New Project: Searchers of Skirmheim, or Mordsystem of the Unkown.

At some point in the very near future I'll be starting my aforementioned OSR campaign with brand new players.   I'm going to be using a heavily house ruled variant of LL or B/X for that, including a lot of the ideas I have seen in on OSR blogs.  At the same time I've been wanting to write a set of quickplay rules for a lunchtime game at work.  I've been quite interested in some of the extremely small retro-clone rulesets, Searchers of the Unknown in particular.  In the last week I've hit upon some ideas for my own variant of SotU, greatly inspired by Battlesystem Skirmishes, Mordheim, and various blog posts and retro clones.  So this week I'll focus on trying to get those into a set of written rules.  The highlights will include:

• 1 character class, but multiple races.
• No spellcasting, but less restrictions on magic item usage.
• Damage tracked by hit dice, not hit points
• Critical hit table when a character is reduced to 0 hits.

The goal is to make the combats quick and decisive, without making them more deadly. The rules should be no more than 4 pages.  Published adventures from pre 3e should convert easily to this system for the most part.