a matrix of interconnected rooms

 In the essay "Figures, Doors and Passages," Robin Evans contrasts the Classical and Renaissance approach to dividing rooms into spaces with the Modern (post-19th century) ideas about the same. As the main example of the former, he discusses the Villa Madama:

The first difference he points out from modern plans is that:

...the rooms have more than one door - some have two doors, many have three, others four - a feature which, since the early years of the nineteenth century, has been regarded as a fault in domestic buildings of whatever kind or size. Why? the answer was given at great length by Robert Kerr. In a characteristic warning he reminded readers of The Gentleman's House (1864) of the wretched inconvenience of thoroughfare rooms, which made domesticity and retirement unobtainable. The favored alternative was the terminal room, with only one strategically placed door into the rest of the house.

Yet exactly the opposite advice had been furnished by the Italian theorists who, following ancient precedent, thought that more doors in a room were preferable to fewer. Alberti, for instance, after drawing attention to the great variety and number of doors in Roman buildings, said, 'It is is also convenient to place the doors in such a Manner that they may lead to as many parts of the edifice as possible.' This was specifically recommended for public buildings, but applied also to domestic arrangements. It generally meant that there was a door wherever there was an adjoining room, making the house a matrix of discrete but thoroughly interconnected chambers. Raphael's plan [of the Villa Madama] exemplifies this, though it was in fact no more than ordinary practice at the time.

In modern design, enclosed spaces are distinguished between access spaces to be moved through but not occupied (elevators, passages, stairs) and those that are meant to be occupied but not moved through (rooms). However in earlier eras, even buildings large enough to be subdivided into many rooms (it is worth remembering that most buildings would contain few rooms; even a king might have no more than a hall, a private chamber for his family and a kitchen in his castle) would generally favor what Evans calls the "matrix of interconnected rooms."

This contrasts markedly with the kind of dungeon plan perhaps best exemplified by Castle Geryhawk, in which mostly-empty passages serve isolated terminal rooms to be stocked with various monsters or treasures:

The Greyhawk map is quite interesting because it demonstrates an extremely modern layout sensibility in an ostensibly medieval complex. The language Evans applies to William Morris's plan for the Red House at Bexley Heath applies perhaps more directly this dungeon than the house itself:

Yet his commitment to past practice only went so far. The morality of craft and beauty might transform the procedures of building and the appearance of the finished work, but medievalism did not percolat into the plan, which was categorically Victorian and utterly unlike anything built in the fourteenth or fifteenth centuries. Indeed the Red House illustrates the principles laid down by the bourgeois Robert Kerr better than Kerr's own plans: rooms never interconnect, never have more than one door and circulation is unified and distinct.

That may have been said to Morris's shame, but I don't mean it to shame the Castle or its designer. If anything, its plan is less typical of modern dungeons than the kind of dungeon plan perhaps best exemplified by (my beloved) Nethack, wherein corridors lead from specific rooms to specific other rooms, rather than forming a network of circulation for the whole level:

However, I think embracing the matrix of interconnected rooms is a useful tool to keep in mind when designing dungeons or other structures because it naturally introduces a high degree of interconnectivity and makes chance encounters with the inhabitants of the dungeon likely throughout, not simply in their designated areas or when they take to wandering the halls. Here are a last few thoughts in the form of suggestions when drawing a dungeon plan:

• When possible, place rooms that connect next to one another without an adjoining corridor.
• Don't put an isolated room at the end of a corridor unless there's a particular reason for it to be separated from the others.
• If many rooms lie on a single passage, consider making it a courtyard or loggia (above ground) or an atrium or other vertical space, perhaps with access to other levels (if below).

GLOG/echo

This is a GLOGhack, I guess, or the first part of one. The original GLOG is from Arnold K but it seems that the real GLOG is the GLOG you had inside you all along.

The most gloggy feature of this is the class structure, since rather than more traditional dice mechanics, this uses the an only slightly modiefied version of ghost/echo. I drew from a lot of GLOG classes from different bloggers, but particularly from Finders Keepers for the backgrounds and Vain the Sword for a couple of the classes.

Dice

Before rolling dice, identify dangers, edges and goals. Roll one die for each and assign one roll to each danger and one to each goal (discarding any left overs):

Roll	Danger	Goal
1-2	Comes true.	Failed, opportunity may be lost.
3-4	Mixed, danger remains.	Mixed, opportunity remains.
5-6	Avoided.	Achieved.

