D&D 2E [COMPLETE] Looking back at the leatherette series: PHBR, DMGR, HR and more!

[Orius]

You're technically correct (the very best kind of correct), but from what I've been able to look up, Player's Option - Combat & Tactics came out in July of 1995, while PHBR15 The Complete Ninja's Handbook came out in August of that same year.

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I could have sworn it was a Q4 release, but then I might be mixing things up with the last volume of the Encyclopedia Magica which was Q4 and which I also had to back order (and IIRC, the clerk thought I was interested in Pages from the Mages instead).

I wouldn't be surprised if by then supplements had really small print runs.

Maybe but the stereotypical gamer who absolutely MUST play a ninja in every game was in place by then, and any of them playing D&D at the time probably grabbed this book if they could. Unfortunately for them, this book does not support the use of motorcycles.

On a related note, why the HELL does this iPad insist on using "turtle" as a suggestion in the autocorrect every time I type ninja?! Not funny. I pity anyone typing up some sort of historical text on Sengoku or Tokugawa Japan. God help us all if it's a text on Nanban interests in Renaissance painters.

 

[Alzrius]

There's some axiom about how wise people learn from their mistakes, but truly wise people learn from other people's mistakes. While I have no way of knowing for sure, I suspect that thought was in the minds of the authors of DMGR1 Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide.

I have a vague memory of scratching my head at the title for this one. While they're not entirely unrelated in scope, the two topics - a sourcebook on how to run a campaign and a guide to underground adventuring environments - seemed different enough that I questioned why they were together in a single volume. At least The Complete Book of Gnomes & Halflings had thematic cohesiveness in putting the two short races together; this came across like an odd blending of the AD&D 2E Dungeon Master's Guide and the old Dungeoneer's Survival Guide squished into one.

Which, if you read the book's sales page, is exactly what it is. Sort of. Apparently the bulk of this book is advice for running a campaign and being a good DM that was ultimately cut (for space reasons) from the AD&D DMG, and was subsequently padded out with some dungeon overviews that aren't technically updated material from the DSG, but might as well be (isometric maps and all).

The problem, at least for me, was that I simply had no interest in a general primer on DMing (despite the fact that, in hindsight, I could have used it). My interest was focused squarely on two things: lore and crunch, both of which are completely lacking in this particular work. Maybe it was because I didn't have a regular group at the time I picked this up, maybe it was my rebellious teenage self thinking that advice was condescension, or maybe it was just that I'm not wise enough to learn from other people's mistakes, but every time I flipped through this my eyes began to glaze over. As it was, I think I picked it up purely for completeness; it certainly wasn't because I wanted to sit down and read it.

Going back through it now, that's a shame, because when I did get a regular group, I made several of the mistakes outlined here. Having said that, I'm still struck by the fact that this is ultimately a how-to book, which means that it's made to be outgrown. Other than brushing up on the fundamentals, this isn't a tome that experienced DMs are going to need to crack open. Even the sections on dungeon adventuring are overviews about various considerations to take into account, lacking any sort of in-game material or rules mechanics; the most you can take away from these are the sample dungeons, which are keyed but still need to be populated with monsters and treasure.

I do, however, have to take a minute to talk about the interior art here. Specifically, the black and white interior art. While there are several full-page color pieces that are quite talented, the black and white artwork has a tendency to be hilarious in a way that the color pieces aren't. It's not quite the blatant humor of the old AD&D 1E illustrations, which often felt almost like doodles, but it's no less amusing for it. Look at this illustration that accompanied the book's section on "hack 'n' slash"-style gaming:

This piece deftly captures the sense of absurdity that a lot of people see as being emblematic of that style of play. Just look at how the fight's right hand is curled into a fist at his hip, the way he's knocking a goblin away just by breathing on him, or the utterly stupefied face on that one goblin who's been decapitated. It's a laugh riot! And it's not the only one:

There's just so much here to snicker at, I hardly know where to begin. Look at how the idol is wearing Madonna-style bra-cones over her two rows of breasts. The way the "Int is my dump stat!" fighter is grinning like an idiot while he scratches his head. The Rube Goldberg-style mechanical setup that requires several party members to put together in their attempt to get at the idol without triggering any traps. It's funny because it's all so true!

All laughter aside, this book is one that's timeless for how everything in it is not only edition-neutral, but for the most part is system-neutral as well. The vast majority of what's here can be used for almost any tabletop RPG, which is certainly laudable, but at the same time its didactic focus means that if it works as intended, you'll have less and less use for it. Overall, it's a DM's self-help book more than reference material; take from that what you will.

