Secret Door Techniques

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I was just reading the LotFP module The Grinding Gear. It has lots of secret doors, and none of them have any mechanisms described. This stuck out after just recently reading this post, OSR Contradiction 2: Player Skill vs. Minimal Dungeons, over at Roles, Rules & Rolls. Further, the Grinding Gear secrets are not “optional” extras; they are required to proceed with the adventure. Both Hammers of the God and Death Frost Doom also have major areas (as in, one third or more of the module content) that can only be accessed if a secret door is found (though some of these secret doors provide specific opening procedures).

When searching for information about how other people have run The Grinding Gear, I came across this LotFP forum post (*). Apparently, Moldvay only allows one try per character per secret door, but no other edition of D&D has a similar rule. This is one of those minor rules variations that has major repercussions on the nature of the game (and module compatibility). Jim goes as far as to say:

My entire style of running (and writing!) adventures just wouldn’t work with a “one chance only” approach, and to repeat again, I had no idea this was a rule in any version of the grand ol’ game, let alone having any idea that people actually played that way.

See also the comments quoted in Zak’s review of The Grinding Gear. (It is worth noting in passing that, unlike B/X D&D, LotFP search is a skill that can be improved, though only by the specialist class.) But then Jeff Rients chimes in:

I use the Moldvay/LL ‘one try only’ rule. It makes elven door-finding and dwarvish sliding wall detection more useful. And since the rule is one try per person, it encourages bringing more people on the mission.

And swords, wands and artifacts that detect secret doors are more valuable if you can’t easily find them.

Also, I like the game to have some roads that are just as real as the one trod by the PCs, but for some reason or another they can never go down them.

And then, how does one handle secret doors that don’t have any description if one wants to support descriptive trap finding? Courtney of Hack & Slash implies that such descriptive trap finding was the way the original wargaming pioneers played. This is, I think, the best statement of his method:

You don’t roll a die to determine if you find and open a secret door, you gather information by asking questions and using your personal smarts to make choices to test the situation to discover the door. Then you make choices about how to open the door.* There is one specific way to open the door. There isn’t a ‘proper’ solution to the encounter because there is no reason you are entitled to find the secret door and no reason it is necessary to find the secret door.
…

*But what about searching for secret doors, talking with monsters, and bashing doors? Situations that are common but just use some random game system to determine the result? How is that player skill?

Unlike modern systems where there is no consequences for failure, each of those is a choice that must be made. Do we risk one turn searching and increase the chance of running into a monster? Do we give up surprise to attempt to parley with the monsters? Do we risk the chance of monsters hearing us bash this door? Each is a choice, weighed with consequences for the attempt and for failure. That is why those are examples of skill based play.

Sorry for the extended quote, but it seems important to be clear about the various positions. So, the options are:

Non-Moldvay: 1 in 6, as many times as desired; cost: 1 turn
Moldvay: 1 in 6, once chance; cost: 1 turn
Courtney: description; non-Moldvay option available

My general mode of operation recently has been none of these. My rule has been that if a secret door is indicated and no description is provided, then searching the area is sufficient to locate the door without making any roll. Just saying “I search the room” is not enough (but it does give you a d6 throw chance), but saying “I spend three turns searching the 30 foot north wall” is.

This is clearly not one of those oh my god you’re so stupid you’re doing it wrong kind of things. If Mr. Rients, Mr. Raggi, and Mr. Hack & Slash all have different (and incompatible!) approaches, I think the only conclusion to be drawn is that even within the relatively restricted field of traditional D&D (let’s say this set includes TSR D&D prior to Second Edition and the associated retro-clones and simulacra) there are several common methods of play. Learn how they work, pick your favorite, and modify any modules you run to fit your method of choice.

* Mostly unrelated, it seems like the original name of Hammers of the God was Old Miner’s Shame, which is pretty cool.

