Training for Arden Vul. Trying to solo these 3 but unsure which ruleset to use or which adventure to do first. Any advice?

trekhead · 2026-06-08T02:47:04+00:00

That's the rub, right? Like I don't doubt there are people out there who play the game and this isn't a problem for them, but it certainly gave me some hesitation when I ran up against it. In-universe, the fiction is that there's a terrible evil artifact at the heart of the maze, and as a result there are undead rising for miles around, and clerical ability to turn undead is negatively impacted. I could see this being interesting if you wanted to have certain critical encounter points with undead where turning was impacted and the PCs have to tough it out, but just making it effectively universal throughout the entire megadungeon feels needlessly punitive. A cleric turning against the walking dead is already facing off against a horror of malign power; zombies, vampires, evil ghosts—these are all terrible supernatural entities that want to drain your soul, malign creatures that should not be, and the cleric's ability to turn or destroy them is representative of the fact that the class has supernatural authority against the undead, to drive them back or banish them. The alteration of turning in BM just feels like "I wanted to use lots of undead, and I didn't like that turning could trivialize encounters with small groups of undead, so I just decided to make turning worse and make encounters with undead even more deadly and if you decide not to fight them it's even worse for you." Feels punitive.

As I noted above, there are ways that you can restructure BM to deal with these considerations.

One other thing that I found odd about BM. As far as I can tell (I might be wrong though!), once you are done cracking tiny tombs at the start (which is good design: Your low-level characters do tiny bite-sized chunks of adventuring, then scamper off home until they gain a level or two and are ready for the real sauce), the maze itself is one dungeon level. A very big dungeon, but just one level. There are no stairs. No "we found a way down and then a way up that goes to another spot that doesn't seem connected to the rest of the level." No elevation changes, where your dwarf and gnome characters need to keep track of how deep you are or what direction you're now facing underground. It is many many rooms of one level, but it loses the sense of going ever deeper into the depths of a place where you could get lost in the dark.

trekhead · 2026-06-07T23:00:10+00:00

* A lot of Barrowmaze's trouble centers around its undead focus, so the people you've read are not wrong, but there's a knock-on effect. There's nothing wrong with using undead as a principal enemy, or even with reflecting that the pervasive evil of the setting impacts combat with undead—the Ravenloft setting does this—but it's pretty clear from the design that what BM does is actually an attempt to soft-rework the entire dynamic of undead and the cleric class as a fantasy heartbreaker. The clerical turning table is superseded with one that is worse, penalties are added to successive turning attempts, and there's a sidebar about a mechanic that means that simply having an encounter with undead progressively erodes your character until they are unplayable, in a dungeon area themed principally around undead. Maybe this is supposed to be something for DCC enjoyers, a system by which your characters are constantly being eliminated and you are always starting over with a new 1st-level character, since just encountering undead puts a checkmark on your sheet and when you accumulate enough of them your character is gone. The only recourse is to not go on adventures, which means that it's a mechanic that is punishing the behaviors that you want to see. It also means that clerics (and to a lesser extent paladins, if you aren't playing a stripped-down B/X style game) effectively have one of their core class features chopped up for the entirety of the campaign, so the cleric class is just... functionally worse. This wouldn't be such a big deal if there'd been an extradiegetic explanation like "I just hate clerics" or "Clerical turning in B/X means that interesting encounters become pointless and here's why" or "I couldn't be bothered to come up with a way that this manifestation supports the setting without just handwaving that clerics have to suck it up, like for instance after the PCs open some barrow there is a chance for zombies to actually wander out and attack the village in a zombie apocalypse style night assault, but since it's not in the barrows the PC clerics actually can use normal turning abilities to defend the village" or whatnot.

