Eldritch RPG by Crossroad Games

Having recently started a series of posts to get ready for a possible Traveller game I discovered sharing with the G+ community is going to make it better by getting views other than my own. I decided to try it with my next Fantasy game as well. My favorite Fantasy RPG is Eldritch RPG by Crossroads Games. It is simple to play and run and the first game I ran on Roll20 was pretty fun before the real world intruded and brought it to a close before any of would have liked. What I am planning on doing is going through the rules as presented in the book giving my take on them (and soliciting other opinions). In the interest of transparency I am an online friend of one of the authors +Eldritch Role Playing Game Dan Cross although I have no ties to the company.

Who the heck am I? I am a 50 year old guy from Massachusetts who has been playing RPG's since I got the Holmes Blue Book in freshman year in high school. I will try and avoid terms like OSR, rules light, story telling and the most common terms thrown around these days because I have noticed they seem to mean something different to each person. <sigh> I will try and expect to fail to convey a sense of the game my expectation of failure has nothing to do with the game. It really is a game that is best played rather than described because it is really intuitive to play but when you describe it it doesn't sound like it. At it's core everything has a die (or series of dice) assigned to it and you roll those dice to exceed a target number. It is a point buy classless system which awards points to improve your character's die sizes or ranges rather than gain levels. There are a bunch of default very broad skills that everyone start with a D4 in and you build your character by increasing the size of the base die or refining the skill with a die in a narrower subset of the skill. For example everyone has Melee D4 which covers any form of beating the snot out of each other with something standing toe to toe. You decide your character is better than average at it so you can bump the D4 to a D6 or D8 or you have a picture of a guy with a walking stick which he uses in combat so you could add a D4 in Bludgeon or Bludgeon D4 and then 1 handed club D4. If Example Guy is standing in a bar holding a short sword (because his party is harassing him all the real heroes use sword) and all of a sudden a gang of orcs attack he rolls a D4 in combat as he retreats toward the umbrella stand. Disarmed he picks up a stray war hammer and starts using D4+D4 until reaching his ebony walking stick when he starts dealing a D4+D4+D4. These are called Ability Die Chains (ADC) and are the core of the system. ADC are simple and flexible letting you to create whatever you want to play without the need for a ton of rules.They all follow the same template extremely broad field / Specialty applying to a lot of situations/ Mastery applying to most cases the PC's can be prepared for. As for GMing the game it is a matter of how much crunch you want to use. There are rules for most of the common fantasy situations but you also look at the situation pick a difficulty and randomly generate a target number.

Having actually run the game and most players I had having no experience with system at all I can tell you explaining was less helpful than just playing. The GM needs a basic idea but not a mastery which is why I am going to go through the book cover to cover to actually know the rules rather than think I know them. The way I did character generation was to ask what the player wanted to play without explaining the rules. Refined a backstory with the player to put them in the game world and then I built the character and did a final tweak with the player. This worked really well with me and the players having fun and them ending up with more than just a fighter or wizard or cleric. You will get different results depending on your group but it is a method to think about. Crap that was a lot of blabbing to say Eldritch works really well to develop a concept and then figure out the rules to meet the concept.

The hardest thing about playing or running Eldritch is accepting it is as easy as it is. This came up over and over again with both me and most of my players continuously over complicating something because we were use to more traditional games. If you find yourself thinking you need to looks something up in the book you are probably overthinking the situation. However there are rules you probably won't memorize right away, disarming (Melee and Ranged) the spell system (not hard but you can make any spell you can imagine) and some other things related to doing movie hero kinds of stuff. Because the system leans more toward a cinematic level of play than realistic.

And rereading this confused mess I am sadly unsurprised I met my expectation of failure. It is a really, really fun game that is easy to play and run which if you are looking for something new I think is worth a look.