Can I play with madness? dabbling in skill systems.

* Edit-
The above image was originally 7th son of a 7th son, an interior illustration from Iron Maiden's 1988 album of the same name. I suppose Photobucket took it down in keeping with their vague,arbitrary enforcement of their terms of service. I'm leaving the censored version up as a tribute to their sniveling obeisance to the dictates of the feckless,dying record industry.

The existence of a skill system in a game, and the willingness to use it, or not, is one of those points which is always a bone of contention in those discussions of, “Is this Old School, or not?”

I got on the D&D roadshow at the Holmes edition, which included the Thief class and its thieving skills matrix, so I’ve never been totally opposed to the idea of skill systems. At least in theory, that is. It’s that gap that exists between the theory of what a skill system can contribute to the game, and the facts of what it actually does in play, that prevents me from employing a fully fleshed skill system in my own game.

Skill systems were added to D&D, and made the heart of later RPGs, with the idea that they would expand the possible actions available to PCs. The perception was that actions not quantified by the rules as written were therefore not possible in the game, and the way to correct this was to add to the rules base.

I think this comes from an assumption that anything not expressly permitted, is forbidden. I have an unsubstantiated gut feeling that, in general, the proportion of the populace which thinks in this manner has been increasing for a long time now. I prefer the opposite mode of thought, that everything not expressly forbidden is permitted. And, you’d better have a really good reason for attempting to forbid me anything.

Anyway, what I’ve seen in games with a heavy reliance on skill systems is that rather than expanding the portfolio of actions available to characters, they actually reduce them. The existence of the skill system encourages an attitude towards viewing your character sheet as an armory or magazine of possible action choices. It is so, partially, but the problem arises when it also is seen as a list of the only actions possible. This is the point where players are in danger of falling into the trap of thinking that, “If it’s not on my character sheet, I can’t do it.”

The general attitude of the Old Guard towards this perception is very well summed up in this quote from a thread on RPGNet by Mike “Old Geezer” Mornard.

“Probably the most extreme case is a TETSNBN player wondering how to tie somebody up in my OD&D game because there was no “Use Rope” skill. I mean, Crom, “Use Rope”? What’s next, a “Tie Boots” skill? “Eat Food?” “Take Dump?”

That guy kills me.

First generation skill-less RPGs, by not instituting a frame work of defined skills, leave open the greater possibility of character action. Players of the mindset that requires a defined rule structure are uncomfortable with the rules looseness of Old Guard play. They want things spelled out on their character sheet, and they want a rules coded menu of action options.

I think this is fine, in a beginner level RPG experience, but it’s not the sort of Advanced D&D I like.

Don’t take that as an insult if you are in favor of skill systems, I’m not trying to pull your beard. What I’m saying is that skill systems are fine for what they actually do. And that is providing a structure for players and GMs to use in place of their own judgment. What they don’t actually do is increase the possibilities open to players. In cases where the participants are young and inexperienced, in life as well as in RPGs, skill systems provide a structure and framework which fills in for a lack of the knowledge and experience that’s required to feel comfortable with playing and DMing by fiat.

In a situation where a PC wants to attempt something about which you, the DM, knows nothing of in real life, having a skill system handy provides a guide line you can use to navigate that gap. This is a great help to starter gamers, training wheels if you will. The drawback is that if you have no fear of relying upon your own knowledge and judgment, a skill system becomes a hindrance and an encumbrance, eliminating possibilities and making the game less than it could be.

I will, of course, readily admit that I am somewhat grognardly in my attitude towards the precepts of contemporary gaming culture. I don’t agree that more is better, or that a system must be rigidly interlocking or else be seen as “broken”. I like to think that I’m genial in my disregard for modern gaming though. I don’t go out of my way to attack those who see things differently. The vast and inherent superiority of Old School games is self evident and requires no defense. Heh….


See above image for an illustration of what might be defined as, "somewhat grognardly".

I’ve never had any difficulty in making a judgment call, and sticking to it, in cases where a PC attempts something for which he has no rules defined success/failure mechanism. I consider the relevant factors and assign a probability, or a number to beat, and we go on from there. That’s all a skill system does anyway. I’m just more confident that I can take the relevant factors into account and make a decision on the fly that’s more closely applicable to the situation than a hard coded skill system could provide.

Now, it may be that I get away with this because I have players who have known me for a long time, and understand how I think. They know that if I employ Dungeon Master’s Fiat, it’s principled and reasoned and never arbitrary. I make a note of it when I have to fill in the gaps of the rules as written for expediency’s sake, and this becomes like referring to prior case law when similar situations arise later. I don’t allow the rules, or the lack of them to bog a game down. I encourage and expect “outside the dungeon” thinking from players. Some of the most exciting and entertaining gaming results from forcing PCs out of their comfort zones and into situations that require them to attempt actions for which their character class is totally maladapted, in circumstances most dire.

Skill systems tend to retard the willingness of players who are used to them to attempt actions which they do not specialize in, or have some rules established ability to perform. This is why I don’t, as a general rule, use them. I want players to surprise me with deeds of daring do and outlandish solutions to problems. With all the work that goes into DMing I expect a challenge and some entertainment at my end of the table too.

I do like the idea behind skill systems though, the thing that skill systems are meant to do, but don’t. That is, I think, to enhance the depth of the PC by adding layers of potential abilities.

I do this by breaking “skills” into three categories and administering them in an open ended manner.

Natural Talents, this is a list of traits, abilities, aptitudes, quirks, flaws, etc, which the PC was born with. This is always rolled randomly, no exceptions. The class of the character is of no matter and has no bearing on which Natural Talents he may be born with. I leave it to player choice if they want to roll on the Natural Talents list. Some, of course, have definite ideas about the sort of character they want to create and play and don’t want to chance the random results of the list. Others are happy to let chance have a say in character creation and interested in the challenge of running a possible oddball. There are no character building points involved, this is not a system which can be worked to PC advantage. These things are simply meant to add texture and depth to the PC. Some are advantageous, some are drawbacks, and some are normally neutral.

Learned Skills, This includes trade skills, political skills, folk ways, woods lore, etc, skills which the PC learned as a child or was taught prior to becoming a classed adventurer. I assign no rules mechanism to Learned Skills and administer them in an open-ended and common sense fashion. If a player wants his character to have been the son of a fisherman, we’ll have a discussion about just what Learned Skills the PC is entitled too. (What sort of fishing, where, with what equipment, etc,). I’ll write up a brief outline to add to the character sheet regarding the implications for the character’s abilities in-game, and that’s that. If a player wants to perform an action based on his Learned Skill list that I haven’t previously OK’d, he’s going to have to make a convincing argument for it, and quickly.

Minor Class Abilities, This includes all the small things that come along with learning to be a fighter, or a cleric, or a magic-user, or a thief. Each class has its own unique list of Minor Class Abilities. These also may be altered depending upon the character’s background history.

I do allow the possibility of PCs teaching other PCs Learned Skills and some Minor Class Abilities.

In cases where this is just about developing characterization, it’s only a matter of role playing it out. If the knowledge or skill gained may be used to affect the outcome of combat or other situations where the dice normally come into play, then learning the skill will require the PC to expend experience points. I don’t make this cheap, so the player’s got to really want it to make it worthwhile.

I’ll post the text of these categories when I get it transferred from notebooks to Word.

In other news, I barely avoided getting a ticket today for having an expired plate. I had no idea the thing was out of date, the BMV sent me no notice that it was about to expire. This is the second time this has happened to me, but I did have to pay a ticket last time. I really hate it when one branch of government screws up, and another branch punishes me for it. I won’t miss the BMV when the revolution comes.

Will the real OSR please stand up? Oh look, they all did.

Restoration, See above image.

This is the definition by which I navigate on matters concerning the Old School Renaissance.

In my mind, OSR is a term which describes new materials, games, rules, art, attitudes and philosophies towards role playing games which are derived from, consistent with, amenable too, or congenial with, those same elements of the original editions of the first generation of role playing games.

This is a broad definition, and each facet of it is subject to debate. That’s fine with me. One of my maxims is that, “All statements are generalizations,… generally.” When an apparent contradiction arises, it usually means I’m missing something, that I’m too close to the issue and I need to expand my focus to take in the bigger picture.

I think that the majority of conflicts, in all things, not only RPG discussions, are due to conflicting definitions. So, I try to be as forthright as I can be in sharing the meanings of the terms I use. Most especially here on the web, where 90% of the subtleties of interpersonal communication are stripped away and reduced to stark black and white lettering.

