Any recs for pick up and play/no prep ttrpgs?
THEME: Pick Up & Play!
Hello there, you’ll probably find a bunch of one-shots in this collection, as I find one-shots tend to gear a bit more towards low-prep play.
Lost Goths From Beyond, by goblin goulash.
You are not from around here. Maybe you’re dead (you sure liked playing the part anyway). Maybe you’re in Hell (your parents warned you). Maybe you found a Victorian city in your dreams. Maybe you come from the Realm of Fairies, or a timeline stuck in the 90s, or a planet far far away… Well you’re here now, and you gotta do what you gotta do to get back. And you intend to do it in style. High heel, black leather, smoky eye style. You’re a Goth from Beyond, and you’re here on a Mission!
Lost Goths from Beyond is a stylish, rules-light TTRPG for 1-5 Goths and 1 GM.
As a hack of Lasers & Feelings, Lost Goths from Beyond is meant to be quick in execution, with obstacles coming up as you roll - and for that reason I think it doesn’t really require much prep. I’d say that the most you’ll have to do is actually collaborative at the table - deciding the setting and limits of your characters, and determining what subject matter you do or do not want to explore in your game.
I have two things I like about this game - one is the layout, how clean and succinct it is, communicating the vibe while keeping the instructions short and to the point. The other is the thirteen special items you can choose from to give your Gogh character their own unique thing - whether that be nail polish that turns you invisible, a body piercing that emits light, or stylish sunglasses that can see in the infrared.
Christ Heist, by shawk games.
ALL ABOARD… It’s 1907 and you’ve been down on your luck. Jobs are drying up, wars are being waged, and the west is growing. As luck would have it, your reputation precedes you: as a storied felon, you and your crew have been forged through indominable industry expertise and pulled together for one last job: Rob the Church.
It was a dangerous journey to Kansas City – but you all know your roles, and you know what you need to do: trick the laity in St. Anthony’s Chapel Car out of their tithes, make off with the Solid Gold Jesus Crucifix, and exit the train in Denver before anyone notices.
Heist games are excellent for one-shot games, and this heist is built on the fabulous Honey Heist rules, which are designed for little to no prep. Because you’re robbing a train, the game comes with a timetable for each of the train’s stops, which can be placed in front of each player so they can come up with a plan on the fly. As per Honey Heist tradition, you also have a series of roll-tables for the GM to help design the Chapel Car of the train and the nature of Bishop Bartholomew, as well as the kinds of complications to make your heist interesting!
The Quick, The Quiet & The Dead, by Whimsynaut Games.
Play as a group of survivors, working together to survive the night from a random table of horrors. Will you be escaping an alien spider in a rusting theme park, an eldritch horror in an abandoned campsite or a murderous cyborg aboard a cargo ship in a storm?
Another Lasers & Feelings hack, this game also gives the GM some roll-tables to generate a situation on the fly. The basic setting is that you’re surviving some kind of horror scenario, but you can cater the scenario to fit the style of horror movie you’re interested in. If there’s a horror setting that you like, you can probably layer that over this game to give yourself a quick horror rush.
If you’re not a bit horror fan, I definitely recommend checking out the broader world of Lasers & Feelings!
The Head, by forkfrenzy.
Vassago's body lays before you. His head is in your backpack. The labyrinth goes on forever. It’s your home. It’s everyone’s home. Maybe you'll get out some day, but right now you have to deliver this head to the Duchess.
The Head is a 1-page, 1-session roleplaying game (RPG) by Levon Jihanian — set in a mysterious, labyrinthine world. The player characters have just cut off Vassago’s head and are tasked with delivering it to the Dutchess, who lives at the palace at the center of the labyrinth. The game builds on the mechanics of Fuck! It’s Dracula and The Agony of Elves.
I don’t own the rules document for The Head, but I did find a copy of the rules for Fuck! It’s Dracula, which is about 200 words long and fairly simple. The game appears to go through a various number of phases, with roll-tables used to both generate characters as well as events that will bring you closer and closer to the narrative climax.
It looks like much of the details behind the main premise are also meant to be explored during play, which I also take as a sign of low to no-prep. If you ‘re coming up with the lore as you play, you don’t need to prepare it beforehand!
Loom of Blood, by curubethion.
Spin your webs of fear through the night, from the corners where you lurk.
Loom of Blood is a game of unfolding horror: sketch out the strokes of unsuspecting lives, and then uproot them into murderous mayhem. Build your own horror movie franchise with your friends, and delve deep into a tangled tapestry of wickedness, bloodshed, and frail humanity.
