Dungeons & Dragons White Box 16

Let's move on.

Levitate: This spell lifts the caster, all motion being in the vertical plane; however, the user could, for example, levitate to the ceiling, and move horizontally by use of his hands. Duration: 6 turns + the level of the user. Range (of levitation): 2"/level of Magic-User, with upwards motion at 6"/turn.

Of course I understand the spell, because I've played it, starting with others explaining it to me and then me explaining it to others, and rewriting it several times for my game world. Read through the eyes of an AD&D player, it makes perfect sense.

But AD&D did not always exist. And if we were talking about the value of a medical study printed in 1973, we wouldn't use an example of a later medical study done in 1979 to discuss the value of the first study between those years. And if the later study advanced and improved the earlier study, we would never refer to the earlier study at all. But we have D&D players who are out there shouting that AD&D is crap, and that this is the "best" version of D&D... so it's fair game to discuss what these rules say without those lagter interpretations.  Ready?

Some parts of this are laughable. Later iterations clarified that the caster's gear and equipment are included, and limited; here, we must assume this is true, that the caster is not literally lifted out of his or her clothes and forced to rise naked upwards. That would be quite the limitation on the spell, but it if did work that way, I imagine a number of players would just roll with it.

It doesn't explain why there is a "range" associated with the spell, but again, we know from later iterations that we mean that the spell can be used to lift objects and other persons, not just the caster. Still, the spell plainly specifies the caster and does not explicitly state that anything else can be moved.

Point in fact (and that's a pun), the caster does not levitate in a "plane" but in a "line."  A plane is a two dimensional expanse, which if taken literally would mean that the caster can move both vertically and horizontally, so long as it's on that imaginary flat plane without an zed-axis. Planes have an x- and y- axis, so it's clearly the wrong word used here. That is, clear to us. To anyone who actually knew the meaning of the word, this spell write-up is a complete fuck-up. Beware the geometry major who tries to run D&D in 1974.

Just an aside: the absence of horizontal movement was imposed to limit levitation so that it wouldn't compete with fly as a 2nd-level spell. But given the actual speed with which one moves when levitating, and if all movement was forced to maintain either a pure vertical or pure horizontal motion each round — up, over, up, up, over, down and so on — would the effectiveness of the spell really be increased by that much?  Outdoors, it's 6 yards a round (60 yrds/turn). That's hardly flying.

Since a "round" isn't defined in the original set (Basic went with 10-seconds, AD&D went with 60-seconds) we don't know how fast this actually was. AD&D specified levitation at 20 ft./round. That's an amazing 4 inches a second. If we use that length of round and the White Box speed, it's 18 ft./round, or 3.6 inches per second; that's the speed of a 19th century elevator. The Basic round increases this to 21.6 in./s. An elevator in the 1950s could do 70 in./s. Modern high rises offer double that. In any case, there's just no way a speed like this can compete with the third level spell. So why the limitation at all?

But, yeah... "We've just always done it that way." Sure. That's okay.

Phantasmal Forces: The creation of vivid illusions of nearly anything the user envisions (a projected mental image so to speak). As long as the caster concentrates on the spell, the illusion will continue unless touched by some living creature, so there is no limit on duration, per se. Damage caused to viewers of a Phantasmal Force will be real if the illusion is believed to be real. Range: 24".

I'd love to know the reason way per se is underlined.

Honest, I personally have to see this spell as a sign of my "growing up" as a DM. For a long, long time, I honestly gave the benefit of the doubt to things like the above, trying to run them in my games and struggling with back and forths between players as we struggled through spells that included no mechanics at all in their design. Likewise with the "belief" attached to illusion. We can all think of examples of the "if you believe it, it's real" trope — culminating in this. For ages I blindly obeyed these incredibly not-fleshed out "rules," telling my characters to make saving throws to see if they "believed" in the dragon... until I smacked myself hard enough in the face that I was finally able to stop being this stupid.

