Semi-Random Starting Spells for Myth & Magic

Random character creation is good because it's fast and unpredictable. Picking spells for new wizards is bad because it's slow and you tend to only pick spells you already know how to use and can anticipate using. Totally random spell selection is a pain in the ass because you may end up with too many spells that do the same things (if you already know Magic Missile, as a level 1 Wizard are Shocking Grasp, Burning Hands and Shoot You In the Face really that useful?). Thus the following:

Starting Spell Selection: Wizards in Myth & Magic start the game knowing a number of spells equal to 1/2 their Intelligence, rounded down. In practice this means that you always start knowing between 5 and 10 spells.

All Wizards start play knowing Read Magic and Detect Magic. Use the guidelines and tables below to determine the rest of the spells in your spellbook.

5 Spells: Roll one time each on the Offense, Control, and Utility tables.
6 Spells: Roll once each on the Offense and Control tables, and twice on the Utility table.
7 Spells: Roll one time each on the Offense, Control, and Defense tables. Roll twice on the Utility table.
8 Spells: Roll once on the Offense and Defense tables, and twice on the Control and Utility tables.
9 Spells: Roll once on the Defense table. Roll twice on the Control, Utility, and Offense tables.
10 Spells: Roll once on the Defense table. Roll twice on Control and Offense tables. Roll three times on the Utility table. Enjoy being a Gnome.

Table 1: Offense Spells

1d10 Roll	Spell
1-2	Burning Hands
3-4	Chill Touch
5-6	Gull’s Stone Storm
7-8	Magic Missile
9-10	Shocking Grasp

Table 2: Control Spells

1d8 Roll	Spell
1	Charm Person
2	Color Spray
3	Deflate
4	Frighten
5	Grease
6	Hypnotism
7	Sleep
8	Unhinge

Table 3: Defense Spells

1d4 Roll	Spell
1	Arcane Armor
2	Protection from Evil
3	Thermoc’s Reflective Disc
4	Thermoc’s Shield

Table 4: Utility Spells

1d20 Roll	Spell
1	Alarm
2	Change Self
3	Comprehend Languages
4	Dancing Lights
5	Detect Undead
6	Enlarge
7	Feather Fall
8	Floating Disc
9	Hold Portal
10	Jump
11	Light
12	Manipulate Flames
13	Mending
14	Message
15	Minor Cantrip
16	Audible Illusion
17	Phantasmal Image
18	Spider Climb
19	Unseen Servant
20	Ventriloquism

Google Trends: The Retroclones

It crossed my mind tonight that there is scant information out there about how big of a piece of the RPG market OSR-style gaming represents. We hear the occasional odds and ends in relation to Kickstarter print volumes vs. the economics of the big game publishers like Paizo and WotC, but beyond a vague idea that the OSR market is 'small', there isn't much information available. Despite its small size, the OSR community makes a lot of noise online. So I started plugging things into Google trends to see what I got.

Several surprising things:

Goblin PC Race for Myth & Magic

In keeping with my love of goblins as a PC race, I decided to put together some stats for Myth & Magic. I diverged a bit from the Goblin profile in the GM's guide in the interest of not gimping them too much as a PC- I intentionally wrote the rules for daylight sensitivity, for instance, so that GMs and players could decide whether to impose the penalty or not.

You can also check out my goblin PC rules for Advanced Edition Labyrinth Lord.

Goblin

Attributes & Speed: Goblins are small and dexterous. On the other hand, they are also weak and unpleasant. Goblins gain +2 to Dexterity, but suffer-1 to Strength and Charisma.

A goblin’s base movement speed is 20 feet.

Weapons & Armor: Goblins can use any weapon allowed by their class. Weapons used by a goblin are considered one size smaller and deal one less die category of damage.

Goblin Senses: Goblins see up to 60’ in total darkness. In low-light or shadowy light, they see twice as far as a human. Goblins not adapted to life on the surface are sensitive to light, and suffer a -1 penalty to AC and all d20 rolls in light equal to daylight.

Languages: PC goblins begin play speaking Goblin and Common. They may also learn to speak Hobgoblin, Orc, Kobold, and Giant.

Heritage Proficiency: All Goblins receive Basic proficiency in Stealth.

Protection from Disease: Goblins often dwell in filthy conditions, and over the years this has rendered them resistant to most common illnesses. Goblins receive a +2 bonus to their Fortitude save to resist contracting or suffering the effects of any non-magical disease.

Opportunistic Digestion: Goblins are accustomed to scavenging for food. At the GM’s discretion, Goblins can locate food in environments that wouldn’t usually feed a human, such as in natural underground caverns, sewers, or urban environments where hunting and gathering is normally impossible. Using this ability may still require a successful Wisdom/Wilderness Survival check, and does not extend to finding food in totally inhospitable environments like deserts, open ocean, or glaciers.

Dirty Fighter: Goblins don’t understand the meaning- or the point- of a fair fight. PC Goblins of any class automatically gain the Dirty Fighting Talent.

Classes: Goblins are typically Thieves, Fighters, or Clerics.

Height and Weight: Goblins stand between 3 and 4 feet tall, with the average falling somewhere around 44” in height. They tend to be quite thin for their height, averaging perhaps 50 lbs.

My D&DNext Looks like Myth and Magic

I learned to play D&D during the AD&D 2nd edition era. Not everything about that era was great for the game (bankrupting TSR, for instance), but I still have a lot of nostalgic memories of it. That is the form of the game that is familiar to me, and certain things about earlier editions (Dwarves being a class, no baseline Bard class) and later editions (sorcerers, Dragonborn and Tieflings) will always feel a little out of place for me.

