Boot Hill As Survival Horror

As some of you may recall way back when, I made a blog post dedicated to the early RPG Boot Hill, a Western-themed game published by TSR in the 1970's. The game itself is a cult classic that never caught on like D&D did, but was fondly remembered by those who did play it. It is primarily known for two things, One of those things is a minimalist percentile-based combat system. The other thing it is known for is said combat system being highly lethal to player characters, with the very real chance of your character dying from a single shot.

While intended as a work of the Western genre, I realized that this game's deadly combat mechanics would lend itself well to horror campaigns. Which brings me to my next point....

A while back I proposed an idea for a game inspired by the zombie films of George A. Romero (particularly the original Dawn of the Dead from 1978) called Waifu vs. Zombie and it was to be based on a modified OD&D or Swords & Wizardry, something along those lines,

However, I realize now that it would be easier both mechanically and thematically to use Boot Hill Second Edition for such a game rather than Original Dungeons & Dragons as the only real change would be to cook up some base stats for semi-automatic firearms and maybe a different wound chart for zombies. From there, you'd basically be set to go.

In fact, Boot Hill in general promises a lot of opportunity as a base springboard system for highly lethal survival horror games of different stripes, whether it be zombies, slashers, Lovecraft-inspired horrors, or what have you.

I might be preparing a small-scale IRL zombie campaign based on Boot Hill's rules titled The Campaign of the Dead so expect to see some more on that soon.

A Quick Review of Lion & Dragon RPG

Wow, it's been a long while since I updated this blog. Again, I do apologize for the lack of activity, as I had been dealing with some depression and other real-life issues and distractions, but fortunately things have gotten much better recently. One of the great things that has helped elevate my mood and inspire me to post more on here and commit to my projects is the subject of this very blog post.

Of course, I am talking about Lion & Dragon, a very awesome and well-researched "Medieval Authentic" OSR game by RPG Pundit, owner of The RPG Site and self-described Final Boss of Internet Shitlords.

Now, it does go without saying that Pundit is somewhat of a polarizing figure in the RPG scene, especially in the OSR Movement.

You either love him or hate him, and while I don't agree with several of his political views, I do like him and respect him as both a game designer and as an advocate for free speech and free expression within this hobby of ours. I've been an active member of his forum, The RPG Site (linked at the end of this article) since December of 2015 and The RPG Site is one of my favorite online spaces in the hobby of role-playing games, equaled only by RPG Pub. But enough about Pundit's politics or his forum, let's discuss his actual work in question!

Lion & Dragon is a Medieval Fantasy OSR that is described as "Medieval Authentic", which means that it is more closely modeled after the actual history and society of the European Middle Ages, and draws its influences and inspirations from actual medieval history and folklore as opposed to fantasy adventure literature from the 20th Century.

Whereas a typical D&D or OSR game would be influenced by the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, and their later successors in the genre, Lion & Dragon would more likely draw its inspirations from the works of Sir Thomas Malory, Geoffrey Chaucer, Dante Alighieri, and Christien de Troyes, among other medieval romances.

There are many key differences between Lion & Dragon and the default assumptions of Dungeons & Dragons and other OSR games, some of which are unusual to those familiar with common fantasy works (especially more recent ones) and to many gamers (especially Millennial gamers like myself) these changes may seem restrictive, but I find them to be rather liberating.

Some of the major changes are as follows....

1. Social class is a major element of character creation and gameplay, and society is structured under a very strict hierarchical class system. Serfs, peasants and city-dwellers are playable, but are assumed to defer to the authority of the nobility and the authority of both the Church and the Crown.

2. The world of Lion & Dragon is monotheistic in its outlook as opposed to the more polytheistic settings typical to most D&D worlds. The two cited examples of monotheism are the Church of the Unconquered Sun (from Pundit's Dark Albion setting) and medieval Christianity. Theoretically, you could play a character who is a pagan or a polytheist, but they would be most likely viewed as a heretic and an outlaw.

3. Alignment is a major factor in gameplay and your character has to behave in a manner befitting of the alignment. The default assumption in Lion & Dragon is Law vs. Chaos, although Good vs. Evil is also mentioned as a possible alternative. The famous Nine-Point Alignment chart from D&D does not apply here.

4. Clerics are monotheistic and must be of Lawful alignment. Rather than being just a priest who can cast spells and wield blunt weapons, clerics in Lion & Dragon are specifically chosen by divine will to serve God (or the Unconquered Sun, if specifically in Dark Albion) and are blessed by him. They do not cast spells, but can work miracles and blessings. As such, clerics are treated as more like a religious society or monastic order as opposed to the mainline clergy. While priests, monks, and nuns can be clerics, it is not a requirement. In fact, you can even play a female cleric, although given the patriarchal nature of medieval society, the leaders of the clerical orders are male.

