Free roleplaying games in Spanish

Which tabletop games you can play without paying and why, what "free" means in roleplaying, and which one to pick depending on what you want.

You can play tabletop RPGs without spending a euro, with complete, legal games available in Spanish. This guide is for people who want to start today and do not know where to begin.

Here we mean tabletop roleplaying (dice, character sheet and GM), not roleplaying video games.

What "free" means here

Three cases are often mixed up:

Type	What it is
Open rules	The text of the rules is published under a licence that allows using and reimplementing it. Thanks to that, free versions exist, and tools that come with them ready-made.
Free basic rules	The publisher gives away a reduced version of the game, enough to play. The full book is paid.
Fully free game	The author publishes it for free. Usually independent RPGs, and some are very good.

All three are good for playing. The first one also explains why a game can be built into an online tool without asking you to buy anything.

To start from zero

Classic fantasy with open rules

The rules of the best-known fantasy game in the world have a part published under a Creative Commons licence. That means the classes, species, spells and monsters in that part can be used freely, which is why you find them already set up in almost any tool.

Who it is for: people who want the classic (dungeon, dragon, levelling up) and do not mind dense rules. Warning: it is one of the games with the most rules out there. It is learned better by playing than by reading, and the first game drags if the GM tries to know everything beforehand.

Light-rules games

There is a whole family of games with one or two pages of rules, many of them free, that you learn in ten minutes. Lasers and Feelings, by John Harper, is the typical example: one sheet, one number and seventies-TV science fiction.

Who it is for: a first game, people who have never played, a free afternoon. Why it works: nobody gets stuck on the sheet and the time goes into playing.

It is what we recommend most for introducing someone.

If you already know what you like

Investigation and mystery

The GUMSHOE engine (detectives, occult, conspiracy) has its reference document published under a free licence. Its central idea is that the clue is always found: you do not roll to see whether you notice the bloodstain, you see it, and the game is about what you do with it.

That way it avoids the classic problem of mystery games: the investigation that stalls because nobody rolled the number.

Narrative, without maps or miniatures

Fate publishes its text under Creative Commons. You play by describing who your character is with sentences instead of numbers and using those sentences to change the scene.

Who it is for: drama, characters with a story, groups who find tactical combat boring. Warning: it is harder than it looks. The rules are simple, but it asks for a different way of playing and sometimes the group takes three sessions to get it.

Dark, deadly and short

The Mörk Borg family (and its spin-offs, like the pirate one) has licences that allow publishing third-party material. These are dirty-apocalypse games where characters do not last long, and that is the fun.

Who it is for: a one-off session, black humour, people already tired of friendly fantasy.

Retro-clones and old-school games

Several have open content; The Black Hack is one of the cleanest. Minimal rules, high mortality, exploration over scripted story.

Who it is for: pure dungeon crawling, and GMs who want to improvise without checking tables.

Superheroes

Bulletproof Blues is published under a dual open licence, including Creative Commons. Comic-book superheroes with point-based character creation.

Hispanic RPGs: games written in Spanish

There are games written directly in Spanish, many of them independent and many free or nearly so. You find them in Spanish-speaking roleplaying communities and on their authors' own pages, more than in international lists, which rarely include them.

They are worth looking for: they are made with the way people play here in mind, and they tend to be shorter and stranger than what arrives in translation.

What costs money (and what does not)

You do not need to pay for	Comment
The rules	With the above you have complete games for years.
Dice	Any online roller works, and physical ones are cheap.
A virtual tabletop	There are enough free options to play.
Adventures	There are plenty of free ones, and the short ones are usually better for starting.
Maps	Some are free to use, and half a campaign is played without a map.

What usually does cost: the full books of commercial games, good art, and the advanced features of tools.

Tip: play three sessions for free before buying anything. After that you will know what you are missing, which is almost never what you thought at the start.

How to choose, if you do not want to read it all

If you want...	Start with
The classic, with classes and levels	Open-rules fantasy
To introduce people who have never played	A light one-page game
Mystery and investigation	A game on the GUMSHOE engine
Drama and characters	Fate
A wild, short session	Mörk Borg or one of its spin-offs
Old-school dungeon crawling	A retro-clone with open content

If none fits, you can also make your own. Many tables play with house rules of a page and a half, and today you can build them without writing code.

Where to play them

Whatever the game, you need voice, dice in plain sight and the sheets at hand. We explain it in how to play roleplaying games online.

Several of the games on this page are set up and playable in Roliando for free, because their rules are open: the sheet does the maths, the dice roll in plain sight and the table is on the same screen. The attributions and licences of each one are published in Licenses, where you can see under what permission each thing is used.

If you still lack the hardest part, which is people, there is another guide: how to find a roleplaying group.