Pathfinder Beginner Box 2

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My first post about the Beginner Box focused on the Hero’s Handbook, which contains the rules for creating PCs. Here I am going to talk about the referee side of the set, the Game Master’s Guide. It starts out with a simple dungeon adventure which is not bad, despite the fact that the map really does look like a set of video game screen shots. However, later on in their section on creating dungeons, they do use a more down to earth map that looks like it was drawn by hand and even make the following remark on page 31:

Your dungeon maps don’t need to look professionally drawn like the map for Black Fang’s Dungeon—the hand-drawn map of Raven’s Watch works just as well.

This is a strategy used several places in the Beginner Box; they lead with glitz and then qualify their recommendations further on, and it works well most of the time.

Excerpt from Black Fang’s Dungeon

There is a decent selection of monsters (forty-something) and some of them are moderately high CR, but there is not as much variety or content as the old basic sets. Each monster entry takes half of a page. The higher-CR monsters include salamander (CR 6), medusa (CR 7), manticore (CR 5), mummy (CR 5), ghost (CR7), and black dragon (CR 8). There is a bias towards enemies that can be defeated directly, but at least they included some stretch targets. And poison is so weak now. If you fail your save against giant spider venom you get all of a -1 on attack and damage rolls (cumulative if you get hit again). Seriously, that’s it.

The XP rewards for defeating monsters are off the charts! A ½ CR zombie gives 200 XP. I guess that’s what happens when you take away treasure XP, but I would think that some of the slack would be picked up by XP for solving puzzles, surviving traps, and achieving other goals. I think OD&D gives 100 XP per hit die, but those monsters are far deadlier. Using the rules as written, I bet PCs would level really quickly.

Just like the weapons chart that I mentioned in the previous post, these monster listings also somehow gave me the feeling of old console RPG supplements, like the Dragon Warrior poster below.

Dragon Warrior Monsters

Much info is presented in random table form, including adventure seeds, magic items, and most importantly encounters. This is another case where they wrote something (on page 84) that made me cringe:

By using the random encounter tables for that terrain, you can create fun battles for the PCs without putting in a lot of work.

But then corrected it it shortly thereafter (same page):

Although these tables are filled with monsters, you can have interesting non-combat random encounters, such as a strange statue, corpses from a battle, religious pilgrims looking for a shrine, and so on.

It would be nice if they had emphasized that not all monster encounters need to be combat either. Speaking of which, I really feel the lack of the traditional social mechanics. There are no rules for retainers, encounter reactions, or morale. This is the single biggest shortcoming of Pathfinder. Of course, it would not be that hard to house rule them in, though you would need to make up appropriate morale numbers. I also miss the “number appearing” and “percent chance in lair” info.

I think it might be fun to use literally nothing outside of the Beginner Box for a game. Use the town of Sandpoint and the surrounding hinterlands. Populate them using all of the entries on the d12 table of “dungeon storylines” and the seven sample “additional quests.” And make sure all the monsters have a place. Maybe roll for enmities. Another attractive option that comes to mind is to use the Third Edition Necromancer Games world and modules, but still cap the PC level at 5. So, if the player’s want to take on the harder challenges, they will need to be very creative.

Pathfinder Beginner Box 1

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I recently picked up a copy of the Pathfinder Beginner Box. I’ve been curious about this product for a while as a sort of rules-lite version of Third Edition, perhaps also playable as a complete game (a sort of E5). The very positive reviews from many parts of the OSR have also played no small part (for examples, see OD&D Discussion here, Babbling Bane here, and Tenkar here).

My exposure to Third Edition is very spotty. I missed the 3E years almost entirely. So this is also a more systematic and thorough introduction to the 3E lineage for me. In this post, I will focus on my initial impressions and on the contents of the Hero’s Handbook (the player facing part of the rules). Most of this will be from the perspective of someone who already knows how to play tabletop RPGs and just wants to use the rules, but I will also note in passing that this might be the best introductory set for a new player as well (up there with Mentzer Basic D&D and the LotFP Grindhouse Edition).

