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.

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. 

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.

OK, maybe it wasn't the last blog post.

I have a couple of different campaign worlds I am working on right now. One of them is my 30+ year old world that I have worked on and run games in since I was in junior high- my Garnia campaign. I have worked on it with my BFF Darryl since the early 1980s. We have both run games there. We have both contributed significantly to the canon. Originally I was the idea guy and he was the cartographer, but that fell by the wayside almost immediately when I outsourced several lengthy eras of history to him so we could have back story; which, as I recall, was a bit of advice from an old article in The Dragon. We're older and better at writing now, both of us have taken a lot of college level history. I was a history major with a minor in medieval and renaissance studies. I forget what he did as an undergrad, but I know he was working on a masters in US history at one point. So I have tons of material, mostly in my brain, but a lot of it written out, that I could share. Garnia started out as a pretty generic D&D (AD&D) world, and it still is, but it has a lot of historical baggage added on too. So it makes me feel a little constrained when it comes to creating for it, and I am not sure that a lot of it would translate well to other campaign settings, as it is a heavily Celtic influence world (with a few other cultures thrown in around the world for diversity).

Then I have my new “Shattered Empire” setting that I started writing last December or maybe January. I started writing that world as a more D&D-ish setting for my (then) new Swords & Wizardry campaign. The campaign kind of went on hiatus while my wife was in the hospital and getting radiation, then we moved across the state, so I don't actually have a play group anymore. But I kept right on writing stuff up for it, I was inspired and it's all new and shiny to me. I started writing it up for Swords & Wizardry Complete, used Delving Deeper as another sourcebook for inspiration and played one session of Labyrinth Lord there, so I am pretty sure it works for any OSR game, or the original D&D (or AD&D) game. This was the elevator pitch emailed to my players-

“My primary working thesis is that I want this to feel like 1970’s D&D, something I was only there for the tail end of. So I jumped in and did some research on 0e and it’s retroclones Swords & Wizardry and Delving Deeper.

What I came out of that with was that 0e was just as much about science fantasy as it was about swords and sorcery, there are Androids, Cyborgs and Robots on the monster lists. Gygax, Arneson and crew didn’t limit themselves to just standard fantasy fare. “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” was not a fluke, it was fairly standard for the game at the time. So too was the almost forgotten art of the (mostly randomly designed) mega-dungeon.

There is a strong “Arthurian” vibe to the overland encounters. Randomly you will almost certainly be challenged to a joust by some knight or other noble, just to prove yourself. There is an entire separate rules section covering jousting, something pretty much lacking from later editions.

Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” was a much larger influence than Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”; all Gygax seems to have lifted from Tolkien’s work were the Hobbits, Ring-Wraiths and Ents. Honestly, pulp fantasy and sci-fi elements are practically exuded from the games metaphorical pores.

Early D&D was set in a post-apocalyptic world, not necessarily post-nuclear holocaust (although it could be), but like a fantasy version of Europe in the period immediately after the fall of the Western Roman empire.

In retrospect, my own style of DMing tends to amplify the weird, post-apocalyptic tone of early D&D.

So I started working on a campaign world that would reflect these ideas and I first came up with the city of Dusk, then Helltown. Here, in this setting, you will find Sir Thomas Mallory, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, an abundance of pulp era science fiction and a curious bit of actual history. Feudal lords and noble knights abound in the rural areas, evil priests and sorcerers scheme everywhere, the cities are invariably decadent and corrupt, noble savages batter the ramparts of civilization, but so too do armies of Undead, and the lands between the civilized areas are untamed, howling, primeval wilderness filled with nature spirits, savages, monstrous creatures and demonic hordes. “

Would you play a game in this setting?

Anyway, it's been a lot of fun to write stuff for, and I think that stuff I wrote for this setting would need not too much tweaking to fit most people's campaigns. So the only thing stopping me from starting my new blog now is lack of a cool name. I am wracking my brain to find something that says something that reflect both my personality and the flavor I am going for. No more ramblings; concise, content oriented, OSR.

