WayneLigon
Adventurer
128. Ah, Tegel Manor and it's balrog butler. 129. D&D had balrogs in it, and they were mean, nasty things indeed.
120. All nexes on hexmaps were numbered, because the early wargaming maps had to have them that way.
131. Games came in ziplock baggies because there would be components in there, like charts and such, that wouldn't be bound in the stapled rulesbook.
132. Miniatures were, like a buck, if that. And they were made of pure lead, as God intended.
133.The FLGS had tables in the front room that anyone could use to run a roleplaying game. The wargamers usually used the big tables in the back because they needed a hell of a lot of room. There were no little card-playing rugrats, either.
134.The AD&D Monster Manual was the first AD&D book to come out and preceeded the rest of the books by several months! So, we had these hints and ideas of what the new rules were going to be, but no way of determining what they were until we got the Player's Handbook. Then we had to wait for the DMG because all the important combat stuff was in there, as well as the magic items.
135. You rolled hit points at first level so, yeah, you could be a fighter with 1 hp. You got hit, oh crap he's dead. There was none of your fancy '-10 hp' rules. 0 was dead.
136. Judges Guild was a huge concern and produced tons of adventures for almost everything under the sun, as well as settings and sourcebooks.
137. No one knew what 90% of all those freaky polearms were except the creepy old wargaming guys who could rattle off statistics of the English army of 1201 and almost come to blows over how far an English longbowman could shoot vs a French crossbowman.
138. No one ever bothered with weapon speeds.
139.You used to get 1 XP for every gold peice you managed to cart out of the dungeon and get to a safe place. This was the A-#1 most commonly house-ruled-out-of-existance rule in the universe.
140. The Dragon had the occassional bare breast shot. There's one illustration near the back of one issue to accompany an article about inns or parties or something, showing imps carvorting with naked elf chicks. This is most likely the source of the long-running Steve Jackson 'naked elf chick' in-joke.
141. One cover of the Dragon shows a guy flipping a bird at the opponents behind them.
142. Photocopiers were not as common as they are now, so there was a reason to buy packs of pre-done character sheets. We bought one pack, and one guy went to his dad's office to use their super-duper state-of-the-art copier and printed off like 100 of each sheet for each of us. They were double-sided sheets on paper the color of the original, so they looked perfect. He even used the drill to put binder holes in them. No-one we knew ever bought another pre-made character sheet pack. I still have some, since even we couldn't make that many characters.
143. Everyone that played had an abiding interest in either history, mythology and/or fantasy fiction, or all of the above. You never heard a player say 'I've never read Tolkien' or 'Who is this Leiber guy?'
144. Orcs were there for killin', not talking to.
145. EHP meant 'Evil High Priest'.
146. Levels had titles. We never used them, but every TSR product did, which meant we has to constantly check what level a 'Myrmidon' actually was since no-one could ever remember dozens of level titles.
147. 'Goblins (4): HP 4,4,3,2' was a legitimate stat-block in it's totality.
148. A Traveller character could be rendered legitimately on one line of text such as
'Lance' Marine Cpl A4575A Rifle-4 Air/Raft-2 Dagger-1 Cutlass-2 cr4566
149. You teased the newbie who thought 'Monks' were like Friar Tuck.
150. Newbie: 'Cleric? Why in the world would I want to play an office worker? Did they even have offices in the middle ages?"
151. There was no 'd'-whatever. All numbers were spelled out, such as 6-36 damage.
152. The only d20 was a '20-sider', which had numbers from 0 to 9 on there twice. Usually you had to color the 'high' numbers a different color and then lie to the GM about which was which. Your fancy-smancy dice of later years sometimes had a '+' on the high side.
153. Lou Zocchi
154. Space Gamer magazine
155. Steve Jackson Microgames. Chitin. Ogre. GEV. Warpwar. Wizard. Melee.
120. All nexes on hexmaps were numbered, because the early wargaming maps had to have them that way.
131. Games came in ziplock baggies because there would be components in there, like charts and such, that wouldn't be bound in the stapled rulesbook.
132. Miniatures were, like a buck, if that. And they were made of pure lead, as God intended.
133.The FLGS had tables in the front room that anyone could use to run a roleplaying game. The wargamers usually used the big tables in the back because they needed a hell of a lot of room. There were no little card-playing rugrats, either.
134.The AD&D Monster Manual was the first AD&D book to come out and preceeded the rest of the books by several months! So, we had these hints and ideas of what the new rules were going to be, but no way of determining what they were until we got the Player's Handbook. Then we had to wait for the DMG because all the important combat stuff was in there, as well as the magic items.
135. You rolled hit points at first level so, yeah, you could be a fighter with 1 hp. You got hit, oh crap he's dead. There was none of your fancy '-10 hp' rules. 0 was dead.
136. Judges Guild was a huge concern and produced tons of adventures for almost everything under the sun, as well as settings and sourcebooks.
137. No one knew what 90% of all those freaky polearms were except the creepy old wargaming guys who could rattle off statistics of the English army of 1201 and almost come to blows over how far an English longbowman could shoot vs a French crossbowman.
138. No one ever bothered with weapon speeds.
139.You used to get 1 XP for every gold peice you managed to cart out of the dungeon and get to a safe place. This was the A-#1 most commonly house-ruled-out-of-existance rule in the universe.
140. The Dragon had the occassional bare breast shot. There's one illustration near the back of one issue to accompany an article about inns or parties or something, showing imps carvorting with naked elf chicks. This is most likely the source of the long-running Steve Jackson 'naked elf chick' in-joke.
141. One cover of the Dragon shows a guy flipping a bird at the opponents behind them.
142. Photocopiers were not as common as they are now, so there was a reason to buy packs of pre-done character sheets. We bought one pack, and one guy went to his dad's office to use their super-duper state-of-the-art copier and printed off like 100 of each sheet for each of us. They were double-sided sheets on paper the color of the original, so they looked perfect. He even used the drill to put binder holes in them. No-one we knew ever bought another pre-made character sheet pack. I still have some, since even we couldn't make that many characters.
143. Everyone that played had an abiding interest in either history, mythology and/or fantasy fiction, or all of the above. You never heard a player say 'I've never read Tolkien' or 'Who is this Leiber guy?'
144. Orcs were there for killin', not talking to.
145. EHP meant 'Evil High Priest'.
146. Levels had titles. We never used them, but every TSR product did, which meant we has to constantly check what level a 'Myrmidon' actually was since no-one could ever remember dozens of level titles.
147. 'Goblins (4): HP 4,4,3,2' was a legitimate stat-block in it's totality.
148. A Traveller character could be rendered legitimately on one line of text such as
'Lance' Marine Cpl A4575A Rifle-4 Air/Raft-2 Dagger-1 Cutlass-2 cr4566
149. You teased the newbie who thought 'Monks' were like Friar Tuck.
150. Newbie: 'Cleric? Why in the world would I want to play an office worker? Did they even have offices in the middle ages?"
151. There was no 'd'-whatever. All numbers were spelled out, such as 6-36 damage.
152. The only d20 was a '20-sider', which had numbers from 0 to 9 on there twice. Usually you had to color the 'high' numbers a different color and then lie to the GM about which was which. Your fancy-smancy dice of later years sometimes had a '+' on the high side.
153. Lou Zocchi
154. Space Gamer magazine
155. Steve Jackson Microgames. Chitin. Ogre. GEV. Warpwar. Wizard. Melee.
Last edited:
