T1+B1+B2

 The ultimate starter module

The Keep from B2 is structurally the same as Hommlet from T1, but without any of the detail. It has the same house of worship, tavern, inn, traders and smiths, and assorted stores. Where none of the NPCs in B2 are detailed, all of the ones in T1 are. T1 also has a small keep in Hommlet, but its under construction and its owners aren't really recognized as the lords of the area. Simply putting all the NPCs from Hommlet into the Keep, or just replacing the Keep wholesale, is basically a straight upgrade. 

B2 is the only one of these modules with a small wilderness region to explore. There is mention of a bandit hideout, lizardmen lairs, and wandering encounters including an old hermit with a pet lion, but these encounters are subject to dice chance and are left to the DM to flesh out. The Moathouse from T1 can easily serve as the bandits' hideout. Simply placing the Moathouse in the marsh in the bandits' "territory" gives them a premade base of operations and a stronger anchor into the campaign. It also comes with Lareth, a Cleric of Chaos, which dovetails nicely with the hidden Temple of Chaos in B2.

 (Also Lareth is apparently implied to be a fallen Paladin)

B1 is assumed to be in the unexplained "Cave of the Unknown" on the B2 wilderness map.  Placing the whole module within in this way grants many more rumors to be given out at the local tavern. And it also creates two more NPC adventurers that "made it", Rohan and Zelligar, along with Rufus and Byrne from T1.

Frozen and the Frostmaiden

 I read the original Hans Christian Andersen story a long time ago, and didn't really understand it.  I guess I was too young to grasp the motivations of the Snow Queen or the moral of the story.

Disney's adaptation was a nice movie and I liked the female empowerment story, but it was wholly unrelated to the source material and didn't really relate to any of the themes or plot. 

Icewind Dale: Rime of the Frostmaiden finally cracked the code for me. In it, Auril the Frostmaiden stands in for Hans Christian Andersen's Snow Queen, and her inciting action is to attempt to freeze the region of Icewind Dale in everlasting winter.  According to the adventure, Auril is an uncaring goddess who seeks to preserve beautiful things in ice so that they'll never fade. This made a whole lot of sense to me: She cares about superficial beauty and cold, crystalline glamor over warm, true connections.

It was on the strength of this revelation that I wanted to run the whole adventure, and maybe remixing the scenario with Auril so that it's not a by the numbers fight but a quest to convince her to show some humanity.  I was also going to switch her forms around, so that her first form was the humanoid "Brittle Maiden" one, and the second would be the Horned Owl creature, kind of like the fight between Dracula and Richter Belmont in Castlevania: Rondo of Blood and Symphony of the Night.  Turns out that I only care about the character of Auril, though, and not really the rest of the module.

Small dungeons

I like small dungeons better than large mega dungeons of interconnected corridors. Instead, I envision a “dungeon” like the single family residence of the monster. There would be only a handful of inhabitants and all the rooms they need to live in, such as a place to sleep, a place to eat, and a place to put their stuff. I also like the idea that, should you run into a monster in the dungeon, it is the monster. 

As for dungeon ecology, I consider it more natural to link dungeons across the over world, where monsters would have their own territories and travel networks. It makes much more sense that two feuding races of monsters would be claiming overlapping territories, than living in close proximity with each other, separated only by a few hallways and doors.

Running small dungeons like this means that your map scale would have to be much more precise and smaller in scale than a 6-mile hex. Alternatively, if you use large hexes, then each hex should have multiple chances of finding a lair. Multiple small lairs actually generate more interest in wilderness travel and provide a unique element to it.

Encumbrance in OD&D

 Encumbrance in OD&D is very simple to calculate. You add the weight (in gold coins) of your armor, weapons and shield together to find your base encumbrance. This value will mostly determine your movement rate. All the other small inventory items you might have, such as 50' of rope, iron spikes, torches etc., are all combined together to a flat value of 80 gold piece weight, or 8 pounds total.

  A standard man in OD&D can carry a maximum of 3000 gold piece equivalent weight. Your equipment and inventory is a fraction of that, generally less than half if not less than a third of the total. That means that most of your free carrying capacity will be taken up by the actual gold pieces you are carrying.

  The whole point of OD&D is to carry as many gold pieces as possible out of the dungeon. Every mechanic in the game is either in service to this goal, or is directly affected by it. It is largely the weight of gold coins that will increasingly slow you down as you travel.

  I found this gameplay loop to be quite satisfying. As a result, though, the silver standard is a bad fit for OD&D, and this simplified encumbrance system is a bad fit for AD&D. The reward feedback of AD&D is different, the primary motivator of that game is to level up XP. AD&D has a stricter, more granular encumbrance system, that is more in service to the simulationist nature of that game.

  Honestly, I found that OD&D encumbrance is easier on the DM, but players who are used to later editions of D&D take a while to adapt to it. Its also not as immersive as AD&D's encumbrance system, and it leads to players not really caring what's in their inventory. Which is fine, for a one shot. The sores of AD&D's math heavy encumbrance system are well known, but it forces players to engage more with the game.

House Rules for 5e

 This is not a typical campaign as I am using a host of variant rules aimed at making this a more engaging and immersive experience. Please read on for details:

Character Creation

Allowed Races: Human, Elf, Dwarf, Gnome, Halfling, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, Dragonborn, and Tiefling

Allowed Classes: Barbarian, Bard, Cleric, Druid, Fighter, Monk, Paladin, Ranger, Rogue, Sorcerer, Warlock, Wizard

Character stats can be generated by using Standard Array or Point Buy.

You may choose starting gold or background equipment for starting equipment.

PHB races and classes only. Subclasses and spells from only one of the following books of your choice: Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide, Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.  

Races and Classes not listed above are not allowed in this campaign. No Unearthed Arcana allowed, no homebrew.

Skills

Please only roll skill checks when I call for them. Any skill rolls that I did not call for will result in an automatic failure. 

Persuasion, Deception and Intimidation are not mind-control, they will not function like a Charm Person spell.

Milestone Levels 

Levels will be gained for completing story milestones and time played. The time required per level is shown below:

Tier	Hours of Play to Gain a Level
1	4
2	8
3	12
4	16

Variant Rules

Variant: Encumbrance 

We are using variant encumbrance rules from the PHB.

 If the total weight you carry is 5 times your strength score, your speed drops by 5 feet. If it is 10 times, your speed drops by 20 feet and you have disadvantage on ability checks, attack rolls, and saving throws that use Strength, Dexterity, or Constitution.

You cannot automatically convert currency to the most convenient coinage. You have to carry coins individually until you can convert them at a banker or money changer.

Magic Item Variants 

Potion miscibility.

Wands don't recharge and have a finite amount of uses. To "regain" the charges of a wand, you will have to craft it again.

Roleplay

I prefer role-playing over "roll-playing". This means that I will ask you to describe your character's actions before you attempt to roll the dice. I will ignore any dice rolls that I did not call for. 

I generally assume that your character knows as much as you know, so if you have knowledge of the lore and history of a place, item or monster, you can just convey that to the rest of the party. 

I do not follow the "rule of cool".

Death and Recovery

If your character dies, you may create another one of the same level.

Solo OSR is boring

 The AD&D 1e DMG contains everything necessary to play the game solo. It is full of tables that can generate every aspect of the campaign, from the governmental form of a city down to the disposition of an individual NPC. However, it provides the barest guidelines on interacting with all that content, preferring to leave it to the discretion of the DM. A binary question-and-answer oracle could be used to fill in this gap. I find the term "GM emulator" to be a bit misleading, as they don't actually fulfill the function of the GM, which is to play the world in response.

