A Hobbit Inspired Campaign

I've mentioned before my love of Tolkien's The Hobbit.  I really, really like it.  My fondness for it has only been growing over the years.  On the other hand, I don't much care for The Lord of the Rings trilogy.  But that's another story.  (Oddly enough, though, I really like The Lord of the Rings movies but not The Hobbit movies.)

Two of my favorite blog posts out there on the gaming blogs are "The Hobbit 1937" at The Hydra's Grotto and "1937 Hobbit as a Setting" at Rise Up Comus.  Both of these riff on using The Hobbit as it was originally written as a campaign setting.  The current version of The Hobbit was modified when The Lord of the Rings was publish in the 1950s to fit better the series' lore.  So the posts ask, what would a campaign be like with just the information available in The Hobbit, as originally published, but with none of the later lore added by The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien's other works?

These two blog posts really make me want to play/run a campaign in that world.  It's essentially a points of light campaign, which I find fascinating.  Though it can be a harsh and grim world it also has a touches of fairytale whimsy.  And it shows how a small group of people can have an oversized effect on the world.

While I'm interested in playing in the setting itself or a close analog, I'm not really interested in using any of the of the licensed games.  Except, perhaps, The Lord of the Rings Adventure Game (LOR), a simple game released in the early 90s by Ice Crown Enterprises as an introduction to their Middle Earth Role Playing game.  But I'll talk about this game in another post.

I can think of several rulesets that I could use for this.  TSR D&D and OSR rulesets jump to mind immediately because that is what I'm most familiar with.

The first for me, of course, is B/X.  With the exception of the cleric it fits quite nicely.  The demi-human race-as-class fits the archetypes well in my mind and the other classes are spot on.  As for the cleric, many people online have suggested that the cleric's magic actually fits Tolkien elves better than magic-user spells.  I will take their word for it because as much as I like The Hobbit I am not a Tolkien scholar in any way, shape or form.  I could do away with the cleric altogether and have elves use clerical magic instead.  I just purchased BX Options: Class Builder by Erin Smale (aka The Welsh Piper) so I could just build the class from the ground up so it would be customized to my liking and have different x.p. requirements suitable for their modified powers.

The second to come to mind is The Hero's Journey by James Spahn.  Either the First or Second Edition would work fine.  The First Edition adheres more closely to its White Box roots.  It does add more classes, modifies how attributes are generated and actually adds two attributes, luck and appearance.  It also uses only shields and dexterity to determine armor class and has armor reduce damage.  The Second Edition makes many more changes to better match Mr. Spahn's vision.  I wrote about it in more detail in this post.  I like both editions but the First Edition draws me to it more at this point.  So if I were to go with The Hero's Journey I would use First Edition suitably modified.  I would throw out some classes and a race to make it fit my vision better.  (Buh-bye Bard, buh-bye Jester, etc.)  And the cleric would have to be dealt with again.

I could go with White Box with added classes and options from Mr. Spahn's White Box Omnibus and White Box Compendium.  This would essentially be taking the building blocks that he used to make The Hero's Journey and brew up my own version to try to more exactly meet my vision.  I would certainly add Greenleaf Elves, rangers and druids and perhaps the barbarian.  I would also probably add the druid spell list from White Box Expanded Lore by Simon "Noobirus" Piecha.  A little more time consuming but the process can be fun in and of itself.

Then there are several other noncommercial OSR games that are aimed at a LotRs feel.  There is Drums in the Deep, which is a modification meant for Holmes Basic.  There is also Balrogs & Bagginses.  B&B states you will need a version of Basic or AD&D to use it.  Whereas Drums in the Deep is 11 pages, B&B clocks in at 58.  I haven't read these in quite a while so I'm not going to say much about them at this time.

I think I'll wrap this post up for now and talk about non-OSR options next time.

The Black Hack

I've had the PDF for the first edition of The Black Hack for quite some time but only recently got around to reading it.  I found that I like it for several reasons.  

First, I can pretty much hold all of the rules in my head.  Since I got back into RPGs about two decades ago I discovered that I prefer rules-lite games.  As a working parent who was perennially tired I just did not have the brain power to expend on complicated games.  Now I'm old and just plain tired and still don't.  And besides, it turns out my favorite games are rules-lite.

Second, it is familiar.  Two of my favorite games are B/X and White Box: FMAG.  The Black Hack is based on the Original Edition and so is very close to these games.  Same attributes, same spells, same monsters and similar adventuring style. So you know what you're going to get and what you're supposed to do.