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[delericho]

I count DMGR1 as probably the best D&D product I own, of any edition. It taught me more about DMing than anything else. After the serious disappointment that was the 2nd Ed DMG, this was extremely welcome. (And, frankly, most of it is material that should have been in the DMG - either by expanding the page count of that book to closer to the 1st Ed version, or by cutting much of the material that did make it in. But I digress.)

Unfortunately, DMGR1 did also create another problem: the rest of this series then felt rather disappointing by comparison. But that's not really this book's problem.

 

[Orius]

This one I didn't have. TSR didn't keep the DM splats in print like they did with the PHB ones, and I think this one was OOP by the time I got into the game. I never saw a copy of it at any rate.

The fact that they put DMing advice cut from the DMG in here, is somewhat inexcusable IMO. There was no need to reprint saw all of the PHB chapter on combat in the DMG while leaving out stuff the DM needed to know! There's just too much stuff in the DMG that's just filler, while too many things were left out. I think that's one reason gameplay slowly shifted away from 1e norms over 2e's lifetime, because some material was just left out.

 

[TwoSix]

I count DMGR1 as probably the best D&D product I own, of any edition. It taught me more about DMing than anything else. After the serious disappointment that was the 2nd Ed DMG, this was extremely welcome. (And, frankly, most of it is material that should have been in the DMG - either by expanding the page count of that book to closer to the 1st Ed version, or by cutting much of the material that did make it in. But I digress.)

Unfortunately, DMGR1 did also create another problem: the rest of this series then felt rather disappointing by comparison. But that's not really this book's problem.

Not to jump ahead, but I think the Complete Book of Villains and Creative Campaigning were both extremely helpful books.

 

[IndigoTraveler]

Not to jump ahead, but I think the Complete Book of Villains and Creative Campaigning were both extremely helpful books.

I don't blame ya: The Necromancer book is great.

 

[Alzrius]

DMGR2 The Castle Guide is a book which I was apparently misremembering rather badly before I sat down to reread it.

Prior to my taking another look at this in anticipation of writing this post, I was under the impression that The Castle Guide was just about that: castles. That is, that the entire book was fixated on nitty-gritty details of various modularities involved with constructing a fortification in a fantasy campaign setting. And to be fair, there are elements of that in here, but not quite in the way I was thinking, and there's also more besides.

In hindsight, I suspect that I was recalling the Stronghold Builder's Guidebook more than this one. Though at this point I wouldn't put it past me to be incorrectly recalling what's in that tome also. I seem to remember that there were some cost-guidelines for various aspects of a castle in the AD&D 1E Dungeon Masters Guide as well.

The Castle Guide, however, is a book that's not only concerned with the building of castles, but also with most other aspects surrounding them. That is, it wants to go over the sort of pseudo-medieval setting where castles - in their classical idea of a keep surrounded by a curtain wall - would be built in the first place (and in this regard, hews a bit closer to the quasi-European tropes than baseline D&D does), the knights that make use of such structures and the activities they pursue (jousting and tournaments get their own chapter), and the role of the castle in war.

This last one is worth noting. While the book desperately wants you to use the Battlesystem Miniatures Rules for any sort of battle large enough to involve besieging a castle, it does dedicate an entire chapter to "quick resolution" rules that don't require a separate product to run.

I should mention that the book does try and round things out by glancing over things like demihuman approaches to knightly orders and what sort of castles other classes and races would construct. Insofar as the castles that non-fighters would raise, I confess to chuckling, simply because of how much this transported me back to the days when "name level" was a thing and everyone got their own stronghold as a matter of course (usually 9th level or thereabouts). I can almost see the divide between players who would want to pull this book out and go over the details of their new keep in exacting measure, and those who'd want to just gloss them over. Of course, anecdotal evidence suggests that most players eschewed being tied down like this, and would want to keep adventuring, leading to what I now think of as the loss of D&D's endgame.

That, however, brings me to my major criticism of this book. Maybe it's because I'm approaching this right after having gone back over the Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide, but I'm struck by how there's no real advice here about how to transition your campaign into one where having a castle - along with the attendant people and territory - under your command is a feature rather than a bug. Maybe it was because the advice in the aforementioned book was taken to be generic enough that it didn't need to be called out here, but if that was the thinking then I disagree with it heartily. The Castle Guide makes a good showing of what having a castle is for, but never gets around to why PCs would want to command one in a D&D game; that this leads to a new kind of adventuring rather than an end to it.

