The early history of D&D is pretty interesting. If you haven't yet, listen to When We Were Wizards. The dramas that play out in the "hobby with friends -> business -> multimillion dollar industry" are almost mythological in their parallelisms and ironic twists.
As I've been retreading some of this history reading Jon Peterson's Game Wizards, I grew interested in delving into the actual text of original D&D: the little brown books that came in the white box.
Behold! The Domesday Book!
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| Click to read! |
As a way to engage with the text, I began porting the text of OD&D into the Explorer's Template. In the margins, I scrawled my reactions to the text: things I wanted to highlight, things I think are weird, implications of certain passages, thoughts on the implied setting of the world.
The title of this project is taken from the newsletter of the Castle & Crusade Society, a medieval wargaming club that both Arneson and Gygax were members of.
This project is unfinished. I've only worked on 21 pages here of booklet 1: Men & Magic. As always, I couldn't do it if I didn't chunk the work. (But maybe I'll never finish it, who knows! Just following my passions.)
I am not 100% sure myself but I think the "3 for 1" thing is that you can reduce a non-prime requisite score by 3 in order to raise a prime requisite by 1.
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