The Building Blocks of D&D

I've been reading Volume 1: Men & Magic from the original D&D boxed set, and putting some thought to how I'm going to interpret various rules and tackle some of the setting assumptions that OD&D implies.  To say that OD&D has some rough spots and ambiguities is an understatement; there is a lot of room for DMs (or I should say "referees") to put their own spin on it.  (And oddly, despite how loose and underwritten it often is, it rarely reaches AD&D's levels of Gygaxian incomprehensibility.  I think the reduced page count made Gary put away the thesaurus, and for the purpose of writing rules I consider that a plus.)  So I'm going to start by talking about why I'm choosing to run OD&D, and then I'm going to outline what I think are the basic building blocks of the game, and what they imply for the setting I'm building.  I was going to tackle some thorny rules issues as well, but this post got away from me a bit.  I'll save that for another day.

Why Original D&D?

I've been playing D&D since I was given Mentzer's Basic Set for my 10th birthday, back in the dim dark days of 1988.  (It would have been during the week between Christmas and New Year's Eve, and I can still remember how disappointed my Nan was that the box didn't contain a board... RPGs were hard to explain in those days, and at that point I didn't know anything about them.  But I digress.)  It's been almost 36 years since then.  In that time I've played a bunch of BECMI (well, just the B part), AD&D 2nd edition, and D&D 3rd edition, all more or less by the book.  I know those editions well.  I have zero interest in ever running 4th or 5th edition, and only slightly more interest in playing them.  That leaves OD&D and AD&D 1st edition as the versions I've never played, and as I write this I'm struck by a realization: I've never played properly Gygaxian D&D.  I've read both editions to death, and in my heart I consider them to be the "true" game.  And I want to play them both, as close to by-the-book as I can, and find out what they're like in practice.

If I had to choose between the two, I would pick AD&D as my baseline going forward.  But I don't have to pick, because they're really the same game at different points on a spectrum.  You can trace a direct line from Chainmail to OD&D, on through the various supplements, and then to AD&D and beyond.  And because that's possible, that's how I'm going to play it.  I'll start with OD&D (mixing in elements from Chainmail), and then gradually I'll add elements as I go, moving through the various articles and supplements, until I've reached the Dungeon Masters Guide.  After that... well, after that I plan to be a little more selective.  Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II, yes please.  Unearthed Arcana? I'll take it under advisement...

The Basic Building Blocks of an OD&D Campaign

Bear with me here, this will be rudimentary stuff for all you grognards out there.  But I'm about to reveal the six basic building blocks for any D&D campaign.  These are the elements that, in my opinion, are absolutely vital to D&D.  Get ready, and prepare to have your mind blown.  Here they come!

• Men
• Magic
• Monsters
• Treasure
• The Underworld
• Wilderness Adventures

I promise I didn't plan this ahead of time, but as I was thinking about what to write here it occurred to me that the titles of the three OD&D booklets (Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, of course) really do boil things down to the absolute core elements of the game.  Of course, this being 2024, we should replace Men with Player Characters (and there's a pun about being "PC" that I could make here, were I a lesser person).  But the point stands.  You can strip out all sorts of other things from D&D that have built up over the years, but you can't take out any of these six elements and still retain the core of the game: the characters controlled by the players; the magic at the heart of the game's fantasy elements; the opponents the character's will fight; the treasures they strive for; and the environments they will adventure within.

Let's have a look at each in turn.

Men (er, "Player Characters")

There are four elements at the core of every D&D character, regardless of edition: ability scores, race, class, and alignment.  We've had the same six ability scores with the same 3-18 range through every edition. (Let's just forget about Comeliness, and whatever the hell they were thinking in the 2e Player's Option books.)  The races (men, dwarves, elves, and hobbits) and classes (fighting-men, magic-users, and clerics) from OD&D are the only ones to have made it into every single version of the game.  Call them what you want, but if you're running a proper D&D campaign, you need all six, or at the very least some thinly veiled reskinning of them.  (That's me making an allowance for kender, even though I'd say that most kender need a good reskinning with a +1 dagger if you get my drift.)

