Greatest Hits #11 - PHB's I Have Known

Of course there's another one to put in the picture now ...

Yep, that's all of them. Bottom right comes in about 1980-81 for me (and yes that's the same book I bought with my allowance back then) and that upper left showed up on my doorstep yesterday.

I've had a lot of fun with these over the years and I can tell stories that came from games played with all of the previous versions. Even though I am still running Pathfinder and 4th edition games I am sure we will get around to giving the new one a try and then I'll have some stories to go with it too.

There are memories around the time each of these came out too. The joy of discovery, when all of this was so new with the first; the college days playing in dorms and at night at the IHoP of second; the fun of putting a new group together with old and new faces and new versions of classic adventures with third; the annoyance and disappointment of fourth gradually turning into a rediscovery of the fun and putting together another mix of old and new - including a new wife and some new kids; with 5th, well, right now it's all kid milestones for the last month - a 12th birthday, a lot of summer band practice, driving to and from the first job, and moving into a college dorm. If 5th has a good enough run, they may ALL be in college by the time 6th comes out.

PDF's may be the future of a lot of smaller RPG's, but I hope the biggest games, or the kickstarters for smaller games, give us a chance to acquire them as books. I'm pretty comfortable using an iPad at the table but there's something about being able to pick up the same book I held way back when that helps refresh those memories too - it's more than visual, it's texture, smell, weight, and all of the little nicks and dings they pick up in use. I'd say the largest ingredient in some of my AD&D materials after paper, ink, and glue is probably Domino's Pizza and Dr. Pepper. I took pretty good care of my stuff but hey, accidents happen, and Domino's was new here back then. We spent a lot of summer time scraping up our dollars so we could order pizza and keep on playing, especially before we could drive.

Anyway, I suppose I've "completed the set" for the time being - now to read the thing, and start the next chapter of a 30+ year story.

RPGaDAY - Day 29 - Most Memorable Encounter

Lots of choices here, both as a DM and as a player. I'll focus on one from awhile back because it still comes up in conversation sometimes.

We're playing AD&D 2E. This was a mid-level party with everyone in the 5-9 range and about 6-8 characters in any particular session. We were traveling cross-country somewhere in the Forgotten Realms, I don't remember the region but it was an area of open plains probably near the Sword Coast.

Camp for the night, Someone casts Leomund's Secure Shelter as was our routine. We eat, sit by fire, then sleep. LSS is a great spell for travelling (4th lvl wiz) in that it pops in a stone building with wizard locked doors and alarms and an unseen servant all built-in - no lousy tents & bedrolls for us! Also it meant no need for watches as we felt pretty secure.

So this particular night everything seems normal until the building disappears from around us in the middle of the night. So we are a)surprised b) unarmored and unarmed c) on our butts in heavy darkness. Then the breath weapon hits. I'm pretty sure one character died in that first blast with a failed saving throw.We start scrambling around for gear and get hit again. Then the thing lands and tears into one of the unarmored fighters and takes care of him. A Great Red Wyrm has stumbled across us, dispelled our Secure Shelter, and attacked with surprise.

It was as one-sided a battle as I have ever been in with characters past starting level. I don;t know that we could have taken it if we had prepared for it and surprised it - we had pretty much no chance given the way it began. I was running one of my clerics, Brutallus Maximus the First I believe, and he died of course - unarmored war clerics don't last long once the unarmored fighters go down. I know our bard turned invisible and hid - and survived - but that was kind of his thing.  The only other character that lived was our paladin, who the dragon picked up in one claw after beating him down into almost no hit points, and who started bargaining for his life with one of the mightier incarnations of chaotic evil on the planet! I was so disappointed, though it was a little funny to watch the up-til-now lawful good character completely ignore any "heroic last stand" thoughts to try and save his own skin as the beast flew off with him, leaving our shattered party behind.

I believe that was the end of that campaign in that form. Even though the bard could have some of us raised I think we called it as a group, and then created a new party, recruited by the bard for revenge on the dragon that killed his comrades. We never did get that revenge as we got sidetracked with other adventures, but it was a sore spot for a long time:

• "Where did he come from?"
• "Wouldn't there be some kind of local legend about the huge ancient red dragon that lives around here?"
• "How did he see our little cottage at night from way up there?" (OK I thought this one was a little weak but it did come up)
• "How have we not heard anything about this thing if it's out flying around and attacking things?"

