OSR: Beyond the Western Desert (or OD&D with Appendix N-1)

The conceit of my current OD&D game is "OD&D without context". What weird mutant offshoot of the tree of RPG development will we create if we take the LBBs, and only the LBBs, in a deliberately isolated context? 

This is OD&D without: 

Books: AD&D's Appendix N + the obvious but not listed books (e.g. Lord of the Rings).

Films: The Raven (1963), Sleeping Beauty (1959), The Court Jester (1955), 7 Faces of Dr. Lau (1964), the Sinbad movies, the Hammer horror films, and maybe Gargoyles (1972).

Yes, it's not entirely sensible. It's deliberate foolishness. It's like trying to derive the urban planning laws of the Imperium of Man by examining Warhammer 40k gaming tables, or starting with a gasoline motor, some spruce, and some cotton and trying to reinvent the airplane. And yet, sometimes, you can learn a great deal from deliberate foolishness.

I love normal basketball too, with two teams trying to beat each other with solid defense and set plays, but we have all the normal basketball we could ever want. Surely, once every 100,000 games or so, you can find room for one pointless, silly, juvenile farce.

 Troy State 253, DeVry 141: Pretty Good, Episode 12 (Jon Bois).

Wikipedia

1. Appendix N-1

How can you answer "What is OD&D like?" if you can't say "It's like Lord of the Rings" or "Sinbad" or "Three Hearts and Three Lions"?

To put it another way, what could a reader plausibly guess were the influences on OD&D, if they weren't aware of the actual influences? 

There are no right answers, but here are my thoughts:

The Implied Setting

• OD&D's wilderness is sparsely inhabited, enormous, and non-pastoral.
• The world is full of ruins, mystery, and the supernatural.
• The game's setting is implied to have a mix terrain types: "clear", woods, river, swamp, mountains, desert, city. Deserts and arid plains are emphasized, as are seafaring adventures.
• Military forces are small (a few hundred at most) and cluster around leaders who are potent in combat.
• Factions and large political structures (other than cosmological alignments) are absent.
• The implied theology is dualist but not necessarily oppositional. Law and Chaos are two facets or approaches, but the implication is that multi-alignment groups are possible. It's not a kill-on-sight division.
• The world is hierarchical. Levels of dungeons, of people, of monsters, of currency, of spells...

Wikipedia

2. Texts

Record of the Three Kingdoms

There are three types of people: those who know a lot about The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (by reading, television, or video games), those who know nothing, and those who know less than they ought to. I'm in the third category. I've read the historical novel at least twice, and I can spot the major figures and events, but it's a thin coat of knowledge over the slippery surface of bafflement. 

But I recently read the Sanguozhi Pinghua, the vernacular precursor the historical novel. It's in the genre of Ripping Yarns, or Suetonial History as opposed to Herodotian History; a fast-paced story of supernatural events, gossip, and battles designed to keep the reader's interest.

I'm going to quote the most of the Origin of the Yellow Scarves chapter, because its twists and turns provide a perfect summary of the work's tone. It also features a dungeon crawl and a miraculous scroll. 

Now we will speak about something else. Right now, in the year in which Emperor Ling of the Han has ascended the throne, bronze and iron both rang out. The emperor, startled, asked his high ministers, “Has such a thing ever happened in past?”

The Prime Minister Huangfu Song stepped forward from the ranks and replied, “This has happened twice from the ancient times of Pangu to the present. Long ago in the Spring and Autumn period, when the Son of Heaven, who was King of Qi, ascended the throne, bronze and iron rang out for three days and nights. The King of Qi then asked his great ministers, ‘What good or bad fortune is foretold by this ringing of bronze and iron?’ He asked three times but all of the high ministers were silent. The King of Qi was furious and summoned the grandee Ran Qing, ‘You are a grandee, why is it you cannot explain this? I will set a term of three days for you; you must reveal the fortune it signals, good or bad.’ The King of Qi did in fact not receive his ministers in audience for three days.

