Tim Bannock (@timbannock on most social media) is a roleplaying game developer and e-commerce product manager. He's been playing D&D since 1985, and has been a best selling DMsGuild developer and indie RPG publisher since 2016.
Coinciding with the (new-to-me!) release of the Cortex Directory which features official and pro/semi-pro published Cortex games, I’ve turned the amazing Cortex Hack Database by Kamala Arroyo into a website where you can sort, find, and submit your own hacks!
Check it out here.
Looking for some ways to change up your Shadowdark campaigns? Maybe you want hardier characters at the lowest levels, or your thinking of alternative spellcasting checks that aren’t quite as dangerous on a mishap. Perhaps you want a morale system that’s not Wisdom-based, but also carries over some of the theory behind B/X’s 2-12 morale rating system, or can leverage detailed descriptions of monster behavior.
Whatever you’re looking to do, start here for some ideas! Read on!
Ever run a 5th Edition game and wonder where an important GM-facing rule is? Ever design a dungeon-crawl and grimace when all the PCs can see in the dark unaided? What are torches for in this edition, anyway?
Throw out your game master guide* and use this instead! Treasures Just Beyond – O5R GM Hack is here for you!
Treasures Just Beyond – O5R GM Hack is a super handy, 28-page reference guide and crawling-rules compilation formatted to be printed out as an A5 booklet: just open it in Adobe Acrobat, select Booklet, print, and staple! (You’ll want a long arm stapler: buy, barter for, or steal** one today!)
It compiles the best, fastest route to getting PCs playing in that “old-school” style where light, inventory, and careful exploration matters. On the GM’s side, it’s got all the hazards, trap rules, and object interaction mechanics you’ll ever need. Plus, it features robust social interaction and exploration rules, as well as some new twists on monster rules, all packed into a super-useful, reference-friendly layout.
In these pages, you’ll get killer new “house” rules and references like these:
With Treasures Just Beyond – O5R GM Hack, everything you need to give your 5th Edition games that old-school feel, and run it smoothly, is right at your fingertips!
*Don’t throw it out! It’s got all the cool magic items in it, and vaguely okay downtime rules!
**Don’t steal stuff!
Cover image by Dean Spencer. All Rights Reserved.
Pay What You Want on itch.io and DrivethruRPG!
All episodes of Enter The Nerdom‘s foray into the old-school goodness of Dungeons & Dragons are out now! Follow along as hosts Stan Moroncini, Chad Cook, and Watson Bradshaw join special guest Dan Mason, and delve into the depths of the Puzzle Dungeon: The Seers Sanctum by Directsun Games! We used a hack of Ben Milton’s incredible Knave to keep the rules simple and straightforward, maximizing our play time and keeping the players on their toes with every death-defying encounter and mystery they faced.
Here’s the complete episode listing:
You can catch all their podcast episodes here. Be sure to tune in, because they cover many amazing “nerdoms”: Ghostbusters fans, the incredible Star Wars-based charity organization known as The 501st Legion, professional wrestling, anime, and so much more!
I’ve also released some of the assets we used for the game:
I’ll put up a few more bits of information and perhaps some more adventure-specific assets I used in the following days!
When the hosts of Enter The Nerdom approached me to run them through a game of “Old School style” Dungeons & Dragons, I knew I needed a lightweight ruleset to get us through what was likely to be a pretty fast one-shot scenario. It turned into two sessions, but we all agreed that the setup and “learning” time needed to be at a minimum to keep the podcast playthrough very fast and energetic. I turned to Ben Milton’s Knave to get what I needed!
I’d already worked on some hacks for Knave‘s 1st edition, so I just compiled those into a doc, stripped out some of Knave‘s more “lowlife, dirty bastards” stylings and replaced those with classic Gygaxian and Arnesonian flourishes: non-human PC ancestries, quick-playing dungeon and wilderness crawling rules, and a simple modification to make spellcasters a bit more of a thing via spellbook rules layered on top of the “anyone can use a scroll” magic rules. I topped it off with some Feat-like abilities to replace class abilities, and give the players their own little niche protection.
Here’s the final document I used, as a PDF formatted to be printed “Booklet” style in Adobe Acrobat, and stapled together. I used cardstock for the first page, to give it a sort of “cover” quality, and referenced it during play. Especially when the PCs started dropping to 0 hit points, or scoring critical hits and fumbles. (There were a lot more fumbles than hits, as I recall!)
Keep an eye on Enter The Nerdom to listen to our actual play of Directsun Games’ Puzzle Dungeon: The Seer’s Sanctum using these rules!
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