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Sunday, December 27, 2009

Old School DnD and Sword and Board

I've recently gotten into the various retro-clones, including Swords & Wizardry, Basic Fantasy, Labyrinth Lord, etc. I had burned out completely on DnD 3e, and I don't personally care for 4e. I've been following a number of blogs, and finally decided to add my two bits to the discussion.

I used to be a very vanilla DnD player, and was not comfortable straying far outside of that. Planescape helped expand my horizons a bit. Then the Necromancer Wilderlands stuff added in a few laser pistols and similar stuff, though it was really rare. Then I picked up Carcosa and started reading Planet Algol. Both of these are pretty fantastic sources of gaming. And they are not shy about adding in robots or Cthulhu monsters. I really enjoy this, and it actually makes the game feel more fun.

I'm also working on my own rpg, which is kind of a mix of OD&D and Traveller. It can be found at: http://home.comcast.net/~danbuter/SwordBoard.pdf if you are interested.

2 comments:

Gonster said...

It seems like Traveller much more than it does OD&D -- not a bad thing, just saying. Overall, I like it.

Why the title Sword & Board by the way?

Dan said...

Sword and Board is a slang term for using a sword and shield in combat. And I definitely was looking through my Traveller books when I made this. The biggest departure from Traveller was that I did not include Lifepaths, as they are really complicated to get right, and for me, not worth the extra time. I could see some kind of Lifepath supplement way in the future, though, if this game actually goes anywhere.