Monmurg Example Campaign

The goal of this campaign was to play up all the way from level one to twenty. We did use milestone XP instead of awarding XP for killing monsters. This avoided bookkeeping and boring combat just to get the XP. You can read the full account of the campaign (in German, start with the oldest post). Here is a nice in depth review on the advantages of either approach. 

For a campaign that goes all the way to 20, you need a story arc that is on the level of "Save the World" so the powerful arch-fiends, liches and elder dragons you later will need to throw at the PCs to challenge them have a reason to care.  I found from earlier campaigns that a bait an switch in the middle of the campaign after the first campaign arc ends does not work well. 

The story goal of this campaign was literally "Save the World, and others too", although of course the PCs only realized this after they were about seven levels into it. It was build on the premise of Ptolus that the world was a prison the great old ones of Chaos, the Galchutt. 

"Canon Hazen" is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. 

In the campaign world cosmology, Praemal is the benevolent god that created the multiverse and the other gods, analogous to to Tolkiens Eru Illuvatar. Tharizdun, the cryptic god of the old first edition modules, is the lord of void that opposes creation. His goal is to undo it all. The Galchutt are his spawn and servants, just as the gods are the progeny of Praemal. Before time, the gods defeated Tharizdun and imprisoned him. To ensure that the Galchutt would not be able to free him, they likewise imprisoned them in the campaign world. The key to this prison is on the Vallis Moon. When the Galchutt first tried to break out, Praemal hid the Moon from the world, similar to what Eru did with Valinor. 

Now the moon has re-appeared and the Night of Dissolution is nigh. Tharizdun sends dreams to his cult at the temple of All-Consumption, instructing them to excavate the old temple of elemental evil and summon the Princes of Elemental Evil, to bind the moon with a four-fold chain. When the moon cannot again be hidden, the Galchutt can reach it, break out, and free him.

To put time pressure on the campaign, the cultists summon one more prince each full moon, and  when all four are summoned the world will end. The PCs learned about the moon being chained and time running out in dreams their Moon Druid had. 

The campaign consisted of the following adventures (recommended level ranges in parenthesis):

• Ptolus (1-5, Monte Cook) 
• The Murderer's Trail, 
• Trouble with Goblins
• Smuggler's Daugther  
• End of the Trail
• Shilukar's Lair
• Sewers and Ratman Nest
• Temple of the Rat God
• Temple of the Ebon Hand

• Mines of Madness (3, Scott Kurtz) This fun adventure had nothing to do with the main arc. As one PC was likely to die right at the start (and did), I played it as a dream-quest.

The characters by now were in the cross-hairs of several powerful crime organizations in the city, so they decided to go to the countryside and wait for things to tide over. Their friends in Castle Shard teleported them to the quaint Village of Hommlet, where they wanted to search for treasure in the ruins of the Old Temple of Elemental Evil. 

• Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil (4-14, Monte Cook)
• Hommlet
• Moat House
• Ruined Temple
• Crater Ridge Mines: Water Temple
• Crater Ridge Mines: Earth Temple
• The Night of Dissolution took place, and changed the World and how magic worked - we switched from Pathfinder to D&D 5e
• Outer Fane
• The Sinister Bakery (5, self written based on the story of Krabat) side adventure 

To defeat the elemental princes and stop the cult, the PCs learned the Staff of Rao was their best shot. This divine relic was held by Canon Hazen, venerable Archcleric of Rao. His former use of the staff had shattered his health, and he had taken it with him to Istivin where he wanted to recuperate. When the PCs arrived at Istivin, they found it under a mysterious black dome -- thus kicked off the next campaign arc.

• GDQ1 Queen of Spiders (8-14, mostly Gary Gygax)
• Steading of the Hill Giant Chief
• Room 23 on the lower level leads off the map, so I had it lead to the underdark. I just riffed this during play with a portal of ominous warning (didn't stop the players, of course), chasms, gremlins, a huge cavern with a buried dead god crawling with hundred of carrion crawlers as maggots in his flesh, a trapper, and a sepulchre with a mind flayer mummy that wore an iron mask; this was a nasty trap, if you donned the intelligent mask, it granted at will detect thoughts and levitate, and secretly tried to dominate the wearer and use him to steer new potential slaves to a nearby a mind flayer city. The mask said it knew of a hidden cache of dwarven magic weapons. Lolth's avatar in drow form appeared anonymously to warn them, as she wanted them to continue against the giants and drow to put down Eclavdra. Greed won out in a party vote, and they forged ahead into mind flayer territory and lost three of the party in a narrow escape. 
• They then went back up to the Yeomanry, as they hoped to learn how to buy freedom for their enslaved friends in nearby Sterich. My Yeomanry was an rotten place, modeled after Velen and the bog of crones from Witcher III. They made a deal a hag to deliver the head of the forst giant jarl in exchange for knowledge on how to free their friends. 
• Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl
• Out of  the Abyss: Mantol Derith
• Here they could deal with the mind flayers on neutral ground and ransom their friends (thankfully they were rich from plundering the Hill Giant treasury). They also hired a renegade drow mage to help them find their way to the Vault of the Drow. He of course would later try to betray them to get back into the good books of his house.
• Hall fo the Fire Giant King
• Warrens of the Troglodytes
• Shrine of the Kua-Toa
• Vault of the Drow
• They stuck a deal with Eclavdra: they would assassinate the high priestess of Lloth, so Eclavdra could convert back and become the new High Priestess and unite the warring houses under her power. Loth was down with this idea: 
• The demonweb pits
• They met Lloth again who had learned about Tharizdun and his plans through her investigations of the Elder Elemental Eye. She had wanted to make sure they were strong enough and so they stand a chance against the elemental princes, gave them gifts and freed Hazen. (This "test if you are worthy" angle is a bit lame, I know).
• Temple of Elemental Evil (1-8, Gary Gygax with Frank Mentzer) Elemental Nodes
• By now three princes were summoned. They killed two, then the forces of the temple pulled back into the inner sanctuary of the old temple with the Air prince. 
• Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Epic battle against all the remaining cult leaders in the inner sanctuary of the old temple. They managed to destroy the altar that was required for the ritual, so the cult was held off for least a year while they built a new one. In that time they wanted to find a way to Praemal via the Jewels of Parnaith, and petition with him. But how to get to the Jewels? The most likely place to learn this was in Jabel Shammar, so the question was, how to get in there?

The plan for the campaign (level 15 to 20) was as follows

• Ptolus.
• Prison (entry to the crypt of the "demon-lich")
• Self written upper levels of the crypt.
• Tomb of Horrors (10-14, Gary Gygax). Learn that there is a portal to Jabel Shammar in Goth Gulgamel. No need to fight Acerak, I put his library with the clues in an earlier room.
• Ptolus
• Goth Gulgamel (13-14)
• Jabel Shammar (19-20) learn how to access the Jewels of Parnaith
• Homebrew Finale (the Jewels are barely described in Ptolus, I planned each jewel had different laws of reality, similar to the way it is towards the end of desert of desolation, to make this all a bit of a dream-like quest, where the PCs powers would wildly fluctuate from Jewel to Jewel.)

The entire party was Annihilated at the Green Devil Face in Tomb of Horrors, so other heroes will  have to step up and save the world. In another campaign. Maybe if I had not put a Green Devil Face that was a teleporter to a location with a dangerous fight at the other end into my prequel level to the tomb, they would not all have lined up and jumped in...

Description Economy: Quick NPCs

You often have to come up with NPCs on the spot, and want to avoid falling into the rut that all your bartenders are sullen or all are hearty fellows. For example

Captain Jack Starling, CG high-elf fighter 1 (ex military) "Rely on me, I served." 

Brave, Wasteful. Blonde locks, muscular; wears chainmail, longsword, throwing axe; no bow

Goals: combat humanoids to become an Eldritch Knight

Secret: ashamed he lost his whole squad to orcs; will rage attack them

 

Mini-NPC vignette

 
Name, Alignment Race Job  Typical Quote
2-trait character; brief looks. Optionally, goals, secret.

Character is more important than looks. Character, goals and secret are the most effective way to help you roleplay them. In later D&D you can infer how they look and are equipped from stats, armor class and weapon. 

To quickly invent character, I use a table of personality traits on my DM screen, in pairs of positive and negative, and roll twice on that. Gary Gygax provided such a table in Keep on the Borderlands, and it worked well. He also did provide more elaborate tables in the 1e DMG, but I like the simpler one better. I tweaked it to something like this

NPC personality roll 2x d20, d6 (1-3 / 4-6)

1. Driven / Lazy 

2. Brave / Cowardly 

3. Kind / Cruel 

4. Cheerful / Morose 

5. Courteous / Rude 

6. Honest / Deceitful 

7. Forgiving / Jealous

8. Hedonistic / Sober 

9. Helpful / Egotistic

10. Proud / Servile

11. Sensitive / Heartless

12. Careless / Cautious

13. Nosy / Solitary

14. Peaceful / Angry

15. Prankish / Contrary

16. Modest / Bragging

17. Generous / Greedy

18. Talkative / Taciturn

19. Trusting / Suspicious

20. Wasteful / Miserly 

Language and Dialect

One good way to make your NPCs more memorable is to use dialects. This also can help to characterize various races. Obviously, in how far you can do this depends on your talent with language. Chris Perkins is very good in this, as are (unsurprisingly) the voice actors from Critical Role.

