May 3rd

Not too much to report today. My dad is home from the hospital, they don't know what the problem was, or he's not telling me, which amounts to the same thing. I am sick and have apparently missed a day or two to some unknown illness where I just spend most of my day asleep and kind of queasy feeling, so that's been fun. Not. I got a couple of packages in the mail from EBay auctions that I won, because I am apparently an addict and can't help myself when I find a good bargain.

Obviously, I already have several copies of this, but one more at the table can't hurt, right?

I actually already have every single miniature from this set too, but you can never have too many pack animals, am I right?

These were just unopened Clan War cards, really cheap. I still have yet to play the game, but I can field an army for every major clan, once I actually get my painting done, and I figure opponents must be out there somewhere.

This is actually my third copy of this book, which pretty much cements the idea that if we ever play the Legend of the Five Rings RPG, it'll be the 2nd edition, because I have more Players Guides for it and lots of other stuff besides.

April 29th is a break day in the A-Z Challenge

So I thought I'd write about a couple of other things that have been on my mind for the last few weeks while I have been doing all this Norse research work, which really wasn't all that hard for me because I am pretty into Norse stuff anyway. Next year though, if there is an A-Z challenge in April, I will think to pick a subject that has more letter options.

But I am digressing from my original point here, which was to NOT write about the Norse A-Z topic I picked this year and instead write about the other things that have been creeping into my brain during that time. First there's the whole Star Trek and Klingon Assault Group thing, both Star Trek gaming, mostly through Star Fleet Battles, but also a little through the FASA RPG have been a big deal for me and my game time in the past. The Klingon Assault Group, while it coincides slightly with the gaming, is another beast altogether. I want to recruit people to KAG, because dressing like a Klingon and acting like a Klingon is awesome fun; but I guess only if you are part of a particularly brave subset of Trekkie.

I have also been slowly working on my own realization of the 1985 TSR AD&D 1st edition Oriental Adventures book. I wrestle with some of the core ideas presented in that book, and I go back and forth over whether or not the book was too ambitiously focused on presenting an entire fantasy east Asia, while still being concentrated on Japan, or if they weren't ambitious enough and should have gone further in their attempt to include everything Asian with the same "kitchen-sink" approach they gave the western world with "regular" AD&D. As it stands, the book is a mostly Japanese game that could not decide on it's focus; was it going to be about court and intrigue? Those skills (sorry, proficiencies) were presented for the first time in any D&D product in the OA book. Was the game about serving a Lord or Clan or a Temple even? That's kind of implied in several class descriptions, but no real advice was given to the DM about how to make a well balanced party work together if it included, for instance, a Samurai, a Ninja and a Sohei. The "normal" adventuring paradigm of AD&D was broken in OA, and no fixed replacement was offered.

Add on top of that the fact that the game had a real issue deciding whether it wanted to emulate a Chanbara film or Ninja film or a Kung-Fu film and we have a problem. Many of the classes don't work well together, and, even if you are not a Monk, you can easily become a martial artist deadly enough to out class the party Samurai, as I saw in my last OA campaign when the Yakuza character took Tae Kwon Do instead of weapons proficiencies. The Wu Jen spell list is inadequate, and while I intend to reverse engineer that list from the 3e compatible magic books I snagged off Ebay that were designed for Rokugan and the Legend of the Five Rings Setting, I can only come to the inescapable conclusion, despite my love of 1st edition AD&D and my nostalgia for Oriental Adventures and the fun campaigns that I have played using those rules, that AEG and L5R were better conceived and better designed than the rush job that I suspect that 1st edition OA was. The best thing I can say about 1st edition's AD&D Oriental Adventures is that it is far superior to the abortion that was 3e OA.

There are gems in the 1st edition OA books, I have seen mentioned on other blogs recently the Yearly,Monthly,Daily events tables. The court game might have worked if they had separated out weapon proficiencies from the "peaceful" ones. The Samurai class might have been less the super class that it was if it hadn't gotten a requirement to specialize in two weapons, something BANNED to every other class. The Kensai, which should be spelled Kensei, needs a total reworking, it is a valid class idea, but screwing him over by never letting him wear any armor OR have a magic weapon of his "chosen" type blows. The two "Cleric" classes of OA both suck though, the Sohei is just a second class Fighter until finally receiving some spells at 6th level? The Shukenja (which should be spelled Shugenja) can't fight anything BUT spirits? Ninja as a "Split-Class" = dumb idea, easy enough to create a Shinobi class, I did it once and I can do it again.

Currently I am reading a lot of Japanese history, watching Samurai movies about the Sengoku Jidai era and reading books about the Samurai and Bushido written during the Tokugawa era, while I am not reading and studying up on Norse history and lore. Obviously, I think the focus of Oriental Adventures should be on Japan and Japanese history and mythology, more focus is better. This is why OA1: Swords of the Daimyo was such a good sandbox to play in, it ignored all of the other nations of Kara-Tur, except for brief mentions. I think every single copy of Oriental Adventures should have come packaged with that module, although the adventures presented are weak.

The other thing that has me feeling nostalgic is my old Steppe Warriors guild, I recently spruced up our Facebook tribute page a bit, and I tried to get in touch with some of the old guys that I lost contact with over the years. AOL's Neverwinter Nights did go offline in July of 1997, we tried a few other online games, even text based ones, but none had the awesome community of AOL's NWN. We weren't there for long, and the core of us were local to the Oswego county area, which is why it was easy for us to have our reunions, at least in the beginning. But I miss all those guys, even the ones I have fought with over the years; and it kind of makes me sad that I never did get around to playing that Steppe Warrior campaign that I always wanted to. I even have a good idea for it now, but we've scattered to the four winds, and the ones left in the area mostly don't talk to each other anymore. Upstate New York's greatest export has always been it's people.

Now, lastly, I have a Dawn Patrol play report that's more than a week over due. We had decided the last time we played that we were sick and tired of random encounters with Fighters versus Two-Seaters and the whole "I fly straight for six squares to complete my mission, now try and shoot me down before I get home" BS. So we just decided on a Fighter engagement, and randomly chose French or British to engage the Germans; then rolled a die to advance the war a number of days. Since I got thee time wrong, and was running late to start with, all of this was taken care of before myself and John even made it to Big Darryl's house.

The date was February 10, 1917. Two Fighter patrols ran into each other deep inside German held territory. My son John and I played the French, we were flying Spad VIIs and the two Darryls were playing the Germans who were both flying Albatross DIIIs. Darryl Jr. was playing his pilot Vizefeldwebel Oskar Schaeffer, who was flying his second mission. Darryl Sr. was playing his pilot Oberleutnant Erich Von Reinstadt, who was flying his 10th mission. John was flying his pilot Lieutenant Guy Bernet and I was flying my pilot, the Serbian volunteer, Lieutenant Vaclev Petrovic; Lieutenant Bernet had two missions and was deemed the flight leader.

Now is the part where I wish I had written this out while it was clearer in my memory, I took a few notes, but I didn't bring the mission logs home with me, maybe I should do that in the future.

The mission started out well enough for us Frenchmen, we were all at high altitude and the Spads outperform the Albatrosses at pretty much every altitude anyway, their only advantage is their dual Spandau guns, which are deadly. We closed to dogfighting range and ended up in a line firing at each other's tails, poor Darryl Jr. in the lead with no target, everyone took a little bit of damage, except me, because I was in the back. It got a little chaotic then, it broke into two dogfights that kept running back into each other, we ban overt table talk during the game, but we can give some pointers about rules and tactics to newer players like John or Dalton (who didn't make this game). Sadly, seven turns into the game Schaeffer scored a critical engine hit on Bernet's plane and it exploded.

Now, completely out of character, it was the luckiest of hits possible, and I felt kind of bad because I shot down John the last time he played (while he was playing MY pilot I might add), so the poor kid has played twice now, and gotten shot down twice. He's a quick learner and he didn't do anything wrong here, except be unlucky; yes, if he stuck around he might have gotten shot down anyway, he was the least experienced player in the game, but I really hope it doesn't sour him on Dawn Patrol.

