An Abominable Fancy

No sooner did  +Arnold K.  post his Dungeon Hacker class , than I started making a playbook for it. Boilerplate Fantasy Spiritualist I'm still going to get around Arnold's Bug Collector . EDIT: Bonus fun: give the ghosts some color with this table from Elfmaids & Octopi , d100 Petty Undead .

I couldn't help it. I made a playbook for a robot. This is built on  +Patrick Wetmore 's Robot class , and +Stan Rydzewski 's  upgrade variations for that class. Boilerplate Fantasy Robot

(part one of who knows how many) Turns out I left out armor pricing from the Boilerplate playbooks! I'll update them, but until then, here's the information: Armor Shield (+1 AC) 10 gp Helmet (+1 AC) 10 gp Leather Armor (+2 AC) 15 gp Mail Armor (+4 AC) 30 gp Plate Armor (+6 AC) 50 gp EDIT: Okay, armor has been added to all the playbooks, and a few other errors have been fixed up. Please let me know if you spot any others!

Once in a while I do something I think might actually be useful. These playbooks should greatly speed up chargen, especially for new or young players. Ask the player what kind of character they want to play, hand them the appropriate packet, and then answer any questions that come up. You should be done in about five minutes. Boilerplate Fantasy Cleric Boilerplate Fantasy Fighter Boilerplate Fantasy Magic User Boilerplate Fantasy Thief Boilerplate Fantasy Dwarf Boilerplate Fantasy Elf Boilerplate Fantasy Halfling NOTES They are mostly S&W Whitebox, but with bits of Holmes and OSR-gestalt. And I couldn't help but fiddle a smidge. It's a compulsion. Some eccentricities from standard OD&D: The S&W single Saving Throw and Ascending AC are used. The demi-humans have different prime attributes. For no particular reason. Fighters get Backgrounds based off of the "Backgrounds for Human Characters" sheet from Ze

I'd love to know more about how the attributes in D&D originated.  Rolling dice for STR-DEX-INT-WIS-CON-CHR is the most emblematic and formative act in D&D. Maybe you've fought a melee or cast a spell or conversed with a dragon, but everyone who has ever sat down at the table for any length of time has picked up three six-siders and scribbled down the results. The six attributes are such an oddly specific abstraction of a character's capabilities. They're the weird little numerical window you peer through when trying to figure out who your character is— who you are —in this shared fantasy. When I was younger, I would obsess over getting the "right" attribute scores, and this frequently tipped over into fudging. I played a statistically improbable number of half-elves with 18's in Dexterity and Charisma— I just wanted to be pretty, dammit! And yet... what good are they? Haintz-Nar-Meister, 1494 The attributes are all there, fully form

The recent burst of activity on this blog is largely traceable to being all fired up after reading the wonderful Delving Deeper Reference Rules . I'm not terribly familiar with pre-Holmes 0e, and not at all with Chainmail, but I found DD to be a spectacularly elegant ruleset. And after mentioning how much I like the new-wave OSR take on a broadly-interpretable Specialist/Expert/Adventurer character class, I thought I should write one up for DD. This can model a thief (although the "Bidding Time" ability is less potent than Backstab), but I hope it will also model anybody who isn't trying to fight or cast their way through problems. The Adventurer Expertise Pick or invent a non-combat realm of expertise, with its attendant Prime Requisite: Communication (CHR) Craft (WIS or DEX) Knowledge (INT) Physical (STR) Subterfuge (DEX) Survival (WIS) All player characters are considered generally competent and well-adapted to the campaign wor

I prefer simple classes that let you model a wide variety of characters. OD&D does this really well with Fighters. Your Fighter can be a knight, or a pirate, or a robin hood, depending on how you outfit and play them. Nice. The new wave of the OSR has provided us with several adaptations that turn the Thief into a Specialist or Expert or Adventurer, which creates a similar effect: you have a class that provides non-combat skills, be it a box-man, architect, diplomat, tracker, whatever. I like it. But spell casters are not so flexible. The spell list contains enough flavor and world-implication that your Magic User is always a D&D Magic User, and your Cleric always tithes to the Church of Gygax. Gustav Doré, Don Quixote, 1863 So. I present a completely flavor-drained spell list. Just straight mechanics. Want a Fire Mage or Shadow Walker or Time Lord or Gadgeteer or whatever? Just pick the mechanics you need and dress them up in lovely fluff. It's a lot easie