Nothing extremely good or bad should happen on a mixed result, but it may make those outcomes more likely; mixed results should maintain or increase tension, not resolve it.

Roll dice in the following situations and pick the appropriate goals (including ones not listed) and use the given danger (in addition to others the situation may call for).

• Act under pressure. Goals: complete a task, get out of harm's way, rescue someone in peril. Danger: you suffer harm.
• Sneak. Goals: move without being noticed, plant an item, remove and item, defeat a lock. Danger: you are caught in the act.
• Close combat. Goals: cut down a foe, dodge past a foe. Danger: you suffer harm.
• Fire missiles. Goals: stop a foe short, cover an ally, destroy something. Dangers: you cause unwanted harm or get unwanted attention.
• Suffer harm. Goals: shake it off, fight through the pain, impress with your toughness. Danger: you are incapacitated.
• Make an impression. Goals: they believe your story, they remember you later, they answer your question, they agree to a bargain. Danger: they distrust or dismiss you.

Characters

Characters are defined by lots ("templates" if you prefer). You set out with four lots: the Adventurer rank, two backgrounds, and the first of a class of your choice. 

de modulii magicii

This is a thinky post and modest proposal about modularity in TTRPG design.

Since modularity can mean a lot of things to a lot of people, I'll be specific. I am not talking (at least not directly) about the role that discrete packages play in character customization; I am talking about the more general organizational principle of giving a unique name to a particular rule and referring to it at need elsewhere in the text.

When a rulebook describes a number of statuses that can affect a character's combat options: blinded, dazed, deafened, prone, surprised, stunned and so on, and then elsewhere gives players and enemies the option to blind, daze, deafen, knock prone, surprise and stun one another, that's an example of modularity. Modularity is a strategy for sacrificing some amount of clarity (the consequences of stunning a foe may not be explained in the same place in the text as the source of the condition) for to make the rules more consistent (all abilities that stun foes achieve the same effect) and concise (it is not necessary to quote a modular rule everywhere it is referenced). The cost in clarity can be offset by choosing descriptive names for the modular rules so that readers' expectations about what applies to stunned characters map well onto what the actual rules provide for those situations.

A place where modularity is particularly useful is in magical effects. By nature, magical affects are at least somewhat contrary to the readers' expectations and, if precise boundaries of the effect are needed, a lot of text may be the result. Delta has a whole series of posts analyzing the rules texts of spells from Chainmail through 3E; it's evident at a glance that spells have accumulated more and more text as time goes on and the attempt is made to nail down exactly what such and such a piece of magic can do.

Whether you like detailed spells descriptions or vague ones, is not practical to quote the full text of a spell description every time it is referenced. As such, the rules are full of effects defined in reference to specific spells. An unscientific survey of a pretty orthodox old school magic item list had 10-40% (depending on category) of magic item listings specifically referencing a spell effect. Excluding scrolls (which are mostly spell scrolls), potions are next most likely to reference spell effects, followed by wands, miscellaneous items and finally rings. Monster abilities in early editions and their imitators seem much less likely to reference spell effects; however 3/3.5E can't get enough of monster abilities directly referencing spell effects, between traditional spellcasting, spell-like abilities and the very confusing situation of "supernatural" (and sometimes "extraordinary") abilities that duplicate spell effects without certain features of spells such as the possibility to be interrupted or dispelled.

Honestly, I think 3/3.5E is pushing in the right design direction there, even if they did it in the messiest possible way. Nevertheless, I'd wager few people have the system mastery to accurately tell you off hand the differences between a spell, spell-like ability, supernatural ability and an extraordinary ability. And even fewer would be able to accurately guess the effects of an unfamiliar spell from its name. In 4E, the designers pulled hard in the opposite direction by removing the modularity from spells (and prayers and maneuvers and psionic powers) entirely: all abilities got siloed to the class or monster type that granted them where they are described in full. In particular, this means that while the information is conveniently organized for the DM running the encounter, the economics of space and how many unique abilities a DM can actually keep in mind while running the encounter suddenly place pretty hard limits on how intricate monsters can be.

