Every Version of D&D Part II: Men & Magic

[UPDATE 1/6/21: I no longer support spending money on products that benefit Zak S, or giving him positive attention and connection. The short version is that I find credible claims that he has engaged in unacceptable behavior and not made up for it. For more detail, see here for the core of the accusations. To get Zak's side of things, he maintains this separate blog from his main one to post updates on the legal status of these complaints. 

Please consider these claims and make your own decision on their validity, and the implications thereof, before either supporting or shunning Zak.]

As promised, we're beginning with the beginning - the Little Brown Books of the original white box.  Okay, yeah, yeah, you might call "the beginning" Chainmail or Braunstein or what have you, but this is the first thing released into the world as "Dungeons & Dragons", though not yet as a "roleplaying game".  I'm no James Malieszewski when it comes to the history of the game, but for this analysis, I'm more concerned with differences in the products as rules manuals that I can use now than I am in their history.  I will touch on it briefly (as well as I'm able) in order to speculate on what changes tell us about the play experiences the designers were trying to address.  But enough jibber jabber, let's jump in.

Men & Magic

"Here is something better!" First off, a word about formatting and graphic design (in the sense that Zak S. talks about it) - there isn't any.  Well, that's not true, there's formatting of the sort some guys could do as hobbyists in 1974, and yes, there's some charm to 'slap it together yourself' aesthetic, but it's a terrible in-play reference.  Material isn't very clearly grouped, there's no index, and rather important concepts get a mention and that's it.  I honestly think a lot of the reputation OD&D has for being "incomplete" or needing high levels of referee involvement and prep stems from the fact that it's not formatted in a way where you can pick it up and use it as an instructional manual.  As I've mentioned before, I started out with the purist vision of playing actual OD&D, but after the first session of character creation and brief play, I made the switch to Swords & Wizardry Whitebox on account of its being easier to reference (and I actually have dreams of reformatting that in a more useful way, but it's still loads easier to refer to in play than the LBBs). With these books, you have to read, re-read, internalize, interpret and otherwise work to make the text work for the game.  That's okay, and there may even be some virtue in that, but overall I tend to come down on the position that RPG texts should facilitate learning the game and referencing the rules in play first, and being engaging and thought provoking works a distant second.  The engagement and thought provocation ought to come out in play rather than the rules.  Given how rarely RPGs acquire new players by someone picking up a book out of the blue and getting an impression of it from that book alone, I think that's a fair set of priorities.  That tangent out of the way, let's take a look at Men & Magic section by section, even if they are inadequate as organizational tools.

Foreword

There's not much applicable to the rules here (as you'd expect), other than the emphasis on campaign play and the exhortation that these rules are intended for people with imagination. I like that.  As much as I admire a "scientific" approach to game design, where rules are crafted to attempt to guide players to the desired play experience, there's a lot to be said for openly putting the onus on the players to use the toolkit provided.

Introduction, Scope, Preparation

So, despite my smack talking about OD&D's value as an instructional manual, it does go into charmingly specific detail on recommended equipment: "Sheet Protectors (heaviest possible)."  It also gives a piece of advice that remains good to this day, around which I've built the entire Fellhold campaign - start small and build up detail as you go.  Other than that, it emphasizes the expectation that the referee will house rule like the devil, and the flexibility of the rules, from the prehistoric to the futuristic.  I like to think of this as acknowledging the then latent potential of roleplaying games as a form combined with some understandable boosterism for a fledgling product.

Characters, Abilities, and NPCs

What I find most interesting about the characters, abilities, and non-player characters sections is what they say about the play that produced them.  The character races that have become canonical are presented more in the sense of "hey, here's the stuff we already figured out, but go ahead and make up something else if you want".  Acquiring followers and armies, and their morale and loyalty scores get a lot of detail, showing the wargaming roots.  I like that abilities are "determined" rather than "created" - I think James Maliszewski hit on that on Grognardia, this notion that your character is randomly picked from all the possible characters in the world rather than crafted to your whim.    I'm still confused about the "use one stat for another at a 3 for 1 rate for experience purposes only", but I don't think I'm alone in that.

Equipment

Some of the prices here don't show the same concern for medieval verisimilitude that later editions get to.  Though not listed here, it's a running joke in my game that tents, as priced in Swords & Wizardry Whitebox, costs something like a year's soldiering wages.  Great fun was had by me in describing the giants' new loin cloths after they chased the party out of camp.

"Alternative" Combat System

Here we have the combat system that turned into D&D's defining mechanic.  The tables are a little confusing, or rather the ways they try to save space by giving Magic Users and Clerics as relative values to Fighting Men.  Deep in my heart of hearts, I'm a THAC0 man myself, so I'm considering switching over, originalism be damned.  It's interesting to me that AC only goes down to 2 and up to 9.  I'll have to check out the Supplements to see when that was expanded.  The 10 to -10 spread is imminently logical, but it does divorce the idea that AC represents particular armor types.  That was probably inevitable, and possibly desirable, considering the diverse uses AC was already being put to to describe different monsters that are hard to hit for reasons other than wearing particular types of armor.

The saving throw matrix is also kind of terrible.

Spells

Level 1 spells have a lot of overlap between Magic Users and Clerics, but after that they start to diverge quite a bit.  Clerics get "Remove Curse" as a level 3 spell instead of level 4, and obviously have all the healing spells.  Otherwise, perhaps what's most surprising about the spells is how little many of them have changed.  Effects and mechanics are remarkably consistent for many of them, and despite the profusion of spells available in later editions, most of the most used and iconic ones are right here.

Next up in the series will be "Monsters & Treasure".



