An addendum of sorts to the year-in-review post. Here’s a quick rundown of the most notable content and rules I homebrewed in 2024 for my ongoing sword & planet classic D&D campaign, Planet Karus. My players may not want to read further for fear of spoilers. I mostly post this as a reminder to myself. It’s nice to be reminded of all the small and large things that get created as we go.
Gaming Content
Adventuring sites, monsters, and items created for the Planet Karus campaign.
The Abyssal Sanctum: A small dungeon comprising 22 rooms across three levels. A natural cave system that serpent men once used for study and worship, now infested by a slime god outer being. The entrance to this dungeon is hidden inside the farmers’ guild hall in the players’ hometown. Players have yet to explore this one.
Plasma Elemental, Harmonic Convergence Chamber: A custom elemental that roams the third level of The Balok, our campaign’s tentpole dungeon, made up of the same stuff as the massive power source that is located at the center of this level.
The convergence chambers are the mechanisms by which these elementals were brought into this world by the Balok’s builders. These are now malfunctioning, allowing the elementals to roam free. Players have yet to encounter these.
Regeneration Machine, Space Crab Cloak, Possessed Visitor Claw: Various magic items that I created in response to players’ actions.
The machine is a thing they plan to build from parts found in the main dungeon. It does what it says on the tin.
The cloak was commissioned from the town tanner, using shells from a defeated giant space crab.
The claw is… a long story. It was originally attached to the zombified remains of a space alien, who was destroyed by the players, the claw taken as a trophy. Then, in session 24, they managed to complete a ritual that transplanted the soul of a deceased retainer that one player character was carrying around in their cranium to the claw and attach it to the arm of another player character. I modeled it after an OD&D-style intelligent sword. Can’t wait to see them try it in action.
Ruined Serpent Man Citadel: Work in progress. This is intended to become a new small, highly lethal dungeon inside the ruined remains of what once was a serpent man citadel, now buried beneath desert sands. I am going to try and use Finch’s method for creating dungeon maps for this one for the first time.
Rules & Procedures
Expansions, adjustments, and additions for Hackbut, my homebrew classic D&D ruleset.
Hex-Crawl Tools: Procedures for generating lairs on a wilderness hex map, a similar one for generating settlements, and for determining the number of monsters and amount of treasure in ruins.
Movement Rules Tinkering: Adjusted encumbrance levels for armor, adjusted movement rates for mounts, triangulating between Delving Deeper, OED, and other sources.
Rationalized Jellies, Puddings, Slimes, Oozes, and Molds: Streamlined rules for the various gooey entities one finds in a typical OD&D dungeon, in particular for handling their grab, hold, and dissolve attacks.
Misc Refereeing Tools: Rolls for equipment costs, inspired by The Black Hack, but usable with classic D&D rules. Six difficulty level descriptors that can be used with the cleric’s turn undead table, converting it into a general task resolution system.
Mighty Deeds of Arms: Rules for fighters’ stunts and combat maneuvers, adapted from Dungeon Crawl Classics but adjusted for a classic D&D sensibility. (Posted here.)
Expanded Colored Races of Man Table: Inspired by Skerples’ table of races for his glog rules, this takes Carcosa’s colored races of man and adds a description for each, inspired by new age parapsychological color theory, a stat reroll, and a bonus and a weakness. (Posted here.)
…
Those are the highlights. If anything piques your interest, do comment, and I might post more details in the future.
Welcome to the fifth annual review on this blog. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023.)
This felt like a year where we settled into a mode of hobby gaming that can be maintained indefinitely. Barring exogenous shocks, of course. I also managed to complete my PhD, which has taken the pressure off things a little bit but did not lead to as much slack to really expand my hobby activity on this site as I had hoped. There is always more work to do.
As has become customary, here’s a review of what we played, some statistics, games, and game-related paraphernalia I acquired, D&D-related fiction I read, and, finally, some resolutions for the new year. Happy 2025, everyone.
I described Planet Karus, our current D&D campaign, at some length in last year’s review. The game is still going from strength to strength, and I continue to expand the map with new adventuring sites. We also have the occasional almost fully improvised session of shenanigans. Running a fully homebrewed game continues to be an incredibly freeing experience, if at times slightly daunting. I look forward to many more sessions in the years to come.
Galaxy Trucker is a quick game, which explains the high count. We typically manage to play two rounds in a night. I am happy we managed to give Sidereal Confluence a go. It’s a beast of a game but also quite the experience. I wouldn’t mind giving it another go at a future occasion, if we all feel up to it. Lunch Money we played on a lark for nostalgia’s sake. That game is so incredibly nineties it hurts. Cyclades is a new acquisition. I would say it is on par with the other Matagot dudes-on-a-map games we like. It is most similar to Kemet, and I think out of the two, I prefer Cyclades because it is less sprawling and more tightly wound.
A game of Cyclades in progress.
Tabletop Role-Playing Game Play Statistics
I once again crunched the numbers on our RPG sessions. Read on for the dirty details.
Sessions
We played nine sessions of Planet Karus, one of which was an eight-hour marathon session. We’ve made the transition to only playing in person with success. I don’t feel it has affected overall attendance too much. If it has, I would say it’s an acceptable trade-off against a much more convivial and engaging play experience.
Attendance
The number of players ranged from 2 to 6 (M = 2.9, SD = 1.3). The six-player marathon session skews these numbers somewhat. If we take that one out, we get a range of 2 to 3 (M = 2.4, SD = 0.5). Almost exactly the same as last year.
The top player was good for 29.6% of the attendance, the number two for 18,5%, and the two shared number three players for 14,8% each. It looks like we had a slightly broader base of participation this year, which is nice and healthy, I would say.
Chart of player attendance.
Character Deaths
We had a total of two player-character deaths and eleven retainer deaths over those nine sessions. Total deaths ranged from 0 to 4 (M = 1.6, SD = 1.2). Both those PC deaths occurred in session 21, which happened on my birthday, and the same player lost both characters. They really do know how to please their referee.
The MilliWhack rating for this year’s sessions ranged from 73 to 103 (M = 89, SD = 9). That’s a decline compared to last year, which I feel reflects the players’ increased savviness and stronger characters. I guess I need to up the ante and start introducing some deadlier environments.
Chart of MilliWhack rating of the Planet Karus campaign to date.
Experience Points
XP per session ranged from 0 to 13,200 (M = 5,710, SD = 4,703). The most lucrative sessions were #23 (13,200) and #26 (11,273). Both were hauls acquired from the second level of the tentpole dungeon, with levels of danger to match the sizeable rewards. I won’t share spoilers here about if there is much more to acquire on this level, but players might need to start exploring the third level if they want to push more of their characters into the upper-level range.
Seven of the current characters saw action this year. Their levels range from 1 to 6 (M = 3.0, SD = 1.5). These characters have now acquired between them 69,994 XP. (Do note that players can get XP from burning treasure, so in effect, each piece of mundane treasure they acquire has the potential of netting them XP twice.) That’s a 3× increase compared to last year. Very well done. Our most active player has managed to get their magic-user character to level six, which is the highest level attainable in Hackbut. A notable achievement!
Game Acquisitions
I believe I did not buy as much hobby-related stuff this year as I did previously. My wallet thanks me.
