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Simple Gambling Rules

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Gambling Rules (Adopted from Knave 2E ) I love the gambling rules that Ben Milton cooked up for Knave 2E. However, I wanted to give them just a little more depth. I’ve added rules for handling characters who are skilled at gambling ( card sharps , riverboat gamblers, and the like) as well as cheating. Basic Rules of Gambling Know when to roll 'em... The player wagers an amount of money (up to the house limit). The House (GM) rolls 1d6. The player then decides to either bow out (losing half their wager) or try to roll 1d6 and beat the House’s roll. If the player rolls and succeeds, they win an amount equal to their wager. If they roll equal to or less than the House’s roll, the player loses their wager. Gambling Skill A skilled gambler (based on a feat or similar mechanic) has a slightly better chance of beating the house. When rolling, the player rolls 1d4 in addition to the normal 1d6. If either of these dice rolls are greater than the House’s roll, the player wins ...
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Simple Encumbrance for OSR

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I'm working on a set of simple encumbrance rules that can work with relative ease with any version of TSR D&D or D&D retro clone. The following system owes a great deal to a bunch of "slot-based" encumbrance systems that other designers have created. It's based primarily on Ben Milton's Knave and an idea I took from Kevin Crawford's Worlds Without Number . The version presented below was written specifically for Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised . If you're adapting it for a different version of D&D, you might get slightly different results depending on how your rules handle "to-hit bonuses" for Strength. Item-Based Encumbrance An adventurer can only carry a limited amount of equipment, weapons, and treasure before becoming weighted down. Rather than track the actual weight of the various pieces of gear a character is carrying, this system counts the total number of items and uses that to measure encumbrance. For rules purposes,...
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On Diseases in Orginal D&D

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One small project I’m working on is writing out rules for handling disease in old school D&D. My general goal is to craft some mechanics that can work, with minor tweaking, for most any TSR era edition of D&D. Whenever possible, I want to use existing rules published by TSR. It’s not a hard requirement, and I’m willing to tweak any rules I find, but I’d at least like to start with something "official". And I thought I was onto something, but now I don't think so at all. In doing some research on this, I found this post from Delta’s D&D Hot Spot, where he points out that the earliest rules for Diseases in D&D actually appear in OD&D supplement 2, Blackmoor. Alas, despite Delta’s endorsement and his general enthusiasm, I don’t think these rules actually work. Let’s take a look at why. The Effects of Being Sick Here's a portion of the rules in question:           Fatality The most straightforward effect of contracting a disease un...
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Random Realm: Ruins and Lairs

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“Once you’ve set down the population centers, you can begin placing the Ruins locations. These Ruins represent lost cities, crumbled fortresses, stygian dungeon, plundered temples, abandoned towers of wizardry, and all the other decaying locales so beloved of adventurers.” -- An Echo Resounding: A Sourcebook for Lordship and War Kevin Crawford (2012) Step 11: Add Ruins In our last installment, we added two major cities to our random map as well as a handful of towns. Now we’re going to place some potential adventure locations in the form of what Crawford calls “Ruins.” The book suggests the following: 5 ruins for every City. 1-3 of those were once major human cities, towns, etc. The rest can be whatever (wizards' towers, lost temples, ancient ruins, etc.) Since we placed 2 Cities in a previous step, we need to place about 10 Ruins. According to Echoes, 2-6 of these should be former human settlements of some kind. I’m trying to lean into random...
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