Recent content by David Howery

the two part article about the Hells is among my favorites from the Dragon era....

Heh. Way back in the final days of TSR, not long before they went under completely, I sent in an article to Dragon on exactly this, putting stats to 'fearsome critters' (come to think of it, that was the name of the article). Needless to say, it took awhile to get an answer what with the WOTC...

of all the quirks of the 1E rules, descending AC was the only one that really annoyed me. I'm not sure why, but it always seemed just so nonsensical, particularly when magic armor had plusses that you had to subtract, etc. I tried a few times to develop ascending AC rules, but never got it...

I'm in charge of D&D? well, hey, it had a good run, 50 years is a long time...

1. Powerful magicians exist in the D&D worlds. 2. Alcohol also exists in the D&D worlds. and this is how you get owlbears and chimeras....

like a lot of readers, I rolled up and tried out a cavalier PC after this article came out... and found the 'never retreat' rule was a mixed blessing...

I never played it, but it was a blast to read....

as I was an active writer for TSR's magazines back in the day, I (and scads of other people in the same situation) got both of these free from TSR, as they were looking for the freelancers to start writing stuff for the magazines ASAP. I can still remember looking through it and having mixed...

I'd always thought one of the big reasons that horror doesn't do so well in D&D is that a big part of horror is the idea 'this character could die a horrible death.' D&D players back in those days were pretty blase about that....

my group did too... these articles came out while my first D&D group was running, and it was great to have some official WoG deities....

I have a 2nd print one with the thank you. I can remember buying it mainly because my group was running in the 'folio' edition of the WoG, and there weren't any deities listed anywhere, so our PCs were worshiping a wide assortment of them out of the book. Not long after I got it though, EGG...

the sheer scope of it. At it's height in 2E days, PCs could go adventuring all the way from Kara Tur to Maztica, and end up in the pseudo Arabian Nights and Mongol ones along the way.

to be sure, the 'open sandbox' nature of it is appealing to many. As a newb DM way back in 1980, I remember preparing to run it and littering the wilderness map with lots of critters from the MM, mainly wild animal types since there were already so many humanoids and the like in the CoC...

printed adventures being scarce at the time, I remember our DM running us through the Aztec adventure in this one, although our PCs at the time weren't really high enough level to do it. We prevailed (barely), but mainly because the DM nerfed the godawful powerful cleric at the end...

B2 is rather notorious for it's lack of detail... I mean, the NPCs n the Keep don't even have names! It's like several other early modules in that it takes a lot of DM preparation to make use of it. That said, at the time, it was one of a handful of published modules out there, and we were...