In honor of Clark Ashton Smith's birthday, I sketched out a character class based broadly on the characters from "The Empire of the Necromancers." It's still a work in progress, but I like the broad outlines of it and will probably find a way to make use of it in a current or future projects.
I've released a draft of another character class for my Old School Essentials-based Lovecraftian fantasy roleplaying game, Dream-Quest – the Shadow, which is a thief analog unique to the Dreamlands.
In addition to the Shadow, I've also released drafts of the following classes:
Elsewhere, I'm still developing Dream-Quest, my Lovecraftian/Dunsanian fantasy game based on Old School Essentials. This is a side project to the others I'm already sharing over at Grognardia Games Direct, but it's starting to pick up steam, with the goal of playtesting an early version of it in the winter. In the meantime, I'm filling out the roster of character classes for play, with the Knight of Dreams being the latest one. The class takes loose inspiration from the knights who serve King Kuranes in Lovecraft's "Celephaïs."
Hunter in shadow. Wanderer in dream. Watcher beneath the moon.
A moon prowler is no ordinary feline. Sleek and clever, with eyes like twin moons and a mind sharp as a knife’s edge, she prowls the Dreamlands with an ease no human could match. She speaks in purrs and riddles, slips through shadows like silk, and leaps across rooftops as though gravity were an optional courtesy. She is feared and respected by all, for the law of the Dreamlands is clear: no man may kill a cat.
Prime requisite: A moon prowler with at least 13 DEX gains a 5% bonus to experience. If DEX is 16 or higher, the moon prowler gets a +10% bonus.
A moon prowler cannot wear armor of any kind. However, her uncanny agility grants her a base AC 7 (modified further by DEX). She prefers to fight with her claws (1d3 damage), but may use melee weapons suited to her size (referee’s discretion).
A moon prowler can squeeze through any opening large enough for her head and balance on narrow surfaces (ledges, ropes) without requiring a check.
Anyone who kills a moon prowler is cursed.
A moon prowler cannot carry heavy burdens. Beyond a dagger and a few small items, she refuses loads. She also loathes water, avoiding it unless magically compelled or under dire circumstances.
Thanks to heightened hearing and smell, moon prowlers have a 2-in-6 chance to:
When under moonlight, a moon prowler may leap up to 30’ horizontally or 15’ vertically. This ability may be used both in and out of combat.
Once per day, a moon prowler may avoid the effects of a single attack, spell, trap, or other hazard that would otherwise kill her.
In dim light or darkness, a moon prowler surprises opponents on a 1–4 on 1d6. In full daylight, this only applies against distracted or unaware targets.
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| With apologies to Peter von Sholly |
Stranger in waking life. Adventurer of the Other World. King in dreams.
A dreamer is a mystic who slips beyond the borders of waking reality into strange and hidden realms. His body may be plain and earthbound, but his mind wanders distant dimensions where wonder and dread intertwine. He may return with uncanny powers – or lose himself forever. In the waking world, a dreamer often serves as a seer, prophet, or enigmatic wanderer, forever shaped by what he has seen.
A dreamer can use any weapon, but he is unable to use to shields or wear any kind of armor.
If a Dreamer is reduced to 0 hp in the Dreamlands, his body in the Waking World convulses and falls into a deathlike coma. He vanishes from the Dreamlands immediately, reappearing in his mortal body after 1d6 days of real-world time. During this period, he cannot enter the Dreamlands by any means.
However, each time a Dreamer is “slain” in the Dreamlands, there is a 1-in-6 chance that his soul becomes untethered. If this occurs, his waking body dies instantly and his spirit is trapped in the Dreamlands forever, unless restored by magic or divine intervention capable of true resurrection. Thereafter, any subsequent death is permanent.
Starting at 7th level, this risk is reduced to 1-in-12, reflecting mastery over his dream-self.
At 1st level, a dreamer must choose one of the following:
A dreamer does not cast spells but instead manifest unpredictable powers from the Dreamlands. To do so, roll 1d8 twice on the Dream Powers table below and select one of the results. The chosen power may be used immediately or held until the end of the dreamer’s next action, after which it fades if unused and still counts toward the daily limit. Only one power can be held at a time. At levels 3, 6, and 9, a dreamer may choose one, two, and three of his daily powers respectively instead of rolling for them. Six hours of sleep restore all daily uses and remove any held power.
