Kickstarter: Book of Fell Wisdom (Adventures Dark & Deep)

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/brwgames/adventures-dark-and-deep-book-of-fell-wisdom

I like Adventures Dark & Deep a lot. As an expanded and reimagined first edition game, it is one of the best we have outside of OSRIC. We are getting a new book this year: basically, everything that didn't make it into the ADAD tomes we have, plus some of the PDF-exclusive evil classes the creator put out. And here is a list from the notification pager:

• Clerical servants of demon lords
• Necromancers
• Witches
• Alchemy
• Ley Lines
• Demiplanes
• New spells
• Followers for high-level characters
• Courtly intrigue
• Generational play

I am looking forward to this one a lot, since ADAD is the de facto new standard of first-edition gaming, expanded and beautifully presented in two massive tomes of first-edition goodness. Outside of Old School Essentials, this is one of the best OSR games out there, well worth your attention, and it captures the 1E vibe perfectly.

The Kickstarter should be happening in the next week, sometime from what I hear, so put this one on your radar, and if you haven't checked this out, please do so!

Cleaning Up My DCC Library

I have too much junk!

The zine culture, small publishing, endless modules, crowd-funded mega modules, and all this other "stuff" for DCC have my game bloated and unplayable. The DCC bloat feels as bad as the Shadowdark bloat at this time, and I find myself having to pare down my collection to the absolute best of the best and put all the junk in storage.

I am there with 5E, and I found focusing my collection just on Tales of the Valiant, and using the Shard VTT to support it with character creation, is my best answer for the mire of junk I find myself stuck in.

All of a sudden, 5E feels playable again.

The mess of options and fluff is gone.

And I am left with a smaller, more focused, compelling game. It is so easy to get overwhelmed when a game reaches a specific size; you just quit playing it.

I am there with DCC right now, and I can't play the game and shy away from it since my shelf is a mess, crowded, filled with junk, and unplayable. I would play you more if I had less of you. I want a smaller, cleaner, more focused "fun center" and not one stocked and jammed with so many books it looks like a disaster zone.

Right now, I don't even have any room for my dice on that shelf, and it is a huge shelf. When a game gets larger than one shelf, it is too much game.

I get why some flock to one-book games, like the excellent Dragonslayer. One book is all you need. Not a library. I could play this and one of the megadungeons, and be set.

Off the Shelf: Hyperborea

Let's pull Hyperborea out of our storage crates and put the game back on the shelves.

Hyperborea is very similar to the classic first edition, and it's compatible with both Swords & Wizardry and OSRIC. It is a strange game meant for swords and sorcery and not high fantasy. Hyperborea is a better choice (for some) than Dungeon Crawl Classics, offering a more traditional experience that lacks much of that game's table-based play and randomness, while retaining an intense, gonzo, Conan-style feel.

I have not really gotten into Hyperborea, as I am more of a fan of first and second editions than I am heavily modified derivatives. Still, I see the strengths of a game like this, where the experience is more like savage sorcery than your traditional Arthurian knights. Modern Dungeons & Dragons tends to slip into a pseudo-Renaissance setting mixed with the Knights of the Round Table. These days, D&D is more an allegory for modern street adventures than anything in the fantasy genre. I like a heavily themed game that gives me a barbaric feeling, as this one does.

The game is contained in two books, one for players and the other for referees, and it is a tight implementation of the rules. It is 100% compatible with any first edition or even Swords and Wizardry, so you will not go without adventures or monsters.

The magic is more traditional and does not have spell failure or spell mishaps like Dungeon Crawl Classics does. The original game never had wacky spell failure, so I understand where they’re coming from. The gonzo and crazy nature of the world is where the focus is, instead of an internal focus where magic mutates you. Here, the focus isn’t on mutation and randomness. Referees and players, not the rules, enforce the gonzo, insane nature of the world.

This is the key difference between Hyperborea and Dungeon Crawl Classics. Hyperborea does not rely on randomness to convey its theme and feeling. The game will be as gonzo and insane as you make it. If you want something to happen, make it happen, and it does. There are times when Dungeon Crawl Classics feels like “gonzo with training wheels” when it is far easier to be less reliant on charts and tables and random results, and do it yourself, given what you know and like. You will always get the result and craziness that is closer to your heart if you do not use a table and let it tell you what happens next.

