Flexor the Mighty!
18/100 Strength!
Ursula LeGuin fantasy isn't what Gygax had in mind when he wrote D&D. I sure don't want my games to be as boring as her books! 
Can someone explain what "1st ed feel" is?
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Pielorinho
Iron Fist of Pelor
Flexor the Mighty! said:Ursula LeGuin fantasy isn't what Gygax had in mind when he wrote D&D. I sure don't want my games to be as boring as her books!
And I for damn sure don't want my games to be as stupid as an RE Howard story. Each to his own!
Daniel
Orcus
First Post
Wow! I love Le Guin. Earth Sea is definately a must read for any 1E enthusiast! In fact, I once ran a D&D campaign set in that world. I love the maps.
I think LeGuin is a perfect example. Imagine a dungeon module detailing the Tombs of Atuan or of the Isle with the ruins and the dragon that Ged goes to slay.
Those modules wouldnt have the story. You have to provide that.
You could take the beer and pretzels approach and say "ok, you land on an island with ruins, what do you do?" Or you could fit the story to your campaign.
Either way, I prefer the 1e way of presenting the setting and letting you figure out how to use it. The lack of story in a 1e module is not an endoresment that there should be NO story, it is instead the freedom to tailor your own.
Now I want to go reread Wizard of Earthsea. By the way, if that doesnt make you want to come up with a cool alternate spell system for D&D you need medication.
Clark
I think LeGuin is a perfect example. Imagine a dungeon module detailing the Tombs of Atuan or of the Isle with the ruins and the dragon that Ged goes to slay.
Those modules wouldnt have the story. You have to provide that.
You could take the beer and pretzels approach and say "ok, you land on an island with ruins, what do you do?" Or you could fit the story to your campaign.
Either way, I prefer the 1e way of presenting the setting and letting you figure out how to use it. The lack of story in a 1e module is not an endoresment that there should be NO story, it is instead the freedom to tailor your own.
Now I want to go reread Wizard of Earthsea. By the way, if that doesnt make you want to come up with a cool alternate spell system for D&D you need medication.
Clark
Pielorinho
Iron Fist of Pelor
mmadsen said:
That's cool. I've not read much Howard, actually -- not since the seventh grade, anyway. I don't have much patients with most sword&sorcery fiction. I was just being bratty to someone who called Le Guin boring, is all!
Daniel
Pielorinho
Iron Fist of Pelor
Orcus said:
The Tombs of Atuan, as a 1E adventure, would have included the traps that held Ged and the Nameless girl down below. It would have included a pack of ghouls, feasting on the flesh of the cult's prisoners. Earth Elementals would have appeared out of the ground to defend the Tombs; in caskets beyond the elementals would have been +2 swords. One room would have been trapped with water filling the room slowly, and a magic mouth would have provided a riddle whose answer would stop the water from flowing in. And before they could finally escape, Ged would have had to solve a giant chess puzzle.
The cult above would not have been detailed in great depth. The PCs would have been too busy slogging their way through the corpses of their fallen enemies to angst about their roles relative to one another. After escaping from the tomb, Ged probably would have confronted the high priestess (the older one who looked after the girl -- it's been awhile since i read the books) and had to kill her messily. Kill her and the several demons she summoned.
Then he would have looted her body, leveled up, and gone looking for the next adventure. He would hear about some lich lord to the South who was stealing magic users' powers....
Daniel
bardolph
First Post
Pielorinho said:
Umm... hate to break it to you, but "cardinal" corridors are made that way because...
it's easier to draw on graph paper!!!
Having to calculate the distance in feet of a curved corridor is just too much math for me during a game session. I have other things to worry about.
And if one of the PC's is the designated "mapper" (ahh... remember those days, where a party had a "leader," who declared all party member actions, and a "mapper," who was responsible for cartography?), trying to explain that 30-degrees-from-north corridor in such a way so that he could actually map it would be a pain.
-----
"1st-edition feel" means "leaders" and "mappers."
It means "declaring your actions" before rolling initiative.
It means looking at that funny "AC vs. Weapon Type" table and ignoring it.
It means wishing you were that thief trying to pry the demon-eye out of that big statue.
It means wondering why those dead lizard-things were draped across that altar.
It means flipping through Deities and Demigods and deciding which goddesses you wanted to do.
It means staring at the "Disease and Parasitic Infestation Table" and wondering when you could use it next.
It means TEMPLE OF ELEMENTAL EVIL!!!
It means AGAINST THE GIANTS!!
It means DESCENT INTO THE DEPTHS OF THE EARTH!! (and, yes, the corridors all bended at exactly 30-degree angles, to conform to the hex paper...)
It means VAULT OF THE DROW!!!
It means getting polymorphed into a pig, and then losing your character because the DM ruled that you now had the mind of a pig and didn't want to change back.
It means thinking that 400 hit points was an awful lot of hit points.
It means advancing to 6th level and becoming a "Myrmidon" (whatever that is...)
It means being thrilled because your Armor Class was zero.
It means thinking "50 feet of rope," a "ten-foot pole," and "12 iron spikes" were things an adventurer simply couldn't do without.
It means making a "Bend Bars/Lift Gates" roll.
It means hoping that maybe, one day, you can be a "Grand Master of Flowers."
It means wandering the land in search of an Archdruid to fight, because you couldn't get to 12th level without fighting him.
It means carefully considering the subtle differences between a bec-de-corbin, mancatcher, ranseur, partisan, lucern hammer, guisarme, bill, bill-hook, bill-hook-guisarme, fauchard, fauchard-fork, awl pike, and fauchard-fork-guisarme-bill-hook-hammer, and finally deciding to buy a longsword.
It means reading the description of the cacodemon spell and losing sanity points.
It means staring blankly at the new "Non-Weapon Proficiency" rules, and promptly ignoring them.
It means being deathly afraid of "poison needles."
Pielorinho
Iron Fist of Pelor
bardolph said:
You are very confident in your opinions, young grasshopper. I respectfully disagree.
The complex that I described, with the illogically winding-but-90-degree-angled corridors, also contains a section with curving corridors. If the concern was that it was harder to draw curving corridors, it wouldn't have contained that other section.
And if you're gonna nitpick me, I'll nitpick you right back: it's actually harder to draw straight corridors than to draw curvy corridors, if you don't have a ruler. But it's easier to DESCRIBE to someone how to draw straight corridors.
If you put Occam's razor to work, I believe, you'll get one conclusion: the map's original designer thought that describing how to map straight corridors was easy, but that mapping corridors that went in random directions was more fun.
I'm guessing, though, that people would rather eat broken glass than admit that old-school dungeons weren't always plausible. So maybe I should let it drop, eh?
Daniel
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