Foreword

Welcome to the limitless worlds of Infinite Horizons. If you are an experienced gamer, we welcome you to something we hope you will find new and different from anything you have seen before. If you are new to role-playing, we think this is a good place to embark on your role-playing career.

We have striven for something that captures the true spirit of gaming. In keeping with this goal, at all stages of creating the game, some things have been foremost in our minds:

• Keep the pace of the game fairly rapid, so that character action doesn't get bogged down by player action.
• Make character advancement something tangible and worth attaining, so that there is a challenge for everyone, without becoming frustrating.
• Create a seamlessly integrated set of rules, firmly grounded in reality, in the hope that situations not explicitly discussed can easily be resolved with common sense and extrapolation from existing rules.
• Don't use too many words like "extrapolation" because what does that mean, anyway?
• In the case of a tie, playability and enjoyment beat realism, but not so badly that realism goes home and refuses to play any more.
• Keep the math simple so that, at worst, it can be done with the kind of calculator you get free with a pack of socks.

We hope that you enjoy playing Infinite Horizons as much as we have enjoyed designing it.

This game system is modular in design; what you hold now is the basis set, which introduces the concepts of character creation and includes everything we felt was required to accompany any of the other sets which are available now, or will be in the future. Current plans call for these to include (but not necessarily be limited to):

Fantastic Horizons: Races and skills pertaining to the genre of High Fantasy, including swords and sorcery. Fairy Tales would also lie in the scope of this supplement, as would the dark ages of Earth's history (albeit without magic).

Modern Horizons: Skills and equipment found in the modern age, including many levels of technology, from the beginning of the industrial age up to the near future.

Galactic Horizons: Space faring adventures, including many new skills and oodles of equipment, plus rules for creating starships and alien races (and examples of both). This supplement will be divided into two sections: a "hard science fiction" section, which will include only that which is known or widely believed to be possible, and a "space-opera" section, adding those things that are known to be impossible (but are still used in movies) and things that may be possible in the future.

cyberhorizons: Skills and equipment present in the genre of cyberpunk. This will include rules governing the creation of new types of equipment, including "mechs", which are basically tanks masquerading as body armour.

Horrific Horizons: Creatures to be used in a horror setting. This will be a small supplement, but really doesn't fit exclusively into any other, so it will be on its own.

Psionic Horizons: Rules for creating characters with psionic powers. These characters may crop up in any scenario, but we anticipate that they will be used in few campaigns, so this will be in a separate supplement.

All of these supplements may be mixed and matched, to form the scenario you want to adventure in. Anything is possible; your imagination is the only limit. We have yet to come across a genre which cannot be emulated using an appropriate match of our supplements (and bending an occasional rule or two: a cartoon campaign would require that physics be ignored).

Oh yeah...

There are several rules which are labeled as optional. These are rules which are intended to make your group's role-playing experience more realistic, but which may complicate matters in some situations. Of course, all of the rules in this book are in some sense optional, but these are the ones which we anticipate may cause the most problems for people. Generally speaking, they may slow things down very slightly, and/or require a few more calculations. We recommend using all of the optional rules, but in the end it is up to you and the rest of your group to decide whether or not to include them.

We have tried to use gender-neutral pronouns throughout the book, except in specific examples, and where such use would make sentence structure awkward. In these cases, we have tried to use an even split between masculine and feminine.

Anything you see in italics is an example, so that you can easily recognize and find them. We also provide links whenever Chapter and Section names are referenced. We are working on the index with links to the index from the text, and vice versa.