I don't think there is a single OSR. I think there is a multitude of overlapping personal OSR's, each sharing to a greater or lesser degree differing amounts of the various elements that are commonly perceived to make up Old School gaming. I don't think it's possible to sharply define what is and what isn't Old School, and I'm really only interested in general definitions anyway. I think it's porous, the borders are shifting and ill defined, and I like it like that.

At the dawn of role playing gaming, there were no limits. Rules were formulated and tested to see if they would provide the play experience the maker was seeking. There is a primal chaos at the naissance of any and all things which later grow and expand. Anything is possible at the beginning, but for there to be growth, choices have to be made and each choice made both provides structure, and eliminates possibilities. Order is required for growth, but too much order causes stagnation and death.

There have to be rules for The Game to be a game, and not just backyard make-believe, but as each later edition expanded the rules and further defined The Game, it also narrowed the range of possibilities at the same time. This is unavoidable, more rules means fewer real choices in the Game, just as bigger government means less liberty in real life.

The thing here is that there is a sweet spot on this sliding scale of imaginative chaos vs. rules order that I think of as Old Guard, or Old School if you like. Where exactly you see this sweet spot on the scale probably has a lot to do with your personal proclivities and also, at what point in rpg history you were introduced to the idea of role playing. For myself, it was the Holmes edition D&D, and immediately after, AD&D. That’s where I’m coming from.


Renaissance, See above image.

A renaissance is a re-birth, a second beginning, it is not a restoration.

I think a very great deal of the internal conflict, but not all, that I read is due to the confusion between the two terms. The camp that requires original rules purity is actually pursuing an Old School Restoration, rather than a renaissance. There is nothing wrong with this. This is the same attitude towards The Game that a classic car restorer has about returning a model T C-cab to original condition. It’s important for understanding and appreciation the history of the game to preserve attitudes, approaches and ephemera as well as the original rules themselves.
The conflict comes from a failure to recognize the different goals of the renaissance promoters and the restorationists.
This, I think, is the origin of the dogmatic absolutism that concerns some of our good fellow game bloggers. I myself don’t find the uber-grognards particularly troubling. Growing up in rural Indiana, I’ve had to deal with more than my share of obstinate, crusty old bastards and I just see them as part of the local color. I treat them like I do upper management, smile and nod and do what I’m going to do anyway.
I suppose the head-butting between the restoration and the renaissance is something like the disconnection between historical re-enactors and the Society for Creative Anachronism. Of course this is a generalization, don’t carp at me if you don’t like where you come down in this comparison. Heh…

Anyway, My Personal OSR is a renaissance and not a restoration. Full speed ahead! Damn the torpedos! I've got a bad feeling about this! It’s about reexamining the originals to figure out why I like them so damn much. It’s about rebuilding them in my own way. It’s about getting back to that root, that origin point, and examining, considering, and testing all the directions I can think of that The Game didn’t take the first time. And also in just creating materials that I enjoy that do work with the early editions as written. I see no contradiction in these approaches and I do them both concurrently. I appreciate that fully restored classic just as much as I appreciate all the work that goes into a modified hot rod roadster.

I get my kicks by exploring what it is that appeals to me about the old games, and building off of those elements to augment the experience of play. Testing the ideas, rules, approaches that others put forth, or are inspired by the experiments of others, to see what happens, and if I find them congenial to my game, lets me expand my horizons. If I don’t like where the experiment goes, that’s fine. I put the idea back on the shelf and start over. No harm done.

I love the OSR, or at least, I love my OSR. After a dozen or so years of thinking I was the last AD&D supporter on earth the online old game community has made it possible for me to blather on about My D&D to people who actually give a crap and to contribute what I can to the preservation and advancement of Old Guard Gaming. I love it because now I have the chance to contribute to The Game in a way that I couldn't back when it was created. I'd have given my left 20-sider to have been there at TSR at the beginning, but I missed that boat by a decade and it wasn't until I blundered into the online community that I had any chance of actually getting my game writing and ideas out there. It was this blog that brought me the chance to write for Rob Kuntz, which is of course, frikken awesome! My wife dosn't understand the girlish glee that brings me, but she's glad it makes me happy. It was the OSR that got me that chance. As an originator of The Game, Rob himself has no need of the OSR, but for myself, it was what reignited my fire for The Game and got me to actually start writing out all the stuff that clogs my head. The unembarassing stuff at least.

This is what I do. I can’t speak for anybody else and I’m not interested in doing so. I have enough NPCs to manage.


And that's all I've got to say about that.

The Dwarfs of Folklore vs the Dwarves of The Game.

Along side the PC available Dwarves, I’m including the Dwarfs of folklore as monsters, (little m), cause I dig that black fairytale vibe. These are the venal, unpredictable and generally no good hairy little men who take advantage of lost travelers, trick the innocent into bad bargains, and steal young women and children who wander unprotected.

Dwarf of the Wild Wood.

Frequency: Very Rare
No. Appearing: 1-6, usually a single dwarf will be encountered
Armor Class: 4, or by armor type
Move: 12”, 120 feet in a round
Hit Dice: 4
% in lair: 40%
Treasure Type: F
No. of Attacks: 2
Damage/Attack: 1-4, or by weapon
Special Attacks: Misdirection
Special Defenses: Vanish
Magic Resistance: 15%
Intelligence: Very High
Alignment: Chaotic Neutral by default, but may be any non-good.
Size: S, variable, 2-4 feet tall on average.
Psionic Ability: nil

A lean and gnarled little man, with an avaricious leer and a sardonic glint in his eye, a dwarf of the wild wood is the last person an adventurer in a tight spot would hope to see. Cunning and venal tricksters, the dwarfs exult in taking advantage of those whom they chance to find in dire straits.

In fact, chance often has little to do with the encounter, as dwarfs lay traps and dig pits to capture the unwary or reckless traveler. It is the dwarfs practice to deny responsibility for the trap, and to offer aid to the unfortunate, but always at a great price.

They will require the victim’s word that he will not go back upon the bargain struck, and though the dwarfs have no sense of honor themselves, they are also bound by the literal words of the deal, and must also abide by it.

If an adventurer should manage to gain a position of advantage or at least of equality with a dwarf, he may be able to reach an agreement by which he may gain a great deal. The dwarfs are peerless crafters of metal and workers of inherent magic. Though not mighty spell casters, dwarfs are able to imbue great magical power in the work of their forges and furnaces. Jewelry, weapons and armor produced by dwarfs are often items of nearly artifact level puissance.

Dwarfs are also quite knowledgeable in areas of dark and hidden wisdom and may be consulted as though they were sages concerning subjects which a prudent adventurer may not wish to openly inquire after. Of course, a dwarf will drive a very hard bargain before providing such lore, and may leave out information which could prove deadly to the incautious. Let the buyer beware who chooses to do business with a dwarf.

A dwarf will rarely choose to engage in direct melee. Though dwarf made weapons can be fearsome, and the armor they craft formidable, they have little liking for putting themselves in danger. If seriously threatened, it is likely a dwarf will use his innate ability to Vanish. In a flash, or with a stamp of his foot, or by stepping into shadow, a dwarf may remove himself from a location of immanent danger once per day. This may function in a manner analogous to Dimension Door, Teleport, Passwall, Meld with Stone, or other standard spell as the DM sees fit.

A dwarf also possesses the power of Misdirection. A dwarf may divert the attention of those who fail to Save VS Spell by insinuation and inference once per day. In this manner a dwarf may cause others to change their plans or act in a way which advances the dwarf’s own agenda at the expense of their own original course.

As an example, Migrud, the dwarf who dwells near the wells of Ohlam, through Misdirection caused Sir Holgruh, Brulm of the Heavy Hand and Yeilasnia the Sharper to abandon their intention to seek the Wyrm’s Band, and instead confront the caravan of Mehulude at the Hoarnung ferry. This action allowed Migrud to steal the daughter of Mehulude in the confusion. Though the knavery was found out, to the shame of all involved, neither the dwarf, nor the girl were ever seen again.

Dwarfs are nearly always encountered as lone individuals as they are too paranoid and untrustworthy to often live in groups. If a group is encountered it is likely they are working a mine or managing some other source of wealth which requires at least some teamwork to acquire.

Encountered dwarfs are always male, it is uncertain that there even are female dwarfs and it is hinted darkly that this lack is the reason for the dwarf’s predilection towards woman theft.
Dwarfs vary in appearance and size, with skin often nut brown, sometimes black, and sometimes pale white. They have long and wild beards and unkempt hair. Dwarfs may dress in the height of fashion, or they may appear in filthy rags. In no case is it safe or wise to judge a dwarf’s prowess by his appearance.
Dwarfs tend to inhabit areas that are wild and uncharted, but near to a civilized land. They live in caves and mines, build huts or shacks in deep woods, or lurk close by waterfalls or riverbends.
Dwarfs are always aware of the passage of travelers through their land and watch avidly for the chance to gain by the misfortunes of others. If it is necessary to manufacture this misfortune then to a dwarf, so much sweeter is the gain.


