Practical Tactical - Which Edition of D&D is Best?

I find myself attracted to some of the older versions of D&D based on the speed of play. If you are tactical combat person, I would suggest either D&D (Red Box) or the Blue rules by Holmes. I lean towards the Red Box because that was the game of my time.

I prefer a role playing style game and as a consequence gravitate to AD&D, Rules Cyclopedia or 3.5. 3.5 does what I want, but I like the quickness and expansiveness of Cyclopedia more. What I often do is mash Cyclopedia with AD&D. It's quick, sloppy and as expansive as I need, without the clunks that come with 3.5. I allow for all of skills and spells in Cyclopedia, but with all the classes and races from AD&D. In some very rare cases, I have allowed the races and classes from Cyclopedia in AD&D with zero modification. That gets weird and really isn't any better than what AD&D offers from its class choices.

Which is best? Well, the one that you play. No other opinion is possible on that. Outside of capturing the flavor of your campaign, the rule sets are flexible with enough abuse.

One of the things that changed between the editions was the numbers of players at the table. When I was playing AD&D I had as many as 12 players in the action. I never split the party unless someone said: "I need a break." If that happened, it was assumed that those players on break would be left behind and not a part of the action, no matter what. This was problematical in the respect that sometimes the second half of the party failed to progress after the first part of the party. Things would get weird.

I never developed a solution for this. What would actually happen is that half of the party would go eat or turn into DJs for a couple of hours, which meant they were observers, not players for the duration. For the most part, they were pretty good at self-moderating, meaning they knew what happened to the rest of the party, but would behave in character, as if they didn't know. They were a great bunch of people.

In any event, as you look at the newer rule sets, the number of players has dropped off from 6-9 or 6-12, down to a mere 4. I hate that because it removes some rather practical tactics from the players hands. When you are operating 12 characters, who are supported by perhaps some torchbearers, porters and a few followers and hangeroners, things slow way down.

I don't mean the game play, but the natural measure of time was slower. Things were done in Turns of 10 minutes each. Being so long, it made sense to have the characters in a marching order which changed and evolved during that 10 minutes.

The lead character would be a thief or ranger. The first wave of characters were usually fighters. The second wave were the squishy magic using types mixed with missile type characters. The last rank was often the weaker fighters. In my campaigns, the players usually did 3 blocks of 4 characters, so they could fit down a 10 foot wide hall. Many times, characters would swap out of positions to meet certain goals. It was very effective.

If you suppose just 4 characters, those parameters vanish.

Being a role playing yet tactical minded person, I would encourage my players to take the time to succeed.

One thing I could never account for but very much wanted to was "evolution" of fighting formations. Say for example, the thief ducking back between the two fighters behind him, so they could deal with a threat. My solution was to simply make sure they had the time to do such things or create scenarios where surprise prevented such things but was not immediately fatal.

When playing encounters for any edition of the game, the DM has to make sure that nearly any scenario cannot be thrown into a "party kill" condition on a single turn, or worse, a single die roll. It takes a bit of creativity to create these story points while maintaining the believe-ability of the scenario.

I recall a particular vicious combat between some hobgoblins and the party. The thief got caught trying to disable an already disabled pit trap. The hobgoblins had triggered the trap and decided to spike the lid in the closed position. They snapped off the tops of the spikes and covered the area with garbage. The thief botched all of his rolls, except a save vs Dexterity to avoid plunging to his death. He was dangling by his fingertips as the battle raged over him.

Wicked fun.

In the very next session, the magic user had exhausted most of his offensive spells early on, but the thief came up with a deliciously fiendish use for his remaining spell, Passwall.  The wizard unleashed the spell at the floor in the middle of a group of hobgoblins. Two fell in and one was left dangling by his fingertips. Turn about is fun, eh?

Beautiful.

That created some interesting DM rulings and decisions by the party. I decided that the wizard could simply end the spell immediately killing those inside the hole or he could ease it closed which would allow the hobgoblins to crawl out as the hole. The party ended up with 3 hobgoblins acting as retainers because their chieftain had a policy of not negotiating for prisoners. I had to call in reinforcements to make the last battle a reasonable challenge, but the players loved every nail biting moment.

Ah... the twists, turns and complexity from what should be a simple set of rules (but probably isn't).

If you are interested in packing the party with NPC types or give your players secondary skills, try out my home brew rules called Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners. If you desire some interesting locations for your campaign, I have two rule set agnostic map sets called Kobold's Folly and the Compass Rose Inn. As final offering, I have an old, old characters sheet for use with AD&D and Unearthed Arcana.

