The Rambling Cleric – Page 16 – Digressive Musings on Old-School D&D

Better Wandering Goblins

On February 28, 2021

Part One: Low-Level Table

Those that know me know I love using tables for wandering monsters to help generate unexpected, exciting, and tension-filled play. Since I’ve been thinking about goblins for an adventure I’m working on, I decided I would post some of the early draft ideas for low-, mid-, and high-level encounters, respectively. This post is part one of three and will only contain the low-level table. Part two can be found here. Anyone running a goblin-centric session set in an underground location could easily plug this table into play with little to no adjustments.

Discerning & Conceptualizing Wisdom in D&D

By The Rambling Cleric

On February 21, 2021

In Ability Scores

Wisdom rating will act much as does that for intelligence.
D&D Vol. I: Men & Magic, 1974

Helpful quote, I know. Besides acknowledging that wisdom is the prime requisite for clerics, along with some guidelines on how a wisdom score can be adjusted to affect a character’s overall experience point bonus, the above sentence is all the original three Dungeons and Dragons booklets ever said about wisdom. Despite my love for OD&D, that’s a pretty half-baked conceptualization for one of the three primary abilities. At least it was half-baked in its originally published form. It seems Gary Gygax just needed a mechanical parallel to the strength and intelligence prime requisites for fighting-men and magic-users, respectively. What wisdom actually measured had to either be deduced by the dictionary meaning of the word or ascertained in actual play with other players.

From Titles to Epithets: New Flair for Old-School Dungeons & Dragons

By The Rambling Cleric

On February 13, 2021

In House Rules

In early editions of D&D, level titles were used as descriptors for each character class at each level of advancement. A first-level cleric, for example, was known as an Acolyte, while a second-level cleric was called an Adept. Encountering three Mediums was synonymous with encountering three first-level magic-users. This system of level titles held true until the publication of AD&D 2nd edition in 1989 which dropped the practice. At the time, I can’t recall anybody I gamed with ever really noticing the change since most of us had already begun to ignore the titles in actual game play.