D&D 5 Basic: Elf

Following on from my last post about a basic Dwarf class for D&D 5, here's my take on an Elf race-class.

You can download it as a PDF here.

Notes:

• This is a high elf eldritch knight with the noble background, all rolled together.
• Again, I replaced some of the equipment choices with suitably elfish options, in order to reduce the number of choice points.
• Likewise, I pre-selected dragon chess as the tool proficiency, as that seems the most suitably fey / noble.
• I made a small change to the mechanics of the class, removing the restriction on only choosing spells from certain schools at certain levels. I felt this was unnecessarily complicated and it would have pushed the description over onto a second page, which I wanted to avoid.
• Some of the text was based on Konstantin M's marvellous condensed basic rules.

I notice that I feel much happier about the PHB, with all its options and lengthy descriptions, now that I see it's possible to also distill the material down to something simple and suitable for new players or just people who don't like spending hours crafting a character.

[All D&D 5 basic classes: Elf, Dwarf, Halfling.]

D&D 5 Basic: Dwarf

I mentioned recently on google+ that I've been a bit frustrated by the complexity of character creation in D&D 5. Though they've eliminated much of the complexity of equipment selection (a very welcome change, in my books!), there's still a lot of different stuff to choose, which can be very overwhelming for new players.

I had a few ideas about how to remedy this: making some very simple summaries or conglomerations of all the choices during character creation, or maybe bringing back race-classes.

Just to see how feasible this might be, I had a quick attempt at making a description of a race-class (the dwarf) which fits on a single side of A4 and includes all of the relevant options, including a background.

Here's what I've come up with:

You can download it as a PDF here.

Notes:

• This is a mountain dwarf fighter with the soldier background, all rolled into one.
• The only thing that I left out was the background flaws, bonds, etc. I figure players can just make stuff like that up.
• I replaced the "choose two weapons" in the equipment section with suitably Dwarfish weapons, just to reduce the number of choices required.
• I made a single small change: adding Medicine to the list of skills. (I found it odd that the soldier background lists "healer" as a posibility, but the Medicine skill wasn't available.)
• Some of the text was based on Konstantin M's marvellous condensed basic rules.

[All D&D 5 basic classes: Elf, Dwarf, Halfling.]

The Complete Vivimancer: On Sale Now!

The Complete Vivimancer, my to-date magnum opus of weird magic, is now available for sale at RPGNow!

Currently only the modern PDF format is available. The setup for the print version is going to require a wee bit more time, so bear with me if you seek paper inscribed with vivimantic secrets.

A few facts...

How many spells are in this thing?

170

If you have Theorems & Thaumaturgy (and you should... it's free!), that's 75 additional spells for the vivimancer class -- more than twice as many unique spells. The old spell list was a bit sparse, especially at high, mid and low levels. The new list is now seriously rounded. See here for the complete spell list.

If you only have the Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition Companion, that's over 130 additional spells to play with.

Many of the spells taken from the AEC or Th&Th have been newly edited, expanded, clarified and spruced. So even the old is now new!

And what about magic items?

42

Weird number. It was originally a nice round 40, but then I found some more space and squeezed two more in there.

Previously there were a grand total of 0 vivimantic items in Th&Th, and maybe 2 in the AEC (the wand of polymorphing and the chime of cannibalism are pretty vivimantic).

These are some examples of the sort of weird and wonderful items among those 42: brain leeches, cerebral spider, worm of poison absorption, apparatus of organ transference, brain vat, lens of blinding, blood tree, solvent of androgyny, staff of flesh dissolution.

What's it look like?

Heavily illustrated.

A5 for convenient, hold-in-your-hand (or on your tablet) use at the table.

And speaking of convenience

Remember that this is a complete reference on all matters vivimantic. (I didn't call it the "complete" vivimancer for nothing.) That means that you don't need to look anything up in other rulebooks. All your character's spells are here in one handy tome.

