While Apocalypse World was the starting line for Powered by the Apocalypse, Dungeon World was what got the ruleset to really take off. By adapting the rules of the perennially popular Dungeons and Dragons as well as showing gamers what it looked like when Apocalypse World was hacked, Dungeon World not only moved significantly more copies than Apocalypse World but also kickstarted the popularity of PbtA in general. Now, years later, Dungeon World’s somewhat inartful mushing of Apocalypse World and D&D together is looked upon less fondly, given years of innovation and expansion of the PbtA ruleset. When you combine that with the checkered behavior of one of its authors, Dungeon World is a game that has sent many of its fans looking for a replacement.

Oddly, straight-up fantasy has not seen a lot of entrants into PbtA. There is Fellowship, but that is designed around a specific Tolkienesque sort of story. There is The Sword, The Crown, and the Unspeakable Power, but while that plays to Game of Thrones and popular dark fantasy themes, actually playing the game demands engaging in a unique and quite adversarial experience. No, the sort of fantasy romp typified by D&D but also offered in games like Forbidden Lands, RuneQuest, and even GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, is not really present to the same degree in PbtA as it is in other places. Maybe it’s the OSR attracting the sort of small press hackers and designers who want to write fantasy, or maybe Dungeon World’s shadow is too long. Either way, there’s a new fantasy PbtA game in town.

Fantasy World is an ambitiously named PbtA fantasy game from Italian publisher MS Edizioni. Fantasy World aims straight at Dungeon World, with the designers completely willing to name that influence in the foreword. Between the name and the aim, the designers have a lot to live up to here. That said, I think they’ve got a decent shot at doing it. Fantasy World takes PbtA back to the basics, but then expands outward just the right amount to make a game that takes on the challenge of doing D&D-style gaming in PbtA from a very different angle.

Fantasy World describes itself as ‘dramatic fantasy’, but I think its strength is simpler than that: Fantasy World is the game that people think D&D is. It’s about personal and interpersonal drama, high stakes combat, and the dynamics of the party. It’s a game for people who want to save the kingdom, not count coins, and who think the character arc is more important than character advancement. By not actually saddling itself to any D&D mechanics but still employing the character class memes, I think Fantasy World could capture the hearts (and dice) of gamers who love the idea of D&D but for whom 5e isn’t really cutting it.

The Mechanics

The core mechanics of Fantasy World go all the way back in the PbtA handbook to Apocalypse World. There are four stats, Daring, Intense, Knowing, and Vigilant, which reduce the list from Apocalypse World but continue the trend of not having strictly mental or strictly physical stats. Stats have values from -1 to +3 which modify a 2d6 roll which is used for making Moves. The Basic Moves are mostly adapted from Apocalypse World (Look Around, Take a Risk, Read Someone), while a few specific ones come from Dungeon World (I’m thinking Journey specifically). Speaking of Dungeon World, there are D&D fingerprints elsewhere in the mechanics set, but nowhere more clearly than the playbooks. Every playbook ties itself to a D&D class in one way or another: Captain (Warlord), Knight (Paladin), Maker (Artificer), Occultist (Wizard/Sorcerer), Priest (Cleric), Scoundrel (Rogue), Troubadour (Bard), Veteran (Fighter), Wildcaller (Druid), and Wayfinder (Ranger) cover every archetype found in D&D these days as well as a couple that have been left by the wayside.There are fewer magical types than in D&D, but without a spell list to lean on, the differences between a wizard, sorcerer, or warlock are more likely covered within the spread of playbook Moves.

The design of each playbook also shows some inclination towards the D&D philosophy, if not exactly mechanics. Character choices are a hallmark of D&D, so the Fantasy World playbook elements aim to bridge the gap between narrow playbooks and broad classes at least a little. Each Fantasy World playbook has two starting moves and nine Growth moves, which you can choose as the character advances. That’s a big number; in contrast most Apocalypse World playbooks have six moves in total linked to them (complex playbooks like the Hardholder and Chopper get even fewer), meaning Fantasy World roughly doubles the number of choices. Considering that over your character’s career they can take between three and five of these nine Growth moves, there’s thousands of different ways to build up a playbook’s core moves before you even consider the options from other playbooks.