  By the book, there's not a whole to do in OSR games beyond traveling into the unknown, encountering monsters or friendly NPCs, engaging in combat, and recovering loot to level up to recover more loot. They really do rely on the strength of the DM to make the game interesting.

When I play RPGs live, I play from the perspective of my character and focus from personal point of view. When I play solo, I feel more like an omnipresent narrator that watches other characters take action as I roll for them.

Why I chose AD&D 2e

 In running 1e I ran into a consistent set of problems in my games that I just wanted to remove. The Half-Orc race, the Assassin and Monk classes, the wild power level of the Paladin, and Psionics. There was a lot I liked about 1e, too, such as the existence of Paladins, Rangers, Druids, and Bards, the really technical nature of stats, it’s reckoning of time and combat, and the attention given to equipment and weapons. I was considering cutting and splicing it all together into my own shitbrew, but then I found a game that does just all of that already; and that is AD&D 2e.

2e is not perfect - it’s reckoning of the combat round and weapon speed factor is inferior to 1e, it jettisoned the weapon vs AC table in favor of a much simpler damage type chart, replaced the table of repeating 20’s with THAC0, made character creation for Magic-Users, Clerics and Thieves more complicated by essentially adding subclasses, and incorporated the infamous non-weapon proficiencies.

For NWPs, I straight up will not use them, as I hate skill systems in D&D’s rigid class based game. The M-U (now called Wizards) spell school choice and the Cleric sphere choice is not something I personally like but players like having more options and it adds a bit of flavor to the classes. The Thief class benefits greatly from the points system. It’s going to be very hard to let go of 1e’s extremely technical combat, so I probably won’t.  Other than that, everything else from 2e flows seamlessly from 1e, so I don’t anticipate any conversion issues.

I envision my 2e game as playing very differently from my 0e one. My OD&D game is all about free form actions and occasionally instant death, where every action is adjudicated by out-of-game logic, while my AD&D 2e game will be beholden to the dice mechanics and graven rules.

The Monstrous Compendium is actually really neat, too.

Heroquest reprint

 If nothing else, it’s cheaper than buying the miniatures and furniture separately, though I’ve already invested in half of that when I cobbled together the pieces for advanced Heroquest out of spare parts.  AHQ also has a solo mode and a set of rules for using the original Heroquest pieces, so I’m looking forward to using them with the reprint. I don’t hate the new art, I’m just glad it’s not a radical redesign, and the Barbarian still exists and is recognizable.

My biggest gripe with Greyhawk

 Most of all, I hate the stupid names. How the fuck are you supposed to pronounce Furyondy or Nyr Dyv? That’s not counting the places that are actual puns. Many of the places are named after people Gygax knew in real life, like Perrenland, the Duchy of Urnst, the Duchy of Geoff, or the County of Sunndi. These names add texture to the place, it’s true, but it also makes the setting feel very personal, full of in-jokes and self-referential humor, like it’s actually Gygax and his friends’ campaign, and not really a place for other players. Playing in Greyhawk feels like squatting in someone else’s home.

The actual playable content of Greyhawk, however, is pretty great. I highly recommend the 128 page box set over the 64 page folio, if only because the box set actually includes the original folio with no alterations as well. Only the crabbiest, highest self-aggrandizing grognard would recommend otherwise. The second booklet comes with actual, concrete game content in the form of weather statistics and random encounters, which make the prep just that much easier. Be warned though, as a Gary Gygax product it still requires a lot of prep.

The 2e and 3e eras of Greyhawk content are heavily focused on meta plot, so I tend to ignore them completely, but they do flesh out the world and mitigate the tongue-in-cheek aspects of it, so there’s that.

Campaign map thoughts

 I’m using the Nentir Vale, a 4e setting, as the basis for my campaign. It’s FOE af, but I have yet to find another map as eminently usable for adventures, outside of Mystara. And I don’t want to log the hours required to draw my own digital map. This is one of the hidden bonuses of theatre of the mind; it lets the GM be lazy.

I was going to use the outdoor survival map, but I couldn’t find it in a decent enough resolution for a VTT, which would mean that I’d have to draw it myself anyway. If you turn all of outdoor survival’s ponds into towns like Vol 3 suggests, then suddenly the map is missing some important geographic features. It also doesn’t have a tundra zone or a border with the sea, so those elements would have to be added in, and it has two deserts.  The Nentir Vale is similarly land locked, and it doesn’t have any deserts, so it too needs some expansion. 

The provincial maps of Mystara, such as Karameikos, Glantri, Ylaruam, Alfheim, etc., are perfect for adventuring. My only issue is that if I were to use them, I’d try to do them justice by playing the whole setting as is, and I don’t actually want to do that as I have a lot of home brew setting ideas that I’d like to implement. I particularly don’t like the idea of the Immortals as the deities of the setting. I think they’re a neat endgame for PCs to reach the heights of power, but I prefer actual gods to be the creators and maintainers of their universe.

Greyhawk is not really usable as an adventuring map. It seems built for war game campaigning, where whole armies would move across it at the rate of 1 hex per day. All of Gygax’s publications seem like sketches that require the individual to fill in all the pertinent details, and the World of Greyhawk is no different. There’s a sparse few capital cities and large tracts of empty wilderness between them, meaning that all the villages, roads, natural features, and dungeons would have to be filled in by the DM. The officially published TSR adventure modules are scattered randomly over the map, making no logical way to connect them geographically without the PCs traveling for in-game months to reach them.

The map of the Central Flanaess that came with the City of Greyhawk is at a much better scale for adventuring. It’s kind of bland and the adventure book is a mess, but it can be fixed with a little work. It is also a natural area to fit classic AD&D adventures around. Hommlet and the Moathouse can be moved to the region at the foot of the Cairn Hills, and Nulb and the Temple of EE can maintain its relative distance from them in the hills proper. The Lost Caverns of Tsojconth and The Forgotten Temple of Tharizdun can be relocated within as well, and the Slave Lords series can be moved to the south shoreline. Only the Giants series is a bad fit, since they imply wide territories for the giants, but the modules are actually just bare dungeon crawls and there’s teleportation between them, and of course the Drow modules are subterranean. 

Making the eponymous City of Greyhawk the geographical center of the 1e adventures seems thematically proper to me.  The actual adventures that came with the 2e boxed set and the big meta plot campaigns that followed are not really good.

And the Forgotten Realms is like, the worst campaign setting.

Dungeoncrawling

 I think that pure dungeon crawling works better in a board game, where its more natural to measure distance by counting actual spaces moved by a miniature, and turns by going around the table.

  In a more free-form role playing game, exact measurements of distance and time can get fuzzy, and start to get handwaved away. They're also primarily the responsibility of the dungeon master, who bears the burden of running the whole game, so technical details like that quickly get dropped. It's why 5e has no mention of a dungeon or exploration turn, and a throwaway chart on travel pace.

  Advanced Heroquest and Warhammer Quest absolutely nail the feeling of a tight dungeon crawl to me. The actual "role playing" aspect of the game happens outside the dungeon, when players can interact with NPCs, travel to new areas, and prepare for the next dungeon. 

Phandalin, begrudgingly

 I've run Lost Mines of Phandelver a number of times, and Dragon of Icespire Peak once, and while I don't particularly like those adventures, I have to begrudgingly admit that Phandalin is a good starting town to use as a springboard for adventures. It's not as deep as Hommlet, but its on par with the Keep on the Borderlands, if not more flavorful. Maybe I'll incorporate it into my OD&D campaign.

HP that doesn’t matter

 Toying with the idea that HP is only used in combat. 10’ deep pit traps, poison gas and flaming oil don’t damage HP, but cause other side effects and possibly death.  In my OD&D game, I want to lean more heavily on role playing the results, rather than stat shifting.

