Notes from My Re-read Part 2

I'm continuing this series of updates as I continue my re-read of the D&D materials I've already covered.  For one it's helping me establish the habit of posting again, and for another I'm just enjoying noticing things that perhaps did not stand out to me on my initial reading.

I've only gotten through one more product in my re-read after I closed the last post with the Holmes Basic Set, but it's a long one - the AD&D Monster Manual.  This time around I noticed in the introduction that Mike Carr talks about how D&D has spawned imitations, and of course urges readers to stick with the original and "best".  He includes this snarky quote about other roleplaying games:

...let the others be measured against the standard of quality we have striven for - a hardbound encyclopedia of monsters, for instance, as opposed to a low quality collection which is poorly assembled and bound.

I just find this a little hypocritical, given that that is where TSR itself naturally started.  If you've read Chainmail or the original boxed set then you know that they don't exactly stand out as paragons of quality.  Their revolutionary content had to succeed despite the poor writing and poor typesetting.  And while I can't comment on the physical quality, only reading PDFs myself, I feel rather sure that it fell on the "poorly assembled and bound" side of the spectrum, being produced by a fledgling company on a shoestring budget.  All in all it reeks of the obnoxiousness of someone who has improved their station in life but then looks down their nose at others still in the place they came from.

Not much else stood out to me in the book, probably due to its exceedingly dry nature, an issue I discussed in my last post regarding the Blackmoor supplement.  However, one thing I did note was that in the entry for Balors (previously type VI demons), it says that only six are known to exist!  This is a far cry from later materials, which make it clear that the Abyss is home to virtually limitless numbers of demons of all types.  I can only assume this is due to the influence of The Lord of the Rings, which I've noted in previous entries.  Balors are clearly knockoff balrogs, and while he went back and forth on the issue, at one point Tolkien had decided that there were no more than seven balrogs total, which is presumably informing this statement.  Not exactly something of monumental consequence, and as mentioned it would be retconned later, but sometimes little throwaway statements like this make for the more interesting tidbits in the evolving history of the game.

Something else you might or might not notice is that I've gone back and edited all my previous blog posts.  A lot of it is just cleanup - fixing the font and font size of entries, which is something I wasn't very fastidious about when starting, as well as correcting a few typos.  However, one major change I made that I will continue going forward is putting a picture of the cover of every product and magazine issue at the start of each post.  I have also added the metadata for products in the captions as well: the author(s), cover artist, and interior artist(s), where that information is provided (it would be a few years before TSR got around to professional publishing standards of consistently including a full list of credits on the title page).

This metadata on products is something I'm going to be paying more attention to and discussing in future blog posts.  While initially I was only interested in pure content for this reading project, over time I've decided that I want to keep track of authors and artists as well.  I'm interested to see who the heroes and zeroes of TSR's writing and art staff ended up being - which names will make me excited when I see them on the cover, and which will make me say, "Oh great, another product by X...", as well as being able to see (hopefully) the growth of these individuals as the years roll on.

As a perfect example take the Monster Manual discussed above.  Dave Sutherland did both the original cover art in 1977 as well as the updated cover art in 1983.  The difference could not be more striking:

That's a lot of artistic growth in only six years.

I don't feel I've missed very much by not discussing the metadata in posts I've already done, as there hasn't been a plethora of diversity.  Obviously Gary has written the lion's share of all the products, and familiar names like Dave Sutherland, Dave Trampier, and Tom Wham have shown up multiple times for the art.  But I'm excited to add this facet of product evolution to my writing going forward.

What's less exciting is that I've decided to add this information to my collector's spreadsheet, which means combing back through every product to fill it in.  It's not hard and really not even that tedious, but it is taking a share of my time right now.  My spreadsheet feels like it is starting to suffer from asymptotic completion, where no matter how much work I do, there's always something else I find I want to add or tweak, so that true completion seems to always be just out of reach.  I promise someday though it will be complete (or at least complete enough) and I will publish it here.

For now though I am continuing my re-read.  I'm realizing that it will take a bit of time to get through the Player's Handbook as well as all six G and D modules, but I'll keep at it and keep posting these updates as I have them.