There are places where Fantasy World clearly strikes out on its own, and one of those is violence and combat. The intent of Fantasy World’s combat is to mix the high-stakes conflict of D&D with the messy, dangerous nature of violence in Apocalypse World, but the mode of doing so is a set of new rules. Instead of boiling everything down to a Harm clock, characters in Fantasy World have three Harm tracks: Temp, Serious, and Deadly. These three are mostly defined through fictional positioning, but the idea is that a player knows which kind of Harm is at stake prior to rolling. Each type of Harm has a number of potential effects, and if a character takes Harm they tick off an appropriate effect. One way stronger Harm gets nastier, though, is that the effects are cumulative; if your character takes serious Harm they tick a temp and a serious box, and if they take deadly Harm they tick one of all three types. If there are no boxes left to tick at one type, you go to the next most serious type. Most Temp effects can be “healed” in fiction: One of the Temp effects is ‘you lose footing’, so once your character is able to get back up and stand fast that effect is effectively unchecked. Serious and Deadly effects, though, require healing. Each effect requires a certain number of Healing Units (HU); interestingly Serious Harm requires 3 HU while Deadly Harm requires 1, implying that while Deadly Harm is more urgent it ultimately takes less to bring someone back from the brink than it does to cure their lingering wounds. Each effect can only receive 1 HU per Long Rest (a move for, well, long rests) and each Long Rest can only generate 1 HU per character, so healing is not a quick affair by any means. Additionally there are few if any quick healing effects or items in the game, so the consequences of violence will linger on in a way they simply don’t in D&D. 

While clearly originating in D&D tropes, Fantasy World embraces and rejects those tropes in roughly equal measure; lack of magical healing is but one example. Another significant one is Blood and Kin. Blood represents the fantasy “race” (though moving away from the term race is intentional and a good thing), allowing for a pretty wide potential range of creatures (albeit with no mechanical effects, so no flying pixies or prehensile lizardkin tails) so long as they’re “human format” (two legs, two arms, head on shoulders). Kin is culture, and while it is also just descriptive, it stands to repudiate the fantasy race monoculture of D&D. In all reality these two elements should be built out in session zero; with no preexisting options they serve more as placeholders for the diversity of species and cultures the group chooses to put in their game.

One other significant framing element is the Fellowship, and I particularly appreciate this one in comparison to D&D. The Fellowship is the sort of group your party is, and no matter which you pick the game establishes some norms like the fact that you’ve been working together for some time and the fact that, at least at the start, you all have similar goals. Instead of letting people mess around with “edgy loner” nonsense or trying to stick the landing on “you all meet in a tavern”, the game simply bypasses those options entirely. I’m here for it. The four Fellowship options help ground what sort of campaign you’ll be playing, and you’ll note that these are all fantasy campaigns that, while they’re generally playable in most games like D&D, require very different assumptions about the sort of story you’re telling and sort of play you’re engaging in. The options are broken into two broad groups, “Local” and “Wandering”. These two actually have slightly different rules, specifically in terms of how the first session goes. The two Local Fellowships are Shields and Knives, parties of town protectors and city criminals, respectively. The two Wandering Fellowships are Hearts and Coins, a group following one epic quest and a group traveling in search of work and wealth, respectively. You can see how all four of these conform to various fantasy tropes, and the Coins Fellowship is the one closest to a typical D&D party. That said, grounding this ahead of time (even ahead of character creation) helps to line up everybody’s expectations and send the campaign, built upon playing to find out, off in the right direction.

The Document

Fantasy World is written in a manner that I’ve found shared with most of the Italian RPGs I’ve read so far. The voice of the book sits outside a game context entirely; it never addresses characters and is rarely written from an in-game perspective, it instead addresses the players specifically, as if it is nothing more than a manual for playing the game contained within. This was a bit jarring in the context of Cowboy Bebop, as licensed games are more often guilty of going too far in the opposite direction and deploying a cloying in-universe narrator. In the sphere of PbtA games this sort of writing is more familiar, but this does mean the book dispenses with, say, the style-heavy writing of Apocalypse World. That’s not to say it dispenses with the authorial voice, though; if anything Fantasy World is the most intense game I’ve read in some time in terms of its rules, deploying “always” and “never” in a much higher frequency than any of its immediate peers. If this sort of authorial voice rubs you the wrong way in, say, Burning Wheel, it’s probably going to do the same here.

At the same time, the thing “always” and “never” have going for them is clarity, and that clarity makes Fantasy World a pretty solid PbtA teaching tool. Fantasy World is built to teach its rules ethos much like Root is, but whereas Root attempts to do it with more words, Fantasy World aims to do it with more rules. And I don’t mean mechanics, I mean rules. Here’s an example: In Apocalypse World, you’re told that when the MC can make a Move, you can choose how ‘hard’ a move or how ‘soft’ a move to make. ‘Hard’ and ‘soft’ are defined in the text; you’re given the idea that harder moves have harsher consequences, but there’s no “hardness” mechanic. In Fantasy World, the entire GM Move mechanic is given significantly more structure. Fantasy World has decided to rename GM Moves ‘Reactions’, acknowledging that the actual mechanical similarity between moves made by players and those made by the person running the game is rather small. Now while the moves/reactions themselves are very similar to those in Apocalypse World, there is a new piece of framing which comes with specific guidance. Every reaction in Fantasy World has an Open form, or a Closed form. Open and Closed represent one facet of the hard/soft scale that has particular importance in-game: Open reactions broadcast that something is about to happen and the character can react, while Closed reactions state that something has just happened and the consequences must now be dealt with.

