I’m very excited to announce that the Kickstarter for Light Fantasy is now live. Visit the Kicksteter page to pledge today!:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gurbintroll/light-fantasy-rpg

Light Fantasy is a game for those of us who want older and simpler rules but who prefer a more modern style of game. It’s design goals from the start have been:

• The basic design paradigm is “Classic Rules, Modern Sensibilities”
• The rules have been kept as light as possible, being no more complex than the existing B/X rules and being less complex where possible.
• It uses a compromise between the unified “target-20” mechanics of Dark Dungeons and the original B/X mechanics.
• No alignment.
• Race-as-class is gone. It keeps the three “demi-human” classes with minor modifications, but as actual classes: Elf = Battlemage, Dwarf = Engineer, Halfling = Scout.
• Characters can be of any ancestry (human, elf, orc, dwarf, gnoll, anthro-animal etc.) and any class – ancestry has no mechanical effect, it’s just something on your character sheet (like gender) to facilitate roleplaying.
• Avoiding essentialising humanoid types by not having them in monster section. Using orcs as an example again, they’re not going to have a monster entry describing how orcs live and behave. Orcs can be as varied as humans, and therefore there’s no single description of what they are like and how they behave.
• Avoiding the colonial aspects of “civilised” human lands both under threat from and exploring/colonising “uninhabited wilderness” by killing or driving out the people (non-humans who therefore don’t count) who already live there – basically making the game more like European history and less like the American Wild West.
• Less emphasis on retainers/hirelings, and subsequently less lethality at low level – taking away the “0hp = dead” and replacing it with a more forgiving death mechanic that gives your allies a chance to save you; and making most poisons encountered at low level not be simply save or die.
• Keeping the strong setting implications where there are no Christianity-inspired demons, no Theosophy-inspired outer planes, and no Occultim-inspired elemental planes; instead you have alternate worlds and weird dimensions of the type found in the early adventures. It’s less Lord of the Rings and more The Elephant and The Tower.
• Similarly, keeping the emphasis on the blurred line between animal and monster, where giant animals tend to have semi-magical abilities and many of the races are straight-up anthro-animals. Orcs are pig-people, kobolds are dog-people, gnolls are hyena-people, etc.
• Ability scores done by standard array rather than rolling randomly
• Giving magic-users a simple cantrip-like attack, but using a prop so they can still be disarmed, so they aren’t effectively a single-use magic item – people play a magic-user because they want to feel magical and use magic.