Ronan McNamee

DCC Day 2026 Part 2

A Case of Mistaken Death

Below, you will find some spoilers for DCC adventure #109 Beneath the Isle of Serpents, just so you know, dear reader.

Fun & TPKs ad in the back of the adventure booklet. Shows a lot of black and white covers of other DCC adventures. Reminiscent of old ads in the '80s and '90s era of RPG magazines. — Fun & TPKs

At this point, I don’t think any of us are going into a DCC game thinking, you know what? This is going to be a piece of cake. You expect to be challenged by lethal traps, dangerous surprises, gonzo monsters and a general air of lethality. But there’s one encounter in Beneath the Isle of the Serpents that has the potential to tip the scales so far from balanced that you could be looking at a one or two round TPK. It almost did in our third session of this adventure. There’s a giant, two-headed viper hiding to one side of a door in one room. It’s given a +6 to initiative to account for surprise. Then, once it probably gets the initiative, it’s got two bite attacks at a +8 to hit. That’s not the worst of it, once it inevitably hits, it’s got 3d6 damage for each bite! Now, please bear in mind that this is an adventure for 1st level DCC characters. Few, if any, will have hit points matching even an average roll of those damage dice. But then, there’s a DCC ad in the back of this adventure entitled “Fun & TPKs.” So, that’s what you’re up against, I suppose. Don’t get me wrong; I actually do enjoy knowing that the dungeon is genuinely scary, that characters can and will die, that the stakes are high. That makes their actions to overcome the dangers all the more significant. It creates an aura of tension that is hard to synthesise in any way other than the players knowing that their characters could be walking to their deaths. We had already had 2.5 deaths by the point they got to this encounter after all. But those deaths were a little more acceptable. The PCs had done everything they could to prevent them up to the point they didn’t, up to the point when I got luckier in my rolls than they did. Not only that, each death was poetic and emotional and caused by a hypnotised member of their own party. You couldn’t write a better death.

Viper, giant (two-headed): Init +6 (surprise); Atk bite +8 melee (3d6 plus poison; Crit M/d10; AC 16; HD 4d8 (hp 18); MV 30’; Act 2d20; SP poison (1d4 Stamina loss, DC 12 Fortitude save negates); SV Fort +6, Ref +4, Will +2; AL N. — Giant Two-headed Viper stats

But this giant two-headed viper? It had the cards stacked in its favour by the stats, the map, the circumstances. Even then, despite that initiative bonus, it still went after three of the party members. The players got a little bit lucky with that, but it was all fair and square. So they attacked, two hits out of three and the snake was down two thirds of its hit points. But then it had its attacks; two heads = two attacks. It hit one PC with one attack, killed her outright, and then hit the second PC because it had a + frikkin’ 8 to hit, so, of course it did, and killed him outright too. Half the party was dead in a single round. And, you know, I’ll be honest here, I thought 3d6 damage for a single attack on a first level character? That’s insane, so I reduced it to 2d6 and it still killed ‘em both… The players looked upon the ruin of their party. Rember, dear reader, there were only two players in this adventure. One had only one of two PCs left and one had none. That last suriving PC was ready to run, but then remembered that the Wizard’s familiar was supposed to go on her turn. The dice were rolled and that dog ripped out at least one of the viper’s throats! We retconned the deaths and were able to finish out the dungeon.

And look, this was dramatic and all, they scraped through when they probably should have died, but it was so ridiculously overpowered as an encounter that we questioned how well this adventure could have been play-tested. Combine this with a couple of other strangenesses and errors and I am not sure, honestly, if I can recommend it without the Judge spending a fair bit of time preparing things and making a few necessary changes.

Mapping Errors

I love DCC maps. They’re almost always beautiful and functional and genuine pieces of art in their own right. That can be said for the maps in this adventure too, in fact. They are, perhaps, not quite as memorable or gnarly as an Doug Kovacs map from, say, Sailors on the Starless Sea, or the Mark Allen one from Hole in the Sky but they are functional and effective. You can compare for yourself:

The six levels of the dungeon from Beneath the Isle of the Serpents - in plan view. By Aaron Kreeder. — Dungeon Plan-view

The six levels of the dungeon from Beneath the Isle of the Serpents - in cross-section. By Aaron Kreeder. — Dungeon Plan-view

But there is a very small problem with the dungeon map/key that left me scratching my head and cursing the adventure for wasting my time at the table. If you look closely, dear reader, you will see that Room 4-2 and Room 4-3 are labelled differently on the plan compared to the cross-section. Now, as the PCs explored Level 4, I was really just looking at the plan map so I didn’t notice this error. The problem is, it’s the plan map that’s wrong. 4-2 is where 4-3 should be and vice versa. This might seem like a small issue, and perhaps I’m making too big a deal of it, but when you only encounter it for the first time at the table? Confusion, frustration, struggle. It’s a waste of time and mental energy that could better be spent on building atmosphere, answering player questions or, like, role-playing.

And if this was the only map problem in the module, I might be a bit more forgiving, but I mentioned in the last DCC Day 2026 post, that the island map should have hexes to allow you to calculate how often to roll on the overland encounter table, but it doesn’t so, once again, the Judge is just left to guess at the table, when they are already juggling a lot.

I will say this is not the only potentially bad labelling in this adventure. On the cover, it defines it as an adventure for Level 1 PCs, but on the inside, it says it’s for Level 2 PCs. This could actually explain the extra lethality. Maybe my party were just too wee?

So

Here’s what happened at the end of the adventure (if you want to catch up, go check out my first post about it here.)

The party, now three-strong since Hilda the Wizard met up with them back on the beach, returned to the point they left off in the dungeon. They picked up some of the weapons and armour belonging to the Serpent-men and continued down the winding, narrow stairway until they discovered a secret door in the wall. Cleverly, they decided to treat it with some care, stepping to either side of it when it opened, thus avoiding the burning oil trap. There is a high probability that this trap was not going to ignite but, ignite it did, to no effect of course. They continued into an uncanny corridor that seemed to have been wrought in a strange way. It was as if the rock had been disintegrated to create this corridor and the pentagonal chamber beyond. In that chamber, by the way, was an Elder Thing. It had come here to observe the Serpent-men and the Cobra-men, apparently, but that does not particularly describe the reason for it to appear in the adventure, if I’m honest. It had a deleterious effect on a couple of the PCs. There’s a table to tell you what happens if you fail a Willpower save upon seeing this Cthulhu-Mythos-ass creature. Anyway, one of the PCs froze and one fled. I’m just glad none of them rolled “fight” because that would have surely been the end of the adventure. The other one found she was able to communicate with it in a rudimentary telepathic way. It was able to tell her there was another exit from its chamber to the surface, and that there was some sort of conflict between the Serpent-men and another sect who worshipped Sett. It then began packing up its things. Now that the PCs had uncovered its ingenious hiding place, it had no choice but to leave, apparently. So they left it to its business.

The Elder Thing: This ancient race has inhabited the earth for many millions of years and may have created life on earth as it appears today. Older creatures prefer water as their habitat, but can also move effortlessly on land and even fly.

The appearance resembles a cylindrical shape a good two meters high, the ends of each tapering slightly, so that an Elder Thing resembles almost a barrel. Furrows and ridges cover the body with strange growths, and the wings and strange head, shaped like a five-pointed starfish, give the creature characteristics of both animal and plant life.

The Elder Things established at least one major city in Antarctica and created the Shoggoths there who used them as slaves. During the millions of years of their existence on Earth, the Elder Things fought many conflicts, but now seem to have retired. From: https://cthulhueternal.com/creatures/elder-thing/ — https://cthulhueternal.com/creatures/elder-thing/

I have several questions about this encounter. The main one is just why? Why is it in this dungeon? It lends nothing to the otherwise decidedly snake-based vibe. If the PCs end up attacking either because the players think its a good idea or because they failed their save and rolled “fight” on the reaction table, they would be killed quicker than you could say “Beyond the Mountains of Madness.” Another why. Why is it watching the Serpent-men? Not really explained. Still whying. Why is is the trap protecting its lair so shitty? This unfathomable monstrosity has the power to disintegrate a lair for itself in the rock, and observe the inhabitants of the dungeon without their knowledge through the walls, but it can’t put a decent security system in? The trap is the kind of thing you might find in an incompetent bandit’s lair. Here’s a what. What use is the other exit? It’s difficult to climb and leads to a part of the island that is much more dangerous than the main entrance. Admittedly, the players did make use of the Elder Thing again later, though.

Once they descended the stairs they came to level 4. This is where I ran into the trouble with the mislabeled rooms and where they ran into decidedly more trouble with the Giant Two-headed Viper. Anyway, once we got past all that, they were able to explore the chamber where the viper was hiding. If you look at the map, you can see that the sluice they discovered beneath the grating on level 1 leads down to that room. There were humanoids manacled and hanging from the ceiling of that sluice. They had been unable to get to them from above. They were able to use the winch here to bring them all down. Some were already dead, but those that could be saved, they brought to the Elder Thing. It agreed to heal them as long as they covered their eyes. With a little healing, one of them even turned out to be an Elf who was happy to join the party and aid them in discovering the evil that imprisoned, enslaved and devoured them. This became our latest PC, replacing Helfgott the Cleric. The rest of the prisoners were sent back to the fishing boat with strict instructions not to let Kamay try to leave again on the off-chance he woke up.

Back to full strength, the party went to investigate the other room on this level. This proved to be the apartment of the leader of this breakaway sect. As at least one of the PCs had the Serpent-man language skill, they were able to discover a plot when they searched through her correspondence. Human and Demi-human adherents of the demonic god, Nehebkau, were worming their way into positions of power and influence across the nations in and bordering Thracia. What their ultimate goal was? Unclear, except that they were to sow chaos and division to leave opportunities open for the Serpent-men. They also found some loot in here, which was nice. Then they opened a hatch in the corridor and went down even deeper.

They skipped Level 5 at first and went down again to Level 6. This level proved to consist only a single tunnel which was collapsed on either end. Slaves were working to dig it out, guarded by a couple of Serpent-man. When the PCs attacked the slaves immediately revolted and with their help, the guards were quickly dispatched. The prisoners are started out in the adventure as a swarm. Only AoE attacks could do any more than a single point of damage, but a single point of damage was also enough to kill one member of the swarm of ten so they were only going to last so long. Still, they were happy to come along and help the PCs in their fight.

They returned to Level 5 and proceeded into the Temple of Nehebkau. This is the finale to this adventure and it didn’t disappoint. The setup coming from the room alone was cool. There are pools of magma dotting the floor and lava domes casting their eerie glow. On top of that, there are drips of acid coming from the roof, ready to burn anyone who goes prone. This happens a lot in the ensuing battle. The PCs entered from the north-west and there is a ritual happening in the southern part of the chamber, which is accessible only through a short passage not he east and west sides. The ritual involves the sect’s leader ritually murdering prisoners by pouring molten magma into their chest cavities. Yup. If she and her three flunkies get to finish it, a demonic Magma viper will be summoned. Added complication? Sure, there are also four Serpent-man guards stationed to stop anyone who tries to interfere.

The PCs ruthlessly sacrificed the prisoner swarm in a full frontal assault on the guards while they attempted to deal with the leader and the cultists. There were some dicey moments, like when one of them got hypnotised again, when they got down to the last sacrifice and just managed to defeat the last remaining cultist before they could kill her and when their swarm was reduced to just two members. But they persisted and played it clever, using the spells and abilities they had to their greatest advantage. Sleep was the best spell in their arsenal to be honest. There were a lot of fun moments provided not only by the rolls on the individual spell tables but also on the mercurial magic tables, grit tables and fumble tables. DCC is all about the tables, isn’t it? It brings new meaning to the word random. You are never quite sure what will happen, especially when you cast a spell. It might work just fine and achieve the goal you intended. It could even result in a far more powerful effect than you could have imagined. But it could also fizzle out and mean you can’t cast it again that day. Or worse…

Conclusion

Three Serpent-folk performing a sacrifice of a human woman chained to an altar.

