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

[Alzrius]

For the final book in the DMGR line, we're going out to sea and beneath the waves! That's right, it's DMGR9 Of Ships and the Sea, which brings us to the nautical realms of singing pirates, mermaid princesses, and anthropomorphic sponges! Except, of course, that this is D&D, so you'll find exactly none of those things here.

Yeah, I'll be honest here: waterborne adventuring - whether on ships or underwater - has never interested me. As much as I like pages and pages of new rules, those can only do so much to capture my attention when the topic that they're quantifying is one I don't care very much about. That's because adventuring in the water always just seemed like a big middle finger to adventurers. I know it isn't meant to be that way, but it always seems to come down to two things: 1) massive changes to various rules, all of which hamper, impede, or restrict what the PCs can do, and 2) intelligent enemies targeting whatever's allowing the PCs to breathe and/or keeping them mobile.

That last one doesn't sound like a big deal when you get down to it - how many enemies can really afford to cast dispel magic over and over again in hopes of knocking out a presumed water breathing spell, or will somehow intuit that someone's wearing a helm of underwater action and try to steal/sunder it? - but that sort of thing tends to come up for big, climactic boss fights. This is D&D; spellcasters are everywhere, and you can't expect those guys not to go for the throat when it's a battle to the death. And yet every spellcasting kraken and sahuagin high priestess and ancient sea wyrm seems to forget that they can just knock out the PCs' life support magic and then let the environment do their work for them.

For that matter, point #1 is kind of the same issue. Even if you're fighting on the deck of a ship, expect any monster that clamors up over the side to try and knock you into the drink, where you're going to be hit with massive environmental debuffs. The whole thing is a sticky wicket from top to bottom, unless you're playing a race whose natural environment is underwater, in which case you're either playing an entire undersea campaign (which probably makes you the only one) or you're comfortable taking, in all likelihood, some degree of penalties for spending time on land, which is where most of the action's going to be.

Needless to say, this was a book that I turned my nose up at time and again. The DriveThruRPG sales page says that DMGR9 had a small print run, but I could swear that I saw this everywhere, in store after store, untouched...though I suppose that explains why WotC wouldn't feel inclined to print it again. As with quite a few other leatherettes, I picked it up purely to fill out the collection.

As it was, when I first sat down to read this, I remember being quite exasperated at how this book felt compelled to reinvent the wheel. I'd picked up a copy of the Naval Battle Rules: The Seas of Cerilia before this, mostly because I was going through a mass-combat kick, and the rules for ship-scale battles weren't usable with what's here. The same is true for FOR3 Pirates of the Fallen Stars.

The actual underwater adventuring rules are slightly better in this regard, mostly because - outside of some low-level overviewing in the DMG - the topic hadn't really been covered much in AD&D 2E. Which, I maintain, is evidence of how unappealing it is. The topic got some coverage in GA1 The Murky Deep, for example, and The Inner Planes (i.e. the Elemental Plane of Water), and probably sporadic coverage elsewhere. I suspect that it was a big part of Evil Tide, Night of the Shark, and Sea of Blood - that is, the three "Monstrous Arcana" adventures that went with The Sea Devils - which were apparently meant to be used in tandem with this book.

For what it's worth, I don't hate all aquatic sourcebooks; Sea of Fallen Stars was absolutely packed with new lore and PC-facing information, a lot of it new races, and was something I quite enjoyed; that book made me believe that it might really have been possible to do an entire underwater campaign, even if I still doubt anyone ever did. Since, you know, a lot of enemies - not all of them, but a lot of them - will have an easy way to escape:


Now, this is usually the part of the overview where I go over some of the specifics...but in all honesty, what's the point? You already know exactly what's in here. It's rules for being on a ship, piloting a ship, ships in combat, combat modifiers for fighting underwater, spell modifiers for using magic underwater, a handful of underwater-specific spells and magic items, underwater environmental effects, etc. I don't know how a book about the wettest of environments can be so dry.

