dnd – The Dice Pool

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

So Charming

He turned up at our door. The lord of the realm, Count Strahd von Zarovich, just appeared at our door on our first night in Barovia. We were expecting maybe wolves? Nope. The great vampyr himself paid us a visit in person. I’ll be honest, we were at something of a loss for how to deal with this. There was a silence around the table (video call.) And then, Warder Jon Blackhall, my paladin, gallant protector, answered the door. He’s not that smart, but also, he believes in good manners. Actually, his lack of smarts drastically compounded the situation moments later. The Count cast Charm Person on him, and just like that, they were best buds.

Charm Person in AD&D 1st Edition is a potentially ruinous spell. There are a few of these low level spells that really punch above their weight. Hold Person is another one. They feel powerful in a satisfying way, whether they are used on you or by you. Strahd cast Charm person on Jon and he was ready to invite the master vampire inside. I had fun roleplaying this and the whole scene was great because the other players had to work hard to convince Jon he was being manipulated. They eventually succeeded and the door was closed. But that didn’t change the fact that he could still under the Count’s sway for at least another week! Lucky old Jon, he’d be allowed another saving throw at that point. This sounds punitive when you look at it through a modern D&D lens. We weren’t even in combat and an element of my PC’s independence was hijacked. And there was nothing we could do.

My other PC, Merryn, the elven Magic User had attempted to learn Dispel Magic during character creation, which would have been enough to remove the charm, but she had failed, and, according to the rules of AD&D 1st Edition, she simply cannot ever learn it now(! This, too, feels rough, at the time.) But, what I found, at the table, was a fantastic prompt for role-play. I think, when player’s complain about their characters’ losing agency, it is often because the game does not go the way they had planned in their head that it should go. But, just like a GM starting a game with an exact idea of what will happen in it, this approach will lead only to frustration and dissatisfaction. This way of thinking presupposes that everyone else at the table is not only ok with your ideas for how your character’s story will go, but also that they are willing to sacrifice their own fun to make that happen for you. Instead, if you go into it with a few major personality traits and ideas for how the PC might act in a given situation, and then roll with the punches, you are far more likely to have a freewheeling good time. For me, Jon getting charmed felt like a pivotal moment for him. Either he would remain charmed for the rest of the game, potentially, and act in Strahd’s best interests when he otherwise wouldn’t, or he would get the spell lifted and this whole adventure would suddenly become much more personal. Read on, dear reader, to discover which way that went!

Night in Barovia

If you haven’t read the first part of our adventure, dear reader, and you want to catch up, please go here. If you think you might want to be a player in Ravenloft, someday, turn back now! There will be SPOILERS!

My paladin, Warder Jon, upon hearing of the missing village girl, Gertrude, felt it important that they make an effort to find her. He thought perhaps she might have run off into the forest, and having found the messenger killed by wolves in the woods, he was worried for her life. I wish I hadn’t pushed this now, actually. I do think this is how Jon would react to hearing about the missing girl, but Isaac had already told us there was nothing more to find around her house. No clues, no tracks. I think it is fairly obvious that we’re supposed to think she might be found in the castle. All roads lead there, after all. Anyway, we wasted a bit of the session doing that.

Afterwards, we still had some daylight so we bought some supplies and returned the Burgomaster’s house to help repair it. We boarded up windows, reinforced doors, patched up holes in the walls, that sort of thing. And then we waited. Merryn went looking for spell books, and found none. Endrei went up to the top floor and looked out over the cemetery with Ireena, the Burgomaster’s daughter who had been bitten by Strahd. Together they witnessed the mass exodus of the ghostly adventurers who had met their end in the castle. They rose, silvery and ethereal, from their graves and progressed up the hill to the castle. Ireena said they did that every night.

And then Strahd came a-knocking. I outlined the upshot of that above. We sent him packing but not before Jon got enchanted. He went to bed thinking the vampire was his best friend. And so, when an aspect of the Count appeared at his boarded up window in the dark of the night, he welcomed it. He was in the shape of a bat, and I’m not sure if this was just a dream or if it was real. Either way, Strahd asked a reasonable favour of Jon. He wanted to know if one of our number possessed a sword that had been broken in two at some stage. Jon thought this might refer to the fighter, Caldan, whose sword had seemed to pull him through the gates into Barovia the previous day. He promised he would get the sword for his new undead mate.

Ireena - a dark, curly haired, white woman in a cloak, golding a sword. — Ireena

The following day, we visited Madame Eva, accompanied by both Ireena and her brother, Ismark. She was to be found at a camp with the rest of her people, along the river. Merryn was very excited to witness what she insisted on referring to as “human magic.” Eva drew the cards for those of the party who entered her tent. For this, Isaac was able to use the Tarokka deck that I had recently procured. It is the official one made for the recent 5.5E version of Ravenloft, but one Tarokka deck is as good as the next, I assume. Anyway, since we were playing online, Isaac drew all the cards himself, and then read out the readings from the adventure. These gave us a lot of clues! I believe they also have a concrete effect on events within the adventure itself, although I’m not sure exactly how since I haven’t read it yet. We discovered something of the location of a “protector of good,” discovered that knowing the history of the place would help us, that the object of our search could be found where a prince is buried, that there is a weapon of light in the hands of darkness, and that all of this would be cast in a dark shadow.

Once the reading was done, the group asked Eva to remove the magic laid upon Warder Jon. She did so in exchange from a promise that we would bring her the two parts of the sword that was broken! We didn’t reveal to her that part of that might be in Caldan’s possession but we did promise we would bring it to her. So, she dispelled the Charm Person and Jon was freed! Of course, he swore an oath to kill the Strahd for the ignominy of ensorcelling him.

Castle Ravenloft with a cariage approaching through a storm. — Castle Ravenloft

From the camp, we made out way back along the road and took the other fork in the crossroads. Up we climbed until we discovered an unmanned black carriage and set of ebon horses, all beautifully appointed and apparently waiting for us to climb board. Only three of us took the ride, including Merryn and our resident gnome assassin, Celfi. The rest refused on principle and, instead, got soaked to the skin as the weather worsened. Eventually we all reached the castle, and it was introduced with some very evocative read-aloud text from the adventure, which, I think, assumed that the whole party would take the carriage.

The front door of the keep stood open, braziers flickered in the hall and it seemed warm and welcoming. We rejected it despite Celfi’s insistence that going in the front door would be the last thing the Count would expect! Instead we investigated the northern side of the courtyard where we found a gate. We easily opened that and found ourselves in another open yard. This one played host to the coach house which was, eerily, filled with the carriage which had just transported some of us there, despite the fact we had just left it on the road out front moments before. Also in this yard, surrounded by high walls was a gate into a neglected garden right at the back of the keep. Our assassin picked the lock for us and we investigated. The garden itself was a sorry affair but right at the back was another gate leading out to the overlook. This promontory jutted out from the pillar of rock the castle was built upon, and allowed an unparalleled vista of the count’s domain. From here, we were also able to line of windows below us, set into the rock face, glowing slightly with a feint light.

We returned to the yard once again to try the back door. This was the only door into the keep other than the front door, so we thought we should enter this way. Inside, we discovered a small, cold chamber. There was a pair of armoured skeletons slumped on either side of a stairway leading down from the room. Upon investigation it became obvious that they were not undead, merely decorative. The room also had a table and on that table rested an ancient book. It was half filled with names, all illegible. Some of us signed the tome, Merryn signed the pseudonym she said she used for her novels, Theodore Woolyfoot. Another member of the team signed it, Count Strahd von Zarovich! Anyway, it then occurred to us that this book could contain the names of all those adventurers who are forced to return to the castle at nigh as ghosts. If that were the case, perhaps destroying it would free them! We took it out to the overlook where there were a pair of bare stone structures sheltered from he wind and the rain. Just as we were about to set it alight, we heard a voice from the shadows behind us, welcoming us to his castle. The Count had come to greet us. Jon prepared to fulfil his oath! Time to roll for initiative!

Conclusion

The cover of the 2012 reprint of the AD&D Player's Handbook - faux-leather cover, with an inset illustration of the head of the famous demon statue from the cover of the D&D Basic set. — AD&D PHB 2012

What I have described above were the events of two sessions. Both were a little short, about two hours each. So, after three sessions, we have not had to interact with the mechanics of the game too much. I get the impression that’s about to change. I recently read the Player’s Handbook cover to cover so I’m pretty well prepared for it, I think, though I am still a little unsure how to factor ⁣segments into a combat round. Thankfully, I’m not the DM so Isaac will have to figure that part out!

I’m very excited to finally be in the castle and exploring. And encountering the antagonist himself, not once, but twice in the course of the adventure so far has been very cool. It makes me feel like he is a real personality and not just a bag of XP and treasure. How will the fight go? Badly, I expect. Let’s find out next time!