For rules, here is the method I used recently for filling out "adventure sites" as determined with the previous rules adapted from Welsh Piper (which generated too many adventure sites and too many large outposts for the vibe I was going for, but would have been good for creating a dense, interesting small map)



Adventure Site Generation

Take stuff from a good source like Dyson Logos, Hexenbracken or the Kraal, or the Tome of Adventure Design, or your favorite published setting material or:

01-60: Monster Lair

            - Roll Random Encounter Chart for Terrain type

61-70: Surface Ruins

            - Use outpost generation rules to determine size and type of ruins, then either roll random encounter chart for monsters there, add intelligent but dangerous inhabitants, or come up with something to make it worthwhile

71-80: Some Kind of Inhabited/Dangerous/Interesting Place besides an outpost

81-90: Small 1 Level Dungeon

            - Generate Randomly, Wing it, or Grab a map

91-00: Full Dungeon

            - Generate randomly, grab a map, or go whole hog and make it

A Problem

So, in my ongoing Fellhold campaign, we’ve been using Akratic Wizardry’s rather good “weapon damage by class” rule as a compromise between “all weapons do d6” and “all weapons have their own unique damage”.  I think if we weren’t already 6 months into using these rules, I’d probably tweak some of the damage a little bit, and maybe recategorize a few weapons (having short bows, long bows, and crossbows all do “medium weapon” damage, and treating hired swords as level 1 fighting men means that players have access to cheap and plentiful d8 damage – I gotta remember to play up the hirelings as people more).  Altogether, though, I like the rule, and it has allowed players to use stuff they think is cool while still giving the fighters a useful role as damage takers/dealers.

I ran into a small problem recently, however.  In my zeal to go all OD&D, I gave everyone d6 hit dice.  Everyone, even monsters.  Those of you more clever than I will have already spotted the problem it took me 6 months to deduce.  In OD&D, the baseline assumption of weapons and hit points was that an average guy has d6 HP, and an average weapon does d6, so any given blow has an average shot of killing someone if it connects.  So far, so good.

When you plug d8’s in as effectively the “default” damage (medium weapons in the hands of fighters and fighty hirelings) against d6 hit dice, all of a sudden the difficulty of monsters as related to their hit dice is thrown way off.  Mobs of hirelings offing hill giants in one round with a volley of short bow fire.  Trolls getting cut down faster than their regeneration can work.  In other words, we’ve gone from damage dealt scaling nicely to damage capacity to slightly (but significantly) favoring the players.

Now, I am by no means suggesting I want carefully crafted “Challenge Levels” for encounters, or even that I want things to be harder for the characters per se.  What I think bothers me is that right now, the meaningfulness of player choice is being undermined, even if it is generally in their favor.  As it stands, fighting men, and employers of hired goons, choose between “bigger damage die than monster hit dice” or “way bigger damage die than monster hit dice” (the latter having the marginal cost of foregoing a shield).  Small weapons are pretty much completely ignored (except for the occasional thrown axe or knife).

By bumping monster HD up to d8s (as was done pretty early on – what, in Greyhawk? Definitely by AD&D) I get to a) keep using the damage scale we’ve been using and which has started to be automatic to players, b) increase the upside of going for a big, two handed weapon and foregoing a shield, making that a more meaningful choice, and c) make monster longevity more in line with their ability to hit, make saving throws, treasure awarded, XP given, et cetera.

So, the rule for today is both short and easy: All monsters have d8’s for hit dice.

Adventurer as a Meta-Class

So, I’m reading through the excellent analysis of skills in D&D over at Hack & Slash.  It touches on what the functions of a resolution mechanic are at all, and especially digs into what 3.x/Pathfinder style skills bring to D&D (and don’t).  Considering some of my recent forays away from a pure lack of skill systems at all (using the “Good at” and “Bad at” cues, considering the use of roll under stat checks more often, et cetera), this is striking me as very useful analysis.

The main approach I’ve been taking when skill type things come up is to ask myself if I figure the situation is the sort of thing a class would cover.  Considering we’re still rocking the original 3 classes only (Fighting Man, Magic User, and Cleric), this gets broadly interpreted to “General Outdoorsy/Rugged stuff, smarty pants stuff, and healy/religious stuff” respectively.  With some consideration for the Dwarf knowing dwarf stuff.  In the Hack & Slash series, the author mentions in a couple of posts (those on ride and heal specifically that I can think of) that there’s some stuff that it’s just assumed adventurers can do, and I kind of like the idea of “Adventurer” as a meta-class for OD&D.

What I mean is a baseline assumption that all PCs know a thing or two about adventurery stuff in the same way that fighting men are assumed to know about combat and weapons and the like.  Now, this gets dangerously close to the whole “adventurers are a special class of people, a cut above everyone else from the get go” mentality of later editions.  I much prefer “your adventurer is just some schmuck until gameplay shows us otherwise.” Overall, though, I don’t think the idea that characters can be assumed to have a basic level of competence in things like riding horses, bandaging wounds, checking doors for traps and so forth clashes with the basic assumptions of a class & level game where fighting men start out tougher, magic users start out knowing a spell, and clerics start out, hmm, well, religious and able to swing a mace?

Clearly, there are play styles where you would not want to approach things this way – a Dungeon Crawl Classics style 0-level “funnel” approach, a Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy Roleplay weird horror tale, a career or lifepath system like WFRP or a “our first adventure” story or whatever.  But I think that acknowledging “adventurer” as a factor for the referee when determining if a character can know or do something comes pretty close to what ends up being the default assumption at many tables anyway, especially in a skill system light approach, where the players have plenty of “dungeoneering/adventurism” experience and use it, regardless of who their characters are.

So, the rules section is easy this time:

Adventuring Skills

All characters are assumed to be basically competent at skills common to an adventuring life style – riding, camping, cooking, first aid, orienteering and so forth, unless stated otherwise by the player.  No tests are necessary related to these skills except in unusual or extremely difficult circumstances (riding a giant lizard, say, or determining directions in a sorcerous fog, et cetera).

Every Version of D&D Part I: Introduction

So, for some blog fodder, I've decided I'm going to take on the rather ambitious project of going through every version of D&D and comment on the rules.  To keep myself sane, I'll be sticking to core books only.  I'm up in the air on OD&D if it will include the supplements or only the the original three LBB's.  The idea is to hit up White Box, Holmes, Moldvay, Mentzer, Rules Cyclopedia, AD&D 1E, AD&D 2E, D&D 3/3.5, and 4E.  And I'll probably have to get to Next if it's out by the time I get through all of the other stuff.  Then, maybe I'll hit up the retroclones for the sake of comparison.

