Henchmen musing

 AD&D 1e actually has pretty in depth rules for finding henchmen. Players generally aren’t very happy with it, since it costs 100s of gold and in-game weeks to find random lvl 1 NPCs with no equipment. Like all of 1e’s rules, it’s pretty punitive on the players seeking henchmen. This can be justified, as henchmen properly run are a huge boon to the party, and it prevents the henchman from becoming disposable.

I don’t think I’ve ever been in a game where the DM used these rules as written. 

My favorite way of introducing henchmen to the party is for them to persuade or subdue NPCs our in the wild to join them.

>>82555592

Side note: Finch’s Primer is bad for converting 5e players, because 5e players can make a simple argument that all his “old school DM” examples can be accomplished in 5e as well. I’ve never gotten much use out of Finch’s OSR primer. It’s probably better to just say what you like about OSR and point out how 5e doesn’t do it.

>>82555773

Finch's primer is just bad in general. Not only does he use strawmen to make his point which will give most readers the impression that OSR people are just boomers with an irrational hatred of any edition post 2e despite having never really touched it (true in many cases), but most of the advice doesn't even apply if you're playing anything but the LBB. Why the fuck OSE still has it listed in the introduction is baffling to me.

>>82555848

Also, hilariously, one of his pieces of advice is literally "add in critical successes and failures" without using that terminology, which is something grogs always say they hate about WOTC editions.

 

 

Documented for posterity

 Running an AD&D 2e game, I had expected to come back and reference the 1e DMG for all the good tables and content. In practice I didn’t feel the need to, even once, as I had all the material necessary for addressing  in game issues within the 2e core books.  Maybe the 1e DMG is better for pre-game prep.

 ranting on discord, copying it here:

B/X is a broken as fuck system. It wasn’t written with an eye towards what plays well, but what reads well. It’s a simplified version of OD&D that tosses out a lot of nuance that makes that game playable. It also contains a mishmash of AD&D elements. “Playtesting”, in regards to BX, is a joke concept.
It’s also a very limited system. BX advertises 14 levels but in reality games fizzle out between levels 6-9, because there isn’t much to do beyond delve into dungeons and travel in between dungeons. BX has wilderness encounters numbering in the 100’s of monsters, but no method to resolve combat at that scale. In OD&D it’s assumed that you would play out the battle using miniatures and the Chainmail rules, BX has no replacement system and no mention of Chainmail. BX mentions the creation of strongholds, but no details on how to do so, what their purpose is, or how to manage them. Even AD&D describes how strongholds can manage henchman and followers.
There’s a reason BX “hacks” and supplements are so popular: you simply need more rules, if you want to play a game that’s more than dungeon crawling with 7 character types. Not “classes”, BX actually just gives you 7 characters that you can modify cosmetically and just play

2e isn’t for everyone. 2e is a fantasy world simulator, and in my very biased opinion, it’s the best at that task. It creates a fantastical world that runs on something approaching real world logic, and gives you the opportunity to run any fantasy in that world. With only some tweaks you can use it to run things wildly different than the standard setting, for example Dark Sun, Ravenloft, Spelljammer.
2e is a very expansive game, with a lot of rules. It’s not as rules heavy as 3e or even 1e, but it has a supplement for seemingly everything. The core 2e books are intentionally a reaction against 1e’s heavy handed authoritarian style, and presents most of the rules as options that you could slot into your campaign. The thing I don’t like about them though is the writing style and organization. The split between DMG and PHB was a mistake
Mostly, 2e cleans up 1e, fixes most of the obvious contradictions and ambiguities, and presents a core game that runs really well as a light system if you don’t use any optional rules, or a fully simulationist system if you do.
Unfortunately the greatest drawback of 2e is the ‘90s and the TTRPG community at the time. They wanted rules for everything, heavy simulationist approaches, the option to chuck dice at all times, at the cost of imagination. 2e splats followed some very bad trends that eventually left the game abandoned for trendier games like World of Darkness or GURPS. the “rules for everything” approach reached its apotheosis in 3rd edition, which is when everyone realized that it was a bad idea
Though, as a point in its favor, 2e actually has two (three?) mass combat systems, and at least one of them, Battle System, is actually very good. As a result of the splatbook explosion, 2e allows you to play a full game from lowly dungeon delver to domain ruler to Planescape jumper with plenty of official support. BECMI is the only other TSR edition that does that

Retrofitting Mythic into D&D

 I've tried a lot of solo systems, and I keep coming back to Mythic, because every other system just feels like a stripped down version of Mythic. Except the PbtA ones, I guess.

 Mythic doesn't really work with D&D, however, since Mythic assumes a cinematic approach to gaming and D&D assumes a simulationist one. In Mythic, game play is divided into a sequence of scenes, where scenes are chosen in respect to how they push the story forward, and do not have to play out in a linear order and all the unnecessary events in between are ignored. This doesn't really fit D&D's simulationist approach, which doesn't divide cleanly into discrete scenes and the "unnecessary" mechanics of the journey are in fact the greater part of the game. 

But I think that Mythic can be salvaged for use in old school D&D by hacking off the parts that work and repurposing them; specifically Threads, Lists, Events, and Chaos Factor.

Threads are basically the goals of your character, as an end goal like "killing the demon lord" or something on the side like "finding long-lost brother". Mythic has many tools for managing threads and manipulating them at unexpected times. Creating, following, and resolving threads adds a story-driven direction to the game.

Events are the meat and potatoes of the solo engine. Everything revolves around them and most of the solo game will be spent dealing with the consequences of an event. Use events in place of a random encounter. Perform the random encounter check as normal, and on a success turn to Mythic’s event generation rules and fit what happens. The Mythic GME constantly stresses that Events should be defined by the context of the game, and D&D provides the context, whether overland, in town or in the dungeon.

Lists and List Management are necessary paperwork for tracking and manipulating Threads and NPCs in your game. Only add “important” NPCs to the list, as in D&D you’ll probably be generating a lot. When a thread or event states to “Introduce NPC”, that would be one important to the story and should be built accordingly. The 1e DMG has a table of traits for random NPC generation, which I found to be more straightforward than the Mythic one, but has more limited options.

The Fate check is introduced in the Mythic GME as it’s most important mechanic, but I found it’s usefulness limited in old school D&D, as there are usually more concrete procedures for resolving in-game activities. Nevertheless, there are points where procedures or results are unknown, and it’s there that the Fate check comes into play. I recommend using the Fate check from Variations 2.

Most people who play solo don’t like to use Chaos Factor, but I do. I like the element of randomness and the unexpected that it provides. 

