Offworlders is a roleplaying game in the tradition of Traveller and Stars Without Number, that strips the classic formula of bouncing between planets with a crew of misfits down to its barest essentials.

Offworlders is built on the foundation laid by World of Dungeons, by John Harper. If you’ve seen that game, you have a pretty good idea of how Offworlders works. It’s a little bit more than just a reskin though. Offworlders contains a brief but thorough chapter of GM tools and structures to plan single sessions as well as campaigns. Like World of Dungeons, Offworlders is designed to be heavily interpreted in play, hacked to bits, and customized to taste.

There are a huge number of very well-built roleplaying games for science fiction campaigns. I play those games too. I put Offworlders together because I wanted one that I could play with twenty minutes notice for a one-shot, but that had enough going on to be usable for short campaigns too. World of Dungeons, which is a hyper-distilled riff on old school D&D, provided a perfect framework.

Originally, Offworlders was just a document on my Google Drive, until my friend Olivia Gulin offered to do layout and illustration for it. Olivia’s drawings and designings really bring my little hack to life. The PDF includes dozens of drawings of characters, ships and equipment, as well as character and ship record sheets.

Like World of Dungeons, Offworlders is going to be a free pdf. We are trying to figure out a paid print on demand version, too.

It’s coming soon! Stay tuned.