Sharp Rules. Real Stakes. Roll Dice for Stories You'll Remember.

Coming in d20 Years

Some games give you a story. Dangerous Adventures gives you a situation and then gets out of the way.

What happens next is yours to survive. Whether you come out the other side — and what it costs you — is the game.

Dangerous Adventures is a d20 game done differently. Built on a familiar resolution engine but rebuilt from the ground up — no Armor Class, two damage tracks, dice that explode, and consequences that stick. Designed for any dangerous setting: the kind where choices matter and the table always knows what's happening and what it costs. The core book runs any setting. The Fantasy Sourcebook adds three risky spellcasting traditions, ancestries, and a full bestiary. The Sci-Fi Sourcebook adds tech levels, zone-based vehicle and starship damage, and a unified initiative track where personal and ship combat run on the same engine simultaneously.

What Makes It Different

Defense Is Earned, Not Just Equipped

There's no Armor Class in Dangerous Adventures. Defense is built from your armor, your DEX, and your Combat rank — so a battle-hardened fighter is genuinely harder to hit than a raw recruit, regardless of what either is wearing. Experience matters. Gear helps. Neither is enough on its own. The gap between a rookie and a veteran shows up in the dice — not just in the fiction.

Your Weapon Choice Actually Matters

Armor in Dangerous Adventures has separate Damage Reduction values for slashing, piercing, and blunt damage. Chain mail shrugs off a sword differently than it handles a warhammer. The goblin with a spear is more dangerous to a lightly-armored target than the goblin with a club — and your players will figure that out the hard way.

Dice That Can Cascade

Weapon damage dice explode — roll the maximum and you roll again, adding the result, for as long as the dice keep hitting max. Critical hits add bonus dice that also explode. A single lucky roll can cascade into something the table remembers. High variance on purpose.

You're Hurt Before You're Down

Most games treat characters as fully functional right up until they drop. Dangerous Adventures doesn't.

Take enough hits and you're Bloodied. Keep taking them and Vitality starts going. Still on your feet, still dangerous — but the table knows exactly how bad it is. Every fight has a middle phase where things get desperate before anyone falls. That moment of "do we push on or get out now?" is built into the system, not left to improvisation.

Hits Land Where They Hit

Every creature tracks Vitality separately for each body region — head, torso, arms, and legs. A called shot targets the region you're aiming for, and the consequences are specific: destroy the weapon arm and the weapon drops; take out a leg and movement is gone; reduce the torso to zero and the death clock starts whether or not the creature has Vitality elsewhere.

This isn't hit-location flavor. It changes the fight. Sometimes you're trying to disarm, sometimes you're trying to stop a retreat, sometimes you just need to find the opening before they find theirs.

Creature Knowledge Matters

Knowing what you're facing isn't just flavor — it's an advantage. What something is shapes how you fight it, whether you can reason with it, and what it actually takes to bring it down. The party that did their homework fights a different fight than the one that didn't.

Skills With Real Weight

Skills in Dangerous Adventures open doors that are simply closed without them. Not just "roll better" — a skilled character can attempt things an unskilled one cannot. The right skill in the right moment changes what's possible.

Ancestry That Shapes the Build

Ancestry isn't cosmetic. Each ancestry comes with mechanical traits that affect how your character plays — not just what they look like. The choice matters at the table, not just on the character sheet.

Fate Tokens — Spend It or Lose It

Each character starts every session with a Fate Token and can earn more through play — up to three. Spend them to turn a miss into a hit, to survive something that should have killed you, to make the moment matter. Lose what you don't spend — they expire at session end.

Never quite enough to feel safe. Always enough to feel the difference.

Every Advancement Means Something

No dead picks. No waiting around for the good stuff. Spend experience points and your character grows — you hit harder, take a hit better, and can do things a fresh character simply can't. It never spirals — a wired street enforcer is still a real threat if you're careless — but it never pretends experience is cosmetic either. For characters who survive long enough, the highest tiers open up things that feel genuinely legendary.

Chases Are a System, Not a Handwave

Running for your life — or hunting something down — deserves better than "roll Athletics, you escape." In Dangerous Adventures, chases are a full encounter: both sides act, resources burn, momentum shifts, and there's a real ending. Escape isn't guaranteed. Neither is capture.

Downtime With Stakes

Projects take time, accumulate progress, and can go wrong. Crafting uses a Clock — incremental steps with failure consequences at every stage. The things worth having are built, not bought.

Fantasy Sourcebook

Three Ways to Cast — All of Them Risky

The Fantasy Sourcebook adds three spellcasting traditions, each with its own failure mode.

Arcane casters use Intelligence. Cast well and it lands. Critically fail and roll on the Mishap table — minor to catastrophic, and the table finds out which. Divine casters use Wisdom and answer to something. A critical failure triggers Penance — the divine isn't a tool you wield without consequence. Primal casters draw from nature through Wisdom or Charisma, with their own failure texture. Every tradition is powerful. None of them are safe.

Fantasy Ancestries

Dwarf, Elf, Goblin, Half-Orc, Half-Elf, Halfling — each with mechanical traits tied to what they actually are, not just flavor text. The choice closes some doors and opens others.

