D&D 2E [COMPLETE] Looking back at the limited series: Player's Option, Monstrous Arcana, Odyssey, and more!

[Alzrius]

Let's just put this front and center: the next book in the "Option" series, Dungeon Master's Option: High-Level Campaigns is (to my mind) the single best take on the subject in the whole of D&D.

While it was preceded by BECMI's Master Set, and followed by 3E's Epic Level Handbook, I feel confident that the flag regarding the best book about adventuring once your party's levels have hit the double digits can be planted here. Of course, one might argue that those are relatively unimpressive contenders, and I won't say that everything here is superb by any means - in fact, a lot of what's in this book was first seen elsewhere - but faint praise is still praise, and this supplement deserves it.

It's to HLC's credit (anyone notice how this book seems to defy being easily reduced to its initials? You see the other books in the series being abbreviated as C&T, S&P, etc., but not this one) that it doesn't take a hard-line view on what "high-level" means. Unless I missed a notation somewhere, the book just sort of assumes that it starts right around level 10 or so - that "double digits" mention I made in the previous paragraph wasn't idle - and goes up from there. Given how the 21-30 range is so often dismissed as being irrelevant for how most campaigns never even come close to it (it's no coincidence that 4th Edition never got a Dungeon Master's Guide 3) and/or is disdained as the realm of power-gaming munchkins, it's perhaps no surprise that the book takes a more expansive view.

That's actually one of the points that's stuck with me ever since I first read this supplement: it flat-out stated, as a universal rule unbound from any particular campaign setting, that 30th level was the ceiling for character advancement, full stop. I mention that because AD&D 2nd Edition, more than any other iteration of the game, waffled back and forth over just how high characters could potentially advance.

Really, it's the only version of the game to be that wishy-washy when it came to whether or not there was a hard limit on character leveling. Original D&D, AD&D 1st Edition, and D&D 3rd Edition (via the ELH) all made it clear that characters could potentially gain infinite levels (demihuman limits notwithstanding). Holmes Basic, B/X, and BECMI all had limits in the levels their respective boxed sets covered, all the way to BECMI offering thirty-six levels for mortals, another thirty-six levels for Immortals, and then dared you to do it all over again. And of course, 4th Edition said right out of the box that you couldn't go past 30th level, with 5E doing the same for 20th (plus epic boons, of course).

But AD&D 2nd Edition? Well, the Core Rulebooks only present twenty levels for the various classes, with no rules about gaining any others, but (if I recall correctly) it doesn't explicitly address things one way or another. Worse, supplements quickly came out that went back-and-forth on the issue in a rather confusing manner. For instance, very early in 2E's life, we had Forgotten Realms Adventures reintroducing unlimited leveling (even if the expanded spell tables it gave for wizards and clerics stopped at 30th level), while PHBR4 The Complete Wizard's Handbook reinforced that message (albeit with expanded spell tables going to 32nd level), as did DMGR7 The Complete Book of Necromancers. But Dragon Kings would cap progression at 30th level, though its status as being specific to Dark Sun would confuse the issue somewhat. At least Netheril: Empire of Magic, when it allowed characters to reach 45th(!) level, would say that was limited to that particular time, after which the gods lowered the ceiling.

So yeah, having this sourcebook say, once and for all, that 30th level was as high as any character could go was really the last word on the issue (even if that Netheril boxed set came out after this).

For what it's worth, the post-20th-level stuff is really confined to the book's last chapter anyway, and even then it takes a much more conservative tone than, say, 3E's Epic Level Handbook did. The introduction of "skills" as powers (with mechanics similar to nonweapon proficiencies) was a nice touch, particularly since they could in many cases be taken well before 20th level. There were also new abilities that were automatically unlocked beyond level twenty as well, and while I recall liking these, I'm a bit irked by how the high-level specialist wizard abilities from PHBR4 weren't reprinted here.

Also, remember way back in my look back at PHBR2 The Complete Thief's Handbook when I said:

On a mild tangent, I can't remember if PHBR2 was where they first floated the idea of allowing thief skills to be raised above 95%, but only in terms of compensating for penalties. That is, you could push your Hide in Shadows score up to 120%, for example, but you'd still only have a 95% chance of success when you rolled; it was just that when you wore scale mail (-50%), your adjusted chance of success would be 70% rather than 45%. But I think that optional rule was floated elsewhere, and I'm misremembering.

