OK, maybe it wasn't the last blog post.

I have a couple of different campaign worlds I am working on right now. One of them is my 30+ year old world that I have worked on and run games in since I was in junior high- my Garnia campaign. I have worked on it with my BFF Darryl since the early 1980s. We have both run games there. We have both contributed significantly to the canon. Originally I was the idea guy and he was the cartographer, but that fell by the wayside almost immediately when I outsourced several lengthy eras of history to him so we could have back story; which, as I recall, was a bit of advice from an old article in The Dragon. We're older and better at writing now, both of us have taken a lot of college level history. I was a history major with a minor in medieval and renaissance studies. I forget what he did as an undergrad, but I know he was working on a masters in US history at one point. So I have tons of material, mostly in my brain, but a lot of it written out, that I could share. Garnia started out as a pretty generic D&D (AD&D) world, and it still is, but it has a lot of historical baggage added on too. So it makes me feel a little constrained when it comes to creating for it, and I am not sure that a lot of it would translate well to other campaign settings, as it is a heavily Celtic influence world (with a few other cultures thrown in around the world for diversity).

Then I have my new “Shattered Empire” setting that I started writing last December or maybe January. I started writing that world as a more D&D-ish setting for my (then) new Swords & Wizardry campaign. The campaign kind of went on hiatus while my wife was in the hospital and getting radiation, then we moved across the state, so I don't actually have a play group anymore. But I kept right on writing stuff up for it, I was inspired and it's all new and shiny to me. I started writing it up for Swords & Wizardry Complete, used Delving Deeper as another sourcebook for inspiration and played one session of Labyrinth Lord there, so I am pretty sure it works for any OSR game, or the original D&D (or AD&D) game. This was the elevator pitch emailed to my players-

“My primary working thesis is that I want this to feel like 1970’s D&D, something I was only there for the tail end of. So I jumped in and did some research on 0e and it’s retroclones Swords & Wizardry and Delving Deeper.

What I came out of that with was that 0e was just as much about science fantasy as it was about swords and sorcery, there are Androids, Cyborgs and Robots on the monster lists. Gygax, Arneson and crew didn’t limit themselves to just standard fantasy fare. “Expedition to the Barrier Peaks” was not a fluke, it was fairly standard for the game at the time. So too was the almost forgotten art of the (mostly randomly designed) mega-dungeon.

There is a strong “Arthurian” vibe to the overland encounters. Randomly you will almost certainly be challenged to a joust by some knight or other noble, just to prove yourself. There is an entire separate rules section covering jousting, something pretty much lacking from later editions.

Robert E. Howard’s “Conan the Barbarian” was a much larger influence than Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings”; all Gygax seems to have lifted from Tolkien’s work were the Hobbits, Ring-Wraiths and Ents. Honestly, pulp fantasy and sci-fi elements are practically exuded from the games metaphorical pores.

Early D&D was set in a post-apocalyptic world, not necessarily post-nuclear holocaust (although it could be), but like a fantasy version of Europe in the period immediately after the fall of the Western Roman empire.

In retrospect, my own style of DMing tends to amplify the weird, post-apocalyptic tone of early D&D.

So I started working on a campaign world that would reflect these ideas and I first came up with the city of Dusk, then Helltown. Here, in this setting, you will find Sir Thomas Mallory, Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, an abundance of pulp era science fiction and a curious bit of actual history. Feudal lords and noble knights abound in the rural areas, evil priests and sorcerers scheme everywhere, the cities are invariably decadent and corrupt, noble savages batter the ramparts of civilization, but so too do armies of Undead, and the lands between the civilized areas are untamed, howling, primeval wilderness filled with nature spirits, savages, monstrous creatures and demonic hordes. “

Would you play a game in this setting?

Anyway, it's been a lot of fun to write stuff for, and I think that stuff I wrote for this setting would need not too much tweaking to fit most people's campaigns. So the only thing stopping me from starting my new blog now is lack of a cool name. I am wracking my brain to find something that says something that reflect both my personality and the flavor I am going for. No more ramblings; concise, content oriented, OSR.

