You asked me once about the official god of Great Staraya.

Many deities are honored at High Vigil, although some not in the open, but the god venerated by Queen Daentrella and her paladins is Vael, the god of the Iron Vow.

The Sign of Vael

Amusing story about how he achieved godhood.

His birth name was Kenneth. That’s correct. Kenneth. If he had a surname or family designation, it’s been lost to time.

Kenneth was an experienced militia soldier from either Aetic or Rath Talorr (sources disagree on that point). At some point he became a sell sword, though a scrupulous one of high morals. Apparently he was the polar opposite of the bon vivant personality.

About two years into his adventures, he was knighted after saving the lives of some prominent nobles (their names are also lost to history, though many suspect they were of the Staray clan), and thus began his true quest.

Kenneth rose in power and prestige, and as the years accumulated he realized that Death wasn’t that far away for him, so Kenneth became obsessed with becoming a god.

As I’ve told you before, the gods of Fayn were all once mortal; through encounters with Archonic relics, they all achieved apotheosis and became the Seventy-two Gods of Fayn.

Kenneth was one of the final gods to achieve that status.

The story was thus: Kenneth had aligned with some other adventurers who sought the same thing as he did. Lore records them as:

Vesper, the master thief (and some said a high ranking cultist of the Gareth Coil)

Valen the Magus (one of my former students, actually, and in my employ until he developed some unnatural cravings and simply had to go; not without a sense of humor about himself, he often traveled under the name The Malcrave)

Thorgar, an exiled Dwarven prince, gem smith and recognized grand master of competitive ax throwing.

Sera, a high priestess from far to the north. Rumor is that she had eccentric rituals when it came to bathing. Her deity or cult was either never recorded or has been lost to history.

Valen himself assembled this adventuring party because he had discovered precious lore concerning Archonic magic housed in The Threshold of Ouros, and needed help reaching it.

The Threshold was, and still is, a legendary structure somewhere deep in Najhas Taloth. Since I had repeatedly warned Valen never to journey into Najhas Taloth… ever… I was surprised to read that he actually did it.

Legend describes The Threshold as a large, cyclopean structure of unnatural angles thrusting up from the side of a ruined mountain deep in that forbidden area. I will not discuss the further lore I’ve accumulated over time… because I don’t want you to lose what’s left of your sanity… but the story is that Valen was also quite the student of The Threshold and conned the rest of the party into accompanying him inside.

Two things he did not mention to them… one, the promise of apotheosis he knew resided inside would only work for one person (and he meant to get it for himself), and two, all of those faces carved into the smooth, purplish granite of The Threshold’s exterior were of adventurers who entered and died within.

Lore has it somewhere at the center of The Threshold was the Engine of Ascendance… two large obsidian discs which rotated against each other in opposite directions and surrounded by floating rings which revolved in random directions. The entire apparatus floated about ten feet in the air.

Details about what went on once they gained access vary across story tellers and centuries. It seems the hidden detail about solitary apotheosis was finally revealed.

Swords were drawn, spells cast, magic was expended, and blood was spilled.

In the end, only Kenneth stood after reaving Vesper’s skull like the rat she was.

How Kenneth achieved apotheosis after that horrible battle he has never said, but godhood was his and he took the name Vael and swore the Iron Vow that law and order through cold leadership would be his ever lasting obsession.

Vael is Master of the Final Watch, Patron of the Last Stand. His symbol is a broken circle of silver wire bisected by a plain, vertical iron broadsword pointing downward into an empty skull. His cult is mostly paladins, though his clerics are prominent in Great Staraya and preach unyielding duty, sacrifice for the greater cause, and unyielding resolve.

Where is his domain now? Where are the domains of any of the gods? It is said that he sits on a stone throne on a high peak somewhere in the Kyrenic Mountains, and that may very well be true.

This is the god who Daentrella serves.

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Where the River Wyd bends west to crawl out of the Bitter Reaches, at the foothills of the Gray Walls sits the keep Gaunt Wydyr.

Passingly ruled by Her Sovereign Grace Mauraeda Enjkiess, the 21^st Duchess of Wydyr, Gaunt Wydyr sits on top of older ruins dating back to the time of the Archons.

Gaunt Wydyr was founded centuries ago as a forward frontier outpost by the western Poxnos clan which later allied themselves with the Staray clan and was thus spared humiliation and defeat during the formation of Great Staraya.

The growth of Gaunt Wydyr over time followed no one’s plan. It is now a baffling, multi-layered labyrinth of keeps, curtain walls, and covered bridges that confound the new visitor.

In the southern part of the city around Gaunt Wydyr lies the Poxnos Quarter which is home to clan loyalists who maintain ties with the throne to the west and consider the Duchess a useless idiot. Some want Queen Daentrella to overthrow the Duchess and install a more active ruler.

The Duchess Mauraeda lives an insulated and decadent lifestyle while rarely leaving the safety of her keep. She is obsessed with luxury and heavily addicted to a specific vintage of wine imported from Rath Talorr to the south. She feels entitled to Starayan protection while she largely neglects the day to day governance of her Duchy.

The only member of her ruling council who doesn’t always tell her what she wants to hear is the Great Druid Yarro, and his advice is regularly ignored; thus, Yarro spends most of his time away from court and in his Great Grove deep in the Shrouded Weald.

Gaunt Wydyr was built upon the older ruins preceding human incursion into this area. The older ruins, Archonic in origin, reach deep into the mountain sides of the Gray Walls. Of the subterranean layers beneath Gaunt Wydyr, the upper levels are mainly cellars, wine vaults, armories and a secret exit to the River Wyd.

Below that is an extensive maze of clan crypts. Portions of this maze have been walled off.

The deepest levels are filled with corridors where past nobility fled during palace coups and died lost and alone; this area is haunted by spectres, wraiths, and other ghostly undead.

It is rumored that below the deepest levels lie ancient foundations holding dark secrets belonging to the Archons. The darkest rumor of all is that there is also a warded entrance to the Qliphoth Realm of Lilith, and that her beautiful servants are within the walls of Gaunt Wydyr even today.

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If you wander west of Talos into the scrubby limestone ridges of the Naej, keep your eyes on the rocks.

Most folk look for the dark openings first… a collapsed sinkhole or a cracked fissure or some mossy archway half-swallowed by the thick brush. But the old hands out of Ays will tell you to watch for a man standing motionless against the gray stone. Thick, silvering beard. Heavy hide robes that look like they’ve never felt rain.

Baht-Zhol reveals the location of a secret door

That is Baht-Zhol. When he is walking the surface, take heart: it means a fresh throat to the underworld has opened right beneath your boots.

Around here, we call him the Sentinel of Doomwatch. He’s the Fourth of the Nine Faynarchs, though he couldn’t care less about the grand titles scholars invent for him. While the other Faynarchs wander the winds, haunt the sea-mists, or play games of spite across the kingdoms, Baht-Zhol stays put. Literally. He is metaphysically chained to Doomwatch. A half-league from its stones is the furthest he can ever walk or cast his body, an invisible leash he has never broken.

He doesn’t mind the boundary, mind you. Inside it, he is everywhere.

Down in the subterranean guts of the place, you have about a one-in-twelve chance on any given day of bumping into him. And when you do, don’t waste time rubbing your eyes if you swear you passed him two corridors back. He can split himself into half a dozen physical bodies at will. Six pairs of hands, six throats, but only one cold, relentless mind behind them all.

What makes him terrifying to some… and an absolute godsend to others… is his mouth.

Baht-Zhol does not lie.

Ask him if there’s an iron portcullis around the next bend, and he’ll tell you plain as day: “Yes, and two spike pits behind it”. He won’t volunteer how to disarm them. He won’t warn you if your torch is about to choke on foul air. But he answers straight, and he cuts through bluster instantly. If you try to lie to him, he knows it before the breath finishes leaving your teeth. He will drop a sphere of absolute silence right over your squabbling party just to save himself the headache of listening to mortal noise.

The dungeon itself bows to him. Counterweights slip back into place. Tripwires reset. Poison darts crawl back into their holes the moment his leather hem scrapes past. More than one terrified thief, sprinting blind through the dark with goblins on his heels, has skirted past Baht-Zhol only to watch a dropped iron grate slam shut behind him, rearming itself in a split second.

