Justin Alexander has done some really cool stuff.
Here is the short version: He’s got a stripped-down version of 3E that you should support at his site. If for no other reason, it’s got an “encounter budget” system, and a “trap budget” system so you can quickly whip up stuff for the PCs to face without getting bogged down in all the numbers, checks, and balances. It is worth a look! If for nothing else, I’ll be checking it out for stuff I can adapt for games I do play.
Now for the long version.
His blog is one of the reasons I’m doing my blog. Let me explain. I was a big fan of DM of the Rings, by Shamus Young. It is a hilarious web comic doing the Lord of the Rings movies as though they were a poorly run RPG. Astonishingly, he makes it all the way through, also!
This web comic does some D&D system bashing, which Justin Alexander took exception to. The result was encapsulated in an article on calibrating your expectations, here, which I thought was great and helped explain a lot of my frustrations with expectations in D&D.
I started hanging around his blog and reading his back articles. Here and there he’d link to something else, and I’d go look at that. So he was a portal into a wider world of the OSR blogging community. I was also fascinated by his Caverns of Thracia reflections, and interpretations of a primitive ruleset.
Legends and Labyrinths has been a project he’s worked on since before I found his blog. It’s great that he’s finally got it accessible and you’ve got a chance to check it out.
So, look at his series of posts on the project. Take an interest. I think you will find it very rewarding. He’s an expert who passionately loves D&D and wants it to be as accessible and smooth as it can be. As Einstein said, any intelligent fool can make a system bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes courage and a touch of genius to go the other direction.