Timely podcast

I love  Aaron Mahnke's Lore podcast. This week, it's about Kobolds. One part history, one part myth, Lore is a wonderful journey to the the darker things. Lore also has wonderful background music by Chad Lawson.

Funny, I just released a little map about kobolds.

Truth or Tall Tale Tuesday (TOT3) - 1 in 3

Molly’s husband asked if they had a thermometer because he wasn’t feeling well.

Her initial answer was “I am feeding two babies because I am their mother, not yours. I am not the keeper of thermometers so you need to go look in the bathroom.”

Several minutes later, her husband comes back downstairs and asks, “Do we really need three thermometers?”

She turned to see him with a glass thermometer in his mouth and replies “You have one in three chance of wanting me to answer.”

Molly is now officially the keeper of thermometers in her house.

***This is a switch up for Truth or Tall Tale Tuesday. This story is both true and not true. My sister in law relayed this tale to me at a party. She told it as true but was drunk. When I asked her about it later, she had forgotten all about it and was pretty sure it was a humorous story she made up.

Writing is Art

This section is for rough works, slightly better than drafts, but still incomplete experiments. As experimental works, they should not be taken as true, or factual, even though each item does contain a bit of fact. In many cases, these experiments have been abandoned because I couldn't figure out where they were going or in some cases, what the rules or boundaries were.

Occasionally, poetry will appear. I'm sorry, I'm not good at it but sometimes it pops into my head.

Blindness

Again, this is a semi-fictional story about my time in high school. All of the named people are real, some of the facts are real, but the timeline and criticality of events has been altered to make an effective story. 

     In 10th grade, I had a homeroom teacher named Mr. Camhi. He was the 12th grade English teacher. How he drew that assignment was beyond me. He was exceptional at homeroom. In 9th grade, I had come up with a scheme to skip school that wasn’t merely good, it was unstoppable. I would come into Mr. Camhi’s class, turn in my note for the prior day’s absence and then turn in my book report for the week and write it on the chart in the corner. Each report was an extra ten points in my final grade, and there was no limit to the number of reports I could turn in.

     It didn’t take Mr. Camhi long to figure out that I skipped school as much as I read books. Back in 1987, it was not common for children to type homework, let alone use a computer. But, I did. Not only did he notice that, he also noticed that I skipped a lot of school. He did not notice that I made $10 a book report from classmates. He was merely a high school teacher, but I was a student of high schooling. I had everything figured out. Or so I thought.

     One day he commented that every book I read was science fiction and I should try something else. I couldn’t say that I was reading other things because someone would have picked up the fact that I was selling papers to fund my extracurricular activities. The funny thing was, I wasn’t really reading anything other than science fiction until Mr. Camhi called me out. Sure, I was writing book reports on the Great Gatsby, The Milagro Beanfield War, and the classic, Killing Mister Griffin for other students for weeks before Mr. Camhi caught up with me. I wish I could say I stopped, but the money was too good.

     But he did affect a change in my behavior. He gave me a book called The New Centurions. It blew me away. It is the story of a rookie cop and his African-American girlfriend, in LA during the 1960s. It could not be further from what I had been exposed to previously. I wanted to know more about this sort of American life, one so distant from me, that I had to put off my shenanigans to use the library at school.

     I lived in that room for months. I noticed every time I was in the library, Mr. Camhi was in the library, too. There was a noticeable lack of 12th grade students with him. He also carried around a bowl of salad. Usually, his appearance was preceded by a disappearance of the librarian. This man was skipping his lunch to keep tabs on a student that had stopped skipping school, but was skipping classes to read everything about racial issues from the 1960s, in the library. I didn’t mind if he didn’t. He was a very welcome person to direct my searches in the card catalog.

     As the 1960s came to an end, so did 10th grade. And with the coming of the new school year, I escaped Mr. Camhi’s watch. However, a second teacher became my keeper.

     Mrs. Cross, my Spanish teacher took on Mr. Camhi’s role. She would have me transcribe her notes and worksheets into Braille. I would spend a few minutes each day with Perkins the Brailler, before ditching out to Perkins the Restaurant. I hung out there so much that they offered me a job as dishwasher. The downside of this was, I couldn’t go there to skip school. They said as much, which was emphasized by the Amherst Police, who drove me back to school.

