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.

Against The Black Temple- Session 1

This session did not start with a bang. One player, John S., cancelled at the last minute, and another, Lance W, just no-showed.

The players that did show up were Paul K., Dalton C., Lee Ann H. and the normal crew of people that live here, my family, my lovely wife Mona, My daughters Ashli and Ember and my son John.

Paul K. took me up on my challenge to come in OA costume for a 10% XP bonus, which was actually kind of cool. Lee Ann H. brought stuff to make sushi, although she has a different Korean name for it. Character creation took most of the session time we had for the day. 1st edition AD&D Oriental Adventures character creation can be somewhat time consuming and complex and I was the only one there that was truly well versed in it's magnificent detail. Fortunately, only four of the seven characters created needed or opted to use the Birth Table and only those require to created Families; that sped things up somewhat. I am going to keep looking for more copies of the OA book on EBay though, only having two at the table was a pain when it came time for everyone to buy equipment and take proficiencies. Ultimately, we ended up with the following party composition 2 Samurai (oddly enough both 5th rank nobility, played by Paul K. and Dalton C.), a Kensei (That's right, I spelled it correctly; specializing in the Naginata, played by my daughter Ashli), a Wu Jen (My son John), A Sohei (My daughter Ember), A Yakuza (Lee Ann, a foreigner from Koryo too) and a Cat Hengeyokai Shukenja (My wife Mona).

The 2 Samurai are funny as they have developed a rivalry over which one is the more important, higher status noble. Random tables are fun! Paul's Samurai, Karasu, has an imperial bloodline and an advantageous marriage in his ancestry rolls; Dalton's Samurai, Masaru, has two large castles, and two hereditary titles, plus some farm land, he's also quite wealthy from his birthright rolls, he got two sets of O-Yoroi of quality, which I would have rerolled honestly, but he was delighted with the result. Karasu, is a pauper by comparison. Aiko, the Kensei, is merely upper class, but got some decent ancestry rolls too and came out a wee bit wealthier than Karasu too, and the oldest child of an only child of an only child, so when inheritance time comes that'll pay off pretty well. Ami the Yakuza got really hosed by the random rolls and got to be an outcast, she got nothing for ancestry or birthrights. Natsumi the Sohei, Katsuo the Wu Jen and Misaki the Shukenja were not required to have families or use the birth table and chose not to; while I was happy to save the time, I was a little disappointed for them not being able to get in on the fun of the random ancestry and birth rights.

On to the game itself-

Since we ran so late making characters I gave them the set up, that they were all retainers of the Tsu clan or owed them favors or were working with them towards a common goal, to investigate the possible resurgence of the Black Temple, which had been defeated at great cost by the forces of Good in a great battle about a decade ago. I had them meeting, after randomly rolling on the "Random Ruins & Ronin Scenario Starts Generator", at a bathhouse. I didn't use the whole table, just enough to get me started, since Dalton had spotted it, my original plan had been a Ramen shop, but a Bathhouse actually worked out better for how I wanted to start. I started them in a pretty bad part of town, getting information from an old Yakuza, Ami's Oyabun, as a matter of fact, an old guy missing part of one pinkie that, given the locale, I kept wanting to call "Ice-pick" after the shady mafia guy that was a friend of Rick's on Magnum PI and they always met in a steam room. After he assigned Ami to the group as his liaison for "favors" owed to the Tsu, he left and the group started planning just what they were going to do and how they were going to do it. I let them talk for a while and then gave them an encounter to kick off the campaign with a combat before we had to call it a night.

Five scruffy looking Ronin and a pretty tough, well dressed leader type walked in, the leader pointed towards the Samurai in the group and said "That's them!", I had them roll party initiative with the giant six sider then, and I rolled for my guys. They beat me by a mile. Katsuo, played by my son John, who has never played a spell caster of any sort, cast Elemental Burst on the air while they were bunched together in the entrance, kudos to him, they all failed their saves and were stunned. Ami jumped out of the bath and attacked with Tae Kwon Do, killing one of the stunned Ronin. Everyone else ran to grab a weapon that round. All my guys got to do nothing.

Next round, I win initiative and my Leader type is unstunned- he charges the highest status Samurai, Karasu, hitting him with his Katana, but barely scratching him. The party goes, Ami kills another Ronin with Tae Kwon Do. Masaru kills a Ronin with his Wakizashi (we assumed that Samurai would have kept their Wakizashi nearby even if they politely left their Katana near the entrance). Karasu attacks the leader and wounds him slightly in return for the wound he received. Aiko attacks a Ronin with her Naginata (we assumed that a Kensei would be OCD enough about their weapon to never really leave it behind)but misses. Misaki throws a stone slightly wounding a Ronin. Katsuo then kills him with a dart. Natsumi returns and attacks a Ronin with her Tetsubo, killing him.

Round three, things are looking grim for the party of fully armed men that attacked a party of naked bathers. The Ronin win initiative again. The leader is fully engaged and surrounded, the hireling is near the exit with just Natsumi near him, he turns to flee, I give her a free shot, but she misses. The leader Attacks Karasu again hitting him pretty hard this time, then the party got to go and it was all over for him. They were left with the mystery of why this obviously upper class Samurai had removed all signs of his clan and hired scruffy Ronin to kill them, which they began to pursue, but we had to call it a night. They haven't looked at all of the clues I gave them though, there is a pretty big one that they kept as treasure...

I'd love to give more details, but I know at least three of the players are at least casual readers of this blog. I was also pleased that we played with out miniatures this time, it was a small encounter, and it was easy to visualize because Lee pulled up a Google image of the inside of a Korean bathhouse. I have lots of minis and we won't always be playing without them, but it is nice to know that the game can still be played that way.

Oh, and this came in the mail today-



This is purely a D20/3e OA game supplement, that just happens to be set in the L5R RPG world, that said, it is actually more useful to me right now than all of the other L5R RPG stuff I have been grabbing off of EBay because I could convert the spells for use with 1st edition AD&D probably. This is most likely the last L5R book I'll be buying for a while (unless I see a REALLY sweet deal) because they are no longer relevant to the game I am running and I have enough that I can mine for ideas already.

Seriously.

