What is Frontiers¶
The Frontiers Engine is a free, open-licensed tabletop toolkit for building your own games. It is written, designed and developed almost entirely by one person — me, Jayke Paver — over the course of around 2 years of development and playtesting.
Primarily, it is not a game you play as is. It's the SRD: the resolution math, the character chassis, the system structure that I, you, and anyone else is free to use for their own games. With that, it includes playable versions, educational design documents (to help teach system creation), and a digital toolkit to help people make their own games.
While it started as more of a passion project for my own home table's games; knowing there are most likely others in my position, I decided to publish it online, for 100% free use for TTRPGs, Games, etc.
Most importantly though, when deciding to release this online for people to use as they deemed fit, I wanted to make sure that it wasn't strung up in red tape and didn't limit the creativity of its utilizers.
So I made the choice to ship it under Paizo's Open RPG Creative License, which cannot be withdrawn from anyone who already has it. And made promises in my own included Usage Policy to make sure it would never be something that someone can't use in any form or capacity.
In my time in this space, so many people have been great to me, so in turn, this is somewhat my best offer back; something free for the community, forever.
How it got here¶
It started as one game¶
When Frontiers started development in late 2023, the goal of it was to make a Tabletop Game for my own table, after the bad faith decisions made by a few of the biggest names in the space, I wanted to step away from my Homebrew past and make something new.
The problem became, I was so focused on making a game that was familiar to me that I wasn't making a game. I didn't understand the design philosophy of TTRPGs or the choices I needed to make. So I eventually scrapped the whole idea and changed focus to making an engine, an "SRD" for those familiar with the word.
Two years later¶
What followed was a lot of research, drafting, playtesting and rewriting (more on that here).
As I developed that engine, I started to realize that my friends, and others in the TTRPG space, might be in the same position I was in. Wanting to make things with a lack of knowledge, and without the two years I had to go away and research and learn. So I made the decision to release Frontiers in late 2025, but needed to do a lot more work to make it a public-facing system.
Beta 2026-1 went up on 13 February, with every design document in its Expanded form. Beta 2026-2 followed on 24 April and did the restructure: core documents split away from design documents, the first Quickstarters arrived, and the subsystem set settled into the seven that 1.0 would ship with.
About half a year of beta in total. Frontiers 1.0 released on 28 August 2026 under the ORC License, alongside this site.
It also carried the largest terminology pass the project has had: Finesse became Deft, Awareness and Intuition were retired as Derivatives, and most of the mechanical icons were redrawn. If you have something written against a beta, the term-by-term diff is in Converting from Beta 2026-2.
Plenty has moved since, both in the documents and in the site itself — the page you are reading does not look much like the one that launched. The Changelog and the Version Index have the document side of that, and the Site updates button on the home page has the rest.
Who made it¶
I am a creative chameleon. I do all sorts of different writing projects, and I studied film and experimental writing. I run games online, and professionally I am a writer and content organiser.
There is a lot I do, Frontiers-related and not, tabletop-related and not. I write poetry. I design tabletop games, Frontiers being the obvious one. I host my own podcast, Den of the Bear. I have written two homebrew books over on DriveThruRPG, and I turn up on actual plays and other people's shows often enough that there is a list of them.
While doing all of that I also formed my own small company, Bearwood Media, which publishes my books and does a good deal besides — we have Kickstarted projects, we fund projects, and we do related work for various groups and people.
You can find everything at jaykepaver.me or linktr.ee/thejayke, reach me by email at contact@jaykepaver.me, or book a game at StartPlaying. The Discord is the fastest way to get hold of me about the engine itself.
Frontiers today is not solely "mine". Dozens of people read, played, questioned, broke, and argued with this engine on its way to 1.0, and the ones who could be named are named in Acknowledgements.