Go to Part 1

Reeva woke up before dawn with a stiff and scabrous back. The rest of the night passed quietly and, in the morning, they headed back down the stairs.

Two more guards had been placed at the far end of the rope bridge. But Thalmain and Trust kept them harried with missile fire while the rest of the party rushed across the bridge and engaged them. In short order they were dead.

It turned out that the guards had been standing duty outside of two large wooden doors.  Jorgen grabbed his 10-foot pole and jammed it through the handles of the doors, barring them shut… And just in time, too, as someone tried to open them from within.

“Dmitri! What is it? Are you all right?”

Jorgen tried to bluff them: “Everything’s fine!”

It didn’t work. Everything within fell quiet… too quiet.

Jorgen grabbed one of the broadswords the guards had carried and jammed it through the handles, taking back his 10-foot pole. Then they kicked the guards’ bodies over the edge of the chasm (they head a splash and a sickening crunch from below).

They headed off in a different direction, crossing over another rope bridge through a chasm where they were harried by giant bats. They eventually reached a chapel guarded by more of the ebon-eyed guards.

These guards they killed, but not before Jorgen, son of Karl, son of Nichol was brutally cut down. (And with a Constitution of 5, he wasn’t getting back up.)

Proceeding into the chapel they found a sacrificial altar hidden behind some black drapes. Bound to the altar and gagged was a prisoner: Herbert the Elf!

THAT’S ALL FOLKS!

And that’s where we ended the session. It was a weeknight and people were beginning to wear out. We’d gamed for about 4 hours (including the 45 minutes or so spent on going over the rules and creating characters at the beginning of the night).

Opinions of the evening were split.

The final PC death tally stood at 7. (It would have been 9 without the Constitution-based survival checks I was making.) After the TPK one of the players very visibly checked out of the game — it seemed like they just couldn’t be bothered to care any more. The player of Nichol/Karl/Jorgen/Herbert — while providing some of the best entertainment of the evening with her spontaneous explanation of dwarven mating habits — was becoming visibly pissed off by the end of it.

(As she later put it, “An entire dwarven family was destroyed tonight.”)

Another player later summed up their impression by saying, “OD&D = Death + Math.”

Everyone else seemed to enjoy themselves. At least one of the players seemed eager to continue playing through the scenario. (Given the mixed reactions from the others, I doubt that will happen. But we’ll see.)

From my perspective, I would have liked to see the Caverns of Thracia get a little more thoroughly explored. But on the flip-side, there was something extremely rewarding about watching the dungeon slowly assume that old school aura of terror/respect.

The players were also slowly learning (or re-learning) classic dungeoncrawling skills. They went from more-or-less barging straight ahead to taking a gradually more cautious and clever approach.

I’d also like to take the opportunity to say that the spontaneous coining of the name “anubis” for the dog-faced humanoid they confronted was probably the highlight of the evening for me. It just felt like the perfect Old School moment — like the first time someone referred to an illithid as a “mind flayer” and the name stuck or something — and I could easily see myself statting up a race of dog-faced anubians for a Monster Manual.

Rules mastery also plays a role in the success of a session. I was certainly struggling in several places trying to figure out how to handle certain things. (And the poor organization, layout, and wording of the rulebooks certainly didn’t help matters.) I was beginning to find my groove towards the end and I wouldn’t mind running a few more sessions in the Caverns just to get a feel for what it’s like to run OD&D from a position of having really internalized the system (however kooky it may be).

I have to, once again, beat down the temptation of trying to rewrite, codify, and re-organize the rules into something more useful. It would certainly make the game (much) easier to run, but it would also kill something vital. Decoding the rulebook is part of the experience here.

If I want to play a cleaned up version of this game, I’ve got 3rd Edition. (4th Edition, of course, is a completely different roleplaying game with no clear lineage to OD&D except its trademark.)

On the other hand, it might be interesting at some point to take the OD&D rulebooks and deliberately explore the path that wasn’t taken: Whenever a rule leaves itself open to interpretation or whenever Arneson and Gygax explicitly give us more than one option, take the path that subsequent editions of D&D didn’t take. See what sort of game you end up with and then refine it from there. Call it the D&D Apocrypha if you like.

