May 2026 – The Dice Pool

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

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 3: Crystalline Experimentation

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

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!

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)
Escaped insect swarm: Save v Poison or take 1 point of random ability score damage
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
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.
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
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

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:

Up
Down
Left
Right
Forwards
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:

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
Escaped insect swarm: Save v Poison or take 1 point of random ability score damage
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
1d3 Crystalline Gargoyles on 1a come alive
A splash comes from the water below
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

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.

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 on the road. The shepherd was already a goner by 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!