So, I’ve continued working on Light Fantasy, and I’ve now finished up to the end of the Treasure chapter – only two more chapters to go before I’ve finished the main text and I’m ready to start proofreading.
Unfortunately, one of those two chapters is the monsters chapter – which is likely to be the biggest chapter in the book. So I’m not looking forward to that at all.
Anyway, if anyone is interested in how the project is getting on; the latest work-in-progress is here.
It’s been a while, but I have a new project in the works.
As should be obvious from the title of this post, the game is called Light Fantasy (I have to say that I was amazed that a bunch of searching didn’t find that name already in use for a tabletop RPG).
The game is a retroclone of the old B/X boxed sets of D&D. Obviously it’s not the first retroclone of those, so what am I doing that’s different? Well, the inspiration for the game came from three places.
Firstly I’ve been in quite a few discussions about the differences in setting and feel between the different editions of D&D, and I’ve been saying for a while that one of the things I really like about B/X and its associated adventures (B1-B5 and X1-X5) is that its setting is very different from that of other editions – even the otherwise very closely related BECMI and RC from which I derived Dark Dungeons. Other than a couple of ambiguous references, the rules and default setting of the B/X game doesn’t have planes. There are no alignment-themed outer planes that are homes to the gods and abodes of the dead. There are no demons or devils or devas or angels inspired by the religions that developed in the Middle East. There’s no Paracelsian elemental planes.
All of the other D&D editions have those things, but B/X doesn’t. What it has instead are alternate dimensions such as Averoigne and the Nightmare Dimension, and Lovecraftian creatures that come from those places. Instead of outer-planar creatures that are based on mythology you have extradimensional entities that are much more alien in nature. It also helps that the level cap on the game mean that it stops before you start getting to spells like Astral Spell, Plane Shift, Gate, and the like – so there’s no standard or simple way to visit other planes or other dimensions.
It gives the game a very different feel, and lets you have actual religions where the existence of gods and demons and even an afterlife are all matters of faith rather than something that someone with a Plane Shift spell can go an check on.
Secondly, I love crossover games that mix fantasy and sci-fi and a few times I’ve toyed with writing some kind of crossover game supplement for D&D – something like Dragonstar and that type of thing. My stumbling point for that always seems to be the metaphysics. Having a sci-fi or modern game just doesn’t sit well with plane-hopping and astral travel and the like; and any modern D&D crossover hits the issue of demons and the like being real in the setting. You either have to cut out a lot of the game or come up with unsatisfying explanations for how it’s fine. Having a basic game chassis derived from B/X that doesn’t have all that stuff gives me a great starting point for a sci-fi crossover, even if it never makes it past being a home campaign.
And thirdly I’ve been involved in discussions on RPG.net recently about B/X involving the removal of problematic elements such as the colonialism and racial essentialism that pervade older (and less old) editions of D&D and there were some excellent suggestions made thast got me excited about actually putting out a game that incorporated them.
So that’s what led to this point – I’m in the process of writing Light Fantasy; a B/X retroclone that takes the old rules and feel and blends them with modern sensibilities about diversity and inclusion and modern attitudes to character and story (characters are assumed to be actual characters from the start to whom you will be attached rather than unamed adventures who have a 50/50 chance of dying to a goblin or a save-or-die trap the first time they set foot into a dungeon).
There’s a Work In Progress of the game so far (it’s still missing its monster and treasure chapters and has no artwork yet) that you can download here.
Cthangband 6.9 is now finished. It’s only a minor release, with no real gameplay changes from 6.8. It’s mostly an improvement in the front end. It now has a proper menu system and lets you change the options mid-game instead of only on startup.
The new release can be found here:
Cthangband has always had a somewhat weird license – the Angband License – which says it’s okay to do anything you want with either the source code or the executable providing you charge no money for it. While this isn’t an Open Source license (it actually predates the Open Source movement) that demands the source code be shared, it does allow for the source code to be shared.
In the “golden age” of Angband development we would normally share source code by uploading it to a couple of specific FTP sites, but since I came back to it with Cthangband 5.0 those sites are long gone.
So from Cthangband 5.0 to Cthangband 6.7 the source code has just been on my home computer (and my NAS back-up device).
However, with Cthangband 6.8, that’s changed. I’ve switched to using GitHub, and the full source code of Cthangband is available for anyone to download from there. Anyone can now download the source code to build it themselves or to fork it and make their own variant of it.
The precompiled versions will still be available from this website.