I tend to use my home regions dialect for rural folk, french pronounciation for elves, italian pronounciation for drow. For dwaves I grumble. 

Writing for others

When you are writing adventures for your own use, all you likely need is the plan of the dungeon and  a minimal one page key of sketched notes to jog your memory. That is how the notes of Kuntz and Gygax looked like for their Greyhawk Castle campaign, and one of the reasons it was so hard to turn it into a published adventure. I personally love it to write the notes right on the map, so you have everything you need on a single sheet of paper.

When you write an adventure for use by others, you have to do a lot more work. You have to provide the essence of your imagination in concise, evocative descriptions, so another GM can recreate the experience you had in mind without getting lost in a wall of text, and you have to organise the information to make it easy to use. You have to provide a hook, as there is no natural starting point from you ongoing campaign.

• Provide hooks that appeal to various motivations like greed, serving the community, protecting the helpless, gaining knowledge, uncovering a secret, or revenge (hard to do for generic hooks).
• Provide a clearly readable map, rich in information about doors, lighting, stairs, elevations
• Organise the information with formatting, bolding, bulleted lists
• Provide summaries and overviews (e.g. synopsis, background, factions, timeline of events, NPCs)
• Include tools to run it (random encounter tables, rumor tables, adversary rosters)
• Provide a digital version of the map for use with game table software
• Include professional artwork - or at least charming amateur artwork, if you can
• Get editing to make sure it is correct, not missing pieces like numbers on the map for the key.

Then publish it as a pdf. Provide a preview too -- if you make it pay what you like, use the whole thing.

Henchman Abuse has a great example with the fantastic ASE, and the Arcane Library is really working hard to make the adventures easy to use with clear, functional formatting.

To give you a practical feel for the difference, here is the same adventure two times:

• One time, in the form of scribbled notes on the map I made for myself.  This took me maybe a quarter of an hour to sketch out, and that is for rerunning it. The original version was even sparser, and most of the really fun parts were invented on the fly during play. You can see that this is next to useless for you, albeit fine for me: The Beer Adventure - Self-play Notes 
• A cleaned up version, that blows this up from one page to five, and took me more than a full day to produce. Note that that still does not include artwork, professional layout, a cool cover, or an actual editor reading it, digital maps or player maps. But at least you can run it: The Beer Adventure - Publishing Edition

Beer Tomb is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. 

Why most DM advise is useless

DMing is first and foremost about running the game.

The best advise I have about becoming a great GM is: Just do it. Listen to your players. Reflect upon what worked and what did not. 

"DM Acting" is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. 

I think written advise about how to run the game is largely useless, because GMing is not a knowledge skill, it is a skill acquired through experience. You have no time to consciously think about what you should do while you are doing it, it is like driving a car. Once you get it, you can recognise true advise, but you do not need it any more. 

That is why watching a great GM or playing under one is the best way to learn it. The best advise I can give about running the game is: watch Chris Perkins at PAX do it. The guy is a genius. It is blissfully entertaining, and you can experience it. You could watch Critical Role, but I think Mercer is not quite as good as Perkins.

DMing also involves preparing the session, so you will be able to effectively run it.

Advise for preparing is probably the area of the game where blogs and DM advise are most useful. There are many resources for this: Youtube channels like Dungeon Dudes, blogs like DMDavid, Mike Shea's Sly Flourish Lazy DM tricks, or The DM Experience where Chris Perkins wrote about it at length. I like Perkins' recommendation to start each session with a short recap (although I don't do it), or Mike Shea's to make a brief list of secrets that the PCs could uncover (although I don't do that either). 

DMing lastly is about creating a world and adventures.

The best advise I can give about creating is: don't, unless you enjoy doing it for its own sake (I do). You do not need to do it. There are published settings, campaigns and adventures, written by professional game designers. Just use those. This might feel a bit like DM on training wheels, but the best of them are as good as anything you would be likely to come up with. All you need is to prep them so you know where to find stuff, and maybe to tweak for your group.

There is all the advise in the DMG trying to explain how to build worlds and dungeons. All I really use from the 5e DMD are chapters 6-9: the reference sections about downtime, magic items, rules options and monster creation, and the latter only because I convert old modules into 5e for play. 

So why is this in the DMG, when it would be in the publishers commercial interest to direct you to their other offerings? I believe because it matters to the designers, and they want to share. Or, if you are more cynical, because the game is marketed as a creative one. Or it is tradition. Back in OD&D and 1e Gary Gygax expected each DM to build their own world and dungeon, so he had advise and a toolkit on how to do it.

If you find writing adventures is fun, I learned more about good adventure design and presentation from the dungeon magazine reviews by Bryce Lynch at tenfootpole than from any other source. Read them, or you can get the cliff notes version here. 

High Seas Example Campaign

I feel this campaign is the best of all I ran, a mashup of D&D, Firefly, Elric, Dracula, King Kong, and Lord of the Rings. Because of all the maritime travel and sea adventures, this was called the High Seas campaign. I learned:

• If you read inspiring stories, play them in video games, or watch them in a movies - steal and remix them. They make great adventure. It is not even bad if your players realize what is going on -- it gives them an edge for meking the connection, and they love it when they realize it.
• It helps to prepare a single page containing a short list of the adventures you plan to run, and key plot elements for the campaign. I made one for each major section. Yeah, that type of scrawly scribbles is all you need. 
• The best way to make a city feel real is to mash together two or three adventures that go on at the same time. It feels much more like a living place. 
• An economic way to create rich texture for a campaign is to make a history timeline of empires, wars, rulers and events that cast their shadows over what is happening in the campaign. 
• Knowing adventures that will happen later allows you to foreshadow what is to come, create meaningful prophecies, and have the players learn hints early on. You can build up the name of key villains, or mystical places. Players will forget most of these hints, but the few times they remember, creates very powerful moments of realization.
• Have site based-adventures for the players to explore if they want, so they do not feel railroaded. Let them run off to do side adventures, if that is what they enjoy. 
• You never worry about hooks. The campaign will tie everything together.
• The published adventure CRs are too easy for experienced players with optimised characters. You can easily run something that is labelled 1-2 levels higher for them.
• It does not hurt at all to run an adventure that is serveral levels below the player CR. Exploration remains, and it feels great for the players to just stomp their opposition into the ground for a change.
• Two unrelated story arcs do not work. If you want a twenty level campaign, design an arc to 20.

In case you are interested, below is the gestalt of the campaign, along with the list of adventures.

You can also read the full campaign story with all the details in German.

The kick-off adventure, Nosferatu, is one I wrote myself many years ago as a teenager. It has the plot and cast of Dracula mixed with King Kong. I patched it up with 3e Stats and a few more detail maps of the village, orc army camps, and the castle. In the campaign, the vampire was spawned by an evil artifact, the campaign gimmick. It is a black iron fly, created by the Chaos God Anarch (i.e., Arioch) and it makes its owner immortal by slowly turning them into a vampire. The players obtain it,  and travel through many dangers to the place where it was forged to destroy it (this obviously is the core plot of Lord of the Rings). A Melniboné-like empire (located in Monmurg on the Darlene map) is were long ago Anarch gave the artifact to the depraved king who craved immortality, and where the characters need to go to learn more about it. The Firefly part comes from the characters winning a sailing boat early on that will be their home for the campaign, and the characters notoriously being short on cash.

Cast: Brother Heiner, pious Paladin of St. Trudbert. Lanfear, sexy female Barbarian. Silverhand, minmaxing Monk and Anton Urbach, beer brewing Bard and entrepreneur. Later on, Dirk Quarzon, ship captain and Fighter/Rogue replaced Anton (as the players changed). This was a peculiar group, as they had no Wizard and after Anton left, no-one knew about Magic. The barbarian in time decided to pick up a few levels of Sorcerer.

Hook: one of the characters dreams of great evil coming to Hillsport, a small port town to the south, and in his dream feels he is chosen to avert it. A paladin made this an easy sell. The others tag along for protection and to conduct business in Hillsport, and then are drawn in by the flow of events.

