Two Great Sales For Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day

Unless you've been hiding under a rock for the past few weeks, you know that tomorrow (April 17th, 2013) is Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day. There's going to be a couple of sales, and I wanted to make sure that you have the coupons ready so that you can buy up all of the stuff that you really need for your Swords & Wizardry games. These coupons are good for twenty-four hours only (I assume that they will likely kick in after midnight EST because, well, I am on EST but do not take that as Gospel).

There are two sales that will be going on. First, is the eStore of the Swords & Wizardry SRD site: http://shop.d20pfsrd.com/collections/swords-wizardry-appreciation-day There you will find a list of Swords & Wizardry products in PDF form (some even by third party publishers). Their sale is only for the items on that page, but the coupon code (SWAD252013) will get you a 25% discount on the 17th.

Frog God Games is also running a sale on all Swords & Wizardry products bought directly from their website (unlike the SRD store, this sale covers print and PDF products). The coupon code for the FGG's site is SWApprDay. The FGG sale does not include subscriptions, pre-orders or items $1 or less.

Remember: These coupons are good only on April 17, 2013.

Tomorrow will be a big day. There is going to be a lot of talk about Swords & Wizardry out there in the gaming blogosphere. It is going to be fun.

Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day: Pre-Mortem

The Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day is coming on April 17th. For me, this is a day that has been months in the making. Last summer an online friend decided that she wanted to give tabletop role-playing a try. Unfortunately, she was in California (still is, actually) and I am down here in Florida. That would require a really big tabletop. Then G+ started up their Hangouts, a way to do browser-based video chats that was tied in to your Google account. It was good. I was surprised, honestly. I had avoided online play for a long time because I had believed that it wouldn't be the same sort of experience as face to face gaming. It turns out that I was wrong (which isn't something that I announce very often) and the gaming was a lot of fun. I think that luck had a lot to do with it, finding the right mix of people that worked well together.

I've never really considered myself a part of the OSR, or any old school movement. When I decided that I wanted to run this game online I started looking around for a system to use. Free was the first consideration. This was a game for someone who might not actually even like it. I didn't want her to go out and spend a bunch of money on a game, or hobby, that it might turn out that she wouldn't like. Simplicity was the next consideration. I am, at heart, a pretty rules light kind of guy these days, and games with a lot of crunch really aren't really my thing anymore. Even with those two considerations, that still leaves a lot of games as contenders.

Eventually I narrowed it down, and I ended up settling on Swords & Wizardry as the game to use. I liked the clearer explanation of the rules from the original (and better organization). I had hoped that it would make it easier on someone who had never gamed before to be able to get into the rules. We start with Whitebox, because of all of the available versions of the game, this was the simplest of them. It seemed a good starting point. The game clicked for all of us, and the mechanics were mostly easy enough to understand for her as well. She had a few difficulties understanding some of the finer points that those of us in the group who were more experienced with gaming had come to grips with long ago, but some further explanations (and none of us being afraid to look stupid helped a lot) smoothed things out eventually. However, one of the things that seemed to help her out the most was when I reccomended that she read Matt Finch's (that's the creator of Swords & Wizardry) Quick Primer to Old School Gaming. I don't agree with all of it, and I certainly never played all of the ways that are talked about in it, but it is definitely a great resource for understanding this style of play, and it helped her to better understand a lot of the things that already made sense to the rest of us.

Over time everyone fell into their characters and the idiosyncrasies of my style of GMing, and we all had a lot of fun. Battle were fought. Scars were earned. Narrow escapes were made. Along the way we even playtested a few things, and my friend wrote her first adventure and tried her hand at GMing herself. Really, not so bad for about seven months of gaming.

As I said at the beginning of this post, Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day is coming, and there are going to be a lot of bloggers talking about the game around the internet. It is very cool and I am glad to be a part of it. This is just another step the journey of gaming that I've taken over the years, only now I have at least one more friend who is walking on that trail as well. I've also made some cool new friends and gamed with them. I've also discovered an awesome game in Swords & Wizardry and I see myself getting a hell of a lot of mileage out of it over the rest of my life.