5. There are no weapon and armor restrictions on characters per se, although Magisters cannot use magic while wearing metal armor, as it inhibits movement and dexterity required for certain arcane preparations.

6. Gold pieces are not standard currency, and they are rare. The monetary system is closer to the actual medieval and Renaissance currency system used in England, albeit simplified somewhat for gameplay purposes. The coins are divided into Pennies, Shillings, and Pounds. Pennies are copper, Shillings are silver, and Pounds are gold, but coinage in general is uncommon and a barter economy is the standard, especially in more rural areas or among the lower social classes.

7. Magic is a lot closer to actual medieval occult practices such as alchemy, astrology, cures, talismans, and banishing. Magic itself requires proper material components, preparations, and conditions to be met in order for the magic to work as intended.

8. Summoning is also a major magical skill, and revolves around demonology and otherworldly beings of a similar nature. There is an infernal hierarchy among demons and it is important that one takes the proper steps in preparing the summoning rituals and ceremonies. However, a Chaotic character can shortcut their way to magical power by making pacts with demons or making blood sacrifices to them.

9. Much like in medieval society, the King and the Church both have absolute authority over their subjects, Unlike many modern and post-modern works, this is not treated as inherently bad, simply as an aspect of the period in question.


These touches of authenticity can help player and GM alike be more creative, thinking outside the box of common and standard fantasy fiction tropes and overall it feels like a breath of fresh air compared to bog-standard D&D and OSR games.

Prior to buying Lion & Dragon, almost all of my OSR collection and experience was with generic retro-clones like Dark Dungeons, Swords & Wizardry, or Basic Fantasy.

While I do like the newer editions of D&D and many OSR games, Lion & Dragon is by far my favorite OSR game and quite possibly my favorite variant of D&D period. Kudos to RPG Pundit for making this game.

In fact, I have several ideas in mind for a Lion & Dragon campaign or fan fiction, including concepts for both the Tudor era and the Arthurian romances. Some of them may appear on this very blog in the near future.

Here is Pundit's forum, if any of you wish to check it out for yourself...

https://www.therpgsite.com/

Medieval Mayhem: An Old-School D&D Project

In my most recent blog entry I talked about the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons that started it all and why I love it so much. So I might as well share some ideas I have for a project that is directly related to Original Dungeons & Dragons.

The project is an experiment that I call "Medieval Mayhem" and it is somewhat inspired by the rise of YouTube videos detailing people's RPG campaigns, the most prolific being Critical Role.

Medieval Mayhem is an idea that takes inspiration from previous ideas I have had for RPG fan fiction stories. However, it is somewhat different from other attempts I have made.

It is essentially a story presented as an actual campaign journal for OD&D, complete with character sheets, recorded dice rolls, and everything else that entails. It is not a heavily pre-scripted narrative and it is largely run in an open-ended and improvisational way, much like the old D&D campaigns of yore way back in the 1970's and early 1980's.

However, Medieval Mayhem also serves another purpose as well. The "in-game" events of Medieval Mayhem also serve as information for a custom OD&D setting that I am working on and will develop within the context of this project, before refining into a "proper" campaign setting compatible with the mechanics of Original Dungeons & Dragons.

Medieval Mayhem will be using only the Three Little Brown Booklets from the OD&D box set.

I may possibly incorporate the materials from Chainmail and the four OD&D supplements as well, although I am not sure. If I do incorporate Supplements I-IV, it would be in an incremental fashion.

Expect more material for the project known as Medieval Mayhem very soon.

Some Thoughts on Original Dungeons & Dragons

It's been a while since my last blog post and so I decided I might as well make a new one and let you guys know I'm still alive and well.

So, for this particular blog post I might as well talk about the classic that started it all, the 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons, which is one of my favorite RPG's of all time and the very first RPG ever made (unless you count Braunstein)

Original Dungeons & Dragons is one of my favorite games and is tied with the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for my favorite version of D&D overall. However, unlike most old-school gamers, I'm a millennial (born in 1993) and was introduced to D&D and the RPG hobby through the revised third edition of the game (D&D 3.5) way back in February of 2007, when I was thirteen years old. However, my Dad was an old-school gamer who cut his teeth on AD&D First Edition and like me, was a huge fan of Second Edition AD&D.

In fact, Second Edition is his favorite version of the game and is one of mine as well.

