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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Teflon Billy" data-source="post: 2011352" data-attributes="member: 264">Ahhh…Grim Tales. I was looking forward to this product a lot. “Low magic, high adventure” is how I would describe my attempts at DM’ing. I even liked the name; Grim Tales; it had the ring of exactly what I was trying to accomplish with my games. Grimness. Talespinning.I couldn’t wait to delve into a ruleset from a publisher whose previous work I was inordinately fond of, and that sounded like it was poised to deliver.I guess I wasn’t reading closely enough in the pre-release hype, because Grim Tales was not at all what I was expecting, and though this sounds like a perfect recipe for disappointment, in reality nothing could be further from the truth. Call it a lateral move. Grim tales impressed me a lot.I was hoping for a D20 treatment of something akin to Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser or Conan; a game where the PC’s aren’t basically pseudo-medieval Superheroes as they approach mid-to-high level, but rather have to fight tooth and nail for virtually their entire careers. Instead what I got was a D20 treatment of another perennial favorite of mine…GURPS. For at it’s heart Grim Tales is what D20 has needed for ages: a campaign toolkit (and it’s actually described as such right on the cover. I really do need to read more closely<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />). Is it generic? Yes and no. Like GURPS before it Grim Tales bills itself as a semi-generic system designed to (and I quote from GT’s introduction) “allow experienced GM’s to run exciting, low-magic, campaigns for any genre”. And like GURPS before it, its real value and utility comes from (and I quote from the same introduction) allowing “the GM to get ‘under the hood’ of his campaign and tweak the rules to his liking”.This is a product that people have been asking for ages: D20 broken down into its basic components, to be assembled as the GM sees fit.At first glance a lot of the ruleset for character generation is lifted from D20 Modern, (which is perfect for generic D20 as the classes are flavorless, based entirely on their chosen base statistic) as is the economic system (which I am not crazy about). Many of the Feats and Skills presented are taken from a variety of sources and are tweaked to the needs of Grim Tales.If this was the product in its entirety, I would have been impressed and given it a solid 3/5—but it would have been ano magic campaign toolkit in that case. Not low magic as it is billed.Luckily the authors have whipped up what I feel comfortable calling the best system for modeling playable low magic I have yet seen for D20.  Without giving too much away, Mr. Durbin’s system addresses most of the problems you see mentioned whenever a discussion of D&D’s poor handling of low magic is in full bloom: spell availability, lack of “mystique”, no repercussions for spell use. It’s phenomenally done not just because it addresses these problem, but addresses them and leaves a playable system behind.Too often “Low Magic” fixes for D20 result in Magic Using characters that no one would wish to play (My own house rules, alas, pretty obviously fall into this category  when compared to Grim Tales.There is a large section devoted to “Horror and Insanity” which seems a nice nod to Horror games and Cthulu in particular, A nicely done section on Vehicles, rules for Firearms, Creature Creation, in fact the more I read it, the more I am reminded of a D20 treatment of GURPS. As written—with a bit of GM Elbow Grease—I feel relatively certain that Grim Tales could adequately model most of the hobby’s favorite genres.But if future sourcebooks for Grim Tales match the quality and variety of the GURPS sourcebooks, we might just have the de facto “New D20 Core Rules” on our hands.</blockquote>

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