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This and the publication of some Dragon articles about sea faring combined with dissatisfaction at running the PC's across the Sea of Fallen stars in a homebrew adventure to rescue slaves led my college GM to steer the campaign into piracy and naval combat. Of course, we found out after just...

I don't think you have to get as deep in the woods as tracking barrels of fish and depending on the campaign setting you probably don't need to track food and water portions if you can assume stops in ports are pretty frequent the same way you don't track food while the PCs are in town. There...

IIRC correctly, that's because Treasure Island has no actual piracy. It features a mutiny by former pirates against the owner of a merchant vessel who was unwise in hiring his crew. There are only about two dozen crew aboard the schooner, so naturally neither side of the mutiny can have more...

UPDATE: Ooops. Sorry. I thought this was a response to a post about the Skull & Shackles AP. What I wrote isn't actually a response to what you are claiming. So, if you don't have ship to ship combat like people expect when they imagine pirates, and instead you have something more medieval...

We tried to play it. The introductory scenario were you get pressed ganged is awesome and the minigame of being a sailor aboard a terrible ship is a great little minigame that really impresses on you life sucks. I would be more than happy to run the first adventure. But leaving aside some...

So typical pirate movies have ships that correspond to age of sail frigates. They have crews in the range of 240 to 350. So, the moment you start running a game that looks like a pirate movie, you immediately jump from dozens to hundreds. And that's probably going to happen to you as soon as...

I'm not really a professional writer by any stretch, but I do know if I was a former professional writer I'd have enough of an ear to recognize I probably shouldn't be starting off all my posts with that claim. I don't think it means what you think it means. Oh, he's a bandit. Somehow I feel...

In case it wasn't clear, my point is not that everyone should take the trouble to make their stuff publishable - as I said of my own stuff, it's not. My point was that the general lack of standards is creating a culture where no one has a clue what published material should look like or what...

Oh no, I think you "win" - though I question whether that's a prize or a white elephant. I doubt I've used more than 300 published monsters in 40+ years of running games. When I was writing my 3e house rules one of my projects was looking at published spells from the 1e/2e era to see if any of...

Ok, since we are being frank here, let me put in my frank thoughts. I am increasingly finding it a total waste of my time to buy gaming content because of the entirely unprofessional and low standard of slop that I usually find on display when I buy something prewritten. I backed two...

Been there, did that. Should have printed out the t-shirt. I had at one time hand-written notes for redoing many of the games monster entries to bring everything up to the MM2 standard and my own house rules. This included big updates to two things correcting XP entries and...

So in a nutshell, "Yes". Multiclassing in AD&D is not additive with HD. Your HD is the same as your highest class level. You don't acquire more HD by multiclassing, just more abilities. So your assumption about the priest king counting as a 12 HD monster would be correct, though you'd still...

@ilgatto: I think it is a mistake to think that there is one true and correct way to play 1e AD&D. It's best to think of the rulebooks as the somewhat disordered house rules of a very influential DM whose campaign and rules was always evolving based on theory crafting and play experience and...

For the purposes of the weekly game, they handwaved back when we ran out of time. I would guess we only ran about 6-7 sessions in the mega dungeon (I ran like 13 weeks) and so at no point did anyone get more than 5 or 6 rooms from the entrance/exit, so it was never a big deal to suggest...

I learned a ton spending a summer running games weekly for an open table. I started with like three players, but by the end of the summer I was running over a dozen with people driving up to 90 miles for the game. It gets very overwhelming. I learned that the game you run depends on how many...

I literally gave you some of the most irrelevant prep I do.

This is one encounter from another adventure. I haven't even read it to see if is readable or complete (please be kind, posting my art makes me very nervous), but I happened to open the file because I needed some world building information out of it and thought I'd give another example:

Let me describe briefly the events of the most recent adventure. The PC's are called on the comlink by the Guildmaster. He tells them he needs them to fly immediately to Lafra in the neighboring Wyl sector for a time sensitive contract. The Prefect there is putting a price on the head of a...

Where are you that you can get sourdough loves for $2.20? That would run around $5.75 around here. (Columbus OH). $2.20 is in the price range for the most generic, softest, mass-produced sliced sandwich bread of the sort that no medieval had access to and no one living in Europe would eat...

Yes, I'm aware. D&D has always assumed that precious metals are relatively abundant, occurring in large coins that suitably fill up vast chests that looks impressive in pictures and movies. My take is that the intention was that the "silver piece" was meant in the system to be a day's wages...