Recent content by Flying Toaster

I was born right around the same time that the original white box went on sale to the general public, so obviously I never played 0E back in the day. In fact I did not even really know that it existed until I bought the Best of Dragon magazine compilations in the late 80s, and reading the first...

I do not remember “Valley of the Earth Mother”, but a Celtic-themed adventure would definitely be relevant to my interests today. I wonder how it holds up. Interesting but perhaps unsurprising that in 1985 Gary Gygax already thought that the pendulum had swung too far towards the...

As a teenager I had fun reading the setting lore in the gold box set and trying to connect the dots to all of the historical and fictional inspirations. The elvish kingdom of Celene was Lothlorien, the Concatenated Cantons of Perrenland were Switzerland, the Baklunish states were Arabia and...

I always thought it was both strange and a bit sad that neither Castle Blackmoor nor Castle Greyhawk ever got described properly in official published form. If a DM ever wanted to run their own home versions of the first two iconic D&D settings, or a group of players wanted to explore the...

Discussions about skill systems often lead to debates about player skill vs. character skill, but they also raise questions about what skilled play consists of anyway. Skilled play might be creative engagement with the objects the GM has placed in a location, but players might well be...

If I ever ran AD&D or a similar game again, I would start with these house rules: • Use the ability score spread from B/X (BECMI); no percentile STR • HD upgrade: d6 for Wizard classes, d8 for Rogue classes • No XP bonus for high ability scores • XP bonus for Humans to balance no level limits...

The rules for non-Humans were really bizarre and wildly inconsistent. Half-Orcs had tough restrictions, plus at least two more undesirable quirks. They were the only non-Humans with a Thief level limit, and their maximum DEX was just 14, so they could not even get any bonuses! I never...

Oh sure, there are various niches in the game market, just like there are different niches in the environment. And right now Pathfinder is clearly occupying the crunchy niche in the gaming ecosystem. I was thinking more about how whenever people try to solve a particular problem in rule...

Yes, RPG design sometimes seems like convergent evolution. Everyone wants to start over from scratch and build the perfect game, but often they end up in more or less the same place by a different route. There are only so many ways to do most things. But fans do not always notice this, and...

The Lich from Adventure Time is an interesting case of a villain who is both generic and specific. He does not even have a real name of his own, just his generic moniker as THE Lich, because he is a cosmic spirit of pure evil older than existence itself, from a time “before there was nothing.”...

I remember reading an editorial note that made it clear to one curious reader that it was not that Roger Moore... 😅

This issue came out around the time I was really getting into D&D, although I only bought it somewhat later as a back issue. It is interesting to contrast Gygax’s upbeat tone with what we now know about the chaos happening behind the scenes at TSR. During EGG’s sojourn in Hollywood trying to...

I would have been almost nine years old when this issue came out, and just getting interested in RPGs as the D&D craze peaked in the USA. I was friends with these two brothers whose parents were friends with my parents, and the older one had many of the popular RPGs of the time, including B/X...

“Aethelwulf the Uncanny! I have had it up to here with your shenanigans! Casting Cloudkill to wipe out the wererats in the sewers? Unleashing a purple worm to fight the Tarrasque? Your latest antics have got the Lord Mayor and the Council of Nobles breathing down my neck! One more screw-up...

Yes, IIRC that was exactly the way my junior high school AD&D groups did it. 2E made THAC0 more official, but we were already used to using it anyway. Players always had their PC’s THAC0 written on their character sheet, and all of the DMs owned some version of the official TSR DM screen, so...