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Grumpy, yet verbose.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

A new angle


I'm thinking about taking the whole "Mutants & Mazes" thing with Kelvernia in a different direction. The difficulty I keep running into is the few, but significant differences between the Labyrinth Lord (B/X) and Mutant Future systems. I would say they are 75-80% compatible, but the parts that aren't keep giving me fits.

First off the characters progression system is different enough to make is kludgy to blend characters from each game. Things like saves, to hits, etc. are more random in MF, so it "feels" unbalancing next to the more uniform D&D style progression in LL. 

Next are the hit points. While this is one of the most obvious changes, it is actually the easiest to fix. You just give the MF character types LL-style HP (likewise the monsters that vary between systems). 

The other problem, related to hit points, is weapon damage. Specifically, the "artifact" weapons (e.g. lasers, etc.). These weapons do a crazy amount of damage compared to things like LL PCs and monsters. Consider a vibro sword. It does 1d8 (longsword damage) +16(!!!) per hit. It can maintain this ability for up to 240 rounds before its battery dies. This thing could kill an average dragon in two (non critical)hits. That's too powerful for the game I want to play, but I don't want to make such items unheard of, either.

So what to do?

Well, in my case, I'm taking inspiration from a slightly different source, but one with a pedigree that most can appreciate.

Kind of a no-brainer, once I thought about it.

Instead of blending the systems, I'm going to port over and convert and scale the tech I want into D&D/LL terms/stats. This means I might not include certain items and monsters, but even using the MF book, it's doubtful any campaign would cover them all. Also, the Mutant Future book will be there as an awesome reference for any future needs.

This will also require updating/converting some of the mutations' descriptions, but I'm hoping that will be relatively minor.

In a future post, I'll give some stats for the "fantasized" versions of the MF weapons and gear. 

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