That sheer, uncaring neutrality is what drives Duke Atticus Ayser down in Talos half-mad.

The Duke has a lovely little arrangement going. He chucks political agitators and condemned thieves into Doomwatch, lets the hardy ones drag out ancient plunder, and taxes every silver coin they manage to haul back through the border depot at Ays. If someone tries to skip out on the Duke’s cut? Strip them buck-naked and toss them back into the dark.

Yet Baht-Zhol gives the same polite, dry answers to a naked convict shivering in the dark as he does to a gold-plated sellsword. He owes the Duke nothing. He owes the crown of Great Staraya nothing.

And don’t bother trying to clear him out of your way. If an adventuring party gets cocky, Baht-Zhol won’t even draw a blade. He will pluck your fiercest fighter out of reality and drop him into an extra-dimensional maze, leaving the poor bastard to wander blank stone walls until his panic burns out. Cut him down, and his flesh turns to dry gray dust right before your eyes… only for him to reform nine days later, whole and entirely unbothered.

Why did the ancient Archons chain a living demigod to a single hole in the dirt?

Some delvers think he’s there to keep us out of the real vaults below. But I sit in the Seven Towers, and I’ve watched this world a long time. My suspicion? Baht-Zhol isn’t a gatekeeper meant to keep mortal scavengers from digging down.

He is an anchor keeping whatever lies below from ever crawling up into the sunlight

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Deep in the Ulfenreach Mountains of The Onrothy lies Marwolaeth, the hidden stronghold of the Gareth Coil.

The Gareth Coil is an assassin cult devoted to the veneration of the fifth Faynarch commonly known as The Death Angel.

The Veneration of Grandmother Death

The lower tiers of the Coil believe they are merely assassins for hire, and they are not wrong.

The higher tiers are taught the Dham-Zehir (“Houses of Venom”)… the profane arts of bringing death into the world. To them, it is an unholy act of veneration that brings power to the practitioner.

The nine Guild masters meet in Marwolaeth five times a year to venerate The Death Angel through their leader, who is known only as Grandmother Death.

Grandmother Death is almost never seen by anyone except those guild masters; she rarely leaves her Chambers of Delight other than to issue orders during times of council or to teach the Dham-Zehir.

The tithe they pay manifests as blood dripping from her hands and feet, for their deeds and their path are drenched.

Her true name vanished from record decades ago. None know how old she truly is.

It is said that she feeds upon the murders committed by her guild masters and those who serve under them. She seeks apotheosis as the goddess of death in Fayn, and she will probably achieve it.

Grandmother Death presides over the Coil by allowing The Death Angel to manifest through her in order to instruct her guild masters on who should die next and how.

Marwolaeth itself is designed as a disorientating labyrinth. It is filled with cold stone vaults and guarded by hidden pits and razor-thin trip wires. In the shadows dwell silent sentries who will slay the intruder before he reaches the grand halls deep within.

That deepest sanctum is lit by brass braziers burning cold embers and floor stones worn smooth by centuries of sandals. At the dead center lies the Chambers of Delight… where Grandmother Death resides among rare poisons and morbid relics.

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That being said, I’m making a significant change to this substack page: from this point on, all content will be strictly Fayn lore. All other content present, such as reviews, comments about game mechanics, etc, will be archived.

Once a week, probably on Saturday morning, an article concerning the lore of Fayn at different levels… from overviews to in-depth examinations… will appear here and in your email.

This also means a probable reworking of the Fayn map, which may take one of two directions. Either:

1. A more detailed map through Inkarnate vs Wonderdraft (which I had been using), or

2. An expanded map covering more terrain. This would lead to a slight rearrangement of the powers around the Sepulchral Seas and a re-examination of their relationships to each other.

The biggest reason I would go with option 1 is that I originally designed the Fayn map as a starting point with lands beyond left vague for individual campaign development. Again, I may stick with that, or I may redevelop it all to cover even more land mass. I haven’t decided just yet.

Since it will be all Fayn lore, I’ve turned off the paid tier. Any material developed for commercial consumption will probably appear on Patreon. More on that in time.

Lastly, not all material will be mechanically designed for AD&D and/or the OSR style games.

See you next week!

Dr. Hugo Rotwang

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It’s a handy thing to have… basic starting town, the wilderness around it described, random encounter tables, fixed encounters, and then the dungeon for the PCs to explore. There lies endless hours of exploration, role play, and combat.

Hoard of Delusion steps up to the plate with that same layout… created by old schoolers who know what a mini-campaign area should look like. It’s authors are: Mark and Sean Ahmed (Mark, of course, known in OSR circles as “Axe Mental”), Scot Hoover and Chris Hopkins. Axe does all the art, including the cover (he’s more well known for the frenetic cover of OSRIC), Scot edited the work as well as doing the cartography with Sean Stone, and the final layout was done by Russell Cone.

So… it’s officially for OSRIC or AD&D.

You can get it on DriveThruRPG in different forms: the watermarked PDF is $12, the softcover b&w version is $17 with the hard cover being $24… or… you can be sensible and order the softcover and the PDF for… $17 (the PDF essentially becomes free, so why not). It’s the PDF I’m reviewing here since the softcover won’t be in my hands until DTRPG’s printers quit dicking around and mail it.

I won’t go into too much detail here for the sake of spoiling it, but the basic premise is an arch-mage has three magic-using sons… all three becoming disappointments to dear old dad to various degrees. He creates three magical necklaces for his sons… bound by a geas that none of the possessors could harm the others… and presented them to his offspring in the desperate hope that would find a way to get along and work together. Upon the presentations, Dad gives up the ghost.

The entire module is part one of a three part series which seems to be tailored for… you guessed it… the three evil spell-slinging sons. One is an illusionist who is doing basically what I would do if I were an illusionist… messing with people’s heads (a side note: I love illusionists and I wish they had gotten more love back when 1E was the king of RPGs), and so this module centers around illusionary magic.

This module is set for 3 to 8 PCs of levels 1-4. I recommend at least 6 PCs, because parts of this art tough. Three simply won’t make it.

The main part is the village of Herth and its surrounding area. It’s highly detailed, including Castle Merkhen, and provides almost everything the PCs will need. NPCs are well fleshed out. NPC factions are described, and what’s always my favorite part of any town… the local rumors table… is creative.

There are four optional adventuring sites through the surrounding area… more geared for 1^st level PCs to get them up to speed. You don’t have to use any of them, but it’s nice. All four are basically mini-dungeons.

Then we come to the Tower of Bones. Four levels of hard adventuring. Well thought out and defended by same nasty creatures and encounters… some of the creatures are new and detailed further on. I won’t spoil it for you.

And speaking of creatures… there are four appendices: #1 being 13 “new” monsters (many are old AD&D monsters retooled for OSRIC, but some are new… or new to me), #2 has three new magic items geared toward illusionists, and #3 has 9 pregenerated PCs for that pick up game that can happen at any time. #4 is all the maps.

Strengths: HoD is well thought out. You can tell it was written by someone who knows what the hell an AD&D mini-campaign area is supposed to look like. The dungeons are nasty and hold a variety of creatures and encounters arrayed in a manner to keep the party on its toes. Where Axes gets creative, he gets highly creative. Any DM can read this in two hours and be ready to go because everything is well explained.

Weaknesses: mainly along production lines. Everything about the production of this module is good, but could have easily been better. The art by Axe ranges from “boss” to “meh.”

Cartography does a weird thing: some of the map legends don’t have dungeon scale on them. Looking at which ones, I’m guessing that Sean and/or Scot dropped the scale on the more crowded legends do to layout reasons. Maybe they just said “to hell with it; everyone knows it’s 10ft per square.”

The surrounding area map has neither scale nor hexes, so who knows how big the area is or how long it would really take to get from one encounter to another. You signed that one, Sean, so that’s on you.

Of the nine pregens, eight are 3^rd level, with the last one a dual class 2/2 MU-T. That’s sort of weird. I noticed Axe used my PC Sogathan the cleric from his test play of Seacliffs of Despair years ago. My attorney will be in touch.

Denny Crane!!!

Of the three new magic items, descriptions of the last two state that a creator must be at least a 12^th level illusionists, while the first one says nothing about item creation.