‘Open Reactions’ and ‘Closed Reactions’ are terms of art to be sure, but they also illustrate another strength of Fantasy World, which is the examples. Fantasy World emulates Apocalypse World again by using some short, specific examples for each rule which show how it can work. In the case of Open and Closed Reactions there’s actually a table which runs down every GM Reaction and gives an Open version of the Reaction and a Closed version so you can see the difference. I think one thing I appreciate here is that the book has few long-form examples of play; all the example text is short and tied directly to the rule or concept being discussed. Long-form examples of play are usually wasted space unless there’s some effort made to illustrate what actions within that text are important. Similarly, bringing back examples of incorrect play from Apocalypse World is another boon for clarity.

Speaking of clarity, it is worth bringing up a few quirks of this game and its text. Fantasy World shares a trend with some of its Italian cousins of getting a little cute with game terminology. In Cowboy Bebop, the worst offender was naming the approaches of the game after genres of music, which was cool in the text but confusing in play. Here, Fantasy World isn’t pulling in new or unfamiliar words, they’re playing with existing terms in ways that straddle the line between clever and confusing. I’m thinking specifically about HP and XP in this case. If you’ve played D&D you know what HP and XP are, right? Well, that’s not what they are in Fantasy World. HP here stands for hardiness points, and is a small reserve of points you can use to negate or reduce the effects of harm you receive. It doesn’t work like hit points do, but it’s close enough that it falls on the ‘clever’ side of the equation. XP stands for ‘Expedience Point’, and here it’s so obvious someone wanted to make the pun. You gain XP the same ways you do in many PbtA games, through missing rolls and certain moves, but XP aren’t specifically for advancement. Instead, you can spend XP on activating Move abilities and gaining certain benefits on rolls, as well as spending them at the end of session for a Growth point, which is for advancement. I’m as always uncertain if using a common pool for advancement and in-game abilities is wise design, though here it’s mitigated by having other, larger ways to earn Growth every session, as well as having an XP cap which prevents you from hoarding points. Still, getting cute with the name is likely to provide a small psychological onus towards saving for Growth points which players may need to unlearn.

Overall, though, I’d call the document design a win. The layout is simple and readable, and uses color to guide your eyes through the text. The basic rules and structure of the game are covered first (yes!) before character options or Moves, and the explanations are clear (in some cases, clearer than they were in Apocalypse World). The index isn’t great, but the table of contents are, and the text uses headings and bold to good effect. While I wouldn’t call anything about Fantasy World striking or innovative in the manner of Mork Borg or Mothership, it doesn’t need to be, and hitting the basics correctly is more important than treading new ground when it comes to mass appeal.

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Fantasy World is not a broad game, no PbtA game is. What it is aiming for, though, is broad appeal, by seeking to emulate arguably the most popular RPG motif in existence, the rootless fantasy adventuring party. I do think Fantasy World has picked the right approach to this crowded market by trying to play to the strengths of PbtA, rather than mushing in D&D mechanics (done by Dungeon World of course, but also arguably by Root to not much better effect). Ultimately, I think that’s why it hews so closely to the Apocalypse World formula save a few key additions (combat and damage being the most significant one). In looking through the game, though, there’s one thread that seems to run through the entire thing. This game is written in response to the rest of fantasy gaming. Parts of the game are written directly in response to online discourse; both clarifications of rules and specific callouts reference debates that have previously unfolded on Twitter or Reddit. Key elements of the game are written in response to D&D, no doubt; the setting rule around “Gods are Silent”, the emphasis on violence being messy and unpredictable (in contrast to, I don’t know, the adventuring day), and many of the assumptions around good and evil (or lack thereof) are written seemingly in direct repudiation of poorly executed and inconsistent elements of that game like alignment and the mess of a pantheon. And of course, the entire game is written in response to Dungeon World, its popular but flawed ancestor. From what I can tell, the designers felt like they had something to prove.

I think they did a pretty good job. While a bit rough around the edges, Fantasy World marries the tropes of the D&D adventuring party to PbtA rules and “play to find out” spirit, and does it in a way I want to bring to the table. Like the other Italian RPGs we’ve reviewed here at Cannibal Halfling there are certainly idiosyncrasies to Fantasy World, but those are nestled in with an engaging ruleset that I think many groups could use to tell their adventure story effectively. By marrying success-biased rules adjudication with wicked Harm mechanics and the classic three-outcome dice, Fantasy World isn’t dark fantasy but it’s not just a power fantasy either. If you like D&D stories more than actually playing D&D, then I think I have a game recommendation for you.

Fantasy World is available on DriveThruRPG.

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