BECMI (1977-1991)
The first of the two parallel branches of 20th century D&D we'll be looking at is Basic D&D and all its rules expansions, which I will collectively refer to as BECMI for consistency's sake. This post will not cover shamans found in individual first-party products outside of the core boxed sets; those will receive their own respective posts later.
BECMI is the closer of the two editions to the Original D&D compared to Advanced D&D, owing to such mainstays as race-as-class, the use of a combined to-hit table instead of THAC0 for individual classes, and avoidance of the 9-point alignment chart. But it quickly distinguished itself with changes and additions that turned it into its own unique beast, including some that have to do with how shamans were implemented and portrayed.
Basic Sets (1977, 1981, 1983)
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| Holmes, Moldvay, and Mentzer editions of Basic. |
There are technically 3 different versions of Basic D&D released over a span of 6 years, each with subtle differences between them. But none of those differences impact the (admittedly niche and hyper-specific) focus of this project, so I'm going to treat the editions as more-or-less interchangeable.
Basic D&D continued the use of character level titles started in OD&D, but dropped the Anti-Cleric distinction in favor of letting a regular cleric be any of the 3 alignments (or any of the 4 extremes out of the 5 in Holmes' edition).¹ ² ³ As such, there were no more 3rd level shamans running around doing dark, culty stuff. Shamans do not appear at all in Holmes’ Basic, nor Moldvay's or Mentzer's.
Alas, its reign was brief and weird.
To get to the next instance of shamans we have to go forward in time to 1981 when Thomas Moldvay wrote his version of Basic, followed quickly thereafter by the Expert set edited by David Cook and Stephen Marsh (with Mentzer once again hot on their heels).
Expert Sets (1981, 1983)
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| Cook & Marsh and Mentzer editions of Expert. |
To get to the shamans in the Expert rules, we have to skip past all the player character information and head straight to the monsters chapter. This section lists several humans whom players might come into violent or peaceful contact with, including your standard brigands and pirates, nomads, merchants, and an uncomfortably holy war-y group of desert-dwelling “dervishes”.
Then there are the natives.
Natives are tribal jungle- or island-dwelling people who are explicitly described as “primitive”. Some of them are warlike cannibals, some are peaceful, and some (1 person in 50% of every village with at least 100 people) are shamans. Shamans in this context are clerics or magic-users of at least 5h level, with nothing more than their primitive culture given to distinguish them from other members of the same class.⁴ ⁵
It is in the native shamans that we see the first appearance of one of the primary kinds of shaman in D&D: the shaman-as-tribal-cleric. Although it is rather unique that a single-classed magic-user can also be classified as a shaman in the case of native shamans- we won’t be seeing much of that again in our survey. But the shaman as a functionally standard priest whose primary distinction is the culture they come from and the tribal aesthetics of that culture will be a recurring idea in D&D going forward.
This art from the 1983 edition helps illustrate the vague mix of Polynesian and Austronesian coding the natives were written with. Humans and shamanism don’t mix very often in old D&D relative to other species, but when they do they tend to rely upon real-world, non-Western racial stereotypes to inform their flavor. We have more of that in store for us as we continue our journey.
Including in this very same boxed set, actually.
X1: The Isle of Dread
The Cook & Marsh edition of the Expert boxed set included a copy of module X1: The Isle of Dread, also by Cook (as well as Moldvay). It's an introductory wilderness exploration, lost world adventure, and treasure hunt full of pirates, dinosaurs, and raccoon-monkeys. The module takes place in and around the eponymous Isle of Dread, which was located in the Thanegioth Archipelago, placed south of Karameikos in the Mystara campaign setting, which was brand-new at the time. The island has moved around between editions and remakes since then, including Greyhawk and the Plane of Water at one point.