I have the Mythic cards, and generally I prefer them for tracking Chaos factor and Lists, but for events and the other checks I like to use Variations 2. 

Silvering of weapons

 The reason Dracula, of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, hated silver was because it was considered a “pure” metal, as opposed to steel which was an alloy, or gold which was too soft to kill in its purest form. It is also why Dracula had no reflection, because mirrors of the time were backed by silver.

D&D Rules allow silver weapons to harm certain monsters, and players expect to exploit a loophole to create silver weapons by melting down silver coins and coating their regular weapons with it. In strict terms, this wouldn’t harm the Dracula from the book, because it is not the chemical properties of silver/Ag, but the “purity” of the creation made from it. Silvering a mundane weapon does not create a pure weapon. 

Players want to melt silver coins because it is cheaper to do so than to buy a new weapon. The way to make such cost commensurate would be to use a silver standard.

 Allowing players free movement over a map makes keeping STRICT TIME RECORDS practically impossible, especially with dynamic lighting. It’s easiest to do in “theater of the mind” style where the DM is effectively in control of the pace of the party. 

In OD&D, all magical armor is plate armor. Using only the LBBs, this isn’t so much an issue as 2/3 classes can wear magical plate with no restrictions, and the class that can’t, cant wear any armor anyway.
But the thief poses an issue, as that class can wear some limited armor, but not the better armors, and no magical armor.
Meaning that the Thief is practically just as bad as the MU. Worse, actually, as higher level MUs can make up for this deficiency where Thieves never can.

Mass combat and the wilderness

 I’ve been thinking about mass battles lately, and how the wilderness crawl was originally supposed to be a mass battle campaign. One only needs to look at the movement rates and encounter numbers to see clues for that. But the d20 combat system doesn’t support mass battles well.

And then I thought about how much actual combat sucks, especially for those low level characters between levels 1-3. Indeed, in D&D it feels like your individual character is just some nameless, highly disposable grunt in a dungeon. In fact it feels like if you want any success in a dungeon expedition, one must lead a whole platoon into it and only come out with the survivors.

And maybe that’s where a hidden genius of the design lies. Instead of playing as super capable heroes, you and your friends must take the role of disposable grunts and band together. Where in a wargame you would control a whole squad yourself, in D&D you just control an individual member of that squad. So you and your friends must coordinate and work as a team to survive. OSR is essentially a teamwork game.

Coming back to mass battles, maybe there’s another secret to the way wilderness works - by the time you’re wilderness adventuring, your characters should be at least level 4 - which in Chainmail terms is the level that they fight using the Hero rules. And Heroes and above can fight at the mass battle 1:20 scale. So maybe that tight knight squad you formed down in the dungeon is now wilderness adventuring, and each member of that squad now fights as 4 men. Suddenly their chances of survival are more favorable. 

And of course, by the time one is ready to start campaigning in the world, he should be able to raise and equip an army of hirelings to fight for him as well. 

Why does a treasure cache contain 1,000 copper pieces?

Because the designer wanted to give you 10 XP, but he wanted you to pay for it by carrying 1000 coins around in weight.

 OSRIC v2.2 is better than v2, and is a very good compilation of the AD&D 1e system. 

v2 is a “pocket edition” that drops all but the most essential rules, for the sake of space. v2.2 is more comprehensive.

I do want to point out that my OD&D Dungeons game offers a magic item crafting option by NPCs. That’s a huge money sink right there, which has a direct effect on the game. Honestly I think that crafting should be a huge part of the gold sink game, but no one actually does it, despite random treasure not being a reliable method of getting useful items. And I think that it fits better in OD&D than it does in AD&D or other editions.

And I think that no one does it because Gygax makes it unreasonably punitive in later editions. The way to do it would be to take on a MU henchman, raise him in levels, and then store him in your stronghold to craft items exclusively. The whole 6-8 players that meet multiple times a week vs 3-4 players that meet only once at best, issue. 

In my game, I’m giving players a use for all their gold, and in fact incentivizing it as those who take advantage of this system will have better gear and items. I think that gamers actually have been trained erroneously by video games to assume that all their good equipment will come from monster drops, because spell research doesn’t exist in video games and crafting generally sucks.

 I no longer consider Mythic GME to be a universal supplement for playing RPGs solitaire. I think it works best as it’s own, roleplay lite, solitaire narrative writing game. I think that without other people, the closest you could get to a solo RPG experience are roleplay-lite board games.

Scarlet Heroes is very much it’s own, OSR-adjacent game. You can’t play Scarlet Heroes with B/X, you have to play it on its own. It has its own systems for managing combat that are more favorable to the PC. SH’s approach to solitaire is to give the player a selection of tables to look up die rolls on.

Advanced Heroquest and OG Warhammer Quest do much the same thing. You could play AHQ just by rolling dice and looking up tables when appropriate. In fact I think that the tables in these board games are more fun as solo games than Scarlet Heroes is.

Terrain movement modifiers in AD&D 2e

 This isn’t really spelled out in the books so I’m documenting it here. 

Terrain Costs for Overland Movement are multiplied to the distance of the terrain. 

For example, travel over 5 miles of rocky Desert terrain, with a terrain cost of 2, becomes effectively 10 miles of travel.

Daily travel time in AD&D 1e

The PHB states that the players can move their inches rate in miles in "a half day's travel". Would that imply that a full day's travel is double that number? One would assume that means 12 hours, but if you cross-reference those numbers with the DMG, you'll notice those numbers are still too low. But they do work out if you use 14-16 hours of travel per day.

AD&D 1e assumes 16 hours of travel per day.

It may not be the most realistic metric, but I like the idea that characters are spending the entire day sans rest time, traveling. The 12 hour travel rule otherwise gives characters 4 hours of downtime in which they are not sleeping or traveling. AD&D 2e explicitly states 10 hours of travel, allowing for 6 hours of downtime and 8 hours of sleep every day. Kind of a waste, I think, even if it is more realistic.

 https://boards.4channel.org/tg/thread/79521668#p79533931

>For those anons that do run 1E, why?
I used to run 1e RAW. the mechanics didn’t bother me so much as the player facing content. I love the mechanics of 1e since I love detailed and technical mechanics to really sink my teeth into and burn my brain on. I don’t mind longer, more complicated games with more mechanical depth.

However in playing 1e I had consistent issues with several of its core elements. The Monk and Assassin classes, for example. Every time a player played Monk he either went full weeb or full campy Kung fu movie. Monks are really easy to kill at level 1, so he was also a useless contributor to the party. Every Assassin PC also added more work for me as the DM to handle their “secret mission” shenanigans. Even if the player was good, the PC was an unneeded strain. If I had to spend every game banning Assassins, Monks, Bards, Psionics and other core elements of the game, why wouldn’t I just find a game that had less issues to begin with? 

