A Hex a Week: Week 2

This week was pretty busy for me so I only managed to complete three pages. This Hex is just North of the one from last week, and is home to the summer pastures of the village from that Hex, currently inaccessible due to a Giant that calls them his own.

A Hex a Week: Week 1

With 2023 coming to a close, I've decided to start a new project in the vein of Dungeon23, to make up for never finishing my megadungeon, the Pythion of the Mad Oracle. In 2024 and the last bits of this year, I plan to work up a wilderness setting at a pace of one hex per week. Generally, I will try to write and draw a page related to the week's hex each day, but busy weeks will mean sparse hexes sometimes, and inspired weeks will result in the opposite.

The setting I'll be working on is going to be the Spanish Pyrenees, sometime in the Early Modern period but with plenty of anachronisms making it impossible to really place between the late 16th and early 19th centuries. I'm going for a tone inspired by Spanish Picaresques and, probably to a greater extent, their derivative works, so the Appendix N for this project includes things like Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, the Saragossa Manuscript directed by Wojciech Has, and Puss in Boots, to name the three that are having the biggest influence on me.

Here are the pages of the first week's Hex:

A Monster Conversion Key for Chainmail's Man-to-Man Combat Table

I'm a big fan of Chainmail's Man-to-Man combat system, see above. In addition to being a fascinating artifact, it's a surprisingly elegant system. With different chances to hit based on specific weapon and armor type, it's more tactical complexity than you usually get from D&D. At the same time, it avoids the feature bloat that many modern approaches to differentiating weapon types take. Moreover, it makes the uniform d6 damage die make so much more sense.

The system has one major problem, however, it doesn't cover monsters at all. If you want to run combat with monsters in Chainmail, you have to use the very different Fantasy Combat Table. This list is going to be my attempt at assigning weapon and armor equivalents to every monster presented in Booklet 2: Monsters and Treasure. The criteria is based on a combination of AC presented in OD&D and AD&D's composition tables for monsters, as well as common sense. It's not the most polished thing in the world and is meant as more of a starting point for someone who wants to run OD&D with Chainmail combat than anything else. I fully admit that in doing so, one will likely need to make rulings to their taste to replace the decisions in this list. Any particular effects of attacks (increased damage, petrification, etc are as presented in Monsters and Treasure).

The List

Old-School Roleplaying at the Dawn of History: First Principles

In this post, I'll be sharing some thoughts on running an old-school campaign set in prehistory, about participating in the very beginning of a people's cultural memory and guiding it forward. In a few words, I would describe the main design goal as follows: a game that feels like a deep dive into the first 10 turns or so of a game of Sid Meier's Civ. I want a game that plays like how the opening cinematic of Civ 5 made me feel when I was a kid.

Civ 4's opening is strictly better because of Baba Yetu, but doesn't evoke the feel of this view.

Maybe You Don't Need a Character Sheet

Last night, I ran an introductory session for a pair of players at my Friendly Local Game Store. Both had experience in Fifth Edition Dungeons and Dragons but were unfamiliar with the OSR. They were great players and rapidly learned the lessons of the False and Upper Tombs of the fantastic and free Tomb of the Serpent Kings. It took only the first few rooms for them to become wise to the kind of dangers they would face, a credit to TotSK's utility as a teaching tool. What took longer was filling out their character sheets. This was through no fault of their own, they were great players. It was also through no fault of the system, Old School Essentials[1], which is light enough that making a character should be a brief affair. The issue was that the sheet had enough differences from a 5e sheet that many simple boxes needed explanation.