Some thoughts on my 500th post

I tend to write down (or type out these days) partially thought out ideas and revisit them from time to time to see whether or not they still have merit, or if they need more polishing. Mostly this is just campaign notes and no one else ever sees them, sometimes they are rules ideas for my various unfinished works using the D&D rule set as base-line, universal gaming system covering a multitude of genres (thanks go out to Kevin Crawford, James Spahn, (and TSR) at least, off the top of my head, for proof of concept), but sometimes they become blog posts. My last blog post was number 499, and I thought I should have something special for number 500.

My first thought was some sort of retrospective, after all, it's taken me a long, long time to make it to 500 posts. I have considered just killing the blog in it's entirety in the past, but I've posted a lot of good stuff in there with the personal stuff and the filler-esque mail call type posts. I've weighed in on some of the issues of the day in the OSR, put up some really interesting ideas and felt a sense of community via my blog, and others out there that made me feel like I was part of something special, if only to a select few people. Plus, it's always disappointing when an OSR blog goes away. So I kept it up, even though I've had very few posts over the last few years.

Then I thought maybe I'd run a contest. I started doing that right before my sister died, and tried to keep some momentum up, but I faltered there and eventually failed. So I figured if I announced a contest now, I'd be fighting against my own reputation and it seems a little contrived at this point.

So I thought maybe some new gaming content? But my purely content posts have never been frequent, and were, if not poorly received, received little in the way of fanfare or comment.

Ultimately I decided to just post some of my thoughts that I'd been saving up, looking back at and trying to figure out what to do with, so here they are.

Retroclones-

OD&D-

Swords & Wizardry Whitebox

Swords & Wizardry Core

Swords & Wizardry Complete

Full Metal Platemail

Delving Deeper

Iron Falcon

Holmes Basic-

Prentice Blueholme Rules

B/X-

Basic Fantasy

Lamentations of the Flame Princess

Labyrinth Lord

-Realms of Crawling Chaos

-Red Tide

-An Echo Resounding

Scarlet Heroes

Silent Legions

Starships & Spacemen

1^st Edition AD&D-

OSRIC

I buy a lot of retroclones in print, I prefer to read books as opposed to pdfs on a screen. I usually buy them, look through them when I first get them, then give them an in depth read through only later, sometimes months or even years later. My wife says I have a retroclone addiction, maybe she's right. Some I get because I don't have the original game, like Swords & Wizardry (especially WhiteBox) and Delving Deeper for OD&D. I also keep buying games that emulate games that I own and play (or played at some time in the past), like OSRIC and Prentice Blueholme; and I have bought games that emulate games that I really didn't own or play back in the day, despite my owning the original, like Labyrinth Lord for B/X D&D. I also keep buying retroclones that have excellent production values like pretty much everything from Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

I have a lot of stuff for LotFP, over half or their catalogue in fact, including both Carcosa and Isle of the Unknown, just because I like where they are taking the game and they are so well made. I have a bunch of Labyrinth Lord compatible stuff too, for many of the same reasons. Kevin Crawford's work is inspired, and I like what he's done to and for B/X.

I have played S&W a couple of time is all though, and LL just once. Why? Some of them I've never played, hell, most of them- although I did use DD in conjunction with S&W for a game once. Scarlet Heroes I keep meaning to try out with my wife, because we both have the time now, but stuff just keeps happening, and I guess both of us are less than fully motivated.

My Campaign and Gaming Aesthetic or “One DM's Manifesto”-

I want to run a D&D or AD&D or clone of either for a group of people. Over the years my circle of friends that game has shrunk to really small levels. My wife, my kids (really just Ember, and John when he's home from college), a couple of adult friends and one younger guy that started gaming with my oldest daughter. I keep trying to recruit more, but I live in a pretty rural area and the weather sucks for roughly ½ the year. Keeping regular gaming going has been, and remains, a serious challenge. Scheduling alone is a serious game killer. I don't want to be too nostalgic for the good old days, but both making friends and finding potential gamers was so much easier back when I was young and the worst scheduling conflict, school, was shared by 90% of the group. There were times when I could not fit everyone around a single pretty large table, now I have trouble filling the seats at a card table on a regular basis. Anyway, a larger, more regular group would be nice, I really prefer campaign play to one-shots.

