Sample File the Oracle and Dungeons and Dragons 4 Dr

Sample file The Oracle and Dungeons and Dragons 4 Dr. Richard Forest Gazing Back into The Oracle 10 Christopher K. Bigelow The Oracle, Issue One 21 The Oracle, Issue Two 53 The Oracle, Issue Three 85 July 1982 The Oracle, Issue Four 117 September 1982 The Oracle, Issue Five 143 October 1982 Appendix A: Summer 1983 Augury, Issue One 169 Autumn 1983 Appendix B: Advertising Material 191 Appendix C: Justice Be Done Notes 196 Sample fileAppendix D: All phone numbers, mailing addresses and other contact information in this book are out of date except that found on this page. Eldritch Adventures 202 The Electric Wizard 227 Book layout ©2016 by Tim Hutchings Original magazines, articles, art, and content in this book remains the copyright of Christopher Appendix E: Bigelow or the original creator, as appropriate. All material in Issue Six remains the copyright of the original creators. Ronald Pehr’s The Healer Manuscript 270 Portions of this book may be reproduced for review purposes only. Appendix F: This book is a project of The Hutchingsonian Presents and The Play Generated Map and Document The William R. Crisman Notebook 271 Archive. It is the third in a series of books exploring the art and history of games. The publisher may be contacted at plagmada.org. Appendix G: Additional Adventure Notes 274 The Play Generated Map and Document Archive The Hutchingsonian Presents Portland, Oregon Appendix H: 2015 The Oracle Issue Six 277 This is the first printing of this book. Printed in the U.S.A. This is right: These rules are as complete as possible within the limita- tions imposed by the space of three booklets. That is, they The Oracle and Dungeons & Dragons cover the major aspects of fantasy campaigns but still remain Dr. Richard Forest flexible. As with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign. They provide the framework around which you will “I don’t remember how I chose the name The Oracle— build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity — your probably simply because it sounded mystical and magical time and imagination are about the only limiting factors, and and ancient.” the fact that you have purchased these rules tends to indicate that there is no lack of imagination — the fascination of the Christopher Bigelow, 2015, a few pages from now. game will tend to make participants find more and more time. Gygax & Arneson, 1974, Dungeons & Dragons, Men & Magic, p. 4 The Oracle was the right name. This is right: An oracle is a place where the gods speak, where their messengers dwell, where authoritative pronouncements ring out. Did this one young My answer is, and has always been, if you don’t like the way man and his publication speak with authority on Dungeons & Dragons in I do it, change the bloody rules to suit yourself and your play- July of 1982? ers. Yes. Gygax, 1975, Alarums and Excursions, #2 We all do. That’s the nature of the thing. Sample fileThis is right: The Nature of the Thing What follows herein is strictly for the eyes of you, the campaign referee. As the creator and ultimate authority in your We know what makes Dungeons & Dragons genius. That, at least, is a respective game, this work is written as one Dungeon Master solved problem. The genius of Dungeons & Dragons is that it is a ma- equal to another… chine that makes more Dungeons & Dragons, and it does this right at your table. D&D is not in the books. It is at the game table. It is in our Naturally, everything possible cannot be included in the whole scribbled notes. It is in our maps, in our jokes, in our daydreams during of this work. As a participant in the game, I would not care to dull classes or meetings, in our forum posts from work, in our blogs and have anyone telling me exactly what must go into a campaign tweets and zines. and how it must be handled; if so, why not play some game like chess? As the author I also realize that there are limits Dungeons & Dragons is the rules for jousting on dragon back that you to my creativity and imagination. Others will think of things I wrote while you were sitting in church on a Sunday morning. It is the didn’t, and devise things beyond my capability. homebrewed minotaur race you made for your brother. It is those wound point rules you added to make combat more realistic. Gygax, 1979, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Mas- ter’s Guide, p. 7 Dungeons & Dragons is the game we build together. This is wrong: the beginning, though they have sometimes claimed otherwise under the influence of avarice, pride, or market and company pressures. The AD&D game system does not allow the injection of ex- traneous