You should probably go to RPGNow and check it out now!

ps. If you're interested in the print version AND the PDF version, I'm going to try to set up some kind of discount so you can buy the PDF now and then cheaply "upgrade" to the print version when it's available. This publishing on RPGNow lark is all new to me, so it might take a bit of fiddling around. I am assured that it is possible though.

Laybrinths of Madness -- Free PDF

Over the last month I've been working on a little side project which I have named Labyrinths of Madness. The name gives a hint as to what it is: a set of guidelines / house rules for running Lovecraftian games of horror and investigation using the familiar and well-loved Labyrinth Lord or B/X rules foundation.

As I say, it's only guidelines, and doesn't form a complete game or campaign setting. I reckon it's enough to get going with though, if anyone finds the idea of running such a game interesting.

Get it here FREE!

Theorems & Thaumaturgy: Free PDF Now on Lulu

I'm sure everyone who's interested has already got a copy, but just for the record I've moved the PDF hosting of Theorems & Thaumaturgy onto lulu as well (it was hosted separately before, as I couldn't work out how to make a free PDF product on lulu... I just worked it out).

You can get hardcover, softcover and free PDF editions of the book here.

Dreamlands: Random Character Backgrounds

Following on from my recent post on B/X character backgrounds, I thought I'd share the one-page PDF I've made for players in my upcoming dreamlands campaign.

One of the concepts of the campaign is that adventurers from virtually any possible world can enter the dreamlands -- thus there is essentially no "campaign setting". The point of this is two-fold:

1. To give players complete free reign over the character they create, with no limitations imposed by the DM's preconceived notions of a campaign world.
2. To encourage an odd mashup of characters. Just for fun.

So, we could have a cleric of St Cuthbert, straight out of Greyhawk, teaming up with a star-faring barbarian and a clockwork dwarf from a steampunk maze-world.

To this end I thought it'd be helpful to produce some random tables for players who like random character generation to roll on. So we have tables for the following:

• Sex
• Sexuality
• Skin colour
• Cultural origin
• Religion

These are, obviously, heavily influenced by Jeff's What Went Wrong.


Here's the PDF.

Recommended for use with JB's B/X Headgear and 100 Reasons tables.

Theorems & Thaumaturgy -- Preview Chapter!

Yes, it's still happening!

My intention now is to finish the book in the next month -- all that remains at this stage is layout, which I have begun this evening.

For your delectation, here's the first chapter which I've fully laid out: The Elementalist. Enjoy :)

Thanks to Cadanse D and Kelvin Green for the awesome illustrations!

New One Page Dungeon

Players in my games -- Nothing to see here, move along!

In the planning of my upcoming Dreamlands campaign, I'm intending each level of dream to be a wilderness area scattered with many interesting encounters and/or dungeons. The idea being that PCs can choose to dip into any of the dungeons they come across, exploring more deeply in any which take their fancy.

So, what I need is a lot of small dungeons, and a few larger ones. The larger ones I'm quite happy to take from published sources (Fight On!, for instance), and there are plenty of one page dungeons around which I could slot in as well. But of course, I want to create some small dungeons of my own to give the flavour I'm looking for.

With this in mind, I've conceived a new way of writing adventures -- speed dungeons! The concept is to map and fully key a dungeon (or as far as possible) in an hour or less. So, a single sheet of paper, with a quickly drawn map and loads of scrawled notes all over it.

For the interest of other DMs, I present the first fruits of this experiment -- The Caverns of the Silver Men -- a mini-dungeon which I created last night in about 50 minutes.

I'm not sure if it'll be particularly comprehensible to anyone else, or if you'll be able to decipher my hand-writing, but please check it out if you're interested!

Mixed-Class Characters for Labyrinth Lord (PDF)

A while back I came up with the idea of a system whereby characters can be created with parts of the abilities of multiple classes -- a kind of simple pick & choose "build your own class" system, intended as a replacement for the (in my experience) over-powered multi-classing rules.

Well, after some rumination and tweaks I've just written the idea up properly. You can grab it here as a PDF.

Character Generation on Carcosa PDF

I just finished compiling my Carcosa / Mutant Future character generation rules into a PDF.

