On Diseases in Orginal D&D

One small project I’m working on is writing out rules for handling disease in old school D&D. My general goal is to craft some mechanics that can work, with minor tweaking, for most any TSR era edition of D&D. Whenever possible, I want to use existing rules published by TSR. It’s not a hard requirement, and I’m willing to tweak any rules I find, but I’d at least like to start with something "official".

And I thought I was onto something, but now I don't think so at all. In doing some research on this, I found this post from Delta’s D&D Hot Spot, where he points out that the earliest rules for Diseases in D&D actually appear in OD&D supplement 2, Blackmoor.

Alas, despite Delta’s endorsement and his general enthusiasm, I don’t think these rules actually work. Let’s take a look at why.

The Effects of Being Sick

Here's a portion of the rules in question:

 

 

 

 

 

Fatality

The most straightforward effect of contracting a disease under this system is that doing so might kill your character. For each disease, Blackmoor gives a flat percentile chance that your character will die from having contracted it. Bubonic Plague, for example, has a 35% fatality rate.

What the rules don’t say, however, is when to roll for fatality. The only mention I can find related to this is the following: “Players may get cured by the local Magic User or Cleric but they must do so before the referee rolls for their death.” So, it’s important in this system to know when the fatality roll occurs, but there’s no indication when to do so.

Strength Decrease

The other effect of having a disease is that it weakens your character, literally reducing their Strength:

“During the early stages of the disease the player will lose the use of strength points based on the days they stay out of bed.”

I really like the idea of diseases decreasing your strength. However, here’s where things get a little clunky.

“… for a disease that lasts 1–5 days, each day they will lose 20% of their strength points.”

It took me a minute to figure this out, but what the rules are saying is that the GM should divide the total possible Strength damage out across the full duration of the disease. Not the duration rolled by GM, mind you, but the maximum potential duration. That’s why the example says 20%, because 20% across 5 days (the maximum duration for the example disease) adds up to 100%.

But wait, that’s not the whole picture. The rules go on to say:

“in ALL [sic] cases the percentage will be taken out of 18 strength points so 20% … [equals] three strength points (all fractions are ignored).”

If you’re confused, what the author* is saying here is that you don’t actually reduce the character’s STR by a percentage of their character’s Strength score, you reduce it by a percentage of Strength 18, which represents the maximum Strength a character can possess in OD&D.

And here’s my next annoyance with this system. If the amount of Strength a character loses from a disease is a percentage based on the disease’s maximum duration, and it’s always applied to 18…then that’s a static number. There's no reason to require the GM to math this out.

Take the example disease, which lasts 1-5 days. Let’s assume it’s cholera, since that matches the duration. The example tells us that cholera reduces the character’s Strength by 3 each day (20% of 18, rounded down). The frustrating thing is that the number here, 3 Strength, will never change for this disease. It’s always just 3. Instead of making the GM divide 18 by 5…JUST WRITE 3 ON THE TABLE.

The Math Doesn’t Actually Work

With the above in mind, I went through and did the math on all the listed diseases, thinking that would solve the problem. Alas, doing that just revealed a new issue. Before I explain, it’s important to remind the reader about a couple things from the rule that I quoted above: 

1. The author says a character will lose strength points based on the number of days they stay out of bed.

2. We're supposed to ignore fractions when we calculate the strength loss.

But what am I supposed to do with Dysentery, which lists a duration not of days, but of 1-4 weeks? Am I supposed to convert those weeks to days, so that a character loses Strength over 7 – 28 days? That doesn’t work, because following the math given in the example would mean a PC is supposed to lose 18 Strength spread across 28 days, or .64 points per day. But remember, the rules say to ignore factions (which would include decimals). So, uh, 0 Strength per day?

Maybe It’s Per Week?

Perhaps, even though the rules clearly say per day, the author meant per time unit (week, day, whatever). So Dysentery reduces Strength at a rate of 4 points per week. That checks out.

Until we consider Tuberculosis, which has a duration of 4 – 24 weeks. Now we’re talking 18 divided by 24 (if we use weeks) or 18 divided by 168 (if we use days). Either way, we're rounding to zero. Unless I’m utterly missing something, these rules don’t actually work for at least two of the diseases.

Strength Loss Doesn’t Mean Much Anyway

Even if I solve the problem above, let’s discuss what a temporary loss of Strength actually means. In OD&D as written, the answer is: basically nothing. If you’re playing a fighter, high Strength grants an XP bonus. It doesn't grant an attack bonus, a damage bonus, or do much anything else of note.

