The Editioning, Weeks Seven and Eight, OD&D

GM prep is play, drawing shitty maps is play, and seeing your players react when they start flying like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, because of something you did, that’s the really good sort of play and you won’t feel half as good about it if some robot came up with it.

iPod Future

MIB HQ - This is iPod Future, all white and ambient lighting.
MIB HQ

I think I first heard this term on one of the Worlds Beyond Number Patreon podcasts. Lou Wilson was taking about his sci-fi influences. The main thrust of it was his fascination with Men in Black. There were a lot of reasons for this but one of them was the design of the MIB HQ. If you remember, dear reader, it was mostly a smooth, white plastic look, with elements of chrome. The WBN crew described it as an “iPod future” design. I don’t know if they originated the term but it was so evocative that I immediately stole the concept for the design of the dungeon in my OD&D game. Well, parts of it anyway. Level 1 was an old ruined wizard’s tower exposed to the elements (or , at least, that’s what it was supposed to look like to any nosey adventuring types,) Level 2 was basically a locker-room/ante-chamber designed to scare off any potential burglars/curious cats. That level was constructed almost entirely of untreated concrete, rather than iPod material since it was a transitionary area. From Level 3 down to Level 5, its iPod as all get out. I even gave the levels and many of the rooms rounded corners, as you can see from the maps below.

Map of Level 3 of my dungeon. It in the chape of an airpod case turned on its side.
Level 3: Crystalline Experimentation
Level 4 of my dungeon. it is in the sahpe of an airpod case.
Level 4: Flight Practice

Why focus on such a design choice? Well, apart from the point that it sets it apart from other, more fantasy-based dungeons, and unifies the whole thing with a particular aesthetic, which works to emphasise a theme, I found it useful for descriptive purposes. I was able to describe these levels as being clad in some smooth, white, slightly translucent material that the characters could not identify, but for the benefit of the players, when I said the words, “iPod future,” they immediately got it. I even referenced the MIB HQ, which helped even more. I am not interested in being coy and mysterious with my players when it comes to this sort of thing. I want them to be on my wavelength. I enjoy sharing the vibe I’m going for with them.

Crystal Clear

Map of Level 3 of my dungeon. It in the chape of an airpod case turned on its side.
Level 3: Crystalline Experimentation

After a short rest in the secret room on level 2, the party decided to tackle the evil in the northwest of the level. They gathered outside a door at the end of the hall. It was not trapped but it would not open easily. They used tools to open it after hearing rustles and squawks from beyond. Once they got it open they were immediately confronted by an angry cockatrice protected some eggs in its filthy nest. Despite the danger of being petrified they triumphed easily, by setting fire to its nest and then cutting its head off. This encounter, was, undoubtedly, underpowered for this party. They are all levels 4 or 5 at this point, so a single 5 HD monster was not going to pose a huge problem for them. However, there was always a danger of instant death. If the cockatrice got a single hit in, and the PC failed their save, they were going to be petrified. That would have been the end for that character. And when the players know that, they still take it seriously. Anyway, They found a bounty of treasure amidst the bones in the room, and took the cockatrice talons as a prize. Abiss then crept through the earthen tunnel on one side of the room. It led out to a ledge in the sea cliff where she was mercilessly battered by the raging storm. She went back inside. As I mentioned on my first OD&D post, if they had wanted to, they could have climbed down to the surface of the sea below from this ledge. It might even have been a shortcut to Level 6. But they would have had a difficult climb, especially as there was a storm blowing outside. Also, they did not know that there was a level below the waves. That’s on me. I think it might have been fun to hint at a submarine area and tempt them to take that plunge.

Instead, the party took the stairs down to the next level. There, they found a large open space. This is where the iPod future aesthetic began. There was a soft glow coming from nowhere and everywhere. Dotted around the chamber they discovered a number of tall, glass cylinders filled with creatures. They examined one with a goblin inside. As they did, they were bothered by a swarm of crystallised insects. The insects poisoned Siward, the Fighting Man and Ilaina, the Magic User, reducing a random ability score by one, before Tadhg, the Cleric did his fire breathing trick again, decimating the swarm in one go.

The swarm came along because of a roll on my Random Encounter table for this level. This is it!

  1. 1d6 Crystal Security Drones phase out of the floor: i) Spider Configuration (Paralysis) ii) Bat Configuration (CON damage) iii) Cat Configuration (DEX damage) iv) Humanoid Configuration (Save v Stone or crystallise body part on touch)
  2. Escaped insect swarm: Save v Poison or take 1 point of random ability score damage
  3. Information Assistant in the form of a hardlight hologram of a crystalline humanoid:
    • If they interact with it, it will speak common to them asking for credentials
    • Can explain the purpose of this level as a lab
    • Expresses the requirement to continue the experiments for the makers
  4. Specimen tube trap: Randomly select a party member. They must save v Death Ray or become trapped in a stasis tube that drops from the ceiling. Controls in Room 15 to release.
  5. Stasis Malfunction:
    • 1-2 – Creature escapes from Room 10
    • 3 – Creature escapes from Room 11
    • 4 – Creature escapes from Room 12
    • 5 – Creature escapes from Room 13
    • 6 – Creature escapes from Room 17
  6. Nothing happens

You’ll notice the list of escapees on the roll of a 5 there. Each of those rooms is a stasis chamber. They contain a selection of large, dangerous creatures, from a chimera to a hill giant, in various stages of crystallisation. The players were lucky that they didn’t roll that one. Instead, while they were on this level, they rolled the insect swarm twice, the stasis cylinder trap once, and the information assistant once. The cylinder trapped one of their dwarf companions, who was rendered inert until they beat the shit out of the tube, releasing him along with some stasis gas.

Now, the information assistant is the closest thing to a helpful NPC in this dungeon. It could, potentially, provide a lot of information about the nature of the place, its purpose and even how to work its systems. But, they hadn’t got any credentials when it appeared so there was only so much help it would provide. The one that appeared to them identified Ilaina, dressed in one of the bio-hazard suits they’d found in the lockers on level 2, as one of the “makers” and addressed her as such. They learned from this assistant that all other makers were in stasis in the the “ship” below. It told Ilaina to use the controls in room 15 if she needed to do anything on this level. Ilaina then dismissed the Information Assistant while one of the hirelings was sent upstairs to retrieve the other two bio-hazard suits that they had left there. When they searched the suits, they found a pair of crystals they surmised might act as credentials.

They figured out they needed to place a selection of gems into indentations in the outer wall of room 15 to enter. Rather than making this a true puzzle where they would have to guess the correct combination of gems, I asked for a luck roll, which they succeeded on first time round. Ilaina and Abbiss entered the room and experimented while the others dealt with the second swarm of crystalline flies outside the door. I told them that control pillars rose from the floor as if by magic when they moved close to them and descended again when they moved away. Eventually, Abbiss, with her shorter stature, noticed that each of the pillars bore a mark, or rune, similar to the ones they had seen in the hologram upstairs. She found one that simply bore a down arrow, just like the door they had found on the north-east wall of this level. She removed the gems from it and they went to investigate. They found a now operational elevator there. They all hopped on and went down to Level 4.

Getting High

Level 4 of my dungeon. it is in the sahpe of an airpod case.
Level 4: Flight Practice

I had fun coming up with the ideas for this level. I had always planned to have a level of the dungeon where one had to fly to achieve anything. I basically made this entire thing up in the last hour before the session on Friday night though, because of procrastination.

It looked similar to the previous level, except the ceilings were 20ft to 50ft high, and there was a 50ft drop down to the water in area 2. The big crystal in the centre of the space allowed anyone who touched it to fly, but did not imbue them with the ability to do so with any sort of finesse. Only Abbiss, the halfling thief, dared to touch it, and only after she had figured out what the plaque on the crystal said: Flight Practice Crystal. I told Abbiss that she was floating upwards and asked her to decide which way she wanted to go. Then I asked her to roll 1d6. On the roll of 1 or 2 she would go the direction she wanted to, otherwise, she would have to roll another d6 on this table, which would determine the actual way she flew:

  1. Up
  2. Down
  3. Left
  4. Right
  5. Forwards
  6. Backwards

After a couple of dangerous experiments, they decided to tether her so she could be dragged around through the air like a bunch of balloons. They also discovered the effect only lasted about one dungeon turn. As they were testing this out, one of the crystalline gargoyles atop the ledge in the north part of the room came to life and attacked. This encounter came from the random encounter table for this level:

  1. 1d6 Crystal Security Drones phase out of the floor: i) Bat Configuration (CON damage) ii) Giant Wasp Configuration (Poison damage) iii) Eagle Configuration (Bleed on hit until healed) iv) Flying Squirrel Configuration
  2. Escaped insect swarm: Save v Poison or take 1 point of random ability score damage
  3. Information Assistant in the form of a hardlight hologram of a crystalline humanoid:
    • If they interact with it, it will speak common to them asking for credentials
    • Can explain the purpose of this level as an area to practice flight and descend to the lower level
    • Explains the nature of the challenges on this level and the importance that flight will have for the makers in the future
  4. 1d3 Crystalline Gargoyles on 1a come alive
  5. A splash comes from the water below
  6. Nothing happens

The splash referred to in no. 5 is from the surface of the water fifty foot below the room in area 2 on the maps. It has the purplish tint that other contaminated water they encountered so far had, and swarms of insects above it. It is impossible for the PCs to see from here but just above the surface of the water below, there is an opening that would allow them to get to Level 5.

Meanwhile, there are a series of challenges on this level. For instance, flying to the top of 1b, a tall pillar, and touching it, would reward the flyer with a gem. The other pillar, 1c, has a spiral pattern on it. If the flyer can manage to fly around it in a spiral, they will be rewarded similarly. Meanwhile in the tall section of the level, area 3, they can fly 50 ft up to a couple of platforms. These are more like traps, that, if the flyer is not fast enough, will hurt or kill them through the use of crystalline spikes or abrupt drops.