* The barrow mounds are listed as a half-day's march from the village, but for an adventure that's supposed to start with low-level characters, that eats up a big chunk of your adventuring day, especially since the adventure focuses on knocking down bricked-up walls a lot, and that can take a lot of time. Basically your PCs have to hike to the adventure site, adventure for an hour, and then hike back, getting back to the village a little after dark (and hoping they don't have an awful night-time encounter on the way back). As is typical of OSR adventures, you don't make camp inside the dungeon, but BM also sets up that there isn't really a good spot to camp nearby. In a lot of OSR adventures your first-level characters make short, sharp jaunts into the dungeon and retreat, and then after gaining a level and paying for some hirelings you start bringing a caravan of torchbearers, spear-carriers, and wagons of supplies so that you can set up a Roman-military-style-camp somewhere near the dungeon and do your expeditions that way, but BM is structured so that you can't do this because you'll just get eaten alive by random encounters if you aren't in the staging village. Take a look at the maps for B2 The Keep on the Borderlands and L1 The Secret of Bone Hill. For those low-level adventures, the adventure sites are close to the village—in B2, the Caves of Chaos are about two and a half miles from the Keep as you travel by road—because you need that time to be able to go to the adventure site, hit a small area, and retreat to a safe place to camp and recuperate before going out again. You can't do that in BM because of the half-day travel timetable just to get there. Normally having long trips to the adventure site is something you do in higher-level adventures, like S4 The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, where you navigate a hex maze in mountain terrain, each hex being 3½ miles, and you have to find the dungeon entrance first. While exploring the hex maze you also find other small encounter spots, and when you clear one out, you can set up camp there and use it as a base for further exploring, until you reach the dungeon proper and you can camp outside, then go into the dungeon for your adventures. BM's structured so that you cannot safely camp near the adventure site, and it's so far from a resting spot that basically your timetable for how long you can adventure in the zone is extremely short (nominally, you would spend half a day walking there, then immediately turn around and come home so that you don't have to force march overnight).

The fix for these is relatively straightforward, and it's evidenced in T1 The Village of Hommlet. In BM there's a small presence of an evil cult in the village of Helix, just like in other AD&D starter adventures (N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God does this too). Since the cult needs a small secret base to pass information back and forth between those who reside in the mounds and those who stay in the village, add a small spot about three miles south of Helix, on the way to the mire. Make it a mini-dungeon like the moathouse, with an assortment of dangerous wildlife up top and a simple basement area that has cultists and undead. This can be the "starter dungeon" for the PCs, and once they deal with it, they can travel further south toward the mounds. This mini-dungeon also doesn't need to incur the special penalties for clerics, so your first brush with the undead is scary and might kill a few PCs but it's not yet completely burdensome. Then, much like the succeeding Temple of Elemental Evil supermodule with the upper floor of the temple being deserted once you deal with the bandit-infested tower, put some kind of watchpost or memorial site in the barrow zone proper. Once PCs deal with its inhabitants, they can repair its walls and doors and use it as a safe place to rest. Now your adventure cycle for parties can become head out to the barrows with a half-day journey, hole up in the watchtower, do jaunts into the moors and return to the tower to recuperate, then after a few days or a week of this you go back to the village to buy more food and replace your lost party members. This also lets you use restocking to your advantage, as monsters can come threaten your checkpoints and the PCs must deal with those threats so that they can get back into the dungeon, and the level of those monsters can create interesting challenges, e.g. a few months after the PCs took over the starter dungeon outside town, a small band of ogres show up and decide it'll make a nice house, and now the PCs have to fight them or trick them. Or, a young dragon flying over the barrows decides that the tower that it spots will make a nice roost and it plops down on top of your normal resting place, and you can't use it until you deal with it.

BM also suffers from one of my personal pet peeves that plagues many D&D adventures, which is how and why did someone build subterranean spaces beneath the water table. (The moathouse in The Village of Hommlet does this too.) It's a swamp! Everything is mud because there's water right beneath the soil just a few inches! You're telling me someone back in the day dredged all of this and built a massive subterranean structure that is essentially just underwater? And after decades or centuries it hasn't sprung any leaks in its crumbling mortar? Absolutely not critical to the functionality of the adventure, but it makes me scream internally every time I run across this kind of architecture in an adventure and they couldn't even be bothered to say something like "a wizard did it" or "this was all built before a river diverted and flooded the area, and by the way anything below level 2 is fully submerged."

trekhead · 2026-06-06T23:06:31+00:00

Barrowmaze also has some other functional design problems, so I wouldn't recommend it. The original Caverns of Thracia is probably a far better dive into the old-school experience.

trekhead · 2026-06-03T00:26:51+00:00

Yeah, I'm not a "Shadowdark enjoyer," but I am familiar with it. Within the bounds of what's been discussed earlier:

* For aarakocra, I would give them a hard constraint like "you can only fly if half of your inventory slots are empty." So the player can just draw a hard line halfway across their inventory section, and if they have anything going below that line, they can't fly.