Now, I'm sure somebody's done something like this before, and I have read some "cover to cover" posts about specific editions, but my goal here is going to be to a) highlight the differences and think about why they are there, and b) identify those rules, tools, and ideas that are most useful to me for actual play, to aid me in kitbashing the Frankenstein's monster of a "perfect version" for my campaign.   In large part, though, I just want to get to know the versions I'm not as personally familiar with (basically everything besides 2E and 4E). I expect it will take a while, but hopefully it will keep me gainfully blogging whenever I'm running short on ideas.  First up will be the original three LBB's in the next post in the series.

Meanwhile, Fellhold Hex Stocking


(Using Welsh Piper's Regional Hex Template, with 5 mile sub hexes and heavily cribbed from Lore.Keeper0's Hex Crawl)

The lands around Fellhold are comparatively sparsely settled, so I'm going to modify the chances of an "outpost" (settlement type place) to be lower.  I'll be running this for the regional hexes the players are currently traveling through first, and eventually flesh out the whole map.

For Each Regional Hex, determine the dominant terrain type (if you can't tell, just use the center hex). In the case of dual terrain (like wooded hills) go down this list in this order for precedence. Roll the appropriate die for the number of outposts/settlements in the regional hex.  Then roll to determine size and inhabitants for each. Place as desired, or decide on a method to randomize placement:

Terrain Type	Number of Outposts	Size of Outposts	Inhabitants
Tundra/Glacier	1d2 – 1	Tiny (01-60) Small (61-00)	Dwarves (01-10) Men (11-00)
Mountains	1d3 – 1	Tiny (01-60) Small (61-89) Medium (90-00)	Trolls (01-40) Trollkin (41-80) Giants (81-90) Dwarves (91-95) Men (96-00)
Swamp/Fen	1d2 – 1	Tiny (01-70) Small (71-00)	Trolls (01-20) Trollkin (21-30) Men (31-00)
Forest	1d3 – 1	Tiny (01-50) Small (51-89) Medium (90-00)	Trollkin (01-30) Dwarves (31-35) Men (36-00)
Hills	1d4 – 1	Tiny (01-50) Small (51-80) Medium (81-90) Large (91-00)	Trollkin (01-30) Dwarves (31-50) Men (51-00)
Plains/Grassland	1d6 – 1	Tiny (01-50) Small (51-70) Medium (71-80) Large (81-00)	Dwarves (01-20) Men (21-00)

Outposts

• Tiny: Individuals or very small groups, hermits, inns, mining/logging camps, homesteads


• Small: Villages, trading posts, forts


• Medium: Towns, keeps, market fairs


• Large: Cities, castles, fortresses, tribal encampments

Next, roll the number of adventuring sites per regional hex by dominant terrain type:

Terrain Type	Number of Adventuring Sites
Tundra/Glacier	2D4
Mountains	2D6
Swamp/Fen	2D6
Forest	3D3
Hills	3D3
Plains/Grassland	2D4

Adventuring Sites

Adventuring sites are ruins, monster lairs, encounters, and so forth.  Detail as you like or use a cool random generator. Abulafia has lots of great stuff.

A Brief Interlude on Rule Systems

Not exactly what I'm talking about

[UPDATE 1/6/21: I no longer support spending money on products that benefit Zak S, or giving him positive attention and connection. The short version is that I find credible claims that he has engaged in unacceptable behavior and not made up for it. For more detail, see here for the core of the accusations. To get Zak's side of things, he maintains this separate blog from his main one to post updates on the legal status of these complaints. 

Please consider these claims and make your own decision on their validity, and the implications thereof, before either supporting or shunning Zak.]

So, after a discussion with Bryni’s player (GM of many of my favorite gaming moments, and fellow game design enthusiast) as well as working my way all the way through the archives over at Zak S.’s Playing D&D with Pornstars, I’m thinking rather a lot about rules.

When I started out the Fellhold campaign, I was pretty high on the “player skill not character skill” and “rulings, not rules!” rallying cries of the Old School Renaissance, and the accompanying rules light approach that I found appealing.  Now, don’t get me wrong, these are still principles I think are good and valuable, but I’m starting to wonder if my game is suffering from an overly strong attachment to some “pure” vision of those ideas.

From the beginning, I intended to take a similar approach to James Maliszewski in his Dwimmermount campaign and add on rules as they became necessary or desired, but in practice I haven’t really regularized that many rulings or added that many brand new rules.  Even if I were to, Bryni’s player pointed out an interesting analogy in the above mentioned conversation.  He said that OD&D (or retroclones thereof, like our current S&W Whitebox) is an excellent bicycle – spare, efficient, gets you where you’re going.  But when you start adding on all sorts of gewgaws and motors and horns and whatnot, you end up with a crufty bike when maybe you would have been better off with a moped or a motorcycle.

This conversation came up because he is a fan of the crunch.  In addition to the tactical and outside the box thinking of play, he enjoys having a meaty rules system to sink his teeth into and engage with as a game. And I can certainly sympathize – I just tend to get that fix with board games and wargaming more than from RPGs.  When I suggested that we can add more systems and subsystems to the game as we go, he made the analogy above and it got me thinking about what the rules are doing now, what we might want them to do that they’re not, and how best to serve those goals.  Most of all, I don’t want to let some silly sense of pride in playing D&D “like it was” get in the way of playing it in the most awesome and fun way possible for me and my friends.  It’s not like I have any personal attachment to how D&D was played before I was born.

So all that has me thinking about how the rules are contributing (or not) to the awesome in my campaign.  One area I’ve been giving a lot of thought to is rolling for skills and stats.  I’ve shied away from doing it much at all in the hopes of encouraging player creativity and problem solving, rather than using character stats and skills as a crutch.  This post by Zak S. made an excellent distinction about what rolling stats is for in D&D, though, and may be the necessary step to break my otherwise loathe to roll stats mentality.

I’ve been so worried about letting the game slip into “roll vs. whatever stat/skill” in place of engaging with the fiction and actually thinking, that I may have gone the opposite direction and made the only useful character distinction how well you hit in a fight.  We’ve had some really good times with stats being little more than a way to color your impression of characters (and the occasional precious +1 hit point), but I think I’ve closed off whole sections of the game to the delights of the oracular power of dice that I’ve not only discussed before, but named my damn blog after.

