My simulacrum game

James at Grognardia posted today about wanting a clone that is closer to the original game. Here's the comment I made to his post, which I figured I might as well repost here by way of an announcement:

I think it's a useful exercise (one that I'm currently about 50% done with myself) for anyone trying to come to grips with OD&D to write their own clone of the three LBB's. Organize it in a way that makes sense to you and your players, but hew as closely as possible to the originals. I've learned a lot by doing this. One of the main problems/decisions is what to do about the ambiguities and omissions in the originals. You must decide whether to preserve those ambiguities or to clarify them. I've settled on mostly preserving the ambiguities, and providing filler for the omissions in an appendix. If my lawyer gives it the thumbs-up, I'll release my clone as a free PDF (along with the LaTeX source files). I encourage everybody interested in this kind of thing to give clone writing a try for themselves. Don't worry about having too many clones around; filtering for the best content is one of the things the internet does well.