#World of Greyhawk Player's Guide

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

AD&D - World of Greyhawk Player's Guide Cover Art by Carol Heyer

[kaznaths-thoughts]

Changing the Lore of Old Worlds

My Thought is simple - do not be so stringent.

Ownership is often a grey area for players of TTRPGs when they begin playing in a built setting. Settings like those I described last time, whether Dark Sun’s Athas or Planescape’s City of Doors, we hold rather tightly onto the book’s descriptions; sometimes at the expense of fun. 

But we also don’t own that world - right? Someone else has crafted it and handed it down to us. But that is the thing - they handed it to us. Goblin, elves, halflings, trolls and ogres alike, they have handed it to us and now - IT IS OURS. As soon as the cash register closes and the proof of purchase is passed, the world does not belong to Wizards of the Coast nor to the authors and writers of whatever ttrpg - it now belongs to you.

Being loose with the Lore is an important step, in my Thought, to making a place your own place. And so I think we should feel liberated to make it a home for our adventures. Whether it is the Athas of Dark Sun or the DragonLance canonical universe, Storytellers and their companions should feel liberated to explore, reshape, and mold the world they play in; including its history, lore, and cultures; in a manner that is fun and contributes to the co-creative nature of Role Playing Games. I am thankful for Athas, which I am currently Hermiting, because its game guides are open and loose with its Lore, admitting that its histories are vague and somewhat conjecture, freeing up players like myself to craft out the events that happened in that past at our own table with the freedom to do it as we please. Some will hold their source books for Greyhawk tightly as Science texts or Fantasy Bibles, but I recommend leaning into the grey in your Greyhawk and building out YOUR table’s Lore of Greyhawk. 

But then again, you do you. If Greyhawk as it is suits you and your players and your stories, that is quite alright as well. But please, play liberated not constrained.

[bc-johnson]

IP Freely

One of the really interesting things about this WotC / OGL thing (if it ends up coming to pass), is how it exposes a way they’ve shot themselves in the foot. I mean, other than the obvious.

Since you can’t copyright game mechanics (though I’m sure they’ll try to sue everyone anyway), D&D has two things remaining: brand recognition, and IP.

Their brand recognition is going to be the real hurdle, because it’s stronger now than anytime in the past, really. They’re about as close to mainstream as they’ve ever been. They got a Chris Pine movie coming out. They’re in the “generic” phase of popularity, where “playing D&D” is shorthand for the entire tabletop experience in all but the minds of the nerdliest of nerds (I include myself in this group, Deadlands4Ever!).

I’m not sure surmounting the brand recognition is possible for any new game (at least not on a short time scale), which is where the battle is going to be fought. Pathfinder has the strongest play, probably, if they can survive the legal fees they’re about to be assailed with. Sounds like Kobold Press is making some moves, too, and more power to them. Good luck, everyone.

However, WotC could have had an enormous second weapon in their arsenal, one they’ve systematically dismantled since around 3rd edition: their IP. Nowadays, I doubt many new players know anything about the D&D IP, and I don’t mean that in a grognard / gatekeepy way. I mean, the company used 3rd, 4th, and much of 5th (with exceptions) to wipe their own IP away in the name of ease of use. Which obviously worked for them - they clearly have the new player base they were looking for.

But, believe it or not, D&D used to have big iconic characters. Elminster and Tanis Half-Elven and the Dragon of Tyr. Fiction books on the best seller list. Spinoff game lore books in the dozens about each setting, packaged in full boxes with maps. Branded video games that introduced huge groups of non-dice rollers to places like Baldur’s Gate and Sigil. They had a mainstream Saturday morning cartoon show, for chrissakes.

Somewhere around 3e, though (when WotC took over), they started to seem embarrassed of their own IP. They released fewer novels, they alienated their own authors. They stopped making campaign settings (leaving 3rd parties to occasionally do it, but with little support or marketing), letting Dragonlance, Spelljammer, PlaneScape, Dark Sun, and Ravenloft wither on the vine. Generic Fantasy World A and B became the primary setting (Greyhawk in name only for 3e, the wildly beige ��Points of Light” setting for 4e).

They certainly stopped trying to make movies or cartoons with their IP. Video games set in D&D worlds became thin on the ground, mostly just a half-hearted MMO no one remembers.

Why wasn’t there a Drizzt movie or cartoon? According to Telegram, the character sold 35 million novels and was on the New York Times Best Seller list dozens of times.

5e tried to make a course-correction. In the rulebooks, you started to see names like “Bruenor Battlehammer” in rules examples instead of the generic “Tordek” and “Mialee.” Curse of Strahd was probably the strongest IP exercise, single-handedly resurrecting Ravenloft and one of the brand’s most iconic villains for millions of new players.

But even these attempts have been lacking any real teeth. Ravenloft eventually got an anemic “Van Richten’s Guide” fully five years after Curse of Strahd became popular, a book that lacked sufficient detail for a true campaign setting - or sufficient flavor to excite newcomers. Dark Sun remains on a shelf. Dragonlance only recently started getting attention, but even those books have been premade campaigns pretending to be campaign settings. Spelljammer is probably their most notable effort in 5e, which actually came with multiple setting books, probably a callback to the heyday of Spelljammer (when D&D loved introducing you to new worlds).

But this isn’t about campaign setting books, though that shit contributes.

It’s more that WotC spent the past two and a half decades making D&D as generic as humanly possible, without all of the flavor and characters of their most interesting settings, and burying all of their actually valuable IP.

And now that people are looking to jump ship, the company has nothing more than branding to lean on.

I hate to say “I told you so,” but, well, shit. Turns out all those cool stories and settings hundreds of people worked on and millions of people loved had some value or whatever.

[redlilyadventuringcompany]

The Northern Treks - Part I: Starting the Open Table

Throughout this series of posts, I hope to chronicle my experiences running an Open Table Campaign using the Original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons with Supplement I: Greyhawk, Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry, as well as the rules for the Ranger class from the Summer 1975 Issue of The Strategic Review. I will be writing about both my successes and my failures, as well as the problems I wind up facing and my solutions to them. Hopefully this series will encourage more people to try both OD&D and the Open Table style of play.

What is an Open Table? Why run one?

Put plainly an Open Table is a style of running D&D especially but tabletop roleplaying games more generally that is flexible and playercentric. Players schedule their own sessions with the referee and are responsible for wrangling other players from the playgroup to make a party for that session, as well as determining their goals. The only job of the referee is to have the dungeon levels or hexcrawl already made and then adjudicate the world. The two best resources on this sort of play are Justin Alexander’s Open Table Manifesto and Ben Robbins’ article on The West Marches. (These creators are brilliant, go read their stuff and support them if you can, we need more people like them in the rpg space).

“But why would you do this?”, you might ask. Well I have a problem, one which I’m sure is becoming increasingly common. I love running ttrpgs and I have a lot of friends who love playing them, but we’re all adults now so scheduling is a nightmare. Even when we can find a night that everyone is available, we usually wind up cancelling half of our sessions. People are busy, emergencies happen, someone’s kid gets sick, someone’s dog injures itself, life happens.

Additionally, I know a lot of people who enjoy tabletop games or want to try them but just do not have the time or desire to join a multi-year campaign that meets for 5 hours 4-5 times a month. The Open Table allows these people to come around every once in a while when they have the time and desire to play and then leave for as long as they want without missing anything important while at the same time being rewarding for those players who want to play multiple times a week.

This sort of play also allows you to play with so many more people and in so many more combinations. Beyond the benefits of letting more casual players have a space to enjoy the game on their terms, the Open Table allows for, nay requires, that expansive 5-50 player playgroup that Gygax and Arneson describe in the opening of Men & Magic. (Yes that’s a later part of this post, but seriously pick up 1974 D&D, it’s 10 bucks on Drivethrurpg.)

Okay, so why OD&D?

The short answer is that it is, in my opinion, easily the best and most purely good version of Dungeon & Dragons. The long answer is a lot more complex. This decision is in part because the Open Table requires by its very nature a very fast and simple character creation method and OD&D has what is probably the fastest and simplest character creation method ever devised. There are other fantasy ttrpgs that do this very well too, such as: Old School Essentials by Necrotic Gnome, Labyrinth Lord from Goblinoid Games, and World Without Number from Sine Nomine Publishing, just to name a few. These are awesome games in their own right which I would highly recommend. 

It is as well a bit of an archeological project, I am very interested in those early years of the hobby and how things were played back then. I want to reconstruct that and tweak it as needed to make it work well in the modern day. A sort of challenge to myself as a gamemaster. It has been a blast already just in the construction of the Player’s Guide to sift through and make sense of these rules.

Finally, it just does what I want out of an rpg for this sort of play. Quick and pulpy swords & sorcery. Plenty of solid domain and stronghold building rules and hirelings/retainers baked into the rules from the start and up in the player’s faces. I’m a bit burnt out on contemporary popular styles of play, i.e. super narrative games and Big Damn Quest games. I want to dive head first into the ocean of the OSR without a lifevest or oxygen supply.  

