Libertad
Hero
It seems these days that there's a retroclone for just about every Dungeons & Dragons edition and popular concept in tabletop gaming. But one of the remaining untapped markets is using the rules systems of fantasy D20 editions to simulate an 'old school feel.' Five Torches Deep strips 5th Edition bare, adding OSR-style rules to the core for a rather novel concept.
The book itself is a short 49 pages, with 13 of those being the cover and lovely full-page art notifying transition to a new chapter. Five Torches Deep is minimalistic, providing brief bare-bones rules for combat and resource management for dungeon delving but little else beyond this. The content itself is laid out superbly, with just about every rule or set of related rules packed neatly into one page with nothing in the way of spill-over, orphaned lines, or half-empty pages. It's extremely easy to find things in the book due to this.
Base System: The core system is still mostly 5th Edition, with a D20 and modifiers vs a DC as the primary method of resolution. But where things differ is that the DC for most tasks is 11, and skills and saving throws have been consolidated into relevant checks determined by one's character class and archetype. Perhaps the biggest changes are that rests take a whole night, and you heal up to your level in hit points during rests in safe areas outside of dungeons and wilderness rather than spending Hit Dice to heal. You heal only 1 hit point in all other circumstances, which makes healing magic a virtual necessity. While instant death isn't something that happens by default on 0 hit points, falling unconscious due to such a state can still cause terrible afflictions such as losing limbs and ability score damage even if the unfortunate PC is saved from bleeding out to death.
Expanded Rules: Areas where the rules are expanded on involve resource management for dungeon delving, and we have some neat ideas which could be picked up and used in other games: Supply points are perhaps my favorite: they are used instead of tracking individual consumable items, ammo, and the like, being based upon the character's Intelligence representing forethought and preparedness. At the beginning of an adventure a player announces what kinds of equipment their PC would purchase, and when they'd run out of said supplies during an adventure they spend Supply to restock. Travel Turns representing the passage of 1 hour's time are important, for they determine how often the GM rolls for a random encounter, the duration of light sources, and the more Travel Turns the PCs spend adventuring the more difficult it is for them to safely return to civilization.
The weak points of Five Torches Deep are unfortunately in the most major facets of Dungeons & Dragons: generating characters via race and class. The race and class options derive heavily from Basic-era D&D, although the classes get Archetypes similar to 5th Edition which serve as more unique subclasses for customization. Races get no special features besides the fact that nonhumans automatically start with a 13 result in 2 of their favored scores, but roll 2d6+3 for the rest of them. Nonhumans are also restricted in what classes they can take, needing a 13 or higher in a score for unconventional choices such as a Halfling Warrior. Humans roll 3d6 for all of their scores, can swap around 2 of their choice upon completion, and are unrestricted in class choice. I find this a rather large downgrade, as it robs the uniqueness that races gained in both OSR and 5th Edition.
Race & Class: The classes match the Fighter/Thief/Mage/Cleric (renamed Zealot) standard, but have fewer Hit Points than their 5th Edition counterparts and only go up to 9th level given the system's grittier feel. The entirety of the class features and archetypes fit on one page each, but this conciseness is to the book's detriment as every class and archetype feature is confined to one line of a few words at most. In some cases the feature is clear-cut, such as the Warrior's Barbarian archetype gaining +6 permanent HP as a selectable option. But others can be interpreted wildly differently, such as the Zealot's Cleric archetype granting "allies advantage vs injury" being incredibly vague in wording. As a result several archetypes are much more appealing than others depending on how they're ruled.
Spellcasting is also greatly simplified, and Mages and Zealots are like 5th Edition's sorcerers in that they automatically know and learn spells based on their level with no need to prepare what spells to pick ahead of time. The biggest change from 5th Edition is that all spells require a check to cast, with a failure causing a mishap to afflict the caster. Magic in general favors utility over direct damage, so playing something like a blasty evoker isn't really possible in Five Torches Deep beyond 1 or 2 spells. Most Mage spells are some degree of utility, battlefield control, or afflicting non-damaging yet still deadly maladies on monsters. Zealot spells get a rather convenient upgrade: most of their healing and defensive spells can aid targets at range rather than touch, and in some cases like curing poisons and breaking curses affects a small area rather than a single target.
Monsters & NPCs We have rules on generating stats for all manner of foes, where the role of an enemy (brute/leader/sniper/etc) determines modifiers instead of a more species-based type (beast/fey/undead/etc) along with a table of Techniques representing unique powers. Guidelines for converting monsters from 5th Edition and OSR games are provided, although I'm unsure to what extent the transition is seamless. Five Torches Deep claims that 5th Edition monsters can be used as is but with half HP, but when you see high damage values, full-fledged spellcasting, and various conditions listed in attacks which don't have an equivalent in Five Torches Deep, I still get the feeling there's quite a bit of work to do.
Final Thoughts: Five Torches Deep has some cool ideas to mine for other systems, but as a game in and of itself it doesn't have much to offer. It's missing too much material (notably a bestiary and magic items) to serve as a worthy alternative to the systems from which it derives inspiration. In terms of changing 5th Edition to a more OSR-friendly format, it succeeds in some areas but comes up short in others.
