id co-founder and Wizardry designer launch old-school RPG Kickstarter drive

Wizardry designer, Brenda Braithwaite, and id and Ion Storm co-founder Tom Hall are teaming up to make an old school RPG and they need a million dollars to make it happen. Cue the start of a new Kickstarter campaign . There's not much information on the setting or style of this old school RPG. In fact, it doesn't even have a name beyond "Old School RPG" at the moment.

There is a whole team raring to get started on this thing, however, and Braithwaite and Hall have buckets of experience between them. Brenda Braithwaite has worked on the Wizardry series and Jagged Alliance. Hall helped build the excellent Anachronox.

Old School RPG will have you guiding a four-character team through "a world that seems at once welcoming and friendly... until you meet its dark side!" Judging from the art scattered about the Kickstarter page, it will be an olde fantasy world inhabited by five races. There will be castles, caverns and dungeons to loot and multiple endings.

Stretch goals are already in place should the drive exceed the $1m dollar donation mark. Dragon Age: Origins style multiple openings are one such goal. A super-hardcore mode with permadeath and a no-save option is another. If donations meet the $1.9 million mark, Loot Drop will make two RPGs instead of one in the next twelve months, which sounds pretty darn ambitious.

Check out the Kickstarter page for more details, see the team's goals arranged down the stretch-goal sword below, and adventure deeper still to see the video pitch from Braithwaite and Hall. It's an interesting prospect, but can it attract the same love as Obsidian's Project Eternity Kickstarter drive? $43,668 has been pledged already, and there are 32 days left to go. Which suggests "yes."

Tom Senior

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.