Category: What I’m Playing

The Editioning Weeks Five and Six, OD&D

The Woes of Sorrowfield, Sessions Four and Five

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

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

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

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

Dungeon Time

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

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

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

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

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

Dungeon Level Two

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

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

Perfect.

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

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

The order was:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

The Editioning Weeks Five and Six, Basic D&D

Taking Sides

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

Losing Friends and Making New Ones

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ethics in Business

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

UVG x Troika

Vibes

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

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

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

The Adventure So Far

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conversion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

The Editioning Week Four, OD&D

The Woes of Sorrowfield, Session Three

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

The Editioning Weeks Three and Four, Basic D&D

Keepin’ on Keepin’ on

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

Donkey Konging

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

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

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

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

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

Snakey

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

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

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

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

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

Factioning

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

The Editioning: Week Three, OD&D

OD&D, The Woes of Sorrowfield, Session Two

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

The Editioning: Week One: OD&D

Highs and Lows

Oh boy, what a D&D week we had. The Editioning has well and truly begun! OK, technically, it began last week with OD&D character creation as I mentioned in the last post. As a note, you can find all the Editioning related posts here. Depending on when you read this post, there might be three others or, like, a dozen. I have no idea how long this experiment is going to go on for, tbh.

Anyway, We’ve had three sessions already! Isaac guided Tom and I through character creation and the first steps on our adventure in B/X D&D on Tuesday and Wednesday. And then I kicked off our OD&D adventure online with four members of Tables & Tales, which included the aforementioned Tom and Isaac.

Across the two games and the three sessions we have had victories and losses, death, and new life, fun and horror.

First up is my OD&D game, so let’s get into what it was like.

OD&D: The Woes of Sorrowfield

The first session of play for this game happened on Friday the 13th. In general, it was anything but unlucky for the PCs, who consist of Ilaina, the Elven Magic User, Abbis, the Halfling Thief, and the two humans, Tadhg, the Cleric of Brigantia and Siward, the lawful Fighting Man.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m not running a published adventure for OD&D. I had expected to run a classic adventure of the era for each edition, but the options were few and underwhelming. So, I decided to take the advice of the game and draw some maps. I started with a basic map of the dungeon and went from there. Although, I haven’t finished the dungeon yet. I realised I needed to be old school about the design: Town, Wilderness, Dungeon, in that order. You need a town for the PCs to resupply, hire hirelings, gather quests and hear rumours. The Wilderness is there to build them up before the dungeon and to add a little to the world, flavour, backstory, connections. And then the culmination should be the dungeon.

So, I went back and drew a map of the town, which the players had decided would be called East Barrens. You can see the map below.

The Town of East Barrens sits atop a defensible hill and is circular from above. Roads spread out in a star pattern from a grand oak in the centre. The Temple to Brigantia towers above the town in the north

We started the session with them arriving at the lower gate, in the south there, the only way through the town’s palisade. It was pissing rain and the guards were asking them for proof of a special invitation from the Bishop.

I told them, luckily, they had just such an invite from Bishop Cerys Williams of the town’s Temple to Brigantia. She had send messengers far and wide across the land of Sorrowfield to garner aid from adventuring types. And they had answered the call.

I instituted a flashback here. I asked the players how they thought their characters knew each other, making it a little easier on them by giving them the nearby city of Bailey as the venue for their meeting. Tadhg, a member of the same sect as Bishop Williams, suggested that the message was sent to him personally, since he had spent time in the town as a young priest, years before. But, knowing he would need more help, he went to the nearest tavern where adventurers gathered, and announced his intention to lend his aid to the town and that he was recruiting. Thus, did the other members of the party gather to him. Of course, they met in a tavern…

Flash forward again to East Barrens. In the town they made immediately for the Temple and the Bishop’s palace. Bishop Williams greeted them and asked them to investigate a series of terrifying bursts of magic that have come from the west, beyond the Barrenwood. Three of these bursts have been launched as though from some enormous catapult over the last three weeks. Two landed in the forest, but the third struck the town’s sturdy stone wall, reducing a section of it to melted, crystaline debris. At the promise of gold, the party agreed to help and then went to explore the town, including the damage to the wall.

Cleverly, Ilaina, the Magic User, decided to use her one spell, Detect Magic, on the wall and its rubble.

This is the text for the spell from the book, Men & Magic:

Detect Magic: A spell to determine if there has been some enchantment laid on a person, place or thing. It has a limited range and short duration. It is useful, for example, to discover if some item is magical, a door has been “held” or “wizard locked,” etc.

I found this, in D&D terms, almost refreshingly vague. This allowed me to describe what she discovered in broad but useful terms, i.e., it was powerful, transformative magic that she hadn’t seen before. And it was dangerous. I was gratified that the PCs were invested in investigation of the phenomena involved from the off! So much so, that, when the opportunity to cast Detect Magic arose again later that same session, and in the same day, I allowed her to do it, with the understanding that, if it were in a dungeon or wilderness setting, I wouldn’t allow it. It’s rough being a 1st level Magic User in these older D&Ds. What is obvious, also, is that far more of the available 1st level spells in OD&D are utility spells, rather than offensive of defensive, compared to later editions. This makes the Magic User much less useful in combat encounters in the early days. This, we discovered later in the session.

