[Musings] Reminiscing About Swords & Wizardry Complete

True original S&WC fans have this cover.
The Otus titan cover is awesome too.
The box set is okay. Let's forget
about the weird uterus stag, though.

It's safe to say this year's Mothership is going to be Shadowdark. While we can argue all day long how much of an OSR game it is, Shadowdark is admired by a lot in the OSR community and had a shockingly successful Kickstarter campaign. On one hand, it's nice to see the game gain such a huge popularity, even if it's not my cup of tea. On the other hand, I was afraid it is going to smother other projects that start after it - particularly the revised edition of Swords & Wizardry Complete, which launched its campaign yesterday. It seems I was wrong - while it is a more humble project with far weaker marketing, it had a pretty strong start.

But why is Swords & Wizardry so important to me?

When I started GM-ing again after my high-school burnout I experimented with different games and styles, until I finally found my expectations in running sandboxes using OSR games. My first memorable sandbox campaign took place on the exotic Coconut Island and used Swords & Wizardry as its core. The party arrived into the single bastion of civilization on the island called Merchant's Port, a colony founded by the imperial Roman-like thuleans. The adventurers explored the darkest depths of the jungles, pieced together ancient maps, dug up buried treasures, traded with slaves¹, saved hostages from the local tribes, murdered their shaman², and finished the campaign by exploring a crashed spaceship.

Soon a cooperation with Frog God Games and Swords & Wizardry Complete was announced, and I immediately jumped on the bandwagon. I had a soft spot for OD&D plus its supplements, because they provided a good amount of content while still being less crunchy than AD&D1e. Wrapping your head around it was no small feat though, so a more accessible entry point was more than welcome. S&WC mostly delivered that, though it lacked some of the content I wanted to see in it. Thus I took the effort to write up some house rules that introduced percentile ability score improvement, Empire of the Petal Throne's skill system, Eldritch Wizardry's psionics rules (that was a tough one to digest), half-orcs, amazons, maybe even bards. After I was done with it, I grabbed my Ready Ref Sheets, Wilderlands of High Fantasy, and Modron booklets, and started what I called the Fantastic Wilderlands campaign.

It was one of my favourite campaigns ever. It is easily in my top 3 campaigns. I still have all my session reports, which I posted on the lfg.hu forums back then. Alas they are all in Hungarian and it would take too much effort to translate them to English. Besides, this post is first and foremost about my experiences with running S&WC, not reminiscing about what happened during that fateful campaign.

Character creation is blazing fast in S&WC. Unless you have a player who likes going through every fucking thing from the equipment chapter and ask mindnumbing questions about them³ it takes a few minutes only. This is a blessing first and foremost for the Referee, not he players. The players will have to roll up only a few characters during a campaign compared to the Referee, who needs an unlimited amount of NPCs, often out of the blue. After the first few sessions I stopped preparing NPC stat blocks, because I could do it in seconds on the fly. Class, level, important equipment, maybe some fitting spells, and you are good to go.

Gameplay is similarly swift, even combat encounters. After messing with the wrong people the party's henchmen were kidnapped by a local bandit chief, who delivered the torchbearer's head in a box as a warning. That warning ended up becoming a campaign of revenge. With some kobold help the party sneaked into the bandit hideot, an old manor through the cellars. There they angered the chief's pet gorilla, whom they had to murder. The scuffle alerted the entire manor. The party of 7 level 2-4 adventurers fought a mixed group of 28 bandits, dogs, altanian barbarians, halfling cooks in one of the most intense battles of my refereeing career. I felt exhausted once it was over, and surprised when I checked the time and realized, that the whole encounter took less than 30 minutes. I wasn't used to this. I just finished a D&D 4e campaign where even a 4v4 match could take up an hour.

This swift and light gameplay is combined with a surprisingly large amount of content. S&WC packs a lot of punch for its page count. It has a solid amount of character options⁴, monsters, magic items, spells, random encounter charts and so on. And just like the source material, it doesn't limit itself to arbitrary sweetspots in gameplay - it goes all the way up to high levels, with +5 Holy Avengers, Meteor Showers, and 30 HD Orcus! Alas the Fantastic Wilderlands campaign never reached such high levels, although my players did fight several red dragons (at once!) and some tough demons.

