It's been a while now...

Picture unrelated to text, purely to grab your attention

A number of things have been running through my mind lately about D&D, well really RPGs in general and D&D, my favorite RPG, in particular. D&D is the 600 pound gorilla of the RPG world, and some of it's modern controversies occasionally cross my field of view. Racism has been a big one lately, between the “Orcs are inherently evil, and therefore a racist stand in for non-whites” and the “Oriental Adventures is racist and should be taken down from Drivethru”.

I think both of these arguments are wrong, but I can understand why they were made, and I also understand that my feelings on this should not be the focus here, when people say that something is bothering them, we should listen, and try to help where we can. I think WotC made a good call putting a disclaimer on the old TSR stuff, not so much with the wording as with the intent behind it, even if it was maybe just to cover their own behinds while continuing to sell “offensive” materials.

I am the Admin for the AD&D Oriental Adventures group on Facebook. I created the group years ago when I saw there wasn't a group for OA fans already. I have never really had to actively moderate this group until the past couple of weeks. I had to add rules to the group, to keep things civil, and I have still had to delete a couple of dozen posts recently. It's frustrating for me, and I am sure for the people that have had their posts deleted for violating rules. I get it, you are upset that there has been a call to remove OA from distribution. I don't think OA is racist myself, and it was pretty enlightened as a treatment for east Asian themed AD&D when it was written. The name was a bit tone deaf in 1985, but not especially so (no real defense for the 3e version having the same name in 2001). 

Having watched over 10 hours of the “Asians Read Oriental Adventures” videos, I found them frustrating, as they didn't seem to understand AD&D, and complained pretty ceaselessly about how AD&D wasn't the kind of story game they liked, and assumed that some AD&D rules were simply racist ways to play Asians in D&D. They also took serious issue with the fact the OA is a mash up of all east Asian cultures, which I found annoying, as it is exactly the same thing AD&D does with European cultures (along with elements from the rest of the world, but especially western Asia and north Africa), while they also complained that it was too Japan oriented. The Japan-centric focus of OA makes sense for the time it was produced as we had recently gotten the extremely popular Shogun novel and miniseries, the Karate Kid, and the ninja craze was in it's bloom.

Were there racist things in OA? Yes. Certainly there were. The implication that east Asians all have Ki powers, making them all more mystically attuned is certainly pretty racist, for example. Ki powers are also a pretty important part of a lot of the media we were getting from Asia at the time though, so it might have been odd to leave them out. In any case, I think Oriental Adventures was a product of it's time, and that at that time it was an American made love letter to the Asian fantasy were were getting from Asia. OA also stoked my love for Asian culture. I have studied a lot of Asian history and OA was probably at least partially responsible for that.

Now, on inherently Evil species, and Alignment in general. D&D has always had this Alignment based cosmology, and I think it's important here to note that it is literally a declaration of what team you are supporting in a cosmic struggle. In my opinion that's the more important part than the code of behavior that your Alignment dictates. I think that adding the Good/Evil axis to Alignment may have broken it a bit, mainly because Lawful was generally considered to be the “Good guys” and Chaotic was already seen as Evil; creating a Lawful that was Evil, or a Chaotic that was Good messed with the dynamic. 

Now all Orcs being inherently evil smacks of biological essentialism, and that's the sort of thing that justifies things like colonization, slavery, or eugenics; all of which are bad (and I really wish I still lived in a world where I didn't need to state that). I get where these people are coming from when they say it's racist to have all Orcs be Evil. I also have seen Tolkien's statement about Orcs being like ugly Mongols, and he really is the father of that species in modern fantasy. The issue I have with this is that I never saw them that way. At worst I saw them as a generic savage “other”, my earliest DM used Orcs basically as Viking analogues raiding and plundering against our civilization, so I really have always cast them in the light of an implacable barbarian foe, the tribes of Germans that brought down Rome, or the Huns, or the Vikings, or the Mongols, or at least a caricature of those peoples. They were savages from elsewhere, seeking to destroy civilization and plunder it's wealth, usually thoughtlessly destructive, almost a force of nature. Looking at this I can see how it could be seen as racist, but most of the named savages are white folks. 

Now we need to factor in one more thing though, the Gods are real, and there really is a grand cosmic struggle between Good and Evil (or Law and Chaos if you prefer). In my Garnia campaign this is a constant, real factor, although the struggle is referred to as one between Light and Darkness, which, apparently, has it's own racist connotations when Light equals Good and Darkness Evil. Anyway, Orcs, in standard D&D cosmology, are created beings, the minions of Gruumsh, of course they are inherently Evil followers of an Evil god. The same is true in Lord of the Rings, they are essentially slaves of Sauron, as I recall they were originally Elves that were corrupted. In my campaign Orcs are created beings used as shock troops by the real forces of Evil for use in their interplanar war. There's a lot of backstory there, but Orcs are a newer species in my game and haven't explored their full potential. 

But, Humans are inherently Neutral. They have free will to choose which side to support, but most of them will happily enjoy the benefits of civilization without ever committing to it via a Lawful Alignment, both in my world, and in OD&D. Cosmologically speaking, Humans are free agents, their Gods come in all Alignments, and they have many, many gods, some petty, some mighty. There's a bit more to it, the plane that my campaign world is on is a good aligned one, albeit only in a minor way, so it slightly shifts the Humans to favor Good Alignments more than usual, but the choice is still there.

Also, there are examples of creatures breaking free of their pre-ordained Alignments. Dark Elves are an example of this (at least it's my campaign's explanation for Evil Elves), but I also have a single culture of Goblins that have broken free of their Evil Alignment, although they are not generally speaking Good Aligned, and some choose Evil, they broke free and got a choice.

