Earl of Fife Games and Jason Duff have launched the Roll20-ready generic tabletop RPG Heroes & Hardships today on Kickstarter.
It’s a d10 system, and free samples are available. The campaign is asking for $10,000 to fund and, on launch day, is nearly there. You can check out more details on the pitch page.
Geek Native reported in August that Tetsubo is expected to be published for Heroes & Hardships. That’s the Warhammer-inspired setting and legend from Dave Morris and Jamie Thomson. Tetsubo isn’t mentioned in the Kickstarter pitch, though.
What is mentioned is the 96-page and Name your Own Price Heroes & Hardships quickstart. Earl of Fife suggests $4.99 for that.
There’s also the entirely free-to-download but less playable sample of 18-pages that showcase quality, ideas, layout and art.
If funded, the core rules will be a 248-page hardcover, offering hundreds of character options and gritty tactical combat. In Heroes & Hardships, there are no hit points. There are wounds and injuries, which characters take and suffer from if hurt badly enough.
The core mechanics are straightforward.
Determine what skill to use and add your Skill Rank and the governing Attribute Score together. This is how many d10s you roll. Once you roll, add a number of dice together equal to your Attribute Score. That is your result. Compare that result to a target number set by the GM or an opposed Skill Check.
You can support the indie RPG by sharing news of the Kickstarter or by promising cash pledges. If you pledge $1, you’ll be able to buy into the pledge manager later, getting ahead of any retail release.
On launch, there are only two tier types; early bird or retailer. That might mean you need to pledge now or miss out, but Earl of Fife Games will (probably) release some new tiers in about two days.
Currently, $20 will get you the Heroes & Hardships core rules in PDF, the digital stretch goals, the early bird digital stretch goals and your name in the book.
At $50, you get the print early bird instead. That’s a hardcover but also $150 worth of current Earl of Fife digital downloads and additional stretch goals.
There’s a $75 tier that adds in print-on-demand codes to those bonuses and then a $100 GM tier that adds a GM notebook in physical and digital form.
After that, there are retailer tiers, and some shops have already moved to back the game.
Jason told Geek Native;
I am proud to announce the Heroes & Hardships’ Kickstarter is now live. This project has been a major labor of love for the last 5 years. Play the game you want with thousands of hours of playtesting, 248 pages of universal RPG rules, and a multitude of future releases planned such as Tetsubo. I cannot wait until you get your hands on the early access PDF only weeks after the campaign ends.”
The estimated delivery of the PDF tier is February 2023 and October for the printed books.
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