An Abominable Fancy

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...

Okay, so. While the Fighter can model a wide variety of character types—fencer, archer, pirate, etc.—it effectively punishes any player who doesn't follow the same arms race of more-better armor and most-magic weapon. I mean, I could turn my back on that +3 plate because I'm really set on the image of Robin Hood. And my twelth-level mage could decide to stick to cantrips. But more than likely I'd start stretching the image of the character until it looks like every other Fighter out there. Let's let the Fighter be the professional man-at-arms. Whether thug, barbarian, knight, or infantryman, the Fighter is someone who has dedicated themselves to general study of combat. They know all the weapons, all the armors, and spend a lot of time in chat rooms arguing over tactics and strategy. The Combat Specialist is anyone who focuses on fighting but without the broad martial education of a Fighter. Perhaps this is because fighting is only part of their job (say, a Pira...

Adam Dant, Shoreditch in the Year 3000 Adam Dant has drawn some lovely maps exploring the town of Shoreditch, including this one, based on interviewing the towns residents about where they thought things were headed in the next few centuries.

I thought about making a Satyr Class for DD , and then realized that, with Boring Spells in play, the simplest way to model a Satyr would be just to use roll up a Magic User (probably an Illusionist) and use its Satyr-ness as the motif. And it occurred to me that this could be a good way to handle pretty much any character race. Simply ask the player to describe what they want to play, and then ask them if that character is going to solve things by fighting, magic, or skill. Want to play an ogre or minotaur or lizard man? That’s a Fighter. A nymph or satyr or vampire is a Spell-caster run through Boring Spells. Your gnome or talking rabbit or animated scarecrow is an Adventurer. Angels and sufficiently religious-minded creatures of any species can be Clerics.  Now, obviously, lizard men are better in water than minotaurs, and satyrs are better in daylight than vampires, but that could all be handled as role-play and off-the-cuff rulings. So, I then immediately came up with ...

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...