Dungeons & Dragons: Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures

Original D&D #Core Rules

by E. Gary Gygax, Dave Arneson

Boxed set containing three paperback volumes:
Volume 1: "Men & Magic"
Volume 2: "Monsters & Treasure"
Volume 3: "The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures"

Information regarding the various print runs of the Original D&D boxed sets can be found at http://www.acaeum.com/ddindexes/setpa...

(Note: The three volumes in this boxed set were not offered for separate sale.)

Genres: Fantasy, Gaming, Role Playing Games, Dungeons and Dragons, Games

116 pages, Boxed set of 3 paperback volumes

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Mark Lawrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read in 1977.

Magic in a box.

Thanks, Gary. RIP.



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[David Chmelik · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first edition of the first role-playing game (RPG) and best fantasy RPG of all time. The first seven regular & advanced versions are still much better than `3rd edition' (from 2000) and later, which are all poor and not worth playing. Try this and those first seven versions.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, this is simply the "granddaddy of all fantasy role-playing games" -- accept no substitutes. I remember my fascination and the wonder of discovery back in the mid-1970s when I was first introduced to Dungeons & Dragons (a name not preceded by "Basic" or "Advanced", or followed by an edition number). I can easily admit that my early fascination with this game system has not been matched by any game since. Our group met for adventuring sessions (some of those lasting for hours and hours), and that there were only three character classes and no magic-user spells above 5th level didn't concern us at all. Then the D&D Supplements showed up. More monsters, more weapons, more treasure, more character classes, more, more, more (...and we all demanded "more, more, more" until TSR was short of breath just trying to keep up with our appetite).

Despite all the "bad press" D&D got from the uninformed and misinformed (mostly concerned Christians), the game survived -- and thrived. What was most often misunderstood was that D&D was only a game, not a religion that was proposing to open a gateway to Hell. What the uninformed and misinformed failed to understand was that it wasn't the game itself that was evil -- no more evil than any other stack of paper with printed words. No, the dangers were in how each individual dungeon master (aka "DM") chose to conduct his gaming campaigns and scenarios. What were the lessons taught by these DMs? What were the values and morals that players were learning from the game?

As with so many things in our world, condemnation often comes from those who do not comprehend, those who refuse to do an unbiased study before declaring a game or a movie or a book unfit.

For myself and each member of our small gaming group from long ago, I'm sure the original Dungeons & Dragons game system remains a fond and unequaled memory...

[James Bowman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unlike the slick and stylish current game, the original Dungeons & Dragons reads much like what it basically was - the homebrew work of a team of talented amateurs, more prototype than finished product. It's rough and unpolished, full of unspoken assumptions, shaky on the organization front... but it's also obvious how much enthusiasm its creators had, and it's full of gameplay potential.

Among some of this version's distinctions:
- Instead of a "Dungeon Master", the game is run by a "referee". There's also no indication that rolls are hidden behind a screen (though maps aren't revealed to players).
- The game is not complete unto itself. Officially, they merely recommend you use another game by Gary Gygax, Chainmail. In practice, you need it, especially in combat. (If you plan on playing without Chainmail, be prepared to fill in those gaps yourself.)
- The game relies on the d6 (all Hit Dice are d6, all weapon damage is d6, etc.), though d4, d8, d12, and d20 have roles. The d10 is absent, but the game still expects you to roll percentages... and never explains how. (Perhaps this was common knowledge among wargamers in 1974.)
- A character's ability scores are rolled randomly (3d6 in order) for a player by the referee.
- They suggest you can play with up to 50(!) players, as long as you have one referee per 20 players. This was likely made manageable through a "caller", a single player who presented the group's decisions to the referee... and which only appears in an example of play in Book III, with no explanation. (Another unspoken assumption, apparently.)
- The game has an implied endgoal - accumulate enough wealth and power to build your own stronghold and barony.
- There are no real instructions for role-playing - apparently you're expected to figure it out yourself.
- The game emphasizes that you don't need miniatures (surprising given its roots in miniatures wargames), but measures distances in inches (which translate differently in dungeons and in the wilderness) and blatantly expects the use of maps.
- A lot of things are loosely defined - and they encourage you to make up your own answers to any resulting rules questions. However, certain important details for players (like a requirement for character upkeep) are not actually left to the ref, they're just buried in unexpected places.

