Rulers Tabletop RPG Review: A Free Game Worth Your Evenings

I ran three evenings of Rulers this February for four mates who’d never played it, acting as the game’s Narrative Overlord (its term for the GM, and yes, the book knows exactly what that acronym spells), and by the end of the third evening one Realm had been quietly overthrown by its own nobility, nobody at the table upset about it because they only wanted to know what happened next, which felt like a solid return for a free rulebook I’d found through a CC licence rather than off a shop shelf.

How it’s meant to be played

Rulers is a 68-page PDF written and self-published by Eliot Miller in 2016, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, which means it costs nothing and you’re free to copy, adapt and redistribute it as long as you’re not selling it and you credit him. Each Player controls a Ruler and their Realm (a civilisation, in the Total War or Civilisation sense, not a character sheet), while one person sits out as the Narrative Overlord and referees everyone else.

Its default unit of play is the Report, a written summary of one Season’s Financial Actions and up to six Political Action Words, sent by a Player to their N.O. by email, letter or, the book insists with a straight face, carrier pigeon, and working through that mechanic for the first time is what made it clear the game isn’t actually designed to be played in a room at all. The N.O. replies, the Season advances, and the whole campaign runs by correspondence over however many weeks the group can sustain it.

We didn’t have weeks, so I compressed it: each of our three evenings covered several in-game Seasons back to back, with Reports written and read out on the spot rather than posted between sessions. It worked fine, but going in you should know that this bends the game’s actual shape rather than playing it as intended, and if your group can stomach a slower, play-by-post campaign, I suspect Rulers is even better suited to that than to what we did with it.

The Political Actions themselves run on a list of 35 Action Words (Accuse, Attack, Negotiate, Take, and so on), combinable and free to interpret however your Ruler’s personality and resources allow. It’s a neat solution to a problem every homebrew nation-building game has to solve eventually, namely stopping “I use my Political Action to have the enemy Ruler die in his sleep” from being a valid sentence, while still leaving the roleplay genuinely open-ended.

World and character generation

Before anyone rolls a Ruler, the book has you generate the actual planet on dice tables: eight rolls across a climate table and a location table produce your terrain, a further set of rolls place mountain ranges, then rivers, coasts and seas, and only after all that do you sit down and colour the map in. My group ended up with a badly-drained river delta civilisation squeezed between two mountain ranges purely because of how the dice landed, and every player treated that as a gift rather than an inconvenience.

Each Realm picks a form of Government from seven options (Monarch, Elected Monarch, Council, Ecclesiastical, Consortium, Magistrate or Warlord), then three Traditions out of twelve, each of which grants a mechanical bonus and usually a Guild, Order or Society to go with it, and by the time you’ve rolled through all of that, character creation turns out to be just as generative as the planet-building that came before it. One of my players took the Pious tradition purely to get a Cathedral, then spent the rest of the campaign resenting the Religious Order that came attached to it, which is exactly the kind of friction the system is trying to produce and was definately the funniest thing that happened across all three evenings.

This whole toolkit would be worth stealing for other systems even if you never touched the rest of Rulers.

Combat

Rather than one combat system, Rulers gives the N.O. three: Automatic, for fights with an obvious outcome and no dice at all; Quick Resolve, a single opposed dice-pool roll for skirmishes that matter but don’t need a blow-by-blow account; and Full Combat, a properly turn-based battle with positioning, initiative and a Wound Table running from Wounded through Routed to Defeated and, if you’re particularly unlucky, Crushed.

Our best evening hinged on exactly this escalation. One Realm had been running a Cruel tax rate to fund a standing army, which pushed its Turmoil high enough that a Winter roll tipped it into open rebellion, straight off the book’s own Turmoil table. The rebel Nobles besieged their own Ruler’s capital. We started that fight as a Quick Resolve roll because nobody expected it to be close, then switched it to Full Combat once the defending garrison’s dice kept landing well enough that the outcome stopped being obvious. Watching a system hand you the choice to slow down mid-fight, rather than forcing you to commit to one resolution method before you know if the story deserves it, is the single best piece of design in the book.

The rough edges

Rulers reads exactly like what it is: a labour of love out of a university roleplaying society that never got a professional proofread. The prose drops the odd word here and there (one worldbuilding example plainly means to say a five-player game “would have 3 NPC Rulers” and just doesn’t), and nothing about that is surprising for a free CC release, but it does mean you’ll occasionally have to guess the intended meaning rather than read it.

The one gap that actually cost us table time is that the Guilds, Orders & Societies section on Turmoil is, word for word, a copy of the Nobles section directly above it on the same page, table included, so the book never actually tells you what Turmoil a disgruntled Guild generates, only what a disgruntled Noble does, and we had to make a house ruling on the spot rather than look one up. I couldn’t find anywhere Eliot Miller has said whether he’s ever going to go back and fix that page, and given it’s sat like that since 2016 I’d guess not, though I genuinely don’t know.

The Quick Reference at the back is otherwise genuinely useful, reprinting the Advantage table, the Wound Table and Siege Defence Ratings on two pages so you’re not hunting through the whole book mid-fight. It just doesn’t reprint the Troop bonuses themselves, so you’re still flipping back to the Army Troop List a good ten pages earlier to find out what a Pikeman’s actual combat bonus is. A single combined combat sheet would fix both problems in one go.

The verdict

Three evenings of it were still properly good fun despite all that, held up by a correspondence structure, procedural worldbuilding and three-tier combat system that between them do more thoughtful design work than most homebrew civilisation games bother with, the rough editing reading as the cost of it being free rather than proof the design itself is half-baked. My group is already asking when we’re running a second campaign, ideally by actual letter this time.