B/X Character Sheet

hey dudes. a year or two ago i was perusing the internet and i stumbled across a blog that used the old DUNGEONS & DRAGONS coloring book border for something. i can't remember which blog it was or what they made with it...so that sucks. i did manage to track down this here blog which has scans of the coloring book (my original one has been lost to time) and i made a character sheet for B/X D&D. as you can see, it's mostly just a reconfiguring of the sheet that shipped with the game. it's usable for LABYRINTH LORD also if that's your thing. 

this is the sheet that we use for our B/X (supplemented by LL) game on sundays. download here and enjoy!  here's a preview...

new RPG idea

i was sitting around in a lot of pain last night and i thought of this...

BASIC PREMISE

Ok – this is a science fantasy idea ala JOHN CARTER OF MARS…except instead of ray powered tech it would be steampunkish magic powered tech.

The setting is a world that has been devastated by a worldwide war. For thousands of years this world existed in a typical D&D –like state, but then empires and tensions rose and eventually magic-powered war broke out planet wide.  The surface of the planet was devastated and the remaining peace desiring cities were forced to go airborne. Magic powered tech was used to rip them off the ground and into the sky.  So, you have flying city states, airships, “radium” weapons and all that jazz.  The surface of the planet is a mutant/monster/ruin filled no man’s land. It’s not post apocalyptic, but as civilization waned after the surviving cities went skyward, the creatures that had been created for war were left behind. Culture on the surface is rather barbaric and brutal. 

With land at a premium, farmland is non-existent. Food and water are provided by the clergy through the use of CREATE FOOD& WATER spells. This makes them pretty powerful as both a religious institution and an industry.  Ore has to be mined from the planet’s surface, so it’s a risky proposition – dwarves and orcs are still really good at it.  Some humanoid races, like goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears live in the sky cities with all the usual races so they’d be playable as PC’s. 

Surface dwelling mutant PC’s could be generated using the generator I made for aliens…and clockwork automatons could be made using my robot generator.

The mechanics would be a mash-up of SWORDS & WIZARDRY and X-PLORERS. Classes would be from S&W (with my thief being used instead of theirs) and the skills would be from X-PLORERS. PC’s would pick 4 skills to start with and then get like 2-4 skill points per level to adjust the difficulty levels downward.  The technological stuff would be from X-PLORERS – the airships would be governed by their super-simple spaceship rules. Also – no armor. I like the idea of people wearing amulets and rings of protection…they’d be expensive but with ore at a premium that would be more practical.

Anyway, I thought of all of this last night. I recently read the AMULET series and the NEOTOPIA series.  it’s obviously a very rough idea – but what do you think?    

EDIT: there's also an obvious SKYREALMS OF JORUNE feel here also. 

D&D NEXT and the "maths" (ugh).

so, i've sort of been keeping an eye on the development of D&D NEXT. i know it's probably going to suck, but i can't help myself.  my friend chris has really been keeping an eye on it, however. this has led us to exchange emails every monday or tuesday after mearls updates his LEGENDS & LORE column.

today, this was in an email he sent me: "it seems to me that they're looking at D&D as a big math equation and not a role-playing game".

boom. dead on.   

so yeah, my hopes for NEXT aren't all that high. chris runs a D&D club at his school twice a week. the kids have abandoned 4E for 1E and LABYRINTH LORD. they also just voted to give up on the NEXT playtest that chris had been running for them.

what does all this tell you?

BEYOND THE WALL - more coolness

so, i had to give a presentation to the school board in my district on S&W AD...i'm only now beginning to wade into all the awesome that was created. i'll post up some links later in the weekend as i begin to explore stuff. 

anyway, i had mentioned the BEYOND THE WALL RPG the other day. they have some FREE playbooks posted up on drive-thru (they're the ones i mentioned i grabbed during the playtest, but now they're all laid out and stuff.). take a look at them here and see if you want to use them in your game - you'll get a sense as to how the village generator and all that jazz works.  i figure that's better than paying 8 bucks for something you won't use.