At that point, outnumbered two to one, you might think I'd just cut and run for my lines, right? Nope. I stuck it out for another ten turns. I'd like to say it was purely for vengeance for my downed comrade, but part of it was also because I was, up until that point, the only one in the group with a legitimate kill scored on another player, so I was trying to shoot Darryl Jr.'s pilot Schaeffer down to keep my record intact. I almost had him a couple of times, I missed at 50' range twice, my guns jammed once, and I had to do all this while evading the other Albatross DIII, not always successfully. Not all the bad luck went in the favor of the Germans, there were a couple of occasions where I almost certainly should have been shot down, both of my wings had sustained a lot of damage and my engine was two hits away from gone, I was just incredibly lucky on critical hit rolls.

In the end, I shot Schaeffer's plane up pretty bad, and Von Reinhardt had some minor damage too, but I was in a position where, if I stuck it out any longer, I was most likely going to give the Hun another aerial victory. I managed to maneuver so that I was pointed towards home and they were either too far behind me or pointed in the wrong direction, and broke for home. My plane had sustained an incredible amount of damage in the fighting, but luckily only one, relatively minor critical hit, to the wing. My Spad was still faster and more maneuverable, so they gave up the chase and the game was over. Lt.Petrovic added a mission to his resume, Vizefeldwebel Schaeffer added both a mission and a kill, and Lt. Von Rienhardt added another mission to his pretty impressive score.

So, if you live in central NY and you have an interest in playing Dawn Patrol, or helping to fix the bugs of 1st edition AD&D's Oriental Adventures through campaign play, or want to play in a B/X Norse campaign, or are interested in alpha-testing a B/X D&D World War II game, or are an old Steppe Warrior from AOL's NWN or one of the other Ordus like Nyrthellan's Woods or The Realm or Everquest or one of the eight million Facebook games we played as a group, or are interested in Star Trek, especially Klingons, but not limited to them, leave me a comment and I'll get back to you.  

GM Questionnaire

So, I decided to fill out Zak's Questionnaire, here are my answers.

1. If you had to pick a single invention in a game you were most proud of what would it be?

I am apparently a one trick pony, I can come up with good campaign settings. I can fill them with interesting NPCs and get some action started via plot hooks, after that it's all on the players. I don't really invent stuff like tricks, traps, spells or monsters.

2. When was the last time you GMed?

December 18, 2011, but that session and the one before it weren't all that great.

3. When was the last time you played?

Sometime in 2009? Right after Hackmaster Basic came out, my Daughter Ashli decided to debut as a gamemaster using that system, it went well for the first couple of sessions while she had pre-prepared material to work with, but once she had to start working with her own material and we started to do things that weren't covered in the book, things started to go bad; it ended shortly after that while we waited for the release of Frandor's Keep. I bought that for her when it came out, but we never went back to Hackmaster Basic, I think that the ultra-busyness of her senior year of high school and the bad memory of how it had ended before turned her off to the system. No, I forgot, it was last Spring when Lee's 1/2 Orc died, she DMed my campaign for a few sessions while I recharged my DM mojo.

4. Give us a one-sentence pitch for an adventure you haven't run but would like to.

B/X Pendragon, more of a campaign really though.

5. What do you do while you wait for players to do things?

Eat, drink, chat with the other players; eventually roll a random encounter.

6. What, if anything, do you eat while you play?

Usually Beef Summer Sausage, a variety of Cheeses, Ritz Crackers and Ranch Dressing or A couple of Different Types of Mustard make the standard "During the Game" snack tray, also Coffee (always), Hot Tea (Black, Green, or some types of Herbal- upon request), Hot Cocoa (upon request), usually some type of soda, always with a couple of diet options for soda. Sometimes the snack tray will include vegetables or other cold meats, this week's game will have Smoked Herring, for example. Since my game is every other week, I have the opportunity to stock up on snack foods when I find them on sale for a good price, so various Potato Chips and flavors of Doritos make their way here pretty frequently too. Since we always break for dinner, we almost always have some kind of food that is either easy and quick to make, or that we can throw in the oven or on the stove and not have to watch too closely, at recent game sessions we have had Beef Stew and Chili Con Carne; or alternately we order Pizza & Wings or Subs. Players are free to bring whatever other snacks they want to as well, as long as they bring enough to share, so this usually adds some Chips, Cookies and Soda to the mix too.

7. Do you find GMing physically exhausting?

No, but I'm not 16 anymore either. I can't play D&D for 16 hours straight and then take a 5 hour nap before another 16 hour session.

8. What was the last interesting (to you, anyway) thing you remember a PC you were running doing?

Planning a tactical assault on a well guarded and somewhat fortified urban mansion with a party of low level PCs? I played a 1st level Magic- User. Seriously, I don't get to play much.

9. Do your players take your serious setting and make it unserious? Vice versa? Neither?

Sometimes they do, sometimes I do. It's a game. Sure I may get a little ticked off when one of the players decides to not take the game as deadly serious as I am, at the moment, but aren't we all doing this to have fun and blow off a little of our real life stress and hang out with our friends, and, in my case, my family too? Sometimes this game just takes a turn for the absurd, and there is nothing you can do to turn it around. When it's one player, it CAN get contagious, when it's the DM it WILL get contagious. The less said about the gay Orc discotheque, the better or the naked no-thumbed Orcs. Why do these things keep happening to Orcs?

10. What do you do with goblins?

After what happened to the Orcs, do you really want to know? Seriously, they're mostly evil cannon fodder.

11. What was the last non-RPG thing you saw that you converted into game material (background, setting, trap, etc.)?

The floor plan of a Korean bath house.

12. What's the funniest table moment you can remember right now?

Funny things happen all the time at my game. We have a pretty fun loving group of players, but nothing springs to mind specifically.

13. What was the last game book you looked at--aside from things you referenced in a game--why were you looking at it?

Moldvay Basic Book, reading it cover to cover for a blog post.

14. Who's your idea of the perfect RPG illustrator?

Tough choice here, but I am going to go with Dave Trampier.

15. Does your game ever make your players genuinely afraid?

I would have to say no. Occasionally a little creeped out, but really scared, no; again, it's just a game.

16. What was the best time you ever had running an adventure you didn't write? (If ever)

Tough to say, I almost always heavily rewrite adventure modules anyway, because if I don't I am afraid I'll forget something important because I didn't write it, and the potential problem of players having read the adventure before hand. The only adventure I can run with a minimum of preparation AND be sure I am not forgetting anything is B2.

17. What would be the ideal physical set up to run a game in?

That would depend on the game now wouldn't it? An ideal set up for a WW II board game is going to be different than the ideal set up for a Star Trek RPG, but for the sake of argument I'll assume you meant ideal for D&D. Ideal for D&D would need to have some medieval ambiance in the room, a table large enough to seat 9 people at least, with room for books, snacks, an optional battle mat and minis. Good lighting. Access to a nearby rest room and kitchen facility, should probably be the DM's residence. Side table for the DM. Bookshelves are a plus, so reference books are in the same room. A good sound system would be nice too. Since we're going for ideal, I'd have a computer at the DM station too. The DM's chair would be more like a throne, so he sat higher up and in a nicer chair, projecting his more powerful status to the players. Actually with some redecoration, my old DM Marty's dining room where we used to play in his 2nd edition campaign comes pretty close, the only issues are that I am the usual DM now, his reference books were in an upstairs library room and it was a little on the small side.

18. If you had to think of the two most disparate games or game products that you like what would they be?

Star Fleet Battles and Munchkin, they have got to be sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum.

19. If you had to think of the most disparate influences overall on your game, what would they be?

Higher education, my 1st edition AD&D DMG, Conan the Barbarian, King Arthur.

