House Rules Format 

 The books will basically be following the theme of the original books and will contain everything my players need to play - reference to original booklets will not be needed. I will be re-structuring some things, such as move encounter tables to vol. 2 instead of vol. 3. It is not meant to be a clone, rather the original system adapted for CHAINMAIL 1:20 combat, some structural changes and a few optional house rules. It will not be published, so in places I will just copy-paste from the original rules.

 

Vol. 1: (Men & Magic) character creation, equipment, hirelings, XP, Magic

Everything needed for Characters creation and to start up the party, as well as spells and basic concepts such as XP. 

Vol. 2: (Monsters & Treasure) monsters, treasure, encounters

The referee's book - like the original vol. 2 but with encounter tables added. Monsters will have rules for CHAINMAIL combat tables (rather than AC etc.), any special rules for mass combat, rules for fantasy combat.

Vol. 3: (The Underworld & Wilderness) the underworld, wilderness, skirmish combat

This is the rule-book. Rules for most of the mini-games for low-mid levels - the underworld, wilderness and skirmish combat, as well as an appendix for pulpy high-tech things. Atm. I have no plans to include aerial or naval combat. Maybe I'll steal Jimm Johnsson's seafaring rules.

 

Vol. 4: (Baronies & Battles), strongholds, mass combat, fantastic combat, specialists, sieges 

Everything needed for name-level play, such as strongholds, CHAINMAIL mass combat (basically just things added to the skirmish system (such as post melee morale, cavalry charges and other things relevant in mass battles but not in dungeon skirmish), fantasy combat, sieges and unit points. As of right now, I'm going to go off the domain rules found in various places of the LBBs, possibly something from FFC. 

Monster Troop Types in OD&D II

Attempt to classify OD&D Monsters by troop type

The entries below refer the monster troop types as compiled by Daniel Norton's Unchained, a collection of public sources (such as Dragon, FFC etc.) edited by Aldarron, what I've parsed from CHAINMAIL itself, a custom list made by Finarwyn (Marv Breig), as well as my own edits (using the temporary name CHAINED, as an un-hippiefied version of Unchained). As obvious, others have already done the work. 

The list is not complete - only monsters I've found to be somewhat ambiguous or difficult to balance are included. I've also abandoned the idea of using many of the default CHAINMAIL values, as I suspect they will not be well balanced for OD&D, for instance, a dragon in CHAINMAIL fights as 4 Heavy Horse (breath weapons etc. excluded) which is the same as a Hero (4th level F-M) on a heavy horse, which seems unreasonable to me, being that dragons can be up to 12 HD. So I've chosen to use the guideline in OD&D (HD = fighting capability).

OD&D Turns and Rounds

Turns in OD&D

Turns and rounds are sometimes used interchangeably in the three books. I would say they are clearly defined but sometimes EGG seems to fall back on using turns as in CHAINMAIL, where it's a 1 minute combat turn, despite defining that as a "round" in D&D. There is absolutely a distinction made in the rules between a Combat Turn (or Round), A Move (or Underworld) Turn and a Wilderness Turn. 

The THE MOVE/TURN IN THE UNDERWORLD section in Book III is quite clear how different time units are used in the game:

Movement (distances given in Book 1) is in segments of approximately ten minutes. 

Two moves constitute a turn.  

Thus it takes ten minutes to move about two moves. 

There are ten rounds of combat per turn. 

 The WILDERNESS section, under Movement, it is also clear that a turn is something else in the Wilderness: 

Turn: Each move will constitute one day. Each day is considered a turn. 

So far so good really, the problem arises when Gygax then goes and use "Turns" when he likely refers to rounds, in spell descriptions for instance. I won't dwell on this, the use of turns and rounds hasn't bugged me that much - many spells clearly becomes bizarre if you interpret their turn duration as 10-minute or day units. 

Relative Turns 

In these house rules, I will adhere to what's stated in Book III but discard the term round, and instead use the very elegant turn definition presented in Vladar's Blog: Simply put - a turn is a relative term (as it already is in the rules). I also get to use "Combat Turn" - very CHAINMAILY.