My primary influences for DMing are Robert E.Howard's Conan stories and their lesser derivatives, including Marvel Comics, and Glenn Cook's Black Company series. Secondary, but still important and in no particular order, are Katherine Kerr's Deverry series, Beowulf, Arthurian tales from a variety of authors (and I really loved the film Excalibur), the original Star Wars trilogy, Norse Mythology, Greco-Roman Mythology, Star Trek and History. Then we have a much larger body of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I like themes of good versus evil, and I like good, heroic characters in my games.

I prefer to use humans as the real monsters, and I like unique monsters when I do use them. Hordes of humanoids are so Tolkien and so 1980s. That, and a few other things make me a fan of LotFP.

I like actual role playing, people who speak in character and use their character's stated motivations for committing to a course of action. I like for their to be interaction between players and between players and the world. I don't like it when players complain about the “constraints” of the alignment system or try to rationalize or retcon their actions to not be an alignment breach. Alignment is a simple short hand for a character's world view and a role-playing tool.

Conversely, I like the mortality rate of early editions, it keeps players on their toes. I like people that use hirelings and retainers as God and Gary intended. I like players that use their brains to solve issues within the game.

The use of good tactics, clever spell use, and good resource management are good things that make me happy. There is a certain level of meta-gaming that I expect and maybe require from my players. D&D is the direct descendant of wargaming, and I feel we should both respect and embrace those roots. That said, gaming the system, finding the cheats and loop-holes annoys me.

I like the gold for XP mechanic, it keeps the game from devolving into a slug-fest. Not every encounter needs to be a combat encounter, managing to get the reward without wasting resources (Hit Points, Spells, Magic Items, etc) should be encouraged, not that a good combat isn't fun too.

The campaign should, ultimately, have an arc that leads to an end game. Strongholds, Domains, what-have-you are the end of the game. A PC should be able to become a political/military force in the world. You should be playing to win, even though “winning” is a long way off and is (usually) a cooperative thing.

I have never been a huge fan of Magic, I think it should be rare and wonderful, or the realm of the irredeemably corrupt. Pacts with evil forces, elder gods and the like are where most magic comes from in my mind. Good magic is the work of a very few uncorrupted wizards or that of the good people of the church. I like my Clerics to be Templar/Van Helsing hybrids rather than heal-bots and my Paladins (in games that have them) to be the chosen champions of the forces of good and light.

I don't like, and usually ban, evil characters. Rarely are they played well, and even when they are, that's not the kind of game I want to play. One time I saw a Lawful Evil ½ Orc Fighter/Assassin that wasn't a complete and total waste of time/campaign killer. The odds are against anyone that wants to be a bad guy in my campaigns even making it through the door.

I dislike when players complain about the game system being used, it's not about the rules, it's about the game. I use D&D in it's various forms, because I am extremely comfortable with it. I am the GM, I need to know the rules. You, as a player, need only be familiar with them to the point where you can play, at least at first, rules mastery is unnecessary in a player.

Vancian magic, it's a thing; argue about it's “realism” all you want, I don't have an issue with it. I think players that complain about having to choose their spells in advance are just not terribly good at playing spell-casters at best, and whiners at worst. I hate a whiner. Spell-casters are not my first choice when I am a player, but I have played them quite successfully in the past, sometimes just to show it could be done.

Demi-humans, semi-humans and humanoids. I am not a fan of them, I get that it's just not D&D to some people without them. I have, rarely, banned them and run a solely human campaign in the past, usually in a historical setting where they would have been inappropriate. I would happily play in a more “Swords & Sorcery” setting without any non-human PCs too. Dwarves, Elves, Halflings and Humans adventuring together is too Tolkien for my tastes these days.