20. As a GM, what kind of player do you want at your table?

People who follow the Wheaton Rule. Other than that be clean, no stereotypical gamers here; be on time and attentive to the game, it's respectful to the rest of the gamers here. It helps if we're already friends and would hang out with each other even if there wasn't a D&D game going on, because sometimes shit happens and we don't get to play D&D when we're supposed to and that can get awkward when there is a stranger that I only really know from D&D in my house.

21. What's a real life experience you've translated into game terms?

Armored Combat with Sword & Shield (and other weapons) both in singles tournaments and in mêlée.

22. Is there an RPG product that you wish existed but doesn't?

AD&D 2nd edition Oriental Adventures. I think it would have cleaned up a lot of the problems of the 1st edition version and probably would not have abandoned the Kara-Tur setting like 3e did.

23. Is there anyone you know who you talk about RPGs with who doesn't play? How do those conversations go?

I have in the past talked with people about RPGs that didn't play, but not with any regularity. Usually they either decide to give RPGs a shot themselves or we don't really talk about them after a while.

D&D 5th edition Wishlist

OK, I know I said yesterday that I'd not speculate on what WotC was going to do with D&D and that I'd just get back to my own business, but my contrary brain wouldn't stop thinking about it, so here it is.

Point One- Ditch the full color, expensive art on every page; black & white line art can be just as evocative and it's easier for kids to afford or for parents to buy for their kids when the book is $20-25.00 rather than $40+ . I also would prefer an art direction that takes us stylistically back to a more realistically medieval look rather than dungeon punk, but I may get out voted on that. That said, feel free to mix it up some too, David C. Sutherland III, D.A. Trampier, Tom Wham and Jean Wells all got art credits in the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual, David C. Sutherland and D.A. Trampier got them for the 1st edition Players Handbook, David C. Sutherland, D.A. Trampier, Darlene Pekul, Will McLean, David S. La Force and Erol Otus got them for the 1st edition AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide; I could go on and list the art credits for various other old D&D and AD&D books , modules and supplements I have, but I think my point is well made- Stylistically these various artists vary quite a bit within the same products and that's OK; all of them can represent D&D.

Point Two- Get rid of the instant gratification. People, even the kids you have been trying to attract get bored when you hand them everything they want on a silver platter. D&D was designed for long term campaign play. Sure, one of the biggest complaints going into 3rd edition was that nobody ever got to play high level characters because campaigns never lasted long enough, dropping the amount of XP required to level alone should have fixed the problem, you didn't need to amp up the amount of XP everything was worth too. I get that nobody likes being 1st level, but everyone feels a sense of real accomplishment when they make it to second, third, fourth and so on under the old rules; now everyone knows that they are going to level pretty much every time they play and it steals the sense of accomplishment from the players and replaces it with a sense of entitlement.

Point Three- Put the danger back in. This goes hand-in-hand with the last point. Since 3rd edition the PCs have been pretty much gods walking the earth, and the encounter scaling system doesn't help this problem. If there is no danger, no real fear of death and failure, then there is no real sense of accomplishment for the players there either. I am not familiar with 4th edition myself, but I have heard stories from my players who tell me that the power levels of PCs are even higher, and therefore worse, than they were in 3rd edition. Get rid of at will, per encounter, per day, per whatever powers; these are still supposed to be people adventuring not superheroes.

Point four- Make skills, feats & powers optional if you include them at all. Obviously I am biased against them, but I might still be playing a new version of D&D if they had made it easy to rip out the parts I didn't like as simply optional sub-systems.

Point Five- Scale back races and classes to the core four, at least at first. I write a lot about 1st edition AD&D and I sometimes lose sight of the fact that post-Gygaxian D&D has gotten way more complex and both class and race heavy than EGG was taking us when he was dismissed from TSR. 2nd edition gave us the endless series of Complete X splatbooks with their numerous kits and subraces. 3x did the same thing and called them Prestige classes instead of Kits. 4th edition, apparently, just published newer Player's Handbooks with new races and classes.

Point Six- Design the entire system first, before releasing anything. Nothing screws things up worse than having a great idea added to a game half way through it's life cycle and then making it mandatory for play. While you're at it remember to fire the first guy that says every class needs to be balanced equally with each other at every level, and then everyone that brings it up again after that. The classic D&D experience was full of unbalanced things and nobody cared, it was part of the fun. People played their characters then instead of these horribly optimized min/maxed things they use for their tactical combat game they call D&D these days. Also, some randomness is a good thing.

Point Seven- Bring back the OGL or something at least as liberal as it was. Get every other game company making product for your game again, it only makes sense, it increases your power and prestige in the marketplace when everything in the game shop says "requires 5th edition D&D to play", or has a D&D logo on it. Hell, give away the D&D license too, let other companies meet a more stringent quality control level and share their profits with you. Lucas does this with Star Wars video games, novels, comics, whatever, all it takes is hiring on a couple of people to make sure they aren't trying to print the adventure "Sex-Slaves of the Under-City" with a D&D logo on it, and if they do, you have the legal Death Star called Hasbro to back you up and destroy them

Point Eight- License official D&D miniatures from every manufacturer that wants to make them and can meet a decent level of quality control and make them all to the same scale and look like the pictures in the Monster Manual and other books, again, this could be done at no cost to you except making sure their product doesn't suck. It really doesn't matter if they are pre-painted plastic or resin or metal, as long as they meet your standard. The cost is all on them and they share the profits with you. They take the risk, you get the reward.

Point Nine- Bring back Dragon magazine as a real, print magazine. Seriously, and make it a real magazine that covers all of gaming again instead of a house organ. Back when D&D was big Dragon Magazine was the one thing that every gamer tried to get every month, players and DMs alike, it had something for everyone. But don't spend more than a third of your magazine space on previewing your own upcoming products, or doing tie-ins to recently released products, or reviewing your own products (unless you have an independent reviewer that's allowed to call you out on a suck product); cover everything in the RPG world, some board game love wouldn't hurt either and I guess I could live with card games getting some space every now and again too.

Point Ten- Don't fuck with us. You say you are going to listen, then listen. Right now you are all conciliatory, you want to re-unite the tribes under your banner. I know this is because you are weak and getting beaten in sales by Pathfinder. Your biggest competitors are your previous editions, that's why the OSR exists. I have spent more money on old TSR product in the last decade than I have on any D&D produced by WotC. If I buy new RPG product at all, my money usually goes to Kenzer & Company, the last time Wizards of the Coast got money for an RPG book from me it was $39.95 for the Saga edition core rules in 2007. I want to love D&D, not OSRIC, Pathfinder, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry or Adventures Dark & Dangerous or any other retro-clone, but you are not making it easy.

Point Eleven- Resurrect TSR. Just as an imprint, a separate division within Wizards of the Coast. Wizards of the Coast is a CCG manufacturer and it has the reputation as the company that killed TSR and D&D. TSR invented RPGs. Avalon Hill still gets to be a quasi-separate entity within your empire, and it is a good thing from the perspective that it gives a sense of continuity to the hobby of war gaming. Bringing back TSR would do the same thing I think for RPGs and it would be a show of good faith that you were going to take D&D seriously this time around.

Point Twelve- Release the PDF library of old editions of D&D again. Removing them from being able to be legally purchased made them only available illegally, you created a piracy problem that was almost non-existent by being draconian about piracy and insisting that everyone only play the current version of the game. I didn't need the PDFs for the most part, but I know a lot of people did, that said I would not hesitate to take illegally that which you made impossible to obtain legally if I felt I needed a module or a copy of a book I didn't have and could not find at a reasonable price in the secondary marketplace.

Now, down to nuts and bolts, I would like very much for them to put out a beginners boxed set. Not like the Pathfinder box, although, by all accounts, it is very nice. I want them to do something very much like Moldvay or Mentzer Basic. Simple. Doesn't require miniatures or tokens or a battle map; just dice, pencil, paper and imagination. I think race as class is a dead concept these days, killed by time out of favor if nothing else, so I won't try and push for that. This set should include a players book and a DMs book and a beginners module like B1 or B2 or both, it should also focus on dungeon exploration and the first few levels of play, maybe 1-5.

