Instead there is white magic, grey magic, and black magic. There is no distinction between clerical magic and arcane magic. Magic itself uses most of the spells from the D&D books. He gets a −1 penalty on weapon damage, but you can’t pick him out in a crowd because he is wearing robes, a pointy hat, and carrying a dagger. The sorcerer is a bit physically stronger than his D&D equivalent, with a d6 hit points and the ability to use most weapons and armour. The thief does things in the manner that should be familiar to fans of D&D and the Grey Mouser alike. The fighter gets to pick some special abilities, such as different fighting styles or being a berserker, to make each a little different. I could easily fulfill my youthful desire to play Clone-an with it. The barbarian has a first attack ferocity bonus and a lot of ranger-like tracking and outdoor abilities. It’s a nice system which increases survivability greatly in a world where healing magic is not common and magic items are rare and always come with a downside. That sort of hurt takes a lot longer to heal. Hit points don’t represent actual physical damage they represent shock, pain, and loss of the will to fight and you can regain them with a night’s sleep or even with a swig of strong liquor (d4 points once per day), a nice genre touch.Īctual physical damage only starts when your hit points are gone and comes directly off your constitution score. The barbarian is actually based on the one in that old White Dwarf article, but done more slickly. They all fit the sword and sorcery archetype very well. Warriors, barbarians, thieves, and sorcerers. The default setting is a world of humans and hidden monsters and the sort of gods and demons whose attention you really, really don’t want to catch. Not only that, it is a stripped down rule system, which plays fast and does a brilliant job of recreating the tropes of the genre.Ĭrypts and Things is set in a dark and dangerous world where casting magic might cost you your soul or your sanity. It’s based on Swords and Wizardry, a well-regarded OSR game that is a very close clone of those old D&D rules.Īt this point, you’re probably thinking, I’m very happy for you and the fulfilment of your youthful dreams, Bill, but why the hell should I care? Because Crypts and Thingsis a very good set of Sword and Sorcery rules that sits right on top of a game engine that, if you are familiar with role-playing games at all, you probably already have a working knowledge of. Now, only 35 years or so later, and courtesy of the Old School Renaissance (OSR), I finally have access to just such a thing.Ĭrypts and Things ( C&T) from D101 Games is a set of rules that would not only fulfil the expectations of my teenage self, but would have been instantly familiar to him as well. What I would not have given to be able to purchase a set of rules off the shelf and drop myself and my players into a world like Hyboria or Nehwon or Zothique. I wanted officially sanctioned rules if I could get them. But they were clunky and still never quite hit the mark and hey, I was not at all confident in my game design skills. I did what everybody else was doing, and home-brewed my own rules. There were echoes of Howard and Leiber and Clark Ashton Smith, but they were smudged over with bits of Tolkien and a kind of high fantasy. There were also elves and halflings and dwarves and all manner of other things that did not exist in the S&S universes of my particular dreams. There was a barbarian character class in an issue of White Dwarf that might, if you squinted, have resembled something like Conan.īut D&D did not quite hit the mark. There were thieves that might have been Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser. The setting of D&D did not look like any fantasy world I had read about, but it was clearly influenced by a number of them. And what was with it with those cleric guys and the undead? Magic items were as common as if they came in cereal boxes. The white box contained an unholy mishmash of Tolkien, bits of medieval history, and a weird variation of Vancian magic from the Dying Earth which, while awesomely powerful, was not very scary or, well, magical. I wanted to adventure in a place of unholy shadows, where magic was scary and thrilling and men with swords sought lost treasures in glittering towers where old gods and dark secrets waited.Ĭlearly, D&D was not quite what I was looking for. I wanted to play a game that caught the atmosphere of Robert E Howard’s Conan, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane, or Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories. Back in the 70s, when I first started playing Dungeons and Dragons ( D&D), I spent a long time wanting a ruleset that would let me recreate the sort of sword and sorcery that I was reading back then.

5e campaign dark crypt