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 7

Nostalgia v Nowstalgia

Nostalgia rarely serves you well, I always think. If you let yourself be solely motivated by nostalgia, you’re destined for disappointment. Nostalgia is a feeling; it’s the feeling you get when you yearn for the feelings things in the past stirred in you. It often gets mistaken for the things themselves. I certainly worried that I was making that mistake when I came up with the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every edition of the venerable dragon game over the course of about 24 months. I told myself I had academic motives; I wanted to compare them, see how they changed through time, how the changes in designers affected them, what happened with the emergence of different play styles, character first stories, actual plays. All that. But, I was particularly excited to run AD&D 2nd Edition. There was no doubt this was driven by nostalgia. I played 2E more than any other edition of the game, concocted some of my favourite campaigns with my players, created worlds for their characters, some of whom would live forever in infamy. Those games live large in my memory.

But I’ll give myself credit for going in with my eyes open. I understood that nostalgic feeling in myself from the start and decided to approach the experience almost as if it were a new one. This turned out easy enough. I really did have to reread the books, relearn the rules, refamiliarise myself with the setting and the adventure. I had no concrete memory of any of that. Before diving back in, I couldn’t have told you that initiative was rolled on a d10 and the lowest roll wins. I didn’t realise that paladins only got spells at level 9 and certainly couldn’t have explained the surprise rule to anyone.

A Collection of Complete Handbooks for player classes and races.

Taken from that perspective, here’s what I learned. Character creation in this game is a task to be endured. It might have been less difficult and time-consuming if I had not chosen an adventure in the Planescape setting with its peculiarities of race and place and faction. It might have been easier if I had not insisted on everyone at least considering the kits in the various “complete handbooks.” I did that because it felt like a uniquely 2nd Edition experience that I didn’t want my players to miss out on. If you only allow the races and classes from the Player’s Handbook and you leave out the optional non-weapon proficiency rules, your Session 0 might involve fewer players tearing their hair out, and it might only take two hours instead of four. Whether or not my players appreciated the pure, unadulterated, 2nd char-gen, I’m not sure. I think some got more mileage out of it than others. But here’s what I am sure of, once that process was over with, we all loved those characters and the adventure we went on. Eventually, it became clear that the best way to play it was to embrace the long-winded spell descriptions, the needless crunch, the haystack-like books and the needle-like rules. If you can laugh about those things together at the table, while also using those rules to create cool stories together, then you are doing AD&D 2nd Edition right, I think. I got frustrated with it on occasion, but that was mainly during prep, when I tried to do most of my rule research. I know some of the players struggled with spells, spell slots, spells per day etc. But, importantly, my priority during play was always to try to keep the session moving. So, in some instances, I made rulings that maybe didn’t reflect the rules. But that’s in the spirit of the game in my opinion. Generally, that would be my advice for any GM and any game, to be honest.

The Eternal Boundary Crossed

The cover of Planescape adventure, the Eternal Boundary. A pale, bald dustman pushes a gurney with a sheet-covered corpse in the foreground. The silhouettes of adventurers peek through an archway in the background. — The Eternal Boundary

Dear reader, this is the last instalment! If you are interested to read all the previous ones, go here. If you think, however, that you might be a player in this adventure, The Eternal Boundary, someday, maybe give it a miss.

Last time, our heroes’ investigations brought them to somewhere unexpected. They’d leapt through a portal in the Mortuary that would take them to the Elemental Plane of Fire. There, they found themselves on an asteroid-like rock floating amongst the never-ending inferno, protected, somehow from being burned to cinders. The rock played host to a citadel of sorts. It had platforms with great ballistae to protect it from the more hostile denizens of the plane, a marble-clad temple complex of some sort and guard tower watching over everything. After killing some sentries, the PCs tricked some hobgoblin mercenaries into believing they were new recruits. They’d been advised to report to the high-up men in the temple. To do so, they tried to by-pass that tower, but the guards questioned them and their prisoner, Toranna the Grey, shouted for help. A fight broke out! The paladin ran in to take on the guards at the door while the thief fired some arrows and the cleric used his Spiritual Hammer to attack the archers on the roof. Even the witch’s goat got in on the action. They took some damage but eventually managed to defeat all six guards inside, steal their uniforms and stock up on weapons and supplies before heading on to the temple. During the chaos of the battle, they misplaced Toranna.

It turned out, once they entered the temple, that she had alerted the guards, the priests and the citadel’s commander, Green Marvent, that they were coming, so their clever disguises counted for naught!

It was a long, wide chamber with a series of columns on either side and an altar at the far end. A large, glowing gem hung, suspended in the air above the altar. It seemed to be important. The PCs were outnumbered here. There were just the four of them and they had just been in a couple of fights. They were not at their best. So they had to think laterally. They played a delaying game as they were engaged in combat by the guards inside the door, the human captain of the guard and the head of the hobgoblin mercenaries. They cast Silence on the spell casters gathered near the altar, forcing them to move, and preventing them from casting things like Command and Scare. This helped Trance, the thief to get close to the altar, before being rendered unconscious by Green Marvent. The Githzerai commander of the faction in charge of this place, the Illuminated. I gave the others one round to help Trance before she would die. Devansh came through with a heal just in time as the fight continued. Aurora, the bariaur witch, was down to using her sling-staff and no-one except the paladin was doing well for hit points when Trance managed to grab the gem and threaten to destroy it. This brought the fight to an abrupt end. Green Marvent explained that the gem was all that was preventing the rock from being consumed by the flames. The hobgoblin chief was swayed by Glaermond the paladin’s superior charisma and agreed to switch sides, seeing how the wind had changed direction. He went out and ordered his lads to go after the other Illuminated guards.

Finally, Devansh used Command on Green Marvent to “Explain.” And so she did. The Illuminated, she said was her faction. It was young and still light on power but she had come up with a way to bring the other factions of the Planes down from the inside. The plan was kidnap the barmies off the streets of the Hive, cure them of their madness and then convince them that their very own deities had brought them back from the dead, assigning them with one task, to join the Society of Sensation, or the Governors, or the Dustmen or the Doomguard or any faction, and to do as they were bidden when they had done so. Of course, Green Marvent was the one using illusions and disguises and appropriately fitted out chambers in the citadel to persuade the former barmies of this. And she would be the one giving them their orders, rather than Saint Cuthbert or Bahamut or Gruumsh or whatever deity they worshipped. It was a long game, perhaps, but she was patient. And she would have gotten away with it too, if it weren’t for these pesky adventurers.

Once the hobgoblins had dealt with he rest of the guards, the PCs rescued the few ex-barmies who were still not eh Rock and delivered them and Green Marvent back to Sigil. The Governors would deal with her treachery, if the Lady of Pain didn’t get to her first.

Meanwhile, Aurora considered the citadel for a new lick of paint and took its measurements for some more witchy decorations…

Conclusion

I had to make some changes to the adventure in the end. “Green Marvent” was the big bad hinted at in the body of the adventure. They were the one issuing orders via messenger and letter. They were the one with the plans for the Illuminated. But, as written, they never appeared in this adventure. I can only assume they were meant to turn up in a sequel to the Eternal Boundary that never happened. So I swapped out the commander of the citadel, Imogen, for Green Marvent. That way, the PCs get a sense of closure to the plot, at least. Other than this, I wouldn’t change too much about this adventure. I do think it was slightly too linear for my liking. I occasionally struggled to fight the text’s efforts to get the party back on the rails. In the end, they got where the adventure needed them to be, but maybe in a different way. As I think I mentioned before, having a member of the Dustmen faction on the team was a shortcut that ensured they did not have to treat the Mortuary section like a dungeon crawl, and that was a significant proportion of the adventure as written! I would imagine, if that hadn’t been the case, or if the PCs couldn’t come up with a clever plan to bypass it, the adventure would have taken at least a session or two longer than the 6 it took us.

In the end, we all agreed that we’d go back to these characters and this campaign and the Planes. I loved the PCs they created and I want to see more. I would like to give them a chance to pursue the original adventure hook given them by Bendon Mawl of the Senstes, the seek out the key to the portal to the Isle of Black Trees, which had been teased several times throughout the game. And I want to see how Devansh’s little temple turns out, not to mention Aurora’s new wizard’s sanctum.

But all that will have to wait. AD&D 1st Edition will continue for a while, but I won’t be running any more D&D until the New Year. I just need little break. I’ll run something else though so be sure to come back, dear reader, and see what that is.

The Editioning, AD&D 1st Edition, Part 1

1E or 2E?

The covers of both 1st and 2nd Edition Player's handbooks, side by side. — 1E v 2E

I don’t have a lot of experience with AD&D 1st Edition. By the time I felt ready to move on to an “advanced” version of the game, 2nd Edition was available and TSR was releasing a truck-load of source-books, settings, splat-books, adventures and accessories for it. It was natural to move from Basic directly to that. So, I couldn’t really say what the big differences are between the two versions.