Ilaina warned the stone masons working to repair the wall that the debris could be dangerous to handle and they began to take precautions, with thanks.

As they made their rounds in the town, they discovered a couple of things. Another team of adventurers had set out a week ago to find the source of the magical blasts, but had not yet returned. This was of particular concern as that group was made up of locals, and the townsfolk were eager to get them home.

Before they could settle into the inn for the night the Bishop approached them again on the rain-soaked streets, with a request to investigate the cemetery by the temple. Reports had come to her of strange noises emanating from there and she was worried about grave-robbers. They readily agreed to check it out. When they got there, they opened the large gate and utilised an iron spike to wedge it open, leaving their vector of egress open, just in case. I admired the use of the iron spike by the players. It was old school as all get out. Then they entered to investigate. They heard the scraping and clacking of the skeletons before they saw them. But it was too late to do anything except roll initiative once they did…

Initiative in OD&D was nicked from Chainmail Miniature Wargaming rules. In fact, the whole combat system was, but thankfully Gary and Dave were kind enough to present an “alternative combat system” for those who didn’t have the patience for all that, in the Men & Magic book. I present it below:

The Alternative Combat System from Men & Magic: Armor Class Description 20-Sided Die Score to Hit by Level* Level 1–3 4–6 7–9 10–12 13–15 16&+ 2 Plate Armor & Shield 17 15 12 10 8 5 3 Plate Armor 16 14 11 9 7 4 4 Chain Mail & Shield 15 13 10 8 6 3 5 Chain Mail 14 12 9 7 5 2 6 Leather & Shield 13 11 8 6 4 1 7 Leather Armor 12 10 7 5 3 1 8 Shield Only 11 9 6 4 2 1 9 No Armor or Shield 10 8 5 3 1 1 *Fighting-Men: Magic-Users advance in steps based on five levels/group (1–5, 6–10, etc.), and Clerics in steps based on four levels/group (1–4, 5–8, etc.). Normal men equal 1st-level fighters. All attacks which score hits do 1–6 points damage unless otherwise noted. Ronan McNamee (Order #51119631) 20 ATTACK MATRIX II.: MONSTERS ATTACKING TARGET: Armor Class Description 20-Sided Die Score to Hit by Monster’s Dice # Dice Up to 1 1 + 1 2–3 3–4 4–6 6–8 9–10 11&+ 2 All as in Table 17 16 15 13 12 11 9 7 3 1. above... 16 15 14 12 11 10 8 6 4 15 14 13 11 10 9 7 5 5 14 13 12 10 9 8 6 4 6 13 12 11 9 8 7 5 3 7 12 11 10 8 7 6 4 2 8 11 10 9 7 6 5 3 1 9 10 9 8 6 5 4 2 0 All base scores to hit will be modified by magic armor and weaponry. Missile hits will be scored by using the above tables at long range and decreasing Armor Class by 1 at medium and 2 at short range.
The Alternative Combat System from Men & Magic

That’s it. If you have any questions about it, ask your referee (they weren’t using the term Dungeon Master at this stage of the hobby.) If they don’t know, shrug. Make something up.

So, back to initiative. Each side rolls a D6 and compares results. If the rolls are equal, everything happens at once. Otherwise, the side with the higher roll gets to go first. If that’s the players, they can make some decisions about who acts before whom and what actions they’re going to take.

Technically, this is how a combat round should progress:

Chainmail Turn Sequence 1: TURN SEQUENCE THE MOVE/COUNTER MOVE SYSTEM 1. Both opponent's roll a die; the side with the higher score has the choice of electing to move first (Move) or last (Counter-move). 2. The side that has first move moves its figures and makes any split-moves and missile fire, taking any pass-through fire possible at the same time. 3. The side that has last move now moves its figures and makes any split-moves and missile fire, taking any pass-through fire possible at the same time. 4. Artillery fire is taken. 5. Missile fire is taken. 6. Melees are resolved. 7. Steps 1 through 6 are repeated throughout the remainder of the game. Note:Missile fire from split-moving troops is considered to take effect immediately during the movement portion of the turn, and the same is true of passthrough fire. All other fire, both artillery and missile, is considered to simultaneously take effect just prior to melee resolution.
The Move/Counter Move System from Chainmail

Or, alternatively, like this:

Chainmail Turn Sequence 2: THE SIMULTANEOUS MOVEMENT SYSTEM 1 . Both sides write orders for each of their units (groups of figures of like type), including direction of movement and facing. 2. Both sides move their units according to their written orders, making onehalf of the move, checking for unordered melee contact due to opponent movement, and conducting split-moves and missile fire and taking any pass-through fire; then the balance of movement is completed as ordered. 3. Artillery fire is taken. 4. Missile fire is taken. 5. Melees are resolved. Note: Exact orders for each unit (group of figures of like type) must be given. Cavalry may be given the order to "Charge if Charged" (CIC), either in their own behalf or in support of any nearby friendly unit. Such CIC movement begins at the one-half move and is only half of a normal charge, i.e., a unit of medium horse CIC to support a unit of archers would move up to 12" during the second half of the turn.
The Simultaneous Movement System from Chainmail

As you might have guessed, dear reader, these are screenshots from the Chainmail rules I mentioned earlier. That’s what OD&D rules were based on, after all.

