The Sigil Trilogy

So my Roll20 group’s very long-running 5E Planescape campaign is over, which seems like a good time to have a look at my old Planescape material one last time and review it before we move on to our next game. (It’s going to be some Victorian-era Mage: the Awakening business.) I’ve previously looked over the core Planescape materials, so now it’s time to drill into the various supplements.

I would actually argue that the most useful supplements for a Planescape campaign are not, in fact, the legendary big fat boxed sets of planar information that followed the core boxed set. Of course they are useful for any extended visit to the planes in question – but equally, the planes in question a) have their basic principles already outlined in the core box, so you have all the tools you need to improvise your own locations and adventures there if you have to, b) are infinite, so you have little need to worry about your own inventions crowding out the “canon” material, and c) almost certainly aren’t the home base of the campaign, and therefore will be under correspondingly less of a microscope than that home base.

Odds are, if you’re playing Planescape your home base is going to be Sigil – and that’s why the trilogy of supplements giving further detail on the City of Doors is so useful for a Planescape campaign. If your characters are regularly spending time there, then your players are correspondingly going to be giving it much closer scrutiny, and therefore the more help you have in making it feel like a rich, real location with actual people with actual agendas living in it, the better off you are.

In the Cage: a Guide to Sigil

Its title comes from an old Genesis song; its subtitle explains what it is perfectly. This is an absolutely stuffed-to-the-gills, information-dense sourcebook on Sigil. No time is wasted on any sort of introduction or prefacing guidance on how to use this stuff in-game, to a large extent because the guide to Sigil in the core box already covers the sort of stuff an introduction would have covered; instead, the book leaps straight into the action, offering a tidal wave of locations (many of which have associated maps), significant NPCs, bits of trivia and information about life in Sigil, in-character advertisements, flyers, and declarations and more besides. There’s some especially useful notes on where to find the most well-known portals to particular planes too.

If you like Sigil and the Planescape house style – and you probably aren’t even thinking about Planescape supplements if you don’t – this is gold. Any Planescape campaign which includes any significant adventuring in Sigil would be enriched by this book, and since 99% of Planescape campaigns qualify as that this makes it near-essential.

The Factol’s Manifesto

Where In the Cage provided a simple enough breakdown of locations, this book provides a deeper look at the various Factions. Despite having kind-of invented the splatbook with their line of Complete (Insert Class/Race Here)’s Handbook products, TSR didn’t go for the Vampire: the Masquerade route of having a splatbook for each and every Faction in the game; instead, The Factol’s Manifesto condenses the sort of information that would have been in there into a single slim volume, and it works great.

Each Faction is given a player-facing look at their philosophy, their leader, their headquarters, and some significant NPCs and other snippets. There’s also a DM-facing section in each chapter which offers ideas for stuff which may be going on behind the scenes, though the authors emphasise that these are just ideas and aren’t necessarily canon for the purposes of your home campaign. (Already, the contrast with White Wolf from the same era is refreshing.) Special powers are given for Faction members which go beyond the abilities everyone gets for joining, giving players a strong incentive to try and seek advancement with their Faction in order to gain additional abilities.

Although it came out in 1995, a mere year after the campaign setting premiered, the book already shows some striking developments over the original core setting. Aside from the new D&D logo at the top which was phased in when the new, tweaked 2E core books got brought out (removing the iconic dragon-ampersand, an unforgivable omission which wouldn’t return until 5E), there are also some new amendments and additions to the overall settings in here. For instance, the leader of the Sensates is given a new surname – she’s now Erin Montgomery, with “Darkflame” being her middle name – presumably because they realised that in actual play having a “Factol Darkwood” and a “Factol Darkflame” as the leader of very different Factions ended up being confusing. (It certainly was in our campaign; killing them off was probably the best thing we could do to bring clarity to Sigil politics.)

More substantively, there’s hints that there used to be many more Factions in Sigil – dozens of the things! – but the Lady of Pain imposed a strict limit of 15, which prompted a brief civil war-cum-purge which the Factions of today are the survivors of. This is a nice development which answers a whole bunch of significant questions about the setting, including (off the top of my head):

• “Why aren’t there Factions for every goofy philosophy?” Answer: there’s a strict limit, so if you can make your personal philosophy fit the broad church of one Faction or another you are better off doing that.
• “Why don’t the Revolutionary League/Sign of One/Xaositects/Free League/any other Faction whose members are likely to have sharp disagreements with each other to the point of not being able to work together schism?” Answer: they’d lose massive amounts of power by doing so, and nobody is entirely clear which side of the schism – if any – would get the vacated Faction spot, so unless you simply don’t believe in the major underlying principles of the Faction it is always better to try and change minds within the Faction than to quit.
• “Why can’t we start our own Faction?” Answer: in principle you can, in practice if you wanted it to be an actual Faction you would need to knock down one of the other Factions, which would make a great goal for a long-term campaign.

There’s also a shift in emphasis noticeable, with the book referring the reader not to the Planescape boxed set to get the basic rundown on the Factions, but The Planewalker’s Handbook, which is already spoken of here as though it is the core book of the setting. That may simply because it’s a player-facing book, and had come out that year to boot so it was an opportune moment to give it a plug and push its sales a bit, but I suspect that there is also an aspect here of TSR realising that the big boxed set approach they had been taking was beginning to become commercially unviable and wanting to reposition The Planewalker’s Handbook as the core book of the setting so as to ease the need to stock lots of copies of the core box, which could be marketed more exclusively to DMs.

In short, the Manifesto is a supplement which finds the Planescape setting evolving, but evolving in a way which for the most part makes sense and feels like a natural embellishment of what had gone before.

