[Switching gears for a moment. Delvers Guild will re-appear next week. This allows me to stop scrambling to get the session written without having to skip a week.]
This series logs a sampler campaign one of my ex-co-workers is running for a small group, playing early role playing games to get a feel for where modern RPGs come from. We will play 10 early RPGs about once a month, playing a different game each month. I’ll provide session notes for the game and then discuss my thoughts on the game system afterwards.
This session happened June 29, 2019, and we played the original RPG, Dungeons and Dragons (1974). We used books I through III and Supplement 1: Greyhawk. We might have pulled some material from Supplement 2: Blackmoor, but I don’t believe so. We used the 2010 PDFs put out by Wizards of the Coast, available through online retailers.
The DM ran us in The Dwarven Glory by Wee Warriors, the second stand-alone adventure ever published and before Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) started publishing their own. The adventure was distributed by TSR although not an official D&D product. The Dwarven Glory is a fallen dwarf city that now exists only as a series of caves opening on the walls of a box canyon…which might sound familiar as a theme from a famous later product put out by TSR.
Player Characters:
Axetar – Human male – a 3rd level Fighting-Man
Sugoi of the Gray Hollows – Elf male – a 3rd level Magic-User
Felos – Hobbit male – a 3rd level Thief
Jill – Human female – a 3rd level Cleric [I never caught her full name – sorry Cathy]
Non-Player Characters:
Jermija the Mongoose – a Man-at-Arms hireling, hired by Sugoi
Gremian Clubweilder – a torchbearer hireling, hired by Sugoi
Lars – a valet hireling, hired by Sugoi
[Lars is a bit of an in-joke with my regular group – he will re-appear as often as I can get away with it in this series of games]
At a gaming table, sometime during 1977
A small group assembled at the entrance to a small canyon, home of The Dwarven Glory, a fallen dwarven city or town, overrun by Mortok and his 10 orc tribes centuries in the past [or so my memory tells me - I didn't get all the exposition into my notes]. The adventurers were here for unspoken reasons, but all were interested in exploring the ruins and acquiring loot.
Having never been here before, the adventurers started by entering the first cavern on the left. This cavern was large, between 30-50 feet in width. There were two passages out the back of the cave, one on the left and one on the right. Beside each of these passages was also a door, providing four paths to explore. Felos listened at both of the doors carefully but heard nothing from the other side of either. By group consensus, the adventurers chose the left door to explore and Felos pushed it open and entered. This triggered a crossbow trap and Felos was hit!
The room seemed to be a sleeping area for a dwarf [based on furniture size and height], with a bed, a desk and chair, a bookshelf (empty), and a chest in the far corner. With a newly instilled sense of caution, Sugoi used his 10-foot pole to prod the floor ahead of him as he slowly walked across the room to the chest, Felos following. Felos investigated the chest and pronounced it safe. He then stepped behind Sugoi as Sugoi used the 10-foot pole to lift open the chest from a distance. Inside was a roll of cardboard rectangles with a hole punched in the center of each [a roll of tickets]. Sugoi picked up the roll and put it into a large sack he had for loot – the adventurers could work out the value of the cardboard rectangles later. Felos moved the chest around and checked the bottom of it. He found a gem hidden under the chest. The gem also went into the loot sack.
After searching the rest of the room [and taking the crossbow from the trap], the adventurers exited the room. They walked across the cavern and investigated the other door. Sugoi used the pole to open this door. The room beyond was some sort of theater, with short stools in the center and a curtained stage at the far end. The adventurers cautiously searched the room and found little of worth. Axetar attacked the wooden stage with his two-handed sword [no, I don't know why - fighting-men...]. A chest behind the stage held the rotted remains of costumes and a search under the stage by Felos was fruitless, so the room was abandoned.
The adventurers picked the left-hand passage and started walking down it. There was a side area, off the passage, so the adventurers investigated it. At the back was a stone door in a worked stone wall. The room beyond the door was kidney-shaped with the door at one end. The far wall had a table with two stools next to it and the far end of the chamber could not be seen from the door [it was around the bend of the kidney shape].
