My first real experience with a DM was with the adventure Keep on the Borderlands, a classic adventure that many, many players had as their first adventure since it was published with the introductory Basic D&D rules for about a decade. The thing is: it’s not a very good introductory adventure if you’re a new DM. Well, half of it is: the dungeon half. That … Continue reading On Introductory Adventures
The 1984 Basic Game adventure for the Dungeons & Dragons system, Journey to The Rock, is an oddity. Written by Michael Malone, who only has one other design credit (an adventure in Dungeon Magazine #57), the adventure is surprisingly slight, and manages to avoid using dungeons; for the most part, it’s a wilderness adventure. It should be noted that the original plan for the Basic … Continue reading Adventure Review – B8: Journey to The Rock
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
The Mad God’s Jest is an adventure by Shane Ward for four players of 6th level. It uses the Labyrinth Lord system, a retroclone of the B/X line of D&D, which makes it suitable for using with most 2E-and-earlier games. To use it with later editions would take more fiddling around with the statistics and mechanics. The adventure begins with the party kidnapped by Captain … Continue reading OSR Adventure Review: The Mad God’s Jest
Rahasia was originally written and self-published by Tracy and Laura Hickman in 1979. Tracy took the adventure with him when he joined TSR, and it was published for the RPGA network in 1982, as RPGA1 Rahasia. A follow-up adventure, RPGA2 Black Opal Eye, also appeared that year. Finally, both parts were published together for the D&D Basic line in 1984 as B7: Rahasia. The hook … Continue reading Adventure Review – B7: Rahasia
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
One of the main tasks of a Dungeon Master in D&D is providing opportunities to adventure for your players. The process to create adventures can be very simple or very involved, depending on how much work you want to put into it. It’s really important to note that most published adventures contain far more information than you’d ever need for your game. I may have … Continue reading Designing a Basic Dungeon
The Tomb of Gardag the Strange is a short adventure written for the Labyrinth Lord system (a variant of the 1981 Basic & Expert D&D set edited by Tom Moldvay and Dave Cook). The adventure contains seven first-level pregenerated characters, so I presume that it’s a first-level adventure. The adventurers are hired to discover the remains of an assassin from the tomb of the warlord … Continue reading OSR Adventure Review: The Tomb of Gardag the Strange
Released in 1984, B6: The Veiled Society is an innovative adventure. Its designer, David “Zeb” Cook, had already made several contributions to the D&D adventure line: Slave Pits of the Undercity, The Isle of Dread, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, Master of the Desert Nomads and Temple of Death as well as writing the original set of the D&D Expert Rules (1981). In The Veiled … Continue reading D&D Basic Review – B6: The Veiled Society
There are D&D adventures I am intimately familiar with. I3 Pharaoh is one of those. It’s an adventure I’ve read many, many times, and DMed on two separate occasions. Other adventures I have known only through their product code. X6 Quagmire is of that latter sort. I never owned it during my early days of D&D, nor did I play it or run it. So, … Continue reading D&D Basic Review: X6 Quagmire!
