A false rumor spread around the Internet this morning that Dave Arneson, original creator of the dungeon crawl and co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, had died.

Unfortunately, Dave Arneson is seriously ill. He was taken to the hospital on April 5th due to a sudden worsening of his cancer. As of this writing, the latest news is that he has been transferred to a facility where his comfort can be best attended to.

An address has been established to which messages can be sent:

Dave Arneson
1043 Grand Avenue
Box #257
St. Paul, MN
55105

I hope you will all join me in sending hopes and prayers in his direction. Not only is Mr. Arneson a shining beacon of creativity who has improved the lives of millions through his work, but — by every account that I have ever heard — he is a truly decent, generous, and wonderful human being. His passing, whenever it may come (and I hope it is a long time yet in coming), will be a tragedy and a loss beyond measure.

Go to Part 1

For our third OD&D session in the Caverns of Thracia, we had four new players. Two of these players were completely new to RPGs; one had spent most of her time playing in the original World of Darkness; and the last had once played in a D&D campaign where the other players didn’t bother explaining the rules to her and she had basically watched while somebody else played her character for her.

This last player was particularly leery about giving D&D another try. In fact, I’m not sure if she would have shown up at all if it hadn’t been for the fact that OD&D was only one of the options for what we might play that night (the other was Arkham Horror). When the group decided on OD&D by a single vote, however, she joined the rest of us in rolling up a character.

I’m going to spoil the ending here: All five of the new players had a great time and all of them were eager to play again, including the player who had suffered such a sub-par experience the last time that she’d tried to play.

The new characters were: Greenwick the Halfling, Brennan the Fighting-Man, Howard the Magic-User, and Bob the Fighting-Man.

The spiel for introducing the rules and walking everyone through character creation took a little longer than in previous sssions because of the complete neophytes at the table, but we all had a good time of it. Howard’s player, in particular, glommed onto the OD&D rule that all weapons deal 1d6 points of damage and decided that, instead of buying a weapon, he could just convert a gold piece into copper and then throw the copper coins at people.

WHEN LAST WE LEFT OUR HEROES…

We also had two returning characters: Reeva (who had missed the second session) and the halfling Thalmain, who had now catapulted himself all the way to 3rd level (despite suffering an XP penalty from his low prime requisite).

At the end of the previous session, Thalmain had gotten himself cursed while opening a chest. Making a ruling based on the costs for creating a magical scroll, I decided that getting the local priest to cast remove curse would cost him 200 gp.

Fortunately, Thalmain’s share of the loot from the previous session had tallied at 240 gp.

This also gave us a nice hook for the new session: While the other PCs from the previous session were carousing with their loot, Thalmain found his own personal purse considerably lighter. Thus he had a motivation for rounding up a likely group of rag-tag treasure hunters (i.e., the other PCs) and returning to the ruins ASAP.

It was around this point, as the group was gearing itself up for the expedition, that Thalmain’s player asked for the map they’d made in the previous session.

I grinned my evil DM grin and said, “Herbert was the one mapping.”

And, of course, Herbert wasn’t there.

After a bit of haggling, I decided that Herbert would be willing to sell the map to Thalmain. Thalmain had 40 gp left, so I grabbed 2d20 and rolled… two natural 20’s.

Thalmain decided that he didn’t particularly want to go completely broke, so he decided to instead steal the map. This proved easy enough, since Herbert was cavorting at the local tavern with his wealth.

THE GRAND TOUR

As Thalmain led them into the Caverns of Thracia, he was able to act as a bit of a tour guide for the new players/characters. (“Here’s where the bridge almost burned down… Don’t open that door… Here’s the pit trap I heroically saved the party from… Here’s the place where I roasted lizardmen…”)

Eventually, however, they began pressing on into unexplored territory. A short while later, they found themselves descending broad stairs of stone…

And that’s when things got epic.

