Shadow and Fae 2e

It’s a strange world out there, child. True, all is well and orderly behind the city walls–or so it usually seems–but out there beyond our gates, well, there’s no telling what you might find.

Why Shadow & Fae?

Shadow and Fae is a game of Fairy Tale characters—from lowly peasants to stone dwarves and abandoned changelings—exploring a dark and treacherous land.

The Essential Rules fit on a single page, and are built to support traditional fantasy gaming, as well as encourage and support roleplay through the "Hope" mechanic, a unified Save/Metacurrency system that encourages players to pursue their character's passions.

Rules: Familiar but Fresh

The basic mechanic of S&F 2e is a simple roll-high d20 mechanic. For players, the character sheet contains the core rules written in a small corner, so they always have them at their fingertips. 

Characters have 3 primary scores, and one new score called "Hope". 

Hope is the most unique mechanic of the game. When a character must roll a save, they roll a d20 under or equal to their Hope to succeed. However, PCs can also spend hope at a 1-to-1 cost to improve any die roll that character makes. Hope is regained by acting on Roleplay elements known as Passions, thus completing the triangle.

Classes: 20 "Tales" to Mix and Match

Players of Shadow and Fae have 20 different classes to play with, each of which can be interpreted in various ways. Classes are designed with choices in mind, not just numerical bonuses. In short, a character playing a Thief should feel noticeably different from a character playing a Knight Vengeant, Sorcerer, or Merchant.

Wide Compatibility

Almost any adventure written for the OSR will work straight out of the box. It is also compatible with almost all character classes written for the GLoG. Such as these.

Print Friendly

S&F 2e is 40  5.5*8.5 pages. By printing through Adobe Acrobat's "Booklet" feature, it fits on 10 pages front and back. My local library charged me $2 for a print copy.

Beautiful Print Copies - Coming Soon!

I am currently learning Affinity Publisher with the goal of putting together some really high-quality print copies. These will eventually be available via PoD from Lulu or a similar service. If you want to support the process, see the Sale Notes below!

Here's the "Essentials" page laid out as a teaser! I love the way Affinity works—almost half Photoshop, half publisher—and it makes it a breeze (after a few good tutorials) to put something like this together!

I'm also interested in releasing 2 additional Zines, a "Referee's Handbook" and a setting document, "Etesia". If you're interested, take a peak at the sale here: https://itch.io/s/120972/shadow-and-fae-2e-3-zine-fundraiser

Community Copies

My hope is to keep community copies permanently available for everyone, but for Itchfunding to work, the game has to have a sell price. If we somehow run out, please leave a comment and I'll add more.

If you do grab a community copy, my only request is that you come back and leave a rating or review once you read. Thanks!

Happy Gaming!

Design Notes

For those wondering, S&F 2e is a sort of "Final Draft" of several of my projects. It is my hope that the lessons I've learned by writing S&F 1e, Goblin Tales, MiniLOG, and a host of other projects have now culminated into something approachable, deep, and above all, fun.

Going forward, I'd love to start working on new adventures and tools for OSR gameplay. Let me know if you have requests in the comments!