Creature Spotlight: Carrion Crawler

I have a special fondness for this creature. As it happens, back in the winter of 1988, when I bought the red D&D box, I ran the scenario from the DM book, the one that takes place in Castle Gygar. It turned out the carrion crawler was the first creature the group faced when approaching the castle. Invariably, the creature killed every group in combat since the odds of it striking at least once with one of its eight attacks and the victim failing a saving throw are quite high. I don't remember how I ran the combat or if I was doing it wrong, but the players kept rolling characters and kept bumping into that carrion crawler from hell and kept dying.

I even inflicted the same deaths on a second group I managed to recruit during the following summer vacations. It was the same story all over again: roll characters, approach the castle, fight creature, and die. Rinse and repeat. After a while, nobody ever tried to create fully realized characters. They first wanted to see if they could survive the damn creature before investing on their personas. Amusingly, nobody ever considered avoiding the creature and go straight to the castle. We were young and still learning the game.

As a DM, I was bad. In my defense, I was learning the game, too. I had no one to teach it to me not even other players. This was Portugal in the 80s when roleplaying games were a thing almost unheard of. I get the feeling that it was much the same situation for a bunch of people, 15 years earlier when trying to learn how to play D&D. My only contact in the weeks I was reading the game were a group of players playing demos of the game in a local store, and they were as bad as I was.

Ironically, when I returned to D&D a few of months back, I used the red box again, though I switch to the Moldvay version a session later. And the players also faced the carrion crawler in its hole but this time, they managed to kill it. Today, I am a much better DM as my players are better players, although these are not the same players I started playing with 24 years ago. The carrion crawler will always stick in my mind as an initiation ritual of sorts for my players. Hopefully, the next time I start a campaign, I'll use a different creature... or maybe not.

The Ruins of Castle Gygax - Part 3

Real life has been very demanding these past few day, hence my lack of activity on this blog. But here I am to relate the latest adventures of my group and the wrapping up of our "tutorial" adventure using the Moldvay basic set and the sample dungeon therein. As related in my last post, the group was barricaded inside a room with something outside. The door was forced open and a greenish, bulky hand was seen. Edralas, the elf, cried out a threat in hobgoblin (a lucky guess) and whatever was outside walked away. At this point, the group decided to return to town, low on health and spells, to recover. They returned the next day to continue their explorations, this time in the company of Ottuman, a fighter henchman they recruited.

I had previously told the players that I would be using the wandering monster rules. As they crossed the room with the sunken statue, they ran into a group of strongly built, greenish creatures, with black hair and powerful, slightly pointed, dirty teeth: orcs. They were well armed, but they did not attack. One again, Edralas spoke in orcish. The orcs were obviously surprised to find the group here and they were not too keen on attacking right away. They ran away from whence they came, but mounted an ambush down the corridor.  When the group went after them, they were attacked from both sides. Orcs maybe more primitive than humans and demi-humans in some ways, but they are not stupid. Some attacked from behind and others from the front. After a quick battle, two of the orcs lost their morale and fled. The rest lay dead.

As they returned to the goblin room they had explored before, they saw something slithering on the wall, in the darkness before them. It was a giant centipede, moving out of a crack on the wall. This was really a wandering monster and I decided to use the reaction rules by the book to test the system. A first roll indicated the centipede was confused and hesitant. I described the creature stopping and raising the front of its body, slowly moving its antennae back and forth as if pausing to check things. Valerius, the fighter, carefully picked a stone and threw it to the opposite direction to try and distract it. I gave him a +1 bonus, in fact lowering the chances of the creature attacking. Another roll and the creature went slithering to another crack on the wall. It was an exciting and tense scene with the group ready to defend themselves at the least sign of trouble. Finally, they approached the second door on the corridor and peered inside.

