Ave Caesar! A Contest Update

I just want to reiterate all of the contest rules and prizes here and announce that I am extending the submissions deadline until the end of January rather than the Ides, because, while the Ides sounded cool, don't think it gave enough time with the holidays in the way.

So here we go-

The contest is to write an Ancient Roman Empire themed adventure for early edition D&D, AD&D or one of their popular retroclones. One Page Dungeons are fine, but I have had people need more space, so short adventures are acceptable too. I am willing to accept anything you are willing to submit, up to and including huge hex-crawls; every adventure will be judged on it's own merit.

The fine print- I intend to publish these submissions to the web as a free series for the OSR community, if you want to opt out of having me give your work away to everyone, mention it in your submission email.

All adventures should be submitted via email to me at williamjdowie AT gmail DOT com by midnight on January 31^st EST. I will then email them to the rest of the judges.

The good stuff-

Everyone who submits an entry, or really, really wants one gets a refrigerator magnet. So far the magnets have made it to Europe and Australia, as well as all over the USA, let's see how many continents and countries we can hit while the supply lasts! Just send me your postal address with your submission and my wife will mail it out within a few days, unless you live in Maryland or Germany, in which case I will have to nag her for weeks.

Grand Prize-

PDF copies of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, courtesy of Zozer Games.

8”x10” Canvas Print courtesy of easycanvasprints.com

Roman Numeral D4(x2), D6(x2) and D10(x2).

One commissioned Character portrait courtesy of Mona Dowie.

Second Prize-

PDF copy of 43 AD courtesy of Zozer Games.

Roman Numeral D4, D6(x2) and D10.

One commissioned Character portrait courtesy of Mona Dowie.

One Old School 1984 Ral Partha Roman Legionary lead miniature, unpainted.

Third Prize-

PDF copy of 43 AD courtesy of Zozer Games.

Roman Numeral D4, D6(x2) and D10.

One commissioned Character portrait courtesy of Mona Dowie.

Prizes may be updated, as I am constantly on the lookout for more sponsors and I am not averse to opening my own vault of gaming goods if I think we need more submissions.

Samurai, Shugenja & Sohei

I have been working on a total rebuild of AD&D's Oriental Adventures book for a while now, just to fix the parts I thought were broken. I play-tested the rebuilt classes for the first time with my regular group recently.

First, a little background: my goal was to make the game more compatible with “classic” 1^st edition AD&D, and that as I played it back in the day and still play it; which is to say with a lot more OD&D via Holmes Basic and a healthy dose of Moldvay/Cook B/X. I have also spent the better part of a decade tracking down other Asian inspired RPGs and reading through them to see what the best bits were, mining for inspiration you might say. The best were Bushido, Sengoku and Legend of the Five Rings (which already has a D&D conversion, albeit 3e). Clearly then, my OA project (which I should give at least a working title) is mostly inspired by Japan; I have, in fact, removed non-Japanese elements from the game where I found them.

Second, some of the character class design concepts were still in fluctuation in my head right up until the players started rolling up ability scores. I knew I wanted the characters in my OA game to be able to fit into anybody's standard AD&D game and NOT be over-powered compared to their occidental cousins. Ki powers are gone from every class. I also ditched all non-weapon proficiencies; my thinking on that was that any character should pretty much know how to do the stuff that makes sense for his Character Class, Birth Rank and background, failing that a player should be able to come up with a plausible reason why their character might know how to do something with the DM using his judgment as to what constitutes plausible.

On to the Character Classes-

What's gone? The Barbarian, the Wu Jen, the Yakuza and the Ninja. The Barbarian didn't make the cut based on me deciding that I was homogenizing the rules set to Japanese. The Wu Jen mostly got the axe for the same reason, he's just a funky Magic-User named in Chinese. The elemental aspects of Asian magic were rudimentary at best. The Yakuza was just a guild Thief with some annoying and usually hard to play special abilities, they make good NPCs, lousy PCs; I replaced them with the Thief from AD&D. Thieves are universal, they don't all need to be gangster thugs in a feudal Japanese fantasy setting. I'll probably change the name if I ever learn the Japanese word for “Thief”. The Ninja I replaced with my Shinobi, which, now that I have a copy of the AD&D 2^nd edition Complete Ninja Handbook is close enough to their Ninja that I want to go back in time and sue TSR.

The Bushi is pretty much a straight port over of the Fighter, I may change this up some for flavor, but no one wanted to play a straight Bushi, so it didn't come up.

The Samurai are about the power level of an AD&D Paladin, only less holy (which is to say not really at all holy) and more combat oriented. Maybe a Ranger? I made them super melee fighters by giving them the 3e feat “Cleave” as a class ability, it seemed pretty Samurai like. They also get to specialize with weapons, yes, I kept weapon specialization from OA/UA. Although now it occurs to me that I may have to create a separate Samurai Archer type class because this class is so melee oriented. Anyway, requires a STR 9 WIS 14 and one other special I'll mention later.

Kensei means “Sword-Saint” or “Sword Master”, so I am tempted to make them solely a sword based class, but discussions with my gaming buddies tell me that it probably would be even less popular a choice for players if I did. I changed their ridiculous XP advancement back down to something reasonable and toned down their powers. A lot of the class abilities require that the player role-play, or at least announce they are practicing whenever possible. While I encourage role-playing, I can't see the stiff penalties for failing to practice, using a magic weapon or using a weapon other than your chosen weapon for instance; they're already the only Fighter Sub-Class that can NOT wear armor. Nobody chose to play a Kensei though, so I guess it's still in flux until someone does. I guess an Archer Kensei would make up for the Samurai's melee focus though. Still not happy about the no armor thing, but I am listing to several arguments for and against, so I am open minded on this point.

Shugenja, this is a big one. I never really liked the Wu Jen or the original Shukenja so I basically started back-porting the 3e OA Shugenja to 1^st edition AD&D, essentially making a Cleric/Wizard mix for the game. I realize this is something of a cop-out, but creating something that's pretty much what I want anyway, when it's already been done by somebody else and it works (theoretically) seems like a waste of my time. No one wanted to play one though, so it's unfinished.

Sohei got a major rework from me. I bring them more in line with OD&D or B/X Clerics only without weapon restrictions and give them the d8 Hit Die. So, pretty much an AD&D Cleric with no spell at first level and all weapons available. Waiting until 5^th level for spells was BS.

The Monk also saw major reworking. I looked at various edition's versions of the Monk Class and mostly mixed and matched what powers/level I liked while dropping the over-all power level, but increasing lower level survivability. They get d8 Hit Dice and fight as Clerics and can use their Monk special attacks with martial arts weapons. No one wanted to play a Monk though, so it hasn't been tested.

Originally OA had one extra Ability Score- Comeliness, which I hated and ignored. Hidden within the game is another one though. One that I brought out and replaced the loser stat Comeliness with- Birth Rank. I changed it from a roll after you pick your Character Class, with Class based modifiers to a straight 3d6 roll. Now it's a prerequisite for becoming a Samurai (13+) and, when combined with Ancestry and Birth Right rolls can seriously affect your starting money. It will not affect any OA characters leaving their “home” setting, but it strongly affects reaction rolls. I actually don't see why this couldn't be ported over into any OSR game setting, I mean in non-AD&D you roll 3d6 for starting gold, that's pretty much the same thing- a 13+ would indicate your character was a member of the warrior aristocracy (or merchant elite) an 18 would indicate noble birth.

