And Now For A Word From Our Sponsor

So, I'm sure if you're at all interested in RPGs in the 21st century, you've heard of DriveThruRPG*. It's basically the Amazon of digital gaming, both in its retail dominance, self-publishing empowerment, and affiliate program, in which participants can get a small percentage of the price of any purchase made through a particular link, for example the one above. This percentage does not increase the price of a purchase, rather it comes out of DTRPG's take.

I've been using DTRPG affiliate links for some time now, usually marking them with an asterisk that leads to a footnote summarizing the above for transparency purposes. Instead of that, I've decided to make a page with that information.

And now for a demonstration: earlier this week, Lamentations of the Flame Princess* announced a sale reducing all their PDFs sold through DTRPG for just $2.00 each, or $1.50 each for their LotFP Everything Bundle* (this works out to about $82.50). This includes the full (NSFW) art version of the core rules*, Ken Hite's excellent Vietnam-War-inspired setting Qelong*, award winners like A Red and Pleasant Land* and Broodmother Skyfortress*, basically every weird, fantastic, and downright horrific book the company has ever produced - right up to their most recent Gen-Con releases*. Believe me, $2.00 is practically a steal for some of these, but the sale only lasts until the end of the month. Once it's October in Finland, it's back to full price.

Retro-clone Read-through: Character Creation Part IIb

Hey, it's been a bit since we had one of these - continued from Part IIa. Overall, I think the tweaks that each rule-set gives to the characters it generates - some have more choices for equipment, some have more combat options - reflects my impression of the overall game thus far. Only time will tell if this continues to be the case, however . . .

Retro-clone Read-through - Character Creation, Part I

Today, as I understand it, is the 40th anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons, and thus in a way the entire RPG hobby. What better day, then to continue my series examining ten of the games that have been closely inspired by it?

Possibly the most important part of the rules, it's no surprise that all of the retro-clones I'm reading through have the character creation rules right up front. For the next few read-through posts, I'll be creating a character for each game, following the processes of each as closely as possible.

While many of them suggest various ways to generate it, all of them use the general "Six stats in the 3-18 range" mechanic. In order to test the rules as scientifically as possible, I'll be rolling one set of stats the traditional way - 3d6 In Order, of course - and applying them to each. So, without further ado, here are the numbers:

10, 15, 9, 9, 13, 9, 9

Not a bad spread, altogether, though the number of nines seems a bit of an anomaly - and yes, there's an extra at the end, I got a bit carried away with the dice-rolling and decided to keep it around in case any of the rulesets have an oddball stat or something. Anyway, let's take a look at what we can do with these numbers:

The Great 2014 Retroclone Readthrough

Over the past few years, a great many different versions of Dungeons & Dragons have been produced, several officially, but the vast majority being retroclones or house rule collections of one sort or another. The author of one of them (Grey Six) has assembled a vast and possibly even comprehensive list of variations, the scope of which underscores the creativity of the OSR community.

It also underscores the difficulty of keeping up with them all. For some time, I've had a bunch of different rulesets sitting around waiting to be read, and so I figured - hey, it's a new year, why not read the whole stack at once and do a comparison?