Realms of Peril is Live on ZineQuest!
REALMS OF PERIL is a classic fantasy role-playing game presented as a pair of jam-packed zines lavishly illustrated by the amazing DC Stow.
📗 THE ADVENTURER'S FIELD GUIDE is a complete rulebook containing everything you need as a player to learn how to play, create unique adventurers, and advance your characters into powerful movers and shakers in the world. 70+ pages, spot color, soft-touch, staple-bound zine.
📘 THE GAME MASTER'S HANDBOOK is an indispensable reference manual for new and seasoned GMs full of clear and concise procedures, enlightening tips, best-practices, and inspiring content to help every session come alive. 70+ pages, spot color, soft-touch, staple-bound zine.
Back the Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/spellsword/realms-of-peril
What's it Like?
☠️ Simple but powerful d20-based core mechanic that encourage fiction-focused gameplay. Based on World of Dungeons by John Harper (creator of Blades in the Dark). Dice rolls determine not just success and failure, but whether you encounter cost, choice, or danger in your actions. Most dice rolls are player-facing.
☠️ Created from the ground up for open-persistent gameplay (aka West Marches). Based on the formative West Marches posts by Ben Robbins (creator of Microscope and Follow). Also inspired by the excellent Hack Attack videos with Steven Lumpkin and Adam Koebel, as well as Matt Colville's West Marches video.
☠️ Designed with OSR principles in mind, as prescribed by old-school luminaries such as Matt Finch, Ben Milton, Steven Lumpkin, David Perry, Patrick Stuart, Scrap Princess, and Chris McDowall.
☠️ Mechanics are designed to compliment West Marches style campaigns. Focuses on exploration of a sandbox-style hexcrawl map, an "open table" (no set cast of characters or static group of players) and a shared, persistent gameworld (the actions of one set of adventurers leave their mark for future adventurers to see). Features "flattened math" so fledglings and veterans can adventure together. Also provided are advice and tools for the GM to host their own open-persistent campaigns.
☠️ Gameplay is about exploration, interaction, tough choices, and survival more than slaying every monster or angling for an epic story every session. The story is created when we look back at what happened during a session.
☠️ Minimal player-facing mechanics and simple character stats encourage creative problem solving over finding the solution on the character sheet. Spend more time talking about the fictional details than looking up complex rules.
☠️ Fast and evocative character creation driven by a list of 100 classic character backgrounds that provide interesting starting items and flavorful, bite-sized chunks of character background.
☠️ Adventurers start as level 0 fledglings. Characters are simple to begin with and grow in complexity as they advance, creating a built-in learning curve for players. Easy to learn and teach, but deep enough to provide long-term engagement for players, suitable for full-length campaigns.
☠️ Over a dozen compact but flavorful classes, all illustrated with iconic art. Each time you level up, assign a rank to one of the classes and gain a special feature from their list. Multiclassing is expected and encouraged. Combine classes to build the character you want to play. But remember, the real power can only be found out there, in the wild.
☠️ Several unique types of magic-users, each with their own thematic spells and strange abilities. Spells are about interesting utility more so than pure firepower. A list of common spells is available to the players, while another set of mysterious and powerful "treasure spells" can be found in the GM's Handbook, only obtainable through discovery. More than 100 different spells in total.
☠️ Hirelings, pets, followers, strongholds, establishments, downtime activities, and more. Ample peripheral content to bolster the party ranks and create extended options for play.
☠️ Guidelines for GMing that foster creative, interactive, old-school gameplay. Clear systems and procedures for the GM to run a session.
☠️ Gameplay puts a focus on detailed descriptions of fictional events and "rulings over rules". The GM can use the core mechanic to resolve any roll, or they can fall back on a useful list of "methods" (PbtA-style moves) that help resolve specific types of actions when needed.
☠️ Assemble actionable quest goals for players from comprehensive lists of options, provided by Johnstone Metzger. Use the lists to build interesting objectives for adventurers looking to pursue more complex goals or projects.
☠️ 100+ classic and new magic items that focus on creative utility over bonuses and combat power.
☠️ Plenty of classic and new monsters, beasts, and enemies to fight or run from. Monsters are scary because they're vicious, deadly, tough, and don't play by the normal rules - not because they have a lot of hit points.
☠️ Conveniently split into two zines. Why? So the players can be creating characters with the Adventurer's Field Guide on their side of the table, while the GM can reference the Game Master's Handbook behind the screen.
☠️ Advice for asynchronous and online play. Run your open-persistent world on the internet or in person, with some simple guidelines to build your own adventuring community.
Head over to our Discord to download the Playtest Version of the Adventurer's Field Guide: https://discord.gg/dRDqJTM