OSRIC

Swords & Wizardry appreciation day has just passed. Along with Labyrinth Lord I think Swords & Wizardry gets the most retro-clone love. There has been a Basic Fantasy RPG appreciation day, and I am a big fan of BFRPG myself; I own in print everything they offer.

But wasn't OSRIC the first retro-clone? Why doesn't it have a special day? If it does, I have never heard of it. OSRIC emulates 1^st edition AD&D, and that's what me and most of my friends were playing back in the day (mostly, there was some bleed through from other editions).

To be honest, I forget that OSRIC exists a lot. Part of my retro-clone addiction is finding the editions that I didn't play (OD&D) or only played a bit (Holmes, B/X). I still have all of my 1^st edition AD&D books, so I guess OSRIC wasn't a priority to me, it was only as I was putting together a list to catalog all of my retro-clone purchases and rounding them up to keep them together that I realized I didn't actually have a hard copy of OSRIC. I have since rectified this- I ordered a copy from Noble Knight Games, it'll be here probably on Monday.

So why no OSRIC love from the OSR community at large?

Which version of D&D do I like better? How about you?

     

 

I have consistently second guessed myself while I run (A)D&D games for my group about which version (or retroclone) I like better for play. I range between the simplicity and adaptability of S&W Whitebox and the complexity and completeness of 1^st edition AD&D (sometimes including “Unearthed Arcana”, but rarely anything later). Sometimes I decide a particular retroclone looks like it'll be good for what I want to play- I just started playing S&W Complete for instance, or I'd really like to play “Lamentations of the Flame Princess” (and so would a couple of my players) sometime soon.

I guess what it comes down to is that I like the adaptability of the early edition stuff based on OD&D and it's semi-gonzo SF additions to our standard fantasy fare. I like the simplicity and lower power level of OD&D, B/X and their clones. I have written a few rules sets now using S&W and B/X as a template. However, something in my head keeps dragging me back to 1^st edition AD&D (or Labyrinth Lord+ Advanced Edition Companion- more on this later). I suppose it's because that's my old default. When I was just starting to play AD&D was just arriving on the scene and B/X wasn't quite here yet (I actually started with Holmes Basic).

Now, the power creep/edition (larger HD, more powerful magic items, more special abilities) is what pulls me away from AD&D towards OD&D or B/X. The absolute familiarity with (and perhaps even mastery of) the rules set is what drags me back. My D&D formative years ran from 1980-85ish, AD&D OA makes it under the wire, and UA slips a bit in sometimes, but my core system has always been PH, DMG and MM.

I guess the power creep is something I never noticed before the 3e era, probably because my default system was 1^st edition and I never really looked at it objectively compared to the Holmes Basic and Cook/Marsh Expert sets. 2^Nd edition was largely the same as 1^st, only with a lot of inconsistent or unused (I am looking at you weapon vs. AC) rules being either tossed or overhauled. With this in mind, perhaps I should be playing either LL-AEC or straight 2^nd edition AD&D, but I can't fully commit to either of those systems because I know 1^st edition, with all it's warts & weirdnesses, it's Gygaxian purple-prose (a feature, not a bug- it immeasurably increased the vocabulary of pretty much everyone I knew), I have it practically memorized, even after all these years and anything I don't have memorized I can find in seconds in the book- no lengthy searches or game stoppage, and I know how to house rule it without breaking it in any way. Plus, I own multiple copies of all the books (including the premium reprints I got cheap on Ebay). I have given away complete core sets to my players that don't have them (another feature of Ebay- when I feel I am running low on extras for my table, I can usually find them really cheap there), and each of my kids has gotten a complete core set+ OA. My wife came with her own set.

But then I think about sub-classes, particularly Fighter sub-classes, which irritate me; why should a Fighter not be the best at fighting? Every other sub-class loses something, or at least fundamentally changes something, from the core class to make up for gaining their new abilities, not Rangers or Paladins though, so what's up with that? It's not that I hate the idea of Rangers and Paladins, and I get that it's harder to get the stats to be one of them and that they level slightly slower, but they still make better fighters than Fighters do, and that's what irks me. I don't take issue with creating a new subclass for the purposes of playing exactly the character class that you want to play even, I've made them in the past and I probably will again in the future. I am pretty sure that was the impetus behind the design of every AD&D sub-class. Think of them as customized class options for your role-playing needs.

