AD&D's Apocalypse and Hereafter

“When the Invoked Devastation came upon the Baklunish, their own magi brought down the Rain of Colorless Fire in a last terrible curse, and this so affected the Suloise Empire as to cause it to become the Sea of Dust.”

- World of Greyhawk (1980)

“And no bells tolled and nobody wept no matter what his loss because almost everyone expected death...And people said and believed, 'this is the end of the world.'”

- Agnolo Tura of Siena (mid-14th century)

I've circled around the margins of theme before—as have a few others—but there is a heady whiff of apocalypse in old school D&D. It's seen not just in the rather obvious stock elements--the countless ruins, the lost artifacts, the former sprawl of civilization lost to the wilds—but hard-coded throughout the rules proper whenever broad human society is involved.

The closer in I go with this AD&D exegesis the more I see this perspective reinforced in spades.

Let's get started by bouncing back to an unlikely place, the Encounters section of the DMG (Appendix C) to pick apart a peculiar section on outdoor encounters (pages 182-183).

Civilization: A Thin Red Line

For starters you get smacked over the head with how desperate life must be even inside the few “inhabited” zones of the implied world. For you see with every encounter rolled in such areas, there is a full 25% chance that the random encounter table should be utterly ignored and a patrol encountered instead.

And by patrol we are not talking about a small group of muddling watch or a handful of tax collectors/wardens, we are talking armed-to-the-teeth, recon in force. Such patrols are always lead by a fairly formidable leader, a fighter or ranger of a whopping 6-8^th level, who has a lieutenant of 4-5^th level and a sergeant of 2-3^rd level (and this doesn't add in the 40% chance of a 6-7^th level cleric and a 60% chance of a 5-8^th level magic user). Even the enlisted men are tough, three to four alone being 1^st level veterans sprinkled among a further 13-24 men-at-arms. All patrol fighters with levels have plate armor, mounts, and an arsenal of weapons. Even the grunts are humping chain (and scale at the worst).

The sheer frequency of meeting such heavily-powered up bands—hell even a mid-level party would find the standard issue patrol of normal men a tough go--inside the settled environs sends a strong message that this is a world right on the knife's edge.

Not only is civilization an obsessively-patrolled armed camp, it is also damn sparse.

The section counsels a DM who hasn't keyed out settlements to use the random terrain charts in Appendix B to do so. These speak wonders about how low the population density is: there's only a 16% chance per “area” (a mile is suggested) of a settlement of any kind. And 16 percent chance breaks down further with the highest chances being a single dwelling, a tiny thorpe/hamlet, or a ruin.

Compare that to 12^th century Britain--which even though it's population density was less than half France's of the time—was still around 40 people to each square mile.

Yet if it isn't the12^th century, it could be more the cataclysmic mid-14^th century. Much like the mass sorcerous devastations of Greyhawk, bubonic plague depopulated Europe to an unprecedented degree—and along with the long wars and other disruptions of that period--unlocked a massive social and political disintegration.

Foissart, a contemporary chronicler, famously said “a third of the world died.” Modern estimates of a 50-60% mortality rate in Europe incredibly make that an understatement.

Whatever the death count, the breakdown of the old order is (relatively) well-documented. Here's Tuchman's Distant Mirror again; “Hill farms and sections of poor soil were let go or turned to pasture for sheep which required less labor. Villages weakened by depopulation...were deserted in increasing numbers. Property boundaries vanished when fields reverted to wasteland. Landowners impoverished by these factors sank out of sight or let castles and manors decay while they entered the military brigandage that was to be the curse of the following decades.”

The Lost Edge 

Ok so if the DMG establishes that post-breakdown civilization is sparsely-inhabited garrison states, the very next section in the DMG oddly implies that the wilderness seems to be reasonably stocked out with fortified outposts. For every encounter in the wilderness there is a 1 in 20 chance that each and every random encounter will be superseded by bumping into...a fortress of all things.

And all these fortresses are not rinky-dink little palisaded affairs on the whole. There is a full on 45% chance that they are at least stout stone-walled medium-sized castles (large shell keeps and small or medium walled castles with keeps) and a further 20% chance of it being a large fortress of some kind.

The Inhabitants sub-chart clears up the mystery, these scattered sites are the markers for where humanity lost the fight with entropy--or is barely holding the walls.