To be fair, though, Blackmoor came out after the Grayhawk supplement, which one could argue means it was meant to be used in conjunction with the expanded ability score rules:

 

 

 

 

So I guess it’s kind of important? I’m not totally angry at the idea of Strength damage for disease, but its effect really hinges on which version of old school D&D you're using.

The Disease Table Isn’t Consistent with the Other Rules

If you read the actual disease descriptions, you’ll also notice that they often contradict the stats written in the table. Looking at Bubonic Plague, for example, we can see that the % chance to catch the disease is 1%. That seems low for a disease that ravaged most of the population of Europe.

But, reading the full description of plague, it says “any person that contracts this disease will infect 90% of the people he comes in contact with.”

What the hell Blackmoor? I guess we’re meant to understand that a person has a 10% chance of getting the plague from fleas, but then a 90% chance to get it from a person who already has it. While I’m fairly confident with my interpretation here, I’m still annoyed at how awkwardly it reads.

There’s More

Honestly, these aren’t the only warts in this system that I’d need to iron out to actually use these rules. I’m not going to delve any deeper here, though, because it just isn’t worth it. While I may still use these rules as inspiration, I’m afraid I can’t do much with the mechanics. I'll dig around a bit more, but I'm not too confident that TSR gave me any rules for diseases that I can easily crib.

 

* D&D co-creator Dave Arneson is credited as the author of Blackmoor. However, there is some debate as to who wrote what part of Blackmoor, so I’ve chosen to be generic about my references to the author.

Random Realm: Ruins and Lairs

“Once you’ve set down the population centers, you can begin placing the Ruins locations. These Ruins represent lost cities, crumbled fortresses, stygian dungeon, plundered temples, abandoned towers of wizardry, and all the other decaying locales so beloved of adventurers.”

--An Echo Resounding: A Sourcebook for Lordship and War
Kevin Crawford (2012)

Step 11: Add Ruins

In our last installment, we added two major cities to our random map as well as a handful of towns. Now we’re going to place some potential adventure locations in the form of what Crawford calls “Ruins.” The book suggests the following:

• 5 ruins for every City.
• 1-3 of those were once major human cities, towns, etc.
• The rest can be whatever (wizards' towers, lost temples, ancient ruins, etc.)

Since we placed 2 Cities in a previous step, we need to place about 10 Ruins. According to Echoes, 2-6 of these should be former human settlements of some kind. I’m trying to lean into randomness whenever possible and let the dice decide these sorts of things for me. So, I roll 1d6 and get a 6. Let’s represent those 6 ruins with some bright pink dots. 

 

The remaining 4 ruins are the miscellaneous type referenced above. These we’ll note with bright yellow dots. 

 

At this point, I still don’t know what these “ruins” represent, exactly. I’m not going to replace them with new symbols just yet. Until I know their nature, I don’t know if they’ll warrant a prominent map feature or just a note. For now, I’ll leave them as dots on a separate lair in my GIMP image file.

Step 11.5: Add a Map Grid 

If I’m going to add features to the map that won’t necessarily get their own symbols, then I’ll need a way to keep track of where I put those features. Before I go too much further, I think I’ll add a quick and dirty grid labeling system to my map.

Now, a lot of old school maps put the grid labels right on the hexes themselves. I personally don’t care for that, as it makes things too cluttered and hinders the visibility, and therefore the usefulness, of the map itself. Instead, I’ll just label the rows and columns. Given the nature of the hex map, the row labels won’t match up perfectly. That’s fine. An approximation will be okay for our purposes.

Take a look at the map above to see what I mean. The area I’ve circled in pink is between two of the row labels. It could be expressed as E1 or E2. When mapping locations, if a hex falls between the labeled rows like this, I’m going to choose the northmost row. In this case, that makes this hex E2. It’s not completely precise, but it will work well enough for our purposes

Step 12: Add Lairs

In An Echo Resounding, the next step is technically “establish resources”. That step is tied-in with the author’s realm management system, which we’re not really going to worry about for this exercise. Instead, we’re going to skip right to “placing Lairs.”

Lairs are sort of reverse-towns. They are the havens for the monsters, bandits, and other hostiles in the area, and inherently hostile to player characters. To use the old school paradigm of D&D adventure progression, Ruins are for Dungeon exploration and Lairs represent Wilderness play.

For Lairs, I'm using gray squares. Adding them according to the advice in Echo, here's what the end result.

Next Time

We'll take a break for the mapping in order to make some decisions about the campaign itself.