PHB page 4 - illustration with a wizard blowing smoke rings and the credits for the book. All writing credits are Gary Gygax. — Smoke Rings

The creator is different, of course. Gary Gygax wrote 1E. And, I mean, he’s Mr D&D, right? That’s got to count for something. Here’s what he has to say about that in the preface to the 1978 Player’s handbook for AD&D 1st Edition:

…the game’s major appeal is to those persons with unusually active imagination and superior, active intellect — a very demanding audience indeed. Furthermore, a great majority of readers master their own dungeons and are necessarily creative — the most critical audience of all! Authoring these works means that, in a way, I have set myself up as final arbiter of fantasy role playing in the minds of the majority of D&D adventurers. Well, so be it, I rationalized. Who better than the individual responsible for it all as creator of the “Fantasy Supplement” in CHAINMAIL, the progenitor of D&D; and as the first proponent of fantasy gaming and a principal in TSR, the company one thinks of when fantasy games are mentioned, the credit and blame rests ultimately here. Some last authority must be established for a very good reason.

I’ll let you make of that what you will, dear reader. But, one thing’s for certain, Gary was sure there was only one man for the job!

From his writing early on in the PHB, Gary seems to have intended this as almost an add-on to the earlier B/X D&D. Here’s another excerpt from the preface:

I am convinced that it does for the old D&D + supplements what GREYHAWK did for D&D when it first appeared, and then some.

Here, he’s referencing the Greyhawk supplement for OD&D, which greatly changed and added to the rules, the classes and the gameplay of that game. And then, in the introduction he states how easy it should be to port your existing D&D character over to AD&D:

You will find it easy to integrate your existing character or characters into the new system, and at the same time the game will be both familiar and different.

I mean, its obvious that the games are built on the same foundations, and that it should be relatively simple to update a PC to work in any version of it, but I don’t think I had realised before that it had been one of Gygax’s intentions going into this project.

To compare, this is an excerpt from David “Zeb” Cook’s foreword to the 1989 AD&D 2nd Edition Player’s Handbook:

It’s not accurate to say this is a book that I alone have written. First off, there are a lot of other names listed in the credits. They, especially the developers, contributed time and talents that I don’t have. Improving the organization and readability was one of the reasons we started this project in the first place. These are tasks that can’t be done without talented developers and editors who play and care about the game. If you discover that it’s easier to find rules during your gaming sessions and that everything seems to make more sense, thank them.

He goes on to state how much the input from players shaped the entire edition here, too. You can see a different approach from the outset I suppose. But is the result all that different?

As to 2nd Edition’s compatability with previously published D&D materials:

Overall, it is best to approach the AD&D game as if it is a completely new game and be pleasantly surprised when you find overlapping concepts.

It’s pretty clear that, in the post-Gygax era, TSR’s attitude to AD&D as a game had shifted. Of course, both D&D and AD&D were being sold concurrently and marketed separately as two distinct games. The D&D Rules Cyclopedia was just around the corner at the time 2nd Ed came out. Indeed, I remember playing a Hollow World campaign run by a friend, using the Rules Cyclopedia, while I ran Dark Sun in AD&D 2E, around the same time. There were good business reasons to see them as separate entities.

I would have to agree that the two games are related but not interchangeable, though, whether we are talking about 1st or 2nd Edition. Your characters generally feel more powerful at low level in AD&D, the options on your character sheet are more numerous, the rules are more likely to dictate the outcome of situations than the DM.

I have to say, the actual character creation process for 1st Edition was time-consuming and involved a great-deal of page-flipping. We created two PCs each for our AD&D 1st Edition adventure. I went for a Magic User and a Paladin for maximum variety. If we had not only recently been through the AD&D 2nd Edition character creation process, I’m sure it would have taken even longer, actually. The two are more similar than different. In fact, this is so much the case that I began to wonder if the two systems are really different enough to even require an entry each in the Editioning. Still, in the end, it’s the playing that matters. I’m excited for it either way.

This surface level analysis has not led me to an answer to the question in the subheading. But then, we have only just started our playthrough of our AD&D 1st Edition adventure, Ravenloft!

Ravenloft

Friend of the blog, Isaac is taking the baton for this leg of the Editioning. He had actually been planning to run Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, but after the way my adventure for OD&D worked out (crashed, underground spaceship, lots of constructs and weird tech,) he felt it might be a bit too similar in theme. Anyway, given the season we were starting in, he decided to switch to the classic gothic horror adventure for 1st Edition, Ravenloft. He even got a copy of the original printed module for it. The adventure is by Laura and Tracy Hickman and was first released in 1983.

This module has spawned more rereleases, reimaginings, re-hashes and reproductions than maybe any other in the history of the game. Personally, I’m more familiar with the 2nd Edition Ravenloft setting, where Barovia joined a plethora of other strange and moody countries to make up the Demi-plane of Dread. These days, I would imagine that most players are more aware of the incredibly popular 5E module, the Curse of Strahd, or even the 5.5E setting, Ravenloft, the Horrors Within.

Anyway, it was with a great deal of excitement that I joined this game as a player, having never experienced it before.

Including yours truly, there are four players, with two PCs each, all starting at 5th level. Isaac felt that, as the adventure is designed for 6 to 8 players of levels 5 to 7, we would not get by with just one PC each. We’ve got:

Dowi playing Din and Dar, twin half-orc fighters, one neutral good, one neutral evil
Tom playing two humans, Caldan the fighter and Endrei the cleric, more siblings!
Jude playing Celfi, the chaotic evil gnome assassin and Nicholas Duskwater, the neutral good half-elf ranger
Me playing Warder Jon Blackhall, the lawful good human paladin and Merryn the true neutral elven magic-user

It’s a doughty crew with so many fighter types but we are fairly stacked when it comes to anti-undead powers and spell-casters. So, I’m confident we’ll come out of this with most of our blood if we’re not too stupid…

Our characters were all that remained of the Company of the Summer Sun, a mercenary band that had recently endured the worst defeat in its history. This ragtag band assumed that they were the only survivors, of course. Although, some of you clever readers with particularly good memories will recall that this was our origin story in Isaac’s previous Editioning game, of Basic D&D. So, Edmund of the Sun and Eandril Summerstream had trudged off to find employment and adventure at the Keep on the Borderlands, knowing nothing of these other survivors who ended up on the road, somewhere near the Svalich Woods. A small, but satisfying nod for those of us who took part in that game.

Welcome to Barovia

The Cover of Ravenloft. illustration by Clyde Caldwell shows the Vampire Lord, Strahd van Zarovich staring moodily from a darkened balcony. — Ravenloft

From this point on, there will be some SPOILERS for Ravenloft so turn back if you think you might play in it sometime.

Our adventure began in a tavern. While enjoying a drink and planning our next move we were approached by a recently arrived traveller, with a message for us and a drink for everyone in the bar. He took off immediately, leaving us to follow the message’s directions all on our own. It begged us to make haste to the aid of the Burgomaster of Barovia, some day’s travel through the Svalich Woods. The love of his life, Ireena had been afflicted and he needed help to deal with it. Merryn, my magic-user, concocted a story on the spot about how she knew the Burgomaster well, having spent a wonderful time in Barovia with him and his family. Just before we began the session I decided I needed at least one major personality trait for each of my characters. Merryn’s was being an inveterate liar, which is tempered only sometimes in the presence of Warder Jon, the Paladin of Forseti, who never lies. Of course we set off the very next morning.

Following the road, we came upon a great gate, with beheaded statues either side of it, which opened eerily before us, welcoming us in. One of our three fighters, Caldan, felt as though his sword was pulling him through the gates and into Barovia. We entered…

Not far down the road towards the town of Barovia, we discovered a corpse. The man looked to be a messenger, who had been torn apart by wolves. Searching him, we found another letter. This one, also seemingly from Kolyan Indirovich, Burgomaster of Barovia and dated before the first message, had very different contents. His daughter, Ireena had been bitten by a Vampyr who had controlled and cursed their land for 400 years. The letter implored the reader to give them up for dead and never to enter Barovia.

Too late did this warning come for our Company of the Summer Sun. We proceeded into the gathering dark, on to the town, taking the poor messenger’s corpse with us. Here we found most of the shops and homes closed up and shuttered. Jon and Endrei took the corpse to the church, where they discovered Father Dunovich in a bad way. He looked in desperate need of sleep and his church looked to have been ravaged by some creatures with great claws. He told us that we were trapped now in Barovia, thanks to the evil powers of Strahd von Zarovich, who resided there, in Castle Ravenloft, a thousand feet above on the mountainside. The town was being attacked every night by creatures, he said. His was the only power able to hold them at bay, which explained his exhaustion and the state of the building. He also told us how the Burgomaster found Ireena near the Pillar Stone of Ravenloft, years before and adopted her.

In town, Caldan and Merryn went shopping and then went for a drink. Here I got to really go to town on Merryn’s lies. They were elaborate and completely unnecessary, about how she held an interest in a vineyard back home and how she couldn’t wait to see some “human magic” in operation. They tried to get some chat from a group of Vistani but got nowhere. They seemed like a bad lot who acted like they owned the place. Even buying them drinks did no good. They did tell us we could visit Madame Eva at her camp along the river if we wanted our fortunes told. In the Blood ofn the Vine tavern, we also encountered Ismark, the burgomaster’s son, who invited us to the big house.