material. That is clearly stated in the rule books. It The game itself is built to support its own extension. is thus a simple matter: Either one plays the AD&D game, or one plays something else... Serious players will only accept Ability scores. Races. Character classes. Equipment. Spells. Monsters. official material, for they play the game rather than playing Magic items. Random encounters. at it... No power on earth can dictate that gamers not add spurious rules and material to either the D&D or AD&D game Dungeons. systems, but likewise no claim to playing either game can then be made. Such games are not D&D or AD&D games — Categories of things that fit together, loosely. Not too well. Not com- they are something else, classifiable only under the generic pletely. Not entirely. Open-ended categories that can be filled with “FRPG” catch-all. new things. Dungeons & Dragons is never finished. Want more Ability Scores? Add new ones. New character classes? The blueprint is there. Gygax, 1982, Dragon Magazine #67, p. 64 New spells? New monsters? New magic items? Yes. This is right: New dungeons. To the contrary, the materials we have chosen to use in our You can’t play the game without creating something new. own game has enriched and enhanced all aspects of the game we play and has fleshed out your own admittedly Dungeons & Dragons is a machine for generating more Dungeons & sketchy guidelines for certain areas of the AD&D game... Dragons, and once you pick it up and start playing it, it’s yours. Purnell, 1983, “Open Letter to Gary Gygax,” The Oracle #4, p. Which is the basis of the entire hobby. 6 Sample fileThirty years ago, Dungeons & Dragons was the only game in town. It This is right: created modern roleplaying from the stuff of contemporary wargaming. Other roleplaying games split off rapidly, expanding on D&D, modify- TSR markets several versions of its popular Dungeons & ing it, remaking it. Copying, adapting, reacting against it. Ken St. Andre Dragons (D&D). One version, AD&D, has been labeled by its didn’t understand Dungeons & Dragons because the rules were not creator as a closed system, open only to official material. complete or coherent. But then again he understood it very well. Tun- While appreciating the desire to retain a playable, balanced nels & Trolls was the result. system, I take issue with the presumption that any version of D&D is immaculate and not subject to modification. One such Steve Jackson didn’t understand Dungeons & Dragons, but then again modification is presented herein, being a new type of player- he understood it very well. Its “combat rules were confusing and un- character. satisfying. No tactics, no real movement - you just rolled the dice and died” (Steve Jackson, 1980). The Fantasy Trip, with its strategic combat Ronald Mark Pehr, 1983, “The Grimlock as a Player Charac- and magic, was the result. Some years later, GURPS would follow (under ter,” The Oracle #5, p. 6 the heady influence of Champions, which took boiling everything down into extensible components to its logical conclusion). The history of the The game works because it is ours. hobby is made of this. Mark Rein-Hagen didn’t understand Dungeons & Dragons, but then again he understood it very well. Vampire: The From the very beginning, we all knew this. Even the designers knew it at Masquerade, with its clans, its disciplines, and yes, its abilities, was the result. Categories of things suitable for recombination, deletion, expan- In fact, if you’re short on time, stop reading this, and go read that instead. sion. There are a lot of ways to be a vampire, and you can always roll your own. And it turns out there are a lot of people who want to do just They aren’t alone. The best contributions to thinking about D&D are that. coming from the same places they’ve always come from, if at times in new modes. From the zines, now blogs, now Google+ threads, until This continues today. Google does away with the service and we move somewhere new. From small press and independent publications emerging from fan communi- Vincent Baker didn’t understand Dungeons & Dragons, but then again ties. he understood it very well. He had limited experience with the Dun- geons & Dragons game, strictly speaking, when he built a game that em- And finally, with the 2014 publication of the 5th edition of Dungeons & braced it anyway: Apocalypse World, a game with playbooks, customiz- Dragons itself, even the flagship game’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, able, expandable, and with a hacking guide built right into the rulebook. appears to understand Dungeons & Dragons again.

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