“But, when Ran Qing returned home, he was deeply depressed and unhappy. A family tutor at his mansion noticed the sorrowful expression on his face and asked the grandee, ‘Why are you so unhappy?’ The grandee answered, ‘Teacher, I will tell you. All the bronze and iron in the world are ringing, and when my lord and king asked me whether this predicted good fortune or bad, I truly had no idea. Now the King of Qi has given me a time limit of three days, and if I do not come up with an answer I will be charged with a crime.’ The teacher replied, ‘This is easy!’ The great grandee exclaimed, ‘If you know the answer, you will be appointed to office and receive a substantial reward. What of the fortune, good or bad, of this affair?’ The teacher replied, ‘It doesn’t predict any good fortune or bad. It only predicts that a mountain will collapse.’ ‘How do you know?’ The teacher explained, ‘Bronze and iron are the offspring of the mountains and mountains are the progenitors of bronze and iron.’”

“The great grandee Ran got the meaning and immediately went to court to report to the King of Qi. The latter assembled his ministers, and grandee Ran stepped forward from the ranks and reported, ‘The ringing of bronze and iron does not predict any fortune, good or bad.’ The King of Qi asked, ‘What?’ He replied, ‘It predicts that a mountain will collapse.’ The ruler asked, ‘How do you know?’ And he reported, ‘Bronze and iron are the offspring of the mountains, and the mountains are the progenitors of bronze and iron. It is neither lucky nor unlucky.’ The King of Qi was highly pleased and promoted Ran Qing to higher office and rank, to be held by his sons and grandsons without interruption. Only a few days after Ran Qing had reported to the throne, one of the peaks of Flowery Mountain collapsed. So, Your Majesty, this affair does not predict good fortune and does not predict misfortune.”

It was no more than a few days after he had finished speaking that a memorial arrived from Yunzhou, stating that a hole had appeared at the foot of Mt. Tai, as big as a cartwheel and of unknown depth. The court dispatched an emissary to investigate whether this was a lucky or unlucky event.

Let us now talk about something else. At some distance from this hole there was a mountain house, the mountain retreat of Old Master Sun. The Old Master had two sons, the elder of whom took charge of the farm, and the younger of whom studied his letters. He was going to be schoolteacher Sun, but he suddenly contracted leprosy: all his hair fell out and his body never stopped oozing pus and blood. The stench offended his father and mother, and that’s why they built him a thatched hut more than a hundred paces behind the farm.

His wife brought him his food each day. Now one day, his wife brought him food early in the morning. It was the third month of spring and when she arrived at the door of his hermitage and saw the full extent of his illness, she could not bear to look at him. Covering her mouth and nose with her hands, she gave him his food but leaned away from him.

The schoolteacher heaved a sigh and said, “A wife is supposed to share your house when alive and your coffin when you’re dead. But—if even my wife can’t stand me when I’m alive, how much less can others? What’s the point of living even a day longer?”

After he had finished speaking and his wife had gone away, he came to the conclusion that he should find a place to die. He took the crutch he used in his illness, and put on his pus- and blood-stained shoes. After going twenty or thirty steps straight north from his hut, [4b] he saw a hole. He put down the staff, took off his shoes, and straightaway jumped into it. But inside the hole it seemed like someone carried him on his back and laid him on the ground. He completely lost consciousness. After a long time, he suddenly came to and opened his eyes to have a look; straight above him he saw one dot of blue sky.

The schoolteacher said, “A moment ago I was desperate to kill myself, I never expected I would escape death!”

After a time in utter darkness, he gradually saw a bright light straight north of him. About ten paces after he started walking in that direction, he saw a staff of white jade. But when he tried to take hold of it, it turned out only to be two leaves of a gate standing ajar. When he pushed that grotto gate open with his shoulder, it was as bright as day. He saw a stone mat and sat down on it to rest for a while. Tired, he lay down on the stone mat and fell asleep. But when he suddenly stretched himself out, his feet touched something soft. And when he arose with a start, what did he see? Doomed to an end was the four-hundred-year-old empire of Han, just because this schoolteacher reached this very spot!

