Against The Fall of Night Quickstart Edition

Welcome, heroes, to Against the Fall of Night: Quickstart Edition!

The Against the Fall of Night Quickstart Edition contains everything you need to explore Against the Fall of Night.  With seven pre-generated characters, a short adventure, and all the rules necessary to create and play your own scenarios for characters of levels 1-3, it will arm you to stand up and fight for the light.

What is Against the Fall of Night?

Against the Fall of Night is a roleplaying system for fantasy adventures inspired by many other fantasy roleplaying systems of the past.  Against the Fall of Night (AFN) takes classic inspiration but combines it with innovative new twists on mechanics.  Combat in AFN is an exciting back-and-forth interaction of attack and defense techniques, where any blow that is not defended against might strike a major wound even against an armored hero.  This adds a sense of tension to combat that is lacking from HP-based games, where players can sit secure in their confidence that they have enough HP to soak the hit.  

In addition to adding tension, the attack, defensive, and magical techniques available to characters give them decisions to make in combat.  Characters have limited pools of attack points, defense points, and magic points, and must choose how to spend them.  In this way, AFN keeps combat turns from devolving into "I attack him, I guess" for players of fighter-type characters.  

Ok, so that's a lot about combat, but why are we fighting?

As you might guess from the title, characters in AFN are heroes who stand against Night.  In the world of AFN, Night is an existential force, the terror that lies beyond, the darkness from without, a force and a place that is not of our world, but that wants very badly to make our world like it.  Every day when the world shelters your view from the sun, that's not Night.  That's just an ordinary night.  Night is a longer cycle, when darkness creeps out from the places between shadows.  When silence rings out, clear as a bell.  When every mistake you have made, every fear you have, every dream you have been denied, rushes into your thoughts with crystal clarity.  These things are the first stirrings of a true Night.  Night is a slow corruption of the normal, a destruction of safety, a denial of predictability.  When you hear a strange noise at 3 am, it could be anything.  In the clear light of day, that was obviously just the house settling.  At 3 am, it could have been an intruder or a monster or an extradimensional rift.  These impressions are the leakage of true Night into any ordinary night.  In an ordinary night, it is a passing fear, pushed away and laughed at nervously later.  In true Night; who can say what fear might reveal, or what might pass through the darkness?

Night has fallen before, and it will fall again.  Every time, the Dawn has come, its clear light banishing the darkness which does not belong.  By default, an AFN campaign is set at Sunset, when the darkness is just beginning.  Will your heroes be able to defend civilization against the encroaching Night, and protect it long enough for Dawn to end this cursed Night?  Will Night find a way to banish the light of hope, and prevent the Dawn from ever arriving?  Find out, with Against the Fall of Night!

If you like the Against the Fall of Night Quickstart Edition, make sure you're set up to receive emails about products from drivethrurpg, to watch for future news about AFN!