Sean, Erik, and I have just finished up playing some Dungeons & Dragons using the 1977 Holmes Basic Set rulebook. We started playing at the beginning of December 2023, and played 19 sessions (about 2 a month). We played over Discord, for about 2 hours per session, using no extra technology: I drew maps and illustrations (like the above pic of a bugbear and his bandit buddies) and shared them to the Discord chat.
This game was personally extremely satisfying for me, both for its intrinsic value (it was tons of fun to play!) and because it represented a kind of end point to a journey/conversation I started several years ago, and which I’ve talked about off and on here at Adept Play. The beginnings of that journey can be seen in my discussion with Ron about D&D play culture, where I talk about my struggles to get some idealized version of D&D to the table, and it continued on through play of various non-D&D games — Forge: Out of Chaos, Tunnels & Trolls, two very influential-on-me series of Lamentations of the Flame Princess games (DM’d by Sam and Noah) — ending up at my very unsatisfying attempt at playing the Moldvay/Cook Basic/Expert rules using the Slumbering Ursine Dunes module.
In the comments to that last post, Ron asked why we bother to use modules for this kind of play, and asked if anyone played original material with these games anymore. Those questions really hit me — enough so that I didn’t want to play any more dungeon crawl games for another year or so.
My development of original material for what would become my next D&D game took a circuitous path (and arguably wasn’t that original). This perhaps goes into more detail than anyone would like (or would need), but after playing Lamentations with Sam and Noah, I was inspired to start working on my own Lamentations adventure, and I started to develop material inspired by John Fowles’ novel The Magus, but set in the Balkans during the standard Lamentations era. I worked on this for a while, but though the idea really called to me, I couldn’t get it to a point where it made sense as something to play, and so I put it aside. But when I finally got the drive to run a dungeon crawl again, I pulled this material out of its (virtual) folder and it started to click for me as something that would work well (or maybe even better) transmogrified into material for Holmes D&D. However, again I got to the point where it wasn’t quite clicking — but I went ahead anyway and started to gather players, figuring that the pressure to get something ready for a scheduled game would help me figure out what I needed to do to make it work.
Unfortunately, as the start date approached, the problems I was facing turning my ideas/inspiration into something playable (namely that I had come up with a situation involving various NPCs that it didn’t seem to have any room or need for player character involvement) didn’t go away, and so a few days before we were supposed to start, I decided I had to come up with something different.
Having hit a dead end in part because I was trying to do something too elaborate, too high concept, I reversed course and decided to keep it simple. I had just finished reading The Hobbit to my kids, and I got the idea to set the game just after something like the Battle of the Five Armies: in our version, decades ago, goblins had invaded the dwarven homelands and pushed the dwarves out. A new goblin warlord had risen up, and they began a war of expansion against various human realms: the humans and dwarves put their differences aside and fought back against the goblins, with the results being that the goblins were pushed out of the dwarven homelands, opening them up for dwarven return.
The starting backdrop for the game had these features, then: lots of dwarven places (settlements, temples, fortresses, etc.), recently inhabited by goblins, now opened up for exploration/exploitation; lots of dwarven refugees on the move back to their ancestral homes; human and dwarf relations breaking down, after they had been allied in the war, due to the human communities feeling that their aid to the dwarven cause had gone unrewarded; lots of veterans of the conflict on all sides wandering around looking for ways to continue to earn a living through violence.
In terms of how we were approaching “the rules”, we tried to use the Holmes text, as faithfully as possible, not out of any sense of needing to do it “one true way”, but more in a sense of fun/experimentations — what happens if we stick to these procedures, as described here, as our starting point, with as few assumptions from elsewhere as possible?
One consequence of this was an early decision that all “out of the dungeon” play was unconstructed — negotiation and conversation between Sean/Erik and me — rather than, e.g., using some kind of travel rules to get between the dungeons and towns. (During the early sessions, we talked about the possibility of adding some kind of more formal travel procedure later, but I ended up feeling it wasn’t necessary for what we were doing).
In terms of my preparation, I did make use of some other material:
I wanted a slightly bigger mix of random creatures and treasures to draw from, so I used a copy of Monster & Treasure Assortment Book One: Dungeon Levels One to Three (TSR, 1977). I also used Vincent Baker’s “The Monster Machine” from Fight On! #2 (2008).
