Microlite and the OSR

I've spent as much time as I can muster to go through the latest Microlite stuff. By latest, I don't mean to imply that most of it is actually recent; much of it is over a decade old already. But latest in the sense that it postdates the original Microlite and the Purest Essence Microlite. "Greywulf", or Robin Stacey, made the first Microlite game as a super rules-lite, stripped down take on the 3.5 SRD. Stacey eventually sold or gave or something the rights, such as they were, to Randall S. Stukey, who runs the Microlite site and maintains the system, such as it is, and its archive.

Of course, a lot of other people have made m20 games over time, including myself, but Randall himself seems to be the main guy, and he's made tons of variants. Of course, also, a lot of his variants overlap with only a few minor differences between them; many of them have literally the same text, as much as possible. Stukey is especially interested in the use of m20 to emulate old school games, and he's the author of the Microlite74 family, the closely related Microlite75, and Microlite78 and Microlite81. 74 is an OD&D emulator of sorts, with some of his own house rules from when those games were current, I suppose, whereas 75 is also OD&D, but more faithful to the OD&D than to the 3.5 SRD base from which the game varied in the first place. 78 adds in a bunch of AD&D material, and 81 is more closely based on B/X. He also created a Microlite2020, which updates the game to a more 5e SRD-like base, but then there's also a Microlite2020 Old School version. He also has a few other variants; a sword & sorcery one (with some dubious commentary on the genre, but it's still a fascinating study), a couple that are for a specific setting or two that he's used, and even one that uses 3d6 instead of a d20. There's another 5e SRD based Microlite20 "Fifth Adamantium Edition" that someone else made that has a 5e-like layout.

It's been fun poking around in these games and seeing how they're different from each other, although honestly they aren't all that different. Some of the house rules that Stukey seems to like a lot are kind of controversial in an OSR environment, no doubt, especially his implementation of what are essentially 3e era Wound/Vitality points, with a different name. He's got a Sanity system, very rules lite, although I think I like mine just a little bit better. He also uses the OSR fetish of removing even the regular skills, although he does have a (admittedly fairly clever) check that replaces it. If the whole point of skill checks is that they replace long-form discussion with a roll, then just about any other system; ability check, etc. has the same problem, and there's no reason not to have skills. He also seems to normally add back one of the ability scores; rather than Microlite's normal three, Strength, Dexterity and Mind, he has Strength, Dexterity, Mind and Charisma. Or maybe he renamed Mind back to Intelligence—can't remember offhand. Honestly, although I did that by inertia when I first started messing around with m20, I don't really see the point of cutting the ability scores from six to three. It doesn't really make the game any more or less clunky to have the six ability scores that everyone is pretty much already used to seeing. I also increased the skills to six, and although I think that's a good change, one of the reasons I did it was so that with six abilities and six skills, the character sheet just looked better. Dark Fantasy X, with the same six abilities as D&D, and an increase from 4-5 (depending on the version of m20 that you used) to 6 skills is still fabulously rules lite; it doesn't actually add any complexity to speak of to have those back in. In fact, because they are all so familiar, it may be faster and easier to have more but familiar abilities rather than fewer, but you have to convert in your mind what the D&D abilities are in m20 terms. MIND as a conglomeration of INT, WIS and CHA and STR having to do double duty for both STR and CON from D&D was actually more difficult for me than just having them all. And my slightly expanded skill list of Athletics, Bushcraft, Communication, Knowledge, Stealth and Tinker seems like the right amount and the right list. They're all sufficiently broad to get lots of use, and sufficiently different from each other to not really have any overlap.

Of course, with these changes to my game, I don't really consider it an m20 game anymore either. It's at least as similar to some other hybrid OSR/modern game like ShadowDark or Knave 2e as it is to the original m20 game. But it's funny how insignificant, really, the difference really is between them. 

Anyway, I've made a few changes to my Dark Fantasy X game file; mostly by adding a more detailed weapon and armor list as an alternate rule. I may trawl through the spell and monster lists to see if there's anything else that I want to add, but probably not. I think a lot of the monsters that I don't already have, or at least have close analogs to, are too D&Dish to really fit well into the Dark Fantasy X setting. 

And when I finally get around to doing Elemental Fantasy X, I may use a slightly more D&D-like magic system anyway. We'll see. But probably not the more D&Dish monster list. I quite like the monster list as it is. Because Elemental Fantasy X is a hybrid of sorts between my Eberron Remixed and Heroes of Might & Magic III, I might find that there are some monsters I want to add from the latter in particular, or possibly modify from my existing list to more closely resemble their HOMM3 variants.

Why do I use X in all of of my recent homebrews anyway? Actually, I created an alternate (which later became my main) YouTube account a couple of years ago, originally to post SWTOR playthrough videos on. I wanted something that sounded like old space opera, but had a tongue in cheek pop culture reference or something like that, and for whatever reason, I imagined a spaceman who was kind of like the mysterious and cool Racer X from the old Speed Racer re-runs that I used to watch when I was a kid in the mid to late 70s. Spacer X became that name. Because I also had a kind of mysterious conspiracy theory X-files like vibe to the settings I was working on at the time it double fit. I decided to call my game Space Opera X, my username was Spacer X, my fantasy game Dark Fantasy X, and later, my not-dark fantasy Elemental Fantasy X, because by that time having an X at the end was kind of the brand.

... I guess that story isn't really all that interesting now that I've typed it out. Oh, well. And sadly, I've occasionally had people assume that I'm an Elon Musk fan because of Spacer X, which isn't really true at all. Sigh.

Finally, I've got a few more updates to a few more Hero Forge models, so here they are. 

Germund de Bosque, an infamous bounty hunter

Bahram Khanwar, an iconic "anti-PC" surtur. Of course, I named him back when they were still called the djinn and had a more middle eastern background rather than an Icelandic one. I might want to consider renaming him.

I have a folder in my Hero Forge characters called "Prospects" where I have either cool minis that I got out of the library, or ones that I just made without having a specific idea in mind for them. This guy was a library model, but I modified him somewhat. The original also predates the face customizer, so I had to implement that if I wanted to touch anything on the face at all.

Originally Drylanders weren't specifically Cossack and Slavic like, but now that they are, some "historical" models, like this Kievan Rus' guy, are good analogs for Drylanders.