A downloadable game

Buy Now$8.00 USD or more

Lowlife is a toolkit for old-school RPGs about delving into tunnels, trenches, and mines.

Inside, you'll find:

  • Systems and consequences for caving, climbing, and tunneling. All the horrible ways you might explore—and die—down in the dark.
  • Procedures for generating cave networks or making existing dungeons denser and more interconnected. If you want your underground spaces to be even more dangerous and maze-like, these tools are for you.
  • Hazards, challenges, and dangers of the underground. From firedamp to the gutter lung, there are all manner of threats beneath the surface.
  • Flora, fauna, and fungi of the rugged hills and caves. 20-odd monsters, plants, and mushrooms that you can add to your game.
  • Items, both commonplace and rare, to use in the tunnels. Items like dynamite, air bladders, miner's nosebags, and singing holler-hammers.
  • Bits of worldbuilding and aesthetic scattered throughout. Enough to help you catch the vibes, but nothing overwhelming or lore-demanding. 

Speaking of vibes, here's a playlist I made to help you get in the mood:

Lowlife is broadly compatible with any old-school RPG system. If your game features d20s, the six common stats, and a lot of backpacking, it'll fit in with no issues. If your system is a little more fringe, it might take a bit of hacking to get it all to work smoothly, but Lowlife includes guidelines and suggestions for hacking, too.

If you need a ready adventure to use these rules with, there's a pamphlet dungeon available here: Beneath Harlowe House.

36 pages, 8.5" x 5.5", three colors. Plaintext files included with download. Audio files available upon request (since it's like 1gb and itch doesn't like huge file sizes).

Physical copies are available at Spear Witch.

StatusReleased
CategoryPhysical game
Rating
Rated 4.9 out of 5 stars
(10 total ratings)
AuthorSam Sorensen
GenreRole Playing
Tagsmodule, OSR, Supplement, Tabletop, tabletop-role-playing-game

Purchase

Buy Now$8.00 USD or more

In order to download this game you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $8 USD. You will get access to the following files:

lowlife_v1.0.pdf 38 MB
lowlife_plaintext_v1.0.docx 81 kB

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

This is a great supplement!  The author really makes cave exploration fun (and gnarly).  It's probably not something you'd want to run every session, but it contains the tools to quickly generate and run a cave/tunnel based dungeon.  And there's an option for adding tunnels between your conventional dungeon rooms too.  All around a great product.  I think it would pair nicely with Frontier Scum.

Any chance of a more printer-friendly pdf?

Not easily, unfortunately—the whole thing is set up across a bunch of interwoven .indd and .psd files, which makes extracting, say, just the art and text but not the grime or weathering all fairly difficult. 

But you can get print copies at Spear Witch :)

(+2)

I got this ages ago from EF and only just now remembered to leave a rating, it’s wonderful!

Is this a group or solo system?

Lowlife's a supplement for OSR games, so almost always for the standard one-GM-with-multiple-players group.