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.