And I assume that the stated Alignment for any given species is the general Alignment for them, not the only Alignment found there. Maybe 1% or fewer members of the species shake the stated Alignment, but it could happen. I assume that's what's going on when players choose a non-species standard Alignment for their characters. Dwarves are Lawful Good, per the book, but most PC Dwarves vary from that, in my experience. Elves, on the other hand, are Chaotic Good in AD&D, and you see that pretty regularly, occasionally dropping to Chaotic Neutral for the Edgy ones, or Neutral Good for the nicer ones. D&D literature already gave us Drizzt, decades ago.

I guess what I am saying is that a certain degree of bio-essentialism seems to make sense in a fantasy world, where there are real forces of Good and Evil out there creating sentient beings to do their bidding, and if all Orcs aren't inherently evil, where do we stop on the Evil food chain? There are a lot of Evil monsters out there. Ogres? Giants? Dragons? Outer planar creatures like Demons? How about the sentient and free-willed Undead, like Vampires or Liches? 

Now, having said this, I heard about, but have not seen or read, a 5th edition D&D supplement that separates culture from ancestry (species). I don't hate this idea, although it does lean hard into some new ideas that are popular in RPGs, namely what I call the “no humans” trend, where it seems like every player wants their character to be somehow absolutely unique. I am guessing this comes from story games, and I was a little surprised when I watched the Asians Represent videos how strongly they seemed to feel that the DM should not be able to dictate anything to the players about what type of characters they might play. As a DM I found the concept intriguing, but also annoying enough that I would have smote them for their attitude if they'd brought it to me like that.

Anyway, I am guessing ancestry (species, race) is the genetic component of your character, and culture is how you were raised. In my campaign world I have Dwarves called “Broken Dwarves” because they no longer live within their culture, they live amongst the Humans that have come to dominate the world they live in, and have relatively little tying them to their ancestral ways. Where there are communities of Broken Dwarves they tend to dominate certain trades, based on their ancestral ties to those trades, but then again they might just become sailors too.

Now that I think about it, most of the PC races available in the 1st edition AD&D PH tend to live in Human communities in my world, which isn't to say they all do. There is still an extant Dwarven kingdom (really a bunch of smaller sub-kingdoms tied together by a shared past, but with large swathes of lost territory between them). There are entirely Halfling villages, although mainly under the protection of the nearby local Human communities. Elf PCs mainly come from a background in Human communities, their empire having long ago fallen, although some “wild” Elves exist in wilderness areas beyond Human reach.

Now all of these being different species, I am not sure how the cultural part works, but the genetic part seems pretty straightforward, Dwarves are heartier, so they get the +1 to CON. Elves are quicker than Humans, so a +1 to DEX, etc. Humans are the base line, so no +/- anywhere, my guess is the -1 to CHA for Dwarves is based on their comparison to Humans, but it seems like a CHA bonus or penalty maybe should have been a cultural thing, which implies then that either Dwarves are genetically predisposed towards gruffness, or maybe that penalty should go elsewhere. Half-Orcs even more so.

Speaking of Half-Orcs, they are somewhat problematic. Orcs being inherently Evil, and apparently super fertile, they clearly go around raping everything they can, which would imply a lot about the setting of D&D that I'd really rather not have to deal with. I like to keep the level of my D&D games roughly PG-13, although pretty much every D&D game would get a R for violence. I am not squeamish, but the rape backstory of the entire Half-Orc species is pretty bad, and kind of racist. I wasn't really comfortable with that once I gave it due consideration, and it was particularly awkward when I played with my wife and kids. I included them when I created this campaign setting back in the day, because they were in the PH as a PC race, but I would give them a pass these days. 

I might consider them as a separate type of Human in a species plus culture context, essentially as Humans raised in Orc culture. I did that in another campaign with Half-Elves, I made them Elf-Karls, who were Humans raised by Elves in my Ostschild setting a couple years back. They weren't playable then though, but it makes for an interesting take on Half-Orcs, and it removes the rape background, as well as, quite likely, the racist connotations of miscegenation. Problem solved? Maybe. Maybe I'll revisit the idea of Elf-Karls for Garnia too, so it removes the “Star Trek” issue of every species being able to interbreed with every other species. 

Maybe not though. I had previously explained the genetic compatibility to the species being related, Elves essentially being an uplifted variant of human, infused by the forces of light into a new species, nigh immortal, with a greater natural affinity to both nature and magic; Orcs, on the other hand, deliberately created from humans infused with wild boar via magic (Pig-faced Orcs in my world). The benefit of Half-Orcs was that they could act as 5th columnists in Human society. The ability to interbreed with Elves just a random accident of being related. Elves and Orcs not being able to interbreed being a function of the opposite natures of their creation.

If we're pulling apart culture and species though, I think we should also consider social class. Cultural values are important and all, but I think a lot more of what makes you comes from the social class you are born into. Even today in the USA the zip code you grew up in is a better indicator of how well you are likely to do in life than any other single factor. A rural peasant's background is going to give you an entirely different outlook on life, and a different skill set, than someone born to the nobility, or even a tradesman's child.

Name Your Poison

I am currently running a Roman themed AD&D (1^st edition, heavy on the house rules) game on Roll20. I am giving serious thought to also running an OD&D (or Swords & Wizardry Whitebox) game there too. I am thinking of giving it a Norman/Crusader theme, kind of roll out with extra medievalisms, like jousting, maybe eliminate non-human characters so everything “other” is special and supernatural. Write up a bit of a culture packet, like I did with the Romans and see how that goes. I don't even know if I'll add Thieves.

