Dalluhn: Wizards' Guilds and Fellowships

If you don't know the history of the document called, alternately, Beyond This Point Be Dragons and the Dalluhn Manuscript, the best thing to do is read Jon Peterson's analysis of it. This is ridiculously thorough, although it doesn't include the latest findings, a fairly complete playtest document that reflects pre-publication D&D.

So: I'm going to comment on this document, although I don't have the rights to share it. Despite the fact that I like the title "Beyond This Point Be Dragons," I'm going to call it Dalluhn after Keith Dalluhn, who uncovered the photocopied text in M.A.R. Barker's papers. In some cases, analyzing Dalluhn means I'm basically going to be talking about changes of unknown provenance. That's fine, because I'm interested in early D&D play and this is a document that preserves it in some sense, even if it's not directly from Dave or Gary's tables. And as always I'm mainly interested in making it relevant to games people are playing today, in 2017.

In Dalluhn, magic-users are said to:

dress in boots, tunics, and cloaks, usually in a special color of the individual (such as Brysbane the Blue) or the Guild or Fellowship they belong to (such as Fellowship of the White Hand)

Furthermore, their goals are described as follows:

The prime object of Magic-Users, depending on individual preference, is to either form or head their own Guild or Fellowship, or to go off somewhere to brood and study in a tower.

The implication is that there are both solitary and organized magic-users in the world, and that there are multiple groups of the latter. This idea strikes me as remniscent of The Lord of the Rings, where Gandalf speaks of "my order" - which I don't think is a coincidence, since the Dalluhn sample character is not Xylarthen but Mythrandir - a misspelling of Mithrandir, the elvish name of Gandalf. It does have other Appendix N bona fides, though, such as the guild of evil enchanters in The Mathematics of Magic.

In a game, there is one obvious - perhaps even overwhelming - reason why a PC magic-user would want to be part of a guild structure: the ability to learn new spells from other members of the guild. It's a benefit for the player but also a relief for the referee, who no longer has to shoehorn scrolls and spellbooks into their adventures. That's not to say these can't be part of the treasure, but it stops being obligatory when there's a good external source of spells.

But the referee shouldn't allow a whole guild of wizards to be a modern, business-like arrangement, when it is a rich and varied opportunity for worldbuilding. In many respects the medieval guilds were more like modern secret societies, to the extent that many such societies, like the Freemasons, derived from guilds. It seems almost like a moral imperative that such guilds must have arcane initiations, rituals, and obligations for their members. It could even be a metaphysical requirement for them to take on all kinds of esoteric symbols and rites in order to pass on their knowledge.

And of course those obligations are a rich vein of adventure seeds. Before your wizard can learn the Invisibility spell, he needs to advance to the 9th degree, and that requires you to get a fresh cockatrice egg for the guild's stores. They're needed in the production of certain potions, you'll learn about them when you reach the 17th degree. You'll need to provide the guild with a new spell before you can reach the 27th degree and be allowed to learn the secrets of making magical items. The list is only as limited as the magic-user's level.

The guild can do a lot of things outside of simply bossing a PC around. They can be hotbeds of rivalry, or places where the characters make deep connections. There can be onerous requirements - this is a good reason to forbid magic-users from using certain weapons or armor. There may be other restrictions on diet, or requirements of always using a certain talisman. It may also be forbidden to use magic toward certain ends, with the penalty for transgression becoming quite severe in some cases. And of course, the guild's knowledge must always be secret.
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If you want to add a more Appendix N twist to magic, a guild suggests a couple of avenues to pursue. For instance, the guild's lore may contain the true name of a particular demon who can be commanded, although the magic-user must try not to alienate the fiend - allowing an avenue to play with some tropes from de Camp's The Fallible Fiend. Or if you take ideas from DCC or 5e, they may have a relationship with a particular patron, and initiation in a certain degree may require the DCC spell Patron Bond or its equivalent.

When a PC magic-user establishes their own guild or fellowship, it's natural that other PCs will be a part of it. This is a particularly useful concept if the players are in an open table type of setting, and one player might share a spell with another - although as before, there should always be costs. If the guild is too generous, NPC magic-users might come in and cause issues - or act as rivals to shut it down. Any time a PC leads an organization, rival groups should be a part of the calculus.

Above all, I think the magic-user guild should be a clarion call to "keep magic weird." It offers the referee an opportunity to play up the esoteric nature of spellcasting, and provides a viable "endgame" for magic-user PCs in an open table.

An OSR Heresy: On Healing Potions

When 3e D&D was the system du jour, the one idea that I could not abide was the magic item economy. The ability to go into a shop and buy a magical weapon or item drained the sense of wonder from the game. It took one of the issues that had always existed in D&D, the obsolescence of magic items, and codified a system around it. The result was a game that assumed players would buy magic items as part of a "build." Rejecting this idea did a lot to help unite the early OSR.

5e D&D generally didn't have the magic item economy, but it did have a healing potion on the equipment list. I've seen pushback against this in OSR circles, which find 5e healing too plentiful and easy. But on reflection, I find that I like the idea of a healing potion being a standard bit of equipment.

Part of the explanation for this is that I don't like the spell Cure Light Wounds. If it seems like an odd pet peeve, it comes down to the fact that I dislike the idea of a cleric as a healer. Dave Arneson's group introduced the cleric not as a medic but as a vampire hunter. OD&D didn't even give the class a spell until second level. But once the cleric gets there, he is on healing duty until he's done. AD&D compounded it by adding bonus spells, chaining the cleric to curing throughout combat.

I also don't like how Cure Light Wounds works with the hit point system. Hit points were a great innovation, allowing a quick, abstract method of combat that doesn't need hit locations and the like. But magical healing seems to fight against that abstraction. The 2-7 hit points (or 1-8 if you go with AD&D) restored by Cure Light Wounds don't represent physical wounds, so why are they healed this way?

The final flaw in CLW is that it just doesn't feel very magical. On the contrary, the high level Heal spell strikes me as how divine healing should work. It gives sight to the blind, cures disease, and repairs all physical injuries. It feels like a proper miracle. CLW feels like it's invoking the divine for a reason confined to the game world.

