It all started with the Fantasy Craft preview PDF. While I was paging through it, my girlfriend was sitting next to me, and when we reached the section about Drakes, she exclaimed: “We HAVE to play this!” To understand this, you have to know that she absolutely loves dragons and everything somewhat resembling dragons. When we tried out D&D 4th Edition, she of course played a Dragonkin character. Who would have guessed. 😉

Then I started reading a few previews and messages on Twitter praising the game, so I finally gave in, put down some hard earned cash and got a copy of Fantasy Craft. Almost $30 is quite hefty for a PDF, but it looked like it might be worth it. While I was leafing through it, I was stunned. Wow, it’s perhaps not as good looking as some other books out there, although the cover art is mega cool, but I very much like what I’ve seen so far.

So, what is Fantasy Craft anyway? It’s Crafty Games’ take on fantasy role playing using the d20 system. Instead of creating a game that is more or less compatible to D&D 3.5 (like Pathfinder), they created an almost completely different game. Combat has been streamlined (Attacks of Opportunity are gone for example), there are a lot of cool new character classes and races, they came up with a new way to create NPCs and monsters, they totally overhauled feats and the magic system relies on magic points and skills. Wow! Of course I haven’t been able to read all 400 pages of rules, yet, but I am officially impressed. More than once I thought: “That’s how D&D 4th Edition should have looked like”.

Currently the easiest way to get your hands on a copy of Fantasy Craft is to buy it from RPGNow, although I’ve heard you can also get printed copies at your local shops (in the US at least). I haven’t spotted it on Amazon, yet.