Well, maybe some day. I’ve already got one game burning a hole in my pocket.

UPDATE: Continued…

Go to Part 1

When Nichol didn’t return to civilization, his explorer’s journal was sent to his son and heir, Karl. Karl hired a group of mercenaries and treasure hunters to accompany him into the jungle, hoping to discover the fate of his father. (This was my way of avoiding the need to generate fresh rumours on the Rumour Table.)

Karl was accompanied by the witches Reeva and Trust, a halfling fighter named Thalmain, and Fientar the Cleric. (The witches were just magic-users. Reeva, as you may already suspect, was run by the same player as Veera. It should be noted that, with this second group, a huge premium was placed on getting the best armor possible. Getting hit was directly equated to being dead, so heavy emphasis was immediately placed on not getting hit.)

This time the random 1d8 roll determined that they would be approaching the ruins from the southwest. As a result, they ended up practically stumbling over a short, squat building of gray-black stone that was hidden within a small copse of trees. A rusty gate on one side of the building led to a narrow flight of stairs that plunged down into darkness.

(I kinda regretted that they stumbled over this second entrance to the dungeons. It would have been nice for them to return to the first building they had explored, since (a) I’m sadistic and (b) the minotaur had ordered that the heads of the previous PCs be placed on spikes in the clearing in front of the building as a warning to others.)

Thalmain made some efforts to get the rusty door to open quietly. When that didn’t work he started trying to remove the hinges, but at that point Karl (like his father before him) got impatient and yanked the gate open with a hideous screeching noise.

They lit a lantern and headed down. The stairs bottomed out at a deep chasm. A rope bridge extended across the chasm. Karl inspected the bridge closely — ascertaining that it was of recent construction and in good repair — before starting to walk across.

Half-way across the bridge, a spear came flying out of the darkness. It impaled Karl through the chest. He collapsed.

(Nichol had a Constitution of 9 and survived his first brush with mortality. His son Karl, on the other hand, only had a Constitution of 6 and died instantly.)

Thalmain and Trust fired blindly (and ineffectively) into the darkness. Thalmain then got the idea to light one of his arrows on fire so that they could see what was on the other side of the bridge. The arrow soared over the head of a broadsword-wielding guard dressed in plate armor who was charging towards the bridge. Eerily, the guard’s eyes were solid black.

(The black eyes were my reaction to this passage from the rules (“Monsters & Treasure”, pg. 5):

…it is generally true that any monster or man can see in total darkness as far as the dungeons are concerned except player characters.

I thought this was rather silly. I felt there needed to be some explanation of this discrepancy. And thus the followers of Thanatos were given their ebon-eyed visage.)

Reeva tried to use her dagger to hack through the ropes holding up the bridge, but she was too slow. The ebon-eyed guard sliced open her back as he ran past her off the bridge. She collapsed in a pool of her own blood.

The others rallied, however, and quickly killed the guard without suffering any additional injuries. Worried about possible reinforcements, they grabbed all of the bodies (the guard, Reeva, and Karl) and dragged them back up the stairs and into the jungle. There they stripped the plate armor off the guard, discovered that Karl was dead, and dressed Reeva’s wound.

… AND BACK FOR MORE!

They heard someone approaching through the thick foliage of the jungle. Drawing their weapons they waited anxiously.

A dwarf walked out of the trees.

This was Jorgen, son of Karl, son of Nichol. He had been sent by his grandmother to find his father.

“Okay, we have some bad news for you…”

THE THIRD CHARACTER

Jorgen, of course, was the the third PC of the night for the player of Nichol and Karl. His ability scores were absolutely abominable: 9 Strength, 8 Intelligence, 4 Wisdom, 14 Dexterity, 5 Constitution, and 7 Charisma.

While she was waiting for Jorgen to be introduced, the player asked for another character sheet so that she could roll up her next character and “speed things up a bit”. She was clearly embracing the lethality of old school play.

She was less than happy, however, to discover that her next character (Herbert the Elf) would have had the best ability scores of the night: 13 Strength, 15 Intelligence, 17 Wisdom, 9 Dexterity, 12 Constitution, and 10 Charisma. He also ended up with 7 hit points (the maximum possible).

