Modern Firearm Rules for OSR Games

Today I want to give a shout out to someone else's blog, Socratic Dungeon. 

There are a mix of interesting posts over there for a game the author is working on called Be Not Afraid and the latest one at time of this post is called Firearms Rules Complendium, it is a collection of the modern firearms rules they have been working on. Although they are set up for their game they are easily converted to any OSR game and I have to admit I really like them! 

The way bursts and autofire is handled is pretty neat and I haven't seen it done that way before. Feel free to let me know in the comments how it is old hat in a game I missed but it is new to me. Basically the damage dice explode and when you fire short or long bursts they explode on multiple numbers. So normally a d6 explodes on a 6 but a three round burst explodes on a 5 or 6 and if you fire a long burst at a target that d6 explodes on a 4, 5 or 6. Not only is this really easy it is also really interesting because the lighter recoiling rounds that use smaller damage dice will explode more often which will result in more hits. It is easier to control a .22 rimfire in fully automatic than a 7.62 Nato battle rifle so this actually makes sense. 

There are also rules for suppressive fire, various accessories, body armor, critical hits and system shock. I plan to use these in a solo Basic Fantasy RPG game in the near future. 

That solo game will see a group of modern soldiers stumble onto a portal that takes them to a fantasy dungeon. This has been explored in numerous ways in the past, from Brian Daley's novel The Doomfarers of Coramonde in 1977 to the Tunnels & Thompsons variant of Tunnels & Trolls that developed into Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes to Don Greer and Rob Stern's Down in the Dungeon published by Squadron/Signal Productions in 1981 to William McCord's Machineguns & Magic RPG (still available from Precis Intermedia) to the more recent The Long Stair thread on various RPG forums. 

I will give some sessions reports here on the blog but I am not planning on recording sessions blow by blow, they are meant to be fun as opposed to work you know! That said there are a couple things I will be adding to BFRPG for the game. Since we have modern soldiers encountering D&D type monsters I think it will be sensible to add some fear and sanity mechanics. I don't want to do anything too granular but want to capture the idea of being freaked out when reasonable people encounter some very unreasonable things. I also want to have a basic sanity mechanic for long term effects.

I have some thoughts on how to do that. For fear checks I am thinking a simple ability check (BFRPG 4th Edition, RC140, page 189) against Charisma as I view Charisma as force of personality and willpower. I know willpower is considered part of Wisdom but I am not a fan of that so I will be house ruling it to Charisma. I plan to use the degree of failure, or success, to determine what happens. Watch a future post for a chart to cover that and for how I will be handling sanity in the game.  

If you have a simple fear or sanity system you would like to recommend please tell me about it in the comments.

Anyhow check out the Socratic Dungeon, there are a number of cool posts on that site, and I will be back in two weeks if not sooner.