At this point I wanted to show the dungeon not as a static environment, but as a dynamic place where things could be happening outside the players' actions. I also picked up the two orcs who had fled and decided to use them. The group saw a band of four hobgoblins with weapons drawn approaching the two orcs threateningly. Words were changed which Edralas understood as the hobgoblins threatening the orcs to leave or die. On the wall opposite from this door, there were two humans, a man and a woman, bound and gagged. As the orcs moved cautiously towards the door, the group fled into the goblin room and let the orcs pass. Then they returned to the hobgoblin room and decided to charge in. When Valerius kicked the door open, Edralas cast a sleep spell. Since the rules do not account for the area of effect of this spell, I quickly ruled that it would encompass everyone within the room and the corridor outside. And that meant that the group was also inside its area of effect.

With this information, Edrala's player decided to proceed, as wisdom was not his strong suit (a low attribute). Everyone thought this was amusing. Two of the hobgoblins, Valerius and his henchman failed their saving throws, leaving Edralas to face two of the creatures alone. It was a heroic moment with everyone joining on the fun with comments and much laughing. The elf beheaded one hobgoblin and the other surrendered, having failed its morale roll. When the group finally woke up, they released the humans, a brother and sister who had been taken prisoners when their caravan was raided. Even though the sister wanted the creature dead, the group decided to leave it unharmed and returned to town with much treasure.

All in all it was a fun introduction to the game, and the to the rules. We, then, decided to switch to AD&D 1st edition, rolling new characters and starting a real campaign using Keep on the Borderlands.

I Speak... Kobold

Sometimes you have to read between the lines, sometimes you don't. Many classic D&D detractors claim that game too often succumbs to the "kick down the door, kill 'em and take their stuff" routine. At first glance, the dungeon element seems to support this claim. However, it is often the case that, when focusing on the whole, the reader will often ignore the details. I believe this to be unintentional, in most cases anyway. But is classic D&D such a game? Let's take a look at the following from the Moldvay basic edition:

When a character has 9-12 in Intelligence, he knows how to speak Common and his alignment language. When a character has 13-15 in Intelligence, he knows how to speak the two aforementioned languages plus one of his choice. With Intelligence of 16-17, he knows two additional languages. And with Intelligence of 18, he knows three additional languages. Alright, it seems fair. A human with high intelligence would know how to speak common and, say, Lawful and elvish and dwarvish. But wait! The list of languages from which the player can choose includes such oddities as kobold, hobgoblin, dragon, harpy, ogre or pixie. Say what? Do I really need to know how to speak kobold when happily hacking away at the little buggers? Perhaps, I'm the kind of guy who enjoys insulting their mothers in koboldish while cutting of their heads. Then again, you never know when you need to know kobold to read a kobold magic book. But that's what Read Magic is for. At first glance, this rule would seem at odds with the whole hack & slash concept of the game. Or is it?

A few pages ahead, the rules state: "Experience points are also given for monsters killed or overcome by magic, fighting or wits." I emphasized the last words. Yes, apparently you can earn experience not by just killing things and taking their stuff, but by actually pitting your wits against the monsters. This suggests a number of things which are implicit, rather than explicit: First, the word monsters is a misnomer which tends to devaluate the intelligence of the opposition. We consider monsters things with no rational thought, things to be killed. Second, the phrasing of the sentence implies that monsters can be, and often are, intelligent, or else overcoming a challenge of wits wouldn't be a challenge at all and, therefore, not worth experience points. Third, there are options other than fighting our way around a dungeon. Most creatures react purely on instinct (such as gelatinous cubes or giant spiders, or do they?) but others have a rather organized society even if only implied. Orcs know how to use armour and wield weapons; they can fight in an organized manner, as do kobolds, hobgoblins, etc.

Considering what I wrote in my last paragraph, a character benefits with high intelligence. Surely, when running into a dragon, the character who knows how to speak the creature's language is given the opportunity to shine. The encounter need not end with a total party kill. Dragons are vain and egotistic. They can cajoled and tricked with smooth words as Bilbo did in The Hobbit. It is up to the DM to provide the necessary challenges. The dungeon then becomes more of a puzzle with situations where roleplay is as important as combat skills.

