The Open Table and Massively Multiplayer D&D

This very interesting video came out from the YouTube channel Questing Beast:

I think that many of the points made here are pretty accurate: D&D was originally written to house a large group, where a player might have multiple characters, and a single referee was seen as running a world, not a storyline. This is certainly what we see playing out in the early days of Alarums & Excursions, when players would bring their characters into other referees' dungeons – and sometimes clashes of expectations resulted.

This is, of course, why time is so important as a resource in the game. The video is quite right in identifying and laying stress on this part of game management, and it makes sense of many of the fiddly time-related rules in AD&D that, in a standard heroic campaign, seem simply like a matter of tedious bookkeeping (and possibly to allow things like weather or dungeon repopulation to factor in).

And it's accurate to say that this style was somewhat submerged. I think that this was a result of the shift from play in large, open groups of high school or college students (as was often the case in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California), to small, closed groups of middle school students, in the explosive growth that D&D went through in the early 1980s. When these players, who learned RPGs from one of the Basic Set boxes, transitioned to AD&D, they lost the idea that the game was designed for large, open tables, and began to play out quests that would look more like modern D&D. And the modules changed to accomodate this – it's not a coincidence that Ravenloft and the Dragonlance modules happened around this point in time.

I think it's somewhat narrow in its view, though. In the early 2000s, the West Marches reinvented this style of play, recognizing that even though 3e D&D had a fundamentally un-Gygaxian attitude to its rules, the notion of a large open-table campaign was still part of the D&D rules. Even 5th edition, with its time-intensive downtime rules, still has some elements that fit into this style of play. Today, West Marches style games run in 5e are such a popular format that it has its own category in areas where people look for games.

A lot of the old school ethos applies directly to this kind of game. It's fundamentally about place and exploration – one of the "three pillars" of D&D play, according to 5e. It de-emphasizes the role of the player characters as world-shaking heroes, but gives them the opportunity to become significant political players by building strongholds. And it places a priority on strategic engagement from the players.

In terms of rules, this is where the D&D Rules Cyclopedia has probably the strongest support. BECMI D&D developed the idea of domain management into a fully fleshed-out system, which a lot of clones haven't bothered with. One will notice this, for instance, in a clone like Old School Essentials: there are tight procedures for dungeon and wilderness exploration, but as far as domain management goes, it simply features a few paragraphs about clearing the land and some prices for castle structures.

To be clear, this wasn't part of B/X and as such their non-inclusion isn't a fault of OSE – but the domain rules in the Rules Cyclopedia are only a few pages long and fill out the processes that have otherwise been left vague throughout D&D's history. This has been one of the consequences of the OSR generally following the lead of B/X D&D and not BECMI/RC D&D in its mechanisms of play. Of course, there are reasons for this: many players have the most fun running and playing D&D in the adventure parts of the game, and B/X is in many ways the cleanest approach. But it seems like there's possibility, in the large-scale game, to really embrace and extend things beyond the individual session.

I think that there's a lot of fertile ground to develop procedures and methods of play that are specifically geared toward large play groups. An old school equivalent of Izirion's Enchiridion of the West Marches (itself a useful resource for any referee) would be, I think, one part of reviving and supporting this style of play more broadly.

Paying for Safe Passage; or, Banditry and Barons.

A recent AskHistorians question about bandits got an answer that is simply overflowing with game-worthy material. The whole thread is fascinating reading, as is an older thread on the same subject.

First: there is a positive correlation between bandits and wolves. There are all kinds of rich ways to integrate this into a fantasy world. Bandits could have some lupine qualities (keen eyesight, sense of smell) or they could be marked visually as wolflike in their appearance. Some bandits might make a totem of wolves or the bandit deity might have some connotations. There is also the possibility of wolves kept as "pets" - or the ultimate twist, that the bandit king is actually himself a werewolf. It's a rich mythic resonance that you can take advantage of when you want to make this gang stand out from the last bunch.

Second: there's a very fine line between noble lords, soldiers, and bandits. In a lot of fantasy there's an assumption that the law is going to protect everyone, but here we find quite the opposite. We saw back in the OD&D setting series that Lords sometimes challenge PCs to combat, so it shouldn't be surprising that sometimes the feudal lord is going to kidnap you for ransom. Tolls and stand-ups for "safe passage" are, of course, a convenient way to relieve PCs of excess loot.