Finally, all the other members of our troupe went to investigate the weeping they had heard from one of the boarded up houses on the Main Street. They found a woman crying endlessly in grief. Celfi, assuming she was some sort of evil spirit, wanted to stab her in the back but Dar tossed a book into her room to get her attention, spoiling the chance for a backstab. The woman was inconsolable, but eventually, the PCs found out that she had imprisoned her daughter, Gertrude in the house, “for her own good.” But she had escaped and now the mother feared the worst.

Later, we all reconvened at the Burgomaster’s house. It, too, was covered in battle-scars: claw-marks, broken windows and burns from the nightly attacks. Warder Jon demanded entry, introducing himself as a paladin who never lied. This prompted Ireena to open the door to the party. Jon used his ability to sense evil on her, but detected nothing. Here we discovered the the Burgomaster was but recently deceased of natural causes and that the nightly wolf attacks had continued until the Burgomaster’s death. We were also told that the ghosts of other adventurers who threatened Strahd rose from the unmarked graves at the church every night. We decided to stay at the house that night to see what happened and then to go on to see Madame Eva the next morning.

Conclusion

So far, so excellent. I have not been a player in an AD&D adventure in well over 30 years. It felt good to be back! And for such an iconic adventure? Genuinely exciting. It’s so timely too, as the nights close in, the winds begin to howl and the cold begins to claw at the door…

I’ll be continuing my analysis of AD&D 1st Edition and comparing it to the other versions in the Editioning over the next few weeks as our Ravenloft experience continues, dear reader. Do join me.

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 6

Who Plays RAW Anyway?

AD&D is a famously crunchy system. It took the relative simplicity and, dare I say, elegance of OD&D, and started piling on subsystems for magic, combat, falling, drowning, encumbrance, surprise, skills and proficiencies, experience, encounters, etc. etc. It’s not an easy system to learn and I’m not sure anyone is really meant to learn the whole thing. Rulebooks are reference books, of course. That’s the case for any game, but it’s a necessity if you want to play AD&D rules-as-written.

Encumbrance for animals — Climbing and geting down

I played a lot of 2nd Edition in the 90s. I ran my own home-brew world campaign, I ran Dark Sun, Ravenloft and Planescape and played in some Forgotten Realms games too. I have a lot of experience with the game. But I don’t remember using a ton of the more nitty-gritty rules. Encumbrance is the obvious one that I think many groups would have hand-waved, and continue to. But things like specific rules for climbing (and getting down again,) and rules for specific weapon types vs specific armour types, were all just, well, too specific. I suspect that other groups handled things in a similar way. I don’t think our games suffered due to a lack of these rules. As DM, if the situations arose where a character needed to rappel down a castle wall, I would have made a ruling and we all would have moved on, instead of searching the DMG or PHB for the precise way to handle it according to Zeb Cook. I do remember doing that on occasion, usually when challenged by a player that something should be handled properly. Generally, this would bring the session to a grinding halt while we found the rule in one of the ten different books it might have appeared in, and then read it, read it again to understand it, and applied it to the situation. This would rarely be worthwhile, although, sometimes we uncovered a rule that actually made our play better.

RAW Editioning

The Editioning, our challenge to play and adventure in every major D&D edition over about a 24 month period, has made it far more likely that I will deal with any given situation as the rules require. I am trying to play these adventures that way. But what I have discovered, playing the Eternal Boundary, is that the adventure doesn’t care about most of those rules. The writer got the 2nd Edition surprise rules wrong, the plot does not involve wilderness adventuring, dungeoneering or, really, any type of traditional D&D shit, and nobody has been required to rappel down anything. As I have stated here before, it is far more an investigation scenario than anything else. Each session has been an exercise in pushing the plot forward. When I think about it, many of the ‘90s adventures were like that. It was, I think, a side-effect of having settings with their own histories and stories, exemplified in hundreds of novels, rife with famous and powerful NPCs, where the canon events impacted the types of adventure modules written for them. The plot-heavy adventure became the norm for D&D.

The Eternal Boundary appeared very early in the life of the Planescape setting but well into AD&D 2E’s middle-age. So, although it had not been confined by published canon yet, you can tell that it was trying to define it. It establishes NPCs that could be involved in major events in the future of Sigil, it is more interested in establishing the setting, its factions and its political situation that in providing opportunities for the DM to apply the rules of the system to the situations the PCs get into. I don’t want to go to far into this area right now. I’ll save it for a more thorough review of the module when we are finished. I’m saying that, when it comes to adventure selection, I could have chosen better if I wanted a quintessential AD&D 2nd Edition experience. But then again, maybe such a thing doesn’t exist.

Plane-hopping

If you need a recap, please go and revisit my previous posts here.

Session 5 of the Eternal Boundary kicked off with another fight. The party, reunited and determined to get some answers, decided to take on Toranna the Gray on her own turf, ie, the portal room right at the top of the Mortuary, under the dome. It was a cool location and a cool set up. She was preparing, with the help of an assistant, to send another barmy’s corpse through the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, ostensibly for cremation. There were a few zombies lurching around the chamber doing odd-jobs as well. We rolled for surprise, which neither side got, and then initiative which the PCs won. Devansh, the Cleric, immediately turned the zombies, just in case, and Trance, the Thief, tried to use her grappling hook to swing of the chandelier and take down the assistant before they could act. She failed the grappling hook roll (used the Thief’s Climb ability for this) but hit with her attack, killing the 0 level assistant instantly. Meanwhile, Glaermond the Paladin ran into the fray, taking on one of the turned zombies, and Aurora, the Witch, sent her goat in to butt Toranna. What followed was a few rounds of Toranna running around, trying to escape while restricting the party’s movement as much as possible with her magic. Hold Person is a powerful spell in this edition, by the way. Mainly because it is hard to save vs Spells.

Hold Person
(Enchantment/Charm)
Sphere: Charm
Range: 120 yds. Components: V, S, M
Duration: 2 rds./level Casting Time: 5
Area of Effect: 1d4 persons Saving Throw: Neg.
in 20-ft. cube
This spell holds 1d4 humans, demihumans, or humanoid creatures
rigidly immobile and in place for a minimum of six rounds (the
spell lasts 2 rounds per caster level, and the priest must be of at least 3rd level to cast the spell).
The hold person spell affects any bipedal human, demihuman, or
humanoid of man size or smaller, including brownies, dryads,
dwarves, elves, gnolls, gnomes, goblins, half-elves, halflings, half-orcs, hobgoblins, humans, kobolds, lizard men, nixies, orcs, pixies, sprites, troglodytes, and others. Thus, a 10th-level fighter could be held, while an ogre could not.
The effect is centered on a point selected by the caster, and it
affects persons selected by the caster within the area of effect. If the spell is cast at three persons, each gets a normal saving throw; if only two persons are being enspelled, each rolls his saving throw with a –1 penalty; if the spell is cast at only one person, the saving throw die roll suffers a –2 penalty. Saving throws are adjusted for Wisdom.
Those who succeed on their saving throws are totally unaffected by the spell. Undead creatures cannot be held.
Held creatures cannot move or speak, but they remain aware of
events around them and can use abilities not requiring motion or
speech. Being held does not prevent the worsening of the subjects’ condition due to wounds, disease, or poison. The priest casting the hold person spell can end the spell with a single utterance at any time; otherwise, the duration is six rounds at 3rd level, eight rounds at 4th level, etc.
The spellcaster needs a small, straight piece of iron as the material component of this spell.

Also, bonus points for use the word “enspelled” there.

Anyway, this allowed her to last four rounds against the party. The had almost made it down the stairs to look for help when Glaermond jumped on her from the top of the stairs doing a shit ton of damage and leaving her at 0 HP.

They questioned her. Trance even used her Intimidation non-weapon proficiency to good effect. Eventually they got Toranna to tell them about the plan, or at least the part of it she knew. She was working for a faction called the Illuminated and a person call Green Marvent. Green Marvent had asked her to take the “bodies” with a mark behind the ear and send them through the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire, just like the other corpses. But those ones would not be burned up, instead, they would be taken by the Illuminated on the Rock, the Citadel of Fire beyond the portal, and revive them. Now Toranna didn’t know what they did after that. But the PCs, having already run into Eliath and the Dancing Man, supposedly returned from death by “their own gods,” were already aware of what was happening afterwards. They are still not sure why, though, and they knew they needed to stop this plot so they grabbed Toranna, took her red glass beads, the key for the portal and jumped through…

The Citadel of Fire hangs in the eternal flame of the Elemental Plane of Fire — The Citadel of Fire

On the other side, they found themselves on a wide platform at the bottom of a long set of steps that clung to the side of a cyclopean rock, floating, impossibly unburned through the eternal flames of the Elemental Plane of Fire. They could hear the inferno raging just yards away, though muted, and they could even feel a portion of the hellish heat, but they were not in danger of being roasted. They were greeted by a number of Illuminated guards, led by a priest. The party’s fast-talking fell on deaf ears and another fight erupted. The Illuminated priest sent one of the guards to get help from the next guard post at the top of the stairs, but Trance, the thief was too quick for him, felling him with a backstab before he could get too far. The priest took his first action to cast Command on Aurora, forcing her to Jump. On her turn, she was going to be forced to jump off the edge of the platform into the flames below. This would have been instant death, but, Devansh, taking his turn before her, countered it with another Command to “Stay.” This was such an ingenious use of the spell and saved Aurora’s life, without question. Meanwhile, Glaermond cut one of the guards in half. The others didn’t last long after that. I realise now that I was rolling Morale for them wrong. This is the danger of playing so many editions. I rolled 2d6 for the Morale check instead of 2d10. I can’t say for sure if this would have made a difference now, but at the time this meant they did not run for their lives when they probably should have.

