One thing I did not realize until a couple of years ago is that original edition D&D used an armor class scale with 9 representing unarmored. I had always thought that was just some Basic edition wonkery, but it is instead really Advanced edition wonkiness.
To make it even more wonkilicious, the Advanced D&D Monster Manual did NOT adjust monsters’ AC at all from the AC 9 Original system to the AC 10 Advanced system. So an AC 6 orc went from three steps better than an unarmored man to four steps better. It seems that they just left monster ACs where they were. Whether this was intentional or an oversight, I do not know. I guess it’s also possible that the decision to go with the AC 10 system had not been made by the time the Monster Manual, the first of the AD&D books published, was finalized.
Comparing Original edition monsters’ ACs to Advanced edition monsters makes it pretty obvious.
Out of 58 monsters listed in Vol 2, excluding men, dragons, giants, and sea monsters (which were either listed “variable” or shared the same AC between types in the original edition), 49 (84%) have the same AC in Original and first Advanced edition despite the change of the base unarmored AC to 10 from 9. That right there should show clearly that no adjustment of monster AC due to the new standard was made.
Of the 9 which have different ACs, only one (the wraith) has the increase of 1 that such an adjustment would be expected to produce.
Below are the changed monsters and what the AC change was in original to first edition:
Wraith AC 3 to 4
Vampire AC 2 to 1
Medusa AC 8 to 5
Chimera AC 4 to 6/5/2
Pixie AC 6 to 5
Dryad AC 5 to 9
Treant AC 2 to 0
Djinn AC 5 to 4
Eftreet AC 3 to 2
For our adventures in the Forbidden Jungle, we’ve had to modify our Labyrinth Minions system to include the native tribesmen who are hiring themselves out to hunters, explorers, and adventurers.
There is a steady stream of people from the settled lands across the sea arriving in the crowded town at the mouth of the huge river which snakes up into the Heart of Darkness. Many of these (which we call “old worlders”) arrive with hopes of gold, ivory, and glory but soon find themselves with nothing but a rusty sword and an empty stomach. They are only too willing to hire themselves out as porters, torch bearers, or men-at-arms to an expedition.
Also, the word has spread among the native tribes that gold can be earned by working for these crazy old worlders. So there is usually no shortage of natives looking for work as well. Unlike most campaigns I’ve run, in the Forbidden Jungle there is no shortage of potential hirelings.
And it’s a good thing, as the Forbidden Jungle is a deadly place. The natives know and accept this with a grim determination. The newcomers maybe don’t, but with no family on the continent there is no one to complain if someone heads out on an expedition but never returns. Most of the old worlders who don’t return are never missed by anyone. It’s sad, but the jungle has no sympathy.
Here is the modified version of the Minions sheet:
Jungle Minions
Free PDF
The native tribesmen are more lightly armed and armored than the old-worlders but are a bit hardier in the environment as reflected by their slightly better hit points. The scale mail for the tribesmen can represent either new world scale mail or perhaps some special tribal construction.
Tags: Forbidden Jungle, Kreations, Labyrinth Lord
The family reconvened for another foray in the Forbidden Jungle with new PCs they had rolled up since the previous TPK. My wife had a halfling druid (great move for the environment) while my daughter went with a dwarf fighter she had rolled up on her own one day. My son, meanwhile, took advantage of the fact that the rules for multi-classed characters using our new XP and advancement system* were finally coalescing and created an elf cleric/magic-user.
They decided to spend a day searching for hirelings as their previous trek into the jungle ended badly at the hands of goblin raiders. Being short of funds, they could only afford to hire two men at arms, an old worlder with leather, sword, and shield and a native tribesman* with scale mail, spear, and shield. I explained that the tribesman’s scale was in rough shape, and my daughter wondered if it might not be stolen. I did nothing to discourage the thought.