This is the joy of playing DCC with PCs of more than 0-Level. The funnels are fun and all, but access to magic and other special abilities really elevates this game, if you ask me.

There were a couple of other beats once they defeated the cult leader and prevented the performance of the ritual but they were not worth mentioning, to be honest. They went back to the boat and returned to the mainland with all the freed prisoners that survived. It was a bitter-sweet ending, however, considering how many they lost along the way.

I think, if I were to run it again, I would prepare a few things. I’d pop some hexes on the map of the island to make the random encounter table useful. I’d probably remove the Elder Thing encounter and replace the Giant Two-headed Viper encounter with something a little less lethal. I’d also seed some more information about what’s going on in the dungeon, throughout the actual dungeon, because, as it stands, there’s no way the PCs could know that the finale ritual is actually going on. They just happen to stumble across it whenever they decide to show up at the Temple chamber.

In the end, though, we all enjoyed the adventure, despite its flaws. I would definitely consider running the main Caverns of Thracia campaign at some point too. Probably once this whole Editioning Business is behind us.

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 4

Investigations

I wrote a post a couple of years ago comparing a D&D mystery/investigation-based scenario to one for the Blade Runner RPG. D&D didn’t come out of that head-to-head too well. It was unsatisfying to create powerful, combat oriented characters only to be stuck questioning party-goers and looking for clues when your abilities were not really suited for that.

So, I suppose it’s a wonder that I chose an adventure like The Eternal Boundary for the AD&D 2nd Edition portion of the Editioning. But let me tell you the difference: the Eternal Boundary has a little bit of everything you could want as an introductory module to a Planescape campaign. Yes, the theme of the adventure is one of clues, schmoozing and sleuthing, at least in the first couple of acts. But, underneath all that, the players are discovering the dark of Sigil, its razor vine-choked alleyways, its legendary landmarks, its numberless portals and its ineffable nature. They’re hearing the chant on the streets of the Hive, from the barmies and the bubbers, out of the mouths of dour Dustmen, hopeless Bleakers and frenetic Chaosmen. As they try to find out what happened to poor Eliath, they visit the Mortuary, where they learn about the morbid philosophy of the Dead, they come into conflict with the Xaositects and discover they have no respect even for the order of sentences, never mind the universe. They hear that they should never cross the Lady of Pain and that even the gods have no direct influence on the City of Doors. They hear a lot and, as they get more involved and feel more like they belong to this bizarre place, they start to contribute their own two coppers to the philosophical undercurrent of the city’s discourse. Every session, our Dustman and our Sensate get into a blazing row about whose thinking is right. What a genuine joy.

The Lady of Pain - line drawing. The masked woman stands on her own in long robes with blades ringing her face. — The Lady of Pain – line drawing. Tony di Terlizzi.

Even though most of the adventure has taken place only in the Hive Ward, the PCs have been exposed to the bones of this city, and the major themes of the setting. The investigation is incidental.

Also, the investigation can be handled in any one of a dozen ways. So far the PCs have utilised deception, bribery, intimidation, local knowledge, ambush, kidnapping, false imprisonment, and they’ve done a “Weekend at Bernie’s.” And many of these instances could have been fights but they wisely avoided violence in most cases. The point is, they were presented with a mystery and were asked to solve it. They were never told they couldn’t do it the way they wanted to. That’s proper old school. And that’s where it differs most from An Unexpected Wedding Invitation (from that Investigations post,) which went out of its way to proscribe certain actions, avenues of investigation and even the freedom of PCs to go to certain places at certain times.

So, although their investigations are meeting with varying levels of success I think I can say with some confidence that the players are having fun anyway.

Finding Eliath

Before getting into our latest session, I had some admin to do. I realised that I had not been handing out XP at all. The poor PCs were not getting their rewards for all their clever little actions. I had to really stretch my memory muscles on this one, as we were talking about two sessions over the course of six weeks. The AD&D 2nd Edition Dungeon Master’s Guide recommends that you award XP at the end of every session, because, otherwise, you’re likely to forget what happened. The XP system in this game is extremely granular, with warriors, wizards, priests and rogues all getting XP for doing different things. For instance, warriors (fighters, paladins and rangers) get an extra 10XP per hit dice of creature defeated per warrior level. However, priests (clerics and druids) don’t get that. Instead they get an extra 100XP per spell cast to further their ethos and even more if they use one of their granted powers like Turn Undead. Rogues (bards and thieves) have it pretty easy since they get 2XP for every gold piece worth of treasure they obtain. But Wizards (Magic Users and Specialists) have it toughest in my opinion, they get a mere 50XP per spell cast or 500XP per spell researched. Now, sure, they can cast spells but only when the occasion arises, and as for researching spells, that is a time-consuming and expensive activity that there is not much space for in a short adventure. Anyway, they all also got some common awards for their investigations and a combat encounter. The combat XP is calculated in a fairly logical way using these tables from the DMG:

Special Ability adjustments to HD for monsters.

XP Award per HD of monster defeated table. — Special Ability adjustments to HD for monsters.

Dear reader, if you can’t remember what went before, frankly, I don’t blame you, so here are a few links to the other posts in this series:
AD&D 2nd Ed Part 1
AD&D 2nd Ed Part 2
AD&D 2nd Ed Part 3

Last we left our intrepid heroes, they were staking out the pub in the hopes they would run into their target, Eliath. They had rented a room and even stayed there for the night without the man in question showing his face. The second day, they decided to split up. Trance and Aurora would return to the Butcher’s Block, the Hive’s diviest dive, where Trundled Three-teeth, its stinking Ogre proprietor would hopefully have some information for them. Meanwhile, Devansh, the cleric and Glaermond, the Paladin continued the riveting stakeout.

After only moments back in the Hive, the first group heard sounds of a yet another attack in yet another alleyway. Aurora sent her goat familiar to scope it out. He is a very sneaky goat, ok? Kid spotted a group of men standing over another after, seemingly, killing him. They talked about leaving the poor bubber for the Collectors to find before scarpering. The goat got a good look at the ring-leader, a half-elf in a dark leather hood. Aurora, out Witch, examined the body and even cast Detect Magic on it. The man seemed completely dead, but was also emanating magic. They decided to take him to the Mortuary, where Aurora’s Dustmen buddies were sure to know what to do with him. So, she and Trance slung the body between them and pretended he was dead drunk, and not just dead, as they “escorted” him through the Hive. Unfortunately, their ruse was not sufficient to fool the Bleak Cabal gang that turned up. Turns out they were out looking for the berks who were putting their barmies in the dead book, and it looked like they’d just found their suspects. Some fast talking from Trance convinced the Bleakers that they were not the bashers they were looking for, by telling them almost the whole truth. Still, Derioch Ysarl, the mage in charge, demanded that, if anyone was going to take the body anywhere, it would be them. Derioch also used detect magic, and, at a higher level was able to figure out that the spell cast on the man was necromantic in nature.

Back to the Black Sail Tavern. Devansh and Glaermond ordered some cranberry juice and watered down wine and a couple of bowls of forever stew from Salja, the tiefling serving maid. They also purchased a hot bowl of information. She was able to tell them that, not only was Eliath in the bar right at that moment at another table, but also, that he had a room in the Black Sail. Rather than confront ELiath in the pub while he sat with a group of his fellow Doomguard, they decided to keep an eye on him and wait for the others to come back, when they would corner him on his own.

Meanwhile, Trance and Aurora were talking to Trundfeld. He gave them a bit of a run around, more-or-less telling them only things that they already knew. They didn’t trust him but they had little choice but to accept what he told them. So they went back to the Black Sail to meet up with the other party members.

That night, Trance took it upon herself to use the skeleton key Salja had kindly provided for the low low price of 1GP and enter Eliath’s room. She hid there under the bed for an hour or so before he returned. When he did, she leapt up and threatened to kill him if he didn’t co-operate. The others then helped her to kidnap him and take him back to their own room. Finally! They had found the barmy they were looking for! But he wasn’t barmy no more. He tried to tell them that he was a Clueless prime, only recently arrived from Toril when he was immediately recruited by the Doomguard. But when they pushed him he confessed that he had been in Sigil for fifteen years, most of which he spent insane on the streets of the Hive. He said that he had died there, a raving loon, but rather than being brought into he arms of his loving god, Lathander insatead returned him to life, claiming that for Eliath to join the Doomguard would be all he would need to do to fulfil his god’s wishes. He had no memory of a key to the portal they were looking for, though he did direct them to a wizard’s tower in the Lady’s Ward, which might contain the Rhaunades Collection, a library that may house the information they’re looking for.

The PCs felt they had run into a major roadblock in their investigations. Despite finding the man they were looking for, they were no closer to the information they needed, the key to the portal to the Isle of Black Trees was still a mystery and the Rhaunades Collection seemed like a long shot since there were a thousand towers in the Lady’s Ward and they didn’t know where to start. So they returned to their patron in the Society of Sensation, Bendon Mawl, for advice. On the way to the Civic Festhall to see him, they ran into another familiar figure, the Dancing Man who Aurora had encountered in the Hive. Another barmy turned sane. This time, they questioned him and when he tried out his cover story, one very similar to Eliath’s they found out that he remembered dying and being greeted Saint Cuthbert, who sent him back with the divine command to seek out and join the Society of Sensation to fulfil his wishes. The party began to make some connections. And when they went to see Bendon Mawl, he was very concerned about the possibility of some conspiracy between the Dustmen and the Doomguard, possibly at the expense of the Senates. He promised them some help if they would go and investigate this new threat. Even the Dustman on the team, Aurora found herself wondering if her own higher ups might have some nefarious plans she was unaware of.

They went back to their decrepit church to rest for the night and think about what they were going to do next but were rudely awoken by armed men busting down the door and attacking them!

Conclusion

The mystery has been preserved even after they discovered Eliath. They have unwound a part of it, of course, in finding him and the Dancing Man alive, but they don’t know the purpose of these “resurrections” or who is really behind it. Meanwhile, there are several factions in play and list of NPCs with their own agendas as well. It’s been low on action, but high on intrigue and that is suiting us just fine after the highly lethal, combat heavy OD&D and Basic.

Can’t wait to get further down this rabbit hole but I’m going to have to. I have holiday coming up so our next session won’t happen for a month! I’ll be back in the meantime with musings on other RPG-related things dear reader.

Stay Frosty, Forneus Research Base Review

Zero Prep

It’s the dream, wouldn’t you say, dear reader? Pick up and play. Many claim it, few deliver. One thing I’ll say about this Stay Frosty adventure, and, to be fair, any Stay Frosty adventure I’ve read (which isn’t many,) is that you can pick it up and play it with pretty much no preparation. I mean, that goes for Stay Frosty to a certain extent too. I discovered that when I reviewed the game itself last October.

The cover of Stay Frosty Remastered by Casey Garske. Space Marines fighting aliens/demons — Stay Frosty Remastered

But, of course, zero prep is not all you might want from an adventure. In fact, for some GMs, prep is as much fun as play. So what else has Andrew Walter’s Forneus Research Base got going for it?

Well, Tom, Isaac and I played it over the space of three sessions recently. In fact, we just finished it the other night. I have thoughts.

Action

There’s no fucking around with Stay Frosty, no long opening scene to allow for introductions of our characters, just a short summary for the PCs, of what they’re doing out there in space and an immediate crash landing at the eponymous Research Base. Oh, the crash landing was caused by black ooze exploding from the controls of their shuttle btw.

