Fiddling With The Grimoire

A few weeks ago, I began editing together some house rules based on the original roleplaying game, as re-imagined by Matt Finch. I called this effort Webster’s Grimoire.

This morning, after a few ideas had been running around my head for several days, I sat down to edit it. There have been two major innovations:

1. Skills (based on the OpenQuest system)
2. Attribute Rolls by Species (inspired by Arduin II)

Skills

I’ve long pondered whether RPGs really need skills… and there’s a really good argument that they don’t.

That being said, I like skill-based games. I especially like d100 skill systems, like the one in OpenQuest. It’s the reason I love Rolemaster, Palladium, and other BRP-derived games.

So, yeah. I’ve further hacked the Grimoire to include percentage-based skills.

I’ve left the combat system to run on d20, but I’ve replaced the “2d10 under attribute” system with percentage-roll skills based on the attribute values (plus any training). Each character class gives you some skill points to spread around, allowing boosts on the default “base” values of the skills as written.

Simple.

Attribute Rolls by Species

Flat 3d6 rolls for attributes are… uninteresting. Also, I’d not mentioned “races” in the original draft.

Enter the Species: a range of humanoid racial groups. I’ve not described them in detail yet, or even added special abilities, but I have begun with a simple table that shows what dice you roll for each attribute.

There are lots more details to come on these species, but it’s a cool start. What I like about this is that each species offers the player different options – e.g. do you want to favour a particular attribute, or do you want to emphasise your class?

And…

Finally, I’ve realised that I can meld the 5e work I’m doing on Mykovnia’s Ice-Rivan Realm into this house rules set too. Thus, I’ll be working out how things work in 5e and then matching that with mechanics and details in the Grimoire.

It’s a lot of fun!

Game on!