Archive for the ‘legacy D&D’ Category

Printable Mazes and Monsters game board

Monday, May 23rd, 2011
This entry is part 34 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

You probably remember sitting around with your friends playing Mazes and Monsters back in the 80s, but your mom threw away all your M&M stuff during the Tom Hanks Scare of ’82. And original Mazes and Monsters gamebooks are so hard to find on eBay! How are you supposed to play M&M retro clones?

Problem solved! I’ve lovingly restored the Mazes and Monsters game board onto hand-crafted free PDFs. Just print out two of each PDF and tape them together.

Mazes and Monsters board, bottom left and top right

Mazes and Monsters board, top left and bottom right


Between this and the Maze Controller’s screen, you’re just about ready to descend into a spiral of fantasy and madness. Candles not included!

Coming in a week or two: Paper-doll minis, suitable for Mazes and Monsters, or for any game system that features fighters, holy men, and frenetics.

holy water in Basic D&D

Wednesday, May 18th, 2011

In Basic D&D, Holy water is actually a much worse deal than flaming oil. I don’t know why I ever got it.

1983 Basic equipment list.

1983 Basic equipment list.

Holy water does 1d8 damage to undead creatures. Not too bad: in Basic, only a fighter could reliably do more than 1d6 damage with an attack, and only if you were using the variable weapon damage optional rules. Holy water is still potentially a good choice for a rogue or a magic-user faced with undead.

Flaming oil, on the other hand, did 1d8 the first round and 1d8 the second – twice the damage. Furthermore, it hurt nearly every creature, including undead.

Not only was holy water half the damage and more situational, it also cost 25 gp per vial, compared to oil’s 2 gp.

If I were to play Basic again, I think I’d at least double holy water’s damage.

flaming oil through the editions

Wednesday, May 11th, 2011

I just looked up flaming oil in my Basic D&D book. It did 1d8 damage on the first round and 1d8 in the second. Of course, it was more complicated than its watered-down 4e equivalent, Alchemist’s Fire: with Flaming Oil, you had to douse a guy with oil and then make an easy attack roll to set the enemy on fire.

1983 Basic equipment list.

1983 Basic equipment list.

Still, 2d8 was a lot of damage in Basic D&D. Keep in mind that all weapons do 1d6: variable weapon damage is still listed an optional rule in my 1983 Basic set. Even with the optional rule, oil’s average of 9 damage is the same average as a fighter with 18 strength and a +2 longsword. It’s enough, on average, to kill a 2-hit dice creature in one shot. It’s hard to compare, but in 4e, to kill a 2nd level creature in one hit would take about 40 damage.

There wasn’t much monetary inflation between Basic and 4e – a Basic sword costs 10gp and a 4e sword costs 15 gp – but Basic flaming oil costs 2gp. That’s a tenth of its cost in 4e. Cheaper and more effective.

By the way, I notice that the new 4e alchemist theme allows you to use a free alchemical item as an encounter power. That improves alchemy considerably.

Finally you can have your own sweet Mazes and Monsters GM screen!

Monday, May 9th, 2011
This entry is part 33 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

The original Mazes and Monsters MC screen.

The original Mazes and Monsters MC screen.

Or Maze Controller’s Screen, to be more precise. Just like the one that Daniel rocked in the movie.

I’ve made a printable screen that is JUST AS COOL as the original, and it has all the Mazes and Monsters charts you need to run the game. (Edit: I’ve added a blank template as well, for use with other games: see below.) Wandering monster matrix, Maiming Subtable, it’s all here. It looks something like this:

Click for a bigger view

Click for a bigger view

Here are all four PDFs you need to construct it. They’ll be in the completed M&M PDF.
left front section
left section
right front section
right section

Or if you want blank templates so that you can play with your own rules of choice but LOOK like you’re playing Mazes and Monsters, you can use these instead of the left section and right section:
left section (blank)
right section (blank)

I’ve tried printing and cutting it out, and the completed castle looks pretty nifty. I can’t wait for my next M&M playtest.

Complete Gary Gygax Enworld Q&A, all on one page

Monday, May 2nd, 2011

If you’re interested in the history of D&D, one of your best resources is the long-running enworld “Ask Gary Gygax” threads. From 2002 to 2008, Gary Gygax answered a heck of a lot of fan questions. Unfortunately, there are over 500 pages in the Ask Gary threads, so if you’re looking for a specific anecdote, you have a lot of message board pages to click through.
For your Ctl-Effin’ convenience, I’ve compiled all of “Col. Pladoh’s” Ask Gary message board posts onto one (long) page.

