We've all read S. John Ross' seminal Medieval Demographics Made Easy  [MDME],  I presume. I for one adore S. John Ross and have spent long hours on his excellent gaming blog .  Trouble, his piece not as usable as it presents itself to be. At least not for the kind of fantasy setting that seeks to emulate a world with some measure of wilderness to explore.  Ross' baseline seems to be pre-Black Death 14h century Europe. But I don't consider this to be a good era to use, since it reflects a time where the remnant frontiers of Europe were basically non-existent and internal development in terms of arable land and infrastructure fully exploited. I would rather look to the 11th century, which strikes a good middle ground between being solidly in the high Middle Ages, but not yet having maximized its population, arable cultivation and development potential. There were still frontiers, tribal lands and unexploited and unexplored lands to find, alongside well developed ...

As an adult, my favorite class is the regular fighter, though I did enjoy playing a paladin straight for a campaign's worth. As a teenager, I did not mirror myself in glory fantasies or related all that well my own masculinity (so fighter wasn't all that for me) and power fantasies were rather fleeting for me (and so Wizards, while cool, were also a fleeting fascination for me). What I really related to was the second edition Bard. Not because I saw myself as a budding minstrel, but for all the non-entertainment aspects of the class. A jack-of-all-trades, extending even to magic, who seems to adventure, not for glory or power, but simply for the sake of adventure. That was something that resonated a lot with my teenage self. Reflecting on this today, makes me think on the strange fit the Bard is setting-wise.  This bard is about to rock your world with his flute and fat shortsword. I mean, what's the deal with a minstrel that knows magic and a bit of everything? Do all   ...

Mmmm, races from the good old days, Before tieflings, drow and dragonborn became core options in the World of Warcraft menagerie that is modern D&D. This is the D&D liberals want. There are no half-orcs in second edition. I don't miss them and honesty feel half-elves could just as well have been left out. Although it is the ability score adjustments that perhaps initially draws the eye on that first page of the PHB chapter, that is really only a small part of the page and everything else is actually the interesting stuff: Minimum and maximum ability scores. Class Restrictions.  Level Limits.  How can we know that Dwarves are a durable and stocky lot? Because no dwarf will ever have less than STR 8 and CON 12. We can know elves are clever and prepossessing folk, because no elf has less than 8 in INT and CHA. It goes the other way too - Dwarves have a cap of 17 for DEX and CHA (which means with the -1 CHA adjustment, no dwarves with more than CHA 16) and can never  ...

There will be interludes between the AD&D Appraisal series, to keep my own writing motivation going. I was going to do a 3-mile hex post outlining the virtues of it, but turns out Silverarm did that already and stole all my points  (even down to the "Outdoor Survival also uses 3 miles") and added more points I wasn't aware of myself. So go read that excellent piece and come back here. What I instead want to talk about is how the 3 mile hex is a very close fit to our natural sense of distance and visualisation and how the that makes the 3-mile hex the perfect blend between immersion and usable game artifact and how to actually bring that into your game.  Minaria hexmap. Scale: 1 hex = 50 miles. Not what we're going for here. A while back, Noisms contemplated the difficulty of creating a sense of wonder in journeys . The difficulty with journeys in RPGs is the scale of it. It becomes too big, and thus too abstract, to visualize, to immerse oneself into.  I tried, un...

It's time. A detailed and opinionated appraisal of the best, or possible second best, version of Dungeons & Dragons ever made. I mean of course Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition. There are many things to love about the Classic D&D line (B/X, BECMI, Cyclopedia). Its streamlined, narrow and intuitive numbers. Its focused presentation. The way it knows, better than any other version of D&D, what it wants to be and then just executes that vision. Its superb chassis that makes it as good for running as-is, as it does for extensive houseruling. It is thus perhaps a tad ironic that many of the things there are to love about Advanced  Dungeons & Dragons are diametrically opposed to the reasons for loving Classic D&D. Extolling the virtues of Classic D&D often end up as an implicit critique of AD&D. And many of the reasons for playing AD&D are a stark rejection of the virtues of Classic D&D. Nonetheless, I want to be understood here. When I ...

I've been anticipating reviewing "Mystara" as perhaps the most difficult of the setting reviews.  Unlike most settings, it never really had a dedicated setting book. As the default setting for the "non-advanced" Classic D&D line, it grew from a couple of pages in the Expert Set published in 1981 up and ended as an AD&D in 1995. It is, perhaps moreso than any other setting, a product of organic development which grew and changed radically over the course of its different release cycles.  Unlike the ham-fisted attempts at development and expansion in other settings (Forgotten Realms with its Time of Troubles, Maztika and Kara-Tur getting tacked on to the edges with cheap glue and then destroyed for 4e altogether stand out), this somehow worked out well for Mystara. Perhaps because it is so non-premeditated and basically a collection of different authors having good ideas they wanted to throw at a setting and a setting that is very receptive to such tre...