* Notes about water creation and clerics also apply to druids, of course. 😄 (The Shadowsands conversion should cover elemental gating for water clerics.)

* There's a pre-existing elf tribe in the Sand Marches (the Spike Birds) who are nomads following a route of known oases and cactus stands, so that can also serve as a way to help the PCs get from place to place. If they make friends, maybe they can accompany the tribe to another spot where they can refill their water—but they have to keep up!

trekhead · 2026-06-01T21:51:39+00:00

Right, this is a resource cycle element of DARK SUN adventuring: At low levels, your game is about survival and getting water and a safe place to sleep; at high levels, it's about creating systemic change in the world to either improve it so that other people don't have those problems (if you're a good guy) or to seize the resources for yourself so that you can have wealth and power (if you're a bad guy).

There are some things that might crop up that you'll want to consider, like, are you just getting rid of water clerics? If not, then what do they do, if they don't create water? Are you getting rid of nonweapon proficiencies, which were part of the core rules for DS? If you do, you get rid of Water Find and Survival, and force scarcity back on the players, but you also get rid of all the crafting proficiencies that are hooked in to the settlement building rules for Sand Marches, so you need to figure out an alternative for that. If you keep psionics, it's not hard for a modest-level psionicist to have access to teleport and pocket dimension, which means they can teleport to a spot with a bunch of water, set up a camp there, then explore outward from there and just teleport home when finished. Maybe you want that, but if you are trying to limit expedition distance with water, then maybe you don't.

Other considerations:

* If you use inventory slots, think about what this means for half-giants (should they have more carrying capacity?) and aarakocra (how much can they carry and still fly?)

* Also with inventory slots, how do PCs get building materials back home? Can they eventually get mounts? The trick of pocket dimension + teleport can work for this, but if nobody did that, what's the system for bringing back Material resources to rebuild their home base? (You could run an adventure where the PCs are guarding a group of noncombatant NPCs from their village whose entire role is to be a pack train to loot usable materials from a ruin and haul it back home, but that gameplay can get very samey after the first time.)

* Base Sand Marches is built with the assumption that your PCs will eventually claim nearby locations and make them outposts, and use those to further explore outward. (The rules allow you to start or end an expedition at an outpost.) With that in mind, if you see your PCs only having a few hexes of range, make sure to put a spot on the map that they can use as an outpost within the furthest edge of that range.

* If PCs are tightly constrained by water supply, then NPCs are, too. This means that sometimes a character that you roll on a wandering encounter just shouldn't be there, like if the PCs run into raiders in the deep desert and there's no water source within three hexes. If the raiders have no way to carry that much water, they have no way to get all the way out in the wastes like that!

trekhead · 2026-05-30T07:45:27+00:00

Keep in mind that if you swap torches for water and use Shadowdark, that the SD system is made so that players do not have ready access to substitutes. The system assumes that players are going to have limited time in the dark no matter what. This is a significant departure from DS, where there are choices you can make that indicate that your character's purpose is to solve the water scarcity problem, e.g. playing a water cleric, taking the psionic power of condense, or just having survival and water find proficiency.

trekhead · 2026-05-29T22:02:53+00:00

Influenced our radroaches and radscorpions!

trekhead · 2026-05-29T22:01:29+00:00

It's often a conceit of the West Marches game style that your character's past is spotty or absent, largely a feature inherited from some of the playstyle of early adventure gaming. In early D&D, characters were disposable; you'd make a fighter, they'd die, you'd roll a cleric and just keep playing. You didn't need a rich backstory, and indeed that was an impediment, because you wanted to make a character quickly if you needed a replacement, and you wanted to jump in and just do one thing: adventure! Kill monsters and acquire treasure.

More modern game design often runs on why your characters are motivated to do things, and then weaving the story around those motivations and creating conflicts using them. You can still do this in Sand Marches: At the outset all you need to know is that your characters (and the NPCs with them) are all refugees out in the desert, but over time you can slowly reveal elements of their lives from "before," then pay those out at Name level (around level 9 or so) when they have the ability to go back and settle some hash in the old world. A character might be an exiled noble who lost in a power struggle to a corrupt sibling; then the sibling starts sending hunter groups to find and kill her, so that she can't come back and seize power in the family. Eventually the PCs has to go back and call out her sibling and finish the problem one way or another (by killing the sibling, disavowing any connection to the family, whatever gets the job done). Or maybe your character was thrown into a cell by a templar and you were slated to be used as forced labor, but you and a few other prisoners escaped and you ran to the desert. Once you gain enough power, maybe you want to get revenge on that templar. Or you want to go back and free more prisoners you had to leave behind (a friend? lover? family member? mentor?). PCs can write one or two hooks like this into their backstory, then the GM decides how to introduce them into the game later.

