TL;DR: Advanced Fighting Fantasy (AFF 2e) assumes that players are familiar with tabletop roleplaying games, or the Fighting Fantasy books. The rules are written in a very British conversational style and is not a game of hard and fast rules. AFF 2e is about a traditional fantasy adventuring party, collaborating to achieve a shared goal in an adventure or a campaign.
After procrastinating for many years, I decided to invest heavily into Advanced Fighting Fantasy 2nd edition. I wanted a simple, robust and hackable rules-lite system, a large bestiary and well supported by official adventures, that can be used for solo play, introduce novices into our hobby and support long campaigns. I also prefer systems which support a bell curve, like the 2d6 task resolution used by AFF 2e, providing swingy dice rolls.
AFF 2e offers only four characteristics, SKILL, LUCK, STAMINA. A fourth characteristic, MAGIC, is only for those who are magically inclined. SKILL represents the general ability of the character to do things and is enhanced by special skills. STAMINA represents health, the physical punishment a character can take, and is also used by Sorcerers to power their spells. LUCK is used for situations outside of the SKILL characteristic, such as testing for fear, resisting magic, avoiding traps, and stumbling over clues. These characteristics are supported by special skills and talents to uniquely define a character.
The mechanical simplicity of AFF 2e would be an advantage for solo gaming, or GM-less play with an oracle, but I am interested in a dungeon, city, wilderness, naval, swashbuckling medieval to renaissance low magic fantasy campaign. AFF 2e requires a GM to play (called a “Director”), and depending on the output of our group brainstorm, we’ll either use one of the official campaigns, do a point crawl campaign, or a cooperative hex crawl using the random generators and other resources found in the AFF 2e system. To cover all these options, I decided to purchase the following books:
Deluxe Edition – includes the AFF 2e rules, Out of the Pit (250 monsters) and the Titan official setting. The AFF 2e rules cover character creations, archetypes, special skills, talents, social actions, encumbrance, perception, hazards, combat, minor magic, wizardry, sorcery, a small selection of monsters, and treasures and a dungeon adventure. The Titan setting has aspects of Stormbringer, Conan and Lord of the Rings with detailed history, continents, major factions, the underwater kingdoms, major points of interests, personas, a calendar, coinage, entertainment, and food. One can easily run a dungeon delving campaign with minimal preparation just using the Deluxe book which has a dungeon generator, adventure hooks and optional rules. The Titan setting also provides travel rules to get the party to those dungeons. Between travel, food, board, entertainment, magic shops and taxes, there are lots of opportunities to keep the party poor, and hungry for more adventures and loot.
Heroes Companion – includes rules for the hirelings, dominions, mass battles, and afflictions (i.e., Lycanthropy). This also includes a simple system for creating running wilderness campaigns, including random tables for terrain generation, encounters, weather, resource management, and options for heroes and magical styles. The Hero companion and Deluxe rules combined would allow Wilderness and Dungeon areas to be pre-built together, or randomly determined during campaign play.
Blacksand – includes rules for black powder weapons, naval sorcery, sailing, seafaring, and naval combat. Rules for settlement generation (hamlet to large city) and detailed descriptions, organisations and personas for the infamous port of Blacksand, perfect for a Lankhmar style campaign. The details of how the “legal system” operates in Port Blacksand are very characterful, and funny for those not on the receiving end of judgement. Blacksand combined with the Deluxe rules and Heroes Companion would provide a GM with the dungeon, wilderness, and settlement generators, allowing minimal preparation, or cooperative build on the fly, hex crawl campaign.
Combat Companion – includes expanded mounted combat rules, monster templates, new equipment, martial arts, and alternative rules for combat including critical and fumble tables. Finally, a checklist to record options chosen for campaign play. It also supports creating less or more powerful characters. My Evil GM persona believes this could provide a fun campaign start, where each player has 4-5 civilians, defending their village from a band of goblins, and choosing a survivor to start their adventuring career.
Beyond the Pit - This is another 250 monster, treasure, and random encounter tables. Note that this book, Out of the Pit and Return to the Pit all have an A-Z monster index, allowing quick access during a game session.
Return to the Pit – another 250 monsters, treasure, and encounter tables. It also has rules for Familiars, named days of the week, Monster lore and archetype characters (i.e., a Beastmaster). Lastly, it has a consolidated, searchable alphabetical index of every monster in the three “Pit” books, by page number.
With these books, one could run a lifetime of fantasy campaigns without needing anything else. AFF 2e would also be suitable for solo or cooperative play using the wilderness, settlement, and dungeon generators in the books. The Encyclopedia of Arcana Vol 1 book was not purchased at this stage, because my preference is to keep a campaign low magic, with players receiving consumables, access to rare knowledge and growing reputations which in turn Evil GM thoughts will attract the attention of more powerful antagonists…
There are good, evil and neutral gods present in the Titan setting, but it is a perilous enough place that all characters are implicitly good, as the evil gods seek the utter destruction of the known world, and this simplifies party composition and the reason for adventuring together, allowing novices to concentrate on the action. However, local laws would still need to be obeyed, and murder hobo characters defying the law can be quickly dealt with in-game by using the court system found in Blacksand.
While AFF 2e has rules for social standing, there are no rules for a lifepath, edges/flaws, or alignment, as these are unnecessary complications for a system originally designed for dungeon delving. A GM craving an alignment system could import one, use the old-school Law, Neutral and Chaos rules, or enforce a core behaviour through character archetypes. The special skills / talents can neatly represent edges, but GM’s will need to look outside if a rules-based flaw system is desired. However, if the goal of a flaw is to drive characterful play, then a character or party losing to a recurring, powerful, and insufferable villain, will provide those dramatic moments.
Those GM’s wanting a life path system in AFF 2e could start the characters as civilians and channel their development through special skills, talents, and archetypes, to create a rich history worthy of journalling, throughout a campaign game. Those groups wanting to live dangerously, and forever remember fondly a glorious (or ignominious) character death, then the Combat Companion options can give that gritty feeling.
AFF 2e would be an easy pathway for new GM’s (“Directors”) and players to start with a few published dungeons, before graduating an official campaign. However the system does not offer GM advice and so the Director would need to be someone who already has some roleplaying experience. But a novice group, working together, could muddle their way through the rules.
The quality of the PDF’s must be commended and shown as an example to budding game designers. Every book has an index (where applicable) and appendices, with charts & tables consolidated for easy reference and printing for player/GM use. All the books are white pages, using a two-column layout and a black text font. The layout is well spaced for easy reading, with the highly detailed, black and white art, giving the eye a sumptuous and evocative rest from the lines of text. It also means less ink used when charts, tables etc are printed out for play.
Most PDF's have a detailed outline with links to each chapter and section, and everything is searchable. This is excellent for finding stuff quickly, either by searching, or just clicking on the relevant section in the PDF outline.
Every monster in the three “Pit” books is rendered in beautiful black & white art, a description, and a stat block. Monster attacks and armour are thoughtfully consolidated into the weapon and armour tables, whereas monster special abilities are in the descriptions.
If you desire a single, well-supported rules-lite system that can do anything from one-shot dungeons to long campaigns, then AFF 2e could be your game. While AFF 2e may not have the coolness factor of modern OSR games, its 2d6 resolution system would support hacking for any game you desire.
I've also heard on the grapevine that an official solo expansion is being developed for AFF 2e.
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