House rules for our White Box games...

For our White Box D&D sessions we are employing a few basic house rules beyond what is in the 3 little brown books. Here is a brief list of the major house rules. These are pretty much inspired by Gary Gygax's latter-day White Box house rules:

Character Generation:

• Abilities: 4d6, and remove the lowest die. Assign the six totals to abilities of choice.
• Level 1 characters start with maximum hit points.
• Players may not name the characters after themselves, because character death may result in death of the player.
• Each character starts with 3d6 x 10 pieces of gold.
  

Ability Bonuses:

• Strength: Fighters with STR of 14 or higher do +1 damage.

Combat Round:

1. Players declare actions (move, missile, melee, spell).
2. Player and DM roll for initiative.
3. Actions resolved for high initiative group.
4. Actions resolved for low initiative group.

Combat:

• Natural 1: Weapon dropped or misfired.
• Natural 20: Roll double dice.
• Bind Wounds: Immediately after combat (within one 10min turn) players may bind wounds for +1d4 HP. This will restore consciousness.

Weapon Damage:

• Unless otherwise noted, all normal weapons do 1d6 damage. Exceptions:
• Dagger: 1d6-1
• Two-handed Sword or Hammer: 1d6+1

Unconsciousness and Death:

• A character is unconscious at 0HP.
• A character is dead when it reaches a negative number of hit points equal to its level.

Harvey Benschoter animation

Fleshetables from Harvey Benschoter on Vimeo.

Recent links in the popular press...

A nice article on Neil Gaiman in the New Yorker.
Kid Goth - Neil Gaiman's Fantasies

An article in the LA Times mentioning Original D&D:
Astral Weeks: In D&D We Trust

LA Times has some really cool black and white D&D stock photos from he 70s that they always use for related articles... I recall they whipped these out for the Arneson obit as well.

Cleric spell books in OD&D

This weekend I re-read the Original Dungeons and Dragons (OD&D) rules from 1974 - you know, the white box with 3 little brown books by Gygax and Arneson - and I noticed that it says explicitly that clerics use spell books just like magic users.

This was an amazing revelation to me! One of my favorite aspects of D&D is the spell book mechanic derived from the 50s-era fantastic fiction of Jack Vance. Having magic users quest for scrolls, books, and mentors in order to expand their magical repertoire is always a major, if not central, character motivation in the games I run.

I relish the thought of applying this mechanism to clerics as well. Searching the planet for lost prayers, meditations, inscriptions, and holy books in hopes of gaining the ability to invoke favors from ancient, and possibly forgotten, supernatural beings would add a lot of fun and mystery to a campaign. I also think it makes things much less technical and gamey than every cleric simply picking the same old spells from the same old list before every game session. Certain orders or cults would of course have their favorite holy books with selected canonical spells and prayers. What good cleric wouldn't want to bring back new invocations for their order to add to their canon?

As far as I can tell, the clerical spell book first was discarded in the "Blue Box" Basic Set by J. Eric Holmes. I am disappointed that none of the editions of OD&D retroclone "Swords & Wizardry" use traditional OD&D clerical spell books.

I hereby declare that, starting today, all clerics traveling through my games must learn their prayers and invocations from mystical scripture.

RPG Party - This Saturday

Role-playing Game Geek Out Party!

When: Saturday, November 14, 2pm - Late
Where: My house in Costa Mesa.

>20 people coming. We'll have Call of Cthulhu, D&D, Dragonstorm, Unknown Armies, and FATE games going on. Two main sessions, before and after (pizza) dinner.

Email me for details, or check out the official Meetup Page. The event is full on Meetup, but we might be able to handle a few game crashers. Email me if you are interested...

Carl Sagan Music Video

If, like me, you wish astronomy was better represented in popular music, you will enjoy this hot new music video posthumously starring Carl Sagan...

Banjos and Decaying Civilizations

I've been burning through Jack Vance books lately. I was greatly entertained by the Tschai series and now I am just finishing up the Durdane trilogy. Next up are Demon Princes books. I love Vance's variations on the theme of civilizations evolving in isolation, usually in various states of drift, decay, and decadence. The character dialogue in his books is amazing, often hitting a chill-inducing sweet spot between hilarity and beauty.

Actually the main reason I like Vance is because he plays jugband music on his banjo, much like myself. I love the space jazz musician protagonist of the Durdane books.

I was surprised a few months back when the NY Times published a laudatory article on Vance.