Welcome to Labyrinths & Liontaurs!
A free fantasy tabletop RPG for gamers who want real character choice, more logical design, and ethical sandbox play.
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| Liontaur: Bad name! Why isn't it Liontaurs & Labyrinths? Other Liontaur: Heck, it should be Liontaurs! Liontaurs! Liontaurs! |
A Fantasy Role-Playing Game For You!
You're a veteran gamer, and you want something more. You want a game that scratches an itch, maybe an itch you didn't even know you had. You know, that one between your shoulder blades that you can't quite reach. Well, Labyrinths & Liontaurs is the backscratcher for you! Here's why:
Flexibility and greater choice: You've played the big games, D&D and Pathfinder. You want more flexibility to make your character exactly what you want. You're tired of railroad advancement. You want to create an original character concept without compromising. It is not unreasonable to mix and match abilities so that your vision comes to life.
A game that makes sense: You've tried the old-school renaissance games like Dungeon Crawl Classics and Old-School Essentials. We can do better than the design philosophy of the 1970s! You prefer a game in which it is equally hard to make a hopeless character or a game-breaker. You're hungry for logical rules, balanced magic, a fair chance to survive adventures, and mechanics that make critical dice rolls more fair.
Heroic deeds: There are plenty of grimdark and morally ambiguous games out there, like Warhammer and Mothership, treating evil play as a viable alternative to good. Instead, you're interested in playing a hero rather than a villain, because uplifting stories are more satisfying than those that glorify the worst in people. You don't want to be a murder hobo, and you hate worrying that your friends will eat your face. What if you could defeat evil without killing?
A complex and rich game experience: Sure, one-shots and rules-light games can be fun, but you want a deep, long-running game set in a sandbox world you can explore for a full campaign. And you want more than a short story or a world of battle encounters interspersed with short rests and cut scenes. You want a game that prioritizes exploration and interaction as powerfully as it does traditional combat.
But what about you RPG newbies? Maybe you've heard of Dungeons & Dragons, the great-grandaddy of the genre. Welcome to the hobby — please go on ahead and visit the Getting Started page. Also check out the Wikipedia article on Role-playing Games; there are lots of good links there, so head down the wiki rabbit hole and learn more.
In short, both veteran gamers and newcomers seeking deep rulesets, flexible character advancement, noble play, and simulationist adventures will find something to like in this game.
Labyrinths & Liontaurs is free of charge and entirely open under a d20 Open Game License. It is all here on the open Internet, and it will eventually be released as a PDF and a set of HTML files you can host locally.
What's next? Go to the L&L Contents page, and bookmark it! That's what I use as my go-to link to L&L. From there you can easily navigate to any part of the rules you need. It is also linked at the top of every page.
Tone and Trigger Warnings
Labyrinths & Liontaurs is often light-hearted and funny. Take a look at the Yuletide Sorcerer and the plushie art throughout the rules. But it is also a game of epic struggle between good and evil. Players are strongly encouraged to create heroic characters, but there are great evils in the campaign world for those good heroes to fight. There are mind flayers, demons, and vampires; slavery, prejudice, tyranny, and genocide; injustices great and small; danger and violence and heartbreak. The game offers many ways for players to try nonviolent or nonlethal solutions, but it also allows some traditional hack-and-slash play for those who prefer it, within the bounds of alignment.
Which is to say, L&L contains multitudes, and a good "session zero" is recommended so that players and game master can start from a common understanding.
Design Notes
If you want to dive deep into why I wrote Labyrinths & Liontaurs, then these Design Notes may be interesting. There, I talk about my game creation choices and why I made them. That page includes my opinions on role-playing game design, why we play the game, and how I devised L&L to be the best darn role-playing game ever.
The Notes are linked at the top of every L&L page, too.
I started thinking about the core design innovations in L&L in May 2008. I started actually writing these rules as a dedicated system in December 2022. I began playtesting the game in September 2026. The 1.0 version of this game will be released in January 2027. The L&L rules and setting were written by one individual, myself, Michael Cayzle Alterio. I hope you enjoy my work.
Note that placeholder AI art found elsewhere in this game was created years ago — before I understood the effect on artists whose work was used as training data without permission. Any such art in the rules is being replaced by my own custom photo illustrations, asap.