The Changing World: How to Explain Rules Changes in the Game World

I've mentioned before that my plan for my next campaign is to start with OD&D, and gradually introduce and change rules until I'm running AD&D.  AD&D is ultimately the ruleset I most want to explore, but I'm just as intrigued by the idea of running OD&D, and I'd like to examine each rules element individually as it gets brought in, and experience first-hand how it changes up the game.  It would perhaps be simpler to just begin with the fullness of AD&D, and less confusing for my players, but I'm fascinated by tracking the progression of D&D.  So that's how I'm doing it, and hopefully my players will roll with it as well.

Of course, if the rules of the game change over time, this will be reflected in the game world as well.  Some of these changes will be more organic, such as the introduction of new monsters, spells, and classes.  But what exactly is going on when, say, the rules for initiative change?  Or weapon damage, or ability score modifiers, or any number of other things?  How does this work in terms of the game world?

The easy answer would just be to hand-wave it.  Gesture vaguely at it, change the rules, and say that it hasn't really changed what's going on in the game world.  The rules are the rules, the world is the world, and one has little bearing on the other.  It would be the sane thing to do.  So of course, I have a different idea.

My campaign world, which I'm tentatively calling "The Last Earth", was formed at the end of a grand cosmic war that destroyed almost everything, fused together from elements of various worlds and settings.  It's been thousands of years since that happened, but it's still a place where reality is unstable.  And that reality is affected by the war between Law and Chaos.  What happens in the planes affects the material world, and vice versa.  As above, so below.  So there will be occasional upheavals, and at times reality will be rewritten.

Normally such rule changes would be the purview of the DM, but I want to involve my players in the process as well.  Healthy discussion and consensus would be one way to accomplish this, but I have something a bit more flavourful and setting-specific in mind.  If I may be allowed to indulge in some setting lore... Back in ancient times, there was a war between mortals and the gods, in which the gods were driven from the material plane.  (I already talked about this in my post on clerics and blunt weapons.)  But not all the gods were driven out; many were killed, and their dismembered corpses still litter the countryside.  An eyeball here, a hand there, a still-beating heart half-buried in a mountainside, that sort of thing.  (I'd initially thought of them as being fossilised stone, but it's more fun if they still have some semblance of life.)  The forgotten dead gods, worshipped by few because they no longer have power to bestow on their followers.  But it's said that if you kneel before them and pray, the rest of the dead gods will hear.  And if enough hear and answer, maybe some desired change will be wrought in the fabric of reality itself.

So basically what this is is a way for my players to voice their desire for a rules change by having their character pray at one of the dead gods.  This would happen during downtime between sessions and require a single game day (remember that I'm going to be trying out 1 real day = 1 game day).  So there's a bit of a trade-off there, because it's a day they could otherwise use for healing or training or research or whatever.  But if they really want to emphasize how much they want a rules change, they could pray for multiple days...  And maybe the gods (aka the DM) will hear them.

I'll have to stress that praying doesn't necessarily guarantee the player will get what they want.  I'm going to be reluctant to change rules that haven't been properly engaged with.  For example, I'm pretty sure I'll have players who initially rail against demihuman level limits... But I'd rather not relax those limits until I've played with them for a decent length of time.  I'll also have to be clear that it's ultimately up to me how any rule changes.  In most cases, I'm going to follow the progression through the supplements and into AD&D.  And I want to set a hard and fast rule that I'm not changing more than one thing per game session.  I want the changes to be gradual, and only rarely will I be instituting sweeping changes (such as when I introduce the PHB or other such manuals).

I'm not sure if this is going to work, or if my players will dig it or engage with it.  But I know I dig it, and I like the flavour it adds to the game world.  A broken landscape, littered with dismembered gods, clinging to life just enough that a prayer to them might be able to change reality...  I'm deliberately building a generic world that reflects the D&D manuals, but inevitably some unique weirdness will filter in.  This is why I enjoy trying to answer these questions.

Do All Elves Wear Elven Cloaks and Boots?

Having looked over all the evidence in my last post, I concluded that all elves in OD&D can move about silently and with effective invisibility.  Some sources attribute these stealth abilities to their elven cloaks and boots, which seems fair enough until one remembers that these are valuable and rare magic items.  As much as I'd like to incentivize rampant elf-murder, the players probably shouldn't be finding these on the corpses of every elf they gank.  So before I make a decision, I need to look at all of the evidence.

Chainmail

Chainmail is the origin of the elven ability to turn invisible, but at no point does it specify a reason for the ability.

OD&D Vol. 1: Men & Monsters

Nothing is said here about elven PCs being able to hide or move silently.

OD&D Vol. 2: Monsters & Treasure

"Elves have the ability of moving silently and are nearly invisible in their gray-green cloaks."

AD&D 1e Monster Manual

"When in natural surroundings such as a wood or meadow, elves can move silently (surprise on a 1-4) and blend into the vegetation so as to be invisible (requiring the ability to see invisible objects to locate them) as long as they are not attacking."

Their gray-green cloaks are mentioned in the description paragraph, but not linked to their hiding ability.

AD&D 1e Players Handbook

"If alone and not in metal armor (or if well in advance - 90' or more - of a party which does not consist entirely of elves and/or halflings) an elven character moves so silently that he or she will surprise monsters 66-2/3% of the time."

I also had a look in the 1e DMG, but wasn't able to find anything.  There could be relevant information tucked away in that august tome, but if there is it escaped me.  I don't really care to look ahead further than that; I prefer to stick to Gygax when seeking these kinds of clarifications.

There's an obvious trend above.  The ability starts as invisibility, shifting to silent movement and near-invisibility in OD&D.  This is restricted to natural surroundings in the Monster Manual.  By the time we get to the Players Handbook, there's no ability to turn invisible; elven stealth is entirely attributed to silent movement.  What started as something seemingly magical has gradually become more mundane.

Notably, only one source - OD&D Vol. 2 - links elven stealth to their cloaks.

Cloak and Boots of Elvenkind

Let's take a look at how elven cloaks and elven boots work in OD&D and AD&D.

OD&D: "Wearing the Cloak makes a person next to invisible while the Boots allow for totally silent movement."  So it appears these items exactly duplicate the stealth abilities of elves.  It's entirely plausible that every elf is wearing a set of these.

