For those of you coming in late, this post is the first in a series of sequels to “Five roleplaying games I’ve played, and you should too“, which covered my thoughts and feelings (oh, those feelings) on:

1. Dungeons & Dragons
2. Traveller
3. Champions
4. Skyrealms of Jorune
5. Top Secret/S.I.

Feel free to go read that as a primer.

This post was originally going to contain five more games, but it grew so much it became obvious that if I didn’t hack it up into smaller pieces no-one was ever going to read it. So, here’s the first of five parts, with the others turning up in the next week or so. Don’t worry, your favourite is probably included.

6) Marvel Super Heroes or DC Heroes

Yes; I’m cheating a bit here, and giving you a choice. Why? Because both of these games simulate their respective comic book universes so well, and c’mon – everyone’s got a favourite from The Big Two. Deep down.

Let’s start with Marvel Super Heroes though, which is easily my favourite superhero RPG. Marvel holds an eternal place in my heart for a number of reasons, but overall it’s just because I’ve had the most fun with it. I had fun with it when I was 11 or so; fun when I was 17; fun when I was 28… and I’m pretty sure I’ll have fun with it again.

As you can tell, it’s been something of a constant companion, the old reliable game system that I keep coming back to when others have come and gone. I’m sure it’s similar for those who are long-time lovers of Dungeons & Dragons, who know the system back to front and can practically name page references for rule checks. I’m not quite at that level – not any more – but for a while, it was pretty close.

Marvel’s beauty, for me, was always in the simplicity of the Universal Table – the appropriately named table on which you completed just about every action. These days, having one mechanic for everything in an RPG isn’t that big a deal, but back in 1984 it was a bit of a revelation to young Stephen.

Coupled with the absolutely genius idea of giving statistics descriptive ranks (admittedly, attached to numbers), which made it immediately clear that with a Fighting rank of Amazing, Captain America was pretty much capable of kicking anyone’s ass (unless they had Amazing Strength), Marvel was incredibly easy to pick up and play. It helped that the original, yellow-boxed Basic Set had an introductory feel easily as good as anything that ‘red box’ Basic D&D could conjure up.

And besides all that… you got to play Spider-Man. It doesn’t get cooler than that. Or didn’t for me, anyway.

I’m sure I’ll come back to Marvel Super Heroes – it’s really my game, and nothing else comes close to it, even though I see more flaws in it as the years go by. For now though, despite the slightly dodgy legal ramifications, I will happily point you towards Classic Marvel Forever (.com!) who host freely downloadable PDF versions of just about everything ever published for MSH. Try the original Basic Set; I’m pretty sure you’ll be happy with it. Of course, if you’d like physical books, there’s always eBay, and excellent out-of-print sites like NobleKnight.com (who were offering an MSH Basic Set at $35 when I wrote this).

DC Heroes, on the other hand, I can’t recommend as whole-heartedly. Mayfair Games put it together, debuting in 1985 after the original Marvel set hit, and while originally I was enamoured by the cluttered box art (not what you see here, which is Second Edition) and the impressive roster of character cards included, for some reason it never quite clicked with me.

Built around what’s now known as ‘MEGS’, or the Mayfair Exponential Game System, to accomplish the very difficult feat of having Batman and Superman in the same system, DC Heroes had one simple rule; a single point increase in anything is double the previous point in values. Therefore, someone with 10 Strength was twice as strong as someone with 9 Strength, and someone with 11 Strength was four times as strong as the 9 Strength guy, for instance.

Even my young mind was somewhat blown by the maths when I looked at the character card for Superman (50 STR) compared to the one for Wonder Woman (45 STR).

(Bear in mind, when the original DC Heroes debuted, Crisis on Infinite Earths had just finished, and Superman was still powerful enough to push a planet out of orbit. After John Byrne’s reboot of Superman, the DC Heroes Second Edition reduced his stats considerably – but still kept him as the most physically powerful hero in the game.)

While the ‘every point doubles power’ rule did mean that Superman and Batman could be on the same team, when it came to creating your own characters, I found that the lack of granularity didn’t work for me. After all my gaming group had been playing with Marvel Super Heroes for the better part of a year, where having ‘Amazing’ in an attribute was pretty special, and getting up to the ranks of ‘Monstrous’ and ‘Unearthly’ was pretty much unheard of.  The idea that every point doubled power just seemed over the top.

