Dave Howery's page

Man thats Great !!!

How do you have all your stored ? Is there somethnig better than In clear file pages an the shelf?

And I want to know what condition your issues 1-5 are AND I want to know
why issue one only goes for 10- 20 bucks while 2,3 and 4 go for about 30-50 ?

I remember them mentioning it in one of the early Dungeons way back when... apparently, they didn't expect a huge demand for issues 2-4... so of course, there was. One of the letters pages mentioned that they were getting scarce even in their offices...

30-50? Wow... now, I wish I had taken better care of mine... :)

*sigh*

at one time, I had every issue from 1 to 100... but alas, frequent moves and assorted accidents depleted my collection... now, I think all I have are the first couple dozen issues... and of course, all the ones that had articles that I wrote.. :)

cheating players should be killed out of the game.

(yes, I said players, not characters) :)

The weirdest thing I ever made up as a DM was... MECHAHAMSTER!! (of which, the less said, the better).

The weirdest thing I ever recieved as a player was a footman's flail that was intelligent and sorta cowardly and if my PC took more than 50% damage, it would go nuts and start flailing around all on it's own, regardless of who or what was nearby. So, one of the most asked questions I got was "Hey, Dave, how many hit points you got left?"

Flame, from Dungeon #1... I mean, he had a whole friggin' ship in his cave lair! Is that cool or what!

#2 would be the little purple dragon from "What's New?", the one who went "Growf" all the time and reproduced like gremlins when they got wet...

the one true Faith is Hill. She has a great voice.

Weren't the Dragon Deck of Many Things in colour and the Dungeon version was in black and white? I have those somewhere somewhere still in the magazines. I had made my own Deck using playing cards as per the suggestion in the 1E DMG so never bothered using the "fancy" cards. ::smirk::

just checked what remains of my collection, and you're right. I still have Dungeon #19, and they are B&W. The Dragon one (#148) are in color; I still have that issue, only because I had a couple of articles in that one, and I did manage to save all those issues.. :) In fact, when I got my two contributor issues, I think I saved the Deck insert from one of them... got it around here somewhere, I think....

Rexx wrote:

I've been subscribing since Dungeon #2. A buddy picked me up #1 in 1989 at Gen Con but I have since picked up a couple of mint copies from a local shop of #1 & #2 since my originals are well loved/used. #2 is my favourite of all time since it was the first.

You were lucky to find those old #1 and #2 - I recently scoured a few game shops for anything older than issue #40, and came up blank (I was looking for a spare copy of the issue with my adventure in it - #33.) Other than that, I've got a straight run from #1 to #50, then nothing until 3rd edition. I guess as mentioned before, it reflects my relative level of D&D play.

as I understood it, TSR massively overprinted #1, but didn't do so many for #2-#6, and those are really hard to find, where #1 isn't. But I hear the hardest one to find of all of them is the one that had the Deck of Many Things cards in it (Don't recall which issue it was)... and the same for the Dragon magazine they were in too...

Greyhawk... before the Wars (they never happened, nope, just a rumor)

I've only played one female character in a campaign... and she didn't start out that way. One of my first characters was a mage who made it all the way to 14th level or so, and ran afoul of one of those gender switching girdles.... well, I wasn't about to dump a character who'd made it that high, and for some reason, I never did get the remove curse thing done. I'd like to say I was mature about the whole thing, but... I had her running about half naked (when you have magical bracers of defense and a ring of warmth, who needs clothes?).

at one time, I had all issues from 1 to 100... but alas, numerous moves and accumulated damage has reduced my collection to 1 to 36, plus a couple of others (I did manage to hang onto 100). I had a fairly large Dragon collection at one time, but the same problem....

unfortunately, I fell out of D&D and reading Dungeon clear back around issue 100 or so... the only one of these authors I remember is Wolfgang. Reynolds' name sounds familiar, but I can't place just who he is. Hey, they say the memory is the first thing to go.....

cool. I have the old softbound "Art of Dragon Magazine", the one that covered issues #1-#100, as well as the "Art of AD&D" and "Art of Dungeons and Dragons" and "Art of the Dragonlance Saga", and "The Worlds of TSR"... I should add the new one to the collection....

I had that stone sword from Tamaochan built for a LARP latex weapon as a movie prop. Though mine has the look of marbleized green stone teeth attached dark wooden frame.

that sword from the module... is that the one that had a bonus to hit vs. gas spores? I never got that one... IIRC, you don't want to hit gas spores with a sword, as they blow up in your face and hurt you. Arrows, sure.. but a sword?

