It was summer 2017 and I was writing idly on a cheap couch in Kazakhstan.

I had taken the opportunity to follow my spouse — or girlfriend, then — on a work assignment to the Kazakh capital. She worked most evenings, and I was left alone to dearly miss my regular tabletop gaming sessions. It was easy to avoid homework and daydream of fantasy adventures. 

Back then, I had been playing Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition for only a few months. I was thoroughly hooked, and keenly interested to become a better dungeon master. I quickly found my way to content creators that are now pillars of that community such as Critical Role and Matt Colville.

Being an engineer and architect at heart, I get great satisfaction from studying systems, testing and rating them, and being forever dissatisfied with their shortcomings. I was cooking up new mechanics, adjusting monster statistics, and writing fiction to support forthcoming games.

At first, this was little more than tweaking. Then hefty patches on top of the game we played. Gradually, I fell under the influence of lesser known games and creators as I fished for mechanics and ways of playing I felt an affinity for.

In time, we traveled back to Canada. By 2019 I had a distinct game that used ability cards not unlike the recent Daggerheart, which I recall painstakingly printing and sleeving. By 2020, life plans changed for obvious planetary reasons and I paused working on the game as I became a father. In early 2024, with a bit more time for myself, I brought an axe to the project. I narrowed down the experience I wanted and created a shortlist of features and content. I wanted to release something, not infinitely version a personal project.

In the end, Primeval is the cumulative product of numerous years of game mastering for a dedicated group of friends. All of us are fond of traditional fantasy adventures as popularized by many other games.

What works for us is what this game is about.

• Table first. I cherish and value meeting people face to face, particularly for something as social and intimate as role playing games. I want a game where laptops and phones can stay shut.
• Tactical options. Lightweight, thin role playing games are fun once in a while for a unique experience, but we prefer a decently complex game that brings about the sort of thinking typically expected of board games.
• Sword and sorcery. I was never overly fond of goblins and orcs as foes beyond the aesthetic. Doing what amounts to imagined genocide of tribal peoples always challenged my suspension of disbelief. Primeval steps away from these tropes to focus on a deeper past, one without clerics and paladins and similar overtly Christian motifs. While you will find orcs and elves, they are stranger than typically depicted.

You will go on grand adventures inspired by the likes of Jason and the Argonauts or Gilgamesh and Enkidu, to places only the gods know of. The game is made to support long term campaigns, from peasant to hero of legend over the course of dozens of play sessions.

If you’re already familiar with this type of game, you’ll have no trouble setting up a trial session with minimal time investment, for free. See if you like it!

How does it compare to major fantasy d20 games, Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder?

Primeval features a party of heroic fantasy heroes battling epic monsters managed by the game master, and it also asks you to roll a die (the d12) and add numbers to the result to see if you succeed. However, Primeval does not ask you to track space in feet or time in minutes and generally squishes numbers down, simplifying some aspects of play — without calling anything a “square” either.

There is a close equivalent to character classes called “paths”. Paths are complemented by disciplines, which are what actually inform what a character’s abilities are. Think of it as mandatory subclasses, where subclasses have a lot more importance.

Primeval features 3 actions per character turn, as with Pathfinder 2nd edition. Numerous spells and abilities have varying effects based on how many actions are invested in them. Unlike it, but similarly to Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition, it relies on advantage and disadvantage to a greater extent instead of smaller numerical bonuses of various types. Similarly to Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition, characters gain abilities (or powers) over the course of their adventuring career with clearly defined outcomes. Defenses are also static — the concept of a saving throw does not exist.

Constitution and Wisdom are also gone! We are down to 4 attributes, each split into an active and passive aspect.

A look at design goals and perspectives

Literal tabletop

Virtual tabletops are gaining popularity and unlikely to go anywhere. They facilitate mathematical complexity through automation, in my experience most eloquently with Pathfinder 2nd edition.

This is not the game I wanted.

I have the most fun when sitting with friends in person, throwing physical dice, making mental calculations, and tracking a status effect or two in my head.