The adventurers entered the room. Sugoi and Felos checked the table and stools and Sugoi found a gem on the floor behind it. The gem was etched with a dwarven profile and tingled in Sugoi’s hand, suggesting it was magical in nature. The gem went into the loot sack. From the table, two chests could be seen sitting on the floor at the other end of the room. Sugoi tried to opened one of the chests with his 10-foot pole, but it had a catch. Felos investigated it and found a lightning trap attached to the chest, which he disarmed. He found a similar trap on the other but failed to disarm it safely and took damage as it discharged into him. Inside the chests were found a book of accounting from a dwarven gemcutter and two uncut gems. After a brief inspection of the book [nothing but sales and purchases], the book and uncut gems went into the loot sack and the adventurers left the room.
Further down the main passage was a fork – the adventures took the left path. They came upon a door on the left wall and could see another down on the right. Inside the door on the left was a small room that was empty…except for a massive metal vault door that made up the far wall! The adventurers entered the room to investigate further. Jill and Jermija [the man-at-arms hireling] kept watch on the door while Sugoi and Felos examined the vault door. Sugoi was looking for a possible place to insert the magical gem, hoping that it was a key to the vault and the treasures on the other side. Felos was just working out how he was going to defeat the lock and open the vault door. Neither was successful.
When Felos finally touched the door to try and manipulate the locking mechanism, the exit door slammed shut on its own and the entire metal wall started sliding forward. If the adventurers did not escape fast they would be flattened! Felos tried and failed to pick the magical lock on the exit door. Axetar attempted to use brute strength to open it and also failed. Sugoi and Jill tried separately as failed as well. Then Sugoi suggested all three try together and they were just successful. The adventurers and hirelings scrambled out of the room at the last minute as the metal wall pressed flat against the wall.
Sugoi hoped that the metal wall was thin enough that perhaps it would be possible to slip behind it and access the vault that way. Unfortunately, there was a trailing side wall [or it was VERY thick] and there was no way to get behind it. Disheartened but glad to be alive the adventurers continued down the main passage.
Further down, the passage ended with a last door on the right wall [as seen previously by the adventurers]. This door opened into a room with a raised stage in the center that had a ramp to walk up to it, two tables with some low and comfortable chairs, posters on the walls advertising in Dwarven the best go-go dancers in the land [because the ‘70s were classy that way], and a second door across the room. Sugoi was mildly scandalized as he could read the posters, the other not as much and were happy not knowing what exactly they said. One of the tables had six bottles of wine on them, the other a deck of dwarven playing cards. Sugoi carefully investigated the cards [dreading what images might be on them] while Axetar grabbed the wine bottles on the other table.
The playing cards were [luckily] just standard cards. Five of the six bottles appeared to hold normal wine, but one had a greenish tint to it. Sugoi asked Lars [his hireling valet] to sip the greenish liquid. Trepidatious but willing to follow orders, Lars did so. He reported it was pleasant in taste but was tingly going down. This suggested it was magical, but there were no obvious effects. The bottles were distributed amongst the group to keep them from getting broken in the loot sack.
Sugoi checked for secret doors at the end of the passage, but none was found, so the group backtracked to the fork in the passage and went down the right-hand path. The found the other door into the go-go lounge in this passage and then noticed a change in the quality of the walls, suggesting they were entering a different section of the caverns.
Down this path they came across another fork in the passage, taking the left fork. A door on the left wall opened into a larger chamber with a pit in the center of it. Felos and Gremian [hireling torchbearer] went over and looked into the pit to see what was in it. Both felt a wave of compulsion to jump down into the 20-foot pit, but Gremian was able to shrug the compulsion off. Felos stated he was going to jump into the pit and Axetar had to grab the hobbit to keep him from doing so. Some slaps to the face later and Felos was able to escape the compulsion.
Looking around the room and avoiding the pit with their eyes, the adventurers saw a door on the far side of the room and one on this side. They made their way over to the far door [studiously avoiding looking at the pit] and opened the door. Beyond was a pile of dead bodies, apparently failed adventurers based on the clothing and gear upon the corpses. The smell was terrible and the inside of the door had scratches and grooves on it from those inside trying to escape…and failing.
Not wanting to get trapped in the small room beyond the door, the adventurers decided to bur the door. Sugoi poured some oil on it and then lit it from the torch. While it burned, the adventurers went back to investigating the pit. Felos had a rope tied around him so he could be lowered into the pit and yanked back out if the compulsion overcame him again. It did. Repeatedly. Over the better part of an hour until Felos was finally able to shrug off the compulsion and report on what was in the pit. The pit’s contents were more dead adventurers with their weapons. The adventurers pulled up the weapons and shield and looked the mover, keeping a few to sell back in town, including a shield bearing the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Tyler.
