On Homebrew RPGing

 Way back in 1977 I got my first taste of Role Playing Games with a homebrew system created by my friend Erik Tannen. At that time he told me all the Gamemasters in our town were Homebrewers, creating both their worlds and rules based on their individual proclivities and insights. It was ok, he said, to use D&D as a basis for rules, but everyone was strictly Anti-Gygax. The reasons for this were:

1. TSR was in the business of creating rules books. Therefore, we immediately understood that this would result in new editions, with rules changes, and expansions in order to compel Gamemasters and Players to “upgrade” with new editions purchases over time. This would become an ongoing cost which none of us were particularly eager for. Especially since we also understood that the rules books would get increasingly more expensive over time. How did we know? Well, duh. We knew.

2. Another thing we realized was that the new editions would become increasingly more complex. The game started out with relatively simple rules. But it would not stay that way. Instead of consolidating and simplifying the rules they would expand, and expand and expand. Why? Well, obviously, so that more rules books purchases would be necessary. That was, after all, their chosen business model. We simply understood the implications and were like “naahh, no thanks, you keep it.”

3. But more importantly, we also knew that the rules changes would be world-history-breakers. History that was based on older rules that worked before would no longer work, and so those histories would fragment. In addition world assumptions would either have to change with each edition, or you would have to create new worlds to fit the new assumptions within the rules (such as what spells exist, and how they work, etc.). This was a deal breaker as far as we were concerned.

4. Rules Books creates Rules Lawyers. We despised Rules Lawyers immediately, and with a purple passion. It put the game instantly in the wrong modality for what we wanted out of it. Even that early on, in 1977, we wanted worlds that engendered long campaigns and epic stories about heroes. We wanted players to be able to immerse themselves in those worlds, the way we felt when a great GM, or author, would draw us into the scene, the history and the characters of their world. Rules Lawyering instantly killed that immersion. And we hated it. Consequently, we didn’t want Rules Lawyers at our tables. And therefore we really didn’t want Rules Books. We had rules. But we didn’t publish them to the players. It was strictly GM Fiat, and that was that. Over time we might give players more insights as to the rules so they could make informed tactical decisions, but we never wanted them to focus on the rules. We wanted them to play their characters as Characters, not pieces on a wargame board. That was our chosen style of play, and we had a strong preference for it.

5. OD&D rules were imperfect. We had rules design ideas that we preferred that we felt fixed those imperfections. Or we had design concepts that we thought better expressed our metaphysical interpretation of the world, or better embodied concepts of mysticism, or combat, or economics. We had lots of ideas. And we wanted to employ them because the original rules chaffed on our nerves.

For these reasons we had a town full of Homebrewers. And boy, after all these years, am I glad! Over the years those homebrew systems, never published, and many long forgotten, were so creative and fascinating. I remember one of my friend David Kahn’s concepts was a magic system that used numerology as the basis for spell casting. He had key metaphysical assumptions such as:

0 = Nothingness / the Void
1 = Unity
2 = Stability
3 = Energy / Transformation
5 = Disruption
6 = Harmony (2x3)
7 = Positive Luck
etc.

This is an incomplete list, but it gives you the idea of what he was shooting for. He used this foundation to create spells with a numerological basis. It was very satisfying to play, I can tell you.

In other cases Gamemasters also create their own worlds. And these were equally creative and fascinating. There is no record that I know of for most of them, unfortunately, and those tales of adventure, perils and victories are likely never to be heard again in this world. Yet at the time, they were the most fabulous things we ever experienced. It was glorious.

That said, not every Homebrew was great. Some Gamemasters were lazy, or thoughtless, or had no creative spark, or on a tyrannical power trip. But those games tended to die quickly. The ones that were great, however, lasted for decades. And damnit if they weren’t works of art. Oh yes, they were.

On Feb 6, 1978, the on my birthday, I launched my own Homebrew game system, Elthos RPG. The rules were modular, and designed to allow me to build any kind of world I could imagine without having to add new charts. At the time I didn’t realize that this design would fastly simplify my later efforts to program my system into the Elthos RPG Mythos Machine, which I began designing in 1993. The rules in 2006 took a new direction as I did a major simplification when I started the Literary Role Playing Game Society of Westchester. The rules did not change in concept or overall design, but they distilled down to a mini-system that was based on 1d6 and I called it “The One Die System”. It is this system that Mythos Machine is currently based on.

My first world was was Telgar, a gigantic world in some unknown solar system. The first campaign was “The Iron Legions of Telgar”, and it went on for several years while I was in middle school and then high school. After high school I went to college for a year and then dropped out to spend the next decade hitch hiking around the country, and wherever I went I brought my trusty bag of dice. Since my Elthos Rules were designed for modularity and simplicity, I had no problem running games off the top of my head. And so the World of Korak was born in those years. It featured some very interesting story arcs, and the most notable was the existence of a northern wall, beyond which lay the wilds and the enchanted lands. It was mostly, however, a story about a border town, and it’s woes and travails living along the wall. Great stuff, and we had a fabulous time. Later, when I landed back in civilization, I created the world of Elthos proper, and gave it a low-fantasy casting. Magic was subtle, and player characters tended to be low level. But the adventures were fabulous and the stories that came out of it really tickled us pink. Finally, one of my players suggested I try a Sci-Fi campaign, and so “The Way of All Flesh” was born in 2018 with the first Mars expedition. The rest is history, as they say. All of it’s been glorious fun.

To learn more about Elthos RPG and Mythos Machine I invite you to visit:
https://elthos.com

To read my Actual-Play Prose Story writeups for my campaigns starting in 2009, I invite you to visit:
https://elthosrpg.blogspot.com/p/elthos-rpg-play-test-stories.html

Long live Homebrew RPGs!
Long live Homebrew GMs!
Long live Homebrew RPGs!
Long live Homebrew GMs!