27 March 2011

Crypts and Things: A Swords and Wizardry Variant RPG

Newt Newport of d101 Games has taken the core Swords and Wizardry rules (the ‘0e retro-clone’), my Akratic Wizardry house rules (which I developed in order to give S&W a stronger ‘swords and sorcery’ character, and used for my 2009 S&W ‘Ilmahal’ campaign), various ideas of his own, Newt’s ‘dying world of Zarth’, and has developed the Crypts and Things FRPG.

More information can be found here.

I’m excited that my Akratic Wizardry ideas for S&W will be appearing in a rather slick looking print product (although I’m sure that some of them will be revised before the final version of Crypts of Things is made available). Of course, some of these rules already have appeared in past issues of Fight On! and Knockspell.

I’m equally excited to see Newt’s ideas for swords and sorcery gaming, including information on his world of Zarth.

Check out the beautiful map of Zarth by John Ossoway (from here):


12 comments:

  1. OOOOoooohhhh, that looks very interesting. Thanks for sharing!

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  2. Sounds cool, and that's a nice looking map, too.

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  3. yes, very nice. I love your Akratic rules which I've incorporated some of into our campaign. Out of all the recent output, this is one that I'm most interested in.

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  4. Nice to see that there's some interest in Crypts and Things!

    I should have mentioned that the map is by John Ossoway. (I'll amend the post to say that.)

    I also should emphasize that Newt is doing all the heavy lifting on this product. My only contributions are the house rules (which were written about two years ago, and have been available for free here since then) and, time permitting, some proof-reading and suggestions.

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  5. I'm looking forward to the release. I like the name and the cover art too.

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  6. Aw shucks guys, thanks for all the kind words.

    Just to note this game wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the holy marriage of Matt Finch's S&W rules & Akrasia's S&S modifications. May hat is firmly tipped to you guys :)

    Now back to writing it ;) 60 New monsters polished off yesterday, now 50 + new magic items to write up.

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  7. Swords & Wizardry related, if not this particular post, but I wrote a treasure generator from the Core Rules tables if anyone else finds that it takes forever to do 'properly'.

    http://foont.net/swords-and-wizardry/tools/

    It is a little flexible in that you can change percentages, so you can customize treasure while still keeping things random.

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  8. My opinion is that all retroclones are usless.

    All dnd like gaming are weird, leave it and toss it to the trash can.

    From my point of view the whole oldschool gaming and retroclone rule designing are completely unnecessary. Because there are lot of games (for example odnd) and you don't have to publish n+1 version. Why don't you redesign the original dnd? Why fun playing with these clones?

    http://newschoolrpg.blogspot.com

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  9. Thanks for the troll post, 'roleplay'. If you're not interested in 'old school' gaming, feel free to ignore it (including this blog).

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  10. Ok, Mr. Oldschool. Thx for the wise advise. I will decide what will my interest. Currently I am interested in osr, I want to understand its background.

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I'm a Canadian political philosopher who lives primarily in Toronto but teaches in Milwaukee (sometimes in person, sometimes online).