Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules

About the Reedition of Phenster’s

In “Pandemonium Society House Rules,” L’avant garde #32, Phenster takes offense at the accusation that the Pandemonium Society plays an unsophisticated children’s game. As proof their D&D game is “plenty sophisticated,” he gives examples of the group’s house rules. Many more house rules follow in later issues of L’avant garde.

Phenster’s style, while explanative, is verbose and haphazard. My purpose in the reedition is only to make the rules more concise. Where I make assumptions or attempt to patch any holes Phenster leaves, I make it clear in the text.

Sources

In the August 1980 article, Phenster hints the starting point for the house rules is the Holmes edition of Basic D&D, which, once the perforated leaf is removed, has 46 pages. Later, he also writes that he started playing D&D when he got “a strange game that came in a box with a dragon on the top with 5 crazy dice” as a gift for Christmas in 1979.

He doesn’t specify the edition of Holmes. From the late date, we might assume 2nd or 3rd Edition. Other clues bear out the hunch. One article in the series adds a curious assortment of rules. Three entries among them come from the earliest printings of the D&D Basic Set:

Phenster adds an “enormous type to the spider list,” which has 6+6 hit dice. A new magic item is a “ring of plate mail,” and “Throwing salt on zombies makes them dry up and wither.”1

…[Phenster] started playing D&D when he got “a strange game that came in a box with a dragon on the top with 5 crazy dice” as a gift for Christmas in 1979.

That these are added as house rules further supports the idea that Phenster’s base rule set is not the 1st Edition (first three printings) of Holmes. The presence of only five dice in the box narrows the field to the fourth or fourth+ printings—both 2nd Edition, or the seventh, which is the last printing of Third Edition Holmes.2

The dungeon Phenster mentions in his “Welcome” message in Paradigm Lost #1 (April 1980) is titled “The Great Halls of Pandemonium.” The name suggests there are multiple Great Halls, and the adventure locale described, “Great Crone Hall,” bears cosmetic resemblance to the Caves of Chaos from Dungeon Module B2. The dungeon consists of several rooms, densely populated by monsters. The accompanying narrative “dungeon report” indicates Great Crone Hall is higher up a cliff face from the previous dungeon and makes the conclusion “so it’s more dangerous.”

Similarities to the Caves end there. The map of Great Crone Hall shows the straight lines of stone-block construction, not natural or rough-hewn cavern walls. In the narrative, player characters 3rd-level and higher encounter monsters of up to 10 hit dice. Though when two player characters are felled and others wounded and short on spells, the party goes “back to the fortress to heal and get the gemstones appraised,” activities typically conducted in a base town.

But this only hints that Hazard, the DM who we presume made the dungeon, had some experience with The Keep on the Borderlands, which circulated by then in the sixth and seventh printings (November-December 1979) of the Holmes boxed set. I don’t know when the module became available separately in stores. In any case, the similarity does not mean B2 came in Phenster’s Christmas set.

…this only hints that Hazard, the DM who we presume made the dungeon, had some experience with The Keep on the Borderlands…

Although Phenster claims the single book in 1980, some additions and rules changes in articles from later years appear to be inspired from other sources. For examples: He makes specific reference to pole arm articles in the Strategic Review. He notes, in separate articles, that the Pandemonium Society uses the experience point tables for high level characters from Men & Magic and Greyhawk, and psionics from Eldritch Wizardry.

Categories

Phentster’s are a diverse array of house rules. He covers topics from the mundane cost of a sling, through the fantastic summoning of infernal beings, to the gonzo “rod of ICBMs.”

I class the house rules into the following four categories:

[H] Holmes

These house rules patch the Holmes edition to make it a more coherent game, while maintaining its simplicity. In this regard, Phenster does a decent darning job without sewing a whole new garment.

Examples: Damage and attacks per round by weapon class.

[E] Extra

Not strictly necessary, the rules in this category extend the game beyond 3rd character level and add elements that most gamers were used to even in the early ’80s. While these come with more complexity, they also add real value to the game without interfering with play.

Examples: Additional adjustments to ability scores, advancement to higher levels, wilderness exploration.

[C] Campaign

This category adds elements as suggestions or models to apply to a campaign. These ideas might be applied to a bare-bones campaign to give it some ambiance without much effort.