Well, it turns out that was here! Man do I love the elegant simplicity of that rule. I'm not even that fond of thieves, but I really like how smartly that solves the issue of capping their abilities. Just brilliant.

One other "epic" level thing that we got here was true dweomers, although whenever I come across that term, I feel like it needs to be capitalized. True Dweomers. Not like all those false dweomers your spellcasters have been using up until now. While very clearly the ancestor of the epic-level spell system we'd get in 3E, my impression is that they didn't live up to how awesome a moniker like "True Dweomers" sounded. I mean, I suppose that if you have to err, err on the side of caution, but these spells just didn't come across as the mightiest applications of magic. Just look at the examples: neja's toadstool...turned a character into a toadstool; is there a reason you can't just polymorph other them into a gerbil? Ratecliff's deadly finger is a hopped up finger of death spell that makes it harder than normal to resurrect someone. Yunni's herald sends a message and brings back a reply, which is about as un-epic as it gets.

Honestly, the best true dweomers I ever saw (which, if I recall correctly, were the only time they appeared outside of this book) were the artificial single-caster recreations of the rain of colorless fire and the invoked devastation that your characters could find in Reverse Dungeon. Even then, the book didn't bother with their details, just noting that casting either one destroyed you and everything else within a one-mile radius.

That said, I still found this better than the chapter on spell duels. Why oh why did anyone need that? It's the wizard version of a jousting match, and I've never understood why anyone would want to role-play what's essentially a sports match against someone else instead of raiding a dungeon, or assaulting a lich lord's keep, or besieging an evil temple, etc. Even now, my eyes glaze over when I read this.

If that sounds like a lot of complaining for a book whose praises I was singing when I started this entry, these are the low points in what's otherwise a good book. The first two chapters have a lot of good advice for running adventures, and while they're mostly germane to higher-level stuff - such as the tables for varying levels of technology, magic, and even the passage of time, on other worlds (much like what we got in the AD&D 1E Manual of the Planes) - they could almost have come right out of the Dungeon Master's Guide or DMGR1 Campaign Sourcebook and Catacomb Guide.

Throw in expanded clarifications of various spells and magic items (much like what we saw in the AD&D 1E DMG) and rules for creating/recharging magic items (somewhat truncated from how many pages they needed in the Book of Artifacts), and that's the book.

Now, that probably all sounds like a hodgepodge of stuff, but similar to Combat & Tactics, what's going on here is that the book wants to be a one-stop shop of various materials that are likely to come up during a campaign that's hit the higher-levels. From general advice, to overviews on spells, to creating magic items, to building True Dweomers (and running spell duels, I guess), to going past level twenty, this book tries to cover all the bases without getting bogged down in any one aspect of the play. To that end, I think it succeeds more than it fails, and so I can't bring myself to begrudge this supplement for what it does.

While it could have been better, there are plenty of examples for how it could easily have been worse, and so what's here is good enough for me.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Voadam]

I thought HLC was decent but I liked the Mayfair Games Role Aids boxed set for Archmagic much more for past 9th level magic. FR had some fun epic power AD&D magic with mythals and Karsus's Ascension and Netheril stuff and Dragon Kings has great magic psionic epic stuff that is fairly setting specific, but Archmagic was focused on straight AD&D big magic.

 

[delericho]

High-level play is something that I've always loved in theory, but have never quite loved in practice. In nearly 35 years of play, most of it DMing D&D in various incarnations, I have seen parties get to 10th level or above 'fairly' on, I think, four occasions - one in 2nd Ed, one 3.0e, and two 3.5e. (I do have two 5e campaigns currently in progress, one at 9th level and likely to hit 10th just before the end; one at 8th level with no end yet in sight.)

(By 'fairly' I mean they started at low level and didn't use some sort of cheat to level up really quickly.)

In each case, I've been relieved when the campaign finally came to its end, as the burden of running the game had come to outweigh the pleasure.

And that pretty much sums up my opinion of HLC as a work - I really want to love it, but I just don't.

 

[Jack Daniel]

HLC was one of the very few physical rulebooks I owned as a kid. (In fact, my whole collection in the 90s amounted to: the 1e and 2e PHBs, the 2e DMG, OA, the CNHB, and HLC). I adored this book, even though I never got to use it in play — because by the time we actually saw a campaign run up into the high levels, it was time to convert to 3rd edition. (And so my swashbuckling, piratical 2e thief, whose level was somewhere in the low teens at the time, became a 3e rogue — who would eventually retire just before reaching 23rd level, but that happened before the 3e ELHB came out, so he surpassed 20th using the rules from the FRCS.)