See now 45% of the all the small forts are completely deserted (30% for medium and 15% large). Monsters inhabit a further 15-25% of the time. “Humans” (social “monsters” again, bandits, beserkers, dervishes with a full 60% chance of them being brigands) are encountered 10-20%. Only in the remaining minority of the time is the fortress held by the ruling name-level characters we would expect.

While there is much here to mine again about AD&D's domain-play, I will rest that thread for another time, but I think you get a sense of what I am going for here.

AD&D's isn't just a hard-fought world that merely experienced the fall of great empires centuries before, it's one where humanity came close to the abyss in the recent past—and has stayed there. It's on that stage of pure chaos that player-character, the rootless opportunists knocked out of the fabric of society, find themselves adventuring in.  

What the Hired Help Say About Ruling the Gygaxian Implied World

“Who built the seven towers of Thebes? 

The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?
And Babylon, so many times destroyed,
Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima's houses,
That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?
In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished
Where did the masons go?”

-Bertolt Brecht

Remember my series exploring the scattershot (yet more far more comprehensive and interesting than is normally given) domain-level play and implied world in first edition AD&D? Longtime readers may remember that I had a few more posts lined up that I never really finished off, posts that have continued to nag me despite me having them buried like the tell-tale heart deep in the drafts box. (You can read the whole series here, here, here, and here.)

Hark! Louder, louder, louder. Argh. I dissemble no more, tear up the planks and let's finish this long due series.

Let's come back around with some Talmudic readings of the section on Hirelings in the DMG (p. 28-31), a section that yields quite a bit of information on what the AD&D domain game and implied world is.

Working Stiffs and the Making of Things

The section on hirelings explicitly begins—with the first sentence—in the context of domain-play and the power arc of the AD&D character: “Most hirelings are dealt with under the section entitled EXPERT HIRELINGS - those which are typically employed at such time as the character in question has an established stronghold. Common, standard hirelings are basically the usual craftsmen or laborers taken on by lower level player characters.”

That's clear and straightforward: one entire class of hirelings revolves around life in a stronghold, the other is more the straightforward useful hacks for adventuring.

A quick look at Standard Hirelings seems to hold this view you have the porters, teamsters, and pack handlers that deal with the copious (and mightily heavy with coinage at 1/10^th a pound) amounts of swag being hauled out of murderholes. You have linkboys to free up your torch arm for that Fauchard-Fork and perhaps a valet to shine your boots, high, hard. These stiffs are easy to come by (most if not all can be found in your average village) and mostly work in short stints of work paid by the day.

But now this is where things get (somewhat) interesting. This is where there are hints at a “middle game,” a sort of higher-level play where a character hasn't gone through that long, tough process of carving their hold in this post-apocalyptic AD&D world but has resources enough to start acting on a larger social scale.

Because, see, the Standard Hirelings list is not just the adventuring-specific mooks above, but includes a broader range of semi-skilled and skilled artisans. So you have carpenters, leather workers, painters (limners), and tailors too. Significantly you can hire all these hirelings at a monthly scale but this “assumes that quarters are provided for the hireling, and that these quarters contain a bed and like necessities.” It assumes further that you actually possess a base of operations.

More over it sets up a freeform way to handle production of goods:

“It is not practical to try to determine the time and expenses necessary to accomplish everything possible for the scores of standard hirelings possible to employ, so each DM will have to decide. For example, assume that a player character hires a tailor to make plain blue cloaks for all of his or her henchmen. This will take only about 1 day per garment and cost the stated amount of money plus 5 c.p. (10% of the cost of a cloak) per cloak for materials. However, if the same cloaks were to be fashioned of a material of unusual color and have some device also sewed upon them, time and materials costs would be at least double standard, and probably more.”

That first sentence strikes me as a great example of the overall design philosophy of that edition--a sweet spot for me. It acknowledges the near-infinite imaginative possibilities of each individual campaign and implies that the hireling list (and the following production rules) are just guiding models and that you can and should be specifically tailoring lists of such working folks to your own quirks. Black lotus powder distillers? Pleasure barge shipbuilders? Sure here you go, here's a detailed example/baseline for their wages and what you charge the players.

Spun a different way, this whole subsection is toolbox support for the level of owning a creaky old caravel, running a scurrilous hole-in-the-wall tavern, squatting a cleared-out mini-dungeon, raising the standard of your own free company, or any other thing that I remember being a big post-lower level goal of our play groups as a kid.