Orcs in my campaign setting

 Orcs do not have green skin, but brown. They are not betusked or pig faced, but resemble ugly humans with heavy brows and strong jaws. There is a wide diversity of body types and appearances among orc kind, from tall, lean and muscular to short, portly and craven. Orcs are intelligent and sophisticated, and have formed an industrialized society with greater production than that of humans. Many diverse races live within the Orc Empire such as Hobgoblins, Gnolls, Ogres and Trolls. 

The heart of the Orc lands is an arid plateau from which they originated as nomadic hunter/gatherer tribes. From their they spread outwards to conquer the mountain ranges to the west, the snow capped peaks to the north, the swamps to the south and finally the wide and fertile grasslands to the east where the humans and other soft demihumans dwelled.

The western border of the human kingdoms brushes up against edge of the Orc Empire. Military invasions from orcs are usually very deadly, resulting in protracted battles between the races and devastation of the surrounding countryside. 

Orcs have flourishing advancements in magical research and the creation of magical items, not just from their own capacity but supported by Ogre Magi, Djinn and Efreeti.

Impressions of the Warhammer Quest Roleplay book

 I’m a fan of Advanced Heroquest. It’s the most fun I’ve had with a tabletop dungeon crawl, and that includes full fledged RPGs like AD&D. I’m of the opinion that Advanced Heroquest is like a reimplementation of OD&D’s dungeon adventures with different mechanics. In some ways the mechanics are straight better, such as it’s method for handling traps and random NPCs.

However, while playing it I felt that some important aspects of full role playing campaigns were missing, and that maybe grafting bits of OD&D on to Advanced Heroquest would result in a deeper game with more long term appeal.

The folks at Games Workshop might have had the same idea because their successor game, Warhammer Quest, does exactly that. The Roleplay book adds an over world, with point crawl travel between randomly generated settlements with their own random services, events, hazards, and expenses. Quests and Events can be picked up in town which would lead to a new dungeon, and characters can train to increase their attributes and upgrade their equipment.

It’s not as deep as Advanced Heroquest’s charts but it doesn’t require as much dice rolling and table lookup, because the charts are streamlined and provide immediate results. Warhammer Quest Roleplay adds a lot of depth to the chassis of the board game. It lacks the open ended ness of a full role playing game, but it has more concrete content than most rpg books. 

I’m of the opinion that if you just want to get a few friends together and tell a story, then you don’t actually need a game system, especially if you have a referee.

Point crawl vs hex crawl

 Point crawl: There is a set distance between two points, which means a set number of wandering monster checks. 

Hex crawl: Players can move in one of six directions from their starting point. PCs can get lost and meander around, without reaching their goal directly. Wandering monster checks are determined by time spent traveling.

John Carter is a beta male (and so is ERB)

   When John Carter first meets Dejah Thoris, he is instantly smitten by her, but is unaware of the social customs of Barsoom and acts awkwardly and ends up disappointing her. Actually, she is kind of disgusted by him.  The second time he sees her, she is struck across the face by a Thark, and this causes Carter to leap into a blind rage and beat the offender to death with his bare hands. Note that he hadn't spoken a word to Dejah Thoris before this feat. He gains possession of her, in an arrangement where she is given without a choice, but she still treats him coldly and indifferently. Essentially, he follows her around as a simp trying to win her favor. Through several more feats of heroism and grand displays of chivalry, she eventually breaks down and warms up to him, and then remains madly devoted to him for the rest of their lives.

    These are not the fantasies of an alpha male, who is at ease around women. These are the fantasies of a beta man, chasing the "one true love" of his life, who believes that grand displays of heroism and chivalry are the keys to a woman's heart. Edgar Rice Burroughs, through John Carter's narration, frequently refers to Dejah Thoris's beauty, and nothing else. He places her on a pedestal, groveling at her image.

    Compare this to Robert Howard's Conan, who has his way with women but communicates with them first, and we get an idea of their motivations and character as a person before any relationship forms. There are also more kinds of women in Howard's stories and not all of them exist for Conan's pleasure, they have their own goals and act of their own accord, and most of them are actually out to trick or use him in some way.

    The whole point of the Dejah Thoris character is to be an unobtainable prize for John Carter. Even though she is physically his slave in the early part of the novel, her emotional distance fulfills that criteria. Once the prize is obtained and she falls in love and marries him, her character has nothing left to do, so all she does in the later novels is get captured and wait to be rescued. This conveniently takes her out of the plot and restores her unobtainability, giving Carter back a prize to chase until the end of the book.

    In A Princess of Mars, we are told that Barsoomian women are always armed with at least a dagger, as life in Barsoom is violent and dangerous. We are also told that Dejah Thoris is a princess, leader, and was in command of a scientific expedition. The image of Dejah Thoris is completely at odds with what she actually does in the novel. I don't think she even fights Phaidor, but only manages to survive a catfight.

  John Carter is not a fully formed character - he is a self insert for the audience. Nobody reads the novel for John Carter. Burroughs knew this and that's why the first novel is titled A Princess of Mars. He is the closest to the ideal of a chivalric knight that was contemporary to Burroughs's society - a Confederate Cavalry Officer.

    The audience wants Dejah Thoris to be a kickass warrior woman from a far off planet, but she has no space to be so in the context of the story. This is actually an issue for the later novels. Once John Carter has established himself as the Warlord of Mars and taken Dejah Thoris as his wife, what is left for either of them to do?

   The later novels introduced the adventures of John Carter's children, but none of them are as exciting to read about. They also do not have the colonial fantasy that the original Barsoom trilogy does. This is evidenced by all modern revivals, such as the Marvel Comics run from the 70's or the current Dynamite Comics ones, which return to creating more adventures for John Carter and Dejah Thoris to be in. In Dynamite Comics' case, John Carter is ancilliary to the story. Several of their miniseries have him disappear completely and the focus is placed squarely on the adventures of not-quite-single Dejah Thoris.  Unfortunately, it seems like their writers have no idea what to do with her, either.

   I can suggest two methods of driving interest back into the character. The first, cheap method, is to just do what shonen anime does, and turn Dejah Thoris into a fanservice character that hangs around the main character while he gets into fights and does cool stuff. If you look at the covers to the comics, you'd be forgiven for thinking that this isn't already the case. All the covers are just pinups of Dejah Thoris.

    The second, better method is to give the audience what they want, and revert the emotional dynamic of Carter and Dejah Thoris's relationship to what it was in the beginning of the original novel. Make Dejah Thoris the unobtainable warrior queen that the fans want her to be. As a royal scion of Barsoom, she will always be the thing that Carter could never have, and as an accomplished warrior herself, mere acts of bravado are not enough to impress her.

   Even if the stories take place later in the timeline where the two of them are married, Carter will remain in awe of her, and will constantly be trying to prove himself to her. This will actually return Carter to being relatable to the audience. Nobody relates to the warlord of an entire planet.  It also gives Dejah Thoris the freedom to act in her own stories. As leader and warrior, she can have her own adventures.

To make Barsoom stories interesting again, make Dejah Thoris an alpha female.

I think the fan perception that John Carter is a manly man amongst men, and Dejah Thoris is an empowered woman, is completely false. I wish someone would write that story, though. It sounds kickass.

New classes for BX BECMI

 I like Races-as-Classes but players prefer to play archetypes that they're familiar with, such as the Halfling Thief, and no amount of explanation can satisfy them that such a distinction is unnecessary. AD&D's race and class separation solves that issue, but at the cost of making the races generic and unbalanced. I thought it would be a good experiment to address this problem by merely expanding the race specific classes available to player characters. Here's what I came up with:

Humans

    The four archetypes of Fighter, Magic-User, Cleric and Thief remain unchanged

Elves

 

Elven Ranger

    The elven martial archetype, the ranger gains all the racial bonuses of the elf but cannot cast spells. Advancement is that of Human Magic-User.