My preferred game now is 0e. Because OD&D eventually turned into AD&D, it is very malleable and fitting for AD&D-isms to be stapled into it. I can take the mechanics I like about AD&D and fit them into OD&D seamlessly, without posting over the elements that I don’t. I can also use AD&D’s race and class system as a “fix” or “upgrade” for OD&D’s very vague and confusing explanation. 

I also enjoyed 2e. In my opinion 2e fixes all the problems I had with 1e, and provides a more streamlined game on top. It’s not perfect but it’s better than 1e RAW. Unfortunately the community for 2e is not there, unless you like playing with 40 year old+ grognards. 

I don’t play B/X because it is an intentionally simpler game. If I wanted to use the more complex mechanics in B/X, I’d have to house rule it on such a grand scale that it’s better that I should find a different system. For me, a blend of OD&D and AD&D is the game I want to play, but BX is for a simpler experience.

 I’m going to move my dungeon crawls into meatspace. I have sets of dungeon tiles and the Advanced Heroquest rules to help me quickly generate dungeon layouts. I can use my miniature figures as a PC party and monsters. I can use the AD&D rules for movement, combat, timing, etc. I can make character sheets and pull monster stats from the MM. I can do this all to run my own solo dungeon crawls with AD&D

Maybe after a few dungeon crawls I’ll move into hex crawling with this method as well

I bought Mage Knight and still haven’t learned the rules. I realize now because I don’t give a shit about Mage Knight. I just wanted the hex tiles. Hex crawling with hex tiles should be easy for fun and profit. In the event of an encounter, I’ll just move my miniature figures over to a battlemap and use the AD&D outdoor combat rules.

The relationship between OD&D and AD&D

 AD&D is what OD&D was starting to be. When E. Gary Gygax sat down to solidify his open notes of OD&D into the more concrete rule books of AD&D, he spent a lot of time explaining what he actually meant by the rules and pinning them with mechanics. Unfortunately in the process, he included a lot of extra elements that complicated or contradicted the rest of the structure. To really understand the game of OD&D, you must add to it cues from AD&D, or take AD&D and subtract elements from it until you return to a game that's like OD&D.

Most players, on the other hand, want to play the game their way, and rather use OD&D as a springboard for their own Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaign, with the elements they like and rules assumptions that they prefer. And that was the original intent of OD&D all along.

The difference between OD&D and B/X

 When I run D&D, I’m not presenting just a game with mechanics and rules, but an experience. The fundamental part of my game’s experience is that I want players to believe they’re interacting with a real world. A world they can maybe only see in their imaginations, and interact only by talking to me, but a real place nonetheless that follows real rules of a world that are similar to our own

And sometimes something as simple as letting players buy equipment as they go along is enough to shatter that immersion and remind them that “you’re only playing a game. We’re only here for a few hours. Speed it along”

And that’s why I will not sacrifice verisimilitude for convenience, and why I don't play B/X.

Because there are many instances where B/X sacrifices verisimilitude for convenience. Race-as-class, the length of a combat round, movement rates, item weights, etc. 

B/X is the game of convenience. It was literally written for kids to play, and play quickly.  It does not deliver the immersion that I want to provide.

OD&D delivers pure immersion in its rawest form.

OD&D + Greyhawk

 “If you’re going to play with Greyhawk, why not just play AD&D?”

Well, now I have an answer. Players don’t want to play AD&D, because of the stigma. But they’ll play a game that’s mechanically identical to AD&D, so long as it’s still OD&D.

To be fair, there’s a lot I don’t like about AD&D, which I’ve expounded about on my blog. So I guess now I’ll be playing OD&D + Greyhawk, which gives me everything I like about playing AD&D, and none of the stuff I don’t.

I love being an OD&D Dungeon Master.

This is my 200th post!

Screenshots from last night!

 

Setting fire to suspiciously purple fungus growing at one end of the corridor

 

And the miasma cloud they left behind

 

More fire

 

And an example of them stacking against a door to check it. Using Isometric maps with tight dynamic lighting in this way made the players behave like they were actually moving their figures. It was like a game of Pillars of Eternity or Path of Exile or Diablo but there was so much more interaction, imagination, and creative freedom.

 

But the REAL trick of the night was this. The players broke the wall that had seperated these two zones across a chasm. The idea was so crazy that I had to let it work. They then threw a lit torch into the other end to examine the place. What happens next? Do they attempt to jump the void? Who knows.

Playing with darkness and light on these isometric maps has increased the quality of my games 1000 fold

And as a final bonus: CUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUBE

Total 180

 As a kid in the 90’s, I swore never to play AD&D 2nd edition

Running dungeon crawls in 2e this past week has been the most fun I’ve ever had in gaming

Thing about hex crawls is, as soon as you run into any feature, you have to move to a new map. Even running into a wandering monster means that you must now move to a battle map. A hex crawl isn’t just one map, it’s at least half a dozen maps, to start.

At least the DM should have a map for every new location, if you don’t use battle maps.

 My personal belief is that for the author of AD&D 1e, the game and the setting were inextricably linked. That’s why there’s so much setting specific information in the DMG, and built into the classes. The author was just of a high level enough to know how to genericize it for his readers, so that they could port and customize it to their personal games

In fact that paragraph just gave me an epiphany. The whole reason I switched from playing 1e RAW to 2e was... I didn’t like Gygax’s setting specific stuff in the PHB and DMG and MMs controlling my game

Managing a large party on Roll20

 The maps and tokens are a godsend . Thank Alex Drummond for the Epic Isometric pack, players are too busy fiddling with their tokens to be distracted by things out of game.  Dynamic Lighting is a necessity. Isometric tokens + Dynamic Lightning make players feel like they’re playing a video game, and they will focus on the POV of their character.

To that end, players can interact as their tokens as well. They don’t all need to talk in voice chat, they can text chat their responses. Only the Caller and the DM actually need to use voice at all. The DM for obvious reasons, 90% of mic time would be the DM. While the Caller is organizing players or the DM is describing the world, the players can text their responses. 

Group initiative from O/AD&D is the only way to play. In Movement phase, all players move tokens. They don’t need approval. Just move your token to where you want to be. In the attack phases, everyone just rolls all their own dice, and the DM can pick successes. It’s so simple and fast. 

The end of my 1e campaigns

 The last campaign I ran before this one was a mix of The Village of Hommlet and The Keep on the Borderlands. I replaced the inner town of the Keep with Hommlet, placed the Moathouse in the Environs of the Keep, and scattered the Caves of Chaos all around the map. I then let players enter the Keep as normal, roleplay with the NPCs, grab adventure hooks and rumors, then head out into the map to run into wandering monsters, random encounters, and find the dungeons, the Caves of Chaos and the Moathouse.

