The Dragon #10, October 1977

So...many...books......fingers...cramping.  Sorry, I'm just complaining about working on the Dragonlance section of my D&D product checklist.  I've had zero direct contact with the Dragonlance setting in my roleplaying career, and I had no idea just how many books had been written for it.  So many, in fact, that no one should ever write another Dragonlance novel ever again.  There is no way one setting can be rich enough to justify that many books.  That well has to be dry by now.  I'm looking forward to getting to those books, however.  All my friends in high school had read at least the Chronicles series, and I always felt I was missing out when they would talk about Dragonlance material.  I was too consumed with the Wheel of Time series at the time to make room in my reading for it.

Anyways, on to this month's Dragon issue:

• We start with an article where the author takes on two of the biggest problems with Basic D&D (since we passed the Holmes Basic Set in history at this point, I'm going to start referring to it as such, even though TSR hadn't quite created the distinction yet).  First, the fact that characters end up amassing too much gold, and second, that they get experience for all that excess gold they accumulate.  His solution is brilliant in its simplicity: instead of gaining experience when they acquire gold, players only gain experience (aside from killing monsters, of course) when they spend the gold.  It solves both problems nicely: draining excess wealth from players and slowing down their rate of progression.  Of course he gives guidelines for what qualifies as valid expenditures for the purpose of gaining experience.  Interestingly, while he gives clerics and mages the obvious outlets of sacrifices to their deity and magical research respectively, fighters and thieves can spend their gold for experience by partying.  Seriously, he gives guidelines for going on massive benders for the purposes of leveling up.  It's a unique solution if nothing else, I'll grant.
• Moving on, another author gives a set of tables for generating random terrain for wilderness encounters.  I have to say, I just have a hard time understanding the table-driven, randomly generated nature of the game (and one could say of roleplaying in general) at this point.  Why do you need tables to randomly generate terrain?  I could randomly generate impromptu wilderness maps for encounters off the top of my head all day long - it's just not that hard.  As if to underscore this point, the very next article is a series of tables for randomly creating new monsters.  I understand the abstract need - the article discusses the problem of players being familiar with all the monsters (by having read the books) and thus knowing exactly how to deal with each one.  New monsters are definitely required from time to time to keep players on their toes.  I can sympathize with these tables a little more, as creating new monsters is somewhat more involved than creating random terrain, but I still would much rather create the monster by hand than roll through a dozen different tables.  If you've read enough monster entries you have enough familiarity to know that a monster of so many hit dice is going to do a certain amount of damage and have special characteristics of a certain level of power to create one yourself without referring to tables.  I would love it if someone could give more insight into the obsession over every aspect of the game being driven by tables for random generation in this era.
• The next article is a breath of fresh air, discussing - gasp - realism in dungeon design.  The author's contention is that a dungeon should represent a logical layout based on the needs and preferences of the person or organization who built it, as opposed to what many early dungeons were - random rooms with random connections, leading to an overall absurd design that could have only been built by a madman.  This is of course common sense to any roleplayer who likes his world to be realistic, but as we've seen this sensibility was surprisingly rare early on in D&D history.
• This issue includes a rarity for The Dragon - a complete boardgame called Snit Smashing.  It's lighthearted and looks quite charming, and I'd love to give it a try sometime
• Another author takes issue with the fact that the rules do not describe how characters gain their new abilities when they level up, and so poses a system where new abilities are granted by the gods and characters must undertake certain rituals when they have gained enough experience to receive them.  All in all I don't find it very compelling.

That's all for D&D content in this issue.  A couple more issues and we'll be to the very first AD&D product - the Monster Manual.

The Dragon #9, September 1977

Apologies for the delay since the last post, but the last month has been quite a doozy for me, and when I have had time, I've been more devoting it to finishing up my D&D collector's checklist.  I'm finalizing the section on Dragonlance products right now, and after that I just have to do Forgotten Realms and then miscellaneous 2nd edition products and everything up through 2nd edition will be done.  I'll post a link to it once I've completed it, but it will probably be a few weeks more still.

This issue has virtually nothing worth commenting on.  A good half of it is devoted to the second half of Harry Fischer's short story on the Finzer family.  There is an article by Gygax on mixing players of different alignment and how different alignments have to interact in a society, but ultimately I don't feel it really said anything useful.  Other than that there are only some EPT and Boot Hill articles and a brief article by Jim Ward on randomly generating a tomb for your party to explore.

All in all scant material due to the fiction, but we only have two more issues to go before getting to the very first AD&D product.  I'll see you there.

Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set (Holmes edition)

At last we come to the Holmes Basic Set.  As I said in the last post, this is one of the most pivotal products in the history of D&D, because this is effectively where Basic D&D and AD&D split from one another.  The two lines would remain related but separate for over twenty years until TSR was bought out by Wizards of the Coast, who brought the game back to a single line with D&D 3rd edition (although they didn't merge the two so much as just kill off Basic D&D).

So how did this happen?  Well, even though it is the very first Basic D&D product, the Holmes Basic Set was never originally meant to start a new product line.  It was originally intended to just be a cleaned up version of Original D&D (the original boxed set plus the supplements) that would introduce people to roleplaying and get them to go on to AD&D products (even though the 1st edition Player's Handbook was still a year away).  This is made clear by the preface which explicitly says so, and then the rest of the product refers to the AD&D rules several more times throughout (this would be a common tactic of TSR for years to come - there would be several more "intro to D&D"-type products).

But as the AD&D line took off, TSR continued to sell both this product and the Original D&D products because, well, they sold well.  There was a marked difference in the philosophies of the two games which obviously appealed to different kinds of players.  AD&D was a highly polished system with lots of rules covering every possible aspect of the game (which is how Gary Gygax felt it always should have been).  Original D&D was a much looser, free-form kind of game where a lot was left up to the DM and players.  Seeing that they had two economically viable customer bases - one committed to AD&D, one committed to the Holmes rules / Original D&D products - they decided to keep supporting both.  Support for Basic D&D was scant at first - really only consisting of modules B1 and B2 over the next four years - but they committed to the line in earnest in 1981, revising the Holmes rules into a new Basic Set and creating the Expert Set as a companion to cover levels 4-14, then both expanding the B series of modules and creating the X series for Expert-level characters.

But to bring it all back to where we are now in the timeline, this product was just meant to capture customers who were new to the whole roleplaying experience.  Let's jump in and take a look at the highlights:

• The purpose of this book, as discussed above, is evident from the way it teases the things to be found in the upcoming AD&D products.  Want to take your character beyond 3rd level?  AD&D.  Want to play something more than just a fighter, thief, cleric, or mage?  AD&D.  Want to have psionic powers?  AD&D.
• In discussing additional classes available in AD&D, it lists paladins, rangers, monks, druids, assassins, illusionists, and witches.  Yes, witches.  I'd be interested to know if this really was an intended class for 1st edition, and if so why it got dropped.
• The time and movement section is quite amusing.  First it states that an armored man can cover 120 feet per turn underground.  The very next sentence then informs us that a turn takes 10 minutes.  For those of you doing the math, that's a whopping 5 seconds per foot!  There's cautious and then there's come on.  But don't worry - an unarmored and unencumbered person doubles that rate.  And the game takes these rates very seriously, as it then informs us that a party must rest 10 minutes out of every hour from this break-neck pace.
• I just find the concept of measuring all weight in gold pieces naively charming.  In fact, the centrality of the gold piece to this rule set gives it such an unabashedly "all about the benjamins" kind of flavor.  When gold pieces not only translate directly into experience, but are also the common unit of measure of weight, you've basically created a game centered around avarice.
• The treatment of doors in dungeons is just hilarious.  It's one of those areas where it's clear the designers just threw realism out the window for the sake of making the game harder.  First, no door can just be opened automatically - they have to be either picked or smashed open.  Apparently every door in this universe is either locked or stuck really hard.  You would think this would make life hard for the monsters who live in dungeons, but the rules explicitly state that monsters can open them normally!  Keep in mind that a "monster" in this game can be just a normal man like a bandit.  So you can be chasing a bandit down a corridor, and if he comes to a door he can just open it and go through without a problem, but when the party gets there they have to smash the thing open.  But wouldn't the door still be open after he goes through it, you reasonably ask?  No, because all doors in this universe automatically close.  Keep in mind that self-closing doors were only invented within the last two hundred years, but every door in a dungeon must be deliberately spiked or wedged open.
• There's a small section devoted to the multiple uses of the word 'level' in D&D terminology - player level, monster level, dungeon level, and spell level.  This brings up two soapbox items for me.  First, why did the game drop the term 'level' for monsters in favor of hit dice?  I'm guessing it's to avoid confusion, since monsters don't 'level up' like players, but to me, '5th level monster' just sounds better than '5 HD monster'.  Second, I've never understood why spell levels couldn't be the same as player levels.  Sure, it would make for a lot more levels if 9th level spells became 18th level spells, 8th level spells 16th level, and so on, but for one mages wouldn't have to consult a table to find out what spells they could cast, and it would give a lot more granularity to spell levels, since let's face it, there is a lot of disparity in the power of spells within a single level as it is.
• It's becoming clear to me in reading these early products that the vast majority of a magic user's power and utility in these early times was meant to come from magic items, not from his memorized spells (because let's face it, there's nothing more pathetic than a 1st level magic user with his 1 piddling first level spell).  The game intended for magic users to always have a wand or at least some spell scrolls on hand that they could use without having to worry about hoarding them too much, because there was probably more around the corner.  I don't know if the game lost this sensibility through the years (while retaining the hideously slow Vancian progression) or it was just the DMs I played with, but it certainly was never that way for any of the mages I played.  I don't think any mage I ever played ever owned a wand.
• At last we come to the (in)famous mini-adventure at the end of the book - the tower of Zenopus.  Aside from the Temple of the Frog outlined in Supplement II: Blackmoor, this is the very first published D&D scenario.  I can't help but wonder how many players had their first experience wandering these halls.  The dungeon makes no sense whatsoever as an actual place, but it's charming in its simplicity.

Reading this product for the first time provided a fascinating glimpse into the history of the game at a turning point in its development.  I'm eagerly anticipating analyzing the divergence of the two strands of the game, but also how I'm sure they cross-pollinated one another.  I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have.  We return to The Dragon for the meantime, as products are still scarce.  I'll see you there.

The Dragon #8, July 1977

This is our last issue before getting back to actual products, and it's a good one:

• Gary Gygax has a fantastic article on the planes of D&D.  My personal exposure to planar travel was a Planescape campaign I played in one summer, and again my surprise is how many of the design elements there go all the way back to the beginning here.  This isn't the first we've heard about the planes - the second-to-last Strategic Review had an article by Gygax discussing alignment, and casually in passing it named the eight planes associated with the eight alignments other than true neutral.  Here though we get the full treatment of inner, outer, ethereal, and astral planes that would be codified in the Manual of the Planes and later in Planescape (although the plane of Concordant Opposition - the true neutral plane - still does not appear).  A few notes:
• The Abyss is listed here as having 666 layers.  That would be retconned later into an infinite number of layers.  Heaven is listed as having seven layers and hell nine, although this isn't surprising since it's just a take on the seven heavens in the cosmology of several religions and Dante's nine circles of hell.
• He goes into detail about magic weapons and monsters that can only be hit by magic weapons, attributing that quality to the creature having part of its existence on another plane.  What follows is a convoluted discussion of how the rules should work when it comes to planar travel, but ultimately we get to the rule that magic weapons can only be removed from their home plane by as many planes as their plus value.
• The Prime Material plane is described as one of the inner planes, although this would later be corrected to the prime just being its own plane, separate from both the inner and outer planes.
• The names of the planes as given here, starting from the lawful good heaven and proceeding clockwise, are:
• The Seven Heavens (LG)
• The Happy Hunting Grounds (LG-NG)
• The Twin Paradises (NG)
• Olympus (NG-CG)
• Elysium (CG)
• Gladsheim (CG-CN)
• Limbo (CN)
• Pandemonium (CN-CE)
• The 666 Layers of the Abyss (CE)
• Tarterus (CE-NE)
• Hades (NE)
• Gehenna (NE-LE)
• The Nine Hells (LE)
• Acheron (LE-LN)
• Nirvana (LN)
• Arcadia (LN-LG)
• Note that he does not associate alignments with these planes in this article - I've done that for my own purposes (although he does mention Nirvana and Limbo as being planes of law and chaos respectively).  I do so because the list in this article is slightly different from the later standard in AD&D.  The Happy Hunting Grounds (Beastlands) would end up as the NG-CG plane, the Twin Paradises (Bytopia) would become the LG-NG plane, Olypmpus (Arborea) would become the CG plane, and Elysium would become the NG plane.  So a little shuffling of the upper planes took place, but all else is as it would later be.
• To get on my soapbox a little bit, I've always been a little surprised by the attempt to force all campaigns to share the same cosmology (and the ramifications regarding deities that comes with it).  I get the fact that the cosmology came first while official campaign settings came later, and so the trend was to make the latter serve the former instead of the other way around.  However, it's obvious that many of the campaign settings had a tendency towards pulling away from the standard cosmology anyway.  For instance, Dark Sun tried to isolate Athas from the rest of the planes (for good reason) and added the concepts of the Grey and the Black, there was the eternal question as to whether Tiamat of the Forgotten Realms was the same as Takhisis of Dragonlance or not, and finally Eberron and Forgotten Realms just tried to do their own thing in 3rd edition altogether.  Campaign setting crossovers - the one benefit a shared cosmology affords - ended up being rare, so it seems much more logical to me that each setting should have been allowed its own cosmology in the first place.
• There's a nice guide to building towns for D&D campaigns that presents a useful, top-down approach from laying out the town down to populating it with residents.  I love worldbuilding as much as I love playing actual games inside those worlds, so this sort of thing speaks to my heart.
• We get part one of a rather lengthy short story by Harry O. Fischer (co-creator of the Lankhmar stories of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser).  It's an amusing little tale of a modern day family of wizards, but it does take up an enormous chunk of the issue.
• We get the first sneak preview of TSR's Gamma World game in this issue.  The game would not be published for another year, but a short article here gives us the background for the post-apocalyptic setting.
• A couple of TSR personalities contribute some brief content as well:
• Rob Kuntz gives several tables for a more detailed determination of gem and jewelry treasure, if you would rather have your character find a flawless peridot, rather than "a 125 gp value gem".
• Brian Blume has a tongue-in-cheek article on using your own real-world capabilities to determine your character's statistics.
• Jim Ward has more mutants for Metamorphosis Alpha.  What's interesting about his list is that the names of the last several entries are obviously plays on TSR personalities: Blumer (Brian Blume), Kerask (Tim Kask), Gygarant (Gary Gygax), Sotherlan (Dave Sutherland), and Wardent (Jim Ward himself).  I'm not sure if "Carrin" and "Rabner" are also plays on names or not.  I'm not sure to what extent he sarcastically based the capabilities of these creatures on the people in question, but I'll close this article with the description of Ward's eponymous Wardent:

"This former human has regressed to a small (3 feet tall) furry bear-like creature with the following mental powers: Height-ened Intelligence, Telepathy, Telekinesis, Mental Defense Shield, Will Force, Mental Control over Physical States, Heightened Brain Talent, and it is a Scientific Genius. The creature has no special physical abilities except constant hunger, not only for food but valuable objects others may have."

Next time we read one of the most famous D&D products of all time: the Holmes Basic Set.  We truly close out the original D&D era now, as this product not only anticipated the new AD&D line, but also was in some sense responsible for the creation of the Basic D&D line.  Join me next time as we explore one of the most pivotal moments in the game's history.

The Dragon #7, June 1977

This issue marks the first anniversary for The Dragon.  As Tim Kask points out in the editorial, they're still trying to get second class mailing privileges a year later.

• The editorial clarifies that all material appearing in the magazine, whether additional rules, alternate rules, or just rules clarifications, are non-official when it comes to the game in question, unless authored by the game designers themselves and marked as official.  This was apparently a point of confusion for earlier readers.
• There's a fascinating, if short, article by Gygax on the history of D&D.  The most interesting part I find is that "The Great Kingdom" and the barony of Blackmoor, two classic Greyhawk locations, actually predate D&D altogether and go back to Gygax and Arneson's medieval wargaming campaigns.
• There's a wildly out of place article on a site in New Hampshire known as America's Stonehenge.  Supposedly a site of evidence of pre-Columbian European presence in America, it's generally regarded today as a hoax.  I have no idea what this is doing in The Dragon, and I'd like to know what Tim Kask was thinking including it.
• There's a fantastic (half sincere, half sarcastic) fiction piece called "The Journey Most Alone" by an author who simply chose to go by "Morno".  He had a short story in the previous issue that was alright enough (neither good or bad enough to comment on), but this - this is what happens when you write fiction after dropping too much acid.  In the previous story the wizard ("wysard" here for unknown reasons) Visaque mastered the element of fire, but now he must master the element of water.  What follows is a delightfully trippy fantastic journey that makes little to no sense.  It's the kind of thing that you can only shake your head at and mumble something about the 70s.
• Having done his best to bore readers to death in the last issue with an EPT miniature painting guide, M.A.R. Barker comes back in this issue to pick off any survivors with a tediously long article on military formations of the EPT nations.  Skip.
• The final Gnome Cache story appears in this issue.  The story isn't finished, but no more chapters ever appeared.  I'm guessing Gygax simply got too busy to ever get back to it.  It's a shame, because this chapter ends with the protagonist apparently encountering the cultists from the Temple of the Frog, a la Supplement II: Blackmoor.
• This month's Featured Creature (why did they change it??) is the prowler, which apparently did not catch on, because I don't think this one ever appears in any D&D material again.
• The Editor's Library features two things I'd like to follow up on at some point.  One is the Ogre boardgame.  I've never seen it in person, but it looks extremely interesting and I'd love to try it.  I like the fact that it's an asymmetric game - a rarity nowadays it seems - where one player controls the Ogre and the other player tries to stop it.  The other thing is a review of The Judge's Guild materials, which were playing aids for D&D.  Ads for them have been appearing in the last few issues, and they look amazing.  I'd like to go back and see what they were producing first hand, because it looks years ahead of it's time for this era of D&D.

Only one more issue, then we can delve into the Holmes Basic D&D set!

The Dragon #6, April 1977

It's been a week since I've published, but I've been doing a lot of reading since then, so I should be able to pump out several posts in the next few days.  For now the stream of Dragon issues marches on:

• The issue starts with some alternate rules for Metamorphosis Alpha that discuss starting the game as a human clone.  I'm not interested in the rules themselves, per se, but they bring to mind an issue I meant to discuss in a previous post but forgot to - the philosophy behind character creation.  The rules presented here are for "rolling up" a character in a very literal sense - most everything about the character is determined by dice roll.  Not only that, but as with D&D and other games of this era, some characters are just going to end up better than others depending on how you roll.  For instance, a character might end up with only 1 minor skill, or they could end up with as many as 2 major and 3 minor skills depending on how well you roll.  Even without context as to what major and minor skills are in this game, it's blatantly obvious that the latter character is going to be far more powerful and/or useful than the former.  This is in stark contrast to modern sensibilities, where games (whether tabletop or computer) go to great lengths to achieve the holy grail of balance between characters and character classes.  I would love to see if someone has done a detailed analysis of this aspect of the history of roleplaying, how we transitioned from an era where it was just accepted that some characters were going to be better than others due to chance, to the modern age where we insist - nay, rage on the forums with righteous indignation! - that all characters must be equally powerful and differentiated only by player skill.  Is it the product of societal changes, such as a rise of a socialist mindset that demands more in the way of equality of result?  Is it just the product of the MMO era?  After all, if there were random variations when creating characters in World of Warcraft, what would stop me from just rolling new characters until I got a good one (thus rendering the randomness pointless)?
• There's an interesting article on incorporating sea trade into a campaign - basically letting players act as traders and gain income through sponsoring merchant ships.  It lays out an interesting risk/reward table, where the farther a ship travels the more likely it is to gain a greater profit, but the greater the chance for the ship to be lost as well.  Okay, it's interesting to me anyway.  I know to some players the idea of planning merchant ship itineraries is ludicrously mundane and boring considering they could be out fighting dragons instead.  Personally I'm a huge fan of civilization-building games, and I tend to let this bleed over into roleplaying games.  I want my characters to not only gain power by going up in level, but to also be able to build their own little "empire", so to speak - but I know that's not everybody's cup of tea.  It's why I can't wait to get to the Birthright setting materials, although God knows how long it's going to take me to get there.  I know very little about the Birthright setting, but I do know it is a combination of standard role-playing and domain management, and I fully expect to geek out about it.
• Four whole pages are devoted to a painting guide for Empire of the Petal Throne miniatures.  Skip.
• There's a brief article on an alternate system for determining psionic powers that humorously boils down to basically throw out all the rules in Eldritch Wizardry.
• Another article describes an absurdly cumbersome morale system that now applies to PCs.  How would you like to play a character who just happened to roll a bravery score of 6 and ends up running from every combat?  I'm not a fan of rules like this.  If a player wants to play a cowardly character, that should be their choice, not the dice's.  I believe in the sanctity of player freedom: nothing - not the DM, not the dice - should dictate a character's actions unless some form of magic is involved.  I'll have a lot more to say about this when we get to the Ravenloft setting.
• The Creature Feature section seems to have changed names permanently to Featured Creature, which seems a step backwards to me.  The creature in question this month is the death angel, a kind of grim reaper-type being.  Meh.

There's an ad towards the end for the Dungeon Geomorph sets, which reminds me I've forgotten to mention them before.  Sets one through three were being released around this time, but even though they are D&D products, I won't be making posts on them - there's really nothing to say, given that they're nothing but pre-created dungeon maps.  But real products are almost back - two more issues to go!