Elven Sword-and-Sorcerer

    The standard Basic Elf, he can use both martial weapons and cast spells. Does not have access to every weapon, instead gains "elf weapon proficiency", and cannot wear metal armor when casting spells. Advancement is equivalent to a Fighter/Magic-User, the XP requirements of both classes are added up per level for one elf level.

Elven Druid

    It's a druid

Dwarves

 

Dwarven Shield-Brother

    The standard Basic Dwarf. Abilities and XP advancement is unchanged.

Dwarven Engineer

    Equivalent to a Fighter/Thief, the Dwarven Engineer does not use two-handed weapons and cannot wear metal armor when performing skill based tasks, as it would be too cumbersome and interfere with delicate movements.

Gnome

    Gains all the abilities of the dwarf race as well as the ability to cast spells and use Thief abilities. Cannot wear armor and restricted to the weapon list of the Magic-User class. Equivalent to a Magic-User/Thief

Hobbits

 

Hobbit Burglar

    The standard Basic Hobbit. Abilities and advancement unchanged.

Hobbit Ringbearer

    A hobbit mysteriously in possession of a magical ring. The hobbit is able to cast magical spells as well as gain hobbit racial bonuses. Cannot wear armor or use weapons besides daggers and staves. Equivalent to a Human Magic-User.

Hobbit Fool

    A hobbit with Thief abilities. Cannot use weapons larger than a short sword, or any bows. Equivalent to the Thief.

Hobbit Bard

    A hobbit that can "cast" druidic spells by singing. Cannot use weapons longer than a short sword, or any bows. Equivalent to the Druid.

Random encounters shouldn’t feel random

 They should feel like they’ve been there the whole time.

Final Fantasy like random encounters are annoying and boring, don’t be like Final Fantasy.

Even though you, the GM, have randomly determined an encounter, the result of that encounter is now a permanent fixture in your world. If it was a monster that your PCs have killed, it’s corpse now stays in the location where it fell, and could lead to further complications in your game world.

Don’t make monsters just jump on the players at random intervals, make it seem like the monsters were just on their way and were going to cross that area all along, and the player characters just happened to run into them.

Wilderness encounters should not be like dungeon encounters. When I make wilderness encounters, they are a full dungeon or of a scale such that they cannot be resolved with a single RP instance or combat round. You can call my wilderness encounters “wandering dungeons.” 

If you don’t want to do that, and want little wandering encounters in the wilderness, then make multiple encounters per day. The AD&D DMG has a very tight method of rolling an encounter check multiple times per day, depending on area terrain type and population density. Any other method can be used as well, for example rolling a check, selecting an encounter from a table, and then rolling another die to choose the number of encounters. Space these encounters out during the day or place them apart in distance, and then describe how the players travel into them. Your map does not need to be that precise in scale, as long as you can believably narrate your players traveling from one encounter to another until they make it out of the hex.

Healing

 Potions of healing are properly Potions of Magical Healing.

Natural healing in D&D is accomplished at the rate of 1 HP per day. Binding a wound or setting a broken bone does not have the same effect upon a character as magical healing.

The effect of a potion is identical to a spell of Cure Wounds. Cure Wounds does not cure disease, remove poisons, unclog arteries, or reverse aging. If every spell was free and every priest knew Cure Wounds, that would still not stop death from natural causes. (There are spells to reverse those other debilitating conditions, though).

A wealthy person with high level priest spells on tap could conceivably prolong his life through magical means. This happens today in the real world with people who live on life support. In the real world, some life support procedures are especially painful, and are not guaranteed to work. D&D magic is always reliable and not especially painful, so the real cost of using magic is the Vancian casting system. Magical healing in the D&D world might prolong the life of a character and improve its quality beyond what it was for actual medieval citizenry, but the high cost and low availability is the only reason it’s not available to everyone all the time. Even the highest level Patriarch cannot heal, cure, and reverse the aging of every infirm person in the city.  That service is reserved for the privileged.

interesting chainmail combat rules

When two figures are within melee range (3"), one or several blows will be struck. The order of striking depends upon several factors. The man striking the first blow receives a return blow only if he fails to kill his opponent.
1st Round:
    First blow is struck by —
        a) the attacker, unless
        b) the defender has a weapon which is two classes higher, or
        c) the defender is fighting from above (castle wall, rampart, etc.).
2nd Round and thereafter:
    First blow is struck by —
        a) the side which struck first blow previously, unless
        b) the opponent has a weapon which is two classes lower, or
        c) the opponent is fighting from above.

A man wielding a weapon four classes lower (1 vs. 5, 2 vs. 6, and so on) strikes two blows during every melee round . If a man has a weapon eight classes lower, he will strike three
blows during every melee round.

a. For any weapon 2 or more classes higher than the attacker the ability to parry does not exist.
b. For any weapon 1 class higher to three classes lower than the attacker the defender may parry the blow by subtracting 2 from the attacker's roll, but he has no counter blow.

"Weapon Class", as defined in CHAINMAIL, corresponds to Weapon Speed Factor in AD&D

It's clear from these rules that should a dagger wielder fight a two handed sword, the swordsman will get the first hit but the dagger will be able to strike back multiple times a round. However, two people fighting with daggers would not get multiple attacks per round.  This is probably where the multiple attacks rule from Holmes' Basic came from, but those rules weren't clarified by the explanation from CHAINMAIL.

Heroes (and Anti-heroes) need never check morale, and they add 1 to the die or dice of their unit (or whatever unit they are with)...Heroes (and Anti-heroes) may act independent of their command in order to combat some other fantastic character...When meleed by regular troops, and combat takes place on the non-Fantasy Combat Tables, four simultaneous kills must be scored against Heroes (or Anti-heroes) to eliminate them.

The rules for heroes is interesting. They're a special unit that can be added to an existing rank and file, to give them a bonus die, such as the leader token from Advanced Squad Leader or a hero unit from Warcraft 3 or some MOBA. In mass missile fire, all the other figures in a unit must die before the Hero unit can be killed, but other Fantasy Creatures can attack heroes directly. The Hero's vaunted 4 consecutive hits to be killed protection only applies in standard, mass combat. In a wargame scenario with a large dice pool, scoring 4 hits is not hard, but it does afford the Hero unit plenty of protection, just not as much as you would assume coming from an RPG/D&D perspective.

The Man-to-Man and Fantasy Combat rules of CHAINMAIL are a mess. Every rule has a number of conditions and special cases to bear in mind while playing, and constant cross-referencing and page flipping is required in order to synergize them. As expected of Gygax.

The mass combat rules are actually a simple IGOUGO war game that is easy to remember and play, but has some funny balance issues between units.

Notes on Lareth the Beautiful

 In the original T1 module, Lareth is only presented as a Chaotic Evil Cleric. No justification was given for his appearance in the module, requiring the individual DM to invent one.

In Mentzer’s T1-4 rewrite, Lareth is apparently allied with Lolth, and the players are warned not to brag about his defeat in her presence. Maybe there is more explanation of their relationship further down the module, but I didn’t get to it.

In the ToEE 3e video game, Lareth is a full-blown Drow and Cleric of Lolth. 

My personal setting is monotheistic, and as such Clerics do not function according to “Spheres” and do not have a pantheon to worship. Lareth has an obvious fit into the setting though, as an Anti-Cleric, a man who learned the teachings of the Church but reversed its methods in order to attract the powers of the lower planes. The Anti-Clerics would be cavorting with demons and devils and creating beings of supernatural horror, which to me, is a more sinister character than a worshipper of the queen of spiders. 

