When you play a tabletop role-playing game like 5e, you want to be the hero. The world is different for you having been there, better. What if you could make the real world better by playing an RPG?! That’s what Limitless Heroics is all about.

Limitless Heroics is the most comprehensive disability compendium ever created for a Tabletop Role-Playing Game. 

Our website will have a free random generator to simplify determining character traits, but you’ll need the book for the descriptions and mechanics, or you can use the included tables to choose or roll manually.

We will also have a free random generator to create thousands of new magic items, you can add your name to the list of magic item creators!

We talked to dozens of people with diverse conditions to make sure our game mechanics represented their experiences, and see this update for news about even more.

All writers, editors, and artists hired for this book are disabled, neurodivergent, and/or have mental or chronic illness. 

A grey-skinned half-orc barbarian with pink ethereal faces speaking to it, a representation of Intrusive Thoughts

We believe that this resource will help you normalize disabilities in your life and the lives of other players. Non-disabled people can sometimes feel uncomfortable around disabled people or don’t know how to talk or act.  This resource allows you to practice in an imaginary world to equip you with empathy and skills to feel increasingly comfortable doing that in the real world.

And those with disabilities now have a way to represent their experience in-game to feel empowered and to help others see them more clearly.

Imagine what we could communicate to the world when all those actual play Twitch streams include disabled characters!

spectacles with gears, knobs, and eyebrows: Emotive Spectacles: Wondrous Item, Common; These glasses allow those who have difficulty expressing emotions with their faces (e.g. Facial Paralysis) to do so while worn. You must choose the emotion you desire to express from dials on the frame of the glasses. To change to a different emotion, you must remove the glasses and change the setting. The glasses must be removed during rest periods to give the face a chance to relax.

Limitless Heroics is more than an RPG book. It’s a petition. Back this project, and you communicate to every game publisher on earth that disabled people exist and can easily be included in their games, that the customers want that representation, and that accessibility and representation are necessary core features for future products.

Imagine companies and organizations seeing the success of this movement beyond the RPG community and how that would affect their decisions in the future. Imagine how you as RPG players who work in every industry can work for change to overcome ableism because of what you and your players learned while rolling dice at the RPG table.

Imagining is what we do best, but we can use fantasy to change reality. Maybe RPGs have some real world magic after all. Back this project now, make it happen, and mark this day on your calendar and social media as the day you helped change the world.

We met these stretch goals, all of which are included.

$25,000: Complications & Prostheses

Once we hit the $25,000 goal, we will add additional complications and magical prosthetics. Some experiences are not traits of various conditions, but complications that result from them, such as infections, concussions, secondary depression, and intoxication. Once we hit this goal, we will add 20 complications to the book and 20 Magical Prostheses.

$30,000: 10 NPCs

Similar to our previously published Disabled NPC of the Week but with more details, our character creators, Our character team will add 10 NPCs (Non-Player Characters) with full backgrounds, personality details, disabilities, and artwork to the book. These are in addition to the characters created for the Create a Character and DELUXE Create a Character rewards and add-ons, which will be included automatically.

$40,000: The Glass Painter's Daughter by Alicia Marie

When we reach $40,000, we will include a one-shot adventure, "The Glass Painter's Daughter," by Alicia Marie, which explores these concepts in an adventure environment.

$50,000: Service Animals

 We will include a chapter to implement service animals into your game, both real world and fantasy animals, including rules for training and how to use them. This section will be written by Brittney Hay with service animal trainer and user consultation.

Printed by DriveThruRPG

Physical and digital book orders are fulfilled by OneBookShelf at DriveThruRPG.com

OPTIONAL DISCOUNTED PRINT-ON-DEMAND VERSION – For this campaign, you will have the option of using DriveThru’s Print-On-Demand (POD) service to purchase a physical, printed copy of the book(s) included in your list of rewards directly from their POD partners at discounted cost. When the POD versions are available to order (sometime after the book has gone to print), you will receive links to purchase these versions of the book from DriveThru.

See the FAQ for more details.

Diagram of advantages of printing with DriveThru, compressing printing and publishing into one to reduce costs and speed delivery

This book contains descriptions and game mechanics for nearly every physical, mental, and emotional condition in existence and a few that don’t exist, including physical, mental, and emotional trauma and all manner of illnesses, including an entry on phobias and mention or illustrations of possible phobic triggers. If it can happen to your mind and/or body, it’s probably here. For those who would have difficulty with any of that, please be aware of that likelihood. Use the table of contents to avoid difficult sections, or give this book to a trusted friend, and let them comb through it for the details you need to build your character while skipping past the traumatic entries.

Primary author of Limitless Heroics, Dale Critchley is the owner, lead writer, and chief tea drinker at Wyrmworks Publishing. He’s been playing tabletop role-playing games since 1982 and launched Wyrmworks Publishing as a hobby in 2000 to share his homebrew resources with the world. In 2021, after seeing the power that a TTRPG group can have to change the lives of the participants for the better, he rededicated Wyrmworks Publishing to focus on using TTRPGs to intentionally improve the lives of others and turned a hobby into a full time pursuit. 

Joie Martin owns Drowning Moon Studios, a roleplaying game publisher that has produced over a dozen titles and two anthologies since being founded in 2017. They have been writing, developing, editing, and doing layout and graphic design for tabletop and live action roleplaying games since 1996. Beyond roleplaying games, Joie has produced content for a variety of markets, including ARGs, interactive theater, and immersive experiences. They have been a key speaker on panels about roleplaying game design at events such as DragonCon, MomoCon, and Metatopia, and was Head Judge for the 2020 IDGN Indie Groundbreaker Awards.

