The Steam Bathed Evil

Statistics, Slug, Save for “Charm Person,” and Sauna

Being a play report of a brief campaign comprised of four sessions of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons played October 6th, October 13th, October 20th, and November 3rd, 2021, written shortly thereafter, and finally published today, Sunday, June 29th, 2025

What is an RPG?

Just kidding.

A few weeks ago, we spent some time talking about early editions of Dungeons and Dragons in the basement of the Brain Trust discord. We dove into what those games were designed to do, different flash games they inspired, and just how great the “history of editions of dungeons and dragons” flowchart on Wikipedia is. After that, Will Jobst reached out to me to see if I wanted to embark on an archaeological expedition into one of those early versions - Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, 1st Edition (1978). I knew Will and a few others had really enjoyed their time doing something similar last year with Gamma World - another early role-playing game (think Fallout) - so I was really excited to be invited along on this experiment. Plus, I still have that cultural idea from things like Stranger Things and Community and pre “The Adventure Zone” and “Critical Role” actual-play podcasts that there’s something special about early versions of Dungeons and Dragons that I’d just been missing out on for all these years. I was determined to capture that magic, catalog what made it different from the immediately preceding and following versions, and see if I could imagine the full length of the arc that would eventually bring the game to 5e - Dungeons and Dragons, 5th Edition (2014) - a game that I’ve struggled against every time I’ve played it (but we’ll get to that later). So, I bought a 3 ring binder and a set of cool orange dice, found some PDFs, printed off the ADND Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide, and did my best to dive right in.

Our guiding principle in this whole adventure was to play the whole thing as if we were a group in a basement in 1978. We wanted to do our best to play rules as written, with all of the applicable rules. Here’s how it went.

Session 1 - Making a Character

• We spent two hours rolling characters. It was a lot more complicated than we anticipated.
• We each rolled 4 sets of 6 dice each, in order for stats.
• I went with my raw stats, Will juiced theirs a little bit to play as a paladin
• We spent a lot of time cross referencing the stats pages with our class descriptions - there’s a lot of weird restrictions that are in place about what you can and can’t do, and for no real mechanical reason, it’s more the fictional logic that’s involved in the background
• I was unable to figure out how spell slots worked
• John let us know that 1e doesn’t have skill checks, there’s just some bonuses and like, “facts” associated with your skill scores, like having the ability to lift a door or bend bars if you’re real strong
• I ended up with only 2 hit points which felt dangerously low
• We spent some time buying equipment and setting proficiencies and learning how THAC0 worked (still a little unclear)
• I did the thing where you go through the spell list for your class and roll the percentile dice to see if you’re capable of learning a spell - big fan of this method of building a spell book
• John told us some more about the setting, from the Jamboard they’d put together - lots of medieval Russian paintings, implied cold and holiness and stuff
• We went through a series of questions to build out the world and our backstories - will’s paladin Nikita had been on a crusade, and lost their religion but was now on a quest for their friend, a Joan of Arc type figure, to find and collect the pieces of their God’s icon from within a bunch of scattered altars
• My character, elf, was an elf with an unpronounceable name from the desert, but not from the desert. Elves aren’t from here, and maybe slipped through a crack in the world. They live in a dome where they’ve painted out the moon, and some of that has leaked out into the bits of the world around the crack. Elves are atheists, which is an interesting choice in a world and setting where the gods walk among us, but at the same time is the reason for this belief

Session 2 - Entering the dungeon

• Adam joined us this week, they wanted to be a fighter, so we spent a little bit of time finding some generators to spit them out a character - all of them are wild and incomprehensible
• Adam’s character Audrey was from the same church that Nikita had left, they’d run away from home to hunt mushrooms in a dungeon
• John gave us a beautiful opening narration about how sad and scary and alone the opening to this dungeon was, and then we spent a while trying to figure out the safest way to go in
• I made sure to pack torches and the other like, OSR items I always hear about (spikes, 10 foot pole, rope)
• The theme of the dungeon was kinda sorta like slime and steam? It was all wet and warm
• First room, we ran into some shriekers, and they didn’t fight, but they screamed and were drawing in more monsters
• Nikita did detect evil and got nothing, so I felt a little conflicted about it, but we blasted them to charred bits and moved on
• In the next room we ran into a giant slug that was coming to eat the shriekers, and was blocking the passage further into the dungeon
• The fight started, and my plan was to just kinda hang back and try to blast it from a safe distance
• Nikita and Audrey took turns blasting the slug and I hit it with magic missile and burning hands, making sure to read the spell descriptions carefully, in the spirit of the game
• I got a little too excited and tried to killing blow the slug with my staff, and it spit acid on me for 6 points of damage, reducing me to -4
• Nikita and Audrey killed the slug and we ended the session

