Earlier this month we visited my brother and his family and got on a little AD&D. The game was great, but the best part might have been going through the books and stuff that he had. What made this special was that these were the EXACT books we had used so much back in the day.
1e AD&D Hardback Books
The Unearthed Arcana is a little out of place, as not only did it not join the others until late in the game, so to speak, but we didn’t actually use it all that much even after it did. And the Deities & Demigods cyclopedia was not used a whole lot, either, despite the fact that we had it for a long time.
Most of these books were mine. The Player’s Handbook was “jointly owned.” The Fiend Folio belonged to my brother. I don’t recall the exact details, but at some point I traded most of my Traveller stuff to my brother for his share of the Players Handbook and some other stuff (or maybe cash). Later, as 2nd Edition was coming out, I traded all of these to him and got my Traveller stuff back.
The big six
As I’m sure is the case with others and their books, each of these has a bit of story (or several stories) that go with it.
The Players Handbook is the “new art” version because we had been borrowing a friend’s PHB for a long time. Instead of buying a PHB like I planned one day, I grabbed the DMG instead. By the time we saved our pennies and bought a new PHB, the new cover was out. Though at first we liked the new artwork, it didn’t take me long to wish for the original.
Our Dungeon Masters Guide, like I mentioned, was bought one day when I was supposed to buying a Players Handbook so we could give back the borrowed one. The DMG was a few dollars more ($15 instead of $12, if I remember right) but I bought it after seeing all the wonderful stuff inside. Up until that point we had been playing with the PHB only. This book saw a lot of hard use and looks it, but it still works great.
This Monster Manual was bought when I and a friend (the one we were borrowing the PHB from) made a spur-of-the-moment decision to drive an hour to the nearest game store and buy it. Except, when we got there, the store had just closed for the day. It was next to a mall and I knew that a toy store also carried D&D stuff, so we ran in only to see the portcullis closing on that store as well. My friend talked the manager into getting us a copy of the MM and sliding it under the gate, and we slipped him the cash.
The Fiend Folio was bought by my brother, maybe even before we got the Monster Manual. Though we had the regular monster stats in the back of the DMG, I didn’t know too much about the FF monsters. For many months he guarded it like a spellbook in an attempt to keep the new monsters a secret from me. I seem to recall whole adventures where I ran into nothing but unfamiliar FF monsters. In the days when we lived an hour from the nearest store that carried D&D and no internet, you could get away with moves like that.
I bought Deities & Demigods with the store credit I got when I returned Star Frontiers. I remember that the store manager was not happy that I was returning the game (in perfect condition except that I had punched the counters) but after Traveller I was terribly disappointed in it. So we got Deities & Demigods, which I was also pretty disappointed in once the novelty of statting up gods and goddesses wore off. Also, my brother liked Star Frontiers and turned around and bought his own set not much later.
The Monster Manual II was also a bit of a disappointment, though we did use a lot of the monsters quite often over the years. I already owned The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth module, so a lot of the monsters in MM2 were not new to me. I think my favorite single thing about the book was the d8+d12 random encounter table method it introduced. That remains my favorite.
Looking through the books, seeing the familiar pencil marks, tears, and stains was quite a trip down memory lane. And playing a game with my brother, the first time we had played an RPG together since 1989 or 1990, was a blast. The fact that my son played, too, was icing on the cake.
AD&D Game: A good time was had by all.
Tags: AD&D
Last year I posted about the book The Terror by Dan Simmons, a fictionalized account of the Lost Franklin Expedition to find the Northwest Passage in 1845. I think the book will appeal to a lot of gamers and I enjoyed it immensely.
In the news today is the story about finding the wreck of one of the ships sent out to find the Franklin expedition, the HMS Investigator. While searching for the lost ships caught in the ice, the Investigator became caught in the ice herself and was eventually abandoned in 1853. The wreck is remarkably well-preserved in the cold Arctic waters.
