Tag: Basic Fantasy

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More Thoughts on RuneQuest

I’m reconsidering part of the rule I proposed for special effects like impale in RuneQuest. The problem with any die showing a 0 is an impale as long as it’s a success is that it skews the chances of impaling at low skills quite a bit. With 20% skill, half your successful hits are impaling. Not what I’d really like to see.

Instead, I’m thinking of making it 0 or 5 showing on the 1’s die. This restores it to about 20% chance regardless of the skill. I think this works out to where rounding would happen with the original RQ: skill 15%, say, you have 3 chances out of 15 (05, 10, 15), while at 19 it’s still 3 but now out of 19, not becoming 4 out of 20 until you hit 20.

In some ways this is even easier to spot: multiples of 5 are special. Hard to imagine even my math phobic players objecting to that.

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Chaotic Caves Hexmap

This is a hexmap version J.D. Neal’s Chaotic Caves map from his The Chaotic Caves supplement for Basic Fantasy, released under the OGL, which is basically a nice, simple, hexcrawl retroclone of The Keep on the Borderlands.  C.R. Brandon released a version reskinned for Heroes & Other Worlds.  Since I was kind of irritated by the square grid in the map, I ripped it out and replaced it with a hex grid to approximately the same scale (1 hex = 1 mile, instead of 1 square = 1 mile). If I have energy I might even go as far a coloring it, though even doing this much took way more time than I had hoped.  (If there’s a truly easy way to just lay down a hex grid in GIMP, I couldn’t find it.  The otherwise nice hexGIMP plugin I found assumed that you wanted to hand-place all the hexes… and Hexographer has pretty much the same assumption: you can import an image to trace over it, but just imposing a simple hex grid of a particular size?  Forget about it.  I ended up just creating custom graph paper at the right scale and combining the images in Paint.NET, having had my fill of GIMP for the evening.)

You can get the free PDF version of the Basic Fantasy edition of The Chaotic Caves here.  The HOW pdf version is available from C.R. Brandon’s Lulu store (and is somewhat inexplicably more expensive than the print version of the BF edition on Amazon, but it does save you any headaches converting from D&D to HOW).

Anyway, enjoy!  Naturally, this version of the map is also released as OGL-licensed, but if you think I’m going to add the complete text of the OGL itself to the image, fuggedaboutit.

Chaotic Caves map by J.D. Neal, with hex grid added
Chaotic Caves map by J.D. Neal, with hex grid added