And thus the joking began: Dwarves, it was theorized, were cursed. That explained all the bad ability score rolls for Nichol, Karl, and Jorgen.

More importantly, how had Jorgen even found them with an Intelligence of 8 and Wisdom of 4?

“You hear noises approaching through the wood.”

“Okay, quick. Kill him now before you see him, then I can just switch over to Herbert.”

But no, Jorgen would live and Herbert would (for the nonce, anyway) be shelved.

Jorgen, however, quickly earned the nickname of “Wheezy” — his low Constitution leaving him with a horrible case of asthma and a slightly arhythmic heart. It turned out that Jorgen, son of Karl, son of Nichol was — like all dwarves — the result of horrible inbreeding. Dwarves, it turned out, bred in their underground warrens like rabbits. The tunnels were packed full of them. Which is probably why Jorgen was pushed out the front door and sent on his way. (“Go find your father!” “Didn’t he just leave like an hour ago? For god’s sake woman!” Cough. Cough. Wheeze.)

…

Okay, you probably had to be there. But by the end of it, we were all nearly dead from laughter. I could scarcely breathe.

Continued…

Go to Part 1

The PCs spent the night in the jungle, eating acrid centipede meat and narrowly avoiding some curious stirges. Shortly before dawn, Cruhst the Cleric heard a large party of some sort moving about in the clearing near the ruins. He crept closer, but it was a moonless night and he couldn’t make out more than vaguely humanoid shadows moving about.

The next morning, Nichol groggily regained consciousness and the party decided to return to the ruins.

When they reached the tree-breach in the building, Veera and Warrain pulled themselves up and peeked inside. They weren’t pleased by what they saw: Eight hyena-faced humanoids, a minotaur, and a dog-faced humanoid (which they termed an “anubis”) were lounging around the stairs, clearly keeping some sort of guard.

Warrain threw a sleep spell at them. The eight hyena-faced humanoids dropped like rocks, but the minotaur and the anubis were still on their feet. Warrain cursed. He and Veera both dropped to the ground and ran back towards the other.

From behind them, they could hear the minotaur shouting in Ancient Thracian (which, happily, Warrain could understand): “TREACHERY! KILL THEM! KILL THEM ALL!”

Warrain and Veera quickly explained the situation to the others and Warrain suggested that they run for it. But, instead, they stood there and debated.

The minotaur came running out of the building, loping up the side of the slanting tree and leaping down into the meadow. The injured Nichol and Warrain hung back, but Cruhst, Ghaleon, and Veera charged the minotaur.

The minotaur lowered his head, speared Cruhst through the chest, and threw him to one side like a ragdoll. The motion carried him between Ghaleon and Veera, who both swung wild and missed. The minotaur whirled toward them. Nichol took the opportunity to come up from behind and stab him.

Unfortunately, Cruhst’s death was only the beginning. Although they inflicted some remarkably grievous wounds on the minotaur, Ghaleon was knocked unconscious and then Warrain failed a saving throw against a sleep spell hurled by the anubis magic-user (who had climbed out onto the tree himself). Veera and Nichol didn’t last much longer.

Total Party Kill.

ANALYSIS OF A TPK

The dice did not like this group.

First you had the truly abominable rolling for hit points. In a group with a total of 5D + 3 hit points, they ended up with only 12 hit points. (The average result is 20.5 hit points.)

Then there was the random encounter: There was a 60% chance that there would be a random encounter in that particular building. The encounter was rolled on the Gnoll Patrol table. I rolled a 6 on 1d6, generating the worst possible result: 8 gnolls + a special.

So I rolled on the Specials table… and got a 6 on 1d6, generating a result of “reroll twice on this table”. I then rolled the two hardest opponents on the table.

Clerics in OD&D, it turns out, don’t have any spells at 1st level. Which means there’s no magical healing. You would think this would be significant, but since everyone pretty much died the first time they were hit, it wouldn’t have made much difference.

Tactically, they knew the minotaur was bad news. The shouldn’t have tried to engage it in the first place. Having engaged it, they should have followed Warrain’s advice to run or tried to lay some sort of ambush (instead of standing out in the open and talking about it).

The entire foray (exploring the building, going down and fighting the lizardmen, coming back up, and fighting the minotaur-led gnolls) took about 20-30 minutes of playing time.

