Less than 24 hours remain!

Once this 8-Bit Funding project comes to a close, I currently have no way of offering the Black Book Beta for sale again. (If I can figure something out, of course, we’ll go for it.) So this may be your last chance to gain access to Legends & Labyrinths for several months: Don’t miss out!

It may also be your last chance to lock in these prices for the final PDF and print versions of the game.

And this is absolutely your last chance for many of the perks being offered here! (And to gain access to the exclusive Tomb of the Crypt Spiders adventure!) If you want artwork featuring your characters or a game session run by the designer or an exclusive, fancy-lookin’ t-shirt or your character’s name in the rulebook… This is it!

We’re also very close to our $3500 landmark, which will unlock extra bonus perks for contributors. So spread the word!

CLIMB INTO YOUR LABYRINTH AND FORGE YOUR LEGEND TODAY!

You may have heard that if you cut an earthworm in half, both halves will grow back into a full worm. That’s an urban legend. (They have amazing regenerative powers, but a severed back end will never be able to grow a new head.) But if you’re wondering how you could bring this into an RPG session, the answer is self-evident: Toss in a couple trolls.

More intriguing is the case of the bulldog ant:

“But the bulldog-ant of Australia affords us the most extraordinary example of its kind; for if it is cut in two, a battle begins between the head and the tail. The head seizes the tail in its teeth, and the tail defends itself bravely by stinging the head: The battle may last for half an hour, until they die or are dragged away by other ants. This contest takes place every time the experiment is tried.” (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation)

I think the behavior after severing would be easy enough to model as a confusion effect on both halves of the creature. But the real question would be determining when and how the creature would get severed in the first place. A few thoughts:

(1) Some sort of modification on the mechanic used for severing a hydra’s head. The question, however, is how you can motivate a PC to actually make the sunder attempt. (This problem also exists with hydras.)

(2) Treat all weapons as effectively vorpal against the creature. When somebody confirms a crit off of a natural 20, the creature is effectively severed.

(3) Treat it as an effect of bloodying the creature (reducing it to half hit points).

(4) Treat it as an effect of killing the base creature (which is effectively transformed into two new creatures). Maybe there’s only a percentage chance that this happens.

(5) Set a “Break Threshold” for creature: If somebody deals more damage than the break threshold in a single attack, the creature is severed.

I recently became aware of the Sarajevo Roses: Deep scars in the concrete of Sarajevo created by the thousands of mortar rounds fired there during the intense urban warfare of the Bosnian War. Where these explosions resulted in casualties, the scars have been filled with a red resin.

I was touched by the sad, serene beauty of these enduring monuments.

But since I’m the creator of fantasy worlds, my mind was also inspired. Taking the familiar and twisting it to the fantastic is nice. Taking something culturally unfamiliar and then, on top of that, giving it an extra twist of fantasy can often result in some really memorable touchstones.

The Sarajevo Roses exist as both an artifact and a memorial of a specific, historic event. More importantly they’re an unintended side effect that, to my American eyes, testifies that something outside of my normal experience happened in this place. What sort of fantastical equivalents could we hypothesize?

Direct fantasy parallels, for example, aren’t too hard to conjure up: The long, blackened scars in the fields around a village where the blight-breath of an elder dragon prevent anything from growing. The effervescent green sands driven into the eastern walls of an adobe village by the sandstorm thrust up by the execution of the Seven Gods. And so forth.

Going a bit further afield, what examples of fantastical side-effects could we postulate from non-destructive events? Are there oil slicks in the street from the fad for armor golems among the city’s mages? Are the skies above the city filled with long twists of multi-colored thread because magic carpets have a tendency to unravel? (And once a year is there a Skein Day when the magical thread is gathered for some purpose either practical or festive?) Does the casting of a time stop spell leave little temporal schisms?