Hobgobln entry from the Monstrous Compendium for AD&D 2E

The party ascended the steps and got a better view of the Rock. A platform jutting out from the side of it held a couple of ballistae and a quintet of hobgoblin mercenaries. Up some more steps and rising into the fiery sky, a tower stood, and, to their left there was an opening into the interior of this asteroid-like floating citadel. Beyond, in the darkness, they were able to make out a forbidding, dark hallway, draped in ceremonial-looking finery and decorated with sinister carvings. The PCs were challenged by the hobgoblins, who seemed more clueless than the Illuminated guards below. The PCs convinced them that they were new recruits, hired by Green Marvent. Dropping the boss’ name did the trick. The party asked the mercs who they should report to and they were told to go to the Temple, up near that guard tower they could see.

So, off they went. At the tower, they attempted to just ignore the guards standing outside it and the archers on the top of it but Toranna, still their prisoner and reduced to a single hit point, called out for help from her Illuminated allies, who turned to take on the PCs…

And that’s where we left it.

Conclusion

I guess my conclusion from all this is that, if you interact with all of the rules, some of the rules or maybe even none of the rules, you will probably still have a good time. In the Eternal Boundary, the wondrous locations of the adventure, Sigil itself, the creepy Mortuary, the Citadel of Fire, are almost enough to make it a fun experience to play. The addition of the PCs, their idiosyncrasies and personalities, and the cleverness and excitement of the players is always going to elevate any adventure to the realm of actual fun.

Next time will probably be my final update on the AD&D 2E part of the Editioning as the Eternal Boundary is unlikely to go any longer. Will they uncover the truth of the Illuminated plot? Will they find and confront Green Marvent? Will they all go up in flames? You’ll have to wait and see, dear reader.

Old School v Old School Essentials

Downtime Discussion

I had a really interesting discussion last night with, friends of the blog, Tom and Isaac. They’ve both been along with me for the Editioning ride and have some great insights. We have started a monthly round-up of games in a Discord video chat. We’re calling it Tables & Tales Downtime. It’s a simple opportunity, that we don’t generally get at the table, to talk about the games we’re playing. We’ve only had two of these Downtimes and they have each turned out quite different. The first went into detail on the games themselves, what happened in the sessions of the previous month, how the systems and mechanics worked at the table, what surprised or delighted players, or what didn’t work for them. In this second one, it was just the three of us so we got into a fairly free-wheeling discussion of the things we had been thinking about games in general recently.

Isaac has been preparing to run the classic AD&D 1st Edition module, Ravenloft, grappling with its copious verbiage and unwanted levels of detail. Meanwhile, I have been reading a couple of OSE adventures and coming to grips with their house-style, which feels like the exact opposite. Tom’s perspective was unique in this mix as the DM of our Dungeon World game, coming up with all their adventure ideas off the dome, which presents its own challenges and opportunities.

The Keep on the Borderlands

I can’t comment too much on Ravenloft since I haven’t read it, but it sounds similar to many adventures of the time. It is arranged in paragraphs, long and wordy. It’s got stats and descriptions for NPCs and areas that are almost certainly never going to be needed. It makes a lot of assumptions about what the PCs are going to try to do and it provides the DM ways to thwart their idiotic plans.

Another prime example is B2 The Keep on the Borderlands. As a beginner module, it has a lot of advice for the starting DM and even for players included. But it also spells out the consequences if the party decides to go on an anti-social rampage through the keep, the exact numbers and stats for the guards, their locations, how many are on duty and in armour, etc. etc. The cognitive load this requires of a DM is not to be underestimated.

Description of hte guard towers in the Keep. — Description of the guard towers in the Keep.

We’re going back in time with adventure modules like this, of course. Maybe comparing them to more modern styles of adventure presentation is unfair. Every adventure produced relies on creators who learned from the mistakes and successes of those who came before, after all. But, in preparation for this post, I read some reviews of Holy Mountain Shaker, the OSE adventure I’m going to use as comparison. Some reviewers and commenters simply hated the OSE house style used to present it because its terse bullet points and single phrase descriptors didn’t include enough sentences or actual paragraphs. Some DMs feel like they need a piece of prose to get to grips with the atmosphere, the setting or the characters. Some people want to have to read through a module two or three times before they feel ready to bring it to the table. The Keep on the Borderlands suggests this approach in the “Preparation for the Use of the Module” section.

Now, up until this point in the text, Gary Gygax has been really bigging up the DM, Here’s an except. Sorry it’s so long. Gary needs an editor tbh:

So, you can see that he has been buttering up the poor rube who agreed to run this classic adventure before telling them they have to learn the damn thing off by heart in preparation. And you can see that that would be no mean feat given the style of writing, the denseness of the prose and lack of distinction between description and stats.

I want to make one thing very clear at this stage; I played The Keep on the Borderlands recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. I thought it was a great module with lots of player freedom, options for the DM to customise and almost endless possibilities for how it might play out at the table. But its the reading of these older adventures that’s a chore. I don’t really want to read them through once, never mind three times. It takes a long time and it’s boring.

Adventures are for playing, not for reading. Is that controversial?

Holy Mountain Shaker

Holy Mountain Shaker is a 2021 adventure module for Old School Essentials by Luka Rejec of Ultraviolet Grasslands fame. I think it’s interesting that UVG was the first RPG book that got me to stop reading it so that I could start playing it. The longer I spent reading it the more it dawned on me that it was a reference book, not a work of fiction. Anyway, Holy Mountain Shaker is an ambitious adventure that includes a really large number of compelling and enormous locations as well as a town with a few relatively unimportant factions. This is a point crawl where each point is big, like a massive underground chasm, an enormous ziggurat under a mountain, an entire mine. That sort of thing. These are not accompanied by maps of the areas. This is only a 56 page adventure. Instead, the DM is given some of those terse descriptors, a few options for what a party might do in the locations, where their investigations might lead to and some encounters and events.

Sure, it might help if you read some of the location descriptions ahead of time to get an idea of what’s coming for the adventurers, but that won’t take very long and you could absolutely get away with not doing it. It’s easy to see, at a glance, what you need to give the players, what they will need to do some work to find, and what might happen if they do certain things. Personally, I think this gives you just enough to improvise with. We’re playing a use-your-imagination-game here, and I like being given the chance to use mine, even on the fly with minimum prep. Admittedly, having run UVG for a while, I have quite a bit of experience doing this, as it is laid out similarly. But, equally, if you play Blades in the Dark, Heart, the Between or any other story game, you are faced with making up locations, NPCs, items constantly. That’s part of the challenge and part of the fun.

The lack of location-specific maps is a little jarring. I get that. I wanted a map of the ziggurat like we got a (kind of) map of the Pharaoh Fish, but, ultimately, I understand that the exploration is meant to be abstracted, and occasionally cut with scenes of discovery where a PC finds one of those wonderful magic items, or by combat, where we zoom in on the action when a random encounter occurs with one of the creatures that is described at the beginning (and only at the beginning) of the book. It reminds me of a Final Fantasy game. Your little guy is travelling by map across country when you suddenly run into a rabid chocobo or whatever. The map disappears and your party are gathered there in a fully realised location facing that one poor flightless bird.

You don’t have to slog through descriptions of endless empty rooms or 30 ft long corridors. We’ve all done that. I get that that’s D&D and I also enjoy the sort of play that involves precise measurement, perfectly drawn maps and searching for traps with ten foot poles. But reading this was refreshing. It presented me with a different way to play even large-scale locations in a mega dungeon that won’t take the rest of your life to play through and was packaged in such a compact and attractive book.

But, for the sake of comparison, we looked at the Keep from Keep on the Borderlands above so let’s look at the town in Holy Mountain Shaker. The town of Plish is described in two pages, both of which are half illustration. The factions get a bullet point each. This actually seems fair since they don’t come into the adventure itself much. Then you get a paragraph about the native Plishlings compared to the Newfolk who have come to mine the mountain. And lastly, there is another short paragraph describing the Cult of the God Carp. On the second page we have a couple of lines about the earthquakes plaguing the town and then a table of rumours. That’s it. No descriptions of fortifications, no guard stats, no structural engineering reports. What it’s doing is trusting that we all know the kinds of things you might find in a fantasy mining town at the foot of a holy mountain. And it’s giving us permission to come up with that stuff at the table (or for the DM to make it up before they start, I suppose.)