In the Caverns of Thracia, there is a room keyed thusly:

The Burial Crypt of the Cult of the Dark One: The reek of decaying flesh permeates the air here. Lying in ordered rows are rank upon rank of corpses. Most are long decayed and in skeletal form, but many are still fairly fresh, not having been dead for more than a few weeks (if you can call that fresh!). […] If the southernmost pair of columns is approached within 5′ or if the columns are passed between or to either side, 1-4 skeletons will animate and begin to attack intruders. Each additional melee round 1-4 more skeletons will animate as long as there are living intruders to fight, up to a total of 400 skeletons. Skeletons, AC: 7, Move: 12″, HD: 1, Damage 1-6, HP 3.

I decided that the Thanatos cultists that they had killed before would have been moved down here, so there were also about a dozen bodies laid out directly before the leading into this large chamber and covered with fresh linen. (This creeped them out because, of course, it implied that there had been somebody around to move the bodies.)

Inevitably, of course, the PCs moved far enough into the room to trigger the undead guardians. As the corpses began to stir and wrench themselves free from the cordwood-like stacks of the dead, the party fell back to the entrance.

The two halfings — skilled in ranged weaponry — picked off the first wave. (Aided by the occasional coin-toss from Howard.) But more and more of the dead were beginning to stir, and they realized it would only take a few unlucky die rolls for the skeletons to reach their defensive position.

(Actually, I don’t think I’ve discussed this previously: Halflings are described in OD&D as having “deadly accuracy with missiles as detailed in CHAINMAIL”. These sessions are being run with the conceit that I don’t “have” Chainmail, so we decided that halflings would simply get a +1 bonus to damage while using ranged weapons.)

Against the eminent risk, they quickly rearranged their lines. Brennan and Reeva took the front line. Greenwick switched from ranged attacks to a polearm in the second rank. And then Howard, Thalmain, and Bob lined up in back using their ranged attacks to thin the undead ranks before they reached the melee fighters.

But, more importantly, they also started spreading oil in front of their defensive position. And as soon as some of the undead got close enough, they lit the oil.

Based on my interpretation of the room key, the undead would just keep coming. Each undead had 1d6 hit points. Those that survived the ranged attacks would enter the oil, suffer 1d6 hit points, and frequently die before they even threatened the melee fighters.

After a couple of rounds, it was clear that the 1d4 skeletons per round were just never going to pose any kind of credible threat: The defensive position they’d created was too strong. And while the oil would only last for 1d6 rounds, they had stocked up on it (in large part due to Thalmain’s success with a similar tactic during the last session).

THE MASSACRE

I was in the process of trying to figure out how to make the encounter more interesting (since wittling through 400 undead 1d4 at a time wasn’t particularly exciting) when the PCs made it easy for me:  They decided to try proactively eliminating the undead before they could rise. They tossed a flask of oil onto one of the piles of corpses and then fired a flaming arrow into it.

I ruled that the resulting conflagration was successful in destroying a large number of potential undead… but it also had the effect of rousing them. I rolled 1d10, got a result of 8, and went from rolling 1d4 to rolling 8d4 for the number of undead animating each round.

As the undead rose en masse, the piles collapsed — sending the dead cascading across the floor of the chamber.

It’s a testament to the strenght of their defensive position that they managed to hold out for several more rounds against the larger waves of undead without sustaining any injury. I was literally rolling fistfuls of d6’s to calculate the skeleton’s hit points while the players rolled a fistful of d6’s to calculate the damage wrought from the wide moat of fire they had laid down. They would read off the results and I would toss d6’s aside or lower their totals to reflect the current hit points of the skeletons.

Unfortunately, many of them were just 1st level characters. Eventually the law of averages worked against them and one of the skeletons emerged from the flaming oil and with a howl of undead rage managed to rip out Brennan’s throat.

Around this same time, my d4’s rolled high and a wave of 22 skeletons started heading towards them. At that point, they decided that discretion might be the better part of valor. But they weren’t done yet: Howard moved up to the melee line and they held the position for another couple of rounds.

As the wave of the 22 skeletons got close, however, they fell back.

But they weren’t done yet. See, Brennan had been the one carrying most of their (very large) supply of oil. So before they retreated, they rolled Brennan’s body into the flames.

1… 2… 3….

KA-BOOM!

Surprisingly, a couple of the skeletons managed to actually emerge from the far side of the inferno and pursue them a couple of steps up the stairs. (I say a couple of steps, because Thalmain and Bob put arrows through their skulls before they got any further.)