AD&D: These items are separated in this edition.  The cloak of elvenkind has chameleon-like powers, granting the wearer near-invisibility, with different percentages based on the type of terrain.  The boots of elvenkind allow silent movement, with a 95% chance in the worst conditions and 100% in the best.

So in OD&D these items are useless for elves, duplicating their powers exactly.  In AD&D, the stealth abilities of the cloak and boots seem like they should be better than those of an elf, but that really depends on the link between moving silently, being invisible, and surprise.  This link is never explicitly spelled out in AD&D, at least to my knowledge.

The Decision

I wasn't expecting the evidence to weigh so highly against the prevalence of elven cloaks and boots.  But it's hard to deny that, if Gary intended for OD&D elves to be wearing them, he quickly thought better of the idea.  It makes sense; elven encounters would be numerous enough to ensure that every character would gain these items and abilities before too long.  Like Gary, I'd prefer to restrict this kind of thing.

The text is even worded in such a way as to support this: "Elves are nearly invisible in their gray-green cloaks."  See, it says invisible in their gray-green cloaks, not because of them.  I'll split those hairs if I must.

So no, no elven cloaks and boots for every elf.  Which is a shame, because a reading of Tolkien would support the other argument.  I'm also a little unsatisfied that the cloak and boots in OD&D are useless for elven PCs.  But I guess in D&D they're a different thing, with magic intended to grant non-elves the stealth of elvenkind.  That's a cool enough ability in its own right.

OD&D Conundrum 2: Elves

 Ah, Elves.  Since the dawn of the OSR, and no doubt well before that, the less-than-humble elf has been a source of perplexity to anyone tackling the OD&D rules.  Part of that is due to their scattered nature; some of the elf's abilities are only found in Chainmail, some are in Vol. 1: Men & Magic, and still more are hidden away in Vol. 2: Monsters & Treasure.  There's more to it than that, as even once you've found the rules they can be contradictory or difficult to interpret.  But before I get into that, I'll go through these sources one by one and give a brief outline of what each says (with an eye towards elven PCs rather than "monsters").

OD&D Vol. 1: Men & Magic

• Can be fighters or magic-users, and freely switch between each from adventure to adventure.
• More able to note secret and hidden doors
• Gain the advantages noted in Chainmail when fighting certain fantastic creatures
• Speak the following languages: Orc, Hobgoblin, Gnoll, Elvish
• Can be aligned with Law or Neutrality, but not Chaos

OD&D Vol. 2: Monsters & Treasure

• Of two sorts: those who make homes in woodlands, and those who seek remote meadowlands
• Can move silently and are nearly invisible in their grey-green cloaks
• Elves armed with magic weapons add an extra +1 to damage rolls
• Elves on foot may split-move and fire. Those mounted cannot.
• Not paralyzed by ghouls

Chainmail

• Elves are listed along with "Fairies"
• Split-move and fire as footmen
• Can turn invisible; can become visible and attack in the same turn
• Those armed with magic swords add an extra die in normal combat, and allow elves to combat certain other fantastic creatures
• Troops paralyzed by a wraith remain unmoving until touched by a friendly elf (also true of wizards and heroes, but that's not relevant here)
• Can see in normal darkness as if it were light

Like I said, the rules are scattered.  The major ability of the elf in OD&D is that they can be fighting-men and magic-users; this is also the ability that's come under the most scrutiny because of how it differs from later editions. But I'll tackle that last.  Before I get there, I'll quickly run through some of the other abilities that are of interest.

SUB-RACES

OD&D splits elves into those from the woodlands and those from the meadowlands.  This seems to me like a fair approximation of what we see in The Hobbit: the wood elves would be similar to those from Mirkwood, and the meadow elves would be like those from Rivendell.

In Chainmail this distinction isn't made, but the elf entry does have a parenthetical inclusion of "fairies".  Later books (specifically Supplement I: Greyhawk and the AD&D Monster Manual) will equate fairies with meadow elves, also referring to them as grey elves.  So that answers that pretty succinctly.  As far as rules go, there are no distinct differences in Chainmail or OD&D.

ALIGNMENT

It's not something I often see remarked upon, but OD&D characters are sharply limited in their alignment.  Human fighting-men and magic-users are free to choose any alignment, but clerics must be Lawful or Chaotic.  Dwarves can't be Chaotic.  Hobbits must be Lawful.  And elves can only choose between Neutrality and Law.

In Chainmail, elves are Neutral but with a tendency towards Law, so this fits together quite well.

STEALTH

So here's the question: do elven PCs in OD&D move silently and invisibly by default?  Vol. 1 says nothing about it, but Vol. 2 certainly gives these abilities to elven NPCs, attributing the invisibility to their grey-green cloaks.  Chainmail is consistent with Vol. 2, giving elves the ability to turn invisible.

So it's pretty cut and dried that NPC elves are effectively silent and invisible when they want to be, and that the invisibility is a property of their elven cloaks.  Giving this ability to elven PCs could be a bit unbalanced, but I don't necessarily consider that a bad thing.  The classes in old-school D&D are unbalanced in a lot of ways, but most of those ways are consistent with the flavour of the pulp fantasies it's drawing inspiration from.  Tolkien's elves really are better than everyone else, so it's okay by me for D&D to match that.

When it comes to things that are ambiguous in OD&D, it's always a good idea to look forward to AD&D, because Gary used it to clarify a lot of his intentions.  We can also look backwards now that the pre-publication draft is available, but that doesn't have anything relevant in this case.  AD&D does, because elves have an innate stealth bonus in their 4-in-6 chance to gain surprise.  That pretty much seals it for me, and I'll be allowing any elven PCs to move around with silence and effective invisibility.  Not actual invisibility, just a near-supernatural ability to stay hidden.

GHOUL PARALYSIS

It's consistent in older editions of D&D for elves to be immune to the paralysing touch of ghouls.  (In fact, elves are immune or resistant to most of the things likely to incapacitate a low-level character: ghouls, sleep spells, and charm spells.)  But there's a rule in Chainmail that I've somewhat glossed over in the past: "Paralyzed troops remain unmoving until touched by a friendly Elf, Hero-type, or Wizard".  This isn't a rule that's ever been explicitly brought forward into D&D, but I quite like it.  And I'm trying to bring forward every rule in Chainmail, as long as isn't contradicted or superseded by a rule in OD&D.  It will make elven PCs even more valuable and unique, and maybe serve to lessen the severe lethality that ghouls present to low-level characters.

