BareBones Fantasy Ain't Slim Pickins

I never meant to be writing this post. I never intended to buy BareBones Fantasy. My intention was to slow down my game buying habit in order to focus on the ones that I already have. I almost held out. I really did. That is until I saw Zachary the First's review over at The RPG Site. But still, I was able to hold out a couple of more days. Then I cracked.

After buying the PDF I sat down and gave it a quick skim. Even after such a cursory look-through, I felt like I got the gist of how to run the game though I didn't feel much fire under my seat to run it.

My wife sat down and made two characters and afterward asked to play. The first character is a scholar cartographer out to remap the world as much of the known world that has been obscured by the decline of civilization. The second character is a warrior-leader accompanying the mapping mission.

We sat down to play a mini-session to make sure that we understood enough of the ins-and-outs. The setup was a chance encounter on a forest road with bandits. We blazed through the session while touching on a sizable portion of the system itself. Right after, I still didn't feel the fire of the plethora of positive reviews. But something happened. I began to think about how to tweak the system. I wanted to play more.

The plan was to play something the next day. The morning slipped by without any game prep. The afternoon slipped by too. I found myself thinking that we weren't going to get to play after all. The day was all but gone. And supper was ready.

After we ate, I went back to the PDF to take a better look at the adventure generator. Fifteen minutes later I was ready to go complete with two objectives, a path through a swamp and a cave complex. Two hours after that we had an awesome session all wrapped up with plans for more.

BareBones Fantasy is very well done.

Run, don't walk over to RPGNow and pick it up. Open another browser tab while you're at it and check out all the cool stuff in the works for BBF over at DwD Studios.