Warlock!

This review comes from reading and not playing. Ideally I would have played it, but I only have so much time in a given week.

Warlock! is a mixture of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (with it's career system and lack of levels) combined with some OSR elements, a d20, and some more modern sensibilities.

For skill checks you'll roll a d20 and add the relevant skill and attempt to get a 20 or higher for a success. Anything less is failure. There's a defined set of 32 skills along with career skills (which are the average of a given career's relevant skills and used when nothing else makes sense).

When you create your character you'll start by picking some beginning skills. You choose ten skills to start at 6, ten skills to start at 5, and everything else starts at 4. Keep in mind though that a skill at 6 only has a 30% chance of success! After that you'll roll for stamina (effectively hit points) and luck (which serves as a saving throw of sorts, except each time you test it, you deduct 1 from your luck for the rest of the adventure (recovering it afterwards).

You'll pick a career and have 10 more points to invest in career skills. Careers define a set of five skills that you can advance in as you gain experience. With the beginning careers there's two skills that allow you to advance as high as 10 and three that can advance as high as 12. After advancing at least three skills to 10 or more you can move on to advanced careers that have 6 skills: three as high as 14 and three as high as 16.

Along with your skills, stamina, luck, and career you'll get some basic possessions and career possessions, and pick some character traits. Then you're off to the races.

Combat is made with opposed rolls with the attacker getting a +5 bonus to their roll, so sure your character might start with a 6 in short blades, but that +5 makes it an 11 which gives you a 55% chance of success. Whoever rolls highest in the roll gets to roll for damage (ranging from 1d6-2 to 2d6+3). Armour reduces damage by 1d3 for light armor, 1d6 for modest, and 2d6 for heavy. When an attack hits it will always do a minimum of 1 damage. Critical hits only ever happen if stamina is reduced below 0 and from there you roll a 2d6 on a chart, adding how far below 0 stamina the victim is. For example: you hit a character with 2 stamina for 4 damage, they roll a 1 on their light armor so you do 3 damage. 2 stamina - 3 damage = -1 stamina. This is a critical hit and you'll roll 2d6+1 on the critical hit table.

Initiative is handled by each side rolling a d6 and highest going first, with ties being rerolled, but then it goes back and forth from the winning side to the losing side, with each side choosing a character who hasn't acted yet. I like that wrinkle from B/X D&D.

Recovery is much faster than in other OSR games: characters recover half their lost stamina if they can rest for 30 minutes. A full night's sleep recovers the rest. However, critical injuries take much longer to recover from.

Magic is probably the most interesting to me, mainly because Wizards typically have fewer hit points in D&D to balance their greater strength in offense, but here everyone has the same stamina roll. Instead, in order to cast spells you must sacrifice a certain amount of stamina, whether you're an arcane caster or a divine.

From all of this, I'm definitely intrigued, I think it could make for a very fun romp through a medieval city. I really like how careers are handled and how simple it is (as I typically bounce off of anything too complex). I'm looking forward to running a small arc of this at some point in the future.