Welcome to this week’s blog club. This week we are looking at “Philotomy’s OD&D Musings” from 2007 by Jason Cone.
Next week we’ll discuss “Grand Experiments: West Marches” from 2007 by Ben Robbins. You can see a list of previous blog club posts here.
A big one this week!
Very influential text! The portion about the Mythic Underworld and it’s “10 Features” resonated with me in particular and really got me thinking more about what I was trying to accomplish with the Dungeons I designed.
Some of the Rulings and House Rules here are also wonderful, because OD&D as a text is full of those lovely lacunae and each Referee tends to approach them in a different way, so I’m always curious to see what they arrived at. I don’t use many of these “as is” in my OD&D games these days, but it definitely inspired me to approach the text with fresh eyes in a similar way.
One of the best exercises one can do is to print out the LBBs with wide margins and then read through them, making notes as you go. Try as hard as possible to shed any preconceived notions about these games, and refrain from the temptation to just start grafting on approaches that would be cemented in later presentations. Even if most of your notes are “WTF GARY?!” it’s still a very illuminating process to “figure out” how you would make these rules work, and how you would go about playing the game from that starting point.
There is so much to talk about in Philotomy’s Musings. I don’t actually know where to start, but I suppose I’ll just go with what interests me the most.
The overall project.
The “Musings” are a personal chronicle and interpretation of the 1974 Little Brown Books (“LBBs”) of course. This is what makes them great, along with the very real mechanical differences between that initial D&D set and later editions or even supplements (obligatory “Supplement 1: Greyhawk ruined D&D” plug here). Of course its the very messy layout and even missing elements of the LBBs that make playing with them interesting - they demand the referee and table come up with rulings and their content is so limited that one almost has to make one’s own setting. Cone certainly manages this in Philotomy’s Musings, and does an influential job - but I think it’s more interesting that he lays out a model for others to do it. OD&D asks questions - one of my favorites is “Does OD&D have simultaneous combat actions…” It arguably lacks initiative and there’s no reason you couldn’t have both combatants act each round before damage is resolved…I’ve personally gone with a no answer, but that’s the kind of thing that looking at the LBBs offers. Possibilities.
The Mythic Underworld… A fascinating concept laid out here along with the reasoning behind it. It seems popular (especially among the more boring adherents to “OSR” play these days) to say that the Mythic Underworld is the default and correct approach to dungeon design in old D&D … along with procedural generation and a host of other things, but I don’t think that’s where Cone is going in Philotomy’s… Rather it seems to me that the mythic underworld concept acknowledges an approach to dungeon design with advantages and disadvantages. Plus one really gets the feeling of D&D as katabasis which has some interesting effects - though in general I think the mythic underworld militates for a more board game like experience then what is usually considered RPG play.
I was quite happy to learn from Philotomy’s that I’m not an outlier when it comes to thinking that AD&D’s approach to ability scores didn’t quite work well with the rest of the system. I started with AD&D, so I didn’t even know there were different approaches in other editions until I played B/X. I didn’t get copies of OD&D until decades later to see how it all began. It was only then that my vague unease solidified; reading Philotomy the first time put words to it, at last.
It’s not that I’m fundamentally opposed to increased gradation for attributes. I’d enjoy that in a system that was designed around it. As it is, I don’t see how it works well with any system built on the chassis of D&D. A system that involves finer granularity would work far better with that sort of differentiation, I reckon.
The notion of the mythic underworld expanded my horizons when I first read it. As I used a lot more wilderness and above-ground ruins and small cave systems than large underground complexes, I’d never considered the underworld bordering on The Underworld in any regard. That notion added quite a bit of appeal to lengthy underground dungeons for me, with the boundaries of the Underworld being able to slip in here and there without warning. That extended to the same sort of thing happening in deep forest, too, where the Primal Wilderness could embrace travelers at any time. Having a named concept to describe the sort of thing that I occasionally used was refreshing.
