Spirits & Spookiness: OD&D (1974-1977)

Original Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

Cover of the famous White Box reprint.

There’s no better place to start off than the Original Dungeons & Dragons: the 1974, 3-volume publication of D&D, popularly known as the “White Box” set, so-named for the iconic packaging it was sold in during its 1976 reprint. It was technically not its own standalone game, but rather a fantasy roleplaying supplement/rules expansion for Gygax’s previous tabletop wargame, Chainmail. Indeed, the booklet assumes the reader is familiar with wargaming already and periodically refers back to rules found in the Chainmail book without elaboration.

OD&D began the curious tradition of assigning each level of each character class a corresponding title that the character would presumably be known by within the fictional world of the game. Some of these are quite sensible for the fiction OD&D had in mind, while others feel more and more peculiar the older the game gets. For example a 1st-level Cleric is called an Acolyte, while an 8th-level Fighting-Man is given the pulp fiction’y moniker of Superhero, and a 10th-level Magic-User is a Necromancer regardless of what types of magic they actually use.¹

To talk about shamans, we first have to talk about those clerics.

The original cleric was heavily inspired by medieval depictions of Christian warrior-priests like Odo of Bayeux anor Archbishop Tilpin, who as their legends say occasionally waded into battle for king and country and whatnot. Many of these portrayals are fictitious, including the idea that they wielded blunt instruments in order to circumvent their priestly vows against “shedding blood” through one of the most absurd loopholes I’ve ever heard of. If you know what blunt force trauma can do to bone and soft tissues, you know it ain’t bloodless.

Despite this close association with Crusades-era Catholicism, clerics also filled in for other sorts of priests or holy figures. In the early days this was mostly limited to the vaguely Greco-Roman, very henotheistic depiction of polytheism depicted in in D&D. But as printed D&D material expanded and covered a wider range of real-world mythology as well as fantasy tropes, the clerical umbrella would also widen. Keep that in mind going forward.

The full list of Cleric titles is Acolyte (1), Adept (2), Village Priest (3), Vicar (4), Curate (5), Bishop (6), Lama (7), and Patriarch (8). Patriarch is also the title for any cleric of 9th or 10th level. Most of these are real positions taken from various denominations of Christianity, with the rather visible exception of Lama, (which is a title that originates in Tibetan Buddhism and merely indicates a “teacher”).

At least, those are the titles for heroic Clerics on the side of Law, one of the three moral alignments in D&D that were inspired by the cosmologies of Poul Anderson and to a lesser extent Michael Moorcock.

The way the DNA from those two cosmologies mixed to inspire part of D&D’s deserves an entire essay of its own, but here I will simplify it greatly: Law is shorthand for order, civilization, community, honor, the Greater Good, and all of that, whereas Chaos is synonymous with hyper-individuality, selfishness, cruelty, destruction, insanity, and diabolic evil. Neutrality between them is mild indifference or naturalism at best, and an obnoxious brand of both-sidesy centrism at worst.

Back in OD&D there were no Neutral Clerics, at least not above 6th level. They must pick a side in the cosmic battle between Law and Chaos, and stick with it. Clerics of Law are just plain Clerics, whereas Clerics of Chaos are referred to as Anti-Clerics.

Anti-Clerics exemplify the early D&D understanding that Chaos = Evil & Destruction. They are overwhelmingly depicted as villains who consort with monsters and the undead. They worship malicious gods or demons. They use the same list of spells as regular Clerics, only perverted and reversed.

Reversible spells are spells that can have their effects inverted; a reversed Cure Light Wounds spell deals 1d6+1 damage rather than healing it, a Protection from Evil spell becomes Protection from Good, etc. Therefore, an Anti-Cleric is one whose nature is not to heal or aid others. They can only harm, curse, spread darkness and disease, and otherwise do villainous things.

Because of this, the Anti-Cleric level titles are as follows: Evil Acolyte, Evil Adept, Shaman, Evil Priest, Evil Curate, Evil Bishop, Evil Lama, Evil High Priest.²

Every single title in that list includes the descriptor “Evil” except for Shaman, which implies that shamans are automatically evil and chaotic within the fiction of OD&D, to the point of not needing such a qualifier. The shaman of D&D started off as nothing more than an evil shadow of a 3rd-level cleric, synonymous with the spooky robed cultists lurking in the shadows, waiting for low-level adventurers to come along and foil their vague but undoubtedly nefarious plans.

Think of the creepy schmucks from the 1970 novella The Eye of Argon as a literary example of this kind of shaman-as-cultist. Or don’t. Maybe just don’t. The awful writing in that story is funny at first, but it wears on you kind of quick. There’s also a lot more male slut-shaming in that story than your average sword & sorcery romp.

What jumps out at me about this is that the first-ever appearance of shamans in D&D was kind of a crap deal, all told. They were exclusively villains unless you were consciously running a mixed or all-evil party, with nothing meaningful to differentiate them from other priests except class level.

On the other hand, it’s kind of hilarious that some form of shaman was technically playable long before many other iconic D&D classes were first printed. This was before paladins, rangers, and bards. Heck, even the thief class didn’t exist yet!