The schoolteacher saw a huge python, a motionless coil—from fat head to tapered tail—three foot tall. Immediately that python escaped into the grotto. The schoolteacher followed the snake inside the cave, and although he didn’t see the snake, he did see a stone casket. He lifted the lid of the box with his hands and found one scroll of text. He took it out and read it from beginning to end. It turned out to be a text to cure all 404 diseases. It made no use of the eight kinds of eight herbs of the Divine Husbandman. It did not involve refining, matching, or curing with heat. Nothing was turned into pills or powders. No activants were used to get it down. On every page were prescriptions for cures; for every kind of symptom all you needed was a cup of water over which the correct incantation had been spoken—you would be cured as soon as you swallowed that! When he came to the passage on leprosy, the method prescribed was a famous prescription for treating the disease of our schoolteacher. When he saw this, he was filled with joy. He took the heavenly book with him, left through the grotto gate, and sat down on the stone mat.

Now our tale divides again. When the wife of the schoolteacher brought his food again, she couldn’t find the schoolteacher. She came back and informed her father-in-law and he immediately set out with the elder son and others to search. When they came to the hole, they saw his staff and his pus- and blood-covered shoes. The father and mother, elder brother, and wife circled around the pit, weeping. After some time they could hear someone calling from the pit. They fetched a rope and lowered it into the hole with a branch at its end to save the schoolteacher. When he appeared from the pit and father and son saw each other, they were deeply moved. When they were done crying, the schoolteacher said, “Father, don’t be sad and anxious anymore. I found a heavenly book that will cure my symptoms.” They immediately returned to the farm together. He took one cup of pure water and swallowed it into his stomach when he finished reciting the incantation. His leprosy was immediately cured, and his hair and skin went back to their original state! Later, no matter the distance, people came to seek treatment and every one was cured. They offered him as a contribution for his services cash and goods worth more than twenty thousand strings and he ordained roughly five hundred or more disciples.

One of these was called Zhang Jue. One day he took his leave from his teacher, “My old mother back at home is advanced in years, so I request a leave of absence in order to take care of her.”

The schoolteacher replied, “When you leave I will give you a book with famous prescriptions, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t come back.”

The teacher instructed Zhang Jue, “With these famous prescriptions you will cure all complaints and diseases in the empire; but never ask people for money. Abide by my words.”

After Zhang Jue had left his teacher and returned home, he treated diseases in all places he passed through; everyone was cured but he never asked for money. Zhang Jue said, “If I cure you, all of your young and adult males will follow me as my disciples—there is no claim on the old.”

Zhang Jue roamed through the four directions and ordained more than a hundred thousand disciples. He recorded their surnames and names and their places of registration, and also the cyclical year, month, and day of their birth. “If I want you for a mission, when that written notification arrives report with the speed of fire. And all of my disciples must abide by the meeting time. Anyone who does not come upon receiving the notification will certainly die. All those who do not follow me will be visited by disaster!”

So suddenly, on that day the Yellow Scarves rose in revolt against the Han, Zhang Jue’s notifications were dispatched throughout the whole world and within a few days his disciples had all arrived at Zhang Family Village, thirty li to the east of the capital of Guangning Commandery in Yangzhou Prefecture. Zhang Jue and two of his nephews gathered the whole in this village, and when they had all assembled, he shouted, “You two younger brothers bring them over here!”

The two younger brothers brought out four bundles, and when these were opened in front of Zhang Jue, they were filled with yellow scarves, which they distributed to the troops and the captains wore … Yellow Scarves. Zhang Jue instructed his troops as follows, “Today the empire of the Han dynasty is bound to end and I am bound to rise. If one day I will be lord, the greatest soldiers will be appointed as princes, the lesser ones will be appointed as marquises, and even the bottom rung will be appointed as prefects.”

When this meeting was over, they had no armor or weapons at all. In the beginning they all wore soft battle clothing and carried only rakes and clubs. But the leaders, Zhang Jue and the two others, led these one hundred thousand men and first took Yangzhou to provide battle dress and armor, bows and swords, saddles and horses, and all other weapons.

Setting out with their army, they started from Guangning Commandery in Yangzhou Prefecture. Whenever they came upon some village, they took that village; whenever they came upon some district, they took that district—they took countless counties and prefectures. Whenever they came to a place, whole families were enlisted in their rebellion. Those who did not comply were either killed, conquered, or enslaved. Occupying two-thirds of the Han empire, the Yellow Scarves had amassed three hundred sixty thousand people in total.