Follow that up with an Expert boxed set. Give new DMs advice on how to take the game out of the dungeon and into wilderness exploration. Include a module like X1 and a bare bones campaign setting, D&D's the Known World AKA Mystara by choice, my reasoning I'll get to later. This should cover levels 6-15 maybe. Add in a few more modular optional rules, for more granularity if the players and DMs want to add them.

Concurrent with the release of the Expert set, I'd release the Advanced D&D Monster Manual. Every monster in it would be 100% compatible with the B/X sets, they would just have a little extra rules crunch to them that wasn't yet explained. More monster choices are always welcomed. This would probably end year one of 5th edition D&D.

Next add a Master boxed set, obviously by the time you are DMing for characters that are this level, you are probably not a newbie DM anymore, but the game focus and scale has changed and there needs to be advice on how to handle this. More optional rules should be added here, including rules for mass combat and warfare, the governing of domains and the challenges they face and what else to do with higher level characters. Have it cover levels 16+

Maybe a few months after the release of the Master boxed set, I'd release the new AD&D Player's Handbook, it would have a couple more race options and a few more class options. This would probably be where I added an optional skill system, or expanded it if it was already in the game. This is the place to add 1/2 Elves, 1/2 Orcs and Gnomes as player races. I'm not fool enough to believe we can turn back the clock to limit Demi-Humans in either class or level, but I'd make specific mention as an optional rule that some specific campaign settings have specific rules regarding those things.

Probably concurrent with the release of the AD&D PH should be the Dungeon Master's Guide, and it should be a weighty tome filled with advice and tables and all manner of rules explanations and clarifications for the DM. Use the 1st edition AD&D DMG as a guide when designing it, every one since has been lacking. I hear the Pathfinder GM book is quite good though, so maybe you all should take a look at that too. Mostly it should reinforce for the DM that he is there to keep the game moving, if he can't find a rule or there is an argument about how a rule works, it is his job to be the final arbiter; to make the judgment. The DM is not against the players, but he isn't necessarily for them either.

From here you can have a fairly robust release schedule that will keep both the publisher and the consumers, us gamers, happy. For instance, every year we can release a new monster book, this can be done for a number of years just updating the already extant monsters in the D&D/AD&D canon from OD&D up through 4th Edition and including everything from the modules and BECMI/Cyclopedia. Updating classic modules for release in the new edition, you could do one of these a month and get years worth of sales. Battlesystem/Chainmail/Whatever-You-Want-To-Call-It the tactical miniature game will always have a market, particularly if it is integrated into the rules system as a method of handling large combats, and it will drive miniature sales; done properly this can be linked to a more mass scale combat system too and then you'll be able to sell army list books for different factions in different campaign worlds. Speaking of campaign worlds, you own a bunch of them and some of them are pretty damned popular, release a boxed set for each one of them. Run a column in Dragon magazine for your old TSR worlds. I think the ones with the biggest numbers of fans are Greyhawk, The Forgotten Realms and The Known World (Mystara), but that may be skewed by my OSR reading habits, re-release them in their classic forms with the new rules. Once those classic worlds are released, put out a hard cover book for them that will cover all the crunchy rules specifics of the campaign setting for people that really want to amp it up. Region books for campaign settings, like the D&D gazetteer series could keep you going for a while too. Race books could give us sub-races, racial classes, whatever. Class books that open up options for various classes and add prestige classes or sub-classes or kits or whatever you want to call them. Remember Players Option: Skills and Powers and Combat and Tactics? AD&D 2.5, something like that could add back in some of the crunchiness that 3rd & 4th edition fans want for their games, while leaving it optional for the rest of us. New books with more spells will always be welcomed too, so a spell compendium every so often would be cool I suppose, provided it didn't screw with the power curve. 2nd edition AD&D gave us all of those HR books too, now mostly they were not great, but the premise was good

Now what not to do, do not put a rule in a core book and then contradict it in a later release. That's why I said to make the entire system first. If you say that only Fighters can specialize with weapons, then don't let anyone else, even Fighter sub-classes do it, and don't give them an ability that mimics specialization with a different name. If you say in the core book that a Fighter can only specialize with one weapon, don't say in a later book that he can specialize under some circumstances with more than one. If you say that all of your martial classes are going to have their options covered in this one book, don't later release a book specifically for Rangers or Paladins. This applies, obviously, to every class and race. You should also keep to your production schedule for stuff, even if it doesn't look like it's going to sell well, you could always sell it as a PDF or print on demand, but people are going to be pissed if you said you were going to publish the "Kara-Tur Compendium" and you don't. Your word needs to be your bond if we are going to trust you again.

Follow this release schedule and between a monthly magazine, annual monster book releases, classic modules revamped for the new edition, new modules being written for the new edition, and presumably at least three campaign settings getting significant support through boxed sets, hardcover sourcebooks and gazetteers, the race and class books, historical sourcebooks, a possible line of army books for the associated miniature battle game, and more advanced player, and presumably, DM, option books I think that this could easily sustain profits through the entirety of the 5th edition D&D life cycle. Don't expect any love though if there's 5.5 in three years though of 6th edition is in less than a decade.

Garnia Reboot.

Rebooting movie franchises and beloved television franchises seems to be all the rage these days, from J.J. Abrams' "Star Trek" to Ron Moore's "Battlestar Galactica", that caused waves of nerd rage and/or nerdgasms, to a bunch of stuff like the "Dukes of Hazzard" or "Miami Vice" that most of us nerds could not care less about. Hollywood has been doing it for decades now and I figure maybe it's time I give my old workhorse world of Garnia a reboot to see how a fresh perspective and some new ideas in design might make my Celtic fantasy world work a little better now that I am older and less of a slave to the AD&D rule books.

Back when I was a kid; I mean literally a child, Garnia started as a project when I was in 7th grade, so I would have been twelve years old; I felt like I needed to jam into it everything "officially" available to me. Thankfully, at the time, the only published AD&D books were the MM, PH & DMG, although I did go on to make extensive use of other AD&D books as they were published, I felt less pressure to always find room for,say, the Nilbog or the Flumph. I will now apologize to my British readers for slighting their countrymen's contributions to the AD&D monster canon.

What got me thinking about this, aside from my work on putting together the campaign pages for my OA game "Against the Black Temple" on Obsidian Portal and seeing my still unfinished "Garnia" campaign pages, was the fact that I have been talking to Darryl again lately, and sure as winter is coming, we will eventually talk about Garnia. Why? Because, while Garnia may have been my brain child, he and I have been collaborating on it for so long now that it is at least partially his. He drew the original maps. He spent countless hours of his youth writing histories for the world. None of it is in use anymore, but he still was always right there in the planning stages. I know for a fact he's run entire campaigns there without any of my input at all when we lived thousands of miles apart.

We even have our favorite nations in the world, I favor Garnia, it was originally named after an old D&D character of mine "Garn the Great", I later retconned that to be an altered form of Gwarynica Riga- in the pseudo-Celtic language I kind of created using bits of Gaulish and Welsh and Gaelic and Breton it means pretty much "Kingdom of the people of Gwaryn", which was later shortened to simply "Garnia"; allowing me to keep the same name I'd always used for the campaign and the kingdom, but giving it a more historico-linguistic rationalization. Historically, in the campaign world, they are founded when the Humans sweep in off the northern steppes and destroy the (already besieged) ancient Elven empire in a decades long war of extermination. I picture their material culture starting off like the ancient Celts and building pretty much like western Europe over time, only with the Celtic artistic flavor throughout. Their kingdom has been conquered several times by their steppe dwelling cousins over the centuries, which generally results in nothing more than a change of dynasty as the new lords settle in to the comforts of civilization. I modeled their history on that of China.

