As many readers may have figured out from my few posts last year, I’ve moved to Garland, TX and have gathered a new group of old school players. Unfortunately, instead of the large group of players I’ve had for the past five years, I’m limited to four players due to space-to-play limitations. We’ve been having a good time with a campaign set in the area around the City-State of the Invincible Overlord. My original idea was to set the campaign in a different part of the Wilderlands, the Valley of the Ancients. However, my players really wanted to be based in the City-State, so that’s where the campaign is set.

Everyone seems to be having a great time, but it turns out they believe they would prefer the “Fantastic Adventures” rules we are developing and using to be based more on Swords & Wizardry than on Microlite74. This is just the opposite of the way my old group went. The old group started using OD&D rules via The Grey Book but decided after trying Microlite74 that they liked it better. This always confuses me because OD&D, Swords & Wizardry, Microlite74 and to a lesser extent B/X, Labyrinth Lord, and Microlite81 seem like almost the same game to me when I’m running them. I played in house-ruled OD&D games in the 1970s that had larger differences than these games do.

This means, of course, that changing between them is no problem for me. So next week, my campaign will be running under Swords & Wizardry Whitebox rules which will be modified as needed to match what we’ve been doing with Fantastic Adventures.

This also means that the Fantastic Adventures rules y’all will be seeing will be something different: they will not be Microlite20-based as as Microlite74, Microlite78, and Microlite81 have been. Perhaps this is a good thing as the later games in this series have not been “microlite” in page count, they have only been “microlite” in that they were based on “Microlite20 DNA”.