The real kicker is that I think I might do it as a megadungeon campaign. My Roman themed “Lost Atlantis” campaign was decided, by player vote, to be a hex crawl and I'd kind of like to run some dungeon delving too.

I think I'd like to run jousting tournaments and stuff too. Maybe I'll have players make their characters like in Mike Davison's Flailsnails Jousting Tourney book.

I guess the point here is that I have a lot of time on my hands these days, since Mona died, and I'd like to fill it with some gaming. Pick either game, or both.

Find me on Facebook here - https://www.facebook.com/wdowie

Look to my gaming Discord server here - https://discord.gg/jYCvjPY

And on Roll20 here - https://app.roll20.net/join/2998862/sQwuRg

Keep in mind that I am a "theater of the mind" guy, so I rarely use minis in person on a real tabletop, I have yet to even try on Roll20.

Lost Atlantis

So I started a new (heavily house ruled) AD&D campaign, a mini-setting, part of my larger "Garnia" campaign setting. I call it lost Atlantis. I am running it as a "cloud" or"West Marches" style game. I asked all my friends (and family that play D&D) what kind of a game they wanted and they picked Exploration over Mega-Dungeon, so that's the focus.

Originally it was supposed to be an in person, local game, but it's like herding cats to get everyone's schedules to mesh, then we had bad weather cancel our only two scheduled games, so I opened it up to the possibility of online play via Roll20 and Discord, that gave me some more possible players, people I used to play with that had moved out of area and such.

I found a couple of other guys that are local through a gaming meet up.

We played a few times and I felt a little more confident. I don't use minis most of the time at home, so much of Roll20 is wasted on me, but it does make for a good dice roller and a repository for character sheets and the various documents I have written for the setting, which is, basically, the Roman empire discovers a new continent, where there never was one before. It's got a bunch of other accretions from my roughly 35 years of DMing in this world, but that's close enough to start.

I mention this now, because I am probably going to keep sharing stuff like my "Schrodinger's Adventurer" rule, which is now a house rule in the game, and also in case anyone want to check it out. We're playing tonight at 7:00PM. I'll be there sometime before 7:00PM (eastern US) to assist with rolling characters.

Here's the Discord link for voice- https://discord.gg/jYCvjPY

Here's the Roll20 link for the rest - https://app.roll20.net/join/2998862/sQwuRg

There is also a Facebook group for the game, which is used for scheduling (until I figure out a better way), as a secondary repository of campaign documents, and for talking about the game. Find it here - https://www.facebook.com/groups/260202304516526/


I still kind of consider my online game to be a beta, so I am slowly rolling it out for public consumption, but loyal blog readers should get the beta pass.

Schrodinger's Adventurer Rule

An alternate take on death and dying in D&D.

Essentially, when a PC or named NPC drops to zero or fewer Hit Points he is in a state of being neither dead, nor alive until we check on him, usually after combat. As soon as he is checked on (an action that takes a round for one PC), or the combat ends (Perhaps due to a TPK or the party's retreat from the battlefield),  the PC (or NPC) then makes a Save vs. Death to see whether or not he (or she) has shuffled off this mortal coil. The save is made at -2 if there was no one checking (this assumes that the person checking is acting as a combat medic/first responder, binding wounds, doing first aid, mouth to mouth, whatever). If the save is successful, the PC is unconscious at zero Hit Points and rolls on table A below; if not he is dead.

Table A-

1. Nothing happened, just got knocked silly somehow.
2. Roll 1d6 1-4 Gnarly scar, cool story, maybe a free drink every now and again, chicks dig it. 5-6 Gross scar -1CHA.
3. Head wound, make a Saving Throw vs Death for ½ effect, save at +4 if wearing a Helmet,  roll a d6 1-2 lose 1d4 INT, 3-4 lose 1d4 WIS, 5-6 lose 1d4 CHA, save again in a week, failure makes it permanent. Can be fixed with a Restoration spell.
4. Picked up a limp -25% movement rate, Save again in a week to see if it gets better, then again in a month, if it isn't better then, it never will be.
5. Broken limb, Roll a d6, 1-4 arm/hand, 5-6 Leg/Foot. Roll a d6: 1-4 dominant side, 5-6 off side, takes 2d4+2 weeks to heal.
6. Lost a body part, roll on table B.
7. Never heals right, -1 CON, natural healing is at 50% of normal from now on. Can be fixed with a Heal spell (50% chance), or a Regenerate spell (100% chance). Either way a rest of 2d10 days is necessary before full function is restored.
8. Mortal Wound, PC may be healed magically, but health will continue to decline losing 1d4 CON per day until 0 CON and death, or a regenerate spell is cast. Some kind of organ damage or internal bleeding or something.

Table B-

1. Fingers (or toes 10% chance), 1d4 fingers lost (75% chance on dominant hand side).
2. Hand (or foot, 5% chance), 75% chance on dominant side.
3. Arm (or leg) 75% chance dominant side, 75% chance below the elbow (or knee).
4. NOT THE FACE! Eye (50%), nose (25%) or mouth (25%), All of these leave a scar, with the eye it's got a 50% chance of being gnarly. Eye leaves you with a loss of vision to one side and a lack of depth perception (-2 to all ranged attacks until a Saving Throw is made, thereafter -1), loss of the nose always is gross, as is the loss of teeth from a mouth hit until the teeth can be regrown or false teeth are acquired.

Setting the stage-

I just sent this out to the Facebook Group for my new West Marches style campaign.

