Reflecting on 2025

As we rapidly close in on the end of 2025, and I emerge from a festive haze of meat and alcohol consumption, I figured it would be a good idea to reflect on the year that was.  I will talk a bit about D&D, but this one will also have some reflections on life, and a lot of writing about other media, mostly because I don't have another outlet for that at the moment.  For those not into that, I'll see you in 2026.  For the rest of you, let's continue.

2025 was, in many ways, a year for regathering strength.  I didn't embark on any major new ventures, or start any new projects, or learn any new skills.  There were losses, one felt very deeply; but there were also gains, and new starts.  As I approach 50 (I'll turn 47 on New Year's Eve), I'm finding that life is more and more about weathering those losses, and learning to appreciate what you had and still have.  I managed to get through my first 40 years without being deeply affected by much of anything, but I'd much rather be the person I am now than the one I was before.

What I'd also rather be is a person who plays a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.  Alas, I haven't managed that this year, which is entirely on me.  I don't have a particularly hectic life, so I should be able to fit it into my schedule.  But I have low motivation and bad time management skills, both of which I need to work on.  I do feel like I've been working towards a deeper understanding of the game, however.  I hope my posts have reflected that, and will continue to reflect that in 2026.  I have plans...

It's been my most productive blogging year since 2020, but 13 posts is nothing to brag about.  Right now I'm trying to write a post every Sunday night, which is as good a New Year's Resolution as any.   I'm not sure if anyone will read them; I've always been on the very outer edges of the D&D blog-o-sphere, which is a real feat considering the blog's early start in 2007.  But writing is good for me, so I'll make the attempt.

I don't have a long list of inspiring D&D content like I did last year, but there's still stuff out there that I'm vibing with.  BXBlackrazor has become the blog I enjoy most, especially when JB is writing about AD&D and adventure gaming.  His posts have been especially enlightening of late.  Tao of D&D remains the D&D blog that I admire the most.  Alexis, while often prickly, is always thoughtful, and I find a lot of value in the way that he challenges how I think about the game.  If only we had more blogging Dungeon Masters like him.  I listened to a lot of Ben Riggs podcast Reading D&D Aloud, which has morphed from a show where he and co-host Scott Bruner would literally read the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide aloud, to a roundtable discussion with different guests each week. I preferred the old format, but it's still a good show depending on the guests.  But on the whole, I'm finding less D&D stuff of value to me on the internet.  Possibly that's the curse of being someone who prefers written content to video.

That's enough about D&D, though.  I'll be writing plenty about that next year.  To wrap up, I'm going to do a round-up of various media, and the things I've enjoyed most in 2025.  Here goes!

Books

I did not read enough books this year.  My Goodreads summary came through today, and it shows that I only got through 12.  A big chunk of that was a Tolkien reread.  I read The Silmarillion, as well as annotated versions of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.  Both were fascinating, especially reading the original version of The Hobbit for the first time.  But I probably don't need to revisit Tolkien for a good long while.

I also knocked The Great Gatsby off my list of classics to be read. (Spoiler, he's not so great.)   In terms of fantasy classics, I read The Last Unicorn, which was my favourite novel of the year.  Such a beautiful book.  It's from an alternate strand of fantasy that I feel didn't much influence D&D, but it's better than most of the things that did.

As for non-fiction, the best book I read was Ringmaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America.  McMahon (long-time head honcho of the WWE for those who don't know) is probably my favourite TV character ever, and is just as interesting in real life in spite of his many heinous activities.  This book does the best job of pinning down his mercurial character that I've ever seen.  It's a shame it cuts off the story in 2000 or so. And that it was written and released before the Janel Grant case that's still ongoing.  It's still the best McMahon biography I've encountered.

Pro Wrestling

While I'm on the topic... It's been a weird year in wrestling. To be honest, it's always a weird year in wrestling, but this year has felt like the end of an era more than most.