Finally My Goals and The Northern Treks Player’s Guide

My goals with this campaign is to create an exciting sandbox that combines old school megadungeoncrawling, with wilderness survival and exploration focused hexcrawling, and explores the idea of urbancrawling as an exploratory system (seriously read and support The Alexandrian). Therefore the Northern Treks must be a fantastical place, avoiding the pitfall of having mundane and ordinary environments. Once it is complete, this region will consist of a small city on the frontier that the PCs are based out of, the megadungeon that is nearby it, and the wilderness hexmap plus PC treasure map.

The Player’s Guide mostly consists of rules clarifications for OD&D as well as short primer on house rules and the such. Anyone who is interested can see what I did with this here.

I am very excited to be going on this journey and I hope it helps at least one person with coming into this style of interacting with tabletop gaming.

[dmsden]

A History Lesson - Looking back at D&D’s history

Hullo, Gentle Readers. Well, this is the 5th Monday in March, and that means I get to write about anything I want! It’s also my birth month, which means it’s my anniversary of getting into D&D (42 years!), and that has me feeling nostalgic. Coupled with a discussion I had recently with some friends, I thought it would be fun to look back at the various editions of D&D and give you all a bit of history. I’m not going to get into Gygax vs Arneson or any of that. I’m only talking about the published game itself, not its creators or its storied origins.

The original D&D (or OD&D as it’s sometimes called) came in a small box. It had three booklets inside - Men & Magic, Monsters & Treasure, and The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures - along with reference sheets and dice. Each was softcover and roughly the same dimensions as a DVD/BluRay case. The game was pretty rudimentary - for one thing, it assumed you already had a copy of Chainmail, D&D’s direct wargame predecessor. It also recommended you have a game called Outdoor Survival for purposes of traveling through the wilderness. It had only three classes - fighting man, magic-user, and cleric - and nothing about playing other races. It did have the insane charts that 1st edition would ultimately known for, and it was possible to play a pretty fun game of D&D with it, as its popularity would come to show.

The game expanded through similar chapbooks - Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, Gods Demigods & Heroes, Swords & Spells. With the exception of the last one, each brought new facets to the game - new classes like Thief and Monk, new spells, new threats. It was clear the game was going to need an overhaul, and it got one.

I consider this overhaul to yield the real “1st Edition”, as so much of the game didn’t exist in those original games. The game split into a “Basic” game, just called Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

The basic game was a boxed set that included a rulebook, a full adventure module, and dice...or, well, it was supposed to contain dice. The game was so popular and new in those days that demand for dice outstripped production. My copy of D&D came with a coupon for dice when they became available and a sheet of “chits” - laminated numbers meant to be put into cups (we used Dixie Cups with the name of the die written on it), shaken, and a random number pulled out without looking. It was meant to introduce new players to the game, so it was a trimmed down version. Races were human, elf, dwarf, and halfling, and classes were fighter, cleric, magic-user, and thief. The box only included rules for going up to 3rd level, with the intention that players would then graduate into AD&D. This is where I joined, with the old blue cover box set and In Search of the Unknown, before Keep on the Borderlands even existed.

AD&D was the game in its full glory. Along with the races I mention above, we got half-elves, half-orcs, and gnomes. The four basic classes also had sub-classes, like paladin and ranger for the fighter, druid for the cleric, illusionist for the wizard, and assassin for the thief. There were rules for multi-classing, as well as “Dual-classing”, a sort of multi-class variation for humans only, which, when done in the correct combination, could yield the infamous bard...which didn’t actually yield any bard abilities until around level 13 or so.

This edition had 5 different saving throws for things like “Death Magic”, “Petrification & Polymorph”, “Spells”, and so on. It had the infamous Armor Class system that started at 10 and went down, so that having a -3 AC was very good!  It also had specific attack matricies for each class; you would literally look on a table to determine the number you needed to roll on a D20 based on your class, your level, and your opponent’s armor class. It was fun, but it was very complicated.

It also had some, frankly, shitty rules. There was gender disparity in terms of attributes, which my group totally ignored. Because the game designers wanted humans to be a competitive the game, and because non-humans had so many abilities and could multiclass, non-humans were severely limited in the levels they could achieve in most classes. In fact, some classes, such as monk and paladin, were restricted only to humans.

As the years went on, things got a bit muddled. It probably didn’t help that the rules in Basic D&D and AD&D didn’t perfectly line up. In D&D, the worst armor class was a 9. In AD&D, the worst armor class was a 10. All of this led to an overhaul, but not one considered a separate edition. AD&D mostly got new covers and new books, like the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeon Survival Guide, Monster Manual 2, and the Manual of the Planes. It got a number of new settings, too. In addition to the default Greyhawk setting, we got the Forgotten Realms setting for the first time, details of which had been appearing in Dragon Magazine for years, thanks to the prolific Ed Greenwood. We also, eventually, got the whole Dragonlance saga, which yielded the setting of Krynn.

In this new version, Basic D&D broke off into its own game system to some degree. Elf, Dwarf, and Halfling started being treated like classes rather than races, with specific abilities at different levels. Higher level characters could be created using progressive boxes - Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortal, each with its own boxed set and supported by Mystara, a completely different setting that got its own updates over the years. It was odd, because D&D essentially was competing for players with AD&D, and I remember arguments with friends over which version was better (I was firmly in the AD&D camp.)

In 1989, when I was in college, they finally brought forth 2nd edition D&D. This streamlined things a little. Armor Class still went down, but now attack rolls boiled into a single number called To Hit Armor Class 0, or THAC0. It made the whole process of figuring out what you needed to roll a bit less cumbersome, but it was still a bit awkward. The classes got a lot of overhaul, including making Bard its own core class. But what I remember best about 2nd edition was the boom in settings. This was the age of settings, and many beloved ones got started, including Dark Sun, Planescape, Ravenloft, and Spelljammer.

It was also the age of the “Complete Handbooks”. They brought out splatbooks about every class and race in the game, as well as books expanding several concepts for the DM, such as the Arms & Equipment Guide, the Castle Guide, and the Complete Book of Villains. There were also splatbooks about running D&D in historic periods, such as Ancient Rome, among the ancient Celts, or during the time of the Musketeers. The game got new covers for the rule books again, and a bunch of books about options started coming out. It was a boom time for books, but many people complained there was too much.

Without going too deep, TSR ended up in severe financial troubles. They declared bankruptcy, and there was real fear of the game going away. And then Wizards of the Coast (WotC) stepped in. They helped TSR get back onto its feet, and they helped produce some modules specifically engineered to help DM’s bring an end to their campaign...possibly even their whole campaign world...because something big was coming.

That something big was, of course, 3rd edition D&D. The game got majorly streamlined, and many sacred cows ended up as hamburger. AC finally started going up instead of down. Everything was refined to the “D20″ system we’ve been playing ever since. Races could be any class. There were no level or stat limits for anyone. After years of the game being forced into tight little boxes, it really felt like we could breathe. I had stopped playing D&D, but 3rd edition brought me back into the fold. I often say that 3E was made for the players who’d felt constricted and wanted more flexibility.

The trouble with 3E, and its successor 3.5, is that it was still a dense and difficult game for newcomers to get into. It’s been acknowledged that D&D essentially created many of the systems we see and know in other games - experience points, leveling up, hit points, etc. But trying to break into the experience for the first time was difficult. The look of 3E was gorgeous, but I understood that it must seem awfully daunting to someone who’d never played.

4E and its follow-up, Essentials, was an attempt to course correct that. They tried to make this edition incredibly friendly to new DMs, and, frankly, they succeeded. By creating player classes and monsters and magic-items that were all very plug and play, they did a great job of creating a game that someone who had never DMed before could dive into with no experience or mentor and start a game pretty easily. Encounter design was given a lot of ease, and there were promises of a robust online tool system that would help out with many of the more tedious aspects of playing.

There was also a lot of shake up in terms of choices. Suddenly, new classes and races were proliferating like crazy. We got the dragonborn, the tiefling, and the eladrin right in the core book, but we said good-bye to the gnome and half-orc at first. Suddenly the warlock was the new class everyone wanted to try. We got paragon paths and epic destinies that would really shape a character as time went on. The game went very tactical, as well, which some of us loved. The concept of rituals came into the game. Later books like the Player’s Handbook 2 and 3 gave us back gnomes and half-orcs, and also gave us minotaurs, wilden, shardminds, and githzerai. We got new psionic classes, brand new class concepts like the Runeknight and the Seeker...

But there was a tremendous backlash. People felt that, in making the game so very plug and play, they’d taken a ton of choice away from the players. Without the tools (which were never that robust, frankly), it was almost impossible to navigate the massive panoply of options. And, worse, it was harder and harder to develop encounters without those tools. People complained that the game had gone more tactical in order to sell miniatures and battlemats. Given that I have never played the game without miniatures and battlemats (since I started in the days when D&D was still half-wargame), I found this odd, but I also understand my style of play isn’t everyone’s.