When it was all said and done, I tallied up the dead:

They had killed 76 skeletons.

Killed? It’s probably more accurate to say “slaughtered” or “massacred” on a scale that a bunch of 1st level characters (with the exception of the 3rd level Thalmain) should really not be capable of dealing out.

Of course, they weren’t 1st level any longer. Everybody not only leveled up, but also maxed out their XP for the next level, bumping into the “thou shalt not get enough XP for two levels” ceiling. (Well, except for Thalmain, who bumped into the “thou shalt not advance past 4th level” ceiling for halflings.)

76 skeletons.

It isn’t the largest single-battle slaughter I’ve ever seen in a D&D game, but it’s almost certainly the most impressive. The only battles that rival it in terms of sheer number involve groups fighting large hordes of significantly weaker opponents.

Smart play. Very smart play.

Admittedly, if the skeletons had been smarter they wouldn’t have continued marching into the flames. But, on the other hand, I’m not sure how much difference it would have made: The skeletons had no access to ranged weapons and any possibility of a retreat was cut off by the chasm to the north. Even if they had hung back, they would have simply been picked off by the party’s ranged attacks.

To be continued…

“Wolves Beyond the Border” is one of the original Conan stories written by Robert E. Howard. The action, however, does not feature Conan himself. Howard chose to skew his literary camera off to one side and look at the world around his protagonist from a different angle.

This is my first memory of being exposed to this particular technique. It creates a very interesting effect, although — ultimately — I think the story is a failure. In the years since then, I’ve seen the technique used in a variety of series, and the result is more often failure than not.

Which is why, when I realized that Athyra was going to be using this particular approach, I subconsciously bunkered down for a long and painful slog…

… only to be more-than-pleasantly surprised to discover that my fears were unfounded.

In fact, it didn’t take me very long to realize that Vlad Taltos lends himself particularly well to this particular approach. Part of it can simply be boiled down to the fact that the Taltos stories have been told from the POV of Taltos himself. So this is literally our first opportunity to see what he looks like to other people. (Whereas with Conan, for example, the stories are told from a third-person POV, so there’s already some distance from the character.)

But Taltos’ susceptibility to this kind of technique also has a lot to do with the nature of the character himself: Taltos likes to play his cards close to his vest. He plots and he plans, but he usually keeps those plans — and even the information those plans are based on — a closely kept secret. When you’re inside his head, though, he can’t keep any secrets from you. It’s like watching a poker tournament on TV: You can see all the cards.

In Athyra, on the other hand, we suddenly find ourselves on the outside looking in: The cards are hidden from us. And that, in itself, is interesting.

But what really makes it fun is that, at this point, we’ve gotten to know Vlad pretty pretty well. So we still have a pretty deep insight into the types of games he plays and the way he plays them. So, on the one hand, we can suddenly sympathize with the new protagonist who finds himself baffled by Vlad’s hidden strategies (a POV that suddenly gives us a fresh insight into the perspective of many supporting characters from the previous books), but on the other hand we can also appreciate the deeper structure of what Vlad is doing.

I think the other thing that makes Athyra work is the type of story Brust has chosen to tell: The main character is Savn, a young Dragaeran lad on the cusp of reaching adulthood. The novel, in short, falls into the familiar genre of “young boy/girl finds unique bond with exotic mentor while coming of age”. (My personal favorite in this category is probably Stephen King’s Hearts in Atlantis, although you’ll find examples of the genre cropping up everywhere.)

This type of story weds itself well to the enjoyment gleaned from knowing Vlad better than the main character does. In fact, the entire genre is largely driven by the fact that we — either as adults or as the genre-aware — can appreciate the “exotic mysteries” of the mentor figure. Part of the genre’s effectiveness is that it saddles both sides of the chasm which is “coming of age”. On the one hand, we remember the (relative) innocence of our youth. On the other, we know the wider world which is being revealed. In the interstice between the two, we remember what that coming of age was like… and thus become intimately sympathetic with the main character as they follow the same journey.

