Author: Steven Grodzicki
Publisher: Pickpocket Press
System: (Highly Modified) OSR Compatible
Marketplace; DriveThruRPG
Tales of Argosa is a new edition of Low Fantasy Gaming that has taken years of community testing, design feedback, and setting development and honed the game into a fast, action-heavy game built for kick-in-the door play and low-to-zero-prep GMing.
My Thursday night group recently switched to Tales of Argosa from Blueholme Journeymanne. It has been a bit of a homecoming for the group, as we started the campaign give years ago as a Low Fantasy Gaming campaign, and returning to it really feels right after two years of Blueholme. There are some things that LFG, and now ToA just do a lot better than a vanilla OSR game.
The System
Tales of Argosa starts with a D&D base, but replaces the Wisdom score with separate Perception and Willpower scores. These are generated by rolling 3d6 down the line. Character may boost one stat to 15 if they have no stat of 15 or higher, and a second stat to 13 if they do not have at least two scores at 13 or higher.
Players are encouraged to randomly roll race and background. These provide skills, some starting gear, and possibly some racial strengths and weaknesses. Backgrounds also add a point to one ability score.
Humans gain a single ability score point. All other races have advantage on one type of roll, one unique ability, and one behaviour that the GM may require a Will Save to resist engaging in. Some races have additional abilities, usually at the cost of Disadvantage on some type of ability check or save.
Character classes include:
- Artificer: A class that gets limited use special abilities such as the use of bombs, firearms, X-ray goggles, mutagens, etc. Very similar to a fusion of the D&D3.5e Eberron Artificer and the Alchemist from Pathfinder 1e.
- Barbarian: A warrior with a rage power that amplifies their combat abilities and some wilderness survival.
- Bard: An educated warrior with leadership abilities that allows them to give allies boosts, make them superior negotiators and grants them access to esoteric knowledge. Very reminiscent of the D&D3e Barbarian.
- Cultist: A religious zealot that replaces the D&D Cleric & Paladin. They have access to miracles that can simulate familiar abilities from both classes including laying on hands, protective auras, smiting enemies of their religion for extra damage, as well as spell-like powers. Each God listed has a creed, code of conduct, and some unique miracle options. Carrying out religious duties and ceremonies affects a PC's ability to use their miracles.
- Fighter: The fighter in ToA has a selection of battle techniques that boost their ability with shields, categories of weapons, multiple attacks, or specific actions in battle, such as serving as a rearguard in retreat. They have one that is "always on" that defines their identity as a warrior to some degree, and a list of others they can activate instead in battle a limited number of times per day. Fighters also have a once per adventure ability to just so happen to have a small, affordable item on them that wasn't previously on their equipment list.
- Magic-User: The Magic-User in ToA has had a major overhaul. Spells have been refined to a relatively small list of spells likely to be valuable for adventurers. Spell levels have been discarded; instead a Magic-User simply has a number of spells they can cast per day, and effects of spells tend to hinge on level; a first level Magic-User could know fireball, but at only 1d6 damage with a save for half, it doesn't break the game. Magic is also volatile, and has a chance of failure and potential chaotic side effects.
- Monk: The Monk feels a lot like a fusion of monks from many different editions of D&D: they are a fast-moving bare knuckle fighter. They learn a number of techniques that share a pool of uses per day that can simulate many of the class features of D&D including slow falling, self-healing, superhuman leaps, stunning blows,and the ability to substitute Willpower for Strength.
- Ranger: A perception-powered class, the Ranger is designed to be an archer with wilderness skills and an animal companion. They choose from a series of abilities that either allow them to perform feats of precision archery or exceptional survival, such as making an herbal antivenin, refining natural poison, or providing cover fire to make ranged attackers miss your allies.
- Rogue: The Rogue is more like 3rd edition's swift striker than AD&D's fragile trapsmith: they get a decent number of hit points, and when striking a surprised, grappled, or severely wounded for deal +1d8 or +2d8 damage. The "backstabbing" damage rarely gets out of hand as it does in 3rd edition where a Rogue could theoretically deliver more damage than a couple of fireballs every round at high levels, but is worth making sure the Rogue can move tactically and coordinate with the more martial characters. Skills like stealth and lock picking are available to any PC, however, so what makes the Rogue unique is a selection of dirty tricks and techniques they can learn as they level that make them faster and more effective at these abilities, and give them a selection of dirty tricks like smoke bombs, hidden blades, pocket sand, and glue pots.