(I've just remembered that this rule only specifically applies to paralysis from being touched by a wraith. It isn't mentioned in the ghoul entry, but I'd be inclined to say that it counts for both.  Besides, the issue of whether I'll have wraiths paralyse in addition to draining levels is still up in the air...)

MAGIC SWORDS

In OD&D, magic weapons are more effective in the hands of elves than anyone else.  Presumably this is because magic weapons in the stories D&D is drawing on, particularly Tolkien, are almost exclusively of elven make.

In OD&D, they get an extra +1 to damage with any magic weapon.  This is listed under the monster entry in Vol. 2: Monsters & Treasure, and is worded in such a way as to say that they get a flat +1, dealing 1d6+1 with a magic weapon.  There are different ways this could be interpreted, but I'm going with it as an overall bonus on top of whatever magic bonus the weapon already has. This ability is gone by the time AD&D rolls around.

Vol. 1: Men & Monsters says that elves "gain the advantages noted in the CHAINMAIL rules when fighting certain fantastic creatures".  Looking at Chainmail, we see that "elves armed with magical weapons add an extra die in normal combat".  I'd say that's superseded by the flat +1 damage bonus in OD&D.  Elves also get 3 extra dice against goblins, and 2 extra dice against orcs; so we can extrapolate that to say that against orcs and goblins they get a +2 and +3 bonus respectively.  (Kobolds are grouped with goblins in Chainmail, so the +3 bonus can encompass them as well.)

The rest of the Chainmail bonuses are a little harder to figure out.  They apply to the Fantasy Combat Table, which probably requires a bit of explanation for the uninitiated.  In Chainmail, there are three kinds of combat: Mass Combat, which is for clashes between large numbers of troops; Man-to-Man Melee, for one-on-one battles between normal men; and Fantastic Combat, for one-on-one battles between monsters and higher-level characters.  The latter two are pretty much replaced by the "roll a d20 to hit vs. AC" system in OD&D, but the distinction between "normal men" and "fantastic creatures" is still relevant in places.  In Chainmail, a magic sword allows a normal elf to fight on the Fantastic Combat table.

Fantastic Combat is pretty simple: you cross-reference the type of creature attacking with the type defending, and there's a number you need to roll above on 2d6 to score a kill.  (You can see why this was replaced in D&D: with an ever-expanding roster of monsters, the table would have become impossibly unwieldy.)  Since this system was replaced in OD&D, it would be easy for me to just ignore these bonuses for elves and assume that the magic weapon's inherent bonus is good enough.  But I still wanted to look at the numbers by comparing the fighting ability of a Hero and an Elf (both armed with magic swords).  I've given the Hero a +1 bonus to all scores required for wielding a magic sword, but assumed that the +1 is already baked into the elf numbers (as they can't even fight on the Fantastic Combat table without one).

	Hero	Super-Hero	Wizard	Wraith	Wight	Lycanthrope	Ogre	Balrog	Giant
Hero	6	9	10	10	5	7	8	10	10
Elf	9	11	10	8	6	9	7	12	10

Most of these numbers are in favor of the Hero as you'd expect: the Hero is a 4 HD fighter, while the Elf is presumably 1 HD.  I'm happy to leave these as is in the OD&D system, as a 1 HD elf will indeed have a harder time killing such monsters than a 4 HD fighter.  Two comparisons come out even: Wizards and Giants.  It's tempting to give elves a bonus here: in general, a Hero in OD&D has an effective +2 to hit over a 1 HD elf.  So I could go with a +2 bonus.  But then we have the cases where the elf is better at fighting certain monsters in the above comparison: Wraiths and Ogres.  If I'm giving a +2 bonus for those comparisons which came out even, should I give +3 against ogres?  And +4 against wraiths?  I would rather not.  Ultimately it's a bit of a mug's game to try to convert this stuff from Chainmail to OD&D, because they are measuring different things.  Chainmail uses one roll to determine the result of a fight, whereas D&D has many more variables: roll to hit, roll for damage, AC, hit points, etc.  Any mathematical conversion, assuming one is even possible, is well beyond me.

That said, I'd still like to preserve some of the flavour of the above results, so I'll go with the following:

• An extra +1 damage when wielding a magic weapon
• An extra +2 damage vs. orcs, ogres and trolls (trolls are grouped with ogres in Chainmail)
• An extra +3 damage vs. kobolds, goblins, wraiths, and spectres (as spectres inherit the qualities of wraiths in OD&D)

MULTI-CLASSING

This was the topic I actually wanted to write about, because it's the one that usually causes the most consternations when people discuss elves in OD&D.  As usual, this post got away with me, and I veered off onto various other tangents.  But as noted above, elves can advance as both fighting-men and magic-users.  They can't do this at the same time; instead, they choose what class they're playing for each adventure.  It seems pretty simple on the face of it, but there are a lot of ambiguities and unanswered questions.

The main thing that trips people up is that this works very differently than in later editions.  Once you get to AD&D, an elven fighter/magic-user operates in both classes simultaneously, having the abilities of both classes (including being fully armoured while casting spells!).  That's not how things work in OD&D.  You're either a fighter or a magic-user for the current adventure, and the only point of cross-over seems to be that you can cast spells while wearing magic armour.

It's interesting to go back and look at the pre-publication draft here.  That version of the elf is even more restrictive: you pick which class you want to play at the beginning, and then you play that class until you hit the maximum level.  Only then can you switch back to 1st level in the other class, and begin advancing.  I can't find anything that indicates an elf can switch back and forth, although it is said that they can use magic items such as wands as a fighter, and that they can utilize magic weapons and spells at the same time.

As for OD&D class-switching, there are many questions.  Can an elf cast spells in regular armour?  Can they use fighter weapons while acting as a magic-user?  What about hit points?  Saving throws?  Fighting ability? How is experience divided between the classes?  None of this is explained, leaving interpretation up to the referee.