It's been a year dominated by the wrestling retirement of John Cena, who has said he'll never wrestle again.  Unlike many other wrestling retirements, I think this one will stick.  I've had a troubled relationship as a wrestling fan with John Cena.  I think most fans who didn't grow up with him had a similar experience.  I came back to wrestling around 2005, at the start of his rise to stardom, when he was saluting the troops and playing the ultimate American good guy.  I hated his character, especially because he would win all the damn time.  He's probably the biggest reason I barely watched from 2007 to 2014.  Then, somewhere around 2016, a shift started.  He wasn't the top guy any more, and while he'd still win most of the time, he was losing when it mattered and putting on better matches.  That year turned me around on him, and I became a fan.  It probably also helped that he went part time not long after.

His retirement year has been a really odd mix of ups and downs.  I thought he'd just coast his way through on goodwill, maybe win the title one more time, and lose to the next top guy on his way out.  Instead, he turned heel in March, something fans had been begging for for years.  And it was a great moment.  He cut some great promos afterwards.  The matches were rocky to start with (he was deliberately wrestling a boring style).  The teased involvement of The Rock and Travis Scott (some rapper, I dunno) amounted to nothing.  Things improved with a feud with longtime foe Randy Orton, and then CM Punk.  Then the heel turn just ended with Cena shrugging his shoulders and going back to his old self.  It was hard to be upset, because he put on some of the best matches of his career towards the end.  His match with Cody Rhodes at Summerslam was probably my match of the year.  But I feel like a lot of storytelling potential was left off the table.  Wrestling really isn't the place to go for quality storytelling, but there were so many wasted moments.

The one thing Cena's retirement has highlighted is that there are a LOT of great wrestlers nearing the end of their careers.  Edge, Christian, AJ Styles, CM Punk, Brock Lesnar, Randy Orton, Rey Mysterio... I feel like most of WWE's top card are 40+, and there aren't a lot of prospects coming up that I'm a fan of, aside from Dirty Dominik Mysterio and Bronson Reed.   AEW has a roster that skews younger, and has more wrestlers I like.  As usual, there's always great new talent filtering in.  But I think there's going to be a big gap at the top end in a few years.

Aside from Cena's retirement year, it feels like WWE has been in a holding pattern, retreading a lot of the same old feuds. With literal madman Vince McMahon out and his son-in-law Paul Levesque running the show, it's been a much steadier production, but that's come with a price.  Nothing's been surprising, aside from Cena's heel turn.  Oh, and the Paul Heyman story that culminated at Wrestlemania was very good. But since then it's been very staid, and a tad boring.  I miss Vince's crazy bullshit, as nonsensical and out of left field as it often was.  Note that I'm not advocating for the man's return; that ship has sailed.  But some more of his brand of insanity in the storylines would be welcome.

Outside of WWE, I've only really been following AEW, which has been very much a year of two halves.  The first half, where Jon Moxley and the Death Riders were running roughshod over the promotion to the point of tedium, almost had me tuning out.  The second half, since he lost the title, has produced some of the best wrestling I've ever seen, and a run of pay-per-views that is very hard to match.  The booking may be a bit haphazard at times, but in terms of match quality AEW is killing it every week.

TV

Look, I watch a lot of pro-wrestling, current stuff and old stuff.  It doesn't leave a lot of time for regular TV shows, and I only got through the new seasons of three shows: Rings of Power, Doctor Who, and Cobra Kai.

I don't know why I watch Rings of Power.  There's no respect there for the world that Tolkien created.  And yet, I get all the choices made.  I get why there's a greater emphasis on diversity than Tolkien's writing would suggest.  I get why they're condensing everything that happened in the Second Age into the span of a few months.  I don't necessarily like it, but I'll probably be back for season 3...  At least the reveal of Sauron as Annatar, Lord of Gifts looked cool.  And I am amused that Elrond looks exactly like legendary Australian wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist, so that's something.

Doctor Who is my favourite show, ever.  Since 2018, it has been a show I genuinely do not enjoy.  The Jodie Whitaker/Chris Chibnall years where tough to get through.  The recent seasons with Ncuti Gatwa and the return of Russell T. Davies have been more interesting, with some episodes I've really loved.  But they've also highlighted the aspects of Russell's writing that I hate the most, leaning into a brand of silliness that I don't care for.  Don't get me wrong, Doctor Who should be silly... but it should also strive to be clever, and Big Russ leans too far into childishness for my tastes.  The show's on hiatus for now, returning for a Christmas special in 2026 (seemingly without the backing of Disney this time, but with Russell still at the helm).  I'd dearly love it to be my favourite show again.

