Leyline Press Blog — osr

The Mecha Hack by Absolute Tabletop is a roleplaying game of titanic warmachines with The Black Hack.

As a system it demonstrates how you can take the core chassis (excuse the pun) of an OSR game ostensibly made for fantasy and port it to a wildly different genre with excellent results. In much the same way as Mothership did for Sci-Fi Horror. 

In this series of blogs we're exploring the various OSR RPG systems out there and how they compare to one another and the original D&D rules.  Last week we took a look at The Black Hack. This week we're exploring Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC) by Goodman Games.  DCC merges old school principles and aesthetics with some more modern game design ideas.  It's core mechanic is similar to the 'd20 system'. You roll a d20+ stat modifiers and compare this to a set 'Difficulty Class' or DC value. If you roll equal to our over the DC value you succeed, otherwise you fail. (They missed...

In this series of blogs we're exploring the various OSR RPG systems in the community and how they compare to one another and the original D&D rules.

This week we're taking a look at The Black Hack 2nd Edition by David Black

The Black Hack, in a similar way to Whitehack and Swords & Wizardry,  uses original D&D as a base but greatly innovates with the formula. 

This is the next in a series of articles exploring various OSR RPG systems. This week we're taking a look at Mork Borg by Fria Lingan.

METAL is the aesthetic that Mork Borg  oozes, from it’s jagged, black and white art style reminiscent of a death metal album cover to its themes of decay, Vikings and hideous monsters.  The unique style of Mork Borg bleeds into the layout of the rules themselves, with art work splashed across the page and words off kilter as though you’re reading some forbidden manuscript that is oozing from reality.

In respect to the rules it's old school D&D turned up to 11.