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.