D&D Timeline

I started playing D&D sometime during 1981, but I've never been sure exactly when. I knew it was on or near my friend Kenny's birthday, because his mom gave him the Holmes Basic set (with B2) as a present.

I'm pretty sure it was the day of, because I was there when he opened it and we were both blown away to finally have our paws on the game we'd been hearing about. We spent that entire weekend sitting on his bedroom floor, diving into the rules and playing B2 like a violent version of Monopoly.

I lost contact with Kenny over the years but reconnected with him on social media. We don't live near each other and have unfortunately failed to catch up online. A few days ago, I happened to see that it was his birthday in my notifications and the light bulb went off. I now have an approximate date (mid-August) and perhaps even an exact date (August 18) for the start of my long journey into this hobby. Great memories!

NEW PROJECT: The Hurricane Dungeon

My corner of the world got smacked by Hurricane Helene last September. While we were not hit as badly as some neighboring areas, the storm still did a tremendous amount of damage here. We lost power for nine days and internet service for nearly two weeks. Everywhere was trashed by high winds, fallen trees flattened many houses. It felt post-apocalyptic, but everyone stayed cool and we rode everything out as a community. I live in a decent-sized city experiencing rapid growth with lots of outsiders moving in,  but we didn't descend into Mad Max-style pillaging or fortified compound-building. That was reassuring, given my appetite for post-apoc/dystopian sci-fi. While walking through the debris-filled streets to scrounge up some food, I wondered how long that cooperation would last if we all weren't certain things would improve (and could see progress of it every day).

It put me in a D&D frame of mind. It's a given that the first editions of Dungeons & Dragons represented a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Not Earth, but like Earth; enough that the same sorts of cultures, technologies, and gods had developed along nearly identical lines. The vague setting implied in the rules, and also suggested in Gary's tales of his own campaign, involved disparate feudal states clawing their civilizations back from the ruins of previous, more advanced societies. The players took on the roles of explorers setting out into the wild to recover incredible riches, lost knowledge, and forbidden arcane secrets from the ruins. All while the forces of darkness press ever inward on their fragile and isolated kingdoms. Great stuff, ripe for adventure! 

Fortunately, I'd just purchased a physical copy of the three AD&D hardcovers to replace the ones I stupidly sold back when I thought I was done with D&D forever. So, since I had no electricity and little to do at night but read by candlelight, I dove back into the 1e DMG for the first time in 30-ish years. I'd been reading a lot of online discussion about using the random tables to stock dungeons, and I was intrigued by descriptions of how the early dungeons were designed and played. I saw this as a great relearning experience.

My frame of reference for the game was minimal when I began playing Basic D&D in 1981. I'd seen some tantalizing advertisements for it in a few military modeling magazines, but there were no gameplay discussions or other players to teach me. It was just me and my buddy teaching ourselves how to play the game, and swapping DM/player roles to run entire parties through a few of the published adventures (B2, L1, X1, X2). 

When I started playing AD&D with a group of players in 1983, my DM's older brother and his friends had started with OD&D/Judges Guild/Arduin in the mid-late 70s. My DM learned to play at their tables and they passed down to him whatever Ur-knowledge of the game they possessed. I know some of those guys were early in the scene, and went to conventions and knew/had talked to many of the original players and TSR guys, including Gary, so I'm fairly confident they got the game's intent right. The mish-mash of house-rules and variant options they handed off to my DM and which we used, however, makes me certain that I never played "book-accurate" AD&D. The game I'm relearning now is very different from what we played back then.

Darconea's negative 7th level... very dangerous!

In any case, my DM had a mega-dungeon called Darconea, which was created and ruled over by an insane magic-user called The Wizard of Darconea (or WOD as we came to refer to him). It was a 20-level dungeon, with 10 "positive" layers up into Mount Darconea, and 10 "negative" layers below it. The maps were from the Dungeon Geomorph sets, hand-scrawled to modify the layout where needed. The dungeon rooms were keyed on single notecards and filed in multiple card boxes by dungeon level. Each room had something in it (monster, treasure, puzzle, trap, etc.), populated by the random DMG tables. When we cleared a room, he moved the card to the "Used" box and eventually created a new card to restock the room. 

Monsters were drawn from the Monster Manual but also from Chaosium's glorious All the World's Monsters books. Chamber walls, ceilings, and floors were painted with bright colors (rolled from the table in Appendix K), and there was a dungeon mini-game in which WOD awarded prizes to parties who could match colors in a single foray. The more matches, the better the prize. 

