Inquisitive Game Design

The Design Goals of Compact Fantasy

Compact Fantasy started as an intrusive thought while working on my other TTRPG project. I was designing the rule system for Clans of the Ages (an as of yet unreleased title) and started to wonder what a more heroic and lighthearted game would look like. The answer was to look at what makes D&D archetypical in this genre: good niche protection, clear abilities, and the ability to play as your favorite fantasy creatures and happily bash monsters.

The second prompt to get started was my oldest child pestering me about running D&D, which I have a hard time bringing myself to do due to the crunchy mechanics and escalating level system. That led me to research alternatives without much success. The closest game I found was a Swedish game called Järn (Iron) by Krister Sundelin, but that is too deeply tied to the iron age edge-of-civilisation gameplay that it is written for. There is a more generic fantasy adaptation, but I feel it makes some design choices going in the wrong direction, for example by dropping some of the social mechanics that made Järn the top contender.

At this point it was all but inevitable. I started writing up the races (called kinds in this game) and their defining ability and then built the game system around that niche protection. The same idea was applied to the classes: each gets a unique ability that may introduce rules interactions otherwise not available. After the fact I realised that the abilities for the kinds and classes of the game are quite similar to how Magic: The Gathering works: there is a simple core game, and then the abilities are free to modify it as they see fit.

To complement the abilities I have tried to create a fairly standard system. The core consists of 15 skills which define how many dice you use for actions. Actions are resolved by rolling over a target number using exploding dice, always bringing the possibility of a fantastic success no matter what the odds are. I also have a damage track that is split into social and physical damage, as well as into temporary and long-term damage. Topping this off with armour saves completes the core system in the space of one page.

The one-page aspect of the core system is very deliberate. If I restrict myself to 1 page of rules, 1 page of character creation, and the lists of kinds, classes, items and monsters, then the initial reading burden to get started becomes minimal, just open the book to the spread containing the game rules and character creation and start building characters, though a little bit of page flipping is inevitable as the kinds and classes you can play have their own page spreads.

The rules are intended to be fast and to lean towards rulings, not rules, most closely inspired by Vampire: The Masquerade, though in the heroic fantasy genre rather than personal horror. I have always found that system principles such as simple task resolution and allowing the GM to make rulings instead of covering edge cases in rules lead to faster play and more focus on the story.

There is no defined game world, just a few short paragraphs about gods creating order from chaos and infernal beings wanting access to the world. This together with the playable kinds and the list of monsters is intended to serve as an implied world. I have tried to align this in tone to D&D 3.5 to allow for literature spawned from 80s and 90s-era D&D to be used as inspiration for adventures. I only have a fraction of the number of monsters available in that game, but hopefully the ones I have can serve as a template for GMs to create their own.

The game is now in a playtesting phase which will be followed by adjustments to smooth out any rough edges before release. Hopefully, it will live up to its design goal of being a quick game to set up and play for adults who do not have the time and energy to get started with the often quite large systems of other games.

/ Johan Burvall Mollevik