FARM Champions is a roleplaying game where the players are young heroes forced by choice or circumstance into embarking on a quest, going on adventures, and taking odd jobs (all developed by the Narrator using tools in the rulebook) to protect and improve their community. And now FARM Champions BETA is available on itch.io – name your own price, or check it out for free!

Let’s take a look at the game below and find out how you can help this game further along development!

What’s Is FARM Champions?

Young Heroes. You will play folks who grew up in a settlement together, usually a village, and who come together by choice or circumstance to deal with a threat to your community. Though your characters can be of any age, they are not experienced soldiers, merchants, or adventurers. A life of action and improving your community is new to them.

Jobs, Adventures, and Quests. The threats that face your community can be simple or complex, and may include anything from bad weather, catastrophic natural events like earthquakes or volcanoes, roving bandits or monsters, difficult negotiations over trade routes, or an organized faction of evil creatures. Quests might be epic in nature like destroying a powerful artifact, adventures might involve improving trade relations with a nearby settlement, and jobs might be slice-of-life tasks in which gather ingredients in order to win the local fair’s pie baking contest.

Your Community. The settlement your characters grew up in is their home, and is their bond to each other, to a number of recurring non-player characters such as patrons and family members, and thus is an integral part of character creation, quests, and the advancement of an adventure or campaign. Building the community and its many folk is just as important as creating the heroes themselves, and this is taken into account throughout the game mechanics.

Adir Truevoice – a FARM Champions pregenerated character

How Do You Play?

FARM Champions covers some familiar ground for anyone experienced with OSR and even Powered by the Apocalypse style games. Plus it has a unique twist in its focus. Let’s cover both points:

How’s It Familiar?

The “FARM” in FARM Champions stands for Fighter, Acolyte, Rogue, and Mage. The players will build fledgling characters with relatively simple traits and skills, bolstered by a unique ability based on which  of those classes they select. When it comes time to roll some dice, they’ll pick up 2d6, add a bonus from a relevant skill and from any relevant gear, and shoot to roll over a difficulty number (generally 7 or up, or a number generated by a contested dice roll). Easy peasy!

How’s It Different?

As you create your characters, the Narrator and the players will collaborate on building the characters’ community. Your choices of where the settlement is located, what day job-style occupations your characters hold, and what sorts of patrons, parents, and other connections the player characters have will impact six traits about the community. The jobs, adventures, and epic quests the characters take on during the game will determine whether these traits are degraded or improve. As a result, prosperity is everything, and it’s built in right from the start!

Of course there are monsters, hazards, events, and threats that target the community’s traits. They might tear it apart politically, socially, or even physically!

FARM Champions community rules

Plus, we got artist Misosile Busher(HIZIKI), creator of the Characters and Monsters Paper miniatures & Clip art, to lend their artwork to FARM Champions, giving it a fun, bright atmosphere! Just look at this wicked bugbear!

Bugbear by Misosile Busher(HIZIKI)

BETA Version

The BETA is now available on itch.io, and we invite you to use the comments on the FARM Champions BETA itch page, our contact info on our About page, or reach out to @timbannock on Twitter with any feedback you have. Armed with that, we plan to continuously improve and expand the game until a final release.

A job generator ties in with community prosperity

Here’s some insight into what we’re thinking and looking for:

• More or less detailed character rules?
• More or less detailed community rules?
• Creating a PbtA version of the game (basically a much simplified Dungeon World, but with the community creation and prosperity rules baked in). Do we bother with this, and does it replace what we’ve already developed or sit alongside it?
• What sorts of monsters and threats do we expand upon?

About the only things set in stone are that the game will be very, very simple to pick up and play, and to create characters fast alongside the community. We also really like the lighter tone of the game: it’s not all about combat and destruction, and most (nearly all) of the monster entries reflect this by having multiple non-violent ways to interact with threats.

So, pick up FARM Champions BETA today (name your own price if you want to support us in creating more and better)!