Conclusion

Now, I have a some issues with Holy Mountain Shaker as well. I think some of the descriptors used are too obscure for the average DM to know without looking them up. And that sort of stumbling block is a big deal if you only have one word to go on (what is a vitrine, anyway?) Some of the illustrations do not really illustrate what I would want them to illustrate about some of the locations. And I would actually like a bit more involvement from the factions. But I’m not really here to review this adventure, especially as I haven’t played it yet. I’m just here to compare these two styles.

I think it’s worth mentioning that the former style has not completely died out. Some trad games are still presented using dense paragraphs when, in my opinion, bullet points would be better (looking at you Dragon Age RPG, Call of Cthulhu, DCC) but, as I mentioned above, that style still has its fans and adherents. More power to ‘em. But, for me? Keep it minimal.

The Editioning, D&D 3E Character Creation

The Wizards Loom

Time marched ever on, TSR faded and went into the West. Wizards of the Coast loomed over Dungeons & Dragons as its new masters. It was a new millennium and it was time for a change.

The 3rd Edition of D&D brought with it many changes. Some were better received than others and the player base, it was fair to say, were divided over this new iteration.

It continued the 2nd edition obsessions with having a rule for every eventuality and providing endless optionality in character creation and development. But that list of saving throws was replaced by an even longer list of skills.

THAC0 was gone and Armour Class was finally ascending with the institution of the d20 system, which would define many mainstream RPGs for years.

We got Feats for the first time and the concept of a PC’s Spell Save value. You can see the embryo of 5E in this edition with mechanics like these and the Skills in particular.

It’s still very complicated compared to the Basic D&D or OD&D but it feels more refined than AD&D.

I have little practical experience with this edition or its later 3.5 version, but I do remember optionality in character creation being quite attractive. Now, looking at the character creation section of the 3E Player’s handbook, which runs for almost 90 pages, I’m a little intimidated. But, I’m here to drink beer and create a character for D&D 3E, and I’m all out of beer (that’s not true. I’m not sure I could attempt this without beer.)

This book is from the illustrious pens of Monte Cook, Jonathan Tweet and Skip Williams. Monte Cook has, of course, had an outsized influence on the direction of the hobby over the last 25 years so it’ll be interesting to see what he has produced here.

Character Creation Basics

I quite like the way the couple of pages here is laid out around a character sheet, with each section numbered. It breaks it down and makes it feel a bit more manageable. Honestly, it reminds me a similar spread in the Mothership Player Survival Guide, which actually only involves two fewer steps than this. I actually like that it suggests, as a Step 0, to check with your DM before starting, in case there are any special limitations or house rules for your character.

After that, the steps are:

Ability Scores (4d6 and drop the lowest six times, then assign as you like, probably in concert with your choice of race and class)
Choose Class and Race (this might seem like it should be two separate steps but, from our experience in AD&D 2nd Edition, it just isn’t. The two are indivisible as race features and ability score modifications have such an effect on your choice of class, and vice versa. The ability scores you roll have a much lesser effect on the choices as they are, by default rolled and then assigned. In fact, the only problem I have with this step is that it should be combined with Step 1 because all three choices impact each other)
Assign and Adjust Ability Scores (fact is, you already did this in that last step. If you didn’t, I don’t know how you made any decisions, tbh. This is another step that should be folded in with the previous two)
Review the Starting Package (sounds like you’re having a look at an automobile brochure but it’s really just giving you a Quickstart option for your PC that details ideal starting Feats Skills and Equipment. You chan choose to take these if you want to speed up this whole process)
Record Racial and Class Features (The writer concedes here that you will probably have to flick back and forth through the book to make choices regarding some of these features. This step includes Spells, btw, so prepare for this to take a while if you’re a spell-caster)
Select a Feat (Same here. You might need to look at particular equipment of skill descriptions to make an informed choice here.)
Select Skills (You get Skill Points from your class and your Inelligence modifier, and you have Class Skills and non-Class Skills so its a little similar to AD&D’s non-weapon proficiencies in that way, but the list of skills is more similar to 5E)
Review Description (This step does not want you to do anything but homework. Just read Chapter 6: Description. Make some of those choices now if you want, but that’s what Step 11 is for, really)
Select Equipment (honestly, since we are including this in character creation, it’s more like 113 pages rather than 89. You randomly determine the amount of gold you have to spend on equipment for your Level 1 PC)
Record Combat and Skill Numbers (this will probably take a while. Just take a look at the character sheet!)
Details Galore (describe your character using Alignment, height, weight, age, background etc.)

Ability Scores

We’ve got the standard D&D abilities, Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma.

Here are my rolls:

5, 3, 1, 1 = 9 (what a start…)
5, 3, 3, 2 = 11 (a little better)
6, 5, 1, 1 = 12 (really just creeping up here)
6, 6, 5, 5 = 17 (now we’re talking)
6, 4, 4, 3 = 14 (not bad)
6, 4, 2, 2 = 12 (could have ended worse)

Now, I can choose to assign these to the six abilities as I see fit. Meaning, of course, that I would have to make choices normally. But, as is my won’t, I am going to keep things random. I’ll roll for both race and class and then choose how to match my scores to my abilities.

Choose Class and Race

This edition has the following races to pick from:

Humans
Dwarves
Elves
Gnomes
Half-Elves
Half-Orcs
Halflings

I’m going to have to break out my D7 from one of my Zocchi Dice sets. And I rolled a 2! I’m a Dwarf! I like playing Dwarves. I was obsessed with them ever since reading the Hobbit.

Dwarves in 3rd Ed get the following traits:

+2 Constitution, -2 Charisma
Medium Size
Base speed of 20 feet
Darkvision – its black and white but it reaches 60ft in total darkness
Stonecutting – +2 bonus to notice unusual stonework (sliding walls, stonework traps, new construction etc.) It also allows them to use the Search skill to find stonework traps like a rogue might
+2 on saves v poison, spells and spell-like effects
+1 on attack rolls against goblinoids
+4 dodge against giants. This does not represent their size, which we have established is medium, but their training
+2 to Appraise rare and exotic items
+2 to Craft checks related to stone or metal
Automatic languages – Common, Dwarven. Bonus languages – Giant, Gnome, Orc, Terran and Undercommon
Their favoured class is Fighter. This means that a multi class dwarf’s fighter class does not count when determining whether or not they suffer an XP penalty for multiclassing

This is already a huge number of features, but at least the book presents them in bullet points unlike older editions.

Now for the Classes. The Player’s Handbook presents the following:

Barbarian
Bard
Cleric
Druid
Fighter
Monk
Paladin
Ranger
Rogue
Sorcerer
Wizard

Another fantastically uneven number. Not even a set of Zocchi dice comes with a d11 so I will roll a d12 and re-roll on a 12. I rolled a 4, so that’s a Druid!

The description of the class explains that “Dwarves, halflings and half-orcs are rarely druids.” But that’s not going to stop me. I’m not here to min-max this character.

This is not the first edition to include druids, OD&D, 1st and 2nd Edition had them as well. But in those, they were much more like a flavour of nature-cleric than a class of their own.

Here are some of the things I will need to keep in mind while I make this character now that I know the class:

Alignment – I will have to be at least part Neutral to represent nature’s indifference
Religion – some druids revere Obad-Hai, god of nature or Ehlonna, goddess of woodlands
Background – there is a larger druidic society but most druids are loners with a charge of their own wild refuge
Abilities – Wisdom is a Druid’s most important stat, what would have been called their prime requisite in previous editions. It determines how many spells they can cast and how powerful they can be. They need a Wisdom score of at least 10 + spell level. The spell save DC is 10 + spell level + Wis modifier. A good Dex is important as they only get to wear light or medium armour
Hit die – D8
Class Skills – Animal Empathy (Cha, Druid exclusive) Concentration (Con,) Craft (Int,) Diplomacy (Cha,) Handle Animal (Cha,) Heal (Wis,) Intuit Direction (Wis,) Knowledge (nature) (Int,) Profession (WIs,) Scry (Int, exclusive skill,) Spellcraft (Int,) Wilderness Lore (Wis)
Skill points at Level 1 – 4 + Int modifier x4
Skill points at each additional level – 4 + Int modifier
Class Features
- Weapon Proficiencies – club, dagger, dart, long spear, quarterstaff, scimitar, sickle, short spear, sling
- Armour – padded, leather or hide only. A druid can also use a shield as long as it’s wooden. If they wear any other type of armour, they can’t use any of their magical powers or spells while they wear it and for 24 hours after!
- Spells – Druids can prepare and cast any spell from the druid spell-list. They don’t have to learn them like wizards. See the table below. They can’t cast spells of an alignment opposed to their own. I honestly didn’t remember spells being identified with alignments in this game.
- Bonus languages – They get to know the secret druidic language and can substitute out one of their bonus languages for Sylvan
- Nature Sense – Can tell you all about plants and animals. Also can identify poisoned or impure water
- Animal Companion – a druid gets to start with an animal companion or two! At first level the total HD of creatures you’ve befriended using the animal friendship spell cannot exceed 2. You can also cast the spell on other animals during play
- There are a bunch of features that druids get at higher levels, including Wild-shape, the ability to polymorph into animals. But I’m not going into them here since I’m making a 1st level character
- At level 1, a druid will get a 0 for base attack bonus
- Druid Saves at level 1 – Fort: +2, Ref: 0, Will: +2

Assign and Adjust Ability Scores

OK, it’s time to assign those ability scores, taking my Dwarven modifiers into account.