I remember being vaguely unsatisfied with it too. Seemed to cater to the stereotype. There was a lot going on in North America right before contact. Just because the area was ravaged by epidemics into a post-apocalyptic hell, I bet it would be more fun to meet the Coosa or the Caddo (societies rivaling the Empire of the Triple Alliance aka the Aztec)than to just lump everything into a sort of plains tribe amalgam (after the introduction of the horse).

well, you have to remember that there was a word limit to consider. It would have been nice to include several more cultures and create kits for them and special rules and magic items for them... but then, I could have filled every page in Dragon for 10 issues in a row and still not covered everything. As it was, I had to go for some generic culture kits... and the editors still had to cut out some chunks of my original manuscript to fit it into the issue....

One reason so many people have such nostalgic views of 2E is that so many good ideas came around during it's tenure... Dungeon magazine published some of its best adventures during this time (IMO, anyway :), we saw such things as Spelljammer, Planescape, Dark Sun, etc. The much maligned "Complete" series of books did have some unbalanced kits, but had quite a few good ideas scattered amongst them. Although they proved to be not so popular, I loved the expansion of the Realms into such non-European areas as the Horde and Maztica. I was so familiar with the rules that I didn't really notice a lot of the problems noted on here, although now I have to admit that they certainly did exist....

Having been around the RPG scene for a while, I've got an eclectic collection of minis from a lot of companies... the old ones from Heritage, Grenadier, Ral Partha, Citadel, some newer ones from GW, Reaper.... on my trips to Gencon, I invariably seemed to pick up some loose 'out of a big box' unpackaged minis that I have no idea where they came from... some of the first minis I ever bought were some Greyhawk based ones from a company I don't recall... thought that was a neat idea... along the way, I've picked up a few odds and ends like the ones from the short lived Aliens game, an Indiana Jones one, Sherlock Holmes and Watson from some British manufacturer, a big bunch of Zulus (used in the days I was creating and running African-type adventures). Looking through my collection, it's obvious that I had a thing for wild animal minis; I always like painting these, as it's a challenge to make them look realistic (no one knows what a dragon would really look like, but everyone knows what a wolf and lion looks like). Nowadays, my nephews got me interested in a couple of GWs' games, so I have a fair sized Warhammer Dwarf army, a bunch of Rohirrim for the LOTR game, and a whopping big Mumakil which I'm still painting...

well, I'm not handicapped by ever having read the comics, so I have to judge the movie on it's own merits. My opinion: they tried to do too much in one movie. They should have done either the Phoenix story or the cure story, not both in one. As it was, the whole thing ended up a bit disjointed. Still, I did rather like it, but it didn't have the same cohesion as the first two stories...

put me down as another "uh... it's my real name, and I have a total lack of imagination when it comes to such things"....

wow. Well, if they're climbing that fast, they're going to hit that broken ledge at full speed without noticing it, and go tumbling down.... that'll teach 'em... :)

BTW, does it bother anyone else that someone could scale a 1400' vertical rock tower in about 20 minutes? (Figure a 7th-level rogue, 10 Climb ranks, Dex bonus, and climbing kit, making DC 15 checks, climbing at one-quarter speed.) Or even 10 minutes if he's very skilled and in a hurry? The result of not having fatigue rules for ordinary actions...

hmm... is that using 3.5E rules? I don't think it worked quite like that under 2E.... I don't have any of my stuff here in front of me, but I don't think that using the climbing rules from 2E or 1E would let you climb it that fast...

Perhaps its just me looking to deep into it, but I would feel kind of upset to see phaerimm and sharn battling thru the jungles of EBERRON, and the chosen of Vecna laying wast to the city of Greyhawk.

OK, I've been out of the D&D literature for a while... but isn't Vecna part of the Greyhawk world? Wouldn't his chosen fit in perfectly with laying waste to the city of Greyhawk? Or are the chosen some weird critter on another world that I'm not aware of?

the bad guys, the Tareg, were a pseudo-Arabic group of Suloise slavers in the Bright Desert. The PCs' goal was to rescue a noble lady of Hardby from their dastardly clutches. I didn't really get too deep into their background, as it was so GH oriented... basically, the PCs had to first travel through the desert to get to the fortress of the Tareg (inconveniently mounted on top of a rock spire). Once there, they had the choice of trying to storm the main gate across a narrow bridge (not recommended) or sneak in the back by climbing the rock spire from the back; mountain climbing skills needed; or a good thief. The Tareg were a tough and nasty bunch, but I didn't delve too deeply into their background. There really would be no problem in adapting it to another campaign.. it's generic enough...

