Menu
News
All News
Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
Pathfinder
Starfinder
Warhammer
2d20 System
Year Zero Engine
Industry News
Reviews
Dragon Reflections
Columns
Weekly Digests
Weekly News Digest
Freebies, Sales & Bundles
RPG Print News
RPG Crowdfunding News
Game Content
ENterplanetary DimENsions
Mythological Figures
Opinion
Worlds of Design
Peregrine's Next
RPG Evolution
Other Columns
From the Freelancing Frontline
Monster ENcyclopedia
WotC/TSR Alumni Look Back
4 Hours w/RSD (Ryan Dancey)
The Road to 3E (Jonathan Tweet)
Greenwood's Realms (Ed Greenwood)
Drawmij's TSR (Jim Ward)
Community
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Resources
Wiki
Pages
Latest activity
Media
New media
New comments
Search media
Downloads
Latest reviews
Search resources
EN Publishing
Store
EN5ider
Adventures in ZEITGEIST
Awfully Cheerful Engine
What's OLD is NEW
Judge Dredd & The Worlds Of 2000AD
War of the Burning Sky
Level Up: Advanced 5E
Events & Releases
Upcoming Events
Private Events
Featured Events
Socials!
Twitch
YouTube
Facebook (EN Publishing)
Facebook (EN World)
Twitter
Instagram
TikTok
Podcast
Features
Top 5 RPGs Compiled Charts 2004-Present
Adventure Game Industry Market Research Summary (RPGs) V1.0
Ryan Dancey: Acquiring TSR
Q&A With Gary Gygax
D&D Rules FAQs
TSR, WotC, & Paizo: A Comparative History
D&D Pronunciation Guide
Million Dollar TTRPG Kickstarters
Tabletop RPG Podcast Hall of Fame
Eric Noah's Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News
D&D in the Mainstream
D&D & RPG History
About Morrus
Log in
Register
What's new
Search
Search
Search titles only
By:
Forums & Topics
Forum List
Latest Posts
Forum list
*Dungeons & Dragons
Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition
D&D Older Editions
*TTRPGs General
*Pathfinder & Starfinder
EN Publishing
*Geek Talk & Media
Search forums
Chat/Discord
Menu
Log in
Register
Install the app
Install
The
VOIDRUNNER'S CODEX
is coming! Explore new worlds, fight oppressive empires, fend off fearsome aliens, and wield deadly psionics with this comprehensive boxed set expansion for 5E and A5E!
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
How about a little love for AD&D 1E
JavaScript is disabled. For a better experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser before proceeding.
You are using an out of date browser. It may not display this or other websites correctly.
You should upgrade or use an
alternative browser
.
Reply to thread
Message
<blockquote data-quote="Blue Orange" data-source="post: 8955794" data-attributes="member: 7025997"><p>It was a tongue-in-cheek wink at the foibles of a game that I read about endlessly but only rarely got to play. (I did get to play a few of the goldbox series--showing my age here-- but they only had a small fraction of the weird stuff in there.) I assumed most people reading the thread would be 1e fans and hoped to add a few chuckles for people who had spent as much time reading those books as me.</p><p></p><p>I got my 1st edition DMG as a 12-year-old and it blew my mind. It was covered with some weird painting of a wizard and fighter obviously in over their heads and some city of fable floating over a river of lava. It was so full of bizarre tables, complicated, archaic words like 'fell' and 'weal', and other arcana that seemed to hint at some greater design that it seemed like the closest analog to the spellbooks alluded to in the book. The tables tickled my mathematical side, the fantasy my daydreaming side, and the archaic words my antiquarianism. It seemed like some artifact from a world that was weirder, more complicated, and <em>cooler </em>than the real one.</p><p></p><p>There was also (now that I'm not kidding around anymore) a lot of very, very valuable stuff for players of later editions. The random table of torture chamber equipment was kind of unnerving (but shouldn't it be?), but there also are lists of gems, games, and forms of government, each of which is an inspiration to the imagination. (What does a gerontocratic magocracy look like?) There are extensive tables of correspondences for plants and gems and a potion miscibility (wanna guess where I learned that word?) table. There are <em>actual moral principles for evil</em> (which resembles Social Darwinism, interestingly enough). Everyone knows Appendix N--but the appendixes run from A, which has rules for <em>playing the whole game by yourself,</em> to P, which has rules for creating a party from scratch. If Gygax or his colleagues thought you might need it, it's in there. Sure, you were supposed to follow the rules...but it's not as if Gygax was going to teleport to your house and bop you on the head for not using the weapon vs armor tables. (Besides, he might teleport into the ground if he did.)</p><p></p><p>And about Appendix N--we didn't see a list of literary inspirations for another 40 years with 5th edition. But White Wolf, which took storytelling seriously, put it in the back of all their games. It took 40 years to get back to the emphasis on imagination they started with.</p><p></p><p>And 1e feels <em>dangerous</em>. The catoblepas kills with no save, as do quite a few spells above the sixth level. Demogorgon can send a whole mob after you. High-level magic-users can do terrible damage with their fireballs (damage caps didn't exist yet). Monsters can turn you to stone, and as we're told that might mean pestering some wizard who might drop a geas on you to be depetrified. Something like a sixth of the items will kill you if you try to use them, and notably these include toxic varieties of the major miscellaneous items (remember the cursed versions of the elemental summoning devices?) Stumble into the wrong room or try on the wrong cloak and your beloved character can die...but that's like the real world, isn't it?