D&D’s Original Setting ‘Outdoor Survival’ – PRIME
Back in the earliest days of D&D, before modules, before campaign settings, D&D relied on two other games, the wargame Chainmail, and Outdoor Survival.
Today you can find everything you need to play a game of Dungeons & Dragons in a simple boxed set–whether that’s one of the starter kits like D&D Essentials or The Lost Mine of Phandelver, or one of the core gift sets that comes with all three of the core rulebooks and some dice–whatever you choose, you get the rules of the game and a world (big or small) to play them in. But back in the dawn of D&D, when the original boxed set was first released, it didn’t even come with everything you needed to play the game. Right there in the first booklet, Men & Magic it says you need two other games: Chainmail, TSR’s wargame of medieval combat, and a game by Avalon Hill called Outdoor Survival.
Published in 1972 and then updated in 1973, Outdoor Survival was “a game about wilderness skills.” It said so, right on the box.
Lost and alone, you must survive and escape the woods. There are 5 different scenarios from inexperienced hikers lost in the woods to a rescue party trying to find a lost person. You will have to deal with animals, finding food and water, mother nature and sickness without dying to win.
The original game was set in a modern wilderness, where players were tasked with surviving in the wilderness by acquiring food and water, finding shelter wherever needed–and depending on your scenario you might have to find a lost hiker or the like. The game itself was a simple board game in two parts, each part of the board outlined a wilderness area populated with mountains, forests, rivers, even swamps and deserts:
Each kind of terrain cost a different amount to move through. Depending on what scenario you were playing the buildings you can see on the map might have different effects. You might need to find sources of food, like that deer up there, or worry about fording the rivers.
And if all of that starts to sound like the different terrain types and wilderness survival challenges you might encounter in a given game of Dungeons & Dragons, you’d be right. In fact, you’ve just hit upon how the Original D&D set made use of Outdoor Survival. By and large, what OD&D needed was a map.
At the time that D&D was originally published, there were no maps. No scenarios. No modules. The only things that the base rules of D&D gave you guidance for were dungeons and the monsters that you might find therein. Or out in the wild, as the case may be.
That’s where Outdoor Survival comes in. The map, which conveniently enough, features a variety of outdoor terrain types. Where you might encounter a variety of monsters randomly, as you try to make your way to the nearby dungeon. Later modules would include language at the start to the effect of “your party of adventurers have made their way through the wilderness to the dungeon.”
But in those early days, nobody had much to go off of. Even the first inklings of what would be the first campaign settings were just scrawls in Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s notes for their home campaigns. Greyhawk’s Oerth was limited to the city of Greyhawk and Blackmoor was just the eponymous castle and its surrounding village. How did you get from one place to another?
Well the third book in the original trilogy has some answers under the section called The Wilderness:
The so-called Wilderness really consists of unexplored land, cities and castles, not to mention the area immediately surrounding the castle (ruined or otherwise) which housed the dungeons. The referee must do several things in order to conduct wilderness adventure games. First, he must have a ground level map of his dungeons, a map of the terrain immediately surrounding this, and finally a map of the town or village closest to the dungeons.
The terrain beyond the immediate surroundings of the dungeon area should be unknown to all but the referee. Off-hand adventures in the wilderness are made on the OUTDOOR SURVIVAL playing board. OUTDOOR SURVIVAL has a board perfect for general adventures. Catch basins are castles, buildings are towns, and he balance of the terrain is as indicated.
Basically the Outdoor Survival game was the first “world map” for D&D. Here you could explore and find the different occupants of random castles, which might venture out if a party of adventurers passes by. There might be friendly lords or wizards, or evil high priests and necromancers–and depending on what you encounter, you might find yourself in a jousting match, paying a toll, or in a hostile, deadly battle for survival.
All that from an existing game which not only set the stage for D&D, but also gave the game its first brush with Hex maps. And had terrain movement costs for D&D to later absorb. So much of what people love about campaigns like Western Marches, comes to light in Outdoor Survival.
