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To begin, the game is distributed as a Free PDF. It is 418 pages long, but as I’ll explain as we go, the document is deceptive in it’s length, large portions of it are alternate rules, histories, and various lists that will not typically come into play at all for any given game. You'll probably wind up using a quarter to a third of it unless you're in love with alternate rules. It is available for download here.
The game features no artwork at all, for which I’ve dinged it slightly on style. It does include useful examples of the various mechanics in actual-play style sidebars which are helpful, and quotations from various FF games for a bit of wall-o-text relief. Every chapter has a glossary at the end of all the mechanical terms in that chapter with a larger glossary at the end of the document covering all the terms together, an excellent addition that makes understanding the game far easier. There is no index but, as a searchable PDF, it’s not as crucial as it would be in a dead-tree edition. The PDF includes bookmarks but they’re horribly done, apparently by a machine working without human supervision. Completely idiotic things are bookmarked, often several to a page, and the labels on the bookmarks are often meaningless random words from where the bookmark is with little to tell the reader what the bookmark actually links to. As an example, the various types of equipment have bookmarks but rather than something useful like, say, "Swords," the links all say "AVAILABILITY" so good luck telling if that link goes to swords or potions. There is a helpful table of contents with page numbers that’s far more useful than the bookmarks.
Chapter 0: Introduction
We begin with chapter 0, no really chapter 0, which covers what an RPG is, and defines various RPG terminology. It further covers FF tropes, which the game seeks to draw out. The chapter helpfully emphasizes that the FF world runs according to it’s own internal logic, and Returners FFRPG does the same, hence players can expect to recover from the damage of a tac nuke with 8 hours rest in an inn, that desert lizard the party just beat up will mysteriously turn out to have been carrying a hundred gil and a suit of chail mail suitable for a human to wear, and a PC who’s an 8 year old girl can expect to be strong enough to beat a entire army of battle-hardened enemy soldier into the ground once she has a few levels under her belt. The rest of the chapter is dedicated to the history of Final Fantasy and covers all the various games, books, movies, etc. All in all a useful chapter for a relatively newcomer to gaming but not one players will return to very often.
Chapter 1: Playguide
This chapter covers the basic core mechanics. The system is a fairly simple d% roll under. The character’s skill level is the goal to be rolled below, or alternately the character’s attributes if they have no skill. Conditional modifiers are added or subtracted from the character’s skill, and rolls of 10 or less are critical successes while 95 or higher are critical botches. Opposed checks between characters use a blackjack-like mechanic, whoever rolls higher wins unless you roll higher than your skill, in which case you lose, while and finally a critical success always wins. The chapter also covers the bare bones of combat such as elements, immunities, resistances, and the damage cap, but the details of combat are left for later.
Chapter 2: Character Creation
In reality this chapter is only a part of character creation as other chapters include mildly important things like, oh I don’t know, how about races, jobs, equipment and all the special powers or spells you’ll want for your character. What chapter 2 actually covers is the attributes, advantages, and disadvantages. The game features six attributes, strength, vitality, agility, speed, magic, and spirit. No intelligence, apparently that’s up to the player. The chapter does include a list of all the races and how they interact with the attributes. Rather than the traditional “+2 Strength” route, races alter the maximum you may buy up your attribute to, thus a Viera can buy up to 12 points of agility but can’t buy more than 6 points of vitality at chargen. These caps continue to be important as the character progresses, as each class has it’s own cap to attributes, and the combination of class and race sets a hard limit that can never be exceeded by a character’s base attributes. The game also has a cap on modified stats from items, no attribute can go above 30 by any means whatsoever. A number of special combat attributes such as evasion, M armor, and Accuracy are derived from a combination of skills and attributes, and the means to calculate them are given here. Special mention needs to be made of the advantages and disadvantages, there are a large number of them covering just about anything a player could want as a modifer to a basic class, and the game helpfully supplies such useful advice as pointing out how they can be modified, for instance with only a mild tweak the animal companion can be used to supply an airship to the party.Skills are fairly simple, any given job comes with X skill points and skills are bought up at a rate of 1 point per point of skill. There are certain skills which are required of all PCs, the game does not allow characters who can’t use any weapons or can’t speak the same language as everybody else in the party. The chapter finishes off with EXP tables, leveling, and a few job-specific charts for characters beginning above first level, such as how many Monster Abilities a Blue Mage might reasonably start with at levels above 1.
Chapter 3: Races
There’s not a lot to say about this chapter, each race is given a brief writeup on their character and society, vital statistics, and a physical description. As far as I can tell, every race from every FF game is present from the Dwarves and Elves that only appeared in one room in FF1 to the familiar Humans and Moogles to the more recent Viera and Bangaa. Each race includes tips on roleplaying that particular species. There are optional rules for Racial traits, for instance allowing Sasquatches to use Ice Breath and Moogles limited flight, but frankly these seem to throw game balance right out the window. Not a whole lot else to say.
Chapter 4: Jobs
Hoo boy are there a lot of jobs. Basically if any character in any FF game has ever had a specific job or mechanical ability, you’ll find it here. Except for Relm Arrowny, for some reason fans of the psychotic 8 year old painter girl are out of luck. But overall there are tons of jobs, and good thing, since the game doesn’t allow multiclassing. At all. This seems like a terrible oversight to me as the FF series games themselves tend to encourage multiclassing and have all sorts of jobs mechanics. Sadly, in this game, if you choose to be, say, a fighter, you’re a fighter for life and never get to add anything else to your sheet. What’s more, the classes have no real choices or options in advancement, every fencer, for instance, always gains swarm strike at level 1, reflex at level 8, feather blow at level 15, and so forth. I consider this locked-in choiceless advancement the weakest part of the game. It’s not quite as limiting as it might sound given that there’s several dozen jobs but it’s still jarring to see such a limitation in a modern RPG.The jobs are divided into four broad categories; warriors, mages, adepts (Fighter Mage Hybrids), and experts (Skill Monkeys). In general each job gains a new power every 8 levels, with nothing but more HP and, in magic classes, MP in the intervening levels. Each class has specific equipment list it’s allowed to use but a broad array of advantages and disadvantages means you’ll have no problem customizing your white mage to use a great axe if that’s your thing. Classes are front loaded with HP and bonuses so the jump between level 1 and 2 is relatively small, and the game assumes that leveling happens rapidly compared to, say, DnD 3.5.
