Dungeons The Dragoning 1.1

    So I guess the best way to kick off this blog is with a bit about Dungeons the Dragoning. It's likely that you already know what it is if you're here, but just in case you found your way here blind, Dungeons the Dragoning is a game that is essentially a mashup game that takes elements from quite a few places, mostly Dungeons and Dragons (2E, 3E, and 4E), Exalted, Seventh Sea, World of Darkness, Deadlands, and Dark Heresy. Not necessarily in that order.
    My original goal for DtD was essentially to just make a halfway decent game, enough that it could be used to play a recursive special session for a game (I'll get into that later - it's a long story). As time went on, I ended up putting a lot of work into making it the best game it could be, taking the best parts of many games and adding in my own bits and fluff to fill the gaps. It was a labor of love, and some parts of the rules went through a surprising number of revisions.
    Anyway, let's have a simple overview of the game.

For ten thousand years, the Lady of Pain has silently ruled the city of Sigil, master of the hub of the Portal network despite the petty wars of the gods. The city of Sigil is the largest metropolis in the Astral Sea, untold millions making sacrifices to sustain it and ensure the continued survival of their people in the face of a hostile universe. From hundreds of Crystal Spheres, teeming with the Clueless and monsters, refugees and oppressors alike come to find their place in a larger galaxy, to find treasure fame and fortune amongst the planes. Beset on all sides by foes of such malice it would sear a man's soul to know but a fraction of their blasphemies, only the strongest and most ruthless survive. Foes from within and without seek to overthrow the Lady's rule, throwing themselves on the Throne of Blades in vain efforts to destroy in a moment the eons of her rule. The Great Devourer comes from the Far Realm beyond the Astral Sea, driven to consume all before it and Ork savages surge from their barbaric empires to pillage and slaughter. The vengeful Eldarin cite prophetic visions as they raid and destroy even their own cousins, and an ancient evil arises from tombs sealed at the dawn of creation.

In the grim darkness of the great wheel, there is only war.

    DtD uses the "Roll and Keep" system from 7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings. Rolls are expressed as XkY, where you roll dice equal to X and keep the best Y of those and add them together. Most rolls are a skill and a characteristic, where you roll dice equal to your dots in the skill and characteristic, then keep dice equal to your characteristic. For example, you might roll Athletics and Dexterity. With Athletics 4 and Dexterity 3, you'd roll 7 dice (4+3) and keep 3 dice. It's a pretty simple system that lends itself to fairly stable results.

    The Skills and Characteristics will look familiar to anyone who knows World of Darkness. The names are changed a bit for the setting, and some skills are different, but it's not terribly out of line. They get rated from 0-5 (6 in some really extraordinary circumstances).

    You've got magic, swordsmanship, and skills. Magic is what you'd expect, casting spells. No spell slots or anything, just roll against the spell's TN to make it happen. If you're exerting your full power there's a chance of getting Perils of the Warp. Swordsmanship is, note, not just using a sword good. It's a system for building special attacks, learning new tricks and upgrades to build them with as you grow in power. Skils are the basic dots in your skills and the core of a character.

    Each character is built with a Race, a Template, and one or more Classes. Races are your character race (Ork, Human, etc). Templates are supernatural additions (Vampire, Atlantean, Daemonhost, etc). Classes determine what you can purchase with XP. You can switch to a new class (or take the next level in an existing class) once you've bought all the manditory upgrades in your current class.

    The setting is a mashup of Planescape and Spelljammer with 40k and a dabbling from everything else.

    Just in case I haven't scared you off yet, here's the download link: http://www.mediafire.com/?bq3bzc2o2n5ness - This goes to Version 1.1, and I'm already working on a new version with some extra proofreading and maybe even bookmarks.