Miniatures: Otherworld Skeletons
As you know, I've been painting Otherworld goblinoids with reference to the AD&D Monster Manual. To take the odd break I've also painted the first set of Otherworld Skeletons and the occasional PC. Here are some pict[...]Read on >>
D&D Basic Set part 11
MONSTERS: The monster section opens with some broad advice on using monsters in the campaign. It goes through how the monster entries are laid out, how the DM should stock his dungeon, provides some advice on using powe[...]Read on >>
D&D Basic Set part 10
MAGIC WEAPONS: The brief treatment of magic weapons given here in the combat section matches fairly well with the OD&D rules. We'll see if that's still the case when Holmes gets into more depth in the magical items [...]Read on >>
In praise of a player: Terry
August 4, 2010 from Temple of Demogorgon
Filed under: Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Fluff/Inspiration, RPG, RPG Hub
This coming weekend my friend Terry is taking me to Las Vegas again. She took me for a weekend earlier this year not long after an immediate member of my family had passed away, and I can’t tell you how much I needed a[...] Filed under: Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Fluff/Inspiration, RPG, RPG Hub
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(D&D3.5..) More Dungeons before GenCon
I still have some of my 3rd Edition D&D dungeons up in various places. One of these is called the Maze of Cherno, and another is Xathyl’s Redoubt. You can see how these kinda sorta go together. Xathyl’s is the [...]Read on >>
Village of Hommlet 4E: Aftermath – Onward To The Temple of Elemental Evil?
So Lareth the Beautiful is defeated, the cultists in the Moathouse scattered. Hommlet is safe again. Or is it?Probably not. The cultists in the Moathouse serve the Temple of Elemental Evil, a classic villain group harkin[...]Read on >>
The Classic Dungeons & Dragons Game… Oh, the Memories…
My experience with Dungeons & Dragons started with my dad's first edition AD&D books, but sometime in late elementary school (after my parents split up) my mom convinced me to throw them away and purchase a less [...]Read on >>
Weeee! Me and OD&D!
Before it gets later in the week and into a possible Mutant Future session, I wanted to post about the OD&D game I did for the group last week as a little alternative. My eyes are a bit bleary, as I sat through three[...]Read on >>
Much Ado: Recent OSR Kerfuffle
Like some other blogs, I do try to keep this blog politic-free. There are a couple things I would like to say, and these are generally applicable to the OSR spats that crop up from time to time.In the final tally, does a[...]Read on >>
Defining an age: “The Age of Dungeons”
When I first began my long running game world (that is, came up with a name for the land my first dungeon and nearby tavern were located in) that I still use for my ongoing AD&D campaigns, I was around 13 or 14. At [...]Read on >>
D&D Basic Set part 6
Thief Saving Throws: While I was going over the saving throw rules, I missed the changes relating to the Thief class. Originally, they had the same saving throw numbers as Magic-Users, but now they save as Fighters. Th[...]Read on >>
Skill Challenges, and an example.
It’s probably useful to think of skill challenges as casual things. Every single one of the really vicious arguments I’ve seen that have to do with skill challenges occurred when one side who had never used one saw i[...]Read on >>
Multiclassing in Microlite75?
Multiclassing was possible in 1970s versions of D&D, at least for demi-humans. Human could dual class in AD&D1e. Microlite75 does not yet have any rules for multiple classes, either for demi-humans or for humans.[...]Read on >>
Otherworld Miniatures: Gygax’s (Orange) Goblins:
As many of you know, I've been busy painting my Otherworld Goblins. In this endeavour I've tried to stay as close to the source material as possible. Regarding goblins, the AD&D Monster Manual states:“Goblins range[...]Read on >>
THE House Rule for Rules Heavy Games?
If you wonder why I prefer older versions of D&D or others rules lite games to the rules heavy monsters often published today, you only need to read part of Christian's Exploring The Magnum Opus That Is Ptolus post o[...]Read on >>
D&D Basic Set part 3
Today I'm looking at a number of different topics, from equipment to alignment to languages. There's not a lot here that is different from OD&D, but I'm going to go through and point out the minor differences anyway[...]Read on >>
Ever DM’d a Campaign Where You Limited the PC’s to Non-Good Alignments Only? How did it work out?
