Optional Rule

*Updated, fixed charts to be more readable THE ORIGINAL KNOWN WORLD, PART II Yesterday I showed you Tom Moldvay and Lawrence Schick’s Original Known World. Today, let’s look at the D&D they were actually playing in it. Because they were tinkering with damn near EVERYTHING. These surviving campaign notes contain weapon effectiveness against different armor classes. Attack matrices. Saving throws. Revised class advancement. Spell progression. Huge dungeon wandering monster and encounter tables. This wasn’t just a setting being invented at somebody’s table. The game itself was being tinkered with right alongside it. And that’s what I find so fascinating about these pages. Early D&D was wonderfully malleable. You had the rules, and then you had your D&D. If something needed more detail, you added it. If something didn’t work the way you wanted, you changed it. If the existing tables weren’t enough, apparently you broke out the typewriter and made some more. And then there’s the name at the center of all this: Tom Moldvay. A few years later, Moldvay would put his name on the 1981 D&D Basic Set, one of the most beloved and influential presentations of Dungeons & Dragons ever published. Which makes seeing the rules he and his fellow gamers were experimenting with at the table years earlier absolutely fascinating. We’re not looking at Moldvay Basic yet. We’re looking at the tinkering that came before it. And the Original Known World gets a LOT stranger from here. Next time: the monsters.

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