The one argument I will never understand is that it didn’t “feel” like D&D, or it was somehow ONLY a tactical game and not a role-playing game any more. Again, given that the original game didn’t even call itself a role-playing game, this felt odd. Personally, I roleplay no matter what game I’m playing. If I’m playing Monopoly, I’m roleplaying, doing voices, and pretending to be something I’m not. I honestly enjoyed 4E, and I know a lot of folks who did, too. A lot of it may simply come down to style of play. But I also enjoyed all the games that came before, including Pathfinder. To paraphrase the YouTube content creator The Dungeon Bastard, “Does your game have dungeons? Does it have dragons? Great. I wanna play.”

As a sidenote, in the months leading up to 4E’s release, a lot of internet videos were released by WotC emphasizing the nature of change and talking about differences in the rules. They also released some preview books showing the direction they were heading. WotC must have anticipated that people were going to find this edition very different indeed. They also cleverly brought in some very funny folks - Scott Kurtz from PVPOnline and Jerry Holkins & Mike Krahulik from Penny Arcade - and got them to play D&D for podcasting purposes. Looking back, this must’ve brought in a lot of listeners who might never have played D&D and given them a reason to try it out.

After its release, WotC clearly noted that missteps had been made, as this edition of the game was losing them players. They began work on what they referred to as D&D Next, and, this time, they did massive amounts of playtesting, some of which I participated in.

I don’t feel like I have to describe 5E to any of you, Dear Readers, as you could go to virtually any store and pick it up. I am a big fan of 5E’s simplicity and elegance, and I suspect this is the edition of D&D we’re going to have for some time to come, especially given its popularity. Given the effect of podcasts like Critical Role (and I might save an article on Critical Role’s importance to D&D until my next Freestyle article), D&D is likely more popular now than it’s ever been, with a much wider and more diverse audience than ever before.

I know I’m painting with broad strokes here, but I hope this was, at least, entertaining, and maybe you learned something, Gentle Readers. Until we next meet, may all your 20s be natural.

[vintagerpg]

Wilderlands of High Fantasy (1977) is a massive step forward in terms of what we now know as a campaign setting. It lays out regions of the world totaling about the square miles of Cuba, organized in such a way as to be similar to areas surrounding the Mediterranean. It is a massive sandbox largely unrivaled at the time. By way of comparison, the Greyhawk campaign folio was still three years off.

Wilderlands comes with two booklets. We’re still in the period where the school of thought centers on helping facilitate players in the creation of their own world, so there isn’t a ton of concrete information laid out here. Instead, you have nested random tables, lots of them, to use in filling out the landscape yourself. They work the same basic way as the Random Dungeon Generator in the Dungeon Masters Guide (still a year off!), with the designer moving from table to table, filling in details as indicated, until the thing seems finished. Wilderlands provides tables for tons of fine detail.

With the broad strokes of the world laid out, JG was free to fill it in over time from one end while players did the work in their home campaigns from the other end, meeting, eventually, theoretically, in the middle. Judges Guild would do this in two ways: releasing stuff like Modron, where the details are pre-defined (a nice thing about Wilderlands, too, is that it shows you where the City-State, Tegel Manor and Modron are relative to each other). Then there were more products like this, full of modular tools for creating your own stuff. And so it went, for DOZENS of products. Ground breaking stuff!

Like most other Judges Guild products, Wilderlands was in a state of constant revision. This is the first edition, far as I can tell. Later ones add color to the cover. They might have gotten revised and expanded over the years too – most of the other popular products did.

[theoutcastrogue]

Alignment in D&D

[by Jonathan Tweet, via EnWorld, June 2020. Jonathan Tweet is a game designer who has worked in D&D 3rd Edition, Ars Magica, 13th Age and others.]

Alignment is, on some level, the beating heart of Dungeons & Dragons. On the other hand, it’s sort of a stupid rule. It’s like the hit point rules in that it makes for a good game experience, especially if you don’t think about it too hard. Just as Magic: the Gathering has the five colors that transcend any world or story, so alignment is a universal cosmic truth from one D&D world to the next. The deities themselves obey the pattern of alignment.

On the story side, the alignment rules contain the rudiments of roleplaying, as in portraying your character according to their personality. On the game side, it conforms to D&D’s wargaming roots, representing army lists showing who is on whose side against whom.

The 3x3 alignment grid is one part of AD&D’s legacy that we enthusiastically ported into 3E and that lives on proudly in 5E and in countless memes. Despite the centrality of alignment in D&D, other RPGs rarely copy D&D’s alignment rules, certainly not the way they have copied D&D’s rules for abilities, attack rolls, or hit points. 

Alignment started as army lists in the Chainmail miniatures rules, before Dungeons & Dragons released. In those days, if you wanted to set up historical Napoleonic battles, you could look up armies in the history books to see what forces might be in play. But what about fantasy armies? Influenced by the popularity of The Lord of the Rings, Gary Gygax’s rules for medieval miniatures wargaming included a fantasy supplement. Here, to help you build opposing armies, was the list of Lawful units (good), the Chaotic units (evil), and the neutral units. Today, alignment is a roleplaying prompt for getting into character, but it started out as us-versus-them—who are the good guys and who are the bad guys?

Original D&D used the Law/Chaos binary from Chainmail, and the Greyhawk supplement had rudimentary notes about playing chaotic characters. The “referee” was urged to develop an ad hoc rule against chaotic characters cooperating indefinitely. This consideration shows how alignment started as a practical system for lining up who was on whose side but then started shifting toward being a concrete way to think about acting “in character.”

Another thing that Greyhawk said was that evil creatures (those of chaotic alignment) were as likely to turn on each other as attack a lawful party. What does a 12-year old do with that information? One DM applies the rule literally in the first encounter of his new campaign. When we fought our first group of orcs in the forest outside of town, The DM rolled randomly for each one to see whether it would attack us or its fellow orcs. That rule got applied for that first battle and none others because it was obviously stupid. In the DM’s defense, alignment was a new idea at the time.

Law versus Chaos maps pretty nicely with the familiar Good versus Evil dichotomy, albeit with perhaps a more fantastic or apocalyptic tone. The Holmes Basic Set I started on, however, had a 2x2 alignment system with a fifth alignment, neutral, in the center. For my 12-year old mind, “lawful good” and “chaotic evil” made sense, and maybe “chaotic good,” but “lawful evil”? What did that even mean? I looked up “lawful,” but that didn’t help. 

Our first characters were neutral because we were confused and “neutral” was the null choice. Soon, I convinced my group that we should all be lawful evil. That way we could kill everything we encountered and get the most experience points (evil) but we wouldn’t be compelled to sometimes attack each other (as chaotic evil characters would).

In general, chaotic good has been the most popular alignment since probably as soon as it was invented. The CG hero has a good heart and a free spirit. Following rules is in some sense bowing to an authority, even if it is a moral or internalized authority, and being “chaotic” means being unbowed and unyoked.

Chaotic neutral has also been popular. Players have sometimes used this alignment as an excuse to take actions that messed with the party’s plans and, not coincidentally, brought attention to the player. The character was in the party because the player was at the table, but real adventurers would never go into danger with a known wildcard along with them. This style of CG play was a face-to-face version of griefing, and it was common enough that Ryan Dancey suggested we ban it from 3E.

The target we had for 3E was to make a game that doubled-down on its own roots, so we embraced AD&D’s 3x3 alignment grid. Where the Holmes Basic Set listed a handful of monsters on its diagram, 3E had something more like Chainmail’s army lists, listing races, classes, and monsters on a 3x3 table.

When I was working on 3E, I was consciously working on a game for an audience that was not me. Our job was to appeal to the game’s future audience. With the alignment descriptions, however, I indulged in my personal taste for irony. The text explains why lawful good is “the best alignment you can be.” In fact, each good or neutral alignment is described as “the best,” with clear reasons given for each one. Likewise, each evil alignment is “the most dangerous,” again with a different reason for each one. This treatment was sort of a nod to the interminable debates over alignment, but the practical purpose was to make each good and neutral alignment appealing in some way.

If you ever wanted evidence that 4E wasn’t made with the demands of the fans first and foremost, recall that the game took “chaotic good” out of the rules. CG is the most popular alignment, describing a character who’s virtuous and free. The alignments in 4E were lawful good, good, neutral, evil, and chaotic evil. One on level, it made sense to eliminate odd-ball alignments that don’t make sense to newcomers, such as the “lawful evil” combination that flummoxed me when I was 12. The simpler system in 4E mapped fairly well to the Holmes Basic 2x2 grid, with two good alignments and two evil ones. In theory, it might be the best alignment system in any edition of D&D. On another level, however, the players didn’t want this change, and the Internet memes certainly didn’t want it. If it was perhaps better in theory, it was unpopular in practice.