Anyway, we survived as players, if not as characters, and moved on. Turned out it was a completely random encounter, a good (!) roll on the wandering monster tables he had for the area. That really didn't make us feel any better when we found out, and it's still a legendary story among my long-time players today.

PHB's I Have Known

Yep, that's all of them. Bottom right comes in about 1980-81 for me (and yes that's the same book I bought with my allowance back then) and that upper left showed up on my doorstep yesterday.

I've had a lot of fun with these over the years and I can tell stories that came from games played with all of the previous versions. Even though I am still running Pathfinder and 4th edition games I am sure we will get around to giving the new one a try and then I'll have some stories to go with it too.

There are memories around the time each of these came out too. The joy of discovery, when all of this was so new with the first; the college days playing in dorms and at night at the IHoP of second; the fun of putting a new group together with old and new faces and new versions of classic adventures with third; the annoyance and disappointment of fourth gradually turning into a rediscovery of the fun and putting together another mix of old and new - including a new wife and some new kids; with 5th, well, right now it's all kid milestones for the last month - a 12th birthday, a lot of summer band practice, driving to and from the first job, and moving into a college dorm. If 5th has a good enough run, they may ALL be in college by the time 6th comes out.

PDF's may be the future of a lot of smaller RPG's, but I hope the biggest games, or the kickstarters for smaller games, give us a chance to acquire them as books. I'm pretty comfortable using an iPad at the table but there's something about being able to pick up the same book I held way back when that helps refresh those memories too - it's more than visual, it's texture, smell, weight, and all of the little nicks and dings they pick up in use. I'd say the largest ingredient in some of my AD&D materials after paper, ink, and glue is probably Domino's Pizza and Dr. Pepper. I took pretty good care of my stuff but hey, accidents happen, and Domino's was new here back then. We spent a lot of summer time scraping up our dollars so we could order pizza and keep on playing, especially before we could drive.

Anyway, I suppose I've "completed the set" for the time being - now to read the thing, and start the next chapter of a 30+ year story.

Reflections on editions and changes over the years - AD&D Second Edition

When the time came around for 2nd Edition there were some things we thought could be handled in a better way: Level Limits were too low. Unarmed combat was a mess, initiative as written was a mess,and other parts of the combat system were largely ignored because they didn’t work for a lot of people. Also, after playing Traveller & Champions & GURPS, James Bond 007, and other games many of us thought the lack of a skill system was a glaring omission. So our issues were mostly mechanical ones – we wanted a cleaned up 1st edition with some new things bolted on – like a skill system – and that’s pretty much what we got. The classes were revised, spells were cleaned up, and the combat system worked better – all good. 

It was handled in a pretty good fashion at the time with several articles and surveys in Dragon and then finally a preview pullout section of what was coming ...

... it was a pretty decent way to keep the players up to speed on what was coming.

I know some people were incensed at the content changes - no assassins, no half-orcs, no demons and devils, but we didn't really care - we never cared much for evil characters anyway, and the demons and devils weren't all that common of a monster anyway. Later as we added in the brown books and the Tome of Magic it felt like we had more material than we had ever had in the AD&D days and more customization of characters and just "more" in general so we didn't miss that stuff, and a lot of it ended up coming back later in 2nd Edition anyway.

So we spent the 90’s playing 2nd Edition as our main game –  D&D has always been our main game among my friends, and I suspect that will never change – and it kept us very satisfied for years. It did, however, have some hard edges – cleric weapon restrictions, magic‐user gear restrictions, humans couldn’t multiclass while demi‐humans still had racial limits (even if they were higher than before), lots of save or die effects – and those hard edges began to wear on us as time went on to the point that by the mid 90’s other games just felt like they played better and our time spent on the game began to decrease as other games crept into the rotation. Among other things we played a lot of Shadowrun, which has a very different feel in play than 2E. The biggest indicator of this decreased tolerance for 2E’s quirks is that we still played a lot of fantasy but we were doing it with Fantasy Hero, GURPS Fantasy, and RuneQuest and not just 2E because we liked the way those systems handled things compared to the game we had effectively been playing for 15‐20 years at that point. Dark Sun and Spelljammer seemed like square pegs in round holes. We greeted the Player’s Option books with a yawn – I think only one guy bought them and we only tried them once. Heck, Gamma World 4th edition (1992) seemed like a revolution in system mechanics compared to 2E! TSR flaming out in the late 90’s didn’t help as it was starting to feel like the time for our game had come and gone and we were prepared to move on to other things like Deadlands or Underground or the new version of Shadowrun, keeping other games for our fantasy fix.

