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This page will be filled with content over the next couple of days... err... weeks... ok, make that months... maybe years... as soon as I find the time to do so.

Things to expect include:

• a downloadable version of all RPG rules existing so far,
• completely revised rules in PDF format,
• a temporary hosting place for the HTML rules (for now see this link).

Click here to return to the official ADOM website.

The ADOM RPG diary

May, 22nd, 2000

Wow... one and a half years (almost) since the last change of this webpage. Tells you something about my schedule. And still no new version of teh RPG in sight although things still are crawling ahead at a very slow pace. I've just upgraded to Adobe Indesign 1.5 without having found the time to even learn to use version 1.0 with acceptable skill. Not to mention that the latest version of the rules still slumbers on my hard drive... woefully incomplete yet much different from the one published so far. I'll try to improve...

But now for the real reason of writing this... in the past couple of months I have eyed the progress of D&D 3rd Edition, to be released on August, 11th, if I remember correctly. I couldn't help but wonder about the parallels between that new game release and ADOM and its rules.

Just take the following...

• ADOM started to grow in my mind around 1993 and from the beginning I pondered about having a DV value that started at 10, going upwards when getting better. D&D 3rd edition now reverses the traditional AD&D armor class (formerly starting at 10 and going as low as -10) and takes it from 10 upwards. Maybe we all were inspired by Gamma World 4th edition although I personally seem to remember that I rather thought about the Palladium Fantasy RPG.
• Talk about class powers... or feats as they are called in D&D 3rd Edition. This was an idea proposed by folks from the net... and suddenly characters in ADOM were able to develop special abilities. The new addition of D&D has something called Feats. Actually those feats seem to be very similar to class powers, although the good folks at TSR... errr... Wizards of the Coast... made up a lot more abilities than ADOM currently has.
• Then we have attributes and their modifiers. ADOM from the beginning internally used modifiers which were very similar to those in D&D 3rd Edition... (+1 for every two points over 12, -1 for every two points below 9... only slightly off). In this place I obviously was inspired by Classic D&D. But ADOM attributes were open-ended from the beginning... something (A)D&D never had (and now gets!).
• In ADOM every race always could learn to become a member of every profession. Until 3rd edition this never was allowed in (A)D&D.
• ADOM for some time now has weapon groups... D&D 3rd Edition also forfeits single weapon proficiencies and seems to use weapon groups.

Ok, we'll leave it at that. What do I want to say with this? Actually not much... especially not that the WotC folks were inspired by ADOM. Nonetheless I find it amusing that two games I dearly love seem to be converging to become more similar in the future. I sincerely hope that D&D 3rd Edition becomes a huge success and helps to revive the RPG scene (and I was pondering for some time wether it's still worth to continue on ADOM RPG now that D&D 3rd Edition seems to be similar in many respects).

I have decided to continue (and will steal one feature from D&D 3rd Edition that I like a lot: the new advancement mechanism that replaces multi-classing... it seems to fit naturally into ADOM RPG and is a truly great idea).

As for the most pressing question: when will there finally be a new release of ADOM RPG? I no longer dare to make any predictions... let's hope that at some point during this year it will finally make it. There's reason for hope...

December, 24th, 1998

Last week I received some new wonderful art from Janne for the role playing game and I'm really stunned by the beauty of his work. The art will be online soon and this really boosted my will to get some preliminary version up. I'll be working on this over Christmas (together with some JADE stuff). Expect the next update for this section to contain some actual material.

December, 3rd, 1998

ADOM RPG has evolved very slowly over the past couple of months. The links above still contain most of the electronically available stuff. Nonetheless I hopefully will be able to write down a lot of stuff over the next couple of weeks (especially during my Christmas holidays).
A few things have been decided for the game:

• The rules will concentrate on roleplaying aspects while striving to retain a sense of realism and some similarity to the computer game. Only a d20 will be used for random tests. The game will probably not be restricted to a certain timeline but rather consist of general rules with era-specific adjustments (the Coming of Chaos, the Fourth Age, ...).
• The core rules will contain the complete roleplaying rules and some details about the world. A later atlas will contain a lot more details about the world.
• I'm finally sure about how to handle the layout: one-colum per page, Chantilly 9/11 for the text, Garamond for the headlines and special headers for the chapters. Fully indexed with a nice table of contents.
• The first few versions of the rules (or rather: the first few drafts) will be presented in Word 97 format. As soon as I manage to get my hands on a decent PDF converter, the rules will be available in PDF format. Sadly Adobe Acrobat costs about 500 german marks (roughly $300), which is a bit too much for my tastes. I'm looking for alternatives and helpful comments are welcome.