[OSSR]DSA 1st Edition Advanced Rules

[Rawbeard]

oh, you poor, poor reasonable person...

[Rasumichin]

oh, you poor, poor reasonable person...

DSA is my Raskolnikov. In case that reasonable was referring not to my nick, but to Longes' assumption that DSA would let you play as anything, see below.

The final part/chapter of the book

Wait, what? Did I miss something? Where are the classes? Are those all the playable races?

This box set is just an add-on to the basic rules. It can't be played on its own and doesn't replace the existing rules, but supplements them. It has two booklets: the one i've reviewed so far contains setting description and monsters, the second one has the rules for the new classes, new spells, new weapons, a failed attempt to introduce a skill system and optional combat rules for movement, attacks of opportunity, feinting and crits. There's also a few artifacts and fiddly bits like rules for gangrene that i'm pretty sure nobody ever used. Except for the skill system and the rules for clerics, almost all of this (including the rules for gangrene) got pasted into 2nd and partially even 3rd edition.

Playable races in DSA1 include humans, elfs and dwarfs. The expanded rules we're talking about here only add wood elfs. All the other species are NPC only at that point. We don't even get a full range of stats for them, just the stuff that's deemed directly relevant to combat. If your lizardman adventurer NPC has to roll for charisma, or if you want to check if a maru mercenary or ork bandit falls for a bluff, you have to pull the numbers for that out of your ass.

DSA2 at least gives you full statlines for the sapient NPC species. It also adds snow elfs and starts calling the run-of-the-mill elfs riparian elfs, because these are suddenly said to live in cool stilt houses on flooded river banks. There's a campaign where dark elfs and desert elfs and three flavors of high elfs get introduced, but they remain NPC only forever because the campaign immediately makes all of these fuck off to a parallel dimension. Except for the dark elfs, who are always chaotic evil with no Drizzt in sight and are also forever the bitch of that naked elf chick i posted upthread.
DSA2 also has a rip-off of the gully dwarfs from Dragonlance hidden in the Orkland box set, but these are also NPC only and most of them are ork slaves anyway.

DSA3 finally gives you half elfs and splits dwarfs up into anvil dwarfs (standard variety with beer and axes), hill dwarfs (as a stand-in for halflings), diamond dwarfs (as a stand-in for trickster gnomes) and arch dwarfs (as a stand-in for tinker gnomes and orthodox jews). Surprisingly, you are allowed to actually play these. All of this happens in their own elf & dwarf box set, which shows strong tendencies of 1990s elven master race bias. After having been around for more than a decade, the game has finally found an incredibly roundabout way of giving players as many races to play as the AD&D core rules.

DSA4 adds rules for lizardfolk (in 3 different flavors), orks, goblins and half orks as playable species, more than 20 years after these first showed up in the setting. To make up for that, lizardfolk get their own magical tradition of crystallomancy, which does extremely complicated and exploitable stuff with crystals and gemstones. At least i've heard it's exploitable, i never got around to wrapping my head around the full 400 pages of basic DSA4 arcane magic rules.
DSA4 also introduces feral barbarian dwarfs because we didn't have enough dwarf varieties yet. I don't know if they're a PC species. They just sit around in caves and don't really do much.

I don't know what will be playable in DSA5 - the core rulebook only includes elfs, dwarfs and half elfs, but i assume that expansions will include the rest of the previously playable species and may introduce new ones. The setting includes various sapient species that haven't been mentioned yet (neanderthalians, mermen, pocket-sized dragons, two varieties of vampires, kobolds and various other forms of fey, schrats, grolms etc.), but the authors are very reluctant to introduce them because there's players who insist that even elfs may be too exotic to be played "correctly" by inexperienced players and the sensibilities of these people are sadly taken very seriously by the developers.

[Rasumichin]

Creatures (cont.)

After the big cats, we get birds of prey because Raubvögel come right after Raubkatzen in German. No rules for falconry yet, you'll have to wait one more edition until you get to be a not-Arabian nobleman with his pet falcon and pet cheetah and pet black people waving a refreshing breeze at you with ostrich feathers. Well, you're only gonna have those things if you roll lucky on the wealth chart. Have to wait till 4th edition until you can just decide to play as nobility and pay points for that.

Then we get giant apes. Who are four meters tall and possess some degree of sapience. The more docile females are said to sometimes be held at courts to entertain the nobles. They never made anything out of that, in spite of Queen Kong having a tea party with the Duke of Almada or the Caliph would be verifyably awesome. Giant apes also hit hard as fuck, 3d6+2 is pretty good melee damage even by the higher standards of later editions. Totally underrated critter.

We've already heard about the giant amoeba and how weird it is that Aventurians know what an amoeba is. Later ingame texts reveal that Aventurians believe these things develop out of dead people's snot. Besides such details, this is your average D&D ooze with potential loot floating in it - because there's no loot tables here, that only happens if your MC feels like it, though.

The giant stag beetle is another creature that became available as a pet in later editions. You can't teach them any tricks, dandies just like to walk them on a leash for shits and giggles (nobody cares that dandies are ahistorical in this setting, which i'm totally fine with). In this edition, we just get told that they're sometimes raised in stables for their meat, because excruciating descriptions of exotic feasts are always around the corner in this game. Giant stag beetles are about as big as a pony, so that's gonna be a big bug feast. These creatures later got renamed great schröters after one of the authors learned a cool, outdated word for stag beetle.

The last "giant" animal is the giant caiman. It's about as big as a saltwater crocodile, has pretty few hit points for something that big and lacks rules for biting down really hard and not letting go of you while doing that death roll thing that crocodiles usually pull off. We still get told that these things are dangerous and should mostly be used to set the mood and that you can chase them away with arrows n shit. A lot of the monster descriptions contain warnings like that. Even back in 1st edition, DSA was rarely out to kill people oldschool D&D style. To give you more reptiles to throw at your players, we get rattlesnakes, the nettle viper and a constrictor snake that's huge even by anaconda standards. It has rules for constricting and choking you, and there's rules to wind yourself out of its grip, but nothing for other Pcs trying to get that thing off you except by beating it to death.

After all these reptiles, we're off to the icy North with the Schneelaurer. I'm not sure how to translate that, i guess snow lurker fits best. It's a badger-like animal that does more damage the more you hurt it. It only has 10 hit points, though, and zero points of armor, so that only comes into play if you're stupid enough to poke it with a dagger instead of blasting it with a combat spell. In later editions, it gets revealed that this a daimonid (animal/demon chimera) created by evil elf chick Pardona in one of her many efforts to fuck with the snow elfs by sending monsters at them. I'd say her frost dragons worked better at that because any snow elf can just zap that thing with a FULMINICTUS spell.


Here's fan art of a snow lurker that looks much more badass than the original and takes into account that it's partly demonic.

