Mail Room: Iron Falcon

Iron Falcon is a cool set of B/X rules from the creator of the legendary Basic Fantasy. This is old-school, like Swords & Wizardry is Old School, but doing that free and low-cost model of distribution and printing. The paperback on Amazon is nine dollars at the time of this writing, and that is an excellent price for an entire game that models itself off the original "boxed set plus world expansion."

This is like a pre-B/X set of rules from the 0E days and a lot like Swords & Wizardry but with more original concepts retained, with the original save tables, old-school descending AC, and no cleric spells at first level. This is also a race-plus-class game with three alignments. The game has four races plus four classes, like Basic Fantasy.

Basic Fantasy has many 3E concepts, whereas Iron Falcon sticks to the original 0E source more closely.

And there is a monster book available for more fun.

I like this game; like Basic Fantasy, it opens the original game's experience to as many people as possible, like an open-source software project. It expands the hobby for everyone, with the free PDF available on the game's site.

Basic Fantasy was a game-changer for me and introduced me to the OSR, and seeing the original game rebuilt and recreated for the world is a great thing that pulls the world into the hobby.