As I stated, there is a short read-aloud piece of text at the start. It explains that the PCs are private marines, employed by the United Universal Corporation to check in on its research colonies. As they are doing this, they are forced to crash land.

As I said, Stay Frosty is not really interested in your PCs feelings, unless they involve terror or going apeshit. At no point is anyone encouraged to take a moment to express their concern for their fellow marines or, for that matter, the colonists they were supposedly there to protect. This is a DOOM simulator. The PCs are there to shoot shotguns and blow up demons. And Forneus Research Base is all action from the get-go.

The Frostiness Tracker goes from Warm to Ice Cold — Frostiness Tracker

As soon as they emerged from the wreckage, the PCs realised they were not going to be able to take off again without significant work on the shuttle, so they decided to make their way to the base. Meanwhile, I’m rolling the Danger Die every time they move from one location to another, take a look around or stop to think, as intended by the rules. The Danger Die works a bit like a random encounter table. You roll a d6 and the result will give you one of the following:

Encounter and Stress – i.e. roll on the relevant encounter table. Forneus has one table for the moon’s surface and one for inside the base. Stress is added to the PCs to build Tension. Tension also equals Frostiness. They higher the Frostiness level the better as it gives PCs bonuses like advantage on initiative and even extra attacks. But Tension can also explode. See below for more on that.
In dangerous areas, Encounter, otherwise, Environment – Forneus has its own Environment table also. But this didn’t come up too often, to be honest.
Environment – as above
Stress – see point 1
Entropy – for some reason, I rolled this one a lot and it had no effect. It’s only relevant if the PCs are using a thing constantly that has its own Supply die. For instance, if they are using Combat Drugs or Fuel when they’re driving a vehicle. The idea is that when Entropy is rolled, the Supply Die for that thing goes down to the next lowest die size. But whenever this was rolled, they had nothing to decrease.
TENSION EXPLODES! – Only rolled this once. The idea here is that when this comes up, the PCs make a Willpower Save. If they succeed, they get to reduce their Tension by one. If they fail though, they take Tension x level damage and reduce their Tension to 1. Then they roll on the Going Apeshit table if their HP are reduced to 0 by the damage. The effects of this can be anything from getting Advantage on damage rolls but constantly rolling your Ammo Die (like a Supply Die for your weapons,) to Last Stand: going down mano-a-mano with your enemies. I actually adjudicated this mechanic incorrectly at the table. I didn’t allow them the Willpower Save, I just rolled the Tension damage and gave it to every PC. Also, this damage is not supposed to be applied to attribute scores when all HP are gone, as normal damage is. Only one PC had to roll on the Going Apeshit table. She ran for her goddamn life and they had to manacle her to the ATV to stop her.

(I only just realised I was calling this the Doom Die the whole way through our game. Oops.)

The Danger Die is the mechanic that really keeps things interesting in Stay Frosty. Many of the locations in the Forneus Research Base, for instance, have no pre-written encounters or much of interest at all, so the random encounters, environmental hazards and ratcheting Tension from the Danger Die are doing a lot of the work. This works fairly successfully but I found I was rolling up Encounters a lot, since a third of the possible Danger Die results give you one most of the time, and after a certain event in Forneus, you actually get Encounters on a roll of 1 to 3. So the marines were drifting from one Encounter to another with only cursory exploration in between.

At least the variety of enemies is suitably gristly, demonic and fun. You have the obvious demons, like the Black Leathery Imps, that used poison to make their enemies fire on each other. Then you have the basic cultists who just have guns, the mutated cultists who have been transformed to allow them to fly with their fiendish lord Xithrabla through the cosmos, sucking from his hellish teats and the Centiservitor who is a cultist combined with a centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. On top of that you have the real horrors like the Cadaverous Persecutor, a giant cyborg corpse with a rocket launcher, and the Fledgeling Pest (The Final Boss,) a sickening, enormous baby’s head with a partially exposed brain and a vicious bite.

The Mutated Cultist has an eye where his torso should be — Mutant Cultist

The Centiservitor is a mashup of a human and a giant centipede with a plasma cannon in its chest. — Mutant Cultist

We found the lower level encounters were essentially just target practice. Since we only had two players, I gave them each three marines and decided to treat it a bit like a funnel. I think this was too many for this adventure. Four would have been a bit more balanced. The main reason I think this is because of the initiative roll in Stay Frosty. Whoever makes a successful Dexterity check gets to go before the enemy in this game. This generally meant that a significant portion of the six characters got to act before the demons and cultists. There were enough weapons between the marines that could do blast damage (flamers, grenades etc.) that they could wipe out the opposition before they ever got a shot off. It felt too easy at times. But, it also seemed to accurately emulate the feeling of playing a video game like Doom. At one point they were crossing a bridge over a chasm and being swarmed by imps and cultists. There were 26 opponents and the party defeated them in two rounds, just mowing them down in waves of gunfire and explosions. In only the second encounter, they came up against a group of six foaming cultists, one of whom was holding a grenade in each hand and standing near a leaky fuel tank. One well-placed shot from the grenade launcher took out the whole bunch with a mushroom cloud left in their wake. These moments felt hilarious, exhilarating and hilarious.

But when it comes to the more challenging opponents like the Centiservitor, the Cadaverous Persecutor and the Fledgeling Pest, I can’t stress how important it is to use the Powerful Opponents mechanic in Stay Frosty. That rule states that when there is a disparity on either side of a fight, the side with fewer Hit Dice, should subtract the difference between their HD and their Opponents’s HD from their attack rolls. For example, when my PCs were facing the Fledgeling Pest at the end of the adventure, the 1 HD/Level 1 marines had to subtract 3 from every one of their attacks against it because it had 4 HD. This meant that they were not able to overwhelm it by sheer numbers in the first round or two. Many shots that might have hit, did not, because of this nicely scaling rule. However, when they were up against the Centiservitor, I forgot to apply the Powerful Opponents rule and they slaughtered it before it ever got a chance to fire off its cool weapon.

My main complaint when it comes to the action in this adventure is that the Fledgeling Pest, labelled as the Final Boss, is quite avoidable. It is described as being attached to a wall by its very flesh in one of the Hangars, which have been converted to perform devilish rituals. But there is no reason for them to go to the Hangars in the adventure. I made one up, of course, to try and get them there. One of the NPCs they met told them there could be a working shuttle in one of them. This did lead them to the Hangars, but as soon as they got there, Tension Exploded and one of their number went running off across the moon’s surface so they hopped in the ATVs they had just found and booked it after her. After that, they decided to egg it as well. Since they had the ATVs, they were better able to make it back to their own shuttle. I had to think on my feet here or they were going to miss out on the best couple of encounters of the whole adventure. So, first, I had the Demon Arms (also restricted to the hangars) appear out of a hellish portal in the ground ahead of one of the ATVs, grabbing the driver and causing he vehicle to flip over. The mouth in the hand of one of the arms devoured one of the party but they won out. Then they moved on again and just as they were about to reach their shuttle the giant demonic archway (also found in the hangars) appeared in the air before them, with the Fledgeling Pest emerging out of it to attack them along with a few of its cultists. This was a genuinely tough fight and resulted in the death of a couple more party members. I might have just let them make it to the shuttle, I suppose, but I didn’t want to deprive the players of the Final Boss.

Non-action

Of course, it wasn’t all action. There was some exploration. This is done in a point-crawl style as you can see by the map here.

The Forneus Research base point-crawl map. — Point-crawl Map

The descriptions of the locations in the adventure are pretty bare-bones. At times, I found I wanted a bit more. For instance, the Systems, Generator & Atmosphere area is supposed to be enormous and encapsulates everything from winding, labyrinthine machine rooms to massive bridges spanning deep chasms. To be honest, these feel like they should be separate, individual locations. Another point about this area in particular is that we’re told that the communications can be turned back on and full computer bank access can be gained here, but not what that might achieve. I had no idea what the computer banks might tell them and I had no idea who they might communicate with off-world. That’s a lot to leave in the lap of a GM, especially when the rest of this adventure is pretty much zero-prep, as I mentioned before.

Apollo

Actually, it is really hard for the PCs to get much information about what has happened here. Even the few living, rational NPCs they meet had no way of knowing what happened on the base, since one was a prisoner and had been kept out of the loop the whole time, one was in a coma and one was a talking chimp, named Apollo, who was in stasis the whole time. It would have been more interesting if at least one of these guys had the full story for the marines. I should have improvised that, in hindsight. Of course, the PCs did recruit both Apollo, the chimp, and Jamal, the prisoner, gave them guns and got them shooting, so that was fun.

Conclusion

I ran this, as I mentioned above, for two players with three PCs each. I think this was a mistake. I mean, once they had recruited the NPCs, they had a squad of eight and they were just mulching the hostiles at every turn, until the very end. Four PCs would have been about right to make it a challenge. Also, I thought I might be able to run it as a one-shot, but that was highly unrealistic. It took three sessions in all, and they did not explore any more than about half the locations.

If I had to do it over again, I might have seeded some of the locations or NPCs with a bit more information on the background of the adventure, but I would still keep preparation time to near zero.

All in all, it was fun, exploding demon sort of romp as an adventure and a system that we all enjoyed, although I expected Tension to Explode more often.

DCC Day 2026

Collections

It’s been a long time since I collected anything. I used to collect comics, although it wasn’t a conscious choice to build a collection. I just bought 2000AD every week and didn’t throw it out as that seemed rude. Those comics went the way of all things for one reason or another, and any comics I bought after that were digital. I even gave up on that when Amazon bought Comixology and ruined it as a service. I used to have a small collection of DVDs and Blurays. Still have a lot of them in the attic, actually. But with the advent of streaming services, I don’t purchase too many of those anymore.

RPGs, though… When I got back into playing them around 2014/2015, I was only playing 4E because I had the books. Then I decided to see what this whole 5E thing was about. That quickly ballooned out of all sense. Frustration with that brought me to discover indie RPGs starting with Spire and then everything that Rowan, Rook and Decard ever produced. That’s when things started to really get out of hand. Now I seem to never have quite enough shelf space. Every time I buy a new set of book shelves, I fill them immediately and then a new kickstarter fulfilment or three arrives.

DCC has been a major contributor to my collection woes. I have backed a number of Goodman Games crowd-funders in the last couple of years, including the recently arrived Dungeon Denizens II, Terror from the Underdeep (a 5E set, but still Goodman Games) and Caverns of Thracia. Also, there are just so many adventures, taken on their own, mere booklets, a few pages. But its hard to buy just one…

The cover of Dungeon Crawl Classics Caverns of Thracia. :arge face of a savage fighter in a bronze helm, lizard man in the background, Minotaur with axe and shield in the foreground. — DCC Caverns of Thracia

Anyway, back to the Caverns of Thracia. The kickstarter was to produce a book that included both the original Judges’ Guild mega-dungeon adventure by Jennell Jaquays and the newly realised version for DCC (or 5E.) It came with a bunch of add-ons like fold-out maps, a handout booklet, a GM screen and a few side adventures that were set in the same general area as the main one. So, I have been thinking recently, especially as I retread old ground in the Editioning, that I should be using some of these books! I thoroughly enjoy DCC but I have only ever run two funnel adventures and a 1st level one. So, I decided to take one of those side adventures from my Caverns of Thracia haul and run it for DCC Day 2026, which just passed on July 18th.

Beneath the Isle of the Serpents

Beneath the Isle of Serpents inside cover illustration shows a band of adventurers filing down a narrow corridor with a warrior in front, a Wizard in the middle and a hypnotised Dwarf in the rear, attacking the Wizard. They are being attacked by a Serpent man who looks a lot like a Lizard man if I'm being honest about it. — Hypnotise!