Third, it is pick up and play.  TBH is excellent for one shots.  Characters can be generated quickly and you can be off and running.  You don't have to spend a lot of time prepping if you don't want too.It's my understanding that it can be used for campaigns also but I haven't played more than a couple of sessions so I don't know this personally.

And fourth, support and adventures.  In the years since the first edition was published many adventures and supplements have been published.  Often these are free or very low priced.  This makes it easy to keep playing if you like the game.  The supplements range from new classes and ways to add in races to full-blown games based on TBH.  What's more, I understand that the modules and adventures from the original games are easily compatible too.  So you can pull out any of the your old TSR modules, or new OSR stuff for that matter, and run it with TBH.

Another thing I like about TBH is what people have done with it.  Not just the adventures and supplements but the full games people have created using it.  TBH has an OGL and is open content, what ever all of that means.  I've never really understood it except that it means people can use it to make other games using the material under certain conditions.  And people have created many, many different variations in many different genres.  Some are a few pages long like TBH's 20 pages to others that are over 200 pages.

For example, I haven't played straight The Black Hack. I have run my son through three or four programmed solo adventures using Bluehack. Bluehack is an expanded (to a whopping 26 pages) version of TBH which fills in some of the gaps in the sparse TBH and is modified to feel more like Holmes Basic, which was the RPG that started it all for me.  In fact it was created by the same person who created Holmes' clone Blueholme.

There are many fantasy hacks that take it in different directions.  There are several D&D versions including Red Hack and Heroes & Monsters.  There are at least three sword & sorcery versions.  I have two, Black Sword Hack and Swords Against the Shroud, and will get the third version, By this Axe I Hack, soon.  There is also a Tolkien version that incorporates some features from The One Ring called There and Hack Again.  

There are also various science fiction versions ranging from spacefaring to post-apocalypse. This includes serious to full on Gamma World gonzo in the form of Barbarians of the Ruined Earth, which is a big, beautiful full color book that I would like to have some day.

I could go on but suffice it to say that the full range is covered.  Anime, cyberpunk, noir, modern, pirates, supers and even dinosaurs.  You name it, it's probably out there.

Now there is one last thing I like about The Black Hack.  It gives me the urge to create.  Not just that.  It actually makes me feel like I could be successful in these creative endeavors.  None of the variations of TBH that I have read are exactly how I want them to be.  I know what I want to change and clarify, add and subtract.  The thing is, the chassis that this game provides is so simple yet so sturdy and I understand it from a lifetime of gaming that I know I could do it.  I just need to sit down and do it.  Write my perfect version of this game to suit my personal tastes and quirks.

I think I've just set myself a goal.  Dammit.

1980

It have always thought that I began roleplaying in 1979 when I persuaded my mom to buy me the Holmes Basic D&D set.  Well, this turns out to be false.  It was 1980.  You see, my Basic set came with The Keep on the Borderlands and apparently it didn't replace In Search of the Unknown in the box until 1980.  Sooooo, I've been wrong all of these years.  In the larger scheme of things it's not really a big deal but it's always a bit jarring to have a long held belief corrected.

Character Creation Challenge

 There is a character creation challenge out there. 

So, I'm going to give it a try.  There will be repeats in systems.  At least variations of the same systems.  But I enjoy creating characters so what the heck.

First up is B/X created by the book.  I want to start with something simple.

Name: Thorn
Class: Fighter
STR 15 +1	HP: 7
INT 11
WIS 9	AC: 4
DEX 10
CON 14 +1	Align: Lawful
CHR 8
Level: 1	EXP: 0	GP: 7
Sword
Dagger
Chain
Shield
Rations
Torches
Lg Sack

Rolling attributes down the line gave me a fighter.  I didn't adjust any of the scores.  I rolled 90 gp to start with so there you have it.

http://tardiscaptain.com/gaming/character-creation-challenge/

B/X Combined

 There is a way to get a printed copy of a B/X Combined book through Lulu. You combine the B/X PDFs into one document as suggested on page X3 in the Expert book and have it printed out through Lulu with a cool

cover someone created. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to create a PDF that Lulu will accept. It keeps telling me that the pages are different sizes and oriented in different ways. Hopefully, I'll be able to figure it someday. In the meantime I've resorted to making my own. I printed out the books, combined them and bound it with my comb binding machine.