The Awesomeness of the Fighter/Magic-User

Neverwinter includes a new class for 4E: The Bladesinger. Bladesingers were one of the legendary "kits" for AD&D 2E as they were rather overpowered and were exhibit A whenever someone wanted to point out that the splatbooks were beyond "power creep". I saw more of them than any other Elf kit during the 2E days and there was a good reasona as to why: Bladesingers were specialist fighter-mages who were just better in almost every way. However, fighter-mages were already awesome and popular...

Basic D&D: Elves. Most people liked elves. Sure, you advanced slower than the stupid thief but you were a better fighter, had more hit points, and could throw spells - who cared if you needed 4000XP to make 2nd level? A bigger bonus, and one not instantly apparent to new players, was that you had full use of all fighter magic items AND full use of all magic-user items. Attacked by flying creatures? Out comes the wand of lightning bolts! Ambushed by orcs? Shocking grasp followed up by a smack from the +2 sword while protected by your +3 chainmail and +2 shield! Sure, advancement was slower but being able to use all those magic items upped your power exponentially over other classes. Plus, the M-U was likely to get croaked more than once at low levels and if you collected his magic items when that inevitably happened, well, you were even more powerful afterwards...

AD&D Fighter/Magic-User - this was just awesome. Slower advancement yeah yeah, but it had all of the benefits of both classes and none of the drawbacks! Plus the magic item synergy described under Basic still applied! Now there was the potential level cap issue but considering the duration of most campaigns that was less of a problem than it might appear and capping at 6th level spells was not that much of a disadvantage most of the time. Making it to Ftr 7/ M-U 11 was still going to take a while but you were still quite formidable into the teen levels at least, and in any case you weren't item-capped...

2E Fighter / Mage - Still awesome but TSR started messing with them in this edition by putting in rules like "you can't cast spells in armor even if you're an elf" and other nonsense. The loophole to this rule was Elven Chain, which unlike in 1E could be magically enhanced, and so despite all kinds of non-mechanical roleplaying type reasons for it to be rare, pretty soon every Ftr/M-U was running around in elven chain, usually of the +1 variety at least*.  You still had the limited advancement speed but you also still had the wide-open item flexibility, less some of the armor. When you added in certain kits (Bladesinger!) It was a very strong character type and the level limits were even higher, especially if you had decent stats - and c'mon, most of us had darn good stats back then...

3E Fighter 1 / Wizard 1 - OK this is where it started to really go downhill. The fighter/mage was perhaps the most-gimped type of character in making the 2E to 3E transition. No longer could you advance simultaneously in two classes at a reduced rate. Now I view unlimited multiclassing as one of the cooler innovations of 3E as it allowed an impressive degree of customization, but the way the rules were set up it severely damaged spellcasters. Conventional attack bonuses continued to increase across classes but wizards and clerics lost both spell power advancement (saving throw targets did not increase) and spell knowledge advancement (as they got no new spell levels if they didn't level up in an existing class), effectively losing out in two aspects of character advancement. I've always wondered if allowing the spell power to advance with overall level instead of specific class level would have smoothed this out but I never had a chance to try it out in play. Whereas in earlier editions a 9th level party might include a Ftr 7/M-U 8 character** who could still contribute in a big way, in 3E that would probably translate into a Ftr 4 / Wizard 5 in 3E terms and alongside a 9th lvl Fighter and a 9th level Wizard that is just pathetic when it comes to combat effectiveness. On top of the power issues the armor loophole was closed meaning that wearing almost any decent type of armor inflicted a chance for spell failure, even if you were an elf. With the leveling ules killing the offensive potential and the armor rules killing the defensive potential, the fighter-mage became a rare bird indeed. Sure there were prestige classes like the Spellsword but anyone going for one of those tended to be mostly fighter with a few wizard levels sprinkled in, rather than a full-on split power type.