The visuals are not bad. I’m not a huge Wayne Reynolds fan, but I like the level of detail in some of his illustrations, and his work for the box cover is quite good (the two adventurers facing off against the black dragon). I’m also fond of the example fighter picture. Valeros looks like a badass, but is still grounded in reality. In terms of game aesthetics, the overall effect is reasonable. The heavily stylized “dungeon punk” look is subdued, though there is a bit of a fantasy seventeenth century vibe. There is only one silly fantasy weapon (the starknife, which is sort of like an oversized shuriken with a handle in the middle so that it can either be wielded as a melee weapon or thrown).

The graphic design is reminiscent of a video game manual, and somewhat surprisingly that is a positive thing. I remember paging through the strategy guides for early Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy games and using them as inspiration for my tabletop games. It is that feeling that I get looking through the Beginner Box manuals.

Dragon Warrior Explorer’s Handbook

I really like how the class descriptions and spells are presented in “level-up” blocks, but the power inflation is notable in comparison to TSR editions. Each class has a few extra goodies (like the wizard’s “arcane bond” feature which gives the character a magic item that allows casting one spell per day without preparation). Hit dice are d10 (fighter), d8 (cleric and rogue), and d6 (wizard). (People can’t seem to stop bumping the thief’s hit die up.) Full HP are granted at first level. In terms of complexity, the caster classes take up 6 pages each (this includes all spells available for the levels covered) and the fighter and rogue take up two pages each (though half the fighter class is hidden in the section on feats and half the rogue class is hidden in the section on skills). In general, this feels manageable and flexible. This level of power advancement is not a problem if you top out at 5th level.

Both of the caster classes are unfortunately a bit bland, and not in an the archetypal “imagination fuel” way. The available wizard schools are universalist, evocation, and illusion (boring) and each grant a few extra powers usable several times per day (for example, the illusionist can use a magical disguise once per day and the evocation specialist gets a free daily burning hands and some force missiles). Cleric “orisons” (that is, at-will powers), include light, read magic, and detect magic. That’s right, as long as you have a cleric, you never need to worry about light sources. Wizard cantrips (at-will powers, in Pathfinder), include detect magic, mage hand (minor telekinesis), ray of frost (1d3 damage with 30 foot range), and read magic. This is a bit more than I would like characters to begin with, but I can work with it. The augury spell (available to clerics at third level) is an abomination and should be excised.

The fighter, wizard, and rogue are all recognizable takes on the traditional classes, though the rogue is significantly more combat-focused. The cleric, however, bears less relation to the traditional mace-wielding undead-smiting holy warrior. This seems like a strange choice for an introductory set. None of the gods resonate with me; they all seem like generic invented fantasy gods.

Demihumans keep getting bigger and bigger! Dwarves are described as on average about a foot shorter than humans. So, dwarves must be around 4½ to 5½ feet tall. That is much larger than I have ever pictured dwarves in a fantasy world. And elves are described as taller than humans. There’s nothing really wrong with these changes, I just think they are odd choices for default archetypal fantasy races. These are minor aesthetic details, but still worth noting.

The overall impression I get from the Beginner Box is that the system is tractable, and this is a very good thing. It seems like it would be possible to understand relatively completely without an obscene time investment. Character generation, though still more complicated than I would like, is not too cumbersome. As Zenopus says, the Pathfinder Beginner Box really is an homage to the classic basic sets, and it includes many nods to the style of traditional D&D as well, though many of them are contained in the Game Master’s Guide and so will be covered in another post.

One Edition to Rule Them All

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Source: http://xkcd.com/927/

Find Traps as Saving Throw

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I was reading about traps over at The Dragon’s Flagon, and that got me to thinking about find traps as a saving throw, which is an idea I first came across over at Courtney’s blog (see his set of answers to the 20 quick rules questions). To quote:

Finding traps is a saving throw, and works as such.