Uncaged: Faces of Sigil

Uncaged is a big collection of NPCs which makes good use of the fact that all the NPCs live in the same town. Whilst they can be treated entirely atomistically if you wish, each of the NPC descriptions also includes links between the NPC in question and at least one other NPC in the book – sometimes a minor connection, sometimes something more significant. Thus, the book describes not only a series of NPCs to enrich Sigil with, but also a network of connections between them which helps the GM find the answer to questions like “Are there any rumours of X having enemies?”

In fact, some of these connections amount to larger plots, with useful diagrams in the appendix at the back of the book giving extremely clear overviews of how the plots in question are structured. You could, in fact, very happily run a sandbox Planescape campaign using this book as the primary reference, simply by having the player characters bounce off the NPCs in question. Used in conjunction with In the Cage and the Factol’s Manifesto, it makes Sigil a city setting as rich as any described in the citybook-happy days of the 1990s, with books like the excellent original version of Chicago By Night for Vampire appearing almost shallow in comparison.

Theological Tomes of TSR-era D&D

Collections of deities have been a part of the D&D game line ever since Gods, Demigods and Heroes emerged for OD&D. Whereas that was a brief booklet containing extremely simple god descriptions, subsequent books have been more lavish affairs, and whilst the finer details of the religions described have been altered for game purposes I still have fond memories of the old 2E Legends & Lore hardcover giving me basic introductions to various bits of world mythology. Here, then, is a quick overview of TSR’s major compilations of gods, as well as a notable OSR product that harkens back to them.

Deities & Demigods

The first AD&D hardback to come out after Gygax completed the big three, Gary’s introduction to this tome and the preface by the authors (Jim Ward and Rob Kuntz) try to make out that it’s a core book for 1E – and to be fair, under a certain light it is. After all, AD&D was constructed as a synthesis of all the major material put out for OD&D in its core set, its supplement series, and in the better-received articles in sources like The Strategic Review and Dragon, and Deities & Demigods is effectively an expanded and revised version of Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes by the same writers.

As explained in the fourth volume of Hawk & Moor, the intent behind Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes – a motivation still evident here – was to define an “upper limit” for D&D. Perturbed by reports of campaigns of absurdly inflated power levels, amused by stories of PCs strolling into Valhalla to mug Thor and take his stuff, and pestered by fans for ever-more powerful spells and monsters and character abilities, it seems that Ward and Kuntz decided to try and defuse this strange gaming arms race by setting a particular standard as the maximum power level that could possibly be encountered in the game. The idea seems to have been that if Zeus himself only has 400 hit points and stats in the mid-twenties and the equivalent of 20th level in a few classes, your 40th level warrior-wizard who casts 20th level spells and has a million hit points ceases to look like an unbeatable god and just ends up looking like a childish exaggeration.

This idea is alright in theory, but of course it does run into the pitfall that by providing game stats for this stuff, you inherently quantify what the player characters need to do to take down a god. It doesn’t help that the book leads off with some expansions to the ability score tables to show what marvellous abilities are unlocked for ability scores between 19 and 25 – though I am fairly sure the intention is that only gods actually get some of these capabilities, so that no matter (for instance) how high a mortal’s Charisma score is they’ll never be able to exert the awe effect that a high-Charisma deity can. Another problem – and one which the introduction to Deities & Demigods freely admits – is that it is very possible to look at the book, see a bunch of stat blocks, and decide that it’s a high-level Monster Manual and treat it as such. (To be fair, a lot of the deity descriptions end up being quite terse – to the point where aside from a statblock and a description of the god’s appearance and behaviour in combat you aren’t really given much to work with, so I can see how people could make that mistake.)

Another motivation is, of course, providing some cultural context for D&D campaigns, and in particular to give some much-needed flavour to the religious practices of clerics. As Deities & Demigods notes, a campaign world would have to be extraordinarily diverse to incorporate all the different pantheons incorporated therein – well, to be fair Earth itself is more diverse, but then again making and running a campaign world that has even a shadow of the sheer range of cultures and ideas that Earth has is a mammoth undertaking. However, if you pick out just one pantheon, or a subset of related ones, and declare that these are the ruling principles of your campaign world, then instantly you give your particular cosmos a distinctive flavour of its own. To this end, the entries in Deities are divided up by pantheon, and there’s actually an impressive number of different cultures provided here, including a bunch which didn’t make the cut for the 2nd Edition equivalent of this book. (Plus, of course, some versions have Elric and Cthulhu Mythos stats – pulled not because Chaosium were unhappy with them being there, but because TSR decided that promoting Chaosium’s games by namedropping them in connection with these chapters was bad for business.)

Some of these summaries inevitably end up being a bit problematic; for instance, European pantheons are finely divided, whilst all North American tribal religions are lumped together in the “American Indian” chapter. This is a shame, particularly since it’s quite obvious that Ward and Kuntz did in fact do a whole bunch of research to begin with to select and detail different deities and cultural heroes; the book ends up in this awkward place where its authors were evidently trying not to be excessively Eurocentric and do their homework, but at the same time they end up with the sort of blind spots you’d expect someone to end up having if they were reliant on late-1970s Midwestern public libraries and book shops to get their information. If you were writing this thing today, you could almost certainly do a better job thanks to the preponderance of information and people to discuss these things with on the Internet; as it stands, particularly when it comes to those pantheons which touch on actual real-life religions practiced by large numbers of people in the modern world, a Dungeon Master would do well to do a healthy amount of their own research when bringing these gods to bear – particularly since, though the introductions to each pantheon are actually quite good, the specific deity and hero descriptions can be a bit brief.

As far as working out stats goes, Deities & Demigods is extremely useful and provides a bunch of information on incorporating the tropes of specific cultural legends into D&D, so it’s decidedly worth it; you just have to make sure you don’t treat it as a one-stop shop for all you need to know about a particular religion when it comes to bringing it alive for gaming purposes (and, as with any supplement like this, corroborate facts with proper sources assiduously before you kid yourself into thinking this reflects real-life religious practices!).