I’ve talked quite a bit about how Legends & Labyrinths maintains 100% compatibility with 3rd Edition. This is awesome not only because it unlocks the thousands of 3E adventures and supplements in your L&L campaign, but because it also turns your 3E core rulebooks into supplements for L&L. Is there stuff in those “supplements” that you really love? Did I cut something you love in my merciless and heartless quest to streamline the game down to its most basic components? Just put it back in. That’s what supplements are for!

But the flip-side of that coin is that 100% compatibility also allows you to use Legends & Labyrinths as a supplement in your 3E campaign. I’ve talked about big examples like the hazard creation system, stunt system, and monster creation system, but there’s a lot of minor stuff that you’ll find useful regardless of what version of 3rd Edition you’re running.

THE FLY SKILL

“Justin, if your goal is to simplify the system why are you adding new rules?”

Often because adding a single, efficient rule is often the best way to replace and simplify an overly complicated system.

For example, the game has been saddled with an overly-complicated system for handling flying characters ever since Gygax decided to base the original rules on a WWI wargame. By adding a Fly skill to the game, I was able to boil the flight rules down to three paragraphs. If you, like me, have always wanted a set of flight mechanics that won’t bog down play, then L&L can give you that. (By and large, it works like any other form of movement in the game… except, of course, you can fly.)

AERIAL DISTANCE TABLE

This is a tool I originally developed for Rule Supplement 2: Flight (which is still MIA). Basically, if you’re standing on the ground and you’re trying to shoot an arrow at a guy flying 50′ away and flying 90′ above your head (or standing on a cliff)… how far is that?

The Pythagorean Theorem is fun, but this table is faster.

WEIGHT GUIDELINES

“Okay, let’s try to lift the boulder. How much does it weigh?”

I don’t know about you, but this sort of thing happens all the time at my table. I eventually broke down and just did the research so that I’d always have the answer handy, and now I’ve made it handy for you: It’s on the Object Substance Guidelines table right next to hardness and hit points.

I’ve also added an Object Construction Guidelines table to give you some basic guidance in estimating appropriate Break DCs for various objects. Like any guideline, you need to use some common sense. But I’ve actually used this table to estimate how difficult it would be for a high-level character to break a building in half. That was pretty awesome.

AND MORE…

Basically, Legends & Labyrinths does more than just tear 3E down. In the process of streamlining the system, I’ve also worked hard to include all the little tools and tricks I’ve developed over the past decade.

So there’s all kinds of stuff: A better system for building encounters. A system for handling off-mission training. The encumbrance system that’s not only usable, but also fun to use. Simplified mounted combat. Simplified grappling. A basic system for wilderness exploration. Social ranks. Rules for crowds. The guideline on how far a character falls each round. Putting the donning time for armor onto the armor table. Putting splash weapons on the weapons table.

Legends & Labyrinths is designed to give you a streamlined foundation for your fantasy roleplaying. But it’s not born out of the belief that rules are the enemy. It’s born out of the belief that having the right rules is more important than having the most rules.

CLIMB INTO YOUR LABYRINTH AND FORGE YOUR LEGEND TODAY!

I’ve culled out some of the more popular responses to Beta Response 2: The Human Feat and here’s a quick poll. You can vote for multiple options, so lemme know all the ones that look like a good idea to you.

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A few of my quick thoughts on this discussion:

I’m surprised by how popular the idea of Improved Initiative is. I’ve always considered it a fairly weak feat and this was an opinion shared by most of the designers I knew back in the day. Poking around, I can see that it seems to have become popular in the CharOp community 4-5 years ago. Which I suppose makes sense given the set of artificial suppositions the CharOp community generally works in. I’d be interested in hearing a greater elaboration on why people think it’s a must-have feat.

I considered the various “+2 to save X” feats when I was first designing the human. Since any choice seemed fairly arbitrary, I backed away from it. But Iron Will makes sense to me.

The +2 bonus to stunt checks sounds really nifty. I’m hesitant to tie it to an L&L-specific system like that (because I know that part of the appeal of L&L for many people is their ability to parcel out portions of it for utility in their 3E campaign), but it’s definitely got some nice flair to it.