The sphinx is one of those creatures who supposedly don't need stats. Because they don't fight and don't get fought. Ok, whatever. These are a bit smaller than sphinx of Gizah, but still colossal. We get told that they also have bare breasts, which makes me wonder if we shouldn't at least have gotten the stats needed to resist seduction attempts, because this is DSA and there's gonna be at least one player trying to fuck everything. Well, probably not the spiders and scorpions and giant leeches coming up next. At least i hope so.
While we're at leeches, let's just skip a few monsters and get straight to vampires.


Sadly not that kind of vampire.

DSA didn't really care much about vampires at this point. The writeup they get here is pretty bland. The stats inform us that they are incredibly cowardly, even though they hit quite hard and have an outstandingly good attack stat compared to most of the other monsters here. They also regenrate completely if you drop them to zero hit points unless you stake them afterwards. Sunlight is insta-kill and they seem to be of the Anne Rice kind in that they avoid drinking from the dead. Garlic and crosses don't bother them at all and other vampiric powers and weaknesses aren't mentioned at all.
All of that got retconned later. Sometime in 3rd edition, somebody decided that the game could do more than that with vampires and came up with the idea of tying them more deeply to DSA cosmology. So they got declared creatures of the Nameless God, one of the many lolevil entities of the setting, who uses them to collect sykarian (life energy) to one day grow his dismembered body back or whatever. The Twelfgods don't like that idea, as they're the ones who dismembered the Nameless God in the first place to prevent him from destroying the world because the world is where their followers keep all their stuff. So they cursed vampires and now every vampire has weaknesses tied to specific gods. If you get cursed by Praios (which you will 95% of the time because Praios is a watchful motherfucker), you get hurt by sunlight. If you get cursed by Efferd, the sea god, you can't cross running water. If you get cursed by Travia, goddess of perfect housekeeping, you have to sleep in soil from your home region and can't enter a home without being invited and so on. This system also means that revamped DSA vampires may have really weird vulnerabilities, such as being hurt super badly from honorable combat because they're cursed by crusader goddess Rondra or getting killed by the embrace of a former lover because they get cursed by Rahja, goddess of sexytimes. I can't recall what happens to them if they get cursed by the gods of hunting or youth or anarcho-capitalism and that's probably for the better. On top of that, every Twelfgod has tons of really minor stuff that can hurt vampires, too, because every god has a holy tree and a holy flower and a holy gem designated to them, and these all work against a vampire with the appropriate curse. So you can hurt most Aventurian vampires really badly with sandelwood and amber and slapping them with sunflowers because Praios likes all of that stuff a lot. It always feels a bit jarring because it's such a severe case of "our vampires are different", but it fits into the setting in a weird way and i honestly like it better than this old writeup that just seems generic.
Oh, because we also need romantic Anne Rice vampires, a whitewashed kind of vampires who aren't life force harvesters for the Nameless God also get introduced at some point. They're agents of Boron, the perky goth god of death and amnesia haze, and therefore hang out in Al'Anfa a lot, where they get their own vampire grotto under a volcano. I'm not quite sure why we need those vampires, too. It's not as if you could play as one. Although that should totally be a thing if you ask me.

I don't know how heavily they've reworked werewolfs over the years. There's one who's on the ruling council in Transysillia, which is about as close to Transylvania as you'd guess from the name, but there's not much besides that. Thorwalians know friendly and playful wereseals, but these are a more recent addition.
The werewolf described here is the usual infectious variety. One bite and you're hosed. One hit with a silver weapon and he's hosed. However, the rules do not tell you how being a werewolf fucks you over - yes, you turn into crinos form at full moon, but the text doesn't say if that makes you go crazy and kill everybody or whatever. Just that over time, you get more hairy even if not in wolf mode and your eyes turn yellow. MC is also warned that he should always give a hint to the players when a werewolf shows up because he's much more dangerous than a normal wolf and it would be unfair if the players confuse these two. Given that these werewolfs look like wolfmen or manwolfs and not at all like normal wolfs, i would have assumed that's kinda superfluous.
They honestly could have done more with that even back then. I mean, they've already got the basics for all those Nivesian wolf myths written down even at this point. The setting's got at least three different moon gods even if we're not counting the Nivesian sky wolfs. There could be more to lycanthropy in DSA. Hell, they could even be anarcho-capitalists working for Phex, as that guy's a moon god, too. I have to stop posting for now before i make bad Wolf of Wall Street puns.

[Blicero]

The way you describe it, most DSA adventures were about advancing the metaplot, and they did so in a heavily railroaded way. Does the standard DSA group a lot of pay attention to that sort of thing, or is it not particularly relevant to the average game?

[Daniel]

There has been plenty of metaplot in DSA, but I think the blatant railroading in the official modules is a bigger negative issue if you are an unsuspecting player. It also predates any metaplot issues DSA has. Prior to the boxed set currently under review, there was no real metaplot, but there was massive railroading. I know that in the first 10 or, so modules there are at least 3 in which the stated objective at the start is unattainable and getting out alife is the only goal.

[Rasumichin]

The way you describe it, most DSA adventures were about advancing the metaplot, and they did so in a heavily railroaded way.

Traditionally, yes. The current publisher, Ulisses Spiele, is putting more emphasis on things like collaborative storytelling, alternate endings, sandbox gaming etc. because a very vocal group of people ranted a lot about the railroading excesses of classic DSA adventures on the Ulisses forums and Ulisses actually cares about communicating with the fan base. They made a Pathfinder-style open beta for the new edition and everything.
But the metaplot is still a core feature of DSA. They've got an ingame newspaper that's been in print since the 1980s where you can read up on the latest border skirmishes and royal weddings and whatnot. And the MC part of the more recent regional sourcebooks marks which plot hooks may be used later by the developers and which ones you can most likely use without worrying that it'll contradict later publications.
And the railroading in earlier adventures was awful. It got toned down a bit in 4th edition, but that was far outweighed by the fact that even most of the authors didn't fully understand the rules and where not aware that a competent mage can remotely heal an important NPC who's heart has just been ripped out, or that any murder mystery plot in that edition immediately crumbles upon contact with divine oaths, or that the stats for their NPCs just don't mean what they think they mean.

Does the standard DSA group a lot of pay attention to that sort of thing, or is it not particularly relevant to the average game?

That's hard to generalize because DSA has such a huge player base in Germany. This is German D&D as far as impact is concerned. DSA is synonymous with tabletop RPGs over here. Shadowrun is a distant second, although it's hard to find a German SR player who didn't play DSA at some point. Same for the more niche games like WoD, CoC or D&D.
And part of the difficulty of formulating design goals for this game has always been the wide variety of approaches people took towards it. There's people who demand balance above all else, people who demand simulation above all else and don't care if some options are mechanically superior. There's casual gamers as well as rules lawyers and Aventuria scholars who know more about DSA history than real world history. There's people who want a sandbox and people who want a pseudo-interactive anthology.
Which means that there's groups who play this as a tongue in cheek dungeon crawl, groups who play this as WoD-style navel gazing and a very sizeable number of groups who avidly follow the metaplot. And a sizeable number of ex-players who still buy the books out of nostalgia and just read them without actually using them. The latter two groups are particularly lucrative target demographics, as they love reprints of DSA2 campaigns and special editions in faux leather and gold lettering and dice cups embossed with the symbol of Phex and cookbooks with recipes for kraken newt in cream sauce. These are the people you make money off.
The groups who don't follow the metaplot may not have bought a new book since the last box sets for 3rd edition came out in the early 2000s. They've got their own campaigns that just took on a life of their own and don't need new products. I think a lot of established games face that situation: If you're an imaginative, productive group, you don't really need more material after a certain point. You can campaign for the rest of your life with the stuff you've bought as a teenager and if you get bored, you may as well try a different system for a while instead of buying a new edition that kills off the NPCs who always invite your character to the big garden party at their summer residence.