Each class also provides the lion's share of skills, some are set when you take the class and the rest rolled randomly.
Any roll to resolve action is handled using ability checks by choosing an appropriate Ability Score and attempting to roll under it. If a PC has an applicable skill, they add +1 to the effective Ability Score. PCs also have a re-roll pool they can spend to roll again on a failed attack roll or saving throw -- or, if they have the appropriate skill -- a failed ability check. Particularly high or low rolls compared to the ability score can lead to great successes or great failures with special outcomes in certain situations, such as casting spells.
The re-roll pool is 1 or 2 for humans and increases by 1 each level.
Saving throws to resist sudden dangers are handled by adding an appropriate Ability Score modifier to your character's Luck Score (which is set by level) and attempting to roll under the modified Luck. Each time a character succeeds a save they take 1 damage to their Luck Score, making subsequent saves harder.
Combat is handled using ascending Armour Class, with a base of 11 + Dex Bonus. Instead of an extensive list of medieval armour with different bonuses armour is broken into Light, Medium, and Heavy granting +1, +3, or +5 bonuses to AC (along with penalties to movement speed and disadvantages to certain rolls based on armour weight.) Shields add and additional+1 and many classes add a small bonus to AC at higher levels.
Attacks use 1d20 plus a characters base attack bonus (based on class and level), with an additional bonus from Strength to melee weapons or Perception to ranged weapons. All weapons have an indicated weapon die along with a special effect on a natural 19 and a die to roll on one of several critical hit tables on a natural 20. Fighters get both critical hits and the natural 19 effect on either roll and eventually get an expanded range of natural die rolls that cause critical hits.
Tales of Argosa also has a system for Exploits, which can be tried during combat twice per NPC (once when they are above half hp, once when below half hp). These can apply either a temporary inconvenience such as being disarmed, stunned, knocked over, temporarily blinded, etc. and be considered a minor exploit, or they can be more permanent such as hacking off limbs, breaking bones, or hurling enemies over a cliff, which are considered major exploits. Minor exploits require and ability check to achieve, major ones a Luck check (costing 1 Luck Damage if successful.) Like Mighty Deeds of Arms in Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, this is a free-form system intended to adjudicate cool moves described by players.
ToA also has a Rescue system designed to mechanically handle catching allies as they fall, jumping in the way of arrows aimed at nearby friends or leaping into the fray between an attacker and their target.
Particularly nasty attacks and critical hits can cause injuries that cause lasting penalties until they are cleared by rest, magic, or surgery.
Characters hitting 0hp make a Luck save to see if they are still alive. If they are, they roll on a table to determine a permanent injury or scar.
Rests have a unique system where PCs may take 3 short rests per day, during which they can make Willpower Ability Checks. A successful check allows a PC to:
- Regain half of missing hit points
- Regain one use of a spell or their daily class ability pool.
- Restore one point to their re-roll pool.
- Recovering from an injury.
Character progression is handled by a simplified XP system that rewards XP for making allies, discovering new locations, slaying difficult goes, learning obscure lore, thorough exploration, and bringing large hoards of treasure or magic items back to civilization.
Magic is risky in Tales of Argosa: characters keep a running tally of how many times they have cast a spell or used a magic item. Each time they use magic they roll a die; a d20 for magic items or a variable die based on level for spells. If they roll under their tally, the magic goes haywire, triggering a roll on the Dark & Dangerous Magic Table, which is full of mutations, weird effects, and a chance at summoning otherworldly nightmares. This tally only resets on a long rest or when you set off a Dark & Dangerous effect.
Distance and movement rates in Tales of Argosa have been simplified into a zone system for easier Theatre of the Mind play.
The game also has mechanical systems for handling downtime that is well-detailed for a broad range of events.
The GM tools for Tales of Argosa offer a lot of simplified and often table-based mechanisms for running the campaign. Amount of downtime between adventures is randomized at the end of which a random hook generator is available. Treasure is not based on level, but simply divided into loot carried by monsters and treasure hoards with a few additional tables to flesh things out mechanics for simplified overland and sea travel, There are rules for resolving mass battles that offer PCs a chance to resolve outcomes through a series of random challenges, and a system for managing PC dominions using random tables and a scoring system.