The rough plan for the campaign and how it developed looks like this (adventure levels in parens, if not mentioned otherwise, all the adventures where adapted from Dungeon magazine): 

• The characters start at level one in the little sleepy province and travel south. 
• Encounter with Bert, the Hill Giant on the road (1, negotiation).
• Wild Boar Inn at an enduring Snowstorm in the Desert (both self-written, 1-3 or higher). Not part of main story; the players opted to not investigate further, as delay could risk bad things happening in the meantime. They were right.
• Palace of the Twisted King  (1-5) On the path, they avoided that too.
• Scourge of Scalabar ("Hillsport" in my game; 1-3, by Chris Perkins); instead of a submarine, I used Sahuagin who control a real giant shark, as I dislike steampunk. With Wreck Ashore (1) thrown in for more investigation and encounters with the pirates. An agent of smith's coster, the nefarious trading company of Monmurg is the brain behind the pirates and briefly seen. There also were Sahuagin raids on seaside villages, with the players and villagers living through the night in a shelter cave, and allies in the lizardfolk in the swamp, as one of the PCs spoke Lizardman and had great diplomacy skills. This was going on at the same time as the next one.
• Nosferatu (1-3, Dracula, with the plague breaking out caused by the vampire and his flies and rats. The adventure had a timeline of what happened unless the PCs interfered. King-Kong Island side story to retrieve a curative pendant that can stop the plague. In gratitude the city gifts a house and the schooner Sea Star as a reward. The combination of these three adventures in Hillsport makes this into one of the richest roleplaying experiences I can remember.
• MAIN PLOT: The players learn about the fly through letters from the young real estate agent  to his love Cecile, the vampire's target. He is still stuck in the vampire's castle, turning into a vampire, and he begs her to learn more about the fly in Chatold before sending help. So she comes to ask her saviours if they can help. This is the root of the evil, so they took this up for sweet Cecile.

The PCs were now about level three.

• Storm and Tammermaut's Fate (6). The players had taken on debt to buy trade goods for their journey, which they had to jettison during the storm; the ship was also badly damaged, and needed costly repairs. (We skipped the harder part at the underwater rift, the tower defense against the undead at night was too much of a close shave.)
• Practical Magic (9; using Cathold for Marsember, this was a side adventure and much too hard for them -- they broke off and negotiated their way out after being badly maimed) 
• MAIN PLOT: The PCs learn the fly's story in a curio shoppe I ripped from Vampire: Bloodlines. The shopkeeper is really an agent of hell and hell wants the fly destroyed. His address was on the box because he sent it to the original count in remote Devil's Pass to get it out of the way until someone shows up who could potentially destroy it.  He does not know how and where to destroy it, and tells them they can find answers for anything from the hags at Scrag Rock. Difficulty is only that the rock shipwrecks ships, and nobody knows where it is. 

This was as far as I had it planned out originally. I knew they had to travel to Monmurg to learn more, as that is where the fly originated. Before the next session, I decided to use Test of the Smoking Eye with Prison of the Firebringer as the final adventure, and that they would get to that other dimension via the jungles of Amedio. I also decided that Kaurophon was a son or grandson of the king who got the fly from Anarch, sired with a succubus, and made the succubus in Eye his mother. He would turn on the PCs or stay true to his hatred towards his father and Anarch, based on how the characters treated him during their joint travels, with good or bad interactions adding boni or mali to the final die roll. 

The PCs were now about level 5.

• Sea Battle encounter with Viking Raiders from Onwal This random encounter I just winged, on board was the lost father the barbarian had been searching for, which let them avoid bloodshed, and got the raiders escort them savely to Eldredd.
• Dead Man's Quest (1) the ghost of pirate captain Ned leads them to Scrag Rock in promise of a return service of freeing his soul.
• Shatterhull Isle (5-7, "Scrag Rock", this was from the Stormwrack supplement). They learn cryptic rhymed answers to three questions (players chose: how to destroy the fly, how to reach Anarch's domain in Limbo, how to find the Mirror of Stars by which it can be reached - they learn that they must find Kaurophon in Monmurg)
• Crypt of the Seventh Lord. (9-13, Homebrew dungeon). This was not part of the plan, the players had found a treasure map to this crpyt in the hills earlier on and wanted to loot to fill their coffers and get out of debt. The wizard was turned to stone early, and they aborted.
• The Setting Sun (5-7) In my game the Wild Coast is overrun by the orc armies with giants and dragons. Eldredd is under siege, elvish griffon riders, high wizards and archers from Celene help defend it. The players get offered transport on griffins across enemy territory, in exchange for help in this side adventure. They also had filled their hold with food, which achieved high prices in the besieged city, and restored their financial position.
• Devil Pass (4-6) second part of the self-written Nosferatu story. The trick is not to kill the vampire, just to impale him, so they do not become the new owners of the fly and will not turn into vampires themselves. They gain the fly, and the players are scared shitless by it. For the rest of the campaign, they will not try to use its powers even once, and only one time open the box to show it to someone. The griffins fly them to Monmurg, then depart, with the Sea Star sailing down separately. (Here the player of Anton left the group for life/time reasons, so Anton was sucked into minimus form in a trapped magical bottle in the adventure). 

The PCs were now about level 7.

• Dead Man Quest. (1-3). Second part, to pay their debt to Captain Ned in the pirate city of Port Jolie. The players have fun flattening the cultists effortlessly.
• Ptolus. As the players enter the city for the first time, the Vallis Moon appears and opens the Banewarrens. The players are hungry for for treasure, and first spend time in the under-city as they have heard there are lots of old dungeons down there, but with little success. Most of the upper reaches are plundered already. They contact Kaurophon who wants them to obtain the Pipes of Madness from the Banewarrens to open the way to the Mirror of the Stars.
• The Banewarrens (6-10). Lots of intrigue from parties in the city, but once they find the flute, they abort and leave this to the dragon riders and the inverted pyramid to sort out.
• The Night of Dissolution (Pythoness House) (4). Easy side adventure to gain the All-Key for opening a door in the Banewarrens. They also learn about the Night of Dissolution, and that they should try and stop it.

Now the story shifted to the Amedio jungle. I made an overall map, to embed and intertwine the adventures. 

• Dragon Hunters (7) This is one of the best modules, highly recommended. Lots of thinking, discussions, choices, possible creative solutions, and action. 
• The Plight of Cirria (8-12) also great. In my version, the cloud fortress was circling above the Solnor Plateau, unless you called it to the Yuan-Ti Temple by playing the Flutes of Madness. I also had Ezhoran be the Archmage of Monmurg, who did not oppose the PCs, in fact he wanted to help them, as he wanted to imprison the essence of Anarch when the fly was destroyed. He gave them access to the Mirror of the Stars. Making it through the mirror with clues from the witches riddle brought them to the next adventure. 

The PCs were now about level 9.

• Test of the Smoking Eye (10) / Prison of the Firebringer (13).  I put a few more factions and sites on the map to have this not just be a linear adventure, and put the castle of the Firebringer on top of the entrance to the peristaltic tunnel, in the heart of the domain of the ancient black dragon Vorkaire. The imprisoned slaad lord was a servant of Anarach, who had led the failed attack. There were lots of political maneuvering with the succubus, Ezhoran, the imprisoned fallen angel, before true to the witches prophecy, the paladin sacrificed himself to carry the fly into the fire, and was reborn with his friends as lord of the plane.

This ended the main campaign. The heroes owned their own plane now, even though it contained some denizens more powerful than they were, and the fly had been destroyed. Closure.  

The PCs were now about level 11.

The use of Ptolus and the Banewarrens/The Night of Dissolution had kicked off of a second campaign arc about the sleeping great old demons of chaos, the Galchutt, and about how this world really was just a prison for them. They were in the process of being woken up, so you had to stop that. We played one more retreat, but it felt somehow tacked on:

• The night of dissolution (Surgeon of the Shadows / Temple of Deep Chaos) (5-9, by Monte Cook). I had to spruce up the encounters to keep some challenge, but that was OK. 

However we were now starting to try online game tables and play-by-skype, and initially thought we would do that only as a side activity, to fill the gaps between our full time retreats, and were not sure it would work, so we made a new group of level one characters. That campaign also started in Ptolus. When time rolled around for the annual retreat, the unanimous vote was to continue with that story, rather than go back to the old one from a year ago. (It did not help that we had switched to D&D 5e, and nobody wanted to convert their Pathfinder level 11 character into a bounded accuracy one). So the rest of the night of dissolution prevention never happened. 

A cool thing of all play being in the same world is that the choices of all the groups matter. What a group does changes the game world for the others. 

• The smoking eye group smuggled the exiled prince and claimant of the throne from Dragon Hunters back into civilisation in Port Jolie. He staged a successful campaign from there, and now is Prince of Monmurg, on of the most powerful and influential positions in the game world.
• With the heroes of the smoking eye not working further to prevent it, the night of dissolution happened and the Galchutt rose and turned Monmurg and the world at large into a horrifying madhouse. The new group in their backwater near Hommlet then had to busy themselves with destroying the elemental chains that had tethered the Vallis Moon, so the Galchutt could not reach it and shatter their prison. This restored the situation where they went to sleep last time, so they might after some time withdraw again. 

White Boar Example Campaign

White Boar Campaign. 

I once had a competition with a friend, where we would build two towers for rivaling high level wizards (2nd Edition AD&D rules) with level adequate g.p. value to spend on magic items. I made a necromancer and used all the tricks I could think of for him to protect himself -- magic jar, having a clone ready, contingency spells.  I created a map of the countryside and placed it on the Darlene Map, between Bright Desert, Celadon Forest, and the Gnatmarsh, where the Necromancer lived. The province was a sleepy backwater behind the enchanted forest. This became a campaign that we played over a couple of annual retreats.