Men (as they are called in OD&D, don't shoot the messenger!) are the baseline, the dominant race, and the rules enforce this by limiting the power levels of the other races.  Dwarves, elves, and hobbits aren't described in much detail in OD&D, which generally assumes you're familiar with the source material.  That source material, of course, being Tolkien.  Not the Tolkien of The Lord of the Rings, but the Tolkien of The Hobbit.  Gary often disavowed the influence of Tolkien on D&D, and when it comes to The Lord of the Rings I believe him (aside from a few monsters cribbed here and there (orcs, wights, wraiths, balrogs, ents... I think that's it?)  But the DNA of The Hobbit runs all through OD&D, and especially how it depicts the core races.  Admittedly, dwarves and hobbits have few differences between The Hobbit and LotR.  But the elves of D&D are much closer to those in The Hobbit than the noble, almost angelic beings of LotR.  Of course, you could always default to folklore for Elves and Dwarves., and you'd be fine, because The Hobbit's depictions aren't out of line with that.  I'd almost encourage that, as opposed to following the lore that's built up over decades of D&D.  I honestly feel that D&D is at it's best when emulating mythology, folklore, and literary sources, rather than when it's trying to feel like D&D.

Before I leave this topic, I just want to point out who kills the dragon in The Hobbit.  It's Bard, of the race of Men.  And who's the most powerful wizard around?  Gandalf, also of the race of Men.  (As far as you'd know from reading The Hobbit anyway, where there's not an Istari or a Maiar in sight.)  In D&D, Men are at the top of the power scale, and that's backed up by the literary sources.

Now, on to classes.  Fighters don't require much consideration, as they're a very broad category, and have no abilities that are out of the ordinary requiring explanation.  Magic-users, of course, imply the existence of magic that works.  A little more on that below.  Clerics are a different thing altogether.  Perhaps I've missed something in D&D's pulp sources, but the armour-clad, mace-wielding, divine spellcasting, undead turning cleric as presented in D&D is original to the game.  And its existence implies one thing for the setting: religion.  The OD&D books are pretty explicit about clerics belonging to a church of some sort, especially for those of Lawful alignment.  At the very least, clerics necessitate the existence of god-like entities willing to bestow power upon them.  And if there are entities bestowing this power, they must have a reason for doing so.

Which brings us to alignment.  In OD&D it's a bit simpler than it later becomes, with only three options: Law, Neutrality, and Chaos.  It's not explained a great deal, but at this point it really does just seem to be an indicator of which side you're on.  Which means, of course, there are sides, and there is some kind of war or struggle that's of importance to every creature that exists in the campaign.  The forces of Law vs. the forces of Chaos, and the many neutral creatures who haven't picked a side or lack the awareness or intelligence to do so.  Note that it's not a struggle between good and evil, although it might as well be: one side has balrogs and the other has unicorns, after all.  But we're not conflating alignment with a character's morality or behaviour just yet.  For now, it's enough to know that there's a war on, and it affects everyone whether they're in the fight or not.

Magic

In terms of the rules, magic might be the most well-defined system in the OD&D booklets.  Magic-users have their own spell list, and so do clerics.  Both must "memorise" their spells before an adventure, and once a spell is cast it can't be cast again until it is re-memorised.  It's notable that in OD&D, both Magic-Users and Clerics use spell books, something that won't be true for Clerics going forward.  But, aside from some odd quirks in the spells themselves, it all works very similarly to spell-casting in later editions.

The system described above, as I'm sure I don't have to tell most of you, is inspired by the Dying Earth stories by Jack Vance.  As such, it's often called Vancian spellcasting, and it's intrinsic to the flavour of D&D.  The system has a lot of detractors and critics, and some of the complaints are valid. Yes, it's annoying to find yourself in a situation where you need a spell but didn't memorise it.  But old-school D&D rewards preparation, and in a long-running campaign the players have more scope for researching planned adventures.  The other criticism, which kind of grinds my gears, is that "memory doesn't work like that".  "You can't memorise something and then forget it!" they say.  It was probably a mistake to use "memorisation" as the term for this process.  If I'm remembering my Vance correctly, it's more like the spells are contained in the magic-user's mind, and casting them releases their power. It's much more flavourful, and describing it that way without the whole "memorisation" bit can stave off a lot of complaints.

Magic is important though, because spells (and magic items to a lesser extent) are the main way the players have of circumventing the rules, and getting one up on the DM.  Without magic, it's a fair bet that mortality will catch up to the players sooner rather than later.  With it, they stand a fighting chance, and that's one of the reasons I'm reluctant to nerf spells when players find an exploit or a clever loophole.  Let the players have their resources, and use them to the fullest.