How good it is at being a retroclone though? S&W diverges in several ways from its progenitor. Using a single save value instead of categories is a well known, and generally liked one - even by me! The way it handles random treasure is radically different, and far more divisive - I still have issues with wrapping my head around it. The lack of some content like stat blocks for gods, some monsters, hit locations, psionics are understandable, while others morale table, reaction table, random castles, and some other minor stuff from are still baffling even today. Matt said there are legal reasons for that, but if he can revamp the treasure tables then so can he make an alternative for these. I have a hunch they weren't included becase he didn't use them - after all the game is partly meant to represent how he plays OD&D. Fortunately I had other clones and the Ready Ref Sheets to fill in these holes. Despite these differences I could use old Judges Guild products⁵ with zero effort, which should serve as a benchmark for the OD&D compatibility.

For a long time Swords & Wizardry's three variants (Whitebox, Core, Complete) served as the definitive retroclones for the various flavours of OD&D. That's not really the case nowadays. If you want to play 3LBB OD&D, Delving Deeper is more faithful and WhiteBox: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Game is sexier than S&W Whitebox. If you want to play 3LBB+Supplement I, Iron Falcon is superior to S&W Core. But S&W Complete is still the king of a niche, which while often overlooked by purists, provides a fun, fast, and substantial old-school experience. It has near-AD&D amount of content, but far less crunch. While most OSR games out there are pretty light and flexible too, they often offer a smaller scope and less stuff out of the box, and if you want to run a campaign, especially a long term sandbox, you are going to need stuff. Lots of stuff.

I don't plan to run S&W Complete in the near future, because I have enough already on my plate and if I wanted to run an OD&D campaign I would use my reprint boxed set and a few sheets of house rules instead. I'm still buying it though, because it is a game I have fond memories of, it helped me to learn and understand what makes old-school games and sandboxes tick, it might come handy when I need a quick and dirty rpg for a quick session, and also because Matt Finch proved several times that he is one of the nicest designers of the OSR scene. Tomb of the Iron God deluxe edition next, please!

¹ Needless to say they weren't really good guys, and were prone to abuse Sleep.

² Killed by the fighter Rogar, who survived a lightning bolt, then threw the invisible shaman in the head with a coconut he bought on the market the day before. His descendants carried the coconut as a +1 weapon in future campaigns.

³ In our case that was the lawful evil grey wizard Anonymous' player, who did a great job at forging a team from a party of ne'er do wells using Sleep, Charm, and various disciplinary tools.

⁴ For race you can choose from human, elf, half-elf, dwarf, halfling. For class you have assassin, cleric, druid, fighter, magic-user, monk, paladin, ranger, thief. Yeah, rangers were not in the OD&D booklets, they are from Strategic Review.

⁵ Of course this means pre-JGU Judges Guild products. Using post-JGU products requires doing tricks like ignoring half the stats and covering the last number on each.

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[Review] The Dragon's Secret

This is the ideal drakon body. You might not like it, but
this is what peak performance looks like.

The Dragon's Secret is a Swords & Wizardry Complete adventure for a party of 6-8 5th to 7th level adventurers. It's one of the biggest surprises of the year, for it is the first module released by industry veteran Jennell Jaquays in three decades. She worked as a game designer and artist of tabletop role-playing games and video games - including  names like Dark Tower, Caverns of Thracia, Griffin Mountain, Age of Empires, Quake III. She wrote some of the finest dungeons the hobby has ever seen. What made them so great? Complex non-linear maps, vertical level design, interesting factions, and an attention to details, among others. The Alexandrian blog has a series of articles about the nuts and bolts of jaquayian dungeon design, which I consider a must read for every aspiring Dungeon Master.

The Dragon's Secret is not an entirely new product. It's based on salvaged dungeon maps from the seventies, and an abridged version was already published last year as part of the North Texas RPG Con fundraiser (Legends of Adventure, by Pacesetter Games & Simulations). The revamped version was originally part of the Dungeons of Doom IV Kickstarter campaign by Star Hat Miniatures, along with its sister product Quack Keep. After all the limited editions it's no wonder I got giddy with excitement when I saw it finally being released on DriveThruRPG. I was also a bit worried though. Does Jennell still has her edge after three decades?

