Undead & Other OD&D Monsters in Chainmail

[vladtolenkov]

I've recently been rereading OD&D and trying to look at it in the context of it as a Fantastic Medieval Wargame rather than as an RPG. Reading it in this light makes many of the description of monsters in the Monsters & Treasure book particularly interesting.

Ghouls, Wraiths, and Specters are particularly interesting as they gain control of any "men" that they kill. For some reason I'd always thought of this in RPG terms rather than in the context of D&D as wargame. In that light, these sorts of undead are seriously bad news (not that they weren't before)!

This might be old news to folks around here, but I'd never reoriented my assumption so heavily than this recent re-read.

[vladtolenkov]

Any other bits folks notice about monsters in a wargame/Chainmail context please feel free to post those observations here.

[Stormcrow]

Dec 29, 2013 16:00:20 GMT -6 vladtolenkov said:

I've recently been rereading OD&D and trying to look at it in the context of it as a Fantastic Medieval Wargame rather than as an RPG.

In the context of the original D&D rules, a role-playing game is a fantastic medieval wargame.

[vladtolenkov]

Right. There was no such thing as an RPG.

I was just interested in looking at things in OD&D through the lens of it as this weird expansion/replacement of Chainmail.

It was a viewpoint I hadn't fully explored in thinking through its implications and trying to look at the text without much in the way of assumptions.