John Carter OMG!

I just picked my jaw up off the floor. This looks AWESOME! And the Peter Gabriel version of "My Body is a Cage" is just perfect...I hope they keep it in the film.

Now this makes me want to game on Barsoom...

Ryth Chronicle: Cover-to-Cover #1

                     Bookletized version, complete with my scribbled notes...

And so it begins--my most ambitious blogging project to date. I've recently been blown away by The Ryth Chronicle document that recently surfaced. It's an amazing source of insight into the earliest days of the hobby, and it really deserves a thorough discussion. My plan is to go through it cover-to-cover, usually covering a few pages at a time. I'll be posting images from the document that connect to the main point of the given post--the document is, of course, approaching 40 years old, and is, I believe, a scan of a photocopy, so don't expect sterling resolution. If anyone can offer insight about how to clean up the jpegs I'm snapshotting out of Reader and editing with Photogallery, I'd appreciate it!

Front Page

We'll start out with the introduction, right on the front page. This is a thing of beautiful utility--it sets up the whole framework for play in four short paragraphs, including all those things that many DMs (well, okay, me anyway) hand-wave:

• Class-specific lodging
• Taxes (based on your status, i.e., XP!)
• Immediate adventuring destinations

"...murky Fenmarch, where few men travel these days."

"Overlooking the road lie the ruins of the once-proud Tar Morgard, a fortress built by the Great Kings long ago. Now the ruins hold only the dread Weir burrowed into the mountain by generations of evil beings. Minstrels sing of vast wealth and powerful treasure hidden in the dark depths of the Weir, but few dare venture there, and fewer still return."

Alright. I know exactly how to set up my Adventurer, and where to go from there. Plus there's an echo of the famous "...vast, ruined pile" quote from the LBB. Oh, and has been pointed out elsewhere, it's called a "Dragons and Dungeons Campaign". :)

Houserules
Next, logically, come the houserules for this particular campaign. The most fascinating thing to me is the Combat Hit Matrix:

It's a bit hard to read, but it first adjusts AC targets by weapon used. I don't think these guys had Chainmail, nor do I think (given the details of the first character report on the next page, and the fact that the Hit Die Roll Adjustment doesn't include thieves) that they had Greyhawk. It's a fairly logical extension of the combat system, especially if you know anything at all about how weapons and armor actually work, but I'm curious where it came from .

Next is the really interesting part, the "Hit Die Roll Adjustment for Degree (Level) of Attacker". It appears they immediately de-matrixed the combat matrix into a simple hit bonus dependent on level. Sound familiar? So much for the innovations of the d20 system! (okay, that's an oversimplification, but still...) They tinkered a bit by letting everyone increase in smaller increments over levels (as opposed to the combat table which only grants bonuses every three/four/five levels), but that's a pretty common houserule even these days. I'd use this table as it stands.

Current Questions for John and Len

1. Did you guys have the Chainmail rules?
2. When did you start using Greyhawk?
3. Why did you decide to make these particular changes?

If anyone else has questions, just add them to the comments.

Old School Archaeology: The Chronicle of Ryth

                        Chronicles of Ryth pdf at risusmonkey.com


Run, do not walk, to Risus Monkey and download this document. Now. Do you have it? I'll wait...

Okay, what you are holding is an ORIGINAL CAMPAIGN CHRONICLE FROM 1975-6. And it's 80 pages long. Published as a series of newsletters by John Van De Graaf and Len Scensny, these guys bought their white box straight from the hands of Gary himself. They concocted (of course!) a few house rules, and then began running and fairly exhaustingly, well, chronicling their multiple-GM, 40+ player campaign.

Yeah. You read that correctly. 40+ players.

I'm going to begin doing a cover-to-cover of this historic text in the next few days here on this blog. Until then, do yourself a favor and read it. No, actually, don't just read it--experience it.

Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG---go get the beta!

Goodman Games had finally released the beta version of their long-discussed Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG. Is it the Holy Grail of Old School Gaming? Is it just hyperbolic sound and fury, signifying nothing?

Only one way to find out.

Two Old, One New...

It's so freaking impossible to keep up with the flood of goodness being produced these days, but here are a few I've had my eye on:

Beasts, Men, & Gods

This venerable game had approximately 1,000 copies in print. My friends and I, back in maybe '83 or '84 somehow got ahold of a copy and played the crap out of it. I think, at the time, we really loved the piecemeal armor system and the more detailed combat (well, more detailed than AD&D.) It's recently been reprinted by the author in the first, at least as far as I know, successful petitioning of an original author by a fan--the Vault Keeper. This enthusiastic Italian has actually been digging up a bunch of interesting lost RPGs; it's definitely worth your time to poke around through his blog.

You can by your own, brand-new, almost facsimile, copy of a piece of RPG history here:

Beasts, Men, & Gods

There's a sizable (60 pg.) pdf preview, so you can get a pretty good sense of what it's like. I would like to point out here that, not only do I have a vintage copy, it's signed by the author. :)

Oh, and there's also a strange Russian novel by the same name...

Holmes 77

The excellent Professor Thork has put together a "retro-edition" of the original Holmes Blue Book rules for Basic D&D. There have been a number of expansions for these rules floating around for a few years now, but Holmes 77 puts it all together in one document, altering as little as possible. Now you can get your Holmes on from levels 1-9 and beyond!

Holmes 77

On a related Holmsian note, the industrious Zenopus has put together and is rapidly updating a Holmes Basic website. Go there now.