But nostalgia isn't everything. 2nd editions rules were baroque and confusing in a lot of places. There were arbitrary restrictions from earlier editions ported over whole cloth (restricted class/race combos, alignment restrictions for rangers and thieves) that never really seemed justified within the game. 3e cleaned up a lot of the mess and added a nice unified skill system for task resolution, but added things that over-complicated the picture like multi-class/PrC fever and complex feat/Prc 'builds' that varied from the unplayable to the game breaking. The refined math made the game more intuitive, but also introduced us to the arms race of optimization and 'effectiveness' that swallowed 4e whole.

So when the Next playtest packets started appearing, I was excited. D&DNext, to me, looks a lot like 2nd edition looked before kits and optional rules and torturous attempts at re-building the non-weapon proficiency system into a general purpose skill system turned it into a morass. Shortly before the second playtest packet came out, I started putting together my own criteria for what I wanted from a D&D-ish experience. As of a couple days ago, it appears that what I was looking for is already here: a 2e retro-clone(ish) called Myth & Magic.

D&DNext Exploration Quick Reference

A thread over at EN World a few weeks ago got me thinking about the importance of keeping time during an adventure- particularly during old school, dungeon crawl-style adventuring. All those little bits and pieces of information- how long a torch lasts, how long until a buff wears off between combats- start to actually matter once you start keeping track of how long it is taking your party to move through a dungeon, search rooms, and engage in combat. These type of rules were very important to early editions of Dungeons and Dragons, and they provide some of the raison d'être for exploration-focused classes like the Rogue and (in wilderness environments) the Ranger. If it doesn't matter how long torches burn for, how long buffs last, and whether or not that Thief can see effectively when he or she goes scouting, some of the flavor of an old-fashioned dungeon crawl is lost- and you might as well junk a lot of the mundane equipment in the gear lists.


With that in mind, I used the Labyrinth Lord rules together with some old 1/2e D&D references to come up with some quick and easy rules for keeping track of time, light, and movement inside a dungeon environment. The rules are intended to be used with D&D Next (I'll be using them with my PbP playtest), but are suitably generic that they can be dropped into most D&D compatible settings (though I do reference advantage and disadvantage in the lighting rules, to stay consistent with the playtest rules for blindness- you can easily enough sub your own penalties as appropriate). Credit to GX.Sigma at EN World for the original inspiration for these rules.

Goblin PCs for Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition

As I've mentioned a number of times, I really enjoy Goblins as a PC race.  For fans of old school gaming, James Maliszewski at Grognardia created these Dwimmermount Goblin PC rules for his Dwimmermount setting using the Labyrinth Lord rules.  James uses a mix of regular LL, LL Original Characters, and Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition for his games, but his race rules for the Goblin lean strongly towards the original edition rules- split advancement, limited class selection, racial prime requisites, etc.

I'm currently working on putting together some OSR-style dungeon crawl adventures that I want to run via PbP.  I'd like to offer Goblins as a PC race (since I expect players will be running multiple different PCs over the course of things, death being a frequent possibility) but wanted to adapt the Goblin rules to be a little closer to the rule system I had in mind- essentially a simplified LL Advanced Edition that keeps the notion of race and class being separate, but focuses on the core four classes of Fighter, Magic-user, Cleric, and Thief.  With that goal in mind, I pulled together the following rules for Goblin PCs in Labyrinth Lord Advanced Edition:

5e feels familiar

I've had the 5th Edition (or D&D Next! or New D&D, or whatever they're calling it) playtest docs in my hands for about as long as anyone else.  Haven't actually played with it yet, but a few scattered impressions:

• Reminds me a lot of second edition AD&D.  This is very nostalgic for me, personally, because 2nd ed. AD&D was what was out and what I was playing when I got into roleplaying games.
• The OSR seems to have won the day.  Wizards is still claiming that the final version of the game will support styles of play that accommodate people who like the 4e style of play, but what they're giving people as their first taste of the game looks as little like 4e as 4e looked like 3rd edition.  Instead, we get something that looks like the style of game TSR published 20 years ago, with a few modernish tweaks.
• That being said, I know that AD&D 2nd Edition is where things really "went wrong" in the minds of some OSR purists (growth of tons of player options that unbalanced the game, endless supplements and official settings, added "realism", novel tie-ins, the Dragonlance "game is story" railroad, etc.).
• Based on looking over the book and the character sheet, I can see teaching someone 5e who was new to gaming.  It seems like a single character sheet actually contains enough information to give a newbie a reasonable idea of how to run their character.  I don't feel like I can say the same about 3e or 4e.  4e seemed to cater to kids who grew up with the Magic-style "cards are powers" paradigm, but not everyone who comes to an RPG is going to know collectible card games.
• Waiting for character creation rules to see how far back we're going on the race/class/level restriction stuff- will Dwarf Wizards and Elf Paladins get the heave-ho again?  Will we see the return of limited progression in non-favored classes?  Personally I hope not- I always found those things to be a pointless barrier to playing the sort of character that you want to play.
• Waiting with anxiety to see what indignity is going to be inflicted on my beloved gnomes by this new edition.  Current guess: left out of the core races for the 5e equivalent of the PBH, gain bug eyes and rock crystals instead of hair, favored class continues to be Bard, some obscure interaction between a STR penalty, size levels, and encumbrance renders them incapable of carrying both a missile weapon and sufficient ammunition for it.  You heard it here first.
• Backgrounds and themes/schemes look interesting.  Backgrounds look like an attempt to merge the old 2e Secondary Skills with the skill/proficiency system,  and Themes/Schemes hopefully prevent infinite class proliferation.  The difference between Themes and Schemes looks a bit unclear at the moment.

Read on for my take on the game as a whole and thoughts for the future.