Now, Labyrinth Lord +Advanced Edition Companion is a game that plays functionally identical to my experience with 1^st edition AD&D, my only real problems with using it as a go-to system are that I already own multiple copies of AD&D and it's B/X based, which means that I need 2 rulebooks and have to ignore a bunch of stuff from the first.

I guess what was trying doing here was get all of these stray thoughts down where I can see them and mull over my options, what it has, apparently, done was talk myself into running 1^st edition AD&D again, with the option of using retroclone ideas as house rule options. Thanks for reading, I am still open to suggestions and differing opinions, because I will, most likely, go back and forth on this for the next day or so before I run something for my oldest daughter Ashli and her boyfriend Rae who are coming to visit this weekend.

Now some other stuff that's been on my mind- if you were going to run a single adventure for three to five players and had access to pretty much every adventure published by TSR for Holmes Basic, B/X, BECMI and 1^st edition AD&D what would you run? I am missing a few from the end of the era, but I have most of them. I was thinking something tournament style, that'll give the group focus and a sense of urgency, plus they won't have to worry about losing a beloved character because these types of modules usually have a bunch of pregens included. I was also thinking something a little higher level, because we never get there in campaign play and I think that they might enjoy playing characters at level 9+ for a change. Not The Tomb of Horrors though, that's a straight out meat-grinder and I've seen parties with all experienced players die in the entryway.

Also, I was thinking about other game systems recently, especially the ones like GURPS that pretty much mandate during character creation how you are going to role-play your character and that's one of those things I've never actually seen the need to have enshrined in rules. Some people think that alignment is unrealistic and too much of a straight-jacket to your role-playing, in my experience these are the same people that want to see at least part of your character creation include at least some options for deciding how you must role-play your character. GURPS has a bunch of these, off the top of my head I can recall codes and berserkerism and addiction as role-playing options that grant you some tangible character creation bonus with a few rules on how you must then play your character as a trade off. I am not a huge fan of point-buy systems in general anyway, I kind of like some randomness in character generation and I don't think all PCs should be created equal (but with the option for a master min-maxxer to really work the rules to make a Frankenstein's monster of a PC).

I am also not a big fan of skill systems, I never saw the point. The way I see it, if you want to do something, you ask your DM if it's possible and he figures out whether or not it's at all possible and then determines how it should work. I guess it helps if you have some sort of background, like the secondary skills in the DMG; although those work best for humans, those are some tables that could use a redesign based on a PC's race, the region they come from (or where the campaign starts) and maybe the general tech level. I guess they'd be best tailor made for every DM's campaign world. Not that I don't use skill systems where appropriate, just not a fan. This is likely because of 2^nd edition AD&D's poorly thought out and ill-named Non-Weapon Proficiency system, which, while optional, was both over used and miss-used in my experience, all the while being extremely unnecessary. Yes, I realize that the 2^nd edition system is a direct descendant of the 1^st edition system which premiered in my beloved Oriental Adventures book, it's just that I am that contrary. Also, I hate that system and have eliminated it in my upcoming retroclone Samurai!, wherein I replace them with a set of backgrounds that grant you the ability to do certain things. But generally speaking, if you can give me a halfway decent reason why you should be able to do something, I usually let you. I base this on the fact that I can speak, read and write English, and to a lesser extent, French and Spanish. I can swim pretty well, do math (even some higher math) and all the other stuff I learned in public schools and just living in rural upstate NY. Usually, no matter how well I min-max a character, there is no way I can come close to what I could do even when I was a teen-ager, much less as an adult, and on top of all that, I am a pretty decent fighter, both armed and unarmed, and an ordained clergyman. That's right folks, I am dual-classed...

