The long-time passion project of my Wandering DMs partner Paul Siegel is currently funding on Kickstarter! Fearful Ends is a rules-light, story-centric roleplaying system for horror themed games. It features nihilistic stories about characters discovering impossible horrors. It aims to allow players to roleplay characters that experience mental or emotional collapse in a safe play environment that neither stigmatizes nor sensationalizes mental illness.  We've been playing and refining Paul's system for horror games for a bunch of years, and it really runs well. I've even GM'd a session o ..read more

The D&D cartoon first appeared on CBS 40 years ago this week! Man, 1983-1984 were really great years for our hobby. Here's a link to the blog and an hourlong video interview by Mark Evanier, who wrote the pilot script and series bible" News From Me (Mark Evanier ..read more

I've vaguely known for a long time that there was some essential problem with the system for horse encumbrance in early D&D (O/AD&D). But I hadn't personally done the accounting to pinpoint where the issue was; I recently went on a deep dive on that point. Big thanks to the folks on the Wandering DMs Discord server for pointing out the problem in OED and helping me think through this reasonably. Original D&D To the side here is the page of encumbrance rules from OD&D (Vol-1, p. 15). Once again I'm struck by the overall completeness of the Original Dungeons & Dragons rul ..read more

Last year I wrote an academic paper formally solving Gary Gygax's Jousting game, as it appears in the original edition of Chainmail: Rules for medieval miniatures (1971; and prior to that in The Domesday Book newsletter). This paper was presented at a conference of the International Computer Games Association (ICGA), namely, Computers and Games 2022 (CG2022) -- and recently published in the Springer collected lecture notes for the conference. You can see the abstract here: Collins, D.R. (2023). Solving Chainmail Jousting. In: Browne, C., Kishimoto, A., Schaeffer, J. (eds) Computers and Game ..read more

I'm constantly fascinated by the novel rules detail in OD&D Swords & Spells. There's a bunch of stuff in there that can be interpreted as updates or clarifications to the core D&D rules -- stuff that often failed to matriculate forward into later versions of the game. Ironically, it's the only little-brown-book I had as a kid, until I got a copy of the other stuff well past 2000 A.D.  Here's one: In OD&D Sup-I (1975) we get the update that moved from all d6 hit dice and damage to different hit dice by class, d8's for monsters, assorted dice for weapons, and a kaleidoscope ..read more

I had an experience the other day where, trying to resolve an issue, office A told me it's the job of office B, office B said to talk to office C, and C said I had to talk to A. This is not uncommon. Things are pretty chaotic. The next time you lay out a dungeon or lair of a bunch of chaotic monsters, consider the chaotic people and institutions in your own life, and see if injecting some of those details doesn't heighten how bewildering they are (or at least give some catharsis to you). I'll say as someone just slightly on the spectrum, it's somewhere between challenging and painful to imag ..read more

It's something of a common gag that in the earliest D&D dungeons, all of the hallways were composed of 10-foot cubes -- but it's not true (notwithstanding the customary backstory to the gelatinous cube). If you look in the right places, Gygax was surprisingly consistent about the shape of his hallways -- and they look like the image at the top of this post here. This is from the original Temple of Elemental Evil (1985), p. 40, in the introductory material to the temple proper. (Note like most art pieces in the extended module, it's signed "Jack[ie] Fred", which is a pseudonym shared by a ..read more

Last week on Wandering DMs we had a smashing chat with one of our favorite repeat guests, Matt Finch of Mythmere Games. As I write this, his Kickstarter for the new Swords & Wizards Complete Revised edition is entering its last few days -- you should check it out if you can.  Matt is both epically knowledgeable about old-school D&D, and also impressively generous with his time and wisdom. After the live show he hung out for another hour to chat with he patrons on our Discord server (accessible at any tier on our Patreon). As part of that discussion, we got on the subject of Carri ..read more

I recently had an opportunity to run AD&D module A4, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, for the first time. This is of course the culminating adventure in the classic A-series Slavers tournament, famous for stripping the PCs of literally every resource and forcing them to outhink their way through a pitch-black labyrinth after being abandoned/ sacrificed to its horrors. We chatted about it a bit on Wandering DMs the other week.  Once again, the playthrough made me realize several things about the adventure that I hadn't noticed, even having read through it multiple times since its r ..read more

The issue of "concentration" for spellcasting has come up a number of times in my OD&D games lately. For those somewhat more familiar with the current-edition of D&D, two reactions are halfway common: (a) surprise that a "concentration" mechanic existed in OD&D, and/or (b) surprise that it's so infrequently required for spells in OD&D. At any rate: Yes, Virginia, concentration was a requirement for certain spells in the very first publication of D&D (1974). Just to reflect on it a bit more, here are all the spells which mention such a requirement: Original D&D Phantasm ..read more