The dungeon was maintained by a crew of magical creatures called the Gnomes of Yipuuri (from All the World's Monsters - Vol III), who would appear post-combat, popping out of a hatch and lobbing canisters of scrubbing bubble monsters (also from ATWM) into the room to clean all the viscera and damage. You had to high-tail it out of the area or get scrubbed to death. There was an adventurer's town down on the negative 4th level with a magic item shoppe, and the negative 10th was said to contain a portal to Hell.

Who knows how many real-life hours we spent down in that dungeon, but it was a place we returned to time and again, all well-spent. It was a remarkable place that felt alive and active, dangerous but exhilarating, and oh-so tempting to keep pressing on. "Just a little further," we would cajole each other. So many fun memories and epic battle stories came out of it... stories we still laugh about 40 years later.

At the time, I was aware of all the dungeon tables in the DMG, but never once made actual use of them. As I read them now with fresh eyes (by candlelight, no less), I felt inspired to try my hand at creating a randomly-generated dungeon. Since I can rarely get to sleep before 1 AM, I had nothing else to do in the dark so I got a pencil and graph paper and started rolling some dice. After a few unsatisfactory attempts with the layout tables, I just started sketching free-hand, creating a series of nine maps—one per night—over the power outage period. I was pleased with how they turned out and now wanted to use the random stocking tables to populate the levels.

Once the power came back on, I got busy cleaning up debris and getting things back in order. Then the holidays came and went, and the maps and my intention to do something with them slid to the back burner. I kept thinking about them though, and I've finally decided to do work them up into a proper 9-level dungeon. 

My goal is to hew as closely as possible to the dungeon stocking tables, but not be a slave to them. The tables were only ever meant as guidelines to spur creativity. Gary wanted DMs to use the results as a springboard to riff their own stuff. The challenge I'm setting for myself is to roll on the tables, accept the results as rolled, and then try to fit all the incongruous pieces into some sort of "dungeon logic" that not only feels fantastical and thematic, but also "realistic" (by D&D standards). I want the end product to make sense as an adventuring locale. Forced limitations like these tend to stimulate my creativity in entirely different ways than when I'm just conceptualizing a dungeon theme and populating it accordingly. It's why I enjoy participating in projects like the annual Adventure Site Contest or Dungeon 23.

As of this writing, I have the first 5 levels completely rolled out, plus an exterior area above the dungeon which I added recently. I've written finished keys for the exterior and first 3 levels as well. I've really enjoyed this exercise so far and can't wait to see what the rolls come up with next. Level 4 gets batshit crazy.  I plan to post each of the nine levels (10 counting the exterior) to discuss how the tables rolled out and then drove my creative decisions. I'll also provide share links to download the maps and keys.

Methodology

For my purposes, I'm using the OSRIC tables to determine room contents because I like OSRIC's statistical spread a little more than the DMG's (for example, 60% of AD&D rooms are "Empty," whereas only 35% of OSRIC rooms have nothing in them). I want to use only official AD&D monsters, but from all three monster books, so I created a d12 table to determine which tables I would roll on for each creature: 1–6 = DMG (i.e., Monster Manual); 7–9 = Fiend Folio; 10–12 = Monster Manual II. For determining treasures, I roll 50/50 between OSRIC and DMG (often decided by which book I have open at the moment). OSRIC's tables are great for rolling up traps, tricks, and jewelry items, but I lean on the DMG for gem types and base values. 

As for whether treasures are hidden and/or "guarded" (i.e., trapped), I tweaked the guidance here. Both systems identify these features as optional, but the DMG explicitly makes it an either/or proposition with a single d20 roll: on 1–8, it's "guarded;" on 9–12, it's "hidden." Thus, AD&D treasure would not be both guarded and hidden using just the tables.

OSRIC provides for a 50% chance, but then instructs the DM to consult two tables to determine a treasure's guarding device (trap) AND its method of concealment. This "and" could be interpreted as an "or" in light of the optional nature of both tables. It's also possible to infer that OSRIC means a 50% chance on each table, which would allow for a treasure to be both hidden and trapped as well.

In either case, these features are only meant to be used "if desired" by the DM. I wanted to surrender that decision to a die roll so I simply determined that there was a 50% chance that a treasure was guarded and a 50% chance that it was hidden. This gives me four results: not guarded or hidden; guarded only; hidden only; or both guarded and hidden. It has resulted in a large number of traps which has me wondering about the original nature of dungeon traps versus treasure traps. The random tables only provide a 5% chance for a dungeon location to contain a trick or trap (independent of any treasure), indicating that they are meant to be rare and could even be non-existent on a dungeon level. I may dial the chances for traps or concealment down to 30% each to reduce the total number. (I don't want my players to get overly paranoid about everything being trapped... or do I?)

