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Let's Not Save The World...Again
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<blockquote data-quote="Jay Verkuilen" data-source="post: 7718600" data-attributes="member: 6873517"><p>A few things about the GDQ series: Against the Giants is very clearly modeled on the first <em>Incompleat Enchanter</em>/Harold Shea novels by Pratt and de Camp, particularly G1. They were very loosely connected by some story in their original releases and are clearly expanded out tournament modules (they even have their maps annotated that way, showing what was tournament and what wasn't). I'm talking no more than a paragraph or two of setup more or less saying "the giants have been attacking the kingdom, so the king sends the adventurers to go deal with them... or face the headsman's axe!" The D modules are similarly not particularly story-rich and big parts of them are also clearly based on tournament scenarios. There's an expedition mounted against the drow because of all the sh*t they stirred up in the G series. Q came out a few years later. The setup is similarly thin, more or less indicating that surface elves, now that they know about the drow, send some to go finish the job. This was also true of the venerable Slave Lords series (A1-4) which started as tournament modules and had some fluff attached about dealing with the slavers who had been raiding. These are brilliant modules, mind you, and they got expanded out nicely but you can definitely "feel" their tournament roots. </p><p></p><p>The supermodules that TSR released in the mid '80s were backwards assemblies of the original modules with a bunch of story fluff connecting them. Very little of that fluff was there in the originals. </p><p></p><p>As far as I recall---I was playing in the early '80s but I was a kid---the first series that really had a fair bit of story attached was Pharoah-Oasis of the White Palm-Lost Tomb of Martek, which I believe were the original modules the Hickmans did for TSR. There are probably some others that have more story, but those three were among the first that really weren't expanded out tournaments (the previously mentioned modules, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Tomb of Horrors), joke dungeons (like White Plume Mountain), or mini-campaign settings (Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread, or Chateau d'Amberville).</p><p></p><p>You could put a good bit of story onto these if you wanted. Playing many of these in some form in the '90s or early '00s with 2E we did exactly that.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Jay Verkuilen, post: 7718600, member: 6873517"] A few things about the GDQ series: Against the Giants is very clearly modeled on the first [I]Incompleat Enchanter[/I]/Harold Shea novels by Pratt and de Camp, particularly G1. They were very loosely connected by some story in their original releases and are clearly expanded out tournament modules (they even have their maps annotated that way, showing what was tournament and what wasn't). I'm talking no more than a paragraph or two of setup more or less saying "the giants have been attacking the kingdom, so the king sends the adventurers to go deal with them... or face the headsman's axe!" The D modules are similarly not particularly story-rich and big parts of them are also clearly based on tournament scenarios. There's an expedition mounted against the drow because of all the sh*t they stirred up in the G series. Q came out a few years later. The setup is similarly thin, more or less indicating that surface elves, now that they know about the drow, send some to go finish the job. This was also true of the venerable Slave Lords series (A1-4) which started as tournament modules and had some fluff attached about dealing with the slavers who had been raiding. These are brilliant modules, mind you, and they got expanded out nicely but you can definitely "feel" their tournament roots. The supermodules that TSR released in the mid '80s were backwards assemblies of the original modules with a bunch of story fluff connecting them. Very little of that fluff was there in the originals. As far as I recall---I was playing in the early '80s but I was a kid---the first series that really had a fair bit of story attached was Pharoah-Oasis of the White Palm-Lost Tomb of Martek, which I believe were the original modules the Hickmans did for TSR. There are probably some others that have more story, but those three were among the first that really weren't expanded out tournaments (the previously mentioned modules, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, Tomb of Horrors), joke dungeons (like White Plume Mountain), or mini-campaign settings (Keep on the Borderlands, Isle of Dread, or Chateau d'Amberville). You could put a good bit of story onto these if you wanted. Playing many of these in some form in the '90s or early '00s with 2E we did exactly that. [/QUOTE]
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