I settled on DCC # 109 Beneath the Isle of the Serpents by Bob Brinkman as a suitably evocative scenario that would showcase a pretty cool dungeon and could easily be finished in two sessions. I have already learned that, no matter how short a DCC adventure is, you are not likely to finish it in one session without severely editing it or via TPK. Turns out I had more lessons to learn.

We started the adventure in montage. My players, just two for this DCC Day, had a couple of PCs each. One of these was a Wizard, and one of the adventure hooks is that the Wizard’s patron calls in one of the many favours owed them. Hilda’s patron Ydd’grrl, demanded that she and her friends deal with the burgeoning evil beneath the Isle of the Serpents on the Starry Archipelago. So they trekked across the continent, traveling largely by map. They got to a fishing village on the mainland closest to the Isle of the Serpents and then a fisherman, named Kamay, offered to take them where they wanted to go. No-one else would…

Map of the Starry Archipelago. A number of green islands dotted acorss a blue sea. — Starry Archipelago: its fun to say. Try it!

Kamay dropped them off at the black sand beach on the south of the island. Here they faced the terror that was a Giant Devil Crab. They largely had the measure of this thing, but when it hit, it hit hard. After a couple of rounds where they battered away at its devilish shell, one of its claw attacks impaled Hilda, killing her instantly. Kinda, I mean, we fucked up here. It has been about ten months since we last played with these characters so we forgot how they worked. It looked like our Hilda had 15 HP, but we all thought that must be some mistake for a level 1 Wizard, right? Wrong, it was only after the session, when Hilda’s player, Tom, was trying to figure out where the 15 came from that they realised it was one of the benefits she got from her familiar! So, when I ruled that she couldn’t have had so many HP, and must have been killed by the 8 devil claw damage, I killed her without due process or any real legal basis. Some Judge! Anyway, once we knew what had happened, we ret-conned the death. Instead, she awoke amidst the devastation of the devil crab, stripped of all her belongings by her fellows, and badly injured. “Fuck this,” she thought, and went back to the boat.

While she was “dead/unconscious” however, I asked Tom to roll up a new PC using purplesorceror.com as I was worried about the ability of the party to survive the dungeon when there were just three of them. Tom rolled up Glagrill, a Dwarf who they’d all forgotten was asleep in the hold of Kamay’s fishing boat the whole time.

The Island

The map of the isle of Serpents. It is vaguely oblong with a volcano with a face in the middle. No hexes. — No hexes here.

The adventure provides a really great random encounter table for those parties that decide to explore the island’s surface. Now, there’s a perfectly good, relatively recently forged path through the jungle that leads directly to the main dungeon entrance. If they take that path, they get to move full speed and forgo having to roll for any random encounters at all! so those PCs who avoid that are probably just paranoid. No good reason to do that, surely!

Now, I will say that while the encounter table is great, if a bit over the top for what is probably going to be a very minor aspect of the adventure, the text tells the Judge to roll for a random encounter every two hexes traveled by the party, but the island map ain’t got no hexes so you would need to kind of guess how far two hexes might be, I suppose.

The Dungeon

Anyway, my clever party took the safe option and went straight down the path and straight down the ancient, root-choked chimney to the buried temple to some chaos God. Here they discovered some indecipherable wall art, a room filled with rust-midges and a grate in the floor, below which those blessed with infravision could see barely living bodies of humans hanging by manacles from the sloping ceiling of what looked like a sluice. And that was the end of session 1.

Session 2 saw them descend the winding staircase out of that first chamber. They found it ill-suited to them, too narrow, with steps too long and too low, as though built for a very different type of body. Before long, they encountered an opening in the wall on one side. Our Dwarf, Glagrill, checked it over but made some noise in the process. So, when he made his way into the chamber beyond, he found two Serpent Men and one Cobra Sub-commander on their way to attack. Unfortunately, the narrowness of the doorway meant only one PC could stand in the front. The Sub-commander attempted to hypnotize the PC right behind the Dwarf, but Glagrill did his best to defend, and Helfgott, our Cleric, cast darkness to prevent any more hypnosis attacks. Three against four, this turned into a war of attrition, which is bad news for a band of 1st level characters. Eventually, the darkness failed and Magnolia, our Halfling, was hypnotized by the Cobra Sub-commander. She had no choice but to attack Helfgott. She critted and did an extra 2d6 damage on top of her normal weapon damage. Helfgott only had 3 HP. He was one of the longer lived PCs. Isaac had had him since Sailors on the Starless Sea. It was a tough way to go but the others looted his corpse and moved on after they killed the two guards. The Sub-commander had locked himself in his room in the back of these guard quarters. On their way through they found a pair of lucky dice, some coin and a barrel of human hands, feet and other bits.

Eventually, they decided to open the door and deal with their opponent. This time, Melmoth, Isaac’s Elf character was the one to suffer the hypnosis of the Cobra Sub-commander. He was forced to turn on his new associate, Glagrill. He critted… Glagrill, so new to the world, was sent out of it again in but a moment. The two remaining adventurers, taking no chances, fire-bombed the trapped Cobra Sub-commander to death and found a bunch of treasure in the ruin of his chamber.

Not even half way through this adventure and technically, three PCs down. This was the dice telling a story. I was rolling so well, I felt bad about it. Tom and Isaac had never rolled worse, except when they were under the Cobra Sub-commander’s sway and they critted. There was shock, sorrow and outrage on display at the table. Everyone was questioning their choices. We laughed and cried. This is why I play these games to be honest. Not to kill characters but to experience the extremes of those moments.

Conclusion

The Cover of the Special Edition of DCC RPG. it has a gold embossed demon skull complete with horns on the faux-leather black cover. — DCC RPG Demon Skull

Eventually they trudged back towards the beach, thinking to retreat. Meanwhile, Kamay the fisherman started lifting the anchor. Hilda asked where he thought he was going. He told her his business was done here. She sent him into a deep and magical sleep and made for shore where she reunited with her former companions. They decided one more try was in order.

DCC Day 2026 may be done, but the expedition Beneath the Isle of the Serpents is far from over, dear reader. Join me again soon, when I will complete my review of this deadly module.

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 3

It’s thedicepool.com’s second birthday today! Two years ago I decided it was time to stop keeping all my thoughts on RPGs to myself and start writing them down for other people to read.

Anniversary Post

It’s thedicepool.com’s second birthday today! Two years ago I decided it was time to stop keeping all my thoughts on RPGs to myself and start writing them down for other people to read. Why? Well, at the time, dear reader, it was not for the edification or entertainment of others. I was just looking for a creative outlet other than RPGs themselves. Blogging is good for that! It makes you organise and record your thoughts, it can promote interesting discussion, and in writing about a topic, you invariably unearth opinions and insights you might not otherwise have realised you even possessed. It’s a cool pastime. You should try it.

Anyway, this is my second anniversary and my 213th post. In some ways I am returning to a topic that I first brought up waaay back on July 24th 2024: returning to Ad&D 2nd Edition. That post was more Dark Sun focused, but it asked the questions that I’m answering now, during the Editioning, our challenge to play every version of D&D, from OD&D to 5.5E. The main question was, why? Why play this mouldering old edition that is, arguably, overly complicated, over-written and under-nuanced compared to more modern RPGs? Why play a game that I have played, without fear of hyperbole, a shit-tonne of already? Why not play something new instead?

Back in that original post, I admitted to a

morbid curiosity to try it out. More as a historical research project than anything else. How would it compare to more modern systems like 5E or the Year Zero engine or even actual OSR systems?

That sentence, right there, that I wrote two years ago, was the seed that grew into the Editioning. Come to think of it, I may have initiated the Editioning purely so that I had an excuse to play AD&D 2nd Edition again. And, so far, I’m not regretting it.

Back to the Eternal Boundary

The investigation progresses well. It has become very clear to the members of the party that there is something very strange afoot. If you need a recap, feel free to have a look at my last AD&D 2nd Ed post.

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the Dustmen. The illustration is of a Curehead in a long dark robe. — The Dustmen

Aurora ended the last session on her way to the Mortuary, headquarters of her own faction, the Dead, aka the Dustmen. Here she encountered Toranna the Grey, another Dustman, whose job was to send unclaimed bodies to the Elemental Plane of Fire using one of the many interplanar portals located in the building. She consulted her records to discover that the barmy, Eliath, was sent to his ever-lasting reward through that portal just last week. His possessions, likewise, were gone, having been distributed to other Dustmen.

Disappointed, Aurora went to await the arrival of the rest of the party. This dead-end (pun intended) left them at a loose end. They decided to go and visit one of the other locations on the point-crawl style map of the Hive Ward, presented in the adventure, the Blood Pit. This is the most famous pit-fighting arena in the city. It is a centre of gambling and considered neutral ground for the factions.

On the way, however, they decided to revisit the alley where Aurora had seen the corpse of the Dancing Man. It was no longer there. Instead, as the thief and the necromancer argued about what to do next, the ever quiet paladin noticed that they were quickly becoming surrounded by Chaosmen. The Chaosmen, or Xaositects, are another Faction that makes there home in the Hive. They believe in the primacy of chaos in the multiverse and they like the barmies, who they see as inherently chaotic. Chaosmen also have a mixed up, garbled way of speaking that was fun to role-play with. It took a moment before speaking each sentence aloud to just throw all the words into a mental hat and then pick them out at random. This particular group of Xaositects made the assumption that the PCs were responsible for the murder of the barmies on their turf so they showed up and demanded the party’s surrender. Unsurprisingly, they refused and our first combat ensued!

Fight!

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the faction, the Xaositects. The illustration is of a githzerai with a sword — Xaositects

I gave the PCs a chance to surprise their opponents here, as our tiefling thief, Trance, had an idea to drop a sphere of Darkness over the battle-ground right off the bat. I had to double-check both the surprise and initiative rules since they have changed from earlier editions. In order to gain surprise on an opponent, the opponent rolls a d10. If they roll a 1 or a 2 (a variety of adjustments can be made to this roll), they’re surprised. Since I rolled a 9, we went straight to initiative, instead. Initiative in 2nd Ed is also rolled with a d10. Each side rolls, just once, rather than once per round. The side that rolls lower gets to go first. There is a weapon speed modifier to initiative, technically, but I decided not to use it as it’s very fiddly. The Chaosmen won initiative and attacked when they saw their opponents not dropping their weapons. They had a priest with them, who Blessed the others. A big fighter named Mordrigaarz Antill, led them into battle and immediately went to focus on Glaermond, the paladin. The other combatants, all mercs ran into attack everyone else. Fighter and paladin spent the fight smashing each other in the plate armour to no effect but the mercs had more success, landing several significant blows in the first round. When it came to the PCs turn, Aurora sent her familiar, a goat to charge at the priest and did a frankly disgusting 15 damage, leaving the poor bastard with a single hit point. Trance dropped the Darkness and then crept through it to finish off the priest with a backstab. Devansh, our priest of Varuna, decided enough was enough and cast Command on Mordrigaarz, ordering him to surrender. He failed his save and dropped his weapon. The mercs followed suit and that was the end of that. After demanding they hand over their valuables, they had a chat with Mordrigaaarz, who told them they wanted to stop the murders of the barmies in the Hive and that they thought the PCs must have been responsible. Satisfied that they weren’t to blame, he left with the remainder of his group and let the PCs go on to the Blood Pit.

