Medieval Mayhem: An Old-School D&D Project

In my most recent blog entry I talked about the original 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons that started it all and why I love it so much. So I might as well share some ideas I have for a project that is directly related to Original Dungeons & Dragons.

The project is an experiment that I call "Medieval Mayhem" and it is somewhat inspired by the rise of YouTube videos detailing people's RPG campaigns, the most prolific being Critical Role.

Medieval Mayhem is an idea that takes inspiration from previous ideas I have had for RPG fan fiction stories. However, it is somewhat different from other attempts I have made.

It is essentially a story presented as an actual campaign journal for OD&D, complete with character sheets, recorded dice rolls, and everything else that entails. It is not a heavily pre-scripted narrative and it is largely run in an open-ended and improvisational way, much like the old D&D campaigns of yore way back in the 1970's and early 1980's.

However, Medieval Mayhem also serves another purpose as well. The "in-game" events of Medieval Mayhem also serve as information for a custom OD&D setting that I am working on and will develop within the context of this project, before refining into a "proper" campaign setting compatible with the mechanics of Original Dungeons & Dragons.

Medieval Mayhem will be using only the Three Little Brown Booklets from the OD&D box set.

I may possibly incorporate the materials from Chainmail and the four OD&D supplements as well, although I am not sure. If I do incorporate Supplements I-IV, it would be in an incremental fashion.

Expect more material for the project known as Medieval Mayhem very soon.

Some Thoughts on Original Dungeons & Dragons

It's been a while since my last blog post and so I decided I might as well make a new one and let you guys know I'm still alive and well.

So, for this particular blog post I might as well talk about the classic that started it all, the 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons, which is one of my favorite RPG's of all time and the very first RPG ever made (unless you count Braunstein)

Original Dungeons & Dragons is one of my favorite games and is tied with the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for my favorite version of D&D overall. However, unlike most old-school gamers, I'm a millennial (born in 1993) and was introduced to D&D and the RPG hobby through the revised third edition of the game (D&D 3.5) way back in February of 2007, when I was thirteen years old. However, my Dad was an old-school gamer who cut his teeth on AD&D First Edition and like me, was a huge fan of Second Edition AD&D.

In fact, Second Edition is his favorite version of the game and is one of mine as well.

I'm actually planning a weekly AD&D Second Edition game pretty soon with some of my real-life friends but I digress.

So, I'm sitting here in my living room listening to The Dubliners and drinking Mello Yello as I type this newest entry to my blog, and I have been thinking about ideas for a theoretical old-school D&D campaign using only the original White Box rules from 1974. That's right, the Three Little Brown Booklets themselves. I recently purchased the official PDF's of OD&D's core rules, along with all four of the supplements and Chainmail as well and I'm looking over the original rules and they are awesome.

I previously have had experience with Original Dungeons & Dragons via OSR retro-clone games like Swords & Wizardry and Full Metal Plate Mail, but having the actual original rules themselves is even better in my personal opinion.

Overall, I love Original Dungeons & Dragons and find it to be one of the best old-school games because it is the epitome of Old-School, it was the first RPG ever published and it revolutionized not just tabletop gaming, but other forms of gaming as well. It is a very versatile game system.

Ostensibly, OD&D is a medieval game with a lot of Swords & Sorcery and High Fantasy elements, drawing heavily from the works of Robert E. Howard, H.P. Lovecraft, Jack Vance, and Tolkien. But that is just the initial setup to help serve as a springboard for nearly any type of campaign you want to run, especially if you are a creative Game Master.

The four supplements of Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, and Gods Demigods & Heroes are excellent additions to the game, which when added in their entirety with the OD&D White Box rules, make the whole game a rough draft form of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons First Edition, which makes sense given that AD&D 1E was originally intended as a compendium of all the stuff that OD&D had accumulated from the supplements and magazine articles throughout the 1970's.

But even with just the core rules, which seem to be bare-bones compared to later editions of D&D, you can run a lot of different games in different styles with the proper minor tweaks. The seemingly minimalist style of OD&D is also one of the game's greatest strengths, making it loose enough to be flexible and easily compatible with Rule Zero add-ons and other fan content.

Even the core rules alone mention some stuff that seems out of place compared to later versions of D&D, but would also make the game very interesting. Stuff like Robots, Androids, and Martians and the like.

Overall, I have some good thoughts on OD&D and expect more posts about it on this blog very soon.