The Long Stairs with Basic Fantasy RPG (Part 1)

 Spoilers for Basic Fantasy RPG module SP1 The Endless Tunnels of Enlandin!

I finished my first session of my The Long Stairs experiment, see my 23 Feb 2025 post for more details, and it was interesting. The adventure started with the squad going through a portal somehow and finding themselves at what appeared to be an ancient ruined castle. They do not recognize where they are and are unable to raise anyone on the radio although. They do find some tracks, a mixture of adult size and slightly smaller tracks in what appear to be sandals as well as some claw prints that seem to be bipedal. There is also a set of stairs leading down. The squad leader decides to have the Bravo Fire Team set up security and sends the Alpha Fire Team down the stairs to investigate. 

The Alpha Team Leader goes first and manages to avoid stepping on the magically trapped stair at the bottom, he checks the corner and all appears quiet. He motions for the team to follow and the next one down steps on the stair causing a statue of a warrior at the bottom to loudly challenge them which unbeknownst to the soldier alerts the kobolds they have company. As the team moves down the hall they pass an illusionary wall the kobolds are behind waiting with short bows to ambush them. The soldiers are totally surprised but luckily on one of them is hit and the damage is minor. Sadly for the kobolds the illusionary wall doesn't protect them from the suppressive fire the SAW gunner lays down toward where the arrows came from and three of them are killed in that first round. Another set of kobolds charge out and attack the soldier but are quickly beaten back by the firepower of the M16s. The remaining kobolds run, a leader and four regular troops. When the dust settles all four soldiers had taken minor wounds and they had killed 10 kobolds. The team falls back to the surface where the squad leader pulls them back from the stairwell and sets up security with special emphasis on the stairs while the injured are given medical attention. 

The firearm rules at Socratic Dungeon worked well using the rate of fire from that site. I do think that rate of fire is too low but the troops would have been much deadlier with a more realistic rate of fire which would have been roughly three times what they had this session. Of course kobolds are about the weakest thing they are going to face so this is not a cake walk by any means. I will also have the squad be much more cautious on their next trip down the stairs. After applying the first aid kit rules, also from Socratic Dungeon, only the Alpha Fire Team Grenadier is still wounded and only by 2 points. Of greater concern is the 58 rounds they expended during the engagement. The squad is not hurting on ammunition yet but they have no source of resupply at the moment. 

All in all I am pleased with this experiment and am curious to see how they do when they hit tougher monsters, I expect some of the soldiers will be killed fairly quickly. I have decided that creatures only hurt by magical weapons will be immune to gunfire but will allow the grenades to damage anything that can be hurt by fire such as wights. Against something that can only be hurt by silver or magic, like a werewolf, the squads weapons will be useless. They better start looking for battlefield pickups or make some friends while they are down there! 

That's all for today, be excellent to each other!

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!