Two Kinds of Wilderness Maps in Original D&D

It's well-known among old school gamers that original D&D calls for using the game board from the Outdoor Survival board game for wilderness adventures. Outdoor Survival is listed under "Recommended Equipment" on page 5 of the Men & Magic booklet, and on page 15 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, it states "OUTDOOR SURVIVAL has a playing board perfect for general adventures. Catch basins are castles, buldings are towns, and the balance of the terrain is as indicated." 

What seems to be much less well-known is that there is an entirely different method for mapping the wilderness called for in original D&D. This method is also used by old school gamers, but for whatever reason it has received much less attention and commentary. On page 15 of The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, immediately above the previous quotation, it also states:

The terrain beyond the immediate surroundings of the dungeon area should be unknown to all but the referee. Off-hand adventures in the wilderness are made on the OUTDOOR SURVIVAL playing board (explained below). Exploratory journeys, such as expeditions to find land suitable for a castle or in search of some legendary treasure are handled in an entirely different manner.

This passage shows that there are actually two fundamentally distinct kinds of wilderness maps for use with D&D. The first is a map created by the referee, which is unseen by the players: "The terrain beyond the immediate surroundings of the dungeon area should be unknown to all but the referee." This is indeed "entirely different" from the Outdoor Survival board, which shows all the terrain and main locations (towns and castles) to the players as soon as it is placed on the gaming surface. 

This passage also specifies that the Outdoor Survival board is for use with "off-hand adventures in the wilderness"; the other passage on the same page of U&WA refers instead to using the Outdoor Survival board for "general adventures." The meaning of these phrases is not entirely clear, but they might refer to using the Outdoor Survival board for "one-shot" wilderness adventures that are not part of a DM's ongoing campaign, or perhaps for adventures which are treated as "side quests" or branches off the main campaign.

Page 16 of U&WA provides some additional clarity about the other type of map to be used for wilderness adventures:

REFEREE'S MAP is a wilderness map unknown to the players. It should be for the territory around the dungeon location. When players venture into this area they should have a blank hexagon map, and as they move over each hex the referee will inform them as to what kind of terrain is in that hex. This form of exploring will eventually enable players to know the lay of the land in their immediate area and thus to be able to select a site upon which to build their castles. (Castle buliding and its attendant requirements will be covered hereafter.) Exploratory adventures are likely to be the most exciting, and their incorporation into the campaign is most desirable.    

What follows is a set of rules for determining the rate of movement in the wilderness, based on terrain type and the type of creature or vehicle moving.

Using a referee's map unknown to the players sets up the possibility of "exploratory adventures," where much or all of the terrain and special locations are initially unknown to the players. The wilderness map is "for the territory around the dungeon location," which indicates the use of a dungeon as the central starting point for a campaign. The text calls for the players' use of a blank hex map which they fill in as they explore. It also specifically mentions that wilderness exploration will "eventually" enable players to find suitable sites "upon which to build their castles." The "eventually" indicates that building a castle is seen as appropriate for higher level characters. It's noteworthy that part of the value of a wilderness map is that it supports this "end game" of D&D, where the characters build strongholds and become lords of the surrounding area.

The second type of wilderness map itself consists of two maps, one for the referee and one for the player. The text itself calls for players to be given a completely blank hex map, which they only fill in as they explore. Actual early D&D products with wilderness maps often soften this, giving players a partially filled in map, and giving the referee the completed map. We can see this in the City State of the Invincible Overlord and other Judges Guild Wilderlands products, and also in the player's map from the D&D Expert module X1 The Isle of Dread. 

The overall picture presented by the actual text of original D&D is that the use of a special map created by the referee (and unknown to the players), rather than use of the Outdoor Survival board, is actually the primary intended form of wilderness play. The Outdoor Survival board is said to be for "off-hand avdentures," while the "exploratory adventures" enabled by the use of a secret referee's map are "likely to be the most exciting, and their incorporation into the campaign is most desirable." Given what the text itself says, it's interesting that the use of the Outdoor Survival board for wilderness adventures has become so much more well-known and salient among latter-day fans of original D&D.

