Neat Bits from Bill Hoyt's Old Campaign

"In 1974, Bill Hoyt, part of the original Blackmoor Bunch, started playing Dungeons & Dragons, which he'd got at Gary Gygax's house. Soon after, he began his own campaign. These are rare maps and campaign notes from the very beginning of D&D."

From here: https://smolderingdung.itch.io/bill-hoyt-my-old-campaign

• Setting's a freewheeling combination of reality, folklore, myth, existing fiction, and original material - Athens and Chaldea are on the map along with Hobbiton, Gotham, Lankhmar, Cockaigne, and Narnia. There's the fountain of youth and the river Lethe. The Forgotten Realms used to have real Egyptians in it. Might still do.
  

• Not much mention of gods or religion - there's a St. Palo mentioned, a statue of "the rhino-headed duck of Rhiannon", a temple in the underwater country of Fathon which contains the blue star stone that keeps the land submerged and the people undrowned, a cannibal cult, and the Sun Dome Templars.

• No alignment in the Law vs. Chaos sense, but there are political alignments - Constitutional monarchy, dictatorship, federation, communist - initially thought the communists might've just been on the smaller end, like the Diggers, but no they've got whole nations. Armies and castles are listed, but only sometimes with an alignment - maybe reavers or independents of another stripe. Armies make for an interesting encounter table addition - like roving settlements with all the camp followers - potentially very dangerous of course.
  

• Some armies have distinctive loadouts - there's communists who carry halberds, swords, and ride rhinos, monarchist armies of mounted knights backed up by guys with two-handed swords, the Empire of Ryka with their bowmen on elephants, and so on. Some forces are equipped with handguns. Only a few armies have siege weapons, which might explain why castle garrisons can hold out with a relative handful of guys vs. armies which typically number in the hundreds.

• No dwarves, elves, or orcs listed. There are instead: impala people, bison people, unicorn women, high llama people, sable people, "alagater" men, newtlings, dragonewts (Glorantha's a big influence), morokanth people, tusk riders, molemen, bluemen, and catans (cat people with familiars). Refreshing.
  

• There are a bunch of rock piles noted on the map. I do not know why.

• This island that looks like a tropical fish:

• Spells: They are scattered for players to find all over the map. Some of these spells are in the middle of otherwise barren and empty ocean regions - whether on a small island or on the ocean floor it's not noted. There's an island of immortals who can use green jade to scry through time and space - perhaps you're supposed to ask these guys for help finding sunken spells. Some of the spells you might find in a modern D&D game. Some defy interpretation: Werelight (maybe something like a soucouyant?), Ill of Demon, Summon Afete. There is a Super Telekinesis, but no regular Telekinesis. Of all the spells, Read Languages is the most ferociously guarded, held within an "overkill dungeon". Similar sort of idea could inspire hexcrawl - hex containing Tenser's Floating Disk might have it on stack of floating islands you have to ascend to get it.
  

• The whimsical places remind me of the manga One Piece. The 1,000 foot high walled island of Marvat - kind of like Wano - if the wall's ever broken, or made too easy to get around, then the Edenic garden within will turn to dust and Marvat's people will turn into demons. Fathon is a lot like Fishman Island. There's Dragonfly Island, which seems to be gigantic and filled with giant bugs, but actually there's a family of giants there operating an enshrinkening machine. Cockaigne and Schlaraffenland of course inspiring Whole Cake Island. The Upside Down Land. Gam, land of music, where there's invisible people and an abundance of everything.

• There's an island of women who turn into birds and an island of women who'll turn you into a bird. Like poetry.

• This menacing note:

• Lahall - home of dead heroes, deep in a mountain range, protected by giant monsters, surrounded by trees with golden leaves - more settings should have an afterlife you can walk to. Also there is a cave "that leads to Weirdworld" - connection to other setting? There are places listed as "under Suyratina" or "under Mooi Land" - can't tell if these are political affiliations or literal underground regions. I like the latter better. "Underdark" or whatever you want to call it integration would be cool to see in a setting map.

• Usian River - poisonous, but if drank from with the Death Stone will make you invisible for 10 years - interesting combination of map feature & artifact.

• "Fein Bain" - listed under Items & Other - fein can mean fine, good, hay - bain can mean a bath, direct, ready, wine, to dig up or strike -perhaps a fein bain then is hay-wine from the high llama people, or a magic bathtub, or an enchanted ointment that you put over your eyes to make you good at hitting things.
  

• Other Items & Other of interest: Paints of Zepaka, Pen of Vogy, the Never Ending Line, the Door to the Red People, Magic Horses of My - exceptional and magical creatures as treasure, eggs you can hatch & tame, don't see those enough these days.

• Cofur: I'm pretty sure this is a city in the Empire of Ryku, but the name immediately evoked the image of a "conifer gopher" in my mind - a sort of little tree-critter that lives in snowy regions, digging warrens in the earth which they pop their photosynthesizing heads in and out of, avoiding pine-munchers - like so:

D6x6 Ebullient Ettins

Click the button below to get your ettin:

Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6	This ettin is
1	a wizard's attempt to create a smarter ogre as a perfect soldier.
2	the soul of a sower of discord that crawled out of hell.
3	an accursed thing born from a cannibal and one of their equally-unpleasant victims.
4	a monster created from a person and their distorted reflection merged by a cursed mirror.
5	the result of too many souls being born into the same body.
6	a descendent of Demogorgon.