(From Will)

Session 3 - The Funeral Boat and the Nymph

• Adam was gone this week, so we spent some time reading the death rules, and figured out that elf wasn’t dead, just real hurt
• Gary said it would be a few weeks for characters to recover from that, so we did a timeskip to account for getting out of the dungeon and healing up, and then went through the XP process from the shriekers and slug fights, which let us each level up once
• I realized I was doing spell slots wrong - at first level you can only memorize ONE spell. You start off so so so weak in this game, which is still kinda the case in 5e, but for some reason, it feels more acceptable here? Like when I play 5e I level skip to at least 5th level so I’ll have stuff to do, that seems unimaginable here, and I think that’s because the progression ramp is shorter and less detailed
• We went back into the dungeon and came to a flooded room with a boat with a grim reaper figure head, a mummified corpse of a noblewoman, and a glass bowl with two small hunting dogs inside
• We roped the boat in and climbed in respectfully and rowed around for a bit, until we found a flooded room that had been set up with treasure to almost resemble a beach. A nymph sat on top of some of the treasure. Elf tried singing at it, but it was unamused. It did seem interested in Nikita.
• Suddenly, 3 nyxies appeared. John said he picked these because they were low level and water themed. Reading the stat block, he told us that they like to enslave humans, which all made us laugh nervously. Their strategy is to cast “charm person” and “breathe underwater” on someone, and then carry them away - for at least a YEAR. Of course, Nikita was instantly blasted.
• I looked up the rules for saving against charm person, and we found out Nikita’s first chance to save wouldn’t come for a full calendar month.
• I got to work blasting magic missile, and was able to conk one of the nyxies on the head as they were carting Nikita off, and that broke the trance.
• The nymph was impressed with us, and opened a dimension door into a deeper less dangerous part of the dungeon.
• We went through and found a dirty room full of treasure, and a domoboy, a Russian house spirit that dislikes messy rooms. (John used the stat block of a leprechaun.) It grabbed a spell scroll I wanted and turned invisible, so I threw oil on it to keep track of it, inadvertently making it super slippery. We chased it around until it gave up, and we got a ton of gold and platinum pieces, which through the gold for XP rule helped us level up 2 more times.
• John mentioned that we also got some jewels, and I got excited because I’d seen the tables and rules for identifying gems, which had seemed super boring when I skimmed past them, but having a reason to actually use them seemed like a blast. We spent maybe 20 minutes assigning treasure through random tables, and I immediately got the appeal.

Session 4 - The Sauna

• Adam rejoined us for this session, and we helped them level up
• We spent some time figuring out the weight of the treasure, and then I cast “floating disc” to help us carry most of it around. John had told us not to use the given names for spell’s like “tenser’s floating disc,” so i decided it was called “Skumin’s floating disc” after a modern Russian philosopher - Victor Skumin

(Victor Skumin)

• We came across a hallway that forked into almost two bracket shaped ( [ ] ) passages on either end of a big steamy room. The doors were moldy and rotten and swollen, and steam poured out from underneath their cracks. Nikita and Audrey took turns trying to wrench the door open, and when they finally got it, an Ettin - a giant 2 headed monster, one side big and strong, one a little smaller - stumbled out of the sauna. Nikita’s “detect evil” senses started going crazy

(From Adam)

• I immediately ran around the corner to try to get into the opposite “bracket” hallway and kick down that door to do a hit from the back
• Audrey scored a really good big crit on the ettin, and then it proceeded to smack the two of them around for a little bit
• Elf got to the door and tried unsuccessfully to pull it open, and thenunfurled the scroll, and did a split second action to attempt to learn “knock” from it. It succeeded and they blasted the door open.
• The fight continued between Nikita and Audrey and the Ettin, and then Elf collected some stinking items from the ruined sauna, and cast “stinking cloud” at the Ettin, wholly and completely incapacitating it. We then took turns hitting it and blasting it with magic missile until it died, which felt really mean
• We got a ton of treasure from this one, and went though the same process of rolling to determine what it was
• We spent some time debriefing, Adam remarked this was maybe the least they’d read any rules and that they thought any game we played in this group would be fun, Will agreed and said they were glad we played but didn’t ever want to play this again, John was happy to do the math and make an adventure for us, and remembered some of the joys of this kind of play, but agreed on the not liking this style of game. I said I found a lot of the same frustrations I have with 5e (waiting for your turn and feeling like your options are limited but somehow still wasted) but also I liked the structure and weird huge ruleset, and how getting to play rules lawyer gave me some guidance/purpose and felt fun instead of confrontational. John agreed.