SWORDS AND WIZARDRY APPRECIATION!!!

so, today is SWORDS AND WIZARDRY APPRECIATION DAY.  i'm posting this now (at midnight) because i have a long day of work tomorrow and i'm not sure how often i'll be able to get online. so, rather than wait until tomorrow night to post all this stuff i figure i'll just do it now. better early than late, i suppose. anyway, i've created a few things in honor of today...

first up is a CHARACTER SHEET for SWORDS AND WIZARDRY COMPLETE. it's based off the sheet in the back of the new COMPLETE book.  now that i'm almost done with DUNGEON STRIKE i had ton of stock artwork laying around - so i applied it to the sheet. here's the result:

 if you like it you can grab a pdf right here!  now, as much as i like the COMPLETE rules, i've always been sort of partial to the ol' WHITE BOX.  if you read this blog at all, you know my love for the X-PLORERS RPG. the rules for that game were greatly inspired by the original SWORDS AND WIZARDRY WHITE BOX, and as i have recently gotten my hands on one of the og BRAVE HALFLING boxed sets, my GM juices have been flowing. partly inspired by the BEYOND THE WALL RPG i mentioned the other day and partly inspired by the HOLMES basic set (where he mentions parties comprised of dragons, werebears, humans, centaurs and elves) - i've begun work on a little homebrew for my players.  i have 2 things for you to check out - 1 is the house-ruled THIEF class. no matter what edition my friends and i play we always wind up tweaking the thief slightly. WHITE BOX doesn't include the thief at all...so, based on the thief in the COMPLETE rules, i give you our houseruled SWORDS AND WIZARDRY THIEF. the class features a simplified skill system based on X-PLORERS. i also  folded a few skills into "delicate tasks".  check it out:

you can grab the pdf here. print on both sides and cut down the middle and you'll have 2 copies - one for your players and one for your WHITE BOX.

last but not least...i made a werebear. some of you older folk may remember the werebear class that was presented in WHITE DWARF #17 (along with the stone giant, lammasu, and blink dog pack!).  the pdfs of all those old magazines are floating around the interwebz, so if your google-fu is sharp you should be able to find 'em. anyway, based on that old article i created a werebear class (and i borrowed a pic from the article/1e MM) for my upcoming campaign:

the pdf for this is available right here.  and that's it, folks! i may remake some of the other classes in the WHITE DWARF article. if i do i'll post them here. i'm also working on a dragon PC. yeah. we'll see how that goes.  enjoy!

Beyond The Wall (and other adventures) RPG

have you guys discovered this little nugget of an rpg? no? well, it's available here for only 8 bucks! i don't really know much about the creators - but they have created a nice little OSR game here.  it's a le guin/alexander inspired version of D&D and it is currently tickling my fancy.  i fully intend on pillaging some of it for my upcoming SWORDS & WIZARDRY WHITEBOX campaign. the stuff in here can also be used with minimum effort for basically any OSR game.

so what has me so excited? why should you really care about yet another clone-esque OSR offering? well, for one - the playbooks.

i plan on ignoring the stat bonuses.

the classes have a few playbooks each; think of them as templates or background generators for each character.  included with the core bundle we have: the untested thief, the young woodsman, the would-be knight, the self-taught mage, the village hero, and the witch's apprentice. each playbook has a bunch of random background tables that players can roll on after they make their characters. these background tables help you create the town/village the PCs come from, they help explain how all the PCs know each other, and they drop in a bunch of adventure hooks for the GM.

A few weeks ago i snagged a ton of the playtest drafts off their website(click here for the site), and there were a ton of other playbooks - the halfling vagabond, elven highborn, and a bunch of noble-born human types.  all the playtest drafts are down now, but supposedly once those playbooks are laid out and the whatnot they'll be posted as freebies.  

the game bills itself as being "low prep"; just pick up the books, roll on a few tables and you should have a fully fleshed out base of operations, a few sandboxy hooks, and an overall mission.

i'll be keeping an eye on this game. i'd also love to have some of these playbooks in dead tree form. maybe soon? who knows.  

Random Robot Characters for X-PLORERS!

after all the positive feedback i received for my random alien class generator for the X-PLORERS rpg, i decided to sit down and try my hand at another class for the game.  so, i took aim at robots.

robot characters are a staple of the old sci fi/pulp stories that influenced X-PLORERS. i figured it would only be fair to let my players control one. obviously, these robot characters are NOT subject to the FIRST DIRECTIVE (for the good or ill of all involved). the robot abilities are basically re-skinned spells from the SWORDS AND WIZARDRY WB and the LABYRINTH LORD core book.  have a look at the rough draft and let me know what you think - you can download the pdf here.