#ad&d

[oldschoolfrp]

Githyanki with silver swords stand guard in Guiradr, a city stolen from the Prime Material Plane centuries ago and relocated to a pocket in the Astral Plane (Vince Pask cover for Australian Realms magazine no 7, September/October 1992)

[bogleech]

Dragons by tony diterlizzi looked a million times better than the standardized glitzy dragons they have now

[vintagegeekculture]

[ysengrm]

From the hoard (Dragon Magazine #1-100)

[drchucktingle]

lots of buds get excited to learn that old chuck has been playing dungeons and dragons SECOND EDITION for over 30 years and that i have long game running for over decade. so i figured i would post my collection of old books for young buckaroos to see

reason there are doubles of some is for a few reasons 1 i like to collect them 2 they are different printings you can tell by logo on front and 3 it is nice if players are using the same class to let them both have one for reference.

mysterious top right books are encyclopedia magica rare leather bound editions VERY hard to find they collect every magic item in the whole game i have one complete set and then doubles of all except for volume 4 which is generally hardest to find

mysterious top right books are encyclopedia magica rare leather bound editions VERY hard to find they collect every magic item in the whole game i have one complete set and then doubles of all except for volume 4 which is generally hardest to find

also interesting is the CHRONOMANCER handbook which is complex to explain legality of i do not think it is entirely CANON but it is an extra magic school of time magic that was briefly tried. if players do something VERY COOL i like to reward with rare spells from that book

things that are NOT included here are other editions which if have tried and always trotted back to second edition because ITS THE BEST. also i am letting some players borrow complete handbook of gnomes and halflings' and 'druid handbook' and long ago someone stole my necromancer book. LOVE IS REAL

[encyclopedia-drowica]

Let’s Talk About the Drowic Alphabet!

One of the things I want to revisit on this blog is the phonetics of Drowic, and before I rehashed my old ideas, I wanted to look at the actual alphabet that would actually turn those phonemes into language. I was typing up my thoughts to try to put together some kind of coherent justification for the Drowic alphabet I’ve come up with, and it started to get very… very long. At the risk of front-loading all of my rambling and bogging the whole post down, I have decided to skip to the fun part and put all the hows and why’s under a cut for your optional perusal.

And so, I give you… the Drowic alphabet!

Now, about that rambling...

Most followers of this blog will be familiar with the fan script “Drow Rounded” and its variants. It’s definitely become a popular alphabet, since it comes with a downloadable font and is distinct from other forms of elvish. I myself have used this alphabet in the past (you can even see it in the blog header). I don’t mean to dissuade anyone from using it, and I doubt this post will have any impact on its prevalence, but I do want to talk about it and it’s origins, and why I want to rehash the Drowic alphabet, rather than using the widely accepted fan alphabet.

The origins of the alphabet itself are a bit more murky than I would like, but I’ve done a fair amount of digging. The original “Drow Rounded” font was created in 2002 by Daniel U. Thibault for use with a Elven Kingdom of Arèthane roleplaying group.

If you are unfamiliar, as I was, Arèthane and its various related realms are a homebrew world derived from the Palladium Fantasy RPG System, borrowing various lore from sources, including AD&D, which is how we get drow in the mix.

Not that I am personally a lore purist, but from my initial research, I fail to find any discernible link between the alphabet created for the EKA and any canonical language published as part of any D&D lore, regardless of setting. So while I will humbly acknowledge the “Drow Rounded” alphabet for its prominence (if not provenance) and won’t discourage anyone from using it, I won’t be using it as one of my references with regards to developing a Drowic alphabet for the purposes of this project.

So where does that put us?