Moritz "Maurice" Kohler, Wizard of the White Boar Group

The premise of the campaign was that, after years of quiet the necromancer was stirring again, black riders were scouring the land for him, and people were worried. They sent group of adventurers with 10,000 g.p. to Greyhawk City for guidance and  help. (The secret part of the story is still waiting to be played, 20 later).

The players first were not in a hurry, and started out exploring various points of interest in the province. They freed the home village of the wizard from some menacing ogres. Then they encountered a ghost in an abandoned tower in the woods, and decided (hair more white now) to get on with their quest. 

The first milestone was to reach Greyhawk City. They trekked through the enchanted forest North towards Leukish, met Sir Karll of Urnst in the woods, made it "Through the Night" (Dungeon #29), solved the riddle of the Goblin stone fairy tale from the Greyhawk boxed set, explored a burned down wizard tower in "A Wizard's Fate" (relocated to Greyhawk, a fantastically fun adventure for low levels, by Chris Perkins, Dungeon #37). Then they got side trekked back into the forest by "Nymphs Reward" (Dungeon #29) and hunted the "White Boar of Kilfray" (Dungeon #37) for the thane of Woodwych, another fantastic adventure that played great -- I really liked the work of Willie Walsh. They loved the keep and because the wild wood elves were their allies, decided to make it their home base, and hence forth called themselves the "White Boar Group". (First retreat, which was one of the best times we ever had with D&D).

On the way out of the woods, the ranger died to giant spider poison  (a random encounter). Still in Norse country, they salvaged the "Cauldron of Plenty" (Dungeon #21) before continuing on to Leukish, corpse of the ranger in tow. On the road, they freed "The Vineyard Vales" (Dungeon #23) from a terrifying "black dragon" who fled, and made friends with the Whiteheart mercenaries. They were robbed by a six fingered brigand leader with two hundred men (another wilderness random encounter straight out of 2e and low point of the campaign). In Leukish, they took a pirate ship over the Nyr Dyv to Greyhawk. A storm standed them with their dead ranger in a barrel at "Wards of the Witching Ways" (Dungeon #11), where the wizard polymorphed all of them into vermin. Lucky for them it was all a bet, and they were put ashore. (This second retreat sucked for the players, and I learned for good that being pummeled by overly powerful opponents is as little fun as getting robbed of your magic items. They were down to gallows humor and joked of playing on in polymophed form Maya the Bee-style).

They trekked along the Nyr Dyv, when an angel of Pholtus appeared to them. Holy relics had been stolen and had to be rescued in "Arms of Nagrash-Tor" (not a dungeon magazine adventure, but one a friend had recommended). They did so, and finally made it to Greyhawk, where the grateful clergy of Pholtus raised their ranger from the dead. Unfortunately, neither the priests, nor Otto the Mage whom they consulted with could divine any information about the necromancer or the black riders, which was very unusual. A setback. The next milestone was to go back home. Demoralized, they traveled the Abbor Alz, when they saw a shooting star in the sign of Pholtus. They followed where it had fallen, and stumbled upon the library of the gods that you can never find if you search for it and that contains all the knowledge of the world, in "Ex Libris" (Dungeon #29). There they found a scroll that revealed the black riders were signs that the thing that had created the bright desert was to raise again if they were not stopped. (Here ended the retreat).

They made their way through the bright desert, where they freed a princess from an efreeti in "Telar in Norbia" (another adventure from Willie Walsh, Dungeon #31) and reunited the thief with his family of desert elves and hunted a behir with them. On returning, they found their home overrun by the undead forces of the necromancer, only the town still held fast. The next milestone was to collect enough armies in support of the town to mount a counter-offense, and defeat the invaders.

First, they send envoys to the desert elves and the wood elves for support. While these were on their way they looked what could be done in the province to turn the tide. The necromancer had hired the Whitehall mercenaries. Because they were friendly with them from back in the vinelands, the mercenaries agreed to an ordeal in single combat to win their support. 

Next, they traveled to Mount Hammer and retrieved the axe of the dwarf king from the lost city to make the good thane king so he could send help (this was self-written, here is the map of the city, the ventilation shafts, and key. This was a caper/heist where you had to get in and retrieve the crown before the undead overwhelmed you, or a crew sent by the evil rival clan got to it first - that clan was willing to cooperate with the necromancer. Here is that NPC crew along with the genealogy of the competing houses. (End of the retreat).

Then they went on a "Hunt for a Hierophant" (Dungeon #63) in the enchanted forest that had been overrun by the necromancer's bullywugs, to raise the forest creatures and weaken his army. 

Finally, a venerable priest of Pholtus, "the lowest of his servants" (of course, the pope), showed up and used the 10,000 g.p. as material component to create an ark that radiated daylight in a large radius and made shadows and wraiths powerless. The delegations of the desert elves and the grugrach also arrived.

At long last they led the united armies of mercenaries, wood elves, desert elves, mountain dwarves, the remaining town militia and even the hill giant Bert into an epic battle against the necromancer's undead, lizard men and black rider ring-wraith masters, the lord of which rode a black dragon. They routed them. We used the narrative battle system from Pendragon for this, where characters duel with opposing leaders, to influence the outcome and turning fates of the battle. Greg Stafford was awesome. Thus ended the retreat, and the climax for this campaign arc.

The heroes now were important personages and had time to attend to their research, or administer their domains, but they felt the urge to once more head out for adventure. They did not want to confront the necromancer himself, which might have been suicidal. Instead, they explored an old ruin in the enchanted forest, "The Seventh Arm" (Dungeon #88), and  after a short trip to the Underdark, the tower of the mage on the lake, who tended to turn people into frogs and collected fey to extract their essence. They agreed on a stalemate with him in exchange for him teaching that spell to the party wizard.

After that, we started a new group, and did not go back to play in this campaign, as we would not get the same players back together, and the player of the mage, who had died in the last adventure when he could not play him for a short while, and lost a point of constitution in resurrection, did not want to continue playing him. 

Growing a game world

The original game assumed that you invent and create your own dungeon and campaign world. Gygax said so, in the white box, in the article in the Europa Fanzine that described Greyhawk Castle dungeons, and in the 1e DMG on page 86ff. He actually gave very good, practical advise how to invest your effort economically, if you wanted to do this. He did not believe people would buy adventure modules, as you could make up your own. So, in the beginning, there were no commercial settings and not enough published adventures to be bought*. 

Creating your own adventures, dungeons, and campaign world from scratch is massively time-consuming. You need personalities, factions, organizations, gods, cities, castles, dungeons, monsters, history, legends and adventures. Few people have the time to do this. 

Thankfully these days, you have no need to. There are many colorful campaign books just waiting for you to be picked up. The Forgotten Realms is a setting described in rich detail. Just buy what you like, and maybe tweak it to make it fit your own game. Improvise, reskin, and incorporate published adventures shamelessly.

The point of this post is that I recommend you embed all your adventures in the same world. The publishers make this easy now with all the official modules set in the Forgotten Realms. But even if you pick up a generic adventure, or an adventure originally set in Greyhawk or Glorantha, or whatever other world, place it there, maybe reskinning some of the names or monsters.

If  you do this, over time the campaign world becomes familiar to you. Stories and heroes in the world are created by the players adventuring in it. You know the towns and who lives there. You can have the retired player characters make cameo appearances. You can have NPCs tell yarns about their deeds of daring. It feels much more like a real place, where things happened. Because they did.

Gygax' home campaign created the world of Greyhawk. Mordenkainen, Drawmij, Myrlynd, Bigby, Robilar, Tenser, Otto, and all the other famous D&D characters originally were player characters or henchmen (the Wizard's tend to be better known, as they have spells named after them). 

If you use published materials, you obviously also do not own the rights to them, and will not be able to publish your game world. I know that I never would be able to publish mine, as it is based on the Darlene Map, and populated by adventures from Monte Cook, Dungeon magazine and classical TSR, next to some I wrote myself. And there is no need to have these rights. Your world will be dear only to you and your players, because you know it, and it is full of memories.

* We had a similar situation in Germany. There originally only were four published modules for Das Schwarze Auge, all for starting levels. Later the publisher had a hard time to keep up with teenagers that had endless time on their hands and were hungry to play. So I started on writing my own adventures, and learned that it can be a lot of fun and a great outlet for your creativity. 

High Level Adventures?

I have played through four campaigns with my players. Here's something I learned.

1. Play is most fun in the mid levels.

D&D is most fun around levels three to six. In that range the characters cannot die quite as easily any more, and still can be terrified by a dragon or a lich. 

You cannot just circumvent all obstacles with a spell, you have to interact with your environment, and come up with creative solutions that still use physical means like rope, donkeys or ten-foot poles. 

The character's experience is still relatable. I have seen wolves, horses, misty forests, old castles and medieval towns first hand and can vividly imagine them. 

The number of spells, skills and feats gives you some options, but is not so overwhelming that the game becomes an administrative task.

2. The game is not designed for high level play

In OD&D spells topped out at level six. Gary Gygax never intended the spells from level seven on to be available to players, and for good reason. In his original campaign, players tended to retire their characters after reaching about level twelve. It turns out, this is still the case.

