An Abominable Fancy

I'm adding some house-rules and what-nots to an edition of B/X Purple Core , and decided I wanted some Grappling Rules: Grappling (Optional Rule) If a character wishes to pin or overpower an opponent, they may attempt to grapple them. Generally speaking, as many as six grapplers can engage a single defender. Each grappler must succeed at an attack roll against the defender. The referee may choose to wholly or partially ignore armor for purposes of this attack. Roll the HD of each combatant on both sides.  • If the grappler’s side has the highest result, the defender is immobilized. They can be disarmed, tied up, pinned to the ground, or pushed in any direction at one quarter their movement. • If the results are a tie, the struggle continues and everyone must roll again unless both sides agree to discontinue.  • If the defender has the highest result, they have broken free. The grapplers are thrown back 5’ and unable to act for one round. Once engaged in grappling, ne

Every character has a backpack or equivalent carryall. It is assumed that your pack contains: 1 week of rations water skin bedroll change of underthings Something Class-specific (equipment for maintaining weapons, spell book, holy symbol, lock picks, etc.) All other contents are uncollapsed wave functions. When you need something, roll against your WIS (or maybe LUCK, if you have a Luck stat) to see if you thought to pack it. First item: roll 1d6. (Automatic success if WIS is 6+) Second item: roll 2d6. (Automatic success if WIS is 12+) Third item: roll 3d6. (Automatic success if WIS is 18) Etc. The GM may add/subtract a die to/from the roll based on how likely they think it is to be in your pack. You may only roll once for a given item in a given adventure. Once an item is produced from the backpack, write it down. That item is now definitely in your pack until the next adventure. The quantum backpack resets at the end of each adventure. Before an adven

This procedure was developed in the wake of reading the social mechanics put forward by  +Courtney Campbell  in On the Non Player Character . It is not meant as a replacement for the rich, nuanced, and highly-gameable content of that book. And I think what is presented below is mechanically distinct. But I'm not trying to steal anyone's lunch money. If Campbell has any objections, I'll yank this post down, no worries.  EDIT: Got the all-clear from Campbell! Read on with a clear conscience. Upon an Encounter When PCs encounter NPCs in a dangerous environment, such as the Underworld or Wilderness, the PCs have a number of ways they can respond, including: attack, flee, stealth, or communication. If the PCs choose to communicate, they enter Parley. Parley There are three broad outcomes possible from Parley:          1. Combat          2. Help          3. Leaving each other alone. Unless they have a specific mission relevant to encountering a bunch of adventurer

Distances I don't use miniatures, and rarely even use maps, so I don't have much use for measuring distance in feet or inches or what-have-you. Here are the descriptive units of distance I do use instead: 1. Touch/Grapple         Combat: only small weapons are effective (dagger, fists, very small pistol)         Communication: whispers 2. Melee         Combat: standard hand-to-hand distance         Communication: low-talking 3. Near/Reach         Combat: long weapons (spears, pole arms, whips)         Communication: normal speech 4. Thrown         Combat: ranged weapons are effective; objects can be thrown (rocks, daggers, axes)         Communication: raised speech 5. Short-range         Combat: small bow, pistols, sling         Communication: shouting 6. Long-range         Combat: long bows, crossbows         Communication: loud yelling heard indistinctly. 7. Very Long-range         Combat: siege weapons, sniper rifles         Communication: horns and dr

Attributes Roll 3d6, assign as you wish. 3-7:      -1 8-14:     0 15-17: +1 18:      +2 STRENGTH: How strong you are. Useful for fighting, climbing, and carrying treasure.                 +/- to melee attack and damage DEXTERITY: How fast you are and how accurate your aim is.                 +/- to ranged attack and Armor Class. CONSTITUTION: How healthy you are.                 +/- to Hit Points INTELLIGENCE: How much you know, and how good you are at figuring things out.                 +/- to Spells learned with leveling as a spell-caster WISDOM: How aware you are of the world around you, including the spirit world.                 +/- 10% XP CHARISMA: How good a leader you are, and how well you can get along with people and animals.                 +/- Pet LUCK Add up all your attributes to determine how many Luck Points you have. Total               Luck 78 or more        0 66-77                1 54-65                2 48-53                3 42-47      

I've been noodling with a ruleset for playing with my kid. He wants to play D&D , so it's basically Holmes on training wheels, customized towards my kid's particular proclivities. Here's a table for determining your character concept: A few notes: 1. The results of this chart do not convey any mechanical effects. Just because you rolled "Wizard" doesn't mean you are any good at wizardry.  Maybe you were raised by wizards, but your true talent lies in... uhm, dinosaur racing? 2. There is no info established for any of the Realms. They're just evocative names. Totally up to the kid what it's like to be from The Corridors of Time. 3. My intention is that, after rolling the above tables and generating stats, the kid draws a picture of their character. For my kid, at least, this seems to be a shamanic moment, calling forth a new soul and fixing it to the material world.