Advanced Heroquest prep

 I've decided to try and give Advanced Heroquest a run solo. Since the game is long out of print, I'm doing a DIY job using leftover RPG minis, dungeon tiles, and paper cutouts. I even made custom character sheets. I'm only using the stats from the original 4, but decided to use different portraits for the different miniatures

Things I like about OD&D

 The simplicity of the numbers. 100 xp per hit die, d6 hp per hit die, all weapons do d6 damage.

Armor Class is entirely dependent on worn armor, except in the case of high dexterity which gives a benefit of at most +1.  This is only an issue with rising THAC0, but for PCs THAC0 rises slowly. Monster THAC0 rises by hit die, so it can be turned into a simple formula - monster THAC0 = 19 - hit die. As PCs gain levels, they gain more hp, so that their greater vulnerability to getting hit is commensurate with their greater ability to take damage.

All of this might seem too simple, but it exists within an elegant ecosystem where one mechanic flows into another. AD&D dissociated all these mechanics from each other, breaking them in the process. Variable hit die and variable weapon damage, new xp determination formulae, THAC0 and AC are no longer symmetric, and on. Maybe there was a wisdom in doing so that was born from actual play, that is otherwise not readily apparent.

AD&D adds a lot of cruft that I'm not a fan of. The Half-Elf and Half-Orc races, the special powers given to Paladin and Ranger classes, the Monk class, numerical modifiers and bonuses to everything.. The Psionic appendix and chapters might as well not exist to me. Yes technically all of this came from OD&D supplements, but they are mercifully not part of the core game. There is an assumption in AD&D that everything must have a mechanic attached and if that mechanic does not confer a numerical bonus, then it is not worth using. That may not be what the designers intended but a lot of groups played it that way, and I can see where they're coming from. This is a criticism usually leveled at 3e or beyond, but in AD&D 1e I see the genesis of all the sins of 2e, 3e, 4e and 5e. It's really hard to enjoy the game knowing that a few simple spells or magic items could completely break the game, or a player who decided to make a certain build could do it at will.   It is the least balanced edition of D&D, and that's saying something. There is a necessity for even low-to-mid level PCs of requiring +stat bonus magic items just to stay alive.

 I originally looked at BECMI to alleviate my issues with AD&D, but there I ran into a new problem - no one wanted to play. The general atmosphere is that "Basic" D&D is not interesting, and even OSR players prefer newer OSR games that are more horror or gonzo fantasy inspired. I assumed that with the current popularity of OSE that I would get more people to play BECMI D&D, but that hasn't been the case.  BECMI also has more haters, where B/X does not, and that I don’t understand.

 A lot of people who play OD&D like to use it as a springboard to wild and weird stories, the gonzo fantasy that the OSR scene is enamored with. I don't play that way. I am a very minimalist gamer and I enjoy low magic, low fantasy worlds with a simple collection of items and classes. Even my monsters are more naturalistic than supernatural. 

The best review of Advanced Heroquest

 https://www.alwaysboardneverboring.com/2013/09/advanced-heroquest.html

He hits the nail right on the head. AHQ feels too real and gritty. To him, this diminishes his enjoyment. It’s what attracts me to it in the first place. And anyone who plays OSR has claimed to prefer gritty, dangerous, highly lethal dungeon crawling, and AHQ delivers.

I also like how he opens the review with a discussion on the necessity of rules, especially ones that bound the realm of possibility. A major drive of RPGs is that there are no rules, only the will of the DM, and I think that’s throwing the baby out with the bath water. Certain rules are necessary to have an actual consistent game, otherwise you’re just playing make believe with your friends. You don’t need an RPG for that, and you really should be embarrassed if you’re doing that and calling it an RPG.

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.

New Wilderness travel rules

 You’ve all been handling wilderness travel wrong! The wilderness only exists as a means for linking dungeons together! Every encounter in the wilderness should be a mini dungeon! The wilderness should be static so the players can know where everything is and can return to it! A wilderness with random generation and small scale random encounters is indistinguishable from a dungeon and offers no unique variety, it is glorified set dressing!

 I would never force my players to travel linearly through the wilderness. They can take any route they want, the point is that the relationship between all elements in the wilderness is static. The players know exactly where they’re going and what they’ll run into on the way (except unexplored areas)

Wilderness encounters should be large enough such that they cannot be resolved in a single combat turn or RP event. Wilderness monsters should be in a monster camp or a full traveling army, not bands of 4 or 5 as in a dungeon. Getting past a wilderness encounter should be a half-day or full day event itself.

Even friendly encounters should be large in scale. Instead of meeting a peddler by the side of the road, the players should run into an entire merchant caravan on route.

Towns are just friendly dungeons. The wilderness only exists to link dungeons together (and “random” dungeons that we call wandering monsters) 

 In this method, the players can see the hexes and move hex-by-hex. When players enter a hex, I can ask them if they want to continue their journey, or spend the rest of the day exploring the hex. If they choose to explore, I reveal to them all the features of the hex (typically three). If they choose to travel, I give them a chance to accidentally find one feature of the hex, and I increase the chance of a wilderness encounter.

Subtle worldbuilding

 Players who read the rule books, campaign setting books, and lore, generally want to bring elements of that into the game. Especially those players that have purchased and read splat books that include new races, subclasses, spells and abilities. In a game like 5e, the DM has no tools for managing how the players use this new material. If a player brings in a build or character idea, the DM can only sit back and watch them play it out by succeeding on dice rolls, or ban it outright out of game. Personally, I think banning concepts from the game is kind of a dick thing to do, as it breaks the implicit agreement between players and DM, but there's no other way in 5e.

AD&D, by contrast, has a lot of subtle mechanics that let the DM maintain the integrity and versimilitude of the game while allowing the player to include what he likes. The training requirement, for example, is much lambasted by the community but what it does is force player characters to seek out NPCs in the world to continue their own growth. NPCs ground the players. Gaining magical spells is not automatic in TSR D&D, in fact there are no rules at all for how magic users gain spells. Only AD&D 1e has a list of admonishments to the DM to not give out magical spells too freely, but no guide on how to give them out at all, except as random treasure spell scrolls. This means that a magic-users spellbook is firmly in the hands of the DM. If the DM does not want to give out Wish spells, Fireball, or even Protection from Good/Evil, the magic-user will never see those spells. This actually solves the "linear fighter, quadratic wizard" problem before it ever even occurs. 

On top of the mechanical controls, it allows the DM to manage the fiction of the world. Say if the DM does not want Orcs as a race, but the player brings in a Half-Orc character. The DM can allow the player to his character while simply having no other orcs or half-orcs show up in the world.  Half-orc adventurers in AD&D can "generally pass as human", and beyond mechanical bonuses don't add anything more to the setting. The NPCs don't even have to mention the different facial features of the half-orc character, and there can be no temples to Gruumsh, no shrines, no mention of Orcs in the hills, nothing. Orcs don't have to exist in the DMs world.

Then there's ways to manage the physical features of the character. "Half-orc", in an orc-less world, could just mean an ugly person. Maybe he had an ugly dad, or his parents come from a separate tribe that the civilized folk consider "orcish". And if the player is insistent on being part of a distinct demi-human race, the NPCs can all just treat that as the rantings of a deranged lunatic.  The player can play his character, and the DM can maintain her world, and the friction between the two is lessened.

  But in 5e, there is a huge interconnectivity between a PCs race, the subclass options he chooses, the background of the character (including ideals, bonds and flaws), and the player's backstory. All of this adds elements to the DMs world that she may not be comfortable with, and the only way to manage it is to talk out of character about it and waste precious game time. Instead of subtle controls, everything becomes an open debate.

