Dariel Quiogue

Chronicles of the Drenai

Monday, October 19th, 2009

Chronicles of the Drenai is an RPG based on David Gemmell’s dark and gritty heroic fantasy novels.

In Chronicles of the Drenai you will play a character struggling to be a better person in a world that is cold, cruel and capricious. This is a game of desperate last stands, painful sacrifices for loyalty and honor, and overcoming your weaknesses to become worthy of legend.

The game is very rules-lite, with a system based on rolling d20’s vs. a weakness, or Passion, of your character in the spirit of Gemmell’s tales. For example, in combat you don’t test Strength or Dexterity, but roll against your character’s Fear (possibly with modifiers if you’re facing something really formidable). Freeform Traits may add bonus dice to your roll. You only need to beat the target number with one of your dice to succeed.

This PDF contains the basic rules for creating characters and running a game, plus brief descriptions of the Drenai world and its nations. This is a fan work made in homage to David Gemmell, and in no way meant to challenge the copyrights of the Gemmell estate.

Desperate last stands. Agonizing choices between two or more evils. Searing encounters with the worst in man. The fate of millions resting on a grim and scarred antihero. Valor and sacrifice in a dark, uncaring world, with only faith in a nebulous and rarely evident Source to guide your way. This is the world of David Gemmell’s gritty, pulse-pounding, dark yet uplifting series of heroic fantasy novels revolving around the unlikely heroes of the Drenai people. In this game, you will walk in the same troubled paths as Waylander and Druss, rising from an unknown or troubled past and into the halls of legend as you fight to save the Drenai.

Lost in Smaragdis

Sunday, May 1st, 2005

Lost in Smaragdis is a pulp-style science fiction adventure RPG inspired by the lostrace, lost-world type stories of authors like H. Rider Haggard, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, A. Merritt and Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Smaragdis, the Emerald World, is an alien yet earthlike planet inhabited by a collection of lost tribes and civilizations living in terror of dinosaurs and a tyrannical Conquistador kingdom. Scattered across Smaragdis are the relics of a vanished alien civilization – mysterious mind-gems that can grant strange powers but at the risk of madness, gangly robotic Demons, gigantic flying machines that can rain down lightning on command, and enigmatic monuments of stupendous scale that may hold the secrets of the cosmos. A portal in the Upper Amazon jungle can transport those who wander into it to Smaragdis, but if there are any portals leading back to Earth they have yet to be found.