Lawful Doesn't Mean Good

This is from the blog Treasure Hunters HQ.  It is an excellent example of lawful not being good drawn from history.

https://treasurehuntershq.blogspot.com/2019/08/lawful-doesnt-mean-good.html

BoL Hack

I finally picked up BoL Hack today.  I've only briefly perused it because I was at work.  (No, I'm never bored at work.  I always have something to do.  Seriously.  Hey, why are you laughing?)  What I saw was pretty cool.  It looks like a nifty fusion of the two system that keeps the simplicity of both systems while adding a twist to both.  And it's just as hackable as both original systems.  I'm hoping this will help solve the problem I have with D&D magic, too.

Vikings on my Mind

Crap.  I'm doing it again.  I can never focus long enough on one campaign idea to get any meaningful work done on it.  A couple of months ago it was White Star.  I actually got a little further on my idea than I usually do.  I drafted a five page background to my own setting.  Trust me, that's a lot for me.  But we never got passed making up characters because video games distract the boys and my attention wandered as it does.  I think it's a version of gamer ADD.

Anyway, I am currently mulling two campaign ideas.  The one that is foremost in my mind is a Viking themed campaign.  But as always I have a couple of problems.  The first is the historian in me.  I don't know much about Scandinavian history and society.  Much of my knowledge is through popular media, predominantly History Channel's The Vikings.  I want to research and research and research the snot out of it.  And this is one of the ways I end up losing interest.  But to help I'm going to try and get a hold of some gaming supplements on the topic like GURPS Vikings and the 2nd Ed. AD&D guide.  Hopefully that will be enough without being too much.

This leads me to my second problem.  What system to use?  I'm looking at three:  Savage Worlds, B/X (or S&W Whitebox) or Barbarians of Lemuria.  My oldest son would prefer Savage Worlds so I'm leaning in that direction but the other two are calling to me too.

What I'm looking at is a low magic setting with fantastic, myth inspired elements.  What magic there is will not be in the hands of the pc's unless it is an artifact.  And those will be rare.  There will be seers that can foretell the future in there veiled way.  There will be npc magic users but I want it to be consistent with the sagas and myths.  And that's another thing I'll need to learn about.  Urg.  So much to learn.  Oh, and every now and again a god might meddle.

So, anyway, each system has its advantages though I'm sure all could do it well.

Savage Worlds is flexible and action oriented and has a lot of official and unofficial support.  I got a peek at the campaign material a Savage Worlds gamer created for his personal game and it really helped solidify my thoughts.  I don't think I could pull off his game off but I am definitely going to borrow from it.

B/X was what I initially thought I would use.  I love the simplicity of it and it is easy to modify.  I figured I would borrow liberally from the Viking Campaign sourcebook from the AD&D 2nd Edition.  It would be easy to find B/X or Labyrinth Lord versions of the suggested classes.  I would have to figure out a way to mellow the magic because I have a feeling it wouldn't be what I would want.  Lately, I've become fascinated with Swords & Wizardry Whitebox and it has a bunch of home-brew classes out there and is easily modifiable.  I've found a couple of fan made supplements that will be very helpful.  One of which is at Sword +1.  If you poke around the site a little you can find a Swords & Wizardry version too.  I also found some related posts at the Magician's Manse.

Last but definitely not least is Barbarians of Lemuria.  I feel it would be very simple to modify it to suit my needs by fine-tuning the career list.

I am going to start the campaign by characters returning home to the cold north after hearing of the death of their father.  One will be a member of the Varangian guard in Miklagard and the other will one of Hrolf Ganger's men in what will become Normandy.  They return home to find that there father was murdered and the rest of the family was also slaughtered or sold into slavery.  This will give us several lines of play including revenge, the quest to find their kin and, of course, there will be various and sundry monsters ravaging the countryside and perhaps a few meddling fey.

So, this was a big word dump but any thoughts or comments are appreciated.

Searchers of the Unknown

As regular readers of my irregular posts know, I prefer rules-lite games.  Barbarians of Lemuria, B/X D&D and Mini Six just to name a few.  And with a strange obsession I continue to seek them out.  If they are free, all the better.  As a result, I've had a copy of the free Searchers of the Unknown by Nicolas Dessaux on my hard-drive for literally years now.  I glanced at it when I first got it and dismissed it as too light.  There seemed to be nothing there.  Well, sometimes I wonder about myself.  The other day I printed out a copy (all 1 page of it) after seeing it mentioned in the course of searching various forums and websites for an OSR/retroclone game that was low or no magic.  I decided to look at it again because it supposedly only had an adventurer class, no magic users or clerics.