Of course, this doesn't always have to be the Lord himself. Primogeniture means that there are going to be sons who don't necessarily have anything good to do, and they could always get up to trouble. You could even have a robber baron (in the classic sense) hiring a less scrupulous group of PCs as "toll takers" to waylay a caravan - sort of the polar opposite of the stereotypical "You're guarding a caravan" opener for scenarios. It'd also be a hoot for a group of Lawful PCs to capture a group of bandits and deliver them to the local Lord only to find that they are his men working under his protection.

If the PCs are in a stereotypical "borderland" environment, doing some kind of hexcrawl, it's not out of the question to put soldiers on the wandering monster table. These could be essentially bandits, or simply a camp of soldiers who want to turn a buck and charge the PCs for safe passage.

Third: there is the idea of pilgrimage. This is interesting for a whole host of reasons. Pilgrims were the stereotypical travellers of the medieval world. They were typically travelling to some site in Europe associated with a saint or a miracle, or in the extreme case (most common when the Crusades were going well) travelling all the way to the Holy Land.

Shrines and churches with particular holy sites have a ton of potential. A shrine can fall under siege by monsters, or be despoiled by a powerful evil cleric, or just be a location where you have to guard pilgrims. If the PCs happen upon a clerical stronghold, the high priest might send them on a pilgrimage in return for some spell cast or favor done. It's a flavorful way to get people to go from point A to point B. And the motley crew that might be found on such a pilgrimage is the kind of thing Chaucer might tell you about.

Fourth: this is the kind of thing that goes great on rumor tables and guides. "Avoid the bridge over the Sterling River south of the Red Hills, the local lord will rob you blind." Of course, turnabout is fair play, and the same Lord might spread rumors that the northern bridge is inhabited by trolls, driving the PCs south into his territory.

Fifth: the last thing that is fun here is that, this being the Middle Ages, robberies were not always in hard cash. In a lean year bandits or predatory Lords may be more interested in food and wine than in taking hard currency that can't buy chicken scratch. Magic items, of course, are prime targets for a nobleman to demand of a passing hero. And kidnapped characters, of course, can always be press-ganged into doing some adventurous task.

In terms of tone, the idea of bandit Lords and soldiers is an undercurrent beneath a lot of the great medieval literature. It was prettified under the guise of chivalric combat for Arthurian tales but the basic idea is not much different. But if you're ever hexcrawling in the OD&D setting, give robber barons a thought.

Cutting It Short: A Case for Short Swords

OD&D had two classifications for swords: sword, and two-handed sword. AD&D expanded this, in a way that I may eventually write about; in short, the AD&D names for long sword and broad sword are both fairly contentious. But it added one sword type that was added into Moldvay and subsequent versions of Basic/Classic: the short sword.

AD&D defined the short sword as a sword with a blade of 2' (24") or shorter. I'm going to assume that this is generally a good rule of thumb.

There were several interesting swords with blades right around 24" that were made in the period of the "knightly" swords that are the D&D standby. One example, pictured in a 15th century Fechtbuch above, is the großes Messer.

If you know your German, großes Messer just means "big knife." This was something of a fiction, since the Messer was a sword, but it had a couple of interesting features. Instead of the pommel of a knightly sword, it had the full tang that you would often see on a knife, and the pommel would be curved to one side instead of the round, riveted type usually seen on a knightly sword. It was single-edged and often had a Nagel or nail sticking to one side, as a type of handguard. All of this was meant to establish that the Messer was just a knife, so people could go carrying them around but they weren't carrying a "sword." It was a prerogative of knights, generally, to carry swords about, so non-knightly individuals were simply carrying a big "knife." (This would be a great law for a city type campaign.)

But the Messer was an early trend-setter for short blades. The cutlass and the English "hanger" sword were both examples of blades that had the same features: a single-edged blade around 24" long, and a handguard that went beyond simple quillons (the two spurs of the crossguard). These developed out of the longer, heavy falchion (which had a blade around 31" long), and became standard sidearms for much of the age of muskets.

Why would you want a shorter sword? These blades coexisted with the long, heavy knightly swords, particularly the longsword (which AD&D would call a "bastard sword"). They were primarily sidearms, meant for fighting lightly armored opponents, often issued to crossbow or artillery soldiers. As the Messer proves, they were carried around in cities and were good weapons for fighting in closer quarters than the longsword allowed. In an era of plate armor, the sword was no longer an armor-penetrating weapon; you'd use something good and heavy like a warhammer if puncturing armor was your goal. So it makes sense to use a short blade that you can carry pretty well anywhere.

In tight dungeon corridors, the utility of such a blade should be obvious. Thieves in particular would seem to be a great thematic fit for the Messer or cutlass. It really underlines the fact that swords were primarily sidearms, and longer weapons, or ranged weapons, were the primary weapons carried by a soldier.

