AD&D 2E Jakandor

[Gus L]

Thanks for finding this thing.

I took a look at the three books, and while some of the basic ideas seem interesting enough as a sword & sorcery/pulp fantasy style setting there was also a lot ... and a lot of it seemed pretty mediocre and it has that 2E/3E quality of just being too much. Rules and options maximalism. Not something I would use now, but were I playing much in 92-93, it would have seemed pretty cool.

It reminds me in a way of my personal favorite late TSR bit of unremembered content: Dragon Mountain ... an enormous boxed set mega-dungeon (with a rather extensive 2e railroad style intro). I should add that at the time it was well received, was reprinted in 2018, and won awards, but I don't ever hear about it these days. From the Wikipedia article on Dragon Mountain you can get an idea of the scope:

"The box includes six poster-sized maps, half of which are tactical displays of village and battlefield settings, while the rest detail the three-levels of the mountain's interior. Six cardstock mini-maps show self-contained sections of the mountain that can be attached to the poster maps at various locations or simply set aside."

Of course when you actually read dragon mountain it's so big that the keys can't catch up to these poster sized maps. So what you get is a series of humanoid lairs. It's a scope vs. content issue that one sees in most really large mega-dungeons, but in Dragon Mountain at least the humanoids have actual factions that a party could exploit... I think Arden Vul is the only thing that gets close to sufficient conceptual density and content for this scale ... and well ... Arden Vul is a unique thing. Anyway...

I think a bit about the mid-90's era of D&D and how it's sort of both the natural evolution of what I see as the TSR Gygax/sensibility in game design - adding more, making rules more granular, always seeming to aim towards a complete fantasy world simulation rather then a "game". There's something appealing about it, but I suspect that in practice it leads to all the cliches about bad 90's heartbreaker games...

 

[Staffan]

I think a bit about the mid-90's era of D&D and how it's sort of both the natural evolution of what I see as the TSR Gygax/sensibility in game design - adding more, making rules more granular, always seeming to aim towards a complete fantasy world simulation rather then a "game". There's something appealing about it, but I suspect that in practice it leads to all the cliches about bad 90's heartbreaker games...

A big part of it is that 90s TSR produced SO MUCH stuff. I sometimes see people criticize the pace of publication for 3e, which IIRC was usually something like 2 books per month (one core and one either FR or Eberron), but at its height TSR published over a dozen products per month. So when you're churning out that much stuff, you run out of low-hanging fruit pretty quickly and then you need to get into the weird stuff or you just keep repeating yourself.

 

[haakon1]

Thanks for finding this thing.

…

I think a bit about the mid-90's era of D&D and how it's sort of both the natural evolution of what I see as the TSR Gygax/sensibility in game design - adding more, making rules more granular, always seeming to aim towards a complete fantasy world simulation rather then a "game". There's something appealing about it, but I suspect that in practice it leads to all the cliches about bad 90's heartbreaker games...

I don’t remember hearing about Dragon Mountain. And I rediscovered the existence of Jakandor, though I haven’t read or owned it.

Anyhow, yes, I agree 2e became overgrown with too many subsystems, which is part of why I love 3x so much (still) - simulationism with consistency so it’s more understandable.

What do mean about “cliches about bad 90’s heartbreaker games”?

 

[Gus L]

What do mean about “cliches about bad 90’s heartbreaker games”?

The characterization of 90's design, especially the sort of indy design as being heavy on rules bloat and specificity. A trend towards GURPS like systems one might say.

 

[McXanaxinAlcohol]

I've got all 3 of the Jakandor books from a co-worker earlier this year but I havent had a chance to give them much more than a cursory glance.

As someone running a few 2e groups(with additional 1e content), I can somewhat agree that 2e can quickly become bloated if you try to bring in every system/setting. Its already been a bit of a handful to be bringing my groups in and out of Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, and Ravenloft.

Since I am a terrible glutton for punishment, I will also be factoring in Al-Qadim, Darksun, Dragonlance, Mystara(Including Redsteel, Savage Coast, and all Known World content from D&D BECMI), and Lankhmar in the future.

So far most of my PCs are either new to D&D as whole or 5e players and all of them are surprised at the lore depth available in 2E for each campaign setting. I've kept the number of extra systems pruned down and I fear I'll need to be more aggressive with it in the future!

 

[haakon1]

Today, I download the 2 (of 3 ever made) Jakandor books available on DriveThruRPG.

Jakandor: Isle of War is the Knorr book.

Jakandor: Land of Legends is the overall DM book, not fully baked without the others.

The missing book is called Jakandor: Isle of Destiny. It’s the Charonti book. It’s unclear if it’s an oversight that it’s missing (though people have complained about that on DriveThruRPG) or if it’s banned by WotC some reason.

Long story short skimming of these long books:

Knorr are an Iron Age barbarian group. They make steel swords, but not armor, and have few horses and no saddles. They don’t like commerce, and don’t have inns, but trade a little, in fur clothing and weapons. They have sheep and corn. They are refugees from the western edge of a continent. (Ahem, fits Greyhawk’s Gonduria unexplained continent, so yoink, Jakandor is my Greyhawk now.)

