Recent content by Flying Toaster

I remember DMs trying to mess with players this way back in the 80’s, and never in a consistent way that would let players learn and adapt. The game is called Dungeons & Dragons, not “Simon Says”.

I have been having this problem all day - Chrome and Firefox on Android.

It figures that I would forget about the 1E Monk, because the Monk, the Assassin, and the weird optional Bard were the three 1E PHB classes that I never played, so I never really learned their rules. No one else in my groups ever played them either, so they were basically absent from our games...

The Ranger was always fairly popular in my junior high school (late 1980’s) AD&D 1E groups, but more because of Aragorn from LOTR and general “rule of cool” than because of the actual class abilities. One of our house rules allowed Elves and Half-Elves to be Druid / Rangers or Druid / Ranger /...

Ancient cultures had lots of weird hybrid monsters mixing animal and human parts, and those of Mesopotamia, Egypt, and the Scythian nomads seem to have been particularly influential. Encounters with unfamiliar animals or prehistoric fossils turned into travelers’ tales and bestiary entries...

One final “staircase thought”: I also like how terse he is here. I like a good villain monologue as much as the next guy, and he could have gone with a long rambling rant about the insufferable impudence of anyone daring to offer him, Settra the Imperishable, a job... a job!!! Because how dare...

Also, over-the-top supervillains should take every opportunity to refer to themselves in the third person whenever possible. 😄

I always wondered how dragons managed to use their huge clawed hands to collect hoards of treasure made by small human hands, especially coins. I guess they all have Mage Hand or some other telekinetic power. See also: sphinxes

Back in 1986 or so a friend of mine had WFRP 1E, but I don’t think we ever actually played it. I glanced through it a bit and found it somewhat interesting as an alternative to D&D, but never liked the grimdark tone. I was only a casual fan of heavy metal music and never liked most horror, so...

Sutherland did a lot of classic D&D art, but I did not particularly like his dragons, especially when they were depicted head-on as they were here or on the cover of the 1977 Holmes Basic set. I got all of my AD&D books in the late 80’s and so they were all from the later “orange spine” series...

It has been years since I last saw my copy, so I am not surprised to discover that I remembered some of the details wrong. The horse riding prohibition probably had some basis in historical fact, but in typical fashion it was presented as a fiat rule with no explanation or advice for the DM on...

I always imagine RPG dragons as legendary, protean beings that might exhibit a wide variety of fangs, crests, horns, frills, claws, talons, wings, and tail tips, so I never pay much attention if one particular depiction or personal artist style does not appeal to me. I figure they are all...

Deities & Demigods - so much to unpack there. An older friend of mine who was pivotal in getting me into RPGs had one of the coveted 1980 printings, complete with the two “lost” chapters. He claimed that he and his power gamer buddies had indeed run the book as a module, slaying various gods...

On the rare occasions that we tried to do something with our characters that was not already covered by the rulebooks (which was sometimes considered cheating by the strictest DMs!), the matter would often be decided with a d20 roll-under ability score check. None of us realized that the rule...

I am always curious to read about what kind of characters were popular in other gaming groups. In my late 80’s AD&D 1E games several of us played Druids from time to time. We also figured that if Elves and Half-Elves could multi-class as a Cleric / Fighter or Cleric / Fighter / Mage, why not a...