I just had to mention these two at the same time since they are kissing cousins and you can easily throw them into your GM blender and hack together a game base on what you want.

Let’s talk about White Box Gothic first. First, it’s a supplement to tack onto whichever White Box rules that you happen to like. We’ve got new classes. The Monster Hunter: Not a Ranger. More along Solomon Kane and Van Helsing. Good at fighting against a specific type of supernatural monster. The Metaphysician: You know forbidden lore, languages, and you can copy magic-user and cleric spells into your Academic Journal. So they cast both. Plus Turn Undead. The Spiritualist: An interesting class. You can turn some types of undead. Use your contact with spirits to get spell-like effects (if it doesn’t kill you). And detect undead. The Wanderer: A sort of Jack of All Trades. Both handy, resourceful, and luck.

Then we get into “racial” Classes. I’m not fond of these. The Dhampir (almost a vampire) and Reanimated. They’re just too close to being monsters. Buy hey! Everything is optional. Do what you want.

Next up, we’ve got some special rules for Corruption which eventually leads a character into insanity or making them an inhuman monster. It uses a simple Save system as the characters falls into the abyss. Then Dread is a mechanic for evening up the power of big bads. It’s still a fantasy game with all the extras. This makes them even more nasty. So that’s a good thing.

Rounding out the book, you’ve got a whole section on Curses, new spells and magic items and of course monsters. All in all, it’s a good addition to your White Box library.

Sabres & Witchery is very similar. It however does use a broader attribute modifier range (-3 to +3) and it’s a whole game. So it’s got your base classes: Fighter, Scoundrel (Thief), Woodsman (sort of a Ranger). Then there’s the Magus which is sort of a cleric/magic-user hybrid and very close to the Metaphysician. Then the Hunter which is similar to the Monster Hunter from White Box Gothic. It’s rounded out with equipment, spells, monsters, and rules of play.

Like I said at the beginning, these two are very close and there’s plenty of inspiration for cross pollination. It’s chocolate and peanut butter time. Make the game you want to play/run. And have fun out there. You can grab up White Box Gothic on DrivethruRPG. You can get Sabres & Witchery for free over at Beyond Belief Games’ website.

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