What, then, about magical swords? After all, this is D&D, not Chainmail; magic weapons are part and parcel of the way the game goes. But it turns out - magical short swords make plenty of sense. The ancient Greek xiphos, the ancient Roman gladius, the leaf-shaped Celtic sword and the Egyptian khopesh are all swords that top out around 24". If your magical swords are properly ancient, why not use one of those as a model instead of the latest trend in knightly blades?

The bronze sword in this blog post over at Tower of the Archmage is a great example of the kind of sword that makes a killer "ancient" looking magic sword. This site has a number of good replica photos, all of which are excellent inspiration for a magical sword that I think will be much more memorable than a typical "sword" with a crossguard and a +1. The khopesh, the Celtic sword, the Spartan sword are all neat looks that will help give magic items a very different feel from the "standard models."

With Moldvay and later classic D&D, magical short swords are also a good way to control "sword inflation" in the game. Since they do on average 1 point less damage than a normal sword, and 2 points less than a 2-handed sword, a short sword +3 is only doing 6.5 damage on an average hit.

Finally, let's not forget the halfling, for whom the short sword is a normal sword.

The moral of this post, of course, is that I really like swords, and I think D&D owes blades other than the classic knightly sword (Oakeshott types X through XIV) some love. As for knightly swords? Look for a post in the future, "R. Ewart Oakeshott vs. E. Gary Gygax." But I really think that there is more potential than most people think for excellent D&D weapons in the short sword, from antiquity right up to the Renaissance.

Dark and Ancient Groves

The only temples in Germany were dark and ancient groves, consecrated by the reverence of succeeding generations. Their secret gloom, the imagined residence of an invisible power, by presenting no distinct object of fear or worship, impressed the mind with a still deeper sense of religious horror; and the priests, rude and illiterate as they were, had been taught by experience the use of every artifice that could preserve and fortify impressions so well suited to their own interest.

Anyone studying late Roman and Byzantine history has to come in contact with Edward Gibbon's epic History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, whether or not you actually agree with its basic premises. Despite some faults in his analysis, Gibbon was generally a remarkable writer and created some vivid pictures.

Gibbon's picture of the Germanic religion draws mostly on Tacitus, who of course was writing not as a disinterested observer but as a partisan for Rome. But the description strikes me as excellent fodder for a type of hexcrawl location. This was doubly confirmed when the picture I found when poking around for a good illustration was one of St. Boniface – the "Apostle of the Germans" – hacking down a tree dedicated to Donar or Thor (actually recorded as "Jove" but theorized as one or the other according to the interpretatio romana).

I generally see pagan religions as sitting outside of the cosmic conflict of law and chaos. The powers worshipped are ancient but are deeply of this earth. This fits squarely into the picture that we see of these "invisible powers" that were the residents of the Germanic groves. Gods of this world, as opposed to the cosmic deities, are similar to the chthonic deities of ancient Greek paganism, earthly deities, frequently associated with snakes and the underworld.

D&D does have one type of forest spirit associated with it, in the dryad. This is quite possibly going to lead to a PC being Charmed and led off from the party, never to return from the forest. I have rarely or never seen referees using this sort of encounter, but to me it strikes a tone of mystery and danger that is something a bit more than just damage. And it is fitting that dryads sit solely in the Neutral column of OD&D's alignment chart.

None of this is to say that forest spirits can't possess the threat of physical violence, but I really love the theme of losing a PC not just physically but spiritually to the forest. It's a fascinating way to make PC loss much more than something easily remedied by a Raise Dead spell (though other spells such as Wish may suffice). Perhaps the central tree of a sacred grove has such powers, and can ensorcel unwitting PCs – unless a Lawful cleric comes along and plays the role of St. Boniface.

What I find most important in this location is the way that they instantly convey a sense of dread by virtue of lacking a central cultic focus. Nature religion was generally not a hippie celebration of the earth, but a fearful and tentative glimpse of the supernatural. We see elements of this in the strange vision scenes of the History series Vikings, where characters often have powerful, even terrifying glimpses of the future. This kind of atmosphere should be fair game if PCs spend time in the groves, including weird and possibly unreal encounters with animals laden with symbolism and the like.

The fear that Gibbon saw at the core of ancient paganism is something that so often feels lacking in D&D's take on religion. These locations are excellent ways to change that.

Crossbows, Bows and the Dungeon

As a referee, I am known among my players for emphasizing the capricious nature of missile weapons. I believe in the chaos of melee, and when a character fires into melee and misses, I often have them make a second roll to hit against a nearby target. Often an ally. That's not to say I don't like missile weapons. When I was younger I wasn't half bad at archery, though mostly with modern compound bows. My father did a lot of hunting and while I picked roleplaying over hunting deer, I did a good deal of practice.

