As you know, the Castles and Crusades role-playing game is my favorite D20 RP and last week, fighter was the topic. So I’ve been experimenting with the options the C&C system offers. In the AD&D 2nd Edition DMG, I saw a class-creation mechanism that I really liked, but I lost interest in using it because the book said that you couldn’t create classes as powerful as the ones in the core rulebook using that method. So I got a little discouraged, but when I saw a similar method in C&C, I returned to the topic.

Well, I started creating classes that are similar to M.A.G.U.S(or M*)—because why not, and I love this game. :) This system is an old hungarian rpg, its a ad&d hearthbreaker.

Now, using a class similar to a bounty hunter (aka: Fejvadász), I’ll show you what this C&C class design method is like. I didn’t try to copy the original exactly, but I positioned it as close as possible to the original example.

You can find the method itself in the Crusaders Companion, which is available for free download from the publisher’s website: http://www.castlesandcrusades.com/downloads/peter-j-schroeder/crusaders-companion.pdf

The Process

First, I determined the roll codes for attribute rolls. I borrowed the idea from another method, which specifies three levels of rolls, each generating values somewhere between 3 and 18, but with progressively higher steps: 1st: 3d6, 2: 6+2d6, 3: 12+d6. These are independent of the base system’s primary/secondary attr. subsystem, which modifies how the checks work. My Bounty Hunter can roll for his attributes using the following roll codes:

STR: 6+2d6

DEX: 12+d6

CON: 12+d6

INT: 3d6

WIS: 3d6

CHA: 6+2d6

It’s clear that DEX and CON are the most important, while INT and WIS are neglected, and STR and CHA are average.

Next, I decided that the Fighter would be the foundation of the class, but the Assassin would also be an important component. It could be a simple Fighter/Rogue multiclass, but I prefer it when a single class represents a specific role. I could have stuck with just the Assassin, but its abilities are limited to a single approach: ambushes and executions using underhanded methods. This approach isn’t far off from my class, but these agents are more versatile, and I want them to hold their own as regular fighters as well. (This comes at a price, though—we’ll see.)

In Ynev (The setting of the M* rpg.), these guys are versatile agents; the powers of the realm use them for assassination, as bodyguards, as burglars, etc. They are the Swiss Army knife of the shadow war.

Next up are the permitted armor options. I’ve taken these entirely from the Assassin class. The cost in XP is shown in parentheses.

Armor: Leather, leather coat, padded
Shield: Small, pavis
Helm: Leather coif
(150 XP)

Next are the abilities.

Abilities:

Assassin:
Climb (DEX) (50 XP), Hide (DEX) (50 XP), Disguise (CHA) (50 XP), Listen (WIS) (50 XP), Poisons (INT) (50 XP), Sneak Attack (200 XP), Move Silently (DEXTERITY) (50 xp)

Fighter:

Weapon Specialization (lvl 4–8: +1/+1; lvl 9–: +2/+2) (50 xp; starting at level 4), Combat Dominance (200 xp; starting at level 7)

In this system, abilities sometimes function as skills tied to checks, or they may grant a bonus; at other times, they provide the ability to use something.

I’ve divided them into two sections: abilities derived from the Assassin and those from the Fighter. Typically, the skills required for stealth belong to the former, while those requiring serious damage output belong to the latter.

The primary attribute for this class is DEX.

Prime Attrib.: Dex

Skill checks for this class are made against a lower base target number (12 instead of 18), and for standard ability checks, the character’s level also contributes to the roll.

I didn’t make the HD too strong, but it helps the character survive:

Hit Die: d8 (300 xp)

I restricted the available alignment:

Alignment: Any but Good. (-50 xp)

Weapon usage is the same as for a Fighter.

Weapons: any (250 xp)

I didn’t want him to be too strong in terms of combat stats, but I definitely wanted him to be better than a Thief, so I gave him the second-best progression scale. This means he’s always one point behind the Fighter class.

Bth: Ranger (500 XP)

Finally, I calculated the XP requirement for the second level. I added up the XP cost for each criterion and came up with the following value:

EPP: 2,050 XP

This is considered average, since the Fighter levels up at 1,650 and the Wizard at 2,300. These values double up to level 10; from there on, the valid threshold is 140 times the base XP. If a particular ability becomes available at a higher level, that value must be added to the given level and then doubled from there.