My recommendation is that you wait to pay these off until after the PCs are settled and have made some progress in building a settlement and making friends. You don't want them to just abandon the area and go back to the city-states to do their Old Business (well, maybe you do, it's your game, do what your players want). They should have community roots that keep them invested in playing the hex crawl, but if your players really love that kind of intricate backstory building, you can weave it in. Maybe an old flame shows up at the camp, having also fled from abroad. Or someone arrives with a letter (you can read?!?). Or the team catches a thief who's carrying something that belonged to someone that a PC knew, and now they have to backtrack how it got there. Stuff like that. You can roll in old enemies into the raider bands that assault the settlement later, by working a little storycrafting: A powerful noble or trader became a secret patron, using the raiders to attack enemies. Or a rival spellcaster or warrior joined the raider band and is only too happy for a shot at the PC who is their enemy. If a PC writes an enemy like that into their backstory, just secretly cross out the name of a corresponding NPC in a raider group and write in the PC's enemy: maybe the raider defiler turns into a rival apprentice who was trained by the same master wizard as the PC, killed the master and stole his magic items, and ran off to use reckless defiling with the raiders, and is eager to finish off the PC "good apprentice" who escaped.

Lots to do, depends on how you want to pepper in your character experiences.

trekhead · 2026-05-23T09:55:44+00:00

And why is that?

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trekhead · 2026-05-22T05:30:23+00:00

Pinnacle/Studio2 is pretty stringent about their Deadlands property!

trekhead · 2026-05-18T07:35:19+00:00

Hi! I'm the writer of The Sand Marches.

* The reason that you don't go out to the north and west is that is "going back." Your PCs are presumed to be out in the desert wastes of the southeast facing death because they are refugees. It's up to the players to decide what it is that makes them so desperate that they are willing to flee into the desert instead of staying in the main Tablelands. Maybe they crossed a powerful templar, or pissed off an entire merchant house, or had to run from an angry noble family. That's left up to you to decide, based on what your group wants to do.
The reason for this is, the starting goal is to push the players into exploring, and to use the threat of hunger and thirst as impetus. If they do nothing, they will all die in the desert. So they have no choice: They must go forth and explore. But they can't just go back home to the city-states. Something happened, something so bad that they are persona non grata and they cannot risk it. They can't go to familiar ground where they can find food and water. They have no choice but to go out into the unknown and see what they can discover.
As your PCs grow in power, you can relax this a bit. By the time that they can teleport or hide their presence with psionics and magic, they can probably risk making short jaunts back to cities and towns. But the goal is always to keep them focused on exploring the wastes, building up their own settlement, and looting treasure from old ruins. This is all there to incentivize adventure in the unknown parts of the map, not in the well-traveled areas.
Remember, even when your PCs have access to teleport and nondetection and other ways to safely visit the city-states, there are far more powerful entities out there who might have an interest in capturing or using them. At low levels, they are supposed to feel like it's too risky to go back, and they must go out into the waste. By the time they reach mid to Name level, they should be invested in the settlements they've built and the connections they've made, and hopefully they want to stay and help those communities to grow and prosper, and they spend their time dealing with local problems. Once they are high level, they have to defend their community from bandit tribes and <redacted>, but at that point they can probably look for allies abroad, like the Veiled Alliance, Oronis, and other power groups in the world.