When a dream powers rolls yield the same result on both dice, roll 1d20 to determine an additional consequence.
At 9th level, a dreamer attracts 1d6 followers: dream-touched mystics, alien poets, or seers. Instead of a fortress, a Dreamer may establish a hidden dream-sanctum, accessible only through ritual sleep.
The AD&D game should not have assassin player characters. In fact, no player character should be evil at all unless adverse magic affects him.This is an interesting, though not unusual, point of view, especially as the '80s rolled on. It's also worth noting that assassins were eventually eliminated from AD&D in its second edition, a point of view even Gygax toyed with on occasion, though for different reasons. In any case, Lakofka continues in his introduction to explain that he feels evil is treated too casually in the game. One of his reasons for creating the death master class was to rectify this.
As a way of putting evil in its often without enough of a penalty proper place, here is presented an evil character that makes an assassin look like the boy next door. The death master is meant as a non-player character -- one the player characters and their party have to defeat. Please use the character that way only. If I ever run into a player character death master at a convention, I may turn evil myself. . .Again, it's an interesting point of view, especially when viewed against the changing culture surrounding D&D at that time. Naturally, Lakofka's concerns had zero effect on me at the time, since there was for a brief time a PC death master in my old campaign – brief, because he was eventually slain by the other PCs, but I allowed the class nonetheless. The PC in question was a formerly good character turned to evil by possession of the Hand of Vecna and who became obsessed with eliminating his former companions in the belief that they would eventually destroy him. He was right, as it turned out, though, ironically, his destruction was more the result of his repeated attempts to slay the other PCs than their own desire to see his life ended. In any event, I didn't heed Lakofka's warnings and I'd be amazed if I were the only one.
The first appearance of the cavalier character class in issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983) is something I remember very acutely, in large part because I loved the idea of a knightly AD&D character class. For that reason, I can also remember the three illustrations, all by Keith Parkinson, that accompanied it. Here's the first one, which has a blue background for some reason. Perhaps Dragon was experimenting with color interiors at the time?
From the moment Gary Gygax first announced that his upcoming revision to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons would include, among other additions, a collection of new character classes, my younger self was waiting with eager anticipation for any news about what these classes might be or what abilities they might possess. By the time issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983) had come out, Gygax had already presented previews of two of these new classes, the barbarian and the thief-acrobat, neither of which thrilled me. I didn't hate either of them, but I didn't see much scope for their use in my ongoing AD&D campaign at the time – and neither did my players, who largely ignored them a brief flurry of interest.This issue offered readers a third proposed class: the cavalier. Described as a "sub-class of fighter ... in service to some deity, noble, order, or special cause," the cavalier was basically a knight, drawing on both historical orders of knighthood and those from legend and literature. Much like the paladin, with whom it shares many similarities (more on that soon), the cavalier has hefty ability score requirements for entrance (STR, DEX, and CON 15+, INT and WIS 10+), as well as belonging to the right social class. A cavalier must initially be good in alignment, whether lawful, chaotic, or neutral, though he may shift away from goodness before 4th level without penalty, which I always thought was an odd detail.
Unlike the paladin, which is a human-only class, the cavalier admits humans, elves, and half-elves, all of whom have the potential for unlimited advancement. The class is focused on mounted combat, which, while appropriate based on its inspirations, would seem to limit its utility in dungeon-focused adventures. No matter: cavalier get numerous other useful abilities, such as combat parries, improved saves against fear, impressive starting equipment (a consequence of their high station), weapon specialization, and, perhaps most remarkable of all, ability improvement. Every time a cavalier gains a level, he rolls 2d10 and adds the result as a note after his Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution scores. When the total from these rolls reaches 100 for any ability, it increases by 1 point.
