Wild mages were, originally, specialist wizards for the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. While 5E has rules for Wild Mages, I was always partial to the class as presented in 2nd Edition AD&D.

My AD&D3E version is rooted its 2nd Edition forebear… which was a little more unpredictable and, consequently, more fun to play.

Based on some playtesting that I’ve done, as well as on comments from Bill Littlefield, I’ve spruced up the Fighter and Magic-User a bit, while giving slight downgrades to the demihuman classes and the optional monk class. Check out the updated BX3E file to give the changes a proper lookover.

The Fighter now dominates lesser foes, doubling their number of attacks against foes with Hit Dice equal to or less than their Fighter level divided by 4. They also are the only class that gets 3 Extra Attacks per round… and start getting Extra Attacks at 6th level rather than 8th level.

Magic-users now begin play with a familiar, a Spellcasting Focus (which augments spells cast through it), and the ability to cast Comprehend Languages, Detect Magic, Find Familiar, and Read Magic as ritual spells. They may cast these spells at will, as a 10-minute ritual that requires them to have their spellbook on-hand, and automatically have these spells in their spellbooks.

Magic-users will now be able to cast utility spells to detect magic, and read both magic and unknown languages, without having to memorize those spells… leaving spell slots open for more “fun” spells. The inclusion of a Spellcasting Focus boosts their spells’ Save DCs while working, thematically, with the whole wizard shtick.

Dwarves, Gnomes, and Halflings have had their Saving Throw Bonuses dropped from +4 down to +2, while both Halflings and Elves have had the Darkvision ability replaced with Twilight Vision (much more in keeping with their fantasy roots). Twilight Vision eliminates penalties to Perception and Attack Rolls due to dim lighting conditions but does nothing to offset darkness-related penalties.

Monks have gotten a few tweaks to bring them more in line with other character classes. Looking back at AD&D and the Mystic class of BECMI, monks were a bit of a convoluted mess with the potential for overpowered greatness; especially when compared to the lowly Fighter class as presented in AD&D (pre-Unearthed Arcana) and BX/BECMI.

Over the past few months I’ve been gaming with two friends and, together, we’ve been giving various games a try: Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Mothership, and, most recently, Star Frontiers. For the most part, these gaming sessions have been 1-shots, played with hastily rolled up characters, that give us a chance to dabble in various systems to see what they offer.

With Star Frontiers, however, we’ve actually made up a slew of characters with the intent of playing every adventure that TSR published back in the 80s. As someone who made up a ton of player characters but never managed to get a game of Star Frontiers up and running, I’m very excited to finally be giving this a shot.

Or course, my obsession for rules tinkering already has me looking at way to improve the skill system and ranged combat system! I’m not running the game, so I’m going to curb those impulses and play the game as published but, after we get some game sessions under our belts, I’ll definitely post some ideas here.