Instrument of the Bards

One man.

Some polyhedral dice.

And the greatest book on gaming ever written.

Follow me as I take an ethereal jaunt through the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide, five random pages at a time.

It all starts, quite naturally, with the afterword...

Somehow this year, I lost my original copy of the DMG. This was a painful blow to my nostalgia (which it so happens is located just above and to the left of your gallbladder in most normal adult males). So last week I dropped in at my local game store and got a replacement. In flipping through it, I realized that almost every page contains some odd bit of brilliance or genuinely noteworthy weirdness.

So I decided to get out my dice and take a random tour through the DMG.

[A NOTE ON METHODOLOGY: The DMG is 240 pages long. I used (1d6/2)-1 to determine the hundreds place of the page number and standard percentile dice to determine the rest -- ignoring, of course, any result over 240.]

Did you think this was NOT going to get super-nerdy?

Let's dive in.

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p.230
If you discount the index and some compiled tables (which any experienced DM will quickly point out is a dire mistake) this is the last page of the book. It is notable for two things:

1. A sparse, black-and-white illustration of a nude succubus. (Whoo! Boobs!) And,
2. The afterword.

The illustration provides more than titillation. (Note to self: poor word choice.) For starters, this is not some Frank Frazetta push-up fantasy girl. She's drawn with a classical, pear-shaped figure and has a little belly roll where her stomach meets her ribs. More significantly, the succubus has her face buried in her arm -- as if she's a little embarrassed at her condition, or what she's done, or maybe what she's going to do. A devil with shame. Wrap your brain around that.

I don't credit much of the art in AD&D for being particularly deep (Hello, cartoon with the +3 backscratcher...) but this one actually has some meaning layered into the mix.

Of course, when I was 15, I just looked at the nipples. (Oddly pointy, am I right?)

The afterword is Gary Gygax's last chance to tell you how to run the game, and the grand master takes a no-holds-barred approach:

... NEVER HOLD TO THE LETTER WRITTEN, NOR ALLOW SOME BARRACKS ROOM LAWYER TO FORCE QUOTATIONS FROM THE RULE BOOK UPON YOU... BE CERTAIN THE GAME IS MASTERED BY YOU AND NOT BY YOUR PLAYERS. [...] YOU ARE CREATOR AND FINAL ARBITER.

Don't think I put that in all-caps because my finger slipped on the keyboard, that's all E. Gary Gygax swinging the shout-hammer.

The genius here is that, while the gears of the D&D money machine turn on selling you a seemingly-endless parade of rulebooks and supplements that tell you how to play, E.G.G. makes a decisive final statement that no one -- not even your players -- should tell you how to run your game. It's balls-out empowerment of the DM -- or as I like to call it deus ex demina. (Note to self: you're getting too clever for your own good.)

It's not necessarily an approach I fully agree with, but you gotta give props when the guy who created the game says "Here are the keys, go crash this thing into the moon."*

* Not an actual E. Gary Gygax quote.

p.177
Part of APPENDIX C: RANDOM MONSTER ENCOUNTERS, this page covers Monster Levels II - V. Gary is not going to tell you how to play the game, but he is going to give you a lot of tools to quickly customize and populate it. In this respect, rolling your way through the charts to create encounters for your game almost becomes a mini-game itself.

This book has a lot of charts, and scanning this page makes it clear that Gary has some definite ideas about proper composition and layout.

A Quick Style Guide to Formatting an AD&D Chart

1. The title of every AD&D chart should incorporate roman numerals whenever possible.
2. A good chart has at least three columns.
3. Grey shading will group results into groups of three, beginning with the first three and alternating white thereafter.
4. A well-constructed chart will refer you to at least one, if not two, subtables.
5. At least one of these subtables must be a Dragon subtable. (Did we call this game "Dungeons & NPCs"? I DIDN'T THINK SO! DRAGON SUBTABLE!!)
6. If you can't refer the reader to a subtable, at least include one result that has an asterisk and a note.
7. Double-dashes are free. Don't be stingy with 'em.
8. There is nothing magical about the number 00. Instead, assign singular results to numbers like 27, 48, and 65.
9. You can dress up a page full of charts by including a nice drawing of stirges* in silhouette.

