Traverse Fantasy

The second part in my series about the evolution of Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Evolution during the play-testing period from 2012-2013 when it was known as DnDNext ! If you haven’t read the first part, you should. The first look we got at DnDNext dated to May 2012, consisting of: a bestiary, an explanation of ability checks, a scant section on exploration, a ruleset for combat, and some sample characters. Three months later in August 2012, we get a vastly expanded play-test packet focused on how to create characters in the everchanging system. And then another play-test release just five days later, offering two new spell-casting classes with totally different mechanical relationships to magic. Let’s see what they cooked up! Bestiary Monsters have been slightly changed: some getting more hit points, most getting less. What’s more interesting is a new attribute that’s appeared, called “level”. Each monster has a level, up to 6 in this packet, which factors into how encounters ar...

I got my dirty paws onto a bunch of play-test packet PDFs from 2012-2013 for DndNext , the pre-release version of D&D Fifth Edition . I thought I would check them out sequentially, to figure out at what point different changes were made, and how different play styles contemporary to that time period meshed and came into conflict with each other. Notably, DnDNext was supposed to be the great absolution of the OSR; at the same time, it was an implicit apology for the radical changes made in Fourth Edition from the wildly successful Third Edition . Does DnDNext return the game to some past state, or does something new come out of this mess? Let's learn and find out! Don’t tell those pesky Pinkertons. The picture above is originally by GeekDad. B/X and the Caves of Chaos The original adventuring locale used to play-test DnDNext was the Caves of Chaos from the 1979 module, B2: The Keep on the Borderland . Doesn’t it go that something isn’t old-school unless it can run B2 (whic...