Two Vicars and a Myrmidon Walk Into a Tavern...

For every little typo and copywriting error, for every bizarre and mercurial choice found in the old D&D tomes, there is someone out there who thinks it is both 

1. intended that way, and 
2. better because of it.

Don't get me wrong, I love delving into the material for new insights, but sometimes someone just wrote down the wrong number, or picked one at random. Even TSR's brightest minds had deadlines to meet.

However, today I'm going to try to pitch the idea that the B/X level titles are secretly pretty awesome. I'm going to talk about how level titles are horribly misunderstood, and then demonstrate how they are an extremely useful tool for both the DM and the players. Hopefully by the end of this article you will be excited to use them when creating and running your own B/X D&D campaign!

Yep, I'm talking about these.

Wrostward Session 1

The last campaign began with the party opening the door to a dungeon. I didn't start them in a tavern, or traveling in the wilderness, but in front of the entrance to B1. The first roll they made was to open the door to the dungeon. It's a great way to start any campaign -- I'd recommend it to anyone running B/X for the first time, and it's probably how I'd do it nine times out of ten.

But... that's not what I did for my first session of the Wrostward campaign. I started them in the hideout of a secret covenant, with their memories all fuzzy as to how they even got there, and gave them a tour of this weird underground lair. Then they found out the leader of the covenant is a dragon, and the dragon gave them their first mission as new recruits.

Wow! Sounds like every terrible cliché I've ever tried to avoid for the past decade. So what gives?

I know this group pretty goddamn well. Of the 4 players, three of them I have now played with as a fellow player through many 5e campaigns, and as their DM in a 5e campaign and multiple OSR campaigns. I know they have no problem with a slow start, and I have no doubt they will trust me when I try something new, even something slow and unorthodox. If I had all new players, or was trying to teach 5e babies for the first time, I would have never done things this way. It's all about knowing your players, and in this case, I know them well enough to know they'll be fine with this. And likewise, they trust me enough to see where this is going.

Oh, and as for the fourth player, who is brand new to this kind of thing, well... At least they got to meet a dragon. I know I'd feel just a bit cheated if I played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time and didn't encounter either of those things.

At any rate, in a few more sessions, the world is going to REALLY open up, and the players will have many strong plot hooks to choose from. They can investigate any of them, or none at all. Honestly, they can ignore them all and never come back to any of this stuff. I'm going to let them choose the story and the narrative. The only stipulation is: if you want to level up, you have to get treasure, and to get treasure, you have to go into a dungeon.

And when they aren't doing that, when they're mucking around above ground talking to NPCs and hanging out? That's fine, they can do that as long as they'd like. They just won't be getting any XP for doing that. They're not getting stronger.

But their enemies are.

Evolution of the Previous Campaign's Hex Map

Note: This entire post was an old draft I've had sitting around since early 2020. I went ahead and took a few minutes to finish it and post it. At the time I wrote it, I was still running the game and used the map below. Even though I'm doing a (sort of) different thing now, I thought this would still make a fun postmortem, so I've gone ahead and edited it a little and posted it.

 

Current Version of Regional Map

It has taken me almost three years of tinkering, remixing, and revising in Hexographer to get the map pictured above. Even now, I make monthly tweaks to the map, and large swaths of it are still a work in progress. This is the map that I used as of the most recent session of my campaign, but the story of how I got here is a long one.