Classic Fantasy: Making References

The big news is that the regular Friday Night Roleplayers have agreed to play Mythras Classic Fantasy. That means transferring the Mistamyr Fell setting we almost started with D&D over to Mythras. The other news is that it has been an absolute blast doing so!

The great thing about emulating old school fantasy is that you don’t need to do much conversion work. The guys’ characters are fairly easy to recreate using Classic Fantasy and the main work has been not in transferring creatures but rather in making the Game Master experience at the table easier.

Creature Cards

When I played D&D Red Box (1983) a few months back, I created for myself a small collection of “Monster Cards”. This weekend, I’ve invested some time in creating a new set of what I’d prefer to call “Creature Cards” for Classic Fantasy.

Here’s an example:

I took the advice found in Mythras about what you really need to hand for most fight scenes (see “Non-Player Character Statistic Blocks” on page 287) and turned those into the cards that you see. I began with Orcs, customising four variants to match my needs for forthcoming scenarios. I’ve added some Zombies and an Ogre too, not to mention one or two non-player characters.

Treasure Cards & Spell Cards Too

Next up, I’ve made some Hargrave-inspired Treasure Cards. I also took the time to make Spell Cards for those spells that the player characters have chosen (plus those I needed for the non-player characters). Similar in principle but, in this case, the idea is to give them to the players as a handy reference… once they’ve identified the items or learned the spells, of course.

Here’s Aoth’s recently-found Dragon Shield as an example:

They didn’t take long to make but should speed along the look-ups when the players need to use an item. My aim is simply to reduce the book look-ups.

All that’s really left to do before Friday’s game is to look through and make small tweaks to the adventure notes I wrote, as well as modifying the Wandering Monster Tables to match.

Game on!

Edit: Some folks have been asking for my template used on the Creature Cards, so here’s a link to the Zombie Cards. These are intended to be opened in MS Word and printed out using Avery C2318-25 White Double-Side Printable Cards.