It's one of the most widely played modules in D&D history thanks to its inclusion in the boxed set, and there are entire posts worth of things to say about it and its contributions to the history of D&D. Posts that I'm not going to write, because I'm busy enough as it is. So I'll try to keep its inclusion brief:
The adventurers make landfall near the native village of Tanoroa/Tanaroa (spelling varies throughout the book) and soon visit others as they expand across the jungle. Rory Barbarosa, the dead explorer whose ship's log entry kicks off the adventure, speculates the natives once had a more advanced civilization that they have since declined from (just in case we forget these folks are written to scream "primitive").⁶ Some are complex societies with urban planning, large stone architecture, and a matriarchal political system, while others are little more than hunter camps in the jungle.
Along the way the party encounters several religious leaders and spellcasters among the natives who are variously identified as shamans, native clerics, and in one instance a witchdoctor. One, Umlat, is a priest of a specific god (Oloron, Lord of the Skies) in the same vein as many traditional henotheistic D&D clerics, while other shamans belong to a necromantic zombie laborer cult, venerate what seem to be ancestral idols, and/or practice a form of animal totemism.⁷ ⁸
Other natives worship more vague "gods" that are ultimately revealed to be the Lovecraftian Deep One-esque kopru. The kopru are malicious amphibian creatures who once ruled the island and seek to do so again through mind control and manipulation of the locals (and any adventurers who fall into their slimy clutches).⁹ The native shamans are never shown to be knowingly complicit in the kopru plot so they don't appear to be examples of the shaman-as-charlatan archetype, but they're still depicted with more variety in implied beliefs and cultural practices than I was expecting when I first looked through the module.
The book is still full of colonialist tropes like headhunting, cannibalism, and large numbers of superstitious natives obediently acting as guides and porters for the party of enterprising military-adventurists who just waltzed in, and that always bears pointing out. But the natives' internal diversity—and thus the variety of their shamans—is also notable for the time, especially considering how new and experimental modules and their approaches to lore and worldbuilding still were.
Companion Set (1984)
You may have sensed the common theme here and guessed that there are no playable shamans in the Companion rules, but the druid class appears here for the first time since OD&D’s Supplement III. In this rendition, the druid is the result of a Neutral-aligned cleric who reaches 9th level and, instead of founding a stronghold and becoming a landholding ruler, retreats into the wilderness and learns the ways of nature under a tutor before officially becoming a druid.¹⁰
This is similar to how fighters of the same level can become Paladins, questing Knights, or Avengers depending on if they are Lawful, Neutral, or Chaotic in alignment and if they fulfill other specific requirements.¹¹ It’s a little bit like a precursor to the Prestige Classes, Paragon Paths, and Subclasses of later editions, but handled differently (and frankly, better) than say the Bard class of AD&D 1E.
I bring this up to show that while the designers didn’t seem to have plans for other types of cleric specialties at this stage of D&D (since the druid is alone among cleric types, unlike the aforementioned fighters), they were equipped with a way in which they could have slotted them into the existing rules with relatively little fuss. I wonder what D&D might have been like had they continued to use and refine this branching class system rather than dumping the idea until 4E. Maybe they might have even made a PC shaman option.
I should tinker with that idea one of these days when I return to writing Destige Class posts.
Druids in BECMI are broadly similar to their OD&D precursors in that they are nature-oriented divine spellcasters. But curiously they lack several iconic features that they had previously been printed with, including animal shapeshifting, proficiency with spears or crescent-shaped blades like sickles and scimitars, and resistance to spell effects from fey and other creatures of nature. It's odd seeing the class briefly bend back toward its clerical parent so soon after branching off of it.
I guess it's one of the few elements of Basic D&D that strove to be truly "basic" in its density of rules.
Master Set (1985)
Once again there are no playable shamans in this piece of BECMI, but NPC shamans do get expanded in scope, in ways that would greatly shape how they were portrayed throughout the remainder of the BECMI/AD&D split. No longer was shamanism limited to humans stereotyped as tribal and primitive; now they could belong to any species stereotyped as tribal and primitive!
