Monsters & Magic RPG: Higher-Level Play

We’re now exactly a week away from our target release date of 12th June 2013 for Monsters & Magic, the new OSR fantasy roleplaying game from Mindjammer Press! That makes today the final preview before release. I’ll keep posting and talking about the game after launch, of course, but today I wanted to post a short teaser from the “Advancement” chapter of the book, giving you a peek into how you can use the rules for higher-level play.

As I mentioned on the Monsters & Magic Google+ community, Monsters & Magic actually allows for play at any level, although the monster statistics and spell lists provided are focussed on the first four levels of play. That’s because we envisage you using your favourite classic fantasy bestiaries and spellbooks with the game; we wanted Monsters & Magic to be a complete and playable game in its own right, so included a core of spells and monsters for you to use right away, but at the same time we didn’t want to reinvent the wheel and include several hundred pages of material you can get easily elsewhere. Not so the rules, however; out of the box, we wanted to make sure you could play your favourite classic fantasy characters, so the rules accommodate play right through 1st to 4th level, then beyond to 10th, 15th, even 20th level.

The way we’ve done that is to structure character levels into scales – groupings within which we imagine characters will have different concerns gradually escalating in power, influence, and magnitude. Today’s preview illustrates some of that concept in the epic, legendary, and mythic constructs which characters can buy as advancements, and use in conflicts and actions at higher levels and scales. You’ll also notice an example of play of a relatively simple epic-level conflict – our magic user, Xiola Zenwaith, now 11th level, aboard her sailing ship Princess of Tarnaband, attacking the Demon Tower of Zann!

I hope you find the preview interesting! Today here at Mindjammer Central we’ve just gone into proofreading of the laid out game and, barring any last-minute gotchas, we expect to be launching Monsters & Magic at RPGNow and elsewhere next Wednesday 12th June. I’ll be posting an announcement here and also over at the Mindjammer Press website, and elsewhere. Hope to see you there!

Sarah
Normandy, June 2013

This week’s art preview is by the very talented Eric Lofgren, whose work features extensively in Monsters & Magic. Check out his website here! Feel free to ask any questions or just say hi here, or join us too at the Monsters & Magic Google+ Community.