Over the past year, I've been workimg hard on the development of GNAT CORE, a simple (but hopefully comprehensive) rule set for writing adventure Gamebooks (of the Choose Your Own Adventure/Fighting Fantasy style).

What is GNAT

GNAT (it's not an acronym, just one in a series of insect-related titles I developed a few decades back) attempts to provide rules for playing COYA books the way I like to play them — quick, few dice rolls, and a very minimal focus on combat. It emphasises collecting items as opposed to agonising over inventory choices, resolves most fights in one or two rolls, and has built-in mechanisms for carrying characters, equipment, and keywords, from game to game.

The other thing I was trying to achieve was a ruleset that other people could easily use, and adapt, for their own games. For that reason the GNAT core rules are covered by a CC-BY-SA 4.0 license, so that others can take them, use them, and modify them, while also being covered by the same license.

The World of Paldoria

GNAT is setting-agnostic, though the default skill list and magic rules are definitely aimed at a fantasy world, but I actaully originally developed it for my own line of game books, set in the world of Paldoria. Paldoria is a sort of post-magical-apocalypse setting, where the cataclysmic wozard's war already ended some time ago, and the world is full of the ruins left behind. Here's the Paldoria introduction that appears the start of Escape from the Tower of Stars:

Five generations ago, the War of the Wizards devastated Paldoria. Mountains cracked, rivers drowned, cities sank into the sea. The few surviving wizards retreated to their fastnesses and closed their doors against the world outside, leaving the survivors to face the aftermath alone.

One generation ago, when you were still a child, the decrepit sorcerers of Treysham, all but consumed by their decadent excesses, re-opened the doors of their citadel to the outside world. Within a handful o...