AD&D 1st edition
Slave Pits of the Undercity is the first adventure in the Aerie of the Slave Lords series. This series of adventures was originally designed for the official AD&D Tournament at GenCon XIII in 1980. It was a very unusual undertaking: the first round was actually five separate adventures, each undertaken by different groups. The semi-final was a sixth adventure, and the final round was a … Continue reading AD&D Review – A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity
With Dragons of Despair, TSR launched the Dragonlance property, and we moved into a new era of D&D. It’s really hard to understate how important Dragonlance is to the history of D&D. The story was told through both adventures and novels, and for the first time TSR were concentrating on telling a really big story through their products. We’d seen hints of this approach to … Continue reading Review of DL1: Dragons of Despair
I’m writing this review thirty years after UK3: The Gauntlet came out. This adventure is part two of the two-part Alderweg series. I was not particularly kind in my review of the first part of the series, The Sentinel. I did not enjoy it when I first read it back in the 80s, and I don’t particularly enjoy it today. It’s not a terrible adventure, … Continue reading AD&D Review – UK3: The Gauntlet
When you get down to it, my D&D designs are greatly influenced by the form of the game that Gary Gygax seemed to be writing about in the DMG. And that means dungeons. Lots and lots of dungeons. Yes, I know that he also wrote about territory development and wilderness exploration, but those sections are rather scant in the DMG, whilst there’s a lot on … Continue reading Caverns of the Oracle: One of my personal megadungeons
While a lot of the rest of the world was sitting down to play their first games of the new D&D using the Starter Set, my regular crew of players were playing AD&D with me. Mainly because the Starter Set isn’t out here yet in Australia, which does make it just a little difficult to play The Lost Mine of Phandelver! Our regular numbers were … Continue reading The Castle of the Mad Archmage
My AD&D players came up against an Adult White Dragon on the weekend. They went looking for it, as Rich’s Thief had been aged 40 years by a ghost, and a sage had told them that a remove curse spell cast while eating the heart of an adult dragon would reverse the aging. It sounded good to me at the time! For my gentle readers … Continue reading Death by Dragon
There are very few adventures that are better thought of than Ravenloft. The adventure, written in 1983 by Tracy and Laura Hickman, was popular enough to inspire an entire campaign setting and brought the trappings of Gothic Horror to Dungeons & Dragons. However, it isn’t entirely smooth sailing. The Hickmans were being pioneers with this form of storytelling and so there are techniques of storytelling … Continue reading AD&D Review: I6 Ravenloft
As previously related, early forms of D&D had trouble clearly describing an initiative system. Original D&D used the Chainmail initiative system, and other versions or clarifications were proposed in Eldritch Wizardry, The Strategic Review and The Dragon. As the Eldritch Wizardry system seems to be missing some key information, Eric Holmes had something of a problem when he was designing the initiative system for the … Continue reading Initiative in Basic D&D
One of the thornier issues in AD&D is on when a spell resolves in the round. There are – in general – two schools of thought on the subject. The first believes that spell-casting starts at the very beginning of the round and concludes in the segment described in its casting time. Thus, Magic Missile always resolves in the first segment of the round, and … Continue reading The Casting Time of Spells in D&D
A recent conversation made me interested in why AD&D initiative works as it does. Or at least, why the description is so darn complicated. In doing so, I went back to Chainmail, which has two initiative systems. The first is for regular mass battles. They work like this: Both sides make an initiative roll on d6, with the winner of the die-roll choosing to move … Continue reading The Development of AD&D Initiative