Overall, this book felt - for lack of a better word - perfunctory. It was done because waterborne scenarios are the go-to for "switch up the environment" adventures. Sailing and swimming are both different enough from being on land that they require a boatload (heh) of new rules to adjudicate. The only real question was if there was enough to make a stand-alone sourcebook for it all instead of cramming it into a more generic book on "unusual adventure locales" or something like that. Someone decided that there were, and so this was what we got, ending the DMGRs not with a splash, but with a whimper.

Buried treasure, this one was not.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Voadam]

In 3e I got a copy of Broadsides! by Living Imagination and read it through. It had a section on running boats and naval combat and I thought it was a great set of simulation rules including things like momentum and currents and wind direction for sailing. It was really neat if you wanted realistic boat chases and such, but I knew while I appreciated the rules (I've done enough canoeing to appreciate momentum and currents and issues in turning boats) I was never going to use them. When I play D&D I generally want the focus to be on the boat narratively as a means of transport, as a location, and the interactions to be more focused on things boarding your boat to fight you, not navigation rolls or tracking realistic position relative to another boat on a map.

And my signature character is a viking sometimes merchant wizard who did a lot of spelljamming and traveling on boats in games and I've run boat focused adventures like RA2 Ship of Horror.

The closest I got to buying specific ship rules during the AD&D period would have been Basic's GAZ9 The Minrothad Guilds which had ship combat rules, a merchant prince magical class, speculative trading rules, a developed setting area with a mercantile focus, and trade route maps. I never really ended up using it though.

 

[Orius]

Os Ships and the Sea is an okay reference myself, at least I don't actively dislike it like The Castle Guide or Sages and Specialists.

The main issue with specific rules for ship combat is that they were tied in with specific campaign settings -- Birthright and the Realms for the examples mentioned -- where a core set of rules that could be used anywhere would have been the better approach. I personally didn't bother with a lot of the settings myself, so it never helped when they had rules that would have been useful outside the setting. It's really part of a general problem with 2e as a whole. This is a book that should have been done several years earlier TBH.

The naval combat rules do seem to be pretty complicated though. I suspect they're a lot of trouble, but I've never really gotten any opinions from people who've actually used them.

The underwater rules are very comprehensive. There were such rules and guidelines before in 2e, but they were scattered around; this book at least presents a single, definitive set of rules for underwater adventuring.

As for the sahuagin sourcebook and adventures, TSR seemed to have an aquatic theme running for 1997. There was this book, the sahuagin stuff, and the fourth MC Annual, which compiled a lot of various aquatic monsters together. TSR's bankruptcy disrupted that though, with the MC being delayed until the end of 1998.

Anyway, I think this is a useful book to fill out a 2e library, and it should be very useful if running any sort of aquatic campaign, but it's also a set of rules that won't be needed all the time.

 

[delericho]

"Of the Ships and Sea" has the distinction of being the last 2nd Edition book I purchased, and I absolutely got it to solely round out my collection (of the "blue cover" books). I'm sure I read it, but equally sure I never used it for anything - I had been taking an enforced break from gaming for about a year at that time, and would only ever run one more 2nd Ed campaign.

 

[Alzrius]

With the PHBRs and DMGRs behind us at last, we come now to the Historical Reference series. That's a bit awkward for me, simply because there are several critiques I have about these works as a whole, rather than being aimed at any of their constituent products. I'm going to set those aside (at least for now), however, in favor of trying to cover each book on its own merits and foibles.

With that said, let's turn our attention to HR1 Vikings. These guys need no introduction, being the ones who gave us Thor, "spear and magic helmet," and showed us all how to train dragons. Though for me, they'll always be the most awesome side to choose when playing a rousing game of Crossbows and Catapults.

D&D, however, doesn't quite slot vikings into any of those molds. In fact, while the Norse pantheon tends to remain one of the top-three most popular real-world mythologies to appear in the game (alongside the Greek and Egyptian gods), Vikings themselves don't appear in the game very much. Mystara got them in GAZ7 The Northern Reaches, and Birthright spotlighted their Viking analogues in Tribes of the Heartless Waste, but beyond that you had to start looking for more generic "barbarians in cold climates" to find similar parallels, such as the various Uthgardt tribes of the Forgotten Realms, covered in The North: Guide to the Savage Frontier or the Wolf Nomads of Greyhawk, but even then, the Viking connections become sketchier.