The defining characteristic of the NPC shaman in the Master D&D set is that they are a cleric of a non-human, most often humanoid tribe. The position of shaman is overtly political, more so than the mere implied political power of player clerics who wander the land serving their god’s interests. In fact, humanoid shamans are often deeply intertwined with tribal governance.¹²
Speaking generally, what you’ll often see in monster writeups after this point throughout BECMI is that any given humanoid settlement with a large-enough population will sport at least 1 shaman who acts as advisor to the chieftain, perhaps with an apprentice or two in tow. Sometimes their religious leadership will exist in harmony with the secular power of the chieftain or war leader, and sometimes the chief may be in danger of getting usurped by a shaman with their own power base, allowing them to take full control of the tribe. It often depends on the species of humanoid in question.
Humanoid. I’ve been throwing that word around a lot without explaining its nuances.
For everyone who didn’t play D&D in the late 20th century, “humanoid” has a different and somewhat more specific meaning than it does in 3rd, 4th, and 5th editions. It refers to all roughly human-shaped, bipedal, intelligent or semi-intelligent creatures, up to and including giants, who are not members of the typical player species. Meanwhile, non-human player species with their own class are typically called demi-humans.
Thus an orc or a goblin is humanoid, but an elf or dwarf is demi-human, and humans themselves are neither; just humans, the mechanical gold standard and center of the universe. There’s something of a brutish, primitive, antagonistic connotation to the category of humanoid in early editions, so the older association of shamans with evil still holds true in a lot of cases in this era, albeit in a roundabout way unlike the shaman = chaotic cleric rule of old.
That isn't to say the humanoid association with evil is universally true, of course; there are exceptions depending on the species or, when the plot permits, the individual. Additionally, exceptions would slowly become more and more common over the years, right up until the modern era where alignment and species are very close to being fully decoupled, but just aren't all the way there yet.
As with the shamans of human natives, there are few mechanical distinctions between non-human shamans and other clerics. One is that non-human shamans have a limited selection of spells drawn from the cleric list, as well as generally low clerical spellcasting level limits, which ensure that shamans will never be as good at divine magic as human clerics. This is in contrast to how flashy they are when they cast that magic: shamanic magic is full of strange gestures, rituals, howling, and waving around sacred items where a human cleric might simply hold out their holy symbol. Shamans are also barred from some magic items normally available to clerics, mostly scrolls, which might be meant to imply illiteracy or at least a cultural aliteracy.
The other notable difference exists thanks to the Companion set. Because the druid was reimplemented as a character class, there are actually two different divine spell lists available. Shamans may cast either the limited cleric spells I already noted, or anything from the druid list, depending on the species (and implicitly, the unique magico-religious tradition) they hail from. Thus a hobgoblin shaman casts from the cleric spell list, while a centaur shaman casts from the druid spell list. This gives us the first, faintest hint of the shaman-as-druid archetype that we will see much more of in the future, while also setting shamanism up as a sort of spectrum located in between clerical and druidic magic.
Opposite the shaman sits another NPC spellcasting class called the Wicca.
As the name that gestures vaguely at the notion of witchy things indicates, the wicca uses limited arcane magic drawn from the magic-user spell list. But beyond this mechanical distinction, there isn't a lot that separates wiccas and shamans. Humanoids are stereotyped as fearful and ignorant of magic, so the two classes often rise to similar positions of power within their tribes to fulfill the same functions.
Further blurring the line between the two is the fact that some spellcasters can be both shaman and wicca, albeit at 1/2 the max levels of each. These shaman/wicca are essentially multiclassing in a system where that mechanic doesn't normally exist- another thing we'll see more of as we dive into the specific books of BECMI.
It's not enough to warrant calling the wicca a shaman-as-wizard in my opinion, but it adds to that hint of a rich and complex spectrum of approaches to magic within humanoid societies that can't be found among more "civilized" species with their stricter arcane/divine binary. I find that both amusing and compelling.
Immortals Set (1986)
There are no shamans of any sort anywhere in the Immortal boxed set, since it's chiefly concerned with how to run and challenge characters that have ascended to godhood in all but name. This entry is just here for completeness' sake, and also to show off the weird cavity in the cover art dude's six-pack.
He reminds me of an action figure I had as a kid, whose belly had a weird squishy guts window that you could poke inside. Eventually the guts part popped out from wear and tear (or maybe me just deliberately prying it out), leaving behind a cavity quite like this.
Anyway, let's wrap up this step of our survey.