So, speaking of 6.8, here’s what’s new (there’s very little change from 6.7, although I thought the level feeling bug was big enough to not wait for the next major version):
Cthangband 6.8 can be downloaded from here.
The GitHub repository is here.
As if you couldn’t have guessed by the title, it’s another Cthangband release.
This new version fixes a variety of issues, but also contains a few other game changes both big and small. The complete list of changes is below:
The new version can be downloaded here.
Another Cthangband release, this time – as you might expect from the title – it’s Cthangband 6.6.
As with 6.5, this is only a minor update with a few bug fixes and quality-of-life changes, not any major gameplay changes. A full list of the changes is below:
The new version can be downloaded from here.
The title says it all really. I’ve packaged up and released version 6.5 of Cthangband.
If that means nothing to you, check out my Cthangband page for more details about the game.
Anyway, version 6.5 is just a routine update, with no major gameplay changes. There are a few minor tweaks and a few bugfixes, but the main difference in this new version is in the user interface. Version 6.5 has new background images and introduces ambient background music and sounds (don’t worry, you can easily turn those off it you don’t want them).
A full list of the changes in 6.5 is:
Anyway, the new version can be found here.
I’m pleased to announce that Dark Dungeons X, the 10th anniversary edition of Dark Dungeons is now available at DriveThruRPG in both print and PDF format here.
When deciding to write a new edition of Dark Dungeons for its 10th anniversary, I took stock of the change in circumstances since I released the original game ten years ago.
At that time, the original edition that it was based on wasn’t available to buy except for extortionate prices second-hand on eBay. That unavailability was the impetus for me to write the game. However, a desire to emulate that original edition as closely as possible led me to write two games, not one.
Dark Dungeons was the version of the game designed for maximum fidelity to its source material, for those who wanted to replicate the experience of playing that source material without needing to pay inflated prices for a second-hand copy of that material. Darker Dungeons, on the other hand, was the game as I actually played it. While the rules for Darker Dungeons were more streamlined and consistent than those in the source material, this necessarily meant that they were less close to it.
So I had the two games. Dark Dungeons for those who wanted closer emulation, and Darker Dungeons for those who wanted improved rules.
However, ten years later the situation has changed. The original edition that Dark Dungeons was based on is now cheaply available in both electronic and print formats. This makes the older Dark Dungeons mostly redundant – since if you want a high fidelity copy of the original rules you can just use those original rules now.
Therefore, when planning Dark Dungeons X, I made the decision that I would use the improved Darker Dungeons rules as a basis for the new edition rather than the Dark Dungeons rules. Since there’s no reason to slavishly copy the original game because those who want that can just buy the original game now I might as well use the improved rules for those who would rather have that.
So that’s what Dark Dungeons X has. It’s based on Darker Dungeons, freshly edited and reformated (I’m the first to admit that the first printing of Darker Dungeons was badly edited – that’s why I never put it up on DriveThruRPG: while I was happy with the rules, I was never happy that the book itself was edited and formatted to an acceptable standard), and with “Developer Commentary” side-bars explaining how the game differs from its source material and why I made the decisions I did when writing it.
But I am more than happy with Dark Dungeons X, and it is now available at DriveThruRPG in both print and PDF format here.
While I’ve been waiting for the printer to approve the manuscript for new 10th anniversary edition of Dark Dungeons, I’ve been bug-fixing Cthangband.
The latest version (6.3) had a few bugs in it, and since I have big plans for version 7.0 I decided that I should just release a quick bugfix version rather than wait until 7.0 is ready.
So I’ve done just that. Cthangband 6.4 has very little change from 6.3, but it fixes a few bugs that really needed to be fixed rather than being able to wait for the next full version.
Specifically, the changes are:
As you can see from that list, there’s very little in the way of anything new – just the change to Kadath (and even that’s just a minor cosmetic change with no effect on gameplay). The main thing it does is fix the bugs that had been found in 6.2 and 6.3.
The new version can be found here.
Back in December, I mentioned that I was going to start working on a new edition of Dark Dungeons.
Well, I’ve spent the last four months doing exactly that, and I’m pleased to announce that the new edition is finished.
I’m calling it “Dark Dungeons X”. The ‘X’ standing for both 10 (because it’s the 10th anniversary edition) and ‘Expanded’ because this new edition includes material from both the original Dark Dungeons and also Darker Dungeons.
The changes to this edition, when compared to the previous edition, are:
Having said that Dark Dungeons X is finished, it is going through a final period of proofreading and checking – and will be uploaded to DriveThruRPG (for both PDF and print-on-demand) in a couple of weeks time.
Gurbintroll Games 