In older editions it was hard to go further, because it took forever to get enough experience. In 5e, this is not the case any more, but at high levels the players still get so powerful, the spells become so reality-breaking, that it is very hard to create good adventures that are fun and challenging. It is tiring and boring to slog through greater demons and devils all the time. 

To challenge my level 14 group, I had to spruce up a dracolich with extra necrotic damage that healed it. Most monsters in the monster manual as given are pushovers. We never played a group to a higher level.

It also gets harder to imagine the scenery as it becomes too fantastic. If my character now must travel in dimensions populated with  bizarre demons under purple suns, I have no reference in my experience. At best I can refer to some movie.

It gets harder and harder to immerse in role-play, as your time is increasingly absorbed by the administrative task of managing all your spells, feats, magic items and powers. Attunement and concentration at least provide some repite here.

3. You don't need twenty levels to tell an epic story

A reasonable campaign has a premise, milestones, complications and setbacks, maybe a few side adventures, and finally, a conclusion. In our games, that point usually was reached somewhere around level twelve. By then the mighty heroes confronted greater demons and dragons to achieve their goal.

Look at the campaigns that have been published for D&D 5e by Wizards.  Tyranny of Dragons goes to level 15, and has been described as tiresome. Elemental Evil, level 15.  Curse of Strahd, seen as one of the best, level 10. Storm King's Thunder, level 11. Tomb of Annihilation, also well loved, level 11. Descent into Avernus, a trip to hell, level 13. It is clear that an epic story fits better to a dozen levels, than to twenty. None of them was able to stretch all the way. The only published module that goes to level 20 is Dungeon of the Mad Mage, and that is not a campaign, it is a megadungeon.

Look at the Lord of the Rings -- how many fights and adventures did the hobbits have? I think from a D&D mechanics perspective, they were likely level six to eight at the end, not even level twelve. There is no need to become powerful as the gods for a good campaign.

4. Powerful characters want closure.

With the big bad evil defeated, the lands celebrating them, castles and titles heaped upon them, it felt underwhelming for us to go back to beat up some other bad guys, even if they were powerful. We did try to play some high level adventures with these characters after the main story arc closed, and never played more than one, maybe two. It just felt better, if these seasoned heroes settled to rule the land, and maybe appeared to a new generation of adventurers as quest givers or wise counsel. 

"Orlanth Slaying Yelm" is licensed under CC-BY 4.0. 

Basic Role Playing System

The basic role playing system was originally created as the rules framework for the RuneQuest role playing game, and then also became the system that Chaosium used for Call of Cthulhu, Stormbringer and others. You can get a free pdf copy of it from Chaosium. Each of these variants tweaked it for its purposes, which is a testament for its flexibility.

I originally got to know it through playing Call of Cthulhu (shortened to CoC by our group). In CoC, fighting is for the most part a stupid idea that will get you killed quickly, so CoC dropped RuneQuest's hit locations. I think for the better, combat is quicker and deadly enough without them. 

I believe basic role playing system is the most elegant system among the major systems. Granted, I only know maybe a dozen or so different ones, but that includes nearly all the commonly played ones. The economy of tools, and the realism and flexibility achieved are just beautiful. 

Differences to D&D

The most visible difference between this system and D&D  is that it is a d100 based system, not a d20 based one. But this is not really a fundamental difference, it just means that the granularity is a bit finer. You could implement nearly the same system in d20.

The biggest real difference is that there are no levels and no ever increasing amount of hit points. You start out with somewhere around 10-15 hit points, and for the most part, that is all you will ever get. With weapons dealing similar damage as in D&D, you die after only a few hits, like a level two or three D&D character. This means the system is not great for high fantasy battles with horrible monsters. Fighting against dragons and giants in RuneQuest is pretty much a death sentence.  

The other large difference is that it has no classes like D&D, no attached attached special class powers. Everyone in principle can learn everything. The professions in the system are just a list of the skills that you can spend the bulk of your points on when you create your character, typically about ten.

Basic role playing has no magic system by default, and no default spell list. This means the magic rules differ from variant to variant. If there is magic, then anyone can use it, it is not limited to a class of wizards, as there are no classes. Variants with professions that primarily cast spells require you to put skill points into magic related skills, and if you do not have those skills in your list, you can dabble in magic by putting your precious general points into them. 

Look at the example adventures in the free rules, where you have a wizard who has a Flame spell at 45%, dealing 3d6 damage at 50 feet range. Not that different from the Elf Hunter who has a Long Bow attack at 60%, dealing 1d10 damage. The Flame spell seems to work like a cantrip, but you might need to spend power points on it, which would offset the higher damage by consuming a limited resource. 

Characteristics

Characteristics are the same as D&D's ability scores. There are seven: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Power, Appearance, and Size. I reordered them similar to D&D. As you can see, most are the same. Power is similar to Wisdom and represents will and mental strength and is also the prime attribute for magic, instead of intelligence. Appearance is pretty much Charisma. In addition there is a Move rate, 10 for all humans. 

Size is the one additional characteristic absent in D&D. It represents body mass and co-determines hit points and damage output. I think this is elegant way to capture the influence of size, in comparison D&D has to fudge this by giving large creatures lots of hit dice. Some creatures are a lot larger than humans, and these creatures can have massive hit points and damage bonuses. A giant or star spawn of Cthulhu can mush you with a single hit. This feels a lot more realistic if you think about it, but of course is less heroic.

All creatures have these characteristics, another thing that D&D took over starting with 3e. Human characters roll 3D6 to determine their attributes, with 2D6+6 for intelligence and size, so the range is mostly between 3 and 18. Derived from these characteristics are

• hit points, equal to the average of constitution and size, when they fall to 1 or 2 you are unconscious, when they fall to 0 you die. They regenerate at a rate of 1d3 per week, full 3 points if in medical care, not overnight. Successful first aid may heal 1d3 points on an injury once. In CoC, if you lost more than half your hit points from a single attack, you had to roll a constitution check or drop unconscious.
• damage bonus, based on the sum of size and strength. The scale is centered around human range, so that the weakest humans have -1d6, the strongest +1d6, and it linearly increases from there. Different variants use slightly different ranges.
• power points equal to power, they are used for spell casting or for resisting spells, and the regenerate daily after a full night's rest. If they fall to zero you are unconscious, 
• personal skill points, based on intelligence x 10. These can be used to increase any skill in character creation, making intelligence a powerful asset. I think because of this, it is a good choice to have power determine magic ability, both from a flavor an mechanical perspective.

The Core Mechanic

The core mechanic is the percentage based skill. You have a number that represents your skill, in percent. To use that skill, you roll percentage dice, and if you roll under or equal to that number you succeeded. Attacks are the same, with the skill that of attacking with a sword, or firing a handgun. If you role under 1/5th your skill, you achieved a special success with better results. My favorite was the impale: if you had a special success on an attack with a melee weapon like an ax, your weapon dealt double damage and was stuck in the opponent, and you needed a strength check to pull it free. 

This mechanic is also used for characteristic rolls for anything but size. To translate the characteristics into d100 range, they are multiplied by 5. This is the analogue to ability checks.

Skill checks may be easy or difficult. An easy check doubles your skill, a difficult one halves it. The rules award easy or difficult status to situations like D&D 5e does Advantage or Disadvantage, for example a backstab or sneak attack is an easy attack. (We used to just apply bonus percentages or penalties, which also works, and RuneQuest does so today, with +/- 20% or more).

Each skill has a starting probability available to everyone. This can range from 0% in Foreign language to 40% in Climbing.  Some skills are special in that their base values are derived from your characteristics, for example dodging a melee attack starts as 2 times your dexterity. RuneQuest bases all starting percentages on the sum of two relevant characteristics, or two times the same. This is a bit more work to create a character. 

Training and experience improve these numbers. Similar to point buy for attributes in D&D, you can set the power of starting characters by the number of points they have to increase their skills. The standard rules allot 300 points for your profession's skills, plus intelligence times 10 points anywhere, and do not allow to start any skill above 75%. On average you could maximize six professional and two personal skills. 

More complex variants can add a bonus for characteristics to skills, similar to how ability score bonuses influence skills in 5e D&D. The basic rules do not and it always felt like an unnecessary complication to me. You have enough freedom with distributing percentage points to be great where you want to be.

In Call of Cthulhu an Education characteristic, I think of 3d6+3, determined how many skill points you could put into your profession skills instead (education times 15 or 20, depending on the edition). 

The brilliant idea is how to represent experience: after an adventure or session, when your character has time to reflect, you get to roll against the skills you used in the adventure (the skills have a small checkbox on the character sheet for you to track that). When you roll over your skill, you get to increase it by 1d6 percentage points. I just love this. You only get better in whatever you actually exercise. And the better you get, the more easily you succeed, but the harder it is to get even better than that. Beginners have a hard time, but learn fast if they make it.

Anything is treated as a skill, from Attack to Dodge, from Appraisal to Zoology. The main question is how granular the skills are. Do you need one attack skill for all firearms, for all handguns, for all revolvers, or for a specific caliber of revolver? This is defined by specialties listed under the skill - in the case of firearms, revolver is a specialty, so you can use any caliber competently, but your training is no use with a rifle. In old CoC, you had to learn a specific caliber.

