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.

One point of comparison often brought up in discussion about Dungeons and Dragons in relation to other Fantasy roleplaying games is of course D&Ds magic system. It is one of the more unique aspects of the game that often is one of the first things shed off or replaced when someone makes a heartbreaker or some contrary system, but why? There is a great many reasons for why, some good, some bad, often the complaints are aimed from a position of ignorance to to exactly what is D&D’s magic system.