Basic Warlord

Just knocked up a quick Warlord Class for Basic D&D

Basic Warlord

Warlords are human warriors trained as leaders in combat. Whether they’re a humble captain of the guards, or an imperious knight commander they lift the spirits of those they lead, and their grasp of tactics can turn the tide of battle.

The prime requisites for a Warlord are Intelligence and Charisma. If a Warlord has a score of 13 or greater in both Intelligence and Charisma the character will gain a 5% bonus on earned experience points. If the Warlord has an Intelligence of 13 or greater and a Charisma of 16 or greater, that character will earn a 10% bonus on earned experience.

RESTRICTIONS: Warlords use a six-sided dice (d6) to determine their hit points. They may wear nothing more protective than chain mail armour, but may use a shield. They may use axes, polearms, spears, swords, and daggers. Warlords must have minimum score of 9 in both Intelligence and Charisma.

SPECIAL ABILITIES: When rolling for group initiative Warlords add +1 to their sides’ score. Warlords add +1 to all three Charisma bonuses (B7). A Warlord may rally any Retainers that fail their morale check if he can roll under his Charisma score with a twenty-sided dice (d20).

A Warlord leading three or more allies (NPC or Player Characters) may employ a number of tactical options: they may form a defensive shield wall. As longs as they all have shields, don’t move, and can’t be flanked, everyone in the Shield wall gains an additional -1 bonus to AC. If the Warlord, and his allies, are armed with spears, axes, or swords they can lead a ferocious charge. The charge grants a +1 damage bonus to any hits, but must cover a distance of at least 20’. Finally Warlord leading three or more allies armed with, spears or polearms may marshal them into a well drilled formation granting a +1 to hit bonus as long as they are not flanked.

Level          Title                      Exp. Points        Hit Dice

1                 Lancepesade            0                   1d6

2                 Corporal                  2200               2d6

3                 Serjeant-at-arms     4400               3d6

Warlord lvl 1-3 Saves

Death Ray: 13  

Magic Wands: 14 

Turn to Stone:13 

Dragon Breath: 15 

Spell: 14  

From the Big Box: Car Wars Deluxe

Time for another game from the big box of random boxed sets! Last time it was Warhammer this time it's . . .

This is going to be an image heavy blog as there's a ton of stuff in the box, and I haven't got a lot to say about it. So mostly pics. Sorry if that's a problem for anyone, but you've been warned.

I don't know what was originally in this boxed set, but mine is stuffed full of supplements, flyers, maps, counters, scraps of paper, and even a notebook, pen, and paper.

The introduction says . . .

Why is Car Wars so popular? I think the main reason is that it's an "accessible" fantasy. Everyone who's been behind the wheel of a car or motorcycle has encountered an idiot in traffic, and the universal  response seems to be, "If I only had some guns mounted on this baby, I'd show that bozo what's what!" Well this game gives you those guns! Of course, the bozos have guns too . . ."

Of course it wasn't that universal to me as 15 whose main mode of transport was the school bus, but I must have took some notice of this as I found a scrap of paper in the box witha car design in my illterate schoolboy scrawl and I'd named the driver Billy Bozo!

I remember my mate getting this boxed set, but don't really remembering us playing it that much. Judging by the evidence though . . .

. . . we really liked designing vehicles. I wonder if were slightly disappointed that it was more of a skirmishing game than an RPG. That and we didn't really know much about drift, cornering, and torque. Still, guns and gadgets = fun.

You can tell that's what we liked by the book marks my mate stuffed in the rulebook . . .

As for the rules; well they're full of the types of details that these days make my eyes glaze over, but as a kid I'd probably have been stoked at the 'realism'. Like I said I don't remember playing this much, but maybe it's the reason GURPS (and especially its fonts and layout) felt like an immediate fit for me when I grabbed it up nearly ten years later.

I wonder if the reason we didn't really get into that much was also because it's the sort of game that even our primitive Spectrum 48Ks, Commadore 64s, and BBC Micro's could handle better.

In fact I've no interest in playing Car Wars these days, but I'd kickstart the shit out of a SJG Car Wars MMORPG.