Note: I edited Gary’s enworld posts into a book, Cheers Gary, for the Gygax Memorial Fund. At the request of the Gygax Memorial fund, I have removed this complete transcript of the Enworld Gygax Q&A. If you want to read his opinions, you’ll have to read them on enworld or await a second edition of Cheers Gary. I wish the Fund the best and hope they get the second edition printed soon.

evidence that the mid-80s was a bad time to be a fantasy reader

Thursday, April 21st, 2011

I went into a used bookstore recently, and I saw these three 80’s fantasy novels:

Sentenced to Prism


Elf Defense


Prince of Whales

Well, it was a golden age if you liked pun-based fantasy. You also had Robert Asprin and Piers Anthony, who were sure to keep you rolling in the aisles.

Malcolm Gladwell vs. Ryan Dancey on the fate of TSR

Wednesday, April 20th, 2011

Mike Mearls, whose retrospective “Legends and Lore” columns always seem to be sidling towards a “We’re relaunching OD&D!” announcement, posted a link to an interesting Malcolm Gladwell TED Talk about the history of spaghetti sauce. Apparently, once upon a time, companies sought the One True Spaghetti Sauce Recipe, until a forward thinker discovered that people were different! And companies have achieved great success by splitting their product lines into different sauces catering to different tastes.

It seems obvious when put that baldly, but it also seems to contradict another seemingly obvious story that’s central to the modern D&D mythos.

There’s an analogy that’s commonly quoted to explain the death of TSR. I’ve seen it attributed to Ryan Dancey and Bill Slavicsek:

“Picture it this way,” Slavicsek says, “it’s raining money outside and you want to catch as much of it as you can. You can either make a really big bucket or waste your time and attention by creating a lot really small buckets — either way, you’re never going to make more rain.” In plain English, TSR, by putting out a lot of product lines instead of supporting the main Dungeons & Dragons line, fragmented the marketplace.

So the path to massive corporate success leads either through diversification or through consolidation. Which is it?

Here’s something that Ryan Dancey said about the death of TSR:

No customer profiling information. No feedback. No surveys. No “voice of the customer”. TSR, it seems, knew nothing about the people who kept it alive. The management of the company made decisions based on instinct and gut feelings; not data. They didn’t know how to listen – as an institution, listening to customers was considered something that other companies had to do – TSR lead, everyone else followed.

On the other hand, Malcolm Gladwell says: “Assumption number one in the food industry used to be that the way to find out what people want to eat – what will make them happy – is to ask them. […] People don’t know what they want. A critically important step in understanding our own desires is to realize that we cannot always explain what we want deep down.”

I think the takeaway from Gladwell’s quote is not that companies should ignore surveys (and message boards and blog posts); it’s that they shouldn’t be used as road maps. I think TSR was right to make a lot of decisions on instinct and gut feelings. No one would have filled out a survey and asked for D&D before it was invented.

Perhaps the purpose of the customer survey is not to tell a company what to do: it’s to tell a company what NOT to do. While no survey can tell a company to “make D&D”, a survey could plausibly say “stop making Dragon Dice”.

Mazes and Monsters: Monsters!!!

Monday, April 18th, 2011
This entry is part 32 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

Here’s the M&M bestiary from levels 1 to 5, from the lowly Pixie to the mighty Mazosaurus Rex. The Mazosaurus Rex is not SPECIFICALLY attested in the movie, but I think it can be inferred from the awesomeness of Mazes and Monsters.

Download Monsters PDF

Crossroads Adventures: stats

Friday, April 8th, 2011

I’ve mentioned Crossroads Adventures, the 80’s choose-your-own-adventure series. As far as I know, it didn’t have a D&D license. On the inside of my copy of “Warhorn”, it says “CROSSROADS Adventures are authorized interactive novels compatible for use with any role-playing game.” “Any role-playing game” is remarkably similar to D&D, because the Crossroads mechanics involve +1 swords, healing potions, and Strength, Intelligence, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, and Charisma, all rated 3-18.

Each Crossroads book includes an essay explaining a bunch of gaming terms, including the six D&D attributes. The best part of this essay is that, unlike D&D, it explains each of the 16 possible values for each attribute, and for most of them, includes a real-life example. The examples are worth the price of the book. They’re pretty well thought out; they do a better job of letting you know what it means to have, say, a 15 in an attribute than does D&D. They’re also hilariously 80s.

Here are some highlights:

STRENGTH:
15 A top athlete or football running back [OR? Dis on football running backs?]
17 Changes tires without a jack
18 Wrestles Arnold Schwarzenegger and wins [OK, why not just peg Arnold at STR 17?]

The essay goes on to point out that an elephant “has a Strength of 23.” How do they know?

INTELLIGENCE
6 Curly (The third Stooge)
13 College professor/good quarterback [a lot of football in here!]
15 Indiana Jones/Carl Sagan
18 Leonardo Da Vinci (Isaac Asimov?) [Really? The author of the essay thinks that Asimov is maybe as smart as Da Vinci? I liked The Caves of Steel but let’s not go overboard here. Also, is Asimov verifiably 3 INT points higher than Carl Sagan?]