Darryl favors Frodia. Frodia was a nation of sorcerers that I always likened to Howard's Stygia with it's Sorcerous Priests and I wanted to have a nation that would be a clear foil to the noble warriors of Garnia when I set up the world initially, as a kid. Plus, Magocracy was a government type in the DMG and it sounded cool. According to the earliest histories that I wrote (and still have!), Frodia is a child kingdom of Garnia dating to the earliest times after the Humans conquered the old Elven kingdom. A cult sprung up worshiping Frodal*, a name that is going to have to go in any reboot, who was a god of magic; and they were outlawed and driven from the kingdom of Garnia into the wilderness; or, alternately, these priest-kings discovered secrets of ancient elven magic and rebelled against the weak central authority of the Garnian high-king, taking the south-western third of the kingdom with them, which is actually more likely. Frodia also is more urban, the major elven cities having been less destroyed by the decades long conquest by the time it reached there. They have a major river as a natural defensive border between them, think of it like the Rhine.

That actually is where he and I had one of our greatest creative differences. He saw Frodia as this Magic-User ruled utopia with magic taking the place of technology, kind of a magi-tech, almost steam punk before that was a thing, thing going on there. He also saw them as clearly the greatest superpower in the world. I was going for a more "pulp-fantasy" Conan the Barbarian, so when magic does happen it will be awesome kind of a vibe, even back then, and I still kind of do that now. I like magic to be either of the rare and wonderful or scary and possibly sanity destroying varieties. Perhaps D&D/AD&D wasn't the best vehicle to convey my vision of a "perfect" RPG world, but it's what I had, and what I have.

Anyway, enough about two countries in a fantasy world most of you don't care about, although, if I ever do actually publish anything through the Hydra collective, my Garnia campaign will probably be it. My wife Mona and my daughter Ashli were sitting in the living room sick the other day, so I had a captive audience, which they hate, and I said to them "I think for my next (D&D) game I am going to get rid of all the half breeds, they really don't make much sense when you think about it. No Half-Orcs, Half-Elves, Half-Ogres, or Halflings!", I threw that last one in there just to see if they were paying attention, and if they weren't before, that sure got it. You'd think I'd kicked a hornet's nest from the reaction it got, are Halflings really such sacred cows in the D&D/RPG universe? My adult take on them is that EGG either added them to OD&D because he snagged everything he could for content from every source he could find, fantasy, science fiction, mythology, even the Bible(!); or, more cynically, he deliberately contrived to add Hobbits to OD&D to broaden it's appeal because Tolkien's work was so popular in the US at the time; either way, I don't think the loss of one PC race is going to ruin the game world and I have always had trouble rationalizing a reason for their existence in my Garnia campaign world. Plus, I didn't see anyone coming to the defense of the poor bloody Gnomes when they got the axe back in the 90's. I know they are technically not half breeds, like the other races I am considering taking out, but is it really so bad to be limited to playing Humans, Elves & Dwarves?

Elves and Dwarves are getting a racial make-over too, partially due to an offhand comment by my wife, who said "Why let people play Elves at all?", in regard to the setting being the ruins of an ancient Elven empire; that gave me a kick-ass idea, all player character Elves are what I am calling "Fallen Elves" the degenerate survivors of their long ago fallen race, no longer immortal, merely long-lived; they have lost the culture, technological secrets and magic of their forebears. They are the ones that fled to the wilderness, turned coat or submitted to slavery, the descendants of the few survivors of a near total genocide of their species. This allows for the seriously strong mystical, hidden Elven island kingdom to still exist and have really powerful Elves that aren't like the PCs, that shun the PC Elves as a lesser version of themselves.

Dwarven PCs get a similar treatment, but to a much lesser extent, all Dwarven PCs start as "Broken Dwarves", Dwarves from clans or kingdoms that have lost their territory to humanoid encroachment and moved into Human lands as refugees. The Garnian high-kings have always had a history of keeping a Dwarven warband, as do some other ranking nobles. Dwarves are essentially mountain dwelling craftsmen, traders and warriors; to my mind that makes them pretty much like short Vikings culturally, and in AD&D they can't be anything but Fighters and Thieves (or Assassins, but that's another story). So, my point here is, essentially, that if you play a Dwarf in my Garnia campaign, then your character is pretty much a refugee. Maybe a refugee of generations long status, but a refugee all the same.

Humans are supposed to be the backbone of any party in AD&D, and the culture of my campaign is set up for it to be a very humanocentric world, the reboot is going to make it even moreso, only more like ancient/medieval Europe too, where the territory between settled areas is dangerous howling wilderness and ancient evils lurk waiting to trap and devour the unwary. The cool thing about a reboot is I don't have to toss out thirty years of development entirely and start again from scratch, that's probably why Hollywood likes them, I can take the good bits and tweak them better, I can keep the best bits the same and I can toss the crap bits entirely.

The hard part is deciding what constitutes crap. Over the last 30 years Garnia has accreted to it pretty much every smaller, lesser campaign idea I have ever had and some of them I still love. Old fantasy Roman empire campaign where the Romans conquered an Egypt that was run by Goblins? It's on the other side of the huge and largely impassable mountain chain where the Dwarven kingdoms are, on the old Roman campaign map, they were called "Regni Homoi Cortii" or something like that, I don't actually speak Latin, so I had to look it up at the time, I really just read Latin, and then only some. Damned American educational system. But it was like I'd planned for those two maps to fit together all along.

How about those independent "Mistlander" Clans? Essentially Scottish Highlanders living in a mountainous area north east of the kingdom of Garnia, the area is always foggy and the sulfurous fog eats ferrous metals over the course of days. Between the mists and the hostile terrain, no one has ever been able to conquer them. Do we like the idea of a Chinese empire on the same map as a Celtic one? How about the Japanese islands (Tenchuko, I forget what it means) just off map? Most of the lands are Celtic, the first non-Celts were the Wotanic Knights, who were actually one of the few (relatively) unchanged names from the original Garnia map, back in the day when all of the names were vaguely Germanic, rather than Celtic. Now the county's called Wodanslund, and the people bear a striking resemblance to the Rohirrim that I never noticed until I actually set a campaign there a couple of years ago. I have an origin myth for them even. What about the Viking island kingdoms? The Byzantines? The Aztecs? The Mongols (actually a mixed Turko-Mongolian horde) that I placed in an unused spot on the map and used as a tribute to the Steppe Warriors? The Necromancer's lands are Arabic in name and culture, just south of the civil war torn Celtic kingdom of Tir nan Kaur, and the Necromancer once, almost, conquered the entire world. I have an Orc kingdom on land torn from Garnia itself, should I keep it or kill it? Do I have too many races and cultures?

The key thing to remember is that the world where Garnia is was the Elven home world and is at the heart of a multi-planar war between the forces of good and the forces of evil. Humankind was the wild card introduced by the forces of evil to unbalance things, Humans are inherently neither good nor evil, other races are. Since this is a good plane, the goodness emanating influences the naturally unaligned Humans towards good, but it isn't a given. Anyway, Humans are an import, brought through planar gates, Stargate style, although long before that movie/TV series, and I picked the Ancient Celts as the people to go, the had a lot going for them. War chariots, head-hunting, woad, iron weapons, warlike disposition and a tendency to migrate entire tribes all at once seemingly on a whim. Oh, and Druids and Bards. Plus a largely mutually antagonistic relationship with the Roman empire over time. Those things combined to make them ideal choices for my peoples of choice for the journey to another world, plus my own feeling that they peaked too soon here on Earth, so maybe I could give them another chance elsewhere, and almost all of my own ancestors are western Europeans, some of them are Scottish Highlanders, so there is a little narcissism there too.

There's a little more to the whole story than just that, and originally I had it being the Germanic hordes that took down the Roman empire instead of the Celtic hordes that were taken down by the Romans, but I wanted to move it back into the mists of time some and give me a little wiggle room, plus it seemed like everyone and their brother was doing everything in a Germanic barbarian or Viking theme back then, so I wanted to be different, even if it meant I couldn't pronounce half of the names I was using properly. Incidentally, also a problem for people using Viking or Germanic barbarian stuff, just saying; it remains so to this day for the vast majority.