It also provides additional random tools for generating dungeons on the fly during play.
What I Loved
Swashbuckling Action
The exploit system, the rescue system, a fast and simple initiative system, some of the class abilities of fighters, barbarians, rangers, and rogues, and the mix of injury tables and natural 19 effects all come together to create a game with fast, creative, and extraordinarily visceral action sequences.
Characters can pull almost any stunt from a sword and sorcery book or movie and have a freeform mechanic waiting to let them try it. Heroically throwing oneself between danger and innocent, or cleaving the head off of an enemy several levels lower than you in a single blow are easily achieved.
If you want your action to feel particularly intense, Tales of Argosa really delivers!
Flat Power Curve
First level Tales of Argosa characters start a little tougher than characters from another Dungeons & Dragons-based game, but they also gain new hit points very slowly. With a capt at level 9, and the simple Armour Class system, they also never become invulnerable walls of hit points with impossibly high defenses. Characters feel like they are perpetually in that "Sweet Spot" between levels 4 and 7 in standard D&D.
Retiring characters at level 9 in this system feels right.
Level-less, Perilous, Magic
I was glad to see ToA ditch spell levels outright. By simply making spells' outcomes more tied to the caster's level, there is no reason why PCs can't have fireball or ice storm at their command.
They balance this in two ways: first by eliminating a lot of spells that would be unreasonable in the hands of a low level party such as teleport, phantasmal killer, and scrying. And secondly by making the Dark & Dangerous Magic effects a constantly looking threat. With the possibility of unleashing a demon or being permanently disfigured every time you cast a spell, you tend not to abuse magic no matter how powerful your spells might be.
This has been something that has really stood out to me since we concerted my Thursday night campaign to Tales of Argosa from Blueholme: My 7th level Magic-User, Scribbles, used to always have a magic effect to throw in at any round of combat. If nothing else came to me, I could always become invisible or use the gust of wind ability from my ring of elemental command (air), to give my allies an advantage. Scribbles solved almost every problem with magic.
When we converted (right after a world-twisting cataclysm) I at first played Scribbles as I had been for years, and the results included:
- Growing a fish eye in the middle of his forehead for a week.
- Having a crab claw for a right hand for 3 days.
- Permanently growing comically long pointed ears.
- No longer breathing for a month.
- Accidentally siccing a gibbering mouther on my party.
- Setting himself on fire.
I have had to go back to playing Scribbles as I did when I started him at level 1 in early 2023: using marbles, caltrops, and his lantern to help control the flow of the battle and casting the off spell when things get dangerous.
And it definitely feels more fun that way.
Treasure hoards can include spellbooks that have a small chance of including powerful spells that don't fit the intentionally restricted list in the sorcery chapter (wish, legend lore, disintegrate, regenerate, telekinesis, and finger of death, as a few examples.) These spells have significant costs or side effects to their use.
Diminishing Luck and Abilities
One of the things I particularly appreciated from the earliest days of Low Fantasy Gaming was the way the diminishing Luck Score added increasing tension as the game went on. Every saving throw that you succeed makes the next one more likely to fail, and after five or six saves, your PC feels pretty vulnerable.
With the limited short rests each day only restoring a few hit points and character ability uses (assuming good Willpower checks) this ratchets up the tension increasingly: even a night's sleep counts only as a short rest; your character needs days to get back their Luck, full abilities, and hit points.
This means that adventures grind you down slowly and surely, and if they are going to take days, a PC either has to take very calculated risks or face a terrifying March towards their doom.
Skills & Re-rolls
At first blush, skills seem underwhelming in Tales of Argosa; a +1 to the ability check anyone can try. The bigger picture comes in when you consider that, if you are playing the role your class is designed for, you will likely be rolling against Ability Scores that are fairly high to start with, you may have class abilities to give you advantage, and you can use the re-roll pool.
The re-roll pool is brilliant, as it vastly increases the chances of success for a given skill as you only use it when you fail a roll and only if you choose to. It is simple, elegant, and gives you one more set of hard choices to make.