Notes from My Re-read

So I'm about halfway done with my re-read right now, having just finished the Holmes Basic Rules.  In the interest of getting back into the habit of posting regularly I thought I'd do a brief update on some things I've gleaned during my re-read:

• When I first started this project I only had a 3rd edition copy of Chainmail, which came out well after the original OD&D boxed set.  As I was reading I naturally wondered whether some things from the boxed set had bled back into the Chainmail rules.  Well since then I've managed to find a 2nd edition copy of Chainmail, which came out before the boxed set, and which I read this time through instead.  In turns out that back-pollination from OD&D did occur in terms of wizard spells.  2nd edition has fewer spells than 3rd, and it also lacks the concept of spell "complexity", which is just spell level ported over from OD&D.  So all told a few spells as well as the spell level concept were reworked into the 3rd edition rules.
• As I was rereading the Blackmoor supplement I was struck by the description of the Sahuagin.  As opposed to just being a block of stats and a barebones description of how they fight in combat - which is the norm for monster entries of this era - it actually goes into significant detail about their society.  The result is that they feel quite fleshed out, which is rather refreshing for a product of this era.  D&D (in virtually every era) has always opted for quantity over quality when it came to giving us monsters.  We can see it already starting to gel here, but the AD&D Monster Manual would completely solidify the format of picture + stat block + very brief description, and I always wanted monster books to be so much more.  Don't just give me a brief rundown on the stats for the different types of giants, give me info on giant society.  How is it organized?  How do the various types relate to one another?  What does family structure look like?  Even with unintelligent animal-like monsters I want details like what does their lair or nest look like?  How do they fit into their local ecology?  Are they an apex predator or what hunts and eats them?  I'm sure the quantity over quality choice was made as part of an arms race with players who had memorized the stats for existing monsters (a problem which is explicitly mentioned in one of the products from my re-read, although I can't recall which one), but the detailed information I long for could have sparked the imagination of countless DMs, and in turn I believe help address the problem of player familiarity.
• I made a very brief mention of this in one of my past posts, but there are a couple of categories of products that came out in the time period I've already covered that I haven't included in this blog, those being the Geomorph accessories and the monster and treasure assortments.  The Geomorphs were basically individual sections of map that could be combined at the edges in multiple ways to allow DMs to generate large maps easily.  There were a couple for dungeons, one for caves and caverns, and one for a walled city.  The monster and treasure assortments were just that - just random lists of monsters and treasures for DMs to roll on.  While both products do have a page explaining how to use them, they're not exactly "readable" products and as such there wouldn't be much to say about them in a blog post, hence my decision to exclude them.
• The very last issue of The Strategic Review had an article recommending some music to play in the background while playing D&D.  I've certainly done this myself in a campaign I've run, but I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the idea of doing it went all the way back to the very beginning.
• Dragon #3 had an entry for a samurai class, and while the class itself wasn't very interesting, it did introduce the concept of critical hits to the game for the very first time.  After doing some research though I was shocked to learn that D&D was not the first roleplaying game to include the idea.  That honor goes to Empire of the Petal Throne, which came out a full year before this issue (although they were not called "critical hits" yet).  But even more shocking is that EPT was not even the first game to introduce the concept.  According to Wikipedia, it first appears in a 19th century wargame!
• I'm quite shocked at the complete lack of marketing in the Dragon.  I don't mean there are no ads (there are plenty), but rather that TSR had no concept yet of using the magazine to preview upcoming products.  In none of the Dragon issues leading up to the Holmes set is there any mention of it - no sneak peaks, no brief excerpts, not even a "hey, we're working on this" mention in the editor's column.  Apparently they just threw the Holmes set out into the world with no fanfare whatsoever.  I checked ahead and there is a one page ad for it in the following issue (2 months later!), but it's just bizarre compared to how things are managed nowadays, where every TTRPG or video game has a carefully crafted hype machine leading up to its release.  Now to be fair the TSR staff at this time are largely just amateurs winging it - I doubt at this point they even had an official marketing department.  I seem to recall they did a little better with AD&D, but we'll see if I remember correctly as I read through the next year's worth of issues.

