I've talked a lot recently about taking inspiration from other sources. Video Games, movies, TV, you name it, I've harvested it for inspiration at some point, even non-fantasy-genre stuff. Personally, I think branching out is how you become a better player and DM. Not just with D&D, but with other RPGs in general, whether they be an indie beer and pretzels game or something more involved like FATE or Burning Wheel. These games have merit, and often at least something to port over to your regular home game, whether it be a mechanic or an idea.
About seven months ago I picked up Barbarians of Lemuria, an "indie" game by Simon Washbourne of Beyond Belief Games. The game itself has quite the following of people tweaking it and playing around with it. It's a fairly straight-forward and simple "swords and sorcery" game that tries to emulate the feel of Howard's Conan the Barbarian and Carter's Thongor of Lemuria. It does this quite successfully. The system itself is predicated on rolling 2d6 to resolve tasks and conflicts. There are of course modifiers given certain situations and character skills with a 9 or greater being a success and an 8 or less being a failure. Two sixes, or natural 12, is a great success and two ones or a natural 2 is a calamitous failure. The simplicity is actually what makes it such a great game. It is supposed to be fast and deadly and scary. Healing isn't something to be taken for granted. Magic is terrifying and rare.
The reason for bringing up Barbarians of Lemuria, or BoL, is that I've been wanting to tweak/hack it for a more generic fantasy feel for quite awhile and I've recently begun to do so.
BoL actually has a generic fantasy supplement that is supposed to be quite good, called Legends of Steel. There is also Honor + Intrigue, a pirate supplement; Barbarians of the Aftermath, a post-apocalyptic supplement; Dogs of War, a modern warfare supplement; and even Dicey Tales, a pulpy genre mash-up. BoL sees a lot of published love for being such a small game and it's obvious. Going to a BoL forums such as Lords of Lemuria, you can see fan-made hacks and house rules that go on and on and on. There is even a conversion for Labyrinth Lord to BoL and BoL to LL. It is quite ridiculous and awesome at the same time.
Now, sadly, I only own the BoL Legendary Edition book, none of the awesome aforementioned supplements, so my own tweaks don't have much inspiration from these other alternate and expansive rule-sets.
What I'm trying to do with my BoL tweak, entitled Dungeons of Lemuria, is to hack it with basic D&D concepts. Essentially, I want to tweak the rules enough (but no so much that the simple elegance of the system is not recognizable) to run through old D&D published adventures. Not necessarily so limited in scope as that, but I'd love to run a tweaked Keep on the Borderlands for BoL.
BoL is predicated on a character having, at creation at least, had four careers throughout their life up to this point. You have four points to allot as you see fit, but no career can have more than 3 ranks in it starting out, with a minimum of 0 ranks. So maybe you were a slave briefly, or were a farmer for awhile. Ranks illustrate how "skilled" you are in a certain area. There is no skill list, so playing up stereotypes and seeing how using a career rank can benefit or harm a player is interesting.
For Dungeons of Lemuria, or DoL for short, I've decided to split up careers into races and classes to harken to more of a D&D fantasy feel. Races are things like Human, Orc, Elf, Dwarf, Halfling. A character must have at least a rank 1 in a race starting out, still using the careers rules listed above. If a character wanted to play a Half-Elf, for example, they would take a rank in Human and a rank in Elf. Races are used as vehicles for skills, which I've introduced to the game.
The other half of DoL careers is classes. These are pretty generic in nature, resembling the "Big Four" of archetypal classes, specifically: Soldier, Priest, Magi, Thief. Again, "hybriding" of classes is acceptable and even encouraged. Want to play a Paladin? Take ranks in Soldier and Priest. A Spellsword? Ranks in Magi and Soldier. Classes also act as a vehicle for skills in game.
Initially I plan to work out the rest of the tweaks, though honestly there isn't much. I'm revamping the spell system a bit to make it feel more arcane in nature and slightly more fantasy-generic as the current one is very open-ended. I will of course keep the open-ended system for those who want to create their own spells, but I want to have the option at least of a decent number of spells to choose from a list for those players not as creative. These will likely be very derivative of basic and iconic D&D spells.
After finishing the rest of the tweaks, I'll likely post them on this blog. I plan on fleshing out some more alternate tweaks in a different pdf, perhaps going more in depth with hybrid races and classes. Introducing an actual Half-Elf race or an actual Paladin class, for example. Currently I like the system as-is, simple as it is in nature, I feel that there are lots of options for depth and customization. BoL at its heart isn't a game where one can really be a munchkin or have an optimized character, and these are ideals that I'm trying to keep in mind when making my own tweaks.
That's all I have for now, I should have more D&D goodness coming soon. Oh, and the dungeon/ziggurat I talked about last post that I based on The Ruins? TPK'd my party with it inadvertently Now my pirates campaign has taken a new direction that should be fun to explore!
Until next time,
-blob
You can follow me on Twitter @Sorcerer_Blob or via the hash-tag #legend4ry. You can also find my blog and others at the Fourthcore Hub and at the RPG Blog Alliance.
No comments:
Post a Comment