Easy No-Prep Setup
If you were to use all of the various systems offered to the GM in Tales of Argosa as suggested, it would be perfectly possible to simply create a handful of interesting NPCs and the basics of a small town a half hour before the first session, roll up some PCs and a random starting scenario and just go.
After the first adventure, random adventure hooks and use of the other design tools would give you most of the outline for your next session. The game could be run without ever taking more than 30 minutes of planning between sessions.
Broad Incentives
While it is not strictly true that what you award XP or character advancement for is what players will do in a game, it certainly is a large factor. D&D awards XP for treasure hunting and combat, and thus they are much of the focus until the players find other motivations in the campaign world. And because things like making allies and exploration are not as overtly rewarded, they are often deferred until the PCs become invested.
Tales of Argosa creates a broader set of incentives by having multiple experience tables for different pillars of play:
- The Loot table rewards PCs from 1-5 XP depending on the size of the hoard and presence of rare items orr magic within it. The treasure hoards scale with level, but the difference between the hoard of a 4 HD creature and a 8th level creature’s is nowhere near as stark as the difference between Treasure Type C and G in AD&D, so characters needn't find King's ransoms and become the wealthiest beings on the planet by mid level. Upkeep for PCs is modest and a good treasure haul can last them for months. Downtime allows PCs to squander their gold on wine, women (or whatever), and song to potentially gain interested random benefits tog keep the PCs hungry for loot.
- The Combat table doesn't account for balanced encounters or any challenge system per se; it instead encourages the GM to evaluate how dangerous a foe was based on the makeup of the party. There are also experience rewards for fleeing and for protecting the innocent in order to encourage those actions. While it's possible to rack up 6 points for combat, most combats will be about the same value as finding a hoard of treasure more completely exploring the first floor of a Dungeon.
- The Exploration table rewards Player Characters for exploring the wilderness, discovering new adventure sites, completely exploring dungeon floors, finding secret doors, disarming traps, solving puzzles, and discovering lore. The rewards here are individually small but could easily pile up to as many points as treasure or combat in a single game session.
- The Social table rewards PCs for inspiring and influencing NPCs for causes, making contacts (with greater rewards for NPCs with power and influence), hiring henchmen, impressing NPCs with thrilling heroics, and for role-playing out madness and addiction. These rewards are a little more modest at 1-3 XP, but a good role-player can easily pile on a volume of small rewards through clever play.
Freestyle Character Abilities
At levels 3, 6, & 9 PCs gain a unique ability. There are several dozen examples to choose from in the core book, but PCs are encouraged to work with the GM to design one that suits their character's experience, deeds, and interests.
The examples and guidelines very much borrow from the D&S3.Xe feats system, and a feat or tree of feats from any 3.Xe or Pathfinder 1e splatbook would work perfectly well.
I appreciate the opportunity to design my own however and have used it to great effect with another of my Thursday night PCs, Clever Nult.
Nult started as a Blueholme fighter with Str 11 Dex 11 Con 8 Int 5 Wis 6 Cha 8 with only 40gp and 2 hp. In other words a wretched, dithering idiot. Figuring Nult was not long for his world, I played him as a sacrificial pawn: he was the one to open doors, pull levers, open chests, and take point down suspicious corridors. And like a cockroach, no matter how many traps (we've lost count), poisons (a dozen times!), time warps (twice surprisingly), and ambushes we blundered him into he came out tougher. He is now the de facto president of a small nation. After all we've put the poor fool through, we invented this trait for him:
Too Stupid to Die: Clever Nult has advantage on saving throws against traps and poison, and takes half damage from mechanical traps.
Conan Energy
Tales of Argosa has drawn many of its flourishes from the kind of brutal swashbuckling action of Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague DeCamp's versions of Conan. Even it's signature monsters, a mix of slimy horrors giant snakes, and savage ape monsters are designed to capture that energy and do it better than almost any other TTRPG I've read.
Experience Design
As an amplification of the last point, Tales of Argosa is a tip-tier example of good experience design in RPGs. Every nuance of design is carefully added to offer a singular experience:
If you are playing ToA as written you are going to have a tense, fast-paced adventure with visceral combat, where magic and magicians are made and vile, and the monsters hideous remnants of a darker, forgotten age. Your PCs will be tough and heroic, but they will be far from invulnerable, and they will come out of their adventures bloodied and scarred but unbroken... If they come out alive.
