2026 Character Creation Challenge – Grim

Leave a reply

This is is going to be a fun one. Today we have Grim, my son’s custom class character based on a creature he created from Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. I first mentioned Grim in this post from 2021, Alex’s Solo Dungeon. He was also mentioned in the recent post for the Billy & Killy the Dwarves. There is nothing really exceptional on the front.

At some point Alex had renamed him Death, but I have his name as Grim and you can barely see where he erased the original name. But pay attention to the opposite side, because this is where the character really shines.

First thing that you might notice is Grim’s normal items. He has 160 Iced Oatmeal Cookies, a frisbee, 92 dog biscuits, poop, and a skull. Okay, we might have had a little fun with the game.

If you look at the Memorized Spells, you’ll see that the Grim functions as a magic-user but doesn’t have any choices, because he only has one spell-like ability per spell-level. He casts the burning hands by swinging his scythe. That’s always cool and a morale buster against <1HD creatures (meaning it forces a check against morale). On the other hand, hold person is used by his 30′ long wraith-like ‘tentacles’.

But check the Other Notes section. Grim also has a tamed wolf. He trained the wolf with both the biscuits and iced oatmeal cookies to perform a few tricks such as ‘bark’, ‘stay’, ‘guard me’, and ‘search’. Also, the wolf now wears plate mail. We didn’t reduce his speed, but are you really going to tell this wolf that he can’t run as fast as he used to? I’m not.

I’d like to think that this is a fairly accurate picture of his wolf for the style of game we had been playing. Think of it, A dwarf in platemail with an axe, a grim reaper with a scythe that glows purple, behind them a wolf in plate mail and another dwarf in plate mail but wielding a crossbow. Good Times!

Anyway, cheers.

2026 Character Creation Challenge – Dacre Scintillius

Leave a reply

Yeah, a simple B/X character. Let’s see how I can screw this up.

So what is so special about this guy? Read closer and you’ll see that I used an ‘AI’ bot to create him on AJ PIckett’s Discord channel. Prove it you say, ok, since you asked, here is a copy & paste of the chat log for the creation of Dacre.

Uh huh. Two pages of this?

So most of the rolls should be apparent, but if not, I’ll tell you what they all were. The d12 roll was for random determination of his first-level spell. The d20 roll was for the bonus language for Intelligence. In my games, all magic-users start with Read Magic regardless of whatever the specific rules say. I also allow free movement of ability score points on a two for one rate. I could have done that with the first set of rolls, but they were already a bit munchkiny. And if you notice, I put them in order, so still kinda building a ‘guts’ character. Now for his rolls, I only wanted to bump the Intelligence up to get the bonus language. (ed. liar! In Lord Vader’s games, higher spell casting ability scores grant bonus spells. The +1 from the new Intelligence will grant one additional first-level spell to cast.) I struggled with taking away from either Constitution or Charisma. I really wanted to keep the Charisma high, but I wouldn’t be surprised if that 1 hit point makes a difference in a B/X game.

Now for the AI bullcrap. My almost last line, ‘!generate and stock a moldvay style dungeon’ of course went unanswered. Some AI. Bet that you can believe that ChatGPT would come up with something no matter how ridiculous. 😛

Anyway, a simple B/X character. Thanks for stopping by. This challenge has been fun so far. Cheers.

2026 Character Creation Challenge – Serena Wanderlust

Leave a reply

So I am moving this one up in the queue because I’m really excited to share this with everyone. Now this character breaks all the rules, but I love it for how adaptable this game can be. Serena started life all the way back in the early days of 3e. I was enamored with the ability for a character to choose their class at every level rise and built this character accordingly.

And the back side. Nothing really special to see here.

Now here is where it gets a little deeper. Back in those days, I spent a lot of time working on creating logical and coherent personalities. I would use any and in some cases every tool I had. And I made a worksheet. The first bit is from Gygax’s DMG, the second part from TSR’s The Complete Book of Villains, and finally the last part fits the 7-Sentence NPC structure from Cline’s article in Dragon Magazine #184 from 1992 (I think). More after the picture.

From these final seven sentences, I really have everything I need to roleplay this character.

But no, I’m not done yet. Now I’ve been homebrewing for decades and when the 2e DMG came out and gave rules for building custom classes, well that was all the invitation I ever needed. But when the 2e Complete Handbook for Thieves came out and introduced me to Lone Wolf Thieves that used those rules, well I jumped on that like a 2-bit…

So here we are in 2026 and I’ve been playing B/X for the past 15 years or so. Serena originally started off as a thief, but slowly gained the ability to use a list of spells at a slower rate than other magic-users. And with the B/X Class Options book I’ve mentioned before, I could now build a class that matched fairly well with my original idea and wouldn’t step on the toes of any other character. And this final page for Serena gives me the framework to fit her non-standard growth. I guess I could have pushed the spells back one level to simulate the later arrival of spells, but oh well.

