Ziggurat

Earthquakes! Famine! Raiders! Bandits!

The world is coming to an end and you have the misfortune of being caught up in the collapse! All of the ancient empires the world have known have come to nothing! All of the royal bloodlines severed, their cities shattered and people scattered. Canals overflow and earthquakes wrack the land. Crops wither in the fields. Are the days getting shorter?

Most haven’t survived.
But you did.

(So far.)

Inspired by Knave, Maze Rats, Runecairn, DURF, and a dozen other cool OSR and adjacent minimalist games that I'll add to the list when I can remember them. Go into ancient tombs with your broad bronze axes and sturdy spears and recover the treasure contained therein- and then?

Play as a shapeshifting Magus, a berserking or protecting Warrior, one of the three Rogue sub-classes, or one of the other classes. You are defined less by your class than by your items and your play in-game. Character creation takes about five minutes and involves choosing a class, then a class feature, and then rolling for a couple of items. Use your favorite minimalist spell lists and monster bestiaries and go out and play!

Still to come:

• Feats/advancement options
• Domain / faction play

Changelog:

2/23: Changed minimum price to $2.00. Added 100 community copies.

1/19: Updated the 'full art' version with the updated game text. Changed resolution mechanic slightly, reworked most of the art. More editing. The game text is now 15 pages! With some whitespace due to formatting and TBD text detailing sub mechanics or other 'minigames.'

12/30: Inspired by #damnRPGjam, I managed to put up the full edition of the basic rules of the game. Make a character, play through your favorite dungeons or randomly generate the dungeon as you're playing it. Generate the overland terrain hexes and fight through some random tables. Simple combat rules and conditions you can inflict on your party. Lots of tables for homelands, background, and 'empire anchors' for the various fallen empires in the background of the implied setting. The HTML exported version looks slightly nicer than the raw text but not as nice as the full-art version that is TBD.

12/24: Transferred Ziggurat's game text into markdown (inspired by OZR) because I forgot to put the .afpub on my laptop and I am away from home. Maybe it will be useful to somebody. ALSO: Added Luck attribute to let you choose when to get advantage (and also help in not dying). Made dying clearer, added explicit death save for the Downed condition, made 'burning' Loot hopefully easier to understand.

12/15- further editing. Warriors and Rangers get a level 1 boon to make them slightly tougher than other classes. Edited wording on buying stuff + loot and on resting section. Making a character now fits on one spread start to finish.

Update 12/14- changed around sections, removed redundancy. Finished weapons section, moved into character generation. Added level and filler text / random chart about loot spending. Still unfinished. artless version uses old text (will update later), etc