Now I think the house wights are just messing with me. I set aside the mega-module "T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil" so I can find it's little brother "T1: The Village of Hommlet" and now I can't find it either. Now I am mocked by only being able to find the vastly inferior 3e "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil". I have been searching high and low for it. I had it YESTERDAY. Where I left it I found the Moldvay Basic book, the Book of Lairs II and Ruins & Ronin. My conversion notes and ToEE were just gone. The notes are no big deal because I had only just started, but I kind of NEED the damned module. I want the real life wizarding skills Jack Chick promised me.

Holding Steady...

...at 63 followers. Not going to level up that way. Ash is home, and while she isn't in great shape and helping to take care of her and helping her with her recovery isn't easy, we are settling into a routine. The other kids, John and Em, are back in school now, so there is a little more time in my day; particularly since we aren't spending as much time building my dad's new garage. So, I guess I am going to have to start blogging about some actual game content again now, instead of just showing off my cool new stuff I get with my "Mail Call" posts- although they often have non-Mail Call commentary attached to them too.

I am slowly falling in love with the Legend of Five Rings RPG, 1st edition so far, although I have a bunch of second and third edition stuff too and I imagine it's quite good. Considering the long and hateful grudge I held against the game based on WotC's abandonment of Kara-Tur in favor of Rokugan and my irrational hatred for collectible card games (based solely on being burned by Decipher's Star Trek: The Next Generation CCG, I hate the idea that people can buy a better deck), I think I have come a long way in my personal journey towards Rokugan love. I am even struggling with the idea that I might enjoy the card game on a casual basis, maybe with the kids. Admittedly, it was the Clan War miniatures that drew me in, mainly because I needed a source of Asian (mainly Japanese) fantasy miniatures for my own AD&D Oriental Adventures game, which morphed into a Ruins & Ronin game, the due to several consecutive TPKs- ended.

Anyway, my point is- I do have a bit more time now, my creative energies are somewhat recharged and I am ready to start giving you loyal readers that have stuck with me through the summer of computer troubles and other woes some real content other than just what I got in the mail today from EBay.

Thanks for sticking with me, I'll have something real soon.

Mail Call 02 JUL 2011

Picture from EBay.



I wonder how long it will be before I have all of the stuff for the older editions of Legend of the Five Rings RPG? I started getting it almost as an afterthought when I started grabbing all the Clan War miniatures I could get my hands on, both as a possible investment to paint and resell at a profit and to have as many Oriental Adventures (or Ruins & Ronin) miniatures as I could find. Then I started thinking maybe I'd been too hard on poor Rokugan, that I'd been too much of a Kara-Tur partisan; now here I am- hundreds of miniatures, a pretty tall stack of quite nice rule books, six novels. I draw the line at the CCG though. I have to draw it somewhere right?

Mail Call 14 JUN 2011

As always the pics are from the EBay auctions. I continue my inexplicable addiction of buying multiple editions of a game I don't play, just because I started buying the miniatures for the game so I would have them available for my own OA/R&R hybrid game.


So, now I have both of the core books for the second edition of the game.


And another of Rokugan's clans is detailed for me here.

My shame at buying so much Rokugan/L5R stuff after so many6 years of being a Kara-Tur partisan is almost palpable, but at least it's new Asian fantasy stuff for me to mine for ideas right?

Mail Call 05-28-2011

OK, I may have a problem. I have never played this game. I only really started getting stuff for it because I wanted the Clan War miniatures for use with my own Oriental Adventures/Ruins & Ronin games. I now have a large number of books and supplements for every edition of this game just because it is pretty and I keep getting really awesome deals on EBay. Apparently I can not pass up a good deal when I spot it. I paid less than $5.00 for this book, with shipping. It has an MSRP of $34.95 and is in brand new condition.

Mail Call 04-30-11

Stuff from EBay that came in the mail today-








I didn't even know this boxed set existed before EBay showed it to me. I am pretty happy to own it now.

R is for-

Rangers. I can't decide if Rangers were invented by EGG as a class when someone said to him "Hey Gary, can I play Aragorn?", thus prompting him to create a prestige class (or sub-class as he called them) of Fighter during the dungeon crawl days or if EGG decided after running a couple of wilderness hex crawls that something like Aragorn would be handy to have around. No other AD&D class refutes EGG's argument that LotR was NOT a real influence on D&D's development particularly. In retrospect maybe this is why they decided to "Drizzt" up the 2nd edition Ranger, so it wouldn't look like such a Tolkien rip-off?

R is for Rogues, not the renamed Thief, but the bunch of rogues that all adventurers usually are. Most of the roguish PCs aren't even cooly roguish like Han Solo, but are more like the dick guy in the Cantina that picks a fight with Luke and gets himself and his buddy schooled by old Obi-Wan; PCs just think that they are cool like Han (or cool and menacing like pre-Jedi Boba Fett). Keep trying guys, your better when you are trying to be the good guys.

R is for Robin Hood, the contrast to the knights are virtuous ideal; in the Robin Hood story the knights and nobles are the bad guys, ranging from slightly corrupt and bumbling incompetents to the truly malicious. So a force of disaffected peasants and clergy rise up to oppose this corruption and manage to not get themselves killed until, finally, a true noble knight arrives and leads them against their evil oppressors- in most recent retellings to put Richard the Lion-Heart back on his rightful throne.

A lot has accreted to this legend over the years. Robin Hood is a favorite though because he robs from the rich to give to the poor, something that most of humanity can get down with; without getting too political, i think most of us can agree that the bulk of the burden of taxation should not fall on the people with the least amount of money (or goods). Prince John is unpopular in England because he raises taxes that put the screws to ordinary people, but as a prince must still be seen as living a life of conspicuous consumption or lose status in the eyes of both his people and his peers, neither of which is a good thing if you are dependent on your status to keep peace and maintain authority in the realm; and it was all Richard's fault.

Richard was busy waging expensive overseas wars and conspicuously consuming goods and services himself, then he got captured by that dick Leopold, whom he had insulted, on the way home; forcing another high special tax for his ransom. So, basically, because Richard had a penchant for war and insulting other high ranking nobles, England was forced to pay for two separate royal courts, the Third Crusade, a home defense (that included defending half of France from the French king Phillipe, whom Richard had ALSO insulted) and a crippling ransom payment to get their popular warrior king back from that nefarious Austrian Duke; all of this in addition to the normal expense of running a nation- and somehow this is Prince John's fault, at least in the eyes of popular historical myth.