Sorry, sorry... if you still follow this rule, then yes, of course, it's a brilliant idea. Don't believe the writer of this post, he's just an illusion.

When I ceased trying to squint hard enough to make the spell work, I abandoned it. D&D does not work nearly as well when it has to resolve epistemology as a rule set. And that's why I'm not going to deconstruct this line by line. 

Locate Object: In order for this spell to be effective it must be cast with certain knowledge of what is to be located. Thus, the exact nature, dimensions, coloring, etc. of some magical item would have to be known in order for the spell to work. Well known objects such as a flight of stairs leading upwards can be detected with this spell however. The spell gives the user the direction of the object desired but not the distance. The desired object must be within range. Range: 6" + 1"/level of the Magic-User employing the spell, i.e. a “Necromancer” has a 16" range.

The exact dimensions? Are we talking about sixteenths of an inch? 32nds? 64ths? Are we talking about the number of atoms? By colour, do you mean, "green"? Or does the object being chartreuse in colour mean that specific shade has to be mentioned? I just don't want to be accused of making a magic item too easy to find. After all, spells shouldn't be useful like that. Picture it... a necromancer capable of raising the dead must apparently pause, cast the spell and say... "I can sense the stairs — within 160 feet!" as an act of mystical genius. Meanwhile, the rest of the party is standing beside the stairs, waiting.

It's easy to feel the insecurity here — that the players might, gasp!, use the spell to solve the puzzle the DM laboured so hard upon. "You find yourself in a room with three doors... One of the doors leads to the object you seek, the other two, near certain death!"

Mage casts spell. Points. "It's that one."

In a way, it's like how cellphones spoiled so many traditional horror story structures. Early D&D was written for the same 1950s/60s landscape... and just like we had to cripple the phone so that "no signal" became the trope that enabled all tropes, there are certain logical spells in the game that spoil the standard D&D set-ups. So, likewise, we have to cripple the spell. "you can only find it if you know what you're looking for... exactly, when it really matters, but no, you don't need to know the colour of the stairs." That kind of thing.

The spell doesn't actually say what happens if the object isn't in range, but I suppose "no signal" is a fair enough equivalent. Or maybe the mage's magic 8-ball reads, "Reply hazy, try again." Presumably after moving ten feet ahead.

If I cast the spell and there's no reply, is the spell wasted? I suppose probably yes. Doesn't exactly make it a spell you want to fill a slot with. I mean, if you know the thing exists, but not the colour, the spell is no good, and if you know where the thing is already, the spell is no good, so...

Invisibility: A spell which lasts until it is broken by the user or by some outside force (remember that as in CHAINMAIL, a character cannot remain invisible and attack). It affects only the person or thing upon whom or which it is cast. Range: 24".

Raise your hand if you've read the H.G. Wells novel.

Ah, apparently, in my last post I was wrong. The spell does say it can affect a person or thing. My mistake. I'll try and do better.

Things can't attack, so they have to be detected, and to be made to reappear, the magic has to be dispelled or else it lasts forever. Presumably, the spell's effect on a person isn't the aforementioned novel, in which the character had to be naked in order to be invisible, since otherwise his clothes could be seen. And presumably no recipient will be affected long enough to go insane like Griffin does... perhaps. Since the spell is so easily cast, however, and has no time limit, there's nothing whatsoever to stop the mage from simply living this way all the time. Or at least until attacking someone. Griffin had to worry about rain outlining his body, or footprints appearing in mud or dust as he walked, or the food he ate not disappearing at once, while living in constant fear that his invisible body would be tripped over or beset upon by rats... but then, again, Griffin had to be naked to pull it off.

Point in fact, if I cast invisibility on myself three weeks ago, and only today attack someone, that means I can immediately become invisible again, right? Because I haven't used that spell slot today.

Hm. As an afterthought... can the mage make everyone in the party invisible... recasting the spell each day?