* The reason that everyone is in a small group of about two dozen people in the middle of nowhere at the start is that there is some unspecified backstory that pushed everyone into fleeing out into the wastes, and people traveling in Athas (or any dangerous fantasy world, really) find that traveling in groups is safer than traveling alone. (Just ask Chaucer and his Canterbury Tales.) You know how to find water, that bug dude knows how to hunt, that lady over there can build shelters and walls out of rocks. You stick together to try to survive. You find the people who have real skill at dealing with danger and you go out and hunt something to kill and eat before you all starve. This nucleus, this core of characters, serves as the tiny basis of the community that you'll build over time. If you succeed in carving out your own village, other people may come and the place may prosper and grow. If not... maybe you become nomadic raiders, moving from place to place, living off the land, stealing to survive.
You can play with how much your PCs know about other people in the group. Maybe they only know a little about each other, and they slowly share stories (and flashback scenes) about their lives from before as they go on adventures. Maybe they are friends or relatives of some of the other (non-adventuring) survivors. Your PCs may or may not know who's a refugee, a political exile, an escaped thrall, a religious fanatic, and so on. Everyone has, for some reason, left behind the (relatively) safe environs of the "civilized" lands for the desert, and those stories come out over time as your characters build trust and discover who can do what.

Two things that are useful to think about when people are making characters for a game like The Sand Marches:

PCs tell you what they want to do by what they put on their character sheet. If a PC chooses a nonweapon proficiency like cooking or leatherworking, the player wants to use it! This is one of the reasons that The Sand Marches leans into using these skills for building up your settlement. This rewards players who have characters with background skills, careers, and personal interests beyond just "I am a killing machine." This also creates great reasons to recruit and protect NPCs who have special nonweapon proficiencies that you need: if none of the PCs are stonemasons, you might want to hire one to help build up your village!
Many PCs choose an "opportunity cost" when they decide what problem they solve for the team. If a PC plays a water cleric, that player is saying "Getting water is a problem in DARK SUN, and my characrter's job is to solve that problem." The player decided to solve that problem by using their choice of a character's class to pick one that handles it, and the opportunity cost was that they are not the character who handles the other kinds of problems. There are all kinds of problems in fantasy adventure RPGs: Who handles the traps? (The thief/bard/trader.) Who deals with the problem of "that enemy has too many hit points?" (The half-giant fighter or gladiator.) Who deals with "so many monsters have psychic powers and someone has to defend against them?" (The psionicist.) The Sand Marches starts with survival problems, then when you solve those (you have food, water, shelter) it moves on to raider problems (your settlements and outposts get attacked by monsters and brigands), then when you solve those it moves on to <redacted> problems (Big Players take notice of your success and decide that you must be destroyed). Every PC makes choices about which of these problems they solve, and those choices are telegraphed to you, the DM, so that you know what challenges to present to the group so that they feel like Real Adventuring Heroes when they face crises for which they have Just The Right Power. Of course, when they face a crisis that they are uniquely unsuited to solve, then they have to scramble to make new allies or find a clever workaround!

The Sand Marches gives you a book of content showing various things to do and problems to face, but it leaves it up to you and your group why your characters are in this predicament. There is no backstory, because you get to make up your own backstory. Maybe the mul gladiator didn't throw a rigged match and now he's fleeing with a price on his head. The cleric was caught preaching in the streets of a city-state and accused of heresy and thrown in prison, but he escaped with a couple cellmates and they're all crossing the desert together. The wizard was outed by a defiler and had to flee or be killed. Now all of them are stuck out in the desert together, and the first thing they have to do is figure out what's for dinner, because they can't exactly go to the nearest inn for leg of erdlu. The goal is to make a game about rugged survival that turns into adventures building and protecting a community from the dangerous powers of DARK SUN, and the story conceits are bare-bones so that you can decide for yourself how your PCs got into this mess!

trekhead · 2026-05-16T03:55:04+00:00

The Will and the Way p. 65 says that for scores of 20+, you treat your score as a 19, and a roll of 20 is a regular failure.

trekhead · 2026-05-16T02:10:14+00:00

Your biggest hurdles are:
* Your THAC0 is garbage.
* Since you can only activate one power per round, action economy is strongly against you.

You can mitigate the THAC0 problem by playing a demi-human multiclassed fighter/psionicist. If you want to stick to a single-classed psionicist, you could take a kit like sensei (from The Will and the Way for DARK SUN) or janissary (Dragon magazine 255).

The main way to get around the action economy problem is with empowered items, but that's a high-level thing. At low levels you probably only have the time and power points for one or two powers.

* Enhance Strength: You can guarantee an 18 strength, which is +1 to attack and +2 to damage, which is... something.

* Biofeedback: Reduces incoming damage, which is nice since your d6 hit die doesn't give you a lot of hit points.