Needless to say, the cavalier was quite a popular class among my friends and I at the time issue #72 appeared. I'd long been seeking an "official" AD&D knight class, so the cavalier scratched a longstanding itch of mine. That the class Gygax presented was also incredibly potent, possessing multiple powerful abilities, was just icing on the cake. Compared to the fighter, of which it was a sub-class, the cavalier was just better in almost every way, especially, if as was usually the case, one were not too strict about the rolling of ability scores for new characters. Consequently, I saw a lot of cavalier characters for a while, both in my own games and in those of friends. I can't say I really blamed anyone for this, in light of the class's power. Plus, it had the imprimatur of Gary Gygax, so who could argue against its inclusion?
Over time, quite a lot of us fell out of love with the cavalier. The truth was that, as presented here – and, later, in Unearthed Arcana – the class was simply out of whack with those in the Players Handbook. Perhaps, I thought, once Gygax completed his full revision of AD&D, it might be more in line with the overall power level of the game, but, until then, it was simply too much. This was doubly true of cavalier-paladins, which combined the abilities of both classes – what was Gygax thinking? Yes, it's true that there were various social restrictions placed on cavaliers through their code of honor that might, in principle, keep them in line, but, as kids, that was rarely sufficient to rein them in. I soon forbade cavaliers from my games and hardly anyone complained about it.
Looking back on this article now, it's pretty clear that, by 1983, Gygax's conception of AD&D was in the process of shifting considerably from his original vision. On some level, I can't really blame him. By this time, he'd been playing some version of D&D for over a decade, so it was probably inevitable that he'd want to do something different than he'd done before. Everything he was writing around this time suggests that he was becoming increasingly interested in a more high-powered kind of fantasy, one whose characters were personally powerful and whose adventures involved high stakes and equally powerful foes. Again, I cannot blame him for this. Having refereed my House of Worms campaign for a similar length of time, I know only too well the temptations of going Big, sometimes to the detriment of the game itself.
That's more or less how I look at the cavalier and most of the Gygax-penned material that first appeared in Dragon and later in Unearthed Arcana: experiments gone wrong. Many of them seemed like better ideas than they turned out to be. "Even Homer nods," as the saying goes, and so it was with Gygax and the cavalier.
Issue #69 of Dragon (January 1983) is another one about whose articles I have very strong memories. The strength of my memories is bolstered, no doubt, by the issue's remarkable cover by Clyde Caldwell. Caldwell's an artist about whom my feelings are generally mixed, but I've nevertheless got a fondness for this particular piece, which, in some ways, encapsulates the vibe of the dying days of D&D's Golden Age. Consequently, I'll be returning to this issue several times in the coming weeks.
This week, though, I want to look at Gary Gygax's "From the Sorceror's [sic] Scroll" column, in which he provides full details on the thief-acrobat "split class" that he first mentioned in a previous column. A split class is a specialization path for an existing class, in this case the thief. Provided he has the appropriate ability scores requirements (STR 15, DEX 16), a thief can, upon attaining 6th level, choose to devote himself to acrobatics as an outgrowth of his thievery – in effect, becoming a cat burglar or second story man in criminal parlance.
At the time of this article's publication, this was a comparatively unique concept, one that Gygax claims "has not been expressed before" and for which there is "nothing similar" in AD&D. I'm not entirely sure this is true. As I mentioned previously, the thief-acrobat reminds me a bit of the original concept for the paladin class, as found in Supplement I to OD&D. Likewise, the AD&D version of the bard, in which a character must first attain levels in fighter and thief before becoming a bard, is in the same ballpark in my opinion. Even so, the precise arrangement Gygax presents for the thief-acrobat isn't one we'd seen before.
I liked the idea of the thief-acrobat more in principle than in fact and my friends held similar views. Only one of them ever chose to pursue this split class and the player soon grew bored of playing him. That was probably the biggest problem with the thief-acrobat: it was very specialized and thus of limited utility. This is the kind of class that I could see thriving in, say, an urban, all thief campaign, where each character needs to distinguish himself from his fellow thieves. In a more traditional dungeon-based campaign, I think the thief-acrobat hold much less or appeal – or at least that's how my friends and I viewed it.
