

Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Player's Tome
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Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy Player's Tome
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Complete Advanced Fantasy Player's Tome
The Advanced Fantasy Player's Tome is a complete player's guide to Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy games, with the following content:
- Character options: 22 classic classes (acrobat, assassin, barbarian, bard, cleric, drow, druid, duergar, dwarf, elf, fighter, gnome, halfling, half-elf, half-orc, illusionist, knight, magic-user, paladin, ranger, svirfneblin, thief), complete lists of weapons and adventuring gear, extensive lists of vehicles, mounts, and vessels, mercenaries and specialists for hire, rules for stronghold construction.
- Race and class: Optional rules for choosing race and class separately.
- Spells: The complete set of 34 cleric spells (from 1st to 5th level), 34 druid spells (from 1st to 5th level), 72 illusionist spells (from 1st to 6th level), 72 magic-user spells (from 1st to 6th level).
- Adventuring rules: Full rules for adventuring in dungeons, the wilderness, and at sea.
Includes all rules and player options from Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy, plus reams of additional material inspired by the 1970s Advanced 1st Edition rules.
Advanced Fantasy Book 2: Referee's Tome
Referees also require the companion book, the Advanced Fantasy Referee’s Tome.
Author: Gavin Norman, Cover artist: Peter Mullen
248-page hardcover; A5 (Digest) size; deluxe quality sewn binding; 2 ribbon markers; endpapers printed with quick reference info. PDF included.



Overview
If you are looking for an old-school feel, be it OD&D, Basic, or Advanced, you can use OSE to capture the feel.
The system merges old and new school. We always called C&C "What 3E could have been", this by extension would be "If the same thing were done today."
We have only played a few sessions, but have purposely deep-delved the rules.
Pros
Nice touches include supporting both ascending and descending AC across the system, old-school save style (where it is based on the source, not the target), and level titles. Race-as-Class sits comfortably side-by-side with Race plus Class. We tried both in a single party, and it worked smoothly.
I know most of you care far more about presentation/art than I do, and I'll say it is beautiful and very old-school. Organization is pretty standard, and contents are hot-linked for quick access in the PDF.
Cost is reasonable, and both books together only cost a little more than a single book for some other games.
Cons
If you are not familiar with the original games, you will want to search online when things seem to make little sense. Some examples - death at zero HP. You are expected to house rule that in some way, just as nearly everyone did in 1E/2E. First level Clerics have no spells - a design choice mimicking OD&D/Basic. There are several other such examples that a DM coming from newer editions will want to consider the viability of at their table. The assumption is that the DM can and will make rulings/rules that suit the world/table, don't hesitate to do so. If a rule doesn't work, tweak it and try again. The game works out of the box/book, but newer DMs will likely be uncomfortable with some pieces.
It good
Really great
This is a great system and a great book
More companies need to make books like these.!