The word Turn is always used.

Underworld Turn = 10 minutes

Wilderness Turn = 1 day

Combat Turn = 1 minute

If a spell is cast, its turn duration becomes the same used when you cast it. I.e. if a spell is cast in the Underworld (outside of combat), Underworld turns are used. If cast it in combat, Combat Turns are used. Wilderness Turns will not be used in this context, unless a spell descriptions explikcet

However! If you transition from one situation to another, the duration also transitions - so if a Haste Spell is used in the Underworld turn and combat ensues - whatever duration is left of it is converted to Combat Turns. A caveat would be Wilderness Turns, since few spells translate from minutes or 10s of minutes to days.

Monster Troop Types in OD&D I

CHAINMAIL Troop Type/OD&D Fighting Capability

In order to use CHAINMAIL combat tables for possibly all type of combat, fighting capability and troop type need to be established for all men and monsters. For men it's very straight forward, they just fight as determined by their weapons and armor, and in case of class levels, they just fight as a number of men equal to the class fighting capability (a 3rd level Fighting-Man fights as 3 men and a Magic-User of equal level fights as 2 men). For most low level men-type creatures it's almost equally easy. 

 

OD&D offers up (M&T p5: Attack/Defense) that monsters basically fights as a number of men equal to their HD. This is very usable in many cases, but doesn't quite work with the CHAINMAIL fighting capabilities. 

 

CHAINMAIL offers some guidelines in the monsters that are clearly described, and I try to use those as reference points:

 

Top of the food chain

Dragons: Attacks and defends like 4 Heavy horse.

Giants: Attacks and defends like 12 Heavy foot.

 

Snacks

Peasants: Attacks and defends as Light foot (1)

Hypothetically, Purple Worm and Sea Monster should be up there with dragons and giants, but the rest of the OD&D monsters should be somewhere in between.

Challenges with converting OD&D monsters to CHAINMAIL troop types

Something to understand about CHAINMAIL troop types is that the difference between Light foot and Armored foot is quite big. A normal man in plate armor (Armored foot) can kill (hit in OD&D) and normal man in leather at 4:6 but in the opposite case, it takes 3 LF footmen to even have a chance of hitting a footman in plate (one of them has to roll a 6). The difference between said Light footman and  a Heavy horseman (mounted knight) is even bigger. So what troop types to assign monsters is important. 

 

Another variable is Accumulated hits or Simultaneous hits. Accumulated hits, as in the case of giants, means simple what's in D&D, each hit is subtracted from the number of HD (or men, as it may be) so when a giant has taken 12 hits, it's dead. But a dragon must take simultaneous hits to hurt it, so while 24 peasants have a good chance of score a few hits on a giant, of the 16 men needed to hit a dragon at least four sixes must be rolled for each hit. Of course, simultaneous hits could be removed but that would be a pity, because it's very cool! And it would make dragons weak.

 

Next task will be to classify all monsters not already in CHAINMAIL. Lucky for me, people have attempted this before. I'm looking at Marv Breig's (Finarvyn) lists, as well as Daniel Norton's Unchained for ideas.

 

 

OD&D Saving Throws

Mostly, saving throws in OD&D isn't complicated: The saving throw headers "Dragon's Breath, Stone.. etc." tell us exactly when to save, much clearer than later editions' standardized saves. For some reason, spells and saves have caused issues for people - maybe there's something I fail to see. One obvious issue though is saves for monsters and any guidelines for this seems to be missing from the LBBs.

 

Alternative to d20 saves

I considered using 2d6 saving throws, since when ditching d20 for combat, the d20 saves start to seem  out of place. CHAINMAIL used 2d6 saves and offers some guidelines as how a class progression in saves might look like, from the standpoint of Hero, Super Hero and Wizard. Jason Vey has offered some guidelines how to go about this. I decided against it, however. The main reason is that the d20 saves are fully functional and probably fits the OD&D xxx better than the CHAINMAIL equivalent - if adopting the saves in CHAINMAIL, the PC's would fail their saves a lot more frequent and I think this would work poorly considering they have to save a lot more often (any hostile spell) than a Hero in CHAINMAIL. I also considered tossing saving throws altogether and instead making them part of a monster's description for instance - such as "to save against the Basilisk gaze, meed or exceed 7 with two dice" a.s.o. That would take a lot of work however, putting an individual save mini-game in most spells and a lot of monster, and for mainly aesthetic reasons. I'll stick with the standard OD&D saves.