The Blood Pit

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the Faction, the Fraternity of Order. The illustration is of a human man with a headress and a white mustache, sitting in a chair holding a book. — The Guvners

At the Blood Pit, they got to talk to the ale-tap tender, a high-pitched gnome named Felgar. Regular told them a tall-tale about a Guvnor (a nick-name for the Fraternity of Order, another Faction of Sigil. They serve as judges and lawyers for the city.) This Guvnor allegedly discovered a way to transform into a demon to devour the souls of the Hive’s barmies and bubbers. Apparently this was to gather enough power to challenge the Lady of Pain, herself, for supremacy in the city. Aurora did not want to pass up the opportunity to have a little flutter on the fights while they were there. I made this mini-game up on the spot. I told them the next fight to occur in the cage in the centre of this dilapidated warehouse on the outskirts of the Hive, was between a nimble, leather-clad human rogue and a muscle-bound, scarred ogre. Then I got two of the other players to roll for each side. There was a roll off for each of three rounds of the bout. The first round went to the human rogue as he flitted around his opponent. The second was taken by the ogre who smacked the rogue a good one with his windmilling tree-trunk-like arms. The third round, was a tie so they died together as the human stabbed the ogre in the neck as he was crushed by a bear-hug. Aurora got her money back and counted herself lucky.

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the faction, the Doomguard. The illustration is of a dark haired humanoid woman holding a knife. — The Doomguard

While in the Blood Pit, Trance was again approached by the messenger urchin from the start of the adventure. They were summoned to Bendon Mawl. They had a rest that night and went to see their patron the next morning. He told them that Eliath, the very barmy they’d been looking for, the man who Toranna the Grey had said was so much ash in the Elemental Plane of Fire, had been seen in a pub in the Lower Ward. Not only that but he didn’t look too barmy anymore and he seemed to have joined the Doomguard (yet another Faction, who believes in the inevitability of entropy.) Off they went to investigate this new lead. Eliath had been seen with a group of Doomguard in the Black Sail, a tavern near the Doomguard’s HQ, the Armoury. The building itself is the prow of a galleon sticking out from between two more mundane frontages. Its sail hangs low and is stained coal black from years of exposure to the smokes billowing from the Armoury. They got a room and set themselves up for a stake-out.

Conclusion

Page from the Player's Guide to the Planes from the original Planescape boxed Set. It describes the faction, the Society of Sensation. The illustration is of a human wiman kneeling and holding a sceptre. — The Sensates

We have such a wonderfully diverse and interesting selection of characters in the party that it has promoted some genuinely engrossing philosophical arguments. There are three different factions represented, to lawful characters and two chaotic. Our priest is a Guvnor, so has to continually justify the party’s less than law-abiding actions, or, simply try to ignore them. He could not gamble at the Blood Pit but did consider just leaving some of his gold out on counter for Aurora to gamble with for him. Our Dustman and our Sensate, despite both being Chaotic, are furthest apart, philosophically, however, and this has encouraged some truly fascinating discussions, with the Sensate thinking that the Dead are, perhaps, responsible for what is happening in the Hive. Meanwhile, our paladin, somewhat deficient in smarts, is content to simply be led around by the nose to do whatever. This could come back to bite him in the arse at some stage, given how unforgiving the gods can be when it comes to paladins committing what they may deem evil acts.

Our first combat was quite successful! I had to check a couple of rules on the fly and I was caught flat footed by movement speeds, but otherwise, I think we all enjoyed it. It certainly helped that it was brought to a swift end, rather than turning into a war of attrition. Also, I am vindicated in starting our PCs off at 3rd level. It gave them a wider choice of abilities and spells to choose from and made the fight a lot more interesting.

OK, I’m off to my second birthday party. Gonna sit in my high-chair and plaster myself in cake and banana.

The Editioning, Basic D&D, the End

The Kept on the Borderlands

You see, it’s past tense because the game’s over now. Anyway… dear reader, if you are reading this and you don’t know what any of the words in the title or sub-heading mean, maybe go back and have a read of the entire collection of posts on the Editioning, our challenge to play every edition of the original fantasy RPG, and on this game of B/X or Basic D&D.

We finished up the game on session 11 a few of days ago and I have been thinking about it a lot since then. There’s a lot to consider! After all, this was the adventure that kicked off the role-playing lives of so many nerds from 1981 on, since it came with the Basic Set. Not only that; in the context of the Editioning, playing it now, in 2026, allows me to think about it in a way that players at the time could never have. As well, it’s the adventure that launched a thousand clones. Could Gary Gygax ever have foreseen the enduring popularity and desire to emulate this scenario, when he first designed it?

But, when it comes down to it, I want to take this game that we played at face value. That’s the real purpose of the Editioning as I see it. That, and comparison. I want to compare this experience with the experience of playing every other edition of D&D. And that’s something I can usefully begin to do now that two of them are done and another is under weigh.

Beginnings

The About page of the Keep on the Borderlands - inlcudes a gnraly illustration of a band of adventurers fighting an owlbear in a dungeon. — Info Page

One of the major attractions of Basic D&D for many will undoubtedly be the ease and speed with which you can create and even detail your PCs. You can easily roll up stats, choose a class and equip a level one character in about half an hour, maybe a bit more depending on your familiarity with the game and the genre. Genre is an important point here. There are no gonzo elements, really. It’s pretty straight-forward medieval Europe with dwarves, elves and goblins. Most anyone interested in playing D&D is going to have at least a passing cultural understanding of the broad strokes and tropes. This ease of character creation is a major bonus, from my point of view, it allowed us to have our session 0 and session 1 in the same evening. But, maybe more importantly, it allows you to roll up a new PC on the fly while the others mourn the loss of the one that just got an arrow through the eye. What this means, in many instances is that any particular PC can be easily substituted by another of the same class.

To compare this aspect of the game to OD&D all I can say is there is not a huge amount of difference, except to say you have slightly fewer decisions to make in Basic. OD&D allows you to choose race as well as class, so, for instance, we had a halfling thief and an elf magic user in our OD&D game. From this perspective, I often think of AD&D as the natural descendant of OD&D rather than Basic. AD&D 2nd Edition is determined to overwhelm the player with options, however, and requires multiple decisions to be made simultaneously. From alternative ability score rolling methods to the inclusion of kits, non-weapon proficiencies and schools of magic, the complexity is ramped up ten-fold from Basic. This is a matter of preference, I think. Some of my players enjoyed all the options quite a bit. While others would much rather get to the game more quickly, like you can with Basic or OSE or most OSR games these days.

Map of the Wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands. A great forest in the north surrounds the Caves of Chaos and the Cave of the Unknown. A river meanders through the central part of the map, with marshes along its edges and more forest to the south. The Keep stands just north of the river on the western side of hte map. — Map of the wilderness from Keep on the Borderlands

As for the beginning of the adventure itself, The Keep on the Borderlands encourages the DM to take the Background section and expand on it or tailor it to their own campaign. Isaac did this for us by indicating that we were the last surviving members of a mercenary band that was returning from a failed campaign in the wilderness. This worked well to explain the relationship of the PCs, why they were traveling together and to give us a motivation to seek out gainful employment so we could get back on our feet.

My experience with OD&D and AD&D 2nd Ed is quite different. Of course, I created the OD&D adventure from scratch so I necessarily created the starting situation for them as well, but for the Eternal Boundary in 2nd Ed, the DM is presented with two options to start, and it’s quite proscriptive otherwise.

Middles

The map of the caves of chaos - a finger-shaped ravine with cave systems branching out from it. — Caves of Chaos Map

The Keep on the Borderlands adventure booklet consists largely of location descriptions. The “plot” such as it is, is contained within those. This is a familiar adventure design methodology for anyone who has been paying attention to the OSR. One of the first descriptions is of the Inner Bailey of the keep. In the two paragraphs devoted to it, the major points made regarding it are that the PCs must do a great service to the keep to gain entrance and if they do that, they’ll have a feast thrown in their honour, where the Castellan will gain the measure of them. If they impress him, he will send them on missions later, have them blessed on the way out and pay them a reasonable rate each time.

Isaac nicked a great little mechanic from the Root RPG for handling our reputations with the various factions involved in the adventure. Root uses reputation trackers to record how well liked or despised your PC is by the various woodland factions, with PC actions able to add points to or subtract them from the tracks. You can find a good description of that here on the Cannibal Halfling Gaming site. Gaining rep with the various factions and being aware of it definitely made us push our characters to make certain choices that we might otherwise not have. Mostly, we wanted to build reputations with factions we were already friendly with and tank all the others. The fact is, the way we ended up playing the adventure, it was about 75% impressing or pissing off factions, 15% dungeon crawl, 10% getting absolutely fucked by random encounters. So, the gaining of rep was at least as important as gaining experience. The module does refer to the possibility that the PCs might become aware of the conflicts between the denizens of the Caves of Chaos and use that as a way to set them against one another. But, it doesn’t provide any useful advice as to how to handle it beyond, “be careful to handle this whole thing properly,” which is genuinely worse than useless. What it does not do, at any stage is present the monsters as anything other than elements to be eliminated. We don’t need a name and background for every monster NPCs but at least the leaders should get that! Once again, Isaac took it upon himself to fill in those blanks, naming the leader of each faction, giving them personalities and motivations that we could attempt to work with or butt up against. He never managed it from a combat-first perspective, and I really appreciated that, because combat is exceedingly lethal and to be avoided at all costs. This might have just been the random encounters which included monsters of higher levels than us who were quite capable of one-shotting our toughest members, but it did feel more lethal than the other two games I’m comparing here.

Comparing all of this to OD&D, once again, in my own home-brew adventure, I actually felt there were some things I could have learned from it. I often felt I should have had more factions and even NPCs in general in my OD&D game, even though the concept I had for it did not require that. Combat-wise, OD&D and Basic both have a hitting problem, in that it’s really hard to do. We missed a lot and it was generally agreed that having a shit-load of hirelings was a necessity, if only so that the law of averages would be on our side. This was true of the enemies killing our party members too. We lost two PCs throughout the campaign, but oh so many more hirelings.

It’s harder for me to compare the middle of the adventure to 2nd ed, since we are not there yet, but I can compare the style of adventure. The Eternal Boundary is an entirely different beast. Of course, it does have the factions of Sigil baked into the adventure, and the factions the PCs belong to have a real effect on things, but they are not trying to ingratiate themselves to the factions, really. It involves a lot of investigations that may involve factions, but that’s about it. Actually, it would be interesting to include a Root-style rep track but, there are so many factions involved in the city, it might become like too much overhead. One thing is for sure, so far, it seems like a more diplomatic than combat-oriented adventure. Combat-wise, I can’t comment too much. We haven’t had any fighting yet, but, from what I remember, combat had the potential to take an age and to be very crunchy compared to Basic. Still quite lethal but with a lot less instant death. I’ll revisit this after we have a few more fights in Planescape.

Endings

An illustration of a minotaur, GHolds a weapon. Looks angry, — Minotaur

Isaac gave us an ending more because we had to move on to other games than because we came upon it naturally. The fact is, looking at the adventure now, we had barely scratched the surface of the Caves of Chaos. We missed the entire minotaur labyrinth! There are caves denoted by letters A to K and we only entered three of them. That third one, though, that was a doozy.

Isaac had been coming up with a variety of events through the course of the adventure, and we had no idea they weren’t detailed in it. The main area of his invention involved the Serpent Cult and its relation to the Curate of the church in the keep and his relation to the Castellan’s advisor, an elf. Now, we had immediately discovered the Curate’s elf-racism since one of our party was an elf, but it ran deeper. One day, we returned to the keep to find that the advisor had killed the curate when he accused him of being a spy for the Serpent Cult. We investigated and found no evidence that the elf had anything to do with the cult, but did discover evidence that the cult was operating from one of the Caves of Chaos. On our word, the Castellan released the imprisoned advisor and then promised us a permanent residence in the keep and his eternal gratitude if we would clear out the cult. In order to take on the cult, we recruited the assistance of the goblins we had previously made friends with and then marched on the evil cave.