In the end my players chose to be a pair of Samurai, a Thief and a Sohei. I retained the Ancestry, and Family rolls from the original OA book, because they weren't broken (mostly, what is will be fixed soon) and used them to tie the player's characters together much tighter than any standard AD&D party would have been. Because of my liberal AD&D policy of rolling 4d6 arrange as you like, and the fact that the players are all veterans of at least one OA campaign, they all chose to put a decent stat score into Birth Rank, which meant I could make them all really interconnected like the aristocracy of a small province really would be. They are all related to at least one other character by either blood or marriage and one is the Daimyo's sister-in-law. OA, the only flavor of D&D where you might start off married with children.

New Years resolution- Finish this beast of a project.

Happy New Year everyone!

Only 10 RPG books and a few other things

I have been meaning to jump on the OSR bandwagon meme of picking out which 10 RPG books I would take with me to a desert isle, presumably with a group of fellow gamers, and I realized that if I am limited to hard copies of books I actually own, while I have an extensive collection, it's going to be mostly, if not all, TSR (A)D&D books; and thus, a pretty boring list. Essentially it's the books on my desk- 1st edition AD&D DMG, PH, MM, OA and module OA1 Swords of the Daimyo, Holmes Basic, Moldvay Basic, Cook/Marsh Expert and modules B2 Keep on the Borderlands and X1 Isle of Dread. Now, if I get to assume that the last 2 modules are part of the boxed sets they come with, I'll pick James Pacek's "The Wilderness Alphabet" and the D&D Cyclopedia. I'll also have an extra copy of B2, unless I am allowed to switch out and put my copy of B1 in the Holmes box. There's only one non-TSR product on the list, and it's an alternate; it is an excellent book and I picked it over every other OSR product because of my preference for DMing wilderness adventures. More people should buy it.

Next, I have been doing a lot of reading. Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition RPG stuff, because I am GMing a campaign of that now apparently. I didn't think this one would take off as more than a one-shot, but everyone seems pretty into it. Roman & Celtic history and historical fiction because I am GMing a 43 AD campaign too, and I like to be both well informed and able to steal ideas from real history and from good authors. This game is off to a good start, even if some of the rules range from a bit to extremely unclear. Anyway, I have got more long days and nights of reading ahead of me, I just got these books over the last couple of days-

The First Man in Rome is actually a replacement of a replacement copy, it's one of those books I keep lending out and not getting back.

I liked Pompeii, so I am giving this one a chance too.

Miranda Green is just a great scholar when it comes to the Celts. 

Obviously the Yurt book and the book on Khubilai Khan are not for the 2 currently running RPG campaigns, they are for my Yurt building project and my long standing love of Mongol history respectively; I just felt that I should add them for completeness' sake.

I have also been working on my Garnia campaign world, I have two different areas that I am detailing right now. One area, I am waiting on art for from my wife, I forget from time to time that I usually fall to the bottom of her priority list for art projects. I want to strike while the iron is hot for me, while I am inspired to write about a particular topic, she needs to wait for the inspiration to strike her to illustrate that same topic. When we are in sync, things are great, when we aren't it is an agonizing wait for me; because it's always me waiting on art, I can't ever remember a time when she was waiting for my writing. The other area I want her art for too, because I want to move away from using public domain art or just pictures I found on the net; I figure if I ever get around to publishing any of this stuff it should have it's own illustrations and she's a great illustrator. She just doesn't appear to prioritize my projects over her own, which annoys me.

So while I have been cooling my heels and NOT working on those projects and NOT reading for 24 hours a day, I have fallen off the wagon and indulged in a few games of Civilization. I say a few games because I haven't played in a couple of years now and I apparently am not the Civilization powerhouse I used to be, that's a humbling experience. I had to drop down two levels of difficulty while I get my Civilization bearings back again and I am still not doing great, just not getting trounced. I used to play the game all the time heavily modded, I tried that and couldn't remember what all the mods did, other than make the game harder. I had to switch back to vanilla Civilization IV + Warlords + Beyond the Sword. I used to create mods for this game, I made an awesome Scotland Civilization, now if I make it to the modern age I am likely to be a 3rd rate power.  

As Requested, My Curriculum Vitae-

Pictured - Mona and I at our big SCA wedding with the kids, Ash was had turned 12 then and Em had just turned 7 earlier in the month, John was still 9.

My name is William Dowie. I am a 43 year old white man from the rural northern edge of central New York state, on Lake Ontario. I am a giant history nerd, in college I majored in history with a focus on Classical Antiquity and the European Middle Ages, I minored in Medieval and Renaissance Studies. I also took a bunch of Anthropology courses, but not enough to count as a second major. I am 6'6" tall and I have worked as a substitute teacher, short order cook, bouncer, machinist and convenience store clerk, just to name a few. I speak French passably well, Spanish slightly less so, and can usually guess my way through written Italian or Latin. I have tried to teach myself Scots Gaelic, much less successfully, but can pick out a number of written words on sight and sometimes recognize words when I hear them. Oddly enough I can pick out Welsh words now just as easily when they are cognates to the Scots Gaelic words I know, I see patterns in language easily.

I am married to a wonderful woman named Mona and we have three children; Ashli (19), John (17) and Ember (14), who were literally left on our doorstep when they were 11, 9 and 6 respectively. We live on a small, mostly forested plot of land in New Haven, New York - which is north of Syracuse and east of Rochester, nearest to the smaller city of Oswego, NY - where I continue to scheme ways to homestead and get off the grid, mostly because I hate the high cost of electricity in a county with three nuclear power plants, and I want healthier food than I can buy from the store, with the bonus that it'll be cheaper too. I have been frustrated in my attempts to clear my land because it's a lot harder to do than you would think, I have a lot more respect for pioneers now, especially since they did it with no power tools at all. I also have some valuable lumber that I can't seem to get anyone to harvest because my lot is too small and the presence of my house and the power lines along the edge of the road make it too difficult to be worth it, so apparently I need the price of Cherry to rise back to the level it was before our economic collapse to attract loggers.

I have been playing board wargames and D&D since 1980, when my friend Chris introduced me to both the week that we went to see Excalibur together with my dad. We played SPI's Sorcerer that weekend, because he had brought it over to my house and played D&D with him DMing before the week was out using the Holmes Basic rules. I went out and bought a set as soon as I could save up the money, maybe a month later. For a long time after that pretty much all of my money went into my D&D habit in some way or another, books, modules, Dragon Magazine, "official" Grenadier miniatures.

I found the SCA while the local group was doing a demo at the Sterling Renaissance Festival in Sterling, NY back in 1983 when I was 14, I have drifted in and out of the SCA ever since. I am currently missing Pennsic for my 41st time in a row. Something always comes up. Not that it matters anymore, I have passed my fighting prime and I don't think it's coming back no matter how hard I try. I keep resolving to make it to fighter practice more often and get back into my "Crown Tourney" rhythm, but that just isn't going to happen at my age anymore. I don't heal quick enough to fight six days a week anymore. That and I can't afford the gas money for the hundreds of extra miles per week I'd be putting on my minivan to go to all of the extra fighter practices and events. Still, I have made a lot of good friends in the SCA over the years and some great memories, I am happy to have been there for what I did and I wish I could do more still.

1985 was the year of the release of the 1st edition AD&D Oriental Adventures book, it's one of those books that you either love despite it's warts or you hate because of them. I love that book and it's probably because it's the only AD&D book I ever pre-ordered at Twilight Book & Game Emporium in Syracuse, NY - a sadly long gone FLGS. Despite the fact that the glue cracked on the binding causing several pages to become loose literally the first time I opened it, I was determined to get my money's worth out of it. Before my friend Tim left for Basic training in the US army the next year I took over DMing duties from him, which I had only rarely done before, and we played an epic OA campaign. I have played in one pretty epic OA campaign, as a Steppe Barbarian named Chanar Ilkhan, and DMed a few more since. One of my current projects is rewriting the OA book as I think it should have been.