That is why some prefer Dungeon Crawl Classics as a game that you migrate from the fifth edition. The charts and tables tell you what can happen, and you need that level of training to understand what savage swords and sorcery all are about. For experienced groups and game Masters, it is far easier to say something crazy happens and then enforce the genre through direct rulings instead of chart results. I still like the tables in Dungeon Crawl Classics, but having played these games for decades, I don’t really need them. There are times when I find the results on the charts limiting and less imaginative than what's in my head. I suppose I would have more fun with the game like Hyperborea, where I can “say what happens just happens.”

This is going alongside my first edition collection and my second edition books, along with the grandmaster game of OSRIC, and joining my games on my living room shelf. A solid tabletop game, fewer books than my bloated DCC collection, and I look forward to reading this and having some fun.

DCC vs. Second Edition

 If I had to keep one game for fantasy, would it be Second Edition or Dungeon Crawl Classics? While my love of a combined Second and First Edition is strong, the fun factor of DCC can't be discounted.

DCC has far, far, far better support than Second Edition, and even ongoing and regular crowdfunding projects, and if there is only one reason to put Second Edition away, this would be it. DCC's support is better than 5E's at the moment, with giant adventure modules released regularly and a steady stream of smaller adventures with varied and imaginative settings.

With Second Edition? I am either playing BX adventures, which are not bad, or recycling AD&D adventures. The support is "sort of what you can find or convert in." It is not bad, but it is not dedicated support. There are a few adventures written for For Gold & Glory, and they are nice, but they are still nowhere near the support DCC regularly receives.

On the other hand, every adventure written for BX, OSE, Labyrinth Lord, Swords & Wizardry, and any other retro-clone is compatible, and it gets easier if they support descending AC. So, really, you do have pretty good support if you expand your thinking and pull in adventures from BX. These work well for FG&G, and really, this is the OSR; your choice of rules is how you express yourself today, and that is cool.

It comes down to a few things. Can I get the full rules to a new player for free in PDF form? Is the publishing license open and free for anyone to create under? Is the book attractive and invites new players to join in and have fun?

FG&G hits all three points perfectly.

And there are some amazing ones. I like a lot of the mega-dungeons written for these games, and each one is easily a 10-year campaign. There is an open question of "Are mega-dungeons too much?" I love how huge and expansive they are, but there are times I prefer a larger campaign area with a few dozen medium-sized dungeons rather than one huge, multi-level monstrosity.

Second Edition has the nostalgia factor, while DCC gives me a tribute band experience, not bad, but not the real thing. There are some tribute bands of classic acts that are better than the real thing. As age takes its toll on these bands, the tribute bands can play with an energy and technical level that shocks me. I don't know the hard-working tribute bands; they pour a lot of heart into what they do, struggling and endlessly compared to the real thing, but putting in the time and effort just out of pure love.

DCC hits that same level of respect from me. This is a group of hard-working people who love the hobby as it was and are trying their best to bring back those days with fun, imaginative ideas. As a tribute band to old-school play, DCC hits all the right notes and brings me back to those days. With the Second Edition, I am playing a game that has seen better days, still the beloved original, but there is a danger here of my memories clashing with the reality of a game that has seen better days and fallen out of active support.

With DCC, every class is designed for maximum fun at the table. They are great class designs, and they have that "instant fun" designed into them, so if you sat down at a random table in a convention to play DCC, you are guaranteed to have a good time. With the Second Edition, it is the slow grind, and while I appreciate that, in today's world, where lots of things ask for our time, I will gravitate towards an instant-gratification game more than a slow grind.

I still like Second Edition; it is the best version of the game for me, across every edition Wizards or TSR put out. For the classic feeling and play, little matches it, and they loosened up the racial level limits to a point where they don't matter as much (or could be ignored), and the story XP is a solid system that is like a lot of the modern XP systems we have today. Taking away "gold for XP" and boosting moster XP makes a huge difference in motivation and why we play. The second edition is 100% compatible with anything made for the first edition or AD&D, so it is a solid choice.

For instant gratification and fast play, DCC wins.

For campaigns and classic play, the second edition, using For Gold & Glory as my rules, wins.

