If 5d6 come up right around their average of 18, it could kill three 1 HD creatures with 6 HP each, or nine with 2 HP each. The EPT damage system has another factor in its favor: one attack might be different from the next. It's a more interesting interpretation, and it has the benefit of greater simplicity: there is only one to-hit and one damage roll. But that doesn't scale well to opponents that you'd fight at higher levels unless you are literally taking on hordes of orcs or bandits, mowing them down in the mighty-thewed barbarian style, it's not half as useful as the EPT system. In the OD&D FAQ, there is a basically similar rule implied: fighters get one attack per level against creatures of 1 HD or less. So a 10th-level fighter might take out five or six 1 HD opponents with that 5d6 damage. This seems quite odd after all, how can a 1 HD creature take 5 dice of damage unless the first four are 1s? But in EPT, excess damage goes onto the next opponent, in a sort of prototype of the "cleave" maneuver. Basically, at 4th level PCs get 2 damage dice versus 1 HD creatures. The one I think gets the least love, though, is the damage by level versus enemy hit dice. It's the first recorded instance of the simple critical hit rule of double damage. This is a 1-in-200 chance not exactly devastating. The second damage rule is that a natural 20 (using those words) does double damage, with the possibility of an automatic kill if the character rolls a second d20 and gets a 19 or 20. This is a good alternative to the popular "roll 2d6 and take the higher result," though both are perfectly usable. First, two-handed weapons do 1d6+1, and two-handed swords specifically do 1d6+2. Less discussed is EPT's damage, which until recently I hadn't looked deeply into. Simple and a fairly popular choice in OD&D. Re-roll, and your HP total can't go down. This makes sense of the OD&D progressions, which have bonuses that appear and disappear over a PC's career. Probably the best known of EPT's rule changes is the idea that players re-roll hit dice each time they gain a level.
EPT was such an early variant, and deeply tied up in the Wisconsin and Minneapolis scenes and early TSR, and as such the ways its rules expand upon OD&D are interesting even for campaigns not set on Tékumel. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne specifically for what rules content it contributes to the original Dungeons & Dragons game. (And like I said, I had not heard of him, so there is probably a lot lot more to the work he has done than I know of.I've been taking a look at M. So even though he seems to be moving away from D&D mechanics (which probably makes his stuff slightly less easy for me to raid from) I have to take my hat off to him for the amount of care he seems to have taken on this project. And it seems like Dave Morris has been taking that sort of approach to Tékumel. I often see designers that say "Make it your own" and I'm more into the idea of trying to get to understand their vibe enough, that you can kind of have a holographic version of them that allows you to infer what they would do. I do really like the idea of fans, like Dave Morris, trying to infer what M.A.R.
EMPIRE OF THE PETAL THRONE PDF DOWNLOAD FULL
There is more there, so I suggest you head over, if you want the full story of the evolution of Tirikélu. Make combat quick to use but more than just the endless dice-rolling of, say, RuneQuest. Recapture the evocative magic of those early adventures by cross-pollinating EPT spells with ideas from The Book of Ebon Bindings.
Simplify the system so that the rules didn’t keep tripping up the play. This was the early 1990s, so it seems a little early to talk of an Old School Revival (not a term I like anyway) but the aim was there. “HBS Factors” and “Healing G9s” gave the game a tabletop miniatures flavour rather too far from the freewheeling shared stories we were looking for.Īnd so I returned to my own rules and began to refine them into the game I had hoped Swords & Glory would be. The other book, the rules, appealed less. My group switched for a while, but it was the S&G Sourcebook that was getting dog-eared from use. I began constructing my own set of Tékumel rules from the fragmentary description in the Professor’s letters, like reconstructing an unknown animal from just a few bones.įinally “the new EPT” appeared. Barker wrote:“We now have one roll to hit, one to get past the shield, one for damage (minus armour) and if one rolls 0 on a 10-sided die on this last roll, then a critical hit for more damage.”
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