Yoon-Suin was a backer reward (I think?) NAP I got to read a few of the winning entries for models to emulate (chiefly Melonath Falls and Caught in the Web of Past and Present). Haven’t gotten around to that yet. Fight On recently relaunched. I had a browse, and it looks fun.
CoraQuest was a birthday present, and it ended up being a big hit with my two six-year-old boys. It’s an extremely well-done, kid-friendly dungeon crawler. Captain Sonar was a gift from my player group, which has yet to find its way onto my table. Dragon Quest was also a gift from a longtime friend and occasional player. A great collectible I am not sure I will ever play, but I am very pleased to own. Cyclades I acquired myself to sort of complete my Matagot dudes-on-a-map holy trinity (alongside Kemet and Inis). We’ve played this a few times, and gosh, is it fun.
Kit: Some more Gamescience dice (d4, d6, d10, d100, d12). I am still on the hunt for a nice d8 and d20. After the previous year’s splurge on some kit for in-person games, I am pretty much set, though, and I don’t feel I need much more.
The final one, CAS’s Hyperborea, is an absolute must for any old-school D&D head, of course, but the single volume I’d recommend the most is Bebergal’s delightful anthology. It’s a near-perfect collection of sword and sorcery, the kind I’d like all of my players to read. I like it so much that I acquired the second, expanded edition in hardback later in the year.
Peter Bebergal’s Appendix N: The Eldritch Roots of Dungeons and Dragons (revised and expanded edition).
Blogging
Ah, blogging. The thing I enjoy doing but can’t seem to make the time for. In the hierarchy of hobby-related things, it does come last. I mean, if the choice is between doing some prep on the Planet Karus campaign or drafting a post, the former takes precedence. And that’s fine, I guess.
I did start cross-posting session reports here, which is better than nothing. But what I’d really like to do is wrap up that series of posts on things I learned about running Castle Xyntillan, continue the series on my homebrew rules, and also start posting some things I have created for the Planet Karus campaign. Now, to make the time for it. Ah well.
Views
The blog had 3,720 views and 1,257 visitors. Surprisingly, that’s an increase from last year of 341 (10%) and 309 (33%), respectively.
We had 498 views through search engines, 93 through Beyond Fomalhaut, and 85 through Reddit. Melan beat Reddit. Amazing. (I don’t really post to Reddit anymore. Maybe that’s part of it.) I also continue to receive traffic through The Byzantine (21), Anne (17), and Xaosseed (10). My thanks, as always.
Looking Back and Ahead
Let’s conclude this post by reflecting on last year’s resolutions and making some new ones for the year ahead.
Last Year’s Resolutions
The goals for 2024 included restarting the Planet Karus campaign on a monthly basis, continuing monthly board game nights, running an in-person marathon session, and maintaining a monthly blog schedule.
We played nine Planet Karus sessions which isn’t exactly monthly, but close enough if we factor in the usual breaks over summer and Christmas. If we manage to maintain this level of play over the coming year, I would be perfectly satisfied. But maybe we can bump that number up by one or two.
It also looks like we managed to have nine board game nights. Similarly, I hope we can keep that up and maybe squeeze in one or two more.
The big achievement in 2024, gaming-wise, was, without a doubt, the in-person marathon session we had on March 2. It was an absolute blast to play for eight hours straight. I can’t remember the last time we did that. It may have been back in high school decades ago. We had so much fun that we have set a date for a new marathon session in the new year.
The only goal I feel like I did not achieve was the monthly blog schedule. Aside from the play reports, I only posted three things, two of which were AI-generated lists. For a variety of reasons already discussed, a monthly schedule is just asking too much. But more than three should be doable. I mean, that’s one post every 17 weeks. So, let’s cut the original goal in half and shoot for a proper blog post every other month, for a grand total of six this year.
Upcoming Year
In closing, here are some resolutions for the new year.
Continue the monthly in-person Planet Karus games, as well as the monthly board game nights. Obviously. See if we can increase the attendance and the frequency, if only slightly. Run another in-person marathon session of Planet Karus. And yes, see if we can have a modest increase in the number of blog posts.
At long last, another proper blog post. I am picking up the series on my homebrew classic D&D rules. We were getting into the rules of play. Last time, we discussed experience and progress. For this post, we will look at time and movement.
Time
I handle time reasonably straightforwardly. I define a Dungeon Exploration Turn as lasting ten minutes. A Combat Round, I set at ten seconds. The latter is perhaps a bit controversial. I follow Delta’s reasoning, which has served me fine.
What about time in the wilderness? When I wrote the version of Hackbut that we currently use, we played Castle Xyntillan, which does not include wilderness exploration. In our current campaign, Planet Karus, we do hex crawl. There, a turn takes up a full day, which, if needed, can be divided into two sets of three watches. (A full write-up of the wilderness rules we use in Planet Karus can be found here.)
A final unit of time that does get mentioned in Hackbut is downtime. Again, my use of this has shifted with the campaigns. In Castle Xyntillan, a downtime turn is always a week. In Planet Karus, we now use 1:1 timekeeping, so downtime lasts however much real-world time has passed.
Movement
Moving on to movement (sorry), the first thing to tackle is scale. The standard scale in the dungeon is 1 inch = 5 feet. Movement rates are expressed in inches. Dungeon maps use 10-foot squares. (In the wilderness, we use hex maps with a standard scale of 6 miles.)
In combat, you can move five times your movement rate in feet per round.
While exploring, careful movement, mapping, and checking for traps are assumed. You can move 100/3 times your movement rate (sic) during a turn.
Normal movement through cleared areas is at five times your exploration rate. Running is at ten times your regular movement rate.
Yes, these exploration rates are generous and prevent the need to count squares. But they are more realistic (again, see Delta’s many posts on the subject), which makes in-game outcomes more predictable. It also has the nice side-effect that in-game and out-of-game time elapsed while in the dungeon are more or less the same (if the referee keeps track of exploration turns, as they should.)
A side note on movement in the wilderness: as in OD&D, double your movement rate in miles per day. But we do something different, inspired by this lecture by Settembrini and taken from Outdoor Survival: we use movement points, which are spent when entering a hex. The movement rate is converted into one point for every three inches of movement you have. Each terrain type has a movement cost. This works very, very well. I highly recommend it.
A final thing included in the rules is a box on zones and ranges for theater-of-the-mind-style play. This is a hold-over from our days playing The Black Hack. We don’t really ever use abstractions like this anymore, but we do play theater of the mind a lot. If everyone at the table is generous and reasonable, issues related to movement, time, and distance rarely, if ever, become a point of contention. In the grand scheme of things, they seldom matter that much. Only in high-stakes situations does it pay to be precise. Those are the moments when you won’t want to use abstractions anyway.
That’s it for time and movement. Next up, saving throws!
Not dead but dreaming. Welcome to the fourth year in review of this blog and the first post in over nine months. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021, 2022.)
As the title suggests, my duties to science prevented me from blogging and, at some point, even from playing for the better part of the year. The heavy lifting on my Ph.D. thesis is now behind me, so I hope to reactivate the D&D campaign and become at least a bit more active here in the coming year.
But before all that, here’s the customary year-in-review post, with an overview of what we played, some play statistics specific to the current D&D campaign, games acquired, books read, the state of the blog, and a look ahead.