By this point the door was burnt, but sparks had ignited the pile of bodies beyond and those had burned up as well. Some lumps of semi-molten gold were found in the ashes and collected by pouring water over them to cool them off.
The adventurers then opened the door on the near side of the pit and found a room with skeletons chained to the walls and a bobbing point of light. The point of light seemed to take notice of the adventurers and then flew past them and out the entrance door, turning left and heading down the passage. Thinking that the light was some form of alarm spell, the adventurers quickly left the pit chamber and returned to the hallway. They backtracked to the fork to avoid running into whatever the light might be alerting and took the right path.
This path forked as well and the adventurers kept left at the fork. A small alcove on the left wall had a door in it and the adventurers investigated it. The long narrow room contained a pool of clear water that appeared to be a well as there were instruments for drawing water hanging on the wall next to it. Felos and Axetar moved forward to investigate and a giant tick dropped off the ceiling, right onto Felos! Before the tick could start drawing blood, the other adventurers attacked it with Axetar killing it. The bite area felt warm to the touch to Felos, so he poured some wine on it to clean out the wound. It stung fiercely at first but stopped after a bit. [We later learned that if no treatment had been done, the bite included a disease that would have killed Felos in 2-8 days, so it was very good that he flushed the wound with alcohol.]
At this point, Sugoi noticed that Lars was a full two inches shorter than he normally was. Lars got very nervous at this point, but Sugoi calmed him down, congratulating Lars on discovering the greenish wine was actually a potion of shrinking. Sugoi assured him that the effects would eventually wear off and he would resume his normal size. Sugoi’s confidence encouraged Lars and he resumed his normal calm.
Done searching the well room, the adventurers continued down the corridor. They walked past a side passage on their left that appeared to loop back to where the pit room was, so they avoided it. A little further down they found a barracks room on the right side. A quick search of the mattresses turned up a small cache of 20 gold pieces and little else.
Past that the adventurers investigated a room on the left of the corridor that appeared to be a mess hall of some sort. There were three tables with chairs, but squatting at the far table was an ogre [we think] contemplating moves on a chessboard. It noticed the adventurers and invited them to sit and play chess with it. There was an implied “or else” with the request, so Sugoi sat down across from the ogre. While the ogre set up the pieces, Axetar also took seat at the table next to Sugoi. When the ogre was finished setting up the pieces, he had a full set of chessmen while Sugoi only had a king and a single pawn!
Sugoi asked where the rest of his men were and the ogre said that was all Sugoi got and then rested his hand on an immense club. Axetar pulled out two wine bottles, placing one bottle of dwarven wine next to Sugoi and the bottle of the slightly green wine next to the ogre. The ogre read the label and found the claimed vintage to his liking, thanking Axetar for it. He then proceeded to take a long pull off the bottle and allowed Sugoi to make the first move. Sugoi suggested that Axetar had already made the first move as the ogre noticeably started shrinking. Fast.
The ogre noticed and flipped the table before making a break for the door. Sugoi cast his Sleep spell, but the ogre, in his panic, was not effected [made his save versus spells, darn him]. By this point he was only human sized. The adventurers ran ahead of the ogre to try and cut him off and by the time they got in front of him, the ogre was only dwarf-sized! The ogre surrendered and kept shrinking. He stated that his name was Malvo and asked that the adventurers tell his brothers to avenge him. He was now the size of a fly. When asked where his brothers were, his final reply was, “Down the hall…” before he was too small to see or hear any more.
Sugoi cautiously looked over at Lars, who was now sweating profusely and about an inch shorter than when they talked at the well. Sugoi apologized to Lars for being wrong earlier but said that they could fix the problem. Sugoi told Lars that after the group slept for the night, he would cast Dispel Magic on Lars, which would stop the shrinking. If that failed, town was close enough and they would find a cleric who could cast Remove Curse and save Lars that way. Lars, possibly grasping at straws, accepted this reasoning and calmed down some. [I rolled really well on a hireling loyalty roll.]
Leaving the mess hall, the adventurers continued down the corridor and found a small side area with a door. They could easily hear slurred orcish speech from several speakers. Sugoi asked for the group to wait before attacking. They agreed and Sugoi pulled a set of leather armor out of his back pack and put it on with Lars’ assistance [hence the need to bring his valet to the dungeon]. Sugoi then separated a shield that was hanging from his backpack and put the backpack back on. He then readied his shield and nodded to Axetar that he was ready to attack the orcs [having improved his armor class by 3 – see the notes later for my thinking on this].
