Pay What You Want download: Lost Roads of Lociam RPG

Rasmus Strand and team have released the core rules of Lost Roads of Lociam: Age of the Black Chaimara as a Pay What You Want with a recommended price tag of $0 on DriveThruRPG.

Lost Roads of Lociam: Age of the Black Chaimara cover showing dark cleric

Has it been that long since I last found a PWYW on DriveThruRPG because? I noticed Lost Roads of Lociam has a wee note suggesting you download for free you can come back and pay later. I paid $5 upfront, and the download is 122 pages.

What got for my money was the results of a 2023 Kickstarter for a tabletop RPG that’s been years in the making. Rasmus’ bio says he’s been working on Lost Roads of Lociam for over 30 years and this edition for five.

It’s a d100 edition and with an attention to mechanical details. The system means you’re trying to roll under your target on a d100 and may have modifiers to get in the way. Attention to mechanical details means I can tell you that the speed-multiplier “Forced” for running long distances is 1.35, achieved with a 25 difference, whereas “Brisk” is a multiplier of 1.2 and needs only a 10 difference. Or, for example, a riding skill is made at -25 if predators are nearby unless you’re riding a warhorse.

Lociam is its own setting but I suspect could also be your fantasy setting.

Beyond the barriers of time there is another world. This world is filled with mystical powers, monsters, heroes, and magic. The only way to get there is by the use of the imagination. This world resides in a universe not unlike our own. A cosmos of life and light in a bubble. This is essentially a bubble on the black seas of Chaos. A raging war is in effect on this sea of Chaos, and the prize of this war is the contents of the bubble. The prize is life.

In the bubble, the cosmos, there is a balance between Order and Chaos. There is enough Order to make the sun rise every day, and sink every night, enough to make water heavier than air, and enough to keep the heart beating in the living beings. But there is also Chaos; Chaos of desire, hunger, greed, random chance, and power. All that which is necessary for the living to keep their spark for life and their motivation. Only in this balance can life exist in the form that we can imagine it, and while the balance is a fragile one, tilting one way or the other, it has remained for the entire age of the cosmos.

However, Chaos is not satisfied with this balance. Chaos has to be all-encompassing, be everything, the totality of all. Therefore, Chaos has made cracks in the bubble. Chaos is seeping into the world, and a war between Order and Chaos is inevitable. The bubble is straining to heal itself, and stop the Chaos incursion. This is truly a colossal effort, and the strain can be felt through the entire of the cosmos within. The life in the bubble is a multitude of worlds, around millions of stars, in millions of galaxies in this tiny bubble on the sea of Chaos. We look at one galaxy, one star, one planet. This planet is the third from its’ sun, and has three moons. The world is named Lociam, used like we use the world Tellus, but is called the Home, like we call our world Earth.

Disease table and pencil sketch of (perhaps) diseased warrior

The illustrations are mainly black and white but fit the weathered parchment look and feel of the download, and the book uses a typical two-column layout.

It’s a hyperlinked PDF with contents in this order;