High-quality systemless books [+]

[Autumnal]

I’ve been thinking about setting books that are either genuinely free of mechanics, or close as darn it. Favorites of mine include things like the systemless version of Freeport, a bunch of the Glorantha books for HeroQuest, and settings for Amber and Lords Of Gossamer & Shadow. My experience with allegedly system-neutral books published within the orbit of D&D was that they were actually compatible with any variety of D&D, but I like being happily surprised. So please, tell me about your favorites of this sort, in any genre.

One request: please tell me about them. Don’t just list them. The easy part is finding lists of tales. The hard part is finding out what’s in them, and what you’ve done them (or why you haven’t). Thanks!

PS. I forgot to say that I’m interested in systemless adventures and campaigns, too, and that I know a lot less about them.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

The Pirates Guide to Freeport is a sequel to the 3E Freeport Trilogy and the following sourcebook, Freeport: City of Adventure. The original sourcebook, which was also for 3E, was full of dumb jokes and joke characters that undercut that this was a free city of pirates with a very dangerous Yellow Sign cult running around.

The sequel updated the timeline, got rid of the goofiness and created a tonally consistent city that both works as a traditional D&D city (they have the obligatory riff on Lankhmar's temple district with innumerable gods) and giving DMs both details where it's needed and blank space to make the setting their own. The gods of knowledge and pirates, for instance, are very important to the Freeport Trilogy, but while the temple and local clergy for each are detailed, there are no names or stats about the faiths, because they expect DMs to drop Freeport into their own world and use the existing pantheons. (The later adventure, Black Sails Over Freeport, gives the pirate god a name, as well as the bloodthirsty pirate god he replaced.)

You get enough details about the local islands to run nautical games for a very long time. And if you don't have a world at all, there's an extremely lightly sketched broader world you can use, especially for the purposes of knowing whose navy is chasing your player characters or what nation's ship you just attacked.

I dropped Freeport into Praemal, the world Ptolus sits on, and it fit like a glove and was home to a fork of my long-running campaign for quite a while. Those players seem to have a warm spot in their black hearts for Freeport even now, years later.

There are supplemental books giving stats for a variety of systems (Pathfinder 1E, 4E, Fate, Castles & Crusades, etc.) but it would be extremely easy to run with pretty much any fantasy RPG with little to no conversion, especially if the system has snake men (which many of them seem to). I could run it with Shadowdark tomorrow, for instance, with zero conversions necessary. And, of course, it would be a fantastic alternate setting for Pirate Borg.

Highly recommended.

 

[Autumnal]

Thanks! I need to see how much Ptolus I have tucked away here.

 

[mamba]

The Pirates Guide to Freeport is a sequel to the 3E Freeport Trilogy and the following sourcebook, Freeport: City of Adventure.

how does the Pirate's Guide compare to the PF1 version? Looks like that is the most recent incarnation

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

how does the Pirate's Guide compare to the PF1 version? Looks like that is the most recent incarnation

DriveThruRPG

www.drivethrurpg.com

I don't have the later one, but my understanding is that it advances the timeline past all of the 3E adventures, but I don't know more than that.

 

[jdrakeh]

Ravensrook is a great system-neutral city setting book. It very much calls to mind dangerous cities of fiction such as Sanctuary and Lankhmar. I've personally used it as a stand-in for the Free City of Greyhawk when I wanted a city with a slightly more grungy feel and also as a city "core" for the City League in Pelinore.

 

[Autumnal]

Interesting. Thanks!

 

[paradisebunny]

There is also all the books by Charlie Ferguson-Avery and Alex Coggon: namely Into the Wyrd and Wild, a fantastic book to create wilderness adventures; Ave Nox, a spooky underdark themed Mega-Dungeon; Into the Cess and Citadel, similar to the wilderness book, but this time geared at city adventures and finally the Vast in the Dark, a dark plane setting focused on exploration. All of these are truly great and the very first page in these has a page called “System neutral and what it means”. Highly recommended!

 

[Autumnal]

I need to check out Ave Nox and Vast In The Dark, because I love the other two to bits.

 

[Wofano Wotanto]

What about moving beyond the gaming industry for this?

Stewart Cowley effectively wrote a sprawling and very usable scifi setting through the Terran Trade Authority and later Galactic Encounters books, and while there was eventually a short-lived and fairly obscure TTA RPG published it's easily ignored since it doesn't appear in the Cowley books themselves.

Wayne Barlowe's Expedition is a fascinating speculative evolution piece, and it wouldn't be hard to imagine a Traveller-like scenario where a crashed ship needs recovery or deliberate poaching/resource exploitation is taking place and needs to be dealt with on a similar world with the yma around to stop it. For that matter, you could flip the situation and play native eosapiens (perhaps farther evolved than in the book) in a first contact scenario. Spec Evo as a genre offers a lot of pre-made worlds of varying degrees of detail and utility to gaming, Expedition just happens to be better known than most thanks to the Alien Planet show based off of it.

On the fantasy side of things Larry MacDougall's Gwelf setting feels very much like a deliberately systemless series of setting books that could be used for the RPG rule set of your choice, with a vague Redwall-ish feel to it.

Easier to find systemless settings when they weren't written with a system in mind in the first place.