This is a fantastic system. It's simplicity makes it quick and elegant at the table. The game that my group and I tried had us howling in excitement more than once as crit after crit exploded. Dreaming up spells and miracles on the fly make for some creative use of these powers. If I could give it 10 stars I would! Definately going to become my go-to game from here on out. Thanks DM Scotty for this masterpiece!

This is a fantastic game! It's going into my travel bag from now on. The fact that you can run the whole thing with easy to find D6s, and character creation is fast and easy, makes it a no-brainer for travel and/or quick games.

Plus, I'm totally stealing some core concepts for my D20 home brew.

A worthwhile purchase.

Here's a snapshot of what you get: 400 pages core rulebook - includes a streamlined form of d20; 5 settings (fantasy, sci-fi, weird west, street-level supers, and prehistoric survival); GM guidance that is actually useful at the table; multi-genre bestiary; advanced magic systems and character devlopment; and tables to randomize NPC and adventure creation, and provide extra goodies/loot for players to find and acquire. 160 pages collected adventures - 19 adventures (between 4 and 12 pages each) give hearty tastes of danger across multiple genres. 70 pages collected print-n-play black & white miniatures - 236 unique minis (not including those that are just different sizes) to print, cut, and fold. Around 120 of them appear suitable for use as PCs, and they still manage to cover each creature in the bestiary section of the core rules. A character sheet in both portrait and landscape formats.

A glorious mess. That is how the author introduces this book. As a compilation, I get that wrangling and presenting game ideas cohesively can be challenging, but I feel that more emphasis should be placed on glorious than mess when it comes to ICRPG. The brief introduction covers how this book came to be, the primary content covered, and what's needed for play.

The next 15 or so pages cover the rules of the game. It is a tight affair--the mechanics are simple, with an emphasis on rulings over rules. "Create rather than seek" is the encouraged mindset. Like the pirate code, these rules are more like guidelines. Movement is simplified, with three important distances: Near (arm's reach), close (get there as part of your action), and far (get there as your action). Actions involve a player rolling a d20 plus modifiers to try to meet or beat the target number. The target number is set at the scene level instead of at the individual level, and situationally can be modified to be Hard (the target number is three higher-a 12 becomes a 15) or Easy (the target number is three lower-a 12 becomes a 9). Rolling high enough means either immediate success or the application of effort.

Effort is damage in combat, but can be also applied to any task that can be measured on a gradient or that takes time to accomplish. Examples of effort include: scaling walls, picking complicated locks, researching spells, mapping ruins, hacking a ship's computer, and plotting a course through an asteroid field. Effort is tracked as one heart equals 10 effort or hit points. Players only start with a single heart of health, and additional hearts are difficult to attain. Combat can quickly become quite deadly!

Actual distances are less important for this game, so there is no counting squares or trying to optimize movement. Like many board games, momentum is maintained by taking actions in turns, clockwise around the table. Where you sit can make a huge difference when attempting to save a fellow PC from certain doom.

And you get to try it out immediately! After covering the basic mechanics, there is a short (four small scenes) micro adventure to get you rolling dice and trying out the mechanics before you even get to character creation.

Character creation is quick, too. Around fifty pages are used to explore character creation. The basics are these: Pick an image of what you want to play (to maintain your vision while statting up the character), then assign a handful of points between two types of stats (attributes and effort types, where the number is the actual bonus--no need to derive bonuses from stats), select a form (what you are--modifies starting attributes) and type (what you do--each class-like type presents a choice between three rule-bending specialties), and pick some gear.

For example, the warrior type chooses between killing hurt opponents faster, protecting teammates and tanking it up, or hit harder when you get hit; the mage type chooses between casting like a wizard, sorcerer, or warlock; the priest type covers clerics (healing), druids (elemental/nature magic), and monks (chi-like effects).