Conclusion

This is pretty much where we left off with the last session. They haven’t figured out where to go from here and they are not done experimenting on the level just yet.

I can’t quite express exactly how much I have enjoyed coming up with the content, the encounter tables, the traps, the challenges and the overall look and theme of this dungeon. I really should do it more often. And I would encourage other GMs to do the same. Your maps don’t have to look professional, you don’t even have to write everything down, you just have to know how it works.

It feels like a radical act of creativity in these times when you can buy a bundle of maps and tables for a fantasy RPG in their hundreds and thousands, and other people in the space are using AI to come up with scenarios, NPCs, even campaigns. The creation is play too. GM prep is play, drawing shitty maps is play, and seeing your players react when they start flying like Charlie in the Chocolate Factory, because of something you did, that’s the really good sort of play and you won’t feel half as good about it if some robot came up with it.

Blades in the Dark, Thoughts

Set-up

I made quite a big deal, last year, about the process of choosing an RPG to play. For months, I perused books and created characters to get a feel for a selection of games. Most of these games I would put squarely in the story game or, at least, narratively focused category. Blades in the Dark beat out Triangle Agency, Slugblaster, Wildsea and Deathmatch Island to name a few.

Once I had decided on Blades, I wrote a bunch of posts relating to the advice presented in Blades and its recent expansion, Deep Cuts. Reading the books and absorbing the advice helped to boost my enthusiasm for it.

We got into Blades well. We had a regular game every three weeks and we found a natural rhythm of having a score session followed by a downtime session. I had always planned to have only six sessions in our Season 1 of the game. This seemed like a reasonable amount of time for all of us to get a good taste for the game, the setting, the system, the characters and the crew.

We had our sixth session last week, so I thought I would take this opportunity to gather my thoughts, lay them out and examine them.

Up-sides

The scores; it’s what it’s all about. Even in the instances where I had no time to prepare and found myself recycling old ideas, we got really into the scores. The players seemed to enjoy the freedom of the narrative-first style that allowed them to fully describe an entire action scene rather than just rolling a die to see if they hit a guy. This bred inventiveness both in-score and out so that they pushed the envelope of what was possible even during downtime.

I enjoyed them because I found I had a curious amount of control over the proceedings. If we had a full session for the score, it was easy and fun to allow the PCs as much leeway and time to describe and indulge in their scenes. Conversely, if time was against us, I was able to push things to a conclusion with the flick of a narrative switch. I used clocks in every score, which will be no surprise to anyone, but, for me, it was remarkable. Looking back, I feel like I could have utilised them more often and to better effect. Almost every score involved just one clock representing the PCs goal and one representing the potential negative consequences. Especially in the final score, it would have been fun to introduce other clocks representing minor peripheral goals or dangers as well, but I didn’t think of it at the time so it didn’t happen. But, what I’m saying is that I like the use of clocks to track eventualities and possibilities. They are easy for everyone to understand and impress on all players the urgencies and exigencies of their situations.

Secondly, I loved the player-characters. The playbooks are iconic and the players loved to lean into them in fun and notable ways. I think the players all became attached to their characters in short order, which was essential since we had only six sessions. The crew became almost a character of its own, especially with its reliable cohort of thugs. I liked that the crew had a sense of ambition. They wanted to become the number one gang in Crow’s Foot, and by the end of the season, they had made significant headway towards that goal, defeating the Red Sashes in a war and capturing their leader. But they also each had their own motivations, religious or “scientific” or naval(?) I think the game itself has something to do with that, with stress and heat and reputation all conspiring to drive them in certain directions. But, I also know that my incredible group of players would build memorable characters no matter the influence of a ruleset so I don’t want to overstate that.

Thirdly, the setting. Duskwall is such an evocative setting. The eternal darkness, the ghostly hauntings, the leviathans and the empire. The nobility, the workers, the weird science and the gangs. It is rich and deep and you would be hard-pressed to fail to come up with interesting things to do in it. But it is not oppressive in its richness. We never felt as though we had to stick to some Akorosi canon. There is a freedom to create parts of the world that you would never get in, for instance, a published D&D setting. But, on the other hand, the books provide a wonderful assortment of factions, places, NPCs and items that can come in handy when you need something specific or general in a pinch. I was rarely left scrabbling for a needed detail. There was always something close to hand.

Up-hill Climb

Light shines down from above on a scoundrel running acorss the rooftops of Doskvol
Light shines down from above on a scoundrel running across the rooftops of Doskvol

But we had some significant issues in our six sessions. Now, some of these are entirely my fault. Some of them are a symptom of having only six sessions to become familiar with the game and some arose because we sometimes struggled to keep our sessions regular. But still, they were there so I’ve got to discuss them.

Downtime was the biggest struggle for me. Now this was, perhaps, the part that I can take most responsibility for, but there are elements that we found just rubbed us up the wrong way. So, firstly, about half way through, I decided to start introducing downtime rules from Deep Cuts. I liked these alternate rules. They were largely diceless and gave the PCs a bunch of other things to spend Coin on. I thought they would speed things along a bit more, compared to the original downtime rules. But it introduced confusion more than anything else. Because we had had so little time to get used to the original rules, and I had an imperfect understanding of the Deep Cuts rules, we ended up often very confused about what was needed for any given downtime activity. We often ended up mixing the two rulesets into some unholy abomination that we could never remember at the next downtime. I wish now that I had started with the Deep Cuts rules and used them the whole way through. I think they are, comparatively, smoother and more interesting overall.

But the main issue I had with downtime was the idea of having a separate and overtly different phase of play. The fact that you need to use a completely different set of rules for it delineates it deliberately from the score. It slows things down, it deals with each PC so separately that they are largely on their own for long periods of the game. This meant that the only other person they were interacting with most of the time at the table during downtime was me. This is a significant increase in mental load for the GM. On top of that, each PC has a few notable NPCs and I was responsible for voicing, playing and inventing them almost from scratch. That’s a lot to remember and a lot to do at the table.

And, the mechanics themselves, to me, made this part of play feel like I was constantly explaining the rules of a board-game to the players. All those currencies and meta-currencies, Coin, Rep, XP, Heat, Wanted Level, Status, Stress. There is so much to keep track of and it often feels like shuffling tokens and cards around on a board. I am not a big player of board-games. Given a choice, I would choose an RPG any day. Combining the two in this manner did not endear the game to me. And all the sheets required to keep track of everything go to evidence exactly how much admin is involved in Blades in the Dark. Now, I understand that this is actually a positive for many people. It’s just not for me.

In general, I found that role-playing, as one might traditionally think of it, was difficult to work into sessions of such heavy admin. Even in the score sessions, there is little time for inter-character development, so focused is the whole crew on the goal of the thing. This is, perhaps, a symptom of the style of play I am used to. Generally, in OSR or more trad games, the players are often role-playing amongst themselves constantly and then with me, as the GM, whenever they need to interact with an NPC in the world. Blades requires the players to know what sort of scenes they might want to role-play, set them up with the GM and know when to end them as well. So, that might be our relative inexperience with this type of game showing. But, if I might be allowed to make a comparison, I never felt like this when playing Spire or Heart, which are hardly OSR or trad. It think they sit more firmly on the story-game side of the divide, but we never had any issue with fitting in role-play in our campaigns of those games. I think this is due to the fact there was so little admin in those games. They feel more streamlined to me. Not perfect, by any means, but, perhaps, more to my taste.

Everyone agreed the character sheets were an issue. This was more from the player side than from me. The design of the character sheets is too busy and the text is too small and the little boxes to fill in are fiddly. In general, there is far too much text on them, even though I know the idea is that the player has everything they need at their fingertips. Interestingly, one of the things some players said was that, even with the quantum equipment rule where you don’t have to mark a piece of gear until you say you’re using it, they found the item list restrictive. They would often look at that list when trying to figure out what to do with their turn. Too often, they could see nothing of use, and instead, just defaulted to the usual skirmish or shoot. I thought this was a very interesting observation, that the design of the character sheet or the item list, at least, conspired to stunt their creativity in the moment.

Up-shot

Now, like I said at the start of the last section, its possible that a lot of these negative views are due to the way I ran the game, the irregular nature of the sessions, the limited exposure to the game, but I think its equally possible that I bumped up against it because I have a particular preference for a different type of game.

I confess that most of my best and most memorable experiences with RPGs recently has been with the OSR. Mythic Bastionland, Mothership, Black Sword Hack, Old School D&D. I am rooted in old school play after all. But, then again, I have played other story-games, like Heart and Spire, like Trophy, Root and Dungeon World and I have enjoyed them immensely. I might be forced to come to the conclusion that Blades is just not for me…

I guess we’ll see when we go back for season 2 of the Death Knells.

The Editioning Weeks Five and Six, OD&D

The Woes of Sorrowfield, Sessions Four and Five

The rain won’t stop and the woes keep coming.

As you may have read in my last post on our Editioning, Basic D&D game, my approach to the Editioning is evolving. Originally, I had only wanted one adventure of about six sessions per edition. This seemed reasonable at the time. But, as the weeks go on, I can see that it was never realistic. The Keep on the Borderlands feels like it’s only just now, seven sessions in, getting into full swing in that game, and Isaac, our DM, asked us all about the future of it. We all agreed that we’d like to continue until we got to a natural end point. This is a huge feather in Isaac’s cap. He has been running a fun and fascinating adventure for us, and, despite the character deaths, we all are enjoying it enough to want to continue.

OD&D is in a similar but slightly different spot right now. We have an enthusiastic bunch of players and the adventure is still going into session six. But there is an end on the horizon, at least from my point of view. Since I am making this adventure from scratch, using guidelines from the Original D&D books, I have more control, and have had from the start. The hexcrawl through the Barrenwood took a bit longer than I expected, three full sessions but I don’t regret that at all. I think it was a lot of fun and set the scene for the dungeon nicely. I’m expecting three to four more sessions of this game. And you never know, there might be more in the future sometime, if the players are interested.

