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The Frontiers Engine

The Frontiers Engine is a passion project, made mostly by one person over two-odd years of work, iteration, feedback, and testing. It is meant to be a template you build your own tabletop systems, games, and other projects on top of.

It is free, modular, and open to being pulled apart by anyone who wants to. You get a starting set of rules in 3 unique variations, along with a good deal of writing about why those rules are shaped the way they are, useful whether or not you end up using Frontiers as your baseplate.

Frontiers 1.0 released on 28 August 2026 under the Open RPG Creative (ORC) License.

If you are thinking about building something commercial on it, the Trademark & Usage Policy carries the commitment that will matter to you: within a version line, no mechanical term gets renamed and no core formula changes. The ORC License already guarantees the material can never be withdrawn from you, but it has nothing to say about vocabulary, which is why that second commitment is written down separately.

Its online presence will be funded and upkept by Jayke Paver (they/them), its primary writer and initial designer for the foreseeable future. It will never be sold nor transferred into anyone else's ownership, so that it stays free for the online tabletop community.

Getting Started

If this is your first time here and you just want to read the rules, pick one of the three base rulesets:

• The d18 Ruleset — 1d12 + 1d6 summed, with the d6 read a second time as the Gradient. It curves toward the middle, and it is the form the rest of the engine is tuned around.
• The d20 Ruleset — one flat d20 with an independent d10 Gradient. The swing is much wider, and it runs on the die most tables already have in a drawer somewhere.
• The d100 Ruleset — percentile, roll-under, with the units die read as the Gradient. Granular enough to be precise about how competent somebody actually is.

If you came for the teaching material instead, start at Designing with Frontiers.

Navigation

• Releases — the current 1.0 documentation, plus every archived version ever.
• Version Index — every official document, organized by engine version.
• Changelog — a single running account of what changed between versions.
• License — the ORC terms it ships under, plus the trademark policy.
• Press Kit — logos, art, and a short description for anyone covering it.
• Showcase — games and supplements built with the engine.