Another mechanic is the resistance table, for comparing the outcome of two forces in contest, like when you try to push a door open, and someone else tries to hold it shut. For this you compare the attribute values of the two forces, here Strength on both sides. If both numbers are equal, the active force has a 50% chance to win. For each point that the active force is larger, this increases by 5%, for each point it is smaller it decreases by 5%. If you have a strength of 15 and you are trying to push someone of strength 12, you have 50 + (15 - 12 = 3) * 5%, or 65% chance to make it. A difference larger than 10 points results in automatic success or failure. 

Sanity

In Call of Cthulhu you also had a sanity characteristic, with your starting points equal to your Power times five. This was an ingenious and elegant way to make the game play like a horror movie. 

Whenever you experience anything horrible, like sudden confrontation with a mutilated corpse, being buried alive, or seeing a zombie, you roll against your sanity. Succeed and you lose no or relatively little of it. Fail and you lose a chunk. A zombie might cost you 1 or 1d6 points. Seeing a great old one like Azathoth might cost you 1d20 or 1d100. If you lose more than 5, you may suffer from temporary insanity, and pick up a phobia. Once your sanity reaches zero, you become an NPC under the GMs control. 

And it was very hard to get back. You might get a few points at the end of the adventure, if you were successful. Otherwise, only lengthy psychotherapy or crude methods like electroshock therapy that could just as likely turn you into a mental vegetable offered any relief. 

Cthulhu also had a special mythos skill, starting at 0, that described how much you knew about dark magic, servitor races, great old ones, outer goods and all. You could increase it by reading tomes like the Necronomicon, or a little by going temporarily insane the first time. This skill was valuable because it helped you understand better what you were confronted with. However, your sanity could never be higher than 100 less this skill. At the time where you knew all, you were irretrievably insane.

The lower your sanity gets, the faster you lose more, its a downward spiral. You want to avoid things that lower it. All of this ensured that we as players were horrified to confront monsters, not only because they could kill us. This is the one game where being blind might actually increase your chances of survival.

Magic

In Call of Cthulhu spells require no specific skills to cast. The real cost here is that most spells take a heavy toll on your sanity, as they are doing things that should not be possible. You normally learn spells from tomes of forbidden knowledge that cost sanity just for reading. Then, if you are lucky and they contain a spell, and if you are even more lucky with a successful intelligence check, you may learn a spell. Most spells call or summon entities that should better be left undisturbed and will cost you even more sanity when they show up. Moreover, they are under no obligation to do anything for you. The casting of the spell itself may cost sanity too. So to for practical purposes, only deranged villains serving the abominations they call become powerful in magic. Players typically learn simple protective wards like the Elder Sign, nothing more. 

In variants like Elric! or RuneQuest magic is more combat-fit, but wizards are unusual there too. In Pendragon, even though later editions provide rules for it, the players are not supposed to play wizards. As these are power point based systems, and you do not have a lot of points, they tend to have other interesting ways to get power points, from rituals to ley lines and sacrifices, and they tend to have ways to scale the effects to longer duration, larger area, higher intensity based on how much power you channel into the spell. It's very different from D&D.

Combat

Combat is organized in rounds, like in D&D. 

Initiative follows dexterity order. Minor actions like drawing a weapon or moving lower your dexterity rank for when you act. In CoC, firearms instead always acted before melee weapons. 

In melee, the outcome of an attack is not resolved in a single roll like the combination of attack bonus and AC is in D&D - you do not compare the attack skill to the parry skill and then roll on the resistance table, you attack and parry separately. Armor does not make you harder to hit, it reduces damage if hit.  (In original RuneQuest, you did have a defense value influenced by intelligence, dexterity and other things, that was directly subtracted from the attack value for the role, but I never saw this in CoC).

Typical combat consists of one combatant going first and making an attack. Then the other can try dodge or parry the blow, unless the attack was from a firearm. Special success on an attack calls for a special success on a dodge or parry or the attack will do normal damage, and if not averted at all, extra damage.

Armor is subtracted from damage. Soft leather is 1 point, full plate is 8 points. Helmets add 1 or 2 more points. Heavy armor subtracts up to 25% from physical skill checks, helmets up to 50% from perception checks. Shields do not automatically add armor, they are used to parry. 

With a sword dealing 1d8+1 damage, fights of fully armored medieval combatants could take a long time, chipping away one or two hit points every now and then. Weak opponent like a goblin with short sword might only be able to hurt a fighter in plate mail when they score special success hits. In CoC, you played librarians and private detectives that wore no armor. A single hit with a shotgun at close range for 4d6 was enough to take you out.

Compared to D&D 5e, a 75% to hit chances for starting characters is similar to +5 to hit, which also translates to a 75% hit chance against an unarmored opponent. In D&D by mid levels you would have +8 or +9 to hit, comparable to 90-95%.

Das Schwarze Auge

I got started on role playing games by Das Schwarze Auge, or DSA for short. DSA started in 1984, with the first edition Basic Adventure Game, a German knock-off of Basic Dungeons and Dragons , and then developed its own rules system and campaign world, following with the Expanded Adventure Game. We played so much with those basic rules, that even now, more than 35 years later, I can recall many of them from memory. 

The strongest indicators for Basic DSA being a rip off Basic D&D is that it had the same conflation of  class and race, was using d20 as the main mechanics roll for attacks and checks, and  had the same split into a basic game and expanded game. It also used the concepts of levels and experience points.

The basic box came with an introduction booklet with a choose your own adventure style scenario in an old sea dog's house in a port town, again similar to the Basic D&D red box approach. It also had a rules booklet, and a games master booklet with a first adventure that played in the basement beneath the aforementioned house.

Several rules were different from D&D, and more similar to the basic role playing system from Chaosium, expressed on a d20 base. These changes may have served to avoid litigation or aimed to improve the system.

Character Creation

You could play an adventurer, fighter, magician, dwarf or elf. Notably absent are clerics, who were introduced with a pantheon of gods in the expanded game. The adventurer was not a thief, he had no special skills at all. He was strictly worse than the fighter. I think the purpose was to need less explanation about abilities to get started -- the character you play in self-play intro is an adventurer. The elf, like in Basic D&D was a mixture of magician and fighter. The dwarf was essentially a fighter. Like in D&D, magicians could only use simple weapons like quarterstaff or dagger, and no armor, while fighters could use all weapons and armor.

Basic DSA had only 5 attributes Mut (courage), Stärke (strength), Geschicklichkeit (dexterity), Intelligenz (intelligence), and Charisma (charisma). It dropped constitution and wisdom. Courage was a kind of will-power, and determined your initiative -- the more courage, the earlier you went. All attributes gave meaty boni for high value and penalties for low values. If I recall, each point above 12 would give you a +1 bonus, each point below 8  a -1 malus. Strength gave bonuses to melee attacks, Dexterity to ranged attacks. 

When you gained levels, you got to increase one of your ability scores by one point, to increase your hit points or astral points (see below), and your attack or parry (more on that later too). This was a simple and elegant way to increase the power of the characters. Mages would focus on their astral points, instead of their hit points.

One key difference were hit points, which were called life points: you started out with 20 for a magician to 35 for a dwarf. A sword dealt d6+4 damage, so you were a lot more robust than a first edition D&D character. These high, fixed hit points were unique to DSA.  

Instead of separate saving throws, you made checks against your attributes, like you do in D&D 5e. 

Each character also had an attack and parry value, starting with 10 and 8.

Magic

The magic system was very different: it was a point based system, were you spent astral points to power your spells. A mage started out with 30 astral points. You could cast any spell as often as you liked (as you can now in 5e with memorized spells) and had points left. Some spells scaled in effect depending on how many points you put into them. There were no spells to learn - as a magician you knew them all, Elves a subset.

After all, originally only few spells were available. These were takes on light, charm person, mage armor, knock, arcane lock, hold person, polymorph, detect thoughts, cure wounds, invisibility, single target fear and a single target damage spell that directly converted invested astral points into damage. Notably absent are battlefield control or area damage spells like fireball. You also had to recite a silly name and rhyme from memory to cast the spell successfully. I retrospect I am a bit baffled about arcane lock and the absence of detect magic on this super short list. 

Core Mechanic

To hit an opponent, or to succeed in an ability check, you had to roll d20 under or equal to your value - either your attack value, or your ability score. Modifiers would add to your roll (to make the test harder), or subtract from it (to make it easier). A hard dexterity check could say "dexterity check +4". To roll a saving throw, you likewise would make the appropriate ability check, dexterity to evade a trap or dodge a spell, courage to resist a fear effect, etc. 

There were no named skills in the basic game. For skill checks, you figured what ability was appropriate, like intelligence for all the knowledge skills, dexterity or strength for athletics related things, and rolled an ability check. We tended to overload courage for things that you would use constitution for in D&D, as it had relatively little other benefits.

The advantage to this mechanic is that it is super quick, there are no calculations unless there are modifiers: you just compare your roll to your value and are done. The disadvantage is that the method is capped at 20 - once you have an ability score or attack value of 20, you automatically succeed all the time. The system hence also had critical hits (natural 1) that on attacks always hit and ignored armor, and critical failure (natural 20) that always failed. 

