Demon Idol

This is Demon Idol, a site dedicated to helping gamers learn, play, and master Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (AD&D), the legendary adventure game of swords & sorcery.

You might have heard that AD&D is impossible to understand, that it's a broken game, or that no one actually plays by the rules. In reality, anyone can learn AD&D and play some of the best Dungeons & Dragons of their life.

In the years since the renaissance of old-school D&D, and especially in recent years, focus has been on Basic D&D, “rules-lites”, and “rulings before rules” gameplay. AD&D offers something different.

This is a brand new project just started in September 2023! Check back regularly as we translate our group's campaign doc and tools over to this site.

Features

Convention over configuration. Instead of being bombarded with varying rules interpretations from forums and blogs, we'll just tell you what actually works, backed by real gameplay.1) If you want to dig deeper, you can via footnotes and references like this one.

By-the-book AD&D. Demon Idol AD&D uses every rule in the books with two exceptions: no sex-based ability score caps for classed characters, and players are allowed to read any rulebook.

Rules extensions. AD&D was always meant to be a living game which grows with your campaign. Any time we've expanded on a rule, it's clearly marked with an Ex, indicating that it's not part of the written word of the books, but in their spirit.2) Since Demon Idol is about convention over configuration, we recommend you use these by default. But you can always toss them or improve on them if you try them and they don't work well for your style of game.

Insights into third-party content. Ever since the days of Judges Guild, gamers have been creating great stuff that works with AD&D. Demon Idol will point you to it and explain where it comes in.

Regular, visible improvements. We play this game multiple times every week and are always learning more. Changes will be easily visible thanks to Demon Idol's page history.3) You can see the history of individual pages with one of the buttons over at the right. That's also where you can download a PDF of any page, see old versions of a page, and see what links to a page. 4) Once we get the the site fully running, we will publish periodic change logs which will give you an overview of updates to the site without having to look through all the page changes.

Tools and resources. Demon Idol will provide character sheets, calculators, generators, and show you how to set up tools to help you run a campaign.

Freedom. Demon Idol is free-as-in-cost and free-as-in-freedom. Everything here is licensed CC BY-SA, and Demon Idol runs on free software.

What this is not

A retroclone. We want you to play the original game, and we want you to enjoy the original books. There is magic in those tomes to last ten lifetimes.

“2nd edition”. This is original AD&D (or “1st edition”).

The only way to play. Just our way.

How to get started

Read the “Getting Started” links in the sidebar: How to Use This, What is BTB, Getting Started, and Own Your Data.