The show I enjoyed most was Cobra Kai.  Yes, it's blatant fanservice, and teen melodrama where karate is the most important thing in the world.  But it's also teen melodrama where karate is the most important thing in the world.  It's a show I found to be endearingly earnest, and I was really happy that the final season stuck the landing, and managed to give a satisfying payoff to every character involved.  Now, please let it rest.  (I know they won't, they gotta strip-mine that IP for all it's worth.)

Video Games

I did very little gaming this year.  My quest to finish the Ultima series continued as I finished Ultima VI and started Worlds of Ultima: Savage Empires.  They're both good games, but neither are series high-points for me.  The game I'm currently playing, though, is incredible: the long-awaited sequel to Hollow Knight, Silksong.  What a game.  Playing it is just about all I've done since October.  I think it might be the best game of its kind that I've ever played.  Previously I'd have given this accolade to Super Metroid, or maybe Hollow Knight... but I think that for sheer scope Silksong trumps them both.  Yes, it's a difficult game.  I've had many frustrating nights stuck on a single boss fight.  But it's never been too hard, and it gives me exactly the kind of open world exploration that I crave.  I haven't loved a game this much since Breath of the Wild.

Comics 

It's been a really down year for comics.  Do keep in mind that I pretty much exclusively read Marvel, which has no doubt contributed to my ennui.  Also keep in mind that I am an X-Men tragic, and the X-Men titles have been uniformly tedious since the 2024 relaunch.  I've been reading the X-books since 1991, and no matter how bad they got there was always a book or two I was really excited about.  I was hugely into the Krakoa era that lasted from 2019 to 2024.  It was a fresh take that treated the X-Men more like sci-fi characters than superheroes, and aside from a few missteps I loved it.  Even after the era's mastermind Jonathan Hickman departed mid-story, I still really enjoyed the Kieron Gillen and Al Ewing books that followed.  But post-Krakoa, with a more traditional relaunch, I just haven't found much to like.  The flagship books by Jed McKay and Gail Simone are okay, but unexciting.  I'm starting to think maybe I've just been reading them too long... but it was only a little over a year ago that I was really excited about them, so who knows.  Alas, the future plans don't look any better than the current books, and there aren't any writers waiting in the wings that would get me excited (unless Al Ewing makes a comeback).

The rest of the Marvel line has been a little better.  Fantastic Four is a standout, with Ryan North creating great one-shot scifi stories full of big ideas.  Jed McKay's Moon Knight is still solid.  Thor by Al Ewing is an amazing blend of actual mythology and Marvel mythology, but Al Ewing is pretty reliably my favourite writer in comics today so that's no surprise.  Overall, Marvel's in a slump though.

Movies

I left movies until last, because I go to the cinema every Tuesday.  So I've seen a lot of them this year, and of all the things I'm covering here it's the one in which I most venture outside of my comfort zone.  It comes with going every week, eventually there are times when there's nothing on that I want to see.  So I take a chance on whatever looks most interesting, and sometimes those end up being the movies I enjoy the most.

I don't think I had a standout favourite for new movies this year.  Sinners was great, especially because I had no idea going in what kind of movie it was going to be.  I loved Mickey 17, despite some rough edges; it's the kind of non-franchise sci-fi that I wish there was more of.  The Phoenician Scheme was another Wes Anderson movie for those of us that like that kind of thing.  I loved The Surfer, because I'm always up for a slow-burn Nicolas Cage freakout.

As a fan of superhero comics I'm always paying close attention to the superhero movies even though I'm thoroughly sick of them.  This year was more of the same middle-of-the-road fare.  Captain America: Brave New Dawn and Thunderbolts came and went without leaving much of an impression.  I had high hopes for Fantastic Four: First Steps, but not even Marvel could deliver a great movie with those characters (although I did love the retro-futuristic designs).  I fear that this might have been the last chance for someone to knock it out of the park with the FF...  Thankfully, James Gunn did knock it out of the park with Superman.  It's exactly the kind of bright, hopeful Superman movie I've been waiting for.  If you're not happy that Superman saved a squirrel, I don't know what to say to you.