What I mean is that when social interactions, or trying to notice things or whatever are entirely based on my rulings on what the players describe, then there is no unexpected content at the decision point. I may be surprised by the player’s actions, but I will have incorporated those actions into my mental model before making my decision, so there is no surprise (to me) from the actual decision. With dice added to the mix, I can shape the probability with modifiers, but the actual result still has the chance to surprise me and even force “unwelcome” outcomes, as Mr. Baker would say, which makes the game more interesting and textured overall.

Embracing this notion, however, starts to point to some of the areas ripe for change in OD&D.  Though I never played D&D 3 or 3.5, the open endedness of ascending AC and difficulty kinda makes a lot of sense, and allows a little more range than roll under a stat.  On the other hand, moving to a totally open ended system like that quickly minimizes the role of the actual D20 that the system is named for.  If you’re adding and subtracting values over 20, then the probabilities get a little weird.  The very strength of having no limit to modifiers starts to become meaningless when they get big enough that the dice roll only matters to check for a critical hit or failure.  Of course, if you want huge amounts of granularity to base stats, skills, and modifiers, all within a reasonable range, you can go to a percentile system, but man, I just kind of hate them for aesthetic reasons that I can’t quite explain (sorry WFRP).

So what to do? I flirted with the idea of a Dungeon World style 2d6 + modifier derived from 3-18 stat with a 2-6 fail, 7-9 mixed success, 10-12 full success model, but again, Bryni’s player pointed out that the basic assumption of such a system is not “does this make sense?” but rather “succeeding while creating problems is the most interesting outcome, so it should happen the most.”  I think making that assumption for some parts of the game but not others is ultimately more problematic than it looks on its face.

What about 3/3.5 style modifies added to a D20 roll against an ascending DC set by me? I feel like this is only slightly different from a straight up decision on my part based on description.  Sure, it’s technically different to set a difficulty, then award a bonus or penalty to the player’s roll, but overall I’d still be largely shaping how a thing goes down based on what sounds right to me, minimizing the surprising effects of the dice.  I’m sure lots of GMs are super good at doing this fairly, but it’s not a skill I’m exactly practiced at right now, and I don’t know how long it would take me to train that skill to the same hard core old school “let the dice fall where they may” approach I’ve been taking so far.

When I started this post, I didn’t know exactly where I was going with it, but I think I’ve figured it out.  Rolling for stats will be a simple roll under affair.  Modifiers will be limited to +1/-1 for both the player and the difficulty, which is consonant with what I’ve been doing for combat rolls (I’ve based this on something I read in either DNDWPS or Grognardia, I can’t remember, which pointed out that the early rules intended a +1/-1 to be a pretty big deal, that was mostly all you got if you got anything).  This means a maximum swing of +/- 10% probability, which still makes the importance of the stat and the D20 roll itself important, which I like.  Plus, it makes my job of judgment a lot easier by making it effectively binary (well, trinary if you count “no effect”): Is this thing unusually hard (-1 to stat) or unusually easy (+1 to stat)? Is your description especially useful (+1 to roll) or especially not (-1 to roll)?.  We’ll see how this works out as time goes on.  So, I guess I’ll cheat a little bit and use the above as my “rules content” for this post:

Fellhold Ability Checks:

When a player cannot or will not expand on an action his character is performing, and the outcome of that action depends to some degree on an inherent trait of the character, then the referee will call for an ability roll.  The player rolls 1D20 and attempts to score the relevant ability or lower. The referee may modify the ability or the roll as follows:

• If the player’s description significantly improves his chance of success: -1 to the player’s roll


• If the player’s description significantly detracts from his chance of success: +1 to the player’s roll


• If the situation is unusually easy: +1 to the character’s relevant ability for the purposes of this roll


• If the situation is unusually difficult: -1 to the character’s relevant ability for the purposes of this roll

Note that if using the “Good at” and “Bad at” skill rules, these should normally grant a -1 and +1 to the player roll respectively.

Swords & Wizardry Appreciation Day!

It's the first official Swords & Wizardry Appreciation day! Considering Swords & Wizardry Whitebox is the ruleset we're using for the Fellhold campaign, I thought I'd like to jump in on this.  I've expounded earlier why we went with Whitebox, but basically I found the simplicity attractive as a foundation to add house rules to, rather than trying to cut out pieces of other versions.  As play has gone on, it has both taught me to value and enjoy the lack of some rules but also it has pointed out exactly how other rules came to be by experiencing the desire to have them in game.  My only real regret about using Whitebox is that it means my beautiful full core rules I got in the kickstarter are only pulled out when I'm looking for guidance on making a ruling on something outside the scope of the Whitebox rules. A small price to pay for an excellent slim set of D&D rules that is far more in-play reference friendly than the actual Little Brown Books.

I'm working on a quickstart character sheet that will hopefully have everything a player needs to create a character A) on one page, and B) logically sequenced and labeled to be as new player friendly as possible, but I'm traveling and wasn't able to get it finished yet.  So, instead I'll post my custom Fellhold character sheets (heavily inspired by the Dwimmermount character sheets), and, unimaginatively enough, a couple of magic Swords and an example of some Wizardry.

Fellhold Character Sheet

Fellhold Character Sheet

Some Swords

Grief, the Foemaker

Grief is a finely made long sword with intricate knot and runework on the crossguard and round pommel.  The steel of the blade is dark, almost smokey, and the scabbard  is black leather with inlaid silver in the form of a knotwork wyrm.

When Grief comes into the possession of a new owner, it is a +1 sword that increases its wielder's chance to fumble by 1 (so, a 1-2).

Every time its owner rolls a fumble, increase the to-hit bonus by +1, to a maximum of +4, and increase the chance to fumble by 1. This works out to:

• +1 = Fumble on 1-2


• +2 = Fumble on 1-3


• +3 = Fumble on 1-4


• +4 = Fumble on 1-5

In addition to an increased chance of a fumble, as Grief's to hit bonus increases, the severity of fumbles should increase.  This is left to referee discretion, but anything that increases discord and endangers allies should be preferred.

Whenever the owner of Grief is present during an interaction with strangers, any reaction rolls will suffer a penalty equal to Grief's current to hit bonus.