(When I was a kid, on the other hand, these stories operated on a very different level: The fictional mentor became my mentor as well, and I became intimately sympathetic with the main character because their journey was my journey.)

The other thing about this type of story is that, although it is not told from his POV, the mentor is a main character. When done properly, the story is as much the mentor’s as the student’s. So even though we’re pushed out of Vlad’s head, Vlad in some sense remains a main character (which I think helps make the technique work).

COMING OF IMMORTAL AGE

In my reaction to Yendi I discussed the genre-alteration of familiar tropes. Brust has a talent for taking existing archetypes, running them through the unique characteristics of his fantasy world, and creating something refreshingly unique and entertaining.

In the case of Athyra, Brust is telling a coming of age story for Savn… but Savn is 80+ years old.

Savn is a near-immortal Dragaeran with a lifespan of several hundred (possibly thousand) years. He is also a farmboy still serving in his apprenticeship to a physick. So in terms of social position (and even maturity), Savn is basically a teenager. A very old teenager.

Brust appears to be consciously attempting to explore what it would mean to be a near-immortal living in a society of other near-immortals. It’s a bold challenge. And, in the narrow case of Savn and the story of Athyra, Brust succeeds.

But, to a large extent, he only succeeds by “cheating” — and so, in a broader sense, he also fails.

By “cheating”, I mean that he has placed Savn in a rural community which is socially backwards and largely populated with ignorance. This allows Brust to get away with having Savn be relatively naive and culturally under-developed. In other words, it allows him to largely draw a line of equivalence between “human 16-year old” and “Dragaeran 80-year old”.

Which, as I say, works just fine for the story… but still disappoints on some level because it misses out on what could have been a much bolder and more dynamic challenge.

Let’s try to break this down. If you actually took human lifespans and started lengthening them, what would happen to the concepts of “childhood” and “adulthood”?

Well, to some extent we don’t have to imagine it: It’s been happening all around us for the past hundred years or so. The concept of “teenager”, for example, is a recent one. (The term itself wasn’t even coined until the 20th century.) It represents a rather radical departure from ages past, when people we now consider “kids” would have actually been seen as fully functional adults. And over the past decade or so, I have noted increasing trends to infantilize college students, with a growing expectation that colleges and universities should be acting as some sort of surrogate parents for their students.

And this social trend appears to be expanding even as recent physical trend lines indicate that the onset of puberty is happening at earlier ages.

Speaking in general terms, I see three reasons for this expansion of pre-adulthood:

First, the increase in average lifespan lessens the sense of urgency in reaching adulthood and pursuing adult goals.

Second, the amount of “basic knowledge” expected for someone to function as an adult in society has drastically increased. We’ve gone from the completion of high school being exceptionally rare to a college education being seen as a fairly standard expectation. The acquisition of more knowledge requires more time, and this naturally expands the amount of time it takes to become an adult in the eyes of society.

Third, the amount of leisure time and the economic structure of our society has fundamentally shifted. When it’s an economic necessity for your kids to help you in the field, you’ll get them out there as soon as they’re physically capable of helping you. But the vast majority of modern careers don’t have that kind of structure. This, again, reduces the sense of urgency in reaching the transition from childhood to adulthood.

But there’s an important proviso here: The 16-year old of today is not the functional equivalent of the 10-year old of yesteryear. And this is the mistake that Brust makes when he draws the line of equivalence between a modern 16-year old and a Dragaeran 80-year old. The expansion of childhood isn’t like taking the same chunk of butter and spreading it over a larger slice of bread.

Because, fundamentally, the 80-year old Dragaeran will still have 80 years of experience, even if they’re not functionally an adult in the eyes of their society. And you can kinda duck around that, as Brust does, by putting the character into a situation where they can easily hit a ceiling of knowledge and enter an endless cycle of dreary life.

But I think you’re ducking out of the really interesting question: Whether it’s a matter of physical maturation or social construct (or both), what does it really mean to be 80 years old and still be a child?

Athyra doesn’t try to answer that question. If it did, it might have been a great novel. As it is, it’s merely a fun one.

GRADE: B

Steven Brust
Published: 1993
Publisher: Ace
Cover Price: $7.99
ISBN: 0441033423
Buy Now!