This led us to the last session of play. As a cleric-heavy group, we turn-undeaded our way through the majority of the encounters leading to the final boss, the Chaos Priest hiding in his chamber beyond a chapel swarming with skeletons and zombies. We used Hold Person on him, he failed his Save against it and we stabbed him to death and cut off his head to bring back to the castellan. Hurrah! We lost the majority of the goblins on our team but otherwise came out a great deal richer and even more experienced.

Isaac had us do epilogues for our PCs, since we are unlikely to return to them and I will genuinely miss playing Thaddeus Nightbane. He finally proved that not everyone he cared about had to die and that felt like a good end to his arc. I will say that, as far as running this only in Basic D&D goes, I think it could be difficult. Thaddeus ended up as level 5 and, thechnically, Basic only goes to level 3. You would have had to have the Expert set on hand before you finished playing the adventure, I feel. Or, just make sure, as DM, that you don’t hand out too much treasure or encounter XP.

So that was the end for us. But, I’m quite sure you could continue playing in and around the Keep and Caves for twenty or more sessions if you wanted to explore every cave and every faction. It’s even got re-playability, especially with a different DM. Isaac put so much of himself and his ideas into it, I’m sure, if I ran it myself, for instance, it would be a very different game.

Comparing to OD&D’s end, it’s difficult, once again, but I can say that my adventure, the Woes of Sorrowfield had a very clear ending, although they might have approached it from different ways. This has nothing to do with the edition either, of course, more the adventure. Woes was a totally different type of adventure compared to Keep, so, like I said, it’s hard to compare.

As for the Eternal Boundary, although we are a long way from the end of that, I know, for sure, that the ending also be at a very definite time and place, although, once again, they might arrive at it in any one of a number of different ways.

The main difference, here is that Keep on the Borderlands is not really interested in telling a particular story, so much as presenting a situation, but both the AD&D 2nd Ed adventure and my own OD&D adventure, had a specific story to tell.

Conclusion

I liked it. I liked it a lot more than I expected to. This adventure tops a lot of people’s favourite adventures lists and I can see why now. Although, I would say a lot of my enjoyment came from the way in which Isaac ran it rather than from the contents of the module itself. But the module gives a DM the freedom to expand and improvise as they want, so that is a very cool aspect of it. As a teaching adventure, I can see its value.

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Character Attacks, Saving Throws, and Cost of Equipment and Weapons — Useful Tables in KotBL

Useful tables in the Keep on the Borderlands - Including Clerical Abilities, Armour Classes, and Wandering Monsters — Useful Tables in KotBL

As for Basic D&D, I thoroughly enjoyed this pared-down version of the game. It’s freeing having no real skills and only a few stats you need to keep track of. Some things like saving throws and THAC0 still bother me but I look at them now as more of a nostalgic idiosyncrasy than a real bother. They are not difficult to get used to and they don’t get in the way too much in play.

The Editioning will continue, dear reader, but its time to leave the Keep on the Borderlands behind along with poor Edmund, my cleric who died in session 2 and whose corpse we found shambling around in the Chaos Cult’s lair. We put out his other eye and chopped off his head for good measure.

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 2

Character-work

We’re back in Sigil, dear reader, and it feels like coming home. Long has it been since my players had their characters sneak around its darkened byways and razorvine-choked alleys, avoiding the Hardheads. Years have passed since they were introduced to the Cage’s many factions, wards, points of interest, cranium rats, and, of course, deranged NPCs.

Back then, I took a peculiar pleasure in populating the City of Doors with the sorts of unusual cutters that one might expect from such a cosmopolitan, diverse crossroads. There was the BDSM dwarf who served them up cocktails and information in a leathery sort of club, the down-on-their-luck founding members of the Mundane, a faction who took great pride in their rejection of magic despite its ubiquity, and the gnome mage who filled the street outside his bookshop with lava to prove a point.

The first of those was all me. Pulled him out of thin air when the party said they went into the nearest pub to ask for info. The other two were inspired by one of my player’s characters and by a character presented in the excellent AD&D 2E Planescape sourcebook, Uncaged: Faces of Sigil.

With our latest foray into the city, I have continued on form. I am still taking inspiration, of course, but have particularly enjoyed making the people and places my own.

The first was Trunfeld Three-teeth, (a delightful tongue-twister, particularly for those of particularly Hibernian dialect.) Trunfeld is a “vile-tempered creature of disgusting personal habits,” according his description in the adventure, The Eternal Boundary. He is also a peculiarly intelligent ogre, and he runs the notorious den of scum and villainy known as the Butcher’s Block. The adventure gave me, I think, just enough to build a voice and personality for this character and, let me tell you, I really went for it. Trunfeld stank to high-heaven of sweat, picked his nose and wiped it on the paladin’s breastplate, breathed his hot, rotten breath on them and offered them some unidentifiable stew. Our cleric, Devansh Rao, used a spell to purify their drinks when they were served, and this was entirely apropos. Trunfeld was hanging out with an honest-to-gods demon when the PCs walked in, and they were lucky not to provoke its ire when they made the mistake of interrupting their conversation. I bellowed at them from the depths of my chest for Trunfeld’s voice. It felt good. He cursed them in his cockney rumble and eyed the priest and the paladin suspiciously. Luckily, the presence of the holy-joes was tempered sufficiently by their companions, the necromantic witch and the thieving tiefling, who were regulars in the ogre’s bar. So they managed to strike up a bargain. As he promised to keep an ear to the ground for them, I am relishing the prospect of getting to play this rancid brute again.

The second was Mourner Tom, another NPC given a brief description in the adventure. He is the leader of a band of Collectors. These poor unfortunates scrape an execrable living on the streets of the Cage by locating, looting and transporting corpses they find to the Mortuary. They have a deal with the Dustmen (the faction that runs the Mortuary, also known as the Dead.) He is described only as a down-on-his-luck thief, but the text does provide a few quotes of his. These are what led me to voice him almost exactly as Danny, the drug-dealer from Withnail and I. So if you know that character and his many famously quotable lines, you’ll understand why quotes like this drew me to him:

It’s like they fall asleep and don’t wake up. Very peaceful, that
We might’ve seen ‘I’m but our memory’s none too good.

Hopefully you get the idea. If not, here’s a link to a helpful YouTube clip of Danny:

I didn’t lean quite as heavily on the speech impediment, but I think you get the idea.

Of course, its not just speech-patterns and accents that make an NPC, Mourner Tom was also dressed in a battered top-hat and tatty tails, all stolen from corpses he’d found on the job. And he had his motivations. Unsurprisingly, his was jink, gold, money. He was another helpful one, explaining, after he’d been paid, that the barmy the PCs were looking for was one they’d picked up recently and brought to the Mortuary, since he was dead.

We have a lot more NPCs to meet. There is a good chance that the PCs are going to be interacting with a few more factions and other non-affiliated weirdos over the coming weeks so I’m looking forward to coming up with more unlikely voices and mannerisms.

To the Adventure!

Honestly, it took us a while to get really started with the first session. Some characters were not quite finished. This was largely due to the arcane (pun intended) categorisation of priestly spell spheres and the added complication of choosing an appropriate faction. But, I also wanted to establish some background and motivation for the PCs.

It’s a rather unlikely story, so I think it’s worth telling here. Our paladin, Galermond, having recently completed his training, was asked to leave his temple and, being a little on the innocent and simple side (read “thick-as-plank”) decided he wanted something to spend his small reservoir of coin on. He encountered Devansh Rao, the cleric of Varuna and they went about finding a ruined old temple to that god in the Lower Ward of the city. Small, dirty and crumbling though it was, they decided to devote their efforts to restoring it, as not another temple to Varuna existed in the city anymore. Glaermond was happy to have discovered such a noble endeavour to pursue, but neither he nor Devansh knew anything about money, and they would need that… Enter Trance, the tiefling accountant (thief.) She told them she could help them manage their gold and brought in Aurora, the bariaur witch, who would be happy to occupy the basement and use it to conduct her necromantic experiments (not that she told them that!) And so, out odd party was born!

To begin the adventure proper, I had a typical cockney urchin approach Trance with a message from one of her fellow faction members and ask her to bring friends to the headquarters of the Society of Sensation, the Civic Festhall. There, they met Bendon Mawl, a tiefling with some influence in the faction, who told them they wanted to find a barmy in the Hive who is said to have the key to a very important portal in Sigil. This barmy’s name was Eliath and it seemed like he might have been a wizard. They were offered a cut of the profits gained from this portal. Since the PCs had a church to restore, and they were all out of donations, they jumped at the chance.

The Point Crawl Map of the Hive Ward. Locations include the Butcher's Block, the Mortuary and the Blood Pit. — The Hive Map

They went immediately to the Hive. The adventure provides a point-crawl-style map of the ward on the inside of the DM screen that came with the adventure.

I have to say, this is an old-school design element that is sorely missed from newer modules. It was not at all unusual to get an adventure specific DM screen in the pack with the adventure back in the old days. Wizards of the Coast now want you to pay another £15 or more for the privilege. I have really been appreciating this DM screens actually. Not only does it have several key maps, but it also has all the stat blocks for the major NPCs and encounters in the adventure! Invaluable, tbh. My only dilemma is whether to use the adventure-specific screen or the utter treasure that is the one from he Planescape boxed set. Its got all the Planescape tables you might need, like how the various factions might react to one-another and how spells are effected on various planes, and on top of that, it also has stuff like ThAC0 tables and saving throws.

The outside of the Planescape DM screen. The visage of the Lady of Pain fis the centre-piece. It is the face of a severe looking woman surrounded by a head-dress of blades. It looks like its made of verdigris-tinged copper. — Planescape DM screen outside

The outside of the Eternal Boundary DM Screen. Coppery Green background. A pale, bald dustman pushes a gurney with a sheet-covered corpse in the foreground. The silhouettes of adventurers peek through an archway in the background. — Planescape DM screen outside

Back to the Adventure! Their first port of call was the afore-mentioned Butcher’s Block where they interacted with Trunfeld Three-teeth, to my utter delight. He was able to tell them that barmies (lunatics) and bubbers (drunks) have been turning up dead more than usual and said he would keep an ear out for news of Eliath.

Then they decided to split up. Why? Well, Aurora the witch is a member of the Dustmen, so it seemed like a good idea for her to go and see if their barmy had turned up at the headquarters of that faction, the Mortuary…

Meanwhile, the others wandered the streets in hopes of finding a clue. Before long, they did. They turned onto an alley and found a disturbing scene, a ragged collection of men, gathered over the dead body of some poor berk on the ground, talking about how they should loot and transport him. Before it could come to blows, they discover that this was a crew of Collectors led by Mourner Tom. As I mentioned above, I had a great time playing him and he was able to tell them that they had collected someone matching Eliath’s description recently. Should be in the Mortuary.

Speaking of which, Aurora, perhaps a little nervous traversing Sigil’s most infamous ward on her own, had an encounter of her own. She was faced with a gangly, dancing man bounding down the street towards her, shouting and mumbling and singing the names of the Princes of the Ba’atezu fiends. She noted the names he was chanting but was about to go about her own business when she heard a shriek from the alleyway he had entered. Investigating, she discovered his fresh corpse lying on the cobbles, not a mark on him…

Conclusion

My conclusion so far is that I am having a ball with Planescape,
As I expected. It is one of my all time favourite D&D settings and it gives me free-rein to invent the most deranged little cockneys I can think of.