Healing potions are a lot like Cure Light Wounds: a magic item brewed only to restore a few hit points. They also exist in the same conceptual space as +1 Swords, where the effort to create them does not seem justified, and are correctly criticized as lazy treasure. But they have a clear strategic use, especially in parties without a cleric healer.

This is where alternative methods of brewing potions become interesting. A healing elixir doesn't have to be magical per se. An alchemist might distill it in his laboratory, a decoction that helps balance the humors. Or an herbalist can brew it as a mix of legitimate medicine, stimulant, painkiller, and psychoactive herbs. There are as many examples as there are real-world attempts to create medicine.

Having such brews in your game introduces several interesting variables. PCs have to be sure of the reliability of their potions. Depending on the quality and reliability of the source, there might be a 5%-25% or higher chance that a potion is a dud. The PCs might not detect this until it is too late. There is even an excuse to introduce literal snake-oil salesmen into the game, an aspect that too often seems to be missing. Equipment is too reliable and straightforward in D&D generally. The world is more interesting for the hucksters and con artists.

Beyond simple duds, a bad potion could be harmful. This might be a straightforward harm or any type of poison the referee can dream up. And there's a whole array of possible side effects even when they work. Just think of medicines in the real world. They could make you drowsy, give you nausea or diarrhea, or make you paranoid or anxious. Alchemical elixirs or herbal concoctions can follow suit. And the effects can be broader and weirder: changes to skin color, hallucinations, even minor magical effects such as floating or glowing.

I also think that alchemy itself is a valuable addition. It is a rich pseudoscientific framework full of interesting bits and bobs for your game world. Its symbols and ideas are great for framing an underworld environment. And the search for rare alchemical ingredients is a fine excuse to delve into unknown labyrinths. Healing elixirs are one logical step on the ladder to the philosopher's stone.

Alchemy also leads to other pseudosciences, such as astrology, which is too often overlooked in fantasy. There are rich symbols and ideas, and they can even work in conjunction with healing. An elixir might be most effective during a certain phase of the moon or while a certain constellation is highest in the sky. The idea of alchemy and astrology are natural for a pseudo-medieval world. All too often, fantasy seems to have a thoroughly modern worldview.

But elixirs don't have to be alchemical at all. They can instead be from any source, and in fact this can be true in the same campaign world. One might be from an alchemist, the second from an herbalist, and the third harvested from a rare plant deep in a jungle. The potential origins of healing elixirs offers room for a tremendous deal of variety. It makes the paltry d6 healing potion look pale by comparison.

The last bit of utility to squeeze from elixirs is that they are great gold sinks. D&D PCs always need more things to make the choice of how to spend gold pieces interesting. If a single d6 worth of healing costs 100 GP, that will take up a good chunk of treasure at low levels.That's worth something.

If they make healing too freely available, this kind of healing elixir offers enough benefits to offset it. And it certainly beats out Cure Light Wounds.

Snake oil image by Wesley Fryer, CC-BY

A Small Change, a Very Different Cleric

I've been thinking a good bit about the cleric lately. On the one hand, I feel like the cleric as a class remains an awkward fit even after 41 years of Dungeons & Dragons. If you really wanted a more sword & sorcery vibe, cutting the priest would seem to be the first order of business. But there are models for the cleric that I find unobjectionable: the Knights Templar, Stoker's Abraham Van Helsing, and Howard's Solomon Kane. Each or all of those would make a magnificent template for what the cleric ought to be, but unfortunately it's not what the Dungeons & Dragons cleric winds up being in play. Once the dice hit the table, and in original and classic once he hits second level, the cleric becomes a healer, and the rest goes away.

The healer role has become entrenched in D&D play over the years, and contributed to a combat-heavy game. By the time of the AD&D 1e Player's Handbook, the first level cleric with a Wisdom of 14 or better can cast Cure Light Wounds three times per day. Armed with this heavy rotation of healing spells, is it any surprise that D&D went from being exploration-first to combat-first? And the cleric's supply of healing spells forms a big part of the basis for the "15 minute workday" problem.

All of that could be adjusted by removing two spells from the cleric's spell list: Cure Light Wounds and Cure Serious Wounds. Without them, the cleric is a much more interesting spellcaster. Rather than running about curing others, he is a front-line combatant who has the ability to augment other characters or cast an occasional in-combat spell. Turning undead and fighting are his biggest attributes.

Once you've done this, healing can go a couple of ways. An "ironman" option is to simply cut the healing down dramatically. This will certainly discourage the combat-first mentality of more recent versions of D&D, as PCs go into a dungeon with pretty much exactly as many HP as they will emerge with. Variants of D&D more or less like this have generally worked.

If that's too extreme, one option might be to take a page from 5e D&D and make healing potions something that can be bought normally for a GP cost. While I generally object strongly to the idea of buying and selling magic items, it's possible that such potions in your setting are not "magic" but simply alchemy or herbalism. It also gives the referee the option of including, say, a chart indicating the efficacy of such potions; a few might be more potent or less so, and a rare few may go bad and turn to poison. (I generally like this approach, of making some of D&D's "common" magic items actually nonmagical; the same logic works for making +1 swords masterwork or mithril or adamantine instead of enchanted.)

A third possibility is to give magic-users the ability to research the healing spells, but at 1 level up. I'm not fond of this, because it just restores the "healer" and moves it over to the M-U, and imperils cool 2nd level spells like Invisibility, but if the players absolutely insisted, I'd certainly allow them to use the magic research rules on analogs to the Cure spells.

There is a second, parallel shift I'd consider for the cleric. Basically, narrowing the scope of the weapon restriction to magical swords. It never made sense to me that clerics can't use swords; the templar certainly wasn't restricted to the mace, which was a specialized spiked weapon mostly used for punching through armor, and after all the image in this post has a knight drawing his sword. Also, if we want more Solomon Kane in our clerics, he certainly was a sword man.

I've thought a lot recently about whether clerics have a place in my D&D going forward. I'm thinking that they might, but with this small change that makes that a very different place.

Better Living Through Clones: Interrupt the Spellcaster!

Most of the changes to the initiative system in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry and first edition Advanced D&D had basically one major goal: making it so that a spellcaster could be hit in combat and stopped from casting a spell. The rules for this got infamously complicated. The best way to start a fight at Dragonsfoot or Knights & Knaves Alehouse is to make some blanket statement about how 1st edition initiative really works. Unfortunately it's one of the more important things that OD&D, Holmes, Moldvay and the RC (I would presume also Mentzer) all lack in any way – by the book there is no way to interrupt someone who is casting a spell.