Setting the stage-

Fort Augustus is the “safe town area”, it is the only remaining imperial outpost here in the wilderness, it is a port. The fort proper is on an island in the mouth of the river, the town itself clings to both banks of the river, nearest the fort. Beyond the buildings of the town are fields, pastures and orchards belonging either to small holders or owned by great-holders and worked by a mixture of hereditary serfs, indentured servants and convicts. The area is, in general well patrolled by imperial soldiers.

History-

The better part of a millennium ago, this land and all the land further east, belonged to your ancestors. There were many petty kingdoms of man, elf, and dwarf. Those kingdoms fell to a tide of beast-men and their demon overlords, your ancestors became refugees who eventually fled westward across the sea to the safety of a new land. Those refugees, united in their purpose to create a new home for themselves settled and civilized that land, creating the empire.

Nearly two centuries ago the empire sent an exploratory expedition to their old homelands, they found that they had become a wilderness, full of danger, but ripe for reconquest and resettlement. This proceeded fairly quickly, the surviving peoples had lapsed into barbarism, but many welcomed the empire, at first. Eventually, after a number of incidents, there were some native uprisings against the empire. The threat of savage tribes of bestial humanoids was omnipresent as well, still, conquest and settlement continued unabated.

Almost a century ago the emperor was assassinated, and died with no clear successor. The ensuing civil war lasted for over eighty years, with short, intermittent periods of peace while alliances shifted and forces gathered and regrouped. The colonies were largely abandoned to their fate. One by one they ceased to exist, except Fort Augustus.

Within the last decade the new imperial house consolidated their power and chose to once again pursue the colonization and conquest efforts of their predecessors on the imperial throne. A viceroy was appointed for the colonies and rapid settlement was encouraged, with many inducements, such as free transport, and free land. Ex-soldiers and mercenaries were given tracts of land as payouts for their services. Various noble houses have been granted vast tracts of wilderness for their cadet branches. Large sums of money have been offered to skilled laborers. Many imperial soldiers have been transferred to duty at Fort Augustus, then mustered out of service while there. Many have chosen exile to the colonies as preferable to life under the new regime. Transportation of convicts to the colonies has become a common punishment for many petty crimes.

However you got here, you are here now.

AD&D back in print

Old TSR stuff has been coming back to life as print on demand products for a few weeks now, but I feel I’d be remiss in my duty as an OSR blogger if I didn’t mention that the core AD&D books are back as POD products now. 1st edition AD&D was where I cut my teeth as a gamer and it’s the dialect of D&D that I speak natively. Sure, I learned on the OD&D variant Holmes Basic, but in less than a year I had the entire AD&D core rules and I never looked back. To this day 1st edition AD&D is my go-to game. Yes, I have many retroclones. Yes, I played 2nd edition for pretty much the entirety of it’s run. 1st edition made me as a D&D player though, so I am pleased to see it’s return to print, even just as a POD product.

I bought the AD&D premium reprints for the Gygax memorial fund- not that that worked out, but I never use those books, they seem to nice to use at the table really. I probably will not buy these POD copies, because I already have multiple copies of each of them, and I would prefer the original covers. Maybe, at some point, they will let you choose between cover variants?

Anyway, here are the links-

Players Handbook

Dungeon Masters Guide

Monster Manual

At $25.00 each, I think they are well priced, provided the quality of the paper and the binding are good.

Thieves in D&D

****Note this is a slightly edited version of a rant I went on about Thieves back in 2012, at the end of a longer post about other things. I figured it never got as much of an audience because it wasn't it's own post, kind of lost in the noise, and I've been considering going through and editing for re-blogging some of my older stuff- consider this a test****

The Thief, D&D's biggest jerk class. 

I think I have finally figured out why though. The name of the class says "If you are a player that wants to screw over the rest of the party, play a Thief!". I know Conan was a Thief for a good portion of his career, but a lot of D&D players have never read Conan, or Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser*, or even Thieves World with Shadowspawn, so, even though AD&D doesn't come out and say "Steal from your party", it does mention that most Thieves tend to be Evil and they see things like the drawing of the shirtless Thief robbing somebody at knife point in the 1st edition Players Handbook right under Thieves XP table, or the "There is no honor among Thieves" drawing in the alignment description section of the Dungeon Masters Guide and they assume that's the code of conduct for Thief characters. The Moldvay Basic book comes right out and says it "..as their name indicates, however, they do steal- sometimes from members of their own party". Dr. Holmes states a little more bluntly in their class description "Thieves are never truly Good and are usually referred to as Neutral or Evil, so that other members of an expedition should never completely trust them and they are quite as likely to steal from their own party as from the Dungeon Master's Monsters.". When you couple this with the fact that they have that Pick Pockets skill, what are they going to do? Screw the party, that's what they're going to do. They don't have to, they level faster than every other party member, so stealing the gems or some extra gold so the get bonus XP they don't have to share is just damned greedy, but they do it because they can, the system encourages them to.

Kind of a dick, eh?

So I got to thinking about this, if D&D is fantasy F-ing Vietnam, then Thieves are like the Tunnel Rats, or SF or some kind of specialized warrior minus the name-tag and the Pick Pockets ability; because when you think about it, what else have they got? Find and Remove Traps? That's a pretty awesome and helpful ability to have in a party, very Tunnel Rat-esque too. Move Silently? Also damned handy and kind of militarily helpful, in a stealthy commando style. Hide in Shadows, same thing. Hear Noise, again, same thing. Climb Walls, again, same thing. Open Locks is the only iffy one there, and I can see an argument for it being a militarily useful skill, or at worst, an espionage type skill**. Even their Backstab ability is a pretty bad-ass commando type ability, so these guys could have been called something else (like, say- "Sneak Attack") and saved us all years of intra-party conflict and douchebaggery. 