I like a coherent setting. My Garnia campaign setting has been cooking for over 30 years now, not every element is suited to my current gaming tastes, but it is coherent as all get out, and I know it like the back of my hand- including apocryphal and alternate timelines.

I like randomness. I like it in character generation, 3d6 in order, play the character you roll. I'll tolerate 4d6 drop the lowest, arrange as desired, but I'd prefer that players play the PC they rolled, rather than the PC they dreamed up and then had to settle for (stat wise); coming to the table without preconceptions about what character you'll play is a plus there.

I like randomness for encounters too. I am not a fan of tailoring the world to the “challenge level” of the PCs, I think that players need to recognize that there are some things that you should run from. If you are a 3^rd level party, even if you have a reasonable number of NPCs along in support roles, you should probably not expect to survive the onslaught of the hordes of Orcus en masse.

Situational modifiers- if I give you a number to aim for, the odds are good that I have already figured them in. I know the rules, I have over 30 years in the DM's seat, there is probably not a lot of advice I am going to need and you are just slowing down the action.

Also, not a fan of rules-lawyers. If you want a bunch of nit-picky BS play 3.x or Pathfinder; my D&D, and it's house rules and rulings, has the weight of experience and tradition behind it.

I like wilderness or overland adventures, hex-crawls even, but they are not static. I believe in a living campaign world. I usually have some primary movers and shakers in the world that will keep on doing their thing too, regardless of PC actions, unless those actions interact with the PCs or one of the other forces in the setting. This isn't to say that I am against dungeons, just that they are less common in my games than elsewhere, and they might be just ruined castles or abandoned mines. I like short, succinct location based adventures more than mega-dungeons.

Site based adventures are cool too. A site based adventure in my campaign might be a commando style raid on a castle, or infiltrating a thieves guild, or it could be an entrance to the hollow world or a trek to a lost city in a swamp or jungle somewhere.

My adventures often have a political bent to them. Politics and court intrigue happen, if not often, at least regularly. When I start a campaign I generally have an idea, and sometimes I completely map out, the major and minor factions in play, what their various agenda are, how they compete with each other and what the odds are of any given plot coming to fruition. Then the PCs are added to the equation.

When I figure out what a faction is, I figure out it's leader, it's goals, it's resources and it's allies. Is the faction overt or covert? Some factions have sub-factions, a good example being different orders within the same religion. My current project has the Duke (Political, Military Power, Wealthy, Overt), The Thieves Guild (Subversive, Wealthy, Covert) and the Dwarves (Racial, Wealthy, Seemingly Harmless) vying for power over a wealthy trading center. The Thieves Guild and the Dwarves are somewhat allied, with the Dwarves having completely infiltrated the Thieves Guild and subverted it subtly towards their own goals. The Duke's faction is unaware that the Dwarves are working as a group towards their own goals, or that they have infiltrated the Thieves Guild so thoroughly, and they consider the Thieves Guild to be less powerful than it really is. The Thieves Guild is more or less happy with the status quo in the city and enjoys having brought the Dwarven community so completely under their control. Clearly, the obvious power in town is the Dukes, digging around some will reveal the influence of the Thieves Guild, but you'd have to be pretty deep to even notice the Dwarves doing anything nefarious.

Minor factions, like the various church orders or the smuggling ring, support or are used by the bigger, more powerful factions. Some are involved with more than one faction, like the merchants, who support the Duke primarily, but have to deal with the Thieves Guild. Some factions are concentrated, usually the powerful ones, some are diffuse, like the merchants, who are a collection of like minded individuals more than an organized group. Maybe one day they'll organize and then they'll wield real power.

Factions might be powerful in one area and weak in another. The Duke is powerful throughout the duchy, the Thieves Guild primarily in the city. Factions might believe they are more powerful than they actually are, like the Duke in a barony contemplating rebellion.