I think it's very important that this ability exist in the game. It takes spellcasters down a notch (often quite literally), but more importantly it can be the PCs' best line of defense against an enemy spellcaster. If you can't interrupt his Sleep spell, well, a low level party is screwed. Generally it's a good defense against casters being overpowering and gives parties a fighting chance, but I don't like AD&D's rather difficult way of achieving it.

Swords & Wizardry has a simple system. Spells being cast start at the beginning of the round, and go off on the caster's initiative. So if a spellcaster loses initiative and gets hit, this interrupts the spell. Easy peasy. There is a more complex method that involves taking a full round to prepare a spell, at which point the caster can be interrupted by damage, and once readied the spell can be cast when the magic-user is ready. Not quite as easy.

Adventurer Conqueror King expands this to damage or failed saving throws interrupting spellcasters. Lamentations of the Flame Princess puts more or less the same rule in different terms: if a character takes any damage in a round, they can't cast a spell after that. It's not a proper interrupt, but it serves basically the same purpose.

OSRIC has a cleaned-up interpretation of the AD&D rules, while BLUEHOLME, Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy RPG just follow their Basic versions in neglecting this area.

The interesting choice here is how Swords & Wizardry and ACKS both assume that the spell is specifically interrupted and lost, while LotFP merely forbids spellcasting once damage is taken. The former approach is harsher on the magic-users, to be sure, and rooted in AD&D, where being hit can likewise cause spell loss. Neither proposes any kind of roll (such as a saving throw) to see if the spell can be kept; it is simply gone. I think this is a good compromise between the harsher S&W / ACKS approach and LotFP's method.

Another possibility I haven't seen explored much is that the attack causes a misfire of the spell. This is always a good excuse to pick your favorite "haywire spell effect" table and roll on it, to reflect the magical energies that have been let loose by the incomplete incantation. These should be used sparingly, and perhaps only have a certain percent chance (maybe 5%-10% per spell level) so that it doesn't devolve into complete unpredictability.

Whichever is your favorite, I think these are the most straightforward spell-interruption rules out there, and deserve consideration for any OD&D or classic D&D game.

Magic and the Sense of Wonder

A linkbait list from io9 recently listed the "20 Most WTF Magical Items in Dungeons & Dragons." It's pretty typical of the genre; you can find it here. But it happened to have an excerpt that I found intriguing.

The Wand of Wonder — as in, the Wand of Wondering What The Luntic That Made This Thing Was Thinking Of. When used, it performs one of 20 completely random functions, which can include 1) a powerful gust of wind, 2) 600 butterflies appearing out of nowhere, 3) shrinking the wand holder, and 4) making leaves grow on the target for some reason. Say you were a soldier. Would you bring a gun that would randomly fire bullets, water, or 600 freaking butterflies into battle? Exactly.

I didn't like the article, but this helped me put my finger on something that has long bothered me generally in D&D about magic, namely that, overall, it's very utilitarian and not often sufficiently wonderful. A magic wand, by my lights, shouldn't be as reliable as a gun.

The one area where D&D really nails this is the magic sword. OD&D magical swords are all unique, with personalities and special abilities, and offer a rich experience for the fighters who use them. This is done with some fairly simple charts, and worked into the alignment system pretty seamlessly. The artifact system in Eldritch Wizardry is also good at this, and creates unique items, but these are top-flight, one in a campaign type items. Magic swords, meanwhile, are things that might exist in fairly normal campaigns below the highest levels without blowing things out of proportion.

Spells, meanwhile, tend to be quite mundane and utilitarian, almost to the point where they are simply a given in the rules. And this is to the detriment of the sense of wonder that the game wants to create. So, I've been thinking about ways to rectify this. I think the magic sword approach, expanded somewhat, is perhaps the best way to enhance the spell list, by giving each copy of a spell some "personality."

The first thing I thought of with relation to this is psychedelia. The picture above by Tim Callahan shows a hallucinating wizard, and is one thing I've long felt was missing. Psychedelic experiences of various sorts have long been a part of magical rituals, particularly using naturally-occurring hallucinogens such as "magic mushrooms." This is a good way to give a spell some really interesting material components; maybe an ESP or similar type of spell requires the caster to use some hallucinogen; the working out of the spell is simply an extension of the hallucination. Or maybe othe spells require an altered state of mind in order to cast them at all. Of course, this always carries the danger of a "bad trip."

But magic-users can't be tripping all of the time. Some spells, particularly non-combat spells, can be made up into rituals that take a while to perform. This is hinted at with the magic circle of Protection from Evil as written; it's a solid way to add thematic requirements to spell-casting and make the magic-user more interesting, particularly if there is some chance of the character botching the ritual to cast the spell. Divination spells combine well with rituals of traditional real-world divination, such as casting bones to come up with a result.

Another fairly obvious spin is alchemical. Dave Arneson's concept, which I've discussed before, of spellcasters needing to prepare a spell in advance smacks of their being alchemical in nature. This can work well with even our more combat-oriented spells such as Sleep or Fireball coming out of some mixture of powerful alchemical components. A Sleep spell effectuated in this way might take the form of a sleeping gas, for instance. It also allows the possibility that spells have been pre-cast and sat for centuries; perhaps the magic has gone a bit awry in that time.

There are dozens of types of practice that you can mingle with the existing spells of D&D. For instance, some types of magic are purely verbal and rely upon magic words or true names. Others could use sympathetic magic, using a bit of hair or a fetish to cast a spell like Charm Person that feels very much like a lot of love spells.

What I think is key is coming up with a way that each spell learned is somehow different from any other spell. These methods can be combined in various interesting ways. One magic-user's spellbook may have a recipe for an alchemical Sleep spell while another's contains a formula that commands sleep, and a third may be an elaborate hypnotism-like ritual. Once this is determined, the spell is now something quite different, not just a powerful thing that the magic-user does but something very special all on its own.

It's a bit of a wrinkle, but I think it's something I want to craft some house rules around. I'm curious how it would work out in practice.