R is for Religion which I have covered tangentially a few times here and here and here and here and here a bit and probably at least a little bit elsewhere in my blog too.

R is for Revenge, which I am told is a dish best served cold. Honestly, I usually would rather just take care of the matter while I am still pissed off.

R is for Roads. We modern folk don't appreciate what a giant pain in the ass it is to create a road out of nothing. I have hacked trails through the woods using modern tools that weren't intended for much use beyond getting a tractor through a few times and it's real work. I read somewhere once that most of the roads roads that the Romans built in Europe were still in use in some capacity; I don't remember where I read that now, so I can't check the quote for veracity, but it is at least plausible. When the effort is taken to build a proper road it is unlikely to be completely abandoned in my opinion. Proper roads are built by skilled crews using engineers to design them. They have proper foundations laid. They are quite impressive feats actually, and we take them for granted because most of them were already there when we were born and the new ones take practically no time to build because of the modern labor saving machinery. They are the life line of modern nations.

R is for Rivers because rivers do everything that roads do, almost as well, for less effort. There is a reason that most ancient cities developed on rivers and it's not just because of access to fresh drinking water; trade builds cities and river borne water craft can carry a huge amount of cargo for a small amount of labor. Rivers are so efficient at moving cargo around the interior of a continent that we make artificial ones, canals. Until the invention of the railroad nothing could compete with the river/canal system for moving a high volume of goods and even afterwards it was still a pretty competitive mode. Trust me, I know, I grew up in Oswego county. The city of Oswego is the terminal point for the New York State canal system (the famous Erie canal), goods shipped to the port of New York were loaded onto river barges and moved up the Hudson river and into the canal until they reached the Oswego river port of Oswego, NY; where they were then loaded onto great lakes ships. Now the NYS canal system is mostly for pleasure craft, since the St. Lawrence seaway opened up ocean traffic from the Atlantic can make it directly into Lake Ontario cutting out us middlemen. I try not to take it personally, but my father and my grandfather were both Longshoremen at the Port of Oswego. That solidly middle class union job should have been my fall-back position.

R is for Ranged Weapons. I have to say I have been looking at some of the older rules stuff on ranged weapons and they are pretty cool, the way they work with initiative in early editions where everyone declares there action before initiative is rolled, then the specific order in which actions take place. That said, I think that my long tendency towards running wilderness based adventures that are, you know, out doors, has kind of over inflated the importance of ranged weapons in the minds of my players, specifically Ashli, who keeps searching for ways to use a bow even when it's not advantageous to her or the party; it's become her crutch, she gets a good rate of fire and a dexterity bonus to hit, so she really wants to do it. Now that we are back to dungeon crawling they might as well be muskets, fire them once, drop them and draw a mêlée weapon. Short distances, poor visibility and lots of cover make them next to useless.

R is for Race. As I get older I see less and less need for a multiracial world. It's another D&D trope inherited from Tolkien and I lean more toward Howard. Other races should be other planar entities, degenerate forms of man, magically mutated animals or some combination. I always liked crazy Gygaxian monsters like Owlbears and Rustmonsters.

R is for Resurrection and Raise Dead. These should be rare and wonderful and come only at great price, an example might be Joel Rosenberg's Guardians of the Flame series. I hate games where death is just a minor inconvenience with a monetary penalty attached, if that's the case why don't wealthy aristocrats live forever in those worlds?

R is for Ruins & Ronin. Until quite recently Ruins & Ronin was the ONLY OSR product I actually bought. Ruins & Ronin has gotten some pretty lukewarm reviews, but I don't get that; R&R is exactly what it claims it was going to be. It's Swords & Wizardry as if the base game were written from an east Asian, specifically Japanese, point of view. Reviewers complained that they didn't get taught how to run a R&R game mostly and I think that means they were just too lazy to figure this stuff out for themselves and wanted to be spoonfed. OSR S&W style (or OD&D) is a tool box, it's up to you to make something with the tools. Could there have been more tools in R&R? Sure. Maybe a future supplement or something will take care of it. Mike Davison has been pretty cool about supporting the game on his blog with free stuff too. So check it out!

R is for Rikishi or "Sumo wrestlers". Rikishi in modern Japan live pretty regulated lives and, apparently, it has been the case since the great sumo crack down during the Tokugawa Shogunate where they banned "street sumo". They live in special houses where they take all their meals and work out and practice wrestling practically all day every day. There is also a religious element to their sport, so it's all pretty serious; but for big, fat guys* they are like rock stars; these guys are always surrounded by hot chicks. Being a pretty big fat guy I always kind of respected this.

R is for Ronin or "Wave-Men" or master-less Samurai. These poor guys have lost their jobs as Samurai, maybe it was their own fault, maybe it wasn't. Often despised by their former social peers they become the Robin Hood types in the movie "The Seven Samurai", in reality they often become mercenaries, bandits or hired muscle for Yakuza because they have no marketable skills beyond being trained warriors. As with so many things in Japanese history, the rise of the Tokugawa Shogunate changed the role of Ronin too. Many Samurai were forced to become Ronin after the Sengoku Jidai by economic circumstances and mostly just moved down into the merchant class, although some took the plunge and became craftsmen and farmers**.

*Don't let the fat fool you, the bulk is there just to make them harder to push or throw; these guys are athletes and quite muscular and skilled.

**Which is actually LESS of a social hit in the Japanese caste system, merchants rank above outcasts only.

Mail Yesterday and Today

Most of these came yesterday and I was too lazy to post the pictures, sorry. As always the pictures are from EBay until I get a better digital camera.

These guys are Lion Clan Samurai for Clan War. I got kind of addicted to Clan War minis when I started buying them for use in my Oriental Adventures/Ruins and Ronin mash-up campaign.


This book I have been meaning to buy for quite some time, like dating back into the 2nd edition AD&D era. I like the way the seller posed it with a wee dragon too.


Finding a complete box set of 1st edition Twilight:2000 for $.99 was awesome. It almost makes up for the fact that my original is still MIA.


This is the one that came today. I don't play GURPS. I just really like their setting books.

Ch is for-

A different way of using C and a bonus day for the A to Z challenge. I'll let you in on a little secret, C is my least favorite letter. C's usefulness came to an end when it was replaced by both S and K, the soft and the hard C sounds. In Latin there is no K, so a C represented that sound, and we use the Latin alphabet; so why did we invent the soft C that sounds like an S? I don't know, but I blame the French. I do know that the CH is C's only redeeming value in the English language.

