Is 5th Edition OSR? (Part II)

(Design by Thaddeus Moore)

Considering the AD&D (1e) experience that comprehensive rules actually guided DM rulings, we can the second "Zen Moment" of player skill over character abilities. Common examples for player skill over character abilities are pouring water over a floor looking for hidden cracks, or a PC tapping the floor ahead with a 10-foot pole to trigger any pit traps are rather quaint, but sort of a sophomore effort. Our game had graduate-level dissertations taking on vague descriptions by Gygax and turning the volume way up as if around were no parents.

To the extent player skill enhanced play over character abilities that most often translated into players understanding the idiosyncrasies inherent in the comprehensive rules and applying those idiosyncrasies in different and interesting ways, such as:

• Using a water-breathing spell with a character's mouth and nose submerged into the opening of a waterskin to keep out poison gas.
• That light spells are not visible to creatures using infravision because the spells emit no heat.
• Using 1st level Cleric Sanctuary spells instead of invisibility (especially in cities) so that anyone attempting to strike or attack that character had to make a saving throw versus magic first.
• Permanent polymorph into imaginary, but beastly, humanoids with owl wings and gills under our arms.
• Many spells such as 3rd level spells fireball and lightning bolt scaled up by caster level so would come to do double, triple, or more damage still while occupying the original level spell slot. (This accounted a lot for 1e magic users getting so imbalanced at higher levels - picture a 9th level wizard with up to three 9 hit die fireballs every day - kaboom!
• Gygaxianisms such as "... the magic item gains +5 on saving throws against attack forms in its own mode" was the source of many considerations. Apart from Gygax only providing a couple examples of "mode," what about the list of saving throws, were the saves versus included on the ITEM SAVING THROW MATRIX (1e DMG pg. 80) the only saving throws where magic items get saves, or should it apply to any time an item must make a saving throw?

So this is not the sort of parochial knowledge that are often used as examples of "player skill," rather the supremely skillful 1e AD&D player had pedantic knowledge of the rules bending towards favorable outcomes for their character or the adventuring party.

Another area touted as player skill is resource management. Setting aside food and water rations (both old school D&D and 5th edition have rules for daily physiological needs of the PC), the main resources that require management are spells and the primarily spell subset of healing.

A big complaint from grognardlings I consort with are the rates of recovery from short and long rests. The argument goes that it is simply not realistic a short rest provides characters the essential approximation of cure wounds, while a long rest returns all hit points to the full maximum. A closer look at how we actually played 1e AD&D reveals an absurdity how adventuring parties managed their health through spells and rest.

Natural healing sans magic in 1e AD&D was absurdly time consuming. The original rules from the AD&D 1e DMG provided a mere 7 points per week, and after the SECOND week of healing a character could add their constitution bonus (if any). In our game we upped the number for natural healing to 1 plus the Con bonus, but even then it was a chore because a character must take total rest - no combat, spell casting, or similar activity. (It's kind that 5e provides an out for this, rather than ruining the entire rest 5e only adds a little more resting time after sleep interruptions that involved combat, spells, or similar.)

That meant adventuring parties had to rely on healing spells to keep their hit points up.

I kid you not, there were deadly dungeons where we would adventure for as little as 10 minutes (game time) before we would be looking for a secure place to shelter, rest, and recover spells and hit points. Before someone discovered rules defining sleep periods, we even had spell casters resting 2 or even 3 times per day to regain spells! 

As a result, is it any wonder folks were reluctant to play clerics? Basically clerics, other than turning undead, had to load up on cure wound spells, then bounce around during combat to help PCs to whom the dice were not being particularly kind. Medic!

5th edition deals with hit points in a way that avoids uncharacteristic pauses to sleep in the middle of dungeons (Did Conan take a nap exploring the Temple of Thulsa Doom?), and at the same time frees up cleric to be more than the fantasy doctor. Anyone who objects to this faster natural rejuvenation of hit points on the grounds of "realism" has probably blocked out the nappy times of yore, or had a DM who freely supplied healing potions, or probably never gamed a cleric.

This repetitive resting phenomena was not limited to divine casters either. On the offensive side once a high level wizard had gone through their 3rd and 4th level offensive spells they too were sent to time-out to sleep and get them back. Ha, that is why we often had elven mages. They could sort-of be aware during their meditation (not asleep) and were often counted in our old games as part of the watch.

Post Script: Death Saves! 

Our old parties used negative 10 + Con Attribute Bonus as the number of hit points below 0 at which a character dies. 

The "old-school" way our parties ran was that constitution somehow figured into when character death occurs. So I was initially dismayed that 5e did not look to Con as toughening a PC versus dying. This death save stuff made character death so rare. But in actuality character death was rare in our old games. When a PC dropped below zero and there were other living adventurers to fight, the critters often left alone dying heroes. 

Losing a hit point per round when you often had as many as 13 or even 14 negative hit points to go before becoming croaked meant a lot of time to be saved by magic or binding wounds. Typically character death most often occurred due to massive damage, and 5e retains that. Con in 5e IS factored into character death as high Con provides extra hit points to the maximum (and Con's extra hit points also lengthen the number of hit points before 0 is reached).

All that said, my "old school" proclivity resists things that "standardize" disparate characters, so my inclination would be to somehow modify either the number of Death Saves or the Death Save itself. My recent personal favorites are death and dismemberment tables which are sort of like death saves and critical hits all at once and factors in the actual number of hit points below zero.

Is 5th Edition OSR? (Part I)

(Design by Thaddeus Moore)

The Old School Renaissance movement found solid footing in D&D RPGs shortly after D&D 4th Edition was released in 2008. During that time Matthew Finch (OSRIC, Swords & Wizardry) wrote “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming” based on 0e, the original edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Finch described the “Zen Moments” of Old School gaming generally as:

• First "Rulings, not Rules" - Letting game referee use common sense to decide what happens or a roll if there is some random element in what a player decides to do;
• Second "Player Skill, not Character Abilities" – A player doesn’t just rely on a character sheet and must use a player’s skill to tell the referee where to look, what to touch, or what a player character is saying or experimenting with in order to gain advantage; 
• Third "Heroic, not Superhero" - Emphasizing the heroic rather than the super-heroic in keeping the game on a human-sized scale becoming a feared or powerful character over time; and 
• Fourth "Forget 'Game Balance'"- That game balance is not important because the fantasy world, with all its perils, contradictions, and surprises is not a “game setting” which somehow always produces challenges of just the right difficulty for the party’s level of experience, The game is a story with dice growing out of the combined efforts of the referee and the players with both being just as surprised by the results.

