New System, New Face: Hastily Reviving a Dead Series with Janky Optional Rules for BFRPG

Been a while since I made a character hereabouts, huh? Figured I'd fix that and shoehorn yet more BFRPG into my blog while I'm at it.

As I've mentioned in the past, the open-source game system BFRPG has tons of fan-made content hosted on its site, from new species and classes, to new subsystems, and in at least one case that I know of, a pretty significant rules conversion mod.

Basic Fantasy Questing by Joe Carruthers changes the game from a mixed OSR title into a hybrid between The RPG Not To Be Named and the "Classic d100 Game" that the supplement references obliquely throughout. For those who don't know what that's referring to, like myself when I started this post, it's the original Basic Role-Playing system by Chaosium released in 1980. It's a generic system similar to GURPS or Savage Worlds in that it supports a wide range of genre fiction that you can flesh out using books in their niche. You might have heard of a few of BRP's little genre splats; they include Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer, and RuneQuest, among others.*

BFQ works like this: you roll your ability scores and pick a species and class like normal, then convert every ±1 of ability modifier into a ±5% to applicable roll-under d100 rolls, like adding Strength percentage to Melee Attack rolls or Wisdom percentage to Divine Casting. Each class has a main skill that determines their HD, like a fighter's highest weapon skill or a thief's highest thief skill. Class skills start at a 55% base chance to succeed, not including modifiers.

For everything outside of the class's niche, you have a new set of Ability Skills to roll. These skills combine saving throws from the core game with the ability checks for all 6 ability scores that you commonly see elsewhere, and their base % is equal to a character's ability score x2. You roll these to push heavy stuff, shrug off the effects of poison, remember lore, etc.

You might notice there's not really anything to build here, though. What would I be doing other than rolling dice and seeing what I end up with?

Well, fortunately Joe included some optional rules for his already optional ruleset: classless characters.

The classless characters rule nudges BFQ much closer to BRP than to D&D by removing classes and opening all skills up to all characters, albeit at much lower starting values than their specialized fellows enjoy. Which comes up as a bit of an issue later on, but for now let's just figuratively and literally roll with it.

Ability score generation is identical to the base game, which means I spent literally hours rolling arrays in a generator until I got one that felt not too crippled by negative modifiers but also not too good that it seemed like I was blatantly fishing for a strong character. Ultimately I found one that's just average enough to help illustrate a few parts of the system.

With this conveniently middling array, we can calculate our classless adventurer's base skills using the following:

You still select species as part of this system, for which I decided to pull in yet another fan supplement; Monsters as Player Characters by Sidney Parham, Omer Golan-Joel, R. Kevin Smoot, and steveman. I decided to go with hobgoblin, since they're kind of like the humans of the humanoid world in a lot of ways, and a generalist character feels appropriate here. They also have a pretty nice Alertness ability that reduces the chance of being surprised, and +5% bonuses to Listen and Finding/Removing Traps, which is great for someone with free access to thief skills.

Maybe they've actually drifted away from their highly regimented community after failing to find a rank and niche to specialize into? A rather uninspired implementation of the societal misfit trope, I know, but one that at least weds plot and mechanics.

We distribute another 50 points on top of the above base values to finish, so that we have at least 1 skill above 55% and none higher than 70%. After some final bookkeeping we've got our hob:

Art stolen from the hedgewitch chapter of Land of Mist.

As you can see, average base values for classless characters start very low to make up for their much greater versatility. This PC's highest ability score, Strength, only amounts to a base of 26% in melee attack and force, although it's actually slightly higher than this thanks to the +5% from the +1 modifier to Strength which still gets applied to all applicable rolls, for a total of 31%. On the flip side, our friend here ain't gonna be doing much wheeling and dealing with an Influence of 11% (16% base -5% from -1 modifier). At early levels they will probably flail and flounder a lot before they eventually slide into a semi-randomly determined niche of whatever they happen to succeed at by sheer dumb luck.

This is where I come to the biggest houserule I would use for a game of BFQ: reverse the progression system.

