Semper Initiativus Unum

The Uniqueness of Things

2010-09-08T17:19:00.000-04:00

One pronounced philosophical trend I have seen in OSR circles is a general attitude in favor of what I would call the uniqueness of things. By this I mean the idea of downplaying (even radically so) the standard list of monsters and magic items, in favor of making each of them unique. For instance, in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, James Raggi purposefully omitted the standard catalog of monsters. And Jeff Rients has put out a call (which I contributed to) for unique artifacts and oddments to replace many of the "standard" magic items. But it's had me thinking.

Personally I will admit to feeling cramped by the number and variety of monsters usually available in Dungeons & Dragons. I've always been a fan of new monster collections, and of products like Raggi's Random Esoteric Creature Generator, which help to spice things up beyond the very plain set of creatures you normally see. I also agree with the sentiment that monsters should be monstrous, and not familiar.

But...certain things seem iconic to me, too much so to let go. To say it's D&D with no orcs, and no swords + 1, may be true but it's a somehow diminished D&D. It's like running without clerics or something - you can do it, and it may be great for flavor, but it's a difference. At the same time, there is shock value in the new, but I think it can wear out more easily than people have given it credit for. If things are always unique, then uniqueness itself isn't as special - it becomes the new normal.

So I see merit in both keeping our traditional approaches, and to varying it up. Which, to be honest, 3rd edition had by the bucket-load. DMs complained through the 3.x era that single encounters took longer to stat out than they did to run - and these didn't exactly fly by. I think that we have to learn from that, the lesson that making every monster totally variable simply takes too long to actually make it a practical solution to the problem of monsters being one-note. Templates, statistics, feats and so on are simply an overload for something that is at best a single usage.

All of these factors suggest, almost naturally, a solution. Unlike 3.x, which reveled in adding layer after layer to monsters, the old school does things straightforwardly. Most creatures don't have ability scores of any kind, or rankings beyond HD, AC, and their methods of attacks. A solution that I think really embraces this is to make monsters different in one dimension. This can be radically varied; a tribe of orcs may take half damage from fire, or an ogre may have a plague of rats at its command, or the giant rats might have wings, or a lizardman may have acidic blood that corrodes or destroys weapons that hit it. The thing to take away is one variation per monster, for most of the standard creatures that will be encountered. Big ones could use the "Random Esoteric Creature Generator" or similar; smaller foes can be traditional but with a twist.

Of course, this pretty much sets up how the book with the trap charts is going to develop - into a whole big book of stuff for your old school Dungeons & Dragons game. We'll see how it goes. Any thoughts on directions to go with this would be greatly appreciated.

On Critical Hits

2010-08-31T17:18:00.000-04:00

As I was reading the commentary on a recent Grognardia post about ignored rules, I came across this observation by Matthew Johnson:

And then there are the rules that EVERYBODY used that are actually nowhere in the books. For instance, I was amazed to find when flipping through the DMG recently that a natural 20 officially has no special meaning (in the example of play section -- you know, the one with the calcified bone scroll tube in the pool -- one of the characters rolls a natural 20 and it's nothing but a regular hit.)

This is one of the things that I'd embraced more or less every time I have run D&D: a roll of 20 has some special effect, double damage dice or max damage or whatever. I've always been pretty even handed about it, applying it to PC as well as monster rolls, but really - 5% of hits being critical is actually fairly frequent, and the simple system in OD&D wasn't really developed for it. Some kind of critical hit rule was extremely common in actual play, probably because the system is otherwise pretty bland as-is.

Unfortunately critical hits are the opposite of what D&D combat is supposed to be modelling. Hit points are, from OD&D right through to 4th edition, representative of something other than the raw physical capacity to take damage. A single to-hit roll represents, not a single swing of the sword, but a number of feints, parries, thrusts, slashes and so on, and 4 points of damage out of 10 may not represent any physical injury at all but rather exhaustion or draining of the endurance, luck, etc of the character. (In terms of the underlying system this also calls into question both magical healing and variable weapon damage.) Saying that a great hit results in extra damage may be dramatic but it creates dissonance with the underlying combat engine.

The impulse for this is to create the really devastating death blows we read about in Conan stories or medieval romances, when a hero smashes an opponent in the face or rends them clean in half. (Le Morte d'Arthur and La Chanson de Roland are both full of people getting cut in half, sometimes to the point where it kills their horses too.) But I would argue that D&D already models this: when a character dies, it is narratively open how they actually meet their end. Just because you rolled exactly the 14 you needed to hit that orc doesn't mean you didn't hit the bastard right in his eye so the arrow went clean through his skull.

Still, the combat system leaves the impression of missing a certain something, and it makes sense to put it on that crucial roll of 20. But what is really missing from the D&D combat system? OD&D combat is lightning-fast and extremely deadly for most involved. What I am thinking goes like this: if a character hits and it's a 20, the target must roll to save versus paralysis (favoring Fighters) or lose their next turn. It's pretty simple, only adding 1 die roll, and to a saving throw chart. I think it does a good job of preserving that "nice hit" effect, in fact moreso as most combat you'll find in a good sword & sorcery yarn tends to have periods where one or the other combatant finds themselves incapacitated, but manages to come back.

Has anybody ever used a system like this? Can I (should I) simplify it any further, or spruce it up, or use it as-is?

What Trap Charts?

2010-08-20T12:01:00.000-04:00

The title of this post references a classic Alarums & Excursions zine that ran in the very early issues. Certainly in my heart I hope it was an evasive denial of real trap charts.

I love charts in RPGs. One of my favorite gaming aids is the Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets, and I've always loved the heaps of charts in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Some of the best products of the old school renaissance are the Dungeon Alphabet and the Random Esoteric Creature Generator for Classic Fantasy Roleplaying Games and Their Modern Simulacra.

I also love traps. I think Jim Raggi's Green Devil Face is fun, and I contributed to it. My first OD&D game included what I affectionately refer to as the "bear trap" (a room with a bear in it, which provoked a ton of discussion that I cut off by pointing out that there was a bear coming at the PCs). Even the cheesy fun of Grimtooth's Traps appealed deeply to me.

So I've decided on a project: trap charts. These are going to be detailed charts to give a wide variety of options for traps. Mainly because I want to use them myself, and I've been thinking of ways to spice up traps beyond arrow, pit, arrow, pit, teleporter, etc. These essentially boil down to a simple set of options; roll or pick from the charts, and now you've got a trap with 4 knives that fire from behind a tapestry when someone makes a noise in the room.

These charts are probably going to come down somewhere from 16-20 pages without artwork, and I will want to publish them. They're pretty system neutral and I'm not worried about what system you use or branding. So three questions:

- Would you be interested in buying these (almost certainly as a Lulu publication)?
- Would you be more interested in a "Trap Charts" product, or as a chapter in a broader product called "Old School Miscellany"?
- What should I do for the art (if anything)? I can't draw but my wife can, although she isn't exactly a D&D enthusiast, but I don't exactly have an art budget.

Magic in Anobrega

2010-08-17T13:02:00.000-04:00

Anobrega has four groups of people who I see as having spellcasters: Calthi (Celtic analogues), Toreans (Roman analogues), Maradani (Roma analogues), and Elves. One thing I'd like to see, is that each grouping is more or less unique.

The Calthi are probably the most straightforward: they have druids. I don't think a second spellcasting class is necessary for them, and as it stands with them I'm leaning toward the druid class as written in Eldritch Wizardry. The other no-brainer for me are the Toreans - they have an order of Lawful clerics devoted to Deus Sol Invictus (the unconquered sun), the sun god in a militant guise. The cult itself is almost wholly military, based on the one fostered by Aurelian in particular, one of the best of the barracks emperors, and lends itself well as the sort of "templar" character embodied in the cleric. There are plenty of other priests - in Torean society as in pagan Rome being a "priest" is an honor conferred on some noble or other for ceremonial reasons - but a militant Lawful cleric is a member of this cult. Chaotic clerics are secret priests of Bacchus and have to keep their class under cover, quite different from the open military priests of Sol Invictus.

All that covers the religious casters, and I think the D&D standard is pretty good for my purposes. But then there are magic-users, and I'm a bit torn. Celtic magic is druidism, and I see no need to have Calthi magic users. Roman magic is a bit of a mixed bag, quite a lot of it had to do with divination (through all sorts of methods), while many reputed magicians had abilities that map better to clerics - miracles and the like. It was also low-status, definitely below religion in terms of overall prestige. The D&D magic-user is not a close match for this.

One thing I've been looking at is the Pyrologist, a class that Len Lakofka claimed in his fanzine was Gygaxian but turns out to have been his own work. I think the balance might be slightly off from the default magic-user, but there are two things that really draw me to this class. One, it comes from an old school APA-zine, and by one of the authors who contributed a lot to the AD&D era. Two, the elemental connection is thematically something I'm very interested in. The classical elements were more Greek but fit in well as a way that Torean magic could be something other than "stock D&D magic." I think it's more of a good jumping off point for a set of old school elementalists, though, each having its own replacement for the stock D&D m-u spell list, and also with its own unique not-quite-a-spell power (fire and air are light and wind, water is going to be purifying water, and earth is doing...something...).

Rounding out humans is Maradani, who are a great category to have witches, although this might wind up being an NPC only type using the classic "witch" NPC class, unless somebody can offer me a witch class that really would work well as a PC type. (The one I'm thinking of is from Best of the Dragon #1 and not quite so good for my purposes.) Witchcraft and curses are the direction to go here in general.

All of which leaves me with two classic D&D elements: the magic-user and the elf. I am seriously tempted to just shove the two archetypes together and say that a standard, no-frills magic-user is also a standard, no-frills elf, toss out level limits and the whole dual class / multi class / race as class concept for them. Elves will be either fighters or magic-users, single class. It's not a perfect match but there are things that can make it work. I'm thinking that the reason elves have the "default" magic is not so much that it takes certain races to do it, but that the physical process of learning magic takes so long that no other race lives long enough.

As usual I'm more than open to ideas, opinions, denunciations, and so forth.

Starting toward a setting

2010-08-10T09:59:00.005-04:00

So I decided that I'm working on a setting after all, because the ideas I've been kicking around have finally gelled. Here's the historic precis of what I'm doing:

Two hundred years ago, the plains of Anobrega were sparsely populated by the Calthi, a human group of cattle herders not dissimilar from the Celts of Europe. They had no written language but a long tradition of myth, and a similar tradition of cattle-raids. South of Anobrega was the fortress town of Miradius, the furthest outpost of the Torean Empire. But then the Empire fell, and tens of thousands of refugees fled the violence northward. After some struggle, the southern part of Anobrega was settled by the Toreans, who call the area Ambrecus. They do not have kings; the nobility are ruled by a man called the Praefectus, although in fact only loosely, and in theory would be loyal to the Emperor in Torea if there were one. The Toreans look down on the Calthi, who they call the Galtheani in their own language. Toreans are dark, with olive skin and curly hair, and the men dress in solid colors; women wear flowing dresses with patterns. Calthi are fair, with light hair and eyes, and the men wear ostentatious checkered patterns. The Toreans particularly find their customary trousers to be "barbaric." Another human group, the nomadic Maradani, followed the Toreans north; they are outcasts and wanderers, but provide vital trade links between the Toreans and Calthi, and the lands beyond Anobrega. They wear colorful, loose clothing.

