Outland Characters

I've been tinkering around with some rules to use for my old-school type game. Mostly it's just things that affect character creation and flavor, with the goal of promoting a darker weird sword & sorcery style, but with plenty of room for gonzo wackiness as well. I was hoping to get everything compiled and put into a nice PDF to release all at once. I even got some cool art to put into it in a legitimate fashion. To make a long story boring, it's taking forever, so I've decided to just release the stuff I've been working on in a piecemeal fashion on the blog, and I'll worry about putting it together later.

Duel by Miguel Santos

The body of work is inspired by the Labyrinth Lord Original Edition Characters book, in that it is meant to be sort of a player's handbook rather than a complete rule set. So far there is no "official" game system it is meant to work with, but I am doing it with an eye towards B/X, Labyrinth Lord, and Basic Fantasy RPG. It should work fine with any of those core systems. I don't want to make another retro-clone, just a fresh way to make characters for an existing game of your choice.

Here is the short list of what you can expect:

• Separate race and class (humans are still the only ones that can level as any class)
• No level limits on any race
• No alignment - I've never used it in a meaningful way in any game. It just seems to be more of a source of potential disagreements than anything else. I see this as one of the main causes of the cleric's unpopularity. Some dude is always trying to shove his ideas down your throat about how a cleric is supposed to be played because of alignment. Sorry alignment, I have no use for you.
• Racial ability bonus as in the LL AEC (usually +1 to something and -1 to something)
• A number of humanoid/monster PC races
• 3 or 4 core classes (still undecided on whether to make a complete thief class, or make it a fighter subclass), with kits or subclasses to further customize them
• Some d20isms, such as ascending AC and Fortitude/Reflex/Will saves
• Super-simple encumbrance rules (even simpler than LotFP!)
• All-new spell lists. Not original in that they were created by me, but rather picked from various sources. (Ancient Vaults and Eldritch Secrets likely being the most prominent)
• Alternative spell system, probably much like the sorcerer from d20, but perhaps also with some ideas stolen from DCC. The main thing is that no caster will ever have to memorize spells at the beginning of the day. I've always hated that mechanic.

As you can see, nothing revolutionary. More just my personal picking and choosing of stuff I like, most of it created by other people who are smarter than I am. Feel free to comment on any of it - your input is appreciated.