I guess not every D&D Thief needed to be played like a raging douche, they could have been played as though they were modeled on Indiana Jones, he displays pretty much every single Thief skill (including Read Languages that I didn't mention because I was reading them out of the Moldvay Basic book and the Holmes Basic book when I listed them), but sadly, no, he's an Archaeologist, not a Thief (although that's a subtle distinction depending on when and where you are and who you ask); all I know is I'd rather have Indy in my party or a Tunnel Rat from 'Nam than any damned Thief, even if it is Conan. Conan occasionally screwed over his party***.

*I haven't for instance.

**Which brings me to the sad slippery slope argument that Pick Pockets makes for a great espionage type skill too. Maybe it would work if the Class wasn't called Thief and didn't have all of those references towards stealing from your own party and tending toward Evil.

***To be fair, if memory serves, they were usually Thieves that were planning on screwing him over, but you have to be careful about the company you keep. 

Not Gaming Today

It always seems like I think and write more about gaming when I am actually gaming less. I guess that makes sense, if I were actually gaming I’d have less time to think about gaming in general. Today I was supposed to GM the new Mophidius Star Trek RPG, but both my wife Mona and my daughter Ember are sick. This should have been the “good” week for Mona, the last weekend before more chemo, we even had an “extra” weekend here because of Thanksgiving delaying a treatment for her. Until her treatments are done it’s looking like we are going to be two weeks off, one week on for gaming, with a pretty good chance of losing the third week too.

Star Trek came as a bit of a surprise this week anyway, we were scheduled to start a new Savage Worlds Fantasy campaign set in my own Garnia setting, but they released the playtest into the wild and they would appreciate getting the results back within a few weeks. It’s not a long adventure, and it seems like it hits all the right rules to test, and teach, the game. In that respect it brings to mind the adventure in the Legend of the Five Rings RPG first edition book.

Working on a new campaign is always handy to distract me from my wife’s illness, so I welcome it. Writing up stuff for Garnia for Savage Worlds is a little weird for me, I easily fall into my AD&D mode there, which makes me want to check out OSR related blogs and such, then lose myself for a while reading about things like the implied setting of OD&D, or Vancian magic, or a myriad of other details about TSR era D&D, especially the early, Gygax era.

I engaged more than usual with the D&D groups on Facebook this week, which made me realize that I have DMed way more than I have played over the years. Made me think about whether Holmes Basic should be counted as OD&D or part of the later Basic line, or should each iteration of Basic D&D be considered it’s own thing? I only recall having two characters of my own for Holmes, an elf I named Elrond- I was a big fan of the Hobbit at the time, and working my way through Lord of the Rings, and a Halfling named Garn- who my campaign world would be named after. Both of those characters were played in my friend Chris’s campaign, which eventually collapsed because of his killer DM/Monty Haul tendencies. Elrond died on his first adventure, killed by a Vampire he encountered on the second level of the dungeon. Garn became a god, after his first successful adventure.

I can only think of four 1^st edition AD&D characters I played over the years. Mandark, a Human Fighter that I played in my friend Tim’s campaign from the time I was in 5^th or 6^th grade until he went in the army when I was a junior in high school. He made 8^th level in those years of heavy play. Second, concurrently, was Lodor, and Elf Fighter/Magic-User that I played in non-Tim run campaigns (except for once, and I’m still bitter about that), he maxxed his levels out, 5^th/8^th I think. The third guy, whose name I don’t remember, I think it was something like “Fredigar”, lost his right hand after his first adventure and I retired him. Lastly, there was another Fighter, named Brennos, who I played in the 2^nd edition era in a campaign run by my buddy Steve, who was the OG of old school. Brennos made it to 6^th level, then got killed at the end of the last session we played by a critical hit from a goblin’s arrow, when he was at full HP. Still a little bitter about that too, but that campaign my well have been the most sand-box, old school game I ever played in.

2^nd edition AD&D had me DMing less often, adult responsibilities and all, but I played in a pretty long-lasting (for the grown-up world anyway) game where I had two different characters, an Elf Magic-User (generalist, no kit) named Celenor, who made it to 6^th level before a Drow’s sleep dart killed him with a crit, while at full HP- seeing a pattern here, still bitter about it too; and a Human Fighter whose name I forget. He was a swashbuckler, I made him so he wouldn’t compete with the Dwarf Fighter

A New Campaign Setting

I have been working on a new campaign setting, on and off, for much of the last year. I intended that it should be used for my Swords & Wizardry campaign that never quite got off the ground, before I moved across the state in July. I call it "Shattered Empire", and it's a setting that could easily be used for "Lamentations of the Flame Princess", due to it's human-centric nature and it's semi-Lovecraftian feel. I almost went with LotFP when we started play, but jumped back to S&W because that was my starting point when I began the design. I also made fairly extensive use of Delving Deeper in the design, especially with regard to the monster list. Some bits of Carcosa were an inspiration too. I guess this works pretty well with any iteration of (A)D&D, with an emphasis on the original edition; or any retroclone, with a minimum of refitting. Anyway, here's a bit from the gazetteer for the primary campaign area- the most fleshed out part.

The Empire-

Official Name: The Manifest Empire of Divine Providence

The Empire was, at one time, a vast continent spanning entity; at the time of the Apocalypse the Empire was essentially destroyed and devolved into numerous small successor states. The heir to the old Empire that is considered the most legitimate is the one that still bears it’s name and it’s original title; even the other"mini-empires" that make up the bulk of the continental land-mass will grudgingly admit that “The Empire” is the one with it’s capitol at Whitehall and controls the great city of Neopolis. The Empire, for it’s part, still puts on airs like it is an immense entity, but in it’s darkest moments will admit that it is a shabby version of it’s ancestral self, unable to exert real control any further than the reach of it’s armies.