A few of my players were ready to toss in the towel at this point, but the rest of us talked them into rolling up a new set of characters and trying it again.

Continued…

Go to Part 1

Now that the PCs had been created, I gave them the brief background I had developed to get them launched straight into the one-shot: They had come to the small duchy of Thracia. Recently there had been a gold rush of sorts on artifacts from the ancient Empire of Thracia, and their own researches in the libraries of a distant kingdom led them to believe that they knew the location of the richly accoutered Burial Chambers that had been built during the height of the Empire.

At this point I pulled out the Rumour Table from The Caverns of Thracia. Following the module, I had each of the players roll 1d4 to determine how many rumours their character would know. And then I asked each of them in turn whether they wanted to let the other PCs now what they knew.

All of them said yes, and the randomly generated results gave them various tidbits: One had read a tale of a man who had stumbled out of the jungle raving about “tombs of gold”. The dying words from his bloats lips were, “Beware the yellow death!” Another had encountered a collector in the small logging village on the edge of the jungle — he offered to pay them a hefty bounty on any legitimate Imperial Thracian artifacts. A third had discovered in an ancient tome a reference that said, “In the Empire of the Thracians, even the statues have been given motion and life.”

And so forth. All of these were spontaneous riffs off of the barebones information given from the rumours table.

Then I got to the last PC, Nichol the Dwarf. His player said that she didn’t want to share her information openly. So I took her into the next room and generated her rumours there.

This had an interesting result: Nichol’s kingdom, it turned out, had been plagued by a death cult dedicated to a God of Death known as Thanatos. Efforts to wipe out this cult had failed, but Nichol had discovered that the cult had first arisen in the Thracian Empire. He had come to these jungles hoping to find some secret lore which would allow him to destroy the cult. He had hired the others as mercenaries and treasure-seekers. They remained ignorant of his true purposes.

INTO THE DUNGEON

At this point I rolled 1d8 to randomly determine the compass direction from which they would approach the surface ruins above the Caverns. And, in short, order they were pushing their way through the jungle trees in a generally northwesterly direction when they first spotted a large, ruined building coming into view.

The walls of the building were mostly intact, but it was thickly choked with trees and they could see that several trees were actually growing through the roof here and there.

They began circling the building, trying to find some means of entrance. They didn’t find any, but they did spot a 5′ shaft driven into the earth nearby. They dropped a fiery brand down the hole. About 70′ or so down it landed on finished stone… perhaps there were some columns? It was hard to tell.

They decided not to descend that way, and instead continued circling the building. They found no designed means of egress (which was strange), but they did find a spot on the eastern wall where a tree had literally grown through the wall.

Climbing up, Veera the fighter looked into the ruin. All of the interior wall had long since been destroyed and she could see a wide stairway leading down into the earth. The rest clambered up after her and they headed over to the stairs.

Lighting torches they headed down the stairs. These bottomed out into a long hall covered in bat guano. The bats were still there — hundreds of them clinging to the ceiling. They stirred with angry agitation at the torchlight, prompting the party to douse their torches and switch to a lantern (which could shielded in such a way that the light would not illuminate the upper reaches where the bats were roosting).

Ghaleon the Cleric moved to the front, using his 10-foot pole to tap carefully on the floor. (Anything could be hidden under that thick layer of bat guano.) Coming to the end of the hall they discovered a large alcove with the ruined remnants of a statue. There were also two doors: One spiked shut with an iron piton; the other slightly ajar.

(There was a funny bit of player interaction here based on the description of the way dungeon doors behaved from “Underworld & Wilderness Adventures”:

Doors must be forced open by strength, a roll of 1 or 2 indicating the door opens[…]. Most doors will automatically close, despite the difficulty in opening them. Doors will automatically open for monsters [“What? Like at a grocery store?”], unless they are held shut against them by characters. Doors can be wedged open by means of spikes, but there is a one-third chance (die 5-6) that the spike will slip and the door will shut.

So when they found a door that was slightly ajar, Warrain said, “Careful. I know that doors don’t just stay open by themselves.”

Of course, in retrospect, this is less funny. It was advice they would have done well to heed.)

