Choice D&D Retroclones

This is, clearly, just a list of retroclones. It's not like the (somewhat out-dated) list of retroclones on the Taxidermic Owlbear, in that it is a comprehensive list of games. It is, rather a list of my own preferred retroclones. These aren't including, of course, games like The Black Hack, Knave, or the Goblin Laws of Gaming, since those are all hacks or mini-systems.

ACKS, Autarch, & Ethical Role-Playing

Months ago I posted a review of the Adventurer Conqueror King System. Since then I’d occasionally have thoughts about it. It seems a little out of place with the rest of the blog. I don’t have any other reviews (besides The Black Hack and the GLOG).

More importantly, the reasoning behind the review's negative conclusion (in that, you should choose another system), seems abrupt in appearance. I don’t actually explain why Alexander Macris is a shitbag, which is certainly something you should do when you call someone a shitbag. The system I recommended to replace it, Basic Fantasy RPG, actually is not the ideal alternative. Finally, I should say that there are a lot of things about ACKS that I like. ACKS is not the worst system and some of its adventures are actually pretty good (see Courtney’s adventure or Dwimmermount, which also has a GURPS version!!). The primary figure within Autarch, nonetheless, by a really shitty person.

I’ll start this with an explanation of what Alexander Macris did to make him a shitty person. There are a number of different things but it boils down to two things. First, there was his involvement with gamergate on The Escapist, allowing it to flourish in its forum. More recently, there was his involvement with Milo Yiannopoulos. This out-shadows the involvement with gamergate, because this is not only a harassment of women encroaching into territory that has historically be reserved for men, but attacks people of color, queer and trans people, as well as women. Further, Yiannopoulos is a fascist – if this is news to you, consider his involvement with fascists and his propagation of fascist ideas. Alexander Macris was the CEO of Milo Inc., whose mission statement was “making the lives of journalists, professors, politicians, feminists, Black Lives Matter activists, and other professional victims a living hell.” Milo Inc. was founded after Yiannopoulos was fired from the fascist propaganda outlet Breitbart due to his remarks on pedophilia (so Macris worked with Yiannopoulos as CEO of his company knowing of these remarks). There have been claims that Macris is not racist; however, this claim is weak when it’s understood that he was CEO of an ideological company which cast activists protesting the proliferation of wrongful deaths/murders of black people by policemen as “professional victims.”

In the time since Yiannopoulos has fallen out of favor and gamergate has dwindled down to its phrenetic core of misogynists, Macris has attempted to downplay his involvement with gamergate. He’s attempted to cast himself as helpless in his involvement with Yiannopoulos and has tried to distance himself as much as he can. The record, nonetheless, remains. He was the will CEO of Milo Inc. He worked for it and went to court for the sake of Milo’s advertising. The stain will remain on Macris’ reputation until he … stops being a shitbag.

Now that that’s covered, we can move on to brighter things. As I said earlier, ACKS has some very neat features. Personally, I appreciate the Proficiency system it has. It also has a few novel and good combat systems (primarily the Cleave mechanic). If you have already bought ACKS, you should absolutely play it and use what material you've already bought. If, on the other hand, you haven't bought ACKS, don't support Autarch while a transphobic racist heads the company. If would like to get a B/X or (more accurately) BECMI game which has rules for domain-level roleplay, then get the Rules Cyclopedia clone Dark Dungeons (if it's just the adventuring, Lamentations of the Flame Princess, Labyrinth Lord, and Basic Fantasy can offer what you're looking for). It's not a strict clone, and many of the rules are cleaned up. Dark Dungeons has detailed rules for high-level play, building & maintaining strongholds, fiefdoms, mass combat. There are also some additional rules for skills in Dark Dungeons (essentially AD&D 2e Non-Weapon Proficiencies). Dark Dungeons is in the public domain (excluding some open game content) and is free to play (there is a PWYW option on DriveThru RPG, if you would like to support the author's labor of love).