(My father did have a friend who used a hand-crafted recurve bow on a boar hunt. Even my dad had the sense to use a compound bow.)

D&D of course has three kinds of bow: self bows (short and long), laminates (composite bows) and crossbows. In Holmes the differences are mostly technical ones to do with range, and even Moldvay with variable weapon damage sticks them all at d6. So why would you use one over the other?

Bows are fast. Crossbows are slow. That's a fundamental difference - bows should fire quickly while crossbows need reloading. In reconstructed Holmes combat I'd think about giving bows 2 fires per round while keeping crossbows to 1/round and heavy crossbows at once every other round. So why would you have a crossbow at all?

The reason turns out to be simple. A crossbow is designed to be drawn and held at tension. You cannot be a sniper with a longbow. You can't hold someone at the point of an arrow for more than a handful of seconds; if the string has a reasonable draw weight, you'll start to waver sooner rather than later. If you want to wait for an enemy to pop his head around a corner and fire, you want a crossbow. If you intend to hold a victim at the point of a weapon, a crossbow is the better solution. If you want to do your dungeon exploration and be able to fire on an opponent at a moment's notice, that's a job for a crossbow.

A crossbow seems like a dungeon weapon to me in a way a self bow doesn't. Traditionally self bows and composite bows were fired up, to get a better trajectory, and were used for raining down hundreds of missiles rather indiscriminately on an enemy force. Crossbows were more of a siege weapon, the kind that really feel like dungeon combat.

In a dungeon, I figure that most arrow traps are crossbow-type rigs. This makes it easy to have a pressure or tripwire switch that releases the tension and lets the arrow fly. Besides, the kobolds who go around checking on the traps probably aren't strong enough to pull it on their own and need a winch.

When fighting in a dungeon environment, it's probably best to keep rules that encourage characters to drop their missile weapons and switch to hand-to-hand fighting once in range, so when I run a Holmesian game I might not go with adding a second bow fire and stick with once per round. After all, that aiming has to happen at some point. And meanwhile my players may want to check for crossbows....

Historical versus Pseudo-Historical Settings

I've started working on an idea for a sandbox and multi-level dungeon. The inspiration is from old Roman catacombs (there are some pretty amazing maps out there) beneath an old abandoned Roman city near a backwater modern village. I'm thinking that Glanum in the South of France as an inspiration for place, and possibly using the Albigensian Crusade as a setting to have some high-level drama with a local component (heresy and all that).

Which is all well and good. Where I'm a bit torn is whether this module should be set in the actual Languedoc or in a fictional analog. James Raggi stuck his Better Than Any Man in historical Germany during the Thirty Years' War, and I think it works fairly well as a module. But there is an automatic feeling from "we're in historical Europe" in games I've run there that I'm not sure I want to evoke in this particular sandbox (which I am hoping to eventually get into shape as a proper module).

Some excellent fantasy literature has managed to be set directly on earth. Adept's Gambit is a novella set during the Seleucid rule of Tyre, rather than in the traditional Lankhmar of Fafhrd and the Mouser. C.L. Moore's Jirel of Joiry and Clark Ashton Smith's Averoigne stories take place in medieval France just as my sandbox, complete with fictitious towns and provinces.

It has certain advantages, as I discussed in the "Dark Age Dungeons" article in the second issue of Dungeon Crawl. You get the richness of medieval Christianity, although that is sometimes a step too far for some people. There's a whole world of culture that you can draw from, although it also restricts you from being able to freely make up as much.

What I'm wondering is whether a thin veneer of pseudo-history might better serve the overarching goal of a flavorful setting while avoiding getting bogged down in details about reality. For instance, because it's inspired by an area that spoke Occitan (sometimes known by the name of one of its dialects, Provençal), French names would be wildly historically wrong in a real-world setting, but in a fantasy analog of France, I can use French names which would give it a much more recognizable flavor.

Simply for my own running, being able to make up churches (and a conflict similar to the Albigensian Crusade but different) would be a major bonus. Too much Christianity is a bit off to me, and the devil-worshiping goat-men could also be a race of demon-worshippers. It lets us detach a bit and insert a good amount of extra "fantasy" into this process.

I also think this is easier to fit into another fantasy setting. Languedoc is specific, whereas my pseudo-France will be much more ready to slip into an already established world. The labels easier to change, the references less baked in by nature.

Now, if I could only figure out which version of D&D I want to run this in...