This all sounds OSR as fuck, right? That's what you're supposed to do. Build a huge ass sandbox with all these elements and then the players choose what they can do to create an emergent story

But it was exhausting to run and the actual time the players spent crawling through dungeons and fighting monsters was about 1/5th of the whole session

bookended by trips to town, buying selling gear, calculating XP and gold, etc... So much time doing telemetry and accounting and almost none doing dungeons.

My current game has all player services available in a single tavern, and the dungeon is a short jaunt away. So much more time spent doing something and not accounting for it.

Also, in my opinion the Caves of Chaos are just not fun dungeons. The Moathouse isn't fun either, but it feels more like a real place.

AD&D 1e

I think it marks the last time I’ll run 1e RAW

Player Knowledge vs Character Knowledge, an illustrative example

 

The players literally stumbled onto the coffin of Snow White and the bodies of the Seven Dwarves, and started begging for Religion and History checks to identify them.

Did you not watch Disney movies??? The Halfling literally ran through their home, where I described everything in sevens.

It took them 30 minutes, but when they got it, it was with a rolling wave of laughter.

That's a Basilisk that they turned to stone behind them, using polished silver. So they were able to use their player meta-knowledge in that case. but I guess the rest of their imagination was a bridge too far.

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is a good test of player knowledge.

Generally, when it comes to reading the rules, I prefer For Gold & Glory. I read FG&G constantly, to learn and look up the rules of the game. I use FG&G as a straight replacement for the 2e DMG

When it comes to references at the table, I use the 2e PHB. This is because players have a lot of questions all the time, and I want to use the exact language of the text so as to minimize conflict. I pull the exact charts and tables from there as well, even though they're the same in FG&G.

I look up the 2e DMG once in a while, just to pull charts and tables, and text for rules lawyers

I really, really don't like how the 2e PHB and DMG split the rules in half between them.

Gygaxian they are not

How to DM 5e

 I finally understand how to be a DM for 5e. I must embrace my role as Entertainer, Storyteller, Railroad Engineer, Babysitter, and Live-Action Video Game. 5e players want to be spoonfed their "entertainment". And to get the most out of that relationship, I should focus on playing the game I want to play, the story I want to tell, the plot I want to run. The players can go through it at the pace I decide. And here’s the evil part, they love it. They will ALWAYS ask for more.

Today, I ran a 3 hour session of Lost Mines of Phandelver for a 5e group. Normally, when I run LMOP, I let players explore the town of Phandalin, do a short hex crawl on the Sword Coast map, and present to them options on pursuing the goblins or saving their employer or delivering the cart. This time, I didn't do any of that. Well, I kept the hex crawl. But otherwise I pushed  the players from encounter to encounter, with little choice in where they got to go.  And they loved it. They want another game next week. They "like the group dynamic"
Everything I know about RPGs is a lie. I'm Booboo the Clown.

I managed to fill up the group in under an hour by recruiting from a Discord. The players weren't technically mentally stable, but I think they were pretty average for zoomers. When I play AD&D, its exclusively with 40+ year old men. I have never had an AD&D group where the average age was below 39. This group was mostly college or post college adults. There was an almost 50/50 parity between the sexes. And they had all signed up completely at random.

 I'm setting up my second dungeon for crawling. I'm learning something: Its so easy.
Prepping for 5e is a process. I don't create a location, I create encounters. And those encounters can occur randomly and in weird places spatially, and each encounter is like a mini story with an inciting action, rising tension and dramatic climax.
I'm not doing anything like that in my dungeon. I just place a bunch of shit around that would be funny if it killed the players, and that's it. I can focus on crafting the location into something that's good. And its so fast. If I wasn't using a VTT, I could probably prep this dungeon in an hour before gametime. Including dice rolled encounter tables.

In fact I spent so long prepping TSR modules as well. The ones written by Gygax are all very complicated, even the so-called easy ones like B2, T1 or G1.

It's so freeing to just let go of the story and plot and sandbox and everything, and just be like "This corridor goes down 120 feet..."

Big Boy Pants

 I’m going to put on my Big Boy Pants and write my own encounter tables to stock my dungeon with, just like the homework Zeb Cook assigned in the 2e DMG.

On Thieves

 I don’t let non Thieves attempt to pick a lock or pickpocket. If a Fighter or Cleric were to pick up a lock pick, I would tell them that they fiddle around with it uselessly for their turn. A subtle pickpocket attempt, such as brushing by the coat of the intended victim, will automatically fail. Repeated attempts will alert the victim.

Detect/Disable traps only works on small, mechanical traps such as a poisoned needle hiding under the lock of a jewelry box. Unless the non-Thief specifically mentions looking for it, he cannot find it. The Thief gets a ‘I search for traps’ roll. Detect/Disable traps does not apply to a bear trap concealed under a moss and bush disguise. Anyone can attempt to search that 10’x10’ area and discover the trap, and there are a myriad ways to disable it. A Thief CAN roll to disable it and reset it to its original position.

Move Silently and Hide in Shadows belong not to the Thief, but the DM. Only the DM should know if the attempt is successful. Not every stealth attempt requires both. Other classes that wish to sneak quietly or duck out of sight may do so organically. Only the Thief is assured of undetectability.

This is how I run Thieves and I don’t understand why /osrg/ can’t fucking get over it.

2e drops the ball

 The 2e books have no random encounter tables! This is a cornerstone of OSR play! They have no random stocking tables for dungeon generation either. Random encounter tables by level were a feature of all core rule books going back to the original 3 LBBs. 

The 2e PHB and DMG each devote an entire chapter to Encounters, but those chapters only have guidelines for writing and general advice. The DMG chapter assigns the DM homework to write encounter tables himself, using the guidelines in the book!

Compare that to the massive chapter in the D&D Rules Cyclopedia, Encounters and Evasion, which is full of amazing charts and practical procedures for handling this step of the game. And so many tables of wandering monsters. Or the famously good AD&D 1e appendices.

I strongly defend 2e in the OSR space but this is a heavy strike against it. The tragedy is that 2e’s 2d10 method, based on rarity, is a better random generator than 1e’s straight rolls, and 2e’s reaction tables are better than all the other games’. 

Dynamic Lighting

 I have to bite the bullet and buy a Roll 20 subscription, just for the dynamic lighting. The player engagement it results in is amazing, they become so much more immersed. I used to try manually removing fog of war, but that slowed the game down, made more work for me as the DM to shuffle about, and caused players to move passively. Combined with isometric maps and tokens, and it’s almost like they’re playing an isometric cRPG.