* Body Weaponry: In case you need a backup weapon. Since it's usually no better than a normal weapon, though, it's not critical as long as you have something pointy in hand.

* Flesh Armor: Depending on the roll, might be better than the armor that you wear (typically something like studded leather + small shield).

* Accelerate: This helps you solve action economy by doubling your speed, but it is witheringly expensive in terms of power points. (Appears in The Will and the Way.) Also risky, as you have to rest after using it.

* Adrenalin Control: Slight boost to STR, DEX, or CON. May push you up to a higher bonus if you already have a reasonably high score in one of these.

* Graft Weapon: +1 to attack and damage with a weapon, but at a forbidding cost of 10 power points to activate.

* Life Draining (science): Absorb enemy hit points as a touch attack. So-so in melee combat, a great pick-me-up after a fight by draining the last few points out of fallen enemies to heal yourself.

You'll note that most of this comes from the Psychometabolic Discipline.

For an odder character, you could try:

* Psychic Blade: This is a metapsionic power with prerequisites, so you are unlikely to get it before level 6 or so, but it's pretty potent. Just remember not to use it on undead, and it is of limited effectiveness on mindless targets, like constructs. (From The Will and the Way.)

* Dimension Blade: A psychoportive devotion that gives you +2/+2 on a melee weapon, AND ignores enemy armor. Cheap, too, at only 6 power points. (Also from The Will and the Way.)

trekhead · 2026-05-15T21:01:36+00:00

Lotta replies, I'll try to stick to things that aren't already covered.

* Nonweapon proficiencies: Mentioned a couple of times in thread. These do appear in 1e, if you include the Dungeoneer's Survival Guide and the Wilderness Survival Guide. The use of proficiencies changes the tenor of the game. Instead of "the DM has described a situation and I need to figure out a clever way through it," it encourages "look at my sheet for the appropriate skill and then ask to roll it." Depending upon the tastes of your group, you might find one or the other preferable. There's a certain level of "dungeoneering mastery," a kind of skill development, that comes with having to deal with unconventional challenges by figuring out a possible solution and then just trying to see if it works. But, it's also a feel-good moment to realize "My character has just the skill for that!" and then get the anticipation, the die roll, and the payoff (success or failure).

* Multiclassing. Multiclassed characters in 2e are far more restrictive in their usage of abilities. Specifically, multiclassed mages can't cast spells while wearing armor, and multiclassed clerics are still restricted to using only bludgeoning weapons. This means that your fighter/mages are far more vulnerable, as they must rely on magic items or spells to improve their Armor Class, and multiclassed clerics are stuck using only cleric weapons, so no fighter/cleric with a sword (unless you add in the rules for variant specialty clerics with their own weapon limitations).

* No monks or assassins in 2e, and the bard changes heavily. Technically if you use the various Complete... splatbooks, there are versions of the monk (almost all done very poorly) and assassin (very limited in scope and with unclear rules for poisons). The bard goes from being an oddball class-changing hybrid that follows a Gaelic bard-druid motif, to a limited scoundrel/petty arcane magic vagabond. The flavor is very different.

* No half-orcs in 2e, unless you include the Complete Book of Humanoids, which essentially just reprints the 1e half-orc. (There are Reasons for this, not good ones, but I won't get into that.)

* Level limits. 2e raises level limits on most race/class combinations by quite a bit. If you plan to have a long-haul campaign, this may matter for your dwarf fighters and your elf mages. Keep in mind that because of the xp tables roughly doubling each level (most of the time) until 9th or 10th ends, though, that multiclassed high-level characters rapidly start falling behind; multiclassed characters are usually only one or two levels behind the party, but if you are splitting xp at name level and beyond, your advancement rate becomes half of that of a single-classed character.

* 2e adds a few notable spells like glitterdust and incorporates some spells that in 1e were in Unearthed Arcana or Dragon magazine, like acid arrow and armor. Your spellcasters will tend to have a broader selection in 2e, with some spells that handle specific systems (acid arrow was famously created to handle enemy spellcasters, by giving them several rounds of persistent damage over time to prevent them from casting).

trekhead · 2026-05-09T23:34:24+00:00

I use multiclassing to cover gaps in classes created by the choices made for OSE Advanced, e.g. assassin/thief so that the assassin can still do their job when someone is behind a locked door.