Norse Mythology-Inspired Monsters For Swords & Wizardry

This post is taken from some notes that I made for a campaign world for Swords & Wizardry inspired by Norse mythology. Norse myths were one of the first that I got into when I became interested in mythology as a kid (I think that the copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology that I received from a grandmother was to blame for all of that). The ideas that I have had for this world are probably the most "metal" of my D&Dish ideas, being inspired by Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Jack Kirby's Thor: Tales of Asgard and the myths themselves. Maybe one day I will get to expand this into a full setting. Characters would be Aesir and Vanir warriors, roaming the Nine Worlds looking for adventure.

I think the fact that I picked the version of Immigrant Song from The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo movie is telling that I'm not going to be all that traditional or "metal" in my interpretations. Keep in mind that this isn't intended to be a strict historical or mythological interpretation, so liberties have been taken for the sake of fun and gameablity.

We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow.
The hammer of the gods will drive our ships to new lands,
To fight the horde, singing and crying: Valhalla, I am coming!

Fenrir
Fenrir (also known as Fenrisulfr or Vanagandr in the Northern tongues) is a monstrous black wolf that bedevils the Aesir and Vanir of the Nothern Lands. Fenrir is close to the size of a full-grown bull elephant and is covered in dark, mangy fur. The wolf is highly intelligent and is prophesized to be one of the forces that will take part in the world's end.

Many adventurers have claimed to have brought the end to the wolf, including many Aesir and Vanir warriors, but still the beast comes during the night to raze and kill.

It is said that the wolf can move freely among the Nine Worlds.

HD: 8
AC: 2 [17]
Attacks: bite (1d10), 2 claw (1d8)
Saving Throw: 8
Special: reforms within 6 days of being killed (roll 1d6 to determine the number of days), hit only by magical weapons
Move: 20
Alignment: Chaos
Number Encountered: 1
Challenge Level/XP: 10/1400

Jotunn
Also known in the Northern tongues as the Hrimthurs, the Jotunn are a race that plague the Northern Lands from their ice and mist-filled lands of Niflheimr. The both fight against the Aesir and Vanir, and sometimes work along side of each other as well. The relationships between the three races is complicated and it is not unusual for them to interbreed. While called giants, because of their large size, Jotunn are in fact not Giant in size (as the S&W game thinks of giants). They tower over the Aesir and Vanir, by a foot or more, and are exceptionally strong.

Jotunn are either extremely beautiful, sometimes rivaling even the most beautiful among the Aesir and Vanir, or monstrous in appearance. The monstrous Jotunn are chaotic and twisted in their appearance, with claws and multiple limbs and heads. The Jotunn are an older race than the Aesir or Vanir, being the offspring of Ymir, the first being.

There is another race of Jotunn that live in the land of Muspell and are known as "fire" Jotunn. Like Fenrir, they are prophesized to take part in the end of all things when they raze the Nine Worlds with their fires. "Fire" Jotunn are not often seen, and do not wander the Nine Worlds, like their brethern. Referees may want to use the Jotunn as a template and add fire-based abilities to that to simulate these fiery giants.

HD: 5
AC: by armor worn (which has to be specially made to fit their larger bodies)
Attacks: punch (1d8), by weapon
Saving Throw: 12
Special: --
Move: 15
Alignment: Chaos
Number Encountered: 1-10, plus a 6 HD leader if more than three
Challenge Level/XP: 6/400

Einherjar

Not strictly monsters, the Einherjar are the heroic dead picked by the Valkyries to reside in Valhalla until their need in the battles at the end of days.  They look as they did in their lives, like strong and brave Northern warriors. They spend their time waiting in Valhalla, drinking, eating and practicing their fighting with each other. Any Einherjar killed again in combat rises up again in Valhalla the next morning.

Einherjar are very rarely encountered outside of Valhalla, but sometimes Odin will entrust one or two of them to Aesir that are on particularly important or dangerous missions.