The Dragon's Secret is a 52 pages long book. The cover is the most drool-inducing I saw recently. I have a soft spot for ugly dragons, dragons with beaks, dragons with ears, dragons with hair, and Jennell's artwork hits the mark in every way. If the art wasn't enough in selling the module, there are still blurbs, taglines, summaries to help you make up your mind. They have all the right words that make my D&D-senses tingling: dungeon, doom, dragon, mystery, hoard, treasure! I usually don't linger much on covers, but this is so well laid out, written, and illustrated, that I had to stay and praise it a bit more than I planned. Time to move on! The interior has a nice two-column layout, and great black and white art done by Jaquays, Darcy Perry, Rick Hershey. My favorites are the medieval etchings, and the cartography, which is easily on Dyson Logos level.

After the foreword we get a half page long backstory about how the Cathedral of the Golden Dragon has risen, and fallen. The whole institute started out as a scam: the gold dragon Aulde Dawne in reality was the sorceress Dawne Rozyfingers, polymorphed by her partner in crime Steed Bramble, who convinved the locals that keeping a gold dragon nearby at the cost of some golds and jewels would be beneficial. Fast forward an unknown amount of time, and you have a whole cathedral with acolytes worshipping the dragon. Bramble thought this would be the right time to get out, but died before he could finish the preparations. When Aulde Dawne learned the man who can polymorph her back to human form died she lost her marbles and devastated the countryside. Some heroes eventually hunted her down, but found little treasure in her lair.

The next four pages are about using the adventure. I found most of it unnecessary, especially the explanation of how room and NPC descriptions are divided, because it felt self-explanatory: each segment starts with a keyword, so even the long-winded texts are easy to browse. The section ends with hooks, that for some unknown reason are split, and continued at the end of the book. That irks me probably more than it should. Fortunately it's worth flipping a bit back and forth, because the hooks are great! They are many and varied, which already shows that there is a lot to do! Highlighting the involved locations and NPCs at the end of each hook is a nice touch. The only way I think it could have been better is including page numbers, or links in the pdf.

The adventure itself is divided into four major areas containing 34 rooms in all. It starts small with the The Cathedral of the Dragon and Connections, then once the players got their feet wet they characters reach Circular Illogic, which is bigger and more complex than the other three areas together. The final part, The Dragon's Horde, is just one large room - I'm sure you all know what that means... Reachig The Dragon's Horde will require a good deal of exploration. Opening the door requires finding the puzzle, its solution, and the two objects needed for it (optionally,ignoring the red herring). This won't be a linear romp from beginning to end. There are loops, branches, secret doors, illusion walls, and multiple connections between the levels - some of which can be discovered later. Vertical design isn't only used to connect the levels: several rooms are three dimensional, and get cross sections to make their layout clear.

Speaking of rooms, there are some fantastic ones among them! Even the mundane entries get something to spice them up, be it some obstacle, an interesting detail, or a hidden treasure. Then there are those which your players will talk about years later. A spherical room with gravity on its surfaces and a gem at the top, that when removed can disable the elevator to the surface, probably also angering the 39 kobolds with paralyzing sticks living nearby. A huge hangar containing a 30 feet tall clockwork automaton, operated from a hidden control room occupied by two wanted mages. A well guarded false treasury jam-packed with fake objects and massive zombie spiders. A deathtrap with illusion chests, phantasmal floor, and crushing phantasmal walls at its bottom.

A good dungeon needs memorable inhabitants too, and this is where Jennell kicks the ball out of the park. There are several factions and NPCs around the cathedral that can serve as valuable help, or annoying nuisance. Two apprentices who murdered their master are hiding down below. The senior was actually a member of the cult long ago, and hired two werewolf families to keep the place safe while he is away. A gurgle of gargoyles was cursed to guard Aulde Dawn's most valuable treasure. A group of fowl folk adventurers (mostly ducks) and a jerk aardvark are also looking for the dragon's riches, and aren't too fond of each other.