So, the general philosophy behind the Editioning is to play the adventure for each edition for as long as we’re all enjoying it, and hopefully to the end to the adventure, rather than enforcing a strict six session limit. I think the challenge has to take a back seat to the players and their fulfilment, after all. This change in approach might mean the challenge takes longer than expected, but that’s ok too! Long may it last, I say!

Dungeon Time

Breandan the Hermit set them on their way, helpfully providing directions through the forest that allowed them to avoid any further random encounters. The party soon found themselves on the coast, not far from the edge of some sea-cliffs, getting whipped by gale force winds and soaked by torrents of rain. The ground beneath their feet was a sucking bog of muck, but they were still able to identify an ancient road that brought them, inexorably to the ruined wizard’s tower they had heard so much about recently.

Level one of the dungeon, the ruined wizard's tower.
Wizard’s Tower Ruins with player doodles

The is level one of the dungeon. It is specifically supposed to disguise the nature of the levels below. The ruined look was designed by the builders of the dungeon to make outsiders think nothing of the place. I even made it so there was no entrance on the ground floor. This is a common trait in Irish round tower design (although, my tower is anything but round.) The idea was to make it easier to store and protect your valuables but making the entrance inaccessible without a ladder or something. Since my ruined tower was just a roofless, ground floor, overcoming this obstacle was trivial for the PCs; they just climbed.

Inside they found a group of dwarves, mercenaries from the south who sought refuge from the elements in the ruins, as they found themselves rebuffed every time they tried to enter the forest. They, too, had heard the call for aid from East Barrens village, it seems. The adventuring party, now two hirelings down, decided to take the four dwarves on as retainers and then set about searching. They had a couple of advantages here, information they had gleaned from rumours and previous encounters. First, they spotted a raven settle into the tower ruins as they searched the perimeter, and they had stories about talking ravens who they should not cross, from he people in the village. Second, they had found Ferris’ diary. Ferris was one of the previous adventuring party to attempt to enter the dungeon. It told them they would need a special handle to enter the dungeon below.

The first thing they did was to try and find the raven in one of the tower’s ruined rooms. When they did, the rumours about talking birds proved true. In classic style, it asked them a riddle and promised them rewards if they could deliver. I had no particular origin story for this raven, and it’s not connected exactly to the plot, I just like the trope and wanted an excuse to have them answer a riddle. It felt very old school. They got it right and were rewarded with a variety of magic items from the raven’s apparently invisible hoard. With that, they left the corvid alone and proceeded to search the level, eventually discovering both the handle and the trap door that opened it. I had popped a Grey Ooze on top of the trapdoor as an encounter, because it was transparent and they could try to grab the trap door through it. They didn’t quite fall for that though. In fact, they defeated fairly quickly, despite it taking no damage from blunt weapon attacks. With that, they opened up the trapdoor and descended the smooth, cement shaft with the inbuilt ladder to the floor below.

Dungeon Level Two

Dungeon Level Two, a five room underground level
Dungeon Level Two

I enjoyed the reaction to my design of the room they landed it. I described it as being all constructed of a singular light grey material, like cement, with a low bench of the same material, a row of lockers along one wall and small, tight chamber constructed of glass with a spigot in it. It took a few beats, but then Isaac asked, “is this a locker room?”

Perfect.

Anyway, they sent the cleric down first since they had heard about a horde of undead down there. Sure enough, after a low humming noise from the adjoining room, they heard the clacking and chattering of skeletons.

I have already written about my idea for this floor in my first OD&D post. Essentially, these undead are projections. As they were defeated more would be spawned in that room, but they would get more and more powerful to kill or frighten off potential explorers.

The order was:

  • Wave 1: Skeletons – I rolled up 19 of these, but with a cleric on the party they made short work of them
  • Wave 2: Zombies – I only rolled up four of these, but their appearance out of then air in room 6 alerted the players as to what was happening
  • Wave 3: Ghouls to up the ante with their paralysing touch
  • Wave 4: Wights – these bastards always scared the shit out of me as a kid playing this game. It was devastating if they managed to suck a level of experience out of your character. I mean, you worked so hard for that!
  • Wave 5: Wraiths – similar to the above but even tougher

Room 6, where the undead spawned, contained four crystal orbs that hummed and glowed when a new wave spawned. So the PCs figured out immediately that they needed to disable them to stop the undead. That’s what my players did, but there were other options.

In the secret room 7, there was a series of control consoles. They managed to find it by noticing the strange vent in the wall and removing it. On each console was a series of indentations, and in each indentation, a gem was placed. These were valuable cut gems, but they were also used to control things on that level. They controlled everything from the lights to the hard-light undead projectors. With a little experimentation, they could have used these controls to disable the undead waves.

The room also contained a holographic projection of a crystalline the humanoid. This was a simple prerecorded message, which, if they could have understood the language, would be telling them how to use the consoles and their purposes. But the Magic User had already used up her Read Languages scroll, so they’re just going to have to figure it out for themselves.

A couple of other things in room 5, I put some bio-hazard suits in the lockers which will act as magic armour of sort, giving bonuses to saves, and I also left a futuristic looking wand of Detect Magic. I did this because the Magic user always wants to use that spell but not really at the expense of a precious spell slot. It also gave them valuable information about the undead (they emanated illusion magic, not necromantic) and other parts of the dungeon.

In room 6, They noticed difference in the surface on the floor in front of the iPod-future, translucent white double doors. The Fighting Man in the party used his ten foot pole to poke that surface and set off the trap beneath, a lethal spray of tint crystal shards exploded upwards, making his ten-foot pole into a nine-foot pole. He did manage to poke the doors which opened to reveal a stairwell leading down.

Conclusion

They are not quite done on this level. When we left them, they were still mucking about with the controls in the secret room. And they had detected an evil presence to the north west (room 8.)

Even after they make it to the next level, where things become even more sci-fi, they have a ways to go.

I’m still really enjoying the creative endeavour of building and populating this dungeon. I went into it only with the map, the outline of the plot and the general themes. I have been adding details as we go along so I can respond to things the players say or do. Maybe this is not quite in the spirit of the Original D&D, but I find it works very well, so I’ll stick with it.

The Editioning Weeks Five and Six, Basic D&D

Taking Sides

The Keep on the Borderland wants you to commit to a faction, become their champion and do quests for them. Or, at the very least, it wants you to pretend you’re doing that so you play one faction off against another. We got deep into these politics in our latest session.

Losing Friends and Making New Ones

The image of the Keep on the Borderlands on the back cover of the adventure, showing a large keep at sunset, a group of adventurers running up the road towards it.
The Keep

We have been growing in the esteem of various factions and drawing the ire of others for the last few sessions. For instance, as I mentioned before, we have ingratiated ourselves to the Castellan of the eponymous Keep, but, we have decided to go against the Ospreys, the bandit-like rebel band who want to overthrow our friendly Castellan. With that in mind we used an osprey feather and a secret handshake to convince a group of these bandits we wanted to join them. This turned into a fight, of course, since they came in force and, although we only needed to capture one of them for questioning in the keep, we couldn’t separate them. This all worked out in our favour as we came away with not one, but two prisoners, one of whom was a high-ranking lieutenant. But one of them escaped the ambush, no doubt returning to Lord Osprey himself. I’m pretty sure we’ve ruined any chances of being best buds with that guy.

Anyway, we went back to the Keep for some carousing and continued making enemies and rivals. Our DM, Isaac’s carousing table has not necessarily been very kind to us so far. This time proved to be even worse than the last. The only thing that happened last time was that we woke up in the street. This time, my thief, Thaddeus Nightbane, got barred from the Blue Wine Tavern for being a know-it-all, Tom’s elf, Eandril, managed to get into a duel with the keep’s armourer and Lotharia, Charlie’s halfling, pissed on the spell book of Thaumic Juggernaut Billiam Asda (is that right, Issac?) Now, we had a bunch of booze back in our apartments so I didn’t mind getting barred too much and Eandril won the duel, impressing the armourer so much that she offered us discounts. But Lotharia? Well, the only way we could satisfy the Thaumic Juggernaut was to quest in search of a replacement spell book. So, we took ourselves off into the mountain woods in search of the Hermit, Dimblemist. It wasn’t too hard to find him, but we wanted to get out of there as quickly as we could. The frog-like man gave us all the ick. Anyway, we traded my ill-fated first character, Edmund of the Sun’s old holy symbol for the spell book. Dimblemist hung the symbol on his pet puma’s collar, oddly enough. They both seemed pleased with the result.

Dimblemist the horrid little hermit in his tree home.
Dimblemist the horrid little hermit in his tree home.

It was on the return journey that we ran into a random encounter. A griffon attacked a shepherd and his flock right in front of us not he road. The shepherd was already a goner but the time we got there, so we decided to try sneaking around to avoid a fight. No such luck. The bird-brained pussycat spotted us and attacked, making short work of Lotharia. She was rent asunder by the beast’s great talons. I’m sure it would have killed us all if we hadn’t had a small army of hirelings with us. So we defeated it with sheer numbers. Poor Lotharia, we barely knew her! She was only the second PC fatality. I’m sure there will be more to come…

Anyway, we returned to town with the replacement spell book and poor Lotharia’s corpse, in an effort to glean a little sympathy from Thaumic Juggernaut, Billiam Asda. Surprisingly, he paid us 100 GP towards the funeral costs. We later heard that Billiam had Power Word: Deathed a man in the pub for shit-talking his mum or something. Counting ourselves lucky, we wrapped that session.

Ethics in Business

Look, this is a game, alright? I want you all to remember that before you judge Tom, Charlie and me on the paragraphs below. Especially as, you know, we’re just doing what our characters would do or whatever.