But we have only barely interacted with the mechanics so far, no more than a spell cast and a non-weapon proficiency attempted, so I am very interested to see how smoothly that goes.

Stay tuned, dear reader!

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 1

The Editioning Format

Just in case you’re new here, the Editioning is a challenge that my fellow members of our little, local TTRPG community, Tables and Tales and I have taken upon ourselves (ok, fine, I came up with it and pretty much forced everyone else to take part.) It involves playing an adventure/short campaign in every major edition of Dungeons & Dragons from the original 1974 version to D&D 5.5E, which came out fifty years later, in 2024. We hope to complete this task within about 24 months. So far, we have completed one adventure in OD&D and are close to the end of another in Basic or B/X D&D.

I’ve been titling these posts with the numbers of the weeks of the challenge, but, honestly, even keeping track of which week we’re on is becoming a challenge in itself. So, I’m just going to number them from now on. As such, this post will be Part 1 of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2nd Edition series. Hope that makes sense, dear reader!

Welcome to Sigil

An illustration of the rooftops of Sigil from the book, Sigil and Beyond from the Planescape Boxed Set. It is entitled Doorway to Sigil. — The enigmatic rooftops of Sigil by Tony Di Terlizzi

What? Are you Clueless, berk? Cutter like you should find out the dark of things in the Cage. Could make a little jink if you manage to sway the high-up men and stay out of the Mazes. Want the advice of an old basher like me? Go chat up a factol, maybe one o’ them Mercykillers or even the Hardheads. They’re always looking for cutters who’ll do some business and keep their bone-boxes shut. You don’t fancy them? Go talk to the Bleakers, maybe. Just watch out for the barmies in the Hive if you go that way. I heard a bunch of them have been put in the dead book of late. Just stay peery on the streets and alleys of the City of Doors, cutter, and if you see death coming for you, just give ‘em the laugh and don’t end up swinging from the old leafless tree, alright?

That’s an example of the type of writing that exists throughout the entire Planescape line of books. OK, it’s not all written like that, but in many parts the voice of a local guide like this is used to inject some really effective flavour. They introduced this sort of patter and unique dialect to set Planescape apart from the more traditional fantasy fare like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance. I Remember the first time I read it as wide-eyed teenaged ingenue. I was immediately drawn in. None of the other settings had ever appealed to me so thoroughly through the voice of the books themselves. This despite the fact that I had spent a couple of years playing the more unique settings of Dark Sun and Ravenloft.

Why? Well, the speech pattern was curiously familiar to anyone with a passing interest in cockney slang, victorian working class dialects and Blackadder. That was me, honestly. So it caught my attention.

Now, admittedly, the portions of the books written in this patter are confined mainly to the introductions and the odd in-character paragraph, but it’s enough to liven up what is normally a very dull business (AD&D modules.)

But, of course, there is so much more to recommend the setting. The factions of Sigil, where philosophical standpoints come to life in their members. Their Cold War or kriegstanz that bubbles under the surface of the city. The Lady of Pain, enigmatic ruler and all-powerful protector of the City of Doors, who sends her greatest trespassers to the Mazes for eternal torment. And beyond Sigil, why, there is only the infinite vastness of the outer planes, the inner planes and every place in between! Every one of them filled to bursting with bizarre landscapes, gods, angels, demons, devils, elementals of every flavour and don’t forget the fairies and other planar beings beyond count or description.

In fact, it can be a little overwhelming. I remember that’s how it felt when trying to write my own adventures for it back in the ‘90s. There were too many options, many of them very lethal and many of them utterly beyond my own meagre abilities to incorporate into my simple AD&D games.

That’s one of the reasons I decided to run a pre-written adventure for this portion of the Editioning.

The Eternal Boundary

This adventure was one of the first produced for the Planescape setting. It’s written by L. Richard Baker III whose other credits include the Planescape Monstrous Compendium 2 and Valley of Dust and Fire for Dark Sun.

I don’t want to provide any spoilers at this point so I’ll only give you the basics that PCs will learn not long after starting to play.

In the Hive Ward of Sigil, barmies and bubbers are disappearing and turning up dead in much larger numbers than usual. The PCs are sent to find one of them, a barmy called Eliath, who knows the dark of a very special portal key. Various factions are at play in the Hive and there is something sinister going on there. The PCs must uncover it is they are going to complete their mission. It will lead them all over the Hive Ward and far, far beyond.

I chose this adventure for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I thought it was a great introduction to the City of Sigil, its Factions, the kinds of strange goings-on they might encounter there and a large cast of NPCs with a fun variety of faction-alignments, personalities and motivations. And second, it was the right length for what I had in mind. I actually think this one might end up being shorter than my recently concluded OD&D game. Of course, I have been silly enough to think such thoughts before, and I’ve been frequently proven wrong so we’ll see how that works out.

Character Creation

AD&D 2nd Edition PHB cover. Its got a horseman on it. He has a sword. — AD&D 2E PHB

Cover of the Complete Wizard's Handbook for AD&D 2e. It is wine in colour. — AD&D 2E PHB

Our Session 0 was an epic crusade deep into the depths of not only the Player’s Handbook but also the Complete Wizard’s Handbook, the Complete Thief’s Handbook, the Complete Priest’s Handbook, Legends and Lore, the Player’s Guide to the Planes, and the Planewalker’s Handbook.

It took over four hours and resulted in a great deal of cursing, misunderstandings, frustrations, arguments, concessions, delight, confusion, amusement, nostalgia, and, finally, I think, satisfaction. The AD&D 2nd edition character creation process could be straight-forward enough. If one sticks to the most simple form of ability score generation (just roll 2d6 for each ability and keep it no matter what,) thus forcing the player’s to choose the classes most suited to their ability scores, forgoes the use of non-weapon proficiencies in favour of the far less complicated secondary skill system, restricts the PCs to options only taken from the Player’s Handbook and sets their game in the most vanilla of fantasy worlds, you could probably create a full party of PCs in an hour or so. But that’s not what I wanted. I wanted my players to have the full AD&D 2nd Edition experience that I remembered with such fondness. I wanted them to be unsure of their choice of class or race until they had a clear vision of a character. I wanted them passing around all those sourcebooks, to get, at least a look at all the various options. I wanted them to not know really anything about their characters until they all came together miraculously in the last half an hour. And that’s exactly how it happened. The character creation system, when you factor in all the optional books, has so many possibilities, dependencies, restrictions, bonuses, minuses, and choice that you simply cannot get a full picture of the character until they are most of the way finished. This differs to such a great extent from modern role-playing games that are not Pathfinder, that I think it’s quite difficult to explain without experiencing it. For a taster, please do check out my AD&D 2nd Edition Character Creation series where I make a Dark Sun halfling Cleric. It takes three full posts and around 6000 words and is, by far, the longest character creation I have ever done on this humble blog.

We ended up with an all-star cast. Our Paladin, Glaermond, completely illiterate but stout of heart and sinew, is the party’s lawful good defender. Aurora, our chaotic good Bariaur magic user, took the Witch kit from the Complete Wizard’s Handbook, and, as a member of the Dustmen faction, has decided to focus on necromancy. Trance, the Tiefling Thief is a member of the Society of Sensation and is driven to experience new things whenever possible. And, finally, Devansh Rao is our Aasimar cleric of Varuna, the guardian of cosmic order and lord of the sky. The players are currently discussing the wisdom of using Devansh’s little church to Varuna as their base of operations and gathering a tithe to fund their adventures in the name of the Great Lord of Order on our discord channel.

This is, potentially, the perfect combination of classes and factions for this adventure so I am very excited to get it started. And that will happen this very Sunday, dear reader. So watch this space if you’re interested to find out where this band go as the delve into the Hive.

The Editioning, Week Eleven, OD&D

The First Ending

Last night we finished up the first of our games within the Editioning, our challenge to play all the major editions of D&D from Original Dungeons & Dragons (1974) to Dungeons & Dragon 5.5 (2024) over about 24 months or so.

I thoroughly enjoyed creating, running and playing this game as referee. I think the ending worked well, and I have gotten generally good feedback from the players.

Playing this very first iteration of the venerable old man of roleplaying games has taught me a few lessons about RPGs in general, D&D in particular and gave me many insights into the OSR.

Illustration from OD&D supplement III, Eldritch Wizardy. A fighter with a aword and shield and a magic user with a glowing wand face-off against a serpentine demoness with six arms and many weapons as a monster attacks from the rear. — Watch Out!

First though, let’s do a quick recap of the final session.

Malfunction

Last we left off, the PCs had discovered the holo-log belonging to the captain of the alien space-ship they had just teleported to. The captain appeared as the hologram of a crystal humanoid and spoke to them. The log described the dire straits the ship found itself in, crash-landed, engines damaged so badly all they produced was the crystalline by-product of their fuel. They had taken the decision to hand responsibility for their escape or rescue to the main computer while the crew went into stasis. Of course, they had already discovered that the computer had re-interpreted its orders to ‘crystal-form’ the surrounding planet to suit the physiology of its makers as, perhaps, escape and rescue were deemed impossible. I didn’t write much in the way of plot for this adventure. In fact, this about sums it up! You can read more about my methods in this respect in my previous post.

Armed with this knowledge about the computer, the adventurers were more determined than ever to find and destroy it. So, they girded their collective loins and prepared to move on through the ship. The next door was jammed so they spent some time using tools to wedge it open. While they did this, another information Assistant appeared to them. They asked it to open the door for them, which it did, but, more importantly, it showed them a map of the whole ship and its current surroundings. In practical terms, this allowed me to reveal the full map to the players on Roll20. This was a blessing as the partial-reveal functionality in Roll20 does not work very well in my experience. It has a rectangular reveal and a polygonal reveal option but, quite often, I find the polygonal one simply doesn’t work. Revealing a curved area with the rectangular tool is frustrating and time-consuming.

The Information Assistant was able to help them further by describing the adjoining chambers, the engine room and the computer and stasis chamber. It told them they could enter that final chamber by “simply passing through the wall.” They didn’t push the assistant on this point. Instead, I guess they decided they would pass through that wall when they got to it.

Having emptied and passed through the partially submerged chamber next to the bridge, they descended to the engine room. Here they discovered a number of crystalline golems running the engines to produce the fuel by-product which they were using to crystalform the surrounding countryside. The golems in this room were not fooled by the bio-hazard suits as the other ones had been so they attacked the entire party. Here they lost another dwarf hireling, leaving then with just one of the humans who’d accompanied them from the start of the adventure and one Dwarf, the leader, Gilda. While the melee progressed around them, Abbiss, the halfling thief and Ilaina, the elven magic user, tried to find a way through the wall, as they heard the approach of yet more golems from the other side of the engine room. Eventually, their listen and Intelligence checks paid off when Ilaina realised there was a connection between the frequency of the sound they could hear emanating from the wall and the ccredential crystals they recovered from the lockers on level 2. They downed the last of the golems held hands and pushed through the wall, crystals first.

On the other side they discovered a circular chamber. The wall was dotted at regular intervals with stasis pods. Each one contained a grey and brittle crystalline being, clearly long dead. In the centre of the room, the computer loomed. It was a 12ft tall, 10ft diameter, iPod-white, capsule-shaped machine with four long tentacles protruding from its carapace. It ‘spoke’ them in a loud and high-pitched form of crystalline speech they could not understand and then it attacked.

Tadhg, the cleric started off strong, throwing a lit oil skin at it. The fire licked at the outer shell and seemed to ignite some wires emerging from a gap in the casing at the top of the computer, but otherwise did no damage. As Siward the fighting man and the hirelings went in to attack the outer casing, Abbiss decided to climb up and examine the cracked area. Meanwhile, Ilaina used her last flying crystal to get up there as well.