Dungeons and Dragons, as far as I am able to discern, has never created an official Drowic alphabet distinct from other Elvish alphabets. Drow are, much to their own chagrin, still elves, and are descended from cultures which shared language and writing systems with surface elves. I want to start there and see if I can’t work my way towards something which feels distinct enough from the various Elvish alphabets while still sharing a common root. To do that… we need to talk about Espruar…

The various creators who have worked on Dungeons and Dragons over the years have not always reached a consensus on lore prior to publishing (understatement of the year?). There are, from what I can tell, three distinct “Elvish” alphabets. Two of them are explicitly referred to as Espruar, which is recognized as the name of the Elvish alphabet in the Forgotten Realms setting. The third is one which was published in the 2014 5E PHB which is labeled “Elvish Script: Sample Alphabet.” There are other Elvish scripts employed throughout various art and other materials, but these are the three I want to look at the most.

As it has seniority, let’s first look at the example we have from the AD&D (1E) Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting Box Set (page 8), which I will refer to as “Runic Espruar.” I find this alphabet to be… busy. It doesn’t come across to me as an efficient alphabet (perhaps if it was a more logographic writing system?) and it seems like it would take anyone an annoyingly long time to write letters like A, Q, and S. It also lacks that… je ne sais quoi – that elegance we expect from an Elvish script (thanks largely to a certain John Ronald Reuel). I think this might be an alphabet that was developed in very early elven history – the Cuneiform of Elvish. I don’t tend to think that this is the alphabet used by any modern elvish society, but could still possibly be something found in ancient lost ruins forgotten by time.

Next, we’ll look at the example we have from the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting manual from 3.5E (page 86), which I will refer to as “Angular Espruar.” Take anything I have to say about this variant with a grain of salt because I’ll admit… I don’t like it. I find it to be very sharp with long, hard lines which gives it a similar feel to languages like Dovah and Daedric from The Elder Scrolls, or Draconic and Dwarven (see also 1E Dethek) from other D&D sources. It does function much better as a written alphabet than Runic Espruar, and comes a little closer to the elegance we would expect, but misses the mark in my opinion. It also does not seem to resemble Runic Espruar in any discernible way… it really does look like it takes greater influence from 1E Dethek. This could reasonably be a writing system developed in the early days of elven contact with other racial groups. The need to communicate quickly and concisely would be emphasized when dealing with shorter-lived races, so a more efficient writing system may have been developed to facilitate such communication. It could also have been influenced by alphabets used by other races (though I’m already far afield enough as it is, I won’t go spelunking quite that deep).

(Click here for a more in-depth fan guide on 3.5E Espruar)

Finally that leads us to the 2014 5E Players Handbook (page 123) “Elvish Script: Sample Alphabet” (ESSA) which is decidedly not Espruar, as the SRD & PHB for 5E are largely campaign setting agnostic. It does, however, contain many of the aspects of an Elvish script I’ve personally come to expect and appreciate, the elegance, shapeliness, and flow of the letters. I want my Drowic alphabet to be something somewhat akin to this in feel.

So where does that bring us? I think the best place to start with a Drowic script is likely something with common characters or shapes to Angular Espruar, but with an even more concise, efficient script which has diverged from old Espruar (possibly a common ancestral alphabet we don’t have examples from) after the drow descended into the Underdark. There were a few goals I wanted to accomplish while working on this alphabet. First, I wanted the characters to seem unique enough from one another that they’re not frustrating to try and distinguish (a personal problem I have with “Drow Rounded”). Second, I wanted to try and recapture the elegance of a more Tolkienesque Elvish script without actually taking more than vibes-based inspiration from Tengwar. Third, I wanted to make a script that was a script, as in words could be written in a single stroke without lifting one’s pen (something none of my extant references do, which provided a unique challenge for me). Lastly, I wanted to make a usable font which could be shared and downloaded for anyone to use (this last piece, I’m still working on, but keep your eyes open for that in the future). There may still be some tweaks to the script in the future as I work on getting a font made, but I hope you find it interesting in the meantime.

As a proof of concept, but also for fun, I wrote the name of one of my drow characters in the Drowic script.