That's all for now.  My initial guess of the re-read taking a single month was perhaps a little naive, but I'm hoping another month will see me done with it.  I'll probably do another one of these posts when I do finish, and then at long last it will be time for new content!

I Live!

Yes, I am in fact still here.  After six years I finally decided it was time to resurrect this project, as I still very much want to see it through to completion.  It's just easy to lose momentum on a project of this size when life gets in the way.  When I made my last post in 2019 we were just about to move to a new house, which is obviously a major life disruption.  Our daughter was still a baby at that point, so it took a while for life to settle back down, which it finally did...just in time for 2020.  After surviving that dumpster fire of a year, life laid on the smackdown even harder in 2021, which was without a doubt the hardest, most traumatizing year of our lives.  After taking 2022 to recover, we then started the process of adoption, which can be rather all-consuming and occupied the last couple of years.  We finally completed that journey in July.

tl;dr - life has been hard the last few years.

When I have had free time the last several years I've mostly devoted it to my YouTube channel (right here, if you're interested).  But lately the siren song of D&D has been welling up from my memories, and I decided at last to dive back in.

Now I'll be upfront, it's going to be a bit before I start regularly posting again.  I feel I need to manage expectations for all those people who've been keeping me in their subscription feed for the last half-dozen years, anxiously waiting for me to return.  That's sarcasm of course, and this is mostly just for recording my own thoughts.  I'd like to think I'm not completely shouting into the void though.

Anyway, it's been so long that I feel I need to re-read the products I've already been through to reabsorb that late-70s D&D zeitgeist before I dive into new products.  It shouldn't take terribly long - I know what I can skim and skip to speed things up.  I'm also restarting my efforts to finish my collector's spreadsheet, and my actual collection of PDFs, which is also taking some of my time.  But hopefully I'll start making new posts here in the next month or so.

And if there actually is someone out there who has followed this blog after all this time, I don't know what else to say but thank you for your incredible patience.  For everyone else, I hope you'll join me on this journey as I pick it back up again.

The Dragon #20, November 1978

So they decided to do a Halloween issue...in November...and the explanation is, um, November sucks apparently, so it needed something interesting?  Sounds more like someone couldn't get their material together in time for the holiday, but whatever.  40 years after the fact it's not like I actually care.

• <Sigh>, people are just dead set on adding every single mythos in the world as a Gods, Demigods, & Heroes supplement.  This month it's the Polynesian mythos.  Are we done now?  Can we be done?  I don't know if people actually liked this material or if it was just low hanging fruit as a way to get published in the magazine.
• Fitting the Halloween theme, there's a new article on a witch class (another appeared in an earlier edition), although these witches are a little more along the lines of historical druid-like witches vs the Satanic witches of the middle ages.  It's a pretty decent write-up for an amateur submission.  Of course, D&D would always take the official position that a witch was just a particular kind of wizard and didn't need their own class, but that obviously didn't stop people from trying.  In 2nd edition it would get the "kit" treatment at least once that I know of to placate fans.
• There's a terrific article on demon (or devil) summoning.  I always have been disappointed that D&D's summoning system...well, basically didn't exist.  There are so many interesting possibilities in building a detailed summoning system - researching the true names of summoned beings, the elements of summoning rituals, bargaining with summoned beings, etc.  But most summoning spells work just like any other spell.  The Cacodemon spell has a few elements thrown in, but it's still pretty meager.  This article goes into detail on rituals, the bargaining process, and the like.  It makes me wish for a more detailed magic system where it really pays off to specialize in schools of magic - whereas a fire wizard might become more powerful by learning more powerful fire spells (Burning Hands -> FireBall -> etc.), a summoner wizard would grow more powerful over time by gaining more and more powerful summoned creatures who served him (whether by force or by bargaining).
• There's a short but enlightening article by a DM who started keeping statistics on character death in his campaigns.  It ends up being a highly insightful look into the nature of the game at this point.  He recorded deaths only of player characters and their followers (not mercenaries or other NPCs), and recorded 600 in a 2-3 year period!  Can you imagine?  His tone indicates that most DMs still see their role as the adversary of the party, seeking to do them by any means necessary.  Obviously players under such a paradigm have to get used to rolling up characters one after another, as each previous one meets a new grisly end.  The statistics themselves aren't that interesting, with goblin-kin taking the top spot on the list of killers - not because they are the most dangerous foe, obviously, but because they are the most commonly encountered, and because they are often encountered in significant numbers.  I've said it before, but I'll be most interested to see the transition of the game from a hack and slash meat grinder that chews through player characters and enemies alike to more modern roleplaying sensibilities.
• Finally we get an article on demonic possession, something that never really made it into official material on demons and devils.  I don't know, maybe even Gary had his limits.  It's not very interesting - basically a demon possesses a party member who then most likely just attacks the rest of the party.  Still, like the article on summoning demons, I appreciate fans trying to add these aspects into the game.  I also wonder to what extent content like this came back to bite TSR when they had to start dealing with the Satanic panic of the 80s.  I guess we'll see in time.