*Frodal- God of Magic is one of the pantheon of deities I designed using EGG's Greyhawk and the DDG as a guide, they are horrible. Garn was another, but he was just a deified player character of mine, that I created the entire world as a vanity project for, one of the other gods was "Ignas the Bright" Who, I believe was a God of Law. His people got the far away "Bright Empire", a Lawful Neutral aligned empire, that was sometimes at war on the sea and over some rough terrain and at long distance, on land, with Garnia, they are now known as "The Empire of Ming Liang**". The rest of my original pantheon? I have them in a binder here somewhere, but they are painful to see. They were replaced, largely, by the Celtic pantheon by the 1990's, although some parts of the world have other gods and the Demi-Humans and Humanoids have always had their own too. I have never been able to come up with a good rational Celticization of Frodia, I have been able to do that for other countries on the map, the old Torakor, invented when I was 12, got to be renamed "Tir nan Kaur", I forget what it means, and it's probably in a mixture of languages, "Tir Nan" means "Land of" in Gaelic I know.

**Yes, it's poor form to footnote a footnote, but I felt it best to mention that I redesigned that area of the world specifically so I could play some Oriental Adventures without ever having to leave my Garnia campaign world, and then never did. Every single time I play OA, I end up playing in Kara-Tur.

Against the Black Temple: Session 2

Image from the Kara-Tur Monstrous Manual - It's a Goblin Rat.

Spoiler alert- they still haven't made it to the Mura of Hondo, if that's all you were waiting to see you can skip this post.

It should be noted that Paul couldn't make it to the game because he had car trouble, so my son John ran Date Karasu for him, as well as his own character Katsuo the Wu Jen.

When we left off last time they were asking if anyone knew whose head it was they were carrying around, the ramen shop owner told them they should probably ask the Doshin (police) or a Yoriki (investigator/boss cop). Ami then took the head and dropped it near the bathhouse where the fight had taken place and started screaming like she was just some poor peasant girl that had stumbled over a severed head. Roleplayed to the hilt, the cops took her to a nearby tea house and bought her some tea to calm her down.

The Samurai and the rest of the party, except for Aiko the Kensei and Misaki the Shugenja, headed back to the nice section of town to the inn where they were staying. Aiko and Misaki stuck around to make sure that Ami was going to be OK, then joined her for tea after the cops left. Eventually they rejoined the rest of the party at the nice inn and got to meet Karasu's army of servants (12) as well as Masaru's pair of servants. Some time in the night travel permits were left in Masaru's room, by whom he does not know, but he suspects they may be forged. He is more than a little paranoid.

Ami spends the next several days getting under Masaru's skin as they travel down the coastal road, she begins to subvert his authority with the servants. They roleplay off one another pretty well. Misaki, is an intelligent cat that shapeshifts into human form, she is being roleplayed pretty well too, if more than a little strangely. Several days pass pretty much uneventfully, although the party is forced to sleep outside one night when the only inn is fully occupied by vastly more important people than them, and the retainers and staff of those important people. Masaru accepts this stoicly.

The very next day I roll a random encounter that I fear may TPK the party- Goblin Rats. Nasty 3HD buggers, they attack travelers and live near human settlements. I rule that the encounter will take place a couple of miles before they reach the village they plan on sleeping in, OK, fine. I figure they're opportunistic, like bandits, so they'll probably want to attack from ambush. Then I roll to see how many only four, it could have been up to twenty. As I am considering this encounter in my head I think to myself, they probably would have set up to attack travelers from a concealed position near the road, maybe some brush; but this party is pretty big, 7 PCs and 14 non-combatant NPCs. They're already in position, but would 4 of them attack a party that big? I let the dice decide, I roll to see if the Cat Hengeyokai detects the Rat Men hiding just off the side of the road. She does. Misaki goes absolutely ballistic on them. As it turns out Goblin Rats are terrified by felines or cat like creatures- I figure a Cat Hengeyokai probably has to count there, right? All four of them fail their saving throws and start to flee in terror. The party opens up on, and takes down (barely) their leader, the one carrying their only significant treasure- a magic trident. The rest escape, I agonize over whether or not to give them the full XP for this encounter, in the end I do because it could have just as easily gone the other way.

After all the back slapping and happiness is done they decide to award the trident to Ami. They ride into town and get themselves to the nicest rooms in the local inn, well aware that starting the next day the travel is going to get harder over worse roads that are less well traveled, maintained or patrolled. Ami seeks out and finds using her Yakuza skills a place to sell the trident. I feel it was an unwise move, and asked at the time "Are you sure you want to do this?", she was and she did. Ami is now, by far, the wealthiest character in the party. She uses this money to buy stuff for the servants and to throw parties for them. She also kills and prepares as food the guard dog that Masaru bought for her last time we played. Her character is from Koryo. Lee herself is 1/2 Korean and I think just likes messing with all of these pseudo-Japanese dudes. Everyone ate the soup she made. Misaki actually ate the Goblin Rat too, raw. Well, part of him anyway. Everyone just assumes she is a crazy Shugenja.

The next thing of major note that happened was a fierce storm whipped up while they were moving up the mountains that cost them a day of travel and while they were waiting there a bedraggled Ronin wandered into their camp so Masaru (who had been looking to hire some extra muscle all along the way unsuccessfully) offered him a job. The Ronin, now restored to Samurai status, was named Otomo Hikaru and is Masaru's Henchman. They bonded.

After striking camp the next day, they ran into some actual Bandits that did attack them from ambush. They got 9 (out of a possible 20) Bandits for the encounter. A surprise round wounded Masaru and Hikaru fairly badly and killed one of Karasu's servants outright. After that though things didn't go well for the Bandits, they lost initiative and got seriously beat down. I made them check morale and was shocked that they decided to stick around and fight (I use B/X style morale for AD&D, it's just easier). The only PC that didn't get to really kick some ass in this fight was the Wu Jen Katsuo, he had memorized Elemental Burst again and all of the targets were either too close and would cause collateral damage to the party or out of range, he was forced to resort to throwing darts and missed with every single one.

Aside from a small amount of cash, the Bandits just had normal equipment, although their leaders Katana will be nice for Hikaru, and three horses and some supplies, including some odd stuff I threw in just because the party asked me what they had, and I quote from the game's Facebook page-

"3 light war horses, with saddles, saddlebags(large), bit & bridle and stuff; 1 chainmail, 2 do-maru, 6 hara-ate, 1 daikyu, 2 hankyu, 1 katana, 1 yari, 1 naginata, 3 wakizashi, 45 days of ricecake rations, 3 pounds of tea, 5 jars of sake, 15 days grain for horses, 1 jar of pickled ginger, 2 jars of beer, 1 large sack of horseradishes, an iron pot, 3 quivers (24 arrow capacity), 57 arrows (standard), 2 small tents, a tobacco pipe, 5 pounds of tobacco, a hammer, 1 pound of nails, a 2 man timber saw, 3 green bath towels and an 8 pound sledgehammer."

That was in addition to 108 tael in cash. We broke for the evening after the fight, before I gave them the tally of goods, which is why I gave it to them over Facebook I also sent them their XP totals. They are half way to the Mura of Hondo, it doesn't seem like we are getting much done from a mission standpoint, but they are all roleplaying their characters quite well, which is not something I see in every group and honestly is one of the reasons I really love OA, the randomly generated backgrounds create a character for you to jump into and play. The unusual way in which random encounters are handled in OA took a little bit for me to get re-accustomed to, but that's working well too. The travel from Tamanokuni to the Mura of Hondo may actually level the characters up with random encounters, if it doesn't TPK them first, it's possible I should have just done what EGG did and started the characters at the edge of the village, we'll see.

Christianity in D&D II

I always "got" that the Cleric was a cross between a Knight Templar and Peter Cushing's Van Helsing with spells; OK with a little bit of Archbishop Turpin from the Chanson de Roland and Bishop Odo of Bayeux thrown in too, to add to the medieval flavor. My first D&D had Crosses and Holy Water as items, and mentioned that Crosses were sovereign against Vampires regardless of their previous religious background. Honestly it never really bothered me at the time and it doesn't bother me now, even as a non-Christian in America I am still part of the cultural background and I get the context. I have played Christian characters in D&D and I don't do it as a caricature, I do it respectfully. I have also played Pagan characters the same way. When I roleplay a character I roleplay a whole person and if their faith is an important aspect of their life I respect that.

