Saturday, May 22, 2021

Adventures in the Green, Draft C

This page provides links to Draft C of Adventures in the Green, my clone of the OD&D rules.

  1. Book I: Characters
  2. Book II: Conflicts
  3. Book III: Campaigns
Draft C is being play-tested during 2021 and incorporates things discovered during last year's playtesting plus a solid editing of the text, improving consistency.  This draft also includes some noticeable changes to spells and the spellcasting classes.

Clerics

Reading through the Cleric spell list, it was obvious the power levels of the spells were uneven and the selection thin until 7th level spells.  I've adjusted spell levels to smooth out things and increase the number of spells available at most levels.  Where needed, I added spells that appear in AD&D that fit.

The level names for Clerics were position titles inside the Christian faiths, which causes two problems.  First, as played, few Clerics are of the Christian faith, so having a Vicar of Thor makes no sense.  Second, if interacting with clergy who are of the Christian faith and had the title but not the character level was unnecessarily confusing (the bishop is a vicar kind of thing).   To fix this, I picked level names that were descriptive without being tied to a specific faith.

Magic-Users

Magic-Users, after 4th level, were the cheapest to level except for Thieves and Thieves overtake them at 13th level.  Deconstructing the costs to level for each class let me identify the pattern all but the Magic-User followed and correct the Magic-User experience table to follow that pattern.

Level names for Magic-Users were types of magic, which could lead to a high level wizard being a necromancer without any necromancy spells in their spell book.  I was not able to completely de-couple level with magic types, but I did indicate a growing power level.  Also, "Name Level" is now Archmage instead of Wizard.

Evil

The various spells dealing with "Evil" [Protection from EvilDetect Evil, and Dispel Evil] had issues as this edition of rules has no Evil alignment, only Law, Neutral, and Chaos.  After wrestling with the spells and what they actually do, I renamed them [Protection from Supernatural, detect Supernatural, and Dispel Malevolence, respectively] and better defined what they did.  Dispel Malevolence is still a little vague, but I feel it was designed to deal with a grab bag of effects targeted at the player characters, like vampiric mind control, so left it that way for flexibility.

The Rest

There are some other changes made to various parts of the rules [like combining Dryad and Naiad under Nymph as different types of nymphs], so read through carefully and don't make assumptions.

As usual, please let me know if/when you find a gap or something that doesn't work and I'll do my best to fix it or explain how it is supposed to work.  Thank you ahead of time!

Later!



2 comments:

  1. You are doing some excellent work here!
    I just read thru the Book III of Draft B, that I found late last nite, only to discover you've published this!
    Please keep up the good work, I look forward to perusing volumes I and II.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for reading and the compliments! Book III of Draft C, as mentioned in the post, should be ready by the end of June. It contains a lot of Referee advice and will take some additional care to edit.

    ReplyDelete