I special ordered Fantasy Craft through my FLGS. In light of my current economic downturn, I have been holding off on purchasing a lot of RPG books I don't intend to actually use in a game for a while. However, I decided to make the plunge for Fantasy Craft. For one thing, it is an underexposed game that would probably appeal to a lot of people who have never heard of it, so I feel like I should support the publisher now, when they can appreciate it, rather than later, when the book has descended into the doldrums of slow-moving RPG stock. I anticipate it will be a good read. Also, it has a generous OGC declaration, something I feel should be vigorously supported as the RPG industry transitions into a number of different business channels.

So why Fantasy Craft? Probably my strongest motivation is to see how well it would do for a baroque fantasy game, in the vein of Talislanta, the Dying Earth, or high fantastic Britain. The emphasis on skills and non-combat capabilities is a draw, too. Although I really like Pathfinder, some of my campaign ideas have been relegated to being possible GURPS or Hero projects due to their lack of hacking-and-looting.

From a creator standpoint, Fantasy Craft seems to represent a distinct and possibly interesting variation of the 3e engine that retains a high level of interface compatability with other 3e games, while running on a very different kind of fuel. If, indeed, it looks like a good system for running domains, playing out intrigue, and slaying giant monsters, in addition to the usual hack-and-slash and looting, I may adopt it for my first published fantasy setting, a non-traditional, baroque fantasy world with a strong amount of emphasis on culture, social station, and weird magic. As an additional benefit, I think it will be an important publishing resource going forward, as the creators seemed to have come up with some good innovcations that could be used in whole or in part in other projects.

I am a little skeptical of Fantasy Craft as the basis for a realistical game, given some of its fairly artificial constraints, but that will be something I can only discover by reading and testing.

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