The main consideration when starting a campaign is to think about where magic comes from for clerics and magic-users.  For clerics, it's easy.  Lawful clerics are bestowed their powers by one or more deities, or other higher beings of a similar alignment.  Chaotic clerics (or anti-clerics as they are charmingly referred to in OD&D) get their powers from demons, devils, evil gods, and beings of that nature.  I'm not sure this is ever spelled out directly in OD&D (an edition that doesn't really do "spelling out"), but the implications are clearly there.

Magic-users require a little more thought.  All we know is that they get their spells from spell books, but how do they get them, and how did they gain their power and learning?  OD&D is characteristically silent on the matter.  You could say they draw power from the gods like a cleric, but I'm not a fan of that.  The flavour of their spells is too different, and it just seems pointless to have two classes that serve much the same role in the world.  The usual answers to this question are that there's a magical school or institution (such as Dragonlance's Towers of High Sorcery), or that every magic-user has a master who taught them individually.  I prefer the latter option, especially for my opening campaign area, which I'd like to be less unified as a civilisation.  The main question then remains, what does the master get out if it. Money?  Or perhaps an agreement that the apprentice will share any magical secrets or items they find?  Clerics are somewhat beholden to their church and deity, and it might be interesting to do the same for magic-users and their teachers.

Monsters

If the players are going on adventures, then they will need opponents.  They have to be literal monsters, of course.  You could just as easily have the players fighting people, and you'd still have a perfectly good and functional game.  But the game is called Dungeons & Dragons, so I'd say at least one kind of monster is required.  And if there's one, well... why not as many as possible?  It is a game, after all, and if you want a long-running campaign variety can only help to keep the players interested.

As a game, you can't really "win" at D&D, at least not in the long-term.  The closest you get is accomplishing story goals (either self-directed, or set by the DM), or advancing in power.  Story goals are a little nebulous, so the rules ignore that in favour of giving you two means with which to advance in power: finding treasure and killing monsters.  Killing monsters gives you much lower rewards than treasure in OD&D, but most treasure is guarded by monsters, so it's fairly certain that you'll be doing plenty of both.  So monsters are a reward, but more than that they're the obstacle to greater rewards.  And in a D&D campaign, they should be varied and plentiful.

OD&D has a good selection: 61 distinct types, with some (such as men, dragons, giants, and lycanthropes) split into various sub-types.  The humanoids can be a bit samey; there's not much to distinguish kobolds from goblins from orcs from gnolls, except for their Hit Dice.  Some monsters are from Tolkien, others from more obscure pulp literature (such as Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions), while most are drawn from mythological sources.  There's not a lot here that you could call unique to D&D (maybe purple worms, invisible stalkers, and the various jellies, puddings, slimes, oozes and molds).  Those monsters would come in Supplement I: Greyhawk.  But in addition to those monsters with specific stats and entries, there are still more mentioned in the wandering monster tables (mostly giant animals, dinosaurs, and creatures from Burroughs' Barsoom stories), and even more in the section on naval adventures (dragon turtles, and giant sea creatures).  And beyond that there are suggestions made for salamanders, titans, golems, robots, and the list goes on.  OD&D contains a lot, but it suggests much, much more.

Treasure

As mentioned above, treasure provides the bulk of a character's experience points in OD&D, and this makes finding loads of it the quickest way to advance in power.  As many before me have pointed out, this incentivizes exploration, looting, and adventuring over pure hack and slash combat, and can make for more self-motivated players than a story-based game where the bulk of plot progression rides on the DM.  Thus, a DM needs to make sure that there is plenty of gold out there for the PCs to find (guarded by the monsters mentioned above, naturally).

Not only does there need to be a lot of treasure to find, but there need to be plenty of opportunities for the players to spend all that coin.  After a few levels, a PC will have enough gold to live well for years, so what then is their motivation to adventure (aside from playing the game, of course)?  AD&D solves this problem by requiring exorbitant training costs for level advancement.  3e and 4e let the players buy magic items, which I guess is a solution, but it's not one that I ever liked.  OD&D assumes that characters will be saving up to build a stronghold, but that's a stage of the campaign that players won't hit for a good long while, and not every PC has that particular urge.  JB over at BXBlackrazor posted an excellent article about this recently, highlighting the deficiencies of BX and BECMI in this area.  I suspect that OD&D will suffer in a similar way, but I'll only find that out by playing it.

