- I think one of the best OD&D retro-clones is Delving Deeper found here (online copy).
- But Marcia is whipping up a more 1:1 version which also incorporates Chainmail.
- And speaking of, The Book of War a sorta Chainmail retro-clone from Delta.
- Grognardia discusses the Outdoor Survival game whose board was a famous requirement of OD&D.
- And here the implied setting of OD&D via that map is discussed.
Gus L. makes a good point in the Grognardia comments about the dangers of OD&D offloading a portion of the play experience to another game:
There's very little of the wilderness in D&D's wilderness and adventures in it have always felt more like a bus ride with occasional fistfights to me then hikes in wild places.
I suspect this can all be traced back to the decision to offload wilderness travel rules to Outdoor Survival (which after all is a one-shot board game with fairly frustrating rules - even worse when you add hostile bandit armies, dinosaurs, and dragons to it's already tough survival rules).
And finally, an astute Redditor makes a nice observation about OD&D's influence on why Moldvey Basic D&D stops at level 3:
This stopping at level 3 intrigued me for a long while as well. Like, why three?
Well .. level 4 is when in OD&D, in good and proper Chainmail fashion, your character graduates from being a normal (if aspiring) combatant to a proper Hero! This progression gets carried over, including the level titles from OD&D which itself includes the ones from Chainmail, into Holmes/Moldvay/B+X.
Interestingly, many spells and effects only work on monsters/NPCs/etc up to 4HD(+1) ... because that's when things become Heroic. Chainmails "[Heroes] have the fighting ability of four figures" seems to have really set a major line in the sand.
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