And despite the ostensibly more-comprehensive approach to domain-play of the other best attempts of D&D editions from the Companion set to Birthright, AD&D alone is the sole attempt in the game to orient such a specific, granular approach to work and working people.

There is no beancounter automatic table of population growth. To entice these folks to said base the player actually has to put some effort into it, “if the offer is for long term employment, only 1 in 6 will be willing to accept unless a small bonus is offered--day's wage is too small, but double or treble that is sufficient to make 3 in 6 willing to take service.” The implication being that you have to hustle and bribe normal folks (to get over their fears, I suppose) and leave the walled confines of beleaguered civilization.

It's not abstractions like “peasant families” and “domain levels” producing things in the Gygaxian world, but NPCs with at least some identity and face. Frankly, that's a game-world vision I find more human scale and interesting.

Onwards and upwards, next we look at how these sections imply certain things about urban life, guild work, the life of mercenaries, general handwaving of duller aspects of domain-play, etc. Stay tuned.

What Rough Men Tell Us About AD&D's Implied World

One thing I am digging about writing the AD&D Domain Game series (now collected here under this label), is how fun and liberating playing the “D&D is Always Right” game can be. For those unfamiliar with the term that is instead of getting bent out of shape about how broken the seemingly wonky bits of classic D&D are that you embrace the notion that there may really be something there there.

Half the fun is in exploring the backward implications of those premises, so you'll forgive me as I digress a bit from the series focus.

Yesterday, we steered into some highly pregnant territory for that kind of exploration talking about the “monster” write-ups for normal humans in the Monster Manual. A number of readers riffed on what was up with all the bandit bands captained by name-level characters. 

(Before we go too far down this rabbit hole I will point that this extrapolation game can often stretch analogies too far, often simpler explanations exist for the real design motivators like “we should keep historical feudalism out of this so people can imaginatively own their campaigns more”.)

UWS kicked off that round stating that “you can look at bandits and brigands as mercenary armies without a liege lord, or between services.” Bomasticus follows it up by hypothesizing about why mercenaries are so scarce: “Strikes me now that most of the armed men out there are already "working" as the various Monster Manual vagrant tribes. Maybe the mercenaries who show up are survivors of tribal or civilized armies that have lost their name level leader.”

John Bell followed that up with some astute historical comparisons: “Early D&D has an implicit near post-apocalyptic setting. I always think of the two closest historical representations of the milieu it's trying to create as post-Roman, pre-Carolingian Europe (late 7th, early 8th century) and Northwestern Europe shortly after 1348.”

This exchange resonated strongly with my read of the domain-play pieces and what it says about the somewhat-anarchic, implied world of the AD&D hardbacks. Many others have explored the notion that most iterations—even the newer ones (“points of light” anyone?)--of D&D have some implied cataclysmic breakdown, but what interests me is the specific bit John ends on because that period marks the series of cataclysms that brought down the established routines of medieval feudalism.

The Funerary Monument of John Hawkwood

Taking one of the best and most accessible accounts of the upheaval of the 14^th century, Barbara Tuchman's A Distant Mirror, you start to see a world with some eerie parallels. You could spend hours talking through chapters of that book, but let's focus back on the mercenary/bandit question.

Take this section from mid-book, note how it all feels so easily translatable back into the AD&D domain game context:

“Outside Paris the breakdown of authority was reaching catastrophe. Its catalyst was the brigandage of military companies spawned by the warfare of the last fifteen years. There were the Free Companies who write “sorrow on the bosom of the earth” and were to become the torment of the age. Composed of English, Welsh, and Gascons released after [the Battle of] Poitiers, as soldiers customarily were to avoid further payment...
Along with German mercenaries and Hainault adventurers, they gathered in groups of 20-50 around a captain...In the year after the truce they swelled, merged, organized, spread, and operated with ever more license. Seizing a castle, they would use it as a stronghold from which to exact tribute from every traveler and raid the countryside.
They imposed ransoms on prosperous villages and burned the poor ones, robbed abbeys and monasteries of their stores and valuables, pillaged peasants' barns...As the addiction took hold, they wantonly burned harvests and farm equipment and cut down trees and vines, destroying what they lived by, in actions which seem inexplicable except as a fever of the time or an exaggeration of the chroniclers.”

