[PSA] HackMaster in Bundle of Holding

How the HackMaster community will look like
when the new edition is finally announced.

HackMaster is now on sale on Bundle of Holding. It is a game near and dear to me, one that I have fond memories of, one that I yearn to run again. Alas I have to bid my time till the stars are right again, and I can sleep through the night without getting woken up 2d4p times by my daughter. You, on the other might be luckier than me. And if you are, then what better could you do with your surplus time and energy, than read, play, and run the best game ever developed by mankind?

The Player Collection costs $12.95 and gets you the following:

• The Player's Handbook, which holds the finest medium-high crunch class and level-based fantasy role-playing ruleset within its hallowed pages.
• The first two Zealot's Guides, for those who need more flavourful religions and clerical spells in their game.
• In the Realm of the Elm King and Legacy of the Elm King, two introductory adventures. They involve bugbears, who eat children, like all bugbears should.
• A bunch of resources you can download from the internet, but now neatly collected in one place.

The GameMaster Collection's threshold is at $29.31 at the moment and contains the following:

• The GameMaster's Guide, which actually contains advice and more rules for GameMasters. Shocking, isn't it?
• The Hacklopedia of Beasts, the most stunning monster book ever. It even has silhouettes, like the dinosaur books of my childhood!
• Frandor's Keep, a little sandbox on the borderlands.
• More free shit from the internet.

If you can't decide, feel free to check out HackMaster Basic, a free rulebook that contains pregens, rules, and content up to level 5, or buy HackMaster Basic Plus for a buck, which goes up to 10 and even has character creation.

And of course while we are at it, don't forget to get the best rpg's best character sheets.

I've been quite hyped for HackMaster lately. Kenzer and Jolly have been teasing a revised edition for a while now. A Kickstarter was promised for this year, then for the next year, and they have been pretty dormant since they've lost Steve Johansson, so I'm not holding my breath. But since it's become a meme that whenever I turn up on reddit I either recommend some d100 game or HackMaster, I think it's time to give the devil his due, and write some reviews for the rulebooks - starting with the now out of print, original HackMaster Basic.

Plus it's easier on the long to just link a blogpost than write it down again why people should care about the game. It's also good for the blog's traffic...

[Update] You Shall Now Pass!

Lately I received a surprisingly large number of requests to access my character sheets¹. While they were available to the public before, the September Google Drive security update messed up the links making them unavailable to those without permission. The links have been updated, so there is no need to knock on my doors anymore. Sorry for not addressing the issue sooner. Also, thank you very much for all your requests - I appreciate your interest!

A photo of Google Drive holding its ground against hordes of
DCC RPG and Zweihänder players (2021, coloured).

Speaking of sheets, since I started working on Hecatomb (which is almost the only projact I can actually progress with in my spare time nowadays) I bought Affinity Publisher during their COVID sale and picked up some bits about layouts and typography. Needless to say, looking at these old sheets with fresh eyes is amusing². I would love to revamp some of them eventually, still following my usual KISS principle, but with better flow and more effective use of whitespace.

I will nont promise anything though. Heck, in the current state I would be happy if I could finish my review of what I consider the OSR product of the year...

¹ See the "My Own Creations" sidebar if you are unfamiliar with them.

² It also makes looking at plenty of professionally produced rulebooks disheartening, but that is a story for another time.

[Homebrew] The Portals of Eremus Have Opened

Like all good campaigns it started in a tavern.
By session #3 they stepped on the moon.

In August our HackMaster campaign ended with a glorious TPK, after which we decided to give the game some rest - it was fun, but it was becoming a bit tiresome, plus we were in the mood to play something else. My best and longest campaigns so far were my two Wilderlands of High Fantasy campaigns (using Swords & Wizardry Complete and D&D5e), and my homebrew Terminus campaign (using DCC RPG). Following the old wisdom "let the shoemaker stick to his last" I decided to run something akin to those: a gonzo kitchen sink sandbox inspired Wilderlands, Arduin, Tékumel, Wizardry 6-8, and the various Might & Magic games.

"I hope it won't be AD&D though" said one of my players after I told them my idea. Once again my plans to use my dream mix of AD&D 1e + 2e + house rules were delayed indefinitely. I rarely let my players have a say in what I'm going to run, but this time I had to agree with him, because I both wanted to minimize preparations and introduce some new players to the game, thus something lighter seemed beneficial. Enter Old-School Essentials, which I managed to upgrade last minute to the print version in the pledge manager, which closed on the night of the aforementioned TPK. After I got the pdf I began to revamp old materials, write new stuff, convert content from other games, draw shitty maps, outsource said maps to someone more skilled, and so on.

This isn't even my final form!

Thus Eremus was born, a continent on Anachron IV, a planet terraformed eons ago by the primogenitors to be a paradise on the galactic fringe. Then they fucked it up during their great war, and vanished without a trace, leaving behind the soldiers and creatures they summoned from across time and space to wage their battles. After a long dark age the survivors began to rebuild civilization.

The campaign which I named Portals of Eremus takes place millennia later, during the tumultuous centuries following collapse of the Tritonian Empire, which ruled over the entire region before it fell apart during the Succession Wars. The players are adventurers seeking fame and fortune in the Contested Lands, where barbaric kings began to raise kingdom upon the ruins of past nations.