As a side note, I was really anti-Rokugan because they changed the default setting in the 3e version of the Oriental Adventures book to Rokugan from Kara-Tur, and that made me, by default, anti-Legend of the Five Rings. I had been strongly attracted to the setting through AEG's Clan War miniature battle game prior to that, but hadn't bought into it at the time because I could not find at least one other person that was willing to also jump on board with me and had been burned by miniature games that way in the past. Now I am happy to say I have come full circle because I started buying old Clan War miniatures on EBay for my OA campaign and ended up getting the rules, which made me interested in the setting, which made me interested in the RPG, which got me to buy the new board game, which led me to buy some CCG cards too. I have even read through some of the published fiction, and, until it was shut down recently, was playing in a Facebook app version of the RPG called Emerald Empire. I really hated the 3e version of Oriental Adventures.

I played (A)D&D, tried out some other RPGs and wargamed a lot through the 1980s and into the 1990s. Wargaming kind of died in the 1990s (except on the PC, it boomed there), and I concentrated on just RPGs, then just D&D. Sometime after 3rd edition D&D came out, after the novelty wore off for me, I realized I disliked DMing it rather intensely. I was a little late coming to the 3rd edition party, because my D&D group was happy with 2nd edition and we didn't switch over until that campaign died. At the time, I had grown bored with 2nd edition AD&D and welcomed the change, although several things bothered me from the beginning; the faster rate of rising in level was a big one and I missed real multi-classing. I took me a while though, and DMing for several different groups, to realize the worst part was that it neutered the DM. My original AD&D groups, who were familiar with my fast and loose, shoot from the hip DMing style were OK with me making rules calls on the fly when none of us had any idea how something was supposed to work in the new system; we'd keep the game moving and I could look it up later. We might even like my way better. The other groups had people who STUDIED the rules though; at first, every time I made a ruling I'd see disapproving looks, eventually they got brave enough to start offering suggestions as to the right way to handle the situation.

So I quit DMing and let one of them DM in each group. Neither group lasted much longer. One started a new campaign and it was just too railroad-ey, I actually started stress testing that campaign to see what would happen if my character deliberately did things that were contrary to the predestined storyline. My character got punished, he made minor alterations to his storyline, but nothing seriously bad could ever happen to us, so, eventually, as a group we got bored and quit. The other guy just took over my game where I left off and had me make a character that would take his place. He had been unlucky in my game and died several times, but I assume that was because he kept making wuss characters, Rogues and Bards. I made a Barbarian, it was fun while it lasted, we went from 8th to 11th level with him at the helm, then he TPKed the party.

I took a break for a while, despaired over playing D&D again, then picked up Hackmaster. I ran a pretty fun Hackmaster game for a while and that was what led me to realize that I should just go back to playing 1st edition AD&D. That was the year we got the kids though, so I wasn't done with 3rd edition - when they decided they were interested in learning to play D&D, they wanted to play the newest version, 3.5 at the time. I gritted my teeth and went with it, anything to get kids into gaming. I have been walking them back in home games for years now, and have only recently discovered the Moldvay Basic half of B/X myself. Back in the day I bought the Expert Boxed Set when it came out, but I never got the Moldvay Basic Set that matched it because I already had a Basic Set, the Holmes Basic Set. So we've been playing that a bit lately, but my home games are pretty much at a stand-still right now, almost everyone that doesn't live here is too busy to come over and play, and everyone that does live here doesn't want to play with just their mom and dad, brother and/or sister. John is still gaming this summer, he's in a regular 4th edition D&D game with some guys he goes to school with and I am playing Dawn Patrol semi-regularly with Darryl & his dad, John and Dalton. We also recently tried out the Legend of the Five Rings 1st edition RPG here at the house. I am trying to start a game of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, but the start has been plagued by bad luck and poor coordination of schedules.

I have always run my D&D games in my own "World of Garnia" fantasy setting as a default. It's my Greyhawk, my buddy Darryl and I have been working on this on and off for decades, we're doing a serious reboot of the entire setting and discussing it on my other blog. The primary idea for the campaign is that a group of Celts fled the Roman onslaught to this new world, the world of the Sidhe (Elves) where magic works. The main campaign area is one where their culture has flourished. I designed it originally using the core 1st edition AD&D rules, so there are a lot of 1st edition AD&D assumptions in the setting, but I am trying to make the setting system neutral so that it can be played with any FRPG system. When we have finished the maps and gazetteers they'll be released for use. Currently we're working on the whole world, then we plan to "drill down" and do specific regions. I will also most likely release the adventures that I have written for the setting over the years, it's just finding and transcribing all of the stuff, then updating it to match the current standard is going to be a chore.

By now you are probably wondering where all this "Great Khan" stuff comes from, right? Well back in 1996 my buddy Darryl and I were living most of a continent apart and wanted to play some D&D together. He had played a lot of the SSI Gold Box D&D games starting with "Pool of Radiance" when it came out and we were both new to the internet and on AOL at the time where they had a game called "Neverwinter Nights" that ran using the same engine, but was multi-player, up to 300 I think it was. I guess that makes it the first MMORPG, it was great fun anyway. Darryl was more savvy than me and figured out the best way to advance in the game was through guild membership, so we duly joined a guild together. ERS, the Explorers of the Rising Sun, who made us create new Screen Names, because that was your character's name in the game, and everyone in the guild was named ERS something. I was ERS Garn, Darryl was ERS Frodal, we were named after deities I had created for my Garnia campaign world.

But then we realized, being ambitious adventurers, that ERS was there to help newbies find their bearings and, in general, be nice; and we wanted to move up the food chain in NWN. So we decided to create our own guild, which would, even though it was a gamble, make us guild leaders and let us take charge of our destinies and how we wanted to play the game. We needed a hook though, and that's where our collective history nerdity took over, we decided to play as Mongols, because we wanted to send out a strong challenge to the status quo in all of the guilds and it was unique in NWN to play a culturally oriented guild, unless that culture was a fantasy one. Mostly I think we chose the Mongols though because I was playing them at the time in Civilization. Partly I think we picked them because we both loved the NES game Genghis Khan*, Darryl and I used to spend weekends playing that game together. We also both liked the Mongol reputation for ass-kickery and conquest. Then we studied and studied some more, at this point I think that our kids could hold their own at a conference of Mongol Medieval History scholars.

Anyway, the Steppe Warriors were born. Technically, since NWN is in the Forgotten Realms, we were members of the, at the time, recently defeated Tuigan Horde that decided to march west rather than return east. Darryl was our first Khakhan with his character SW Ogotai, named after one of the sons of Genghis Khan, the reasoning was that he could afford to be online more often (remember this was when you paid/minute of use) because I was in school at the time, and he was a better recruiter. My character was named SW Jagatai, also after a son of Genghis Khan. Ultimately Darryl resigned the position of Khakhan and I was elected to fill it. We've had our highs and lows as a group, and we're pretty dormant now, but I have been Jagatai, Khakhan of the Steppe Warriors since 1997 on the internet, so when I named the blog and when I created my initial Blogger account, I just naturally went with the same motif. My Yahoo email address is still SWJagatai at yahoo dot com, created in the same era. Back when I was sure we were going to leap from AOL's NWN into the expanding universe of MMOs I registered three domain names, steppewarriors.com, steppewarriors.org and steppewarriors.net; I used to joke that they would soon be followed by steppewarriors.edu and steppewarriors.gov. Clearly things didn't turn out as well for the Steppe Warriors as I had anticipated in the late 1990s.

