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Post Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 12:53 am 
 

Hello, my name is Nels and I played AD&D heavily back in 1981 (at age 15) and just got back into it a year ago after my 20th high school reunion.

Last winter I picked up the 3.5 core books, and while I like some changes, I hate the slickness of the game now, the artwork were every creature has to look "kewl" and be massively overpumped on steriods, and all the nonsense with bizarre mixes of races and classes just to have a more powerful character.  (Give me the cheesy black & white line drawings of the old MM and 1e modules, where the half-orcs didn't look bigger than the Incredible Hulk, and many creatures looked downright dorky!)  There's no sense of characters fitting into the constraints of the society, and the time & effort a character would need (years and years) to specialize in any way.  THe hit point & damage escalation seems ridiculous.  I tried joining a Living Greyhawk campaign starting up at a local game shop, but the people who showed up were all losers who no one else would let in their groups.  I promptly dropped out.

Still, I find the potential of the d20 system appealing, for cleaning up the clumsiness of many combat rules, and especially for providing rules for many non-combat issues.  What I hated about 1e was that whenever you tried to do anything ingenious, there was no rule for it, so the DM had to pull something out of his ass -- usually just "um, ok you can do that" or "nope, not possible".  Even in the rare cases where there was a dice roll, the DM just made up some number needed to succeed, whose value he wouldn't tell you, so you had no idea if your character had a good or bad chance of succeeding.  That ruined all sense of fairness, specific skill being required or (unless their was a dice roll) fear of screwing up.  The same black & white "sure thing" or "impossible" problem plagued spellcasting -- if your character was of the right level, the spell he learned was usually guaranteed to work (not counting magic resistance of the target).  No one ever kept track of encumbrance, food, fatigue, environmental discomfort, fear (unless called for by the description of the creature in the MM), wounds and healing were just "points", bleeding was never taken into account (why would a character care about a Periapt of Wound Closure when the game system didn't track wound types or bleeding?) etc. etc.  Way too much was just glossed over in the name of making a fast-paced game where "roleplaying was what counted" (even though real roleplaying was rare).

I love the old 1e modules, and would like to "fix" them somehow so I can run a worthwhile campaign for my daughter and her friends, but they seem to be hopelessly just hack-n-slash dungeon crawls.  I want to run (and play in) classic Tolkien-esqe campaigns, without glossing over details related to things that would make "real" adventuring hard (fatigue, discomfort, fear, confusion, real wounds, spell failures, etc).  I want a campaign where the killing intelligent foes (at least those who have some form of tribal structure or society) gets remembered and often comes back to haunt you.  There are plenty of unnatural and/or unintelligent monsters for killing -- undead, summoned creatures, anything incapable of speaking, extra-planar creatures, etc.  The rest would need to be dealt with in some non-lethal way, or only the leader(s) would be killed.

Maybe a game like that would be unplayable, but I want something better than I've seen anywhere.  I've been playing weekly with a group of long-time gamers in a 2e campaign for about a year now, and it still stinks of high-school hack-n-slash, with little or no rules for circumstances.  These are guys who have been playing at least weekly (with different groups) since 1980.  I keep playing with these guys because I played with one of them back in 1981, so I do it mostly for the nostalgia, but it always feels like a failure to reach anywhere near its potential ...

  


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Post Posted: Sun Nov 27, 2005 1:03 am 
 

Oh yeah (DUH!) I forgot to mention my collecting interests.  Since I was pretty much out of the game from about 1982 to 2004, my collecting interests are currently focusing on stuff up to about 1982-1983.

I'm currently working on getting all the Grenadier Solid Gold boxed sets (I have just over half of them now), since I had the "Dungeon Explorers" set as a kid.  I also picked up copies of all the AD&D TSR modules and accessories to about 1983 so far, I'd like to get a complete 1e set.

I'd love to get the old individual figures from Grenadier and Ral Partha (pretty much whatever existed as of 1981), but there does not appear to be any photo catalogs of those available, and likewise the figures are difficult to identify, since many have no dates or numbers on the bases, and specimens still in original packaging are essentially non-existent.  I remember seeing all that stuff at the "D&D shop" a few miles from my house, but with no steady job or allowance at 15, I could barely come up with money to get the core books and a few modules ...

  

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Post Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 12:30 am 
 

Welcome, Sleestak!  Anyone on this forum have the name, "Marshalwillandholly?"



Mark


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Post Posted: Mon Nov 28, 2005 8:13 am 
 

pjflores wrote:We made this NJ connection before.




Ah, sorry for the redundant harassment, Pete: I've been working too much :D



But I do spend a lot of time here and on Canonfire. I'm very familiar with your site and have read your reasearch on the Treasure of the Dragon Queen but I'm sorry to say. "No bells ringing". I will do some asking around though. I know quite a few people who went to Rutgers including some people who might have even been teachers around 1984. I'll see what I can come up with.




