House Rules

Assume we are playing an Original D&D game with the following exceptions outlined below.

dCarcosa

Whenever you are asked to roll a dCarcosa roll all the dice: a d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20! The d20 tells you which of the dice rolled should be read:

You will use a dCarcosa to roll your hit dice and damage.

Hit Dice and Healing

In traditional OD&D a hit dice is a d6. In this game a hit dice is a dCarcosa.

HP is recovered as one of the steps during the “Haven Turn” (see below). There is no (natural) partial HP recovery during a session. (Your characters don’t feel rested if you haven’t rested.)

Attribute Scores

Roll 3d6 in order for your stats. They provide no bonuses for high scores, or detriments for low scores. They are sometimes used to determine the success of actions your character wishes to perform, and to give you a rough sense of what your character might be like.

Classes

Players can pick from the following classes: Fighter or Sorcerer as described in Carcosa.

Fighter

The most common adventurer is the fighter, skilled in the use of all armour and weaponry. They have a +1 bonus to their to-hit rolls at first level (as noted in their to-hit table below).

Sorcerer

The Sorcerer is similar to a fighter, but can also learn to cast the horrific sorcery of the ancient Snake-Men. A sorcerer can learn any number of rituals, and cast them as often as they like, though the costs to do so are quite high to say the least. Sorcerous rituals banish, conjure, invoke, bind, torment, or imprison entities such as the Old Ones and their spawn. All rituals (except for rituals of banishment) require human sacrifice, and all except banishing require long ceremonies (typically at least an hour) to perform along with much paraphernalia. (The model for a Lawful sorcerer would be one that only focuses on the rituals of banishment.)

All sorcerers can read the ancient language of the Snake-Men.

Sorcerers can eat other sorcerers brains in an attempt to learn any rituals their victim may know.

Encumbrance

Characters can carry up to the greater of their strength score or ten number of items. An item is anything one could imagine taking up a non-trivial amount of space. So a ration would take up one item slot, another ration would take up another; armour is a slot; your weapons are each a slot; 100 GP in coins is a slot.

A character takes a -1 to all rolls for each extra item they carry over their allowed amount.

Combat

Ascending AC will be used for combat. Players roll a d20 to hit, add their attack bonus, and try and score higher than their opponent’s AC. An unarmoured combatant has an ascending AC of 10.

The attack bonus progression for Fighters is:

The attack bonus progression for Sorcerers is:

The attack progression for specialists and psionicsts is: