I'd been meaning to get back to "Rusty-Bladed Veterans," my hack of "Searchers of the Unknown," and I've finally managed to do it.
If you're unfamiliar, "Searchers of the Unknown" is a clever one-page OSR rules option written by Nicolas Dessaux, built around the idea that if the referee can use a single succinct line of monster stats to portray an NPC warrior, you don't really need anything more for a PC. Nearly exactly two year's ago, I was compelled to offer my own variation, "Rusty-Bladed Veterans." And now I've finally gotten around to sprucing it up a bit.
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Besides generally clarifying the wording, there are a handful of specific rules changes:
- Added range modifiers. The original document didn't really address ranged attacks besides listing them as a possible weapon choice.
- Added an armor penalty to the cost of HP-based spell-casting, 9 - Worn AC. This gives another reason to go with a sparsely armored character.
- Put some explanatory text on the Movement rating, also implemented a simplifying house-rule to movement I've occasionally applied to B/X.
- Expanded the advancement range up to 8 Hit Dice
- Removed the awkward in-combat healing rule. There really was no precedent for it in B/X, and it was a bit fussy to implement in practice.
- Removed the extra-attacks for higher HD. Again, because they weren't really authentic to the B/X style. I did however keep the bonus attack for killing a foe, because there is some tradition of that in old-school D&D, and it's an easy compensation for lack of room-clearing magic-users in the party.
More discreetly, I nudged things a bit to push an implicit niche selection: make a low-AC veteran if you want to be all about combat, go with high-AC if you want to be skillful or aspire to focus on magic (or at least the ramshackle version that veteran's can manage).
Another issue addressed was how the original "Searchers of the Unknown" arbitrarily replaced some B/X procedures for the referee while leaving others unaddressed. For this revision, I went with the assumption that the "rusty-bladed" rules are entirely player facing, and the referee will be defaulting to the main B/X texts for resources and guidelines.
As I said with the first version, for a one-shot or short campaign "Rusted-Bladed Veterans" arguably has some advantages over original B/X, since it's much easier for players to jump in, and it actively follows an often-touted but rarely implemented OSR ideal: putting the emphasis on what the character achieves in play rather than what's on their character sheet.