Legends & Lore (2E Version)

Midway through 1E’s run, when the hardcovers got reprints with snazzy orange spines, Deities & Demigods got retitled Legends & Lore in what I suspect was a crafty rebranding exercise – the Satanic Panic propagandists had tended to cite Deities & Demigods as being the most objectionable of the AD&D rulebooks (“it encourages kids to worship pagan gods!”), so retiring the title may have seemed like a crafty way to deflect their complaints. The rebranding carried over to 2E, the new volume being prepared by Troy Denning and a returning Jim Ward and bearing with it a brief disclaimer that the book neither encouraged nor discouraged the worship of the gods presented therein, but merely depicted them for the purposes of inspiration for Dungeon Masters (a clever way of disavowing Satanic Panicers’ complaints without kowtowing to the extent of retiring the volume and without buying into their assertion that these religions were inherently evil… OK, a lot of the Aztec pantheon gets branded as evil here, but when you’re dealing with a state religion that mandates human sacrifice it’s hard to wriggle out of that one).

The 2nd Ediiton version of Legends & Lore increases the page count by 50% but presents markedly less pantheons, even when you account for the loss of the Elric and Cthulhu Mythos stuff. Part of this comes down to the book not being printed in teeny-tiny text and having more artwork, but not all of it is solely down to the layout bloat; it also comes down to 2E being the edition where context was king, and the authors went the extra mile to provide more substantive notes on cultural background and the specific role in the pantheon of each god and hero depicted; although it is still not a substitute for doing proper research if you want an actual historical or cultural insight into the religions involved, the gods presented here are at least much more fleshed-out than in the previous book and in general you don’t have entries where it’s like “This god shows up with this sort of costume and generally carries this sort of weapon, usually reacts favourably to blah and unfavourably to blah blah” and so on.

NPC stats are still provided, but this time around they are presented as stats not of the gods themselves but as avatars thereof – mere projections of the deity into the mortal realm, as opposed to the sum total of the god’s majesty. As well as providing an alternate take on cosmology that Dungeon Masters can adopt if they think it is suitable for their campaigns, this also finally provides a way to resolve the thorny problem of providing truly epic opponents on the one hand whilst on the other making sure that the gods aren’t diminished or made to seem puny when high-level mortals take them to the cleaners: simply say that those high-level characters simply fought and bested a mere fraction of the god’s true power, and provided that taking down that fraction is hard enough the god remains impressive.

That’s handy, but the expanded god descriptions remain the major benefit Legends & Lore has over its predecessor. Whilst it can’t be emphasised enough that this isn’t a one-stop resource for mythology or religion for any real-world application, and whilst it does cover less pantheons than Deities & Demigods, I feel like I could do every god described in Legends & Lore justice in terms of presenting them as a feature of an RPG world’s universe just working from here, whereas with Deities I feel I’d need to have the manual in one hand and another resource in the other to get a handle on some of the less well-described gods.

Monster Mythology

This part of the blue softcover Dungeon Master’s Guide supplemental series for 2E is rooted in a particular take on monsters in D&D – namely, that they are part of the ecology, that they are living creatures like the PCs with their own cultures, and therefore their own gods (provided here). This is a perfectly legitimate way to do worldbuilding, but is far from the only one – for instance, in a setting based around ancient Greece it would make no sense for the satyrs and pegasi and whatnot to have their own distinct pantheons of gods – they worship the same gods that humans worship, because they are not distinct and separate from the humans’ cultures but a part of those cultures’ mythologies in their own right.

Which comes down to the main issue I have with the deities outlined in this book – they’re all a little bland, in part because they seem to be developed to just generically care about the particular monsters they are the patrons of and aren’t really integrated into the wider cosmology of any particular campaign world. On the one hand, that makes it easier to drop them into your campaign world, but on the other hand it will also mean it feels a little obvious that they’ve been dragged and dropped in. Let’s say that your campaign world has had major events in its past in which the gods as a whole took an active part (like Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms, Mystara… in other words, a good majority of the campaign worlds made by TSR themselves). What role did these monsters’ gods play in that event? The book offers no help, and nor can it. My inclination in running D&D these days is to bite the bullet and say that there’s a single pantheon for everyone (because those are the objectively real deities of that campaign world), and the gods appear humanlike to humans and elflike to elves and horselike to horses and so on. Different cultures might worship the pantheon in strikingly different ways, or worship a different subset of the pantheon, but a god that’s real for anyone is real for everyone in a D&D world and therefore I don’t think it makes sense to assume that any god will exclusively be worshipped by one species or another.

On Hallowed Ground

Penned by Colin McComb, this Planescape supplement is largely taken up with an extensive listing of gods – some from Legends & Lore, plus some additional pantheons (like the Sumerian and Finnish, which had appeared in Deities & Demigods but not the 2nd edition Legends & Lore), plus some D&D originals like the monster gods from Monster Mythology or the deities of the Birthright, Dragonlance, Forgotten Realms and Greyhawk campaign settings.

This makes it useful straight off the bat as a one-stop source, provided that you bear in mind that the book is offering a Planescape take on the deities in question -a bit more jaded and much less easily awed than the traditional high fantasy take on such subject matter, and working on the premise that even if you aren’t going to regularly stroll up to Thor and punch him on the nose, the realms of the gods are viable places for the player characters to go visit. This is a gear shift away from the 2E Legends & Lore approach, but that’s no bad thing – if you don’t like it you can correct for it, and if you do like it then bam, you’re in luck.