I’ve seen many people praise DC’s simplicity in this regard, and also because the same scale was applied to everything – speed, time, range and so on. It worked pretty much the same way in Marvel though, and the Universal Table felt considerably easier to read from where I was sat. Needless to say, despite some enjoyable enough adventures playing Batman and friends (no, we never did run Superman as a character), DC Heroes never quite caught on with my gaming group, with the exception of my friend Tim, who liked it enough to run a campaign, and ended up giving me his Second Edition of the game. I’ve still got it, but more as a curio than anything else.

Over the years DC Heroes managed to make it to a Third Edition (although I’ve never seen it) and even spawned a stand-alone Batman Roleplaying Game off the back of the 1989 movie. Eventually the licence disappeared, and West End Games produced the DC Universe Roleplaying Game in 1999, but that seems to have failed, a bit like the various Marvel follow-ups.

Today there are no current licenced roleplaying games for Marvel or DC, although of course the DC Universe Online and Marvel Universe MMOGs prove that there’s still potential interest in ‘living the comic books’. Unlike Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes, however, these MMOs will fall short of doing the one thing you all want to do: play your favourite hero.

For that alone, these games are worth playing.

This is the latest in a series of posts looking at roleplaying games I really think you owe it to yourself to play.

Last time out, looking at Ghostbusters, I talked about the wonderful simplicity of the game’s system, and how it could only be betterered by one thing: taking that system and combining it with the greatest science fiction movie trilogy of all time. Well, at least, it was in 1987….

9) Star Wars

Remember how Traveller, well, just didn’t do it for me? Remember how I was essentially seduced by that image of a Luke Skywalker-lookalike on the box? (Damn you, GDW….) Well, it took five years or so, but finally my sci-fi roleplaying prayers were answered in 1987 with the release, on the (gulp) tenth anniversary of the movie, of Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game from West End Games.

If Marvel Super Heroes had opened my eyes to how a game system could work with you in creating a setting, Star Wars blew out of the back of my skull. Designed by Greg Costikyan, Curtis Smith and Bill Slavicsek, the simple D6 system in Star Wars expanded on the initial principles of Ghostbusters, and was an absolute joy to read. The original rulebook filled my head with the potential excitement of adventures across the galaxy, where the players would fight for the Rebellion against the evil forces of the Empire. Blasters would be fired! Quips would be uttered! Lightsabers would be drawn! Heroes would be made!

So naturally, in the first session of my campaign, the players stole a starship and then – I remember this quite specifically – spot-welded the ship merchant to the inside of his own safe.

Yeah, they weren’t really looking to be heroes.

Despite what you may think, that incident kicked off one of the best campaigns I’ve ever run, although it was a classic example of the lunatics taking over the asylum. The ring leader of this band of lunatics – the McMurphy character, if you will – had asked to play a rogue Imperial agent, a man who was only interested in looking out for himself, and wasn’t anxious to work for the Rebellion or the Empire. Thinking this would make for a kind of Han Solo-like rogue, I said yes; not knowing that what he was actually going to play was the classic Traveller or D&D anti-hero. Chaotic Neutral, in other words; everyone else can go hang, as long as I come out of it with cash.

Now, there’s a place for that kind of character, but not necessarily in a classic Star Wars campaign. The original rulebook suggested you set your game between the end of Star Wars and the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back, when the Rebellion has won a major victory by destroying the Death Star, but the stakes are high and there’s plenty of danger. I liked the sound of that, and I particularly liked the high drama inherent in the setting. But, we didn’t really get to that; instead we created some high drama of our own.

That was mostly because a latecomer to the game asked to create a Jedi – a very rare thing at this point in the Star Wars timeline, as you might realise – and I said yes, thinking that perhaps that with him in the group, we’d get some of that good-vs-evil stuff that I was craving. Well if you thought of him as good and the rest of the party as evil….

What happened was what always happens when you drop a Lawful Good Paladin into the middle of a Chaotic Neutral party: lots of arguing, scheming, backstabbing and ultimately, bloodshed.

The thing is, it was immensely entertaining to watch every week, simply because both of the players were very good at sticking within their roles. The rogue agent lied, schemed, double-crossed (the rest of the party) and generally acted in accordance with his personal code. The lone Jedi proselytised, argued, defended innocents (from the rest of the party) and generally acted in accordance with the Jedi code. I just sat back and occasionally prodded them towards something, and somehow that eventually led to them turning up to the battle of Hoth to help Darth Vader.

Mmm. Well, it was certainly a memorable campaign.

Long rambling personal reminiscences aside, Star Wars was (and really, is) a classic in roleplaying design, and to date is one of the few RPGs which I liked enough to actually buy supplements for. Unfortunately not long after my campaign started, it ended, as I moved away from the area and my roleplaying group. As a result my dreams of a classic Rebels vs Imperials campaign never came to light.

