I believe Richard Snider may have been one of Dave Arneson's players in the original Blackmoor fantasy campaign. Mr. Snider went on to author Powers & Perils published by Avalon Hill in 1984. Back in the late '70s Mr. Snider and Mr. Arneson collaborated on Adventures in Fantasy (AF) and I think I see the design connections between Supplement II Blackmoor, AF and Powers & Perils (P&P). Looking at each in the context of the other gives me a greater appreciation for each and the sum is a significant contribution to the hobby.
Supplement II offers up an alternate combat mechanic that uses weapon length, creature height and a hit location system that includes several tables based on target body type, humanoid, snake, fish, reptile, avian and insectoid. Damage is figured differently depending on body type and the system is quite detailed and potentially deadly as a hit to a vital area can result in instant death even though damage dealt is only a fraction of overall hit points. My friends and I made brief use of this system and I recall it being great fun to "kill" a dragon with a single blow to it's head whereas under the "old" system it would have taken many hits to drain the dragon of hit points. I believe we lost interest in the hit location system when it was also applied to us PCs.
AF came along a few years after and its combat system uses a hit matrix comparing body type of attacker to body type of defender to determine hit percentage and damage varies with body type as well. AF is a percentile based system throughout as a sort of universal mechanic and in that respect is somewhat more "modern" than White Box and its use of a different mechanic for almost every subsystem. Percentile based systems have the advantage of being intuitive and granular and AF takes advantage of both. It is not uncommon for conditions to raise or lower the percentage chance of success in AF by as little as 1%.
Two character classes and a number of social levels differentiate PCs in AF. Players can choose to be a magic user or a warrior and the default character race is human, although there is provision for dwarf, elf, changeling (half-elf left in exchange for a human baby) and troll characters. A roll determines starting social rank and that can change as the PCs advances in levels. Experience is figured differently for warriors and magic users, the latter gaining exp. for casting spells and defeating magic users, encouraging magic confrontations or duels. PC age matters in AF as it factors into the education equation which determines your PC vocational skills and training, which is necessary to make full use of some abilities such as strength. AF uses six abilities which are mostly the familiar ones with the addition of Health and with Stamina replacing constitution. There is a formula for using Charisma to influence others that can be used for leadership or as a social conflict system.
AF includes two types of magic, the "spells" kind familiar to gamers and practiced by human magic users in AF and the magic of Faerry, which includes "songs" and "runes" as practiced mostly by Faerry folk. The basic "human" magic system is a spell point system with spells grouped according to the three alignments, Law, Chaos and Neutrality. What AF calls Faerry magic reminds me of the kind of magic one encounters in fairy tales, Wagnerian operas and myth. Dwarfs, who are Faerry folk, and some elfs, can inscribe runes which have magical effects and can be made permanent. Elf magic is song magic and there are a number of songs that are tied to level. Troll Lords and Faerries (small, winged humanoids) also use Faerry magic.
AF includes some very clear advice on how to set up a game and referee a campaign in a manor we now refer to as a "sandbox". The example setting of Bleakwood is one of the best small campaign areas I have encountered in any product. In the bestiary, including the Jinn races, and descriptions of Faerry, Faerry magic, elfs and dwarfs one can see the beginnings of the world as conceived and described more fully in P&P. As the AF box cover illustrates (troll lord on horseback), AF and P&P are not typical Tolkienesque milieux. In many ways they remind me of a pre-Tolkien concept of elves and fairyland, drawing on myth and legend from northern Europe, and from the literary work of Lord Dunsany (King of Elfland's Daughter) and Poul Anderson (The Broken Sword).
Dave Arneson's Blackmoor may have started it all. Mr. In AF, Mr. Arneson and Richard Snider take the White Box and go in a new direction in many ways, possibly building on early ideas about combat, magic, milieu and Faerry. In P&P, Mr. Snider seems to build on those ideas and adds more original material. I have found it helpful to look at them all as part of an evolution of ideas about system and setting and through this process come to appreciate each more. Sometimes this hobby feels like detective work and I seem to be working backwards to reconstruct a series of related events that are not well documented...of course these thoughts of mine may be just a personal mental adventure into fantasy.
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