Witches, Lovers and Pigs

In addition the charisma score is usable to decide things such as whether a witch capturing a player will turn him into a swine or keep him enchanted as a lover.

This is an interesting allusion. Gygax is clearly referencing Homer's Odyssey, where the enchantress Circe uses her magic to turn the companions of Odysseus into pigs and then keeps Odysseus as her lover. He stays on her island for a year, then finally frees himself and sails home to Ithaca. Holmes changed this to a frog, perhaps thinking that The Frog Prince would be more familiar to the young audience of his Basic Set than The Odyssey.

Lately I've been thinking about the idea of various sorts of magic-using types in D&D. Generally, these prompt the objection that a single Sleep spell can beat an entire party of low-level PCs. And while this is very true, they remain a standard part of the encounter tables, and in my opinion provide rich encounter potential. It helps to think of the Sleep spell as similar to the NPC having a powerful weapon and requiring negotiation instead of being dealt with in the "standard" way.

One particular role I like for magic-users is that of a dungeon "neutral." I think these are generally underused: creatures and personalities of the dungeon that aren't necessarily harmful, nor helpful; depending upon the PCs' actions, they can be taken in either direction. Magic-users are great for this, in a whole variety of ways. In the early levels of a dungeon, they can be conduits for spells and items that PCs won't necessarily have access to; a 5th level magic-user in the second dungeon level, for instance, can do all variety of divination that the PCs don't have access to yet. And the referee can make the cost of such assistance whatever they like, allowing them to set up all sorts of missions into the dungeon.

The second role is that of a nemesis. An enemy witch or magic-user is a great foe, in no small part because of the threat of polymorph and charm spells. While I am generally leery of the "boss fight" concept from video games, they do make good leaders of dungeon factions. The built-in fragility of magic-using types in D&D means that they will not be there for long drag-out fights, but rather short, desperate struggles as the PCs try to disable them. In the mean time, their abilities make the PCs' lives very interesting, since their comings and goings might be monitored, illusions cast, or many other magical tricks used to deter them.

The third concept is something I've mentioned before: giving NPC magic-users totally sui generis abilities. Circe, after all, was somewhere between a witch and a minor goddess, depending on what interpretation you choose. They can be the source of magic abilities unseen in the books, or even magical items that are unique without being artifact-level objects. (I'm thinking here of the magic sword forged by a witch from lightning bolts in The King of Elfland's Daughter.)

At heart, this dilemma — lover or pig — is an interesting one to place PCs into. It requires care that it doesn't become a railroading tool, but embracing both possibilities opens wide the options for magic-using NPCs as a major force for the kind of emergent dungeon roleplaying that I find really fascinating.

NPC Wizards - Powers versus Spells

The whole Internet Drama over Isle of the Unknown (the source of the gorgeous picture to the right) reminded me of something Geoffrey McKinney did in that book that I've given serious thought to at times. Namely, instead of giving the magic-users a repertoire of spells from the list in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, he chose to give each one a unique and non-repeatable power, frequently tied to some piece of equipment or to animal companions (part of a Zodiac theme that is shot through that work).

Another LotFP product, The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions (which I feel that I should like in principle but find myself tepid on in execution) assumes that proper wizards aren't limited to spell lists and straight-up have powers and "often they are other things entirely, and have other origins, natures, and lifecycles."

I've considered using a similar for NPC wizards, giving them powers that don't neatly slot into the standard D&D spell system. Partly I think this is really juicy and mythic; it isn't like Circe or Merlin runs around casting Fireball or Detect Magic. They have powers, properly, and those aren't constrained by the limits of a spell list. I find the idea that NPC wizards and witches might have straight-up powers that aren't on the spell list to be an easy way to inject a bit of mythic wonder into a game.

A second reason I've considered it is the relative power of certain spells. It's long been noted in old school circles that an enemy magic-user can TPK a low level party pretty trivially by casting a single Sleep spell. There are ways to "go easy" on a party once Sleep is cast, but a lot of them are sort of lame. Giving the enemy wizards some totally unrelated powers seems to be an easier way to resolve this.

There are further benefits to this approach. One is cross-compatibility. Probably the biggest fiddly issue with modules and supplements is when a magic-user's spell list is enumerated and it contains a spell that's not in the specific game you're using. This is an annoying problem with clones. A unique powers cuts this out, since the power is listed directly. The other is simplifying high-level magic-user encounters for the referee. Instead of juggling a dozen or more spell options, the referee just has to pick from, say, one to three powers.

Of course there is a downside. Specifically, it's something of a tease to give enemy wizards a power that PC magic-users can basically never get. That's not to say that PCs normally get other magic powers, like a dragon's breath or a basilisk's gaze, but using the same spell list for PCs and NPCs does give PCs the aspiration of being able to turn the tables on foes. This can be remedied by making a way to get these powers, but making it very difficult to do so. If you run a game where finding spellbooks is difficult, not having NPC casters use spells is an obvious issue. And it does cross a certain "feel" boundary, since NPC magic-users casting spells is a pretty ingrained part of the game from its earliest days.

Still, I think it's an idea worth doing some experimentation with. An NPC wizard able, say, to shape and control certain plants might be a really interesting wilderness encounter, or a witch whose hexes go outside the "normal" boundaries of the spell system. I'm going to give this one a bit more thought on ways to go forward, but I like the basic concept.

Arnesonian Magic System

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In First Fantasy Campaign, Dave Arneson describes in a brief thumbnail the original magic system he used in what would become Dungeons & Dragons.

In Blackmoor, magic followed the "Formula" pattern for most magic. The reason behind limiting the number of spells that a Magic User could take down into the Dungeon was simply that many of the ingredients had to be prepared ahead of time, and of course, once used were then powerless. Special adventures could then be organized by the parties to gain some special ingredients that could only be found in some dangerous place.

Progression reflected the increasing ability of the Magic User to mix spells of greater and greater complexity. Study and practice were the most important factors involved. A Magic User did not progress unless he used Spells, either in the Dungeon or in practice (there was no difference) sessions. Since there was always the chance of failure in spells (unless they were practiced) and materials for some spells were limited (determined simply by a die roll) the Magic User did not just go around practicing all the time. The Magic User could practice low level spells all the time, cheaply and safely, but his Constitution determined how often he could practice without rest. Thus, the adventurers might want a Magic User to come with them only to find him lying exhausted.

