Jeffro's Space Gaming Blog

It is a property of the DMG that it always seems to contain some offbeat rules element which alters your conception of the game when you finally take a moment to seriously contemplate it. Now, most people don’t want to alter their conception of the game. And I guess that’s fine. But some people want to actually try playing AD&D before they die. This post is for that sort of person.

First off, check out these notes on the denizens of an inhabited area:

I don’t get why this in the book. I mean, everyone always told me that the implied setting of AD&D was post-apocalyptic. If AD&D is some kind of “points of light” style campaign setting by default, then how is it that there is room in the game for this low key renaissance fair stuff? Well, the answer to that is patrols. A good chunk of encounters in inhabited areas are going to be with patrols. What are those?

These patrols are no joke. They are combined arms units. If enemies set for charge, they can hang back and let the men-at-arms fire volleys of arrows. If the patrol elects to charge, the lance attacks will likely go first at a bonus and the horses will get an overbear attack on the opening round and then melee attacks thereafter. The potential for midlevel clerics and magic-users to be along for the ride makes these units even more formidable.

Patrols are not something that is dealt with in most D&D supplements. Most people build their game off of the B/X derivatives of the game which omits things of that sort. Chances are you never gave such things much thought. But Gary wasn’t like that. His 1983 Greyhawk box set dedicates quite a bit of effort to the concept. Check it out:

These entries are further detailed in the supplement, but one thing is immediately noticeable just from this. The patrols got much more formidable in the Greyhawk setting. I wonder why that is?

Well, that has something to do with the wilderness clearing rules.

Look at that. This works out rather neatly. I had always preferred to use 30-mile campaign hexes per Gygax’s instructions and I was loathe to drop down to the one-mile hex scale in order to map out a bunch of measly hamlets and thorps per Appendix B. But the wilderness clearing rules suggest that the 30 mile hex is sufficient to denote that there is a domain with settlements in a given location.* And these guys when they have settled in and gotten the clearing job sorted out only have to deal with maybe one bad monster encounter a month. But then again, this stronghold hex won’t even have to bother with patrols at all if each of the surrounding 30-mile hexes are inhabited and patrolled. Which suggests that the inner hexes of a multi-hex polity could send a portion of their troops to serve on the frontier, beefing up the already formidable patrols which are there.

This is not post-apocalyptic at all. This is nowhere near anything like the “points of light” campaigns which I used to hear so much about. But this brings us back to the absolutely maddening inhabitants table which is back in Appendix B which I have never really bothered with at all. Why on earth would I ever care about the location of all these stupid hamlets and thorps and so forth at the one-mile hex level of resolution? The fact that they exist at all on the map is an indication that we are nowhere near anything that the typical AD&D adventure session tends to deal with.

Seriously, look at that stupid stuff. Why would I ever care about the exact location of 700 renaissance fair peasants? But then I remember… there was something about this in the Players Handbook. You know, I really think there was. Behold:

I think all of this is starting to fit together now. Because as the wilderness clearing rules state, hamlets, thorps, and various other settlement farms will eventually be established here and there in [your cleared stonghold hex], starting near the castle and working towards the fringe of the territory. These points of interest aren’t necessarily adventure locations. They’re the economy of your ongoing strategic element which you and the referee keep up with monthly turn orders and status reports– because obviously weekly and day to day activity would of course burn out any referee and cause them to delegate all domain activity to solitaire play. Boy, that would be stupid, wouldn’t it!?

And so we have arrived at the end of a great mystery which practically no one has argued about for forty years since the release of Gygax’s famed Dungeon Masters Guide. What is the real point of the inhabitation table in Appendix B? Is it so you can have abandoned fortresses just sitting around randomly for players to just wander up to and seize for their own purposes even in the midst of patrols which include powerful knights and magic-wielding NPC’s? You know, I am skeptical of that. Is it so that players can go deal with brigands which have taken over a castle hex which the local patrols have allowed to happen? Hey, I don’t buy that either.

