While he was in college, Bill Underwood wrote his own fantasy role-playing game. I appreciate every act of creation like this, but in the case of Beasts, Men & Gods, there's one especially interesting thing: This started in 1977, and the game itself was self-published in 1980.
So we are at an relatively early stage of RPG publishing, where almost everything is pretty dominated by D&D. While Traveller and RuneQuest were out by that time, it's quite likely that Bill mostly had experience with TSR's little brown books. Why does this matter? Well, you get the ability to look at a time capsule of RPG design. Nothing influenced by a plethora of other games, or even contemporary blog bloviation. Things often went in a different direction than we're expecting. Now, granted, this often means that during the decades that have passed since we've gotten more streamlined and tested alternatives, but sometimes, just sometimes there are hidden nuggets and sources for inspiration.
This will be the first in a short series of posts going through the book. It's not really a "Wherein I Read" long-form review format, but a focus on some rules that I've noticed, both bad & good ones, but also those that might serve as a kernel for some new house rules. This first post will all be about the core statistics of a character, the beginning of the character creation.
Acquiring the Game
A few years ago, the author re-created the original game, with very few modifications. The PDF can be downloaded at wunderwood.com/BMG, and you can get a cheap print-on-demand physical version at Amazon.
Core Statistics
You won't be surprised to find the following statistics as the core of every character in the game:
- Strength
- Constitution
- Intelligence
- Wisdom
- Dexterity
- Charisma
Then we add Personal Appearance. Not that unusual, AD&D's Unearthed Arcana also added Comeliness, to distinguish mere physical beauty from the more vague interpersonal magnetism that's Charisma.
At number eight, we're getting Willpower. Now, this name often turns up as a replacement for Wisdom, so why do we need both here? Well, in BMG, Wisdom is defined as your powers of recollection, whereas Intelligence is the logical ability – what Rolemaster called Reasoning and, well, Memory.
The weird final attribute is Bowskill. A whole statistic just for one specific form of attack? We'll see whether that's useful, at least I haven't seen anything like this before.
Not many retroclones resurrected Comeliness, and for a good reason. Especially in the procedural confines of the modern OSR, there's little use for that. The other new stats also don't seem like they make messing with the tried and true core stats worth it.
Pair up and do-se-do
The range of the core statistics is the same as in D&D, so we might expect 3d6 down the line or some more generous variant.
But instead we're getting something I haven't seen before: Each characteristic apart from Willpower is paired up with another, and at first you roll 1d6 that applies to both, then finish them up with two 2d6 rolls added to that common basis. Also, if you manage to roll 18 for one of the stats, you add 1d6-3 (if positive) to both the paired stats.
The pairs are Strength + Constitution, Intelligence + Wisdom, Dexterity + Bowskill and Charisma + Physical Appearance.
It's not a bad idea, I'd say. The first issue you'll run into is what to pair up. Strength & Constitution work fine, as do Wisdom & Intelligence. But that leaves us with Charisma and Dexterity. Well, both have something to do with grace, and quite often they fit for the thematics of the characters, with rogue-ish ones being good in both. It's workable.
You could tack on some variant rules here. Maybe let the player arrange those first 1d6 die rolls as they want, then do 2d6 down the line.
Flesh wounds & sweat?
As many "heartbreakers" do, BMG tries to tackle the abstract nature of hit points. Some do this with harsh criticals, some just constrain the hit points into a "believable" range, whatever that is supposed to mean.
Here we get an early version of what D&D 3e called vitality and wound points, with hits being actual physical damage, and stamina losses meaning that you had to jump to get out of the way. Player characters get a single hit point per level added to their base, some monsters might be mostly/all hits (e.g. a not very agile dinosaur or dragon), or stamina (ghosts and the like).
We'll talk a bit more about this in a later post when we get to the combat section, but in general you take hits once your stamina has run out, or when you receive a critical hit.
The interesting thing here is that this game had it that early, but most people designing and picking their OSR and D&D house rules probably heard about vitality & wound points. It generally favors the enemies, as they often have the numerical advantage and thus more opportunities to get critical hits.
It does change the power curve a bit. At first level, you tend to have a higher damage capacity, as you have two sources for this, and at higher levels you still remain more fragile and combats can be less predictable.
Personally, I don't think it's worth the effort in a more rules-lite OSR game, and it doesn't make sense at all if you don't have critical hits.
100 sit-ups, 100 push-ups and a 10 kilometer run
We're skipping the attack and defense bonuses and the myriad modifiers to them at character creation, as there's really nothing that special about it (apart from them being percentile-based).
But right after the boring carrying capacity section, we're getting to the unprecedented Determination Points.
You get six of those points, plus one for each point of Willpower beyond 12, plus three for each level past the first. So an average first level character has 6 points, and a third level mage with awesome mental fortitude might have 18. They renew weekly.
The core idea is that you "invest" them in certain long-running tasks, to improve yourself or learn new things:
- Raise your statistics (anything but Intelligence, Charisma and Personal Appearance). You save up 50 points (oof), then roll 1d20 + level. If you get above your stat, it's raised by one. If not, fifty points wasted, start anew. Can't raise it more than 3 points from your starting value or higher than 18. And if you raised it, you need to spend 1 determination point per week to maintain it per raised point.
- Learn a new language. Spend 40 points if immersed in the language, 80 points otherwise, then you get a learning roll (based on your wisdom). Spend 1 DP to maintain fluency per week. This adds up.
- Get a new spell. We'll talk a bit more about this in a future post about magic. It's expensive.
- Specialize in a weapon. This is a bit weird. You need to find a mentor with a higher hit bonus than yours (can be a PC!), spend 40 points, and if you then roll below your dexterity, you get 1/4 the difference between your hit bonuses. Doesn't mention if you can learn from an even better sensei to replace this bonus (or it even being cumulative).
Many D&D iterations and clones had training rules, and this is another one of those. It's not a mandatory tax when you try to level up, and mostly concerns itself with matters that aren't tied to classes, spells being the exception.
With a 3d6 down the line roll, this might be a good alternative to magical fountains & wishes for raising your abilities. And finally some half-way decent language learning rules.
But on the other hand, this is literally bookkeeping. If you're in a game where you're already doing that a bit (STRICT TIME RECORDS!), this might fit in more nicely than if you're more laissez-faire.
In the next post, we'll start talking about the classes.