So to progress to a new level, one first learned the spells, and then got to use that spell. There was no automatic progression, rather it was a slow step by step, spell by spell progression.

It strikes me that this is not entirely gone from OD&D - magic-users preparing scrolls (only at wizard level) for 100 GP/level at a rate of 1 week/level seems to take a page from Arneson's non-Vancian style of preparation. Holmes took it even closer by allowing scroll creation at first level, following the same rules as OD&D. By the book, you could actually get pretty close to Arneson's spell system right there.

Taking a step back, the Vancian system is one that has survived not so much out of sentiment but because it is dead simple to use in a game. Like hit points and armor class, the specific rationale is second to the fact that the system is very effective in game. It limits the magic-user in a readily defined fashion and keeps the bookkeeping manageable.

For many players, though, Vancian casting is a weird limitation. It requires tactical choice, which is good, but very little flexibility. Once out of spells, the MU is useless. A lot of alternative systems such as spell points try to alleviate this by making the MU super-flexible. But with this advantage the game tilts entirely in favor of the spellcasters, who already get powerful at high levels with Vancian casting.

I like Arneson's concept because it invokes a bit more resource management than traditional Vanciancasting. A spell is not just an investment of a spell slot, but is a permanent resource bought with money and/or effort, and available to the magic-user as long as he or she is alive. The decision to use or not use a prepared spell is one that has lasting consequences and cannot be idly cast just to use up a spell for the day.

To use this I think the OD&D pricing is a good start. The prices are about right where an MU will not suddenly become super-powerful, and the referee might give a free spell or two at the game's start to speed things along. Also, an alternative method of preparing spells from ingredients that the MU has to search for at low levels might be a natural source of adventure fodder. The spell components for AD&D are one possibility, as are randomly determined components a la Arneson.

In practice, then: spells would cost 100 GP/level, but take only 1 day/level to prepare. The trade-off is that more spells can be prepared than could be cast. Magic-users would have alternative but difficult methods of finding ingredients. A spell, once cast, is used up. Beginning characters would have 2 spells already prepared. Characters can only cast spells of levels they would be able to cast per the OD&D Magic-User chart (i.e. level 2 at 3rd, etc). I'm also thinking that after some time a spell could start to go unstable.

Has anybody used this kind of system? Any thoughts on potential side effects? Maybe some differentiation in the pricing?

On Reading and Writing Magic

First off, I want to give a hat tip to D. Vincent Baker for his The Seclusium of Orphone of the Three Visions for inspiring this particular article. It's one of a number of new releases on the Lamentations of the Flame Princess store that were made available today.

From the original edition of D&D onward (Holmes copies the text almost exactly), Read Magic has been a fundamental spell for reading scrolls and generally "magic." Without it, the instructions on scrolls, spellbooks, wands, and so on are incomprehensible. In Seclusium, Vincent discusses how - and this is an "in his campaign" moment - there is something personal of the wizard wrapped up in his own writing, explaining why magic writings even in an age of print as assumed by LotFP are still hand-written. That's one way to do it, but I've been thinking of another.

As I see it, the words of magic-user spells are inherently magical. Uttering them is enough to tap into unknown energies and change reality itself. From there, the words on a scroll or in a magic-user's memory are in a semi-stable form, where they've been encoded in some way so that the magic-user has to interpret either the contents of the scroll or his own memory to transform it into the actual words. This form is based on a personal cipher that only the magic-user himself knows, and disappears once it is actualized. That's why the memorization isn't permanent: the form requires the magic-user himself to complete it.

The level of a spellbook has to go even further. Since the magic-user must be able to memorize the spell without it disappearing from the book, it has to be an encoded form of the already semi-stable form. This means that the magic-user has two personal ciphers, one for memorization and scrolls, and the second unique to his spellbooks. It follows that these ciphers themselves are also magical, and that writing with them takes a certain number of pages, words, diagrams and so on that, when read, will store the semi-stable form of the spell into the magic-user's memory without casting it.

From this perspective, the ciphers are "securing" the underlying spell in place. No magic-user knows another's ciphers; they are not just a secret, but something crafted as an apprentice that is as much a part of the MU as his arm. And that's where the Read Magic spell comes into play. Read Magic lets the caster read without casting, and what it's doing is the work of simultaneously deciphering the original and presenting a re-ciphered version to the magic-user as if it were written on his own scroll or spellbook. This allows, as per Holmes, for a MU who has read a scroll written by a different magic-user once to cast the spell from it without casting a second Read Magic.

One side effect of this is that magic-users who have Read Magic memorized has a 25% chance to spontaneously decode any nonmagical message written with a non-mechanical cipher (alphabet substitution, etc). Actually casting the spell and using it to read a mundane-encoded text is possible, but it's much too powerful; there is a 10% chance that doing so will cause a backlash that knocks the character unconscious for 2d6 turns.

DCC RPG, Charts, and the Pareto Principle

A recent post on Tenkar's Tavern has me thinking about why I object to the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG's use of charts for each magical spell. Given that I love charts, it comes down to a statistic sometimes called the Pareto principle.

According to Pareto, 20% of causes are responsible for 80% of the effects in a given system. This is an interesting general rule that has some broad applicability. Here I want to apply it to RPGs and specifically to random tables. Specifically: in an ideal RPG design, 80% of the time I'm referencing charts, it should be to a core 20% or less of the charts in the game system. For instance, I don't mind referring to a combat chart, the experience table, a wandering monster chart, or the turning undead chart - they are all core activities. I'm able to optimize my access, whether it's through memorizing the charts, or knowing where they are, or having copies or a GM screen.

DCC's spells break that efficiency, because you're stuck referring to them every time the spell is cast. People wind up playing where spellcasters have "spellbooks" with photocopies of the spells they're actually casting. Because everything's a fairly long description, it's a pain to memorize them; you probably have to look back at the chart every time.

They're also not useful in the sense that each chart applies to only one spell. This is a poor contrast to, say, Spellcraft & Swordplay's spell retention table, or one of the better touches in 2e AD&D, the Wild Surge chart in Tome of Magic. Even critical hit charts have better ability to be spread across multiple uses than spell charts that literally affect only a single spell.