Personally, I think the interpretation that sticks closest to the rules is to go with a complete split.  An elf is either playing as a fighter or a magic-user, and that's that.  They use the hit points, saving throws, fighting ability, etc. of the class they are playing as.  (And I'm going with hit points being re-rolled at the start of each game session.)  When playing as a magic-user, they can't wear armour unless it is magical, and they are restricted to daggers for weapons.  When playing as a fighter, they can't cast spells.  I'm tempted to allow them the use of magic items as in the draft, but that's not in OD&D, so I'm a little torn on it.  Experience points will be applied to the class being played for that session.

(It's just occurred to me that fighters using wands and magic-users wearing magic armour can be quite elegantly combined into one rule: the elf can always use the magic items allowable to both classes.  My only misgiving is that this would allow the elf access to spells and magic swords at the same time.  but it's something to think about.)

There are two things that poke holes in my interpretation.  The first is this line in the elf description: "Thus, they gain the benefits of both classes and may use both weaponry and spells".  It's a vague enough line that it can fit with my interpretation, or the AD&D version of multi-classing, or any number of other ideas a referee may have, so I'm okay with ignoring it.

The second thing is that elves, when encountered as monsters, have high-level leaders who seem to be operating simultaneously as fighters and magic-users.  It would be easy enough to just have them pick one class or the other, but that's not how it looks like it's meant to be played.  It would also be easy enough to hand-wave it, and say that monsters and PCs operate by different rules.  I'm not the biggest fan of that either.  It's true to a certain extent, but I prefer to level that playing field wherever possible.  If the players never question it I'm happy enough to ignore it, but if it comes up I'll tell them that elves can indeed operate in both classes simultaneously, but if they do so they earn no XP for that adventure.  This will give a big boost to those elves that have maxed out both classes, for sure, because they will be able to do this without penalty.

CONCLUSIONS

As I wrote above, this post got away from me.  I'd intended to just tackle the multi-classing issue, but ended up digging into a whole lot of ambiguities regarding elves, and reconciling their many abilities from various sources.  To sum up, elves as I'm running them in OD&D will have the following abilities:

• Switching between fighter and magic-user from adventure to adventure
• If it comes up, they can act as both while gaining no XP for that adventure
• Better at finding secret and hidden doors
• An extra +1 bonus to damage when using magic weapons
• Increase to +2 vs. orcs, ogres, and trolls
• Increase to +3 vs. kobolds, goblins, wraiths, and spectres
• Extra languages: elvish, orc, hobgoblin, gnoll
• Must be Lawful or Neutral in alignment; cannot be Chaotic
• Can move silently and with effective invisibility
• This invisibility is lost when they make an attack
• Can split-move and fire when on foot (but not on horseback)
• Immune to ghoul paralysis, and may remove paralysis from others
• This may also apply to characters paralysed by a wraith, but I haven't decided if a wraith's level-drain ability replaces its paralysis, or if they both apply
• Can see in the dark

OD&D Conundrums: Clerics and Edged Weapons

When devising a D&D campaign, one of the things I'm always compelled to rationalise is why clerics are restricted from using bladed weapons.  There are historical precedents in our world, but these may not necessarily apply in the average D&D campaign setting, especially when most of those settings are heavily polytheistic.  Let's take a look at some history, of the real world variety and also the D&D variety.  (You may find that I'm a bit more fluent with one than the other...)

The first thing to explore is whether clerics had that restriction at all in OD&D.  The text says "Clerics gain some of the advantages from both of the other two classes (Fighting-Men and Magic-Users) in that they have the use of magic armor and all non-edged magic weapons (no arrows!)".  If we're to take the text at its literal word, the restriction only applies to magical weapons.  But of course, OD&D is notoriously inexact, and necessitated a lot of clarification in AD&D and other later editions.  The other classes also give their weapon and armor allowances in terms of magic items, with the sole exception of the magic-user being restricted to daggers.  We know from AD&D that all of these were meant to apply to normal weapons as well, but readers in 1974 wouldn't have known that at all.

(There's an issue of The Strategic Review were Gary gives an angry rebuttal to a critical review of D&D. One of his retorts lambasts the reviewer for playing a spear-wielding cleric, but I dunno Gary, maybe you should have written it in the rules. Just putting it out there.)

Looking forward can give us clarification, but so can looking back now that we have access to the pre-publication draft of OD&D.  In that draft, it's explicit: "In any event, clerics may not used edged weapons (at the referee's discretion)."  The referee gets to choose, but the rule was intended from the start.  I do wonder sometimes what was left out on purpose, and what was left out by accident, and whether Gary could always remember what actually made it to print.  It would be easy to mix it all up in memory.  Regardless, clerics were always intended to be restricted to blunt weapons.

As for why this rule exists... It's all so clerics can't use magic swords.  Magic swords in OD&D are powerful.  They're all intelligent, and a good chunk of them have special powers.  They're intended as an equalising factor for fighters.  Magic-users and clerics can both cast spells, but fighters can't... until they find a good magic sword.  Give those swords to the spell-casters, and this intended balance is disrupted.  How effective this balance was is up for debate; I'd say not very effective at all, because a significant sore point in D&D's development has been the power gap between casters and non-casters.  But the intention was there from the start: casters don't get magic swords, so magic-users are restricted to daggers and clerics can't use edged weapons.

But where is this all coming from?  What was the historical or literary source?  Historically, the main influence would probably be the principle of sine effusione sanguinis, meaning "to shed no blood".  I'm having some trouble researching whether Catholic priests followed this principle, and if they did why, because every article that's popping up is related to D&D.  But it appears that the clergy did fight on occasion, especially in the Crusades, and they may have used maces and other blunt weapons to get around this principle.  "But Nathan," I hear you ask, "would not hitting a man upon the head with a flanged mace or morningstar cause them to bleed?"  To which I reply, of course it would. Profusely.  But people love to get around restrictions on a technicality or a flimsy justification, and priests are certainly no different there.

The main historical source that people point to is the Bayeux Tapestry, and it's depiction of Bishop Odo of Bayeux fighting with a mace.  There's also Bishop Turpin, depicted in The Song of Roland as fighting Saracens, also with a mace.  Turpin is a very likely source, as I believe that he's been specifically name-checked by Gary or one of his crew (although I can't find a source to corroborate that belief).

(This blog post does a much better job than me of laying out the historical precedents, if you're interested.)