WISDOM/LUCK [Here’s where Crossroads becomes slightly incompatible from “any game”: it rolls “luck” into the Wisdom stat.]
13 Lee Iacocca
15 Captain Kirk (wisdom) / Conan (luck) [I take issue with both of these. Kirk, as far as I can tell, succeeds entirely based upon Charisma and maybe Luck. I don’t ever recall him making a wise decision.]
17 Sherlock Holmes (wisdom) / Luke Skywalker (luck) [Again, Sherlock Holmes’ skill is clearly Intelligence. And Luke Skywalker, luck? Apparently the author of the essay doesn’t believe in the Force. He thinks that hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side.)

CONSTITUTION
15 Olympic Athlete/Sam Spade [Sam Spade? I guess he has a lot of constitution… I don’t remember much about the Maltese Falcon but I’m willing to believethat Sam got knocked out a few times and survived it.]
16 Marathon runner/Rocky [I agree that Constitution is pretty much Rocky’s strong point.]
18 Rasputin/Batman

DEXTERITY
13 Good fencer/Walter Payton [ah, more football!]
15 brain surgeon/Houdini
16 Flying Karamazov Brothers
17 movie ninja/Cyrano de Bergerac
18 Bruce Lee

A dexterity of 20 is possessed, apparently, by The Waco Kid. From Blazing Saddles. BLAZING SADDLES.

CHARISMA [This one is my favorite.]
7 Richard Nixon today [I wish they had statted Nixon’s Charisma at various points in his career. In China, 14! Jowly appearance vs. Kennedy, 8!]
14 Magnum, P. I. [Only 14???]
16 Henry Kissinger/Jim diGriz [one of these is the Stainless Steel Rat]
18 Dr. Who/Prof. Harold Hill (Centauri) [I have no problem with Dr. Who, but it never would have occurred to me to chart his CHA as 18. And apparently Centauri is a lovable character from the Last Starfighter? and Prof. Harold Hill is from the Music Man? OK, The Music Man is (arguably) timeless, but The Last Starfighter must have JUST COME OUT when this essay was written.]

Mazes and Monsters: magic charms

Monday, April 4th, 2011
This entry is part 31 of 34 in the series Mazes and Monsters

Gear up your Hanks with a chapter of magic items! Here’s the PDF of the full chapter.

Click to download the pdf.

As a sample, here’s a charm that, for sheer baroque old-school madness, knocks the Eye of Vecna into a cocked hat:

Graven Eye of Gellor. Level 8 charm. This is a faceted ruby with twelve faces. (It looks much like a d12.) On each face is carved the iris of an eye, along with a unique magical rune. To use the Graven Eye, you must actually put out one of your own eyes and put the Graven Eye in its place. From now on, you will probably want to wear an eye patch a lot of the time.

At the beginning of every day, a different face of the Graven Eye will face the world, and you will have a different power when you gaze through the Graven Eye. Each morning, roll on the following table:

Table 9-1: Graven Eye of Gellor
1: Eye of Understanding: You gain the benefit of Read Strange Languages all day.
2: Eye of Fear: You can make an attack on people in throwing range or closer. If you hit, they are Mazed (RONA 6). While Mazed, they fear you. They may either stand where they are, not moving, or spend their turn moving away from you.
3: Eye of Seeing: You gain a trait die on all RONA checks involving seeing or perception. Also, you can see invisible creatures.
4: Eye of Truth: When people are lying, you see them surrounded with a red haze.
5: Eye of Light: You can shine light from your eye as if it were a lantern.
6: Eye of Lies: You can change your appearance to that of any person or monster that is approximately your size. Whoever you change your appearance to must have the Graven Eye of Timor visible as one of its eyes. The change of appearance does not affect your abilities or the appearance of your clothes and equipment.
7: Eye of Change: For the entire day, whenever you go through a door you’ve never been through, you roll on this table (rerolling 7s), temporarily taking on a new power. Passing through the same door multiple times has no effect.
8: Eye of X Rays: You can see through anything within throwing range (walls, curtains, etc) except lead. This doesn’t let you see in the dark, so you can’t, for instance, see the coins inside a dark coin purse or treasure chest.
9: Eye of command: You can make an attack on someone within throwing distance. If you hit, you do no damage, but you may issue them a short command. They are Mazed (RONA 4). As long as they are Mazed, they must follow your order. The Maze ends when the order has been fulfilled. The attack will fail if following the order will obviously lead the creature to immediate harm. (Near future harm is OK. The Mazed creature will not stab itself but will insult a dragon.)
10: Eye of the Mind’s Eye: You may make any images or visions you want appear in the sparkling surface of the Eye.
11: Eye of Darkness: You are blind in this eye. You gain a weakness die on all RONA checks involving seeing or perception.
12: Eye of Flame: As an attack, you can shoot a fiery red beam from your eye. It can attack at bow range, but unlike a bow, can also attack people next to you. It does fire damage. You gain a Trait die on the attack roll.