Off the Shelf: Dragonslayer

This game does not get as much love as it should. Dragonslayer is front-to-back, page-to-page, pure awesome. Now that Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy is no more, people are taking another look at this game and realizing that sleeping on this book was a mistake. We are sort of in a two-way battle between this and the new revised Labyrinth Lord 2E, and this game compares favorably as a BX/1E mix that Labyrinth Lord Advanced once covered.

Page after page, the art in this game is fantastic. This game gives Goodman Games and DCC a run for their money, and the beautiful line art evokes the old-school style perfectly.

And this is a one-book game! One book is all you need for unlimited fantasy adventures.

Fighters in this game have a cleave ability, allowing one additional attack per two levels if the fighter kills a target. This is one extra attack at level one, two at level three, and so on. The fighters in this game are fun, and that cleave ability is greatly appreciated. In some old-school games, playing the fighter seems like punishment, and you get nothing to do except roll a d20 per turn and do damage. Here, they fold in the classic low-HD multiattack rules into the cleave ability (without the HD limitation), and it makes you want to be out there in the front ranks, hacking away at crowds of monsters.

The OSE fighter, in comparison, feels too basic. This is more of a "reference work" book, and once you add in some of the optional abilities from the Carcass Crawler zines, things improve for OSE, but you need to mod the game to customize how it plays. In the new OSE Advanced, I hope those optional rules are folded into the core book, and the game takes on its own identity.

The racial level limits in Dragonslayer are lower than OSE, but everything is more or less compatible between OSE and DS, or any old-school game for that matter. The hit-die scale is on 1E levels, with fighters being a d10, so the lower level limits are likely due to the bump in hit points. The game's power level is adjusted by focusing on fewer levels and more hit points.

Dragonslayer gives full hit points at level one. Nice. Please don't force me to play a level-one character who rolled a 1 for hit points. There is a fun to that, but most would throw that character away as an expendable rabble. If I want that, I will play DCC with my level-zero peasants.

A level 10 fighter in Dragonslayer with a +2 CON bonus will have 78 hit points on average. A level 10 fighter in OSE with a +2 CON bonus has an average of 61 hit points. In general, you are tougher in this game than OSE, and you do more damage.

If you don't want the complexity of OSRIC, but you want all the cool 1E "stuff" in a BX-like package, then Dragonslayer is a fantastic game. The base game feels like BX, and not like 1E's endless tables of modifiers and percentages to bend bars and lift gates, and it keeps things simple. The demons and devils are here, so this is not censored like 2E was.

Compared to Shadowdark? Dragonslayer is more heroic, no spell failure, no small-map play, no torch timer, more theater of the mind, and not as tightly focused. I love Shadowdark as a "small dungeon" game, almost as a board game, but if I want a more traditional game, Dragonslayer will fill that old-school need nicely.

Dragonslayer is a fantastic game, well worth your time.

Mail Room: Labyrinth Lord 2E PDF

I like Labyrinth Lord, and it is good to see them back for another edition. The OGL is gone from this version, and we have one of the originals back. The game is not a strict copy of the original rules; it adds a few new races and tweaks a few things, which is interesting. The game is finally getting its own identity and flavor. This is taking BX as a base and moving on from there, without feeling it needs to pull in 1E material. This is the new king of the BX starting point games, where the 1E stuff is not essential, and the game should feel more like a 1E base.

A shout-out needs to go to the extremely close Basic Fantasy, a BX clone that hits all the right notes for many, and it uses a modern ascending AC system while being free to download and play. I can see how many would say "juststick with this" instead of supporting yet another BX clone, since the market already has quite a few of them.

Where Dragonslayer does more of a BX and 1E mix, Labyrinth Lord keeps 1E out of the game and just does its own interpretation of a BX ruleset. Dragonslayer is a nice and solid alternative as a replacement for the old Labyrinth Lord Advanced Fantasy, where we started to see 1E monsters and classes enter the game. Dragonslayer uses the 1E hit point scale, with fighters being a d10 hit die instead of a d8.

Dragonslayer is a fantastic game, well worth supporting and playing, and this is the king of mixed BX and 1E content, where you have the stuff from 1E, but a simple BX framework to play with it all in.

If you do not want to go with the full complexity of an OSRIC or For Gold & Glory, and you want to keep the base experience simple, and you want the 1E additions, then Dragonslayer is the perfect game for you.