Throughout the rest of the book you find descriptions of Free Company leaders who almost to a man sound like the rootless name-level fighters rooting around the fringe of power we were discussing yesterday. Take the archetype, the marvelously named John Hawkwood, Captain of the infamous White Company, who rose from second son of a tanner to the man rich enough to immortalize himself in the art above.

Or Fra Monreale, a renegade Knight of St. John who “maintained a council, secretaries, accountants, camp judges and gallows” in his rough mercenary camp and who—undoubtedly emboldened by his massive accumulation of hit points—cockily waltzed into Rome alone only to be seized and tried. According to Tuchman, “he went to the block magnificently dressed in brown velvet embroidered in gold and had his own surgeon direct the ax of the executioner. Unrepentant he declared himself justified 'in carving his way with a sword through a false and miserable world.'”

Again it's highly doubtful that Gygax sat down and said “how can I subtly code in these great historical themes of the 14^th century into the game?” But those themes, tropes and parallels did have their own distant mirrors in the pulp fantasy and historical wargaming influences that inspired the game.

Personally I like it because then it starts to weave it all into post (or pre) apocalyptic themes that can be stretched into any number of customizable campaign elements.

I had originally sat down to write this post with the tongue-in-cheek title “WTF Berserkers?” mostly because my MM reread had me scratching my head again about why the hell you had strange bands of anti-social Norse stand-ins tooling around the wilderness and first level of dungeons with such relative frequency. It still takes some creative spinning but in the above context you start to see it more. Maybe these are some of the former warriors who have succumbed into that pure blood frenzy, that terrible addiction of Tuchman's that truly have become “monsters”? See, wasn't that fun?

Now back to finishing that series, while I let you take a turn at the game.

AD&D's Domain Game: Pity the Poor Name-Levels and Their Private Warbands

Enabled by some of you dear readers I continue exploring the domain game scattered through AD&D today. (Parts 1-3 can be found here, here, and here.)

No Easy Entry to the Ruling Class. AD&D's Domain Game reads to me as a rougher and less assured ascent to power than in many other iterations of D&D's domain game. You get the impression that busting into the existing nobility is difficult to impossible task and that the PCs can only manage to tentatively push their way onto the lower rungs by carving out a small hold far from the civilized centers of power.

My read on this became reinforced when I started rereading the long sections in the Monster Manual on Men. It's startling to me how frequently high level NPCs show up not as lords and the captains of great realms but in relatively low-status commands. Indeed the wandering bands of humanity (what is driving all this restlessness? Political collapse?) seem sloppy with formidable characters. The MM makes a special point of emphasizing this fact: “Note that there will always [my emphasis] be higher level characters with any group of men encountered.”

Take your garden variety band of bandits that roam (only a 20% chance they are in “lair”) the wilderness in packs of 20-200. From the entry:

“Bandits will always be led by an 8th, 9th, or 10th level fighter...To determine the level of the bandit leader use the following guide: if under 100 bandits are encountered the leader will be 8th level, if 100 to 150 the leader will be 9th level, and if 150 or more the leader will be 10th level...For every 50 bandits there is a 25% chance that there will be a magic-user of 7th, 8th, 9th, or 10th level (roll a 4-sided die for level if one is with the group).”

These name-level “lords” rule over the most rudimentary of “strongholds”: “Bandit lairs will be informal camps 80% of the time, but 10% will be cave complexes with a secret entrance, and 10% will be regular castles with 1-4 light catapults for defense.”

Some of these high-level characters are even further down the status ladder. Merchants for example have a caravan guard leader that's a 6th-11^th fighter. 11^th level and all you can add up to be is the leader of some pot-bellied traders' guard detail? Slacker.

Looking back at how rigorous the steps to creating your hold are by the book—you must find a plot of land without a flag planted on, rigorously explore and fight for it, pour a very large stash of money into construction, and continue to fight and patrol your turf while fending off the newly jealous--no wonder you have so many powerful humans just grabbing the small amounts of power they can.

(Personally I have always found this supercharging of NPCs not to my taste and as a rule of thumb cut all the levels in half, but I think the point stands.)

Build it and They Will Come. Circling back to that second to last paragraph above, building a stronghold is no easy task. Presumably the sheer difficulty and audacity of the rare name-level character who succeed is what creates that automatic pull for bands of followers. Indeed by the book, their new private armies start at the moment you have completed that task.

