Sunday, November 24, 2013

Review and Commentary The OSR "Pay What You Want" Hack! Firearms From STRAYCOUCHES PRESS For Your Old School Retro-clone Campaign


Grab It Right Over 

 Fire Arms in a D&D retroclone are a tricky proposition for some folks. There are literally a dozen rule sets tucked into a variety of retroclones currently on the market. A friend turned me on to this set from STRAYCOUCHES PRESS. Apparently these are the same folks who are into Dungeon Crawl Classics(I'm not into that game). This is a twenty four page pdf with the usual D&D tropes in the background. 

Hack! Firearms! is a supplement compatible with the Swords & Wizardry rules. It features simple firearms rules, an adventure tool-kit for introducing firearms to your campaign and whole bunch more! 
  • Basic and optional rules for Firearms.
  • Different eras of firearms and their stats.
  • An adventure tool-kit for adding guns to your campaign.
  • A bunch of bonus items.
This is a solid pdf and really well put together for doing long guns, dungeon conditions for firearms, firearms in campaigns, and lots of strangeness with fire arms. 
 Here the technology of black powder is exploited to its fullest and given its due. This is the sort of strangeness we get with introducing black powder and guns into a fantasy setting. 
These rules will work very well with a setting like science fantasy or primitive science fiction settings. I'm thinking about a 'Planet of The Apes' or alternative world. 
The rules would be excellent for a game like Carcosa where the setting and rules might give the PC's a bit of an edge on survival. 
For a game like Labyrinth Lord these rules might be a welcome addition. While the post apocalyptic goodness of Mutant Future might actually welcome something like these rules.

The bonus items and different eras of firearms can be used to induce many pre-mutations of relics and artifacts for many of the usual dungeon or wasteland tropes.
There many other uses for the items here as one shot use items in campaigns.
All in all these rules are solid and interesting. While their not going to revolutionize the retroclone market, the Hack Firearms rules are very well recommended. 

      4 comments:

      1. Interesting. I'm curious to see how theirs is compared to mine on my blog.

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      2. Your rules are much more concise and compact.The focus of their set seems more towards applications as yours seems to be oriented toward game play itself. All in all I'd probably take yours over there's but then again I'm far more familiar with your stuff Dave. The Pay For Your Coffin Rules remain a favorite.
        Thanks for the comment and more to come!

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        Replies
        1. i enjoy your blogs. i don't comment much but i do read. keep up the good work,

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      3. Thanks Dave and I do read yours as well and use the OSR resources but haven't had the time to comment as much as I'd like. Work has been keeping me very busy lately and I've got to devote more time to blog very soon. I'll do a review and commentary on your blog's resources coming up soon.

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