Fast Fantasy is a lightweight, but complete PbtA rules system in the tradition of World of Dungeons. I loved the way it arrived on the RPG scene. Without any announcement, it was simply released on Drivethru one day. No Kickstarter, no wait. No payment even! Just download, read, enjoy.

And it was (and is) a well-rounded product. A lot of thought has obviously gone into these 16 pages. I knew at once I had to run Fast Fantasy.

I did run it, three sessions of Ravenloft (1e) by Tracy and Laura Hickman and two sessions of A Simple Dungeon by Micah Anderson. What follows is not a review, but a list of things that went through my head during those sessions – things I will want to remember when, one day, I'll run FF again.

• It took me a while to figure out, but Fast Fantasy is an expanded version of a small game by Jeremy Strandberg, Defying Danger from 2020, which I had never heard of. Some of the best innovations come from there.
• A hard rule to grok for me was the wounds system. In Fast Fantasy, players allocate damage as they see fit. Do they prefer a situational disadvantage to an actual wound? They can! Do they spend a point of their power and reduce damage by one? Go for it! – From a read, this concept sounded cool and was easy to understand, but in play, I struggled a bit. As the GM, I could never describe how and where they got hurt. They would decide themselves. How could I use the GM move "Inflict Harm" properly, if allocating harm was up to the player? I like the wounds rules, but I'm still not entirely sure how to handle them in certain situations.
• The Take the Risk standard move forces the group to negotiate both a gain and a cost before rolling. As written, the cost always occurs on a 6-, and usually also on a 7-9, along with getting the intended gain. This gave me the impression that there is no distinction between Hard and Soft Moves. Looking at Jeremy Strandberg's examples on his website, however, that is not so. The intent behind "cost" is to specify not really the cost, but its source, e.g "the ogre will take a swing at you". The consequences can still vary. On a 6-, in addition to any damage, the character may also be knocked back, the ogre might be shouting for reinforcements etc. (There's a box with advice on p.7 of Fast Fantasy which hints at the same thing. I still feel the term "cost" is misleading.)
• The game has just four playbooks: warrior, scoundrel, mystic, wildsoul. In my opinion, this is not a big problem: With all the options available, one warrior will be quite unlike another. However, there is the one playbook not written by Jeremy Strandberg, the wildsoul. All wildsouls have animal companions. This very much means that many Fast Fantasy games will feature an animal companion. Not a bad thing per se. Companions too can be quite diverse. One wildsoul at my table had a giant turtle they rode, another an owl. Still, there were an awful lot of animals around – perhaps more than I would have liked.
• Every playbook has one signature move. This created some confusion: If only the warrior has Wade into battle, can the other playbooks fight at all? Of course they can, but then again, why does the warrior have a specific move for it? I think for me and most of my players, the class-specific moves were not specific enough.

I'm glad I tried FF, or at least its basics. It has many extras we didn't use, like archetypes for longer-term play and even a mystery system in the vein of Carved from Brindlewood. There are so many RPGs around, but ... maybe I will be coming back to FF one day.