While I was writing my
Return to RPGs series of posts I kept thinking about my old D&D gaming sessions through rose tinted memory filters. I have been looking for something to fill in the D&D shaped hole in my mind.
The D&D I originally played was the Basic game 1983 Revision red Box edition and it's following rule books (expert, companion etc). These books I now know tend to be referred to as Dungeons and Dragons BECMI as edited by Frank Mentzer. This was evidently a follow up to the Dungeon and Dragons B/X rule books by Tom Moldvay and David Cook.
Way back then I did have a look at 2 Edtion AD&D but felt there were too many tables and too much fluff :) Trying 4th Edtion AD&D was a bit of a shock. It is a fun game but I have missed far too many generations of the game to work out quite what has happened. I still spend time trying to work out my THAC0#. I saw mention of the huge change between 4th Edtion and 3.5 so had a look at Pathfinder.
Pathfinder is really nice. I like it a lot. But it still has far too many bells and whistles.
For me the best and purest system was the Mentzer D&D with the rules system from the Gazetteers.
Turned out on the wonderful world of the internet I was not the only person to have this itch to scratch. There was a whole world of
stuff!It turns out game rules
can not be copyrighted:
Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.
At least in the U.S. I believe it is similar in Europe. This means some enterprising people with far too much wonderful time on their hands have recreated or reinterpreted old gaming systems. They are known by the collective title of retro clones. All seem to be very careful about avoiding naming the system they are inspired by and only concentrating on no longer commercially exploited versions. A few minutes of Googling will find much more complete lists than the one that follows. Most of the retro clones have made slight or significant tweaks to the core rules, often these are the more popular house rules that people used or additions from published supplements. Sometimes ideas from later versions are backported.
Best of all most of these games are free to download with print versions on offer from Print on Demand stores.
Here is my rough list of what I found and liked the look of..
