Recent content by David Howery

That's 1E in a nutshell. :) I think our group just generally let the mages pick their starting spells because it was easier. It was never much of a RAW group.....

that's not too bad, although you could still end up with a frustrated player who doesn't get anything he wanted. I don't recall all the details about setting up a mage's spellbook (other than it has to have Read Magic in it), but a decent house rule could be 'pick one spell that is in there...

that seems like it could really hamper starting mages who don't have really high INT. At the least, I'd think they should be able to choose one spell for their book. Otherwise, random bad luck (something that can really plague 1E RAW) could give them nothing all that useful to survive....

hmm. Did people actually use the random % chance to know a spell rules? From what I remember back in the 1E gaming days, we pretty much let starting mages pick the spells they wanted (they already had a difficult start). I don't think we used the % chance of adding a new spell either.... if...

the 1E surprise rules always annoyed me, particularly when it involved "so, this guy can sneak up on a wild panther and has a better chance of surprising it than vice verse?" And it got even crazier with all the new classes/demi-humans available in UA. I think in the last days of 1E, I...

never ran this one, but it drew the attention of our group due to the Huntsman NPC class, sort of an anti-ranger. I'd thought about using it in some other adventure, but never did....

D&D had some growing pains from the old 3-book set to 1E, and some Chainmail carryovers, moving from a heavily 'miniatures on a gaming board' to 'theater of the mind'....

one thing I've idly wondered about but never looked to closely at.... did Dungeon have any short adventures that could be used to fill in some of the blank areas of that huge Underdark map in the D series? There were a LOT of side caverns and tunnels on it that didn't have anything noted for...

mounted archers, like blocks of pikemen, are one of those historical things that are great to read about, but not so translatable into a D&D campaign. Unless your campaign is set outdoors a lot and deals with mass combat a lot, it's hard to get much use out of them. Individual PCs and NPCs...

I had a pretty hefty collection of those from Moore and Young both....

Into the Fire, #1. One of the best dragon centered adventures ever. Ancient Blood, #20. Frost Giant ghost wants revenge. Neat. Kingdom of the Ghouls #70. Epic Underdark adventure.

the one transfer I noticed early on was that the idea of 'priests healing people' got ported into the decidedly non-fantasy "Age of Empires" computer game....

I never really was affected any by the Satanic Panic, even living in a tiny MT town full of rural Christian types. Mostly, people regarded D&D as 'that nerd thing' and didn't bother much about it. No one was the least bit surprised that I was into it....

like most issues around this time, this one was one that was 'fun to read', but not 'used any of the info presented'. Mainly because I was in between gaming groups at the time....

that's been a complaint about the module since the Basic version came out back in 1980 or so. It's a slugfest and runs along the lines of 'fight/retreat to the Keep to heal up/fight some more." And yet, there's been versions of this in about every edition from Basic to 5E. Something about the...