If we apply the Pareto principle to gaming, 80% of charts should be things that are not referenced during play. These can be as particular and picky as you like - stuff like dungeon dressing, monster creation, magic item customization, and other "off-screen" details. The 20% of charts designed for play-time reference should be lean, mean, and memorable. You don't need to master the potion miscibility table, but you should have an understanding of the basic combat table that makes it easy for you to adjudicate it quickly. DCC is forced to virtually the opposite - 80% of charts used are one-off things, rather than the clever high-usage ones it does have such as the "turn over the body" chart.

This rule of thumb, I think, is a good guideline for making reference charts for RPGs. Most should be aimed at the prep time, and those should feel free to be as intricate as you like. Only a minority should be true "everyday" charts, and these are the ones that need optimization so they can be both interesting and have results that can be memorized.

Magic, Drugs and Breaking Commandments

In my last post I touched briefly upon the Spice, Melange, from Frank Herbert's Dune. Anyone who knows the Dune universe should know that the Spice is addictive, to the point where not using it means death. It has me thinking about the myopic late-era TSR Commandments, specifically this one:

16: NARCOTICS AND ALCOHOL

Narcotic and alcohol abuse shall not be presented, except as dangerous habits. Such abuse should be dealt with by focusing on the harmful aspects.

This forecloses on the ability to make really awesome, but addictive, magical substances. And so, like many of these rules, I think it should be defenestrated.

Both Dune and Dungeons & Dragons came about in an era when people still thought of drugs as mind-expanding. Of course this crashed and burned in real life - but since when does fantasy have to follow reality? If drugs are really gateways into alternate worlds or ways of seeing reality, why not depict them in both positive and negative aspects?

One thought is that the fantasy world may have powerful hallucinogens that, rather than simply showing delusions to the viewer, actually reveal elements of the truth. Magic mushrooms or psychoactive substances like peyote may, in addition to rollicking hallucinations, impart upon the user the ability to detect magic or detect invisibility as per those spells. Deep in a trance, a character may be able to use spells such as ESP, clairvoyance, or clairaudience. Of course, side effects and addiction should both be likely.

Another drug might empower magic use further, allowing the user to cast spells as if they were a certain number of levels higher - for instance, a 5th level Magic-User casting an 8-dice fireball. Such impact might follow the typical "de-escalation" pattern of a mundane "high," where achieving the same result requires more of the drug. There could also be the danger of burnout, with the user needing it just to cast spells that have been over-optimized.

I might do some of these as magic items in the next Dungeon Crawl. Any thoughts?

Telling the Future in RPGs

Historically, many forms of magic are based on attempts to tell the future. This presents a problem when adapting them to RPGs, because in many or most cases the referee does not know exactly what the future will bring. RPGs have, for most of the last two decades, made it very clear that "railroad" plots where the basics are predetermined are not desirable. I think that's right, but at the same time I want to adapt ideas of divination into an RPG-compatible form.

There are two types of divination that I think work well with RPGs. One is what I'll call the "Magic 8-Ball" technique: the method of forecasting the future provides only general answers to yes/no questions, which is often the case with actual divination techniques; the answer is as often as not a "maybe," giving the referee flexibility to opt out if a question is truly in doubt. ("Will we get rich?" "Outlook not so good.")

A second type is to think of the Delphic oracle. Prophesies given at Delphi were so elaborate and open-ended in their phrasing that there were always several potential interpretations. Many famous myths such as Oedipus begin with oracular utterances where attempts to avoid the disastrous consequences actually cause them to come true; the myth of Oedipus is a famous example of this.

Beyond this, we should ask: what is fortune-telling actually useful for in RPGs? In a dungeon crawl or sandbox, it may seem odd or even superfluous to actually predict the future. But I think the two types of fortune telling have several good roles in an RPG context.

First, there is the use of fortune-telling to drop clues and ideas about what is in a dungeon or sandbox type of environment. For instance, a character consulting a fortune teller might get a cryptic hint that "the green-eyed gems are jealous and plot destruction" if there is a trap involving emeralds at some level of a dungeon; knowing the nature of players there will be some inevitable back-and-forth before they actually settle on what to do about the green-eyed gems of destruction, perhaps looking for a statue with green eyes or some such.

Second, there is the instant adventure seed. This is probably richer for sandbox play, but a hint in divination about what lies beyond the Black Mountains is bound to drive curiosity wild. It's one of the relatively few places where it doesn't seem out of place to just stick an arrow on the map and say "Go there!" - since after all, the characters are literally asking for it. Combining this with the Magic 8-Ball method would also do a fine job of livening up a game that has gotten a bit flat and stale from the GM's side - using the question-and-answer format as a place to make some decisions on your feet, as it were.

Third, there are the prophesies that deal with the "big" things in the game. If a megadungeon has an ultimate goal, like finding Zagyg Yragerne in Castle Greyhawk, then a good cryptic prophecy should be just the thing for it. In general such divination should be the most general type, since after all the actual outcome of the final encounter should never be a certain thing. This is one way to give a campaign some shape and depth beyond "The Quest for More Money."

So I do see a strong role for divination magic in D&D and I think it'll be interesting to get a bit more into the systems for it in Demon-Haunted Lands. I'd like to hear more about how folks have used fortune telling in RPGs before - both good and bad, if there are horror stories that can serve as cautionary tales.

An aside on rules

I've been thinking a lot about my choice of ruleset lately. I've been running Holmes D&D for a month or so now. The games have been fun but I think there are some issues I've been having with it, and in the long run I might wind up retooling my games to look more like B/X or Labyrinth Lord with variant race/class options.

The first problem is ability scores; back when I started running OD&D several years back I wanted to de-emphasize high stat rolls. I still basically think that impulse is correct, and aesthetically I dislike AD&D's approach to ability scores. The Holmes stats are a middle ground, but wind up emphasizing extremely high Constitution in a way I don't like, and make Strength and Wisdom useless. That is particularly bad for Fighters, who have nothing to distinguish themselves. I've long been on the fence about Moldvay-style stats; I dislike them in a "4d6 drop lowest" type of ability score generation, where the bell curve that the bonuses follow gets skewed quite badly in favor of high modifiers. The 4d6 drop lowest methodology is only useful for AD&D where stats below 15 rarely give any bonus. But compared to Holmes I think the Moldvay stats make fighters much better.