What We Played
Planet Karus
We played ten sessions of Planet Karus. This is my fully homebrewed sword and planet campaign, which we play with my also fully homebrewed classic D&D ruleset, Hackbut.
The campaign has a dedicated website, which should give you a sense of the sources I am tapping into and some of our house rules. Recently, I have also begun posting play reports. These are less fleshed out than those I used to do for Castle Xyntillan and contain no referee commentary. They are very much written for the players’ benefit and my own. But maybe some of you will still get something out of it.
Maybe in the future, I will share some bits from the campaign here, like I previously did with the wilderness monster and treasure method I developed to populate the campaign hex map. We will see.
In any case, this has been a lot of fun to run so far. It is a different experience from running published materials. It is more freeing on the one hand. Anything I fancy goes. At the same time, it is more daunting because I sometimes wonder what, if anything, to prep beforehand, particularly when it comes to wilderness locales. How much is enough? For this, I am always on the lookout for models to emulate. The constraint is that any examples I look to for guidance need to operate within classic D&D rules assumptions.
Boardgames
This year, we enjoyed eleven board game nights.
Across those, we played Skull (4 plays), Inis (4), Mission: Red Planet (Second Edition) (3), Quantum (3), Tigris & Euphrates (2), Cosmic Encounter (1), Kemet: Blood and Sand (1), and Power Grid (1).
This year’s new favorite has to be Mission: Red Planet. It scratches that dudes-on-a-map itch while remaining streamlined and, best of all, accommodates up to six players. It’s as if Cathala and Faidutti sat down to design a game specifically for our group’s needs.
A game of Cosmic Encounter in progress.
Play Statistics
Sessions
We played eleven roleplaying game sessions. One to finish up the MOTHERSHIP: Bloom and ten sessions of Planet Karus, using my classic D&D homebrew ruleset Hackbut.
We basically stopped playing after June. That puts us at an average of a little under two sessions per month in the active period of play.
Attendance
The number of players ranged from 1 to 3 (M = 2.3, SD = 0.6).
We added two new players to our group. So we now have a pool of nine players total. It is nice to have some fresh blood in the mix. The new players shake things up because they bring in their own assumptions, interests, and playstyles.
The top three players were responsible for over 70% of the attendance. That’s even higher than in previous years. I believe this may point to a narrowing interest in joining our group’s RPG sessions. But maybe it also indicates folks have other things going on that prevent them from playing.
Chart of player attendance.
Character Deaths
We had no PC deaths, only retainer deaths (four in total). Deaths per session ranged from 0 to 3 (M = 0.4, SD = 0.9).
The deadliest single session was #13, in which three heavy footmen succumbed to a swarm of giant plague rats while covering the retreat at the end of a very fruitful foray into The Balok.
The MilliWhack rating of the Planet Karus campaign’s 2023 sessions ranged from 93 to 174 (M = 125, SD = 26). Things are becoming way less deadly after a spiky beginning (see the chart below), probably mainly due to more careful play and a more capable party.
Chart of MilliWhack rating of the Planet Karus campaign to date.
Experience Points
The XP per session ranged from 0 to 4,847 (M = 1,120, SD = 1,357).
The most gainful session was also #13. As mentioned, three footmen died, but the party did abscond with many riches from the treasury of the late gremlin king Zaiden on the first level of The Balok.
We currently have a stable of nine player characters. Their levels range from 1 to 4 (M = 1.9, SD = 1.3). These characters have, between them, now acquired 20,644 XP.
Game Acquisitions
All of the below were either direct purchases or Kickstarter reward deliveries.
PDF Game Books: The Monster Overhaul, Mike’s World: The Forsaken Wilderness Beyond, X1 The Isle of Dread, Blackmarsh, Echoes From Fomalhaut #03: Blood, Death, and Tourism, Echoes From Fomalhaut #08: Welcome to Castle Sullogh, HYPERBOREA Ready Reference Sheets, Gathox Vertical Slum, Monster of the Week.
Most of the above were acquired to pilfer game content from for use with Planet Karus or as models to emulate, particularly for the wilderness section of the game. The Monster Overhaul was a Kickstarter delivery. An impressive GM tool, but not one I will be using because it has drifted too far off from classic D&D.
Physical Books: AD&D First Edition Dungeon Masters Guide (Easley cover), Vaults of Vaarn, The Scourge of Northland, TROIKA!.
Vaults of Vaarn I acquired for Planet Karus inspiration. Scourge of Northland and TROIKA! were Kickstarter deliveries. I continue to enjoy Fleming’s publications’ structure, art, and production qualities. TROIKA! was mainly purchased for completionism’s sake. It has really nice paper.
My Easley cover AD&D 1e DMG. I managed to grab a copy in a decent condition for a somewhat reasonable price. Now my three-book set is complete.
Board Games: Sidereal Confluence, Mission: Red Planet (Second Edition) and Modern Art.
Sidereal Confluence is a beast, and I have yet to bring it to the table. As mentioned, Mission: Red Planet is a new favorite. Modern Art we have yet to play as well.
Kit: ZucatiCorp Holmage Dice, DriveThruRPG Game Master Screen (landscape), Chessex Polycarbonate Dice Boot, selection of Mini Meeples.
The above was acquired mainly for use with our in-person marathon session, which I had to cancel. I now have snazzy custom referee inserts for the screen. The mini meeples were long on my list after reading this Reddit post.
The Holmage dice were a birthday gift. I have an actual set still in shrink wrap in my vintage Holmes box. These are for actual playing with. Although I think I still prefer my selection of Gamescience dice more.
My ZucatiCorp Holmage Dice before receiving the classic crayon treatment.
Books Read
Here I introduce a new section where I review the sci-fi and fantasy fiction I consumed over the year. As you will notice, I am, for the most part focusing my reading on the science fantasy and sword and planet genres. The idea is to immerse myself in the genre that best matches the feel I am going for with Planet Karus. I have found it is beginning to pay off in my ability to spontaneously improvise genre-appropriate content on the spot.
Novels: Swordsmen in the Sky, The Jewel in the Skull (History of the Runestaff, #1), While the Gods Laugh, Bazaar of the Bizarre, R.U.R., Servants of the Wankh (Planet of Adventure, #2), The Serpent (Atlan Saga, Volume 1 of 5), The Mad God’s Amulet (The History of the Runestaff, #2), The Dirdir (Planet of Adventure, #3), The Pnume (Planet of Adventure, #4), Red World of Polaris: The Adventures of Captain Volmar, The Sword of the Dawn (History of the Runestaff, #3), The Runestaff (History of the Runestaff, #4), The Eyes of the Overworld (The Dying Earth, #2).
If I had to pick a single book from this list to recommend, it would have to be The Dirdir. The extended sequence set in the alien hunting ground of the Carabas is one part Predator, one part Roadside Picnic, and a hundred percent terrifyingly awesome. (Close contenders were The Mad God’s Amulet and The Eyes of the Overworld.)
My copy of Red World of Polaris. Not CAS’s strongest stories, but of interest to those who are intrigued by his take on sci-fi.
Comics: Het Geheim van de Nitronstralen (Storm, #6), De Legende van Yggdrasil (Storm, #7), DEN Volume 1: Neverwhere, Stad der Verdoemden (Storm, #8), The Adventures of Red Sonja Vol. 1.
