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Into The Odd

I think I have talked about Chris McDowall’s Into the Odd on Stargazer’s World already. It’s a very cool fantasy game with horror and sci-fi elements that is reminiscent of OD&D.

But instead of focusing on combat and treasure it is all about exploration of strange places and weird magic no one understands.

Chris has run the game for me and a few others several times now and it already ranks as one of my favorite games. The tone of the game is different from most others I’ve played so far. While playing the game I never felt my character was safe. Behind every corner death could lurk – or something worse than that.

And the powerful arcana (Magic artifacts that provide spell-like abilities) my character wielded could as easily kill me as they helped me to overcome the weird obstables we encountered.

Into the Odd is a welcome change of pace, especially when you’re fed up with killing things and grabbing their loot. Chris recently created a nice PDF that contains the current draft of the rules and which also includes “The Iron Coral”. Enjoy!
Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team. In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games. Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.

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alex

Woah! How does that “Miss an attack, take damage” rule work in play? Do high-STR characters just dominate anyone within arm’s reach? It doesn’t mention this, but I assume that all attacks are automatically successful unless saved against?

That and the up-to-the-DM initiative could really make the combat feel much different than straight D&D, in a way that sounds appealing.

I also really like the Arcana rules.
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