Some other movies I liked... The Naked Gun was surprisingly funny, in a landscape where genuine comedies just don't make it to the cinema any more.  Spinal Tap II: The End Continues was a good enough sequel to one of my favourite movies, and I'm not mad that it exists. (Sometimes that's all you can hope for.)   Predator: Badlands did a bunch of things with the franchise that I thought I'd hate, but it was surprisingly fun.  The Running Man was a good adaptation of the book, even if it shied away from the ending where the hero flies a plane into a skyscraper.  Wake Up Dead Man was another enjoyably twisty-turny Benoit Blanc mystery.

I have to end by mentioning the Minecraft movie.  I don't know what to tell you, I enjoyed the hell out of it.  It's so, so stupid.  But I grew up in an era where movies based on video games were very much not based on the actual video games.  You never knew what you were getting when one came out.  But this was a goddamn Minecraft movie, and it never let you forget that for a second, and I loved it in all of its glorious stupidity.  I'll probably never watch it again.

So, that's a wrap on 2025.  Who knows what next year will bring?  More movie watching certainly.  I have got to read more books, and I'd like to write more.  I've been finding time to play some board games, so I suspect more gaming in my future.  I suspect that in early 2026 my life will continue to be dominated by Silksong... But most of all, I want to play more D&D.  I know I said that last year, so I can't guarantee that it'll happen.  I don't really make resolutions anymore, but I did make one earlier in this post: more blogging.  Shouldn't be too hard to beat 13 posts, right?

The New Philosophy

In the comments thread of a post over at BXBlackrazor (where JB has been on a tear of great posts lately), we got into a brief exchange about my past as a Dungeon Master, and how I'm planning to run Dungeons & Dragons going forward.  During that exchange, JB said that it sounds like I'm trying to "re-learn the approach to the game", or "reformulate a new philosophy of D&D".  Which got me thinking... what is that philosophy, and what do I want out of my next campaign?  Why am I delving so far back, and stripping D&D back to its most basic form?

I'll start by writing about my history with the game.  As I've mentioned before, I got the D&D Basic Set (the one written by Frank Mentzer) for my 10th birthday, somewhere during the last week of 1988.  I was already obsessed with the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks (and possibly Lone Wolf, though I'm not sure of the timeline there), so the type of fantasy found in D&D was familiar to me, and the "choose-your-own-adventure" intro in that set made for a perfect segue into role-playing games.

My friends and I played D&D (first Basic, then AD&D 2nd edition) a lot during my last two years of primary school, just about every lunch break, and outside of school as well.  This continued through high school, although as I remember it the lunch break session tapered off once we got into years 10 through 12.  We never had a proper campaign as such, or a regular Dungeon Master.  Our games were mostly set in the Forgotten Realms, as filtered through our collective knowledge of the novels (actual game products being relatively scarce in the country town of Ararat where I grew up).  Whoever had an adventure they wanted to run would be DM, and there was rarely any continuity between adventures.  We had a lot of fun at the time, but looking back on it I don't feel like I learned much about how to be a good DM during those years.  My times running the game were too few, and too sporadic, to really build any skills beyond familiarity with the rules.

After graduating high school in 1996, I went to university in Ballarat to study IT, and it didn't take long for me to put together a new group of friends to game with.  Most of these guys had never played D&D before, so I was the permanent DM.  This time, I had my own campaign setting, "The Twin Worlds", inspired in some ways by Warcraft and in others by The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past.  I also had a story I wanted my friends to play through.  I was fully on board with the story-path, Dragonlance style of D&D.  It wasn't a total railroad.  I let the players act as they wished, and based subsequent adventures on what had gone before.  But I still had a destination in mind, and story beats I wanted to hit, and I made sure that nothing happened that could derail that train.

