Greater Spirit Games

Greater Spirit Games is a one-man game-making (quote studio endquote) machine run by Dennis N. Santana AKA Wyatt Salazar. All of Greater Spirit Games’ releases are below. For license information, check the Legal page – all GSG releases use the same license. All of Greater Spirit Games’ releases are currently available only in a very basic PDF.

If you enjoy the games, consider offering a small donation. Greater Spirit Games’ work is always released in Creative Commons and runs on the generosity of the players and game masters for whom the games are made. Donations are primarily used to keep the domain name for this site, but could be used to improve it in other ways as well. Donations of any amount are welcome. If you pitch in five dollars four times a year, you’ve paid for the domain name for a year! Pretty much anything after that can go into future plans. I hope to someday have budget for a few illustrations and to pay someone for a good book layout.

You can contact Dennis N. Santana at: wyattsalazar[at]gmail[dot]com.

Expedition

Expedition is a fantasy roleplaying game derived from the previous Copper Coins! and High Score! projects. It drops the exclamation marks and gains a new system for combat and task resolutions, faster character creation, and easier to pick up gameplay. The character generation revolves around player-created Potentials that define your character’s problem-solving skills, and combat is easy to learn but tactically deep with broad Maneuvers that can be used to play out a variety of narratively-satisfying and strategically empowering effects that any character can use. Advancement isn’t about getting more bonuses, but instead earning points that can be spent to add beneficial elements to the story. The uses 2d10 and rolls high (but more d10s would likely be helpful). The game empowers everyone to contribute to the story.

You can get it here: Mediafire.

You can also check out the Errata page periodically for corrections.

The file is 90 pages of very basic PDF, and about a megabyte to download. It has PDF bookmarks.

Insectum

In the summer of 2008, I got bored one day and decided to take the 24 hour RPG challenge. The name says it all – I had 24 hours to write an RPG game from the ground up. Pressed for ideas, I decided to write a take on old school-ish D&D style systems, but with the twist that everyone in the game is a bug-person. Not an actual insect, but a person with insect parts – think of it like anime catgirls with antennae and wings and extra limbs. It’s one of the first homebrew projects I ever undertook, and it shows! It is little more than trying to write a minimalist D&D with bugs under a 24 hour time constraint and without being able to look anything up to do so. But maybe you can find some enjoyment from it.

Insectum is pretty much completed. In the future, I may overhaul it.

Download: 1000 Monkeys, 1000 Typewriters.

Not An Acronym (NAA) D6

A 3d6 skill-based point buy game inspired partly by GURPS. No further development is planned on this game – I don’t really support it anymore. It may perhaps in the future become a d100 game and be supported again. It might be interesting, however, to see the many ways in which it changed throughout its development. You can find the myriad of NAA D6 versions on my mediafire account’s NAA D6 folder. You might even find a version there which has a game you might like to use! I will still answer email inquiries about NAA D6, but they are not a very high priority compared to other things, so be patient!

High Score

High Score is an original, rules-light universal RPG system designed around the eponymous concept of a High Score – a number of points that must be attained by the players to succeed, or by the environment and enemies so the players are defeated. Anything the players do that advances play will earn them points toward the completion of Events. Players customize their characters with various narratively-linked skills, assets and perks that offer them great freedom and choices in designing their characters while at the same time keeping character creation quick and simple. In play, players and GM can manipulate the amount of score, who can score, and how they can score in various ways, offering enough tactical depth to make one event quite different from the next. It’s a very weird and experimental game that taught me a few lessons.

High Score has been discontinued, but its Spirit lives on in the engine powering Expedition RPG.

Download: Here (thanks to Dave Chalker of Critical Hits for the hosting.)

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