There’s other minor, nit picky crap that’s not worth mentioning. Hoard of Delusion could have used another editing and layout pass, but very often these things are finished when the designers simply get tired of fooling with it.

Doktor Rotwang rates: 3.75 out of 5.

This might be a month. It might be slightly longer, but fear not… Doktor Rotwang will be back.

Paid subscribers, I’m pausing your subscriptions until then.

Treasure is divided, everyone gets their share, taxes and tithes are paid, and that weird wizard in the tower bought the tapestry for… well, the Duke’s tax collector might be reading this, so let’s not say it out loud.

No one is near the point of having to visit a trainer to learn new valuable skills in their respective classes.

What are you going to do with your share of the loot?

Gygaxian AD&D provides many avenues to relieve the PCs of their treasure. Compound that with the mechanic that treasure brings XP when it is spent… and now we see a major aspect of the game: it’s better to spend that loot in order to advance than mowing down monsters and placing yourself at risk.

We’ve all had PCs who accumulated just too much loot because the DM didn’t take steps to extract it from them, and that virtually unchecked wealth can cause problems for the campaign if not dealt with as efficiently as possible.

Case in point: you’re in a frontier town… let’s say Oakhaven deep in the Shrouded Weald in Wydyr. We bring in massive amounts of treasure that’s really always been there but no one had the balls to go get it until you bunch wandered in.

Most people in Oakhaven don’t have a lot of money. They don’t need it. Their material needs are mostly met by their surrounding environment, and whatever outside goods they do need can be obtained through passing traders or through barter.

Now here you are wandering in with hundreds, if not thousands of coins… spending them like water. You don’t stop it at the tavern either… you can weaponize your wealth: hiring the idle farm hands to form a private militia, monopolizing the local blacksmith to make weapons and armor for your militia, maybe setting yourself up in the local ruins to be the de facto lords and ladies because we all know the powers of Caer Wydyr will let that happen.

Bam goes all the hard work the DM did to set up this campaign area.

But let’s be honest: the scenario I painted above isn’t likely to happen; few players are that enterprising. Your adventuring party is a collection of heavily armed and traumatized tomb robbers, and such people rarely invest wisely.

So let’s move on to another game mechanic that drains material wealth in order to generate some danger and fun and earn some XP in the process. Let’s call it the Gygaxian Gold Sink.

With the GGS, you can journey down the mechanic of GP=XP and advance your PC through out-of-dungeon play. Just because you’re not burning torches or listening at doors doesn’t mean you can’t face danger;

After all, Fayn is a dangerous place.

Below for paid subscribers is the complete 1d100 Carousing & Downtime Complication Matrix. No vague fluff or hand-waving roleplaying prompts—just ten brutal tiers of real mechanics, stat penalties, financial hits, and sandbox complications designed to sit behind your screen and turn downtime into a another night of adventuring. For those paid subscribers… you’re keeping Fayn World alive and interesting!

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As I pointed out, WOTC is doing it although they’ve repeatedly sworn off the stuff like a wino church member. Look for other big companies to follow suit; my guess is Paizo will (though I really hope they don’t) because they’re in a money crunch after getting royally shafted by Diamond Distributors.

Now that I caught your attention last week, here’s my personal opinion on why creators geared toward fantasy works should avoid AI like the plague.

Drawn by Erol Otus

Above is the weapon rack from the Moldvay D&D Basic rule book.

That’s where I started.

Literally.

I originally thought D&D was too weird for me, but that image is the one that forced me to take a closer look at the game.

Drawn by the legendary Erol Otus, it drove home to me a fundamental aspect of D&D and fantasy RPGs in general: you can affect the game world through your actions… in this case through picking up a heavy weapon and defeating something with it and gaining something from that.

Let’s face it: Erol’s art was sort of weird. Nothing looked natural. Everyone had weird helmets and those sock-like boots. You really didn’t want to real world meet up with anyone depicted in his art.

There were other artists with TSR at the time who were technically better (Trampier and Easley come to mind right off). However, Erol Otus had the ability to draw weird scenes and convey the gravity of the situation depicted in a special way that others couldn’t quite meet.

AI can’t do that. AI will never do that, and the reason it never will is because AI cannot create… it can only emulate.

AI art can be technically superior and come out faster, but it will never be able to reach human emotions in the way a human artist can.

Once, there was a professional photographer named William Mortensen. Ever heard of him? No? I’ll bet you’ve heard of Ansel Adams though, right?

The reason you’ve never heard of Mortensen is because Adams hated his guts and got him essentially blackballed. That’s a whole other story.

Mortensen was well known at one time… well known for composing professional images which were subconsciously disturbing. He even wrote a book about his technique for compositing shots titled The Command To Look. It was out of print for decades, but Feral House Press brought it back. If you’re an artist, it’s well worth the read.

Mortensen laid out several aspects of art that instantly capture the attention of the viewer and force emotions upon him.

Read the techniques Mortensen used to evoke emotions from his viewers, and see how many you can find in this image.

AI can’t do that. AI cannot create images that reach into the primal emotions of the viewer.

Again, it cannot create, it can only emulate.

And damned few artists can really create, while we’re on the subject. Take a stroll through the ninety gazillion splat books TSR churned out for 2^nd Edition AD&D; the art work is, by and large, atrocious and uninspiring… so having a human hand in the creation is no guarantee either.

That crap wasn’t exactly flying off the shelves either; it would sit there for months at a time before Waldenbooks finally sent it back to Random House.

In the end though, as I pointed out last week, fantasy AI art is unfortunately here to stay. It’s here to stay because it must be. Production companies with a lot of money at stake will be forced to churn out more material to market for their customers at an increasing rate (that’s what killed TSR, by the way) and that will call for short cuts.

And short cuts usually wind up being the longest route.

As usual, the comment section is open to anyone who would like to voice their opinions on this subject, so feel free to chime in.

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How far down that road are we going to travel?

Ladies and Gentlemen, AI is here to stay. Very wealthy people are sinking massive sums of money into building AI Data Centers; it’s a controversy right here in Little Rock. They’re noisy, huge, and extremely bad for the environment. They’re also not going away.

Compound that with the knowledge that the average Joe can get really good AI service at a reasonable price that’s useful for a great many things, it’s inevitable that AI content will be part of the RPG industry for the foreseeable future, and will probably become a standard tool for generating art and text.

Just you wait and see.

The traditional artist, pen and paper in hand, won’t be able to compete with an art department of one or maybe two people who have learned how to properly prompt a decent LLM into producing stunning fantasy art.

The traditional writer can’t type fast enough to compete with the small staff of writers at WOTC or elsewhere who can crank out indepth fantasy literature or supplements. Yoke that with companies who have access to distribution pipelines you and I don’t, it’s a done deal. Give it time.

I have Google Gemini. The Pro version. I use it for many things in my life… mainly personal research. Last night, I spent about three hours playing with AI generated art in an effort to produce fantasy art roughly comparable to the art in the OSR movement.

Here are some examples. I used Google Gemini on these… hence the Gemini logo in the bottom right corner of each of them (there are ways to remove that, incidentally).

Now this is just me assing around; this isn’t really serious effort… just really good prompts. Some of them are based on reference images I provided, and some are straight from my imagination and ability to tell Gemini what I want. See if you can tell which is which.

You’re also going to get a glimpse into my taste in women, but that’s another subject.

Here we go…

Derikae, vampiress and a ranking Grave Queen of the dark Kingdom of Waerda. She likes historical novels, moonlight walks, and going out for a bite.

Lorelei, the imprisoned daughter of Castis… one of the wealthier merchants of Iot. She dreams of being an adventurer, but Daddy will spend her dearly to increase his financial empire.

We have to have a treasure chest, of course.

The main temple of the Snake Mother, goddess of the Naga.

Never adventure alone…

The Red Sorceress. She loves the smell of roast pork.

The Pantheress has completed her mission.

The party is surprised… except for the elf.

A Weald Stalker… a monster native to Fayn, but sure… use it in your dark forests. Stats later.

Ambaex, a Whore of Lilith and fast climbing in the ranks of those dark witches.

Lastly…

Sabanorak, an Onroth Wizard of some dark repute, but widely sought out for his extensive knowledge of the Najhas Taloth regions. Some say most of his magic came from expeditions into that forbidden and damned place… expeditions that few of his companions survived.