Grief cannot be freely given to anyone its owner considers a friend or ally.  If Grief is ever used in the presence of a former owner, any fumbles will automatically strike the former owner (provided it is even somewhat reasonable).

Grief's powers "reset" whenever it comes into the possession of a new owner. 

Woe, the Blooddrinker

Woe is a "viking style" sword of regular size, effective at both stabbing and slashing.  The broad fuller is bronze, and the crescent shaped upper and lower guards are inlaid with copper knotwork polished to a bright red sheen.  The hilt is wrapped in simple, well-worn leather. It is currently housed in a weather and sweat stained simple leather scabbard.

Woe gives no bonus to hit, but instead any damage dice rolled "explode", meaning that if the maximum value is rolled, save that value, roll again and add them together.  If this second roll is also the maximum value for the die, roll again and add, and so on.

On a critical hit, automatically consider the damage die to have rolled maximum value and proceed from there, in addition to any other usual effects from a critical hit.

Woe always inflicts vicious, nasty wounds when it is able.  Any time its damage die "explodes", NPCs and monsters with HD equal to or less than the victim must test morale (yes, this applies to both friends and foes).

Woe's owner will find it hard to keep his or her hand off of the hilt and the blade in the scabbard anytime his situation is uneasy or dangerous, unless he exercises iron will (a good way to reflect this is for the referee to assume that the owner does these things in these situations unless the owner's player specifically says otherwise).  NPCS will likely interpret such actions as hostile and react accordingly.

Some Wizardry

Altered Guise

Spell Level: 1st

Range: Self

Duration: 8 hours

The caster may take on the appearance of any person of roughly the same size and shape provided he obtains something that belongs to the person being imitated. He may change appearance within the duration as many times as he likes, though once he returns to his own appearance the effect ends.  The greater the disparity between the caster's appearance and the imitated person's, the more likely something will seem off, and people familiar with the imitated party will have a greater chance of spotting the deception.

 

Humanoids of Fellhold

[UPDATE 1/6/21: I no longer support spending money on products that benefit Zak S, or giving him positive attention and connection. The short version is that I find credible claims that he has engaged in unacceptable behavior and not made up for it. For more detail, see here for the core of the accusations. To get Zak's side of things, he maintains this separate blog from his main one to post updates on the legal status of these complaints. 

Please consider these claims and make your own decision on their validity, and the implications thereof, before either supporting or shunning Zak.]

Player Spoilers!  This post might spoil some stuff if you’re playing in my Fellhold game!

Okay, so, with that out of the way, today we’re going to talk about the humanoid races we’ve encountered so far, with associated rules.  Rules stuff is in bold italic:

The currently playable races:

Men



Men are pretty much what you’d expect.  Vaguely Germanic (Anglo-Saxon names by default), scattered settlements, one largish town outside of Fellhold, one big city a few days away on the coast.  There are probably more and different cultures farther away, but those haven't come up yet.

Rules:

All playable classes (Fighting Men, Magic Users, and Clerics).

Languages: By default, all men speak Mannish, and may choose additional languages in the usual manner.

Dwarves



Dwarves are a mostly insular race, though they once had many mighty holds dug into mountains across the land.  The greatest of these was Fellhold, conquered by sorcerors, now overrun with all manner of foul beasts.  Dwarves are pretty stereotypical super-nordic dwarves: hard working, expert craftsmen and miners, live in giant cities carved from the living rock, tendencies towards rampant greed, et cetera.  Know ancient secrets of weaponsmithing that men do not. Pretty much all magic weapons come from the dwarves, and most of those from long ago.  I’ve been pretty inspired by Burning Wheel and Warhammer’s versions of dwarves, but ultimately they come from the Norse myth (and Tolkien’s take on them, of course).  While their skill is better than humans, they don’t have any advanced technology like steam or clockwork or guns, because I don’t want it.  This may change in the future, who knows.

Rules:

Character Advancement: The only character class available to Dwarves is that of the Fighter, but they have no level limits.

Weapon and Armor Restrictions: Like human Fighters, Dwarves have been trained in warfare and have no restrictions on the weapons or armor they may use.

Fighting Giants: Giants, ogres, and similar giant-type creatures such as trolls are not good at fighting dwarves, and only inflict half the normal damage against them.

Keen Detection: Dwarves are good at spotting traps, slanting passages, and construction while underground.

Saving Throw: Dwarves do not use magic and, as such, are somewhat immune to its effects; they receive a +4 bonus on saving throws vs. magic (whether or not the alternate “Saving Throw Matrix” is used).

Languages: Dwarves are able to speak Mannish, Dwarvish, Goblinic, and Trollish.

Those encountered by the party

Trollkin



Trollkin are a group of related tribes of humanoids, with a fairly wide range of technological sophistication, physical size, and characteristics.  Men tend to refer to them based on size as “goblins” and “hobgoblins”, and there are rumors from the dwarves of even larger and more sophisticated Trollkin that dwell almost exclusively underground.

Okay, so, stats-wise, I’ve to this point used standard goblin and hobgoblin stats, which is pretty boring and generic, I know.  Where I’ve tried to bring in some interest is to make Trollkin more than just two dimensional walking XP sacs guarding treasure.  The PCs even ended up as chiefs of a Trollkin tribe for a while, but then messed up their sacred rites and started a tribal war, and who knows how that turned out.

So, act what later versions of D&D would probably call “lawful evil” despite being dedicated to the forces of Chaos (demons).  They take their traditions and religious values seriously – but those traditions and values are kind of, you know, evil.  So, for example, when the PCs challenged the chief of the Sword clan to single combat, a champion fought him, and that champion became the chief (despite being a dwarf).  All the trollkin were like “them’s the breaks” and acknowledged him as chief, even though they thought it was pretty weird.  When the PCs tried the same stunt on another tribe and cheated, however, they made the mistake of telling their shaman, assuming that an evil guy would be all about cheating and backstabbing.  But to him (a demon worshipping cannibal), breaking the trust of the blood rite was a horrible blasphemy and could not be borne.  So, he summoned a demon as he was killed by the PCs, the tribe dissolved into Chaos, and that’s the last we heard of them.