Creating characters in the different genres may include the additional trivial step of selecting intrinsic powers, starting spells, or some other special ability, but it remains fast. Advancement is done at milestones, and players pick from the list of milestone rewards assigned to each type. An advanced heroes section details a number of thematic milestone paths that provide additional tiered milestone rewards, where a player must pick up at least two milestone rewards from the current tier before they can select one from the next tier. Gear also plays a large role in advancement and character development, with many abilities are tied to gear. This means that changing profession can often be as simple as swapping out your gear with different loot.

Next is the positively helpful GM section. After a few encouraging paragraphs covering the responsibilities of the GM, you get right into practical advice. This section covers starting adventures based on player goals, knowing what information is important to track, keeping prep efficient, utilizing cliffhangers, tuning challenges, story and encounter architecture that keeps the design focused on novelty and fun, and general adventure building guidelines.

As difficulty is scene-based, there are ten distinct room (or scene) designs (with default difficulties already figured) that use positive and negative space and door positioning to encourage specific types of encounters. It is all generally useful and practical advice, applicable to encounter design for most RPGs, especially if viewed figuratively as well as literally. In fact, there's even a page on importing some of ICRPG's mechanics into other games.

The Monsters section comes next. Two-to-a-page, you get 48 example foes of varying difficulty and complexity that cover much of what one might expect in fantasy and sci-fi games. The stat blocks are incredibly simple, but often incorporate special rules or wrote behaviors for the players to figure out at the table. The bestiary is followed by guidelines on how to make your own monsters, and provides some fun inspiration to get you started. Finally, Durathrax (a world-shaking dragon of enormous proportions) is written up as a campaign-ending threat to really drive home that nothing is off the table.

Worlds outlines the five included settings. More than simple gazetteers, each setting is given a high-level overview, followed by series of adventure sparks-never complete adventures, but brief morsels to tempt the players to take an active role in the setting.

Alfheim is 45 pages of fantasy, with a fun mix of the various sub-genres to provide what the author calls a "complex fabric of flavors." Many of the Tolkienesque cultures have been given wrinkles. For example, elves are trying to take over the world through access to four colossal constructs. Each land is given a write-up that includes environmental modifiers to travel, specific threats, peculiar places of interest, important people to meet, and dungeons worth delving (each with accompanying adventure sparks).

Warp Shell is 20 pages of episodic sci-fi adventure. Instead of mapping out planets (or galaxies), this setting provides a common background where a sentient ship (called a Warp Shell) seeks out trouble for the players to handle. Sometimes this means stopping genocidal empire of artificial intelligences that threatens extinction of all organic life, other times it might be chasing a corrupt Warp Shell, or helping a reptilian race renew their honorable warrior culture. With random tables for "planet-of-the-week" style adventures and specific rules for fleet combat, there's a lot of content packed into a few pages.

The next 20 pages covers Ghost Mountain, a unique take on Purgatory. Specifically, a spirit-heavy wild west. You're dead, but not quite DEAD-dead. Good deeds push back sunset, which is good because if the sun sets, everybody here goes straight to Hell. Collect souls to participate in a daily high-stakes poker match with the Devil. Win and you reset the day, freeing the bargained souls from Purgatory; lose and everybody (you guessed it) goes straight to Hell. PCs can be tempted to exchange souls for milestone rewards, the paying unpayable debts, or healing negative conditions. While there are no new life forms (everybody here is-or was-human) there are new types, new gear, and new rules to give the game a distinctive Western flavor.

Vigilante City follows with 40 pages of city-scale supers. Mutant powers are just cropping up, centered on the now-overwhelmed urban locale of Grey Heights. The city is divided into districts, with each district given 6 points of interest/adventure sparks. Players get to respond to assorted crises, natural (like blackouts, fires, and floods) and artificial (like giant robots, mutant beasts, ninja, radiation leaks, and of course, superpowered menaces), randomly generated from handy charts. Modifications to character creation (extra points and the introduction of powers) and rules tweaks (such as the good/evil vigilante points to track morality, stun points to fuel powers, properties for passive character adjustments, and weaknesses) serve to reinforce a comic book flavor. The villains are varied and delightful, and a few random rolls gets you a basic plot with twists for a night of superheroic adventure. The section ends with some supers-specific GM guidance to encourage the right atmosphere.

