Ibn Shisha's Old-School Gaming

  In the first two episodes of this series I took a look at what makes up the Fighter and the Magic-User in the Original D&D Three Little Brown Books. Today we're diving into the third remaining class, the Cleric. We are told on page 6 of Volume 1 - Men & Magic that, "There are three (3) main classes of characters." (I am inordinately amused by that emphasis on "three (3)!") The final class listed and described is 'Clerics,' and we are told that Clerics are limited to Men only. The full class descriptions follow this.  Clerics get three paragraphs taking up about one-third of page 7. Clerics are described as having some of the advantages of the each of the other two classes. Clerics are allowed the use of magical armor, as well as all non-edged magical weaponry.  As far as I can tell, this is the only point in the original box where it states that Clerics cannot use edged weapons, and then only as pertains to magical items.  However, we know from...

  I've been silently for a little while - work and also cataloging some of my other collections, but it's time to dive back in to the Eldorian Isles! So far, in the Cultures subseries of these Setting the Setting posts, I've detailed the dominant culture of the area - Eldorian Humans - our three major cultures - the mercantile Thunderan Dwarves, the Egyptian-like Sunari Elves, and the militaristic, Roman Empire inspired Tauren Minotaurs - and three of our minor cultures - the Vindhyaksha Goblins, the Hearthwarden Halflings and the Drak'Thul Lizard Men. I'm saving our second Human culture for last, so next up we have the last culture before them - the Orcs. For the Cultural Archetype, I rolled on the World Builder's Guide Cultural Characteristics Table on page 43, and got... Viking!  Quite fitting for our oceanic, archipalegic world setting, and an interesting contrast to our tropical local campaign area. Viking: While the Vikings of northern Europe could probab...