Much like later editions, the rules are separated into three books. Some highlights follow...

Men & Magic: Roughly equivalent to the later Player's Handbook, this contains rules for character creation, as well as some fundamental gameplay rules.
- There are three character classes: fighting-men (fighters), magic-users (wizards), and clerics. Each level has a name associated with it (for example, a level 6 fighting-man is a "myrmidon") and the rest of the rules reference these names thereafter. Each class advances at a different rate, with different experience totals needed for each level in each class. They emphasize magic-users (and clerics) creating their own spells and magic items. Clerics' ability to turn undead appears (as a table you roll on and consult), but it's buried in the spell section later.
- There are four character races: men, dwarves, elves, and halflings (hobbits). Men are the default assumption, with all other races having limits to how far they advance (probably not coincidentally just short of achieving stronghold-building levels). Elves seem particularly powerful, able to swap between fighting-man and magic-user between adventures. Halflings seem like an afterthought, and get overlooked during later sections that reference dwarves and elves (most notably, the Raise Dead spell); you almost wonder if the designers only included them grudgingly. They also suggest you can make up additional races of any sort, so long as they start weak.
- There are three alignments: Law, Chaos, and Neutrality. These are treated more like teams than philosophies; creatures of a given alignment can even communicate through shared "divisional" languages.
- Outside of affecting how much XP you earn, and a few specific features, the uses of the six ability scores are left broad and undefined. (This particularly hits Wisdom, which they admit is basically redundant with Intelligence.)
- There are rules for hiring, persuading, or coercing NPCs and monsters to work for your players, so they can build an "entourage". They seem to assume that players will do this.
- There's an equipment list, with weights in coins (plus encumbrance rules). The list includes specific monster-hunting tools such as wolvesbane and garlic.
- Experience includes the gold value of any treasure you find.
- While they clearly expect Chainmail rules to be used for combat, they do present a d20-based "alternative combat system" - basically the ancestor of the combat system in later edtions. However, this only addresses attacks vs. Armor Class (using a table you have to consult), and leaves out key elements (such as how to determine turn order). This section also includes saving throws to evade negative effects, which are more specialized and idiosyncratic than later versions of the concept.
- Spells are much more loosely defined than in later editions, and execution will depend on the ref's judgment. (A few spells, like Slow and Haste, aren't really explained at all.) Magic-users have way more spells than clerics, but don't get any damaging spells until the third spell level. This section also pointlessly includes a topless amazon as an illustration (not exactly trying to win women over, it seems).

Monsters & Treasure: As the name suggests, this is where the monsters and treasure (mainly magic items) are.
- Monster listings are split into a reference table with their stats, and descriptions later on in the booklet; having to flip between the two seems very inconvenient. Worse, the monsters aren't organized in any obvious way, just sort of clumped together by category.
- Monsters get one attack per Hit Die (which seems like it could get crazy with high-HD monsters, even with damage defaulting to 1d6). Some also have poison, but this is never clearly explained.
- Many of the classic D&D creatures are here, if mostly those known from myth and legend. (There are also a few that faded away later on, like nixies.) Descriptions tend to be thin, just a few sentences and mostly about combat (though there are exceptions). The light detail admittedly makes some of the monsters seem redundant (why so many oozes? why multiple petrifying monsters?).
- Some undead have the ability to drain character levels on a hit, with no discernable way to resist the effect. (I can only imagine the response of the first players to this.)
- Dragons get the most detail, distinguishing between non-talking and talking varieties (which can cast spells). They also include slightly discomforting guidelines for subduing them into service and/or selling(!) them. (Lycanthropes allude to this as well.)
- The original gnolls are half-gnome, half-troll.
- Unicorns will obey "maiden-warriors" - possibly the only reference to the idea of female characters in the rules.
- Mundane and giant animals (and sea monsters) are represented with generic stat blocks, left to refs to specify. They also suggest other monster ideas (including an ancestor of the iron golem, plus robots and cyborgs).
- Treasure caches can include maps, which can lead to side quests.
- Several random tables of magic items, some of which get no description and rely on the name alone (such as "dagger +2 vs. man-sized opponents, +3 vs. orcs, goblins and kobolds"). There's a detailed section on intelligent magic swords, with guidelines for power struggles with them, plus advice on tricking players into falling prey to cursed items (and some curses are quite nasty!).
- The concept of Artifacts is introduced - as powerful items tied to law or chaos - but they're pretty much left to the ref to design.

