Greyhawk

Supplement I
Greyhawk is the first of many supplements expanding the Dungeons & Dragons game.  The White Box had lit the fires of imagination and the fire was spreading.  Written by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz, my understanding of Supplement I is that it brought us the rules changes and interpretations as they were used in Mr. Gygax's home campaign of Greyhawk.  Mr. Kuntz, co author of Supplement I, was also a referee in the Greyhawk campaign as I understand.  Supplement I builds on the creativity first expressed in the White Box and while not detailing much about the locations in the world of Greyhawk, Supplement I shows us how we can use the White Box rules in a world of our own creation. Creating new worlds of imagination, populating them with fantastic creatures undreamed of and creatively modifying and adding to the game rules was becoming the norm for player of Dungeons & Dragons almost from the very start.  Supplement I is organized along the lines of the 3 Little Brown Books.  There is a section on Men & Magic, one titled Monsters & Treasure and finally The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.  Each section describes the rules differences, additions and alterations, that pertain to play in the world of Greyhawk.  Under the heading Men & Magic, Supplement I notes there are four main classes of player character, Fighting Men, Magic-Users, Clerics and the new class of Thieves.  Paladins make their appearance as a sub-class of Fighting Men. The tailoring of character classes to a specific campaign quickly became standard in D&D and it is here in Greyhawk that we first encounter this.  The addition of Thieves, common in fantasy literature as character types, significantly altered the game for some referees. As a separate class with specific abilities such as open locks, find traps and climb sheer surfaces brought into question whether the Thief class was the only class capable of such feats or whether they were just better at these activities than say Fighting Men.  There are descriptions of dwarves, elves and hobbits as they appear in Greyhawk as well as a new character race, half elves.  A character can belong to multiple classes usually combining Thief with some other class.  Races other than humans are limited in class level as a balancing mechanic.  Abilities in Greyhawk take on more importance as the bonus or penalty for high or low scores can be greater, thus making good ability scores more desirable. The computation of hit points is changed as classes no longer all use a six-sided die for hit points.  Dice with different numbers of sides are now used for hit points. Thus the familiar Magic-User four-sided hit point die and the eight sided Fighter hit point die is used in Greyhawk. There are guidelines for awarding experience points for monster slaying based on the monster's hit-dice. Killing the monster now gains the player character experience as well as taking it's treasure. A matrix listing bonuses or penalties to hit with some weapons against some armor types makes its appearance here as an alternative to the standard combat procedures. Weapons and monsters now do damage using different dice ranges rather than all being rolled on a six-sider. The sword, for example, now does 1-8 (1d8) damage points.  Magic-Users and Clerics now get expanded spell lists with both new spells and some higher level spells.  The Monster and Treasure sections introduces several new creatures and magic items for referees to challenge and reward players.  Among them are some iconic D&D baddies seen for the first time, such as the Beholder seen on the front cover illustration. The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures section provides additional traps and expanded monsters by level tables. The whole tome weighs in at 68 pages of D&D goodness and with Supplement I we have a glimpse into the possibilities of customizing the game to a specific campaign.