AD&D Play Report - Session 11 - Intro, Fog of War, A Fight
article, play report, adnd, osric, adnd toolkit, thief, swords and wizardry, labyrinth lord, old school essentials
Intro
Back in June I decided to join an Advanced Dungeons & Dragons newbie group as a means to refresh my take on the rules rather than just read them. The OSR seems to mostly revolve around Basic and OD&D with AD&D games being the exception. I have played in one previous AD&D campaign in my adult life but it wasn't good for understanding the rules - just antagonistic GMs.
To re-learn the game I wanted to approach this edition with a beginner's mind - jump in as a newbie and not make any assumptions. I wanted to dive into the rules that are a step in the crunchier direction than previous editions. My reasoning was to use this experience as prep for an AD&D (OSRIC 3, really) campaign. That campaign may never happen - it's competing with other itches to scratch. I answered the call for players anyway.
It turns out the GM, is also the developer of an AD&D-focused web app called AD&D Toolkit. We're using it for character sheets along with Discord for voice/chat, and Roll20 for maps and dice.
The Toolkit is great, especially coming from a one-person development team. It removes the pain of encumbrance tracking and calculating movement speed like you can do with a VTT. I can't figure out if it would be better with dice rolling also or that would just bloat it.
For this game I'm playing my surviving character, Stannum Rosekeep, who's a "steal from the rich, give to the poor" sort of thief. This is a good opportunity to see how the AD&D version of this class plays out compared to Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord (not an affiliate link), and Old School Essentials.
The only weapons available to AD&D thieves are club, dagger, dart, sling, and sword. The AD&D Player's Handbook claims this is a "fair number of weapons"
but without a bow of some kind, it feels limiting from a modern perspective. What's a thief without a bow? The thief skill chances to succeed are also slightly different than other editions and clones - something that others have blogged about extensively. I've still never come to an opinion on any of the old school thief implementations. As a GM, I like the party to have one but from the player side the utility vs fragility is questionable. Anyway, it's going to be a challenge!
The Fog
With that background out of the way, we can move on to the play report. For this campaign's reports going forward, we're focusing on lessons learned from the GM to take to other games and becoming familiar with the system. It is a learning campaign, after all.
The party started on the coast of the nation of Karmont. Most of the regional map is unseen hidden by the fog-of-war but the GM does show hexes once they've been traveled. We can see Concordance Bay, the nearest body of water. There's a shoreline labeled Cliffs of Keltheald and the implications of a river mouth. The settlements that the party has visited are shown, sharing a common road:
- Sotfen, coastal city
- Seaway
- Drayonn to the north
To the west of Drayonn is a kobold camp among a forest.
I've used this heavy fog-of-war for hex crawls in the past. Seeing this in action as a player is a bit awkward - wouldn't our characters know more about this area? Are we from a foreign land? I don't recall this being stated at the beginning of the campaign but that could be my memory. This does remind me of the Forlorn Encystment post "Strangers in a Strange Land". In that post, about how the implied setting of AD&D is almost certainly the situation in which the PCs are new to the area.
I'm making note of this for future sandboxes. How much knowledge of the surrounding area should players have?
Actual Play
At the end of the last session, we were in Dragyonn licking our wounds after scouting the Kobold party and running into some as random encounters. This scouting missions was at the behest of Drayonn's mayor but the gold bounty for kobold heads was given to us by the governor of Seaway. Gathering heads has been our main focus when we're not managing inventory and rations for our expeditions. The struggles of first level.
We resupplied before meeting with Drayonn's militia on the route to the kobold camp, as previously discussed with the mayor. We were attacked by a kobold scouting party while camping overnight - we couldn't do without a fire because the weather effects would have hurt us mechanically. This was where AD&D's weather rules came into play. The party planned to sleep without a a campfire to maintain a stealthy approach as we neared the camp but brutal cold reality practically forced us to have a fire. Either way, we took care of the scouts.
The next morning, we made our way into the camp. We decided on a frontal assault using a formation we came up with earlier in the session. We took out three waves of the enemy and a fleeing kobold - that we guess was heading off to warn a larger lair. I stuck to range attacks with sling bullets the entire combat. This worked out well, even though I had a non-proficiency penalty in their use - I took two melee proficiencies at creation.
One of the party was taken down near the end of the battle - our newest paladin. As far as treasure, there was virtually none other than cheap weapons to sell and the skulls of kobolds. We wrapped up the gruesome task of head gathering and returned to Drayonn. There we could pick up the rotting heads we left behind and recover in preparation for traveling to get our reward from the governor.