Str – 9 (-1 to melee attacks and damage, Climb, Jump and Swim checks as well as general Strength checks)
Dex – 14 (+2 to ranged attacks, AC, Reflex saves and a whole bunch of skill checks)
Con – 14 (one of the 12s with a +2 from my Dwarven ancestry) (+2 to each hit die rolled, Fortitude saves, and Concentration checks)
Int – 11 (A lot of my skills are Int based) (0 extra languages, 0 extra skill points/level)
Wis – 17 (had to be) (+3 to Will saves and a bunch of skill checks. More importantly, it’ll mean an extra 1st level spell)
Cha – 10 (the second 12 with Dwarven -2) (Another 0 modifier, which sucks since so many of my skills work on Cha)

Record Race and Class Features

I think this step is here rather than amalgamated with your choice of race and class above, is because you don’t know how many spells you might be able to choose or learn until your ability scores are settled…

The fact I’m coming to terms with here is that this series of steps is not particularly distinct or clear. You have to jump back and forth constantly. I actually think it’s worth asking why you are supposed to roll your Ability scores before selecting your race and class. Since you can assign them any way you want, they have no bearing on those choices. It would actually make more sense to choose the class and race first, then roll up your abilities with your race modifiers in mind and a much better idea of how you want to assign them.

Anyway, I’ve gone through the race and class features above. I only really need to choose spells

So, with my Wis sore of 17, I will get 3 0-level spells and 2 1st level spells.

I had forgotten there were 0-level spells or cantrips in this edition. I guess this is another first!

As I stated above, a druid can choose from all available spells but does have to prepare them at the start of each day. Here are my day 1 choices:
0 – Cure Minor Wounds (Cures 1 Point of Damage,) Guidance (+1 on one roll, throw or check,) Resistance (Subject gains +1 on saving throws)
1 – Animal Friendship (gains permanent animal companions)

I am going to pick a couple of badgers since a level 1 druid can have up to 2 HD worth of creatures as friends and badgers only have 1 HD each. They are tiny, can burrow and have the ability to fly into a rage in combat! I shall name them Eddie and Brock.

Select a Feat

Feats are also new in this edition. They add yet another way to personalize your PC. I only get one at level 1, so I guess I should choose carefully. But even then, I do think it’s interesting that they made feats optional by 5e. Was this single choice adding just a little too much cognitive load to players? Or is it just because 5e characters already have enough going on?

Back to 3e. There’s a decent number of feats to choose from as you can see from the photo.

Here’s my choice:

Toughness – Gives me +3 HP and I can take this feat multiple times, which is nice.

Select Skills

I have 4 + Int Modifier x 4 skill points to spend at level 1. Since I have no Int modifier, this means 16 Skill Points. I have to spend all of them. Here’s how spending them works.
You can spend a point on buying a new Skill or on increasing the rank of one you already have. One aspect of the point-buy system I find confusing and strange is that you can spend one point to gain a rank in a Class Skill. But you can also spend a point to get half a rank in what they call a Cross-Class Skill, even though that half a point will do you no good. So why not just make is it so that you can only buy a single Cross-Class skill rank with two points instead?

Anyway, as I mentioned above, there is a pretty long list of skills presented here in a table that is going me a headache.

Animal Empathy (Cha, exclusive skill,) – 2 ranks

Concentration (Con) – 2 ranks

Heal (Wis) – 2 ranks

Profession (Wis) – miner – 2 ranks

Knowledge (nature) (Int) – 2 ranks

Scry (Int, exclusive skill,) – 2 ranks

Spellcraft (Int) – 2 ranks

Wilderness Lore (Wis) – 2 ranks

I’m not specialising much but I think that’s appropriate for a low level character. They often grow in a particular direction after starting off as a generalist.

Review Description

If I’m reviewing it, I’m going to add the details now too.

This is an overly long section that goes into a lot of unnecessary detail on alignments, religion, gender, height, weight and eye colour…

I’m going to skip through it quickly as I have already tired of this process and this blog post has taken me almost a full week to get through:

Alignment – Chaotic Neutral (this book gives a title to each alignment, which is bonkers. I hate D&D alignments at the best of times but this is making me dislike them even more. Anyway, Chaotic Neutral is known as the “Free Spirit.”)
Religion – Obad-Hai, god of nature
Name – Oskar Holderhek (got this from the dwarf names presented in Chapter 2)
Gender/pronouns – he/him
Age – there is a random starting age table here that has different possibilities based on your class… anyway, I rolled 7d6(!) and added to the starting age of 40 giving Oskar a starting age of 70. There is also a table of aging effects for middle, old, venerable and maximum ages that can give you minuses to Str, Con and Dex and bonuses to Int, Wis and Cha, which is bizarre, frankly.
Height and Weight – another random table split along race and sex lines this time – Dwarf men start at 3’ 9” and add 2d4 inches. I rolled a 5 making Oskar 4’ 3”. Weightwise – the table is incredibly confusing but I think I’m supposed to roll 2d6 and multiply the 2d4 roll in order to add the result to the base weight for dwarf men… I got an 11 so that’s 55 + 130lbs making Oskar 185lbs. This absurd level of detail is bringing me to breaking point.
Looks – He is a grimy little dwarf with a short cropped beard, thick brows and a hunchback. He’s constantly covered in dirt and wears leathers to protect himself as he digs tunnels.
Personality – this dwarf is obsessed only with the fauna who occupy the underground along with him. He does not care for surface dwellers at all and will only emerge into the light under duress. He is stubborn, direct and frequently insulting.
Background – Oskar escaped an underground work-gang that the dwarves authorities put him on to punish him for various infractions including insulting his thane’s son, keeping moles in the city and building a pit-trap to drop the guard down when they came to arrest him for the first two offences. When he escaped he found an ancient dwarf in a forgotten corner of the Underdark. Helga taught him how to be a druid and protect the mushroom grove of the myconids from their enemies. When they were attacked by surface dwellers, he vowed to find the perpetrators and kill them.
This section also encourages you to customise your character but I think I have given him enough defining characteristics already.

Equipment

A druid starts with 2d4 x 10 gold – I rolled a 3, so that is a very poor, 30 GP. But, to save time, I have decided to go with the equipment from the Druid starting package described in the Class section:

Armour: Hide +3 AC, wooden shield +2 AC, speed 20ft, 35lbs, armour check penalty -5
Weapons: Scimitar (1d6, crit 18-20/x2, 4 lbs, Medium size, Slashing)
Club (oaken cudgel): 1d6, crit x2, 10ft., 3lbs, Medium size, bludgeoning
Sling (1d4, crit x2, 50ft., 0lbs, Small, Bludgeoning)
Gear: Backpack with waterski, one day’s trail rations, bedroll, sack, flint and steel, pouch with ten sling bullets, Holly and mistletoe, Three torches

Record Combat and Skill Numbers

I just can’t. This process has already taken sooooo long, and I don’t have the time or patience to continue. I have, at least, shown the workings of the character, you can see Oskar’s ability score bonuses and skill ranks above anyway, so I don’t think it’s necessary.

Conclusion

My main conclusion is that character creation in 3rd Edition takes too long. There are several steps which could be removed entirely, to be honest, and there are other steps that could be re-arranged to make the entire thing more efficient. There is far too much detail. It feels like D&D over-adjusted far too much to mechanising everything by this point and completely forgot the days when spells were there to be interpreted and you didn’t need to know a PCs exact weight in pounds before beginning play.

Nonetheless, I will be proceeding with a 3rd Edition game as part of the Editioning as planned. I’m thinking about taking one of the old Goodman Games modules. There are loads of them and they look a bit more fun than the official ones I have been able to lay my hands on.

Meanwhile, in other Editioning news, we will be starting the classic 1st Edition module, Ravenloft, next week, thanks to DM Isaac. Can’t wait for that!

The Editioning, AD&D 2nd Edition, Part 5

Surprise!