The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures: Basically the Dungeon Master's Guide, this provides the remaining guidelines for running the game.
- They provide advice on dungeon design, with examples - though what they provide isn't really for beginners. They also emphasize using the layout to confuse players. Rooms can (and should) be filled with monsters and treasure randomly.
- Dungeon exploration is turn-based and very procedural; it earns one of the rare examples of play (that unfortunately skips combat). Checks for finding secrets and the like are made by the referee. Random encounters and surprise are also part of this process (the latter providing the closest you get to determining turn order without Chainmail). There are also rules for escaping pursuing monsters.
- Monsters (to include NPCs in dungeons) can always see in the dark, even though players can't. However, they lose this ability if they enter the players' service (logic be damned!).
- A small bit of attention is given to players running around their home-base town.
- Wilderness adventures are basically macro-scale dungeon crawls across a hex map, following much the same procedures. (The designers also seemed especially enthusiastic about them.) Although the referee is supposed to draw up a local region around their dungeon (including the nearest town), they also expect them to reference a separate game called Outdoor Survival (kind of late for telling readers this). Besides random encounters with monsters, players can also encounter castles held by NPCs, which may challenge them in various ways.
- Players are expected to establish their own strongholds in the wilderness (to include rules for staffing them), build baronies by clearing out nearby monsters, collect taxes from locals, and even develop their territories further (though they don't provide much detail for that last). However, player outrages can invoke the "Angry Villager Rule", sending mobs (or even Conan types) after them.
- A paragraph is dedicated to sending characters to other worlds and times (and they suggest refs can take their time introducing this).
- The rest of the booklet becomes increasingly specialized, with mini-games for aerial combat and naval combat (the latter being particularly detailed). These almost come off like filler, though the naval section does sneak in some more monsters.
- The booklet ends with a few more random guidelines (on natural healing and time-keeping).

Objectively, these rules have many problems - incompleteness and disorganization being the chief ones. A referee who wants to run this by the book, without improvisation, may have a hard time, even if they have Chainmail and Outdoor Survival at hand. Still, it's hard to deny the game's appeal, and it certainly should be respected for its historical value. While this version of the game isn't really suited to modern players... it might suggest some interesting forgotten ideas to bring into their campaigns. (B)

[Thom · Rating 3 out of 5]

The original D&D boxed set consisted of three books, the first was the largest. Four supplements were published, and the set of seven was reprinted and sold for big bucks to nostalgia seekers in 2013.

As covered in Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-Playing Games, this edition was the second step away from wargames and towards the Dungeons & Dragons RPG we have today. These books *feel* like the rules to a large game, with the third even suggesting a board to re-use from a different game (Outdoor Survival). Later publications from TSR included the Dungeons & Dragons Basic edition (not too far from these books) and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which put much more emphasis on role play.

The first book is the largest, spelling out how the game is played. It describes the attributes, character classes and the concepts of levels. For combat, these are spelled out in the number of "men" the character could fight as, eventually reaching "hero" and "superhero" - which connects directly to the original wargames. Nearly everything is ruled by the six sided die, and the number 6 shows up many places, including the highest spell level. Most weapons do a d6 damage, occasionally modified by 1 or 2 points, and most spells damage in multiples of a d6. This book also mentions the main venue for play - dungeons - and the third book covers this in depth.

