Onslaught Six

The best thing I ever did for my big-ass hexcrawls was establish what I call “encounter chains.” This is a series of escalating encounters with the same faction or NPC.

For example, a roving band of orc cultists cutting off people’s left hands. (I can’t take credit for this idea, it’s a riff on this.) The first encounter in this chain actually isn’t the orcs at all, but the result of one of their attacks–an upturned cart and a family of five (man, woman, three children), with the father’s left hand cut off and taken by the orcs. This is a fantastic non-combat encounter that lets you drop info about the orc cult and lets the players figure out all sorts of stuff–turn the cart back over, collect their scattered remaining supplies, offer some of their own, calm down the children, potentially healing magic on the father to at least stop the bleeding and cauterize the wound. Great stuff.

Then, the next time they find the orcs attempting to knock over another cart. This time the players can stop it. Whether any survive or not, the orcs will be aware that some group of assholes is going around cutting up their cult members, leading to the next encounter where the orcs have definitely set up an ambush for the players.

Eventually, of course, this all has to lead back to the players asking an orc who they’re with, where they live, what their goal is, and now there’s an orc lair on the map somewhere and the players will be figuring out how to lay siege on it.

Now, do this for three or four other things. For example: A guy who keeps ending up in mischievous trouble. Buried up to his neck in the middle of the road, enchanted by a satyr and strung up in a tree, stuck in a barrel in the river. Eventually this guy could be revealed to be a powerful NPC ally in disguise as a schmuck to throw people off his scent; a spy from a powerful organization, sent to deal with the same problems the PCs are dealing with (such as our orc cult).

Other simple examples: A group of roving barbarians, trying to summon a thunder goddess to cleanse the land. A migrating group of treants. An old man, with one eye, attended to by seven canaries, who turns out to be Bahamut, or Odin. A hungry dragon driven from its lair by evil adventurers. Etc. Be creative. Use whatever stuff you like. You can even pull the plotlines and factions from your favourite modules and drop them in, creating the powder keg effect (article forthcoming).

Once you have three or four of these encounter chains set up, scatter them on your table amongst other, single-service encounters–some just straight up combat (there’s a bulette! attack/run!), some avoidable (an Ettin is in a field looking for easy hunting prey), some unrelated people (like merchants or lost travellers).

Keeping an even keel between “random bullshit” and “ongoing plot threads” means the game never feels stale, and the players are never overwhelmed by too many threads to keep track of. I don’t recommend any more than four encounter chains at once; any more than that and the players could start to get overwhelmed by ongoing plot threads. It also helps if each encounter chain has a different amount of encounters in them–one chain that can be “solved” in three encounters, one that’s six or seven, one that’s about four. You can alter this based on the vibe of your table and campaign; if you had an encounter chain with five or six encounters and the players are clearly beginning to get annoyed, just jump to the end.

One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t have to develop every encounter in the chain at the beginning of your prep. You just need the first encounter. Once the players hit upon it, cross it off the encounter list and repopulate it with the next encounter between sessions. Easy money. You can also take any random encounter you’ve used and then decide after the fact to expand on it; maybe you introduce a merchant NPC and play him a little weirdly, and the players are interested and start speculating. Great opportunity to take that guy and turn him into an encounter chain!

Last October I was talking about Hit Dice, Hit Points & Weapon Damage in my various games, and how I want to work to unify some of this.

Since that post I’ve thought a lot and want to move forward with things it does, and this required a few changes. First up, I recategorized the classes:

Couple things: I will be adding a feat that allows you to bump your Hit Die to the next die up (maximum of d12). I like feats in my games! I think big chunky complex games like what else should have lots of customization options.

Under this system, your hit die is also your hit die, as in the die you roll for damage. Your character does damage, not your weapon. That’s not to say weapons won’t have differences; I am much more strictly implementing a “light/medium/heavy” system and locking those weapons behind class proficiencies. I prefer light/medium/heavy to the 3e “simple/martial” divide; it just makes more sense to me.

For equipment I’ll be starting with my Canonical Weapons List. I really like this one as it simplifies the list just enough. Probably, I will deep dive into the Martial Options I’ve got for my 5e house rules and compare against the Wolves weapons. (I keep going back but then stopping for some reason. It obviously works in that game or in OD&D. Why am I so hesitant here?)

But, the first thing I’ve got to cut from the weapons list is the damage. And once that’s done, there’s a little bit of work to be done to ensure an “archetype” exists for each one–there’s 3 damage types, so if there’s a heavy weapon there needs to be 3 of them, one for each type.

Light weapons will be disadvantage on damage (roll 2, take the lowest) while Heavy weapons will be advantage or when you take the weapon, you can increase it from your Hit Die up one step (maximum of d12).

Still working on the magic system. I have always liked the way 5e does saves and so I’ll be sticking to that, but I am thinking of changing the way they are statted. I think this version of my game is removing “proficiency bonus” the way it works in 5e. You’ll still have a base attack bonus that increases with level, but skills are moving to a skill ranks system ala 3e, and saves are probably going to use the New Modifiers system.