Historical or not, clerics in D&D are famously restricted to blunt weapons, and in the interests of sticking close to D&D lore I'll be keeping that restriction as well.  Except, it's not a universal restriction, is it?  When you get into 2nd edition, and possibly even some of the specific pantheons of 1e, there are clerics allowed to use certain bladed weapons depending on their religious beliefs.  Which makes perfect sense, but means that whatever explanation I come up with, it has to be flexible enough to allow for some religions to ignore it.

In my 2nd edition campaign, circa 1997-2000, I explained it like this: there was a god of light (Solarin) and a god of darkness (Malak).  (Yeah, I know, the names were a bit on-the-nose, I was 18.)  These gods fought in the cosmos for a few centuries, until finally Malak stabbed Solarin in the side with his spear.  But this didn't kill him; instead, it sent him hurtling in orbit around the planet, with light spilling from the wound, and this was the origin of the sun.  So clerics of both sides avoided bladed weapons, one side in sympathy for their wounded sun god, the other to avoid their dark master's mistake.  Or some shit like that, it was 26 years ago, but it did the job, and stopped my players asking why they couldn't give their cleric a two-handed sword.  I'll need a different explanation now though.

The obvious one would be to go with the real-world inspiration, since I'm already basing the campaign's major religion on the Catholic church.  I could very easily say that the Church of Law forbids its clerics to shed blood, and they've justified their way around it by hefting dirty great flanged maces instead.  Then, when I later introduce some competing churches I could just have those that are offshoots of the Church of Law using that restriction.  The problem here is Anti-Clerics.  If it's a restriction of the Church of Law, why are these devil-worshippers and dark cultists also similarly restricted?  There's no reason they should be.  So that explanation is out.

I've been tossing up the idea of there having been some kind of primordial war between mortals and the gods in the ancient past, which ended with the gods retreating to the Outer Planes, and mortals ruling the Earth.  Maybe during that war, the gods decreed that "mortals may not take up blades against us", and mortals got around that decree by taking up the mace instead.  So the legends say, anyway...  Now it's less of a restriction and more of a tradition, although certain gods may enforce it more rigorously.  And while clerics may not be literally "taking up blades against the gods", they're always fighting for their deity, and against creatures of an opposed alignment.  And would not fighting a god's servants also be taking up blades against the gods?  I like this.  For some clerics it's a hard restriction, for others a tradition, and there are some who would have abandoned it long, long ago.  But for the Church of Law it's very much a going concern, and in the opening campaign area it will be for Chaotic clerics as well.

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.

Where I've Been and Where I'm Going

 So, uhhhhh, anyone still there?  Hello?

Yes, I am aware that it's been a long time.  About three years by my calculations, which makes it very unlikely that anyone who used to read this blog still checks in.  That's not even taking into account the general shift of online content from the written word to video; I'm guessing blogs are somewhat deader these days than they used to be, but I still read and enjoy a bunch of 'em, and I still think it's where the best online content for older editions of D&D can be found.  Basically, I like to write and I don't have the discipline or work ethic to transition this stuff over to Youtube, so for the moment I'm back at it.

As for where I've been, let's just say it's been a tough few years.  Separated from my wife, who I'd been with for nearly 20 years. Met someone else who passed away quite suddenly just after we moved in together.  Met the love of my life (so far) while I was still messed up from that, and lost her as well...  Life has been kicking me in the balls a lot lately.  It's what life does, but these last few years have been harder than most.  I have a great son, a supportive family, a job in a library that I love, and awesome friends who I live with and I know will always have my back, so things aren't all bad.  But needless to say, gaming and blogging have taken a back seat to all of that.

Of course I've still been following developments with the game, reading blogs, watching videos, making plans.  I'm not particularly enthused by anything coming from Wizards of the Coast, although I am quite keen to dig into The Making of Original D&D: 1970-1977; that kind of historical material is pretty much the only way they'll pry any money out of me.  I've been watching the various scandals and RPG-related kerfuffles with wry amusement, but as usual I've kept my head down and stayed out of these things, except to talk about them with mates in real life.  All in all, I'm happy enough to have jumped off the new edition train as of 3rd edition.  I'd happily play later editions, but I can't see myself running them or buying the books.  I don't even want to run 3rd any more if I'm being honest.

It's all a moot point, because I haven't been running anything.  I have vague plans to do a quick wrap-up of my campaign that's been running since 1998, having transitioned from 2e to 3e.  But that involves rounding up a number of specific people, one of whom I suspect has very little interest in playing again.  But, if I can convince him to squeeze in 3 to 6 sessions for old times sake... It would be nice to tie off that loose end, and then maybe my other friends will stop pestering me for the answers to various long-standing questions...

Most of my efforts have been going into the planning stages for my next campaign and world, the one that I would like to run for the rest of my life.  I began this blog many years ago talking about "The Ultimate Sandbox", my plan to run a mega-setting that incorporates everything ever officially published for D&D into a kind of huge multiversal sprawl, where I would begin with Greyhawk and OD&D and gradually layer in rules and elements as they're introduced in various supplements.  Youthful hubris, basically, and indicative of my habit for taking on tasks too big to practically accomplish within a single lifetime.  I have more modest goals now, although along some similar lines.

The biggest difference with where I'm going is that I'm not planning on using any official settings .  I may include some smaller setting elements, such as cities and smaller wilderness areas.  I definitely want to include modules and adventures; my plan is to design a world where I can incorporate as much official D&D material as possible, but my own personal spin and a lot of original material as well.  I don't have much interest in running games set in Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms any more, but I do have an interest in running a lot of the old classic modules, because we didn't do a lot of that when I was younger. (Tomb of Horrors, Ravenloft, Dungeonland, a little bit of Night Below... I think that's about all we had access to.)

So, inspired by Alexis of The Tao of D&D, who uses the real world for his campaign, I've decided to use Australia as my geographical basis.  I could bang out yet another fantasy map, drawing little mountains and trees and coastlines, and I'd enjoy the hell out of doing it... but I like the idea of using the real world and having geography and weather patterns that makes some vague sort of sense.  I'll probably flip it on both axes, so that north becomes south and east becomes west; there are various cliches I still want to play into, such as the "frozen north".  Not that Australia has much of a frozen north (more rain-soaked and windy...), but there's a lot of D&D and other fantasy material that assumes a northern hemisphere, and I do like to play into the tropes where possible.