By 1992 I had an entirely new roleplaying group at my disposal – and West End Games released Star Wars in a Second Edition. However, on reading reviews at the time, I found out the Second Edition expanded the rules quite a bit, which frankly I never thought they needed. I understand now that Second Editions are a natural part of any large RPG line’s progression, but at the time, I didn’t see the point in buying into it. Besides, I hated the cover art.

Since then the Star Wars licence has proved perennial in RPGs, although I stopped paying attention long ago. Today Wizards of the Coast publish the official RPG, although the original D6 System Star Wars came from is still knocking around in various forms. For a good overview of Star Wars’ RPG history, I recommend this article on – where else – Star Wars.com.

Today, even after the wildly uneven Prequel Trilogy and the relentless exploitation of Star Wars by the Lucas Empire (Hey, it’s either that or Howard the Duck spin-offs), I still have a hankering to run a Star Wars campaign that evokes the classic era, the original trilogy.

Being realistic and boringly adult about it, I know there’s an element of wanting to recapture those glory days, when I felt like I was running a campaign by the skin of my teeth, barely keeping up with an older, smarter and wilier group of players. That’s unlikely to happen, but I still have my rulebooks – you never know.

It took Lucas 16 years to get back to the movies, after all….

For those of you coming in late, this post is the first in a series of sequels to “Five roleplaying games I’ve played, and you should too“, which covered my thoughts and feelings (oh, those feelings) on:

1. Dungeons & Dragons
2. Traveller
3. Champions
4. Skyrealms of Jorune
5. Top Secret/S.I.

Feel free to go read that as a primer.

This post was originally going to contain five more games, but it grew so much it became obvious that if I didn’t hack it up into smaller pieces no-one was ever going to read it. So, here’s the first of five parts, with the others turning up in the next week or so. Don’t worry, your favourite is probably included.

6) Marvel Super Heroes or DC Heroes

Yes; I’m cheating a bit here, and giving you a choice. Why? Because both of these games simulate their respective comic book universes so well, and c’mon – everyone’s got a favourite from The Big Two. Deep down.

Let’s start with Marvel Super Heroes though, which is easily my favourite superhero RPG. Marvel holds an eternal place in my heart for a number of reasons, but overall it’s just because I’ve had the most fun with it. I had fun with it when I was 11 or so; fun when I was 17; fun when I was 28… and I’m pretty sure I’ll have fun with it again.

As you can tell, it’s been something of a constant companion, the old reliable game system that I keep coming back to when others have come and gone. I’m sure it’s similar for those who are long-time lovers of Dungeons & Dragons, who know the system back to front and can practically name page references for rule checks. I’m not quite at that level – not any more – but for a while, it was pretty close.

Marvel’s beauty, for me, was always in the simplicity of the Universal Table – the appropriately named table on which you completed just about every action. These days, having one mechanic for everything in an RPG isn’t that big a deal, but back in 1984 it was a bit of a revelation to young Stephen.

Coupled with the absolutely genius idea of giving statistics descriptive ranks (admittedly, attached to numbers), which made it immediately clear that with a Fighting rank of Amazing, Captain America was pretty much capable of kicking anyone’s ass (unless they had Amazing Strength), Marvel was incredibly easy to pick up and play. It helped that the original, yellow-boxed Basic Set had an introductory feel easily as good as anything that ‘red box’ Basic D&D could conjure up.

And besides all that… you got to play Spider-Man. It doesn’t get cooler than that. Or didn’t for me, anyway.

I’m sure I’ll come back to Marvel Super Heroes – it’s really my game, and nothing else comes close to it, even though I see more flaws in it as the years go by. For now though, despite the slightly dodgy legal ramifications, I will happily point you towards Classic Marvel Forever (.com!) who host freely downloadable PDF versions of just about everything ever published for MSH. Try the original Basic Set; I’m pretty sure you’ll be happy with it. Of course, if you’d like physical books, there’s always eBay, and excellent out-of-print sites like NobleKnight.com (who were offering an MSH Basic Set at $35 when I wrote this).

DC Heroes, on the other hand, I can’t recommend as whole-heartedly. Mayfair Games put it together, debuting in 1985 after the original Marvel set hit, and while originally I was enamoured by the cluttered box art (not what you see here, which is Second Edition) and the impressive roster of character cards included, for some reason it never quite clicked with me.