They have so little contact with the outside world, most think it’s all dead. The War Mother is their goddess and tells them to exterminate the Charonti, who are necromancers.

The author mentions they are loosely based on some unspecified real societies - yup, Vikings and Pre-Columbian Native Americans were at least visual influences. Cultural is largely CN - highly individualistic and resentful of authority attempts, but also bound by a code and tribal and cult affiliations.

The Charonti, their book wasn’t available, but the gist is they are necromancers who use undead for labor. (Maybe that’s why it’s banned? I could imagine something written in 1998 about a unfree, undead labor force could have made WotC decide not to sell on PDF despite letting through things like GAZ10.) Their empire collapsed in an apocalypse and they are using undead to unearth ruins. Seems likely an LN-LE magocracy.

 

[Tonguez]

Today, I download the 2 (of 3 ever made) Jakandor books available on DriveThruRPG.

Jakandor: Isle of War is the Knorr book.

Jakandor: Land of Legends is the overall DM book, not fully baked without the others.

The missing book is called Jakandor: Isle of Destiny. It’s the Charonti book. It’s unclear if it’s an oversight that it’s missing (though people have complained about that on DriveThruRPG) or if it’s banned by WotC some reason.

Long story short skimming of these long books:

Knorr are an Iron Age barbarian group. They make steel swords, but not armor, and have few horses and no saddles. They don’t like commerce, and don’t have inns, but trade a little, in fur clothing and weapons. They have sheep and corn. They are refugees from the western edge of a continent. (Ahem, fits Greyhawk’s Gonduria unexplained continent, so yoink, Jakandor is my Greyhawk now.)

They have so little contact with the outside world, most think it’s all dead. The War Mother is their goddess and tells them to exterminate the Charonti, who are necromancers.

The author mentions they are loosely based on some unspecified real societies - yup, Vikings and Pre-Columbian Native Americans were at least visual influences. Cultural is largely CN - highly individualistic and resentful of authority attempts, but also bound by a code and tribal and cult affiliations.

The Charonti, their book wasn’t available, but the gist is they are necromancers who use undead for labor. (Maybe that’s why it’s banned? I could imagine something written in 1998 about a unfree, undead labor force could have made WotC decide not to sell on PDF despite letting through things like GAZ10.) Their empire collapsed in an apocalypse and they are using undead to unearth ruins. Seems likely an LN-LE magocracy.

is the Internet Archive legal? you can read it there

 

[Staffan]

The Charonti, their book wasn’t available, but the gist is they are necromancers who use undead for labor. (Maybe that’s why it’s banned? I could imagine something written in 1998 about a unfree, undead labor force could have made WotC decide not to sell on PDF despite letting through things like GAZ10.) Their empire collapsed in an apocalypse and they are using undead to unearth ruins. Seems likely an LN-LE magocracy.

More LN/LG than LE, I think (with the caveat that they consider the use of mindless undead a neutral thing – 2e was more into the idea of zombies being robots made of flesh than them being unholy abominations animated by pure evil and hungering for the flesh of the living unless actively held back through necromantic control). The Charonti once (millennia ago) had a world-spanning empire, but got their butts kicked by a magical plague that spread through the portals they used to control far-off places, so they devolved into a bunch of enclaves that didn't get along at all with one another. At some point some of them developed a more benign philosophy about service to the community, and swayed some of the other enclaves thus forming the current Charonti nation. This service doesn't end when life does, which is why they are fairly gung-ho about the use of mindless undead – the corpse is not the person, so why not make use of it?

Much like Island of War, Isle of Destiny makes heavy use of kits: notably wizard and priest kits. Each wizard school has its own kit, representing one of the mage guilds. The Charonti once had vast magical knowledge, but much has been lost. They have a fairly small list of commonly available spells, and each guild also has a set of their own that they do not share with outsiders. One thing I remember is that they do not have access to fireball – the evoker guild is more about electricity (and yes, they do have lightning bolt).

Their primary priesthood are not priests of any gods, but are instead devoted to the ideal of a Just Society. Exactly what that means is up for some debate, which is represented by the Philosopher kit. There's also the Jurist kit, which is narratively part of the same priesthood but dedicated to upholding the law in the society as it is rather than debating what it should be once the Charonti are once again in ascendance. There are also Pantheists who believe there's some truth in all religion even if none have the whole truth, Cultists who have found faith in some version of an outworlder religion (which might not be in accordance with the way its original practitioners do things), and Thanhotepics who follow the old ways of the original Charonti religion dedicated to a sleeping elder god of death and rebirth.

The only fighter kit is one who gets abilities to command undead, so they're more about leading skeletons/zombies into battle than actually fighting themselves.

Where Knorrmen are modeled on the Norse and Native North Americans, the Charonti are definitely more themed on Egypt with some South American spice. I'm thinking Aztec, but I'm not familiar enough with them to say that with any certainty.

One thing I distinctly remember is that the two sides had very different ideas about NPC levels. I think most NPCs mentioned with class/level in Island of War were single-digit, whereas Isle of Destiny has plenty of them in the 10-15 range. I don't know if this was intended to represent the Charonti being fewer in number but having more elite training than the Knorrmen, or just different writers not being in tune with appropriate levels.