When it comes to the question of designing character classes, there are a couple of common approaches, neither of which is without its problems. Dungeons & Dragons began with only a few broad, archetypal classes, like the cleric, fighting man, and magic-user, but soon added many more, each one devoted to a narrower but nevertheless real archetype. AD&D opted for a larger list of available classes, while the D&D line kept to something closer to the original, narrower list. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages and I can easily defend them both.
Had Gygax remained at the helm of AD&D, we would certainly have seen more classes added to its roster, some of which, like the thief-acrobat, would have been quite narrow in their utility. That's not necessarily a problem, but it can add a lot of unnecessary complexity to the game, not to mention diluting the game's flavor. On the other hand, a goodly selection of classes can, if presented properly, increase the game's flavor, with each one revealing more about its explicit or implied setting and the sorts of activities characters are expected to undertake within it.
Whether the thief-acrobat succeeds in doing any of these things is an open question, hence my own ambivalence toward it. Even so, this article sticks in my mind, because, like others written by Gygax at the time, it offered a sneak peek into his evolving vision of AD&D. It was a really interesting time to be a fan of the game and I'm glad to have been around for it.
Like many (most?) gamers at the time, I'm not certain I ever played AD&D "by the book." Instead, my friends and I played a cobbled-together mishmash of Holmes, Moldvay, AD&D, and random bits of RPG "folklore" we picked up from Crom knows where. We still called what we were playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, of course, because that was the game to play and we all wanted to play it, but whether we actually were playing something Gary Gygax would have recognized as AD&D is an open question. What's important to understand for our present purposes is that we believed ourselves to be playing AD&D, hence why the new material Gygax presented for use with AD&D in Dragon was so important to us.
My first experience of Gygax's additions had come in issue #59 (March 1982) with his introduction of cantrips. While these minor spells were interesting, they were never widely adopted in our group, unlike those that began to appear a few issues later. A good example of what I am talking about is "The Big, Bad Barbarian," which appeared in issue #63 (July 1982). As its title suggests, this article gave us our first peek at the barbarian character class that would later be included in Unearthed Arcana several years later. Since this was the first new – and official – addition to the line-up of AD&D character classes, I was very excited to see it.
I also perplexed by it. My own sense of what a "barbarian" was had been informed by two sources: ancient history and fantasy literature, particularly Howard's stories of Conan the Cimmerian. The class that Gygax presented in issue #63, with its proficiencies in survival and suspicion of magic, was vaguely reminiscent of both, but still somehow its own distinct thing. I didn't hate the class, but neither did I wholeheartedly embrace it as I would other new Gygaxian classes. I suppose it's fair to say that, in principle, I was attracted to the idea of a barbarian class. I simply wasn't yet sold on the AD&D version.
Part of the reason why I felt this way is that Gygax's barbarian broke a lot of standard AD&D "rules." For example, the barbarian's ability scores were generated according to its own unique methods, unlike even those presented in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Strength is generated by rolling 9D6 and picking the three highest, while Constitution uses 8D6 (Wisdom, interestingly, is generated by rolling 4d4). Furthermore, barbarians get double the benefit for high Dexterity and Constitution scores, both of which they'll almost certainly have, given the way the scores are generated. The class also began play proficient in even more weapons than a fighter, in addition to many other special abilities. Even to my twelve year-old self, it all seemed a bit much.
Nevertheless, I dutifully attempted to make use of the new class. One of my friends asked if he could convert his longtime fighter into a barbarian, since he'd always imagined him as a barbarian. I agreed, since it gave us the perfect opportunity to give the barbarian a whirl, just as Gygax suggested we do. The results were ... mixed. In play, we found the barbarian exceedingly tough in combat and its various abilities useful. However, in its Dragon iteration, the class was utterly forbidden from using magic weapons, which hampered its ability to take on many powerful monsters. I imagine this was intended to be balance out its other strengths, but, in the end, it proved crippling and my friend asked to return his character to being a fighter, which I happily permitted.
