Kuunari

There are a lot of resources out there for people interested in Retro Gaming.  My goal here is to find as many of them as possible.

I started playing with AD&D second edition, although that’s not entirely true.  I had the AD&D second edition books, my friend had the 1st edition books, and his dad would run us through modules that were from D&D.  We didn’t really seem to notice or care.  It’s been interesting reading all these old D&D clones, because they include a lot more rules than I ever remember playing with.

The Big Ones: 

Here are the big clones that are out there, at least the ones that get the most mention, or caught my fancy.

OSRIC: Seems like this is the one that started it all.  A free download, based off the OGL, designed to allow people to play 1st edition without the need to find copies of the books.  I found the reading to be a bit dry

Labyrinth Lord: A clone of the 1981 rules for D&D by Moldvay. Again a bit dry as it’s goal is to emulate the rules, not to copy the stylistic prose of the original.

Sword and Wizardry: A clone of the Original D&D rules. One thing I like about this is there is a bit more fluff to the rules than some of the other clones.  They also have three different versions, Whitebox (only the first three books), Complete (all the rules including supplements) and Core Rules (a balanced version of the rules).

Basic Fantasy RPG: A clone of the Old School D&D with a few modern conceits, like ascending AC.  I like a lot of what they did with this game, and could definitely see myself using this system, if everyone I played with wasn’t so familiar with 4th edition.

Other interesting Clones

Lamentations of The Flame Princess: Game that maintains compatibility with most old school clones, while dialing up the volume to 11.  Haven’t had a chance to read this one yet either, but it was getting a lot of attention, mainly for some of it’s, uhem, interesting art choices.

Torch and Sword BETA: Another 0e/LBB clone, but this one is a short 79 pages with a very minimal style.

Old School Hack: Looks interesting. I have a feeling I read this last summer, but I can’t remember what made this one unique.  I’ll have to look at it again.

Red Box Hack: Interesting looking Hack of the Red Box that adds some new bits to it including Wuxia and Asian inspired elements. Haven’t had a chance to really delve into this one yet either.

Microlite Versions:

Microlite20 was the first one, and then they made a bunch of versions based off other rules. I haven’t had as much chance to read these, but they look really great: Microlite74, Microlite75, Microlite20 OSS.

More Resources:

Retro Roleplaying: An amazing website with lots of links to Retro Clones.

Enworld Retroclones: A post on Enworld’s front page going over many of the retroclones available to players.

Forums:

The Delver’s Dungeons: A place to discuss 1st edition advanced dungeons and dragons.

Knights and Knaves: A place to discuss old school D&D.

Dragonsfoot: Probably the place that gets the most traffic and discussion of old school D&D.