Wednesdays in Thracia

Getting Started

I’ve had the itch to run an old school megadungeon campaign again for a long while, but struggled to get the players for it for various reasons. In any case, I’ve recently acquired a playerbase, and binged the entirety of Chris P Wolf’s Thursdays In Thracia, so I’m jumping on this opportunity to expose some people to the merits of the OSR. I’ve run quite a lot of OSR, but it’s been *years* since the last time.

For this campaign I’m running Jennell Jacquays’s classic Caverns of Thracia using Moldvay B/X, by way of Gavin Norman’s excellent Old School Essentials. I’ve got a solid 7-8 players RSVPd for session one, so I’m pretty optimistic about it. I don’t want to overwhelm them with too many new rules, but there are some obvious parts of B/X that need to go. Here are the house rules I’ve decided to start the campaign with and a brief explanation of why.

Encumbrance

First off is the Encumbrance rules. B/X’s rules are unfortunately fairly clunky, and I really want to emphasize a system where it can be necessary to leave caches of loot to come back for later, or drop some important adventuring supplies to carry the heavy treasure they find. As such I’ve chosen the encumbrance rules from Cairn by Yochai Gal. I’ve used slot based inventories in the past but they’ve never ended up quite restrictive enough for my taste, and cairn’s simple ten slot system feels like it’ll help with that. Worst case, I would rather remove restrictions later on than add them.

Cairn‘s system gives all players ten slots with nearly every item taking up a single slot. Tiny stuff can be bundled, and I’m considering a pouch of 100 coins as one slot. It also has the nice feature of giving a visual representation of where said slots are actually located (6 in the backpack, 2 in the hands, and two more on the torso.) This way it’s also very clear what is easily accessible and what might take some wrangling to grab out of your bag. My only concern with this is that in addition to armor and weapons, pcs may only have one or two slots for easily accessible funky gear, but I can see myself being a bit lenient with tiny trinkets or stuff that can be strapped to locations. Perhaps a bandolier or harness might be able to add chest slots. I especially like that cairn nails down concrete slot buffs for beasts of burden, carts, and wagons, since that was always a challenge to adjudicate using the other systems I’ve tried.

The only thing I had to tweak with cairn’s system is the penalty for encumbered characters. Rules as written characters are reduced to 0 HP, but that means a different thing in cairn than it does in B/X, and would be far more dangerous. In B/X I’ve tweaked this to granting opponents a +2 attack bonus vs heavily encumbered targets, and I will be granting players with less than half of their slots filled quicker movement in combat and exploration. Players are typically far more likely to try to avoid a penalty than grant someone else a bonus, so I think this will be better than an AC penalty or the like. This is a weird bit of player psychology that I don’t have empirical data for, but I’m sure someone smarter than me has written a study on.

Death and Dismemberment

I love death and dismemberment rules. They add some weight to combat that is less binary than simply “did you die or not”. For these I’m using Cavegirl’s grotty Horrible Wounds system. I’ve actually never used it, preferring James Young’s incredibly detailed death and dismemberment rules for LotFP, but that one ties into a bunch of other subsystems that I don’t feel like using yet.

Dismemberment tables are really all upside in my opinion. Death at 0 hp is very sudden and can be jarring for a player more used to modern editions, while providing a far more interesting gameplay experience than “Death Saves”. Not much else to say on these, I’m sure they’ll go over well, especially since I had a player asking if I was using them before I even shared the house rules with them.

Tweaks to Classes

Starting off very simple here so as not to overwhelm:

• Fighters get Shields Shall Be Splintered, a classic time-worn OSR house rule allowing them to destroy their shield to completely nullify an attack.
• Thieves are replaced with LotFP’s Specialist class. I’ve always like LotFP’s approach to thieves, and the B/X thief is much maligned for it’s infamous thief abilities table.
• Magic users get an extra 1st level spell per day, just to give them a bit more flexibility. I’ll likely be adding bonus spells from intelligence too, but I’d like to see how this plays first.
• I intend to tweak clerics a bit later as well, but I haven’t settled on exactly how. Perhaps something similar to James Young’s cleric heresies.

Player Roles

Lastly I’ll be expanding B/X’s player roles with some additional options that take some of the pressure off of me as the referee to manage all the game’s systems. I believe these were popularized by Retired Adventurer over on his blog. In addition to the Caller and Mapper roles, I’m also using:

• Notetaker (self explanatory)
• Quartermaster (keeps a record of the party’s treasure and a master copy of all of their inventories to provide accountability.)
• Rules coordinator (fields PC rules queries and takes down rulings)
• Chef (brings snacks :3)