How I do Sword & Sorcery (and old rant)

[karaunios]

This is from an old rant I posted somewhere else awhile ago. Some things have changed (for instance, just yesterday I changed from 2e to OD&D, just the three core classes, but with heavy house ruling to suit my group's logic and simplify things overall).

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I do prefer sword and sorcery and low magic than your today's typical high magic wishy washy 'frogs oooo magic'. It's like magic is all over the place and can explain and allow everything. Besides, it's like D&D has its own canon (a.k.a. Gygax' preferences for his world) and many or most people are just content following that. More power to them if that's what they like. Not that I don't like it (I do, and a lot) but I prefer gritty sword and sorcery where the more familiar humans (it's humans who are playing the game after all) have to contend with mysterious alien dark forces, fight with mighty warriors and can't get a hold of magic at every step, much more the contrary.

This is what I do, and it's a lot of house ruling.

We use 2e as a base, which is almost identical to any of the previous editions (despite what other people might tell you). Oh yes, this saving throw is one point higher for this class at this level and you use a d10 for initiative instead of a d6, blah blah blah. Such huge differences! 😱 Anyway, I'm digressing 😅

Clerics have to learn spells from parchments in the same way magic users do.

I do use a spell point system. Clerics get one spell point per level, magic users 2. Both clerics and mu can cast every spell, but, since they have to learn them from scrolls, they don't get to have that much access to many magics, because, you, as the DM, control what they come across and what not.

Clerics are controled by their churches, so if they cast offensive spells nothing can happen, in principle, but if it reaches their superiors' ears, they might get expelled from the order, be pursued by other members and hired mercenaries to be put into jail so they don't represent a danger. IMC magic is a subject of debate, does it come from the gods (priests will tell you that) or it's just a mere manipulation of the forces of nature (wizards)? No alignment, no gods showing up. It's just people trying to survive and/or get poweful.

You can remove elves and dwarves, or at least don't make them elligible as PCs. You can make them mysterious creatures from folklore that live in the deep forest or in distance mountains, more feared than anything else. Don't get me started on hobbits.

I draw inspiration for my campaign world from real world mythology, philosophy and history. The more familiar european setting is where my PCs start, then they can travel and wander off to more exotic places.

But even then, the 'more familiar european setting' is not that familiar in my campaing. I built the main culture inspired by the bronze age yamnaya culture that later developed in the different indo-european peoples that spread across Europe and Asia, I added a bit of Mycaenean Greece and medieval Castile (as I wanted a 'primitive' Bronze Age/Dark Ages European mediterranean setting). Then I changed things and made up stuff to make it more to my own taste. I like getting inspiration from the real world, but not lazily copy/pasting from it (that's what there's many aspects I don't like about the Hollow World and the Mystara settings, as much as I can understand they can be appealling to others).

Monsters aren't as frequent. Make your PCs fight with other humans. Plots and hostilities and alliances are driven by the wills of NPCs against/with that of your PCs. Don't place 'a Chimera' but 'THE Chimera', same with the Minotaur, etc. Werewolves don't show up in packs as if they were vulgar dogs. They're powerful terryfing creatures that appear one by one, if they ever get to see one.

Change the stats of said monsters to make them stand up to their fame and the fact that there's only one of them. 4HD for a werewolf is ridiculously low. Make them 6 or 7HD. If you do orcs, bump they're stats. They're now like ogers stat-wise instead of like disposable vermin you may find everywhere.

+1, +2, etc. weapons and armour aren't magical, just have a better finish or are made with a better steel or mineral. Also, you can make gold scarce, except in some special places (a noble's treasure). Weapons and armour cost ten times than in the equipment list. The prices in any edition of D&D don't make any sense. How is it that a chainmail costs only ten times the price of an oil lamp. If you're going for a sowrd and sorcery feel (Conan and Fafhrd & the Grey Mouser for instance were mostly in an imagined bronze/iron age setting) good weapons and armour should be rare. For instance, an anglosaxon eorldorman, the most important nobles after the king, would have no more than four chainmail birnies that they would pass on generation to generation. Even many among the lowest ranking nobles didn't have access to chainmail. I'm not going for that of a scarcity level, but it's a good reference point.

My campaign lore is always expressed through the people who live there. I rarely write down that stuff, I have an idea of what happens where or how this culture is here and that other over there, and those things develop into play. BUY when I do write some lore (out of entertainment and fun) I always do it in the form of 'books' written by savants and authors from my own campaign. Some books are anonymous or fragments of ancient epics that may be the fundational wirting of a culture or what have you. What this means is that the people living in your world don't know anything for sure (not even you know that!) but they can only guess about what the gods are, if this peoples' gods are worth venerating etc. This increases the sensation of 'abandonment' and 'loneliness' of humans in a world with no sure anwers.

And there's much much more that you can do. These are just some ideas drawn from my own campaign.

PS - And regarding house rules I have many more that allow a lot of character personalisation (they're more like on the fly rulings most of the time) and make the gamic logical and simpler in my eyes. But that'd be going off topic.

[The Perilous Dreamer]

Great post, eventually I will get to reply to this. But in not too long you can learn one version first hand.

[karaunios]

I can't wait to see that, The Perilous Dreamer!

[ripx187]

My group and I were AD&D hold-outs as well. I consider it to be Old-School, but I was not welcomed warmly when I started talking about it online. It was the 4e era and an edition war was going on. Its always glad to see others who held onto the tradition. We got decades of enjoyment from those books! 