The game play in car wars is very much a wargame style. You have a basic scenario like Autoduelists defending a truckstop from roving bike gangs, and each side has a budget to build and arm their cars and then you play it all out on maps and track sections using 2d cardboard counters. I'm not sure if there was a range of miniatures, but the average scenario would need a lot of lead and cost a bit.

One of the fun things about using the track sections is that you can design your own Autoduel tracks.

Maybe it was just me that wasn't that interested, after all my mate bought quite a lot of supplements for this game . . .

I actually find these supplements more fun than the rules. And just to up the nostalgia factor I always find this sort of stuff interesting these days too . . .

Anyway thank's  KLC for doing such a great job of assembling Car Wars Deluxe!

Trade Haul

After this post someone noted I was unlikely to get any use out of the two Warhammer boxed sets and asked if I wanted to trade. Which I did. I traded them in for DCC RPG and ACKS . . .

. . . the person I traded with also very kindly threw in DCC 65.5 Doom of the Savage Kings. Which was very cool of him.

I'd already got the ACKS pdf and liked its version of B/X enough to jump in on the Companion Kickstarter. DCC RPG I knew a little about, but hadn't really taken it in. 

It's a big old tome, but I wizzed through in a couple of days and am absolutely smitten. I love it. It's currently my favourite version of 'the game' and I can't wait to play it. No doubt there'll be more DCC RPG posts along the line.

Random Death

Laptop has died. Not Good.  Solution . . .

Roll 1d6 . . .

1) Hit with hammer
2) Hit with Sledgehammer
3) HIt with Warhammer
4) Burn
5) Burn with fires of hell
6) Repeat steps 1-5 as neccersary

From the Big Box: Warhammer x2

As I mentioned in my post about the Big Box of Random Box sets I was going to write some follow up post about what was in the box. This first one is about the two Warhammer boxed sets.

 I find it interesting that in 1974 D&D was launched as 'Rules for a Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaign' but miniatures and the campaign, for most players, soon became an increasingly small part of D&D, and all the other fantasy games that followed in its wake. Until almost ten years later, in 1983, things come full circle when Games Workshop released Warhammer with the 'Mass Combat Fantasy Role-Playing Game'. So in less than ten years we go from a hobby started with a game born of minis wargaming that introduces roleplaying, to a hobby more or less devoid of wargaming where a new RPG game is launched that (re)introduces wargaming to the hobby.

Now the above cover is a source of later confusion for me. When I came back into the hobby in 2004, after being out for a decade, I found a thriving online RPG community and when talk turned to Warhammer  RPG people were talking about WFRP with the iconic dwarf trollslayer cover, and I would be thinking of this, becasue when my mate picked this up he gave it to me to run and I ran the RPG side of it and largerly ignored the mass battle side of it. Through the mists of time (and my age addled brain) this came became WFRP for me. Ha.

Anyway it's been (a terrifying) 3 decades since I read and played this rules so I thought I aught to take a quick reread.

Everything was still in the boxed set even the special offer to send off for a Thorgrimm Branedimm mini.

The rules are split into two volumes. The battle and the RPG side of things are split between Vol1: Tabletop Battles and Vol 3: Characters whilst the magic for both is covered in Vol 2: Magic (natch). The colour box art is by John Blanche and the interior illustrations in the books by Tony Ackland both of whom are iconic rpg artists. I love the box cover and the interior art is good, but I think this must be early in Ackland's career as I've much stronger stuff from him.

The rules for tabletop battles look simple, fun, and slight (most of the space is taken up by the creature list). I can't say how they compare to other miniatures rules as I only ever plauyed hex and chit wargames. I particularly like the Psychology rules that simulate Hatred, Fear, Terror, Frenzy, and Stupidity. I might nick that for D&D monsters. 

The magic system looks rather bland on paper (though most do) but 

 has a few distinguishing traits, such as some spells requiring a Talisman of some sort and the fumble mechanics. The spells contain much more utility (or dungeon delving) spells than I imagined. I was expecting mostly battlefield artillery. There are also seperate spells for Nercromancers. The magic items section spices things up with a few named items with history that form the basis of what will become the Warhammer world.

