"“Toolbox rules”?" Topic

The Sword and the Flame has well established and deserved reputation as a "toolbox set of rules".
In other words, the basic mechanics are not really "period specific".
I've used it for FIW and AWI games with very few changes.
Obviously, rifles are very scarce in both, despite the prevalent mythology. So, use Carbine ranges.
Are Grenadiers and Highlanders superior? If you want them to be, you can give them a +1 if you wish. I just call them Regulars who think highly of themselves. Do what you want! Or as Johnny Ringo said to Doc Holliday, "Age quod agis".
Add bows? Sure. Why not. If you're fluent with the rules, you know what to do.
There are 3 flavors of Native troops. Choose one, or make up your own.

But I would like to recommend another set if rules that can be considered "toolbox", and that's GASLIGHT. I've used it quite successfully for "small unit" skirmishes. Last of the Mohicans, for one.
I have had Sasquatch controlled by a Lakota shaman. Even strangers at a convention accepted that with no complaint.

I've run Wyoming Massacre games using both rules, with small modifications.

I'm throwing this open to the Hivemind Mib.
What other rules would you recommend as "toolbox rules" that are adaptable for out of period play, with very few mods?

Fistful of Lead. Both original and Big Battle.

Shock Force.

Our club used to use Sword and the Flame mostly. We have pretty much moved to The Men Who Would be King for colonial, now.

For skirmish gaming:
Shock Force, loved creating army lists for that one.

Two Hour Wargames, Chain Reaction system.

Brother Against Brother by Ivor Janci

As PzGeneral states Fistful of Lead is certainly a toolbox set of rules. It is becoming our group's go-to set for pretty much every era of both small and large unit actions. It plays quickly is easy to learn and in a few turns the players are running the game.

Black powder or Valour and Fortitude

"Necromunda"-- modified the basic set for WWI, Vietnam, and Old West.

Buck Surdu's G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T and Battles by G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T have proven easy to adjust

Warmaster / Warmaster Ancients has proven to be very easily adaptable for many periods (it's the basic engine Warlord Games uses for their mass battles rules like Hail Ceasar and Black Powder

Fistfull of Lead

Pulp Alley

Just about all of Neil Thomas' rules

GW's Lord of the Rings game is the same way. They changed a few names and released it for Cowboys (Legends of the Old West) and pirates (Legends of the High Seas).

I have run it as a SciFi game (Legends of the Old Spaceport). Really all you need are new weapon stats and maybe some simple vehicle rules. But the base game has elephants and wagons so you have some starting points even for tanks and landspeeders.

I've thought of running to for WW2 but the club are already playing Bolt Action….

I have had Sasquatch controlled by a Lakota shaman

In Pacific Northwest, Sasquatch controls shamans!

StarGrunt II and Striker have rules for a wide range of technology, as well as rules for designing your own vehicles, artillery, etc.

The designer of Striker has mentioned that a player once told him that Striker was perfect for playing pike-and-shot era games, so that's a long time frame.

Fire and Fury has been converted to a number of period – mechanics (movement/morale system for example) easily used for other rule systems

Not just the Pacific Northwest for Sasquatch.
He and his kin have been RELIABLY spotted in Alabama and the Poconos. The Jersey Devil? Maybe…

I tried to modify Necromunda for WW2. In the end all I did was change the names of the weapons. I think I excluded one weapon. Even the skill advances seemed reasonable for the most part.

The DBx engine has been stretched from the Renaissance through Napoleonics through fantasy/scifi.

Striker, Command Decision and Fire and Fury are my 'toolbox' rules.

Black Powder has a 'plug and play' system in respect to the units involved. It is not good for skirmish but in the scale it is intended for it can be used for multiple centuries.

2 hour wargames is a skirmish game that can be easily cut and pasted to fit many genres.

My feeling is that most rule sets can be readily adapted as long as you don't vary the level of representation too much, or shift out of the period broadly defined. By "period broadly defined" I mean, say Ancients in the traditional sense, horse and musket, "moderns" as in 1914 on, and colonials. By "level of representation" think roughly RPG, skirmish "I know every man by name") the commander can see his units--corps in horse and musket, brigade in moderns--and commander needs a map (and a big wall)--higher levels. I have or had an edition of Napoleon's Battles which described how easily it could be turned into "Frederick's Battles" or "Lee's Battles" and I thought it was a fair hit.

TSATF works very nicely at that skirmish/colonial point, and you can stretch it into ancients or H&M without doing major damage. Too big a battle kills it, though. I suspect the number one killer of convention games is someone trying to put on a game three or four times the size the rules were designed for.

In a fit of hubris, I took "Gloire", a game with a recommended total of 4 figures per person on a 3' x 3' mat, and did a grand extravaganza game with 100 players per side to do "Rescue Roddy McCorley".
It worked surprisingly well.
Gloire is a quasi RPG format, but the basic mechanics did not hinder play at my megalomaniacal scale.
Yes, the Irish rescued him. The song is from the ‘98, but I had no 1798 figures. I did have Marlburian dudes. And of course his sister Claire. 😄

I would describe TSATF as a flexible set of rules that can be easily adapted for different time periods. However, I wouldn't classify it as a toolbox.

Toolbox-style rules, which often originate from British designs, typically don't provide specific, concrete rules. Instead, they offer suggestions for various rule options, leaving it up to the customer—who thought they were buying a complete set of rules—to piece together their own system. Sometimes, these suggested rules are buried within a narrative, requiring significant effort to extract them. A good highlighter is a must. Not a fan.

Pulp Alley. At least, before the publishers came out with so many variants and supplements and add-ons, I was already using it for periods and scenarios beyond its initial scope. It was/is so easy to plug in historical types for a League and fight a purely historical skirmish. I'd usually drop the peril cards mechanic and just use the movement/combat/initiative/morale system and it worked great! But you can also use the "Perils" or other mechanics for stuff like booby traps, completing tasks or fulfilling objectives, random events, etc.

I agree with Robert P. that TS&TF needs adjustments for a BIG game, or for a convention game that seeks to add a lot of players and has a set time limit. But there are workarounds for these problems. Some veteran TS&TF players and game designers like Steve Winter (former TSR game wizard) have managed to host convention games with these rules, just adjusting for more players and units and speeding up melee.

A true tool box set of rules would for me distill fundamentals of combat in to intuitive and simple mechanics that would work across periods and size of action.

I think some rules do this inadvertently or to some degree and get used in various periods. TsatF, WH, etc. Though mist do it across a limited range of operational scale.

Donnybrook

The Silver Bayonet

What all periods have in common are time, distance, weapons performance (especially ROF), recon/intel, logistics, command & control, troop quality, terrain, tactics, and communication. One other would be screwups.

I'm sure I left out something.

Wolfhag

I refine and zoom in further.
One might consider this under command and control.
What actions do the men or units do.
Move, reorganise, take cover/defend, shoot/attack etc.

I've not seen many rules that deal with these aspects. Units behave how the player wants when they want, unless some limiter such as action points or chits etc.
And these tend to be a binary. The units is activated as the player wants or they don't. Of they have AP that allow a limited number of actions but they are still acting as the players wants with in that constraint.

We the focus on things like accuracy or rof, but those are ultimately dependent on the people or units operating them.

I know we have can modifiers based on unit type and etc but if that's a number of a dice roll etc that's still putting the weapon system and really the numbers front and centre, rather than the people

My work on rules has been to look at the aspects that don't change, getting people to do something and what those somethings are.
That tool box can then be adapted to the specifics of time place or scale.

Some rules have address this to a degree but it's either too complicated or made.so becuae it's in addition to the complexity of a "normal" system.