Let's start with #1 “Rulings, not Rules” because, other than the initial several months of our intro to D&D through John Eric Holmes’ "Basic Set," our group played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

Homes' Basic incorporated rules from OD&D, but was only set for character levels one through three for players to learn D&D concepts. The progression was for players to graduate to Gary Gygax's AD&D (1st Edition). Now the stated purpose Gygax's "Advanced" D&D and divorce from Dave Arneson was to make a rules-heavy system intended to cover any conceivable situation ostensibly to arbitrate disputes at tournaments. In practice that meant ...

We. Had. Rules. For. Everything.

Initially there was the modest-sized 126 page Players Handbook with rules on abilities, species, classes, alignment, hit points, languages, money, equipment, armor, weapons, hirelings, henchmen, time, distances, spells, encumbrance, movement, light, vision, surprise, traps, initiative, communication, combat, damage, falling, healing, obedience, morale, mapping, experience, morale, mapping, poison, psionics, and the Known Planes of Existence.

This was 1978 so no DM’s guide yet, so we supplemented our game with Judges Guild Ready Ref Sheets (50 pages) rules for social level, city encounters, crimes/trials, advertising, esxchange rates, gems, beggars, binding wounds, guards, repartee, more poison, construction costs, item enchantment, resurrection results, swimming, sea monsters, melee tables, underwater encounter tables, rules on wishes and limited wishes, more on hirelings, income, civilization technology levels, population density, caves, lairs, ruins, prospecting, flora, fauna.

During late 1978 we added rules from the Arduin Grimoire Trilogy. 3 booklets of about 100 pages each (The Arduin Grimoire, Welcome to Skull Tower, and Runes of Doom) with additional playable species, classes, monsters, spells, and magic items. Tables for critical hits, fumbles, character's eyes, hair, weight & height, techno weapons, guilds, brawling, diseases, weather, and more.

We initially used the 3 Oe D&D supplements Greyhawk, Blackmoor, and Eldritch Wizardry. However, these pamphlet booklets were superseded in 1979 by the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. 

Even though our game had already hard-wired much of our rules prior to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide that would persist for decades (in particular the insane way we figured "speed factor" prior to the DMG explanation), we did lock into the DMG's clarifications of spells and abilities in addition to rules on character aging, disease, encumbrance, loyalty, morale, acquisition and recovery of spells, airborne travel and combat, combat underwater, plane travel, vision, experience, climate, economics, languages, construction, spell research, divine intervention, random treasure, random encounters, and buying/selling magic items.

A ginormous aspect of our D&D game related to our explosion of rules is that we regularly rotated games refs. So our dependence on some sort of canon version of rules for just about everything was how we made the game fair. And, other than players who originally started with the OD&D booklets, AD&D 1e is a huge aspect of how more players experienced OSR before it became OSR.

Game designer Anthony Huso best describes the purpose of this type of Old School D&D in his article:  "Rules over Rulings: Consistency in DMing"

I respect the rules because they are the foundation of my game. They are agreed upon, even if a few of them are not perfect. They are predictable and therefore viewed as fair. Implementation and adherence is also consistent ... Shields are broken. Spell books are destroyed by fire. Characters perish in the wastes without water. And the rules do not care. The rules are unrelenting and therefore shoulder the blame when characters die ... Rules should be memorized whenever possible or allocated to handy screens. They should not be searched for during a game unless doing so is minimally intrusive. It is the DM’s burden to know the rules front and back and to hew closely to them. 

I have always ran a sandbox campaign. Characters could run in whatever direction they please and that ends up being how the details from any setting I'm using gets built. I was often and rightfully so accused of "making it up as I go along" but extremely rarely was I ever accused of not following the rules (ha, except the hour-long buzz kill argument over whether the rules for sword damage during subdual attacks also applied to regular attacks - that was a doozy!)

The rules were essentially comprehensive and our players trusted the rules probably mostly because everyone knew them front and back, including our home-brew interpretations (sorry Dr. John PhD), and the rules essentially appeared to cover most all aspects of the reality within the game.

Splendid Isolation

(My original Judges Guild Judge's Shield (1977), DM view.)

Almost always I have used a dungeon master shield. 

• In 1978 I picked up the original first published Judge's Shield by Judges Guild. This was really made for OD&D using the Greyhawk supplement, but it worked for our D&D gane until the Dungeon Masters Guide was released around the summer of 1979. (I made a canary yellow Advanced Labyrinth Lord screen in honor of my old and worn Judges Guild screen.)
• During this period of the late 70s through the 80s is was also common for Dungeon Master's to just use gatefold record albums. This did not provide any helpful tables, but did hide the DM's notes and often the record albums were chosen for their trippy art.
• Later (not sure when) I acquired or most likely shared the T$R AD&D (1st Ed.) Dungeon Master's Screen. This is probably the most classic and well known screen, even had a separate 2-panel screen just for psionics!) 
• When I restarted our game with new rules in 2004 I used the Ver. 3.5 D&D Deluxe Dungeon Master's Screen which was my first landscape paneled screen (my older screens basically had panels in portrait orientation). I really enjoyed being able to see over the screen better without having to stand up.
• When I developed a 3rd Ed./AD&D hybrid rules we used in our game starting in 2012 I found the original 3rd Edition DM screen from 2000 and just clipped a whole bunch of alternate tables on top the screen.
• During 2018 when we switched to a modified 5th Ed. I used Dungeon Master's Screen, Reincarnated (2017) which was the first screen I used in game play that was hardbacked instead of cardstock (4th Ed. had the first landscape/hardback screen I ever purchased, however we never ran our campaign in 4th Ed.). This was a superb improvement, especially when players in our game "sieged the DM" by launching volleys of dice attacks. The hardback screen repelled dice attacks where the cardstock screens often fee. I ended up over time covering this screen in stickers.
• When we switched to Advanced Labyrinth Lord retro-clone in 2019 I made the aforementioned canary yellow Judges Guild tribute screen.
• I also created homemade ref screens for Arduin games I've run for Green Hell in 2022 and a more generic Arduin screen in 2023. And also made a little mini-screen for Lamentations of the Flame Princess off of art for a future screen that hasn't yet been published.
• During 2024 we first started our new 5th edition campaign I used the 5e screen from the 5e Wilderness Kit (the screen art is very cool), then when the 2024 revision books were released switched to the 2024 standard screen.