 

When to save?

M&M doesn’t say when to save specifically, so a logical conclusion would be always when suffering an attack from any of the listed categories. I don't see a reason why this would not include all hostile spells. would include all hostile spells.  Also, no individual spell says it can’t be saved against.

 

• Conclusion - PC’s save against all hostile "weapon" categories above, spells included.

Who can save?

PC classes are the basis of saves in OD&D, so logically, everyone with a Class save.

There is no mention in the LBB’s of how or if other creatures (i.e. monsters and normal men) save, except in the descriptions of 3 spells: Confusion, Disintegrate and The Finger of Death (Anti-Cleric). These are the only spells that specifically mentions a saving throw made against them (may well be because it’s taken for granted) and they all mention “creatures”, suggesting not PCs’ only  In Disintegrate, it even mentions “dragons” in the example, and the wording is also interesting - it says “If it fails to make its saving throw against magic”. This to me sounds like it has one, I mean generally.

From that, it would seem monsters are allowed saves. 

This is made complicated by the fact the LBBs’ don’t mention how anyone except classes would save and it is a weird thing to have been simply overlooked or not included by Gygax (but apparently I’m wrong, see below). Were it not for those three spells, I would conclude only classes get to save. 

So if LBBs’ have an obvious hole in the rules, CHAINMAIL is often a good place to look: In CHAINMAIL, saves are only invoked in specific cases. If no saving throw is mentioned in the spell or effect, there is none.

So in light of CHAINMAIL and the obvious lack of a rule for monsters to save, I think it may be valid to conclude that non-classes creatures do not save, unless otherwise specified. But then again, how?

With no other resources I would rule one of two:

• No non-classed creatures make saving throws, except in the cases of the three aforementioned spells. For these, I would perhaps use Fighting-Man saves based on HD.

This is a conundrum I don’t think there is an answer to simply by looking at CHAINMAIL and the LBBs’.

In Strategic Review #2 (Summer 1975), Saint Gary writes:

Saving throws for monsters are the same as for the appropriate type and level of man, i.e. a balrog would gain the saving throw of either a 10th level fighter or a 12th level magic-user (the latter based upon the balrog’s magic resistance), whichever score is the more favorable for the balrog. A troll would be equal to a 7th level fighter as it has 6 dice +3, virtually seven dice.

From this I would make the conclusion saving throws for monsters were there all along - he tells us how the rule “is”, not suggesting a ruling for those that want monster saving throws. In the Q & A section he also offers an explanation why the rule may have been left out: 

The space limitations of D&D (and it was difficult to get all we managed to in three booklets!) forced us to gloss over certain areas, hoping that this would not cause undue problems for readers. While the number of letters with questions regarding D & D indicates that our assumption was correct, even one or two percent of the readers represents too large a portion of unsatisfied buyers, so we herewith offer a few more details in those areas where questions most frequently occur.

• Conclusion: Monsters save as Fighting-Men of monster HD level. In cases where they have some sort of magic resistance, they may also save as a M-U.  

Effect of a Successful Saving Throw

Here, M&M is a bit more clear: 

• Death Ray, polymorph, paralyzation, stone, spell - No effect, no damage

• Poison, dragon breath - Half damage

• Wands of cold, fire balls, lightning etc., staves - Half damage

• Poison scoring one half of total possible hit damage

• Dragon breath scoring one half of its full damage

The only complication would be the given damage reduction for poison and dragon breath: 

I assume this means the referee upon a successful save vs poison calculates the maximum possible damage and the victim takes half that.