Ultimately, I am pretty pleased with my alternate persona. In doing the research to properly play a Mongol character I have learned a great many things about the Mongols and other steppe peoples. I have eaten a bunch of Mongol food, drank Kumiss, shot arrows from a composite bow (not while mounted though), been in a yurt and made friends with a bunch of people that I otherwise probably never would have met. When I think about how it could have gone another way, if I'd been playing a different Civilization that day when Darryl and I were talking on the phone, or if he and I hadn't played so much of Koei's Genghis Khan together and he hadn't been as receptive to the idea, or maybe it was the fact that he had played in one of my epic Oriental Adventures campaigns that made him cool with the idea. If Darryl hadn't signed on for Mongols, we might have been a Samurai guild or a Viking guild or a Celt guild, they were all infinitely more familiar to both of us at the time; or maybe we'd have gone with something lame like a Dark Elf Ranger guild, who knows?

At any given time I usually have more irons in the fire than is wise, so many of my projects get back-burnered until I get back around to them. Currently I have on hold an Oriental Adventures campaign that just kind of fizzled when it was starting to get good, I had converted the Temple of Elemental Evil for OA and made it the Black Temple from OA1. I have a B/X Viking campaign that stopped when two of my regular adult players got new jobs. I have a B/X conversion for WW II that I spent a lot of time working on last summer, but my regular group, which is mostly my wife and kids and family friends, was lukewarm about play-testing it. I'd say it's an early alpha level right now. I am working on a total rewrite of the 1st edition OA book, kind of recasting it in a form I find more desirable. I just started learning the L5R RPG, I am GMing and the party is about 1/2 way through the adventure in the back of the book, I still haven't found the fumble rule. I have announced several times, prematurely, the start of my 43 AD campaign, so while that should be starting soon, I am going to not say when just in case something happens again. Mostly though, right now, getting a lot of my time behind the scenes, is the reworking of my old Garnia campaign world. We've made some interesting progress on it. I also have a bunch of OSR stuff piling up on my to read list, making me wish I had bought hard copies rather than pdfs because I mostly hate reading off my monitor, but that's where my copies of "Lamentations of the Flame Princess", "Carcosa", "Vornheim", "Adventurer, Conqueror, King", and several other major releases are sitting waiting to be read.

*Out of all of Koei's strategy games for the NES, Genghis Khan had the best multi-player play, Nobunaga's Ambition and Romance of the Three Kingdoms were too slow, and Nobunaga's Ambition II had the annoying "siege mode" in battle.

Games That Define Us- Great Khan Edition

Obviously, since this is an OSR blog, I feel like I should open with D&D/AD&D. I saw the ads for the Holmes Basic Set in "Boy's Life", the Cub Scout magazine and I was hooked, it took me something like a year to find a store that sold that D&D boxed set, sometime in early 1980. My next D&D purchase was the AD&D Monster Manual, then the Cook/Marsh Expert Set, followed by a Christmas present of both the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide, this set the tone for some confused rulings over the years as a DM, since I was playing a hybrid of Holmes, the X half of B/X and AD&D, but over the years I started to fall more in line with AD&D orthodoxy, with a few exceptions. Then, in 1985, I pre-ordered Oriental Adventures and it has been almost an obsession ever since.

Chess- Chess had to make the cut here because it is one of the first thinking man's board games that I ever learned. I learned how to play when I was in second grade, just because it was one of the quite games on the shelf in my classroom we got to play during recess time when it was raining or the weather was otherwise too bad to go outside and play. I really didn't learn the game until high school though when I played regularly with my principal, who was a ranked player, and occasionally I'd even win. My real claim to fame though is that I once played chess against a guy who had played against Bobby Fischer, I met him through my buddy Darryl's dad. Totally got my ass handed to me, it was worth the experience.

Risk- Ah, Risk, the game of world conquest. You taught me that the Ukraine was gigantic and the names of other exotic places. You were wrong about the Ukraine, but I guess a game produced during the cold war wasn't going to give Russia it's due, right? This game taught me two things, basic strategy and the importance of luck. Play with good strategy, take a few chances, and hope your luck holds; I was Risk champion of my dorm. On the other hand I have been beaten by people that had NEVER played the game before, so there you have it.

Axis & Allies (The Game Master edition from the 1980s)- Axis & Allies wasn't the first in this series that I played, that honor goes to Conquest of the Empire; which we also played quite a bit; but Axis & Allies we played more and better. Axis & Allies was the better game right out of the box, even it's recommended optional rules made sense. By the time Axis & Allies hit the scene, I was already a veteran wargamer, but this managed to take a lot of wargame elements and make them accessible to the masses, like a gateway wargame.

Dawn Patrol- This should come as no surprise, since I am currently engaged in a new Dawn Patrol campaign, but it was my first and is still my favorite aerial combat game. I bought it because TSR put it out, and I was a young TSR fanboy at the time, it's taken me this long to get good at it.

Star Fleet Battles- I never really understood why this game got a bad reputation as highly complex to the point where you needed a PhD in Mathematics to play it. I am not a math guy, and I have played a lot of SFB, if filling out the energy allocation sheet is too hard for you I advise going back to remedial 4th grade math. I bought the Commanders edition boxed set the year I turned 14, since my birthday is in July I don't remember if it was before or after I turned 14. I taught myself and my friends how to play, we made a few mistakes along the way in learning, but we had it down after a few games; it says right on the box "1,2 or more players Ages 12 and older". Sure it got a little more complex with each additional boxed set (or module, which I never bought), but it was building on knowledge that you had already mastered.

Up Front- The Squad Leader card game, picking on Avalon Hill title to add to the list was really hard to do, then I remembered the one we always played when we had extra time on our hands, it's quick to set up and play, even when you build you own squads with the point buy system, and it is one of the only games that I have that'll bring Lance and Darryl into the same room, although maybe not anymore, we used to have tournaments. Up Front is one of the few games I don't mind losing just because I had bad luck. Theoretically Multi-Man Publishing has the rights to it now, as part of the Squad Leader line, and they were considering making it a CCG, which would make me want them all to suffer horrible curses, but I would like to see a new edition. I have Up Front and it's official expansions Banzai and Desert War, but the cards have seen a lot of wear over the years.

Koei's Genghis Khan- Yeah, I know, it's a little odd to add a NES game to the list, and this title is really representational of all the Koei titles that were turn based war/administrative games from Nobunaga's Ambition through L'Empereur and including Romance of the Three Kingdoms; but my alter-ego here being the Great Khan, obviously I was going to pick Genghis Khan. I actually still own a NES and a copy of that game, I never play it, the battery inside it is shot so it doesn't save and I can't see leaving it on for the days that would take to complete the game. Darryl and I used to play the hell out of this game together too, in multi-player mode, usually one of us would pick England and the other Japan, since the four playable countries were Mongolia, Byzantium, England and Japan, we wanted as much space as possible between us before we had to start fighting each other.

