The Adventurer's Tale is the latest game to come out of my head, and one that I thought I'd never write. The main inspirations are my happy memories of playing simple boardgames like Heroquest and gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy. I've tried to take this simplicity and high level of abstractation into work it into an RPG.

Although comparisons to "old school" games are likely to arise, due to the light nature of the rules and relatively high danger level, it isn't really a type of game I'm familiar with, so I can't call that a direct influence on my design.

My influences are apparent in the monster design, with more of a focus on description and hooks than written-in-stone stats and the broadening of Stats to remove the need for a skill list. For example, the Grace stat covers how stealthy, agile and quick a character is. If you need a character that's great at jumping but poor at climbing, this isn't for you. The Fighting Fantasy system in particular was a big influence, and I go into this in a bit more detail here.

There's little in the way of groundbreaking material in here, it's assumed setting is very broadly defined generic fantasy. It's definitely to be considered a "toolset" type system. I still feel I've done a good job with the mechanics. I'm happy with the almost complete removal of whiff factor and the ease by which a GM can come up with new material and rules when they need to.

Of course, it's easy for me to say the game's quick and easy, being as I wrote it. This is why I need some GMs to playtest this for me. Although general feedback is always appreciated I'm eager to hear about how GMs find running the game.

You can find the Google Doc here. Don't let the size daunt you, all you need is the Core Rules section and whichever monsters you decide to use.

Edit: To clarify, this version is by no means complete, but it's at the point where I'm happy with the basics and want to move it onto the next stage after testing. Things like layout and ordering are back-burner concerns at the moment.

For those groups not wanting to spend time on prep I've thrown out a very quick starting scenario here. Completely untested but zombie survival and fantasy is a combination that's underused but can't fail.

I had a quick look at it. Alas, I'm only a player and not a DM at the moment so I can't test it.

It looked good, but my first thought was that there are a lot of rules-light fantasy games out there. It seems to me that there are more people wanting to write rules than there's a demand for, and less people wanting to write adventures and other material for existing systems.

I started writing a game years ago but it sort of mutated into a set of tables, which I think has gotten more interest than the original idea would have.

So, my advice if you wanted to promote this system would be to come up with lots of adventures, monster lists etc. There are tons of rules-light systems out there but they're generally not very well supported with other material.

Another idea is that you might want to run a play-by-forum game, for example on giantitp.com or forum.rpg.net

Oh yeah, I'm under no delusions as to the amount of light fantasy games out there. This is the reason I've stayed away from the genre with my previous games. Still, I expect little more than to have a few people enjoy this game, I certainly have no large-scale ambitions for it. I do appreciate your feedback a great deal, though, AoF.

Frankly, I consider a game to be a success if I enjoy writing it and get one good game out of it. Grounded ambitions, for sure!