Here the pick is easy. DEN is a remarkable feat of psychedelic picaresque storytelling and mind-blowing art. I wish I could find more sword and planet comics in a similar vein.
My copy of DEN, which I managed to find at a reasonable price after long scouring the internet.
The blog received 3,379 views (down by 517 compared to 2022) and 948 visitors (down by 159). A clear decline, likely due to the lack of posting and sharing posts.
After search engines (324 views) and Reddit (106), Beyond Fomalhaut (60), Seed of Worlds (31), and A Distant Chime (21) generated the most traffic to this blog. The usual thanks go out to them.
Looking Back and Ahead
Let’s finish by reflecting on last year’s resolutions, and make some new ones for the year ahead.
Last Year’s Resolutions
We did indeed finish MOTHERSHIP: Bloom which ended suitably grimly.
We played Planet Karus online, but as already stated, at some point, we basically stopped.
Our group continued to play board games once a month, pretty religiously. This has been, for a very long time, the backbone of our group, the thing that keeps us together, and I value it greatly
Blogging basically stopped as well.
Finally, the last resolution was to play an extended in-person game of D&D. We were all set to play a marathon Planet Karus session in mid-November, but I had to cancel at the last moment due to illness.
Upcoming Year
In closing, some resolutions for the new year. I will reactivate the Planet Karus campaign. A weekly game appears to be too tall an order, so we will try to convene once a month instead.
We will also continue our monthly board game night, of course.
I want to run that in-person marathon and have already sent out a new date picker. Fingers crossed that no act of god will prevent it from occurring this time around.
Finally, I hope to return to the occasional spot of blogging here. Monthly is probably still the best target. Less than that is equal to basically no target at all. More than that is very unlikely to happen.
I have more posts on running Castle Xyntillan on the old to-do list, starting with one on our single delve per session doctrine. But I realized there are a few basic rules details I’d like to jot down here so I can then refer to those. Specifically, on time and movement. So we are picking up the thread on the Hackbut homebrew rules series. In the rulebook, we have arrived at the chapter titled “playing the game.” The very first section, which precedes time and movement, is on experience. Let’s get to it.
Sources of experience
All XP in the game is gained from “looting stuff.” Treasure must be returned to a place of safety for it to count towards XP. Mundane items that are kept for use rather than sold do not net XP. Magic items do not net XP, ever. Each gold piece of treasure is worth 1 XP.
Side note on monster XP: I chose not to hand out XP for defeating monsters because I knew I wanted to disincentivize combat. An added benefit is that it reduces bookkeeping on my part. If I were to do monster XP, I would simply hand out 100 XP for each monster HD. In any case, not giving out monster XP has worked fine so far. Any slowdown in advancement is made up for by generous carousing rules, which I will detail some other time.
Dividing experience points
In practice, we tally treasure and commensurate XP at the end of each session. Players are then free to divide the XP between all characters that participated in that session’s expedition as they see fit. Hired help usually does not receive XP, unless they are classed NPCs, in which case a half-share of XP is mandatory.
Side note on dividing XP: Just letting players divide things however they see fit adds a bit of strategizing on a group level. They can choose to have certain characters advance quicker if they figure it would be helpful for the party as a whole. For example, getting that magic-user to the next level where they gain access to more powerful spells. It also adds a small amount of politics to the proceedings, players will petition others for giving more XP to their character. This is fun for our group and differences are usually settled amicably. But I would only recommend this approach to groups with a lot of trust between players.
Advancement
Characters cannot advance more than one level in a single session. Any XP that exceeds the second level above their current one evaporates, and the character’s XP is left one short of the next level.
Multi-classing
Finally, I also detail rules for multi-classing in this section. These are basically the same as described in Original Edition Delta. The only change I made is that I lowered the minimum score required in the new class’ primary ability to 13.
In practice, we have seen less than a handful of multi-classed characters so far. I am left wondering why. Perhaps the slow advancement is just not worth the extra abilities for the majority of the players in our group. If I were playing I know I would be all over a fighter/magic-user combo. Anyway.
…
That’s it for the rules on XP, advancement and multi-classing. Nothing shocking, I know, but at the same time, this is the little engine that makes the whole game run. A simple idea which has had far-reaching consequences for the hobby and beyond.
The next post will be on time, and possibly movement thrown in at the same time.
Another year, another annual review. This marks the third full year of publishing on this website. Let’s hope there are many more yet to come. (Previous annual reviews: 2020, 2021.)
The previous two years were marked by the global pandemic. This year was characterized by our collective emergence from that strange and challenging time and the resumption of what I guess can be called normalcy.
Most COVID measures in this country were lifted by the end of February. I was worried that increasing competing activities would end our weekly roleplaying game. This was luckily not the case, as will become clear. We settled into what I think is a “new new normal” or the old normal, one with fewer plays but still enough to sustain a satisfying campaign.
Table of contents:
What we played: Castle Xyntillan, Planet Karus, MOTHERSHIP: Bloom, boardgames.
Play statistics: sessions, attendance, character deaths, experience points.
Game acquisitions: roleplaying game PDFs and physical books, boardgames.
Looking ahead: last year’s resolutions, upcoming year.
What we played
Castle Xyntillan
We played a fourth and final season of Castle Xyntillan from mid-January to mid-April numbering seven sessions in total. These are all written up here on the blog. (See the index.) It was a very satisfying conclusion to a very memorable campaign, one that taught me a lot about how to run classic D&D and also gave me the insight and the confidence to start creating my own material. This brings me to the next thing we played.
Planet Karus
We went on a bit of a hiatus as I finalized preparations for a new campaign named Planet Karus. Its setting is homebrew sword and planet inspired by other planets, including Eternia, Skaith, and Pandarve. For the rules, we continue to use Hackbut, with some setting-specific tweaks sprinkled on top. My ambition is for this to be the campaign world where I can run classic D&D games until the end of my days. So one goal was to keep it compatible with baseline classic D&D, to make it easy to develop things using stock tools out there (like the original book’s treasure tables). But to use a setting that resonates with my younger self’s first encounters with fantasy, which is not EDO, but decidedly more science-fantasy, horrific and weird. (This approach was inspired, among other things, by this great now-gone blog post by Robert Parker.) The idea is to just reskin classic D&D where necessary. To basically reinterpret classic D&D’s implied setting through a sword and planet lens. (More on Planet Karus can be found on the campaign’s site.)
Anyway, we played seven sessions of Planet Karus from early September to early December. Let’s call it Season 1. I have not written those up on the blog here, contrary to my stated intentions in the previous annual review. Writing up CX was fun and useful but also quite a bit of work. The posts found an audience because they were about a published module. The same does not apply to my homebrew campaign even if I at some point publish the materials here (as was previously suggested by commenter DC.) I am keeping notes, of course, if only for my own reflection and analysis. But those are too rough for public consumption. It will probably stay that way. It makes running the game more sustainable, and I can focus my blogging energies on other types of posts.
MOTHERSHIP: Bloom
We concluded the year’s roleplaying with frequent player HB taking over the game-mastering reigns from me for another MOTHERSHIP miniseries. This time we used the latest preview versions of the first edition rules and the module BLOOM by Daniel Hallinan. I’ve enjoyed playing through this so far. The module gave me some good underwater sci-fi vibes in the vein of The Abyss (and, I am told, also Underwater) as well as bio horror along the lines of Annihilation (novel, film).
