In May 2024 we presented the Runehammer Crown and Skull Bundle featuring Crown and Skull, the newest FRPG rules system from Index Card RPG designer Brandish “Runehammer” Gilhelm at Runehammer Games.
Runehammer, the writer/designer/illustrator/influencer, goes by many names – Gilhelm, “Hankerin Ferinale,” “Ingrid Burnall”; even though we presented Index Card RPG in March 2021 and July 2023, we still don’t know this guy’s real name. He’s a seasoned gamer who started in the mid-’80s with GURPS, Rifts, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and now helps novice D&D players through his Runehammer YouTube channel and Patreon campaign (“A shield wall of creativity”). As a designer he’s effusively creative, supporting Index Card RPG, his follow-up system EZD6, 5E, and now Crown and Skull.
Runehammer designs thoroughly practical games, grounded in his experience at the table and in the Runehammer community. Crown and Skull draws on two years of collaborative play and his confident opinions about the hobby. “I wanted to push the boundary of maturity or erudition in an RPG book,” he said in a September 2023 Hardboiled GMshoe interview. “To me, it’s a stand against RPG books feeling like kids’ books. The writing, mechanics, style all trust and challenge the reader, rather than talk down to them.”
Crown and Skull shows Runehammer’s usual eclectic rules approach, amalgamating ideas from Fantasy Hero and Fate in an old-school hexcrawl experience he describes as “innovative, detailed, vast, deadly, human, lush, quilted, disruptive.” Crown and Skull has deep point-buy character creation and systems that put player creativity center-stage. In addition to ready-to-run character templates, the rulebook supports building custom characters, custom equipment, and even spells from scratch.
Combat takes place in five-phase rounds. Player characters can choose which phase to act in, but they usually only act once, whereas enemies can act in multiple phases. Your attack roll hits automatically; your die roll determines the damage you inflict. Enemies don’t make attack rolls; instead, you roll Defense to avoid injury, modified by an enemy stat, ATK. You have no statistics and no hit points, just skills and equipment. When you take damage, you cross off (lose the use of) a skill or piece of equipment. Once you’ve crossed off everything, you’re incapacitated or dead.
As their characters move across the map, players make the hex rolls that can uncover new setting locations, inhabitants, and events. The Game Master is right at the players’ side, discovering all this with them, and using the game’s inventive no-prep tools to improvise epic adventures. Crown and Skull gives chronically overloaded Game Masters the resources and techniques – hex rolls, enemy tactics dice, loot rolls, and more – to improvise a session on-the-fly. That said, the in-depth Game Master’s Guide gives you a well-drawn setting, the North Holds, with heroes and villains, guilds and orders, dungeons and enemies, and dozens of landmark locations. The rulebook also gives you tools and advice for everything from modifying, inventing, and running enemies to dream states and deeper considerations of style and story.
As characters do great deeds, they earn hero points and gain new abilities. After earning 25 hero points, each character makes the ultimate choice: the Crown (an order of protectors sworn to the realm) or the Skull (freedom to choose their own destiny). The Crown and Skull paths each grant exclusive skills and equipment.
Want to know more? Download the free 78-page Crown and Skull Player’s Guide at the Runehammer Games website.
This all-new Runehammer Crown and Skull Bundle let players experience these new frontiers. The complete, DRM-free Crown and Skull Digital Bundle (sold on the Runehammer Games website for $30) included the 356-page Crown and Skull core rulebook, filled with GM tools, 40 original monsters, huge loot tables, and the rich landscape of the North Holds; the North Holds setting map in hexgrid and no-grid versions; 30 image tokens suitable for virtual tabletop (VTT) platforms; and 23 atmospheric MP3 music tracks to enhance your game sessions.
Note: Our friends at DriveThruRPG host many Bundle of Holding offers, but none of these Crown and Skull titles are currently available on DriveThruRPG. Download your files from your Wizard’s Cabinet page on the Bundle site.
