Cal-Con: A Tale of Two Conventions

Cal-Con, the local gaming convention, was this past weekend. After much deliberation, I finally settled on the old school game I was going to run. I chose to use Spire of Iron and Crystal using Original D&D (the first three books only).A couple of months ago, I was also asked if I could help out with DMing a couple of sessions of a 4E tournament.

I had sent numerous emails to the convention organizers following the request to help with the tournament in order to get more information. However, all of these emails went unanswered until the wednesday before when I received the tournament adventure. I spent the next two evenings reading and prepping the adventure.

I was excited. I had a great time at the convention last year and was really looking forward to going again this year.

Saturday - I was scheduled to run an OD&D session at 9:00am and then help out with the 4E tournament in the afternoon. After arriving early I stopped at the ticket desk I learned that 5 of the 6 tickets for my session had been taken. I then went to the gaming room to stake out a good table. Unfortunately, only one of the five showed up. After chatting with the fellow and trying to wrangle up other players, I talked to one of the RPGA guys and found spots for myself and the other fellow at some 4E Living Forgotten Realms tables. After the 4E game I tracked down the gaming coordinator and discovered that my efforts were not needed for the 4E tournament.

While I had fun playing in the LFR game, I was disappointed with the day.

Sunday - I was scheduled to run an OD&D session. Following my disappointment from the previous day, I had also prepared a character for a Pathfinder Society game that was scheduled during the same slot. After staking out a good table I again waited. This time I was approached by a group of seven people. Some of them had seen me DMing the OD&D session last year and decided that they wanted to play.

I had a great time and they all seemed to really enjoy it. Some well placed spells had them explore most of the first and second levels of the Spire. As time was winding down I had them find their way down to the bottom level and face the BBEG. The party won initiative and got a Fireball and Lightening spell off. Two failed saving throws and the BBEG was down to 1 hit point! However, the next round the BBEG got in his own Fireball spell and half of the party were charred bits. A few rounds later the remaining party members were victorious.

Day two left me much happier than day one.

Compound Magic Items

Just for fun I pulled out my copies of Monsters & Treasure and Supplement I: Greyhawk. I had the idea to roll twice on the magic items tables and try to combine the results into a single magic item. Here are three magic items I cam up with:

Armour +1 + Rod of Beguiling =
Armour of Beguiling
This armour subtracts its bonus from the hit dice of the opponents of the wearer. The wearer of this armour is also able to beguile all enemies in a radius of 20' into believing that the wearer is their most trusted friend or respected mentor. Each use takes one charge and the armour has 4 to 24 charges. Beguilement lasts for 4 to 16 turns.

Ring of Contrariness + Scroll Protection from Undead =
Ring of Attracting Undead
When this ring is put on it cannot be removed without a spell to Remove Curse, and the wearer will not wish to remove the ring. It makes the wearer absolutely contrary and he will act in the opposite fashion of normal/requested. Each day the ring has a 2 in 6 chance of attracting undead. Roll on the Undead-Types table from the Wilderness Wandering Monsters table in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry to determine the type of undead.

Sword +1 + Drums of Deafness =
Thundering Sword +1
This sword will seem to every test to be a normal sword +1. However, each time the attacker rolls a 20 for their attack roll, the sword will cause a peal of thunder which will deafen the wielder of the sword as well as those within a 6" radius, and this deafness will last until Remove Curse spell is cast upon them.

Castles in the Wilderness

I have been reading my OD&D books again in anticipation of receiving my Swords & Wizardry White Box in the mail - it still hasn't arrived yet = {

I have also been browsing my B/X rulebooks for the Red Box Calgary game.

Each of those versions of D&D have information and rules about encountering a castle in the wilderness. This is another one of those "gameist" things about early D&D that I love.

In the OD&D books, the text specifically mentions the Outdoor Survival playing board and that ponds indicate castles.