So while there's plenty of gamers who don't care what's officially going on in Aventuria right now, they don't matter much if you're the publisher. And even most of the groups who don't slavishly follow the metaplot will adapt a lot of it to their own campaign. The big draw of DSA has always been the setting, not in spite of, but because of the blatant clichés and plagiarism. It's something people can immediately relate and grow attached to, and subjecting it to constant development gets a lot of people hooked for real.

[Daniel]

The big draw of DSA has always been the setting, not in spite of, but because of the blatant clichés and plagiarism. It's something people can immediately relate and grow attached to

This one of the reasons DSA will always have a special place in my heart. The basics are very simple and unintimidating and it has a remarkable amount of depth if you want to expand.

[Rasumichin]

I think the writing plays a huge part here as well, at least for the second and third edition that recruited the biggest part of the player base. It's not quite there yet in this box set, you can tell that Kiesow is still trying to find his own writing style and hasn't fully developed his ingame voice yet, but that changed over the next couple of years.
They still reprint 2nd edition ingame texts in current sourcebooks. Simply because they do such a great job at emulating ancient varieties of German and setting the mood. We're not talking renfair speech here, a lot of the authors back then where liberal arts majors or dropouts who actually read plenty of historic German texts in university. So they where quite capable of writing short 1-3 paragraph pieces of intro fiction that sounded extremely authentic and even differentiated between a recent text and one that's 300 years old and one that's 800 years old ingame just by the writing style. And they managed to do this in a way that's still immediately understandable to modern readers. And when you look at sourcebooks like the 4th edition writeup of the Tulamidians, there's parts that have probably been written by somebody who's a history buff who routinely churns out very visceral texts about the victory parades in the Scorpion Wars where the mogul's chimeras drag the chained idols of defeated city states through the streets.

I think that's also one of the major hurdles of translating this stuff. You basically need somebody who is halfway familiar with German literature from Baroque to Romanticism and can fluently write Elizabethan English and gothic prose to properly transport the seminal texts of this game. If you can't make your translation sound as if Shakespeare, Lord Byron and Bram Stoker dropped you some notes on Aventuria, you're foregoing a major part of DSA's appeal. And paying for that kind of competency is a pretty big risk when you want to bring a game with huge barriers to entry to the saturated American RPG market.

[shlominus]

The big draw of DSA has always been the setting, not in spite of, but because of the blatant clichés and plagiarism. It's something people can immediately relate and grow attached to

This one of the reasons DSA will always have a special place in my heart. The basics are very simple and unintimidating and it has a remarkable amount of depth if you want to expand.

yeah, for me too.

reading this is great fun, cause the basic game was my first ever roleplaying game, all those years ago.

[Rasumichin]

Now that we're done with the booklet about the setting, let's take a look at the crunchy bits.

The Book of Rules II

While the setting booklet in this box set was mostly written by Ulrich Kiesow, the rules are brought to you by Werner Fuchs. He stopped writing for DSA at the tail end of first edition and focussed more on importing and translating science fiction novels. His love for science fiction shows up in some of his later DSA adventures, which take a turn towards the genre of planetary romance/sword and planet. If he had stayed with Schmidt Spiele, DSA may well have developed into something like Masters of the Universe on LSD and Praios may have turned out to be the commander of spaceship Alveran. But none of that shows up in these rules, and the spaceships and stargates in some of the DSA1 adventures later all got retconned and explained away as fever dreams and stuff like that. Which is a pity if you ask me.
The illustrations in this book are by Jochen Furtmann, who to my knowledge never worked for DSA again. The game's visual aesthetic was largely defined by Ina Kramer, the metal as fuck mustachioed cover artworks of Ugurcan Yüce and the beautiful black and white pieces by Horus.




This is what DSA2 looked like. They still reprint a lot of these images, because they rule.

According to Horus' website, he drew all that stuff based on directions that Ulrich Kiesow gave him over the telephone and he doesn't even know which books they showed up in. But they're always spot-on and fit the scenes or NPCs they're describing perfectly.
But i'm digressing here, as all of these pics come several years later. So let's take a look at the introduction to the Book of Rules II.

Introduction

The introduction informs us that the basic rules are "no heavyweight folio" but an "easily digestible introduction." Which is true, but this booklet isn't exactly rules-heavy, either - particularly not by the standards of the mid 1980s when you already had Runequest and Rolemaster and stuff like that. Like the setting booklet, it's 64 stapled black and white pages with loads of white space and a rather large font size.
It's worth mentioning that the introduction declares these rules enable adventures "under the open sky" - previous DSA adventures railroaded you straight into the dungeon and ended with you getting out of the dungeon. You didn't really spent any time above ground. The introduction also makes claims about realism and adding more details and you clearly see that this is a reaction to criticism from players who where familiar with other RPGs and looked down on DSA for being rules-light. Looking at DSA4, these people should have been careful with what they wished for.

The next page gives us an overview of time measurements (1 combat turn = 2 seconds, 1 game turn = 5 Minutes, 1 day = 24 hours), the dice used (d6 and d 20) and a list of all the abbreviations that the game uses.
As this is DSA1, that all fits on half a generously layouted page. I don't think that would work today.

Part I: New Hero Types

DSA 1-3 called its classes (and its races that worked as classes) Heldentypen, which translates to hero types. Even today, player characters are as often as not adressed as heroes, in spite of there being tons of options to play as edgy anti-heroes or completely unheroic normal peasants.
The basic rules had the hero types adventurer, fighter, dwarf, elf and wizard. The expanded rules bring us the druid, wood elf, 9 types of clerics in spite of there being 12 gods and the Streuner, which is a rogue and whose name could be translated as rover or roamer or stray. I'll go with rover.


The logo of the DSA thieves' guild.

The druid is a caster who mostly uses mind control spells. DSA druids later deveoped mostly into nature-worshipping elementalists, but they've still got a sub-tradition that lives in the cities, studies human nature and fucks with your head and that's probably all a leftover from this writeup.
Druids are described as mysterious and secretive and like real-life ancient druids, they do not write their knowledge down, but pass it on orally and memorize it. We get two paragraphs about their possible motivations to go adventuring, which boil down to lol i dunno.
If your stats are high enough to qualify as a druid (Courage and Intelligence 13, which is the max you can have at chargen), you can become a druid even later in the game. That got retconned the fuck out of the game in the next edition because DSA is one of those games where you're either born with magic or you can go fuck yourself.
Your charisma is capped at 10 and your social skills at 50% because your druid is supposed to be an antisocial, unkempt hermit. We get told that this will mostly be a problem when you're haggling with merchants, because this is DSA1 and social interaction is something that mostly happens when you buy stuff to kill things with. Which you're not going to do as a druid, as you can't use metal weapons and armor. The latter part got kept as a central part of DSA druidism.