The DMG states bluntly that “fighters and clerics will be the principal territorial developers” (remember that only the three old OD&D core classes are even allowed to rule politically). The type of followers those two classes attract reflects that.

Clerics get a pretty sweet deal when it comes to followers—and early too. As an 8^th level Patriarch or Matriarch after building a “place of worship” they get two bites of the apple: 20-200 (presumably civilian laity) followers and “men-at-arms”. The DMG gives a healthy mix of seven different troop types as followers: 10-50 light, medium, and heavy cavalry and from 25-140 light and heavy infantry.

What's more the cleric's army of zealots “are fanatically loyal and serve without pay so long as the cleric does not change deities and/or alignment.” Nice.

Fighters get a tough-cookie lieutenant (5-7^th level fighter) and a slightly-smaller unit. Fifty percent of the time a company of 20 light cavalry supported by a 100 heavy infantry. There is a 40 percent chance of getting one of two smaller, but better armed companies of heavy infantry and a further 10 percent chance of getting a shock group of 60 medium-heavy cavalry

The common thread for both the fighter and the cleric in follower type is that they are the only classes receiving what is essentially an army (albeit a small one scaled to a petty warlord). Interestingly in composition and numbers they run pretty close to the groups of men description in the MM.

All other classes generally receive much smaller bands of similarly-classed individuals, here the ranger gets 2d6 creatures, there the assassin 7d4 lower-leveled assassins. More of a henchman/apprentice set-up writ slightly larger.

Why is this significant at all?

Mostly because it seems pretty dang hard to find and hire up large bodies of armed men in AD&D. Skip over to the DMG's description of mercenary soldiers on page 30. While it leaves it up to the DM to determine the likehood of encountering mercenaries, it does suggest in detail how many of such and such type you do meet. Significantly the numbers are pretty small by the standards of raising an army: 70 percent of the time you will only find a range of 1-12. A further 20 percent of the time you're only getting 2-30 and only 10 percent of the time are you reaching numbers getting into the low-range ballpark of those groups of starter followers.

Shewww so much still to cover, we have peasants revolts, construction costs/time (and it's larger implications to building settlements), hirelings more broadly, etc. Tomorrow perhaps and then on to tackle B/X, Mentzer, and OD&D.

AD&D's Domain Game: Growing a Demense from the Beautiful Chaos of Encounter Tables

Today we get to the third part of our little tour of what the AD&D books say about domain-level play (parts one and two here and here). There's still more to analyize about followers, peasant revolits, hirelings, morale rules, wilderness and other relevant sections, but I'm wary of losing my audience here.

Not Just Wilderness Clearing. Reading over my post I think I may have gone a little too far with yesterday's stick-bending about wilderness clearing being the entirety of the domain-play adventure in AD&D. While it's undoubtedly central stage, Gygax does specifically mention political machinations as a way to shake things up when things start looking dull:

“Because this is a fantasy adventure game, it is not desirable to have any player character's territory become tame and staid. There must always be a chance for some monster to enter the area and threaten the well-being of its inhabitants. What is the answer if the territory is located in the heart of some powerful state? Intrigue and petty wars, of course! If the territory of a player character is part of a nation, then there will be jealous neighbors, assassins, and the like to threaten him or her.”

Encounter Tables as Central Mechanic. Yesterday I also made several mentions of how the many, longish encounter tables crunched in the back of the DMG were to be used to stock out the hexcrawl contents and periodic checks for wandering bands. Suddenly the gigantic “number appearing” and “% in lair” lines become much more relevant.

Interestingly this is extended even further to be the central mechanic to handle the all-important way that your little hold in the wilds grows:

“[Potential settlers] will begin to appear after the player character's stronghold is finished and patrols have generally cleared the area. The populace will match the area and the alignment of the character. When a random monster check reveals some form of creature who properly matches the potential inhabitant type for the territory, then have them move in and settle down, making proper subservience calls upon the master of the territory, naturally. Hamlets, thorps, and various other settlement farms will eventually be established here and there in the area, starting near the castle and working towards the fringe of the territory.”

It's an interesting contrast to how the other D&D domain games which almost to a system work out some automatic (and bone dry) formula for population growth (such and such percentage of “peasant families” move in per such and such time).

At first glance it seems silly and unworkable—what I'm going to grow a colony of wandering ankhegs, satyrs and stag beetles here--but when you look harder at the frequencies of certain encounters it becomes more obvious: the most common encounter across clime and theme is with groups of “normal humans”.