Last of the Worlds, Blood and Snow is 32 pages of prehistoric tribal adventure. When storms and icy crevasses provide as much danger as sabertoothed cats, survival is always a struggle. This setting provides specific rules and tables for hunting, foraging, trekking across hazardous terrain, seeking (or building) shelter, and otherwise surviving. Unlike typical fantasy settings, Blood and Snow embraces the rather harsh realism (or at least verisimilitude) of life in a frozen wasteland. And it is expected to get worse. The PCs seek a legendary relic rumored to have the power to stop the approaching cataclysmic maelstrom from decimating the last of the ancient ancestors of the human race.

After the five Worlds, there is a 54 page section on enhancing Magic in the game. This is a considerable overhaul to the system provided in the basic rules, and feels designed to let players really explore the mysteries of the arcane. From mix-and-match spell creation to wizard towers, magic-focused campaigns are well supported in this section. Character creation gets a small boost, with origin stories, destinies, and magic-themed. Cross realms, amplify existing spells, and generally make magic a meaningful part of a campaign.

Finally, there are a bunch of tables compiled at the back of the book for easy reference. With a few dice rolls, you can create quests, NPCs, wandering monster encounters, and the treasure in a monster's lair (for however you want to define "monster" and "lair.")

The core book is comprehensive, yet condensed. There is lots of content without feeling unwieldy. There is support for multiple genres, and each World feels fresh and exciting, but the basics are easy enough to keep in your head.

That's not all you get, either.

Here's the list of adventures included in the ICRPG Adventures PDF, with basic synopses: Last Flight of the Red Sword (9 pgs.) - Warp Shell adventure about an infamous pirate ship (the Red Sword) that is now derelict. It's an exploratory mystery that escalates quickly. Doomvault (8 pgs.) - Alfheim adventure about a dungeon beneath the city of Norburg. The fate of three kings rests in stopping cultists from completing their ritual to open a gateway to the nether realm of Ogdru. Speed Kills (8 pgs.) - Warp Shell adventure about dangerous racing and...murderous vehicles? A touch of restless dead is combined with a chance to race through the Underworld. Eyes of Sett (8 pgs.) - Alfheim adventure about delving into an ancient ruin to purify a desert spring and stop an awakening evil. Beneath the Door (11 pgs.) - A nonlinear adventure of cosmic horror (a la Lovecraft), with fragile human classes/types to play as instead the typical heroic fare. Explore the grounds of Arden Manor and discover its terrible secret. Planet Killer (14 pgs.) - Like Rogue One and the end of A New Hope, this is a two-team, two-part Warp Shell adventure involving the ultimate sacrifice of one team during the countdown of a planet's destruction, and depending on what the first team manages to accomplish before their demise, a chance for the second team to avoid a similar fate. Mercury Dale (11 pgs.) - A Warp Shell adventure involving a starship under siege, a supercomputer mainframe, jumping across space and time, fungal pirate invaders, and saving the universe from the Devourer. Blackbird (5 pgs.) - Alfheim adventure that involves getting catapulted by dwarves at a massive airship for a fun boss fight along the ship's exterior. The Heckoon Carapace (10 pgs.) - Alfheim adventure about a nigh-unstoppable crab-like kaiju as it returns to the sea, the dungeons within, symbiotes, and the cult guiding this titan through populated lands. Into the Sunset (12 pgs.) - Ghost Mountain adventure that starts with a holdup, then spirals out of control. There's a whole town enamored with a single woman, flash floods, a bunch of explosives, and a hellish dungeon crawl that may end with all of Ghost Mountain falling into oblivion. Devious Dimensions (8 pgs.) - A Magic adventure that serves as an excuse to realm hop. Chase a wizard through portals and prevent them from freeing the prisoners of Splinter. Red Fang (6 pgs.) - Alfheim adventure involving Dwarven blood magic, tentacled undead, and the return of an enemy that threatens all Alfheim. Orvald's Tower (5 pgs.) - Alfheim or Magic adventure involving the death of a wizard and a race for survival. Short and sweet. The Relics of Odium (19 pgs.) - Alfheim adventure where the players seek magic relics to confront Odium, a titanic dungeon-creature. The players modify what the magic relics do based on the special gem socketed into a given relic. Collect, mix, and match the 8 relics and 5 gems to taste, then challenge Odium in an epic showdown. Crossroads (4 pgs.) - A single "room" Alfheim adventure involving the overthrow of the city guard in an uprising against an evil elven king. Toss in some changelings and things quickly get out of hand. Minotaur Bridge (4 pgs.) - A single "room" Alfheim adventure involving the perilous crossing of a well-defended bridge. How bad are those crosswinds anyway? The Myre Miners (4 pgs.) - A single "room" Alfheim adventure involving a haunted abbey and the rescue of dwarven miners who may not ant to be rescued. Hairpin Gate (4 pgs.) - A stealthy single "room" Alfheim adventure involving gnomish steampunk power armor, a hive of giant insects, and fungal warriors. Mechs and Myconids (4 pgs.) - Random tables to expand Hairpin Gate.

