Into the Odd - and a project

I've been looking at various simple, D&D-derived rulesets recently. Whitehack is, and will probably remain, my go-to for long-running campaigns; the rules have enough sophistication to support considerable intricacy and range, and can also be elaborated on (for more detailed combat for example). But for one-offs and side-projects, I'm planning to run a bit of Into the Odd, a brilliantly atmospheric game with rules neatly packed into a single page of the PDF.

We played our first session tonight and greatly enjoyed it. The game has lots of novel features that make it run very smoothly. For instance, characters always hit in combat. So there's no roll to hit, just a roll to damage. Once hit points are whittled down, characters take damage to their strength score - and have to save against it to stay operational. So combat is likely to be short and decisive; Chris McDowall, the author, has blogged about the implications of that here.

Another great feature of the game is the way starting characters are created. You roll for just three stats (strength, dexterity and willpower: STR, DEX and WIL) and hit points (1D6). Then you cross-reference your highest stat and your hit points to find out what equipment you start with. Characters with low hit points and stats generally get better stuff. The results are glorious: just a few items of gear and the odd physical trait, but rich in atmosphere (and begging to be soundtracked by Tom Waits). Here are a couple of examples from the book:

• "Pistol, bomb, shovel, glowing eyes"
• "Halberd, fake pistol, artificial lung"

There are 60 possible results (if two characters end up with the same, the second shifts left or right on the table to get a different set). The entire character-creation process takes about a minute.

As I'll be running the game with at least three different groups in the coming months, it occurred to me that there's an intriguing project here: kitbashing, converting and painting up a miniature for each of the possible starting combinations. The results would be perfect for one-offs (and games with high PC mortality, which Into the Odd seems to be), as players could be handed the appropriate miniatures as soon as their characters are created.

Painting 60 miniatures is a tallish order, of course (and that's before getting into male and female variants of each). I've got a one-off game coming up next month, so I'll have the players roll two or three characters each in advance and then get to work on those, matching each miniature's sex and other specifications to each player's wishes. To begin with, I've ordered a couple of sprues of Warlord Games' "pike and shotte" miniatures to get a supply of arms with flintlock pistols and the odd spare musket: muskets, pistols and swords are the most common weapons on the tables.

The adventurer miniatures created in this way will also work as NPCs for our Whitehack games: militias and watchmen in particular, I think. And our Whitehack PC miniatures (e.g. a pistol-toting lizardman) could well feature as Into the Odd baddies. Win/win, then.