Even on the pure wilderness charts the chance of a given encounter being a roll on the “men” sub-table is as high as 10-25 percent of the time. In inhabited/patrolled areas (presumably what you are rolling on in the post-clearing example above) that number jumps up to 40-65 percent. You can potentially throw in a 1-10 percent chance of meeting demihumans and a 3-15 percent chance of humanoids as possible settlers (depending obviously on alignment and reaction).

What's more on the Men sub-table the “monster” listings—bandits, beserkers, brigands—only occur 10-20 percent of the time, leaving merchants, dervishes, nomads, pilgrims, and tribesmen as groups that have some likelihood of settling down. (Hell my players would just as likely be recruiting the former group of ruffians).

There are also interesting domain-play possibilites for some of the less obvious monster encounters. Herds of mastodons and wild horses? How about a potentially lucrative resource on the hoof? Tribe of hill giants? Do we risk trying to sign those giganto-bumpkins up or mount up?

Personally I love this. It's not great “simulation”, but it is great fantasy gaming. 

But then again the idea of being a self-proclaimed petty warlord just barely ruling over a motley deep-wilderness, monster-haunted domain of religious zealots, blink dogs, forest tribesmen, pixies, and ballsy caravan owners has a way more evocative pull to me then being a feudal-like count with an auto-expanding number of faceless serfs.

AD&D's Domain Game: the DMG

Taking where we left off from yesterday, I look at what the Dungeon Master's Guide (the one with the ugly red dude and chainmail bikini gal on the cover) says about AD&D's implied domain-level play.

The longest and most direct section that handles this is the Territory Development by Player Characters section (page 93). There are a number of obvious observations here and some interesting subtle ones both in it and in the accompanying sections around it that I never caught until rereading these passages through this lens. Let's check through them.

Feudalism is Not the Default. One of the consistent themes you see in other treatments of D&D's domain game is that the political structure is almost always based on an idealized version of European feudalism (maybe with a few token nods to the title ranks of other cultures). You have a graduated hierarchy going from barons, counts, dukes, kings each owing fealty to the other. You have peasant families tied to the land. And you have the PCs inserting themselves into that existing structure.

I have written before how Gygax explicitly breakswith faux European medievalism as the one and only implied backdrop of AD&D in the Social Class and Rank section (which precedes and is clearly tied to the Territory section). Indeed he repeats this more succinctly in the first paragraph here saying “the exact culture and society of the area is up to you.”

Interestingly if you flip back to the section right behind it (Peasants, Serfs, and Slaves) Gygax states that, “any character who forces peasantry, serfdom, or slavery upon any inhabitants of an area he or she controls will have to be very careful to guard against uprisings.” There is a strong backwards implication here that slavery, serfdom and even a freeholding (perhaps tenant?) peasantry is not the default state of most of those settling into a cleared hold. Given the fact those rural laboring classes made up 80-90 percent historically of most west European medieval societies that's quite an assumption.

Wilderness Clearing is the Central Adventure. The real meat of the Territory section is the example of how to handle the mechanics of wilderness clearing. (It's important to note that Gygax sets it up as an example, as in here's how a DM could handle it if organically developed in the campaign, there is no set one way on how to adjudicate it.)

Example or not it's a pretty fascinating glimpse of play that clearly focuses more on the adventure of carving out a section of the howling wilderness than the routines of established power. It's not about courtly intrigue or political machinations with other civilized powers and it's definitely not like retirement it's about barely holding on in the wilderness through continuous exploration, adventure, and combat.

Let's parse it out point by point:

Domain Carving Starts Way Out in the Wilds. “Assume that the player in question decides that he will set up a stronghold about 100 miles from a border town.” Not on the border of civilization but so deep in the wilds to be half a week or more travel to the edge of civilization.

You Need Detailed Zoomable Hex Maps. The player chooses (or co-creates a site as in the example where the player says he wants a site with a high bluff overlooking a river) a site and the DM presents him with a rough map showing the campaign hex and the six surrounding hexes. (It's unclear here if these are the whopping 20-40 long hexes described in the outdoor section.) You also need some very small-scale detailed maps 200 yards to a hex with an imposed larger hex at a one mile scale (nine smaller hexes wide).

