Lightmaster

Lightmaster is a game of pulp fantasy where you can loot ancient tombs, sail your flying ship to the moon, and engage undead Martians with flintlock, sword, and spells.

With its skill and level based characters, detailed combat involving critical strikes and specific injuries, and extensive path based magic system, Lightmaster is a retro-clone of a popular role-playing game from the 1980s. As usual, I can’t name that game because the Open Game License forbids it, but it should be easily recognisable to anyone who knows it as soon as they see the combat and critical strike tables! However, you don’t need to have played that game in order to play Lightmaster – the game can be enjoyed on its own merits.

The game greatly streamlines and tunes the mechanics found in its source game, while providing a familiar feel. While being simpler in terms of mechanics, it still provides the full scope of the source game; as with the source game it’s a class-and-level based game and it has eighteen classes and fifty levels of play – with well over 2,000 spells, unique full page attack tables for nearly fifty different types of attack, and eight different critical strike tables.

Because the size of the game is so big, it comes in two books – one containing the rules and the other containing the spell paths and combat tables.