4E - now this is where things turn around. The initial PHB had the traditional classes and very limited multiclassing but dropped the armor issues - you could make a fully armored wizard if you wanted to spend the feats on it! Not a bad start, but then the Forgotten Realms Player's Guide came out and included the Swordmage...oh yeah! Not only was he a fighter type that threw magic he was a full-on defender, the toughest of fighter types - a new wrinkle for the fighter-mage fan because they had never been the most durable of characters. Teleporting around the battlefield smacking enemies with a sword, dumping spell effects out through the sword, and even hitting things at range on occasion, the Swordmage was a lot of fun. It definitely leaned more towards the "Fighter" side of the spectrum but it was unlike a conventional fighter in many ways. Other classes came out in other books and some of them leaned in the fighter-mage direction with various elemental or magical effects like the Warden or the Hexblade Warlock, and multiclassing plus the right paragon path could add some pizzazz as well. Now though, the Neverwinter book is out and it gives us the Bladesinger...

The Bladesinger class is the return of the fighter/magic-user in all of its glory. Not since 2E have you been able to fight up close with a decent weapon and armor class then turn and blast someone across the room with a lightning bolt! Their utility powers are almost all magic-user flavored too, consisting of wonderful things like Mirror Image, Shield, Expeditious Retreat, etc. They also have some of the teleport abilities of the swordmage but it's not as pronounced as with that class. The key mechanical limitation on them is that they choose wizard encounter powers at most levels, but they are treated as dailies, meaning they do give up some power for flexibility - just like the old days - but with dailies like lighning bolt and charm monster and with magic missile as an at-will power they are not giving up a lot. In short, they will play very much like an old school elven fighter-mage (and they no longer have to be an elf although that is the typical background) and I like that very much.

So there we go - after my trashing of Traits here's something that the 4E Neverwinter book got right. Note that it's not just because it's an old-school type of character, it's because they did it right! Now, I'm off to roll one up and see if I can talk my player who occasionally DM's into letting me take it on his next run...



*Another good choice was Drow armor if you were going through those adventures. "Oh but it loses it's power in sunlight!" - hey, you know what? Once I get back up into the sunlight then I'm not going to care because I won't have a bunch of Drow shooting at me! "Oh but if they see you wearing Drow armor they will hate you!" - I'm a surface elf, they already hate me. Besides it might make them realize that I'm both practical and ruthless - like them.


** Figure a fighter needed 250,001 XP's to hit 9th. Give hime 251,000 split evenly and you have a level 8 fighter and a level 8 M-U, but Elves could only advance to 7th as a fighter anyway.

Z is for: Zenopus!

Zeonpus was the creator of the mysterious tower that once rose above the sample starter dungeon in the Holmes Basic D&D book. All we know about him is this:

100 years ago the sorcerer Zenopus built a tower on the low hills overlooking Portown. The tower was close to the sea cliff west of the town and, appropriately, next door to the graveyard. Rumor has it that the magician made extensive cellars and tunnels underneath the tower. The town is located on the ruins of a much older city of doubtful history, land Zenopus was said to excavate in his cellars in search of ancient treasures.

Fifty years ago, on a cold wintry night, the wizard's tower was suddenly engulfed in green flame. Several of his human servants escaped the holocaust, saying their master had been destroyed by some powerful force he had unleashed in the depths of the tower. Needless to say the tower stood vacant for a while after this, but then the neighbors and the night watchmen complained that ghostly blue lights appeared in the windows at night, that ghastly screams could be heard emanating from the tower at all hours, and goblin figures could be seen dancing on the tower roof in the moonlight. Finally the authorities had a catapult rolled through the streets of the town and the tower was battered to rubble. This stopped the tauntings but the townsfolk continue to shun the ruins. The entrance to the old dungeons can be easily located as a flight of broad stone steps leading down into darkness, but the few adventurous souls who hove descended into crypts below the ruin have either reported only empty stone corridors or have failed to return at all. Other magic-users have moved into the town but the site of the old tower remains abandoned.

Whispered tales are told of fabulous treasure and unspeakable monsters in the underground passages below the hilltop, and the story tellers are always careful to point out that the reputed dungeons lie in close proximity to the foundations of the older, pre-human city, to the graveyard, and to the sea.

