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Free League is one of those RPG publishers that seem to have a firm grasp of what I want in an RPG. They publish some of the lines that I am genuinely a fan of, such as Tales from the Loop and, of course, the second edition of The One Ring. So when they announced a kickstarter for the new edition of their sci-fi game, I was interested.

In a brilliant marketing move, they already had a free quickstart ready to release when the campaign started, so you could get a feel for the rules, the types of games you’d play with it and, also important, the art style. So I downloaded the PDF and I’ve recently found the time to read it.

Free League has a “house system”, the so-called ‘Year Zero System’ which they use in many of their games. But in this case, there were quite a few rules elements from other games mixed in. For instance, the idea of Blight and Hope, that seems lifted from The One Ring — a game that uses a totally different rules system. The delving rules in The Great Dark, in which characters have specific jobs in a group and they get to deal with specific events, that’s also from The One Ring.

I have to say, I am not a big fan of the “cosmic horror” genre — seems all sci-fi these days is cosmic horror, and while I get that the idea of humans being so small in the large universe and not being prepared for what’s out there is certainly A Feeling, I’m already over it. But I liked the idea of the setting: a large and intrigue-filled “home base” with various factions vying for position, and “expeditions” into “dungeons”, where resource management is an important part of the game.

Just as this RPG has lifted mechanics from other games and made them work in its framework, I wonder how easy it would be to lift the delving rules and apply them to, say, a fantasy game. I was reminded of DanMachi: the city of Orario is certainly a “home base” filled with factions and intrigue, and the dungeon certainly requires care and resources to traverse. But also a setting like Dungeon Meshi has this set-up.

How hard would it be to add these delving rules to, say, Fabula Ultima, and make a DanMachi-like game, where adventurer groups delve into the dungeon to harvest resources that will improve their position above-ground?