Heroquest rankings

 Advanced Heroquest > Warhammer Quest > Heroquest

Advanced Heroquest actually adds a whole lot of cool new rules that add depth to the combat, loot and trap content of the game. Advanced Heroquest also has rules for generating content procedurally, ensuring that the game remains dynamic for repeated play. Compared to Advanced Heroquest, the base game is a little too simple and lacking depth. Regular Heroquest also requires a dungeon master to play and every scenario is pre-programmed, so there's no system for creating your own adventures beyond the GM's discretion. It also doesn't have as much content. Warhammer Quest is like a streamlined version of Advanced Heroquest. It removes certain complexities of Advanced Heroquest rules and simplifies some of the dice rolls. The Roleplay book adds expansive content, and this adds breadth to the game.  However, Advanced Heroquest has the deepest rules for dungeon crawling of the three.

Perusing these boardgame rulebooks really highlights that D&D has pretty bad rules for handling traps and loot. There's a couple of random tables, but for placing and showing them to players the rules basically state "it's up to the DM". As such, when it comes to traps and treasure the only information is about what types are available, not how to use them. The nature of a board game like Heroquest allows for more solid rules on placing and using traps and finding treasure.

Advanced Heroquest actually has a great system for handling traps. Trap Counters must be pulled in random events and then played by certain triggers. Each trap has a spot chance that allows the player to roll a die to see if the trap is spotted or avoided, otherwise the trap causes a unique affect or damage to the character. This is such a simple and elegant system for handling traps that I wonder why D&D doesn’t have any mechanics for dealing with traps. DMs in D&D just have to imagine triggers and the players have to imagine ways to avoid them. The Advanced Heroquest system is so good that I feel like stealing it for every other game.

In Warhammer Quest, all dungeons are randomly generated and the objective room is somewhere buried in the stack of dungeon cards. The role play book introduces the role of the GM who can make dungeons that are not random. In Heroquest, all dungeon layouts are pregenerated, so require a DM to keep that knowledge hidden from players. Advanced Heroquest presents both options, it has a few pregenerated dungeon layouts that are combined into one overarching quest, and then the default mode of play to generate them randomly. Advanced Heroquest is dice driven, as opposed to the other two games which are card driven.

cool blog posts

city stocking tables:

 https://lizardmandiaries.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-collected-infinigrad-and-guild-dogs.html

 

Historical Europe inspired campaign
https://cydonianknights.blogspot.com/2020/08/europa-fantastica-ahistorical-campaign.html

The dice are not your friend

 The dice only exist to give players a chance to fail at something. The dice do not allow you to do things, you do that yourself when you declare your action. Rolling dice only gives a chance of hindering the players, not helping.

D&D is at its core, a dice game in which you declare your action and then roll dice to see if you fail.  If you don't, then you continue onward to gain power and glory.

How to play solo D&D

The introduction of the 5th edition rules describe the basic gameplay loop of D&D:

1. The DM describes the environment.

2. The players describe what they want to do.

3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.

We can rephrase this into technical jargon as:
1. Content generation
2. Player action
3. Action resolution

To determine how to play solo, we can examine all 3 steps individually and take into account the special considerations of each.

1. Content Generation

In a traditional live game this is the purview of the Dungeon Master, who creates the content of the campaign and expresses it to the players. Conveying the right amount of information is crucial, because if the players know too much then they will not be surprised or challenged, and if they know too little then they will be confused and unable to engage with the game properly. In a solo game, the player and the DM are the same person, so this makes separating the content of the game tricky.

The "Master of Adventures" section of the Dungeon Master's Guide is presented as a toolkit for creating adventures. Many of the options for creating an adventure are presented as tables, and those tables can be used to randomly generate content through the use of dice rolls. 

Randomly generating content through the use of dice rolls and table lookups is a natural method for OSR gamers. The AD&D 1e Dungeon Masters Guide provides three appendices devoted to the random generation of dungeons and wilderness terrain, random determination of monster encounters, and a chapter on random determination of treasure. 

Randomly generating content provides an exciting level of the uncertainty for the solo gamer.

2. Player Action

This is where the actual fun of the game is. This is where the DM asks "What do you do?" Given the world elements, the NPCs, the environment and location your characters are in, your player characters can take their actions. Sometimes the elements of your scene are not clear, and that requires interpretation through a question and answer oracle, or through some guided inspiration like a Tarot deck, but this is where the solitaire gamer can put on their player hat and indulge in the fun.

This is the phase where you put everything together. You can now animate all that content that you previously generated by having your character(s) interact with it all. What happens when they interact with it? Why is it all there? How did it get there? Answering these questions can be useful prompts for writing your character's story.

3. Action Resolution

The 5e system provides a universal mechanic for action resolution, using a d20:

       1. Roll the die and add a modifier
       2. Apply circumstantial bonuses and penalties

       3. Compare the total to a target number

The thresholds for the target number (called Difficulty Classes or DC) are described in plain English, so this system can be used as-is for most in-game task resolution. For the solo gamer, simply determine what you think the DC of an action is, then roll the d20 and add modifiers to see if you succeed.

Most of the action resolution rules in 5e are split between player facing and DM facing rules. The chapters devoted to "Using Ability Scores", "Adventuring", and "Combat" are all technically player facing, while the DMG chapter "Running the game" is for the DM. Simple dice mechanics can be used to cover almost all types of results, and for the rest of the unknown results it is advisable to use some kind of oracle, such as the Mythic GME.

Most solo oracles are devoted to the Action Resolution stage of gameplay. The Mythic GME uses the Fate chart, while other oracles use simple yes or no resolution. A simple d20 roll can also be used as a "yes or no" oracle as well.

Once all success or failure results have been determined, the solitaire player can return to the Content Generation or Player Action stages of the game, to keep playing and continuing the loop.

These three steps cover the "how to play" section of solitaire role-playing, and to know "what to do", the player must adapt the "Three Pillars of Adventure" to solo play, which I discuss further in depth here: https://farooqsgaming.blogspot.com/2020/05/the-three-pillars-of-d-solo.html

My wilderness travel rules

OD&D and AD&D use a default wilderness scale of 1 hex = 5 miles. B/X and BECMI use a default scale of 1 hex = 6 miles.

In my personal game, I don't let my players see the hexes. Instead I let them choose a compass direction and a length (distance or time) in which they want to travel, and I then describe what they see and experience on the way. This roots them firmly in the perspective of their own character, instead of breaking immersion into a top-down map view, and they never see the changes in scale. Ideally, the experience for the players would be identical whether they are traveling across the overworld or through a dungeon.

On the DM side, I use hexes as handy boundaries for a collection of stuff. As the players' party enters a hex, I'll describe the features within the hex that they can see. This is similar to a videogame like Skyrim or GTA where, as the player avatar nears a location, the compass fills with icons of interesting things to do. In practice, this means telling the players something like "You see a stone tower off in the distance" or "You can see smoke rising from a firepit between a camp of tents", or "you can see a band of goblins down the path".

I never force my players to stick within the bounds of the hex. The PC party travels according to their own judgement and I simply describe what's nearby, even though they would actually be "between" two hexes.

A wilderness travel scale in terms of hours is useful for certain situations and types of terrain, but sometimes days is a more wieldly scale.

I haven't yet tested the mapping procedure for cities by individual streets that I described in this post, but I intend to subject some poor party to it anyway.