And, two house rules that I’ve been using for a while now that are going to stay: Hit Points are your Hit Die plus your CON Score (no modifiers ever added) and Stats are 1d6+8 six times, assign as desired.

The first thing I’m going to wholly design for this is probably the Barbarian, because I have an interesting and new take on it.

One of the biggest questions I keep seeing about Old-School Essentials is, “What vintage adventures are compatible with the system?”

The most common refrain to this is, any vintage TSR module–but be careful using AD&D modules, because the AC will be off by 1.

Let’s put aside, for the moment, that one should never reference exact stats for a different game than the one you are currently running–if the module calls for an orc, you refer to the orc from Old-School Essentials, not the printed stats in the module. Even if they match, or OSE purports to be an exact match, you should abide by the stats of your system–not the module.

Also, if the AC is only off by 1, that’s 5% chance on a d20. Will it break the game if the AC of the orc is 6 instead of 7? Absolutely not. It should be fine to just ignore.

But, I wanted to investigate the wisdom. Is it actually true that the AC is off by 1? Let’s do the work.

Read more: AC in OSE, AD&D, and Modules

To start with, we’re gonna need the basic AC values from OD&D (I will get into why in a moment), B/X, OSE, and AD&D 1e’s Player’s Handbook. The OD&D values were actually quite hard to find; I couldn’t find an exact match in the Men & Magic book to just tell me if Plate Mail was AC 2 or what. I couldn’t find it quickly detailed in Chainmail or Greyhawk, either, and had to resort to Delving Deeper (I double-checked against Fantastic Medieval Campaigns for accuracy):

Here we see, indeed, that the base unarmoured AC for 1e is 10, rather than B/X and OD&D’s 9. Fine, seems like everyone is right, and we could end it there. But…there needs to be more interrogation.

You see, AD&D 1e’s Monster Manual was released in 1977, before the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. And I have long heard that the Monster Manual simply reused many of its stats from OD&D, rather than updating them to the AD&D AC standard–indeed, it may be that at the time of the Monster Manual’s publication, the new standard had not even been created yet.

So, we need evidence. Let’s grab orcs. They’re in every edition of the game and we should be able to look at them easy.

Wait. What the fuck? Why are orcs at 6AC still in AD&D? Leather armour is 6 AC in B/X and earlier, but 6 AC in AD&D is studded leather. Are AD&D orcs wearing studded leather? Or perhaps scale mail? Their description offers nothing.

It’s possible the AC values for AD&D are supposed to simply be abstracted–orcs have 6 AC, and it’s up to the DM to determine if this means they have studded leather, ring mail and shield, etc. Hey, who am I to argue?

Some of the monsters just are straight up different, which helps no one.

So, here’s what we’ve figured out: The monsters in the AD&D 1e Monster Manual do in fact conform to OD&D and B/X AC standards. In most cases, where they aren’t changed entirely to something clearly different, they opted to simply leave the AC the same and not bother to “adjust” to what it “should be” according to the new scale. In cases of humanoid men, typically they included a %-based table of what equipment they had; in these cases I assume you were to use the PC-facing armour class table to determine their AC. But an ogre just has AC 5, no matter if this scale is different.

But…this whole thing kicked off because of modules, not because of the AD&D Monster Manual. By my own admission, one needs not look at the AD&D Monster Manual at all, merely what is in the modules. Well, I wanted to do the research, because I need to know: Are the monsters as printed in modules bespoke, or are they simply reprinted from the Monster Manual?

To check this out, we’re gonna start with a couple famous modules that are likely to be rec’d and used in OSE’s format. Let’s start with T1: The Village of Hommlet, and see if we can’t find a few of the baddies we’ve already looked at.

Of first note, there’s some bandits and included is the table of what AC they should have based on their equipment–helpful. Let’s compare these AC against OSE:

So, their AC actually is going off the AD&D PHB, meaning their AC is actually worse than if we just used the proper values for OSE. If you use these values, the bandits will actually be easier to hit than they were in AD&D…maybe. I gotta be real: I’m not an AD&D 1e expert and it’s possible the to hit and STR modifiers are different enough to account for this.

Here’s our ogre friend, with 5 AC as expected. The same as in OSE.

Let’s move on to N1: Against The Cult of the Reptile God, a classic. This has no orcs but it does have goblins:

I could go on with more deep diving into old modules, but based on these two examples, I think it’s safe to say that the standard was to just grab the stats from the Monster Manual and reprint them. So, even less than we’ve thought, do we need to worry about the difference in AC.

In January, we lost famous gaming pioneer Jennell Jacquays. Much has been written about her in that time. The day the news came down, I sent a message in my Discord that I would be running her classic Judge’s Guild module, The Caverns of Thracia, in OD&D (Original D&D from 1974), with a handful of house rules, partially inspired by Luke Gearing’s Snackrifice.

I told the players that this was expected to be a one-off but could expand a little bit if we were having fun. I didn’t anticipate finishing the dungeon as it’s fucking huge, but I did figure we would get through to some of it. The first session had a total of 7 players and me–a real OD&D party! Scheduling eventually got in the way and after only two sessions, I could tell that this basically wasn’t working, for a variety of reasons. Let’s talk about what I learned.