I'll probably center play in Victoria to start, as that's the region I've lived my whole life.  That's where I'd cluster the adventures and material with an OD&D, BX, BECMI or 1st edition flavour.  Areas further out from that would have more of a 2e, 3e, 5e, or (god forbid) 4e flavour.  (Note: flavour, not rules.)  That would cover most generic fantasy adventures, those set in Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Mystara, etc.  Your meat and potatoes D&D.  I have this idea to make the setting more like Dark Sun the closer you get to the country's "dead heart"; maybe instead of Uluru there's a weird monolithic thing there that warps magic and gives people psionic powers.  It would let me play with some D&D-as-Mad-Max vibes, which could be cool.  Mystara has a Hollow World, so that's probably a given.  Spelljammer, Ravenloft, and Planescape all exist as their own things, separate from the game world, so they're fairly easy.  Anything tropical probably goes in Queensland, and anything too culturally non-Western I'd shunt off into other worlds or continents, or maybe Western Australia.  For Eberron material, with its advanced magic-as-technology civilisation, I'm thinking that my world got to that level of advancement at some point in the past, before it was all destroyed in a big apocalypse (a good old post-apocalypse being the catch-all explanation for all sorts of D&D assumptions).  Maybe there's a "bottle city of Kandor" situation, where a pocket of that civilisation exists trapped somewhere, and maybe the PCs can get in but the inhabitants can't get out.  

It's definitely going to be a hodge-podge setting, and may suffer for that, but I do enjoy fitting those kinds of disparate elements together.  I'm also thinking of making it a part of the world's ancient backstory.  If the world is a hodge-podge of disparate D&D setting elements... why not lean into that?  Maybe there was some sort of cataclysmic, final war across all of creation, realities crashing into each other like in Jonathan Hickman's Marvel crossover Secret War.  And just as in that story, the final surviving world was a kind of smashed together conglomerate of everything that had gone before.  (Well, maybe not the final world; I'll still need places to sail Spelljammers to, as well as other planes and such... But close to it.)  I don't plan for it to be as patchwork as Doom's Battleworld from that story; many thousands of years will have passed since the creation to smooth things out.  And it may not be something the players ever know.  But I like it as an explanation for why my world is going to have all sorts of elements from different settings.

As for rules, I still plan on starting with OD&D, and gradually bringing in new elements and changing rules until I'm running AD&D 1st edition, or something resembling it.  I have some thoughts on how I can explain the changing rules, and also how I can give my players some agency in changing rules they may not like.  But I might tackle that in a future post.  The one aspect of the rules that I'm very keen on exploring is the use of 1:1 time.  As we all know, YOU CAN NOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT etc. etc. take a bow, Gary. I've become kind of fascinated with what the guys over at the BrOSR have been doing with the game (a journey that started when I discovered Jeffro Johnson's blog).  Say what you will about their online personas (personally I find them quite funny), but they're doing things with the game that nobody else online was talking about before them.  I've no doubt other folks have been out there running things similarly for decades, but this is the first time I've seen it discussed, and it's clarified so many rules from AD&D that I always found mystifying.  So I want to try to run an open table, where campaign time runs at 1 real world day per game day, and the game is "always on" (i.e. players who want to will be doing downtime stuff between sessions).  I'm not sure how my players will like it; before this we've only really done the adventure path style of gaming, so they won't be used to it.  But I'm very jazzed to try it out and see what effect it has on how the game runs.

As for what I had been doing with the blog... I don't plan on continuing with the historical, product-by-product analysis.  Going back over that stuff, I find my understanding of OD&D and its supplements woefully inadequate, and I just want to scrap it all and start all over again.  I would do it better.  But I'm older now, and I don't have that kind of time.  Well, I do, but I want to use it more wisely, in developing my world and playing the game.  I've been going through OD&D again to figure out how I'm going to interpret various rules, and I'll no doubt tackle that as I go.

I have more to write about (three years of build-up!), but it's 4am here in the Antipodes as I type this, and I'm meeting my son for lunch for his 16th birthday tomorrow.  We might even talk some D&D (he's a very casual 5e player).  Responsibility dictates that it's time to polish this up, send it out, and get some sleep.  I don't know if anyone will read it, but writing it's been good for me.  I want to play and run more D&D, and while thinking and planning is great, there's nothing quite like getting those ideas out of your head, even in a scattershot manner like this.  It's good to be back.

Recaps & Roundups: Monster & Treasure Assortment Set Two - Levels Four-Six

Around this time in late 1977 the second Monster & Treasure Assortment was released.  (Note that this date is very approximate; I've used a number of sources to try to pinpoint release dates, but there are a bunch of products that just don't have that info out there.)  As with the first installment (which I covered here), it presents a number of pre-prepared encounters and treasures to help the DM stock their dungeons more quickly.

The instruction text at the beginning is exactly reproduced from Set One, including the example that uses introductory monsters from the first set.  As with the previous product, each dungeon level covered (in this case levels 4 to 6) has a list of 100 encounters and 100 treasures.  Most of them are standard fare, but there are a number of monsters that are appearing here for the first time ever.  I'll list them below.

• Black Widow Spiders: These spiders have hit points in the teens, so I guess they'd be around the 3-4 Hit Die mark. All of the encounters with these spiders give them a poison attack, but only some of them list a web attack.
• Crab Spiders: They average around 10 hp, so they probably have 2 or 3 HD. They're listed with a poison attack.
• Giant Driver Ants: Giant ants are a D&D staple, but I haven't seen driver ants given stats before.  They're a species of ant native to central and east Africa, but there's nothing about them that different statistically from regular giant ants.
• Giant Gecko Lizards: Giant lizards with no specific special abilities, and hit points in the high teens.
• Tiger Beetles: Giant beetles with no special abilities, and hit points in the low 20s.
• Living Statue, Crystal: Living statues were mentioned passing in the OD&D booklets, but this is the first time they are getting stats.  The crystal statue has hit points in the mid-low teens, and no special abilities.  They won't be brought forward into AD&D, but they will be included in the Basic D&D line.
• Giant Draco Lizard: Giant lizards with around 20 hit points and no special abilities.
• Giant Lizard, Horned Chameleon: Giant lizards with hit points between 20-30.  They have a "tongue" attack listed as a special ability, which I assume means they grapple opponents with their tongue and drag them into their mouth.
• Tarantella: A type of giant spider with hit points ranging from the mid-teens up to 30. They also have a "dance fever" attack listed.  This monster will appear in the Basic D&D line, where its bite causes the victim to dance uncontrollably.
• Living Statue, Rock: This statue has around 30 hit points, and may squirt magma on a hit, dealing 2-12 damage.
• Giant Lizard, Tuatara: A giant lizard with around 40 hit points and no special abilities.
• Caecilia: A type of giant worm that will swallow opponents whole on an attack roll of 19 or 20.
• Oil Beetles: Giant beetles that can make a painful oil attack that blisters opponents, giving them a -2 attack penalty for 24 hours.