</p><p></p><p>1e is like a Breughel painting, full of weird, minute, exuberant detail and intricate byways that lead nowhere or places nobody bothered to pursue since. Celtic Druids and Bards rub shoulders with Chinese (Shaolin) monks and medieval European mercenaries wielding endless lists of polearms and magic items (a small but significant fraction of which were dangerous or deadly to the user) against monsters from Greek, Indian, and Chinese myth and fantasy/sci-fi novels published a few years before. It laid down tropes you see in Japanese computer games made 50 years later (why does Final Fantasy 15 use fire, cold, and electricity? Fireball, Cone of Cold, and Lightning Bolt...the big floating yellow eye is a copyright-friendly reskin of the beholder) and massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (healer, tank, and DPS? cleric, fighter, magic-user). The broad outline of fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief persists years later.</p><p></p><p>It's what your game looks like after you've added on your all favorite supplements. It's an artifact from the old, weird America, when you mate weird fiction, Westerns, and wargames. It's the Baroque 300 years after it went out of style.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Blue Orange, post: 8955794, member: 7025997"] It was a tongue-in-cheek wink at the foibles of a game that I read about endlessly but only rarely got to play. (I did get to play a few of the goldbox series--showing my age here-- but they only had a small fraction of the weird stuff in there.) I assumed most people reading the thread would be 1e fans and hoped to add a few chuckles for people who had spent as much time reading those books as me. I got my 1st edition DMG as a 12-year-old and it blew my mind. It was covered with some weird painting of a wizard and fighter obviously in over their heads and some city of fable floating over a river of lava. It was so full of bizarre tables, complicated, archaic words like 'fell' and 'weal', and other arcana that seemed to hint at some greater design that it seemed like the closest analog to the spellbooks alluded to in the book. The tables tickled my mathematical side, the fantasy my daydreaming side, and the archaic words my antiquarianism. It seemed like some artifact from a world that was weirder, more complicated, and [I]cooler [/I]than the real one. There was also (now that I'm not kidding around anymore) a lot of very, very valuable stuff for players of later editions. The random table of torture chamber equipment was kind of unnerving (but shouldn't it be?), but there also are lists of gems, games, and forms of government, each of which is an inspiration to the imagination. (What does a gerontocratic magocracy look like?) There are extensive tables of correspondences for plants and gems and a potion miscibility (wanna guess where I learned that word?) table. There are [I]actual moral principles for evil[/I] (which resembles Social Darwinism, interestingly enough). Everyone knows Appendix N--but the appendixes run from A, which has rules for [I]playing the whole game by yourself,[/I] to P, which has rules for creating a party from scratch. If Gygax or his colleagues thought you might need it, it's in there. Sure, you were supposed to follow the rules...but it's not as if Gygax was going to teleport to your house and bop you on the head for not using the weapon vs armor tables. (Besides, he might teleport into the ground if he did.) And about Appendix N--we didn't see a list of literary inspirations for another 40 years with 5th edition. But White Wolf, which took storytelling seriously, put it in the back of all their games. It took 40 years to get back to the emphasis on imagination they started with. And 1e feels [I]dangerous[/I]. The catoblepas kills with no save, as do quite a few spells above the sixth level. Demogorgon can send a whole mob after you. High-level magic-users can do terrible damage with their fireballs (damage caps didn't exist yet). Monsters can turn you to stone, and as we're told that might mean pestering some wizard who might drop a geas on you to be depetrified. Something like a sixth of the items will kill you if you try to use them, and notably these include toxic varieties of the major miscellaneous items (remember the cursed versions of the elemental summoning devices?) Stumble into the wrong room or try on the wrong cloak and your beloved character can die...but that's like the real world, isn't it? 1e is like a Breughel painting, full of weird, minute, exuberant detail and intricate byways that lead nowhere or places nobody bothered to pursue since. Celtic Druids and Bards rub shoulders with Chinese (Shaolin) monks and medieval European mercenaries wielding endless lists of polearms and magic items (a small but significant fraction of which were dangerous or deadly to the user) against monsters from Greek, Indian, and Chinese myth and fantasy/sci-fi novels published a few years before. It laid down tropes you see in Japanese computer games made 50 years later (why does Final Fantasy 15 use fire, cold, and electricity? Fireball, Cone of Cold, and Lightning Bolt...the big floating yellow eye is a copyright-friendly reskin of the beholder) and massively-multiplayer online role-playing games (healer, tank, and DPS? cleric, fighter, magic-user). The broad outline of fighter, cleric, magic-user, thief persists years later. It's what your game looks like after you've added on your all favorite supplements. It's an artifact from the old, weird America, when you mate weird fiction, Westerns, and wargames. It's the Baroque 300 years after it went out of style. [/QUOTE]
Insert quotes…
Verification
Post reply
Community
General Tabletop Discussion
D&D Older Editions
How about a little love for AD&D 1E
Top