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09
August
2012
I recently discovered that there is a small convention that takes place in Toronto focused on old-school table-top gaming. OSRCon takes place this weekend. It sounds like it will be fairly small as conventions go, and the focus seems to be about running and playing games. If you are in or around Toronto it seems worth checking out. How easy is it to bump into people who are into old-school D&D? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on July 30, 2012
There are so many old D&D modules out there that sound a little bit interesting. I decided to write out exactly what older D&D modules and books I want. The goal here was to stop myself from spending money like an idiot on anything and everything I might stumble upon, but also have enough books to buy that I can spend money like an idiot. I don’t consider myself a collector of D&D books, but there is certainly some aspect of collecting at play in my behaviour. I also have a (bad) habit of buying more books than I could possibly hope to read in a reasonable amount of time. I wanted to pick a small set of old books and then forget any others exist.
In the end I decided to look for the following books:
I’ve picked up a few of these books already, finding them used on eBay and Amazon. I have a question for you: have I missed any obviously amazing D&D or AD&D 1e books?1
I have no interest whatsoever in anything from 3rd Edition. There is a part of me that wants to buy up all the 2nd Edition Dark Sun books, but for now that’s not something I plan to do. ↩︎
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24
July
2012
I have mixed feelings about the Dragonfoot forums. They are a pretty great resource for all things old-school D&D. On the other hand they are also filled with all the horribleness one finds in a forum of reasonable size. Still, I don’t think there is a better source for stuff like this: the “B1 - In Search of Unknown” index thread is full resources and reviews of the D&D module In Search of the Unknown. It’s probably got a link to anything of interest about that module.
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22
July
2012
Over the last few days i’ve been working on a little web application to help Lamentations of the Flame Princess players go through the motions of casting the Magic-User’s Summon spell. The spell lets players summon a demon to aid them–hopefully. The LotFP rules outline what sort of demon will show up and whether or not it will listen to the players. It’s a crazy spell. There are lots of tables and dice rolling. It’s a complicated enough procedure that it produced a thread on the LotFP forum to discuss how exactly the spell works. From the discussion there I figured turning the spell into a little web-application would be a small fun project.
For those interested, the site was created using the Python (mini) web framework, Flask, and is hosted on Dreamhost.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on July 19, 2012
Tagged: readingthedmg ad&d dmg gygax
I picked up copies of the new Premium AD&D 1st Edition reprints earlier this week at Hairy Tarantula here in Toronto. I was on the fence about getting them as I don’t have much interest in actually playing AD&D 1e. I decided to buy them because I heard they were great books on role-playing games in general, and an important part of the history of the game. I’m also a big fan of the art from that era–back when no one working for TSR really knew how to draw. The reprints are really well done1 and I’m quite happy with my purchase.2
The Dungeon Master Guide is the biggest of the three books that comprise the core AD&D 1e rules, and it is fascinating. I plan to post little snippets from the book as I make my way through it.
A word of warning. Many products might purport to be satisfactory for use with ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, but only those noted as OFFICIAL or Authorized AD&D items should be accepted. Do not settle for substitutes or second-rate material in your campaign; ask for approved AD&D products only!
I can only imagine what was happening in the table top gaming community back in the 70s, but clearly Gygax was unimpressed with the work being done by 3rd party publishers. I wonder what his thoughts about the OSR community would be. Gygax’s writing is full of exuberance and passion, but the start of the Dungeon Master Guide is full of talk of official rules and playing the game properly. It seems to run counter to ethos of old school gaming, as I understand it.
Of course, we then get to a table about contracting parasites while adventuring so why are you griping about Gary Gygax? Please!
Wizards of the Coast wrote about the process they went through to create these reprints, and it’s really quite incredible. All three books pre-date digital typesetting, so they had to redone by hand. The designers at Wizards of the Coast had to recreate the layouts from scratch. It’s actually quite amazing when you look at a page from the original books and then the reprints. ↩︎
I need to begin a moratorium on book buying. ↩︎
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on July 16, 2012
I’ve added a new page to this site, listing the D&D books I currently own.1 I like seeing what books (and PDFs) other people own, as it’s a good source for finding new books that might be worth reading. That page will also be a good place to link back to reviews i’ve written about the books I’ve bought. For someone who doesn’t actually play that much D&D, I own a lot of books on the subject. I suppose this page also exists to shame myself into not buying more D&D books.
