PREFACE "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's - I will not reason and compare, my business is to create." Blake A friend asked me a little while ago, "Why?". This wasn't just the philosophical query that professors like to ask students; no, that would have been comparitively easy. It caught me off guard, too; it was during a player feedback session, when I was expecting to get comments on spells, classes & the like. Such a deep question did get me thinking. Why did I spend so much time doing this? It was like some (un?)holy mission to make this work, to make a Hero system simulation of AD&D. It turns out that there were several reasons, some of them not realized until late. When I first began this project in June 1991, I had just been laid off from my job, and saw at least a month of idleness until I would have another job. This seemed like an ideal oppurtunity to at least begin on a "dare" a friend of mine & I had given me. We were talking about some of the limitations of the Hero system, and mulling over how it is really so much more a game design system rather than an actual game system. Sure, combat and skills are don't quite fit the bill, but powers (and to a certain extent perks & talents) do; by association, even the skills had a certain element of the generic to them. Anyhow, we stated that it really should be possible to design another game system, whether that be Warhammer, Call of Cthulhu, or AD&D. This was some months before my layoff, and I really did not have the time to pursue the idea with my 60+ hour a week job. I did some initial jotting down of ideas, and then let it sit. When the day came that I became jobless, I found myself looking at the scribblings I had made from a few months back, and began typing. And typing. And referring to AD&D manuals. And typing, ad nauseum. Within a week or two of this (and looking around for a job), I had the skeleton of a class system; not quite so rigid & structured as it's parent, but not as freeform and unguided as Hero. Another week, and I had some alpha-release spells. Another, and I had a few monsters, and some items. I knew then that running a campaign was the best way to simultaneously playtest and develop the game, but I didn't have enough time to dedicate to creating one, what with my too hastily found new job looming in the weeks ahead. It made sense to try adopting D&D modules, which I collect with abandon, over my campaign; finding one with a long running storyline would be best. I settled on Dragonlance, as I was quite fond of the story and knew it was popular enough so that I could easily find the rest of the series for the latter parts of the campaign. I shortly found out a few answers to "Why?". In standard fantasy hero, we find players ranging the gamut of power, from the truly ludicrous mage to the barely-able-to-stand fighter. Knowledge of the system, specifically but not limited to, the spell/power system would enable one to generate a character of monstrous proportions (or Unearthly, for those of you who get the reference). Ignorance of the system would result in the opposite. Sure, there is always the GM's perogative, that of the veto, but I find that this gets to be tiring after a while. Fantasy Hero, with its low point totals, can exacerbate the symptom of min-maxing, and having to fight this beast on a constant basis is rough. Handing a set of rules to players, neatly spelled out with the obvious progressions, gives the players a sense of safety to the player, who doesn't have to worry if player X is going to spend his 10 pts on 5 levels with her sword; no "How can I keep up?" queries. From the GM's point of view, there wouldn't be as many suprises of the same sort, those that can really ruin a scenario where the GM isn't expecting anyone to have a DCV of greater than 12. As well as providing an orderly progression of power, Dungeon Hero also provides access to the truly heroic levels of ability, as one would expect to find with heroes of legend. There is no "stopping off" at 50 STUN, 20 BODY or whatever, although for many situations these limitations still hold sway. Some may consider this to be a problem, and not a feature. In simu- lating the parent system, certain things will happen that gamers may not feel is appropriate. However, if they are not happy with the way this system does these things, chances are they are not happy with the parent system either. Dungeon Hero does allow some things that don't happen in it's parent system. Multi-class and "Second Class" characters effectively become the same. There is nothing preventing a person from being mainly a thief, but picking up, and improving when interest & experience permits, a few levels as a mage. Progess in any class a person has is independant from any other class they have, depen- dant of course upon campaign limitations. As well, there is nothing keeping an otherwise burly fighter from being an excellent acrobat, or the sneaky thief from knowing nothing about picking locks. What we have is a system that hovers somewhere between the rigid caste of AD&D v1 and the chaotic randomness of the hero system. Just enough order to direct players in the "right" direction, just enough freedom to keep the vast majority happy. Spells deserve a special place all their own in a fantasy game. It is not enough to just say there is magic, and then have hazy, ephemeral rules that speak of how it works. In order to be successful, often times a Fantasy Hero GM will find themselves with too tall an order to fill in this area; the spell colleges & lists in the newest FH books go a short way towards parring this down. With a qualitative system, ala AD&D, you see an attempt to pigeonhole various spell effects into various levels of power; sometimes this works, other times not. How many GM's have seen a player completely ignore some spell, yet home in on others, simply because one was too weak for its level, whereas the other was an incredible source of power. Like GM intervention on character design, there are ways to fix this problem: perhaps the sleep Spell is hard to find, while the Jump spell is everywhere. Also like above intervention, such action is tiring, and not consistent from GM to GM. Fantasy Hero spells have their own problems. How many ways can an attack spell be written up? Well, there's "Finger of Flame" (4d6 fire EB), "Gaze of the Winter" (4d6 cold EB), etc. With such a generic set of powers to start off with, it is easy to fall into the trap of too generic spells. It is my hope that, with the Dungeon Hero spell list, I've at least in part cured these two maladies. On the one hand, we have a large host of spells, with just about zero overlap except in certain rare cases (and these are most often due to the parent system). On the other hand, we have spells rated more for their power level. All spells of, say, 3rd level, are pretty much commen- surate with any other 3rd level spell (of the same class; this is important, and the reason won't be obvious until you see how spells work). During the campaign I previously ran, I found my players trying to decide between various spells that by straight AD&D rules wouldn't be a contest. There are, of course, some things that have not made it through the trans- lation, whether due to insurmountable obstacles, personal preferences, base system differences, or whatever. Alignment is something of a mixed blessing in AD&D, and many gamers leave it out, no worse for wear. If someone were to wish to duplicate this effect, the disad system of Hero works fairly well for such purposes. AC and THAC0 are completely gone, and we use the Hero system conventions of CV, defense and skill levels. Saving throws are gone as well; they were originally meant as an abstraction of various types of resistance and avoidance anyhow. Hero system allows for most of these defensive moves directly anyhow, so I saw no reason to include them. Certain other minor features, like followers and such, are things that are best left up to the individual campaign anyhow. Spell components were always such a hassle and often ignored, so I have just included a way to deal with some of them (the simpler components) in the optional rules section. You could always contest that I haven't really created anything; after all, AD&D and Hero have both been around for a while. All I've really done is build yet another mousetrap with "phasers & tractor beams", as one friend put it. But... we all need mousetraps in our hobby, but we don't really need another original design. The market is flooded with good (and bad!) ideas, to the point that I find certain comfort retreating to the familiar. If the above is the case, and I really haven't created anything, then perhaps I have given a refuge to those people who, like me, look back on their AD&D days with some amount of nostalgia. Still... I suppose the real, truest reasons for this task are the most abstract. Creating just for the sake of doing it, doing it to see if it could be done; that is reason enough for me. Blake had a point. And now, my psuedo-dragon familiar Ghidora and I need to do some work on my game for DunDraCon XVIII. Wouldn't want anyone disappointed, would we? Dungeon HeroMaster, Joe Di Lellio February 15, 1994