Changeling: The Lost (1st Edition Core) - Introduction

From the Back

You remember your home.

You remember what it was like, before They took you. The sound of your family's voices, the smell of your home, the colors of your neighborhood. Even after the blinding glories and pitiless dark waters of Faerie, you remember.

Your memories were a beacon. Without them, you would never have found your way back through the twisting maze of the Thorns, to collapse torn and exhausted on the cool earth of the world you were born in once more -- to find that your home was no longer yours, than an imposter had taken over your life, that you had been changed. Yours is beauty and grotesquerie, illusion and iron, insight and madness.

Where will you go now that you are Lost? Who will you love, who will you war against, who will you make of yourself? How will your tale end?

Expectations

I've read this game before, so I have a pretty good idea of what to expect - a weird, melancholy trip through a lavish world of modern high fantasy, only slightly undercut by the New World of Darkness's tendency to short-change its power levels.

The hardest part of reading this, I expect, is going to be powering through my resentment at not being able to read 2nd edition just quite yet. However, after reading Mage: The Awakening 2nd edition and missing some crucial context from 1st, I didn't want to repeat the same mistake. It's important to see how the line developed over time.

Luckily, this is one of my favorite game systems. I wound up tracking down and buying almost every supplement for 1st edition, read them all at least twice, and backed the 2nd edition kickstarter. It's inconceivable that anything could go wrong.

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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual - Reaction

This one was cute. That's probably not the reaction they were going for, but hey, I wasn't the one who chose the art. I'm not in a place where I can post photos, so I'll just have to try and describe it in a way that doesn't make me sound like a total dick.

If you were to make a movie about a sad, but creative teenager, who made up for their lack of popularity by having a rich inner life, and you wanted to show that your main character wasn't really an artist, but they did have an active imagination, you would probably direct the professionals in your art department to create something that looked exactly like the cover of the AD&D 1st edition Monster Manual.

Which is to say, if I saw something that looked like that today, I'd assume it was a professional doing an impression of an amateur. In 1979? Maybe it's the most expensive professional TSR can afford, having no contacts in the underground comics scene and only an rpg-company's budget. It's probably at least another decade before they can afford those Frazetta-inspired watercolors that I've come to associate with "D&D art."

Aside from the art, it's serviceable. It suffers from comparison to its 2nd Edition follow up, which is probably the greatest fantasy bestiary ever printed, but it delivers what it promises - plenty of monsters to use in your campaign, from the iconic (dragons, orcs, giant spiders) to the thinly-veiled pop-culture references (don't think I didn't notice that flesh golems are just one long riff on Frankenstein) to the needlessly bizarre (so, a "Thought Eater" is basically a psychically-endowed platypus skeleton that floats around in a nearby alternate dimension and steals magic spells . . ?). In other words, it set a tone early, and D&D has stuck with it for more than 40 years. I can respect that.

The only complaint I have, and this is going to sound churlish because it's fundamental to the very concept of an rpg monster book, is that AD&D monsters are kind of . . .poorly executed. I'm not talking about anything on the fiction layer here, just their mechanical implementation.

The upside is that they've got very simple and easy to use stat blocks. But the reason these blocks are so easy to use is that they all describe basically the same encounter - whittle away at this sack of hit points while avoiding these mechanically interchangeable attacks. The only thing that varies is the numbers.

Sort of. There are also special abilities, which are usually just spells from the players handbook (or inexplicable instant-death effects, like the bite of a poisonous snake), and occasional descriptions of battle tactics, which only have teeth if the DM decides to give it to them. Of course, it's probably no worse than the opposite extreme - in a game like Exalted where every serious enemy is exactly as complicated as a fully-developed player character.

 It's a hard act to balance, and not a task I envy, but I can't ignore that in our time, this is basically a solved problem - D&D 4th Edition's encounter-balanced monsters are pretty much the gold standard for rpg enemy design. Here, in AD&D world, when creatures get powers at all, they're pretty much on a daily recharge, and I can't help wondering - who is this for? Who is tracking this monster's entire day?

You know what, though, that complaint is basically nothing. Most rpg monsters are poorly executed. These were no worse than average and better than some. So overall, I'd have to call the AD&D Monster Manual a good book. Not just on the curve for older games, but in general. There's a lot to discover in its pages, and it is only slightly annoying that it mentions an Ogre Magi from Japan, a Rakshasa from India, and a Portuguese Man of War.

UKSS Contribution: This is kind of a target-rich environment here. The thing where you could subdue Dragons was included here, so that could almost carry over, but I figure a new book merits a new bit of canon.