So what is the deal? I often have DMed without a shield, in particular by the 1990s when I knew the AD&D (1st ed) rules like the proverbial back of my hand. We also did a lot of "theatre of the mind" style games without miniatures and adventures were built out of imagination in real time improvised off simple maps and small sets of notes.

For me at least I enjoy having a wide variety of tables and notes for situations that might come up during a game. I am also often translating scenarios from different rules editions so want to make adjustments on the fly. Also cool and provocative player-facing art on a screen helps set the vibe a little.

And I guess I do like DMing from the far side of the table, away from the door, where a screen provides some privacy when I get up to pee and still have my maps and notes somewhat hidden. Unless someone wants to obviously sneak a peak.

Ha. mostly though, if I am being honest, when I am furiously going through a variety of materials trying to find that note or rules section or piece of a dungeon I am hacking for my campaign, it really is best for my players not to see that.

Attuning Fork (or I Almost Started Loving Myself Again)

But, nah, so probably the most significant 5th edition rule that grates on my OSR sensibilities is magic item attunement. 

The idea that certain magic items and their wielder to "form a bond" before the creature can use the item's magical properties is just a little to cozy. I can close my eyes and see Cyberpunk cybertech. (Should there be magic attunement psychosis?) And, as others have noted, the rules are pretty vague on what actually happens during the 1-hour short rest required to bond with such items - the time must be spent "focused on only that item while being in physical contact with it..." This takes away an opportunity to secure a magic item requiring attunement and using it during the battle during which the item is acquired. A total buzz kill.

The universal rule of a 3-item limit, for all creatures (except Artificers), seems inherently meta pox. Ugh. I understand that the 3-item rule only applies to certain magic items and for particular reasons unrelated to an items power, multiplicity of effects, or how interesting the item is (See Sword of Spirit's exhaustive look into the 2014 5e attunement, Reverse Engineering the Real Rules of Attunement, on EN World). 

The 2024 revision Dungeon Master's Guide no longer deigns to disclose a basis for when a particular magic item should require attunement. We can look back at the original 2014 Dungeon Master's Guide which informs (DMG, 2014, pg. 285):

Decide whether the item requires a character to be attuned to it to use its properties. Use these rules of thumb to help you decide:

1. If having all the characters in a party pass an item around to gain its lasting benefits would be disruptive, the item should require attunement.
2. If the item grants a bonus that other items also grant, it's a good idea to require attunement so that characters don't try to collect too many of those items.

Number 1 can be dealt with in other ways such as limits on the number of uses or the time between uses, or having the item be restricted to certain classes, species, etc. This is kind of silly as a reason because even with attunement items granting "lasting benefits" could be passed around.

That makes the reason that makes sense is to prevent stacking which we all know was quite out of control in 3rd edition. Which means keep attunement, but without being needlessly cumbersome.

Here are what I've culled as modified rules of attunement:

Attuning to a magic item that requires it may be by an Action that is not automatically successful.

The consequence for failure is you can perform attunement via a 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item. (You may always perform attunement via 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item.)

When an attempt is made to attune to an item, you must make a difficulty check according to the item type where bonuses to that roll correspond to your character attribute most closely related to the item's function and the check adds your proficiency bonus.

The DC is 10 for common items, 12 uncommon, 14 rare, 16 very rare, 18 legendary, and 20 artifact.

If the check succeeds, you attune to the item. However, if you fail, you must perform attunement via 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item. Some magic items (e.g. Artifacts) may present unique consequences for failure. 

NOTE: If you have already attuned to 3 items or more there is disadvantage on the check. Your successful check with 3 existing attuned items results that a random pre-existing attunement (that is not a cursed item) ends.

Attunement ends if:

• You no longer satisfy the prerequisites for attunement.
• The item has been more than 100 feet away from you for at least 24 hours.
• If you die.
• If another creature attunes to the item.
• If you voluntarily end attunement by a 10 minute Ritual-like focus and contact with the item unless the item is cursed.

To Touch the Annulus

(Matrox Lusch and Sick Rick bookend newcomers' viewing "The Annulus")

I finally dug into the "End of the Multiverse" scenario which was where our New Old Weird World campaign left off in 2022 (and the site of where our Blipping #2 campaign left off). The scenario is a hack from Dawn of the Overmind by Bruce R. Cordell. 

Ha, most everyone said the night vibed like an old Blipping game as yes we pretty much followed Ye elder game anatomy:

1. Drive: 2 hours each way from the Bay Area to Mountain Ranch up in the Sierra foothills.
2. Jam: We did have a pretty fun set, plus had our Geo Pigs singer Sumerled for a couple of covers "Last Days of May" and "Guns of the Roof."
3. Feeding Frenzy: Jeez, 3 flavors of BBQ chicken, steak, salad with homemade dressing (Thanks Michelle!), 2 different sorts of cheesy bread, etc., etc., etc... 
4. Pre-Game Business: So J.A.S. daughter visited with her beau and she hadn't gamed regularly with us since the ver. 3.5 "High Fantasy" days. They ended up playing Grady, the plane and time-hopping techno-barbarian from the 20th century. Then also, because the last time we played this party was in 2022 there was a bit of clean up like folks who couldn't find their current character sheet, what happened last time, stuff like that.
5. The Game: It was actually very exciting considering there were only a couple of encounters (well, 3, except the party purposefully avoided one). I did good when I mixed up the stats for the Grimlocks with another critter and gave the Grimlocks 4x damage from their claws due to their bodies producing a corrosive enzyme. Har, Plus I rolled 3 natural 20s on J.A.S.'s Pixie. (The Grimlocks use echo-location by emitting a soft clicking noise, to the Pixie's invisibility was nullified.) Fortunately I wasn't using the Arduin critical hit table or the Pixie would have been toast. On natural 20s I use exploding max damage, then if a character drops below zero then Zak Smith's Death & Dismemberment table. Raspatan the Elf cleric-assassin shifted himself over to the Astral Plane along with "7" the half-orc, Elf cleric mage Darrius, and the mercenary Sando Brech. It was Brech who grabbed the Annulus, and the characters also spotted not one, but two Mind Flayer "Engine Consummate" adrift on the Astral waiting to travel through time...
6. Interlude Journey: Was there? I am not sure. 
7. Stacking: Unfortunately no, we do not all drink nor as hard for most of those that do. 
8. Wind-Down: Indeed we chowed more sugar and discussed where to play the next session.
9. The Ride Home: Some did stay for breakfast. Me and a couple others headed back home at 1:30am, barely making a gas station in Mountain Ranch for a 12-pac of Budweiser just before 2am.

