Since 2025 is apparently the year of the beta, I've decided to go ahead and post something from an unpublished google doc from ~2019. I was a few months into an administrative assistant job with a lot of seasonal variation in workload and had just gotten jazzed up about Tolkien and OSR writing from reading Rise Up Comus, The One Ring 1st edition and Adventures in Middle Earth, so I was able to get a lot of writing done on the clock.
Piggybacking off of Josh's Wilderlands posts, I hatched a grand scheme to write a boxed campaign with a megadungeon, a small hexcrawl, and a bespoke ruleset in a kind of "The Hobbit meets Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay," "what if you replaced Smaug with Chernobog" thing called "Orcmont". I wrote a bunch of stuff for it before realizing that A) I'd bitten off way more than I could chew, and B) I was adding very little original material to my sources. Bits and pieces are still pretty good (although you'd certainly hope so, since the google doc is over 100 pages long), and a lot of the work that I've done since has owed a creative debt to Orcmont.
Maybe I'll revive it in some form one day, who knows! While these rules are mostly me clambering onto the shoulders of giants, there are a few minor innovations and ideas that I like:
- The sigil rules are pretty fun. You can make a ward or magic item by casting a spell as a sigil, but you can only ever have one at a time. For example, Josh had the great idea of letting the caster choose who the victim of a Charm Person is charmed by, so it can be a love spell. Using the sigil rules, you can also make a love potion.
- Making Blessing work like Glinda the Good's kiss is pretty cute.
- I combined Josh's Animate Object and Command spells, which feels resonant to me. They are both in a sense Words of Command.
- The table of non-magical counterspells for lifting curses is neat.
- While unnecessarily clunky in implementation, this marks my first attempt to combine the Light spell with a Turn Undead effect. To be honest, I think they should be the same thing in any setting where the cleric isn't warding vampires off with a cross. Everybody's always trying to rework or drop the cleric because "adventuring priest" is a fairly specific archetype, and the best way to do that in my opinion is to just hand their tool set to the wizard. Gandalf holds a demon at bay and Ged banishes shadows with magelight: why not do the same in your game?
- Wizards should also be able to turn into animals.
- While my Speaking spell is lifted almost word-for-word from Josh's Give Voice, I do think that I wrote a nice line expanding on how to give the target of the spell a thematically appropriate personality.
