Free Role Playing Game Supplement Review: Fireball

Fireball by Łukasz Kołodziej is a free role playing game supplement published by Skavenloft. This is the core book for the game. and is covered by the Creative Commons: Attribution 4.0 International license.

The supplement is available as a 19-page PDF for free from DriveThruRPG. Two pages are the front and rear covers, one the front matter and one the Contents.

The Introduction explains that players are brave adventurers and it is designed for 2-6 players, including the narrator (GM). It uses six-sided dice.

Characters covers character creation. A d6 is rolled six times and these are the character’s strength, agility, intelligence, charisma, health and mana points. They are assigned in the order rolled; no moving results to preferred stats. There are five different species; elf, dwarf, halfling, orc and human, and the species is determined by the character’s lowest ability score, excluding health and mana. All but humans are chosen by an ability and have a talent, which is a short sentence, and two locked talents which are unlocked between quests. Humans lack talents.

Character class is determined by the highest ability score, again excluding health and mana. The classes are fighter, rogue, wizard, cleric and adventurer. All but adventurer have a talent and two locked talents, in the same way as species does. They all also have equipment and skills.

Quest is determined by the six dice rolls made earlier and is a table with six rows and six columns. Players may decide to try and complete the quest during the game. Character details are determined again by the dice rolls and is again a table with six rows and six columns. Finally, characters do not begin with any money.

How to Play explains that the players select one of their quests and the narrator describes the place. Turn order is determined by agility, and turns are when the character or creature can perform an action, which may be anything possible for the creature to perform. Actions have consequences, which can be losing or gaining things or anything else agreed upon. The target of an action can perform a counter-action.

Checks to see if an action or reaction succeeds are done by rolling a die and adding the result to an appropriate ability score. The higher result wins. Skills and talents can also affect the result. Targeting an object or attempting to help an ally uses more dice. If a character loses all its health points dies; if all characters die, the quest is a failure, if all monsters die, it is a success. Dead characters may be replaced.

Safe Havens are places characters can rest up between quests. They can also visit a variety of locations, each with different benefits.

Monsters take up the rest of the supplement and each is similar to a character. Each has the six abilities, equipment and a number of talents.

The last page is a character sheet.

Fireball in Review

The PDF lacks bookmarks and has enough different sections that these would be useful. The Contents is thorough. Navigation could be better. The text maintains a single column format and appeared to be free of errors. There are no illustrations. Presentation is adequate.

This is a very simple, rules-lite game that has a good degree of narrative component to it. It should be easy enough to learn, though playing it will require the GM to interpret things and come up with quests; there is additional content, also free, but it is all in Polish. Fireball can be downloaded for free by clicking here.