If your fantasy campaign has gone stale, here is a roleplaying game with a very different flavour. Frontier Scum, the rules-lite acid-western RPG from designer Karl Druid, has returned in an expanded hardback through Free League Publishing, and it is heading to UK Games Expo 2026 this weekend.
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Find events near youFrontier Scum casts two to six players as wanted outlaws scrabbling for infamy across the Lost Frontier, a surreal, LSD-soaked riff on the spaghetti western. Druid (working as Den of Druids, with co-development from Games Omnivorous) wears his influences openly, channelling the dreamlike violence of El Topo, the slow death-march of Dead Man and the grimness of Bone Tomahawk. It is built for short, brutal sessions rather than years-long campaigns, which makes it an easy one to drop onto a game night when you want a one-shot with teeth.
The new hardback is the reason to look now. It pushes the roster of character backgrounds up to 31, with 19 of them new, adds fresh name tables and optional 'gun hand' rules for the quickest draws at the table, and includes a complete adventure, Escape the Organ Rail, so you can start playing the night you open it. There are also tables for the bits every frontier needs, covering NPCs, hunting, carousing, bounties, odd jobs, loot and strange relics.
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See how it worksFree League is the Swedish studio behind some of the most admired licensed RPGs around, from the ALIEN roleplaying game to Blade Runner and the fantasy hit Dragonbane, so a scrappy indie western finding a home there says something about its pull.
You can get hands on it at UK Games Expo at Birmingham's NEC from 29 to 31 May. If your group fancies swapping dragons for six-shooters, this is a tidy way in.
Sources: Free League | Bleeding Cool | Geek Native