It was a good OSR-style game, at least our version of that style. Advanced Labyrinth Lord with my New Knights of the All Mind (Conventional Edition). Since all my other games are running 5th edition it felt good to have at least one intermittent old-style game hanging around. Although there is that pesky ending of the Multiverse thing. And the game finished as the Astral Travelers your see the destructive blot consuming the Multiverse had intruded even onto the Astral plane.

Party Like It's 1979

 

(Art by Cynthia Sims Millan, 1978)

I've got my half-round combat and floating seconds initiative for the low-rollers. What else from golden games of yore can I cram into the most modern version of D&D?

We had fun using in our game the critical hit table from Arduin which, as often mentioned in many commentaries, is daft because over time odds are your PCs are going to suffer many more double natural 20s than any individual monster they are presently fighting. What happened over time is crit tables became more watered down (no more having a spine severed in one blow).

An excellent replacement is the Death and Dismemberment table by Zak Smith of Playing D&D With Pornstars. Basically, the Death and Dismemberment table is an alternative to death saves in 5th edition. Once a character falls below 0 hit points, a single roll is made with a variety of modifications against a table ranging from the very bad (hey, my spine can be severed again!) to characters getting that second wind and single hit point that comes with it.

The fairness of a Death and Dismemberment Table is that someone has to already drop to zero hit points before it's rolled on. To get there you use the standard critical hits of double damage (although I am experimenting with an exploding damage die on crits). This method is more fair to PCs, but still leads to broken bones and scars.

Another thing, that I am somewhat on the fence about, are divine intervention rolls. These used to be pretty common back in the day as a last ditch before character death or TPK, although it doesn't seem to be very common in the same way nowadays. The latest edition asking for divine intervention and expecting results is limited to 10th level clerics receiving a free cast of 5th level or lower spell or a 20th level cleric getting a free wish. And looing like RAW the cleric can call upon their deity as often as they meet the rest requirements.

I kind of like the idea that only the divine magic practitioners may call upon their personal deities, I had several religiously ne'er do well characters who asked for divine intervention without even listing a deity on their character sheet. But I still thing there should be some rules a'la the 1st ed AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide (pgs 111-112) that deities may refuse or even be angered by excessive requests for extra special boons. I have a table that expands on the original olden rolls, and will be working on something to make the clerical divine intervention interplay a little more robust. And perhaps offer some kind of an expansion to any character that regularly practices their religious faith.

What other gems have I tried to maintain over the years...? Ha, I do like weapon to-hit mods by armor type (although I've become attached to Anthony Huso's idea of tying the modifications to numeric base armor class sans dex & magic modifiers). I noticed character's age, height, and weight tables are missing from the latest versions. Ditto for eye and hair color. I mean, you could just pick an abnormal color - but those special Arduin tables were fun too. 

Binding Combat Turns With Time in a Round

(J.A.S. 15th Level Paladin "Alancrost" by J.A.S.)

"But with regard to the material world, we can at least go so far as this — we can perceive that events are brought about not by insulated interpositions of Divine power, exerted in each particular case, but by the establishment of general laws."  

Whewell: Bridgewater Treatise.

 

The abstraction of time in a 5th edition combat round reared it's ugly head when the Reaver intended to blow a horn sounding alarm and J.A.S. wanted to know how much time his PC had to stop it. 5th edition combat rounds combatant turns (apart from a reaction) each fully occur prior to the subsequent actions of the next combatant's turn in initiative order.

On the one hand a result of taking full-round turns sequentially in order, rather simultaneous turns, is that game play is easier. The counter-intuitive abstraction is that there is potentially an infinite amount of time within each 6 second round bounded only by the number of combatants taking turns that round (i.e. in our combat with the Reavers the first combat round there were 13 sequential 6-second periods, 6 PCs + 7 Reavers, in total 78 sequential seconds of combat turns had elapsed). The rules abstract the turns as simultaneous, however there is no simultaneous effect.

I have been working on assigning time duration to actions/movement/bonus actions/extra attacks using 3-second half-rounds to reintroduce a combat round being governed by time and the idea of simultaneity to combatants' turns within a round.

Below are my ideas I was intending to introduce first in my in-person Wilderlands game, but since these ideas were briefly touched on by J.A.S. during our combat Saturday night, perhaps we'll attempt the  new rules first in Psychedelic Deadlands / Dreamer of Dreams campaign (or not, Dr. John PhD is DMing the next 2 sessions for October and November).

Tony "Hawklord" in his blog "The Cryptic Archivist" writes how ideas for D&D to abstract time in combat have been a source of debate between Midwest and West Coast D&D from since the earliest days of the game.

"D&D evolved from wargame rules by members of the Castle & Crusade Society, founded by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz as a chapter of the International Federation of Wargaming, itself founded by Gygax, Scott Duncan and Bill Speer in 1966. These gamers got together around a sand table (usually in Gary's basement) ordering miniature armies into mock battles. Abstract combat was simple and made sense.

"Conversely, the [Society for Creative Anachronism] was founded in Berkeley in 1966 with armored members going outside to fight mock battles with padded weapons. Their point of view was not that of a military commander with a bird's eye view of battle, but as a common soldier who has felt the heft of their shield and the sting of a (padded) sword. Combat seems abstract if you aren't the one fighting. The reenactors saw something missing in abstract combat and created their own rules and games to fill those gaps."

(from California Gaming Part I - Steve Perrin's Conventions, "Conclusions" ¶¶ 2-3.)

Anyhow, here is my take thus far...
----------------------------------------------------------

Rounds are an abstraction of 6 seconds.