Same kind of situation with regard to magical treasures. Using OSRIC's spreads, there is a 35% chance for a room to contain a treasure. Of these, only about 6–7% will be magic items. Overwhelmingly, treasure will be items with gold piece value (i.e., experience points). That makes sense and is desirable, but I like doling out magic items, too—especially consumables like potions, scrolls, and wands. My initial rolls turned up very few items, and no magic weapons, even as the monster stocking tables were beginning to produce monsters requiring magic weapons to hit. Level 3 had no magic items on it at all. It felt paltry and disappointing, so I made an executive decision to add magic treasures to each level: three item rolls per dungeon level (so, six extra items on level 2, nine on level 3, etc.) Many of these items will be potions and scrolls, statistically, but I will likely cap this number going deeper, as a few of the extra items I've rolled thus far are pretty choice (especially for low levels).

I let the die results stand in most cases, only re-rolling a few results that made no sense (like a string of piercer results in a finished dungeon room), or that were too similar to another roll (like when I rolled 3 different tween rooms on the same level...I'm sorry, that's too many tweens). Some of those results have been wildly swingy (for example, the +4 Leather Armor on level 2), but I'm okay with that. Let's see what happens if the players manage to find it.

>>The Surface Ruins (Level 0) 

Failure States

A combination of personal and professional circumstances over the past 8 months forced me to put blogging on hiatus back in the Spring, but I continued to game on a regular basis during that time. I hope to get back to posting regularly.

I failed the Dungeon23 challenge. It was purely a matter of time-availability and not a lack of creativity, which is comforting despite the disappointment. My chief problems were the scope of the project I laid out and my inability to keep things simple. As the ideas started to flow, I found myself building so many layers of complexity into the concept that I struggled under the challenge's daily demand, making it difficult to get things done in a timely manner. 

Writing by hand was an obstacle as well, and I became frustrated at not being able to go back and edit in order to fix some of the complexity errors that crept in. Then, having to transcribe the daily hand-written installments into a weekly blog post just added to the load. I thought writing the daily posts by hand would take me back to the days when I filled notebooks with material, but it turned out to be a far-more time-consuming experience that wasn't worth the nostalgia (and cramped fingers).

As my freelance writing projects accelerated in April and other things in my personal life required attention, something had to give. The Dungeon23 challenge and this blog were the obvious "somethings."

Were I to do the challenge again, I would probably just draw some simple maps or adapt a few Dungeon Geomorphs, and then populate them according to stocking guidelines, adding my own personal flavor to the results. That sounds way more achievable than what I ended up doing. I have a ton of great notes, however, so Tunnels Beneath the Earth will live on in a more-manageable and less frustrating way.

I also brought Keep on the Badlands—my weekly 5e Roll20 campaign with my long-time gaming buddies—to a close. This was another major disappointment, as I did a ton of work on the campaign and frankly think it's some of the best material I've ever written in over 40 years of DMing. My players never quite grasped how a true sandbox campaign works and kept looking for me to drop obvious adventure hooks in their path, rather than develop their own ideas for what they wanted to do.

They also rejected the survival mode of the campaign, which was baked into every aspect of the setting. I really think a lot of it was laziness brought on by videogames, where they can just press a button or mouse-over a highlighted feature to "do the thing" necessary to advance. 5e also encourages this kind of behavior in the way that it has removed risk and complexity, and dumbed everything down to idiot-level gameplay.

Sessions would invariably boil down to conversations like (actual exchange)...

Player: "I want to capture that wild horse." (a random encounter)

Me: "Okay, sure...how do you want to go about doing it?"

Player: "I use Animal Handling."

Me: "Yes, but what do you do specifically?"

Player: "I handle the animal." [Clicks "Animal Handling" skill on character sheet.]

Me: *sigh*

We played 81 sessions of this nonsense and the party still had difficulty figuring out what to do or where to go, to the point that 7th and 8th level characters decided the best course of action was to continue plundering a nearby cairn field for loose coins and burial goods (an activity they began at level 2). They never even made it to the Caves of Chaos and I just couldn't take it anymore, so I ended things. I have not resumed running the Monday campaign (another player is trying their hand at being DM)—and I'm not sure I will.

If I do run for them again, it certainly won't be with 5e. During Covid, I dove into the OSR (10 years after the fact), and fell in love with Basic D&D (and 1e to a lesser extent) all over again. I think 5e's core game engine is good...it's fast, intuitive, and easy to explain to others. But the power creep and ever-stacking abilities create a lot of decision paralysis, even for experienced players. This tends to result in the same character "builds" appearing over and over again with the same set of optimal choices. 

I enjoyed 5e when it first came out, but the longer I run it, the more the flaws keep appearing and the harder it is to ignore them. I won't even get into the problems I have with WotC adopting Forgotten Realms as the default setting for the rulebooks(!), or their constant editorializing and virtue signaling, or their pervasive efforts to make the game a "safe" and uniform experience for a category of player psychology I don't relate to at all. 

