Traverse Fantasy

After writing the blog post on the weird fantasy capitalist economy suggested by Dungeons & Dragons , I had been thinking about ways to apply that sort of thinking to something practical at the table. I didn’t suppose when writing it that anyone would actually want to establish a firm in their D&D campaign, much less would anyone have the mental energy to deal with the month-by-month math of running a business on paper and pencil. I figured that maybe instead it would be fun to establish a sort of organization as part of high-level play. It’s not quite domain play as much as it is conspiracy play. What makes low-level play interesting is that you as a player are constantly striving for something. Domain play in theory can become managing a state of affairs rather than working towards anything at all, becoming something more like a traditional war game compared to D&D ’s game of upward strife. This isn’t to say that domain play can’t have the same degree of progression a...

In this article, I’m going to take a closer look at some of the presuppositions underlying movement and perception in early or early-inspired D&D rulebooks. Originally, I was going to make one short post about treating movement rates as a non-random ability score, and then a separate one trying to figure out what different behavior that flashlights would have compared to torches if you were to set your dungeon crawl in the modern age. As it turns out, though, it’s difficult to separate light and movement since they are intertwined in how players perceive and then interact with the game-world. On 12"-Scale Movement Defining movement rates in inches seems at first glance a vestige of D&D ’s origin in tabletop wargames. Movement rates were given as such in Dungeons & Dragons (“ OD&D ”, 1974) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (“ AD&D ”, 1977-9). The base rate of movement for an O/AD&D character is 12”. The rate decreases to 9”, 6”, and finally 3” for in...

A not-uncommon complaint about the usual Dungeons & Dragons fare is that combat is a slog, or if it is not a slog then it is repetitive. The usual wisdom is that without a variety of choices, or without the player being made aware that they exist, the player opts only to hit things with their sword again and again and again. Yet one solution that manifests recurrently and to not much avail (in my opinion) is to allow players to pick special powers or features off a list, which become proverbial buttons to click during an encounter and have something cool happen. The result is a lot of deliberation, a lot of book checking and, with a decent character sheet, a lot of writing. One solution, popularized lately by Odd Skull and seeming to have originated from Delta’s D&D Hotspot [1], is to have an attacker choose to declare a maneuver before attacking another participant in the battle. If the attacker’s to-hit roll succeeds, the defender then decides whether to lose HP from the ...

You can quit playing your pretend games wholesale and go back to living an undisturbed life not worrying about what a lyric game is or whether indie creators are more or less oppressed than Minecraft youtubers. However, I myself began following TTRPG hobbyists on Twitter because I liked being part of the discussion and learning how to have more fun with my friends. I had even been lurking for years earlier, reading blogs and threads and archived G+ posts. By the time I decided to join the conversation, the predominant mode of interacting with everyone else was selling PDFs on the internet. It took me a while to realize that none of that was necessary or desirable for myself. It took me until more recently to realize I didn’t have to put up with others doing it either. I want an exit from what has been sold to me and others as normal. Something we can do, on an individual and a collective basis, is to reject the predominant culture of the hobby and to strive for a community with non-com...

Edit: I removed the photos from this post because they are too large and slowing down the blog for everyone. Apologies on all accounts! I had the pleasure of playing Wanderhome under the guidance of Jay Dragon, the author of the book. Wanderhome was influenced by Dragon's experiences as a camp counselor, especially in running LARPs for campers and helping them feel comfortable playing with others. Play itself is an essentially human thing. Huizinga argues in Homo Ludens that play is in fact constitutive of being human, in that play is the rehearsal of cultural or symbolic expectations. Play then is the basis of socialization, since when we adorn ourselves with titles like “mother” or “father” or “cop” or “robber”, we are indeed playing a role that has been taught to us. Yet Dragon has found that as we get older, we become shameful towards play. We refuse to put on new masks. Maybe, and this is just my hunch, the passage into adulthood consists of internalizing particular roles t...

After months of writing and rewriting and analyzing and formatting, the body text of Fantastic Medieval Campaigns , my retroclone of the original 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons (a.k.a. OD&D or 0E ) is basically complete! I wanted to take this time to talk about my motivation in working on this, how far it's come along, and what steps are left for me to feel satisfied in putting at least an initial version online.

In most campaigns I've played, the passage of time on a larger scale is handled liberally. We tend to see the value in handling smaller scale time via procedure, thinking of exploration in terms of 10 minute chunks for no reason other than to structure the game around those chunks like clockwork (torch duration, monster checks, etc.). The course of the year is not given the same attention, for the obvious reason that it's difficult to keep track of. At first glance, you'd think you'd have to figure out what day of the month it is, how many days are in each specific month, when one month stops and another ends. However, using a simplified calendar like the one I will outline below, you can begin to see months pass and the seasons turn without much additional effort. The point of this calendar is not to simulate any actual calendar we use in the real world. Real world calendars have the dual function of organizing human life and matching that with what are basically measu...