Check it out it!

Note that these rules assume the use of the Mutants & Mazes section at the end of the MF rulebook. So we're talking D&D style characters (with 1HD at 1st level, not CON HD), possibly with mutations from MF.

Also note that in the end I decided to make the ability to learn and perform sorcerous rituals a special skill -- that is, not available to all characters. It kind of seemed to make more sense that way.

Labyrinth Lord PDFs updated

I recently discovered that the file for the souvenir font which I've been using was somehow corrupt -- it had a few weird artefacts on certain characters when I printed it on my printer at home, but I assumed this was a problem in the printer or the driver, not in the font itself. However one of the players in my campaign found that printing one of the PDFs caused three different printers he tried it on to crash with firmware errors! This led me to track down a new copy of the font, which now works on all known printers*.

So I've re-exported all the PDFs in the downloads section on the right. As a result, the Esoteric Equipment & Urban Activities, Expanded Thief, and the Necromancer documents have had a content update as well, to the latest versions that we're using in the campaign.


* Based on a sample of 4.

Adventure Log PDF

I thought I'd share this very simple adventure log sheet which I've just knocked up for my Labyrinth Lord games.

Get it here.

Pick pockets results charts!

I've been doing a spot of musing lately on what  sort of things could result when a PC thief attempts a bit of petty pocket picking on the side in between adventures. This comes up every so often, especially now we have three thieves in the party, and I'm never properly prepared for the event. Unprepared no longer!

I present my lovingly crafted pick pockets results charts! (Players in my campaign, please don't look at the charts, unless you love spoiling fun that is ;)

This is the second draft of these charts. The initial version I came up with included a lot more extreme results -- including being able to pilfer some pretty valuable items, and the accompanying possibility of severe punishment (incarceration or execution!). After some discussion with the players we decided that, while this was realistic, it wasn't much fun. So the final tables have been kind of smoothed out. Items of moderate wealth can be stolen, and moderately bad consequences of failure may occur, but nothing at either extreme.

I hope some other DM out there might also find these charts useful!

DM info sheets: Specialists

I've recently been putting a bit of thought into the kind of specialists living in a big city which PCs might want to consult or hire. As a result of this I've knocked up some simple info sheets to print out and fill in the details of such characters, which I thought I'd share, in case they're useful for anyone else.

They contain a very small amount of mechanical information, and are otherwise just convenient tables with blanks to fill in.

So far I have: Sages, Magic-Users, Shrines and Alchemists.

Hex mapping

I usually just draw maps freehand, but somehow, as I sat down today to do a bit of mapping, the urge for hexes came upon me! A quick google search for hex paper later, I was disappointed to find that what I had in mind wasn't quite as easy as it at first seemed -- I couldn't find A4 size hex-gridded paper with a per-hex number anywhere!

On the way I did find some very useful websites, which I shall share for others on a similar mission:

• Some very nice pre-made PDFs of hexes and others, including grids with small hexes overlaid with larger ones: http://mojobob.com/roleplay/props/mapping.html
• An online gridded paper generator! Very cool, but unfortunately doesn't do numbered grids: http://incompetech.com/graphpaper/
• An inkscape extension for generating hex grids: http://www.lysator.liu.se/~perni/iboardgameexts/

I ended up using the latter, which is an extremely and easy to use flexible tool allowing you to generate hex grids exactly to your own specification. I'd really recommend it. One tip, for anyone who does use it: the default grids it generates include a dot in the middle of each hex (apparently some games require this). For D&D mapping this was unnecessary, but it took me a while to work out how to remove it (there's no option for that in the tool's dialogue box). The secret is that the tool actually generates four layers, one of which is the dots. So you can just delete that layer.

Here's the PDF of my hex paper anyway, so you can see what I ended up with.

Addendum: I just started filling in those hexes, probably for the first time in 20 years -- what a joy!

The Necromancer - a new class for Labyrinth Lord

It's been brewing for some time, but is finally finished: my take on the necromancer class. It's a class that's seen many, many interpretations over the years, in all different versions of D&D, so making my own version was really just for fun. And fun it was.

