Dungeons & Dragons Immortals Rules

• 1. Introduction

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  The Dungeons and Dragons Immortals Rules asks a question most game designers never dare to pose: what happens after a character reaches the top? Not the end of a campaign, not retirement, but something stranger. In 1986, TSR published this boxed set as the fifth and final entry in a series Frank Mentzer had been building since 1983. It was the capstone of an entire revision of the D&D game, the point where players were expected to leave levels behind entirely and step into something the rules call transcendence.

  To reach this point, a player character first had to climb through four prior boxed sets, from the Basic Rules supporting levels one through three, all the way up through the Master Rules covering levels twenty-six through thirty-six. The Immortals Rules was not a starting point. It was a destination. And the rules waiting at that destination were strange enough that at least one reviewer could not imagine actually playing them.

• 2. Frank Mentzer's Five-Set Vision

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  Frank Mentzer revised the original Dungeons and Dragons Basic Set in 1983, renaming it Dungeons and Dragons Set 1: Basic Rules. What followed was a project spanning two years. Between 1983 and 1985, Mentzer rebuilt the entire game as a ladder of five boxed sets, each covering a distinct range of character power.

  The Basic Rules handled levels one through three. The Expert Rules extended that to level fourteen. The Companion Rules brought characters up to level twenty-five, and the Master Rules carried them to thirty-six. The Immortals Rules sat at the top, covering characters who had gone beyond levels altogether. Each set was designed to hand off to the next, making the whole series a single continuous arc from novice adventurer to something post-human.

  Mentzer wrote the Immortals Rules himself, and Anne Gray McCready served as editor. Harold Johnson also contributed to editing and development. The cover and interior artwork came from Larry Elmore, with Jeff Easley contributing interior illustrations as well.

• 3. Inside the Box

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  The physical set contained two booklets. One ran fifty-two pages and the other thirty-two. Their titles were Player's Guide to Immortals and DM's Guide to Immortals, a division that mirrored the standard D&D practice of separating what players needed to know from what the Dungeon Master controlled.

  The player-facing material introduced a complete redesign of the character's core mechanics. Upon achieving immortality, a character exchanged all accumulated experience points for power points at a rate of ten thousand to one. Those power points could then be spent to permanently raise attribute scores or to purchase new special abilities through a magic point system. Ranks replaced levels entirely, and a character had to maintain a minimum number of power points simply to hold their current rank.

  Promoting to the next rank required something unusual: competition in the Olympics. That single detail captures something of the tone the set was reaching for. Immortal characters were not just powerful; they existed in a structured society with duties, responsibilities, and a hierarchy above them. The Dungeon Master took on the roles of the Hierarchs of the spheres, the superiors to whom Immortal player characters answered.

• 4. A Multiverse of Extremes

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  Three Immortals, according to the mythology built into the set, originally discovered the multiverse and chose to give it order and purpose. From that founding premise, the Immortals Rules constructed a cosmology on a scale the earlier boxed sets had never attempted.

  An Astral Plane runs through and connects the whole of the multiverse. Alongside it sit the Prime Material Plane, elemental planes, Ethereal Planes, and a range of outer planes. The outer planes vary in size to a degree that borders on the comic. Mono-spatial atto-planes measure roughly one-third of an inch across. Penta-spatial tera-planes stretch to approximately eight hundred fifty-one billion light-years. Both exist within the same cosmological system.

  The set's monster section drew on earlier D&D history. The twenty-two pages of game statistics included demons that had originally appeared in Eldritch Wizardry, linking the Immortals Rules back to the earlier years of the game's publication. The set also included sample plots and adventure scenarios designed specifically for Immortal-level play.

• 5. How Critics Received It

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  Graeme Davis reviewed the Immortals Rules in issue number eighty-three of White Dwarf magazine. His verdict was that the set represented "the culmination of the D&D game system." Davis found the material interesting, though he admitted he could not imagine actually playing it.

  Lawrence Schick offered a sharper assessment in his 1991 book Heroic Worlds. He wrote that play using the Immortals rules is "so different from low-level D&D as to be almost another game entirely." That observation cuts to the center of what the set was trying to do. A game about managing the equivalent of divine politics and constructing personal home planes on the scale of billions of light-years shares very little with rolling dice to see if a first-level character survives an encounter with goblins. Schick's framing also appears in a review published in Casus Belli number thirty-six in February 1987, which placed the set in the context of French-language D&D coverage from the period.