BotA Character Creation Handout #1

So I wanted to make starting up a game of Barbarians of the Aftermath easier for new players by making some handouts. I began with the steps for making a character divided up by the various genotypes. I will be putting them up here on the blog in case they are of use to anyone else as well.

First up, the sheet for Adonai characters:

BotA Adonai Sheet .odt
BotA Adonai Sheet .pdf

Two House Rules

Two house rules crossed my mind recently that I definitely want to put into practice when I get the chance.

The first comes from Talysman over at The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms and it is a very simple rule regarding penalties for wearing armor in D&D. The rule assumes descending armor class, and is so simple and yet totally nifty that I wouldn't want to steal his thunder and re-print it here. Go check it out there.

The second rule comes from Savage Worlds, though I plan on using it in Barbarians of Lemuria and Barbarians of the Aftermath. I wanted to post about it on the Lords of Lemuria forums to get some feedback on it, but again they seem to be broken.

The rule deals with ganging up on an opponent, either rabble ganging up on a PC or the PCs ganging up on a huge monster. For each attacker on a certain target beyond the first, all attackers get a +1 to hit that target. This represents the fact that it gets harder and harder to defend against more and more attackers, and it gives the weaker mob a greater chance against the stronger single opponent.

In the practice combats I've done with PC-types against rabble, three or four rabble are about equal in power to a single PC. This rule is intended to put a bit more of the fear of mobs into them without totally taking away the ability to "wade though" the hordes.

One thing I've noticed in the practice combats is how much better a high defense score is versus a high attack score when confronting several opponents. No matter how easy it is to hit one of several opponents, your attack score is only used against one opponent per round (assuming we aren't talking about a mighty or legendary success) whereas you use your defense score against all of them. Using this gang-up rule, it evens that disparity up a bit.

100 Pre-rolled Mutations for BotA

I like the way Nathaniel Torson made his random tables in Barbarians of the Aftermath. Given that the core mechanic of the game uses two six-sided dice, all of his tables are based on d6 rolls, either rolling one, two, or three d6 for some variability.

In particular, I like that fact that the mutation tables are effects-based, meaning that the table result gives you an effect, but you have to come up with the specific implementation of that effect. It gives you the freedom to decide for yourself why you have a doubled move rate or how a built in common melee weapon manifests. Of course, freedom always has a price, and that price is usually paid in time and effort.

So I decided that I would roll up a bunch of mutations before-hand so that when I needed them, I wouldn't get stuck with no inspiration on how to interpret an effect. But not just a handful, I wanted to run the whole gamut and try to incorporate at least some of all the categories. The result can be found below, in both .odt and .pdf format:

100 BotA Mutations.odf
100 BotA Mutations.pdf

Posting Once Again

Well, it is once again time for me to revive this old, crappy gaming blog. I am still in love with the OSR movement, though I am much more of a consumer than a producer. I still like simple, old-style rule sets (hoping to play some Barbarians of Lemuria soon), and I am still constantly in search of a regular play group.

I actually had one for a while. At Titan Games in Battle Creek, I played AD&D every Wednesday with a great bunch of players led by an awesome DM named Randy (I wish I'd gotten his last name). They just finished the Keep on the Borderlands when I joined, and we transitioned into the Isle of Dread. My character was a halfling named Leptos who was modeled after a Greek Hoplite. He looked kind of like Marvin the Martian I imagine. He started at 4th level with a +1 spear and later got a hold of some gauntlets of ogre power and a +3 spear. He kicked some serious ass!

Now that we're back in Tucson (hopefully to stay), I'm trying to get something started with Garnett, a guy known on the internets as G-Man. You might recognize his name on a few really nifty free adventures for Barbarians of Lemuria. I'm hoping he'll be running some stuff that I can play in, but I've also offered to run either BoL or maybe some Swords & Wizardry or Labyrinth Lord.

Actually, I've been doing a fair bit of stuff with Barbarians of the Aftermath recently, and maybe we can do some of that. I was supposed to run a BotA game at the Marmalade Dog convention (see my earlier post) but no one signed up. The next year, I ran Holmes Basic D&D and the dungeons beneath the Tower of Zenopus from the rulebook. I think it went really well, but I never heard back from the couple of players that I traded emails with.

So what I plan on doing in upcoming posts is putting out some of the stuff I've been doing for BotA. The Lords of Lemuria forms seem to be broken, it looks like no one can make any new posts, and that gave me the idea to get this blog started back up and post the stuff here.

So that's it...