I had an idea or a hack that made use of the 4e D&D chassis to facilitate an old-school feeling dungeon crawl. Aside from base mechanics, it almost feels nothing like 4e at all, despite relying on it tremendously. This is either a good thing or a bad thing, I'll let you decide.
The point wasn't to be contentious or edition war-y, instead it was more of a private thought experiment and a way to learn how to use the free open-source publisher program, Scribus. Thus Hardcore Dungeons was born.
The concept was that of trying to combine the dungeon crawly feel of yesteryear with deadliness through and through. I wanted a simplified chassis to work on, and as I feel like I know the ins and outs of 4e, I wanted to use it. So, basic mechanics stand, but with some major and minor tweaks. The attack and damage system still remains, as does how a lot of other things are calculated. What is gone is most of the AEDU system and classes. A few core concepts remain, but that's about it. Those of you who have read my ideas for Legend4ry will notice a few similar concepts and ideas, but a lot of it is very stripped down and new-feeling, even to me.
As I said, I did appropriate some concepts from other sources. I wanted Dragons and Minotaurs to be scary. How else does one make them scary? By making them rare. Maybe it is THE Dragon, or THE Minotaur. I wanted some combats to be so intense and deadly that you didn't know what would come next. Fighting a Dragon, or The Dragon, should leave scars on the characters that survive, both physical and mental. Survival is not guaranteed. It has to be fought for tooth and nail.
What I did in a lot of cases with the new classes is give them all Striker-esque abilities and bonuses to hit. To some this may seem like I am purposefully over-powering the characters. To me I see it as an excuse to get deadly. Much higher level creatures. Nightmare Damage. Things of this nature that will push the party to the limits.
Well, enough pontificating about how a design thought experiment from a few months ago feels awesome, here are the docs to check out for yourselves. I realized after reviewing the original pdf the other day that I had left some things out or had typos. I'm lazy and don't want to mess with Scribus again right now, so I've created a separate Errata document.
I will state that I feel like a dick. I forgot to attribute the art used in each of the documents. As I'm placing the documents online as free-to-use, I believe there shouldn't be any issues, but I would feel like even more of a dick if I didn't get a shout out to the amazing artists' whose works I poached for my pdfs.
The H and the D cursive-y illustrations were both found on Old Book Illustrations. Page 1 of HD features art by Bill Willingham. Pages 2 and 3 feature art by Erol Otus. Page 2 also houses Larry Elmore's famous Dragon painting. Again, I apologize for not placing these attributions in the documents, I feel like a dick about it.
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For those interested, I've also been working on a Barbarian's of Lemuria fantasy hack that is about 95% complete. I'll post that on this blog as well whenever I get it to a point that I'm satisfied with it.
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.
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