Thus, anyone can interact with the fictional world and discover or avoid traps purely by investigation and reason. Note that this doesn’t necessarily require any particular mechanical knowledge on the part of the referee or players (though you can go there if you want), it just requires determining trigger mechanism, effect, and clues. Remember, traps don’t need to be mechanical, or even explainable. Traps can be driven by magic, ancient technology, or incomprehensible clockwork.

I think this is really a special case of a more general principle. In some sense, all of combat is also a (complicated) saving throw. If, through smart play, a player can figure out a way to defeat or slay their enemies without a single attack roll, good for them. (Some examples: luring monsters into a trap, flooding a room, burning down a structure rather than engaging in an encounter, starting an avalanche to bury an enemy encampment, ad infinitum.)

Here is a brief history of trap finding and the evolution of the thief class function. As you will see, the scope of “find traps” has steadily increased, the major inflection points being the poor wording of the Moldvay Basic rulebook (this is still my favorite edition, but the description of the thief class is pretty unforgivable) and the generalization of the skill approach in Third Edition.

Supplement I Greyhawk; 1975 (page 4):

— open locks by picking or foiling magical closures
— remove small trap devices (such as poisoned needles)

Holmes Basic; 1977 (page 6):

Thieves — are humans with special abilities to strike a deadly blow from behind, climb sheer surfaces, hide in shadows, filch items and pick pockets, move with stealth, listen for noises behind closed doors, pick locks and remove small traps such as poisoned needles.

AD&D Players Handbook; 1978 (page 27):

Finding/removing traps pertains to relatively small mechanical devices such as poisoned needles, spring blades, and the like. Finding is accomplished by inspection, and they are nullified by mechanical removal or by being rendered harmless.

Moldvay Basic; 1980 (page B10):

They are the only characters who can open locks and find traps without using magic to do so. Due to these abilities, a thief is often found in a normal group of adventurers.

Second Edition Player’s Handbook; 1989 (page 39):

Find/Remove Traps: The thief is trained to find small traps and alarms. These include poisoned needles, spring blades, deadly gases, and warning bells. This skill is not effective for finding deadfall ceilings, crushing walls, or other large, mechanical traps.

3.5 Player’s Handbook; 2003 (page 81):

You can find secret doors, simple traps, hidden compartments, and other details not readily apparent.
…
The Search skill lets a character discern some small detail or irregularity through active effort. Search does not allow you to find complex traps unless you are a rogue (see Restriction, below).
…
Restriction: While anyone can use Search to find a trap whose DC is 20 or lower, only a rogue can use Search to locate traps with higher DCs.

So this idea of find traps as a saving throw is clearly a recent innovation, but it could be thought of as a refinement of the early OD&D approach where there was no find traps ability and remove traps could only be used for very small mechanical devices. The find traps ability does not show up until AD&D. In both OD&D and AD&D, susceptible traps are very specifically defined (small devices), and this is perpetuated in 2E. Moldvay doesn’t define traps at all (perhaps leading a generation of gamers to think that hazards like the the rolling boulder of the Indiana Jones movie could be discovered and disarmed with a simple throw of the dice). And then 3E decides to do away with qualitative differentiation all together and replace it with a continuous difficulty class rating.

Empire of the Petal Throne

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Empire of the Petal Throne is an RPG set in the science fantasy setting of Tékumel, inspired by an amalgam of nonwestern cultures, and based heavily on 1974 D&D. And by “based heavily on,” I mean almost identical to. Based on what I have read online, most people come to EPT for the setting, but this is actually not true for me. I am interested in the early mechanics. I first knew that I needed to read EPT when I came across the rule for re-rolling hit dice periodically (now taken to an extreme by the Carcosa dice conventions).

A PDF of a very high quality scan is available cheaply on RPGNow (around $10). Unfortunately, it has not been processed with OCR software, so it is essentially just images (i.e., one can’t copy text from it), but that being said it is very readable and much better than some of the Judge’s Guild PDFs I have bought from RPGNow. Reasonably priced hardcopy reproductions are also in print, though I have not seen them myself.

