The Free Void System is a tabletop Role-playing game system designed to run narrative heavy role-playing games that follow a episodic formula that is useful for people who wish to run and participate in role-playing games without having to commit to the kind of long haul campaigns that traditional and long standing TTRPG systems such as Dungeons and Dragons require of their players.

Purpose

The Free Void System was designed with three goals in mind. The first goal was to create an RPG system that prioritized narrative and storytelling and the flow of storytelling above combat resolution, stats and gameplay. In the words of the Aardvark, most tabletop RPGs are games that tell stories, The Free Void System is storytelling that uses a game. The second goal was to create an RPG system that was fast and smooth to play, and provided a complete experience in any one play session, not unlike an episode of a television show. The Ape is not getting younger, and has complained that adulthood has not left time for six hour marathon gaming sessions and has made maintaining a gaming schedule for years on end unreasonable. Thus the Free Void System is designed to create shorter and more self contained gaming sessions to accommodate the adult gamer trying to work around a day job and parental duties, or indeed trying to teach younger humans with shorter attention spans how to play. The third goal was to provide a system that had a minimum of rules, and as few intimidating complications as possible to make teaching and learning both easy and approachable for new players. This is why the Free Void System is composed of a mere four required elements, and one additional optional element. Ape is old enough to remember trying to learn THAC0 in the days of first edition Advance Dungeons and Dragons, and remembers the huge tables and reference sheets in Rolemaster. And the Ape wants nothing to do with those complications on this project.

So there you have it. The Free Void System has been designed to focus on story first, to be episodic in nature, and to be easy to learn and to teach.

The Free Void Systems

The Base Free Void System

The Free Void System is an open source and public domain system for tabletop role-playing. The Free Void System was originally designed for use with the Blood Red Dreaming tabletop ARG/RPG. The system itself is quite versatile, and the Ape asked the Aardwolf to hunker down and surgically separate the system from Blood Red Dreaming and make it available for people and designers to use in other projects. The Free Void System proved a little idiosyncratic, and in order to make it self sustaining as a tabletop RPG system, the Aardvark added the optional rule of the SEA Scores to the system. The SEA Scores are thus listed as optional, but really the whole system is optional. Use what you like, modify who you want, discard the rest.

• The Deck of Void
• The Deck of Fire
• The ARC Cycle
• The Three Act Story
• The SEA Scores (optional)

The Blood Red Dreaming System

Blood Red Dreaming is the first game built from the underlying Base Free Void System. In addition to the base Free Void Rules (although Blood Red Dreaming does not use the SEA Scores optional rule), Blood Red Dreaming uses several additional rule sets to achieve the gaming goals of the System.

• The Vajra System
• The Crescent Sun System
• The Occult Psychonaut Skill Tree

License

Pretty much everything on this website is open source and/or public domain unless otherwise noted. The Free Void System is no exception. Use this as you like, please link us if you do (we will be happy to post a link). We would prefer if you make your own projects open source and/or public domain, or even share-alike under the Creative Commons license system. Obviously, by releasing this into the Public Domain, we cannot demand you do this. So instead, we will ask you to do this.

Either way: Play nice and make good art!

 

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Contributing Authors

• Professor* Harbinger