What about Henchmen, Hirelings, and other Retainers? I swore by them in the early days of playing D&D, not so much for the extra swords in the fight, but for handling the mundane stuff like carrying the light sources or acting as bearers for the loot we found, but we usually had a couple of “special” guys too, usually a Thief hired on to open locks and search for traps- oddly enough, even when we had Thieves in the party. You can't be too careful in the dungeon. Later, as the games started having more overland and wilderness type adventures, we started having people just for helping out with the horses (and staying with them while we went into dungeons) and some extra muscle to help out with guarding our camp. Now it seems like even the people I played with back in the day avoid them like the plague. I can understand (although not agree with) the notion that Henchmen are experience point and treasure leeches, but what about the ones that only get paid a pittance and don't get a ½ share of experience points? Plus it makes Charisma less of a dump stat if they are included in the game.

What's the deal with people not liking (A)D&D for more pure role-playing type game sessions? There's nothing stopping you from going all thespian with a D&D character, as a DM I actually will give an XP award or some other type of bonus as a reward for good role-playing, it's within my purview as DM. But some players insist that there is something inherent about D&D in particular that stunts role-playing. I don't get it. Sure D&D evolved from wargaming, and there was a certain wargame mentality to the role-playing by association. I don't hate that to be truthful, but I think that it is making less of the game than it can be. That said, there are some things that I can't stand to role-play like, say, buying equipment or any other mundane, somewhat boring task. Who wants to role-play mucking out stables or brushing down their horse? I don't, not as a player and not as DM; some stuff can be glossed over pretty easily and we don't lose anything by doing so. You probably want some real interaction the first time you meet the duke though, and maybe a bit when you are invited back for dinner. These role-playing vignettes are a great opportunity for mini-information dumps as a DM and I think that players and DMs alike should grasp the opportunity to try their hand at being more of a thespian. The exchange between DM and players there can lead to some really cool ideas for your campaign heading down the road.

A new contest

First, I'd like to say that falling out of the habit of regularly blogging blows; it's like taking a break from college, or quitting exercising for a while- it is so very hard to get back into the habit. Second, yet another apology to David, my wife has been driving around with your loot from my contests in the back of her minivan for something like a month now. Mea culpa, I should have taken care of it myself.

Art by Todd Lockwood.



Now, on to the contest, generously sponsored by Warlord Games (so far), I have a box of their Celtic Warriors, from their Hail Caesar line of products ready to send to the winner. I'll also throw in a copy of the AD&D 2nd edition "Celts Campaign Sourcebook" for 2nd place and, I guess, a pdf of same for 3rd place.

The contest, since it is October, is to get something Celtic and/or Horror themed (better if it's both), short adventure, long adventure, monster(s), anything that fits the theme and is OSR related, anything from B/X to AD&D to Call of Cthulu will be welcomed. Adventures will be judged by my small, elite group of players and myself, anything that can't really be classified as an adventure will be judged by the Council of Central NY Game Masters.

All entries should be received by midnight EST,October 31st and the winner(s) shall be announced sometime in early November. Authors retain the rights to their work, so feel free to publish it on drivethru RPG/RPG Now, I also make no claim to any art created for or used in your contest entries. Enter as many times as you want, at the end of the contest I'll put all the files together in a zip file and upload it to Dropbox or some other storage site.

Happy October!

Ave Caesar! A Contest Update

I just want to reiterate all of the contest rules and prizes here and announce that I am extending the submissions deadline until the end of January rather than the Ides, because, while the Ides sounded cool, don't think it gave enough time with the holidays in the way.

So here we go-

The contest is to write an Ancient Roman Empire themed adventure for early edition D&D, AD&D or one of their popular retroclones. One Page Dungeons are fine, but I have had people need more space, so short adventures are acceptable too. I am willing to accept anything you are willing to submit, up to and including huge hex-crawls; every adventure will be judged on it's own merit.

The fine print- I intend to publish these submissions to the web as a free series for the OSR community, if you want to opt out of having me give your work away to everyone, mention it in your submission email.

All adventures should be submitted via email to me at williamjdowie AT gmail DOT com by midnight on January 31^st EST. I will then email them to the rest of the judges.