I'm getting ready to start up a new AD&D 1st ed. campaign, and I'm simply not interested as a DM in having the characters rescue the princess or save the village. I want characters who are selfish and greedy. I wan[...]Read on >>
Unemployed? Play D&D!
Alright, it may sound insensitive or crass, but it's not meant that way. I've been unemployed and I know how much it sux ass. But here's the thing: tonight I played a game of AD&D with a few people I've never play[...]Read on >>
D&D Basic Set part 2
Today I'm going to take a look at the races and classes in the Basic Set, and how they differ from their presentation in OD&D. The classes included here are Fighting Men, Magic-Users, Clerics and Thieves. The races[...]Read on >>
Do I like Champions more than D&D?
June 12, 2010 from Temple of Demogorgon
Filed under: Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Hero system, RPG, RPG Hub
D&D is my first and always will be my best love. I think. I’ve been running my 1st ed. (started out as OD&D) game world for over 30 years, and it would be hard not to look at it as a favorite son. And jeez, I [...] Filed under: Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Hero system, RPG, RPG Hub
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Why I Still Play Old Role-Playing Games
I'm often asked why I play old RPGs instead of whatever the current fad is or whatever the latest edition of the game I'm playing is. Of course, most people asking are really asking why I have no interest in the latest v[...]Read on >>
Basic/Expert D&D House Rules from 1984 (PDF Version)
RetroRoleplaying Cancer Fund Donors have been able to download The Second Grimoire of Pharesm the Bright-Eyed for about a year. I just noticed that I have never really described what this download actually is. This 15 pa[...]Read on >>
RPG Rules Complexity and Casual Gamers
I've heard a number of people say that the complexity of the rules of many modern RPGs are one of the major things keeping casual gamers away from the game. While rules complexity certainly is part of the problem, I don'[...]Read on >>
Painting Humanoids: Do Your Goblins Look Like this?
I've always loved this image. The goblins appeared different from other representations in D&D, or are they? I'll return to this in a moment. I'm slowly creeping to the point where I've prepared all my Otherworld mon[...]Read on >>
Oh the irony
I had a funny thought the other day. In my ongoing, semi-regular Wilderlands campaign there's been a lot of tweaking and adjusting to get the PCs' race-class choices to be "just right" for Castles & Crusades. Two of [...]Read on >>
I played me some AD&D
So last weekend I played in regular player Ben’s game. I won’t lie to you, I was severely hung over. My older bro and I stayed up till almost 5am drinking whiskey and Jager. Ugh. Getting too old for this.But with a l[...]Read on >>
Taking off the DM hat (at least a little)
I always preferred GM’ing to being a player. From the mid-80’s through the late 90’s, I was the DM/GM 99% of the time and was the guy who would put the gaming group together. The last time I sat down as a player wa[...]Read on >>
Selling a different game experience
After my first game of AD&D nearly 30 years ago, the first thing I did was start making character, even though I didn't have a rulebook. When I finally got books Christmas of 1981, I went to town. Character building,[...]Read on >>
“Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything…”
“Now and then a player will die through no fault of his own. He or she will have done everything correctly, taken every reasonable precaution, but still the freakish roll of the dice will kill the character. In the lon[...]Read on >>
Meanies of the Old School
Although I have been computer savvy since the early 90’s, I never spent any real time looking up the gaming community online. When I returned to gaming after several years off in 2008, I got in touch with most of my pl[...]Read on >>
ROLL FOR INITIATIVE
I want to mention up front that it was a gaming podcast that got me involved in the online blogging community. I don’t know the name of it (maybe it was an early episode of RFI), but James from Grognardia was a guest, [...]Read on >>
Labels, the OSR, and Where We All Fit In
I don't know where I fit into it all. I mostly play a newer game, 3.0, in as old school a way as I can. We use most of the skills, some of the feats, but narrative combat, no minis or mats. We don't particularly care abo[...]Read on >>
Old School Gaming: The Art of (Im)balance