Wood elfs are next. We get to hear how mysterious it is that some of them have started leaving their native forests and still don't get an explanation for this. Wood elfs are mostly differentiated from other elfs by their different spell selection, which i'll get to later in the spell chapter. They get 25 hit points like normal elfs and 30 spell points instead of 25. Maybe to compensate for their lack of a motivation to go on adventures.

After this, we get a writeup of the rover. DSA carefully avoided to call the class thief even though that's usually what they are and DSA2 even recommended stealing your teammate's stuff because that's supposed to be expert level roleplaying. We don't get that kind of awful advice here and get told that rovers are slackers who go for road trips and live off "their wits and dexterity" instead of slaving away at a "honorable" job, whatever that means. Their mechanical advantage is that they can raise skill ranks easier and faster and fuck you for wanting sneak attacks.
We'll see later in the skill chapter how that turns out for them. Like the druid and the fighter from the basic rules, rover is a hero type you can pick later in the game if your stats are high enough (in this case, Courage and Dexterity 13). The only people playing as the "adventurer" hero type are those who rolled real badly for their stats and now have to wait till they can switch to one of the hero types that are just plain better. There's no word about switching back from one type to the other (say, from rover to druid or vice versa) and no multiclassing multiherotyping. And nothing telling us what happens when an elf or wood elf decides to become a rover for more skill points.

The final addition are the clerics. I'll keep calling them clerics because people on here will be more familiar with D&D terms, but they're actually called Geweihte in DSA, which means sanctified ones. Unlike the other hero types, they get given actual motivations for going on adventures instead of staying in their temples. You can get sanctified later in the game if your charisma and intelligence are at least 13, unless you're an elf or wood elf, because these have their own gods, which we don't get to hear anything about (it later turns out that DSA elfs are pissed at their gods and have stopped worshipping them). If you're a dwarf, you should probably become a cleric of the dwarven god Ingerimm who gets worshipped by human craftsmen as well. If you want to be a cleric of another god, you get one chance to roll a d20 and if it doesn't turn up 19 or 20, Rondra doesn't want your stubby halfer ass to worship her.
DSA clerics cast their spells with a ressource called karma points, and you start with only 15 of them, which isn't much. All DSA casting is non-Vancian and works by spending points instead of prepared spell slots. In this edition, you get karma points back by proselytizing. Good luck doing that in adventures where you mostly run into ogres, undead and demons. At least karma points refresh between adventures. Unlike later editions, the miracles you work as a cleric are direct divine intervention instead of something you produce yourself with your allotment of karma points. So they have a chance of failure that arcane spells don't have. To fuck with you some more, you also lose all your karma points for the rest of the adventure if you violate the tennets of your faith. Like a lot of the other stuff in this section, this gets retconned later, because these gods aren't omniscient and are too buys with other stuff to watch each and every one of their clerics all the time.
After reading all this, you probably just want to play a wizard or a wood elf. but you still get a description of the gods and the churches that's actually more informative than the chapter on religion in the setting book.

Praios is the head of the pantheon. His aspects are sun and law and his cult is highly hierarchical, headed by the Herald of Light who resides in the Middenrealm's capital Gareth. Praios supposedly hates magic (he actually doesn't give a damn and it's only his clerics being intolerant dicks, but that only gets revealed in much later editions). They're also not allowed to hide themselves, lie or bow to any authority but the church. Just in case this doesn't sound disruptive enough for you, Praiotes are also described as pompous, boastful douches who like to show off by blasting their enemies with divine rays of light.

Praios knows how to handle this shit.

Rondra is the goddess of war and thunderstorms. Her temples are more like fortresses and actually get used as the last holdouts of a city in times of a siege. Her clerics like to go on crusades and slay infidels. In more recent editions, that's more like going on crusades and becoming a martyr. Rondrians have a long and storied tradition of dying honorably. They get dropped to zero karma points if they refuse a challenge. Because that isn't restrictive enough somehow, later editions made up all kinds of inane shit about them hating crossbows, ambushes, combat magic, teaming up against strong enemies, kicking people in the balls and anything else that's effective in a battle.

Efferd is the god of water, wind and seafaring. His temples are mostly found in port towns and his clerics have a problem with fire. In this edition, this means that they can't carry torches or lanterns. In later editions, that means they eat sushi and get special glowy stones that get washed up on the shore.

Travia clerics are said not to go on adventures. Her aspects are hearthfire, hospitality and matrimonial fidelity and her temples give food and shelter to the poor. Or to people on the run, which is described as both something that can be used by the players or their adversaries.

Boron is the god of death and sleep. The cult is torn on whether or not the clergy should install a theocratic regime that encourages smoking opium and jumping off cliffs. That schism within the church is not yet written up here, so his priests just get confined to places outside of the city walls where they take care of burying the dead. If you play a Boroni in this edition, you're only allowed to speak once per game session. Like many things in this chapter, that got redacted and now the church has developed a special school of rethorics that focusses on snarky one-liners to maintain an appreciable amount of Boron-pleasing silence.

Hesinde's aspects are scholarship, alchemy, art and magic. In this edition, that makes her clerics loot artifacts like crazy to lock them up in the temples. In later editions, it means you go around exploring and write a journal about it to add it to the churche's vast archives.

Firun is the god of hunting and winter. His clerics dress like mint bonbon furries and are so grumpy that there's Aventurian proverbs about not making such a Firun face. To drive that point home, you're not allowed to laugh when you play one. No, not your character. You, the player. But you're allowed to smile once in a while.

Tsa is the goddess of youth and rebirth. Her clerics are pacifists and are not allowed to take a life, but they are the only ones who get to resurrect you if you get chopped up by orks.

Phex is the trickster god. He's also really into theft and making money and his clerics are not allowed to do anything without getting something in exchange and have to take advantage of every opportunity for enrichment. Like many things, that got toned down a bit, but other weirdness got added in return. For example, his church has a hidden branch whose members are all in deep cover and can't show you they're clerics.



Peraine is the goddess of agriculture and healing. Her clerics aren't playable in this edition, because then you'd be able to play as a healer cleric who isn't a pacifist. In stark contrast to that, DSA5 really wants you to give a fuck about Peraine priests and presents them as the default band aid for the group.

Ingerimm is the god of dwarfs, craftsmanship, ore and fire (maybe they should add beer and beards to that list to add more redundancy). Most dwarfs don't even recognize other gods or only view them as minor deities. Except for the anvil dwarfs, who are also really into Rondra and view her as Ingerimm's wife and he constantly invents new and improved crossbows for her, probably to troll Rondrian players. Ingerimm clerics are not allowed to extinguish fires. No, not even when your house is burning down or when you have to put out that lantern that they always carry around with them because the bad guys would see you sneaking up on them. And that's all still official. I don't know how dwarven cities haven't all burned down by now.