Built around what’s now known as ‘MEGS’, or the Mayfair Exponential Game System, to accomplish the very difficult feat of having Batman and Superman in the same system, DC Heroes had one simple rule; a single point increase in anything is double the previous point in values. Therefore, someone with 10 Strength was twice as strong as someone with 9 Strength, and someone with 11 Strength was four times as strong as the 9 Strength guy, for instance.

Even my young mind was somewhat blown by the maths when I looked at the character card for Superman (50 STR) compared to the one for Wonder Woman (45 STR).

(Bear in mind, when the original DC Heroes debuted, Crisis on Infinite Earths had just finished, and Superman was still powerful enough to push a planet out of orbit. After John Byrne’s reboot of Superman, the DC Heroes Second Edition reduced his stats considerably – but still kept him as the most physically powerful hero in the game.)

While the ‘every point doubles power’ rule did mean that Superman and Batman could be on the same team, when it came to creating your own characters, I found that the lack of granularity didn’t work for me. After all my gaming group had been playing with Marvel Super Heroes for the better part of a year, where having ‘Amazing’ in an attribute was pretty special, and getting up to the ranks of ‘Monstrous’ and ‘Unearthly’ was pretty much unheard of.  The idea that every point doubled power just seemed over the top.

I’ve seen many people praise DC’s simplicity in this regard, and also because the same scale was applied to everything – speed, time, range and so on. It worked pretty much the same way in Marvel though, and the Universal Table felt considerably easier to read from where I was sat. Needless to say, despite some enjoyable enough adventures playing Batman and friends (no, we never did run Superman as a character), DC Heroes never quite caught on with my gaming group, with the exception of my friend Tim, who liked it enough to run a campaign, and ended up giving me his Second Edition of the game. I’ve still got it, but more as a curio than anything else.

Over the years DC Heroes managed to make it to a Third Edition (although I’ve never seen it) and even spawned a stand-alone Batman Roleplaying Game off the back of the 1989 movie. Eventually the licence disappeared, and West End Games produced the DC Universe Roleplaying Game in 1999, but that seems to have failed, a bit like the various Marvel follow-ups.

Today there are no current licenced roleplaying games for Marvel or DC, although of course the DC Universe Online and Marvel Universe MMOGs prove that there’s still potential interest in ‘living the comic books’. Unlike Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes, however, these MMOs will fall short of doing the one thing you all want to do: play your favourite hero.

For that alone, these games are worth playing.

About as scrappy and loosely organised as the original roleplaying hobby, retro-clone roleplaying games (or ‘simulacrum games‘ to some) are spreading across the web, gradually gaining converts to their cause: a return to fast-paced, imagination-led roleplaying.

Most of them have a lot in common:

• They’re inspired by the early editions of Dungeons & Dragons.
• They use Wizards of the Coast’s System Reference Document, under the terms of the Open Gaming License.
• Best of all, most of them are free to download, with no strings attached.

Just add dice and you’re ready to play.

Why play a ‘retro-clone’?

You might ask why anyone would want to play these games, when Dungeons & Dragons now has a 4th Edition, and thirty-plus years of recognition behind it.

Well, the reasons are as varied as the players, but for most, it seems to be simple: they want to get back to something that they feel has been lost. Away from enormous rulebooks and mountains of supplements, they want their imagination to take hold again, to run things fast and loose, and to experience roleplaying as they remember it.

While you can easily argue that roleplaying games don’t ‘force’ you to play any particular way, it’s also hard to argue with history and tradition. So if you’re fed up with people throwing rules in your face, or you just fancy getting back to the ‘old school’ way of playing without hunting down out-of-print rulebooks, there’s probably something for you here.

Secret origins

While there may be some people who’ll come to these games completely fresh, perhaps even as their first roleplaying experience, I think it’s more likely that they’ll be introduced to them by someone else – someone who played the original games that inspired these clones.

As one of those people myself, when I first heard about these games, I wanted to know which retro-clone was inspired by which original game. I figured that would help me gauge whether I was interested in using them, based on my memories of the original game, and frankly, I was also just curious.

Unfortunately, most of the retro-clones don’t explicitly state their ‘inspirations’ – basically because of the legal terms of the Open Gaming License, which do not allow them to position themselves as direct replacements for those Other Trademarked Games which usually feature an ampersand in their title. As a result, I had to do some research to determine exactly which game, and which edition of which game, inspired what. (Then I made some pretty pictures to make it really clear.)