It’s sad but the best way to play D&D online is to present it as close to a video game as possible. I very strongly tried to resist this but it’s the sad nature of people sitting in front of a computer not seeing each other.

Theater of the mind is the best and most immersive way to play but it does not translate to online voice and video software. I’ve had too many players play video games on Steam in the background during my sessions.

MOMENT OF SHAME

 Out of all the starting towns I've used, I've come to use Phandalin the most and have started to prefer it best

Soft home brew on Mystara

 I’m considering running another open table sandbox, this time set in Mystara. I’ve tried an open table idea many times before with little success, using different campaign ideas like a sandbox set in the Nentir Vale, module B2 The Keep on the Borderlands, the intro adventures from Mentzer’s Basic books, short dungeon modules, and the 5e Starter and Essentials boxes. I also tried multiple editions of D&D from OD&D, BECMI, AD&D 1e and 2e, and even 5e, to see which I would like.

My first attempt at running a sandbox set in Mystara began in Threshold was played with the BECMI system. The experience fell flat for me because the lore didn’t match up with the game mechanics- specifically the powers of the Cleric class didn’t match up with the background lore of the Immortals, and the confrontation with Aleena made this obvious. But it does work with AD&D 2e’s notion of clerical spheres and specialty priests...and Mystara did get a limited port to AD&D 2e. I have my own ideas about religion in D&D that I’ve detailed on my blog and that I personally love, and I’m sure I can fit it into the Mystara campaign setting with a few soft retcons.

First, the Church of Thyatis would be a stand-in for the “Great Church” outlined in my religion piece. The Church of Tralada would be considered a Thyatian misnomer by the Traladarn people, who call their religion the “Old Faith”. Everything else can remain the same, including mechanics.

I don't think that the Immortals should be stand ins for the deities of the setting. I'm fine with player characters becoming immortals, but believe that the creator and ruler gods themselves should be kept separate from immortals.

No more fodder enemies!

 Orcs, goblins, kobolds, gnolls, etc. are boring! They only exist as sacks of XP and random loot for players to slay in sequence. I think it takes away from the mystery and magic of a monster encounter when the monsters are so commonplace. I'm starting to prefer the approach of LotFP and other OSR games where monsters are unique and rare. Coupled with my idea of dungeons as real places, I envision dungeons that are lairs of single monsters, who are powerful and highly dangerous, but hoard massive amounts of treasure. A single dungeon, maybe 5-10 rooms, would be a cache of thousands of gold, but also the dwelling place of a small band of 3HD+ monsters. 

I realize that this is how the Moathouse in module T1 works. Most of the creatures in the upper levels are natural animals that have become giant sized - frogs, lizards, snakes, spiders and ticks. It is also a hideout for some random bandits. The lower level of the Moathouse is the lair of a single Ogre, who has his run of several rooms, and keeps prisoners locked in his pantry. It is then connected to the hidden underground lair of Lareth and his band from the Temple, and their bugbear slaves. The monster ecology of the Moathouse is very different from the Caves of Chaos, which has many diverse fodder monsters filling up the place.

I was reading up some Eastern European folk tales in an attempt to incorporate them into my adventures, and I noticed how the boogeymen in them were individuals that were highly lethal. I certainly couldn't imagine them living in groups and forming their own communities. I think monsters like that are better for an adventure, as the local peasants would be asking heroes to travel to the dark and scary parts of their land to face off against the cannabilistic hill troll, rather than asking the heroes to be goblin exterminators.

DM Yourself and OSR

     DM Yourself by Tom Scutt is my favorite solo RPG product. It's the one that finally cracked the code for me on how to play D&D adventures alone. Every other solo engine, I feel, is focused on generating content to play through, which is not an issue I had as a solo gamer. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide contains so much content for generating an adventure that a lot of the systems of other solo engines felt redundant to me, and most of them boiled down to just another set of random tables. DM Yourself finally addresses the problem of running a character. It does this through a number of innovations centered around basic choices you would make as a player, and gives you a framework for how to use them. It is written for use with premade adventure modules for D&D 5th edition, but can be adapted seamlessly to randomly generated content and OSR play.

    The most important innovation of DM Yourself is the method for handling "Default Behaviors" and "Time Consuming Actions". In OSR games every action has a time cost associated with it, and DM Yourself advises to choose 3 of them prior to visiting any new location. This sets up a "Binding Decision" for your character that you must follow through with, even if you find out that such an action would cause them harm. There is a neat little card in the back of the book that sets up Binding Decisions, such that you can keep track of your choices when taking new actions, and can turn it to different choices as you progress.

    The second innovation that improved my solo play was the suggestion to play for 1 main character and 1 sidekick. Using henchmen is a fundamental part of OSR play but as a solo gamer I found it laborious to juggle a full complement of henchmen, and I didn't really see the difference between a henchman and a full player character in a solitaire game. Stripping the number down to a single character and henchman allowed me to immerse myself more fully in the role of my character, while also having the extra support for combat and other challenges.

    The immersion table was a nice addition and I used it more than I thought it would, and the rest of the advice in the book is fairly helpful for structuring solo play. The Character Sheet add-on is very useful for keeping the systems straight, as are the quick reference appendices.

    There is a page near the end of the book for adapting DM Yourself to OSR games, and it covers mostly all the minor tweaks needed. Most of the book's additions to solo 5e are part of OSR games anyway, such as determining encounter distances and logging time.  There are a few things I would make a note of though, such as mapping.

    Mapping is a big part of the player's experience in OSR games, but for the solo gamer this will basically have to be spoiled. Every TSR module comes with a map of the dungeon, and it's better to just have the full dungeon map in front of you as you play and move your characters by grid spaces per turn, and only read room descriptions after having entered the respective room. This way you don't really need to worry about the difference between "skim reading and deep reading", but you lose the risk of getting lost in the unknown. Although this isn't an issue if you're randomly generating the dungeon, such as out of the AD&D DMG. 5th edition D&D adventures also come with plentiful gridded dungeon maps, and their online publications have "player" versions with hidden information removed, so the maps themselves are technically better for solitaire dungeon crawls, but the problem is that 5e itself doesn't have exact rules for dungeon exploration.

   As I mentioned in an earlier post, TSR D&D and its OSR derivatives are very simulationist games where every action is expected to occur as if it would in the real world. For that reason I feel that narrative structures like the Mythic GM Emulator are a bad fit for D&D as they assume a generally incompatible style of play. Tom Scutt's DM Yourself is meant to work explicitly with D&D and can fit both modern and old school adventure modules, and randomly generated dungeon and wilderness adventures.

