TSR's "A" series of adventures in unusually unruly strongholds: Introduction

Illustration from Slave Pits of the Undercity (1980) by David S. LaForce

D&D was born in the castle. The Castle and Crusade Society of wargamers brought Gygax and Arneson together over miniature battles fought at Bodenburg, a scale model of a medieval fortress. Castle sieges were one suggested scenario for the Man-to-Man section of Perren and Gygax's Chainmail rules, the predecessor to D&D's combat system. But despite the genesis of Gygax's and Arneson's dungeons as the cellar levels of castles, it was these underworlds and not the upper rooms that captured the imagination of generations going forward.

Indeed, it's not hard to see how attacks on fully manned fortresses can fall flat as an adventure. The horn is blown, the defenders stream forth from their barracks. Pitched battle on unfavorable terrain ensues. One might, perhaps, set up a night-time infiltration. But then the play only becomes catastrophic: one failure to sneak takes you to the pitched battle again. The appeal of the dungeon environment is precisely its disorganization. There, the adventurers control the tempo of exploration, deciding whether to push their luck, encamp, or retreat.

Still, TSR's first published adventure module was a stronghold assault, the enemy being hill giants (G1, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief), and the next two continued on to fortresses run by frost and fire giants. This choice joins the wargaming castle instinct with a wish to recreate the adventures of De Camp and Pratt's protagonist Harold Shea, guest and prisoner in the stronghold of the frost giant Utgardaloki. Also, the high character levels capable of taking on multiple giants at the same time can access the kind of magic - invisibility, illusions, distractions, knock spells, and the like - that'll support effective infiltration. 

In aid of this goal, the steading is not exactly on a war footing. Giants are drunk, feasting, asleep, on errands: plenty of gaps in the defenses for smaller folk to exploit. As well, the cellars play  more like a classic dungeon - one retrospective has called the lower level a "monster motel" -  - a pattern  followed in the Frost and Fire sequels. If they win through to the underground, the party can take back control of the tempo, switching to the more usual room-by-room exploration.

But let's turn to the next major series of campaign modules after the high adventure of the G-D-Q series. The A series was based on four adventures that made up the AD&D tournament at GenCon XIII in 1980, run on consecutive days as qualifier rounds, semi-finals and finals, at huge scale: 40 tables to start with. Each adventure had a different authorship, but the connecting plot was simple enough: you were mid-level characters infiltrating and attacking the bases of a ring of slavers in the failed state of the Pomarj, World of Greyhawk. 

A word about tournament play. Although this style has largely fallen out of favor these days, it was a well-subscribed activity at early conventions, an answer to the question, "How do I win at D&D?" Tournament mode differed from home-campaign D&D in design choices that equalized experiences across tables, so that in theory, the most skilled player groups could prevail. In the 1980 tournament, each group ran the same set of pre-generated player characters; the adventures were linear, presenting the same challenges in the same order; and sometimes, DMs were told to apply a standard amount of damage from traps and the like, instead of rolling dice. To determine winners, each run was scored by awarding points for dealing with enemies, bonus points for discoveries or anticipated clever solutions, and points deducted for party casualties along the way.

The linearity in these adventures, in particular, deserves comment. It's an innovation that appeared at Origins 1979 with the Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan; the previous year's tournament module, the aforementioned Giants series, was more open-plan. TSR realized that what was good for the tournament might not be good for campaign play, so when the A series was published, some alternative paths were added to give players more of a sense of agency. For the most part, these revisions work, although the final chapter still presumes an escape from having been thrown in prison -- a plot fiat that shines notoriously in the gallery of Railroading Through the Ages.

In reviewing these A adventures, I'll examine how each one spices up the organized stronghold concept by presenting it as an unruly place -- factions that chafe, distracted guards, abandoned areas that follow their own rules, and clever defensive tricks that sometimes try a little too hard. The quality of this series, unfortunately, falls off from A1 to the later modules. It's not that the creativity is lacking. Rather, the idea of the unruly stronghold starts to repeat itself and challenge the limits of plausibility.

Pergamino Barocco Kickstarter!

Uncountably many years ago, I was kicking around a selection of weird old woodcuts from alchemical manuscripts, and got the idea to write up a Baroque (in the sense of elaborate, symbolically fraught, and ideologically opposed to a simplifying tendency) set of spells based on them. Paolo (Lost Pages) aided in design and publishing and lo, the original Pergamino (scroll) was born.

With newly acquired levels in bookbinding, Lost Pages has put out a Kickstarter for a new edition that is accordion-bound, like a real folding scroll. We've made our goal and have already got new content planned: a couple of new and reworked spells, material for the back of the accordion such as a magic system based on historical Baroque-era mnemonic devices.

Curious fact: the first one of these spells I personally used in a campaign was the Appeal to the Seven Worthy Elders, which my players bought at a magic market in the Fey Paths.

Check out the promo video here:

And KS page here!

52 Pages at Canterbury (UK) Gaming Con

 For my followers who can easily get to Canterbury in the southern UK on August 8-10, the local game shop is hosting a convention on the University of Kent campus and I will be running multiple sessions of Jennell Jaquays' Thracia using 52 Pages rules and pregen characters, including classes from the Next 52 expansion.

Register for the convention here. For my sessions, you can sign up using Warhorn here.

That is all, carry on!

The Next 52 (26?) Pages

As promised, here is the pdf of the first 26 of the Next 52 pages. It's an expansion to my preferred homebrew adventure game system that, like the Expert set of yore, covers level 4-6 with new powers and spells. Also, like the Advanced edition of yore, it puts in a dozen or more new class options for both established and starting characters. And there are a few extra goodies - a summoning table for the new set of summoning spells; a way to promote hirelings into henchmen.

[Download here]

You will see that the second 26 pages of Next are somewhat of an ideal outline for new types of adventure, new monsters and treasures. While nice to have, I don't think filling this part out is my first priority. Based on a couple of campaigns that made it to 7th level, there is a full list of spells to level 10, a take on advanced skill possibilities once the skill boxes begin to completely fill, and the framework of a game that has an ultimate win condition at level 10. Adding more character options and a kind of "domain game" to this, and you have a 26-page Beyond supplement that I will be looking to work on more this year.

The 52 Pages 3.0

Prodded on by a satisfied player's long delayed post after a minicon one-shot game last year, I have finally gotten around to finishing my revised 52 Pages, a graphically enhanced rules outline for a heartbreaker based mostly on the Basic and 3rd editions of the world's most cautiously-referenced roleplaying game.

The most obvious update is in the fonts, at the same time calling back to the roots with a Futura-clone in the text and letting go of Berlin, the Papyrus that nobody talks about, in favor of the classier Alegreya. The main "lore" change is a clearer definition between characters' hit points - now called "hero points" with a lower-case hp, and serve to shield characters from physical damage and injury effects - and monster hit points (HP), which represent physical damage more abstractly.

The main change to play is a reordering of the combat sequence so that melee no longer goes first, and "run up to your face and hit you" is now intuitively supported. This has been a long time coming, seeing that  whenever I have run the game in one-shots, melee-first was the hardest thing to remember and implement. The solution was easy - a second move after attacks that counts as an attack and may be made by the engaged (skip attack to disengage, but you must survive melee).

Here's the link, also available in the bar to the right. I realize that the game is much more viable when you add rules dealing with levels 4 to 6 and I have those mostly written, with a load of additional spells and classes/races. By the end of April you should see another post with the 52 Pages Next!

 

 

Mass Combat 3: Delta's Book of War (and its inspiration)

Back in the early days of the Old School Revival, Delta's D&D Hotspot was a place to go for thoughtful design and scholarship, firmly rooted in the classic games and free of the edgy or curmudgeonly posing indulged elsewhere. Like many of that blogging generation, Delta (Daniel R. Collins) has put out books of his house rules, modifications and expansions of Original D&D, all in a familiar trade dress. One of these, revised in 2021, is a set of rules for miniatures battles in D&D campaigns, called Book of War.

 

OD&D itself had a mass combat supplement: Swords & Spells, authored by Gary Gygax in 1976, but little noticed by revivalists today. Still, its features clearly influenced the more widely known and promoted Battlesystem, and also Delta's battle rules for OD&D. All three share a 10 soldiers:1 figure scale with provision for lone heroes and leaders. All three, in different ways, scale unit stats to D&D individual stats. Command, movement, and morale, though handled in slightly different ways, follow a common model that was also not far from standard rules for formed historical battles. We can also see a preview of AD&D in the percentile morale approach and weapon-to-armor modifiying tables.

 

Delta's foreword briefly mentions Swords & Spells as "based firmly on D&D, but frankly not fun to play." Indeed, S&S damage is dealt out completely deterministically. Dice only figure into the deeds of individuals (played out using D&D rules) and the morale of units. There is an option to add random damage, but as a clunky percentage modifier to casualties, which layers onto an equally inelegant appendix handling differences in troop and weapon quality. For in true old-style grognard fashion, S&S also depends enormously on double-digit calculations: dealing out casualties according to a combat table similar to Battlesystem's, in modifying said casualties, and adding up the myriad of modifiers for percentile morale checks.

Book of War is also meant to be compatible with OD&D. But it goes the opposite way, abandoning calculations and tables in favour of a feature taken from the most successful wargame rules sets of all time: rolling huge handfuls of dice against a defender's set number, and scoring the hits as Hit Dice of figure casualties. Some granularity is lost in scaling down the d20-based stats to d6: armor class and hit bonuses improve only by groups of 3. So the work of calculation and lookups go into creating the unit stats in the first place. Those stats then, although superficially different from their D&D originals, dispense with the need to use a table in play. 

Book of War's innovations, by the way, resemble Battlesystem's 2nd edition improvements, which merged THAC0 and damage die into an attack rating which then scored hits against the defender using dice of different sizes. Both revisions realize that there's something primal and satisfying about throwing lots of dice and seeing the results right there.

Otherwise, Book of War is geared toward simplicity of use. There are none of the detailed formation or commander rules you see in Battlesystem or S&S. Morale is based on pass-or-rout checks, with only a few modifiers. Apart from some long division when figuring out casualty rates for morale checks, there is little math beyond what's necessary. This simplicity, however, works against the rules' ability to scale effectively and simulate any but the grossest differences in equipment and quality between troops. A goblin fights just as well as a dwarf here. Morale differences are handled only very broadly, as a function of Hit Dice and troop alignment. As a PC commander you may want to drain your treasure chest buying shields, training, or improved weapons for your troops. But these upgrades will likely not register in play.

Book of War, then, meets all the desirables we have listed in a D&D mass combat system: scaleability, bounded chance, PC participation, emergent properties (mostly morale), and incrementality. The rule set is also relatively elegant and easy to use. But because of the way this affects scaling, it is best for battles that happen as a backdrop to the action. DMs whose players are in a position to equip and train their own armies may want to look at using a more fine-grained system.