About Our Game Rules Battle of Five Armies & The Third Age of Middle-Earth All of our adventures & campaigns will take place during the Third Age of Middle-earth. Inspired By J.R.R. Tolkien & Peter Jackson

I wanted to write up an article describing the game rules we will be using. We are using a "modified" B/X system but I guess you can say that we lean way more towards AD&D 1st edition and Old-School Essentials. Basically we are using B/X with "AD&D" house rules and some slight adjustments to the classes "which mostly come from Old-School Essentials".

I also plan to bring them up to scale with 1st edition "with our AD&D house rules that we use" since most of the adventures I plan to run are from 1st edition anyways. The new Old-School Essentials books have released but, I feel B/X is just fine, I'll just import a few house rules in from the new books as well as Advanced Fantasy.

We are going with the class based system from B/X and Old-School Essentials that uses Racial classes, not the race "and" class system from 1st edition & we will also be using the racial classes as well "like Elf, Dwarf, Halfling to name a few", basically the same as what is in the Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy books but with a lot more choices to choose from since classes were pulled from other sources like the Carcass Crawler zine.

I guess you could name our modified system something like, "B/X Advanced Fantasy Legacy"? All magical items that are used in our games will come directly from the whichever adventure we are running at the time, most likely straight out of the book. All playable classes will have levels caps kept in place as they are listed in the books "unless an adventure/campaign goes past level 14" but we have a house rule in place for times when we move higher than level 14. All spells used in our campaigns will come straight out of the adventure but we will also be using the Magic Compendium Companion which is a free download from DrivethruRPG which greatly expands the spell lists for all spell casting classes. I just found it exhausting to keep up with all the rules in 1st edition and you don't realize just how unorganized those rules are until you return to systems like B/X and Old-School Essentials. The reasoning behind me using this modified version of B/X classes is because for some reason, I seriously love the old style gameplay & I also wanted to expand on the core playable classes.

B/X classes are not anywhere near as powerful as new edition classes, even AD&D classes so players can't simply have characters charge in and run through all the enemies that they face. It's a mix and match of materials that we use, but it is very easy to understand and gives players a classic feel to the type of gameplay they will experience. The system that I use for my modified B/X gives me the best of both worlds. I can run B/X and only import the AD&D house rules from AD&D that I like without all the rules sludge.

The goal is to keep the core of our B/X but with a few OSE/AD&D house rules and some slight adjustments to the class sheets. As I said earlier, the bulk of our rules will be straight from the B/X books but we do have a few minor adjustments that we made. I am sure we will encounter bugs that will need to be ironed out and fixed but overall I think I have it pretty well hammered out. I want to run my games as classic as I can but give my players a little more expansive style of play at the same time.