In 5E, the alignments get a smooth, clear, spare treatment. The designers’ ability to pare down the description to the essentials demonstrates a real command of the material. This treatment of alignment is so good that I wish I’d written it.

My own games never have alignment, per se, even if the game world includes real good and evil. In Ars Magica, membership in a house is what shapes a wizard’s behavior or social position. In Over the Edge and Everway, a character’s “guiding star” is something related to the character and invented by the player, not a universal moral system. In Omega World, the only morality is survival. 13th Age, on the other hand, uses the standard system, albeit lightly. The game is a love letter to D&D, and players have come to love the alignment system, so Rob Heinsoo and I kept it. Still, a 13th Age character’s main “alignment” is in relation to the icons, which are not an abstraction but rather specific, campaign-defining NPCs. 

~ Jonathan Tweet [source]. Jonathan Tweet is a game designer who has worked in D&D 3rd Edition, Ars Magica, 13th Age and others.

From DDB's stats, 2019​

[pixelgrotto]

Online dungeon delving in the time of the coronavirus

In between my last post and this one, the world really turned upside down thanks to COVID-19. Due to the advent of social distancing in the United States, activities that were once commonplace suddenly became impossible, and ironically, this affected me the most in the tabletop gaming realm, since the various Meetup groups and Dungeons & Dragons sessions that I’d been holding in person were forced to make a speedy transition to a virtual space. 

I’m no stranger to online tabletop roleplaying, and that’s actually been the main mode of play between my brother and I for our two previous D&D campaigns, which you can read about here and here. But I prefer to play in person whenever possible, and over the course of 2019 I went all-in on physical props, getting myself one of those handy dandy dry erase boards for sketching maps along with a ton of cardboard Pathfinder Pawns to serve as miniatures. (No, I haven’t gone about purchasing and painting metallic minis, since that is a very expensive road I am not yet prepared to hike upon!) In 2019 I also ended up starting not one, not two, but THREE new D&D campaigns for friends, and along with another ongoing campaign that I’d been running (which recently finished Curse of Strahd), that meant I had a whopping four in person groups that suddenly had to make the switch online when the coronavirus hit. 

Thanks to my games with my brother, I became a firm believer in Roll20 in 2018, and even used it to display images on a monitor for my Curse of Strahd players before I’d invested in dry erase boards and Pathfinder Pawns. But converting so many in-person games into online ones was an overwhelming prospect. Initially, I considered playing only via Google Hangouts, Facetime, Skype or Zoom, but the fact that the vast majority of my D&D players are relative newbies who make me hold onto their character sheets meant that at the very least, I’d have to digitize the info they needed to play. Both my players and myself were by this time also used to the maps I’d sketch out and the minis we’d move around during combat, so using a text-based, theater of the mind solution like Discord wasn’t ideal either. (This isn’t to say that Discord isn’t a perfectly viable method for some groups, which multiple “how to play D&D during the era of the coronavirus” articles have pointed out. I just didn’t think it was the best bet for my groups.) 

This led me back to Roll20, and the very busy business of digitizing eleven character sheets and re-creating the tokens, maps and playlists that I’d been using in our real-life games online. Frankly speaking, I simply had to grit my teeth and do the work...and this took a long time, though I kind of dug my own hole by making the decision to DM four games at once in the first place! But as I was going about this project, I discovered a few tricks to speed up the process, making it significantly less life consuming than it would have been otherwise.

First off, it’s very tempting to treat Roll20 like a fancy video game level editor and go all-out programming nice maps with tons of graphics. (I did this for the games with my brother.) You can even purchase packages for official D&D adventures that have done the hard work for you, giving your maps incredible doodads like dynamic lighting. (I’d done this for Curse of Strahd.) I made the decision to NOT go this route for the four games I had to convert, however, simply because there wasn’t enough time to add bells and whistles. Instead, I kept the maps to the absolute minimum, only making one good-looking map with official artwork that depicted the “main area” of each of the campaigns, which were all Forgotten Realms/Greyhawk mainstays like the city of Waterdeep, the jungle land of Chult and the seaside town of Saltmarsh. Then I created a separate map with an old parchment background which I designated as the official battle/encounter map, treating it as I would my dry erase board in real life. Whenever the characters ended up in a special scene or a combat scenario, I’d merely move their tokens to this map and then use Roll20′s freehand tool to drawn in the surroundings by hand, keeping things quick and simple. Were the resulting sketches the prettiest things imaginable? Perhaps not, but as the above screenshots can attest, they got the job done, and in one game, my players even joined in to draw certain parts of the map with me. Collaborative tabletop gaming!

As for character sheets, you can input those manually into Roll20, but I decided to make use of the drag ‘n drop function of the platform’s Compendium, which is a massive time saver. Basically, Roll20′s Compendium is a sidebar that provides information from the rulebooks of various RPGs - from D&D to Pathfinder to Call of Cthulhu - in a fashion similar to an encyclopedia. Don’t remember what a spell does? Type in the name and Roll20 will provide that info in an instant, which is supremely handy in the middle of a game when you’re the DM and players are throwing a bazillion inquiries your way at once. The Compendium also has a function where you can drag certain entries - for instance, stats on weapons and items - and place them on a character sheet, instantly populating that sheet with the appropriate dice rolls and modifiers. It’s darn convenient, and actually made me realize some mistakes I’d made when advising my players on the capabilities of their weapons. 

Obviously, Roll20′s a business, and the base Compendium only contains the rules, items and monsters listed in the D&D Systems Rules Document, or SRD. If you want the extra stuff in the other D&D books out there, you’ve got to purchase them, and to ensure I had all the stuff I needed, I bought the Compendium add-on packs for the D&D Player’s Handbook, Monster Manual, and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. At about 30 bucks a pop, that was 90 dollars spent on extra material for Roll20. Was it worth it? Perhaps not for everyone, but for me - someone who needed to get four games up and running within a reasonable time frame and also knew he would get the most out of this material for future online games in today’s COVID-19 environment? Absolutely.  At the end of the day, I succeeded in introducing all of my players to the online world of tabletop gaming this month, and minus a few technical issues here and there (Roll20 still has unreliable voice chat, so use Google Hangouts or Discord as a backup), everything was butter smooth. I even discovered that the online environment actually made one of my most boisterous “beer ‘n pretzels” groups more focused than they’d ever been in real life! Maybe it’s because they’re six dudes who’re more used to interacting with other gamers over the internet than they are with hanging out around a table in real life? Who knows! At the end of the day, the important thing was that the dice rolling went on, despite the chaos of the real world. And now that I’m properly set up with both a physical dry erase board and the virtual one of Roll20, I expect my players and I will be good to go for the foreseeable future...no matter what unexpected twists and turns a global pandemic tosses our way.

[shadowron]

Seattle Sourcebook (1st Edition): The Indispensable Shadowrun Book That Makes No Sense

I have never been to Seattle.

And maybe it’s good that I never go there, because I would just end up confusing the natives by ignoring the first Starbucks and instead asking where the Renraku Arcology is.

Sorry, Seattle Art Museum

Sourcebooks can make or break a role-playing game. If you’re a game publisher, you want to keep making money and keep players buying supplementary books and adventures. You can take this too far, suffer from supplement bloat, nearly go bankrupt, and get bought out by Wizards of the Coast.

Too soon?

Of course, you don’t want to leave money on the table, either. And location sourcebooks are an old standard in RPGs, going back to the Greyhawk setting. They provide an opportunity to provide new rules, gear, NPCS, and adventures to keep players excited about your world. So what’s in the Seattle Sourcebook?

Let’s start with what’s not in there:

New Rules

New Gear

New NPCs (Archetypes & Contacts)

New Adventures

Which, if you sit back and think about it, is what 99% of any sourcebook consists of, regardless of the game system, really. So now is the time to ask, what’s in the Seattle Sourcebook? What is the Seattle Sourcebook??

Short Answer: It is a travel guide to the Seattle Metroplex in 2050, entitled the Yoshida Guide to Seattle, that was hacked and annotated by the shadow community, with everything being presented in-game.

Other than a two-paragraph introduction on page 5 and some color plates near the back, the entire book is presented with no reference to game mechanics. It is literally a travel guide. It has lists of restaurants:

That second place really resonates with me.

Random Advertisements throughout, including Matrix numbers and addresses:

People accuse Shadowrun of not being real cyberpunk and to that I say even in the dark future flowers are your best entertainment value.

And even full page, in color, ads featuring real people and objects. As in, the writers set up a photo shoot involving a snake on a plate,

I’ve had it with these motherfragging snakes on these motherfragging plates.

a chick with no pants,

She’s really moved up since starring in Robert Palmer videos.

and creepy Dr. Eyeball.

GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

What this accomplishes is giving new players a chance to DIVE into the world.