That'd be great, thanks. I've tried to ping Al Reider again from time-to-time (he was president of RUG at the time of the convention), but haven't been able to synch up since our one phone conversation a year+ ago.



I do enjoy your research on The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth and I'm planning on using it for an upcoming "flashback campaign" that I'm planning on running sometime starting December. It will most certainly be 'Canth not 'Conth. 1st Edition Rules!




Thanks :D



Speaking of the lost caverns. I heard rumor that there is a Living Greyhawk adventure that deals with the caverns. Do you know anything about it? If so does it expand on your research? I never got into Living Greyhawk myself.




I read the info over the summer; WotC ran an adventure of interest to me (and perhaps the rest of you):



The Living Greyhawk site wrote:CORS5-03 Secrets of Tsojcanth

Evil once again lurks within the Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth. This adventure is playable by any Living Greyhawk character and is split into three sections: low level, middle level, and high level.




I haven't been able to track down a copy of this LG event yet, so I don't know what, if anything, is useful in it. When I find out, I'll be sure to update the site accordingly :D



The RPGA also ran some form of Greyhawk Castle as a one-round adventure last summer too:



The Living Greyhawk site wrote:CORS4-03 Castle Greyhawk

For years, the dungeons beneath Castle Greyhawk have been sealed but no longer. Crazed followers of the Mad God have disappeared inside, inviting the brave, the greedy, the pure, and the wicked to join them. Your invitation arrived this morning. Do you dare to follow them into the most infamous dungeon in all the Flanaess? This is a special adventure for Living Greyhawk characters of any level.




There were two articles on the site to help to promote this (I think it was the GenCon Open tourney, or whatever passes for that nomenclature-wise now):



Castle Greyhawk at Gen Con Indy

and

Living Greyhawk Column: Game Tips -- Castle Greyhawk, A Found Journal


Allan Grohe ([email protected])
Greyhawk, grodog Style

Editor and Project Manager, Black Blade Publishing
https://www.facebook.com/BlackBladePublishing/

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Post Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 10:20 am 
 

Hello to all!



I'm Brian "Old Sardul" Collins - a D&D player since the "earlies" of the mid Seventies. I'm proud to have attended the first Origins convention, in Baltimore Maryland in 1975; and the first DunDraCon in Oakland California in 1976.



Following my discharge from the Army in 1980 I've been steadily employed in the gaming industry. In San Francisco I worked at the "Gambit" and "Gamescape" game stores - then in Berkeley at the first and second "Games Of Berkeley" locations. It was from Games Of Berkeley that I transferred to the "Berkeley Game Distributors" wholesale operation, where I worked from sometime in 1985 to the year 2000. Now they are no more, and my travels have carried me as far afield as Knoxville Tennessee and "Gameboard Distributors" - Sadly they too closed; and now I find myself in frigid Battle Creek Michigan, employed by the "Fred Sanford" of the Gaming Industry, Marcus King at Titan Games.



Not much time for actual roleplaying these days. My own "Athankrys" campaign ran through the eighties and faded away in the nineties. Our crowd was not orthodox AD&D/D&D - rather we were followers of the "West Coast" high powered style favored by Dave Hargrave and Mike Gunderloy. Our Berkeley group of the seventies also boasted the presence of the Fantasy Arts crowd - Erol Otus, Paul Reichie and Matt Genser all participated at one point or another. Well do I recall Erol's running his horrible dungeons such as "The Aquarium"... And those guys' characters could eat other characters for breakfast without breaking a sweat, if the need arose, and with them the need arose rather often...



Anyway there you have a roleplaying and gaming industry professional history. Hope I haven't bored anyone to sleep

  


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Post Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 5:19 pm 
 

Well, this is the height of irony.



I'll bet you Brian wishes he'd never bothered introducing himself after the totally unjustified flaming he got on the Titan Games thread. There's 15 minutes of his life he'll never get back ...



Anyway, Brian, you'll probably never read this, but I'll say "welcome." If you do ever decide to come back, I think you'll discover that there are a lot of good things going on here at The Acaeum.

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Post Posted: Wed Nov 30, 2005 5:22 pm 
 

hello brian - i always welcome everyone else on the site and dont ignore anyone :)



welcome to the acaeum and i DO hope you have a stay here, despite the short period earlier.



Al


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Post Posted: Thu Dec 01, 2005 8:01 am 
 

1st edition AD&D is my game. Modified, of course. I have been playing on and off since 1982. Lost most of my earlier Mods and other books via theft and stupidity. But I always found myself back in the game...almost always as a DM (Give up the chance to be a GOD? "When someone asks you if you are a god, you say 'yes'!").



