On the Radar: D&D Cyclopedia and New Styles of Play

You may not have heard yet, but at the end of January 2018, the D&D Cyclopedia went up for sale on DriveThruRPG. Apparently, it's possible to order printed versions of this, but I'm sorely tempted to get the PDF version, for archival purposes -- because it's only $9.99 at the time of this writing.

Now while, this was available before, they now also offer a softcover and hardcover version (POD, I believe). I own the hardcover, but the concept of a softcover version blows my mind!

Story Games & Indie Games in Mystara

The setting of Mystara is a such an easy go-to for me, especially when I have to force myself to read through new material these days (it used to be so easy to read and retain stuff) that I've been looking at how to build characters using the old system here -- then just use mechanics from a variety of sources to add a different sheen or style of play for a night or two, before going back to the old rules. What rules sets are these?

Retro-clones and Neo-clones

I won't go through the list, especially since you can find it online -- more than one, actually. But it's a trivial matter to go through this list to see what particular aspect of play might be spiced up by the emphasis of a given ruleset. In fact, that may be part of a future series of posts.

D&D 5th Edition

Given the system's construction, it's pretty easy to just use characters built from the Cyclopedia and then apply a handful of rules from 5th edition (Advantage / Disadvantage, hit points and death) and so on to get the modern feel without doing a full on conversion.

Special Plug-ins

If you want to handle something like investigations in the world of Mystara (there's been a multiple murder -- of the same guy, and he wants you to find out who's been killing him over and over), you may want to pick up something like Gumshoe (especially their rules-lite version Pocket Gumshoe), and pop it into place to handle some Manhunter of Mystara adventures in the Known World.

There's also the possibility of taking from the page of FATE, and similar and similar aspect-oriented games, to create an aspect or two for your character, which allows you to trigger a special Advantages / Disadvantages when you can invoke it them game -- due to circumstances -- in order to further cement your character's uniqueness in the world. They can be serious ("Not on my watch!") to silly ("Kobolds must but saved"), but do add a twist to the traditional gameplay in the setting.