You sit at your table prepping for the next session but are losing interest in what you’re doing. It’s not that you want to lose the fantasy aspect of your Tabletop Role Playing Game, Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition (D&D). The new edition of 2024 brings you back to basics but D20 is predictable and chopping at the health tree of your latest flavor Barbarian isn’t all that appealing.

All of your searching hasn’t brought up an easy system that creates that same level of threat and challenge. The balance game, as it were. Where things are realistic, and your player’s heroes aren’t the same caliber as a certain impervious, red cape wearing superhero. Your search will come to a close by reading this. I was once in your seat. I know the struggle for balance between GM and player. Been there. Done that. Still do it, by the gaming gods.

Heyo, I’m Kat and I’ve been a Game Master (GM) for the last 10 years (at least). While this may not be your Magic Missile, the combination of Classic Fantasy and Unearthed Companion has blown me away. Let me explain a bit about Classic Fantasy and Mythras before I launch into the similarities between Classic Fantasy, Unearthed Companion, and D&D.

Classic Fantasy and Mythras

So you think you know how to play, do you? Well, as someone who’s used to the D20 system where you roll, do math, and pray for the ultimate outcome, the Mythras system rocked my world. The way that it’s designed is both more and less complicated than D&D’s D20 system. There’s much more that goes into creating your character initially, which is where the math comes in, but after that you get a difficulty table, your skill percentage (skill%) and when you roll, there’s no guesswork involved.

I can hear the screeching brakes. My fellow D&D players, here’s the beginning of the benefits of the Mythras D100 system at work. When you roll out your character, you roll standard things like, Strength (STR), Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, and Charisma. Here’s the difference: you also roll out something called Power, instead of your Wisdom, and Size. Each of these, like our standard six, gives us bonuses, but instead of a 15 in STR giving a +2 to your dice roll to attack, you take a percentage in your chosen weapon style. Let’s say you’re working on converting that Barbarian from earlier. In Classic Fantasy, he’d be a fighter and get a standard of 20% to his combat skill%. From there, you can boost that number up to 60% combat skill (fighter) at the base rank. (D&D’s level 1).

The significance of this is that a fighter at level 1 rarely (unless rolled very well) walks out of character creation with a +3 bonus to STR. While in Classic Fantasy, thanks to the way Mythras works, you have a 60% chance to hit your target. That means you have to roll 60 or less on a D100 (D10 and D%) or less to succeed in hitting your target. It makes those encounters a lot smoother when figuring out if you or your players hit. Here’s the other bonus to the Mythras system: there’s an actual back and forth in the combat so your players don’t wind up completely in la la land when it’s not their turn. This is carried over smoothly into Classic Fantasy. Check out ‘7 MORE Key Differences Between D&D and Mythras’ for how combat works in Mythras.

If I’ve caught your attention with combat, let me up the ante with classes and leveling. The way that classes function in Classic Fantasy is an upgrade to D&D in the fashion that you can, with time, experience rolls, and the right teacher, create your character the way you want to instead of being pigeonholed into one style of subclass. Classic Fantasy coupled with the Unearthed Companion creates a plethora of possible spells, ability, and multiclass options. Here’s one drawback, it’s a Rank system. Those of us accustomed to leveling up consistently have a bit of a shock when we hear levelless or Rank systems.

Here’s a quick explanation. You don’t level up and gain a boat load of new abilities, feats, or subclass spells. What you gain is experience rolls at an appropriate point (GM dependent). These experience rolls help your character grow their abilities and skill% making them better than just your standard leveling. You get to customize your character the way you want to instead of relying on just standard feats, spells, and equipment. Though experience is also spent on gaining spells and the like, they just cost ‘more’ than your skills.

I stated that you wouldn’t be pigeonholed into a subclass and that’s accurate with Classic Fantasy and expanded upon in Unearthed Companion. The pair of books boasts a total of 13 different classes to choose from. Most of which relate to what we know and love out of D&D. It’s the same for the races, or as of 2024 our species. Classic Fantasy and Unearthed Companion have even expanded upon how the races, cultures, and classes work. (Yes, that includes spells, too!)

