NEW KS begins Oct 3rd by Jason Vey of Elf Lair Games

I checked my email this morning and this info was sent to me a couple of days ago.

By thegreyelf widely known as Jason Vey of Elf Lair Publishing

 Hoping you guys will follow and back when this comes out:

Coming Soon

Night Shift is a modern urban fantasy, horror, and supernatural game designed to cover just about any style of game in that genre you like. It uses a new system that mimics the mechanics of OD&D, B/X D&D, and AD&D, but streamlined and smoothed out. I'm calling the new system O.G.R.E.S. just as our original house system was called O.R.C.S. While not a clone of any existing system, the mechanics are close enough to make your classic O/B/X/A games and resources compatible with it.

We're Kickstarting next week, on October 3, and the campaign will run until October 31 at 11:59 P.M. Yes, Halloween.

It's designed by myself and Timothy Brannan. The two of us have worked together on a lot of games over the years, and our names appear in publications such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ghosts of Albion, Doctor Who, Castles & Crusades, Amazing Adventures, and many more.

What makes it different from Amazing Adventures? AA (both the C&C and 5E versions) does a great job of emulating Urban Fantasy.

So, AA is built to be a multi-genre game in the pulp tradition which can handle any kind of play you can imagine. It also in both its iterations uses pretty definitively modern rules systems (even though both SIEGE and 5e seek to emulate an old school style of play).

Night Shift is very specifically built to emulate a horror/urban fantasy game rooted in things like Buffy, Angel, Forever Knight, Ash vs. Evil Dead, Charmed, Supernatural, Wynona Earp, Van Helsing, Lost Girl, and the like. In Tim's and my mind, it's a replacement for the Buffy RPG, which is no longer (technically) in print. We're including a range of "Night Worlds," or mini-settings to get you started.

The system, also, is what sets it apart. It's based on my blog and thread here about how there were actually 3 systems in old school play. In hashing that out, we've got a system with 3 sub-systems: combat, saves, and ability checks use a d20 system which is a sort of mashup between SIEGE, OD&D, and Target20. Class abilities use percentiles. The GM then uses the Rule of 2 to adjudicate just about everything else.

The system is called O.G.R.E.S., and is meant to replace my original O.R.C.S. system in the second edition of Spellcraft & Swordplay, which I hope to release next.

Here's a bit of a more formal press release about Night Shift:

Night Shift: Veterans of the Supernatural Wars
Debuting the new Elf Lair Games house system, O.G.R.E.S., Night Shift is an urban fantasy, horror, and dark modern supernatural game that uses old-school mechanics derived from the original, basic, expert, and advanced versions of the World's Most Famous Role Playing Game. It allows you to mimic all the tropes of just about any film, TV series, or novels you like.

All of the following are possible with Night Shift:

    •Cheerleaders that are chosen to slay vampires, granted with extranormal powers to accomplish their destiny;

    •Sisters imbued with the power of chosen witches;   

    •Worlds where Fae of all manner battle in the politics of light and dark;

    •The great-grandniece of a famous gunslinger inherits the legacy of the demon hunter;

    •A world where two brothers armed with knowledge and weapons hunt the supernatural in their father's name;

    •And more!

Night Shift is built to handle just about any sort of urban fantasy you can dream up, using the tropes of classic horror-based television, motion pictures, comics, and novels.

Designed by industry veterans Jason Vey and Timothy Brannan, whose names have appeared in such products as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ghosts of Albion, Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, C.J. Carella's WitchCraft, All Flesh Must be Eaten!, Nightbane, Amazing Adventures, Castles & Crusades and more, this game brings together two noted designers with decades of combined experience.

Within its pages, you'll find:

Complete character generation using familiar stats

Major character archetypes, including the Survivor ("I've seen something weird"), Veteran ("I hunt something weird"), Chosen One ("I am the weird thing that other weird things fear"), Theosophist ("I see weird dead things"), Psychic ("I sense and control something weird"), Sage ("I study weird things"), and Witch/Warlock ("I am something weird")

    •Complete rules for magic, psychic powers, and necromancy/spirit channeling

     •Customizable supernatural character race--play a werewolf, vampire, succubus, or fae

     •An optional skills system to expand what your character can do

     •A simple rules system comprised of three basic mechanics, designed for fast and intuitive play

     •Variant styles and levels of play that modify the system to represent gritty, realistic, and cinematic styles

     •A GM section with tips and tricks on creating a series, seasons, and more, as well as guildelines for building custom character classes

     •A full bestiary with all of the classic monsters like werewolves, vampires, demons, devils, zombies, mummies, and a few new surprises

     •Several complete mini-settings you can use to get up and running right away

    •Conversion rules to use the game with Original and B/X, and O.R.C.S (Elf Lair's Spellcraft & Swordplay) systems

    •A complete alternate combat system, which hearkens back to the very earliest days of the hobby, before the publication of the first version of the World's Most Famous RPG.

What Is O.G.R.E.S?
O.G.R.E.S. stands for "Oldschool Generic Roleplaying Engine System." It's the new house system for Elf Lair Games, which will run alongside our current O.R.C.S. and Cd8 Systems. It's another step forward in presenting a new approach to the definition of a "unified system" for running just about any kind of game, using mechanics that will be instantly familiar to players of "old school" fantasy games, specifically those that powered the Original, Basic, Expert, and Advanced versions of the World's Most Famous Role Playing Game.

What O.G.R.E.S. does, however, is streamline and codify these mechanics, to remove what many view as arcane and confusing elements, and break the system down into a fast-playing, fun, easy-to-understand, and open presentation, adding a few modern design elements to improve the smooth play.

This also means that the majority of products which are compatible with any of these editions of the game, are also compatible with O.G.R.E.S.