The main campaign consideration is: where did all of this treasure come from?  Why is it still sitting out there, unclaimed by human hands?  The answer to that last one is easy enough: it's dangerous out there!  Monsters, traps, other assorted hazards and nasties...  Going out looking for treasure is a deadly business.  As for the former, the usual answer is that there was an advanced and incredibly wealthy civilisation. and now it's fallen and its lands have been overrun by the denizens of the various Monster Manuals.  And it's a good answer; I'm yet to find one that better fits with D&D's standard set-up.  You could say that the treasure has been raided from the current day civilisation, but not every monster has the kind of lust for gold or intelligence that would send it out on a pillaging spree.  You can use that explanation sometimes, but not all the time.  A post-apocalypse is the way to go, I think, but how far in the past?  And was it just one, or could your setting be a post-post-post-apocalypse?  You could have any number of fallen civilisations, or different answers depending on the region.  But whatever you choose, the gold has to come from somewhere.

(There is another treasure-related campaign consideration, and that's the economy.  Which is completely broken in most by-the-book D&D campaigns.  But that's not a question I feel qualified to tackle right now.  I said I was sticking to the basics!)

The Underworld:

Remember above, when I was saying that a game called Dungeons & Dragons needs some dragons in it?  The same titular consideration applies here.  The dungeon, or the underworld, or whatever you call it, is vital to the identity of D&D.  It's especially great for beginning players and DMs, as it gives them a bounded area to explore, with plenty of danger and variety and opportunity for adventure (assuming it's been designed well).  The players won't be overloaded with options, and the DM will be less likely to be blindsided by the players running off somewhere he hasn't prepared for.  More experienced players can get a little jaded with dungeons, and it's my experience that campaigns that start with a heavy dungeon focus can often transition mostly to city and wilderness adventures later.

A dungeon can be anything from an underground labyrinth, to a series of caverns, to a mad wizard's castle, to a crashed spaceship, or whatever the DM imagines.  What they actually are is a guaranteed source of adventure (i.e. monsters and treasure) for the players.  And if the dungeon is structured as the OD&D books suggest, with levels that predictably increase in deadliness the deeper you descend, that danger is somewhat under the control of the players.  Want a low risk adventure?  Stick to dungeon level 1.  Want to try for a big score?  Risk death on one of the deeper levels, and hope you make it out with stacks of loot (and don't lose too many comrades or your own life in the bargain).  I don't think every dungeon should be structured like this, of course - some unpredictability is always welcome - but there should be some mechanism for players to make calculated risks, especially if the DM isn't tailoring encounters to their level.

Finally, note that OD&D gives primacy to the term Underworld rather than "dungeon".  This suggests a lot, especially in a mythological sense.  The Underworld is often defined as the resting place of the dead, such as Hades or Hell.  So the further down you go, the less the rules of the natural world apply, and the greater the dangers.  The connection between the Underworld of your D&D campaign and the lands of the dead may not be literal, but it all makes sense on a thematic level, and being a place outside of the natural realm explains a lot of OD&D's rules oddities.

Wilderness Adventures:

Like the Underworld, the wilderness is a place of adventure.  And in may ways it's a lot more deadly, because there is no mechanism for the players to control the level of danger.  It's a big, wild world out there, and the wandering monster tables are not kind.  Even lowly creatures such as kobolds can number in the hundreds, so wilderness adventures are mostly for larger bands and higher-level characters.

Aside from being another place to find monsters and treasure, the wilderness serves as a place for high-level characters to establish their strongholds.  The rules state that plenty of NPCs have already done just this, with fighters being named "barons" by whoever happens to be the local ruler.  Mind you, NPCs in charge of castles seem to be free to demand treasure from passers-by, or hit them with a geas, so it feels like they're fairly autonomous (or at least legally allowed to do whatever the hell they want to anyone passing through).  And characters of all alignments are out there ruling their castles, so the grand cosmic conflict is no factor in who's allowed to rule a patch of land.  To me that suggests that the wilderness is exactly that: wild, untamed, and up for grabs to whoever wants to go out there and stake their claim.  (And note that the demi-human races hit their level limits well before they can rule castles; just another way that OD&D ensures that men are the dominant race of the setting.)