We buried Lotharia and greeted Charlie’s new PC, Anastasia, Cleric of the Sun and newest member of the Company of the Dark Sun (we change the name from the Company of the Summer Sun after Edmund died.) Soon after we received a visit from Richard Kirkdon of the the Thyrenian Guild, a group of merchants with a base of operations in the Keep. They had been paying us for Osprey ears and, unsurprisingly, were very happy to hear with had ambushed a bunch of them and taken prisoners. Dick paid us 900 GP just for being cool. He then offered us a small fortune to find some of his mates who had been captured by the hobgoblins in the Caves of Chaos and, oh yeah, to deliver a shipment of arms to the Shakkelwart Clan of orcs, also of the Caves of Chaos. He even paid us a third of the fee up front. We agreed, and bid him farewell.

Now, Thaddeus Nightbane’s immediate instinct was to sell out the Thyrenians to the Castellan for arming his enemies. He saw it as a win-win, especially as we had already been paid so much for doing nothing. But the other PCs talked me around. Several other plans were thought up and shot down. We considered damaging the shipment and delivering it to the orcs, thereby damaging their relationship with the Thyrenain Guild. We thought of just destroying the shipment and telling Dick we delivered it. In the end, after a debate that consumed the lion’s share of the session, we decided to deliver the shipment as requested, but also to deliver another shipment of arms and armour to the goblins we’d made friends with earlier. The idea was that, if both sides were well armed, they might just weaken each other enough to make them both easy pickings for the keep’s forces, thereby increasing out standing with the Castellan and earning the rest of the gold promised us by the Guild.

So, off we went, back to the ravine containing the Caves of Chaos. As we were scouting out the best way to approach the Shakkelwart Clan’s caves, we encountered a few representatives of a rival mercenary group, known as the Great Company. They took one of our hirelings hostage but we managed to defeat them despite that. In searching their belongings, we discovered they had been contracted to find and eliminate Thaddeus Nightbane!

Conclusion

Less and less am I concerned with the mechanics of playing the game, now. We almost never need to refer to the rules or even question the way things work in Basic D&D. Its fair to say that “basic” is the right word for it. Your characters are simple, the rules are straightforward and everything that isn’t spelled out can easily be ruled upon by the DM.

More and more am I invested in the occurrences of the adventure, the faction play, the NPCs and the quandaries we are presented with. We are figuring out what we want from this whole caper and we are also figuring out how the various groups involved can help or hinder us. It is bringing the Machiavelli out in us quite a bit, whether we’re lawful, chaotic or neutral. And it’s very fun.

The last session we played was Session 7, which is one more than I thought we’d be playing for this whole adventure. Isaac asked us if we wanted to continue until we reach a reasonable end point. This obviously sticks a spanner in the works of the Editioning plan, but I had already come to the conclusion that if we were having fun with it, we may as well keep playing. I’m coming to the realisation, actually, that we won’t get through an adventure in each edition in a single yer. More likely, it’ll take two. And I’m fine with that because, right now, I’m enjoying it so much!

UVG x Troika

Vibes

It’s easy to categorise RPGs by genre. Traveller is sci fi, D&D is fantasy, Cyberpunk Red is, well, cyberpunk, Call of Cthulhu is horror. There’s no real question about that. But, when you want to do an RPG medley, you’ve got to consider rulesets and vibes. D&D and Gamma World are basically the same ruleset, which makes it handy to mash ‘em up. But more importantly, their vibes are vibing on the same frequency. This has a lot to do with the art style in the books and the ways in which the games themselves are presented as well as the settings. I’m sure I’m not the only one to take their Gamma World players through a portal to a D&D fantasy world where they could blast dragons with their enormous radiation guns. It just made sense because of the vibes.

We finished a Mörk Borg campaign earlier this year. Got all the way to the end of the world, believe it or not. Cleverly, our GM, Isaac, ended that world and then woke us up from the the virtual reality game our Cy-Borg characters had all been immersed in. Someday, we’ll return to this game that’s also a new game. Now the vibes of these to are so obviously similar because they were both made by the Stockholm Kartell and designed by Johan Nohr. The art style is brash and neon and loud for both so you feel like they vibe together naturally.

Today I want to discuss a couple of games that you might not automatically mention in the same breath, Ultraviolet Grasslands, Luka Rejec’s psychedelic, prog-rock fuelled old school trading simulator, and Troika, Daniel Sell’s Science Fantasy Moorcock/Wolfe mashup using the rules for Fighting Fantasy and the surreal art stylings of Shuyi Zhang and Andrew Walter among others. OK, you might mention them in the same breath, actually. They both tickle a very particular armpit, in between the arm of sci-fi and the torso of fantasy, and, to me, their vibes intersect perfectly. So much so that I decided to employ a Troika adventure in UVG.

The Adventure So Far

The PCs have been on the road for more than six weeks. From the Violet City on the shores of the Circle Sea they have traveled west through the Ultraviolet Grasslands. They’ve encountered Lime Nomads, giant mushroom-tending armadillos, cyborg-like bio-tech lifeforms called vomes, and even a furniture trader named Jonky Bonko so far. And at every point along the way they have gathered resources and items to trade, hopefully for a profit. This has been their over-riding motivation thus far in the campaign. The players are utterly invested in the success of their joint business venture, which they have named Isosceles Inc. Watching their Cash numbers go up has definitely been exciting for them, especially when they make a really good market research roll, or haggle their way into a selling price three times higher than their buying price. But I have been wanting a bit more old-school in it too. To that end, I’ve been seeding something in the otherwise completely randomly generated adventures. It originated in a random encounter, but I kept it running through a couple of other random encounters.

They rescued the daughter of a Lime Nomad clan chief and returned her to her mother. The mother, grateful and impressed, entrusted them with a message in the form of an item known as a portable illusion. She asked them to take it to her sponsor, a Porcelain Prince called Black Pot 5-Body at the Porcelain Citadel. Almost immediately, they rolled up another random encounter with a Porcelain Prince out on the road. A Porcelain Prince is an intelligence that’s distributed across a number of humanoid bodies that wear matching porcelain masks. The PCs, wary and out-numbered mentioned that they were on the way to see Black Pot 5-Body in the Porcelain Citadel in the hope that it would encourage this Prince to treat them favourably. On the contrary, the mention of Black Pot seemed to cause something of a stir. The Prince promptly sent a messenger off in the direction of the city. The PCs promptly killed the messenger in the grasslands and buried him in a shallow grave.

Later, at the Low Road and the High trading post, they heard a rumour that an ultra-conservative Porcelain Prince, Meissen 13-Unity had dedicated themself to restoring the Citadel to the unity of thought not exemplified since the end of the Properly Recorded Period. Not only that but that Sunfire 3-body, who they had met on the road, was an adherent of theirs. At this stage, the PCs were not able to put things together. But once they pushed on towards the Citadel they ran into a random encounter, the caravan of another Porcelain Prince, this time, an ally of Black Pot 5-body. This time, the Prince sold them a pass to get them into the Upper Citadel, where they could do business and find the Prince they were looking for.

Finally, they reached the Porcelain Citadel, the great hand-shaped edifice towering over the grasslands doing devil’s horns. They had been eager to do some carousing here. The PCs had a taste of it in the Violet City at the start of the campaign and gained a lot of XP from it so they saw it as a short-cut. This time, one of their number got completely fucked up on drugs and managed to lose most of their Cash as a consequence of a particularly poor Carousing roll. So they needed to make some money quick. The next day they went to visit Black Pot 5-Body in their workshop. There they presented the eccentric Prince with the Portable Illusion. They activated it and they all witnessed a Porcelain Prince being abducted from a camp by an enormous winged creature with a hand where its head should have been. They were dumped in an enormous nest at the top of a massive index finger stretched up into the sky, as high as a mountaintop. From there the view within the illusion changed and they saw the Prince negotiating with a wizard in a black tower atop another digit of this huge hand. He exchanged a copy of a book for the wizard to help him escape back to the Grasslands. And then the illusion ended. Black Pot was very excited. This was their chance! They had finally found the evidence they had needed for so long. The original book that would prove that the laughable philosophy of their political rival, Meissen 13-Unity was based on nothing more than a work of fiction designed to satirise the exact sort of overtly conservative views they thought were espoused by it.

That’s a lot of backstory. Suffice it to say, Black Pot employed the PCs to get abducted from their dreams by the bird-with-a-hand-for-its-head so they could be taken to the mountainous hand and retrieve that book. They went into the grasslands and did just that. They woke up in the nest, just like in the Illusion. After avoiding the gaze of THOG, the bird-thing, they killed some worms escaped the nest and found themselves on the tip of that cyclopean index finger looking out on a wide green land and a cerulean blue sky. They knew immediately that they weren’t in Kansas anymore.

I loved this moment. At this point, the players did not know they had just transitioned from UVG-proper to the Troika adventure, The Hand of God, so they had no reason to suspect anything. Also, there have been hints of portals and other worlds dotted around the plains in our campaign so far, so they had no reason to think this was anything but more UVG weirdness. I kept up the pretence as long as I could. But, eventually I shared one of the illustrations from the adventure in our chat and Isaac was quickly able to identify the distinctive style of Andre Walter, so well known for his Troika work. He asked me if this was a Troika adventure and I answered honestly as is the law.

But that was ok! It helped me in fact. The players understood that I would have a little work to do to translate from one ruleset to the other when I had to spring things on them so they have been quite forgiving.

Conversion

For the first session in the Hand of God, I didn’t even do any preparation of encounters in UVG terms. I winged it completely and that was fine. It would absolutely have been better if I had prepped, but it was ok. The nice thing about both rulesets is that they are light. A UVG creature’s strength is based largely on levels/hit dice, in a very D&D-esque way. So I was able to use the following table to work things out approximately while my players waited patiently.

But the fact was, the only combat encounter they had was with a couple of weak and lowly Prayer Worms. In Troika terms, they had low Skill and medium Stamina and their only special was screaming when they died so it was was easy to look at that table and decide to make them level 0.