So, CH is for Chivalry; the medieval European code of knighthood. Chivalry comes to us from French and the code of the Chevalier, which is French for knight, but really just means horseman. I have to say that if Conan the Barbarian was a major influence on me, so too was Arthurian legend and the bulk of Arthurian stuff is based on Mallory's Morte D'Arthur which features some pretty idealized knights; this is the other pole of my D&D love, the idealized middle ages. I have played Pendragon, although not as it was intended to be played, but I have always wanted a chivalric D&D game too. Other Chivalric influences on me were le Chanson de Roland, which I read an English translation of when I was in 7th grade; and John Boorman's masterpiece film Excalibur, which I saw in the theater when it came out with the friend that introduced me to D&D, Chris G.

Ch is for Chanbara. Chanbara is a genre of swashbucking samurai historical films from Japan. Kurosawa was famous for them. Watch some and an Oriental Adventures (or Ruins and Ronin, depending on your preferred Samurai action rules set) campaign will spring forth fully formed from your brow like Athena from Zeus.

Ch is for China. China is to east Asia as Rome is to western Europeans, except it never fell. All of the Japanese stuff that I love so much owes a lot of it's existence to Chinese culture. I never give the Chinese the credit that they deserve for being the fountainhead of east Asian culture probably because I find their culture to be smug. I have always felt the Chinese were expressing a kind of cultural superiority complex towards all other cultures, they are always going on about how ancient their civilization is. That rubs me the wrong way, probably the same way that all the Germanic tribes felt about Rome and it's empire. Anyway, that's my problem not China's and I have to admit they are responsible for some pretty sweet stuff; kung fu and the associated movies, Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Chinese food come immediately to mind.

Ch is for Chariots, which are just a damned cool way to travel around. Historically they were used by pretty much everyone that ever conquered a settled kingdom or empire from the dawn of history up into the iron age and the Roman raced them. In the Táin Bó Cúailnge Cú Chulainn, with just his driver, fights off the entire army from Connacht for nine days while riding around in his chariot challenging them to single combat at a river ford.

CH is for Charisma everyone's favorite dump stat. Charisma used to be more important in earlier editions when everyone needed henchmen and hirelings if they wanted to survive and WotC D&D made it necessary for Clerics and invented a spell-casting class that used it as it's prime requisite. Me, I always used wisdom as a dump stat when the opportunity arose.

Ch is for Chimera the lone CH monster in the 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual. I just wanted to include him for that reason. I also like that EGG would freely loot monsters from classical sources or anywhere else for that matter and make them excellent. I don't really stat monsters up that well or easily, so I greatly appreciate those that do and therefore save me the work.

Ch is for Chaos. Whether it's the evil chaos of the Caves of Chaos or my own Chaotic Good alignment preference, I like chaos. In early D&D chaos had the implication of evil, but I am a Holmes to AD&D guy, so I like the Good-Evil and Law-Chaos 9 fold alignment axis.

Ch is for Characters. In the modern world they probably would have been called avatars or personae or something. I like characters, it makes them more separate from the player, like an actor taking on a role. Considering the crap that RPGs went through in the early days about people being unable to distinguish between the game and real life I'd like to keep the distinction as clear cut as possible. This is probably because my parents always seemed to assume that because I liked fantasy that it somehow made me retarded. Yes mom, I know the stuff on Star Trek isn't real. No mom, I don't think my D&D character is actually me. Funny, they never asked me if I was confused about my real identity when I was acting in plays.

Ch is for Charging and charging hard. My characters in D&D are hard charging battle monkeys mostly and I am hard charging battle monkey in the SCA. I love to shatter a shield wall, what can I say? it's exhilarating. In D&D I often play berserker types. I think it helps me blow off steam and relieve stress. Oddly I am much more careful a planner when playing wargames, although I do love setting up a good cavalry charge to finish off an opponent!

B is for-

Barbarians. Barbarians are one of my earliest influences on playing D&D, Robert E. Howard's Conan in particular. While I feel that we, as modern people, tend to go the "noble savage" route when we talk or think about barbarians; I can not deny the power of Conan on my gaming over the years. Marvel's Conan the Barbarian, King Conan and Savage Sword titles were among the very few comics that I read regularly as a teen. Arnold Schwarzenegger's Conan the Barbarian movie is still one of my favorite fantasy films. Not so much the sequel. As I got older, but still in my teen years, I discovered that real barbarians were nothing like this really. Real Barbarians were the ancient Celts and the Germanic tribes that brought down Rome. The Greeks just thought that everyone that didn't speak Greek was a barbarian, and the Romans adopted this attitude and adapted it to include Latin speakers in the civilized category.

B is also for berserkers, who may just be the epitome of the barbarian to some people. D&D 3e certainly pushed this perception of the berserker barbarian. This kind of annoys me. Certainly a berserker is a different type of warrior, more focused on his frenzied strength than on precision attacks. Real berserkers though were, probably, a warrior cult dedicated to Odin; though the evidence is scant simply because there are really only a few references to actual berserkers. Berserker types though exist in a number of cultures. Ancient Ireland's Cuchulain had the warp-frenzy which certainly sounds like berserker rage as attributed to the Norse berserks. In my D&D games over the years I have included Berserkers as another path that a Fighter could follow, sometimes as an extra Fighter sub-class, sometimes as a Gift at character creation, occasionally as both.

B is for the Boga-Treveri who are a tribe of ancient Gauls I invented for a 2nd edition Celts campaign. The Boga-Treveri were retconned as the first tribe of Celts to migrate to my Garnia campaign setting from earth after discovering how to use the planar gates built by the Elves in ages past. They were a small but distinct offshoot of the Treveri tribe.

B is for Bandits and their evil cousins Brigands. I tend not to differentiate between the two too much, but I know that there is a perception that maybe bandits are like Robin Hood or Rob Roy McGregor rather than the dirty outlaws that they really are. I rarely use them as "good" bad guys, maybe it's because my dad was alsways watching westerns when I was a kid and I got the whole bandito equals bad thing over-ruling the whole Robin Hood is a good guy fighting royal corruption. I do use bandits pretty frequently though, probably mostly because having tribes of Orcs running around in civilized lands works against my sense of verisimilitude.