HD: 4
AC: 5 [14] (ring mail and shield)
Attacks: by weapon (typically battle axe or bastard sword)
Saving Throw: 13
Special: if killed, return to life in Valhalla the next morning
Move: 12
Alignment: Law
Number Encountered: 1-3 if guarding, 1-100 in Valhalla
Challenge Level/XP: 5/240

Svartalfar

These so-called swart or black elves are probably closer to what fantasy games think of dwarves than elves. They are the craftmen of the Aesir and Vanir and dwell in the lands of Svartalfaheim. Their disposition towards the Aesir and Vanir tends to bad, as they have put up with generations of being ordered and threatened by the two races. Jotunn tend to be on slightly better terms with the Svartalfar. They tend to stay to themselves in their caverns of Svartalfaheim, creating great items and artifacts and tending to their forges. For enough money (which is often a lot) or pledges of favors, the Svartalfar will work their magics and create items for the Aesir and Vanir. If attacked, or organized into war parties, they will be carrying powerful magical weapons and items that they have created.

HD: 3
AC: 9 [10], 3 [16] if armored
Attacks: by weapon, always magical weapons of at least +2
Saving Throw: 14 (+2 against magic)
Special: --
Move: 10
Alignment: Chaos
Number Encountered: 1-6
Challenge Level/XP: 4/120

Swords & Wizardry Blog Appreciation Day

Over in the land of Google Plus, +Erik Tenkar and I discussed doing a follow up to the highly successful Basic Fantasy RPG Blog Appreciation Day with an appreciation of another old school system. Since I have been running a Swords & Wizardry game via G+ Hangout since the summer, and Erik is gearing up to run one for his face to face group, we thought, "Why not do one for Swords & Wizardry?" A couple of emails with +Matt Finch later and we have the basics. A Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day is now set for April 17th and bloggers are rapidly coming on board. At the time of this posting we were about to reach 20 bloggers, and we will probably have more by the time we're done.

I even made a "snazzy logo" for it:

If you're interested in participating, go to Erik's post linked above and sign up in the comments.

A Is For The Abyss

Between the three sephiroth of Kether, Chokhmah, and Binah is the Abyss. The Abyss is home to the displaced shards left over from the previous creation, these shards were once much more than the lingering, broken spirits that they are now. The previous creation was marked by Chaos and Silence, and now the things in the Abyss are what remains of all of that.

These shards sometimes irrupt into worlds, as they drift around through the cosmos; moving amongst the sephiroth and floating about through the various pieces of the tree of life. When these shards move into world they become great beasts of destruction, driven to undo the current creation and restore the one in which they had been whole. Sometimes these creatures go unchecked and they raze world, drawing them into the anti-creation of the Abyss and bringing them closer to Tohu and Bohu. Sometimes champions rise up and fight these creatures, struggling to save their worlds from death and darkness and silence.

I will (hopefully) be doing a series of Alphabet posts that tie in some of the background ideas that I am putting together for my Demon Hunters game. This is going to be a dark fantasy game, and it will be playtested by the G+ Hangout gaming group that I am a part of so you will be able to watch the game as it develops.

Atlantis! An Old School Fantasy Role-Playing Game

Back a year or so ago, in the early days of my involvement with Google+, I started thinking about a game that was a hack of the Swords & Wizardry Whitebox rules. I called this game Atlantis!, and yes the exclamation point was intentional. I found an appropriate piece of art and the concept cover was born (you'll find the most recent version of that concept art at right).

I like the Whitebox rules for Swords & Wizardry. They are simple and to the point, streamlined and yet they give you plenty of options for playing a fantasy game. My only complaint is that there isn't a thief class, which is understandable since the original game that it is emulating didn't have one either, but it is easy enough to fix this.

I ran a Whitebox game for a while on G+ Hangouts, until we "upgraded" to the Core version of Swords & Wizardry. I have a lot of respect for what can be done with a very few rules in a game. I went through my period, like a lot of gamers I think, during the 90s when I wanted a lot of rules in my games, even when I didn't really use them. The rules were comforting in a way, letting us all know that thing were covered if we needed them to be. Nowadays, that style just isn't my thing. I've played this way for a while now, but I have definitely become much more comfortable with a "rulings, not rules" style of play over the last few years. There's a trust there that everyone at the table is there to have fun and not screw each other around that I kind of like again.

