There has been a bit of hubbub - and thus, presumably, a bit of interest - in the social spheres through which I find myself floating in recent vintage regarding the original edition and its wargame roots. As such, I'm pressured a bit to share a pet project I'd been working on - one that I'd hoped would get me back to the table - that presents just that: an integration of 0e and Chainmail mechanics, presented together and seamless, as RAW as possible - allowing for clarifications that I'd run into at the table to date.
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The books are not finished. They are a jumble of rules, written legibly, but wrought with typos induced by the use of voice to text in the generation of descriptive paragraphs. However they are usable - and they present the spirit of the original rules in their entirety (including rules for griffon riders darting around dragons hundreds of feet in the air; including rules for catapult fire, mounted atop the aft-castle of naval war galleons; and for, of course, delving deeply into the mystic underneath below) as they would have been on original release.
But about WW&W? As returning readers will know, I had been working on my own twist of the original edition - Weapons, Wits, & Wizardry - which I had been working towards as an actual play last year. I will continue to work on WW&W - it is after all my own complete-genius heartbreaker - but in play, I found that my own preconceptions from future editions were polluting my judgements. I was integrating 1e elements, B/X elements, on the fly - I was instinctively incorporating mechanics from other games in the same genre to fit into niches while also experimenting with other resolution practices - e.g. "proficiency dice" - with wanton abandon.
This project was an attempt to, realizing the accidental inclusions (specifically stocking: stocking dungeon treasure is totally different in B/X than 0e!), understand the rules of their own accord, to enter into them with a clean slate, and to assimilate the spirit of the game - as it was in its first incarnation. Once I understood the foundation - only then would I be safe to build upon it and recapture the zeitgeist.
So here it is.
These are the rules I'm going to spin the Ash Coast game back up with - tweak, as needed - and ideally, re-release with art, readable layout, and a fancy license. I hope they help - if nothing else, showing off exactly how much was packed into those four booklets - three brown, one blue and spiral bound.
And now the only question is... what do I call it?
Delve on, readers!
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