Talisman- The 2nd edition before it got completely crapped up by the people at Games Workshop and used as yet another way to promote their Warhammer franchise, although this was sneaking into this edition too. This was a go-to game for us if we wanted to play something fantasy, fun and easy to teach/learn. I had, I am pretty sure, every expansion for this game that was released in the US except Timescape, we drew the line there. I always wanted to play in a D&D campaign set in this world, minus the out of place and silly characters. The board evoked a place that was both real and medieval, yet mythic at the same time. The only real drawback to this game was that it could get tedious after having died several times and starting over. I have played the new Fantasy Flight Games version, and while it is much, much nicer than the last Games Workshop edition, the 2nd edition still holds my loyalty, the FFG version is like a more polished, prettier version of my old 2nd edition, but it loses something in the transformation.

Warrior Knights- Have you ever razed a city to win a game? My old gaming group got in touch with the designer to ask him a few questions about the rules and our interpretations and we discovered we were doing the entire political phase wrong, apparently we were supposed to spend all of our votes on a single action. We didn't. We played a much more corrupt and Machiavellian version of the game than had been considered by the designer. We bought and sold votes, forged alliances to screw over whoever was in the lead, and fought over who would hold the wool concession. Games Workshop did a great job with this one, I hear that Fantasy Flight Games has put out a new edition, but, in the words of Lance, who has played it "It sucks. They screwed the pooch on this one". He tried it several times, just to try and get accustomed to the rules changes and that was his ultimate opinion; then he taught his Tuesday Night Gaming Group how we played the old GW version and they had a blast with it.

This was fun, maybe I'll do a part 2 that includes the games I cut from this list.

Bonus Post- B/X Alignment Musings

I know I have been rushing trying to get all Norse stuff in during April here for the A-Z Posting Blitz, but I have been thinking about Alignment in B/X D&D since I rolled up all those pregens for my new Norse campaign and wanted to get some of those thoughts out before I forgot about them. I know that OD&D had the Lawful-Neutral-Chaotic Axis, and so does B/X, but I never really gave it much thought because I started playing D&D with Holmes Basic which had a proto-AD&D Alignment axis, and I never saw or heard about the older, original three alignment axis until much later, so when I saw the B/X version of Alignment I assumed it was dumbed down from Holmes or AD&D for the younger audience it was aimed at and never really gave it much more thought.

Now it occurs to me that I was just wrong. I was wrong first because I was misinformed, original D&D used the same Alignment system as B/X, which was later adopted by BECMI and Cyclopedia D&D. Secondly, I was wrong because I think the Alignment system in D&D, as opposed to AD&D, is not a simplified system at all, it just doesn't encompass all of the moral choices that a Character can make in a game, rather it is about where their ultimate loyalties lie. AD&D muddied the waters there, it was AD&D that made Alignment not so much a statement of allegiance, but a moral code. In OD&D, B/X, BECMI & Cyclopedia D&D, Law represents a commitment to civilization, Chaos to those forces that oppose it. To be fair, they don't do the best job of explaining this clearly.

I am not sure how I feel about this to be honest. I have lived most of my life with the nine-fold Alignment system. I have defended it, often, against it's various detractors. I have found it to be a useful role-playing tool for helping to get players to consistently play their Characters with the same moral and ethical standards from game to game, and I think we all know players that need the help out there. Mostly, I think in AD&D Alignment terms most of the time. So this conclusion that Law and Chaos aren't really moral/ethical/behavioral outlooks on life, but rather an allegiance to the concept of being pro or anti civilization, while groundbreaking for me, leaves me at another one of those places where I have to wonder whether AD&D was a good idea or not, and I grew up with AD&D, it's like asking me if I love my mother or America.

I consider almost every day switching from B/X to AD&D. AD&D is like home to me, I know it like the back of my hand. B/X is the experiment for me, so I can get some experience playing the "other" D&D game that was out back then. I have to say that there is a whole lot of stuff I like in B/X D&D, stuff I remember using back in the day in AD&D that I probably took from the Expert book and other stuff like the way that all the spells are better, Morale is easier to use, and probably a dozen other things; but I keep defaulting back to AD&D at weird times too, like when I rolled D6s for all the Thief's Hit Points or the way I keep thinking of all the ACs as starting at 10.

All that said, the more that I think about it, the more I realize the way I have always played AD&D was closer in spirit to OD&D or B/X, probably because I started with Holmes; but I whittled away the rules from AD&D that I didn't like or didn't understand. I won't go through the usual litany of AD&D rules that get listed as superfluous, everyone knows them by now, and each one of them has their supporters and detractors; I support some myself and dislike others.

It does make me think though, that the D&D Next team should maybe be looking at Labyrinth Lord as a model for the 5th edition of D&D. Labyrinth Lord already has "modules" for what you want to add to your game, from "Original Edition Characters" to the "Advanced Edition Companion" you cover the D&D games from the time period of 1974-1985. If they added an "AEC II" that covered all the crazy late first edition AD&D stuff and an "Oriental AEC", we'd be covered up to the advent of 2nd edition. Some sort of "2nd edition companion" would get us through the 1990s, although I know most OSR types hate post Gygax era TSR D&D, it would at least give us completeness and show the robustness of the system.

A bit of D&D trivia

So I was over on the "Old School Gamers" group on Facebook the other day* and there was a discussion thread about the Holmes edition boxed set going on, and people started chiming in about the differences between their various boxed sets when they got them. I am a sucker for any discussion about Holmes edition D&D, so I dutifully read through every single comment when I noticed that nobody had mentioned getting a boxed set with the same contents as mine. So I felt it was practically my duty to comment this- "That's the boxed set I started with. Mine had chits instead of dice and came with module B2. There was a coupon for free dice though."**.

Less than a minute later James M. Ward says to me; and this is the way I will always tell the story, since he responded immediately after my post; he says- "Another trivia point if anyone cares. Dr. Holmes wasn't hired to do the set. He actually did all of the work and sent it into Gary to see what he thought of the effort. I know this because I was there the day it came in the mail. The rest is printing history.".

First, I can not imagine anyone not being interested in learning that bit of D&D history. Second, wow! It's like he was talking to me personally. I love the internet for making it easier for us all to communicate, and I am even starting to like Facebook again, because of this group. Jim Ward isn't the only old TSR guy there either, I see Tim Kask posting stuff there all the time and some other familiar names too. Jeff Dee comes to mind.


*I'd have told this story earlier, but I wanted to write the Dawn Patrol report first.

**Although here I corrected a typo from the original.

Moldvay Basic Observations Part 3-

Sorry I missed a couple of days, I had some real life get in the way of blogging, not all bad, some gaming was involved. I figure I should probably provide a link back to parts one and two in case you missed them before.

Now, we only really got through the first 18 pages of the book in the last two parts of my Moldvay Basic Observations, but I am confident that we can make it through the rest of the book here in part three because, despite the fact that we still have another 46 pages to go, there really aren't all that many more observations, and most of them are from the next few pages.

Part 4: The Adventure starts on page 19, and is a bunch of useful information for the beginning player and the beginning DM. I was both amused and impressed by the first paragraph, it has the heading beginning the adventure and essentially states that once the players have rolled up their characters and bought their equipment, the DM will tell them what the Adventure is going to be, where they are headed, what they're after, who is with them and what they know about the place. I found this amusing because I have had players over the last three decades that were such a pain in the ass that I wondered why they showed up at the table. I'd drop adventure hooks, usually some sort of hire, and they'd be all "Nope, I'd rather not take your excellent commission to go clear out the Dungeon of Doom, I'd rather sit at the inn doing nothing for the next six hours"; here they pretty much tell you that kind of nonsense doesn't fly.

