Blog Book Club #47: OD&D Equipment

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Welcome to this week’s blog book club. This week we are continuing our recent theme of items by discussing OD&D Equipment by Brendan S. of Necropraxis.

Next week we’ll be reading about ammo dice in “Abstracting Missiles,” also from Brendan S.

You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.

As a kid, when I first started making characters in 3e I always felt like the process came to a screeching halt as soon as it was time to roll up the gold and buy inventory. After creating what seemed like the perfect badass with stats, feats, and skills it felt like spending any additional brain power to fill out the pack was unnecessary. The material concerns of my adventurer were uninteresting at the time. While my days of painstakingly crafting bland Legolas clones are long behind me, the problem of equipping new PCs remains a drag to some.

Today’s blog post aims to combat the start of game shopping sprees with randomized tables based on classes for OD&D. The post starts off with a breakdown on the categories of equipment which could be a useful reference. I enjoyed the analysis of learning about the adventuring world through assumptions of the gear that everyone will have. For me, the best parts of the post were the more extravagant ideas like scrolls. The idea of Clerical scrolls are fun (though probably best re-themed as relics or scripture and I also appreciated the advice for mages to carry high level single use scrolls.

The discussion of OD&D rules explicitly stating whether monsters and other antagonists are more distracted by food or treasure was interesting to me as those are rules which I would have appreciated when starting to DM but are largely absent in later editions.

Having bundles for re-equipping is also a nice touch because sometimes I feel like starting packages throw players an escape rope but then every subsequent trip to town is still a slog. Re-equipping bundles help solve this problem. And again I feel like this equipment tells us about the default campaign world and I for one like that gothic monster slaying is at the forefront of the minds of adventurers.

To test out the table I did an example roll on the starting equipment table for a fighter who had (read in the cadence of a Wes Anderson Movie Character):

  • plate armor

  • shield

  • sword

  • light crossbow

  • case with 30 quarrels

  • backpack

  • waterskin

  • lantern

  • 4 flasks oil

  • 1 week iron rations

  • 10′ pole

  • 5 Gold Pieces.

Overall, this is perfectly serviceable. It will get a game up and running quickly and reduce barriers to play by lessening the time between filling out paper work and imagining a fun and dangerous world together. I appreciate any tools that are in service to that goal. I think these ideas have since been taken further by creating starting equipment tables with more personality which allow players to adopt (or reject) an immediate role based on what they carry.

I am currently running into the odd remastered and perhaps one of my favorite things about this and the NSR games that spring from it, such as Cairn, is how starting equipment can load the early adventure of a campaign with dramatic potential. What’s your experience like when you or your players go to kit out a PC?

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I really like rolling for equipment, especially in packages, because I find looking at lists and optimising my spending to be tedious and not at all fun.

As a GM, especially for new players, the quicker I can get through character generation and into the actual game the better. Cutting out the initial half hour shopping exercise goes a long way to helping that.

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I’ve always enjoyed trimming down the time it takes to Generate Characters, and that “Shopping Trip” to Ye Olde Bloodbath & Beyonde does chew up a lot of time. One solution we like to use is my Quick Equipment sheet, because Player Facing Equipment Lists can tell you a lot about the Setting, and seeing other options can sometimes breed creativity (“Oh if only we had a Wheelbarrow!”)

Plus, I do like to preserve some aspects of Choice rather than making it completely random. This can result in a very good feeling when a Player just happens to bring along the right tool for the job and encourages that kind of preparedness. :slight_smile:

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I was not in any way OSR-adjacent in 2012 (or involved with TTRPGs at all; this was part of my 20-year hiatus) but this seems to me typical of the Early Google+ Era of the OSR, when there was work being done on streamlining procedures and there was work being done on bringing back the weird, but the two streams were largely being pursued separately. This is clearly a Streamlining Procedures approach, and it’s valuable (although I’m not sure how revolutionary it was considering B4 was doing pre-built adventure packs back in '82).

To me, though, the real value of prebuilt equipment packs is when the two streams recombine and the package also reinforces campaign- or world-specific facts. I’m going to call out @GusL 's equipment lists for his Fistful of Crystals campaign (equipment packages start at page 32) as really helping me lean into equipment packages as worldbuilding. Your roll on 3d6 determines not only your starting equivalent but your previous career, and every entry on every table drips flavor and setting. Some examples:

  • Hedge Witch: Gray robes; gnarled staff (reach); Bull Kingdom’s lesser practitioner’s brand; herb lore (Survival 1); “Thee Auld Shrewdnesses” (heal, beast charm)
  • Mountebank Conjurer: Bright motley; rapier (finesse); repertoire of cheap tricks (Legerdemain 1); Legerdemain Kit; “The Black Poullet” (illusory visage, phantasms)
  • Mud Isle Waerloga: Man-hide breeches and cape; driftwood and stone war-club (crushing); grave chalk (paint body with chalk and be invisible to the undead for 6 Turns) “White Brother’s Testament” (speak with dead, darkness)

At bottom, I think this is another of those artifacts of the Google+ era that doesn’t look so interesting today because it’s been so widely accepted and built upon that readers have either already adopted its principles or have considered it and chosen a different route to optimize for other values (like @ktrey’s emphasis on player choice above).

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I think that’s all really useful insight @pooserville!

On the topic of the “streamlining procedures” approach from this era:

One of the most commonly held “OSR maxims” (e.g. see Blog Book Club #41: Trinity of OSR) is quick, random character creation. Whereas in early D&D this was by no means standard - hence rules based around complicated shopping lists at character creation. This random equipment generation is a way to change D&D to make it fit the OSR play-culture[1].

Also, more practically: I loved this post so much when I encountered it 6 years ago that I made my own one for The Black Hack: https://www.reddit.com/r/osr/comments/f7gzim/quick_starting_equipment/.

  1. Insofar as such a monolith ever existed ↩︎

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