While it goes without saying, this book - like all of the Historical Reference works - doesn't add to those campaigns (outside of whatever cherry-picking a DM might decide to use it for). Like all of this particular series, it's not a generic sourcebook per se, but rather is set on semi-historical Earth, in this case in the Nordic region of Europe in a period covering roughly the 9th through 12th centuries. I'll also take a moment to note that this book (like the rest of the HRs) included a poster map attached in the back; if you're a collector, be aware of that if and when you go shopping for used copies.

Having said all of that, this book sets the pattern for the rest of the series in how it tries to straddle the line between being a game resource and also being a primer to a historical culture. In terms of what's here, it does a fairly decent job, though I suspect I think that because this one seems to skew just a little bit more toward game resources than trying to turn readers into armchair experts when it comes to Vikings.

For instance, there are only two available races here: humans and trollborn. The former get a Gift, which has you roll a d20 for some quirk that you're born with, either because of the Norns, the actions of your ancestors, or something else. Ironically, this isn't necessarily a straight power-up: you can get detrimental Gifts, or no Gift at all. Trollborn are the offspring of humans and Norse trolls (whom the book calls out aren't like typical D&D trolls), but otherwise come across as your typical demihuman race, with some ability modifiers and infravision, class restrictions and level limits, etc. Honestly, I would really have liked to see some of those appear in a Planescape module somewhere; you're really telling me that nothing in this book could be found on the plane of Ysgard?

It's the new classes that are most notable, however. Or rather, one new class. While we do get a special berserker class - who have shapeshifting powers in addition to your standard "kill everything in sight" battle-fury - we also get a runecaster class. And this is a martial class, not a spellcaster. Even so, their magic system gets its own chapter in the book; long story short is that you can't really use runes in combat: each one takes 15 + 1d20 minutes to activate, has several usage requirements that aren't individually burdensome but can be collectively limiting (e.g. runes must be carved instead of just drawn, must be activated as soon as they're carved, require a successful Wisdom check, etc.). However, they're never "used up," and so can be put to use as often as you want, though the listed runes are all fairly tame in what they can accomplish (e.g. the rune to speak with animals, which apparently has no limit on its duration, will only let you speak to a single specific animal each time you use it).

If that of that sounds familiar, I should note, it's because this is almost identical to the rune magic and runecaster class found in FOR7 Giantcraft. By contrast, the totemic inscriptions in FOR5 Elves of Evermeet are similar, even if several of the particulars are different.

After this, however, the mechanical alterations largely become an issue of what's not to be found, i.e. disallowing various classes, not using certain monsters, etc. This isn't something I dislike; removing existing options is - to my mind - just as important for creating the feel of a given campaign. That said, I always think of how the Dark Sun campaign made sure to add new stuff in conjunction with refusing various other options; this book can't really go that far, since it's one product rather than a game line. The end result is that, while the aforementioned new stuff is nice, this still feels somewhat minimalistic due to how much it rules out.

Actually, no, "minimalistic" isn't the right term. It's more that there's an expectation that what you do use will have greater depth to it. Monsters aren't going to just be throwaway encounters, and magic items aren't just a dime-a-dozen items sitting around in dungeons waiting to be looted; that's the expectation here. It's more about impact than quantity, though to be fair that's more me reading between the lines than anything I recall the book explicitly saying (and is, once again, something that could easily apply to the HR series as a whole).

I've been focusing on the mechanical aspects of the book because those are the parts that interest me most. In terms of its overview of Viking life, the book does okay, but I always found these to be the metaphorical vegetables on my plate. It can absolutely be useful to know about the different strata of Viking society, along with a timeline of events, but I'm of the opinion that the book would have been better off presenting new monsters, highlighting more about the Norse gods, or even presenting some sample adventures. As it is, this feels like it's going just far enough to make sure we can get the pastiche correct, and no farther.

