My inaugural post is a GLOG hack, because I am an overambitious fool. It’s based primarily on Skerples’ version of the GLOG.
The GLOG is great. It’s roll-under, the class system is simple and interesting, and character generation is quick and new player friendly. It has a great community already, despite being relatively young (it has its own G+ community, and it’s pretty popular on Chris McDowall’s discord server). Its greatest strength--and greatest weakness--is the fact that the best bits are spread across a dozen or two blogs. If you want to run the GLOG, you need to build it yourself, but once you have, you’ll be able to do it much more easily because it’s really yours.
My “edition” isn’t really a complete hack so much as it is the Character Generation instructions for the GLOG the way I run it. It’s meant to be printed out and used by the players at a physical table with me, personally, so a lot of stuff is unexplained. It also doesn’t have any setting information beyond the stuff implied by the race table, career table, and classes (medievalish fairy tale).
So here it is, for whatever it’s worth.
The GLOG: Trenchcoat Edition
Here’s a standalone character sheet and an explained character sheet, so you can print individual copies more easily.
If you print it, you should be able to take the four character sheets from the back and staple the rest together into a booklet so that the race table, career table, cleric words tables, wizard mechanics, and orthodox wizard school print as two page spreads.
Major Changes:
Cobbled together my own race table, mostly from Skerples’ list and Luke Thomson’s list.
Reduced James Young’s d200 Failed Medieval Careers to a d100.
Changed various stat calculations.
Included an “Expanded Class List,” which links to a list I will continue to update with new classes as I find them.
Players can get 6 class templates (by Level 8). It’s a bit more heroic than a max of 4, but it doesn’t come into play for a while. It’ll encourages early multiclassing, since everyone knows they’ll have to do it eventually.
Rewrote weapon rules. All of them use d6s, and the numbers work out on a mathematical level so that there are several viable combinations of weapons. There are also guns, featuring exploding damage.
Created my own Character Sheet, as well as an Explained version with notes and calculations written into every area.
Fighter
Starts with notches, gains Extra Attack Later
Thief
Added Second Story Work, which lets Thieves skip most climbing rolls, and Artificer, which lets them identify magic things like wizards do. This class is probably going to see some decently-sized changes in the next version; Always Prepared and Great Escape encourage Thieves to be more reckless than other classes instead of more cautious.
Cleric
My own custom class, built mostly off of Beloch Shrike’s Magic Words. Basically clerics roll randomly on tables of words to generate their own minor god, then cast spells using pairs of words. This class will see some changes, too, possibly an XP-for-converts ability and a consult-your-god ability in exchange for their current Identify ability (too much overlap with wizards).
Wizard
Mind spells can be cast as much as you want, paper spells can only be cast once per day (which, now that I understand it, is sort of the mechanical opposite of Vancian casting, I guess). It’s a bit more videogamey. Also condensed Arnold K’s Familiar Rules and bundled them with the class, then wrote up a default rule for “rituals” that can be expanded on-the-fly to build magic labs and invent spells.
So that’s the GLOG: Trenchcoat Edition. I might post more in depth about some of the changes I’ve made later, especially Clerics. I’m going to try to post once a week, alternating “RPG theory” and “gameable content,” but no promises.
The GLOG is great. It’s roll-under, the class system is simple and interesting, and character generation is quick and new player friendly. It has a great community already, despite being relatively young (it has its own G+ community, and it’s pretty popular on Chris McDowall’s discord server). Its greatest strength--and greatest weakness--is the fact that the best bits are spread across a dozen or two blogs. If you want to run the GLOG, you need to build it yourself, but once you have, you’ll be able to do it much more easily because it’s really yours.
My “edition” isn’t really a complete hack so much as it is the Character Generation instructions for the GLOG the way I run it. It’s meant to be printed out and used by the players at a physical table with me, personally, so a lot of stuff is unexplained. It also doesn’t have any setting information beyond the stuff implied by the race table, career table, and classes (medievalish fairy tale).
So here it is, for whatever it’s worth.
The GLOG: Trenchcoat Edition
Here’s a standalone character sheet and an explained character sheet, so you can print individual copies more easily.
If you print it, you should be able to take the four character sheets from the back and staple the rest together into a booklet so that the race table, career table, cleric words tables, wizard mechanics, and orthodox wizard school print as two page spreads.
Major Changes:
Cobbled together my own race table, mostly from Skerples’ list and Luke Thomson’s list.
Reduced James Young’s d200 Failed Medieval Careers to a d100.
Changed various stat calculations.
Included an “Expanded Class List,” which links to a list I will continue to update with new classes as I find them.
Players can get 6 class templates (by Level 8). It’s a bit more heroic than a max of 4, but it doesn’t come into play for a while. It’ll encourages early multiclassing, since everyone knows they’ll have to do it eventually.
Rewrote weapon rules. All of them use d6s, and the numbers work out on a mathematical level so that there are several viable combinations of weapons. There are also guns, featuring exploding damage.
Created my own Character Sheet, as well as an Explained version with notes and calculations written into every area.
Fighter
Starts with notches, gains Extra Attack Later
Thief
Added Second Story Work, which lets Thieves skip most climbing rolls, and Artificer, which lets them identify magic things like wizards do. This class is probably going to see some decently-sized changes in the next version; Always Prepared and Great Escape encourage Thieves to be more reckless than other classes instead of more cautious.
Cleric
My own custom class, built mostly off of Beloch Shrike’s Magic Words. Basically clerics roll randomly on tables of words to generate their own minor god, then cast spells using pairs of words. This class will see some changes, too, possibly an XP-for-converts ability and a consult-your-god ability in exchange for their current Identify ability (too much overlap with wizards).
Wizard
Mind spells can be cast as much as you want, paper spells can only be cast once per day (which, now that I understand it, is sort of the mechanical opposite of Vancian casting, I guess). It’s a bit more videogamey. Also condensed Arnold K’s Familiar Rules and bundled them with the class, then wrote up a default rule for “rituals” that can be expanded on-the-fly to build magic labs and invent spells.
So that’s the GLOG: Trenchcoat Edition. I might post more in depth about some of the changes I’ve made later, especially Clerics. I’m going to try to post once a week, alternating “RPG theory” and “gameable content,” but no promises.