These extra adventures provide added value to the core rules, and are not included in the printed book; some of the adventures feature extra mechanics, and most include some kind of map and adversary write-ups. Coupled with the print-and-play minis, Index Card RPG is truly an all-in-one offering.

But how does it play? It is fast. Fast to learn, fast to play, and occasionally fast to die. (One heart means a couple hits--or a single crit--is likely to drop even an experienced PC.) Make no mistake, the "do-it-yourself" attitude that permeates this game means there are not always discrete answers to every problem; you may find instruction to "work it out with the player" to be an unacceptable response. Some assembly is required to cater to your particular table. Like the index cards of its namesake, I love the modular nature of the rules, and am quite fond of scene-based difficulty in particular. You can generate anticipation and dread by slowly increasing the target number, and regulate drama by making larger jumps. Like the musical cue signaling a boss battle, raising stakes with the significant shift of a single number is simple and efficient.

I've run a number of sessions of Alfheim and Warp Shell, and am excited to try out each of the other settings. It is my favorite iteration of the d20 system, and I keep coming back to it as a wellspring of inspiration and gaming goodness.

Index Card RPG perfectly encapsulates the spirit and the experience of old-school tabletop roleplaying games, delivered with consistent, intuitive, modern mechanics that are easy to learn and teach to others. It’s a game that is built for gamemasters from the ground up, providing all the tools and the inspiration one ever needs for unique, personalized, original worldbuilding and DIY adventure settings in any time, place, or genre. ICRPG always provides a way forward, and with its universality and hack-friendly, plug-in game mechanics, it provides the most tabletop fun you’re going to find in 400 pages. The art throughout the book is evocative and inspiring. No matter what your level of experience is with RPGs, this book has something valuable to offer to you. Read it and see for yourself.

Not way could I resist buying this after participating in a handful of session at conventions. Truly a master stroke in mayhem and marvelous adventuring. A few of my players have bought, read and LOVE it! Rabble Rousers United! Thank you DM Scotty for sharing this with all of us.

I bought a copy of this based purely on my liking of the author's YouTube channel. I intended to put it on the shelf with all my Runehammer books. I tend to play OSE and kind of stick with that but I wanted to support both Scotty and Hankerin. Then I watched Dave Thaumavore's review of it and decided to give it a try with an old RPG buddy and run a solo game. I don't think I could have had a better time! It worked splendidly! Super fast, minimal rules breaks and a game that is able to adapt on the fly! I absolutely love this game. It works extremely well for a more narratively driven game with minimal rules interference. I printed a really rudimentary copy of the bare minimum rules needed to run. Gave it to my friend and just used the PDF to run it. I CANNOT wait for my physical copies. Highly recommend.