These were the years where I felt like I actually learned the rudimentary skills of putting together and running a campaign.  Not just designing my own setting and adventures, but organising sessions and managing the personalities of my players.  This campaign lasted until 2001, when it faded out with a whimper in the form of a Total Party Kill (the first time they got fireballed).  It was a bad end to a game that everyone was invested in, and I'm still torn about how I handled it.  Should I have found a way to save the game, or did I do the right thing by following the rules and letting the TPK stand?  Let's park that question for later, because I think it's relevant to my new way of thinking about the game.

I started a new campaign about a year later, set in the same world a few centuries down the line, and updated for the new and shiny 3rd edition of D&D.  I won't lie, part of me was excited to get the old campaign out of the way so I could start playing 3e.  I was still in story-path mode for my 3rd edition game, but with a lighter touch.  The players had more agency, and I was more willing to roll with the consequences of their actions.  This campaign lasted until 2011, not coincidentally a few years after I got married and had a son.  Despite the frequency of play really slowing down from 2008 to 2011, this one went out with a bang rather than a whimper, a huge blowout against an invading army of orcs.  It was a very satisfying conclusion that wrapped up most of the campaign's loose threads, and to date it's the only successful campaign that I've ever run.

I feel like I learned a lot during that decade running 3e.  Certainly the adventures I was designing were stronger than the ones I wrote earlier for 2e, and I feel like the setting and story I'd come up with were more robust, better able to withstand the vagaries of character deaths and player dropouts.  A lot of what I'd learned was how to adapt my style of D&D to real life, and the ways that real life could interfere with it.  That said, what I'd learned was how to adapt to the lives of a bunch of unmarried guys in their 20s.  I never did figure out how to keep playing and DMing once I was a husband and father.

I had a long gap after 2011 where I barely did any gaming at all.  I tried to continue the 3e campaign circa 2018, following up on a major outstanding plot thread, but I only had two players and it sputtered out after a half-dozen games over the course of several years.  Some of those games were really good, but in retrospect my heart wasn't in it.  Since 2011, I'd delved deeply into the online D&D community, particularly the OSR.  I wasn't all that interested in running story-path D&D anymore.  I was weary of 3e, and had been for a long time.  My D&D muse had moved on to other styles and other editions.

Which brings me to where I am now, planning a campaign using original D&D, with a minimal sandbox setting and not a story-path to be seen.  Going back to basics.  Treating the game as a game.  I return to the question that's been nagging at me since 2001: was I right to let my story-driven 2e campaign end in a disappointing TPK?  Now that my philosophy on the game has changed, I think I have an answer: no, I shouldn't have allowed it.

This might come as a surprise, given that I've come around to treating the game as a game first.  But back then, I wasn't doing that.  I'd set that campaign up as a highly story-driven game, with the promise of a pay-off to the elements I'd introduced.  Prophecies, chosen ones, the end of the world... name a cliche and I'd thrown it in there.  But having set that up, I should have followed through.  I'd built a game where the story and the characters came first, the world second, and the rules third.  But when I allowed that TPK, suddenly I had flipped the paradigm, and the rules were made paramount over the story and the setting.  The promise of the game, albeit one made unknowingly, had been broken.

The thing is, I want to play and run D&D where TPKs are possible, and where they don't run counter to the way the campaign is set up.   I have to flip the paradigm on how I've run D&D in the past, but do so knowingly and deliberately, and before the first game session.  Rather than the importance of game elements being story and character, then setting, then rules, it must be the opposite: rules, then setting, then story and character.  The game must be a game, first and foremost, because I don't ever want a campaign to end in a whimper again.

Steps for Setting Up an OD&D Campaign: What the Booklets Say

If I'm going to set up a campaign exactly as it says to in original Dungeons & Dragons, the first obvious step is to read through the booklets and find out what they say.  I've done this many, many times, so I know exactly where to find things.  There's some general advice at the start of Volume 1: Men & Magic, and some more specific instructions in Volume 3: The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.  Let's have a look.  (And for those wondering, I'm working from a pdf of one of the earlier OD&D printings, before they cut balrogs and hobbits and other such Tolkienisms.)

