8 TTRPGs Giving Back with Every Purchase
In the spirit of Giving Tuesday, let's embark on a quest for both adventure and altruism. This year, consider elevating your game-play by purchasing tabletop RPGs that not only promise thrilling escapades but also commit to donating their proceeds to meaningful causes. Below are eight TTRPGs that stand as beacons of generosity. Whether you seek epic tales in high fantasy realms or crave the suspense of futuristic dystopias, this curated list ensures there's a game to captivate the heart of every adventurer while making a difference.
Game: Critical Core
Charitable Cause: Critical Core is designed and sold by Game to Grow, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to the use of games of all kinds for therapeutic, educational, and community growth.
Harness the power of therapeutic gaming with Critical Core!
Critical Core is a fun, easy-to-understand tabletop RPG that helps new and experienced game masters run epic games. Players build social confidence and connect with family, friends, and the world around them.
Critical Core includes two thoughtfully designed reference books, three game modules specially designed to make any game master look like an experienced veteran, and a plethora of additional tools which make the game accessible to new and experienced players alike. It is enhanced with Game to Grow’s therapeutic foundation, backed by years of therapeutically applied role-playing game experience and specifically designed to build social confidence and collaboration between players.
With Critical Core, you can bring the benefits of intentional gaming into your own home!
Game: Songs for the Dusk
Charitable Cause: Proceeds from sales of Songs for the Dusk will be going to the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund indefinitely.
Description:
Once, we lived at the peak of an era of unbridled human Radiance. Then, everything came crashing down. The cataclysm tore down our cities, broke our machines, and rearranged the very continents beneath our feet. The societies of old Earth are gone. This is an unfamiliar world, littered with the wreckage of what came before and shaped by a strange new physics that feels almost like magic.
The land is littered with ancient machines running haywire, new and extraordinary forms of life, and autocrats big and small vying for power. But for once we have a chance here: a chance, for once, to build something good, something better than all the human flaws and ancient tyrannies of the world we lost. And this is how we do it.
In this Forged in the Dark tabletop RPG, you'll assemble a crew of brave and compassionate adventurers who explore this strange new world, find out how to help people among the teeming threats that dot its landscape, and figure out what it looks like to build a better future.
Game: RMS Titanic: The Millionaire’s Special
Charitable Cause: All proceeds from the sale of this adventure will go to the Heroes in the Dark charity. Heroes in the Dark is a nonprofit organization with a clear and simple purpose: to create audio comics to be enjoyed by the blind and sight-impaired. Working with local businesses, comics industry professionals, and recording industry professionals, HITD are dedicated to creating a chronological history of comics, in audible form.
Description:
First Class on the Titanic is exciting in itself but when you are invited to a private viewing of one of the world’s great curiosities, you jump at the chance. The mummy of Hettunaway, Priestess of Amun-Ra, the Unlucky Mummy is being shipped to New York and donated to the Metropolitan Museum of Art by its owner, Jefferson Shaw. Legend has it that those who look upon her face are doomed. Jefferson Shaw’s intentions are not as philanthropic as they seem. Strange rituals, a device to contact spirits and the awakening of something he cannot control.
The Titanic is on a collision course with an iceberg… but will it be the icy water that kills you, or the ancient force, finally unleashed?
The Millionaire’s Special is a short adventure for Trail of Cthulhu by Adam Gauntlett (Not So Quiet, Hell Fire, Flying Coffins). This is to commemorate the centenary year of the Titanic’s tragic sinking.
Game: Ravensberg
Charitable Cause: By supporting this product, you are aiding the students and faculty of the English Department of Winthrop University, as all collected monies from this Pathfinder version will be donated to the department funds for scholarships and academic travel.
Description:
Ravensberg is a horror-themed town setting suitable for 5th-level Pathfinder characters and above. It is generic enough to be placed in any ongoing campaign. The small town lies nestled near a forest of unmistakable evil, wherein lies an ancient structure known as the Black Keep. The fortress is now filled with necromancers and undead, and its darkness taints the surrounding area. Other horrors plague the townsfolk, as well: lycanthropes, a dullahan, a vampire, and a coven of witches.
