Of Fantasy And Ash

Getting Started With Of Fantasy And Ash

Most people find this system by accident. They see someone talk about the dice resolution mechanic and think it is clever. It is clever in a narrow sense, but the rest of the game has some serious structural problems that nobody mentions until they have already spent six hours building a character. It is a fantasy tabletop roleplaying system built around a custom die pool mechanic. You roll a variable number of d6s, count successes, and the margin determines narrative control. On paper this is clean. In practice you need at least three people familiar with the book before you can run a session without constant page flips. The core rulebook is 142 pages, but the character creation alone is 38 pages of interdependent subsystems. I ran my first campaign using the PDF release from 2021. The physical book came out later with a few errata fixes. The download is still available through the publisher's site at fantasyandash.net/downloads, and also on DriveThruRPG. The free starter adventure takes about forty-five minutes to read. The full Core Rulebook runs $29 for the PDF.

How The Mechanics Actually Work In Play

The central mechanic is called the Ash Roll. You pick a stat, roll a number of d6 equal to that stat plus your trait rating, and each die showing 4 or higher counts as one success. Difficulty is set by the GM as a target number of successes. That is the summary. Here is what nobody tells you. Margin matters more than raw success count. If you need 3 successes and roll 4, you get a narrative advantage point. These points let you alter how your character achieves the outcome, not just whether they achieve it. A single point changes flavor. Three points lets you reroll any failed dice in the same action. This is where the system shines and where it traps beginners. People hoard advantage points and refuse to spend them because they think they will need them later. They never do. I hit a wall in my second campaign when a player tried to use the combat system. The initiative order is not simultaneous. It is sequential based on a hidden speed stat that only the GM sees initially. I forgot this and ran three rounds of combat before realizing players could not predict their own turn order. We paused for twenty minutes while I recalculated everything backwards. After that I wrote down the speed values on index cards before every session. Simple workaround. Took me four games to figure it out.

Character Creation Without Losing Your Mind

Do not start with traits. Start with your backing. The backstory determines which of the three starting advantages you get, and that choice locks you into one of three mechanical paths for the first five levels. I have seen people regret this decision at level eight when they realize their path gives them nothing useful for their build concept. Here is the order that actually works: First pick your backing. Arcane Scholar, Warden of the Old Ways, or Merchant Prince. Each gives a different opening mechanic. Scholar starts with one ritual spell. Warden gets a tracking bonus and a combat edge. Merchant gets resource generation that scales with play time.

Second assign your four stats using the point buy system. The book suggests 8, 10, 12, 14 distributed however you want. Most people put 14 in combat and 14 in social because they do not realize those stats rarely both matter in the same session. Put 14 in the stat your concept actually uses. The rest is secondary. Third choose two traits. Traits modify how your stats function rather than changing the numbers themselves. Good trait choices compound. Bad ones sit there doing nothing. The trait "Patient" reduces stress damage by one die size when you wait for an opponent to act first. In a system where most encounters last two to four rounds, Patient is frequently useless. I learned this the hard way after my fighter took it and never triggered it once in twelve sessions.

Common Pitfalls That Waste Time

The magic system is the biggest time sink. Ritual casting requires a preparation phase that the book describes in nine pages. In practice it takes longer because you need to track material components and the casting time varies by ritual tier. A tier 2 ritual takes ten minutes of real time to prepare in game and requires a skill check against the relevant stat. Fail that check and the component is wasted. This is not inherently bad design. It just means your campaign will have fewer magical confrontations than you expect because players self-censor when they realize casting a spell takes a quarter hour of downtime. The economy system has a similar issue. Money in Of Fantasy And Ash is not abstract. You track individual coins for certain transactions. The rulebook assumes gold pieces are the standard, but the exchange rates between copper, silver, and gold are not 100-to-1. They are 100 copper to 7 silver to 5 gold. I discovered this when a player bought a sword and I handed them the wrong change. The publisher confirmed the 7-and-5 system in a forum post two weeks later. It is in appendix C. Nobody reads appendix C.

What The System Does Poorly

Combat encounters are slow. A standard fight between four players and four enemies averages forty-five minutes to an hour. The action economy favors defenders because the defensive posture rule lets you choose your response after seeing the attacker's roll. This creates a bottleneck where the GM rolls first, then each player responds, then the GM resolves outcomes. Turn times stretch because players waste dice pools on defensive maneuvers instead of pushing forward. The system assumes a certain group size and tone. It works best with three to four players who understand the resource management loop. Groups of six or more will crawl. Solo players can run it but the advantage point economy breaks because there is no one to share narrative control with. The GM has no equivalent mechanic for resisting player advantages, which means solo games tilt heavily toward player agency and away from tension. If your group prefers fast tactical combat or heavy roleplaying with minimal bookkeeping, Of Fantasy And Ash will frustrate you. The game sits in an awkward middle ground where it is too crunchy for casual play and too narrative-focused for optimization-heavy groups. It is not broken. It is just specific about what it does well and blunt about what it does not.

Where To Find Of Fantasy And Ash

The official download page is at fantasyandash.net/downloads. The Core Rulebook PDF is $29. The starter adventure is free. Character sheets are available as fillable PDFs on the same page. Third-party content exists but is sparse. Only about eight published supplements have come out since the 2021 release, and two of them are expansions for the magic system specifically. There is no support for other mechanics from third parties yet. If you want to try before buying, the free starter contains enough rules for one complete session. It assumes no prior knowledge and walks through the Ash Roll with a sample encounter. Read it first. If the pacing clicks for you, invest in the full book. If the character creation process already feels tedious, you will not enjoy the full system any more than you enjoy it now.