As I wrote above, the EPT rules are almost identical to OD&D, other than a strange fascination with the percentile dice. For example, the six abilities (strength, intelligence, constitution, psychic ability, dexterity, and comeliness) are rated from 1 to 100 and determined by d100 rolls (that’s right, no probability clustered around an average here). With the exception of a d100 table for inspiration, I have never been fond of using the percentile dice for mechanical resolution. So many possibilities are rarely needed. Other dice are frequently used throughout the text, so I don’t think this was a game design decision based on limiting the required dice (like the way the Storyteller system only uses the d10), so I can only conclude that Prof. Barker just really liked percentile dice.

For those that lament the pulling of the OD&D PDFs by Wizards of the Coast, just about all the original mechanics are in EPT (though, of course, none of the iconic monsters or treasures are present, and some of the terminology has been renamed). The text itself is also much better written and organized, though the writing is also extremely dense. The information about the setting is necessarily interspersed with the rules text, and as a complete newcomer to the setting, much of the information is difficult to understand. This is definitely a work that requires multiple readings.

The rulebook starts off with four and a half pages of uninterrupted two column small text that is a world overview. I made my save versus wall of text and actually made it through all of this, though most of the invented words were just processed as squiggles with the exception of common terms like Tsolyánu and Sákbe Road. I realize that some people dig on this kind of unique detail, but it does serve as a very high entry barrier for those interested in the setting or rules but not desirous of studying for an RPG setting. There are literally no common natural points of reference; the world is totally alien other than the products of civilization (e.g., there are swords, shields, spears, etc).

That being said, there are lots of interesting things to learn from this text for those interested in old school play style. Tékumel is, after all, in some sense the first published campaign setting for D&D, and one of the first sets of rules variants (I’m not sure if it came out before or after the Greyhawk and Blackmoor supplements). In fact, I would go as far as to say that EPT is one of the most interesting and valuable RPG products I have right now because it takes the spirit of OD&D and explores it prior to any precedents. And, this is a work written for adults. Not in terms of subject matter (though there are a few mature themes covered, such as slavery), but in terms of an assumed level of attention and engagement. Nothing is dumbed down. And the art is great though not plentiful. Using Tékumel as a reference for inspiration is probably more approachable than running it straight.

Though I seemed to be critical of the setting above, I’m really not. In fact, I love the ambiance. It’s just too much detail and specificity for a tabletop RPG that does not have complete buy-in and intellectual investment from all the players sitting around the table. Even if played with the expected campaign beginning (all PCs are newcomers), there would almost never be an encounter like “there are two giant wolves feasting on the carcasses of a ravaged caravan.” This is not a setting that can be played as intended casually. I do think a simplified Tékumel would be a great base for a setting, and many of the subsystems are really interesting. I’ll touch upon some more of these examples in future posts. I would also be negligent if I did not mention the excellent OD&D Discussion EPT subforum in an introductory post on EPT. So do go check that out if you are interested in Tékumel.

Cantrip Scrolls

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Let’s consider the warlock and the eldritch blast ability. The warlock as a D&D class was first introduced in the 3.5 supplement Complete Arcane, and then perpetuated as a core class in the Fourth Edition Player’s Handbook. This is notable because it is one of the first appearances of a class with at-will spell-like powers. Other than the blast ability, the warlock is basically a slightly tougher magic-user with a more custom spell list (though the spells are called invocations).

In the original game, all weapons did 1d6 damage. Thus, a magic-user with a bandolier of daggers is not all that different mechanically from an eldritch blasting warlock. The major difference is that the warlock cannot be disarmed short of being restrained and has theoretically infinite ammunition, whereas the dagger throwing magic user has only practically infinite ammunition (most thrown daggers can be easily recovered after battle) and can be more obviously disarmed. A warlock’s eldritch blast might also be able to damage monsters which can only be harmed by magic.