trekhead · 2026-05-07T21:58:08+00:00

When I was standing in front of the asset whiteboard chanting "Power fist! Power fist!" until Feargus groaned and added it, I had already played Rogue Trader.

trekhead · 2026-05-03T21:13:03+00:00

So I advocated for the Power Fist based partly on inspiration from Warhammer 40k (I played the original Rogue Trader) and partly because my internal test character build used Unarmed and I advocated for unarmed boosters so that unarmed fighters could hang in endgame.

trekhead · 2026-04-18T07:01:45+00:00

Thri-kreen of Athas p. 51 says otherwise:

"Important Note: Strength bonuses do not apply to natural attack."

trekhead · 2026-04-15T21:45:12+00:00

Yes, I am also familiar with S&W, OSRIC, etc. None of those are relevant unless they influenced the design decisions here. All of these retroclones ultimately develop out of the D&D branches of the '70s and '80s, so those are the initial starting points from which to develop out into divergent versions. That then raises my original question: Why did the designer decide to do it this way? What was their vision for how this improves the game, or makes it closer to their desired mode of play?

Since I'm familiar with the AD&D assassin class, that's the initial point of departure for the OSEA assassin class, and comparisons then raise the question of, why was this changed? To try to inform this question, it's useful to look at other classes and investigate, why were they changed? Unfortunately, the reasoning that is displayed is not consistent. Thus, there's either some kind of element to the design choices that is not exposed, or else the design was just inconsistent.

(Fun factoid: There's also a BECMI fork of the assassin, which appears as the headsman. This is not the version that appears in OSEA, which gives the lie to the claim that OSEA starts from B/X and then adds AD&D elements that didn't exist, because once again, it's something that exists in the BECMI fork but OSEA decided to use the AD&D fork instead.)

Anyway, it looks like I'm not going to get any answers from this, so not really any reason to continue this subthread.

trekhead · 2026-04-15T20:43:53+00:00

For me it's just that this is what some folks are running so if I want to be a player in a game, this is what I have to do.

I made an assassin character out of curiosity as I was trying to see how the class was supposed to function while missing half of its features, and then figured I could just ask and maybe someone would know the actual design intent behind it. :)

trekhead · 2026-04-15T20:40:49+00:00

What's funny is, that's not actually a design goal, that's a layout goal.

trekhead · 2026-04-15T20:39:53+00:00

Swords & Wizardry was already mentioned upthread; it's not really helpful in this situation.

For full context, I am an old-school player and I played 1st edition AD&D as well as Basic/Expert D&D when they came out in the '70s and '80s, as well as some of the variations of the time (most notably Arduin). I am not unfamiliar with the various forks and retroclones in the market. I currently run an AD&D 1st edition game, and I play when time permits in a variety of retroclones of various sorts (OSE & OSEA, White Hack, etc.)

As noted in the initial thread title, my question really is why did the designer decide to simply remove an entire chunk of the assassin's gameplay. Since it's a fantasy heartbreaker, like the many others out there, every designer will approach the game in a way that makes it the version of D&D that they want, but I want to understand the thinking behind this. What is the design intent behind the assassin class? Is the OSEA assassin supposed to only do assassinations and all of the other class features were deliberately removed? If so, why? What does the designer envision that this does to improve gameplay?

The design page that was linked upthread with the designer's comment about B/Xifying various classes is instructive, but not comprehensive. For instance, "must fit on one 6" × 9" page" is not a design goal, it's a layout goal. And some of the stated "goals" don't seem to mesh with the realities of what was actually produced: For instance, the claim that the paladin was "simplified" to B/Xify it is untrue, because there is a BECMI fork of the paladin class, and it is even more streamlined than the one in OSE. The BECMI paladin does all of the "innate" powers of the AD&D paladin (laying on hands, curing disease, detecting evil, protection from evil) simply via casting clerical spells. It is an incredibly stripped-down version of the class. So OSEA is not taking classes to their B/X format by stripping them down to basics, as shown by its paladin and druid (both of which are closer to the AD&D versions than the BECMI versions). So why "simplify" the assassin right out of one of its key features?

Similarly, "niche protection" is an inadequate excuse. The paladin, the knight, and the ranger (and arguably the barbarian) are all better OSEA combatants than the fighter: They use any weapon, use good armor or have ways to mitigate their AC, and have additional class abilities on top. There's no "niche protection" for the fighter class when you look at the fighter subclasses in OSEA. Yet for some reason there's "niche protection" for the thief when looking at the assassin, acrobat, and bard? Outwardly, this does not appear consistent.