My last post went off a little half cocked because I had just read 3 or 4 different blogs talking about Christianity and it's compatibility with D&D and why that is either a great idea or a crap idea. I was up late when I wrote it and just wanted to say what I had to say on the subject; I thought I could be quick and to the point. I think it's obvious, although never made explicit, that D&D was designed with a medieval European Christian background in mind and that ultimately TSR removed references to Christianity to protect Christians. The ones that felt uneasy about having their religion portrayed in an explicitly fantasy game. The so called "Satanic Panic" and BADD must have caught them completely unexpectedly since they were trying to do good Christians a favor.

In my experience, the "Satanic Panic" of the 1980s was based on a mostly Catholic/Protestant divide, I say mostly because it was only the more fundamentalist denominations that really bought into the whole thing. Catholics were mostly pretty cool with D&D. More mainstream Protestant denominations didn't seem to have a problem with it. I live in the North-East US though, so your mileage may vary. I don't know how Orthodox Christians felt about it then or now. Jews seem to be OK with D&D. I don't know enough Muslims to get an accurate sample. No other religion would be concerned with Satan in the least.

What muddied the waters was the publication of Gods, Demigods and Heroes; superseded in AD&D by Deities & Demigods. I do not own, nor have I read Gods, Demigods and Heroes, but I do own Deities & Demigods (sadly lacking in Cthulu and Elric) and I assume they are pretty similar, designed to give the average American a "fictional" pantheon to play with so as to protect the feelings of Christians that might be uncomfortable with their religion being implied in a fantasy context. EGG goes one better in the pages of The Dragon by offering up entire pantheons of his own devising of entirely fictional deities for Greyhawk, which I am way more cool with.

I understand that in the 1970s and 1980s we didn't have the cultural sensitivity and awareness that we have now, but damn, between Buddhism, Hinduism and Shinto you are coving something like 1/2 of the world's population. Throw in traditional practitioners of Native American religions, Sami Shamanists (a religion closely related to the "Finnish Mythos"), Wiccans, and religious reconstructionists of various types and pretty much the only unworshipped gods in my copy of Deities & Demigods are the "Newhon Mythos" and "Nonhuman Deities". The fact that the powers that be at TSR at the time, presumably EGG and I have no idea who else, sat down and talked it over and felt uneasy enough that they had to remove explicit references to Christianity from the game but give fictional alternatives speaks volumes. The hubris expressed by them in only eliminating references to Abrahamic religions also speaks volumes about our culture at the time.

I can understand seriously minority religions being fodder for the Deities & Demigods book, but Buddhism, Hinduism and Shinto have between them Billions of adherents, just not in the US (although Hawaii has a substantial Buddhist minority, Hawaii usually falls outside the spectrum of consideration for most decisions made concerning the US as a whole); I really think that maybe they could have, even in the caveman 1970s and 80s, considered the implications there.

Now, Deities & Demigods pretty much told you that you HAD to be a Pagan in AD&D, it's one of those things where if they hadn't mentioned it, probably nobody would have thought of it, but since they did it got set in stone. They gave you a nice bunch of pantheons to choose from; although they treated polytheism the way you would expect a bunch of gamers from a monotheistic background to treat it; choose a pantheon, then pick one deity from that pantheon as a patron and worship him or her pretty much monotheisticly. That's totally NOT how polytheism works, just an FYI.

In the wild and woolly days after the release of the Deities & Demigods book pretty much everything in it was fair game, at least in my neck of the woods. So every player would flip through the book and pick a patron god (and check out the goddesses boobs) from whatever pantheon struck his fancy (yes, we were mostly boys then, with a few notable exceptions) and away we'd go.

That said, to be honest, in my longest running AD&D campaign in the 1980s I was a player, and the DM didn't own the Deities & Demigods book, neither did I until about 1985-ish, and religion was never an issue at all in his game. We had a town that was our home base, there was a tavern and a church and some other shops. Implied Christianity. Hell, even the Dwarven Cleric miniature from Grenadier has a Cross, and we used those official gold box Grenadier AD&D Miniatures almost exclusively. What didn't come in boxed sets from Grenadier, the only miniatures you could find in central New York back then, came from toy sets- dinosaurs, animals and stuff like that. I even found in a bargain bin at a local department store a plastic Bulette and a plastic Rust Monster, IDed from their pictures in the Monster Manual. I really wish I knew what happened to them.

Later on responsible DMs like myself set limits on what pantheons you could choose gods from, the favorite in my experience was the Norse pantheon. I assume this is because of a combination of ass-kicking gods, easily pronounced names (for the most part), Thor comics, and cultural familiarity. I have run games using Norse gods, Celtic gods, Roman Gods, Pantheons of my own devising based on pure fantasy, Pantheons of my own devising based on Indo-European commonalities, the Celestial Bureaucracy, Path of Enlightenment and Way of 8 Million gods in Kara-Tur and Greyhawk Gods in the World of Greyhawk. My own Garnia campaign uses a mixture of real world religions and fantasy religions and extrapolated religions based on real world religions that became extinct. I expect that my players are going to be mature enough to be respectful of religion in the context of the game and that they will be respectful of religion outside of the game too.

We have a diversity of religions at my game table that would probably have never happened back in the 1980s. Back in the 1980s in America you had essentially three or four choices of religion; Catholic, Protestant, Agnostic, or Atheist. Yes, I count no religion as a religion here, particularly when some Atheists get really preachy about it. At my game we have at least two different sects of Christianity, an Atheist, an Agnostic or two, and a couple of Heathen Asatruar; and those are just the ones I know the religious preferences of. My house, at game time, is a religious neutral zone. The characters currently are all adherents of various sects of fantasy versions of Shinto or Buddhism because we're playing an Oriental Adventures campaign set in Kozakura. In my last campaign they were all adherents of an extrapolated Celtic pantheon that included heroes that had been deified over the course of my 30+ years of DMing in Garnia. That pantheon also includes Christ.

Is it time for an Oriental Adventures Retro-clone?

I mean a full on retro-clone, not a few add-on classes for Labyrinth Lord, or a conversion of an earlier version of D&D, like Ruins & Ronin for OD&D/S&W, but an AD&D 1st edition, OSRIC* I guess, Oriental Adventures book. I never bought OSRIC, I just downloaded the free .pdf files because I already own 1st edition AD&D, but I just might to work on this project. Mostly because I hate to read lengthy works on my computer and I like real books. To be clear here, I am not volunteering to retro-clone OA, I am volunteering to be a team member on a retro-clone project. I think that someone with experience doing this sort of thing would be a better team leader than me, and I have already had one major project (B/X WW2) more or less fail, although that was more due to me being more enthusiastic about it than my gaming group.

Since I brought it up, I have to ask, how closely do you have to hew to the original rules in a retro-clone? Can you correct things that turned out to not really work in play? Can you add to the game? I guess I am asking because, despite what EGG intended it to be, I always considered AD&D to be a toolbox like earlier versions of D&D, if non-weapon proficiencies have to be included at all, can we make them optional? Can we make them work like they did in 2nd edition? Can we rename them "Skills"? The OA NWP system kind of made expectation that there would be a certain style of play, involving a lot of time spent in Courts, and that there would be all of these peaceful "contests", but there weren't really any guidelines for how to run an adventure set in a court, so did anyone ever do that? Should we write some guidelines for it? Can we expand the Ancestry and Birthright tables? I know we have to change them and I hate writing random tables, I know there are people out there that love doing them though, so that's another reason I want a team. I am good at coming up with cool random stuff on the fly in the game, not so much at making an entire table of it before hand.