B is for Bushi, the Fighter class of Oriental Adventures for whom Bushido, the "Way of the Warrior" was named. Ruins and Ronin calls them Bujin, which means "Fighting Man", but in any case they deserve mention here since, as a guy who spent his teen years in the 1980s, all that Japanese cultural stuff made a pretty huge impact on me and Oriental Adventures was always my favorite post-core book for 1st edition AD&D.

B is for Bards. What can I say about Bards? Historically they were trained by the Druids and survived the extinction of their parent group by adapting to Christianity. Bards remained important in Gaelic culture until the English made a concerted effort to extinguish the entirety of Gaelic culture. Ironically, Shakespeare, the most important playwright in the English world, is referred to as the Bard. Game-wise, Bards remain an important part of the dominant human culture of my Garnia campaign simply because they are a Celt descended culture. Bards are also a D&D character class that has traditionally been wonky, from the bizarre and over-powered 1st edition Bard (world's 1st prestige class?) to the lame and weak 2nd edition bards to the equally useless 3rd edition Bard; no game company has done them justice. I have tinkered with the class over the years, but no one ever wants to play one so my bard has never been tested.

B is for Beowulf the hero-king of the Geats. Beowulf has all of the traits of a typical Germanic hero, I learned that in English class in 11th grade and several college courses reconfirmed it over the years. Beowulf will always be special to me because I was maybe the only kid in my 11th grade English class that recognized that it totally kicked ass. Mr Moriarty, my English teacher that year, used me as an example of a Beowulf-like heroic figure, a mighty warrior to whom honor was paramount. So Neil Gaiman can fuck off for making a mockery of Beowulf.

Lastly, B is for Blogging, the reason that anyone is reading this. My wife encouraged me to blog so that I would get back into writing and that's how I discovered the OSR. Before that I thought I was a lone Luddite when it came to my gaming, the only guy out there eschewing the "newer-better" editions. I knew there were fan sites out there for earlier editions but never realized there was a grassroots movement to take back our game, so thank you Mona for making me blog and thank you to all the people at Blogger that made it easy for me to do myself and to find all my OSR brethren and thanks to all of you OSR gaming bloggers out there that keep me inspired.

A is for-

What is A for? I think in the context of RPGs, obviously A has to be for adventure, it's what keeps bringing us all back to the table week in and week out. Adventure in the tradition of Conan the barbarian and all the other guys from appendix N. So it's adventure, at least a little bit.

A is also for ancient. Ancient fallen empires, whose ruins we explore. Ancient secrets we seek to solve. Ancient gods whose cults we oppose. Ancient treasure troves guarded by Ancient Red Dragons!

A is also for Arthur, the king, whose story always held me rapt. I always loved the Mallory version of Arthur the best, probably because it hews closest to the movie Excalibur. Excalibur and D&D are linked in my mind inextricably due to the fact that I first played D&D within days of seeing that movie in the theater as a kid. Arthurian adventures lead us to the next A word by way of Celtic myth that the Arthur cycle draws upon so much.

So A is for Awen, the Welsh word for poetic inspiration, which I freely associate with the inspiration of the DM and, in my Celtic themed Garnia campaign, Bards. Bards have, in the mythology of my campaign, a spirit of inspiration known as Awen, which grants them all of their supernatural abilities.

A is also for Ashigaru. Ashigaru are the lightly armored troops of feudal Japan. When I run Oriental Adventures (or Ruins and Ronin) they are the types of guys who join the party as hirelings, generally they are lightly armored and carry spears.

That's all for A today because I have had a pretty busy day.

Interesting to me...

I find it interesting that, despite having no interruptions today and nothing else to do, I still have had a hard time sitting down and typing out today's thoughts. I have been musing on the whole "We explore dungeons not characters" thing for a while now, mulling it over along with a couple of related topics; namely player character social class/background and character generation. I tie all of these together because it reflects the depth we give our characters at start. I have also been thinking about the whole "Commercialization of the OSR" and "OSR is dead" stuff, but not as much. Additionally, I have had a few further thoughts on D&D campaign ideas and the "default" D&D setting. My thoughts are a bit scattered today as I keep bouncing around from topic to topic like I am trying to work on a unified OSR theory, which I am not, but I finally convinced myself to sit down and start typing so maybe that'll help crystallize what I am thinking into something useful.

To start with the "Dungeons not characters" thing, I guess I should first confess that I have fallen in line with pretty much every major trend in gaming since I started. Randomness and simplicity were the order of the day in the beginning and I was all about it. The first thing I ever DMed was B2 Keep on the Borderlands. I DMed it for my dad and a party of NPCs I created to accompany him. His character was a Halfling fighter named Mee the magnificent (who eventually had a son named Mee II). We didn't care that the caves were a few hundred yards from the keep and just off the road*. It also never occurred to any party I have ever sent through that module that perhaps they should tell the authorities at the keep, who have an ARMY at their disposal, where the hidden enemy fortress known as the Caves of Chaos were. Maybe they just wanted all the riches and glory for themselves.

Eventually, as DMs, we were told we needed to make our worlds (and adventures) more believable, more realistic. I was reading this stuff in the Dragon pretty early on in my gaming experience and it sunk in hard. That is what really killed the megadungeon for me. I wound up with lots of small ruins scattered across my campaign world's landscape. Eventually, the "Underdark" concept arrived and I started throwing in vast subterranean adventure areas again, but they were never the same as the old megadungeon.

I don't think the style of play had changed drastically over the years until after 2nd edition hit the streets. My style of DMing did pretty drastically change after 2nd edition arrived as a result of my one and only pilgrimage to Mecca (Gen Con '90). I played in the AD&D Open and the charity events there that year and it completely changed the style of my DMing for years afterwords. I know everyone hates the 2nd edition style of railroad module, and I do too. The abuses of module design, particularly by the end of the 2nd edition era, were substantial and irredeemable. That said, the "encounter flow chart" plus keyed locations style of play catapulted me from "He runs a pretty good game" to "He is an AWESOME DM!" status locally, so I may be a little biased towards having a little railroad-eyness in my games when I have a plan. When I don't have a plan, which is about 99% of the time, I still roll some dice and fly by the seat of my pants; but I have written some pretty damned good adventures that used the encounter flow chart style.