I now think SotU borders on the superb.  The premise is that if the monsters in an old-school game only need one line for stats so do player characters.  And it works if you are looking for a light-weight, quick-playing D&D type game!  You can pick up any adventure or module, make a character in literally moments and be playing moments later.  The touch I like the best is that the to-hit roll is roll under armor class.  Descending armor class finally makes sense to me.

So, if you like rules-lite, quick playing D&D derivatives, take a look at Searchers of the Unknown.  And if you find that it is too lite or that you want magic using classes you can pick up Searchers of the Unknown Expanded free from Lulu.  SotU has also been hacked to other genres.  Here is a website full of them.  To top it off there is a compilation of every known version of SotU up to 2012 located here.  Enjoy!

A Belated Thank You

I have been very remiss.  In January I received a package in the mail that contained a copy of the outstanding  Creature Compendium by +Richard LeBlanc, published by New Big Dragon Games.  You see, I had entered a Christmas drawing at Richard's blog Save Vs. Dragon.  And because I never win anything, I had completely forgotten about it.  Well, Richard contacted me to make sure I knew that I had won.  I was pretty excited.  A few weeks later, I had the book in my hands.  And it is a pretty cool book.  It contains a large variety of new and strange creatures for your old school campaigns.  The best part is that he included stats for both Oe/1e and my preferred BX.

So, thank you Richard.  Though I am late I much appreciate the prize.

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 28: Favorite Game You No Longer Play

Day 28: Favorite Game You No Longer Play

The two games I play most in olden days were Advanced Dungeons & Dragons and Melee/Wizard.  I had the black box Traveller but spent more time fooling around with it than I did actually playing it.  Since I still pull out Melee and its successor Heroes & Other Worlds, I guess by default this catagory goes to AD&D.  But it's not like I miss it.  I mentioned recently that I wish I would've gotten ahold of Moldvay Basic instead of getting into AD&D.  I really liked it at the time but there are too many rules.  Maybe this is just me looking back through my current rules-lite loving filter, but hey, I can't speak for my teenaged-self anymore.

I just discoverd while googling for an image that AD&D also stands for Accidental Death and Dismemberment insurance.  Come to think of it, many D&D characters could use an AD&D policy.



#RPGaDAY2015

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 24: Favorite House Rule

Day 24: Favorite House Rule

Ya know, I don't really house rule.  The closest I came to house ruling was with Basic D&D.  when my boys were younger I would allow them to roll 4d6 for stats and place them where they wanted.  That way they could play the character type they wanted to.


#RPGaDAY2015

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 17: Favorite Fantasy RPG

Day 17:  Favorite Fantasy RPG

You'd think this would be an easy one for me.  (Bol, BoL, BoL!!!)  But it's not.  I love Barbarians of Lemuria.  I've probably refered to it as my favorite game.  But...I have an abiding love for Melee/Wizard/Heroes & Other Worlds.  Early loves are hard to shake and Heroes & Other Worlds just increased that love.  And it's not one I want to shake.  And then there's my new love, Basic D&D of the Moldvay variety.  I did not play it back then.  I went from Holmes to AD&D.  I wish I had played Moldvay back then.  Simple and straightforward.  As many others have said, we didn't play AD&D with all of the rules.  Not even close.  So when I finally did read Moldvay it was closer to what we were playing anyway.

So, a very hard decision that I don't feel like making now.


#RPGaDAY2015

#RPGaDAY2015 Day 16: Longest Game Session Played

Day:  Longest Game Session Played

Not us.  I wasn't this cool looking.

Once again I must go back to my Middle School days.  Imagine it is a hot summer day.  Say 90 degrees.  The second floor of a two story house without air-conditioning.  A small room on the second floor with one window.  Then imagine two 12 or 13 year olds playing AD&D for 14 hours with only brief breaks for sustenance.  Wiping our sweaty brows as he guided me through whatever dungeon I was fighting through.  We must've smelled LOVELY after that.


#RPGaDAY2015

Your Inner Character

Your inner character:
Unaligned Dwarf Pit Fighter 

Who'da thunk?

Take the quiz here.

A Cool Surprise

I have a 16 year old niece who hangs out at our house.  (O.k.  She's my favorite niece.  Don't tell my other nieces.)  She's a few years older than my oldest son but likes to play video games with them and comes to my wife for motherly advice and conversation.  My wife told me other day that my niece had started hanging out at a game store near her place.  (Not knowing about it, I checked it out.  Unfortunately for me it is geared toward Magic and other collectible card games.)  Well, when I came home this evening from work, she's here.  She comes up to me and says, "Uncle!  Can we play D&D?"