Next it moves on to optimal party size and composition, pretty standard stuff for old school; it tells you that you should probably have 6-8 characters in the party, that's what pretty much every module said on the cover back in the day; and that you should have a mix of character classes, all the human classes should be represented and, if possible, get some Demi-Humans in the party too for their special skills. The most noteworthy thing here is that it suggests that some players, at the DMs discretion, might be allowed to play multiple characters. I am pretty sure that this was, if not outright forbidden, at least heavily frowned upon in AD&D. It also point's out here that if you don't have enough players you can fill in the ranks with retainers, but I'll get back to them in a bit.

Next we move on to organizing a party; setting your marching order is mentioned first and it mentions having several different marching orders for various tactical situations, which is something I always thought that me and my nerdy friends came up with on our own, but here it is in black and white. Then comes the Caller. Is this where the Caller comes from? I just looked through Holmes and didn't see any reference to a Caller, but I may have missed it, and in AD&D's PH it says that party's should have a leader who will "call" to the DM the party's actions. I never played in a D&D group with a formal Caller and damned few with formal Leaders, although informal leaders often existed. This is the first place I question whether or not people actually played this game with the rules as written.

After the Caller, there is a section on the importance of mapping and how one player should be designated the Mapper, this is a D&D job that I used to see a lot more in the old days than I do now. I can't decide if it's just because every DM on earth got sick and tired of having to describe the room over and over again, or draw sections of map for the "Mapper" to copy or if it was just because D&D moved away from dungeon based adventuring over the last three decades, either way, mapping is practically a lost art and it is frustratingly difficult to reinvent. I do like the way it says here that you maps aren't going to be exactly perfect and not to worry too much about making a perfect, detailed map though.

Next it brings up a controversial subject, use of miniature figures. They are clearly optional, but can enhance play. However, many of us OSR types, no matter how much we loved our old lead miniatures back in the 1980s are still a little gun shy about being slaves to the battle grid. Me, I can go either way, I hated being a slave to the battle grid and it did take me forever to wean my kids off of using miniatures even when we were playing 1st edition AD&D. I haven't used them yet with Moldvay Basic, but I may. I used miniatures pretty much the whole time I played D&D from Holmes through 3e, I only wanted to quit after 3e and now that I have had a break I am OK with them again. The only thing that bugs me is when 3e-isms crop up in an old school game when we're using miniatures, I know it's because we're using miniatures; someone will say something like "Shouldn't I get an attack of opportunity here?" and make me want to smack them.

The last things on the page are Time & Movement, there's not much of note there, except the note at the end that you need a 10 minute break every hour or you'll start getting fatigued and suffer a -1 to hit penalty until you do rest. I don't ever recall seeing that rule anywhere else. The only other fatigue rules I remember seeing in a version of D&D were in Hackmaster 4th edition.

Flipping the page brings us to encumbrance, which fills the entire page and is an optional rule. Sadly encumbrance gives us one of the worst and most enduring game-isms of D&D, the idea that all coins regardless of metal or purity weigh the same, and that the weight of a coin is 1/10 of a pound. Here in Moldvay Basic the basic unit of weight has gone from the Gold Piece (gp) to the more generic Coin (cn). I never really understood why we couldn't just measure weight in pounds, or ounces if necessary, but there you have it. I hear Lamentations of the Flame Princess has a better encumbrance system, and I did buy it in December during their PDF sale, but I haven't gotten around to reading it yet; if it is vastly better I will most likely adopt it for my B/X game.

Page B21 starts us off with Light, points out that most dungeons are dark and tells us how long torches last and how long a flask of oil will last in a lantern, reminds us that you need to pay attention to who is carrying the light sources because you can't fight with a sword & shield if you are the one holding the torch and then talks about how Infravision works. Now, when 3e hit the market and we lost Infravision in favor of Low-Light Vision and Dark Vision, I hated that as much as the next grognard; but over time I have come to actually prefer them to Infravision and I'll tell you why- there is always some jerk trying to screw with Infravision, either a player who has seen the movie predator or a DM that realizes that undead are the same ambient temperature as the air surrounding them. Giving a scientific explanation for how the eyesight of fantasy races work is stupid, plus have you ever looked through an infrared camera? Seeing everything like Geordi LaForge or the Predator isn't really all that helpful, plus why does it only work for X number of feet? An Elf or Dwarf's ordinary eyesight will allow them to see pretty much to the horizon, but their Infravision only works for 60'? Sixty feet of visibility is pretty crappy, especially if you can only see stuff that gives off heat. Realistically, deep enough underground the stone and the air are going to be about the same temperature, so the subterranean dwelling Dwarf is still screwed without a light source; he'll be blind, bumping into cavern walls*.

Next we move on to Doors, which has three sections Normal Doors, Secret Doors and Listening at Doors. Normal doors are pretty interesting in Moldvay Basic, because they kind of have some weird mojo going for them. First, they are usually closed, that's cool, I usually leave my doors closed too; but additionally they are often either stuck or locked. Stuck doors any character can take a shot at, but higher strength characters are better at unsticking them, this is where the "Kick in the Door" meme in D&D comes from. Locked doors have to be picked open by a Thief, and the text here kind of implies that if your party Thief fails here, you are just screwed; which makes sense from the description of the Thief and his lock picking ability, but not from the point of view of a dungeoneering party that probably has at least one axe with them. The other odd, semi-magical qualities of dungeon doors are that they automatically swing shut after you open them unless you specifically jam them open and that they will automatically open for monsters unless you spike them shut; and these are the "Normal" doors.

Secret doors have fewer rules regarding them, but there is the interesting clarification that a Character only gets one chance to find a secret door. I remember playing AD&D and having the party know there must be a secret door in an area and just keep searching forever until they found it, that was annoying. Listening at doors gets a mention at the end of the doors section, I am amused by that because that's another one of those semi-lost dungeoneering skills, like mapping. When I DMed last weekend the party remembered to check for traps about 70% of the time, but only listened at one door. This section also has a rules clarification that a character may only listen once at any given door, and that the undead do not make noise.

The bulk of this page though is taken up by rules regarding Retainers, which brings me to a mini-rant- What is the deal with the inconsistent terminology between editions of D&D for the hired help. That's just confusing, why does every damned edition need to change the name? Here Retainers are, mostly**, what you would call Henchmen in AD&D, in 3e they'd be called Cohorts. Why on earth couldn't they pick a term and stick with it? That said, they are a little more interesting to hire on than they are in other editions, they have their own reaction table, which I assume the PC's Charisma modifier applies to, although it doesn't expressly say so. I also find it interesting that they have to check morale after every adventure to see if they will stick with you. Charisma would not be a dump stat in this version of D&D even if the rules supported stat rearrangement.

Skipping way head to combat, did anyone use the rules as written? The DM rolls all the damage dice? Why? Just because only one set of dice shipped with the boxed set? I like the morale rules, they are simple and easy to use, every monster has a morale value. Would I have preferred it to be on a D20 instead of 2d6? Yes, but Moldvay has a lot of 2d6 tables, so I am getting used to it. AD&D didn't get a decent monster morale system until 2nd edition.

Moving on to the monsters in general, there is more variety in low level monsters than in previous editions of D&D or than in AD&D, even some more mid-level ones than I would have expected; and many that weren't in any previously published D&D. The AD&D Monster Manual was only published four years earlier, so I would not have expected too much deviation from it's list, but there is. All of the standard humanoids are there, as are all the minor undead and a bunch of other "standard" D&D monsters, like Stirges, Rust Monsters and Ochre Jellies. Dragons are here too, surprisingly, since the book only covers levels 1-3. There are a bunch of new monsters and monster variants though that I never saw really until I read through this book, different types of Giant Lizard, Snakes, Giant Spiders and the Thoul to name a few.