* Stirges were clearly drawn by a dropout from the Children's Television Workshop. No other monster in AD&D is more obviously descended from an evil Muppet breeding program gone horribly, horribly wrong.

p.147
From the section on TREASURE (MISCELLANEOUS MAGIC) this page has some classic magic items.

Horn of Valhalla - Let's be honest, when did you ever use one of these things? It's got some weird class restrictions on who can invoke its power and typically by the time you found one, you didn't really need four or five 3rd level fighters who were just going to get fireballed the next round anyway. They should really rename it the Horn of Cruel & Unusual Punishment or the Horn of Delayed Blast Screaming & Dying.

Incense of Obsession - One of the best moves Gary ever made was putting the cursed items into the treasure list right alongside the regular items. "What did you get??" "Incense of Obsession!" "Sweet! Oh, wait..."

Ioun Stones - It's a magic item, within a magic item, wrapped in an enigma, inside a paradox, boxed in one of those russian nesting-doll things. Plus they're weightless and orbit your head -- even the dead ones! It's like a fantasy wizard rave, only without the drymouth, headaches, or homonculus walk of shame the next morning. This entry wins triple bonus points for not only including a table but also sporting three (THREE!) asterisked footnotes. "What does the purple one do??" "I don't know, it's probably lame."

Instrument of the Bards -- In the hands of a group of teenage boys, this magic item provides a constant and endlessly-renewable source of double-entendres.

p.213
I will be honest. I never read APPENDIX E: ALPHABETICAL MONSTER LISTING because I had this nifty book called The Monster Manual which had all the same stats laid out in a much friendlier format, along with some really terrible illustrations of said monster.

But apparently this was put in the book so DM's could run a game while they were waiting for the release of the Monster Manual, which hadn't been published when the DMG first came out. Whatever, just put some stats in a PDF of the quick-start rules on your website Gary!! BUSINESS 101!! ...You're welcome posthumously.

Here's what I learned from scanning this page:

1. Still boring.
2. Treants come in three sizes: "shrubling", mature, and "moss trunk."*
3. You used to get bonus XP for a monster based on its hit points. WHY DON'T WE BRING THIS BACK?! IT IS SO ESOTERIC!
4. Trappers kill you with your A.C., which is awesome.
5. There are two types of giant turtle: those who can "shoot neck" and those who can't.
6. The exact definition of "shooting neck" is left as an exercise for the reader to complete.
7. I don't know either, but I bet it's a lot easier if you have an Instrument of the Bards.

*Moss Trunk is the name of my new band. We are releasing our debut album 4 + A.C. on iTunes September 28th. #newband

p.31
There's a lot of crap in the DMG about starting your own keep and having a staff and some men-at-arms and other garbage my gaming group never bothered with. HIRELINGS (EXPERT HIRELINGS) belongs to this category. Remember, there are TWO rules* to D&D:

1. The DM is a complete bastard.
2. If you are ever suspicious of any NPC you meet, remember Rule #1.

So you'd NEVER hire an expert hireling because the first thing that would happen is they'd turn out to be an evil doppelganger with twin daggers of venom and boots of speed and everyone in your keep/castle/adventuring party would be skewered like a rack of lamb in the morning only the lamb is seasoned with Type D Insinuative poison and then not only are you out the money you spent hiring that Sapper/Miner but you also have to cough up a giant pile of gold pieces to the Arch-Cleric of Veluna for a bunch of neutralize poison and raise dead scrolls.

However, despite Gary's heavy-handed afterword that this is YOUR game, and your players are nattering rules-lawyers who are going to try to screw up YOUR story, he still tries to give them some help here with a list of expert NPCs.

Or maybe he's giving you cover so you can infiltrate their keep and have a really great scene where the Arch-Cleric of Veluna berates them for being such rubes. Gary's genius is a little inscrutable that way.

This page is also remarkable for the fact that Gary spells it "serjeant" -- which, it should be noted, comes in three varieties: "shjrubling", mature, and "moss tjrunk."

* There are considerably more than two rules to D&D, but most of them are unprintable and have to do with that one road-trip we took to see the Grateful Dead in Alpine Valley.

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Alright, that was fun. Maybe I'll do that again.

-Tom, Hobilar, heavy or light.