     I was rather diligent as her assistant. I made sure that she had not only her notes transcribed, but also had a steady stream of trustworthy students to escort her to and from classes, since I was occupied elsewhere.

     One day, she cornered me in her office. She complimented me on my transcription skills. I never made a mistake, in English or Spanish when Brailling.  She thought that was unusual since I couldn’t read phonetically. She was fascinated by how I was able to “read” items she asked me to transcribe for her class, while also struggling with simple handouts she had not let me read and memorize ahead of time. She commanded me to come to her office and transcribe those handouts. Another several months of truancy was wasted. Eventually, I wised up and transcribed the whole workbook so I could visit my new favorite daytime haunt, “Your Host”, on Main Street.

     Mrs. Cross whupped that out of me in rather short order. Since I had an unstoppable method of skipping school, I was rather frank with her as to where I spent my time. She asked me to steal her a menu, as she went there often herself. When I brazenly delivered it to her, as requested, she clucked her tongue. She asked, “Where is this from?”

     “Your Host,” I said.

     “You’re smart, but not that smart.” She held up the menu. “It hasn’t been ‘Your Host’* for quite some time. Can you tell me what is really called?”

     I was silent because I really couldn’t ¡SEE! where it what it said.

     “You have dyslexia and you don’t even know what you can’t see. Funny that you see for me and I have to see for you.”

     I wish I could say that I stopped skipping school, but I continued to be blind for a very long time.

     However, even blind, I knew that I had very special people looking out for me, seemingly, for no good reason that I could discern.

     In 2010, I returned to school and the blindness lifted. Thirty years after graduation, but not too late.

* Many of the local “Your Host” restaurants had opted to stay in business under the name “our Host”.

A (Fictional) History of Writing

This is work of fiction. It is a blending of real events, people and places. Every event occurred, but not in the order presented. Without the proper order, stories lack impact, Such is the way of the world. While much of this tale is based on my own experiences, the point of view is based on the challenges faced by a classmate of mine from Vietnam. 

For a child, the story is about victory. For future educators, it is about failure. 

     When I was in 5th grade, our school received its first computer, a TSR-80. When it turned on, it made a rattling noise and the screen filled with garbage. No one knew what to do with it. It was placed in a room, in the library, for student use. The students were given the manuals and the disks, but there was nobody to teach us what to do with it. After a while, the light was turned off and the door was locked.

     I was the odd kid at school. PS 95 was a Magnet AND an open school. Children were shipped to the Waterfront from all over the city, to classrooms that had no desks or walls. To stand out as an odd duck in that sort of environment is an accomplishment. And not a good one. I had a poor command of English as I had been brought up speaking Italian until age 5 or 6. By fifth grade, I didn’t so much speak English as nod at the correct times.

     I plucked up the courage to beg for the key to the computer room. Thankfully, the librarian lived down the street from me. She was friendly, but more importantly, familiar with my odd communication methods. It was less humiliating to plead with her than other people. A number of adults either ignore or mock me. My parents were called a lot that year.
   
     As an open school, students were instructed for the first and last few minutes of the day. All of the time in between, except for lunch and specials, was open study. Since I couldn’t read or write effectively, it wasn’t particularly hard to disappear into the computer room. I wasn’t going to produce anything anyway and I was not causing trouble, so where was the harm?

     I left the light off, locked that door and took a seat. Behind me, light streamed from the window across the floor. It was the first level playing field I had ever seen.

     I had seen the machine turn on and display garbage. Everyone saw the same garbage. We all agreed that no one knew what it meant. Except, I knew it had to mean something. So I turned the machine on.

     Nothing happened. No rattle, no lights, no garbage.

     Something wasn’t right. So I drew up my first program. If it had been in words and not in pictures, it would have looked like this:

     1. Turn on monitor.
     2. Turn on memory module.
     3. Turn on keyboard.
     4. Turn on the computer.
     5. Screen displays Garbage!

     Some of the buttons were hidden and other seemed redundant. The order of operation was key to switching on the machine. Those five instructions, button locations and their correct order took over an hour to implement. I felt drunk with success and returned to my class in IB feeling wonderful.

     Soon, I had discovered a book on programming in the library. It had the words “Don’t Panic” on the cover. It was for a completely different computer, for the wrong computer language and licensed quotes from Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was a bit baffling, but by comparing it to the computer manuals, I was able to reason out how to make the machine work. After some trial and error, I knew how to boot the computer, load disks and save information. Then I began writing code. I was going to make a game.