Under standard BFQ rules, you mark a skill for improvement once during an adventure when you succeed with it. At the end of the adventure you then roll vs your skill to see if you improve it by 1d3+1 points by succeeding at the roll, or just 1 by failing at it. This is fine for use with the class system because it means each class will naturally excel in the area of their expertise from the base game, such as fighters leveling their attack skill much faster than magic-users from having more and higher chances to succeed at a roll, which compounds after a certain point and makes you all but guaranteed to mark a skill for advancement within the first roll or two of a session, while your less relevant skills fall far behind.

But with the base skill calculations of classless BFQ, most of your skills are going to start off well below 50%. This means improving almost anything other than your 1 or 2 favored skills will be a long slog. And if you're going to specialize like that, why not just stick with classes?

So I propose houseruling it so that you mark for advancement every time you fail a roll instead of succeed. Likewise, when rolling to advance, a failure adds the full 1d3+1 points and success adds only 1.

This way, characters are encouraged to try things outside of their comfort zones, and it's easier to build a generalist if one wants. At the same time, the jacks of all trades will be discouraged from becoming masters of anything by the fact that it's harder to fail rolls at higher levels. Quick, early skill advancement naturally trends downward and slows to a crawl as it nears 100%. This is also closer to the the leveling curve of many OSR games, if that's a plus for you. And depending on the players at your table, it might also just feel better to always be getting something out of an action? Losing that Agility check and faceplanting in the mud's no fun, but now you've learned from that mistake, as that old saying goes.

* Okay, technically RuneQuest came first and then had a genericized version of its ruleset spun off into BRP, but I think it's still accurate to say that RuneQuest is "powered by" BRP so to speak.

Shepherd Class for BFRPG

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon Dragonsfoot's old OD&D and BECMI fan zine, OD&Dities. In addition to realizing how close I came to ripping off their name with my 3E OdditE series, I found a few things of passing interest to me; mostly different takes on character classes and optional rulesets.

The thing that really caught my interest in Issue #12 was the Shepherd class by one Kenneth Bailey. The shepherd is a rustic herder who combines a few thief/ranger skills, herbal healing, light fighting abilities, and nonmagical bardic music together into a generalist package that screams "pastoral folk hero" in like a thousand different languages and mythologies at once.

Naturally, I was piqued.

And then I was crushed, because for some reason the tables that should contain most of the information for the shepherd's abilities and how they scale with level don't appear anywhere in the zine.

All you get is its XP table (they level about as fast as magic-users on average), followed by a featureless, out-of-context spell progression table that resembles but ultimately falls behind the Rules Cyclopedia cleric's. It should be said that the shepherd is explicitly described in the text as not casting magic. Additionally, the section titled Shepherd Songs and Herbology doesn't include any of the herbology, leaving it a mystery what they do to use herbs in healing wounds, curing diseases, or doing weirder stuff like granting temporary infravision or invisibility to animals.

It's frustrating to find, and I don't know how it happened. Maybe the class was just published unfinished, or the wrong file version got submitted, or there was a major editing/formatting oopsie? I browsed around for several different hostings of the zine but all of them had the same imperfect file in their archives. I'm not going to blame anyone particular because it's a 20 year-old issue of a discontinued fan zine and I should really have better things to be doing, but it's pretty frickin' weird all the same.

I suppose I could just ask around Dragonsfoot to see if anyone from that era knows what the deal was. But I've never been a part of that community and don't know much about it, and ever since their AD&D 2E character roller with the dark green UI and half-ogres that I swear I didn't hallucinate went offline years ago, I've had little reason to start.

Anyway, with my curiosity frustrated thus, I decided I'd just make my own shepherd class instead.

Of course I'm not going to bother poring over enough Cyclopedia material to fully grok its class design all the way up to level 36, which is why you don't see BECMI in the title up there. Instead, I decided to recreate the spirit if not the letter of the class alongside my own personal tweaks in BFRPG, another OSR title of which I'm fond, and which I've made other mediocre content for in the past.

Shepherd

Shepherds are rustic hinterland folk and nomads who migrate throughout the year with their herds and flocks of animals. Some drive seas of cattle and horses across the plains to sell in distant markets, while others subsist with their small and hardy flocks in the hills and mountains. All are skilled in the ways of nature and life on the move. Such a tough life alone or in small, interdependent communities makes them competent survivalists with a broad skillset. It's no wonder then that some shepherds find themselves drawn to the adventuring life, where they help keep a very different kind of flock out of trouble.

