Welcome to Side World, a tabletop pencil-and-dice role playing game.
I (Alaric Snell-Pym, although I was known as Alaric Williams at the time) wrote Side World in my teens; in 1994, to be precise. It was a work in progress as I was extending and refining it while playtesting it with my friends in lunch breaks, so there may be a few inconsistencies here and there; we are releasing it as-is, with a quick dash of copy-edit polish here and there, but if there's interest we will overhaul it more thoroughly and write some expansions!
To play it, you'll need to understand the basics of tabletop pencil-and-dice gaming, and have a set of dice including:
| Die | Suggested Quantity |
|---|---|
| D4 | 2 |
| D6 | 10 |
| D8 | 2 |
| D10 | 2 |
| D20 | 2 |
You'll also need a calculator for some parts, unless you fancy doing multiplications and divisions by hand.
Get in touch with us at @pointdefection on Twitter.
Many thanks to Jon Greengrass and Daniel Tabner for helping me with the universe design, Bryn Hudson for helping with everything, Alan Lee for doing the vehicles, L. Bateman for the Penetrator Bomb design, Jean Pym for illustrations and Sarah Snell-Pym for publishing it, and also to the many playtesters and people who have commented on the various drafts!
Typeset in Gentium Book Basic (license) and Titillium Web (license)
You can download Sideworld to use offline!
You are also free to print it out. We'd like to generate a PDF with the whole thing so it's easy to print the lot out, which is currently a bit tricky with the HTML page-per-chapter online version (and we could even then publish it as a book), so please tell us if there's interest in that...
Sideworld is published under the "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial" Licence. See the licence link at the bottom for full details, but a quick summary is that you can copy it and share it or parts of it as much as you like, including using bits of it to make other kinds of cool things, as long as you include the information in the page footers about copyright and licenses, and don't make money from it.