I think it's a matter of contingency planning that makes most people hate the "railroad". A well written "railroad" adventure CAN go off the rails with a decent DM that can wing it. I think the 2nd edition modules that everyone hates so much were just written so that a crappy DM could still get you to the end of the story and the story was like a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book with only two possible endings. Success- Most of the time, whether you did it by yourself or needed Elminster/Drizzt/Raistlin/Bigby to save you OR Failure- Where regardless of how much heavy artillery the DM had to throw in to help you and whatever number of shock troops came to the party's rescue they still managed to screw it up bad enough that no rock star NPC could pull their fat out of the fryer.

I also fell in with other schools of game mastering thought, either through actual play or through reading about them or talking with people who had played. I got "in media res" from West End's D6 Star Wars. I got "Story Telling" from White Wolf's Vampire the Masquerade**. I got practically religious encounter balancing mechanics from D&D 3e***.

Now, how does all of this related to the dungeons not characters question? I guess it's that at each point along the way we have been told to invest more into our starting characters, to give ourselves more role playing potential right out of the gate. When I started playing D&D you rolled 3d6 in order and played what you got, with few exceptions. You picked a class and a name then bought some equipment off a pretty short list of stuff. Maybe you had a character concept, but probably not. You weren't real attached to your character at this point and would not start developing any real attachment until you had played him a few times. Even then it would be more like the attachment you had for the 82nd airborne counter in your D-Day board game after they took out the 2nd SS panzer counter against all odds**** than it was like it is today.

By the time of late AD&D 1st edition things had started to change. Unearthed Arcana had social class and family tables and Oriental Adventures had them on steroids. Now you were much more fully invested into your character than previously. Your randomly determined background turned into a character history in your head, sometimes even on paper. At some point in here it became suggested that we give players extra rewards for fleshing out their starting characters, either as extra starting money or an experience point boost or even a starting magic item. By the time we were playing 2nd edition around here it had become so standard that Lance was mocking the process, it seemed like everyone was an aspiring actor and needed character motivations for every action they made. Simply adventuring for riches and glory had fallen by the wayside as everyone (except Lance) had angst filled reasons for needing to become an adventurer. I blame the influence of White Wolf pretty much completely for that.

Now, I think the whole character background thing is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does take us away from our roots where we use the player character as a "piece" in the game. At the very least it makes any PC a very important piece in the game. The background, whether it's completely randomized or wholly from the mind of the player, gives us a much bigger investment in whether or not our character survives the adventure. Our character took a lot longer to create once we added in a whole back story. Equipment lists also got longer here, so they even take longer to equip. Much, much longer.

This leads us to a desire to change character generation too. Now nobody wants to play a fighter with a 6 CON, so we invent a new method of rolling our characters to avoid just such a possibility. My standard was to roll 4d6 keeping the best 3, 7 times keeping the best 6*****, arranged as desired. So now you came to the table with a character in mind, you didn't just make due with the random guy you rolled. Sure it was still random, and it made AD&D stat-worthy characters most times, but I often hear people talking over what role they will take on in the party before anyone touches the dice. Mona will be the Cleric, Ash will be the Thief, Lee will be the Fighter, etc. Rarely does anyone play a different type of character based on their stats. Now they might if they want to experiment some. Point buy systems only make this phenomenon stronger.

So now you have lovingly crafted a character and most likely given him some kind of background even if it's not required by the game system. You have spent some time making sure he fits the needs of the party and you have equipped him along with the rest of the party to avoid redundancies. You have probably spent at least an hour on this guy and you have breathed life into him via his personal history. You are invested in whether or not he survives, and the longer he survives the more invested you are. Now you are at a point where you'll get pissed if the DM kills your character, let alone the whole party******.

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think there is anything wrong with investing in your character, to a point. The problem comes from not investing in more randomly created, old school style characters; and in changing your character creation rules so that you can come to the table with a concept and see it made completely as you envisioned. I figure that if you came to the table with a Conan style fighter in mind and you rolled a 5 for your Strength score you need to figure out how to roll with that, it is not up to the DM and not up to the game system. Maybe you play as a Thief that is a Conan wannabe, or maybe you just put that character concept back on the shelf for next time, eh? What's wrong with coming to the table with a blank slate and creating a character when you get there?

Now, on to the commercialization of the OSR and whether or not it is dead, as they are related to each other. I think the rumors of it's demise may be a bit premature. For profit goods produced by the OSR can't help but be a good thing I suppose. If they are good, they will sell. If not, then they won't. I don't see why anyone is annoyed about people profiting from their hobby. Gary Gygax profited from his. The production values of some of the OSR stuff are quite good, or so I hear. I haven't bought much from the OSR, just Ruins and Ronin. I keep meaning to buy some other things too, but money is tight here and I have a wife, 3 kids, 2 dogs and 3 cats to feed first. All told, I don't understand what the problem is, despite having read numerous blog posts about it, because it's not like fanzines and free stuff killed D&D the first time around; if the for profit producers of old school stuff screw it up we'll just start another OSR in the future.

Lastly, I have been ruminating on the "default" setting for D&D. The default is a multi-racial setting in an apparently post-apocalyptic world. This kind of makes me wonder why we haven't been playing Gamma World for all these years instead of D&D. Tolkien gave us the concept of our standard good guy races and bad guy races, D&D ran with that. We aren't playing in a heroic age type setting, if I had to place a historical analogue to the default D&D setting I would say that it is like early medieval Europe. A mighty civilization has fallen and we come from petty kingdoms seeking to rebuild it's glory while at the same time looting it's ruins. In some ways their technology was much more advanced (or their magic in a fantasy world), in some ways ours is; particularly with regard to weapons.

My campaign ideas, generally, are based on exploring historical cultures and settings; sometimes I throw in a neighboring culture that didn't really live next to them. Usually I add a liberal dose of fantasy elements, more or less, depending on where I want to go with it. Sometimes that'll be the full on AD&D special with all the races and all the magic, that's where I went with my Garnia setting where several tribes of iron age Celts migrated to a pretty standard fantasy world. Sometimes it'll just be adding a bit of fantasy to the real world's history like I did with my Viking campaign where I added just the fantastic elements that the Vikings themselves believed in. Sometimes I just pick a culture I like and draw them a new map to be on. Sometimes I take a bunch of these different elements and mix and match. I have found though that most players don't have much interest in actually playing in non-standard fantasy worlds; so, sadly, the closer you cleave to their expectations of what D&D "should" be the more likely the successful run of your new campaign.

