As you know, about a month or so ago I received a shipment of classic
Arduin material from
Emperor's Choice, the current publisher/rights holder of Dave Hargrave's
Arduin game and setting. Even with just a few of the books in the line, I have enough gaming material to keep me busy for a long, long time.
As I have been discussing the
Arduin stuff on Google+, one of the things that I brought up was that I wanted to see Hargrave's first attempt at a game (the early
Arduin Grimoires were really intended as supplements to
OD&D) as a stand alone game. Called
The Arduin Adventure, this boxed set was a simple,
OD&D inspired set of rules for fantasy gaming that could be expanded upon with the
Arduin Grimoires. And now,
The Arduin Adventure is available in PDF from RPGNow/DriveThruRPG.
Dave Hargrave's
Arduin and Steve Perrin's "
Perrin Conventions" were influential in creating the West Coast style for D&D back in the late 70s and early 80s. Both of these lead to a style of play, and a style of game worlds that were different from the "mainstream"
D&D that
TSR was selling. This West Coast style lead to
The Arduin Adventure and also to
Runequest. There are references to DMs and designers like Perrin and Greg Stafford throughout the
Arduin Grimoires. Like Bigby and Tenser in the
OD&D rules, there are spells and monsters named for both Perrin and Stafford.
So, what is the
Arduin Adventure? It is a fantasy role-playing game, class and level-based, very much in the mold of
OD&D. In fact, these codified rules owe a lot to the Holmes boxed set for
D&D that helped to codify and mold those rules into something cleaner and clearer. The influence of Holmes' rules, however, are filtered through the imagination of David Hargrave.
If
D&D is Tolkien's Middle Earth and Moorcock's Young Kingdoms as filtered through the imagination of Gygax and Arneson, then
Arduin takes those influences and a number of science fantasy ones (
Star Wars being very important to Hargrave) and pulls them through the psychedelic experience that was the mind of Dave Hargrave. I consider this to be very much a plus because
Arduin definitely has a much stronger voice to it than
D&D did at the time, perhaps because it was the vision of one person instead of a growing committee. Don't get me wrong,
D&D is a great game (I play one of the retroclones of
OD&D on a regular basis), but it does not have the voice to it that
Arduin has. For some this might be considered a weakness, but I think that it was a strength of the game. I believe that
Arduin was the first RPG that was as much the vision of its author, rather than just a way to come up with some rules that could be used within a certain genre. I think in this way,
Arduin is the spiritual father of games like Kevin Siembieda's
Palladium Fantasy and
Rifts. There are a lot of similarities between
Arduin and
Palladium Fantasy to me (but that is probably something for another post).
Now, while
The Arduin Adventure has everything that you need to play, it is really not a complete game. Much like how the Holmes version of
OD&D covers only the first three levels of play, so does
The Arduin Adventure really only cover the equivalent for
Arduin. You have enough to get play started, and play for a bit before having to "upgrade" to a fuller version of the rules in order to continue. If you have
The Arduin Adventure and the first three (at least!)
Arduin Grimoires you can fill in a lot of the gaps and play for a while. If you're interested,
Emperor's Choice does offer a print version of
The Arduin Trilogy that contains the first three of the
Arduin Grimoires and
The Arduin Adventure. This thick book will give you a lot of gaming, whether you use
Arduin's native rules, or plug them in to
D&D or some retroclone of it. If
The Arduin Adventure whets your appetite for
Arduin, then I really recommend getting the Trilogy in print.
All of the things that are familiar to
OD&D players will make
Arduin easy to pick up. The classes are basically the same, races are handled in a similar manner, and spells and advancement are very similar. Moving between the two games would be ridiculously easy. Picking up
Arduin will not be difficult, if you already have a familiarity with
OD&D or various OSR games that duplicate the experience of it. If you aren't already familiar with the "old school" approach to fantasy games,
Arduin may cause some problems for you because it does assume a familiarity of that style of play. However, at 66 pages, reading
Arduin and picking up the rules shouldn't be that much of an investment of your time. Whether you want to pick up
Arduin in order to learn about an old school game that you may not have known about previously, or if you want to pick it up because you want to supplement your
OD&D/OSR games with some new material, I think that you should be picking up
The Arduin Adventure (and then moving on to as many other of the
Arduin Grimoires that you can find). You will not be disappointed.
Combat is a bit more complicated in
Arduin than in
OD&D. Dave Hargrave liked his critical hit and fumble charts. Each weapon hits differently, depending upon the Armor Class of a character's opponent. This looks more complicated, but the combat tables in
The Arduin Adventure and
The Arduin Grimoires make this process much simpler than it should be. Regardless, this is still
OD&D at its heart, and
that game really only gets so complex. Some may see this added complexity as a boon in their old school games.
On the negative side, this is an ugly PDF, however as it is a reproduction of the original game (layout warts and all), I don't know that I can hold that too much against the publisher. Much like with the older edition D&D PDFs available, this book is an artifact, a reflection of its time. If pretty and shiny is a requirement of your role-playing games, then
The Arduin Adventure may not be for you. However if you like rough and tumble RPGs that do at the table what they say they will, you will want to pick this up for your gaming library. And then, go to the
Emperor's Choice website and buy more
Arduin stuff.
All in all, if you like old school style
D&D and you
haven't already experienced
Arduin, you should buy
The Arduin Adventure and kick the tires. I think that you will like what it can bring to your gaming table, even if it is as a supplement to your
OD&D/OSR game of choice. Go out now and get your copy.
I still have some more
Arduin posts in me. There's a lot of material in the books that I have, and a lot to talk about. I may try to run
Arduin, or perhaps an
Arduin-influenced
Swords & Wizardry game. Really, I think that the only thing that I could ask of the publishers of
Arduin to do is to open up some of the content of the game (spells, monsters, maybe even some of Hargrave's original races) under the OGL so that homebrewers and hobbyists and pull
Arduin into our games, and maybe even share what we've done with it.