Quests of Kh’Aos

Welcome to Quests of Kh'Aos

Quests of Kh’Aos is a new tabletop role-playing game built for players who want deep character customization, tactical choices, expansive fantasy, and the freedom to create characters that truly feel like their own. 

Set within a world of strange civilizations, dangerous creatures, ancient magic, and three vastly different realms to explore, Quests of Kh’Aos gives players and Game Masters a flexible system for creating everything from grounded adventurers to legendary heroes. With extensive character Archetypes, Enhancement Trees, hundreds of spells, unique races, monsters, equipment, and a complete set of rules for building and running adventures, Quests of Kh’Aos is designed to give your group the tools to create the kind of fantasy campaign you want to play.

A FREE bonus item for all Backers.

ALL Backers receive the Fantasy Core Rules for FREE . 

The Fantasy Core Rules (FCRs) are more than a free tabletop role-playing game - they are an open foundation that other creators can build upon. Released under a Creative Commons license, the FCRs give game designers access to an established rules framework for character creation, combat, magic, monsters, advancement, Game Master tools, and more, allowing them to focus their time on creating new worlds, adventures, characters, creatures, and game content instead of rebuilding an entire RPG engine from scratch. For independent designers, that foundation could potentially save months - or even years - of development, testing, balancing, and revision. Players and Game Masters receive a complete system they can use immediately, while creators gain a framework they can legally adapt and expand into their own compatible games and products, making the FCRs not only the foundation of Quests of Kh’Aos, but a resource intended to help other tabletop creators bring their own ideas to life.

The Core Concepts of Quests of Kh'Aos.

Fight Back. Combat uses contested rolls and active defense, keeping players engaged even when it is not their turn and making every attack feel like a struggle between two opponents rather than a roll against a static number.

Spend Your Turn Your Way. The three-Action system gives players the freedom to attack, move, defend, cast, assist, or react in combinations that fit the situation instead of forcing every turn into the same predetermined action pattern.

Build Your Character Your Way. Philosophies, Archetypes, and Enhancement Trees work together to give characters a strong identity while still allowing players to shape how their abilities, tactics, and specialties develop over time.

The World Remembers. Player decisions create consequences through Pressure, Reputation, Discovery, factions, and encounter fallout, allowing the campaign world to respond to what the characters actually do instead of resetting after each adventure.

Discover Something New. Original races, distinct magical philosophies, three very different realms, and an intentionally unfolding campaign world give players something increasingly rare in fantasy gaming - the opportunity to explore a setting they do not already understand.

Roleplaying Is Part of the Game. Important conversations, negotiations, investigations, deception, and social conflicts have meaningful structure and consequences, giving socially focused characters opportunities to influence the campaign without reaching for a weapon.

Exploration Actually Matters. Travel, survival, navigation, environmental hazards, discoveries, resource pressure, and regional consequences turn the journey itself into gameplay instead of treating everything between destinations as narrative downtime.

Magic Has a Cost. MANA, upkeep, concentration, interruption, Rituals, and Overdrive force spellcasters to manage their power and decide when taking additional risk is worth the potential reward.

Combat Has Consequences. Stamina and Health separate short-term fighting endurance from actual physical injury, making wounds, healing, resources, and the decision to enter a fight matter beyond the current encounter.

Monsters Are More Than Stat Blocks. Creatures have behaviors, environments, motives, warning signs, tactics, rewards, and consequences, allowing a monster encounter to become a mystery, negotiation, survival problem, moral decision, or entire adventure rather than simply another fight.

Characters Keep Growing. Advancement continually gives players meaningful decisions about abilities, enhancements, skills, magic, and specialization so gaining a level represents more than simply increasing existing numbers.

Player Choice Drives the Campaign. The game is designed around presenting situations rather than predetermined outcomes, allowing negotiation, exploration, avoidance, combat, deception, or unexpected solutions to change where the story goes next.

Danger Means Something Again. Limited healing, resource management, persistent consequences, and the real possibility of character death encourage players to plan, cooperate, and decide whether every confrontation is actually worth fighting.