Oddly, I don't think this is true of published settings. Dragonlance did fine with it's changes and that only seemed to encourage TSR to come up with even more non-standard settings like Spelljammer and Planescape. They pillaged history for the various Forgotten Realms setting additions from Al-Qadim to Maztica. Some of these were fairly well done and rather successful, some not so much. Even post TSR D&D has had some success with non-standard settings it would seem, Eberron springs to mind although I am not particularly familiar with it other than it's use of arcane machines that cropped up in some of the boxes of WotC miniatures I bought.

Some of the coolest D&D settings I have ever seen sprang forth from my wife Mona's mind. I mention this because she had a pretty cool pirates-in-the-age-of-sail-meets-D&D-fantasy-world where there was a city called Ampersand (which makes me kind of smile every time I read that people want to call our game Ampersand) and because she doesn't really DM much, like twice since I have known her is all. Her stuff is always uniquely outside the standard D&D box and I have always loved the idea of playing in her worlds. I just find it to be too bad that the expectations of certain players for a certain flavor of D&D have discouraged her from DMing more. Shooting down my Zulus-invade-China-with-unicorn-riding-laser-sword-armed-elves setting is no big deal to me, I have run more D&D games than pretty much anyone else I have ever met and I have had a thousand campaign ideas that I never got around to trying. It's criminal to shoot down something as cool and unique as hers though.

That's all for now.


*Depending on which scale you believe, I believe in using the map of the caves scale, but the overland map lists the distance in hundred yard increments; it matches the caves map scale if you alter it to 100'/square rather than 100 yards/square.

**Which I never played, but knew several people that had played and kept begging me to run for them, only years after the WW craze did I actually take the plunge and play a WW game, Mage: the Ascension, it was fun but nothing I'd really want to do all the time and that GM never really wanted to run it again anyway since he was more of a Werewolf: the Apocalypse fan.

***I know 3e was not the first place that encounter balancing was mentioned, every version of D&D dating back to the original explores the concept at least a little, notably in the random encounter tables for dungeons, but 3e really made a science of it and preached balance as a virtue. I have since backed off of this in a big way because, hey, sometimes an encounter should be too tough for the party to handle.

****Wargamers know what I am talking about, the irrational feeling of affection for a cardboard counter after it has been lucky for you is real. My wife still mocks me for the sadness I felt when I lost my Grossdeutschland unit when playing Panzer General back in like 1995. I foolishly named my units when they achieved 5 stars of experience so I could more easily tell them apart and remember their individual battle records.

*****8 times if Comeliness was used in the game, only really an issue with Oriental Adventures here, we never really adopted Comeliness as a stat in our "regular" D&D games even after it was introduced.

******Which just goes to show how cool my players are, they spent the entire month of December with weekly TPKs after making complex Oriental Adventures characters every week. Sure, they eventually revolted at the idea of taking hours of character creation every week, but they just wanted to play standard occidental AD&D instead rather than quit playing in my games all together.

Clan Wars

I got a bunch of new minis in the mail today. Most of them were WotC D&D minis I got real cheap on Ebay. I also got a pretty large lot of Clan War minis for a song. I bought them for a couple of reasons.

First, I wanted to use them for my R&R/OA campaign that I will eventually play again. Clan War minis seem like about the only available option for finding specifically Asian/Japanese inspired monsters and supernatural creatures, so I kind of keep my eyes open for deals on them. Are there any other companies that maybe have current lines suitable for my OA campaign? I know TSR never really supported OA with official minis and WotC's support has been anemic at best since they released OA for 3.0.

Second, my wife is a really good miniature painter and I thought I might be able to sell them at a profit on Ebay at some point. I actually already have a large number of Katana wielders prepped for her to paint for just that reason, although I may snag a few for my own collection. I am curious though whether or not anyone still plays Clan Wars or if they'll just be useful as 28mm Samurai units for a historical miniature battle game?

Missed my anniversary

I missed my one year anniversary with this blog.

For a recap- this blog has covered 3 separate campaigns in the course of 1 year.

First was an AD&D1 campaign set in my own world of Garnia that lasted four or five sessions before ending abruptly in the middle of what was most likely the final combat encounter of the adventure when my wife Mona paused to make dinner. That was my post apocalyptic Garnia game. Oddly enough, we will be restarting this one next Sunday.

Second was a Rules Cyclopedia game where I figured the more rules light version of D&D might keep the game flow going for the kids, particularly John and Em. That didn't really seem to matter to them particularly. I held John's attention but not really Em's. Em died about half way through Castle Caldwell. Ashli died literally on the second to last hit of the last encounter because of a failed save vs. poison. John and Ash were both pretty psyched about actually finishing an adventure though. We planned to do the Castle Caldwell dungeons in the next session, but we never had another session of that campaign. I have really got no idea why that was, but it might have had something to do with either Ash getting ready to join the Army reserve or Ash training for SCA heavy weapons combat or both. We pretty much spent the summer getting in shape, training sword and shield and then moving back to my old property and cleaning it up and repairing things. After school started up again we were really busy all the time. John was in football, Ashli is in Marine Corps junior ROTC and National Honor Society and pretty active in both as well as being in the Army reserve, so we really had to wait for the weather to get cold before moving on to gaming again.

Third was my extremely short-lived Oriental Adventures/Ruins and Ronin hybrid campaign. I was looking forward to it for weeks and it really was my baby. I had been subtly prepping everyone on a diet of cool feudal Japanese stuff during our evening family TV viewing time. It lasted a total of three sessions, all in the month of December and we only made characters during the first. Two TPKs in two weeks apparently killed the enthusiasm for the mystic orient.

It's all OK though, in a year I have discovered the OSR which led me back to my gaming roots and my family and I have had some good times with gaming. This year seems to be well on track to having a D&D game every Sunday. I only wish I could connect with someone local that was into wargaming, all my old wargaming buddies have left the area. I haven't been able to get so much as a game of Axis & Allies going with the kids. By the time I was Em's age I was already experienced at getting my butt kicked at numerous AH and SPI games :)

What a difference a day makes.