I wrote it for Greyhawk (dealing with Hardby and the Bright Desert), but you could easily change the background. Instead of a Hardby noble, make the captive a prince or princess... not really all that hard to adapt it...

Vecna is the best... he changes the whole multi-verse by trying to outdo all the gods combined, his Hand and Eye are out there causing chaos, and he just keeps coming back for more. After Vecna, Lolth and Wastri are pretty neat...

1979. I never even heard of D&D until I went to school at Montana State. Like a few others on here, I got sucked into the game by seeing the huge array of gaming figures at the local toy store. The one that really grabbed my attention was a Heritage frost giant... being a big REH fan, that one really interested me. Only later did I figure out that there was this fantastic game attached to those figures. Several people on my dorm floor were into the game, and I slowly managed to infiltrate myself into a group. The first adventure I actually played was the first Slavelords module, A1.... lost three rangers in a row in that one...

cattle prods and thumbscrews?

These message boards just keep getting better and better with authors from bygone days showing up... Dave when was your last Dungeon adventure published? You mentioned that you had done some work on the Nyambe line (which is incredible stuff by the way) so I am assuming that you are still in the business. Are you at all tempted by James' hint to write a sequel to your older adventures? Or even to write something new?

My last adventure was way back in #56. No, I'm not really up to writing any more... for one thing, I have no practical knowledge of 3E, much less 3.5E, as I haven't been in a gaming group since the days of 2E. Also, being out of a gaming group pretty much sinks your inspiration... no ideas being thrown out and bounced off other people, no coming up with new adventure ideas every week, etc. My work on Nyambe was limited to some of the monsters, which were ones I'd developed for my campaign way back when and updated to 3E (I do have the books, and can piece together the info... I've just never actually played a campaign under those rules). That said, it's be neat if some of the current authors undertook to do some Dark Continent adventures....

I'm not sure how anyone would decide just what is 'the best' when it comes to Dungeon articles... everyone has different ideas. Maybe one thing they could do is to do a compendium featuring the first 20 issues, with 20 articles, all the ones that were featured on the cover? Just a thought..

well, I stopped collecting Dragon after 300, and have lost most of my collection in a number of moves and accidents, so I'm limited to what I can remember from the early years. In no particular order...

Flight of the Boodles: an incredibly silly board game included in one of the April issues.

Elefant Hunt (no, I didn't mispell that). One of Tom Wham's sillier games.

Ed Greenwood's several articles on the Nine Hells.

One article who's title I don't recall, but it involved a multiple choice test about what you would do in various D&D situations. It was hilarious. The A answers implied you were a little dense, the B answers implied that you were pretty average, the C answers implied that you were a wuss, and the D answers implied that you were basically evil and insane..

The Deck of Many Things cutout issue... that was one of the neatest freebies ever in Dragon. I understand that this issue is very hard to find now... I've got two and I'm keeping them both! Nyah nyah nyah! :)

and of course, every article that I wrote... :)

I took a gamble and actually bought it... and I agree, it didn't suck. The story was actually coherent, there was an actual dungeon involved, and the CGI wasn't fantastic, but was still improved. Unlike the first one, I'll actually watch this one again...

cool... I have all those issues :)
Actually, at one point I had every issue from 1-100, but frequent moves caused me to lose most of them... down to the first 20 issues or so... my once huge stack of 1E/2E D&D stuff dwindled away too, down to just a couple of shelves now...

on the general subject on finding back issues of Dungeon, I read somewhere once that it is actually easier to find old copies of #1 than it is to find #'s 2-20, due to the fact that they printed up a huge quantity of #1.... not sure if this is true anymore...

I had them as a mixed Suel/Oeridian group that got driven into the wilderness by the Suel and Olmecs.... basically, because they were fairly decent, and the others weren't...

Greg> sounds like your campaign ran a lot like mine. I set up Fort Thunder as a trading post of the Lordship of the Isles, and treated Hepmonaland as Africa (I pretty much ignored the whole Olman/Aztec thing). I started out with 'Dwellers' and just kept going from there. The players liked the African flavoring a lot (although they got kinda irked at not being able to wear heavy armor and constantly being sick). My campaign ended before the whole Greyhawk Wars thing, so I never had to deal with that....