I'm still ambiguous in the case of dragon breath: does the referee roll the damage and a successful save halves that figure? Why does that warrant an extra explanation? Or is it half maximum damage, as with poison? “Full damage” is a bit ambiguous here in my opinion.

 

House Rules Plans

Future Campaign

As it looks, I'll start a new campaign likely in a year or two, when my group finishes the current 5e module. Presently, we play about once a month, due to families, work, other obligations etc. This is what I have to work with, which is unfortunate, since it really isn't often enough for any campaign worth its salt. In terms of Campaign world, at the moment I'm leaning towards Wilderlands, perhaps map 9 (Elphand Lands), possibly Gabor Lux's Fomalhaut or possibly some decoction of my own. This may change however.

OD&D with CHAINMAIL

The system I'll use is OD&D and I will make an attempt to resolve combat with the CHAINMAIL normal mass combat tables, possibly with a sprinkle of fantasy combat, I'm unsure. At the time of writing I have started to write 4 booklets of house rules, basically adhering to the overall organization of the LBBs with a fourth book covering mass combat, strongholds and domain level stuff. I likely have at least a year to do it as it looks now with the 5e campaign - a sudden demise for the party is highly unlikely due to the fact we have six 10th level characters of which exactly none have died a single time, that’s 5e for you. Anyway, that’s good since I have a long time to finish setting up the rules and campaign. I will record the process in future posts.

House Rules

I think my initial aim is to keep OD&D as untouched as I can. As far as I can see and have have tested, OD&D works well out of the box. I need to alter quite a bit for the CHAINMAIL combat tables to work with OD&D, but aside from that I don't plan to implement a lot of house rules.

 

 

CHAINMAIL Legitimacy in OD&D

CHAINMAIL Legitimacy in Original D&D

If maybe not be-all end-all, it's absolutely a relevant point of inquiry for me going forward. 

Firstly, by reading OD&D, it's obvious that CHAINMAIL is meant to be used as a baseline for this new game, the LBBs are littered with references to it and as mentioned, and I at least didn't feel like I understood OD&D fully before reading CHAINMAIL. It is also obvious that without CHAINMAIL, OD&D lacks necessary procedures such as morale and a complete combat system (the "Alternative" system presented is just a mechanic for hitting a target). 

To me, and likely a good chunk of contemporary players, it's not always obvious how to use CHAINMAIL in OD&D. As mentioned, there are at least three combat systems in CHAINMAIL, all used  for different purposes. Intuitively, I would guess Man-to-Man would be used in most encounters, in the Underworld and Wilderness, perhaps in conjunction with the normal mass combat tables. Specific systems are rarely mentioned  explicitly in the rules: In Book 1, under Fighting Capability, reference is made to the [CHAINMAIL] Fantasy rule, as modified in various places herein If this means the Fantasy Combat Table specifically is difficult to discern. In Book 3, under Land Combat a valuable instruction is offered how exactly to use CHAINMAIL with OD&D:

The basic system is that from CHAINMAIL, with one figure representing one man or creature. Melee can be conducted with the combat table given in Book I or by the CHAINMAIL system, with scores equalling a drive back or kill equal only to a hit. Battles involving large numbers of figures can be fought at a 20:1 ratio, with single fantastic types fighting separately at 1:1 or otherwise against but a single 20:1 figure. 

From this we get a hint on how to use CHAINMAIL with OD&D - basically use CHAINMAIL but one figure is one man and one kill is one hit. Very useful overall.

To me, the most intuitive way to interpret one figure represents one man or creature is that it refers to the normal mass combat tables, but at a 1:1 rather than the CHAINMAIL 20:1 scale - the mass combat system is the only of the three systems using 20:1 figure scale.

The second sentence Melee can be conducted with the combat table given in Book I or by the CHAINMAIL system, with scores equalling a drive back or kill equal only to a hit. seems to me the Fantasy Combat Table is the system referenced, since that is the only one I recall has a mechanic to "drive back" an enemy. 

