This supplement is kind of ironic because the original Knights of the All Mind supplement I prepared for our home group back in 2012 was to introduce old school attributes to d20. Now this "New" supplement is helping refine our foray back into the "old" ways, since about a year ago we had crossed over to Advanced Labyrinth Lord.
So what is in this new-old supplement? Merely a few somewhat minor aspects we used in our old 1st edition game that I thought would be interesting to bring back in some fashion.
- Strength Above 19 - The Advanced Labyrinth Lord uses increased hit dice for belts of giant strength and the like, which on a certain level makes sense, but really only works for to hit and damage and not feats of strength like breaking down doors and bending bars. We went through a doozy of a discussion over how to stratify strength where the Gygaxian special "fighter type" strength from 1-100 is eliminated. (There was sooo much needless Gygaz complexity that our era beginning in the late 70s had to live with...)
- Divine Intervention - An old table I had from the original Knights, not always an impact, but when divine intervention is your character's last hope, well...
- Godly Grants - This came up because we were going to run a group through Geoffrey Dales Inferno, and J.A.S. has a fighter, Halberton, with a mace that grants a Godly Grant every day (He gained the mace at Grimcon III). Mark Scheinert was kind enough to describe this Arduin magical grant.
- Death and Dismember Table - I derived a much simplified 1d20 table adapted from Zak Smith's d100 DADT from the 5th edition Zak Hak. The mechanics are awesome because rather than having 0 hit points become this demarcation point between fighting as normal and unconsciousness/death, moving below 0 is a sort of dance between barely hanging on to consciousness, risking death, while often suffering injuries.
- Weapon Speed - Our group came about during the glorious period of J. Eric Holmes Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set. It had very simplified weapon speed: Light weapons take a half round to use, heavy weapons 2 rounds, and regular weapons 1 round. So when Players Handbook came out in late 1978, PRE Dungeon Masters Guide, we took all the weapon speed factors as number of segments to use and ran SEGMENT BY SEGMENT combat for nearly 30 years! It was insane, not what Gygaz intended, and FUN AS HELL!!! Anyhow, it doesn't work quite right with B/X 10-secomd melee rounds, but you know what? HOLMES BASIC USED 10-SECOND ROUNDS! So there we go, I just threw in the Holmes rules.
- Weapon Adjustments To Hit Versus Armor Type - This is really something that just about everyone ditched: Giving different weapons bonuses or penalty based on whether they were striking against someone wearing anything from no armor to plate mail. Most folks I supposed thought it was a needless wargaming complexity, I always thought it was kind of cool and made weapon selections a little more meaningful - and occasionally a PC super-needed that bonus! So I included armor type adjustments for all the weapons listed in Advanced Labyrinth Lord.
- Variety of Other Stuff - Most of these are from my earlier book that I though were useful, but there is just kind of a salad of other things: Mutation Table, Whimsey Table, Psionic Rules adopted to Labyrinth Lord as simplified by Silverblade the Enchanter, and my very own Appendix N.
Any how, it's free, so what do you have to lose? Ha, where I come from they say "Take what you need and leave the rest."
Namaste.