I appreciate 5e for bringing me back into the game, and I think someone could take the core engine and skin it with an AD&D ethos, but man that seems like a lot of work.

On a positive note, I brought my 5e Heroes of Brackleborn campaign to a satisfying conclusion for my neophyte players. When I started it during the lockdowns, it was just to show a few friends what D&D was all about. I wasn't expecting them to fall in love with the game and turn a few sessions into a multi-year campaign. We concluded with the girls having reached 6th level and their characters becoming notable leaders in the town of Brackleborn.

We may return to this campaign in the future, as there were some loose-ends that could rear their ugly heads once more. For now, the girls were interested in my stories about Basic/AD&D and wanted to try it out, so I started a new campaign with them using Old School Essentials as the ruleset. I kitbashed three classic adventures, along with an OSR sequel to one of those classics and some personal modifications / additions. 

I've named it The Sinister Secret of Zenopus' Tower, combining and adapting S1 The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh with the sample dungeon from Dr. Holmes' Basic D&D Rulebook (commonly referred to as The Tower of Zenopus), and inserting the superb Forgotten Smugglers' Caves by Zenopus Archives' Zach Howard and the dungeon portion of N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God as additional levels.

We've played 3 sessions and, so far, there have been 5 character deaths among 4 players...it's glorious. The girls have had a great time dying, and I try to turn each death into an hilarious moment by cranking up the gruesome details. They also appreciate how streamlined and simple the rules are, given how often they struggled to cope with all the choices in mid-level 5e. I'm adjusting well to running OSE, I think, but realigning my brain to the different procedures in BX has been harder than I anticipated.

On a final note, I had the great privilege over the summer to help a friend catalog and value a humongous collection of vintage D&D materials and other gaming products he purchased recently.

Flipping through a copy of the tournament version of Lost Caverns of Tsojconth, and seeing Erol Otus' foundational artwork in actual copies of Booty and the Beasts and The Necronomican (among many other rare pieces) was a huge thrill.

I'm happy to start blogging again—something I've been shooting for since August. I intend to start posting material from all these campaigns and other adventures / settings I've created over the years. 

I'll share pics and details of the vintage D&D collection in coming posts as well. In the meantime, here's a sneak peek at left (for you Batman fans, that's Dennis O'Neil's desk in the background).

My Girls Love D&D

A little over a year ago, I had the pleasure of introducing four brand-new players—all women—to D&D. The first was my girlfriend, Rachel, who often listened in on my regular Tuesday night campaign on Roll20. She was intrigued by it all, but I've been playing with most of those guys since 1985 and she was reluctant to dive into that game. She isn't well-versed in the fantasy genre other than The Hobbit/Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter (books and films), all of which she loves. I don't think she's ever once played a video game, and she doesn't watch a lot of television that isn't BBC comedies or Bob's Burgers.

My other three new players were a little more familiar with some of the fantasy tropes. For years, we'd gotten together every Wednesday night for dinner and TV, and we'd just finished watching the unfortunate conclusion of Game of Thrones. I'd discussed with them how GRRM and the showrunners were all D&D players. We had also watched Freaks & Geeks during previous TV nights, which featured D&D in several episodes (and, coincidentally, depicted roughly the same era in which I first began playing the game, when I was roughly the same age as the characters in the show.)

The girls (my best friend, Marie; her wife, Cameron; and our mutual friend, Emily) didn't really get it, but they at least understood the basic concepts--that it was a game in which you went on adventures, rolled dice to determine success/failure, fought monsters, and found treasure. While walking one evening with Marie, she mentioned listening to a podcast that discussed using D&D as a means to rehabilitate prisoners. The show went into great detail about how the game worked, and she was interested in trying it out. I offered to run a game for my TV night gals plus my girlfriend, just to show them what it was like.

An Introduction to This Blog

In 1979-80, I was already smitten by Tolkien's Middle Earth and voraciously read any sort of fantasy books I could find at the library. I had a giant comic book collection and was a fanatic for everything Star Wars—the movie having blown my 10-year old mind just a few years prior. Star Trek, Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, Six Million Dollar Man, Battlestar Galactica, Micronauts—all of these things were important touchpoints for my fertile imagination. I was also into staging huge battles with army men or action figures (fireworks included), as well as building and painting model cars, planes, naval ships, etc. 

My neighbor's older brother was an advanced modeler who not only helped refine my painting skills, but also gave me a huge stack of Military Modeler mags. I devoured every page of those magazines, including the many ads for wargames and the "new" sensation, Dungeons & Dragons. To the best of my recollection, this is how I became aware of D&D and began what would become a lifelong obsession.