Recent content by David Howery

not to mention, he was writing for what he assumed would be a tiny group of gamers in his area, and had no idea that D&D would take off like it did...

I had this one way back in the day. Not sure why it was for sale in a toy store in Montana, but back then, I was grabbing about every D&D thing I could find. Alas, I lost it somewhere along the way...

definitely a milestone issue, with an odd cover (a paper sculpture, apparently). Can't say I made use of any of the stuff inside; never ran the adventure, I don't recall anyone in any of my 1E groups wanting to run a druid/ranger, and didn't use any of the Pages spells. That said, it was still...

from what I remember about my group in 1E days, initiative was simply one roll for each side, winner goes first, in the event of a tie, everything happens at once. The only exception I can remember is when there were spellcasters on both sides casting spells... in the event of a tie, the spell...

I read partway through the Thieves World books, right up to the point they introduced that guy who was a god or something and couldn't be killed. I found him to be incredibly annoying, and wondered if he could actually die if he got tossed into a volcano, and was hoping someone would write that...

Don't think I used any of the ideas in this issue, although I had planned to make use of the troops one...and then never got a campaign to high enough PC levels to do so...

Heh. Years after the magazine came out, this obscure fact popped up in an unexpected place. Long ago, TSR had a live chat forum, and once a week, they did a trivia game where you could win prizes for answering the most questions. Being a live chat, it boiled down to 'how fast can you remember...

a rather common fate back in these early chaotic days of RPGs....

my reason for 'buying the boxed set and never playing it' was 'wandered into a toy store in the mall in 1980, saw a really cool display of gaming minis, figured out they were for a game called Dungeons and Dragons, saw the boxed set (Holmes version) moments later, bought it... then later figured...

when it comes to 'articles we used the most', I have to look way back in the earlier days, when EGG was publishing the deities of Greyhawk... before the folio set, there wasn't anything official, so we just picked random gods out of the Deities book (including some of the gnarly Cthulhu ones...

well, some group somewhere out there in the world might have played 1e RAW. But every group I ever was in had a lot of 'rules not used', house rules, etc.

or even better, don't have training costs at all. From what I remember of the final days of my last 1E campaign, I did away with them completely. 'Huge training costs' are one of the things that turn PCs into murder hobos...

from what I saw on groups who used the book, it was generally along the lines of 'ignore the new classes, races, comeliness; use the new magic items, spells, weapon specialization." Specialization seemed to give kind of an edge to beginning fighters, but at the same time, the DM could apply it...

yeah, the joke articles were all kind of groaners. I did like when later on, they used to print some of the really oddball letters they got from readers. EGG's new rules for demi-humans was another one that I used a lot later, when I got back into another gaming group.

EGG's "raising the demi human limits' was one I wasn't able to use at first since I was in between gaming groups when this issue came out. But I did look it up a couple of years later and write down the pertinent facts after I joined a new group as the DM. Ignored all the stuff about...