Most of that list above will go on to appear in the Basic and Expert boxed sets written by Tom Moldvay and Dave Cook, while being excluded from AD&D.  The Monster & Treasure Assortments were reportedly put together by Ernie Gygax, so it's possible he created these monsters or was inspired to include them based on earlier games.  Wherever they came from, it's odd that they never made the jump to AD&D.  The AD&D Monster Manual would have been written around the same time as this product, so perhaps these monsters hadn't been created by the time it was finished.

Also of note is that the Monster and Treasure Assortments include a line for each monster showing what saving throw they use.  OD&D is fairly nebulous on the matter, just telling you to use the appropriate class and level equivalent to the monster's Hit Dice.  This is, I believe, the first product that gives concrete information on monster saving throws.

Finally, I want to mention the entry for number appearing.  As with saving throws, OD&D doesn't really tell you how many monsters should be encountered in a dungeon; the Number Appearing entry in that version of the game is meant to apply to wilderness encounters.  The Monster & Treasure Assortment could be used as a guide to determine the proper number to be encountered.  Take Orcs, for instance.  In OD&D, they will be encountered by the hundreds, at least in the wilderness.  In the Assortment, they are encountered as follows: 2-5 on level 1; 3-12 on level 2; 4-24 on level 3; 10-40 on level 4; not encountered after that.  There's no pattern to follow, unfortunately, but it's the closest that the original game ever gets to providing guidance on the matter.

I also just noticed that the blurb on the back of the product mentions some products that were never released.  Apparently TSR planned a fourth set of dungeon geomorphs (ruins), another set of outdoor geomorphs (castle/fortress), and a set of geomorphs for use with miniature figures.  None of these ever saw the light of day.  I'd assume this is because the other geomorphs didn't sell all that well, but I honestly don't know.

I'll leave you with this image from Set Two, which shows some poor bastard being eaten by an Umber Hulk.  My favourite thing about early D&D art is its dedication to showing adventurers meeting grisly fates.  It's definitely something that the more modern art is lacking.

Recaps & Roundups: White Dwarf #3

Cover by Alan Hunter

White Dwarf #3 is cover-dated October/November 1977.  Whether that's an accurate guide to when it was released is a mystery to me, but without anything else to go on I'm covering it with other products from October.

"Solo Dungeon Mapping" by Roger Moores: This article gives a method for creating a map for solo D&D, which involves having a bunch of premade smaller maps and rolling dice randomly to determine where you end up when you transition from one map to another.  It looks workable, although I don't think it's all that well explained.  Perhaps it would be more efficient in play than rolling on random tables, but there's a lot of prep work involved before you can start.

"Competitive D&D" by Fred Hemmings: Last issue, Hemmings gave the tournament setup: the surviving descendants of the Underhill family have been summoned to compete for the treasure in the dungeons beneath the mansion of their deceased uncle.  This time around Hemmings details the first dungeon level of what is called Pandora's Maze. It's an almost entirely linear affair, with puzzles that very much rely on the player's knowledge of mythology and pop culture.

Take, for example, the following verse:

"Treading on across the floor,

Remember well the leading knave,

Of a band, two score, no more,

Strike the rock with a stave!"

The answer to this is to strike the floor with a staff while shouting "Open Sesame".  The lines about the "leading knave" and "a band, two score" refer to Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, which is the clue to the correct password, but what happens if your players don't know that story, or don't get the reference?  Getting this right is necessary to open a door in the first room of the dungeon, so the entire adventure hinges on it.  I could very easily see a party getting stuck at this first hurdle.

Another room has riddles that make reference to Sesame Street, Jesus, and the Wizard of Oz; there's no regard for verisimilitude here.  It's very much a dungeon to challenge the player rather than the character, but it does assume a cultural knowledge that may only be appropriate to a certain time and place.  There are references to things I have absolutely no idea about, such as a riddle requiring knowledge of the Condor cigar brand, or the poem "Come Into the Garden Maude" by Lord Tennyson.  (I had to Google these.)  Leaving aside the question of what these references are doing in a D&D world, you just can't expect players to know this stuff.  (Although maybe I'm wrong, and every kid in 1970s Britain would have all of this as common knowledge.  Regardless, it would be almost impossible to run as-written today.)

The reward at the heart of the dungeon level is a machine that can produce any magic item, at the price of having to fight a monster of commensurate power, and being transported to a lower dungeon level.  Talk about your potential game-breakers!  It would only take a few turns of that dial before a party would become strong enough to defeat just about any monster in the books, unless the DM decided to resort to gods and the like.  And being taken to a lower dungeon level would be meaningless when you could just turn the dial to some item with teleportation powers and use it to escape.

"News": There are rumblings about the D&D Basic Set (which I've already covered in this series), as well as the upcoming Monster Manual.  Of the other news, the publication of Traveller is probably the most significant to gaming.  In terms of the wider world, we get our first mention of Star Wars, and that's about as significant as it gets.

"The Monstermark System" by Don Turnbull: Turnbull's meticulous dissection of the relative deadliness of monsters continues.  The first two articles were used to rank the monsters, and this article puts that ranking to a practical use.

The first thing Turnbull does is provide a new table for determining the level of monster encountered by dungeon level.  In OD&D monsters were split into six levels of difficulty, whereas this system splits them into twelve.  I can't really comment on the effectiveness of what Turnbull's done, but it would be interesting to see which results in better play: Turnbull's rigorous yet flawed mathematical system, or Gygax's instincts based on years of play.  It's probably all subjective in the end.