Despite the fact that daggers do not generally run out, there is a sense of scarcity associated with anything that is numerically tracked on a character sheet, and this resource management is important to the feel of traditional D&D. The eldritch blast does not break the game mechanically, but it does break the game thematically.

What if we wanted to provide an alternative to the dagger mage with slightly more arcane flavor but that avoids the thematic problems described above. Enter the cantrip scroll. Any magic-user can create a cantrip scroll. It takes one day of work and 1 GP worth of supplies. Cantrip scrolls function just like other scrolls (they take a full round to intone, do not allow movement, and are consumed when used). The alternative to the eldritch blast is the malign ray: enemy must save versus magic or take one die of damage, range as thrown dagger.

There could also be cantrip scrolls with other functions. I prefer to think of arcane magic as inherently chaotic (following the lead of LotFP), so I don’t think they should have more constructive abilities; they should be limited to minor effects consistent with an agent of chaos.

This post began in my head as an old school take on the eldritch blast. To be honest, there wasn’t really a problem to be solved (I actually quite enjoy playing the traditional magic-user with no at-will powers and only one slot for a prepared spell at first level). I was just sitting in the dentist’s chair with nothing else to do and got to thinking: how is this at-will power really any different than a magic-user with a bag of daggers?

The Dice Know

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Last night, a new player joined my weekly game for the session. I don’t know yet whether or not she will be a regular. She was completely new to tabletop RPGs and didn’t even have experience with superficially similar video games. Another player helped her create a character (she chose a human rogue) at the beginning of the game. We leaned heavily on one of the default 4E PHB rogue builds, and the process was actually relatively quick (though we didn’t really go into power descriptions or anything).

I gave the new rogue a very simple backstory to get things moving. The PCs had accepted a mission from the queen, so I made the new rogue a member of the queen’s secret police sent to assist the party. To make things interesting, I started the rogue with a free collapsible hand crossbow and six poisoned darts. No name was selected.

There were several open hooks, and the players chose the one that led to Death Frost Doom (they only know about the options via diegetic information, so they were not choosing based on knowledge of modules). When exploring the cabin her character came across the pouch of purple lotus powder. Of course the unnamed rogue decided to partake. New player, Raggi d100 table… I was kind of dreading the outcome. Percentile dice were rolled…

What was the result?

33 Character Suffers Total Amnesia!

So the character with minimal backstory (and no name) had a mind wipe. I can’t make this kind of stuff up. If the player decides to join us again, we now have a reason why she will stick with the PCs. And if she doesn’t, I now have an amnesiac member of the queen’s secret police to use as an NPC.

TV Adventuring Parties

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I’m not a big fan of trying to ape other media in RPGs, especially to the extent that some games do by appropriating terminology like scenes and episodes. I’m not saying that there is nothing to be learned from other art forms, but tabletop RPGs are really their own thing, and have their own different potential. An RPG can’t do everything that a novel can do, and the reverse is also true: a tabletop RPG can do things that a novel or movie can’t.

That being said, other media can be amazingly inspirational for tabletop RPGs (hence the proliferation of “Appendix N” style lists). They can serve as examples for settings or characters. They can provide a common language. There are not that many movies, TV shows, or even books, that really capture the dynamics of a D&D party though. Even The Fellowship of the Ring, which was probably the most direct inspiration for the D&D adventuring party, doesn’t really capture it.

There are a few TV shows that come pretty close though. The ones that come immediately to mind are Lost and The Walking Dead. These two shows both feature a group of disparate characters that don’t necessarily share a common purpose, but that are thrown together and forced to cooperate in order to survive a hostile environment. Much of the story revolves around exploration, survival, and resource management. Another thing these shows share with D&D is (mostly) a lack of dependence on any single character. Characters can and do die, and the story continues.

