What are Your House Rules?

A parent forum for communities of specific S&W-based games, each game will have a sub-forum here.
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Persimmon
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What are Your House Rules?

Post by Persimmon »

So we've been playing all kinds of OSR games over the past few years but have meandered back to Swords & Wizardry as our game of choice, modified, of course with elements from other games, most notably Labyrinth Lord, with a few personal tweaks added. As we are about to tackle Necropolis, I decided to revise an old campaign a bit and convert it over to Swords & Wizardry from AD&D 1e. This provoked a revision of our house rules for distribution to the group. I thought I'd post them here & invite others to do the same.
Swords & Wizardry House Rules.docx
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merias
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by merias »

Thanks, I love seeing other people's house rules. I can see the influence of DCC in there with the combat options, and I like the random illusionist spells for Gnomes and the simple Bard class. Somewhat related - I always thought it odd that S&W Complete had Rangers but not Illusionists, since both appeared outside of the original supplements you can't say it was for legal reasons.

Have you played any sessions yet in the new campaign?

I need to consolidate my own set of house rules for S&W White Box, it's been a few years since I have updated them from what is on my blog, and some things have changed.

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Persimmon
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by Persimmon »

Yeah, I was also bummed about the illusionist and the exclusion of gnomes since the gnome Illusionist/Thief is one of my favorite character types. In fact, when I first got into retroclones, I chose Labyrinth Lord over Swords & Wizardry because S&W lacked gnomes & illusionists. Finally, as you see, I just added them, along with a few other things cribbed from many sources. The main goal was to take bits we like, but keep the basic streamlined simplicity of Swords & Wizardry.

These house rules have mostly been in effect for the party that's about to start Necropolis. If they survive, they'll be high enough level for my apocalyptic campaign so we'll see how much I've revised by then. Or we could do Cyclopean Deeps, which I love, but have never actually played.

I'd like to try City of Brass, which would also take years to play but is really cool, and we're definitely going to play Dwarrowdeep, which is the forthcoming megadungeon from Greg Gillespie.

In the meantime I'll be updating and converting my apocalyptic campaign to Swords & Wizardry too. That's more long-term as I want to incorporate lots of the cool monsters from Tome of Horrors, etc. into my older campaign. Interestingly, I always disliked the way AD&D differentiated devils & demons and created the lame "Blood War" concept. My conceptualization of the Inferno has always been as a vast realm of gradations of evil and chaos that mixes all the traditional concepts of Hell & the Underworld. So demons, daemons, devils & their ilk all exist there together, sometimes fighting, sometimes working together. When I found that this was essentially how Swords & Wizardry presents it, I was hooked and started thinking about redoing my old campaign to incorporate all the new devil & demon types into the Infernal section.
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Valdus
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by Valdus »

In my Whitebox campaign I explain clerics having no spells at first level as they being adept the cannot harness the power of the gods. So that the cleric-players don't pout, I explain that fighters and etc. also only do 1d6 across the board because of their inexperience at level one.

Also when I roll stats, I roll 7 3d6, the last roll replaces a possible low roll in attributes.

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Persimmon
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by Persimmon »

Valdus wrote:
Sun Jun 12, 2022 3:37 pm
In my Whitebox campaign I explain clerics having no spells at first level as they being adept the cannot harness the power of the gods. So that the cleric-players don't pout, I explain that fighters and etc. also only do 1d6 across the board because of their inexperience at level one.

Also when I roll stats, I roll 7 3d6, the last roll replaces a possible low roll in attributes.
Yeah; White Box is challenging in that I want to add a few things, but by the time I add everything I want, it's basically just Swords & Wizardry Complete....But it's a great minimalist system for introducing newbies to RPGs.

So is there a S&W or Whitebox community in New Orleans? I'm in south Mississippi and I'd possibly be interested in games.
"Behind closed eyes, realize your sight."--Blue Oyster Cult

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Valdus
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by Valdus »

I am slowly trying to build one by hosting a tabletop in my carport using the whitebox. It is not easy to tabletop in a town that works out their roleplay in hte streets, thus pbo. I have two-three peope with solid interest in a good ol' dungeon crawl.

Wow, driving to New Orleans from Mississippi to play a tabletop? Wow, no pressure for me there!

I am also trying out a dungeon crawl over at The Maze of Maldoom at Gamersplane, the dice roller and clarity are rather flawless. There is good interest there.

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Persimmon
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by Persimmon »

NOLA is about a two hour drive for me. I sometimes hit the game stores there and a few have gaming in the store though I've never participated. We have one semi-decent game store in Hattiesburg, but as might be expected, most of the games run there are war games, board games, or 5e. I may try to get an OSE or Swords & Wizardry game going. Now I generally play with family, but not as often as I'd like.
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Valdus
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by Valdus »

If things get OSR “hot” at my carport I’ll let you know.

Do you play-by-post?

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Persimmon
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by Persimmon »

I've tried play by post but every game flamed out pretty quickly. And I loathe VTT play, having tried that as well. So it's pretty much old fashioned, mask free face to face gaming for me.
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jcftao
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Re: What are Your House Rules?

Post by jcftao »

I am curious about your experience with virtual tabletop gaming. I am in a group that has been playing many years online. We play on average once a week for a couple hours. It has been a great alternative to face to face games.
We use Roll20, basic level is free.
If you could, I'd like to hear what problems you had with VTT.

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