RetroRoleplaying: The Blog

The reaction to my recent post on a Microlite74 Edition designed for "Swords & Sorcery" genre play has been very positive. I'm happy to announce that I have started to work on it. So far, work consists on taking a copy of Microlite74 Extended Edition and starting to trim material from the document that will not be needed in a Microlite74 Swords & Sorcery Edition and beginning to give some careful thought to what is needed to give the game a more swords & sorcery feel.

Your input will be welcome. As with previous Microlite74 projects, I will be talking about the project on this blog (and eventually in the forum) and draft copies of the rules will be available to download and comment on. Unlike some of the "big company" playtests and open design projects, I really am interested in comments and they influence my work.

A homemade D&D module from 1981 called G2 Squared: Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord is available for free download at PlaGMaDA. It's typewritten, illustrated, has hand-drawn maps on graph paper, and full of typos (like the one in the module title). It's also full of gonzo fun stuff like a kitchen full of female giants who defend themselves by throwing (giant) kitchen utensils and an introduction that includes this line: "If the adventurers return without sufficient evidence of kills they may be hanged or otherwise executed..." There's also the advice to "Trust no one!" (Years before the publication of Paranoia, but keeping your laser handy would be helpful too -- if you only had one). BTW, the designer was 14 at the time.

Go download this amateur gem now either by viewing the scanned pages at PlaGMaDA or by downloading a PDF version here.

Edit: As noted in a comment below, this PDF was created by mwschmeer at his Rended Press blog. A CBZ version is also available there.

According this a post on the RPGSite from Windjammer, there is an amazing amount of free 4e material on the WOTC web site -- and not behind their paywall. Enough material to play 4e for quite a while -- and without most of the limitations of their basic set. While I'm not a fan of 4e and have little interest in playing it again, I thought the info in Windjammer's post should get wider attention.

With 4E on its way out, I thought it may be helpful to alert people to the sheer amount of free material WotC released for this game over the past year. Basically, they put out all the base classes and quite some canonical monsters on PDFs and released these for free. Throw in the Quick Starter rules PDF and you got a complete game at your hands, and one 'fully up to date' too.

I've been asked if I could make a "Swords ansd Sorcery Edition" of Microlite74 by someone who would be willing to donate a few very nice AD&D items for a Cancer Fund drive. He's asked that a Microlite74: Swords and Sorcery Edition have characteristics like these:

* Based on Microlite74 Extended
* Like "E6", be limited to 6th level with advancement thereafter be limited to things like talents and action points.
* Player characters should be human and limited to two classes: Adventurer (think Fighter) and Sorceror (magic-user with access to both arcane and divine magic). Backgrounds could be used to create specialists.
* Magic should be divided into white, grey, and black with different costs for each.
* Only spell levels 1 and 2 (with some level 3 spells as specials after achieving level 6) should be directly castable. Higher level spells should require lengthy rituals.
* Fighters should have some mild mechanical customization something like the Fighter Special Abilities optional rules in Companion 1.
* Sorcerors should not have Magic Dart but can have minor magic. Can use weapons and armor, but casting in armor should be limited.
* No alignment, but virtues and vices might be okay.
* Single saving throw (like in Swords and Wizardry).
* Drop the grand tour of old school games
* Include some treasure

It really would not be very hard to create a Microlite74: Swords and Sorcery Edition that fulfills most (or even all) of those requests. Would anyone else be interested in such an edition? If you are interested, do you have any issues with the above characteristics or have additional requests?

We started to try the "Weapon Feats" from Dark Dungeons (don't let the word "feat" throw you, they are similar to the "Weapon Mastery" rules from The Rules Cycopledia and have little in common with the "feats" of 3.x or 4e) in my Microlite74 Extended based Wilderlands campaign last Sunday. These rules can be dropped into M74 easily and serve to make weapon choice somewhat more important and bumping up the abilities of fighting classes at bit. Well, it seems to just be "a bit" at lower levels. I'm not sure how it would do at high levels. Even at high levels, fighting classes are generally able to old their own with spell-casting classes in Microlite74, just as they can in most older versions of D&D.

Player opinion of adding Dark Dungeons-style "Weapon Feats" to the game was mixed. Of course, after only one session with the rules, this is to be expected. It will take a few more before there is a real consensus on whether they add enough to the game to be worth the added complexity. To be honest, they aren't as much "complex" as they are "space-consuming." The initial draft of the M74 Weapon Feat rules is long enough to be a full Companion volume.

If published for Microlite74, "weapon feats" would be completely optional. My question is not so much if they will work, but whether there is any real interest in something like this among M74 fans. Many players today seem to see fighting classes in general (and the fighter in particular) as "second class citizens" with less "good things" than spell-casting classes. The weapon feat/mastery rules give fighting classes a something that allows them to do more damage and even, depending on the weapon, do special things that most others cannot, but I'm not sure they aren't a solution in search of a problem given that fighters aren't pansies in 0e or M74 without them.

I expected Microlite74 Standard to be the most popular version of Microlite74 Version 3.0. After all, Microlite74 Standard covers almost all of 0e, including material from the supplements and early TSR magazine articles. Microlite74 Basic, on the other hand just cover the original three little 0e booklets. It lacks the higher level spells, additional character classes, and other material that is common to most editions the "World's Most Popular RPG". As Microlite74 Extended was similar to Microlite75 (as it includes late 1970s 0e house rules as a builtin part of the gamesystem), I did not expect it to be all that popular. After all, Microlite75 was not nearly as popular as previous versions of Microlite74.

Therefore, I was surprised to discover that Microlite74 Standard was the least downloaded version with 28% of the downloads at the main download site and Microlite74 Extended was the most downloaded with 39% of the downloads. Microlite74 Basic was in the middle of the pack with 33% of the downloads.

I've very surprised by these results. The are almost the opposite of what I expected. I'm not really sure what this all means, other than my predictions were basically wrong. If only downloaded one version of Microlite74 3.0, why did you select the one you did?

The big news today is that WOTC is going to do a limited printed of the original 1e player's Handbook, Monster Manual, and Dungeon Master's Guide in April with part of the proceeds going to the Gygax Memorial Fund to help made the Gygax monument a reality. The interiors with remain unchanged, but they'll have new covers. I think this is a wonderful idea. The only problem I have with it is distribution is going to be limited to basically hobby shops in North America. Given that hobby shops aren't that common any more and there are 1e fans all over the world, this restriction seems weird to me. I suggest fans outside North America and those in North America but live where the closest FLAGS is a multihour drive write WOTC polite letters complaining about this silly restriction. After all, if the goal is both to help raise money for the Gygax Memorial Fund and to make a nice profit while doing so, you'll think they want to make these available to everyone who wants one. Limiting it to the hobby distribution channel in North America just seems silly.