About 10 days ago I posted a playtest report on Gryphons & Gramarye (see Gryphons & Gramarye Report from the Trenches: What Works and What Fails) where I reported that the Hunter class had problems and players really wanted a cleric class. This sparked a few changes to the game. I’ve eliminated the Hunter class (at least for the time-being as I still like the basic idea. I changed the Magician class slightly, it lost healing abilities and gained more nature-related spells. Finally, I’ve added a Paladin class.

The G&G Paladin is a competent warrior (like the Scout and eliminated for now Hunter class) who can also turn undead and has a number of prayers (including healing abilities). Prayers do not work like magic spells. They use a different system where the Paladin as to roll to succeed it obtaining divine help and the more times the Paladin asks for such help during a day the more likely the Paladin’s deity is to say “sorry, no more for a while”. The amount of help the Paladin’s deity will give increases as the Paladin goes up in level.

I tried to post the first draft of the Paladin class to this blog a couple of days ago without success. For some reason pasting from Word isn’t working for me right now (at least not if I want to keep anything like the original formatting). Therefore I decided to release an early public playtest version of Gryphons & Grammarye — or at least of Gryphons & Gramarye Basic.

The goal of Gryphons & Gramarye is to recreate the style and feel of early fantasy roleplaying games (e.g. 0e, B/X, 1e) published back in the 1970s or very early 1980s without trying to duplicate the exact features of any of those games. Gryphons & Gramarye will try to do some new things with old school while retaining basic compatibility with adventures for 0e, B/X, and 1e.

This first public playtest version of Gryphons & Gramarye reimages the classes but otherwise mainly uses Microlite74 Extended rules. Public Playtest 1.0 has five classes classes: Fighter, Scout, Paladin, Magician, and Wizard. The Fighter is a very powerful warrior (better than a 0e fighter). The Scout is a less powerful warrior with outdoorman and “thief” abilities. The Paladin is a holy warrior with the ability to pray for miracles. The Magician has limited warrior abilities but wields illusion and nature magic. The Wizard is next to useless as a warrior, but can wield powerful magic.

These rules assume that the GM understands the basic concepts of roleplaying games, but provides information for both the GM and the players on the various “old school” styles of play. Gryphons & Gramarye can easily use adventures and material from early editions of the world’s most popular tabletop fantasy roleplaying game or modern clones. Note this is a set of playtest rules, the final version of Gryphons & Gramarye will likely be much different. Your feedback is welcome and will help shape the final version.

You can download a copy of Gryphons & Gramarye Basic Public Playtest 1.0 from the Public Playtests section of the Download are of Microlite20.org.

I hope you like this very early public playtest of Gryphons & Gramarye Basic. Comments and ideas are welcome as always.