Weapon Subtype Tables for Random Equipment Generation Part 1: The One-Handers (And Hand-and-a-Halfers)

Of my earliest gaming memories, the fondest is looking over the illustrations in the 3.5e Player's Handbook. I started playing in my adolescence on the cusp of 4th and 5th edition, but my friend who owned the books played 3.5, so that's what we played. The illustrations were captivating to me, especially the equipment illustrations. For those who have not played D&D's middle sibling, 3.5 and 3rd edition were in love with polearms for reasons I still don't quite understand. If you've ever read 5e and thought it was odd that there was both a halberd and a glaive, you'd be more amused to read the entries on ranseurs and guisarmes.

Now, it's been a long time since I played either 3.5 or 5th edition, and nowadays I tend not to even differentiate damage for different weapons in most of my games, preferring the d6 damage die. Much has been written on differentiating weapons with a flat damage die, so I won't go too deep into that. The state of the art is, generally, to give weapons special mechanical traits or rule differently regarding different weapons ability to do different things on an ad-hoc basis, adjusted to your taste. Still, I miss the big, evocative lists of weapons that I was so taken by in my youth, so I've decided to write some tables for subtypes of each of the weapons found in OD&D Booklet 1. Each has an idea for what it might do particularly well, but I've kept these non-mechanical, both for the sake of system neutrality and because designing mechanical weapon traits is outside of the scope of this post.

I've titled this post with regard to random equipment generation, but you could just as easily have players choose from the tables and use the options as a referee to more evocatively stock armories, weaponsmiths and warbands. This week, I've done the weapon types that are (mostly) held in one hand. I've consolidated certain types together when they did not have enough variations to fill out a table and had significant overlap with other types. Next post on this will be the two-handers, which means lots of kinds of polearms. I will likely not give ranged weapons this treatment, as there just aren't enough distinct varieties with different strengths that I am aware of to fill out a post for them.

Some Character Like Conan to Bring Matters into Line

 "Anyone who has viewed a horror movie is aware of how dangerous angry villagers are. Whenever the referee finds that some player has committed an unforgivable outrage this rule can be invoked to harass the offender into line. Within the realm of angry villagers are thieves from the 'thieves’ quarter,' city watches and militia, etc. Also possible is the insertion of some character like Conan to bring matters into line."

This is the "Angry Villager Rule" of OD&D. I just wanted to muse on it, I don't have much of tremendous insight to say. It goes to show that some issues really have been the same since the start of the hobby, though today the advice would usually be to simply talk to the problem player. I suppose that might show a difference in maturity (of the hobby, not of individuals), but I can't help but miss this kind of off-hand, conversational advice. It feels less like I'm reading a rulebook, and more like I'm receiving advice from some guy in a game store, in a good way. Lots of OD&D feels that way. It also evokes a  kids smashing their action figures together sort of zany fun that I think maybe we need more of.

Maybe you should consider, if needed or desired, inserting some character like Conan to bring matters into line or, for that matter, out of it. After all, who is to say how the scenario will react to such an entrance. I guess if there's something to take away from this post, it's this: go read OD&D if you haven't. It's a quick read and whatever ways you're expecting it to be strange and intriguing, it will surprise you in a different way than that.

A Hex a Week: Week 3

I ended up putting this project on hold for the holidays, now that we're actually into 2024 I've picked back up with the first actual week of the new year. This week I've focused in on the nearby forests, filled with abandoned ruins and ancient megalithic sites.

A Hex a Week: Week 2

This week was pretty busy for me so I only managed to complete three pages. This Hex is just North of the one from last week, and is home to the summer pastures of the village from that Hex, currently inaccessible due to a Giant that calls them his own.

A Hex a Week: Week 1

With 2023 coming to a close, I've decided to start a new project in the vein of Dungeon23, to make up for never finishing my megadungeon, the Pythion of the Mad Oracle. In 2024 and the last bits of this year, I plan to work up a wilderness setting at a pace of one hex per week. Generally, I will try to write and draw a page related to the week's hex each day, but busy weeks will mean sparse hexes sometimes, and inspired weeks will result in the opposite.

The setting I'll be working on is going to be the Spanish Pyrenees, sometime in the Early Modern period but with plenty of anachronisms making it impossible to really place between the late 16th and early 19th centuries. I'm going for a tone inspired by Spanish Picaresques and, probably to a greater extent, their derivative works, so the Appendix N for this project includes things like Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, the Saragossa Manuscript directed by Wojciech Has, and Puss in Boots, to name the three that are having the biggest influence on me.

Here are the pages of the first week's Hex:

A Monster Conversion Key for Chainmail's Man-to-Man Combat Table

I'm a big fan of Chainmail's Man-to-Man combat system, see above. In addition to being a fascinating artifact, it's a surprisingly elegant system. With different chances to hit based on specific weapon and armor type, it's more tactical complexity than you usually get from D&D. At the same time, it avoids the feature bloat that many modern approaches to differentiating weapon types take. Moreover, it makes the uniform d6 damage die make so much more sense.

The system has one major problem, however, it doesn't cover monsters at all. If you want to run combat with monsters in Chainmail, you have to use the very different Fantasy Combat Table. This list is going to be my attempt at assigning weapon and armor equivalents to every monster presented in Booklet 2: Monsters and Treasure. The criteria is based on a combination of AC presented in OD&D and AD&D's composition tables for monsters, as well as common sense. It's not the most polished thing in the world and is meant as more of a starting point for someone who wants to run OD&D with Chainmail combat than anything else. I fully admit that in doing so, one will likely need to make rulings to their taste to replace the decisions in this list. Any particular effects of attacks (increased damage, petrification, etc are as presented in Monsters and Treasure).

The List

Old-School Roleplaying at the Dawn of History: First Principles

In this post, I'll be sharing some thoughts on running an old-school campaign set in prehistory, about participating in the very beginning of a people's cultural memory and guiding it forward. In a few words, I would describe the main design goal as follows: a game that feels like a deep dive into the first 10 turns or so of a game of Sid Meier's Civ. I want a game that plays like how the opening cinematic of Civ 5 made me feel when I was a kid.

Civ 4's opening is strictly better because of Baba Yetu, but doesn't evoke the feel of this view.