The Littlest Brown Book, a 0e Retroclone

14 Jan, 2025

(Alternate title: "What is this, rules for fantastic medieval wargames campaigns playable with paper and pencils and miniature figures for ants?")

The Littlest Brown Book is a minimalistic, open-source 0E retroclone formatted as a 4.25 x 6.875 in. book (the smallest print-on-demand size offered by Lulu). I originally made it for personal use because I found the LBBs tricky to reference when refereeing but didn't want to deviate too far from the original rules.¹ So the 'elevator pitch' is that TLstBB squeezes almost all the 0e/3LBB/Whitebox rules into 93 pocket-sized pages, cutting out a lot of 'fluff' and giving everything better organization without sneaking in house rules.

I've also done my best to make it 'forkable' by providing the Typst source code, described in detail below.

Design Principles

Fidelity

I tried to preserve the original game mechanics, procedures, & stats, warts and all, without trying to rationalize them or insert modern innovations. (Though obviously re-written to avoid IP infringement). I'm currently running a fairly by-the-book white box game and wanted a reference with all the faithfulness of Fantastic Medieval Campaigns but half the size.

(And, of course, I probably messed some stuff up -- please don't take this as 100% authoritative. I'll add a changelog or errata section to this page as I make corrections).

Organization

The LBBs are tough to reference at the table. I chose to keep the original tripartite division but rearranged what appears in each part:

• Part I: everything I consider a "rule of play", including character creation, dungeon/wilderness exploration, and land/aerial combat.
• Part II: tabular descriptions of entities existing in the fiction: spells, monsters, and treasure.
• Part III: tables and instructions for stocking a campaign sandbox.²

Each book should theoretically be useful at different times, with Part III consulted between sessions, Part I during a session, and Part II relevant to both. For example:

• How do I randomly generate a castle for my game world? Part III.
• What's the procedure to resolve the castle's reaction when the players accidentally approach it while exploring? Part I.
• What are the stats for the Necromancer, 3 Gargoyles, and 110 guards defending the castle? Part II.

Parsimony

I tried to use concise language & abbreviations wherever possible, excising superfluous verbiage. If you need a detailed physical description of a manticore, to be told that "STR" stands for "Strength" or an essay on what 'fantastical medieval wargame campaigns' are, this is not the clone for you. (My hope is that anyone using this book will have already familiarized themselves with the original material to whatever extent they desire.)

When possible, I refactored nested tables into a single (statistically equivalent) table to minimize the amount of die rolling & page flipping required (see here for an example).

I also omitted some less-used material:

• References to the Chainmail combat system -- for a book of this size, the alternative system is a better fit (and anyways, Wight Box already exists).
• Advancement tables past the highest named level of each class.
• Naval combat
• Castle building & domain management

Forkability

The best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way! -U&WA, p. 36

If you hate these changes (or wish they went further), I have good news! TLstBB is written in Typst, an open-source typesetting language that's pretty easy to learn. All the necessary files can be downloaded on Itch, and you can use Typst for free in a web browser here.

To my mind, the single best thing about 0e is the DIY culture it sprang out of & perpetuated (despite Gary's best efforts when promoting AD&D). Part of my intent with the 'fidelity' and 'parsimony' principles described above was to create a suitable starting point for hacking, preserving the challenge posed by the incomplete rules but with minimalistic presentation to make it easy to insert new material or overlay one's own voice & aesthetic tastes.

Instructions for editing the source files are given here.

Other Changes

• Stats for Martians were pulled from this Barsoom sourcebook by The Grey Elf, which apparently drew on Gygax's Warriors of Mars wargame. Stats for some animals were filled in using Delta's compilation of AD&D animal stats.
• I used abbreviations that I consider part of the TTRPG 'lingua franca': modern die notation instead of number ranges, HD, HP, STR/INT/WIS/CON/DEX/CHA, etc.
• I also used emoji shorthand for HD, AC, & saves. This is, I concede, really obnoxious, but I found I liked it. (There is a toggle to disable this in the source code, fwiw).
• I 'exploded' stats for composite monster entries to individual table rows (e.g. dragons, elementals, different bandit types & loadouts). That way, less cross-referencing is needed when one needs combat stats for a staff-summoned Earth Elemental.
• Information in M&T relating to lairs but not directly applicable to a wandering encounter was moved to a separate section in Part III with other stocking procedures. (This includes the table used to generate lair treasure hoards).
• I omitted naval combat rules but kept aerial combat -- mostly due to their respective lengths, but also because the latter seems slightly more useful given the number of flying-types in the wandering tables.
• NPCs that appear on the encounter tables are included in the monster list with appropriate hd, spells/day, etc.
• Certain words were 're-skinned' for IP reasons & to use more gender-neutral language. ('Fighting-man' to 'Fighter', 'Balrog' to 'Abyssal Archon', etc.)
• I replaced the terrible charmingly amateurish pen & ink doodles with my own terrible charmingly amateurish pen & ink doodles.