Thanks for stopping by. Maybe one of these days I’ll post a stupid, bog standard character.

2026 Character Creation Challenge – Strider

Leave a reply

And here we are today on the 3rd of January and I already fell behind. Oh well, I spent all day yesterday making characters or rebuilding characters for various game systems. If I ever finish and post them is another matter.

Anyway, as I mentioned in my previous post, I often make characters to test my various classes and this was a quick playtest version of my BECMI Style Ranger from a few months ago (ed. yeah, that was posted back in July of 2024). Since I always felt that the 1e Ranger was modeled more on Aragorn than a more generic woodland warrior/survivalist, I figured I’d go whole hog on this one. More after the break.

So if you check out the back side of the sheet, you might notice somethings. Now back in the day, we never used the level titles. I mean I kinda like the idea of them, but they never got any use. Honestly, it’s one of the things that is really annoying about Shadowdark. Anyway, I thought it would be cute for this character to only refer to himself by his level title.

Another thing you might notice is that I try and keep notes about what the character has been up to. Strider here is one of the few times I actually ran three characters at one time. He led my son’s new B/X Style Druid (ed. not yet published) and a different character pair into a Random Dungeon called The Deadly Gallery of Cursed Lights.

So a couple of things here. Bob and Brother Awesome are a Fighter & Cleric pair who are part the local campaign area’s Templar analogue. There’s nothing really special except that I always like to build my campaign’s through the characters like that. I probably won’t bother posting their NPC record, but then again, I actually put them on proper character sheets because I liked them a lot in play. we’ll see.

The other thing is that over the past few years, whenever I build a new Random Dungeon, I use a spreadsheet random name generator that i built after being inspired from this blog post: Beyond the Black Gate – Megadungeon Random Area Name Generator. I even posted about all of Al’s megadungeon resources back in 2010 here: Megadungeon Resources at Beyond the Black Gate. This helps me keep these random dungeons separate in my mind and actually help me come up with ideas for any specials that the players might find.

So thanks for stopping by. I have more on the way. Cheers.

2026 Character Creation Challenge – Billy & Killy

1 Reply

So Welcome to 2026. While going through the blogs that I follow this morning, I saw this https://theotherside.timsbrannan.com/2026/01/character-creation-challenge-day-1.html. As we all know Timothy has a thing for witches, and he posted a few as part the Character Creation Challenge. I thought this brilliant and figured I’d play along as well. Now I am under no delusions that I will post a character a day, but I thought it might be fun to show some of the mess I have come up with over the years.

Because it has rarely been more than my kids or my wife playing at any given time, I often have to play two characters as DMPCs. I generally create them as a pair that routinely adventure together for various reasons. I even created a random generation spreadsheet to do it for me. I’ve come up with a few interesting ones that maybe I’ll get to showing later. Often times, I create the pairs to cover whatever abilities the group is missing for that day. As such, I often put notes on the character sheets that records with whom they normally adventure, and you’ll notice that later.

So one day after creating a new characters class, the Grim, for my son, we needed to test it out. Now the Grim is basically a grim reaper looking magic-user, so he needed some meat shields. Enter Billy & Killy the Dwarves, platemail armoured and either axe and shield or sword and crossbow wielding vicious little monsters.

So for today’s participation, you get Billy & Killy the Dwarves. I’ll post a little more about them and a little surprise after the first character sheet. Look on their greatness.

Billy & Killy started off as normal dwarves and after three levels, they play very much differently. As the lone meat shields for what functions as a scythe wielding m-u with burning hands, they often have taken the brunt of attacks against the party. While Billy only uses his axe and shield, Killy has gravitated towards using only his crossbow, which leads to Billy taking the majority of the damage. Let’s just say that they are not on the best of terms with each other. And since my son likes playing his Grim in melee to use his scythe and burning hands, Killy has been happily remaining in the rear and using his crossbow.

But the little surprise, Yep, I made a character sheet for my character pairs. Because I knew I needed a compressed typeface, instead of using the more appropriate Baskerville, I used News Plantin. It has a similar vibe as the Baskerville and I think it looks great.

And finally, the picture below leads to the blog that I believe hosts/runs the Character Creation Challenge.

BECMI Psychic Infiltrator

Leave a reply

So Fred did it to me again. Last week he hosted another stream where he worked on building a Shadowdark version of the 5e classes and sub-classes. This time he worked on the Soul Knife. This is one of my favorites of these classes because I think it is one of the most thematically solid. I also love that most of its abilities are not necessarily combat related.

But during the stream, he specifically mentioned me because of all the design work that I’ve done for B/X & BECMI. So here it is, challenge accepted, my BECMI version of the 5e Soul Knife. Clicky the picture for the two-page pdf.