Thank you very much for your attention! That was the C&C class design.

C&C on DTRPG.

Troll Lord Games

Below are three d666 generator tables adapted into classic dark fantasy tropes. To roll on a d666 table, roll 3d6 at once, reading each die left-to-right to determine your result across the three columns.

Feel free to bookmark this post or print these out for your DM screen!

Based on ’s random table.

d666 OSR Quests & Hooks

d666 OSR NPCs

d666 OSR Random Events

Bonus recommendation:

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I did it the last two times; Shamu is my test character. 2 years ago, we tested an unknown and not-too-interesting D20 system, but this RPG had a human race: It is the prehistoric man. It is the best choice for a dumb and meaningless character who can not communicate, and only battle is his language and lifestyle. So the starting point was the regular dnd fighter. The campaign was fun and interesting, telling the truth not because of the system; I think we brought life into the play.

I developed the character into a proud tribeman who serves his master well, and it became more than a dumb killer. So I converted him into a better system, which is a Conan RPG (ZeFRS) spinoff, in an interesting setting. (I will tell you more details later.) So in this campaign, Shamu is an outcast who loves his motherland, but he must live outside and Shamu must do things, and the things are not noble acts sometimes. You know.

Ok, so in this context my fighter is more sophisticated than the earlier one. We escorted a young girl and saved her from an unwanted marriage. Then we looted a tomb with new bandit allies, and in the last story we solved a mass crime in a decadent city. So my character developed with detailed personality traits.

In the character level, in the numbers level, Shamu is still a dumb fighter; the fun factor was the play and the decisions, what I made with him.

So I did some research on how I can lift the play higher with the fighter characters. Enjoy the tour!

“The fighter is the boring class” is close to a founding myth of the hobby at this point — no spells, no special die-rolling subsystem, just a sword and a number that goes up. But the OSR blogosphere has spent years pushing back on that premise from two directions at once: some bloggers argue the fighter never needed fixing in the first place, and others have built genuinely clever fixes anyway. Here’s a tour of both camps.

Pushing back on the premise

What a horrible night to have a curse... — “I’m the greatest swordsman that ever lived!”

This post asks an obvious question nobody quite stops to answer: if fighters are the boring class, why are nine out of ten legendary heroes across myth and fiction sword-swinging warriors rather than spellcasters? The argument isn’t that the fighter’s mechanics are secretly deep — it’s that “boring” may say more about how we frame combat description than about the class sheet itself.

Why it’s here: every other post on this list assumes the fighter has a problem to solve. This one is worth reading first because it questions that assumption directly.

This blog post highlights an important topic. Most of the heroes, like Conan were fighters, they did great things with great flavor (and mojo :) ). But in the RPG, almost everybody treats the fighter as a common and mandatory, but not the favorite option in the classes. In the rest of the post, we will talk about how we can spice it up with the fluff and other levels of the play.

5 Stone Games — “How Old School Empowers Players”

A broader defense of minimalist character sheets in general: a character built from six stats, a class, and a level can feel intimidating to players raised on menu-driven option lists, but the post argues that’s exactly what hands the interesting decisions back to the player at the table instead of pre-baking them into a character sheet.

Why it’s here: it’s the clearest statement of the “the fighter’s simplicity is the feature, not the bug” position, and it explains why so many of the fixes below are deliberately lightweight rather than feat-tree-heavy.

Every minimalist system has the problem that players suffer from the lack of character feats and options. I think the GM must encourage the players, that they use their ideas, and the GM will offer roll if it is needed. If the idea is optimal, the action will be automatically successful. So if the GM treats the fighter as a hero and lets him or her make heroic acts and solve the roll question, the player can feel the classic fantasy heroic style. In this game, every character is a hero (or antihero :) ), so act like this and make decisions; don’t be afraid of failure!

Fixing it without slowing combat down

Porky’s Expanse — “Giving fighters a once-over”

Maybe the lowest-effort fix on this list: at character creation, have the fighter’s player describe their fighting philosophy, school, or preferred techniques in a few words — then let that flavor genuinely color how each attack gets described and adjudicated, no new subsystem required.

