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Showing posts from September, 2019

Reincarnation in RPGs

A couple of  decades ago I became interested in how one could introduce reincarnation as what happens when a character dies.  I even tried fiddling with a new system for measuring the passage of time just to have a way of minimizing the downtime while waiting for a newly born character to grow up and go adventuring.  I realize now I was too tied to RPG as simulation; that every week, month and minute had to be accounted for and most of it in-play. Today I thought of it in a different way.  Imagine instead how it would impact the rest of the party to have their characters age 20 years.  Of course they would have to describe what they had been doing during that time -- manning an outpost on the border, running their own tavern, contemplating the meaning of the universe in some isolated monastery-- something that could be described in a sentence or two.  As well as what encouraged them to come out of retirement-- a new menace, a new apprentice, a promise to a fallen comrade that the

Chaoses Limb: How is it different from Holmes Basic?

Chaoses Limb Chaoses Limb is an OSR retro-clone based on the Holmes Basic Dungeons and Dragons version (~0e). Changes made to the original Holmes Edition: Changes to make it ‘more’ OSR: Race as Class: One of the attributes of 0e is that demihumans have predefined races with the elf being the prime example, combining both fighter and magic user.  I have extended that concept to dwarfs and halflings making halflings multi-class fighter and thief and dwarf multi-class fighter and cleric. The choice for halfling makes sense given his Hobbit origins and Bilbo Baggins the Burglar.  For the dwarf, other than the fact there weren’t many unique combinations left, having some spell use for the dwarf felt like it hearkened back to the dwarfs of myths and fairy tales that predated Tolkien. Zero to Hero: OSR characters start as weak unremarkable characters and only become heroes after many challenges and obstacles have been overcome.  I modified the level progression tables t