I know I've used this art for posts in the past but I can't stop loving it.
Wanderers by merlkir

Requirements: To become a Shepherd, a character must have a Strength score of 9 or higher, a Dexterity score of 11, and a Wisdom score of 11. They may use any ranged weapon, but may not use any edged weapons besides daggers, hand axes, and shepherd's axes (see bottom of page). They may wear nothing heavier than leather armor (studded leather if using the armor and shields supplement), but not shields. There are no racial restrictions for the Shepherd.

Shepherds use a d6 to determine Hit Points. They fight using the cleric/thief columns and save as thieves. They may use magical versions of all allowed weapons and armor. Otherwise, they may utilize magical items that a thief would be able to use.

Special Abilities: Animals, both wild and domestic, are unavoidable and important facts of life for shepherds and their communities. Shepherds receive +2 to Reaction Rolls with all animals. Additionally, herd animals, beasts of burden, and all breeds of work dog never react worse than "Favorable" toward the shepherd.

Shepherds are highly proficient with the club/cudgel/walking staff and sling. When wielding a sling or walking staff, a shepherd adds +2 to their Attack Bonus. Additionally, shepherds may score a "critical hit" when an attack roll with a sling or walking staff results in a natural 20. A critical hit deals double weapon damage, increasing to triple at 5th level and quadruple at 9th.

Shepherds can Climb, Hide, and Track in wilderness areas, at percentages given in the table below. Tracking targets whom the shepherd is very familiar with, such as party members or animals from their flock, do not require a check to successfully track except in very adverse conditions such as severe weather or magical interference. When tracking a target, the shepherd must roll once per hour traveled or lose the trail.

Note: Track may also be used to represent gathering and preparing herbal medicine (see below) if your group is not using any optional rules for secondary character skills.

Shepherds are often miles from the nearest village with magical healing. As such, they are well-versed in folk medicine and herblore. Shepherds may spend time in the wilderness finding, collecting, and processing herbs into medicines that mimic the effects of a small number of cleric, magic-user, and druid spells.

To prepare a medicine the shepherd must be at least 1 level higher than a normal spellcaster who would be able to cast the spell it mimics. 1 use of medicine requires 1 hour of work per level of the spell being mimicked. Thus a poultice of cure light wounds can be made starting at 3rd level and takes 1 hour to make, a tea of cure disease becomes available at 7th level and takes 3 hours, etc. The shepherd must make a successful check (either the Track skill or an appropriate secondary skill) every hour to make progress. Failure means a setback and 1 wasted hour. Medicines of reversible spells cannot be reversed; they are not trained poisoners. Other herbal medicines probably exist out there in the world, to be discovered and learned through play. Medicines may be kept for 1 week before losing their potency.

Example Herbal Medicines include (but are not limited to):

Poultice of Cure Light Wounds - A mash of herbs applied to an injury to help heal cuts, reduce inflammation, and prevent infection. 3rd level, 1 hour.
Ointment of Protection From Animals - More of a noxious repellent, made from unmentionable substances. Slathered on the body to ward off animals, as protection from evil. 3rd level, 1 hour.
Tablets of Purify Food and Water - Pills containing bitter antimicrobial agents that kill most common pathogens, but don't help the taste much. 3rd level, 1 hour.
Tincture of Bless - A highly alcoholic solvent of one of the most powerful substances in the realms: placebo. Affects only the imbiber. 5th level, 2 hours.
Gel of Charm Animal - A cocktail of pleasant (to animals at least) botanicals sure to get the first pack of animals you encounter rubbing up on you. 5th level, 2 hours.
Tranquilizer of Slow Poison* - Depressants meant to arrest the progress of toxins until they can be fully treated. May cause grogginess. Must be formulated for a specific poison. 5th level, 2 hours.
Drops of Cure Blindness - A tiny, stoppered bottle, good for flushing out gunk and stimulating ocular muscles. 7th level, 3 hours.
Tea of Cure Disease - Technically a decoction, made by boiling horrible-tasting herbs, bark, and roots. Must be formulated for a specific disease. 7th level, 3 hours.
Eye Soak of Darkvision - Essentially just a highly concentrated dose of drops of cure blindness, able to briefly push human eyes beyond their limits. 7th level, 3 hours.
Needle of Neutralize Poison* - A rudimentary syringe with a single dose of antitoxin in it. Must be formulated for a specific poison. 7th level, 3 hours.