In addition to the god listings there’s a bunch of useful Planescape-specific stuff here. Chapters are providing expanding on the roles of gods and priests in the context of the setting, which is decent enough, but McComb also goes the extra mile and finally fleshes out the whole deal with petitioners (dead people reborn in the realms of the gods they were aligned to in life) and proxies (agents of the gods), which is long overdue, since I always felt those concepts weren’t outlined well enough in the core set to be especially useful.

My one criticism would be that in discussing the possibility of PCs becoming proxies, McComb is sufficiently hostile to the idea that he neglects to cover a particularly entertaining option: what about an all-proxy campaign, in which the PCs are all agents of the same god (or a set of gods sufficiently closely aligned to ensure party unity)? That sounds to me like a particularly interesting premise for a Planescape campaign, but he never even considers it.

Petty Gods

Petty Gods is a project with a long and troubled history. The original idea was to provide a supplement along the lines of the old Judges Guild Unknown Gods release, dedicated to presenting a number of deities with portfolios somewhat more small-scale and niche than the greater deities that usually get the lion’s share of the attention when campaign settings are cooked up – to take an ancient Roman example, think the household gods of the family hearth, as opposed to mighty Jupiter.

The intention behind the project was that it would be a community affair, with submissions solicited from anyone interested and collated into a single volume, with some editing for system consistency and proofreading. Originally, the plan was for it to be edited and laid out by James Maliszewski – however, when James abruptly dropped off the radar during the debacle surrounding his Dwimmermount Kickstarter, the project was left orphaned. Eventually, Greg “this is probably a pseudonym” Gorgonmilk decided to revive the project, calling for anyone who had submitted work for it to resend it to him and opening up the floodgates for further submissions on top of that. Gorgonmilk succeeded in whipping up a renewed wave of enthusiasm for the project, and at one point even seemed on the verge of obtaining submissions from Michael Moorcock, Gene Wolfe and Charles Saunders (though these sadly fell through), but found it difficult to actually finish the job of editing. Luckily, he was able to pass the concluding stages of the project over to Richard J. LeBlanc Jr., who whipped it into shape and got it out of the door.

Although in design it is deliberately reminiscent of Deities & Demigods – the back cover is in the same style as the original release of that book, and the spine is in the same distinctive orange style as late 1E hardbacks – this is statted up not for 1E, but for Labyrinth Lord. That means that it’s entirely compatible with B/X, needs only a momentary sanity check to use with BECMI, needs a touch more care to use with other TSR incarnations of D&D, and can be used with 3E and 5E with somewhat more work. The interior design is actually very reminiscent of the B/X rulebooks, which is a nice touch; the sense that this could have been a lost classic TSR supplement is only heightened by the inclusion of some work by old stars of 1970s TSR – Jim Ward pens an introduction, Erol Otus provides some characteristically tripped-out artwork, and the appendices include a welcome reprint of an extensive M.A.R. Barker essay on penning religions for RPG purposes, in which he makes a strong case that if you want a fantasy game which is genuinely immersive and where the PCs are deeply engaged with the gameworld’s culture, you can’t neglect the design of religions – and also provides his insights into how to craft a religion which fits a culture. (In essence, you work out the basics of a culture first, and then consider what sort of religion would thrive in such a culture.) As well as a massive number of petty gods, the book also includes chunky chapters cataloguing related material – including a bunch of servitors of the gods, a brace of new spells and items, and ideas for developing cults.

But the stars of this nearly 400 page tome are the gods themselves, and they do not disappoint. Not all will be to everyone’s taste, since that is the nature of such community-written supplements; some will fall flat, won’t be to your tastes, or be actively annoying and/or offensive. That doesn’t really hurt, though, because nobody would make a serious attempt to implement all these gods in the same campaign; anyone trying to use this work is going to need to be selective and pick out those gods which suit the tone of their campaign world.

What’s nice is that there is a genuine diversity here in terms of the type of god presented as well as the concept. Which gods you choose will say something about the nature of your campaign world and the cultures that appear therein. Some are gods of particular locales – sometimes extremely specific locales (there’s a patron deity of a pub, for instance) – others are petty less because of the extent of their influence than the fringe nature of their interests, either because their sphere of influence is very narrow or because it is extremely obscure. There’s even some gods which can fill in aesthetic niches in previously-described pantheons; in particular, there’s some lesser Cthulhu Mythos entities which would let you throw in a bit of Lovecraftian action in your games without being so dickish as to bring your PCs face to face with Cthulhu himself.

Choosing to incorporate the idea of little godlings into your campaign world will set it in a certain light; choosing a particular subset of these petty gods to include will cast it in an even more specific light and lend a particular flavour to it. Go for the more serious-but-esoteric sorts, and your world will be one where mysterious powers lurk in dark corners pondering problems which would seem entirely irrelevant until such time as it becomes very important to the player characters to get some divine intervention in a matter. Go for more of the genius loci sorts, and you have a game world where locations themselves can make their feelings known through their manifest spirits. Go for the more whimsical and wacky sorts, and you add a little Vancian flair to your world. You can even treat this like the sort of high-powered Monster Manual that Deities & Demigods was used at by more combat-happy groups, and it’d make perfect sense: whilst it may be risible for a mere mortal to best Thor in a fight, it makes absolute sense for a high-level character in D&D to kick the ass of a decidedly minor god of the sort explained here. (In particular, eyeballing it it seems like if you use the statlines as-is in BECMI player characters will end up having better saves than most petty gods once they get to high levels – but since high-level PCs in BECMI are on the verge of becoming gods themselves that works just fine.)

In fact, what browsing the pages of Petty Gods reminds me of is strolling down the Street of the Gods in Lankhmar, where a host of minor religions bicker and compete for attention (as evoked perhaps most memorably in Lean Times In Lankhmar). You are wasting your time supremely if you bother to listen to them all, but given the vast number of submissions presented you’re sure to find some gems in here, and for my part I found the ratio of hits to misses admirably high.

