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RPG Design Resources

By Mirko (@digitalhobbit), for RPG Lab

Last updated: October 4, 2026. This is a living document. If something is missing, wrong, or dead, leave a comment and I'll fix it.

Tabletop RPG design has many different aspects: mechanics, writing, layout, art, playtesting, licensing, selling, and marketing. There's a lot of good material on these topics out there, but it's scattered across blogs, subreddits, newsletters, forum threads, and Discord servers. This page is an attempt at collecting the most helpful resources in one place.

The list below leans toward resources that are free or cheap. It's limited to design specifically; general RPG resources (reviews, GM advice, VTTs, etc.) are left out on purpose.

Disclaimer: Some links carry affiliate ids that help support RPG Lab at no cost to the reader.

Communities

  • r/RPGdesign: The largest active community for RPG design, and pretty high volume. Also has a really nice wiki resource list.
  • r/RPGcreation: Smaller and a bit quieter. Also has a dedicated Discord server listed in the sidebar (also not very active).
  • r/ttrpgdesign: Even smaller subreddit, but still worth keeping an eye on.
  • r/tabletopgamedesign: Board games mostly, but some aspects overlap with RPGs, such as playtesting and prototyping.
  • Rules as Written Discord: A very active Discord server dedicated to TTRPG design.
  • RPGnet forums: Has dedicated subforums for game design and publishing. Less active than Reddit, has a long history.
  • Bluesky, #ttrpgdesign: Much of the indie RPG design conversation moved here. Follow designers you like and use custom feeds.
  • The Forge archives (read-only, 2001 to 2012): The source of a lot of the vocabulary still in use (GNS, "fruitful void", "system matters"), and many popular indie games and designers emerged from this community. Read for history and ideas, not current advice.

Reading: newsletters and blogs

  • The Indie RPG Newsletter by Thomas Manuel: Weekly. Links, new releases, and an essay up top.
  • Explorers Design by Clayton Notestine: Graphic design and layout for RPGs: page size, lists, hyperlinks in PDFs, covers. The monthly newsletter (The Explorateur) runs small design jams.
  • Skeleton Code Machine (Exeunt Press): Weekly breakdowns of tabletop mechanisms, board games included. Home of the free Make Your Own One-Page RPG series.
  • RPG Design Theories by Monte Cook: A working designer thinking out loud about dice, metacurrency, genre, and adventure structure.
  • Failure Tolerated by Sean McCoy (Mothership): Design notes, mostly horror and adventure design.
  • Win Conditions also by Sean McCoy: The business side: crowdfunding, marketing, distribution, and what actually happens after a campaign funds. (Seems to be on hiatus?)
  • Bastionland by Chris McDowall (Into the Odd, Mythic Bastionland): Rules-light design philosophy, with a podcast to match.
  • lumpley games by Vincent Baker (Apocalypse World): Sporadic now, but the archive is foundational for PbtA and story-game design.
  • The Alexandrian by Justin Alexander: Written for GMs, but the essays on adventure structure (node-based design, the three clue rule) are standard reading for anyone designing adventures.
  • Crowdfunding Watch by Sean P. Kelley: Weekly newsletter that lists RPG related crowdfunding campaigns that are about to close.

Reading: books

Where a book has a publisher page and an Amazon listing, both are linked.

On designing RPGs

  • Designing TTRPGs For Dummies, Martin Buinicki (2025) (Wiley, Amazon): The current introductory book. Broad rather than deep, and useful because there was no single "start here" book before it.
  • Kobold Guide to Game Design, 2nd edition, ed. Wolfgang Baur (Amazon): Essays from working RPG designers on rules, adventures, and getting published.
  • The RPG Design Zine (and Zine Two), Nathan D. Paoletta (pay what you want on itch.io; Zine One, Zine Two): 24 pages of design thinking, illustrated with real games.
  • Make Your Own One-Page RPG, Exeunt Press (Exeunt Press): The Skeleton Code Machine series as a book. Free to read online, a few dollars as a PDF.
  • Design Patterns of Successful Role-Playing Games, Whitson John Kirk III (Internet Archive, free): A 2005 catalog of RPG mechanics in the "design patterns" sense. Dated in its examples, still the only book of its kind.

General game design that applies directly

  • Building Blocks of Tabletop Game Design, Engelstein and Shalev (Amazon): An encyclopedia of mechanisms. Board-game focused, but also applies to RPGs.
  • Uncertainty in Games, Greg Costikyan (Amazon): Short and sharp on why randomness and hidden information matter.
  • The Art of Game Design: A Book of Lenses, 3rd edition, Jesse Schell (Amazon): General game design, "lens" based.
  • Playtesting Best Practices, Chris Backe (2025) (Routledge, Amazon): The whole playtesting loop, in person and online.