In addition to the fact that the Outdoor Survival board does not support the same kind of exploratory play as a referee's map, since the main features on the board are immediately visible, another important difference between the two is that the Outdoor Survival board has hexes that are not numbered, while hex maps of the sort used in the 1970s for wargames usually had numbered hexes. Numbered hexes are quite handy (I would say essential--perhaps more on that in a later post) for campaign play, in that the referee can keep a separate document for the wilderness map which contains details of locations and events keyed to each hex. With the Outdoor Survival board, it is much more difficult to record information that can be localized to a hex, and so it is more difficult to keep and record data on special locations (such as monster lairs discovered by the players) that can be referred to in later sessions of the game. This makes the Outdoor Survival board better for "off-hand" adventures, rather than adventures that are part of an extended campaign set in a well-developed world.

Addendum: The excellent YouTube channel Geek Gamers has a video discussing Jon Peterson's new book, The Elusive Shift, which covers the history of what are now called tabletop RPGs from around 1975 to 1980. At around 9:06, the creator of the video discusses their particular copy of the Outdoor Survival board, which has custom features added to it by a previous owner, including an alphanumeric key written in by hand to help identify each hex. It seems that early players of D&D understood the importance of using numbered hexes to support wilderness play, even when using the Outdoor Survival board. 

D&D Alignments as Meta-Factions of Religious Allegiance

Paul Siegel and Dan Collins, who host the YouTube channel Wandering DMs, recently aired an episode on Alignment in D&D. Paul is skeptical of using alignment at all, but around 38:08 he states that his previous best attempt to understand alignment was to interpret it as allegiance to a side in a cosmic battle, rather than regarding it as having anything to do with personal morality. Dan states that he conceives of alignment in terms of a character's basic response to the existence of a being like Cthulhu: a Lawful character fights against Cthulhu, a Neutral character runs away, and a Chaotic character furthers the ends of Cthulhu. (Presumably, any Great Old One, demon lord, or similar being of cosmic evil could stand in for Cthulhu here.)

Paul has several criticisms of alignment as found in original D&D and its successors:

• The existence and mechanics of alignment languages make little sense; for example, why would a character forget their old alignment language upon switching alignment? 
• In OD&D, alignment languages have the side effect of reducing the value in learning multiple languages; there are only three alignment languages spoken by all creatures, and the rules only prohibited learning 'opposing' alignment languages. In Gary Gygax's original Greyhawk campaign, this was interpreted as permitting Lawful and Chaotic characters to learn the Neutral alignment language, and as permitting Neutral characters to learn any alignment language--at least, according to Mike Mornard, one of the original members of the Lake Geneva Greyhawk campaign.
• Equating alignment with personal morality requires either forbidding certain actions for player characters, as being inconsistent with their alignment, or carefully tracking PC actions with some putatively objective criteria that could then force an alignment change after a sufficient number and intensity of violations of the original alignment's values--all of which are impractical or at least very tricky to implement.
• It is either impossible or impractical to define an objective list of values and actions for each alignment.
• Having an alignment rule adds nothing to the game, and it is not necessary to have an alignment rule even if a campaign features a cosmic conflict between good and evil.
• Alignment would have no meaning or application in Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age. Since Conan is such an important source of inspiration for D&D, this means that D&D does not need alignment, either.

I agree with many of Paul's points, but I still think that a three-value alignment system (Law, Neutrality, Chaos) is useful for most D&D campaigns. 

It may seem strange that Paul leaned so heavily on the one example of Conan (and I may have exaggerated the weight he was trying to place on this one point in my summary of it here). But considering the example of Conan and the Hyborian Age is very important when evaluating and interpreting the rules for OD&D. Conan was one of the main inspirations for D&D, for both Gygax and Arneson. If a rule like alignment would be useless in attempting to adapt the Hyborian Age, or similar worlds of pulp and weird fiction (such as Fritz Leiber's Nehwon) to D&D, then that would be an important piece of evidence against the necessity or the utility of alignment in D&D.

However, I think that alignment does have a use in D&D, and it is precisely that suggested by Dan and Paul in their best attempt to define alignment in a maximally clear and concise way: alignment indicates allegiance to a cosmic force or a group of gods or other similarly powerful beings. The main function of the alignment rule is just to serve as a marker for which cosmic faction a character belongs to and identifies with. 

The exact beings or forces that a person is aligned with or against can vary from campaign to campaign, but the general three-value alignment system is likely to be useful in many if not most OD&D worlds. Chaos aligns with a big bad or cosmic threat, Law with the forces that oppose it, and Neutrality with neither, or with forces that are orthogonal to the central cosmic conflict.

Defining alignment in this way neatly sidesteps the interminable issues surrounding morality, much less how to quantify these in game terms. It also sidesteps the puzzles surrounding alignment languages, because alignments can be conceived of as factions without having to introduce the notion that aligned creatures share a common tongue. Alignment in this sense is more of a tag than a mechanic, which simply labels the main faction that a character belongs to.

An alignment is a 'meta-faction' in that it can lump together otherwise disparate groups or creatures. If Cthulhu is the big bad, then those aligned against him may otherwise share little in common, and their rivalries may also be quite significant for the campaign. Similarly, those aligned with Law may have intense internal rivalries, similar to the rivalries between different monotheistic religions or different sects of the same religion.

Strictly speaking, alignment need not be allegiance to a religious cause or faction, but most often the cosmic evil in fantasy fiction is indeed a god or spirit of some kind. Cthulhu is an alien entity, but even he inspires religious devotion among his human followers, who form nameless cults in his honor, for example.

Returning to the case of Conan, alignment works surprisingly well with Howard's Hyborian Age. Chaos aligns with Set or the Great Old Ones; Law aligns with Mitra; and Neutrality aligns with various other gods and unaligned entities, such as Conan's own god Crom, and beings such as Bel and Anu.

This conception of alignment is not far from that found in Chainmail, the ur-text of D&D. As Dan notes in the video, Chainmail includes a table labeled "General Line-Up" (on page 39 of the 3rd edition), which divides Fantasy Supplement creatures into three categories: Law, Neutral, and Chaos. The purpose of this list is to determine which creatures will tend to fight as allies in miniature battles; as the text itself says:

It is impossible to draw a distanct [sic] line between "good" and "evil" fantastic figures. Three categories are listed below as a general guide for the wargamer designing orders of battle involving fantastic creatures.

Two aspects of this original Chainmail rule are useful for D&D as well: (1) alignment is not based on strict criteria for good and evil; (2) alignment is a general guide for which creatures will fight together against common foes. In this case, returning to the simplicity of Chainmail helps resolve much of the confusion and muddle introduced by decades of development of D&D.

Granted that alignment is useful to many or most D&D campaigns, is it truly essential? Is it impossible to play bona fide D&D without alignment? Well, many effects, such as of spells, magic items, or monster powers, are defined in terms of alignment. Ditching alignment would require tweaking with these game elements, such as the rule that only Chaotic clerics may cast the reversed form of cleric spells. Arguably, though, the central motivation for D&D characters is winning treasure, rather than choosing a side in a cosmic battle; D&D, at least in its original, 1974 incarnation, is fundamentally a game about finding treasure from the dungeon underneath a mad wizard's castle, or from another similar place of adventure. This motivation does not depend fundamentally on cosmic allegiance, so the game could probably survive in recognizable form even without alignment. Nevertheless, alignment is likely to be useful in most D&D campaigns, as long as there is a recognizable cosmic big bad whose existence shapes the interactions between many of the characters and creatures of the campaign setting.

Zak Smith's VICE Article on D&D

Zak Smith, artist, adult film actor, award-winning DIY game designer, and fellow resident of Los Angeles County (Hollywood division), has written a thoughtful article on the persisting appeal and vitality of Dungeons & Dragons in an age of video games and Hollywood blockbusters.

I can't quite put my finger on it, but it feels as if some kind of giant open pop-cultural loop (or loops) have finally been closed with the publication of this article.

"Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace."