Rolteca

Rolteca is an archive of tabletop role-playing games in Spanish. Each game has its own page with the editions, modules and adventures, character sheets and play aids published for it, plus a classification that lets you search by genre, era, rule system or theme. It currently holds 896 games, and you can visit it at rolteca.com.

What I wish I’d had in one place

The idea came up in 2015, while I was studying for my DAM degree. I wanted a site where I could find the rulebooks, adventures and play aids I needed to play, sorted by game, and I wanted that site to be useful to the rest of the community too.

Since then Rolteca has had four versions, each one built with what I knew at the time. That also makes it the most honest record I have of how I’ve grown as a developer. The story of each version is further down, with the screenshots that survived.

What’s in the archive today

The game archive can be filtered by genre, system, era and theme, narrowed down to free games or to games with character sheets, modules or play aids, and sorted by name or by amount of material. Search for “vampiro” and you get the five versions of Vampire in the catalogue, from The Masquerade to the PbtA take.

The game pages are what has changed the most. The Aquelarre page, for example, doesn’t just list its 132 modules. It explains what each edition brings, which adventure works for a table that has never played and which ones are meant for long campaigns. For people who don’t know where to start there’s the “Nunca he jugado” (I’ve never played) section, and for those who’d rather browse, Explorar organises the whole archive by genre, themes, era, rules family, format, origin and inspiration.

Recursos has hand-picked selections, such as free horror adventures you can play in a single session, or Aquelarre adventures sorted by era, tone and length.

From collecting material to helping people choose

The early versions of Rolteca were mostly a place to pile things up. Over the years I’ve become more interested in helping people choose. Having 132 adventures for one game is great, but someone about to run their first session gets more out of knowing which one plays in an afternoon with newcomers.

You can also tell which games I’m drawn to. I have a soft spot for the BRP percentile system (Call of Cthulhu, Far West or Omertà), and Call of Cthulhu is the game with the most material in the archive, with 176 modules.

Where the material comes from

The current archive has been built since 2020 with material shared by the community or published with its authors’ permission. When a resource has an official source, the publisher or the author, I prefer to link to it rather than host a copy. Paid rulebooks, supplements and adventures are not published without authorisation, and anything that turns out to be under copyright is taken down. The details are in the editorial methodology (in Spanish).

I also learned to write

I wrote Rolteca’s first Crónicas when I was just starting out with copywriting. They’re still there as they were, and the difference from the current game pages and guides is easy to see. Writing for Rolteca has made me think about who’s reading, which is almost always someone with a session coming up and little time to prepare it.