Every subsystem supports this experience. As a corollary, though, it does not support other role-playing styles. If you are looking for complex courtly intrigues, knightly romances, elaborate world-spanning kriegspiel, explorations of the PC as sacred expression of self, or Tolkienian high heroic fantasy you will need to hack and modify the game to some degree or other.
Art and Book Quality
The interior art in Tales of Argosa is amazingly selected: every image is action-packed, evocative, and high quality. It helps to visualize what the rules are trying to suggest and provide solid imagination fodder for the reader.
My print copy of Tales of Argosa is a beautifully clean book on high-quality paper with a stitched binding. It has withstood my kids looking through it unscathed and lays flat when I am referencing it. It is one of the nicest physical books I have ordered in the past few years.
Monster Reaction Rolls
Each monster in Tales of Argosa has its own simplified NPC reaction roll table. Some of these add a fascinating amount of depth to the encounter, others just add charm to the monster entry such as the Banshee's:
Reac 2-6 Hostile 7-8 Hateful 9-10 Malevolent 11-12 Covetous
or the Sprite's:
Reac 2-3 Hostile 4-7 Covetous 8-10 Mischievous 11-12 Curious
Solo Rules
Tales of Argosa has a sizable section of tools for solo adventuring, which I appreciate! Solo is now a much bigger part of hobby and I hope more games will follow this example and make solo easy and integrated.
Growth Points
3e Style Monsters Reduce OSR Compatibility
Tales of Argosa uses some pretty unique monster stat blocks; like in D&D3.Xe, monsters have all the same ability scores PCs do. They also have a special ability set to trigger on a natural 19 attack roll. Speed and ranges of abilities are set as zones.
It is dead easy to convert D&D3.Xe or Pathfinder 1e monsters to ToA, but grabbing something from my AD&D2e Monstrous Manual requires me to do a lot of guessing and on-the-fly modifications. And for that matter, a lot of D&D3e monsters have way too many powers and special abilities to play right in Tales of Argosa.
Overall this makes grabbing a module for some other Old-School TTRPG like Old School Essentials require more work. ToA, is very much intended to be run using a lot of improv and randomization, and doesn't really play all that well, even with very similar OSR games.
Spells Could Use More Variety
Eliminating spell levels and choosing which utility spells are available to PCs is a brilliant innovation, one I appreciate, as it means that magic-using PCs have some really cool options from day 1. The spell list includes some mainstays for Magic-Users mixed with a few of the most useful Clerical healing spells. There is a total of 50 spells available to PCs, around 45 of which are reskinned and renamed D&D spells, and others are unique to Tales of Argosa.
Honestly, though, there are some omissions that would hardly have broken the game, but been very interesting to include. Floating Disc, Rope Trick, Entangle, Jump, ESP, Knock, Flaming Sphere, Darkvision, Unseen Servant, and Sanctuary stand out to me.
Don't get me wrong, I understand why the omissions, and I have no doubt it would have been hard to get the list up to a full 100, but I often notice these as I play a role character who earned his first six levels in Blueholme.
Tales of Argosa also use obscure spell names that feel Howardesque for common spells. "A Wisp of the Unseen" for Invisibility, "Fetid Fog of the Pit People" for Stinking Cloud, and "Glimpse of the True Gods" for Fear are prime examples. This is a topic I've discussed when discussing Low Fantasy Gaming; I find the spell names too abstruse to be useful and do little for immersion. I suggested that future versions of LFG offer a reference table that shared the standard D&D spell name for the spell. Steve Grod listened, and the master spell table lists both the Argosan name and the traditional one.
Unremarkable Divine Repudiation
Rather than Cultists' spell-like miracles causing a Dark & Dangerous effect, they cause a roll on a Divine Rebuke table. This seems to draw on the Clerics of Dungeon Crawl Classics, where clerics have an increasing threat of angering their gods by asking for miracles, especially on behalf of unbelievers. I found it a nonsensical idea in DCC RPG, and still think so here. Why would a god choose to punish a chosen mortal vessel for their power for "flawed faith" when the very act of casting the spell is a show of absolute confidence in Them?
