Sickle Swords of the Exiles
–Tuesday Treasure

We’ve roughly defined the mystic/magic philosophy that we will use in our game. In our world, there is a mystical power field that permeates the universe. We’re calling it “The Force” until we can come up with something better.

Clerics use this power to perform magic by meditating and letting the energy flow through them, using metaphysical discipline to “plug in” to it and channel it for their purposes. Druids use similar methods, but rather than meditating and using mind over body to access the mystic force, they commune with nature and use their understanding of life and the natural world to draw upon it.

Magic-users and illusionists, on the other hand, use science, physics, and mathematical formulae to tap into this force, siphoning off a small amount and harnessing it so they can force it to perform magic for them. It is not a partnership with the force like clerics and druids employ, but rather a method of exploiting its power.

There are beings who call themselves gods and goddesses, and people worship these beings. But they are really no more than very powerful monsters. Clerics may be affiliated with a religion, but that religion is not the source of their power.

We’re more or less sticking with the three-alignment system, but we’re switching the terminology a little to fit in with our worldview:

Light Side: These beings are most often good and generally lawful. Though not necessarily kind or even law-abiding, they will stand together if the final battle comes. Light Side characters are opposed to the Dark Side but they usually do not fight it on a daily basis.

Dark Side: These are usually not terribly nice and often quite evil. Dark Side characters are not always opposed to the Light Side characters, but their views of the world and how it should be run are self-centered and generally chaotic.

Unaligned: These beings are not on either the Light Side or the Dark Side. This does not mean they are in the middle. They are simply not on anyone else’s side. If the final battle comes, most of them will hide until it’s over.

This system is very much in keeping with my view of clerics as mystic warriors, though we do not allow them to use edged weapons.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that spell casters DO NOT need to pre-memorize spells. Time must be spent in study/meditation but any spell the caster knows can be cast at any time. The number of spells per day per level is unchanged, though a higher level slot can be used to cast a lower level spell if desired. To slightly offset the large advantage that this gives spell casters, casting the same spell more than once in a day requires a successful save vs. spells. Subsequent attempts are save at -2 for the third try, -4 for the fourth, and so on.

If the save fails, the spell does not work, but we haven’t decided if it uses up that slot for the day or not.

Also, clerics and druids have “known spells” just as magic-users and illusionists do, though they do not have spellbooks. Clerics simply have patterns in the Force that they recognize and meditate upon, while druids have rune-inscribed stones or pieces of wood that serve as their “spell book.” They usually carry these around on a leather loop.

Finding a new rune stone is how druids acquire new spells, or they can try to create their own rune stone for a spell they want to learn. Clerics learn new spells by finding them written down or are taught them by other clerics. I haven’t quite worked that out yet.

Over the past year I’ve bounced back and forth between several games I’ve wanted to play. Initially, as I’ve written about several times previously, I planned to play a mostly by-the-book Labyrinth Lord game and a houseruled-and-modified-to-the-hilt Swords & Wizardry White Box game. Time limitations and a great deal of respect for the B/X clone Labyrinth Lord made me drop the White Box plans. I was disappointed about the missed opportunity to tinker with the lower power curve of White Box, but I was relieved to have one game to rule them all. And it was a simple one with enough options for all the gaming we’d ever need.

Then the Advanced Edition Companion came. By taking what I liked most about the 1st edition of AD&D and porting it over to the Labyrinth Lord engine, it was truly just about the Perfect Fantasy Game. A couple minor house rules, and we’d be set forever.

But a couple of my ideas for the White Box game have kept gnawing at me, particularly an alternative experience/advancement system, the possible use of ascending armor class, and the greatly simplified way that monsters are handled.

So I began work on my custom advancement system and decided that we’d give it a try in our Forbidden Jungle game. To simplify things for others, I decided to put together class charts listing advancements, and I tacked on an attack bonus to use with AAC. As most of the hard work was done, I decided to add in the rest of the class information into my level tables, as well, to replace the default pages in the Labyrinth Lord book. This way we could work in some of our house rules, such as d6 hit dice for thieves and magic-users getting bonus spells for high intelligence the same way that clerics do for high wisdom. We also tinkered a little with weapon damage values, so those would have to be updated as well.

It was somewhere in there that the trouble started. Because I was re-doing the tables, I began to tweak a few more things. Just here and there as needed. Thief skills needed a little kicker, and the read languages was just not quite right. Fighters needed a slight advantage in attack progression over rangers and paladins, and all three fighter classes needed to begin with better to-hit numbers than the other classes. We’re going to use retainers/henchmen heavily, and I decided to up the maximum number a couple for each point of charisma. And so on.

With my son’s help, we’ve pretty worked our way through the player’s section (except spells) and re-worked everything into our own customized Labyrinth Lord. I have a few reservations about this, as it means we’ll be playing a different game than everyone else who plays LL. But we’re trying to be careful as we go, making sure that none of our tweaks and re-interpretations are drastic.

I think we’ve succeeded so far, and a fourth-level fighter in our game will be analogous to a fourth-level fighter in anyone else’s game. We want our game to be considered “compatible” with other LL or old-school games. Just because our clerics are a bit different in the details than standard clerics won’t really matter. Just because our characters advance using a different system won’t invalidate what it means to be X level. There will be little fiddly bits that are at odds, but there already are in nearly everyone’s game that uses any house rules and I’m not concerned with a conflict over what a seventh-level thief’s pick pockets percentage is.

Now I’m doing monsters, building what is essentially a customized Labyrinth Lord version of the combined monster table from OD&D. I’m tweaking things as I go, with a significant change being the elimination of multiple attack routines and replacing them with a single attack. Many monsters are also undergoing a slight “de-powering” during this process, something which is related to our efforts to make the game slightly more survivable. But if a dungeon we build has “three bugbears” in it, it will be perfectly usable in standard campaigns by simply putting three standard bugbears in it.

This is all sort of a grand experiment. The fun has been upped by my son’s participation and the final product will certainly be the better for it. Will we finish it? Who knows? My ultimate end state would be a printed and coil-bound full version of our game for use in play. That’s a long ways off, as today we’ve got a bunch of tables with simple notes listed in between. But we’re moving ahead a little bit every day, and we’re playing as we go.

Kilgore’s site suffered a level drain at the hands of an undead host server. The unholy abomination has apparently been turned and the adventure can now continue. Unfortunately, a small amount of content (including some reader comments) have been lost.

UPDATE: Hmm. I seem to have lost more content on this site than on some other sites that I run which are hosted on the same server at my hosting provider. I’m not sure if it will be able to be restored from my own back-ups or not.

ANOTHER UPDATE: I think I’ve got everything here more or less restored except for the post I accidentally published with some notes about the Forbidden Jungle. That wasn’t supposed to see the light of day (at least in that format) and was only the beginning of a new idea dump for my own use.