Ghaleon and Veera began discussing how they should go about opening the door. Veera was inspecting the frame of the door carefully. Ghaleon started probing it gently with his 10-foot pole.

Nichol lost patience with this and pushed the door open. On the floor of the room beyond, he found an injured lizardman stretched out next to the dead bodies of 12 giant centipedes.

Before he had a chance to react, however, the three lizardmen waiting in ambush leapt out. The others could only watch in horror as the lizardmen beat Nichol to the floor with their clubs. Warrain quickly cast a sleep spell, however, and all of the lizardmen fell instantly unconscious.

Ghaleon moved into the room, carefully blessed each of them, and then caved in their skulls with his mace. While he was doing that, the rest of them gathered up the giant centipedes — the lizardmen had aleady eaten the meat from two of them, but the other 10 of them would give them rations for the better part of a week… assuming the meat wasn’t poisonous to non-lizardmen. (It wasn’t. I checked randomly.)

Veera, meanwhile, was poking through the rubble of the ruined statue in the hall. She recovered its original head, revealing the statue to have been of the goddess Athena. Warrain was fairly certain it would fetch a good price from the collector back in the logging village. They bagged it. Then Ghaleon threw Nichol over his shoulder and they retreated into the jungle.

A DIGRESSION ON SURVIVAL

At this point, a brief digression is called for regarding the matter of Nichol’s survival from his brutal beating at the hand of the lizardmen.

In OD&D, there are no negative hit points. If you reach 0 hp, you die. And Nichol hit 0 hp. So why was he still alive?

Well, because of this table:

Chance of surviving… what?

The rules don’t say. The description of Constitution itself says that, “It will influence such things as the number of hits which can be taken [which it does] and how well the character can withstand being paralyzed, turned to stone, etc.”

But Constitution doesn’t offer any bonus to the saving throws for resisting paralyzation. Should I interpret these rules to mean that effects like paralysis have a chance of killing a character and that the survival percentages for Constitution reflect the odds that they won’t? That doesn’t seem likely to me.

So what I eventually came up with was that I could use these percentages to determine whether or not a character actually survived at 0 hp (while being rendered unconscious and requiring assistance to recover). I’m 100% certain, given my knowledge of how later editions of D&D worked, that this is not what these table entries meant. But if all I had in front of me were these three booklets, that’s what I would have worked out for myself.

And thus Nichol survived… for now.

Continued…

I wasn’t actually planning to write up a detailed account of my one-shot session as part of my Reactions to OD&D essays, but somebody requested it and I have no reason not to oblige.

I had a group of five players: Like me, two of them had first played with the BECMI rules from the ’80s. Two of them had started playing D&D with 3rd Edition. And the fifth had never played any tabletop roleplaying games (but he had played NetHack, so he easily grasped the lingo).

PRIME REQUISITES

We spent the first forty-five minutes walking through character creation, deciphering the rules, and generally getting ready to go.

There was some significant sticker shock when it came to the “roll 3d6 in order” method for generating attributes. A fighter named Veera was “blessed” with 9 Strength, 9 Intelligence, 7 Wisdom, 9 Dexterity, 11 Constitution, and 8 Charisma. And there was only one ability score higher than 14 at the table (Warrain the Wizard had a 16 Dexterity). One of the players said that they felt practically “coddled” in 3rd Edition’s system of 4d6, drop lowest, and arrange how you like.

We had an interesting discussion regarding the rules for Prime Requisite scores. Prime requisites are a topic I’ll be discussing at greater length in a separate essay, but this particular discussion revolved around how to interpret these particular passages (“Men & Magic”, pg. 10):

Strength is the prime requisite for fighters. Clerics can use strength on a 3 for 1 basis in their prime requisite area (wisdom), for purposes of gaining experience only. […]

Intelligence is the prime requisite for magical types. Both fighters and clerics can use it in their prime requisite areas (strength and wisdom reflectively) on a 2 for 1 basis. […]

Wisdom is the prime requisite for Clerics. It may be used on a 3 for 1 basis by fighters, and on a 2 for 1 basis by Magic-Users, in their respective prime requisite areas..

Before we get into the meat of the discussion, I’ll note that I chose to interpret this passage to mean that the phrase “for purposes of gaining experience only” applied to all of this ability swapping. (If you choose to not draw that conclusion, then things get even more complicated.)