Magic-Users in D&D Basic

As I finish reading the Moldvay edition of the D&D basic rules, some things were readily apparent as differing from the Mentzer edition but none so striking as the magic-users spell usage. You see, people complain a lot that in the latter magic-users (henceforth, known as M-U) can only cast a spell per day, on their 1st level, even though they start with two spells in their spellbooks. However, in the Moldvay basic rules, a M-U starts with only ONE spell and can only cast that spell per day. Before I would consider the impact of this in play, I wanted to know the rational behind this. I could, obviously, house rule the whole thing and make it more like the Mentzer edition, but I'm the kind of guy that needs to know why something works the way it works before fiddling with it. I asked about this in the fine Dragonsfoot forums, where people are always ready to lend a hand in all things D&D / AD&D. You can read the actual discussion here.

Even if I couldn't understand why the rule was meant to be that way (perhaps someone can comment on it here), there were a lot of useful answers. Nothing like a fresh perspective to get the creative juices flowing. Of all the answers there, the one I liked best was this (and I will try it during my next session):

"To all the people who keep saying Mentzer D&D is virtually the same as Moldvay D&D, you've just hit upon the biggest difference. Yup, one spell. Read magic is a useful spell because it means magic-users can make use of scrolls. Out of mercy, if a starting magic-user has read magic, I'd let him start with a handful of scrolls of other spells. In Moldvay, you can't transcribe scrolls into your spellbook; they are just one-shot magic items."

This is a great idea! The M-U knows Read Magic as his first spell and carries with him some scrolls provided by the DM, which are already known to the mage (one assumes he used Read Magic to decipher them prior to the game). Now he can go around with a Read Magic and some prepared spells which he can cast as normal spells. Sure, they're scrolls and can only be used once, but I can provide extra scrolls as part of the treasure found in the dungeon. This might be a great deal of fun to the player without causing undue frustration for lack of spells. It's a house rule, nonetheless, but it makes perfect sense in this context. Will it work? I'll have to try it on my next session.

A Set of Rules

When I started playing 20 odd years ago, the only commercially available set of rules in my country (Portugal) was the D&D red box set. The economy was different and the Internet was not available so the process of importing products was excruciatingly painful. I started playing D&D, gleefully unaware of the immense universe of games available out there. I did not get very far. My gaming options eventually drifted from D&D, though I always tried to keep in touch with anything D&D-related. None of adventures, all using the Gygar dungeon, got any far. I don't think any of my groups passed through the first level. That carrion crawler with 8 paralyzing attacks and having only 3 players didn’t help either. But that didn’t diminished the fun we had, even going so far as rolling 2-3 characters per session just to get into the castle.

When I returned to D&D on a whim last week, I re-read the whole thing again. So far, my contact with D&D had been the old AD&D 2nd edition with the Jeff Easley cover and a lot of modules, mostly Forgotten Realms. I'd never run any D&D adventures, except twenty years ago, and a few one-shots here and there. As I re-acquainted myself with the rules, something struck me. I couldn't put my finger on it at first, but as we played, it suddenly struck me.

The red box rules were written to introduce new people to the game, holding your hand with a long introductory story and then a Be Your Own Her adventure, explaining all the concepts necessary to play the game, before explaining how to play in a group. This isn't necessarily bad, as I still believe it was one of the best intro games to the hobby. However, there was already a disconnect between my already extensive experience running games, and the way the red box explained things. Plus, there were times when we couldn't find were a certain rule was as quickly as we wanted. Make no mistake, we had a lot of fun. Fortunately, I got my hands on the Moldvay basic version.

This prior version of the rules, printed in 1981, is not necessarily better organized than the Mentzer version from an introductory point of view, but it is better organized for my tastes. It cuts the number of pages in about 2/3 (from approximately 98 to 68) as it isn't encumbered with a small tale designed to introduce gradually all the concepts necessary to play the game. In this regard, I consider the Moldvay edition superior because it aims at a more adult audience, whereas the Mentzer edition focus on younger readers. The Moldvay edition open with a small explanation on how to use the dice and what is a role-playing game, and skips directly to how to create a character. This appeals to me more as I don't need to be held by the hand any longer and need to be able to look up a rule quickly (if at all). Given that both sets are virtually identical, with some minor but important differences, it shouldn't be hard to adapt later modules (those written post-Mentzer) to the Moldvay edition.