Grievous Grimoire

Grievous Grimoire available as a PDF

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Grievous Grimoire is an optional ruleset for the Open00 system used by Against the Darkmaster. This rule supplement allows the customisation of character development from the base vocations. General Skills can be enhanced using Specialty skills. Now, each character can have an area of expertise. Vocation Initiate Spell Lores and Unique Specialty skills for non-spell users provide tools to develop your character your way. The book provides supporting rules for Shaman (Spirit World), Summoners (Elementals), and Mages (Animated Objects) and a host of ways to apply development points. Grievous Grimoire is a must for the GM armory.


Remember, we’re not for profit so all proceeds from this will be invested back into the following publication, Falling Skies. Please give us your support and head over to our webshop to buy your copy.

Grievous Grimoire
An optional ruleset for Open00 and Against the Darkmaster
Available at the Imaginary Turtles Webshop

A statement from Lez regarding Grievous Grimoire

Grievous Grimoire Lead Designer Lez Johnson shared his thoughts on our Discord this morning.

“Hi folks,

First of all, thank you to those who have purchased Grievous Grimoire. We really appreciate your support, and the monies we have collected from this product will be reinvested into future products, specifically artwork and the like.

We also appreciate the comments, both good and constructive. These will help us in delivering more quality products in the future.

A few things we would like to get out in the open:

A lot of people have asked if we are exploring options with DTRPG. We have tried to keep our costs down as much as we can and feel like Itch.io as an initial outlet allowed us to do that. DTRPG will eat into the finances but given we have had so much feedback stating that people would like it, we are currently looking at those options for the future. We are beginning to collate information for an errata and we will let you know about this as soon as we have enough information to act upon. Fortunately, at this point there has been little need to make any significant changes (I see some of the Milestones may need a little up-tick in power – e.g., the +5 top Saves will need a boost).

There have been some comments regarding the power level increase (positive and a few, not-so). We just need to make it clear that, yes, there is an increase in the power level of Player Characters, but this is deceptively slight. The economy of Drive Points does limit many of the options, in fact during playtests we still had those players who would hold on to them for those emergency ‘avoid a crit’ moments, and others (especially in one-shot tests), who would use them for the +10 to just about everything for a combat. We conducted playtests using our own, upcoming campaign in both core rules and GG rules, both were pretty similar, but the players did enjoy more options. We even conducted a playtest using a converted version of LMoP, with great success.

One thing to be aware of is that some of the spells are a little ‘different’ and do indeed hold a little more power than some of the core lists, but remember, a player would be required to select the Vocational Initiate (at the cost of a BP), to get anywhere near these – they are not within the general selection of Spell Lores and exclusive to those characters.

Yes, there are a lot of new skills. This is by design. Most players will not select many of them due to DP restrictions. Some feedback has stated that the character sheet is a little big due to the inclusion of these skills. We are currently working on a more concise version for those that would prefer to fill in their own, small selection of additional skills.

You may have noticed that this supplement is aimed at ‘High Fantasy’. It was not designed as an alternative for MERP, as we have seen other systems do this so well. It’s doubtful the full set of options would be allowed in a ME setting (Harlequins, Paladins, Virtuosos, and the like), but some may.

I think that’s answered a few of the burning questions and comments, for now. We (Imaginary Turtles), are always keeping an eye on things, so if you have any questions or comments please let us know here.

Once again, thank you so much for your support!

Lez | Imaginary Turtle “