Following that Turnbull goes on to talk about experience rewards, and providing a way to use the Monstermark System to calculate them. He's very much a proponent of the idea that XP should be relative; a 4th level PC fighting a level 1 monster should earn less XP than a 2nd level PC doing the same, at least according to him.  I'm ambivalent to the idea.  Sometimes I think it sounds great, but then I wonder what the point of it is when the amount of XP needed to level goes up significantly each time.  I guess it incentivizes the players to seek out genuine danger rather than playing it safe; I might be talking myself into liking the idea.

The third use Turnbull comes up with for his system is to determine the numbers in a group of wandering monsters.  He uses a ratio of the average hit points of the party over the Monstermark Rating.  Doing so, he calculates that a group of 7 Bugbears would slaughter a party of 10 PCs between 1st and 5th level.  This sounds patently wrong to me, and Turnbull acknowledges that his system doesn't factor in spells, magic items, and other special abilities of the PCs.  As I said above it's a flawed system, but I'm not sure I disagree with his findings that 3 Bugbears would be a reasonable random encounter.  I generally think wandering monsters should be a nuisance rather than a party killer, something that drains resources rather than threatening their existence (unless they're already weakened).  I also disagree with scaling encounter difficulty based on party strength; I can just about see doing it based on party size, with the idea that a larger party would make more noise and attract more monsters, but level and hit points are a much more intangible thing in the game world.  I get the desire to tailor the game to your players, but I prefer the game world to be more static than that; the players should be learning and reacting to the world, not the other way around.

"Open Box": Don Turnbull gives some fair but ultimately positive reviews to various Judges Guild products (the Ready Ref Sheets, Judges Shield, TAC Cards, Tegel Manor, City State of the Invincible Overlord, Thunderhold, Character Chronicle Cards and First Fantasy Campaign).  Mike Westhead reviews Citadel, a two-player game where one player controls heroes searching a dungeon for a talisman, and the other lays monsters and traps in their path.  Fred Hemmings reviews Fourth Dimension, which sounds kind of like a chess game where the players control warriors, rangers, guardians and Time Lords.  Martin Easterbrook reviews Battle of the Five Armies from TSR, the unlicensed wargame depicting the climactic battle from The Hobbit that drew the ire of the Tolkien Estate.  This is a game I've never seen, and am not likely to, but it seems to have most of the good and bad points of TSR products of the day: good production values, but poor rules clarity.

"D&D Campaigns: Part 1 - Philosophy (cont.)" by Lewis Pulsipher: This article kicks off with a quote that exactly sums up my approach to running a game: "the referee should not make up anything important after an adventure has begun".  Basically, the ref should have as much worked out beforehand as possible, and changes to the rules and the dungeon shouldn't be made during play.  Of course, adding unestablished details as required will always be necessary, but if my notes say something before I start playing, that's how I roll it.

Pulsipher goes on to give all sorts of good advice, touching on such topics as the logical determination of monster actions, morale, and maintaining a good relationship between the players and the DM.  He lays out the desirable attributes of a campaign as follows: "simplicity, rapidity of play whenever this doesn't reduce skill, participation by all the players, a sense of control by the players of their own fate, and believability".  It's a pretty hard list to argue with.  When Pulsipher refers to "skill", he's talking about whether the decisions of the players can affect their survival.  He has a long section on how much time to allow players to make decisions, and whether they should be able to change their mind after stating an action.  Pulsipher errs on the side of giving the players plenty of time, and letting them change their minds, and I agree with him.  His argument is that the players shouldn't be expected to display the rapid-fire decision-making of their characters, and that imposing strict time limits just leads to more player death.  Again, I find that it's all good advice (though I am inclined to hurry players along when their hesitation is holding up the game to a frustrating degree).

He has a section on the use of detection spells, which he says are vital to good play and vital to increasing the survivability of players.  I've honestly never had players that made extensive use of them, but then again I've never played the kind of exploration-centric dungeon-crawl that was prevalent at the time.

The article finishes with a section on alignment, and identifies Moorcock as the source of the OD&D alignment system.  His own system has a number of actions that are restricted by alignment, including which other alignments characters are allowed to attack. He finishes with a bit about the five-point system introduced by Gary Gygax in recent issues of The Dragon, and rather presciently declares that the introduction of such a system would require a complete overhaul of the game.

"Colouring Conan's Thews" by Eddie Jones: This is an introductory article about painting miniatures that gets into specifics about what paints and brushes to use.  I've never had the patience to get good at painting figures, so this isn't of much interest. Besides, most of the brands mentioned are probably defunct by now, and the prices are certainly no longer accurate.

"The Assassin" by John Rothwell: This article gives rules for using the Assassin class introduced in Supplement II: Blackmoor as a player character.  To be honest, a lot of this is just reproduced from Blackmoor, where the class was already intended for use as a PC, so I'm not sure what the purpose is here beyond adding some guidelines about using armour as part of a disguise, and the needless restriction that assassins can't be female.

"The Loremaster of Avallon: Part III" by Andy Holt: Holt continues with his own house rules, this time getting into combat.  I say house rules, but really it's an entirely new system that uses cards, with the attacker laying out cards to attack and the defender using their own cards to parry.  There are more details to come next issue, so it's impossible to evaluate at present (and pretty difficult to do so anyway, without actually seeing it in practice).  Regardless, I'm always leery of RPG combat systems that don't use dice.

"New Magic Rooms" by Ian Waugh: Waugh details two special rooms.  The first, a "cloning room", splits any neutral character in two, with one lawful clone and one chaotic clone. Both will fight to the death.  (I'm assuming he nicked this from the Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within".) The second, a "clumsy room", reduces the Dexterity of any character inside by 75%.  It also contains a purse containing gold that makes the bearer similarly clumsy for as long as they carry it.

"Letters": Jennell Jaquays writes to praise the Monstermark System, and express her annoyance that her adventure "Merlin's Garden" was referenced in the "Competitive D&D" article without appropriate credit.  Lewis Pulsipher suggests some rules changes to the Lankhmar wargame.  Nigel Galletty provides Monstermark ratings for the Balrog, which he says Don Turnbull missed (not entirely accurate, as he covered the Type VI Demon).  And Patrick Martin complains that there aren't any miniatures portraying characters with backpacks, poles, lanterns, and other adventuring gear.