The final deity in this section is Rahja. She's the goddess of steaming hot sex and good wine and ecstasy. You're not allowed to play as one of her clerics because they stay in their temples all the time to get drunk and sleep with the visitors to convert them to the cause of sexytimes. Of course, Rahja clerics got made available as player characters in 2nd edition because DSA players are all constantly horny. To make this all seem less like a desperate wank fantasy, even later editions added that a lot of her priests do other things besides fucking, such as making wine, writing poetry and other stuff you don't care about when you visit a Rahja temple.
Oh, these temples usually look like giant tits or genitals carved out of pink marble. I guess their clerics are all really into oglaf.

[schpeelah]

evil elf chick Pardona

The Apologizing Sorceress.

DSA 1-3 called its classes (and its races that worked as classes) Heldentypen, which translates to hero types. Even today, player characters are as often as not adressed as heroes, in spite of there being tons of options to play as edgy anti-heroes or completely unheroic normal peasants.

Does this have any cultural /linguistic roots or is this a DSA quirk? Here in Poland protagonists are always referred to as heroes, no matter how evil, at least in common parlance.

The druid is a caster who mostly uses mind control spells.

Well that's unexpected. There did that come from?

For example, his church has a hidden branch whose members are all in deep cover and can't show you they're clerics.

But are they called The Black Hand?

[shlominus]

I guess their clerics are all really into oglaf.

who isn't?!

[Rasumichin]

DSA 1-3 called its classes (and its races that worked as classes) Heldentypen, which translates to hero types. Even today, player characters are as often as not adressed as heroes, in spite of there being tons of options to play as edgy anti-heroes or completely unheroic normal peasants.

Does this have any cultural /linguistic roots or is this a DSA quirk? Here in Poland protagonists are always referred to as heroes, no matter how evil, at least in common parlance.

That's moderately common in German as well, and the introductions of some editions of DSA mention that "hero" is used in the sense of protagonist.

The druid is a caster who mostly uses mind control spells.

Well that's unexpected. There did that come from?

Maybe it's just because Werner Fuchs felt that there where too little mind control spells in the game, so he just dumped them all into his druid writeup. Whatever the reason, it's one of his ideas they ran with, so the most notorious druid NPCs tend to be specialists for mental domination and write up books on psychology.
Aventuria veers into ahistorical territory from time to time, so psychology is much more advaced than you'd expect from a setting where the highest tech level is early modern era. You can totally be a druid who has a practice as a shrink. That's usually a cover identity, because urban druids don't like to tell people they're druids.

Besides that, the druids in the Middenrealm also have the problem that you can't charge money for magic services there if you're not in one of the wizard guilds, who only accept wizards as members, both to protect their business model and to suck up to the Praios church. As the Praiotes are generally anti-magic and vastly influential in the Middenrealm, the main wizard guild up there tries to cover its asses by offering a tightly regulated, church-sanctioned way of practicing spellcasting and sometimes rat out witches and druids who don't play by their rules.
So other casters in that place need to be discreet about offering their services and usually pose as another profession, such as shrink, herbal healer, astronomer and so on.

For example, his church has a hidden branch whose members are all in deep cover and can't show you they're clerics.

But are they called The Black Hand?

They may as well be, because like the True Black Hand, they all have a tattoo of their holy symbol to make infiltration harder.

There's also an order of assassins within the Al'Anfanian brach of the Boron church who call themselves The Hand of Boron or just The Hand (*dun dun dun*) and have the totally sensible habit of leaving a tiny obsidian hand behind at the scenes of their murders.
In Aventuria, the dirty secrets of the black hand aren't particularly secret.

I guess their clerics are all really into oglaf.

who isn't?!

Only clerics of Travia. Anybody else has of course already heard about the gospel of Sithrak.

[Longes]

quotation tags have been fucked.

[Rasumichin]

Quotations tags successfully unfucked.

[name_here]

For example, his church has a hidden branch whose members are all in deep cover and can't show you they're clerics.

But are they called The Black Hand?

They may as well be, because like the True Black Hand, they all have a tattoo of their holy symbol to make infiltration harder.

Gah! You guys! Use magical tattoos that only appear when you want them to!

Seriously, the 40k Inquisition has solved this problem; it is downright embarrassing that groups who don't regularly resolve problems by publicly announcing their job titles can't manage it.

[Rasumichin]

Part II : The Talents of the Heroes

This is DSA's first attempt at skills, which are called talents in this game. In the basic rules, you just rolled attribute checks for about anything besides attack and parry, which where different stats. Even in 1984, that was a bit too simplistic, so they eventually introduced the talent system.

Later editions use a rather clumsy approach where every talent is tied to three attributes. You try to roll under each attribute with a d20 and your talent points can be used to counter roll overs. So, let's assume Alrik wants to climb a wall. Climbing is tied to courage, strength and dexterity. Alrik has all those attributes at 13. He has 5 ranks in climbing as well. Alrik's player rolls 10 for courage and passes. He rolls 16 for strength and uses 3 talent points to compensate for that. Then he rolls 18 for dexterity, which means he's 3 points over the limit and falls on his ass.

The talent chapter begins with climbing as an example and tells us that rolling for dexterity, strength and courage would slow down the game too much. You can tell that nobody on the team agreed with Werner Fuchs on this assertion as they immediately introduced the system he just wrote off as soon as he had left. They also used it for spellcasting as soon as the DSA2 arcane magic box set came out. And even today, each spell in DSA is a completely seperate skill and you have to roll for three attributes and do addition and subtraction to cast it.


After MC has honed his mathematical skills, he knows that Liscom succeeds at hitting the players with an IGNIFAXIUS.

While i don't like that, i don't think the alternative that's proposed here is any better. In fact, it's brokenly bad.
DSA1 talents aren't tied to attributes at all, but are entirely seperate stats. Like the attributes, they use roll under on a d20, but the starting values are so abysmally low that you'll never succeed at anything. Attributes for starting characters go from 8-13, so as a starting character, you have a 40-65% chance to pass an unmodified test if you don't use this talent system. That's apparently way too good, so talents start at 5 at most and a lot of them start at 1 or even 0. And you can raise them by 3 ranks per level at most, and you don't get to do that at first level.
Which, btw, means that by these rules, everybody starts the game being illiterate. Even wizards or clerics of Hesinde. They also don't have a bloody clue about all the sciency stuff like alchemy (which, at this point, is split into 4 different skills).


It took him a few decades of adventuring to become a scholar.

The talent system is also incredibly granular, which gets even worse in later editions. Like all highly granular skill systems, it is also weirdly incomplete. DSA tried to fight that by introducing even more talents in each edition. When DSA2 rolled out, you already had an entire A4 sheet just for your talents. DSA3 introduced so many new talents that they made all the talents tied to your former job, like pottery and baking and prostitution, optional write-in skills because they couldn't make the font size on the talent sheet any smaller.