Now that I’ve talked about Classic Fantasy, and I keep mentioning Unearthed Companion, let me talk a bit more about the latter.

We Have Unearthed a Great Companion

What is the Unearthed Companion? Well, when it comes to Classic Fantasy and D&D alike, Unearthed Companion brings all the things we love about D&D to us and improves it. This includes classes, spells and monsters. The Classic Fantasy core rules have been out for 10 years, but only cover Ranks 1 to 3. In that time,the development team had a mass of feedback as well. What the Unearthed Companion brings to the table is an expansion covering Ranks 4 and 5 (Rank 5 is the maximum in Classic Fantasy), plus errata, upgrades, and brand-new spells, monsters, and class abilities. The Unearthed Companion takes the feedback and upgrades every class to make sure that they are relevant throughout each of the Ranks.

There are 124 pages talking about spells that are new and those that are improved from the original Classic Fantasy. Yes, this includes your mage’s favorite Fireball and more! Here’s one I’m excited about, “Aerial Servant” It’s a rank 3 cleric spell that allows the caster to summon an invisible entity (stated as an Air Elemental) that fetches something or someone that the cleric describes up to ‘X’ weight. You don’t really have that in D&D which makes me want to play a cleric in Classic Fantasy.

Thinking of the Air Elemental, Unearthed Companion also boasts an additional 92 pages filled with new monsters for the Classic Fantasy setting. These are also given with a conversion table like everything else when transferring from a level-based system like D&D. Having that tool alone makes our GM lives easier. My favorite aspect of the Monsters is the massive table on dragons. There are 6 pages on how to build your own dragons from age, to spells, to damage and attacks and each are broken down by their color in chromatic and metallic.

So why do I want to convert? Let’s talk about the similarities between Classic Fantasy and Unearthed Companion and D&D 5e.

Why Wouldn’t You Want To Convert?

There are plenty of reasons to say no and most of it revolves around learning a new system if you aren’t familiar with the D100 systems like Mythras. Here’s the best thing about that though, Mythras Matters is a YouTube and Podcast that helps you learn all about how to play if the rule books seem confusing. (Fun Fact: That’s how I learned a lot of what I know now. Thanks, Inwils!). I stumbled upon the Mythras Matters YouTube channel when I was first learning more about Mythras. Once you get the basics down of Mythras, you’re good to go with Classic Fantasy.

Here’s the main difference between those two. Mythras is human based fantasy. Classic Fantasy is D&D styled. Upon close inspection, there are plenty of differences between D&D 2014 and Classic Fantasy, but most of it leans into either the gameplay style as listed above, or that it’s a levelless system. Those two things are relatively easy to shift out of for those of us looking to do more than continue chopping at our Flavor of the Week Barbarian’s hit points. It brings about a sense of realism for both players and GMs when building encounters and not every encounter is a dungeon crawl with the skills that Classic Fantasy has brought to us.

All of our classic spells, classes, races, and monsters are outlined for us with a conversion table. It’s all the same elements while making it more interactive and cooperative in and out of combat. There is a sense of realism when it comes to our character’s health and survivability. This is something that I’ve consistently repeated throughout the blogs I’ve written. The Mythras System combines high creative flexibility for both player and GM while giving a sense of realism with how durable your character actually is. That makes the tree chop seem much more doable.

So Why Classic Fantasy and Unearthed Companion?

Systems aside, the essence of both Classic Fantasy and D&D are the same. High fantasy settings, multi/monster like heroes, collaborative role playing to create an epic story. If you’re hung up on the system, I’d check out Mythras Matters or Black Lodge Games on YouTube. They each give their own perspective on why they love the system and explain what you can do with it. All in all, something like Unearthed Companion is the perfect complement to Classic Fantasy, since it improves a lot and expands even more for those of us who’ve lived through 3-5e of D&D.

If you aren’t committed to the concept of going all in you can also check out Classic Fantasy Imperative. This is the ‘lite’ version of Classic Fantasy. This will help you dip your toes in and see what I mean by how similar it is to D&D. With Unearthed Companion’s launch, I’d just go for the whole shebang and check both Classic Fantasy and Unearthed Companion now.

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