What is Tavern Tales
Tavern Tales is an incredibly rules light system that has a greater emphasis on roleplaying and creative license. The game encourages (and sometimes outright forces) you to work with the GM to make the world and story more interesting and involved.
The game does not use classes or races, but instead uses 'traits' and 'themes', which allow you to mix and match a diverse group of powers and reflavour them to suit your character.
Tavern Tales only uses four stats (Brawn, Finesse, Mind, Spirit) and uses a 3-d20 roll system for all checks, where you roll 3d20 and take the middle-most value as your result, thought sometimes modifiers make you take the higher or lower dice based on difficulty and traits.
Having played the game, its certainly a good introduction to tabletop gaming both as a GM (with advice and preparation) and for players not used to learning more comprehensive rulesets. Character creation for a new player can take about 30 minutes or longer, but once you know the system and have an idea in mind it takes only a few minutes.
An anon has been in touch with the creator and a pdf version is coming.
Here are examples of some of the traits in game to give an idea of how aspects of it play…
>Demolition Charge • Slow Action
>Describe how you create an item → Create a bomb and determine the trigger condition. When activated, it charges obviously and ominously for less than a minute (runes appear, a clock counts down, it glows red-hot, etc ) and then explodes, annihilating structures and brutally maiming creatures (or worse). Work with the GM to determine the explosion size.
>Lair • Slow Action
>Describe how you claim your lair → A piece of territory that you control becomes your lair. Gain creative license to slowly change the terrain and features of the lair (create web-strewn paths, clinging ice, pools of magma, etc). At any point, you can ask if someone is trespassing in your lair, and the GM must answer honestly.
>Light Feet
>When you fall, lower the severity from deadly to dangerous, or from dangerous to safe. Whenever you like, all solid objects and liquids are capable of supporting your weight.
>Unlife and Unlimb
>You can attach and reattach your body parts. You can control your detached body parts and sense the world through them (feel with a detached finger, see with a detached eyeball, crawl with a detached hand, etc). If you ever lose a body part, you can reattach a similar body part from another creature and it becomes part of your body (this never affects your attributes).
Have fun making broken combinations.