Once again, I didn’t put a lot of effort into any of these other than repeated tweaks. Gemini did all the heavy lifting. If I wanted to develop extremely detailed prompts, I could make some enticing fantasy art.

Is it fair to fantasy artists out there now? I dunno. Looks to me like they have yet another medium to master.

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For those of you playing at home, that dandy little trap can be found in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide.

So far as I know, it appeared in two AD&D publications… HR4 The Throne of Bloodstone (1988) and The Ruins of Undermountain (1991). A modified version appears in The Secret of Bone Hill (1981).

The Mirror of Opposition is a classic fantasy trope that sounds amazing on paper: a character catches their reflection in a cursed mirror, and an exact duplicate steps out to pick a fight. It feels like the ultimate test of skill. After all, who is better equipped to challenge a hero than the hero themselves?

But in practice, this encounter usually goes off the rails fast. Instead of a dramatic, cinematic duel, it often turns into a frustrating mess that exposes some of the cracks in tabletop combat design.

To understand why the mirror is such a trap for referees, we have to look past the cool story flavor and talk a little bit about how RPGs are actually built.

1. Monsters and Players Don’t Play by the Same Rules

Tabletop RPGs work because combat is inherently unbalanced. Monsters and player characters are designed to do completely different things. I suspect this is one reason playing monsters never really caught on with AD&D players that well.

Monsters are usually built like punching bags. They have huge piles of hit points, but their actual attacks and abilities are pretty straightforward. They exist to absorb damage, scare the party, and drain a few resources before they go down.

Players, on the other hand, are built like glass cannons in a way. They don’t have massive health pools, but they have a massive array of tricks...magic items, specialized abilities, and powerful spell combinations. And healing. Don’t forget that.

When you throw a Mirror of Opposition into the mix, that entire dichotomy gets tossed out the window. Now, you have two glass cannons pointing their highest-damage abilities directly at each other’s HP tallies. The built-in safety nets that usually let players make a mistake or survive a bad die roll vanish.

2. The Rocket Tag Problem

Because characters deal way more damage than they can actually take, a mirror match instantly turns into a high-stakes game of rocket tag.

Think about a mid-level fighter or ranger. On a good turn, with the right abilities active, they can easily dish out a massive chunk of damage. When a monster takes that hit, it barely flinches because it has lots of hit points to spare.

But when that same fighter takes their own full attack combo to the face, they can easily drop in a single round.

There’s no time for clever positioning, no room to play defensively, and no back-and-forth. The whole fight gets compressed into a mad sprint to see who can blow up the other one first.

3. The Curse of Winning Initiative

Because the fight is so fast and lethal, the initiative roll becomes a literal matter of life and death.

In a normal fight, if the goblins go first, it’s no big deal. They land a few hits, and then the party reacts. But if a high-level wizard clone wins initiative, it can be a disaster. The clone is going to immediately drop the absolute worst crowd-control spell or highest-damage effect right on the player’s head.

This creates a really frustrating paradox: the better you are at building your character, the more punishing this encounter becomes. If you spent months picking the perfect spells and/or weapon proficiencies to maximize your efficiency, your reward is facing an automated nightmare that will use those exact same choices to kill you before you even get a turn.

Did I mention the clones aren’t subject to morale rolls?

4. Fighting Your Own Brain

The real headache of the mirror match isn’t just on the character sheet; it’s the fact that your clone knows exactly how you think.

When a DM runs a dragon or an orc, they play them like creatures. Beasts attack the closest target, and smart villains make tactical choices based on what they see. But a mirror clone has your character’s exact strategies in mind. It knows your blind spots, your favorite defensive escape plans, and exactly which party member you always try to protect first.

This forces players into a really weird psychological corner. To beat your own clone, you have to stop playing like yourself. You have to make intentionally bizarre, unpredictable, or sometimes flat-out bad choices just to throw your clone off the scent.

5. How It Breaks Different Classes

Every type of character suffers in their own unique way when forced to face their reflection.

The Caster’s Mexican Standoff

For magic-users, clerics, druids and illusionists, a mirror match is pure anxiety. Your clones knows what spells you have/don’t have, what magic wands you have, and your casting habits.

The Martial Grind

For heavily armored martial characters like fighters and paladins, the mirror has the opposite problem: it’s incredibly boring. You are facing an opponent with your exact same high AC and defensive saves.

If your paladin has a massive AC, you might need to roll high just to land a normal hit, and suddenly you realize how all those goblins felt. The fight instantly turns into a tedious slog where two tanky characters stand toe-to-toe, swinging and missing 60% of the time, waiting to see who gets a lucky streak of dice rolls first.

The Stealth Collapse

For thieves and rangers who rely on hiding, sneaking, and flanking, the mirror completely breaks their play style. Your clone knows the map exactly like you do and anticipates every single ambush route you might try to take. The thieves are stripped of their ability to fight from the shadows and are forced into a straight-up fight...the exact thing they aren’t built to do.

6. The Loot Trap

The rules say the clone gets everything you are currently carrying or equipped with, which introduces a ton of weird problems for the game’s economy… reduced by the fact that the clones’ equipment disappears when they do. If they do.

Most groups have a few unique, incredibly powerful items spread out across the party… like a single sentient sword or a powerful magical staff. These items are meant to give characters a cool identity, not exist twice on the battlefield at the same time.

The worst part is your emergency gear. Every player hoards a few rare consumables… like a Potion of Extra Healing or a powerful spell scroll… saving them for the actual boss fight at the end of the campaign.

You are hesitant to use them because you have to worry about surviving the next room. The clone doesn’t care about tomorrow. It exists for this single fight, and it will happily drink your best potion, burn your rarest scroll, or smash your magic staff on round one just to win. You are forced to either waste your best loot just to stay alive, or keep hoarding it and get killed by your own stuff.

7. The DM’s Worst Nightmare

We talk a lot about how much players hate this trap, but it’s arguably even worse for the DM. Running a high-level game is already a massive juggling act. You have to track monster health, environmental hazards, and complex rules interpretations all at once.

A high-level player character sheet is incredibly complex. The player knows it inside and out because they’ve been playing it for months. As a DM, suddenly being handed that sheet and expected to play it with perfect tactical efficiency on zero notice is a massive headache.

If you play the clone poorly, the fight feels like a letdown. If you play it perfectly, the players feel like you’re cheating because you have absolute insight into their character sheet. It’s a stressful, high-effort mess for a fight that isn’t even that fun to run.

8. How Players Can Beat It

If you ever find yourself staring down your own clone, the absolute worst thing you can do is play along with the 1v1 duel. The mirror wants you to fight yourself, which means the only way to win is to break the symmetry of the fight completely.

Don’t attack your own double. Cross the lines of engagement. If the fighter is facing a fighter clone and the magic-user is facing her clone, they should immediately swap targets. The fighter should charge the fragile magic-user clone to crush it instantly, while the real magic-user conducts crowd control to lock down the tanky fighter clone from a distance.

By swapping opponents, you bring teamwork and strategy back into the equation. You throw your strengths against the enemy’s weaknesses, and you disrupt the clone’s psychological script because the fighter clone doesn’t know how the real wizard’s brain works.

9. Even Cooler Ways to Use the Mirror

The idea of facing a dark reflection of yourself is a fantastic story trope, and you don’t have to banish it from your campaign entirely. You just need to change the mechanics so it’s actually fun to play at the table.

Here are three quick ways to redesign the mirror trap:

The Echo of Flaws

Instead of making a perfect mathematical copy with all your gear, the mirror spawns a creature made of your character’s dark regrets, fears, or flaws. Give it unique shadow abilities instead of copying the character sheet. This keeps your hard-earned loot advantage intact and avoids the tedious armor-class slog.

The Laggy Echo

The clone manifests, but it can only do what you did exactly one round ago. If you cast a spell on turn one, the clone copies that exact spell on turn two, aiming at where you used to be standing. This turns the combat into a brilliant tactical puzzle where players can actively trick and manipulate their own clones by planning their moves a turn ahead.