Finally we have the RPG rules in book 3. These look to be a simple and fun light system where randomisation is the name of the game when it comes to character creation. You role for race, social status, age, stats, and skills. It's a d100 roll for skills which are really backgrounds, and quite vague when it comes to implementation. For example Skill #76  - Transvestite gives no advice on how to implement it or what a character with this skill set can do. Anyway I get the feeling Bowskill and Weaponskill are all you really need. There a bit of stuff about creating adventures, lots of encounter tables, and a sample adventure. It's all very brief. The only thing I find really comment worthy here is that . . . OMG! The designers really loved Elves. I mean really loved 'em.  

By 1986 Games Workshop split the game between rules for Role-playing off into WFRP and produced a new edition of the battle game . . .

 The later version has also has three volumes of rules (all with nice colour covers).

This time they're the combat rules, a bestiary, and Combat magic. They seem like the same rules, but there's more detail in the combat volume with more details about movement and formations.

I just gave these a quick skim as I'm not really interested without the RPG angle. 



What I did find interesting was the piece of paper that fell out of the bestiary when I opened it . . .

This isn't my handwriting, or this isn't my illiterate scrawl I should say, this is my mate's he must have been working out the points for our various forces. It's weird I have no memory of playing this. It must be one of the last games we played before the two of us, and the rest of our group all went our separate ways after our O'levels.

Speaking of which on the other side of the paper was this . . .

. . . well you can't read easily it because Blogger won't let me rotate the picture after I post it, and no matter what I to before still reads it as portrait.

Anyway, we had scrawled out are armies on the back of a letter from our school informing us that our mock exams would be disrupted by industrial action by the teachers union. Ha! Seems we found something better to do with our time than revise then.

Heroes & Other Worlds - First Impressions

Just got my copy of Heroes & Other Worlds by C.R. Brandon

It's a cracking little digest sized rule book, clocking in at a no-nonsense 121 pages, with easy on the eye crisp layout, and lots of  black and white illustrations.
Including these two which are excellent call-backs to the source material.

It's based on The Fantasy Trip/Melee/Wizard with a  smidgen of Moldvay Basic D&D thrown in. It should be an excellent retroclone  rules light alternative for those that aren't keen on class and level. Looking forward to digging into it.

Why I don’t use House rules When I Play Tunnels & Trolls

Why I don’t use House rules When I Play Tunnels & Trolls

It’s often said that ‘if you ain’t using house rules, then you ain’t really playing Tunnels & Trolls.’ Which distresses me, because I never use house rules when I play T&T, which means I’ve never played T&T, and 30 years is a long time to be never playing. Silly me. Must try harder. By the way when I say Tunnels & Trolls this is what I mean . . .

So why don’t I use house rules when I play Tunnels & Trolls?

Firstly it’s because Tunnels & Trolls was the first RPG I ever played. Before T&T I hadn’t even heard of RPG rules, let alone house rules. In fact in my first game we didn’t have a copy of the rules. All we had was Sword for Hire, 3d6, a pencil and my Maths exercise book (most fun I ever had with that thing). But my mate, Gareth had read his brother’s copy of the rules. He knew enough for us to be able to roll up a character (a warrior I called Boromir with not a hint of irony) and play through Sword for Hire.

Then there was the fact that it was 1980 and I was stuck in a small village in the middle of England. There was no internet, no way to easily share ideas with a community of players or T&T’s creators. To me, back then, Phoenix Arizona may as well have been another world, another universe. So I don’t know when I first heard the term house rules but it wasn’t when I started playing. So in the beginning I had to play without them.  It would probably be a year or so later when I started buying White Dwarf that I’d read about House Rules. Even so I probably wouldn’t have really ‘got’ house rules back then which leads nicely on to my next point . . .

. . . I was ten when I first started playing and even if I knew what house rules were any that ten-year old me would have made up would have been all over the place.