Axetar kicked in the door to the room, smacking one of the orcs with the door. Sugoi successfully threw his sword to the ground in the surprise round [I rolled a 1 on a d20 and Sugoi fumbled his weapon]. In the next round the orcs won initiative, but who attacked first broke down to weapon lengths, with longer weapons attacking first. Axetar beheaded an orc with his two-handed sword. One of the orcs attacked Sugoi with a sword and missed [rolled really bad]. Two other orcs attacked Axetar and Jill, luckily missing. Sugoi countered the attack on him with two punches [weapons a lot smaller than an opponent’s weapon may go last, but they also get additional attacks], both of which missed.
And then the game ended because of time.
End of Session
[So several things to discuss.]
[I got a ton of use out of that 10-foot pole, much more than I expected.]
[Magic-users wearing armor in original D&D apparently just kept them from casting spells. As an elf, Sugoi could still cast spells if he had magic armor on, meaning there was nothing to keep him from wearing armor other than it blocked his spell-casting abilities. Once he was out of attack spells he had no reason to not wear armor, so he put it on before the attack on the orcs to increase his chances of surviving the fight. I hadn’t thought of this until an hour before the session started, so I spent my leftover gold to buy the leather armor for Sugoi. I would have bought him chain armor, but the additional weight would have encumbered him and slowed him down if the party had to flee a monster. I didn’t want him to be the slowest adventurer there if we had to flee something.]
[There is no Find Traps skill for Thieves in OD&D, just a Disarm Traps skill. The players would have to describe looking for a trap, getting precise and detailed in what they had their character do. Once a trap was located, then a roll happened to disarm it. Later editions modified this to be a single Find/Remove Traps skill, changing a reliance on PLAYER knowledge to the use of CHARACTER skills. We ended up doing a mixture of this, mostly to save time.]
[Combat uses Chainmail’s process of rolling for initiative and allowing the winning side to chose to move first or last, then ranged attacks happen, then melee attack. Ranged attacks are done in initiative order (fastest to slowest) and melee is resolved in weapon length order. This took a bit to work out in the final fight as we were all used to rules that said higher initiative moves and attacks before the next combatant went.]
[Having played this version of the rules for the first time, I can see why people still use these rules – they were fun to use! I can also see why house rules and alternate ways to play developed as these rules have gaps in them, failing to explain things they hint at. For example, elves are stated to be superior in finding secret doors in Supplement 2 – but there are no rules for finding secret doors at all. Unless they are somewhere in Chainmail, which I have not had time to completely read through. We didn’t have time to go looking for them and winged it using rules we know show up later in AD&D. I’d be willing to play these rules for a campaign, grafting in things from other systems to fill out the gaps or add things that I like and would fit, most notably the Mortality Table from ACKS.]
[Oh! Multiclassing or switching between classes was something that could be done freely between adventures, especially for elves who could freely switch between Fighting-Men and Magic-Users. I need to find out how it worked for humans and others, but at least for elves it was really easy to do. In all later editions is became harder with many penalties to doing so.]
[One last thing, the writing/layout of these rules was obviously at the hobbyist level. You regularly have to go flipping through the books to find all the relevant rules for combat and for several of the classes. Groupings of text were done on the “relevant rules” level, not the “topic” level, meaning that for example, the Thief is introduced in Supplement 1 with an overview early in the book where they expanded upon the descriptions of the various races and classes in the game, but tables for leveling and thief skills are in a section dealing with miscellaneous character skills and there is a side note for what saving throws thieves use (they use clerics of the same level), and things like that. There are also issues of what we’d now call copy and paste errors. There is a table for to hit modifiers for weapons per armor class. At the bottom is a list of missile weapons that was clearly copied from Chainmail, because the last row is for the arquebus – which is mentioned nowhere else in the D&D rules, but IS in Chainmail where a table with the same information has the same list of ranged weapons, also ending with the arquebus.]
[I’m actually fine with this as it creates a back door for gunpowder weapons in the rules. They have a very low rate of fire, but whatever they hit they kill. Simple.]
[That’s it for now. Session 2 will be a Boot Hill game but the date hasn’t been set yet. It might be late July, but more likely early August.]
