Dungeons & Dragons White Box 05

Clerics: Clerics gain some of the advantages from both of the other two classes (Fighting-Men and Magic-Users] in that they have the use of magic armor and all non-edged magic weapons (no arrows!), plus they have numbers of their own spells. In addition, they are able to use more of the magical items than are the Fighting-Men. When Clerics reach the top level (Patriarch) they may opt to build their own stronghold, and when doing so receive help from "above." Thus, if they spend 100,000 Gold Pieces in castle construction, they may build a fortress of double that cost. Finally, "faithful" men will come to such a castle, being fanatically loyal, and they will serve at no cost. There will be from 10-60 heavy cavalry, 10-60 horsed crossbowmen ("Turcopole"-type), and 30-180 heavy foot.

Note that Clerics of 7th level and greater are either "Law" or "Chaos," and there is a sharp distinction between them. If a Patriarch receiving the above benefits changes sides, all the benefits will immediately be removed!

Clerics with castles of their own will have control of a territory similar to the "Barony" of fighters, and they will receive "tithes" equal to 20 Gold Pieces/Inhabitant/ year.

If you want to know how the cleric came to be one of the character classes of the game, I must give a little instruction about the religious world in 1973. Remember, while this book was published in 1974, it was designed and written the year before.

About that time, most of the middle class attended church at least a few times a year; it was still a respectable thing to be, a belief that was still treated with respect. Religions functioned as localised, community-binding networks of personal trust and mutual aid. If your lawnmower broke down and you needed your lawn mowed for whatever reason, you could actually just call your minister and within two hours, someone from your church — or even another church of your own religion — would arrive with their lawnmower and mow it for you. As good will.

The 700 club existed, but at the time of this launch it hadn't yet occurred on public television — and it was long after before it gained political power. The Moral Majority wasn't organised until 1979. You can idiots like Anita Bryant and Phyllis Schlafly running around, who had their admirers, but to most people these were just cranks. They didn't represent actual religions. There was no reason at that time to believe that evangelicals would one day organise themselves as identity warriors.

At the same time, speaking of a medieval setting, the religious figure was absolutely central, especially to the concept of "adventure." The greatest adventure at that time was the one sparked off by Pope Urban, who called Europe to retake the Holy Land. Hundreds of thousands were on the move, not always in the same direction, while the fever lasted for two centuries.  At the same time, the other great adventure for the common person was the "pilgrimage," when people would forsake their lives for months, even years, to quest for enlightenment. Atop this, all the great figures of myth were bound hand in glove to religious motives, consequences and ideals. To import the religious figure into D&D would have seemed very right.

The designers were careful. They chose a word that, by 1973, had largely fallen out of common English usage, except in very formal church contexts or historical writing. Cleric sounded dusty, it was associated with Chaucer, it was non-sectarian and thus could apply to everything from a crusader to a monk to a missionary. That allowed for the individual to be included into the game's structure, without the baggage of the church hierachy. For worlds like Blackmoor and Greyhawk, it was a word that allowed completely new, untainted religious structures that could emerge to suit the DM's tastes. It was a word that felt holy without that holiness being defined. The only thing that "cleric" meant was a type of power.

The cleric fits the middle ground; we're all familiar with that, part fighter, part mage. Easy to understand. The explanation of the cleric getting two g.p. value for every g.p. spent returns us to the example of the lawnmower. It's peculiarly odd here that time is taken to explain precisely how many "faithful" show up for the cleric, where such was not included for the fighter (which is fixed later in AD&D). And no logical reason is given, either, for why a cleric gets twice as much tithe as a fighter gets tax. It's simply stated. But it's the sort of thing that can start arguments at a game table that insists on "rules as written." These rules are clearly not written very consistently... but I'll return to that in a moment.

We also get our first whiff of alignment here, with the usual caveats. The cleric has to pick one, the cleric can't switch... and by default, whichever one picks makes the other half of the population the enemy. It's essentially the Republic Western black-hat/white-hat dichotomy, with all the depth of those 30s serials and all the promise as well. There's an old saw that you don't cheer for a team, you cheer for laundry. That's pretty much the division being presented here — and if you want an origin, it comes from the wargaming table, where no other justification is needed to explain why this army from this side of the table wants to kill that army from that side. The division keeps the sides straight... any philosophy surrounding the words is an afterthought.

Dwarves: Dwarves may opt only for the fighting class, and they may never progress beyond the 6th level (Myrmidon). Their advantages are: 1) they have a high level of magic resistance, and they thus add four levels when rolling saving throws (a 6th-level dwarf equals a 10th-level human]; 2) they are the only characters able to fully employ the +3 Magic War Hammer (explained in Vol. II); 3) they note slanting passages, traps, shifting walls and new construction in underground settings; and 4) they are able to speak the languages of Gnomes, Kobolds and Goblins in addition to the usual tongues (see LANGUAGES in this volume).

Some caveats. I've struggled to present the italic text as it appears in the White Box, which is counter-intuitive as to what's capitalised and when. Here, "fighting class" isn't, while "fighter" is variously capitalised and not. I can't help but point out that while the Oxford Comma has appeared somewhat consistently, it's suddenly missing here. That tells me that different parts of the same page, or the same section, are written by different people, and that the work wasn't edited by a single person. Note that while all the races are capitalised here, elsewhere on the next page, they won't be.

