HMS APPOLYON PLAYERS GUIDE PART 1 - Combat and Exploration

It's perhaps long overdue, and really this document has been sitting about, mostly edited, mostly complete for some time now.  I've finally decided to release it and hopefully others will find it useful.  In addition to being the combat and exploration rules I've used extensively for my last campaign of HMS APPOLYON, it's a set of fairly well tested rules that I've used in modified form for other games.

A LINK TO THE GUIDE

From the Introduction to this ruleset:

H.M.S. APOLLYON

Player Manual Part I
COMBAT AND EXPLORATION

I never set out to write a retro-clone, only my own esoteric setting material, but HMS Apollyon has turned into a retro-clone of sorts – specifically a sort of homage to the earliest editions of Dungeons and Dragons.  I have a copy of the “Whitebox”, the later “collectors’ edition” that I bought long ago in my youth, but I never really read it with a critical eye until playing in Brendan S.’s Pahvelorn game on Google+.  Most of the basic rules and mechanics here are pulled or interpreted from the “Whitebox” and the “Little Brown Books” it contains, but they are more the product of other’s work and games – Nick W., Ramanan S. and most of all Brendan S., as well as the players who have stuck with the setting as it has contorted and evolved, especially Chris H. and Eric B.

I have tried to keep my rules concise, but rather than just offer another set of retro-clone rules I want to provide my reasoning for why I have adopted them.  You may notice small text boxes below some of the rules, and in these I have tried to justify why I am using a rule and what I hope to accomplish with it.  It’s my belief that while setting is largely formed by evocative description, NPC interaction and collaborative storytelling, that rules are still important as they can destroy or support a setting’s tone.  I shy away from too many player-facing mechanics and try to emphasize “player skill” over “character skill” but mechanics do help make a setting, especially combat mechanics which largely set the game pace, character turnover (lethality) and how important central is to the game.

The intent of the HMS Apollyon setting is to provide players an exploration game in a setting where life is cheap, the world cruel, and combat against the denizens of the haunted hull a desperate, not altogether wise gamble. These combat rules are written with this goal in mind.  The rules were slowly developed and modified through play and thus are esoteric as opposed to systematized.  While systematized rules have an intuitive appeal, I have found that the effort to fit everything into a structured rule set rather than a collection of smaller subsystems or individual rules tends to stifle the sort of “rulings not rules” mindset that early Dungeons and Dragons fosters as well as discouraging the individualized house rules that are necessary to fill gaps in any rule system in a comprehensible manner that doesn’t rely on metagaming or “build science” more appropriate to war games.