I'm actually planning a weekly AD&D Second Edition game pretty soon with some of my real-life friends but I digress.

So, I'm sitting here in my living room listening to The Dubliners and drinking Mello Yello as I type this newest entry to my blog, and I have been thinking about ideas for a theoretical old-school D&D campaign using only the original White Box rules from 1974. That's right, the Three Little Brown Booklets themselves. I recently purchased the official PDF's of OD&D's core rules, along with all four of the supplements and Chainmail as well and I'm looking over the original rules and they are awesome.

I previously have had experience with Original Dungeons & Dragons via OSR retro-clone games like Swords & Wizardry and Full Metal Plate Mail, but having the actual original rules themselves is even better in my personal opinion.

Overall, I love Original Dungeons & Dragons and find it to be one of the best old-school games because it is the epitome of Old-School, it was the first RPG ever published and it revolutionized not just tabletop gaming, but other forms of gaming as well. It is a very versatile game system.

Ostensibly, OD&D is a medieval game with a lot of Swords & Sorcery and High Fantasy elements, drawing heavily from the works of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Tolkien. But that is just the initial setup to help serve as a springboard for nearly any type of campaign you want to run, especially if you are a creative Game Master.

The four supplements of Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, and Gods Demigods & Heroes are excellent additions to the game, which when added in their entirety with the OD&D White Box rules, make the whole game a rough draft form of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First Edition, which makes sense given that AD&D 1E was originally intended as a compendium of all the stuff that OD&D had accumulated from the supplements and magazine articles throughout the 1970's.

But even with just the core rules, which seem to be bare-bones compared to later editions of D&D, you can run a lot of different games in different styles with the proper minor tweaks. The seemingly minimalist style of OD&D is also one of the game's greatest strengths, making it loose enough to be flexible and easily compatible with Rule Zero add-ons and other fan content.

Even the core rules alone mention some stuff that seems out of place compared to later versions of D&D, but would also make the game very interesting. Stuff like Robots, Androids, and Martians and the like.

Overall, I have some good thoughts on OD&D and expect more posts about it on this blog very soon.

8-Bit Chivalry: Dungeons & Dragons and Final Fantasy

So, it should be obvious that old-school Dungeons & Dragons was a colossal influence on video games, and directly led to the concept of the CRPG genre of video games (short for Computer Role-Playing Game or Console Role-Playing Game) and one of the greatest and most triumphant examples of this influence is the extremely popular Final Fantasy franchise, a series of Japanese video games and one of the most popular and long-running examples of the RPG video game genre.

While later entries in the Final Fantasy series would follow in a more science-fiction influenced direction, particularly from Final Fantasy VII onward, the early games of the 8-Bit and 16-Bit eras were very much done a more traditional pseudo-medieval fantasy more reminiscent of other popular fantasy works, most notably Dungeons & Dragons. In fact, it is often rumored online that the very first Final Fantasy game was originally intended as a direct licensed game based on D&D.

Not much evidence exists that suggests that Final Fantasy I was initially intended to be an officially licensed Dungeons & Dragons video game, but one thing is certain and that is the people at Square responsible for Final Fantasy I definitely were fans of D&D. The influence of the world's oldest tabletop role-playing game on the Final Fantasy franchise is most prevalent in the very first entry into the series, with several tropes that may seem weird to fans of the more modern games in the series, but would be very familiar to anyone who played D&D in the 1980's, or is a fan of the Old-School Rules movement within the greater hobby.

Hell, even more modern D&D players may pick up on some of the D&D influences in Final Fantasy.

First off, while every subsequent game would use Magic Points (MP) for casting spells, Final Fantasy I had a more Vancian-style magic system of spells per day that took up a number of spell slots, and could only be replenished by resting at an Inn or camping in a tent or cabin.

Gee, I wonder where I've seen that before? (sarcasm)

Second, a lot of the classes are based on early D&D classes. Most notable are the Monk (called a Black Belt in the original NES release) which is the typical martial artist familiar to D&D fans, along with the mages. Much like in Dragonlance, there are three types of mages: Red, Black, and White.

However, unlike Dragonlance, the colors are not indicative of alignment but of the kind of spells used. White Mages are healers, essentially a rendition of the Cleric class in D&D, they even are restricted to only using blunt weapons like hammers and staves, while Black Mages cast combat spells and Red Mages use a mix of both spells but not to the same extent or proficiency as either White Mages or Black Mages.

