About Our Game Rules The Valelands & The Nerath Timeline The current year for our Valelands campaign is set during the year 103AE. Inspired By Gary Gygax

I wanted to write up an article describing the game rules we will be using. We are using a "slightly modified" Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy system with "some" of house rules added to it and maybe a small amount of 5th edition house rules . . . all of which I will explain below.

The primary game system that we will be using is Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy and also all races/classes have had level caps removed to cap out at level 18, "all classes no matter the race". We will not be using level caps for non human races in our games, so no matter what race/class combo a player chooses they can all reach level 18. I've heard the complaints from folks complaining about "well, if you get rid of level caps, allowing all races to reach 18, then no one will play humans any longer, why should they?". My reply to them is - SHUT UP! My last game I ran had 4 players, and the racial composition of this group was three humans and a dwarf . . . so where is your logic at now? Play your game how you want to play and I'll play mine how I want. We have mature players here that don't try to min/max.

I want our core rules that we use to be Old-School Essentials Classic Fantasy but we will be playing in AD&D adventures so if an item, spell, particular piece of equipment is not found in our core rules we will pull from AD&D. All playable races can be found here and all playable classes can be found here.

All spells, magical items and such will come from Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy unless it specifically states it is from AD&D. The reasoning behind us using Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy and at times using AD&D material is, I want to make things more challenging for my players. Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy characters fighting AD&D monsters at times will be a lot of fun . . . for the DM *grins evily*.

Old-School Essentials classes are not anywhere near as powerful as the newer edition classes, even AD&D classes so players can't simply charge in and run through all the enemies that they face. We do plan to use a few 5th edition rules as house rules . . . mainly advantage/disadvantage and death saves. More 5th edition house rules may be added later but at this time I don't see any I want to use. This could change and we end up dropping the 5th edition house rules, we are going to test them out and see if we like them or not and if they don't work out we will simply drop them.

The goal is to combine two sets of rules but keep things as classic as possible with Old-School Essentials Advanced Fantasy. I think what rules we have set up will work just fine. I am sure we will encounter smalls bugs or issues that will need to be ironed out and fixed but overall I think I have it pretty well hammered out.