AD&D 1st edition
It occurs to me that I very much miss the original golems from AD&D. These monsters were absolutely terrifying. Let’s take the clay golem, and recast it in 5E terms… Clay Golem Large construct, unaligned Armor Class 14 (natural armor)Hit Points 133 (14d10+56)Speed 20 ft. STR +5 (20) DEX -1 (9) CON +4 (18) INT -4 (3) WIS -1 (8) CHA -5 (1) Damage Immunities … Continue reading Dungeons & Dragons Lore: Old-School Golems
Back in 1984, Conan was hot. The Arnold Schwarzenegger movies had come out to the general acclaim of – well – fantasy fans. (The first movie found a more general audience, but the second did not). And TSR somehow gained the license to do Conan-based RPGs. There was an actual Conan RPG, plus three AD&D adventures – two Conan adventures and one Red Sonja adventure … Continue reading AD&D Adventure Review: Conan Unchained!
The World of Greyhawk is one of the oldest fantasy RPG settings, and grew out of the personal campaign of Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. In previous articles, I’ve discussed its origins, and the updates to the setting. In this article, I’ll discuss its adventures. Many campaign settings are defined by their sourcebooks. Greyhawk rarely had a sourcebook, although some came out … Continue reading A Short Introduction to Greyhawk, part 3
How often do your characters rest? Where do they rest? Do your characters always fight to the death? Further to my last article on the effects that the availability of healing has on the game, I was considering how other mechanics change the flow of the game. To some extent, the mechanics are elements of the old-style dungeon explorations that I still enjoy very much … Continue reading Wandering Monsters, Pursuit and Resting
I recently ran a session of Tomb of Horrors. Not the new version from Tales from the Yawning Portal, but the old version. The AD&D first edition version. With the pregenerated characters included in the adventure. Seven players, seven heroes. In a two-hour session they reached about half-way through. The dwarven fighter began the session on 90 hit points, a very good total in those … Continue reading More Thoughts on Healing
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
The First Book of the Dragonlance adventures concluded in 1984 with Dragons of Desolation. In this adventure, the heroes guide the refugees of Pax Tharkas into the dwarven city of Thorbardin, and then have to persuade the dwarven council to let them stay. They are fine with it… just as long as the characters retrieve for them the fabled Hammer of Kharas from a floating … Continue reading AD&D Adventure Review – DL4 Dragons of Desolation
In the late 1970s, Lawrence Schick took the best bits of the dungeons he’d designed, stuck them all together, and gave the result to TSR as a sample document hoping to persuade them to hire him. It worked. His sample document was published as S2: White Plume Mountain without changing a word, much to his surprise. It’s also one of my favourite adventures of the … Continue reading AD&D Adventure Review: White Plume Mountain
The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan is the first module of the “C” or “Competition” series of modules. It was originally used (as Lost Tamoachan) in the 1979 Origins tournament, and this module was the first to give a scoring system within its pages. Although most of the previous modules released by TSR had been tournament adventures, this was released to be used as a tournament … Continue reading AD&D Adventure Review: The Hidden Shrine of Tamoachan
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