For the first dungeon, I started by rolling for some random dungeon inhabitant on the M&TA tables, giving us some dwarves, some bandits, some kobolds, two bugbears, and a flock of stirges. For whatever reason, this clicked for me right away: the site would be an abandoned dwarven temple; the dwarves were there with a group of kobolds they had taken prisoner during the war; while the (human) bandits and the bugbears, who had been on different sides during the war, had now made common cause and were using part of the temple as a base to stage raids on caravans of dwarves heading back to reclaim their homeland. Finally, the creature I rolled up by using “The Monster Machine” procedure was a “water/shadow” type creature that attacked with a strangle power and a confusion power. This provided the final details: this was obviously some kind of supernatural wine creature, and the dwarves here part of a cult devoted to a dwarven wine god (worshipped in secrecy because wine isn’t the standard dwarven alcoholic beverage, of course).
Finally, I picked an appropriate Dyson Logos map (and made some adjustments) to represent the temple.
It worked even better than I expected!
This was more than enough to get us going: Sean and Erik quickly developed their characters’ relationship to various setting elements — or, rather, by pulling things from the backdrop, they turned them into setting: Erik’s cleric, Pax, had an interest in cross-cultural religious history, at first a convenient motivation for exploring the first dungeon, but as the game developed, a trait that played into his approach to overall strategy and his interactions with NPCs.
The first delve and its aftermath led to a need to flesh out the surrounding area a bit more: there was travel to a dwarven refugee camp; a town of humans who had tried to stay neutral during the war; and then eventually to several more dungeons/exploration sites (the lair of a summoner that was rumored to hold the secrets of the summoner’s magic; a sacred site of a band of nomadic humans who had abandoned the area during the war).
Things eventually worked their way back to the first site, and we ended the game with most of the group of the PC’s under the thrall of the wine creature, doing its bidding (though all with a chance to make further saves to escape its control — if we were going to keep going).
My big takeaways from the experience:
- I’m still at the point in my playing of these games that my best bet is to start with things being pretty simple, and build from there.
- I’m pretty happy with really placing the focus on exploration sites/dungeons, and not getting sucked into various rule schemes for “wilderness travel”, “town play”, etc.
- It’s so much more fun for me to come at the experience using this kind of pieced together preparation process (some random creatures, a Dyson map, etc.) than to use more fully written out material (whether prepared by me or someone else). I kind of can’t imagine playing this kind of game any other way at this point.
4 responses to “Ripping Off Tolkien and Other Secrets of My Success”
Hi Jon!
Thanks for that post. I had pleasure to share some similar experience which I described in that post: https://adeptplay.com/2024/03/01/holmes-the-golden-medusa-of-sorrow/
During that Holmes game:
– How did you treat character death? Especially in reguards to Johann and Ron’s discussion here: https://adeptplay.com/2024/11/04/workshop-no-not-blackleaf/#comment-8564
Death occured in the one dungeon-3 session I played, when one character became a statue of stone due to failing his Savint Throw vs Turned to Stone against the Medusa. This was an annoying moment that was dealt by giving an expisting NPC/Hireling (dependant to another Player Character) to the current player, but it feel like generating less engagement instead of more. I think everyone felt unsatisfied.
– I’m curious about the role of magic during your game. As mentioned in my own, we realized that the huge restriction on spells are mitigated by the possibility to create scrolls – which was then widely used and gave incentives for the magic-users to collect money, almost to the point of generating intra-group adversity, or at least competition, between one magic-user and the thieves.
– I cut out the “travel/town play” too, but it was obvious to me that the “exiled princess” would come back into her own “capital” and especially “palace”, which I would have treated like a dungeon, with factions/reaction rolls and adversity. So really a dungeon but “skinned” as a “home town”. Did something like this happened in your game? Or maybe a better way to phrase this question would be: what were your your “less dungeony” dungeon, appearence-wise. Did you end up designing “dungeons” in responses of what actually happened or what the character became or want, or in consequence to how it went into a previous delve?
Hi Greg – great questions!
