James Spahn of Barrel Rider Games does it again. After hitting it out of the park with White Star, he comes out with The Hero’s Journey.
In a nutshell, this is another hack of Swords & Wizardry White Box. While White Star was space opera, Hero’s Journey is back to fantasy. So it’s very, very similar to White Box but adds a few things. First, there’s a bunch more classes like the Barbarian, Duelist, Druid, Jester, and Cavalier. There’s a total of 14 classes. There’s the usual array of races including Half-Orcs. And there’s some nice additional rules like Luck, Professions, and armor as damage reduction. Do note some of the material is from Barrel Rider Games’ White Box Line. All in all, it’s a good retroclone. It has a little Umph than the regular White Box without going overboard. Of course, like most OSR games, you can pick and choose and blend the rules as you wish.
Here’s the cool part. It’s Pay What You Want. So really, there isn’t much reason not to. It can make a good addition to a collection, mine it for rules tweaks, add it on to an existing White Box campaign or just play it as is.