     It was a Herculean struggle, oddly made easier by the strange Hitchhiker’s quotes interjected into the coding instructions.

     “Don’t Panic”.

     I knew I had seen those words someplace before. They were on a record cover, in the audio bins of the library. The record would say the words. Not just the words from the coding book, but other words. A whole story, just like the Star Wars record I had at home. Except better because they made me laugh.

     It wasn’t long before I had a record player on a cart, next to the computer as I plugged away at my game. It had seemed like an easy program, but since the book had the wrong language and syntax for the computer I had, it was harder than it looked. Many days, I would leave the room with a pad of graph paper covered in code and the record. The librarian said, “You know, you can keep the record for a week. You don’t need to return it every day.”

     Yes, I did. And I would be returning, every day.

     One day, I noticed a teacher from the 7th grade poking around the computer room door. She was always mean to me. She was one of the few staff that went out of her way to make me uncomfortable. She would ask questions I couldn’t answer, which ended in with me crying and a call to my parents. I hoped she would ignore me so I could finish my game. I was very afraid she would take the computer away from me.

     However, I felt more confident than I ever had in all my life. Mr. Gallagher, my teacher, had called my parents. He brought me to the phone so I could listen in. He said that I was participating. I was talking and reading. It didn’t look like they would need to hold me back.

     Not too long after that, the mean teacher, who’s name I might never have known, pounded on the computer room door. She yelled at me, accused me of stealing her cart and the record player. Even through the door, her voice echoed and boomed in the computer room.

     The yelling brought every adult within earshot. That was good because I was done and I wanted an audience. I opened the door, returned to the computer to press a button with a flourish. The drive whirred and words popped up on the screen:

     “Game time! Pick a number, 1 to 10.”

     The record player was forgotten. The fully functional program for writing language was the item for discussion.

Poem #2 Un Truco

This was an assignment for a class on Argentina, taught in English. The requirement was to create a tango, utilizing Spanish phrases. What was interesting was that each writer (including me) was not particularly knowledgeable about Spanish anything, let alone language. 

In my mind, these four items are superimposed on each other, not independent pieces. 



Dos Bailarines, vén y va.
Media vuelta, medio rechazado.
Todavía una pareja.
Aún abrazado.
Agujas susurradas
En azul frío.
Y naranja caliente.
Cada en un gancho.
¿Castigando a quien?
Titubeo. Escucha, una pausa.
Un descanso. Mira, una parada.
Retroceden, se tuercen.
Una amague arrepentida.
Antes de abrazar de nuevo.
Resolución.

One Trick
Two dancers, come and go.
Turn about, half rejected.
Still a couple.
Still embraced.
Whispered needles.
In cold blue.
And hot orange.
Each on a hook
Punishing whoever?
I hesitate... Listen, a pause.
A break. Look, one stop.
They go back, they twist in
An apologetic feint
Before they embrace, anew
Resolution.

One Trick
Two dancers, vén y va.
Media vuelta, half rejected.
Still a parejas.
Still embraced.
Whispered needles.
In cold blue.
And hot orange.
Each on gancho.
Punishing whoever?
I hesitate... Listen, pausa.
A break. Mira, one stop.
They go back, they twist in.
An apologetic amague.
Before they embrace, anew.
Resolución.

One Trick
The cabeceo and she nods.
Slightly…
He is half rejected.
Two dancers, vén y va.
Media vuelta,
Yet, they are still a parejas.
Still embracing, in the caminata for the people.
But whispered needle are traded.
Breathed, in cold blue.
And hot orange.
Each on a gancho.
What will happen at the Cortina?
I hesitate... Listen, pausa.
A break. Mira, one stop.
They go back, they twist in.
A swirl of feet, a sway of hem.
An amague of separation for the people,
Before they embrace, anew.
An amague of a cortina,
As each goes their separate ways.
The Tango is at its end,
But is it resolución?

Poem #1

I don’t do prose, poetry, or song. 

Not even on free beer and open mic night. 

At church, people move away when I sing. 

But I’ll give it a shot.  

I can’t bring you sunlight. 

You can’t taste tasteless water. 

Or discern greenie blue from bluey green. 

We don’t have our drinks for long.

Or the fire that alcohol brings.   

You can’t hold the infinite.  

Or can you? 

The only place I have, 

Is space between my ears.

The only thing you have, 

Are the echos of what has been.

We keep words, concepts and meanings,

To quantify all of I/You am/are. 