We played two sessions in December and will pick it up again in January to finish up in another session or two.
MOTHERSHIP as a system is fine. The changes made to the classes for the new edition are definitely improvements over the original version. But I continue to feel like the skill-tree design is a poor fit for a game that purports to be “old school” in its sensibilities. I notice players tend to look at their character sheet when they are faced with a problem, looking for something they can roll against to solve it rather than engaging with the fiction directly. Also, at character creation, choosing skills is still a significant speed bump, as it invites planning ahead and offers a large number of choices at the outset. Better to randomize them, like we do with magic-user spells in classic D&D.
Boardgames
We sat down eight times this year for face-to-face board games on the last Friday of the month. BoardGameGeek tells me these were the games we played in order of the number of plays.
King of Tokyo and Skull are quick games that we like to break out at the end of an evening when we are too tired for the big stuff, but we do not want to go home just yet. “Tokyo” is always a riot, and Skull is a great shortcut to some of the bluffing kicks one also gets from games like poker.
Dragomino is a kids’ game I acquired for my boys (who are now getting into tabletop gaming themselves, an exciting development.) It is surprisingly appealing even for adults as well.
7 Wonders mainly sees table time when we have a big turnout, and some of the other meatier games’ player limits are exceeded. I have a love-hate relationship with this one, I find the engine-building aspect of it kind of tedious, but I have yet to find a satisfying replacement.
This brings us to the top three.
Quantum I acquired second hand late 2021. I have been looking to add it to my collection ever since my game design consultancy days when I was acquainted with its designer. It is quite good and strikes a nice balance between quick-to-play and crunchy. The way it uses chunky six-sided dice is elegant and satisfying.
Galaxy Trucker I received for my birthday in spring. Another one that had been sitting on the list for a long time already. Ever since playing Space Alert, I have been a Vlaada Chvátil fan. Galaxy Trucker has recently had a revamp, and the components are all very nice. I also love how, as is usually the case with Chvátil games, the how-to-play is integrated with the rulebook. This game was an instant hit with the group. It is very funny and plays really fast, but it still has a satisfying amount of crunch. It feels like riding a rodeo on a chaos-generating engine that is quickly tearing itself apart.
And finally, my personal favorite, Inis, which we now play with the Seasons of Inis expansion so that it allows for five players. I adore this game. It looks gorgeous, plays really quick, scratches that “dudes on a map” itch in a way that is not obvious, and does not lead to analysis paralysis like its close contender Kemet does. Highly recommended.
Play statistics
Moving on to some data and analysis of how often we played, what the attendance was like, and the two most important data points in the D&D resource economy: character deaths and experience points. What follows is limited to our classic D&D roleplaying sessions, which continue to take place online.
Sessions
We had a total of 16 sessions in 2022 (down from a whopping 37 in 2021). That is an average of 1.3 sessions per month (SD 1.2). In 2021, by contrast, the average was 3.1 (SD 1.5). This can be explained for the most part by the long break between the final Castle Xyntillan season and the new Planet Karus campaign kicking off. If we removed the months when no plays happened from the data, we get an average of 2 sessions per month in 2022 (SD 0.8) versus 3.4 in 2021 (SD 1.2). Still lower, but not as dramatic a drop as it would first seem, and it can largely be explained by the fact that one Friday a month is now devoted to face-to-face board games.
Attendance
Our group still consists of seven players (eight, if you include the undersigned). Two players did not participate in any of our roleplaying at all (they did join in on the board games occasionally). This year we had an average of 2.6 players per session (SD 0.7). That is down from 3.7 (SD 1.4) in 2021. However, in the last season of 2021, that number is 2.6 (SD 0.7). So things are staying pretty stable. Barring significant life events that impact the ability to participate, this looks like the “new new normal” for our group for the foreseeable future. As in the previous year, the top three players are once again responsible for 66% of attendance, but players did trade places.
Chart of player attendance.Chart of number of players.
Character deaths
And now, for the statistic that all classic D&D referees care about the most: character deaths. It is interesting that I now get to compare a module written by someone known for their grasp of classic module design, and my own home campaign, in terms of deadliness (as well as XP, for which see the next section). Just to reiterate, rules and procedures have remained basically the same: My homebrew rules Hackbut, which largely has parity with OD&D, B/X D&D, and its retro-clones.
Castle Xyntillan season 4: Seven sessions, zero player-character deaths, and 11 retainer deaths, for an average of 1.6 deaths per session (SD 2.1). The single deadliest session was #37 in which five retainers died when the company breached the Crusaders’ Tomb, went head-to-head with undead crusaders, faced off against the Giant Snail Guardian, and pilfered the treasury.
Planet Karus season 1: Seven sessions as well, four player-character deaths, eight retainer deaths, for a total of 12 deaths, and an average of 1.3 per session (SD 1.5). The deadliest single session was #4, in which the same player lost two characters, and two retainers died as well, during a foray into The Balok (the campaign’s current tentpole dungeon). One fighter was killed by a volley of gremlin javelins. (Gremlins are Planet Karus’ equivalent of kobolds.) As a result, a porter failed his morale check and fled back out of the dungeon, triggering a trap on the way out. The same player’s second fighter later stepped on a large venomous snake while heading back out of the dungeon and failed his save versus death. The last retainer also failed their morale roll at this incident and fled into the dungeon’s darkness to be captured by boogieman slavers (read: hobgoblins). (The party later declines to pay the ransom.)
So, it looks like Planet Karus is about as deadly as Castle Xyntillan, but we see more PC deaths on Planet Karus. This can be explained by the fact that the number of monsters and their deadliness is about equal, but PCs in Planet Karus are just starting out and so have far fewer hit points to rely on when things go south.
Chart of character deaths.
Experience points
Moving on to the flip side of character deaths: The sweet rewards reaped for braving danger in the form of experience points. I should point out that I only reward XP for treasure recovered at the traditional rate of 1 GP = 1 XP. (Although in Planet Karus, we use a silver standard for flavor reasons, the game is balanced accordingly, basically as Delta recommends here.)
Castle Xyntillan season 4: The company gained 14,800 XP, all in a single haul in the very last session when they ransacked the suite of the countess. That amounts to an average of 2,114 XP per session (SD 5,594). By comparison, in the previous year’s gaming, they collected 132,796 XP, on average, 5,533 XP per session (SD 5,281). A pretty big drop which can be explained by the fact that by this point, they had cleared out most of the easy-to-reach treasure. The campaign ended with the company on average at level 4.4 (min 1, max 6, SD 1.9). Between the active characters, they had collected 126,926 XP.
Planet Karus season 1: Here the picture is quite different. So far, the party has collected 7,071 XP in total, averaging 780 XP per session (SD 1,830). Am I being too stingy? I know there are big hauls tucked away in the tentpole dungeon, but players have been repeatedly repelled by the gremlin tribe that has made the first level their home base and appear to have lost interest in making a concerted effort to oust them. This dungeon has been set up more as a classic assault-style scenario in the vein of the original G series of modules. It is something the players are less accustomed to, and it is certainly a very different approach compared to Castle Xyntillan.
