Men & Magic, nothing more?

[sham]

Fin's "How much can you change OD&D...?" thread in the Philosophy forum got me thinking about this approach to an OD&D campaign setting/house rule version.

Let's say, for arguments sake, that D&D never reached any level of popular success. It was published 34 years ago, and was quickly forgotten. Then you stumbled upon an interesting old rule book, just the one though, Men & Magic. There was nothing to support this game on the internet, and no one you knew had heard of it, or any role playing games at all. (After all, there probably wouldn't be any RPGs as we know them now).

After reading the rules, you become enchanted with the concept and the idea of making a fantasy campaign based on this book, you begin to generate interest in your fellow gaming buddies. Despite your best efforts, you cannot find any record of a company called Tactical Studies Rules, so you are on your own. Soon, you are sitting down to fill in the gaps and apply these ideas to paper for your upcoming D&D game.

From here, where do you go? How would you go about making this a playable game in you lived in such a RPG vacuum?

[howandwhy99]

The game isn't really playable out of the box. You need some aids as well as purchasing Chainmail and Outdoor Survival (and Wooden Ships, Iron Men too really. The rules in booklet three are pretty brief)

But with those? You should be good to go. And it isn't as if so many of those details weren't stolen right from history anyways. I guess the only thing that would be difficult to know would be good rule ideas later come up with in supplements. Like custom classes beyond the core classes. Like paladin, druid, and illusionist were. It does say medieval fantasy on the box.

[Stonegiant]

I don't know, allot people have played the game out of the box without Chainmail or Outdoor Survival. As to the WS,IS rules being needed, I think Fin posted here about the rules not being really compatible with OD&D. A couple of rules might have to house ruled but thats what OD&D is all about.

[sham]

I wanted to 'set the mood' with my original post, but to simplify my question, disregarding the 'what if' portion of it:

Do you think one could run a D&D campaign using nothing more than Vol. I, Men & Magic?

You'd have to define everything else by home brewing, including references to Chain Mail.

For the most part, and I might catch flak for this opinion, I think Vol. I is the 'rule book', the rest is just supplemetal to a degree.

The more home brewing and defining of rules that I do, the more I am thinking along such (possibly) radical lines.

~Sham

[Finarvyn]

An interesting concept. If all I had was Men & Magic, obviously the first thing I would have to do is to create something similar to the other two books.

Since I had never seen those books, I would have combed through literature to come up with some magical items. I probably would end up with lots of magic swords (Orcrist, Excalibur, Stormbringer) and maybe some misc magic (Alladin's lamp, magic mirror on the wall, and so on).

As far as monsters, I would have probably done a similar search through literature and wound up with orcs, dragons, and a few monster-movie nasties. Not knowing any better, I might have assigned them a class and called most of them "Fighting Men" except for creatures with clear magical talents (genie, dragon...).

[driver]

Wow. Good topic. This is exactly the sort of exercise I enjoy. I will give this some thought, and possibly put it into practice -- obviously I can't unlearn everything I've learned over decades of gaming, but it might be neat to toss everything but Volume I for my next scratch-built campaign and see what I come up with.

[jjarvis]

Hmm...

interesting.

Nothing in book one on monsters besides a monster list in alignments, npcs reactions and the players can be a balrog/dragon if they start as a young one.

I might define most of the humanoid races similar to demi-humans, a couple of special abilities and level limits. I figure the more magical monsters would have a couple of spells they could use a couple of times a day.

Magical items would likely end up "spell x/y times a day" sort of thing. Not sure if I'd think up +1 swords or any such thing all on my own. But a sword with a sleep spell or detect magic in it, even higher level spells would likely turn up.

[driver]

The descriptions of non-human PCs are loaded with details that one would have to puzzle out. What's a Gnoll and why do Elves know how to talk to them? What's a +3 War Hammer and why can only Dwarves use it to its full capabilities? Also, the Dwarf and Elf racial abilities imply a certain kind of subterranean setting, where the ability to detect slanting passages, secret doors and the like is useful.

The examples of magic items a Wizard can create points at least in the direction of "proper" D&D magic items, e.g., armor with "plusses." Between that and the +3 War Hammer, most people would probably extrapolate that adding offensive or defensive bonuses is one way that items can be magical.

Someone might look at the Magic-User level titles and decide that at each level, one pursued a course of study appropriate to the title. At 10th level, you slog around in graveyards, hook cadavers up to generators, and so on.

A glance at the Saving Throw tables would probably result in a lot more Death Rays than one encounters in traditional D&D. There'd also be a greater tendency for poisons to cause damage.

And, you'd have an idea that the spectrum of Undead creatures exists.

(This is based off a skim of M&M at work. I'm sure detailed exegesis would yield a version of OD&D with both interesting similarities and differences -- there's more information in Vol. I than it appears at first blush.)

[Finarvyn]

I suspect that I would put together magic item charts without cursed weapons and armor. No delusion stuff and no poison. I'm not sure that would have occured to me.

Heck, the entire concept of treasure would probably be different in my homebrew. I probably would do something like d6*monster level*1000 GP for treasure.

Thinking about magic items again, it's possible that I would have treated each magical item more like an artifact with a name and/or history rather than just another random thing to pick up in a pile of treasure. As an example, Lord of the Rings gives a name to Orcrist and Glamdring, and clearly a history to the One Ring. Most fantasy treasure hordes that I can recall from literature seem to be focused on gold and jewels rather than magic items (unless that item is the focus of the quest of the story).

EDIT: By the way, Sham, an EXALT for this topic. Very clever and a lot of fun to think about!

[sham]

I have to agree with the whole artifacts vs. generic magic items approach. I can't think of any reason why I'd have weapons that didn't at the very least have a name of some sort (Sting, as well as those mentioned before). Stormbringer would be influential, for me anyway.

Along the lines of 'mundane' magic items, I might think of potions ala Alice in Wonderland, and wands in general...but wands might end up being more along the lines of a presto-chango, conjuring approach.

Then, of course Arabian Nights type of stuff. Magic Lamps (as mentioned), Flying Carpets, etc.

Brothers Grimm, Jack and the Beanstalk, Jonathan Swift, Lovecraft, Howard, and on and on would all add some elements to consider.

All of the above could help with ideas for Monsters and Treasure.

Mechanically, you'd be doing the same kind of things we hash out in the forums here, defining things, filling in the gaps, and judging a lot of outcomes on the fly (and probably slowly compiling house rules as you DM).

One thing's for sure, you'd certainly have a truly unique "OD&D" campaign.

[Finarvyn]

Just curious -- was this totally a thought puzzle or were you really in this situation?

[sham]

admin said:

Just curious -- was this totally a thought puzzle or were you really in this situation?

Hehe, nah, I have the LBB PDFs. Had the real thing decades ago, but I recall someone 'borrowing' them. I actually never used OD&D at all until this year.

It just struck me along the way that Vol.I is the 'rules', a lot of the rest of it is supplemental to a degree. So I cooked up this question.

[Finarvyn]

Don't get me wrong. It's a great question.

I had just conjured up this mental image of some poor soul who has lost all of his gaming materials except for Men & Magic and saying "Well, crud. Now what do I do?"

The next thread should be "Suppose you had only Chainmail but knew what an RPG was, what would you do....?"

[coffee]

Or if you didn't like the medieval period, so instead you started with Donald Featherstone's Skirmish Wargaming. What would happen then?

For one thing, would you add fantasy elements or not?