Dawn of the Dark Sun

Back when I reviewed The Complete Psionics Handbook, I noted that part of the problem psionics faced was that most official D&D settings had been designed without really making much of a space for it, so we were left without a model for how it could be used in a game and integrated into a setting that also had clerical and arcane magic. The Dark Sun setting, on the other hand, was designed with an eye to providing a world that could tie into the major supplemental additions to the AD&D system – as well as psionics, it was also supposed to rely a lot on the Battlesystem mass combat rules, though poor sales of that meant that its significance was dialled back considerably in the released version of the setting.

Within a mere four years of its release, Dark Sun‘s possibilities would be exhausted due to an ill-advised decision to let setting co-creator Troy Denning resolve all its major conflicts in a series of novels, but the early Dark Sun material reveals not just an impressively equal-opportunity display of rippling thews, but also a refreshingly original campaign setting. Here, I’m going to review the core setting and the major supplement releases of its first 20 months or so.

Dark Sun Campaign Setting

The original Dark Sun boxed set is a masterfully flavourful presentation of what was, at the time, the most unusual setting released for D&D (if you don’t count Empire of the Petal Throne, which used an eccentric variant of OD&D). The world of Athas is a godless place, where clerics derive their spells from contemplation of the elemental planes, and it is a psionically gifted place, where all characters at least have a psionic wild talent. But its greatest cosmological difference from mainline D&D worlds is in the way wizardly magic works – and how it’s utterly reshaped the setting.

AD&D 2E’s Little Brown Splats

Although White Wolf turned the splatbook into a central plank of their 1990s business model, they weren’t the first major RPG publisher to hit on the idea of pushing products aimed specifically at players rather than GMs, each themed around a different type of player character. That accolade goes to TSR, who followed up the publication of AD&D 2E’s core books with a series of class-focused books with chocolatey-brown cover art, with the line soon branching out into race-specific books as well as more offbeat entries like The Complete Psionics Handbook and The Complete Book of Humanoids.

The idea of selling books of player-facing material divided by class was in principle a good way to meet demand and to produce products which, whilst designed for 2E, were compatible enough with 1E and added enough that was novel that you could still sell the books to people who hadn’t migrated from the earlier edition. The downfall of the line is that there doesn’t seem to have been much oversight and cross-product co-ordination, with the result that some splatbooks ended up adding more power creep than others. In addition, some of the books seem to have struggled to come up with sufficient material to meet the page count – they often resort to sections of variable length on generic roleplaying advice dressed up as advice on roleplaying the classes in question but frequently amounting to universal platitudes, for instance.

The Complete Fighter’s Handbook, for instance, pads itself out with some extra weapons and a lot of waffle about investing your sword-swinger with a personality, whereas the Thief’s Handbook includes a bunch of waffle about how Thieves’ Guilds are run which is sometimes interesting but should probably be referee-facing, and the Priest’s Handbook incorporates rules for designing religions and cosmologies which should definitely be for DMs to use rather than players under most circumstances. The Wizard’s Handbook, however, commits the ultimate sin of presenting a player-facing supplement: throwing out a bunch of new spells which a referee may or may not be happy with including in their campaign, but which by being put into a player-facing supplement creates an expectation that if a player’s spent their money on the book the referee should at least consider including the stuff – beginning the tendency towards bloat that many complained bitterly about during the 3E era.

One common strand among the class and race handbooks is the inclusion of kits, which provide a new aesthetic skin, a bundle of proficiencies, and some special bonuses and weaknesses for your character class. This is one solution to the age-old problem of members of classes tending to feel alike, but a problem soon becomes evident when you compare them from book to book – the kits range from desperate scraping of the bottom of a barrel (is there any reason a jester should be that different from a regular bard?) or riffing on the same general theme from book to book. (For instance, lots of classes have an amazon-themed kit, a peasant kit, an aristocratic kit and so on.)

Ultimately, I think 5E Backgrounds are much better and more elegant solution to the same general problem, and they have the advantage of not being arbitrarily divided up by class in a bid to fill out splatbooks. And that’s really the main barrier to me embracing a take on 2E that incorporates all of these splatbooks; to get the best out of them you really want to use kits and proficiencies, but 5E covers all the same bases those subsystems cover in a much more robust and adaptable way; were I to play or run 2E these days, I’d advocate for trimming back most of the optional rules, which would make this line rather useless.

A Capstone and a New Foundation

The 2E era of D&D is known for having simultaneously the greatest emphasis on distinctive settings in the game’s history and the greatest downplaying of the classic dungeon-crawling mode of play on the part of the game’s publisher ever seen. This makes sense given the general ethos of the era.

For one thing, in gaming circles it was fashionable to run down playstyles you considered less sophisticated, and dungeon crawling was considered to be nonsense for babies who hadn’t grown up to do something more oriented around exploring a distinctive setting or playing through a GM’s preplanned story; whilst I don’t think TSR’s management at the time paid attention to such things, I could believe that their designers did. Another factor, which I think would have been much more on the mind of the Lorraine Williams-helmed board of directors, was that a large chunk of TSR’s D&D-related profits arose not from the game itself but from the various ranges of tie-in novels based on the various settings that had emerged ever since Weis and Hickman had turned the Dragonlance trilogy into an unlikely hit.

Infamously, it was the novels that put paid to TSR. They were published through an arrangement with Random House, who handled the process of getting them into the distribution chain and as such were the link between TSR and the major book shops. This had the advantage of being able to leverage Random House’s much better connections in the world of traditional book shops (as opposed to hobby stores), putting the novels and other TSR products in front of an audience other game publishers could only dream of.