* Druid spell or druidic version of it.

Music is the shepherd's indispensable pastime. Without it, the long hours sitting around at pasture would be even longer. But those thousands of collective hours of boredom have also unlocked some of the secrets of those ancient songs, poems, and myths. Shepherds gain access to a limited number of Bard Songs related to wilderness survival, such as those listed below. They may also use and benefit from the effects of any magical instruments they come across. They begin with knowledge of 1 song and gain a small number of song proficiency points to either learn new songs or improve known songs according to the table below. Other shepherd songs probably exist out there in the world, to be discovered and learned through play.

Example Shepherd Songs include (but are not limited to):

Flock's Lullaby - Sometimes the animals are restless and need a bit of help settling down for the night. This song functions as the sleep spell when played to herd animals. Friendly targets may voluntarily fall asleep to it, in which case they gain +1 point of extra healing from a rest per rank.

Folk Hero's Ballad - This saga contains a little bit of everything; action, drama, tragedy, comedy, etc. And each chapter is more inspiring than the last. All allies within 60 feet receive +1 to saves against spells, initiative, or damage depending on if the shepherd uses the story to inspire caution, excitement, or righteous indignation in them. Additional ranks allow 2 or 3 effects to occur at once.
Wary Herder's Song - Predators in the night are a constant threat to the lone shepherd and their flock. The shepherd and all allies within 30 feet are less likely to be surprised, reducing the die roll range by 1 (from 1-2 on d6 to a roll of 1 on d6). A second rank of proficiency reduces the chance further to a roll of 1 on d8, and a third rank modifies the roll to 1 on d10.
Nomad's Migration Song - Moving camp across great distances is arduous business. This travel song helps lighten loads and spirits, increasing the carrying capacity of all who hear it by 20%, including any pack animals being used. Additional ranks increase this by +20%.

Song of Calling - This appeal to the land that sustains the shepherd summons a number of animals equal to the shepherd's Hit Dice from the surrounding wilderness to serve them and follow rudimentary commands for 1 turn per level. Unlike most bard songs, this can only be sung once per day. Additional ranks increase that limit by 1.

Shepherd

Lv	Exp. Points	Climb	Hide	Track	Songs (Max)	Hit Dice
1	0	80	10	40	1 (+1)	1d6
2	2,500	81	15	44	1 (+1)	2d6
3	5,000	82	20	48	2 (+1)	3d6
4	10,000	83	25	52	2 (+1)	4d6
5	20,000	84	30	56	2 (+1)	5d6
6	40,000	85	35	60	2 (+1)	6d6
7	80,000	86	40	64	3 (+1)	7d6
8	150,000	87	45	68	3 (+2)	8d6
9	300,000	88	50	72	3 (+2)	9d6
10	450,000	89	53	75	3 (+2)	9d6+2
11	600,000	90	56	78	4 (+2)	9d6+4
12	750,000	91	59	81	4 (+2)	9d6+6
13	900,000	92	62	84	4 (+2)	9d6+8
14	1,050,000	93	65	87	4 (+2)	9d6+10
15	1,200,000	94	68	90	5 (+3)	9d6+12
16	1,350,000	95	69	91	5 (+3)	9d6+14
17	1,500,000	96	70	92	5 (+3)	9d6+16
18	1,650,000	97	71	93	5 (+3)	9d6+18
19	1,800,000	98	72	94	6 (+3)	9d6+20
20	1,950,000	99	73	95	6 (+3)	9d6+22

Shepherd's Axes are constructed from a short staff with a small axehead mounted on it, sometimes with an accompanying metal spike or butt on the opposite end. They are commonly employed by shepherds in mountainous regions where they are useful as walking sticks, bushcraft tools, and even animal crooks (when the head is sheathed of course). Many are highly personalized, carved and decorated by their owners while they sit for long hours minding the herds.

Treat shepherd's axes as walking staffs for all intents and purposes, except that they deal 1d6 slashing damage in combat.

A monochrome public domain image to wrap up,
if that's more your speed.