AD&D 2nd Edition
Although the main part of our original AD&D Greyhawk game was now over, there was one offshoot of it, and it all came down to my brother’s character, Brunak the Barbarian. You see, Brunak was a Frost Barbarian. He was a long, long way from home. I have this sneaking suspicion that in the early stages we actually said he came from the Wild Coast … Continue reading Memories of Greyhawk Campaigns Past: Brunak the Barbarian
Following the completion of the Temple of Elemental campaign, our characters were considered heroes. The players? We were transitioning. In my case, I was becoming a student at Melbourne University. (Our DM was already there). This puts an actual date on this campaign: I began my first year in 1990. It’s worth mentioning that this was an incredibly erratically scheduled campaign. And my memory is … Continue reading Memories of Greyhawk Campaigns Past: Tsojcanth
Examining my old archives, I found the following entries relating to campaigns played 20 years ago or more… We played the events in 578 CY in 1997-8, if I recall correctly, using the AD&D 2nd Edition rules (using the Player Options books). The later events came from a campaign begun in 2000, in the weeks leading up to the release of D&D 3E and beyond! … Continue reading Memories of Greyhawk
In the beginning, there was Chainmail. And, in Chainmail, characters were either alive or dead. A single hit was enough to kill most characters. However, this was a miniature game, and a single player controlled many characters. Well, figures or models. The more powerful characters, such as the Hero or the Superhero required several simultaneous hits to kill. A Hero required four regular men to … Continue reading Hit Points Through the Editions, part 1
Well, this is interesting! Wizards of the Coast and OneBookShelf have enabled print-on-demand for a initial range of titles on the DMs Guild. This is fantastic news for people who want hard copies of those older products. However, it does come with a few caveats… The main thing to consider is that those products won’t be printed exactly like the original printing. A single softcover or … Continue reading Print-on-Demand versions of classic Dungeons & Dragons titles
Including monster statistics – stat blocks – in adventures is a challenge. The earliest adventures – the Giant adventures by Gary Gygax – listed the name of the monster and its hit points and nothing else. It’s a little hard to tell if this was an aesthetic choice or one born from the fact that the rules were still somewhat in flux (the AD&D Monster … Continue reading A Short History of Monster Stat Blocks
A recent question was asked on Facebook about why AD&D dragons had so few hit points. In fact, the original D&D dragons had even fewer hit points but, compared to PCs, they were god-like creatures. The history of dragon statistics in D&D displays the changing balance between players and monsters. The game began in 1974 with all characters rolling d6 for hit dice. Although we … Continue reading The Original Dragons of Dungeons & Dragons
It is probably fair to say that the main line of D&D development never had a coherent initiative system until AD&D 2nd Edition came along in 1989. Gary Gygax was many things, but a writer of clear, unambiguous combat rules was not one of them. The systems in the various versions of Basic D&D were used by many as the basis of how to run … Continue reading Initiative in AD&D 2nd Edition
This isn’t a very good analysis, and is not particularly deep, but seeing as I had the book sitting on my hard-drive, I decided to have a look at the Armour Classes of creatures within… Here’s the count of Armour Classes of each number. It’s a bit odd seeing the spikes on AC 6 and AC 0, mucking up what would otherwise be a nicely-shaped … Continue reading Monstrous Compendium Annual, Volume 1 – Armour Class analysis
Between the Monster Manual of AD&D and the Monstrous Compendium of 2nd edition AD&D, there are ten years of the game being played. There were some notable changes in the new monster lists, with quite a few omissions due to the Angry Mothers from Heck problem that was plaguing AD&D at the time; in particular, demons and devils don’t appear in the original two Monstrous … Continue reading A Historical Look at Armour Class – Second Edition AD&D