Why it’s here: it’s proof that “make the fighter interesting” doesn’t have to mean “add more rules” — sometimes it just means asking one good question at session zero.

It’s a minor fix, but it can be a good starter for a new mindset; if the GM uses this fluff, the play can be more interesting. Every successful attack can be a minor celebration. ;)

Roles, Rules, and Rolls — “One Page Class Powers: Fighter Feats from Damage Dice”

A direct critique of DCC’s well-known “Mighty Deeds of Arms” system: cool in principle, but the extra dice rolls and table lookups slow combat down rather than energizing it. The proposed fix ties fighter feats to something the fighter is already rolling anyway, so the “special move” falls out of the existing action instead of adding a new decision on top of it.

Why it’s here: it’s a rare case of a blogger naming a specific, popular published solution and explaining exactly why it doesn’t fully work at the table — useful context if you’re evaluating whether to adopt Mighty Deeds yourself.

Another example, but from the other end of the complexity scale. If you want fancy combat actions, but don’t want to create feats for it, it can be a good solution.

Roles, Rules, and Rolls — “Improving 52 Pages: Fighter and Rogue Combat Powers”

The same blogger’s later, more refined design rule: fighter powers should add effects, not decisions — bonuses and consequences that happen automatically rather than new choices the player has to stop and weigh mid-fight.

Why it’s here: this is close to a thesis statement for the whole “fix the fighter” project — a one-sentence design filter you can apply to judge any fighter house rule, including the others on this list.

This example builds feats into the core system without creating feat system.

of Pedantry — “Adjudicating Combat Maneuvers”

A response to a different, older failure mode: 3rd edition’s sprawling, situational rules for trips, disarms, and sunders, which routinely stalled the table while everyone looked up modifiers. This post proposes one unified foundation for adjudicating any combat maneuver on the fly, instead of a different subsystem for each move.

Why it’s here: it tackles the opposite risk from the “too few options” problem — a fighter fix that’s too complicated is its own kind of boring, and this post is explicitly designed to dodge that trap.

In this case, the designer wanted to solve the too many feats problem with one universal solution: If you want to make a special move, you have to roll higher than a normal hit.

Sword and Board — “Improved Fighters for S&W WhiteBox”

A concrete, small houserule: fighters pick a “profession” at character creation that grants an extra ability layered on top of the normal fighter abilities — a light customization hook without rebuilding the class from scratch.

Why it’s here: it’s the most literally “ready to steal for your table tonight” entry on this list — a small, bounded addition rather than a whole new subsystem.

Fighting styles can be a great option to advance your play with fighters; if they grant special maneuvers, that can be better. My favorite solution for the boring fighter problem, and because these are not unbalanced, I think this doesn't cause any system-related complication.

Summary

Pull these together, and the disagreement turns out to be smaller than it looks. Most of the players and GMs like the simplicity of the fighter class, it is the cornerstone of the RPG system. This class is essential, not because you need a bodyguard or damage dealer role in the party; it is because this is the baseline of the classes; every other class developed from this entity.
The blogs did not mention the proficiency; you can choose a trade for your character. So he or she can introduce himself as a smith, as a soldier, etc. These trades add more flavor and spice into the game. They can use the prof. as a skill and roll for it during play if it is relevant.

Even the bloggers defending the fighter’s simplicity aren’t against giving the class more texture — they’re against texture that costs table time. And the bloggers proposing fixes keep converging on the same design filter: additions that resolve automatically beat additions that hand the player one more decision to make before the dice even hit the table. Whether you fix the fighter or just describe it better, the goal both camps agree on is the same: make the player’s choices at the table feel like they matter, without making the fighter’s turn take longer than anyone else’s.

Shamu 1.0 was only a troll character, and the play was not the best with it, but Shamu 2.0 was even better, and it became, during the campaign, an interesting personality who encouraged me to continue adventuring. I wish you similar enjoyment of games with fighter characters.

Editor’s Picks

Old-School Essentials (Editor’s Pick)

One of the best starters.

Return to the roots of fantasy adventure! Don your chain mail, grab your iron spikes, and prepare your magic missile. Glory, wonder, and doom await!

Castles & Crusades Starter Set (Editor’s Pick)

My personal favorite.