Wizard Lock: Similar to a Hold Portal, this spell lasts indefinitely. It can be opened by a Knock without breaking the spell. A Wizard Lock can be passed through without a spell of any kind by a Magic-User three levels above the one who placed the spell.

Changing the name of the spell from "portal" to "lock" creates some issues. The spell doesn't define what constitutes a "lockable" surface or whether the thing must even have a mechanism. The assumption of a door comes from players importing real-world logic and dungeon architecture into the rules, not from anything stated in the spell.

Which brings us back to the original interpretation, that the spell could be cast on any kind of barrier — a cave mouth, a gate or even an open passage. But it doesn't need to be a passage because there's no "moving through" a space as there is with hold portal. As such, feasibly, a trunk, a scabbard, a scrollcase, even a privie, virtually anything that can be closed could be effectively "locked."

How many things? Well, if cast once a day, hundreds of things a year. Once the wizard is three levels higher than at the point when the spell was put in place, everything in a wizard's home could be so locked. In fact, if you're 6th, it's worth it to have a third level mage come around every day and just lock things. You can ignore the locks, while everyone lesser than you can't. It's a great way to manage the servants.

Just imagine if this has been going on for two or three hundred years, with vast parts of the world so locked up, while the upper class of wizards are free to go as they please while everyone class has to ask some mage's permission (and knock spell) to pump water. We'd end up with a whole civilisation quietly suffocating under the accumulated locks of hundreds of wizards creating ten thousand such locks per lifetime. And when they die, having failed to undo their magic, it just lingers, waiting to be dispelled somehow.

Detect Evil: A spell to detect evil thought or intent in any creature or evilly enchanted object. Note that poison, for example, is neither good nor evil. Duration: 2 turns. Range: 6".

 "Evil" is such a fascinating negative space in the books. Evil men, evil monsters, "arenas of evil," the word proliferates like a virus through the books... but naught a single word is given regarding what it is or how it's defined. Presumably, as ordinary individuals living in a materialist world in the 1970s, we just know what it is, don't we?

I, of course, know evil when I see it. Usually, it's connected to my computer, it begins with "G", ends with "E" and there's no protection against it. I mean, at all.

In the end, evil in D&D isn’t a metaphysical principle or a moral law — it’s a referee’s ruling. The DM is the world’s conscience, the cosmos’s final arbiter, the invisible judge who decides whether a thought pings as malignant or merely inconvenient. The rules hint at theology, but what they really describe is authority. "Evil" is whatever the person behind the screen declares it to be. Of course, since the DM, unlike a priest, doesn't have to suffer the consequences or resolve personal behaviour based on what's actually said about evil, or what holy writ says, it's really a matter of extreme convenience, isn't it? Thus, the spell's detection of what you can't see pretty much relies upon a DM's interpretation that you also... can't see.

The effect of being told what's evil and what's not by an individual whose directives are "make the game happen" is that the spell becomes "Detect Narrative." By locating the evil, we learn that "the story is this way," which tells us what to do next... conveniently for the game runner.

It also has the side-effect for murder-hoboism by clarifying, clearly, that it's okay to kill all these creatures because they are, by definition, "evil." The game's logic really doesn't need this universal solvent — a game can just be a game, it doesn't need to self-justify — but most likely there were a number of early participants who viewed the game's structure and thought to themselves, "Wow, this really is just fun based on slaughtering a lot of people, isn't it?"  Which awoke a trigger in them that said, like a premature quoting of a later Schwarzeneggar film, "Yes, but they were all bad."

Then, however, the thing got turned on its head when a subculture of D&D got into the, "We're evil and we're killing the good guys" cult, which parents overheard and then, in the 80s, we were off to the races. But that's something for another day.