So, Atlantis!

Most of my Swords & Wizardry gaming has grown out of my enjoyment of a sort of pulp style of fantasy fiction: Moorcock, Carter, Leiber, and Howard forming a lot of my ideas for what fits into a fun fantasy role-playing game. This makes sense since it is the sorts of fantasy that the designers of D&D were reading as they played and created the game. It is a fun style of fantasy, heavy on action and magic (some of the times), and people living their lives large. Beautiful women used their charms to bewitch the heroic leads, almost always against the backdrop of a world of ancient, decaying graces that are giving away to a new age.

That is what I am looking at with this game. Atlantis is sort of like my analogue to Moorcock's Melnibone. Except where Melniboneans were cruel and inhuman monsters subjugating the world through terror and magic, the Atlanteans brought culture, society and order to the world. This sets the stage for the Law versus Chaos conflict in old school fantasy games, with a world where the premier civilization is in its twilight days, but the light has not yet gone out. A world where chaos and weird monsters are again peaking out from the shadowy corners of the world, those things that will take stalwart adventurers to hold back. The great cycle of the conflict between Law and Chaos turns, and the world is changing....but into what? That, of course is up to those bands of adventurers that are around the world, trying to hold back the night.

From the Far East, there are the blue-skinned Strangers, with their sky ship and their strange weapons, and stranger magics. Some have even seen that there are Strangers with more than one set of arms, even. There are disenfranchised Amazons, wandering the world and seeking to right the wrongs within this darkening world, and bring their strange Amazonian ideals of peace and love through strength to the rest of the world. Barbarians are everywhere, causing destruction and seeking the chaos that can be found in the world. There are still the Atlantean Sword Brothers and Sisters, some of the best warriors to be found in the world, selling or giving the swords and their bodies to keep the light of civilization from winking out completely. There is magic. There are monsters.

One thing that I find about an old school fantasy approach, particularly with older versions of D&D, is that they tend to be happening during the apocalyptic times, when things are going bad but there is still a chance for change. That is one of the things that influences Atlantis! in my mind. This is not some idyllic time. This is not an age after things have happened and people are trying to survive. This is the time of change, the time of battle, when strength of mind, of body, of will can make a difference to those who are willing to try to make a change in the world. And that, to me, is one of the things that makes RPGs so much fun. You can be that person who steps up and says "None shall pass!" and make that stand, whether or not the odds are in your favor. Hopefully, this will come through in the final version of Atlantis!

Swords & Wizardry on G+

This past weekend a new "function" rolled out on Google Plus, called communities. Communities are sort of like forums, but in the same style and formatting as G+ proper. It is a nice functionality because it does away with some of the things that I hate about online forums and it allows you to interact with new people that you may not know, without having to leave the relative safety of your Google+ stream.

The Swords & Wizardry Discussion community sort of exploded (in a good way), but we are looking for more people to join in on the discussions. Matt Finch and various of the Frog God Games people are already active in the community, as well as some of your favorite Swords & Wizardry bloggers. Click on the image, and come join us.

New Spells for Your Swords & Wizardry and Old School Games

I like spells in my fantasy games. I like the feeling of magic and wonder that they bring to a world. I also like for the players in my games to have options for their characters. The linked PDF has 26 spells that are new to Swords & Wizardry, converted from the SRDs of OpenQuest and the Renaissance system. I am pretty sure that none of them have appeared in an old school or d20 game. The spells are split between Cleric and Magic-User spells, so there is something of use to either class.

Some of these spells are a bit non-traditional, but that is why I am sharing them.

The PDF can be found here.

Enthusiasm and Professionalism in Tabletop RPG Publishing

About this time last year I wrote a post about publishers rushing games in order to have them for sale at Gen Con, only to have to release a new edition within months because the rush job missed so many errors. The business of RPG publishing sometimes seems to forget the fact that there's more to this than just having something to sell at Gen Con.