Anything that becomes popular for any length of time tends to move further and further from its point of origin as the facets of it which attract the most attention are magnified by public perception and feedback on the original. Most things, art movements, political positions, musical styles, The Game, become self-referential at some point and move away from whatever originally attracted the majority of fans to them in the first place.
Getting at the root of The Game, and from that point considering and testing the directions in which it wasn’t explored is a big part of what the OSR is for, in my mind. Alongside with, and complementary to, building my personal iteration of Greyhawk , I’m revisiting the basic elements of the game to find their origins and see what happens when I look at them from a different direction. Just like the rest of you.

So, dwarfs. OD&D dwarves are largely Tolkien dwarves. The good professor humanized the dwarfs of folklore and fairytale and turned them into an organized and non-human, but relatable race. They have their own motivations and desires, but they reflect facets of human nature, stubbornness, greed, inflexibility, etc… the same as the orcs represent war on nature, militarism, destruction for its own sake.

As The Game has changed with new editions and materials, so have the portrayals of dwarves in The Game also changed. OD&D dwarves were, after the Tolkien version, non-magical, technologically oriented, stolid, hardworking, and unforgiving. There really wasn’t all that much written about the dwarves culture, but it was natural to default to Tolkien and to the cultures from which most of the original folktales he drew from, Scandinavian, Germanic,Celtic, English and so on.

Of course, that cultural feedback loop starts up quickly as a thing grows in popularity, and the most prominent features of what was written about dwarves were amalgamated with the same prominent features of the northern European cultures they had their roots in, and commonly perceived dwarf game culture began to rapidly expand.

Now, there is a sweet spot in the arc of development of whatever cultural fancy you want to talk about, where it is fully realized and detailed and distinct from its inspirational origin. After this point, caricature sets in, like gangrene, and the compounding stereotypes turn it into a joke. This shark-jumping occurs in every medium, and it’s pretty much unavoidable. It’s hard to pin point when it happened, but suddenly every dwarf was Foamy Tankard MacTankard, hard drinking, grim, stubborn, but loyal warrior/iron worker of the Stony Iron Hammer Shield Clan.

This is why there are renaissances. Of gaming, and otherwise.

I’m not about to throw out the Tolkienesque D&D dwarves as PC races, I’ll just scrape off the cultural cruft and try and restore them to original condition so I can add new cultural cruft that’s in keeping with my own sensibilities.

My favorite art depictions of pre shark jumping dwarves are always by Jim Holloway. This has a lot to do with the fact that Jim’s art has a sharp sense of fantastic realism and rough humor, as well as clean line work and good figure balance. The armor and weapons he depicts are just slightly fantasized versions of real world examples and believable to me and that’s important to my view of fantasy. Spikes, straps and ridiculous oversized weapons just kick me right out of suspension of disbelief.

This will be my starting point for redeveloping PC dwarves for Wyrd Greyhawk. If I decide it's needed. As with the paladin, the players don't care that much, so this is just for me. And you if it appeals to you.

These last two images are close ups that I've clipped out of larger pieces by Holloway. The originals you may find in the Holloway art thread at Dragonsfoot. These are new art, not previously appearing in published D&D material. Mr Holloway is planning a book of new illustrations, and I'll be glad to see it.

The top illustration is by Rackham, it's a small page decoration for The Rhinegold. The second image is a pic of Sutherland's illustration for the dwarf entry in the 1e Monster Manual.

The Once and Future Game. Old Guard Gaming isn't going anywhere.

I know a lot of old gamers worry about the future of The Game, but I’m confident it’s not going to die off anytime soon.

When we’re discussing the future of Old Guard gaming, I think we’re discussing three different, but closely related things. The future of Dungeons & Dragons, (OD&D, AD&D, and the Retro-clones), the future of Old School gaming style and philosophy, and also the future of table top Role Playing Games themselves.

Each of these is seen as under threat from the same sources. You’ve got computer role playing games and shooters, the merchandising mentality that tries to insert the need for continual purchases of add-ons like cards, minis, splatbooks and new editions, which fractures the hobby and creates factions, and the disinterest of the kids who are creating their own diceless and freeform types of role playing over the internet. I think each of these things will have its day, but I don’t think any of them are a lasting threat to Old Guard D&D, or table top role playing in general.

This is why.

Original Dungeons & Dragons is the foundation of role playing games. Love it or hate it, there is no going around that. All following RPGs are efforts to copy it, improve it, or defy it, and those that seek to repudiate its assumptions still owe their creation to the prior example of OD&D.

Because The Game is at the root of all the various forms that contemporary role playing has taken, it is the most broadly applicable. This is important because it’s not the super specialized form that survives over time, it’s the adaptable generalist. This applies to just about everything, not just rpgs. Music, art, science, work and technology etc... More and more complex forms of what ever you care to look at specialize in a smaller and smaller niches until the conditions that supported that specialization end and the super specialized form is no longer viable. Then the generalist fills the gap again, OD&D can be tweaked, modified, amalgamated, and kit-bashed to serve just about any style of play or genre of fiction.

Original D&D laid out the basis of role playing games. Imagination, negotiation, discussion, and adjudication hung on a framework of rules as guidelines, and the results of actions determined by the dice. The fashion pendulum of rpgs has swung over time, giving priority to different parts of this structure at different times. From story telling and the narrative approach which exalts imagination and down plays rules and dice mechanics, to the rules oriented near-wargame which disregards both story and the randomness of dice in favor of iron clad system. OD&D is the center point where the swing of the pendulum begins, and the appearance of the OSR is the first return to that point.

In my view, Old Guard gaming allows the DM to draw on each of these facets of good design as appropriate for his game. Rules, imagination, and dice driven randomness are a mutually supporting triumvirate which make for the best gaming experience when given equal weight at the table. This is what I mean when I say OD&D is a generalist system. Being small, open to interpretation, and without an assumed style of play that the rules enforce, it will always be able to provide a satisfying game experience when players become disenchanted with the play style du jour.
All subsequent rpgs distort this three-fold structure to some extent, in one direction or another. Doing this emphasizes one facet at the expense of the others, and may deliver a more sharply defined theme to the players, but it does so by limiting the greater utility of the game. Soon enough, some new fad of gaming will seize the attention of the larger population of gamerdom and draw their attention away, but it’s only a matter of time before the pendulum swings back through Old Guard territory again.

And it always will.
Table top role playing provides an experience that no other media can. It is active, uncertain, and collaborative in real time. With a crew of the sort of mad visionary weirdos that role playing games attract sitting around a table together, there is just no telling what’s going to happen. Movies, books and tv provide experiences that people may passively observe, and imagine themselves in, but have no ability to affect the outcome of. Channeling this same imagination through a game with rules and other players whose actions affect the events of the game creates a far more real and exciting experience.

I’ve often heard people say that the graphics of computer games are better than their imagination. I honestly find that a bit frustrating, they’re not better than mine. I find crpgs to be the poor cousins of table top games, confining and quickly drained of possibility. I doubt that the fans of crpgs are expecting the same things from them that the fans of table top are looking for. The utter unpredictability of face to face role playing games is the thing I most enjoy, and this is also the thing that other media cannot provide. This unpredictability is also the thing which Old Guard gaming excels at, while most contemporary game styles attempt to suppress randomness in favor of story, or system. That’s probably the reason that’s at the heart of why I think table top rpgs, OD&D, and Old Guard gaming are not going anywhere any time soon.

As far as its relevance to future generations of role players goes, OD&D is just as much the core idea of the role playing game as it is a specific set of rules for playing it. No matter what form the dominate style of role playing takes in the future, there will be a percentage of those players who have an interest in the origins of their hobby. These will be the players who keep The Game from fading into obscurity in between the swings of the pendulum of fashion after the last of the Grognards has gone to sit at Gary’s table in the sky.

The real dangers I see to table top role playing come more from Hasbro than from shifts in cultural tastes. WOTC largely gave up its ability to make decisions about how the game would be presented once it whored itself to big business. Hasbro is no more of a friend to the rpg hobby than Walmart is to Mom&Pop stores. By repeatedly altering the game with new editions that seek to capitalize on the perceived tastes of each successive generation of possible gamers, the current owners of the name move the game further and further from its origin. Each edition amounts to increasing specialization, in effect painting the game into a corner from which, at some point, it will not be able to escape.

