Leprosia meets Searchers of the Unkown

I've been reading up on more of the very "minimal" d20-based RPGS like Microlite20, and discovered one that's even lighter, yet still feels like OSR D and D - called Searchers of the Unknown. The whole basis for this game is that the creator (a gentleman by the name of Nicholas Dessaux) believed that the abbreviated stat blocks used to define monsters in old school games could also be used to define the heroes controlled by the players. In other words, In a typical old-school module's monster stats are listed like this: (AC6, MV9’, HD 1, hp 4, #AT1, 1d10 by halberd). The idea is that, if it’s enough for monsters, it should be enough for PCs as well.

The original game was only one page long, and the additional supplements which added races, magic, monsters, etc to the game were each also only one page long. In fact, the "expanded" version of the game, (SotU-Expanded) where the author basically compiled all of the basic supplements and arranged them into a single game is still only 30 pages long! The collection of all the supplements and revised versions of the original game (Searchers of the Unknown RPG Collection - 2012) is 68 pages. That's still shorter than most of the newer versions of D and D, Pathfinder, and a lot of the other RPG games.

Even though the Stat block is short, you can "flavor-up" your character with your own imagination, like we did waaaayyy back before DnD started adding "skills" and "feats" to their rules system, making a character sheet at least two pages long, with all kinds of unnecessary details that just add time and boredom to the game. 

Simpler is better, in my not very humble opinion. Melee/Wizard - The Fantasy Trip started out as a similar simple game - only two or three character stats, which then bloated itself into Advanced Melee, Advanced Wizard, and Into the Labyrinth, which actually was the first RPG to take the useless step into adding "skills" to a character, and making the process way too long.  Then Steve Jackson abandoned that system to create GURPS, an even way more bloated rules system that requires a STAT rating for just-about-anything-you-can-possibly-do-including-blowing-your-nose-and-cleaning-behind-your-ears. As you can tell, I'm NOT a fan of these kinds of systems.

And the new version of FATE, which is supposedly considered to be a "lite" game is 302 pages long! And has a 2-sided character sheet with a lot of tiny lines on it for keeping details about your character's abilities.

Anyway ... the point of this blog post is ... I like Searchers of the Unknown. And I am basing one of the versions of my own game system directly off of it's rules setup. This will be called "Searchers of Leprosia". I'm still hashing it out ... it'll take a while, but hopefully I'll have it completed and ready to post soon.

...then on to the next rules system for Leprosia?