Ostensible Cat

Ok, so I've had some time, energy, clarity of thought, alignment of the stars and planets, or whatever that has allowed me to make some progress on my classless OSR system. I've pretty much been consulting a bunch of OSR games such as Swords and Wizardry (Whitebox/Core/Complete), Astonishing Swordsmen and Sorcerers of Hyperborea (naturally :) ), Knave, the Black Hack, and even some 3.5 books and Palladium fantasy, and Arduin Grimoires amongst others for inspiration. So far, what I've decided is to lean heavily on Swords and Wizardry Core for the base system, particularly around attributes and bonuses. I love the Black Hack's take on saving throws. I mean, I really have always wanted to make the difference in say a 14 wisdom and a 15 wisdom quantitatively meaningful. Therefore saves are attribute checks, where the character rolls their attribute score or lower on a d20 with modifications for the type of challenge they may face. As for character creation, I'm still

In line with my recent posts and along with some of my past posts, I really feel like I want to build some alternative magic systems for use with Old School Fantasy systems (read D&D and clones). I do not want to do away with Vancian magic. I think it does what it does pretty well. However, I don’t think Vancian magic is the end-all-be-all to capture fantasy tropes. This is especially interesting in light of the famous Appendix N and the sources of inspiration sighted there. I don’t feel like the Magic from Moorcock’s writing is well captured. Or Lieber, or Howard, or Lovecraft, or, well anyone outside Vance and a few others. Matt Finch’s Eldritch Weirdness is perhaps one of the most compelling RPG magic books I’ve ever read. No, I take that back. It is THE most compelling magic book I’ve ever read. In it, he exhorts folks in the RPG community to think beyond the spell lists and explore other types of magic systems. Note, he doesn’t advocate doing away with the tradition

In light of yesterday’s post concerning my intentions for my campaign setting, I just wanted to clarify that I really like the way D&D and the clones handle many things such as combat, stats, etc. What stifles me a bit are the classes. I actually find them to be somewhat restrictive and don’t allow for a lot of customization. Old School rule sets are like an old Volkswagon. They are infinitely customizable, hold up pretty well, can be somewhat clunky at times, have some sort of strange allure to them, etc. I do not want to throw out the entire D&D system. I’m also not trying to say that Gygax and Arneson got it wrong. I simply want to chop the system down to the core, and reassemble the parts to be able to create more flexible character types. That is what is so cool about the Old School systems, the rules are more like a kit and I can chop away a bit here, jack up the back end, add a blower and a spoiler, paint flames on the sides and put suicide doors on. Still is a

So, I’ve been thinking of my campaign world again and my magic system a lot lately. I’ve been reading a lot of Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga and the Hobbit (what a strange dichotomy!) and they have both influencing my thoughts on magic systems. I’m becoming more and more intrigued of having only a single “class” and everything else being a trapping of that. For my campaign world, I’m steering towards an everyman approach were you purchase “disciplines” as you advance to create different character types. I’m not really interested in creating a whole new retro-clone system per se, but building on top of either the Labyrinth Lord or Swords and Wizardry White box. For what I have in mind, the S&W Whitebox might make even more sense. So I’m thinking that the normal adventuring type guy would have a base d6 hit die. You’d have some starting amount of experience to spend on disciplines to start down the road of customizing your character. So for instance, if you wanted brawny fig

I’ve been thinking about my approach to magic and I think there is one more element I need to add to the mix to really be able to pull it off. I don’t care for skill systems much. I find them just as restrictive as classes. It seems more natural to say someone has an aptitude for something and give them bonuses for a check against an attribute or a baseline success rather than artificially levy a skill construct with percentile scores that is restricted by class. However, I do think it makes sense that someone who has a background in say demonology, might be better at summoning these malevolent entities than say Jikara the Buxom who just happens to be leafing through the Tome of Three Hundred Secrets of the Occluded Soul and is trying to summon Gbrank Ywoldar the Crushing Fist of the Dread Mist. So instead of creating a whole skill set to support things like fishing, horsemanship, bowling, hair styling, etc, I’m thinking about using disciplines. A discipline would be a sort of “s

I think I’m pretty well sold on using two classes for my base in my campaign world. I think that with a fighting man and a magic user as a base, you can build some pretty interesting characters. What I’m thinking about doing is collapsing the cleric spell list into the magic user spell list. In addition, I’d make some priest spells along the lines of invocations. These invocations would be and appeal to the divine for aid and would fit into much the same pattern as the ritual magic I mentioned in my post yesterday. That would mean that theoretically an invocation to a god could be used by anybody. However, like the ritual magic, there would be a baseline that would affect the chance of success. Here’s an example of what I’m thinking: Vladamir the bold is agonizing over Carnelia the Bountiful’s grevious wound to her head. He is not a cleric or associated with the church, but has been a more or less respectful adherent to Yzul Haedratha. Vladamir appeals to Yzul to aid his love