Savage Dungeons: Grognar the Veteran, Edges, Leveling Up, and A Cooperative Roll

     First let me say this is turning into quite the fun challenge. The biggest challenge is remaining faithful to my original goals. Because I don't live in a vacuum and tend to read RPG system and setting books like they were page turning novels, the harder it is to keep all the new ideas I find out of Savage Dungeons and remain true to the original idea of Savage Worlds with the trappings of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons. Fortunately I have help. My good friend +Victor Diaz who has been a sounding board and playtester for my previous projects, has graciously decided to lend a Cooperative Roll and lend his talents to the project–especially his talent for keeping me on task.

I'm still working on getting character creation using Quickdraw Wildcards just right. The challenge here is to keep things simple but still maintain both Savage Worlds and Basic D&D flavor. I have to get the mixture just right or the whole thing will explode. The initial concept is to keep character generation simple enough for an eight year-old to pick up a character sheet and start right away with little or no help. In my home playtests with the Inkling we've found that character generation grinds to a near stop if he has to choose too many things or has too large of a buffet to choose from. To help this I'm going to break character creation up into smaller steps with game play in between.  To do that I'm thinking of breaking up the Rank into three segments. When playing with new or young players, they like the feeling of leveling up quickly. As the character gains experience they can add a new edge or hindrance appropriate for their archetype and adventure experiences. Those choices may also be something that gets written into each adventure.

Along with dividing the Novice rank into three segments, another idea I want to include from the Basic Rules is level titles. In the basic rules a character would have a title which coresponded to their level for instance a 1st level fighter would be called a Veteran, a 2nd level a Warrior, 3rd Swordmaster, etc. The only current system that I know of that keeps this tradition is Dungeon Crawl Classics. The idea was that when meeting with other characters or NPCs you wouldn't say, "I'm Grognar a first level Figher," but, "I'm Grognar the Veteran." For me there's a little more "character" in that. 

Here is the first playtest draft of the Fighter Archetype Quickdraw Wildcard.