towards a medieval "brown stone" game

Note: this is not an earnest attempt to recreate any game that was played in the Twin Cities in 1971. It is just something that I threw together based on one explanation I have seen of the (poor quality and contradictory) evidence of how combat in that game worked.

These are incomplete, I basically just wrote and edited until I ran out of steam but I think it'd be enough to start playing. 

I didn't include any Referee's guidance for timekeeping or reactions or things like that, just do your best I guess.

Rules Brief for Players

The game is about a companies of adventurers going on expeditions into strange mazes and uncanny places to find their secrets and treasures. These expeditions are dangerous; adventurers may well die. If they survive, however, their fame and power will grow...

Advice:

• If you don't know what to do, ask questions.
• Tell the others what you want to do.
• The Referee won't lie to you, but they may not tell you everything.
• There aren't rules for everything. If you make a good play, you won't need to roll any dice.
• If you fight, someone will get hurt. It could very well be you.

Adventurers usually go on expedition in large companies, to have the advantage of numbers. Each player can have a few different characters in the company.

digression: ICBWS

I have a bee in my bonnet to run a kind of high school isekai game, and this set of rules just kind of came together. The HD/saving throw rules, if you're interested, are based on this thread speculating about the combat system used in the original Blackmoor game.

Working Title: I Can't Believe My Whole School Got Transported to a Fantasy Dimension Just Before Summer Break

Just assume that anything not covered here you don't have to worry about until I say you do.

Character Creation

The stats represent what kind of high school kid you are. For each, roll 3d. Half that roll, rounded down, is your Defense for things related to that stat. You have one-third the roll, rounded down, advances to divide between its skills:

• ARTS, craftiness and matters of taste. Skills: cooking, mending, nuts-and-bolts, taste.
• GOTH, self-reliance and dedication to the bit. Skills: animals, literature, mending, stealth.
• JOCK, morale and physical condition. Skills: animals, cooking, scouting, sports.
• NERD, analysis and specialized knowledge. Skills: book smarts, literature, nuts-and-bolts, scouting.

Skills with no advance have no rating. One advance for a 5th-Rate, two for a 4th-Rate, three for a 3rd-Rate, four for a 2nd-Rate and five for a 1st-Rate skill.

Then, give your character

• A name and class year.
• One or more named people you care about at school. These can be other players' characters but don't have to be.
• What they have on their person and in their bag. This can be whatever you want, within the bounds of teen stuff.

Harm and Saves

In circumstances of peril, roll harm dice (HD) appropriate to the danger. A normal adult trying to do you harm is 1HD, while you'd roll 2HD for every 3 normal teens.

When rolling HD, discard all 6s and add up the other dice to determine the harm. Teens are taken out if they take 3 points of harm, and adults if they take 4.

When the character is able to do something to defend themselves, make a saving roll of 2d; if the roll is less than the appropriate Defense, reduce the harm taken by up to the amount rolled. Protective gear improve a Defense by 1 or 2, but the gear is damaged if that difference saves you. A risky plan and space to try it can also add 1 to Defense.

Skill Checks

When presented with a challenge, a skilled character may make a skill check. Their chance of failure is their Rate in the skill plus 1-3 if they lack each of information, time or tools. If this chance is 1-5, they pass if a roll of 1d is greater than it.

An unskilled character doesn't usually get to make a check. A lack of the appropriate information, time or tools can each increase the chance of failure.

If the chance of failure is 6 or higher, the roll fails unless a roll of 2d is 12 or higher. A character with a stat of 6+ adds 1 to this roll, and one with a stat of 8+ adds 2.

• Animals. Check to calm or handle an animal.
• Book Smarts. Check to diagnose a problem or follow a procedure.
• Cooking. Check to preserve or stretch supplies.
• Literature. Check to find or know relevant information.
• Mending. Check to repair clothing or gear.
• Nuts and Bolts. Check to make or repair simple structures and machines.. 
• Scouting. Check to find food, paths, shelter or water.
• Sports. Check to perform athletic feats.
• Stealth. Check to avoid notice or hide something.
• Taste. Check to color reactions to your art, music or presence with a feeling.

3eish draft - action sequences

My 3eish concept has been through a lot of drafts, but I recently arrived at the following rules for action sequences (combat) and I think they're quite close to what I'll use in the final thing. Who knows, maybe I'll even use the same words.

rule

Encounters take place over rounds, representing a few seconds each.

Actions

Each character may act once per round. Characters act in order from highest initiative (aka adrenaline) to lowest and then from highest Wisdom to lowest. Changes to initiative affect the next round's sequence, not the current round.

A character may make only one reaction between one action and the next. They may only react a second time by forfeiting their next action.

Actions that take a few seconds require a character to commit to them; a committed character can't react until after their next action.

Movement

A character may move up to their Move score as part of their action; if they take no action, they may move twice that amount.

Careful movement---such as balancing or leaping---requires a check; a failed check occupies the character's action. A failure by 5 or more means they fall.

Contested movement---such as climbing, parting tangles or swimming---requires an action, at least one free hand and a check; a failed check takes a few seconds (committing the character). A failure by 5 or more means they fall, become entangled or sink. 

