“Well, I’m back”
— Samwise Gamgee
It has been several months since there has been any activity on this blog, and for that we are sorry, But there was a reason for it.
When we began this project, it started a group-enabled world-building exercise. Were chose to create a role-playing setting based on a more primitive bronze-age, rather than the hodge-podge medieval Europe so many games fall into. And to keep that visceral feel and unrestricted flexibility, we wanted an old-school rule-light system that wasn’t already borne down by its own canon. And we tried to use the long out-of-print system from Metagaming called The Fantasy Trip: In The Labyrinth.
Designed by Steve Jackson, the man who would go on to create GURPS, TFT is a compact, flexible and exciting RPG. It is also nearly 40 years old, poorly packaged, inconsistently edited, and so poorly organized that they published a separate index for players to find the rules spread across the several books.
We loved the style of play and open nature of character creation, but the rulebooks themselves became a major hindrance to world-building and role-playing. So we did what any obsessive nerds would do in this situation— we wrote our own rulebook.
We tried to capture the spirit of old school games like TFT with its deceptively nuanced, but quick, combat system, as well as its unrestricted character building structures to create an easy-to-learn, fast-paced, and entertaining RPG for our fantasy world and beyond.
Enter ‘Heroic Expeditions’, a retro-inspired role-playing game for fantastic trips into labyrinths and beyond.
A play-testing version of the rules are posted here, and we welcome you to download, play, critique, and enjoy what we’ve done. We are still in the process of testing and editing the game, so your input is always welcome.
And watch this space for rules expansions, design discussions, and new ways to make HEX an exciting addition to your gaming table.
Let the Heroic Expeditions commence!