My R&R/OA campaign got canceled today because my wife's parents, nephew and aunt came to visit. Victor still came over because apparently Ashli forgot to call him (or just wanted to see him) so, of course, we talked about D&D for a while (and SCA heavy weapons fighting- I gave him a helmet) during which time he stated that he'd rather just start a "regular" D&D campaign next time. Maybe he reads this blog? I don't know. Ashli had been talking for days about how she wanted to go back to playing Ruby, her Hobbit thief with the speech impediment and mushroom habit.

So it seems that we will be returning to Garnia post-apocalypse after all. I have some new ideas for that setting anyway. Poor Garnia. I have collapsed that civilization so many times before; civil wars and break-away kingdoms, the necromancer war, various barbarian invasions installing new dynasties in old established kingdoms, the troll war, the great orc war the war of the twelve. That's just the core human kingdoms too; the elves have their cataclysms culminating in the absolute annihilation of their civilization with the rise of man. The dwarves have their slow decline to collapse following the troll war. The hobbits with their lost origin and lost homelands. So many memories.

Now it begins again.

New Campaign?

Is there a new campaign beginning here? No, not yet anyway. I know the announcement that I had an Obsidian Portal account and was starting to put up my Garnia stuff was a tad confusing to some people, but I am still trying to run my Ruins and Ronin/AD&D Oriental Adventures hybrid campaign. I only started putting up Garnia stuff there because I wanted to see how everything worked there and Garnia is dead easy for me to write about; it's been kicking around in my noggin for nigh on to 30 years.

Holy cow that makes me feel old, but I just date checked myself and my earliest Garnia stuff is from right around 1980 (unless my memory is failing). I started the whole thing off as a vanity homage to one of my own characters- Garn the great. I played him in Chris's super Monty haul get rich and godly-powerful or die campaign through the spring/summer of 1980 I am pretty sure. By fall that campaign was over, and I was soon playing in Tim's much better (and much longer running) D&D campaign. However, I was already designing my own world, centered on that mysterious castle (that I had designed for my character Garn!) and with Garn as chief deity of his own pantheon. That said, I probably didn't run any games in that setting until maybe as late as '85 or '86 using instead the world of Greyhawk or D&D's Known World. I know Darryl started doing cartography and helping me to write a world history when we were in 8th grade which would have been the '82-83 school year, so I was most likely running it with that group of gamers back then on a limited basis.

Anyway, my point was, R&R/OA will still be played tomorrow and, unless there is another TPK, the following Sunday and all of the for the foreseeable future. We all really wanted to try OA again and I was in the right frame of mind to do it, kami willing everything will work out fine :)

Samurai fever... Broke?

I don't really know what happened to blogger here, but my fairly long post about my Samurai campaign was eaten when I tried to post it. I was under the impression that blogger saving my posts once per minute would prevent this sort of accident, but apparently not. It had a commentary about how my game was getting just one more chance before I pull the plug and go back to "standard" AD&D1. It also had a long tangental discussion about minis, the new ones I bought for OA, my love/hate of the WoTC D&D line, my irrational hatred of Games Workshop for causing both scale creep and ridiculously sized weapons, and my nostalgic love of Grenadier's AD&D line (and consequently the story of Lance-the-lucky). I also briefly discussed old D&D computer games. I worked on it for quite a while and now I have no desire to run across that ground again. Sorry, blame Blogger.

2nd TPK

I wiped out the party again. Fortunately they were considerably quicker to generate Ruins and Ronin characters rather than the AD&D Oriental Adventures type I killed off last weekend. I am having a hard time figuring out exactly what went wrong here, but I suspect it comes down to two things.

First, the party failed to hire any hirelings of any sort. The reason for that is that AD&D players were discouraged by the AD&D rules from bringing along too much help because of the expense and the XP drain, both of which are absent from OD&D/S&W/R&R, but the attitude is hard to break. OD&D characters are basically the officers of their party of soldiers not really stand alone adventurers. AD&D characters can not afford to hire help at level one and are significantly tougher, so they don't really need to as much.

Second, I think they made a pretty big mistake after their first battle when they didn't retreat to safety and instead pressed on ahead. They had won the battle but got pretty hurt in the process. They looted the corpses and kept going. All of their Bujin were pretty hurt and the Shugenja used her only spell. OD&D, and by extension, S&W/R&R are much more games of resource management than AD&D because AD&D characters have more resources to work with, like 1st level clerics having at least one spell which the Sohei does not.

When I suggested that they should have retreated to my wife after the game she got kind of mad at me and said that every time they have previously retreated in my games I have punished them, either with pursuit or restocking the dungeon or both. This is true to a point. I have pursued retreating parties when they were running from encounters, and I have generally restocked dungeons when I found it likely to have happened. I have also done the opposite of both cases when I thought it logical to do so, so I don't really know what the problem is here except that Mona might be trying to read me for hints as to what to do too much maybe.

Last week the party died partly based on the fact that Mona did as I suggested through the village headman Gobo. I suggested it because I was thinking of what Gobo would do, trying to get in his head and play the role of Gobo- a peasant farmer responsible for the well-being of the rest of the villages farmers. I figured the last thing he would want was a big fight in his village where the people he was responsible for could get caught in the crossfire or punished by the Black Riders for getting help from the PCs. Deaths, property damage and worse extortion were on his mind and it caused him to beg the samurai to hide until they left.

Mona also said to me that, if the adventure is going to be tougher than I think they could handle, she expected that I would supply back up NPCs to give them extra firepower. I actually was hoping that they would try and hire on some 0-level help for the adventure, but I didn't suggest it. Maybe when I play old school I try to be a little more like an impartial referee and less like the guy trying to help the party along? I don't know. I just know that I want the party to start coming up with ideas on their own instead of having Harvey the helpful NPC suggest stuff to them (or have noticed the clue, or had a handy healing spell memorized, or whatever). I also have been rolling all of my dice in combat out in the open to stop myself from feeling (or acting upon)the urge to fudge the rolls in favor of the party. I really want all XP to be earned here.

I know they can do this, but I can't help feeling that I have coddled my players for years now with all of this later edition stuff and the advice I read about advancing story lines and making sure everyone is having fun and making death rare and memorable and not punishing the players for having bad luck. I have now torpedoed my own dream campaign two weeks in a row to show that I am not afraid to let the dice fall where they may and that caution, thinking and planning are more useful than excellent AC or a ton of stat bonuses (although I did alter the universal stat bonus to be in line with later editions of D&D).