Dungeon Mapping Software

Can anyone recommend to me some good, easy to use dungeon mapping software? And by "good," I mean software that isn't just a pared down version of a CAD program with some dungeon tiles added into it. Most of the ones I've encountered are far, far too complex for my purposes. I just want to be able to draw some simple maps without having to read a big manual or an anti-intuitive interface.

Do such things exist?

Curious

Anyone else notice a rash of mysterious "links to this post" appearing in their blogs? I've found a lot of my posts recently have included several supposed links, sometimes multiple ones from the same site, that have absolutely nothing to do with the posts in question. What's up with this?

Dwimmermount Campaign House Rules

The following is my initial stab at documenting the house rules I plan to make to Swords & Wizardry for my Dwimmermount Campaign, which begins in earnest this coming weekend. Many of these rules derive from discussions on the OD&D forums or from Philotomy Jurament's excellent site. More will almost certainly arise through play and I'll post them here as they do.

Alignment

Alignment consists of the following options:

Chaotic: Inimical to civilization and possibly reality itself – the alignment of demons, Faerie, and the insane.

Neutral: Apathetic and/or unconcerned with the battle between cosmic forces.

Neutral (Balance): The philosophical stance that a balance between Chaos and Law is necessary for the well-being of the cosmos.

Lawful (Good): The philosophical stance that civilization exists to foster the common good.

Lawful: The philosophical stance that civilization, regardless of how it is organized, is preferable to other alternatives.

Lawful (Evil): The philosophical stance that civilization exists to allow the strong to lord it over the weak.

Combat Sequence

The combat sequences proceeds according to the guidelines found here.

Helmets

Not wearing a helmet with one's armor grants opponents a +1 bonus “to hit” to reflect the likelihood that they will aim for the vulnerable head and neck area of anyone they are facing in combat.

Hit Dice

Hit Dice are re-rolled upon gaining a new level, but maximum hit points never decrease as a result of a re-roll, although they may not increase.

Example: Brother Candor of Tyche is a 3rd-level cleric; he has 15 hit points. Upon gaining 4th level, he rolls 4D6+4 for hit points. If the result is below 15 hit points, he gains no new hit points this level.

Liquid Courage

Once per session, characters who possess strong alcoholic beverages may partake of them to gain an additional 1D6 hit points that lasts for the duration of the next combat, after which these “spiritous hit points” disappear should they not have already been used up in the combat.

Magic Shields

The armor bonus from magic shields does not stack with that of magic armor. Instead, it is either used instead of the magic armor's bonus if it is higher or ignored entirely if it is lower. For example, a fighting-man is wearing a suit of chainmail +1 and a shield +2. In this case, only the shield's +2 bonus applies. If the bonuses had been reversed, the shield would confer no additional benefit beyond the usual bonus for any shield. Of course, when retreating or caught by surprise, a shield confers no benefit to a character, in which case the normally-suppressed bonus from magic armor may apply instead.

Scrolls

Spellcasters of any class and level may create scrolls at a cost of 100 gold pieces per level of the spell to be inscribed and 1 week's worth of time.

Weapons

Dual Wielding

A fighting-man with Dexterity 13+ may wield two weapons simultaneously, but makes only a single attack roll at +1 “to hit.” A successful attack deals the normal damage for the weapon, however.

Two-Handed Weapons

A fighting-man wielding a two-handed weapon rolls two dice on a successful attack roll and uses the higher result (to which he can apply damage bonuses, etc.).

A Grognard Christmas

Christmas is less than two weeks away. Here are some gift suggestions for the grognards on your list:

1. Adventure Games Journal: If you're a fan of Judges Guild's Wilderlands setting, James Mishler has got what you need. Published irregularly, the AGJ, like all of Adventure Games Publishing's products, is chock of great ideas and palpable entusiasm for one of the hobby's oldest sandbox campaign settings.
   
2. Castle Zagyg: The final product of the late, great Gary Gygax (and his stalwart protégé, Jeff Talanian), Castle Zagyg is probably the closest we'll ever come to the long-hoped for Castle Greyhawk dungeons. Grab a copy while it's still available!
3. Encounter Critical: The wackiest game that never was, EC is a loving homage to the wild and woolly early days of the hobby and the gloriously nonsensical games they produced.
   
4. Fight On! With three issues already available and more on the way, Fight On! is a terrific 'zine that reminds me of the early days of Dragon. It's packed to the gills with great old school gaming goodness.
   