If one plays the same system for as long as we have, it gets pimped out. Why are you abandoning it and going back to an even older system?

[karaunios]

In my case I became enamoured of those little brown books when I saw them in my hands. The illustrations, tables, everything. It gave it a special flavor that I knew it's the one I wanted to pursue.

But, apart from that, it's also the freedom. Instead of having to reference obscure rules time and again and being overwhelmed by a system that shoehorns rules for 'every' possibility into your game as if you were a child with no common sense to make a calling, this was just bare bones and the blanks could be filled either with previous knowledge from the other edition(s) or, what's even way better, with your own ideas.

It's also the fact that, at least to me, OD&D lends itself to many types of play, since it's sources are historical wargaming (which grounds itself in History), fairy tales, mythology and, of course, Sword and Sorcery. There's not a 'pre-established' system. The later editions seem to be telling you how your characters have to behave and how the lore if your world should be (either directly or indirectly). Granted, OAD&D isn't exaggerated in this regard, but you already see in Dragon and other how Gary tries to tell everyone that there's only one way to play D&D, and that affects, IMO, both rules and, say, the 'metaphysics' (character behavior, world building, etc.) of it. This would be even worse with later editions and campaign settings.

AD&D is Gary's game. OD&D is everyone's.

[ripx187]

I enjoyed using OD&D. It taught me a lot about the history of the game, but design wise I find that it shoehorns a specific style of game. I was able to build some muscles when it came to improv, but we did quit using it because of my players not enjoying it as much. Granted, I did just use the three original rules, and ran the purest kind of game in the style of Arneson, but my players had issues which I understand. They wanted to know the rules and understand them. Under close scrutiny, I think that we were still playing AD&D, it is the same game. Not much is different at all except you know that you aren't going to find much help in the reference material. 

I find myself being torn in two. My ultimate goal is to have a system which disappears in the background while playing the game, OD&D looks like a simpler game, but I found that it demands much more from the DM than is really fair. This may not be the fault of the system, this is could just be me and my experience with it and carrying the baggage that is in my head over to OD&D. 

Most of the guys that hang out here never left a system, we are in the minority. These guys invented the wheel, and we didn't. Can a user go back and invent the wheel? Should we? Why did we leave a system that we played for decades?

[karaunios]

I don't see anything 'wrong' with what you tell me. I see the flaws and inconsistencies in my own reasoning, that I layed out in my previous comment, in the end it comes to a kind of 'feeling' that it can be plain unexplainable.

Also, it makes a lot of sense that you prefer to play AD&D if your players want to have a grasp of the rules. In my case my players just want to know the basics and not bother with anything more. They're (at least most of them) more appreciative of rulings and keeping the game going than anything else. So that's an aspect that plays an important role in the choosing of an edition over the other

[ripx187]

I stopped using AD&D because it has too many spells, specifically for the cleric class, but for NPC wizards as well. Designing enemy mages, even with someone whose ran the system as long as I have, was a chore.

THAC0 . . . it isn't hard but for some reason some players just can't get it. Stacking bonuses on bonuses is a step that we forgot to do when we were in the thick of it, and it takes you out of the game and plants you right back at the table. I want a game that disappears into the background. That game is not AD&D.  

The books themselves are also an issue. They are old, beat up, and harder to find. I've got a collection of PHBs but the players couldn't just walk into a store and buy one, they were acquired over time. Once I started running 5e, I was surprised that half of my players rushed out and bought a copy! 

[Hexenritter Verlag]

May 19, 2020 5:01:35 GMT -5 karaunios said:

In my case I became enamoured of those little brown books when I saw them in my hands. The illustrations, tables, everything. It gave it a special flavor that I knew it's the one I wanted to pursue.

But, apart from that, it's also the freedom. Instead of having to reference obscure rules time and again and being overwhelmed by a system that shoehorns rules for 'every' possibility into your game as if you were a child with no common sense to make a calling, this was just bare bones and the blanks could be filled either with previous knowledge from the other edition(s) or, what's even way better, with your own ideas.

It's also the fact that, at least to me, OD&D lends itself to many types of play, since it's sources are historical wargaming (which grounds itself in History), fairy tales, mythology and, of course, Sword and Sorcery. There's not a 'pre-established' system. The later editions seem to be telling you how your characters have to behave and how the lore if your world should be (either directly or indirectly). Granted, OAD&D isn't exaggerated in this regard, but you already see in Dragon and other how Gary tries to tell everyone that there's only one way to play D&D, and that affects, IMO, both rules and, say, the 'metaphysics' (character behavior, world building, etc.) of it. This would be even worse with later editions and campaign settings.

AD&D is Gary's game. OD&D is everyone's.

I agree with you.

OD&D is a wonderful toolbox to work with especially once I broke free of the BTB mentality that ripx187 struggled with. Sure playing purely BTB will lend itself to a certain style of play especially for those coming to it late.

But for me I finally broke the BTB mentality that I had wrapped myself into initially. Now I just use it as a foundation to build a system that fits the type of campaign that I want to run. Tweaking the classes and combat here or there, develop a cosmology that builds on the Law, Neutrality & Chaos axis and tying spells to it. Adding mutations for using Chaos magic.

If I want to run a more light hearted campy campaign with OD&D I can. If I want to run a Sword & Sorcery campaign I just limit magic and humanoid races and focus of S&S tropes. Easy peasy.