 

This introduction doesn't have a great deal to say about the finer details of campaign preparation, but it does advise that the referee begins building their campaign slowly, following the steps outlined in the books.  It's sound advice, especially for a newbie to the game.  Most of us don't have the time or inclination to plan out an entire world before starting a game, so creating the bare minimum is best for novices.  It's also pointed out that doing so allows the campaign to grow at an organic pace.  I'd add that doing it this way means that the interests of the players will influence the areas in which the campaign grows, and this can help with player investment.

Near the end the reader is instructed to read the three booklets in order, so that by Volume 3 they'll have the "prospective" (I think it should be "perspective") necessary to understand the game.  As I said above, I've done this a lot of times.  I'd recommend D&D novices read them at least twice (and if they could read the first D&D Basic Set before coming back to this version for a second read, all the better).

  

 

Page 5 lists the equipment needed to play the game: the original D&D boxed set, a copy of the wargame Chainmail, a copy of the board game Outdoor Survival, some dice; and a bunch of stationery.  It must have been a big ask in 1974 to require someone who just shelled out for your game to buy two more games on top of that.  It's an even bigger ask in 2025.  I own a physical copy of OD&D (a late printing that I bought around 2010, back when such things were expensive but attainable).  A bit of research reveals that a copy of Outdoor Survival will cost around $100-150 AUD (including shipping), while a copy of Chainmail can cost anywhere from $600 to several thousand dollars.  I have a copy of Outdoor Survival on the way; the board is a necessary component for running OD&D as the books direct, and a digital copy won't fill that need.  For Chainmail, at that price I'm more than happy using a pdf.

The dice and stationery I have already, of course (though I'll need to source some more six-siders to hit the recommended amount).  I believe that "Imagination" is in adequate supply, and I'm more than ready to fill the requirement for "1 Patient Referee".  As for "Players", I know enough gamers that I'm confident I can get a campaign up and running (probably a dozen or so folks, not even close to the upper limit of 50 given in the book).  We might have to play on-line, which is a shame.  I'd rather run face-to-face, but unfortunately people have lives outside of the game, and a digital get-together is easier to organise.

It's interesting to note that, despite the game billing itself as "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures", miniatures are not required.  I do find them useful for helping to keep track of where everyone is in combat, but I also find that they slow down play.  And despite the aesthetic merits espoused by the books, I find that not having the correct figures for a monster can detract from that visual appeal.  Not to mention the costs involved in acquiring such a suitable menagerie...  My current thought is that I'll try to run battles with "theatre of the mind" where possible, only using minis or counters for the more complicated fights.

Finally, we get to "Preparation for the Campaign", which is where the prep advice actually begins.  The burden for prep is placed solely on the referee, who is instructed to map out six levels of the "underworld", and stock them with monsters and treasure.  Six levels might sound daunting to some, but anyone who can't or won't put that work in before the game begins is probably not ready for the continual investment that running such a campaign requires.

That's it for the advice in Volume 1.  Volume 2: Monsters & Treasure doesn't have any such instructions, so we move on to Volume 3.

  

 

Because it's 1974, the prospective referee needs to be told to draw out their Underworld levels on graph paper.  Special attention is given to ensuring that the referee provides plenty of ways for the players to traverse between levels, and that those connections make sense.  Advising that the referee constructs at least three levels at once seems contradictory with the instruction to build at least six to begin with.  Perhaps this is advise for constructing new levels, beyond the original half-dozen.

The author (Gygax, no doubt) recommends that a good dungeon will have at least a dozen main levels, with additional offshoot levels, and new levels always under construction.  The "mega-dungeon" or "campaign dungeon" has an odd place in D&D history.  Here, it's the default setting of the game, but it won't be too long after this that it falls out of favour.  Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, a game fully published by 1979, barely mention the concept.  There was a fascination for mega-dungeons in the early OSR, but I feel like they've fallen out of favour again.  I've never designed or run one, but I'm looking forward to trying to make this kind of campaign work.

