It was that sentiment which drove young Ava Islam headfirst into a book titled Dungeons & Dragons. She started role-playing with 2e loyalists, one of whom gave Ava a copy of the Mentzer red book (the B in BECMI). She convinced her father to purchase a big box set, but instead of containing the treasures she knew and loved, it confronted her instead with the D&D 4e Starter Set.
RPGs passed out of Ava’s life for years until 5e landed on her gaming table. Imagination rekindled, she unwittingly ventured into the online OSR scene, and after absorbing the ideas and play-style, she set out to implement both in 5e.
It didn’t work, and it left Ava hungry for a game that delivered the desired experience. At the time, that game —the game— was The Black Hack. Its rules-lite system, though, raised new obstacles. The almost microscopic cracks that other gamers easily stepped across appeared to Ava as unbridgeable chasms.
For example, how do parties move across hexes? What is that action’s formal basis as part of the game instead of just an utterance at the table?
Ava scoured the blogosphere, used what she found to fill in those cracks and then rebuild the emaciated infrastructure entirely. She did not intend to design (or rather, compile) a game; she just wanted to play one. But for her, it was more than a matter of entertainment.
‘[I was] broke, constantly on the verge of homelessness, dropped out of university after being the “golden child” of my middle-class immigrant family, spending every day getting high out of my mind till I could drink myself to sleep,’ Ava said. ‘The only thing really keeping me sane was running my games and writing Errant.’
Errant harkens back to fantasy adventure gaming’s roots while diverging from them and the overall trends in the genre’s almost 50-year history. Fantasy RPGs infamously labor under the mechanical bloat inherited from wargames. Errant reduces the cognitive load for all players, especially the GM, through its light rules, its comprehensive procedures, and their efficient presentation.
In its every aspect, Errant minimizes the rolls and arithmetic necessary to determine an action’s outcome. At the same time, specific aspects —narrative positioning and qualitative advantage, combat feats, arcane and divine magic and many others— provide guardrails for player creativity and agency without straitjacketing them.
The procedures —fighting an enemy, running a business, mass combat, overland travel and every other situation fantasy adventurers conceivably find themselves in— guide players through the four turn types. Initiative, exploration, travel, and downtime turns can instantly and seamlessly shift to accommodate players’ immediate goals.
None of this is novel to Errant; it self-admittedly deploys a structure as old as RPGs. Errant innovates by excavating and explicating this structure and bolstering it with streamlined procedures across the system. It empowers gamers with clear cognitive models of how play progresses at all scales, how different subsystems flow and how these components interlock and interact.
Errant’s emphasis on simplicity is the ‘rules light’ aspect of its tagline. The diversity and structural support for player goals is the ‘procedure heavy’ bit. A single procedure is mechanically light; the vast spread of procedures —from melee to mass combat, running a business, standing trial, pursuing a rivalry and beyond— is heavy in scope, but all coalesce into a robust whole artfully delivered in linear form.
‘I found the traditional organization where character creation and classes are introduced right after the core mechanics fell flat for me personally, as without an understanding of the foundation of the system it didn’t feel like players would have any framework with which to make decisions regarding character creation,’ Ava said.
‘As the book began to find its identity more solidly as a toolkit, it just made more sense. The stuff at the beginning of the book is the most essential to the system, core resolution mechanic, the turn structure, and how to adjudicate conversations, and everything continuing forward is increasingly optional - an inventory system, character classes and attendant magic systems, sub-procedures for different types of activities in each turn type.’