In practice, there was really no need for all that. The combat was short. These were half hit-die skeletons (I’m using the optional rules for monster hit dice from the Greyhawk supplement for OD&D, which allows you to use d8s for hit dice. Previously, they were d6s with various bonuses.) Besides, there was a cleric who could turn them on the roll of a 7 on 2d6, which he did. Here’s the rules for turning undead:

The Turn Undead Table from Men & Magic: Clerics versus Undead Monsters: Monster Type Acolyte Adept Village Priest Vicar Curate Bishop Lama Patriarch Skeleton 7 T T D D D D D Zombie 9 7 T T D D D D Ghoul 11 9 7 T T D D D Wight N 11 9 7 T T D D Wraith N N 11 9 7 T T D Mummy N N N 11 9 7 T T Spectre N N N N 11 9 7 T Vampire N N N N N 11 9 7 Numbers are the score to match or exceed in order to turn away, rolled with two six-sided dice. T = Monster turned away, up to two dice in number. D = Dispelled/dissolved, up to two dice in number. N = No Effect.
The Turn Undead Table for Clerics. this is all the rules for that ability.

Yep, it’s just a table again. You’ll notice there is nothing about distance or duration of the turning so we kept that vague. Basically they were turned for as long as it took the PCs to do another action each and make for the gates.

Before that, though, the thief succeeded in a Hide in Shadows roll to go for a backstab. In OD&D, low level thieves’ chances to do anything with their skills are practically non-existent, so the success felt immense, as did the 8(!) damage from the backstab, utterly destroying one skelly! In OD&D, backstabbing gives the thief a +1 to hit and doubles the damage. Huge for a first level character. I would imagine it is much less satisfying at higher levels, as I don’t believe there is any way to increase those bonuses as they level up.

From Greyhawk. The tables for thief abilites and how they improve across levels. Also included is that table showing how demihumans benefit: Thief Open Locks*/ Remove Traps* Pickpocket* or Move Silently*/ Hide in Shadows* Hear Noise Apprentice 15%/10% 20%/10% 1–2 Footpad 20%/15% 25%/15% 1–2 Robber** 25%/20% 30%/20% 1–3 Burglar 35%/30% 35%/25% 1–3 Cutpurse 40%/35% 45%/35% 1–3 Sharper 45%/40% 55%/45% 1–3 Pilferer 55%/50% 60%/50% 1–4 Master Pilferer 65%/60% 65%/55% 1–4 Thief*** 75%/70% 75%/65% 1–4 Master Thief 85%/80% 85%/75% 1–4 Master Thief, 11th Level 95%/90% 95%/85% 1–5 Master Thief, 12th Level 100%/95% 100%/90% 1–5 Master Thief, 13th Level 100%/100% 100%/95% 1–6 Master Thief, 14th Level 100%/100% 100%/100% 1–6 Bonuses to Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings as Thieves: Type Open Locks Remove Traps Pick- Pocket Move Silently Hide in Shadows Hear Noise Dwarf 5% 15% - 5% 5% - Elf - - 5% 10% 15% - Halfling 10% 5% 5% 10% 10% + 1
The thief abilities.

Our Magic User helped by providing light, in the form of a lantern they borrowed from the front gates. I gave the PCs a +1 to hit for this.

Meanwhile the Fighting Man guarded the Magic User. But once the skeletons had been turned, the fight was effectively over. This is when I gave them the opportunity to use Detect Magic again. This time it was on the fountain, which was overflowing into the disturbed graves. The water was filled with the same magical crystal shards as they had seen at the damaged wall, leading them to believe the magic was what raised these skeletons. So they asked me if they could destroy the fountain, make it stop working. The thief failed a Detect Traps roll, which I allowed as a way to understand the workings of the fountain. The Fighting Man, however, was able to destroy it. Now, if this was a later edition, that would have been a Bend Bars/Lift Gates roll for the fighter, but since no such ability existed in OD&D, I was forced to go with the next best thing… Open Doors. As this is a feat of strength described under the Strength stat in the Greyhawk supplement, it seemed like the best thing to use, honestly. It’s a D6 roll, and Siward needed a 1 or a 2 to succeed. He rolled a 2! He used a rope to bring down he fountain and bent the pipe inside until it stopped flowing.