The good stuff-

Everyone who submits an entry, or really, really wants one gets a refrigerator magnet. So far the magnets have made it to Europe and Australia, as well as all over the USA, let's see how many continents and countries we can hit while the supply lasts! Just send me your postal address with your submission and my wife will mail it out within a few days, unless you live in Maryland or Germany, in which case I will have to nag her for weeks.

Grand Prize-

PDF copies of 43 AD and it's supplement Warband, courtesy of Zozer Games.

8”x10” Canvas Print courtesy of easycanvasprints.com

Roman Numeral D4(x2), D6(x2) and D10(x2).

One commissioned Character portrait courtesy of Mona Dowie.

Second Prize-

PDF copy of 43 AD courtesy of Zozer Games.

Roman Numeral D4, D6(x2) and D10.

One commissioned Character portrait courtesy of Mona Dowie.

One Old School 1984 Ral Partha Roman Legionary lead miniature, unpainted.

Third Prize-

PDF copy of 43 AD courtesy of Zozer Games.

Roman Numeral D4, D6(x2) and D10.

One commissioned Character portrait courtesy of Mona Dowie.

Prizes may be updated, as I am constantly on the lookout for more sponsors and I am not averse to opening my own vault of gaming goods if I think we need more submissions.

Thinking about Thieves

So I got to thinking about Thieves and how they weren't in OD&D originally. I chatted with my buddy Darryl about it and I talked a little bit with my wife Mona and I got to thinking that the introduction of the Thief class, in whatever supplement it was, started the slippery slope of Skills and Non-Weapon Proficiencies that later proliferated through AD&D in both editions and has made 3rd and, from what I hear, 4th edition a skill based math nightmare that you practically need a computer to assist creation of characters and run combats, it also took the roleplaying and player skill aspect out of the game when people just started rolling search checks to search rooms or bluff checks to BS the guards, but that's another post waiting to happen someday.

The real and biggest problem with the introduction of the Thief class was that as soon as it came along and codified "Thief Skills", suddenly everyone felt like they couldn't do any of those things themselves anymore. So, for however many years before whatever supplement introduced the Thief came out, Fighting Men, Clerics and Magic-Users, Hobbits, Elves and Dwarves all were finding traps and presumably opening locks and climbing walls and hiding in shadows and moving silently when necessary and now, all of a sudden, they lost that ability because it wasn't coded onto their character sheet? It used to be the DM's call, he'd take the situational modifiers into account and make a judgment, now all that changed with the introduction of a new specialist class.

AD&D made the problem worse, first with Weapon Proficiencies; because now everyone had just a couple of weapons they really knew how to use, instead of the broad (or tight) range they used to; then with the mid- 1st edition AD&D introduction of Non-Weapon Proficiencies it got even worse, the Thief skill problem was magnified by orders of magnitude. Sure, I loved the idea when they were introduced in the Oriental Adventures book, and every group I know played with them all through the 2nd edition AD&D era, despite the fact that they were an optional rule. We loved the rules crunchiness of them all. By the end of the 2nd edition era I had adapted the NWP system to my Garnia campaign and had set up NWP packages based on your race and socio-economic background; I like randomness in character generation; by the time of the 3e era I had ported that system over to the newer Skill system too. Sadly, most of those documents are lost, but since I have grown to despise the system anyway I guess it's for the best, but it may have been nice just for the historical value.

Anyway, I kind of meandered away from the point I was making there, so I'll get back to it, as soon as the NWPs (or Skills) were codified into rules and onto character sheets, suddenly no one could do any of those things anymore. Maybe none of the players in your campaign had ever thought to have their Druid or Ranger or just their what ever class character with a woodsy background ever try to find a healing herb in the forest before, but now they never would without herbalism. Try hunting without the Hunting NWP? Preposterous! Fishing without the Fishing NWP? Not going to happen. Suddenly all of these characters that should have been easily able to survive in the woods are going to starve to death if they picked the wrong NWPs when they made their characters, all because the players think they can't do it now because it doesn't say they can on their character sheet, and it all started with the Thief.

