Solo Dungeon Crawler - Solo DnD Tutorials

Many players might not consider the bard as an official OD&D class. Case being that unlike the Ranger & Illusionist, which were also introduced outside of the official OD&D supplements (in Strategic Review or Dungeon magazine) - the bard never made it into the AD&D Player's Handbook. There are several other proposed classes like this, such as the alchemist (which I want to visit at a later date). I've been toying with the idea of how these "unofficial" classes would be well suited as been specialists that can be hired or consulted by players in an OD&D campaign. The alchemist is already listed as a specialist in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures, so why not expand the details provided to included some of the traits they have as a proposed class? Like, I said, I want to look into this later, but for now I am intrigued by the bard... OD&D Bards as NPCs NOT PC's! A new version of the Bard combining Michael Siemon's & Dan Pierson...

So, what do the OD&D rules as written tell us about languages? Well, Men & Magic says "Intelligence [..] allows additional languages to be spoken." and goes on to say that "Characters with an Intelligence above 10 may learn additional languages, one language for every point above 10 intelligence factors. Thus, a man with an intelligence level of 15 could speak 7 languages, i.e. the common tongue, his divisional language, and 5 creature languages. Of course, Magic-Users’ spells and some magic items will enable the speaking and understanding of languages." Note the use of the words " may learn additional languages". The implication here, quite clearly in my opinion is that additional languages are not adopted from the get-go but must be learned.  Unfortunately there is nothing further to describe how this might be done in terms of game mechanics, but there is a strong indication that the referee should come up with something themselves. OD&D Lea...

Footpads, Robbers, Burglars, Cutpurses, Sharpers, Pilferers and Thieves... Quite a mouthful! In the original Monster Determination Table found in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures you won't find these entries, but of course, when the Thief class was introduced in Greyhawk an updated Monster Determination Table was provided. Now, that's all well and good, but the supplement did not include details for these entries. It's true that these are simply individual levels of the thief class, but Monsters & Treasure does gives some information on how to handle encounters with NPC fighting men, magic-users and clerics. i.e. under the entry for Bandits there is a 5% chance per level that any of these three classes might have an appropriate magic item with them. There are two ways to interpret this. One way is to assume that these super-normal types might only have magic items when leading a group of bandits. Another popular option though is for referee's to extrapolate th...