Here is another one of the classes for Swords of Cydonia. It’s pretty close to the regular Fighting Man, with a couple of minor tweaks reflecting how any class can use any weapon, although not always as effectively as the Fighting Man. The class also allows players to choose an area of speciality, and make multiple attacks against enemies under 1 Hit Dice.
Fighting Man
Bounty Hunter, Gun Fighter, Soldier
Hit Dice: d8
Armor: Any
Weapons: Roll up to d10 damage for weapons
Martial Training: Make a number of attacks per round equal to character level …

One of the goals of the upcoming Swords of Cydonia campaign is to break with my usual conventions for playing D&D and explore some other sources of inspiration, like the Western, and game material I haven’t made much use of before. While looking through my AD&D books for ideas I realized The Monk class was always something I disregarded as being “out of genre”. I also realized that Muse’s video for Knights of Cydonia not only has martial arts, but a few quick shots of a guy who looks like …

Continuing from yesterday’s post on Desert and Heat in a D&D campaign, here are the rules for traveling in the wilderness.
Again, I found the d20 system had some excellent suggestions but found it just too much for me to manage as is. I also find that when you’re looking at rules that include traveling across desert, forest, arctic, water and by every means of travel imaginable it’s quite inclusive… but not very evocative of a particular location. By condensing it down to just the rules that are relevant …

Since the D&D campaign I’ve been working on is partly inspired by Westerns more than the usual Magical Medieval Europe, I wanted to have the environment reflected in the rules of the game a bit more.
In Western films like The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, or even Knights of Cydonia there’s a common theme of the danger posed by the desert heat, and characters struggling to make their way across the burning sands. While I tend to prefer the more basic rule systems for D&D, …

While working on material for my next D&D campaign I’ve been reading a lot of blog posts about adding Weird Science, Horror, Sword & Planet and other “non-traditional” elements to the generic fantasy of Dungeons & Dragons. I’ve also been watching a lot of Westerns lately and with Deadlands Dice close at hand, I’ve been thinking of taking the “generic fantasy” more in that direction as well.
It wasn’t until I started looking at some pre-written modules and imagining them in a Dark Fantasy Wild West type setting instead of …