I rolled up another random encounter as two of the three PCs made their way down through the index finger’s stony interior. There, on the stair, they found a poor undead whose body had been crushed by a fallen boulder. She told them she would reward them if they would bring her to the undead village of Jigigji over on the Little Finger. So they re-reanimated her decimated body and brought her along with them. Meanwhile, the third member of Isosceles glided across the span to the next finger on his handy glider. He landed on the opposite side of the bridge long before the other two made it there. At this point I knew they would be running into a lot of potentially tricky encounters that I thought I should prepare better. So we left that till the next session. In between, I converted all the stats for all the potential encounters, whether random or planned. The conversion did not always fit neatly into the rows of the table above. Sometimes I would add more hit dice if they had more Stamina than Skill, and I would always look at the potential damage on the Troika damage tables to decide the dice and bonuses to give them in the UVG context. None of this was particularly taxing, although I’m sure some GMs would do the conversion differently to me, if they wanted something more or less balanced.

The next session they dealt with a bridge troll and his gremlin minions, but realised they were in for a tough time on this adventure quite quickly. Once they got across the bridge, they soon reached the black tower of the wizard as shown to them by the Portable Illusion. In the adventure, this is known as Rezkin’s Folly. All they would have to do is get into this powerful wizard’s abode, avoiding the fireballs being flung by the magical orb security system and all the weird shit inside, and they would get the chance to maybe retrieve that book!

The Folly is presented as a mini dungeon within the context of the overall adventure. It has fourteen rooms and its spread over a mere eight pages. It is very easy to read and absorb and most of it is usable in any system, with only the creature stats requiring conversion.

There are some Wizard spells referenced in the adventure that are taken directly from the Troika core book. I had to spend a bit of time looking up UVG spells that worked as alternatives to their Troika counterparts. None of these were really done on a one-to-one basis. Troika spells are generally fairly D&Dish, but UVG spells might really do anything, conceivably. I used both the UVG core-book and the forthcoming Wastelands Guidebook to help with this.

Conclusion

Well, we haven’t concluded this adventure by any means. Isosceles Inc have only made it into the tower’s lowest floor. They have encountered a gossamer assassin creature and survived, but still have to make it to the treasure room and out again. They also need to bring their undead companion back to Jgigji and then escape this potential dreamworld to get back to the Grasslands!

So far, I am loving how well the Troika adventure vibes with UVG. There are some anachronisms, like trolls and gremlins, which seem a little too generic-fantasy for the weirdness of UVG, but, on the other hand (if you’ll excuse the pun) they’re on a ginormous hand and they were sent there by a weirdo who lives in a giant hand. This was obviously the thing that linked UVG and the Hand of God in my head. Somehow, this dreamworld leaked into the “real world” of UVG and led the Porcelain Princes to build their Citadel. And, perhaps, the item that same their citadel from repression is contained in it.

Anyway, this adventure will continue soon, hopefully. Our gaming has been dominated by the Editioning recently, but, hopefully, we’ll get some more UVG x Troika in soon!

The Dice Pool at Two Hundred (posts)

Milestone Levelling vs XP

There’s a strong argument for XP levelling in D&D type games. The pursuit of XP can be used to promote certain behaviours from the PCs, leading them towards the bigger, badder monsters and the shinier, more valuable treasures. I have been using XP levelling in our OD&D game to preserve an element of authenticity, and in UVG to stay true to the rules. But I have been more than generous with the provision of experience points in both. The GM has the privilege and responsibility of controlling the XP tap to speed up or slow down the progression of the PCs as seems appropriate, but it is an imprecise instrument. For instance, in OD&D a Magic user requires more than twice the number of XP to level up than a Thief does, and PCs with high prime requisite scores are getting 5 or 10 percent bonus XP as well. So no-one is really levelling at the same rate, even if you ostensibly give them all the same amount of hit points.

So, when I first encountered milestone levelling in D&D 5E, I saw it as a way to unburden myself and our group of the calculations XP levelling lumbered us with and to reward PCs with levels at narratively appropriate points in the campaign. I never really planned when I would give them a new level, I would just tell them to level up at the end of a particularly significant session. This method, or lack thereof, had the added bonus of it being a nice surprise for the players. They were still able to plan ahead for what new feats, spells, etc. they were going to take when they levelled up, they just were never sure when it would happen, unlike with XP levelling.

Anyway, I have been thinking about my progress with the dice pool dot com in a these terms recently. Obviously because I’ve known this 200th post was coming for some time. I’ve certainly hit a few big milestones, like when someone first subscribed to the blog, or when the blog was first linked on the Indie RPG Newsletter, or when John Harper reposted my bleet (skeet?) about my Blades in the Dark posts on Bluesky. All of these milestones built my confidence, motivated me to continue and improve and got more eyes on the site. It felt like levelling up each time. Every unlooked for goal that I reached made me want to write more and se what might come next.

In the time since my 100th post my views and visitor numbers have grown enormously. This has been true since the start of the blog in fact. My guilty obsession is checking the Jetpack app to see what the daily/weekly/monthly numbers are at. I often do it a few times a day. This feels like the accumulation of XP. Each view is another point towards the next level. You can even measure the effects of the milestones I mentioned above in this way. John Harper and Thomas Manuel granted the site a lot more XP than it got most days. It was like completing a quest I didn’t even know I was on.

If I’m honest, I have to admit that the everyday XP grind feels more like where the real progress is made. The milestones certainly come up, but if I were to rely on them, I would level up pretty infrequently. Also, I like the ability to measure the progress through numbers, as you will have noted from my New Years post. Not that the numbers really influence me to write on any particular topics. I have and always will write what I want, whether its Triangle Agency Character Creation or half-assed flash fiction. Maybe I’m obsessed with the numbers because I’m just old school, maybe I crave XP.

Anyway, here are some links to a few of the last two hundred posts that I’m most proud of:

Conclusion

It’s a short one today, dear reader. I just wanted to acknowledge the milestone, as it were, and reflect on how the blog has built and changed over the last two hundred posts. Thanks for reading!

I’ll be back soon with the promised discussion of the Hand of God x UVG.

The Editioning Week Four, OD&D

The Woes of Sorrowfield, Session Three

The hex-crawl continues through the Barrenwood. The PCs have been doing their best in difficult circumstances. Sorrowfield is a miserable place right now. There have been some sort of magical ballistics going off over town and country, undead and chimerae stalk the land and the bloody rain hasn’t stopped in weeks. Perhaps it was the constant and growing danger around them that prompted the adventurers to finally question the motives of the pixies they’d been following for a few hours through the forest.

The pixies, you see, had been trying to get them to the lake in the northwest part of the woods. Once they reached it, however, they could see a soft, violet glow from the waters. It matched the glow from the crystals they had discovered throughout the forest so far. The pixies hovered above the lake and asked them to dive in, claiming the source of the corruption was submerged beneath the unsettled waters. The PCs thought better of it despite the pixies’ mocking and cajoling. They wanted to circumnavigate the lake to see what sort of traps the mischievous little fae had in store for them, but that proved difficult. To the east, the river emerged from the lake’s waters, and there were no convenient trees to chop down to act as a bridge this time. To the northwest, they found a vast patch of crystalline briars. Since the briars covered the entire hex, they eventually decided to go one hex further around to the west, avoiding it entirely. This forced them into a a hex that was particularly confusing, with lots of entangling plants that tried to trip them. I asked them to roll a d6 to see if they got lost. They avoided rolling a 1 so they were able to press on in their desired direction.

All of the above; the pixies, the briars, the hex of confusion, all came from encounter table rolls. You can see that table on my last OD&D post here. They have all come together to make some interesting challenges and have forced the PCs to explore further than they might otherwise have. I’m fairly satisfied with most entries on the table. I feel like there’s a good mix of combat and non-combat encounters that require a good variety of solutions, skills and ingenuity to deal with. But there were two entries I really hoped they would roll up. Lucky me, those were their next two rolls!

The very next hex they entered, they rolled an 8, so they came across the Hermit’s Shack. They knew from rumours gathered in town, that there was a Hermit out in the woods somewhere, so it wasn’t a big surprise. They approached politely and Breandan welcomed them in, offering them tea and “biscuits.” I had a great time playing this guy. After a couple of sessions of mainly exploration and combat, it was refreshing to have some solid role-play. He was eccentric but friendly enough. He explained that he had run into the other group of adventurers who had been sent from the town of East Barrens. They had come across his shack on the way back from the ruined wizard’s tower on the coast to the west. They explained to him that they had been rebuffed in their attempts to delve into the dungeon beneath the ruins. Wave after wave of undead appeared as if by magic on the first level below. There was no way through… These adventurers had moved on after a restful visit, turning back towards the town.

Breandan also had a quest for the adventurers. He wanted them to hunt down and slay the carnivorous crystal elk that had been terrorising him of late. He wanted to travel up along the river to the north to see if he could escape this crystalline corruption, but every time he attempted the journey, the elk chased him back home. He promised the PCs a valuable reward if they would do this for them. They readily agreed and, after resting up in his cabin for a few hours, they set off to do just that.

Now, I considered just having the elk itself as the encounter in the next hex, but I decided, in the end, to stick to my own rules. I got them to roll on the encounter table again. This time they rolled a 6. The halfling heard them before she saw them, a shambling, groaning group of partly crystallised undead amongst the trees ahead. She tried moving silently through the woods to flank them and get a better look, but she failed badly, and got slammed to the floor by a zombie instead. This encounter was really over before it began, even though the zombies won the initiative roll. They couldn’t hit any of the other PCs, and then Tadhg, the cleric, now on Village Priest level (level 3) stepped in. A Village Priest can ably and automatically turn zombies, just have to roll 2d6 to figure out how many are affected. Well, Tadhg turned all four of them. But as he did so, the party got a good look at the zombies, two humans, a dwarf and a halfling, the exact make-up of the other band of adventurers. Now, this encounter on the table also involved the reward of an adventuring diary, which the PCs would have gotten if they had a chance to loot them. Since they sent them running instead, I decided to bring the elk into play. As the dwarven zombie was scarpering, the monstrous crystal antlers of the carnivorous elk emerged from between the trees, skewering him and sending him flying through the air. And suddenly, they were back in combat.