These are the main explicit mentions on how to use CHAINMAIL in D&D. There are other clues scattered throughout the books, in the Fighting Capability columns of the classes in Men & Magic for instance, where Man, Hero, Superhero and Wizard are the reference points from which to deduce fighting capability of a given level. This is referencing the normal combat tables or man-to-man combat, take your pick. 

Was D&D played with CHAINMAIL in the 70s? 

I have seen it hypothesized that systems were used interchangeably whatever system fit the need of the situation. I have also read in more than one place that, the OD&D boards, for example, where a few folks who played OD&D in the 70s lurk. The conclusion seems to be that neither the Twin Cities groups or the Lake Geneva groups did in fact use CHAINMAIL for OD&D to a large extent. D&D sold well, however, and the majority of people playing it were naturally not part of those founding groups. Among these normal grunts, is my impression,  the Alternative d20 system was prevalent for practical reasons. But considering the game rules prescribes CHAINMAIL, I take it for granted CHAINMAIL was used to play D&D at the time.

In case you're wandering why it's important how people (Gygax and Arneson in particular) played in the 70s - either CHAINMAIL works well with D&D or it doesn't? - Of course it's important!

How to play D&D with CHAINMAIL? 

As discussed, I assume the most intuitive way to use CHAINMAIL, is to use a mix of man-to-man and the mass combat rules for Underworld and Wilderness, and general low level play, and for mass combat use mass combat rules and fantasy  combat. Done. That's not how I will likely do it, however.

 CHAINMAIL

Reading CHAINMAIL started the same way I read my first English novel, I gave up. I gave up on CHAINMAIL a few times actually, until I didn't. When I had carefully parsed it over a few months, laboriously figuring out each sub system, I felt confident I could play a game and get it roughly right. 

The most rewarding part of this was then re-reading OD&D and watch so many parts of it fall into place. Not primarily Morale or Combat procedures, because St. Gary explicitly told me to reference CHAINMAIL for those, but for the conceptual understanding of it. I also then knew what Man +1, Hero -1 and Heavy Foot meant!

 Combat System 1: Combat Tables

I quickly became smitten with the core combat system of CHAINMAIL - the combat tables. It incorporates weapons vs armor in an elegant way, and as one who has always desired this mechanic, this was very attractive. I have read (never tried), the AD&D system for this and wasn't impressed with it. I have read and tried Oakes Spalding's system for it in the excellent OD&D clone Seven Voyages of Zylarthen but felt it didn't have impact enough except on low levels. But in CHAINMAIL, a fully armored horseman is a monster compared to lightly armored footmen. I suppose this triggers some sort of verisimilitude kink of mine. 

 Combat System 2: Man-to-Man

I was ambiguous when reading the Man-to-Man rules. It did incorporate weapon vs. armor, not unlike 7VoZ (I would even be bold and say 7VoZ is a revised version of CHAINMAIL man-to-man), but seemed very cumbersome and granular in a way I didn't feel might sit well at the table, especially at high levels or where many combats may have to be resolved simultaneously. It seemed more like a system fitting for duel-like battles. I understand it might be used just like that, for "boss fights" to use a novel term. Here, I did like Spalding's system more, similar but more functional in a table top skirmish situation. 

 Combat System 3: Fantasy Combat

This struck me as not very useful in OD&D. In a mass battle with fantasy elements such as a Dragon or Troll, it seems a perfectly feasible way to handle epic monsters vastly out-powering normal men, where let's say a Hero battles as Dragon in the midst of battle, it's super fast and heavily abstracted. The monsters presented in the Fantasy add-on have rules for engaging other legendary figures in fast, epic battle (Fantasy Combat Table) and for the monsters slaughtering droves of men using the normal mass combat rules. 

I don't immediately  see an application for this in OD&D, the system is so heavily abstracted - positions, time, abilities, strategy and spells are irrelevant here (not magic weapons and armor though) and resolution is just a die roll on a table. If anything, the real epic fights become substantially less detailed and my experience is that the tolerance for drawn out, granular battles is higher when fighting a dragon or a balrog, not the opposite. 

 Cheers! 