The Shattered Mirror

Instead of one big, terrifying clone, the mirror cracks and spits out four or five fragile, glass shards of the character. Give these mini-clones only 1 hit point each, and let each one have just a single signature ability from your sheet. It still looks incredibly cool visually, but players get the fun of smashing through copies of themselves without the risk of an accidental total party wipe.

The Takeaway From All This

The Mirror of Opposition is a classic piece of old-school history, but it serves as a great reminder for modern campaign design. An encounter shouldn’t penalize players for building cool, efficient characters, and it shouldn’t reduce a tactical tabletop game down to a single, lucky initiative roll.

By tweaking the factors beneath the rules, you can give your players a memorable psychological challenge without a probable TPK.

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To the modern gamer, this act is often treated as a trivial, risk-free narrative action… a routine perception check before the tactical deployment of that sweet kinetic breach. However, under the Gygaxian architecture of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition, listening at doors is a high-stakes mechanical procedure fraught with potential danger.

Behind this procedure sits a tiny, one-hit-die organism that fundamentally redefined player psychology and underworld pacing:

The Ear Seeker.

Far more than a mere “gotcha” monster, the interplay between the mechanics of listening at doors and the presence of surprise parasites serves as a masterclass in environmental tension and resource management.

The Procedural Engine: Listening at Doors

To understand the dread this creature inspires, one must first look at the exact procedure required to scout a closed portal. This is not a casual narrative request; it is a highly regulated mechanical action governed by distinct rules across the core system.

According to the Dungeon Masters Guide (1st Edition), Page 60, under the explicit section heading LISTENING AT DOORS, Gary Gygax establishes how the operation happens for DMs. The text notes that, despite the underlying terrors of the underworld, “most players will insist on having their characters listen at doors at every pretense.”

This action is not some passive skill check. It is an active gamble governed by asymmetric information:

• The Non-Thief as a Baseline: For standard characters (Fighters, Clerics, Magic-Users, and their sub-classes), the ability to hear movement, whispering, or scratching beyond a portal is incredibly restricted. DMs resolve this with a flat percentile roll based upon race, made secretly behind the screen to prevent meta-gaming.

• The Thief Specialty: The Thief class, however, possesses a distinct mechanical edge in this environment. As outlined in the Players Handbook (1st Edition), Page 28, the Hear Noise column defines a Thief’s specialized percentage chance to detect faint acoustic anomalies. Note that at 1st level, his chances are actually less than the average adventurer unless he holds a racial advantage; at mid-to-higher levels, however, he far outshines the rest.

This disparity exists because the Thief is specifically trained to interpret the subtle, subterranean tells of the underworld. Where an average adventurer might simply suss out that something is there, a skilled Thief can often discern exactly what and how many entities occupy the room beyond.

The critical tactical detail that determines survival is the requirement of silence. To listen effectively, the party must halt their movement, douse loud light sources if necessary to avoid detection through door gaps, and remain entirely still for at least one full turn (10 minutes of game time). This deliberate pause exposes the party to the ticking clock of Wandering Monster checks. Listening is never free; it costs time, and time in a high-lethality dungeon is paid for in blood.

Enter the Parasite: The Ear Seeker Profile

If the time cost of listening at doors is an abstract threat, the physical consequence can be brutal. The dungeon ecology was explicitly designed to actively punish reckless or predictable scouting routines. The primary mechanical countermeasure to the “listen at every door” strategy is found in the Monster Manual (1st Edition), Page 36.

Nestled alphabetically between the “Giant Eagle” and the “Eel,” the Ear Seeker is detailed not as a standard combatant, but as an environmental hazard. Structurally, these creatures are small, insectoid parasites that dwell exclusively in rotting wood, subterranean detritus, and—most notoriously—the damp, unvarnished surfaces of dungeon doors.

Mechanically, the Ear Seeker is almost non-existent in traditional combat terms:

• Hit Dice: 1 hit point (not a full hit die, but a single hit point).

• Armor Class: 9.

• Attacks: None in standard initiative rounds.

A hard sneeze could probably kill one. The horror of the creature lies entirely in its infection vector. When a character presses their ear against an infested wooden door to utilize the mechanics from DMG page 60, there is a flat, unmodifiable chance that 1d4 ear seekers will immediately crawl into the warm, dark environment of the character’s ear canal.

The Brutal Mechanical Resolution

Once infestation occurs, the mechanical trajectory shifts from a dungeon crawl to a horrific medical countdown. The Monster Manual outlines a strict timeline that completely bypasses standard hit point pools and armor class defenses:

• Incubation: The creatures lay 9–16 eggs within the ear canal and die shortly after entering. The incubation period lasts a brief 4 to 24 hours, during which the character remains entirely asymptomatic.

• Hatching: When the eggs hatch, the larvae immediately begin burrowing inward toward the victim’s brain. Chekhov screams ensue.

• The Countdown: The mechanical damage is swift and absolute. The larvae destroy brain tissue rapidly, causing death 90% of the time.

Standard healing magic is completely insufficient to combat this localized cellular destruction. A simple Cure Light Wounds spell will not neutralize parasites lodged deep within the cranial architecture. Only a full Cure Disease spell (a 3rd-level Cleric spell) can destroy the larvae and save the character’s life.

If the party lacks a high-level Cleric capable of casting third-level divine magic, the infestation is a functional death sentence. This structural finality forces players to treat every wooden door not as a simple barrier, but as a potentially lethal contact poison.

The Structural Value of Asymmetric Risk Architecture

By encoding a lethal parasite directly into the primary scouting mechanic of the game, AD&D 1st Edition achieved a specific design goal: the systematic de-escalation of meta-gaming. Because the DM rolls the Hear Noise check secretly, and because Ear Seekers do not cause immediate pain upon entry, players cannot meta-game the results. The player must simply live with the choices their character makes in the dark.

Furthermore, this interplay validates the Thief class. By making door-listening incredibly dangerous for non-specialists, the rules cement the Thief as an indispensable survival asset rather than just a combatant with utility skills.

Finally, it acts as a tool for resource depletion. An Ear Seeker infestation forces the party to expend a valuable, high-level spell slot on Cure Disease rather than offensive or utility magic, systematically grinding down the party’s endurance over a period of time.

The intersection of these specific page references reveals the true genius of Gygaxian design… a system where the environment itself is alive and predatory, and explicitly engineered to kill and eat the adventurers.

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I’ll confess right up front… I was one of them. It was when I actually sat down and strived to comprehend what EGG was laying out for us in those massive walls of text that the OSR tries mightily to avoid these days, that the subtle currents of what was happening at his table started forming springs to the surface.

I’ve maintained for decades now that the railroady nature of AD&D from about 1986 on started with the Hickmans and Weis through Dragonlance. I never made it beyond the first module of the series, so great was my loathing of “choo-choo” play style ; being told that the actions I took with PCs who were not my creation had to be negated in order to fit with the storyline of the next module genuinely hacked me off.

This weekend I learned of some obscure reference from even earlier than Dragonlance that actually set the ball rolling… no really, I had never heard of this until today, and I’m quite the student of TSR history… the so-called “Hickman Manifesto”. I looked it up during lunch. I have opinions about this.

The manifesto outlines four core principles:

1. A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing.

2. An intriguing story that is intricately woven into the play itself.

3. Dungeons with some sort of architectural sense.

4. An attainable and honorable end within one or two sessions of playing time.

Now, I don’t have any problem with any of these per se… in fact, I strongly uphold the first three. But off the top of my head, I suspect these were written in response to the stereotypical “fun house dungeon” of Greyhawk style and the gaming mindset that came from that sort of play. The problem is that Hickman’s solutions completely misunderstood the very AD&D mechanics he was trying to use.

Take that first point: “A player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing.” I’m hard-pressed to name a TSR module released before 1982 with pillaging and killing as its main objectives. Perhaps Keep On The Borderlands... maybe?… but that was designed by EGG as an intro to the B/X game system for new players. One could say In Search of the Unknown, but that has the same design principle. So I’m guessing Hickman was indeed talking about fun house mega-dungeons. What he missed is that the core mechanic of gold-as-XP wasn’t about mindless killing; it was a mechanical incentive for stealth, reconnaissance, and survival.

