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.