During combat in the 5th edition (2024 revision) of the World’s Most Popular Role-Playing Game here is how a 6-second round of a combatant’s turn is divided:

• Action (cost is 3 seconds)
• Movement (cost is 3 seconds)
• Brief Communication (cost is 0 seconds, duration is less than 6 seconds)
• Interact with 1 object or feature of the environment (cost is 0 seconds)
• Ready Action/Movement (cost is 0 seconds)
• Bonus Action (cost is generally 0 seconds, duration is 1 second or less)
• Reaction (happens outside of your turn)

We can discern that within a round an action and a movement are each equal to a duration of 3 seconds. This is because movement permits you to move up to a distance equal to your speed in 3 seconds, and the action "dash" permits you an extra move up to a distance equal to your speed in 3 seconds.

However, movement is different than an action such that while you can take an action for additional movement, a combatant cannot substitute an additional action from not moving.

There is a quality of reconnaissance to movement.

During the movement phase of your round regardless whether you are actually moving, you are also making an effort to locate enemies (and allies) and to ascertain strategic features of the combat. Even if you do not move at all, it takes 3 seconds from within a round to a round to evaluate your strategic situation within a combat round.

Dividing 6 seconds generally into a 3-second movement and a 3-second action, we must consider what happens to that time when bonus actions and extra attacks occur.

I suggest that a bonus action takes 1 second at any time during the 6-second round while the gaining of an extra attack takes 1 second from the 3-second action phase.

Inserting a bonus action into a 6-second round requires some additional time, but seems would overlay movement and action rather than interfere with them. I considered many different bonus actions to arrive at this conclusion.

Some classes permit extra attacks at higher levels which historically would fit within that same amount of time for an attack action, with the inference that you attack faster.

Each individual combatant rolls for initiative on a d20 (an exception for a group of identical monsters who roll one d20 as a group), then adds their Dexterity Modifier.

The number difference between the highest initiative score and the lower scores determines the second in the initial round when each combatant begins their particular turn. Each 5 points a combatant’s initiative score is less than the highest initiative score results in beginning their turn 1 second later that the highest initiative score. (For example, at 5-9 points below, that combatant begins their first turn 1 second after the combatant with the highest initiative score; at 10-14 points below, begins their turn 2 second later; at 15-19 points below, 3 seconds later; etc.)

Where multiple combatants can act in the same second, compare actual initiative scores and the highest acts first. If actual initiative scores tie, the combatant’s dexterity ability score is the tie-breaker.

Rounds would be managed in 3-second half-rounds, rather than full 6-second rounds.

By breaking down the round by seconds, and then assigning a staggered starting second based on initiative, combatants actions can be arguably more simultaneous. The order of turns in a round is actually bound by time as overlapping sequential rounds instead of time having been bounded artificially by all the sequential turns in the round.

In their given 3-second half round a combatant may:

• Take an action (with or without a bonus action or extra attack); or
• Make a full movement (with or without a bonus action); or
• Make a partial movement and begin or conclude an action (with or without a bonus action or extra attack). 

However, because of staggered starting seconds within the initial round, a combatant may not have a full 3 seconds in their initial half round (or even, if a combatant rolls particularly poor versus the highest initiative score, lose the entire first half round and perhaps seconds from the second half round). 

This would be similar to "surprise" (ha, especially if a combatant rolled very poorly on initiative), but more accurately could be assessed as the amount of time for a combatant to react in an attack.

A Cascade of D&D

Ha, so all our games were not drug and alcohol infused debauchery.

Technically speaking, our first game system was from the Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set by J. Eric Holmes. Holmes uses a very simple weapon speed system - Daggers get 2 blows per round, long swords 1, and 2-handed swords 1 every 2 rounds. When the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Players Handbook came out the summer of 1978 we naturally assumed the 'speed factor' of weapons indicated the number of segments within a round it took to wield any particular weapon.

There was no AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide until sometime during the summer of 1979, and I don’t believe I ever read that book straight through. We just began using the updated to-hit and saving through tables, magic items and such, but never got into the nitty-gritty for what we thought we already knew. (Ha, except Dr. John PhD may have tried to explain the DMs Guide version of speed factor, lo by then the drugs were beginning to kick in.)

Pre-Blipping Campaign Dr. John PhD ran our 8th grade Greyhawk campaign from the formal dining table in John's family’s front room. I began to DM some when we hit high school and at the same time began branching out into the Wilderlands of High Fantasy City State of the Invincible Overlord campaign and started integrating the Arduin Grimoire original trilogy into our rules. (We also I think never played at John's again, his mom had a better nose than mine for weed!)

Our D&D combat was FAST, segment by segment actions with multitudes of attacks per 1-minute rounds. Often decisions had to be made in half a melee round or less.

Post Blipping Campaign we never quite attained our old style of play. Ha, #1 was because previously we were not plying rules-as-written (the DMs Guide strangely only used speed factor for initiative). But also, #2, because 3e, 3.5, and 5e (including most all of the reputed “Advanced” retro clones) were based on a style of play where AD&D was cropped onto the Moldvey/Cook BX D&D or the Mentzer BECMI which did away with segments of melee rounds and used only gross action and gross movement.

Rather than our simulation where actions were subjugated to TIME, i.e. the clock would be ticking and the PCs and monsters had to fit their possible and variable duration-based actions within the confines of the passing seconds, the new versions has time subjugated to the ACTIONS of each participant, i.e. everyone gets their move and their attack and at that moment 6 seconds (or 10 seconds depending on the version) duration had passed.

A rundown of our main campaigns pre-Blipping Campaign were:

    • Dr. John PhD’s “Greyhawk” (1977-1982) – Pretty much centered in the Pomarj, we went through most all the classic AD&D modules: Hommlet, the Giants and Descent into the Depth of the Earth series, White Plume Mountain, Tomb of Horrors. This campaign ended after we graduated high school when Dr. John headed of to UC Santa Barbara to become a chemist.

    • Matrox Lusch & Others “Wilderlands of High Fantasy” (1979-1984) – I piggy backed several T$R modules like the giant series, but also ran Tegal Manor, Thieves of Fortress Badabaskor, Dark Tower, all 3 city states (Invincible Overlord, World Emperor, and Tarantis) as part of my main campaign. I also ran the some of the Judges Guild one-offs like Citadel of Fire, Sword of Hope, and Under the Storm Giant’s Castle. The Wilderlands was somewhat of a shared campaign as my brother Sumerled ran Modron and Verbosh and our friend Spacin Jason would run the Arguin dungeons there. In 1982 Judges Guild lost their license to publish “official” AD&D materials and started to use this “Universal” format which was a pain in the ass. Plus a lot of Judges Guild had been disconnected from the Wilderlands setting and sort of silly even before they lost the license.

