And Greyhawk Complicates Things

If last Tuesday you bought a copy of Original D&D, today you can buy Supplement I: Greyhawk (links now go to the new DM's Guild, which is replacing D&D Classics) and complicate things.

Categorically, Greyhawk is when OD&D began to be recognizably Dungeons & Dragons. High Strength made you hit harder and more often. High Dexterity improves your armor class. There were half-elves, thieves, and paladins. Swords do d8 damage and daggers do d4, as fighting-men went to d8 hit dice and magic-users to d4s. Magic Missile and Web and 7th through 9th level spells all got introduced in Greyhawk. Beholders and Owlbears and Bugbears all came to be in this supplement. It is whence the Deck of Many Things. In short, the things that made D&D a recognizable brand come from this booklet, to a degree that is surprising in retrospect.

That said, OD&D plus Greyhawk is not a particularly good combination for gaming in 2016. A few Greyhawk elements are worth grabbing, such as the thief (Zach Howard at the Zenopus Archives put together a good reference sheet for the pre-Greyhawk version). If you want to run a game with OD&D roots that is classically D&D, a better bet is using the Holmes Basic book with the Cook/Marsh Expert book (the two blue books); the result will be cleaner and better organized. Greyhawk follows OD&D's sections literally, meaning that information such as thief abilities are scattered across a dozen pages of unrelated content.

Greyhawk's problem isn't that its material is no good; it's that its approach has been taken much further. AD&D, classic D&D, and most of their derivatives all take the material here and do more with it.  It's interesting as a historical artifact, but if your goal is to play OD&D, it works best as a snapshot of areas that could be expanded from the brown books.

It's interesting to see how much Greyhawk changed things. It touched on every aspect of the game, usually adding new layers of complexity. Ability scores, classes, races, combat system, spells, monsters, magic items - everything is added, and it becomes easy to see why it was named "Greyhawk" as the world is now much more Gary Gygax's. Once you have the idiosyncratic rules and creatures of the Greyhawk world, every setting starts to blend in with the next.

Once you remove that layer, OD&D's setting (which of course I've written about) becomes much more flexible. Each monster, spell, or magic item you choose to add does more to customize the game, because you're no longer fighting the now-entrenched Gygaxian assumptions. A beholder is interesting, but that's the kind of threat Gary's world features. OD&D has plenty of directions to go: there's Tolkienesque fantasy, classical mythology, Universal and Hammer films, '50s sci-fi/horror films, giant versions of normal animals, dinosaurs, Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom, and several minor influences. Anything from fantasy, sci-fi, or horror is fair game, as are wholly new creations.

Empire of the Petal Throne is the furthest-reaching example of where this can go. A whole world constructed from the base up. But with OD&D as a basis, the referee doesn't need to create everything, and has a fairly stable basis for their variation. Using Greyhawk short-circuits this and leads back to the over-exploited, familiar soil.

I don't want this to be misconstrued. Greyhawk was where a number of classic ideas that have entertained people for decades got their origin, and deserves to be read as such. I just think that, as far as OD&D today goes, there is a sound creative reason to go back to the sources, and adding Greyhawk in is a distraction from that.

Actual Play: OD&D, Greyhawk and a touch of Arduin

I ran OD&D today. It seems odd, given a wide array of systems – including clones – to still use the original booklets to run games. I did recently give Lamentations of the Flame Princess a whirl, and it's a fine clone. And yet I now feel like OD&D is my "home" system.

(The picture above is of dice inked by Lou Zocchi. I was using the tiger eye beauties above as my primary d20s, using a d6 as a control die. There's just something to it.)

The game used Dyson Logos's Dellorfano Protocols Map. I loaded it with an adventure that had some plot behind it, a portal leading to Cykranosh (the Clark Ashton Smith name for Saturn), a few other CAS references, a few monsters, and a couple of interesting tricks. It was a ball to run.

Using OD&D plus Greyhawk as a basis winds up a lot like AD&D lite, or an alternate version of B/X D&D. But I like this particular iteration's quirks the best. It was how OD&D was really played, and it hits a sweet spot that attempts to add more detail or systematize things wind up missing. There is a comfort level to it, but a big factor is that it doesn't feel as much like somebody else's game. That's the main weakness, in my opinion, of the various clones.

As a side note: I think the best thing that you can do for your D&D experience is to run original D&D, no supplements, at least once. It's like a Zen cleansing moment for D&D: you just get to focus on the dungeon crawl itself. My love for OD&D I think stems from that. Everything I add, I choose to add, for a specific reason that I understand.

I also used the Arduin Grimoire, which I've been consulting for its quirky-as-hell critical hit table for a few games. It's a frickin' riot in use. One of the PC hobbits got a result of "eye" against a bandit with a dagger, and the damage was enough to kill the bandit straight out, so I described the hobbit getting up on top of the bandit and jamming the dagger home. I'd actually like to see a book like Arduin but designed by a person with better rules-sense than Hargrave, and less of the stupidly complex charts like individual weapon damage by number of enemy HD.

