Rulesets and Supplements Thereof

Last week, Jim Raggi posted a "rehearsal tape" version of his upcoming old school RPG rules. It's quite an interesting document and well worth looking at, if only to see where Raggi's ideas match up with one's own. I'm also intrigued by the fact that it's called a "weird fantasy" roleplaying game, although there's not much (to my mind anyway) evidence of that in the material that's currently available online. Perhaps that will be more apparent in later iterations.

I'm genuinely looking forward to seeing the publication of this game, though. I personally appreciate seeing lots of mutant descendants of Dungeons & Dragons, each one reflecting the idiosyncrasies of its creator. To me, that's where the hobby lies, not in unambiguous "official" rules that admit to only one interpretation and foster only one style of play. Confusing though it probably is to an outsider, I adore the crazy quilt nature of the old school movement these days, with all of its participants presenting their own eccentric takes on the game. That's why you'll never hear my complain about "too many old school rulesets" except to the extent that it's often hard to keep up with them all.

Despite this, I am of two minds about the possibility of ever publishing the rules I use in my Dwimmermount campaign. That's because the rules are mostly just tweaks to already existing rulesets rather than extensive rewrites. Likewise, they borrow from no single source but are instead a Frankenstein's monster knitted together from OD&D, Labyrinth Lord, and Swords & Wizardry, along with my own ideas and those I've borrowed from others. The result is a game that's at once not so different as to justify being called a "new" game but also different enough that I couldn't just point to already existing game and say, "Use these."

This is why, despite my criticisms of it, I am sympathetic to the fanciful reinterpretation of OD&D's supplements advanced by Geoffrey McKinney. I think it would have been terrific if each supplement to OD&D had in fact been one writer's take on the game presented through the lens of his home campaign. That's more or less what I'd love to do with a theoretical Dwimmermount supplement, since most of my "rules" are in fact rules changes. The basic structure of my game is still recognizably OD&D; it's the little nuances that are different and deserve mention.

But, as I say, the problem is that I'd prefer it if I could say, as Rob Conley did in his own Supplement VI, that Dwimmermount was a supplement to Ruleset X, but I can't. My baseline is OD&D rather than a retro-clone. I suppose it's fairly close to Original Edition Characters in many respects, so perhaps I could associate it with that. It's also similar to Swords & Wizardry: White Box, but since I refuse to include ascending armor class notations that option isn't available to me. In the end, it might not matter, since this isn't meant to be a mass market product and, in all likelihood, those who purchase it are probably more interested in the world and megadungeon I've created than in my rules variants. Still, something to ponder.