“Make it dark, make it grim, make it tough, but then, for the love of God, tell a joke.” ― Joss Whedon
Radiance Role Playing Game is an independently published game that uses the d20 game system developed for D&D, in some new and different ways. Its setting is a magical/ fantasy version of Earth in the late 1800s – early 1900s, as imagined by speculative writers of an earlier time (Jules Verne, H G Wells, H P Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, etc.) So in addition to magic, goblins, dragons and the usual fantasy trappings, we have dirigibles, steamships and trains, steam-powered robots, and perhaps even space flight. The rules are available as a free PDF download or a purchasable hardcover here: www.radiancerpg.com or as a (big) image file on this site here: Radiance Players’ Guide
Radiance is my current favorite game system – it’s the one I run as my personal game with friends and family. It’s not well known and not sold in game stores, so you won’t find a lot of people playing it. The biggest advantage of Radiance is the variety possible in character creation. Once you choose a Race, Class and Theme, each of those choices gives you a menu of specific abilities to pick from as you advance in level.
Stories in Radiance will often involve, or be inspired by, historical or pseudo-historical events. Past adventures, for example, have included sabotaging the first dirigible flight from Hindenburg’s factory, retrieving an ancient shipment of wine (with a demon in one of the bottles) from a shipwreck, and getting religious relics out of Constantinople during a siege of the city.
