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Rock Opera '79. The RPG of rock and rebellion in a campy dystopian retro-future. In the distant future of 1979, can you overthrow the evil Discocracy and restore rock’s right to rule? Imagine your favorite rock band of all time. Better yet, a supergroup with stars from legendary acts that...

When you're gaming with kids, especially, props help the players keep track of money and other resources. I use pirate coins, gems, treasure chests, teeny potion bottles, food packs, and arrows when I'm running a Dungeonteller game for young players. The food packs even have grease stains...

The Queen's Cavaliers is a recent Kickstarter offering. The playtest PDF is available here.

Attributes are pretty hard for young kids to translate into "what my character can actually do." I would go with skills only, with very concrete names like "Fighting", "Shooting", "Sneaking", and so on. Take a look at my Dungeonteller kids' RPG to see an example of this idea in action. I think...

Sounds like you need something a bit more freeform than a class-based game if your daughter wants to be a unicorn-riding princess. I would suggest RISUS, because she can just tell you the character she wants to be and you can stat it up for her. The math is pretty easy too. Regarding easy math...

Your little tyke will be killing monsters and taking their stuff before you know it!

It's from Jinx. My kid had one, it got a lot of laughs from folks in the know when she wore it.

I agree with Whizbang, that sounds a bit like Northern Crown. It is a d20 System game, but you can easily just use the setting and ignore the system if that's your preference.

It was at a demo game during MaineCon '77. My 1st-level elf bashed down a door. Two orcs rushed out and slew him. I was hooked for life. Bummed $5 off my friend Roger so I could buy the Holmes boxed set.

Northern Crown is indeed out of print, but you can still find it fairly easily, I think. it focuses on cultures east of the Mississippi, and it's set in a vaguely 17th century world. The horse-riding plains cultures were in their infancy during that time and they weren't my priority -- I was...

I voted "other." The strongest mechanism for balance in 1e is the tension between DM fiat and the right of players to vote with their feet if they don't feel the DM is fair.

I think a good group trumps a bad system. Good groups transcend a bad system by looking the other way when a rules loophole presents itself; they don't sweat it when a bad outcome occurs because of broken mechanics. I have inflicted plenty of creaky systems on my group (Space:1889 combat system...

Yes. Funny, I was just playing the original Zork last week.

I would argue treating it as a dungeon rather than as a wilderness -- come to think of it, I treat wildernesses as dungeons too. When you're mapping the city, think of each neighborhood, district, or quarter as conceptually equivalent of a room in a dungeon. There are one or more ways in and...

For my fantasy games, I go with some of the same stories that Gygax mentioned as inspirational reading in the 1e DMG: Roger Zelazny's Amber series and his stand-alone novel Jack of Shadows. Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast novels (the first two, anyhow) REH's Conan stories (and the later Conan...

We didn't have dice OR chits back in '77. When you attacked someone, you actually grabbed a weapon and swung it at the controlling player. We had a closet full of bardiches, glaives, and Bohemian ear spoons just for this purpose. When dice were introduced to the game, many lives were saved. Oh...

I had the same experience -- my dad bought me the boxed set and a zillion minis in 1978, but it was too unfamiliar to be appealing to my friends. Ultimately it was too much work to DM, but I loved reading the books and poring over the wonderful map included in the boxed set.

I guess the design philosophy was to fix the most clumsy aspects of 1e play, without creating a completely new game. Whatever quirks remained, like low AC = good, were almost certainly recognized by the designers as quirky, but not worth creating additional backwards-compatibility issues by fixing.