I went back to the 5e Soul Knife to get an idea of the class’s original intention, and using Fred’s work, built my version out from there. I went a little more into the thief abilities as a base and took out the three that didn’t fit the theme. I kept the Backstab in because I do see that this class could be used as an assassin. I also followed his example and kept his infiltration spell-like abilities and added in a few from 5e.

(Tangent: While I have been working on converting 1e classes to my B/X, BECMI, OSE game, I’ve struggled with the assassin both mechanically and thematically. I think this Psychic Infiltrator class easily takes its lunch.)

One special note though. I have ALWAYS hated that the thief only gets a d4 for hit points. As a constant house rule, they get d6. So I vacillated between d4 and d6 and finally went with the d6. If anyone keeps the d4 for the thief in their game, I’d strongly consider dropping this class’s hit dice to d4.

I really like that in the end both of our classes focus on the infiltration or spying aspect of the game rather than the combat. This class really gets the Exploration column of D&D.

BECMI Battle Cat

Leave a reply

So it’s been awhile. I’ve been constantly working on all sorts of D&D stuff, but not much that I put into a form I can publish. That changed yesterday and this morning. So let me tell a quick story.

Late last night for me, Fred from How to RPG hosted a live stream that showed his thought process on overcoming problems while creating his own work. He chose to build a Shadowdark class specifically for one of his players. It ended up fine, but it was the chat that prompted me to do what I’ve posted today.

You see, I normally follow Fred’s location building live streams, and I always ask for an area for a Battle Cat. You know, like from He-Man. Well Fred doesn’t believe that big cats are strong enough to carry the weight of a human, despite all the evidence to the contrary. I don’t know how many pulp fiction stories and cartoons I’ve seen where big cats are used as mounts. But anyway, in the chat I got too big for my britches and made a comment about playing a Battle Cat in a live-stream and someone called me on it; said they’d like to see it. Well until last night, there were no rules for playing a Battle Cat in D&D. Today, there now are. Clicky on the picture to get the pdf.

So let’s talk a bit. I get why Fred has a problem with people riding cats. I learned a lot more about big cats than I ever thought I would. I didn’t realize just how small lions and tigers actually were. I think he’s right; great cats in the wild probably would not work as mounts. As the largest big cat, the tiger only gets to around 715 pounds with a shoulder height of 3.5 feet!

But then I started thinking, why not just make them bigger? So I did. But I didn’t think it wise to start the class at that size. So the Battle Cat class starts as a Cub at first level which ends up weighing about 20 pounds and is about one foot tall. And at every level after that, the character physically grows until eventually reaching the size of a standard Tiger at 8th-level weighing 715 pounds and being 3.5 feet tall at the shoulders. Still not quite rideable. But at 9th-level, the Battle Cat becomes a Panther that weighs 900 pounds and has a shoulder height of 4.5 feet. This is the size of a pony. Almost there for a fully armoured human. So finally at 10th-level, the Battle Cat reaches it’s true form at 1,200 pounds with a shoulder height of 5.5 feet. We now have a great cat the size of a small horse! Put in a few rules for barding with saddles, and we now have something we can ride.

A couple more thoughts. Basic D&D has a listing for Great Cats in the monster section, and I used that to plan out the damage and attack routines. I dropped back the number of attacks so as to not outshine any other melee damage dealing class. I also used that writeup to give me some ideas on abilities the Battle Cat might have. I am really happy with what I came up with and hope that someone aside from myself can enjoy this class in their favorite Basic Style RPG. And yes, lions and tigers can still climb trees. Real pictures, not just cartoons and pulp fantasy.

BECMI Ranger and some rambling

3 Replies

Well here we go. After posting my version of the Barbarian class suitable for play at my table, I couldn’t just stop there. This is my version of the first edition ranger. Using the BX Options Class Builder rules, I created what I think is a very successful ranger class. Click on the picture for the pdf. Many rambling thoughts after the image.

One of the things I’ve noticed about most of my classes is that they resemble the advanced classes more than anything. The only ones that seem to fit perfectly in my B/X game are the Hedgehog Guardian (Demi-human druid), Gnome Illusionist, Dwarven Templar (Dwarven cleric), Elven Ranger (Elf with druid spells), Halfling Robber (Halfling Thief), and the Ninja Cat. All of these demi-human classes have similar abilities to the ones found in the original rules, so none of them seem overpowered, and in my opinion help define the style of the campaign world at my table.

My mostly completed human classes on the other hand: Druid, Paladin, Ranger, Barbarian, Red Wizard, and Hunter (Witcher class), require too many abilities to match previous editions that they seem to be overpowered compared to the original human classes in B/X.

When I look at the human classes in B/X like the Cleric, it has two major Special Abilities: Turn Undead and Clerical Spells. The Magic-User has Spells and Magical Research. The Thief has three: the Thief Abilities, Backstab, delayed Read Languages (which I’d consider fairly minor), and delayed Use Magical Scrolls.

