Last week I wrote a five-part series on modernizing The Village of Hommlet (links at the end). However: my goal isn’t really “modernizing” anything, my goal is to make a fantasy role-playing game that’s really easy to play / DM and yet feel like it’s from 1980. I’ve called this substack “Play in Five” because that’s what I want - you should be able to start playing Classic d20 with 5 minutes of prep.
I believe the way to make this happen is to move the rules of the game from paper books into software. Software is great at accounting; software is great at jumping to a related reference; software (thanks to AI) is great at answering questions and great at customizing things for your own campaign.
The pitfalls I am attempting to avoid:
software should not be a trap for players: everything done in software should be doable on paper, the software is there as an aid just like paper, pencil and a calculator are.
the game is at the table: I am not making an MMORPG or World of Warcraft. I want people sitting around a table
eating Cheetos androlling dice.not try to wring $5 a month out of everyone at the table: when you spend money, you should get real value. And like in D&D and FRPs in general, likely the DM will be the one spending cash and the players not at all.
Play in Five. Not a pitfall. I think anyone should be able to start playing in 5 minutes, DMs should be able to jump into a new module with 5 minutes (not 5 hours) of review, and generally there should be no friction between wanting to know something and finding it out.
Here’s the Village of Hommlet links. The next steps for me are to turn this into a playable module in Classic d20 and start playtesting.
Part I - Background, Hooks, Rumours and Factions
Part II - Major Places
Part III - Other Places
Part IV - NPCs
Part V - Monsters
(I also wrote a post on “What is AD&D Feel”)