I can't find a direct statement or explanation in the actual text, but I'm fairly sure it's intended to follow the original AD&D rules (since the system is largely AD&D based), in which a standard 1st level Magician knows 3 spells, but can only memorize one of them at a time and forgets it when the spell is cast.  The one memorized spell is the only one that's ready for use.

If he gets a bonus spell for high Intelligence, then he can memorize two of his three spells (or the same one twice) at a time.  The non-memorized spell(s) would not be available to cast, other than by casting from a scroll or directly from his spellbook.

Blackadder23 wrote:

I thought your original explanation for why they couldn't use the same spells (different magical languages) was perfectly reasonable.

 
If that's the rationale, then perhaps implement a method for characters to learn another magical language, thus allowing them to learn shared spells from the other class?

francisca wrote:

It's easy.  Don't use all the magic.

 
If only it were that easy.  :D

When people start talking about excessive magic in D&D-type games, they usually either go straight for "excessive numbers of magic items" or "fireball-type spells" and, yeah, both of those are easy to get rid of.

But then there's healing magic.

D&D and its clones are heavily based on characters being able to be beaten down and bounce back repeatedly, in rapid succession, often within the span of a single combat.  If you take away clerical healing spells and barrels of healing potions, characters are no longer able to do that, instead taking days, weeks, or even months to recover from their injuries after combat.  This, in turn, requires significant changes to adventure design to compensate for the radically-reduced durability of the PCs.  Which is a good deal more trouble than just saying "this magic doesn't exist".

Zombieman wrote:

one critical hit or fall 

 
Isn't AS&SH one of the branches of D&D where, if a character fails a saving throw, then anything they're carrying has to make a saving throw as well?

Just sayin'...

I've always split the XP for treasure evenly, even if the treasure itself is divided unevenly.  Partly because everyone participated (at least relatively) equally in retrieving it, but mostly because I don't like the metagaming of "We got 1200gp of loot and Bob needs 1000 XP to level, so Bob gets 1000gp and the rest of us will share the other 200gp."

If the fighter sells the sword, then I would give no magic item XP for the sword, but the party would get the standard 1 XP per gp for the sale price.

ThornPlutonius wrote:

Practically speaking, you can make Hyperborea anything that you want it to be.  The rules share Ghul's Hyperborea.  I'm considering defining it as having more heat and moisture close to the edge of the "disc" and dry cold closer to the central peak.

I've been thinking along similar lines, particularly given that the points of the hexagon are defined as 0 degrees latitude and Mt. Vhuurmithadon as 90 degrees, implying that the edge is equatorial while the center is polar in Old Earth terms, but I'm curious both about how Ghul envisions it and what other GMs have done with it.

ThornPlutonius wrote:

(And to further my apostasy, I will be using RuneQuest 6 rules instead of Ghul's D20 variation.)

 (Don't tell Ghul, but that was actually the reason for my recent rereading of the gazetteer...  I've recently discovered RQ6 and was preparing to start a conversion of the Hyperborean setting.)

Chainsaw wrote:

Normal attack rate was 3/2 because of weapon mastery and then berserker rage doubled it to 5/2.

Minor correction:  3/2 => 5/2 is +1 attack per round, not doubling (which would have given you 3/1).

Blackadder23 wrote:

Melee is the berserker's job.  He's supposed to dominate it.  When a lock needs picked, or an eldritch inscription needs deciphered, or the party needs a path through impenetrable magical brambles... then it's someone else's turn to shine.  All you have to do is provide a variety of challenges.  If your game is really nothing but combat... well, then they should all play fighter classes, right?  So there'd be no problem.

These things take care of themselves in an Old School game, at least in my experience.

 
Exactly!

francisca wrote:

As you say, the rules in OD&D amount to stronghold building, not crop management, domain/kingdom building, etc...

 
Funny you should mention that...  At the moment, I'm in the process of going through Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign, which is all about his original Blackmoor campaign and how he ran it, including several of the rules he used.  Included among those rules are such things as:

- Annual rate of return on building farms and how that is affected by attacks on the farmers themselves.
- The number of trees per hex of wooded terrain, the number of logs required to build ships, and the rate of regrowth after you've turned some of those trees into logs.  (With an optional rule for cutting the trees down in advance and aging the logs before using them, in order to produce longer-lived ships.)

It was clearly a domain/kingdom-level game, with crop-management-like subsystems in place.

In your next post you said that Blackmoor-the-supplement contained nothing in the way of domain-level rules (I've never seen it myself, so I wouldn't know), but they were definitely a part of Blackmoor-the-campaign.

Which is not meant as an assertion that "Dave and Gary did this, so we must also do it", but merely to point out that "crop management, domain/kingdom building, etc..." were part of the earliest games played using what we now know as OD&D, even if the rules for those activities were never codified as a part of the OD&D rules as published.  (Why weren't they included?  My general impression from FFC is that the information it contains is essentially the history and house rules from Arneson's game, which leads me to assume that domain-level rules were unique to each early DM/Judge, in which case there would be no "standard" set of rules to publish.  But I could very easily be wrong in that conclusion.)

NAJones wrote:

You can always change the way magic items are "identified" if you want to maintain a sense of mystery. Don't let all of the properties of an item be revealed with a spell, make some of the properties hidden that only emerge through use, etc.

 
Indeed.

A few weeks ago, my players got their hands on a set of 10 magical crossbow bolts.  Analysis determined that they would "burst into flame" on impact.  (I'm sure all the GMs out there already know where this is headed...)

The following week, they got into a tough fight with a couple of trolls, so the crossbow specialist figured, "fire works on trolls" and fired one of those bolts into the melee.  The resulting fireball incapacitated half of the henchmen and outright killed all 13 of the party's mercenary pikemen.

They haven't found any more magic items since then, but they certainly sound like they'll be a bit more careful when they do...

Blackadder23 wrote:

I should point out that "to hit" numbers in Old School games are not really meant to be calculated on the fly or looked up on a table during play.  They're meant to be written on your sheet at character creation (and altered whenever they change due to level gains).

I would argue that a table on your character sheet, even if if has only a single row, is still a table.

Blackadder23 wrote:

Modifiers are applied to the d20 roll, not the target number.  That doesn't change.  No matter how fast someone can calculate a hit number, it won't be faster than just reading it off their character sheet - which is equally true no matter which way the AC numbers run.

If the AC is the hit number, then, yes, that's faster than reading it off their character sheet.  *roll d20* *apply modifiers*  "I rolled 15 and the monster is AC 13, so I hit."

Both table lookups and THAC0 insert an extra step (either a lookup or subtraction) to convert from "modified die roll" to "AC which is hit".  3e-style ascending AC removes that step entirely because the modified die roll and the AC which is hit are one and the same - roll a (modified) 12 and you hit AC 12; roll a 17 and you hit AC 17.