But with my Ranger, which I love anyway, has FIVE Special Abilities compared to the other human classes. I’m not counting the followers because in one way or another pretty much every class gets them. But the Ranger still gets Bonus Damage versus giants and goblinkin, Danger Sense, Tracking, delayed Druid & Magic User Spells, and like the Thief, delayed limited magic item use. Now the Bonus Damage I see as comparable to the Backstab for all the times I’ve seen thieves able to use it in pre-3e games. Tracking would be comparable to the Thief Abilities but not nearly as versatile. Maybe Danger Sense balances it out. I don’t know; it just feels like too much. But what abilities do I take away?

Now one class I shouldn’t have a problem with is my Druid. You would think that a Druid class with two Special Abilities: Wildshape and Druid Spells wouldn’t be a problem. But no, I added just the Pass without Trace and Identify Plants and Animals abilities at third level and even that seems too much. Think of all the abilities I kicked to the curb!

I want to eventually make a B/X Bard, but what abilities stay/go? Bard Influence, Bard Inspiration, Bard Lore, Thief Abilities, Magic-User Spells, Bard Songs.

I also want to make some type of Ki-powered Monk. I love my 5e Monk. And I know the Mystic exists, but it has so many powers that I’m not sure it fits in a B/X style game.

Again this is all in comparison to the B/X or early BECMI human classes. If I could keep the Special Abilities to two or three, then maybe my classes wouldn’t seem so overpowered. But that leaves me at an impasse with a lot of them. What do I take away while still keeping the flavor of the class?

At my table with my kids and friends, I never cared all that much. But posting my classes, I’d like to make sure they are basically balanced with each other. So it might be awhile before I post some of the classes inspired by earlier edition classes. Honestly, while writing this post, I’ve given myself a lot to think about.

BECMI Barbarian

Leave a reply

For the past few (5+) years, I’ve been running a B/X game with my children, and much like I did when I was just a wee little tyke, I’ve let them build character’s that they’d like to play rather than restrict them to the classic seven. I love making new classes for these games, and I also like to convert old classes. To date standout classes that we’ve created are a Hedgehog Guardian (a druid demi-human), a Red Wizard (modeled off the class in Final Fantasy 1), a Grim Reaper, a Ninja Cat (inspired by our feline master who has so graciously allowed me the time to make this post), and a few more classes inspired by earlier editions of a world famous Adventure Fantasy Game.

The one I’d like to share today is one I created almost a year ago after being inspired by a livestream on YouTube by Fred from How to RPG. What he did was take the 5e Barbarian class, deconstruct it, and rebuild it.

So I thought, why shouldn’t I do that for my game. And I did. What’s even better is that after I shared it with him, he devoted another live stream to making a BECMI character using that design. You can watch that here.

So after all this time, I am posting this class write up here. Let’s see if I can figure out how to use the WordPress system again. Click on the image to download the pdf.

Well, crap, I should post more often. I had to copy a previous post to get this one set up to match my previous posts.

A few notes on my version. I based my class on the 1e version of the barbarian, but that one has a lot of abilities than I am not a big fan of and doesn’t have the rage ability which I think is one of it’s core abilities. It also has an insane amount of experience required to rise in levels so I had to make a lot of choices on what to include and exclude. I am really happy with the final product so feel free to use this class for your own game and please reply if you have any thoughts you’d like to share.

Alexander’s Solo Dungeon

2 Replies

So it’s been a while, and boy do I hate the way this editor works. If I did it right, either image should give you a link to a PDF I created that describes a dungeon my seven-year-old son and I played over the course of three (maybe four) sessions.

It’s a small dungeon, but one I think turned out exceptionally well. It’s one that I think Alex will look back on fondly for a very long time. Click on either image and make sure to get the PDF. More after the break.

You see, it’s the first dungeon he explored by himself, and he did it with a custom character class we call the Grim. It’s a grim reaper based on a youtube video for a game called Totally Accurate Battle Simulator. His class looks like a grim reaper with a scythe and tentacles and has about six abilities that mimic magic-user spells. At first level he can cast Burning Hands by swinging his scythe that shoots black and purple flames. At third level he can use his tentacles to grab and hold people. By 11th-level, he can just straight up use Death Spell. He loves it and keeps asking to play.

I also was able to test a custom character class based on the Red Mage from Final Fantasy I. We built both classes (including a Hedgehog class) with BX Options Class Builder, and they both worked great. The Hedgehog class we’ve tested in the dungeon that the whole family plays in. Check out the commentary for a much more in depth discussion.

After setting up this post, I guess in the grand scheme of things, this editor is not a big deal. Just don’t like having to relearn these things every time I post. Cheers.