HALO is OSR

search your feelings, you know this to be true

Think about it. Master Chief has limited inventory slots (two for guns, two for grenades) designed to force the player into making interesting choices and tradeoffs. If you pick up a powerful but overly specialized weapon like a sniper rifle, gravity hammer, or rocket launcher then you'll be less flexible in situations that those weapons don't excel in, but if you keep to your solid foursquare meat-and-potatoes loadout of battle rifle and shotgun/pistol you may find yourself outgunned or outranged in a key moment. Sometimes you'll just run out of ammo for the better weapons and need to scrape by on readily available trash-tier equipment like the needler until you can scrounge something better, a design philosophy meant to generate tense moments and force the player out of entrenched habits (or learn why the plasma pistol is actually good). 

Halo also uses a two-track HP system with a large pool of easily regenerating ablative HP and a smaller one representing real injuries, which requires a limited resource to restore. The Chief spends a lot of time exploring ancient ruins, interrupting destructive alien rituals, and fighting eldritch tomb-spawned horrors. 

Plus, you can honk the little horn on the mongoose ATV.

Down/Out/Dead: A Death & Dismemberment Variant

​D&D has struggled to find a good answer for "what happens when my character hits 0 HP?" The original answer "you die" leads to a lot of character deaths at 1st level, and eliminates a lot of potential drama with trying to recover/defend a downed and wounded ally, being wounded and captured, etc., so even groups who are comfortable with a high-lethality game have looked for alternatives. Conversely, many of the common alternatives, such as unconsciousness at 0 HP and death at -10 or 5th edition's death saves make the characters too resilient: character death is technically possible, but you need to work pretty hard to make it happen.

Various alternatives exist: a single saving throw at 0 HP is one perfectly good option. Two-tier HP systems, where characters have a lot of ablative HP (commonly called something like Grit, Sweat, etc.) and a small amount of "real" HP representing physical damage (Flesh, Blood, etc.), with death at 0 real HP, is another good one. Bucklers & Backswords rolls the chance of death into weapon type, which interacts nicely with Elizabethan surgery – in a rapier duel it's quite probably for the winner to end up bleeding out from a mortal wound like Inigo Montoya. Other games have adapted some technology from The One Ring and/or various PbtA-derived systems, where "Wounded" is a condition you can get and "Dying" occurs if you're Wounded twice. The most popular alternative in OSR games however is probably the Death & Dismemberment table.

Night-Haunted Hogwarts: End-of-Session Procedure & Character Advancement

End-of-Session Procedure & Character Advancement

When the party finishes their expedition and returns to town, run through the following procedure:

1. Clear all injuries and conditions.

2. Check to see if anyone meets the requirements to advance to the next Rank.

3. Go through the House Points checklist and distribute Points. When awarding House Points the Referee should announce the awards in a dramatic voice.

 

Designing Hogwarts Characters: My Process (and how to use it to make your own)

The possibility seems remote, but imagine, Dear Reader, that find yourself playing a game of Night-Haunted Hogwarts. Further imagine that none of the 24 clan options suits your purposes - perhaps you have a favorite character that I failed to include (cutting it down to a d6 roll's worth for each house left many on the table), you don't like my interpretation of one of the existing ones, or you really want to play something off the beaten path like a foreign wizard, goblin, centaur, or elf. What to do? 

In this post I'll walk through my process and see if we can distill that into some general principles that we can use as a guide for making your own material in this setting.

As I've discovered, writing tie-in material for an established setting you have to fill in a lot of blanks left by the text. A roleplaying game needs different things than a series of boarding school mystery novels does, for example. At the same time, your work needs to feel like it belongs or you lose the benefits of using the established setting in the first place. Writing tie-in material, therefore, is mostly a process of extrapolation - you're trying to surprise your audience with a sense of familiarity. In practice this mostly consists of looking at specific examples from the text and expanding outward to make a generalized type. These can be direct (Neville Longbottom killed one specific snake one time --> his descendants are famous dragonslayers and serpent-hunters) or indirect (a mirror in the Leaky Cauldron gives Harry sarcastic advice on his appearance --> mundane objects in Harry Potter world can have funny personalities that relate in some way to what they do --> the Crabbe's magical caltrops chortle to themselves whenever they think they're about to stick someone). Sometimes they are made from the thinnest of thin strands (house-elf could be said to imply other kinds of elf: by looking at house-elves what can we interpret as qualities of "elfishness" in Harry Potter and how can we apply them to different contexts).

Slytherin: Clan Snape

 Snape

"always"

Sigil: the lily and doe, silver on black

Skills: Potions (expert) | Curses (basic) | Herbology (basic) | Stealth (basic)

+1 Courage

The Snapes are a small and rather poor clan, but all know them as bitter enemies of the One Enemy - indeed, their family words "always" are said to be a reference to how long the Snapes intend to oppose Him. Their seat is at Spinner’s End, where they own a watermill built into the brick ruins of an old pre-war muggle mechanical one.

Slytherin: Clan Slughorn

 Slughorn

"family, duty, honor"

Sigil: the horn and sun, gold on plum

Skills: Potions (experted) | Transfiguration (advanced) | Courtesy (basic) | Herbology (basic)

A wealthy, well-liked, handsome, and well-connected family, the Slughorns are related to most prominent wizarding families by bonds of blood or business. Though the Slughorns fight more wars with quill and ink than with wand or blade, clan Slughorn has always known that there can be no rapprochement with He Who Must Not Be Named.

Slytherin: Clan Moody

 Moody

"constant vigilance"

expect the unexpected!

Sigil: the eye and claw, green and gold on red

Skills: Curses (expert) | Potions (advanced) | Transfiguration (basic) | Stealth (basic)

The Moodies have long studied the arts of the Enemy in order to better combat them. They have a reputation for hardness, even cruelty, but it is universally acknowledged that their courage and conviction is second to none. The family is small, grim, and strict, with few dependents, but their dim halls are full of the honors and battle-trophies won by generations of Moodies.