For demihumans: Elves are called the Shae (pronounced "shay") by the Calthi, and were the inhabitants of Anobrega in antiquity. Those who remain live in the western woods, and have no love for humans. Dwarves are considered great heroes; for nearly a thousand years they fought the great Goblin War, and they won four hundred years ago. The last of the goblin hordes was driven asunder and their confederation will never rise again. Before the war, Dwarves were great craftsmen and thinkers, but many of their bloodlines met their end in the victory. With their low fertility rates they will never be able to recover their old civilization; they are a dying race. There is no traditional hatred between elves and dwarves, but not precisely any love. Halflings are - well, something of a mystery. They attach themselves to the nearby human civilization, and live quietly in its shadow; most Halflings in Anobrega are from the Torean lands, but they are not of them. The only humanoids who live above ground are the orc tribes, which live in the west and rarely pass over the mountains. Goblins used to, before the war, but since then any goblin settlement above ground is destroyed without mercy.

I'm still working on the map; once I have it done I'll scan it in.

In terms of historical analogues the Calthi are the Celts and the Toreans are the Romans, with the Maradani taking up the part of Gypsies. I'm thinking I want the Toreans to have a unifying religion that isn't either Roman paganism or Christianity; maybe something with a Zoroastrian flavor. The Calthi are close to Celtic myth, and I'm thinking that they might have Druids rather than the traditional Cleric. The thing is, the D&D cleric is pretty specifically Christian. What do folks think of this? Is there any religion that these Toreans might have "gotten" in place of Christianity before the Empire fell? Or should they be straightforward Roman analogue pagans, or Christian analogue monotheists? I think the Cleric might work in a pseudo-Zoroastrianism, with the Lawfuls worshipping Ahura Mazda (or a lookalike) and the Chaotics Ahriman.

This setting accomplishes a few things for me. First, in terms of feel it's a bit more ancient, which I think is appropriate to a setting a little more like Conan or Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, than the high medieval of D&D. The equipment list is going to be fairly harsh, in that I will probably wind up removing crossbows, plate armor and polearms; if anyone has a good ancient D&D equipment list I'd love to see it. Second, it gives me a good excuse to use Roman coinage, which I've started to collect, as the basis of game coins.

I'm throwing this out there for feedback - what needs more detail, what's cool and what's lame, and what should I look at for ideas? All sorts of thoughts are appreciated.

Defining D&D part 1 - The Hidden Map Game

2010-07-26T14:17:00.000-04:00

There were a number of posts over at B/X Blackrazor, which I've been reading since the announcement of the author's B/X Companion, that culminated in this entry. Something about it was percolating in the back of my mind; I think it became solid as I was reading back over about Braunstein, the wargame scenario that led directly to the development of Blackmoor and from it Dungeons & Dragons. This will be the first of a short series of posts on how I define D&D.

For me, at the core of D&D is a hidden-map game. The dungeon is the hidden map; in the course of the game, the map becomes known and the characters find the things marked on its key - whether that means monsters, treasure, traps, puzzles, or anything else the referee has chosen to put on it. To me this emphasizes the fact that the exploration is the heart of D&D, and any game worthy of the name focuses on this.

The hidden-map game is not just one mode of play in D&D. It is the subject of a relatively simple set of rules: characters have well defined movement rates, there are rules about the rate of exploration, opening doors, listening at doors, setting off traps, finding secret doors, running into wandering monsters. There are a number of internal timers built into the game, including the time needed to search, various upkeep items (rations, torches etc), the break every 6th turn, and of course random encounters. And if you play OD&D, Holmes Basic D&D, first edition AD&D, B/X D&D, and as far as I know Rules Cyclopedia D&D, and you follow the dungeon exploration rules, you will be playing basically the same hidden-map game as any of these editions. Later games branded as Dungeons & Dragons didn't have this; they subsumed the hidden-map game into a larger "game system."

From the perspective of actual play, this simple set of mechanics was at the center of a very light game engine. Other systems were developed for things like fighting monsters, determining treasure, casting magic spells and so forth - but in the early days of gaming these were not front and center. This is sharply differentiated from 3rd and 4th edition Dungeons & Dragons. 3rd edition was not about exploring the hidden map to find what was on it (and whether you'd survive), as much as it was a character-building game in which the DM provided combat-based "challenges" to the carefully crafted PCs. 4th edition is a tactical combat game at heart.

I bring this up first because, to me, the hidden-map game is the most fun part of D&D. I love drawing up maps of dungeons, with tricks and traps and twisting corridors and secret doors, and then having players progressively find their way through them, fighting or running, or tapping a 10-foot pole, and I also enjoy being on the other side of the table. It's a very evocative kind of fun and completely different from what you do in the modern games - and, to be honest, it's a game where combat is not the preferred option in most situations. It's unprofitable unless there's a mass of treasure to be had.

What I am not doing here is limiting what I think D&D is or does to the hidden map game. But that's the first major part of what D&D means to me. I'll post the second part later.

riffing on "Strength is for Fighting-Men"

2010-07-16T21:33:00.003-04:00

James M. over at Grognardia posts so much that it's easy to forget that this post was only a week ago. But so it was.

One of the things that has never, ever sat well with me, in any edition of Dungeons & Dragons (except for 3-book OD&D and Holmes basic), is that Strength gives bonuses to hit and to damage. It's far too important of a stat, especially in AD&D where "Exceptional Strength" charts remain one of my least favorite things about the game. Even the "milder" B/X variant irks me. Strength is just a big thing in most editions.

But I've been mulling over what to do with Fighting-Men. And I think giving them +1 to damage in the style of OD&D that I like (with my matrix that simplifies the Greyhawk weapons vs. armor table instead of giving weapons variable damage) for Fighting-Men with a Strength of 14 or more fits in the category of where I want stats to be in the overall scheme of things. It doesn't go too far with emphasizing Strength but it does give Fighting-Men a bit of variability.

All of which leaves me torn between what else to do with Fighting-Men, because I do find them to be a bit less impressive than the other classes in OD&D by the book. Aside from multiple attacks, which are a given and I just have to figure out their form, I was also considering a mulligan rule to prevent Fighting-Men from whiffing on damage rolls. Nothing extreme, just saying that Fighters and only Fighters get one re-roll when their damage die shows a 1. Statistically that pushes every other result up to 7 in 36 and pulls 1 down to 1 in 36. Dunno how this would work combined with the extra damage, though.

Just wanted to put that down. Sometime soon I'll be working on level design (I have an idea for an entrance to the mega-dungeon, a "ruined temple" access point, that I've been kicking around in my head) and will get to posting about that.

Ritual magic

2010-07-14T07:38:00.002-04:00

One of the things I've been thinking about is the "Utility Spells" in D&D. Basically, until a M-U has more than 3 spell slots available, why would he or she memorize Read Magic instead of Sleep or Magic Missile?

The house rule I have been thinking about is allowing certain spells to be cast as rituals. Fantasy literature has no lack of ritual, and it makes sense to me to allow this to happen in D&D. The rules I'm thinking of include:

- Magic-Users may cast any eligible spell in their spellbook that they could memorize, as a ritual, without memorizing the spell.
- Clerics may cast any eligible spell that they could normally memorize, as a ritual, without memorizing the spell. First-level Clerics may cast Protection from Evil as a ritual but no other spells.
- Rituals take 1 turn to cast plus 1 turn per level of the spell being cast. Any interruption in the casting disturbs the spell and it cannot be cast again in the same day.
- Casting a ritual spell requires material components on the following scale. 1st level: 10 GP; 2nd level: 100 GP; 3rd level: 1,000 GP; 4th level: 10,000 GP; 5th level: 100,000 GP; 6th level: 1,000,000 GP. These should be appropriate to the spell being cast and must be purchased in advance.
- Any spell may only be cast as a ritual once per day, and characters may not in any case cast more than 3 ritual spells in one day.

Eligible spells
Magic-User
1st level: Detect Magic, Read Magic, Protection from Evil
2nd level: Locate Object, Detect Evil, Continual Light
3rd level: Dispel Magic, Protection from Evil 10', Protection from Normal Missiles
4th level: Remove Curse, Polymorph Self
5th level: Conjure Elemental, Contact Higher Plane
6th level: Reincarnation, Anti-Magic Shell

Cleric
1st level: Detect Evil, Protection from Evil, Purify Food & Water
2nd level: Bless, Find Traps
3rd level: Remove Curse, Cure Disease, Locate Object
4th level: Neutralize Poison, Protection from Evil 10', Create Water
5th level: Dispel Evil, Raise Dead, Create Food

Thoughts?

Additions and embellishments

2010-07-10T11:39:00.003-04:00

One of the things that I have never been quite so happy with in the Old School Renaissance is the extreme tendency toward simplicity in character types - after all, in a humanocentric OD&D game, you're basically a Fighting-Man, a Magic-User or a Cleric. That's fine for one off gaming, but as players want to do different things it can be a bit monotonous.

That's part of what I like about Holmes, which adds the Thief class. It can probably use a bit of polish, but without the Thief you pretty much have no options for the player who wants to be something like the Gray Mouser. I'm okay with the Holmes Thief at this point, really. The "character skill" aspect of this is avoided elegantly by noting that Holmes has a "Remove Traps" skill rather than the later "Find or Remove Traps" - the others are mechanical (Open Locks, Pick Pockets, Move Silently, Climb Sheer Surfaces, Hide in Shadows, and the already existing Hear Noise). This integrates tightly into the D&D I already prefer to run.

But the "basic 4" classes leave a real niche uncovered that I think should be filled. I think the Ranger type, somewhat modified from the original presented in The Strategic Review (it's a bit powerful despite its claim otherwise), fits it. The Thief is good at some dungeon tasks, and I'll probably add scroll use for extra Gray Mouser flavor, but a tracker / archer type is really what the game demands IMO. I've run into more issues with OD&D when players got frustrated trying to play a lighter-armored archer than anything else. The ranger fits with the loner hero type; Aragorn is the obvious inspiration, but I think you could find a lot of rangers in post-apocalyptic fiction (Hiero pretty closely fits, I think, despite the fact that he's technically a priest). And it has a clear place in the game, which I think is very important.

For me the watchword remains "don't repeat AD&D, or do AD&D lite." I think a lot of the restraint with regard to classes is based on this, but we shouldn't kid ourselves. It was relatively rare in golden age (pre-1979) play that people didn't bolt on any and every character type that they could get their hands on. I think it has more to do with forethought and planning; I think the Ranger is a good fit for the kind of D&D I want to do, so I'm tinkering with the class. It's one thing to go back to basics at first, so you can figure out what your style actually requires, but to enshrine this as a principle is mistaken.