I won't reproduce the key for the sample dungeon level above, but I'll note that most of its features are designed to confound map-making, or to drive the PCs into dangerous areas.  Tricks such as barely perceptible sloping passages, rotating rooms, teleporters, endless corridors, and one-way doors abound in original D&D.  Becoming lost or trapped seems to be the primary danger for PCs in this kind of design.  I try to avoid running mazes and labyrinths, as they've resulted in some tedious gameplay for me in the past, but it's exactly the kind of play that the books suggest.  I might try to mitigate that somewhat with my dungeon level designs, but I think that liberal and creative use of the wandering monster tables might be the key to making this style work.

There's more dungeon design and stocking advice on the following pages, including a list of "Tricks and Traps" that continues the trend of fucking with map-makers.  The book recommends that the referee thoughtfully place several of the most important treasures and monsters on each level, then fill out the bulk of the dungeon by random determination.  About one-third of the rooms will be occupied by monsters when using the recommended method.

 

 

Here we get into what's required of the referee to run adventures outside of the dungeon: a map of the dungeon's ground level; a map of the wilderness surrounding the dungeon; and a map of the town or village that the PCs will use as a home base.  The Outdoor Survival board is recommended for "general adventures" in the wilderness.  I take this to mean that it's used as a kind of abstract representation for when you want to run a wilderness adventure with minimal prep.  I have my own ideas for using it in a less abstract way (which I plan to get to in another post).

The "ground level" map isn't extrapolated upon further than what's written above, and it's also all the book has to say regarding city adventures.  I would have thought that a simple list of the goods and services available in town would be enough, but the book recommends a full map.  I'm terrible at city mapping, so I'll probably rely on maps of real-world towns (just as I plan to use the real geography of Australia as a basis for the campaign world).

The guidelines for the "surrounding wilderness map" are given below.

  

I find it odd that this map is unknown to the players.  Would they not know the terrain around their hometown?  Even if it's not their hometown, surely the locals would know.  But because we're treating this as a game, such considerations must be hand-waved or rationalised, and the rules given precedence.  It's the total reverse of how I'd normally treat such things, so it will take some adjustment.

Unless I've missed something, that's the entirety of the game preparation requirements and advice given in the booklets.  The steps I need to take are as follows:

1. Read the damn books.
2. Acquire all of the recommended equipment
3. Design at least six levels of my underworld
4. Design a ground level map of the area above the underworld
5. Map the terrain immediately surrounding the dungeon on hex paper, with a hex being 5 miles across
6. Map the town that will serve as a home base for the PCs

To the above list I would add "fill the gaps in OD&D's combat system".  This is all quite a lot of work, but I'm excited to get to it.  I've already done steps 1 and 2, and I have plans in my head for the rest.  Besides, it's not necessary to complete all of the steps before starting to play; as the book says, you can play your first game after designing some dungeon levels.  I would rather be thorough, so I have plenty of mapping to do over the next few weeks (or months, more realistically).  Time to get to work!

The Game Before the Game

Dungeons & Dragons is a roleplaying game.  I don’t think many people would dispute that, though they may quibble about the exact definition of what an RPG actually is.  Smarter people than me have tried to define it, and I'm not here to do that today. I'm still thinking about what I am here to do, but sometimes I need to let those thoughts flow out of my fingers, through the keyboard, and onto the blog page before I really know what I'm on about. Please bear with me as I work my way through it.

D&D is also the first RPG.  Yes, yes, there was Braunstein, and Blackmoor, and who knows what else… Commence quibbling if you like.  But as far as the world of normal people goes, D&D came first. But it also came in a form that normal people would find - let's be generous - somewhat difficult to interpret. Hell, there are many highly abnormal D&D obsessives who are still puzzled by it, even after decades of internet discussion.

Reading the original booklets again for the umpty-umpth time, particularly in light of the dissection of them that's happening over at Tao of D&D, has made one thing very clear: the original creators were not writing this game as an RPG.  Of course they weren’t, and they couldn't have: the genre didn’t exist, and the term had yet to be coined.  But what’s apparent on a close reading, especially when one tries to throw off assumptions from later iterations of the game, is that what’s written on the page is not an RPG.  Not one as we’d understand the term today certainly.  I don’t even think it much resembles the style of play that was prevalent when I picked up the game in 1988. Whatever game the folks in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva were playing, it's not the same game that many of us grew up with and are playing today. The more I look into it, the more fascinated I've become with what I call "the game before the game".