Coming into the session, I had concluded that the passage meant this: For the purposes of gaining XP you use your prime requisite ability score as a base value and then add in these 3-for-1 and 2-for-1 scores as modifiers off of this base value. So, for example, if a Cleric has a Wisdom of 14, Strength of 9, and Intelligence of 10 their prime requisite for purposes of XP would be 22 (14 + one-third of 9 + one-half of 10).

But when we actually started running the math at the table, we quickly realized that this didn’t make any sense. Using this interpretation, it would be almost impossible for a character to not gain the maximum XP bonus as a result of their prime requisite score.

A closer examination of the “Bonuses and Penalties to Advancement due to Abilities” table on pg. 11 seemed to confirm that this interpretation was in error, as it clearly read: “(Low score is 3-8; Average is 9-12; High is 13-18)”. (And if we uesd my interpretation, that would not be the actual distribution for the purposes of the table.)

Then we noticed a rule crammed in on the bottom of this page:

Note: Average scores are 9-12. Units so indicated above may be used to increase prime requisite total insofar as this does not bring that category below average, i.e. below a score of 9.

That passage confused us for awhile because it’s grammatically incorrect. In that sentence structure “that category” refers to “prime requisite total” — and how could increasing your prime requisite total ever result in it being brough below a score of 9?

In reality, of course, what the passage is trying to say is that the “units so indicated above” cannot be reduced below a score of 9. And this led us to the interpretation that  this was an actual modifier to the ability scores. In other words, clerics could give up 3 points of Strength to gain 1 point of Wisdom. But then we re-read and clearly noted the “for purposes of gaining experience only” phrase.

So then somebody said, “Well, maybe it just means that you can use these other scores instead of your prime requisite for the purposes of experience points.” But about five seconds of math showed that was even more nonsensical. (When would a cleric ever have 5 Wisdom, but 18 Strength?)

We circled around the issue several times, but eventually came to a workable conclusion: You can permanently trade in ability score points as indicated to gain a bonus to your prime requisite for gaining experience (but not the actual ability score itself). So a cleric could, for example, reduce their Strength from 12 to 9 and thereby gain a +1 bonus to their prime requisite.

This sounded like a horrible deal to me, but several of the players took it.

LANGUAGES

After debating the rules for adjusting prime requisites, we had some fun with the unfortunately worded Language rules on pg. 12.

The “common tongue” spoken throughout the “continent” is known by most humans. All other creatures and monsters which can speak have their own language, although some (20%) also know the common one. Law, Chaos, and Neutrality also have common languages spoken by each respectively.

Did you spot it? You may not have if you’ve been accustomed to the tropes of D&D through other editions. I didn’t notice it myself until I was reading that passage out loud to my players.

While the “common tongue” is known by most humans, it’s only known by 20% of non-humans.

Elves and dwarves aren’t human. Ergo, Veera the Elf and Nichol the Dwarf only had a 20% chance of knowing the common tongue. We rolled the dice to check it… and they didn’t. We had a brief discussion about how Warrain the Wizard was going to have to act as a translator for both of them (he was the only party member with an Intelligence score high enough to learn their languages), but then the good ol’ alignment languages came to the rescue: Everybody quickly changed their alignment to Lawful and the crisis was averted.

EQUIPMENT & HIT POINTS

Then everybody rolled their starting gold and started buying equipment. A few players had some misunderstandings regarding how encumbrance worked (thinking that the cost of the item in gold pieces also determined its encumbrance cost), but we quickly got that sorted out.

As the equipment itself, there was some consternation at discovering that all weapons did the same damage per hit. Assembling the old school adventuring kits, on the other hand, was no problem: Two of the players at the table were the only two players I’ve ever seen defeat the Tomb of Horrors. They knew what they were doing.

At this point we realized we had forgotten to roll for hit points, so we did that. This went… poorly. Hit point totals for the table: 6, 2, 1, 1, 2. With the exception of Veera, the entire table had glass jaws.

This boded ill for their dungeon delving. A few of them asked me to let them reroll, but I shook my head: The whole point was to play it by the book. And by the book they went…

Continued…