Do we hold the infinite? 

We do, within limits,

Called words. 

Weeks of Updates!

Lately, updates have fallen by the wayside. This has happened for a couple of reasons. I have taken on some new responsibilities at work, I've begun working overnights in a group home in addition to filling in for a teacher out for training this week.

How does he know he lost anything?
His tent looks like his room.

My son has been working a camp in Wyoming county and managed to lose a whole backpack of critical supplies for his work week. Between stints at work, I've been ferrying camping supplies to him at random because he doesn't know what he lost until he needs it.

I am bone tired.

Let me give you the updates for the past couple of weeks.

In the middle of July, I put the 52 Weeks of Magic of series on hiatus. That will be back at the end of August. I have also decommissioned three other blogs and imported their data to These Old Games. I am still in the process of vetting data from that process, some posts will be completely deleted while others will be adapted for here.

To this end, should now see some new tabs above: Short Stories and Hardware. "Short Stories" is exactly as labeled, some fictional and some from real life. "Hardware" is comprised of a series of links to computer support issues that I have run across while maintaining old hardware, usually for this site.

On July 15th, I launched The Compass Rose Minisetting title on DriveThruRPG. On July 28th, I launched a similar title called Kobold's Folly. Based on the feedback I have received, I separated the maps from the books, causing me to relaunch Compass Rose to match the style of Kobold's Folly. These are ruleset agnostic titles and are merely maps and descriptions for quick plug and play into your campaign. Sort of like a travel guide for DMs.

Zero to Hero and the Character Sheet continue to do well on Drive Thru. Thank you for downloading them.

Compass Rose follows the lives of the von Landskeep family and I have always intended to expand this title and align it to D&D and AD&D. Look for that in late August. I intended Kobold's Folly to be a one shot with no expansion, but King Minwan and his sister Hermin are so interesting, it may receive the same treatment as Compass Rose. When? Not sure. Maybe September.

The final update was to the Tek Tab, with new data for July being added.

Upcoming changes to website are based off of my experience from this round of updates. Right now, the Gemstone IV tab, Maps tab and Pregenerated characters are all static pages. It is more logical to break them down by subject and recreate them as individual post. The tab feature can pull up a chronological list of posts by subject. This makes far more sense, as my web stats do not include static pages.

One last item is, it has recently come to my attention that I will be going to Disney in November.

Thank you for being so patience with all of these updates and changes as I get everything in order to present more content to all of you. I couldn't and wouldn't do it without you.

The Tek - July 2019 edition

As promised, here are the webstats and download stats for DriveThruRPG for the month of July. I have begun collecting data in Google Analytics, and if possible I will start proving that information in September, 2019 for August.

July 2019: 
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 10
Compass Rose Inn Minisetting - 90
Kobold Folly Minisetting - 43
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 9

Webstats July 2019 - 2294

June 2019: 
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 48
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 8

Webstats June 2019 - 1380

May 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 6

Webstats May 2019 - 1965

April 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 2

Webstats May 2019 - 3011

March 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 12

Webstats May 2019 - 1838

Febuary 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 4

Webstats May 2019 - 1423

January 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 12

Webstats May 2019 - 2792

Keep in mind, these are raw stats from the reports I have available. While the DriveThruRPG stats are rock solid, the webstats are coming from the report that Blogger provides. I am sure there is some crap in there that shouldn't be. I am working to refine these numbers by using Google Analytics going forward.

Books are not sales, they are downloads only. My sales rate for the lifetime of all products is an averaged 6.5% (as of today, 7.8%) of all downloads. This is owing to the fact that I offer PWYW and specifically told people not to pay for the character sheet or the Compass Rose Inn maps in the product description. It hurts sales, but I am 100% certain that the downloader got what they needed.

In the future, I plan to move away from the PWYW model for a lot of titles, but only once I feel confident that the production quality is high enough to support it. You can click the link in the upper left (THE TEK) for the latest update.

The Tek

Why 'o why?

When I was a kid, we lived near a pharmacy called The Tek. The store is long gone, I have no idea why it was called that, but it was great little shop with all kinds of books, medicine and tchotchkes for sale.

Like every normal parent on planet Earth, my parents didn't have enough for every wish and desire. But they did their damned best.

One day, my dad took me to The Tek for something and told me flat out, "I don't have any extra money to get you anything." When he picked up his script or whatever he was buying, he found me looking at a book called: What is Dungeons and Dragons by John Butterfield, Philip Parker and David Honigmann.