    • Matrox Lusch “Krull” (1980-1985) – To fill in the gaps of the Wilderlands I would just make things up, ha, with the problem being the monsters would usually “cry uncle” when I was too tired to carry on. So I was accused of “making things up” (true) and also railroading (somewhat true when I was falling asleep in the wee hours). I had written up a dungeon during probably 1979 or so based on the “Pirates of the Caribbean” ride at Disneyland (one of my favorites), and began to spread out from there into other regions of my game world “Krull” (well before the 1983 movie of the same name). Ha, the problem was I still made shit up – I mean it’s D&D and I loved a sandbox and would do these on the fly all the time.

    • J.A.S. “Drow Mag-Tec” (1986-1987) – This is seriously as close as I got to the 80s “Satanic Panic” (our group was so insulated we never heard of that at the time). J.A.S.’s wife watched the 700 Club (Jim Bakker & Tammy Fay Bakker) who did a show on the evils of D&D. So his wife wanted J.A.S. to stop playing that evil magic game immediately. John compromised by developing a setting with no other religions besides the Mycretians (a Wilderlands quasi-Christian-type religion) and the main enemies were the Drow who used something called “Mag-Tec” which was basically sci-fi technology. All the characters were fey (our party was a brownie, a pixie, and a leprechaun) so we had a bunch of innate magical abilities, but no spells. Ha, we were all technos.

By the time our Post Blipping campaigns began in 2004 I had sobered up and wondered what happened to all the friends I used to have, so toward the end of 2005 corralled everyone into version 3.5 by anonymously sending them copies of the new Player’s Handbook. (Also, since Dr. John PhD had moved off to Oregon with his Physician wife I was the de facto DM.)

    • Matrox Lusch “High Fantasy” (2005-2011) – This campaign was set in the Wilderlands, but the party did travel around the planes quite a bit. Timewise I don’t think there was any time travel, but I did have the party visit other settings such as Grayhawk and Arduin during different time periods than when campaigns in these settings typically started. Tragically in 2011 we lost our long-time 30-year gaming friend, Postman Bob (and a friend of J.A.S. longer than that). This sad event resulted in the campaign ending as we decided to roll up new characters rather than carry on without Bob. In addition to Wilderlands products, among the other published works I leaned on for this campaign were Red Hand of Doom, City of the Spider Queen, Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, “The Lich-Queen’s Beloved” three-magazine Incursion event featured in POLYHEDRON #159, DRAGON #309, and DUNGEON #100. The overarching plot was an attempt by Tharizdun to free itself from Prime Material chains.

    • Matrox Lusch “Blipping 2” (2012-2019) – In this campaign the characters were unstuck in time and space, but it was due to a mysterious orb they discovered (or possibly revealed itself to them) on Sigil, and the orb transported the party around. We also did not rotate DMs in this campaign, but I visited many of the locations and NPCs from our Blipping Campaign. I also developed a set of rules for this campaign that was a blend between v3.5 and AD&D. Fast forward to DunDraCon in 2018, I ran an “official” game where players could bring in any D&D version of a character they wished, hoping folks would bring out some old high-level characters they hadn’t played in years. However, every single player in that game brought a 5th edition character. Then, at our regular game that Saturday night at the Con the group was short a cleric and advertised for one – every interested person brought a 5th edition cleric. The writing, I saw, was on the wall that 5e had settled in as the standard. I put together a hand-crafted 5e adding some modifications such as critical hit tables and psionic abilities and we ran this modified 5th edition for almost 2 years.

    • Various “New Old Weird World” (2019-2023) – I was fortunate to run a character in a scenario Jeff Rients was testing out and had this realization I had not run a character since I became sober 15 years earlier! I kind of overreacted and told my group I wasn’t going to run the campaign solo any more, that I was going to run a character, we were going to rotate DMs, and we were going to run an AD&D retro-clone (we ended up using Advanced Labyrinth Lord with some of my collected mods). This was more truly a Blipping 2 campaign, although we used only single DMs for 3 sessions each. After the campaign surviving through Coved that campaign took a hiatus when we had all kinds of troubles getting the group together, and were missing some fun players like Sumerled and Random Addison who were extremely opposed to online D&D games. These are the characters I am running (in-person) my End of Time Extravaganza for up at J.A.S.’s mountain abode next October 27, 2025. 

And now I've ended up co-DMing and DMing two 5th edition (2024) campaigns: The Psychedelic Deadlands / Dreamer of Dreams campaign online with Dr. John PhD, and the new "5th Iteration Wilderlands" in-person campaign.

My next task is to understand how I can break down the variety of things folks can do in a 5th edition melee round, and to see if I can get the game subject to time again rather than time subject to the actions. Perhaps it's a difference with no meaning - but I am digging in. It has been almost 15 years since we all last played an official Dungeons & Dragons RAW. Until next week I hope you go easy.

The Astral Asshole

 

The Blipping Campaign, Friday November 29, 1996

Magic Item of Note: Mithral Torch (+1 to Wisdom, True Sight line of sight, it burns twice as bright as a normal torch (80 feet). Once per month everyone within the light has protection from evil and undead within the light are effected as if by sunlight.)

Game Background Music: Old Dick Dale (I think), Ministry, and the Steve Miller Band.

So from where J.A.S. is indicating in the Deities and Demigods we were battling Cthulhi Mythos, namely Nyarlathotep in this session. Plus it seems to have some friend with him. It seems creatures from the Far Realm (called the “Aberrant Realm” in my game) are fleeing from something even worse – The Old Ones.

In my pre- and post-End of Time scenario then the New Old Weird World adventuring party (or parties) could encounter two Illithid time-traveling starcrafts, one from the Illithids preparing to travel backwards in time to escape the End of Time event and the second the first Illithids’ ancestors who traveled forward in time to escape the Githyanki. Both are aware of the impending End of Time event and presumably would be aware of involvement by the Old Ones.