Portown is a small but busy city linking the caravan routes from the south to the merchant ships that dare the pirate-infested waters of the Northern Sea. Humans and non-humans from all over the globe meet here. At the Green Dragon Inn, the players of the game gather their characters for an assault on the fabulous passages beneath the ruined Wizard's tower.

So we really know very little other than that he was a wizard, he built a tower, and he was curious enough to risk his life searching for lost knowledge and power. Now in D&D a wizard is supposed to be 9th level before he builds a tower, so we have a baseline there. We also know he lived in the tower for 50 years before The Incident, so I'm going to propose that he had advanced at least a bit beyond 9th level during that time, started off youngish, and ended up oldish. The signature notes from the end are "green flame" and a force unleashed in he depths - maybe he was a summoner? So...

BECMI D&D - Let's call him a 14th level M-U with all of the fire spells and some summoning as well. All of his fire spells are customized to be green fire, not regular fire. If you can find his spellbook, you can do the same thing. Give him a 17 Intelligence  and an 8 Wisdom.

AD&D - Same thing, maybe with a green efreeti servant. Engulfed in green flame sounds more like a deal with the Nine Hells or the Abyss gone wrong though so give him a quasit or imp for a familiar, a flesh golem servant, and a demon running loose in the ruins of his tower. If he's going to make a personal appearance give him a custom spell that changes cone of cold to fire damage - green fire. M-U players will love it.

AD&D 2nd edition -  Make him a conjuration specialist with a lot of Monster Summoning spells and the same familiars and servants above.

D&D 3E - I'd still keep him a pure wizard with a few levels in one of the summoning or planar focused prestige classes, maybe even a few levels of Loremaster if you want to assume he has learned a few things during his excavations. I'd still go with one of the improved familiars and a flesh golem bodyguard because I think it's cool. 

D&D 4th - Wizard is still good but Warlock might be more thematic, Infernal Pact or Vestige Pact warlock especially so. The green flame was the pact being called in at the end of his life on this plane in a particularly spectacular fashion. 

So what ended his life? If you go with the dabbling-in-things-better-left-alone theory then I like the idea that he opened up a gate to somewhere else because he had just enough knowledge and power to find it, recognize what it was, and figure out how to open it, but not enough knowledge or power to control it. It could be the aforementioned Nine Hells or Abyss, or maybe it's the Far Realm (in 4E) or the Shadowfell / Negative Material plane which is causing the dead of the city to rise and cause trouble, or maybe he found the upper outpost of a Great Underground Empire and the thing he opened is a gate to the now-ruined capital city that lies even deeper underground and allows weird monsters to find their way into the upper levels of the underground where they would normally be seen. There are many options, some probably better for low-level heroes than others. 

What if he was blown into another universe? Maybe he learned his lesson and now fights to stop those who probe into such forbidden knowledge as a mystic in the world of Mutants and Masterminds?

Set it in the Old World of Warhammer and the story works as-is and makes a pretty decent starting adventure there too. 

In 40K he becomes Zenopus the Rogue Psyker, delving into forbidden knowledge and now on the run from the Inquisition, making for a fun little romp to start that campaign off. 

In Deadlands he becomes the crazy lighthouse keeper who is clearly digging into things he shouldn't be and perhaps the PC's help arrange his dramatic emerald ending.

 In Star Wars he could be a simple rural force-user who takes a walk down the dark side early in the campaign, appears to be reformed by the intervention of the Jedi Order, then later in the game becomes the awesome Darth Zenopus, master of force-wizardry and ranged effects and blazing green force lightning, less so the lightsaber. Perhpas after his demise some PC's are asked to journey to his lair and investigate, giving an excuse to send the heroes down some 10' wide corridors and rectangular rooms deep underground with hidden secret doors, fiendish traps, and enigmatic statues.

Anyway that's the Zenopus brainstorming session - no sheets, no serious stats, just concepts. 

Tomorrow: What to do, what to do....