The disadvantage of the arrangement, of course, is that TSR was keeping the book stores at arm’s length, and as a result they were less able to keep an eye on how many of the books were being returned unsold by the stores. The way the publishing industry worked at the time – I have no idea whether it still works the same way in these devastated post-Amazon/ebook years – was that unsold books would get returned to the publisher by distributors in return for a full or partial refund. This means that a problem could arise – as it did for TSR – if you ended up shipping far more product to the distributor than they and the bookstores they serve were actually able to sell, and especially could be a problem if the end-of-year returns from a distributor ends up being much larger than you expected.

That’s exactly what happened to TSR: Random House returned a massive amount of stuff to them at the end of 1996, and presented them with a huge bill for it. This wrecked their cashflow, in turn meaning that they couldn’t afford to print new runs of the material which was selling, making business impossible, and in 1997 Wizards of the Coast bought out TSR.

Wizards kept the old branding alive for the remainder of 2E’s run and then retired it, releasing 3E under their own name. Whilst 3E is sometimes held up, not without justification, as seeing a new embrace of dungeon crawling as a legitimate focus of play, at the same time if you take a close look at Wizards’ output after acquiring TSR you can kind of see that ongoing gear shift in process. The two supplements I’m going to be reviewing for this article include one of the last really great releases put out by TSR, and an early Wizards contribution to the game line; they form a two-book set which between them offer both the peak of the 2E ethos and the beginnings of 3E’s back-to-the-dungeon movement.

A Psychic Second Try

The history of psionics in D&D is a bit patchy, partly because in some settings it feels basically rather redundant. Supernatural powers are supernatural powers, and a pseudoscientific explanation for one set as opposed to a mystical or theological explanation is just a different flavour of fig leaf over them, as far as I am concerned. Especially once you have the idea that (in some settings at least) clerics can cast spells through the sheer force of belief in something, including an abstract idea, I’m not seeing much conceptual difference between a psionicist and a cleric who gains spells from their sheer belief in the power of their mind.

Still, the difference seems bizarrely important to some people in the D&D fan community, to the point where Psionics Totally Isn’t Magic is an article of faith to some people even though if you dip into the broader history and philosophy of either there really isn’t much of a gap between them – “psychic powers” is just what pseudoscientists call the act of changing the world through sheer will, which in turn which is how lots of occultists define magic these days, and in general seems to be an idea which only really makes sense in a post-Enlightenment context which sits awkwardly with a magical land of dragons and gods and pixies.

Monster: the Monstering

Although Vampire: the Masquerade popularised the whole “you play the monsters” thing, there’s been a tradition of that in RPGs for a very long time. In the 1970s Tunnels & Trolls variant Monsters! Monsters! cast players as dungeon monsters fighting incursions of adventurers, and of course back in Dave Arneson’s original Blackmoor campaign that yielded the seed of what Gary Gygax would wrangle into a commercially viable game product you had Sir Fang, a vampire player character who was so gamewreckingly unbalanced (Dave Arneson wasn’t very good at rules, go figure) that the cleric class had to be invented specifically so a Van Helsing-type could put Fang back in his box (which is a coffin because vampire).

More generally, the immediate aftermath of the release of Dungeons & Dragons involved a big wave of people cooking up wild homebrew stuff. The nice thing about OD&D is that in those three little booklets it gave you fairly clear formats for coming up with new content – it’s easy enough to set your hand to making new monsters, spells, and player character races and classes.

Over OD&D‘s lifespan a range of odd variants of the game developed as a result of that, ranging from root and branch revisions of the entire game like Warlock, interpretations on how to resolve some of D&D‘s ambiguities like the Perrin Conventions, flat-out unauthorised third party supplements like The Arduin Grimoire, and that’s just taking into account material that saw publication: there were also uncountable local micro-variants of the game, not least because each gaming table running OD&D would inevitably​ develop its own house rules simply because the core books have some areas where there’s no one clear, unambiguous interpretation available. Offbeat character races and classes were a regular feature of these variants.

From Cook to Cook (or Planescape Revisited)

It’s interesting to me that whilst Gary Gygax gets ample credit for his custodianship of 1E AD&D, Dave “Zeb” Cook isn’t similarly celebrated by 2E fans – despite the fact that Cook was arguably the game’s “show-runner” in the early 2E period much as Gary was for the early period of the game’s existence and Mike Mearls seems to have become for 5E. As well as writing the 2E core books, Cook was also the primary author of Oriental Adventures (despite Gary being given the credit), which as well as being one of the more beloved of the post-Unearthed Arcana 1E hardbacks was also the book which introduced the idea of nonweapon proficiencies to the game – a system feature which would underpin a bunch of other distinctively 2E mechanics, like the “kits” offered in the line of brown splatbooks (ew) that acted like a fiddly, class-specific, not-really-very-balanced set of forerunners to 5E Backgrounds. Moreover, between the release of the 2E core and his departure from TSR in 1994, Cook helmed two out of the three major hardback additions to the system – the Tome of Magic and the Book of Artifacts. (Legends & Lore was penned by Jim Ward and Troy Denning, building on Ward and Rob Kuntz’ previous work on Deities & Demigods).

His last major contribution to the game was Planescape. In the 1E era Jeff Grubb had produced the Manual of the Planes, taking the Great Wheel cosmology as outline by Gary in previous works (notably the 1E Dungeon Master’s Guide) and stacking a whole bunch of dry rules detail on it. Interesting in principle, it was felt that it didn’t really support much in the way of adventure on the planes, and when 2E rolled around the idea started brewing of giving it an update with an eye to using the planes as a basis for campaigning in their own right.

Overlooked Hardbacks of AD&D 2E

Among grognards of a certain generation the hardbacks of 1E AD&D are looked on especially fondly. At first they just consisted of the three generally-embraced core books plus Deities & Demigods (pushed as a core book by Gary Gygax himself when it first came out) and Fiend Folio, consisting largely of monsters submitted to White Dwarf by British gamers with all the wild and wacky variation in quality which comes from that. After Gary came back from his stint in Hollywood pushing for the production of a D&D movie in order to take the reins again and turn around TSR’s flagging sales, he made the periodic publication of new hardbacks a top priority. This process began with Monster Manual II, a decent monster supplement largely dedicated to providing a whole mess of lawful neutral, neutral good, chaotic neutral and neutral evil monsters, since those categories hadn’t been formally included in the alignment system when the first Monster Manual was being composed, plus further embellishing the ranks of devils and demons and other such monster categories; it then led to products with rather mixed receptions like Unearthed Arcana, Oriental Adventures, and the Manual of the Planes and by the end of the line the hardback series varied between putting out highly setting-specific stuff like Dragonlance Adventures and corresponding books for Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms on the one hand and on the other hand churning out poorly-received content-light books like the Wilderness Survival Guide and Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide, which aside from restating the proficiency rules introduced in Oriental Adventures really didn’t merit being presented as a major supplement.

Less celebrated or acknowledged is the way that the approach of putting out a series of hardback books with trade dress to match the core rulebooks providing major, central expansions to the system continued during 2E. Some of these books have been widely commented on; Legends & Lore gets attention as the direct 2E sequel to Deities & Demigods, whilst the Player’s Option books provided a range of extremely controversial alternate systems which many have characterised as the rise of a “2.5E” comparable to 3.5E, but the comparison there doesn’t quite work – not only am I not aware of anyone implementing all the Player’s Option rules (indeed, I think some of the options presented were mutually exclusive), but on top of that almost no subsequent products assumed that you were using Player’s Option, more or less guaranteeing that the proposed tweaks to the system would gain no traction.

For this article, I’m going to take a look at three hardbacks which to my knowledge haven’t been commented on that much – despite being interesting insights into the development and approach of early 2E and the system’s drift in the mid-1990s.

Tome of Magic

Compiled by “Zeb” Cook following on from his work producing the core 2E books, Zeb’s introduction talks about how he didn’t just want to produce a book which was a big list of extra spells, but for the most part that (along with a grab-bag of whimsical new magic items) is what the Tome is. That said, some of the new ideas that Cook throws in for good measure do help to flesh out the 2E magic system.

Although the infamous wild mage stands out here, additional options for wizards are also given. In particular, there’s guidelines on playing an elementalist, providing a nice showcase of how you don’t have to be limited by the standard division of spells into schools when coming up with specialist mages for 2E purposes. The book also introduces the idea of “metamagic” – subject of so much unfortunate power gaming and character build optimisation in its 3E implementation – but it’s moderated somewhat by the fact that metamagic effects arise not from some sort of Feats equivalent but by casting spells, so if you want to do a bunch of metamagic stuff you will need to devote some spell slots to the metamagic spells which allow you to modify other spells.

There’s also a range of nice new options for priests – new spheres are proposed and filled out with spells which will help anyone trying to round out a pantheon (the spheres of Law, War, and Wards are particularly appropriate and welcome in this respect), and guidelines are offered on Quest spells – off-the-scale priest spells of incredible power that are given out not on request like other priest spells but are bestowed under particular circumstances at the discretion of a priest’s deity. On top of that, the book introduces the possibility of clerics with a shared faith (or at least allied gods) coming together to perform group ceremonies of greater collective power than they could have accomplished individually, and provides appropriate spells to enable and support that, explicitly underlining that this is a special thing that priests can do but wizards can’t.

The really nice thing about these various additions is that they really help underscore the demarcation between wizardly and clerical magic, emphasising how one involves personal manipulation of occult forces (exemplified by the wild mage, who isn’t entirely in control of their own power, and users of metamagic who use their knowledge to modify their capabilities on the fly), whilst the other involves personal service to a higher power with its own priorities and agenda (Quest spells) and a faith shared with a wider community (collective spellcasting). I wouldn’t necessarily want to make all the options in Tome of Magic available at once – like any game supplement, I’d want to exercise a lot of discretion as to what features actually make the cut in my campaigns – but equally I think it’s a useful resource to have to hand.

Book of Artifacts

Another Zeb Cook contribution, this consists largely of a book-length treatment of the subject of magical artifacts. Taking in all the old favourites from the 1E Dungeon Master’s Guide and throwing in a bunch of new artifacts, in keeping with the general “context is king” approach of this period of 2E the individual entries not only concentrate a lot on the histories of the items in question but also throw in suggestions for thematically-appropriate ways to destroy the items in question. There’s also a good essay on how D&D artifacts are designed and what pitfalls to avoid and what to remember to include, as well as a detailed bit at the end describing how PCs can construct and recharge their own magic items – covering a bit of a disappointing gap in the 2E Dungeon Master’s Guide. Since the supplement spends a lot of time talking about general system-independent considerations in artifact design and in presenting the artifacts in question, this is a supplement which can find use in pretty much any edition of D&D, or any game in which powerful-but-perilous artifacts like those in D&D are thematically appropriate.

Dungeon Master Option: High-Level Campaigns

This came out in 1995, alongside the much more controversial Player’s Option books, and was written by Skip Williams who would go on to be one of the co-designers of 3E (and the one who had served at TSR/Wizards the longest out of the team of Williams, Tweet and Cook). The Player’s Option books were controversial mainly for offering a bunch of highly divergent options for radically changing major D&D systems, and are sometimes seen as being testbeds for experimental game systems – a way for TSR to test the ground for a prospective third edition of D&D. Many of their innovations didn’t make the cut, like the spell point system. Conversely, there’s a bunch of ideas in here which would eventually creep into 3E; for instance, Williams provides guidelines for assigning full PC-style ability scores to monsters, a shift which would become standard in 3E, and provides a replacement system for magic item creation which seems easier to handle, is less reliant on the DM feeling generous, and generally seems to make it a bit easier for PCs to craft magic items on a regular basis.