The other thing this book has – more plot hooks than a street samurai has bullets. Pair it with Sprawl Sites and you have enough resources to run adventures until 2050 actually arrives.

Next up: The Districts of Seattle.

[unbound-shade]

I've now played some and they're very fun, but I've always, likely incorrectly, considered people who bought adventure modules and used established campaign settings in D&D to be community outliers.

When I got into late AD&D and early 3.0 in high school, I didn't know anyone who owned modules to go with their core rulebooks. The books were $90 all together. You got a player guide, a Dungeon Masters' guide, and a monster manual and that was all you needed to play. The books gave you some information on Eberron, but that was literally it. No maps, no noble houses, no cities. Wizards of the Coast were asking us for another $30-$80 or some such if we wanted more than that. For single campaigns. Meanwhile I could write my own world and campaigns for fucking free.

The first people I ran into who used modules were adults who had been playing since they were teens, and rich kids. I played Neverwinter Nights, I read Elminster and the Cleric Quintet, so I knew what canonical settings could be like, but I didn't even let myself look at and get jealous over the expansion books at the local shop. Greyhawk, Faerun, Eberron, Dragonlance, and so on were for the hyperlexic or the "rich" nerds.

I still consider canon settings and module play to be "fancy" as a result.

[greyhawk5e]

Raiding Tal’Dorei for your Greyhawk Campaign

A lot of D&D players (including me) like Critical Role, and Matt Mercer has created some great content for his campaign.  The “Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting” book has a bunch of stuff that is suiable for any campaign world, and the “Blood Hunter” class is now on DnDBeyond.com.  Just as the “Sword Coast Adventurers' Guide” had a couple pages on how to convert the sub-classes to an Oerth-based campaign, here are some suggestions for incorporating some Tal'Dorei goodness in the Flannaess.

The Blood Domain Cleric description sites neutral and evil deities as patrons for these Clerics. Basically they give evil options and one option that uses Blood Magic against villains, the Lawful Neutral Death deity the Raven of Matrons.  Probably the closest Greyhawk equivalent would be Wee Jas, The Suel goddess of Death, Magic, and the Law.  Also, when in doubt, any creepy ancient magics on Oerth always make sense for the Suel.

I feel like the Blood Domain would work for some clerics of Wee Jas and also for evil clerics of Erythnul and possibly Hextor.  For Blood Hunters and Blood Clerics who are opposed to evil, I feel an ancient sect of Wee Jas followers who have preserved Suel Blood Magic from before the Rain of Colorless Fire would be a great stand-in for the Claret Orders.

The Gunslinger Homebrew class from DM’s Guild should only have one highly specialized usage, as a multiclass choice available to high level Clerics of Murlynd, the only known Greyhawk character to use revolvers.

The Path of the Juggernaut seems like it would fit Ice, Snow, and Frost Barbarians, as well as the warriors of the Hold of Stonefist. The various Nomads and Rovers seem more into mounted combat and the Juggernaut seems very much to be an on-foot thing.  But Juggernauts coming off of raiding ships and marching into towns in the north seems to fit the setting well.

Because of the Nordic origins of Runes, I'm going to suggest the Suel of the Barbarian North once again for the Runechild Sorcerer.  But any nomadic culture without scholarly magic could producer a raw-power sorcerer like this.  Flan nomads of the Bright Desert might also be prone to producing a Runechild here or there, or villagers born in the strange lands of Blackmoor.

The Way of the Cobalt Soul, like most other Monk fighting styles, has only a few possible homes in a Greyhawk campaign. One is the Baklunish East, where the strange hybrid of Asian and Middle Eastern culture that is the Bakluni produces monks of Xan Yae and Zuoken.  Another is the Scarlet Brotherhood, where the Suel study monkish combat to help their racist crusade against everyone else.  And finally, the far Asian inspired lands of Shao Feng and the Celestial Imperium are perfect for producing monks who have wandered far into Eastern Oerik.

Backgrounds can go as-is, with the Greyhawk Thieves' Guild filling in for the Clasp, Grey College for the Lyceum, lots of candidates for Recovered Cultist, and Fate-Touched being applicable to anyone.  Only the Ashari has no Greyhawk equivalent.

Any of the new Feats can fit into a Flannaess campaign.  

The Vestiges of Divergence are all very cool magic items, and the idea of a three-stage magic item that increases in power along with the character is one of the best concepts in the book.  You don't need the concept of the Divergence at all to use them either.  Just explain that some very powerful magic items take a long time to attune to their wielder and require an extraordinary person with a strong will to unlock all of their might.  After that it's just a matter of applying a Greyhawk appropriate origin to each item and keeping the stats the same.

Agony seems like the kind of thing an ancient Cleric of Erythnul or a powerful Gnoll Shaman created.

The Armor of The Valiant Soul was worn by an ancient king of Furyondy and is buried under a battlefield.

Cabal's Ruin was a Cloak of Zagyg, and is buried somewhere beneath Castle Greyhawk.

The Circlet of Barbed Vision goes to the Drow, and is somewhere in the Underdark.  The Tal'Dorei setting's Spider Queen , after all, is clearly Lolth.

Condemner was the weapon of the founder of the Assassin's Guild of Greyhawk.

Deathwalker's Ward is an old artifact of Wee Jas, and was last seen in possession of the Silent Ones of Keoland.

Fenthras is a Bow of Ehlonna herself, lost somewhere in the forest by a great elven warlord of Celene.

Honor's Last Stand was created by Bahamut (who else could the Platinum Dragon be?) and is now in the hoard of an evil Ancient Dragon somewhere in the Lortmils.

Kiss of the Changebringer was given by Olidammara to one of his faithful rogues and is now somewhere in the Bandit Kingdoms.

Mythcarver was the sword of the founder of the Old Lore college of bards and is now lost somewhere in the Wild Coast.

The Plate of the Dawnmartyr was worn by a great paladin of Pelor and is held by the Pale in a deep vault.

Pyremaul was forged to kill Giants by the Dwarves.  It was taken to Geoff by a great Dwarven hero who died doing just that.  It now lies in the treasure hoard of a Fire Giant.

The Spire of Conflux is held by the Great Druid of the Old Faith.

The ancient Titanstone Knuckles are in the personal possession of the Wizard Bigby, fascinated as he is by all manner of “hand magic.”  

Whisper was used to assassinate many an Overking as it was passed down among the rogues of the Great Kingdom.  It lies somewhere in devil-haunted Rauxes.

The Wraps of Zuoken are held by a great order of Monks in Zeif, usable only by their greatest master.

Any of the Optional Rules fit in just fine.

Ignore the irrelevant monster backgrounds as Greyhawk has its own monster origins.

The Ashari don't fit in, but the stat blocks of the Firetamer, Stoneguard, Waverider, and Skydancer would make great bosses for the four factions of the Cult of Elemental Evil.

A Cinderslag Elemental makes a great servant of evil Baklunish wizards, or any of Greyhawk's Archmages.

The Clasp Cutthroat and Enforcer work well in the employ of the Thieves' Guild or Assassin's Guild of Greyhawk, Dyvers, or any other big city, as well as the Scarlet Brotherhood or the Slave Lords.

The Cyclops Stormcaller and the Goliaths are at home among the Giantfolk conquerors of Geoff and Sterich.  Tribes of Goliaths make great occupiers of subjugated human towns for Giant warlords.

The Kraghammer Goat-Knight can fight for any mountainous group of Dwarves.

The Ravagers would be great in the hordes of the Pomarj fighting for Turrosh Mak, or up in the northern hordes of Iuz

The Whispered One of the Tal'Dorei setting seems like a version of Vecna so the Remnant Cultist and Chosen would work great in any Cult of Vecna.

[dmsden]

By My Oath - Personal Plot for Paladins

Knights in shining armor. Lawful stupid. A moral compass. A pain in the ass.

Paladins have been part of the D&D game for a long time, first appearing in the Greyhawk supplement for original D&D. All the way through 3rd edition, they had to be Lawful Good, which made a lot of people dislike them, since they were often the one preventing the party from torturing or killing prisoners, fighting dishonorably, stealing and looting, and other fun activities. The portrayal of Sir Osric the Chaste in the movie Gamers: Dorkness Rising is a classic "Lawful Stupid" paladin, and the other players clearly hate having him along. As of 4th edition, paladins can be of any alignment, which might have helped people get over their dislike of them. In 5th edition especially, however, they are still bound by an Oath that defines their behaviors and powers.

Each Oath is so different from the others that each one is likely to have its own sort of quests to follow. In this article, unlike previous personal plots, we'll take a look at each Oath and give a few ideas for storylines that might fit that concept.