Three things you may have noticed in yesterdays post, about the long-ago encounter with the vampire queen. 1) The average level of the characters in the party was around 4th-5th level. We were fighting a vampire with a[...]Read on >>
Old School Gaming: Four Gallons of Holy Water and a Vampire Queen
More and more lately, I keep finding myself trying to define what an old school game would be. Some people say its not something that can be defined; I dont really agree with that. Some people define old school as si[...]Read on >>
Monday Pointers: March 22, 2010 Edition
D4:Lamentations of Conan James Raggi IV moves one step closer to the killer weird fantasy boxed set by getting Ernie Chan, famous for work on the classic Marvel Conan books, for his boxed set. D6:Fight On #8 is out Surr[...]Read on >>
I’m Up to My Eyeballs in Visions
I've been thinking about all the different visions in a fantasy game setting. The first mention that I know of was in the original White Box, Monsters & Treasure. The goblins get the distinction, they (goblins) see [...]Read on >>
Retro-Stupid Defined
In the past, I've enjoyed posting some of my favorite essays from my days of reading Dragon magazine. Lately, I'd been thinking about posting my all-time favorite Roger E. Moore editorial, a piece entitled "Legend"...but[...]Read on >>
A Sword Named “Finslayer”
Finslayer, the most iconic magic item to be found within the Night Below setting for AD&D 2nd edition, is about to be found by the party in my current 1st edition AD&D run of NB. Located (as indicated in book 2 o[...]Read on >>
The Joy of Pets
Back around 1986-1988, four friends and I were playing in an AD&D campaign using the 1st edition rules (including the Unearthed Arcana). We wandered around in a sort of plot-hook based sandbox run by our pal Geoff, a[...]Read on >>
We Aren’t Alone
A recent post in A Paladin in the Citadel, a blog I regularly follow, dealt with gamers and bloggers in the place you live in. Speaking for myself, I was under the impression that gamers are a rare breed in my city and m[...]Read on >>
How Much Character Design Crunch is Too Much?
One of the main features of modern versions of D&D seem to be complex character builds that delight min-maxers and lead to players who do not optimize their characters being looked down on in some player groups. Old [...]Read on >>
AD&D2e Campaign Reports
The RetroRoleplaying message board doesn't see a lot of use, unfortunately. However, if you are at all interested in AD&D2e, CondorDM has posted a couple of session reports from his campaign: CondorDMs Sessions journ[...]Read on >>
A Chess Master on D&D Edition Wars
One of my regular players had relatives in town this weekend and brought his cousin Debra to our Sunday game. She had played AD&D2e in college in the late 1980s and had a great time playing Serge (the NPC sergeant in[...]Read on >>
A Colossal Waste of Time?
Sometime back, I listened to a podcast from All Games Considered on old school gaming. It was pretty interesting and went far to validate a lot of things about the hobby I knew about or suspected that I knew about. Liste[...]Read on >>
The Advanced Edition Companion
I think I found my dream version of Dungeons & Dragons. Sadly, I dont think Ill ever find a group with which to run or play it at this point in my life but thems the breaks. Im just happy to have found it,[...]Read on >>
Expanding James Maliszewski’s “To Roll 20″ D&D Combat System
Over at his absolutely must read "in praise of Old School RPG gaming" site Grognardia today, James Maliszewski takes on one of the typical myths regarding the complexity of the original AD&D and D&D games. Many [...]Read on >>
Return to Moria: House Rules
My Return to Moria game is hewing pretty closely to 1st Edition AD&D rules, but we're adding a number of house rules to add our own flavor to the game. Here they are: Attribute Checks Certain situations call for [...]Read on >>
Currency
Campaigns need money. Some sort of standard coin that can be traded goods. You have the old standard copper, silver and gold. If you have played AD&D you will have experienced the dreaded electrum pieces. Then th[...]Read on >>
Token Magic
In my Failures of 2009 post a few days back I made mention of Token Magic, a system I implemented in a heavily house-ruled AD&D 2nd edition game I ran a while back. One of my readers commented that it sounded interes[...]Read on >>
The Weird Stuff I Find
I was cleaning up my RPG folder on my computer this week, a never ending process, and stumbled across this text file dating from 1997. It appears to be some sort of classless advancement system for AD&D 2nd edition, [...]Read on >>