Mythic GME and D&D

 I don’t think that Mythic is a good fit for D&D. D&D is a very simulationist game where you move distance by tens of feet and time in tens of minutes, while Mythic is a cinematic narrativist system where you focus only on the scenes that push forward the plot. I feel like the two systems are largely incompatible, and if you try to mix them you’ll be leaning on one to the exclusion of the other. For example, dungeon crawling with D&D doesn’t need Mythic for anything except maybe the Q&A Oracle, while Mythic’s structure doesn’t need D&D’s procedures for except maybe character creation and more detailed combat. 

From another anon who says things I totally agree with:

This is exactly why I've found it difficult to use Mythic when playing solo osr games (especially old-school D&D) because the game has a narrower focus on dungeon crawls and wilderness adventures. 

Enter a new room of the dungeon? Roll on tables to check for room type, size, content, number of exits, monsters, treasure, and other features. 
Run into an NPC? Roll to determine occupation, gender, personality, immediate desires, and quests.
Traveling through the wilderness? Subtract rations, roll for terrain type, roll for encounters, roll for discoveries, roll for miscellaneous events.

I keep Mythic on hand because it does some neat things with the random events and stuff, but I almost never even get a chance to use it because there are already straightforward procedures for 99% of the stuff you do in OD&D. The pacing of 'scenes' and 'chaos' doesn't even really work with room-by-room dungeon exploration anyway.

For Gold & Glory vs 2e

 I’ll be honest, I don’t like the AD&D 2e core rule books. I don’t like how they’re written, how they’re organized, or that they’re split up between three books. For Gold & Glory addresses all these issues by combining all the material into one book, reorganizing it for clarity, editing the language, and reformatting it using modern understandings of technical writing. The result is that it’s much easier to reference, easier to read plainly, and more convenient to have at the table. In fact I’d go so far as to say that FG&G is my favorite representation of the AD&D rules. 

If I had to rank the various versions of AD&D and their retroclones, it would look something like this:

For Gold & Glory 

AD&D 1e

AD&D 2e 

OSRIC

AD&D 1e’s greatest strength is the amount of content within, and the explanations and guidance on how to play the game by the author himself, written in a singular style now called “High Gygaxian”. On the other hand, the rules themselves are a mess, with plenty of internal contradictions and fiddly details that can’t be run as written and otherwise bog down play.

AD&D 2e is a streamlined take on 1e which fixes the rules, but in the process excises most of what made the 1e DMG so good. The 2e books themselves are written in a textbook style with plenty of instructional sidebars and optional rules, but this also makes them a chore to read and actually doesn’t help when trying to reference a specific rule. Also when the player community complains about it's removed content, they bring up Half-Orcs and Demons, but I don’t care about that and what actually bothers me is that the lists of hirelings, construction costs, encounter tables, random generation and stocking tables, and other such content was removed. As such, the 2e DMG has a lot less content than its predecessor.  The rules are better still, though they tried to be more “realistic”.

OSRIC is a reference book, not a game manual. It was only written to cover copyright licenses so that third party (fourth?) publishers could release content that is compatible with AD&D. OSRIC replicates all the content from the 1e PHB but only a thin slice from the DMG, just the mechanical rules necessary to play the game. It’s fine if you just want a quick reference but you definitely won’t learn how to play from it, and it’s utility is limited. FG&G is a much more comprehensive compilation of the AD&D system.

 I’m comparing AD&D 2e right now to Delta’s DND house rules and it’s funny how they match up with what Delta insists is more “realistic” or “closer to Chainmail”.  For example, Delta uses the silver standard because he claims that gold coins in the medieval world were never used as such, but as “coins of account” as mathematical shorthand. And then there’s this line from the 2e PHB:

Above these two coins is the much rarer gold piece (gp). This coin is seldom found in common use and mainly exists on paper as the standard money of account.

So Zeb Cook and Delta came to the same conclusion, using the same means...

 

Although, Delta’s stone encumbrance is way better than 2e’s pounds. Anything is better than pounds. Even weight in coins. 

Delta also makes much note of scale, and rules 1 turn to 1 minute, and 1 round to 10 seconds, which essentially makes characters 10x faster than they are in vanilla D&D. AD&D 2e increases the movement speed of characters by the same amount, but does not change the length of turns and rounds. No reason is given, presumably to keep terminology the same, but this could lead the casual observer to assume that there is an incongruity in the system. 

Interestingly, by changing rounds to 10 seconds, 2e initiative segments match up precisely to seconds, elegantly pinning game mechanics with reality.

Monks in AD&D

 I don’t like them because they’re directly based on the main character of the movie “36th Chamber of Shaolin”, and don’t fit any fantasy milieu that aren’t in Henan Province, China.

But I have to begrudgingly admit that they occupy an important place mechanically by essentially being an upgrade class to the Thief. The four “base” classes of Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User and Thief are fairly bland, and the “advanced” classes like Ranger, Paladin, Assassin and Druid are much more attractive. The Fighter especially is like a consolation prize for characters that don’t meet the stat requirements of any other class, and the base Thief is very weak. The only exception is the Magic-User. 

The Assassin is basically a ninja before OA, and has a ninja’s list of weapon proficiencies. Monks and Assassins fill the “striker” role of inflicting massive damage with regular weapons and special skills, instead of magic, and this role is basically what the Rogue class became from 3rd edition on.

The Monk is the only way to play a Lawful class with Thief skills, without multiclassing. I think it’s a mistake to drop monks to a level 1 character if they break alignment, they should drop to a Thief of the same level, in the way Paladins and Rangers drop to Fighter.

magic weapons in my campaign setting

 A +1 bonus on a d20 isn't that big of an effect. For that reason, I consider mundane weapons of high quality, like "Masterwork" or "Exotic" weapons, to grant a +1 bonus to THAC0 and damage. I'm also okay with them striking monsters that are otherwise immune to mundane damage. 

Magic weapons glow with aetherial power and grant a +2 bonus to hit and damage. Some weapons only have magical power in special circumstances, such as when used against orcs or goblins, or when held by a character of the necessary alignment. 

"Double magic" weapons glow with even more brilliant power, and grant a +4 to hit and damage. 

"Triple magic" weapons are mythical in existence and in power. They grant +5 to hit and damage, and only unique world artifacts are ever that powerful.