Rob Bastard wrote:

Never played these adventures, but I enjoyed reading them. I especially liked a later article in Dragon (I think) which expanded the area, placing it in the Amedio Jungle, IIRC.

Hmm... I did write one article for Dragon about African-type adventures in general... it wasn't really set in Greyhawk (this was during the bad ol' "Greyhawk is out, FR is in" days) or any other specific world, and presented a generic African continent. That said, when I developed all those African adventures for Dungeon, I originally did have them all set in Hepmonaland, only because my campaign was set in Greyhawk. I always thought one neat idea would have been to make a 'supermodule' out of "Dwellers of the Forbidden City" and all the jungle adventures from Dungeon....

For those of you who really like this type of adventures, see if you can find a copy of "Nyambe: African Adventures" from Atlas Games, written by Chris Dolunt. It's a very good setting. And, you'll find my name in there as a contributing author... I developed a few of the monsters in the book...

If you're out there reading these boards, David: Thanks for the awesome adventure!

You're welcome :) This was an adventure that I had a lot of fun developing, and I ran a couple of the local groups through it in the process. Just to tell you how old I am, I submitted this to TSR back in the days before there was a Dungeon (as a module idea), and it got shunted over to Roger Moore as the magazine was just starting up. It used to be a lot longer (and a lot more unfocused... I tightened it up a lot for the magazine), and incorporated a little of what later became "The Leopard Men"...

hmm... ok, just how do we decide which are 'the best' though... I'm guessing there'd be a lot of disagreement on that... I suppose you could do some themed books... all the Greyhawk adventures, or the best ones by party level, etc... or, the mammoth Willie Walsh one (I'd buy that one...).

in general, this sounds like a good idea... but I'm curious as to what you all would like to see in it. The best of the best from issues 1 - 50 or 1 -100? Everything converted to 3.5? Generic, FR, Greyhawk themed? Everything written by Willie Walsh? (that'd be a pretty thick book) :)

"Personally I think that Old Man Katan module was a brilliant read and a lousy module to play - but a lot of people think it was right up there near the top of the best adventures ever made."

I ran very few Dungeon modules, as it had only been out for about 3 years before I got out of gaming... but I still enjoyed reading it. There were probably quite a few modules that were 'brilliant reads and lousy to play'... but I didn't consider that to be so bad, as I enjoyed reading them anyway...

I stopped collecting Dungeon after issue 100, long after I stopped gaming, and have slowly lost the bulk of my collection (which had run complete from #1)... but I did manage to hang onto every issue with an adventure by one or both of the Boucher brothers. IMO, they were the best of the best....

Dwellers of the Forbidden City is likely my favorite module of all 3 editions. The whole idea of having a 'northern' enclave on the edge of an African like wilderness where the PCs could be based and go adventuring off into the jungle is a neat one, and was the inspiration behind the jungle adventures I wrote for Dungeon lo those many years ago. In fact, I used Dwellers as a starting point, and my 'Fort Thunder' was originally a Lords of the Isles outpost on Hepmonaland, where the PCs went to the Forbidden City and then elsewhere....

My first issue was #50. I started subscribing later and kept it going all the way through issue 310 or so, and let it lapse as I had been years out of gaming at that point (at one time I had the whole collection from 50 to 300. Alas, time and many moves have eroded my collection down to #50 to 89, plus 100, 200, 300, and a few issues that I contributed to). I feel the same as the original poster: #100 fantastic, #200 great, #300... blah.

yes, I'm still alive and kicking. No, I didn't really just disappear... life got in the way. My job forced me to move around a lot, and I found it impossible to stay in a group, so I simply fell out of D&D gaming. Without regular playing, my inspiration for writing articles simply vanished.... no chances to playtest anything, etc...

greetings one and all. This is my first posting on this site, although I've been on the Enworld D&D site for some time. Since you can never have too much discussion about D&D, thought I'd join this one too :)
As the author of several of the above mentioned adventures waaay back in the early days of Dungeon, this thread caught my eye first. In addition to the articles and modules above, I'd also recommend the "Nyambe" D20 book by Chris Dolunt (with some contributions from other authors, including some monsters by me)from Atlas Games (if you can find one; it's been out for some time). This article has adventure ideas not only for the jungle, but for a whole pseudo-Africa setting.