Obviously, this talent bloat also leads to real problems with figuring out which kind of talent you use for what - at times, there's been 3 different talents for acrobatics, obviously not including climbing and jumping, and i still don't know when a DSA3 character uses seduction and when they'd better roll for prostitution.

Because all of that isn't complicated enough already for a serious game, there's also tables for how much you can raise a talent per level. This difficulty was completely arbitrary because some of the talents are ranked by assumed importance and impact on the game while others are ranked by how difficult training supposedly is.


"Do i roll for riding or lance riding?" "Both."

DSA5 finally decided to simplify things a bit by reducing the number of talents and by unifying the xp costs to raise them.
Then they noticed that this makes too much sense for DSA and introduced a new talent for feats of strength so you don't have to feel bad for just doing an attribute check for strength if you want to lift heavy things. And there's reviews of DSA5 that actually applaud that as a wonderful and sensible idea because doing a simple attribute check in a situation where you're only using a simple attribute is for kids who want DSA1 basic rules.

[Rawbeard]

I hate DSA so much, mostly because of this mindset. "it's ok to have useless skills/classes/whatevers because it's falvor" or "it's great to add complexity to things that worked just fine". I wish this feat of strength thing would surprise me, but it really doesn't.

The worst part is this mindset spreads to other games, so people play D&D like they play DSA, so at higher levels people still kill orks, cry about how overpowered the monk is, etc. And when they make new games they have retardedly complicated rules, like initiative that puts even the worst hickups of AD&D to shame (I started initiative with a dagger, now I switch to my greataxe and smash some face!). Splittermond (Splintermoon) has (had? not sure if they ever changed it) an initiative tracker, that was basically also like action points, with every action reducing your initiative and it had so many different values for who takes what action that dwarves for example could literally not move. Nobody noticed, because that is the other part of the DSA mindset, you don't really care or play by the rules, but you want to have them and lots of them.

fucking assholes, all of them.

BTW, I would like to read an OSSR for the Gezeichneten/Borborad campaign. that shit made me despise this game, watchingNPCs get all the magical goodies right in front of you, do all the fancy stuff, while you are the actual chosen ones, was abit much. only did the first three books, so I am curious how bad it gets, I have heard different stories that sounded a lot like "our Master did not play it as written".

[Rasumichin]

An OSSR for the 7 Gezeichneten would be fun, but that's something somebody else has to do because i stopped paying attention to that crap after Pardona showed up, literally raped one of the PCs and rubbed it into everybody's faces how special she is by shapeshifting into a frost dragon.
Then demigod super wizard Borbarad shows up and assures us that he's even more special than Pardona by telling her that she can fuck right off because he prefers being a supervillain without her assistance. And all the PCs can do is stand by the sideline and watch the cut scene. All the investigation/vampire hunting plot before that means fucking nothing. It's absolutely irrelevant if the players succeed at it or fail. The plot just happens as planned regardless of their actions.

And most players seriously think that's the best DSA campaign ever.

[Rasumichin]

Part III: Magic

One of the many, many things for which DSA has been made fun was the insistence of DSA1-3 that spell names should rhyme and that you, as a player, should be forced to loudly shout things like BANBALADAM - YOUR FRIEND I AM when casting Charm Person. That embarassed the fuck out of a lot of players, including Werner Fuchs. So all the new spells he wrote up for this have simple, descriptive names like telekinesis or command plants, and he introduces the rule that high-level casters can eschew verbal components for their spells altogether.
Three of the new spells still have names that rhyme, but at least one of them was verifiably written up by Ulrich Kiesow and i'd bet good money on him also being behind the other two.
After Fuchs left DSA, most of his spells got rewritten to have names like MOTORIDONG MOTORIDING - FUCKING MOVE YOU LIFELESS THING. I'm taking a few liberties with these translations, but not many.
Nonverbal spellcasting is largely the domain of druids, witches and changelings, although DSA4 and 5 retconned the spell names to just be two pseudo-latin words as in Harry Potter.

The chapter starts with two new staff enchantments. Wizards in DSA are the gandalfesque kind that carries a big stick with it and they can enchant these sticks to cause neat minor magical effects at will, such as serving as a torch or temporarily turning into a rope that you can control remotely so you basically have one of those grappling hook pistols like Batman or your average shadowrunner. In a game that generally has very, very few magic items, even simple utility stuff like that can be kind of a big deal. Although the more interesting part is that later editions let you use that thing as a rechargeable wand to store spells in.


They also get a crystal ball and whatnot. Changelings get nothing.

The two new staff tricks are turning the staff into a flying, flaming sword that hits people for you and turning the staff into a salamander that you can then mentally possess and use for spying. If you fuck up on the initial casting of the sword enchantment, the sword beats the crap out of you and then permanently turns into a normal sword and you have to start over again and put all those enchanments on a new staff.
If you succeed, you automatically get the salamander trick. Because you seriously don't want that on its own, as every housecat or owl or whatever can easily kill the salamander and then your staff is lost and you have to start this crap all over again as well. At least we get loose guidelines on where to get a new staff if that inevitably happens.

This book doesn't mention how you get the new spells for wizards, though. Do you know them automatically? Do you have to learn them from looted scrolls? Do you have to level up or ask an NPC wizard to teach you? No idea.
The selection of new spells includes a lot of standard stuff, like telekinesis or teleportation or anti-magic sphere. There's also a future mainstay of DSA combat spells, the IGNIFAXIUS RAY OF FLAME which is just called firelance here. This version allows you to transfer spell points to damage at a 1:1 ratio, which means there's much more efficient spells to use in combat even in this edition. It still got nerfed in DSA2 by capping the maximum damage to Levelx1d6 because DSA is mortally afraid of powergaming while having no bloody clue which kinds of fuckery are possible with the magic rules. Wasting all your spell points to kill a single target should be the least of their worries.

The druid spells are, like i wrote upthread, mostly mind control. It holds true for mind control powers in general that they are pretty useful for any imaginative player, but the anti-powergaming vanguard of DSA doesn't worry about that because they themselves are about as imaginative as a Michael Bay movie and only get scared by people doing a lot of damage, not by people mindfucking the opposition into oblivion. If this reminds you of WoD players clamoring to hit celerity with the nerf bat while doing nothing about dominate, you're 100% right.

The wood elf spells allow you to blend into your surroundings Predator-style, speed up plant growth and shape these plants, magically locate traps and living beings, speed up or slow down movement, create and shape fog and befriend animals. A thematically fitting, moderately useful selection that in large parts remained part of the game, but a lot of them got nerfed later. In spite of those nerfs, the DSA3 box set of elven supremacy insisted that elfs do magic all the time, even when picking grapes or saying hello (no, i'm not exaggerating), which is completely unfuckingworkable under any edition of DSA rules because you'd be out of spell points 5 minutes after stepping out of your magically constructed tree house.


To make up for all this, their eyes and ears just kept getting bigger and bigger.