I'm going to go with the Giant Lynx. There are a lot of giant versions of normal animals in this book, but only the Lynx could speak the common tongue and only the Lynx got a cheesy little comic where cute, cartoon adventurers expressed their shock and disbelief at this fact.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Monster Manual - Introduction

From the Back

This book provides a complete alphabetical list of all the "monsters" encountered in the various works which comprise the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons game system. It is an invaluable resource to players and dungeon masters alike.

Expectations

Ooh, back cover contradicts the DMG, do I smell trouble? No, obviously not. I'm pretty sure all that stuff about the necessity of keeping information secret from the players was mostly just posturing. I'm sure, even in the 70s, groups rotated DMs.

There's no real way this book can go wrong. It's going to be goofy D&D monsters, presented in those minimalist old-style statblocks. Worst thing I'll be able to say about it is that my brain refused to process the numbers and thus most of the book was unintelligible. But that's fine. I'm not here to run detailed analysis on each of these games, judging their numbers against an abstract notion of balance. I'm just collecting impressions. And I expect my impression of this book to be favorable.

I am hoping to be shocked by something super weird, though.

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Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide - Reaction

I think this book may be a genuine Classic. I don't necessarily mean that as an unalloyed compliment. And I don't necessarily don't mean it as a compliment. I think the book is beyond all that, beyond our petty judgements of good or bad, right or wrong. It belongs to history now, and it is only in history that it may be judged.

It's just funny. Many times I would read a bit of the Dungeon Masters Guide and I'd be stunned to find the seed of about a half-dozen flame wars I've had over the years. It's all there, right from the beginning. That's what makes it a Classic (with a capital C). It is so foundational to the hobby that even its flaws would describe whole branches of gaming's grand taxonomy.

It used to be a pet peeve of mine when amateur games (or even the occasional older professional one) would go out of their way to point out how they weren't like D&D, but I get it now. I respect Gary Gygax. I'm extremely grateful for his contributions to our shared hobby. But there were times in this book when he would talk about the nature and limits of the game, or about what made for a good roleplaying experience, and he'd be flat-out wrong.

And I don't mean this as a dig at Gygaxian-style dungeons crawls. This isn't a case where he was presenting a set of guidelines to create a particular Gary Gygax type of fun and I'm dinging him because I have a different set of preferences. After reading this book, I can, indeed, see the appeal in doing things his way.

But, he had an unfortunate tendency to not see himself inside the context of the hobby as a whole, and instead to declaim from on high as the ultimate roleplaying authority and there's no kind way to put this, but it was just obnoxious. I don't know exactly how many times it happened, because I didn't bother to keep count, but there would be whole paragraphs where he would shoot down some particular idea as being a surefire disaster that would inevitably ruin any game, and I'd know for a fact that some later game did exactly that and was positively great. But he always sounded so sure of himself, so willing to condescend to any who might disagree. There were times when I simply had to set down the book and shout "Oh, come on!" to the ether.

I'll give you an example, so you don't think that I'm pulling such a harsh criticism entirely out of my ass. Consider the following passage:

Enumeration of the limits and drawbacks which are attendant upon the monster character will always be sufficient to steer the intelligent player away from the monster approach, for in most cases it was only thought of as a likely manner of game domination. The truly experimental-type player might be allowed to play such a monster character for a time so as to satisfy curiosity, and it can then be moved to non-player status and still be an interesting part of the campaign - and the player is most likely to desire to drop the monster character once he or she has examined its potential and played that role for a time. The less intelligent players who demand to play monster characters regardless of obvious consequences will soon remove themselves from play in any event, for their own ineptness will serve to have players or monsters or traps finish them off.

He is just flat-out calling players who want to play monsters stupid. What the hell, man?! You realize that your definition of "monster" is just "any living thing that shows up in an encounter, including stuff like benign human merchants," right? And that there are tons of monsters that are just fun classical fantasy creatures, like centaurs, fairies, goblins, and snakemen? And that, despite what you said earlier about fantasy needing limits to be relatable, your selection of PC races was completely arbitrary? Or that there would be a dozen rpgs on my shelf alone that prove you wrong, some even produced by TSR.

I don't want to get too far into it. It was aggravating, but now its over. Lets move on to the bones of the book - the actual AD&D system . . .

Play BECM. Play 5th Edition. Play any number of OSR games. Google "fantasy heartbreaker" and play the one that is damned with the faintest praise. There are many games out there that try to capture the AD&D experience, and almost without exception, they wind up out-AD&Ding AD&D itself.

