AD&D 1st edition
Have you heard of Tomb of Horrors? Designed by Gary Gygax for the original Dungeons & Dragons game (and based on an idea by Alan Lucien), it is infamous as a character and party-killer. It was designed to test the skills of D&D players and was the D&D tournament module at Origins I in 1975 – that’s only a year after Dungeons & Dragons itself … Continue reading Classic D&D Review: Tomb of Horrors
The publication of Q1: Queen of the Demonweb Pits in 1980 was an important event. After about a two-year wait, we finally had the conclusion to the Giant and Drow series. However, the author of the adventure wasn’t Gary Gygax, who’d written the first six modules, but instead Dave Sutherland. Gygax explained the substitution in the adventure – he had written the first six modules over a … Continue reading Classic D&D Review: Queen of the Demonweb Pits
Of the classic Dungeons & Dragons campaigns of the early AD&D era, we talk about three: Temple of Elemental Evil, Scourge of the Slavelords, and Queen of the Spiders. All three were collected into three supermodules, and it had been our original plan to play through all of then and then go to the Bloodstone Pass series. Now, we finally got to the second of … Continue reading Memories of Greyhawk Campaigns Past: Slavelords
In Dungeons & Dragons, there are dungeons. And in those dungeons are doors. Doors were tremendously important in Classic D&D (the term I’ll use to describe the original, B/X and AD&D versions of the game), and I have a few thoughts I’d like to share with you about them, and how you can use them well. The basic purpose of a door is to divide … Continue reading D&D Procedures: Doors
Dungeon Module D2: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa continues the 3-module “Drow” series. By this stage, the party has defeated the giants and is pursuing the drow deeper and deeper into the earth. The first adventure of this series, Descent into the Depths of the Earth introduced the party to the world that existed below; this adventure deals with the second part of their journey. The … Continue reading AD&D Review: Shrine of the Kuo-Toa
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
Descent into the Depths of the Earth is the first of three modules in the “Descent” or “Drow” series, and the fourth of 7 modules in the special campaign series generally known as the GDQ series. First published in 1978, the adventure picks up after the end of the Giant series, with the adventurers pursuing the fleeing drow elves into a long tunnel deep under … Continue reading AD&D Review: Descent into the Depths of the Earth
Although I remember the beginnings of the Elemental Evil campaign well, I don’t remember all that many of the details. Well, it was nearly 40 years ago now! It’s an odd thing revisiting my memories of this time, because I’ve read the source adventures many times since then – but at the time I was coming at them as a player. In my later revisitings … Continue reading Memories of Greyhawk Campaigns Past: Elemental Evil
I was watching Justin Alexander’s stream yesterday when one of his watchers lamented that newer players didn’t know about all the tricks used in the old days. Such as using marbles to test if a passageway sloped downwards, or a ten-foot pole to test if the passageway ahead had a pit trap in it. Justin replied that it doesn’t take much for that sort of … Continue reading Using (Your) Marbles – Decision Making in RPGs
G3: Hall of the Fire Giant King is rightfully considered a classic of Dungeons & Dragons adventures. For a module that is only 16 pages in length, it contains a great deal of incident, evocative description, and adventure. It premiered as the final round of the D&D tournament at Origins ’78, and an account of the winning team’s accomplishments was published in Dragon Magazine #19 … Continue reading AD&D Adventure Review: Hall of the Fire Giant King