Now, I pay little attention, generally, to WOTC editions of D&D, they do not provide what I desire. The thing that can’t be ignored however is that they control the public perception of what the name means and what is to be expected from playing Dungeons & Dragons. They will continue to publish new editions every few years in an attempt to keep the revenue stream steady, and each of these future editions will cater to whatever market research indicates is Trend of the Day. The game bearing the name, Dungeons & Dragons could become unrecognizable in a fairly short time.
This could still be circumvented by determined young students of the history of rpgs so long as copies of original systems are available. Of course, acquiring such materials was made that much more difficult when WOTC stopped sales of out of print edition materials in PDF. The retro-clones are the best that can be done at the moment, and I’m grateful for them. I just wish that their progenitors could once again be published directly.

The death and break up of Hasbro is one happy possibility I see in the near future. At the same time that escapism in all its forms becomes more popular as the economy deteriorates, Giants like Hasbro will become less able to capitalize on it. Toys are their major market, not rpgs, and they may well sell off underperformers like WOTC. Whether or not they would hang onto D&D, I don’t know. In the best possible scenario, a competent small company, run by someone who loves and understands The Game would acquire it.

Now that the feckless morons in Washington and the economic illiterates who advise them have committed us to facing a thing that will make the Great Depression look like a minor inconvenience, we’ll be able to test this theory of mine.

Won’t that be interesting kids?!

Considering Class Design Theories.

I had a short, but thought provoking exchange with Zak S of Playing D&D with Porn Stars a few days ago in the comments of one of his recent posts. It started me considering just what it was I was doing when I think about a potential new class for The Game.
Everyone has basic assumptions about The Game that they absorbed when they first started to play. Depending on which edition you were first exposed to, you internalize views about D&D, how it’s played, what it’s about, how the rules are to be applied, etc… This really applies to everything, music, cars, whatever, first impressions set the standard and are difficult to overcome.

My first edition was the Holmes basic box, and then on to AD&D, where I’ve been happy to stay ever since, occasionally venturing out to plunder other systems and drag their choice bits back to my lair to see if they may be assimilated.

Resistance is futile.

Anyway, I think that when you are designing a character class for The Game, the degree of definition of the class will depend on what your vision of the game world entails, as much as which edition of the rules you are playing by, and what view you have about how those rules are to be applied. In my mind the notion of classes of people in the game world reflects the archetypes of the sorts of figures and characters in the fiction and literature that the game world is made of.
I think there is a sliding scale here that describes the degree of resolution you’re comfortable with in your version of The Game. The scale moves from very broad character types in OD&D, (a fighter class character can be anything from a pikeman to a cavalier to a gladiator to a goat herder with a rock), to the extremely and tightly defined classes of the newest edition, which run like Swiss watches, but are rigid and inflexible.

In the medieval world, society was seen as divided into three parts. Those who pray, those who fight, and those who work. These are broad, archetypal classes, similar to OD&D classes. You could add to this, those who use magic, and those who steal, and delete the workers and you’d have the standard line up of Cleric, Fighter, Magic-user, and Thief. Subclasses and refinements of these basic classes cover just about all the types of characters that make sense, to me, in the game. From this point, further character types, and increased definition of the abilities of those characters are more a matter of increasing the flavor and depth of the game world than they are of increasing player choice. Of course I’m not against that; I do it all the time. I see it as a matter of detailing and embellishing the game though, rather than fixing something that is, “broken.”

I think for a class to be fitting in the game, it should in fact simulate a group of people who appear in significant numbers in the game world. To actually rate a character class, there should be an actual occupational or social class of people to support the archetype. That’s where I’m coming from when I consider character classes; I’m trying to simulate in game terms a given archetype from what ever media, generally fantasy or science fiction, that has caught my eye, and that I think can be made to fit my game world.

This means that though I give the class advantages and disadvantages, whether or not it’s balanced against the other classes in the game isn’t really my top priority. The idea that all classes must be equal in effectiveness in all situations strikes me as bit creepily Marxist. I suppose it’s the spirit of the age infecting The Game. Though a PC is also a playing piece, I suppose the gamist point of view is not my primary one. It’s one of my assumptions that you play the game to simulate being a certain type of character and experience fantastic situations, more than to dominate or attempt to “win the game”. This may or may not be one assumption you share, but I expect good sportsmanship in my players and a co-operative spirit amongst them, as players if not as characters.

Any character class that leaves details open to interpretation, leaves them open to player abuse. That’s an acceptable risk to me as that’s something I can deal with. Openness in the rules is what makes them flexible enough to accommodate any eventuality. Bad faith players will face the iron gauntlet of retributive DM fiat. Like I’ve said, I was a ruthless min/maxer as a kid, but now I want a sense of immersion in the character and the world.

I don’t do voices though, and no singing.

In building a PC, I see two routes to creating an interesting character. You can go with the bare bones OD&D archetypal classes, fighter, Magic-user, cleric, and then create secondary rules to further flesh them out, or rely on negotiation between the player and the DM to determine what the PC can do, other than what is explicitly spelled out in the rules. This is the least restrictive and most free form method, at least as far as D&D goes.

I’m a Holmes/AD&D baby though, so I’m not adverse to skill systems like that introduced with the Thief class. I still think that role-playing by the players and description of the actions they want to perform and how, plus negotiation are the “best” way to run The Game, but, there will be times when it’s necessary to have a written skill system to fall back on. If the players encounter a problem they can’t solve that’s killing the game’s momentum and stalling play, if they are a shy or retiring group and don’t want to speak up, or the problem is trivial and holding up progress, I just default to rolling for it.

Just where it is on the character class creation scale that your preferences lie depends on your personal gaming philosophy and which edition of the rules formed the foundation of your assumptions about The Game. Of course, the edition you started with may not be the one you are philosophically predisposed to prefer. I think the rapid success and expansion of the OSR indicates that quite a few younger gamers are finding the earlier editions more to their taste than the newer ones. You don’t have to be old to be Old Guard.

The Universal Tarentino Game Mechanic.

A couple of days ago, Trollsmyth put up an interesting post concerning rules design.

http://trollsmyth.blogspot.com/2010/01/rules-and-rewards.html

Let me quote from the post here where he quotes JB 's post from B/X Blackrazor.
"Good game design rewards behavior meeting the objectives of play. "

"By which he means, an effective game rewards the sort of play that the game is intended to create. To whit, if you make the Tarantino Cinematic RPG, it should involve lots of people sitting around and communicating who they are as people by using pop culture references when discussing matters of morality and psychology, or invoking the creative process, punctuated by periods of horrendous and blood-spattering violence. "

This, of Course, sounds wonderful to me. I'd love a Tarentino themed game. The first time I saw Reservoir Dogs, I thought, "Hey, these characters talk like the guys and I do in real life". It's just that Tarentino characters get to shoot people while philosophizing instead of just drinking coffee.

Trollsmyth suggests an interesting mechanic to facilitate the Tarentino game experience, which I also like.

"So in our Tarantino game, maybe every character starts with an artistic obsession and a secret existential crisis that is referenced by those obsessions and a pile of poker chips. Getting another character (that is, the player, in this case) to agree with your argument as to the worthiness of your obsession earns you a poker chip, and two if you can turn their argument towards promoting the worth of one of your obsessions. However, if they guess your existential crisis, you have to surrender most of your chips to them, and those chips are the only things that will keep you alive in the extremely brutal combat that is always threatening to erupt."

This is a good thought, and applicable to a story oriented game. However, I avoid anything that feels like a "story reward" type mechanic. That way lies narrativism and story games, Ewwwww.
My preference is for creating a series of potential events in a game scenario that may or may not occur and may or may not influence each other. I don't plot out any over arching story line that leads to a climactic confrontation. Sure It'll probably happen, but the player characters determine by their actions just how the game will play out, not me.
Tarentino's movies feel like Old School gaming to me anyway. There's lots of competing characters, each with their own motivations, all crashing into each other and spinning off crazy situations that nobody could have planned. That's D&D to me.

So, how to bring the Cinematic Tarentino theme to the Old School game I like? This is what I'm thinking.

Every player picks a theme song for their character at the character generation phase of start up. Tarentino movies are chock full of atmospheric music that accompanies those brutal gun battles and combats along with the philosophical bone gnawing, without it his movies would lose alot of their impact, I think. Consider the use of Stealers Wheel in Reservior Dogs, you're not going to forget that bit with the straight razor and the gasoline any time soon.

