I’ve been asked to convert some of the core Microlite75 rules to Swords & Wizardry by a surprising large number of people. People apparently like some of the modification to “old school D&D” I use in Microlite75: backgrounds, minor magic, vices & virtues, the combat mods like strike speed, using body points and hit points, etc., but want to use them in Swords & Wizardry.

My initial reaction was “just use them” — after all many of them were simple conversions of rules I was using in the late 1970s in my D&D games so converting them to S&W would be simple. Weirdly, this answer does not seem to have gone over well. The majority of people who’ve asked for S&W conversions don’t want to just use the M75 rules in S&W, they want me to rewrite them especially for S&W and publish them so they can use them. I don’t understand the need, but as this would not be hard to do, I might just write a short supplement for S&W Complete if I can find the spare time.

A smaller group of people don’t just want a supplement, however, they want me to take a copy of Swords & Wizardry and rewrite it with my rules changes replacing those in the original so they can have a single set of rules with “Randall’s Own Version of S&W”. This boggles my little mind. This would be at least ten times as much work as a supplement — and I can’t see how it would be ten times as convenient. I know this sounds like a “I walked five miles to school in a blizzard and it was up hill both ways” story but I remember using the original D&D books, their four official supplements, a couple of volumes of Arduin, the Warlock rules from The Spartan, and photocopies of a good number of Dragon articles, All the Worlds’ Monsters, and more to run game sessions with back in the 1970s. The idea that all the rules “must be” nicely incorporated in one book to be usable is just incomprehensible to me. Needless to say, I have no plans to do this.