The class is designed explicitly for Labyrinth Lord, though of course that means it's trivially compatible with any other form of pre-d20 D&D or clones. It's worked as an equal to the standard magic-user, having the same XP and spell progression, all the way up to 9th level spells.

You can download the PDF here. Over 50 new spells can be found within (including a couple of re-writes of spells of yore).

One of the players in my on-going LL games is playing a necromancer at present, and the class is playing out pretty well so far, and seems well balanced in comparison to the standard magic-user. The PC is only 2nd level though, so we've not had a chance to test out the higher level spells yet! As usual, if anyone ends up using this class or any of the spells, I'd be delighted to hear how they worked out. And any feedback of any kind (well, ideally constructive ;) is also most welcome.

Esoteric Equipment and Urban Activities

I've just finished putting together a document for my players of all the "esoteric equipment" (stuff like drugs, poisons, healing draughts, and so on) that they currently have access to, and some rules for living expenses and various things they can do in towns.

I thought I'd share it here, feel free to download the PDF and check it out if you like.

(The poisons list, by the way, matches up with those in the Labyrinth Lord AEC, but gives them names and descriptions, rather than just a number.)

3 new random tables: Stuff to do between adventures

Note: Players in my game, you'd better not read these tables!

In my Labyrinth Lord game I've wholeheartedly adopted Jeff's party like it's 999 carousing concept. My take on it has been as follows:

• After any session a character can choose to go carousing.
• The PC can spend any amount of gold they want, and gains that much XP in return. (Of course, the usual limit of not being able to gain more than one experience level in one go still applies!)
• They also roll a die (any type). If it comes up odd, then the DM rolls on the carousing results table, which indicates a noteworthy event which occurred during the character's boozing. Some of these are beneficial, some are detrimental, some are funny, and some may lead to adventures.

I've mainly adopted this rule as a means to speed up character advancement a bit. As you can see I've modified it a bit from Jeff's original version, in that there's no randomness involved in the amount of money the PC spends. It just seemed simpler this way, and the carousing results table contains enough entries forcing the PC to spend more than they intended.

In addition to using this system for carousing, I've offered PCs two more ways to turn gold into XP: by making sacrifices to cosmic powers (deities, demi-gods, devils, demons, elemental princes, etc), or by engaging in magical research. (The latter is, obviously, only open to magic-users, and probably requires a laboratory or at least a home base.)

Of course, these activities also needed some interesting tables of random results. I've just finished writing up the last one, so I thought I'd share what I've created. Here they are as PDFs:

• Carousing results
• Results of sacrifices to cosmic powers
• Magical research results
  

The carousing results table is obviously heavily inspired by Jeff's original, but I've altered some entries, and expanded the whole thing up to a d30 table.

The sacrifices table contains entries suggested by kelvingreen, anarchist and Daddy Grognard. Thanks guys!

Hope someone else finds them useful / enjoyable!

An arcane alphabet

Well, that was that for the April A to Z challenge!

I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and I'm pleased with the end result, looking back now at my post list for April! I did, of course, find the incessant onslaught of posts rather hard at times, especially with some of the challenging hypothetical spell names I'd set for myself -- some of them were really really difficult to come up with anything for in practice (laughing gnome, tessellate, zoetrope!?).

To wrap it up, I've created a PDF of the whole lot, which you can download here: An Arcane Alphabet.

Labyrinth Lord house rules sheet

I've just knocked up a quick summary of the house rules we've been using in my Labyrinth Lord games so far. I was feeling slightly concerned that the number of house rules was too large, and that they seemed to be gradually expanding, however after making this sheet I'm pleased to see that there aren't too many of them -- they fit very easily on a single side of paper, without needing any cunning formatting work to squeeze them in.

This also answers one of my questions about what to put on the players' side of my customizable GM screen...

In case anyone's interested in checking out the house rules we're using (I know I always love seeing other people's house rules :), there's a PDF of the one-sheet summary here.