The single biggest haul (5,000 XP) was actually from a wilderness adventure where they cleaned out the treasury of a clan of swinelings holed out in a somewhat remote swamp. (Swinelings are the Planet Karus equivalent of hobbits. Don’t ask.) This may have taught them the “wrong” lesson.
The current total XP for the party is 5,631. The average level is 1.3 (SD 0.5), although 2 out of 7 characters in the active stable have managed to reach level 2. I guess I will not change anything about the treasure distribution for now, but if I place new treasure, I will err on the side of making it easier to reach.
So much for play statistics. Let’s move on to the games I acquired and then wrap up with some blogging numbers.
Game acquisitions
I will not account for every acquisition that sits in my DriveThruRPG account. When I went through the 2022 purchases, I was kind of shocked by the volume. I will call out some notable items instead.
The book I actually pulled things from, technological items in particular, is Hyperborea 3e. I love the vibe of the items in this book, and they can be transplanted easily into any classic D&D rules framework.
(I should also mention Warriors of the Red Planet, Xuhlan and Carcosa; three books that I have drawn significant inspiration from for Planet Karus, but which I had already acquired some time ago.)
I also got the Hill Cantons Compendium II specifically for the white wizard class in there, which I adapted for my own Planet Karus “celestial wizard” NPC class (there are no clerics in this setting, so I needed an alternative source of magical healing).
And then, on the physical front, I was very pleased to acquire both Dungeon Geomorphs Set One to Three and Monster & Treasure Assortment Sets One-Three to add to my very nice Holmes Basic box. I also decided I wanted to own the core three books for AD&D 1e, and managed to acquire a Players Handbook and Monster Manual, both with the Easley covers, which I have a particular fondness for. All that’s left is to find a reasonably priced Dungeon Masters Guide.
Dungeon Geomorphs and Monster & Treasure Assortment.
AD&D 1e Players Handbook.AD&D 1e Monster Manual.
I also received some physical books from kickstarters I backed. Knock! Issue Three was once again fun to leaf through and sits nicely next to the first two editions. Through the Valley of the Manticore I liked for its solid art and compact yet comprehensive design. And Into the Odd Remastered is a refreshing example of what can be achieved by a formally trained graphic designer when they take a stab at a game book.
On the board games front, I managed to limit myself to two acquisitions, one for my birthday and one for Christmas. My shelf space thanks me. These were the aforementioned Galaxy Trucker, and Power Grid, another game I have played in the past but was still missing from my collection of classics.
Blogging
I did way less blogging this year. Seven Castle Xyntillan reports and two entries into the new “Running Xyntillan” series (on magic swords, and on downtime). That’s nine posts versus 33 in 2021. A big drop. A lot of my creative energies went into completing Planet Karus materials instead. The first note I wrote towards this when I was still following the Gygax 75 framework that I would later abandon dates from 29 August 2021.
My writing energies were otherwise pretty depleted by a lot of heavy lifting on my Ph.D. labors. I will have to complete my thesis in the upcoming year, so it is unlikely I will have a lot more room for blogging. But I will try to hit about a post a month.
Views
On to some readership statistics: The blog had 3,896 views and 1,108 visitors. In 2021 the numbers were 3,519 and 1,188, respectively. So about the same despite way fewer posts. This can be explained by those Castle Xyntillan play reports being of enduring interest to people who are (considering) running it themselves.
I have expanded the promotion of my posts beyond Twitter and the OSR Discord to also comment on the weekly r/osr blogroll curated by u/xaosseed on Reddit, and my new-ish Mastodon account.
The top sources of traffic are search engines (329 views) and Reddit (191). These are followed by a bunch of classic D&D blogs: Beyond Fomalhaut (run by Melan, the designers of Castle Xyntillan, 91 views). Twitter has yielded a mere 23 views. The final referrers I will mention are A Distant Chime (home to a great Castle Xyntillan campaign write-up, 16 views), Tales of the Rambling Bumblers (Joshua was kind enough to link to an old post of mine about ability checks, 11 views), and DIY & dragons (11 views).
Looking ahead
Okay, let’s wrap this thing up with a reflection on last year’s resolutions and make some new ones for this year.
Last year’s resolutions
2022’s notable achievements include bringing our Castle Xyntillan campaign to a satisfactory conclusion and starting up the new Planet Karus one, which, as planned, is indeed so far 100% homebrew.
I also did manage to get Quantum to the table, but not my other acquisition from back in 2021, Tigris & Euphrates, which I will have to amend soon.
Blogging-wise, I did not continue writing play reports and also did not continue the series on Hackbut. Reasons for the former, I have already addressed. I might revive the Hackbut series, but probably not by continuing to go through the rules section by section.
Finally, we ended up not adding any new players to our group, although I did ask around and got some enthusiastic responses from potential candidates. This year I hope to actually get them to join in.
Upcoming year
And finally, here are some new year’s resolutions: We will finish up the MOTHERSHIP: Bloom miniseries. Then we will pick up the Planet Karus campaign again, and I hope to run 2-3 seasons this year. One in winter, one in spring, and one in the fall. Maybe we can hit 20+ sessions this year? That would be great.
We will obviously also continue our last Friday-of-the-month board game nights, of course. Those are always great.
Blogging-wise, as already mentioned, I hope to post maybe once a month this year. Who knows if I will actually manage that. But this monster-size annual review is at least a solid start.
And finally, a “dream” I’ve had for some time is to get together physically with the group and play D&D for more than a few hours but do one of those marathon sessions we used to always do over the weekend when we were teenagers. Maybe rent a holiday home? It would be great to play face-to-face again sometime. Roll physical dice, scribble maps, and stain character sheets with crisps-soiled fingers.
The second year of blogging has come to a close, time to take stock. Contrary to my hopes and expectations this time last year, 2021 turned out to be the second year of playing in times of a global pandemic. In spite of this, we managed to continue our gaming.
What we played
So what did we play? Most notably, I refereed two seasons of Castle Xyntillan using my homebrew classic D&D rules, Hackbut. Season two ran for 14 sessions, from late January to late April. Season three lasted 10 sessions and ran from mid-September to mid-December. In between these, from early May to mid-July, one of our players stepped up to “warden” a season of Mothership. We played one session of The Haunting of Ypsilon 14 and 10 sessions of Gradient Descent. Over summer I ran a two-shot of The Coming of Sorg, again using Hackbut. When circumstances allowed for it, we managed to resume our monthly face-to-face boardgame night. To celebrate, I acquired Kemet Blood & Sand, which according to many is the pinnacle of Matagot “dudes on a map” games. We managed to play this three times between late July and late October.
With regards to our ongoing Castle Xyntillan campaign I kept pretty extensive records. What follows is some data on attendance, character deaths, and experience points. Just for kicks.
Attendance
Like last year, our play group numbers 7 players, not including me. Most sessions had 2-3 players attending, with average attendance being 3,6. Season 2 had an average attendance of 4,4, season 3’s average attendance was 2,6. This drop in attendance is probably the result of a number of factors, including big life events for at least one of our players, and perhaps also some fatigue with online gaming setting in for a few others.
Attendance
The top 3 players were good for 66% of the attendance. This was 56% in the previous year. This shift can be explained mostly by one of our group not participating at all this year, and another only playing in the beginning of the year.