The Clearing is an Intensive Hexcrawl Adventure. Now Gygax starts talking about the clearing much as he is describing the dangers of exploring hexes in the wilderness but in a through search grid like operation—and it's clearly meant to be an adventure to be done by the PCs themselves over several sessions almost a mini-campaign if you think about the scale involved:
“The player character and his henchmen and various retainers must now go to the construction site, explore and map it...Use actual time to keep track of game time spent exploring and mapping (somewhat tedious but necessary). Check but once for random monsters in each [200-yard?] hex, but any monster encountered and not driven off or slain will be there from then on, excepting, of course, those encountered flying over or passing through. After mapping the central hex and the six which surround it, workers can be brought in to commence construction of the castle.”

Danger Continues Well Into Construction. Interestingly this exploration and fighting doesn't end after the first bout but continues throughout the long period of building the hold:

“As [construction] will require a lengthy period of game time, the player character will have to retain a garrison on the site in order to assure the safety of the crew and the progress of the work (each day there will be a 1 in 20 chance that a monster will wander into one of the seven hexes explored by the character, unless active patrolling in the territory beyond the area is carried on).

While the construction is underway, the character should be exploring and mapping the terrain beyond the core area. Here the larger scale of about one mile per hex should be used, so that in all the character can explore and map an entire campaign hex. There are MANY one mile hexes in a 30 mile across campaign hex, so conduct movement and random monster checks as is normal for outdoor adventuring.”

Constant Adventuring is Required. Even with all the intensity of the above two phases the stronghold is never assured of a dull safety it remains on the edge only barely mitigated by the counter-moves of the PCs: “1) Once per day a check must be made to see if a monster has wandered into one of the border hexes which are adjacent to unexplored/ uncleared lands.

2) Once per week a check must be made to see if a monster has wandered into the central part of the cleared territory.”

The nature of the set-up demands that the PCs and followers be constantly exploring, expanding and holding the territory:

“Monsters which are indicated will generally remain until driven out or slain.

Modifiers to this are:

Posting and placement of skulls, carcasses, etc. to discourage intelligent creatures and monsters of the type able to recognize that the remains are indicative of the fate of creatures in the area.

Regular strong patrols who leave evidence of their passing and aggressively destroy intruders.

Organized communities whose presence and militia will discourage all but organized groups who prey on them or certain monsters who do likewise.”

And even when they are settled in and “patrolling the territory regularly--about once per week on a sweep basis, or daily forays to various parts of the area, the character will need only check once each week for incursions of wandering monsters...on the Uninhabited/ Wilderness table.”

That's a lot of vigilance and if handled imaginatively a heap of fun trouble to rain down on player's head. In otherwords little to nothing of political tedium or record keeping and the like, just more emphasis on a larger stage version of core D&D play areas: exploration, combat, and their related resource management.

Today's analysis is growing overlong. I will pick up later about how the copious encounter tables play a central role in providing a simple, workable (and fun) system for handling the mechanics of domain growth and ongoing adventures. I will also look at other sections on hirelings and followers to see what they say about AD&D's domain game.

AD&D's Domain Game

The secret we should never let gamemasters interested in domain play know is that they don't need any rules.

Yes, that's a clumsy paraphrase of a likely apocryphal Gygax quote and, yes, it's hyperbole—role-playing games need some kind of rules structure to keep them from just slumping into amateur theater hour. (And yes there is much to use in later supplements and games digging into this realm-ruling realm—including my own Hill Cantons: Borderlands when it's tarrying rear sees the light of published day.)

But it's an exaggeration that amplifies a simple truth, you may already have more in your head and hands about how to run this then you realize. For one you the ultimate baseline: your own capacity to imagine a robust imaginary world and adjudicate on a situational basis. Though a victim of scatter-shot organization there is also the fact that a fairly substantive rules framework for domain-play in D&D was already in place as early as 1979--in two books that you likely already own.

Let's do some textual analysis of the explicit and implicit domain game lying in those lovable old hardbacks (coming again for an encore this summer). Here's part one mostly from what we can gather from the Players' Handbook (part two of this post deals with the smorgsborg scattered throughout the DMG).

Different Classes, Different Domain Games

When you put together the various scattered paragraphs on higher level play you get a sense of a few overall themes (I will present a few more when we get to the DMG) that what class and race you are highly colors what you can as a charcter when you get to name level, enough that it feels like you have not just one domain game but several.

