Hey, I get to PLAY!

So, I'm a lucky boy. The only player who's been to EVERY Otherness session, Will, aka "coffee", is all primed and ready to go running Lamentations of the Flame Princess, and I get to play! He's even got the deluxe boxed edition, which is, in a word, gorgeous. James Raggi, you've set the bar high.
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If anyone wants to join in, the date set is Sunday, November 21st from 12-4 at The Source Comics and Games. You can let me know about it here, let Will know about it over at his blog (linked above), or just show up---we run things by the Free Campaign philosophy: whoever shows up gets to play.

I'll obviously be posting more about the session and the rules after we play, but I'll say this immediately---the free  Rules and Magic books available on the LotFP site are clearly written and thoughtfully laid out. I mean, I don't expect much when something's free, but even these free, art-less versions are laid-out, as opposed to just dumped from word processor into a pdf.

I dig it.

primordial_odd: A Work in Progress

Alright, here's the newest iteration of my attempt to write a simulacrum of the Fantasy Supplement from Chainmail:                                   


primordial_odd


There are still lots of holes, but I've made a couple of breakthroughs that I'm pretty excited about.    

1. I replaced the attack and defense terminology of Light/Heavy/Armored with Cunning/Fierce/Masterful. The more I studied the original tables, the more it became obvious to me that they really weren't so much about armor as they were a gestalt of force and skill. This is especially obvious when you look at the way the terms are used for monsters in the FS. That kind of abstractness appeals to me, so I just pushed it one step further. Armor as such still matters in the Dueling Table, but not at all in the Combat Table.
2. Which leads me to my next breakthrough, which is the, well, not so much re-creation but interpretation of the three main combat tables in the FS, the Combat Table (kept the same name), Man-to-Man (now Dueling), and the Fantasy Combat Table (now Wondrous Combat). I made some significant changes, especially in the Dueling Table, but overall I think they closely adhere to the spirit of the originals. I can honestly say when I was madly designing "indie" games three and more years ago, I would laughed out loud if you'd told me I'd design a game with three good-sized, cross-referenced, combat resolution tables---the world is funny like that, I guess. :)

For the tables themselves, which still woefully lack any sort of instructions or examples, so here's a short crib:

• The Combat Table uses single d6s, and the formula is dice/rank(target number to score a hit); e.g., 1/2(6) means one die/two ranks, with a 6 needed to score a hit.
• The Dueling Table uses 2d6, and at least right now, the low rank in the duel is subtracted from the high rank. The high rank in the duel uses that "duel number" as the number of 2d6 combos he rolls. The low rank in the duel rolls their rank, unless it's higher than the duel number, in which case they use the duel number, too. Opponents of the same rank each roll one 2d6. E.g., a 4th rank character faces off in a duel against a 1st rank character. 4-1=3, so the high rank rolls 3 2d6s combos, while the low rank character only rolls 1d6. If the low ranking character was 2nd rank, then both opponents would roll 2d6.
• The Wondrous Combat table uses single rolls of 2d6 for each opponent. Damage can be dealt in one of two ways: each successful roll equals one hit of damage, or a successful hit equals an actual kill---that'll learn ya' to take the Wondrous lightly! The scores needed to hit are listed, for instance, as "7/5". The character's score to hit is on the left, the monster's on the right.
• Characters themselves have hits equal to their rank. They can actually be knocked down to zero hits and keep fighting. Once below zero, they make a Saving Throw---if they make it, they're unconscious, if they fail it, well, even heroes die. After a combat, all hits are restored. If knocked down past zero and only rendered unconscious, when revived, hits will go back up only to the character's rank minus one, until the Adventure's over (or they spend a few days resting.)

I'm happy to field questions, and if someone's willing to give the combat tables a spin, well, that'd be fabulous. I'll be playtesting it this Sunday for Otherness: Session 13. Already sounds like we're going to have weird characters, so stay tuned...

Work in Progress: Fantasy Supplement Simulacrum

The working title for this document is PRIMORDIAL ODD. I started working on it, as the picture indicates, over two years ago, but now am finally primed to finish it.

Right now it's still written as if the user will be accessing the original Chainmail rules, but that'll change soon---I'm working on redoing the appropriate tables.

My goal with this is not to create a clone, per se, but instead a game heavily inspired by Chainmail's Fantasy Supplement. Some of the data and progressions in the combat tables will be modified, and I've thrown in a couple of things that have nothing to do with the original (like the characters' Stories, and Grit), but seem to fit the spirit of the whole.

I'm happy to field comments, questions, hate-mail, etc., either here or here.

Abridgment

I think I'm done with the big, sprawling accounts of play. I only end up delaying writing the posts until it's long past when we played. So, I'm now all about abridgment. I'm going to try smaller, more frequent posts.

In the spirit of abridgment, Otherness 11 was played with a rediscovered D&D simulacrum: Abridged Dungeons and Dragons. I have no idea how I first stumbled upon these rules, but I do remember that it was back maybe eight years ago when I was first getting interested in the White Box. I was cleaning out my games and there it was, so, since I hadn't had time to flesh out Level 2 of GRISTLEHELM, it seemed like a good session to try something different.

I have to say, it actually worked pretty well. It was low seriousness, with a Wizard (named Anton the Gloomy, Friend of Bats), one Hero (Melvin's twin brother), a dwarf, two elves, a goblin and...wait for it...a Ghoul named Ghoulio. Yes.

I took them through a dungeon I made a few years ago, The Lost Tomb of Frater Perduabo, Mad Alcymyst. No characters died, and I didn't really notice any imbalance from the elves being able to turn invisible or the Wizard having access to a big list of spells, including an innate ability to throw a fireball.

It'd need some tweaking for the long haul, but what game worth playing doesn't, right?

In case you're wondering, Ghoulio was discovered locked in a room full of mutated bats. On the fly (and this is what's so great about the oldskool mindset), I decided that since ghouls can't parlyze elves and so probably don't even LIKE to eat dead elves, there wasn't really any animosity between the two. I had a momentary vision of the King of Ghouls and the Burning Year having a diplomatic meeting in an overgrown graveyard lost in the forest. And really, Ghoulio was played (by Shelly, new gamer to our group) more like a Lovecraft ghoul, meeping and creeping, complete with very ghoulish finger-twitching...

Oh, in case you're wondering, it was Will's bday last week, and the cake arrived mid-session courtesy of his wife, Susan (playing Carol the Elf...) And it was tasty.

Happy Birthday, Will!