What else did I skip over before?

Paralysis can be cured with a Cure Light Wounds spell? Does that happen in AD&D? I never heard of it if it does. Here it gets mentioned in the spell description and in the description of pretty much everything that causes paralysis.

The Monster Reaction Table, not every encounter needs to be a combat encounter and another reason why Charisma wouldn't be a dump stat even if the game rules allowed for it. Sometimes a monster might help you out.

Individual Initiative is an optional rule. I can't decide whether or not to use it, because my current group is less wargamer heavy, and therefore less rules crunchy and combat oriented than most previous D&D groups that I have played with, so I think that it might just be too much of a stress builder on combat and make combats more chaotic and lengthy, but on the other hand I think it really helps open up the combat options for high Dexterity characters like Thieves to be able to maneuver into position for Back Stabs, which is never actually called back-stabbing here, but instead "striking unnoticed from behind", or just getting to go first in combat.

Experience points, you get WAY more of them for treasure than for killing monsters, that kind of sets the tone for what's important here, now doesn't it? I actually noticed this when I was figuring experience points for the game I ran last Sunday, gold piece value is king when it comes to XP, killing not so much, magic not at all. AD&D was kind of like this, except that you got the XP for magic and monsters were worth a little more, Goblins in B/X D&D are worth 5XP each in AD&D they are going to be worth an average of 13XP.

Overall thoughts- There is still a great deal of customizability to Moldvay Basic, like there was in OD&D. The number of rules that are presented as optional is reminiscent of 2nd edition AD&D and the rumors of 5th edition D&D's multi-edition compatibility; for example- if you use none of the optional rules presented in Moldvay you have a game that is more similar to OD&D, if you use them all, it becomes much more distinctly it's own version. As an introduction to D&D, and RPGs in general, I think it does a much better job than Holmes basic did, and I mean no disrespect to Holmes Basic, it had a different design agenda; I am told Mentzer Basic did a better job still, but I haven't seen it to say for myself. What I can say is that all of the rules you need to play D&D are in this book, it's only flaw, and this is by design, is that it tops out at 3rd level and then you have to buy the Expert boxed set to go to level 14; which is past "name" level, the theoretical end game stage of D&D, so you really never needed the Companion boxed set, that never got published, that promised levels 15-36.

Now, I suppose I'll have to do some posts on my observations about the Expert side of the B/X equation too, but at least this will be more mixed with review, I had that set back in the day and I used stuff out of it pretty liberally with my Holmes Basic set and my AD&D until everything was taken over by AD&D eventually. I'll need to finish reading it




* unless the assumption is made that Infravision is very, very good and he can see the heat from his body and breath emanating around him and it outlines the walls and stuff, but then you still have the problem of jerks trying to blind Infravision scientifically because they can.

**They might be a 0-level torchbearer, that dude would be called a hireling in AD&D which has entire classes of standard and expert Hirelings. I looked ahead in the Expert book and some of the Hirelings in there are overlapped with the Hireling types in the AD&D DMG, but it didn't include any of the standard 0-level porters and torchbearers that AD&D parties have available to them.

OK, these EBay items arrived today.






Everyone in the OSR raves about this old Judges Guild stuff, I never had any, so when I saw I could snag some cheap I grabbed these.



I know I swore off buying Star Wars stuff, but it was a bargain and I was bidding on a bunch of other stuff from the same seller, I figured if I caught this at the minimum bid and got the combined shipping with any of the other stuff it's be like getting a free item almost. This was the only item I won though, but I got it for the minimum bid.

Moldvay Basic Observations Part 1-

When I started reading through the 1981 Moldvay Basic rules I really didn't expect that I would find anything new or exciting to me, especially considering how many times I have looked things up in that book just for the sake of comparing it to something in AD&D, OD&D or Holmes. I assumed what I was going to find was a rules-lite version of AD&D, the "Kiddie-D&D" I had always been biased against since I was a kid myself. I am delighted to say I could not have been more wrong. I have stated on a number of occasions that I started out with Holmes Basic, and it is, more or less, just a re-edit of OD&D, less confusing than OD&D, but not by much and with a few funky house rules Holmes threw in there of his own, that's cool. AD&D was just OD&D all house ruled to hell for E. Gary Gygax's Greyhawk campaign and then declared official TSR, tournament style, never house rule this D&D again, D&D anyway*, right? That and a way to separate it from Dave Arneson's contribution to the hobby in a legal, financial way; or so I have heard.

Anyway, on to my observations about the red book. Right from the get go I could see that this was a different beast than Holmes, it was not simply a restatement of OD&D rules, but an evolution of them; sure they were clearly descended from their immediate ancestor, but they were a new creature, sleeker and more graceful than the one that had come before. I am currently so enamored of Moldvay's rules set that I am seeking out a Mentzer Basic set too, just so I can check it out and make that comparison too.

I was specifically asked by a blog reader to break this analysis of Moldvay down into easily digestible parts, so I will try to not cover too much in this post. I will also attempt to NOT simply compare Moldvay too much to it's immediate predecessor, Holmes Basic, or to 1st edition AD&D, which I am much more familiar with, but I can't promise anything simply because sometimes the only, or at least the easiest way to illustrate is through comparison. I should also mention that this blog post has been a beast to write, I have written and rewritten several sections, switched parts around and, in general, done more work on this post than any other blog post I have ever written; usually I just put out my thoughts as they come to me, do a quick fact check if necessary, look for obvious spelling or grammar errors and send the post on out. This one seemed like more of a special occasion post. I took notes for this one.

On to character generation then. It's totally old school; 3d6 in order (Str, Int, Wis, Dex, Con, Cha) with a slight ability to modify based on what class you choose, you can drop an ability score by 2 points to raise your prime requisite by 1, but you can't drop anything below a 9 and Dexterity, Constitution and Charisma may not be lowered at all, but depending on class Dexterity may be raised. Ability scores are way less fiddly than in AD&D, there is almost a universal stat modifier like in 3e. Except for Humans race equals class, another old school concept that's been gone since the AD&D 1st edition days from my world view, but there it is. I think that may be the biggest hurdle for more modern gamers to accept, and this includes 1st edition AD&D players**.

The classes available are Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, Thief, Dwarf, Elf & Halfling; a short and simple list. It's the same list, with a slight change in terminology, as the one in Holmes Basic, but way shorter than the list in AD&D. It also doesn't lead us to believe that this is the gateway to AD&D, this version of the Basic book comes right out and tells us that there is an Expert book coming (Spoiler Alert: I looked in the Expert book and it said there was a Companion book coming too), it doesn't ever imply that we should be moving on to AD&D.

So, you rolled your Abilities picked your class, modified if you wanted to or it was possible, now you roll your Hit Points. The bad news here is that if you are used to AD&D your Hit Die shrunk. A Fighter or a Dwarf get a D8, a Cleric, an Elf or a Halfling get a D6 and the Magic-User and Thief get the D4. I kind of felt bad for my players so I let them roll against me for starting Hit Points, that is to say, we both rolled the appropriate die and kept the higher result. Hit Points are still modified by Constitution and there isn't any of AD&D's preferential treatment given to Fighters, so you could possibly have a 7 HP 1st level Magic-User or Thief.