The Strength table from Greyhawk: Strength Hit Probability Damage Weight Allowed* Open Doors 3–4 –2 –1 –100 1 5–6 –1 NORMAL –50 1 7–9 NORMAL NORMAL NORMAL 1–2 10–12 NORMAL NORMAL +50 1–2 13–15 +1 NORMAL +100 1–2 16 +1 +1 +150 1–3 17 +2 +2 +300 1–4 18** +2 +3 +500 1–5 *this is an addition or subtraction to/from the normal carried without encumbrance **fighters with a strength score of 18 are entitled to make an additional roll with percentile dice in order to determine if their exceptional strength is highly extraordinary, consulting the table below: Dice Score Hit Probability Damage Weight Allowed Open Door*** 01–50 +2 +3 +500 1–5 51–75 +3 +3 +600 1–5 76–90 +3 +4 +700 1–6 (1) 91–99 +3 +5 +900 1–6 (1–2) 00 +4 +6 +1,200 1–6 (1–3) ***the numbers in parentheses represent the chance of a fighter with that particular score of opening wizard locked or magically held portals.
The Strength Table from Greyhawk. You’ll notice this table includes the percentile addition for fighters with 18 strength. They abandoned this for B/X D&D and then brought it back for AD&D.

Then they looted the opened graves and went back to the cemetery gate. They used some more iron spikes to keep it shut and called on the Bishop to go and destroy the undead with her far more powerful turn undead abilities. She rewarded them and then they went for a few well deserved pints in the inn where they informed a grateful populace that the water from the fountain and probably the wells in the town, which all came from the same underground river, was probably polluted. They immediately started gathering the plentiful rainwater and filled our heroes with drinks and rumours.

Now, I provided the PCs with plentiful loot from those opened graves. Thousands of silver and gold pieces, gems and magical items. It might seem like a lot, considering it was their first encounter, but gold = XP in this game. At one XP per gold piece, two of their number were able to level up at the end of the session. The thief and the cleric have to attain much lower numbers of XP to level up than the fighting man and the magic user. Since I knew I wanted this game to only last about six sessions and it would be a single adventure, I wanted to make sure they got the chance to level up. So I suspended the usual rule that they can’t gain levels until the end of an adventure, instead allowing it at the end of sessions. I may even allow it whenever they rest to account for the disparity in levelling rates.

Conclusion

I’ll have to come back for another post on the B/X D&D game, dear reader. I didn’t expect this one to go so long! But, please come back for it. We’re playing the absolute classic, The Keep on the Borderlands!

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

As for the first session of OD&D; we had a brilliant time. As a note, we were playing online using Zoom and Roll20. Unsurprisingly, Roll20 does not have an OD&D character sheet option, so the player’s just used their own hard copies. We really just used the VTT for the maps. And, although I had a map of the cemetery drawn, we didn’t even place tokens on it. It ended up all theatre of the mind, which was just fine by me. There is no doubt that the game presents some challenges and relies on the referee to make a lot of rulings or to use the rules in unexpected ways, but that was actually part of its charm, I found.

Looking forward to the next session in two weeks.

The Editioning: How to OD&D

The Editioning Begins

The first session for our Tables & Tales OD&D game is set for next Friday. I think it’s just going to be a session 0 to introduce the game to the players and have them create characters. Part of the reason for this is the way I’m approaching it. It’s going to take a little longer to complete my preparations than I thought it might. Today, I’m taking you on the start of that prep journey with me. Click this link to check out all the posts on the Editioning, our challenge to play all the major editions of D&D in the next twelve months or so.

Step 1: the Map

I have made an important decision, dear reader. I’m not going to run a published adventure for OD&D in the Editioning. For one thing, there are precious few of them. For another, they are not very attractive. I considered running the adventure contained in the Blackmoor supplement, the Temple of the Frog. But then I listened to this review of it on the Between two Cairns podcast and I decided against it (yes, I know they were reviewing the 1986 version made for the D&D Expert Set, but I’m assuming a sufficient similarity that will allow me to make assumptions about the older version.)

Instead, I thought to myself, I thought, “you should just do what the OD&D core books assume you’re going to do, create your own dungeon, your own wilderness, your own NPCs and monsters and treasures. That’s the real OD&D experience, you idiot!” I then apologised to myself for calling me an idiot and got out some graph paper and a pencil, because Gary and Dave told me to start with a map.

Dungeons & Dragons, Book III, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures by Gary Gaygax and Dave Arneson starts with a section entitled, “The Underworld.” Here’s the first page of that:

Sample side elevation of a dungeon from the Underworld section of OD&D volume III
Sample side elevation of a dungeon from the Underworld section of OD&D volume III

OK, I don’t have a lot of time, and am only willing to expend a moderate amount of effort but I have a decent imagination. So, hopefully that’ll see me through. One advantage I have here is that I know I only want this game to last about six sessions, so I doubt I need to make anything very large.

Since I’m starting with this map, I’m hoping it will inspire me to come up with a theme for the adventure/dungeon. Let’s see.

If you are one of my players, TURN BACK NOW! SPOILERS AHEAD!

