My OSR Campaign

Since last fall I've been running an Old-School Essentials campaign at my FLGS. Here's the house rules and third-party books I use for it.

The roster of player characters and a brief summary of past adventures can be found here

The core of the game is OSE Advanced Fantasy, with most monsters coming from the excellent bestiary The Monster Overhaul. The terrain of the region was created with a mix of Welsh Piper's great system for filling out a hex map, stocked via An Echo Resounding, and is navigated via the procedures outlined in the Manual of Hexterity

Silver Standard

The game operates on the “silver standard,” where experience for treasure is 1 XP per silver piece of loot, but all treasure found is about 10% of the expected value for BX/OSE.

Character Creation

Players may choose the “classic seven” classes (Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric, Thief, Dwarf, Elf, and Halfling). Starting Equipment is randomly determined by the procedure in Carcass Crawler #2, and all characters must roll on B/X Blackrazor's Headgear Table.

“Arcane Casters” (MUs/Elves)

All MUs and Elves can cast Read Magic once per day for free, and begin play with both it and one spell of their choice in their spellbook. For spells learned via a mentor upon gaining levels, I've generally randomly selected three spells from among their spell list options at the level of the new spell slot.

Multiple spell lists from Advanced Fantasy have been consolidated into the Magic-User and Elf's repertoires, as follows:

Fighters

From the Adventurer, Conqueror, King System, fighters get a +1 bonus to weapon damage rolls, and can make cleave attacks when they kill something with a weapon attack. By ACKS's rules, the damage bonus goes up every couple levels, but I'm not sure if it's needed. I'll cross that bridge when I get there.

Fighters can also “prestige class” to become Rangers, Paladins, or Chaos Knights (chaotic antipaladins), should they meet any ability score and alignment prerequisites, be at minimum fourth level, and gain the approval of an appropriate organization in the fiction.

Halflings

Halflings have a reduced chance of getting lost during overland travel akin to the ranger.

Downtime

I use the procedures in Downtime in Zyan to great success. I run downtime periods in one week “downtime turns” to coincide with magic-users needing a week to learn new spells after gaining a level.

I've typically presented the party with one rumor from my stack of index cards with rumors on them each downtime.

Damage and Death

I use the popular Shields Shall Be Sundered (break your shield to negate an incoming hit) rule and the Save or Die! system by The Dwarf Died Again.

In the exploration turn spent recovering from combat, any injured character can roll a d4 and regain that many hit points, up to a maximum of the amount of damage taken during the combat. I think this came from something Judge's Guild published but I have no idea what.

Inventory

My group has landed on Arnold K's Triple X Depletion and inventory slot system.