I think something else is going on here and I think Gygax just comes right out and tells you what it is:

I think the exact location of those thorps and hamlets most matter in the moment when inimical forces are set to roll right over your civilization. They are strategic targets for troops and monsters that want to destroy your ability to pay for mercenary troops. They are a measure for how far along you are in taming a wilderness hex. They are a marker demarcating just how much of your holdings you are able to maintain. Once the inhabitation table has been used to nail down just what is where in the area of your stronghold, you suddenly have a very clear measure of the economic power of your domain. And you also have a clear idea of just what it is you need to protect.

After all, the inhabitants of your settled region are just somebody else’s orc babies.

—

* Note that the range of these cleared areas spills over beyond a the standard 30-mile hex. They can end up with a 30-mile radius of cleared terrain. You can still map out polities on the 30-mile hex campaign map, though– just mark strongholds in every other hex!

The overworld of AD&D is concerned with the contrast between wilderness and inhabited regions. If you do not get this right, you are botching something that is integral to how everything in the game is set up. So pay attention!

Inhabited areas have patrols. Uninhabited areas have fortresses. THIS IS THE DIFFERENCE.

Does that mean that inhabited areas don’t have castles per the inhabitation table from Appendix B? Not at all! A fortress in the wilderness is an isolated outpost. A castle in an inhabited region is not only manned, it is actively sending out patrols to sweep the area of monsters on a weekly basis– just like the player that is establishing a stronghold does when he has cleared a wilderness hex and wants to keep it cleared.

Check out what the text says in the section on fortresses:

Look at that! From the context of this passage, it is as if these castle tables are tailored specifically to flesh out something that only occurs in a wilderness area. So now we know a few more things about the game.

• It’s possible for a player to establish a stronghold in the wilderness and then set up a system for organizing patrols of an entire 30-mile hex.
• 25% of outdoor encounters in inhabited regions will be from patrols which are based in the many cities and castles which are scattered about on maps drawn up at the one mile per hex scale.
• Fortresses in the wilderness are, by definition, unable or unwilling to implement such patrols.

If you don’t get the difference between wilderness and inhabited regions correct, then the very elaborate stronghold building aspect of the game loses its luster. So get it right! And try to think about more than one aspect of the game at a time when you read through individual rule sections. They’re not going to make sense any other way!

“But what about the note in Appendix B that says to use the Castle tables? And what about the fact that the fortress section you quote above says that there will be settlements there? It sounds like the inhabited regions will have bandits occupying abandoned keeps and that wilderness hexes will have all of the things which are mentioned in that inhabitation table.”

Yeah, buddy. I know you think that makes sense. But it doesn’t add up with the rest of the text.

Hamlet, thorps and various other settlement forms only show up in patrolled areas. The inhabitation table in Appendix B is not used in wilderness areas.

If you muddy the waters in how you define how inhabited and wilderness areas work, then there is no point to name-level player characters going out and clearing hexes and establishing strongholds. None. DON’T DO THAT!

There is one more thing that will happen if the wilderness clearing model of the player characters is actually honored. INHABITED AREAS THAT ARE THE RESULT OF ONE NAME-LEVEL CHARACTER CLEARING A 30-MILE HEX WILL NOT HAVE RANDOM LAIRS AND SETTLEMENTS AND CASTLES OF PEOPLE WITH OPPOSED ALIGNMENTS. The inhabitants of the hex will be people more or less of the same alignment. Thus, inhabited areas are not going to be as weirdly heterogenous as you might assume based off of a naive application of the random tables in the back of the DMG.

That is one more reason not to stock a hex in a completely random manner.

If you were wondering why it is that it took forty years before someone could explain this stuff to you, look no further than the Cook/Marsh Expert ruleset and all the people that are mindlessly singing the praises of the B/X incarnation of the D&D ruleset. Seriously, read this:

Wait, are you telling me that in B/X that castles in the wilderness belong to high level NPCs who have cleared the land and hired mercenaries? Bruh. If they have cleared the land, then that area isn’t wilderness anymore.

The B/X ruleset is not just incomplete. It is disastrously wrong. If you’re still using it or one of its derivates as the basis for an ongoing campaign, stop it an start using Real D&D instead.