Rumors floating around town centered around a tower across the big river, off to the southeast. My son’s previous character, the ranger detailed here, had been to this tower but had told the boatmaster he had not been able to locate it. Despite the ranger’s story, the amount of loot he brought back out of the jungle had set the townsfolk a-talking. So the party decided to set out in search of this tower. They rented canoes and paddled across the river. The elf had trouble and was nearly washed out to sea, but after an hour of fierce effort they were all safely across and the canoes hidden.
After an afternoon of jungle trekking, they set camp for the night. Being as everyone was in good shape and the weather was good, they decided not to set a fire. All three PCs have infravision (simply good night vision in our game) and the three of them decided to take turns on watch. Shortly after the other bedded down, my daughter’s dwarf spotted a man and a mule loaded with packs and tools making their way southward. As the dwarf had surprise, he quietly watched as the man stopped and set up camp. Soon the man was snoring away. The dwarf let him sleep and waked the halfling druid for her watch.
The druid (played by my wife) cast a Speak With Animals and asked the mule what was going on. The mule complained about being awakened but informed her that they were headed toward the sea. Apparently the previous place had not worked out, though the halfling didn’t understand exactly what that meant. The halfling thanked the mule and let the strangers sleep. At the crack of dawn the man awoke, grumbled about his sore bones, and set off toward the south with his mule in tow.
The party continued on their way through the jungle, taking cover when a group of five elephants rumbled past. The old worlder man-at-arms, a newcomer to the new world, wanted to take one down for the ivory. Fortunately, both the elf and the halfling talked him out of trying. Soon they stumbled upon the tower they sought, but while they looked it over they were surprised by something in the trees.
An arrow flew into the tree next to the old-worlder’s head, and not waiting to see who was shooting at them, the party ran for the tower. A huge set of bronze double doors, one of them slightly ajar (from the ranger’s previous visit), was visible through the vines overgrowing the tower, and they fled inside. The native tribesman, slowed by his scale mail, lagged behind and was narrowly missed by another arrow. But soon they were all safe inside.
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Tags: Forbidden Jungle, session
We’ve roughly defined the mystic/magic philosophy that we will use in our game. In our world, there is a mystical power field that permeates the universe. We’re calling it “The Force” until we can come up with something better.
Clerics use this power to perform magic by meditating and letting the energy flow through them, using metaphysical discipline to “plug in” to it and channel it for their purposes. Druids use similar methods, but rather than meditating and using mind over body to access the mystic force, they commune with nature and use their understanding of life and the natural world to draw upon it.
Magic-users and illusionists, on the other hand, use science, physics, and mathematical formulae to tap into this force, siphoning off a small amount and harnessing it so they can force it to perform magic for them. It is not a partnership with the force like clerics and druids employ, but rather a method of exploiting its power.
There are beings who call themselves gods and goddesses, and people worship these beings. But they are really no more than very powerful monsters. Clerics may be affiliated with a religion, but that religion is not the source of their power.
We’re more or less sticking with the three-alignment system, but we’re switching the terminology a little to fit in with our worldview:
Light Side: These beings are most often good and generally lawful. Though not necessarily kind or even law-abiding, they will stand together if the final battle comes. Light Side characters are opposed to the Dark Side but they usually do not fight it on a daily basis.
Dark Side: These are usually not terribly nice and often quite evil. Dark Side characters are not always opposed to the Light Side characters, but their views of the world and how it should be run are self-centered and generally chaotic.
Unaligned: These beings are not on either the Light Side or the Dark Side. This does not mean they are in the middle. They are simply not on anyone else’s side. If the final battle comes, most of them will hide until it’s over.
This system is very much in keeping with my view of clerics as mystic warriors, though we do not allow them to use edged weapons.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that spell casters DO NOT need to pre-memorize spells. Time must be spent in study/meditation but any spell the caster knows can be cast at any time. The number of spells per day per level is unchanged, though a higher level slot can be used to cast a lower level spell if desired. To slightly offset the large advantage that this gives spell casters, casting the same spell more than once in a day requires a successful save vs. spells. Subsequent attempts are save at -2 for the third try, -4 for the fourth, and so on.