Mystery Men

John Slater, from deep within The Land of Nod has produced, as far as I know, the first OSR superhero game. Grounded solidly in class and level D&D, it is a fascinating, incredibly inventive game. One of the cooler features is that the GM picks a starting Experience level for the campaign. All characters then start with that fund of XPs to "buy" superpowers. Any left over end up being added to actual XP, so a character with just a couple of powers can easily end up starting higher than first level. This is so simple and elegant a solution to both how to do superpowers within this particular framework of rules and how to give players an option to start higher than first level. The trade-off choice is beautiful.

Mystery Men

Oh, and did I mention it's FREE?

And, since it's made by John, the art and layout are superb. I will make time at some point to play this game!

Legends & Labyrinths Playtest, Episode One: Heart of the Storm

Though faced with rain, hail, and tornadoes, our playtest of George Strayton's swiftly developing Legends & Labyrinths rules went on at the Fantasy Flight Games Event Center. We only had to evacuate to the warehouse for about 15 minutes. :) Thor is obviously watching out for Secret Fire Games! One of my players is a member at the Event Center now, too, so we got to game up in the mezzanine, which was pretty cool. Like playing in an attic instead of a basement...

The players were:

The characters were:

Nicker the Nimble, Dwarven Holy-Man
Though weak and uncoordinated (obviously not suited for being dwarven warrior!), his robust health kept him alive long enough to join the priesthood. Though insightful, his offensive nature sometimes makes communication difficult.

Talia the Clever. Or the Beautiful. Or the Nimble. Or the Mysterious. Or any combo of the above, Elven Thief
Though weak and delicate, her nimbleness has gotten her out of many a situation in the course of her scoundrel life.

Bahb the Enigmatic, Human Fighter
Muscular, robust, and agile, Bahb is a competent warrior of few words. A bit dense and foolhardy, others sometimes mistake his incomprehension as deep reflection, especially when he decides to speak up and use his natural persuasiveness to convince others he knows what's going on.

Sargon the Inquisitive, Arch-Mage-in-Training, Human Magic User
Robust, brilliant, and persuasive, Sargon leaves no stone unturned. Nor soil untasted. His wizardstaff, topped with brass human hand, only adds to his formidable appearance.

Snakefoot the Unblinking, Elven Thief
Though delicate and occasionally foolhardy, his physical adroitness leaves his foes wondering just where that arrow came from...

Initial Cool Thing: I just made up these descriptions by using only the ability score descriptors. They immediately bring the characters to life! I could've kept going by working in their personality traits (one each for Good, Neutral, and Evil), but I wanted to get this posted today... Players were using them throughout the session in reference to one another.

Character creation took awhile, but it turned out we were using two versions of both rules and character sheets, so that slowed things down. Once solidified, I don't see making a character taking more than about 15 minutes. Once characters were set, we didn't have a whole lot of time to explore McKracken's Folly, the insta-dungeon I created for this session (more on that in a later post.)

Situated in the skull of a titan defeated long ago by the Arch Mage McKracken, they discovered a circular trap door on the inside dome. Some careful examination of the ground revealed a metal rectangle which, when depressed, extended into steps leading up to the door, each one embossed with the McK sigil. One by one our intrepid adventurers walked up the stairs and entered the trap door and went up the ladder rungs on the revealed shaft, only to find themselves, after a moment of disorientation, climbing down instead. This was a bit too much for Nimble, and he lost his grip. This necessitated him making a Luck roll. Having taken the Special Quality, "Lucky Son of a Bitch", he had a +3 to this roll and made it, being jerked up short by his holy symbol getting jammed in a ladder rung.

A bit of exploration of the dungeon at the bottom of the shaft led to one encounter, with a necrophidius:

If you recognize this from the Fiend Folio (though this is a different illustration), you made your Lore roll. I used both the Fiend Folio and the 4e Essentials Monster Vault for monsters. There are great quick and dirty conversion rules for both 1e and 4e in the rules, and I made liberal use of them.

The scouting elves heard this horror at a corridor t-junction but, deciding to leave well enough alone, they continued on ahead. The other three characters were subsequently hypnotized by it's swaying, lambent eyes until the elves, running back, peppered its skull with arrows, shattering it and destroying the beast.

Attacks in L&L are interesting, in that they currently combine a d20ish system of adding adjustments to a d20 attack roll with cross-referencing that number on an level-determined Attack Matrix with their foe's appropriate defense. Armor is, of course, a defense, with higher being better, but so are Fortitude, Reflex, and Will, which confused me at first. Part of my confusion came from the current lack of an explicit statement about this in the text; obviously a beta-draft issue. Once I figured it out, I just assigned the necrophidius a level for his hypnotism and made an attack roll on the Matrix, no problem.

I was going to go into more detail about the system and how it worked, but correspondence and George's blog have shown the rules are rapidly evolving into a non-OGL framework with some really intriguing differences. I'm excited for the direction it's going, and am eager for our next playtest session (scheduled on June 12.)

Zak's Insta-Dungeon---the weal for your woe...

...or at least mine. Go check it out! And if you're interested in trying it as is, choose the print option on the blog, increase the font size to 15, and save it as a pdf. It ends up a decently formatted two pages.

I have yet to try it (I'm at work with, alas, no dice), but I'm thinking this is a huge insight both into random table design and the possible ways to randomly design dungeons. Too awesome.