Every player then rolls a 1d4 to determine the number of times per game that they can play their theme song. You'd have to have a stereo, or maybe and mp3 or other sound file player, with the chosen theme songs keyed up on it. A nice sounding system would be necessary, tiny tinny speakers would make the whole thing seem silly instead of funky grim and groovy.

PCs would have to have initiative, or surprise in order to declare a theme song action. So long as the song plays, that particular PC receives bonuses to his actions. Pluses to hit, increases in skill level, etc. Once the song comes to an end, the bonuses vanish. The power of the theme song bonus could increase with level, should any PC survive the game. I would sort of expect a Tarentino theme game to end in a TPK most of the time, that's part of the idiom.

The length of the song would be a real time limit on the duration of the theme song bonus. Most songs only last 3 or 4 minutes of real time, and that's not a lot in an RPG combat situation. Also, since the PC can only use the theme song a limited number of times per game, they aren't likely to waste it on frivolous events.

If more than one Player wants to employ the theme song bonus at the same time, I think I'd make them dice for it. Or maybe create some sort of character coolness index chart which would determine which character has more Tarentino in his veins. Yah, dig it, Daddy-O?

You could bolt this on to just about any RPG and make it work without too much trouble, I think.
Getting the music system set up satisfactorily and keeping the players from squabbling over songs would be the tougher part.
I think this would be a good way to inject some of that Pulp Fiction spirit into any game without having to work out a complete rule set just for it.

I was really thinking of this as applicable to modern gritty pulp and crime type gaming at first, but I think you could Tarentino just about any genre.

Basil Polidourus's Conan soundtrack has lots of great stuff for Sword & Sorcery type D&D gaming. I guess you could use just about anything that fit with the theme of your game

I'd use Johnny Cash for an Aces & Eights or other western character theme. "God'll cut you down", would be great tune for that. Or some of those spaghetti western themes like "the Ecstasy of Gold".

I think I'd like a little Monster Magnet for a Weird Planet type game.

In any case, this would be a way of incorporating the background music a lot of people like to play during games as an actual part of the game. I haven't tried this myself yet, but I'm sure the guys would be willing to give it a spin.

Ewart Oakeshott assures me that variable weapon damage is ok.

Ewart Oakeshott, 1916-2002 was and is one of my favorite authorities on the medieval sword. It was Oakeshotts sword typology which really made clear to me the great variety of design and purpose of medieval European swords.

It was Oakeshott who refocused the attention of academia and collectors on the blade itself, instead of merely the swords furniture. Previous studies of swords tended to pay more attention to guards, hilts,and pommels than they did to the blade.
The blade is the sword, however. Oakeshott recognized the sword as a tool designed to perform a function, rather than a totem of war, or a ceremonial showpiece.

Oakeshott's typology concerns the blades shape, length, cross section, and structural design, and groups blades in families of related designs that show how the weapons evolved to overcome the improving defences they faced.
There has always been an arms race, it just used to be slower and more subtle.

Modern sensibilities tend to focus on the flashy weapons of kings and princes. Gold plated hilts and gem stone pommels are what you see in movies and fantasy art, along with ridiculously huge blades with extraneous flairs and curves that no man could actually lift, let alone use in melee.
That sort of thing disrupts my belief in the game world. I haven't any problem accepting a thousand pound, fire-breathing reptilian monster in a fantasy world. I suppose that's because it's not really much of a jump from dinosaurs to dragons.
A twenty pound sword however, makes me roll my eyes. I split alot of wood, with a 6 pound maul and a double bit axe. I play around some with the swords in my own collection, the largest of which is just over 4 pounds, and a two-hander. Actually using anything that weighs more than 4 pounds in melee combat is beyond the capabilities of most humans.

A melee weapon will be as heavy as it must to perform it's function, and no heavier. Speed in combat is more telling than force, and if you use a weapon that is so large it slows your attack, you will be killed by the guy who uses a less clumsy and faster killing tool.

So much for the real world.

In the Original Edition of The Game all weapons did D6 damage and many aficionados of OD&D and it's retro-clone, Swords&Wizardry use this system. It's fast, and straight forward and streamlines combat to keep the action moving quickly. From the stand point of game rules, it's eminently sensible and is in keeping with the Old School philosophy of rules light gaming.

These are all things I'm in favor of, but I'm an AD&D guy at heart, and I have no problem with variable weapon damage. I prefer the idea in fact. I'm willing to spend the extra few seconds to check a weapons damage rating if I don't already know it.

In an ideal situation, a dagger can kill as easily as a two handed sword, certainly. A single deep thrust from a six inch blade will let the life out of an opponent as surely as would loosing their head to the mighty swing of a four foot blade.

This ideal situation is something that almost never occurs in life though. If you were in a actual melee situation, I think I'm safe in assuming you'd rather be the one with the two handed sword and not the guy with the dagger. This is what I think the variable weapon damage accurately reflects.

Since AD&D/OD&D combat is abstract in nature, the difference in weapon damage is the difference in the potential harm the weapon can cause. Either the dagger doing d4 damage, or the two-handed sword doing 1d10 damage could kill with one blow, but the sword is more likely to do so.

At least at low level, where The Game is most true to life. I've only once had a character make it past 10th level myself. I just prefer low level gaming, it's more thrilling I think.

I've pasted in a few illustrations of portions of Oakeshott's sword typology from historicalweapons.com. These are just a few of the types covered in the full typology. There are sub-types within most categories. The typology covers viking age to renaissance sword types.

For some reason I don't understand, blogger is not allowing me to cut and paste links tonight.

So, you'll have to type these in for yourself if you would like to read more on the web about Ewart Oakeshott and his work.

myarmory.com has and excellent bio of the man, and a type by type example of the swords that make up the typology. There is also a wealth of other arms and armor related information if you're like me, a DM who dwells on that sort of thing.

oakeshott.org will take you to the Oakeshott Institute. The Institute houses Oakeshott's own sword collection and works to expand on his research.

Wyrd Greyhawk. Concerning Raise Dead, they don't come back the same.

James over at Grognardia just put up an interesting post on his concerns about Raise Dead in his Dwimmermount campaign.
There's always been an interesting back and forth on Raise Dead, and it's effect on the play experience. Does it make the game less exciting and intense? Does it lessen the sting of death, since you can bring your PC back from the grave and soldier on? Is it contrary to the Sword&Sorcery foundation of the game?

There's plenty to say, pro and con on allowing the recovery of PCs from death. And I'm sure you've probably already chewed this over yourselves, and read all the arguments, so I'm just going to share what I do for Wyrd Greyhawk.

Raise Dead is not a spell or power that I allow Player Characters.
Only the most puissant of NPC Clerics, those with the ear of their god, are able to return the dead to life.

PCs who wish to raise a dead comrade will have to present their case to such a personage with care, and it will certainly not be cheap. In fact, it's likely to beggar them, or put them in the debt of the Cleric or his church to a great extent.
They may be tasked for a time, or for a set number of services to pay off the debt if they can't produce the wealth in coin or treasure.
There isn't a drive-up window for bringing the dead back from the grave, it's an event of divine gravity for the cleric and not considered lightly.

It's also not a Get-Out-Of-Death Free Card for the PC.

A PC raised from the dead will undergo a forced alignment change to match that of the Cleric, (and his god),who raised him. This will almost certainly change the PC's personality, and a Player has to be willing to go this route with the character if he wants to have him raised.

If the PC's new alignment is in conflict with his old class, he will be forced to adopt a new class that is acceptable. There is a 25% chance that the PC will experience a revelation and wish to become a cleric of the god who provided the divine power to raise him in any case. Even a shiftless murderer of a thief may find himself a,"born again believer" after tasting death.

If not, then the new class is treated as if dealing with a Dual Class Character under the AD&D rules. A PC who doesn't become a follower of the raising god is free to choose a new class if he likes, so long as it doesn't conflict with his new alignment.
The raised PC keeps his hit points, less a 10% penalty for having been DEAD, but starts over as a 1st level PC of the new class.

If the players are the type who just see a PC as a playing piece, they likely won't bother with raise dead or resurrection. They'll just roll up a new PC and Game-On. If they're the type who like to immerse themselves in the character, they'll likely enjoy the challenge of playing an altered version of their PC.

Win-win.

Raise Dead is not as big of a game-changer any more. The death of the PC isn't a trivial thing or a speed bump in PC advancement. In a sense, the original PC is still dead, and only players who really want that PC back in whatever form will go to all the trouble of getting him raised, since it will have an effect on the direction of the campaign.

That's what I do. Tah-Da!

Welcome to Wyrd Greyhawk! We'll all laugh about your ignominious death.

