I ran three evenings of Rulers this February for four mates who’d never played it, acting as the game’s Narrative Overlord (its term for the GM, and yes, the book knows exactly what that acronym spells), and by the end of the third evening one Realm had been quietly overthrown by its own nobility and nobody at the table was even upset about it, they just wanted to know what happened next. That’s a decent outcome for a free rulebook I found through a CC licence rather than a shop shelf.

It’s built to be played by letter, not across a table

Rulers is a 68-page PDF written and self-published by Eliot Miller in 2016, released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence, which means it costs nothing and you’re free to copy, adapt and redistribute it as long as you’re not selling it and you credit him. Each Player controls a Ruler and their Realm (a civilisation, in the Total War or Civilisation sense, not a character sheet), while one person sits out as the Narrative Overlord and referees everyone else.

The part that actually surprised me is that the game isn’t designed to be played in a room at all. Its default unit of play is the Report, a written summary of one Season’s Financial Actions and up to six Political Action Words, sent by a Player to their N.O. by email, letter or, the book insists with a straight face, carrier pigeon. The N.O. replies, the Season advances, and the whole campaign runs by correspondence over however many weeks the group can sustain it.

We didn’t have weeks, so I compressed it: each of our three evenings covered several in-game Seasons back to back, with Reports written and read out on the spot rather than posted between sessions. It worked fine, but it’s worth knowing going in that you’re bending the game’s actual shape to do this, not playing it as intended. If your group can stomach a slower, play-by-post campaign, I suspect Rulers is even better suited to that than to what we did with it.

The Political Actions themselves run on a list of 35 Action Words (Accuse, Attack, Negotiate, Take, and so on), combinable and free to interpret however your Ruler’s personality and resources allow. It’s a neat solution to a problem every homebrew nation-building game has to solve eventually, namely stopping “I use my Political Action to have the enemy Ruler die in his sleep” from being a valid sentence, while still leaving the roleplay genuinely open-ended.

The worldbuilding tools are the best part of the book

Before anyone rolls a Ruler, the book has you generate the actual planet on dice tables: eight rolls across a climate table and a location table produce your terrain, a further set of rolls place mountain ranges, then rivers, coasts and seas, and only after all that do you sit down and colour the map in. My group ended up with a badly-drained river delta civilisation squeezed between two mountain ranges purely because of how the dice landed, and every player treated that as a gift rather than an inconvenience.

Character creation is just as generative. Each Realm picks a form of Government from seven options (Monarch, Elected Monarch, Council, Ecclesiastical, Consortium, Magistrate or Warlord), then three Traditions out of twelve, each of which grants a mechanical bonus and usually a Guild, Order or Society to go with it. One of my players took the Pious tradition purely to get a Cathedral, then spent the rest of the campaign resenting the Religious Order that came attached to it, which is exactly the kind of friction the system is trying to produce.

This whole toolkit would be worth stealing for other systems even if you never touched the rest of Rulers.

Combat scales its own effort, and that’s the smartest design decision in it

Rather than one combat system, Rulers gives the N.O. three: Automatic, for fights with an obvious outcome and no dice at all; Quick Resolve, a single opposed dice-pool roll for skirmishes that matter but don’t need a blow-by-blow account; and Full Combat, a properly turn-based battle with positioning, initiative and a Wound Table running from Wounded through Routed to Defeated and, if you’re particularly unlucky, Crushed.

Our best evening hinged on exactly this escalation. One Realm had been running a Cruel tax rate to fund a standing army, which pushed its Turmoil high enough that a Winter roll tipped it into open rebellion, straight off the book’s own Turmoil table. The rebel Nobles besieged their own Ruler’s capital. We started that fight as a Quick Resolve roll because nobody expected it to be close, then switched it to Full Combat once the defending garrison’s dice kept landing well enough that the outcome stopped being obvious. Watching a system hand you the choice to slow down mid-fight, rather than forcing you to commit to one resolution method before you know if the story deserves it, is the single best piece of design in the book.

◂ HACKKKTUALLY ▸

Rulers isn’t a retail product you’ll find on a shop shelf or a publisher’s storefront. It’s a free PDF released under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, meaning anyone can download it, print it, host it on their own site or hand it to their group without paying Eliot Miller a penny, provided they credit him and don’t try to sell it themselves. There’s no ongoing support beyond the one rulebook, and the author says plainly he’d approach the whole project differently if he started it again today.

The itch.io page it lives on is set to name your own price, so nothing about downloading it requires paying a penny. A 68-page system with worldbuilding tables this well thought out is exactly the kind of thing worth throwing a few quid at anyway, given that a one-person designer surviving to write a second rulebook usually comes down to whether anyone bothered.

Where it needs a firmer edit

Rulers reads exactly like what it is: a labour of love out of a university roleplaying society that never got a professional proofread. The prose drops the odd word here and there (one worldbuilding example plainly means to say a five-player game “would have 3 NPC Rulers” and just doesn’t), and nothing about that is surprising for a free CC release, but it does mean you’ll occasionally have to guess the intended meaning rather than read it.

The one gap that actually cost us table time is that the Guilds, Orders & Societies section on Turmoil is, word for word, a copy of the Nobles section directly above it on the same page, table included. It means the book never actually tells you what Turmoil a disgruntled Guild generates, only what a disgruntled Noble does, and we had to make a house ruling on the spot rather than look one up.

The Quick Reference at the back is otherwise genuinely useful, reprinting the Advantage table, the Wound Table and Siege Defence Ratings on two pages so you’re not hunting through the whole book mid-fight. It just doesn’t reprint the Troop bonuses themselves, so you’re still flipping back to the Army Troop List a good ten pages earlier to find out what a Pikeman’s actual combat bonus is. A single combined combat sheet would fix both problems in one go.

The verdict

None of that stopped three evenings from being properly fun, and that’s the part worth leading with rather than burying under the caveats. The correspondence structure, the procedural worldbuilding and the three-tier combat system are all doing something more thoughtful than most homebrew civilisation games bother with, and the rough editing is a forgivable cost of it being free rather than a symptom of the design being half-baked. My group is already asking when we’re running a second campaign, ideally by actual letter this time.