The first thing: OD&D is the wrong system for this module. For a while I was under the impression the module had been published in 1975, which is how I pitched it to my players.

Part of this was ostensibly so I could deal with descending AC all on my side of the screen without the players worrying about it, but inevitably there was an argument about how descending AC works and what target numbers you actually want to hit were. Felt like a right of passage.

Anyway, it turns out the module was released in 1979 according to the copyright. I had chosen OD&D because I was inspired by playing in Snackrifice and wanted to try running OD&D out. I had a few house rules–I added the Paladin and Bard classes from the original Strategic Review sources, but no others. I redid the equipment and weapon lists from Snackrifice, and tweaked a thing or two here and there. You can check out the house rules doc here.

The problem is: Jacquays was on the fucking cutting edge of this shit. At one point there is a gnome who has Illusionist levels, something I hadn’t accounted for at all in my prep. There are several monsters not present in OD&D, but would have been in the Strategic Review or in Dragon or even in the AD&D Monster Manual by 1979. (These monsters are perfectly useable in OD&D, as they don’t even account for the AC changes in the AD&D 1e Player’s Handbook.) So, I was learning, there was a lot of stuff in the module that the system wasn’t really set up for. If I were to do it again, I’d use Old School Essentials with the Advanced Fantasy add-ons.

The second thing: The group didn’t like the system. With 7 players, it’s hard to suit everybody. Most players of mine are happy to go along with whatever bullshit I’m doing and have a good time; some of them are clearly happier about doing an OSR dungeon crawl than others, and even those who clearly aren’t into it as much are happy to be a good sport to be in a game I’m running. I would say, though, that the overwhelming amount of my players ended up really chafing against 1975 standards, or even OSR standards in general.

They balked at the idea that sometimes you want to roll the d20 high and sometimes you want to roll low (Thracia occasionally calls for roll-under stat checks), that sometimes situations call for a 1:6 chance and other times they call for a d20 check or even a saving throw, they balked at the weird saving throws and then further got frustrated and confused when the module called for a weird saving throw.

(I recall one trap that called for a save vs. breath to avoid it; the player was baffled when I explained that vs. breath is typically “vs dragon breath, but sometimes they use it as a catch-all Dex save,” something many of us are comfortable with and accept, but honestly, they got rid of this shit for a reason.)

Even if I had used a system like Old School Essentials, I don’t know that it would have “worked” for this particular group. Many of them have lots of 3.5e or 5e experience and would probably prefer a system with a unified resolution mechanic–something like bastards with its unified d20-roll-under-stat mechanic would probably have worked fine! Just player preference, is all. I could have decided to run this in 5e and those players would have been as happy as a pig in shit. (Not an indictment of 5e or those players, btw.)

The third thing is that, even against those grains, the players had fun, and engaged in good faith. They engaged in a little bit of faction play, openly communicating with the lizardmen on two different occasions. They mapped their own dungeon and even let it get a little fucked up (but not too fucked up!), and checked for secret doors and all the normal bullshit. One guy got fucked up from a crit from the carrion crawler in the very first encounter, and immediately had that character’s son show up with the exact same stats, but with a fucking helmet this time. (I even gave that guy a save vs. Death at 0hp, which he sadly failed.)

After 40 minutes or so, everyone was engaged in the OSR 70s mode as much as they could be, looking for ways to use their limited spells or abilities (the Bard charm came in handy twice!) to bypass encounters rather than engage in combat as first resort. They didn’t care about backstories, recognizing that the goal here was to get treasure, because treasure = XP.

I also used my longstanding house rule of not dividing XP. If the players found 1000gp, they got 1000 XP. They still had to divide the gold up evenly amongst them. This meant that players started to level up pretty quickly early on, but I suspect this evens them out around 4th or 5th level. I don’t mind doing this in harder edged OSR systems (like OD&D or OSE) because we likely aren’t going to play longer than a handful of sessions. For some of these people, this might be the only time they ever play OD&D. Let them level up a little bit. It’s not going to hurt anything. I even didn’t make them go back to town or anything, just let them level up right there in the dungeon, like it’s Dragon Quest or something. These are all millennials who have been playing JRPGs their entire life, nobody gives a shit.

Mind you, I think they got a little too much XP from monsters. Delving Deeper (and I think all of OD&D) says that monsters should give 100XP per hit die. That’s obviously a little too much especially if I’m not dividing them between players, so if I were using OSE or something that provided different numbers for monster XP, I probably wouldn’t have had that part of the issue.

All in all, I still had a great time. I think if I’d ran with OSE to begin with, or chose a system with a unified resolution mechanic, then the game would have lasted a little longer. I was up for a third session, but we had scheduling problems and so I decided to call it good there, and no one seemed all that upset about it. One day I’ll return to Thracia–hopefully after Goodman Games puts out a nice, beefy Original Adventures Reincarnated version. Maybe I’ll even run it in 5e.