I haven’t actually posted anything about my game world before because it’s Greyhawk, and I figured everyone is already familiar with it. I’ve realized though, that everybody’s Greyhawk is different. And alot of gamers have no experience of Greyhawk at all.
Weird, huh?
It sort of took me aback the first time I ran into a dismissal of Greyhawk as “vanilla fantasy”, and poorly detailed. My Greyhawk is based on the original World of Greyhawk Folio, and I had always just assumed that everyone understood that the world was only sketchily described because you, the DM, are supposed to make up and fill in your game world as you need, and as you like.
Apparently, this isn’t so. I’ve gathered from the forums and game blogs that there is an expectation that contemporary game product should be, “plug and play”. No tinkering or house ruling required or allowed. A product is considered incomplete if every possible situation isn’t nailed down in the rules.
This strikes me as one of those disconnects between Old Guard thought and New School. I like to make stuff up. I like to build things and figure them out at my leisure. I’d much rather buy the tools I need to create something on my own than pick up a turn-key version already finished. You learn something when you do it yourself.

Anyway, I’ve never actually written out all the things I’ve done to Greyhawk over the years. My version mostly just exists in my head, or in scattered notes in binders.

I’ve decided though, to at least write an outline, or a set of points, that detail the differences and changes I’ve made, and those I plan to make in the future. I’ve picked up a lot of great ideas from the blogs and forums and I look forward to trying them out. This is really to help me pull together just what I’m going to do for the next campaign.

I’m preparing to get a game together in the near future and relaunch the Greyhawk campaign with a reconstituted game group. I think getting this down in one document will help me focus on the spirit of the World of Greyhawk I want to convey. This is just a draft of the general idea, not a complete description. I don’t think that’s even possible.

I’m calling my iteration, Wyrd Greyhawk, cause we’re all a pack of doomed, laughing bastards anyway. Eat, drink, and be Gary! For tomorrow we die!

Theme/feeling/atmosphere.

Wyrd Greyhawk is mediaevalesque pulp sword and sorcery. Imagine it as Arthurian myth, the tales of Charlemagne, and the Canterbury Tales, as rewritten and expanded on by Fritz Lieber, Clarke Ashton Smith, and R.E.Howard. In the private library of a disreputable tavern, while smoking black lotus from a bejeweled hookah, and drinking absinthe from elf-skull cups, with smoky eyed dancing girls languidly twirling about the room.

And H.P.Lovecraft sitting on a pile of black silk cushions in the corner playing a sitar.

My sense of humor is dark and earthy, and so is my sense of drama. Stuff happens in my games that you know you’re a bad person for laughing about.

The core of the world is solidly medieval European, with themes and situations from Sword&Sorcery, Weird Tales/Pulp fiction, real world ancient history, Lost World stories, dark fairy stories, and others layered on top.

Player characters are not super-human Heroes, but average Joes. Maybe they have a bit more skill, or talent, or luck, than usual. They’re desperate, or idealistic, or greedy, or excluded, or otherwise unwilling or unable to plow, or march, or forge, or serve their betters.
For one reason or another, they’re at least partially outside the bounds of society and must make their own way in the world.
Black humor is at the heart of the game. The odds are stacked heavily against the PCs and they know it. Humanity and its allies are beset on all sides by inimical races, monsters, and gods. Plagues, war, and famine stalk the Flaness.
They aren’t destined for greatness, though they may attempt to carve their way to it. If that’s what they’re after. It’s really up to their own actions, and the dice. They might make you a king; they might say you die in a pit.

Magic

* Magic is rare. It is weird, feared, and not a technology stand-in. Magic-users are few and far between. No crystal ball TVs, no magic streetlights, no wizardly freezers. There are no magic shops. There’s not a snowballs chance in hell that anyone is going to sell genuine magic weapons, spells, or items from a storefront. PCs might be able to work out a trade with an NPC in possession of a magic item they desire, but it won’t be cheap, and it’s unlikely that mere gold will be sufficient to purchase magic outright.
* There are no magic schools. Arcane knowledge is guarded and shared by the powerful practitioners of the art only with their own apprentices and followers. Great wizards accumulate apprentices and followers and hangers-on. These may be thought of as members of a particular school of magic, centered on the theories of that particular mage, but there are no classes or diplomas.
* The city of Greyhawk has an area known informally as, “The Sorcerer’s Quarter”, where many of the cities powerful magic-users have their homes, but, there is no giant pyramidal School of Wizardry. I always hated that thing.
* I’m writing a version of Trollsmyth and Malisjewski’s Secondary Powers and Residual Effects for spells. I think it’s a brilliant idea that helps drive home the weird and fearsome nature of magic use. Magic-users are manipulating the very fabric of reality by casting spells, and that kind of power is not free of consequences.
* I think that I may work up a sanity risk table to associate with spell use of levels above 3rd. Maybe something like Call of Cthulu has. I may extend the risks of magic use to include those who spend a lot of time with the magic-user, like fellow party members.


* Religion

I’m including all the published gods of Greyhawk in the setting. No Norse, or Greek, or other pantheons though. I’m including real world approaches to the gods to make religion a bit more true to life though.
* People create hyphenated, or composite deities to serve cultural or political needs. As the Egyptians had Atum-Ra, so there might be a Pelor-Pholtus, or a Boccob-Celestian
There’s always the problem of having a pantheon of deities underlying the monotheistic structure of the Cleric Class, which as you all know, was built on the archetype of the Christian crusading priest. And also, to hold Sir Fang in check. To address this, I’m adding the religion of The One God, a belief system which holds that all the gods of the various Greyhawk pantheons are in fact, each facets or faces of a single creator god. Worshipers of the One God view all other gods as valid, but incomplete, manifestations of the One God.
This will take care of the players who want a classic, crusading cleric, while keeping the pagan flavored pantheonic cleric as well.
All religions have factions and theological hair-splitters, so, there’s also the worshipers of the True God, who view all other gods as false, or demonic. Some of them are open-minded and philosophic about their beliefs and some are militant and intolerant.

* I’m also including the Cthulu mythos under both their own, and alternate names. They won’t be worshiped openly, at least not by humanity. But behind closed doors in degenerate backwaters, and in guarded dungeons in the great cities.

“IA! IA!”. My kuo-toa are Deep Ones.

I haven’t assigned areas of influence yet, but the flavor and style of worship of every god and pantheon will vary widely from place to place. There is no guarantee that worshipers of god X in one location will agree, or get along with worshipers of god X from another location. They might not even be of the same alignment.
Also, whether standard, composite, monotheistic, or pantheistic, all clerics classes will be able to cast clerical spells. The true nature of the gods can never be known, and no one can point to the ability to call on divine magic as proof of their religions validity, as all clerics are capable of doing so.
There isn’t going to be any final truth about whose view of religion is correct that the PCs can ever uncover.
The unknown is at the heart of the game.

* Expanded Timeline

The chronology of historical events in the gazetteer covers a space of 1122 years. It begins with the start of the Baklunish-Suel wars in 5031 by the Suel calendar and ends at 6091, or 576 Common year.
The Invoked Devastation and the Rain of Colorless Fire are marked at 5094, Suel calendar. 1003 years Before Present,(publication of the Greyhawk Gazetteer).
Pulp sword&sorcery is built on ancient empires and forgotten kingdoms, prehistoric races and monsters of the unknown past. I really want the Suel Empire to be my ancient empire of evil sorcery, Hyperborean, Melnibonean, Stygian in feeling. So, I’m pushing the Rain of Colorless Fire way back a few thousand years.
I’m assuming that Gary meant the Suel Empire to play a somewhat analogous role to the Roman Empire, as far as the history of the Flaness is concerned.

The commonly accepted date for the end of the Roman Empire is A.D. 476. If the end of the Suel Empire is meant to overlay that, and you add the 1003 year span to take us to the publication date of the Gazetteer, that would bring us to a real world date of 1479, and knowing Gary’s preference for a high renaissance setting for his own Greyhawk, I have to think this isn’t coincidental.

I came to D&D from literature and not wargaming though, and 1000 years just isn’t enough time for me to feel the sense of really ancient history that I want the Suel Empire to evoke.

So, in Wyrd Greyhawk, 5094 is the date of the fall of the Oeridian Empire instead. The Oeridian Empire is going to be my Rome analogue. The end of the Suel Empire in the Rain of Colorless Fire takes place thousands of years earlier. In the aftermath and migrations into the Flaness, the Oeridians founded their own empire. It stands for two thousand years, and then disintegrates due to continued invasions by the Knor in 5094 where we pick up the standard timeline. This makes the Great Kingdom of the Aerdy a lesser imitation of the Oeridian Empire. Something like the Holy Roman Empire was to the actual Roman Empire.