 

Original D&D

 When I first properly read OD&D, I was surprised to find a relatively complete game. I was mystified by certain things that seemed and it did seem slightly anachronistic at times, but I was mostly intrigued. I think what you come away with after reading the LBBs is perhaps influenced by what you believe they are. I think my preconception was that these little books obviously contained genius, something else could not be possible considering history. So if I didn't get it, it means I didn't get it - the fault must be with me. When reading accounts of people setting themselves to do the same thing, I have most frequently seen the opposite - the reader's presupposition from the get go is that this is dysfunctional, and considering the eccentric style and lack of editing makes it easy to take cheap-shots at the game and its author and the accounts become both infantile and arrogant.

I did come away with a feeling that is was something I didn't get. The reason, I think, is I didn't understand this was not an RPG and the intent was not role-playing as I have experienced it - it was a different game. Now that I write about it I find it hard to articulate what game I think OD&D is meant to be. 

Is OD&D a role playing game? 

I think it's primarily a form of wargame (funny, it even says so on the box!), not an RPG. Apart from a few sessions of Warhammer FB and 40k, I have no experience of wargames however so I've found it helpful to think of OD&D in terms of a complex board game. In a board game, persona or character is irrelevant, even if you play a figure with a name and abilities. Reality is rarely important either in most board games. It's a game board with rules for the common action you are able to do. The difference may be that in this game we are not limited to the game board and the player can have his figure do anything, and this is obviously a huge difference from any board game. But procedurally, it behaves like a board game. Example - the Movement Turn in the Underworld - you can move the figure 6 inches, have an encounter, determine surprise and reactions, negotiate or move into combat. In our 90s - present D&D games, the dungeon is just a backdrop (often to combat). There may be the occasional complication such as a trap or saving throw, but it has no procedures of its own, which to me indicates that it's not considered to be important. 

Characters in OD&D 

The other thing is that characters in OD&D are meant to be perceived more as board game characters, which I think means when you lose one, you cry because it means you lost the game, not because you were attached to the character. When we played Dungeonquest, we had no emotional bond to the figure, and I doubt the first players of D&D had much of that either. Of course, the D&D campaign may go on for years, and if lucky and clever, with the same character but I don't think player characters were as much a form of self expression, that seems to have become the norm. 

That said, OD&D can of course be played as a modern RPG, but that's where I think some things start to seem alien. 

My take-away 

Anyway, OD&D immediately started to make much more sense, and that different game seemed attractive to me and paired with the  mini-game structure, the perceived invitation to pulp, the wildness, originality and elegance of OD&D made me enamored. 

 

  

 

New Blog Overview

OD&D with CHAINMAIL 

Since this summer (of 2026) I'm working on making a "hack" of Original Dungeons and Dragon using CHAINMAIL to resolve combat. This is by no means anything new and original, many have attempted and succeeded at it before. I will write this mainly to sort my own thoughts on the matter. However, first something about my background in D&D.

My Background in D&D

I have played RPGS since the late 80s, first swedish RPGs such as Drakar och Demoner (first a variant of Runequest, these days Dragonbane in english), Sagan om Ringen - Rollspelet, MERP in swedish). I have played D&D since the early 90s, starting with AD&D 2nd edition with my childhood group. I joined another local group in 1998 using 1st edition, I distinctly remember trying to wrap my head around combat segments. 

When 3rd edition hit the year 2000, we embraced it, considering it superior to both 1st and 2nd edition in every way. Remember that was from a player perspective, I can imagine the DM wasn't too thrilled with the broken CR-system and power balance-fetish, but he says he just winged it - he had been a D&D DM for quite some time by then. I specifically recalled we were impressed with the core mechanic and the math and I don't remember we noticed any drastic change how the game was played otherwise. Remember though, that starting playing TTRPGs in the late 80s meant trad games, i.e. rail roaded narration heavy games that persists to this day and I don't recall playing 1st or 2nd editions any differently. Paralell with D&D, I played a number of European trad-games and was deeply into story-telling games such FATE. I managed to design no less than 3 games myself, one set in a fantastic version of the Swedish middle ages, one in European thirty year war and one horrible hippie story game which you can read about (if you read Swedish) in earlier posts on this blog. 