The polar opposite of this attitude is the "hobbyist," those who publish because they love games more than they understand how a business really works. A good example of this would be the current (as of the date of this post) Kickstarter being run by Frog God Games for a new edition of their Swords & Wizardry Complete, in hardcover format. They previously released a hardcover edition that was marred by printing errors and poor follow up and customer service. I guess some lessons are difficult to learn.

I do not think there is any nobility in publishing something from the stance of being a hobbyist, so if your responses to this opinion post are based from that mindset don't bother.

Simple Skill System For Swords & Wizardry

Admittedly, not everyone want skills in their old school games, this post is for those people who do want to add the option to their games. This is written for Swords & Wizardry but could easily be ported to any old school game. The genesis of this particular variant comes from a forum post made by one of the players in the G+ Swords & Wizardry game. This is still in a very rough form, and I am posting this mostly to get it out of the headspace and into a format that can be commented upon.

The basic mechanic is that the player rolls 2d6, adds any modifiers from their character's Ability Scores, and compares it to a target number for the difficulty of the task (as set by the Referee). If the roll + modifiers is higher than the target, the character succeeds at using that skill.

Difficulty Determined by Referee	Die Roll
Simple Task	No Roll
Hard Task	9+
Difficult Task	12+

The referee should keep the difficulty of the task in mind at all time, and should also consider the general level/competency of the character in mind as well. What is a simple task for a 6th level character might be Hard or Difficult for a 1st level character. The referee is always cautioned to err in favor of the character when determining the difficulty of a task.

Modifiers are determined by the Dexterity or Intelligence of the character, using the following table:

Score	Bonus/Penalty
3-8	-1
9-12	+0
13-18	+1

If a skill is something that is dependent on the character's overall agility and coordination, use the Dexterity score's bonus/penalty. If the skill is something that depends on the overall mental capabilities of the character, use the Intelligence score's bonus/penalty.

At this point I do not include Thief skills, because I think that those skills should be a protected niche of that character class. An option for Thieves could be to convert the Thief "skills" over to skills in this system and just give the Thief a special modifier, like half their level. I'm not 100% on this specific listing of skills just yet. This is a part that I am still turning over in my head (yes, this list of skills was taken from an OGL source, and it will be properly attributed, should this idea make it into a polished and final form).

Arcana: Your character’s knowledge of the unknown and the magical within the game world. Note that this doesn't give a character any sort of spellcasting ability.

Athletics: Anything involving physical or athletic activities, including climbing, swimming, and acrobatics.

Communication: Your character’s ability to communicate with others, but not to persuade (see Social, below).

Focus: Anything involving concentration, observation or perception.

Nature/Outdoors: How good your character is at things like camping, fishing, hunting, survival, navigation and horseback riding.

Enterprise: Your character’s knowledge of how businesses and finance work.

Investigation: Your character’s knowledge of how to look for clues, searching an area for hidden things, and the like.

Languages: How good your character is at speaking/reading/understanding a particular language. Each language counts as a different skill.

Military Sciences: Your character’s knowledge of tactics and strategy, as well as military history.

Profession: This is what your character does for a living when not out adventuring. Sample professions can be: Blacksmith, Cooper, Brewer, Weaver, Veterinarian, and etc. The profession must be specified, and this skill can be taken multiple times for multiple professions.

Performance: Your character’s ability to perform in front of others, this can be acting, singing, dancing or playing a musical instrument.

Social: Anything involving using your charm or persuasion

Technical: How good your character is at technical tasks such as mechanics.

Transportation: How good your character is at driving or piloting vehicles. Also allows the character some basic mechanical knowledge of their preferred vehicle.

Skills do not have ranks, they are either trained (i.e. the character has that skill) or untrained. All character classes start play with one skill at first level, and gain another every three levels.

Random Spellbooks For Swords & Wizardry

One of the benefits to a game like Swords & Wizardry is the ability to quickly generate a character. Roll the dice, pick the class, fill out hit points and you are pretty much ready to go. The only thing that can slow down the process is figuring out what spells the Magic-User can have access to when starting out. The assumption is that a fledgling magic-user is given a (mostly blank) spellbook when completing their studies that has a handful of spells scribed into it by their teacher. The question is, what spells are in their spellbook?

