Mail Room: Labyrinth Lord 2E PDF

I like Labyrinth Lord, and it is good to see them back for another edition. The OGL is gone from this version, and we have one of the originals back. The game is not a strict copy of the original rules; it adds a few new races and tweaks a few things, which is interesting. The game is finally getting its own identity and flavor. This is taking BX as a base and moving on from there, without feeling it needs to pull in 1E material. This is the new king of the BX starting point games, where the 1E stuff is not essential, and the game should feel more like a 1E base.

A shout-out needs to go to the extremely close Basic Fantasy, a BX clone that hits all the right notes for many, and it uses a modern ascending AC system while being free to download and play. I can see how many would say "juststick with this" instead of supporting yet another BX clone, since the market already has quite a few of them.

Where Dragonslayer does more of a BX and 1E mix, Labyrinth Lord keeps 1E out of the game and just does its own interpretation of a BX ruleset. Dragonslayer is a nice and solid alternative as a replacement for the old Labyrinth Lord Advanced Fantasy, where we started to see 1E monsters and classes enter the game. Dragonslayer uses the 1E hit point scale, with fighters being a d10 hit die instead of a d8.

Dragonslayer is a fantastic game, well worth supporting and playing, and this is the king of mixed BX and 1E content, where you have the stuff from 1E, but a simple BX framework to play with it all in.

If you do not want to go with the full complexity of an OSRIC or For Gold & Glory, and you want to keep the base experience simple, and you want the 1E additions, then Dragonslayer is the perfect game for you.

Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy (now out of print) did a near-perfect BX implementation with no changes. When you start to fold in Advanced Fantasy, you lose some of the elegance and simplicity, and some of the classes (fighter) need quite a few mods and optional rules from the Carcass Crawler zines to feel worth playing. I see how OSE, to some, feels all over the place and needs a bit of tweaking to become fun, and the extra material required keeps it from being a one-book game.

OSE is currently experiencing an identity crisis and needs to find its focus. The revision next year will sort things out, and they make a few more changes to Advanced Fantasy to pull in some of the material people want, and to up their game to become a great one-book game.

On that "one book game" scale, I would rank these as follows:

1. Dragonslayer
2. Basic Fantasy
3. Labyrinth Lord 2E
4. OSRIC and For Gold & Glory
5. Old School Essentials

On my personal preference scale? I am a fan of 2E, but Dragonslayer hits a lot of the right notes for me, too.

1. For Gold & Glory
2. Dragonslayer
3. OSRIC
4. Old School Essentials
5. Basic Fantasy
6. Labyrinth Lord 2E

On the "Does this game have bards?" scale, from no to yes, we get:

1. Dragonslayer
2. OSRIC
3. Labyrinth Lord 2E
4. Basic Fantasy
5. Old School Essentials
6. Shadowdark
7. For Gold & Glory

I bring up bards since the class feels like it has an identity crisis, especially in old-school games. In a classic dungeon crawl, where the party fights to keep quiet, what use is a class that makes the most noise? Even the base book of Shadowdark skips the bard. In newer games, there is a tendency for the class to be the default choice for players who want to be disruptive or don't care about the game, and there is a flippant nature to them that reduces the seriousness some tables desire in gameplay.

And I have played bards for decades and see this too, so I am not a hater, but someone who is generally concerned that the bard class has lost its way. I am not a hater, and I see the confusion and how some lean into this class to disrupt the game. Sometimes they are illusionists, other times healers, other times combat mages, and yet other times they feel like the "default town class," and nobody knows what role a bard fills.

As a result, you see a lot of old-school games drop the bard altogether, and even core-book Shadowdark does this. They do have it as an expansion class (as well as the ranger), but they do not feel like "core book" classes, and there is a reason they are not in the base book.

Design meets the focus of the game, and some classes get dropped since they are distractions to the core experience that the game tries to deliver.

So Labyrinth Lord 2E comes in as a BX+ game, rebuilding the basic game with a simple core but not feeling it needs to add any 1E content. It is closest to Basic Fantasy, which is a game very close to a modernized BX, but with strong ease-of-use features. Labyrinth Lord 2E adds new elements to the mix, so it is a fork of BX that maintains compatibility with BX. Some would want to stick with Basic Fantasy, Dragonslayer, or the 1E/2E clones over supporting another new BX game.

It is good to see an old friend return so strongly.