Should an OA retro-clone be even more narrowly focused on Japanese culture and myth? Or should we open it up to more of Asian myth and legend? If that's the case where do we draw the line? I think the obvious intent is EAST Asia, and one of the odd bits of 3e's OA book was incorporating stuff from the Indian subcontinent, even odder considering the clearly Rokugan setting, but they did make the alternate fantasy India-based setting free DLC. Can we incorporate stuff that was published in other TSR materials like modules or boxed sets or 2nd edition stuff? I have almost everything TSR ever made for OA, with the sole exception of the Kara-Tur trail maps, which I assume are just maps, right? I even recently acquired the 2nd edition Ninja book, which, technically isn't an OA book, but might be useful, I don't know I haven't really read through it yet. Hell, I even have the next "connected" part of the Forgotten Realms- The Horde boxed set, and most of the stuff to go with it, because I felt it was supplemental to Kara-Tur and Oriental Adventures; and, of course, because the Mongols are wicked cool. I know we can't use any Kara-Tur material in a retro-clone and would have to create our own mini-Asian setting for it, if we were going to include any setting information at all, but those things all have little tidbits of inspiration and occasional rules clarifications or entirely new rules- usually new monsters or spells as I recall, it's been a while since I read through my OA module/boxed set collection.

There's a lot of old school goodness in OA and I think it is deserving of a real retro-clone, but I don't really know the ground rules of retro-cloning I guess. So, has anyone reading this blog written a retro-clone before? Would you like to be team leader on a new OA retro-clone? Can anyone answer the questions I have? Does anyone else want to be on the team? On the plus side, I am pretty sure I can get it lavishly illustrated at a pretty reasonable rate :) If we can't get a team together I guess I can keep muddling through and subtracting what I think doesn't need to be there, tinkering with stuff and adding in a few bits for my own game, but I think this could be a good community project.

*Although I'd be OK with a full on supplement for Labyrinth Lord AEC too. I am down with both OSRIC and LL; S&W too, but it already has Ruins & Ronin.

These came in the mail the other day, Ashli's birthday actually-



They popped up on my EBay radar because they were listed as Clan War cards. Don't judge me too harshly, I just figured since they were cheap I'd see what all the fuss was about and if the CCG sucks, I can still use the cards as art inspiration for my OA campaign.

Welcome to Kara-Tur

This is what I posted to my players today-


Kara-Tur is the assumed setting for the original AD&D Oriental Adventures campaign, in much the same way that Greyhawk is the assumed setting for 1st edition AD&D; it is a fantasy Asia. The politics at TSR when OA was published divorced it from the World of Greyhawk, since E. Gary Gygax was on his way out; eventually they grafted it on to the Forgotten Realms, but in it's originally presented form it's just an exotic fantasy east Asian continent. Presented in the OA book they name only four main empires- Shou Lung and T'u Lung (both analogues to different periods of Chinese history, although I couldn't tell you what periods because I am not all that well versed in Chinese history), Wa (modeled after Tokugawa era Japan) and Kozakura (modeled on Sengoku era Japan); and mention only a handful of other locations in passing. There is no map.

Kozakura, where our campaign is set, is modeled on Japan during the Sengoku Jidai period (Roughly, the last chaotic century of the Ashikaga Shogunate, before the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate; a period of nearly constant civil war, actually a pretty great time for adventure, most Japanese themed RPGs are set during this time period). I actually have the Forgotten Realms Kara-Tur boxed set though, so we can add in all of the other places that are detailed there too for future adventuring, from fantasy Korea (Koryo) to fantasy Tibet (Tabot) to fantasy Mongolia (the Hordelands and the Plain of Horses), you can see that, as was the case with many late 1980's TSR products they didn't spend a lot of time trying to come up with original names, they mostly just changed the vowels added them to the map and were good to go.

Anyway, here is the Native's guide to Kozakura:

Kozakura:

Or the "Little Cherry Blossom," is far from a unified state. For several centuries it has been the scene of incessant warfare between powerful Daimyo, all struggling to gain the title of Shogun. The island is divided into fiefs and estates, ruled by the Daimyo. It is a very turbulent place - one where fortunes and might can be achieved by even those with the most humble of origins. As such it is the perfect place for an adventurer seeking fame and fortune.

Kozakura lacks the rigid social structure and laws of its culturally similar neighbor, Wa, and more than once a peasant has risen to become a powerful lord through military skill.

There are two main religions in this country: The Way of Enlightenment (analogous to Buddhism), and the Eight Million Gods (analogous to Shinto). There are many schools, temples and shrines in each. Most Monks come from the powerful temples of the Way, as do Sohei (but by no means all). The Daimyo realize the spiritual and martial strength of these bodies of holy warriors, and do their best to keep on the right side of them.

The majority of the populace are human and dwell upon the 3 great plains of the main island of Shinkoku. Korobokuru and Hengeyokai live in remote valleys, safely away from intruders. Spirit Folk are all the offspring of unions between nature spirits and humans, and thus are from areas of remote natural beauty.

History:

No one knows when the first humans arrived in the islands of Kozakura. The Korobokuru, who had inhabited the islands for ages, keep no written records. Their oral tales are filled with stories of
their heroes battling foreign chiefs and gaining wondrous and rare gifts. The Korobokuru themselves maintain that the humans came from over the sea. Humans have no recorded history of this migration.

According to the chronicles of various temples and monasteries, the islands of Kozakura were the creations of one or more gods, of which Shinkoku was first. There is no agreement on which gods
were responsible, but a general consensus maintains that it was Izanagi "Heavenly Brother" and "Izanami" Heavenly Sister. The Korobokuru believe the world (and thus the islands of Kozakura) were created by one of the Animal Spirits—possibly the Bear God or the Eagle Goddess. All agree that Shinkoku has been the home of the gods for untold millennia.

Gradually, the other islands came into being. Tenmei was created when Heavenly Sister was banished from Shinkoku by Fierce Wind Son. Hinomoto was created when Heavenly Brother declared his retirement and Mikedono was created accidentally in the war between Fire Bright and Fierce Wind Son.

The Korobokuru were the first settlers of the islands and their stories tell how the islands were given to Poinpeyuan, a great hero of their race, as a gift from the gods. The Korobokuru could keep the islands so long as they paid proper reverence to the gods and obeyed special taboos. Later stories tell how the Korobokuru people broke these taboos and the humans came to take the islands away. Recorded human history begins with the accounts of several powerful family tribes. Each tribe controlled a small portion of Shinkoku and constantly struggled with the other tribes and the Korobokuru for more territory. Then, the Akimatsu tribe presented the claim that its tribal chief, Mori, had been chosen by the gods to lead all the peoples of Shinkoku. Several miraculous events occurred that helped substantiate his title as emperor.

This is the "Legendary" history of Kozakura, taken largely from the module OA1: Swords of the Daimyo by David "Zeb" Cook published by TSR in 1986; slightly edited for content and space. Much of this was typed up and I just copy/pasted it from Fabian's OA website- Adventures in Kara-Tur. I altered some of it to suit my campaign and edited it for US English, but other than that the "Guide" is Fabian's & Zeb's work.

Rules stuff-

Most Characters are of Lawful Alignment, some classes are REQUIRED to be lawfully aligned, perversely, some are required to NOT be.

There is no common tongue in OA, the Human language in Kozakura is Kozakuran. I actually like that not all people speak the same language in this version of D&D. There is a "Trade" language though that can be used to get your point across in most international ports or major cities; I suggest that if the campaign ever starts to travel at least one player pick it up.

The OA rules had not differentiated yet between number of proficiency slots given for weapon/non-weapon. I am working on splitting them apart as you read this so that OA characters don't get stupidly high numbers of proficiencies to waste on weapons at the expense of other skills or vice versa.


Now- Here's what I got in the mail today!



Another bunch of Clan War miniatures, but at least I have real purpose behind owning them now. I tried to convince my wife that I bought them for her, in an effort to get her to paint them before Sunday, but that didn't go well. I wish my painting skills were as good as hers. She is temperamental.