Welcome back, dear reader, to the Editioning, our challenge to play an adventure in every major edition of D&D over a period of about two years. We’ve already completed OD&D and Basic D&D adventures. Had a great time with them. They were both quite rules-light, even if some of the mechanics were not exactly instinctive. And, even if you didn’t know any given rule and you couldn’t find it in the book, the DM could easily make a ruling in the moment. AD&D 2nd Edition is another beast.

Now, I will preface the following complaints with the fact that I am really trying to play each edition as close to rules-as-written as possible. One of the things I wanted to get out of the Editioning was to be able to learn all those rules and another was to be able to compare them to each other. There are, of course, a lot of similarities across each of the editions. They’re all still D&D, after all. But some things change in every edition for some reason. Surprise is one of these things, initiative is another. Today, I want to discuss Surprise in AD&D 2E… because I have a bone to pick.

You know, it’s not even the rule itself that I have a problem with. The rule is pretty simple, actually. Each side, if there’s a chance they could be surprised in the situation, rolls 1d10. If they roll a 1, 2 or 3, they are surprised. There are a bunch of modifiers that can be applied to this roll, including a PC’s reaction adjustment, which comes from their Dexterity. But that’s it. Easy, right? Easy to find? WRONG!

Where would you expect that rule to exist, dear reader? Well, let me tell you where I thought it would be. I thought it would be in the Combat chapter of the Player’s Handbook. But to narrow things down, I checked that book’s index. S, s, s… there it was! Surprise, pages 89, 112 and 113. OK, I thought, now I’ll find out how to determine Surprise in AD&D 2E. WRONG! Page 89 provided me a definition of the term, “surprise.”

Surprise can happen any time characters meet another group unexpectedly(monsters, evil knights, peasants etc.). Surprise us simply what happens when one side–a person or party–is taken unawares, unable to react until they gather their wits. Their opponents, if unsurprised, are allowed a bonus round of action while the surprised characters recover. It’s entirely possible for both sides in a given situation to be surprised!

This is only the first of three paragraphs telling me about the concept of Surprise. At no point does it actually explain the rule to me, however.

I cannot quite express to you, dear reader, how much unnecessary text is contained in the PHB. I don’t think the majority of people reading this book require a definition of surprise, especially when it is not immediately followed by the rules for it.

On to page 112 and 113 then. The index gets this slightly wrong. It should read 111 and 112. 113 is a full page illustration. One of my favourites in the book actually, medieval Cheers! Anyway, we are now in Chapter 11: Encounters. The Surprise Roll is finally described here in some five paragraphs. Here’s an example of some of the absolute sawdust they used to fill out this book.

Naturally, surprise does not happen all the time. There are many easy and intelligent ways it can be prevented. The most obvious is if the player characters can see those they are about to encounter well before getting close. For example, the characters may see the dust of a group of horsemen coming their way, or notice the lanterns of a group of peasants coming through the woods, or hear the grunting barks of a gnoll war party closing through the trees. In these cases there is no way the characters are going to be surprised by the encounter.

And it’s not just a matter of ignoring this bumph. The rules are cleverly hidden away within paragraphs like this!

Anyway, this section has finally described the rule for me, and even told me what the effects of surprise are for both sides! The surpriser gets a free round of attacks but not spells and the surprisee is caught flat-footed so loses their Dex bonus to AC.

But here’s the kicker:

The surprise roll can also be modified by Dexterity, race, class, cleverness, and situation.

I’m sure the designers of this fine game thought to do something as convenient as to provide the potential modifiers to a rule on the same page as the rule itself. WRONG!

The DM has the listing of modifiers that apply to given situations.

“I do?” I thought.

At this point, I was close to despair, dear reader. I had a little cry and a big swig of my beer and dove back in. But this time, I used my noggin. I googled it and found the answers I needed here on the Murphy’s Victim blog. By which I mean I discovered that the table of modifiers I needed was on page 102 of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, in the Encounters chapter of that book. So, at least it’s consistent.

The Surprise Modifiers table from the DMG

Anyway, there I discovered that the PCs, being in poor light, would have a -1 modifier to their surprise roll. None of the other modifiers applied in their situation.

Dear reader, they rolled a 6, meaning they were not surprised. Nonetheless, they still lost a full round of attacks because they had just been rousted from their makeshift beds and were still a little bit eepy.

I went exploring this rabbit-hole because of a single line in the description of the encounter Sunday’s session started with. This is from the Shadows Abroad in Sigil section on Chapter II The Mortuary:

If the PCs have no watch and are awakened in the middle of the night, the Shadowknave and his men have a +4 bonus on their chance of surprise.

This is an awkwardly phrased sentence, but, essentially, what it means is that, should the Shadowknave and his mates roll to be the ones who are surprised, they would get a +4 bonus on that roll. This would, most certainly, make it more harder for them to be surprised. But, why in the Nine Hells would they ever have the potential to be surprised in a situation where they are breaking down the door to the home of four sleeping individuals who they know for a fact are inside and sleeping? But, since I didn’t understand the surprise rules when I first read that sentence I had to look them up to understand what they meant.

Dear reader, I did not make a surprise roll for the Shadowknave and his lads. That would have been absurd.

This is a pretty good point to segue into what happened last session.

To the Mortuary

It was a hard fought battle in the little run-down church to Varuna that they call home. The PCs were caught off guard (if not precisely surprised) and lost a full round while the mercenaries burst into the church. The enemy spell-caster immediately used his Sleep spell, downing Glaermond the Paladin again straight away. I ruled that our tiefling, Trance, as a half-lower-planar creature, was allowed a saving throw. She managed to save and, somehow, avoided getting hit by the three mercs attacking her and immediately kicked the Paladin to wake him up. The three attackers on Devansh Rao, our Cleric, were not so unlucky (he’s got a Dex of 4, so no surprise.) They knocked him out and then went to focus on the Necromancer who lived in the basement. Aurora managed to use her wand to move the earth from the walls and floor to block off the entrance to her underground lair, while her goat familiar and Spectral Hand continued the attack. Back upstairs, the spell-caster Scared and Slowed everyone in the church, his own men included, and Trance cast a sphere of Darkness that encompassed the entire interior. The Paladin, who had the Blind Fighting proficiency, managed to get a couple of licks in. Trance climbed up into the rafters and then through the front window dropping down silently behind the hooded spell-caster to successfully back-stab him. When he turned to face her, she saw that it was the same half-elf they had seen leaving a “dead” body on the floor of an alley in the Hive the previous day. At this point, the half-elf issued the order to retreat. The mercs grabbed Devansh and his stuff and scarpered. Glaermond managed to take out one of them as they ran off but they soon lost them in the maze of Sigil’s streets.

Devansh woke hours later in a vault otherwise occupied by a foursome of skeletons and a sarcophagus. He had a look around, experimented with the skeletons and examined the sarcophagus. He discovered the skeletons only reacted when he made for the door and then found that there was a cache of useful and incriminating items inside the sarcophagus. Long story short, Toranna the Grey, of the Dustmen faction was involved with someone called Marvent and had something to do with the disappearances of the barmies from the Hive. He also got his stuff back and immediately turned the skeletons with his holy symbol. Unfortunately he was still locked in the vault.

Meanwhile, the others returned to Bendon Mawl, their patron, to explain what happened and to pick some useful items, Oil of Elemental Resistance (fire) and a Potion of Invisibility. Interestingly, these matched the sorts of useful items that Devansh found in the sarcophagus. Then they formulated a cunning plan involving a coffin delivery that allowed them all to enter the Mortuary by the back door. Once there, they soon heard Devansh calling for help and freed him from his vault. Once they were all together and disguised in Dustmen robes, they ascended all the way to the Overvalault where the portal to the Elemental Plane of Fire was. All the evidence they had gathered so far suggested that there was some connection between Toranna, this portal, the disappearances of the barmies and the return of Eliath and the Dancing Man to Sigil. Toranna was there, feeding another barmy into the portal. The party watched as they planned what to do next…

Conclusion

I was glad I didn’t have to look up that surprise rule at the table. I did all that before the start of the session. But just imagine if you did have to? I would simply not have bothered. I would have made a ruling as soon as I got stymied in the PHB Combat section.

I don’t really remember how I dealt with these situations when I was originally playing AD&D back in the ’90s. I do think I had a better grasp on the rules back then, but I also remember having a fair amount of frustration with the game too.

Despite all of this, I think we’re all having a good time with the adventure still and even with the system, in many ways.

I’ll be back with more Editioning in a couple of weeks, dear reader. In the meantime, don’t be Surprised if I am back with some other post next week.

An elven king on his throne with a guard on one side and an elven woman on the other — Elven King

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

Investigations

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

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

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

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

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

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

Finding Eliath

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

Special Ability adjustments to HD for monsters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

Anniversary Post

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

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

Back in that original post, I admitted to a

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

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

Back to the Eternal Boundary

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

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

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

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

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

Fight!

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

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

The Blood Pit

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

The Editioning, Basic D&D, the End

The Kept on the Borderlands

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

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

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

Beginnings

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

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

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

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

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

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

Middles

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

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

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

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

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

Endings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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