This mechanic is essentially the core mechanic of Chaosium's basic role playing system using d20, so there is no need to multiply the ability scores by five. However, the lack of skills in the basic rules is a large difference. The advanced rules then introduced skills, but attack and parry still remained special skills not integrated into the overall framework.

Combat

The system only used two kinds of die, d20 and d6. All weapons caused d6 damage plus or minus a modifier (and some double handed weapons caused multiple d6). 

Armor did not make you harder to hit, it subtracted from weapon damage. Full plate would subtract 6 points. A small shield would subtract an extra point. Heavy armor could lower your dexterity and make you easier to hit. We felt this was superior to AC systems, as it gave another dimension to play and felt more realistic. Subtracting small numbers was easy enough. Absent critical hits a heavily armored fighter could be essentially invulnerable to a weak opponent like a goblin with a short sword, just like a character with a very high AC can be in D&D 5e. 

One peculiarity was the parry. If an opponent hit you, and you had not yet parried, you could roll to see if you successfully parried. You did not need to roll over the attack value, just under your parry value. If you parried, the attack was deflected. This was a bad mechanic. At higher levels it lead to long back an forth slogging where nothing happened as attacks were parried all the time. Better would have been if there would not have been a parry at all, or if the rule at least would have been you need to contest the attack. 

Monsters

Compared to D&D, there were crazy few monsters in the basic rules: kobold, goblin, orc, ogre, troll and at the high end, Tatzelwurm, a kind of drake. That's it. The toll was like a huge Norse warrior with a battleaxe and human level intelligence who liked candy, no warts or regeneration. The kobold was very interesting, a magical, evil gnome, who had crappy combat values but could create illusions and turn invisible, instead of just a weaker goblin. One of them who could teleport featured in the introductory adventure alongside orcs and bandits. This was a useful precedent, as it showed you could modify the monsters to make them different or more interesting.  

What I do not understand in retrospect is why they used similar humanoid monsters when they only gave six to begin with. The goblin was essentially a slightly weaker version of the orc. Ogre and troll were similar big brutes. Why not provide variety with skeletons, wolves or harpies? 

The monsters did not get a full attribute template, they had just 7 values: courage, hit points, armor, attack value, parry value, damage per attack, and experience points. (Implicit in the damage was number of attacks, as the drake for example had several attacks that did different damage). 

Adventures introduced a few more monsters, like the krakonier (similar to a bullywug), the maru (a croc man with a huge maw, similar to lizard men), the demon (looked like a nazgûl in black robes, and was not really to defeat in combat), the giant amoeba (a mix of gelatineous cube and ochre jelly), skeletons, zombies and wolves. 

But the game and atmosphere overall was more like medieval Europe, not the garishly colored fantasy of D&D with its bizarre monsters, and worked well with human opponents, and he occasional ogre or orc. 

Expanded Game

The expanded game introduced a skill system and more character classes, in particular a rogue who was good in skills, priests, who used karma points instead of astral points, along with new spells and a pantheon of gods, modeled loosely after the Greek pantheon. It added additional features to the magician, who now could enchant his staff, and added more weapons and equipment.

It also added monsters, among them a variety of dragons, from the cave dragon (a tough drake without flight), to the tree dragon (flying), to great wyrms with thee heads, flight and firebreathing.

In Search of the Unknown

In Search of the Unknown was an introduction adventure distributed with early versions of the Basic D&D rules (Holmes Edition), and replaced in later printings by Gygax' Keep on the Borderlands. 

It is not a fully realized adventure location. While the map and room furnishings and contents are set, both treasure and monsters come as lists at the end that the DM is supposed to populate the dungeon with. Because of this, the monsters have no provided motivations or relationships with each other.

Overall, my impression is that it tries to emulate the original Greyhawk Castle, or at least, implement the guidance from the OD&D books that was derivative of the play in Greyhawk Castle -- it has the same kind of door labyrinth that the Old Guard kobolds later have in the Castle Zagyg version, it has the magical pools, the teleport rooms to confuse mapping, the sloping corridors with fake stairs, the pit traps, the labyrinthine layout with paper thin walls on level 1, and natural, hard to map caves on level 2.

To make this dungeon work, here is my populated version.

Backstory: I put DC challenges on each paragraph, so that the PCs could discover the story by spending half a day of research per check in the library or asking around in town.  DC 10 for well known information, 15 for most, and 20 for obscure pieces. My players found a relative of the dwarves who built the dungeon, the cousin of another dwarf stonemason they had hired to tunnel into the vault at Tower of the Stargazer. This worthy provided some of the background to them, but no floor plans. 

Dungeon Ecology: I have weird fungi and mushrooms growing all over the dungeon, and small insects and vermin feeding on them. The giant rats, spiders and caterpillars feed on those and the occasional kobold, orc or goblin. The ghoul preys on the orcs and goblins. Kobolds, goblins and to a lesser extend the orcs forage in the forest outside. 

Factions

Each group of monsters controls part of the dungeon around where they are based. Due to the wandering monster tables, the overall groups must be a good part larger than the number of monsters that can be found "in lair", or those lairs would empty pretty quickly after 2-3 encounters. 

Kobolds. "The Crookshank Gremlins". They look like Gremilins from the eponymous movie, use kobold stats, and have the added weakness that daylight damages them for d6 radiant earch round. They control the North of the upper level, including rooms 35 and 37. In the spirit of the "Old Guard Kobolds" from Gygax, they are quite cunning and if they survive they learn tricks from the PCs, like spiking doors. They use what ever equipment they can - traps, baskets filled with poisonous insects, sticky or slippery plant sap, and flaming oil, all to tip the fight in their favor. They trained the carrion crawler ("the grub") at the entry to let them pass and forage in the forest for slugs, snails and fungi to eat. They fear the "stinkies" (troglodytes) and avoid them. They also fear the berserkers, They have not been to the pool room or locked rooms, and do not know of any secret doors but #14. They torture captured orcs (20% chance) to learn more about the "rock spiders" that the orcs talk about, and their dream is to capture and train those as steeds. They know giant caterpillars are too stupid to train - they tried and got poisoned/eaten. They lock up foes in the door maze. They trapped 2 trogs in the "training room" (I rolled a random encounter for trogs there).

Berserkers. This small, all male group are based in 21 and control the South of the upper level and access to the fungus garden, one has the key. They eat the fungi and use luminescent ones as light sources. They know about the orcs and dangerous stinkers on the lower level and will not descend, and fight the kobolds. Due to the carrion crawler at the entrance they do not leave the dungeon. They are descendants form prisoners made in Roghan's and Zelligar's war against the barbarians and hate  fighters and wizards - in their mind the two still live. They are brutal and rowdy but childlike. 

Orcs. Former slaves of the two founders, the warband controls areas 49, 50, 51 and the large caves nearby. They have no females or young, so every man lost is irreversible attrition. Their main diet is bats from 53 if they cannot get by the carrion crawler at the entrance because it moved beyond the secret doors. They fear rock spiders, have a truce with the goblins, and war against the berserkers and kobolds. They avoid the troglodytes due to their stench and don't like to pass by the "blob" in 46 or "old hag" in 51. Unbeknownst to them, the 30' deep oubliette they use for prisoners has a secret door that connects to the caves of chaos, area 51.

Goblins. The Tonguesplitter tribe controls rooms 55 and 56, and are the only ones who know about the secret passage to 53 (but do not know 54). The bats in 53 form the base of their diet, and as they control the "back door", they also set traps and forage in the forest. They use the area to their advantage, sneaking and backstabbing, and use the pit in front of 56 to help protect against the trogs. They have an uneasy truce with the orcs. 

Troglodytes. This extended family has several cousins out at all times to hunt for sentient food. They control areas 43-45 and the large cavern nearby. They  prey on kobolds and goblins. The orcs warband are stronger combatants than trogs, so the trogs leave them alone and the orcs avoid their stink. One was snatched by the hungry black widow in 51 in spite of the stench, so now they feed prisoners to her. 

Room keys

Cave of the Unknown. Weird mushrooms bloom in the shadows of the trees at the foot of the rocky knoll. 

ENTRANCE The dungeon is hidden under a DC 17 Wisdom Save illusion.  

In our game, the PCs failed it, then observed from the ruins of the tower above until a band of gremlins emerged for foraging. This dispelled the illusion for them. (They later ambushed the returning gremlins with sleep spells and slaughtered them all, the mage lying to the paladin that they were "demons"). 

Tentacle Mushroom. The dank tunnel is overgrown with weird fungi. Right behind the entrance door is a tentacle mushroom. It has fire red tentacles that extend in a star like pattern and grow out of a white, gelatinous "witches egg". They stink of carrion intensely in 10' r, and attract flies to their slimy mucosa. It is difficult (Acrobatics check DC 20) to pass without touching. Touching rubs off the slimy stink which will impose Disadvantage to stealth checks for 1d6 days.