C is for: Cleric

From the 90's on I have probably played more Clerics than anything else. In 1st edition D&D I liked fighter types the most with magic-users as a close second. I did have one cleric though he was definitely a secondary character:

This is probably about his 3rd character sheet. The first one would have been on notebook paper. The second one would have been on a goldenrod sheet like this but over time they get pretty grungy and grimy from spills and eraser marks (this was before we discovered sheet protectors and erasable markers). This one is far too neat for me to have used it much after transferring from the old one. This was probably done after our harrowing journey through D1 or D2 where I ran multiple characters along with a couple of other players. Between characters, henchmen, and various other things in the party (like Homonculi) it was more like an invasion than a secret strike force. Looking at his ability scores, I seem to recall using some wishes and one of those stat-raising books to boost some of his stats.

Thelegad was a cleric of Heironeous, the honorable war god in Greyhawk. Being more of a supporting character he rarely was in mortal danger and was quite content to sit at the back and dump either healing or blasting spells, whichever was called for at the time. Thus the accumulation of magic items. In my defense I will say that he did spend a lot of time going through published adventures and those old adventures contained quite a bit of treasure. If you were the only cleric in the party, well, you tended to end up with all of the cleric-y magic items. Considering how un-filled the back of this sheet is I know I never played him again after moving to this one as I always filled in the mundane equipment stuff at the top. I think we paused in between D2 & D3 and probably never went back to 1E with that campaign and those characters.

Somewhere during our 2nd edition playing time Faiths and Avatars was published for the Forgotten Realms and I became a devotee of Tempus, the war god, and never looked back. Specialty priests of Tempus were a blast to play and this started the Maximus Dynasty:

Remember when we used to buy packs of character sheets?

This is actually Brutallus the Second as the First used a two-handed spear and was a half-elf. His descendants  have all been human as it usually works better mechanically and keeps with the theme. The best thing about the Tempus specialty priest was that you could finally, legally, take a clerical character and use something that was sharp! They could pick one weapon as their blessed weapon, and they got a +1 to hit & damage and could incite berserker rage in themselves and their party. With that bonus, decent stats, and a magic sword like the one he found, he was pretty ferocious in combat. This made things a lot more exciting and also helped me justify that "I'm not here to heal ya son" attitude I played him with. This was a cleric that was in the middle of the action fighting right alongside the fighter and the paladin in the party and kicking ace while doing it! This (and his predecessor) was my main character for a fair chunk of my 2E playing time.

For 3rd edition I re-made Brutallus at some point, calling him the 3rd, but I can't find his higher level sheet. I do have his lower level sheet and here it is:

For III I stuck with the two-handed sword concept and otherwise made him a straight cleric. Later on I experimented with taking a level or 4 of fighter but this seriously impacted his ability to throw Flame Strikes so I dropped that goal of going for Fighter Weapon Specialization and decided to get more out of my casting ability.

Feats were mostly devoted to making him better in combat since that's where he intended to be most of the time.

Ah, the 3 page character sheet. I much prefer 2 pages, but with spellcasters it's sometimes difficult to pull off. Note the Magical Throwing Greatsword - a bit of a violation of Tempus preferences but it's good to have options in combat and sometimes you need to free up both hands for a spell anyway.

In 3rd I mostly ran but on those uncommon times when I did get to play I mostly played clerics (Brutallus in some form or fashion) and occasionally druids, with a smattering of something else here and there. Then we went to 4th Edition and I've done nothing but DM since. Almost...

One of my players decided to take a stab at DM'ing 4th edition so I finally got to play! Details are here but suffice it to say Brutallus Maximus IV plays a lot like the previous incarnations - he's a bad dude with a two-handed sword and a war god on his side. He can wade into melee, stomp some tail, and throw out some divine retribution as well. Now he's only 1st level so far but he's still a lot of fun to play and I had a very good time dusting off the concept and the attitude once again, almost 20 years after the first. His feats here, once again, are dedicated to making him nastier in combat.

That's a default picture, not my first choice. The "Adventurer's Kit" handles most of the old-school 50' rope, bedroll, two weeks worth of rations kind of thing so it's a shorter list here than some others.

 There are his powers. In this case I went ahead and made his big daily spell a nice area-effect heal as he was the only clerical type in the party. His bread and butter is Righteous Brand which tags a bad guy and sets up an ally with a bonus to hit that same bad guy too. The other two at-wills are situational with Sacred Flame  being able to grant a save if one is needed and Lance of Faith gives him a nice ranged attack in case the need arises, but it's not his preferred approach.

Anyway, that's my presentation of the Cleric, brought to you by the Letter C.