A fantasy roleplaying game system originally developed by David “Zeb” Cook for the Conan Role-Playing game published by TSR in 1985. Several important rules and concepts appear for the first time in this system, including:
- Talent pools: characters were built around skills, from which characters derived a talent pool which represented the base skill level for any skill in the pool. For example, knowledge skills such as Arcane Languages, Lore, and Survival were grouped into the Knowledge talent pool. To derive the Knowledge talent pool level, divide the sum of all the points a character possessed in all of the skills in the talent pool by 10. Use the talent pool number for any skill in the talent pool when the character does not have any levels in that specific skill. For example, a character with 20 in Arcane Languages and no other knowledge skills would have a Knowledge talent pool of 2 which was their score for any knowledge skill they did not possess, so the character’s score was 2 for Lore or Survival.
- Tiered levels of success: using a colored chart, a player’s roll of d100 modified by appropriate character skills and opposing penalties would determine a range of outcomes, not just success or failure. The probabilities for marginal, acceptable, total, and heroic successes change situationally, even to the point of making certain outcomes impossible with overwhelming odds. The chart was useful to quickly determine a roll’s outcome, but required some calculation to apply.
- Prerequisite skills: Certain abilities and skills required prerequisite skills, creating de-facto skill trees. They were not very complicated in this system but made some skills we generally ignore in most games necessary and creative players could find uses for them.
- Penalties for learning magic: magic had a corrupting influence on its users in 2 ways. The first was an obsession skill that needed to be rolled when learning new magic or using certain magic items — a failure when rolling obsession meant the magician becomes obsessed with the magical type and pursues furthering their power in it to all other priorities. Obsession increased the more magic a character learned, so magicians of great power were also eventually obsessed with obtaining more magic. The second were magic weaknesses certain magical schools randomly generated such as disfigurement, a nocturnal sleeping cycle, madness, animal antipathy, and so on, which meant magicians accumulated creepiness as they accumulated power.
- Fame: the system measured your character’s most noteworthy actions and their famous skills if they became high enough mechanically. To quote the Conan box set text, “In Hyboria, a person’s deeds are much more important than his wealth.” However, there were only 2 explicit benefits to fame in the basic rules, which were:
- a bonus on NPC reaction rolls if the character’s fame was greater than an NPC’s fame
- the level of employment the character could achieve, from caravan guard to high priest
More information can be found at:
https://sites.google.com/site/zefrsrpg/ and http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=327143