That's really my big critique for this book. As much as I liked what it gives us, at the end of the day it's like being given a bunch of lumber and tools and told to build a house. I still need a blueprint - that is, practical advise on adventuring in a Viking setting - in order to get started. This tells me what a Viking campaign would have, but not how it would play.

That won't be the last time I make that complaint.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Sithlord]

With the PHBRs and DMGRs behind us at last, we come now to the Historical Reference series. That's a bit awkward for me, simply because there are several critiques I have about these works as a whole, rather than being aimed at any of their constituent products. I'm going to set those aside (at least for now), however, in favor of trying to cover each book on its own merits and foibles.

With that said, let's turn our attention to HR1 Vikings. These guys need no introduction, being the ones who gave us Thor, "spear and magic helmet," and showed us all how to train dragons. Though for me, they'll always be the most awesome side to choose when playing a rousing game of Crossbows and Catapults.

D&D, however, doesn't quite slot vikings into any of those molds. In fact, while the Norse pantheon tends to remain one of the top-three most popular real-world mythologies to appear in the game (alongside the Greek and Egyptian gods), Vikings themselves don't appear in the game very much. Mystara got them in GAZ7 The Northern Reaches, and Birthright spotlighted their Viking analogues in Tribes of the Heartless Waste, but beyond that you had to start looking for more generic "barbarians in cold climates" to find similar parallels, such as the various Uthgardt tribes of the Forgotten Realms, covered in The North: Guide to the Savage Frontier or the Wolf Nomads of Greyhawk, but even then, the Viking connections become sketchier.

While it goes without saying, this book - like all of the Historical Reference works - doesn't add to those campaigns (outside of whatever cherry-picking a DM might decide to use it for). Like all of this particular series, it's not a generic sourcebook per se, but rather is set on semi-historical Earth, in this case in the Nordic region of Europe in a period covering roughly the 9th through 12th centuries. I'll also take a moment to note that this book (like the rest of the HRs) included a poster map attached in the back; if you're a collector, be aware of that if and when you go shopping for used copies.

Having said all of that, this book sets the pattern for the rest of the series in how it tries to straddle the line between being a game resource and also being a primer to a historical culture. In terms of what's here, it does a fairly decent job, though I suspect I think that because this one seems to skew just a little bit more toward game resources than trying to turn readers into armchair experts when it comes to Vikings.

For instance, there are only two available races here: humans and trollborn. The former get a Gift, which has you roll a d20 for some quirk that you're born with, either because of the Norns, the actions of your ancestors, or something else. Ironically, this isn't necessarily a straight power-up: you can get detrimental Gifts, or no Gift at all. Trollborn are the offspring of humans and Norse trolls (whom the book calls out aren't like typical D&D trolls), but otherwise come across as your typical demihuman race, with some ability modifiers and infravision, class restrictions and level limits, etc. Honestly, I would really have liked to see some of those appear in a Planescape module somewhere; you're really telling me that nothing in this book could be found on the plane of Ysgard?

It's the new classes that are most notable, however. Or rather, one new class. While we do get a special berserker class - who have shapeshifting powers in addition to your standard "kill everything in sight" battle-fury - we also get a runecaster class. And this is a martial class, not a spellcaster. Even so, their magic system gets its own chapter in the book; long story short is that you can't really use runes in combat: each one takes 15 + 1d20 minutes to activate, has several usage requirements that aren't individually burdensome but can be collectively limiting (e.g. runes must be carved instead of just drawn, must be activated as soon as they're carved, require a successful Wisdom check, etc.). However, they're never "used up," and so can be put to use as often as you want, though the listed runes are all fairly tame in what they can accomplish (e.g. the rune to speak with animals, which apparently has no limit on its duration, will only let you speak to a single specific animal each time you use it).

If that of that sounds familiar, I should note, it's because this is almost identical to the rune magic and runecaster class found in FOR7 Giantcraft. By contrast, the totemic inscriptions in FOR5 Elves of Evermeet are similar, even if several of the particulars are different.