My first experience with a new, official class for AD&D ended in disappointment. This made me wary of all future classes Gygax presented in "From the Sorcerer's Scroll, though, as we'll see in future posts in this series, my wariness did not sour me on the idea of new character classes in general. But the barbarian, in either its original version or its "improved" one in UA, never won me over. I retain a fondness for the concept of a barbarian class, as I've explained before. I simply haven't yet found (or created) one that I like well enough to use. One day!
Having now covered all of the published TSR era D&D and AD&D character classes with level titles, I wanted to turn to some other RPGs published by the same company that also include them. First up is Empire of the Petal Throne (1975), which only makes sense, as the game's rules were essentially a variant of OD&D. Here is the chart featuring level titles for all three character classes available in that game:
Having already covered the level titles of most of the character classes in Dungeons & Dragons, it's now time to turn to those that remain, some of which are unusual. Let's start with the most straightforward: illusionists. A sub-class of magic-user, illusionists first appeared in volume 1, issue 4 of The Strategic Review (Winter 1975) in an article written by Peter Aronson. As presented there, illusionists have the following level titles:
The paladin class first appeared as a kind of proto-prestige class to the fighting man in Supplement I to OD&D (1975). In that form, the class has no distinctive level titles. Those didn't appear until the stand-alone version of the class was presented in the AD&D Players Handbook several years later.
The druid class first appeared in Supplement III to OD&D, Eldritch Wizardry (1976). Though the supplement gives Gary Gygax and Brian Blume the byline, the class was actually the creation of Dennis Sustare, who's credited with a special thanks (and dubbed "The Great Druid"). Here's the original list of druid level titles:
The ranger class originates in volume 1, number 2 of The Strategic Review (Spring 1975) in an article written by Joe Fischer. Presented as a sub-class of fighting men akin to the paladin (which appeared in the Greyhawk supplement earlier the same year), this OD&D version of the ranger has the following level titles:
To continue with our discussion of level titles in Dungeons & Dragons, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a look at two classes that first appeared in Supplement II to OD&D, Blackmoor (1975), and later in the Advanced D&D Players Handbook (1978) – assassins and monks. Here are the level titles of the former, as they were in Blackmoor:
As with most level titles, these are all mostly synonyms, with a few exceptions, the first being "dacoit," which is an archaic term that, like "thug," ultimately derives from India. Another notable exception is "guildmaster of assassins," which suggests, like the titles immediately before it, that there's some kind of organized structure granting these titles to assassins as they gain experience. The text of Supplement II more or less states this: "Any 12th level assassin (Prime Assassin) may challenge the Guildmaster of the Assassins' Guild to a duel to the death, and if the former is victorious he becomes Guildmaster." This suggests there's a single Assassins' Guild rather several, as seems to be the case with thieves.
Regardless, the assassin level titles in the Players Handbook are somewhat different:
Yesterday, we looked at the level titles of fighters and thieves, so today we'll turn to the level titles of clerics and magic-users. These are a bit more interesting, in that there's more variability between the different editions of Dungeons & Dragons. In OD&D (1974), clerics have the following level titles:
Level titles first appeared in original (1974) Dungeons & Dragons, seemingly inspired by the various types of figures available in the "Fantasy Supplement" to Chainmail (1971), about which I may make a separate post later. These titles, in themselves, have no mechanical purpose whatsoever, serving solely as a verbal way to distinguish between two characters of the same class but of different levels. Consequently, they disappeared entirely from AD&D's Second Edition (1989), but were present in all editions of D&D until the Rules Cyclopedia (1991), when they disappeared (though they did reappear in the brief and often forgotten The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game in 1994).
Since I've lately become very interested in the degree of continuity between the various editions of D&D, I thought looking at the level titles of the various classes might make for an interesting series of posts. To start, let's look at fighters (fighting men) and thieves. Here's the level title chart for the former from Volume 1 of OD&D:
However, in the 1981 David Cook/Stephen Marsh-edited Expert Rules, we get this list of level titles, which is only nearly identical. The 3rd-level title, Swordsman, becomes Swordmaster, probably for the same reason the 9th-level title, Lord, gains the parenthetical option of Lady. All later editions of D&D (1983, 1991, 1994) use these same level titles.
Thieves first appear in Supplement I to OD&D (1975) and use the following level titles:
