So in Blackmoor, the pre-D&D attempt at a role playing game, we run into what I think is the best attitude to how to run a campaign and why I dislike so many modern RPGs. So with nothing to turn to, because he was doing something entirely new, Arneson grabbed a copy of the war game “Chainmail” and gave the three most interesting military units in the game to his players: the Hero, the Seer, and the Elf. 

The Hero is a basic ground unit that ranges from Light Footmen to Heavy Horse (all units in the Chainmail game) depending on the gear they can buy. Really, it is 6 different units that all follow similar rules. Basically, they can make themselves a higher point value unit by finding gear or looting dungeons to buy gear. They have 4 unique features: 

• No morale checks (a war game mechanic) 
• Gain +1 to all melee attacks 
• The biggest and most powerful bonus of all: 4hp!… which in a game where everything has 1hp is actually a really big deal. All 4 points of damage had to be dealt in the same round. 
• If a Dragon is flying overhead and you have a bow, instantly kill the Dragon on a hit of 10 on 2d6 assuming you are a “Ranger” and you are using enchanter arrows. 

There is also an upgraded unit called a Superhero. 

• Force a morale check when you charge at an enemy formation
• Upgrade that health to 8hp
• Dragon killing with a bow on a 7. 

The Seer is the lowest form of Wizard. They had a strong default spell list right out of the gate. 

• Invisibility on Self. This is a turn to turn ability so it is actively using their magic. 
• Fireball… which used the math of a Catapult 
• Lightning Bolt… which used the math of a Heavy Field Gun (i.e. a Cannon) 
• Immune to normal arrows and they got a saving throw to prevent fireball or lightning bolt against them. Think of this as the shield spell and an automatic Counter Spell against spells they know. 

In addition to these things they also got a single spell of their choice. As they improved, they learned more spells and increased their odds with Counter Spell and Shield. They had two health and the defensive stats of heavy infantry which is solid. 

Arneson also made a few Elves. These elves were less Tolkien and more Kibbler or Santa style and are always talked about in the same breath as fairies. These were upgraded archers from chainmail with some bonus features like the Dragon-kill archery, invisibility, and bonus dice when rolling against Orc or Goblins (similar to 5e’s advantage system). They also got to ignore some of the rules about combining movement with archery as well as splitting movement. So they aren’t faster in a run, just less restrictions on movement overall. 

Now while Arneson was happy with a bunch of Heroes running around in his world, he still wanted Seers and Elves to be somewhat rare in his world… so he just did not make that many character sheets for them. Later on DMs and game designers would try to control for this rarity with stat requirements as a way to control access… but if you are the DM, yea, you can just control for that directly. 

As people started to play the campaign… things started to change based on what his players did, what players wanted, and what challenges they faced. 

First, built into Chainmail is a trade-off between protection and movement speed. Higher protection, slower movement (from 12” to 9” to 6”). Movement paired with a charge mechanic from the base chainmail game. 

The obvious way to play was to buy nicer armor and weapons as you looted the dungeon, so most players moved along this default “Peasant to Knight” style of play. Most players did this while hiring soldiers and building castles along the way. 

However a few mechanics stopped this from being universal. If in melee, you can give up your movement to attack a second time. Charge was also a solid tactic the people wanted to use whenever possible. Both of these made some players favor movement over armor. Thus, some Heroes preferred the speedy, so a more “Barbarian” style of play developed, ignoring the armor aspect of character development for the speed. 

Other players liked to have ranged weapons. Ranged weapons only fired once per turn and had specific movement limitations added. From here you can see the emerging mix of heavily armored knights with swords, lightly armored archers who quickly redeploy as far away as they could, and speedy barbarians who mix it up with both sword, bow, and charging into combat. This is NOT a Knight Class, Ranger Class, and Barbarian Class since it is all within the same system… but they did use those terms to describe who their characters were, not what their character was. And of course which of these options was the best also depended on if you had picked up a magic sword, enchanted arrows, or magical set of armor. This was all the default Hero and the root of the multifaceted Fighter we have today. 

One of the first big enemies in the campaign was a Vampire named “Sir Fang”. He was actually not played by Arneson, but instead played by another player and played by correspondence since they could not be at the table often. Some of the players were talking about how they could defeat him. They started to research vampires at the local church and discovered that yes, the vampire was weak to all traditional anti-vampire things. Then one of the players pitched an idea “Hey, can my Hero join the priesthood so I can make holy water?” Arneson loved this idea but wanted to keep the game balanced. So he gave the best answer any DM can give “Yes, but at a cost.” Two of the Heroes now class changed to Clerics. All of the magic weapons in the game were bows or swords, so they gave up bows and swords, thus limiting themselves to hammer, but they gained holy water and Turn Undead. They were now Van Helsing like characters.

