Dave Arneson Memorial Gameday

[Tav_Behemoth]

In honor of the memory of Dave Arneson, the Compleat Strategist is hosting an afternoon of gaming this Saturday, May 9th from noon to 5 pm, at their store on 11 E. 33rd St. in Manhattan.

Dave is best remembered as the co-creator of the original Dungeons and Dragons, but he has as good a claim as anyone to be the inventor of fantasy roleplaying itself. If you're in New York, we hope you'll join us in celebrating his life, or do so in your own neighborhood the next time friends gather for imaginative voyages of exploration, discovery, and adventure!

Here are the games we'll be playing at the Strategist:

From Blackmoor to Loch Gloomen
- Run By: Tavis Allison (Tav_Behemoth)

Journey through the wilderness, equipped with your wits, your skill with swords and spells, and your choice of mysterious magical artifacts! The great lord of Blackmoor is no more, but he left an inheritance for your brave band of adventurers: an abandoned castle near Loch Gloomen. You are destined to rule a kingdom of your own, if you can survive the trip through the gloomy swamps, find the castle, and defend it against hordes invading monsters.

- Recommended For: Kids, parents, and fans of exploration, discovery,
and free-wheeling, rules-light imagination.
- Rules: A Lego-based indie interpretation of Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign.

Tower of Souls
- Run By: Brad Velcoff

A meteor crashes nearby, and adventurers investigate. But the crater is no ordinary crater, and the party finds themselves whisked off to an interplanar adventure where thousands of lives...and souls...are at stake, including their own. The party must not only engage in hellish encounters, but also find a way home. Players may create their own 25th level characters, or characters will be provided.
- Rules: 4E D&D, for 25th level characters.


The Fane of St. Toad
- Run By: Jon Hastings

We're going to try to answer the question of what kind of person would trek across a dismal swamp to loot an abandoned temple that was once dedicated to the worship of a sanity-shattering Toad god from beyond the stars. The Fane of St. Toad is a scenario written by Michael Curtis as a tribute to Dave Arneson's The Temple of the Frog, the first adventure ever published by TSR.
- Recommended For: Brave souls interested in dungeon crawling, problem solving, and traditional, non-nerfed adventure gaming.
- Rules: The "Original Edition" of D&D. We'll be using the three "Little Brown Books" along with Supplement II: Blackmoor ('natch) (but no experience with that or any other particular version of D&D is necessary).

Delver's Requiem
- Run By: Johnny Tek (Captain Commando)

The village of Narn has known peace for many generations, thanks to the protection and vigilance of the village's guardian spirit. The spirit, known as Van Reis, appears in the form of a translucent male human wearing a mask that covers his face. Wandering monsters are driven away from the village by music played by the spirit, and lost village children are led back to safety by the very same music.
Little is known of Van Reis except that he was once a traveling bard that settled in the village in the last days of his life. Whatever keeps the spirit bound to the village is a mystery, for he will always vanish or wander off whenever the subject is brought up in conversation. The villagers have always been content to let a mystery remain a mystery, since no harm has ever come from the bard's presence.
On the night of each full moon, the spirit plays a mournful tune and sings a song of lament. It is a frightening contrast to the bard's ever cheerful disposition at any other time. None of the villagers know what this means. No one dares to approach Van Reis on these nights to find out why...
- Rules: 4E D&D, 5th level characters

 

[Mark]

Short notice but great idea. Have fun!

 

[Ktulu]

Somebody get a review of the Captain's game! I'd like to know if he's got the chops or not (And would definitely be there if I lived in Manhattan)

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

Mark: Next year I'll definitely announce things further in advance! I started planning this at New York Red Box weeks ago, and posted at nerdNYC, Facebook, the OD&D '74 board, and the local D&D Meetup last week. Forgot EN World until I saw Spinachcat's post pop up with a Convention tag; this especially caught my attention because his posts about winning a charity auction to play with Dave Arneson at a convention are the best evocation of the First Fantasy Referee's style I've ever read.

Ktulu: Reviews are a good idea! I'll bring a guest book that we can use to write our experience of the celebration & how the invention of fantasy roleplaying has touched our lives.

 

[jaerdaph]

What a great way to celebrate Dave's legacy! If I hadn't moved out of New York City a week ago, I definitely would have shown up.

Have fun, everyone!

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

Too bad we missed you, jaerdaph! If you're back in town at any point & looking for some old-school gaming, check out the New York Red Box site in my sig and see if there's anything scheduled when you're around - if not post & we'll try to get a session together then.

It seemed like a good time was had by all. Here's my own experience:

One of the best moments of the gameday for me was right at the beginning as we were getting set up; a player in Brad's epic 4E game was telling me that in his gaming history, Arneson had been much more influential than Gygax because his group had stuck with Basic/Expert/C/M/I and played in Mystara. I asked whether they'd done a lot of wilderness adventuring and he said yeah, they'd used all the rules that the Compendium had to offer. Building baronies? I asked (enviously) and he said yeah, because a stronghold was always his character's highest priority when he got to the right level. All of this sounded like a ton of fun!

I'd always seen the Arneson -> Basic / Gygax -> Advanced split cynically, simply an artificial result of a sad litigious schism in TSR's history rather than a real stylistic branching. My own experience was dominated by AD&D from pretty early on, so it was interesting for me to realize that Arneson's influence was actually much better preserved on the Basic side of things. I'd known in an abstract way that Blackmoor remained a supported part of the BECMI Mystaran setting, but never made much of it - it's there on the map of Greyhawk too, and in First Fantasy Campaign Arneson redrew his map to let you stick Blackmoor adjacent to the Wilderlands as well. More than that, the elements that stand out in FFC - overland travel, clearing territory for strongholds, overseeing baronies, leading armies - are also strongly prominent in BECMI. (It might well be that Gygax devotes just as much space to these things in AD&D, but does so in a way that I and most people I played with missed it in amongst everything else).

I had to leave to take my son to a birthday party in the middle of the afternoon, so we played my Blackmoor hex-crawl for the first half of the gameday. Character creation was simplified to choosing class (warrior, magician, believer), alignment (law, balance, chaos), and species. I made six races available to PCs, one for each type of terrain on the encounter chart - cleared lands/castles (robots), rivers (animals), mountains (fighting men), swamps (fairies), forests (wise women), and deserted lands (elves). The final stages of character creation were for everyone to pick a magic item - coolest might have been my son's Flying Boat, because he made an awesome Lego interpretation of it & was always eager to use it in every situation - and a miracle (believers), spell (magicians), or power (warriors). The Miraculous Blizzard of Fireseeds spell got the most mileage, being used from everything from freezing a water weird to the contemplated vaporization of a water elemental. I think the stripped-down, tri-color Lego-based system I used for this has promise, although spending more time on the Lego tactical scale with the whole party taking minute-long actions would have been satisfying; most of our play time was spent at the strategic scale, where the rotating caller takes two-week-long turns exploring ten-mile-wide Heroscape hexes. And certainly, it was a blast to experience the results of the First Fantasy Campaign maps, ideas, and outdoor adventuring charts that we were using this system to run.

After I left to drop off my son, Jon took over with Fane of the Toad. When I rejoined the group, we had two assassins, a monk, and an elf adventuring as a magic-user, so I made a cleric of Law to serve as the monk's spiritual advisor and political officer.

Using speak with plants, we learned that a group of feet had walked over the roots leaving the Fane three days ago, and that the last time this happened the feet returned three days later bringing more feet with them. So we decided to set up an ambush at the entrance to the temple, and used speak with animals to feed some birds and convince them to warn us of approaching humans. With these preparations, the elf's sleep spell, and a pair of successful assassin's strikes from hiding, we had no problem putting down the six batrachian spearmen and rescuing their captives. To our chagrin, one of the things we thought was a captive was actually a frog-mummy they were leading on a rope. Fortunately, everyone hit by the mummy made their saving throws, and although we largely lacked the magic weapons we'd need to harm the thing, my Bishop Patmoss was able to make it flee from the sight of the cross.

We ended the session with both the mummy and the cultists tied up and awaiting further disposition. We used ESP and detect evil to extract a fair amount of information, but ran out of time before we could act on any of the plans we came up with. Another session is being planned to continue our exploration of the Fane, so the gameday has inspired at least one continuing celebration of Arneson's legacy!