Don't Sleep! There are Snakes and The Thulean Hack playtests to date

These are my systems. There are many like them, but these ones are mine.

Last year I wrote two and a half systems. This post is about the two that I wrote all by my lonesome.


Don't Sleep! There are Snakes is a one-page system. I wrote it in under two hours on an ennui-filled night and published it on a fresh drivethrurpg publisher account the next day. It is based on a single D100 resolution mechanic (originally a Tim "Samwise Seven" Harper idea).

The basic concepts of the system are simplicity, player skill (roleplay over character sheet) and a single physical attribute that doubles as hitpoints.

The system is available on Drivethrurpg as Pay-What-You-Want. I had a lot of fun playtesting it a couple months ago using a pulp 1930s adventure of my own design titled The Golden Lion below Sacsahuamán. I plan to self-publish that adventure in a form easily used with either this system or your Old School game of choice, so the recording of the session remains private for now. Don't Sleep! There are Snakes made for quick play, holding up well to the stress-test in my opinion.

Any similarity to the professor's exploits is "purely" "coincidental".

The Thulean Hack was written on another restless evening and is based on the skeleton of The Black Hack. It is my attempt at taking some ideas from Myfarog 2.6 and reimagining them in the spirit of the old school style of play.

The basic points differentiating this system from Black Hack are:

- Constitution as Hit Points, which makes first-level PCs more beefy but severely curtails level creep

- Differentiating the playable classes even more, including making the Warrior much better at combat than every other class, and strongly tying the classes into the setting

- Willpower replaces Wisdom, the morale mechanic being Willpower-based and affecting PCs as well as NPCs, possibly severely

- Shields make you harder to hit

- A freeform magic system encouraging player improvisation and tied to burning Intelligence.

The system has been playtested twice so far:

The Thulean Hack playtests

The first game on that list was based on my version of the Myfarog 3.0 setting. Myfarog 3.0 is rules-wise practically identical to 2.7, itself an errata version of 2.6. The setting, originally based on European barbarian antiquity, has however been turned on its head by an apocalyptic event laying waste to all major civilized settlements. While this inversion can be summed up in a blog post and hardly justifies publishing a new edition of the game, I found its post-apocalyptic fantasy premise very intriguing. I combined it with a creature from Dolomite folklore, the Anguana, and ran with it.

The second playtest was ran by my friend Ethan and was based on Native American myth from the upper Midwest.

All in all The Thulean Hack played pretty painless. This proves, at the very least, that Black Hack is hard to fuck up.

If you play these systems yourself, let me know how it went!