-We took a bit of “tragic fragility” and “potato chip” approach to the death of characters: each player started with two player characters a piece, and the party also had a shared hireling. During the course of play, both Sean and Erik lost a character to death, and they were able to replace the character with a new player character once they returned to town. There was never a time when the death of a character sidelined one of the players. We didn’t have a very formal in-fiction reason for the new characters to join up with the survivors, and I don’t think we got a chance to see the “replacements” develop into characters that we were as interested in as the originals — but that may have changed with some more play. Somewhat relevant (I think): we never played for more than about 2 hours at a time, and in each case the death of a player character triggered the group wanting to return to town, so there was very little play where the players didn’t have their two PCs in play at the same time.
-We didn’t really explore the scroll options, though, again, probably would have gone down that path with more play. I found magic to be similar to my prior experiences with Holmes: though limited, it tended to be quite situation-altering.
-The design of dungeons (or, rather, “dangerous places to explore”) became very reactive after the first one. For example, I created the second dungeon, the summoner’s lair, after the characters decided they needed more magical oomph and started asking around about likely places to find more spells, etc. Most dungeons remained pretty dungeon-like. We did have some scenes set in town: notably, meeting two other adventuring characters in a tavern, who ended up making common cause with the party for a few sessions.
I like the ending! It reminds me of most of the Clark Ashton Smith stories. I think 1950s sword-and-sorcery fandom lost the focus from mic drop “and this is how that disaster ensued” to a default “our hero bounds off to his next adventure.”
For an addition to your link list, a few years ago, I talked with Jason D’Angelo about the Holmes D&D: Staying underground, dungeon or no dungeon. It includes another thing that I think got lost somewhere, the straightforward goal of playfulness. Since then, I’ve understood more, or think I do, about the pressures on D&D as text during the next five years, which led to inflated expectations and beliefs that no actual text can fulfill, a guarantee of some kind of profound and originalist role-playing experience just because it’s D&D.
At the risk of rudeness, I have to tease you a little bit about your path to simplicity, as it began with adapting The Magus into Balkans gothic horror, and trying to fit a dungeon into it … anyway, I hope that looks a little bit comical to you at this point too.
More seriously, I can ask for reflective purposes, why not abandon any concern at the start with any out of dungeon play at all? Textually, for both Holmes D&D and Tunnels & Trolls, town is merely “town,” and it does very well that way until after a delve or two.
Exactly! It’s easy, fun, and reliable. I’d like to see a whole lot more of it from any number of people here, using the early D&D and other role-playing texts, rather than the built-up cruft of practices and texts which only exist because people didn’t do that historically.
Play was satisfying and rewarding. As evidenced by how long we played for. I gained a bigger appreciation for Holmes as a playable set of instructions and a game that can stand on its own. Reflecting back on when we played Blueholme, the texture and wonder missing from those “cleaned up” rules was in full force here with the original.
I’ll just sum up my thoughts:
• We never leveled. All of this took place at level 1. There was, for me anyway, excitement about getting to the next level, but not frustration or the obsession with getting there you often see. Once I relaxed into the slower progression in terms of level, the satisfaction picked up. We were not at level 1 of 14 or 36, but 1 of 3. And I think that is baked into Holmes and Moldvay: if you play them as their own game with 3 character levels, you can concentrate on that experience. There is no 4th level, so don’t worry about it. For me this answers the question whether 1st level characters are viable. Fuck yeah they are and fun to play.
• (reply 1 to Greg) When characters died we reacted in character, but the game moved on. We had two character deaths I think; Erik and I each had one casualty. Poor Oron, my human cleric, was almost to 2nd level. But he had not personality or not much of one and in some ways was the least interesting of the original four characters. Which means his death wasn’t all that remarkable. I will say, death just happened. I would not say at random, but it certainly wasn’t a heroic, spotlight moment. We got in a fight and the character took a big hit. Shit happens. Roll up a new one.
• (reply 2 to Greg) Scales was my barefoot hippie magic user. And yes scrolls and the idea of using them quickly became a theme, even though I do not think we used that many. We held strong to the idea that whatever spell you had with you, is all you had. The giant spell book was left back at base / home. I had the one spell and sometimes chose poorly with the one to bring. Erik, who had an elf, and I made what I think were practical decisions about magic we found. The hunt for more magic did drive play at certain points and I do not feel the limitations of the class limited play at all.