Alma Mater / OSR Mash-Up

I recently ran a one-shot games day for a group of friends I rarely get to game with in person anymore. After a friend’s initial suggestion I’ve been thinking a lot about a campaign premise not entirely dissimilar to the original Dungeons & Dragons cartoon series, in which a group of high-school students enter into the fantasy world of D&D. I decided to use the one-shot games day to play with some ideas for such a campaign, and since I am a fan of all things old-school, I was tempted to use perhaps the original RPG to be “cancelled”: Alma Mater, mashed up with my own OSR game Mailed Fist. While I don’t think I’ll use Alma Mater for an actual campaign built around this premise, as a one-shot games day catching up with old friends, incorporating Alma Mater added a little bit of “spice” to make things interesting.

What’s Alma Mater?

If you’ve persisted this far and have no idea what this Alma Mater game I’m talking about is, here are some helpful links to find out:

• RPG Geek: Alma Mater
• Grognardia: Retrospective: Alma Mater
• Immortals Inc YouTube Channel: Possibly the WORST RPG EVER Created?

That should give you a good enough idea!

Character Creation

Alma Mater has players roll 7 ability scores, each on 1d10. There are eligibility thresholds based on these ability scores for the character classes Average, Brain, Cheerleader, Criminal, Jock, Tough and Loser. These character classes are immediately evocative of 1980s high school archetypes. Before entering the fantasy world, the player characters are simple high school students, with stats and skills (and game world rules) all per the Alma Mater game. When they cross over to the fantasy world, then the characters become equivalent OSR characters.

Alma Mater to OSR Attributes

Alma Mater	OSR
Strength (ST)	Strength (STR)
Coordination (CO)	Dexterity (DEX)
Appearance (APP)	Contributes to Charisma (CHA)
Intelligence (INT)	Intelligence (INT)
Learning Drive (LD)	Contributes to Wisdom (WIS)
Courage (CR)	Contributes to Charisma (CHA)
Willpower (WP)	Contributes to Wisdom (WIS)
Constitution (CON) (Derived Attribute)	Constitution (CON)

Since Alma Mater attributes are on 1 to 10 scale, rolled on 1d10, I propose converting them to OSR based on score distribution vs a standard 3d6 curve (see the table below to assist). The exceptions will be CHA, WIS, and CON, for which an interim score will be calculated which will then be converted to an OSR score via the look-up table. The interim scores are calculated thus (round all fractions to the nearest whole number, 0.5 rounds up):

• Interim Score for CHA = ( APP + APP + CR ) / 3
• Interim Score for WIS = ( WP + LD ) / 2
• Interim Score for CON = Alma Mater CON / 2

Score conversion is then done using the following table:

Alma Mater Score	OSR Score	Additional Step
1	3 to 6	Roll 1d6, 1: 3, 2: 4, 3: 5, 4-6: 6
2	7
3	8
4	9
5	10
6	11
7	12
8	13
9	14 to 15	Roll 1d6, 1-3: 14, 4-6: 15
10	16 to 18	Roll 1d6, 1-2: 16, 3-4: 17, 5-6: 18

After converting the ability scores from Alma Mater to OSR ability scores, the appropriate OSR character classes will probably suggest themselves easily enough. In my Mailed Fist conversion, the following class conversions were used:

Mailed Fist Character Class	Alma Mater Character Class
Cleric	Average (I had a couple of “very religious” pre-gens who became clerics in the fantasy world – their Alma Mater class probably wasn’t very important)
Fighter	Jock, Tough
Magic-User	Brain
Specialist	Everyone else! Appropriate skill selections from Mailed Fist were used to create “custom classes” like Acrobat, Bard, Thief, etc based on the Alma Mater character

Skill Conversion

Most Alma Mater skills will not come up much during play in the OSR style fantasy world, and so we are looking for “near enough is good enough” conversion. In Mailed Fist or Swords & Wizardry you could use the skill level as a (positive) modifier on a saving throw used for task resolution, and apply the Alma Mater skills in only the most general way. Some Alma Mater skills provide for modifiers to different types of rolls (e.g. seduction) which can be applied “as is” to a saving throw or task resolution roll for a similar task in the fantasy world, but for other Alma Mater skills, the Alma Mater rules could be used entirely “as is” even in the fantasy world with appropriate discretion by the Referee. It’s probably not a good idea to convert combat skills from Alma Mater to the OSR fantasy world as this will probably lead to “overpowered” OSR characters.