A Work In Progress

Stunning art by Liz Danforth.

I know it's been a while since I brought the subject up but, behind the scene's I am still busy chipping away at my very own Tunnels and Trolls house rules. Well, it's a little more than house rules and, it's proving to be a project on a much more grandiose scale than I had actually imagined when I set out about it.

For a long time now, I have had my own set of rules regarding weapons and armor that have allowed my characters to let their imaginations run wild in the apparel they wanted to face the perils of an adventurer. I do hope to post them sometime soon (along with the amendments that I have made for my new house rules, hence the reason of bringing it up) but, the long and short of it is that pretty much any weapon, no matter how elaborate you want to be with the detail can be thrown into a general category such as "axe", "club" or, "sword" (there are more categories but you get the idea) and, within that a sub-category that best fits it.

For example, I'm creating a character with an oriental theme. Katana's appeal to me as a player but I decide to go with something a little less cliché (but only slightly) and, settle on a pair of sai. Now in the broadest sense, they are swords. Very small swords granted, but the general make up of any dagger is not unlike a sword and would therefore see it in the sword family of weapons, with daggers being the appropriate sub category within that grouping. So, I look up daggers on my  "sword chart" to get the relevant statistics, and bingo! I now have sai's within my campaign. Katana's would have been no more difficult though, I'd just look along the same "sword chart"  until I reached the longsword sub-category for the relevant info.

Armor's just as simple too in my books, where it matters less what shape it takes (that's an aesthetic choice between the GM and the player) when compared to the material that it is made of. After all, a lot of what gives armor it's protective qualities is the material used in it's construction. So, as I see it, there is very little significant difference in the protective properties of say iron plate versus iron mail, as long as they are both covering the same area. It's still iron!

Which leads me nicely to what I have been working of late, which is a series of modifiers to those rules, that allow the player (and GM of course) to manipulate the quality of a weapon, the material it is made from, and the individual intended to wield it (before these had all been steel / wood weapons of standard quality made by humans, for humans).

This has been more time consuming and difficult than I had thought it would be to accomplish (mostly because I no longer have a lot of my original notes on how I arrived at certain conclusions) but, after a lot of work, I finally have my old tables sussed. At least for the close quarters weapons. I've even made a couple of improvements on the old figures.

There is of course still a lot of work to do and, for the time being at least I am a little more focused on my setting, rather than the crunch behind it, which itself has come on leaps and bounds in the past 24 hours.

Whilst still very much at the drawing board stage, there is at least enough in the way of ideas to share now and some good solid bones to flesh out. That though, is the subject for another post (coming very soon).