% in lair

What does this mean? Does it give a chance for the wilderness encounter monster to be in its lair? Does it mean that if I find a lair, a monster may have a chance of being in it, or leave it empty? Does it mean that, should I encounter a monster in the wilderness, a certain percentage of them would be in a lair and the rest without? If I do find monsters in the lair, do I have to construct an entire dungeon, populated with the number of monsters rolled? The wording is unclear and no explanation is given.

I'm reminded of the chapter in The Hobbit where the dwarves ambush/are ambushed by some Trolls, and upon surviving the encounter find the trolls' lair and their booty of magic swords. The trolls' lair was actually just a cave with a simple bag buried under the dirt, not an elaborate dungeon.

I think it's easy to convert that into AD&D terms, if we treat the wilderness as the dungeon. As players encounter monsters, the % in lair could mean that the monsters are within the lair, that they have a lair, that a lair exists without monsters, that a certain percentage of the monsters are in the lair and the rest wandering around, or all of the above. The "lair" can be a simple abode - a tent camp for semi-civilized races or bandits, small caves or holes in the ground for creatures that naturally live in the wild, or whatever.

The purpose of a lair is to hold treasure - the only relation it has to the rest of the game, and the only gain of passing the percent check, is that it allows you to roll on the "lair treasure" table for the monster. In short, its more rewarding to find the monster's lair as it will have more treasure. Turning the lair into a dungeon just adds too many steps to finding the treasure. A simple lair, populated by a band of monsters, that the players can clear out and spend a day searching to recover the treasure, is probably the most expedient way of handling it.

Creating simple wilderness lairs is also much easier and much more natural than dotting the landscape with dungeons. Unless a major part of the fiction of the game is that dungeons simply exist all over the world for no reason, much like an Elder Scrolls game.

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.

Wilderness as a dungeon

Here's a thought: Treat city streets as corridors of a dungeon that players must move through and map. Of course, since they're outdoors they move at a faster rate - 10 yards per turn of mapping, or 100 yards per turn not mapping.  They can accurately map out a city, and the DM can explain it, by walking down the streets and noting intersections and important buildings along the sides. Of course no one does it this way, because it's too cumbersome.

Traps in the wilderness are way more natural to my imagination. Snare traps hidden under a pile of leaves, pits dug into the ground and covered with moss, spikes dug into the ground, nets in tree canopies, razor wire across barks, bear traps in the ground. These are all great traps that have actually been used in the real world. It's gruesome but the fighting in Vietnam and WW2 in the Pacific have many examples that can be used for inspiration.

Wandering monsters actually have a reason to wander in the wilderness. In a dungeon, it's assumed that they're aimlessly walking about, or occasionally stalking the players. In the wilderness, they could just be going somewhere. In the case of orcs and goblins, they can actually be an organized band on patrol. Maybe they're actually a unit marching to a destination and run into the players by accident. Maybe they're camping and taking a rest. Maybe they found the players' tracks, and are actively following the players. Maybe the players accidentally walked into the territory of a large predator. All of these create encounters with a purpose.

Wilderness travel, for small scale exploration or town activities, should be measured in terms of hours. The conversion is simple, 60 yards for every hour of travel in an unknown wilderness, if mapping carefully, so a character with 12" movement can cover 720 yards per hour.
Without mapping, that's 7200 yards per hour, or roughly 4.09 miles per hour, which is about average human walking speed IRL.

Also, moving over the hex map - Give the players a large radius of sight, but don't reveal the whole map. Have the players move with natural directions - orienting towards a landmark, or a compass direction, and setting a distance. Reveal hexes according to the players' sight radius, or multiple hexes at once. Obviously this technique is meant more for VTT that handles line of sight for you.

House rules for AD&D

Source books

Core Rules only. No UA, OA, Survival Guides, or other nonsense.
 

No Psionics, Bards must follow the requirements to level in Fighter and Thief first. We will be using the Weapon vs. Armor class tables, and by the book bean-counting encumbrance

- Stats are 4d6 drop lowest, arrange to taste.
   - if you don't like your stats, you must reroll a full set of 6 stats

- Worn Armor refers to armor on the body only. Gloves, Boots, Helmets and others must be worn separately.
- A shirt can only hold 100 gp weight. To carry any more you'll need to carry sacks, backpacks, belts etc.
- Riding a mount allows characters to fight as a cavalry class. Your mount does not gain secondary attacks for you.
- If you fire a ranged missile into a melee, you have an equal chance of hitting any engaged combatant
- Characters must drink an unknown potion entirely to determine its effects.

Phased Combat

I use phased combat where each side moves in order per phase. Combat rounds are 1 minute long and are broken up into 10 segments of 6-seconds each. The phases are:

Surprise

Initiative

Movement

Missile

Melee

Players have to declare their actions before initiative is rolled and combat phases are resolved.

Multiple Actions During Combat

If a player wishes to perform multiple actions, then every action is broken down into segments of 6-seconds and added up, to a total of 10.

For example, if a player wishes to move, drink a potion,sheathe one weapon and draw another, and attempt an attack, then first the segment of initiative is added to the distance moved (Movement rate x 1' foot per segment), then any number of segments for extra actions like drinking or switching weapons, then the weapon speed factor is totaled up. If the result is 10 or less, the player is successful in performing all actions. If it is less, the player cannot finish all actions.

Surprise

Every player will roll surprise for themselves.  Generally, characters will be surprised on a roll of 1 or 2 on d6. 

If there is a Ranger in the party, he will be surprised on a roll of 1, and any monster he is attempting to surprise will be surprised on 1-3 on d6.

Initiative

The party caller will roll initiative at the beginning of each round of combat, and the DM will roll for the monsters. The lowest die wins, and the die score indicates the segment of the round that the party acts on.

Movement Phase

The party that won initiative can move first, and the party that lost can follow. Movement rate x10' is the number of feet that a character can move in combat.

If a character is engaged in melee at the beginning of movement phase, they may choose to make a fighting withdrawal or a retreat. A fighting withdrawal disallows the use of an attack in that round. A retreat allows a character to flee at 10x his normal speed, but exposes them to rear attacks.

Missile Phase

This phase encompasses the firing of missile and thrown weapons, and of magic spells and magic item discharges.

Firing a missile weapon into an existing melee will result in a chance of hitting any combatant in that melee. The long length of the combat round presupposes much movement, positioning, feinting and striking, so it is not possible to accurately aim at an opponent in an engaged melee from an advantageous "angle" for very long.

It is not possible to fire a missile weapon when an opponent engages you in melee. If a character were to try, he would be struck by a melee attack and lose his missile attacks for the round.

If a spellcaster attempts to cast in melee, the casting time of the spell will be compared to the weapon speed factor of the melee combatant to determine who strikes first. If the spellcaster is struck before completing the spell, the spell is lost.

Melee Phase

Weapon Speed Factor is only used to determine first strike on simultaneous initiative. Melee combat is always resolved at the end of a combat round.

Creating a story with Mythic GME

I’ve had this idea for a Swords and Sorcery type game story for a while, but I could never really pin down enough details to start writing. Maybe I should use the Mythic GM Emulator to play it out, as a method of writing the story.

Scale is the most important thing in a campaign

Everyone is familiar with the scale of dungeon exploration - tens of feet in ten minute increments, but there's little guidance for any scenarios beyond that. Scale up your maps for outdoor movement, but let players describe their actions naturally, as if they were making normal decisions in an urban environment - where they want to go, what they want to see. Outdoor movement, especially in a city, should be in increments of hours - from half hour, to full hour increments, to eight hour "working days", and so on.

The D&D rule books only talk about overland movement in terms of days, and that's only good for macro scale adventuring, or mass army campaigning.

