I've decided that, in order to get me producing more content for this blog I am going to do my campaign planning here on the blog.using tools I have presented in a number of my game hacking and experience design articles. I am going to discuss my world ideas first, then consider how they are going to be reflected in the game, and in the end, I will have what should amount to a pretty solid custom TTRPG.
But to do that I needed a starting place.
The Tragic Tale of AEr
About four years ago I started a campaign called AEr, which, unfortunately fizzled out before I could really get it going. The ideas was to create something that would feel like The Dragon-Riders of Pern meet The Pirates of Darkwater. And I went about making a couple of custom classes for it that eventually became the basis of two of the six classes in Strange Ways. I shared some of my AEr design work in the first few months of the blog.
One of the things I started with AEr was writing a complete game manual in my own words. I figured that once I had a retro-clone that was exactly what I liked in terms of rules, I could copy/paste it ad-infinitum and then just rejigger classes, spells, and races however I wanted to fit the experience that I want to give to my players.
Obviously I could - and have - used other open systems like Cairn, Knave, and Mark of the Odd. And I certainly have had a lot of fun with the Black Hack over the years... but none were quite right for the project.
One needs to "know their audience." And in meeting the tastes of the people I am playing with for this campaign, I have the following constraints that make these systems less useful to my aims:
- The players for this campaign like to have some crunch, which you definitely do not have in MotO or Cairn.
- They also like to have some character customization options. They don't need Pathfinder 2nd Edition... but they need more than Knave can offer.
- And I want the campaign to feel risky and tense... and quite frankly The Black Hack makes the game so easy on players that I only every use Black Hack based games for short pallette cleansers.
- Even my own ultra-light that I play with my kids, Drakken didn't make the cut because it is essentially crunch-free.
So I undertook writing a fresh clone that used many of my favourite rules and innovations from across the OSR when I built AEr.
The Kitbash
When AEr was declared dead as a campaign about four sessions in, I stopped, but I kept the document, and promised myself that one day I would finish it so that I would have a template to build custom games in a fast, easy manner. And to be fair to my players, all of it would be spelled out it one place.
(I have worked on it since in a very ambitions scifi wargame project that is on hold while I am waiting for some collaborators.)
While taking a break from the final and most challenging parts of making Undeadwood: Wierd West RPG, and while planning a second more traditional fantasy home game, I decided now would be a good time to finish the game.
And that is what I have done over the last week. Well, at least the most important part: the PC-facing rules.
And, of course, why make it just for myself when I can offer it to my fellow hackers as a free resource?
The final result, Heroes & Homelands, is specifically designed to have light, easy-to-use rules, including some of my favourite innovations from across the Old-School Renaissance sphere. And I endeavoured to present them in a format that was clean, easy to understand, and all in my own original language so that I could release them into the Creative Commons without needing to worry about conforming to the Open Gaming License.
You will find elements from Basic Fantasy RPG, The Black Hack, Deathtrap Lite, Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, Index Card PRG, Knave, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Low Fantasy Gaming, and Swords & Wizardry here... along with innovations from Tales of the Manticore.
And I have made heavy use of both my Rules Cyclopedia and the AD&D1e manuals to make sure I have a game that is fully compatible with almost any OSR material you car to run.
I have also released it in multiple formats for the convenience of my fellow Hackers.
For the upcoming thought experiment, I invite you to download it in PDF format here.
PDF Download
If you want it in .docx, .odt. or as an .html file... or if you just want to throw me a few bones, I put it as a Pay What You Want game on itch.io in all of those formats.
Get All Formats on Itch.io
Obviously this game is devoid of the niceties like examples of play and discussions of what is a role-playing game or a basic "How to Play" section. Those are things that I might add to a finished product, but H&H is intended as a template that I (or any of you) can flesh out with those details when it suits you.
The Experiment
Heroes & Homelands as it is presented here is a generic OSR game. It might be well-designed for the kind of play I always want: fast, loose, and with plenty of room for surprises and chaos... but it is still designed to be used to play a vanilla D&D setting.
In my next article, I am going to start going over my world idea in bite-sized chunks and start changing those rules in simple, easy ways. The end result will be a game that is very different. You will get to see me do "live" world-building and then the kitbashing to make it an explorable world at the table.
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