Random Realm: Adding Settlements

Now that we have most of our natural features established on our map and we’ve taken stock of the scale and overall size of the campaign area, we need to add some settlements. Dwarf Fortress is no longer any help to us, as the starting map it generated didn’t contain any cities or settlements. Note that the program could have generated a whole civilization for us, complete with history and such. However, the result wouldn’t have been very useful for our needs. Anything produced by Dwarf Fortress ends up being pretty specific to the nuances of that game and its setting.

It would be helpful to have some kind of guidance going forward, however. For that help, I’m turning to the first of our specific tabletop-related resources: An Echo Resounding, by Kevin Crawford. While partially a book on domain management and mass combat written for Labyrinth Lord, Echo also contains great guidance on building a D&D-style campaign using a sort of top-down approach, which is what we're interested in. I’m going to be following its advice through this step and possibly beyond.

Step 9: Placing Cities

To quote Crawford (2012) “Not every village and tribal campsite needs to be qualified as a location…At this stage, you are concerned only with the major City and market Town locations of your region” (p. 10). Crawford (2012) recommends placing a City “along rivers, or along seacoasts where a river empties into the ocean” (p. 10).

I’m not going to directly quote Echo any further, but here’s a summary of the advice it offers:

• A relatively unsettled region (which is good for D&D gaming) should only have about 1 proper “city”.
• Cities need a lot of surrounding farmland to support them (and about 10x as many farmer-peasants as city dwellers).
• Cities usually develop near water.
• A city on the edge of civilization should have a population of about 10,000 – 15,000.
• Cities should be far away from one another.

Looking at my map, I decided to bend the rules above a bit and place 2 cities. The map we have is divided into north and south regions by those mountains near the center. I think a mountain range forms a nice border and gives justification for perhaps two separate cultures existing here: one to the north, one to the south. 

Remember, too, that our campaign map is a cropped version of a much larger map. There is plenty of land north and south of where we’ve arbitrarily decided to zoom in for our project. Perhaps our map represents the relatively unsettled borderland between two more developed nations who are slowly encroaching upon this unsettled wilderland.

With that in mind, I added two dots to represent two large cities, a red dot to the north and a purple dot to the south.

Red Dot: This city is in a coniferous forest hex, where two rivers connect and flow to the sea. One river flows from the mountains, bringing potential mineral wealth. The presence of a lot of forest implies fertile land, which I imagine could be converted into farmland near the river. I’m not knowledgeable enough about agriculture to know whether the presence of the sea near that scrubland helps or hinders things. But I think this region is believable enough for a city to meet our needs.

Purple Dot: Probably a better location than the northern city, this location is on a river, along a coast, near a large lake, and surrounded by forest and adjacent to grasslands. There are some badlands to the northeast, but the region here seems pretty hospitable.

Step 10: Placing Towns

Crawford recommends placing four towns per city on the map, spread out fairly evenly along coasts, rivers, or in any particularly blank spots on the map. I’ve done that here, keeping to the color schemes of red toward the north and purple in the south. At this point, those colors denote some kind of cultural connection or affiliation, but I’m not yet sure what.

 

And here’s a version where I’ve replaced the bright dots with more appropriate map symbols. Large black dots ringed in white for cities. Smaller white dots ringed in black for towns.

Up Next

We'll add potential adventure sites to our map.

Random Realm: The Map So Far

WThis post is part of a continuing project to turn a map generated via the PC game Dwarf Fortress into a usable map for an RPG Campaign. At this point, we have a nice-looking hex map fleshed out with terrain and natural features. I wanted to take a break to look at what setting details we have so far.

Setting Details

At this point, we haven’t determined much about our setting. However, we do have SOME detail established. Before we move on to adding settlements, let’s take stock of what we know about our campaign

 

Terrain

Our map includes hexes that correspond with the following types of terrain:

• Mountains
• Forest, Evergreen
• Forest, Deciduous
• Savanna
• Shrubland
• Badlands
• Grassland

Scale and Terrain

We also know a little bit about the area of our campaign and the map itself.

• Hex Size: I build this using a 6-mile hex scale.
• Number of Hexes: 30 hexes wide X 26 hexes high.
• Total Area: 24,180 miles. The math here is 1 hex = 31 miles, 780 hexes (30 x 26), 780 * 31 = 24,180.
• Rivers: 6 major rivers visible. 1 major river partially visible (in the extreme north of the map).
• Lakes: 4 major lakes, with 3 of the 4 in a cluster near the south of the map.
• Mountain Ranges: 2 major ranges, with the southernmost range only partially visible.