Playing D&D as written feels like playing a Final Fantasy game, where dungeons and towns are the same scale, but you instantly switch to a "world map" scale where your little character avatar is just so much bigger now. Altering time and movement scales removes that disconnect, and allows players to stay immersed through the eyes of their characters, and lets them make decisions naturally, without worrying about metagame issues such as hexes per day or treating time in a city as if it were frozen.

For that matter, combat while adventuring in the overworld shouldn’t be a Final Fantasy style instant switch back to dungeon scale. When players are talking as if they could only see what's through the eyes of their character, the DM can easily narrate that they see some wandering creature in the distance and what that creature might be doing. The players can then make natural decisions about how to approach or avoid, and engage in combat without just standing in front of it and hacking away, but by negotiating the environment between themselves.

Turn Sequence vs Gameplay Loop

D&D 5e expressly mentions a gameplay loop in the "how to play" section of the introduction to its rules, and describes it as:

1. The DM describes the environment.
2. The players describe what they want to do.
3. The DM narrates the results of the adventurers’ actions.

Contrary to this, BECMI describes a "turn sequence", using terminology similar to wargaming. The BECMI books actually use several different turn sequences to describe different activities, but here's an example of the most general one:

ORDER OF EVENTS IN A GAME TURN
1. Wandering Monsters: DM rolls 1d6 (Normally checked every 2 turns)
2. Actions: Caller describes all party actions (movement, listening, searching, etc.)
3. Results: If —
    a. a new area is mapped, the DM describes it.
    b. an encounter occurs, skip to ORDER OF EVENTS IN AN ENCOUNTER.
    c. something is discovered (secret door, item, etc.), the DM announces the results.
    d. no encounter occurs, the game turn ends; return to #1.

OD&D actually has no explanation of its game turn. It refers the player to the Chainmail game for the combat sequence and Outdoor Survival game for wilderness travel, and only discusses special considerations that occur while playing. It only explains how to play through an example. AD&D does the same thing, but doesn't make reference to the previous games.

Links

http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/2008/07/od-awarding-experience.html?m=1

https://harbingergames.blogspot.com/2020/04/if-your-torches-burn-for-only-one-hour.html?m=1

http://steamtunnel.blogspot.com/2009/12/in-praise-of-6-mile-hex.html?m=1

http://monstersandmanuals.blogspot.com/2012/03/contents-of-hexes.html?m=1

Cool resource for random generation, including rules for solitaire games: https://osricrpg.com/wizardawn/
Click a rule set then click “Dungeon Door”
The thing I like best about it is that it tells you the container first, before revealing the contents. It could be 1000 gp, or it could be a poisoned dart trap. Very useful for solo play, as you can choose to take your chances without knowing the result beforehand.

The GoldBox games!
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/unlimited-adventures-20y
Needs the more. All the more

Thoughts on grid squares

In AD&D, three characters can fit in a space 10 feet wide. Technically, this means that 9 characters could crowd together in a 10’x10’ square.

This has heavy implications in combat.

 - Crowded 3 to an area, characters would not be able to use weapons that have a space required greater than 3’.

 - Firing a missile into a crowded 10’ area could hit any target randomly, as accurate fire would be very difficult. 

 - Within that 10 ft. sq. area, characters in combat would not be statically staring at each other but constantly moving and jockeying for position.

 - A character fleeing combat from such cramped conditions would obviously be open to attack from another.

 - it forces you to look at the “space required” stat on the weapon chart and think in real world terms about the space, reach, and formation of the combatants, treating each 10’ sq as a miniature sandbox for the combatants to fight in.

I feel like this was the intent of the original rules but was never used or implemented correctly, and designers and players abandoned it going forward. Basic D&D and beyond use 5 feet squares with the assumption that characters would attack from adjacent squares. Contrary to that, I think in AD&D you must attack from within the same square as your opponent (unless your weapon has a reach of greater than 10 feet)

I’m going to rescale all my maps to 10 feet squares and tell my players that they must be within the same square as their opponent to attack. 

D&D solo as a board game?

Just play Advanced Heroquest instead. It does everything that D&D does, but in a more solid system that’s not so heavily reliant on the GM, and has better tables for generating content.

The most frustrating part of playing D&D solo is handling room descriptions.  In purely random play the rooms are either completely bare, or you have to waste time rolling on a table to stock the room with non-gameable content. When playing with a module, it really depends if the room key is split out into player only read aloud text and DM only information, and how well both are written. Sometimes the player read aloud text does not have enough information to spur meaningful choices, and sometimes through no fault of the writer it’s just easy to glance at the GM description anyway. It feels easier to just read the whole text of a room key at once, but in doing so you won’t really be playing the game.

So to solve this problem I have this idea, to tie the game more closely to the board. Almost every module comes with an empty map with numbered keys. Instead of moving my characters abstractly through the dungeon, I’ll select an actual 10’x10’ area per character, move them to that location, and see if anything is there. This necessitates moving the characters through an actual space in the dungeon. Then I’ll flip over to the room key and see what is in the space around each character. If they tripped a wire or pit trap, fell into an ambush by a monster, or discovered treasure or secret door, all would be resolved after my characters first moved into the area ‘blind’.  If I do not look into the right area, or do not do the right procedure to find the hidden element in a square, then I miss it and lose the treasure, fall victim to a trap, or lose surprise to a monster ambush.

This is contrary to the way live RPGs are played and denies me information that I should “know” before entering an area, but on the other hand it is playable and keeps the fun of discovery for myself.

AD&D has more in depth rules for dungeon crawling than any other edition. The sections on movement and searching, lockpicking, and listening at and forcing open doors are the most helpful here. These procedures are tightly coupled with the time scale, so it’s important to keep an ‘adventuring clock’ to track rounds and turns, or a sheet to check them off as they go by. Accurate tracking of time allows the player to coordinate the characters’ actions in a standard way.

For random dungeon generation, this means not stocking the dungeon until after the player characters have moved through it. This incentivizes checking squares, because to do so otherwise puts me at maximum risk for falling for a trap or a monster ambush.

In the case of traps, if I choose a PC to check a square for traps, and if he hits the chance of triggering the trap, then he detects and avoids it and I can mark it on the square for all PCs to know. If I want the PC to do something else, like check for secret doors, and I roll that he gets hit by a trap, then he falls victim to it.

Expert rules printings differences

Cool post showing the differences (with pictures!) https://waynesbooks.games/2019/10/28/which-becmi-dd-rulebook-do-you-have/

What is a roleplaying game?

A role-playing game is one where a referee presents the player(s) with a hypothetical scenario, the players respond to the scenario and say what actions they would make within it, and the referee adjudicates the results of those actions.

 We do this all the time in our everyday lives, but a roleplaying game provides a set of rules to help the referee structure the game, and manage the chances of success and probable outcomes. In most roleplaying games the player(s) will take on the role of a character or person outside of themselves, and state actions as if that character were doing it.

Many different role-playing games reflect different settings, focuses, and styles of play. For example, Dungeons & Dragons concentrates on Medieval fantasy adventures, while Vampire: the Masquerade chooses modern urban Gothic horror, and Apocalypse World focuses on post-apocalyptic science fiction. Some role-playing games are 'rules heavy', and have a lot of rules that strictly define actions and outcomes, while others are 'rules light' and have a simple set of rules that focus on free-form play. Some take their cues from the war gaming hobby and involve a lot of dice rolling, math and combat, while others focus on a more narrative style in creating collaborative fiction.

It is an immersive hobby that can involve the use of miniature figures, battle maps, pen and paper and dice, or could be just one where a group of people get together to create collaborative fiction. However you choose to play a role-playing game, the most important thing is that you and your group are having fun and enjoying this unique experience.

(every other definition of an RPG I've ever seen has gotten too involved with technical details or comparisons with other gaming hobbies, or misses the point entirely.)