And of course the Ready Ref Sheets were in hand. It's another product I love but would appreciate a new version for. I'd like a to-hit chart closer to the one in Iron Falcon, which has additional gradations by level, and a fresh dungeon searching table. And of course various and sundry other charts.

My feeling is that D&D is an intensely personal game, being a creature of imagination. So it's naturally going to wind up as a kitbash game, where you take from the variants and other games out there and construct your own. Other people have talked about how they're running an "OSR Frankengame" and I think that's educational. The best thing the OSR has done is put out an awful lot of material for kitbashing. No one piece is a sine qua non, but there's plenty out there to tune a game just the way you want.

Goblins are slow, Velociraptors are fast

I got to run a hangout game of OD&D with Greyhawk last night, and the above was the list of books I used in prep and while running the game (less the Arduin Grimoire which I wound up using because it was handy). I'm actually lookng at finally writing the module I've been meaning to write and wanted to run some players through the dungeon; it was successful.

I have to give a positive mention to Geoffrey McKinney's Carcosa; I used his "Spawn of Shub-Niggurath" generator to get inspiration for one of the monsters, which helped add to the high weirdness quotient of the game. I also reskinned a wand as a ray-gun, which went over very well. The dungeon itself is supposed to have an "ancient ruins invaded by some science fiction stuff" feel, so that was all very much to the good.

The one thing that really stood out to me in the game was the effect of movement rates in combat. It's a very static thing, where a high movement rate more or less always wins. The PCs, not yet being burdened with encumbering treasure, were able to chase down fleeing goblins so handily that they could have overtaken them if they liked. Later when they chose to run from a large number of goblins they had no problem doing so.

Likewise, when they got back to the surface they found that they could not run from the velociraptor whose interest they drew. (Velociraptors in my games are basically colorful, predatory turkey-vultures that primarily stay on the ground and have nasty sharp claws.) Giving velociraptors a movement rate of 18" (180/60 in B/X terms) means that the PCs could not even conceivably flee and had to stand and fight. This led to the near-death of the hobbit thief, who took a raptor claw to the face.

This aspect of the game is really important when you play it as generally intended, with monsters regularly breaking morale (like the goblins in my game) and running, and yet it isn't – to my knowledge – covered in any of the various rule sets and revisions out there with anything more sophisticated than the OD&D movement rate system. At best, initiative can get you a head start, but that's about it.

OD&D with Greyhawk has some pretty severe organizational issues, but overall it's such a favorite of mine that I couldn't permanently get away from it. Getting a chance to run it on hangouts is a real pleasure. If you don't have the real thing, I'd recommend giving Iron Falcon a shot. I don't use it because I prefer making my own inferences and rulings from the OD&D booklets, but more than any other clone it gets the rules I prefer to use out.

It was ALL weird!

In Michael Mornard's discussion thread over on the OD&D forum, I asked this question:

OD&D lists a bunch of increasingly weird options at the end of the monster types - dinosaurs, living statues, robots, androids, etc. Do you remember any encounters with that kind of creature?

Michael's response, which I am enthusiastic enough about to get on a t-shirt:

Greyhawk was FULL of weird sh*t. Once you got below the fifth or sixth level the odds of encountering anything "usual" except as a wandering monster was virtually nil. Go look at Rob Kuntz' "Bottle City" for an example. It was ALL weird!

Somehow, the idea that Greyhawk was vanilla crept down into the gaming world, and it has sort of lodged there as one of the great falsehoods of our hobby. It leads to the perception of the megadungeon as nothing more than a reverse mountain of stock fantasy, and of the Greyhawk setting as a big boring realm, when nothing could be further from the truth.

In The Dragon #17, Jim Ward wrote the following in an article called "Boredom and the Average D&D Dungeon":

The Future or Machine Age: While some steady readers might think that I harp on this topic too much, the first time I came in contact with a level of this type was in the “mighty” castle of Greyhawk; run by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. Imagine conveyor belts that force players to travel in one direction or another, a cellophane machine that wraps you up no matter how big or small you are and puts you in a holding area for as long as it takes to rip yourself out, how about a die press that shapes anything in its path into a bottle top (Boy, can that hurt!), or a row of blades that cut in a pattern on the belt with a 25% chance that any given blade will cut you? Try a slot machine that takes only large sums of gold and with the flip of the handle takes a random magic item from the party, and how about a lever that turns on something way off in another part of the level (like a robot or level clean up machine) that you can’t know about until you travel to that part of the level? The treasures of this level could easily be more fun than the level: imagine bottle tops made out of mithril on wine bottles; how about guns and pistols that work; a set of chain mail made out of a super hard and light alloy that acts like plus 5 armor and shows no magical traits; how about a huge pile of gold dust in a large plastic bubble that isn’t small enough to get out the door and can’t be cut by anything less than a plus 5 sword?