In your hands you hold the very font of imagination, where all things can become real. Play as mighty warriors and weavers of powerful spells, face off against terrible dragons, giants, and monsters of lore. Win gold and glory, or die trying.

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If you want to skip the basics and don’t want to fill your settlement only with taverns, temples, shops (eg.: Torture Chamber Shop :) ), it is for you.

Let’s see how the elite of the blog sphere solved this part of the adventure development.

The underground area gets all the attention in the fantasy play, and the wilderness gets the sandbox glory — but the city is where most campaigns actually start, and where players keep coming back to resupply, gossip, and get into trouble between delves. A well-designed settlement does something: it gives players a web of relationships, rumors, and factions that keeps generating adventure on its own. It rewards return visits instead of being cleared out once and forgotten. And because everyone already has an intuitive sense of how a city works, players can improvise their way through one far more confidently than they can a closed complex.

The catch is that “just wing it, it’s a city” tends to produce exactly the kind of generic, interchangeable fantasy town that several of the bloggers below call out by name. Building a city that actually earns its place in your campaign takes a different kind of design thinking than an ordinary adventure site does — and the OSR blogosphere has quietly built up a solid body of thought on exactly that. Here’s a tour of the best of it.

The problem that started the conversation

GROGNARDIA — “REVIEW: Vornheim”

Most roads in this topic lead back to Zak Smith’s Vornheim, and this review is the clearest account of why it mattered: it names the exact failure mode — every fantasy city in every campaign ending up feeling like the same city — that the rest of this list is, in one way or another, responding to.

Why it’s here: this is the reference point. Almost every other post below is either reacting to Vornheim’s ideas or working independently toward the same problem it diagnosed.

Roles, Rules, and Rolls — “Street Guide Without Streets”

This post takes Vornheim’s insight somewhere genuinely useful: a city needs a different design logic than an average adventure site, because access isn’t the challenge. Nobody needs a detailed map to find their way down a street the way they need one to navigate a cave system — a city’s difficulty lives in its social terrain, not its floor plan.

Why it’s here: it’s the clearest one-sentence explanation of why “just draw a bigger map” is the wrong instinct for city design.

That’s why I love city adventure: you can play exciting social encounters and intrigue.

Building one from the ground up

Black Hole Diaries — “Designing the City Campaign” (Parts 1–3)

A genuinely practical, step-by-step series: starting from the big conceptual questions in Part 1, moving through concrete locations worth fleshing out first (the tavern, the smith, the sundries shop) in Part 2, and rounding out with religion and other city institutions in Part 3.

Why it’s here: most design essays stay abstract. This series is the closest thing on the list to a literal checklist you could follow starting tonight.

Practical and useful.

Monsters and Manuals — “How I Run Sandboxes in the City, Part III: Appendix N”

A different kind of practical: a reading list. The recommendation is a work of nonfiction about a real homicide squad’s year on the job — not fantasy at all — used as raw material for how urban institutions and urban danger actually function.

Why it’s here: it’s a reminder that a city’s authenticity often comes from research outside the fantasy genre entirely, not from reading more D&D supplements.

I strongly recommend that you use sources outside of the fantasy genre!

Treating the city as its own kind of crawl

Vaults of Nagoh — “Rubblecrawl? Ruincrawl? *crawl, in a dead city.”

A half-formed-and-proud-of-it experiment: sketch a flowchart of lootable locations across a ruined city, and run the whole thing as its own kind of point-crawl — structurally much closer to an underground complex than to a “living” city.

Why it’s here: it’s a genuinely different answer to “how do I structure a city” than the living-metropolis approach most of this list takes — worth including for contrast.

It is a good idea to build your city with mixed living and dead areas, and you can add a transitional area between these two.

roleplay-geek — “Encounter by Encounter: A Nodal Design View of a Campaign”

A real-play case study of nodal design applied to an 11-session Judge Dredd megacity campaign — showing the abstract “nodes and connections” theory actually holding up across a full campaign arc, not just a single session.

Why it’s here: theory is easy to find; a multi-session retrospective on whether the theory actually worked is rarer and more convincing.

Encounters, tables, and what the old rules already knew

Jeffs Gameblog — “Haunted Cities and Swamp Elves”

A close reading of the original wilderness/city encounter charts as implicit worldbuilding — taking seriously what the old tables’ odds and entries suggest about what kind of place the game assumes a city actually is.