Despite having once been a republic, most positions within the empire have become hereditary – at both ends of the socio-economic spectrum. The powerful have become Dukes, Counts and Imperial Electors, the peasantry are attempting, without much success, to stave off the steady encroachment of hereditary serfdom.

The society of the empire has evolved to have a distinct split between it’s urban and rural components, with power largely residing in the rural and prestige with the urban. The urban citizens of the empire consider their rural brethren to be uncultured, uneducated, rude hicks. The rural folk consider the urbanites to be effete, lazy, corrupt fools. They are both essentially right.

Think of it like a cross between the late Roman empire and any decadent bit of Hyboria, only with extra-dimensional and cross-time pockets leaking in and the elder gods starting to sleep less deeply. I also had recently supported the Kickstarter for Silent Legions just prior to starting on this and my wife was diagnosed with cancer, so it is a bit dark.

I have a lot more, I just thought I'd float this tiny bit to see if it was of any interest.

A Pair of Meditations on OD&D

I have been thinking a lot about the game, as it is played now, even by us OSR types, versus how it was played at the beginning. This led me down a couple of similar, related paths regarding the origin of the game and the expectations of it's players.

These days D&D, and RPGs in general, have evolved into two distinct categories. I do not claim that one style of play is superior to the other, I merely observe that there are two camps. They are not mutually exclusive of each other either, though groups tend to fall with a majority of players in one of the two camps and rules systems have developed to play to the advantages of both styles. I also do not claim that the camps are opposed to one another, they simply are.

The first category of RPG takes the RP part and expands upon it, to the near exclusivity of the other parts of the game, essentially making the experience a directed improvisational theater performance. Some D&D players do this, most everyone in the “Storyteller” type games is doing this. I have found this type of game to be generally too abstract and often too linear. I like to make the story for myself, reacting to the world around me, even as it reacts to my actions; I don't like to be locked into a pre-plotted narrative.

The second group embraces the G, and become somewhat gamist about it; meta-gaming and rules mastery are rewarded, most people playing 3.x D&D, Pathfinder, or 4^th edition D&D seem to fall into this camp in my experience, which is, admittedly, small. Games that emphasize tactics and have detailed rules systems kind of encourage this, I found this style of play to be too simulationist for my tastes.

So I sat down and read a bunch of blogs about OSR gaming. I read through a couple of different iterations of the D&D rules from the early days, and their modern clones and variants. When I was done doing that I thought about it for a while.

On Player Characters-

D&D started out as a cooperative skirmish scale wargame. Players, at least beginning players, were encouraged to play only one “unit” in this game. One unit being a single individual, the character. Wargamers tend to begin to identify with certain units, or at least they think of certain units with regard for the memories of what those units have done in past games. When there is a campaign game, and units can gain experience, moving up from green, to veteran or even elite status, they care even more. Since early D&D, and presumably the “Braunstein” games that preceded it, adopted this experience system, and the players were identified solely with their single unit, those units developed a life and personality of their own. The game could be played with miniatures, and I am certain it was, in the beginning. That's how I played it when I started out. However, and this is important, it could also be played “theater of the mind” style, with out miniature figures, without a board or table. This opens up a lot of possibilities, you don't need as much space to play, and you don't need to have the “right” unit (miniatures wargamers tend to hate substituting in the “wrong” miniature), to name just two, off the top of my head.

My point here is that the single unit that you play in this cooperative skirmish game, becomes something you get attached to more and more over time, with repeated successes, or at least escaping death. Your character's stats may be written on a 3x5 card, but he ultimately becomes more than the card he's written on. He doesn't start that way though. Gygax is famously quoted as having said “Backstory is what happens in the first three levels”*. Generally as your character gets more experienced he starts to acquire retainers and hirelings, sub-characters whose job is to assist in the success of whatever “mission” the party is on and to help keep the primary character alive**. The player character becomes a “squad leader” as the game scales up, and it generally becomes expected that the trusted, experienced henchmen will become player characters in their own right over time, usually at the death or retirement of the primary PC; and all of this was necessary because PCs never reached the power levels that are common now.

I came to wargames and D&D at the same time- I played my first hex-and-counter wargame one week to the day before I played D&D for the first time. I had no preconceptions of how either type of game “should” be played, so I approached both of them from what my previous board game experiences had taught me, and, in the case of D&D, just what being a kid with a good imagination taught me. The lack of a board was slightly confounding, but I got that my single character was my “piece” or token for the game, and that, if I died, it was game over (a term I was just beginning to see in the nascent video game industry). The more difficult part to wrap my head around was the “play acting” part, that took time.

My original D&D crew also had to be slowly coaxed into having hirelings, and never really took to henchmen at all. I suppose AD&D taught us to regard them as experience point leeches. We did start to really give personality and individuality to our characters though, eventually, as they were played more and leveled up some. I guess we were more or less on point with regard to how the elders of the game had originally played there at least.

So, to sum it up. I think it's possible that we are placing too much emphasis on our player characters, making them too individual, with their own backstories and personalities too soon, jumping the gun trying to make all of our characters special snowflakes right out of the gate, where in the earliest days of the hobby that wasn't really a thing. Both schools of thought in modern gaming seem to have lost sight of what was just obvious in the beginning, for different reasons.