Rules Cyclopedia (1991)
The Rules Cyclopedia was the last of the Basic remakes, synthesizing everything from the Basic to Master boxed sets together into a single cohesive text that dispensed with most of the godhood simulation rules of Immortals. It made several minor changes throughout, such as making the druid a standalone optional class decoupled from the 9th-level options/subclasses of the cleric.¹³
The cyclopedia also continued the tradition of monstrous spellcasters, with shamans and wiccas returning. Only, they're not wiccas anymore. Beginning in 1990 with Mystara's Hollow World Campaign Setting (which we'll get to eventually), all instances of the wicca class were changed to "wokan", plural wokani.¹⁴
At first I thought this change could be chalked up to the power of the early Wiccan lobby, but I think the real reason behind this change is that it was the latest in a series of PR name-changes for a different sort of butt-covering. It was the ‘90s, but the Satanic Panic was still having far-reaching impacts on popular culture and media. Wicca was one of the last remaining words in a TSR product that could in some way be misconstrued as Satanic, and I think they just kind of forgot about it until they were editing these books.
Just like when they changed demons and devils to Tanar’ri and Baatezu in AD&D 2E a year earlier in order to assuage the reactionary twits who were gripped by moral panic, I think TSR filed the serial numbers off of something vaguely witchy but left it mechanically unchanged, figuring it'd give them plausible deniability where useful and that nobody else who'd notice would care.
Interestingly, the BECMI shaman didn’t share that fate. Perhaps ‘shaman’ was generic-enough a word by now not to suggest a connection to black magic, Satanism, kids harming themselves in particularly deranged Chick Tracts, and all that stuff.
Or perhaps shaman was more distant and exotic, still having clear connotations but none of them negative or strong enough to elicit the same response in some readers. Clearly, something about the public perception of the word shaman and the ideas associated with it were different than those associated with witches and Wicca.
Again, this is just my speculation. I could be completely wrong.
The monstrous spellcaster section also treats us to a cyclops wokan and a pair of returning native humans together in an illustration of, uh... whatever this is.
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| I'm with Insensitive Caricature #1 on the left over there. I can't believe this shit either. |
BECMI and all its permutations stayed in print right up until Wizards of the Coast's acquisition of D&D and the development of 3rd edition, which was a pretty decent run of over 20 years all told. In that time, BECMI would experiment with new ideas that further distinguished itself from AD&D, but also left it as anything but "basic" by comparison. Over the next few posts we'll dive into specific sourcebooks for a cross-section of these innovations and how they relate to the ways shamans were conceived of, written, and at long last, played as viable PC options.
Next time we'll start looking through the Mystaran Gazetteers.
Or you can click here to return to the Shamans in D&D archive.
¹ Holmes, Eric. Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set. 1977. P. 11.
² Moldvay, Tom. Dungeons & Dragons Basic Rulebook. 1981. P. B8.
³ Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Set 1: Basic Rules. 1983. P. 24.
⁴ Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Expert Rulebook.. 1983. P. 31.
⁵ Cook, David, Tom Moldvay. Dungeon Module X1: The Isle of Dread. 1981. P. 29.
⁶ The Isle of Dread. P. 4.
⁷ Ibid. P. 7, 22-23.
⁸ Totemism is a whole other can of worms that we will be cracking open, but not quite yet. I don't have the room for it in this post. Fortunately there is no shortage of shaman classes that in some way involve totems, totem animals, spirit animals, spirit guides, or some other permutation of one of those loosely associated terms. You can probably look forward to that midway through our look at the Gazetteer series.
⁹ The Isle of Dread. P. 23-24, 26.
¹⁰ Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Players Companion: Book One. 1984. P. 14.
¹¹ Players Companion: Book One. P. 17-18.
¹² Mentzer, Frank. Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters' Book. 1985. P. 21-22.
¹³ Allston, Aaron. Dungeons & Dragons Rules Cyclopedia. Edit. Pickens, Jon, Steven E. Schend, Dori Jean Watry. 1991. P. 28-29.
¹⁴ Rules Cyclopedia. P. 215-216.
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