History of RPGs
Session 1, Dungeons and Dragons (1974) [This session]
Session 2, Boot Hill [Not Yet Run]
This series logs a sampler campaign one of my ex-co-workers is running for a small group, playing early role playing games to get a feel for where modern RPGs come from. We will play 10 early RPGs about once a month, playing a different game each month. I’ll provide session notes for the game and then discuss my thoughts on the game system afterwards.
This session happened June 29, 2019, and we played the original RPG, Dungeons and Dragons (1974). We used books I through III and Supplement 1: Greyhawk. We might have pulled some material from Supplement 2: Blackmoor, but I don’t believe so. We used the 2010 PDFs put out by Wizards of the Coast, available through online retailers.
The DM ran us in The Dwarven Glory by Wee Warriors, the second stand-alone adventure ever published and before Tactical Studies Rules (TSR) started publishing their own. The adventure was distributed by TSR although not an official D&D product. The Dwarven Glory is a fallen dwarf city that now exists only as a series of caves opening on the walls of a box canyon…which might sound familiar as a theme from a famous later product put out by TSR.
Player Characters:
Axetar – Human male – a 3rd level Fighting-Man
Sugoi of the Gray Hollows – Elf male – a 3rd level Magic-User
Felos – Hobbit male – a 3rd level Thief
Jill – Human female – a 3rd level Cleric [I never caught her full name – sorry Cathy]
Non-Player Characters:
Jermija the Mongoose – a Man-at-Arms hireling, hired by Sugoi
Gremian Clubweilder – a torchbearer hireling, hired by Sugoi
Lars – a valet hireling, hired by Sugoi
[Lars is a bit of an in-joke with my regular group – he will re-appear as often as I can get away with it in this series of games]
At a gaming table, sometime during 1977
A small group assembled at the entrance to a small canyon, home of The Dwarven Glory, a fallen dwarven city or town, overrun by Mortok and his 10 orc tribes centuries in the past [or so my memory tells me - I didn't get all the exposition into my notes]. The adventurers were here for unspoken reasons, but all were interested in exploring the ruins and acquiring loot.
Having never been here before, the adventurers started by entering the first cavern on the left. This cavern was large, between 30-50 feet in width. There were two passages out the back of the cave, one on the left and one on the right. Beside each of these passages was also a door, providing four paths to explore. Felos listened at both of the doors carefully but heard nothing from the other side of either. By group consensus, the adventurers chose the left door to explore and Felos pushed it open and entered. This triggered a crossbow trap and Felos was hit!
The room seemed to be a sleeping area for a dwarf [based on furniture size and height], with a bed, a desk and chair, a bookshelf (empty), and a chest in the far corner. With a newly instilled sense of caution, Sugoi used his 10-foot pole to prod the floor ahead of him as he slowly walked across the room to the chest, Felos following. Felos investigated the chest and pronounced it safe. He then stepped behind Sugoi as Sugoi used the 10-foot pole to lift open the chest from a distance. Inside was a roll of cardboard rectangles with a hole punched in the center of each [a roll of tickets]. Sugoi picked up the roll and put it into a large sack he had for loot – the adventurers could work out the value of the cardboard rectangles later. Felos moved the chest around and checked the bottom of it. He found a gem hidden under the chest. The gem also went into the loot sack.
After searching the rest of the room [and taking the crossbow from the trap], the adventurers exited the room. They walked across the cavern and investigated the other door. Sugoi used the pole to open this door. The room beyond was some sort of theater, with short stools in the center and a curtained stage at the far end. The adventurers cautiously searched the room and found little of worth. Axetar attacked the wooden stage with his two-handed sword [no, I don't know why - fighting-men...]. A chest behind the stage held the rotted remains of costumes and a search under the stage by Felos was fruitless, so the room was abandoned.
The adventurers picked the left-hand passage and started walking down it. There was a side area, off the passage, so the adventurers investigated it. At the back was a stone door in a worked stone wall. The room beyond the door was kidney-shaped with the door at one end. The far wall had a table with two stools next to it and the far end of the chamber could not be seen from the door [it was around the bend of the kidney shape].
The adventurers entered the room. Sugoi and Felos checked the table and stools and Sugoi found a gem on the floor behind it. The gem was etched with a dwarven profile and tingled in Sugoi’s hand, suggesting it was magical in nature. The gem went into the loot sack. From the table, two chests could be seen sitting on the floor at the other end of the room. Sugoi tried to opened one of the chests with his 10-foot pole, but it had a catch. Felos investigated it and found a lightning trap attached to the chest, which he disarmed. He found a similar trap on the other but failed to disarm it safely and took damage as it discharged into him. Inside the chests were found a book of accounting from a dwarven gemcutter and two uncut gems. After a brief inspection of the book [nothing but sales and purchases], the book and uncut gems went into the loot sack and the adventurers left the room.