In principle, Williams is trying to address the issues of high-level play that make it difficult to handle. In practice, however, the results seemed a bit mixed. A lot of the advice offered consists of broadly good ideas which you should be applying at lower levels anyway, like crediting opponents with the level of intelligent they are supposed to have rather than playing monsters as utter idiots who don’t know their own strengths and weaknesses and don’t come up with sensible tactics and don’t have any sense of self-preservation. Other contributions seem to be counter-productive; if you want to convince DMs that high-level play is viable and won’t degenerate into the PCs utterly steamrolling everything, tacking on rules to take PCs up to 30th level and adding amazing new powers they get on the way there kind of isn’t the way to do it.

Skip Williams was, for a long time, in charge of the Sage Advice column in Dragon which would answer people’s rules queries. This, perhaps, ended up shaping his approach to design; for instance one section in the book consists of a bunch of what are effectively patch notes for existing spells from the core books and Tome of Magic, adding new constraints and details on them to deal with edge cases and potential exploits. This feels to me like the start of the “system as software” approach which would result in 3.5E emerging to patch perceived problems in 3E and, eventually, the endless rolling releases of errata for 4E – in other words, features of Wizards-era D&D which turned me off their versions and which 5E has thankfully dialled back on. Then again, this also seems to be an artifact of TSR apparently trying to have their cake and eat it when it came to the rollout of these Player’s/DM Option books, in that they seem to have not wanted to do a third edition but at the same time clearly want to make sweeping changes and tweaks to the game of the sort which you’d really want to roll out a new edition to implement.

Perhaps the most damning feature of the book is that, despite of all its talk about the necessary thinking behind running high-level adventures, it doesn’t really come up with a model for them that isn’t just a more garish and high-stakes version of the “adventuring party wanders around righting wrongs” model for lower-level play – which I suppose explains why so much of the advice is actually equally applicable to earlier phases in a campaign. The assumption that adventuring looks the same no matter what level you are seems to be axiomatic to Wizards-era D&D, but there’s fairly clear evidence here that the attitude was spreading in TSR even before Wizards bought them out.

What I find absolutely maddening about this is that up until around this point D&D actually had offered a range of propositions and models for how high-level play could work as a distinctive style from low-level play, both in the AD&D line and in BECMI, which this book almost completely ignores. There’s some redundant discussion of ascending to godhood which doesn’t really add much to what’s offered in Legends & Lore, but there is, so far as I can tell, absolutely no reference to domain management. Making your own temple, castle, or thieves’ guild and gathering a bunch of lower-level followers had been a feature of D&D since its original publication, but which ironically had enjoyed far better support in BECMI than in the Advanced line, so this was a golden opportunity to address that that Skip completely blows.

To be fair, it might not be entirely his fault. The same year this came out saw the debut of Birthright, a campaign setting specifically designed around and focused on domain management. However, the domain management rules there were extremely closely tied to the campaign setting (to the point where if I remember right players were expected to have the ruler’s supplement for their domain handy in order to play the game), and as such wouldn’t necessarily be appropriate for a straight port to, say, Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. Given that this book is already extremely happy to revisit mechanics published elsewhere, you’d think that providing a more generic take on the Birthright domain management system for use with other settings would be a good idea, but perhaps management decided to keep that exclusive to Birthright.

At the end of the day, I rather think that if you end up playing 2E to the extent that you’d need to do to get characters up to these stratospheric heights, over time you would become versed enough with the system that you wouldn’t need a guidebook to tell you how to handle your PCs anyway; nor does Skip really convince me that the best thing to do isn’t to just retire PCs when they hit the level where they break the game and start over. This DM opts not to use this book.

Ravenloft and the Dark Secret of Context

So, the news broke a while back that the next big published campaign for 5E will be Curse of Strahd, a return to the Ravenloft campaign setting, so I thought it was a good time to dig out my old Ravenloft bits and see how they’ve held up over time.

In case you aren’t familiar with the history, Ravenloft‘s first incarnation was not as a campaign setting but as an adventure module for AD&D 1E penned by Tracy and Laura Hickman which pitted PCs against moody vampire Strahd von Zarovich, ruler of a foggy land called Barovia that could be dropped into any D&D setting. The module was notable for the way it randomised key plot elements like the location of crucial items and what Strahd’s current scheme is, and its spooky atmosphere made it a big hit, prompting sequels like House On Gryphon Hill and Feast of Goblyns.

The full-blown campaign setting, an attempt to find a common context for the otherwise disconnected adventure modules and provide a basis for more horror-themed gaming, came out in 1990 – hot on the heels of the release of the 2E core books. (Notably, this puts it a full year before the release and unpredictable runaway success of Vampire: the Masquerade kicked off the 1990s horror RPG boom, so Ravenloft was simultaneously ahead of the curve in seeing an under-served market and at the same time was the last major horror RPG release before White Wolf changed everyone’s ideas about what a horror game could be like.)

It makes a lot of sense for D&D to have a setting focused on ostentatious gothic horror in the Hammer mode, particularly since such material is an often-overlooked influence on the game – for instance, it’s easy to forget that the cleric class was originally conceived to depict a vampire hunter in the vein of Peter Cushing’s portrayal of Van Helsing, designed to counterbalance the runaway depredations of a vampire PC called Sir Fang in Dave Arneson’s original Blackmoor campaign. Whether or not Ravenloft succeeds in that is another story.