The Long Stairs with Basic Fantasy RPG (Intro)

 Previous on the blog I discussed doing a solo play where modern soldiers have to clear a fantasy roleplaying style dungeon using Basic Fantasy Roleplaying and Socratic Dungeon's modern firearms rules. This post will finish laying out how I will tackle this project and my next one will cover the first session. I am considering recording the sessions but am on the fence, let me know what you think. 

This is not an original concept I came up with all by myself. The idea of a modern crossover with fantasy goes back to at least Mark Twain's 1889 novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and I don't doubt the idea predates that classic tale. Closer iterations to what I am conceiving are Mike Grell's 1975 comic book creation Travis Morgan The Warlord, the 1977 novel The Doomfarers of Coramonde by Brian Daley, the AD&D 1E DMG's sections on crossovers with Boot Hill & Gamma World, the Tunnels & Trolls crossover with modern weapons called Tunnels & Thompsons that lead to the Mercenaries, Spies, and Private Eyes roleplaying game, the 1980 game Valkenburg Castle which has a variant for WW2 soldiers to clear the castle, the 1987 horror/comedy film House II: The Second Story, the 1991 roleplaying game Machineguns & Magic by William L. McCord Jr., and of course the ongoing discussion on roleplaying forums about The Long Stairs where hole(s) to a dimension with fantasy style dungeons is opened in the modern world. I first saw the discussion posted by Bailywolf on RPGnet but it has also been discussed other places such as The RPG PUB which is my preferred RPG forum for discussing all manner of games as opposed to forums for specific rulesets. 

So you may ask why I am not using one of those rule sets or Palladium Books' roleplaying game Rifts which seems custom made for this? Well I like the Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game community, I think it is a solid enough set of rules for what I want to do and I really liked the modern firearms rules that Socratic Dungeon posted, since they are nominally compatible with Basic Fantasy RPG I decided to give it a shot. I do have some reservations that I will outline below but we'll play a few sessions and see how things actually work in play.

I want to incorporate surprise and shock, the soldiers have never seen anything like the monsters they will be encountering and the chance of them breaking or freezing is very understandable. I like to consider Charisma force of personality so I will be doing a simple ability check (BFRPG 4th Edition, RC140, page 189) against Charisma for those sort of fear checks. I am also interested in a longer term sanity mechanic that would be a slower burn on how survivors and those going on repeat missions cope with the horrors but I haven't decided how I will handle that quite yet. It also isn't needed for the first few sessions as I fiddle with rules and decide if this concept is worth pursuing in a longer term game. 

I have a reservation about the incorporation of modern firearms in the Basic Fantasy combat rules because even the Socratic Dungeon's rules are widely unrealistic regarding rate of fire. Modern weapons with a realistic rate of aimed fire would overwhelm the system. If we look at the US Army's TC 3-22.9 Rifle and Carbine Change 1 dated January 2017 we see that "Rapid Semiautomatic fire is approximately 45 rounds per minute. It is typically used for multiple targets or when the soldier is within 300 meters of the threat." Now that is a conservative one aimed shot every second and a half, that would be approximately 7 aimed shots each Basic Fantasy RPG combat round. That isn't even considering burst or fully automatic fire and to be honest it is a pretty conservative figure. A commonly quoted rate of aimed fire for the M1 Garand is 40 to 50 rounds a minute. That is telling when you consider the M1 has more recoil and only uses 8 round en bloc clips compared to the 30 round magazines of the M4 carbine. The bolt action rifles used in WWII are slower but not by much, an average rate of 28 rounds a minute for the British Enfield, no doubt due to the 10 round magazine it used, and 15 rounds a minute for the German Mauser. As you can see General Patton's comment that the M1 was "the greatest battle implement ever devised" wasn't unwarranted, it gave the American troops a great advantage in firepower during the war. I am initially going to keep with Socratic Dungeon's rules, one extra attack per combat round so most characters will have two shots every ten seconds, but I will probably try an encounter or two with realistic rates of fire which I expect will be pretty devastating.

The other reservation I have is with healing and with modern medicine. Modern battlefield medicine doesn't fix you like magical healing does. It stabilizes and keeps things from getting worse until you get to an aid station or combat hospital. In TSR style fantasy roleplaying games, like Basic Fantasy RPG, characters don't normally have progressive negatives as they get wounded. If there were negatives based on the percentage of hit points of damage taken I would have magic healing remove the negatives when the hit points were healed but modern medicine would not remove the negatives, they would have to be recovered over time. This is something to address on a different day but I wanted to mention it as a thing I am thinking about.

I will be creating one US Army light infantry fire squad circa 1992 and they will be thrust into Stefan Poag's SP1 The Endless Tunnels of Enlandin. You can find the adventure for free on the Basic Fantasy RPG downloads page or buy a print copy from Lulu or Amazon. There will be full spoilers for that adventure and I will mention that at the top of every post those spoilers appear in. I think all that is left is for me to create characters. My plan is to just stat them up as fighters. The squad is comprised of 

• The squad leader, level 4, M16A2
• Alpha Fire Team 
• team leader, level 3, M16A2
• automatic rifleman, level 2, M249 squad automatic weapon
• grenadier, level 2, M16A2 w/M203 40mm grenade launcher 
• rifleman, level 1, M16A2

• Bravo Fire Team
• team leader, level 3, M16A2
• automatic rifleman, level 2, M249 squad automatic weapon
• grenadier, level 2, M16A2 w/M203 40mm grenade launcher
• rifleman, level 1, M16A2

Basic load is 7 30 round magazines for the M16A2s, 5 200 round belts for the M249s, 36 40mm high explosive grenades for the M203s. Each soldier will also have a bayonet and 2 hand grenades.  

I rolled attributes but I will do so using 2d6+6 for the physical attributes as modern soldiers tend to be better fed and have better exercise routines than I would expect of a fantasy adventurer. Yes, you often come out of the army broken but we won't worry about that for the purpose of these initial sessions. As you can see using 2d6+6 didn't help much, here is what the squad looks like. In the AB (Attack Bonus) box the first number is melee based on strength and the second is ranged based on dexterity. The order of the attributes are strength, intelligence, wisdom, dexterity, constitution, charisma. The squad has some unwise soldiers which feels true thinking back on my time in the Army... 

See you in two weeks with the first report. Until next time be excellent to each other!