It turns out that I’ve been interested in game design since my very earliest days as a gamer. Back in 1975 I read a review of Dungeons & Dragons, couldn’t afford a copy, so wrote my own rules that I played with my brother and some friends!

Throughout the seventies and early eighties my friends and I devoured all the RPGs we could find, and there were a few that we settled on as our favourites. While playing games like D&D, Runequest, Bushido and Traveller, I added or changed rules to experiment with making each game a little more to our liking. I recently found the exercise books in which I wrote these, and thought it might be fun to include the headings (and perhaps a few additional notes) about the rules I produced for each of these games.

Each of these variants was between half a page and a couple of pages of rules to cover them.

D&D Variant Rules (AD&D)

1. Brawling rules (overly complex narrative brawling rules!)
2. Random castles (random tables for castles, their occupants and guardians)
3. Mineral resources (random tables for mineral riches which you can mine)
4. Mines and their values
5. Medieval style social background tables
6. Accommodation costs
7. Ceremonial magic (ritual magic that anyone can attempt with enough people to help, but with severe backlask possibilities)
8. More fearsome dragons (bigger, tougher, nastier. Much needed in 1e days)
9. Magic user subclasses (this is in the days when illusionists were the only official ones!)
10. Large scale battles
11. Good outsiders
12. New magic staves
13. new magic rods
14. New magic rings
15. Eagle riders
16. Piratical dragon riders
17. Additional prismatic wall layers
18. Alchemetic gemstones (cribbed from Chivalry & Sorcery, I think)
19. Wealth by craft and guild status
20. Table of monster activities
21. Dragon encounters
22. Balrogs
23. Running a business
24. Tombs and crypt contents

Campaign world specific

1. History
2. Magic item families
3. Politics
4. Seasonal events
5. Weather
6. Encounter tables
7. Terrain travel rules
8. Languages
9. Elves, Dwarves, Drow and Sahaugin
10. Societies and social classes by nation
11. National clothing

Runequest Variant Rules

1. Healing plants (finding by environment and season)
2. Group Fighting tactics (advantages for a team fighting together)
3. Battle strategy effects (when two forces both pick a strategy, cross reference on a table to see which side gets what kind of advantage for that battle)
4. Runemaster Followers (table for special followers when one becomes a priest or rune lord)
5. Grappling rules (special rules for pinning and throwing)
6. Combat variant - who is on the offensive? (alternate combat system where one has to gain the offensive position in order to attack)
7. Net combat (using nets in combat)
8. New Diseases (more magical ones)
9. Wizard rules (inspired by Earthsea, allows for artificers, enchanters, conjurers, thaumaturgists, necromancers, symbolists and power-word wizards, each associated with a particular rune)
10. Truestone properties (table)
11. Effect of extreme weather (very hot or very cold weather will make life harder!)
12. River crossings (number of swimming rolls to cross rivers based upon season and size)
13. Weapon vs armour modifications (giving weapons a small bonus or penalty to damage when facing different kinds of armour)
14. Variant time to draw a weapon (rather than +5SR for everything, smaller and shorter weapons are quicker to draw and thus take fewer SR)
15. Bravery characteristic (a new experimental ability score)
16. Drinking and drunkenness
17. Getting lost in the wilderness
18. Brawling and non lethal combat
19. Large scale battles
20. Serious wound charts by location
21. Unusual weapons (boomerang, bolas, whip)
22. Additional Elf types
23. Lovecraftian monsters
24. Miscellaneous items table
25. New runespells
26. Archipelago setting ‘the twilight isles’
27. High elves
28. Heights and weights
29. Fast Town generation
30. Cult spirit familiars
31. Some D&D monster conversions
32. Alternate post-magic setting

Bushido

1. Variant Budo rules for using practical arts (basically slightly better for yakuza and ninja)
2. Torture rules modification (making it easier to accidentally kill someone. Don’t do torture, it doesn’t work!)
3. Entangling weapon modification (making it slight less easy to bind someone up in combat)
4. Seppuku-lite for Yakuza (gangsters can cut off a finger and gain all the benefits of seppuku without the dying)
5. New Okuden (for ninja families campaign)
6. Parrying Rules (rather than just increasing defence, these rules allow a parry to completely block an attack)
7. Status in Ryu, gangs, families, clans, Shogunate. (rules for accumulating status point with different groups. A table indicates whether actions are good for some groups and simultanously bad for other groups)
8. Ninja families (and their preferred okuden)

Traveller

1. Patron encounters
2. Prospecting
3. Hunting expeditions
4. Space combat variants (to try to bring the excitement of asteroid belt chases into space combat)
5. New gun types
6. New missile types (stealth missiles and jump missiles)
7. Aristocracy (privileges that come with rank and status)
8. Port facilities tables
9. Planetary encounter tables
10. New alien races
11. Space combat software improvements (more kinds of software to run)
12. Attacks on ATVs
13. Fuel to energy exchange ratios
14. Ship construction variants
15. Special brawling stunts
16. New electronic equipment

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Cover Photo by Masaaki Komori on Unsplash