Old School Essentials Classic Fantasy (now out of print) did a near-perfect BX implementation with no changes. When you start to fold in Advanced Fantasy, you lose some of the elegance and simplicity, and some of the classes (fighter) need quite a few mods and optional rules from the Carcass Crawler zines to feel worth playing. I see how OSE, to some, feels all over the place and needs a bit of tweaking to become fun, and the extra material required keeps it from being a one-book game.

OSE is currently experiencing an identity crisis and needs to find its focus. The revision next year will sort things out, and they make a few more changes to Advanced Fantasy to pull in some of the material people want, and to up their game to become a great one-book game.

On that "one book game" scale, I would rank these as follows:

1. Dragonslayer
2. Basic Fantasy
3. Labyrinth Lord 2E
4. OSRIC and For Gold & Glory
5. Old School Essentials

On my personal preference scale? I am a fan of 2E, but Dragonslayer hits a lot of the right notes for me, too.

1. For Gold & Glory
2. Dragonslayer
3. OSRIC
4. Old School Essentials
5. Basic Fantasy
6. Labyrinth Lord 2E

On the "Does this game have bards?" scale, from no to yes, we get:

1. Dragonslayer
2. OSRIC
3. Labyrinth Lord 2E
4. Basic Fantasy
5. Old School Essentials
6. Shadowdark
7. For Gold & Glory

I bring up bards since the class feels like it has an identity crisis, especially in old-school games. In a classic dungeon crawl, where the party fights to keep quiet, what use is a class that makes the most noise? Even the base book of Shadowdark skips the bard. In newer games, there is a tendency for the class to be the default choice for players who want to be disruptive or don't care about the game, and there is a flippant nature to them that reduces the seriousness some tables desire in gameplay.

And I have played bards for decades and see this too, so I am not a hater, but someone who is generally concerned that the bard class has lost its way. I am not a hater, and I see the confusion and how some lean into this class to disrupt the game. Sometimes they are illusionists, other times healers, other times combat mages, and yet other times they feel like the "default town class," and nobody knows what role a bard fills.

As a result, you see a lot of old-school games drop the bard altogether, and even core-book Shadowdark does this. They do have it as an expansion class (as well as the ranger), but they do not feel like "core book" classes, and there is a reason they are not in the base book.

Design meets the focus of the game, and some classes get dropped since they are distractions to the core experience that the game tries to deliver.

So Labyrinth Lord 2E comes in as a BX+ game, rebuilding the basic game with a simple core but not feeling it needs to add any 1E content. It is closest to Basic Fantasy, which is a game very close to a modernized BX, but with strong ease-of-use features. Labyrinth Lord 2E adds new elements to the mix, so it is a fork of BX that maintains compatibility with BX. Some would want to stick with Basic Fantasy, Dragonslayer, or the 1E/2E clones over supporting another new BX game.

It is good to see an old friend return so strongly.

Second Edition Deserves to Live

It is sad how the Second Edition died. With TSR bankrupt, the game took on a tarnish from the mismanagement of the 1990s, as AD&D itself was blamed for the downfall. The game did not deserve to die and end like this. Wizards' buying TSR and releasing 3E as a complete rewrite reenergized players, but it left a stain on 2E's legacy, as if it were a failure.

And we have not had a stable edition from Wizards since. They replaced the 3rd Edition like they replaced the 4th, and now the 5th Edition is in its endgame phase. D&D 4 Essentials came out to "clarify the rules" and "not replace the original," and we see the same thing with 5.5E.

I wish we lived in an alternate timeline where TSR never went away, and we were back on the original set of rules that started this all. Constantly changing the underlying system of how D&D works is getting tiring, and I just want the game to play how it felt back in the good days. While a lot of the concepts are the same, characters and the damage scales have been constantly tinkered with over the last 25 years of Wizards' ownership, and nothing from 3E to 5E uses the exact scaling anymore.

The First and Second editions are the original game, and essentially the same set of rules, and are compatible. 1E and 2E are classic games, like Monopoly, and they should be seen the same way. There are times when I wish Wizards would stop releasing new editions of the game and support and preserve the ones they already have.

And not rewrite, but preserve and honor.

These days, it feels too much to ask, so I am over here in the OSR enjoying the games as they were.