Levelling

My dungeon - six levels including the ruined tower on the surface and the sea cave at the bottom with the flyig saucer crashed in it.
My dungeon – six levels including the ruined tower on the surface and the sea cave at the bottom with the flyig saucer crashed in it.

I’ve started by planning out six and a half levels of dungeon. My pen did provide some inspiration immediately by drawing the whole side elevation with a cliffside on the left. I hadn’t meant to do this, but a slight mistake led to it and then, it just felt right. I placed the ruined lower floor of a tower on the surface, near the cliff’s edge and drew a shaft dropping from the floor down to a subterranean level. That level also has an entrance on a ledge poking out from the cliffside.

At the book’s urging, I decided to mix up the methods by which an adventurer might move between each of the levels. The bare shaft between levels one and two gives way to a simple stairway between two and three. From three to four and from three to five there are lifts and you can only safely traverse the gap between levels four and five if you can fly. From level five, you can get to level six by the use of a rocky slide or a teleportation pad. You might also get to level six by descending from the ledge at level 2 above, although you would need a lot of rope and a swimming proficiency badge. I like this! It seems fun and means the players won’t always know what to be on the look out for when they decide it’s time to descend.

For the craic, level six is a submarine cavern, inside which is a crashed flying saucer. Well, looks like a theme is definitely coming together, although, it hasn’t fully crystallised yet.

Level One

The ruins of the tower currently play host to a group of Dwarven mercenaries in need of shelter. There are four rooms, including the Dwarves’ camp. One room contains nothing of interest but a handle to the trapdoor that leads down to Level Two. Another has a riddling raven who keeps its hoard of shinies here. If they answer a riddle, they’ll get a prize but if they attack the bird, they’re getting cursed. The last room has the trapdoor to the next level and a Gray Ooze resting on top of it.

I’m having immense fun with this so far. I’m doing it all by hand; drawing the maps in a notebook and writing out descriptions on the opposite pages. I normally do session prep on my computer and I haven’t built a dungeon from scratch in maybe eight or nine years. It’s a real breath of fresh air!

Level Two

My thinking behind this level is that it is there to dissuade potential dungeon delvers. It will present wave after wave of undead, who will regularly appear, as if from nowhere, in the room adjacent to the one the adventurers emerge into from the level above, trying to force them back. The undead are not real. Rather, they are like characters generated by the holodeck in Star Trek. If the PCs explore other ares of the level, they will probably find the hidden control room which will allow them to turn off the hardlight illusion generator. Then they’ll be able to get through to the stairway leading to the next level down.

I am quite excited about this idea, especially as there is an alternative to fighting the undead or figuring out the illusion generator. They can escape to the ledge on the cliffside from this level, although the only option is to descend into the sea from there…

Levelled Out

A crude line drawing of a dragon with a bird flying at its face
Dragon

That’s as far as I have gotten so far. I need to knuckle down and expand on what I’ve done so far. So I’m going to leave this post here for now. I’ll keep you posted on my progress in a few days.

The Editioning: From OD&D to 5E 2024

Bloggies Inspiration

I have read a lot of TTRPG blogs in the last few weeks, dear reader. I imagine the chances are good that you have too, if you’ve been following the Bloggies awards over on Explorer’s Design. There have been so many wonderful reads, I really did find it hard to choose between many of them. What a I liked most of all were the posts that expressed their enthusiasm for the hobby in one way or another. You can feel it shine from a d66 table of carefully curated results as much as you can from the effusive prose of some bloggers. And there were blogs about every aspect of this weird pastime from story-telling to initiative methods and everything in between. So often, what I found is that writers went back to the source material for inspiration, those historical tomes that defined the RPG scene and continue to play an outsized part in it, whether we like it or not. Most of these we were OSR bloggers with a keen interest in the original D&D from 1974. But you would occasionally see other editions get a shout out. On top of this, I get a newsletter from the Shop on the Borderlands that tempts me weekly with a lot of old dragon game shit I don’t need… Unless, what if I did need it?

The Editioning

Now, I have some to lots of experience with most of the editions of the game, and I already have a bookshelf full of D&D, mostly AD&D 2nd Ed and 5E, but also several 4E books, a smattering of 3rd Ed and a couple of 1st Edition tomes. So, I figured, if I undertook a challenge to play a full adventure in every edition of D&D during the next twelve months, I wouldn’t need to supplement my collection too much to make it possible.

So, that’s where we are now. The Editioning is coming to pass. The plan is to play every edition of the D&D game, in order (although there may be some overlap) in our gaming community, Tables and Tales, between now and February next year. Isaac has agreed to take up DM duties for several editions. I will run OD&D, AD&D 2nd Ed, 3rd Edition and 3.5 and Isaac has said he would like to run B/X D&D, Ad&D 1st Edition and 4E. Someone else in the community might run 5E 2014 and 2024, but if not, I’ll probably do those too.

Pre-loved

The covers of the AD&D 1st Edition Dungoen Master's Guide and the D&D 3.5 E DMG.
Just arrived!