With dungeons to be found, loads of monster lairs, and castles ruled by PCs and NPCs alike, this suggests one thing about the wilderness in OD&D: there's a lot of it.  However civilised the PCs' home base may be, there should be plenty of wild lands nearby.  The "points of light" idea put forth in the 4e era was a good example of this: pockets of civilisation surrounded by dangerous wilds.  It perhaps strains credibility from a worldbuilding perspective (i.e. how does trade happen if the wilderness is so damn dangerous) but that's what adventurers are for.

What This Establishes About the Campaign:

With the basics above laid out, I'm going to go through and talk a bit about what this means for my campaign, at least as I envision it right now.

• The nature of the universe and the world is defined by the war between the forces of Law and Chaos.  This war is being fought by great cosmic forces on higher planes, as well as mortal beings.  Some fight knowingly and willingly, while others serve Law or Chaos with no awareness of the struggle that goes on.  Most creatures, especially those of animal intelligence or less, fight for neither side, but may serve one or the other's purposes from time to time.
• At some point in the past, there was an advanced civilisation that fell into ruin.  I'm thinking that civilisation may have somewhat resembled the Eberron setting, with it's "magic as technology" assumptions.  For whatever reason, that civilisation never progressed past the use of coins as its primary currency, so its ruins will be full of gold, silver and copper pieces. I haven't figured out what might have destroyed that civilisation, but tying it into the Law-Chaos conflict seems like a safe bet.
• Civilisation has built itself back up since then, to a roughly Medieval level of technology.  I'm thinking it will mostly be independent city-states, with smaller towns and castles dotting the landscape, all separated by dangerous wilderness populated by monsters.  The major roads will probably feature lots of castles ruled by NPCs, which will serve to keep trade flowing.  But the wilderness will be full of monster lairs, castles ruled by independent NPCs, and treasure-filled dungeons, just as the game suggests.
• Civilisation is ruled by men, although dwarves, elves and hobbits can be found in their lands in smaller numbers.  Those three races will be depicted similarly to the way they appear in The Hobbit, which is broadly consistent with later D&D lore.  I'll probably place their homelands somewhat distant from the main campaign area, though not so far away as to make demi-human presence unrealistic.
• Clerics (the Lawful ones) belong to the Church of Law, which due to various elements in the rules of OD&D - such as the presence of crosses on the equipment list, and the cleric level titles - I'm making broadly similar to the Catholic church.  I'll be doing this without specific reference to Christ and real-world Catholicism, just using the structure and some of the beliefs of that church as a baseline for how clerics work. Some of this can be explained by the mash-up nature of the campaign world: the cross, for example, would be referred to as an ancient symbol of Law whose origin has been long forgotten.  Worshippers of other deities and concepts will also be out there, of course, but the Church of Law is the dominant religious force.  I'm thinking that, despite working to further the cause of Law, and the church itself, clerics will be mostly independent operators, holy warriors that venture out to fight against Chaos.  Most of the clergy working day-to-day in churches will be regular people, or at most 1st level clerics (who conveniently can't cast any spells in OD&D).
• As for Chaotic clerics, I'm inclined not to give them a large, organised presence.  I'm thinking they worship various demons and evil gods, and are organised into smaller sects and cults that are not at all unified, and may even work at cross-purposes at times.
• Magic-users don't have an organised presence, at least in this part of the campaign.  Instead, they operate alone or in small groups, and all magic-users learn their craft by apprenticing themselves to a master.  Presumably the obligations of this apprenticeship - mostly doing the bulk of their master's menial work - are done by the time a PC M-U is out adventuring.

So that's my campaign so far, working off of the assumptions of the OD&D booklets.  So far, so generic.  But that's okay, I want this to feel like a D&D world, at least at the broad scale.  There'll be plenty of scope for including smaller areas with a more unique flavour.  But if I'm building a world that I can slot the majority of D&D modules and adventures into, it has to be somewhat generic.  It's a feature, not a bug!

That's it for today; this post turned out much longer than I planned or expected.  I'll start tackling some of the rules issues in the next few posts, although I might make them shorter and more focused.  I have a tendency to sprawl.  Right now, I need to sprawl out in bed and go to sleep; it's 5am and I'm meeting my son for lunch tomorrow (and to see Deadpool & Wolverine).  Writing is good for me mentally, but it does tend to wreak havoc on my sleep cycles.