Only the three original core classes are able to “rule”. Only clerics, fighters, and magic-users are able to exert political authority enough to be able to squeeze income out of a local population. Furthermore they collect this revenue in varying amounts implying that the classes have different spheres of activity in the realm that can control.

There is an implied subtext I see in the terseness that the only beancounting that is important to AD&D domain ruling is knowing what the population of the land you control is and how much swag you can pull out of them.

Cleric (income from “trade, taxation, and tithes”): 9 sp per inhabitant per month

Fighter (income from “trade, tariffs, and taxes”): 7 sp per inhabitant per month

Magic-User (unclear but they “rule much as a noble”): 5 sp per inhabitant per month

Domain play does map neatly to name-level. Clerics begin in a limited way—they can build a temple and attract followers but not tax--right before name level at 8^th level. On the other hand you have Magic Users who cannot build a stronghold and rule until 12^th level, one after name level.

Ruling is for humans. Level-caps make it a humanocentric part of play for PCs. Only Dwarves with 18 STR and Half-Orcs can become name-level fighters. No PC demi-human can achieve a qualifying Cleric or Magic User level. So ruling is really left as far as PCs go to humans.

Class determines type of “stronghold.”

Clerics: At 8^th level must build “a place of worship, a building of not less than 2,000 square feet in floor area with an altar, shrine, chapel, etc” to attract followers. At 9^th level to rule they have the: “option of constructing a religious stronghold. This fortified place must contain a large temple, cathedral, or church of not less than 2500 square feet on the ground floor. It can be a castle, a monastery, an abbey or the like. It must be dedicated to the cleric's deity (or deities). The cost of construction will be only one-half the usual for such a place because of religious help.”

Fighters: Have freeholds which are “some type of castle” based in a cleared radius of 20-50 miles.

Magic-Users: Have strongholds based in a cleared radius of 10-20 miles.

Thieves: Cannot build strongholds (i.e. a building that serves as a seat of power) but can “build a tower or fortified building of the small castle type for their own safety; but this construction must be within, or not more than a mile distant from, a town or city.”

Assassins: Like thieves cannot build strongholds but can build guild headquarters when they reach 13^th level and defeat the sitting guildmaster “the headquarters...is always within a large town or big city...It is typically a warehouse or other nondescript structure, with safeguards and traps added.”

However evocatively at 15^th level, “the headquarters of the Grandfather of Assassins can be virtually anywhere and of any form--cavern, castle, monastery, palace, temple, you name it. However, if it is a large and obvious place, the headquarters must be located well away from all communities - such as in the midst of a murky woods, a dismal marsh or fen, a lonely moor, a deserted island, A remote coast, or far into forsaken hills or atop a mountain.”

Druids: vaguely “When attaining levels above the 11th, characters will generally inhabit building complexes set in woodlands and similar natural surroundings.”

Paladins: Beyond personnel costs they can only keep enough treasure “to construct or maintain a small castle.”

Monks: Can either steal or build one: “The monastery or monastery-like headquarters of the monk can be that of the character he or she defeated to attain 8th or higher level, or it can be a building specially constructed by the monk player character after attaining 8th or higher level. In the latter case, the monk may retain up to 250,000 gold pieces value in treasure in order to finance construction of the place.”

No Easy, Guaranteed “Endgame”

There is an implied style of play that often seems to crop up in OSR circles that domain-level play is either: (a) part of an automatic and assured process (you get the required level and poof); or (b) consitutes some kind of partial or full retirement. The AD&D domain game seems in its sparse detail to be about fighting your way up and fighting to maintain your position.

Indeed three classes—assassins, druids, and monks--have to literally do both. As they reach name level they must fight and defeat increasingly smaller circles of high-level characters (and presumably must be fielding the same from NPCs and other PCs) culminating in a single character of the highest level. No gentle coasting to oblivion there.

And even ruling for the three main classes implies a small-scale and intense experience. Only wilderness clearing—and constant vigilant patrolling--of a relatively small scale is mentioned at all. There is zero mention anywhere in the books of coasting into the higher and safer higher ranks of the nobility surrounded by a cast of tens of thousands of soldiers, retainers etc. There is a strong implication that you are right there at the edge of the howling wilds and you don't get out of that until you actually handover your character sheet to the DM.

More perhaps tomorrow on followers, wilderness clearing, political forms, and military matters from the book with the screaming, butt-ugly red fiend.