heralds and little guys for FMC basic

 

I absolutely love FMC Basic by Marcia B. It's as beautiful for everything it leaves on the cutting room floor as everything that it includes. That said, here's a cleric and two demi-humans it intentionally omitted.

fantastic journeys, powered by BIRG

This is a hack of TFT and, to a lesser extent, GURPS. The main novelties are in the readiness/experience rules and in the injury and recovery rules. It's not quite complete, there's no list of skills or special abilities, but I think it's enough to share. Use your favorite list of skills and make up abilities if you want.

Characters have three attributes:

• Dexterity (DX), used for physical rolls
• Strength (ST), used for endurance and overpowering
• Wits (WT), used for mental rolls.

Human characters have a minimum of 8 in each attribute.

Characters succeed at difficult tasks if a roll of 4d is less than or equal to their adjusted attribute. If they have a skill specific to the task, they roll 3d instead. A roll of 4 or less always succeeds, even if the attribute is adjusted to lower than this.

If two characters are directly opposed, they both make rolls. If both would succeed, the character with the higher roll does. On an exact tie, or if both fail, they are in a deadlock.

a brief "history" of d&d, 1980-2000

(This post is fiction and not history.)

Dave Arneson's 1980 lawsuit goes to court, and Arneson is awarded not only great deal of back royalties but some damages as well. The legal battle and debt compound TSR's other financial problems and and the fledgeling company go bankrupt in late 1982. Moldvay's Basic Set is published late, and Cook's Expert Set never is.

Gygax and the Blumes spend 1983 unsuccessfully shopping the company around for a buyout. Arneson, as one of TSR's creditors, negotiates for Cook and his unpublished expert materials to be released to his company, Adventure Games.

When the "Dungeons and Dragons" trademark lapses in 1984, grimoire games, desperate to sell to a wider audience, republishes its Arduin material as Grimoire Dungeons and Dragons, not as "the Arduin Adventure." The game is a success and saves the company from bankruptcy.

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.