The last few months, in the midst of COVID-19, the new civil rights movement, and me personally returning to work, I haven’t posted much. But I had been reading and mulling over two rulesets: The Landshut Rules by Darkworm Colt AKA Norbert Matausch, and One Page Rules by Gaetano Ferrara. The Landshut Rules are minimalist “ancient-school” rules in the spirit of Chainmail and Blackmoor, with wargaming roots. One Page Rules are a (successful) attempt to consolidate Warhammer and Warhammer: 40k wargaming rules into one page of rules text.

I quite like what Ferrara has done with his lightweight wargaming rules (for an even lighter version, check out Chris McDowall’s GRIMLITE hack), and they made me think about what it would look like if I started with OPR as a base instead of Chainmail, but built on them in the same direction as Landshut.

So, BEHOLD! The Fort Miami Rules. It features:

  • Baked-in mass combat, where player characters fight with the strength of multiple men (like Heroes in Chainmail and OPR).
  • A GLOG-inspired freeform magic system
  • A one-axis class system, where you can be anywhere on the scale between Hero and Sorcerer (like the Hero and Magic-User of Chainmail, but with added gradiation).
  • A freeform skill and task resolution system inspired by M.A.R. Barker’s “Perfected” system and married with Vincent Baker’s Apocalypse World degrees of success.

Yes that sounds like a lot bolted together, but I think it flows well. This is geared less towards dungeon crawling, and more towards early domain-level play where the players are controlling small bands of followers. A good fit might be Viking warbands raiding the British coast, Robin Hood and his band of thieves waylaying caravans, or small units of Prussian infantry dealing with a zombie outbreak.

(Edit: I had a slight fiasco with setting up itch.io, and uploaded the game under the wrong account. I have since re-uploaded to my correct itch.io account and updated the link above).