Oh, except for his assistant that the PCs captured, who adamantly refuses to go along with them, because he’s a devout believer in Mustakrakish, demon lord of trolls (yes, from the Dethklok song).

Because you’ve waded through all of that, here’s my quick and dirty blood magic rules (I want to find and/or come up with better ones, but this is simple and makes hordes of otherwise useless guys scary):

Trollkin Blood Magic:

A Trollkin shaman can invoke the powers of demonic patrons with appropriate sacrifice.  For every 1HD of sentient creature killed by a shaman, he can attack any target within sight for 1d6 damage.  If he begins a ritual, chanting and remaining stationary, drawing grotesque symbols with the blood of his sacrificial victims, he can “store” HD for an attack or a summoning. 

Summoning

As stated, a shaman may perform a ritual, slaying a sacrificial victim each round and storing up the victim’s HD.  At any point he may finish the ritual to attempt to summon a demonic being with HD up to sacrificed HD -1.  Chances of success are 1 in 6 for every HD stored above the target demon’s HD. Damaging the shaman mid-ritual will disrupt the ritual.  Consider any fun “interrupted summoning” consequences you like.

Example: Odo the head shaman of the sword tribe wants to punish the unbelieving upworlders for their blasphemous ways.  He begins chanting and grabbing nearby members of his tribe and viciously cutting their throats.  He can do that, because he’s the shaman.  The PCs hear his disturbing chant and see smoke starting to gather around him, so they direct their attacks his way, but are stopped by his bodyguards.  Each round, he sacrifices another hapless tribe member, until after 6 rounds, he announces he has completed the ritual and is attempting to summon a 4 HD demonic being (Erishkaltu, the sword clan’s totem demon and servant of Mustakrakish). He has a 2 in 6 chance (6 sacrifices – 4 demon HD = 2 in 6).  The PCs finally land a telling blow, killing Odo, but he had initiative and completed the ritual.  The referee rolls a 1, and the smoke begins to congeal into a tangible form. . .

Trolls

So, in the world of Fellhold, Trolls are related to trollkin (goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears) but are their own race.  They’re sort of a mash up of ogres and trolls and look more like the guy above than like the classic green rubbery dude.  They’re size L, but smaller than giants (basically, think Warhammer scale Ogres). But they still regenerate.  Here’s a “normal” troll’s stats:

Troll

HD: 6+3

AC: 4 [15]

HD: 6+3

Attack: Weapon (1d10) or Berzerk (claw/claw/bite for 1d4/1d4/1d8)

Saving Throw: 11

Special: Regenerates

Move: 12

Alignment: Chaos

Number Encountered: 2d6

Challenge Level/XP: 8/8000

Trolls regenerate 3 hp every round. They do not regenerate damage by fire or acid.  When below 10 HP, they go “berserk” and attack with claws and teeth instead of their weapon. Berserk fury ends when troll reaches 0 HP or the fight is over and he cools down, but not if he regenerates to over 10 HP.

I haven’t decided yet if Trolls regenerate from decapitation or total bodily destruction by means other than fire or acid.  The party has a mostly charred headless troll body in their caravan right now, and I’m really tempted to have it wake up in a few days, but we’ll see.

Like Trollkin, trolls are intelligent and have a society with rules and values, and also like trollkin, they’re evil and worship demons.  They’re just rigidly principled about it.  Trolls are super transactional.  They see all interactions as exchanges of value for value.  They are extremely “letter of the law” sorts of people.  Probably from a long history of asking for things from demons.  Normally they are very calm and terse, but when severely injured or pushed too far, they go berserk and attack in a blind rage with their bare claws and teeth.  So, they can be dealt with as any other intelligent species, but their rules of behavior might be strange and unsettling.

Major sources of inspiration visually are Paul Bonner’s stuff for Drakar och Demoner, along with every Warhammer ogre ever.  Behavior-wise, I gleaned some stuff from Magic: the Gathering’s Kamigawa (one of the few good things to come out of a misguided decision to read the novel that came in a “fat pack” of cards for the block), and now that I think about it, I’m ashamed to admit, from “Sword of Shannara” with its stoic, noble troll guys in thrall to the evil lord.  But my trolls are evil, just stoic and honorable.

Giants

Unlike Trolls and Trollkin, giants much more closely resemble men and dwarves.  The way I figure it, trolls and trollkin are one “genus”, and men, dwarves, and giants are another.  Not that I want to get too naturalistic with the ecology here, but I like folk lore giants that are just big, ugly, kinda dumb humans.  I’m keeping the scale of hill giant on up to fire giants and titans and the like pretty much the same, with a comparable ascending scale of sophistication.  Unfortunately for me, besides dishing out tons of damage, Hill Giants have proven to be kind of pushovers for well-equipped PCs and their army of hirelings.  I really need to rock the morale rules more carefully.  And it turns out that dwarves’ “half damage from giant type creatures” rule is insanely useful.

Giants speak a crude dialect of mannish (hill giants = mostly grunts and 1 syllable words, frost and fire giants = normal conversational skill, but sound like, well, monstery giants).  Giants aren't evil per se, just greedy, selfish, and prone to violence.  So, like I said, big, dumb people.  I’m thinking that the frost giants have a big ass keep up north and that they have the Trolls in unwilling serfdom, but we’ll see.

Elves?



So, I put this way down at the bottom to make it even less likely that my players will read it (shame on you if you’re here!), but I’m considering putting elves back into the mix.  Initially, I was so sick of ‘elf-bloat’ and I wanted to stick to a sword & sorcery kind of Germania that I thought elves wouldn’t fit (yes, I know elves come from Germanic myth, even Tolkien’s, but they’ve been so D&D-ified that I was sick of them).  Now, though, reading about Zak S.’s pitiless white elves, I’m thinking there might be a place for them as sort of Others-cum-Melniboneans living up in frozen palaces in the icy wastes, probably only a few decadent remnants of apathetic, cruel, graceful aristocrats.  Maybe with armies of frost wights, I dunno.  I’m still pretty torn.

