Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, Oh my! Part 1

Well if you don't know already I am running a Labyrinth Lord Campaign. It is what is known as a retro clone of OD&D. Specifically I'm shooting for a close recreation of the 1984 red box game which eschews skills, feats and the bucketfuls of modifiers one can get in newer editions for a simple and slim game. On your character sheet you will find 6 attributes, saving throws , a to hit table, equipment , class, AC, HP and name. You can find a very good example of such 'here'. I usually just put this whole thing on the front and back of one slip of 6x9 steno book paper.

Simply put I'm looking for a fun exciting game where the players (that includes me as the GM) are not worried about what modifiers we should apply but are instead worried about what that troll is about to do to our characters. I want an experience where my players walk away from the table not talking about how to best build their characters stat blocks to take on the next adventure but instead excitedly chatting about how the one character did this or that which was clever, exciting or crazy. That is why I have made the choice to use with Labyrinth Lord and well a mish mash of other editions of D&D (more on this later).

Now with simplicity comes some issues. I was going to avoid elves, dwarfs and halflings altogether and for the first couple of games I did only allowing human player classes. This is due to campaign issue and simply a limited number of players. The party needed a fighter, a mage, a cleric and a thief. Without those four bases covered we would simply not be playing the game I wanted to play. Now though we're up to 4 players. It would have been 5 but the wife simply cannot sit still for several hours at a time (preggers ya know).

Unfortunately with her leaving the game that takes our thief character out. I'm already running the cleric as an NPC and for reasons of campaign flavor I don't want him replaced or played by a player who doesn't know the secrets of my dark powers of campaign verisimilitude MUAHAHAHA. So now I have a problem of what to do with a party that currently contains one NPC cleric, one magic user, one fighter, one elf (fighter/mage) and one player who is currently playing a fighter but will probably want to switch up as this was his intro character for one game and he did not have a great deal of time to create it.

You may notice that I've already allowed an elf in the group but simply put this is the one elf and that is that. There are no elves on this side of the campaign world without there being a very good reason and even though the players don't know it yet there is a very good reason. Heck, the other characters don't even know he's an elf yet. He's just a short mysterious fellow in a cloak to them.

Now that still leaves us short of a character that can open locks, sneak about and back stab. So what to do what to do. Well off to get ready for work and slog away behind the man's desk. More later on demihuman classes and the possible resolution of a serious lack o thief.