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Here's a few miscellaneous house rules and tidbits that you'll need to play, but don't fit well on any other page.

1. A roll of a natural 1 on an attack roll is a weapon fumble. The character must make a Reflex save (DC 15). On a success, he recovers with nothing worse than having wasted his action for that round; on a failed save, he drops his weapon. If the save is successful, the character still loses his ability to threaten attacks of opportunity for the rest of the round.

2. Character generation is done by using the standard array, 15, 14, 13, 12, 10, 8. You have three extra points to spend on this array -- you can increase one ability by three, or add one to any three ability scores, etc.

3. All players begin play at 3^rd level. Multiclassing is allowed; all races are treated as human for purposes of multiclassing.

4. XP is not awarded by using any chart or table in the DMG. That's not to say that it's arbitrary, but it is based on Story Progression, not enemy deathcount. There will not be any XP awarded as special rewards for good roleplaying, etc. -- rather, Action Points will be awarded for that.

5. Players may roll twice for hit points when levelling and take the best of the two rolls. However, after 10^th level (assuming characters make it that far), all characters gain a flat 2 hit points per level, regardless of class.

6. In keeping with a genre in which magic armor is not prevalent, every character has a defense bonus based on his class and level. Because this is represents the character getting better at avoiding taking hits, wearing armor does interfere with it to a certain extent. The class bonus, regardless of how high it actually is, can never add a bonus higher than the maximum Dexterity bonus allowed by whatever armor the character wears. The defense bonus does stack with shields, magic items, and other types of AC bonuses normally, however.

7. In addition to the armor value being added to a character's armor class, armor "converts" an amount of damage recieved in each attack equal to the armor value into subdual damage. This causes character's mortality rate to drop, as it is more likely that characters wearing armor will fall unconscious due to subdual damage before they fall unconscious due to regular damage and enter the "dying" state. This is true of foes as well, however, so savvy characters will be advised to watch out for recovering enemies if they hang around too long.

8. The Massive Damage Threshold has been reduced from 50 to the character's Constitution score. However, rather than instantly dying on the resultant saving throw, the character is instantly reduced to -1 hit points. This adds a little bit of grittiness without (hopefully) really changing too much the probability of actual character death. This only applies to regular damage, so armor-wearing character are much less likely to fall victim to this rule, because of the rule above.

9. Each character begins play with 5 Action Points. Upon levelling, he'll gain 5 more. In addition, Action Points will be (somewhat) frequent roleplaying rewards. Action points have essentially three uses:
   1. Add to a Roll: You may spend 1 Action Point to improve any d20 roll (i.e., attack roll, skill check, saving throw, etc.) to help meet or exceed the target number. You may declare the desire to spend an Action Point after rolling the d20, but it must be before the GM tells you the result of the roll. Depending on your level, you may be able to roll more than one d6, but you must pick the highest of the rolls. You can only add the results of 1d6 to the d20 roll. For characters of 1^st-7^th level, you may only roll 1d6, but for characters of 8^th-14^th level, you may roll 2d6 and take the best of the two rolls. For characters of 15^th-20^th level, you may roll 3d6 and take the best of the three rolls.
   2. Special Actions: An Action Point can be spent to do one of the following actions:
      • Activate Class Ability: A character may spend one Action Point to gain and extra use of a class ability that has limited uses per day.
      • Boost Defense: A character can spend 1 Action Point as a free action when fighting defensively. This gives him double the normal benefits for fighting defensively for the entire round (+4 dodge bonus to AC, +6 if he has 5 or more ranks in Tumble.)
      • Emulate Feat: At the beginning of a character's turn he may spend 1 Action Point as a free action to gain the benefit of a feat that he doesn't have. He must meet the prerequisites of the feat, and it lasts until the beginning of his next turn.
      • Extra Attack: During any round in which a character takes a full attack action he may spend 1 Action Point to make an extra attack at his highest attack bonus. Action points may be used in this way for both melee and ranged attacks.
      • Spell Boost: A character may spend 1 Action Point as a free action to increase his effective caster level of one spell by 2. He must decide whether or not to do this before casting the spell.
      • Stable: Any time a character is dying, he can spend one action point to become stable at his current hit point total.
   3. Improving Feats: Each of the examples below is a free action to activate and the effects last for 1 round, unless otherwise stated.
      • Blindfight: You can spend 1 Action Point to negate your miss chance for a single attack.
      • Combat Expertise: You can spend 1 Action point to double the bonus to Armor Class granted by this feat.
      • Dodge: You can spend 1 Action point to double the Dodge bonus to AC granted by the feat. This effect lasts for an entire encounter.
      • Improved Critical: You can spend 1 Action Point to double your critical threat range. This stacks with the effect of the feat, in other words -- a threat range of 19-20 becomes 18-20, a 17-20 becomes 15-20, 15-20 becomes 12-20, etc. This does not stack with any other effect which increases your threat range.
      • Improved Initiative: You can spend 1 Action Point to double the effect of Improved Initative.
      • Power Attack: You can spend 1 Action Point to double the benefit of Power Attack. For instance, if you take a -3 on your attack roll, the damage roll will have a +6.

10. The Traits rules are available to any character as an option. Rules to be posted in the near future.

11. The Sanity rules will be used. They are really too long to be reproduced here, but can be referenced in a variety of places. Don't worry; the fact that I'm using Sanity doesn't mean I'm intending for characters to go insane over the course of a campaign! For one thing, because I want this campaign to be potentially long-term, Sanity checks will be relatively infrequent. I have no intention unless your character does something incredibly stupid or unlucky of having anyone go beyond short-term temporary insanity in any case. However, Sanity is a good mechanic for representing the nature of magic in this setting, as well as the dark nature of the setting. It's a very real risk that serves to remind players of the cost of heroism.

OPEN GAME LICENSE Version 1.0a

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