Rusty-Bladed Veterans ... Revised!

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.

Click on this image to Download the PDF

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.

Veterans of the Rusty Blade

[Edit from 2021: there's a new revision of "RBV" available]

Every now and then, I'm compelled to circle back to the vast cooling deposit left over from the early 2000's D20 eruption, and poke through it once more for salvage. "There's so much here," I think as I pry apart compacted layers of feats with a geology hammer, "so much meticulously crafted work, all free for the taking. There just has to be something I can make from it." 

As is usually the case, the affair begins with The Core Elements Toolbox, an obscure 2005 work by James D. Hargrove and Butch Curry that tried to distill the d20 SRD down into an intense liquor of fast easy role-playing. It doesn't quite work at that goal, for reasons I can't fully articulate, but that may be why I keep coming back to it, trying to figure where the fix needs to go. Which leads me to rifling through the standard SRD's (Fantasy D20, D20 Modern, D20 Future and the "true romantic" SRD derived from original Blue Rose). And it's usually around True Romantic that the fatigue starts to grow, since even that lightened version of the system is a lumbering mechanical behemoth compared to the systems I generally prefer, and I start to doubt if anything D20 can be redeemed.

So then I bounce out to Mocrolite20 to get some breathing room. Which is refreshing at first, but by laying bare the core bones of D20, Microlite rather starkly forces me to (again) realize the central problems with that whole school of design. Mechanical character optimization and min-maxing as a primary mode of play, lunk-headedly linear resolution and modelling, and constant built-in roadblocks and speed-bumps intended to wring player initiative through a sieve of incremental advancement. Somehow, the whole manages to be both burdensome yet insubstantial, a expansive act of running in place to look busy.

Unsurprisingly, I always end my latest D20 tangent frustrated and jumping to some other project to clear my head of the affair. What I'm saying is, this is why I re-wrote Searchers of the Unknown over the weekend. So here's Rusty-Bladed Veterans.

Click the image to download the PDF

There's a lot to like about SotU, but I perceived issues with it. The language was loose at the cost of clarity. And while the stated goal was B/X style play, it introduced several eccentric elements leading to a much more combat-focused experience. Because I'd just been trudging through D20, it was clear that the original writer of SotU had carried over a few 3E-era assumptions upon creating it. All of which were things I wanted to change. Additionally, I aimed to make the rules thoroughly compatible with B/X resources without conversion; I wanted to be able to send a "Rusty-Bladed" party through B2 The Lost City using every line of the adventure's text as written. Also, I wanted to be able to run standard B/X classes alongside those characters, if it so happened old-hand players showed up for such a session.

On top of that, I threw in some elements from other SotU hacks I liked, the clever spell-casting system from Microlite20 and a means for characters to learn spells from scrolls (which weirdly I had assumed was already part of the original SotU; wonder where I picked that notion up).

I'm really pleased with how Rusty-Bladed Veterans came out. I dare even say I'd prefer using it over full B/X, since starting all characters on the same foot eliminates a lot of the disorienting disparities players have traditionally had to deal with (thief skills in particular come to mind, and demi-human abilities), doubly so for new players. Plus I prefer magical abilities earned as a consequence of play rather than as preordained advancements. I'm looking forward to seeing how this plays out at the table.