Rather than continue talking about the historical vicissitudes of spell modularity, I will instead make a modest proposal:

Modest Proposal

Keep magical causes and magical effects separate:

• A magical effect (wonder) should be listed under a descriptive name and any limitations that are not obvious spelled out (for example, that the wonder of move earth can shift loose earth and its vegetation, but not stone).
• A magical cause could be a spell that can be learned, a consumable preparation, an artifact or a natural ability of a magical creature. The description of a cause should name the wonder should spell out any important limitations on its use (costs, concentration, durations, number of targets, ranges, time to activate and so forth).

Different ways of working the same wonder can be made to feel very different if, for example, different costs are demanded from a holy person and a necromancer to bring about the same healing of a broken body. The details of the wonder equip a ref to rule on its applications and edge cases, while the details of the causes are able to be more diegetic and flavorful without sacrificing modularity for that.

A book of wonders could be used by a referee both as an at-the-table reference for whatever magic is in play but also as a source for describing new wizarding traditions (by selecting a set of wonders and describing that tradition's means of causing each), artifacts or creatures. If the rules texts were sufficiently concise, a deck of cards bearing wonder descriptions could be physically handed out to players when they become able to use them.

alignments and way of life

Characters have to come from peoples, and those peoples have ways of life. Where is home for your people, and how do they see themselves?

• The boats or carts you travel from place to place, plying your trades and peddling your wares. Alignment: civil.
• Grand cities rising from the plain or shore. Alignment: civil.
• Ancient holds cut into the deep earth. Alignment: goodwright.
• Rough warrens in the clefts of hillsides. Alignment: goodwright.
• Sound houses of timber or stone. Alignment: civil.
• Beneath the open sky. Alignment: free.
• Under canopy of thick woods. Alignment: moonfolk.

Alignment describes how a people sees themselves and how they divide up the rest of the world. Some see themselves as worldly and do not share the alignment of their folk. Even those who share an alignment do not necessarily like each other or agree about where one another fit into the order of things.

Civil

A civilized fellow knows that without the nameless gods of heaven to teach mortals the arts of civilization, we would be naked heathens all. Elders who still name the gods of the earth may know no better, but the barbarian who call on demons from behind the sky and beneath the sea. A heaven-fearing fellow knows a 'worldly' one for what they really are: a scoffer not to be trusted.

Civil folk all see the peoples of cities and houses as civil (though they may war with one another just the same), woods-dwellers as elders and nomads under the open sky as barbarians. However, they differ on a few points:

• Boat and cart-folk have a dread of the barbarians of the deep earth but call the herders and traders of the hillsides elders.
• City people consider the half-settled lives of boats and carts or hillsides to be fit only for scoffers, but consider deep earth-delvers old-fashioned elders.
• Dwellers in stout houses see travelers by boat and cart and miners in deep earth both as elders, and raiders from the hillsides as barbarians.

Free

Freedom is especially treasured by those who live under the open sky, viewing the labors of settled peoples as a kind of thralldom. They honor their beloved dead and all the spirits of the air and earth that touch their lives, chanting their names and deeds for later generations. The 'worldly' fellow who scorns these gods is a lonesome one, a tiny fellow adrift without ancestor to guide their feet or shelter them from the cruel winds.

Those of cities, the deep earth and houses are seen as thralls, while those who range in boats and carts, from the hillsides, or in the deep woods are seen as half-thralls. A free neck does not bend to the yoke of a thrall, and a warrior certainly does not fear one.

Goodwright

Goodwrights have learned the secrets of craft from the earth itself. They celebrate the good earth with the work of skilled hands. Though a goodwright will take spoil from war, they detest nothing as much as a thief. And what is a 'worldly' creature who pays no mind to their mother earth but a thief of her gifts?

All outsiders are seen with a measure of suspicion, but wrights of the deep earth and of the hillsides revile one another as thieves nearly without exception. Hillside wrights will treat with most other outsiders, but those of the deep earth consider the folk of boats and carts or the woods as thieves as bad as hated hill-wrights.

Moonfolk

The day is for the sun, the night for the stars, but the moon wanders through day and night in its turnings. Moonfolk chase the balance of the moon, honoring the earth in all its seasons. Moonfolk cultivate the woods around them with a gardener's care and live from the game and fruits thereof.