Further on Holmes

2010-07-06T09:07:00.008-04:00

So I'm still looking seriously at Holmes D&D as a basis for a campaign, and digging up my megadungeon maps and working them into a new, bigger design. Particularly I think Holmes is more suited to the campaign dungeon than the wilderness sandbox, and I'm primarily interested in the dungeon environment anyway. (I'm not much of an artist, but I certainly can make dungeon-lookin' shapes on a piece of graph paper.)

Still, there are a few concerns with Holmes, mostly in the short combat section. Initiative based on Dexterity - I leave that to long time Holmes fans to make the case to me. Honestly rolling 3d6 and counting down Dex scores sounds cumbersome compared to my preferred initiative method, which is each side rolls 1d6, high roll wins it, ties occur simultaneously. (This blog is, after all, named after a long run where the PCs lost the initiative in every fight.) But more worrisome are the rules for weapon speed.

Basically, daggers are said to roll twice per round, most one-handed weapons go once, and two-handed weapons go once every other round. There is no "weapon type vs. AC" chart, and everything does d6 damage - so a two-handed sword means you're rolling to hit 1/4th as often as a dagger with no benefit. In fact, everybody but clerics (who have to use maces) should be combat gods according to this comparison.

I've been thinking about raising the damage dice for other weapons and lowering it for daggers, but that still doesn't work. To actually have a better average effective result as a dagger, with the dagger doing 1d4 twice (average 2.5 x 2 = 5), the long sword would need to do 1d10 (average 5.5) and the two-handed sword would need to be rolling a d20 (average 10.5 / 2) for damage.

Looking at the actual data, I think the solution lies in relative effectiveness, which can be done without the high degree of complication present in Greyhawk or AD&D. If you say that daggers do 1d4 damage and suffer a -2 penalty against characters with AC 7 or better, they are deadly effective against unarmored characters, but their impact goes down dramatically with lower ACs. If you say that 2-handed weapons have 1d12 damage and take the opposite effect, treating AC 7 or better as two categories higher, e.g. AC 7 becomes AC 9 and so on, they become more effective, on the whole, than standard weapons in the d6/d8 range. I'm envisioning 4 "classes":

Light weapons - daggers, mainly - 1d4 damage, Fighting-Men and Thieves get 2 attacks / round, -2 to hit versus AC 7 or better.
Normal weapons - maces, spears etc - 1d6 damage, 1 attack per round.
Heavy weapons - swords and similar - 1d8 damage, 1 attack per round.
2 Handed Weapons - two handed swords and polearms, 1d10 or 1d12 damage, 1 attack per 2 rounds, +2 to hit versus AC 7 or better.

Holmes does have one other "hole" in the combat system - specifically it says that Fighting-Men get more attacks but doesn't go into detail. I'm considering that at Hero level, they get 3 attacks per 2 rounds, with the 2 coming in round 2, with normal weapons, 3 attacks per round with light weapons, and 3 attacks per 4 rounds (essentially skipping a "rest" round) on 2-handed weapons. When they reach Super-Hero, this goes to 2, 3, and 1 respectively; I realize that the consistent thing would be 4 dagger attacks per round but that's just silly. Holmes rounds are 10 seconds long, not the 60 second abstraction of AD&D.

I think I like the dynamics of the house rules listed above. It doesn't complicate things too much, it differentiates weapons without giving too much advantage to one type or the other, and it's mathematically sound. Any thoughts?

Why I'm looking at Holmes D&D

2010-07-04T20:15:00.007-04:00

I'm looking at getting a campaign ready between now and September, since we will have a big enough apartment that playing at home would be more feasible, and I've been looking hard at various systems that are available for doing so. Of course there's what I had been running, OD&D with supplement content as needed, but it doesn't really have the same appeal for me that it did.

What I'd been considering is Labyrinth Lord or Rules Cyclopedia D&D - just because both are complete in one book and reasonably straightforward. But the steps they take beyond OD&D - race-as-class, ability scores becoming emphasized, and the slow growth of subsystem bloat that eventually overtook RC D&D - don't appeal to me. So I think I've found my solution: the 1977 Blue Book edited by J. Eric Holmes, although with significant amounts of house-ruling.

Holmes was unique, in that unlike anything else produced it documented D&D as it was played before it became AD&D. People used the handful of things that it added from Greyhawk - magic missile, the Thief class etc - much more than the clunky quasi-Chainmail system. The rules work pretty well, although there are a couple of obvious issues, the biggest being the lack of rules above level 3. I'm going to plug that hole with the Holmes Companion, which to be honest is basically just extrapolating out the extra data from Men & Magic.

Most of the other issues are fairly simple and involve things I had issues with in OD&D anyway. For instance, I found that plate mail has a really heavy distorting effect on certain things, as PCs immediately start off with AC2 for any but the poorest fighting-men and clerics; my solution is to come up with an expanded equipment list where plate is more expensive, throwing in a handful of goodies taken from Arduin just for fun. (It's actually pretty sane stuff, like grappling hooks, crowbars and a couple more ranged weapons - although Arduin also has prices for gladiator nets, aerial saddles and spider-silk ropes.) I also fully intend to actually use the 3/4ths of the Ready Ref Sheets I haven't gotten around to implementing, like the sweet poison rules, and to spend the next few months cribbing stuff I like from other gamers and other games.

To be clear, this is a philosophical choice. In the first five years of D&D, the game was not really played "as written" by the majority of the groups that were out there; the sketchy nature of the rules and the creative nature of the hobby scene meant that everybody was coming up with their own take on everything, and that was all for the good. And this is really the vision I've always had of classic D&D: it's part of a make-your-own-RPG kit, where a game that is uniquely yours could be constructed from bits and pieces, some of your own devising, some from commercial products, some from other referees. I think Holmes, more than 3LB OD&D, is open to that interpretation, mainly because it's a straightforward and well thought out presentation of the rules, and it includes things like thieves that were cut from OD&D for space.

Thoughts on the above thoughts are appreciated!

apologies...

2010-07-03T20:24:00.003-04:00

...for disappearing off the map! I got married last fall, and life was really busy, and I'm moving this summer and gaming (and therefore attention devoted to it) has been something that's been put off for upwards of a year.

Anyway, I'm thinking of doing something maybe Holmes-based after the move and I might start putting up thoughts. Feel free to let me know of any really cool stuff I've missed.

Goblin doesn't have a word for "friend."

2009-05-27T11:01:00.004-04:00

One of the oft-neglected concepts in gaming is of the various languages spoken by player characters and monsters. At most, players who roll well for Intelligence write down a few languages out of the list and periodically remember that they have such a thing. This, of course, becomes an issue when the monsters surrender or the players attempt to parlay instead of fighting. Typically, it's handled relatively simply: PCs with the language get to talk with the monsters.

Personally, I like to have a bit more fun with the concept. The one I've run into most is goblin, which is a great stock humanoid type. The way I figure it, goblins are mostly a savage, uncivilized race who break down into small tribes unless actively enslaved by some higher force, like orcs or hobgoblins. This brings us to the question of what goblin language is actually like.

The first thing about goblin is the counting system. There's really no reason for goblins to have a significant counting system; the exact numbers aren't their concern as much as having a rough estimate. So they have words for one and two, which are pretty much universal, and for "some" (which may vary from goblin to goblin) and "many" (which also varies but is bigger than "some"). This is conveniently frustrating for their interrogators, for whom the difference between 5 and 9 goblins may be more significant. I would expect "some" to be based around the goblin's family or fighting unit, depending on the exact context.

Then there are other fun things. Goblins aren't nice folk. The way I figure it, they probably don't have a lot of words for making nice – as the title of this post says, there's no word for "friend." The closest would mean something more like "goblin of my tribe," with a different word for "goblin of another tribe." A human would mostly be referred to by whether they were a threat, or whether the goblin group could defeat them, or whether they were slavers. No concept of allies and alliances exists, and even attempts at diplomacy would involve threats or admission of weakness. Lofty concepts of "fairness," "equality," "justice" would be boiled down to a handful of ideas - "human nonsense" and "weakness."

Goblin language's richness is one that humans would not prefer - the word for what smells good probably includes a rat on a stick. Threats abound, as do vocabulary for hunting, killing, tunnelling and so on. War is present, but as a permanent condition of goblin society. There is no word for "peace" or even "truce." Likewise, what need is there for a distinction between "earn," "find," and "steal"? If goblins are primarily raiders, and secondarily scavengers, there is fundamentally no difference between them.

This is just a sketch; I think I'll write up a more complete (and definitive, possibly with "translations" for effect) article on goblin speech for the miscellany. Has anybody else done any work on this? Or have any input on what a goblin (or orc, or what you like) language should be like?

Why Old School Matters

2009-05-25T05:55:00.003-04:00

Since there's a debate going on about "old school" again, here are some links to essays written so far.

Grognardia: More Than a Feeling

Wondrous Imaginations: My Response to the Grognardia essay "More Than a Feeling"

LotFP: RPG: What is Old School?

And people are asking, why does it matter? Why is it important that you're able to draw some line between "old school" and "new school" in gaming if everyone has fun?

The answer isn't that hard to find, and I think it falls in two places. One is related to the gaming community, and the other is related to products that are being released.

With the gaming community, what we're really doing is pushing back against decades of "new=better" and stating an active preference for play styles that are derived in part or in whole from the early days of the hobby. There are fairly specific things that are involved here: the twin concepts of the megadungeon and the hexcrawl as sandboxes; the idea that sometimes less is more, specifically in regard to "how much do you need in terms of rules depth?"; the idea of player skill lying more in the exploration part of the game rather than in working character generation or the combat system. There are more, none of which encapsulates "old school" but a group of which, taken together, push you over the border line into "old school" territory. A lot of people nowadays seem to have a hypersensitivity to polemical speech, where you basically go further down one direction because you badly need to correct from the other way; this is where we get the whole "rulings not rules" discussion from. It's not that "x is universally bad," it's that we need much more y and less x, so we're making the full-court press argument against x.

To this end, I think we've been somewhat successful. Some of these old school ideas have taken on a broader currency, and people are now legitimately interested in the whole sandbox idea coming from totally non-old school traditions of play. What's being missed is that they aren't playing old school games, just drawing ideas from the old school movement. If you're playing 4th edition with some ideas that you got from people who consciously play in older styles, and you enjoy doing so, that's great. But you're not playing an old school game, if the phrase is to have any meaning. There are big assumptions in between you and old school. This is only a problem because there's a certain cachet that now comes with the whole "old school" label, and people are trying to water it down to the point where it no longer matters.

And that brings me into the other side of why old school is important. Simply put, old school is a quality filter. Blogs, message boards, and commercial releases are still relatively well sorted into "old school" and "new school." Given the limited resources (time / money) I have for gaming, and the fact that my tastes run decidedly on the old school side, I am able to use the "old school" designation as a limit for where I will invest my resources. You can argue that I'm unfairly excluding "new school" material that I might enjoy, which is absolutely true, but I don't consider it worth my time to research and buy new school products in hope that some of them will have been worth checking out.

