The Years of Adventure

The Years of Adventure is a tabletop roleplaying game that takes characters across lifetimes as they learn, adventure, live, rule, and leave a legacy throughout the years. Pivotal moments in this game often come down to seconds and minutes, but the weeks and years leading up to those moments are just as important. In long campaigns of The Years of Adventure, characters journey through their entire life, gaining skills and abilities as they go from inexperienced youths to seasoned veterans. Eventually, characters may even retire, or perish, while the game continues on through their successors.

Inspired by epic fantasy series such as the Malazan Book of the Fallen, Earthsea, and A Song of Ice and Fire, The Years of Adventure was designed to create sweeping, large scale stories with a personal focus. Characters in this game may delve into ancient ruins and dark dungeons, explore mystical places, and battle magical beasts, but they are just as likely to negotiate a peace treaty with a neighboring monarch, lead soldiers into a large-scale battle, or spend years researching the secrets of immortality. They may even take a break and live quiet lives for 10 years before the call of adventure pulls them back out once again.

The Years of Adventure is still under active development. Much of the game text has been written (and edited, to some extent), but it is still missing a significant amount of art, and the layout is simple. There is more than enough here already for countless sessions of gaming, including:

• The Years, the core system of the game that organizes play into distinct year actions to synchronize character, faction, and domain actions into a single system.
• Classless character creation system designed to be quick to start, but with plenty of options for growth based around skills and special abilities referred to as techniques.
• Unified resolution mechanic that encourages player skill first, and allows character skill to fill in the gaps
• Social encounter system that puts roleplaying at the front and center
• A fast and consequential combat system that resolves quickly without taking away tactical depth
• Modular adventuring mechanics
• A robust Domain system designed to include players from the start, to support all of your sandbox needs
• A complementary Faction system that can be used in conjunction with Domains to complete your sandbox
• Lightweight rules for player characters to build structures, from simple homes up to entire cities, to further increase their options for engaging with the sandbox
• A mass combat system which can be mixed with individual combat to work with anything from a pack of wolves to a large scale battlefield
• Naval adventuring and combat rules, to be used alongside mass combat
• Game master advice on running sandbox games utilizing as many (or as few) of these systems as you choose

The text of The Years of Adventure © 2024 by Archstone Press is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Find out more about Archstone Press at archstonepress.com, or support our continued development of The Years of Adventure, as well as getting access to our setting guide and adventures on Patreon.