The Long Recap

Grasping, Avaricious PCs - the best kind

So, long time no recap.  As mentioned in my little apology for non-blogging/calling myself to action post, I’m going to completely change up my style for recaps.  The whole ‘pulp adventure narrator’ tone was dumb, and I was dumb, but now I’m better, and I’m going to actually talk about player decisions and my decisions and how the session went down and so forth.  Feedback on my refereeing style are quite welcome (even if they’re “wow, that sounds super boring, you suck”. If so, you’re a dick, but it might be useful input). 

For the too long, didn’t read crowd, feel free to scroll down to the rules at the bottom of the post in bold italic (a method for determining what players have heard body parts of a slain foe might be good for).

At any rate, looking back, yikes, a lot has happened.  The last recap was for sessions 13 and 14, and last night we played session 27.  So, yeah.  Shortly after where we left of there, Blum the wizard wandered into a seemingly empty room full of scrolls and got himself killed by a poisonous giant centipede.  Considering Blum’s sleep spells had been astoundingly useful, and that he had been rather deadly with his quarterstaff (“The Widowmaker”), he was greatly missed.  Add to this that Blum’s player is the one with the most difficult schedule, and therefore the most often absent, his character took on a sort of “mascot” role for the party, and as the first PC death (astonishing, I know!) the party decided he deserved a proper memorial. More on the memorial later.

So, for reasons that remain obscure to me even now, after returning to town to properly bury the body on their shared property, they decide that the best revenge would be to go take out the seemingly unending force of trollkin they fought and ran away from (I think the rationale *might* have been: they made us flee where we were exploring, the new place we went because they were scary killed Blum, therefore it’s their fault).  After another sizeable battle against prepared foes, a big scary chief showed up with his big scary bodyguard *from behind them*, and feeling trapped (they were pretty trapped), they decided to try to call out the chief mano a mano.  Turns out, that’s actually a sacred and respected ritual to this tribe of trollkin (the “blood rite”) and the party had killed enough trollkin to make it a credible offer (trollkin are kinda weird that way).

After some haggling over how it’ll work, it ends up with Yllgrad (dwarf fighter) and Dag (former bandit sergeant now henchman of Bryni – and one of the most effective characters, not just because he started out level 2, but because he *always* rolls well) square off against the Trollkin chief (he had a name, but he’s dead now, so whatever) and his biggest, baddest champion.  Oh, with no armor.  With knives.  Yllgrad’s player tries to get clever by spreading some centipede venom on the blade, and I rule it’ll have a weakened effect due to being old (it’s already the weakest kind of centipede, so the poison had no effect on the fight).

By ganging up on one guy at a time, and narrowly escaping death (I think 1 hit point left for Dag, the toughest character in the party at that point), they defeat the chief and his champion and, surprise, are now chiefs of the sword clan! So, what do they do with their newly acquired evil humanoid tribe?  Well, besides take half their loot, they put them to work cutting down one of the massive statues of an evil sorceror dotting this level, cut away walls of the dungeon so that the huge thing can be maneuvered out (thankfully they were only on level 2), and then transfer it to human workmen on the surface to take into town to be the giant monument to their fallen mage.  So now the party has a 20 or 30 foot tall statue of an evil demon-worshipping sorceror in their yard, with the name of their dead friend carved in the base buried under it. So that’s cool.

At any rate, the party also discovered a treasure map in the room that killed Blum, and it marked the location of a mine up in the Trellheim mountains.  They organized an expedition, got ambushed by giants, hid for a while, then snuck past them and found the mine.  It was haunted by the ghosts of the miners killed in the cave in.  Only by invoking Volsungr, the god of forge and craftsmanship (and mining, apparently) could they lay the ghosts to rest.  Oh, and the dwarf’s player came up with the death blessing of followers of Volsungr all by himself, and it was pretty cool (Volsungr, find my path).  This also narrowly avoided one of the clerics of other gods from invoking the wrong god in the mine and the ghosts turning all scary, so that was good for them.  Turns out it’s a mine of Volsungril, this world’s equivalent of adamantium/mithril/whatever, and they found a small nugget of the stuff (worth a crazy huge amount of money) apparently as a gift from laid-to-rest ghosts.  Of course now the game is about trying to secure the mine of infinite wealth and magical weapons and nothing else, but I figure that will have enough complications to be alright.

So, they returned the big city (Mickleheim) to hire a bunch of fighty hirelings, because Silverdelf is pretty much tapped out (too many killed and maimed), and decide to launch a huge expedition into the mountains to clear out the giants.  But first they figure they’ll get their tribe of trollkin and take them along too (not realizing that this is potentially problematic in all kinds of ways).

Well, while down there, they get the idea to get an even bigger hoard of trollkin to help them kill the giants, and so they attempt the same blood rite trick with the neighboring rival spear clan.  Turns out that the spear clan does their blood rite a little differently, and the rolls go a little better for the chief than for Yllgrad, and right when it looks like he’s going to lose, the players come up with the plan of interrupting the fight with a thrown spear made to look like it came from the watching spear clan reps.  Well, chaos ensues, the players slaughter all of the spear clan guys, and manage to convince the remaining sword clan guys that the spear clan started the trouble.

When they get back, though, they level with Odo, the sword clan shaman, about what happened, and they say they want to have a big party to get everybody fired up to go start a war with the spear clan.  Odo’s a devout (demon worshipping) shaman, though, and the blood rite is sacred, so instead of a party, he summons a demon to attack the party, the party kills him right as he completes it, and he curses them with his dying breath.  The party fights the demon, and it’s disappointingly easy for them to kill.  And the clan scatters in terror.

Poking around the now abandoned sword clan lair, they find Odo’s assistant and end up keeping him as a prisoner, and then decide to go down a set of ornate stairs and find themselves in what appears to be a temple and/or tomb of the old sorcerors, who they find out were called “the Urog”.

While exploring the temple to this Iron God of the Urog, Yllgrad is struck by a terrible vision of a trollkin going crazy and murdering and dismembering and eating his whole tribe before running deeper into the catacombs.  So the players know this place is creepy.  They find a warning inscription with instructions about going into the sacred catacombs, and two of the three entrances are flanked by basins full of nasty water and teeth.

Well, sure enough, they don’t follow the instructions, and are struck by horrible hallucinations after a few rounds of exploring and pushing a giant block around.  After they flee from the hallucinations, they decide maybe now’s not the time to explore the super creepiness, especially if the offering required by that room of skeletal hands is that they cut off somebody’s left hand, so they head back to town.

