a wandering mind (edmo's blog)

Swords Appeal (and Wizardry)

There may come a time in a post-OSR (or NSR, or plain old OSR - whatever, choose your acronym) gamer's life where they feel compelled to study the old ways. To look beyond the smooth elegance of a Mythic Bastionland or a Mothership, and try on the frictive clunkiness of TSR era D&D to see how it fits.

Dear reader, I have been playing in a modified Old School Essentials campaign for a couple of months now and... I like it! The sense of achievement in finally getting a hobbit (halfling) to survive to level 2 (now sporting some chain armour to boot) was delightful. A far cry from the quotidean feel of the expected levelling-up in Official Brand & Builds style D&D.

Does that mean I have cast aside my Cairn 2e box and the teachings of Yochai Gal to learn the ways of Moldvay, Cook and Mentzer? Not at all... but my appetite has been whet, and so I delved deeper.

I dabbled with PDF scans of the 1974 TSR D&D box, B2, some of the various Basics, and after extracting some enjoyment from that process... I’ll be honest: I lost patience.

Then, after hearing about it piecemeal, I took the plunge into reading an alternative take on the classic dungeondragon: Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised (2023), by Mythmere Games (Matt Finch writing & Suzy Moseby on layout).

Please don't treat what follows as a comprehensive product review. This is just me explaining why I enjoyed my read of this particular retroclone.

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Why Swords & Wizardry?

For me the motivation to read Swords & Wizardry over any other retroclone - or the original TSR texts, for that matter - starts and ends with Matt Finch.

Being the (relative) OSR newbie that I am, Finch first came across my radar on a youtube recording of a convention panel in which he spoke up for the OSR as being more about a community of practice and an infrastructure for publishing than a particular set of rules or some kind of ephemeral vibe. I liked that! Plus, as far as I could find, nobody seems to have a bad word to say about him - impressive for someone who's been OSR since before it was called “OSR”, and publishing OSR texts since OSRIC 1e.

The rules to old school dungeondragon have existed in various forms - original, retroclone, homage, pastiche - but I was curious to see what a version of these rules would look like when it’s reassembled and explained by someone with decades of experience in running the game.

In Swords & Wizardy Finch's writing is not terse in the manner of Chris McDowall, nor poetic or punchy in the style of our indie blogosphere-NSR-pOSR contemporaries. Nevertheless I find myself charmed. Finch’s love of The Original Game (the term he uses to refer to the original 1974 D&D rules) is evident throughout. Swords & Wizardy is written as one DM speaking to another DM; a practical and reassuring guide for playing and running the game, clear and thorough in explanation and commentary without condescension. Where The Original Game was unclear or unspecific (such as initiative and order of proceedings in a combat situation), Finch presents his preferred interpretation and offers alternative methods. If a game's rules are a designer's essay on game design (to paraphrase Max Lander of RTFM) then S&W is Finch's thesis on why he's landed on this particular combination of clarified rules and procedures for running The Original Game.

The book is also a love letter to the trappings of classic fantasy roleplaying, and it's best enjoyed when you try to forget what you know about dungeondragon from playing the official branded version(s) and imagine yourself to be the neophyte - relearning the principles of the attribute scores, the character classes, calculating Armour Class, and the diegetic qualities of Law and Chaos, the “Vancian” magic system, and so on, with a receptive mind.

In purely practical terms, I think this edition of Swords & Wizardry (Complete, Revised - 2023) is all I need to learn and run my own game of OD&D. Yes I’d need to build the sandbox and the dungeons (from modules or the extensive Referee material in the back half of this book)... ‘twas ever thus.

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Why not OSE?

If all you care about is the raw rules then for the most part it doesn't really matter. You could run any popular OSE module in S&W. They are subtly distinct flavours like v60 versus chemex - both will make for a tasty drip-filtered coffee.

On the referee side of the screen, S&W is based on "The Original Game" instead of Basic/Expert; on the player-facing side you have Finch's structured approach to "Order of Battle" initiative and the incorporation of the Dragon Magazine supplemental Class and Ancestry rules for OD&D (most famously known as the “races” and classes that appeared in AD&D 1e, as opposed to the “race-as-class” design of the Basic/Expert line).

There's some other rules differences but they are minor and to exhaustively list them here would be tiresome for us both.

For me, the argument for OSE is pretty clear:

To choose Swords & Wizardry means forgoing some of those conveniences. It means settling in to read some proper paragraphs, passing on the slicker rules-abstractions of an indie NSR darling, imagining yourself having unlearned what you already know from other versions of dungeondragon and approaching the text as a patient and studious learner - an experience I've rather enjoyed.

Do you need this book if you’re already well versed in running OD&D and/or Basic? Probably not... if all you want is The Rules then Delving Deeper has got your covered; but I came to the old school via the new school, and I’m enjoying S&W as a text which teaches the old rules in a comprehensive and friendly style. This is not going to be a foundational and hobby-altering text for me in the way that the Warden’s Operation Manual has been, but reading S&W has given me a welcoming approach to The Original Game.

If I ever run ”The Original Game” in the Picaresque open-ended sandbox style in which I’ve run Cairn 2e (and am currently running Wages of Sin) then I’ll be running Swords & Wizardry.

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