The obvious lens through which to look at original D&D is that of wargaming.  The game sprang from that scene after all, as an outgrowth of Chainmail.  Just as wargames are played as individual battles or scenarios, possibly linked as a campaign, D&D is played the same way on a smaller scale.  A game is a single underworld foray or outdoor adventure, in a “scenario” (dungeon or wilderness) set up by the referee/dungeon master, with a campaign being a series of such adventures with a consistency of player characters and world setting. None of this is news to anybody reading this blog, although I gather that the older playstyle resembles a picaresque, or series of short stories with a revolving cast, much more than the ongoing quests and epics favoured by modern D&D.

But there’s more to the original D&D booklets than dungeon and wilderness adventuring, especially once you get to the naval and aerial battle sections of Vol. 3.  I’m starting to feel like original D&D is best understood as a collection of sub-systems, or mini-games.  You have the core game of dungeon exploration in the referee’s “underworld”; ad-hoc wilderness adventures using the board and some rules from Outdoor Survival; the domain game, where players carve out an area of the wilderness to build their castle and rule once they reach “name” level; the medieval fantasy wargame of Chainmail; the naval wargame adapted from Don't Give Up the Ship; and the aerial wargame adapted from Fight in the Skies.  All of these can be interlinked to form a campaign, and even though the rules between them aren’t always fully compatible, and some aspects are far from adequately explained, the framework is just about sturdy enough that it can be made to work.

I’m not really sure where these thoughts are leading me, but I’ve been getting more interested lately in treating the game as a game, and divesting it of the amateur storytelling and theatrics it’s accumulated over the years.  I can see why it went that direction after it got out of the hands of the wargamers and pulp fantasy fans who originated it.  Maybe it was inevitable, especially given that the most popular fantasy fiction over the next couple of decades was chasing after Tolkien, but it doesn’t help that original D&D does a pretty poor job of explaining itself.  The conceptual power is there in those booklets, as evidenced by how quickly the game spread in spite of its shortcomings, but it barely explains how D&D is played, or how the sub-systems/mini-games fit together.  At best, it lays out some rules for dungeon and wilderness adventures, and vaguely gestures at the rest.

I wonder what a version of D&D that could be shelved alongside Monopoly (as Gygax envisioned) and played out of the box would look like.  Certainly the rules would have to be rewritten for clarity (not by Gygax, as much as I enjoy his writing).  And maybe only one of the sub-games would be included, probably dungeon adventuring. The various D&D basic sets did just this, but they still required a lot of pre-preparation by the dungeon master.  Perhaps the game would come with a pre-packaged underworld (or “megadungeon” if you prefer), and stock character types, and play something like a boardgame where only the DM sees the whole board.  There are a bunch of games like that now (and Dungeon! existed back then), but who knows what D&D might look like now had that been done in 1974.

Of course, in many ways this is removing the unique elements and the core appeal of the game.  D&D’s greatest strength, I feel, lies in its freeform nature, the ability for players to take any action and for the DM to improvise based on those actions.  There’s also the personalisation that comes with character creation, and also the crafting of the dungeon and wilderness on the DM’s part. The DM and players can't play without creating characters and an environment to adventure in, and that process builds a strong investment in the game.  I doubt D&D would have lasted without those elements.

In some ways, after all of this writing, I feel like I’ve just gone around in a circle and conceptualised the BECMI line.  You have your boxed game for dungeon adventures (basic set), followed by your wilderness game (expert set), followed by your domain game and war game (companion set), and so on.  But even that version of the game, just a decade later, feels vastly removed from the game that original D&D hints at.

Perhaps I'm just grasping at phantoms here (no save or die effect, thankfully!). We all have our own ideas about what Arneson, Gygax and company were doing back in the earliest days of the game, but only those who were there know for sure. It doesn't really matter to anybody's home game what those guys were doing 50+ years ago, but I still find myself fascinated by it. And I find myself wondering, if I do my best to set up and run a campaign exactly as the original booklets instruct, what will the game look like? Will it be a wargame, or will it be a roleplaying game? Or will it be something in the middle, undefined?