Back in town, they once again decide to return to the mountains to clear out the giants so that they can have a safe passage to the mine.  Did I mention they hired 20 soldiers in addition to their usual retinue of hirelings?  I decided that if they were going to treat them like red shirts, so was I, so these guys are especially prone to dying horrible deaths, like when holding a trip line in front of the entrance to the giant’s cave and being sent flying off when the giant runs into it.

One distinguished himself by volunteering to be “bait” for a counter ambush on the giants, and he narrowly came out alive after getting clipped in the head by a mule flung by the giant.  This crazy old coot looks like King Bumi, is named Helm, and is apparently wiry, jaded, and willing to do incredibly stupid things for reasonably small amounts of money.  A perfect hireling, he’ll probably stick around even if the other surviving members of the 20 don’t.

So, they clear out this cave of giants, including the women and adolescents, make surprisingly short work of high HD, high damage opponents because apparently 20 to hit rolls + standard cross bow damage = dead giants.  So far everybody and everything has had D6’s for hit dice, but I’m *strongly* considering upgrading monsters to D8’s, since a standard weapon in a standard fighting man’s hands does d8 damage (using Akratic Wizardry’s weapon damage chart).

There’s some debate about what to do with the surviving giants, but in the end, the party decides to keep one adult female, and one adolescent male alive to try to sell off to House Dagaeca back in Mickleheim (they’ve mentioned their desire to buy exotic beasts before. We’ll see whether giants qualify as “beasts” or not, assuming they get them back safely).  They’ve also heard conflicting rumors considering the medicinal and magical properties of giant testicles, hands, and tongues, but decide that cutting off those parts is a little too icky for rumors they don’t even know to be true.

Then a posse of 3 trolls rolls up, and ask for a parley.  Turns out the trolls are glad to see the giants gone, and offer safe passage along the path in exchange for being given the surviving giants.  Yllgrad’s player ends up flubbing the negotiation by demanding too much and insulting the trolls (and this is *minutes* after introducing the “Good at” and “Bad At” skill system found here, and him picking “Bad at detecting lies, haggling, and negotiations”, so that was perfect).  When the troll gets all insulted, Yllgrad attacks him, and a general melee ensues.  The leader, who was negotiating, goes down, one of the other trolls grabs him and runs while the other holds off the PCs and their horde of hirelings (down to 13 out of original 20 at this point).  After downing that troll and chasing the others for a bit, they see a smoke signal going up, and they know that a troll village is nearby, so they decide to high tail it out of there.  Despite this being the first time the group has met trolls, and despite trolls being somewhat mysterious to people, Yllgrad’s player knows the score and scorches up the body, but they decide to keep it to see if troll parts will sell for anything. 

Whew, and that brings us up to speed. Here’s some rules to make this long read through a little more worthwhile:

The characters have killed something and want to know if any of its parts are worth anything.  Ask the players which of their characters have heard anything about valuable body parts from this creature.  For every player that says his character has, roll a D10 and consult the following chart:

“I heard that ________ is a cure for/ingredient in/component of. . .”

1. Eyeballs
2. Gallbladder
3. Hands
4. Heart
5. Intestines
6. Appendix
7. Testicles
8. Penis
9. Tongue
10. Feet

Pick something that seems to go with it, or something totally out there (or use a random potion/spell chart of some kind).  Tell the players that’s what they’ve heard. If multiple dice come up for the same body part, feel free to make up different uses they’ve heard for it, or to say they’ve all heard the same rumor.  That’s what the players know.  It’s up to you to decide if the rumors are true, but you might assign a straight 50/50 chance or 10% per die that came up the same body part, or whatever else.  But don’t tell the players that until they’ve tried to unload the parts or make something out of them.

 

 

Moving Away from Actual Play Reports

[UPDATE 1/6/21: I no longer support spending money on products that benefit Zak S, or giving him positive attention and connection. The short version is that I find credible claims that he has engaged in unacceptable behavior and not made up for it. For more detail, see here for the core of the accusations. To get Zak's side of things, he maintains this separate blog from his main one to post updates on the legal status of these complaints. 

Please consider these claims and make your own decision on their validity, and the implications thereof, before either supporting or shunning Zak.]

So, again with the absence of blogging thing.  You know, apologies, et cetera.  Reading through awesome OSR/DIY D&D blogs has made me realize something important, though: my “fictionalized” accounts of each session were ass.  Though in my heart of hearts I may have dreams of writing fiction, this here gaming blog is not the place for it.  More than my questionable literary style, in recounting a bunch of in-fiction actions, I’m leaving out the best stuff.  What’s fun and interesting about D&D (and especially what is fun and interesting about reading about other people playing D&D) is the interactions at the table, the problem solving, the jokes, et cetera.  “The fiction” as a coherent thing only really matters to the participants, I think, other than as the context for and product of the interesting stuff.
The other big thing I realized is that I’ve been holding off on using this blog for hammering out some of the more nitty gritty stuff for Fellhold for fear of my players seeing it and spoiling the surprise.  I’ve decided that this isn’t useful or super necessary.  Any game content that might spoil stuff for the players will just get a big fat SPOILERS warning of some kind at the top, and that will be that.  If my players read it, they’re adults, they can still have a good time anyhow. Especially since most of what I’ll be hashing out here will be systems and tables rather than plot points or secrets or what have you.
Finally, after reading this post by Mr. Rients, and this post by Zak S., I’ve decided that my campaign needs to be more awesome.  I’ll admit it, I’ve succumbed to the artsy fartsy urges that Mr. Rients talks about and limited my setting (no elves or halflings, for instance).  I need to continually remind myself that whatever cool aesthetic vision I may have for the world and adventures in it, primarily it is the setting for a game, the players’ characters are the focus of that game, and what makes this more fun than writing up a tedious fantasy novel is the surprises I get from interacting with other human beings.  So, I’m going to relax my iron self-imposed “genre restraints” in the face of things that are totally flippin’ sweet.
Oh, I lied. Finally finally, I’m going to strive for more posts with more gaming content (monster interpretations, stats, whatever).