It also needs pointing out that game balance is only so-so between these classes. In our test game we quickly found that the Spoony Bard was well-able to handle entire encounters by himself and made the Black Mage look like a complete wimp for sheer magical damage. Some classes have real MAD problems while the Dancer can use agility for just about everything and ignore all her other attributes. Our Dancer dual-wielded whips and was pretty much a terror against any Final Boss, who tended to wind up blind and paralyzed for the entire fight thanks to her.
Chapter 5: Skills
The basic mechanics were already covered earlier, so this supplement is primarily about what each skill means and what you can do with it. Certain skills are considered particularly valuable, and cost twice as much as others. Skills are divided into several broad categories such as wilderness or social, and each class gets half off skills in the category considered key to that class. In general I find the number of skills reasonable (The list takes up a bit under half a page) and the game is generous with it’s skill points, allowing a new character to be competent in several areas. Each skill gets a small writeup covering what the skill might be used for and the conditional modifiers a GM might want to apply. As an optional system, the Scavenge skill is used to extract useful parts from defeated monsters for those who find their suspension of disbelief broken when a murderous tree turns out to have a pile of Gil inside.
Chapter 6: Equipment
Much like the jobs chapter, this is a rather exhausting effort filled with just about every item ever found in any game. There’s a half dozen types of swords and knives divided by class and many, many armors. Items are divided by Tier, with more advanced items taking up higher tiers. In general there’s two items at each tier, one “mundane” and one with a magical ability. Items also have an availability rating for those who want to use that optional system, although since the cost of an item increases exponentially with tiers I find that it’s not really needed, the players aren’t going to be able to afford equipment out of their tier. At the highest level are artifacts and legendaries with no availability that should only be obtained as a result of an epic dungeon battle.Ammunition has a writeup although this is optional, the game generally assumes that a player has infinite ammunition for any given weapon. Ammunition mostly lets you stack still more special magic powers onto your attack. Accessories and usable 1-shot items are not ignored, the lists include everything from tonics to scrolls of Firaga. The chapter finishes off with some useful advice for the GM covering things like tools, which are assumed to usually be rolled in with the player’s skills, and a detailed section on crafting.
I really like the crafting system here. It’s detailed and interesting, which is odd since crafting isn’t much of a part of Final Fantasy. Raw materials for crafting are divided into tiers just as items are, and a PC needs raw materials of the appropriate tier to build the item. Hence a player can’t churn out a Masamune from iron ore, you’ll need to find a source of Mithril first. The type of material is also divided into types such as cloth, gems, or metals, and adding magical or special abilities generally requires particularly special materials extracted from monsters using the scavenge skill or found in the most horrible dungeons.
Chapter 7: Combat
The system is simple and fast, roll under your ACC - the target’s EVA, then roll damage (hint: You’ll usually hit, dodging doesn’t work much in this game). Some special abilities hit automatically and there’s a sort-of initiative system that can give a character extra actions with enough agility, just in case somebody was worried that the Dancer wasn’t overpowered enough. Ahem, right, moving on. Movement is extremely abstracted, as might be expected from Final Fantasy. How abstracted? There’s not exactly any range attribute and if you’re facing an enemy that flies around you’ll still be able to hit it just as easily with your sword as the bow-user next to you. The majority of the chapter is taken up by yet another list, this one of every status-ailment and buff in the game. The game finishes with some advice on experience and unusual battle conditions such as pincers and reinforcements.
Chapter 8: Magic
This is another fairly self-explanatory chapter. The spells will be quite familiar to anybody who’s played the games this RPG is based on, and surprisingly mages actually get to pick which spells they learn when, within tier limits. There’s also a fuzzier, non-spell based system called Intuitive Magic, which lets a character produce nonstandard effects and massage the system a bit. In general intuitive magic is what the players pull out in cut scenes, it can’t heal or inflict damage and can’t duplicate spells, but lets you do other things like move plants to create a bridge across a chasm or charge up an airship’s mana battery. Basic guidelines are given for what intuitive can do, and what kinds of MP costs these effects should incur.
Chapter 9: Adventuring
This covers all sorts of areas the players might wind up in, from Inns to Stores to Dungeons. There’s a large number of rules that might be useful but are pretty much optional, such as changes to healing based on the quality of Inn the players go to and a range of charts for the weather and how it affects the PCs. It’s fairly short, and probably not going to be referenced much, but still a useful index for life on the road.
Chapter 10: Game Mastering
Chapter 10 includes quite a bit of useful advice on dealing with game balance issues, what players might want and how to give it to them, and how to structure an adventure with goals, complications, and rewards. Houserules and customization get a work over, along with potential pitfalls for GMs like the GMPC and railroad plot. Overall this is an excellent primer for new GMs for any game and quite useful.
Appendices 1-5
The remainder of the book consists of several appendices with supplemental rules, about 230 pages of them. The 1st is a skill supplement with even more crafting rules and details. The 2nd is all about creating monsters the FF way. The 3rd appendix has additional summoning rules to augment the magic system. The 4th is more Game Master advice and some rather esoteric optional rules such as zodiac and blood type traits. The 5th appendix has character sheets.
