What could be easier than returning to your roots and playing a game most of us grew up playing?Picking up a a free copy of Swords & Wizardry, that's what!
If you know me at all, then you probably know that I am a rules-lite, heavy story games kind of guy. I have been on the prowl for that system, the one that I will run for the rest of my life... or at least for a good long time. In my many travels in search for this, I came across a system just yesterday that piqued my interest. It is called Swords and Wizardry. It is really an updating of the text of the original Dungeons & Dragons. The site actually lists two different sets of rules, one is Swords and Wizardry Core Rules, and the other is Mythmere Games calls White Box. Best of all, they are both free!
Core Rules cover what D&D looked like in 1979 and includes a few supplements that added to the earlier, original rules. Mythmere Games presents those original rules via the White Box PDF, named after the original white box in which the D&D rules were published around 1974. When I found the site, I was intrigued, probably more from a nostalgic point of view than anything else, so I downloaded the rules to check them out.
Needless to say, an immediate thought struck me. I had a game planned for the following day, but a few players had told me beforehand they could not make the game. (Everyone, welcome the new Meadows boy to the world!)
I thought, why not throw this in there. Everyone has played some version of Dungeons & Dragons in their past, so they should be able to grasp the rules pretty quickly, and heck, the nostalgia of the moment... well, it got the better of me. I threw the idea out, and I surprisingly and suddenly had four players that were interested in playing these rules as well. Maybe it was reminiscing on our old glory days playing when we were kids, but I suddenly had a full group... and no idea on what to run!
The following is the progression of the quick set up of the game:
10:30 a.m.: Decided to run game utilizing White Box, announce intentions to players...
10:50 a.m.: I have two players ready to play.
11:00 a.m.: I start Googling maps, looking for ideas. Brainstorming, I come up with:
"The PCs will be wandering into a small town as a terrible storm crashes into the coastal town; literally, a deluge of rain is falling. Stumbling into an inn, they at last find some shelter from the storm. They will spend a little bit of time determining where they ended up, as the storm was so bad they merely ran for the first sign of life they came across. As they are sitting there eating their first warm meal in days, a lady comes screaming into the inn, claiming a ghost ship has just crashed down on the wharf, and sailors have been frozen in fear and plummeted into the storm wracked waters of the bay! The barkeep laments that all of his business comes from the sailors who come through town; without them he doesn't know what he will do! He begs the players, noting they are clearly brave adventurers! He offers free room and board for a week if they help get rid of the ship."
This was really just a basis for the quick game session, and I figured I could fill in plot holes or introduce NPCs as needed during game play... yeah, I can fly like that.
I found a good pirate ship map to use, then a fitting tavern. (I ended up using a tavern map I had made a while back, but this map would have worked as well.)
11:15 a.m.: Total of four players sign up to play.
12:05 p.m.: I loaded maps and tokens into MapTool, and saved campaign file.
So roughly an hour-and-a-half which included recruiting players, finding maps, and loading them and tokens into a MapTool campaign file. Not too shabby. I spent maybe an hour scanning through the rule book for White Box, which ends up being about 20 pages of rules and then 40 pages of spell and creature listings. Twenty pages? That I can handle!
When game time came, the players had a few questions which were a bit ambiguous in the rules, I quickly house ruled them. We wasted about an hour making characters and doing general chatting about different versions of D&D, which ones we liked better than others, etc. It was the kind of chatter commonly had when a new group gets together, and each is feeling eachother out to learn with whom they are playing. I would guess making a character would normally take about 10 minutes, if that, but we kept getting sidebarred... I guess we had a lot to chat about. ;-)
After everyone had arrived, threw a character together, and tossed out a token on the map, which most made using TokenTool, we were ready to go.
We jumped right in, and the crew was hit with a terrible storm. Coming to a village, they hunkered down at a local tavern/inn named "That Fishy Smell," when suddenly another villager bursted in to report that some sort of haunted ship had just crashed into the wharf and was terrorizing all the sailors so badly so that some were falling into the rough water and drowning. The heroes jumped up (as if on cue) and sprinted down to the wharf. The heroes quickly boarded the ship and started searching.
One thing I would like to point out here: it felt like the players knew their immediate purpose, they all jumped into hero shoes and started working on a common goal, something I have seen missing in other games when ran the first time. Perhaps it was the fact that most of us were familiar with the fantasy genre, but for whatever reason, players were eagerly searching about the ship and playing their roles without any prodding from me at all.
The players immedately stumbled upon some undead wandering about the ship and began a short combat. White Box uses a very simple d20 method of determining if you hit, and it speeds along very quickly. Minus one player rolling a "1", which I house ruled was a fumble and had him strike his own party member, the combat went smooth and fast.
My Thoughts on Swords & Wizardry: White Box
I really like this sytem. Very simple mechanics: use either a d6 or a d20 to resolve all situations. It is a bit limiting on player choices with just the core 'classes' of fighter, cleric, magic-user, elf, dwarf, and halfling, but I can see the players branching out from those and creating more indepth personalities as time goes on. It is very easy to GM, so long as you are comfortable making snap decisions on how to resolve issues where gaps exist in the official rules which is in a lot of places. All in all, I would rate this pretty high, partially for nostalgic reasons, but also for playability, I think it could go real far, especially for those who want to continue playing some form of D&D without the investment of preciously limited time.
3 comment(s):
Sounds like you had a blast! I wish my next session would be like that. :)
We should have a player's perspective from the same game, will be posted as an article. His write up is amazing compared to my write up here, but this way you will get a GM and a player's view on the game.
For more old-school material, check out Green Devil Face. I haven't read it myself, but it's cheap enough.
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