And it looks beautiful. This was the first Kickstarter project I backed, and am very glad for it.
I take it quite a few of you are familiar with Kevin Crawford's work. His latest project brings to mind Exalted vibes, set in a world where mortals waged war against the heavens and looted their celestial engines for power and the creation of artificial soldiers known as made Gods. Of course, fooling around with the building blocks of creation is rarely a good idea, and this has caused all sorts of crazy stuff to happen.
Angels have taken over Hell, sending all mortal souls they can claim for punishment at rebelling against them. Extradimensional gateways known as Night Roads open up in the middle of mortal settlements, causing all manner of monsters to spill forth. Mortal tyrants, titanic beasts, fell sorcerers, and more ravage the lands, and the PCs possess a special spark of the Words of Creation to perform superhuman feats.
Godbound is interesting in the fact that it's not a class-based system. A Godbound's set of powers are determined by access to Words, timeless concepts and ideals which can grant great powers in that domain of influence. One with the Word of Might may be able to lift and drag building-sized objects and jump leagues into the air, whereas one with the Word of Deception might create illusions and see through mortal lies and trickery.
Like Crawford's previous works, it has enough different elements to set it apart from most retroclones on the market, but maintains many core elements (Armor Class, Hit Dice, etc) that conversion shouldn't be too tough a process. However, the power level in Godbound is significantly higher than most OSR games, so many adventures will take quite a bit of tweaking to accommodate Word-wielding PCs. Best of all, Godbound has a free version playable right out of the box! The Deluxe version has 50+ pages of additional content and more artwork.
Surprisingly, the game is relatively rules-lite for a superpowered game. Although that's to be expected with an OSR book, it's a welcome element nonetheless. I can see Godbound's rules being adaptable for several other settings, such as the upper echelons of power in Forgotten Realms with the gods warring in the Time of Troubles or old Netheril, or the philosophical conflicts and planar paradigms of Planescape.
Here are the links below:
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