Death of Beowulf by JR Skelton Beyond the Wall has a "Cheat Death" rule: A dying character may spend a Fortune Point to stabilize at 0 hit points and not continue taking damage every round. The rules also say: All damage taken before reaching zero hit points represents narrow escapes, minor cuts and bruises, and painful, but not debilitating, wounds. Once a character reaches zero hit points, however, he is out of the fight, either unconscious or nearly so. It is at this point that we can call a character seriously wounded, perhaps with a grave sword wound or a nasty blow to the head. He’s not dead yet, but he is in serious trouble and desperately needs the help of his companions. And: Characters who have reached 0 hit points need help immediately. They will continue to lose hit points at the rate of 1 per round unless they receive medical attention. Should a character’s hit points reach -10 he is dead. So that works. But, after reading  +Lloyd Neill 

I'm reworking my Adventurer class for Delving Deeper . For one thing, I'm probably going to call it the Expert class, and use "Adventurer" for what is now rather awkwardly called "the Combat Specialist." Each type of Expert is also getting their own combat move. Subterfugue gets Backstab, Survival gets Ambush, Knowledge gets Calculated Strike. I was working on the move for the Communication Expert and decided to see if I could use the Turn Undead table. +John Stater  had mentioned the idea of testing other applications for this table, and, wouldn't you know,  +Peter Fröhlich  just happened to post an analysis of the table's math as I was in the middle of it. The resulting table is based largely on the numbers from  +Dyson Logos '  Alternate Turning Table . The move is Harangue Enemy, and the idea is that the Expert in Communication (a Bard, or Siren, or firebrand Preacher, etc.) would be able to speechify a real whammy on a group of cr

Delving Deeper, like Oe and B/X, has lots of 1d6 skill rolls scattered throughout the rules— listen at doors, open a stuck door, detect traps. Except for the thief skills, DD's skills are pretty much the same as the early editions and other clones. Being someone who would much rather learn a guiding principle than memorize/look up specific instances, I decided to gather all the skills together and see what I could do with them: Listen at doors Halflings, Elves, Dwarves: 2 in 6 Thief: 4 in 6 Everyone else: 1 in 6 Dungeon Architecture Dwarves: 2 in 6 Find Secret Doors (takes 1 turn) Elves, Thieves: 4 in 6 Everyone else: 2 in 6 Thiefy Stuff: Open Locks; Disarm Device; Climb sheer surface; Sleight-of-hand Thief: 4 in 6 Stealthy movement/Hide Halflings: “nearly invisible” “almost silent” = automatic? (B/X: 10% in underbrush, 2 in 6 w/ cover) Thief: 4 in 6 Surprise Thief: 4 in 6 Everyone else: 2 in 6 Open Doors Weaklings (STR 3-6): 1 in 6 STR 7-18: 2 in

Here is the ruleset I've cobbled together to run the Anomalous Subsurface Environment, Patrick Wetmore 's gonzo megadungeon: Anomalous Subsurface Microlite The chassis is Microlite20,  although I slowed down skill progressions a lot . There's a DCC -style meat-grinder attached, and the weapons list and combat stances are highly influenced/ripped off from Beyond the Wall. Some favorite house-rules from here and there (but mostly from Goblin Punch ) got chunked in, too. The setting and the Scientist and Robot classes are, of course, from the ASE modules . A powerful impetus behind this is to play a game where I can use The Dungeon Dozen as a straight resource. This is intended as the Players' document, and doesn't contain things like advancement. And it only goes up to about level 6, because I'm intending this for PbP and holy geez, we'll all be long dead before anyone gets to level 6 via PbP.

Beyond the Wall has a lovely, simple weapons mechanic. The only mechanical distinction between weapons is melee or ranged, and the amount of damage. Weapons can do 1d4, 1d6, 1d8, or 1d10, and all weapons within a given damage range cost the same. You can call your 1d6 melee weapon a short sword or a cutlass or a bearded axe or a mace—it's all the same. Wound Man I much prefer this to AD&D style weapons charts with all sorts of granular damage rates, which seem primarily derived from arguments over why a claymore is better than a carp's tongue and oh my god how can you not know what a carp's tongue is?  But I still felt the urge for some mechanical distinction between weapons. So, this. The Critical effects of each weapon are for natural 20's and 1's only, and are only suggestions. Always go with what is situationally most appropriate. Dagger, Knife D4, 4 Coppers Can use either the STR or DEX bonus to hit in melee. Can be thrown; Range:

May I present your reading material for the next year or so? Edmund J. Sullivan, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Links to Wisdom It's a wiki-style listing of great and useful OSR material and houserules, organized along the lines of Moldvay's Basic. It looks...  oh gosh, it looks so good. Edit: The minds behind this resource are Alex Schroeder , The Jovial Priest , and Jeff Rients . Thanks, guys!

In my Kley-inspired setting , I'm calling the thief and thief-adjacent classes The Sneak because it seems to address the tactics of the class. Fighters fight, Sneaks sneak. Sneaks can be thieves, con-men, spies, assassins, detectives, merchants, reporters, diplomats—anyone who chooses guile as their way of getting things done. All illustrations in this post by Honoré Daumier An ongoing event in the OSR Olympics is reworking the thief skills. They're an inelegant fit with the rest of the rest of the game, what with their exclusive claim on tasks that had previously been open to anyone who could describe their character doing something sneaky, and their weirdly low levels of competency. And yet they loom so large in the broader conception of what the game is supposed to be that it seems churlish to just excise them. So here's my take, with the Sneak Skills. These skills are based on the assumption that everyone can hide, and look for traps, and climb, and whatnot b