Tags: literature
It occurred to me that nearly everyone who wants to give Five Color Magic a try in their own game will want to tweak it a bit. So I uploaded a .doc version of the lists for you to mess with:
Click here to download Five Color Magic in .doc format
Tags: Five Colors, Kreations, Labyrinth Lord
Last week I wondered aloud about the possibility of reorganizing the spell lists and spellcaster classes into five schools or spheres based loosely on that one card game. As I’ve thought about it some more and got my son involved, we’ve come to like the idea more and more. So, without further ado, here is the list of spell levels 1 through 5 in PDF form:
Five Color Magic - Free PDF
There are, I think, a lot of benefits to doing something along these lines. Most of all, it gives five fairly equally-playable classes instead of four where one (the druid) is often seen as out of place and another (the illusionist) is often not viable. Plus it solves the issue of “just what is the cleric class doing in the game, anyway?” which has always bugged me a bit. Rather than one powerful spellcaster and one supporting cast member, there are five flavors of adventuring wizard, each with strengths and weaknesses.
I should say that this list is not exaclty what we’ve come up with for our own game. We’ve added a few spells (such as a full complement of cure wounds spells) and some other minor tweaking along the way. I wanted a fairly standard list for others, though, so I’ve removed our own spells and used the standard names from Labyrinth Lord’s Advanced Edition Companion.
One thing we’ve done on our own list is to slightly adjust the spell’s flavor to better suit the color it ended up in. For instance, in our list the illusionist spell obscuring mist is in the red list so we changed it to obscuring smoke to better match red’s theme of fire. And some of the overtly-religious spells have also been re-named while keeping the same mechanical effect. Bless, for instance, became rally.
Some of the slotting decisions were arbitrary, and no doubt others will want to adjust things to their liking before giving it a try. Our own list is still in a state of flux and will probably continue to be so for some time as we keep tinkering. One thing that I did leave in from our take are the separate elemental conjuration spells (as the druid handles it) rather than the all-in-one conjure elemental magic-user spell. Splitting up the conjuration and banishment of elementals from the various elemental planes really plays to the strength of the color-based system, so I included it here.
Our basic idea is to use five wizard classes, one for each color. A wizard will only be able to cast spells of his own color or from the “colorless” list which consists of general magical function spells. An optional idea is to allow wizards of higher levels to begin getting access to lower-level spells from the two sympathetic colors (white and red for green, for instance). We haven’t quite worked out how we’ll manage that.
Another thing we’ve been thinking about is making spells of seventh-level and above require cooperative casting by wizards from two or more colors.
One thing I should say is that this does not at all, I think, turn D&D into some sort of Magic: The Roleplaying Game. The spells themselves remain the same as in the original game and the number cast per day is unchanged. This is simply an attempt to look at an alternative class system for spellcasting adventurers.
Take a look if interested and, by all means, give me some feedback on this. It has gone from something done out of curiosity to something that is looking more and more worthwhile to use in our game. In fact, my son’s enthusiasm for the idea has us working on taking some of these ideas beyond just the magic system and re-tooling our homebrew game in a more significant manner. I’ll have more on that in the near future if we keep at it.
Tags: Five Colors, kilgore edition game, Kreations
Came across this book while looking for something:
What is Dungeons & Dragons? by Butterfield, Parker, and Honingmann
I think I got it as part of a bundle on eBay a while back. Meant to look through it but forgot all about it. Looks fairly interesting and I will have to read through it when I get a chance.
Tags: literature
‘Conan’ painting by late Pa. artist goes for $1.5M
A 1971 painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta has sold for $1.5 million, two months after the Pennsylvania artist’s death.
Frazetta’s managers said this week that a private collector bought “Conan the Destroyer” from a family trust. Managers Robert Pistella and Stephen Ferzoco call it the price the highest ever for a work by Frazetta.
Conan the Destroyer
by Frank Frazetta
Tags: literature
Noticed this bit in the AD&D Players Handbook (pg. 40) on clerics getting their spells:
Note that the cleric might well be judged by his or her deity at such time, as the clerk must supplicate the deity for the granting of these spells. While the deity may grant such spells full willingly, a deed, or sacrifice, atonement or abasement may be required. The deity might also ignore a specific spell request and give the cleric some other spell (or none at all). Your Dungeon Master will handle this considering a cleric’s alignment and faithfulness to it and his or her deity. [emphasis Kilgore's]
I’m sure I’ve read that passage many times before, but I sure don’t remember it. We knew that clerics were required to remain in good standing with their patron deity, but I don’t ever recall the DM simply ruling that spells weren’t granted. As for clerics taking too many cure light wounds spells, here’s the solution, I guess.
Something that I’ve thought about off and on for several years concerns re-working the spellcasting classes in D&D. I’ve never been 100% convinced that the cleric belongs in the game, at least not in the “adventuring religious fighting priest” concept, and though I think the illusionist is interesting, he doesn’t seem viable except in certain circumstances. I’ve re-envisioned clerics as mystic warriors, removed the religious themes to the class, and explained their spells as being more like powers. I’ve described how magic works in our game. I’ve tweaked spells slightly and dropped the pre-memorization requirements. But still I’m not overly thrilled with any of the spellcaster classes.
So I dusted off an idea I had for Swords & Wizardry White Box last year and redid the spell lists. I took all the spells and sorted them into five “colors” or “schools” loosely based on (and this is sure to ruffle some feathers) the Magic: The Gathering card game.
(Yes, I realize I just lost a lot of folks right there. That’s okay. If someone is likely to arbitrarily dismiss ideas just because they sound like something from WotC games, I’m not really interested in their opinion anyway.)
So I have red magic, white magic, green magic, blue magic, and black magic. With red wizards, white wizards, green wizards, blue wizards, and black wizards to use it. Roughly one-sixth of the spells at each level are “colorless,” meaning they’re available to wizards of any color. Spells like read magic, hold portal, light, dancing lights, and dispel magic can be used by any wizards.
Reversed versions of spells are separate in this system, meaning that detect evil and detect good are separate spells on separate lists. The same goes for cure light wounds and cause light wounds.
White wizards are not necessarily good, but they cast a lot of the healing and protection spells. However, even though many of their spells are from the standard cleric’s list, they aren’t exactly clerics. Magic missile, for instance, is a white spell.
Black wizards, of course, deal with darkness and death. They get the cause wounds spells, sleep, and lots of the other nasty magics. They end up being a sort of anti-cleric/necromancer mix that isn’t afraid to mix it up.
Blue wizards are the masters of illusion, trickery, and water and sky. Much (though not all) of the standard illusionist spell list is available to blue wizards, and they also get some spells that deal with unseen forces such as feather fall, invisibility, and teleport.
Red wizards are masters of fire, chaos, and warfare. Many of the fire-based spells (like fireball and pyrotechnics) are theirs, as well as a good selection of direct combat-related magic and monster summoning.
Finally, green wizards are not only in tune with nature and life with spells like sticks to snakes and entangle, they get some pure magic like fly, knock, and charm person. Though many standard druid spells were spread out among the other four colors, a lot of them stayed with the green wizard.
The spell lists still need a little tweaking, but I’m pretty happy with them after the first stage of sorting. I’ve done spell levels one through six, which is as high as our game is currently designed to go.
I’m toying with the idea of giving each type of wizard a special power, such as turning undead for white wizards and maybe even some weapon/armor allowances (or even thief skills?) for others, but I haven’t got that far yet. I’m also considering wizards of one color to have access to the spells of another complementary color once at higher levels.
I’m not at all sure where this is going to go. Maybe it won’t ever be used at all. One major downside is the fact that it would pretty much wreck compatibility, something that we’ve been trying hard to maintain. I’ll keep messing with it for a while and see how it turns out.
UPDATE: Check out the first draft of the list here.
Tags: Five Colors