Number of players
Character deaths
Ah, killing player-characters, the thing every classic D&D referee enjoys doing the most. I am kidding of course, but still, deaths is a good indication of how hazardous my game is. Seeing as how a key distinguishing aspect of classic D&D is that it is a game of challenge for the players, character death serves as a reasonable proxy for it.
Deaths
In total, 10 player-characters died in the dungeon. That’s an average of 1,7 per session. The most PCs killed in one session was four, which happened during session #18 when the company had an ill-fated run-in with a bunch of ghouls.
Retainers were unluckier still, with a total of 27 perishing across this year’s two seasons, for an average of 2,3 per session. The most retainers killed in one session was five, during session #33, when the company got lost in a pocket dimension forest.
Overall, 37 characters were killed by the dungeon, for an average of 1,5 per session. I don’t have a baseline to compare these numbers to, so I really can’t say if I run an extraordinarily deadly game, or if I am soft-pedaling it. I guess over 1 PC killed on average every session is kind of rough, but I don’t go out of my way to try and slaughter them. In fact I often feel bad about not giving the players the challenge they deserve. Maybe this number is an indication I should relax a little on that front.
Experience points
In any case, was all that dying good for anything? I would say so. The players brought back 132.796 XP. This breaks down to 84.754 XP in season 2, and 48.042 XP in season 3. That is an average of 5.533 XP per session (6.054 XP in season 2, 4.804 XP in season 3). I think it is safe to say Castle Xyntillan is a pretty generously stocked dungeon, but not overly so. I think this nicely offsets its lethality. Yes it is easy to die in the dungeon. But it is is also easy for players to get back into the game reasonably quickly, and level up past those first fragile levels.
Experience points
All of this XP is from treasure recovered, at a rate of 1 GP equals 1 XP. I award no XP for killing monsters and in case you are wondering, magic items also do not yield any. Another important thing to note is that players get to divide XP between all player-characters that participated in an expedition as they see fit. I do not enforce shares for player-characters.
The highest single haul was 15.900 XP, in session #21 (in season 3, the biggest score was 11.660 XP during session #34). In general, it is those wine barrels in the cellar that are the real money makers.
The seven currently active player-characters between them have acquired 106.393 XP. The average party level is 4.
The lowest level character is Guillemette, a level 1 thief, with 432 XP collected over 4 sessions. But this character saw no action this year. The next lowest-level character is Robert, a level 2 cleric, at 2.529 XP, all of which was acquired in one session.
The highest level character is Hendrik, a level 6 magic-user, at 36.000 XP, collected over a whopping 24 sessions of careful, diligent play. Level 6 is the highest level in the game and the magic-user is of course the class that requires the highest amount of XP. Getting there was quite an achievement, well-earned.
Closely following Hendrik is Jürg, a level 6 fighter / level 1 thief, at 31.600 XP collected over 14 sessions. Jürg is the only multi-classed character in the game. I wonder if more will follow now that some of them are plateauing and have no use for XP anymore. It’s also worth noting Jürg began life as a retainer (and husband) of this player’s previous PC, Bartolomea.
Blogging
Moving on, what happened with the blog? I mostly wrote play reports, for Castle Xyntillan seasons 2 and 3 (see the index), as well as the Coming of Sorg two-shot (a, b).
WordPress tells me I had 3.519 views and 1.188 visitors over the past year. This is of course very modest, and in truth I pay little attention to this sort of stuff. I do promote my posts on the OSR discord server and my twitter, but not anywhere else really.
I got quite a bit of traffic through referrals from Beyond Fomalhaut (thanks Melan). Most of my visitors are from the anglosphere (US, UK, CA) and also from The Netherlands of course.
Looking ahead
I hope I will be able to keep our weekly online D&D game going. It is definitely something that keeps me sane, and a welcome outlet for my many creative urges. I think we have one more season of Castle Xyntillan in us. I might try to add a new player or two to our group, so that we push the average attendance back up to the 3-4 mark. We are a close-knit group though, so recruiting will have to rely on our immediate social networks.
After Xyntillan, I think I want to try my hand at running material of my own fabrication. I have come to realize that this is the purest form of D&D, homebrewing everything, and I want to experience it first-hand. I have been quietly chipping away at a mid-size dungeon (about 120 rooms across three levels) and am about half-way through completing it. It is strongly OD&D inspired, but filtered through my personal fantasy canon, which is very much in a science fantasy vein and includes things like Masters of the Universe, Storm, and The Incal.
Of course, once we are able to, I look forward to once again playing games face-to-face, but that will most likely mean more boardgames. I recently acquired both a copy of Tigris & Euphrates, and Quantum and I hope to get those to the table in 2022.
In terms of blogging, I will continue to write up play reports for as long as I referee games. I like keeping a record of what happened and most of all reflecting on what went well and what I can improve on as a referee. Occasionally I get a comment saying others are getting some use out of them as well, which is always nice. I also intend to continue the series on Hackbut, although we have now hit the section on running the game, which may lend itself a little less well to the kind of posts I have been doing so far.
In any case, despite circumstances, 2021 was another good year for me for gaming, and I hope to maintain this in the year to come, bat plague be damned.
“Retainer” is the catch-all term I use in my game for NPCs that accompany player characters on adventures. I make no distinction between hirelings, henchmen, mercenaries, etc. In some editions, each serves a particular purpose: Some accompany PCs on wilderness treks, others also go with them into dungeons, etc. In our current campaign, town is mostly handled off-screen and we don’t do wilderness treks. It’s all about the dungeon crawl, so different types of retainer don’t add anything.
The reason for having rules for retainers in Hackbut is mainly so players can pad out their expeditionary force with some extra muscle. This way player-character death rate is reduced, without having to dial down the lethality of the campaign. Retainers are usually the first ones to drop, as anyone who has been following my Castle Xyntillan play reports will know. Retainers also add to the party’s carrying capacity, which nicely complements the rather strict encumbrance rules we enforce.
Okay, so how do they work? The short answer is that I lifted the Morale & Men rules module by Istvan Boldog-Bernad and Sandor Gebei published in Castle Xyntillan (as well as Echoes from Fomalhaut #1). These are a coherent, comprehensive, but straightforward set of rules that fit on a single A4 page. They cover:
Determining the availability of retainers that takes into account settlement size, and includes light & heavy footmen, bow & crossbowmen, and mounted troops
Recruiting retainers
Determining their level
Loyalty and morale (very close to the rules in B/X, with a few clever tweaks)
I more or less lifted these rules wholesale, so I won’t describe them here. I will note the few small changes and additions I made.
Rather than having all retainers be 1 HD by default, I say that non-combatants are 0 HD, and men-at-arms are 1 HD but have no class.
I add a line to the table for determining availability of classed NPCs. These are the ones for whom a level and class can be determined as the original rules module suggests. The probabilities and amounts for village, town, city and metro are: 10% 1d2, 10% 1d4, 20% 1d6, 30% 1d8.
These classed NPCs don’t take a per-expedition wage as the others do, but instead insist on a half-share of the expedition’s treasure haul (and as a result, because of the way my XP rules work, they also get a half-share of the XP).
