Today I’m celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m 53 myself this year and my experience with the game goes back over forty years. It’s strange to consider how this one game of imagination has impacted me on the whole, and I’ve written some about that here:
My fascination with The Lichway adventure continues and today I’m happy to release a new copy edit of the adventure. Tomorrow I’ll run this adventure for a friend’s birthday celbration.
The last of the print copies were distributed at North Texas RPG Con ‘25. There is a small chance that there are still a few copies still at Black Blade Publishing. That means there are 99 copies in circulation + my own personal copy. There are no plans for another print run.
Acknowledgement
My own copy edit of The Lichway is not the first, there is a very fine effort from 2023 which you can find here. Please let me know if there are other such efforts so they can be linked here.
In 2019 I started running Basic D&D using the Holmes Blue Box, I’ve written about that here. During that time my games were heavily house ruled with ideas that addressed how I wanted the game to work at my table. As new players joined in my open table games I committed to convert these house rules to something that more resembled a traditional rulebook.
It was an interesting, if not difficult, project producing a complete rpg rulebook. Even when this project was informed by concepts that are now familiar within our hobby. My guiding principle in this work was to produce an accessible reference to my interpretation of the game; simplifying concepts and to perhaps offer something new.
2020 and the quiet years that followed allowed me to run more games using these rules, all the while shaping and refining the presentation. What exists now is something that matches my original vision and these rules have been tested in well over a hundred sessions with dozens of players.
This work which I’ve termed “Holmes & Clark” is offered here without charge. Print on demand copies are made available at cost. My hope is that others will pick up these rules and attempt a game like D&D that is not overly complicated with expense or minutia, and rather; enjoy a fantasy adventure that can propel the imagination and excite the mind.
Hardcover – no longer available, sadly Lulu cannot produce an acceptable full-bleed color cover.
We now have a Discord server! Please get in touch if you would be interested in joining the conversation there, or find the link in the rule book.
Preview Pages
Update Nov 10
Jason Conerly of the Nerds RPG Variety Podcast has be on as a guest recently to talk about ol’ school games and the Holmes & Clark rules in particular. You check out that episode here.
The You Tuber “Hex Pressed” has done a read through (flip through?) of the Holmes & Clark rulebook. Check that out here.
Peter Mullen cover for AA16 w/ Prisma Gothic filter.
In January of 2023 Bundle of Holding offered a large collection of Advanced Adventures, these being originally designed for AD&D 1e / OSRIC.
Always on the lookout for the next adventure for whatever campaign I’m currently running this bundle was irresistible, especially when a few comments on Redit mentioned how good some of this work was. SOLD!
However, the collection was delivered as 43 (!) separate pdf files without great detail on PC level range for each. So I set these aside without much attention.
3 months later I was starting to cast around for the next adventure for my bi-weekly Saturday game and went back to this collection, creating an index of sorts to better facilitate my review.
As an aside – if you’ve run or played in any of these adventures I would love to hear your feedback about them. The google sheet above is shared with “commenter”privileges.
…Motorhead toured England, but more importantly for me White Dwarf No. 9 was published. This issue of a “new” bi-annual British tabletop game magazine included (as far as I can tell) the first ever dungeon published in a periodical: The Lichway by Albie Fiore. The Dragon magazine would follow suit a few months later in the a US. However, that dungeon offering would pale in comparisons to the White Dwarf material.
Fiore’s Lichway is a remarkable piece of work: multiple factions in a strange environment, well scaled for low level play, while offering useful awards, and a challenging puzzle. More importantly this a is an excellent example of how the game was played in earliest days. I knew that when I first glanced at the hand drawn map I had to run this this dungeon and share it with as many people as possible.
To that end I spun up a roll20 session: importing the map, laying out the dynamic lighting, sketching in a few key details for the rooms, adding monster tokens, and preparing both DM & PC handouts. For about a month a group of old school enthusiasts have on a near weekly basis to plunge the depths of the lichway. As the DM I have greatly enjoyed the process of studying the dungeon and considering the best way to present it to my players.
The bigger challenge has been how to share this with a broader audience. 1) the roll20 marketplace is a bit complex to setup and doesn’t fit with my personal model of “free” content. 2) could invite other DMs to use my existing roll20, but that could restrict the number of games and could result in unintended changes to the roll20 module. 3) publish an asset pack that would allow other DMs to setup their own lichway session, you can get that asset pack here.
What’s included:
a player map, with the room numbers removed (this from the original White Dwarf
PC handouts for a boat, inscription, and demon
DM handouts covering an introduction, wandering monster table, a monster index, and an NPC index
a collection of VTT tokens to support online play, these sourced from game-icons.net
full color player and DM png maps << new for ‘24
Dungeon Scrawl v1 files << new for ‘24
Aa brand new copy edit of the dungeon providing a complete key for ease of reference << new for ‘24
Some notes about running the dungeon:
the interior of the original dungeon map does not include grid marks, which may be confusing for some players
the hand drawn nature of the grid of the original dungeon map makes alignment within roll20 challenging, I would suggest close enough is good enough
the wandering monster table is my own creation, as the original key calls only for wandering monsters outside the the temple
the key itself is leaves plenty of room for DM interpretation & improv moments – go for it!
I’ll ask some of my players to leave their thoughts on the lichway here. I’d also be interested to hear your own group’s experience in playing this classic.
January 2021 Update
Have just finished laying out Albie Fiore’s “The Lichway” in Dungeon Scrawl. Dungeon Scrawl is an excellent online map making tool. Features include infinite canvas, infinite layers, and tools designed for dungeon mapping. Circles & arches are a bit tough but a creative approach can yield some useful result.
Zip package linked above provides a new player map suitable for use in your favorite Virtual Tabletop.
A low tide – Carmel, California. The visuals I associate with the Rasp of Sand setting.
In 2019 Dave Cox kickstarted a “Rogue Like” tabletop RPG setting with a heavy sea scape theme. A reverse dungeon crawl where the heroes, in this case familia heirs that are attempting to return an artifact to the lowest level of the dungeon. I fell in love with the setting in my first play as a PC and quickly wanted to share this with the rest of my group.
Challenge for this setting is that just about everything is procedurally generated: rooms, encounters, situations, character traits, equipment, and more. While I love the concept of procedurally generated stuff, it is challenging to use real-time on the tabletop. So I built myself a tool that allows all of this to be generated with the push of a button, which you can find here for your own use. I’ve also created a family & heir character sheet which might be helpful to understand how these two elements go together.
This does not include the artifact grade treasures, loot tables, monster appendix, or spell pearl details. To really play this setting you’ll need the book itself and you’ll be supporting the Indie RPG scene.
Our group has had good fun with A Rasp of Sand, after the 3rd generation they are making their final descent to level 5. Maybe a few of my regular players will chime in here about their experience with this setting.
My only critique is that A Rasp of Sand was designed for play with Knave, which I find to be a bit too light for my tastes in a fantasy rpg. It may be I just don’t understand the finer points of the 7 page rules. I expect that Rasp of Sand could be played with just about any rule set by relying on the heir stat generation and capacity to gain levels while in the dungeon (i.e. +1 to 3 different stats per level).
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