Welcome to Labyrinths & Liontaurs!

"a well-designed and fun game that is perfect for fans of fantasy RPGs."
From a review by Google's AI chatbot, Bard.

Introduction

Are you new to role-playing games? Maybe you've heard of Dungeons & Dragons, the great-grandaddy of the genre. If you are a complete newbie, go 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 about this great hobby.

But if you are a veteran gamer, you may wonder why this game is better than a game you know already, one enjoyed by millions of players, and especially why you should spend time with this one. Well, let me tell you what my game is all about ...

Labyrinths & Liontaurs is designed for balanced play that works with low-power campaigns, high-magic campaigns, and everything in between. It offers a lot of flexibility in character design and advancement, so that it is easy to make viable, good choices for both traditional and unusual PC concepts. L&L encourages heroic story-telling, noble conduct, epic quests, and honorable deeds. It prioritizes exploration and interaction as powerfully as it does violent confrontation. And it sets adventures in a complete game world, not in mere set-piece combats between cut-scenes.

Let's break that down.

Low to high power: L&L is divided into tiers of play, and you can choose to play exclusively in a low-power tier, a high-power tier, or in between. Or you can take a traditional path from humble beginnings to legendary might.
Flexibility: Using multiclassing rules designed to allow balanced progression, the game lets you mix and match class powers to create personalized concepts. Even single-class PCs have interesting choices to make almost every level.
Heroic deeds: L&L offers mechanical benefits to playing good-aligned characters, because games are more fun when we play heroes rather than villians, and because uplifting stories are more satisfying than those that glorify the worst in people.
Exploration, interaction, and confrontation: The game does not allow players to follow combat optimization paths exclusively; players are required to take an interaction and an exploration class power choice for at least two of every five levels. And L&L adventures are designed to offer challenges across all three areas.
Complete game world: Labyrinths & Liontaurs simulates a logical and rich setting, and the game's philosophy encourages sandbox play, rather than centering combat to the near-exclusion of other modes.

Hopefully, gamers seeking rich rules sets, flexible character advancement, noble play, and simulationist adventures will find something to like in L&L.

All of the rules of L&L can be found on the Contents page. Please do bookmark that page. That's what I use as my go-to link to L&L. From there you can easily find any part of the rules you need.

Design Notes

On the other hand, if you want to read my long essay on why I wrote L&L, then these design notes may be interesting. There, I talk about my improvements to the game and why I made them. That page includes my opinions on roleplay game design, why we play the game, and how I devised L&L to be the best darn roleplay game ever.

Credits, Copyrights, and Cash

I stand on the shoulders of storm giants. There's a lot more on this legal stuff in the OGL info, but suffice to say that I am deeply grateful to Gary Gygax, who once sent answers to a teenage Cayzle's AD&D rules questions; Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet, and Skip Williams, the D&D 3E designers; and Jason Bulmahn and the other designers of the Pathfinder game.

I'm also very grateful to my many playtesters, especially [[insert list here after I get some]].

I should also mention that although I have always depended on the kindness of strangers, any errors or omissions in Labyrinths & Liontaurs are mine alone. Therefore, I do always welcome feedback, corrections, and suggestions. Reach out to me via email at cayzle@cayzle.com or on the Twitter @cayzle.

This game is released freely online at my site at cayzle.com/LnL. Some day there will be a PDF version at my free downloads page. If you have paid a couple bucks for a PDF version on a site such as Drive-Thru RPG, well, by charging a couple bucks there, I can get them to include it in the charitable bundle assortments that they offer on the regular, so I hope you do not mind having made a contribution to a worthy cause -- either to a genuine charity or even to myself, and it is much appreciated.

But seriously, the L's in L&L also stand for labor and love. I'm not making anything from this, I release it freely into the OGL ecosystem, and I hope other people will enjoy it. The art is also my own, based on my own photography, and I release it freely as well.

Speaking of free, like Cory Doctorow says, quoting Woody Guthrie's copyright notice for "This Land Is Your Land" ... "Copyrighted in U.S., under Seal of Copyright # 154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don’t give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that’s all we wanted to do." That's my spirit with this game, within the limits of the Open Game License, of course. Well, okay, one exception. The name of the game -- "Labyrinths & Liontaurs" -- is "product identity," that is, a trademark not covered by the OGL. If you fork my game, give it your own darn name!

Colophon

The makers of D&D Third Edition and Pathfinder First Edition released the core essence of their games to the general public in the form of "System Reference Documents." Other people took those docs and put them online freely, as reference materials. My main source for L&L is a version of the Pathfinder 1E SRD put online ages ago, and I cannot find the name of the creator or where I found it. I grabbed the source files a long time ago and hosted my own copy of the PF SRD on my own site here. It includes the Advanced Players Guide and no other splat books, so that dates it to aroundabouts 2010-ish. For a great many pages in L&L, I just take the source code for that old SRD and edit it as I see fit. I also have copied and pasted text from a similar copy of the 3.5E SRD located here on my site.

This website uses that borrowed code, hand-tweaked html, and a smidgen of css to get the job done. The background color (#ffddff) and red headings are design choices made in the 20th Century, when Cayzle's Wemic Site was first launched, and I see no reason to change now. The preferred font for all text is "Calibri," and the preferred font size is "big," because old grognards like me have bad eyes, and because I think it looks better on mobile devices. That's also why tables look the way they do.

Back in the day, this was a Geocities site, and it migrated with Geocities to Yahoo Small Business web hosting, where it lived through 2020, when Yahoo gave up the Web hosting game. At the moment, it lives on Hostinger, a decent inexpensive Web-hosting service.