The Editioning – The Dice Pool

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 the 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 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

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.

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.

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

Character-work

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Adventure!

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

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

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

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

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

I have to say, this is an old-school design element that is sorely missed from newer modules. It was not at all unusual to get an adventure specific DM screen in the pack with the adventure back in the old days. Wizards of the Coast now want you to pay another £15 or more for the privilege. I have really been appreciating this DM screen actually. Not only does it have several key maps, but it also has all the stat blocks for the major NPCs and encounters in the adventure! Invaluable, tbh. My only dilemma is whether to use the adventure-specific screen or the utter treasure that is the one from he Planescape boxed set. Its got all the Planescape tables you might need, like how the various factions might react to one-another and how spells are effected on various planes, and on top of that, it also has stuff like THAC0 tables and saving throws.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

Stay tuned, dear reader!

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

The Editioning Format

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

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

Welcome to Sigil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eternal Boundary

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

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

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

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

Character Creation

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Editioning, Week Eleven, OD&D

The First Ending

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

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

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

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

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

Malfunction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

The Editioning, Weeks Nine and Ten, OD&D

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

Revelations

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

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

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

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

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

Back up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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