Further down the main passage was a fork – the adventures took the left path. They came upon a door on the left wall and could see another down on the right. Inside the door on the left was a small room that was empty…except for a massive metal vault door that made up the far wall! The adventurers entered the room to investigate further. Jill and Jermija [the man-at-arms hireling] kept watch on the door while Sugoi and Felos examined the vault door. Sugoi was looking for a possible place to insert the magical gem, hoping that it was a key to the vault and the treasures on the other side. Felos was just working out how he was going to defeat the lock and open the vault door. Neither was successful.
When Felos finally touched the door to try and manipulate the locking mechanism, the exit door slammed shut on its own and the entire metal wall started sliding forward. If the adventurers did not escape fast they would be flattened! Felos tried and failed to pick the magical lock on the exit door. Axetar attempted to use brute strength to open it and also failed. Sugoi and Jill tried separately as failed as well. Then Sugoi suggested all three try together and they were just successful. The adventurers and hirelings scrambled out of the room at the last minute as the metal wall pressed flat against the wall.
Sugoi hoped that the metal wall was thin enough that perhaps it would be possible to slip behind it and access the vault that way. Unfortunately, there was a trailing side wall [or it was VERY thick] and there was no way to get behind it. Disheartened but glad to be alive the adventurers continued down the main passage.
Further down, the passage ended with a last door on the right wall [as seen previously by the adventurers]. This door opened into a room with a raised stage in the center that had a ramp to walk up to it, two tables with some low and comfortable chairs, posters on the walls advertising in Dwarven the best go-go dancers in the land [because the ‘70s were classy that way], and a second door across the room. Sugoi was mildly scandalized as he could read the posters, the other not as much and were happy not knowing what exactly they said. One of the tables had six bottles of wine on them, the other a deck of dwarven playing cards. Sugoi carefully investigated the cards [dreading what images might be on them] while Axetar grabbed the wine bottles on the other table.
The playing cards were [luckily] just standard cards. Five of the six bottles appeared to hold normal wine, but one had a greenish tint to it. Sugoi asked Lars [his hireling valet] to sip the greenish liquid. Trepidatious but willing to follow orders, Lars did so. He reported it was pleasant in taste but was tingly going down. This suggested it was magical, but there were no obvious effects. The bottles were distributed amongst the group to keep them from getting broken in the loot sack.
Sugoi checked for secret doors at the end of the passage, but none was found, so the group backtracked to the fork in the passage and went down the right-hand path. The found the other door into the go-go lounge in this passage and then noticed a change in the quality of the walls, suggesting they were entering a different section of the caverns.
Down this path they came across another fork in the passage, taking the left fork. A door on the left wall opened into a larger chamber with a pit in the center of it. Felos and Gremian [hireling torchbearer] went over and looked into the pit to see what was in it. Both felt a wave of compulsion to jump down into the 20-foot pit, but Gremian was able to shrug the compulsion off. Felos stated he was going to jump into the pit and Axetar had to grab the hobbit to keep him from doing so. Some slaps to the face later and Felos was able to escape the compulsion.
Looking around the room and avoiding the pit with their eyes, the adventurers saw a door on the far side of the room and one on this side. They made their way over to the far door [studiously avoiding looking at the pit] and opened the door. Beyond was a pile of dead bodies, apparently failed adventurers based on the clothing and gear upon the corpses. The smell was terrible and the inside of the door had scratches and grooves on it from those inside trying to escape…and failing.
Not wanting to get trapped in the small room beyond the door, the adventurers decided to bur the door. Sugoi poured some oil on it and then lit it from the torch. While it burned, the adventurers went back to investigating the pit. Felos had a rope tied around him so he could be lowered into the pit and yanked back out if the compulsion overcame him again. It did. Repeatedly. Over the better part of an hour until Felos was finally able to shrug off the compulsion and report on what was in the pit. The pit’s contents were more dead adventurers with their weapons. The adventurers pulled up the weapons and shield and looked the mover, keeping a few to sell back in town, including a shield bearing the coat of arms of the Kingdom of Tyler.