I like the “per-side” round by round initiative roll of OD&D. I like that it utilises a simple d6. I even like that, if both sides rolls are equal, then everything happens simultaneously. All of this adds a bit more randomness to the proceedings and keeps it interesting. Especially in this system where each combat round equals a full minute, you can imagine the ebb and flow of combat evolving constantly, with the momentum swinging one way for a time, and reversing quickly and unexpectedly when the enemy spots a weakness or exploits their opponents’ mistakes.

This was the strongest monster they had faced yet but I was only reminded of the primacy of action economy in D&D. It applies as much in this version as it does in 5E. One combatant against six is not an equal fight, no matter how many hit dice that one enemy has, unless they’ve also got six attacks per round. So, of course, they made relatively short work of it, and somehow, managed to avoid any further damage as well. What these two fights combined really showed, though, was the full range of combat abilities in the group. We had turning undead and healing magic, we had magic missiles and invisibility, and, as well as that we had backstabs and the Fighting Man even got in a mighty blow or two.

After they had dealt with the elk, they investigated the body of the dwarven zombie. Finding a diary on it, they were able to confirm that the corpse used to be Ferris, the son of the town’s blacksmith and stonemason. The PCs had been asked to keep an eye out for him by his mother so finding him like this was a poignant moment. His diary described his journey to the old wizard’s tower, the hidden entrance to the underground dungeon and the desperate fight with the hordes of undead in the basement. They had been forced to retreat, as Breandan had said earlier.

With that, they took the head of the elk and the body of Ferris back to Brendan’s place. They asked if he would return the body to his parents in town but he refused, conceding instead that they could bury him there on his land. They did so and held an impromptu funeral for the boy. It was a touching scene. That done, they received their reward from the hermit and rested up again that night before setting out for the wizard’s tower the next morning.

I just want to share with you the hex map as it looks now. The players, totally unbidden, have been filling it in with the things they’ve encountered on their way through the Barrenwood on the Roll20 map. I love this!

The hex map of Barrenwood. Now with added colour!
The players have been drawing on my map and I love it!

Conclusion

We had a couple more level ups following that session so some of the band are now level 4! I will be honest, I had not totally foreseen the speed they would be levelling at. Still, it was my decision to make levelling as easy as possible. For instance, I am allowing level-ups at the ends of each session, rather than the ends of adventures and I am handing out plenty of gold and treasure (1GP + 1XP in this edition), as well as bonus xp for completing quests and clever solutions to problems. So, I’m actually quite happy with the situation.

What it does mean though, is that I will have to upgrade some of the encounters I had planned for the dungeon itself. Since I don’t have the whole thing prepared yet and I’m not writing up entire stat blocks for encountered monsters anyway, it’s really no more work in prep than I was going to have anyway. I plucked that elk out of the Monsters & Treasure book’s list of monster stats at the last minute. It was a just a re-skinned unicorn. I love being able to do this quickly and easily when I don’t feel beholden to the 1000 entries in various monster books to choose from. I would often find myself in decision paralysis when presented with all the monsters available in official products for 5E, unable to find the exact right one for a given encounter, despite the sheer number of them. I don’t have that problem here at all since all the monsters are just a collection of hit dice and ACs with maybe a special feature to set them apart. It’s very easy to imagine that line of stats as representing any monster at all, or to customise them as you see fit.

Anyway, that’s it for the report on Session Three. It might be a few weeks before there’s another one, what with various IRL happenings. But I’ll be back next week, probably with a post on my current UVG exploits utilising the Troika adventure, The Hand of God. See you then, dear reader.

The Editioning Weeks Three and Four, Basic D&D

Keepin’ on Keepin’ on

We’re two more sessions into the classic Basic D&D adventure, the Keep on the Borderlands. And we’re getting into the meat of it now, I think. We’ve got multiple factions, both in the Keep itself and in the Caves of Chaos. We’ve got spying and betrayal. We’ve got court intrigue! But most of all, we’ve had laughs and fun with this.

Donkey Konging

There are some spoilers for the Keep on the Borderlands below. If you think you might want to be a player in that adventure, you might want to choose a different post to read.

We launched straight into a fight at the start of session three. We managed to trick and ambush a dozen strong goblin patrol, trapping them in a pincer movement. The fight didn’t last too long, actually. We took out their leader and the rest pretty much dropped their weapons and happily consented to be tied up and gagged so they couldn’t follow us as we went to pillage their home. We did bring one of them with us as a kind of guide. Gaw was a congenial sort of goblin, and very eager to help. He told us about their leader, Sharktroll. Now, Sharktroll, is, it turns out, neither shark nor troll, despite the name. She’s a goblin and the other goblins seem pretty scared of her. Armed with this knowledge, we proceeded along the tunnel to the west, keeping a sharp eye and ear out as we went.

At the start of the campaign, Isaac presented us with a list of traditional roles for players that he cribbed from the Retired Adventurer blog. Tom took the Quartermaster and Timekeeper roles. I got the Rules Coordinator and Mapper ones. Normally, in our groups, the GM just gives out the map and trusts in the ability of the players to compartmentalise the knowledge they have, with the understanding that the characters don’t have it. It works well, saves time and avoids frustration. But we thought it would be an interesting experiment to do it the old fashioned way. So far, it’s going ok. Isaac has been good about providing accurate measurements for rooms and corridors, and I’m using graph paper to maintain consistency. At times, it has been hard to picture some of the rooms correctly in my head, but in those instances, Isaac has kindly showed us that part of the dungeon map from the adventure. Keeps me busy.

A map drawn with pen on graph paper. It shows a wide canyon and a caves sytem where the goblins live.
A photo of the crude map I have drawn so far of the goblin caves in the Caves of Chaos

So, we went exploring the goblin caves, found a sack full of gold which we robbed, and a barrel full of javelins, which Thaddeus Nightbane, my thief, peed in. Of course, we almost immediately found cause to use those miturated upon javelins as another goblin patrol approached the guard room where we found that stuff. We were able to get ourselves set up to launch a surprise attack on them, chucking spears and, even more fun than that, rolling barrels of water down the narrow tunnel! Donkey Konged the hell out of those gobbos. Killed ‘em all in one fell swoop. It felt like a really great old school moment; setting up a ridiculous plan with very little time and only the few items to hand. Surprising that it worked out so well, though, to be honest.

Snakey

We pushed on, thinking to find this Sharktroll character and maybe do her in. But, instead, we found a large room full of goblins: men, women and children. We didn’t alert them to our presence, luckily, but this “family room” as we called it, gave us pause. We all cooled on the idea of clearing out these goblins, now that the ramifications of doing that were staring at us with big green, baby eyes. It was at this point, in the tunnel outside that room, that we turned to Jabeck, the so-called Priest of the Sun who had asked us to accompany him to rid the caves of the monsters. We delicately questioned his real motives here. And with the lightest of verbal jabs, he revealed his true colours, as an adherent of the Cult of the Great Serpent! He and his acolytes attacked and we were forced to kill them. The acolytes went down without much hassle, but Jabeck weathered round after round of attacks. He was wearing magic plate mail, so his AC was ridiculously low. He did us some damage too, but, eventually, we brought him down and took his stuff, and his head.

I had known there was a treacherous priest somewhere in this adventure, as it happens. I think I read it in the Wikipedia article I linked above, in fact. But I didn’t know which priest. It could just as well have been the racist one back in the keep, who had asked us to keep an eye on Jabeck. So, it was fun to discover this in this way, while delving this dungeon.

Of course, the noise of battle attracted the attention of the goblin civilians. We spotted them in the entrance and then all our torches went out (thanks to Tom’s timekeeping for that incredibly dramatic event!) some of them ran to get Sharktroll, who returned with her bodyguards and wives. Through our goblin-speaking dwarven hireling, Gimleth, we conducted some negotiations. I remembered that the rumour I had received about this place was that the Great Serpent cult had been wiped out by the goblins, orcs and gnolls so they could take over the caves. Deploying this bit of knowledge, we convinced her that Jabeck was the one who was to blame for any deaths amongst her people, that we might have caused. Unlikely as it may sound, she bought it. She seemed far more pre-occupied by the enmity between the goblins and the orcs and gnolls who occupied the other side of the canyon. On top of this, someone was stealing from their stores. Loot, food, everything was going missing, and they wanted us to help discover the culprits.

Our elf, Eandril, Tom’s character, used his secret door seeking abilities in the store room and immediately discovered a hidden entrance to the lair of the hobgoblins, Sharktroll’s erstwhile allies. So, we convinced her that it must have been the hobgoblins who were creeping in and stealing their hard earned booty, right from under their noses. We got her good and riled up and sent her off into the hobgoblin tunnels with a warband and a whole lot of righteous indignation.

We did not accompany them. Instead, we left them to it and scarpered off back home. Isaac rolled up the results of the goblin assault and was able to determine that they were successful in defeating the hobgoblins roundly. Huzzah! This seemed pretty good to us, as it reduced the number of Caves of Chaos factions we had to deal with by one.

Factioning

Back at the Keep, we returned to the racist priest with Jabeck’s head. In fact, I threw open the church doors while Lotharia the halfling, atop Eandril’s shoulders, hoisted aloft the head, declaring for all to hear that we had killed the priest! This didn’t go down very well with the other members of the clergy there gathered, and for a second, we were about to get into another fight. But then Father Burgoyne intervened, calming the situation when we told him what happened and showed him Jabeck’s forked tongue. Burgoyne congratulated us on a job well done and then went off to report these happenings to the castellan. We blagged our way into an invite to talk to his castellanship. We told him what we had found out about the goblins, how we had gotten them to defeat the hobgoblins and what had happened with Jabeck. In turn, he rewarded us handsomely. He gave us the use of Jabeck’s quarters, exempted us from the 10% gold tax at the gate of the keep and trusted us with an all important mission to capture one of the rebellious Ospreys alive!