Look, I don't mean to be cruel here. I don't want to underplay the AD&D rulebooks as an accomplishment . . . but they needed an editor. They needed someone who didn't know the rules to go over the first draft and try to learn the rules from the manuscript. The rules for initiative (to just choose an example, avoiding the low-hanging fruit of the grappling rules) are two paragraphs (and these are full-throated Gary Gygax paragraphs, mind) long when they should be two sentences, and they still manage to be completely misleading - the party with the higher roll is said to "possess the initiative," but every subsequent example shows the party who rolled lowest with the advantage.

There are the bones of a good game here. But that game is D&D Basic.

Which isn't to say the whole book is bad. There are moments of inspiration. The last third of the main text (before the Appendices) is devoted to magic items, and those are pretty decent. Hell, more than decent - memorable, fun, occasionally iconic, and only sometimes completely baffling. I'm pretty sure it's reprinted almost word-for-word in AD&D 2nd edition, and has heavily inspired similar sections in both 3rd and 5th edition. And for good reason. It's one of the all-time greats.

Attempting to sum up my feelings for this book, I'm left with a deep conflict I don't really know how to resolve. To be blunt, I didn't like it. But I like many of the things that came out of it. I've got a ton of AD&D 2nd Edition books that are among my most prized possessions. And that makes me feel like I should like it. For the sake of the things I love, I should make peace with their immediate ancestor.

But that's not my truth. In the end, I simply did not enjoy myself while reading this book. I saw the shadows of things I would eventually come to enjoy, but they were not enough.

UKSS Contribution - This one is a bit subtle and meta, but I kind of like magic wands. Not necessarily as they are implemented mechanically - as spell batteries with limited charges - but as they are presented in the flavor text - as instruments for working a particular type of magic. I like the idea of having, say, a Wand of Illumination, which can control and manipulate light in various ways, and having that as the basis for a mage's magical discipline. To be a mage, then, is to learn to control a particular wand, with its own particular legend.

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide - Introduction

From the Back

Dungeon Masters everywhere, rejoice! Too long have you had to suffer along with crucial charts and tables spread through many works. Too long have you had to use makeshift references trying to solve the problem. You now have a complete compilation of the most valuable material for your refereeing. The Dungeon Masters Guide. Herein you will find:

Combat Matrices
Encounter Tables
Monster Attacks Alphabetically Listed
Treasure and Magic Tables and Descriptions
Gem Values By Type
Random Wilderness Terrain Generation
Suggestions on Gamemastering

And a whole lot more. It is an absolute must for every Dungeon Master!

Expectations

Surprising to see the term "game master" used so early. Not sure what the rpg scene in the late 70s was like, but it must have mutated just a little bit by this point. Whether AD&D learned anything from that remains to be seen.

Honestly, I'm not looking forward to this. I have a feeling that it's going to be dry and technical, but also weirdly specific about the "right" way to play the game. Still, it will be another core book behind me. One closer to being able to only read flavorful supplements and setting books.

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Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook - Reaction

I got my start in roleplaying with AD&D 2nd Edition. I can't say that I read those books especially closely (mainly because I doubt 14-year-old me read anything closely by my current standards), but I did read them repeatedly. So my experience of reading AD&D is odd - it's like looking at something familiar in a funhouse mirror. Everything's a bit off. A bit shabbier, less polished, but still recognizably the same.

I can't say that I like the AD&D Players Handbook. It's just filled with these inconsistencies and questionable choices. Like spell ranges being measured in inches, to represent space on a tabletop battle-mat, but then the inches themselves having contextual translations based on the conditions of the game. If your characters are outdoors 1 inch equals 10 yards. If they're indoors 1 inch equals 10 feet. But that's only for spell ranges. Areas of effect use the inch = 10 feet translation regardless of where the spells were cast. It's needlessly confusing, even before you count in the fact that sometimes the text slips up and uses true measurements in the descriptions. Like, seriously, what is "Darkness 15' Radius" even supposed to mean?

It feels weird to say this, but BECM D&D was a more sophisticated and polished game. Perhaps not surprising, given its later release, but still, I thought the "advanced" in the title signaled something. There is some added complexity, but I'm not sure it adds all that much. High attribute levels have a larger variety of effects, but in practice a simple modifier does almost everything that you'd want with much less fuss. And decoupling race and class theoretically offers more diverse character options, but in practice only the halfling thief was better than its BECM counterpart.