Those were just the examples I came up with off the top of my head relating to wilderness adventuring, there are probably thousands of other examples you could come up with based on the NWP/Skill proliferation in AD&D and later D&D systems. But what it all boils down to I guess for me is this- Why can't a Fighter climb a wall? Or a Magic-User pick a lock? Or a Cleric hide in shadows until the Orcs pass? The Fighter might have to lighten his load a bit, drop his shield, maybe even take off his armor, depending on what it is and how hard the climb is, but why can't he do it? The Magic-User is a pretty smart guy, he should be able to figure out how locks work, if he has any reasonably decent Dexterity, say 9+, he ought to have a shot at it with the right materials, like, say, a set of lock picks. Hiding in Shadows is even easier, just get into the dark, try and get low or behind something and don't move or make noise. OK, that may be cheating a bit, because usually when a Thief does it they are trying to maneuver through the darkness to their advantage, but a Cleric should have a chance at that too, but he doesn't for the same reason the Magic-User and the Fighter don't, because the Thief explicitly does.

What's worse is that the Thief is the most contentious player character class, like they were deliberately designed to screw over the rest of the party. There is a certain type of player out there that thrives on playing Thief characters just because he enjoys ruining the fun for the other players and any sense of cooperation between the party members. The skills on his character sheet and the name of his class pretty much tell you that you should play a Thief this way. That's pretty much the way every Thief was played back when I was a teenager and even when I was in my twenties I saw a lot of my peers playing Thieves that way. The attitude didn't change much when the name changed to Rogue either. I don't have much of a problem with intra-party conflict just because one player was a stupid, fun-killing-for-his-own-amusement, chaos monkey these days; but then I observe a pretty strict no gaming with jerks rule nowadays.

Between these issues, and the issue of Ability Score inflation, with the much greater importance of higher ability scores in AD&D than in any version of D&D from OD&D through Cyclopedia, I am giving serious thought to starting my next game as either B/X (LL) or OD&D (S&W White Box). B/X still has the Thief, and both of them have race as class, which I am not sold on, raised as I was on AD&D, but I can always house rule that stuff or check out Labyrinth Lord's AEC.

I also started a second blog. It's a blog specifically dedicated to the development of my Garnia campaign world and currently has two contributors, myself and my longtime Garnia co-developer and friend Darryl. Right now the entire thing is just a long conversation between the two of us asking questions and answering back and forth, but if anyone is really interested in the creative process there, you are seeing something like 75% of all the new stuff right there, the rest has been usually over the phone or via email. Older stuff can be gleaned from blog posts here tagged "Garnia" or from the Obsidian Portal site, or you can just ask me questions if you are curious. Actually comments and questions might be helpful to spur the development process, and if anyone is really interested I am not averse to adding more team members.

Here's what I got in the mail today.




I got them both for a pretty sweet bargain, so it doesn't even really bother me that it doesn't look like Mona will actually be running a Star Wars game for us, and these books are in seriously pristine condition, like they were never even opened and read before.

I also stopped at a Salvation Army Thrift Store and found a pristine copy of "Star Trek - Tales of the Dominion War", which is an anthology edited by Keith R.A. DeCandido, who is probably my favorite Star Trek author; this book is out of print and has been on my Amazon wish list for a while, so finding it there and for the super discount price was awesome, plus it's nice that it helps people out too.

OA Quasi-Session

In an effort to not completely screw over my eldest daughter and force her to essentially retire her character, I went with yet another alternate dying rule for my Oriental Adventures campaign and removed the odious broken leg result from her. Instead she ended up unconscious for an hour and losing a point of Comeliness permanently due to scarring. The party healed her up some, waited for her to regain consciousness, then entered the Moathouse proper through the broken doors to the great hall area. There were no random encounters during this time. I described the room to them, not as well as if I had found my original conversion notes, but pretty good from the actual module and my memory of what I had changed. The loss of those notes will continue to haunt me until they are found or someone admits to throwing them away because they didn't realize what they were, but I digress. I fear that I am just going to have to do it all over again, which I guess isn't a big deal, since I did it once, but it is rather annoying.