On Alignment-

My second thought was about alignment, which has been popping up here and there across a bunch of blogs, but I never would have understood in it's originally conceived form, if I had not thought about D&D as a wargame. Simply put, alignment has no real morality to it in it's original conception, it's just the faction or “team” your character plays for. Lawful versus Chaotic (Law vs. Chaos), with some neutral parties that could go either way, or they might form their own team and fight against both sides. This “which team does my unit belong to” alignment system makes a great deal of sense when coming at this from a wargaming point of view.

Admittedly, there was some moral component creeping in even at the start (or at least near the start).

This is the alignment chart from the Holmes Basic set, which I think we can all agree is closer to OD&D than it is to either AD&D or B/X.

The moral component, or Good-Evil Axis only really comes into it's own with AD&D, where each of the nine alignments in the spectrum have distinct definitions. Few aspects of the D&D game have brought about more rancor and disharmony than the expansion of the “team” alignment system into the “morality spectrum” alignment system, and we lose an important part of what alignment meant back at the beginning. Holmes Basic was my first D&D, followed quickly by the X half of B/X and AD&D, pretty much concurrent with each other, so my entire concept of alignment was the AD&D style, until now. Now I like the “team” alignment system present in OD&D, that apparently continued, with a slight hiccup in Holmes, through the entire TSR D&D line.

To conclude I want to state that I wasn't looking to declare any one play style superior to the others, but instead to discover for myself what we do differently than the creators of the hobby did. Going back and reading through OD&D, skimming through Chainmail, and reading through S&W White Box and Delving Deeper, but from a wargamers perspective was an interesting exercise. The expectation of what the play experience was going to be is somewhat different than it is now. Regardless of whether the game is more story oriented or more simulationist, new games spend a vast amount of time in character creation, which means that high mortality rates are extremely undesirable. Contrast this with the five or so minutes of character creation in OD&D and it's simulacra, and the concept that the character is just a playing piece and the high mortality rate is no big deal, but you really start to feel it when they have some time invested in them later on.

I don't think any of this is ground-breaking news, simply stuff that I was unaware of. I may be wrong about the whole thing, this is just what I got from trying to see things from a different perspective as I read through these early D&D books and their more recent restatements. I had a similar epiphany the last time I did this, after I had read a series of blog posts about the post-apocalyptic assumed setting of OD&D with regard to setting and encounter design, and embracing randomness.

* Or five maybe? It's possible he never said it at all, but that doesn't make it a bad sentiment.

** I suppose that makes Charisma seem less like a dump stat, it affects how many retainers you can have and whether or not they stick around; which is important in the “squad leader” phase of the game.

Monks, Monasteries and AD&D

Monks, love them or hate them, are part of the AD&D landscape. They have been around since the early days of the original D&D game, from the Blackmoor supplement in 1975. Ever since then they have been crapping up D&D's (and AD&D's) pseudo-western European fantasy vibe. They yanked them from the D&D line with Holmes Basic (which was really basic) and they weren't in B/X, but they returned there, renamed the Mystic, with the Cyclopedia, maybe BECMI, I don't know, I only ever had the Companion set for that edition. 2^nd edition AD&D dumped them, although it's possible they showed up in one of the eight million splatbooks. They definitely made a return as a core class in 3^rd edition*, and were/are presumably in 4^th and 5^th editions**.

I work, mostly, with 1^st edition AD&D, so eventually the subject of Monks always comes up. They make decent villains, as the Scarlet Brotherhood, in Greyhawk; and, as such, appear in several AD&D modules set there. Greyhawk is about as close as you really get to an official, core, 1^st edition AD&D setting. It belonged to EGG, pretty much all of the published modules are set somewhere in the World of Greyhawk, pre-1985 anyway, and Greyhawk means acceptance of Monks. So does 1^st edition AD&D, by the book.

We may not use every single rule when we play 1^st edition AD&D, for instance we mostly ditch weapon vs. armor, but it's tough to justify getting rid of a class from the Players Handbook. Assassins are probably the only other class people ever try to ditch, and you have more justification for that- I often run with a “No Evil Aligned Characters” house rule to promote a more cooperative and heroic style of game. But with Monks, we're just kind of stuck with them***, if we're playing AD&D.

It's hard to remove that whole Shaolin Kung-Fu image from them, and that flies in the face of the rest of the AD&D aesthetic. They should be tonsured and live a simple, contemplative life, away from the concerns and squabbles of the secular world, devoted to their deity, in short, another brand of Cleric. I keep trying to find a way to make the Monk Class seem more like traditional European monks, to justify their existence in an otherwise largely Western European assumed setting. Maybe something like Friar Tuck? I know he's not a Monk, but a Friar, but in a pseudo-European context isn't that what adventuring Monk would be?

I don't really offer any solutions to the Monk problem, I just wanted to air my thoughts on the subject a bit. What does everyone else think? Are Monks fine in AD&D? Do they need some sort of reskinning for a more western medieval setting? Do we say to hell with verisimilitude and go with it anyway, because it is a FANTASY world first and foremost?

*which should have been either called 3^rd edition AD&D, or like 5^th or 6^th edition D&D. Does Cyclopedia count as a different edition than BECMI? What about that black basic book from the 1990s?

**I actually own, and gave a read through of 5^th edition, but I honestly can't recall if the Monk was present, and I am not interested enough to go look it up.

***Mostly, I have run a long standing game in a world without any Monks and never had anyone complain.  

1st edition AD&D

I don't think it's a secret that my favorite D&D is AD&D- 1^st edition, from back in the days when you didn't need to quantify your edition. It seems to me that most OSR folk remember AD&D fondly but prefer OD&D or B/X. They certainly have encouraged me to give both of them a try, and, by and large, I have enjoyed it. AD&D is pretty much where the “power creep” between editions started, I get that, but I still can't think “Fighter” without thinking 1d10+CON bonus/level HP; decades of playing and DMing have drilled this into me. 1^st and 2^nd edition AD&D. There are, doubtless, other examples, that was just off the top of my head.