B/X doesn't have the same relationship with a board game so I have always used the random wilderness encounter tables to indicate when a castle is encountered. The B/X wilderness encounter tables give chances to encounter "Fighter", "Cleric", and "Magic-user" in addition to "NPC Party" and "Adventurers". When the result was one of the singular I would often use that as a castle encounter.

The part that I like best is that each of these editions has a very simple table to determine what happens. I actually somewhat prefer the OD&D tables as they are crazier that the B/X versions.

The OD&D tables give a chance that the Lord or Necromancer or Evil High Priest (EHP) that owns the castle to have retainers such as Giants or Manticores or Vampires.

The B/X tables are much more boring in that they just list the horsemen patrols. It does give a suggestion that the "rest of the force" may include trolls or superheroes mounted on Griffons but I like that these types of things are the default in OD&D.

I also love that the OD&D rules say that Fighting Men will demand a jousting match and will demand the loser's armour if he wins. Magic-users are complete dicks and send passersby on errands by using Geas. And Clerics demand tithes and use a Quest spell or just try to kill the passersby if they are unable to pay.

The B/X rules are more staid with the castle owner either chasing the party off the lord's land, ignoring the party, or being friendly (either feigned or genuine).

Of course, as with all things in D&D (especially older editions), the imagination of the DM and the reactions of the players are the only limiting factors to these types of encounters but I love the fact that the default setting of these early editions includes this kind of stuff.

Check This Out

Stuart over at Robertson Games has a series of posts about taking OD&D/Swords & Wizardry attribute scores and making them descriptive instead of numeric.

I think it is brilliant and makes the low attribute modifiers really interesting.

Check it out if you haven't.

Us versus Them

I have mentioned a number of times that I believe to understand OD&D and B/X it is important to remember that they are outgrowths of wargaming and carry a lot of assumptions from wargaming.

One of these assumptions from wargaming was that you knew who the enemies were. In a historical wargame they wear different uniforms and are controlled by another player; in OD&D and B/X they were labelled "Chaotic" which, by default, made it okay to kill them.

The other aspect of alignment is a mechanical one. Spells such as Protection from Evil need to know who the bad guys are.

As roleplaying matured, as a genre, the labels got stronger ("Evil") and the characters were clearly portrayed as "the good guys". The paradigm shifted towards telling a story, and with that came the assumptions appropriate to a story - i.e. that the good guys would always grow in power and triumph over adversity, and the death of a good guy would be a rare and tragic event.

The Colour of Money

Looking back at B/X and OD&D and reading 3.5 and 4E the role of treasure has changed over the years. I believe that the change really came about in 2E when the Experience Point system was changed away from the simple and straight forward GP=XP system.

Arranging the uses for treasure in a spectrum from "old-school" to "new-school" I get something that looks like:

Experience Points
|
Stronghold
|
Hirelings
|
Information
|
Better Equipment
|
Spell Research
|
Magic Item Creation
|
Purchasing Magic Items


Not to say that magic item creation is not present in B/X (see page X51) or OD&D (see page 6&7 or Men & Magic) but (at least in my games) the focus has been skewed more towards the uses higher on the spectrum.

One interesting thing that Barbarians of Lemuria has done is make the spending of treasure mandatory. All treasure must be spent before Advancement Points (XP) are awarded. The player gets to describe how the money is spent and the GM is encouraged to use this to develop hooks for future adventures.

When did Secret Doors become so hard to find?

I was reading through "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures - Volume 3 of Three Booklets" today and noticed on page 9 that, "secret passages will be located on the roll of a 1 or a 2 (on a six-sided die) by men, dwarves or halflings. Elves will be able to locate them on a roll of 1-4."

On page B21 of Moldvay we see that, "Any character has a 1 in 6 chance of finding a secret door; any elf has a 2 in 6 chance."

Honestly, this is the first time I have noticed that it is tougher to find a secret door in B/X than in OD&D.