Feel The Knives...Flowing Through You (GLOG Class: Psychic Rogue)

(I posted something rather like this in the GLOG discord but here it is in a less ephemeral format. "Skill" is here, what most GLOGs call "template." Characters start with two skills and learn one per level.)

The Soulknife

The initiates of Soulknife orders hone their mental and physical talents until they become uncanny masters of intrigue and infiltration. Soulknife skills have the are psychic and rogue types.

Psychic — when you make a bad impression you may make a psychic roll ([psychic skills]-in-6 chance to succeed; if the roll is 1 you may not make another psychic roll until you collect your thoughts) to reroll the reaction roll.

Rogue — whenever you fail an ability check/saving throw to do sneaky stuff, you have a [rogue skills]-in-6 chance to succeed anyway.

Soulknife skills:

• Can instantly create a knife in your hand, any time your psychic roll is not spent, which fades to nothing a few seconds after it leaves your person.
• You may make a psychic roll to make an implausibly long or high jump. On a failure you know better than to attempt it.
• You may make a psychic roll to make one creature who noticed you forget about you. When next they notice you, they remember the first time.
• You you hit someone with a hand-to-hand attack but deal [psychic skills] damage or less, you stun them.

Related skills:

• (Psychic, requires 2 psychic skills.) You can collect your thoughts in a few minutes instead of a few hours.
• (Rogue) Whenever you hit an enemy who is surprised, deal a minimum of [rogue skills]d6 damage.

3eish: bones

Alright, without further ado here is the mechanical skeleton of my 3eish rules. This does not include any character options or combat-specific rules, other than a brief description of how attacks work. It also doesn't include rules for equipment, adventuring hazards or any kind of magic or special abilities. It is literally just the resolution and injury/endurance parts of the system.

it's a small (domain level) world

So, domain play rules tend to turn games into different games. I like playing Smallworld, so here's campaign rules that kind of turna campaign into that.

if our lives be short - the gloghack

Being an excerpt of the beating mechanical heart of Hulk Rats, themselves being a light revision of Maze Rats.

3eish: a closer to 3e hack

Heaven help me, I'm about to make a "why I haven't been posting as much recently," post, aren't I.

I won't dwell on it because no one cares, but honestly the reason I haven't made many posts is that instead of rapidly flitting from idea to idea I stayed relatively focused on a couple of projects. For a while, this was hulk rats, which I just posted, and then I moved on to my current obsession which I am calling 3eish.

No, I won't be posting a draft (even an incomplete one) of a second whole-ass game today. I just want to talk about the project a little bit.

3eish

So, I've worked on hacks that have said they're based on 3e or d20 modern before but their relationship to those systems beyond my invocation of their names have been, uh, unclear. For Target 20 Modern, it was basically the names of the stats, and for my previous 3e-based hack it was basically just the words "Fortitude, Reflex and Will," which were used in totally different ways than before.

Having recently regained possession of my old 3e books, however, I was poring over them and realizing how much I genuinely do like about the first DnD I learned; especially knowing what I know now about the history and motivations of a lot of its pieces. And, inveterate tinkerer that I am, there are simply so many points of pain in the system that I can't help tearing it apart and rebuilding it.

This is not a small project; I'm basically rewriting the entire SRD from the ground up. I'm about thirteen thousand words deep already, big beefy chunks remain more or less unwritten (the arcane spell list, to name a big one). So like, watch this space? But don't hold your breath.

Nevertheless, I feel like I do have a distinct vision for the game, here's my attempt to articulate what I'm doing with it:

HULK RATS

Well, it's certainly been long enough since I made that uncharacteristic scifi weapons post, so it was only to be expected (as, indeed, Orbiters Local 519 was itself the sequel to what was meant to be a standalone scifi post) that in the meantime I have written up HULK RATS as its own hack.

what's in it

• A very cool, very sexy take on Maze Rats saves and attacks, where saves are to roll under and attacks roll over targets' saves.
• Adventurer templates rebranded as skills.
• Adrenaline as HP
• Rules for resource exhaustion and how much you can carry on your spacesuit.
• Extremely half-assed environmental hazard rules.
• All the power tools stuff, in somewhat less clunky form.
• A surprisingly detailed bestiary with eighteen stat blocks for iconic sf/horror enemies that I hope are all absolutely busted in different ways.

why's in it

To be honest, one of the main reasons I pushed through to completion on this project despite losing my steam for it weeks ago was because I wanted to make more posts about the Maze Rats-derived GLOG chassis I developed here. I really like the way this hack uses templates as "skills" and I really like its lineup of RUN, HIDE and TRICK for the saving throws. I will probably post a more traditional fantasy GLOGhack using them at some point.

power tools (towards HULK RATS)

I have spent too much time thinking about first person shooters for someone who has not played one in years. Here's a sketch of a system encompassing scifi power tools (and, correspondingly, guns). This was written with a (forthcoming? who knows) mashup of Orbiter's Local 519 and Maze Rats in mind, working title: HULK RATS.