I just ordered a “new” 1^st edition AD&D book from Lulu- “The Lost Handbook” a compilation of AD&D articles from “The Strategic Review” and “The Dragon”. “The Lost Handbook” is over 500 pages of “new” AD&D material, much of it new to me anyway, and for what isn't it saves me having to dig through my back issues of Dragon to find stuff, probably the best $14.28 I've spent in a long, long time.

 

I also just realized that I don't actually own a “complete” set of 1^st edition AD&D hardcovers. I never owned, and only skimmed through my friend Darryl's, a copy of the “Manual of the Planes”, nor have I ever owned, or even skimmed through a copy of “Dragonlance Adventures”. I understand the latter, I always loathed Dragonlance; but the former was most likely an oversight or something. I was never really all that interested in planar adventures, and, as I recall, it seemed pretty technical. I guess I'll look for copies of both now though, just because I am a perfectionist when it comes to the completeness of my hoard.

 

That said, I own and have read through a few other AD&D books that I have had pretty minimal use for, “Greyhawk Adventures”, “Wilderness Survival Guide” and “Dungeoneers Survival Guide”. Each of them are of limited utility, in my opinion. I have seen partisans for the two survival guides, particularly the one I like the least, “Wilderness Survival Guide”, to each their own I guess. Maybe it's that I bought these books long after the 1^st edition era, all within the last five or six years, so I don't have any fond nostalgia for them.

“Greyhawk Adventures” suffers from little to no use primarily because I don't run a Greyhawk campaign. I like the concept of 0-level characters, but I have never used the rules. I guess the new spells might be OK, again never used them. The Greyhawk deities were of no use to me by the time it was published.

That being said, I also have little use for, and general disdain for “Unearthed Arcana”. I am a bigger fan of “Unearthed Arcana” than the aforementioned tomes, just because it has some redeeming qualities- new spells and items, demi-human deities although I don't think I have ever seen them in play. I don't totally hate the concept of Hierophant Druids, although I've never seen them in play. I think we can all agree that Cavaliers and Barbarians are an abomination. I am, in theory, favor of Weapon Specialization for single classed Fighters, but I have seen that some OSR people hate it. I can honestly say I rarely use(d) any of this book, probably because I didn't actually own it until, roughly, the 2^nd edition era. My friends Darryl and Lance each owned a copy, which I could borrow from either one of them whenever I wanted, so I just put off buying a copy. I did think it was curious that it was given the Premium Edition reprint treatment, if I'd been WotC I'd've likely just reprinted the core three books.

“Oriental Adventures” is a love-it-or-hate-it kind of a book. I love it, warts and all, but I can see why a lot of people don't. This was the only AD&D book I pre-ordered at my FLGS (at least as local as it got for a country boy like me)- the late and much lamented “Twilight Book and Game Emporium” in Syracuse, New York. The rose-colored glasses of nostalgia are in full effect for me, OA rejuvenated waning interest in AD&D, and RPGs in general, for my group back in '85. I have heavily modified the character classes and the non-weapon proficiency sub-system for play over the years, but I still love it and I think OA1 “Swords of the Daimyo” is maybe the best sandbox ever released by TSR.

 

Aside from OA, I was always pretty much a “core books” kind of a guy, “Monster Manual”, “Players Handbook” and “Dungeon Masters Guide”, sometimes with “Deities & Demigods” added for when religion entered the game in anything other than it's “Yeah, my Cleric has a Deity” kind of a way. “Fiend Folio” and “Monster Manual II” were kind of under utilized too I guess. This probably stems from my introduction to (A)D&D- Holmes Basic→AD&D and the X half of B/X concurrently, and all of them within no more then eighteen months of each other, as I was learning the game. I played D&D for the first time in early 1981 (I just checked, it was the week after I saw the movie “Excalibur” in the theater, which was right after it came out). I distinctly remember “Fiend Folio” being the new book. “Monster Manual II” came out around the same time as “Unearthed Arcana” and “Oriental Adventures” in 1985, so I really remember those being new books, and, while new books had their novelty value, most of us in my neck of the woods stuck to the tried and true- MM, PH & DMG.

I have to wonder what my experience would have been if I'd found that boxed set a year or two earlier, or been introduced to D&D via B/X. I remember finding a book store, after I'd discovered (Holmes Basic) D&D and already moved on to AD&D, where I spotted the original D&D books. It was in a mall we never went to, I tried to hunt down my mom and dad to get them to buy them for me- but when I found them they decided it was time to go. I never saw any of those OD&D books again until I spotted them on the internet. After I moved on to AD&D and realized there was a distinction at all, I had nothing but disdain for Basic. I never owned a Moldvay Basic set until I started reading about how great it was on OSR blogs and grabbed on off Ebay, despite the fact that I freely used my Cook/Marsh Expert set all the time, at least until 2^nd edition AD&D came out. The only Mentzer set I bought was the Companion set, and only because it had the War Machine rules that were hyped in Dragon at the time.

Now that I look back on it, that was kind of odd behavior for me. I bought pretty much every TSR boxed set I could afford, when I could find them- “Boot Hill”, “Dawn Patrol”, “Marvel Super Heroes” and their minigames too. I was an early to mid 1980's TSR fanboy, except when my AD&D snobbery kept me from buying into the D&D product line (for the most part, I did pick up a lot of D&D stuff when Kaybee Toys periodically purged the D&D stuff from their shelves, since it was so cheap and compatible with AD&D).