I shamelessly stole this idea from Untimately, which I recently mentioned on this blog. ↩︎
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on July 15, 2012
I woke up the morning following the death of Osrik, my dwarf paladin, realizing the character had a power that would let him re-roll a missed hit when bloody. I’m not sure this would have turned the fight that cost the character his life, but it certainly would have helped. This got me thinking about 4th Edition and its pantheon of classes and powers a little bit more.
Playing–and killing–a few characters in 4th Edition will teach you that the combat mechanics of the game are important to grasp.1 With the Encounters game I participate in I had been playing characters whose abilities the official character builder picked for me. I found I spent the down time between my turns in a battle scanning my list of abilities, trying to pick the one that seemed most appropriate for the situation at hand. This is a sure fire recipe for death and destruction. It can also be kind of boring.
Looking around the table I could see that I was not the only one suffering from this problem. D&D is ostensibly a game where you can do anything you can imagine. That’s what makes it so much greater than a video game: the possibilities are endless. The way 4th Edition has been designed really discourages that sort of play. This is probably the biggest weakness with 4th Edition. When playing my Warlock in my regular 4th Edition game, I spend most of my turns in combat doing some permutation of: moving at least three squares to gain concealment; cursing my nearest enemy; casting an eldritch blast. No matter what the situation may be this is almost always my best choice of action.
The flip side to this is that the enumeration of all these classes and powers is 4th Edition’s biggest strength. You can quantify the challenge of a battle in a way you really can’t with any accuracy in earlier editions of the game. If you’re interested in tactical combat 4th Edition is really unrivalled when it comes to simulating a battle. I don’t think you could do something like Forth Core Death Matches with any of the older versions of D&D. I’m not getting the most enjoyment out of 4th Edition because I haven’t invested the time in learning what options my character has, and how they best work with those of my fellow adventurers. The question for any 4th Edition gamer is whether this is something they even want to do.2
People often compare 4th Edition D&D to a video game. Certainly Wizards of the Coast used a lot of modern video game language when describing character classes and the mechanics of the game, but I suspect that’s because that language is going to be most familiar to new D&D players. I think 4th Edition has more in common with Magic: The Gathering.3 You and your fellow adventures are working together to produce a winning mix of classes and powers–this seems analogous to deck building in Magic. The focus on game balance is a natural extension of this. Magic is a successful collectable card game because there is no one deck to rule them all. Wizards of the Coast seem to have taken what they learned making Magic and tried to apply that to D&D, with mixed results.
I’m curious to see if Wizards of the Coast, or the wider D&D community, do interesting things with 4th Edition once the 5th Edition of D&D has been released. I feel like there is a lot to 4th Edition, if you can get past the fact it’s not exactly the same as every version of D&D that proceeded it.
Some might say they are the only thing to grasp in 4th Edition. ↩︎
Wizards of the Coast even sell the various powers available for the various classes as packs of cards! ↩︎
Rebecca of Dungeons and Donuts recently made a little hand-out for generating 4th Edition characters. Rather than bothering with classes or powers, she decided to ask players to pick a role and pick from a list of abstract powers. Players could then make up all the fluff that goes along with the role and powers they’ve picked. I’m a big fan of this idea. ↩︎
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12
July
2012
There are lots of great blogs about D&D out there on the Internet, but one that puts out consistently good stuff is Untimately by Toronto’s own Brendan S. His most recent post is on the rules that compromise Original D&D, distilling everything in the 3 brown books into concise lists of rules. A recent post that was particularly creative was about his take on schools of magic. If you’re into D&D you should be reading Untimately.
by Ramanan Sivaranjan on July 09, 2012
As I have mentioned in previous posts about Carcosa, Geoffrey McKinney seems to be working quite hard to say as little as possible about the nature of his “official” game world. There is very little exposition about Carcosa’s history, people, culture, etc. Each section of the book reveals a little bit of Carcosa’s story. The books bestiary reveals the most about the setting, hinting at the nature of the world and some of its history.