I say that unclassed retainers can be promoted into a level 1 class by assigning XP to them. For 0 HD this requires an initial expenditure of 1000 XP. I took this rule, like so often, from Delta.
I added stat blocks for the basic retainer types to my rules booklet, which are largely based off of those created by Nic, with just a few tweaks to bring them in line with my flavor of classic D&D.
And that’s it, really. These rules have served us so well hardly a game has gone by we do not have at least a few retainers join the party. I cannot count the number that have perished in those haunted halls of Castle Xyntillan. At least one of the currently still active player characters, a level 6 fighter now, started out as a lowly porter. In short I can’t imagine playing classic D&D without retainers, and this set of rules make running them a breeze.
That’s it for this Hackbut rules post. With this, we have also come to the end of the equipment section of the rules booklet. The next section is “playing the game”, which is substantial, but also in many cases maybe less interesting to blog about section by section. So I will have to see how I will go about that. In any case, to be continued.
Update (2023-03-30): The series continues! Read on for all about XP, leveling up, and multi-classing.
Time for another Hackbut rules post. This one is about encumbrance and inventory management.
I considered sticking with the traditional way of tracking encumbrance, but none of the systems in the original editions felt right to me. They were either too abstracted, or too unwieldy. Of course, in contemporary old school D&D circles, slot-based encumbrance tracking has become a house rule many people adopt. We were familiar with this approach from playing The Black Hack, and liked it, so I decided to adopt it for Hackbut as well.
My goal with this particular iteration of slot-based encumbrance was to have a set of rules that would be easy to remember and adjudicate, something that would make inventory management meaningful and enjoyable, but also, to have something that would be compatible with the traditional movement rates, and weight allowances that go along with that.
Let’s get to the rules. Here’s a bullet-wise rundown. I’m sure a lot of this will be familiar to those versed in contemporary old school D&D gaming.
A character’s carrying capacity is a number of slots equal to 10 plus their STR mod
Most things take up one item slot
For on-the-fly adjudication purposes, slots are roughly equal to 1/3 stone, 5 lb, or 2 kg
When you exceed your capacity — and once again at every multiple of it — your movement rate drops by 3″, and physical rolls incur a cumulative -1 penalty
The first three slots are so-called quick-draw slots, readying an item from any other slots takes a round
Small items stack to a slot — most notably, 100 coins take up one slot
Armor takes up a number of slots equal to its AC “bonus” (e.g. light armor, AC 7, takes up two slots)
We ignore clothing, worn items, and very small single objects for encumbrance purposes
And that’s it, basically. I will close with some further notes on my thought process here.
I did not use the raw STR score because that’s too swingy. In general in Hackbut I use the ability score bonuses rather than the raw scores to ensure abilities don’t matter too much.
I went with a simple progression between the MV tiers. In particular, the break point for MV 6″ is some times at 1.5 or 1.33 times the base capacity. I dialed in the slots and weights to a slot so that I could simply have breakpoints at each multiple of the base capacity. Again, easy to remember.
The weight a slot is roughly equivalent to I dialed in by analyzing the classic editions, some of the main retroclones, but also OED and Knave.
I played around with the number of coins to a slot to get a sensible single coin weight. I landed on 0.05 lb (0.02 kg). By comparison, Delta’s coins are 0.01 lb, and Knave’s are 0.05 lb.
I believe I mentioned this in my series of posts on the equipment lists, but I determined slots for each item mainly by translating from the weights listed in Delving Deeper, and plugging holes where needed using Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy’s Equipment Emporium (PDF).
Finally, keen-eyed readers may be wondering about the slots for armor. I admit this is a deviation from the classic editions. If I were to follow the weights listed, armor would have to take up roughly twice the slots I am currently using. But that is hard to remember, and also possibly too punitive under a system where a lot more stuff adds to your encumbrance than was the case in the original game. So I have made peace with the fact that my armor slots are on the lenient side.
Besides those already mentioned, I would also point to Necropraxis (a, b), Delta (a, b), and Coins & Scrolls as three other sources of inspiration.
And that’s it for encumbrance. Next time I will likely discuss how I handle retainers.
Continuing the discussion of Hackbut’s equipment list, after adventuring gear I now turn to melee weapons, missile weapons, and armor.
This, along with the missile weapons, are a part of the game I agonized over way too much. In particular, I fiddled with their damage and properties until each each was distinct from all the others.
The items on the list are basically a merging of the OD&D and B/X weapons lists. I wanted something that would be broadly compatible with the original editions. So I stuck to the original prices or took averages where editions diverged.
I also did not want to offer situational bonuses for specific weapons against particular types or armor, like for example OED does. I think that is adding a level of complexity that does not fit the simple and fast-playing game we want to be playing.
Melee weapons
Melee weapons
I rationalized the damage as follow: 1d4 for small weapons; 1d6 as a baseline; 1d8 for two-handed weapons with reach or versatile weapons wielded in two hands; 1d10 for two-handed weapons with no reach. (I took some inspiration from Skerples for this.)
If it wasn’t obvious, “reach” means a weapon can be used to fight from the second rank. “Versatile” means the weapons can be wielded in one or two hands. “Oversized” means the weapon takes up two slots.
Pikes, lances, pole-arms and halberds are a bit of a mess in the original editions. I decided to make pikes and lances functionally the same weapon, with certain benefits gained when fighting from horseback. Halberds I used to model large axes that do not quite have reach. Pole-arms I used for the plethora of slashing/stabbing/hooking implements that do have reach.
The keen-eyed observer will see that spears are incredibly useful, as they should be. Note, however, that the 1d8 damage die is only rolled when using the weapon with two hands without reach.
The flail is the two-handed variant that might have actually seen some use in the late medieval and early modern eras. I designed it to basically be the cleric’s alternative for the fighter’s zweihander.
Two-handed flails (Paul Hector Mair)
Missile weapons
Missile weapons
Ammunition
The bows are balanced against each other by trading rate of fire for damage. (My rules don’t have multiple shots for regular bows like some of the classic games do. My combat round lasts 10 seconds. I follow Delta’s reasoning for this.)
The eponymous arquebus is the only deviation from “official” classic D&D weapons. I added it to the list because I wanted to add some early modern flavor to my game and guns are a big part of the battlefield in that era. However, I again went for simplicity, so it is basically a souped-up heavy crossbow that has an even worse rate of fire, and a heavier ammo kit. My main reference for this was the firearms appendix of Lamentations of the Flame Princess.
Those “Ud” notes are usage dice (taken from The Black Hack) which are rolled after each combat. In my game, no-one enjoys counting individual missiles, except when they are remarkable in some way (magic arrows, silver arrows, etc.)
Edit (August 15, 2021): I should add missile weapons all have the same range. All missile attacks are at -1 for every 10 feet beyond the first 30 feet. Thrown weapons can’t go beyond 60 feet. (This, like so much else, was taken from Delta.)
Armor
Armor
Armor really is incredibly straightforward. The only deviation from the classic rulesets is the pricing, for which I followed Delta’s intervention to make chain and plate more expensive.
***
I’m sure there are more teeny tiny details that might catch your eye or you might think are odd. Suffice to say that I don’t think I left any aspect of each single item unconsidered.
That’s all for melee weapons, missile weapons and armor. The next post about Hackbut will most likely be about every OSR blogger’s favorite topic: encumbrance.