I’m trying to source second-hand copies of the main rule books of each edition where possible. It seems more like a real history project when you have relics, primary sources, legendary tomes. It’s part of the adventure. I like to think about others using the books to play their own campaigns twenty, thirty, forty years ago. It puts me in touch with my own teenaged self and allows me to tap into the enthusiasm I had for the game back in the day. Also, its just cool to have them.

The covers of the DMGs from AD&D 1st Ed, 2nd Ed, 3.5E, 4E and 5E 2014 and 2024
The covers of the DMGs from AD&D 1st Ed, 2nd Ed, 3.5E, 4E and 5E 2014 and 2024
The covers of the Player's Handbooks for Ad&D 1st Ed, 2nd Ed, 4E, and 5E 2014 and 2024. I am missing a representative from either 3 or 3.5.
The covers of the Player’s Handbooks for Ad&D 1st Ed, 2nd Ed, 4E, and 5E 2014 and 2024. I am missing a representative from either 3 or 3.5.

I’ve been surprised to find that you can get most of them for prices that I don’t consider extortionate, either on Shop on the Borderland or Ebay. I started shopping for them last week and a couple of DMGs showed up on Friday, AD&D 1st Edition and D&D 3.5E. They’re in good condition considering how much I paid for them. But before we get to those editions, we need to take a look at OD&D and D&D Basic/Expert.

The Educationing

The cover of the original D&D book, Men & Magic. It is an off-white/brown colour. It has an illustration in black and white of a warrior on a rampant horse. Its from the Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons book.
From the Making of the Original Dungeon’s & Dragons Book.
OD&D Volume 2, Monsters & Treasure. There is a guy astride a horse with a sword and a crown on the cover.
From the Making of the Original Dungeon’s & Dragons Book.
OD&D Volume 3, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures. Its a got a line drawing of a hydra on the cover.
From the Making of the Original Dungeon’s & Dragons Book.

This undertaking has taken me to school. I had to figure out which editions were really distinct enough to deserve to be a part of it. I started by looking up the full list of editions here. I found this useful table:

A table nicked from the Wikipedia entry for Editions of Dungeons and Dragons. it shows all the versions from OD&D to 5E 2024.
From Wikipedia

You can see that it clearly shows the parallel evolution of Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. I remember, as a young DM being quite dismissive of the non-Advanced version of the game. I had cut my teeth on the Basic Set but felt as though I had graduated past it to AD&D after a year or two. Never-the-less, I did play it in the nineties. A friend DMed it for us using the Rules Cyclopedia and the Hollow World campaign setting. Looking back at it now, I wish I had had more of an interest in it. Above any other version of the game, except, perhaps OD&D, it seems to have had the greatest influence on the modern OSR. Hindsight is 20/20 I suppose.

I have seen the terms B/X and BECMI and Blueholme and The Red Box and whatnot, for a long time. But this was the first time I bothered my arse to figure out the differences between them. This despite having actually played the using the Basic Set myself. I did not know that the confusing “abbreviation,” B/X referred to the first two boxed sets of the D&D rules, Basic and Expert, which allowed play from level 1 to level 14. I also had not known that the initialism, BECMI, referred to the full set of five rule-books, Basic, Expert (why is Expert shortened to ‘X’ in B/X but ‘E’ in BECMI? Make it make sense!) Companion, Master and Immortal. BECMI supported advancement all the way from 1st level to 36th!

Anyway, I made the executive decision to collapse all these versions into one, and just refer to it as B/X, since the main difference seems to be the extension of level caps with each successive book and we will not be playing long enough for that to be an issue. Nonetheless I have ordered both the Basic Set rule book and the Rules Cyclopedia, just to make sure we have all our bases covered.

Whither Adventure?

The cover of the Making of the Original Dungeons and Dragons. It has a red cover with a big gold ampersand on it.
The cover of the Making of the Original Dungeons and Dragons.

There are still a few decisions to make. And there is a lot of work to do to prepare.

I have a relatively easy task to begin with, and that’s the reading of the OD&D books. I picked up the PDFs of these from Drivethru for a song. I do have them in a a slightly unwieldy printed form in “The Making of the Original Dungeons & Dragons” book that a friend kindly gifted me at Christmas, so I am happy not to need to empty my bank account to purchase a vintage copy of those books. I’ve quickly realised that I would also need the Greyhawk supplement since, otherwise, I would need to use the Chainmail medieval miniature war-game to run combat, and that was a bridge too far for me. The Greyhawk supplement included the first iteration of the D&D combat system that we might recognise today.

On top of that, we have to decide on what adventure modules to run for each edition. I would like to use vintage adventures that were made for the particular edition that we’ll be playing. For B/X, AD&D etc. there are tonnes of options, which means we’ll have to narrow them down somehow. But for OD&D, we have a very different problem. Adventure design appears to have been mainly the domain of the DM. The main books give you rules and tables, monsters, treasures etc, but mainly they encourage the DM to create their own stuff. Which is great! But it leaves me with the question, is that what I should do? Since that’s the intention? Or, should I use the one adventure I could find in any of the OD&D supplements, Blackmoor? The adventure is “The Temple of the Frog,” and I haven’t finished reading it yet. But it does strike me as the sort of scenario that could be quite lethal unless the PCs turn up with an army of hirelings. If that’s what’s intended, maybe that’s just what we should go for.