Examples: Coins of the realm, human languages, birds of war.

[P] Pandemonium

These are additional house rules employed by the Pandemonium Society. They often go a step—sometimes leagues—beyond fair or useful. But they can be fun.

Examples: Magic-use without spell books, combat complications, a number of improbable and horrific monsters, and “the Boomtown Rule.”

While Phenster’s start point is Holmes, many of the house rules are applicable to other old-school editions of the world’s most superlative role-playing game.

1 Again, Zach Howard’s Zenopus Archives cast light: in the Holmes first printing, an “enormous” 6-HD spider lurks in Room J (44), a ring of protection “serves as plate armor +1” (38), and zombies are vulnerable to salt (14).

2 See the Acaeum for an exhaustive list of D&D Basic Set contents by printings.

Pandemonium Society House Rules

This is the third of a continuing series of articles called Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules. Previous articles:

Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, incidents, and newsletters are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is pure coincidence.

The following text is from L’avant garde #32 (August 1980). In transcribing, I fix spelling and punctuation errors, but I leave grammar as is.

Pandemonium Society House Rules

by Phenster

I was talking to Ivanhoe at the Game Hoard one day. I invited him and the other big kids from the store to join the Pandemonium Society and play D&D with us. He asked me, "What version do you play?" I said, "What do you mean? We play D&D," and I showed him the rulebook. He said, "Basic is for kids. We play Advanced D&D. It's more sophisticated."

I didn't know what he meant by that. Then he showed me the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks. There's three of them and they have hard covers with colored pictures on the front. The rules look more complicated than ours do, but more sophisticated I don't know about.

In the Pandemonium Society, we only have one D&D book. It has 46 pages and a soft cover. And we use some extra rules too. Hazard calls them "house rules." We make up house rules when we need them, and sometimes we write them down. That makes our game plenty sophisticated. I'll give you some examples.

The rulebook says all weapons roll a 6-sided die for damage. That's nonsense though, because some weapons are heavier than others. So, we say that the light weapons do one less damage point and the heavy weapons do one more point. Some weapons that are extra-heavy, like a two-handed sword, do TWO more points.

Another thing it says in the rulebook is that some weapons go more or less times in a round. That's hard to keep track of, and a weapon that doesn't get to attack in a round is pretty useless. So everybody wanted to fight with a dagger, except Beowulf. That's his campaign name, but we like to call him "the Bully," because he's always getting into fights. When Beowulf the Bully gets into a fight, he likes to use a two-handed sword, so we figured out another way to do it.

We play it where all the weapons only go once per round, except the heavy crossbows, which shoot every other round, so they're still pretty useless. But if your crossbow is already loaded, you can fire it fast, so you shoot first, but only for that go. Both crossbows always shoot last in the round. After bows are fired, if you don't move or do anything else, you can fire again at the end of the round.

Daggers always go last on the first round when you're fighting something. After that, they go first. Two-handed swords, et. al., always go last in the round, unless it's also a long weapon. Long weapons, like pole arms and two-handed swords, go first when closing to hand-to-hand combat, then they go last after that. So, when Beowulf is charging into a horde of orcs with his two-handed sword, he gets the first blow against the first orc that's fighting with an axe. But after that he goes last, until he wins the fight and goes to fight another orc.

Starting with this issue and sporadically throughout the next years, L’avant garde printed a series of articles, under the byline Phenster, describing various house rules used by the Pandemonium Society of Neighborhood Dungeons and Dragons Players.

In Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules, I reprint parts of Phenster’s articles, reedit the house rules into a form more comprehensible to the modern reader, and discuss certain points I find interesting.

Coming Up…

Forthcoming articles in Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules:

The Postlethwaite Collection

Some months ago, I helped a friend move. Kevin bought the new house from the children of the previous owner, who passed away. Our first job was to clear out some things they left behind.

There was a big cardboard box in the attic. It was full of old comic books and magazines. The magazines were National Geographic and Elle, the comics DC. Kevin knows something about comic books, so we left the box. He would sort through it later.

Recently, he invited me over. He said he found some things at the bottom of the box that I might know what to do with. He showed me a stack of pages folded in half. The paper was yellowed. The typewritten text was photocopied. Tiny holes and tears on the open edges suggested they were stapled together. A hand-drawn banner across the top read “L’avant guard” next to a figure with rifle in uniform complete with epaulets and bicorne headdress.

