Old School Psionics - the final word

As long time readers of this blog knows, I started a project to clone Supplement III since I am fond of psionics. I have reached the end of the road of that project, and it wont materialize as intended.

The fact is that when you delve deeper into Supplement III, you realize that this some of the worst written rules in the D&D canon. The editing is abysmal and the rules contradictory and clunky.

There are two ways to approach this, one is to rewrite it to conserve the feel or the other is to try to untangle the mess and present it the way it was intended. I had intended to do the latter, but I found it was way harder than expected. Partly I guess that comes from loosing all respect for the original after spending some time with it. I also felt the tug to just write my own, but then it would not be a clone.

But, after all those negative vibes I am happy to say that someone have managed to create a set of rules that have that old school feeling, preserve thrust of the original and are clear and lucidly presented. I direct you to the Retroroleplaying blog by Randall Stukey. Randall have written the very cool Microlite 74 and Microlite 75 rules, and those contain a very workable and excellently presented rules for psionics, in the spirit and style of Supplement III.

My project floundered, but at least someone managed to present something instead. My hat off to Randall for his great work.

Do you want to own a rpg? M20 for sale

I just read over on Greywulf's Lair, that he is selling the rights to Microlite20! That was not what I expected to find on the web today.

If you don't know what it is, I will summarize. 3rd ed D&D had something called the SRD and the OGL, which made it possible to write a game based on 3rd ed and retool it to your tastes. Greywulf decided to distill the core essence of that game to three stats and four skills. Everything fits on a page! I was participating somewhat on the ENWorld forums when Greywulf started to talk online about this project, so I feel I was there from the beginning. For some reason I have never managed to convince somebody to try it, but it's still a favourite. Take a look at it.

Now Greywulf feels he has lost that initial energy and enthusiasm, and that somebody else should be the one to take M20 into the future. So, if you want to own a game system of your own, it's for sale!

Microrules, now for T&T

Visiting the Trollbridge, I found a very cool and fun hack of T&T called Micro T&T. It is of course a relative of the other great micro game, Microlite20, which is a ultra slim re-interpretation of the D20 D&D rules. The man behind Micro T&T, "Hogscape", calls it a work in progress so he probably welcomes your feedback! I think it looks really cool. Check it out!