Other tropes is the presence of Bahamut, the Dragon King (based on Bahamut, the Platinum Dragon) and enemies such as the Evil Eye (essentially a Beholder with the serial numbers filed off) and even some throwbacks to OD&D such as robot enemies like the infamous Warmech and the Flying Fortress at the game's end being a futuristic sci-fi space station (later renditions of Final Fantasy I would make the Flying Fortress a more traditional fantasy castle and either remove or downplay a lot of the sci-fi elements in the late stages of the game)

My favorite Final Fantasy game is Final Fantasy XV (Noctis is my man-waifu), but the more I learn about Final Fantasy I and its ties to D&D, the more I want to make a D&D or OSR campaign inspired by it.

I might even make my own campaign setting as an homage to both Final Fantasy I and early D&D.

Waifu vs. Zombies: The Soundtrack

Here's a "just for fun" blog update about the ideal soundtrack for a game of Waifu vs. Zombies and given the 1970's-inspired style of the game, I figured it would be appropriate that such a soundtrack would consist largely of hits from the 1970's (with a few songs from the 1960's as well) and without further to do, here is my picks for the soundtrack to Waifu vs. Zombies.

1. King Harvest: Dancing In The Moonlight
2. Edison Lighthouse: Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes
3. The Archies: Sugar Sugar
4. Elton John: Crocodile Rock
5. Brewer & Shipley: One Toke Over The Line
6. The Stampeders: Sweet City Woman
7. Creedence Clearwater Revival: Bad Moon Rising
8. John Denver: Take Me Home, Country Roads
9. The Steve Miller Band: The Joker
10. Stealer's Wheel: Stuck In The Middle With You
11. David Hess: Wait For The Rain
12. The Dillards: Copperfields
13. Dusty Springfield: Son of a Preacher Man
14, Jim Croce: Bad Bad Leroy Brown
15. The Who: Pinball Wizard
16. Seals & Crofts: Summer Breeze
17. Simon & Garfunkel: Homeward Bound
18. Lynyrd Skynyrd: Sweet Home Alabama
19. The Allman Brothers: Ramblin' Man
20. Queen: Fat Bottomed Girls
21. The Bee Gees: Jive Talkin'
22. Don McLean: American Pie
23. Blue Oyster Cult: Don't Fear The Reaper

Waifu vs. Zombies: A New RPG Project

Wow! It's been a very long while since I've posted anything on this blog at all. I figured it's about time to remedy that right now.

Anywho, real life kept me somewhat busy during the months of June and most of July and I sort of forgot about this blog. But I am now returning to it. And I figured I'd announce a new and ambitious project on my part. A new project that at the very least, would be a nice campaign to run and at the very most, an actual published OSR RPG, albeit one of  a different sort.

The game is titled Waifu vs. Zombies and it is an homage to both old-school anime and old-school zombie fiction. The two main zombie works that this game is inspired by are George A. Romero's Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Shinji Mikami's Resident Evil (1996) although I am taking influences from other zombie works as well, including Night of the Living Dead (1968), Day of the Dead (1985), Resident Evil 2 (1998), High School of the Dead (2010), DayZ (2013) and the cheap Italian zombie grindhouse flicks of the 1970's and 1980's such as the Zombi series.

Another major inspiration for the game is the classic Stephen King post-apocalyptic epic The Stand, as well as the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons.

The premise is that the game is a survival horror sandbox RPG where the PC's are survivors of a slow-moving zombie apocalypse in the United States circa the late 1970's and early 1980's, with a focus on the Eastern United States, specifically the Mid-Atlantic and Central Appalachia, though your campaign could be set anywhere within North America to be honest.

The initial goal of the game is to explore and survive, with an endgame scenario of rebuilding civilization and managing a domain or settlement, similar to the endgame scenario of OD&D.

If I can save up enough money to commission artwork, I would have anime-style artwork. But it would resemble the anime of the 1980's rather than more modern anime franchises. Think along the lines of the general art styles found in stuff like Saint Seiya, Vampire Hunter D, Robotech, Angel Cop, Ranma 1/2, and the original Mobile Suit Gundam,

It would be a very dark and violent game, but also a hopeful one. Because if your characters manage to survive long enough against the zombies, bandits, and the elements of nature, then maybe they can rebuild society and make a fresh start of things, Rebuilding civilization and rescuing civilians would be emphasized heavily alongside survival.

The mechanics are another question. It would be an OSR "clone" system under the OGL, but rather than use an old TSR-era version of D&D, I am thinking of heavily modifying the open-license Anime SRD for this game. For those not in the know, the Anime SRD was released alongside the d20 System version of Big Eyes Small Mouth back in the early 2000's.

Waifu vs. Zombies would be an OSR game of a different sort.

Because when there's no more room in Hell, the weebs will walk the Earth.