Anyway, I sketched them a map of the room and what they could see, they looked around and then quickly decided to check out the storeroom to the left, the one with the stairs down that they could not see, oddly enough with Misaki leading the way, and sure enough she heard the rats in there and started looking for them. Well the module says these rats are hungry and fearless, so I just had them roll initiative and combat began. Unfortunately, Aiko was the other person in the storeroom with Misaki and, while she actually got to attack the rats first, she got dropped by three lucky rat hits in the first round. Well, there are thirteen Giant Rats in this encounter, so I guess it's a pretty tough encounter for a (mostly) first level party, particularly in the tight space of the storeroom. It took the party four rounds to kill them all, no one else was even injured. Aiko made her save versus death, but ended up permanently deaf and unconscious for the next four hours. The party decided to retreat to Hondo and return to the strange Moathouse for further exploration later.

Honestly, it was a super short session. Lee Ann couldn't make it, which should have been OK because she died last session anyway and it actually made introducing her new PC less difficult for me. The real problem here was that my daughter Ashli was really beginning to believe that Aiko was just an unlucky character and wanted to roll up a replacement, and my daughter Ember has pretty much been dissatisfied with Natsumi the Sohei since she started playing her too. So both of my daughters spent the after the battle time rolling new characters. Ember will be playing the Human Samurai Kato Momoko, who has awesome stats; Ash will be playing Natsua of the Bear-Killer Clan, a Korobokuru Barbarian of the Forest variety.

Interesting trivia about OA Barbarians- at the top of page 15 in the OA book it says in the second paragraph "Barbarians are automatically considered outsiders and thus occupy the lowest levels of the caste system. Barbarian characters never roll on table 38:Character Birth.", then on page 31, about the middle of the page on table 37:Birth Requirements By Class- when you get down to the Barbarian class it says under Birth Table Required- Yes, it says that for Family too, but when one page tells you one thing and another tells you the exact opposite, which one are you supposed to go with? I mean, for some classes the Birth Table is not required, but is optional, but the class description for Barbarian outright forbids the use of the Birth Table, it says they "NEVER" use it. I tend to think that they mean for Barbarians to use it because they explicitly mention Barbarian characters twice under the Ancestry section, and imply how a roll could apply to a Barbarian character at least one other time.

I also killed Non-Weapon proficiencies officially today and scaled back proficiencies to their core class standard AD&D numbers, so now it's a race to see who gets their versions of all the classes and races done first and best for playtesting, Fabian's got a strong lead, but it's more B/X style because it's for Labyrinth Lord; Dangerous Brian is coming in pretty strong with a "closer to AD&D" version for OSRIC; I hate to throw my hat in too, but I kind of did today in a little way, just deleting bits of AD&D OA that were driving me a little nuts. I am still willing to let my players playtest anything that comes out from the OSR for OA, but I think they are a little scared of new material for an old game or something, or maybe just not using the rulebook and it's official classes and material. Still, I alter the game slightly every time we play, so I wonder how long it will be before the game isn't really an AD&D OA campaign anymore and just becomes a product of the OSR's combined creative talent with me at the helm.

I still haven't put anything more than holding pages up on Obsidian Portal, other real life stuff keeps intruding on my taking care of my D&D campaign time. On a completely unrelated note, here are a couple of pictures of some FASA Star Trek RPG stuff I got off EBay that arrived on Saturday and I forgot to show you all.

An OA Retro-Clone for OSRIC

An OA retro-clone for OSRIC actually is a pretty good idea the more I think about it, but I think it has to be a real clone- not something with my proposed fixes thrown in. I say this because OA needs to be out there for the masses to have again and build up a fan base all over again. I would still be happy to be a part of this team, but I am going to continue to explore my own OA fixes in the mean time.

Sorry for the short post today, I am working on my OA conversion of T1, I call it OA-T1: The Mura of Hondo. I can be a terrible procrastinator and need to get more of it done before we actually get started with the actual module on Sunday. I was just going to name/rename the villagers as needed and wing it with conversions on the fly in the village; now I have some more time, so I am redrawing the map and writing it out.

