More Ryth goodness

At Risus Monkey the findings about The Ryth Chronicle continue: An installment #10 (the final one ending the Chronicle) has been uncovered and posted. Grab it and read it - great stuff! Additional Kesher at the Sandbox Empire has started to read the Ryth Chronicle from cover to cover. Here you can find the first post about it - again great stuff! Finally Risus Monkey started a Q&A for the Ryth Chronicle which is yet more cool stuff. Both have been added to the reference section for TFG. I totally enjoy these glimpses into the very early days as they IMHO contain a raw strength that I never found in the ancient retellings of happenings in Greyhawk and Blackmoor... probably due to the fact that I am able to see the stats of the characters, their items and get pretty detailed campaign accounts. Marvelous!

New cover design attempt

To the right you find another attempt at designing the cover for 'The Fantasy Game': I have replaced the classic knight from the initial attempt with a new kind of knight, who is somewhat more fantastic. In any case the image also is more vivid and dynamic... what do you think?

Personally I have become somewhat accustomed to the classic knight (yeah, I already cal it a "classic" ;-) ). It has kind of grown on me and now I miss it :-) To me the classic knight seems to represent the early days of the hobby in a more appropriate way, even if it seems more Arthurian that alternatives.

Reading OD&D from cover to cover: Changing classes

Before we continue our discussion of elves we look a bit ahead in the rules in order to see what other surprises and detail rules await us. Some might shed new light on certain of the more complex issues we have found with the race descriptions. So next up are the rules for changing classes.

Reading OD&D from cover to cover: Alignment

Alignment is one of the interesting topics that usually raises a lot of controversy. As far as I am concerned OD&D has a pretty good stance on the topic: Namely almost no stance.

Reading OD&D from cover to cover: The races

So next up in our tour through the OD&D rules in the LBB are the character races. Specifically mentioned are dwarves, elves and hobbits. Additionally there are some remarks concerning arbitrary other races. Men are not explicitly explained probably assuming that they mostly equal their real world counter parts.

'Outdoor Survival' arrived!

After coming home after my conference week I was surprised with a nice package from the United States containing "Outdoor Survival" in decent shape. Thus I am now complete to resume my OD&D research and quickly progress with 'The Fantasy Game'.

Reference material added to the blog

Just a quick notice: I freshly added a reference section to his blog (see the top navigation bar) that will host a growing list of materials used in order to distill the best of the LBB and create 'The Fantasy Game'. You are welcome to recommend more stuff to read or take into account if you have good pointers as my fascination with this kind of OSR research keeps growing by leaps and bounds.
And since I finally have started to write 'The Fantasy Game' (after previously just fiddling with the cover designs) it is also great to watch a love child growing. Ok, back to work for this night - I still have to finish a presentation...

Researching OD&D: Magic-users in arms and armor - case closed for now

After reading and rereading the class descriptions in the LBB again and again I am (for now) totally convinced that the literal interpretation of the rules allows for but one result:

Magic-users may use any kind of non-magical weapon or armor.

'The Fantasy Game' versus TFG

I'm slowly getting tired of endlessly repeating the name of my OD&D clone. Thus I hereby declare

TFG

as the future abbreviation to be used when talking about 'The Fantasy Game' in this blog.