Loom of Blood is collaborative, and for that reason, I think it’s a great option for a no-prep tabletop game. I find that GM-less games still typically require a person to exist in a facilitator role, so you might have to read through the pdf before you sit down to play, but each beat of the story is introduced in the process of play - try to come up with too much beforehand, and you’ll probably feel like you’re trying to turn the story in a direction it wasn’t naturally set up to go.
On your turn, you’ll introduce either a Moment, a Fool, or a Mirage to the story. Moments are descriptive phrases that introduce a new horror to the scene, like the rustling of trees, or a scream of something “neither animal nor human.” A Fool is a character doomed to stumble into the danger, their death perhaps not imminent, but likely to happen before the story is over. A Mirage is a place that feels safe, a location that fills out the map of your story.
The elements of this story feel somewhat similar to I’m sorry did you stay street magic, which is also beautifully collaborative, as well as a game I’d consider no or low-prep. If you want a game of collaboration that leads you through each step, you might be interested in Loom of Blood.
Let’s Kill the King, by Obli-Awa.
The revolution has begun. The people cry out for justice and, as night falls on the capital city, they have swarmed its streets in righteous fury, pitchforks aloft and torches blazing. The guard have locked things down as best they can, but you, you lucky few, have made it over the wall; managed to slip into the castle thus far unnoticed. Tonight, the old order falls. You will be the regicides who bring it crashing down.
A TTRPG designed to indulge in the fantasy of bringing corrupt leaders to the justice they so richly deserve by our own damned hands, LET'S KILL THE KING offers 2-4 players and 1 game master a raucous couple hours of manic, king-hunting glory. Absolutely no preparation of any kind is needed from either GMs or PCs: encounters are generated via table and the basics of who a character is can be rolled on the spot.
Games like this one, which have a very strong premise and a very clear goal, are often really good options for folks who want little to no prep. You are sitting down knowing what all of you want - to kill the King - and you also have a few other facts that are already determined for you, such as the fact that you’re hunting through the Castle, so you have a good idea of the limits of what you might or might not find. I’m also a big big fan of the fact that you have two clocks that you can use to track your progress - one for the Hunt of the king, and one for the King’s escape!
Black Bars, by HMLW.
Black Bars is a roleplaying game for three people about slipping secrets past censors that want to prevent the TRUTH from getting out. One of you will play the Whistleblower, the one that creates the Secret and the Messages. Another will be the Censor, redacting the Messages whilst trying to discover the Secret yourself. The last of you is the Decoder, receiving a heavily obfuscated Message and tasked with finding out the Secret.
The prerequisites for Black Bars are pretty specific (3 players only), but I really like the goals for your characters here. A game about trying to code, decode and redact messages, you can invent all of your own reasons for why these messages are being sent and obfuscated, but you can also play competitively, which might allow for a nice transition from boardgames into roleplaying games, if that’s a background that your players share.
Goblin Errands, by Sharkbomb Studios.
Goblin Errands is a no-prep RPG for 2 to 4 goblins and one Tall Person. Together you'll go on comical (mis)adventures trying to complete seemingly mundane tasks as you struggle with a world not designed for you.
You've just joined a new family of goblins and you are determined to prove yourself useful. Clearly, the best way to do so is by running errands for the community.
Unfortunately as a goblin you live in a world made for folk much bigger and stronger than you. And on top of that you have only a single brain cell to work with - and one that you have to share with your fellow goblins. Even otherwise ordinary everyday tasks turn into hilarious challenges.
A lighthearted game with cute misadventures, Goblin Errands describes itself as a game about “solidarity among the unrecognized” - folks who don’t fit in to the infrastructure of the world as it is. It’s a game about underdogs, but the stakes feel rather low, so this might be a great palette cleanser, or a nice way to start roleplaying with a group of people you don’t know as well.
While the game styles itself as a no-prep one shot, you’ll probably have to do a bit of reading beforehand, just to make sure you know how the rules work. Character creation looks like it needs to happen at the beginning of the game, since you generate something called the kenn together. The fact that the goblins are sorted into playbooks signals easy of entry to me, since playbooks often provide all of the information you need to know about your character in one place.
When it comes to running the game, the GM will roll to generate an errand, but I think the obstacles and challenges that arise will likely become apparent thanks to the collaborative worldbuilding that happens before you create the characters.
Also For Your Consideration...
Low Improv Games
Zero-Prep Characters / One Shots
Holdfast Station, by Lampblack & Brimstone.
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