Planet Eris: Booklet 1 - House Rules is another purchase from NTRPG Con - and no, I'm not sure where you can find this outside of NTRPG Con (or other Old School gaming cons I'm guessing). So yeah, more cool shit that I have and you don't. Sorry about that.
Anyhow, it's a bunch of house rules that build upon the Original D&D White Box, but the source material is downright extensive. I don't have the patience to copy it all down, so here's a pic:
Yes, that would have been a lot to type.
So, the big thing that sticks out to be is the changes to the Thief class (with all I've been thinking about thieves in OSR gaming, it's not surprising that this stuck out. Anyhow, Jimm Johnson converted all of those damn percentile rolls to d6 rolls, but some are on 2d6 and some are on 1d6. I have no idea why he used both methods when dividing up the skills, but I do like the 2d6 method as it has a nice built in bell curve (I believe this is similar to Stars Without Number). I'm going to yoke this and rework it and post it when I do.
There is a nice section on hirelings, retainers and henchmen.
There are some spell tweaks. Well, lots of spell tweaks. More than I care to read.
Everyone has at least a 1 in 6. Dwarves have a 2 in 6 chance. I'm yoking this.
Jousting, disease, getting lost, starvation, jousting - even a 2 page mass combat system.
Worth the cash on inspiration alone. The fact that I can steal some of these houserules as is? Damn near priceless.
And yes, i noticed the cover...
http://cubeofquazar.blogspot.com/
ReplyDeletewell done!
DeletePDF is available at the link James posted, and it appears to be Jimm's blog itself.
Nice!
Rebuilding the thief class is an OSR rite of passage. I have made two so far. The first one I made (for my BX game) uses a 2d6 table for thief abilities.
ReplyDeleteThe second one I made is for my Pirates game. It uses 1d6s, but instead of getting all your skills at level 1 and sucking at all of them, you get to pick a skill at each level and be really good at it.
This allowed me to throw in a number of other skills suitable for a thief-y character that a player could choose instead of the traditional ones. You could be an assassin type or a bard type. No two thieves will be the same, all things being equal.
It also means you could pick up several hireling thieves who have different specialties and be pretty OK at level 1.
2011 I told you this. http://swordsandwizardry.blogspot.com/2011/07/most-awesome-megadungeon.html
ReplyDeleteAustin Jimm has run an Outdoor Survival hexcrawl game the last two years at NTRPG con...it is great and I recommend it if you attend NTRPG con (and I think he gave a free copy of the rules away to all his players this year).
ReplyDelete