Studio Passerine’s Icosa RPG is free. I’ve called it a free to download RPG as you don’t need to pay, but you don’t need to download anything either.
The whole RPG exists as a website of a few pages.
Icosa is about the contradiction between fantasy and sci-fi and is a game that wants to capture the fun strangeness of a setting that looks to be medieval but is really far-future post-(post)-apocalypse.
The Icosa RPG also draws inspiration from the works of Jean Giraud (Moebius), Hayao Miyazaki, Frank Frazetta, John Harris, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, and Larry McMurtry, among others, as well as classical and early modern history, theology, philosophy, and the synthwave genre of music.
The core mechanic has players picking the relevant skill or stat and rolling the associated dice. They have to hit the target number, which is usually 4. Dice explode, so maximum results are rolled again and added to. Critical successes happen if that total gets to 12.
You can play Icosa now, but the game is a living thing and will expand. There will be a setting book with 20 unique regions alongside blank space for your own world-building in time. The art already teased for the project looks great.
The project is being supported by a Patreon with $1, $3 and $5 tiers. Supporting at even $1 gets you in the acknowledgements of the game.
Are you taking a short break from classic, Tolkien-esque fantasy and hard, desaturated sci-fi? Does the thought of knights, wizards, robots, aliens, and radioactive mutants living in the same world make you feel all glowy inside? Did you watch the animated Heavy Metal movie at much too early an age?
If this sounds like you, then you sound like us, and you’ve come to the right place. In the world of Icosa, irradiated meta-wizards stroll forgotten halls of subterranean chrome. Knights hunt dragons across toxic skies in ancient biplanes retrofitted with alien technology. Suits of armor filled with colonies of self-aware fungi seek out the tombs of tyrannical gods. Put simply: post-post-apocalyptic science-fantasy.
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