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My submission to the Markdown Jam has been submitted! Check it out below.
Barrows & Basilisks is my take on the original 1974 rules. It’s heavily based on the retroclone Delving Deeper by Simon Bull, and White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game by Charlie Mason (itself based on Swords & Wizardry by Matthew J. Finch). The lack of ability scores is a house rule of mine, though I discovered after the fact that Nicolas Dessaux had already experimented with omitting ability scores in his Searchers of the Unknown game.
Barrows & Basilisks also incorporates some of the best ideas I could steal from OSR bloggers like Dan Collins, Brendan S., and Skerples. Among them are: HD as to-hit bonus Silver standard Accurate medieval prices Stone encumbrance Shields shall be splintered
Barrows & Basilisks is currently narrow in scope, and only provides rules for character creation and simple dungeon crawling. In the future I plan to add expansions with advanced classes, rules for overland travel and domain management, mass combat, and more. It strives to emulate a time period like the Early Middle Ages (or the very start of the High Middle Ages) in Western Europe, with feudalism still present, plate armor and heavy cavalry rare, and monarchies with centralized governments still in their infancy.
The “source code” for the rules was written in Markdown (specifically the pandoc flavor) using a simple text editor, then converted to PDF and HTML using pandoc and LaTeX (specifically the TeX Live distribution).
Cover image and background art by Darkmoon_Art and Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay.
