For the last few years, I have been really intrigued by Trophy and particularly Trophy Gold, which are absolute messes of games, which don’t suit my play style at all, but that I find deeply compelling, to the point where I wrote a very long review for Wyrd Science about them. Anyway, in the intervening years, I’ve been tinkering with Trophy as a framework to run the kind of game I enjoy playing.

Guilders is an attempt to do so, basically by modifying the basic framework of Trophy, by removing the nihilistic perspective, aiming it at running open worlds, filled with specific modules, and then layering in some 3rd edition prestige classes for advancement. But it keeps the simple rule-set, the sharing of narrative space (while shifting it blorb-ways), and the principles-first perspective. I’m pretty proud of it, and I think it’s pretty good, covering in a modular way all the bases that I think an elfgame needs to cover.

Anyway, spurred by such movements as The Year of the Beta and The 1e Manifesto, I decided to release it. It’s been playtested a fair while (I tend to playtest my modules in it), and I haven’t tweaked it for a few months.

Tongue in cheek, it’s an open-world, scenario-based, rooted by trophy game. So, OSR. Anyway, I hope a few of you enjoy playing Guilders.

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