If the save fails, the spell does not work, but we haven’t decided if it uses up that slot for the day or not.
Also, clerics and druids have “known spells” just as magic-users and illusionists do, though they do not have spellbooks. Clerics simply have patterns in the Force that they recognize and meditate upon, while druids have rune-inscribed stones or pieces of wood that serve as their “spell book.” They usually carry these around on a leather loop.
Finding a new rune stone is how druids acquire new spells, or they can try to create their own rune stone for a spell they want to learn. Clerics learn new spells by finding them written down or are taught them by other clerics. I haven’t quite worked that out yet.
Over the past year I’ve bounced back and forth between several games I’ve wanted to play. Initially, as I’ve written about several times previously, I planned to play a mostly by-the-book Labyrinth Lord game and a houseruled-and-modified-to-the-hilt Swords & Wizardry White Box game. Time limitations and a great deal of respect for the B/X clone Labyrinth Lord made me drop the White Box plans. I was disappointed about the missed opportunity to tinker with the lower power curve of White Box, but I was relieved to have one game to rule them all. And it was a simple one with enough options for all the gaming we’d ever need.
Then the Advanced Edition Companion came. By taking what I liked most about the 1st edition of AD&D and porting it over to the Labyrinth Lord engine, it was truly just about the Perfect Fantasy Game. A couple minor house rules, and we’d be set forever.
But a couple of my ideas for the White Box game have kept gnawing at me, particularly an alternative experience/advancement system, the possible use of ascending armor class, and the greatly simplified way that monsters are handled.
So I began work on my custom advancement system and decided that we’d give it a try in our Forbidden Jungle game. To simplify things for others, I decided to put together class charts listing advancements, and I tacked on an attack bonus to use with AAC. As most of the hard work was done, I decided to add in the rest of the class information into my level tables, as well, to replace the default pages in the Labyrinth Lord book. This way we could work in some of our house rules, such as d6 hit dice for thieves and magic-users getting bonus spells for high intelligence the same way that clerics do for high wisdom. We also tinkered a little with weapon damage values, so those would have to be updated as well.
It was somewhere in there that the trouble started. Because I was re-doing the tables, I began to tweak a few more things. Just here and there as needed. Thief skills needed a little kicker, and the read languages was just not quite right. Fighters needed a slight advantage in attack progression over rangers and paladins, and all three fighter classes needed to begin with better to-hit numbers than the other classes. We’re going to use retainers/henchmen heavily, and I decided to up the maximum number a couple for each point of charisma. And so on.
With my son’s help, we’ve pretty worked our way through the player’s section (except spells) and re-worked everything into our own customized Labyrinth Lord. I have a few reservations about this, as it means we’ll be playing a different game than everyone else who plays LL. But we’re trying to be careful as we go, making sure that none of our tweaks and re-interpretations are drastic.
I think we’ve succeeded so far, and a fourth-level fighter in our game will be analogous to a fourth-level fighter in anyone else’s game. We want our game to be considered “compatible” with other LL or old-school games. Just because our clerics are a bit different in the details than standard clerics won’t really matter. Just because our characters advance using a different system won’t invalidate what it means to be X level. There will be little fiddly bits that are at odds, but there already are in nearly everyone’s game that uses any house rules and I’m not concerned with a conflict over what a seventh-level thief’s pick pockets percentage is.
Now I’m doing monsters, building what is essentially a customized Labyrinth Lord version of the combined monster table from OD&D. I’m tweaking things as I go, with a significant change being the elimination of multiple attack routines and replacing them with a single attack. Many monsters are also undergoing a slight “de-powering” during this process, something which is related to our efforts to make the game slightly more survivable. But if a dungeon we build has “three bugbears” in it, it will be perfectly usable in standard campaigns by simply putting three standard bugbears in it.
This is all sort of a grand experiment. The fun has been upped by my son’s participation and the final product will certainly be the better for it. Will we finish it? Who knows? My ultimate end state would be a printed and coil-bound full version of our game for use in play. That’s a long ways off, as today we’ve got a bunch of tables with simple notes listed in between. But we’re moving ahead a little bit every day, and we’re playing as we go.
Realized that my post of my One-Page Dungeon (which isn’t even a dungeon) is part of what vanished into the ethereal plane this week. Here it is again:
The Heart of Darkness
One Page Dungeon
As a side note, I’ve made several significant changes to this one-pager as we’ve begun playing. The most immediately noticeable is the scale of 15 miles per hex. My plan had been to map things out using 1-league (3 mile) sub-hexes, with 1-mile detail hexes only when/where necessary. However, I decided to go with an “everything conforms to hex sides” plan but was stuck with river hexes three miles wide. So I decided to go back to the good old “5 miles per large scale hex” scale, making the area covered by the one-page map only a third as big. I think, as it’s all heavy jungle, that it will still provide far more than enough territory for the low- and mid-level adventuring this eastern section of the Forbidden Jungle is intended for.
Tags: Forbidden Jungle
Kilgore’s site suffered a level drain at the hands of an undead host server. The unholy abomination has apparently been turned and the adventure can now continue. Unfortunately, a small amount of content (including some reader comments) have been lost.
UPDATE: Hmm. I seem to have lost more content on this site than on some other sites that I run which are hosted on the same server at my hosting provider. I’m not sure if it will be able to be restored from my own back-ups or not.
ANOTHER UPDATE: I think I’ve got everything here more or less restored except for the post I accidentally published with some notes about the Forbidden Jungle. That wasn’t supposed to see the light of day (at least in that format) and was only the beginning of a new idea dump for my own use.
Got in more hours of gaming on Friday and Saturday than I’d managed in the previous six months, I think. The first session with my son on Friday night was one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever played, and we followed it up on Saturday morning with another (shorter) successful session.
His ranger was dismayed to discover that the trolls are keeping a closer eye on their hoard now that he’s stolen some of it while they were away from their lair, but was excited to check out a little more of the tower he’s been exploring and managed to get back to town with another ivory tusk. Another NPC bit the dust, this time a thief who fell victim to the undead monkeys within the tower when the characters failed to take sufficient precautions.
That evening my wife and daughter rolled up PCs and we had our third-ever whole-family game. The two new PCs joined my son’s ranger and yet another NPC and headed into the wild. After some tense moments when they became disoriented in the trackless jungle, they managed to find their way back toward town and drove off some jungle goblin raiders near town. Unfortunately, the next morning they ran into more goblins and were wiped out.
The first time we all played together, the party was captured out by goblins. The second session we all played together was a successful rescue mission with new PCs. And now the third time was a TPK. Though I want the threat of danger to be very real and want 1st-level characters to be justifiably frail, the death rate is discouraging. My son, in particular, was pretty upset about losing the ranger that had done so well in the first two sessions.
He and I have discussed this extensively and we are going to be making a few tweaks to improve the survivability of PCs. I’m going to up the binding of wounds from 1d4-1 hit points per battle to 1d6, and the overnight healing is going to be upped to 1d6 hit points as well. I think this is in keeping with the sword & sorcery vibe I’m going for. Battles are savage and death is not uncommon, but soon the characters are back into the thick of it. So we’re going to give it a try.
I’ve got another change, much more significant, in mind as well, but I want to think on it a bit. The goal is to increase survivability at the first couple levels without altering game balance or making mid-level characters TOO powerful. I also want the risk of PC death to remain significant, and even a threat to well-played characters. It’s a fine line and one that I think a lot of people have trouble with.
Tags: Forbidden Jungle, session