The Knor are my stand-ins for the Saxons, Goths, Franks, and other Germanic Tribes which finally overwhelmed Rome. In Wyrd Greyhawk, they’re suel tribes who move down from the north and destroy the Oeridian Empire after 300 years of migrations and wars.
By the time of publication of the Gazetteer, they’ve largely assimilated with the conquered peoples and no longer strongly identify with the Thillonrian Suel.

* I’m also making the Thillonrian peninsula the original home of the Suel. It never made sense to me to have the survivors of the Suel Empire make their way there and then suddenly abandon all their ancient culture in favor of viking-like barbarism.
In Wyrd Greyhawk, tribes of ancient suel sailed from their ancestral home in the Thillonrian peninsula many thousands of years ago, and dispersed across the Oerth. One group founded the kingdom in the south that would later become the Suel Empire. Others vanished to known history.

This frees up the Frost, Snow, and Ice barbarians from the Suel Empire baggage, and gives me the option of inserting new history as it occurs to me.

* I think I’m going to flavor the Baklunish countries, Ket, Tusmit, and Ekbir, with some Empire of the Petal Throne Seasoning. I’m not sure exactly how yet, but they always seemed a little flat to me.
A dash of Tekumel ought to spice them up.

This up coming campaign will kick off prior to the Greyhawk Wars. I’ll eventually do some version of the wars, but I think I’ll hold off on that until the party makes it to End Game stage.
There will be no Rary the Traitor, or Vecna knockoff rubbing out the Circle of Eight. That was just silly.

Alignment

Alignment is treated as a generalization. I’m not getting rid of it; it’s a good method of shorthand for basic behaviors. No alignment languages though, I don’t see a need that thieves cant, or arcane speech, or soldiers argot doesn’t fill. Players don’t know the alignments of each others characters, that stays between the player and the DM.
A cleric PC who casts Know Alignment is unlikely to share the knowledge gained other than vaguely. The Cleric’s player is not allowed to pass the information to other players, only hint.


Technological level

I think that in a world with many competing races, plus monsters, war, plagues, gods, and demons that the constant strife would result in migrating areas of Dark Age and renaissance. Technological advancement depends on the persistent transmission of accumulated knowledge over time, from one generation to the next.
Wyrd Greyhawk has no printing presses, and magic is not used to bring learning to the masses. Wizards are generally unsharing sorts. Save for the personal teachings of the friars of Delleb. With knowledge only transmitted directly from master or teacher to student, or apprentice, or journeyman, any break in the chain results in the loss of information and skills. The learned, the skilled, the knowledgeable, get killed in wars, or eaten by monsters, or die of plague, and civilization must rediscover, or recreate what has been lost, over and over again.
So, the default maximum level of technology tops out at about 1350 AD Europe in the greatest cities, an average level of 1100-1200 AD in the towns, villages and hamlets, and an iron age base in the hinterlands.
Plate mail is the greatest protection normally possible, and it’s not common. Full plate armor is nearly unheard of. Only the elves and dwarves have the skill and knowledge for complex armor, and even they don’t make a lot of it.


Societal Changes

As with technological level, the ever present threat of humanoids, monsters, magic, war, plagues, etc, has an effect on the mostly feudal governments of Wyrd Greyhawk’s perpetual middle ages.
The structure of society is both altered and reinforced. Even mediocre Lords, Chieftains, or Kings enjoy the loyalty of their subjects, so long as order and a degree of security are maintained.

The recurring destruction and disruption of villages, towns, and cities results in a permanent underclass of wanderers, refugees, and dispossessed. These people migrate in search of new homes and opportunities, outside of the normal feudal structure of most kingdoms.
They are generally referred to as the Unfettered, as they have no masters or lords. Adventurers often come from the ranks of the Unfettered.
The fame and riches that a successful adventurer may acquire may result in greater than normal social mobility, both upwardly, and downwardly.
A lord whose castle is sacked, and whose land is overrun, may also sink to the level of the Unfettered and take his chances as a soldier of fortune.
A dirt poor swineherd whose pigs are devoured by wargs may also become unfettered and take his chances on adventure.
Life with perpetual near-disaster tends to make both rulers and ruled more accepting of their inferiors and superiors. People still desire advancement, since advancement equals greater security, but in general, there is less friction between the classes than was the norm in actual history. Nothing unifies the in-group like Threats from Outside.


Slavery

Slavery is prevalent in many areas of the flaness, but not quite the majority. Those areas without slavery are usually the ones where the common man has a fair amount of power. Slave labor devalues the work of free men and puts them at a disadvantage. Lands such as the Yeomanry stoutly oppose slave holding.
Bringing slaves into non-slaveholding land is viewed with distaste and discouraged, but only the Theocracy of the Pale automatically declares slaves in its territory to be freed.
The city of Greyhawk looks the other way concerning outlanders bringing small numbers of personal slaves within its domain. Only convicted criminals may be enslaved in areas controlled by the city.

The Elves

The elves are weird. They hale from the Otherworld. The Otherworld is contiguous with Greyhawk, meaning entering it at one point, traveling across it and exiting it at another point will bring you out in an analogous point on the face of Greyhawk.

It exists in the same space as Greyhawk, but not the same dimension, as it were.

The Otherworld is a fey Greyhawk, where the elves are dominate and men are few in number.

There, the elves are their true selves and far more powerful than they are in Greyhawk.

For various reasons, they choose to spend time in Greyhawk and the longer they stay, the lesser they become.

PC elves are always the standard "lesser" game elf.

Suelucidar.

This is the hollow world at the center of Greyhawk. There unknown races built eldrich and ancient civilizations eons before the surface was populated.

It has had many names, but known now by the name given it by the last to discover it, explorers from the Suel Empire.

This is as much as I’ve got for tonight, just off the top of my head. I’m going to keep posting my ideas for Wyrd Greyhawk as they form up.
I think I’ll pick out some more atmospheric art for posting too. A picture is worth a thousand random tables, you know.

Picture credits:

Top pic is from a king arthur tale and the artist is unknown to me.

second pic is the Darrel Sweet cover for Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions.

Usually Sweet is a bit to cartoony for me, but I like this one, and Three Hearts and Three Lions is often sited by Gygax as one of the foundational books that inspiration for D&D was drawn from.

Third pic is Jeff Jones, the Son of the Bear God. Rockin, eh?

Fouth pic is called Tyranny of the Night and I think the artist's name is Raymond, not certain on that.

Fifth pic is The Wizard, by Don Maitz. You might recall it on the cover of Dragon magazine long ago. I love Maitz's stuff, You have to see a large version of this to really see all the detail in it.

Spontaneous Generation allows the Weird Mythic Underground and Gygaxian Naturalism to play nice together.

Spontaneous Generation is the theory that life can arise spontaneously from non-living inanimate matter, or that one form of life may be generated by another unrelated form.

The classic example is the notion that dead meat itself creates maggots spontaneously. Other forms of the theory allow for life to arise from lifeless matter by the power of the sun, by the "Vital Heat" contained within all matter, or by many other igniting factors.

The early natural philosophers held that by natural trials of combinations of parts of spontaneously arising animals, successful combinations had formed the species that they saw around them, and that the unsuccessful combinations had failed to reproduce.

A sort of unnatural selection. Heh...

This theory held from Aristotle until well into the 18th century before being finally pushed aside.

In my own Greyhawk, Spontaneous Generation is a fact. It is also modified, and altered, and distorted by the existence of magic, the will of the Gods, the meddling of infernal intruders, malignant emanations from the underworld, or the black spaces between the stars, and DM Fiat.

This is how I justify to myself the existence of so many monsters and sentient races on a single world. It is in the nature of Greyhawk itself to constantly churn out new life forms. Most of them are only single examples, and fail to found a species. These are my Monsters, with the capital M.
The creatures that do manage to continue themselves with offspring become the regular monsters, (little m), and other creatures of the gameworld.

I've got a little list here of modifying factors which influence the likelihood of any particular corpse spontaneously generating a new living thing.
This isn't a hard and fast rule, I may just say, "It is so!". It is always fun to roll some dice though, since you never know what'll happen.

Whenever something dies in the game, I check to see if there's a chance of a new creature being spontaneously generated. These percentages are cumulative.

* If the creature was killed directly by magic, +5% chance.
* If the deceased was a user of, a creature of, or actively employing magic at time of death, +5%
* If the body lies in an area either sacred or profane, +5%
* If the deceased creature had powers of regeneration, +5%
* There is a 1% chance of spontaneous generation for every hit die, or experience level of the deceased.

