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Renaissance

This is the open-source pen-and-paper RPG tentatively titled Renaissance (and colloquially called Gleeches and Dragons, after the on-line handle of its main author).

It concerns the Commonwealth, an advanced, multi-racial people in a fantasy world. They have a significant command of magic, and a technology very roughly tracking Europe in late 1400. THey are a peaceful and prosperous nation.

Some of their neighbors are less so, tho: the Kingdoms of Man is riven with internal conflict, the Shaded Sea Peoples are piratical raiders, and the Goblin Kingdoms are slavers and worse. Perhaps worse are the Spirits – the world of Renaissance is alive with spirits: some are closely aligned with the Commonwealth, reguarding mortals as allies and friends; others are aloof, but are willing to offer service in exchange for propitiation; still others are either actively hostile, or completely aloof and inscrutable.

In terms of play, Renaissance leans away from dungeon-crawling: D&D is already an excellent take on that. It leans towards intrigue campaigns – investigating slave rings, busting smugglers and infiltrating neighboring kingdoms. Largely because of its Eclipse Phase heritage, it also handles horror well, driven by malevolent spirits – creating a style of play that might be called "Fantasy Call of Cthulhu".

It is based loosely on the rules from Eclipse Phase, Version 1. (Which is an excellent game that is well worth playing).

This is obviously a very early draft: we're missing a lot, we've got some inconsistencies and errors, we've got two different candidate versions of some things posted, it's still a bullet list in some places… We're still working on getting the rules in place. If you feel like giving it a playtest or submitting feedback, please do.

The RPG was initially written by and is copyright of David Bolding ([email protected]), with significant contributions from Alexis Williams and other. The game is released under an open license; see the LICENSE.md file.