Castle Oldskull Module 15: Warriors

Hello everyone, Castle Oldskull is a well-regarded RPG supplement series, designed to sync with Gygaxian, old school, and Wizardly tabletop role-playing games. If you play tabletop, you’ll sync in quickly. If you’re a retro videogamer, you might see influences from Archon, The Bard’s Tale, Dragon’s Lair, Gauntlet, Mail Order Monsters, Phantasie, Telengard, Temple of Apshai, Tunnels of Doom, Ultima, Wasteland, Wizardry, and Zork. If you’re a game designer, writer, or programmer, you’ll find lots of creative material that can fuel your own projects, with inspirations for dark fantasy characters, encounters, monsters, plots, settings, spells, treasures, and random generation. I’m keeping prices dirt cheap here for those who find me, please enjoy and spread the word!

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Wonderland Imprints is proud to present the first volume in the Mythic World of Oldskull series, providing the advanced modular rules developed for author Kent David Kelly’s epic campaign adventure game. These volumes are designed to integrate perfectly with one another if you collect them all, or to stand alone if you prefer to pick and choose aspects from the Oldskull campaign that you’re personally intrigued by. If you’re looking for universal and directly compatible old school materials to bridge the original game editions created by Arneson and Gygax (1974-1985), Holmes (1977), Moldvay and Cook (1981), Mentzer (1983-1986), and other luminaries of TSR (1974-1989) into a single refined system, you’ve come to the right place.

This detailed volume features the fully refined and corrected classes of the warrior archetype: the doughty Fighter (with clarified rules for weapon specialization), the revised Oldskull Barbarian, the intrepid Hunter, and the deadly Ranger of Queen’s Cambria. All classes have been fully integrated with world mythology, folklore, weird fiction, and detailed campaign notes from the author’s campaign that will bring your warrior characters alive in the World of Oldskull. All of the classes and rules have been reimagined and updated throughout with extensive sagely advice along with out-of-print magazine and newszine errata, supplemented by notes and musings derived from E. Gary Gygax in accordance with his vision for his never-attained Advanced Second Edition.

Twenty of the new elements and systems you will find herein include: extensive themes and evocative level titles for all classes, social standing guidelines by level, freehold guidelines for fighter lords, fighter command ranks, fighter morale and loyalty effects on soldiers, corrected and more intuitive weapon specialization, jumping rules, non-thief climbing rules, rebalanced barbarian role-playing guidelines, 11 iconic Oldskull barbarian tribes (the Amazons, Cimmerians, Stygians, etc.), full barbarian skills based on Gygax’s hunter notes, snare setting rules, wound binding rules, full hunter skills, beast mastery rules, spirit hounds for high-level hunters, free-from-problematic-IP background lore for the ranger class, fully corrected and justified ranger spell casting rules for druidic and magical powers, corrected tracking rules (following from the Unearthed paradigm), and rebalanced and fairer thematic disadvantages for the ranger class.

I hope you enjoy this celebration of the old school TSR tradition. Be sure to watch for future volumes in this series which will detail the full array of character classes, new classes and races, adventuring rules, campaign setting details, and much more. Another fine gaming supplement from Kent David Kelly and Wonderland Imprints, Only the Finest Works of Fantasy. (141 pages, 41,200 words.)