Orcs as Native American expys

 I love this idea. I love it so much because it makes the campaign explicitly colonial - Orcs and goblins and the other monstrous intelligent races are just naturally existing in the land and the humans are explicitly invading and driving them off. In fact it fits in almost perfectly with the backstory to the Keep on the Borderlands, where the Keep itself is established as a foothold into the "wild, untamed" Border areas. I can think of no better parallel to the American frontier of the 1800s and the idea of "Manifest Destiny". I especially love the implicit racism it projects onto the human and demihuman races and the nuanced shades of grey it adds to the greenskin races. The orc children dilemma no longer becomes so cut and dried. Gygax's assertion that "nits make lice" becomes absolutely, categorically, 100% bigoted.

Chainmail Fantasy Mass Combat

 It’s not that hard, just give your hero characters the same number of dice as equivalent numbers of “man” units from the mass combat table. For example, a Hero counts as 4 men, so against light infantry he gets 4 dice to roll. The annoying thing is looking up what fantasy units match up to which unit’s combat rating. It really slows the game down. Man-to-Man doesn’t really work with fantasy, you almost have to convert to mass combat when fighting the fantasy creatures. This means that some units are completely unable to hit certain fantasy creatures.

Chainmail is a dice pool system where you grab a handful of dice for the number of units in your army, as defined by the unit matchups on the mass combat table. Then you roll for successes, and each success causes a hit that would remove an enemy unit. 

 I honestly believe that if you took the dungeon movement and exploration rules from Basic or AD&D, and the combat and characters from D&D 4e, you'd probably have the best dungeon crawler ever made.

OD&D's Wilderness Rules

OD&D's wilderness game is much smaller than people think it is. The rules that exist only cover movement, setting up encounters, and evasion. The encounter charts have a large number of monsters, too large to actually fight using the Alternate Combat System from Book 1. When encountering monsters in the Wilderness of OD&D, it seems expected that the players would switch over to a set-piece battle using the Chainmail rules.  OD&D's wilderness adventuring can basically be seen as a sketch of rules for using a hex map and random monster battles with the Chainmail miniatures game.

 OD&D, by the book, is an inferior game to Advanced Heroquest. My primary sources of complaint are:

• Encumbrance
• The primary modifiers of encumbrance in OD&D are your armor and weapon, and everything else is assumed to weigh 80 gold piece equivalent. The rest of your weight limit is determined entirely by how many gold coins you carry.
• In Heroquest your move speed is modified by armor, and everything else only adds up to your weight limit, until you cannot carry anymore. Again, you are mostly only concerned about how much gold you can carry.
• Gold for XP
• In OD&D, Gold and Monsters both grant XP. In Supplement I: Greyhawk and later, monster XP is trivially small, to the point of not being worth the fight
  
• In AHQ, the only way to level is to pay for training with gold. Monsters also drop gold when they die, such that it can be considered equivalent to an "XP value", however gold has more uses than just as a means to level 
• The Gold feedback loop
• Taken as a whole, the above two points illustrate that both games stress the need to dungeon crawl for gold, but the gold economy and feedback loop is stronger in AHQ 

Further complaints

•  Time tracking by steps-per-turn
• This is much easier to track on a board game with an actual grids or a ruler, than it is to convey and track abstractly in theater of the mind 

• Exploration
• AHQ still allows players the thrill of exploring the unknown
• The method for finding secret doors (actually, generating secret doors) puts more control in the hands of the players while counterbalancing that with a DM's wandering monster check 
• Traps
• AHQ d12 spot and disarm chances make finding several common traps much simpler than OD&D.
•  I like it more than a 2-in-6 for every trap. I also see this as a framework, I can imagine any new trap and give players an X-in-12 chance for finding it. This is assuming that they haven't sussed out the "secret method" planned by the GM of finding and disarming it.
  
  This also straight replaces the Search/Spot/Perception rolls of the d20 system. In fact I think that roll is a flat answer to the problem of finding traps that OD&D has. Importantly, I like the d12 chance because it sets the chance of finding on a per trap basis, and not per character ability score. This is more logical to me and cuts out the need to put a modifier on the perception roll to detect trap.

• Spells
• OD&D Magic-Users know every spell in a spellbook of appropriate level, and can create new spells at the cost of 1,000 gold and a week of research. However, they can only use a limited number per day, and must rest before casting another
• AHQ Wizards also know every spell, however they must roll at the beginning of each round to see if they have enough spell points to cast. This keeps their gameplay dynamic and allows them to be useful more frequently than the OD&D magic-user
• NPCs
• The given NPC Hazard encounters in AHQ are a lot of fun
• Henchmen are easier and less punitive to recruit
• OD&D's morale and loyalty system is better, however
  

For a straight dungeon crawl, AHQ is better than OD&D. What OD&D offers above AHQ is the chance to do more, to journey in the overland and  engage with NPCs. Also maybe build a stronghold and go flying or sailing, but nobody really does that. OD&D shines when you lean into its role as a free-form RPG.

I really do like OD&D and I've run several games with the system, but I've always found it lacking in some pretty big ways and have ended up needing to create many more rulings per session. For a strict dungeon crawl, the more solid rules of AHQ are better for a more enjoyable evening of play.

BONUS:

• No f@#$ing DM 
• AHQ can be played out of the box without a DM, while in OD&D the notion ranges from absurd to plausible with extra procedures and oracles
  

AD&D 1e loyalty

 BtB, henchmen have a 50% loyalty chance. This number is modified by charisma score and several properties of the individual, such as alignment, training, treatment by liege, length of service, etc.  It looks like all this stuff should be calculated ahead of time and written on the henchman's sheet somewhere, or kept in a separate log by the DM, and incrementally modified when appropriate. It's another level of bookkeeping in an already bookkeeping heavy game. 

Instead, it's possible to only calculate these numbers when necessary, and instead of summing them into a static challenge target, turn them into modifiers to the dice roll. The base score to fail a loyalty check remains 50%, but now all the modifiers are reversed and added to the d100 die roll. It's a simple algebraic equation:

    BtB: 50% + modifiers > d100 score

Just reverse it to become: 50% > d100 - modifiers

This will take longer at the table, but I am becoming much more amenable to spending time at the table, than spending time outside it to get stuff done. AD&D itself is a very cumbersome game where doing even simple things BtB can take a very long time fiddling around with dice math.

Cracking the solo code

 Turns out that I’ve been playing solo wrong. Apparently it’s better to first decide what your character wants to do and then generate the world in response, than it is to generate the world first and then try to move your character through it like an automaton. With the latter method, I found most GM Emulators to fail in usefulness since I would be doing all the GM roles anyway, and I found them to be better used as “Player Emulators” where their oracles and tables were better suited to controlling the PCs.

DM Yourself is a great new product that puts the focus back on the solo player acting only as a PC and not as a GM, to drive the story forward. 