This is the reason I've been so enamored of the Adventurer Conqueror King System for several years now: it ties the evolving nature of the campaign into the rules at a fundamental level, to the point where it's in the name of the game. The Castle Guide, by contrast, is exactly what it says on the tin: a guide, not a system for running campaigns where the PCs are more than tomb-raiders and dungeon-delvers.

To be give credit where it's due, TSR did try this with the Birthright Campaign Setting, which I remain interested in playing to this day but grow increasingly doubtful as to whether I'll have the chance to. Even then, reading over the various supplements suggests that the line was very much a mixed bag, as it had a lot of unique enemies (found in Blood Enemies: Abominations of Cerilia, a book that I purchased before I bought the actual campaign setting) who were intriguing for the fact that they were political, economic, and military opponents as much as things to kill in a tactical skirmish, but also insisted on feeding us unappetizing supplements like Player's Secrets of Stjordvik.

But I digress. The Castle Guide is good at what it does, but does a poor job at explaining why you'd need it in the first place. That's a shame, since I think that what's here could be used as part of a great campaign, one that all too often goes ignored in favor of endlessly killing monsters and taking their stuff.

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[Voadam]

but also insisted on feeding us unappetizing supplements like Player's Secrets of Stjordvik.

Where else are you going to get a 32 page viking realm setting book written from the point of view of you as the new ruler?

Wait, I'll answer that myself: Player's Secrets of Halskapa.

 

[Voadam]

I was in the middle of a 1e long term campaign where my character had become a merchant prince member of a ruling triumvirate for a city state when the Castle Guide came out. I had very little interest in the Castle Guide and picked up stuff from the Basic Gazetteer system Minrothad Guilds and Republic of Darokin in particular to scratch any interest I had in possible D&D rulership systems. Being a D&D ruler narratively with a little focus on appropriate skills in the homebrew skill system we were using was more than adequate for any mechanics needs we had, and the in-depth rulership politics and roleplay aspects of the campaign was fantastic.

I was glad to have D&D be more narrative on this type of stuff instead of going like GURPS where everything became point buys out of your character for narrative stuff that would leave you hurting for points for anything else.

 

[Orius]

And here comes my rant.

I never had a physical copy of this book, it was another that went out of print apparently. There was however a plain text file of the book along with some image files in the 2e downloads section of WotC's website some years back and I grabbed that. The rules for castle construction were my main interest, but it was a while before I took a look at it. And in the end, I was disappointed with it.

The main disagreement goes back to what I said under Paladin's Handbook: TSR was very firmly in their "the standard D&D game is set in a psuedo-European fantasy world" mindset is here. And this book is very much written with this in mind. I've had problem with this for nearly 20 years now.

It goes back to me buying a copy of 3e's Oriental Adventures back in 2002 or 2003. There was a lot of good usable game material in there, but the idea seperating real world based cultures in a manner similar to the real world makes it harder to use the material. Look at how vast the Eurasian landmass is; to mimic it in a homebrew campaign world means the far ends of such a continent are going to be difficult to reach, and probably only with fantastic means like teleportation. So how often is non-European material really going to get used? Plus I find using real world cultural bases to be creatively restrictive. And TSR's material of this sort from that time, like Kara-Tur, the Horde, Maztica, some of the Gazetteers, etc, are also very dry and dull, because they stick too closely to their historical influences and fail to make them interesting from a gaming PoV. OTOH, using real world inspired cultures can be a useful shortcut for things like naming conventions which are harder to make up from scratch and often too easy to do badly. One can come up with something very unique, but then you run the risk of making something like Empire of the Petal Throne which might gain critical acclaim but be far too inaccessible or unfamiliar to players. It's a hard balance to maintain and it's something I struggle with in my world building.

Another problem with this book is the same as the previous book -- it has material that should have been in the DMG to begin with. @Alzrius is right, stronghold building and domain management is basically the D&D endgame, and 2e really screwed things up by putting the material here in a separate book. And because castle building and domain management really isn't enough to fill 128 pages, we get padding about how to make your game a psuedo-European snorefest.

Anyway because material that is supposed to be part of high level gaming got shoved into stuff like splats or a campaign setting that was released as TSR entered its terminal decline, it became a less important aspect of the game. Then when 3e came along, and players really started to notice the balance problems of high level play, there was no end game to transition to. 5e gives some brief lip service to it in its DMG, but I can't comment on whether later material in the edition covers it.