It's important for me, then, that "old school" stays in tact as a label that filters relatively well along the lines that it has so far. I haven't found every single old school module I've bought to be a revelation, but I've generally found them to be reasonably well written dungeons without an overbearing plotline, which is nice. The problem is that, as people find that there's a market for "old school," there is some necessary dilution of the label as something worth using to differentiate my stuff from other people's stuff. The more we can push back against that, say "it's a nice product but it's x where old school stuff tends to be y," the more we can preserve the old school label as a firewall. It'll never be foolproof, but it's good enough for my purposes now and I'd like to see it stay that way.

Really, it's the same thing for play. If I say "I want to run an old school game," that means I expect people to not mind that they will be rolling 3d6, quite possibly in order, for stats that aren't all-important and all-determining; that I will frequently be making judgment calls on what they are doing rather than referring to a rulebook; that we are playing a dungeon crawl and PCs are liable to die at any time if they're not careful (and it's never careful to engage in combat). Oh, and if you do die, your next PC will probably be in the next room with monsters, bound and gagged, and a first level shmuck. If you're lucky and careful, this shmuck may actually advance up to being a hero, but he or she certainly doesn't start off as one. If that kills the game for you, honestly, why would you want the old school label in the first place? It isn't useful for either side – the people who don't have old school gaming values don't enjoy it, and the people who do want to use it to find players who actually like the kind of games they play.

Everybody (except for Jim Raggi) is in this to have fun. But part of being mature means that you recognize that one size doesn't fit all. My fun isn't necessarily your fun, and these divisons exist for a reason. We're trying to get games, modules, supplements and discussions going for the kind of things we like here. And it's working, which is why I think the "old school is just a feeling" thing is actively harmful at this point.

Spellcraft & Swordplay and its Big Cool Idea

2009-05-21T17:27:00.005-04:00

Like 29 other souls in the old-school gaming community, I recently received my "white box" of Jason Vey's Spellcraft & Swordplay. S&S is a reimagining of OD&D if, instead of fleshing out the "Alternate Combat Matrix," the creators had stuck through with a unified Chainmail-style combat system. Now, being a guy who worked out a matrix for weapon classes, I think that's pretty nifty, although I don't think I'd go with its specific interpretation.

The idea in S&S that I think is really remarkable is rolling for spells. Here's how it works: when a wizard tries to cast his spell, he rolls 2d6. It has three possible results: "Immediate," "Delayed," and failure. A failure indicates that the spell fizzles, except on a "2," when it's forgotten but still useable. Immediate means the spell goes off that round, Delayed means that it goes off the next round. The neat thing is that Immediate and Delayed results don't involve forgetting the spell until the next day. It's a very cool way to run wizards, especially so that first-level ones aren't necessarily one-shot ponies and high-level characters aren't indominable. It's a cool enough idea that I think it's worth adapting.

Of course, the S&S spell failure rates are a little high at low level, and I think it may need a broader "works but you forget it" option, as well as the possibility of an actual failure (and attendant "spell failure chart," natch). But when I finally get a miscellany written (see Jeff Rients's excellent Miscellanium of Cinder for an example of awesome in a can, will write more about this once I get it read) something inspired by Vey's spellcasting rules will probably work their way into it.

Successful game reflections

2009-04-25T21:17:00.003-04:00

So I finally got my weekend game together. I used a level I've been wanting to run, stocked with some appropriate nasties for new PCs. Things went well, and the game was enjoyable, with my pretty average number of 1 PC death in an evening. (Lets you know you're doing it right.)

Some observations:

1. I used Points of Light for the setting, specifically the Wildlands. This paid off richly, as I had decided the dungeon level we were using would be beneath the ruins of Gervonium. I love any setting where I'm able to basically plug in the idea of "this was an old Roman camp city." A group of goblins guarding one of the dungeon entrances turned out to be pretty interesting in itself.

2. The rules were Labyrinth Lord. I enjoyed that a lot, although I think I'd prefer to stay away from thieves – by doing without them we kept the exploration pretty focused. The rules are not perfectly organized, but being more systematic than OD&D helped a lot, as did the fact that one of the players had the LL rules in a binder. (This made for more copies of the rules at the table than players: one on my laptop, one in a player's binder, one I had printed at FedEx Kinko's with a nice coil bind to lay flat, and one official Lulu printing, with two players and me, the GM.)

2a. However, I'm still the GM, or the referee, or even the DM. I don't think of myself as the Labyrinth Lord, and object to titles other than "referee," "game master," "game moderator" or "dungeon master".

3. One of the things I love about old school sensibility is the sense of freedom. I like sketching things and then letting player interaction, with a healthy dollop of common sense, determine some details – like an acid bath full of gold coins, which the players managed to scour for a drain that worked. Since it was a perfectly good solution, it functioned – they still had to seek out a way to get the rest of the acid off the coins, which led to one PC burning his fingers to the point where he couldn't accurately wield weapons the rest of the day.

4. We got pretty quickly to my favorite bit in the level. The PCs fell for a teleport trap that took away the ability to quickly enter and leave the dungeon for a significant chunk of the evening.

5. Jeff Rients's chart for reaching zero HP, from Fight On! #3, has cemented its status as my favorite bit of chart to come out of the old school renaissance.

The Direction of Old School Gaming

2009-04-21T14:33:00.008-04:00

This post said a lot that I have been wanting to say for a while. I've read Alarums & Excursions from as far back as they go, and people were...using Greyhawk, modding the living crap out of the rules, and doing things that they keep on doing down to this day. People wanted different levels of crunch and detail, and they improvised as necessary. Tunnels & Trolls and Chivalry & Sorcery – that's about as yin and yang as you can get - both came out before AD&D.

At the heart of what I think is the problem is that the old school movement has, for a while, been trying to adjust expectations in a certain direction, one embodied in the slogan "rulings, not rules." It's not about the objective quality of rules, it's meant to break people out of the assumption that you really need a 3e-style single, unified mechanic and rules for every occasion (one roll to rule them all...).

And it works. The old school style is a success. Combats in OD&D go lightning fast, because there's nothing to worry about in terms of complicating factors. It's a matter of imagining it and having the rules match quickly. Dungeon delving is more fun when it's about problem-solving and trial and error instead of every trap and trick being a roll-off between the thief and the DM. Ability scores barely matter, and determine a couple of key factors.

For some people, that's enough. The core of the game holds together for them just fine, and they enjoy playing with it as is. That's great. But other people don't have the same enchantment with the bare basics. For me, what has really hampered things is the relative limits of creature design you have in by the book OD&D. There isn't much you can do for different creatures' attacks; a bonus is a pretty big thing, not dished out lightly. Two dice even moreso. I don't think it's an accident that D&D never went back to "everything is a d6" – monster diversity just works better with the minor complications that ensue. And the thing is, very few gamers really played like that. Gygax didn't. Don't know about Arneson. But the reality is, people wanting simpler combat mechanics at the time were more likely to go to Tunnels & Trolls, where the whole thing is two big die rolls. It's a great little game, which I like a lot for the solo adventure concept, but not what I'd want for my day to day. That takes nothing away from it.

This is the kind of thing that I think old-school gamers have started to hit up against. For some, the extreme varieties of "rules light" was just a step in getting to a further path. For others, it was the end of the journey. It leaves a much bigger problem: where do we go from here?

Well, by way of answering, I think there's a little more clear view of what could be published. Probably the easiest thing to do is lots of dungeon modules. These are something we know how to do fairly well, how to craft and publish and use a printed module. And that's going to be part of what our next step is. But then there's the whole rest of the story: creating material that works for people regardless of what step of their own crazy journey they're on. Stuff that works if you're doing OD&D, B/X D&D, AD&D, RC D&D, S&W, BFRPG, LL, microlite74, OSRIC or some combination up to and including "all of the above."

Personally, I think our biggest successes thus far have pointed in the right direction. Fight On! has had a ton of "drop this in your game" type of articles which are awesome, and Green Devil Face is an idea whose time is gladly here. Monsters of Myth, another collaborative effort, is another highlight of the Old School Renaissance so far. And I think there's ample room for another kind of project, which I've talked about before: the old school miscellany. Thing is, I'm not sure I want to come up with enough material to put something out on my own. It's going to wind up being filler, at least in part, and I don't want to put out something I can't be proud of. So I'm going to open this idea up for discussion: who else would be interested in contributing to such a project? I'm not talking about a fanzine, but a book of stuff that is usable to drop into your games or reference when you need a chart, or some flavor, or some variants to get things going. Would anyone be willing to commit some contribution to such an effort?

Buy Green Devil Face #1 and #2

2009-04-21T13:36:00.003-04:00

Green Devil Face #1 and #2 are available.

You should buy them. It's an idea whose time has come: a magazine full of trap ideas. One of them (in issue #2) is submitted by yours truly, so of course you ought to buy it. I'll think up – and use! – something by the next issue, but in the mean time make sure you pick this up.

Dave Arneson, 1947-2009

2009-04-08T21:48:00.002-04:00

Dave Arneson died yesterday. He was with his loved ones.

It was Dave's wild creativity that led to the very concept of D&D, of the dungeon and the role-playing game. Sadly, he left much less on the printed page than Gygax did, but his contributions are felt throughout our hobby. And I think, in a real way, Arneson remained ever a hobbyist. He was very much one of ours, and he loved his game. We all owe him a deep debt of gratitude.

Every game we play is a tribute to Dave's legacy and his contributions.

....

2009-04-07T15:05:00.003-04:00

As chgowiz noted, Dave Arneson is fortunately still with us, but in hospice care. I'm glad he has a bit more time in this world, and I wish him all the very best.

Medieval Naturalism and D&D

2009-03-11T07:28:00.003-04:00

D&D has always inhabited a sort of in-between realm, stretched between the classic sword & sorcery fantasy works – which have a very particular take on a lot of aspects of everyday life – and being much more medieval than most really popular fantasy has been. But I think certain aspects of how medieval people thought have been neglected because we let our modern understanding of how the world works shine through too much.

It's the kind of thing I'm reminded of when I find an article like this. Medieval people saw cotton plants, didn't know what it really was, and figured (based on what they did know) that it was a plant that grows sheep. That's unscientific but ten different kinds of awesome for fantasy purposes. Regardless of what you feel about how the real world got here, the fantasy world is explicitly creationist – which was the default assumption of people in the middle ages as well. And, acting based on that assumption, they came up with some pretty interesting theories of how things came to be as they are.

Unfortunately, I think the tension between D&D's pulp S&S roots and the attention to medieval detail got washed away, to a great extent, by settings that internalized big chunks of what I think of as "Tolkienesque" fantasy (the mode of modern high fantasy; the biggest epigone being Terry Brooks). Which is a shame, because I think there's tons of useful material that could be wrenched out of not just the various facts and names of the medieval world, but how people used to think. I've been spending a lot of time lately on considering just how superstitious people really were; they weren't stupid in any way, they just lived in a time where the best explanations for natural phenomena involved unknown forces acting in barely-explicable ways.