I remain torn on damage dice. On the one hand, I love dice and rolling different types; on the other, I like the simplicity of having all weapons keep the d6. In long term play I am tempted to switch over to variable weapon damage just for the variety. With one-shots and the like, d6 damage is fine as a way to make things simpler.

Dexterity as initiative is another point I'm torn over. This blog's title comes from when I was running with group initiative as 1d6 roll high, and I remain fond of it. I also didn't mind Dexterity for initiative, but once again it runs a bit dry on the variety after a bunch of combats. My actual issue with this is different: neither method has a good way to interrupt a magic-user who is casting a spell.

I've come to think that two of the design cornerstones of TSR AD&D that got lost going to Wizards of the Coast D&D (both 3.x and 4e) were absolute improvement in saving throws and the ability to interrupt spellcasters. Saving throws get better as characters level up, meaning high level characters are less likely to be affected by a spell at all. Combined with the fact that magic-users could be hit during combat and lose their spells, this did a lot to level out what came to be called "caster dominance" in 3.x D&D, which removed both of these effects.

Most of the complicated stuff in AD&D combat stems from the attempt to bolt enough complexity to handle spell interrupts onto a relatively simple initiative system. There we have all kinds of complication from weapon speed and length, spell casting times, segments and so on, all so a fighter can smack a wizard with a sword and stop him from casting his spell. It's much more than I actually want to deal with in my games, but at the same time I want the impact of melee characters being able to stop a caster.

I'm thinking of just following the simpler method of ruling that a magic-user or cleric, if hit in melee before they cast a spell (i.e. lose initiative and get hit), they can't cast the spell. Or I may modify it: so that if the losing initiative die is less than or equal to the level of the spell being cast, then any hit will interrupt it. So: casting Sleep will be interrupted if the magic-user gets hit and his side rolled a 1 for initiative, but not if they lost on a 3, while casting Fireball will fail when the losing initiative roll is a 1, 2 or 3. (Using the die roll rather than the difference because I don't like penalizing high misses more than low misses; losing on a 3 should not be as bad as losing on a 1.)

So I'm looking for thoughts on these issues, both from Holmes and Moldvay fans and in general. What's the best way to achieve these goals? Am I better off hacking Holmes further or switching to Moldvay but without the race/class divide? Am I overthinking things here?

The Uniqueness of Things

One pronounced philosophical trend I have seen in OSR circles is a general attitude in favor of what I would call the uniqueness of things. By this I mean the idea of downplaying (even radically so) the standard list of monsters and magic items, in favor of making each of them unique. For instance, in Lamentations of the Flame Princess, James Raggi purposefully omitted the standard catalog of monsters. And Jeff Rients has put out a call (which I contributed to) for unique artifacts and oddments to replace many of the "standard" magic items. But it's had me thinking.

Personally I will admit to feeling cramped by the number and variety of monsters usually available in Dungeons & Dragons. I've always been a fan of new monster collections, and of products like Raggi's Random Esoteric Creature Generator, which help to spice things up beyond the very plain set of creatures you normally see. I also agree with the sentiment that monsters should be monstrous, and not familiar.

But...certain things seem iconic to me, too much so to let go. To say it's D&D with no orcs, and no swords + 1, may be true but it's a somehow diminished D&D. It's like running without clerics or something - you can do it, and it may be great for flavor, but it's a difference. At the same time, there is shock value in the new, but I think it can wear out more easily than people have given it credit for. If things are always unique, then uniqueness itself isn't as special - it becomes the new normal.

So I see merit in both keeping our traditional approaches, and to varying it up. Which, to be honest, 3rd edition had by the bucket-load. DMs complained through the 3.x era that single encounters took longer to stat out than they did to run - and these didn't exactly fly by. I think that we have to learn from that, the lesson that making every monster totally variable simply takes too long to actually make it a practical solution to the problem of monsters being one-note. Templates, statistics, feats and so on are simply an overload for something that is at best a single usage.

All of these factors suggest, almost naturally, a solution. Unlike 3.x, which reveled in adding layer after layer to monsters, the old school does things straightforwardly. Most creatures don't have ability scores of any kind, or rankings beyond HD, AC, and their methods of attacks. A solution that I think really embraces this is to make monsters different in one dimension. This can be radically varied; a tribe of orcs may take half damage from fire, or an ogre may have a plague of rats at its command, or the giant rats might have wings, or a lizardman may have acidic blood that corrodes or destroys weapons that hit it. The thing to take away is one variation per monster, for most of the standard creatures that will be encountered. Big ones could use the "Random Esoteric Creature Generator" or similar; smaller foes can be traditional but with a twist.

Of course, this pretty much sets up how the book with the trap charts is going to develop - into a whole big book of stuff for your old school Dungeons & Dragons game. We'll see how it goes. Any thoughts on directions to go with this would be greatly appreciated.

Magic in Anobrega

Anobrega has four groups of people who I see as having spellcasters: Calthi (Celtic analogues), Toreans (Roman analogues), Maradani (Roma analogues), and Elves. One thing I'd like to see, is that each grouping is more or less unique.

The Calthi are probably the most straightforward: they have druids. I don't think a second spellcasting class is necessary for them, and as it stands with them I'm leaning toward the druid class as written in Eldritch Wizardry. The other no-brainer for me are the Toreans - they have an order of Lawful clerics devoted to Deus Sol Invictus (the unconquered sun), the sun god in a militant guise. The cult itself is almost wholly military, based on the one fostered by Aurelian in particular, one of the best of the barracks emperors, and lends itself well as the sort of "templar" character embodied in the cleric. There are plenty of other priests - in Torean society as in pagan Rome being a "priest" is an honor conferred on some noble or other for ceremonial reasons - but a militant Lawful cleric is a member of this cult. Chaotic clerics are secret priests of Bacchus and have to keep their class under cover, quite different from the open military priests of Sol Invictus.

All that covers the religious casters, and I think the D&D standard is pretty good for my purposes. But then there are magic-users, and I'm a bit torn. Celtic magic is druidism, and I see no need to have Calthi magic users. Roman magic is a bit of a mixed bag, quite a lot of it had to do with divination (through all sorts of methods), while many reputed magicians had abilities that map better to clerics - miracles and the like. It was also low-status, definitely below religion in terms of overall prestige. The D&D magic-user is not a close match for this.