Go to Part 1

I’m continuing the account of our second session of OD&D in the Caverns of Thracia.

FIRST TRAVAIL: FUN WITH PIT TRAPS

The pit trap in this section of the dungeon also led to some hilarity: After detecting its presence, Thalmain spent the better part of 15 minutes working out massively elaborate and overwrought work-arounds for trying to get across it… having missed the fact that there were 1-foot wide walkways to either side of the pit that could be easily walked across.

The funny part was that the other players had heard that information just fine. They, like me, just waited for Thalmain to finish his various exertions with ropes and acrobatics. When he was finished, Herbert calmly walked around the pit trap and patted him on the shoulder. “Can we go now?”

INTERLUDE: SLEEP AND SLEEP ALIKE

Following their first forays into the dungeon, the Thanatos death cultists had retreated to this chamber. This was going to be a tough encounter in any case and the PCs, unfortunately, alerted the cultists by talking loudly as they approached the heavy wooden doors.

This allowed the cultists to entrench their positions. When the PCs finally battered their way through the doors they found 8 well-accoutered guards in full plate; 2 cultist priests; and a trained black bear awaiting them.

Which is when I was forcibly reminded of just how powerful the sleep spell used to be:

Sleep: A Sleep spell affects from 2-16 1st level types (hit dice of up to 1 + 1), from 2-12 2nd level types (hit dice of up to 2 +1), from 1-6, 3rd level types, and but 1 4th level type (up to 4 +1 hit dice). The spell always affects up to the number of creatures determined by the dice. If more than the number rolled could be affected, determine which “sleep” by random selection. Range: 24″

At low levels it is, effectively, an encounter-ending ability. It was significantly neutered in 2nd Edition and then further neutered in 3.5 to the point where I almost never see it cast any more. But it quickly became apparent why it used to be a staple of the Magic-User class (along with magic missile and fireball):

Trust cast his first spell… and the entire room (except for the black bear) fell asleep. The bear was quickly taken down and a mass throat-slitting ensued.

There was much cheering and general approbation.

I had poetic justice a few minutes later, however, when the party triggered the sleep gas trap on one of the chests in the room. Everyone except for Thalmain was knocked out.

SECOND TRAVAIL: FUN WITH FLAMING OIL

Here we had another fun twist: Earlier in the session, several characters had been afflicted by a paralytic effect. Thalmain had been among those who had tried (unsuccessfully) to wake them. They had been forced to wait for the better part of an hour before the effect wore off. Left all alone, Thalmain now assumed that the sleep gas was, in fact, another paralytic effect.

When Thalmain decided to move their unconscious forms to the far side of the room, I was initially going to declare that the disturbance of being moved was sufficient to wake them up. But then Thalmain’s player specified, out of the blue, that he was moving them very carefully — and I decided that such careful ministrations would not be sufficient to wake them.

This nearly proved their undoing when, a few minutes later, a patrol of lizardmen showed up hoping to parlay with the cultists. Thalmain had spiked the door shut and even tried to bluff them into going away, but the lizardmen weren’t having it. They managed to batter the door open, although Thalmain’s cleverly placed iron spikes managed to wedge it in a position where they could only come through single-file.

But, nevertheless, it was still Thalmain the Halfling against an entire squad of lizardmen.

This would have probably ended badly if it wasn’t for Thalmain’s pyromania: He had, with great forethought, doused the floor in front of the doors with oil. As the lizardmen started to pour through the gap between the doors, he fired a flaming arrow into the middle of it and turned the entrance into a pyre.

A few lizardmen managed to leap through the flames largely unharmed… only to be struck by a second flask of oil that Thalmain had kept in reserve, spreading the inferno even further. The remaining lizardmen tried to pull back… only to be taken down by Thalmain’s archery.

It was a complete rout.

Shortly thereafter, Thalmain realized he could wake the others up by simply slapping them on the cheeks.

On this triumphant note, the characters retreated from the dungeon and the players retired for the evening.

Session 3 – Coming Soon!

Go to Part 1

Christopher B. encouraged me in a post over at Grognardia to prioritize these session summaries of my Caverns of Thracia mini-campaign using OD&D. In Part 5 I wrapped up the end of the first session, which turned out to be such a success in the eyes of my players that several players asked for a follow-up.