As I haven’t agreed to any binding legal license, however, I don’t have to be coy as to what inspired what – even though it’s just that, inspiration. I want to be clear that while most retro-clones use the System Reference Document and will therefore have very familiar mechanics and systems, that does not mean they’re direct copies of Dungeons & Dragons. Instead, they’re inspired and derived from it, and that means all of them will be slightly different from the original… even while they feel very much the same. In other words, my use of an ‘equals’ sign in the pictures below is meant to be interpreted very loosely.

Games inspired by Dungeons & Dragons

Easily the biggest category, and mostly responsible for kick-starting the ‘old school movement’, these games are all to some degree based on Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve ordered them based on which edition they draw most inspiration from.

Swords & Wizardry: White Box

Inspired by: Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

Publisher: Mythmere Games

Download it: Directly from Mythmere Games (PDF file)

Buy it: From Lulu.com, in softcover

Swords & Wizardry: White Box is inspired by the original three-volume rules for Dungeons & Dragons, first printed in 1974 and made available in – you guessed it – a little white box. With no supplemental rules, no extras and no twiddly bits, this is about as close as you can get to the original fantasy game from 35-odd years ago.

A 72-page PDF (only 10 pages shorter than Swords & Wizardry: Core Rules, below) everything you need to play is included, from character creation to spells, equipment and monster listings. The text is well-laid out with suitably ‘vintage looking’ illustrations. It’s also dotted with sidebars including many ‘house rules’ that long-time players will recognise, such as auto-hit on a natural 20, and so on. There’s not too much advice on running a game, except “It’s your game, do what you like” – and frankly that’s probably all that anyone needs.

Compact and brief it may be, but that’s sort of the point. This excellent quote from author Matt Finch’s introduction sums things up:

… this game contains within itself all the  seeds and soul of mythic fantasy, the building blocks of vast complexity, the kindling of wonder. The game is so powerful because it’s encapsulated in a small formula, like a genie kept imprisoned in the small compass of an unremarkable lamp.

Reviews: There seem to be very few reviews, specifically, of the White Box edition of Swords & Wizardry; there are a few reviews of S&W: Core though, some of which I’ve listed below.

Swords & Wizardry: Core Rules

Inspired by: Dungeons & Dragons (1974) and Supplements (1979)

Publisher: Mythmere Games

Download it: For free from Lulu.com (PDF file), or as a Word .doc from Mythmere

Buy it: From Lulu.com, in softcover or hardcover editions

Chronologically, Swords & Wizardry: Core Rules is inspired by slightly later editions of Dungeons & Dragons, and more specifically, supplements for it – however, it was released before the White Box edition seen above.

Using entirely unscientific methods (i.e., my best judgement), Swords & Wizardry seems to be gaining a fairly strong following in the ‘old school roleplaying’ movement, and gets a lot of praise. Publisher Mythmere is also putting their money where their mouth is with ongoing support of the product, so far including a module, a spells supplement and a dedicated magazine called Knockspell. As I’m sure Mythmere would point out, however, Swords & Wizardry is easily compatible with just about all the other games here, so you can use that supplemental material for just about any retro-fantasy RPG.

Swords & Wizardry: Core Rules is a little larger in size than the White Box, being an 82-page PDF. Most of the extra material will be familar to anyone who’s played D&D since 1979, considering the rules are based on those ‘later’ editions. For me, it certainly felt more familar than the White Box, although the differences really are minor. Layout and artwork are again of professional standard, with the cover in particular feeling ‘right’ for an old-school game, mostly because it draws obvious inspiration from the original AD&D Player’s Handbook (appropriately called the ‘Best Cover Ever‘ by Grognardia).

Reviews:

“Return with me to the days of high adventure… The approach is refreshing and the love and care put into the project is obvious. You can’t lose if all you do is check it out; indeed, you might find a new favorite game.” – I Waste The Buddha With My Crossbow

“While I’m one of those weird old-school players who happens to like 4th edition D&D, Swords & Wizardry has re-ignited an old smoldering ember in my gaming heart…. it’s nice to go home for awhile to a game that is made for the hobbyist, by hobbyists, just like 0E was.” – Dragonsfoot Forums

Microlite74

Inspired by: Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

Publisher: RetroRoleplaying.com

Download it: Directly from RetroRoleplaying.com or in print-ready form, from Lulu.com

Living up to both the ‘micro’ and ‘lite’ implied in its title at a mere 20 pages thin, Microlite74 nevertheless manages to pack everything it needs into its page count, assuming that is that you’ve previously played some version of its inspirations. These really are skeletal rules; more of a suggestion of how to play than a Bible for your personal reference.

