A Cleric Spell Glitch And Textual Criticism

The character creation rules in ACKS seem to be organized around using the four classic classes (fighter/cleric/mage/thief), in their original incarnations. Most of the sub-type classes are implemented in rather novel ways, with the Gnomish Illusionist (for example) looking very little like the original 80s-era version of the illusionist class. But the Basic Four are almost exactly copied from their primitive form. To be precise, they resemble the Greyhawk/Holmes/Moldvay implementation of each, aside from some clean-ups like using d20 for thief skills instead of d100.

One of the places this is most obvious is in the cleric spell progression. The original 1974 release of Men and Magic includes this table:

You can see that the cleric is differentiated from the mage in two general ways: Slower initial spell progression (the text description suggests that the clerics need to "earn" their spells by service), but rapid progression after level 4.

But even stranger is the irregular at level 5 (or actually "4+1", in these pre-Grehawk booklets designed to mate perfectly onto the Chainmail rules). At the following level, suddenly the cleric gets two spell levels at once! The line that reads "2 2 -" should probably have read "2 1 1" for the sake of a smooth "one spell level per player level" progression. The removal of this discontinuity in both 1e and the Rules Cyclopedia suggests that it was a mistake.

This glitch is reproduced faithfully in the ACKS core rules. This has the effect of artificially weakening level 5 clerics, who are missing the 3rd level spell that they "should" already have in place of that additional 2nd level spell. I'm debating whether to put it back in, or leave it in the currently quirky form as a nod to tradition. There's something charming about it being a permanent monument to the amateur proofreading of TSR during the early garage-publishing era.

There's a fascinating parallel here in Biblical scholarship, where early scribal transcription errors that result from skipped lines (called "haplographic" errors) show up in many older texts that are used as the basis for modern translations. This creates a situation in which a modern translator is forced to make a choice between fidelity to the flawed text, or inserting a reconstructed version of the missing line that might not perfectly replicate the original material.

No more pink Vaseline!

In some ways, the RPG-writing community (or at least, the retro-RPG community) shows many of the same passionately conservative exegetical tendencies as a Hebrew or Christian religious community. Errors are first a source of confusion, then grow to become viewed affectionately, in the same way that some Star Wars fans would rather watch the original theatrical version of Star Wars with Vader's uncolored lightsaber and the smear of Vaseline that hides the wheels on Luke's speeder.