Wanderer

May want to glance towards the end of this thread for ideas as well.
www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?t=10964

Some inspiring ideas there too.
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My thoughts exactly. As OD&D is a toolkit for making your own fantasy RPG, Wanderer has become the same, without ever having existed!

I ran another session of Wanderer this weekend. Since we now have an official "Wanderer" thread, this is where I'll discuss it:

The characters, now minus their sorcerer, find themselves skulking through Simarghan, a dire temple-fortress carved right into the face of a mountain by the mysterious Night Tribes. They discover that the goblin goddess has but a single commandment for her faithful: "Put thine enemies to the sword." They also learn that nearly a thousand years ago the goblins (then known as "gnomes") were a race of forest dwellers cruelly enslaved by humankind and driven nearly to extinction. The party manages to free dozens of human children that the goblins were preparing to offer up as a sacrifice to their pale goddess, but not before one of them is ensnared in the barbed whips of the goblins. He is literally drawn and quartered into bloody chunks as the rest of the group flees with the children to the outside world, safe beneath the bright sun that is poison to the Night Tribes.

In terms of the actual Traveller rules being adapted for Sword & Sorcery, I have to say that they appear to work well. The combat is simple, but gritty enough to ensure that combat is taken very seriously. I'm thinking about adding a critical hit system similar to the original Arduin books; dangerous and bloody.

The only part that doesn't really jive is the magic system, which seems too much like something from the Dying Earth books. Since this past session didn't have any magic in it, it never came up. I am going to eventually sit down and see how I can put a spin on it to put it more in line with more traditional S&S magic. But on the the other hand, I have to admit that I kinda like Wanderer magic as it is. So I guess that I'm conflicted. I like the dangerous, overblown, sometimes insanely powerful way that magic is depicted, but I don't know if it has the right feel for something like a Conan or Lankhmar setting.

But yeah, we had fun

Doc

Great minds think alike - I've created my own Traveller fantasy material as well some time ago...

Reposted from here.

Now that Mongoose Publishing has released an OGL/SRD ("2d6 OGL") of their Traveller rules, we could do almost everything we please with the SRD, including using them for low-fantasy settings.

A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY: This is based on Traveller, and in Traveller (beginning from Classic Traveller) the term "DM" means "Dice Modifier" and not "Dungeon Master". The "Dungeon Master" is called a "Referee" in Traveller.

So far I've created:
1) stats for fantasy creatures for the 2d6 OGL.
2) Rules for low-tech equipment and combat for 2d6 OGL.
3) Fantasy Skills for 2d6 OGL.

---

There was also an older version using Classic Traveller (CT) as a basis - you could take a look at it here.

I seem to recall that, at least with a type A ship, it was nearly (literally?) impossible to pay the bills with trade, freight and passengers alone. One pretty much had to find patrons offering lucrative jobs ... which of course tended to be interesting!

I thought of it as being a combination of ancient Greece and the Carribean during the 'age of piracy'. I guess they're the two settings with lots of trading and small islands that first leap to mind.

If I'd done non-human creatures, I think the existing aliens would've worked fine: lion-headed people, Eastern wizards...

I had a basic trade table worked out, but then browsing through one of my old text books that surfaced recently, I found a list of trade goods found at Jericho during the Neolithic period. These included salt, sulfur, bitumen, turquoise, cowry shells, obsidian, and "greenstone." I hadn't thought of sulfur, and I had listed semi-precious stones as at a later tech level. This may require some juggling.

Based on the comparative weights and values of different Roman and Greek coins, I have found some relative values of metals:
Silver was between 22 and 25 times as valuable as brass (called orichalcum or aurichalcum - literally "gold-copper." Yes, that is where this word comes from.)
Brass was about twice as valuable as regular bronze.
Gold was about 14 times as valuable as silver (In Greek times, it was more like 10x the value of silver.)

One of Diocletian's reforms was to create a silver coin called the Argentus, which was the same weight and purity of the denarius of Nero's time (which was 3.4 grams, at least before it was debased later in his reign) This gives me something to make comparisons with. Diocletian's maximum prices were just that - maximum retail values, and while inflation quickly made an utter hash of things, it gives relative values at one point in time. The main question for a trade table is: what might the wholesale price have been like? ... I'm going to take a wild stab at 30-50% and see where that gets me. The next step is to make some sense of Roman weights and measures, and to convert back and forth between bulk and weight. (i.e. how many modii of wheat in a modern ton if there are 60 pounds of wheat in a bushel and a modius is one third of an amphora? And what would the average wholesale price at the dock be if the maximum retail price is 4 argentei per modius? And if I bought a ton of olive oil, how much of that 2000 pounds is taken up by the pottery containers? [It turns out to be about 50% at the top end.])

Wheee! Basically I have a very enjoyable brain teaser to distract me whenever the stress of filing out divorce papers gets too high.

Please - quite the contrary: if I have offended or was too flippant, I do apologize. What is clear from your reply is that we are taking two different approaches (or perhaps keeping with a nautical theme, two different tacks.) You seem to be trying to translate Traveller directly, keeping all the tropes intact; while I am trying to imagine what a fantasy game written by GDW, based on their Traveller engine, might have looked like. Is either approach better? Well... you seem to have a largely functional game, while mine is barely in the larval stage. On the other hand, since given the current circumstances in my life, the chances of my actually getting a FTF game - of anything - going any time within the next year or so are vanishingly remote, I am doing what I enjoy: namely geeking over minute questions of anthropology and economics and the history of technology.

[Classic Traveller] Ancient World Trading and Sailing Rules
by Mithras @rpgnet

So, is the title Wanderer sufficiently ripped off enough that anyone can call label their variant Traveller rules as such (i.e. It's not trademarked)?

Yeah, I've checked out the SRD. I'm not plotting anything drastic; I was just curious.
I'm content with Traveller as it is. Getting stranded on a low-tech world full of alien beasts is fantasy enough.

Odd (instead of an OD&D) question: does anyone know what font was used to make the book covers in that mockup of the 'Wanderer' game? I have not had any luck trying to find it.

The creator appears to be active at therpgsite if you want to ask him directly.

www.therpgsite.com/member.php?u=973

Close, but not quite - those are both the Celtic uncial calligraphy style, and the cover of the Wanderer books is different. You can really see it in the "a" and "e".

The quest continues...