A very interesting looking old-school fantasy RPG is up for crowdfunding for Barrel Rider Games. The White Box Cyclopedia is a stand alone roleplaying game which builds off of the Swords & Wizardry White Box rules to bring loads of roleplaying options for your game table. The project is over 500% funded and you can reserve a coupon for at cost printing of the 200+ page hardcover and PDF for a $30.00 pledge or just grab the PDF for a $15.00 pledge through February 7th. Expected delivery is this March.
About the Cyclopedia:
The White Box Cyclopedia is a stand alone roleplaying game that takes the simple elegance Swords & Wizardry White Box rules and countless options to allow you to create a custom fantasy roleplaying experience. Modular and fully integrated, you can make your fantasy as fantastic, as gritty, as strange, as traditional, as gonzo as you want it to be.
Thirty classes and dozens heritages. Over 100 spells. Nearly 200 monsters. Strongholds and seafaring. Psychic powers and spell duels. Chivalry and natural-born sorcery. Custom rules for the Referee to run campaigns that mimic your favorite Appendix N inspirations. A treasure trove of magical items, both familiar and new.
Five Decades of Dungeon Crawling packed into a single, simple rules set.
I love White Box. The raw simplicity that cuts straight to the heart of the hobby and the rapid-fire play where imagination trumps complex calculations and endless modifiers. When it was all over what mattered was the hard-won victory or harrowing defeat you shared with friends. All with the nothing more than a d20, a few d6s, and a tiny digest book.
White Box Cyclopedia builds on that rock solid foundation, unifying the original Swords & Wizardry White Box rules with two hundred pages of additional material. But White Box Cyclopedia isn’t “White Box with a ton of options,” it’s White Box if Dave and Gary had remained friends and partners. It’s a dream of how gaming would have evolved with the simplicity and elegance you remember it having, but brought into the 21st century. White Box Cyclopedia asks what would happen if we had rode nothing more than a d20 and a d6 into the same infinite well of adventure of the modern era? You’d get a complete fantasy roleplaying game we all loved, without the baggage of being “advanced.” Remember those simple days? You had a few pages of rules, but somehow there was no limit to what you could do. That is the essence of White Box Cyclopedia.