-Records of the Three Kingdoms in Plain Language, trans. Wilt L. Idema and Stephen H. West

In summary, we have:
-A ruler asks for someone to interpret an omen.
-The ministers are baffled.
-A wise tutor explains.
    -A sinkhole opens.
    -A leper falls down it.
    -He discovers a scroll that can cure any disease.
        -This the previous two tales are revealed to be the origin of a faith healing sect.
        -The faith healing sect rebels.

And all this related at a breakneck and uncritical pace. It's great stuff. You could easily imagine that OD&D, with its scrolls, dragons, bandits and larger-than-life heroes, drew from this source directly. It's also a hierarchical world.  

2. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand by Edward H. Schafer

Patrick Stuart has a great writeup over on False Machine. This book fit perfectly into the OD&D setting that was congealing in my brain. A sprawling all-devouring empire, cycles of civil war, and exotic goods from unmapped and dangerous lands beyond the borders. The book is largely from the perspective of the core, but that works for OD&D; the gold-bearing magic-item-laden wilderness described by the text is the land of the campaign.

3. Great Game Books

Or "Whoops All Massacres." 

• The Great Game, Peter Hopkirk. 
• Bayonets to Lhasa, Peter Flemming.
• Mission to Tashkent by Frederick Bailey.

For this project, they're more for a sense of sparsely populated mountain kingdoms than for accurate historical detail. 

3. Film & Television

The Desert of the Tartars (1976)

I can't explain why, but this film struck me as OD&D adjacent. A crumbling fortress overlooking a deserted city and a vast, utterly lifeless wilderness. Distant armies. The blind rituals of Law. The fear and allure of the unknown. Yes, this is fudging the timeline a bit, but it's too good not to list.

Everything about this, minus the rifles, screams OD&D to me. A small band of soldiers, mounted leaders, a mule with supplies, a distant ruined castle, a haunted landscape. More than Arthuriana, more than Hollywood Medievalism, this is what it seems to be all about.

 

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms TV Series (1994) 

I've been watching the excellent subtitled versions put out by the Gentlemen of the Hàn. The costumes and scale feel perfect for OSR games. The series with its limited extras (well, relatively limited) and practical effects feels like the kind of wargaming that OD&D was designed to support. 

It's cheating a bit, as OD&D predates the series by twenty years, but it's still worth watching.  

OD&D castle generation produces characters and groups that strongly resemble groups of Three Kingdoms heroes (well, minus the Wyverns). There's no need to adopt specific terms, given OD&D's highly abstracted armour and damage system. 

Viy (1967)

Circle of Protection from Evil? Undead? Gargoyles and magic? Undead creatures galore? Surely the creators of these strange little brown books saw this film and incorporated it into their rules.

Other Films

• Satyricon (1969). Less for the details and more for the texture. Cyclopean ruins, ogres (if not named as such), and baffling events in the wilderness.
• Sadko (1952). Well, if can't have Sinbad...
• I was going to suggest Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955) as a "Well, if we can't have Harryhausen / Well, if we need dinosaurs..." but it's very possible that Gygax (et al.) saw the US TV cut of the film. 

4. Setting Specific Interpretations

The implied OD&D setting that congealed from this project isn't a specific reference to any one real-world location or culture. I wanted to do the bare minimum of initial work and let the setting develop as the game progressed.

I loosely based the hex map on the region around the Fergana Valley, as it's one of the few areas in the world where all the OD&D terrain types are represented on a 5-mile (or 15 mile) hex scale. D&D hexes are enormous but in historically sparsely populated and inhospitable regions, they start to make a tiny bit more sense. There's one castle in a huge region because there's one spring of any considerable volume in a huge region. There are only a few villages because herds need to remain mobile (especially given the contents of the OD&D random encounter table). Anyone who farms in OD&D is either a sucker, capable of truly heroic self-defence, or under the protection of a local army.

I wanted mountain hexes to feel like actual mountains. Sure, you can cross any ridge of mountains, but passes are useful. "There's a dragon guarding this pass" is a perfect adventure plot, but it doesn't work if mountain hexes are just lumpier desert hexes.

Picking a real-world location helps me visualize the terrain, weather, and environmental pressures. The valleys look like this so any farms have to look like this. If you climb this peak, you can see here. A lot of hex maps don't feel real. This one, at least to me, does. 