I didn’t conceive of the Underworld in the same fashion. The whole of it might be big, yet that doesn’t mean it’s all accessible from the same place. I view it as fluid and the boundaries fluid and finite – more “pockets of Underworld” than anything else. That can remove it from being the central feature of a campaign.
And I don’t see it as necessarily inimical to PCs. I find it more interesting if the experience can vary from pocket to pocket. The Underworld should be confusing, I think, and inconsistency helps deliver that feeling.
I found Philotomy useful in sparking a lot of though about aspects of play that I hadn’t considered or hadn’t ever examined closely.
I am very much interested in the direction this discussion will take. I recently re-read the LBBs through Marcia Bs Creative Commons restatement (highly recommended!) with the Musings on the side for additional commentary. I am particularly fond of the open spaces or lacunae that ktrey mentioned and how they prod the reader/gm to shape their own game. In Cone’s interpretation he arrives at a very clearly defined ruleset that covers common areas of play that schews towards tactical play on a grid. I find in particular his search for a suitable initiative system for his tastes illuminating, as it has verbalized what I do not like about highly structured initiative systems: they add granularity and thus complexity, ergo frequently slowing and restricting the arena of possible play. I’d be curious to know your thoughts on the trajectory of initiative systems over the years, from war game inspired systems, to side initiative to individual initiative and in recent years in OSR spaces to again side initiative (OSE, Mörk Borg, etc) or simultaneous initiative (Mothership). Daggerheart being an interesting novelty in this space. Generally, reading the musings sparks in me the question which modern games maintain these open spaces and inspire the readers to similar heights of interpretation and imagination. One could argue that games like Into the Odd or Mörk Borg (and all their respective offspring), are more in line as spiritual successors to OD&D then current editions of the original game.
I think with initiative, one has to have a vivid view of what is desired in the combat experience and build an ordering system to provide that. I’ve been digging around in all of the early documents I’ve found and find that the phase systems are very useful for providing an orderly way to proceed that results in a specific feel to combat. I know lots of players of modern systems want an experience based in discrete attacks and instant adjustments and a phased wargames-like system isn’t going to make them happy; likewise, the nearly freeform ordering systems they’ve described as preferring don’t provide me with anything near the flavor I want.
I’m currently playing with phased systems and figuring out how I can tweak them to provide the same flavor while offering a bit more flexibility of the sort I see players of modern systems seeking. I figure that would open up my old school play approach to more people, making it easier to find more local players for in person play.
Tilting at windmills or the quest for the Holy Grail? I guess I’ll find out.
The “mythic underworld” is what strikes me the most about this post as of recently, seeing things like Dolmenwood and Mythic Bastionland coming out. I feel like there is a hunger for this type of setting, using weird to differentiate themselves from more “common” fantasy interpretations
I think the most interesting / influential thing about the musings is that they served as a model for a lot of other people to start trying to read and play the LBB from “first principles”. Brendan/Necropraxis ends up doing a lot of interesting work that all comes out of his exegesis of OD&D. I love seeing people rediscover the game and do similar sorts do deep dives. Skerples is doing one right now.
That’s also of interest. For me, it sparked thoughts of what could be done to make the wilderness wilder alongside making the underground stuff more like the underworld.
I want the wilds to be wild, and to be wild in a way that reflects a fantasy setting. Enchanted groves and waterfall pools and fae coming out of thickets. Stretches of forest that are hostile to humans and their ilk. Strange events that create a bit of chaos, wizard weather that can open rifts between worlds, monsters that appear seemingly out of nowhere. Any lands more than a couple of miles beyond settled lands should be quite active and most people shun travel into them.
Likewise underground, whether old mines or crypts or storehouses. At some point, the mundane connects with the mythic and delvers can find themselves involved in situations and events far removed from their lives in settled lands. So, while I don’t think all spaces underground should be Underworld, the two should certainly be intertwined in interesting ways.