One thing I've been looking at is the Pyrologist, a class that Len Lakofka claimed in his fanzine was Gygaxian but turns out to have been his own work. I think the balance might be slightly off from the default magic-user, but there are two things that really draw me to this class. One, it comes from an old school APA-zine, and by one of the authors who contributed a lot to the AD&D era. Two, the elemental connection is thematically something I'm very interested in. The classical elements were more Greek but fit in well as a way that Torean magic could be something other than "stock D&D magic." I think it's more of a good jumping off point for a set of old school elementalists, though, each having its own replacement for the stock D&D m-u spell list, and also with its own unique not-quite-a-spell power (fire and air are light and wind, water is going to be purifying water, and earth is doing...something...).

Rounding out humans is Maradani, who are a great category to have witches, although this might wind up being an NPC only type using the classic "witch" NPC class, unless somebody can offer me a witch class that really would work well as a PC type. (The one I'm thinking of is from Best of the Dragon #1 and not quite so good for my purposes.) Witchcraft and curses are the direction to go here in general.

All of which leaves me with two classic D&D elements: the magic-user and the elf. I am seriously tempted to just shove the two archetypes together and say that a standard, no-frills magic-user is also a standard, no-frills elf, toss out level limits and the whole dual class / multi class / race as class concept for them. Elves will be either fighters or magic-users, single class. It's not a perfect match but there are things that can make it work. I'm thinking that the reason elves have the "default" magic is not so much that it takes certain races to do it, but that the physical process of learning magic takes so long that no other race lives long enough.

As usual I'm more than open to ideas, opinions, denunciations, and so forth.

Ritual magic

One of the things I've been thinking about is the "Utility Spells" in D&D. Basically, until a M-U has more than 3 spell slots available, why would he or she memorize Read Magic instead of Sleep or Magic Missile?

The house rule I have been thinking about is allowing certain spells to be cast as rituals. Fantasy literature has no lack of ritual, and it makes sense to me to allow this to happen in D&D. The rules I'm thinking of include:

- Magic-Users may cast any eligible spell in their spellbook that they could memorize, as a ritual, without memorizing the spell.
- Clerics may cast any eligible spell that they could normally memorize, as a ritual, without memorizing the spell. First-level Clerics may cast Protection from Evil as a ritual but no other spells.
- Rituals take 1 turn to cast plus 1 turn per level of the spell being cast. Any interruption in the casting disturbs the spell and it cannot be cast again in the same day.
- Casting a ritual spell requires material components on the following scale. 1st level: 10 GP; 2nd level: 100 GP; 3rd level: 1,000 GP; 4th level: 10,000 GP; 5th level: 100,000 GP; 6th level: 1,000,000 GP. These should be appropriate to the spell being cast and must be purchased in advance.
- Any spell may only be cast as a ritual once per day, and characters may not in any case cast more than 3 ritual spells in one day.

Eligible spells
Magic-User
1st level: Detect Magic, Read Magic, Protection from Evil
2nd level: Locate Object, Detect Evil, Continual Light
3rd level: Dispel Magic, Protection from Evil 10', Protection from Normal Missiles
4th level: Remove Curse, Polymorph Self
5th level: Conjure Elemental, Contact Higher Plane
6th level: Reincarnation, Anti-Magic Shell

Cleric
1st level: Detect Evil, Protection from Evil, Purify Food & Water
2nd level: Bless, Find Traps
3rd level: Remove Curse, Cure Disease, Locate Object
4th level: Neutralize Poison, Protection from Evil 10', Create Water
5th level: Dispel Evil, Raise Dead, Create Food

Thoughts?

On Vancian Magic

With this post, I realize I'm going into territory that some OD&D fans would consider heresy, but it's something that I feel needs to be explored. I want to examine the whys and wherefores of Vancian magic, and how it appeared in OD&D and how it came to be used.

To be clear: the magic system was not necessarily "intuitively" Vancian in the 1974 rules. The Magic-User and Cleric classes had a number of spells per day determined by level, and that was about it. With subsequent clarifications, it was made clearly and determinedly based on the ideas in Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories, where spells were "memorized" and stored for later use. Elements of other fantasy were also added, with verbal, somatic and material components making spells slightly different from a strict Vancian take. For purposes of paperwork and record keeping, it's a very workable solution with a sound basis in the source literature, and was used in every edition of AD&D and D&D up until the 4th edition, when it was done away with.

That is, in the published rules. Unofficially, the Vancian magic system was never all that popular. Early issues of Alarums & Excursions reveal that the magic system was considered seriously flawed and referees were reworking it from the very early days. Entire game systems developed around alterations, mainly, to the combat and magic rules from OD&D. But Gygax soldiered on with Vancian magic and it became a staple of the game from that point onward. I would think that an AD&D campaign without Vancian magic would be sort of like a Call of Cthulhu campaign without SAN — it's possible, but would be missing the point a bit.

However, one of the things I intend to emphasize in this blog is the idea that OD&D isn't AD&D, and that what is right for one is not necessarily right for the other. The magic rules in OD&D are simply a sketch of the fleshed-out system in AD&D, and I think they ought to prove vital and legitimate ground for tinkering. One of the things I will be looking at in coming posts is old-school approaches to magic, which actually are quite plentiful in print — there is a mana point system sketched in Arduin, discussion in A&E, and the systems of Chivalry & Sorcery and Tunnels & Trolls that I intend to look at for ideas, and adaptation into something of a cohesive alternate system.

The reason for this is not that I'm not happy with Vancian magic as such. As I said, I think it's a quintessential part of AD&D. The reason I'm interested in exploring alternative magic systems is tied into a particular vision of OD&D that I think is perfectly valid, one that looks outside of the AD&D / Gygaxian tradition for solutions to rules questions. I do believe, strongly, that OD&D is not AD&D lite, or with fewer of the specific rules and a trim; what attracts me is the idea that it's possible to build a D&D as one sees fit. The reality is that, when OD&D was at its newest, magic was not bound to any single interpretation but open to wild interpretation and creation. I think the old school renaissance needs to embrace this spirit if it is going to thrive.