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!

My OD&D campaign

 I'm using the Outdoor Survival map for my wilderness map. I was looking for a good outdoor terrain map and briefly considered using Mystara or the Wilderlands of High Fantasy since I already have them, but I figure if I'm playing OD&D it'd be really neat to go straight back to the source.

Book 3 states: "Catch basins are castles, buildings are towns, and the balance of the terrain is as indicated."

That doesn't leave a whole lot of towns.

I've recently taken a liking to isometric maps, especially for online gaming as I feel they increase immersion and player engagement, but there's not a whole lot of isometric maps out there gridded and scaled for RPG play. 4e actually has some really neat isometric maps courtesy of a blogger, and Greyhawk got one in 2e's City of Greyhawk boxed set. 

So I guess my towns are going to be a mishmash of the Nentir Vale and Greyhawk. Players can start in Fallcrest and travel to Greyhawk or Winterhaven or whatever. It actually seems pretty neat, to turn this setting into a mishmash of everything that was once D&D. Maybe Specularum could be placed innocuously in one place on the map, Threshold in another, etc...

UPDATE: On second thought, the Outdoor Survival map doesn’t give you a whole lot to work with, and the OD&D rules only “open doors without going in”, to paraphrase the Immortals box. 

The original Judge’s Guild Wilderlands of High Fantasy, though, has a ton of content, tables for generating more content, and fleshes out the skeletons of the rules that were introduced in OD&D. I think I’m going to transition my OD&D game to a hex crawl of the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.

I might just use Advanced Heroquest’s dungeon map generation and stocking tables for the dungeon crawl part.

 UPDATE 2: Use Monsters & Treasure Assortment for ready made dungeon encounters.

UPDATE 3: Yeah, now just going to use Nentir Vale, because a guy made isometric maps of all the Nentir Vale towns and I can use my isometric tokens.

5 room dungeons

 I mostly only play one shots anymore, so I've gotten a lot of mileage out of certain 5 room dungeons, like the one in the Red box Basic set. I've gotten pretty bored of it now though, there's only so many times you can kill Aleena and be interested in it. My last player tried to use a healing skill to bring her back to life, which I think is precluded by getting a magic missile through the chest. Still, I let him roll for it and I fudged the results anyway.

Apparently there's a case for running megadungeons for open table play, but I think a mega-dungeon is too much for a group of level 1's. A simple 5 room dungeon, the equivalent of a haunted house, should be enough for the first adventure for a group of lowbies. Once they gain wealth and power, then they can strike out into deeper and more dangerous ruins.

Why do we always start off killing rats and goblins in RPGs? Why aren't haunted mansions more of a thing? Abandoned buildings really should be more of a standard adventuring location for level 1s.

You ever notice that the monsters in the original DOOM and DOOM II are all basically mutated humanoids? The Imp, sure, is just a human with spikes, but even the pinky Demon has the limbs and torso of a man, just strangely proportioned. The Spider Mastermind is a human brain on a robot walker, not an animal brain and not a spider in any other way. Even the Cacodemon is a human eye and mouth sans the rest of the body. I like to believe there's some subconscious knowledge there that the id software team probably weren't aware of, that the demons are all twisted aspects of humanity. Also notice that they've all shed all their clothes away. The zombies retain their human clothing and weaponry, though. 

I prefer humanoid enemies in my games as well, but maybe I just lack the imagination to come up with weird eldritch lovecraftian foes.

I've been using BECMI D&D for my one shots but I've fallen out of love with the system. I briefly considered B/X, but then it dawned on me (actually my wife gave me the idea) to just use OD&D. Which is actually a really genius idea, if you think about it.  AD&D kind of sucks for one shots because character creation can take upwards of an hour, especially with players new to the system. Players used to modern D&D struggle with the concept of Race-as-class, but OD&D is simple and straightforward and hopefully fast enough that the party can get to play in a few minutes.

The problem with OD&D is that players usually have questions about basic mechanics, which are not explained in the books. Really simple stuff like how much damage does flaming oil do and how far can it be thrown? Every DM just makes a ruling on the spot but IMO an official rule does exist in every other version of D&D so why not just use that? AD&D specifically has a half page chart describing the outcome of throwing a flask of flaming oil in excruciating detail, and since it's penned by the same author as OD&D I figure its a natural fit. I figure running OD&D and filling in the rules with AD&D is probably the most natural way of running it.

But most people who run OD&D use it as a license to run wild with their imagination, which was kind of the original point of the system and kind of also what killed it and prompted the publication of AD&D.

My Mystara Campaign

So I bit the bullet and created a campaign on Roll20, in the Mystara campaign setting using the BECMI rules. I've billed it as an ongoing, open world sandbox styled campaign, and that's what it would be for the first session or so, but really I want to run through the modules B11 King's Festival and B12 Queen's Harvest, leading eventually to B10 Night's Dark Terror. Those three modules all occur in the same area of Karameikos and can fit more or less seamlessly together. The first two are basically just dungeon crawls with some story dressing, so I can fit them in whenever.

That area in Karameikos specifically has a lot of pre-made content written for it. Threshold and the surrounding areas are given plenty of detail in the Expert set, which is expanded upon in the Gazetteers and several modules, so finding material to fill in a game session shouldn't be too hard.

As a VTT software platform, I find Roll20 lacking in many ways but its LFG tool is heads above any other method of finding players, so I had to succumb and put it there.  Every other VTT on the market is taking the wrong approach, I think, by trying to be free and open source and making more features for automation, but providing no new way of finding or connecting players together. Fantasy Grounds requires you to do 90's style port forwarding and direct IP connection.  Roll20 simply wins the VTT competition, and will continue to do so for some time, I think, simply due to its ease of use.

I tried to get spur-of-the-moment pick up games running, but that met with mixed success so I figure the only way to really get consistent games is to keep an ongoing campaign running with a large pool of players involved.

Ironically, when I was looking at other games I noticed that quite a few were set in Mystara, and were playing the same modules that I wanted to use.

I want to run a similar game, set in the World of Greyhawk in the AD&D 1e system. Greyhawk itself is a very empty campaign setting, and all the modules nominally set within it are disjointed from one another. The TAGDQ series is a popular adventure path to play through for Greyhawk, but I was thinking of lowering the scope, and actually introducing the namesake City.  The City and Dungeon of Greyhawk itself were never released to the public, but a faux version of them appeared for the 2e system. Which is fine by me, I wouldn't want to play in Gygax's personal campaign any more than he would want to play in mine. 

For my campaign, I was planning on starting with T1: Hommlet, touching ToEE for a bit (because it is a really involved, cumbersome dungeon that players would get bored of sooner or later) and then routing them to the City of Greyhawk and Greyhawk Ruins. It would be a smaller campaign that wouldn't get very far out of the mid levels, but in case the players get bored there is the whole World of Greyhawk to explore, which I intend to fill in with content from the Wilderlands of High Fantasy.