Free Game Friday: Ronin Story

"Ronin Story. A samurai blood opera."

This homemade RPG (impressively created for the 24 Hour RPG competition) lists this as its tagline. For many of us, that's more than enough to warrant a download. If that's not you, read on.

Ronin Story, of course, focuses on the ronin of medieval Japanese history, lordless samurai who drifted across Japan "like waves upon the sand." Character creation begins by choosing two, three or four wicked acts that your character has committed in the past, each netting him a point of Honour, signifying that the greater the character's prior sins the less willing they are to stray from their moral code. Honour is not just a single stat in this game—in a very flavourful fashion, your character's stats comprise of six different types of honour, namely Jin (compassion), Chugo (duty & loyalty), Makato (complete sincerity), Gi (honesty & justice), Rei (polite courtesy) and Yu (heroic courage).

Another important stat is Glory, a very important resource that represents fame, prestige, respect and notoriety—it gives you bonuses to your rolls of any kind. But the only way to gain Glory Coins is to have your character do something, announce to the other players that your action was a "hint" to one of your character's secrets, and then you go around the table and every other player guesses at what the secret is. Whoever gets it right gets an honour point, and the player whose secret it was gets Glory.

That's just the beginning of it. It's a substantial 25 pages of text (again, written in a day!), and goes pretty deep, even up to feat lists for ten different schools of fighting and strategy based on the five Japanese elements of Earth, Fire, Water, Air and Void. Well worth checking out—after all, Ronin Story is free.