Updated "New Knights of the All Mind" - Free!

 

I've updated our home brew supplement for Advanced Labyrinth Lord™ and other OSR rules. Inside New Knights of the All Mind you'll find new classes, character abilities, an old-school initiative process, rules for charging, parries, death and dismemberment, Astral combat, and more.

You can pick up New Knights of the All Mind here for free from DriveThruRPG.

Hasbro, Please Take No Action Regarding the Open Gaming License v1​.​0a

 

The community has organized to fight changes to the Open Gaming License. One of those points of organization is a change.org petition drafted by Ryan Dancey (you can read Ryan's article on the OGL here). Please sign the petition here.

New Ref Screen for Labyrinth Lord!

 

I finally fashioned a useable ref screen that is compact enough to fit in my FRP bag. I started with the inner panels designed waaay back in 2010 by Shane Mangus over at Swords Against the Outer Dark. I altered the player-facing side by including my own art (inside the now-tainted Decanter Room) and, a-la Judges Guild "Judge's Shield," added to-hit, saving throw, turning, and a couple other bits of info duplicated on both sides of the art where players can access them. (I also adopted the "Judge's Shield" canary yellow color.)

The build the screen I printed the 6 sides separately (i.e. 1-sided) in color on an Ink-Jet printer to water-proof photo paper. Next trimmed the outer edges, basically everything outside the print-area of the printed page so color went edge to edge. Then bound first with 2" width book-binding tape the inner-facing pages (so outer seams would only expose the non-glued side of the tape). And finally used an Elmer's glue stick to fasten the outer pages against the inside ones.

If you are interested in making your own screen, or just want to see the sides close-up, here are PDFs of the yellow-colored screen and a regular black &white one...

Yellowed-colored Screen

Black & White Screen

Much Work Ahead

(Abyssal Levels Player Map)

 Dang, I want to develop a "Metropolis of Chaos" scenario as soon as I complete my Advanced Labyrinth Lord conversion of "Underport." I only had the barest completed work of yore, so figured pretty much an almost blank slate to go with. But I forgot about Player Maps...!

My friend J.A.S. ran a paladin in my first home brew campaign, from 1st until about 12th-13th level. It was his pegasus that fell through the prime material gate to the Abyss while the parties, yes there were two, fought Orcus. (Orcus' timestop vs Alancrost magic resist needed to play out each of several melee rounds. Yikes!)

While I would ref on the fly, I did draw maps for the players as they went along, and J.A.S. happened to pull an old box of stuff from his attic that included a bunch of old player maps from my 1980s  Krull campaign. Pretty cool, now I want to incorporate them back into my published Krull stuff. Weeeee!!!

Uruk is on the north coast of a southern land mass that was being threatened by demons or some kind of monsters. That's why the city is surrounded by tents of refugees.

Har, I also forgot that Alancrost the Paladin now lairs in the Eternal Pit beneath Underport, watching over the prime material gate to the Abyss. I should add stats for Alancrost to my Rogues Gallery.

The Coastal city of Uruk

Alancrost's Lair in the Eternal Pit.

New Knights of the All Mind

New Knights of the All Mind is posted on DriveThruRPG for free download.

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.

Color Maps!

I added the color maps that are completed for the new Advanced Labyrinth Lord/OSR compatible Underport: Abyssal Descent - Revisionist Edition to the current DriveThruRPG download of Underport: Abyssal Descent. The old black and white maps are still included, however, the color maps are much more legible.

The two differences between the original maps are an underground fungoid jungle section with an Aboleth on level 1 and a new level 9 which essentially incorporates a cross dimension connection with an alien spaceship. (The rough v.3.5 SRD version alien spaceship is free on Knights of the All Mind blogspot "Free Encounters" page. The new LL/OSR version will be encounter driven rather than these general notes.)

Once the new version of the dungeon is complete I will replace the old files with the new ones so anyone who purchased the v.3.5 SRD version will receive the new version for free.

Half Way There ...

Whew, this is taking me much longer than I expected...

Last June I had decided to convert my vintage (circa 1978-81) megadungeon "Underport: Abyssal Descent" from our home-ruled v.3.5 to 5e and also improve some of the shortcomings of the original presentation, specifically the long stat blocks and often illegible scanned maps.

The first part of the project was to add color to the maps, which in addition to making them more legible also came out purdy:

Shortly thereupon, however, I participated in an online B/X game with Jeff Rients and had a blast. So much so that I prevailed upon my home gaming group to switch from 5e to Advanced Labyrinth Lord, a B/X & AD&D retro-clone. At the same time I gathered myself to move the revision of Underport from 5e to the more original Advanced Labyrinth Lord.

A problem developed in that the original-original Underport (pictured below) was not a complete dungeon. It was bits and pieces formed over time as adventuring parties delved there. With the home-ruled v.3.5 version I used Tome of Horrors from Necromancer Games (one of my favorite publishers from the 3rd edition days) to fill in critters and encounters. Now with deciding to go back to my roots, I was faced with converting 3rd edition stats to 1st edition. Bleh!

(The "original" original Underport.)

So I am looking through the different iterations for Tome of Horrors Complete that Frog God Games has put out since Necromancer merged with them. Lo and behold, there is a Swords & Wizardry version of the tome!!!

Swords & Wizardry is an OD&D retro-clone harkening back to the "White Box" set of little brown books that started the game way back in 1974. I had considered S&W as one of the option to propose to my home group when I wanted to pitch them going back to an earlier version. The reason I ultimately went with Advanced Labyrinth Lord is that we gamed 1st ed. AD&D from 1978 until 2005 and Advanced Labyrinth Lord adhered close to those rules while cleaning up some unnecessary Gygaxian complexities.

The bottom line is that the conversion is going soooo much smoother with the S&W Tome! Maybe even get this done by next June...

PS My plan is to replace the existing v.3.5 Underport on DriveThruRPG with the new retro-clone version. That means everyone who purchased the first version will get the new version for free, but if for some reason needs to re-download the first version will need to contact me to do that.