# Frontier Scum *Created:* 2026-10-09, *Modified:* 2026-10-09 ![[Frontier Scum (cover).jpg|600]] Somebody once looked at the spaghetti western, rolled it over a few times in the light, and asked what it would do if the pasta had gone off. **Frontier Scum** is Karl Druid's answer: a rules-light "Acid Western" about wanted outlaws making their mark on a Lost Frontier that has no particular interest in whether they finish the job. It began life as "[[Mork Borg]] with guns," a print-at-home zine that a publisher talked him into inflating into a proper hardback — and it never outgrew the sour aftertaste. This is the Western where you're not the gunslinger in the white hat so much as the thing the white hat is standing beside. ## Setting The Lost Frontier is a capitalist fever dream wearing a cowboy hat. At its rotten heart sits **Covett City**, a slag-slathered factory capital where the **Incorporation** — a profiteer collective run by the miserly Melancthon P. Murrsom from the tallest tower ever built — leases and plunders every industry, every idea, every crocskinnery and haberdashery. Nothing is safe from facsimile or counterfeit; trains shriek through Cathedral Station along the **Eternal Rail**, a railway whose true span nobody knows and whose building killed untold thousands (freighthoppers will swear the black-iron rails run all the way to Hell). Beyond the city walls the country curdles: **Carcass Country**'s bloodgum trees bleed and hunger and strangle the roads, while **Sunken Hill**'s bog bubbles up the corpses of the mass-buried dead, its grave bells luring the desperate on toward one doom or another. You play the scum of this world — the wanted, the broke, the desperate — and the book is admirably frank that the monster isn't the lurking supernatural thing (there's deliberately no ghost statblock) so much as the system that's been bleeding everyone dry. ## Mechanics Frontier Scum is d20 at the core and doesn't ask forgiveness for it — a rules-light chassis built for speed and terminal violence rather than character longevity. **Character creation** is as grim as a wanted poster. Roll your crimes and your price on the Wanted table, pick (or roll) a background, draw a skill or two from it, roll up your starting gun and a stolen horse, then keep an eye on your slot-based carry weight — pockets, belt, back, and saddlebags, each affording a little more room than a coffin. Four abilities — **Grit**, **Slick**, **Wits**, **Luck** — run generally from -3 to +3, and that's most of the sheet's ambitions in one glance. **Ability checks** are the bread and butter: roll a d20, add the relevant ability, and beat a Difficulty Rating, with the standard DR a forgiving 12. A skill that covers the situation turns it into **Advantage** — roll two d20s and take the best — and you can hold up to six of them. The charming wrinkle is that a natural 20 on a check can let you *learn a new one*. Which brings us to the game's little gambling wheel, the **Ace**: spend one to reroll any die that isn't a natural 1 or 20, refresh a single Ace at the start of every session — and everyone *loses all their Aces* the instant any player rolls a natural 1. It's a beautiful, terrible incentive to actually use your luck before the table's collective jinx drains it. **Combat** is where the frontier earns its nickname. Initiative is a d6 per round (enemies get the first volley on a 1–3); melee and non-gun ranged are opposed checks, but a gun just *hits* unless the shot is genuinely tough — and then the shooter rolls Slick to place it while the target rolls Luck to not get ventilated. Damage dice can be spread across adjacent targets, and when a brawl devolves into trading blows the whole mess can compress into one Grit check per round. Best of all is the hat: before damage, you can **lose your hat** to block a single attack entirely — then check Luck to see if it survived. On a frontier where headwear is genuine armor, you know you're in a specific kind of place. **Death** is the game doing its best impression of a hangman's knot. Drop below zero HP and you're rolling **Death Checks** against a table of ways to go: a natural 1 is instant and somehow even worse than that, low rolls leave you unconscious, and a 16 or better has you dying by degrees over anything from minutes to d4 weeks of "tedious expiration." Non-lethal damage gets a kinder **Drop Check** that mostly just knocks you out. Conditions round out the misery — **Miserable** (no HP back from rest until you fix the cause), **Drunk** (swap two random abilities), plus Frostbit, Snakebit, and Skunked — and rest, hunting, foraging, and the eternal search for a reason to keep going all run through the same battered machinery. Tucked in the back is the complete *Escape the Organ Rail* adventure, a prison-train heist, along with a generous pile of random tables for bounties, odd jobs, house loot, and strange relics. ## Editions - **Core Rulebook** (2022) — the original 64-page acid-western hardback, published by **Games Omnivorous** / Den of Druids; born as a print-at-home **Mork Borg** zine. *In the library* (third printing). Kickstarter backers' copies came as a red-ink variant, "The Red Printing" — a *color* variant of the same rules, not a separate edition. - **More Rulebook** (2026) — Free League Workshop's expanded hardback: the full core rules and the *Escape the Organ Rail* adventure, plus all-new material — 19 extra backgrounds (31 in total), name tables and generators, and optional "gun hands" rules to add tactics to shootouts. *In the library* (current edition). ## References - [Frontier Scum official site — frontierscum.com](https://frontierscum.com/) - [Frontier Scum: Core Rulebook (More Rulebook edition) — Free League Publishing](https://freeleaguepublishing.com/shop/frontier-scum/core-rulebook/) - [Buy the PDF — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/403322/Frontier-Scum) - [Buy a physical copy — Games Omnivorous](https://gamesomnivorous.com/products/frontier-scum) - [Review — No Dice Unrolled](https://www.nodiceunrolled.com/frontier-scum-review/) - [Review & retrospective — Līber Lūdōrum](https://liberludorum.com/2022/08/01/frontier-scum-a-review-retrospective/) - [Kickstarter (Tides of Rot + rulebook reprint) — Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gamesomnivorous/frontier-scum)