Frontier Scum

Saddle up on a stolen horse, check how many bullets you’ve got left, and ride out into a West that never quite existed. Frontier Scum is a rules-light Acid Western roleplaying game about outlaws with prices on their heads, scraping a living on the Lost Frontier. It’s a feverish, hallucinatory wasteland where greed is the only law and your character’s life expectancy is measured in gunshots.

Karl Druid wrote and designed the game, which was developed with Games Omnivorous. It takes the grit of the classic Spaghetti Western and runs it through a psychedelic filter, drawing on cult films like El Topo, Dead Man and Bone Tomahawk. The rules are short and fast, so you spend your time playing rather than looking things up. That makes it ideal for brutal one-shots or campaigns that spiral out of control.

The book itself is laid out like a battered old frontier almanac. It’s bound as a raw A5 hardback with an exposed spine, so it looks and feels like something dug out of a saloon drawer. This updated Free League edition builds on the original with 19 new backgrounds (31 in total), new name tables, optional rules for gun hands and refreshed art.

Inside you’ll find:

Complete rules for running the game
Character creation, covering your outlaw, their guns and the horse they stole
An introduction to the Lost Frontier
Escape the Organ Rail, a complete ready-to-play adventure
Random tables for NPCs, bounties, odd jobs, hunting, carousing, loot and strange relics
New to this edition: 19 extra backgrounds, name tables and optional gun hand rules

Specifications:

Designer: Karl Druid (A Den of Druids)
Additional credits: Setting text by Brian Yaksha; additional art by Chalkdown and Skullfungus; edited by Walton Wood
Publisher: Free League Publishing, with Games Omnivorous
Format: A5 hardback with exposed binding
Pages: 76
Size: A5 (approx. 5.8 × 8.3 in / 14.8 × 21 cm)
Language: English
Published: 2026 (updated edition)
EAN: 9789190079164