We played 3rd edition until 4th edition hit, which we sneezed at and like many others went to Paizo and I started to DM a homebrew version of City of the Spider Queen using the 600+ pages Pathfinder rules. This went on until my campaign ended with a TPK in the Underdark, just at the doorstep of victory. We started play testing D&D "Next" (5th edition) 2012-13. 

By that time our DM had tired of "modern games" and we started playing B2 with his childhood game of D&D Basic/Expert. Unfortunately I separated from ex wife 2013 and got a girlfriend, which made me lose interest in anything else for 3 years - she played various purple games though, so I played various drama och edge games such as Mouse Guard, Apocalypse World etc. When life stabilized again, I had met my present day wife and went back to the table and D&D (thank Gawd) where the group was knee deep in the Isle of Dread. 

This was the first time I experienced sandbox adventure gaming, although I didn't know it at the time. And we didn't appreciate it. I think a combination of the brutality of B/X and lack of experience with sandbox games made us just feel lost and like every move would get us killed. We didn't have any clear idea where to go or what do without getting killed and just froze. The campaign ended thus. 

For a few years we tried a few other games, and ended up playing the board game Frosthaven. This was mildly amusing until one of us said what everyone was thinking "Unless we start playing proper RPGs again I'm done". Unfortunately neither myself or our original DM were interested in DMing at the time so a fellow player stepped up and we started that 5th edition campaign that we had been planning to do when we were play testing "Next".

We have played this campaign now for a few years and have some experience of the finished 5e game. Firstly, it hasn't been quite as I remember it from play testing. The Next kit was sleek and fast, no feats, no multiclassing and no tricks and the finished product wasn't like that, even though we only play with the three core rulebooks. And while we've had tons of fun playing the campaign, the weaknesses of modern D&D has crept up on us the last two years. The main problem for me is that it's apparent we are participating in a preconceived story, written by someone else and I have often felt we're expected to make choices mainly to avoid ruining the module and the work the DM has put in. I have many other issues with 5th edition I won't go into here - it's not a 5th edition issues blog.

The OSR

My story of discovering the OSR is by no means unique, I've heard accounts very similar to my own many times by now. A couple of years back I started to become aware of it, I have forgotten exactly how. First I think I was smitten mostly with the simplicity, speed and the lost dungeon mini-game, which I don't recall I've ever played properly (except in a convention Tomb of Horror one-shot in D&D eleven years ago). I got my hands on the usual lookers of the OSR as it was 2024, Cairn, Knave, Mörk Borg and Shadowdark (I ran Shadowdark for my 5e group and they were very impressed and had no reservations about anything except possibly the slightly rigid torch timer -rules). Last year i found the Classic Adventure Gaming (CAG) podcast and it blew me away. I immediately set myself to read OD&D and AD&D and I was thoroughly surprised to find them so highly functional, quite the contrary to the view of "main stream" OSR. I also started to glimpse a different game to any D&D I had previously played, except for, in retrospect, those few sessions of the Isle of Dread. I saw for the first time the brilliance of procedural game play, of empty rooms, of time keeping, of aging, open ended play and other aspects of the Game of Old. "A lost art" was the term that the most described by my impression of these procedures (lost in the sense of how the majority have played - a seemingly substantial number of players never stopped playing this way and many have discovered this much, much earlier than I did). 

For a while I just consumed OSR blogs and social media while continuing to study old rulesets. Enamored with the idea of Adventure Gaming campaigns I tried refereeing the Swords & Wizardry, AD&D and OD&D rules in one-shots. Whenever I tried out any out any of them I found it hard not to massively tinker, so I settled for OD&D, since it seemed designed for that. EOTB of the CAD discord said something along the lines of "AD&D is a fully furnished house, ready to move in, OD&D requires is an empty house for those who want to do the furnishing themselves" (perhaps he was paraphrasing someone else, I can't recall).