House Rules for Warriors of the Red Planet (part IV)

A wonderful aspect of OSR games like Warriors of the Red Planet (WotRP) is that the rules are broad enough that you can adapt, modify, or add to the material in the game. Making a setting is a great way to do this, and let's go even further by adding that OSR games are a great chassis, or base if you like, for developing your entirely original game.

Last post, I introduced some purely OSR style ancestries/races to a supplement I was working on for my WotRP supplement, and felt that I was beginning to work the rules in such a way that the game was beginning to feel like mine. The act of creation is a pleasure when you can feel like the work you produce was done wholly by you.

Then out of the blue these other thoughts kept creeping into my mind: the art that sets the mood for my work is public domain art by underpaid comic book artists who aren't in any sense on board with my project or getting credit for any of it. Also, I thought that it the end, people might be able to lop off my ancestries and other rules from this supplement and use them for their own OSR games if they didn't get a copy of WotRP as well. But my work would still be this derivative or satellite creation with one of those legal OSR statements with the micro font that no one can read at the end.

So what's the problem? Everyone borrows old art! And everyone "piggybacks" on other's work to create supplements and settings! Yes, that is true, and there is nothing I can do about my public domain art in my supplement. I never learned much visual art, unfortunately. But, I thought, why not do something for this supplement that was 100% my own. Why not turn this into my own stand-alone game with it's own game system? 

To begin exploring this possibility, I did a bit of a thought experiment with these questions:

• What if you took an old style game and removed all of the 

    classes and made all characters “race” or “ancestry-as-class”?

• What if you removed the cumbersome and seldom used 3-18

    ranged stats common in most OSR games?

• What if you removed all those tricky dice and just used d6s? 

• What if you removed the game referee in an OSR style game? 

People have tried these things before for sure, but what would such a game based on WofRP look like? 

In such a game, characters would be defined by setting appropriate (sword & planet themed) Ancestries ("races"), and each Ancestry would have its own bank of Skills and Flaws, and differ in terms of character Health (hit points), Origin, starting Money (gold), and starting Equipment (items, a mount, or even a hireling). When leveling in this game, players would add more Health to their character, a new Skill, or they could improve a Skill their character already had. In this way, players in a game group who had more than one character of the same Ancestry, would still find each character unique and individual.

With all these modifications to WofRP, the game would still feel like a similar setting and game play would still feel mechanically similar. People would likely still see it as an OSR type game, but with an "original" system.

I already talked about running my game using a pre-made world map (you can see the map 2 posts ago in this blog) with rules to adventure on it, and some kind of adjudicating oracle table for times when the game didn't have an answer to what was going on or to fill in missing details. 

Using the very nice chassis of the WotRP game system, I think I might give this a go and write this game all the way! 

In the meantime, here are some character creation examples I thought up. (They deliver the same kinds of characters, if a little more minimally.):
































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