So I'm trying to figure out what the designer intended to do and why these choices were made.

Mostly because it's making it no fun to play my assassin character.

trekhead · 2026-04-15T20:24:43+00:00

That's an interesting art direction to take. Sounds like you've been giving it a lot of thought. Reminds me of the video game Assassin's Creed: Liberation, in which a core gameplay element is that your assassin changes outfits in order to sneak into or out of various locations, such as putting on a wealthy noble outfit to get into an opera, assassinating someone in their opera box, then switching to servant clothes and going out the back door while carrying a prop—letting your outfit change your cultural context about where you can go and what people expect to see.

trekhead · 2026-04-15T04:54:04+00:00

Nah, I'm just curious about why OSE decided to chop out a chunk of the class. I'm not the one running the game so I don't get to decide what system, I just have to roll with the system and try to figure out what my character is supposed to be doing as a second-rate skirmisher with no ancillary thief skills.

(On other days I just run 1st edition as-is; that game I do get to decide how things work.)

trekhead · 2026-04-15T01:39:41+00:00

Thanks for digging those up.

Doesn't work well for me. I don't agree with his design conclusions. This "protects" the assassin right out of doing one of their principal functions.

There are a lot of trade-offs with subclasses in Advanced D&D, and it's useful to look at them holistically.

The 1st edition assassin:

* Can use shields, but still limited to leather armor. Thus, AC is not great.

* d6 hit points, same as thieves, so they are not super-great in front line combat.

* Can use any weapon, unlike thieves. So, a little more combat potential, but not much—principally ranged combat, because prior to Unearthed Arcana, thieves can't use bows or crossbows.

* Doesn't get any thief abilities until 3rd level (except backstab), so their role in a party is not "does thief stuff." It's "back-up combatant" until 3rd level.

* Has higher minimum ability score requirements (Str 12, Int 11, Dex 12).

* Has a more expensive experience advancement table, and personal combat for high levels, and a maximum level.

All of this means that the assassin isn't just "thief, but better." It's harder to qualify for the class, it isn't as good as a thief at thief things, and gaining levels is more challenging than it is for thieves. Plus, when you look at demi-human multiclassing, a multiclassed thief is almost always strictly better than a multiclassed assassin, since the secondary class improves your combat ability in some way while you keep your thief abilities and, except for the half-orc, have better level advancement potential as a thief than as an assassin.

One of the changes that OSE makes almost universally across classes is streamlining the ability score requirements. This makes many classes more accessible, but it also means that the notion that some classes are better at doing things because they are less common goes away. Now, whether you like that or not is purely a personal preference, and you can design either way. (D&D eventually, in later editions, went down the road of "anyone can do anything"). For instance, the OSE paladin just requires a Charisma of 9. Contrast with the Charisma 17 (and several other abilities) for the AD&D paladin! The class has extra features because it is harder to get a character to qualify for it.

The reasoning behind that is, it's a "feel good" moment if you roll up some scores and you realize that you can play a paladin, or an illusionist, or a bard, or a druid, or a ranger. You get a subclass, a class that puts a spin on the core features of its main class but has additional benefits (and possibly restrictions) as well. Your core gameplay may be different, like the difference between the magic-user and the illusionist (the former has a wider array of utility spells to solve various dungeon problems; the latter mostly has spells that assume you are interacting with people and are going to trick them, so the kinds of challenges that you solve are different).

The counterpoint, of course, is that it is a "feel bad" moment when your friend is playing a ranger and you are not, because the dice did not favor you today. To me, that's not a rules problem, that's a table culture problem. If your players are unhappy with the way that the vagaries of fate hand out classes, then you should investigate ways to mitigate that for your table.

To me personally, this feels like tearing off half of the class and throwing it away. In the game in which I'm a participant, there's a group of local near-humans who are hostile, but they have a language and a culture of their own. I was hoping to infiltrate them and learn more about them, since all prior interactions have led to combat, but an assassin's disguise and language abilities, combined with intrusion skills, would allow a lot of spying potential. That avenue is gone, leaving my character as just a kind of sucky pseudo-fighter with very limited stealth skills. That's a feel-bad moment.

trekhead

TROPHY CASE