The most prominent NPCs have a whole page devoted to them with illustration, background, rumors, and personality. They have fun quirks and traits, which is what turns them from stat block with some background info into fantastic personalities. For example the werewolf leader Elder Worgg doesn't want to transform because it will ruin his clothes. Glyphic Three-Horn the gargoyle leader who wants to throw off the curse of her kin thinks she was a human before becoming a gargoyle. That sounds like an adventure hook right there! It's also noteworthy that the dungeon's denizens aren't just standing idly stuck in a room, frozen in time, but are on the move. They are parts of the random encounter tables, there are guides how they react to various crises, and the gargoyles even have specific routes that helps them navigate through the dungeon easier.

The book ends with supplemental content. There is a random curio table, which you can roll on whenever the room description says there is one. The table is filled with colorful items, and their value is a random roll on another table, so the results can be interesting, even downrigh ridiculous. The players might find a worthless jade flute, or an extremely valuable magical graffiti on the wall - it will be a joy to see how they will tansport that to the surface! We also get Swords & Wizardry stats for two new races: the fowl folk (ducks, geese, swans, and crows) and aardvarks. They get their own monster entries too, along with zombie spiders, living statues, and the horrible drakghuls, who are the children of Aulde Dawn and some other dragon (maybe?), that were born undead and are calling ghouls to the area with their song. Yes, surprisingly The Dragon's Horde was not a typo.

Surprisingly... The book captures the old-school Judges Guild feel in its editing too. It's full of typos, missing whitespaces, double or missing articles, gibberish sentences, and even Aulde Dawne is refered to as a brass dragon instead of gold somewhere. The room entries have some redundant information too. Another readthrough by someone, or hiring an editor would have helped a lot. Looking past these annoyances I found the writing style amusing, with a good amount of humor and wordplay thrown in.

In the end, it seems my fears were irrational. While The Dragon's Secret has some warts, it is a splendid adventure. It's fun, it's colorful, it's dynamic. It's not Dark Tower or Caverns of Thracia, but it is on par with a good module right out of Dungeoneer magazine. Jennell said this is but a fragment of her Thousand Worlds campaign setting, and more is coming soon. Well color me interested, I definitely want more of this! In the meantime, I will bang my head into my desk, because I didn't buy Quack Keep before it was taken down from DriveThruRPG for revision.

Tl;dr: Even with the bad editing The Dragon's Secret is a fun read, and a good example of how to design a complex and living dungeon. You can buy it HERE.

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The True Danger of Tabletop Gaming

A monster that makes you quack with fear.

Those christian parents who are afraid that their little angels will turn to Satanism because of Dungeons & Dragons are adorably naive. The real danger of tabletop gaming is not spiritual defilement or moral corruption, but monetary bankruptcy. There are villainous authors and publishers out there, waiting for the right moment to snatch your hard earned cash with a surprise attack. They are quick and efficient: most victims end up confused about where their money went, and when did their DriveThruRPG library grow so big. This summer already had some exorbitant swindles, like the release of Cubicle-7's Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 4e preview and R. Talsorian Publishing's The Witcher Pen & Paper RPG. If you thought this will be all of it for the season, well I have some bad news for you...

Frog God Games storms Indiegogo with their The City that Dripped Blood campaign, which isn't a brick-sized tome you can beat players to death with (if character death wasn't satisfying enough), but an approximately 24 pages long adventure. I like small modules and the premise reminds me of R. E. Howard's Red Nails (one of my all-time favorite sword & sorcery stories), so I ended up supporting the Cult of Tsathoggua with $6.

Jennell Jaquays hasn't released any rpg-related products in the last thirty years, until now. It seems she gathered enough strength to return with not one, but two adventures - and there are more coming! The Dragon's Secret and Quack Keep were all parts of various Star Hat Miniatures kickstarters, and are now available on DriveThruRPG. I'm almost done with The Dragon's Secret, so expect a review coming soon. As for Quack Keep, my Wisdom checks were successful so far, but rest assured I'm going to fail next month.

While I'm struggling with my last ZWEIHÄNDER session reports and getting the next session going (it's summer after all), the game is growing strong and is about to reach new heights with its MAIN GAUCHE supplement. The content is ridiculously tempting, but I have to moderate my expenses and be satisfied with the pdf version, for now. Daniel, if you're reading this: please call the next supplement BOHEMIAN EARSPOON. I know there are people out there who want to see that title on the shelf.

Oh, and before I forget: Echoes of Fomalhaut #2 is out too.

I should have chosen drugs when I was a teen...

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