Spears & Spells - Core Rulebook

Welcome to Spears & Spells!

Spears & Spells is a streamlined tabletop roleplaying game designed to get you telling fantastic stories with your friends in no time. It's easy to play, easy to run, and suitable for any fantasy setting, from heroic to gritty. It's designed with the OSR (Old School Revival) in mind, evoking traits of the classic RPGs we grew up with.

Heroic Yet Simple

We wanted a game that was fast, simple, and transparent. Spears & Spells is designed to help the characters be heroes without needing a half-dozen rulebooks containing hundreds of pages of confusing rules. The math is balanced to be slightly in the characters’ favor, though it’s still pretty easy for them to die if they’re not careful.

Every Die is a d6

From initial stat generation to damage dice, nothing in Spears & Spells uses any die but a d6. Having a half dozen d6s handy is a good idea.

Tasks

To determine outcomes players roll dice based on their character stats.  These rolls are called Tasks. The Ref works together with the player to determine which stat governs the Task, though the Ref makes the final decision. You roll some six-sided dice, hoping the total is under that stat. If it is, you succeed!

Customized Characters

Spears & Spells is classless, and it uses levels. Characters choose Talents at creation and level-up. How you choose Talents lets you custom-tailor your character so they can do precisely what you want them to do.

Fail-Forward

Spears & Spells uses "fail-forward" techniques when a Task roll doesn't come up a success. Rather than failure stopping the game in its tracks, it complicates matters and makes the session more interesting!

What You Get

The Book: Spears & Spells is designed to be light on rules, heavy on fun. The whole book, including the introductory adventure, is only 64 pages long.

Starter Adventure: The book comes with an introductory fantasy adventure, complete with pre-generated characters. All you have to do is grab a handful of six-sided dice and some pencils! The adventure walks you through how the game works.

Form-Fillable Character Sheet: Pull it into your favorite PDF reader/editor and create a permanent record for your character.

Third-Party License: Once you've read and played Spears & Spells, you might want to create your own content for sale. The very last page is our Third-Party License that lets you do just that! The fine folks at Free League let us copy the MÖRK BORG license. 

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Who Are We? 

Kabouter Games is a pico-publisher of tabletop role-playing games and adventures, creators of Toxandria, the FIRST complete game released under Chaosium Inc's Basic Roleplaying OGL! 

Kabouter Games creates adventures, GM support materials, stuff for players, and more, all for a variety of RPG systems - click here or the logo for our DriveThruRPG store (opens in new window).

Chief Kabouter R P Davis is a veteran RPG freelancer who's written and edited for a passel of pico-publishers, as well as bigger names like Kobold Press, Cubicle 7, Loresmyth, Onyx Path, and Wizards of the Coast. It was only a matter of time before he started his own thing.