Conclusion

I don’t yet know which way I’ll go with that decision, dear reader. I would welcome feedback from anyone with more experience of OD&D or the Temple of the Frog than me.

In general, this challenge has got me quite excited about playing D&D for the first time in quite a while. I wrote a few posts about maybe getting back into playing AD&D back in 2024, specifically I wanted to play Dark Sun. The experience of even making a character put me off it. But I now think that, with other players involved, it could be not only of historical interest, but it could be really fun! I know some of our players in Tables & Tales really like a bit of crunch, while others love the OSR principles of rulings above rules that OD&D might bring.

One thing you can be assured of, dear reader, is that I’ll be taking you with me along the way. I hope to have some interesting things to write about reading, prepping and playing these games, so stick around!

Downtime in the Dark

My First Downtime

I’m taking a break from taking a break from Wednesday posts for this one. We had Session 2 of our Blades in the Dark campaign last week, and our first downtime. I also decided to start introducing a few elements from the latest Blades sourcebook, Deep Cuts, which came out earlier this year. So, I wanted to write about our experiences.

Deep Cuts Character Options

The head and shoulders of a person in portrait. They wear a metalic mask over the top half of their face and a hooded cloak. They are an Acolyte Spirit Warden
An Acolyte Spirit Warden by John Harper

Deep Cuts really expands on the options for your new scoundrels. It doesn’t replace what’s available in Blades, it just adds depth. For instance, if your PC is Akorosi, maybe your family served among the clergy for the Church of Ecstasy. If your scoundrel had a military background, maybe they were a Rifle Scout, serving in the Deathlands and harassing “enemies with sniper attacks.” Before we got into the session proper, I offered all of the players to not only select from these new options, but also to reassign any of the Action dots they had assigned to reflect their Heritages or Backgrounds. What I discovered was most of them had already formed a pretty solid image of their characters in their heads. Even the one player who did take me up on my offer, only took the two examples I laid out above for their Hound because they fit the picture they had imagined so well.

I’m still quite fond of a lot of these new Heritage and Background options. They might have been a lot more useful if I had offered them from the start.

Downtime by the Book

In Blades in the Dark, John Harper tells us there are two main purposes to having a separate downtime phase:

  • The first is that the players could do with a little break after the action of the score that just went down. To be honest, this one doesn’t ring very true for me, but that’s probably because it’s been six IRL weeks since the last session and the crew’s first score. I also get the impression that, once you get the hang of this game, you’re sometimes running a score and downtime in the one session, rather than a score session followed by a downtime session. If that were the case, I can see the advantage of breaking the action up.
  • Second, moving into downtime is a sign to all that we are changing the mechanics that will be needed in the game. To me, this seems like the more concrete of the two purposes. Blades in the Dark has tools for you to use during a score, and only during a score, and it has tools you only pull out during downtime. We don’t need to worry about divvying up the proceeds, dealing with the heat you’ve brought down on yourself or figuring out your long-term crew goals while you’re beating in some poor Red Sash’s head. Let that wait until you’ve got time and space for it.

Luckily for me, it’s easy to follow along with the Downtime chapter of BitD. Once again, I have to praise the usefulness and usability of the book. The layout of the chapter leads you by the hand through the phase, from one step to the next. Three of my players have taken responsibility for maintaining the various crew/campaign tracker/factions sheets without my even suggesting it so that made the job even easier.

Payoff was easy enough, just a simple matter of recording the Rep the Death Knells got and dividing up the 6 Coin they garnered from the last score. They took one each, popped one in the crew stash and paid their tithe to Lyssa, the new leader of the Crows, as their patron. I ran this moment as a scene. I don’t think I would have if it wasn’t for the fact that she was pissed off with them for raiding the Red Sashes’ drug dens on the Docks, and I wanted them to know. She also gave them the option to take a job to redeem themselves. The Hive have been a bit too active in Crow’s Foot for her liking. She wanted the Death Knells to do something about it.

I mentioned Deep Cuts earlier. New mechanics appear in the sourcebook for downtime. They make it diceless, and they would also definitely up the Coin our crew made from that score if we had been using them. In BitD, you are given a range from 2 Coin for a minor job to 10+ Coin for a major score. In Deep Cuts, the Coin the crew accrues is determined like this:

  • Score – 1 Coin per PC, plus Coin equal to the target’s Tier x3.
  • Seized Assets – 4-8 Coin for a vault of cash. Stolen items can be fenced for 1-8+ Coin, but you take Heat (see next page).
  • Claims – Collect payment from crew claims like a Vice Den.

