Selling Some Old Stuff

I have some RPG things for sale. All are in that "neat but I'll never use it" category for me. These should be of interest to OSR-minded folks, which is why I'm posting them here first.

Prices are in USD. I usually charge around $3 to ship USPS media mail, but I'm happy to ship another way if you're picky and willing to pay more. Likewise, I'll consider shipping them outside of the US if you're willing to pay extra for shipping.

If you have questions, or want to barter, say so. Here's what I've got:

Central Casting: Dungeons (Task Force Games, 1993). An impressive dungeon generator in the fine, hyper-detailed Central Castings tradition. It's in good shape, though the cover has some corner dings and general buffing. $20. SOLD.

Cities, 2nd Edition (Midkemia Press, 1981). "A guide for all role-playing games - City encounters - City populating - Character catch-up". This book has seen considerable interest in the old-school blogosphere of late. I'd say it's in very good condition - the pages are slightly yellowed from age, and there is a very small stain on one corner of the cover. $15. SOLD.

Best of Dragon Magazine, Vol. III (TSR, 1983).

Best of Dragon Magazine, Vol. IV (TSR, 1985).

Best of Dragon Magazine, Vol. V (TSR, 1986).

Check the links for the details and articles compiled within. There's some fun stuff here, including some nice rules for ruins, demihuman gods, modern weaponry, and notorious character classes like the death-master. All of the Dragon collections are in very good condition. Volume V looks like it has some warping to the bottom of the pages from moisture, the other two are in excellent shape. I'll sell all three for $10. SOLD.

RuneQuest II Core Rulebook (Mongoose Publishing, 2010). Mongoose's acclaimed revision of a Chaosium classic. An excellent, near-mint condition hardcover; I did read it, but you'd never be able to tell. $20.

Thanks for looking.

Back to the Island

Courtesy of my good friend Bret Woods, here's the revised and beautified map of the Isle of Cosk, where most of the action of my campaign setting, The Bladed Earth, will take place. As you can see, the northwestern chunk of the island is a good deal more fleshed out than the rest.

(The original, ugly version is here.)

If anybody's interested in checking out what I've got written up so far, check out the Bladed Earth wiki. It's being worked out in a very haphazard fashion thus far, and it's sort of on hold while I figure out if I want to keep writing it with Labyrinth Lord in mind, or if I want to use the Adventurer Conqueror King system.

Since I became a backer of the game, I have to admit that I'm leaning toward the latter. ACKS looks like it's going to support the style of game I want to run a little more readily than Labyrinth Lord does. Obviously this means that most of the LL-based house rules I've posted to the wiki won't apply.

Anyway, if you'd like to have a look, feel free.

Adventurer Conqueror King

There's a new old-school RPG in the works: Adventurer Conqueror King.

ACK is a retroclone in the sense that Lamentations of the Flame Princess and the upcoming Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG are retroclones. That is to say that they take the mechanics of classic D&D as their starting point, and then tweak them to suit the style of play the game is intended to encourage. In this case, the focus is on "providing integrated support for play across all levels of a campaign". To put it another way, it's built from the ground up to support things like domain building and that old-school D&D "endgame" people love to talk about.

Autarch, the publishing partnership working on Adventurer Conqueror King, includes luminaries like Alexander Macris (of The Escapist fame) and Tavis Allison (of The Mule Abides and numerous D&D products). The game is currently in its Kickstarter phase but it's evidently well fleshed out already, rules-wise, and also looks like it's going to be top-notch in the production value department.

I recommend checking out the design blog for a better idea of what the ACKS (Adventurer Conqueror King System) is all about.

Meekrob the Multi-Talented

I'm not currently running Labyrinth Lord. In fact, I'm not currently running anything at all (though it looks like I'm going to be playing Pathfinder soon). OSR kids like to say that houseruling old school games before you even play them is usually a bad idea.

Too bad. I just spent several hours writing house rules for my as-yet unstarted Labyrinth Lord campaign, formerly known as Cosk but recently renamed "The Bladed Earth" when I started working on the wiki I mentioned a while back.

Specifically, they're multiclassing rules. Oh yeah. A lot of people hate multiclassing. I go back and forth on the idea, but I have to admit that in my youth I made plenty of multiclassed characters. (I also usually gave them goofy thematic names like "Jaxxus Two-Fisted". I think the example multiclassed character in the AD&D 2nd edition Player's Handbook had a name like that. I blame Zeb Cook.)

Anyway, a thread over at the New York Red Box forum got me thinking about multiclassing, so I started to write down the ideas I'd had when I started my wiki and before I ran out of steam. For the most part, it's all by-the-book Labyrinth Lord/Advanced Edition Companion multiclassing, which is not identical to the way it works in AD&D. My additions are heavily influenced (read: ganked unceremoniously, at least in part) from the AD&D 2nd edition-inspired-but-not-really-a-retroclone Myth & Magic RPG. My rules are slightly campaign-specific, but those bits are easily ignored, I think. They are also probably broken as all get out, which is why I'm posting them here. Tell me what needs fixing.

Multiclassing and Switching Classes

Multiclassing

Human characters may multiclass using the rules in the Advanced Edition Companion. Note that in The Bladed Earth, demi-human characters cannot multiclass.

Switching Classes

Human and demi-human characters also have the option of switching classes. To do this, a character must meet all the requirements of the new class and must declare the intention to switch classes when reaching a new level of experience. At that point, the character does not progress in the original class - he is regarded as being "in training" for the new class. The character must still accrue enough XP to reach the next level in its original class, at which time he begins the new class at 1st level, gaining all the advantages of the new class.

For example, Farkas, a human fighter, accrues 8,125 XP, which would make him 4th level in that class. Instead of advancing to 4th level in the fighter class, his player announces that Farkas will switch his class to magic-user. He remains a 3rd level fighter (with all the abilities of such) until he reaches 16,251 XP. At that point, he becomes a 1st level magic-user, adding that class' advantages to his fighter abilities.

As when multiclassing, the saving throws and attack values of a character that switches classes are equal to the best values available for all of the character's classes. Likewise, the notes on conflicting abilities from the Advanced Edition Companion's multiclassing rules apply to characters that switch classes.

A character cannot go back to advancing in a previous class after switching classes.

Demi-human characters cannot switch classes until reaching the maximum level available to them in their current class. (For training purposes, assume that race-classes, such as "elf", reach the next level at half again as much XP as it took to reach their maximum level.)

For example, Goldfinch, whose class is elf, accrues 600,001 XP and reaches 9th level, the maximum for that race-class. He would have to train until he reached 900,001 XP to switch classes.

Demi-human characters cannot switch to classes forbidden to their race.

In all cases of multiclassing and switching classes, the Labyrinth Lord has final say on which class combinations are allowed.