By this point the door was burnt, but sparks had ignited the pile of bodies beyond and those had burned up as well. Some lumps of semi-molten gold were found in the ashes and collected by pouring water over them to cool them off.
The adventurers then opened the door on the near side of the pit and found a room with skeletons chained to the walls and a bobbing point of light. The point of light seemed to take notice of the adventurers and then flew past them and out the entrance door, turning left and heading down the passage. Thinking that the light was some form of alarm spell, the adventurers quickly left the pit chamber and returned to the hallway. They backtracked to the fork to avoid running into whatever the light might be alerting and took the right path.
This path forked as well and the adventurers kept left at the fork. A small alcove on the left wall had a door in it and the adventurers investigated it. The long narrow room contained a pool of clear water that appeared to be a well as there were instruments for drawing water hanging on the wall next to it. Felos and Axetar moved forward to investigate and a giant tick dropped off the ceiling, right onto Felos! Before the tick could start drawing blood, the other adventurers attacked it with Axetar killing it. The bite area felt warm to the touch to Felos, so he poured some wine on it to clean out the wound. It stung fiercely at first but stopped after a bit. [We later learned that if no treatment had been done, the bite included a disease that would have killed Felos in 2-8 days, so it was very good that he flushed the wound with alcohol.]
At this point, Sugoi noticed that Lars was a full two inches shorter than he normally was. Lars got very nervous at this point, but Sugoi calmed him down, congratulating Lars on discovering the greenish wine was actually a potion of shrinking. Sugoi assured him that the effects would eventually wear off and he would resume his normal size. Sugoi’s confidence encouraged Lars and he resumed his normal calm.
Done searching the well room, the adventurers continued down the corridor. They walked past a side passage on their left that appeared to loop back to where the pit room was, so they avoided it. A little further down they found a barracks room on the right side. A quick search of the mattresses turned up a small cache of 20 gold pieces and little else.
Past that the adventurers investigated a room on the left of the corridor that appeared to be a mess hall of some sort. There were three tables with chairs, but squatting at the far table was an ogre [we think] contemplating moves on a chessboard. It noticed the adventurers and invited them to sit and play chess with it. There was an implied “or else” with the request, so Sugoi sat down across from the ogre. While the ogre set up the pieces, Axetar also took seat at the table next to Sugoi. When the ogre was finished setting up the pieces, he had a full set of chessmen while Sugoi only had a king and a single pawn!
Sugoi asked where the rest of his men were and the ogre said that was all Sugoi got and then rested his hand on an immense club. Axetar pulled out two wine bottles, placing one bottle of dwarven wine next to Sugoi and the bottle of the slightly green wine next to the ogre. The ogre read the label and found the claimed vintage to his liking, thanking Axetar for it. He then proceeded to take a long pull off the bottle and allowed Sugoi to make the first move. Sugoi suggested that Axetar had already made the first move as the ogre noticeably started shrinking. Fast.
The ogre noticed and flipped the table before making a break for the door. Sugoi cast his Sleep spell, but the ogre, in his panic, was not effected [made his save versus spells, darn him]. By this point he was only human sized. The adventurers ran ahead of the ogre to try and cut him off and by the time they got in front of him, the ogre was only dwarf-sized! The ogre surrendered and kept shrinking. He stated that his name was Malvo and asked that the adventurers tell his brothers to avenge him. He was now the size of a fly. When asked where his brothers were, his final reply was, “Down the hall…” before he was too small to see or hear any more.
Sugoi cautiously looked over at Lars, who was now sweating profusely and about an inch shorter than when they talked at the well. Sugoi apologized to Lars for being wrong earlier but said that they could fix the problem. Sugoi told Lars that after the group slept for the night, he would cast Dispel Magic on Lars, which would stop the shrinking. If that failed, town was close enough and they would find a cleric who could cast Remove Curse and save Lars that way. Lars, possibly grasping at straws, accepted this reasoning and calmed down some. [I rolled really well on a hireling loyalty roll.]
Leaving the mess hall, the adventurers continued down the corridor and found a small side area with a door. They could easily hear slurred orcish speech from several speakers. Sugoi asked for the group to wait before attacking. They agreed and Sugoi pulled a set of leather armor out of his back pack and put it on with Lars’ assistance [hence the need to bring his valet to the dungeon]. Sugoi then separated a shield that was hanging from his backpack and put the backpack back on. He then readied his shield and nodded to Axetar that he was ready to attack the orcs [having improved his armor class by 3 – see the notes later for my thinking on this].