This post helps you to quickly, and randomly, generate a starting spellbook for your first level magic-user. (It can also be handy for spellbooks found in the loot while dungeon-crawling.) We assume that your character's teacher is not going to be too helpful and provide them with too much magic...just because powerful magic-users tend to be covetous of the knowledge that they have gathered, and paranoid about how others might use that power against them. One house rule that I have for my Swords & Wizardry games is that Read Magic is a class ability for magic-users, rather than a spell. It seems silly that a magic-user would undergo that much sorcerous training and not understand magical languages.

Spellbooks are a repository of the accumulated magical knowledge of the magic-user, part documentation for their spells and part magical diary of their journey of discovery. A spellbook is very important to a magic-user because it contains the formulas and memory devices for each spell that they use. Losing a spellbook means that a magic-user is unable to rememorize spells as casting causes the spells to vanish from their minds. This makes a spellbook more valuable than gold to a magic-user.

Some New Options For Your Old School Cleric

I use the conflict between Law and Chaos as a central point in my D&Dish fantasy games. I like the idea of the conflict because it provides a central narrative to what is going on in the game and embracing and ramping up this conflict really makes a lot of the central concepts of a fantasy role-playing game really start to make a lot of sense. This post is about making Clerics a central part of this conflict in a mechanical way, as well as giving your Cleric a bit of extra juice. These rules were written with my Swords & Wizardry game in mind, but with a little squinting that could be easily adapted to most old school types of games. Obviously, not everyone is going to be as interested in applying these rules to Clerics in their home games, but I think that they add a nice bit of flavor to Clerics, particularly at lower levels, and makes them into something other than a slightly weaker Fighter knock-off.

At some point in the eternal conflict between Law and Chaos one side, or the other, hit upon the idea of having their own supernaturally empowered warrior to use as pawns in the battles. Fighters were helpful, but they would not always have the raw power that these forces would want or need and Magic-Users were useful but they ultimately served their own agendas. This was the origin of the Cleric. Once one side had their own Clerics, the other side needed them as well.

Clerics combine the qualities of a a warrior and a wizard, but into a package that is controlled by Law or by Chaos. The spellcasting ability of the Cleric is entirely dependent on their following the rules of their patrons within Law or Chaos. Not following those rules gets the Cleric stripped of their spellcasting, which can be very dangerous in the types of situations that Clerics tend to find themselves. However, since Clerics are typically chosen from the ranks of the most faithful, breaking these rules is rarely an issue.

Different Clerics fill different roles within an organization, and these roles are represented by Domains. A Domain is a class ability for the Cleric, but one that the player gets to choose. The Domain picked for a Cleric is like a theme for them, giving them purpose within their religion and sometimes within the adventuring group as well. All Clerics get one Domain at first level.

Domains are fairly generic because Clerics tend to fill the same sorts of niches within religions. Groups are encouraged to come up with their own Domains as well, using these as a basis for their own creations. One thing to remember is that these Domains do not work in the same manner as those from other editions of the original game.

Swords and Wizardry

So, the other day I found a "new to me" retro clone of OD&D called Swords and Wizardry. This game is brought to us by one of the people responsible for OSRIC, another retro clone built under the OGL that emulates the AD&D experience instead.

Not a big game by any stretch of the imagination, which is a plus to me, Swords and Wizardry does a good job of emulating that old school fun that was OD&D. I miss my little booklets, stolen by some visitor to my apartment god only knows when. But I got hours and hours of enjoyment out of that game, which lead into almost 30 years of gaming now.

Frankly, I haven't had the chance to read the rules that thoroughly yet. But, what I have seen I do like. I am probably going to get around to ordering an actual print copy so I can really give the game a reading. What I have seen so far makes me want to read more and (more importantly as a litmus test for an RPG) it makes me want to game. So, for now I wanted to share the existence of this with everybody and I will post more when I have a chance to digest the game more thoroughly.