The vast majority of the monsters discussed in the bestiary are unique. They are crazy grotesque beasts one might find in a H.P. Lovecraft story.1 The gods of Carcosa are for the most part absolutely terrifying. These creatures have stat blocks and descriptions, like your typical kobold or goblin, so they are ready for your players to battle to the death. I mean, why give a monster hit dice if its not meant to be killed?
A few these monsters reside in particular places (hexes) in Carcosa. In the PDF version of the book, this is mentioned in their description.2 In the hardback you only learn of their home on the planet when reading through the hex descriptions later in the book.
Here looms the great and extinct black volcanic Mount Voormith’adreth, honeycombed with weird and outré caverns, and beneath which bubbles and heaves Shub-Niggurath. – The description of Hex 0402, Carcosa
Of all the old ones that reside on Carcosa, Shub-Niggurath appears to be the most important. Two of the races mentioned in the first section of the book, The Great Race and the Primordial Ones, are spawns of Shub-Niggurath. In addition, 4 other races mentioned in the bestiary are his children, so to speak. The most typical monster found on Carcosa is a Spawn of Shub-Niggurath, which can appear as almost anything. (A disgusting mutant tree? Why not. A horrible giant fish? Of course.) There is an appendix at the back of the book that contains random tables to help the DM with generating these spawns. This one monster description provides a lot of clues into the cosmology of Carcosa.
The remaining monsters of Carcosa provide further insight into what’s happening on the planet. One of the few non-unique monsters are dinosaurs. Of course, this being Carcosa they are expected to be of a crazy mutant variety. Similarly one finds giant jungle ants wandering from hex to hex. Lakes in Carcosa are likely home to to giant lake monsters. These sorts of beasts paired with the descriptions of the 13 races of men hints at a King Kong style world.
As mentioned at the start of the book, there are space aliens. From their description we learn that they originally crash landed on Carcosa a millennia ago, but since then they have established bases and come and go as they please. It’s their presence and their technology that makes the world a little bit less King Kong and perhaps a bit more Flash Gordon.
There are all sorts of slimes, puddings, and oozes similar to those encountered in your typical game of D&D, but with a Carcosa twist. Many of the unique monsters discussed in the bestiary are also some variation of disgusting ooze-like thing with tentacles. If it’s not a giant-mutant-monster it’s probably a creepy slime.
The illustrations by Rich Longmore really bring this portion of the book to life.
The bestiary ends with a brief description (without stats) of the long extinct snake-men. Here we learn some more of the history of Carcosa.
For tens of millions of years the civilizations of the Snake- Men were mighty upon the planet of Carcosa. They delved deeply into the arcane mysteries and laid the foundations of the systematic practice of sorcery. From shambling man- apes the Snake-Men bred the various races of humans to be sacrifices efficacious for their sorcery. At the height of their powers, the Snake-Men destroyed themselves by releasing ultratelluric forces impossible to control.
What else is there to say?
Finally we get to the hex descriptions, which is what it’s all about.
As I had mentioned when discussing the sorcerer rituals, each set of rituals deals with one of these unique monsters. The two sections work together to provider a fuller description and background of the monster in question. ↩︎
The level of cross-referencing in the PDF is one big advantage it has over the physical book. Figuring out how everything fits together is much easier when browsing the PDF. ↩︎
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09
July
2012
The author of Carcosa, Geoffrey McKinney, mentioned in a recent interview that he published Carcosa because people on the Dragonfoot forums seemed interested in the game he was running. This being the internet, we can travel back in time and look at the first thread where McKinney starts discussing his setting and what he hopes to accomplish with it.
In a thread over on Original D&D Forums McKinney announces that he is going to start selling a little booklet about his home campaign setting.