Swords & Spells | OD&D Goes to War | Wandering DMs S08 E27

i'm definitely aware of x10 um i feel like i've heard i don't think i've ever sat down and just read the thing Would you recommend it? Should I spend some time with that particular module?

I do.

I really like it.

It helps if you've already played or read the prior modules, Master of the Desert Nomads, the Desert Nomads series, X4, X5.

One of the things, it's almost like the equivalent of Marvel's Endgame, frankly.

of it is situated specifically to reference everything that ever happened in all the basic modules and all the expert modules.

And it specifically locates basically all of them.

And if you haven't played an expert module, there's going to be like a side quest of like, oh, in order to get this king's army in your alliance, you got to go play module X7 or something like that.

um so it does this really kind of nice i mean i'll say fan service of recognizing all the prior stuff that the players have done in this campaign area and then you get both you know you're right right at this point of switching to domain play.

So you get a lot of traditional adventuring, you get solo combats.

Really the whole thing swings on the negotiations and diplomacy of what kind of alliance your party of diplomats can forge in the face of this outside invasion that's happening.

And then hopefully you can lead your army into battle and actually actually confront the invaders with yeah so a really nice mix of kind of everything you've got going on in dnd uh uh there i will say that there's at least one or two politically cringy elements uh from the 80s that i would probably shave off a little bit but 90 of it i kind of adore all

right well this this episode is not about x10 we could we could go down that road but We're here talking about swords and spells.

This is very interesting.

But I think that X10, it doesn't tell you to run it with swords and spells, right? It probably directs you to the battle system.

It

does.

It does.

Yes.

Good call on your part.

uh and so so partly you know so swords and spells is the first uh little brown book that i got so for what it's worth i got into d d uh in the late 70s or like around 79 80 and this is at the point when you had the homes uh basic set in stores and they were just coming out with the advanced d d hardcovers But there wasn't any dedicated, you know, and at that point, again, all the end game high level fighters, you're talking about baronies and you can hire mercenaries and raise armies and like that.

What do you do with them? Well, at that point, the thing that's actually in stores is still this.

They still have a couple of little brown books like Eldritch Wizardry is on the shelves of my hobby store and also Swords and Spells.

So I actually go and pick this up and you can see my copy is very well organized.

very well used and beaten up frankly so for many years um and as i pointed out um it's reference it's still referenced in uh the uh cook expert rules it says uh mass land combat although large-scale battles are beyond the scope of these rules miniatures rules such as swords and spells can be can be used so even in the early 80s they were still referencing this as the the primary way that you do mass battle.