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 score 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 score, a player divided the sum of all the points a character possessed in all of the skills in the talent pool by 10. A character could use the talent pool for any skill level 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 score of 2 which was their level for any knowledge skill they did not possess, so the character’s level 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 simple in this system but made some skills players might 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 a player rolled when their character learning new magic or using certain magic items — a failed obsession roll meant the magician became obsessed with the magical type and pursued furthering their power with it over all other priorities. Obsession increased the more magic a character learned, so magicians of great power were inevitably obsessed with obtaining more magic. Secondly, growing in magical skill randomly generated flaws such as disfigurement, a nocturnal sleeping cycle, madness, animal antipathy, and so on, which meant magicians accumulated strangeness 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 to 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