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...

OD&D: A matter of language

Although the past week has been pretty silent as far as postings go I have made some pretty good progress actually writing down more of the rules of 'The Fantasy Game'. Volume I is shaping up pretty nicely. While writing the rules I noticed a thing about the way the rules language has changed from the very early times to more current editions... in a way which to me takes away a bit of the flavor inherent in the ancient rules. I'm not sure if I feel this way just because English is not my native language or if there is more to it but today I would like to elaborate a bit on this observation.

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.

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).

Getting started with 'The Fantasy Game'

Here we go with the first actual post concerning the live design process. I will try to describe the basic decisions I so far have made for 'The Fantasy Game':

• Naturally the format should follow its role model. Thus the game will be designed in three DIN A5 sized rulebooks (as that format is nicely supported by Lulu for the print edition I am going to produce).
• I will only use both the little brown books from the white box to create 'The Fantasy Game' and Chainmail (as both are required according to the preface in the LBB).
• The only sources used to extends and modify the given rules will be the collected house rules of Gary Gygax for OD&D as collected by Robert Fisher and Cyclopeatron. Philotomy's OD&D musings will serve for further inspiration although my goal is to stay as close as possible to the official rules.
• For image sources I only will use historical images (taken from Dover Publications and their excellent resource CDs).

And here we go with with a preview of the cover for book 1 (I once more felt compelled to work on the design first):