The enemies of the moonfolk are the nightfolk who harry them from the deep earth and open sky, while city and house dwellers are dayfolk and useful allies against the nightfolk when they can be roused to it. Those of boats and carts or hillsides or 'worldly' folks who think themselves wiser than everyone are smallfolk and not worth serious consideration.

Worldly

The worldly are not many, and they are called lonesome, scoffer, smallfolk, thief or worse where they go. Nevertheless, a worldly fellow hates to suffer fools and sees no reason to give up the better parts of life to distant gods. They can't abide the small-mindedness of boat and cart travelers, the cruelty and hypocrisy of the cities, the incurious provincialism of the deep earth, the baseless boasting of hillside folk, the credulous superstition of house holders and open sky nomads both or the sanctimonious mysticism of the woods.

"target 20" modern

This is an idea I've had for some time. It's a silly idea, but that's rarely stopped me before. Back in high school I played a lot of d20 Modern, at least until my friends and I collectively realized that the game was kind of a mess and d20-system combat and character creation was majorly in the way of the way we actually wanted to play.

This is an attempt to strip as much of the cruft from that game while leaving parts of it recognizable. A lot of the mechanical inspiration here is due to the Target 20 system on the one hand and UVG's SEACAT system on the other. Revisiting d20 Modern I was struck by how many fiddly mechanical choices there are, in the forms of talents and feats and skills and advanced classes, and how little most of that stuff matters. Most abilities boil down to a small modifier on certain saving throws or skills checks. I only bothered importing interesting rules as Target 20 Modern's talents.

exploding statline

rule

to generate a standard six-stat line with each stat ranging from 0 to 5:

1. roll six d6; for each die that shows a 1, mark one stat down as 0 and set those dice aside.
2. re-roll the remaining dice; for each die that shows a 1 or a 2, mark a remaining stat down as 1 and set those dice aside.
3. re-roll the remaining dice; for each die that shows a 1, 2 or 3, mark a remaining stat down as 2 and set those dice aside.
4. ...and so on.

repeat, increasing the threshold, until either no dice remain or it is impossible to keep going (that is, if you would have to roll higher than a 6).

why?

if bonuses from skill range from 0 (unskilled) to 5 (expert) and bonuses from circumstance range from 8 (easiest task that could be failed) to 0 (hardest task that could succeed), then a Target-20-style core mechanic of d20 + stat + skill + circumstance such that a roll of 1 always fails and a roll of 20 alwasy succeeds.

to my mind this is a pretty good balance of character ability and circumstance. also, this kind of exploding roll is fun.

but...what are the probabilities?

the most likely stat values to be generated are 1 or 2, followed by 3, 0, 4 and distantly by 5. the exact frequencies are:

0	16.67%
1	27.78%
2	27.78%
3	18.52%
4	15.43%
5	3.09%

75.5% of six-stat lines rolled with this method will total 9 or more, and 72% will total 12 or less. the probability that the highest score rolled will be the given number is given in the following table

0	46,656 to 1 ≈ 0%
1	0.77%
2	13.42%
3	41.63%
4	35.27%
5	8.91%

winning fame

Fame is gained by defeating foes, carrying off loot or receiving grand gifts. Fame represents not only your celebrity but also your esteem among your people.

• Every hit dealt in a mêlée is worth a point of fame to each fighter on the line.
• A foe slain in single combat is two points of fame per hit it took to bring them down.
• A foe brought home as a captive is worth three points per hit they could have taken.
• A captive freed from the enemy is worth four points per hit they could take.
• A peace made is worth five points of fame for ever family involved.
• Goats or sheep seized from the enemy or given in recognition of great deeds are worth a point of fame per head. Cattle or horses are worth eight points per head.
• Wealth given away freely is worth half the fame it would be worth when seized from the enemy.
  

A group of heroes who carry of loot together (or are awarded a gift in gratitude together) each receive a full half of its fame and split the remaining half between them. Thus, if three warriors together drive home a flock of 24 goats from enemy lands, each one of them gains 12 points of fame plus one-third of the remaining 12, so each warrior receives 16 points of fame.

Only wealth taken from the enemy or awarded as a gift for one's great deeds builds an adventurer's fame. Gifts to or from one's comrades-in-arms do not increase one's fame unless they are wedding-gifts.

