Low Fantasy Gaming

by Stephen J. Grodzicki

Low Fantasy Gaming is a tabletop RPG built for sword & sorcery adventures in low magic worlds.

LFG is a mix of old school and modern game design, based on aspects of the 1d20 Open Game Licence. LFG is rules lite, with fast, gritty combat and dark & dangerous magic.

Genres: Role Playing Games

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2016

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

For the past few days, I have soloed my way through Little Trouble in Big Absalom (Pathfinder 2.0). It is a fun 18 page English fantasy kobold adventure available at Paizo.com for free. It is designed for a Dungeon Master and several players. There are two maps and five characters to use (and I did use them). I used a solo engine so that I could solo my way through this adventure. For my first attempt I did use the Pathfinder 2.0 rules. What a disaster. My characters made it 27% into the module and then four of the five got poisoned with persistent damage. They retreated but only two of them made it back to their base alive. So, my solution was to try a different game system. I picked out Low Fantasy Gaming. This worked out much better. The bard did catch a nasty disease. Damage was healed by the druid and magic user. After Part 1, they were able to retreat a bit and have the bard cured of his disease. It was during Part 2 that they met Jacques the frogman. He was speaking with a French accent. The kobolds only understood half of what he was saying. They called him "Socks". Jacques did not like that. All five kobolds did survive and they are considered heroes by their tribe members. Give Low Fantasy Gaming a try. There are good times to be had , , ,

[Chad Hoblitz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Low Fantasy Gaming Review

I have read countless Tabletop Roleplaying Games over my my lifetime and although quite a few have impressed me; I would put Low Fantasy Gaming in the top 30. The game is interesting and well written. The use of Unique Features at (3rd, 6th, 9th and 12th level), allow players to create varied characters. What unique features interesting is you don’t need countless books, classes etc to create a variety of characters. If there is anything confuses me is having checks failing at natural 20, maybe because I have so much d20 under my belt. Saying that I love how magic and luck works in the game. I also love having rules for injuries, ships, and mass battles in the same book is a plus. If I figure out how to hack the game for my own world I will use it as my fantasy system.

[Stephen Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I believe this is a very solid attempt to create relatively simple D&D-like gaming rules that combine a lot of the best features of old-school and more modern rule editions. It will never become my go-to game, but there are definitely good ideas here and this may be something I play/run as a "palate-cleanser" between campaigns.

On the negatives, I think there are some questionable class designs (the artificer seems overpowered to me), and I don't like the inclusion of black powder weapons. There are also some odd "quirks" to some of the randomized tables.

There are many more positives, though, including what I believe is a good way to include skills/feats in an old-school format, rules on injuries, and so on. Better still, I don't feel like there are very many "different just to be different" quirky rules or mechanics that a lot of game designers seem to include just to be different than other established games.

This is definitely worth a play-through and deserves to be better-known than it is.