 Every procedure in D&D is longer and slower than doing that same action in real life 

cRPGs

 I liked Pathfinder: Kingmaker better once I created a character not as a "protagonist", but as a fit to the party. That game is more about managing a 6 person party than it is about playing a single individual main character.

Most of the guides online say that your choice between focusing on magic or melee doesn't matter in Divinity: Original Sin 2. This is false, magic has significantly deeper gameplay and most of the combat is built around the interactions between different magical effects. Physical combat and damage doesn't have nearly the variety, unless you play as a polymorph. I didn't enjoy D:OS2 until I had a full magic caster party.

Pillars of Eternity has the best controls for console. The 2D backgrounds are also better than every other game that use 3D backgrounds. The isometric perspective on a fully 3D modeled game gives me motion sickness.

Baldur's Gate sucks. Baldur's Gate II sucks more. I never felt like I was playing AD&D while playing those games, instead I felt like I was playing any generic BioWare game.

Fixing problems with Storm King's Thunder

1. Restrict the size of the map

 The given Sword Coast map is too big, and the given quests force characters to journey to extreme ends on glorified fetch quests. It's better to restrict the campaign area to the region shown in Harshnag's map, which is more or less bounded by the ancestor burial mounds. Even this is a bit too wide, as it includes the cities of Neverwinter and Luskan and some of the Sword Coast., but the players might want to journey to such iconic cities themselves, and to restrict the map further requires moving some of the burial mounds.

2. Put the Giants in actual war

There's a beautiful two page art spread of a Storm Giant and a Fire Giant about to clash, but this event never occurs in the module. In fact, beyond assaulting the initial towns in Chapter 2, the Giant Lords don't really do much of anything except waiting for the players to show up. Instead of that, the main goal of the Giant Lords should be changed to fight the other Giant Lords. The purpose of their incursions into settled lands is to expand their territory and take such from the others. There should be opportunity for frequent clashes between true Giants and their armies, with the small folk caught in the middle. That prospect seems far more terrifying as a plot device than what's written in the module.

Where to put the Giants' war

Chapter 2, the assault on the towns should be the beginning of the Giant Lord's incursions into smallfolk lands. After that, in Chapter 3 and beyond, true Giants can be encountered fighting with one another. Several Giant territories share borders and can be struggling with each other, such as Frost and Stone, Stone and Fire, Fire and Hill. Cloud Giants technically could be fighting anyone.

Making the Giants' war the central theme of the adventure

As written, the events of the town of Nightstone make little sense and leave too many unanswered questions. A better solution would be to make it the focal point of a battle between Hill Giants and Cloud Giants, both of which were after the titular Nightstone. This would be the first town that the PCs encounter in this way, and would foreshadow the later incursions

3. Turn the Giants into allyable factions

The Giant Lords are all obviously evil, by intending to increase their own power at the expense of everyone else. However, the players can play the Giants against each other, and possibly cause one to lead them to the Temple of the All-Father. It adds more interest to the game than Harshnag just randomly showing up, and puts meaning behind the puzzle to the Giants' portal.

4. Turn the Overworld into a Barbarian Wilderness

"Know, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars"

 When the PC's meet Elves, they meet the Wild Elves of the Forest, who are uninterested in peaceful negotiations so much as they are interested in protecting the location of their forest homes. The humans that the PCs meet are Barbarian Tribesmen, following the territories and motivations listed in Chapter 3. Human settlements take inspiration from Viking and Gallic settlements of the early Medieval period.  Orcs, Gnomes and Trolls need no adjusting to fit this theme.

The Dwarves are Scottish

Simply that. Taking inspiration from the Troll/Fyre-Slayers of Warhammer, the dwarves of Citadel Adbarr and Citadel Felbarr are vaguely Celtic Highlander proxies that love smithing. They also live in above-ground sod houses. Because Braveheart. They're also strongly allied with the Fire Giants, who taught them to smith.

5. Get rid of all references to other 5e campaigns

The Ring of Winter quest in Icewind Dale that goes nowhere and cannot be resolved without playing Tomb of Annihiliation. The Cult of the Howling Hatred. Blagothkus's Son. Klauth and the Cult of the Dragon. Just throw them all out.

Thoughts on RotF and SKT

 Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden is actually a good adventure module to come out of 5e. Leaning into horror and high fantasy tropes, the designers have delivered an adventure dripping with theme, creativity, and identity. Even the low level encounters are unique, such as a sentient plesiosaur in a frozen lake, and the marquee villain of the adventure, Auril the Frostmaiden, is finally engaging on her own. It’s not perfect, and suffers from pacing and railroading problems like every other 5e adventure, but it’s a step up from the others, at least.

Storm King’s Thunder, on the other hand, is one of 5e’s worst adventures, sitting near the bottom with the likes of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. It has grindingly terrible pacing issues and an overall lack of focus in the campaign which results in feeling like the ending comes out of nowhere. And, it requires the DM to basically write half the module himself in order to run it.

And yet, I find myself possessed by a desire to modify, tweak and home brew SKT into something playable and fun, while my interest in RotF remains mostly academic. I think that’s because RotF is good enough on it’s own, and to play it you would have to do little more than run it as written.  There’s also a significant overlap between the two adventures- one of the main quests in SKT revolves around Frost Giants attacking Icewind Dale in search of a magic ring. These giants are also worshippers of Auril and seek to extend an everlasting winter over the North. RotF already prominently features Frost Giants around both Icewind Dale and the abode of Auril herself, so importing SKT’s material into it would be redundant. But going the other way, and importing material from RotF into SKT would flesh out a truncated and ill defined quest line and add more content to a barren section of the map.

Realizing that I could take the story of Auril herself and graft it onto the Frost Giant princess and keep the rest of SKT intact, and in fact improve it by doing so, completely shattered my interest in running RotF. SKT itself is more a tale of high adventure, of confronting dangerous foes and exploring savage lands. When I first bought it, I was on this huge “Barbarians” kick and the appeal still remains. The Savage Frontier is an ideal setting in which to explore those themes and play through some straight tropes, instead of the more atmospheric horror of RotF. I have no problems with double dipping as well and running RotF right after SKT and revisiting the Frozen North storyline twice.

For home brewing SKT, I imagine throwing out the plot as written but keeping mostly the setting info and keeping the conflict itself in broad strokes. The Giant Lords and their plans will remain, but the adventure would be more faction driven as the players could choose which Giants to ally with. As for the infamous third chapter, I see that more as barbarian adventuring against other tribes of men, elves, dwarves and orcs, and I’m looking forward to exploring those tropes. For the Frost Giants, not to give too much away, I would replace the Jarl with his daughter, make her a Chosen of Auril and grant her possession of the Codicil of White, wherein she gains the power to extend the Arctic regions southward.