The Oath of Devotion is very much a classic knight in shining armor, calling for the paladin to act very much as a chivalrous member of Arthur's Round Table. I think this is the perfect place to begin looking for inspiration. An Oath of Devotion paladin could be going on quests for a liege lord, defeating evil knights, rescuing those in need, seeking out lost holy relics, and the like. You might decide that there are orders of knighthood in your campaign, perhaps taking inspiration from Dragonlance's Knights of Solamnia. Perhaps your paladin wants to work up through the orders, achieving higher ranks of knighthood, eventually becoming one of the king's "peerless companions" or something of the like.

An Oath of Conquest paladin is almost the opposite of this ideal. They could be the lawful evil version of the same, following a tenet of might makes right, a lawful neutral knight who wants to wipe chaos out altogether, or a lawful good knight who truly believes that by establishing an iron rule over others, they can make the world a better place. Quests for such a paladin could involve vanquishing the forces of chaos, defeating other knights in order to conquer their lands, putting down rebellions for their liege lord, or seeking things that will make them more powerful - the better to bring order to the world.

Oath of Redemption paladins have a crazy road ahead, because they've chosen to seek violence only as a last resort. Their powers and spells are much more geared for defense and protection. I could see a Redemption paladin working as a diplomat, trying to make treaties with goblins, orcs, and the like. They could be atoning for something in their past...perhaps they were a villainous character or minion, but now they have forsworn that path for a new one. Perhaps there is a holy quest, such as recovering the Cup and Talisman of Al'Akbar and returning it to a shrine of Lathander, that will ultimate guide them to their own redemption, freeing them from the bonds of an infernal contract. It's worth noting that the party should probably be aware of the presence of such a paladin and be cool with it. It definitely calls for a different style of gaming than the norm.

The Oath of the Ancients Paladin fights for the green, living world, kindling hope and protecting beauty. These paladins can definitely raid the Druid's wheelhouse for plot elements, protecting sacred groves, slaying forces that seek to corrupt the natural world, and protecting those around them. Perhaps an Oath of the Ancients paladin serves a fragile elven kingdom, seeking to protect it from any encroaching evil that haunts its woods. Quests against hags would seem to be a particularly appropriate choice for these paladins.

A paladin who follows the Oath of the Crown is tied strongly to civilization, serving a king, a nation, or law in general. They could be called upon at low levels to pacify a group of bandits, to slay a marauding monster that threatens a small village, or to rescue a local lord from the forces that threaten his rule. As they gain in levels, they might break up slaver rings, face an encroaching army of gnolls head on, or champion a king's cause in a tourney. At the highest levels, they should face threats that threaten the kingdom, if not reality itself. Chaotic primordials, demons, and the like make excellent foes for such a paladin.

THe Oath of Venegeance has story built into its very core. What was the event that caused the paladin to swear such an oath? What is the core wrong that such a paladin longs to right? I jokingly call this the Batman oath, because I could easily see a character modeled after the Dark Knight. Perhaps the vengeance that needed taking has long since been taken - the parents are avenged or what not. Perhaps that brought the paladin no satisfaction, and now they ride to bring vengeance for the sake of everyone who could not get it for themselves. A town raided by worgs, a family who lost a loved one to drow kidnappers, or a community suffering under a tyrannical dragon can all expect aid from an Oath of Vengeance paladin.

I hope this has you thinking about plot for the Paladin in your game. Paladins are great, flavorful characters who deserve love...and plot.

[derkastellan]

Old School vs Truth

The “Old School Revolution” (OSR for short) is a niche within the wider role-playing ecosystem that has attracted my attention over the years. By now, it has diversified into people experimenting more with rules, but right now I want to look at the origins because frankly that is so much easier and is also something I have the most beef with.

Without mincing too many words the OSR seems to be about emulating the play experience of the versions of Dungeons & Dragons that were around during the Gygax era, so mostly Classic D&D (Original Edition or Oe, 0e), Basic D&D (Basic/Expert mostly), and Advanced D&D (AD&D 1st Edition or 1e). Most of this was done by writing retro-clones which either emulated the original rules, stream-lined and cleaned up the original rules, or versions that added popular house rules. The strongest contenders were Swords & Wizardry (based off of Oe mostly), Labyrinth Lord (based off of Basic mostly), and OSRIC (based of 1e). 

It’s interesting that OSRIC basically became the least used of these systems. This doesn’t mean there are no people playing 1e, though. For example Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea is a 1e-based ruleset that seems to go strong. Also Labyrinth Lord incorporated the Advanced Edition Companion. 

All of these games benefit from the basic compatibility provided by the D&D stat block. While details may differ on how to do such things as saving throws or attack rolls, in general monsters and other trappings can be shared with these games with minimal hassle - or used from the original game materials from the 70s and 80s. After all, the purpose of a retro-clone was in part to play a game that is out-of-print. (And to clean up rough edges of which there were plenty.)

“Virtues”

Having spent a few years browsing or participating on OSR boards, groups, forums - whatever was at the time an appropriate social medium - I came across various arguments in favor of old school play.

There were claims that old school gaming is...

Fostering emergent story.

More creativity-driven on the GM side because it is less defined. “Rulings not rules.”

More problem-solving-driven on the player side.

Inviting GMs to tinker with the system and getting into a do-it-yourself culture.

Overall more challenging than later games (mostly iterations of D&D).

I think it’s also perfectly fair to say that a lot of people are attracted to OSR because either of nostalgia, like I was. I see an old adventure book with black line art and I can get giddy. But somehow the OSR always wanted to rationalize an emotional response into something that is of presumably higher virtue. You may like or dislike various editions of D&D for various reasons. The question is whether you make a high horse of it to talk down from.

The list above is basically the “best of” of rationalized boasting about why older is better. The amount of claims that “D&D used to be more challenging” or “D&D has been dumbed down” and the endless amount of “war stories” from playing classic modules were truly legion. 

One could easily rephrase this list to a critique of something else and not be far off, I think:

Modern-day D&D...

Is more story-oriented or “railroady.”

Defined the GM’s job very narrowly and the rules claim to cover everything.

Diminished problem-solving on the player side.

Encouraged GMs more to be consumers than producers.

Is less challenging.

And in fact, this is the variation you will find more often expressed in the player base. It has a bit of “old man shaking his cane” at all those people playing mostly 4e or 5e D&D. 

It is also, if you ask me, partially true. It depends on how you select your data. 

You may find decades-old grudges against Dragonlance as the TSR setting that introduced rail-roady gameplay into D&D more heavily. And with the advent of unified rules the mindset of “I roll a die to succeed” has become more prevalent in both many GMs and players heads. In fact, many players come from very different backgrounds now, having cut their teeth on video games and MMORPGs.

But here’s the thing. Nothing requires you to run a 5e game as rail-roady, roll-driven, or less challenging. And while I can see how it encourages a certain mindset, style of play, and attitude, there’s plenty of systems around that one might chose instead. The world is larger than D&D, even though it ends up cornering so much of the US market for itself.

Wild times

I have no doubt that uninspired modern modules exist aplenty, providing unchallenging diversion to players. (The deluge of material for 5e is mind-boggling even when considering 3e flooding the market with 3rd party product.) 

But this already started from the days of AD&D 1e, with people clamoring for TSR to release stuff to run. And in fact, people in the OSR cite such modules also as their influences, with a very few standing out. And in fact a lot don’t stand out so much! The Greyhawk setting has probably around a hundred modules associated with it (though some or many may be set anywhere).

B2: Keep on the Borderlands was released in 1979. Tomb of Horrors in 1978. Within 4 years after the original game’s first release the idea of a game module as consumable product takes shape for TSR. Before that it took TSR about 2 years to publish “supplements” which added rules and general game stuff - as opposed to “adventures.”

The very first players had nothing to guide them by - no true introduction to running the game, for example. The first introduction as to how to play and run the game would be left to later products, like Basic D&D. So the first players pieced together what they could from a jamble of rules, thing they had heard, etc. 

How vague are we talking about? If my index search doesn’t betray me, only one of the three books contained in the original boxed set contains the concept of “caller” (without explaining it) and an example of an actual gameplay conversation between caller (on behalf of players) and referee. From this and the rules you had to deduce how the game is played. (The role of caller appears in other products but the Players Handbook of 1e finally casts it as the leader of a party, requiring “obedience” or the party is penalized for their confused actions.)

So, for many years people basically had only the vaguest hunch of how to play the game at all. It would be a bold claim to say people had a strong idea of how D&D was meant to play unless they made it to a convention and played with people who had in turn played with original players. Or read about that in a zine.

Gygax tried to make the game more uniform and defined in AD&D 1e, which in turn also curbs the most free-flowing aspects of the game and drives it towards “weapon speed factors” and a detailed list of armaments. 

The “advanced” in AD&D certainly stands for more detailed. It also stands for the end of a free-wheeling era and aims to be definitive and unifying. It goes from “you could do it like this” (even suggesting other games as part of the game) to “this is how it is done”.