Axetar kicked in the door to the room, smacking one of the orcs with the door. Sugoi successfully threw his sword to the ground in the surprise round [I rolled a 1 on a d20 and Sugoi fumbled his weapon]. In the next round the orcs won initiative, but who attacked first broke down to weapon lengths, with longer weapons attacking first. Axetar beheaded an orc with his two-handed sword. One of the orcs attacked Sugoi with a sword and missed [rolled really bad]. Two other orcs attacked Axetar and Jill, luckily missing. Sugoi countered the attack on him with two punches [weapons a lot smaller than an opponent’s weapon may go last, but they also get additional attacks], both of which missed.
And then the game ended because of time.
End of Session
[So several things to discuss.]
[I got a ton of use out of that 10-foot pole, much more than I expected.]
[Magic-users wearing armor in original D&D apparently just kept them from casting spells. As an elf, Sugoi could still cast spells if he had magic armor on, meaning there was nothing to keep him from wearing armor other than it blocked his spell-casting abilities. Once he was out of attack spells he had no reason to not wear armor, so he put it on before the attack on the orcs to increase his chances of surviving the fight. I hadn’t thought of this until an hour before the session started, so I spent my leftover gold to buy the leather armor for Sugoi. I would have bought him chain armor, but the additional weight would have encumbered him and slowed him down if the party had to flee a monster. I didn’t want him to be the slowest adventurer there if we had to flee something.]
[There is no Find Traps skill for Thieves in OD&D, just a Disarm Traps skill. The players would have to describe looking for a trap, getting precise and detailed in what they had their character do. Once a trap was located, then a roll happened to disarm it. Later editions modified this to be a single Find/Remove Traps skill, changing a reliance on PLAYER knowledge to the use of CHARACTER skills. We ended up doing a mixture of this, mostly to save time.]
[Combat uses Chainmail’s process of rolling for initiative and allowing the winning side to chose to move first or last, then ranged attacks happen, then melee attack. Ranged attacks are done in initiative order (fastest to slowest) and melee is resolved in weapon length order. This took a bit to work out in the final fight as we were all used to rules that said higher initiative moves and attacks before the next combatant went.]
[Having played this version of the rules for the first time, I can see why people still use these rules – they were fun to use! I can also see why house rules and alternate ways to play developed as these rules have gaps in them, failing to explain things they hint at. For example, elves are stated to be superior in finding secret doors in Supplement 2 – but there are no rules for finding secret doors at all. Unless they are somewhere in Chainmail, which I have not had time to completely read through. We didn’t have time to go looking for them and winged it using rules we know show up later in AD&D. I’d be willing to play these rules for a campaign, grafting in things from other systems to fill out the gaps or add things that I like and would fit, most notably the Mortality Table from ACKS.]
[Oh! Multiclassing or switching between classes was something that could be done freely between adventures, especially for elves who could freely switch between Fighting-Men and Magic-Users. I need to find out how it worked for humans and others, but at least for elves it was really easy to do. In all later editions is became harder with many penalties to doing so.]
[One last thing, the writing/layout of these rules was obviously at the hobbyist level. You regularly have to go flipping through the books to find all the relevant rules for combat and for several of the classes. Groupings of text were done on the “relevant rules” level, not the “topic” level, meaning that for example, the Thief is introduced in Supplement 1 with an overview early in the book where they expanded upon the descriptions of the various races and classes in the game, but tables for leveling and thief skills are in a section dealing with miscellaneous character skills and there is a side note for what saving throws thieves use (they use clerics of the same level), and things like that. There are also issues of what we’d now call copy and paste errors. There is a table for to hit modifiers for weapons per armor class. At the bottom is a list of missile weapons that was clearly copied from Chainmail, because the last row is for the arquebus – which is mentioned nowhere else in the D&D rules, but IS in Chainmail where a table with the same information has the same list of ranged weapons, also ending with the arquebus.]
[I’m actually fine with this as it creates a back door for gunpowder weapons in the rules. They have a very low rate of fire, but whatever they hit they kill. Simple.]
[That’s it for now. Session 2 will be a Boot Hill game but the date hasn’t been set yet. It might be late July, but more likely early August.]
History of RPGs
Session 1, Dungeons and Dragons (1974) [This session]
Session 2, Boot Hill [Not Yet Run]
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