As I put it back on the shelf to leave, my dad said, "Oh, a book. I have money for a book. As long as you read it."

Fast forward 20, 30 maybe even 35 years, I remember that lesson. Knowledge is worth more than money. I spend time making sure my kids read, just as my parents did for me. When they couldn't read, I read for them. When they don't have time or money to read, I make sure I close those gaps so they can.

But reading isn't the point of this post. It's about THE TECH. Sometimes, I wonder where I stand in the whole scheme of things. I have no idea. Do I sell a lot of books? Don't know. Do a lot of people read my blog? What is "a lot"? No idea.

To that end, I have decided to post my web stats and copies download from DriveThruRPG stats. Why? Because information is power and perhaps you too are wonder where you are at. This isn't a bid for transparency, I love the fact that someone reads my stuff, simply for the joy of it.

So, here are the year to to date states for my site and books.

July 2019: 
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 10
Compass Rose Inn Minisetting - 90
Kobold Folly Minisetting - 43
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 9

Webstats July 2019 - 2294

June 2019: 
AD&D Character Sheet For Use with Unearthed Arcana - 48
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 8

Webstats June 2019 - 1380

May 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 6

Webstats May 2019 - 1965

April 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 2

Webstats May 2019 - 3011

March 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 12

Webstats May 2019 - 1838

Febuary 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 4

Webstats May 2019 - 1423

January 2019: 
Zero to Hero: Uncommon Commoners - 12

Webstats May 2019 - 2792

Keep in mind, these are raw stats from the reports I have available. While the DriveThruRPG stats are rock solid, the webstats are coming from the report that Blogger provides. I am sure there is some crap in there that shouldn't be. I am working to refine these numbers by using Google Analytics going forward.

Books are not sales, they are downloads only. My sales rate for the lifetime of all products is an averaged 6.5% (as of today, 7.8%) of all downloads. This is owing to the fact that I offer PWYW and specifically told people not to pay for the character sheet or the Compass Rose Inn maps in the product description. It hurts sales, but I am 100% certain that the downloader got what they needed.

In the future, I plan to move away from the PWYW model for a lot of titles, but only once I feel confident that the production quality is high enough to support it. You can click the link in the upper left (THE TEK) for the latest update.

The Kobold Warren Folly

Update - This post has been expanded into a short book with 4 maps on DriveThruRPG. It's priced at PWYW, with a suggested price of $1.99.  

Like the Compass Rose Inn Mini-Setting, this set of maps and descriptions are rule set agnostic. 

And now on to the original post from my birthday, Jan. 17th, 2016. 

This map is of a folly in the southwest of Potamus Bay. Who built the folly is lost to time. There is a larger ruin closer to the Lake, but it isn't as well preserved or interesting as the folly.

The tale of the folly's preservation is very odd and owes its history to the river. The river is subject seasonal flooding and one of those floods brought the kobold's to the folly.

The kobold's had their own underground village, which made them very happy. They stole the best food, killed the prettiest animals and had wild political intrigues that often ended in bloodshed. One day, the ruling clan pushed the wrong buttons and were tossed in prison to await their doom, as soon as the method could be decided.

A chance rainstorm freed the rulers, but washed them deep into the cave system. The village rejoiced at the apparent deaths. They were very kobolds happy, indeed. The ruling clan was washed away into the cavern system under the folly. They were able to squeeze and claw their way into the basement of the structure. The family rejoiced when they discovered the ring of pear and apple trees, the fresh water and rabbits.

There are no furnishing, no details inside the Folly.
The kobolds keep the interior bare.
The ring of trees continues, but is obscured by the
upper two levels. 

Over the years, they have set themselves up a kings and queens of the folly. They do not understand the principle of a folly, they believe that human or elven kings hold court in an empty building. The six rulers have set themselves up as the High, Middle and Low Kings and Queens. They receive guests through the windows, as there are no doors except trapdoors between the levels. They keep the folly up, but they do not live in it. They live below in finely finished chambers. Recently, they have hung curtains in all of the windows of the folly, purple, yellow and red. 

The family plans on enlarging the chambers, but for now they are satisfied.

The lowest level is almost all natural, only the eastern side has any finished features. The western side is often flooded with fresh water and sometimes contains fish.

Folly Details:
One Square equals 5 feet.
Height: 45 feet.
Depth: 75 feet below ground, as near as anyone can tell.
Population: 17 adults, 33 children.