There are two ways, both of which I think are quite valid, of approaching magic. One is to assume that the world operates pretty close to how it does in reality, but there's also magic stuff. Some people play up the otherness of such magic really well; it's the intent of all the stuff that was so controversial in Geoffrey's Carcosa, for instance. But I think there's a second way, where the laws of reality really are like people believed them to be. Numbers have deep mystical meanings, which actually has some bearing on outcome. Herbs and stones and gems really do have the properties that people ascribed to them, not because of some weird medical coincidences, but the innate properties of life work like that. I'm talking about going the way that says that what you read in the medieval bestiary – the weird stuff about animals born from plants, or having unconventional internal temperatures, or tearing open their own breasts to birth their young – is true.

It's a vision of fantasy that I think deserves some exploration, and I really think that incorporating it could bring a very different feel than most modern high fantasy, rooted in history and painting the world several shades of fantastic. I think it's where I want to go with the work I need to get back into on my OD&D miscellany.

Fight On! #4 is released

2009-03-04T10:56:00.005-05:00

Fight On! #4 is available in print. I bought it as soon as the proof was up on Lulu, and already have my copy. I've always been an early and frequent enthusiast of such works. Table of contents is here.

FO! 4 contains some of my own work, a table full of magical weapon drawbacks. Now, that's about half a page, and personally I think the other hundred twenty odd are worth full admission price without my little contribution. But it's always fun to see your name get in print. I really like what I've read so far (most of the charts, incl. the random facial hair generator, and Calithena's award-winning Arduin adventure). I love that every issue has tables and goodies that are easy to drop into a game as well as those more involved dungeons and areas that take a bit more doing. FO! 4 is also Arduin themed, although it really has a ton of different gonzo influences going for it.

On a sad note, as everyone's been pointing out, it's a year now since Gary Gygax died. Still, it's beautiful to see that his legacy is still alive. Fight on!

Reading Arduin, part 1

2009-02-28T06:17:00.003-05:00

So, in the interest of doing more for this blog, I've decided I'm going to read and comment on aspects of the original Arduin trilogy. My editions are the three-book reprints done a few years ago by Emperor's Choice, which I will note had the unfortunate effect of mis-paginating the reprint text by a page (so that page 1 faces page 2, rather than page 2 facing page 3, and so on). The newer reprint, I understand, puts Hargrave's somewhat random tables and notes in a more coherent order, which may be contrary to the spirit of the whole exercise, but I'm getting ahead of myself.

The book starts with a dedication to the player characters of Arduin, rife with names stolen from Moorcock and Tolkien; it is a tribute that Hargrave found his fantasy world through. He continues with a guarantee to answer any inquiries personally; his home address is printed in the book as a guarantee. It's nothing really that far afield, but it underscores the fact that it was a very personal work, for all its oddness and quirks (which we'll get into).

Actual rules text starts off with a page of notes on overland travel procedure. There is an implied re-write of the reaction chart, with the most aggressive result being a "screaming attack upon your party." This is not in the shape of a table, although there will be plenty to come; it's described narratively, with a separate listing for intelligent foes, who exercise more caution. We also find out that Hargrave was using Dexterity to determine who goes first in combat, describing that a fighter may hit an enemy just before it is struck by magic, which then does its work on the weapon. The procedures are straightforward enough, and there is an offhand reference to using "other roleplaying games" for random encounter charts (i.e., D&D), but an admonition to make your own.

Page two breaks with Gygaxian tradition and instructs the referee not to give experience points for gold or treasure. Instead, the experience rewards are given on a chart, scaling from 50 (figuring out a trap, casting a minor spell, any generally uncalled for or dangerous act) to 400 (dying and coming back). Rewards range from acquiring Satan's pitchfork or nuclear weapons (350) to going down to 1 HP (100), and focus mostly on magic items acquired and spells cast, with combat only coming when you beat a monster worth 4x your hit dice or more.

The next two pages (the book now flips to landscape format, which will happen often enough) run experience charts for Arduin. Unlike OD&D, which capped out with 11, these take characters up to 105th level and beyond. The actual math in the charts is interesting, because it takes quite a different tack than D&D. Where D&D keeps raising numbers by factors of 2 for a number of levels, Arduin prefers to add a new level whenever the total for 3rd is reached, up to a point around or after 10th level, when the number doubles. Somewhere around 20th level it gets doubled again (although the charts stop listing individual levels and go in increments of 5, then 10). It works out that a fighter in D&D with 240,000 XP is 9th level, but in Arduin they are 27th level.

Arduin's experience tables are interesting. Because points come much harder, (although it isn't clear whether standard monster XP is accrued) it makes a certain degree of sense that levels come more easily. Not having run that much at higher levels, I'd be curious to see their impact, although I certainly wouldn't use them with 1 GP=1 XP. There are also more classes listed than are presented in the book. They are: Thief, Slaver, Techno, Courtesan, Assassin, Alchemist, Rune Weaver, Saint, All Outlaws, Warrior, Cleric, Monk, Mage, Illusionist, Druid, Singer or Bard, Ranger, Normal, and Barbarian. The classes in the first Grimoire are Trader, Psychic, Barbarian, Rune Weaver, Techno, Medicine Man, and Witch Hunter. The Trader, Psychic and Witch Hunter all have XP tables with their descriptions. Given the classes that were in D&D use at the time, that leaves us with Slaver, Courtesan, Alchemist, Saint, miscellaneous Outlaws, and Normals without explicit description.

The "Singer or Bard" class is particularly noteworthy. The Bard class from the Strategic Review (reprinted in Best of Dragon #1) is implied, but the "Singer" part actually refers to a class published in the first two issues of Alarums & Excursions, which filled the gap prior to the TSR version.

Level limits follow this. For a game that gets up into 105th level, Arduin doesn't expand the more traditional demihuman level limits too much. The highest numbers are 15th level (Mermaid Mages, Titan Psychics, Gnorc (sic) Warriors and Insect Thieves). Almost every race is on the chart, some with unlimited levels in a few classes, others with almost no classes to be a part of. There is a riotous diversity here - from Hargrave's originals (Saurigs and Phraints, lizard and mantis men respectively), to his hybrid Kobbits and Gnorcs (though not Knoblins) and everything from Titans and Giants down to most types of animals, where Hargrave helpfully explains "Obviously, normal insects and animals are not smart enough to do much of anything, but there are were-creatures and other types that fit the bill, so these guidelines are meant for them." Were-creatures were extremely prolific in early Alarums & Excursions, with one were-fox mage, Brilliant Jade, being a prominent character in several campaign stories, so it's not surprising to see them here. Cave men and Amazons are their own races, with quite restrictive level limits; there are also Uruk-Hai, an indication of Hargrave's tendency to crib bits he liked quite shamelessly from other sources. Personally, I think it'd be interesting to have a cat mage with a human familiar, but that might just be me.

That's just the first five pages of Arduin. It's intriguing, and I do have to say I enjoy the idea of some of the different possibilities open here, but it'd take a bit of doing to get them into a D&D game without upsetting the whole apple cart. Next up will be more race info.

Thoughts on Arduin

2009-02-25T23:32:00.003-05:00

Geoffrey McKinney's recent post on the OD&D forum (read it here) talks about some of the strangest and most infamous of old-school games, the original Arduin trilogy. I've had the books for months and read them off and on, and I occasionally get the desire to just rip off big chunks and run with them in D&D. I still have the sort of eyes that read the reduced typeface of the original trilogy, although I may be tempted by the allure of a single hardcover volume (available here) in the future.

Arduin was marketed as its own game, to a certain extent, but fundamentally it was David Hargrave's house rules for the original D&D game. It's interesting to look through it, almost to the point where I think it should be required reading for people talking about OD&D in this day and age. Like most gamers at the time, Hargrave cheerfully embraced the OD&D supplements, hacking and modifying away at bits of them rather than taking the very modern stance of embracing "just the original 3 rulebooks." It's also rather accurate as a snapshot of the kind of thing that gamers, at least the sort who wrote in to Alarums & Excursions, were doing at the time: there are charts for character special abilities, critical hits, a mana point system, and concerns about all those areas where OD&D wasn't really clear.

But beyond that, Arduin reflects certain realities about the time that OD&D was out that weren't true about the subsequent period. Hargrave was very conscious that he wasn't writing eternal rules down to the ages. His tone is constantly that of one participant in the larger conversation about how to do things – albeit a participant who'd gotten himself a bully pulpit by publishing his rules as a supplement. And this was the reality of the gaming scene at the time: TSR was regarded as having a great product, but nobody was poring through the works of Gygax for hidden pearls of wisdom; his ideas were regarded as nothing more than one way to do things. What I think people miss is that this is the context of the publication of AD&D as we know it. Into this volatile stew of gamers taking D&D off in varied and colorful directions, in which Tunnels & Trolls was considered about as good as the "real thing", Gygax launched a set of hardbound rule books that really solidified a lot of the play culture to come afterward. But the AD&D books have every mark of being birthed in this ongoing milieu; the game was then wrenched out of it by sudden fad status, and the idea of a set in stone "D&D" replaced it.

Arduin, because it's back in print, serves as a living reminder that the game wasn't always that way. Even if you don't embrace a single thing from its rules (although how anyone can pass up air sharks is beyond me), the more important thing is to look at the original D&D game as it was seen in its early days. Sometimes I think that the best thing we can do in the old-school renaissance is to create a dozen or two Arduins, reinterpretations of D&D that expand on the wild possibilities in the game rather than constraining ourselves to trying to understand and appreciate what Gygax managed to put into the first three D&D books ever published.

Now this is what I'm talking about!

2009-02-18T11:22:00.005-05:00

So Jim Raggi over at Lamentations of the Flame Princess put this post up today announcing "Green Devil Face," a new magazine for the old school renaissance. Rather than trying to be a generalist mag like the excellent Fight On! or dedicated to a specific retro-clone like Knockspell, Green Devil Face is going to focus on big obvious fun room traps.

To be honest, I think this is one of the coolest ideas to come out of the old school since Points of Light (which is just pure awesome). It's immediately useful, cuts out all the nonce about plot and setting and context that you often get out of dungeon modules, and asks for one thing: rooms that you can stick into an existing dungeon. And it's about traps, which is something I've specifically wanted to see more of in old school renaissance publications for a while now.

Naturally, I've already written up a contribution to this excellent effort, and I hope that a lot more people get behind it. Go! Write us your trap rooms!

The Joy of Random Encounters

2009-01-21T22:12:00.003-05:00

I ran a game this evening - first actual play I've had since November. I just wanted to share a couple of tidbits here while events are still fresh.

Probably the stand-out for me this evening was a random encounter. The players were going through a corridor, and reasoned it would have a secret door; they sent enough characters down it that I actually rolled a 1 on the square with the door and it was revealed. The door went into a pocket, and the players failed their surprise roll. The kobolds on the other side didn't fail theirs, so they took a round of dagger-throwing. The kobolds were evenly numbered but the players, with much better AC, managed to take them down without fatalities. The characters looted the kobold room (I think it was actually the only keyed piece of treasure in the session) and were searching for secret doors when I rolled a 1 on my random monster check.