Simple to the point system with a supprising amount of depth. Extremely refreshing in comparison with 5e / Pathfinder. Im a relatively new dm (7 months experience) and find this much easier to run then other systems. The dm section is also very handy.

I often struggle with teaching new players 5e / Pathfinder and find that they get so hung up on the rules, the story/gameplay gets slowed down. Have run this at the table once and has sped things up significantly. Players are loving it and are suggesting switching over for our main campaign.

I have seen some concerns about long term campaign play and i personally think it would work fine for me as story trumps mechanical progression at my table everytime. The system still has enough meat to it to keep people interested in my opinion.

Great buy, i have the hardback on the way so cannot comment on that yet.

D6 pool systems and aspect and free form magic systems are in fashion right now. EZD6 has the typical issues of those.

The difficulty of a roll can be both regulated by changing the target number or by adding boon/banes (extra rolls). Even if the former is favored it is not always clear which one to use and sometimes it is advised one or the other, without considering probabilities. In a section, the author even suggests using the critical exploding system.

When creating a character, Aspects may easily overlap with inclinations or even classes. Magic also requires tuning spell effects, number of dice, etc. It is not a system for new players, much less new DMs. There are two meta-currencies to track, karma and hero dice. Each with its own particular rules and a magic variant, spellburn.

Finally combat is not simpler or faster than basic d&d. Both the attacker and receiver have to do one roll (with numbers that vary depending on class and monster) so we are at the same or more complexity. The author even acknowledges this by making combat asymmetrical, monsters don't roll for defense/armor. Instead the DM just adds strike/wounds for harder foes. This is quite a mental overhead for a system promoted as simple.

Playing this game requires extensive experience with d&d and even narrative systems. Something the author does not see probably because of his own expertise, but the book fails to explain many things clearly.

I have played in several games over the years at conventions with Scotty while he was developing the EZD6 System. I have played a nonverbal alien in a sci-fi setting, a vampire hunter in a near future setting, a nun with a gun in a Lost World type setting, a ex con in a horror setting, and a lowly fighter in a dungeon crawl. I had a blast in every one and the system was easily learned and highly adaptable. If I were start a new campaign or run a quick one shot at a con, I would use this system regardless of the setting.

I have 42 years in the hobby. I bought this on the reccomendation of PDM. I am so happy I did. Already played it with my kids, we all love it. Lovely stuff. Well done.

Awesome system to teach beginners and children- Thank You GM Scotty!

Great game that's highly adaptable to any genre of play. Physically the book looks great, Hankerin's design skills and Sean Bova's art are evocative and on point, making picking up the book a pleasure.

The truly great thing about the system, though, is that it allows Scotty's personality to shine through. Scotty understands the importance of being his player's greatest "cheerleader" and this is reflected in a game system that, while not overly easy on players, let's them have meaningful moments in the spotlight. The game emphasizes thrilling combat, role-play, puzzle solving. Its an accessible system that can be readily picked up for the aspiring DM and taught to new players. It also works well for groups ranging from 2-8 players (something more technical systems struggle with).

Really high quality hardcover, and an awesome system. DM Scotty + Runehammer is a dream team, and the system obviously reflects years of experience at the table! An easy recommendation!

Very nice hardcover. This is an extremely simple yet elegant system designed to keep the story flowing. It's written with fun in mind but still allows for strategic decision-making, specifically with the magic and karma systems. It feels outrageously easy to adapt any other system modules in a matter of minutes and get on to the business of role-playing. Can't wait to "Rabble Rouse" my first game.

As a DM with attention deficit disorder, the simple monster stats are great. It allows me to quickly choose a template and then "stat it out" using boons, resistances and tactics that fits. I will minion the shit out of my players: Guerilla shoot/n/scoot minions? Check! 15 minions stacked as a mecha with a lieutenant acting as the head? Check!