Like I indicated above, we used the standard downtime rules from Blade in the Dark in this session. Now that we’ve experienced that, I’ll put it to the players to see if we want to make the switch. If and when we do that, I’ll come back and examine the other downtime changes then.

It was fun calculating Heat for that score. I’ll admit, I didn’t warn them that killing people on scores really hikes up the Heat. They started off the whole thing by murdering a bouncer, of course. In fact, I didn’t really explain the concept of Heat to them beforehand at all. This meant that they went in hard, loud and chaotic. I actually think this was for the best. The game is built on building up consequences, after all, as well as narrating big, exciting action sequences. Anyway, they ended up with 6 Heat, which was fast approaching a Wanted level. That put the shits up them.

In the book, the Heat section also includes the Incarceration section, which seems logical to me, but I didn’t need to refer to it, so I’m skipping it here.

Of course, due to all that Heat, they had to roll on the worst of the three Entanglements tables. These represent all the potential impacts of contacts, acquaintances, enemies and authorities getting wind of what the crew have been up to. Entanglements range from Gang Trouble, which can be dealt with internally, to Arrest! If you get that, it’s going to cost you Coin, a crew member or the effort to escape capture. The Death Knells rolled up Interrogation so our Hound was caught on her own and dragged down to the station for some “enhanced” questioning. We played this out in a fun scene where she went out to get beer to celebrate their big score and got ambushed out behind the pub by Sergeant Klellan and his boys. She wisely Resisted the level 2 Harm and the additional Heat, without incurring a single point of stress! All the others could do when she finally turned up was wonder where their beer was…

So then, we spent a bit of time going through what’s possible during the downtime phase in our last session. This can all be a little overwhelming the first time you do it. It can also take quite a while to get through each player’s turn as you talk through the possibilities and they negotiate amongst themselves to see who will spend their activities on reducing Heat for the whole crew. Sometimes it’s obvious who should do what. If a character has some Harm, it’s probably a good idea for them to get some treatment and Recover. If another scoundrel is a bit stressed out, they should go and Indulge their Vices to help them relax, but training, long term projects and acquiring assets are all more subjective. The chances are, they’ll turn out to be useful to the whole crew in the future, but they don’t feel quite as immediate in their effect as clearing Heat.

Anyway, I was gratified to see the PCs did all of the six possible downtime activities at least once. They managed to clear practically all their Heat. The Leech did this by studying the movements of the Bluecoats around the district so they could avoid them. The Whisper took an inventive approach, by losing a bar-room brawl in the King’s Salty Knuckles tavern, thus proving that he couldn’t be part of a crew of Bravos!

Our Cutter decided to acquire an asset, an old and worn-out little boat for use on a future score, perhaps. The players ad-libbed a scene in which they ribbed him about the state of the thing. But, of course, it only needs to be used once.

A person "walks" through the air above the darkened city,seemingly on lightning bolts emanating from their feet.
“I’m walking through the air!”

We had another scene when the Whisper’s strange friend Flint turned up on his canal boat with some electroplasm. Our Whisper needed it to build himself a lightning hammer as a Long Term Project. From Flint he also learned about the Sparkrunners, a gang of rogue scientists who are out there boosting government tech. This is one of the new factions from Deep Cuts, which “sparked” my imagination.

Just before we wrapped up for the evening, our Hound decided to deal with all her stress by visiting her local Temple of the Church of Ecstasy. She prayed and prayed, she prayed to hard and too much. She over-indulged in her vice and something bad happened. The bouncer she killed on the last score decided to haunt her!

Other Actions

Of course other actions are possible during downtime too. They decided to visit the ghost who had given them such good info during their Information Gathering phase in the previous session, because he said he would help them more if they really fucked those Sashes up good. From him, they discovered that Lyssa was responsible for the death of Roric, whose leadership of the Crows she then usurped. She had been backed up by the Red Sashes who had killed out ghost friend. He told them to go to Mardin Gull in Tangletown for the skinny on what all that was about. This wasn’t a downtime activity or an entanglement or anything. It was just something they wanted to do.

The Imperial Airship, the Covenant flies bove the darkened city streets, shining searchlights down to illuminate a meeting on a bridge.
Its the Fuzz!

I also introduced a few more Deep Cuts factions in a little news segment. They learned about the Sailors being press-ganged on the Docks, The Ironworks Labour-force pushing for unionisation, the arrival of the Imperial Airship, Covenant without her sister ship and the recent adoption of the new Unity calendar and maps. Any one of these could potentially lead the crew to their next score. Except, maybe for the calendar one, I suppose.

Conclusion

I was very happy to have left a full session aside for our first downtime. It needed it. In fact, I would say, we could have used even longer. They still haven’t decided on their next score. I will say, I am quite happy with how many potential score options I managed to sneak into the various scenes in the session. I was worried that I wouldn’t give them enough opportunities, but, in the end, they came up quite organically, much like the scenes themselves. These all proved to be fun and freeform, allowing us to dow some world-building and to introduce some fun new NPCs.

I’m now looking forward to the next session, and, hopefully, the Death Knells next score, the Big One.