FMC Basic
A downloadable pamphlet
My personal house rules pamphlet for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, my 1:1 retroclone of the original 1974 fantasy adventure game.
Included are:
- No ability scores.
- Levels 1-5 for fighters, mages, and experts.
- Straight-to-the-point class definitions and stats.
- Quick-start equipment for starting characters.
- 20 level-less spells; arcane attacks are instant.
- Simplified equipment cost guidelines.
- Copper standard currency and experience.
- Slot encumbrance with variable figure speed.
- Guidelines for site and region design.
- Monster templates, from mooks to bosses.
- Treasure stocking and magic weapons.
All these custom rules are meant to get the game going quickly! This is also going to be a living document, because it's my own reference booklet (not yours!).
Download
Development log
- Introducing Arcane Foci5 days ago
- Improving Fighters & Magic Weapons10 days ago
- Clarification & Hirelings!12 days ago
Comments
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I ran an 8-room dungeon crawl with this last night (as its own system, no FMC) and everybody had a blast! Combat was smooth and deadly; converting 0e monsters was breezy as well. Ditching ability scores was a breath of fresh air for me and the players. We ended up supplementing the starting items table with the d100 Former Professions table from the Knave 2e draft and it added a lot to character creation. Thanks for the excellent pamphlet!
This is maybe a dumb question, but you wrote FMC, and this is your hack of that?
As I understand it, FMC is a strict OD&D clone. This is how she house rules it in her campaigns.
just about! though in a way, this is mostly for me as a player than as a referee for when my friends run off-the-cuff semi-flailsnails D&D :)
Thanks! This is more or less what I thought, but it kind of threw me for a loop. Great work :)
really enjoy the booklet, will be reprinting the updated edition soon. There's plenty here, but as the solo player, compelled to ask if there's a chance of you adding some tables per sit design, etc etc? Always looking for all in one.
Just curious what you'd add, and its very unreasonable of me to ask. Great work and thank you for making!
hey PR and thank you!!
someone asked me similar with regards to my bite-sized dungeon pamphlet. my feeling is that i don’t think of tables as being very useful. someone else responded to them to use chatgpt, and that sort of reflects my feelings about it—what effort spent making a table is better spent than making a specific, concrete place? i don’t know if it’s helpful to have a table of things like, “ruins”, “caves”, “tower”.
but what i think would be more interesting is using the monster table, instead, because that tells you about the inhabitants. what are werewolves doing with treants? what about hoblins with giants? what treasure are they holding onto, and why? i think those are more productive prompts that tie directly into the site and its various dimensions.
excellent answer! you know i dont tend to build my self play narratives that way (monster first, leading to narrative), tends to be the "why" first, but going to keep this mind next time i play! cheers!
The Rosalia quote on page 1 is wild. Love it.
Great set of rules!
thank you so much! :)
At first I was very skeptical about this one, as it lost so much of what made '74 rules so special to me. No hirelings, no clerics, no level titles, shift to a point-crawl and slot-based encumbrance.
But if I look at FMC Basic as its own being, unrelated to FMC, I actually really like it. Unlike many light-rules retro clones, it actually has guidelines on dungeon stocking and wilderness! I like how every class has a unique stat, it makes hacking the game so much easier.
The rules are still rough around the corners. Some spells refer to hit dice, some spells lack duration, basic roll is easy to miss.
Otherwise, great job! Hope to see FMC Expert some day.
thank you for your kind words and feedback! i wanted to clarify some aspects, mostly that this isn’t meant to be a complete / totalizing system as much as a supplement or substitution for some aspects of OD&D.
for example, i will add explicit rules for hirelings! but the way i would treat them is just hiring them for a month and doing morale checks like for other NPCs.
another example is the ‘basic roll’, which i don’t consider to be a specific resolution procedure, as much as a point at which you would turn to randomness. i like 50-50, some people like 2-in-6, and some people might insert ability checks.
(also: neither dungeons nor the overworld are really point-crawls! i make a comparison between the wilderness proper and a point-crawl, but that’s just because i think it’s interesting to restrict movement between ‘wild hexes’ based on what paths are familiar to the travelers.)
This.
Rocks.
thank you!!
I might be overlooking something, but what is Tempting Fate?
check the first page! flip a coin or do an equivalent
Ugh, totally missed that, CTRL+F'd for "tempt fate". Thanks!
Very nice! One question though: how you deal with Saving Throws?
thanks! :) and i explicitly removed saving throws for magical attacks, but for anything else just flip a coin or roll a die
Very nice work (again)!
I'll give it a try with my daughter and her friends, that's a level of complexity they might enjoy.
thank you!! hope they have fun with it :)
Looks good.
thank you! :)
Nossa este material ficou muito bom, eu gostaria de traduzir ele para o portugues brasileiro, poderia entrar em contato comigo via e-mail?
lucaskyyo6@gmail.com