Minimalist Magic: A Review of 1400 Lo-Fi Hi-Fantasy
Despite its unwieldy name, the "1400" collection has rocketed to the top of my favorite rules-lite fantasy tabletop games.
A fantasy hack of Jason Tocci’s 24XX rules-lite system, 1400 Lo-Fi Fantasy (henceforth “1400”) has emerged as a serious contender for my favorite rules-lite ttrpg. Written by James Lennox-Gordon, 1400 describes itself as “a collection of five rules-lite fantasy micro-games with a shared ruleset.” If you’ve never heard of it, let me introduce you to this awesome suite of games, and encourage you to take it for a spin.
Out of the gate, you’ll notice 1400 provides a huge bang for your buck. For $10 you get a collection of five fantasy-inspired micro-games that while distinct in tone and flavor, can be mixed and matched to suit your gaming purposes. The amount of content and imagination fueled contained in the 1400 zine collection is impressive, and is only eclipsed in value by Tricube Tales’ free ruleset.
The 1400 zine collection features the following micro-games:
Quest - Heroic fantasy adventures that embrace the most trope-laden D&D conventions.
Below - Dungeon crawling with a darker vibe. Introduces magic (and cursed) items, new rules for harm, and generators for dungeon locations, hazards, and enemies.
Sneak - Shadowy heists and assassinations. Play a vagabond pulling off under-the-table jobs. Introduces gadgets and new spells for players, and rules for running heists.
Mage - High magic spell-slinging adventures with expanded rules for spellcasting and sixty spells.
Planes - Explore the multiverse as one of twenty ancestries, including Cambion, Myconid, and Reptite. Tables for the GM to populate an entire universe with adventure.
Written with maximal efficiency, 1400’s core rules fit into one column.
These rules check so many boxes for me:
Degrees-of-success dice resolution mechanic? Check.
Player-facing rolls? Check.
Spellcasting that free-form, avoids spell-slots, discourages/prevents spamming, and avoids cumbersome spell tracking? Check.
A flexible harm system that discards Hit Points and can be tuned to the level of lethality desired by one’s group? Check.
A skill/talent system that can support robust character customizability? Check.
A rules-lite system that uses all of the classic polyhedral dice (not just d6’s)? Check.
A system that is narratively driven and keeps players focused on the game instead of their character sheets? Check.
There’s a lot to love here.
Each of 1400’s micro-game provides new options for character creation, gear, and magic, while presenting Game Mastering advice unique to that setting. Each micro game ends with tables that allow you to generate setting-specific adventures, and they are really well executed. And to top things off, unlike many rules-lite offerings, 1400 is characterized by great art and crisp interior design that ups its level of professionalism.
Until you take a few minutes to read through 1400, I’m not sure you’ll be able to appreciate how concentrated and content-dense these games are. Each one accomplishes in a handful of pages what other games struggle to achieve with 4x the page count. Does 1400’s minimalist brevity provide a challenge to players and GMs? Maybe. I could envision a newbie feeling a bit overwhelmed at the lack of hand-holding in each game (especially an inexperienced GM). But James Lennox-Gordon anticipated this, and devoted 4 pages that provide practical guidance on playing the game, running the game, and best practices when it comes to GMing adventures. It’s one of the most concise yet thorough overview of player and GMing principles I’ve come across.
After providing some general tables for locations, NPC’s, and Factions, 1400 ends with The Planar Nexus, a pre-written adventure that can be used with any of the micro-games in the collection. Although I haven’t played through it with a group yet, it looks incredibly fun and gives GMs an example of how to design and run an adventure using a rules-lite, narrative based system.
1400 is a fantastic system for groups looking to keep a D&D-esque feel to their adventures while eliminating the rules bloat that stalls so much story momentum. It’s also an excellent engine for solo play, providing a simple but rich framework that facilitates great solo play without a lot of bookkeeping or unnecessary crunch.
While Tricube Tales is my go-to rules-lite system, 1400 has absolutely overtaken EZD6 and Tiny Dungeons to situate itself in my top three rules-lite rpgs. It offers so much for so little, and the more I play it the more I appreciate how special it really is.