Now, as a referee I always prepare my listing of random encounters. I wanted something icky, worm-shaped and Cthulhoid, but not too high in hit points, so I rolled up a quick, squishy Spawn of Shub-Niggurath using the charts from Carcosa, and it came out to pretty much exactly the kind of beast I needed: ugly, a bit frightening, totally new and unknown to the players. They thought quickly and used a button on the inside of the secret door room to shut themselves in. Then they got one of those moments of ingenuity that you just can't fabricate: they realized that the door seemed to be able to open or close by pressing a panel, and that they might be able to use this against the Spawn. I rolled a quick check, giving it about a 35% chance that the secret door would work like they expected (not have to recess all the way before it began to close) and it came up in favor of their idea, so they managed to neatly bisect the Spawn. I assigned 2 dice of damage for this; it would've been a save or die if the enemy had been less....thing that should not be-ish. Taking down the remaining half - what, you expected it to just die? - didn't take long, and they discovered that the blood was acidic, which they managed to bottle and sell for a bit of a profit.

Of course, I probably could've come up with a suitably Cthulhoid encounter without the charts in Carcosa, but it was fun to have a whole bunch of different options to stat up the kind of creature I needed for a very particular niche. I was also very pleased with the lateral thinking to get around the fight, which turned the whole thing from a "you see something weird" "we run / kill it" into a memorable encounter.

Modules, Megadungeons and the Old School Renaissance

2009-01-20T07:47:00.000-05:00

A lot of this is prompted by thoughts shared on this thread on RPGnet, by Mike Mornard (Old Geezer), one of Gary Gygax's original players. Reading it will give a bit more context into what I'm talking about.

As somebody who read about the megadungeon idea and said, "Wow, that's cool!" and went off to make his own, I have to say that I feel like today's old school modules are going down a path that, while it has its merits in its own right, is neither useful to the megadungeon designer, nor reflective of the old school play that we are trying to get at. Read the RPGnet thread linked above, Mike Mornard makes the main points: a lot of the classic modules are relatively linear grinds because of the requirements of tournament play. And as they were popular, and needed their own justifications in the world, they tended to be given a location, a rationale and a place that makes them awkward fits at best for a megadungeon.

But there are a few products, both older and more recent, that make me think there is another way to approach the module. Two are classic Gary Gygax modules: EX1 Dungeonland and EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror. These are high Gygaxian funhouse areas that were linked to the original Greyhawk Castle -- in fact, they're really the earliest published levels from that classic dungeon. The other is a more recent product, which I was lucky enough to actually play in: Bottle City by Robert Kuntz. This was another sub-level in Greyhawk Castle, and the product really shows the difference - it's a big sandbox to play in, rather than being a linear, plot oriented dungeon.

What makes these modules so interesting for me is that they validate an alternate model to the classic convention module. The intent is not to have a fully sustained, well plotted and placed dungeon, but something that can be dropped into an existing dungeon with relatively little difficulty of integration. It doesn't have to be Wonderland, since Gygax already did that, but it could be just about anything that is accessible from stairs, a chute, a teleporter, a mirror, a bottle, or anything else you're likely to find in a big dungeon.

But the other thing that sets EX1, EX2 and Bottle City (and the Living Room, which I've yet to receive) apart from other modules is that they are not simply someone dreaming up "what dungeon should I put out next" but real sub-levels from dungeons, which arose not out of commercial or convention needs but were worked up for an actual play group, cleaned up and published. There is something wonderfully authentic about that, the sense that I'm not just reading a scenario the author wrote for others, but an actual level from a well-loved dungeon, which I can add to my own dungeon (or not) because the idea is so interesting.

Who knows? Maybe once I stock it and some players actually get to it, I'll write up the "abandoned temple" sublevel of my own dungeon and put it out on Lulu. But I hope this is food for thought for some of you looking to write a module.

My lizardmen

2009-01-14T10:36:00.006-05:00

The idea of lizardmen always struck me as one of the cooler "mash up a human with an animal" type of monsters, because they're a bit squick-ish. The first picture of a lizardman in Greyhawk (which I use primarily for monsters and the paladin class), after all, was sufficiently cool to be TSR's logo for several years. And it has always struck me as a neat D&D monster just begging for variants, but apparently even modern editions haven't done too much of interest with them.

So, I spent an afternoon a few weeks ago looking up different facts and ideas about different types of lizards. And, as is my wont, I translated some of these things into game-ready ideas: nothing really too extreme, but enough to make a class of monsters varied and fresh for a number of encounters.

The race of lizardmen results from a long-ago magical cross of humans with various sorts of lizards. The "standard" lizardman type is in fact a mongrel of different breeds, which has few if any of their special qualities. Purebred lizardmen have preserved their characteristics much more strongly, and are named for their lizard progenitors. All of the lizardmen types noted below regenerate at a rate of 1 point per turn.

Iguana - These lizardmen have a third eye, which allows them to see through magical invisibility. 25% of the time they will be accompanied by a shaman who is effectively a 2nd level magic-user.

Chameleon - Like their namesakes, these types can change their skin color to match their surroundings. Groups encountering chameleon lizardmen are surprised on 3 in 6 instead of 2 in 6. Chameleon lizardmen are usually found in small hunting packs.

Komodo - Based on komodo dragons, these lizardmen are considerably larger than average and have armor class 4 and 4 hit dice. Their bite (used on 1-2 in d6) is a powerful poison, which acts as a slow-acting poison described elsewhere in this book*. Fortunately, Komodo lizardmen are almost always solitary creatures.

Plated - These massive lizardmen have heavy plate-like scales, and correspondingly AC 3, but only move at a rate of 3". They do an additional 2 points of damage based on size.

Horned - Although they more resemble frog-men covered with short, pointed spikes, the defining characteristic of horned lizardmen is their ability to squirt a stream of blood from near their eyes. This is not poisonous or caustic but, if the target fails to make a save versus dragon breath, he is blinded for 1d6 rounds.

Spiny - These lizardmen are light, fast (base move of 9"), and walk effortlessly on walls, being closer to lizards in their stature. Their bodies are distinguished by short spines that resemble those of Horned lizardmen.

* My poison rules are actually somewhat more forgiving than the standard. Slow acting poisons work as follows: if the saving throw is failed, they do one die of damage per turn for 6 turns. At the end of the 6 turns, if the character is still alive and has not been cured, he (or she) makes another saving throw; this one is "save or die." You're free to make komodo lizardmen have save or die poison if that's how you roll.

D&D and Miscellanies

2009-01-12T09:13:00.004-05:00

The previous post, Save vs. Death Ray, is from a longer document I've been working on, on and off, for a while. My initial intent was to fill up enough content to put out a 8.5 x 5.5 supplement perfect bound from lulu.com, but it turns out that requires something ridiculous like 84 pages, which is honestly more rules and details than I want to put into the thing. So I've considered doing it 6 x 9, which would let me put out a smaller saddle stitched book. I may eventually compile the material I put out here, and on the OD&D forum and other places, into such a book. But for now I'm going to be putting some of the stuff out bit by bit.

You see, for me the perfect book has little of classes and races and spells as such. And, while I do occasionally like a module for inspiration (either in mapping or room descriptions), to be honest I'm not going to be running so many of them. I would gleefully use a hundred thousand stacks of monster books, though. But what I'm really interested in is a miscellany.

It's one of the reasons I never run without my Ready Ref Sheets - it's just a great little resource where I can pull out, ominously roll a couple of dice, and have dungeon dressing or something of the sort. So a lot of the stuff I've been working on is in the vein of "here are a bunch of things that might be interesting if you dropped them in your game." I have a listing of reputed properties of gemstones (only applies to flawless stones, which are about 5% of specimens), advantages and drawbacks for magical weapons, properties of herbs, types of lizardmen and so forth. Everything's simple, adhering to a straightforward philosophy of - "maybe it does something, but it's minor." A couple of examples:

From Gemstones: Topaz: A true topaz will lose its gold color when brought within 5’ of poison. When removed from the proximity of poison it will regain its color.

From Herbs: Eyebright: A poultice of this flower must be laid over a character’s eyes for 1 full turn. When it is removed, he can see the blurry outlines of invisible creatures or objects for the next turn. The poultice cannot be used twice.

So the questions I'm interested in finding the answers to:

1. Would you be interested in a 32-page miscellany of the type described above?
2. If so, what additional items would you be interested to see in it?

Save vs. Death Ray!

2009-01-11T15:47:00.003-05:00

One of the things that strikes me when I read through the OD&D rules is a throwaway item in the saving throw list. There is a save versus "Death Ray or Poison," which for the most part is interpreted rather tamely as referring to spells like finger of death and similar effects. Don't get me wrong, that's perfectly legitimate way to look at save versus death ray. But it's missing one of the most fun aspects of old-school gaming: making up fun stuff based on vague suggestions in the rulebook.

So, the way I figure it is, death rays have different color beams, which determine the overall effect.

Red: Red death ray beams are based on extreme heat. They will cause wood or cloth to burn, and if intense enough, may cause metal to become white-hot.

Orange: Orange rays are derived from acid, and must be extremely corrosive to any object in their path. Items must make a saving throw or be destroyed.

Yellow: Yellow rays are effectively lightning, and will be conducted by any metal they come in contact with.

Green: Green death rays are based on poison.

Blue: Blue death rays are based on extreme cold. Liquids (canteens, holy water, potions etc) must save or the vessel containing them will be destroyed.

Indigo: Instead of causing physical destruction, indigo death rays affect the mind. A character who fails his or her saving throw will go irretrievably insane.

Violet: Violet death rays reduce living matter to its constituent elements. A person killed by a violet death ray will be reduced to a pile of ashes and a mass of super-hot, boiled water. This has no effect on non-living matter.

And, of course, death rays have to be launched from something.

Ray Gun: These are small enough to be held by hand and do 2-3 dice of damage per blast (save for half). They only strike their target if the wielder first makes a successful "to hit" roll, considering all man-type creatures to be effectively unarmored. A ray gun will have enough energy for 1-100 (roll d100 to determine) blasts.

Cannon: The cannon is a form of death ray too large to be held by hand. Based on their size, cannons (which may weigh from 100 to 1000 lbs) may do 4 to 12 dice of damage. A cannon will have enough energy for 4-40 blasts.

This is just a sketch of how I intend to have death rays work in my games. Has anybody else done anything like this with death rays?

Thoughts on Searchlight #1

2008-12-15T12:45:00.001-05:00

The article I posted from Bill Paley is fairly typical of some of the things I've found in the early run of Alarums & Excursions: it reflects the complexity and assumptions of the early years of RPGs in a way that I think gets lost when we just look back at the official products and the reminisces of the TSR old-timers.

I love the fact that Arneson let the players roll for level. But there's an element I want to point out that I think goes a bit deeper. In A&E, and throughout its early years that I've been reading this is consistent, a DM (referee) was a person who had a "dungeon." GenCon games weren't scenarios prepared with pregen characters made up for balance; they were forays into an existing dungeon, at least until TSR started releasing tournament modules and that became the basis of the whole format.