In a way though, that’s sort of the point, as Microlite74 almost spends as many pages explaining the point and principles of old-school roleplaying as it does giving you rules to play with. There are even two pages of suggestions for other games (including all of those I’ve listed here).

While you might want a bit more detail to run a game with, I’d actually recommend grabbing Microlite74 as an excellent introduction to the ideas behind the old-school movement and style of play. You can read the whole thing in a coffee break, and darn it, the selection of medieval-era artwork is quietly inspiring, too.

OSRIC

Inspired by: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1978)

Publisher: Knights ‘n’ Knaves

Download it: For free directly from the OSRIC website (PDF file)

OSRIC, or ‘Old School Reference & Index Compilation’, doesn’t do itself any favours with that name – not exactly evocative of thrilling pulp fantasy adventures, to my mind – but nevertheless, for those of you who want a bit more heft to your game, OSRIC’s got it.

Inspired specifically by the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons ruleset (usually referred to as ’1E’ in old-school circles), OSRIC’s aim is to be “nothing more than a tool for old-school writers” according to the creators. What that seems to translate into, according to commentators, is essentially a ‘readable AD&D’. (How ‘readable’ AD&D is in its original form depends on your tolerance for what fans call ‘Gygaxian’ – Gary Gygax’s uniquely ornate writing style.)

As a result, you get a 400-odd page PDF to swallow, opposed to the sub-100 page counts of Swords & Wizardry, with masses of tables, loads of spells, and a menagerie of monsters. Whether 400 pages of rules makes you freak out or fill with excitement, well, your mileage may vary according to your personal history with the Advanced game.

There’s plenty of supporting material available if you want it, with 41 products available to buy online – and let’s not forget, just about everything published since 1978 or so for That Fantasy Game. Considering the size of the rules in PDF form, it seems odd that there’s no print version available, but there’s nothing stopping you from DIYing your own version.

Reviews:

“… this isn’t 1E within the OGL, it’s 1E with prettier tables and an actually readable presentation… OSRIC is good at what it does – making AD&D readable.” – Turbulent Thoughts

“This certainly is the most ambitious retro-clone project yet undertaken, both in its scope and in the boldness of its approach.” – Grognardia

Labyrinth Lord

Inspired by: Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert sets (1981)

Publisher: Goblinoid Games

Download it: For free directly from the Labyrinth Lord website (ZIPped PDF file)

Buy it: From Lulu.com, in softcover and hardcover editions (two alternate covers available)

Labyrinth Lord shares a lot with Basic Fantasy (below), in that it’s based upon the D&D 1981 Basic-Expert rules, arguably the ‘last bastion’ of the old-school before those new-fangled red-blue-cyan-black-gold ‘BECMI’ sets. Unlike Basic Fantasy though, Labyrinth Lord is trying to make it as a commercial venture, with the publishers Goblinoid Games working to get the rules into games shops across America, at least. (The rules are still available as a free download, though.) Their aim is to try and ignite interest in an older style of fantasy roleplaying, and while I commend their efforts, I’ve got to say I think Basic Fantasy would look better alongside other modern RPGs.

On the other hand, Labyrinth Lord definitely has the D&D nostalgia factor down pat. I mean hey, look at the title typeface for one thing. It’s also a very accurate recreation of the D&D 1981 rules; apparently you can play just about any adventure or use any existing supplement with it. Everything’s covered in the game’s 138 pages, right down to a sample ‘labyrinth’, the game’s term for dungeons (hence the title), and like Basic Fantasy, it’s got some nice illustrations and a good layout.

Unlike Basic Fantasy – and possibly because I believe Labyrinth Lord came out a little later – there’s not as much supplemental material for Labyrinth Lord, at least not from the publishers. However, it’s frequently mentioned alongside Swords & Wizardry when talking about the old-school ‘movement’, so I’m sure it must be getting played out there. There’s actually a comparison between Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy written on this blog, so if you want to know the differences, check it out.

Reviews:

“I’m very happy with LL. The product is a good one and I wouldn’t hesitate recommending it to newbies just starting, experienced gamers looking for something that allows them more freedom, or those who want to remember what BD&D was like at its best.”- RPG.net

Basic Fantasy

Inspired by: Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert sets (1981)

Publisher: Chris Gonnerman

Download it: For free directly from the Basic Fantasy website (PDF file)

Buy it: From Lulu.com in softcover, hardcover and coil-bound editions

Of all the retro-clones, for me, Basic Fantasy is the one that feels most like a ‘modern take on an old classic’. As you can see from the cover, there’s a real attempt here to at least style the game like something you’d see on a bookstore shelf; unlike Labyrinth Lord, it doesn’t acknowledge its origins quite as explicitly. However, the two games do share a lot in common, as they’re both modelled off the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert rules.