On top of this, Isaac informed us that we were now RESPECTED with the Castellan. Not only that, but had also gained important reputation boosts with the church so that we were ESTEEMED in their eyes. We had even, somehow, gained respect amongst Sharktroll’s goblins! This reputation game was not something I knew was part of the adventure but it’s very welcome actually. Oddly, it struck me, at first, as a very video-gamey element. It reminded me of the reputation trackers you get in games like World of Warcraft. Indeed, the reps in the Keep on the Borderlands work very similarly as they unlock new quests and options within the confines of the adventure, as you can see by the offering of the quest to discover the thief in the goblin lair and the unlocking of the quest to help the castellan with the Ospreys. It adds a richness to the adventure and makes it, perhaps, quite re-playable. I imagine that, if we had gone to meet the Ospreys representative on our first night in the Keep, things might have turned out very differently indeed. Or if we had decided to explore the hobgoblin caves before the goblin ones, maybe the goblins would be the faction that got wiped out first instead. The possibilities are fascinating. I’m beginning to see why this module is so well loved.

Conclusion

We’re all getting very invested in this adventure. We’ve had a little while with our respective characters and they are very much developing their own personalities. Equally, there is an inter-character dynamic appearing too. The NPCs are compelling, especially as portrayed by Isaac, and the plot is doing enough to keep me interested in getting involved in it. What I had thought would be a relatively standard dungeon crawl is turning into something with far more bite and complexity, or it is the way we’re playing it, anyway.

As for the D&D Basic rules; I feel as though we have all more-or-less adjusted to things like THAC0, descending AC, etc, and, where the rules fall short, Isaac has been very pro-active in rulings. In several instances, he decided that the best way to resolve an action was just to make an ability check, i.e. a d20 roll under the PC’s defined ability score, such as a Strength check to lift those barrels of water to go Donkey Kong on those goblins. This has served to move things along nicely in instances which could have been bogged down in rule-checking.

I think we will be having a bit of an Editioning break over the next couple of weeks. I have another report on my last session. Of OD&D to come next week though, so please do come back for that, dear reader!

The Editioning: Week Three, OD&D

OD&D, The Woes of Sorrowfield, Session Two

Let me start by saying, if you’re one of my players, turn back now! Do not read! Danger! Danger!

The PCs gathered some hirelings. The town of East Barrens was not replete with adventuring types or even warriors, so I ruled that the only idiots available for hire were what OD&D refers to as “normal men.” This is a term from CHAINMAIL, I think, and means they are not fighters of any kind. Basically, they’re what later editions might call 0-level NPCs. Four of them showed up for duty. They did not all survive the session…

Hirelings are an interesting part of old D&D. You don’t really hear of a lot of 5e adventuring parties taking on a bunch of mercenaries as backup. But I remember playing AD&D particularly back in the olden days, the party would always want an extra NPC or two. They were often necessary to ensure survival. Playing OSR games like the Black Hack and Black Sword Hack, we have always employed hirelings for a variety of reasons in recent years too. Even in UVG, you probably won’t get very far without a crew of NPCs to keep your caravan running smoothly. UVG’s pretty old school in that respect. In the old games, they were pretty much just damage soaks, meat shields and extra carrying capacity. Even today, as a GM, I find I only role-play them when the players remember they exist as characters, which is not very often. In our Basic D&D game, the adventure we’re playing, Keep on the Borderlands, is designed for 6 to 9 players or something nuts like that, so we went all out of hirelings. Especially after my character got murdered by bandits in the first combat of the game. In oD&D and Basic, I think it’s easier to handle a larger number of characters, especially in combat. You don’t have to remember all those actions and complicated initiative order that you have in 5e and other more modern systems. Mostly, each character gets one actions/attack and they can move and that’s it. You roll initiative per side each round so you don’t have to keep the order in mind for a whole combat. This keeps it smooth. At least, that was our experience last week in both games.

The adventurers set off into the Barrenwood. They had to pass through it to find the source of the magical attacks the forest and the town had been coming under for weeks. It had not stopped raining and the road was a mucky morass. They trudged along the overgrown path into the dark, rotting woods and, before long encountered some trouble. A swarm of crystal infected arachnids had built a supernaturally strong web across the path in the dark, at just the height to trap unwary travellers. That’s what it did to our Fighting Man, Siward, who was leading the way. Abiss, the Halfling Thief set about cutting him free with her magical bronze sword while the others tried to scare off the spiders. Tadhg, the Cleric, made clever use of his lamp oil and torch, by blowing the oil out of his mouth at the flame to create a DIY breath weapon, incinerating a large part of the swarm and the webs as well, freeing Siward! They found some treasure on the ground below the webs, gold and some more magic items, a magic mace and a Staff of Striking.

I am running the Wilderness expedition as a hex-crawl. Here’s a picture of the hex map I drew in my “Pocket Dimension” from the Melsonian Arts Council. I bought a pack of ten of these a couple of years ago and I’m finally getting some use out of them.

A hex map in a hex-flower shape. It has letters from A to G along the top and numbers from 01 to 13 along the left hand side. There is a town in G-04 with a river flowing south and through it. a road goes from the town southeast and off the map. Another branches off into the forest that takes up the rest of the hex map. In the forest there is a lake B-05 and river winding south through the trees.
Barrenwood hexmap

Anyway, you can see the town in the north-east of the map and most of the rest of it is forest by design. I want the entire Wilderness portion of the adventure to take place in the Barrenwood. The area is not very large. I haven’t defined the exact size, but I’m thinking about an hour of travel per hex, with time added for encounters and rough terrain. Essentially, I ask the players to roll 2d6 on this encounter table each time they enter a new hex.

2Undead animals – crystalline growths – They won’t attack unless attacked. They make terrible noises while attempting to go on as if they were alive. Stats as Skeletons.
3Trapped merchant – stuck in a tree with strange crystalline chimeric creatures below. Stats as Zombies. Succesful attacks provoke a save vs Stone. Offers them 1000 GP to save him.
4Swarm of glowing crystalline spiders – trap! Treasure dropped amongst the webs – Staff of Striking, Mace +1, 560 GP, 300 SP, 500 CP. The spiders can do no damage but PCs will need to make saves vs Stone.
5Undead trees – crystalline branches. brittle and weak to fire – try to grab PCs. Treasure inside them – Total of 400 GP.
6Crystalline undead – one has a journal explaining how to find the entrance to the dungeon
7Pixies – frightened and angry – try to trick the pcs into swimming in the lake, diving for treasure
8Hermit’s shack – Breandan only drinks rain-water he collects himself in casks. Wagers the adventurers that they can’t kill the carnivorous crystal elk that he says has been stalking him. He will offer them an old silver amulet with a ruby in it (3000 GP.) Can also tell them the best way to reach the coast so they don’t have to roll on the encounter table anymore. Says he encountered another adventuring party returning from the tower ruins a while ago. Apparently they were frightened off by a horde of undead on the first subterranean level.
9Nothing but more sodden trees and undergrowth trying to trip them. Roll 1d6. On a 1, become lost. Roll 1d6 to determine the direction they go in.
10Crystalline briar patch. It takes up the whole hex. Will require ingenuity to traverse, or they can go around. If they brave the crystal thorns they will need to make one Save vs Stone per turn for six turns. They will find treasure, however. Roll on Type A table each turn.
11Roll on Wilderness Encounters tables in the Underworld and Wilderness Adventures page 18
12The rain stops and the sun comes out. Crystalline shards glisten upon every bough and underfoot. A lost Acolyte finds them. Grainne Bell, CL 1, AC5, HP3, THAC0 19, Turn Undead, Crystalline ear
Barrenwood Encounter Table.
I can’t figure out how to format this so it doesn’t look like crap on the blog. Sorry!

So far, this method has worked well and has been telling a story, which is what I wanted. I have struggled to stick exactly to the letter of the old OD&D books, mostly because so much is left to the referee in play. But there is also another point. The Underworld and Wilderness Adventures random encounter mechanic just didn’t work for me and the game I’m creating with the players at the table. There is a lot in the that book about castles in the wilderness, and a set number of hexes you can travel in a day and how far away you can be from a monster and still be surprised. There are no castles in the Barrenwood. It wouldn’t make sense in the context. Surprise will occur if no-one Hears Noise from the trees because it’s a forest and not open territory. And surely hexes can be any size one chooses? For all these reasons, I decided to go with my own hex-map + encounter table combo. It’s simple and effective.

The PCs escaped the spider webs with their loot and no casualties, although one of the NPCs got bit by a spider and failed her Save vs Stone so her index finger turned into crystal. She managed to keep it together enough to continue, though. They moved on into the next hex towards the river and they encountered a pair of mischievous pixies who flew around them laughing and invisible. The Magic user, Ilaina, used her own Ring of Invisibility and I ruled that she was able to to see the diminutive fairies in that state, because I thought it was a cool idea. She was able to identify what they were up against and get a good look at them (they had thought, perhaps, that these were talking crows that they’d heard tell of in the town.) This seemed to anger the pixies but they nonetheless agreed to show them the source of the magical bursts which had polluted the waters and damaged the town.

