From the chaos of whatever I'm working on at the moment, relatively complete one page player rules for a retrohack have fallen. It's difficult to make a complete account of one's influences, but the frame of the thing (and the one page format) owes a lot to Searchers of the Unknown, the starting equipment tables to Necropraxis, the encumberance and saving thows to Delta, the use of hit points for damage dealt to Akratic Wizardry and the 'length in feet' polearm rule to the Nine and Thirty Kingdoms. My innovations are mainly the the Guard/Agility defense system, canny/uncanny check mechanic, the (minimal) magic-working rules and the five alignment system.
The five alignments are something I've been messing with a fair amount in the context of traditional fantasy RPGs, and I've gone through several different incarnations of how I want to handle them. A year or so ago, I read Cuisine and Empire which, in its general treatment of the culinary ancient world, discussed a group of theories about the nature of the world it described as 'Cosmological Correspondences.' What I'm working towards with the alignments in here is in the vein of those theories, a way of dividing the world, society, the body and so forth into thematic groups:
| Weight | Star | Ring | Red | Bright | |
| planet | Jupiter | Mercury | Saturn | Mars | Venus |
| direction | West | Center | North | South | East |
| season | Fruit | Winter | Grain | Autumn | Spring |
| tissue | Bone | Nerve | Viscera | Lean | Fat |
| color | White | Blue | Black | Red | Green |
| taste | Pungent | Sweet | Salty | Bitter | Sour |
I intend to add spell, monster and treasure lists themed around these five alignments, probably one page each.