Lost, of course, follows in a long tradition of castaway and lost world stories (Robinson Crusoe, The Lost World, Land of the Lost, etc) and I think this tradition is worth revisiting for tabletop RPG inspiration because of how well it fits structurally. I might even include the post-apocalyptic genre within the lost world genre. Can anyone think of other TV shows that fit the experience of a D&D party well?

There are two other common TV show structures which are often copied for tabletop RPGs, but usually to poor effect in my experience. The first is the “ship crew” approach (Star Trek, Farscape, Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactica, SeaQuest DSV, Stargate, Firefly, etc). The second is the “department” (or police procedural) approach (X-Files, Fringe, Law & Order, any legal or police drama you can name). These setups are commonly used for genre shows, and so are often inspiration for fantasy and sci-fi games. The department structure works particularly well for episodic presentation because each show can be a self-contained case with beginning, middle, and end. Thus, people can follow the characters over episodes if they want, but don’t really need to start from the beginning of the series to follow an individual episode.

The dependence of the ship crew approach on specific characters makes it an awkward fit with open-ended scenarios. Such a show can’t really survive the loss of too many characters, as generally the meat of the show is the soap opera interaction of the characters, not the plot or setting (some people might disagree with me here, but I stand by the point, even for shows like Star Trek). How long would any Star Trek (or clone show) last if the characters started to drop like flies? One thing that can be profitably learned from the department approach though is starting and ending at the same place, thus making shows (sessions) self-contained. This is very similar to the “start and end at the tavern” trope of much traditional play.

Dragonlance

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Dragonlance occupies several strange and important places in my gaming history. It was, I think, my original introduction to D&D. I was browsing in a Waldenbooks or some store like it in a mall with my parents and I came across the book Kaz the Minotaur. I’m not sure exactly what about that book caught my attention. Perhaps it was the stone dragon on the cover. When I brought it to my parents, they wouldn’t buy it for me because it was Heroes II, volume 1. They thought I should begin with Heroes I. So I ended up walking out of the store with The Legend of Huma instead (which, in retrospect, is a better novel). I was around 10 at the time. After that, I began to devour other Dragonlance books, including the main two trilogies (The Chronicles & The Legends).

There are actually a number of elements I like in the Dragonlance setting. For example, the three orders of magic, and how magic is tied to the moons. I have borrowed the institutions of the wizards of high sorcery for several of my own settings. The basic idea is that magic is considered too dangerous for individuals to do as they please with. Instead, a monopolistic organization arose to self-regulate wizards. Upon reaching third level (in game terms) a wizard must take “the test” which controls entry into the the three orders (white, red, and black robes, corresponding to the three moons, three gods of magic, and three alignments). Presumably, this test also would allow the order to screen out the truly psychopathic or insane. Any wizard that does not take the test and join one of the orders is hunted down as a renegade. I also like the background of the Kingpriest’s hubris and the resulting cataclysm sent by the gods to punish the mortals. I like the fact that the “immortals” D&D endgame is actually played out within the Dragonlance Legends.

Speaking of the Legends, lets talk about the Raistlin books. The Chronicles are often criticized for being warmed-over epic fantasy; rather than Sauron, there is the evil goddess Takhisis. Our band of heroes has to recover some artifacts and defeat her and her minions, thus saving the world. Rather than orcs there are draconians. Yes, that is rather derivative, but it is only the first (and less interesting) part of the story. And, the heroes are not victorious due to their valor or character. In fact, they would have failed if not for the actions of Raistlin, who only aided the companions to further his own ends. For all the poor plotting, stilted dialogue, and cliche setting elements, this story still resonates with me. It’s not about a quest to destroy a dark lord. It’s about jealousy, and lust for power, and adventure.

Raistlin was probably the first character in literature that I really identified with. I went on to read many other Weis & Hickman books, including the Death Gate Cycle, which is also flawed but still great for inspiration. What about the DL series Dragonlance modules? I never played them. The idea of playing through or running a story that I had already read was deeply unattractive to me. I rarely used modules at all back then; I developed my own settings and locations. So the “railroad” aspect of Dragonlance was not something that I absorbed.