Is it time for an Oriental Adventures Retro-clone?

I mean a full on retro-clone, not a few add-on classes for Labyrinth Lord, or a conversion of an earlier version of D&D, like Ruins & Ronin for OD&D/S&W, but an AD&D 1st edition, OSRIC* I guess, Oriental Adventures book. I never bought OSRIC, I just downloaded the free .pdf files because I already own 1st edition AD&D, but I just might to work on this project. Mostly because I hate to read lengthy works on my computer and I like real books. To be clear here, I am not volunteering to retro-clone OA, I am volunteering to be a team member on a retro-clone project. I think that someone with experience doing this sort of thing would be a better team leader than me, and I have already had one major project (B/X WW2) more or less fail, although that was more due to me being more enthusiastic about it than my gaming group.

Since I brought it up, I have to ask, how closely do you have to hew to the original rules in a retro-clone? Can you correct things that turned out to not really work in play? Can you add to the game? I guess I am asking because, despite what EGG intended it to be, I always considered AD&D to be a toolbox like earlier versions of D&D, if non-weapon proficiencies have to be included at all, can we make them optional? Can we make them work like they did in 2nd edition? Can we rename them "Skills"? The OA NWP system kind of made expectation that there would be a certain style of play, involving a lot of time spent in Courts, and that there would be all of these peaceful "contests", but there weren't really any guidelines for how to run an adventure set in a court, so did anyone ever do that? Should we write some guidelines for it? Can we expand the Ancestry and Birthright tables? I know we have to change them and I hate writing random tables, I know there are people out there that love doing them though, so that's another reason I want a team. I am good at coming up with cool random stuff on the fly in the game, not so much at making an entire table of it before hand.

Should an OA retro-clone be even more narrowly focused on Japanese culture and myth? Or should we open it up to more of Asian myth and legend? If that's the case where do we draw the line? I think the obvious intent is EAST Asia, and one of the odd bits of 3e's OA book was incorporating stuff from the Indian subcontinent, even odder considering the clearly Rokugan setting, but they did make the alternate fantasy India-based setting free DLC. Can we incorporate stuff that was published in other TSR materials like modules or boxed sets or 2nd edition stuff? I have almost everything TSR ever made for OA, with the sole exception of the Kara-Tur trail maps, which I assume are just maps, right? I even recently acquired the 2nd edition Ninja book, which, technically isn't an OA book, but might be useful, I don't know I haven't really read through it yet. Hell, I even have the next "connected" part of the Forgotten Realms- The Horde boxed set, and most of the stuff to go with it, because I felt it was supplemental to Kara-Tur and Oriental Adventures; and, of course, because the Mongols are wicked cool. I know we can't use any Kara-Tur material in a retro-clone and would have to create our own mini-Asian setting for it, if we were going to include any setting information at all, but those things all have little tidbits of inspiration and occasional rules clarifications or entirely new rules- usually new monsters or spells as I recall, it's been a while since I read through my OA module/boxed set collection.

There's a lot of old school goodness in OA and I think it is deserving of a real retro-clone, but I don't really know the ground rules of retro-cloning I guess. So, has anyone reading this blog written a retro-clone before? Would you like to be team leader on a new OA retro-clone? Can anyone answer the questions I have? Does anyone else want to be on the team? On the plus side, I am pretty sure I can get it lavishly illustrated at a pretty reasonable rate :) If we can't get a team together I guess I can keep muddling through and subtracting what I think doesn't need to be there, tinkering with stuff and adding in a few bits for my own game, but I think this could be a good community project.

*Although I'd be OK with a full on supplement for Labyrinth Lord AEC too. I am down with both OSRIC and LL; S&W too, but it already has Ruins & Ronin.

These came in the mail the other day, Ashli's birthday actually-



They popped up on my EBay radar because they were listed as Clan War cards. Don't judge me too harshly, I just figured since they were cheap I'd see what all the fuss was about and if the CCG sucks, I can still use the cards as art inspiration for my OA campaign.