Both the PC group and the monster groups were simply massive. The PCs (there were upward of 12) run into 50 orcs. I guess the "# Appearing" column was read literally in some of the larger games. It's interesting to see in context, because decades in which 12 is an almost unmanageable number of players has created the expectation of much smaller enemy groups.

What's probably the most fascinating is the fact of wildly contrasting play style and expectations. Bill's "heretical" assumption about 1st level magic-users is interesting by contrast to the idea thrummed into my head, and probably countless others, that a first level MU is a sleep spell, or maybe a magic missile, and nothing else. The three little books, plus supplements (which earned quick and widespread use, but mixed approval) created a riotous diversity. And for what it's worth, I think that's something the modern old-school gaming scene needs to nurture and expand.

Special Post from Alarums & Excursions 15

2008-12-13T21:28:00.004-05:00

I realize I'm not as prolific as I'd like to be on this blog. But I do have a bit of a treat from my stack of Alarums & Excursions issues: an actual play account from a game run by Dave Arneson in 1976. I was fortunate enough to get the ok from Bill Paley to reprint his article with proper attribution. I hope you enjoy it, and I'll be posting commentary soon enough.

The following article appeared in Alarums & Excursions #15, October 1976, as Searchlight #1 by Bill Paley. It is reprinted as it appeared in its original form (complete with all spelling and punctuation), with Mr. Paley's kind permission.

Anybody want some +1 Armor from Grimborg?

After a long hot wait in the wastes of North Carolina and an even longer one before that in the wastes of Los Angeles (Westwood to be exact) I acquired A&Es 10-14., SR 1-6 and Dragons 1 & 2, not to mention "Gods, Demigods and Heroes" (just in time!). Ah, nothing like an overdose after the dry season. There was scattered applause after my debut in A&E #8 with the poem of Gabbo (thanks to the typing skills of Mrs. Gold) but nobody threw the bard any gold. Maybe they saved....

Also, Jack Harness, I hear, wrote up a run into the Spire Vigilant in which he walked out much the richer. I made at least one mistake, perhaps more, but the party didn't notice, so I guess it's okay.

The main reason I'm adding this extra bulk to an already weighty 'zine is to relate a bit of what occurred to me at GenCon IX in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. I was returning home from my summer labors and stopped in Milwaukee. After teaching the relatives the wonders of D&D, we found out about the convention but an hour's drive away.

On Sunday, August 22nd, my cousin and I found ourselves outside Horticulture Hall, the seat of the convention. We perused displays of miniatures and such games as Banzai!, Boot Hill, Blue & Grey and others from the wargaming ranks. We found that Blackmoor was to be available to the first twelve entrants at 3:30. I found out that signups began at 2:45 and that (at 12:45) ten people were already in line. I grabbed the next spot. The wait was made bearable by the friendly atmosphere and the sudden appearance of the card game Nuclear War.

The expedition's prize for the "best" character was to be one year's subscription to the Dragon, but it was a very subjective prize. Upon arriving at the game, I found that several folks from Lake Geneva were added to the original twelve (though not competing). We rolled the six standard characteristics (sorry CalTech) and hit dice a la Men & Magic, but we were additionally allowed to roll a D4 for...LEVEL.

I rolled a cleric 10-11-14-11-10-9, Tindell. Unfortunately the #*&%¢$ die rolled a 1. (Nothing more useless than....) (Boy, did I miss Jock Root's tables, A&E 4). One of the Lake Geneva folks brought his 14th level Paladin--the Great Sweeney (apparently in case we ran into Sir Fang. I couldn't get no data on who this character (or monster) could be). When this occurred, I had a distinct shiver of fear course down my spine, but I decided that I would more likely learn something if I went and listened, than if I went and pretended to be a superhero.With a first level cleric, you either tend mules or die gloriously. (Surprise: we didn't take any mules! hint, hint.) There were two MUs , a third and a first, one hobbit thief (with a paladin! Good heavens!), one or two more clerics and a vast number of fighters. Things were so confused that I never really found anything else about them. Two dwarves, no elves.

Apparently Blackmoor Castle was destroyed during a battle actually played in Lake Geneva and over the hundred or so years ensuing the elves who took over ignored the increase of chaos beneath them. This led to the present difficulties.

The party went through various tests administered by the elves to try to make certain that we were not attempting to join the Chaotics below (drink holy water, touch silver crosses, etc.) We then entered a large odd-shaped room which I heard was once the throneroom of the castle, but had since changed shape. Many doors out of this chamber were found, leading to linen closets (with outhouse-style arrangements) and some leading to five-foot corridors.

We finally chose one such corridor (with some trepidation; walking single file can be dangerous!) after a drunken fighter named Richard leaped into a linen closet and tripped...We walked along it a bit until it widened to ten feet (apparently a major disaster collapsed the room and the area was repaired to different specifications).

At this point (having no graph paper), Tindell became lost. He vaguely recalls walking down a long corridor and then turning back when the ceiling started becoming quite wet. The group also burst into a room of goblins who fought tenaciously (Tindell racks up two!) until they caught sight of "the Great Sweeney." They instantly recognized him and immediately dropped weapons, etc., and ran like...er. heaven was after them. We pursued and killed a couple more and then found a door held closed by an ogre's body. We shoved our way in and continued exploration. Tindell brightly suggested spiking a door open and the group woke up...ten people began spiking it. Ho hum.

Finally we came to an open stairway with circular stairs down which we heard music playing. Richard stumbled down the stairs immediately. The rest of the group halted and tried to decide to follow him or not, Tindell urging them on. As we walked down, we heard the orc national anthem (don't blame me; it's Arneson's dungeon; how could orcs have one nation?) played backwards. This brought a horde of orcs on us from in front. While we battled (and Sweeney worked his way forward) ten of the fifty ran off. Soon after, thirty hit us in the rear as well. The battle was fierce with wounds exchanged rapidly on both sides, but when Sweeney appeared up front, again the orcs ran off. Arneson stated: "Sweeney, in a whirlwind, has just killed 17 orcs in this melee round" (!) (Not only that, no one else was allowed to pursue. I'm still confused about this.)

In the rear one fighter died and nearly everyone was wounded. At this point, I showed my ignorance. Coming from an LA dungeon (distinct from Bay Area) I was used to multiple spell casting capabilities and asked why our first level MU didn't throw sleep his second time. (The third level MU never threw anything!) The howls of shocked amazement nearly caused me to hide under the table. I rapidly learned "the right way" to play MUs.

After Sweeney "feared" the others, we slew all but one slept orc and questioned the remaining one. He told us Richard had come down the stairs, taken one look at the horde and run back up, disappearing. Figuring that he lied, ourdwarves dismembered him.

On exploring this level, we entered a room, finding some 12 "heroes" in plate with crossbows. We found they were not chaotic and not friendly, so we left. A bit farther on, we found a room full of gold. Sweeney and some of the lawfuls stayed out, but Tindell entered to investigate a gold statue (perhaps a religious article?). When Tindell realized that the others were merely filling their packs with gold, he complained loudly and ordered them to leave his "share" behind. A number of other lawfuls agreed but not many.

We began to return the way we had come when we came across some of the "heroes" playing craps. Two of our neutrals joined in, trying to win more gold. When the remainder of the party tried to pass, they found themselves taken under custody. Apparently the treasure room was the Heroes'. After many denunciations ("He did it," "No, he did it.") the heroes sent some men to find how much we'd stolen. At this point, they once again found Sweeney with two dwarves and a cleric. Genuflecting to Sweeney, they asked his permission to search the dwarves . A dwarf offered to fight to the death, winner takes treasure. Scratch one dwarf. THEY LEFT THE BODY BEHIND! The other dwarf surrendered. We were handed over to the custody of Sweeney.

We soon found ourselves at the magic stairway. At this point Sweeney teleported out of the dungeon (!) and left us behind. As we climbed up, we found that the stairs went up higher than we thought. Testing for illusions didn't work. We walked all the way up, where we found a trap door. Opening it revealed blue sky. We began to climb out, first the MUI, then Tindell.

The DM led me out. "As you climb out, you see blue sky above you, then around you, and then the trapdoor winks out and you have a gorgeous view of Blackmoor Castle and the lake below you, 200 feet. What are you doing?" "Stripping off my armor as fast as I can." "Very good, I'll only give you one hit die damage. How many hit points do you have?" "Four." What did the die roll up? 4." So Tindell's in unconsciousness. Glub, glub.

Don't ask me what happened to anyone else. I left rather than give it away. Somebody did ask if I got wet though.

The roots of the game

2008-11-24T18:24:00.004-05:00

James Maliszewski, in his ever interesting blog Grognardia, makes an interesting post here stating what grognards have been saying for a couple of decades now: E. Gary Gygax was not primarily influenced by The Lord of the Rings when he wrote D&D. I believe it, and it's true for what it's worth when we are discussing Gygax's taste in fantasy novels.

But it isn't true of the phenomenon we understand as "D&D." Gygax wasn't just tossing in some random elements from one source when he included Elf, Dwarf, and Hobbit as races and Orcs, Balrogs, Nazgul and Ents as monsters in his game. While his contempt for some of them was pretty naked, and elaborated in many subsequent articles and interviews, it's disingenuous to say that this was just equal to dozens of other elements he added from other books. These elements were, in reality, anything but coincidental, and have dominated despite Gary's clearly stated intent otherwise.

Including elements from Lord of the Rings was decisively different from any other major elements of D&D. They were strategic, because — let me be blunt here — they were much more popular than fantasy of the type preferred by Gygax. LotR took fantasy out of the "pulp" magazine and put it into the paperback book. D&D was released at a point in time when Tolkien became popular that the utterly hacklike Sword of Shannara was published just because it was like Lord of the Rings. This was clever marketing on Gygax's part, as well; by injecting Tolkienesque elements in the game, he made it relatable to a much larger audience than the pulp fantasy connoisseur like himself. To go out on a limb, I don't think D&D would've been nearly as successful if it weren't so easy for an aficionado of The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings to slip into it with familiar assumptions.

The influence is really straightforward when you look at the secondary literature of the time, such as Alarums & Excursions, where broad swaths of Tolkien were simply assumed to be good coin in D&D because the game had included so many of its core elements. There are articles that assume larger groups of Tolkien influence, such as the Dunedain, and incorporated it much more knowledgeably than, say, the large chunks of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions (one of the seminal books for D&D). Eventually, despite Gygax's warnings about humanocentrism in the DMG, demihumans assumed the central role of the game, and in the Wizards of the Coast editions, they are more prevalent than humans, at least for anyone with any sense.

Now, I want to be clear that I'm a D&D humanocentrist. I find elves, hobbits and dwarves very dull after nearly a decade and a half of gaming, and could do with never seeing another pointy ear in my game. I also tend to use orcs sparingly, favoring goblins, kobolds, and hobgoblins at the lower levels. But dealing honestly with D&D as it really played out over the last 35 years, I have to acknowledge that the Tolkien elements played a tremendous role in popularizing the game and are a part of our history that we have to own, even if (like thieves and skill lists) we don't use the blasted things.