1. ALCOVES A carrion crawler nibbles at the pile of corpses and will be alerted and atttack when the magic mouths trigger (As a nod to the deadly encounter at the beginning of the intro module in the basic red box). 

2. KITCHEN. 7 giant rats. They do not attack if not distrubed.

4. LOUNGE. Crystal goblet GG on a bench.

5. WIZARDS CHAMBER. Zelligar was big into fungi and growing artificial live in vats. 6 skeletons guard the doors to 6, 7. Will attack if one enters the room but not pursue. Jeweled Dagger E under the pillow can be used to create an homunculus, see #9.

6 CLOSET.  Book #4 has research notes on developing a control weather spell, making researching one 20% cheaper. Stack of papers lists the codes to boxes in #10.

8. WIZARDS WORKROOM. Fake Magic Wand T. Appears to be a Wand of Charm Person DC 13, d6+1 charges, recharge d3/day, but does nothing.

9. WIZARDS LABORATORY. A half-developed naked cadaver without skin in one of the vats will lurch out and attack if lid opened or it hears loud noise (use zombie with intelligence 4). Homunculus research papers / formula to grown one strewn about. Requires casting of mending, mirror image, arcane eye, each day over 5 full days of crafting, blood from mage cut with dagger like the one from #5 (100 gp Onyx set), material components worth 500 gp of clay, rare ashes, mandrake root. 1 alchemist supplies can be salvaged.

12. LIBRARY. Books of lore: each worth 25 gp weighing 5 pounds, d20 of each: nature (focus on fungi and mushrooms), history (of the north, barbarian lands), religion (undead, creation of artificial life). Can use value to self train in downtime activity to learn knowledge skill (250 days needed). Novels worth 10 gp, weighing 3 pounds, d20 each on: comedy plays, tragedy plays, erotic diaries/romances, heroic sagas. Scroll of sleep BB, spell book pages with Create Homunculus spell (from Xanathar's Guide to Everything, the final conclusion of the earlier research on how to craft one more laboriously).

18. SMITHY. Giant spider. The whole room and the corridors leading up to it are thick with webs. The doors is standing ajar. 1 set of smith's tools can be collected. Random encounters nearby can be Swarm of Insects (Spiders). 

19. ACCESS ROOM. If PCs are noisy, they attract the spider from #18.

20. DEAD END ROOM. Any random encounter in this area will be berserkers.

21. MEETING ROOM. The berserkers have their base here, although all may be out. Roll for random encounter, any such will be berserkers. A leather pouch with 10 e.p. A lies under one of the benches, DC 15 perception to spot. Lokh (boss), Masst (fungus master), and Bred (speaker). Only Bred speaks broken common, the others speak a barbarian dialect.

22. GARDEN ROOM. 3 shiekers grow in the corner areas, shriek will attract wandering monsters 3 in 6.  Poison is Constitution Save DC10 or d8 damage and cramps (poisoned condition) for d12 h. Also present are fungi that if squashed give off eerie blueish glow, bright in 5' radius, dim in 10' radius for a 8 hours. You can add other magical fungi, for example a rare kind that heals d4 hits if ingested. 

23. STORAGE ROOM. 1 carpenter's tools. 

24. MISTRESS CHAMBER. Silver mirror Y.

 

25. ROGAHN'S CHAMBER. +1 mace H, hidden under secret flat stone (DC 15 search check), 1 ft thick under cabinet, which has to be moved. The velvet bedding in which it sits also has empty forms for an axe, sword, crossbow. Brass dragon skin can be made into brass dragon scale armor, cost to manufacture 800 gp, takes a month for a smith with apprentices.

27. THRONE ROOM. 2 giant centipedes

28. WORSHIP AREA. Alms box with 35 g.p. D, with slit, padlocked DC 15 and screwed to the floor.

31. ROOM of POOLs. The centerpiece of this level. Each pool contains about 16 gallons of liquid. The acid is too diluted to be used directly in vials, would need to be distilled to higher concentration alchemically. Sleep pool DC 10 Con Save to resist.

32. ADVISOR'S CHAMBER. Elfin Notes mention: a teleporter to the great city of Greyhawk, nobly embellished, with another such-like at the other end; a guard room with a statue in the form of a beautiful woman, crushing unwanted visitors; a trap room with a pile of treasure luring thieves to their deaths at the bottom of a pit of poisonous snakes and stakes; a room full of unique pools with unheard-of properties (#31);  a lavish throne room of noble grandeur, columned, with a secret exit behind the throne (#27); a privy in the men's barracks area is urgently needed; a store room near the kitchen, to minimize walking distance (#10).

33. BARRACKS. Small gold ring 10 g.p. AA in a crack in the chest of drawers (Search DC 10). 

35. GUEST CHAMBER. Home of the kobolds. North room:  4 kobolds, 2 female kobolds, 8 kobold children, shit bucket. Middle room: chief Krishnak (max hp), 8 kobolds, 2 female kobolds. South room:  Locked DC 15, chief has keys. Treasure Room, sign with mirrored R on door says so, chest of 2450 cp N, cask of salted snails, sacks of dried fungi, hogshead of fungi-laced water, giant rat carcass on rope, jar of dried bugs. 

37. RECREATION ROOM. Used by kobolds for training, before they trapped two trogs in there, who are now starving (exhaustion level 2). Break DC 24. 

PIT TRAP. Will let characters fall into pool in 51, where the orcs will try to capture them.

Level 2 is difficult terrain unless you are used to the ground (as the orcs, goblins and trogs)

40. SECRET CAVERN. 2 forest gnomes. Ernest Glindigger & Ignatz Teldower in secret hide-out operations base. None of the monsters know of them. They search for gems, may help the PCs & hide them, as they see them as useful for clearing out the monsters. But they consider they were here first and the keep is theirs. Each have 4 gems of 10 g.p. value. Use scout. 

41. CAVERN. Giant spider. (Black Widow, max hits; poison 4d8, Constitution Save DC 13), deep in webs, with spider swarm of young offspring. Emerges if webs at #42 are disturbed. Skeletons of a trog, several kobolds and goblins in webs.

42. WEBBED CAVE. Deep in the webs sticks a skeleton of a small creature (goblin) and a leather bag with 820 sp P. 

43. CAVERN. 2 troglodytes. father max hp, mother. Noncombatant: 1 ancient grandfather, 2 young, 7 eggs. Onyx Statue 200 gp O, on shelf with burned down candles (depicting Lizard-Toad Demon Laogzed). They venerate it and will barter for candles.

44. CAVERN. 1 trogolodyte. guards family cave.

45. CAVERN OF THE MYSTICAL STONE. 3d20 chits left. If noise, trog from 45 investigates. Cavern is holy to them.

46. SUNKEN CAVERN. Ochre jelly sticks in wetness crevasse at the ceiling. 

47. CAVERN. Noise attracts ochre jelly from 46. 

48. ARENA CAVERN. The dried, desiccated corpses of 2 stirges lie on the floor. They are in hibernation, if provided with blood, they will revive.

50. WATER PIT. 7 orcs. Main lair of the warband. 1 orc is posted outside at g. as guard. Each has 4 gp in a mix of coins.

51. SIDE CAVERN. Bulrog the orc chieftain (called "Chainguzzler" by his men), in chainmail +1 Z, treasurer Ygg with 28 gp pouch C. 

52. RAISED CAVERN. 2 giant wolf spiders ("rock spiders"), can not be distinguished from rock if hidden. They prey on the orcs and goblins that come to the bat cave for food. At far end of cave blinks a silver medallion 500 sp L, wedged half under a 30 pound rock. 

53. BAT CAVERN. Ghoul (use ghast max hits) Inzericks the Old, lives in catacombs and maze and preys on creatures that come here to feed. Both goblins and orc have scare stories of the "eater monster" and fear him greatly. pouch with 15 gp B on a half-eaten orc carcass. 

54. TREASURE CAVE. 2 vat-grown berserkers, count them too as items of value. 2 locked chests with 620 gp, R, 840 cp, 290 sp, 120 ep, 25 gp DD. 

55. EXIT CAVE. Main cave of he tonguesplitter tribe. 5 goblins, noncombatant 4 female goblins, 8 goblin young. Chief Cugel (goblin, max hp) has a 80 sp silver bracelet CC denoting his status. 

56. CAVERN OF THE STATUE. 4 goblins guard and raise alarm for reinforcement or flee to #55. One is the tribe shaman, Roach, minor illusion cantrip, 2 level 1 slots, command and hex. Will use minor illusion to make the statue appear to talk (which scares off the trogs), command to get people walk into the pit.

Wandering Monsters

 

Level 2

1. 1d4 Troglodytes. On raid for captives. 20% carrying tied up kobold to black widow lair.

2. 1 Crab Spider. (Use giant wolf spider, nearly invisible against rock)

3. d6+1 Kobolds.  Reconnoitering to search "rock spiders" to capture & domesticate; have 2 nets 

4. d8 Orcs. On their way out for food (1/3), checking caves for enemy movement (2/3)

5. d2 Zombies. failed experiments, mindlessly wandering the halls, craving ... something

6. d6+1 Goblins. exploring in search of treasure to steal, have empty canvas bag with them