To determine its effect on one's fame, convert coin, fine cloth, jewels or other precious stuffs to an equivalent amount of livestock. One weight of gold, or 25 weights of silver is a fair price for an ox, a common horse (though a warrior's horse may be much dearer) or eight sheep or goats.

Fame	Title	Followers
0	Nobody	Hired hands demand payment in advance.
20	Rogue	Hands want half their fee up front.
40	Neighbor	A few (2-7) will brave danger with you for a fair share of the rewards.
80	Fellow	A band (5-35) will brave danger for a fair share, a few for loyalty alone
160	Senior	A company (30-175) will brave danger for a fair share, a band for loyalty alone. your decisions suffice for twenty families.
320	Worthy	A company will follow you for loyalty's sake. your decisions suffice for 55 families.
640	Grandee	Your decisions suffice for 400 families.
1000+	Legend	Your decisions suffice for 3,000 families.

If one's decisions suffice for a community, they still may not be in any formal position over it; this simply means that if a matter from a community of twenty families is brought to a captain to settle, they will not dispute the decision unless it is obviously unjust. One need not have a captain's esteem to officiate for such a community, though it may be more difficult without.

a freeform magic system

A piece of magic is constructed of terms which either name entities to be effected or adjure them with certain commands. A single piece can incorporate many terms to achieve greater effects---though this increases the complexity of the magic---but all magic must contain a name and an adjuration.

Ex: a magician wishes his foes to become lost in the mists, and constructs a spell that names the mists and adjures them to confound. If he wished only his foes to be lost and others to be to pass normally, he could add another term naming his foes.

The base complexity of a piece of magic depends on the magician's mastery of the adjurations involved. These ratings range from 5 (a fifth-rate magician) to 1 (a first-rate one). To this, add the complexity of the naming.

Using a genuine name the complexity varies depending on what is being named: self (0), a bodiless spirit (1), another person (2), other living beings (3), a place or insensate thing (4). One can also name entities present without knowing their names. This has a complexity of 4 for a person, 3 for a living thing, 2 for an insensate one and 1 for a bodiless spirit. If many individuals or an undifferentiated mass are named, increase this by one (by two if some present entities of the same kind are to be excluded).

Ex: the magician is a second-rate confounder, so the base complexity of this spell is 2, and the magician names mists which are close at hand (insensate 2 + 1 for a mass 2), so the complexity of the broad spell of confusion is 5.

To work magic, one needs magical power. Magicians use their own power, tap into an artifact's or call on the power of others. Roll a d6 for each power invoked (re-roll 6s, adding 5 each time) and total them. Sources of power are tapped if their die was re-rolled in working the magic.

Ex: if the magician used only his own power, he would need to roll a 6. He chooses to invoke the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, rolling a 1 and 7, for a total of 8, which is more than enough but taps the Hoary Hosts of Hoggoth, so he will not be able to call upon it again for some time.

If the total is greater than the complexity for the magic, it takes effect as intended. Otherwise, the ref may drop terms from it or modify the entities named to create a different effect.

Ex: if the magician had rolled a 2 and a 3, that would not have sufficient for the magic. If another subject could have been named for 1 complexity, the ref could do so. However, they decide that no other subject makes sense and the magic simply does not take hold.

factoring ad&d classes: a modest proposal

This post is an attempt to sketch out a different way that the base book classes of AD&D 2e, an edition of the game I never directly experienced, could have been developed in another edition.

Obviously, now we have the benefit of three additional editions of official D&D and numerous offshoots and hacks widely available, so this isn't to say, "this is what 3e/4e/5e should have been" as much as, "this is another direction that could be explored," now that we've taken some probing steps in various directions.

So: classes in 2e AD&D were derived from the four types:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Cleric	Thief
Ranger	Illusionist	Druid	Bard
Paladin

Let me single out a feature that i rather like: only the four core classes are always available to players. From the DM's chair, I find this very appealing; it's a much lighter demand of a setting that it have fighters, mages, clerics (though clerics present some problems) and thieves than that it also have barbarians, bards, druids, monks, paladins, rangers and sorcerers (to say nothing of warlocks) as well. Bards, druids and monk are particularly egregious in terms of the amount of baggage that their inclusion brings. Although 4e and 5e took the step of distinguishing common and uncommon "races," they do not do the same for classes (which, for my money, do a lot more heavy lifting in terms of providing implied setting).

Another interesting thing about this grid is the idea that we could make the rows meaningful as well as the columns. for example, the Ranger and Druid do seem to have something in common, as do the Bard and Illusionist, suggesting:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Cleric	Thief
Ranger		Druid		Wilderness
	Illusionist		Bard	Trickery
Paladin

...hey, this looks a lot like:

Defender	Controller	Leader	Striker
Fighter		Warlord	Rogue, Ranger	Martial
	Wizard		Warlock	Arcane
Paladin		Cleric		Divine

I'll freely admit that this is a part of 4e's design that i genuinely do like. I think you could potentially communicate a lot of setting using a matrix like this, especially if your sources of power corresponded to diagetic factions. even the gaps in the table (though later books, of course, fill them) serve a purpose. It says something about what these sources of power are about that there would be no martial controller, arcane defender or divine striker, for example.

However, this tableau is of basically no use for restricting available classes, which was one of the things that the 2e one does so well. Furthermore, little enough is directly shared between classes of the same source of power that they feel, to me, a lot more like palette swaps on the same game math than genuinely distinct types of character. This is exacerbated by the insistence on filling in gaps in the source/class matrix

Returning to our spread of classes in 2e AD&D, let's use a different axis to split things. Instead of source of power, let's use (3 position) alignment:

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Ranger, Paladin		Cleric		Lawful
Fighter	Mage	Druid	Bard, Thief	Neutral
*Berserk			*Assassin	Chaotic

Italicized classes are ones that we'd expect DM veto power on. I'm adding in a couple of thematic Chaotic classes, nothing to see here. there's a couple of things that i don't love about this. First, as in 4e there's no clear way to use this table to restrict available classes; the neutral classes don't correspond to the core classes (druids in particular probably should not be the core priest class). Second, i don't like the idea of the core classes being restricted to neutral alignment. i'd prefer something like this:

My proposal is to distinguish the alignment of druids and bards from 'neutrality' (probably replacing that with a better term). I'm merging paladins into rangers (as we don't necessarily need two distinct Lawful classes about defending the innocent), and making clerics no longer a core class but instead a Lawful-only specialty.

Warrior	Wizard	Priest	Rogue
Fighter	Mage		Thief	any
Ranger		Cleric		Lawful
		Druid	Bard	Old Believer
Berserk			Assassin	Chaotic

This setup involves four alignments:

• Worldly - occupied with the here and now, uninterested in bigger questions or grand conflicts. most scoundrels.
  
• Lawful - follower of the nameless craft gods of the Heavens. most people, to some extent are Lawful.
  
• Old Believer - keeps the old ways in the secret names of the old gods of the Earth. back-country folk, to some extent, are Old Believers.
  
• Chaotic - traffics with the uncanny forces out of Deep Sea and Far Sky. most Chaotic characters will disguise their rites; wizards are always under great suspicion of being Chaos cultists.
  

This is better, in my book, but it can be further refined. Notice that there is no longer a core Priest class, and take the obvious step of collapsing that column with Wizard:

Warrior	Wizard	Rogue
Fighter	Mage	Burglar	any
	Druid	Bard	Old Believer
Ranger	Cleric		Lawful
Berserk		Assassin	Chaotic

This is approaching what I'd really like to see. We understand fighter, mage and thief to always be on offer. The specialty classes are all bound up with a diagetic alignment (in this case a mostly religious meaning). Any type is available to any alignment, but that doesn't mean that every alignment has a specialty in every type. Indeed, in the first draft of this post I had a Necromancer Chaotic wizard specialty rather than Berserk. While that could work, it seemed better to me to place all wizards under the suspicion of being Chaos magicians by associating wizardry and Chaos.

Available talents ("nonweapon proficiencies" need rebranded) would be chosen by combining the Warrior, Wizard or Rogue list with the appropriate alignment list. Other distinctions (say, what a cleric can do that a lawful mage cannot) would be as noted in the specialty class.

If one wished to customize the array of classes offered to a given setting, identifying alignments and their associated specialties seems like a natural way to do this; for example, someone could remove the Old Faith and add in something home-brewed.

In my dream vision of this, the core classes each get a spread to themselves. Each aligned pair of specialty classes could then be presented in a single spread, one on each facing page. Nine classes in twelve pages.

one page rules and five-way alignment

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.