“In all of my universe I have seen no law of nature, unchanging and inexorable. This universe presents only changing relationships which are sometimes seen as laws by short-lived awareness. These fleshy sensoria which we call self are ephemera withering in the blaze of infinity, fleetingly aware of temporary conditions which confine our activities and change as our activities change. If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.

The troll shambled closer. He was perhaps eight feet tall, perhaps more. His forward stoop, with arms dangling past thick claw-footed legs to the ground, made it hard to tell. The hairless green skin moved upon his body. His head was a gash of a mouth, a yard-long nose, and two eyes which were black pools, without pupil or white, eyes which drank the feeble torchlight and never gave back a gleam.

This is going to be a short and to the point mechanical article about my homebrew redesign of vampires in Basic Fantasy. As well, because Halloween is coming up I thought I’d cover a couple monsters and give them some hefty overhauls. In standard Basic Fantasy, vampires are an extremely dangerous foe to fight, having access to Level draining and being immune to all non-magical weapons. This makes them very deadly but somewhat one note, they are what some might call a trick monster, they are nasty to fight unless you know their weakness or singular trick they do.

Supernatural is a dangerous and difficult word in any of its senses, looser or stricter. But to fairies it can hardly be applied, unless super is taken merely as a superlative prefix. For it is man who is, in contrast to fairies, supernatural (and often of diminutive stature); whereas they are natural, far more natural than he. Such is their doom. The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil’s tithe.

“An idiot admires complexity, a genius admires simplicity,” Terry Davis, Creator of Temple OS. This article more exists for the sake of completeness and a bit more perspective on my introduction to the OSR. My conversion from the 5th edition D&D to Old school D&D was a long, yet remarkably simple one. It involved very little convincing and at the same time very hard fought internalization. We forgo doing things which we objectively known are better or more efficient because we think the effort expended to make that change is costly.