That's all for this issue.  There was a lot of material devoted to other games, and besides the witch article and the two demonology-related articles it really wasn't much of a Halloween issue.  But now we get to an actual product again - the very first Basic D&D module - In Search of the Unknown.  I'll see you there.

The Dragon #19, October 1978

This issue of The Dragon falls right after the most recent GenCon and Origins, so it has a very con-heavy focus, debriefing a lot of what went on.

• There's an interesting article which gives a recap of one of the rounds at the Origins D&D tournament written from the perspective of one of the members of the winning team.  The team managed to complete both G1 and G2 modules and get most of the way through G3 before time was called.  I appreciate this because it gives a little more insight to how the game was played "back in the day".  Not surprisingly it's still a very "kick the door open and kill anything that moves," hack-and-slash kind of game.  Clever roleplaying merely consists of finding more creative and effective ways to hack and slash (and recover as much loot as possible).
• There's another article giving ideas on how to properly score a D&D tournament, which basically boils down to use as many objective (as opposed to subjective) measures as possible.  I'm not interested in the particulars of the article so much as I am just amused by the idea of a D&D tournament to begin with. I know it's always been around and is still around today, but to me personally, "competitive D&D" is an oxymoron.  It's not that I have anything against it really, and I can see the appeal to some people to the kind of game described above (like I've said before, I enjoy a little hack and slash myself every now and then).  It's just that whenever I've finished an adventure in a D&D campaign I've never found myself wondering if my group finished it "better" than another group might have.
• There's an article regarding managing magical wishes - always a sticky point for any DM. The article proposes assigning an alignment and strength level to wishes that come from magical objects in order to help the DM adjudicate the success of the wish, but ultimately I don't find the ideas very compelling.
• There's an article on creating treasures that proposes the radical idea that the treasure retrieved from a foe should have some kind of logical connection to that the foe.  I.e., a defeated thief would probably have thief-related treasure, as opposed to just whatever came up randomly on the tables in the DM's Guide. I wish this kind of sensibility had permeated the game more.
• And yet once more, because apparently players back then just loved this stuff, we get the Australian Aboriginal supplement for Gods, Demigods, and Heroes. Skip.
• There's an interesting article taking on spell caster progression, creating a new system of spell schools and requiring casters to learn spells in order by school. It's a nice way of taking on the inherent problem where a wizard can go his entire career never learning a single summoning spell, then suddenly learn an 8th level summoning spell at high level with no issue.  It also introduces a fatigue system for casting spells in place of normal Vancian rules.  It's a little rough as a system, but honestly just about anything is an improvement on the Vancian rules.

There was a decent amount of Gamma World material in this issue, but that about wraps it up.  I'll end though by going back to the beginning - the cover art for this issue.  The cover art for The Dragon has never been exceptional to this point, but...what the heck is that even supposed to be?  It looks vaguely like a dragon head, but made out of plants?? I'm not going to lie, I'm looking forward to the 80s when the artwork starts to become more professional.  Stick with me and we'll eventually get there. 

