Warrior & Wizard RPG: The Little Retroclone That Could

One of the hot things in tabletop RPGs right now is the "retroclone." For those who may read this and not know, a retroclone is a reproduction of an out of print game that relies on the legal concept that you cannot copyright game mechanics, only your exact wording of those mechanics. That basically means that anyone can come along and rewrite the expression of your rules with a completely new wording (that obviously explains the same basic mechanics underneath) and have a new game. This is something that has been happening a lot the last few years in tabletop gaming. The Open Gaming License and the various d20 SRDs have gone far in creating the foundation on which clones of earlier editions of D&D can be built, making these the most popular retroclones out and about. This makes sense, since D&D is the dog that wags the tail of tabletop gaming.

There have been other retroclones as well. There was a World of Darkness clone that came and went, which apparently disappeared because the creator had some legal issues that weren't properly skirted in his writing. I think it is still out on the internet in a place or two. Phil Reed did a super-heroic retroclone called 4Color that never really seemed to catch on like it should have. I'm sure that there are others out there that I don't know about, either.

Early today on G+ I posted a link to Warrior & Wizard, a retroclone of the old, out of print, Fantasy Trip game. It is a nice piece of work from author Chris Goodwin that really deserves more attention than it has probably received. That's why I made that post, and that is why I am making this post on my blog. Warrior & Wizard is available in two versions (both with the same text), one released under the OGL (to better allow mingling with other OGL-released open content) and one released under a creative commons license.

I put a copy and paste of the original author's document up in an editable format Google Document in my Google Drive folder, so that people can find and easily download something. I hope that you check it out, enjoy what you see and work up your own hack of the game. Hopefully the creator sees all of this and it spurs him to some further work.

Here's the link to Warrior & Wizard on Google Drive. [8/17/2018 Update: Because of the Kickstarter bringing back Steve Jackson's first RPG, The Fantasy Trip, I've taken down the link to this project.]

What unrepresented retroclone do you think needs more attention? You can mention it in the comments. Let's make this about those games that really aren't getting a lot of attention already out with other bloggers or forums. I think most of the D&D clones get enough attention already. What isn't being talked about out there?