Ebenenspiel

An undead cowboy walks into a cantina somewhere between here and Neptune. An efreet pours tea while you wait to entreat with their master, the Fire King. A heartbroken knight from Nowhere offers you a key to a door that shouldn’t exist.

Ebenenspiel ( ‘game of planes’ or ‘game of levels’) isn’t a bold reinvention—it’s a love letter to old school play and the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR) mindset. To games where rulings matter more than rules. Where imagination trumps crunch. And where The Multiverse is a haunted, glorious mess. It exists to inspire you, then get the hell out of your way.

In Ebenenspiel, you don’t play numbers or statblocks. You play people—flawed, strange, clever, and maybe even brave. No hit points. No initiative order.  No classes. No nonsense. Just a shared dream, and a few simple tools to help it unfold.

Inspired by FKR and powered by 24XX, Ebenenspiel gives you everything you need to get started in just 10 pages:

• Guidelines for conversation driven play. 

• A frictionless d10 dice pool system for resolving risky situations. Players only roll to avoid risk!

• Evocative character creation rules with no stats and no point-buy.

• Referee tools and guidance for high-trust, fiction-first, cinematic play. Includes:

  •  The Die of Fate

  • Clocks

  • Fast NPC creation

• Portal—an infinite, ever-shifting sprawl at the center of The Multiverse where hawkers preen, slip-dens sleep, ideas squirm, and lairs burrow deep. Includes:

  • Cosmology and planar travel

  • Swords and sorcery style true name magic 

  • Factions, guilds & gangs

  • Weird denizens of The Multiverse 

  • Portalese slang 

A minimalist, maximalist TTRPG framework. Perfect for one-shots, long campaigns, or anything in between. Play worlds, not rules, berk! 

Ebenenspiel v1.0 was created by H. P. Huggins and is licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0. It includes material adapted from 2400 by Jason Tocci, World of Dungeons by John Harper, and Galaxy Far Away by Jim Parkin, all licensed under CC BY 4.0. It also draws inspiration from Blades in the Dark by John Harper, Messerspiel by Oz Browning, the weird and wonderful setting of Planescape by David “Zeb” Cook, and the works of countless creators across the OSR and FKR communities. Ebenenspiel is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the above. The Front cover art was created by Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The TOC art is a photograph of Kowloon Walled City by Ian Lambot and is licensed under CC BY 4.0. The Demilich Productions logo was created by T. A. Huggins and used with permission. Fonts licensed under SIL Open Font License v1.1: https://openfontlicense.org/open-font-license-official-text/. Now go make your own hack!