D6	This ettin's left head
1	bears many misplaced and missized eyes.
2	is bloated and jiggles gelatinously.
3	is broad and blocky-squashed.
4	is gaunt and sour-pinched.
5	is slackjawed and wall-eyed.
6	is breathtakingly handsome, though with a grating voice.

D6	This ettin's right head
1	is shriveled and gnarled.
2	is cloven down the middle by a ragged scar.
3	is just a mouth, without eyes, nose, or ears.
4	is that of a fangy, bristly beast.
5	is upside-down on its neck.
6	is wildly bearded, with birds nesting within.

D6	The dynamic between the personalities of this ettin’s heads
1	is that of uncanny twins, completing each other's sentences.
2	is of a couple of riffing jokesters.
3	is of superiority & servility.
4	is of treacherous loathing.
5	is that they're giving each other the silent treatment.
6	is discomfitingly intimate, with many PDAs.

D6	This ettin wears
1	a pair of fancy caps with feathers stuck in them.
2	a coating of crusty blue woad.
3	a barnacle-studded boat hull on suspenders, with holes punched out for their legs.
4	a scarf made of rolled-up cobwebs twined around their necks.
5	a toga that was once a tapestry hung in a noble's hall.
6	a thong made out of a black bear’s hide, riding up their hairy butt.

D6	This ettin is infamous for
1	eating all the deer in the royal woods.
2	trapping travellers inside caves and taunting them while they die of dehydration.
3	showing up at festivals and feasts to extort booze.
4	the haunting songs it sings on moonless nights, which carry for many miles.
5	taxidermying the knights who sought to slay them, and displaying them at crossroads.
6	serving as a hatchet man to witches and warlocks.

My Taxonomic Kingdom for a Gorse

Special thanks to Eldritch Eternity for help brainstorming this post.

Something is amiss in the dungeons. Things have learned to sprout mushrooms that ought to grow flowers - fungi do not exist.

From the AD&D 2nd Edition Monstrous Manual

Those of you who've read wikipedia might've noticed something by now: fungi are not plants - in fact fungi are closer to animals, evolutionarily speaking, and have their own taxonomic kingdom to boot.

Maybe they didn't have this scientific knowledge back in the '80s. I read a book some time ago about hymenopterans - that is, ants, bees, etc. - and it included termites as hymenopterans. To my white surprise I discovered later in life that termites are in fact much more closely related to cockroaches and mantises than those other bugs that live in hives and have queens and so on.

This is a classification that continued past AD&D 2nd Edition (I won't call it a misclassification, because that would make for a shorter, less interesting post). Here it is in 3rd Edition:

And again in 5th:

This suggests some things about the world, the implied setting, on the scale of deep time.

According to the Science, in reality fungi evolved as a distinct kingdom of life about 1.2-1.5 billion years ago - maybe even 2.4 billion years ago - apparently for plants it's like a billion years ago - wow. There's a sort of plant called the quillwort which has been around about 252 million years, reproduces through spores like fungus do, and lacks an elongated stem or vegetative leaves. Although it's still photosynthetic, it's about the closest plant I've managed to find to fungus, and so something like quillwort makes sense to me as the ancestor of D&D's plant-fungus (or plungus). The relative abundance of underground niches - in dungeons, the underdark, etc. - might have incentivized these proto-plungus ancestors to lose their pigmentation, their chlorophyll, turn to decomposing organic matter, and eventually develop into mobile, predatory, even sapient forms.

"But semiurge," you may be thinking, "semiurge you scamp, you wetbrained fuckwit, you're burying the lede here - what of the saprophytic plants, the plants that are decomposers like fungi are - wouldn't those make more sense as the plungus ancestor?" - to which I must respond: no. Another thing I've discovered reading wikipedia for this post is that saprophytic plants don't really exist - they're actually myco-heterotrophic plants, that is parasites on fungus rather than proper decomposers on their own - their existence requires the existence of fungus, and so they could not be the plungus ancestor.

Aquatic mushrooms are rare - there's like one, apparently: Psathyrella aquatica. This is because mushrooms need to take in oxygen, and apparently this is a lot easier for them to do from the air. In a D&D world we might expect to see quite a few more aquatic mushrooms - perhaps from some less-derived plungus species that retain their photosynthetic ability, able to produce their own oxygen underwater.

Fungal cell walls in reality are made from chitin - same stuff that makes up bug exoskeletons - whereas for plants it's cellulose. Maybe paper-making is more widespread from an earlier time if plungi can be more easily made into paper - with implications for the development of informational & cultural technologies.

No proper fungi might mean no psilocybin, no amanitas - psychedelic culture in D&D world might be relatively impoverished, or maybe peyote and ayahuasca pick up the slack. Stoned Ape theory is endangered.

In-world, why might this have become the case? Being D&D, it's not necessarily a totally naturalistic explanation. There is no deity of fungus, but there is a demon-queen: Zuggtmoy. Maybe fungus once existed as its own kingdom, a kingdom that would've lent Zuggtmoy tremendous power due to its omnipresence, and was eliminated from existence in some cosmic conflict - plants then filling in the ontological void.