There is a new shop in town for indie tabletop RPGs, and it has walked straight up to the biggest player in the room. RPG Trader opened on 9 June, and its sales pitch is built around two numbers and one hard line on AI.
Run game nights? Backseat Gamer handles RSVPs, waitlists, date polling, and game voting so you can focus on playing.
Start organising for freeRun by studio Ten Acre Games, RPG Trader takes a 20% cut of sales. For comparison, Wargamer reports that DriveThruRPG, the long-standing default storefront for the hobby, charges 30% to 35%. That is a meaningful gap for small creators selling a £6 zine, where every percentage point is the difference between a coffee and a tank of petrol.
The second hook is the content policy. RPG Trader is positioned as a home "exclusively for handcrafted TTRPG content" and explicitly bars products that include AI-generated text or images, "even in part". After a year of creators bristling at AI art creeping into rulebooks and storefronts, a marketplace nailing its colours to the mast like this is going to find an audience.
Got a regular group? Create a private community, poll for the best date, vote on games, and let your friends RSVP in one place.
Set up your group for freeIt is not a thin launch, either. As covered by Rascal during the beta, the platform grew fast, and by Wargamer's mid-June write-up it was already listing 2,200-plus products from 467 creators, including more than 1,200 complete games. Print-on-demand runs through Lulu's global service, so physical copies ship worldwide rather than being locked to one region.
Whether it dents DriveThruRPG's dominance is another question. Marketplaces live and die on discoverability, and a storefront is only as good as the creators who choose to stock it. But for UK indie designers weighing where to sell their next adventure, a lower-fee, AI-free option arriving fully stocked is exactly the kind of competition the scene has been asking for.
Sources: RPG Trader | Wargamer | Rascal