I said, “Wow! These are a wargaming group’s old newsletters.”

He said, “Yeah, do you want them?”

 

L’avant garde was the “Newsletter of the East Middleton Wargamers Association.” The association’s address shows Middleton, Kansas. The recipient’s address box names the subscriber as Andrew J. Postlethwaite of Batesville, AR. Kevin’s new house is not in Arkansas, and he tells me the previous owners were named Thompson.

I said, “Wow! These are a wargaming group’s old newsletters.”

He said, “Yeah, do you want them?”

What I call the Postlethwaite collection counts 43 issues of L’avant garde plus a half dozen numbers of Paradigm Lost, an excerpt from whose first issue I cite in “The Pandemonium Society.”

L’avant garde usually runs between 20 and 30 pages. The front page displays the banner at top and contains a letter from the editor and sometimes a contents table. The back page reproduces the banner on the top half and shows the sender and recipient addresses on the bottom half. Folded and stapled, it makes a mailable package.

Each issue is numbered, most are dated by the month and year. A few numbers are missing—I presume lost or the subscription lapsed. One number is repeated in a later issue.

The newsletter was published at irregular intervals, the longest between October 1970 and March 1972. The earliest I have is issue #3, dated July 1967. The latest is #78, [no month] 1986.

The contents are standard wargame fare: battle reports; game rules; reviews of games, game books, game magazines, and miniature figurines; gamer classifieds: game dates, players seeking games, used games for sale or trade; and ads for games sponsored by the Game Hoard, a local shop.

Early issues are all wargames, mostly Napoleon-era. The first reference to fantasy comes in 1969, and in March 1974 the first mention of D&D appears. In the next year or so, D&D articles are sparse, but “fantasy wargaming” takes up more and more space as issues go by. A 1978 letter from the editor states the goal to maintain “a 50/50 balance between fantasy adventure and historical wargaming.”

Paradigm Lost apes L’avant garde’s layout. Its page count varies wildly from six to 44 pages. Its contents, notably more juvenile, are strictly D&D.

Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, incidents, and newsletters are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is pure coincidence.

The Pandemonium Society

I have discovered a treasure—all in my mind. A treasure no less.

Welcome to PARADIGM LOST

My name is Phenster. Least that's my campaign name. Me and the kids in my neighborhood play a game called "Dungeons and Dragons." In a game of D&D, we pretend to be heroes and wizards, and we go on perilous adventures in a fantastic world of dangerous dungeons. The dungeons are filled with terrible monsters that guard fabulous treasures. We explore the dungeons, slay the monsters, and take the treasures. It's like a game of make-believe, but with paper and pencil and dice.

All our adventures together make a campaign. We all made up campaign names that we use for our heroes and wizards. There are about 20 of us who play, so we made a club. Not everyone always shows up for games at the same time, but sometimes there are quite a lot of us.

One time, Hazard--that's his campaign name--invited all of us over to his house to play. It was a cold and rainy Saturday, and almost everyone was there. The kitchen was full of kids. We had to sit two to a chair, and some kids were standing up or sitting on the countertops. We were all talking and laughing, because there's a lot of talking and laughing when we play this game, and sometimes shouting and swearing, too. Hazard's mom came in and said, "What's all the pandemonium?" We all got quiet and jumped down from countertops and sat straight in our chairs. She said we were behaving like little demons and told us not to swear. Then she took a jar down from on top of the fridge and gave us all cookies. Homemade chocolate chip, my favorite.

After that, we named our club "The Pandemonium Society of Neighborhood Dungeons and Dragons Players." This is the first issue of our newsletter. There's one of Hazard's dungeons and a story about our adventure in it, so you can see what it's like. If you want to play with us, you can join our club and make up a campaign name. Call Hazard: [redacted], after school but not at dinner time.

—from Paradigm Lost, the Pandemonium Society Newsletter, #1 (April 1980)

Phenster’s Pandemonium Society House Rules is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, events, incidents, and newsletters are either products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is pure coincidence.

DUNGEONS & DRAGONS and D&D are registered trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. Use of these trademarks is not a challenge to the trademark and does not imply any affiliation with or endorsement by Wizards of the Coast or its parent company.