CotMA Continues

It’s been an awfully long time now since I mentioned my ongoing foray into Joseph Bloch’s Castle of the Mad Archmage (CotMA); in fact, there’s a new version of said dungeon out now. My friend Bob and I started out sometime before the Olympics and though we played 2 sessions in rapid succession, we’ve only managed one session since. What follows is my vague recollections of these sessions—bolstered a bit by some notes I took in a rare show of foresight on my part.

Whence last we ventured, the party was picking on some skeletons in a closet... and only right now do I finally get the joke. Oy veh. Anyway, suffice it to say that our boys polished them off and continued their quest for dungeon dominance.

As we continued, we met up with a statue of an ape whose secret I shall not reveal here and some olive slime and its offspring. I assume this must be a Monster Manual II critter cuz I can’t find it in any of the sources I’ve checked (AD&D Monster Manual, OSRIC, S&W Monster Compendium, Laby Lords, Castles & Crusades) and it's far too sensible sounding to be a Fiend Folio creation. And since I don’t feel even slightly compelled to purchase the MMII--or the Fiend Folio for that matter--it shall remain a mystery to me until some beneficent Olde Schewle scholar provides a description in their freely downloaded bestiary.

Anyway, since our fearless party already blew off the troglodytes a few rooms back out of sheer ignorance (at the time of this session, we had only the S&W rules pdf on hand), we felt compelled to take action. We extrapolated a bit based on the info in the module and our knowledge of the more famous green slime and decided to torch the stuff and it’s offspring. More fudging was necessary a few rooms later when we were surprised by giant frogs. We surmised, given their hp totals, that they must have 3 or 4 hit dice and, based solely on ancient memories of the murderous frogs at the Moat House in T1 The Village of Hommlet, I gave them 1 attack for 1d6 plus, if they hit you, they grab you with their tongue and automatically do an additional 1d4 dmg/round thereafter.

This is a battle we barely survived intact. Because we were surprised, Borrance the MU took it for the team before he was able to cast the sleep spell that might have saved our asses. Sigurd the ranger, Glebberd the Halfling and Borrance all got knocked to 0 hp. Only with S&W’s optional wound-binding and Negative Hit Point rules did we manage to drag the entirety of our party back to the surface alive. First level clerics without Cure Light Wounds are not worth all the sanctimonious posturing.

Since it was now getting late in the real world, we decided to clear out of dodge rather than leave our party to sleep in the dungeons. On the way out we encountered our first wandering monster: a “Floating pearlescent bubble.” We had a moment of silence in memory of Patrick McGoohan and then loaded it full of arrows. Our first day of adventuring yielded us a massive total treasure haul of 15 silver pieces! Not too impressive, especially at the cost of 3 near-dead characters.

What’s going on here?

At long last I have coerced my friend Bob into playing D&D. More specifically, the original D&D as published in 1974. Well that’s not quite true either, we’re going to play Swords & Wizardry, a—pardon me—retro-clone. Man do I hate lingo like that, but that’s what the kids are calling it these days. Since I am a card carrying absurdist and a contrarian of the highest order, I have decided to refer to the game—both my game specifically and all other versions, be they the original or an homage version—henceforth as “Old Style.”

It all began when Bob and I started spending the occasional Saturday night—after the wives and kids go to bed—getting together to play games and drink beer. Usually they’re games of strategy: Chess, Stratego, Risk, Axis & Allies; crap like that. And usually Bob beats me pretty handily. I tend to take either a ridiculously conservative approach and lose in a long, tedious war of attrition or else I take humongous, ill-conceived gambles that, though they sometimes make the game interesting, have yet to result in victory for the good guys.

Anyway, we both played a lot of (A)D&D back in the day (80s) but haven’t really played it or kept up with the hobby since. A few years back I invented this thing called the internet and, at first purely for nostalgic reasons, started loitering in RPG boards, seeing what people had to say. I found some interesting facts. Apparently TSR kept publishing more gaming material after 1986; I had no idea. Also, there was some magic card game in the 90s that was so popular that it ate D&D like a giant frog swallowing a halfling. Stranger still, the company that bought TSR was located in a shitty suburban office park within walking distance of where I was working in the late 90s. I was that close to Lake Geneva West and had not a clue.

Eventually I got married and settled down and found myself with free time in my evenings that had, for many years, been occupied with beer drinking, show-going, laid-getting and various other activities of young adulthood. That’s when Bob and Saturday game nights come in.

So anyway, Bob and I had often reminisced about our D&D days though neither bothered to broach the notion of playing such a game. Then about a year ago, after losing my 237^th consecutive strategy board game, I finally had had enough. “Let’s try D&D, man,” I said.

I had secretly been working on some Byzantine house rules for AD&D in my basement laboratory and when I presented them to Bob for possible playtesting, he scoffed. I won’t go into details, but he had every right to do so. I had cobbled together an ink and paper golem from vintage 80s rule books that I’d been slowly acquiring over the last 5 or 6 years. Besides D&D I have DragonQuest, MERPS, GURPS, Fudge, Heroes, Call of Cthulhu, Champions… you get the picture. Though in my opinion I had created a Frankenstein’s monster akin to the Mary Shelley version—strong, fast, sinister, yet eloquent and introspective—Bob felt that it more resembled the Mel Brooks rendition: clubfooted and a bit Abby Normal in the head.

The relative worth of my house rules aside, the real problem was that Bob had his own ideas about how he would re-make the game in his own image, and they differed greatly from mine. After a few rounds of verbal taunting and outright mockery, we both agreed that we couldn’t really sit down and play AD&D without drastically altering the rules, nor could we agree on how they should be altered.

That’s when I came across the blog of a one Mr Grognardia. His little piece of the internet is chock full of really cool content: book and game reviews and retrospectives, interviews with historic figures of the game, opinion pieces that are informative and enjoyable to read—not like anything you’ll see here—and posts on his own campaign, which he is running using the original D&D rules as published in 1974, Old Style gaming at it’s purest. Also, he just can’t be beat for the amount of content he chucks up every day.

Now neither Bob nor I have ever played Old Style—we started with Holmes and/or Moldvay Basic back in the very, very early 80s—so we thought this would be enough of an unknown entity that we could look upon it with fresh eyes yet it’s also the root of the game that we gleefully wasted our adolescence playing so it’s familiar enough that we’ll know what we’re doing.

That’s where this here bloggy thing comes in. I decided to document the development of our game as we play it; mostly for my own nefarious purposes but I’m putting it out there on the old intertubes as well ‘cuz I’m an exhibitionist at heart. If, somehow, someone manages to extract a milligram of amusement from this, then I’ll call that gravy.