New Year, New Game

Now that the holidays are over and we’re into the new year, I’d like to pay more attention to the blog again. I have to admit, over the holidays I grew frustrated with Harrow (my in-process hack of Into the Odd), and spent much of winter break poring over the Gygaxian ramblings that are OD&D. The simplicity and hackability intrigued me, and after stumbling across Whitebox: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game (FMAG), I was hooked.

I’ve started running Dyson Logos’s mini-megadungeon Dyson’s Delve using a lightly houseruled Whitebox: FMAG. Paul over at Paul’s Gameblog has done some great work with investigating the inferred setting and factions inside Dyson’s Delve, which I’ll be using to fill in the background of the delve. The house rules I’ll be using are as follows:

• No Clerics. For party healing, I cribbed the 5e rest mechanic (rest, eat a ration, roll a HD to heal that many HP).
• Thieves have 1/2 HD progression (as Wizards)
• Add HD to your to-hit roll.
• HD are d6
• Light weapons deal 1d4 damage, hand weapons 1d6, two-handed 1d8
• Ascending armor class, unarmored AC 10
• Shields shall be splintered
• Slot-based encumbrance, with a number of inventory slots equal to your Strength score
• Ability scores of 15 or higher grant +1 bonuses to various rolls. No penalties.

The two sessions so far have gone reasonably well. A hireling was burnt alive by fire beetles, and the party dwarf had his throat ripped out by a giant ferret. Though they’ve only recovered about 100gp so far. I’ve played fast and loose with movement rules and dungeon turns, instead rolling an overloaded encounter die whenever the party moved between rooms, down a hallway, or searched a room. It seemed to work well enough.