I don’t mean to suggest that this naming convention was done with malicious intent. In all likelihood, Gary and/or Arneson were just struggling to come up with enough synonyms for all the lists they made for themselves, and they really didn’t give much thought to how shaman (or any other title) was being used in this context, except in terms of what sounded like a proper escalation in power and prestige from the last.

But intentional or not, this little list helped set the tone for how shamans would appear in D&D for years to come. They put the 'spooky' in spirits & spookiness from day one.

Other OD&D Shamans

Other than that cameo in the first booklet, shamans didn’t appear much in OD&D or its first-party supplements:

Pictish Shamans from R.E. Howard’s Conan universe are given a monster stat block in Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes where they are described again as evil priests, and given the spellcasting power of Lamas.³

A few early issues of the Dragon and Dungeon magazines that were directly written by Gary & Co reference shamans, though not in much depth, and about half of those shamans are actually android faux-mystic charlatans from Metamorphosis Alpha.⁴

I’m actually surprised that this was the closest thing to the “shaman-as-charlatan” trope that I found in my research. This flavor of shaman stereotype is portrayed in media as nothing more than a self-interested huckster using their mysticism to browbeat their superstitious tribespeople, who are invariably depicted as too gullible and primitive to recognize the smoke-and-mirrors act.

Part of that is a holdover from colonialism, but I get the feeling part of it is also informed by the experiences of naïve modern Westerners who got conned by the global industry of plastic shamans that cropped up in the wake of said colonialism.

Oh, and while we’re off topic, let’s talk about druids real quick.

Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry (1976)

Another important foundation for this project is the Druid class, which first debuted two years after OD&D in Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry. Technically they first appeared in the original Greyhawk booklet as a sort of hybrid cleric/magic-user NPC with limited shapeshifting, but Wizardry is where they became playable.

The Druid began as a Neutral sub-class of the Cleric, which as mentioned earlier did not exist in the base game. They are priests of Nature, more concerned with plants and animals than their fellow humans (as all druids were human back in the day). They tend to stay aloof from mortal matters, protect forests and other areas of great natural importance, and strike against despoilers with a vengeance.⁵

Theirs is an identity that has gone virtually unchanged over the last 40+ years through so many iterations of the game, among so many other classes that have gone through major thematic changes, such as the shaman(s) we will be discussing. I can’t tell if the strong and stable identity of the druid class is in spite of or because of the hyperspecific-yet-obscure nature of druids in real life.

Historically, druids were the elite members of a priestly class found in many Iron Age Celtic societies. We don’t know a ton about their functions or rites because what little written evidence of them that we have comes from Roman elites, who had it in their interest to smear the druids, because they were kind of trying to conquer the Celtic peoples at the time. Gaius Julius Caesar personally got in on the dunking-on-druids game, and his account of the druids is the most famous as a result. He played up the human sacrifice that may or may not have occurred in Continental Celtic cultures, and made them seem as nefarious and mysterious as was convenient for him.⁶

Modern archaeology has given us a somewhat more nuanced view of the druids, but there’s still so much we don’t know. And that knowledge vacuum allowed early fiction writers to ascribe whatever the hell they wanted to druids, up to and including the forest magic and animal transformations so iconic to druid character classes today.

The reason I bring druids up is because the trope of a nature-priest has, at times, a lot of overlap with the fantasy idea of a shaman. Because of this, later iterations of the shaman that we’ll see will often have some amount of DNA from the druid- a sort of thematic cross-pollination that I find intriguing.

I think it also explains why shamans have never had the same kind of presence and identity as other classes in D&D: with the distinct flavors of cleric and druid cemented very early on, shamans often occupy an edge of the Venn Diagram between them. I think that goes a long way toward explaining why shamans only ever appear in splatbooks or sequels to core materials, when they appear in an edition at all.

Original D&D and its supplements stayed in print until ‘79, but by then it had been overtaken by newer versions of D&D that were released as it became a popular and recognizable brand across America. 

Next up, we will look at how D&D branched as a property, and the long-term consequences that had.

Or you can click here to return to the Shamans in D&D archive.

¹ Arneson, Dave & Gary Gygax. Dungeons & Dragons Volume I: Men & Magic. 1974. P. 16.

² Men & Magic, P. 34.

³ Kuntz, Robert, James Ward. Dungeons & Dragons Supplement IV: Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes. 1976. P. 47-48.

⁴ For those who don’t know, Metamorphosis Alpha was a science fiction RPG about space colonists and mutants on a generational spaceship in the far future. It was also published by TSR, and its 1st edition heavily utilized OD&D rules like ability scores and its combat system. Excerpts from the campaign played by Gygax and his son sometimes appeared in early issues, back when the magazines catered to pulp and sci-fi as much as to fantasy.

⁵ Blume, Brian, Gary Gygax. Dungeons & Dragons Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry. 1976. P. 1-2.

⁶ Gaius Julius Caesar. Commentarii de Bello Gallico. 58-49 BCE. Trans. McDevitte, W. A., W. S. Bohn. 1859. Book VI.