Then there’s: “An intriguing story that is intricately woven into the play itself.” I think this is where the conductor shouts “all aboard!” One of the common themes of early TSR modules was dealing with a local threat… hill giants, bandits, strange monsters coming out of a metal door, etc. Hickman seems to state that there should be a story that actually dictates PC action during the course of play. Now, that’s a slippery slope… have a sequence of events unfold regardless of PC actions but can be changed is one thing… corralling the PCs in order to keep the storyline intact is another thing entirely. That’s where Dragonlance comes from…

As for “Dungeons with some sort of architectural sense…” Yeah, I have no problem with that other than it’s a deliberate jab at people who just sit around drawing mega-dungeon maps and then put them on Facebook like a Kindergartner showing his family his latest art work. I know some of those people.

But the real kicker is the fourth principle: “An attainable and honorable end within one or two sessions of playing time.” Well, what do you call a session, Tracy? I come from a background of playing 6-10 hours at a time multiple times a week. EGG ran long games every night. These days, people often limit gaming time to 3-4 hours one night a week. So, that time window sort of varies depending on the players and the DM.

All four of these principles lean toward gaming that wraps up quick and neat, and AD&D doesn’t do that. AD&D is built for campaign continuity, logistics, and long-term survival.

The core mechanics do not promote any of his four points. They simply don’t. They were developed by EGG, RJK and others through “fun house” dungeons. Off shoot adventures like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks don’t wander too far off the main course. It’s Hickman’s works like the Desert series, Ravenloft, and lastly Dragonlance that change players’ perceptions of what the game is truly about. They forced a narrative structure onto a rule set explicitly designed for open sandbox exploration.

When you try to force AD&D to be something it isn’t, the mechanics become a hindrance. Look at the 1990s, when TSR had a boxed set titled Masque of the Red Death. It was a branch off of Ravenloft. Great stuff… basically AD&D set in Victorian London with vampires, golems, Kabbalists, witches, all that stuff… and the AD&D rules were a hindrance to the setting rather than supporting of it. I played it a lot and constantly thought this setting needed its own rules that advanced the detective-like play it demanded.

This is what I do on purpose to your choo-choo modules.

I’d like to go on record here as stating I have never, nor will I ever, develop a fantasy franchise anywhere close to the impact that Dragonlance has had on the fantasy RPG genre. There are modules, books, novels, posters, comics, you name it. There are probably Dragonlance tampons, for all I know. I can’t touch that nor can I impugn it… but I can say that as a player I’ve never given a single damn about Dragonlance. They never made a dime off of me.

If you really want a damned near perfect blend of AD&D hack-n-slash with story telling, something Hickman was describing, then the closest thing would have been the Forgotten Realms. Why?… because the Realms left the core AD&D mechanisms completely intact. It gave you an intricate world to explore without forcing the DM to pull out the conductor’s whistle.

If you don’t actually read the DMG and understand why the mechanics are there, you fall into the trap of thinking the rules are just a clunky vehicle for a pre-written story. They aren’t. They are the engine of the game itself.

Created by a sect of illusionists within the Lodge Obscure under the direction of their lodge master Arbiddance, these three rings have wrought great deception and destruction through the centuries. Each of the three rings are master deceivers that grant their wearers the ability to fool others in regards to true alignment.

Of the three rings, only one has a confirmed master: The Flattering Mirror is possessed by the Lord Khesser of Ristriax as a family relic. Of the other two, The Brother of Zeal is rumored to be held by some evil priest on the isle of Da’ath, while the location of The Shadow of Balance is unknown (perhaps owned by some thieves guild master or an master assassin).

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By any measure of statecraft, the High Kingdom of Great Staraya is the dominant jewel of the western shores. With a population exceeding 235,000 souls, a disciplined army capable of fielding 45,000 levying troops, and the ability to summon one hundred paladins of the Iron Choir within three days’ time supported by about 230 cavaliers, its security appears absolute.

From High Vigil Castle, Her Serene Royal Majesty, Queen Daentrella (herself a 15^th level paladin) rules with an unyielding commitment to fairness and justice. Rich ironwork, timber from the Gwynnald Forest, and gemstones from the eastern slopes of the Kyrenic Mountains pour into the capital, while the Duke of Talons secures the southern coast from heathen incursions.

Yet, for all its majesty, the kingdom’s foundation has cracks. It is an open secret that the court wizard, Maddonlynks, directs much of the kingdom’s governance through closed channels…a reality that breeds deep distrust among an aristocracy that suspects his true ambitions lie outside the interest of the crown.

But the deepest, most agonizing wound in Great Staraya sits right on its northern border, entirely untouched by Law and Good.

It is the dark hold of Ristriax.

The Fraudulent Vow: How Ristriax Became Untouchable

To understand why the Iron Choir has never marched north to cleanse the accursed barony on the banks of the Ghen, one must look back three generations to the reign of King Alistair Staray.

The master of Ristriax at the time was Sir Gareth Khesser, a celebrated paladin of the Iron Choir who had secretly fallen to corruption. Gareth had begun trafficking with the dark things of the Sistermoors, but before his treason was discovered by the crown, he orchestrated a masterstroke of legalistic deception. Claiming that Ristriax was a necessary, secret bulwark against a massive humanoid incursion from the deep moors, Gareth approached King Alistair on his deathbed while using dark magics to mask the taint of evil on his soul. He begged for a royal decree that would grant Ristriax absolute administrative autonomy and safety from royal interference, ensuring his “vital defense work” could never be disrupted by political rivals in the court.

Alistair, weakened by illness and trusting a brother of the Choir, swore a binding, holy oath upon the realm’s sacred relics: The crown, the state, and the Iron Choir shall never commit an act of aggression, nor cross with martial intent, into the boundaries of Ristriax, so long as the line of Khesser holds its gates.

Only after the old king died did the horrifying truth emerge. Gareth hadn’t been defending the realm; he had been carving out a sovereign sanctuary for his own black designs. Because the oath was sworn upon holy relics by a rightful king, any violation of it by the forces of Great Staraya would instantly shatter the divine mandate of the Staray Throne and strip that clan of their right to rule.

Today, Gareth’s descendant...Lord Jaod Khesser, a brutal and ruthless 10th-level fighter… sits in sits in the cold, slate-roofed keep of Blackspire Hall. He is bolstered by small bands of evil men and humanoids who raid into the anarchic Sistermoors with absolute impunity. So long as his forces remain north of the Ghen, the Crown cannot touch him.

In the last year, matters have taken a turn for the worse. Persistent rumors throughout the northern part of the realm suggest that dark emissaries from the undead Kingdom of Waerda have been crossing the Kyrenic Mountains into Ristriax. Some speculate Lord Khesser has made, or is about to make, a pact with Vladek the Deathless in order to swarm into Great Staray and unseat Daentrella and the Staray line forever. With High Vigil Castle and its forces swept aside, there is very little to stop the deathless march of Vladek’s vile touch south into the Naej… and Lord Khesser is just power mad and insane enough to aid him.

The Cold War on the River Ghen

Because of this ancient loophole, the borderland along the Ghen, a minor tributary leading into the Sistermoors, has become a pressure cooker of passive-aggressive surveillance and absolute paranoia.

• The Iron Choir’s Watch: The Queen has stationed heavy concentrations of forces along the edge of the moors. Watchtowers line the southern bank of the Ghen. Rangers track every shadow that moves out of Ristriax, their fingers constantly on their bowstrings. They are looking for the slightest excuse…a single foot stepped across the official border…to justify a lethal response.

• Khesser’s Defiance: On the northern bank, Khesser’s guards and humanoid mercenaries openly mock the royal sentries. They march up to the very edge of the water, knowing they are entirely safe behind a dead king’s word. Khesser is careful; he never directs his raids into Staraya proper. Instead, he bleeds the unaligned settlements of the Sistermoors dry, knowing Queen Daentrella can only watch from across the river with righteous, restricted fury.

Angles for PC Involvement

In a High Gygaxian sandbox, a political stalemate locked by rigid law is an open invitation for a group of desperate, heavily armed mercenaries who don’t wear the Queen’s livery. Here are three ways to drop a party into the middle of this boiling pot:

• The Wizard’s Deniable Assets: Maddonlynks, the ambitious court wizard, is entirely unbothered by the paladins’ moral qualms regarding the oath. He approaches the party through a proxy with a cold proposition: cross the Ghen under the cover of night, infiltrate Ristriax, and retrieve a specific arcane artifact Khesser is unearthing. If the party is caught, the crown will disavow them, and the Iron Choir will execute them as border-breakers to maintain the oath...but if they succeed, the rewards are astronomical.

