RetroRoleplaying: The Blog

Tarnhelm's Terrible Tome: House Rules for 0e Games is now available for free download. I'll probably find a few more typos and other minor issues over the next week, if I find enough, I'll release a version 1.01 later in the month. But I don't expect to find anything truly major -- at least I hope I don't.

Tarnhelm's Terrible Tome: House Rules for 0e Games is written for use with any 0e game, the original TSR 1974 edition, Swords & Wizardry, etc. It will probably also work with only minor changes for B/X-based editions. The PDF file is can be printed as a 40 page booklet using Acrobat Reader's booklet printing feature. Here's the blurb from the back cover of Tarnhelm's Terrible Tome: House Rules for 0e Games:

Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is a set of house rules for the original 1974 (0e) version of the world’s most popular tabletop fantasy roleplaying game (and modern clones, like Swords & Wizardry). These house rules are modern renditions of the house rules the author used with his original edition games in the 1970s.

Some of house rules included:

• A simple “skills” system based on class and background instead of lists of skills
• A Hit Point/Body Point system where Hit Points represent fatigue and Body Points represent actual wounds.
• Ritual Magic
• An alternate alignment system
• Critical Hits and Critical misses
• A class based weapon damage system that ends class weapon restrictions.
• An optional Armor system that ends class restrictions on wearing armor
• An optional class: the Mnemonic Mage
• Optional Divine Intervention rules

This digest-sized edition of Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is designed to be printed double-sided using the booklet-printing feature of Adobe Acrobat, the pages can be folded and stapled to create a “0e” style digest-sized booklet.