The Cthulhu connection from the Blipping Campaign is interesting because the New Old Weird World campaign also intersected with some Cthulhu mythos after escaping from a future Sigil. We departed from the besieged Cthulhu lands by way of resetting the mysterious “Great Portal of Broya,” ending up in an unstuck, time and space-wise, Tegal Manor.

Now I have a couple tricks to play with:

1. One is my thoughts of using the Decanter Room extradimensional space broken through to the Shadow Plane (a colloquial name, not any “official” Plane of Shadow); and

2. How the Old Ones intersect with the End of Time even and their essential indifference to the rest of reality.

More Slippery Time ...

I have 2 D&D campaigns running post-End of Time event: Wilderlands 5th Iteration and the shared Psychedelic Deadlands / Dreamer of Dreams (co-DMed with Dr. John PhD), both running 5th edition 2024 rules. The new Wilderlands game incorporates 5e recreations of the original Judges Guild by Goodman Games (Caverns of Thracia and City State of the Invincible Overlord) and Frog God Games (Tegel Manor) with plans to very loosely lay "Tula, City of Mages" over the 5e Historica Arcanum "The City of Crescent" (Victorian-era Istanbul with magic) from Metis Creative. My Psychedelic Deadlands piece of the shared campaign is set in a nascent Outlands centered - again very loosely - around Monty Cook Games 5e version of Ptolus, City By the Spire and surrounded spreading outward, among other things, with hacked bits from the Ultra Violet Grasslands (2nd Edition) by Luka Rejec and Numenera, also by Monty Cook.

My longtime gaming and jamming buddy J.A.S. has moved to a big piece of property waaaay up in the higher foothills California side of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The makes it quite a hoof to journey up there for D&D and playing music. After our first visit there we had an idea that we could re-enact anew one of our old gaming traditions: the annual camping trip (albeit with the comfortable situation of electricity, running water, and no Park Rangers).

We had left our New Old Weird World campaign hanging just at the time our heroes were on the the Mind Flayers' home planet of Penumbra searching for the Annulus psionic nullity device with pursuing Githyanki warriors barking at the party's collective heels. I thought a great idea would be to have an overnight affair up there with the gang for guitar jam and a tournament-style session of gaming to resolve the mess of the Mind Flayers traveling back in time to re-enslave the Gith origin peoples.

However... it seems the New Old Weird World campaign must have started before the end of time event, although definitely far in the future of the campaign multiverse and seemingly near the end of time event itself.

During the seminal sessions (heh, heh ... he said “semen”) of the New Old Weird World campaign the party met Sick Rick’s old PC “Ranger Rick” from the Original 90s Blipping Campaign. At the time Ranger Rick had been for “hundreds of years” magically kept in an undying state deep in a dungeon designed to keep something in (Deep Carbon Observatory by Patrick Stuart). When he encountered the party he offered a warning, “They’re here from the shadow,” then used the dispel magic ability from the Blipping Campaign’s Amethyst Throne to remove the magic keeping him “alive” and permitting him to die.

Now I’ve looked back to see where we left of the Blipping Campaign PCs. This was before we rolled characters for a “less good” Blipping Campaign in December 1997 when I began to have other priorities... I don’t have any notes from the last session we gamed with the original Blipping PCs, but there is a video (oh god yes) from the second-to-last session titled “The Astral Asshole” no less.

This also happens to be the last video from our classic AD&D 1st Edition period of gaming which lasted from December 1977 through February 2005. (Out of preservation for our battered original rule books and to have some welcome updates to the somewhat confusing original Gygaxian rules, whenever we’ve played “AD&D”-style since we’ve used some retro-clone.)

Now that I am getting closer to the End of Time event, I'll also note (again) the New Old Weird World Campaign wasn’t the only party of PC adventurers who had reached the Mind Flayer home world of Penumbra. Our “Blipping #2” campaign from a far-future Wilderlands had discovered in undead caverns on Ghenrek IV an Illithid Spelljamming Nautiloid ship which had an autopilot taking that party to Penumbra.

So there are two parties on Penumbra as the Illithids attempt to flee. Could there be two sets of time-traveling Illithids? There are for sure the Illithids planning to escape the End of Time event by time travel to the past. But there are also the ancestors of those Illithids fleeing the past back to the future. Should they meet, hmmmmmmm...

Slipping Time in Dungeons and Dragons (Another Essay Wherein It Is Good Players Do Not Read My Blog)

I have devoted lots of hours (weeks, months, years, decades) toward the Dungeons and Dragons game, right up there with jobs, and only essential compensation having been companionship with my fellows of the game. (There is also a distinct possibility based on personal and family history I am somewhere on the spectrum for autism and that D&D helped me build self-esteem and rewrite my personal narrative, ha, so there is that too.) The campaigns I run I attempt as best I can to all fit together in strange and wonderful ways into a single overarching setting. This banks time I can re-use to construct narrative background and provides great rewards forming common existential bases for the variety of adventuring party settings and events.

However, several campaigns over the past 5 years have reached a point where they have begun to approach and even wrap around an “End of Time” event where I feel the need to at least make an observational leap to what happens at the “End of Time” for my game.

The caveats are that my observations must be somewhat in harmony with how the still-developing adventuring campaigns have already “wrapped” around the end of time. And also be as best as I can manage philosophically consistent with the game Multiverse which in various magic and lore has already co-signed time travel itself as a thing. That said, I am not too much worried about specific outer plane Gygaxian metaphysics because what I imagine is a moment where time and space do, or at least seem to, cease to exist – temporal movement, the Multiverse, and all related planes are gone… or perhaps almost gone. Of necessary the event itself is beyond experience for any planar and extra-planar beings or spaces.

****NOTE: I have used in-game the apocalyptic description for the “End of Time” reckoning from Star Rovers RPG, co-written by David Hargrave, which I loosely pasted over some Judges Guild Traveller background… 

For Time has begun to run out. The Hurrakku — they who would gnaw their way through a starcluster and leave nothing in their wake — had already starswarmed. And even though they were still more than forty galaxies away, they were headed in the Empire’s direction.

But they were only the messengers of a great doom. What goaded the Hurrakku onward was the fear of impending annihilation. There loomed behind them an expanding, starless, blackness — A rift in the Space/Time fabric grown so large that it consumed the Past, the Present, and the Future. This was the Final Darkness that Would Cancel Everything!