• The Border Gamble: A desperate border commander of Great Staraya knows that a caravan of humanoids carrying stolen wealth is about to enter Ristriax from the moors. The commander cannot cross the river to stop them, but he can look the other way if a band of independent adventurers “coincidentally” ambushes the caravan right in the no-man’s-land of the river shallows.

• The Legal Loophole: A scholar in Wydyr believes there is a flaw in the original wording of King Alistair’s vow—specifically regarding what constitutes “the line of Khesser holding its gates.” The scholar hires the party to venture into the dangerous territory near Ristriax to unearth genealogical or historical proof that Lord Khesser is not actually Gareth’s blood descendant, which would instantly break the cosmic protection holding the Iron Choir back.

The Major Adventure Hook: The Corpse-Run Covenant

The Setup: Maddonlynks, the court wizard, contacts the party through his usual deniable channels. His network of spies along the River Ghen has intercepted a specific piece of intelligence: an emissary from Waerda...a powerful wight or perhaps even a Grave King bearing a heavy, lead-lined iron casket… has successfully slipped past the Kyrenic Mountain watches. The emissary is currently holed up in a ruined, abandoned monastery in the no-man’s-land just west of the Ghen, waiting for Lord Khesser’s personal guard to escort them safely across the river into Ristriax tomorrow night.

Inside that casket is the Covenant of Bone: a dark treaty signed by Vladek the Deathless. If the treaty reaches Lord Khesser and he carves his name onto it, the ancient oath protecting Ristriax will be expanded by Waerda’s necromantic magic, effectively turning the accursed barony into a permanent, unassailable beachhead for an undead invasion force right on Great Staraya’s flank.

The Mission: The party must intercept the Waerdan emissary before they reach the River Ghen and cross into Khesser’s territory. Once the emissary crosses the water into Ristriax, the Queen’s royal decree binds the Iron Choir, and they will be legally forced to execute the party if they follow the undead across the border.

The Complications:

• The Guard Post: A local, zealous commander of the Iron Choir patrols the south bank. He doesn’t know about Maddonlynks’ deniable mission. If he catches the party skulking around the ruined monastery at night, he will assume they are tomb-robbers or Waerdan cultists and act accordingly with unyielding force.

• The Envoy’s Arsenal: The Waerdan emissary isn’t traveling alone. They are accompanied by a small, elite cadre of shadow-wights whose level-draining touch makes any frontline combat a terrifying gamble.

• The Ring Factor: If the party manages to intercept the meeting, they might discover that Khesser’s captain is carrying Lord Khesser’s ancestral Band of False Witness (q.v.) specifically to smuggle the undead envoy through any passive paladin detection nets near the river. If the PCs can secure that ring, they gain a tool of immense value… and perhaps put a massive target on their backs.

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If you can’t immediately recall off the top of your head where that is, don’t feel bad about it.

(The late, great Ace Frehley once asked me where I was from. I told him Little Rock because I was 99.999% sure Ace Frehley didn’t have a fucking clue where New Edinburg was.)

That’s the most rural Southern of rural Southern towns, and I grew up attending the most rural of Baptist churches which was even further out in the sticks than the town itself.

If this town had a soundtrack, it would be made by Dead Can Dance.

Now that you can admire the picture I’ve painted, let me tell you why I’m painting it.

I was one of the few there who had even heard of Dungeons & Dragons. Me and another guy. He tried to recruit a couple of others, but it didn’t stick.

At first, you could get Moldvay/Cook sets in the nearby Wal-Mart (that’s Fordyce on the above map), but the “harder stuff” could only be found in the larger cities. For us that was a 45 minute trip to nearby Pine Bluff and a Mom-n-Pop bookstore on the edge of the city limits named Pickwick’s Books.

Pickwick’s is long gone now and if you spend more than 30 minutes in Pine Bluff these days you can totally understand why.

Thank God for Little Rock.

But very soon, the church psychos bullied Wal-Mart, along with Sears and JC Penney, into removing all D&D products from their game sections, and therein lies the story for this post.

(Jack Chick at his most ludicrous. Anyone remember anything like this bullshit happening at your table? I certainly don’t.)

Being a teenager in the early 1980s, arguably the Golden Age for AD&D, I never really saw the Satanic Panic.

I’ve heard stories, horrible stories of mother hen bullying of bookstores, groups like BADD being formed and funded (note the last word) and weird episodes of 60 Minutes. There was that sad and atrocious novel Mazes & Monsters which got made into a TV movie with Tom Hanks.

(Tom Hanks peering into the entrance tunnel of a long and brilliant acting career, but checking for traps first. Image copyright to someone somewhere who isn’t me.)

But anyone in Dirty Burg breathing down my neck telling me I’m going to Hell for playing AD&D?

Didn’t happen. Not once. My own Mom was fundamentalist as hell and a devotee of Jerry Falwell, and she liked me playing D&D. She thought it was great. My Mom also loved vampire movies too, so there’s that...

Two chicks in my high school class (who, in retrospect, were way over-rated) were curious about me reading the Player’s Handbook in study hall. They totally... got the wrong impression about the title... and I had to set them straight. That was probably the first time they had heard of D&D.

Over time, I’ve concluded the “D&D is Satanic” was more of an urban phenomenon.

How urban? A few years later I attended college at nearby UA-Monticello. Quaint town that’s now overrun with burger joints. In about three years, I fell in with the campus Methodist Student Center… mainly because a guy there had a running D&D (2E) game going along with a Star Frontiers game which was rampant with hilarious stories. He and I formed a fourteen year friendship that ended because I became a serious liability to him (as many, many others did). Whole other story...

There was a rumor floating around that there was a coven of witches on campus, and he speculated it was because he was running a D&D game. In fact, he was sure of it. I never really saw anything to make the connection, but the rumor did ebb and flow over the years depending on how involved he was with the place. I suspect it’s still going on there.

I wasn’t there for this one, but I was told that one night a couple of the players were sitting there inside rolling up some new PCs… when in walked two very strange cats who were apparently unknown to anyone.

One was a chick with spiked blue hair and a ton of metal in her face framing her Manson lamps… accompanied by a Sting lookalike in a trench coat repeatedly flicking and closing a Zippo.

“We hear there’s gaming here,” they intoned. “Is it true? We want to get in on the gaming.”

The two players replied “Uh, no… nope. No gaming here. No idea what you’re talking about” while quickly shoving their books into a book bag.

I suspect that’s as weird as it got.

Make no mistake, I’m not belittling the experiences of others. I’ve heard stories over the years of family fights, book burning, bookstores being constantly harassed and so forth by busy bodies across the nation. Some geek asses getting kicked on the school bus. You name it.

The D&D subset of the Satanic Panic, which was definitely a thing, was definitely there and definitely caused problems for too many people.

I often think the tragic and highly inflated story of James Egbert Dallas III (Google it) did for AD&D sales what the “Paul is dead” rumor did for Beatles record sales. I’m pretty sure I’m right.

So much in fact that the 1989 sugar-free version of AD&D known as 2^nd edition removed almost all controversial elements of the game in order to give TSR a better public image… to include, but not limited to: demons, devils, half-orcs (and the implication of interracial SA), assassins, whores, and drug use. The giant Molech idol on the cover of the PHB. Satan walking off with Miss America on the cover of the DMG. And so on.

Yeah, good bye to the ‘70s, huh? Meddling old bitties…

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The Wydyr, Duchy of

Her Sovereign Grace, Mauraeda Enjkiess, The 21^st Duchess of Wydyr (Cavalier level 10)

Capital: Gaunt Wydyr
Population: ~150,000
Demi-humans: some (mostly elves and halflings)
Humanoids: rare (more common near mountain regions)
Resources: foodstuffs such as cattle, grain and fruit, some ores, gold, gems

A former satrapy of one of the distant clans to the west (the Poxnos clan), Wydyr enjoys autonomy guaranteed by the Starays after the wars of unification. The Paladin Daentrella protects this far region by providing arms for its soldiers and occasional naval patrols near its coast.