The villains abound.
But where are the heroes? That’s where your players come in.
Game: Renegades of Mercury: Love's Messengers
Charitable Cause: All author proceeds for this book will be donated to The Trevor Project. The Trevor Project is an American non-profit organization founded in 1998 focused on suicide prevention efforts among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning youth.
Description:
Renegades of Mercury presents information on a small group of Renegades who deliver the lost love letters of soldiers. Information on this group of Renegades includes details on a Forged Arcanoi and the figure that built the group in the wake of The Great War.
Though written for The Great War setting, the Renegades of Mercury may be used in any Wraith setting or edition.
Game: Escape from Yule Mountain
Charitable Cause: Proceeds from this sale are donated to Feline Lifeline.
Description:
From the mind of David Baity (author of Carnival of the Damned and the forthcoming Dark Trails) comes this holiday funnel adventure to bedevil and delight your players.
Across the land, scores of children are swept away during the week before the Winter Solstice, never to be heard from again. Legend has it that an ancient demon is the twisted force behind these mysterious abductions. A creature still worshipped in the darkest corners of the world, known to some as...Krampus.
The week before the solstice has come to be known as Krampuslauf. A time of judgement where, legend tells, winter's demon is allowed the freedom to roam alongside its minions. Villagers who have sinned against their neighbors leave offerings of peppermint schnapps on the doorstep, in hopes of detering the malevolent spirits from bringing harm.
While good children are rewarded by Sinterklass with gifts of candies and toys, the most unruly children are left naught but a velveteen sack of coal, a bundle of gold tinted ruten, and a warning. Those children who fail to take heed? Come the next year they vanish, never to be heard from again....until now.
Game: The Merciful Cousins Cavalier Order
Charitable Cause: 100% of the proceeds of this PDF to the Red Cross to help the victims of disasters
Description: The Order of Merciful Cousins, who also go by the name the Masons of Recovery, are an order available for cavaliers (a class presented in the Pathfinder® Roleplaying Game: Advanced Player’s Guide™). Dedicated to assisting those who have suffered tragedy or disaster, the merciful cousins wander the world trying to help those communities in greatest need. In addition to defending those too weak or shocked to defend themselves, the merciful cousins spend time healing the injured, building shattered homes, and helping communities plan to better weather future hardships.
The merciful cousins see themselves as kin to all the distressed and dispossessed, and believe communities that have suffered significant disasters must be protected and helped to rebuild. Of course, the cavaliers also believe in preventing such disasters before they strike and are happy to hunt down bands of pirates or brigands, secure destructive artifacts before they fall into the wrong hands, and help protect caravans and keeps where danger looms, but has not yet befallen. But if a community or settlement has already been ravaged, that is the where cavalier’s first duty lies.
The symbol of the order is two four-pointed stars overlapping one another. These represent the four pillars of their duty – defense, preparation, recovery, and rebuilding – both in the present (the front star) and in the past (the star in the background). Whenever an order of the merciful cousins cavalier helps a community recover from disaster, she adds another smaller star to her personal heraldry, much as soldiers mark their successes in major battles. To the cavalier, those she has helped are more important than those she has defeated.
Game: EPOCH: Polaris Six
Charitable Cause: All proceeds will be donated to children in need through the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF).
Description: Polaris Six is an EPOCH Christmas Special; a one-shot survival horror scenario.
The Polaris Project is looking for exceptional individuals ready for their next great challenge. Polaris Six is a floating research station built on an Arctic ice floe. Equipped with cutting edge technology this is a unique opportunity to be part of a small team researching oceanology, meteorology, geophysics and marine biology. Polaris Six is also studying how people interact and work together in harsh environments so every member of staff, regardless of their role, will be contributing to a range of world-leading research. You will be a highly motivated, resourceful, team-player with proven technical or scientific expertise. Successful applicants will begin residence on Polaris Six in November.
EPOCH is a game of character-driven survival horror. The goal is to deliver a tense and scary experience in a single game session. EPOCH players are active participants in the creation of the game atmosphere and have complete control over the creation and ultimate fate of their characters.
