As others have remarked (see this excellent write-up by
Wayne Rossi for example http://initiativeone.blogspot.com/2013/05/od-setting-posts-in-pdf.html
) the wilderness given by the rules in OD&D is a wild, fantastic place
crawling with nightmarish creatures and punctuated by tiny struggling beacons
of civilization. Generating the
monstrous population of this “upper world” wilderland is done through a series
of tables. What distinguishes these tables
most from later versions of D&D is that each table is given a creature type
category and each type is generated on a separate table first. For example, one one might roll “flyers” on
the first table and then roll giant eagles on the Flyers table.
But why go through this extra, seemingly superfluous
step? No doubt the reason is to allow a
referee to create custom lists of creatures for their wilderness while
maintaining the same encounter type frequencies called for in the rules.
The creature types given in the rules are:
Men
Flyers
Undead
Giant (kind)
Lycanthrope
Animal
Swimmer
Dragon (kind)
All the monsters and characters of D&D fall into one or
other of these categories, (possibly more than one) and all these categories
have a pretty wide variety of creatures – except for Lycanthropes. Lycanthropes are the most specific of the
categories, having the least members – only 4 in the 3lbbs. Why aren’t lycanthropes simply folded into
the “men” category or some other? Perhaps
the answer is simply a result of Gygax and Arneson’s conceptualization of the
category types. In the entry on
vampires, Lycanthropes are stressed as a separate type not to be confused with
undead. I suppose the logic was that if
they are neither undead nor normal men they must be a separate type, more or
less by default. The upshot is that
using the OD&D wilderness tables as is will give a much higher occurrence
of the four kinds of lycans than any other monster.
Perhaps though, there’s a little more to the story than
simply a fluke of classification. The
wilderness encounter tables of OD&D appear to be derived and expanded from
Dave Arneson’s “Encounter Matrix I”, a copy of which can be found at the start
of the “Into The Great Outdoors” section of First Fantasy Campaign. Encounter Matrix I is a d20 table Dave
Arneson came up with in the very early days of Blackmoor to generate random
monster encounters when the Blackmoor players first began to leave the dungeons
and explore the countryside. The
derivation of the D&D wilderness encounter table from Encounter Matrix I is
fairly obvious in that both have exactly the same location categories except
that D&D adds one new terrain category “cities”. An
important distinction however is that the FFC list has only individual monsters
taken from the CHAINMAIL miniatures rules – Ogres, trolls goblins, air elementals
etc., instead of the creature type categories of D&D. Both lists however share the category
“Lycanthropes” in common. Perhaps even
more interesting, Lycanthropes occur most frequently in woods on both lists, at
very nearly the same frequency 21.4% (FFC) to 25% (D&D). So the curios
abundance of lycans in the D&D wilderness appears to be as much a
carryover from the early Blackmoor wilderness as anything else.
Now I don’t want to get carried away with this. Undead for example appear more often in
Arnesons’ lists than in the OD&D list.
There are ghouls and “wrights” in the Mountains in the Blackmoor
wilderness where as no undead are listed in D&Ds mountains, but the general
character of the Blackmoor wilderness does seem to have set the stage from
which the D&D wilderness was crafted and the predominance of Lycanthropes
appears to be an artifact of this relationship going to the earliest milieus of
the game.
3 comments:
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