Secondly, no explanation appears regarding whether or not the dwarf, or the subsequent elf or halfling, are "characters" or "races" or what. Page six is very clear: there are three (3) main classes. Three is even named twice, though in my quote of this yesterday I dropped the number in brackets. Yet here, on page seven, three other "races" occur, (the word does not occur) that can in the dwarf case only be fighters. Obviously, not "Fighting-men," thus revealing the somewhat clumsy nomenclature. I don't highlight this to criticise, only to point out that in writing game rules, one of the hardest sorts of literature to write, these errors are telling that no actual game designer was consulted or had any say over the content. And that was a bad error... understandable, of course, since in 1973, who knew that 52 years later people would be screaming at each other over a global communication system about the rightness or wrongness of these rules. Yet, here we are.

Taken as given, the dwarf is familiar. Special benefits, tough, and counter-measured by removing the benefit of becoming a baron in what's presumably a human world. As a player, you get to play one of these for a while, but the day comes a little sooner when you put it down and try the next character type. It's a smorgasbord, not an enduring model for infinite enjoyment. The willingness here to treat play as iterative — testing one option, see how it works, set it aside, test another  — rather than as a personal expression separates this text from everything about the game that came after. The writers never imagined permanence as a virtue. That's not how wargames are played. You clear away all the units on the board, set up new units, and enjoy the present experience. Longevity is inherent our enjoyment of the game, not in any single element of that game.

Briefly, and again, with understanding, it just shows they didn't know what they had. That mental leap, the connection players would later have with their characters, hadn't occurred yet. And that's hard for us, on the other side of that revelation, to understand. It's easier if you started out in wargame culture. But if you've never played that sort of wargame, the tendency is to imagine that of course the originators "got it." But it's clear from the text they didn't.

I'd be amiss if I didn't include this image from page seven... the classic treasure pile. Chest, coins, bones, sword — and skulls, of course, the classic Stevensonian relationship between adventure and buried riches. We constantly fail to grasp how much the children's literature of the age, much more so than the more adult authors that came to the gamers later, affected our thinking about what a pile of treasure ought to look like. Even today it's assumed that if there is a treasure, at some point someone must have died over it, in some fashion that allowed them to be killed and yet, mysteriously, the treasure left behind. What, the killer just filled his pockets and went, like Ben Gunn? I've never encountered a horde that the party acquired, only to leave enough to still half cover the skulls left behind. Just an observation. It looks nice, but... does it make sense?

Page 8 gives us this, the dwarf posed as swashbuckler. A little odd that you'd place the perspective below the dwarf's waist to make him look tall and strapping; no modern depiction would do so. Additionally, this is not the Tolkienian craftsman or stoic miner. It's a stock adventure figure, a seagoing rouge with naked thighs and calves (not great for caving), with a sword out of scale that's held like a prop and not a weapon. Judging from the belt loop, this thing would drag comically upon the ground. Not exactly the image of jaunty thrillseeking.

But why not accept it as is? The purpose of illustration is to clarify, not to improvise scattered meaning and interpretations. This is a fictional race; we have no photographs of it, nothing but our imaginations... and when those are cluttered by hundreds of competing, inconsistent depictions, "dwarf" automatically locks onto the clearest one... which in our present day ends up being John Rhys-Davies from the LOTR movies, by default. Now, I'm good with that, but this image occurs next to a text that says nothing whatsoever about the dwarf physically. The text does not even tell us it's height. And this picture doesn't. That's not how a descriptive rule book is meant to work.

Elves: Elves can begin as either Fighting-Men or Magic-Users and freely switch class whenever they choose, from adventure to adventure, but not during the course of a single game. Thus, they gain the benefits of both classes and may use both weaponry and spells. They may use magic armor and still act as Magic-Users. However, they may not progress beyond 4th level Fighting-Man (Hero) nor 8th level Magic-User (Warlock). Elves are more able to note secret and hidden doors. They also gain the advantages noted in the CHAINMAIL rules when fighting certain fantastic creatures. Finally, Elves are able to speak the languages of Orcs, Hobgoblins, and Gnolls in addition to their own (Elvish) and the other usual tongues.

The "switch class" here certainly leaves me uncertain what it means. And since so far we have no defined "game" as a measure, I'm not wholly clear on the dividing line of that either. I take it to mean that the same character can, in this campaign, be a mage, and in that campaign, be a fighter, so long as they don't both occur at the same time. If we reset, okay, sure, fine, but the new designation is THE designation. But admittedly, that's just my interpretation. Someone else might have another. Which is why we want language that is more exact than this.

Again, not meaning to criticise. It's an issue that the writers are using "game," "campaign" and "adventure" interchangeably. It's not my issue, it's the issue of thousands who find that when it's not nailed down, it brings disruptions to the table. Anything ambiguous must. And it's worth pointing out for those who flee to these rules to "run a simple game," that there's nothing simple when the rules aren't rigidly defined. It just takes one player able to read English two ways (and we know it can be) to make a mess of all your simplicity. This is merely an example of why the "rules-lawyer" emerged in the instant the game did; because if your laws cannot properly resolved contingencies, there's nothing to do but take the matter before the judge, lay out your case and expect a judgement in your favour. And if you don't get one, not just once but multiple times, your respect for the judge starts to wane. This may be the best we can do in the complex world of legal statutes and precedents. Generally, we expect a game, a far more manageable structure, to fix this hole. But D&D never has, because it's marketed as "player error," not game error. If you'd just stop questioning the rules, no matter how ambiguous they are, there'd be no problem. Essentially, straight out of Stalin's play book: "obedience, not clarity, preserves order." Ah, if only obedience could be counted upon.

The remaining elf is, again, recognisable. And even more hamstrung as a fighter than later versions. That 4th level restriction is harsh. I wonder who in the present day might accept that as written?