Next we pick Alignment, there are only three to choose from which is actually a step backwards from Holmes Basic, which had five, but really the whole nine Alignment spectrum was there, just not filled in and defined; anyway, Lawful, which is more or less "Good" or allied to civilization, Chaotic is the opposite of Lawful, generally considered Evil, uncivilized, and selfish. Neutral falls in between the other two, either as unintelligent, and therefore unaligned in anyway, or actively preserving some balance between Law and Chaos, or just kind of libertarian and trying to survive.

Anyway, the thing that struck me right away about the classes was that they were both weaker and slightly stronger than their AD&D counterparts; what I mean by this is that AD&D kind of institutionalized the first iteration that all Player Characters were Heroes, not just average Joe's trying to better their existence through adventuring, AD&D gives you a whole bunch of different character creation methods, but the most common/popular one is probably 4d6 rearrange to taste; that's your first character build right there. AD&D is the first D&D where every player can sit down before the game and discuss what character they are going to play before character generation, that doesn't happen in Moldvay, in Moldvay, as in Holmes and in OD&D, you play the character you roll, it's actually kind of liberating. I had forgotten how much I liked that, much in the same way that I had forgotten how much I liked playing without miniatures when I quit playing 3e.

Now, that, and the fact that they get a smaller Hit Die type than AD&D, shows how they are weaker, so how are they stronger? First, they get an average higher amount of starting money than their AD&D counterparts because every character gets 3d6x10 starting gold; everyone except for Fighters makes out better, and the lower cost of better Armor even helps them out with better AC. They were going to get an AC boost anyway because there are only 9 ACs instead of 10. The thing I think makes Player Characters clearly tougher than their AD&D brethren though is the Morale rules in combat, two Morale checks in every combat encounter means that every encounter is not necessarily a slaughter, especially against the weaker low Hit Die Monsters like Goblins. Sure, when I played this past weekend the four Goblins the party encountered fought to the death, and killed the party's Magic-User in the process, but it was just bad luck there.

Every class has some clearly listed restrictions and special abilities; I could quibble with some of the restrictions, particularly considering the fact that variable weapon damage is an optional rule, but I won't for now. One thing I noticed today, after I'd already read through this section several times, was that Halflings DO NOT have infravision in B/X D&D, I went back and looked it up in Holmes and saw no mention of it there either, so EGG apparently decided in the AD&D PH that all Halflings got infravision, in the AD&D MM only Stouts have it and there is no mention in any book that I have before then; I mention this as a case in point of how hard this project has been, to read through rules text that greatly resembles rules text that you are very familiar with looking for the differences.

Of all the classes and racial classes, the one that I think gets hosed is the Thief. They get the d4 for a Hit Die type, no Dexterity adjustments for their Thief skills and their Thief skills are generally worse than they are for a first level Thief in AD&D. In a statistical anomaly, they are actually worse at finding traps than any other characters, despite it actually being one of their class specialties; a first level B/X Thief can find a trap 10% of the time, any character searching for a trap has a 1 in 6 chance or roughly 16.6% of the time, a Dwarf under the right circumstances doubles that to 2 in 6 or 33.3% of the time. Similarly, Halflings can hide in shadows better, 2 in 6 or 33.3% anywhere, 90% outdoors vs. the Thief's 10% chance at 1st level.

Having rolled our Abilities and chosen a Class then, possibly, adjusted them, picked an Alignment, and rolled for starting money, we move on to buying equipment. Fewer choices, quicker to play. There are literally 40 items on the entire list, I could type the entire thing here, with the prices in about a minute. 3 types of armor, Leather, Chain and Plate. 3 types of sword, Short Sword, Sword (normal) and Two-Handed Sword, I might have named them differently, but I am cool with the choices. Variable weapon damage is an optional rule, although I'd recommend it's use. Crossbows are far less screwed than in AD&D, they only get to fire every other round, but at least it makes more sense given the shorter rounds (10 seconds vs AD&D's 1 minute) and they aren't penalized on damage like in AD&D; that was one of the things that always bugged me about AD&D crossbows are vicious, deadly killers in the real medieval period in AD&D they are just a poor choice of ranged weapon.

Right after the equipment page is a page with Languages, Inheritance, "Hopeless Characters" and the run through of Character Generation. Languages are just a list of suggested languages for all of those characters that rolled a high enough Intelligence score to know any additional languages (13+). There are 20 of them listed so it could be easy to make it a random pick if you were indecisive or didn't care. Inheritance is a rule for inheriting the possessions of your previous character. The only place I have seen a similar rule before was in Hackmaster. This rule curiously applies to the player and is once only per player, so, presumably most older gamers that have played B/X are screwed, they probably used this rule back when they were 12 years old so they could keep their cool items from the Monty-Haul days. There is a 10% inheritance tax applied though. "Hopeless Characters" are a little more loosely defined in Moldvay than they are in AD&D or later editions, a Hopeless Character here is "below average in every ability" or has "more than one very low (3-6) ability score" in which case the DM may declare the character hopeless and allow the player to roll up a new one. The run through of Character Generation is cool for a couple of reasons. First, it is concise and easy to follow. Second, it assumes a girl will be playing D&D; I have rarely been part of a D&D group that didn't have some female players, and most of my players are women these days. I guess I missed the part where D&D was supposed to be girl repellant.

There are a few pages of spells listed after character creation and equipment, I suppose now would be a good time to mention the two things about spell casters that are different than AD&D. First, Clerics don't get a spell at first level, I thought this would be a huge weakness in play for the party but it really wasn't. Second, Magic-Users and Elves get to choose their spell, one first level spell, for their spell book, that's it. AD&D Magic-Users get them assigned semi-randomly, but they get four starting spells, Read Magic, an Offensive, a Defensive and a Miscellaneous spell for their spell books. At second level, the Magic-User or Elf will get a second first level spell, at third level they will receive a second level spell. Now I shall end for today, but I want to talk about the actual spells some next time.



*Not that anyone ever played it that way, but that was the intention, to get everyone playing by the same "official" set of rules for the purposes of tournaments. That's what old Dragon Magazine articles said anyway. I might not be imagining things if I thought there was a more mercenary motive in pushing the AD&D product line over the D&D product line, but then again I might be too.

**I am aware that, technically speaking, 1st edition AD&D predates Moldvay Basic; the Basic D&D line represents an older lineage of D&D gaming, AD&D was the more "modern" descendant.

Oh, and it was D&D bargain week on EBay-


A much better copy of the Cook Expert Book, my other one the cover fell off of.



The Mentzer Expert Book, I never had this one, so I am looking forward to reading through it too.



AC2- Combat Shield & Mini-Adventure, the 1984 publication date indicates it's a Mentzer era D&D product, is it compatible with B/X? I'll have to check the charts and see. When I bought it I was hoping so.



Grenadier's Dragon Lords Monster Manuscript, this one is pretty much just an AD&D monster manual for Grenadier's Monster Manuscript line of miniatures released in 1986-7; still more monsters with unique stats is always a good thing, eh?



Dwarf with a Torch, not too much to say there, I just usually throw down a minimum bid on any miniature I find that's carrying a torch or lantern or backpack or chest. Hireling types are hard to find.



Four Knights with a bonus Thief and Warrior, I really didn't expect to win these guys on the minimum bid either, but I did, I already had at least two of that Grenadier Thief. The Knights are nice, but kind of scrawny even for old 25mm scale, and the Warrior I'll need to strip and repaint, anyone recognize the company?



The High Level Campaign Book I grabbed because it was cheap and I never even saw it before, much less read it.



Ditto the Book of Artifacts, same seller, I must have been asleep for that part of 2nd edition AD&D's life cycle.