Archivists of the magazine will recall that this was the very same issue in which Gygax writes up a foray from Greyhawk Castle inhabitants onto the Starship Warden of Metamorphosis Alpha fame. A story, which is too long for me to quote here, by Gygax talks about the Black Reservoir, a massive body of water in Castle Greyhawk. (Allan Grohe, who created that Greyhawk site, ran a group I was in through some of that Reservoir using the AD&D rules.) And of course several oddities from Greyhawk have seen print: Gygax's EX1 Dungeonland, EX2 The Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, WG6 Isle of the Ape; and Kuntz's The Original Bottle City, The Original Living Room, and Garden of the Plantmaster.

What this adds up to is the opposite of a big vanilla madhouse. The point of this classic megadungeon was to get down, survive the weirdness, get the treasure, and get the hell out. Perhaps most impressive is that Gygax and Kuntz were so good at making these environments into really challenging game areas, as we see in Ward's summary: the things that are trying to kill the PCs are themselves objects of intense curiosity.

Forays into science fantasy are expected; there is a way to get to Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure and face the birdlike Dirdir (documented in the DMG) as well as to Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom. One of the remarkable things about Greyhawk is how literary it was; everyone talks about Appendix N as inspiration, but Gygax was using various novels straight-up as material for his dungeon. This of course allowed Gygax to use puzzles, riddles and puns that relied on real-world references and wouldn't make sense in a totally fleshed out fantasy-land like, say, Tolkien's. Compared to this, S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks seems almost par for the course of what you'd expect in a Gygax dungeon.

Gygax advocated using the weirdness as a contrast to the "standard" grind:

That is, moments of silliness and humor help to contrast with the grinding seriousness of a titantic struggle and relieve participants at the same time.

In the ponderous high fantasy seriousness of the '80s, the railroady plots of the '90s, the over-the-top '00s and the grimdark teens, it's way too easy to lose sight of this simple advice. Gygax was on the ball, but more importantly he managed to shift tone without losing playability. That's really the most important takeaway from all this: everything described above was seamlessly part of the game. It didn't stop to look at something cool, there was something interesting just around the next corner and an encounter in Wonderland was just as threatening as anything in the grim "area of evil."

Arneson had a reputation for being the weird one, but in the most productive era that he had, Gygax really laid this on thick. It's not a coincidence that large chunks of Appendix N are either planetary romance, post-apocalyptic or straight-up science fiction. So the next time you're wondering how to make your dungeon a bit of a stranger place, try to make it a little more like Greyhawk. You won't go wrong.

Fast and Slow Dungeon Levels

More time running Stonehell and thinking about Blackmoor has me considering a certain principle of dungeon design that I think can be best summarized as "fast" and "slow" levels of megadungeons.

A lot of what we see in the field of published megadungeons are composed of slow levels. I think the reputation of Gygax's early levels (such as the one glimpsed in the photo above) and the general desire to have big maps had a definite influence on this. By a slow level, I mean a level that encourages a party to spend multiple sessions exploring it and finding its secrets. Big levels tend to be slow, but a small level with a lot of rooms and secrets and not many passages down will also be slow. Most sub-levels will be small, but slow, levels.

Fast levels, by contrast, are levels like the first level of Blackmoor. They are designed to encourage the PCs to get through quickly and down to another level. A fast level isn't necessarily a small level; a level with a few big cavernous rooms could be fast if there was nothing in particular to keep the players in full-on exploration mode. Likewise, a level where some local condition makes in-depth exploration difficult or dangerous could be fast.

There is a lot of value in having slow levels; this is where much of the meat of the gameplay will take place. I think the error in modern megadungeon design is an assumption that every level should be slow. We see big intricate maps and think - "I want that in my dungeon." It's understandable. And I think Barrowmaze represents the extreme end: a first level so massive it has its own book. That is a slow dungeon level.

One reason I think good design should lean more towards fast levels in the early parts of the dungeon is that low levels shouldn't always be a grind. The average OD&D piece of jewelry is worth 3,410 gold pieces. There should be jewelry in one out of 15 rooms on level 2 based on the chances of finding jewelry, and there should be 3.5 pieces on average. On average it will be worth 11,935 gold pieces and at 1 GP = 1 XP, that's almost enough for 6 characters to gain a level, more than enough if they have prime requisite bonuses. So in theory, a dungeon should have a single treasure on the second level that first-level PCs can go in, get it, get out, and come back second level. If that second level has 30 rooms, it should have two such treasures, which will get the PCs to third level.

Now, that might require some reconnoitering and planning to extract with a minimum of PC deaths, but that's the nature of the game. I think the ideal pattern for a megadungeon would be a fast first level, a big slow second level, and then two fast third half-levels that each lead to different paths down. After the third level, of course, things begin to be weird.

I have some more ideas about fast levels that I'll get into detail on, hopefully later this week.