The last part of this chapter are the cleric's miracles. Unlike in later editions, these effects are not stuff the clerics create themselves by using their allotment of divine energy, but actual cases of direct divine intervention. All of these have a pretty high chance of failure unless you're a high level character, so i don't get why Aventurians are supposed to take their gods super seriously for their constant displays of power when every wizard or elf can help them out much more reliably and with similar effects. Because this is DSA and we can't have nice things, the abilities of clerics got nerfed a lot in the next edition. Divine intervention became something people only witnessed once or twice in a lifetime and was handled by mother may i. You could do some minor stuff by the power of faith alone, but it was less powerful and less versatile than the miracles described here, although you could at least count on the fact that it would actually work. Then DSA3 completely revamped that and made divine magic bland, but very versatile buffs to your talents. And then DSA4 decided to rename all this to "liturgies" and write hundreds of pages about them, while making sure it was both largely unusable and lead to massive contradictions with how the setting was supposed to work.


At least the cover looked nice, though.

Even compared to all the crap from later editions, the powers here really aren't nearly as good as they seem at first glance and as the people who nerfed the fuck out of them probably thought. Like i said, all of this stuff will very reliably fail at low levels. I thought Praiotes have a bad reputation for nuking things from orbit? Well, to pull that off, they have to roll under their level -5. Maybe the Herald of Light (Aventuria's Pope Sunshine) does that a lot, but forget about that as a starting character. You'll just have to put up with blasphemous mages stealing the show from you.
Boronis theoretically get to summon and command undead, which would make a lot of contemporary DSA players froth with rage, because Boron is now supposed to be anti-undead (in spite of being a death god and in spite of having his own brand of sparkly vampires). Don't worry, though, that undead control is not gonna work unless you're the opium pope of Al'Anfa. I guess before playing a Boroni who constantly fails at commanding undead, i'd rather go with the contemporary option of playing one who only gets to punch undead with her hammer of undead bane. At least you get a hammer of undead bane in a setting where you usually don't get to play with magical weapons.

You can tell by her crazed look that she's one of those Northern heretics who don't recognize Boron as the supreme ruler of the Twelve.

Firun's ice miracles have a surprisingly good chance of actually working - starting characters have a totally overpowered 15% chance of creating a wall of ice and only have to meditate for 5 minutes to pull that off. I mentioned upthread that Tsa clerics are the only ones who can resurrect you - well, they have to roll under their level -8 to do so. I won't get into the rest of the miracles, because you're not gonna pull them off anyway.


At least Tsa clerics would fit right in at any goa party. The artist even thought of giving her a vial full of LSD.

[Rasumichin]

Part IV: Movement System and Endurance

These are 3 pages about how fast you can walk and run and crawl and how long you can keep that up.
Movement is divided into tactical movement, which applies to dungeons, villages and cities and is tracked on a square grid, and strategic movement, which is for overland travel and is tracked on a hex grid. Sheets of hex paper that you can xerox come with this box set in the unlikely case that somebody cares. You can track movement rates based on how much armor you're wearing and whatnot. Somewhere towards the end of the first page, we get assured that while all these rules may seem complicated, they will only rarely be necessary. Unlike a lot of other stuff in this book, the entire chapter got reprinted in the DSA2 box set. We get tables for overland travel and for modifiers based on terrain and get introduced to the endurance stat that requires a lot of micromanagement and that nobody cared about except as using it as a seperate track of hitpoints for unarmed combat.

Expanded combat rules are coming up next and i don't think i'll cover them today.
But i've found a pic of a Rondra cleric from this book to give you an impression of what Jochen Fortmann's illustrations actually look like.


30 years and top knots are finally back in style.

[Rawbeard]

MOTORIDONG MOTORIDING - FUCKING MOVE YOU LIFELESS THING

I feel like I need to stress the accuracy of this translation. This thread is starting to have therapeutic value for me.

[Rasumichin]

Part V: Expanded Combat System

In oldschool DSA, the sound of battle is the endless rolling of 1d20, very sporadically interrupted by a d6.
See, DSA1 did two of the usual things that games back then did to be "more realistic than D&D": active parry and damage-absorbing armor. And both have remained a part of the system in all its iterations.
As with about any check in DSA1, you have to roll under your stat with 1d20, both for attack (AT) and parry (PA). If you manage to hit your opponent and he fails to parry, you roll for damage. A longsword does 1d6+4 unless you're really strong and get a few extra damage points. The barbarian combat axe as the strongest weapon in this edition does 2d6+2. After you roll for damage, you subtract armor, which in this edition ranges from 1 for sturdy, normal clothes to 6 for a full suit of plate armor. And there's generally more hitpoints than at comparable levels of D&D. But if both opponents are good at parrying, nothing ever happens. It just goes AT/PA, AT/PA, AT/PA, AT/PA and on and on. It really drags out a lot, which has gone to the point of making many DSA players averse to combat scenes in general. Every edition more or less tried to remedy this problem, usually with little success.


Hitting these guys ain't easy. But don't worry, they won't hit you, either.

These expanded rules promise to make combat "much more detailed and realistic" because it's the mid 80s and people somehow want that kind of thing instead of wanting DSA combat to be more fun and over sooner.
Fuchs strongly suggests to use a floor plan with tin minis or the little cardboard miniatures that Schmidt Spiele published under the title "Tools of the Master". He's even nice enough to mark the few rules that can be used without a floor plan with a *. Such an emphasis on miniature combat is something DSA hasn't dared since then, because there's seriously players who look down on you for using a floor plan and minis because it's "too much like a boardgame" and therefore not for true roleplaying thespian elite shitstains like them. Ironically, these fuckheads usually play characters who've dumped way too many talent points into making their character really good at boardgames. No, seriously.

As you're supposed to play on a plan with squares, a combatant can be surrounded by up to 8 people, which is the best thing that can happen in DSA combat because you can only parry one of these 8 and the whole ordeal is over very soon.

The next two pages are spent on explaining movement in combat, because that wasn't part of the 3 pages on movement in the last chapter. It's a bit dry, but fairly sensible.
Then we get to the rules for lunge attacks, which the author very, very strongly recommends to everybody even if they don't use any of the other rules in this chapter. Because they're supposed to fix DSA's AT/PA/AT/PA/AT/PA problem.
A lunge attack is something you may be familiar with from épéé or sabre fencing or from swashbuckler movies. In the context of these rules, it means that you get a number of attacks equal to a 10th of your endurance that your opponent can parry, but not counter with attacks of his own. The series ends if you run out of your endurance micromangement subsystem points, if you fail at an attack or if the opponent rolls a "good parry" (see below). Even a parried attack also drives the opponent back into a field of your choice, which allows for more interesting things in combat than anything in the next two editions of DSA. You guessed it, they dropped that part of the lunge rules ASAP.
The rules for attack of opportunity that we get a few paragraphs later also got dropped in the next two editions because they require one of these floor plans that make you a bad roleplayer.

All of this makes me want to make a sacrifice to the lizard gods so they smite the people who fucked up both of the editions of DSA that i actually played for more than one session. (NSFW)

I admit it, i just wanted to show you that DSA at least always had more tits than D&D. Maybe because it always had less balls.

