The Hollows and Hobgoblins Blog

Tag: free game

  • Some Free Games for You

    Here is some of my work that I am making available for free. They’re labors of love that I want to share. They aren’t very polished, have little to no art, are only a few pages long, but they are playable games I’ve had a lot of fun with. Here’s what I’m sharing:

    (1) The Raid: Rumors and Secrets. A cyberpunk setting where every player has a secret, and so might the employer.

    (2) Shadow Dominion: inspired by the game Night’s Black Agents, the setting is a group of Jason-Bourne-type operatives fighting vampires. This game has a specific setting unlike NBA, and is much simpler to learn and run.

    (3) Fantastic Secrets: a GMless game that is a dungeon crawl on the surface, but is really about the secret motives each PC has and why.

    (4) Cthulhu Darker: Really more house rules than an independent game, these are my modifications to the game Cthulhu Dark, and my notes on how to run a Lovecraftian game.

    (5) How to GM: Finally, not a game at all, but a document I’ve written distilling what I understand to be the best practices for GMing an RPG, based on my 40 years of experience doing so.

    You can check them all out at this folder:

    https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1dhytj0RWw6FVBvSijDIbyQLtDQcZY0P1

    All I ask is please come back here and drop me a comment! Tell me what you liked or didn’t like, and especially if you tried a game what your experience playing was. Happy Gaming!

  • Shadow Dominion: A Vampire Dark RPG

    This is my latest creation, a work-in-progress but functional as-is, so I thought I’d share it. After watching the film Sinners and reading through Ken Hite’s interesting game Night’s Black Agents, I found myself wanting to play in that Jason Bourne vs. Vampires kind of genre.

    NBA is a great game, but it requires a lot of handling time – and the dice mechanic is not to my taste, frankly, for a couple of reasons. So I looked at Cthulhu Dark, and thought of combining the simplicity of those mechanics with risk from EZD6, and adding in some inspiration from the colorful combat options in NBA. For Chargen, I went for quick, roll-or-choose tables for everything from the name to background events, that I find fun to use. I like chargen that’s a fun part of the game rather than laborious number crunching. And so, Shadow Dominion is born!

    I hope to try it out this Friday in a one-shot. If you try it out, please let me know your experience!

    Shadow Dominion RPG