5. Gamescience Dice: You can't go wrong with Lou Zocchi's famous dice. Granted, even these dice include the un-Platonic D10, but I think we can overlook such shortcomings in the spirit of the season.
6. Goblinoid Games: Whether you prefer the straight fantasy of Labyrinth Lord or the science fantasy of Mutant Future, Goblinoid Games has got you covered with great products.
7. Goodman Games System-Neutral Products: My hat's off to Goodman Games for publishing both Points of Light or The Random Esoteric Creature Generator, two excellent products filled with old school sensibilities that are of use to all gamers, regardless of the system they use.
   
8. Monsters of Myth: Certainly the best old school monster book put out in many years, Monsters of Myth is a testimony to the fact that the old school movement is more than just wallowing in the past but is in fact creating new and exciting material. While you're at it, grab the free PDF of OSRIC.
9. Planet Stories: Without a doubt one of the most exciting publishing ventures in years is Paizo's Planet Stories line, which makes available for the first time in decades the classics of pulp fantasy and science fiction. It's the perfect antidote to the banality of modern genre writing and a reminder of the literary roots of our hobby.
   
10. Swords & Wizardry: Matt Finch's excellent creation is my personal favorite retro-clone and it's now available in a variety of formats.

Have any additional suggestions? Post in the comments below.

Pulp Fantasy Gallery: Three Hearts and Three Lions

First published in 1953, Three Hearts and Three Lions is sort of the "older brother" to The Broken Sword. The two books share a medieval northern European setting and draw heavily from the mythologies of those lands, but the 1953 book is the one that more heavily influenced Dungeons & Dragons. The paladin class, the troll, the swanmay, and the struggle between Law and Chaos (from which Michael Moorcock drew inspiration as well), among others, all first appear here, making this one of the most important books for anyone interested in the pre-history of D&D. It's also worth noting that this book predates the appearance of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, so it's another bit of evidence for the fundamentally non-Tolkienian origins of the game.

Three Hearts and Three Lions is also useful in understanding D&D for other reasons. Firstly, its story of a Danish soldier during World War II being flung into a fantasy world is one more example of a "lost world" tale, one of many that lurks beneath the surface of the game. Secondly, the novel's equation of Law with the forces of civilization and the Church and Chaos with paganism and Faerie is clearly present in OD&D and is often overlooked in discussions of what alignment is and where it came from. Finally, because Three Hearts and Thre Lions draws on the romantic "Matter of France,"
it's a very clear case of a non-pulp fantasy influence on D&D (yes, I am aware of the irony of discussing it in this series of posts) and that alone makes it a worthy subject of study. That it's also a well-written and enjoyable book only adds to its significance.

RPG Anthology Fundraiser

Jonathan, over at a blog called The Core Mechanic, has been working on the 2008 Anthology of Roleplaying Game Blogs for publication. In order to raise some funds for this project, for which a post of mine, has been nominated for inclusion, he asked permission to sell some products using a phrase from the title of my post. I freely gave such permission, because I both think the anthology is a good idea and because I don't think of anything I write here as mine. I offer up my ideas freely in order to foster a better understanding of the history of this hobby and, more importantly, to encourage people to have fun with whatever games they're playing. I'm frankly gratified that I've generated so much enthusiasm in many people. That's one of the big reasons I started this blog in the first place and it's why I continue to post here day in and day out. Thanks for reading.

Building a Better Thief (Part II)

This post is going to be somewhat stream of consciousness in nature. I'm going to look at each of the OD&D abilities and give my current thinking about each. Note that I say current thinking. I'm prepared to change my mind through reasoned argument, so here's chance to convince of how I've got it all wrong.

Open Locks: I actually don't have a big problem with this ability. It's an appropriate "specialist" ability and one that not all characters were assumed to have prior to the introduction of the thief class. Likewise, magic-users could already use knock to achieve a similar effect, so it's not alien to the milieu of early D&D.

Remove Traps: This is a bit more worrisome to me, insofar as previously all characters could theoretically remove traps. It is my understanding that the thief class owes its origin to players in the Greyhawk campaign who wanted to hire someone who was specially trained to deal with removing traps, which is is why I call the class "dungeon bomb specialists." I'm of two minds about this. On the one hand, why shouldn't there be someone trained in such things? On the other hand, why should such training be integral to only one class? I'd long used the Secondary Skills in AD&D and allowed characters with certain such skills to remove traps if I deemed it appropriate. Part of me wants to go back to a system like that, because the presence of a thief makes the other players lazy when it comes to dealing with traps and I don't want that.