The effects of the Rebuke can be a compulsion, a curse, a mark, or a dark omen. Some do damage or have lasting penalties. One's that last require a random atonement.
Honestly, it seems like a way to level the field between the Cultist and the Magic-User that is artificial, and unnecessary. Given all the strictures and demands on the Cultist class and their limited choices of spell-like miracles, I don't feel like they need an equalizer. Shouldn't the power of a God be less fickle than mortal Arcana?
Fine Tuning the Dark and Dangerous Tables Might be Worthwhile
The Dark & Dangerous table is a buffet of horrid things that faulty magic can do to your Magic-User. Some are truly horrid or outstanding. My only gripe with it is that certain results are repeated over and over again: Rift (summoning a monster by accident) and Spellburst (being hit with your own spell) are frequent. Why not place them twice with greater weighting, or add a few additional weird effects in the place of some of the repeats? The table feels incomplete as is.
Specialized Oracles
Tales of Argosa includes instructions for two Oracles to answer questions for the GM dynamically.
Read the Signs is a Tarot-like oracle where each card having a noun, verb, adjective, mood, a direction, and an indicator for lighting and time, which can provide all kinds of information for setting a scene or answering an open, rather than a yes/no question. The deck is sold on DTRPG separately, but there is a free online version of it linked in the corebook.
Honestly, I love the design, and I'm a bit cross with Steve Grod for making me want it. My only real complaint though is that it really isn't an integrated product. The optional rules regarding it feel more like a misplaced back-matter ad than part of the game.
Information Design
A quirk of design that Tales of Argosa has inherited from Low Fantasy Gaming is the peculiar organization of the manual. Once we are past the sections integral to introducing the game and character generation, the rest of the book is organized alphabetically by chapter heading, so Naval Battles come after Monsters, who in turn come after Madness and Mass Battles.
In some cases, things are tucked as subheadings that are only partially related to the heading. XP and Character Advancement are a subheading of Downtime, for example.
Individual sections of the book are neatly organized and easy to read with only a few "unfortunate turns", and the rules are well-explained, but finding them can sometimes require searching and the order they are presented in is not ideal for learning the rules of the game; I have found myself flipping back and forth through the book to piece together some elements of the game.
PDF Compression
I wrote this review over the course of two 1,100km train voyages with only my phone available to me. This meant that I spent an exceptional amount of time referring to the PDF file, which was quite a task. The PDF is beautiful, has hyperlinks, and crisp-high-def graphics, as well as multiple layers of information, but you pay for the beauty in RAM.
The file is poorly compressed by PDF standards and loads slowly on an Android device. Scrolling had to be done in slow motion as it could only display four Pages at a time in Android's native reader, forcing you to go slow enough to let it unload old pages and load new ones. If it will load at all, as sometimes my poor Nokia couldn't display the file at all unless I cleaned the RAM out. My tablet out did marginally better. Even my PC with 32GB of RAM and an SSD sometimes struggles with the file.
Conclusion
Tales of Argosa has one D&D play experience in mind: It wants to take you on a fast, furious, low-prep game that is full of blood, guts, swashbuckling adventure, and mounting tension. ToA is D&D with the Robert E. Howard turned up to 11, and nearly zero chill. With its specialized action mechanics and DM Tools it does it really well. Everything from the choice of monsters to the art in the book is designed to augment that experience.
This comes at a cost: it is not a game that does not do cozy fantasy, courtly intrigues, chivalric romance, or long, sprawling fantasy sagas well. It is not geared for elaborate world-building kriegspiel, and actively discourages modern OC culture and long theatrical role-play sessions with its punctuated downtime and totally random character generation. It also requires a bit of hacking to make material and modules from other Old-School games to work.
If high-octane Sword & Sorcery action with little downtime and low-to-no-prep are what you want, Tales of Argosa is an ideal system. I enjoy it immensely on my Thursday nights, and if I just want a quick pick-up game because I feel like playing on the spur of the moment, it is now one of my go-tos.
It is also a great resource for hacking. There are a lot of very unique ideas in there that can make mass combat, wild magic, overland journeys, and the menace of dungeons feel a lot more interesting, and they are not hard to port over to another OSR game.
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