And also the description from the 3.5 supplement Lords of Madness that Illithids existed “… at the end of time.” “Facing annihilation,” Illithids “… traveled to the past, arriving roughly 2000 years before the present in any given D&D campaign.” Mind Flayers are almost always lurking in the background of my campaigns.

Otherwise, without so far having researched in any depth folks smarter than me on the subject, either in a game sense or our own “real world” physics, I am attracted to 4 possibilities that might fit given I’ve already gamed adventuring parties whose adventures at least seem to have wrapped beyond the end of time relative to parties prior to the “End of Time” event.

Full Stop / “Dead End”: The Multiverse “births” then events unfold in a singular routine. Time travel past and forward is unable to change events because appearances in the past/future have or will have already happened or deigned to occur. This is Robert A. Heinlein’s “The Door Into Summer” version and how I generally structured time travel in my game without having yet added the “End of Time” epistemological considerations. But with time travel another possibility arises for perpetuating the game Multiverse...

The Loop / “Roly Poly”: The existent “wrap” in my game may indicate time folded back on itself as characters or beings head back in time before the “End of Time” event, but appear early in the generation of the Multiverse such that it only seems new. Yet ultimately, given “The Door Into Summer” the Multiverse unfolds exactly the same as a result of no change with the inputs (i.e. anything that happens in the past has already happened). A game could have new characters and delve deeper into incidents for how this or that history actually occurred – but characters would have no agency to change actual events that are “known,” either in game or meta–game. That is sort of a bummer given my sanboxxy sensitivities, which leads to my next possibility…

Re-Birth / “New Big Bang”: Something nature to the “End of Time” event, or perhaps some interruption or alteration or missing/hidden piece of the Multiverse re-births into a new multiverse, sort of a new Big Bang with new possibilities, and explains the formation of a Multiverse some ways similar to, but not exactly same or maybe very different than, the former Multiverse. There is also a possibility of entities from the old multiverse to jump through time over the “end” and “bang” events into the new Multiverse.

Of course, it could be that “The Door Into Summer” set history is not the nature of the Multiverse, leading into the 4th possibility I consider…

Temporal Branches / “Time-Stems”: This is a William Gibson-esque infinite multitude of potential universal timestreams where time travel does not change the source Multiverse, but rather produces an alternate branch of time. While it is not possible to physically pop over from one time-branch to another, characters would still meet beings from their origin Multiverse altered only in the sense of their contact with different branches. Potentially an infinite number of Multiverses from which, as a result of cross contamination through time travel, it would be virtually impossible to discern which is the “real” Multiverse, or even if that really matters. 

Anyhow, that is a long explanation being the good news is that I do not need to answer any of these questions quite yet. I can preserve a timeline of my campaigns to date (below) to set some parameters, then just see what direction where go the present campaigns.

I have 2 campaigns on hiatus that both are approaching near the “End of Time” event that some of the players are encouraging me to run “tournament style” and the remaining campaigns I feel are post-”End of Time” event, so possibilities 1 & 2 seem to be excluded and I am leaning into possibility 3.

CAMPAIGNS TIMELINE

The years are 1st Year 0 relative to the High Fantasy campaign (where the time stuff began to loosely cohere), 2nd the Wilderlands Balozkinar’s Corrected Commoners Calendar (“BCCC”), and 3rd Greyhawks Common Year calendar (“CY” and “BCY”). Note that many dates are approximations.

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-47,733 / -43300 / -47,158: Uttermost War comes to an end.

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-35,000 / -30567 / -34,423: During Century Wars of Domination Agent Smith arrives from early 21^st Century Earth and is transformed into cybernetic unit 718552.

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-2,000 / 2433 / -423: Future Illithids arrive in past.

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-200 / 4233 / 376: Githyanki uprising, future Illithids disappear from past & Astral Plane.

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0 / 4433 / 576: High Fantasy Campaign begins in the Wilderlands, Blipping #2 Campaign begins in Sigil, Wilderlands of the Torment Nexus Campaign begins in the Wilderlands and a cursed scroll from the ancient Markab ruins in Ashenshaft and found in the library of the Wizard Korpauntarl transported the adventurers through time and dimensions in space to Cube World.

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1 / 4434 / 577: Blipping Campaign begins in Arduin. High Fantasy thermonuclear-like explosion resulting from Tharzadu'un traversing portal escaping to Arduin - Artaban/Codex of the Infinite Planes intervenese saving party; throws Blipping Campaign to be "unstuck" in the Multiverse.

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2 / 4435 / 578: Baron Uther of Blackmoor activates the “secret weapon” from City of Gods in Valley of the Ancients, unwittingly a massive terraforming device, and the planet Ghenrek IV is forcibly tilted from its axis.

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4,000 / 8433 / 4,576: Blipping Campaign #2 arrives in future Comeback Inn.

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16,345 / 20778 / 16,921: Blipping Campaign #2 arrives in late 20^th Century Earth.

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16,355 / 20788 / 16,931: Blipping Campaign arrives in late 20^th Century Earth.

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16,565 / 20998 / 17,141: Blipping Campaign #2 arrives in late 22^nd Century Demonic Earth.

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20,000 / 24433 / 20,576: Space/Time Rift approaches Imperium, Blipping #2 Campaign arrives in future Ghenrek IV/Ghostring to discover Illithid Spelljammer which carries them to Illithid origin disc-world “Penumbra.” New Old Weird World Campaign adventurers also end up on Penumbra after visiting future Sigil and future Illithids depart the future to the past. 

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Out of Time and Wrapped Campaigns

• New Old Weird World Campaign: A flat disc planet (on the back of a turtle?) on pocket plane (post “End of Time” event) but passes through a far future Sigil to Penumbra prior to Illithids fleeing (pre-"End of Time" event)
• Wilderlands of the Torment Nexus: Wilderlands of High Fantasy on Prime Material Plane (Pre-"End of Time" event), sent to Cube World on pocket plane (Post “End of Time” event)
• Psychedelic Deadlands / Dreamer of Dreams Campaign: On Outlands and Prime Material Plane (Post “End of Time” event)
• Wilderlands 5th Iteration: Wilderlands of High Fantasy on Prime Material Plane (Post "End of Time" event and pre-"End of Time" event???)