Then we get to "good attacks" and "good parries". A good parry is when you roll below your PA -5, a good attack is...well, you have to look on a table to see what counts as a "good attack" and it's rolling somewhere between 0 and 4 on your AT roll, depending on how high your AT is.
A "good attack" can only be countered by a "good parry". If your "good attack" is not countered, you have to roll again to see if you've made a critical hit. Even if it's not a crit, you still get 1-5 extra points of damage.
If you get a crit, you have to roll again to determine effects such as making your opponent losing use of his arm, suffering continuous blood loss, going unconscious or getting insta-killed. There's also modifiers for your roll against gangrene which have most likely never been used outside of the group of Werner Fuchs himself. Then there's all kinds of tables for critical failures.
This part of the rules is kinda unwieldy due to all this retro insistence of using tons of tables. But it's actually one of the parts of these rules that made it into DSA2 with only minor alterations. Go figure.

The next two and a half pages are about ranged, unarmed and mounted combat. Each of these three will take up a lot more space on their own in the most basic DSA4 combat rules. Then we get a half page on gangrene because it's the 80s and Rolemaster had shit like that. Like i mentioned upthread, that part just got copypasted verbatim into DSA2 and the attacks of opportunity and rules for floor plans and driving back an opponent didn't.


Fuck this shit. We're outta here.

The chapter concludes with one page of weapon stats and a page full of pics of all these weapons. One of the few good things i have to say now about the DSA2 box set is that it had two pages full of pics of more weapons that looked better than these, including the Aventurian katana, the Tuzak knive.


3rd edition got an actually Japanese looking version, as it came out in the 90s.

As with most RPG weapon lists even today, the weapons aren't exactly balanced well.
Maces and one-handed axes and sabres just suck compared to the longsword. That actually got a bit better over the editions, but DSA3 relapsed in a very serious way by introducing the Maraskan hardwood harness (oyoroi armor), which German gamers still use as a synonym for options that are better in a stupidly obvious way.
Then there was a third party supplement that gave us elven ivory armor, which is basically a hardwood harness +1.
Because in 90s RPGs, the only thing that was better than being pseudo-Japanese was being an elf.

[Rasumichin]

So, i'm about to wrap this up. I actually had a nice final post that discussed the last chapter of booklet II and tied that into the game in general. Then i realized some tags had been fucked again and i lost the entire post while trying to unfuck them.

A lot of this thread admittedly hasn't been about the DSA1 expanded rules box set, but about DSA in general. That's partly because i can't read it without noticing what later became of all this stuff, partly because some of this stuff needed to be put into context for people unfamiliar with this game and partly because all the other DSA gamers coming out of the woodwork deserved a good rant about things that are wrong with this game. Some of that already shows here, but there's also things that make you wonder where it all went downhill.
I hope that it was an enjoyable read nevertheless, that the people familiar with DSA got the rant we're all looking for and that the people unfamiliar with DSA got an entertaining and comprehensive impression of the gaming culture i grew up with.
To finish this properly, we need some oldschool DSA-flavored divine judgement in here.
So here's a pic of Grand Inquisitor Dexter Nemrod.


DSA is all about the lame inside jokes. Such as playing a wizard who uses a staff made out of a tree from the mage-hating Grand Inquisitor's garden.

Part VI: Magic Items, Toxins, Diseases and Herbs

DSA was never big on the magic items. Probably due to D&D being so heavy on them - in later editions, definitely because of D&D being so heavyly into them. Because DSA players have a morbid fear of D&D. Then they get their panties wet about an edition that steals the way D&D3x uses feats.
So the list of magic items is really short. There's just 7 of them. Which is more than the basic game, that mostly seemed to include magic items to have a writeup of the dark eyes that give the game its name. Kiesow wanted to call it Aventuria, Schmidt Spiele thought DSA sounded better, so Kiesow just lifted the palanthirs from Lord of the Rings, named them Schwarze Augen and called it a day.

The first item on the list is a mainstay from German myths, the Tarnkappe (stealth cap). It has turned German folk heroes invisible since the days of the Nibelungenlied back in the high medieval ages and probably before that. And while this cap turns you invisible, it immediately crumbles to dust if you try to use it in combat. At least you don't have to get naked to use it, because you totally have to do that with the normal invisibility spell.
The shapeshifting suits, available in eagle, wolf and bear variety also have the dubious advantage of less nudism. Seriously, this game wants you to get naked a lot and i think Werner Fuchs felt a bit uncomfortable with that.
There's a few other items here, and the main deal about them is that you can use them all the time. Your average DSA item in DSA2 just had a few charges and then it was useless. But it cost you permanent spell points to craft. Later, that got a bit better again. But items that work permanently are a super big deal in this game.
It also quickly became a big deal to have the better toxins out of the 20 different ones provided here, in a very short, crunchy format. You could get thrown into jail for life or even get executed just for possession of what's still the game's most ultra lethal poison. It first shows up here, without all the legal hassle attached, and goes by the name of Purpurblitz (purple lightning).
There's 10 different diseases and if you use this writeup as intended, you will roll for getting fleas a lot. There's also quite lethal diseases such as the Zorgan pocks. At least this early version doesn't permanently disfigure you if you survive.
If you happen to play in a group that consists of a subsistence farmer, a hill dwarf short order cook and a prositute, which some people actually do, you're obviously fucked for lack of a healing mage. That's where DSA's love for botany comes into play. The last words of this box sets are dedicated to 12 different herbs, including future staples such as the no-frills hitpoint restorer four-leaved oneberry or the kajubo bud that allows you to breathe underwater. The list of herbs has expanded massively over the years, just in case you want to spend a lot of ingame and outgame time looking up what actually grows where in the region you're adventuring in and then wandering around picturesque glades and atmospheric marshes and heaths, looking for herbs and running into random encounters with the Dickspecht, a giant, flightless woodpecker.

And that's DSA in a nutshell. It's so full of things you'll probably never use. And it's easy and not unjustified to shake your head at all the inanity and excruciating attention to totally minor details. The endless talent lists and the crappy spells that are just there for flavor.
Still, i can't help but admit that all these things serve a purpose precisely because they are not a necessary part of the actual gaming part of playing this game. That all these things exist outside of the usual space of what a tabletop gaming group does adds something tangible to all the make believe about riparian elfs and sunken cities inspired by Innsmouth and douchebag sun priests. You can put your finger on it and say "look, it's all there." And there's beauty and depth and magic to that.

It's just sad that this has never been put into a functional and elegant rules set. Not in this very bare-bones edition full of oldschool wonkyness, not in the systematic gimping of DSA2, or the entry-level powergaming of DSA3, not in the total ruleslawyering madness of DSA4 and not in the designed-by-community-committee DSA5. Really, this world would have deserved better.

But what's worst is that it never turned into what it should actually have been: Oglaf the RPG.

So let's conclude this with a final NSFW pic from Horus. And let's hope that one day, Aventuria will get rules that we actually want to use.

Remember, somebody gave him clear instructions over the phone on what he had to draw.

[shlominus]