I do a lot of rambling in this one so I'm just putting the good stuff here at the front: Here's the current Iron Halberd core book. It's not finished and it's sort of semi playable, maybe. Not really. Take a look.
My take on an old-school ruleset has been in development for a while, and it's far along enough I feel like it's in a good spot to show people. The driving direction behind this game was a realization of what exactly I want out of the OSR, because some things appeal to me and some don't - and I still haven't found anything that fully scratches the itch. The closest thing so far is Grave, a dark-souls-y Knave hack.
So Iron Halberd takes heavy inspiration from Grave and the game it was hacked from, Knave, but it does bolt on bits and pieces of Dungeon Crawl Classics, GLOG, B/X D&D itself, and a little bit of what I actually did like about D&D 5e and its kind sprinkled in. Here's the pitch:
All stats are useful for all characters. Any attribute spread on any character is roughly equally viable. The stats used in Iron Halberd are tailor-made to suit this concept instead of the six D&D scores.
Randomization is lateral, not vertical. The appeal of rolling stats for me is randomizing how you play, not randomizing how good you are at your chosen playstyle. 5e completely fucks this up because you already pick what you're going to be, so all rolling stats does is give you a chance to either suck or be stronger than everyone else. The rolling method in Iron Halberd results in equally strong PCs whose power manifests in different ways.
Semi-random character generation. Characters are partly hand-crafted and partly randomized. Attribute spread is randomized, but your ancestry isn't. You have some control over which starting gear tables you roll on, but you still roll randomly on those tables. You can swap two attributes at the cost of randomizing your ancestry and starting gear pack.
Flexible melee & unpredictable magic. All characters have a limited resource which is used for both spellcasting (if you're a caster) or fancy combat maneuvers (if you use weapons). I don't have a codified list of maneuvers in here - it's just whatever you can come up with. Spells have you roll on that spell's table; they're unreliable and always a gamble.
Leveling doesn't do very much! When you level up, you gain +1 to one attribute (capped at 4 + a third of your current level) and that's it. Why? So leveling becomes a more secondary form of progression. Accruing magic items, favor with factions, followers, land, titles, all become more significant ways to increase your strength when compared to the relatively minor gains from leveling up. Oh, and because...
Less HP bloat, and the original meaning of 'bounded accuracy'. When 5e was being formed, one of the design tenets it touted was Bounded Accuracy. While this has come to mean the slower proficiency progression 5e has compared to other systems, the original intent was: Nothing in the game world becomes stronger just because you got stronger.
Which... didn't end up happening, in 5e. You still need to pull out the CR 5 monsters because the players are level 5 now and CR 1 monsters' numbers are just too low for them to matter. And I'll put up with having to scale fights to my players so we can have a functional game, but the system takes a big hit to immersion because it feels like there's no in-universe consistency in how dangerous anything is. How dangerous is a stab wound, in-universe? If you're a 4 HP commoner, a longsword stab from someone with +0 strength has a 50% chance of dropping you instantly. If you're a 5th-level adventurer, being stabbed stops feeling like being stabbed unless you just start inflating the damage enemies deal.
Any specific damage value is lethal to everyone below a level threshold, dangerous to anyone within that threshold, and insignificant to anyone above the threshold. It ends up feeling gamey and immersion-breaking. If, say, natural nonmagical fire you'd see in a burning building deals 1d6 damage each turn you stand in it, that'd be extremely lethal for regular people but laughably ineffective against most creatures in the world.
So the highest HP you can ever have in Iron Halberd as a 20th-level character is about 30 (38 with optional classes if you build for it), and that's if you max Vitality to the detriment of your other stats. 1st-level characters start with about 13 on average, 18 at most. That's more than you'd start with in old D&D, but the slow scaling means you stay around roughly the same amount of being-stabbed-before-you-die for most of a campaign, which I like for verisimilitude reasons.
...at some point there I stopped making readable bullet points and started rambling, but I feel like the points I made there are important enough I'll leave it in. What else was I saying?
Anyway, there's the pitch. Many sections of the book are unfinished, but fleshed-out enough to give you an idea of where the system is headed as I keep filling the holes. The planned monetization scheme for this is the core book will be free forever, then as soon as I have any sort of supplement (which will most likely be the classes), a one-time $5 payment gets you that supplement plus all future content released for the game. As a customer I hate not being able to see a game before I buy it, so I like having some sort of free version available for my games so people can try them out before spending any money.
I'll probably post about specific parts of the game as I flesh them out more, but at time of writing I'm satisfied enough with the game so far to show it off.
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