Adept Play
A fantasy game composed of the Monster Manual (1977), Player’s Handbook (1978), and Dungeon Master’s Guide (1979), It was written/compiled by Gary Gygax and published by TSR (TSR Hobbies).
We have begun our third adventure for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, including one half-orc cleric-assassin for the Church of the Eternal and Fundamental Ordination, one half-elf fighter-assassin for the Church of the Ineffable Disruption of All Being, one half-elf fighter-thief who moonlights for the Disruption, and two half-orc fighter-clerics for the, well, it doesn’t really…
We’ve continued to play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, first version, at Spelens Hus, for another whole adventure in three more sessions. It has included a big shift in focus due to adding two players, Yaroslav and Milo. [see the previous post You had one job!] Milo had been present in our initial preparatory session but…
It begins at another post, Finding a game in there, which muses upon “fire-axing” Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, first version, published 1977-1979. Briefly: using the rules as best as possible or practical, but for a subset of the content, disallowing various classes or concepts from the start. I’ve already registered a session at Lincon, in…
(I’m in a maudlin mood) While rummaging through some old things in my cave, I came across some old artwork based on an AD&D game my friend Sam ran. This was back in the mid to late 80s, and I was firing on all pistons with art. My friend Sam ran a campaign with so…
After I finished my stint as referee in a long game focusing on sailing, exploring the wilderness, and leading bands of warriors, I wanted to try something a little different. That game had risen to really great heights, with dramatic, difficult challenges for both myself and the other players, but also spent a lot of…
One trend in role-playing game publications, from the beginning, is to stuff too much into the pages: design discovered and utilized in play, speculated design, padding, features or content provided by other people, consolidated content for IP purposes, content perceived as “needed” or “people want it,” and more. I find many game texts to be…
Around 1981, a book called Down in the Dungeon was published. It featured the theme of a dungeon and pages and pages of paintings of scenes inspired by fantasy roleplaying game play. The book included a view of several levels of the actual maze of the dungeon, and images of the denizens. Inspired by this,…
These are some very think-y questions! Including a lot about beasts and monsters. I want to clarify some things about my response to Sean. First, here are the three “roots” of critical hits in text. They’re not intended to be in order, as I think they were simultaneous at this scale of history: Here’s the…
I think we have created a solid mini-curriculum about some critical features of play. The first part is Movement and maps, the second is Horses on squares, and here’s my next part. I definitely include the comments to the prior posts as part of it. If you find any other posts or sets of comments…