Reading B/X

I’ve been doing a deep-dive into the D&D Moldvay Basic rules in an attempt to learn an old-school fantasy roleplaying ruleset. While my eventual goal is to start a campaign set in a Dying Earth inspired world of my own I’ve decided to start small and focus on learning to run a good dungeon-crawl.

I’m a late-comer to the world of roleplaying games (RPGs) having started with Call of Cthulhu in the December of 2019. Since then I’ve run 5 sessions of Call of Cthulhu before starting a Dungeons and Dragons (5e) campaign from the starter set (Lost Mines of Phandelver) in May 2020. We played biweekly for about 6-8 months but we never ended up finishing that game. Around that same time I’d signed up for 5e campaign at work (also based on a pre-written module, Princes of the Apocalypse) which ended last month after ~2 years.

During this period I played in a variety of one-off games in different systems online and in-person but none of them materialized into a group that could evolve into a proper campaign. At the same time I dove into tabletop roleplaying discourse online (Reddit, various forums and blogs) which introduced me to the different schools of thought that existed in this hobby and gave me much to think about my own preferences.

Lately, however, I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with my participation in the hobby. I’ve been looking for deeper, more active involvement - one based on solid creative thought and substance. The kind, which, in my opinion, superficially skimming dozens of rulesets or playing in one-off games just cannot offer.

So I’ve decided to return to the basics. My ruleset of choice is the Basic/Expert (1981) D&D which seems appropriate given my limited experience. My goal is to familiarize myself with the rules enough to run a fun dungeon-crawl fully by-the-book. This means everything from tracking turns and resources (light sources, arrows and rations), wandering monster checks, reaction, morale and loyalty checks, listening at and forcing open doors, combat phases etc. I don’t expect to be perfect right off the bat but I’m hoping to master enough of the system to realize it when I (inevitably) forget a rule or apply it wrong.

The next step, as the old-school wisdom tell us, is to draw up a dungeon for your players to explore and I intend to do just that. A mistake I’ve made with this step in the past is spending a lot of time thinking of new traps, monsters and tricks in an attempt to make the dungeon “unique” or special. Not only does this suck up my limited creative energy and free time, the resulting burnout means I have a small pile of unfinished “idea” dungeons that I never ended up fully keying (let alone playing).

Therefore, I’ve decided to keep my first dungeon a simple, workmanlike affair. It will have goblins, maybe some undead, fire beetles and giant rats. It will have a deadly trap or two to keep players on their toes and a simple puzzle that will require them to interact with the environment (eg. turn a statue to unlock a locked door like Holmes’ “Sample Dungeon”) and treasure rolled up using the by-the-book rules. The map needs to be straightforward with a few loops and a little three dimensionality. 20 rooms for the first floor should suffice.

With all that said, like any other project, I think a little accountability would help keep things on track and keep me from getting stuck. I’m hoping that writing about my progress on this blog would do that for me in some small capacity. Next time, I hope to post some of my observations from reading the rulebook (particularly, things that I think I would likely forget while running my first game) as well as an initial idea about the ‘first’ dungeon.