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Let's Ride!

Just had a fun evening with the kid, using +Benjamin Baugh's B/X supplement: At 5th Level, Everybody Rides.

The idea is that, just as you get a fancy house when you enter upper-level domain-style play, you get an epic mount when you reach the point where B/X introduces wilderness exploration. And who doesn't want an epic mount?



The kid had been asking if his lizardman fighter could catch a hippocampus. I pulled out Benjamin's rules, and the kid forgot entirely about any fish-tailed horses, and instead rolled:

GHOSTLY, the undead coal-fired cyborg horse-fox-spider chimera!

Ghostly is a walking nightmare, ridden by a lizardman with a flaming sword. My seven-year-old is metal as fuck.

And so, of course, we didn't stop there:

Lisa, the rabbit cleric, rides high atop a tiger-striped wooly mammoth that can sound the heavenly trumpets with his trunk.

Bochen, the griffon wizard, doesn't need a mount, because he's a griffon. But he gained a companion: a spectral crab that floats behind him, focusing Bochen's magic and nibbling at anything that catches his interest.

And Durgan, the rustic bear pankratiast, plods along on Wilmore, a grumbling rhinoceros beetle.

In just a few pages, Benjamin packed a lot of goods. There's enough die-roll randomization to spur your imagination, but enough choice that you end up with a mount that feels right for your character.


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