Fantasy Age has a lot of cool elements, but it’s hard to recommend when stacked up against other tabletop RPGs.
Pros
- Core book is complete with character creation, game rules, bestiary, magic items and starting adventure.
- Lots of cool character customization options, including a great, modern presentation of kin such as orcs and goblins.
- Mixing and matching arcanas (groups of spells such as Fire and Healing) to create any kind of mage.
- Optional rules and mechanics are easy to add to your campaign
- Having “defeat conditions” such as Captured on the table instead of simply dying when you’re defeated in combat adds great flexibility for a campaign.
Cons
- The Stunt Die is cool in theory … but in practice stunts often boil down to “deal more damage.”
- You need to play on a grid to get the most out of the combat system, which uses discrete movement and and area of effect measurements.
- Overcomplicated attribute and skill system
- Rolling to successfully cast a spell isn’t fun.
- Advanced test system is clunky.
I have a few criticisms of Fantasy Age, so I want to make something clear off the top: this is a solid, well-designed RPG and I can see why the game has been popular enough to warrant multiple supplements, spin-offs and now a second edition. You could buy it today, start a campaign and have a fun time.
Fantasy Age’s main selling feature is its Stunt Die. Instead of rolling a d20 as in many RPGs, players roll 3d6 – two of one colour and the other, the Stunt die, of another colour. If the roll is a success and you roll doubles on any of the dice, you gain a number of Stunt Points equal to the value of the Stunt Die.
The game has dozens of possible stunts covering combat, social scenes and exploration. Each of the four classes, warrior, rogue, envoy and mage, have their own advanced stunts you gain as you level up.
So in theory, Fantasy Age offers dynamic, tactical gameplay, in which every player – and enemy – has access to a list of cool moves to spice things up.
However.
In practice, our group found most of the combat stunts to be some variation of just dealing more damage. Other stunts such as moving enemies were too situational to see much use. And our social and exploration encounters tend to be on the shorter side, so we didn’t get much use out of those stunts. Other tables’ mileage may vary.
Character creation is also a mixed bag. On one hand the game offers many class specializations and feats to choose from, from weapon styles to additional skills (called focuses.) It’s easy to create a wide variety of character archetypes.
On the other hand, the game has nine attributes and no fewer than 37 non-combat skills, not to mention another 15 weapon skills. I can imagine entire campaigns in which “etiquette” or “heraldry” or “calligraphy” never come up.
From asking around the Green Ronin Discord server, it seems like this is a legacy from the system’s origins as a spin-off of the Dragon Age computer game, and it’s meant to allow for concepts like a low-Fighting high-Strength ogre who misses often but hits like a truck when it does connect.
Which … sure. But a second edition is a great opportunity to re-visit core design elements and I don’t think backwards compatibility with first edition products is a good enough reason for not streamlining the system, verisimilitude be damned.
By comparison, Numenera and the Cypher System rules underpinning it have just as many – if not more – character abilities to choose from when creating your character, and they also come with an elegant mix of just three attributes.
13th Age offers high-powered, no frills combat coupled with One Unique Thing, Icon and background systems for filling in your character’s backstory.
And the elephant in the room, Dungeons and Dragons, has dozens and dozens of books worth of content for players and GMs that no game can match. (I’d say it’s borderline bloated with rules and character options at this point, but many players love that stuff.)
At best, Fantasy Age Second Edition is a light tactical game for people who love playing around with mechanics such as forced movement and measured area of effect spells. Even at its worst, it’s professional-grade homebrew you could plug into other RPGs. Adding the various Fantasy Age spells into a 5e game would be a particularly good fit, and the defeat conditions could easily be applied to any RPG. In fact, it almost feels like a stripped-down, alternate reality Dungeons and Dragons.
So there you have it. Fantasy Age is a good option for your next tabletop RPG – I just don’t think it’s your best.
Into the Fray 