D. Maxwell essentially disappeared. While the digital version of the game was finished, the hardcover print run was never delivered to the BackerKit backers, and no contact was made with the author after around mid-2025, despite many various attempts and methods.

It's still not clear what happened to him exactly, with theories ranging from simple burnout to scamming people to something as dark as an actual death. Unfortunately, we may never know.

Nonetheless, there was a silver lining - the game's community stuck around and continued to play Grimwild, and in that process found some things that could have been improved in the original text. Luckily, Grimwild was licensed under Creative Commons, allowing anyone to take the game and do pretty much whatever they wanted.

And so, starting in late 2025, Grimwild's most ardent fans began working on the Community Edition, collaboratively going over every part of the text, with lots of ideas being thrown around and considered, but ultimately a direction was chosen, to be a refinement and additive improvement of of the original game, rather than a drastic departure. Over time, preview versions started to roll out (courtesy of Chancey "Groov" Scott, who kind of became the de facto lead developer on the project), and the Community Edition began to take shape.

Additionally, while the original text of the game was freely-licensed, Per Janke's artwork was not; regardless, the community pooled together some money to reach out to Per to commission some extra new cover and interior art for the Community Edition, a cherry on top of the whole affair.

And now, the full thing is ready to go - freely available for anyone to play with and build upon further, a new chapter in the story of Grimwild. Whether you're an existing Grimwild fan, somebody who bounced off the original version, or checking it out for the first time, hopefully you'll appreciate the tweaks, clarifications, and fine-tuning that went into it all!

Hello! I’ve run a few games for the last two years using dnd and for some time genesis and im thinking about getting myself something new for chrostmas. Right now im really considering buying Alien starter edition (a lot of stuff for a good price where i live), always loved Alien and most of my games tend to be horrorish anyway.

Im also thinking about Lancer, i just ADORE the art and worldbuilding and it seems more combat oriented which could be a breath of freash air for me.

The third one im thinking about is Heart The City Beneath, once again i LOVE the Darkest Dungeon artstyle and honestly it speaks the most to me? It looks interesting and i would love to run something more gritty, the only downside for me is price, and also if anyone played it, how much does the bonus content give? Im talking about the Dagger In The Heart and Ways&Means.

Or your favorite competitive / versus mechanics in a TTRPG.

I'm looking for games to poach for mechanics. I'm happy to hear about both games which are explicitly meant to be competitive, and games which are more flexible but nonetheless have good player vs. player mechanical systems, be they combat, hidden goals/roles, or some other kind of intra-player contest.

So far I'm only really familiar with En Garde! the fencing sim, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, and the semicompetitive aspects of various editions of Paranoia.

To use D&D as a lingua franca, a lot of people never consider rolling to hit and your damage dice at the same time. Doing so simply saves time, and reminds you to have your damage dice prepared if you've already decided to attack. I did the same in my Perils & Princesses game.

In Mythic Bastionland, I began rolling my Feat Save for Smite at the same time I roll my damage dice.

What systems have you played where there's a clear rules optimization that saves time without sacrificing anything mechanically or narratively? Do you think games would be better having these optimizations as the default rules?

So, I loved the Dungeons of Drakkenheim system with a different system; Pathfinder 2e seemed like a great fit, but I learned the hard way that the economy, which is a big barrier in DoD, was hard to balance for PF2e, as the two game's economy works very different. Plus, in a game where D&D has the hp resource issue where PF2e DOESNT, it turned out to be trickier to manage than I thought.

So, I sat here wondering: I liked DoD a lot, but I don't like D&D anymore; so I wonder, what system might do a great job of capturing the DoD's feel, dark cosmic horror, keep it dangerous, have the risk of mutation and madness as well, depressed economy, etc, without it quite being immediately dangerous?

I'm thinking Basic Roleplaying/Mythras, but what do you think?

I’ve been rereading a couple of The Witcher novels and I’m now looking for a system to sink my teeth in, that would do a game fairly well in this setting (or similar).

I know of the official game and the.. middling reviews, so I’m looking for an alternative. Something dark fantasy with an interesting bestiary, asymmetrical fights with a bit of crunch and maybe even subsystems for alchemy and magic.

I was considering GURPS, but I think the point based system for NPC/monster generation would be time intensive as a GM to prep for.

Hi everyone, I’m Willy, a French GM. I’ve played and run D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu and more, and loved them all, but something was always missing for me. So I built my own game, Destynéa, starting from Giffyglyph’s QuickQuest. Two years of sessions later, it’s a system of its own. I'm so excited to share it with you today!

What it does differently at the table:

- d100 roll-under: 45 on your sheet means a 45% chance.
- No initiative rolls, no damage rolls, no armor class. When you’re hit, you parry, dodge or endure to halve the damage.
- Exploits cost HP instead of mana, so every use is a choice.
- Karma coins: your first failed roll in a scene earns a bonus for later.
- Fantasy by default, but it works just as well for a western, a cyberpunk story or a space opera.

The quickstart has 29 pages of rules, six pre-made characters with form-fillable sheets and The Ternauve Detour, a 2-hour adventure for 2 to 6 players. It’s pay what you want, and free is fine.

Disclosure: the English text was translated with AI assistance and reviewed by me. All the art is by human artists. If anything reads awkwardly, please tell me.

itch.io: https://kiimlee.itch.io/destynea-quickstart-rules
DriveThruRPG: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/591222

I’d love feedback, especially from anyone who plays it.

I just backed the campaign for "The girl with the most delicious heart" which is a journal based RPG where you try to survive as long as you can from monsters. It looked really cool but I was wondering if there is anything else with the same tone or similar play styles? I know there is thousand year old vampire but I like the idea of playing as someone trying to survive the monsters instead.

Yeah I know it sounds dark, but these are fighting games where people are killing each other. My players like to narrate strangling their enemies. I'm not sure how to handle it?

In DND, I've just made strangling an unarmed attack, with the usual attack roll and resulting damage.

But I'm about to run Invincible RPG, and one of the villains is going to be a stretch villain, like an evil Mr. Fantastic. He assassinates people by wrapping them up and strangling them out. I'm not sure what a "good" way to handle this is... thoughts?

Stuff where there's little or nothing supernatural going on, but everything is weird enough to convince people that some specific supernatural thing is going on but there's a real explanation. Thinking the kinda stuff you hear about in unaolved yt mysteries that ofc have real life solutions but seem impossible. Horror premise to throw players off. Payoff must actually be satifying and have an oh shit moment. Open to any system and adventure!