I've heard good things about Blood & Treasure and I'm intrigued. It sounds like D&D3 simplified, which sounds cool. What can you tell me?

It's pretty much old school D&D at its core. Somewhere between AD&D and OD&D with Greyhawk. (attack progression is closer to AD&D, hit points are closer to OD&D)

But it uses ascending AC, base to hit bonus, and the 3 save system (Reflex, Will, Fortitude) and clerics get 9 levels of magic (plus 0 level spells). Which frankly is something so obvious I don't understand why no one had done it before.

He also ties the skill system into the save system. Basically if you want to use a skill, you make a saving throw (you have better chances than pure d20).

Like a 1st level Thief wants to pick a lock, he uses his reflex save.

This sounds a bit crazy, but it really makes sense because in practice, you always just increased your class skills anyway, so why not have them automatically go up (along with the save)? And since it doesn't go up as dramatically (basically 10 points over 20 levels instead of 20 per 20 levels), you don't have the crazy difficulty inflation where DCs have to keep getting higher to challenge PCs.

The catch (and my main complaint) is he reversed the saves back to the old school, descending format. (I just reversed them back)

I'm also not crazy about some of the class conversions. For instance, only the Fighter gets multiple attacks, up to 4 of them a round, while the Ranger and Paladin get stuck with 1 (though occasionally they can do double damage). But at low levels its fine, how may people really get past 10th level when this shows up?

JeremyR is right.

As I said elsewhere on this board, Blood & Treasure is a "Rosetta Stone" for the different editions of D&D, the modular approach that D&D Next announced to be. Blood & Treasure is a clone of OD&D, AD&D, and a bit of D&D3, taking "a little bit of everything from the first 3 editions" but at the same time being playable as a clone of each single edition.
It's three clones in one book.

The one gripe I have with it is the small type font.

If I hadn't already invested so much work in my own S&W variant B&T and LotFP would have to do a battle royale for the spot of my favorite D&D clone.

EDIT: Didn't know it was by Stater. I stand corrected, and I'll look into it eventually.

So why haven't I heard of this before? Why hasn't it had the success of some of the retro-clones or other OSR-versions of D&D?

RPGPundit

Quote from: The Butcher;612294Sounds a lot like Castles & Crusades.

You know, maybe I should just format my C&C variant, give it an Ampersand & Alliteration type name, and publish it.

Not really.

John Stater is one of the most prolific writers/designers the OSR has. B&T is not his first D&D/S&W clone, and each and every one of them has, or is, its own thing.
I greatly prefer Blood & Treasure and Pars Fortuna to C&C. (And I was such a big C&C fan before that I hunted down the rare C&C White Box edition.)

Quote from: RPGPundit;612579So why haven't I heard of this before? Why hasn't it had the success of some of the retro-clones or other OSR-versions of D&D?

I honestly don't know.
Nearly all of John Stater's releases are pretty much "under the radar". He is best known for his OSR fanzine, NOD (one issue ever two months, 18th issue in production, the only fanzine with a schedule), and his blog The Land of Nod on which he churns out gameable material (new classes, spells, monsters, NPCs) like there is no tomorrow. Just from the last few days (not counting two holiday-themed posts):

• Fighter Moves - a Feat Hack
• Adventuring in the Himyarite Kingdom
• The Vigilante [New Class]
• Demi-Humans Inspired by the Norse Mythos

He did previews of Blood & Treasure there as well and let his readers have a say in layout matters.

Even you know some of his stuff -- there was a discussion here about the OSR ever doing fantasy clones instead of something new and Stater's super hero game, Mystery Men, came up as a counter example. I seem to remember that you didn't like the idea of modeling super powers after AD&D spells as this still counted as adapting the old stuff too slavishly.

John Stater is the internet's best kept secret. He has more creativity in his little finger than the rest of us do in our entire bodies. But because he doesn't court the limelight and stir up controversy at the drop of a hat, he tends not to be noticed. It's a crying shame.

Quote from: noisms;612616He has more creativity in his little finger than the rest of us do in our entire bodies.

Not only that -- he has the discipline to put it to paper (or computer). He's not wasting his time on forums. That's one reason why he isn't noticed.

Another one is his artistic vision. He doesn't ape the old school aesthetic. This doesn't scream "OD&D clone / S&W variant":



He prefers art that has a more 90's flavour, and is more comic book or cartoon like:



(This is an actual page from Blood & Treasure.)

EDIT:

I just found a page full of pregens for Blood & Treasure.

Spoiler

Will have to check it out, the man churns out an insane amount of awesome content, so much that it's a bit overwhelming for me. Some time I'll have to get around to doing a thorough read-through of all of his NOD stuff.

Quote from: RPGPundit;612579So why haven't I heard of this before? Why hasn't it had the success of some of the retro-clones or other OSR-versions of D&D?

RPGPundit

In addition to the other reasons mentioned, it has only been out for a few months.

awesome stuff, thanks for the head's up on this, guys

I might spend some of my Christmas money on a hardcover. Looks great.

As far as why you hadn't heard about this earlier, everyone's covered it pretty well - it's new etc.

I bought a hardcover copy of Blood & Treasure Complete along with Lords of Olympus, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Adventurer Conqueror King earlier this semester, and Blood & Treasure looks like what I had been looking for as a mostly old school system which still allows players a little customization. My preference runs to BX or BECMI as D&D rule systems, and this is a pretty good combination of that type of thing with minor AD&D additions (classes and races) and some minimal 3.X customization. (A big reason is that I want to use E6 which doesn't work so well with BX.)

The way skills work is by using target numbers of 18, 15, or a saving throw value, depending on the level of training someone has, which is a much easier way to do things. I ended up liking the saving throws as DCs rather than bonuses as it seems to end the hassle of continually escalating DCs as well. Also it includes old school style minimal write ups of even newer edition monsters, if you have need of anything from post 3.X D&D.

I will probably still tinker with it and add pieces of other things but so far it comes closest of anything I'd seen to what I was looking for.

And as for the Land of NOD blog, he puts out tons of stuff.  Probably only Zak S of Playing D&D with Porn Stars comes close to the sheer volume of usable ideas (at least in current output volume). His NOD magazine has two free PDFs available on lulu if you want to check them out. Both have lots of usable things in them as I am sure do all the other issues.

Welcome Warlord Kro!

Thanks!