The mischievous pixies left the PCs on one side of the raging river that passed through the forest while they flew on and laughed at them from the opposite bank. Siward and one of the hirelings, Edmund, used their axes to chop down one of the more gargantuan stress on their side and I asked for an attack roll from Siward to hit the other side with it. I did this, mainly because there is not really a mechanic to test abilities and there are no skills at all, unless you mean thief skills. I briefly considered adopting the roll-under mechanic used in Basic D&D, but felt that I would rather use the mechanics as presented for this, as much as possible. I really am just picking and choosing which rules to employ here. So, with their makeshift bridge in place, the party clambered across to a an area relatively devoid of trees. Since they had entered a new hex, I asked for another encounter table roll. Sticking close to the riverside, Abbis was able to hear a rustling and cracking coming their way through the trees, giving the adventurers a heads-up to the emergence a moment later of a half-dozen undead trees! My idea for these monsters was basically, zombie treants, brittle and rotting and falling apart. I gave them the stats of a regular zombie from the Men & Monsters book, but made them extra susceptible to fire damage, not that that came up in the fight. It was a tough combat! Our thief was lucky that she had levelled up the previous session or she would have died when she got brained by a rotting tree limb and two of the NPCs, Edmund, who I had named for my dead Basic D&D PC, and Brianna of the crystal finger, went down. The party were victorious but it had been a costly battle. Luckily, the bole of one of the undead trees was filled with treasure!

That’s where we wrapped up the session. Everyone levelled up at the end of it, what with all the treasure I’d been throwing at them.

Conclusion

This week, more than the previous one, I have become aware exactly how difficult it is to stick to the idea of playing this game as it would have been in 1976. It’s really impossible. My gaming brain has been influenced for good or for ill by so many story-games, the OSR and even later editions of D&D that its essentially impossible not to feel their effects on what we’re doing.
But, then again, I’m sure there were as many ways of playing this game at the time, as there were groups playing it. You would have had you hard-core war-gamers that used it as fantasy set-dressing, your power gamers and min-maxers who wanted to do nothing but gain XP and influence, castles and followers and power and there were probably still others who played it as a fantasy romp with real role-playing elements and deep character backstories. So, I’m quitting my hand-wringing over it. As far as this Editioning challenge goes, it has to be secondary to the enjoyment of the players, including me. Otherwise, what’s the point?

The Editioning: Weeks One and Two, Basic D&D

The Keep on the Borderlands

Friend of the blog, Isaac has generously offered his time and effort to take on the Editioning with me. He’s DMing Basic D&D for us right now. He decided on the Keep on the Borderlands as the adventure for this edition, and I couldn’t be happier. It’s the iconic first scenario for many, many adventurers in the 80s. I actually think I might have played at least part of it as a novice, although I have no real memory of it.

For those who don’t know it, here’s the set up. The PCs arrive at the Keep on the Borderlands, a remote and embattled outpost, that has been recently assaulted by a group of creatures that have come from the nearby Caves of Chaos. They use the keep as a base of operations to set out and explore the caves and other locations in the area.

It’s got a few interesting NPCs with their own specific motivations and desires and a couple of different factions to keep things interesting, including the Ospreys, a rebellious bandit clan, the current ruler in the keep, the Castellan, and the Thyrenian Guild.

A lot of these older modules are designed for unusually large numbers of PCs. I think this one is designed for 6 to 9 players. As we started off with just two players (now expanded to three) it was essential to hire a whole bunch of hirelings. We started off with four but quickly decided we should max out that number and hired three more. By the time we set out to the Caves of Chaos, in our third session, we had a small army, including a slightly suspicious priest by the name of Jabeck and his acolytes. This should make combat interesting.

The cover of B2, The Keep on the Borderlands. A purple cover with the name of the module and a colour illustraiton in the middle: a piched battle on the road between adventurers and monsters.
By Scanned by DM2ortiz, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=505624

How its going

I say we set out for the caves in session 3, but actually, that was just our most recent and successful foray. Here’s the story of the first one.

So, in the first session, Tom and I made characters. As per the rules, we rolled up our ability scores first and determined the character class best suited to those scores afterwards. Tom rolled pretty well and decided on an Elf character, Eandril Summerstream, which made a lot of sense as elves had the benefit of spells and proficiency with melee and ranged weapons too. Given our smaller party size, that flexibility could be useful. I rolled execrably:

Str: 6
Int: 6
Wis: 12
Dex: 5
Con: 9
Cha: 10

There was only one option with those scores, so I created Edmund of the Sun, a Cleric of the Sun. He’s a lovely fellow, but thick as pig shit. I played into the idea that he was barely literate and couldn’t remember an NPC name if his life depended on it. I outfitted him in plate armour because his dexterity was so bad and he only had 2 hit points. Between the two of us, we represented the only two survivors of our mercenary band called the Company of the Summer Sun (a clever play on the names of the two characters) who arrived at the keep with the hope of rebuilding.

I genuinely had a great time roleplaying Edmund in the keep and getting pissed in the tavern with the party’s new hirelings. We awoke in the street the next day, suffering from alcohol poisoning and set off with Jabeck and his mates to explore the Caves of Chaos. Now, we had been warned about Jabeck by the keep’s chaplain, Father Burgoyne, who asked us to watch him and find out what we could about him. He suspected that he was a spy for the Great Serpent Cult, which operated out of the caves. But Father Burgoyne was incredibly racist against elves and Jabeck seemed reasonable when we went to talk to him. He also plied us with ale, which endeared him to us. So, I guess we took his side. That’s how he ended up accompanying us to the caves. I really hope he doesn’t betray us…

Anyway, on the way, Isaac had us roll for a random encounter, which resulted in an ambush by the aforementioned Ospreys. Now, we had been given a token by one of the guards in the keep to take to the Ospreys to maybe do some work for them. However, there was also a bounty on them, which was worth 10GP per right ear returned to the keep. Being rather lawful types, we decided to go anti-Osprey in our outlook. Edmund tried to throw them off by deliberately mistaking the voice of the unseen Osprey in the roadside bushes for a lad he knew in seminary. He trusted in his armour to protect him from any potential attacks. Turned out this was a mistake. They got tired of Edmund’s sass and rolled initiative. We lost, they won, one of them fired an arrow. It lodged in Edmund’s eye-socket, killing him immediately and outright, with 2 points of damage. The first combat roll of the game killed my boy. It was a bit of a shock, even though I had predicted Edmund’s early and brutal demise from the outset, given his atrocious stats.

From there, Eandril led the charge and killed the three bandits. I picked up one of the hirelings to control for that battle but wanted to make my own character again. So as the rest of the party turned around and returned to the keep to regroup, I started rolling. Oddly, by the time Eandril and the hirelings got back from chasing down the Ospreys, to the road where Edmund’s corpse lay, it was gone, taken, they assumed, by Jabeck to dispose of as per the rites of their shared religion.

A thief in a black and white illustration from the Basic Rule Book
Yoink

Despite the loss of Edmund, the encounter proved quite profitable, between the 30gp for the Osprey ears and the horses they left behind, Eandril did well. By the time they returned to Father Burgoyne to tell of Edmund’s demise, I had my next PC ready. Thaddeus Nightbane is a thief, obviously. I rolled significantly better for this character so hopefully he will last a little longer. This would be unlike every family member, friend and acquaintance he had ever had, however, as they have all perished tragically somewhere in his backstory. Despite this slight worry, Eandril decided to take him on as a full party member.

To the Caves

Finally, with session 3 on Wednesday, we actually made it to the Caves of Chaos. We were joined by another player, who rolled up a Halfling. We also created some backup characters for everyone, given the obvious lethality of the system and the adventure. There is no doubt that the lack of hit points, the lack of healing, or spells of any kind for the cleric, the swinginess of the combat and the potential for unbalanced encounters is pretty rough on these little adventurers, so its best to go in prepared. Unfortunately, my backup character is just as bad as Edmund, and is, possibly, one of his peers, as I had to go Cleric again. With all this character creation, we didn’t get too much time to play. But we did make it down the road without a random encounter this time.

When we got to the caves we discovered a group of goblins moving something around down there in sacks (the sneakier PCs went in to hide in shadows and spy on the inhabitants.) Our plan is to draw them out of the caves as much as possible and ambush them in a pincer. We have executed the first part, gaining their attention with some elven lullabies, so out of place in the darkened caverns. And last we left off, we were getting ready to roll initiative! Exciting! Hopefully Thaddeus lasts a little longer than Edmund.

The Basics

Dungeons and Dragons Game Rule Book cover. A red dragon menaces a warrior wielding an axe.
Big Red

There are too many possible versions of Basic D&D to definitively say that we’re playing the version. I mean, we’re not even really using one version at the table. We have the Rules Cyclopedia, which contains all the rules from the entire BECMI line, the Dungeons and Dragons Rule Book also printed in 1991, which only contains he Basic rules for levels 1 to 3. Isaac also has been referring to the Moldvay rules, a kind of 2nd edition of the Basic set, and we have even been using resources and specific rules from OSE, which is essentially the same ruleset.

In general, this hasn’t been an issue. We have come across some conflicting rules. Encumbrance was the first one. Isaac simply made a ruling to go with the encumbrance from OSE rather than the Cyclopedia. We have discovered a could have differences in spell descriptions, but they were functionally unimportant so we could safely ignore them or Isaac would make a ruling as to which version to use.

I have to say, stuff like the class sheets from OSE, printed out and handed to the players, have actually been very useful and don’t have any deleterious impact on the “playing Basic D&D experience.”

As for interaction with the rules, Some have found THAC0 and descending AC to be a bit of a leap to understand, but, luckily, the character sheets Isaac has selected have the full range of “to hit” numbers laid out so all we have to do is roll the dice and refer to the table.

Things like the rolls for thief skills are weird and anomalous but not difficult to understand. Once again, as long as you have them laid out for you, its easy to know what you’re rolling and what you need to get below to succeed, whether its on a D6 or a d100.

Conclusion

It’s too early for a conclusion, but, despite the death of my first PC on the first combat roll of the game, I am enjoying the game and the adventure. The old school style has been particularly refreshing. It’s interesting that we need to rely on a cadre of mercenaries to even attempt the adventure and I like the randomness that’s inherent in it.

I’ll be back with more reports once we have a couple more sessions, dear reader, so stick around!