As the campaign moved on, Sir Fang started to try to turn people into vampires. “The Wounds” was an euphemism for the pair of neck holes when a vampire had bitten into your neck. Wounded people had a chance to “turn” periodically, thus creating a moment like in a zombie movie when someone is bitten and the others have to decide to save their friend or kill them. One of the Clerics started to research how to cure people of vampyrism while the other Cleric went on a quest to find that knowledge. In the end, they put what they learned together and gained the origin of “Cure Wounds”. In modern D&D this would be a restoration spell with a percentage chance of failure, not a heal. This is a war game at its heart, you are either fully alive or fully dead, so there is no healing. 

The next set of upgrades were to the game’s Seers/Wizards. Those players were just a bit underpowered. Arneson did not change the class, he just patched each character in a different way. One of them got a temperamental baby dragon. Most of the time, it was a bonus but not always. … and yes, this right here, this is the best way to patch a character. Not a +1 or +2 or weak to X damage type, but a temperamental baby dragon. 

Another of these patches was the “Super Berries”. These were limited, grew on only one tree, and would rot after a while. The Wizard could eat them to cast a more powerful version of their spells. Basically, this is the 5e Sorcerer’s Empowered Spell or upcasting a spell but with a limited number of usages. That is right, Sorcery Points are actually older in D&D than spell slots. Blackmoor was played on Arenson’s ping-pong table and they used brightly colored ping-pong balls to track the Super Berries. Using a Super Berry also gave the player the chance to chuck the ping pong ball at the DM’s head, an underutilized mechanic in modern D&D to be sure. 

And finally we have… the unique ones. There are two characters that are often brought up as classes. They were never classes, just the result of one-off things in the game. The first is the Sage… which may be one of the most unlucky characters in the history of the game. They were a Hero and had built up a bit of an army. They studied tactical and siege weapons. They were meant to be a great and powerful warlord… until they were turned into a basilisk. One of the other magic users tried to develop spells to reverse the effects… but instead just kept polymorphing them into other random things. Every few sessions he would get transformed into something else odd, everyone would laugh about it, and then move on with the player using a set of monster stats for just a session or two. Finally in one session he got polymorphed into a female elf seer and he said “good enough” and that character became “The Sage.” Basically Arenson agreed to another “Yes, but at a cost” deal similar as he did with the Clerics. The Sage kept all his weapons, soldiers, and siege knowledge but would physically play those as a Seer. He-now-she, would give up damaging spells like Fireball and Lightning Bolt but keep spells like Shield, Invisibility, and Counterspell. She then gained some curses to cast on others. This odd character was a mix of war scholar and support caster is a class total unique to their story in game, with many of the curses match his previous forms. 

The second was “The Merchant” who was actually a bad guy like Sir Fang. No, this was not a player running a shop like a NPC. It was a mafia don and it was one of the players doing it. They were forming a cabal to raise pricing at all the shops and the tavern with the difference in price going to “The Merchant” who soon became the richest player until the other players were tired of being taxed and figured out who was doing it. That required the players to break up the mafia in game and thus defeat the Merchant. So, at the start PvP was enabled but it was done via economics. 

Much in the same way we got the Blue Rider, the Flying Bishop, and the Paladin. The Blue Rider had a blue-flame sword (nice), a mechanical horse named bill which ran on lamp oil (neat), and a set of blue platemail which was really strong (and he was clearly trapped in it, causing him great pain and slowly killing him, oh God!). The Flying Bishop was one of the two clerics but with a magic cloak that let him fly some-what, really it was more like jumping really well. So he dropped the hammer, got a pair of metal boots, and started to do kung-fu kicks. The Paladin was just one of the more honorable Heroes who had done some quests for the King, had a nice sword, and always answered the call to patrol the roads. 

So let’s review: 

Start of Campaign 

1. Hero 
2. Seer (limited number)  
3. Elves (limited number) 

End of Campaign 

1. Heroes with a side of Knight 
2. Heroes with a side of Ragner 
3. Heroes with a side of Barbarian 
4. Seer but with Baby Dragon 
5. Seer but with Super Berries
6. Elves  
7. Hero into Cleric 
8. Hero into Cleric into Monk 
9. Sage 
10. The Merchant 
11. The Blue Rider 
12. The Paladin 

… and to me, this is the way to run a campaign. Give players the minimum they need to get started. Players should get their powers from the world, not the Handbook, so the more you give them upfront the less choices they have as they play. This makes large lists of starting character options a bad thing. Those ideas are great, but they belong in the world and not a starting character’s sheet. At the same time, the DM should not limit how a player wants to develop their character. They should allow for a “Yes, but at a cost” style of character development in game. How your character changes and improves should be a response to what happens in the game, not a build you got off of Reddit.

This is part of my beef with many tabletop games. We have moved character development from the story to the prologue. Let’s put the character back into the story.