Why it’s here: it treats old rulebook tables as design documents worth interrogating, not just mechanics to roll on — a useful habit of mind for building your own.

I think these random tables are better references than mechanics to roll on

Hack & Slash — “On Reader Mail, Cities and Encounter Design”

A reader-question format tackling something the rest of this list mostly assumes: how do you actually plan encounters for a city differently than for a linear crawl, where the power curve and time structure work completely differently?

Why it’s here: it’s the post most directly aimed at a GM who already has the theory and wants the practical “okay, but how do I actually run tonight’s session” answer.

The Alexandrian — “Game Structure: Sector Crawl”

This piece breaks down the “location-crawl” structure that a classic crawl is built on — moving through a space area by area, deciding what’s worth engaging with in each one before moving to the next — and treats it as a general-purpose framework rather than something exclusive to dungeons. Applied to a city, the same logic turns districts or “sectors” into the rooms: each one has its own reason to explore it, and the PCs move between them the same way they’d move between chambers underground.

Why it’s here: it’s the clearest bridge between ordinary OSR design thinking and city-design thinking on this list — useful if you want to reuse structural habits you already have from running adventure sites, rather than inventing a whole new approach for the city.

Seeing a finished example

Superhero Necromancer — “A Visitor’s Guide to the Rainy City”

A homebrew city setting, born out of actual years of play with a regular group, turned into a system-agnostic published zine — worth including simply as proof that a small, personal city built at your own table can become something worth sharing.

Why it’s here: every other entry on this list is advice. This is the result advice like it eventually produces — a good closing note.

The common thread

Pull all of this together and a shape emerges: the writers who think hardest about city design agree that the city’s challenge isn’t structural the way a site’s is — it’s social, institutional, and relational. The best city designs don’t map every street; they map who the PCs know, who they owe, and who’s watching them. That’s also exactly what makes urban adventuring worth the design effort in the first place: it’s the one part of your campaign that keeps generating new hooks out of relationships the players have already built, long after the last dungeon on the map has been cleared out.

It is harder path, and most of the GMs are afraid of it, but I think it is worth it.

Basically, it is true; the basic gamer logic is that if you win, you get the reward. In reality, you can gain experience from bad things; if you get a wound, next time you will be careful. In the rpg you will get xp and the xp brings you a level-up; your stats will increase.

But let's examine the short-term effects of the wounds and other losses. If you kill a monster or survive a trap with difficulty, you lose HP, lose sanity, lose stat value, lose time, kill a follower, lose speed, lose resources, etc. The next encounter will be more difficult, so you have to heal, rest, refill resources, and so on…

I am convinced that a good GM does not want to cause TPK (its a failure); a good GM can play with the party's resources, and in this case I mean all stats and resources that are in and out of the character sheet.

The most valuable thing is time; if you build goals into the adventure that are time-limited, or create situations that are time-sensitive. For example, in your encounter situation, an escalated combat can alarm other enemies; the situation can be worse than originally planned. In this case, the party can decide whether to continue the fight with the strengthened enemy or withdraw. The emphasis is on the decision.
Other example: If a party member runs into a trap, the enemy can be alarmed because of the noise, or because of the yell. In this case, the member also has a decision possibility.

Always let them decide!

So you can plan a pile of shit for your party, but please don’t pour the whole matter over them; just in little portion. They will decide how to handle the situation.

Here you can find a collection of several versions of the adventure.

For me, the best part is the cover. It reminds me of my childhood fairy tales with the kind dragon, with the old absent-minded wizard and the hero, who was not so heroic. We had a satire of Snow White from the early ‘80s, where the main character was a Frankenstein monster-like, big and strong girl, who could shatter the anvil, so everybody was in fear of her company. :) The queen I. Arrogance exiled her, and the story continued with similar surreal moments….

So, this cover reminds me of some unconventional tales. I think this adventure could be a init for similar stories.

Rule System: Old-School Revival (OSR) Titles

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Every DM who’s built a bestiary eventually runs into the same question: what actually makes a monster interesting at the table, rather than just a stat block with a name? Digging through the blogosphere turns up a surprisingly consistent set of answers — and a few genuine disagreements. Here’s a roundup of the best thinking on the subject.

The trap of “more powers = more interesting”

One of the sharpest critiques on this topic comes from The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms, which traces a design habit that crept into demon and extraplanar-creature writeups over the years: once “add more powers” became the default way to signal a more dangerous monster, entries started competing on power-list length rather than on how interesting they actually were to fight.

Monsters and Manuals names this same failure mode directly as one of three things that make a monster bad: a “nuclear-grade” special ability that a save-or-suffer roll settles instead of player choice settling it. The other two criteria are worth keeping in mind too — a monster that breaks verisimilitude by being too jokey or hard to visualize, and a monster that’s simply boring because there’s nothing to actually engage with.

Monsters that do things, not just damage

The strongest counter-proposal to the “more powers” trap is a design principle you could summarize as: give the monster an effect on the fight, not just a bigger number. Blood of Prokopius credits rpg designer Matt Finch specifically for this approach — his best monsters aren’t memorable because of raw damage output, but because they change the battlefield conditions and force players to adapt their tactics mid-fight.

Do monsters need a believable ecology?

Here’s a genuine point of disagreement in the scene. Old School Psionics points out that almost a third of the original 1st-edition Monster Manual is just mundane animals (sometimes in giant form) — a design choice that reads as an attempt at ecological completeness, even though, as the post wryly notes, almost nobody has ever actually run a giant weasel encounter. The implicit question: is “populate the ecology realistically” actually a useful design goal, or is it padding that crowds out more interesting entries?

Monsters as a world-building tool

I SEE LEAD PEOPLE pushes back on the idea that monsters should default to broad, setting-neutral design at all. Most published creatures are built to work anywhere, which means they end up saying nothing specific about any particular world — the post argues for going the other direction, using monster design itself as a way to communicate what makes your setting distinct.

Middenmurk shows this in practice — a bestiary-in-progress built around a “reasonably coherent design philosophy” for both the creatures and how the information itself is laid out on the page, treating presentation as part of the design problem, not an afterthought.

How the goalposts moved across editions

Lawful Indifferent connects monster design directly to a mechanical shift over time: early editions demanded careful monster design because both players and monsters were fragile — three hit points and a sword meant every encounter was inherently dangerous. As hit points crept upward across editions, monster design had to compensate in ways that didn’t always age well.

On a related note, The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms tackles a stranger structural question: if you’re using monsters as player characters, should a monster with thief-like abilities progress on the thief’s advancement table? It’s a small question that opens up a much bigger one about how cleanly “monster” and “class” are really separated in most systems.

The pop-culture angle

Not every good design essay comes framed as design advice. THE LAND OF NOD uses early Superman comics as a case study: a character with no real limits is a character nobody can write an interesting fight for. The parallel to monster design writes itself — unbounded power is the enemy of a good encounter, whether it’s wearing a cape or has forty hit dice.

The common thread

Pull these together and a pattern emerges: the bloggers who write best about monster design agree that raw power and long ability lists are a trap, and that the goal should be a monster that changes how a fight or a scene plays out — through altered battlefield conditions, through connection to a specific setting, or simply through being genuinely strange rather than generically “more.” Where they disagree is more interesting than where they agree: how much ecological or systemic realism is actually worth the page space it takes up is still very much an open question in the scene.

The second published monster is a Shadow; I named it Mirror Shade. Because Cornelius, the extraordinary wizard, created them to guard his possessions. They lives in a black mirror and when the wizard or in the shelter initiatiate alarm, 1d6 Mirror Shade spreads around the complex and attacks the intruders.

They can teleport within 30ft; their Str drain causes -1 STR, and they have the Douse Light ability, so they can turn off physical lights with their touch. Thanks to the Blend ability, they are more dangerous in the dark. The Mirror Shade body is incorporeal, so they can pass through walls, and only magical weapons are effective against them.

Statistics:

Mirror Shade, undead (extraordinary)

Level: 3 (d12) HP:19
AC:13 SR:1
Saves:M
Move: 30ft., 40ft. (fly)
Sanity: 1/1d10
Attacks: Incorporeal Touch (1d6)
XP:90+3
Abilities: Strength Drain, Blend, Incorporeal,
Sunlight Vulnerability, Dark Vision, Undead Traits, Teleport (30 ft), Douse Light

Ecology:

Number: 1-6
Size: Medium
Int: Low
Disposition: Evil
Climate: any
Biome: Any Land (often underground)
Treasure: 3

Description: For general description see Monster and Treasures: Shadow (p 218)

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I provide the statistics in the C&C Siege system, but you can easily convert it into your favorite system. It will be D20 compatible.

Statistics:

Mutant Orc, humanoid

Level: 1 (d8) HP:5
AC:13 SR:1
Saves:P
Move: 30ft.
Sanity: N/A
Attacks: By Weapon
XP:5+1
Abilities: Light Sensitivity, Dark Vision

Ecology:

Number: 2-12, 40-400
Size: Medium
Int: low
Disposition: Evil/Law
Climate: Desert
Biome: Any Land (often underground)
Treasure: 1

Description: See Monster and Treasures

Special: Roll 1d8 and add the ability to the monster:

The mechanic, as described in the book

The Characters chapter (pp. 8–17) explains that during each 4-year term of service, a character must make a survival throw (2D6) against that service’s own target number, modified by any characteristic-based DMs that apply. If the throw fails to meet the target number, the character dies, and a new character must be generated.

It seems very strict and cruel, but this is not the whole story. On page 10 of both editions of the genuine Book 1, the complete, official “Prior Service Table” was found (enlistment, survival, commission, promotion, and reenlistment for all six services)

Source: Book 1, Characters & Combat, p. 10 (identical in both editions). Every DM mod is +2 if the listed characteristic reaches the threshold. * All six characteristics (Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Intelligence, Education, Social Standing) are generated independently with 2D6 in the very first step of character creation; the “P(condition)” column follows directly from that roll’s mathematical distribution (e.g. the chance of reaching INT 7+ on 2D6 is 21/36 = 58.3%). The last column shows how much the death chance drops if the character has the required characteristic: a +2 DM lowers the survival throw’s effective target by 2 (e.g. for Navy, 3+ becomes sufficient instead of 5+), which sharply cuts the death chance. If the characteristic does NOT reach the threshold, the death chance stays at the “base” column’s value.

So the more talented characters have more chance to survive the term.

The book also offers an optional rule: if the referee/player decides beforehand, a failed survival throw results in injury instead of death — the character serves only 2 years of that 4-year term and then leaves the service (this short term does not count toward mustering-out benefits).

So the DM can overrule the original strict rule. But the story is continuing.

Difference between the 1977 and 1981 editions

The survival table’s numbers did not change between the two editions. One important rule did, however: the “optional survival rule” (a failed survival throw results in injury and early discharge instead of death, the term lasts only 2 years, and does not count toward mustering-out benefits) appears only in the 1981 (2nd) edition — the original 1977 Book 1 has no such option; there, a failed survival throw always means permanent death. In other words, between 1977 and 1981 GDW explicitly softened the lethality of character creation with an official, optional rule.

So the strict survive-or-die rule was solely authoritative in a short term. Since 1981 all DM had been the soft version of this rule.

But there is more….

Expanded career systems — yearly risk by assignment

Four supplement volumes (Mercenary, High Guard, Scouts, Merchant Prince) give a much more detailed risk breakdown: instead of Book 1’s single survival throw per 4-year term, each service year (so four times per term) gets its own specific assignment and its own survival throw, with a target number that depends on the assignment type (training, patrol, speculative trade, siege, etc.). This means the risk is far more granular and has a far wider spread: some assignments are completely safe (automatic survival), while others are extremely dangerous.

For example the Mercenary:

Mercenary (Book 4, 1978) — mercenary military career

Mercenary characters receive a specific assignment every service year (Training, International Security, Political Action, Counter-Insurgency, Raid, Garrison/Ship’s Troops), and each assignment type has its own survival target, varying by branch (Marine, Infantry/Cavalry/Artillery, Support, Commando).

DM: +1 to survival if any MOS skill level is 2+. Source: Book 4, p. 7.

It is clear that Training and Garrison/Ship’s Troop duty are essentially risk-free in every branch, while Raid and Counter-Insurgency are the most dangerous (comparable to, or worse than, Book 1’s base Marines 6+ value — but for a single year, not an entire 4-year term).

Conclusion:

The fact is true that in the early Traveller system the player characters have a significant chance to die. The core mechanic described in the book is one of the worst in the history of the RPG, but with the optional rules and with further supplements, the GDW refined the character creation, and the Traveller system became, through the years, one of the best RPG systems. I just recommend it to you. Let’s play Traveller RPG! (any edition)

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Reaction Rolls Are Doing More Work Than You Think

The reaction roll is one of the oldest “special rules” in the hobby, and it’s easy to underrate. As The Wasted Lands points out in its read-through of 1st edition AD&D, the reaction system barely changed for decades, moving only from percentile dice to a d20 by 3rd edition - and its companion mechanic, the morale check, is something many GMs actively miss when running newer systems.

Henchman Abuse frames this nicely from the player’s side: a session can turn on nothing more dramatic than a party consistently winning (or losing) reaction rolls, which quietly reshapes the whole tone of an encounter before a single attack roll happens. Over the Misty Mountains goes further and ties reaction rolls directly into sandbox design, treating them as the pivot point between “random encounter” and “adventure hook.”

Morale gets its own dedicated treatment too - SAVE OR DIE! has been working through gaps in the original D&D rules and devotes a full post to patching morale specifically, treating it as unfinished business in the base game rather than an optional add-on.

Triggering an Encounter Is Its Own Subsystem

The basic “roll every X turns” procedure is only the entry point. Several blogs have built entire triggering systems on top of it. Old School Psionics highlights a rule buried in the DMG: any time psionics or psionic-like effects are used, there’s a flat chance the next random encounter shifts to a psionic-monster table entirely - encounter tables reacting to player choices, not just the clock.

Terrain-based triggering shows up constantly in hex-crawl writeups. The Book of Worlds assigns each hex a flat daily percentage chance of generating an encounter, while In Places Deep builds a more elaborate hex-crawl procedure derived from an old Unearthed Arcana article, layering additional checks on top of the basic frequency roll.

There’s also a genuine debate about when to roll. The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms picks up a question originally raised on Tenkar’s Tavern - whether to pre-roll a session’s wandering monsters ahead of time or generate them live at the table - and argues the timing matters less than GMs assume, since either approach can be made to feel equally “random” to the players.

Matching the Threat to the Party

A flat table doesn’t know what level your party is, which is exactly the problem Oubliette Magazine sets out to fix. Its “Fixing the Encounter Tables” series builds a rough power-rating system (borrowed from the old Monstermark method) to sanity check whether a table’s contents are actually survivable for a given starting party, rather than trusting the printed table blindly.

PLANET ALGOL takes a different route to the same problem: instead of re-rating monsters, it recommends deliberately combining two rolled results into one encounter

• pairing a wandering group of cultists with a monstrous “pet,” for instance - which raises the challenge and the strangeness at the same time without touching the underlying table at all.

Encounter Tables With Structure Built In

Plenty of GMs have stopped treating the encounter table as a flat list. Sword+1 builds a nested table for its Gorham city-state, where an initial roll points into a second, more specific sub-table rather than resolving immediately - useful for regions with several distinct factions or environments packed close together.

The City of Iron takes the structural approach even further for a Dolmenwood hex crawl, maintaining separate day and night master tables broken down further by encountered creature type (animal, fey, monster, person) - a good example of a table designed around narrative variety rather than a single flat distribution.

The Complication Nobody Plans For: NPC Parties

Almost every table includes an “NPC party” entry, and almost every GM dreads it. The Grumpy Old Troll calls this one of the most feared results on any random encounter table

• not for the players, but for the GM who suddenly has to improvise five or more fully-statted characters mid-session - and works through some practical shortcuts for generating them on the fly rather than freezing the table.

The Common Thread

None of these are replacements for the core “roll and consult” loop - they’re all layers added on top of it: a reaction system that decides tone, a trigger system that decides timing, a rating system that decides fairness, and a structural system that decides variety. Pick up any one of these independently of the others, and your random encounters stop feeling random in the boring sense and start feeling random in the interesting one.

Sources linked above are all still-active OSR blogs as of this writing. If you run any of these procedures differently at your table, the comments are open.