Basic Fantasy weighs in a little heavier than Labyrinth Lord, at 159 pages, but the rules read much the same – especially because they’re in the same typeface! There are some small differences; Basic Fantasy chooses to allow players to combine class and race in various combos, for example, whereas Labyrinth Lord goes with the more old-school alternative of having races actually serve as classes.

Production wise, Basic Fantasy is certainly well laid out, with appropriate ‘old-school style’ illustrations. About the only thing it’s missing is a sample adventure, but this is where the publisher – Chris Gonnerman – really shines. The Basic Fantasy website has over a dozen adventures available to download by a variety of authors. There’s also more than ten supplements available to download, too. Considering they’ve all been written by a variety of people, it’s obvious that Basic Fantasy is enjoyed by more than just the author, which moves it from the realm of amateur publication almost into the professional. The only difference is, it’s all for free; even the Lulu printed editions are not making any money for the authors.

If you want a retro-clone that’s got a bit more to it than the rulebook alone, you definitely want to take a look at Basic Fantasy.

A couple of years ago I worked with someone who was coming back into the (video) games industry after being out of it for over 10 years.

When I mean ‘out of it’, I mean it was like he’d lived in a cave for a decade. He hadn’t played key games; more than that, didn’t even know what they were.

It was simultaneously terrifying and exhilarating to talk to him. Terrifying because he was in charge of some major product decisions; exhilarating because he came to everything with incredibly fresh eyes and intense new ideas. Needless to say he’s now blazing a trail somewhere.

I feel a little bit like that in relation to tabletop roleplaying today. Apart from the odd session here and there, almost always with an old system, I haven’t been properly aware of or up-to-date with the roleplaying industry since… probably 1994, when I was finishing university.

Since then I’ve seen things peripherally – like Dungeons & Dragons losing the ‘Advanced’ tag, like Games Workshop finally admitting it doesn’t do RPGs anymore, and sending their properties elsewhere (twice). I’ve also attended enough games shows in the last four years that I’ve seen some of what’s been played.

What I didn’t see (because I had no real reason to look) was the seeming re-invention of roleplaying as a hobby, rather than an industry – thanks to the Internet. It’s easy to joke about (“Nerds on the Internet? No way!”) but it’s obvious to me that the Internet is now allowing roleplaying to become what its fans want, rather than what some giant toy or games conglomerate decides it should be.

Which is damn cool.

It’s damn cool because – as others have pointed out in more erudite terms than I’m about to – quite possibly, roleplaying was never supposed to go from being a hobby to being an industry. When it was an industry, in comparison to today’s multi-billion dollar games empires, it was only ever a tiddler anyway. Even that couldn’t sustain.

Why? For the obvious reasons that I think a lot of players instinctively knew, and which was one of the promises that got us into roleplaying in the first place. Namely: buy this game and a lifetime of adventure awaits.

In other words, we don’t need add-ons or supplements or 2nd Editions; if we want to, we can do everything we need to with that first rulebook or boxed set, and nothing else.

For me, and possibly for a lot of others, that was all I ever needed from roleplaying. Sure, I was happy to buy a lot of different games, and yes, I got the odd supplement here and there. I never felt obligated to buy anything though; I never needed to. So in a way, roleplaying – as an industry – sewed the seeds of its own destruction when it was created. It was a hobby that could, if you wanted, begin and end with one single purchase.

That was extraordinarily powerful to a lot of people, I think; that brought in the sales, which made some publishers think “Hey, this could be big business!” What I think those publishers failed to see was that there was always going to be a limited audience for the hobby. When they started to realise that, I think that’s when the business model changed from “Sell a lot of people one game” to “Sell a limited amount of people a lot of games and supplements”. That was never going to sustain in the long-term, and it hasn’t.

Which brings me to today, waking up out of my long sleep, looking around and seeing that roleplaying is sort of back to where I started. There are lots and lots of games available. Some from ‘big’ publishers, some from small publishers, some from individuals. There are a million different possibilities of play out there. All it takes is one book, some dice, and imagination.

Don’t know about you, but I’m ready to dive back in.

Friendly stalkers might have seen me muttering recently about virtual tabletops, as I seem to be going through another of my phases where I think about getting back into regular roleplaying – as in face to face, dice-rolling, character sheet-checking roleplaying. Old-school, in other words.