D3 Vault of the Drow

3rd printing cover

Author: Gary Gygax
Cover Artist: Dave Sutherland (Erol Otus 6th printing and beyond)

We finish up the D series with this module, and again, it follows the same format as the previous two:

• There are three detailed minor encounters: a Drow checkpoint, a nest of giant spiders, and most interestingly, a cave in which dwells a succubus and her vampire Drow lover.  A pretty interesting concept roleplaying-wise, but again, the only thing to do here is just kick down the door and kill them.  The giant spider nest has a pretty cool idol of Lolth that gives its possessor the powers of a spider, but makes them completely possessive of the item and gradually turns them into a giant spider.  This is why you never touch the obvious item of evil.
• I haven't touched on it yet in previous modules, but the D series introduced not only the Drow, but also the concept of their adamantite weapons and armor.  This gives all such items a bonus of +1 to +5, even though the items are not actually magical.  The module gives plenty of rules to make sure the party can't benefit from them though (at least outside of these modules).  Adamantite items decay if exposed to sunlight, and they lose their bonus in any case if removed from the Drow homeland for more than a month, as they get their powers from the special "radiation" in the underworld.  It's purely a gimmick by Gary to up the difficulty factor of the modules, since they're designed for characters level 9 and up.  I'm a software developer, and in software there's a concept called "code smell".  If you're looking at some code that works but still doesn't seem right, it is called a code smell and sometimes indicates a deeper problem in the architecture of the system.  Having to artificially create a gimmick like this to increase the difficulty of a module without also giving away the bank and letting characters walk out with an entire armory's worth of magical weapons and armor from defeated enemies is an RPG smell, and indicates a deeper fundamental problem in the rules - namely a flaw in the design of the hit and armor class system progression.
• And so we come to the titular vault, and there's an explanation of how minerals in the roof give a dim illumination to everything.  It's a vaguely scientific explanation, where a mineral called tumkeoite radioactively decays into lacofcite, giving off a ghostly purple glow in doing so.  "Tumkeoite" is actually a play on the name of Tom Keogh (whom you may recognize from the eponymous Keogh's Ointment), while "lacofcite" is a play on Len Lakofka.
• This module takes a similar tack to D2 that I just find a bit puzzling.  If the players have collected the medallions they've found on defeated Drow in previous encounters, then they can present them when they enter the vault and basically have free run of the place.  Just like the shrine, even though this is a place full of villains, they can just wander around.  The modules have made clear that the Drow (and the Kuo-Toa of the previous module, too) hate surface dwellers, but when surface dwellers show up to their respective areas, as long as they have the right tchotchkes, everything's just cool apparently.  I realize that the logical alternative - a city full of Drow who kill surface dwellers on sight - would be untenable, but I still just feel there was a better way.
• At last we arrive at the Drow city of Erelhei-Cinlu.  Gary created the name by using the first syllable of each of his kids' names (Ernie, Elise, Heidi, Cindy, and Luke).  It's a tremendously intriguing place - a dangerous, decadent, and depraved hive of evil, full of every sin and vice imaginable.  Demons, vampires, and more wander the streets (as if the Drow weren't dangerous enough), and the party is warned that they wander the back streets at their peril.  But all that appears in the module is just a few paragraphs slightly more expansive than what I just gave you.  There are no particular locations detailed, no NPCs, just a vague description, and if the party wants to do more than wander the streets aimlessly for random encounters, it's up to the DM to create something to do.  It's just so head-scratching to me, and completely counter to what you would expect to find in a modern adventure.
• FINALLY, six modules into this series (including the three G modules) we actually are told in full what the story is!  Can you believe this?  I mean, I understand that from the players' point of view it's supposed to be an unfolding mystery, but usually you don't want to keep the DM in the dark as well.  So here in full is the story behind these modules: Drow society is made up of multiple noble houses that vie with one another for power.  The most powerful house, Eilservs, has contended that Drow society needs a queen to unify it (which naturally should come from them, being the most powerful).  A coalition of less powerful houses, backed by the priestesses of Lolth, has opposed Eilservs and its own allies.  As a result, Eilservs has forsaken the worship of Lolth and pledged themselves to an Elder Elemental God (whose shrine appeared in G3), and Drow society is now in a sort of cold war over the issue.  Eilservs, led by the priestess Eclavdra, has attempted to gain power by moving to the surface, creating a coalition of giants and other evil creatures, and spreading the worship of their deity.  She had hoped to gain enough power through this plan to install herself as Queen.  This is what was behind the coordinated giant raids on civilized lands, and what the party has been thwarting.  The thing is, this little detail of the story is only given to the DM, almost as a side note in numbered location description of the Eilservs compound.  In no place is the party given any hooks or means of finding this out on their own.  It's like the players have to go hunting for the story, which again is so counter to how adventures should be written.  I try not to get too frustrated over this - I mean, to be fair, Gary is literally inventing the art of writing adventures as he goes, so obviously it will take some time to get the kinks out.
• This module introduces daemons (the *-loth creatures of 2nd edition), specifically the mezzodaemon and nycadaemon.  One thing I'll say about D&D is that I do like it's demonology, from the pact making devils, to the mercenary daemons, to the plain monstrous demons.  There are still some things I would change, but overall it's one of the things I feel D&D did really well monster-wise.
• The party can fight Lolth in this module if desired.  The whole presentation of her is very confusing to me.  It makes it clear that she is a demon lord and resides on a plane in the Abyss, but at the same time it makes it sound like she lives full time in the Drow temple to her.  I guess it's her avatar or something, but considering that 99% of the content of all the G and D series modules consists of just detailing the combat abilities or treasure of things the party can fight, I'm not surprised it's not well explained.