Note: The title of this post gave me some pause. I had initially derived the phrase from "ethical consumption." "Ethics" sounds a little elitist, a little high and mighty. Declaring what's ethical sounds pretentious. But there's not really a better way to phrase it. Ethics is determining what's good or bad, what's right or wrong. Knowingly supporting a chauvinistic, transphobic, white supremacist is wrong, unethical.

Random Families

So there I was, making a hook for the beginning of a post-apocalyptic campaign. I needed some families to pose as the maguffin for the start. Rather than intricately detail all of the villagers that my players were frankly not going to give a shit about, I decided that I would randomly generate them. Below is my scheme for how I did that followed by the example families that I had generated.

First, roll the family size (a d8). If the result is 2, check to see if it's just a pairing of two people (two lovers). I had decided that the chances of a single parent might be high, since this was a post-apocalyptic setting. In retrospect, it probably should've been higher. Otherwise, it might be better to have the chance be higher or lower depending on the setting. Perhaps religious controls forbid divorce, but there's always the chance of death in childbirth, war, or freak accidents (how else would a PC's entire family be dead?).

A note on the ages of people: a couple might not have as great an age variance, depending on the mores of the setting. In this case, you can either add a d10 and subtract a d10 ([age]+d10-d10) to find the age of the second person or just decide. Determining the age of adults can vary, of course. It might be better to change what you roll, depending on what age you'd prefer. After finding the age of the parent(s), I would roll the age of each child, progressing down the chart below.

I determined that a group were siblings by the absence of children and determining that the two were not a romantic couple. They could also be cousins.

Family Size 1d8 (3-in-6 chance of a single parent, 2-in-6 chance pairing). Random Age: 10+5d8 adult, 5d3 --> 3d4 --> 2d6 --> d12 --> 1d10 --> 2d4 --> 1d8 --> 2d3 --> 1d6 --> 1d4 child. Sex m-1 f-2. 

Refugee Villagers

Costa Family: Two brothers, 18 and 15.

Derricks Family: Mother and son, 20 and 2.

Durante Family: Husband and wife, 44 and 43. Likely sterile.

Frost Family: husband and pregnant wife, 25 and 23.

Graves Family: Mother & 3 daughters, 24, 8, 6, 3. Father probably died -- that's a nice tragedy and makes for a fierce mother character.

Tasker Family: Two Sisters, 12 & 28.

Thomson Family: Paulo Thomson (scavenger & amateur doctor; 35-jaraĝa viro)

Wetzel Family: Mother (32), father (29), daughter (12), daughter (5), son (3)

Yamasaki Family: Hector (father, 45), Marion (mother, 36), Jonas (10-jaraĝa son), Tandra (6-jaraĝa daughter).

Example of generation process

I roll a d8 to determine family size and the result is 5. I roll a d6 to determine whether it is a single parent, and I get a 2 (so yes, since it's a 1-3 chance out of 6 for a single parent). Ouch, that's four kids for one parent. I roll for the age of the parent, and decide that it might be lower that 10+5d8 so as to provide that it's early in their life. Instead, I roll 18+2d6 and the sum is 26. Next I roll 5d3, 3d4, 2d6, and 1d12 for each of the children. I get, in order of the chart, 10, 10, 10, and 9. How bizarre. I'll say they had triplets (at the age of 16, my God; this is medieval fantasy, for sure) and somehow another one after that. Then, other partner dies to leave four children of more or less the same age to one very very young adult. How terrifying. This is some real life horror. Now I roll sex for each with a d2, starting with the eldest. I roll 2, 1, 2, 2, 2. I'll move that 1 to the 9-year-old. So one single mother with triplet girls and a younger 9-year-old boy.

Going through this process, you might see how I was developing some of the story of this family as I went. The absence of one of the parents I took to mean a tragic death, but it could easily have been abandonment or conscription (the father is still out serving in his lord's rabble). If you're fleshing out a village that's going to be seen quite a lot in your next campaign, this method might help you with that quite a bit.