Classes, tradition and related problems.

2008-11-14T08:43:00.004-05:00

A month or so back, I posted a barbarian class (later renamed berserker) to the OD&D board (you can read the thread here). It brought up a couple of points that I think are relevant.

First - there was a bit of backlash to the merging of the barbarian and berserker archetypes that I had perpetuated in the original sketch of the class. The separation of the two is, I believe, a bit artificial - Conan did have moments that are best described as berskerk rages. And it's a very old conflation in the hobby. Issues of Alarums & Excursions had a berserking barbarian as far back as 1976, and the 1977 Arduin Grimoire codified it as a class. So I don't feel that I was entirely off base. But, there are legitimate differences at work here, and since the "berserker" is in Monsters & Treasure, I changed the name to reflect this.

What I find equally important is the question of "What should be a class?". I view D&D as best played within a dungeoneering context, which plays a significant role here. The major classes that people were interested in during the early period of D&D were the paladin, the ranger, the bard (or singer or poet), the druid (or neutral cleric) and the barbarian. Most of these are outdoorsy types who are not necessarily a natural fit for the dungeon. I play the game with the Greyhawk paladin (pretty much any Charisma 17 character becomes a paladin), and I'm considering the druid as an addition.

I've been reading some more of the Conan stories lately, and Conan is plainly a fighting man. He can do a lot -- definitely at different points he's a hero and a super-hero -- but class wise, I would not put him in my berserker class. There's a certain cachet to being a barbarian, but there's not a lot of mechanical flavor that is going to differentiate the character from the OD&D fighting-man without going the weird route pursued by Unearthed Arcana or merging with the berserker. And I'm starting to think that this is okay.

The niche that I think has not been filled adequately is the lightly armored, clever type who dabbles in magic but isn't serious about it, and is a hell of a fighter nonetheless. (The Gray Mouser, Cugel the Clever, etc.) There were echoes of it in the Greyhawk thief class, but this was merged with a specialist who is probably best left as an NPC. I think that some adaptations of the bard came closer, but really it's one of the challenges that remain, and something I've spent some time thinking about.

Beyond the examples I've listed above, I think it's necessary to have a certain skepticism about the need for a new class. For instance, I've thought about a more potion-oriented magic using class as a witch, but too much of the interesting detail would happen outside of the game. It's a valid character type in the world, but I don't know if it translates to an interesting D&D class.

I think that this approach needs to inform our class-building. There's a certain degree of flexibility within the three original classes, but they tend to move in definite ways in-game. (For instance, fighters tend toward AC 2, magic-users go from one-shot "sleep 'em!" to world-shaking magic, etc.) But classes still need to be added with a "should I add this?" approach rather than "this would be cool."

Monsters, levels and experience

2008-10-08T20:35:00.000-04:00

One of the more natural things to appear in the early issues of Alarums & Excursions is a certain degree of fluidity between the concepts of monsters and player characters. This is one of the things that Gygax initially encouraged in the text of OD&D, saying that a player can be pretty much any "type" described in the game, but that was played down quite vehemently in the DMG, with a prolonged essay on humanocentrism that has stuck with the Gygaxian mode of play for decades. I don't disagree with its main thrust, in that I feel that the majority of PCs should be human, but it did change the overall direction of the game, particularly in drawing a hard line between PCs and monsters.

Early A&E issues were very heavy on the actual play stories, and one of the characters with a lot of stories under her belt was Brilliant Jade, a fox spirit (a fox who turns herself human, taken from Chinese myth). This is interesting to me for a few reasons. One, the lycanthrope was actually pretty thoroughly covered in the early A&Es, frequently as a player type and not specifically a monster so much. Two, the concept was freely borrowed from myth and inserted without a lot of world-building or fantasy mythologizing around it. You had fox spirits in myth, therefore they were relevant in D&D. Three, the boundary between player and monster types was very deeply fluid.

A couple of other examples should suffice for what I mean. A number of writeups include the fact that monsters were given character levels, this long before 3e made it standard. Hobgoblins could be 6th level Fighters just as well as humans. As time went on and more statistics were printed in the zine, monster writeups often included a full experience chart with multiple levels detailed out. I really like the implications of this, because it lets you come up with monsters that are really varied and unique.

It's interesting that this method, which seems to have fallen by the wayside for AD&D in favor of simply adding to the variety of monsters, was embraced most in 3e, where it allowed for nigh-infinite fine tuning of opponents. With OD&D, it's radically different. Since the system is so much simpler, it's possible to do this much more easily. The example that brought me to realize that this was an early phenomenon was a reference to an "F6 Hobgoblin," who would have 6 levels as a Fighting-Man. 6 HD, possibly better AC from armor, hits as a 6 HD monster. This seems to me like a simple way to make a lot more out of a small inventory of traditional monsters, and just the sort of thing one would expect of the time before there were dozens of books full of monster statistics. Definitely something that will find its way into the lower works of my dungeon.

On Vancian Magic

2008-10-03T16:00:00.003-04:00

With this post, I realize I'm going into territory that some OD&D fans would consider heresy, but it's something that I feel needs to be explored. I want to examine the whys and wherefores of Vancian magic, and how it appeared in OD&D and how it came to be used.

To be clear: the magic system was not necessarily "intuitively" Vancian in the 1974 rules. The Magic-User and Cleric classes had a number of spells per day determined by level, and that was about it. With subsequent clarifications, it was made clearly and determinedly based on the ideas in Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, where spells were "memorized" and stored for later use. Elements of other fantasy were also added, with verbal, somatic and material components making spells slightly different from a strict Vancian take. For purposes of paperwork and record keeping, it's a very workable solution with a sound basis in the source literature, and was used in every edition of AD&D and D&D up until the 4th edition, when it was done away with.

That is, in the published rules. Unofficially, the Vancian magic system was never all that popular. Early issues of Alarums & Excursions reveal that the magic system was considered seriously flawed and referees were reworking it from the very early days. Entire game systems developed around alterations, mainly, to the combat and magic rules from OD&D. But Gygax soldiered on with Vancian magic and it became a staple of the game from that point onward. I would think that an AD&D campaign without Vancian magic would be sort of like a Call of Cthulhu campaign without SAN — it's possible, but would be missing the point a bit.

However, one of the things I intend to emphasize in this blog is the idea that OD&D isn't AD&D, and that what is right for one is not necessarily right for the other. The magic rules in OD&D are simply a sketch of the fleshed-out system in AD&D, and I think they ought to prove vital and legitimate ground for tinkering. One of the things I will be looking at in coming posts is old-school approaches to magic, which actually are quite plentiful in print — there is a mana point system sketched in Arduin, discussion in A&E, and the systems of Chivalry & Sorcery and Tunnels & Trolls that I intend to look at for ideas, and adaptation into something of a cohesive alternate system.

The reason for this is not that I'm not happy with Vancian magic as such. As I said, I think it's a quintessential part of AD&D. The reason I'm interested in exploring alternative magic systems is tied into a particular vision of OD&D that I think is perfectly valid, one that looks outside of the AD&D / Gygaxian tradition for solutions to rules questions. I do believe, strongly, that OD&D is not AD&D lite, or with fewer of the specific rules and a trim; what attracts me is the idea that it's possible to build a D&D as one sees fit. The reality is that, when OD&D was at its newest, magic was not bound to any single interpretation but open to wild interpretation and creation. I think the old school renaissance needs to embrace this spirit if it is going to thrive.

Gygax and the old school

2008-09-28T21:41:00.000-04:00

In the very first issue of the APAzine Alarums & Excursions, Mark Swanson wrote that he subscribed to a simple slogan — "D&D is too important to leave to Gary Gygax." A&E started in June 1975, the very infancy of the hobby, before even The Dragon made an appearance. Swanson was describing his differences with the way spells worked in the OD&D rules as described by Gygax, but he definitely hit on one of the points I want to explore.

For the curious, Gygax responded to Swanson in a letter published in A&E #2, and quite heartily agreed. It's important to remember that Gygax was not held in the kind of regard that he has been by latter-day followers; he was a designer who had released a game, and while other hobbyists were enthusiastic about it, they were also frequently perplexed by or in outright disapproval of the rules as originally presented in the "three little booklets". On the whole, Gygax's treatment of magic seemed to garner the most controversy. Very few contributors to A&E responded positively to the quasi-Vancian system presented in OD&D, or any of its possible permutations.

In a broader sense, I think that Gygax needs to be taken with a healthy grain of salt in the old school community. Obviously we owe the man a tremendous debt of gratitude for his design, and I think his philosophy of dungeon exploration games contains a lot of things that are worth taking to heart. But there are two caveats here. First, Gygax's interpretation is just one take — whether it's in the 1974 OD&D rules set or not. Second, he was a normal person and his interpretations changed a lot over the years, like anyone's ought to. The more imperious Gygax of the 1979 DMG and the years to follow was not exactly the same as the one who had been just another gamer a few years earlier, and when he explained his philosophy and ran games for people in his twilight years (certainly too few) they reflected a different level of maturity and perspective. In the very early days, most gamers knew little about Gygax's intent beyond the sketches presented in OD&D and Supplement I: Greyhawk.

For these reasons, I think it's important to consider Gygax's approach to gaming less as the gospel truth and more as one of several valid approaches that exist for gamers interested in the old school. While there is a definite tendency in the old school community today to stress Gygax's work and approach, I think it should be taken like any other part of D&D history — the good should be used for what it is and the bad left behind, with "good" and "bad" being what's good for your game. If Gygax happened to have a few more hits and a few less misses than most designers, all the better. But nothing Gary Gygax ever said should stand in the way of you running your game the way you best see fit. And Gary would've stood behind that statement all the way.

Intro & Statement of Purpose

2008-09-24T23:25:00.000-04:00

This blog is one of a number that are covering the original 1974 edition of the Dungeons & Dragons game (OD&D). I am a member of the "old school" of gaming — not because of a simple conservatism or nostalgia (I was born in the same year as the Moldvay boxed set and the height of D&D as a fad) but because I am more inspired by the gaming philosophy of early D&D and the do-it-yourself community that is growing up around OD&D.

I named it after the name being given to my ongoing OD&D game by its players, "Semper Initiativus Unum," always initiative one. We roll a d6 for initiative, but the players seem to roll 1 with uncanny regularity. And I intend for this blog to be informed as much as possible by real play, which I think is the ultimate measure of game systems.

The other stream I want to include here is the history of the game as it existed in the early years. Chronologically, this spans the period roughly from 1974 to 1980. The period that followed was defined much less by amateur work and thought, although these remained important features of the gaming scene, and more by official publication. This gave way gradually over the course of multiple publications and a vast increase in size for the whole hobby. It's the do it yourself spirit of early D&D that I think deserves to be the cornerstone of the modern "old school renaissance."