The region itself is framed by the Duskspire Mountains to the west, the Bitter Reaches to the north, the lofty Gray Walls to the east, and the Sallowflow River to the south. The dominant waterway, the River Wyd, flows directly into the fog-shrouded Sepulchral Seas in the southwest corner of Wydyr. The region is subject to biting winds from the Bitter Reaches and, from the River Wyd south keeps a persistent early Spring damp in the air no matter the season. Despite the cold reaches to the north, it rarely snows here.

The realm is ruled from Gaunt Wydyr by the Duchess Mauraeda. She rarely ventures from this great keep, and instead holds court in extreme luxury while the rest of her realm is largely left to fend for itself. Rumors are she is overly fond of a particular vintage of wine brought in from Rath Talorr.

The three other decently sized population centers are Kilvarna, Roscrana, and Rath Mor, with the first two taking prominent positions on the River Wyd and the latter sitting south on the Sallowflow.

The Duchess maintains a personal household guard of 250 fighters (no less than 2^nd level) along with 200 heavy cavalry. The three other large settlements can provide up to 750 mounted archers and 3,500 well trained infantry proficient with the hookbill and the light crossbow. A peasant draft can fatten the defending forces by another 1,500 soldiers.

Gaunt Wydyr itself is a large and baffling complex. Built originally as a forward outpost to the east by the Poxnos, it was steadily expanded over the centuries into a labyrinthine structure that few understand. Poxnos architecture still dominates the keep, and there is a Poxnos quarter in the surrounding city serving as a hotbed of intrigue for those still loyal to the clans in the west. Rumors abound concerning deeper sections of the dungeon under the keep containing chambers and corridors that have not been seen by human eyes in untold years yet are haunted by ghosts of past nobility who wandered in there never to return.

Dominating the landscape of Wydyr is the massive Shrouded Weald… an immense and deep forest ruled by the Great Druid Yarro. When Yarro is not advising Mauraeda (advice she rarely heeds), he is here in his Great Grove somewhere at the center of the Weald. In the northern part of the Weald are several large lakes fed by streams which flow away from the great River Wyd on the north. One of these lakes served as the bastion of the now vanished Ravenwake dynasty… an aristocratic family who left Gaunt Wydyr under cloudy circumstances and moved to this isolated region only to vanish decades later. Whispers tell that the Ravenwakes brought with them an unknown Archonic artifact that had been resting in the dungeons of Gaunt Wydyr.

In the eastern reaches of Wydyr, near the Gray Walls, stands the Tower Nythros… home of the great Wizard Sabanorak. This reclusive Magus holds practical rule over this region extending as far west as the Weald and as far south as the Sallowflow, and collects taxes from the farmers in that region as well as a tribute of strange herbs, especially the fabled ghost-willow bark, from the Weald.

Southwest of Tower Nythros lies the enigmatic Caeldghul… an eldritch phenomenon rarely explored. Appearing as a large lake, the Caeldghul has no sources flowing into it, no movement on its surface, and no apparent depth. The ground within a bow-shot of the water is unnaturally smooth and devoid of all life; moonless nights give way to a reflection on the surface which doesn’t show the stars above, but unknown stars and constellations from some other place. Anyone traveling within a half-mile near the lake’s edges can feel a subtle hum that lightly vibrates the teeth. What examination that has taken place of the Caeldghul usually is fruitless and results in death, though Sabanorak himself is said to have compiled extensive arcane knowledge of the lake through his investigations.

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To quote Rodney Carrington: “if you go to Disney World, you don’t wanna see Chucky Cheese…you want the real thing!”

You remember the early ‘80s, right? When this stuff was cool, and you could put a sexy red head on the cover of something without it being a topic on CNN and some fish-faced harpy going off about it for 10 minutes?

Many of us started on these books, and they’re back in print.

Moldvay Basic:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/110274/d-d-basic-set-rulebook-b-x-ed-basic

Cook Expert:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/110792/d-d-expert-set-rulebook-b-x-ed-basic?src=also_purchased

You can also get The Keep on the Borderlands:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17158/b2-the-keep-on-the-borderlands-basic?src=also_purchased

And, the Isle of Dread:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/17083/x1-the-isle-of-dread-basic?src=also_purchased

All we need now are those cheap dice and that crayon…

Enjoy.

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https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555490/into-the-majestic-fantasy-realms-the-northern-marches

His Into The Majestic Fantasy Realms: The Northern Marches dropped yesterday on DTRPG, and it’s a pretty good deal. Conley has oriented this toward OD&D… basically Swords & Wizardry if you need that sort of thing.

I just ordered the softback copy, and got the PDFs. We’ll wait on the softback before I give a good review.

The discerning buyer will notice the PDFs alone are $39.99, but if you order the softback… for $39.99, then the PDFs are free to download.

So, even if you don’t need another D&D setting, give Robert some OSR support and love.

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I touched on this subject in a previous Substack note (you do read my notes, don’t you?), but for those of you too cool to do the homework, I’ll expand on the topic here.

Old school saving throws are a totally different animal from what you get in 3E onward. The latter systems make saving throws rely on the PC’s abilities. 3E devolves the ST system into three categories: Fortitude, Will, and Reflex. Each reflects not a situation for which you must save, but the ability that can affect the save… FORT is affected by CON, WILL is affected by WIS, and REF is affected by DEX.

Okay, mechanics economy. I can dig that.

Here’s the question: if I’m a new player and rolling up my very first PC, if I look at that system… what can I learn from it?

What does this simplistic ST scheme tell me about the dangers I might face later at the table?

Furthermore, since I really don’t know what I’m rolling against, only the bonus I have… how can I gauge my chances of success when my butt is on the line?

The vagueness of the system information here is concerning.

Then we move to 5E (I’m not counting 4E because I don’t know it and apparently few others do either). 5E moves the ST to the abilities themselves; each ability has a ST bonus based on the ability score… so you have STR saves, WIS saves, CHA saves, and so on.

The same vague viewpoint happens again… how can I learn from this system in order to predict what might be coming down the chute at me later on? And how can I gauge my chances of success when I can’t see the goalpost?

So now we go back and look at 1E (or 2E, if you’re into that candy-assed waste of ink and paper): saving throws get broken into five categories, and those categories tell you exactly what dangers your PC can come across in the process of play. Let’s look at each one in turn:

Paralyzation/Poison/Death Magic: These are effects that act like an off-switch. Fail this and you’re out of action… perhaps permanently.

Petrification/Polymorph: These are effects that fundamentally change your body structure. You’re turned into stone or you suddenly become a snail. Add to that a System Shock roll to see if you can handle being a snail; this is a horrible way to go.

Rod/Staff/Wand: This is your ability to withstand the effects of the spellcaster’s greatest weapons… his personal hand cannon.

Breath Weapon: Generic area attack. Did you dodge just enough to avoid taking the full brunt of that red dragon’s breath, or are you now Mongolian BBQ?

And finally… and perhaps most importantly… Spells: The broad catch-all for resisting the effects of an enemy spellcaster’s spell attack.

Now, I’m that newbie player rolling up my very first PC… I can look at those categories, understand what they mean, and I have a pretty good idea what can happen to Randicore the Thief down in the Dungeons of Doom or wherever I’m heading.

But wait… there’s more:

Each saving throw is defined by a number based on class group and level. For example: a 1st level Fighter has a saving throw against spells of 17. Not good.

A 1st level Cleric or Thief saves vs spells at 15… better but still not great.

A 1st level Magic-user, however, saves vs spells at 12. That’s a lot better.

Why? The fighter doesn’t understand magic; he’s a fighter. The Cleric knows magic when he sees it, while the Thief is naturally cautious about everything; those two have a fighting chance to resist the spell effects. But a magic-user knows magic, even at a beginner level… he can withstand the effects because he can subtly alter them upon contact. Maybe.

These categories of dangers, in tandem with solid numbers to roll against, provide the player with much more information to use tactically when in combat or general play.

I’ve often debated with people about why the save tables aren’t in the Player’s Handbook. My general reply is that they are a game mechanic and so fall under the purview of the DM. In retrospect, I don’t think that argument is solid enough… though it can be mitigated by the knowledge that the player will record the saves, as given by the DM, on his character sheet.

Eh… no system is perfect.

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