A Fantasy Creature Catalog

Goblins, dragons, undead, fey, giants, and more — stat blocks built around the regional VIT and damage type systems already in the core book. Designed as a GM toolkit: reskinnable, scalable, and ready to run without prep overhead.

Magic Items

Magic items are rare, distinctive, and often dangerous — not shelf inventory. They're found, taken, or built. Crafting uses a Clock: incremental progress across downtime periods, with the right knowledge, the right materials, and enough time to get it wrong at least once. Sentient items have personalities, flaws, and opinions about how they're used.

Sci-Fi Sourcebook

One Initiative Track for Everything

Vehicle combat, starship combat, and personal combat all run on the same initiative track simultaneously. The soldier on the ground and the fighter pilot overhead act in the same round. No mode switch. No separate subsystem. No stopping to run a different game.

Tech Level Sets the Ceiling

One number — TL 1 to 9 — defines what exists in your campaign. Slug pistols and ground cars at TL 3. Energy weapons and FTL at TL 6. Combat drones and military AI at TL 7. The table knows exactly what's on the table and what isn't. Settings can straddle tiers: a frontier colony might be TL 5 for personal gear but TL 6 for its starship drives.

Ships and Vehicles Degrade Like Characters

Zone-based damage applies the same regional VIT logic to vehicles and ships. Destroy the drive zone and they drift. Breach the hull zone and they vent. Four combat scales (Personal → Vehicle → Heavy → Capital) with clean escalation rules — two scales down means instant kill, no roll needed.

Career Templates

Soldier, Scout, Medic, Engineer, Pilot, Operative — mechanical identity on day one without locking into a class for the campaign.

Who This Is For

Dangerous Adventures suits groups who want:

How It Compares

If you're coming from... Dangerous Adventures is...
D&D 5e The same d20, rebuilt with teeth — no AC, damage types that matter, regional damage, and a handful of Fate Tokens between you and disaster. Add the Fantasy Sourcebook for magic that can fail. Everything you know transfers; everything that frustrated you is gone.
Pathfinder 2e A fraction of the rules overhead, more tension per turn. DA doesn't have three-action parsing or feat trees to maintain — just clear procedure and consequences that land harder.
True20 True20 replaces HP entirely with condition tracks. DA keeps a real damage economy — Stamina buffer, regional Vitality, exploding dice — with more variance and sharper tactical texture inside the fight.
d20 Conan (Mongoose) Shared design DNA — Defense earned not worn, armor as Damage Reduction, magic that bites back. The 3.5e chassis and Conan IP are gone; the grim-and-tactical instinct stays. DA is the modern, in-print version of the same idea — without the class lock, license dependency, or corruption bookkeeping.
2d20 Conan (Modiphius) Three-economy system (momentum, doom, 2d20) replaced by a single d20 roll. DA covers the dual-health territory — Vigor/Resolve becomes Stamina/Vitality — with less overhead and a faster table. The optional Momentum rule closes the tactical banking gap if your group wants it.
Savage Worlds d20 instead of the die-type ladder, templates instead of freeform edges. Same appetite for speed and danger; sharper tactical texture inside the fight.
GURPS No point-buy, no advantage shopping, no statting every NPC from scratch. Templates replace freeform character math; d20 replaces 3d6. DA keeps the tactical respect for weapon choice and damage type — and gets you to the table faster.
Shadowdark Every rule in DA earns its place by adding a decision that matters. More scaffolding inside the fight — conditions, damage tracks, action timing — and more tactical weight on every choice. Add the Fantasy Sourcebook for magic with a real failure economy, not just torches going out.
13th Age No escalation die, no icon relationships, no heroic arc carrying you through. Danger is the point, not the backdrop.
OSE / B/X Same consequence-driven stakes, more tactical texture. Exploding dice, DR by damage type, and a two-track damage system give the old-school danger more mechanical bite.
Dragonbane Both use d20 — DA rolls over, Dragonbane rolls under. Same grim-fantasy tone. DA has more structured combat procedure; add the Fantasy Sourcebook for risky magic with real critical failure consequences.
Knave / Cairn Characters have mechanical identity from day one — templates, talents, skills. The danger is just as front-and-center; you have more tools to navigate it.
Worlds Without Number No sandbox campaign tooling, no referee-side world-building architecture. DA goes deeper inside the fight and shallower outside it.
Forbidden Lands Year-zero engine and strong hex-crawl structure from Free League. DA is leaner inside the fight — no die-type ladder, more structured combat procedure. Forbidden Lands wins on published setting and long-form exploration architecture.
DCC / Mork Borg Wild tables, gonzo spectacle, and maximal aesthetic identity — danger as performance art. DA is the campaign-stable choice: same real consequences, tactical pressure instead of a chaos engine. If DCC sells the wild ride, DA sells the hard edge.
Traveller Career templates and sector generation cover the same territory; DA replaces Traveller's separate ship combat phase with a unified initiative track where the crew on the bridge and the boarders in the corridor act in the same round. Less world-building architecture, sharper moment-to-moment tactical resolution.
Stars Without Number SWN wins on sandbox GM tooling and faction systems. DA goes deeper inside the fight — zone damage, cross-scale combat, unified initiative — and shallower on campaign infrastructure.

One Line

d20 done differently — no Armor Class, dice that explode, one engine for any setting, and consequences that stick.

Dangerous Adventures is currently in development.