A Bit Late To The Party, But Wow!

[theron]

Somehow, in the all the hullabaloo of D&D 3.x along with the explosion of OGL products, I managed to completely miss Microlite 20.  Probably because it was developed largely on the web in plain sight.  Because that's usually how I manage to miss very clever stuff.

Put simply, Microlite 20 is D&D 3.x stripped down to the barest essentials.  Three stats, a few skills, some simple rules for spellcasting and combat and your out the door.  It's quite possible to put all the pertinent rules on a single page.  But because it's derived from d20, stripping down published material to fit that paradigm is a snap, so there's tons of monsters and adventures just waiting to be plundered.  But it gives a very definite old-school vibe, as minis and detailed tactical maps really don't have a place.

Best of all, it's so bare bones that it's easy to customize without breaking the system.  And lordamercy, have people ever customized it.  There's tons of fan-produced material out on the web covering everything imaginable.  So much stuff that I'd despair of ever finding it, given my ability to overlook the obvious.

Fortunately, my old gaming chum Randall (we played together back in the 80s) runs Retro Roleplaying: The Blog.  A big proponent of Microlite 20, he saved everyone the trouble of hunting down these supplements and put them all in one convenient, if huge, place.

The Microlite RPG Collection is over 600 pages of free material, from the core rules, through options and expansions, to complete Microlite games and settings, ranging from sword and sorcery to post-apocalypse, from cowboys to spies, and possibly the best ever Star Trek adaptation I've ever seen (and I own them all, including the one Heritage Models put out in the 70s).  Seriously, the notion of the color of your shirt indicating your character class is absolutely brilliant.  Sure, there's some stuff that I'll never use and probably never look at, but there are some rare gems worth exploring, and if nothing else, it offers something less cumbersome than d20 and showcases some truly outstanding creativity from our fellow gamers.

You should really check it out.

Comments

[doc-ezra.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the headsup! There's some great stuff in here, though the document manager in me is going to have to radically rearrange and reformat most of it for some kind of consistency. :P

[hwrnmnbsol]

Will review, with an eye toward Owlcon rounds.