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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ariosto" data-source="post: 4876330" data-attributes="member: 80487">In 1980, I think the shops in my town stocked but a baker's dozen of modules from TSR. Most of those were for high levels. Indeed, the G-D-Q "adventure path" was 7 of the 13 modules. Judges Guild offered more, and perhaps retailers in other places carried more. Dark Tower had been excellent (and also high level), but too many JG products were disappointing -- to me, any rate -- to encourage ordering any sight unseen.With our high frequency and duration of play sessions in those days, my gang could easily have exhausted the TSR modules ... if we'd had the interest and cash. As it was, someone was bound to have played in any given module before. Some RPGA players today think nothing of going through the same scenario repeatedly, but back then and there it did not even cross our minds.Graph paper was cheap and plentiful enough. We had no production constraints limiting a dungeon to two levels, each fitting on an 8.5" x 11" sheet, with a key that could be typeset (with space for illustrations) in a signature or two -- although our keys for some bigger dungeons might, as they also did not need to be so verbose.A campaign (as the term was understood back then) of only moderate scope needed a score or more places of interest anyway. Some of those of course would be quite small -- perhaps but a single barrow mound, a simple fort or a shallow den of caves. Those naturally must be numerous in inverse proportion to their re-use. Others might be vast; the Dwarfs, of course (or so it seemed), must have at least one mountain fastness like unto Moria!Not always, but often, the campaign's first delving became an "underworld" even of such scope as recommended in the original D&D books. The instructions therein to prepare at least six levels before the first adventure seem to me infelicitous, if one is inclined to procrastinate on the basis that "it's not ready yet".That seemed not to be a problem for us youngsters! We could hardly help but sketch so much by lunchtime, imaginations racing ahead of pencils. Dungeon doors could open onto whole new worlds (often inspired by the books and magazines we devoured at similarly astounding pace).One thing I noticed (or rather found confirmed) later, when I acquired more modules, was how very prosaic the commercial scenarios seemed next to our homespun wonders. To have taken them as prescriptive would have led to a very different sort of game than what the little brown books, the blue (Holmes) book and a smattering of The Dragon had inspired. Those three pages in Supplement I on "Tricks and Traps" and "Monstrous Tricks and Combination Monsters" were probably the equal of several reams of fairly typical later material.</blockquote>

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