Hi,
anyone around here remember The Riddle of Steel rpg by Jake Norwood? Yeah, the one with the awesome combat mechanic, and those Spiritual Attributes that made play so extremely player driven!
There is a successor game out now, called Blade of the Iron Throne. It can be downloaded free (!) from here: bladeoftheironthrone.com/
(15 MB pdf, full color)
It’s a fan production, but has real astonishing quality, both in terms of its artwork and of its rules.
Whereas the original TRoS came with a decidedly medieval/historical flavor, Blade is firmly rooted in the Sword & Sorcery genre, a heavily underused genre in RPGs these days…
While Blade firmly rests upon the same strengths as a system that made TRoS so popular and successful, many problems with the original have been fixed in this new rendition, streamlining the rules, fine-tuning the combat mechanic and Spiritual Attributes (now called Passion Attributes), and porting the game to its new genre. It’s really worth a look for everyone interested in, well, RPGs in general I’d have to say.
In terms of GNS theory,
It describes itself as a NAR-SIM hybrid (which is in itself an interesting category not often seen). Combat is largely SIM, here, so you get very detailed, very realistic combat maneuvers, wounds that cause Pain, Shock and Blood Loss, and armor that covers various locations but leaves others unprotected…
While the rest of the game is very NAR, i.e. player-driven, story-focussed gaming - predominantly powered by the Passion Attributes (PAs) each character has.
Go check it out, download the free pdf, visit the site’s forum if you’re interested in this awesome new game out there!
And yeah, I’m looking to get a player or two for this Kaylossus and me are planning to try our hands at it with a short run of maybe three to five or so sessions to see what’s what with this new system.
I helped playtest it in its early phases, so I’d run the whole thing. Kaylossus will play, and one or two more players would be just about right for a first venture into Hyboria (or Xoth?)
Anybody interested?