Ergo, session two.

For this session, the player roster was shuffled a bit: The player for Reeva couldn’t make it, but we added two new players. We glossed over the escape from the dungeon and moved everybody back to the logging village on the edge of the jungle containing the ruins.

Herbert the Elf had been rescued at the end of the last session and he volunteered to return to the complex to wreak vengeance (and loot treasure). He was joined by the core of the previous party (Thalmain, Trust, and Warrain), as well as new recruits in the form of Dominic and Thaxter.

Thaxter, it turned out, proved to be one of the two main highlights of the evening. Thaxter was an elderly gentleman who presented himself to the party as a worldly and experienced knight. The party was eager to have such an experienced swordarm as part of their expedition.

Unfortunately, Thaxter was nothing of the sort. It turned out that he was, in fact, the chef from the local inn. He’d seen the gold rush adventurers profiting left and right from the various ruins of the Thracian Empire and wanted in on the action.

The truth came out shortly after they had ventured back down into the dungeon complex: As they were crossing one of the rope bridges over the subterranean chasms, a giant bat swooped out of the darkness… Thaxter panicked and cowered like a little child, tossing his torch aside wildly and screaming in terror.

(The torch ended up landing on the rope bridge itself, and started burning one of the ropes. A couple of the players — realizing that they weren’t carrying any water — dropped their trousers and peed on the fire to put it out. This was not their noblest hour…)

In short, Thaxter — as a character concept — was brilliant, clever, funny, and memorable. When he eventually perished (after finally conquering his fear and bravely plugging a hole in the line when Trust was knocked unconscious in a fight against a band of lizardmen), he was applauded by the entire group.

Ironically, the players’ appreciation of Thaxter was not matched by Thaxter’s son — Quinton — who showed up shortly thereafter looking for his father. Quinton proved to be nothing but critical of his father’s (many) shortcomings, which led to this short exchange:

Thalmain: “Okay, look. We’re going to ask you a couple of, umm… hypothetical questions.”

Dominic: “Right. Hypothetical questions.”

Thalmain: “Hypothetically speaking, if you were suddenly faced by a giant bat, what would you do?”

Quinton: “… my father ran away like a little coward, didn’t he?”

Thalmain: “Umm… Yes. Uh… Hypothetically, anyway.”

(UN)FUN WITH MAPPING

For this OD&D mini-campaign, I’m not using any kind of battlemap. I’m also (a) strongly encouraging the players to keep a map and (b) requiring that, if they’re mapping, then their character is mapping. (In other words, they need to have pen and parchment; they need to be carrying them in their hands; and the map itself is a physical item.)

On the first level of the Caverns of Thracia there is a room that looks like this:

It looks easy enough. But attempting to communicate verbally what this room looks like proved to be really confusing. (And I had several opportunities, because the exact same issue came up again in the third session when somebody else was keeping the map.)

“There’s a platform jutting out over a chasm. Directly in front of you, on the far side of the platform, there is a semi-circular protrusion with an altar. Columns lead off to your right, ending in a stone bridge that leads towards a tunnel in the far wall of the chasm.”

At one point I even whipped out a small piece of paper and sketched the shape of the room. The map still got screwed up in ways that weren’t reasonable for characters actually standing in the room and looking at.

This reminded me why I eventually drifted away from this particular conceit in my regular campaigns. Having the characters keep a map can lead to a lot of fun gameplay: Analyzing the map for clues on where to explore next (or where some secret passage might be hidden). Losing the map. Getting lost due to poor mapping. Chewing up valuable time trying to make the map accurate. Using the map to re-orient yourself after getting forcefully lost.

But on the flip-side, the metagame complexity and pace dragging of trying to communicate any kind of non-standard passage or room shape can be incredibly frustrating. It also strongly encourages the design of relatively uniform floorplans (square rooms, straight corridors) to avoid the headache. But, of course, this uniformity ends up undermining the very type of gameplay that this type of mapping is supposed to enable.

I’m still not sure what the best solution is for this. Or if there is one.

Continued…