(Notice I said ‘think’, because these ideas rarely go anywhere. What I’ve discovered over the last few years is that for me, roleplaying as a hobby isn’t about the roleplaying anymore – it’s about the socialising, and that means my requirements for a gaming group have gotten tougher. To put it bluntly, I have to like people before I can enjoy roleplaying with them. Sounds obvious, I know, but I tend to forget that my best roleplaying memories were generally with people I knew as friends first and roleplayers second; it’s easy to delude myself into thinking that the activity will make me like someone, and that doesn’t happen.)

(Having said that, I’ve got some pretty fun memories of playing games with total strangers, as that seems to bring out the sociopathic side of my personality. Thinking about it, it’s surprising I’m not the world’s biggest online griefer.)

Anyway; this actually isn’t a precursor to me boring you with my roleplaying memories. Some random searches later brought me to a whole host of roleplaying blogs (because of course being supreme geeks, roleplayers are all over the web) and led me to an interesting phenomenon: the resurrection of old-school roleplaying. I mean real old-school. I mean… original Dungeons & Dragons.

Not the ‘red box’ edition of D&D. Not even first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which is pretty much where my memories of roleplaying begin. I’m talking about guys who want to play with the original ruleset, exactly as it was back in 1974. And who were obviously guided by the spirit of Gygax when they came up with the name Swords & Wizardry.

They’re not the only game in town, either. Apparently if your taste is a bit more ‘new school’ then you can play a ‘retro-clone’ of the 1978 ruleset in OSRIC (Old School Reference & Index Compilation!), or even recreate those red box days of 1981 with the cunningly referential Labyrinth Lord.

Understand that none of these games are strict reprints of the original material; instead, under Wizards of the Coast’s Open Game License, they’re a sort of… reimagining? Retelling? Swords & Wizardry describes itself as a ‘newly written description’ of the original rules, almost as if they’ve been told to scribes down through the years and now just written down, or perhaps swapped around campfires.

If you’ve got any experience of the original golden oldies though, like I have, then you might be wondering just why these things exist. I mean, we’ve had Advanced Dungeon & Dragons 2nd Edition, then 3rd, then 3.5 and even 4th last year – although somehow they lost the ‘Advanced’ along the way. I mean, isn’t this sort of like ignoring World of Warcraft’s existence, and recreating Colossal Cave Adventure, claiming it’s more fun to play?

Well yes, and no. The comparison is spurious of course, because any roleplaying game trades in one thing; imagination, which doesn’t ‘improve’ with 3D graphics or an 80-level cap. In fact, the argument goes, your imagination tends to atrophy when you’re shown more and asked to imagine less. That’s basically where the fans behind these games are coming from. Just as modern games have added graphical complexity, modern RPGs have added rules complexity – partially because gamers asked for it, and partially because it means more books can be filled with rules, and then sold.

The idea behind this ‘old school movement’ seems simple enough; get back to basics, where the rules are just a helping hand to let your imagination run riot. When the rules don’t cover something, you make it up. Whether that’s a summation of the ‘true spirit’ of original style roleplaying is for a more learned blog than this to cover, but suffice to say, it’s appealing to a lot of people.

I find all of this fascinating, partially because the idea that people are still clinging to The Rules while playing RPGs seems unbelievable to me. I do feel sort of smug saying this, but I never really got beyond the (apparently) old-school idea that the rules are just there for when you want them, and should be ignored when you don’t. Even when I was 15 I was gravitating towards systems that were rules-lite (Star Wars, Ghostbusters, Marvel Superheroes) after struggling with others that were rules-heavy (Champions, Rolemaster).

Perhaps those who’ve been faithful to Dungeons & Dragons all these years have felt that their faith demanded an adherence to The Rules, whatever they may be, and some of them are finally ‘seeing the light’. (Born again roleplayers?) They seem to be kind of late coming to the party, though; even my casual interest in the pen-and-paper industry over the last few years has shown me that the trend is towards less rules and more storytelling, although that itself seems to be a bone of contention for some.

In some ways this is a massive exercise in nostalgia, but then there’s really nothing wrong with that. Just as I still cling to my original favourites (and have been interested to see ‘remakes’ of those games, too), so ‘old school roleplayers’ want to get back to what excited them about roleplaying in the very first instance; imagination run riot, and rules be damned.

POSTSCRIPT: I found a very workable description of what ‘old school D&D’ should ‘feel’ like back in the Grognardia archives, which is worth reading in light of this. I’ll admit, it makes me pine for something, although I’m not too sure what.