Second Edition is like the 5.5E of today, if 2014 5E was the First Edition. Both games were "changed due to outside societal pressure" to be more "mainstream product." Both may bankrupt the company. The Second Edition introduced significant numerical changes that improved the game, and we still had some great game designers working on the rules.

While a lot was removed due to outside pressure in 2E, it all found its way back into the game, even demons and devils. With 2024 D&D, half-elves and many other choices were removed from the game, and all humanoids were removed from the monster lists. None of the removed content from 2024 D&D is likely to ever return to the game due to the zeitgeist of social media pressure.

The ideological crusade that forced the removal of content from 2E was an outside force, and the designers found a way to bring it all back. The ideological crusade that created 5.5E came from within the company, and we are never going to get these things back.

I fault 2E for its failings, for being too commercial and mainstream, such as dumping assassins, half-orcs, and demons. Demons return in the Outer Planes Appendix, and the Assassin returned in the Complete Thief book. Half-orcs return in the Complete Book of Humanoids. So, all the cut content was eventually restored; it was just well hidden and took a few years to be published and released.

The main books of AD&D 2E remained a mass-market game to avoid controversy.

They kept the game essentially the same as AD&D 1E, and just cleaned up the rules and organization. The more I study D&D 3.0 and 3.5E, the more I see them as inferior to the two originals. I wish Wizards kept its games in eternal print, not changing them, but just keeping every edition of the game available to buy, even in print form. POD is halfway there, but many titles are still not available, and the 1E books have scanning errors.

Still, this was the version of the game that got us back into D&D. We loved the removal of XP for gold pieces, and the story XP system with the higher encounter XP made us fall in love again. The game wasn't about greed anymore; this was about stories and epic tales of heroism. The game wasn't any less deadly either, although progression seemed faster due to the higher rate of XP for encounters.

The tone of the game shifted from gritty swords & sorcery to heroic high fantasy.

Removing demons and devils improved our game. As a DM, I needed to come up with evil factions, use other monsters, highlight evil dragons and their cults, put the yaun-ti front and center, focus on the drow, and use the monster book in creative ways. We never had them as a part of our Forgotten Realms campaign, and the game was better for it.

That is not to say I did not miss them, as ultimate bad guys, they were missed. They more thematically belonged in Greyhawk and other settings, back when 1E featured them prominently, and they did make appearances by the time the Outer Planes Appendix came around. Still, having the first run of the Realms as a "no demons place" made it feel special, like the gods actually worked for a living and kept them out, and other evils had to step up and take on the roles of corrupters and wicked masterminds.

This is why I love For Gold & Glory. It is a clean-room Second Edition game that works as the engine for any Second Edition book or adventure. People can write for this game, and it works with any First Edition book. It is nice to see a version of the game that does not get much love receive attention and support. This is also setting agnostic, and it feels more thematically medieval and grounded than much of the Forgotten Realms books and 2E source material.

It is a fantastic game, authentically medieval, storytelling, and compatible with anything in 2E and 1E. This feels like home to me. The classes are not overpowered and bloated, and you need to rely on gear, teamwork, and smarts to make it by. While the product identity monsters and spells are stripped out, they are easily added back in, or left out if you want to play in original worlds.

Where other games feel too simplified, like Old School Essentials, and other games feel unnecessarily flashy and wild, such as Dungeon Crawl Classics, FG&G hits the Second Edition notes and feels perfect. This is still 1E, but with many quality-of-life improvements. The non-human level limit caps were significantly raised, too, bringing about a better parity and fairness to the other character races.

FG&G is also an open game, and people can write material and adventures for this version. We can't do that for AD&D 2E. I always support the community-supported game that allows for the most freedom.

I get why First Edition takes most of the attention. This is the original game. People look at the Second Edition and see something that Gary Gygax did not work on; it had censorship issues, and it was the edition of the game that bankrupted TSR. When it comes down to it, there are only very minor differences between them, and both editions are cross-compatible.

I love the tone of Second Edition shifting to heroic high fantasy, and the feeling that this was the "game of the novels." The 1990s novels were very popular escapist entertainment. They perfectly captured the freewheeling adventure of those novels, where heroes went from place to place, swinging swords and casting spells, saving the day, and making daring escapes. While the First Edition could do that, the Second Edition was built to provide that experience, primarily through changes to XP, which shaped the nature of play and the flow of the game.