Quatrefoil: A Fantasy Musketeer TTRPG

The Ruler of the kingdom is dead, their heir is too young to take over, and in their stead the unscrupolous and power hungry Chancellor has taken over. The first thing they did was to disband the old musketeer guard, your guard; the elite of the elite, loyal unto death to the royal family. They quickly replaced you with a new guard; loyal only to the Chancellor and led by those of your former friends without enough loyalty to the old guard to follow it into history. Retirement suits you poorly, however, and you are once again called on to defend the kingdom. This time not against any outside threats, but against those that would destroy it from within.

Quatrefoil: a fantasy musketeer ttrpg is an easy and rules-lite(-ish) TTRPG designed to emulate the faced-pace, pulpy type of fight scene usually seen in the three musketeers-movies; where a few heroes fight against tides of faceless goons in large and sprawling set pieces, or duel one-on-one against their nemesis as the battle rages on around them. 

To achieve this, Qatrefoil utilizes a dice-pool system of d6's assigned to any of the four stats Attack, Defend, Magic, and Sneak, which players spend to take actions during combat. The actions available are determined and modified by the equipment and talents of the player characters, which are unleashed against hordes of faceless and expendable mooks represented by single dices each. With actions and reactions being quick and simple, more opportunity is given to players to narrate action-filled and fast-paced battle scenes.

Outside of combat the narrative rules of Quatrefoil are more free-form, focusing more or overarching story goals rather than the individual actions of players. True to the genre focus lies on the combat scenes, with the narrative mainly functioning as a backdrop.

The rules come with suggestions for alternative settings and premises to play the game in, should playing magic-wielding seventeenth-century musketeers not entice you but you still want the fast-paced pulpy fighting scenes: pirates, space opera smugglers, or nazi-fighting archeologists. 

Qatrefoil: a fantasy musketeer ttrpg is directly inspired by a game-idea discussed on the Stop, Hack, & Roll podcast. Thumbnail and banner art is The Night Watch, by Rembrandt.