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Really wish I had done more with the historical settings. I tried a couple times to get a Vikings campaign going. Loved the take on rune magic.

Now I want to come up with a way to trap my PCs in a roundabout. But seriously, yes, it's important to have a rich diet of potential inspiration.

That's the perfect summation of Kingdoms of Kalamar. When I first read it, my first impression was that nothing was happening. Then I realized that the entire setting was perched on the edge. There was no metaplot at work, just meaty hook after hook, waiting for the PCs to come along and change...

Absolutely. The way I look at it, even if the mechanics are completely different, you never know what's going to inspire you. Everything I consume gets funneled into my imagination, potentially broadens and/or deepens the ideas I can come up with.

Yes to all these. When the series was at its best, it had characters that evolved, that had multiple notes, coming to life amidst a sweeping backdrop of events and places.

Reviewing products in the house organ magazine had to be a fraught thing. Not only were you reviewing the products of the people signing your paychecks, but there's every chance of bumping into the person who wrote the thing you reviewed.

For me, it kinda has. When the new edition came out, I decided it wasn't for me, and that I would not be playing or running D&D anymore. And I noticed that with Kickstarters and with walking the vendors hall at Origins, just how much suddenly was getting filtered out.

I always liked the explanation in Dickinson's The Flight of Dragons. That dragons can't sleep on something flammable, and gold is a soft metal. "A great deal better than many readers are likely to expect" is an interesting choice of words, considering that the D&D fiction line was still in its...

I think that's a good way to sum up good prep - not so much needing to plan for every outcome, but to understand the situation and the NPCs enough to bring it all to life and improvise as needed.

Looking at people I gamed with back in the day, that sort of grossness was around. I wouldn't say that it was integral, but there were some players and some DMs that it seemed like were always bringing those elements to the game. Both Frankenstein and the Creature have a whole lot of shirking...

Both characters are flawed and ultimately selfish. That's part of the horror of the story, what makes it compelling. I'm also reminded of George Lucas' dialogue. Some of those sentences required actors to work really hard to try to make it sound natural. And that was the two-part crime of...

I wanted to use the Egg of Coot, but in my last Greyhawk campaign (which was a quasi-sandbox campaign) the PCs never went there.

I finished reading Shelley's Frankenstein. This time around, I have a suspicion both Frankenstein and the Creature are unreliable narrators. And as much as people will say Victor Frankenstein is the real monster, I dunno after this re-read. The Creature does a whole lot of murdering innocents...

On paper, I probably split 60-40% in favor of planning to improvising. I always deliberately leave myself holes in my session outline that I will have to improvise through. One thing I read years ago that stuck with me is that when we plan a session in advance and when we improvise, we draw from...

At this point I'm sure 5e has overtaken 2e as far as hours played, but until the, 2e was tops. From about 1989-1993, I was running 2e every week, oftentimes multiple times.

I dunno, if a PC wants to make a Stealth check sneak up on a guard in a chamber, I think the game becomes infinitely more evocative and interesting if they say "I dart from pillar to pillar when the guard isn't looking to try to sneak up on them" instead of "I want to roll Stealth to hide from...

With social checks, I also ask myself the question of whether the two (or more) people involved have different desired outcomes. If the answer is no, it's not a check. If the answer is yes, it is a check.

With a campaign of that complexity, you really need to track time. I mean, I guess you could get away with not, but after a certain point you're going to start running into the walls, not knowing who is where when, doing what. I remember when I did the math on my Tomb of Annihilation campaign -...

The funny thing is, I've been running a Cyberpunk Red campaign for over a year, and it pretty much requires an in-game calendar be kept. And it really does make the campaign more meaningful. When you've got rent due at the end of the month, every day you spend healing, hustling, crafting is a...

And yet, those conflicts, the shambolic, occultic nature of AD&D is a huge part of its appeal. There was a sense of mystery and lore about it. You had to delve, divine, and customize the game to run it. Because, as you said, you could not run it completely as written. I remember trying out the...