Sertorius: Our Fantasy RPG

We accomplished a lot of work on Sertorius this week. After months of talk and taking notes we have begun writing the rulebook for our first big fantasy roleplaying game (we already made a small fantasy game when we designed Slayers).

Everything is still in an early stage, but here is what we can say right now:

It is about very powerful beings called Sertori, capable of wielding magic because they were born with a gift. All player characters are assumed to be Sertori because they are tougher than the normal population. However we have options for playing mundane people.

The setting is going to be well developed. We put a good deal of thought and time into establishing the basics of the setting before moving onto mechanical considerations. It is a world where gods walk the earth and magic is a new source of power.

There is a large list of playable races: dwarves, elves, humans, halflings, orcs, ogres, kobolds, and more. The standard races are familiar but new at the same time. We didn't just want to rehash the orcs or elves, but we also didn't want to veer so far away from the familiar that they became unrecognizeable. In our setting elves may be long lived but warlike for example. Orcs may be martial but civilized.

This is a network system game, in many ways similar to Servants of Gaius. The skills from SOG all carried over smoothly (with one or two exceptions). But spells change everything. Characters all have spells and a number of other attributes related to their use.

The spell system is rather interesting. It isn't vancian but it isn't point based either. You can cast the same spell as much as you want all day. But there are built in checks and balances for fully unleashing a spell's potential.

The rulebook will be big: about 190 pages or so. It will contain character creation, spells, combat rules, monsters, world information, etc.

Our aim is to have a playtest worthy character sheet and spell list by the end of the month. Then we intend to playtest the game into the ground. Anyone interested should contact us (as always) at: BedrockBrendan@gmail.com