Switching to Barbarians of Lemuria

My new ruleset for Fantasy roleplaying.

I recently decided to change from using Blades & Black Magic as my fantasy gaming ruleset to Barbarians of Lemuria. My first love in roleplaying was The Fantasy Trip, so I really love that style of game. But… I think it is time to move on.

Why I Am Making The Change

The biggest reason I am making this change is because it is pretty obvious that Blades & Black Magic has become an orphan game. I want a game that is actively supported, with a real community. I have never really found that with Blades. I love the game, but I don’t see us fans getting anything more from the author.

I considered just going back to The Fantasy Trip, and talked it over with a good friend and gaming buddy. Still… I love the magic system in BoL, and would have to house rule it to bolt it on to TFT. I don’t mind house rules, but that is just not something I wanted to do right now.

And then I thought: why not just jump in the deep end and use BoL itself? It really does have the swords & sorcery feel that I wanted to do fantasy gaming with, and the rules can pretty much be used as-is.

Another thing: it is a 2d6 system. I already use the Quantum family from Stellagama Games for my SF gaming, so this was not a real stretch. The more I thought about it, the more it just seemed right.

What Do I Want?

Damn good question! I want a game that fits the way I want to play, has an active community and is at least somewhat under development or active support.

Like I mentioned, I think BoL fits my style of play, from mechanics to tone and feel. It is not what I would call rules light, but it is definitely not crunchy, either. I would call it “clean.”

The rules also are also very fast-playing. The game emphasized story and fast play, not bogging down in modifiers for every different action. That really works for me as a solo gamer.

BoL also has a fairly active community. There is a forum for players and the original developer shows up occasionally. It is not as active as say, the Steve Jackson forums, but it is a lot more than I had with Blades & Black Magic.

Finally, the game is still being supported. The rights were just sold to a new company, Ludospherik, who has published a new edition, the Mythic+ edition. I sprung for the print and PDF versions and was very impressed. The artwork is amazing, and really helps capture the feel of the game—much more than AI-generated crap or cartoonish drawings. They are also converting some of their French language adventures into English, so I have that to look forward to coming out.

What Next?

I have started working on my Sands of Sakhrat swords & sorcery kitchen sink campaign again, so I am converting the NPCs I have created there into the BoL format. I’m looking at how I planned to do magic in that setting, and how I can fit that into the rules of BoL. The artifacts and spells I had written up for B&BM, using my house ruled magic system taken from BoL, I am fitting back to, well, BoL.

I have already cleaned up my existing repository of creatures and their reference material to use BoL (I have not converted them all, just reformatted my notes!) At the same time, I also went through my conversion of the creature traits I borrowed from Best Left Buried. These will all be folded together. I’ll start publishing them here when I get them done.

One thing I have started looking at was some of the other rules/supplements that come from BoL. One of them, Barbarians of the Aftermath, has some rules for mutants and “arcane radiation.” I think I might be able to use those in Sakhrat—it is a post-apocalyptic setting as well as swords & sorcery.

Anyway, I am pretty excited about this change. It’s a big one for me, but I think it will be the right thing to do for my style of gaming. I’ll let you know how it turns out!

Marc