2015-02-09

The Fellowship by Michael Shorten

In line with the idea from the last post that there will probably be more Book of War stuff coming up this year, here's the first thing. A month or two back Michael "chgowiz" Shorten sent me a draft of a set of expansion rules for BOW that he calls "The Fellowship" which addresses one specific, sometimes hotly contested, limitation -- the fact because of the 1:10 scale, you need a hero to be at least 10th level in order to appear on the table as an independent figure (and even counts as only getting 1 hit before going down).

Michael's idea was to allow "PC Party" units -- all of whom might be 3rd-7th level or some-such, acting as a single, combined figure. Such a great solution; I never bothered to allow heterogeneous units in this way because I thought it would be too much trouble. But Michael's done a great job of basically averaging out all the armor, moves, combat abilities, and magical powers you might encounter. He even has an expanded spells section for use at that level. I'm completely flattered that he spent enough time to deeply understand Book of War as he clearly does, and I think it's a real step forward for the game. Check out his rules expansion on Google Docs, I highly recommend it!




6 comments:

  1. Thank you for the kind comments and link. I'm hoping to play test these and refine them over the next few months. Now if only I could find a few local OD&D players with some time on their hands..

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  2. This post is really good! I added a link to it in my Best Reads of the Week Series for February 8-14, 2015.

    http://dyverscampaign.blogspot.com/2015/03/best-reads-of-week-febraury-8-14-2015.html

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    1. Hey, that's awesome! Great stuff on your blog. Thanks again to Michael S. for coming up with the material here.

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  3. Hi Delta! I wanted to share this blog post with you, about how on a moment's notice, I used BoW /Fellowship to quickly adjudicate a battle at a 10:1 scale during a session of OD&D. It worked great! I am gaining confidence in how to make this happen going back and forth between scales. http://chgowiz-games.blogspot.com/2016/02/solo-game-wwife-moving-scales-on-fly.html

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    1. I love that writeup. Thanks for thinking to share it here!

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