And with that we wrap up both this module and the D series.  I'll leave you with what is without doubt the most awesome part of this module - a drawing of a hypothetical battle with Lolth.  Now in this drawing the wizard is actually supposed to be flying, but the artwork does a poor job of making that clear, so instead he appears to be doing a flying karate kick at Lolth.  He's the man!

D2 Shrine of the Kuo-Toa

3rd printing cover

Author: Gary Gygax
Cover Artist: Dave Sutherland

The D series adventure continues, and this module uses the exact same format as the last: two minor encounters followed by one major keyed location at the end, with the rest of the action determined by how lost the party wants to get in the maze of surrounding tunnels.

• This module is notable to me for including what I consider to be the very first NPC in any module.  Now technically there were some in previous modules, but usually they were prisoners meant to be freed by the party, like the siren in Tomb of Horrors or the storm giantess in Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl.  To me, a true NPC is a character who has 1) a name, 2) a personality, and 3) an encounter with the party whose outcome depends on how the party roleplays.  Enter Thoopshib, a slightly insane rogue Kuo-Toa who operates a ferry across an underground river that the party must negotiate with.  History should have remembered you better, Thoopshib.
• This module is a little light on content.  After dealing with Thoopshib to get across the river and encountering some deep gnomes who might accompany the party, we jump straight to the titular shrine itself.  The shrine is a bit of a strange place, as the Kuo-Toa are not automatically hostile to the party.  If they wish, the party can sight-see the shrine and just pass through, making it a very short adventure.  The party really has to go looking for trouble in the shrine.  Now that's a nice change of pace from the norm, which usually involves busting down the door of some place where the party expects pretty much everything to be hostile, but it's a little strange for the climax of the module.
• The Kuo-Toa deity Blibdoolpoolp is introduced here, and the party can meet her if they desire, which again just seems strange.  Using her altar that is the focus of the shrine teleports the user to the elemental plane of water in her presence.  Making a sufficient offering to her grants the user a small favor, plus the ability to speak Kuo-Toan, so yeah.
• One thing I haven't commented on before is Gary's writing style.  He is obviously very well read and has an extensive vocabulary which he does not hesitate to use.  Quite often he'll use words far out of the norm. For example, one of the locations in the shrine is referred to as a seraglio.  That's just another word for harem, but darn if I knew that without looking it up.  I can never tell if he does it on purpose to show off or not.

That's all for this module.  We finish up the D series next time with Vault of the Drow.