Through my years as an archaeologist I have always flavored my games with  maps with strange languages and books of untold mysteries. I never run a Mod straight through....I morph everything to fit my campaign(s). EXAMPLE: I once ran the EX Mods, but had Metallica on a stage as an encounter. As the players got closer or further away, the volume of their music would rise or fall accordingly.



I only started collecting a few years ago, and only an item every 6 or 8 months or so. But I did just look through my trunk and find what may be a 1st printing, 1st edition MM. Who knew?



I'm off to a friend's house for a few days....and what are we gonna do? Play AD&D!

 

  


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Post Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 3:26 pm 
 

Hello everyone, I was directed to post here to let everyone know a little about me, so here I am!



I'm 32 and I've been gaming in one form or another since I was a little kid. In all that time I haven't done TONS of face-to-face gaming like many I'm sure have, but I've certainly played my fair share. I grew up in East Troy, Wisconsin which is about 10 minutes from Lake Geneva. I had the (now nostalgic) pleasure of visiting The Dungeon Hobby Shop and watching my older brother play D&D with his friends and go to events in Lake Geneva. I also fondly recall sitting in the far corner of the magazine section of the Lake Geneva Public Library and reading back issues of Dragon in the dead of winter, this is when I was in grade school mind you. I'm not sure I understood what it was all about at the time, nor did I grasp the full sweep, but I sure do now and having those memories is pretty cool.



Ironically as a kid my mom NEVER let me play D&D or anything vaguely related to it, she followed the backlash some parents were fond of buying into at the time. I was always really upset because my older brother got to play, but she simply wouldn't let me... No matter, I dabbled at D&D proper a few times as a kid but failed because, little did I know, I was trying to learn the companion rules without any other rule set - I was slow I guess.  I went on through my younger years making my own game worlds and I even made an entire solo game system where you created your own dungeons and treasures and monsters and everything else all based on random tables and the like. Now I realize it wasn't terribly original but at the time it was a great deal of fun and I took a lot of pride in it. Sadly, I no longer have that material as one day my mom found it all and in the trash it went. Sigh. More fond memories. I guess the fact my game materials were stacked with a copy of that early 1980s hard cover popular press book on Fantasy Gaming (you know, the one with the demon rising out of the pentagram on the desk) didn't help much to insure to my mom it honestly wasn't demonic at all...



During my later years of highschool I played mainly wargames and the like, and for many, many years (to this very day in fact) I have collected and played mainly historical wargames. At one time I had a collection of over 300 wargames. This is when I lived in Milwaukee at the time, across the street from Napaleon's Game Store (ahh, more fond memories...) but I later moved to San Francisco in the summer of 2000 and in the process sold 90% of my collection. I totally dropped out of the collecting and playing scene for a few years but about 2 years ago got the bug again and realized the folly of my ways. I now have a respectable collection of wargames again, but certainly nothing like the rare stuff I used to own. Oh, the pain.



Anyway, more to the point, literally a few weeks ago, while at Gencon SoCal I realized that wargames are frankly hard to come by, little played, infrequently found at used book stores and the like, and that it gets frustrating never finding what I am looking for. Ebay and a forum or two are basically my only solace in that regards. I really enjoy finding stuff in person. The thrill of the hunt, I guess. Although I am still and will always be a wargamer at heart (I run a massive WWII German military history website, for example) I decided to let go of my refusal to accept fantasy RPGs as things I could collect and once again enjoy. My girl friend of 10 years has always been very accepting of my hobbies, even wargames, but she always looked down on RPGs, so that was part of it too I guess.



Anyway, while at Gencon I finally said forget it and bought SPIs 1979 game "Demons" which, although hardly an RPG, started me on the path I am now (when I do things I do them 110%). When I got home I really started thinking about the history of D&D, RPGs, and the like, and my connection to them. After studying that online for a few days I went out to hit some stores "just for fun" to see if I could find some of the original D&D and AD&D manuals that I recalled seeing as a kid. I did my research, hit the stores and sure enough I started finding them. That led me to get more excited, and that led me to study them even more.



Altough I am far from an expert 3 weeks in I have pretty much figured out the major differences in the print runs and various editions of the games, the arguements over the various rule changes, the main shifts over time, etc, and can now focus my collecting pretty nicely. I have already collected 33 different D&D and AD&D books and manuals. I have all the first edition AD&D books and manuals now and already found a rather nice find - a mint condition 2nd printing of D&DG for $10.



I'm glad I got over my "fantasy isn't for me" kick. I've had an amazing blast the past few weeks looking for new items for my new found hobby. The ironic thing is I already have a nice collection of modern and military related RPG games (Twilight 2000, Merc 2000, Phoniex Command, Recon, GURPS, Delta Force, Top Secret, etc) so you'd think I would have gotten into the stuff I enjoyed as a kid sooner. No matter, I am now, and here we go!



