Day 4 of the #CharacterCreationChallenge has me going back to my roots with some Old School Essentials. Descending Armor Class and THAC0 FTW!

Talamund of Lys is a cleric of lawful righteousness (deity to be determined by the world he eventually inhabits). I’m thinking more like the Whitecloaks from the Wheel of Time: very self-righteous, but not necessarily well-liked. This fits his low Charisma stats.

Talamund takes his beliefs directly to those who most need it – the chaotic, the undead, the vile – and delivers his sermons with a warhammer to make sure they get the (blunt) point.

Old School Essentials

As intended, this RPG reminds me of the game I grew up with. In the base rules there are only four classes (cleric, fighter, magic-user, and thief) and, although demi-humans are mentioned, they’re in supplemental books. For this effort I stuck with the Basic Rules, making Talamund a human cleric of Law.

Yeah, for alignment, there’s only Law, Chaos, and Neutral – no requirements for good and evil, though law is represented as good and chaos as evil. I know some who would disagree.

I also stuck with the old school way of rolling stats: 3d6, in order. Fortunately, I rolled really well. I then used the adjustment option to reduce STR and INT by two each and applied the resulting two points to my WIS to get it up to 16.

I also rolled well for starting gold, getting 120 GP to start and equip him with some decent chain mail and a shield. Technically, I did have enough god to go full plate, but that really didn’t match my concept. If I ever get to play him, maybe I’ll reverse that decision.

With so many modern (and commercially successful) RPGs offering dozens of classes and races supporting hundreds of combinations, I find it refreshing to work with a limited palette. There’s a time and a place for complexity – and THAC0 still seems unnecessarily complex – but simplicity of design can be nice to focus on the game and how it’s played.