ESP: A spell which allows the user to detect the thoughts (if any) of whatever lurks behind doors or in the darkness. It can penetrate solid rock up to about 2' in thickness, but a thin coating of lead will prevent its penetration. Duration: 12 turns. Range: 6"

Anybody want to guess how many times "a thin coating of lead" turns up in an archeological or historical site prior to the 20th century?

In a word, never. Certainly, lead could be used — melted, beaten, or alloyed — but it couldn't be used to coat anything until electromagnetism, and then only very small objects. Plus, liquifying lead tends to produce a horrendously toxic gas, which when encountered tends to drastically shorten one's expected lifespan. The idea of anyone deliberately coating an area underground with molten lead would have been suicidal... and before someone suggests a humanoid that's immune to lead poisoning, we'd still run headlong into physics. Immunity doesn’t solve the engineering problem. Even if some hypothetical humanoid could shrug off lead’s toxicity, they’d still face the practical impossibility of producing and applying a uniform metallic coating without modern tools. You can’t just melt lead in a cauldron and slather it on like paint; it solidifies too quickly, cracks when it cools unevenly, and flakes from stone or wood. So you still could "read thoughts" through it.

On one level, I can forgive the authors for this. The 1970s didn't really offer much in the way of reliable and wide-reaching educational television or documentaries, or even magazines to any large degree, so that many people raised on the cultural imagination of the 1950s to 70s were at the mercy of pulp science leaking into comic books and Cold War pop physics. In 1969, it was possible to consider yourself an "educated" person while yet lacking any real knowledge about the emergence of electricity or magnetism, computers, space or any number of hard sciences unless you personally were a part of that field.

The post-war decades turned science into a kind of modern mysticism, where scientific literacy and scientific "aura" were hardly distinguished from one another. I grew up in that culture, just as it was breaking free from the bullshit... and my 20s and 30s were filled with "tin-foil hat" people, who resisted hard against the growing dissention that systematically made former "prophetic intellects" like Wilhelm Reich, Carl Jung and even Freud far less influential on advancing, less fuzzy thinking. Presently, when we hear people speaking about the cosmic mind or spirits speaking through "vibrations" and such, we know they're nuts... but in 1974, there were enough people who believed it that you could go on television, be interviewed and come away respected. It was a quirky time.

Thus, we have to question why "ESP" is even here. The idea was an entirely a twentieth-century idea, born from the fusion of late-Victorian spiritualism and early modern psychology. The term itself was coined by the American psychologist J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s. Rhine and his wife, Louisa, tried to study telepathy, clairvoyance and precognition under laboratory conditions, using those famous decks of Zener cards with circles, stars and wavy lines. Their experiments were meant to give psychic phenomena a scientific veneer — controlled tests, statistical analysis — though their results never held up under scrutiny.

Reading minds doesn't have a precedent in medieval folklore or theology.  The concept of one person directly accessing another’s private thoughts simply didn’t exist in that framework. That entire architecture of the mind — the notion of hidden motives, repression, unspoken thoughts — is a Freudian inheritance, or at least a modern psychological one. Medieval people certainly believed in temptation, sin, conscience and divine inspiration, but those all assumed a moral soul, not a psychological self. The soul’s secrets were between a person and God; they weren’t “buried thoughts” to be decoded by another human. A confessor didn’t read your mind; he guided you to confess what your soul already knew. The very premise of mental privacy, of thought as an internal stream with content separate from speech, is modern.

Thus it appears in D&D as a cultural hitchhiker... with "extrasensory perception" being one of those tin-foil hat belief structures. For a long time it had been a fringe obsession, turning up in films and books, especially science fiction — Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, even Beneath the Planet of the Apes. It's position in a medieval fantasy wargame is highly suspect... they couldn't even think of a suitably period-type name for it.

Yet, weirdly, I still include it in my game. I guess it sort of fits. As presented here, its effectively indistinguishable from a very strong hear noise ability. Funny that "use it to discover rumours about adventures that could be pursued" never came to anyone's mind.

That's enough.