Dangers & Dweomers - House Rules

Wasting time is a thing I do well.

Prior to having kids I wasted time like a pro, not even managing to do the things I really wanted with my time (i.e. designing and playing RPGs).  Objects at rest tend to stay at rest.

These days I have significantly less free time, but manage to pack a bunch more productivity into it.  Still not showing utmost productivity, but an improvement.  The problem now is not the amount of time, so much as other constraints (e.g. stringing small bits of free time into big chunks, the need to be home at night for child-care purposes, meshing free time with friends' schedules).

Not so easy to schedule playing, but plenty of tinkering around with designing gets done.  Still, even designing takes some time when trying to piece together a full game from a lot of small pieces.  So, while Wyrms & Warrens/Crude Simulation Engine is still in the works, I've turned to Luigi Castellani's Dangers & Dweomers (official site w/downloads here) as something I might actually get around to using to run a game (possibly, maybe, hopefully) in the foreseeable future.


Dangers & Dweomers is essentially mashup of Swords & Wizardry with a bunch of d20 system elements.  Although it may not have all the qualities I'm looking for, there's something about the cut of it's jib I find myself admiring.


Of course no game is complete without extensive house-ruling, so:

Dangers & Dweomers House Rules PDF

House Rules include:

• Hit Point & Defense changes - Mostly cribbed from Ken Hood's Grim-n-Gritty system with a few significant modifications.  I've always been interested to see how a D&D game would play out with hit points that didn't inflate much.  This system has long struck me as a good fit: allowing a little better survivability at lower levels, while requiring greater caution at higher levels.
  
• The Class/Race freedom option - Make an argument for any class/race combination and if you can make it shine it's ok by me.
• Reskinning -Spells & such can just have their descriptors changed to whatever you prefer.
  
• Turning - At character creation priests can choose one broad category of outsiders (e.g. infernals, celestials, elementals, etc.) or aberrations which they can turn instead of undead.
• Stingy-mana Spellpoints - A variant of traditional 3E spellpoint systems but using slower progression.
• Psionics - Reskinned Sorcery.
• Cantrips - Putting 0-level spells back in.
• Rituals - Somewhat similar to 3E incantations and 4E rituals.