The computer was able to use some spells during the fight. I gave it Charm Person, Phantasmal Forces and Confusion but only got to use the first two. It used Charm person on their remaining dwarf, Gilda, to get her to attack the ground based PCs. Ever the gallant, Siward refused to fight back, instead focusing on defeating the computer in the hope that that would end the effect. Siward was also the subject of the Phantasmal Forces. Spells in this game are interesting because they are so imprecisely described that, in some cases, even their effects are not obvious. Look at this description of the Slow Spell, for instance:

Slow Spell: A broad-area spell which affects up to 24 creatures in a maximum area of 6” × 12”. Duration: 3 turns. Range: 24”.

That’s great Gary, but what does it do?
This one stood out to me because I was going to give this to the computer as well before I read it.

Also, our cleric, Tadhg, had reason to use his last spell slot to heal Abbiss at one point. That was interesting for a few reasons. The first reason was that, after Abbiss widened the crack in the computer’s casing even further, Ilaina stuck a few fingers in there and let the innards have the full blast of a fifth level fireball. Unable to contain the full power of that, the casing belched flames out of the crack on top. Luckily, I decided to give them a Save vs Spell to avoid half the damage but this still hit Abbiss for 12 points. (This is another point about spells. Fireball has no Save mentioned in its description, so I had to home-rule that.) Our thief, already hurt from the precious fight and a couple of whacks from the tentacles, needed some healing. Now, in later versions of D&D, Cure Light Wounds, or any Cure Woulds spell, in fact, required the caster to touch the subject. Not so in OD&D:

Cure Light Wounds: During the course of one full turn this spell will remove hits from a wounded character (including elves, dwarves, etc.). A die is rolled, one pip added, and the resultant total subtracted from the hit points the character has taken. Thus from 2–7 hit points of damage can be removed.

Leaving to one side the mercurial and perverse wording of this description, you will note the complete omission of any sort of range. So, I ruled that Tadhg could, effectively use it to heal anyone on the face of the planet. Lucky too, as Abbiss was still on top of the computer and he was on the floor.

The combat continued, both sides hit and missed, but in the final round, all actions were resolved simultaneously so, even as the tentacles reached out to reduce our halfling once more to just one HP, and the Gilda the dwarf pressed the attack against Siward, our heroes hit it till it cracked open, finally reducing the crystal inside to a dull, grey ruin. They discovered treasure in some shiny lockers there in the computer room, and then they used the teleportation pads in the dungeon to take them back to the village.

After that, we did what I always like to do to wrap up a campaign, I asked them for epilogues for each of their character s. I asked one what they would be doing a week from the end of the adventure, one what they would be up to a month later, then a year and finally a decade. I loved what they came up with but I won’t go into it here. I recommend this as a nice way to wrap things up as it puts the final words in the mouths of the players and allows them free rein.

Conclusion

Illustration of a lich from OD&D supplement III, Eldritch Wizardy. The robed undead wizard stands with arms stretched out to either side, hands aglow. — Lich

Illustration from OD&D supplement III, Eldritch Wizardy. A Demogorgon. It has two baboon-like heads, a reptilian body, tentacles for arms, chicken legs and two reptilian tails. — Lich

So, I ran this game while being very conscious of the history behind it. It’s hard to overstate the impact this game has had. It is, arguably, the origin of our hobby, the starting point for the world-beating phenomenon that is D&D today and, as well as that, its the kind of wonky, imprecise, strange love-child of a war-game and nerdy obsession with fantasy and myth.

DD&D never tried to be all things to all people, even though it did include a couple of different options for your combat rules, ie, the combat table in Men & Magic, the first booklet, or the detailed and labyrinthine war-game rules from Chainmail. It gave options but it never pretended to have all the answers. It is the very epitome of the OSR pillar, rulings, not rules. Sure, it has “rules,” but these are clearly only there as guidelines. Just look at those spell descriptions above. Look at the complete lack of mechanics for ability tests. In the end, I imported the roll-under mechanic from Basic D&D to allow for things like Intelligence and Dexterity checks. I resisted doing this sort of thing in the first few sessions. Instead I wanted to try to resolve situations using only the mechanics in the books. But, I quickly realised that, even at the time, OD&D was a work in progress. So many sourcebooks were released to clarify, overwrite, or even ridicule the rules from the first three booklets that it is impossible to ignore the fact that, even those people using the books to play in 1974, were not sticking to rules as written. They were house-ruling it, they were hacking the system and they were adding their own tweaks and options constantly. So that’s the way I began to treat it too. And it only got better as I did that.

One of the things I wanted to reveal in the Editioning was exactly how the game has changed over the decades and how it changed from one edition to the next. I suspect I will find that, over time, the rules became more exacting and less flexible. Of course, that is yet to be seen as we play through the editions. So come back for more insights into D&D and its evolution, dear reader. The Editioning is still in its infancy so there’s plenty more to come.

The Editioning, Weeks Nine and Ten, OD&D

Welcome back, dear reader, to the Woes of Sorrowfield, my homebrew adventure for OD&D. You check out the rest of my posts on this game here. We are playing this as part of the challenge I made up in February, the Editioning, which involves playing every major edition of D&D from OD&D right up to D&D 5.5E as I understand we’re calling it now. This was supposed to take place all in the space of twelve months, but at this pace, we’ll maybe get half way through the nine editions by February next year.

Revelations

So, returning Woes of Sorrowfield readers will be aware that I am creating this adventure myself. I started by taking advice from Gary and Dave. They have a lot of good, if basic advice for the beginning referee in terms of dungeon design, populating your dungeon with monsters, traps and treasure, running wilderness adventures etc. Essentially, I followed that advice until I didn’t. There was a point at which, the stuff they presented in the original white books fell short of my own decades of experience.

One thing that I’ve been quietly proud of is providing revelation and information through simple and, hopefully, not overly expository means throughout the game.

For example, the PCs discovered that a lake and river flowing through the Barrenwood had been polluted with some sort of magically glowing crystal that was turning the whole forest to crystal. Later, once they entered the dungeon, they found living beings, trapped in there, also being turned to crystal in a lab setting. Further down, they found a Flight Practice chamber which allowed them to literally fly around in the air. And finally, on a crashed space ship at the bottom of the dungeon, far beneath the earth and sea they discovered an illusory representation of another world that where flying crystalline aliens could be seen spreading the crystal pollution from high above in the atmosphere “crystal-forming” the surface for their own comfort. There’s more to the plot, but already, without any exposition or need for long diary entries or anything like that, I slowly revealed the nature of the threat they faced.

One thing that I am sure helped me do this was not over preparing before starting the adventure. I had a vague outline of the plot, the threat and the enemy before we started playing, but I never wrote down any specifics. I was creating new dungeon levels almost week-to-week. Doing it this way allowed me lots of room to improvise and also to play off things the players had said or directions they were planning to take.

As things all came together in the last session, and the entirety of the plot was revealed, I felt it was finally ok to include a small snippet of exposition, a captains log they discovered on the bridge of the alien vessel, which revealed that even the aliens on the ship had not wanted to necessarily crystal-form the PCs’ world. Instead, they were hoping for a rescue after their crash. In the recording, the captain indicated in a few short sentences, that the crew had gone into stasis and left the main computer in charge. It was the computer that decided to start the crystal-forming process, in the interests of maintaining the lives of its makers while they waited for rescue.

Back up

I skipped to the end a bit there, so here’s a recapitulation of the events of the two sessions that led us there since my last OD&D post.

The adventurers continued their experiments in the Flight Practice chamber. Abbiss tried again to fly but continued to prove completely inept. Still, she and the others made it up onto the shelf 10 feet above the main floor after defeating another two crystallised gargoyles. They managed to hit all three buttons on that level simultaneously and received a reward: a rain of gems! But not without the loss of two of their dwarven hirelings. During the fight, Abbiss had her left hand crystallised by one of the gargoyles. Also Siward suffered a crystallised pinkie from an attack.

Next, Ilaina decided to give this flight business a try, and, sure enough, she proved to be a natural at it. She was able to fly up to the hanging platforms in area 3. The first one spiked her and she had a toe crystallised. The other platform simply dropped to the floor far below when she threw a knife onto it.

Abbiss took a close look at the water fifty feet below in the southern section of the level. She realised she could see a gap down there that must provide access to the next level down. They all began to make plans for the descent. While Siward abseiled down and onto the fallen platform which he had thrown onto the surface of the violet coloured waves, Ilaina was able to fly down under her own power. Tadhg, Bryn and the Dwarves all followed Abbiss down the rope and Siward kept the floating platform steady as they ferried themselves across the narrow span of water one after another. Eventually, they all made it.

On the other side of the glass wall holding in the water on the next level, it looked like an aquarium. As they were searching the hall they found themselves in, another Information Assistant appeared and addressed the party members dressed in bio-hazard suits and holding credentials crystals. It informed them that this was the Teleportation Chamber Level and that it could guide them around it and in the use of the teleportation facilities if they wanted. It led them through a door and into and armoury where Abbis picked up a +1 Crystal Dagger and Siward and the dwarves also acquired some shiny new weapons. Little did they know that using the weapons would provoke a Save vs Stone or have a random body part turn to crystal. From the armoury, the Information Assistant passed through another door into a room with an elevator door with and up arrow on it and a number of crystal golems with sword-like arms phasing out of the floor. They moved to intercept the party members with no bio-hazard suits.

The fight started off badly enough for both sides. The golems won initiative but failed to hit anything. Siward hid behind the cover of the control console in the room, along with the hirelings and they generally also failed to hit. Using the advantage of the bio-hazard suit making her essentially invulnerable to the golems, however, Abbiss got a back stab in on another of them. Meanwhile, Ilaina, using her noggin, attempted to deactivate the golems through the use of the console. She succeeded only in turning out the lights, but at least she cast infravision on Siward. Moving into round two, Tadhg, with the same impulse, asked the Information Assistant for help in calling off the golems, which it promptly did.

They followed the IA into the Teleportation chamber. It was able to reveal there the three platforms. One could transport them anywhere on the surface but could only be used once, the second one could transport them to the ship below and the third one was being used by the computer to transport the fuel by-product from the ship’s engines high into the atmosphere from where it rained down like a crystalline bombardment on the surrounding countryside. Ilaina sent the IA into a buffering loop by having it refer to the makers who, it revealed, were all in stasis on the ship. The paradox that it was talking to what it thought were “makers” gave it a bad headache.

They also explored an adjoining room that was filled with crystalline barrels full of the fuel by-product, the crystal corruption that was transforming their lands.

My map of the alien ship crashed into a sea cave - the final level in my dungeon. It looks like a flying saucer with a crumpled hull at the bottom of the map. — Crashed ship map

It took them very little time to decide to teleport down to the ship to deal with the computer. From the teleportation room on the ship, they first went and explored the holo-deck room where they saw the vision of the alien world I described above. And then, after a random encounter with some star shaped crystal drones, they checked out the bridge where they found the holo-log of the captain.

Conclusion

Not just yet. Actually, the conclusion of the Woes of Sorrowfield is definitely coming next week. Looking forward to it! I have a big finale encounter planned. I hope all these PCs survive it. I’ve gotten really rather attached to them.

In other Editioning news, our AD&D 2nd Edition journey starts this evening! We’re going to be playing the Eternal Boundary, a starting adventure for the original Planescape setting. I’ve already warned the players that making AD&D PCs is not like Basic or OD&D. I expect us to take the whole session just to roll them up, choose races, classes, kits, proficiencies, spells, equipment, factions (Planescape-specific but very important) etc. Its been so long since I’ve played this game… Can’t wait!