Pick Pocket: I never had any problem with this ability, as it's specialized enough that very few non-thief characters have ever attempted to try it in my experience. Plus, it fits in nicely with the archetype.

Move Silently: This ability gives me pause, partly because I'm not quite sure what "move silently" is supposed to represent. Is it just the ability to sneak up on someone unawares -- and thus gain a greater likelihood of surprise -- or is it something more preternatural than that? Given that the thief is an archetypal "low magic" character class, I tend to favor the form interpretation, in which case I'd be inclined to give the thief a bonus to surprising an enemy and leave it at that. This gives him a clear niche without making other classes useless when it comes to laying ambushes, etc.

Hide in Shadows: Like Move Silently, I wonder what this ability is supposed to represent. Is it the ability to camouflage oneself so as not to be seen, provided it's dark enough? Or is another variant on being able to lay in ambush for someone? Part of me thinks this ability could easily be combined with Move Silently into a single one, but I'm not sure.

Hear Noise: Any possible objections I have to this ability -- which are few -- are overridden by the fact that, mechanically, this ability uses the same system as that for other character classes and that thieves are no better than elves, dwarves, or halflings till they reach level 3.

Climb Walls: I don't have a problem with this ability as described in Greyhawk, because it gives a system that's perfectly usable for other characters as well. A 1st-level thief has a 13% chance of slipping, with that chance decreasing by 1% per level attained thereafter.

Back Stab: Again, no real problem here. I'd allow any character, regardless of class, striking silently form behind a +4 bonus to hit. The additional damage bonus should probably be unique to the thief, or at least the increasing damage bonus should be. Must ponder.

Read Languages: I don't have any problem with a thief's ability to decipher treasure maps and ciphers, but I'm not so sure about reading dead or foreign languages. That just seems odd to me.

Read Magic: I know why this ability exists and I appreciate it, but I'm not sure it makes a lot of sense. I have many fond memories of thieves using scrolls at opportune times and of scrolls backfiring in amusing ways. Still, I'm not sure there's much warrant for this ability, particularly if one is reworking the class, as I am, to be more strongly archetypal and also more in keeping with the way other class abilities work. Must ponder this too.

The Dwimmermount Campaign

So, I'm finally about ready to begin my Dwimmermount campaign, after having worked on it on and off for the last couple of months. I've got enough of the megadungeon mapped out and ready to go that I feel confident to start using it as soon as my players can find time in their busy lives to get together for it. One of the things I'm intending to do, in order to facilitate the fact that some of my players have unpredictable schedules and that I may have "drop in" players from time to time, is to make each session quasi-episodic in nature. I'm probably going to borrow an idea from Jeff Rients to help keep my players on task and to ensure that every session ends with all the PCs out of Dwimmermount, thereby making it easier to pick up the following weekend, even if, for example, one of my players isn't available on that day or I have to introduce a new PC. I think Jeff's table is probably way too deadly even for this old schooler, but the principle behind the thing is a very sound one.

I'm going to use Swords & Wizardry for this, albeit in a modified form. At the start, I will allow paladins and monks, because I've done versions of both for S&W. In due course, I'll almost certainly add other classes, but, to start, I want to keep it simple. Available races are men (of course), dwarves, elves, and goblins. Dwarves are free-willed earth elementals and dwarven adventurers tend to be a bit peculiar compared to "ordinary" dwarves. They've spent so much time among men that they've started to act like them. Lots of dwarven adventurers affect human behaviors -- like eating ordinary foodstuffs rather than rocks and minerals -- that make it hard for them to return to the secret places in the earth from which they originally come. Elves are "hillbilly Eld" and are generally distrusted by most other civilized races because of their ancestry. Goblins are similarly distrusted.

I'm deliberately going to be vague about the wider world. I have some ideas, of course, and I'll probably drop them into the game if the opportunity arises, but my goal is to be flexible and to create as needed rather than too far in advance of the campaign itself. I plan to use the old Outdoor Survival map as the initial campaign area, with Dwimmermount situated in the central northern region (it's a snow-capped mountain) and a nearby fortified town (a catch basin on the map) called Muntburg as the PCs' base of operations. Think of Muntburg as a bit like the titular Keep from Keep on the Borderlands, except that it's more explicitly an outpost for a large city-state to the south (Adamas) that lays claim to the region around Dwimmermount and taxes adventurers who venture into its caverns and return laden with loot. Beyond that, though, I'm trying to keep details to a minimum.