History and theory

  • Monsters, Aliens, and Holes in the Ground, Stu Horvath (MIT Press, Amazon): A survey of RPGs by decade. Good for seeing what has already been tried.
  • Playing at the World, 2nd edition, Jon Peterson (MIT Press, Amazon vol. 1, Amazon vol. 2): Where the hobby came from, in two volumes.
  • The Elusive Shift, Jon Peterson (MIT Press, Amazon): How the 1970s community worked out what a "role-playing game" even was. An early history of RPG theory.
  • Designers & Dragons, Shannon Appelcline (Evil Hat on DriveThruRPG, Amazon): Four volumes of industry history (one per decade), company by company.
  • Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–2012, William J. White (Springer, Amazon): Academic, but the clearest account of what The Forge was and what it argued about.

Listening

  • Dice Exploder: One mechanic per episode, taken apart with a rotating co-host. Transcripts on the site. Also hosts a Discord server; the link is on the website.
  • RPG Design Panelcast (Jason Pitre): Recorded panels and seminars from Metatopia and other conventions, going back over a decade.
  • Bastionland Podcast (Chris McDowall): Short episodes on rules-light design.
  • Design Games (Nathan Paoletta and Will Hindmarch): Ended in 2016 after 50 episodes, but the back catalog holds up.
  • Rascal: Two shows: the Radio Hour (industry news) and the Reading Club (close reads of rulebooks).

Reference systems and licenses

You do not need to build on someone else's system, but reading a few well-made SRDs is one of the fastest ways to learn how a rules text is organized. These are the ones designers most often study or build on.

Finding more

Licenses

  • Creative Commons: CC BY and CC BY-SA are now the default for indie SRDs. Know the difference before you pick one.
  • ORC License: The irrevocable open license Paizo and others created after the 2023 OGL episode.

Art and fonts

Openly licensed art

Note: licenses vary by collection or item, so check attribution and commercial-use terms.

Icons

Fonts

Curated lists and guides

Tools

Dice math

  • AnyDice: Probability distributions for any dice expression.

Writing and layout

  • Affinity: Professional page layout, and now free (a Canva account is required).
  • Scribus: Open source layout. Less polished, no strings.
  • Adobe InDesign: The industry standard, but expensive and subscription priced.
  • Homebrewery and GM Binder: Markdown in the browser, D&D-style output. Fine for playtest documents and 5e-compatible material.
  • Pandoc: Markdown to PDF and everything else. The Annotated Archive (below) links Luke Gearing's guide to building RPG documents this way.
  • Typst: Real typesetting without LaTeX, if you want a text-first pipeline that still looks designed.

Maps and generators

Safety tools

  • TTRPG Safety Toolkit (Kienna Shaw and Lauren Bryant-Monk): The standard reference for lines and veils, the X-card, and similar tools. Free.

Playtesting

  • RPG Lab (right here! 😀): Post an open playtest call and let players find you.
  • Metatopia (Double Exposure, November, Morristown NJ): A convention built entirely around designers testing with each other, with seminars on running and being a playtester. Double Exposure also runs the First Exposure Playtest Hall at Gen Con.
  • Break My Game: A website and Discord community around game design, with an emphasis on playtesting. The focus seems to be on board games, but much of it should carry over to RPGs as well.
  • Playtesting Best Practices (Chris Backe, above): The method. What to ask, what to watch, how to separate signal from noise.

Publishing and selling

Where to sell

  • itch.io: Low friction, pay-what-you-want, jams, community. Where most indie designers start.
  • DriveThruRPG: The largest RPG-specific storefront, with print on demand. Wider reach, more rules, lower cut on non-exclusive titles.
  • RPG Trader: A more recent RPG storefront that aims to provide a modern and streamlined experience with fair terms for creators. Both print on demand and PDF.
  • Exalted Funeral and Indie Press Revolution: Print distribution for small publishers.

Crowdfunding

  • Kickstarter, BackerKit, Crowdfundr: Aside from general crowdfunding campaigns, each of these platforms runs a small-project event every February under the Zine Month umbrella (Zine Quest, Zinetopia, Tabletop Nonstop).

Print

Guides and lists

Industry news

  • Rascal: Worker-owned, reader-funded tabletop journalism. The only outlet doing real reporting on the industry.
  • ICv2: Trade news, retail and distribution side.

Jams and awards

Jams (deadlines are the most reliable way to finish a game)

  • One-Page RPG Jam: Annual, five weeks in July and August, on itch.io. Its resources thread is a good list on its own.
  • PocketQuest: DriveThruRPG's annual jam, spring, 25 pages or fewer, themed. Comes with a starter kit.
  • Eternal TTRPG Jam (Rowan Sender): Monthly, low pressure, new theme each time.

Awards

Suggest an addition or correction

Leave a comment or reach out via email. Just make sure it's about designing RPGs specifically.

Changelog

  • September 29, 2026: first published.
  • October 1, 2026: Added Crowdfunding Watch newsletter.
  • October 3, 2026: Added Break My Game to playtesting resources.
  • October 4, 2026: Broke "Art and fonts" out into its own section and added several public domain art resources.
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  1. Victor(@vjwyatt)

    Okay... This is a huge list of resources.

    Thanks for collecting them into one location.

    I'll post any new ones as I spot them.

    1. Mirko(@digitalhobbit)

      Thanks, Victor! I'm sure there's still a ton missing, so any additions are welcome.