Rovers

A while ago, my friend Marcus introduced me to World of Dungeons: Turbo, a streamlined version of Dungeon World with a quirky setting, in which blue-collar heroes fight against monsters, take their stuff and destroy incursions of other realities into our own.

WoD: Turbo looks like it could be easily hacked into other genres and so I was delighted to hear (but not that surprised) that Catherine Ramen of Aviatrix Games created a WoD: Turbo hack which is basically a Traveller hack with the serial numbers filed off.

It’s called Rovers, and it’s available for free as a 7-paged PDF on Aviatrix Games’ website. It contains a character creation system reminiscent of Traveller’s in which the player decides how many terms the character wants to be enlisted. Each term grants a new skill, but ever term after the first causes a scar. Before the character can go on adventures they also get mustering out benefits depending on how many terms they served.

The core rules fit on just one page and like many other PbtA games you can probably run it with no prep at all. The game even contains rules for creating your party’s starship, which almost becomes a character in its own right, and a world generator, which is of course not as detailed as the one in Classic Traveller (or later editions) but it should serve it purpose just as well – especially when considering the narrative nature of the game. By the way, did I mention that Rovers is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike license?

Since the game is free and only 7 pages long, I highly recommend you check it out!

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.