Naomi Hazlett, Bsc., MScOT, OT Reg. (Ont.) is a writer, editor, and occupational therapist with chronic pain. She is neurodiverse, queer, and lives with chronic pain and mental illness. Her work has most recently focused on social accountability, diversity, and inclusion in occupational therapy and gaming, including the adoption of a critical disability lens. Naomi has played and run TTRPGs for over 20 years; she has worked with organizations including Level Up Gaming, BALANCE for Blind Adults, and LOFT Community Services to run accessible TTRPGs, and consults for D&DBeyond. Naomi has multiple publications in academic journals, magazines, blogs, and poetry collections, and is currently the Managing Editor of the Canadian Association of Occupational Therapists’ national magazine, Occupational Therapy Now. She can be found online at @naomi_hazlett or can be reached via email. 

Melissa Critchley lives with multiple disabilities.  She has worked in the disability field for over 15 years and holds a graduate level certificate in Disability Policy and Services from the University of Minnesota in addition to her interdisciplinary master’s degree. She also recently completed an advanced certificate in Equity and Diversity and is an advocate for social justice and equitable societal change.

Melissa has played quite a few tabletop RPG games through the decades which include Shadowrun, BESM, D20 Modern, Mutants and Masterminds, and Star Wars.  However until we were confined to our homes during Covid quarantines, Melissa hated D&D.  A good friend invited her to play over Discord, and despite her objections, convinced her that she "never had him as a DM." It didn't take long before she changed her mind about D&D, and it's now her favorite game.

Simone Arnold MA, Certified Geek Therapist, is a neurodivergent, queer clinical mental health counselor in the state of Vermont. They have been working in the mental health field since 2013 across a variety of settings including as a crisis clinician and currently as a counselor at a designated agency. Through this they’ve had the opportunity to work with people across the disability spectrum. They are also establishing their own private practice that is queer friendly with a special focus on ADHD and Autism. Simone has been gaming since 2012 and has had the opportunity to play across an array of systems including D&D 5e, Pathfinder, Dread, Thirsty Sword Lesbians, Call of Cthulhu and more.

Matthew Rickmon, Certified Therapeutic Game Master, owns Tabletop For Growth (IG, Twitter), a business dedicated to helping people learn interpersonal skills and develop core values through interactive tabletop games. Matthew has a Bachelor of Science in psychology and a Master of Divinity with a focus in pastoral counseling. He is a Certified Therapeutic Game Master and Certified Geek Specialist through Geek Therapeutics. He lives with multiple chronic illnesses: Crohn’s Disease, Irritable Bowel, and Psoriasis. He also strongly suspects he is neurodivergent. Matthew has been writing stories and running in-person and live-streamed tabletop roleplaying games from his home in California since 2019. Beyond running roleplaying games, he maintains a strong partnership with The Erika Legacy Foundation, a mental health awareness and suicide prevention non-profit in Canada. Painting and writing tend to take up his free time when he’s not being yelled at by his cat, Mr. Fox, for more pets.

Alicia Marie (IG Twitter Tik Tok Facebook) is a costume artist and concept creator, author and accessibility advocate that turned her love of super-physiques, comic books, video game art and TTRPGs into a creative career.

Known for her attachment to classic Mortal Kombat and Marvel superheroes, Alicia, a self-professed “compulsive maker,” creates costumes and fan-styled character looks for media companies like NBC, Warner Brothers; gaming and interactive studios such as Netherrealm (Mortal Kombat), Riot and for celebrities like platinum recording artist Megan Thee Stallion and WWE superstar Ronda Rousey.

Alicia is the physical inspiration for some of the female fighting characters you see in popular video games today. In 2020, she was introduced as a playable character in Sony Interactive’s new Predator game PREDATOR: Hunting Grounds.

Alicia, who refers to herself as “walking tech” or as a “cyborg” following auditory surgery to replace her lost hearing, now uses her ability to move in the hearing world as an advocate for the D/deaf and hard-of hearing.

When she isn’t creating a new costume or speaking out on accessibility awareness, you can find Alicia appearing in various Dungeons & Dragons or other RPGs live on Twitch or working out at the gym as she is “forever inspired” by the characters she loves to cosplay!

Brittney Hay is a non-binary ENNIE-nominated bestselling TTRPG writer and creator. They are a full-time geeky nerd mom who enjoys reading, cooking and all things nerdy.

Artists

We intentionally assembled an eclectic team of artists to reflect the diversity of experiences and expressions of these conditions:

Kalman Andrasofszky (Insta) is a freelance illustrator, comic book artist, writer, and educator in Toronto, a longtime member of the R.A.I.D. Studio, and newly diagnosed with ADHD.

In 20+ years as a creative professional, Kalman has worked with many clients such as Marvel Entertainment, DC Comics, Wizards of the Coast, Shaftesbury Films, UNESCO, Portfolio Entertainment, and TekSavvy, among others, creating content for such brands as X-Men, Avengers, Batman, Star Wars, Dungeons & Dragons, Murdoch Mysteries, and PG: Psycho Goreman.

Kalman reinvigorated the classic Canadian superhero property Captain Canuck by both rebooting and adding many new concepts and characters to significantly expand the scope of the brand into a dynamic sci-fi shared universe.

When not writing and drawing too many things at once, Kalman can be found retro-gaming on his vintage SEGA Genesis system.

Additional Artists

In addition to Melissa and Naomi, our primary sensitivity consultants, we discussed traits and game mechanics with dozens of others as part of the research for this book to reflect their lived experiences as closely as possible. That list is too long to include here, but many of their names are included in the book's credits, and we can't express enough how grateful we are for their help.

We appreciate all who have helped us get the word out about this project on podcasts and in the press.