Your Beliefs Affect Your Power. Philosophy is more than character flavor - it connects worldview, magic, Archetype, and progression so what a character believes can meaningfully influence how that character plays.

Freedom Without Losing Structure. QoK gives players broad tactical and character-building choices while maintaining clear procedures for resolving combat, social conflict, exploration, magic, and other uncertain situations. 

Traditional fantasy roleplaying games already give us a wonderful foundation, so I didn't want to tear that foundation apart just to make something look different. I wanted to keep the parts that make these games fun - gathering around a table (or VTT), building characters, rolling dice, exploring strange places, fighting dangerous things, and watching a perfectly reasonable plan fall apart five minutes after the adventure begins.

What I wanted to change was how some of those pieces worked together. I wanted characters to have stronger identities. I wanted choices made during character creation and advancement to continue mattering later. I wanted combat to move without losing uncertainty, and I wanted exploration and social situations to feel like parts of the game rather than pauses between battles.

After five years of designing, rewriting, testing, and fixing, that idea became Quests of Kh'Aos.

One of the ideas at the heart of the game is specialization. I like parties where different characters are genuinely needed for different reasons. When the group encounters a locked chamber, a wounded companion, a dangerous negotiation, an ancient mystery, or something enormous coming through the doorway, the answer shouldn't always be that everyone is roughly equally capable of dealing with it.

Characters have room to develop in very different directions, but that freedom sits on top of strong identities. If you choose to become exceptional at something, I want that decision to mean something at the table. Some of the best moments in a group are when everyone realizes exactly why a particular companion is there.

"Good thing we brought you."

Customization works best when choices create consequences. A character shouldn't simply collect more and more abilities until every path begins arriving at the same destination.

Instead, I wanted development to feel like a series of decisions. Which strengths do you lean into? Which weaknesses do you accept? Which path fits the character you imagined, and which path appeared because of what happened during the campaign?

Two characters can begin with similar ideas and become very different people. That's one of the most enjoyable parts of roleplaying: the character you begin with doesn't have to be the character you expected years later.

The part of Quests of Kh'Aos I'm personally most proud of grew from asking a question about magic: what if supernatural power was connected to how someone understood existence rather than simply where a spell appeared on a list?

That idea eventually reached much farther than magic. Beliefs about life, death, order, chaos, nature, time, the mind, the spirit, and other forces began shaping characters, cultures, creatures, and the world itself. Different people can look at the same reality and reach very different conclusions about what it means.

I wanted those differences to matter. Not because every game needs a philosophical debate around the campfire - although I'm certainly not going to stop you - but because ideas are more interesting when they have consequences.

Another major goal was pace. Suspense comes from not knowing what is going to happen, not from waiting a long time to find out.

I wanted players to stay involved when danger starts. Attacking, defending, reacting, positioning, using abilities, and making decisions should feel like parts of an exchange rather than a sequence of people waiting for their turn to interact with the game.

The same philosophy carries into the rest of play. Make the decision. Roll when the outcome is uncertain. Find out what happens. Then deal with the result.

Sometimes brilliantly. Sometimes very much not.

Kh'Aos is intentionally not a world where every road has already been traveled and every ruin cataloged. I want maps with blank spaces. I want places that exist because a Game Master needed something beyond the next ridge. I want groups to discover things I never planned.

I also want discoveries from actual campaigns to work their way back into the larger world. A settlement, legend, organization, location, or other creation that begins at someone's table may someday become part of the history everyone shares.

A setting becomes much more interesting when its players feel that they are exploring it instead of merely touring it.

So here we are, gathered around the fire on a cool, dark night. Somewhere beyond the trees, a stream is running. An owl calls from deeper in the forest, and through the branches the fog has begun to move in a way that seems just a little too deliberate.

You've built your character. Your friends have built theirs. Somebody has a plan. Somebody else has already noticed the problem with that plan. The Game Master smiles in a way nobody at the table particularly trusts.

Then something moves beyond the firelight.

What do you do?

Actual game pages with human-made art.