Midwest Fantasy Wargame: The Primeval RPG

What would it have been like if fantasy role playing started with a slightly different origin point? The Twin Cities style of play emerged from a truly American wargaming culture with

limited British influence. Midwest Fantasy Wargame has recovered some of these lost rules directly from the primordial ooze but much is, admittedly, a reconstruction or reimagining. Midwest Fantasy Wargame tries to come as close as possible to reproducing gameplay from 1972 without the benefit of first-hand knowledge. It has been a labor of love to analyze fifty years of misremembered game sessions, some scraps of paper, reminiscences written years after the fact, and a few draft rulesets to find our way home.

Unlike Dragons Beyond, there is no single manuscript to guide this reconstruction. However, a fantasy wargame campaign built upon these rules is playable and is distinguishable from what came in 1974 and later. There is also plenty of great material to poach for any “old school” fantasy campaign from the monsters and prizes.

Within Midwest Fantasy Wargame: The Primeval RPG, you’ll find: 

•  Rules for running your own “Braunstein” with a complete example from the Twin Cities 
•  A new dungeon generation procedure guaranteed to create maps with a Twin Cities flavor 
•  Unique missile and melee resolution mechanics based on Charles A. Totten’s Strategos: The American Game of War 
• A set of Oracles for solo play or Referee use that are based on vocabulary exclusive to the earliest medieval fantasy wargaming ruleset 
• Dungeon oddities, traps, tricks, and artifacts true to the Twin Cities experience 
•  Monsters more true to Bulfinch than Lerner 
•  A non-Vancian magic system

Between 1971 and late 1973 experimentation and discussion coalesced around a central set of themes, ideas, and mechanics. The role playing industry that emerged now has worldwide appeal and a legacy spanning a half a century.