We use a heavily modified and expanded version of OSE. Without going into details, the following resources are in use, more or less (sometimes an entire book, other times a few articles only):

• OSE Rules Tome
• OSE Advanced Fantasy Genre Rules
• OSE Druid and Illusionist Spells
• Theorems and Thaumaturgy Revised Edition
• The Complete Vivimancer
• On Downtime and Demesnes
• Broodmother Skyfortress
• Deities and Demigods
• Unknown Gods Revised and Expanded
• Petty Gods Revised and Expanded Edition
• Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets
• The Arduin Grimoire Trilogy
• various articles from Echoes From Fomalhaut, Fight On!, and other fanzines
• various blogposts from around the OSR community
• a shitton of house rules and homebrew content

Plenty of house rules are work in progress, under playtest, even totally untested. Nothing is set in stone, and if they won't work out as intended they will be changed, retconned, or thrown out. Not that I care too much about balance, but usability and simplicity are paramount. If we keep forgetting to use something, then it wasn't interesting in the first place and should be thrown out. Some highlights of my house rules document:

• crapton of races for the wandering circus feel
• monk, samurai, techno class conversions
• a deck o' stuff table that keeps growing
• learning skills and talents by training
• improving ability scores by questing
• smoother THAC0 and save charts
• expanded secondary skill list
• spell point based spellcasting
• spellburn and spell mishaps
• expanded weapon qualities
• dungeon fortune cookies
• combat maneuvers
• psychic powers

I will go into the details in future posts. I will also consider writing session reports, but time and time again they have proven to be something I can't keep up with on the long. For now, enjoy the Holidays, and this overview map by Gábor Csomós (author of the excellent The Lost Valley of Kishar).

Work in progress overview map of Central Eremus

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[Content] Generic Fillable B/X Character Record Sheet

What the new campaign will end up looking like.

Summer has been busier than usual this year, if it wasn't obvious from the lack of blogposts. Miraculously it didn't have any effect on my campaigns - unlike the chain of bad decisions and critical hits that TPK-d my HackMaster party. My players started rolling up new level 1 characters immediately (that's the spirit!), but the process came to a halt as we ended up discussing that this might be a good time to give HackMaster some rest, and play something else. We agreed that an old-school kitchen sink sandbox using the B/X rules would be fun, so that's what I'm going to run starting this September or October.

I've spent a few hours on retooling one of my older character records into a bare-bones, printer friendly, form-fillable sheet. B/X has probably the largest amount of variants and descendants within the OSR. My game of choice is Old-School Essentials by Necrotic Gnome, but I wanted my character sheet to be useful for those too, who prefer some other flavour. Thus, there are no logos or watermarks on it. On the other hand, it has a place for race, in case you are running a variant with Advanced options. I hope you will find it useful!

Generic Fillable B/X Character Record Sheet (A4)
Generic Fillable B/X Character Record Sheet (US Letter)
Generic Fillable B/X Character Record Sheet with AAC (A4)
Generic Fillable B/X Character Record Sheet with AAC (US Letter)

Update #1: US Letter-size version added.

Update #2: Version with both descending and ascending AC addad.

Disclaimer: The DriveThruRPG links on this site are affiliate links. If you buy something through the link we'll get some credit for your purchase too.

HackMaster Character Records

High crunch, high production values old-school gaming.

HackMaster is one of my all-time favorite role playing games. I already loved what HM4e was doing, but HM5e is where my heart is, because it managed to advance AD&D to the next level: it offers far more realistic game mechanics, while also manages to keep the old school spirit I love. It is a crunchy system full of optional advanced rules that make it seem more threatening than it is, but in practice it flows really well once someone wraps his head around it.

The problem is I haven't run it for years, mostly due to the lack of time. The game also felt abandoned in the last few years by the publisher Kenzer & Company. These are all about to change soon though: with the end of my D&D5e Wilderlands campaign I'm finally able to fulfill my old dream of starting a HackMaster sandbox centered around Frandor's Keep, and after last year's successful Aces & Eights Reloaded Kickstarter campaign the guys at Kenzer & Co. seem to be picking up pace again. What a time to be alive!

My biggest issue with official HackMaster resources is the lack of good character sheets - the official ones are barely enough for HackMaster Basic. Fans were fortunately quick to fix this issue. I too have created a landscape sheet earlier that got a lot of positive feedback (despite being overcrowded), and earlier this year I took my time to put together a portrait sheet that is more breezy and (hopefully) has place for everything. I hope they will get as much use as my ZWEIHÄNDER character sheets. Happy hacking!

Old A4 landscape character record for HackMaster

New A4 portrait character record for HackMaster
New A4 portrait cleric spell record for HackMaster
New A4 portrait mage spell record for HackMaster
New A4 portrait humanoid follower record for HackMaster
New A4 portrait monstrous follower record for HackMaster

HackMaster in Bundle of Holding

The pdfs might be not as gorgeous as the hardcover,
but at least they have the errata included.

HackMaster 5e is my all-time favorite fantasy heartbreaker. The pinnacle of old-school game design, it mixes the classic D&D gameplay with detailed character creation and a more realistic combat system. It sounds like something right from the late eighties, right?

It's a game I love, but didn't run or play for years now. Fortunately this is going to change soon: during the summer I'm going to start a campaign using Frandor's Keep, In the Realm of the Elm King, and probably a conversion of Quest for the Unknown. Fingers crossed my players will like both the borderlands, and the crunchy combat.

Meanwhile Bundle of Holding has launched two Kenzer & Co bundles:.one for the Knights of the Dinner Table comics where the game originates from, and another for some HackMaster rulebooks and supplements of the current edition. The latter contains not only the core books, but the above mentioned Frandor's Keep, the two Elm King adventures, and the first two Zealot's Guides. If you want to get involved with the game, now is the time!