For example, you’ll find Primeval features consistently low numbers. The choice of a d12 and fairly low modifiers is intentional to avoid having to add two-digit numbers together. And I say this as someone with an academic background in actuarial science, computer science and machine learning. I can math.

Another impact is the removal of any precise measurements. I find a grid overly limiting, almost stifling for creativity. It’s a lot of fun to stack books to form a ziggurat at the table! This is nothing new for the genre, but still a key decision to make.

Quick, impactful crunch

In games, crunch is a concept similar to complexity. Games can be complex in many ways, but crunch is usually very numerical and mathematical, in the interest of simulating a game environment. If you have rules about falling distances and the density of material you land in, that’s intense crunch. If you don’t even mention it and let a game master handle it, that’s no crunch.

Generally speaking, I enjoy crunch.

Some games I’ve played are so light on crunch they just want to fly away and become story time with friends instead of a proper game. Other games get bogged down in crunch, and this is made much worse by that large portion of players that lack an analytical interest in the simulation is supposedly enables.

It has to be quick.

This is why I believe making advantage and disadvantage central to Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition is fantastic. Some will bemoan the relative lack of crunch compared to fiddly +1s and +2s of various types, but this is exactly the sort of crunch Primeval avoids. There are rare exceptions.

Options galore

Having a decent amount of crunch opens design space for various types of characters. If you have no rules relating to movement, you can’t really have a fast character other than in the vaguest narrative sense.

There is also a lot of fun to be had in the pre-game, when you mess around with character options to find the most optimal way to play to a certain theme.

I find games such as Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition to have sufficient options at the early levels but to lack choice later on. A shame, since that is when players have better system mastery. Another disappointing aspect to games like it is locking complexity with character types. I’m sure many players would love to play a wizardlike character without committing to learning dozens of spells, and conversely some players would love to play a warrior that does not boil down to very few mechanics.

Primeval lets you ponder “builds” of varying complexity and theme.

Skillful skills

I made an early design decision to essentially remove perception-adjacent skills from the game. Most d20 games, and even games like Call of Cthulu feature Listen as a skill. In my experience, such skills lend nothing to the story other than causing the players to adopt a drop, spot and listen approach to various scenarios. This is because the only expression of player skill through these in-game skills is to constantly ask to use them. When results are unfavorable, players are often overly cautious, possibly without cause.

In Primeval, the game master lets you know everything you can know from what you see and hear. I still like the idea of a hawk-eyed character, but that is accomplished through deterministic abilities rather than “skill”.

Constant heroic progression

I find progression very appealing, particularly when there are various tracks to advance, when advancement has granularity, and when the game sets you up as a commoner to start with.

Consider Dungeon Crawl Classics, famous for its funnel. The funnel is a hilarious, gonzo first session of play where players each get a few peasant characters and naturally select them to find a first level character that actually fits a fantasy theme such as warrior or wizard. From peasant to knight through a harrowing, deadly adventure.

Primeval does not have a funnel, but it does create quite simple characters to start with, simpler than you would find with typical d20 games. This is also intentional, to heighten progression from very humble beginnings.

The narrative is yours

Everyone can grok rolling a die to see if their character achieves something or not based on physical or mental aptitude.

Not everyone can grok make-believe, emotionally complex relationships between wizards and leverage meta currencies from it. It’s very satisfying when it happens, but my experience has been very mixed, particularly when it’s been two weeks since the last game and you can’t be bothered to spend 15 minutes just to get in character.

I did theater as a youth and enjoyed it. Part of being the game master scratches that itch. But wrapping game mechanics around that aspect of the game is not a concern for Primeval.

Begone, Christian iconography

Much of fantasy tradition has ties to some degree of Christian iconography, even when it glorifies the idea of pantheons. Paladins, angels, devils and hell all make frequent appearances.

I find the visual identity of these icons to be evocative, striking even. But I find it lends an overly gothic and evil versus good tone.

Most players won’t have strongly evil or strongly good associations with a setting inspired by say, ancient Mesopotamian deities and their followers. I find the lesser prior bias, and ensuing curiosity to be more interesting. I consider the Glorantha setting of RuneQuest and HeroQuest to be stylistic triumphs in that regard.

