Development Log: Expedition D&D (Part 1)

 I'm going to start blogging about the OSR system I'm creating, which I'm calling "Expedition D&D". 

My goal looks back at the long history of adventure storytelling—a genre that stretches all the way back to some of the earliest recorded stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Odyssey. Over time, that tradition evolved through tales like Beowulf or the Arabian Nights. It came to America with Last of the Mohicans and then the pulp fantasy of the 1920s and ’30s, with authors like Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. And you can trace that DNA right up to modern adventure films like Indiana Jones or The Mummy.

This kind of adventure storytelling leads directly to what folks like Ben Milton call “adventure gaming”. I love that term because it places these games in the context of that literature and history. The adventure is the heart of Dungeons & Dragons. 

Modern D&D usually focuses on a small cast of characters, one for each player. Each one of these is a hero in their own right. It's like a Mission Impossible team where everyone crucial to the mission.

But the scope of adventure storytelling permits larger parties, which I'll call "expeditions". Think back to the Odyssey: it isn't just Odysseus alone, but Odysseus and his group of soldiers. I also like Michael Crichton's Congo, or Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, or the historic Lewis and Clark expedition (the pair had some 40 people in support). 

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To make this work, I want a system that supports three types of play. The first is expedition play, which is your overland travel. You're controlling heroes, but also a number of generic soldiers or porters, some perhaps with special abilities, who are part of the journey. Here you'll do hex-crawling: you’re exploring new places, dealing with hazards, managing the morale of your team, ensuring everyone’s fed, and keeping track of resources.

Then there’s the hero play, your classic dungeon crawling. Those smaller scale adventures where the heroes are engaging in combat or exploration within a defined location.

Then, I want to have some support for mass battle play. If you have an expedition with 50 or 100 guys, you might end up in a large combat and the hero play rules won't work. 

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The simplest part is the mass battle element. For that, I’ll basically start off using the old Chainmail rules. If that ends up being a problem or not fitting perfectly, I’ll adjust from there.

For the hero play, there are a lot of great systems out there—OSR games, Shadowdark, and so on—but I’m going to use one called Simple D&D. It’s something I got from a friend named José. Characters start out strong enough to feel heroic, rather than super fragile at level one, and the progression slows down around level three. That means the heroes can become useful and powerful, but they won’t overshadow the rest of the expedition. They’ll still need to rely on their team and resources.

As for the expedition system itself, I have the least experience there. I'm going to start with the Source of the Nile rules. I actually played that game with one of the original creators, Ross Maker, who was part of the Blackmoor crew. David Wesley was the co-designer, so it has a nice link to RPGs. Source of the Nile is very expedition-focused—you have a hero, some soldiers, bearers, you track food and deal with environmental hazards—and I’ll be building on that as the expedition framework.