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The Hobbit was part of the reading list for the Modern Novel class I took in high school.... which led to LOTR, Conan, Tarzan, assorted fantasy novels, and ultimately D&D. Was always so glad I took the Novel class instead of woodshop....

I started playing D&D in college in 1980, and saw the rise and fall of the whole Satanic Panic thing. Weirdly enough, even though I lived in a small very conservative MT town, I never got a bit of grief over it. There was even an annual convention in various places in MT that never drew any...

maybe they think you buy illicit characters from shady dealers in dark alleys. "PSSST! Hey, buddy! Got some primo PCs right here for ya, on sale cheap!"

I got my foot in the door in Dungeon through kind of a roundabout way, by submitting a proposal for a module to TSR before there even was a Dungeon magazine (back in those days, any schmoe could submit a module proposal... and I was one of them!). It got punted over to Roger Moore, who...

it's been a while, but IIRC, Dungeon paid a bit better than Dragon on average, due to the maps. My own writing career for TSR's magazines ranged from 'mid 1E days before there even was a Dungeon Adventures' through 'right before 3E came out'. By that time, I was long out of gaming, and had no...

Heh. I can relate to 'freelance writing to make money for game stuff.' Just about every dime I ever made back in my article writing days went to trips to Gencon…

that's sad. The guy had an odd life, according to that article, being involved in parapsychology before his D&D career. Anyway, his disappearance was noted in one of the product notes on DTRPG for one of his TSR notes... he seemed to have disappeared on his way to a job. Apparently, he was...

I've read that Carl Sargent, another old-timer at TSR, seems to have disappeared. Maybe him and Swan are retired and holed up in a small town somewhere, running campaigns for old gamers.

not to mention, adventurers tend to spend a lot of time in tight places... dungeons, caverns, inns, etc... some of the polearms that you have to swing in a big arc (all the axe ones) may not be feasible there. The spear type ones might be okay...

have a fort by the river commanded by a fighter/madman named Kurtz who has used his high Charisma to suborn a tribe allied to the Pharaoh, and is using them to take on the pharaoh's enemies using methods that are... disturbing. The PCs have been ordered to terminate Kurtz with extreme prejudice...

Well, you can devise scenarios where it happens, but generally, no. Regardless of whatever advantages polearms had over swords on the real medieval battlefield... the PCs aren't soldiers in an army of thousands, expected to do not much more than march and fight and backed up with an army's...

this topic always falls astray mainly because of the difference between 'real world medieval combat' and 'small squad of adventurers'. Sure, pikes and polearms are great out on the battlefield, where it's you and several hundred friends to back you up. For an adventuring group, they may not be...

I did use piranhas once in an Amazon jungle-ish type adventure, where the PCs were looking for a lost pirate ship, which turned out to be sunken in a wide river pool... the hardest part of the adventure was finding a way around the zillion and one piranhas in the pool. For a Nile River-ish type...

I want to say piranhas, but wrong continent. Ah heck, put them in anyway....

did druids have to pay those whopping high training costs in 1E to advance in levels? That was one thing that was kinda contradictory in 1E.... a few of the classes had to limit their worldly possessions (including cash), but still had to pay big training costs, so they ended up having to load...

months of preparation? Back in my DM days, far too many of my adventures were being finished up 15 minutes before game time. I did do several 'story arc' ones that I had planned out in advance, but the individual chapters in those were often 'last minute'...

amusingly, a pop-up note on this whole endeavor has appeared on the computer training program we use for new hires/new products, telling us to watch for gamers piling in because of it. Unless we start selling minis/adventures for the game or giving them out in kids meals, I doubt that we are...

I have no idea who these guys are, but the descriptions they give of each other are pretty neat... :)

I ran B4 way back in Ye Olde College Days when it was a new release... had a blast with it... mainly because of all the weird factions of people in the place and the bizarre random encounters with them...

I'm pretty sure the stodgy old grumps who run our franchise have nothing to do with this promotion... the next time they show a spark of imagination will be the first...