A resolution mechanic is a role-playing game’s answer to “how do we determine if this attempt succeeds”. In this article, I’ll walk you through various ways this is accomplished, and why I made the decisions I did for Primeval.

Story twists

It can be tempting to begin by looking at various ways to roll dice. But the dice are simply a tool to create randomized outcomes. It’s better to start by asking yourself what kind of story you hope to tell.

Let’s consider the big player, Dungeons & Dragons 5th edition. To resolve outcomes, you roll a d20, add some numbers to the result matching your character’s aptitudes, and compare to a target number. If you meet that number, you succeed. Otherwise, you fail. You might succeed beyond your expectations (a “critical”) through random chance, when the die falls on 20.

When you want to hit a monster with your spear, you roll a die. Based on the result, you miss, you hit it, or you hit it really hard.

One takeaway here is that the game presents three outcomes. Failure, success, or critical success. You improve your odds of succeeding by improving your character, but a critical success is always random.

Most players will recognize this is overly simplified, but let’s immediately consider Powered by the Apocalypse games. This is a much more modern take, where players are given a set of “moves” they can and sometimes must attempt.

All these moves have predetermined outcomes that steer the story, organized in three outcomes: failure, partial success and success. Powered by the Apocalypse asks you to determine which move applies to the situation and to play out the outcome as instructed.

When you want to hit a monster with your spear, you identify the “hack and slash” move and roll the dice. Based on the result, you miss, you hit it but the monster hits you back, or you just hit it without reprisal.

There is an enormous difference between a game that just gives you the barest means to determine if you succeed at something, and another that gives story beats as you do, and expects success at a cost to come up often.

Storyteller’s burden

I do believe the Powered by the Apocalypse take on resolution to be in many ways better than the one offered by games like Dungeons & Dragons.

Then why did I not choose it for Primeval?

I found Powered by the Apocalypse games to be more exhausting on me as game master, in general. My gaming circle has few players with a strong inclination to lean into the suggested outcomes and improvise appropriate emergent story beats. With the right players, this approach of “playing to see what happens” is likely to be immensely successful. I remember a lot of genuinely funny, spontaneous moments.

But with a typical group of players, most of that mental overhead falls to the game master, who must constantly conjure up the right thing to happen next, which can become mentally taxing.

Some people would rightfully argue that in games more akin to Dungeons & Dragons, the game master arrives to play already exhausted because so much had to be prepared beforehand, something that is counterproductive in Powered by the Apocalypse. Regardless, I decided Primeval would be better off using a plain success or failure mechanic, without added story.

Asymmetric challenges

Another key differentiator between games such as Dungeons & Dragons, and others such as Powered by the Apocalypse or Dragonbane is the idea of rolling against a moving target or a static one.

In Dungeons & Dragons, you evaluate the success of a sword swipe by measuring it against the armor of your foe. That armor varies between foes. In Dragonbane, you evaluate it against a static number, on your character sheet.

Games like Dragonbane do provide the means to make a challenge easier or harder, but that usually involves rolling more dice.

Triumphant heroes

One thing I did want portrayed in the story are heroes who accomplish mighty deeds. I took a page out of Pathfinder 2nd edition, which features four outcomes: critical failure, failure, success and critical success. Interestingly, Pathfinder defines a critical success as reaching a result that is 10 above what is needed for a success. Conversely, a critical failure is 10 below. This makes a critical success more commonly attainable than merely through random chance, as Dungeons & Dragons does.

Some games implement critical failures with fumbles, which are usually at least humorous (“You fall on your sword”). Pathfinder uses them more like a balancing mechanism. When a character spends a precious resource and fails, failure can still have a dimished impact, but rest assured that nothing happens on a critical failure.

Primeval recycles the idea of a critical success, but calls it a triumph simply to lighten the text and highlight it as a legitimate outcome instead of a success with a rider. Critical failures are thrown out as an anticlimactic piece of design.

Conclusion

I hope that seeing the final game through these design goals and its inception makes it more interesting for you to ponder as a system.

Are there any aspects of the game that feel as though they are misaligned with these goals? Let me know.