Stunned silence and then I reply, "Of course we can!"

So I pull out the Basic D&D rules, borrow a 1st level character from my son and away we go.  I make up a scenario on the spot.  A creature has taken a little girl from a village and dragged her into the woods.  The villagers asked our hero to get the girl back.  She tracked the creature through the forest to a burial mound that had been broken into.  The chamber in the mound smelled horrible but she cautiously went in.  The room was a shambles with broken furniture scattered all over the place, trash strewn about and, apparently, one corner being used as a toilet.  She found the little girl whimpering in a pile of rags.  She grabs the girl and heads for the entrance.  She notices a door in the wall near the rags while she is heading out.  Then, a figure looms in the doorway, growls and attacks.  Our hero sets the girl down and meets the creature with bared blade.  It's an orc!  (She loves the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings so I had to throw one in.)  They battled back and forth and after taking a wound she finally put the brute down.

After returning the child to her parents she went back to the mound to examine the door.  She managed to pick the lock and enter the room beyond.  (The character's a thief.)  In contrast with the first room this one was untouched.  Dust coated the floor.  The tapestries, though rotten, still hung from the walls.  In the middle of the floor was a stone throne with a skeleton sitting on it, sword grasped in its desiccated fingers, gold band encircling its skull.  Of course, as soon a she touched the sword (cautiously, with her sword) the skeleton came to life.  Our hero reacted quickly, swinging her sword savagely and beheading the skeleton with one blow.  Thus, she collected a long sword and a gold head band.  She then heads back to the village to a heroes welcome and needed recovery time.

The whole session took about 45 minutes and she said she had great fun.  I'm a happy man at the moment.

This story also illustrates one of the reasons I love Basic.  I can make up adventures on the spot and have the session be successful.  There is only one other game I can do this with and that is BoL.

My New Basic D&D Setting

Have any of you read The Tough Guide to Fantasyland by Diana Wynne Jones?  I did years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it.  It is an encyclopedic list of fantasy tropes (read as cliches) written in a mock serious style that actually cuts the genre to the bone in a good way.  Here is an example:

Why do I bring this up?  Because my oldest son doesn't like playing in adventures I didn't create.  So I created a setting for Basic D&D for him to play in.  I can drop my own adventures into it (borrowing heavily from published adventures when my creativity fails.)  There is a problem though.  It is one giant cliche.  Did I say giant?  Pardon me for my imprecision.  It is one GINORMOUS cliche.  Seriously.  It hits many of the cliches mentioned in Tough Guide.

So, we have:

• Fallen empire based on Ancient Rome.
• Ruined cities, temples and forts.
• Barbarian kingdoms founded by Northern (and Western) barbarians.
• Rump empire consisting of the last remaining imperial city.
• Invading Orcs (coming from the East.)  The humans call the area that the orcs have conquered "Orkland."  Original, huh?
• Southern desert.
• Elves, dwarves, halflings and other demi-humans.  (Actually, I do deviate from the cliches a bit here.  The playable races don't mingle much.  The halflings live in a secluded valley and are suspicious of outsiders.  The elves live in a deep forest and are suspicious of outsiders, etc. This is a concession to the boys.  I like human-centric settings but the boys want demi-humans.  In fact my youngest chose a halfling as his character.)

So, you get the idea.  Thing is I'm happy with this setting.  It's comfortable for me and the boys like the idea.  Now we just need to find time to actually play.

I'm working up a map for the campaign but I'm still trying to find the best way to get it out of my head.  When I do, I'll post it.

A Confession to the B/X G+ Group

Read about my secret shame here.

0e Reprints

So, Wizards of the Coast is reprinting the 0e White Box.  Unlike others, I am in no way excited about this.  I am young enough (hah!) to have started with Holmes Basic and then went on to AD&D.  I am now enamored with Moldvay Basic and, in a way, wish I had stuck with the Basic editions back in the olden days and never touched AD&D.  Loved it then, not so much now.

So, I never had, played or even heard of the three little books and supplements until years later.  (When I hear of three books I always think of Traveller's LBBs.)  Thus, no excitement here.

D&D Expert

Somebody somewhere listened to me!  DrivethruRpg now has Cook Expert!

And for an excellent justification as to why a person should buy Basic and Expert, please see this post at the RetroRoleplaying blog.