Also, because this sort of thing didn't even exist when I started this blog a decade ago... I do not use any AI in any part of my creative process. Please do not use any part of this blog for AI training purposes.

[anim-ttrpgs]

have a gm who insists that story comes first. this had led to 1 dozen sessions without combat, followed by an announcement that we would be performing a 30 round combat against "infinite" level 1 guards. we were level 6 at the time. there was no way to stop "the story." i quit the campaign, immersion broken forever

The only thing worse than a player who thinks the story comes before the rules is a GM who thinks the story comes before the rules. This is not only obviously really severe railroading, but that scenario is also treating the game like a video game more than a TTRPG.

I actually think there is a lot that TTRPGs can learn from video games (like “your game should ship with playable levels”) but a scenario like that doesn’t really play to the strengths of TTRPGs as a medium.

“Survive for a set amount of time against infinite enemies” is really fun for an action video game, but will usually very quickly get repetitive in turn-based combat, especially if that combat is relatively slow to play out like in most TTRPGs.

While I don’t think a concept like this can never work (like for instance it could be a puzzle of some kind - infinite goons until the party figures out how to close the portal or whatever), I think that turn-based tactical combat in TTRPGs should almost always aim towards relatively low numbers of rounds, with majorly impactful tactical decisions to make each round. In one of the best dungeon crawls I have ever played through (it was in AD&D2e using an AD&D1e module, which in my opinion is the best way to play D&D), the most tense and nail-biting instance of combat in the entire thing lasted about 2.5 rounds. Every other instance of combat lasted 1 round, because the party either snuck up on the enemies, tactically surrounded their enemies and forced a surrender, or at one point just paid the dark lord’s mercenaries to jump sides after a tense stand-off.

Absolutely none of this was planned as part of “the story.” The only planned part of the story was “the party (mercenaries currently in the employ of the Castellan Sir Raul) are being sent to [this village] to figure out why they suddenly stopped paying taxes.” Of course the answer to that question was also already known to the GM. It’s because the dark lord’s mercenaries had been sacking the wagons carrying the taxes, and the dark lord’s lieutenant had set up a secret forward operating base in an abandoned castle in preparation for a larger invasion. How the party finds this out, however, and if they even survive doing so, is up to their own actions.

The GM didn’t adjust anything on the fly to make sure the party won, no fake dice rolls, etc.. Just playing the game straight; and it resulted in a “story” that we still talk about all the time.

A lot happened that we didn’t want to happen, too, but in the moment that’s the adversity and challenge that makes the game engaging to play, and in retrospect it makes the resulting story much better. One of the characters got taken out pretty early on in a fight with the dark lord’s spies (the ACTUAL scariest fight in the adventure, but it happened nowhere near the dungeon), and another character got badly injured by a trap (technically a monster but basically a trap since it drops from the ceiling and only attacks one person) really early into exploring the abandoned castle (the dungeon). Both characters ultimately survived. The first character was dropped to 0 HP with a dagger buried hilt deep in her gut and “died” mechanically but was able to be taken to a surgeon which in this campaign is just reskinned resurrection mechanics but with a much higher chance to fail. She spent the rest of the adventure on a cot being tended to around the clock and made a near miraculous recovery, though with -1 total Constitution. The second character was very very narrowly saved from going below 1HP by quick thinking and action on the part of everyone else in the room. If they had been just 1 round later she would’ve died.

Anyway if you are going to play D&D any edition please just play normal dungeon crawls without a plot (beyond just some kind of framing device to give the PCs a good reason to go into the dungeon), it’s what the game is built to do and itll even produce a good story a lot of the time. If you don’t like dungeon crawls please play something besides Dungeons & Dragons - and im not saying that to “gatekeep” people out of D&D I am saying that because if you don’t like dungeons then there are so many other games out there that you would probably enjoy so much more than D&D.

[theshunbun]

Kani, my level 5 Ban Lung (Earth Dragon) Geisha/Pirate from my AD&D 2e Kara-Tur game 💕