Heroes of a Bygone Age - My Journey to OD&D

 I've been playing D&D (and other TTRPGs) now for 35 years. I began with AD&D 2e back in 1990 because a) a friend gifted me the books and b) it's what was available at the time. So who am I to argue with free stuff when I was 12. Fast forward and I not only went through my time with 3.5e and 5e, but have circled back to classic D&D in the last (roughly) 5 years. Why did I ever leave?!?!

I have been gobbling up anything and everything classic D&D. I explored the editions that I never played back in the day, such as B/X, BECMI, and AD&D 1e (which I am currently running and loving). The one edition that, for whatever reason, I never really looked at was 1974 original Dungeons & Dragons. I owned Swords & Wizardry for a number of years, but aside from a few one-shots, essentially ignored it in favor of OSE or a different classic edition of the game. That all changed during the course of last two years. I stumbled across the Secrets of Blackmoor documentary in 2023 and the YouTube videos by Bandit's Keep. Then last fall, after moving to Wisconsin in the summer, I attended my first (of hopefully many) ArneCon in the Twin Cities. I got meet so many OD&D enthusiasts, as well as players from Dave Arneson's gaming group and Rob Kuntz. I then began my journey into discovering the magic of original 1974 Dungeons & Dragons.

Sadly, original copies of the 1974 books are beyond my budget, but I have since made my own copies of them (+ Chainmail). In these past two years I've also been reading a lot of "Appendix N" books to see the inspirational roots of D&D. Needless to say, all of this has been enlightening and inspiring. I'm looking at the game I've loved for 35 years in a whole new light.

The question I now wrestle with a little is what to do with this newfound passion. Naturally, I want to build a world and dive into a campaign. I want to write and create content for it (in some form), like I've done with OSE in the past. So I decided to enlist my most dedicated players into this process...my kids (at least the eldest two...the 4-year-old is a bit too aligned with the forces of Chaos at this point).

We will, at least initially, be using Swords & Wizardry as our basis. But I'm also considering just crafting our own homebrew version of OD&D to better fit our world and the flavor we want at the table. I'm also not sitting down and methodically using worldbuilding techniques. Random tables will be our guide, pulling from resources such as Knave 2e, Sandbox Generator, On Downtime and Demesnes, and Table Fables 1 & 2.

I gave my kids open license to write up world elements that inspire them. We'll figure out how, where, and why to incorporate them as we go. I wanted their imagination to run wild with things that inspire them and are not as structured (i.e., hemmed in) as how I as an historian would approach these topics. Kids are great when it comes to generating such elements.

Whilst at GaryCon I then stopped by the Mythmere Games booth, chatted with Matt Finch and added to my Swords & Wizardry collection with the Referee Screen, Book of Options, and Fiends & Foes.

The next steps in this process will be to start randomly generating the world with the resources mentioned above. I will be using 3-mile hexes, as they work perfectly with the scale outlined in Sandbox Generator (they use 2-mile hexes, but 3-miles is close enough) and it scales properly with the overland movement rates in Swords & Wizardry (all divisible by 3). We already have a name for the world: Wilkuria. And one of the realms (maybe the starting kingdom) will be Zufahl (or something like that). Both are a play on words from my native German that can translate to random (Willkür and Zufall).

I plan on updating the progress here on the blog, in terms of worldbuilding, campaigning, and rules mechanics. Like I mentioned, I will start on a basis of Swords & Wizardry, but am tempted to go straight with 1974 OD&D. I will note though that I am also exploring other OD&D rules products such as Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, Delving Deeper, and Wight-Box. Domain play and warfare will be features in my campaign as well. Therefore, Chainmail and/or The Old Lords of Wonder and Ruin (by Alchemic Raker) will be used in my campaigns.

My next post in this series will hopefully feature some hand-drawn hex maps and first  randomly generated threads.