“Rulings not rules” was necessary during this time as the rules were incomplete, haphazardly organized, lacked uniformity (yes, this includes AD&D 1e), and relied on the GM to fill the gap. AD&D 1e partially fills this gap but in my opinion is lacking a coherent design. It is more like an “opinionated, polished, and edited” version of the original game. It is one possible thing that could have evolved from the original soup and canonizing Gygax vision of the game.

So within a few years of the first D&D release into the wild we move from “rulings not rules” to “my rules, not your rulings.” Except for the areas like social interaction where D&D left it vague, probably for its benefit in the longer run.

It was a creative time... a time of problem-solving and challenge!

But what did players do before that? Now here we have mostly accounts of people chosing to involve themselves with the OSR in the sense of a wider audience, shaping a legend of how play was, leading to the claims I listed above.

I have heard numerous claims, in one case in person, of how this was a time where smart people devised ways to assure winning by avoiding combat or dice-rolling altogether because it was so damn risky. And this is how it was meant to be played. One played carefully, probing floors for traps with 10 foot poles, always on the lookout what GM (and module) might throw at you, and this is how you won the infamous Tomb of Horrors. 

It has a sense of e-sports athletes, doesn’t it? Because Tomb of Horrors was a tournament module you could test your gaming mettle against. Depending on who you ask it is a great challenge or a screwjob. 

Now, there are good examples of disabling traps that I do like from these accounts. Freezing traps or pouring concrete into a mechanism - good stuff. Some solutions were decidedly cool. This is certainly the response some players had to the game. They adopted a gameplay driven by cautiousness, avoiding rolls, bringing hirelings and henchmen, and otherwise minimizing risk and optimizing chances.

Reading around the internet I found other accounts - like people saying that characters used to die a lot and having a 2nd level elf was special. Running away is also mentioned as a valuable reaction to encounters. Of course, breaking the enemy’s morale also played a role, not running all encounters to the very end.

My bet is, however, that many people house-ruled D&D to be more heroic before D&D canonized step by step with 2e and later editions. My bet would be that people not only awarded more hit points, they might also fiddle with tables, the rules for dying, etc. And why shouldn’t they? If it was desirable to modify the game, why not modify that? If D&D was a means of having fun, people probably modified it to have more fun which was probably not had by dying a lot, no matter what certain GMs or Bill Webb or whoever claim.

My suspicion is that most experimenting and problem-solving went into puzzles and tricks, and occasionally traps, especially if they resembled puzzles and tricks more. And I see no true difference here today - if you provide players with something complex that they have to figure out, a lot of them will pool their problem-solving skills and try to reason it out and some will mash buttons or smash it. What has changed is that detecting traps became a lot more passive. (And traps have always been a divisive topic - how to run them well, what makes a good trap, and what outcomes are appropriate traps vs death traps, considerations of fairness, etc.)

In general, the challenge argument hinges on very few things. Part of it is that players had so few hit points on the lower levels, their survival was constantly at stake even from small challenges. On higher levels, save-or-die effects could easily kill the PC just the same. Sudden death was certainly possible enough. In other words, being vulnerable, often crazily and unrealistically vulnerable, was part of the game. A level 1 wizard might have less hit points than a cat and might be killed by one.

These don’t stem however from design, and came about at best unconsciously. If these are virtues they were at best acquired at random, not planned or designed for. They were at best happy - or depending on whom you ask, unhappy - accidents.

Dungeons & Dungeons

Looking at the material published for the OSR you notice a lot of dungeon crawls. Draw a dungeon, run a dungeon. I wonder what real story is supposed to “emerge” here? How I tricked that troll out of a magic sword? How we snatched the dragon hoard without fighting the damn thing?

The whole thing about “we evaded combat” and “not everything is scaled to your level” or “we did some pretty inventive things to disarm traps” tells a story of its own. The game itself was mostly about monsters, traps, and dungeons. Beyond that, any degree of freedom you might feel you had can frankly be had in most other RPGs with a willing and capable GM.

I have no doubt that a lot of interesting things went down in Dave Arneson’s games when everything was new and he had to adjudicate the game on the fly, stuff ideas in, make up systems, etc. It was less of a game in a codified sense and more of an experience. That must have also been born from this new sense of freedom of discovering the story angle of your avatars, and since they had all their own interests and turfs and stakes their adventures likely often had some ingrained motivation D&D often lacked. 

Evaporating marketplace

This aversion to “stories” is interesting. When you see what is published inthe OSR ecosystem, it quickly went away from plain dungeon modules to more exotic affairs. Weird set-pieces, playing to a heavy metal vibe, gonzo adventuring - I know several series of publications that thrive on that. And how about Sword & Wizardry? Half of the stuff published for it is also published for 5e. I think you will find nothing in there upsetting to “modern” sensibilities and yet it comes also for an old school system. Are we more alike than “they” think?

None of the actual retro-clones are truly thriving. They are multiplying, but who is publishing adventure modules for them? Fewer than you think. Labyrinth Lord had a pretty humdrum Kickstarter to get a new edition out, OSRIC is probably best considered dead,  Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerers of Hyperborea is selling as much a setting as a system, and Swords & Wizardry is also not brimming with new stuff. Look at the DriveThruRPG page of stuff for the S&W rules and you find that the section ordered by “Popularity” has barely seen any change - because no new major stuff got published for it. Labyrinth Lord in turn sees mostly publications for the compatible Dark Places & Demogorgons. Settings sell, retro-clones fail. Funny that. Games like the Black Hack stole most of the OSR’s thunder depending on how you want to see it, all these games like Polyhedral Dungeon that want to innovate the rules a bit, and encourage actual “hacking” instead of polishing slightly the “same ol’.”

So, unless we assume all of these happy OSR GMs homebrew, the OSR has largely failed as a marketplace. The ones succeeding to attract attention are the more gimmicky ones, the weird of LotFP, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and various module and adventure series heading into more gonzo, weird, and surreal directions. And some of the weird and surreal authors are leaving the OSR behind, like Ultraviolet Grasslands and the Black City or Electric Bastionland, having clear old school roots but playing them out their own way. Even seemingly successful publishers like Hydra Cooperative branch out into also providing their material to DCC. Both the Troll Lords and Frog God Games cater to the 5e crowd. Material palatable to more flexible old schoolers seeps into Dungeon World, the Year Zero engine, and other lightweight or even narrative systems. The OSR might not be dead, but it is not really expanding, nor is it getting stuff into stores unless you count the weird, gonzo offshoots.

Or let’s say, it’s not expanding the original OSR sphere. The old school’s influence is felt everywhere, including 5e itself. An old school vibe has reached far and wide in the RPG community, but left the OSR community behind. Unless you think that the Black Hack and other new systems are the inheritors of the OSR, that this next generation OSR will actually continue to thrive. I actually hope so. It might end up being less preachy. 

[dragons-bookshelf]

A Guide to the Spell-Inventors

... or, ‘Who Exactly Are Melf, Mordenkainen, Rary, and Drawmij?’

While some of you probably already know this stuff, there are among you out there newcomers to Dungeons & Dragons, who started playing in one of the last couple of editions. One thing that you’ve probably noticed in the current edition’s Player’s Handbook, and the recent sourcebook Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, is that quite a few of the spells are named after characters in the game world, such as with ‘Tasha’s Hideous Laughter’ and ‘Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion’ and ‘Melf’s Acid Arrow’.

This is in part a reference to Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories, which were a huge influence on Gary Gygax and which had spells with names like Phandaal’s Mantle of Stealth. The stories also influenced the magic of D&D in an even more enduring way, as the origin of so-called ‘Vancian magic’, where spells are prepared or memorised ahead of time and then lost once cast.

Quite a few of the characters mentioned as inventors of D&D spells actually are detailed in various sources in the older editions, and I’m going to explain who they are in a series of posts. Most of these are from the Greyhawk campaign setting, so wouldn’t appear very often in a campaign set for the most part in the Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, or Eberron, but they’ve been known to cross worlds and knowledge of their spells pretty definitely has.

To start us off, let’s go for the obvious stand-out...

Mordenkainen

I suppose the origins of Mordenkainen shouldn’t be surprising in that he in fact started out as a player character in early test campaigns, in fact being the personal character of none other than Gary Gygax himself. There wasn’t much revealed in detail about this version of Mordenkainen except that he was leader of a group called the Circle of Eight, many of whom were other characters on this list, and that he was a magic-user of neutral alignment. His name was apparently derived from a mix of the Biblical figure Mordecai and the Finnish mythological figure Lemminkainen, and honestly the result works really well.

His character name amongst others was used to provide origins for certain spells, notably Mordenkainen’s Faithful Hound, Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion, and the really cool Mordenkainen’s Sword. There are of course many others introduced through dozens of different sourcebooks.

In the mid-’80s, after Gygax left TSR, they retained a lot of the base rights and information on the character and decided to remake him somewhat in their upcoming second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. In this, he was made into the most powerful and famous wizard within the Greyhawk setting, sort of a counterpart to the Forgotten Realms’ Elminster, who he actually happens to be friends with according to a set of Dragon Magazine articles. Unlike other old wise mages, however, Mordenkainen is in many ways obsessed more with balance and neutrality than good, and in a somewhat more active way than most interpretations of that phrase.