The second book lists monsters and treasures. This is far before the concept of a "stat block" - tables at the beginning list a few important vitals, and the description of most is only a small paragraph. Men and Dragons are exceptions, with many details of the varieties, and for the latter, a large discussion on subduing them for later market sale.

The third book is the slimmest, going into detail on dungeon design - which was mostly an exercise to frustrate the party trying to draw a map. For exteriors, Outdoor Survival is frequently suggested, with water holes becoming castles. The actual battlefields were probably played out on the same sand tables used for Napoleonic conflicts, though with a different scale of one character per miniature figure. While not a "DM" book, this volume has the least information for players, who could probably get buy with just one book. These books were not sold separately at the time - I would bet the first book was passed around the group quite a bit.

These were a quick read, and really connect D&D back to its wargame roots. The first few printings of this book detailed the balrog, ent, and hobbits, then the Tolkien estate kindly requested these be removed. The 2013 reprints were of a later edition without these bits, and the cover art for all seven books was updated. Very amateur interior drawings were not changed however, and the balrog (drawn by Greg Bell) lives on at the bottom of page 13.

I recommend these books to anyone interested in the historical D&D, especially as a supplement to the research tome listed above. My gaming will continue to focus on the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons branch though - I enjoy the role playing aspect more than the tactical combat and board game described here.

[Joseph Riina · Rating 3 out of 5]

Gygax is an interesting writer, but not a particularly good one. Still, his pretty human writing style makes this a pretty organic read up until it goes into (just like the 1e dmg) pages and pages of rules that have not lasted through the ages, like the rules for naval combat.

It's also interesting that D&D was originally kind of an amalagam of like 3 different games, using a board from Wilderness Survival and combat rules from Chainmail. Kinda crazy this started the game that's still running, because it just doesn't feel fully realized yet, even if you include the chainmail combat rules

[Kars · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sure, it’s full of holes. But it is also a remarkable act of creativity to have come up with this game, and it is very refreshing to read the rules that started a hobby.

[Juho Pohjalainen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Effectively what got this whole mess rolling, leaving an indelible mark to all of fiction and entertainment.

We owe much to it, but it's honestly not all that useful for actual gaming. You'll need deep comprehension of gaming lore, and the even more ancient Chainmail books, to really even figure it out - and even once you do, the Basic and Advanced lines both greatly refined and fine-tuned its rough edge into something keen, deadly, and legitimately fun.

Still worth reading through, though, just to get an idea of where we started and how we got here.

[Pádraic]

I've not actually read this, I've read a retroclone called Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, which reformats the original text (almost entirely without editing the actual words) and provides some additional appendices. This, to me, was a lot more bearable than reading the barely organised original. Anyway, I'll never run this, but it's a strange fascinating document, and it seemed appropriate that I tackle it or a version of it, given the 50th anniversary this year.

[Arthur B · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the version of TSR D&D you go for if you want to be very, very confused. Worth a look if you are very interested in RPG history, but there are better versions of even early D&D out there which are better optimised for actual play. Would be a 10/10 if rated on sheer influence, though. Full thoughts on this and other TSR-era D&D editions: https://refereeingandreflection.wordp...

[Goli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great framework for running a fantasy game world. Many different ideas here that you just don't see much anymore, many because they were cumbersome or needlessly restrictive. Nonetheless these LBBs have a totally unique feel to them, modern game masters would find it worthwhile to read these and other old editions.

[Neville Ridley-smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely fascinating.

For more detail - see my reviews of each individual booklet :
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[T1na Ba1ley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book seems to me like a game of life. It reminds me of the book ‘ The Richest Man in Babylon,’, where your questions should be directed to the character that specializes in that subject for the best results.

[Joe B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Played with 1st edition rules, but got this to see how it all had started before my time as a player. Very nostalgic!

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

Even if you're not interested in running OD&D you should check this out. The art alone is worth the price of admission and some of the referee advice is, unsurprisingly, priceless.