Primordial OD&D: A Chainmail fantasy simulacrum

Alan Kesher provided links to work he started on a kind of primordial OD&D. Or as he more appropriately phrased it: a Chainmail Fantasy Supplement simulacrum. Although it's not complete I find this fascinating stuff that I directly added to the references section of 'The Fantasy Game' and will also study over the next weeks.

Enjoy!

The Fantasy Game: A d6 only game?

The past couple of days I have been a bit silent, studying "The Big Brown Book" (also newly added to the reference section), "Epées & Sorcellerie RPG", "Using CHAINMAIL to resolve OD&D combat" and "Forbidden Lore". I mentioned it a couple of times and now I am sure concerning the use of dice in 'The Fantasy Game'.

Epées & Sorcellerie RPG now available

Picking up Nicolas Dessaux' recent comment about the extended reference section of 'The Fantasy Game' I just wanted to point to the most recent post at There's Dungeons Down Under: the Epées & Sorcellerie RPG now is available as a free download from Lulu as well as a print edition. I already added the print edition to my shopping cart  but now need to find some more new releases that make the shipping costs worthwhile. Suggestions welcome ;-) Naturally I also added it to the references section for 'The Fantasy Game' in order to see which inspiration might be derived from it. I'll probably post an opinion about the game soon, too.
(BTW: What font is that in the logo? Love it!)

New reference material added: Forbidden Lore & Consolidated OD&D rules

I just added two new references to the references section of this blog:

• Original Dungeons & Dragons Consolidated Rules by Bruce Mohler
• Forbidden Lore by Jason Vey, which nicely describes a way to integrate Chainmail with OD&D - together with the resources mentioned above by D. H. Boggs I will consolidate the Chainmail based combat rules for 'The Fantasy Game'

I'm probably soon going to jump around a bit more in the LBB as I am itching to get to the combat section of the game. The goal here is primarily to have a playable rule set as soon as possible and the combat rules are the most pressing (and missing) part right now. Since I do not have any experience with Chainmail I will have to do quite some research. The goal here will be to present a more or less unified combat ruleset closely matching the intention of Chainmail. More soon...

Researching OD&D at the OD&D discussion boards

[After posting this stuff in the morning I added a few more links in the evening that I missed during the first run due to some browser tabs I had overlooked]

In the past couple of weeks I had a lot of fun reading through the various postings at the OD&D discussion boards (and I'm still going strong). I find the comments there very helpful in getting into the right mindset for reading the little brown books and to get sensitive about the finer formulations used in the rules.

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'.

From cover to cover: Introduction, Scope & Recommended Equipment

Today we are going to read through the introductory explanations of the white box edition of Men & Magic before starting out with the actual game rules.

Reading OD&D from cover to cover: The cover itself

Today I will start with reading OD&D from cover to cover, line by line. For me this is going to be a very interesting experiment as I usually do not read any RPG rules completely (ever - I skim through them and use them, but reading rules completely to me would be like reading my VCR manual completely).