I was interested to see what was cut from AD&D 2nd edition - a couple of spells, the half-orc race, and the assassin class. I'm guessing they wanted to get rid of the evil options as the game became more popular. I'd bemoan the loss of prime anti-hero material, but honestly, AD&D doesn't do well with the concept. Alignments are very non-porous. Good is good and evil is evil. There's very little room for nuance, like a character who is kind towards his friends, but ruthless towards his enemies, or someone who is generally good, but pragmatic enough to use poison. The game seems to work as well as it does because its basic mode of play is utterly mercenary - go into trap-ridden underground chambers and steal treasure, possibly fighting monsters along the way, but ideally avoiding them if possible. It's all about the loot and scoot. And in such an endeavor, good and evil can work side-by-side.

Ultimately, this book is highly flawed and I don't think it has enough of an upside to overcome those flaws. Dungeons and Dragons, taken as a whole, with all of its myriad expansions and spinoffs, is fertile enough with brilliant ideas that this book is worth it for the foundation it provides, but it cannot stand alone. Hell, even to the extent that you might like old-school D&D, this book can't stand alone. It lacks all of the basic rules for combat and exploration and treasures. Those will be in the Dungeon Master's Guide, which apparently wasn't yet released at the time. It's odd to think that there was a period of time where Dungeons and Dragons was literally unplayable, but I guess it was backwards compatible. The players could work from the advanced book while the DM used the original book, and apparently that was functional, but in retrospect it could potentially be a trap for people looking to get back into old-school roleplaying.

UKSS Contribution: This game does not have the same out-of-control weirdness as BECM D&D, but that may be because it doesn't focus on setting elements. Most of its unique character comes from its spell list (roughly half the book, grr). The most interesting thing is the Clone spell. The mage creates a duplicate of the target with all of its memories and abilities, but the clone and the original cannot abide the existence of the other, potentially going insane if they persist too long.

Dungeons and Dragons resolutely avoids allowing its magic to greatly affect the setting, but I think it would be fun to explore the implications of this. Maybe tone down the forced insanity (AD&D, for all its "rulings not rules" philosophy, doesn't shy away of enforcing genre cliches in its spell descriptions) but play up the paranoia, existential angst, and transhuman decadence that would inevitably result from this power being in the hands of the rich and well-connected.

Advanced D&D Players Handbook - Introduction

From The Back

No more searching through stacks of books and magazines to find out what you need to know. The Players Handbook puts it all your fingertips, including:

All recommended character classes. Fighters, Paladins, Rangers, Magic-Users, etc.

Character Races. Dwarves, Elves, Gnomes, Half-Orcs, Humans, etc.

Character level statistics.

Equipment lists with costs.

Spell listings by level and descriptions of effects (including many new spells).

As a dungeon adventurer or a dungeon master, you will find the contents of this book to be what you have been waiting for. All useful material is now compiled under one cover, especially for the players!

Expectations

First, I have to say that I'm impressed with how weird and alienating that back cover is. It really sells the "if you don't know what this is, it's not for you" feel. I suppose that's all part of labeling your game "advanced," though. Doesn't make sense to be "advanced" Dungeons and Dragons, unless there's also a regular Dungeons and Dragons out there for you to be advanced from.

I'm not too worried about it going over my head, though. I'm a pretty old hand at this stuff, and I got my start with AD&D 2nd edition. In fact, the only real reason I have this book is because I wanted to fill the gaps in my collection. One day, I looked at my shelf and I said, "you know, you've got Basic D&D, AD&D 2nd edition, D&D 3rd edition, and D&D 4th edition (which, at the time, was the most recent), so why don't you have AD&D 1st edition?" And while that's not literally how it happened, it was the basic thought process behind why I wound up buying more than a half dozen books for a game I never intended to play.

The weird thing about AD&D 1st edition is that it is the oldest game in my collection. The copyright on my Players Handbook is 1978, a full four years before D&D Basic. Not going to lie. That surprised me. What were the newbies buying between 1978 and 1982? It can't be those books and magazines alluded to on the back cover, because they were the problem AD&D was created to solve. Maybe it was just AD&D. Maybe they saw it on the bookstore shelves and said, "you know, I'd feel more comfortable with just regular Dungeons and Dragons, but there isn't any here, so I'll just have to get advanced and jump in feet first. Gotta run before you can walk, right?"

Anyway, I'm expecting this to be pretty rough, as befitting its age. I'm also expecting, after reading the later BECMI D&D to have it be thoroughly inspired in the oddest of places. That's something to look forward to, at least.

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