After this, however, the mechanical alterations largely become an issue of what's not to be found, i.e. disallowing various classes, not using certain monsters, etc. This isn't something I dislike; removing existing options is - to my mind - just as important for creating the feel of a given campaign. That said, I always think of how the Dark Sun campaign made sure to add new stuff in conjunction with refusing various other options; this book can't really go that far, since it's one product rather than a game line. The end result is that, while the aforementioned new stuff is nice, this still feels somewhat minimalistic due to how much it rules out.

Actually, no, "minimalistic" isn't the right term. It's more that there's an expectation that what you do use will have greater depth to it. Monsters aren't going to just be throwaway encounters, and magic items aren't just a dime-a-dozen items sitting around in dungeons waiting to be looted; that's the expectation here. It's more about impact than quantity, though to be fair that's more me reading between the lines than anything I recall the book explicitly saying (and is, once again, something that could easily apply to the HR series as a whole).

I've been focusing on the mechanical aspects of the book because those are the parts that interest me most. In terms of its overview of Viking life, the book does okay, but I always found these to be the metaphorical vegetables on my plate. It can absolutely be useful to know about the different strata of Viking society, along with a timeline of events, but I'm of the opinion that the book would have been better off presenting new monsters, highlighting more about the Norse gods, or even presenting some sample adventures. As it is, this feels like it's going just far enough to make sure we can get the pastiche correct, and no farther.

That's really my big critique for this book. As much as I liked what it gives us, at the end of the day it's like being given a bunch of lumber and tools and told to build a house. I still need a blueprint - that is, practical advise on adventuring in a Viking setting - in order to get started. This tells me what a Viking campaign would have, but not how it would play.

That won't be the last time I make that complaint.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

I love randomly generated abilities. Love them. Anything to offset min/maxing.

 

[Voadam]

but beyond that you had to start looking for more generic "barbarians in cold climates" to find similar parallels, such as the various Uthgardt tribes of the Forgotten Realms, covered in The North: Guide to the Savage Frontier or the Wolf Nomads of Greyhawk, but even then, the Viking connections become sketchier.

FR had specifically fantasy vikings who invaded the Moonshaes and the short eastern europeanish Rashemi berserkers.

Greyhawk had the Snow, Frost, Ice, and Hold of Stonefist kingdoms as the explicitly fantasy viking analogues.

 

[Orius]

I think FR's Viking equivalents come from Ruathym, and there's some Viking touches with Luskan. Birthright's Vikings come from Rjurik which cross them with Celtic flavor, Vosgaard is a Slavic/Mongol culture.

The poster maps aren't really a big deal unless you're a collector and completeness matters; the HR series describes real world historical cultures so if you really need a map, grab an atlas. Or Google Earth. The maps generally tend to reflect each culture's view of the world anyway.

The restrictions don't bother me to much; some D&Disms really don't work in the real world. And it makes sense to put the mythological monsters with the cultures that created them.

The thing that bothers me about the series as a whole is that I don't think D&D works for the real world very well at all. The series itself has some good entries, but even a magical Earth, which is a given possibility with the series, kind of doesn't work. I tried getting some of these books after the World Builder's Guidebook pointed them out as inspiration for real world cultural analogs, but I didn't think they were as useful as they could be. As a whole I found them disappointing.

Still, this wasn't a bad start to the series. I just don't find it to be that useful, and it's one of the better HR books.

The minimalism might come from the fact the HR series ran 96 pages rather than the usual 128 pages typical of 2e's softbacks.

 

[delericho]

We're now onto books that I don't own - I made sure to get all the PHBR and DMGR books, but skipped much of the HR series. I've always regretted that somewhat, as these books tend to be extremely well regarded. On the other hand, I made fairly little use of the few I do own, so maybe I'm not missing that much.

 

[Orius]

That depends on how much you want to run a game in the real world or not. The HR series is focused on setting up anything from a strictly historical game, to a more fantastic magical Earth where monsters and magic exist, but it's going to be much more low magic than a typical D&D game. There's usually not a lot of crunch that's useful for a homebrew campaign.