Recent content by Celebrim

"Oregon Trail" definitely needs to be only part of the gameplay loop. Oregon trail makes things interesting by having river crossings, resupply opportunities, and other fixed events along the way. When doing long overland travel I like to break it up with fixed encounters ("lairs") as well as...

So, perhaps not surprisingly, since Star Wars generally seems to occur in a universe where outer space has air and gravity, there has been very little mention of exposure to a vacuum in published Star Wars material. But I play a bit grittier of a Star Wars game than most, and while I've played...

There are a ton. The Great Pendragon Campaign Beyond the Witchlight Tomb of Annihilation Chronicles of the Dragonlance A thoroughly revised "Skull & Shackles" Two-Headed Serpent A full Ravenloft campaign based on thoroughly revised and expanded "Curse of Strahd" My own "Return of the Ice...

I've always hated the term "adventurer" because the word actually means "tourist" and is most closely translated as "danger tourist" or "extreme tourist" today, though at the time the word was coined there wasn't a need for an adjective because all tourism was considered dangerous and extreme...

It's the Crypt Thing and it's in the class of "mobile traps" that we see in a lot of AD&D monsters. How dangerous it is depends entirely on how the DM sets up the random teleportation. It could literally be anything from a minor annoyance to a die no save death trap depending on what the...

Page 174, 1e AD&D DMG. See also this blogpost about it that you might appreciate: AD&D Monster Levels and XP UPDATE Personally I believe it was a mistake to cap at Monster level X. If you look at my thread about revising the dragons, you'll note that I believe I have monsters listed up to...

No, I mean rather that since all hydra powers scale with HD, the system in the table on page 85 works well (and indeed 10 headed hydra is given as an example on the page) whether or not it was consistently applied in Appendix E. There is no need to count the hydras 10 heads as 2 multiple...

I think typically between 1 and 2 hours of prep time per hour at the table. The worst ratio I ever had was probably 5 hours of prep time per hour at the table. That was when I was prepping for open table play at my local gaming story - as much 15 hours for a 3 hour session. Since it seems...

Many more than that. Regardless of which edition of D&D we are talking about, assigning a "challenge rating" and thus a reward to defeating a monster always involves a ton of arbitrary decisions starting in the 1e AD&D case with the numbers assigned to each line in the table. What you are...

It doesn't help that when Hollywood depicts the 1920s it almost invariably depicts the 1930s - and quite often the late 1930s - in terms of dress, cars, planes, and styles. There is a pretty dramatic cultural shift that goes on during the later 1920s and early 1930s that is the period we think...

White Box OD&D "Of Men and Magic". You could call that a prototype I suppose. The 1st printing is a valuable collectible if in good condition, though its far more likely you have a later printing (4th most likely).

That may well be my mistake, but "Wellsian" and "Vernian" don't commonly mean optimistic or pessimistic, even when you google the contrast. In fact, when I Google it, Google's AI does suggest that it means optimistic or pessimistic, but as it's source for that claim it cites this conversation...

What I use... ALTER SELF Transmutation Level: Brd 2, Sor/Wiz 2 Components: V, S Casting Time: 1 standard action Range: Personal Target: You Duration: 10 min./level (D) You assume the outward appearance of a creature of the same type as your normal form. The new form must be within one size...

No. Maybe someone has but it is not at all obvious to me that the words are commonly used as you use them here. For example, this is a quote using the term Wellsian from SF literary criticism of 1935. "How much more courageous realistic and honest to say ‘the dark ages before us’...than to...

I don't think I would characterize either writer so simply. The quintessential Wells story for me is, "The Food of the Gods". And while the food is the cause of enormous problems, try reading the end of that story and telling me that Wells is critical of the idea of progress. Heck, not even...