He was, along with many of his compatriots in the Circle of Eight, concerned with keeping the balance of good and evil rather than combating evil directly, to the point that he would actually work against good-aligned causes if they proved to be too unbalancing in the other direction. It made him just as often an antagonistic force as it did a supportive one, and I remember at least one article on the Wizards of the Coast website actually suggesting him for use as an outright villain.I suppose it makes him a perhaps-unintentional but very good example of how centrists can fuck things up.

Naturally though he does often serve as a supportive figure, and this even counts as recently as the current edition. Mordenkainen made an appearance in the recent adventure module Curse of Strahd, where he was driven mad in his attempts to oppose the evil vampire necromancer and Dracula cosplayer, Strahd von Zarovitch, and he can serve as an ally to the players if they’re finally able to get through to him.

He also got a shitty haircut where he had a shaven head for a while in 3rd and 4th edition and thus resembled Ming the Merciless. I think this has finally been reversed in his appearances in 5th edition, but don’t quote me on that.

I want it to be true, at least because seriously...

... this is not a good look for him.

[xt1erminator-blog]

Will There Be Eberron For 5e?

I thought about this recently. A friend and I discovered Eberron in the last couple of weeks. I personally never had any exposure to it before then because I never played 3e/3.5e, nor 4e. When I got back into playing D&D using 5e, we began with the Starter Set, based in the Forgotten Realms, as is the rest of the current adventure content for 5e and is the focus for content being submitted to the DM's Guild website. I am very familiar with the Realms, so it was very easy to start running a game in that setting. I tracked down a few of my old favourite Forgotten Realms source books from 1e and 2e (the grey box Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and the 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms Adventures hard cover are two of my favourites). Also picked up the 4e Forgotten Realms Player's Guide and Campaign Guide. Very well done books, it's too bad the 4e rules didn't turn out to be very good. All of these books have proven to be a great source of information, and the 5e release of the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide has been a welcome addition to my collection, despite it being a rather short book with a lack of really good information and totally lacking in great maps. Hence this is why I have a lot of older releases to pull required content from for my campaign. It's a mish-mash of stuff from older editions as well as stuff from the new.

Aside from running my own game, I've also become a player as part of another friend's homebrew world campaign, and he has been using the 5e rules to run his game. Very cool world. It has a very European, or Victorian or... "steampunk" flavour to it, but not steampunk. Mixed in within it all are classic D&D monsters, riflemen, steam powered trains, a heavy emphasis on basic firearms, etc.  I was asked a few sessions after playing in this world if I wanted to start a second game of my own, using his campaign setting. I thought that was a great idea, and started working up what I would do. Then the DM announced last week that he was going to change the setting (not the rules) for his game over to Iron Kingdoms from Privateer Press. He expressed that it was a better fit for what he wanted to run. No problem.

I then made the decision, after stumbling upon Eberron, to make my second game an Eberron Campaign.

What a cool world. I am only into Chapter 2 of the 4e Eberron Campaign Guide, and I'm hooked already. The guys at Nerdarchy have also helped fast-track my knowledge of the setting a little bit thanks to the many videos about Eberron on their YouTube channel. I hope running it goes smooth. I wasn't aware how rich of a world it was, with intriguing classes, races and history. I enjoy that it's a good read, and the information is presented in a relatively easy to understand manner. It’s very interesting and unlike any other campaign setting I have read up on.

So, will there be an Eberron campaign/source release of some sort for 5e?

I think there will be. In February of 2016, Chris Perkins posted a poll on Twitter entitled "_______________, for the win." The options were Dark Sun, Dragonlance, Eberron and Greyhawk.  Everyone assumed that he was asking “what should the next setting be for 5e?” The results were Dark Sun 28%, Dragonlance 26%, Eberron 27%, and Greyhawk 19%. Pretty close results for the first 3. I can't see it being Dark Sun because even though the votes were the highest, in my opinion it's one of the least interesting and most challenging to “get into” campaign settings. Dragonlance is a fantastic setting, which I think a lot of people love more for the wide variety of excellent novels the setting has produced, and not so much for campaign source material. I can't see it selling well if released as a campaign source release. Greyhawk was very popular and spawned a lot of early D&D content, but I think it's too old to make a comeback. Eberron has such a unique flavour to it, and is probably the most compatible with the Forgotten Realms, making it easier to adapt FR based content released under 5e to work with the world of Eberron and it's magic-rich offerings. Something else that makes me believe WotC are working on Eberron for 5e is that one of the early releases of the online Unearthed Arcana playtest supplement content featured some information about running Eberron with 5e, and another more recent edition of UA featuring the Artificer class.

It will be exciting to see what the next move is for Wizards of the Coast. My guess is that they will release a hard cover 5e source book for Eberron, similar to the Forgotten Realms Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. It will be updated information with perhaps some kind of a new storyline occurance in the world, possibly the next War? Maybe focusing on a different area other than Khorvaire? Not a complete campaign reference though, which is why I am investing in some of the older Eberron releases, which I started doing this week by picking up the 4e Campaign Guide and Player's Guide books.  Now, to hunt down some warforged miniatures...

-runDMsteve

[oldschoolfrp]

I decided my Greyhawk module campaign should skip the Temple of Elemental Evil as published and transition from Hommlet and the moathouse (T1) to the Wild Coast to chase the slavers to the Pomarj (A1-4).  If players want to follow clues from the moathouse to the ToEE, they will find all of the exterior entrances are magically sealed by the spells that bind Zuggtmoy.  The exterior grounds would be a good place for a big encounter with cultists and their minions trying to force open the doors in the classic tradition of “rush to stop the ritual before the great evil is released.”

I do like the upper levels of ToEE, but the full megadungeon is a complete campaign by itself (plus old school Greyhawk had an empty promise where the temple was supposed to be, unless you played at Gary’s table, so a true old school campaign can keep the ToEE off-limits).

More notes below a cut where I can find them when I need them:

For converting T1 and T1-4 to 5th ed, I highly recommend Brian Rideout’s thorough conversion as a guide, (direct link here to free 125 page PDF).  He explains throughout why he made certain decisions, making the whole thing a master class in how to convert from 1e to 5e.  I’m only changing a few things for my use.

There are some errata for T1-4 on the Mage of the Striped Tower blog (the old free PDF link now redirects to the DMs Guild page for ToEE).

This discussion of the distance from Hommlet to Nulb gets to the heart of some of the impossible contradictions in T1-4.  This post by Scott matches my own decision about how to redraw the area map and reposition the temple and Nulb as out-of-the-way locales.  (Doomsday message boards)

This detail map shows the area from Verbobonc to the Wild Coast, including the Kron Hills, Hommlet, and Nulb, part of Anna Meyer’s amazing online Greyhawk maps project.

Some discussion of converting ToEE to 5e in this ENWorld thread.

There are 5e conversions for many older D&D and AD&D modules for sale on DMs Guild, with many published through “Classic Modules Today” (listed titles link to DMs Guild).

The upcoming Tales from the Yawning Portal will include a conversion of Against the Giants if you want to hold out for an official $49.95 hardcover.

William Patterson has some good 5e conversions of the aspis and the ants from A1 on the “Why, hello.” blog here and here.  These stats seem balanced and comparable to the original 1st ed versions, and appropriate for the party size and level I expect to explore the pits.

Greyhawk Grognard has many good posts about trying to make sense of the history of the ToEE and the links between other Greyhawk modules: “Thoughts on the Elder Elemental God”, “DMing into the Depths of the Oerth, Part III ½” (more on the EEG), “From Hommlet to Tharizdun, by way of Tsojcanth”, “An Iuzian Conundrum”, “More on the Temple of Elemental Evil”, “Thoughts on Q2″

Some expanded background on the Battle of Emridy Meadows, placing Rufus and Burne there, from the Canonfire! Greyhawk site.

A very nice Ballad of Emridy Meadows by Kylearanon from a 2003 post on Zansforcans, a site with some resources for Return to ToEE.

Domains of Verbobonc – Possible ruler names and political names from the Dark Days of Greyhawk campaign blog.

I like these notes on the city of Dyvers from the Greyhawk Destinies campaign blog.  I don’t feel obligated to include everything ever written for Greyhawk, but I can cherry pick between homebrew and later official materials.

(I can ignore the “Greyhawk Wars”, too.  I don’t like canon world-altering events in previously existing campaign settings.  Give us a starting point and if we choose to base our own campaigns there we can tell our own stories about what comes next and none of them should be exactly the same.)

In case new characters need to progress through early levels:

Smulroon’s good 5e conversion of N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God is a free PDF, linked from this Reddit thread.

And a different version of Explictica Defilus on GoogleDocs from N1, posted to Reddit by CalvinballAKA.