Free to Download: Wicked Ones lets you play as the dungeon baddies

Following on from a successful Kickstarter in 2019, which I backed, Wicked Ones now has a free download which you can get from DriveThruRPG.

Wicked Ones is a great game in the right hands as you play as one of the fantasy monsters trying to build and protect a dungeon. It’s refreshingly different but does require maturity from players.

The Forged in the Dark RPG is by Bandit Camp, designed by Ben Nielson and illustrated so remarkably by Victor Costa.

The free download is the full edition and so includes the Forged in the Dark rules you need, safety tools and an easy start. There are rules for building a dungeon, for the four cycles of play, game mechanics that remind you that you’re a monster, spells, rituals and the weird science of monsters.

The existence of this free edition means my hardback has been promoted to “deluxe edition”, and I’ve more sandbox settings than the new baseline edition of the game, four primal monsters and the dungeon generator.

The free to download Wicked Ones comes in at 325 pages and, therefore, incredible value. No wonder the decision to give the game away for free has been both so startling but lauded.

Something Wicked community content

Bandit Camp has also released guidelines to direct third party creators who might want to contribute to the game. It’s not a license, as such, more like an agreement.

The full agreement isn’t very long, but you can find it on Google Docs. Ben starts off by noting;

While there’s no real legal authority to prevent anyone from making community content that’s compatible with Wicked Ones, I’d really like it if people could follow some pretty simple rules when setting up their products. In exchange, you can put “Something Wicked” in the title or description of your product to make it easier to search for supplements. This doesn’t make anything official – it’s just a way for people to more easily find it