 

[Orius]

HLC offers the DM some pretty solid advice, but I've never played high enough to see how well the crunch runs. My last 2e game did get right to the edge of old name level, but I had no plans of using HLC because I wanted to switch over to 3e when the campaign wrapped up.

 

[Alzrius]

In many ways, this next supplement is the bookend to the "Option" series. Not because it was necessarily the last to use that particular designation, but because it ended the mainstay entries for it. This is the fourth sourcebook in a series of sourcebooks, all of which offered a variety of modular options for use in any AD&D 2E game. After this, we'd get an adventure and a repackaged (pseudo-)campaign setting. So in a way, this is was the beginning of the end of the series; or at least, I think of it that way, since the next two products are ones I didn't pick up until some time later.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Up next is the magical counterpoint to Combat & Tactics, expands on the options in Skills & Powers, and offers more useful toys for spellcasters than the true dweomers from High-Level Campaigns. Yes, we come now to Tome of Magic II: Tome Harder Player's Option: Spells & Magic.

The stricken-through text above is only half in jest, I should note. While this book isn't technically a successor to the ToM, it honestly feels like it could be, as it presents new types of wizards that are fit for any campaign, expansions and changes for priest characters, and a variety of new spells. It's just that this time it folds in some related material regarding proficiencies, creating/recharging magic items (again; after the BoA and HLC, did we really need that a third time?), and a few chapters of optional rules.

The big winner here, at least for me, is the massive expansion of specialist wizards. Rather than simply dumping a bunch of new options on us, this book smartly offers alternative ways to categorize arcane magic, each of which can be specialized in with the classic eight designations that we all know and love (abjuration, conjuration, divination, enchantment, evocation, illusion, necromancy, and transmutation) are the "schools of philosophy," as they're based around particular thematic applications of spellcraft. Stepping back from this are "schools of effect," where a particular energy is utilized to various ends (e.g. a fire mage might summon fire elementals, mesmerize someone with a fire charm spell, or simply blast them with a fireball), including force, shadow, and the four elements, among others. And stepping even further back from that are the "schools of thaumaturgy," where the difference is in the method of casting, so you can have mages who sing their spells into existence, alchemists who need reagents, geometers drawing magic circles, etc.

What really did it for me here was how this series of alternative ways of dividing up the various specialists can be utilized from an in-game standpoint as easily as a meta-game one. It's easy, for instance, to envision a stodgy old magical college where the schools of philosophy are treated like bedrock institutions, and the schools of effect are only begrudgingly given minor recognition while the schools of thaumaturgy are dismissed outright, or even suppressed. It's little things like that which spur the imagination.

Priest characters do get some new classes of their own, though I have to note that three of them - the monk, the shaman, and the crusader - were also found in the Forgotten Realms' (excellent) Faiths & Avatars sourcebook, which also had the all-new mystic. I bring that up because I'm fairly certain that I got that book first, despite its debuting a few months after SaM (because I can't abbreviate this book as S&M, for obvious reasons), so to be that's where they came from.

I don't really need to note that there was also a crusader class in FOR10 Warriors and Priests of the Realms (and even if I did, I've already talked about it anyway), so I won't. Though it's worth noting that by this point TSR was pretty clearly running out of class names. We would also get another shaman (imported from Mayfair Games) in Shaman, along with the barbarian shaman in PHBR14 The Complete Barbarian's Handbook, along with a new monk a few years later in The Scarlet Brotherhood. That's not even counting the various kits that had made the rounds by that point. Clearly, someone up in Lake Geneva wasn't consulting their thesaurus.

Where they did a good job coming up with new names, however, was for the spellcasting classes that used the all-new spell point system! By the mid-90s, the use of "MP" in various games (many of them video games) had already grown to great to ignore, and so it's no surprise that - alongside how Skills & Powers had seen fit to make use of point-based character building (at least somewhat) - this book allowed for spell point-based spellcasting. And rather than simply laying out some rules to translate spell levels to points, they actually presented several new classes to go with it, such as the alienist, the channeler, the warlock, and others. They even offered up alternative versions of Dark Sun's defilers and preservers!

I feel it necessary to note how far out of its way the book went to make these classes feel different in ways that went beyond their use of spell points. Channelers, for instance, used a fatigue system where they could potentially strain themselves to death if they used too much magic. Warlocks utilized a corruption system that was openly ported over from Ravenloft's dark powers checks. Alienists had percentage chances of going mad, along with various forms of madness presented. The book even made use of colored borders around each class's layout, which remains a very striking way of commanding visual attention. My only wish is that these had followed the pattern established earlier in the book of calling these as "schools of" something. "Schools of arcanism" perhaps, since they seem to deal with different sources of magical energy?

Less notable than any of the above, but just as interesting to me, were the slight clean-ups that the various spellcasting classes got. For instance, this is where the arcane school of "lesser divination," which no specialist could give up, became the "universal" school, including shuffling a few spells around. Similarly, clerics and druids had some minor reshuffling of their sphere access. Little details like this were absolute candy to my inner nitpicker.

The rest of the book doesn't quite live up to its best parts, though it's by no means bad. The discussion about whether or not to use material components (remember, they were optional in AD&D 2E) basically boils down to "it can be a headache, unless you think it's fun." The section on proficiencies seemed almost obligatory (and the rules for signature spells just didn't wow me, for whatever reason). The expansions to the Skills & Powers materials were nice, but were fairly brief sections that were scattered throughout the book's chapters, and so likewise made little impact on me.

I do have to give some props to the new rules offered in the Spells in Combat chapter. Ranging from adjudicating how hard it is to detect someone's casting a spell to various collateral effects (e.g. a lightning bolt creates a bright flash that can inflict a -1 penalty to attack rolls for 1d3 rounds), to the "critical strike" options, these felt like some nice combat options that, for once, didn't involve learning new spells, taking new proficiencies, or taking a particular kit. I suspect that, if used in conjunction with the optional combat rules in C&T, this could have made AD&D 2E combat quite different from how it had been run up until that point.

The book closed out with some new spells, and while there were a few winners in there - where "winners" means spells that we'd see again over subsequent iterations of the game - such as expeditious retreat, cat's grace, and dimensional anchor, the bulk of these were okay, but nothing too special. Don't get me wrong, spells like trollish fortitude and heart of stone were certainly evocative, but I'm not surprised they didn't end up in the 3E Core Rules.

Overall, I'm comfortable calling this my favorite of the "Option" books. While the preceding three all had bits and pieces that made for good cherry-picking, this book is one where I'd happily use the bulk of what was here. There's room for improvement, to be sure, but what it offered was exciting enough that I had no problems forgiving it for its rough patches. Notwithstanding the next two products in the line, Spells & Magic ended things on a high note.

Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.

 

[Orius]

Yeah, S&M is pretty good. It cleans up rules issues that had been building up over the edition, added some really good casting classes and systems, offered a good number of new spells, and did a good job in covering spell research and magic item creation. Of all of the PO series, this one had a pretty strong influence on 3e's development along with C&T's first chapter.

 

[delericho]

Skills & Powers and Spells & Magic have the dubious distinction of being the last 2nd Ed books I tried to use at the table. (My last purchase was "Of Ships and the Sea", but it never saw use.) hey were only used in one campaign, which... didn't go well.

But Spells & Magic, like the 3.5e Unearthed Arcana, was a book that I loved to think about, twist and adjust, and 'play' with away from the table - there were so many great options, and so many potentials hinted at. It was just great for that.

I do also think WotC maybe missed a trick a bit, in that the 3.0e Sorcerer is only a somewhat-rearranged Wizard, where there was the potential to take forward some of the options in this book and thus give us something truly different. (Then again, balance was always somewhat odd in 2nd Ed materials, and no moreso than in Player's Option...)

 

[Orius]

Saying 2e balance was odd is definitely an understatement. I've been saying for a while that 2e really didn't have any sort of standards on game balance, and so each supplement varied widely depending on what the writer thought was balanced.

 

[TwoSix]

Overall, I'm comfortable calling this my favorite of the "Option" books. While the preceding three all had bits and pieces that made for good cherry-picking, this book is one where I'd happily use the bulk of what was here. There's room for improvement, to be sure, but what it offered was exciting enough that I had no problems forgiving it for its rough patches. Notwithstanding the next two products in the line, Spells & Magic ended things on a high note.

Absolutely true. I've mentioned this before, but my Planescape game where everyone ran clerics using Spells and Magic rules (and the Dragon Magazine article for Planescape races) was the best experience I had running AD&D, and in my top-tier for best RPG experience. I've always had a soft spot for point-buy type abilities since then.