Reading into the OD&D encounter tables and monster descriptions, Dwarves are rich in magic items and want gold. Elves are poor in magic items. One of the oldest posts on this blog is about the ravenous hunger of civilizations for wood. Why do untouched and uncleared forests exist in OD&D's wilderness? Elves. And Dryads, who can't move far from their tree, and Ents, who can turn even a determined party of woodcutters into meat paste. Elves can't or won't smelt; no smelting means no iron; no iron means no top-tier magic armour or magic weapons. They are the outsider-elves of Icelandic mythology.

Orcs are traders. Visually, they're people. They're the only faction that seems 'civilized', for lack of a better word, if "inter-tribal hostility" is read in a slightly euphemistic light. Some of them live in caves; very sensible, give the number of incredibly dangerous flying creatures. They have wagon trains. Nobody else has wagon trains. Presumably, it's Bandits vs. Orcs out there, fighting at night.  

Su Jian

Theology and Evil Priests

Not Evil as in "Clerics who do Evil" but Evil as in "Clerics of Evil." Evil days, an evil name, an evil omen. Clerics of discord, of death, of funerals, of broken hearts and broken contracts, of famine, plague, storms, and tears. Priests of death, but death is necessary. Not the cause of Evil, but its monitors, its propitiators. 

You need some Chaos Clerics around. Too much Law is stultifying. Dead stone and undisturbed dust, not living flesh and growing plants. Also, the dead start to rise if there's not enough death-energy around. On the other hand, too much Chaos and it's difficult to get anything done. Chaos clerics are self-disorganizing.

That's the high theological argument, and it might even be true. But on a practical, boots-on-the-ground everyday religion level, the Chaos and Law Clerics are just two different schools, monastic traditions, or disciplines. OD&D doesn't have devils or angels. It's interested in the material world.

In the Lands Beyond the Western Desert, the local clerics (not the Sai Empire clerics) are monastic. They use the title "Molgon" for Evil High Priests and "Molga" for Patriarchs (and Su-Molgon / Su-Molga for Vicars/Evil Priests and up, with other yet-to-be invented titles for the rest). In OD&D's incredibly dangerous wilderness, having a local cleric who can cast Finger of Death is pretty darn handy. 

Evil Clerics studying death get funny ideas about avoiding death entirely. This happens with Law Clerics too (Raise Dead is a great temptation). Who could have guessed that applied theology leads to megalomania? Just as Empires tend to civil wars, Monasteries tend to schisms and tyranny. 

Famine - John Charles Dollman

Tiers of Sapience

Men, Elves, and Dwarves can benefit from Raise Dead. Hobbits, Orcs, etc. can't. This is... kind of weird and uncomfortable in a setting, but it's also a worldbuilding opportunity. Hobbits are reformed Hobgoblins trapped in samsara. They cannot be raised by Raise Undead. You can't escape the churn unless your foot is on the highest rung of the ladder. A virtuous Hobbit can be reincarnated as a Human and get a chance to escape. 

Kicking down the gates of Heaven and creating a better system could be a goal for a very high level campaign. Alternatively, it's just one of those things. It's only relevant after death, and only known for certain by high-level Clerics, and Raise Dead isn't guaranteed to work in any case. OD&D is not interested in fairness. And people don't need factual excuses to divide the world into "obviously superior us" and "easily slaughtered them." 

Or maybe elevation is not tied to virtue or vice, good or evil, but to some other property or behaviour? Wealth, perhaps (given the GP for XP system)? But then, why are Dragons less sapient than other creatures (as they only have a chance to be able to speak)? How mysterious.

Reincarnate is the Magic-User equivalent of Raise Dead. In modern D&D terms, it's applied chronomancy. Grab the wheel of reincarnation and give it a good hard spin. Someone out there had a child, raised it, and then magic whisked them away and deposited them in front of the PCs. Two lives, two sets of memories. You didn't skip the queue, you just fast-forwarded the tape. Every use of this spell kills a person's future.

Final Notes

This deliberately context-less reading of OD&D produced an interesting setting. It's still got OD&D's bones, but some of the game's oddities (from wargaming roots, unusual editing, or authorial intent) can flourish if read with an open (or deliberately warped) mind.