Game System

Hello, and welcome to the core rulebook of Forge of Power! I assume that if you’re reading this, you’re already familiar with tabletop RPGs, like Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, or Shadowrun. After years of playing these games, I found rules that I wanted to change, new mechanics I wanted to introduce, and interesting ideas I wanted to combine. The result was this system, Forge of Power, that takes all my favorite mechanics from across many systems and merges them together. I think the whole has become more than the sum of its parts.

Versatile Character Creation

Forge of Power tries to maximize the number of options available in character creation. Unlike D&D or Pathfinder, characters in Forge of Power do not choose a single class that determines what your character does. Instead, whenever a character levels up, they can choose a talent, a special ability that makes the character much stronger in one way. Talents are organized by theme into collections of related talents, called classes. Characters are free to mix and match talents from different classes, letting you pick the perfect combination of talents to realize your character’s theme.

To expand your options even further, classes have minor abilities called ribbons, which make characters more flavorful or thematic, without greatly affecting your combat power. Ribbons separate out combat strength from roleplaying abilities, making it so every character always has unique strengths to offer both in combat and in social interactions.

Tactical Combat

Like many other roleplaying games, Forge of Power puts a heavy emphasis on combat. The game rules try to make combat as interesting as possible for all characters. All characters, magical and martial, have access to the same number of powers. This means that the fighter will have just as many interesting options to use in combat as the wizard. A lot of effort has been spent trying to balance the various powers against each other. No strategy in combat should ever clearly be much stronger than another.

Setting

Forge of Power was designed around a medieval fantasy world, just like D&D or Pathfinder. Players can expect a setting where brave paladins fight against cunning devils, elven wizards duel against ancient dragons, and adventurers regularly delve into dungeons to slay monsters and recover hidden treasures. That said, the game rules never assume the game uses a specific setting, and groups can play this system in a universe of their choice. Forge of Power can be adapted to completely different settings with only minor modifications. Running a futuristic sci-fi game only requires changing the equipment list to add plasma guns, lightsabers, and spaceships. Running a realistic medieval game is as simple as banning all the “magical” classes.