Omission of rules is not the same as house ruling and as kids me and my friends might not have known enough to make house rules, but we were experts at ignoring any rules we didn’t want to use. Hell, we pretty much ignored all the rules in AD&D and just used the good stuff in our B/X D&D games. It was the same for Runequest, Traveller, Bushido, all the games we played. If we didn’t, like, understand, or see the point of a rule we just ignored ‘em. Doing that we made games work for us without house rules.

Who needs house rules when you have options,and there are plenty of options in T&T: Multiple ways to handle APs, three different ways to generate monsters, and PCs, and three different ways to handle Monster Ratings to name a few of ‘em.

But the main reason I don’t use house rules when I play T&T is that it just works for me as is. From day one T&T has always just clicked. Most of the common T&T house rules have evolved to deal with problems common to a lot of T&T fans. Nerfing the warriors x2 armour and Spite are used to deal with problem of stalemate between evenly matched and well armoured foes. I like the idea of stalemate as it forces the players to come up with cunning (or fatally stupid) plans using the Saving Rolls rules. Of which there are plenty of great examples in the 5^th ed rules and Solo #12 The Arena of Khazan (and now the excellent Dare to Daro by Dan Prentice). Also the more SR the players make the more Adventure Points they gain.

Another perennial problem for some is the idea of the Schwarzenegger Wizard. Because T&T magic is powered by ST most folks playing wizards will seek to increase ST above other stats. Often this might mean a wizard has more ST than a the party’s Warriors and folk imagine that instead of  T&T wizards looking like your archetypal Gandalf or Merlin they must be muscle-bound meatheads. I never saw it this way. Yes the St range for a normal human is 3-18 so the average guy has a ST of 9-12, but in theory the stat range for T&T characters is 3-3,000 and beyond.  Of course it depends on the GM, but if the solos are a good guide it’s not unusual to get characters with stats in the low hundreds, so would a ST 300 character really look 30 times more muscle bound than a character with ST 10? I don’t think so. Just as I don’t think a 1^st level Dwarf with a ST of 36 would have a gym sculpted body of rippling muscles.  They’d have an ale scuplted body of rippling flab, but they’d still be able to rip yer arm off and beat you to death with the soggy end if you spilt their pint.

Speaking of stats, Power & Speed are house ruled additions to the classic six stats. POW to replace the use of ST in spells, and Speed basically for legging it from Trolls. I like the idea of POW, but not as much as I like the affects that losing ST has on casters, and I never use SPD as a stat. After all the character that misses their LK SR by the most is the one that’s gonna get eaten, right?

Finally there’s the funny spell names. Sadly it seems like most of the folk who couldn’t stomach those just dismissed T&T rather than rename them. Their loss, it’d be trivially easy to rename the spells and what kind of wizard doesn’t want to yell ‘Take That You Fiend!” as they vaporise a Troll?

Why I Lie When I Make Up Post Titles

Because ‘Why I Don’t Use House Rules When I Play Tunnels & Trolls . . .’ is clunky enough without adding . . . Except These Two House Rules . . .’ that’s why.

Okay, so I do actually use a couple of house rules these days. I use POW with racial modifiers so that Elves, Fairies, and Leprechaun’s have a high POW, humans average, and Dwarves, and Hobbit’s have  a low POW modifier. I use both POW and ST for spell points with the players deducting the cost from whichever stat is highest first and then both when they level out. I do this because I like the results of ST depletion and how they affect the game, but I also think Wizards, and the more magical races, should be able to cast lots of spells without needing a high ST.

I also use a simple Fatigue system. After 10 rounds of combat (20 minutes) everyone deducts 2 from their ST for each additional round they fight. Apart from Warriors who can fight for 10+ their level in rounds before they suffer Fatigue penalties.

Anyway as Ken St Andre says . . .

1.1 Troll Talk

There is no "right" or "wrong" way to play, only suggestions.

. . . the cardinal rule remains: adjust the system as you see fit to suit your own style of play.

Ken St. Andre – July 1979

I guess that means my style of play is straight up 5^th ed with very few houserules, but lots of Saving Rolls!