Sing to me, O Muse, of BECMI!

[cavalier973]

I’m reading through B11: King’s Festival, and there certainly is an element of “don’t try to talk to these orcs; they want to fight you” in it.

B2 had the option to pit one group of monsters against another, but, as you pointed out, that’s B/X instead of BECMI.

 

[cavalier973]

A hearty “thank you” to The Sigil, for recommending that list of products; King’s Festival has a bit of information on it’s “adventure clock” (p. 20) that I could not find anywhere else: how long an adventuring day lasts. Twelve hours. The rules elsewhere say that a party traveling at 90 yards a turn can cross eighteen miles “in a day”, but I was unable to find what “a day” meant. Eight hours? Ten? The RC says a day lasts 144 turns, which is twenty-four hours, but I don’t think that an adventuring company travels twenty-four hours without resting. One might noodle it out from p. 91 of the RC, when it says that a party begins travel at daybreak, and ends travel at nightfall, but unless days in The Known World have exactly twelve hours of daylight year round, then one would not know how long a day’s worth of travel lasts. And, if daylight is variable, then it means that adventuring parties travel faster in the winter than in the summer.

 

[Gus L]

I’m reading through B11: King’s Festival, and there certainly is an element of “don’t try to talk to these orcs; they want to fight you” in it.

B2 had the option to pit one group of monsters against another, but, as you pointed out, that’s B/X instead of BECMI.

King's Festival is not an adventure I like very much. A decade ago when I was reviewing the B-series, its the last one I did. I didn't think of it positively then, but I was pretty critical of most of the B-series based on my then understanding of 2010's OSR play goal. I still don't love B11 though - it's small, uninspiring and bland to the point of feeling like something anyone with 10 minutes, a bar napkin and a vague idea about vernacular fantasy settings could write up.

Yet! It's an interesting module as an artifact of later TSR. It shows the "professionalization" of TSR in the late 80's and early 90's and the efforts to both make it family friendly and predictable. I'd suggest it was a response to the Satanic Panic (check out the referee advice regarding alignment and such). Its aesthetic likewise the result of the normalization of D&D fantasy in popular culture by that time and its mechanical/structural aspects show the way that the path/scene/fixed narrative/Hickman style of design had come to dominate TSR's ideas of play style. These are all more or less the focus of subsequent editions and the model they have followed to lesser or greater success.

So while I personally don't find it much of an adventure, King's Festival strikes me as a very representative adventure for BECMI. BECMI struggles to adapt the old mechanics of D&D to a the commercial demands for a product that seems "safe" to Reaganite America and while embracing a morally simplistic aesthetic of heroism. Fascinating stuff really.

Here's a link to my old B-Series reviews that sort of charts the change in play style (not overtly or clearly)

Classic Module Reviews - The B Series

When I don't feel like writing content I sometimes review the hoary artifacts of a childhood spent reading modules in the back of Waldenbook...

dungeonofsigns.blogspot.com

 

[The Sigil]

I would tend to agree that B11 is not the most exciting or original adventure ever written.. but it has DM-helper inserts that are not adventure-specific (the best example being the "adventure clock") that I have found are helpful to anyone trying to get a good handle on running BECMI.

 

[The Sigil]

unless days in The Known World have exactly twelve hours of daylight year round, then one would not know how long a day’s worth of travel lasts. And, if daylight is variable, then it means that adventuring parties travel faster in the winter than in the summer.

I have always assumed that the idea was less something super-granular like "track minutes of daylight on a given day, multiply speed per round by rounds per minute by minutes of daylight" to see exactly how many feet you have travelled ... and more the idea of "this should be a close enough approximation" for the sake of getting through the "travel" part of adventuring and into the "exciting" parts of combat, NPC interaction, dominion ruling, research, War Machine, etc.

Especially when you consider most large-scale maps in BECMI were at a scale of 8 miles per hex so a party could normally cover about 2 hexes (16 miles) per day; except around the solstices, rounding off to "2 hexes per day" is a decent enough approximation. Perfect? No. But I don't think early versions of D&D (BECMI, for example) were interested in getting much more granular than that.

 

[cavalier973]

I wanted something a little more precise when I started making my own “grid crawl” sandbox.

I wanted a first-level dungeon within an hour or two of the base town, but does that mean an adjacent square, or does it need to be in the same square as the town? Knowing the miles-per-hour rate helps in determining where to place landmarks. The party can travel 18 miles in a day; if hexes are six miles across, how much time does it take to move through one hex? “It takes them a third of a day.” How many hours is that, though?

 

[The Sigil]

I wanted something a little more precise when I started making my own “grid crawl” sandbox.

I wanted a first-level dungeon within an hour or two of the base town, but does that mean an adjacent square, or does it need to be in the same square as the town? Knowing the miles-per-hour rate helps in determining where to place landmarks. The party can travel 18 miles in a day; if hexes are six miles across, how much time does it take to move through one hex? “It takes them a third of a day.” How many hours is that, though?

My recommendation is usually to prepare maps at different scales (or if you have software that allows you to zoom to the scale you want, so much the better). I typically find 8 miles to the hex is a nice scale for plotting kingdoms, while something like 2 miles per hex (where movement is about 1 hex per hour in favorable terrain/conditions and could be 1 hex every 2-3 hours in bad terrain or conditions) is good for mapping a local area and its surrounds. Having done a lot of backpacking myself (not the same as travelling in armor but I like to think backpacking is "moderately encumbered") I can attest that in the real world, 2 miles per hour with some load is a pretty good approximation assuming relatively easy terrain.

If you want more granular, I suppose you could do a scale of 1 mile per hex or some particular number of feet per hex but I think miles are a close enough approximation (BECMI uses one-minute rounds, most characters in gear will be at least slightly encumbered and will move 90' per round instead of the maximum 120' and the product of 90 feet per round/minute times 60 minutes per hour is 5400 feet... close enough to the 5280 feet in a mile for my taste).

Note also that there are some great maps for Mystara over on Thorfinn Tate's excellent site (https://mystara.thorfmaps.com)- examples:
Karameikos, 8 miles per hex: B1-9 Karameikos, 8 miles per hex | Atlas of Mystara or Jason Hibdon’s Karameikos, 8 miles per hex | Atlas of Mystara
Western Karameikos, 2 miles per hex: DDA3 Western Karameikos, 2 miles per hex | Atlas of Mystara
For King's Festival in particular: B11 Northern Karameikos, 3 miles per hex | Atlas of Mystara (this is at 3 miles per hex as the original module).

 

[Willie the Duck]

I have always assumed that the idea was less something super-granular like "track minutes of daylight on a given day, multiply speed per round by rounds per minute by minutes of daylight" to see exactly how many feet you have travelled ... and more the idea of "this should be a close enough approximation" for the sake of getting through the "travel" part of adventuring and into the "exciting" parts of combat, NPC interaction, dominion ruling, research, War Machine, etc.

Oh, definitely. I always assumed that travel time shouldn't be the same. One because they are both abstractions and simplifications, but also because the activity is different (speed when measured in rounds is when you are being more cautious, but also willing to exhaust yourself more quickly).