Once the campaign begins in earnest, expect regular updates about it to be posted here.

Building a Better Thief (Part I)

When people wish to parody the old school community, if they're not making fun of our discussions about dice, they often turn to our discussions about the unsuitability of the thief instead. I suppose that was inevitable, given how bizarre it is to many gamers even to consider kicking the thief from the clubhouse. They likely don't realize that, for a brief time, there was no such thing as a thief, because, as I've said before, every character was a thief. And given that the thief was formally introduced to the world a little over a year after OD&D was released, it's not at all unreasonable to say that the class has been around long enough to be classified as a venerable tradition.

I have a hard time disagreeing with that, since one of my guiding principles, higher even than fidelity to pulp fantasy, is that D&D is always right. By that I mean that, before considering changing, let alone removing, some element of the game that's been around for decades, look carefully at why this element was introduced in the first place and consider just as carefully what a change might do to the gameplay of D&D. Basically, "D&D is always right" is a reminder that, though the game may look haphazardly constructed, there is a logic behind it, a logic that you really have to understand and respect before you can start monkeying around with its internal organs.

As he so often does, Philotomy sums up the case against the thief as follows:

The Thief class is not part of the original three OD&D books, but was added in Supplement I. Weak in combat and casting no spells, the main feature of the class is its special skills like climbing sheer walls, finding and disarming traps, moving without making a sound, hiding in shadows, executing surprise backstabs, et cetera. Over time, I've come to prefer the game without the Thief class (i.e. using only the original three classes). The role the thief usually plays (scout/sneaky-guy) is easily filled by the other classes; everyone can attempt to be stealthy, search for traps, et cetera. Also, without the Thief and his special abilities, these activities are often performed by the player describing how he goes about it, rather than rolling against a skill, which I think is a lot of fun.

I'm largely in agreement with Philotomy's assessments, but I've nevertheless been reading Greyhawk's description of the thief very carefully, as well as the Holmes rules, looking for insights that might help me "rebuild" the thief into something that's simultaneously true to the archetype that many now (rightly) consider a staple of D&D while still taking into account the (valid) criticisms many cite against the thief.

I have noticed a couple of interesting things. First, the OD&D thief, unlike his AD&D descendant, has no ability to find traps. Or rather, he is no better at finding traps than any other character class, who use the standard "rules" for doing so (i.e. player deduction). Now, I did know that this was the case and it makes sense, given that several people, Gary Gygax chief among them, have noted that the thief owes its origin to the desire for a "dungeon bomb specialist" class, who was better at removing traps than other characters. Second, in OD&D -- again, AD&D differs in this regard -- a thief's ability to hear noise uses the same game mechanics as the standard rules describe in The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures: a D6 roll. Holmes further explains that "The thief's ability to hear noise at closed doors, secret panels, etc. is rolled on a six-sided die like anyone else, but his ability improves as he advances in experience." (emphasis mine) Indeed, until a thief reaches third level, he is no better at hearing noise than is any other character.

Taken together, these two things might point the way toward making the thief more palatable to me. Some have suggested in the past, Philotomy among them, that it might be best to view a thief's abilities as extraordinary in nature -- being able to climb sheer surfaces rather than ordinary walls, for example (which is exactly how Moldvay does it). Taken this way, the thief's abilities are more akin to a magic-user's spellcasting; they're "powers." While there's nothing wrong with that approach, it doesn't appeal to me, both because I don't think the mechanics for the class, as presented in Supplement I, support it and also because it's the first step on the path to turning the thief into the ridiculous ninja he becomes in the WotC editions.

To rehabilitate the thief in a way that's in keeping with its origins, both in Greyhawk and in pulp fantasy, I would much prefer to treat the abilities of the class more like the combat abilities of the fighting men -- ordinary abilities at which the class excels compared to other classes. The difficulty, though, is finding a way to do that without fostering the inevitable diminishment of the ability of other classes to attempt -- and succeed at -- those same tasks. I'm not yet certain that it's possible to do that, but I am exploring that avenue and will discuss it at greater length in future posts on this topic over the coming days.

Pulp Fantasy Audio Books

Check out this site, which includes, among many others, Abraham Merritt's The Moon Pool as an audio book.

Enjoy!