As for style of play (even though I technically haven't started playing yet, ha) will tend to lean more towards the old school 1st edition AD&D context with a bit of the "dungeon ecology" mind set thrown in for good measure (come on, I'm a analytical historical wargamer at heart for goodness sake). I also tend to really get excited when I see the stuff in the much detested Dungeoneers and Wilderness Survival Guides. That being said, I detest the new current versions of whatever it is they are calling AD&D and wouldn't touch it with a 10 foot enchanted pole.



I do intend to play also, btw. I am reading the rules and catching up right now. I plan to force my girl friend and another friend to play with me while I DM. If they laugh I will summon a slime mold to attack them or something...



Well, if anyone actually read this intro, thanks! Glad to be here and looking forward to the discussions.

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Post Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 8:53 pm 
 

jpipes wrote:Hello everyone, I was directed to post here to let everyone know a little about me, so here I am!



Well, if anyone actually read this intro, thanks! Glad to be here and looking forward to the discussions.




Hmmm. ...  This wouldn't be the same "jpipes"/Jason Pipes from Feldgrau.com, would it?

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Post Posted: Sat Dec 03, 2005 9:27 pm 
 

That's me!  8)

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Post Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 2:37 pm 
 

Seeing as this is the introduction topic, I thought I'd do so :P



Hi! I'm 25 and just started this whole collecting hobby, not made any easier by the fact that I live in Holland, but I try anyway. :) The focus now is on collecting Planescape as much as possible, but I am looking into all the wonderful choices out there as well. I think I saw a familiar name somewhere around here (Fluffmaister), who I think is the same Fluffmaister who sold me my very first Planescape CS boxed set :P



Anyway,



Greetings to you all!

  

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Post Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 2:50 pm 
 

Nexus wrote:Seeing as this is the introduction topic, I thought I'd do so :P



Hi! I'm 25 and just started this whole collecting hobby, not made any easier by the fact that I live in Holland, but I try anyway. :) The focus now is on collecting Planescape as much as possible, but I am looking into all the wonderful choices out there as well. I think I saw a familiar name somewhere around here (Fluffmaister), who I think is the same Fluffmaister who sold me my very first Planescape CS boxed set :P



Anyway,



Greetings to you all!




hello there and welcome to the forum :)



hope you enjoy your stay and join in the many topics that get discussed on here. its also nice to see another european here!



by the way, if you like Planescape stuff, you may wish to go and visit our own sub-web, which covers that same thing!! : Planescape



Alan


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Post Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 2:50 pm 
 

Beware_of_Sleestak wrote:Oh yeah (DUH!) I forgot to mention my collecting interests. Since I was pretty much out of the game from about 1982 to 2004, my collecting interests are currently focusing on stuff up to about 1982-1983.




Welcome, Sleestak.  Another Wisconsinite!  Soon, we shall rule the boards.  It is our legacy after all.



Where did you find that avatar?  I haven't seen a sleestak since, well, whenever The Land of the Lost stopped airing.

  

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Post Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 3:13 pm 
 

afoolandhis$ wrote:Another Wisconsinite! Soon, we shall rule the boards. It is our legacy after all.




Damn right! :wink:

We just need to formulate a plan against all these English/UK invaders  :lol:



ShaneG.

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Post Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 3:36 pm 
 

Plaag wrote:
afoolandhis$ wrote:Another Wisconsinite! Soon, we shall rule the boards. It is our legacy after all.




Damn right! :wink:

We just need to formulate a plan against all these English/UK invaders :lol:



ShaneG.




bah no chance.



if it wasnt for us, you would be still sitting in mudhuts :)


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Post Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 5:09 pm 
 

killjoy32 wrote:
Plaag wrote:


Damn right! :wink:

We just need to formulate a plan against all these English/UK invaders :lol:



ShaneG.




bah no chance.



if it wasnt for us, you would be still sitting in mudhuts :)




What do you mean would be?

  


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Post Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2005 9:42 pm 
 

afoolandhis$ wrote:Where did you find that avatar? I haven't seen a sleestak since, well, whenever The Land of the Lost stopped airing.




Actually, I "made" it, back in 1992, using a very expensive (at the time) video capture board. At that time, I wrote a ginormous episode guide of Land of the Lost for Epilog magazine. in 1995 I made that into a crappy website, which was never maintained and died in 2000 when I switched ISPs. This particular image ended up being swiped and was made into bootleg items like mousepads and lighters.



Back in 1981 I made a D&D module of the Lost City. The Sleestak could cause fear with their hissing, regenerated like trolls, and were good at grappling (so they could throw you in the pit), but you could laugh in their face when it came to their crappy miniature crossbows. They also moved REALLY slowly and you were pretty safe if you had a torch with you.


- Nels

  
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