If a spontaneous generation does occur, there is a 75% chance that it results in ordinary insects or vermin. (75 or below on a 2d10)
There is a 10% chance of normal animals of a higher sort. (76-85 on a 2d10)
There is a 10% chance of the newly generated life being any sort of standard monster native to the area. (86-95 on a 2d10)
There is a 5% chance of the spontaneously generated creature being a new Monster. This may be an altered version of the deceased creature, or something completely unrelated.

This new Monster may or may not be able to breed with other creatures to found it's own line. That's up to you.

As an example, lets just say that Gneerg the goblin footman of the Vampire lord is slain along with his master by our band of intrepid adventurers.

Lets say Gneerg got himself zapped by the same lightening bolt that did in his Master. And also maybe sprayed with vampire blood and ichor. Just after downing an invisibility potion in an attempt to escape.

If the dice are feeling generous, or if you just decide it will be so, this combination of factors causes the spontaneous generation of an altered goblinoid some few weeks later.
Maybe it's an adult to begin with, or maybe it starts as a grub and metamorphoses into a larger creature later.
I think in this case, the spontaneous goblinoid will have vampiric abilities, and to make it weird, I'll have the nails of it's hands become long hollow fang-like blood syphons.
Maybe this thing is just a one-off, maybe it reproduces and becomes a pox on the gameworld.

This is just a thing I like to do to maintain some feeling of verisimilitude to the natural world of the game setting, while still allowing for the existence of the weird and freakish.
It also lets me keep everyone on their toes. It codes into the rules the idea that the DM is totally within his rights to throw unknowns at the players.

Just as Greyhawk is selecting for the best possible monsters to inhabit the game world, it's also deselecting the player characters who fail to show the survival traits needed in a worthy adventurer.

Survival of the Fittest just cracks me up.

*edit, that pic at the top is a clip from a larger Richard Corben illustration from 1971, fyi.

What If?! Jack Kirby played D&D!

It would look like this!

Some where, out there, in the depths of the Multiverse, there is an alternate reality where Gary Gygax was best buds with Jack "The King" Kirby!

In that wondrous world, True Believers, Kirby illustrated Dungeons & Dragons with all the majesty and hallucinatory phantasmagoric wonderment that only he was capable of!

Consider well, oh my brothers, (and Timeshadows), the mind expanding force of fantastic illustration, and think on what might have been the path of Dungeons & Dragons had this exotic world been ours!





I'm a bit punchy tonight. please forgive my hyperbolic hyperbole.

Excelsior!!!

How I learned to stop worrying and love the dice.

Some little while ago, there was a thread on Dragonsfoot started by a gamer who came from Wotc D&D, but wanted very desperately to like AD&D. The flavor and feeling of Old School gaming was very appealing to him, but he was having difficultly getting a handle on the rules eccentricities and the differing gaming philosophy at the heart of early TSR D&D. The thread was about how to address his frustrations with the facets of AD&D that seemed irrational and counter-intuitive to his 3E senses.
It was a very interesting thread, and the stalwarts of Dragonsfoot were mostly helpful and generous, counter to the image that I often see bandied about the web concerning Old School Grogs.
I'm going to quote my own response in that thread here. It seemed to me that most of the problems the opening poster was having in adjusting to AD&D had to do with the different expectations that the two schools of gaming thought bring to the table. Old School's acceptance of free-wheeling, and loose game mechanisms vs New School's desire for tight, and precise rules that are capable of standing on their own without the hand of the DM to hold them together.

Don't take this as 3E bashing, I don't really care enough to attack the game. AD&D is my baby, and I just look to other games to help me define and discover by contrast, just what it is that brings me joy about it.

This is what I said on Dragonsfoot about how to come at AD&D vs 3E.

"AD&D, and OD&D, I see as something like a suit of armor. Many different pieces that must be worn together and guided by the DM to function as a complete system. Each sub-system of the game ties loosely to the others, but depends on the DM to keep the whole thing together and moving.
This bothered me as a kid player, I wanted that unified mechanic phantom that everybody chases after. I wanted it to always, "make sense". The thing is, this is not possible, there is no way to cover all possible contingencies in a set of rules that neatly tie together and don't cover 10,000 pages.
Unified mechanical resolution of every possible scenario is a perpetual motion machine. It is not achievable. AD&D, and OD&D can cover all possibilities because they do not attempt to define them.
You, the DM, are the "unified mechanic" , you inhabit the rules, you wear them, and pick and choose which ones to employ and at which times in a way that is most congenial to the shape of the game you run. I think this is the core of the disconnect between old and new schools of thought.
New school appears to see the rules of the game as the game itself. It wants the game to be a self contained thing that stands on it's own without guidance and can be picked up and turned on and played and always turns out a perfect game.
Old school, as I perceive it, considers the game rules as a set of tools. The rules are hammers and wrenches, paint and brushes, chisels and saws. I use the rules to make the game as I go along. The game is created as it is played, by the choices the DM makes in how to use the rules, and the choices the players make in reacting to them.

Well, that's how I do it, anyway. Heh... "

Now, I don't think I'd change any of what I said in that post, but I think that what I was really thinking about was the difference in accepting the idea of abstract conflict resolution rules vs the idea of defined conflict resolution rules.
I'm pro TSR D&D because of the abstract nature of the rules. I think this is the very heart of the disconnect in approaches between the schools. As I said above, as a kid I wanted the strict yes or no approach to every situation in the game. I thought there was a problem if the rules didn't cover something.
But you can't cover everything in an RPG. We're simulating life and death in a fantasy world, not moving counters on a board. You just can't ever write a complete set of rules to deal with all possibilities, because the possibilities are infinite.
Abstraction in the rules is absolutely necessary to allow the Game Master to address unexpected and unplanned for situations, and those situations are exactly what give the game life.
This is what allows The Game to be the fantastic mind trip that it is at it's best. When you hammer down every last play option by hard wiring the rules to dictate that you must make the optimal choice or fail, you're not enhancing play, you're ensuring that it will be less than it can be.

At least, that's what I think. I'm going to go have some cake now. Buh-bye.

Enough whining about DMs! What do you want from your Players?

There just sometimes seems to be no end of the carping and bitching and whining about DMs exercising their Gary-given powers. It's the Authoritarian DM, or the Adversarial DM, or the Viking-hat DM, or the Killer DM. DM fiat is abhorred as unbalanced and "deprotagonizing".
If you see someone actually use the term deprotagonize, grab your dice and run. Those people are black holes of gaming, from which no fun can escape.

I think that I can fairly assume that if you're reading a blog on the internet about out of print Dungeons & Dragons, that you're probably a DM

So, what is it that you want from your players?

It's great if you have players who'll bring snacks, or help set up, or clean up after. But that's just what you want from any guest. The thing I want most from players, in game, is for them to ask me questions.

Ask lots of questions, about the NPCs, about the buildings, about the horses, about the road, about the doors, about the walls, about the tavern keeper, about the moneylender, about the halfling hanging in an iron cage at the crossroads. If I don't have something written down, I'll make it up, right then.

It's not going to throw off my story, because I'm not fricken telling a story. I've got no idea what the heck's going to happen next. I'm not running an improvisational theater troupe. Dice come with the game for a reason.

Each question asked adds to the reality of the game world. Each one contributes some new, tiny bit of knowledge that reinforces the sense of immersion that I want to build.
Especially the inconsequential little things. The stuff that doesn't directly effect play is just as important as the things that do.

This is a Role Playing Game, and not just a combat simulator. The world has to have depth, it has to breath. And, if you can describe that breath as sour, and ragged, and drawn through stained snaggle teeth, it's ten times better than just counting the number per round.

I want to hear questions because it indicates a level of investment in the game. People who are just phoning it in, and just sit there waiting to be spoon fed warm, pre-chewed adventure piss me off. I expect engagement in my players.

I think the second thing I really want is for every player to be willing to play along with every other player.
There's lots of different play styles out there. Thespians, Strategists, Hackers, Game players, what have you. It's nearly arguing about pin-dancing angels to try and define them all, so I don't.

The thing I want is for each player at the table to recognize that they have a preferred style, and so do the others. I want them to make allowances for each other, and play like a team. Not necessarily an in-game team like a tactical assault squad, but like a group of experienced players of any sport who realize that everyone has something they're best at, and lets that player shine when the opportunity arises.

I will create at least the possibility of situations arising which play to the strong suites of the styles of everybody at the table. I want everyone to have a chance to get what they want out of the game, and I want the players to do their part to make sure this happens as well.

I think of this as the, "humor the Bard rule".

Do unto others, gentlemen. And let the good times roll.