(The staff in that picture above actually lights up. I built a penlight into the top part. It was pretty cool.) Then, there was Time of the Dragon. Check out the excellent retrospective of this boxed set over at The Mule Abides. The Time of the Dragon is a setting that details the continent of Taladas. It was, if memory serves, the first published D&D product that I owned. I didn’t have a PHB or DMG to begin with, so I needed to make up anything that wasn’t in the The Rule Book to Taladas. There were only 8 monsters detailed in the back of the Rule Book (each taking an entire page, as was the custom back in the 2E days), so those monsters showed up quite frequently in my early games. All the interior art of The Time of the Dragon is done by the fantastic Stephen Fabian, who happens to be one of my favorite fantasy artists.

The main events in the Dragonlance novels take place on the continent of Ansalon, so there are few “canon conflict” problems with running a campaign in Taladas. At least, as presented in this boxed set. I don’t know what they did with the setting in more recent products. Other than the background of the cataclysm, there are not many connections between the two continents. Like the ties between Roman and Greek mythology, the gods even have different names. There is a priestly kingdom of necromancers (Thenol), a sea of lava in the middle (Hitehkel), and a great glaciers in the north sailed by ships with blades like ice skates (the glass sailors). The only weakness of the setting is the minotaur empire which is basically just Rome, but with minotaurs. For some bizarre reason, this was the only part of Taladas that really seemed to get any support or attention from TSR.

I was just looking through this boxed set again for this post, and man is there a lot of content in there. Some highlights. There is an elevation map of a gnome citadel in the sea of fire just begging to be turned into a vertical megadungeon. Included are also several level maps, one of which is a fungus farm level. With encounter tables. There are 8.5 x 11 cardstock pages with paintings of people from various cultures, some with NPC details on the back. There is a full unkeyed dungeon map called “Tomb of the Great King.” There are schematics for gnome inventions, including hang gliders and lava guns. There is a full city map easily usable as the base of a campaign. And I am just scratching the surface. I totally did not intend this post to be gushing about Time of the Dragon, but damn. This is one high-quality product. For more photos of the stuff in this boxed set, check out this post.

I sold most of my books when I went off to university in 1999. I didn’t play much over the next few years, and almost missed the Third Edition years entirely. Between 2000 and 2009, I played one session of Shadowrun (which I hated), one session of Midnight (which was cool), and one session of Ars Magica (which was complicated and didn’t go anywhere). Some time in 2006 or 2007 I did buy a copy of the 3E core books, which I read and admired for their elegance compared to the 2E of my youth, but I never used them to play and ended up selling them.

Fast forward to some time in 2010. One of the guys in my office decided to run a Fourth Edition game. It lasted for a few months, and I played in it for the first half (eladrin warlock, if you must know). Then, in the summer of 2011, for no particular reason, I thought it might be fun to run a D&D game of my own for my office mates. I decided to use 4E as it was the most recent edition and I still was not very familiar with it. The best way to learn something is to do it, right? (This experiment turned into the Nalfeshnee Hack.) I started to follow some Fourth Edition blogs. At this point I still didn’t know Moldvay B/X or OD&D from a hole in the ground.

One site I was reading (I think it was Square Fireballs) linked to a post How Dragonlance Ruined Everything at some blog called Grognardia. Thus was I introduced to the OSR. The more I read about “old school gaming” principles, the more I saw these principles at work in my own most successful past games. And the things that I didn’t understand back then (save or die, level drain, oracular dice) did actually have an inner logic, even if the books often didn’t do a good job at communicating that logic. Within the gaming community online, it seemed like all the interesting ideas, all the interesting innovation, was coming from the OSR. And so, Dragonlance has been my gateway into the realm of gaming twice now, though in dramatically different ways.

Necropraxis

Classic fantasy roleplaying games and loosely associated thoughts