A friend recently asked about recommended books on warfare. I recommended a book and and then I started thinking about the handful of books I’d like recommend in addition to that first one, all of them freely available online:
History of the Peloponnesian War
Read a bit on Wikipedia if you like, but I recommend you get a printed copy from some second hand book seller and read one of these books as soon as possible. They’re tiny by todays standards of science fiction and fantasy trilogies and decalogies.
Enjoy!
The actual reason why I started writing this blog post was a different one, however. On the one hand, I was thinking of Explaining d6 Damage on JB’s **B**X Blackrazor__ blog, and on the other hand I was thinking of my new campaign… 😄__
Regarding d6 damage: I decided that my next campaign would be using d6 for damage. Yes, some weapons look more impressive than others, but they’re all good for killing people. I don’t want to get into the arm’s race, the fighting styles, the armor improvements. All of this certainly played a role on the battlefields of history, but if my game is going to ignore the advances of infantry tactics, I might as well ignore all the other details and assume that “different weapons inflict harm in different ways…” (JB).
So why the step back from variable weapon damage that I’ve used for all of my role-playing life? In the last years I’ve been reading the old school blogs and realized what exactly I didn’t like about D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder RPG. I’m still playing the games, but I decided that my next campaign will be different. I’ve mellowed a bit in the last year, and decided upon the following compromise:
my next campaign will be different
The real reason for returning to the old school of D&D is my increased dislike of reliance on the rules:
I hope that having less rules will solve my problem. Switching to a d6 for all weapons just pushes the game further in the direction I want to take. It might lead to other problems, of course. I think it was my friend Marco who said that I’ll end up with more arguing at the table if there are less rules. We’ll see. All I know is that I have to change *something*.
Looking at my blog I see that I’ve already made these attempts at convincing myself two years ago. Maybe the onset of winter does that to me. Damn it! This time I *really* mean it. I do. I do. Once the Campaign:HagfishTavern Rise of the Runelords campaign ends, I’ll switch gears.
Campaign:HagfishTavern Rise of the Runelords
Anyway, now I need to think of a way of tying all these topics together for this blog post…
What I did is this: I started writing up some pages for my next campaign (in German) on a new Campaign Wiki, Campaign:FünfWinde Fünf Winde (referring to the *Sea of Five Winds* region – my Alder King game is situated in the *Lenap* region), added some explanations regarding the old school style I’m aiming for, house rules, starting village (_Oathcomb_ near *Longbottle*).
I read up on *Mitra* and *Set* and decided to move this conflict into the foreground. My current Alder King uses a lot of inspiration from the Babylonian mythos (Marduk, Nergal, Ishtar), and I think I want to move the imagery of my world in general away from European medieval knights and wizards to a more Babylonian, Assyrian, or Greek background. Which is where the books on warfare in the ancient world tie in! The part that isn’t influenced by Sword & Sorcery literature will be influenced by Greek and Persian culture, I think.
Thinking of house rules, I started wondering about d6 damage and found JB’s blog post to be a nice intro to the topic. And I ended up thinking about the effects of Strength on melee combat.
I think that’s good enough. In D&D 3.5 there are no XP bonuses, but there are a dozen feats to push your numbers up, allowing players to power game and apply their skills to making better characters, moving the arena away from the table into their studying of books and rules. I feel that in order to prevent that, I need to limit rules-relevant options for players during character creation. There shall be options, but they’ll emerge from the game itself:
Planning for the next campaign while you’re still playing the old campaign is messing me up as a referee. I need a separation of concerns, somehow. My current plan has been to try and not talk about it until I had pretty much decided on the basics. We’ll see how that goes.
Ok, enough rambling. What happened to my preference for short blog postings!?
P.S.: I added *Google Friend Connect* to my RPG page a while ago. I didn’t want to add it to every single page because I fear that this will slow everything down. Then again, I hardly ever mind when I visit other blogs. Perhaps obsession over bandwidth and load times just goes to show that I lived through the early years of the web. 😄
#RPG #Old School
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Thanks for the recommendations Alex. Anabasis Alexandri looks like just what I need.
– NoufalIbrahim 2010-10-24 15:24 UTC
---
Although, I can’t find a copy of the book online. Is it available freely? Openlibrary.org doesn’t seem to list it.
– NoufalIbrahim 2010-10-24 15:26 UTC
---
Hm, I was sure that I had seen it before, but you are right, a quick googling does not uncover anything but the Greek original! 😄
– Alex Schroeder 2010-10-24 18:10 UTC
---
Is this not the one? http://websfor.org/alexander/arrian/book1a.asp
http://websfor.org/alexander/arrian/book1a.asp
– NoufalIbrahim 2010-10-25 06:43 UTC
---
That’s the one. 😄 I myself have the translation by P. A. Brunt in the Loeb Classical Library...
– Alex Schroeder 2010-10-25 17:01 UTC