Randomdays's page

There's also Whiterock Castle for 3.5 by DCC, plus some of their other modules tie in to make mini megadungeons, or are big enough by themselves to make short campaigns.

147 - There's nothing but a grey fog outside the town in all directions until the DM finds time to create an outside to adventure in.

To use your two examples, and I haven't gotten to those 2 parts of the AP yet so I'm not sure of the specifics with them;

The Wights - At night, everyone in town is behind locked doors due to the townpeople knowing about the local undead problem. The PC's hear a scream and see the wights either attacking an unlucky townsperson who didn't make it home in time, standing over the body of said townsperson, or attacking a door trying to get inside for "lunch" The PCs react as they think best.

The Elephant - Have it maddened either due to an obvious injury like spears and arrows in its side, or showing signs of disease. This would give a reason that it has left the herd and is not in a norma l state of mind. You could also place it near the body of a dead calf. The rest of the herd has moved on but the mother refuses to to leave and continues to protect her young, dead or not.

Same here. Its strange that when you remember picking up a new module and ripping off the plastic wrap to check it out, it will always seem "new" to you, even 25+ years later when for everyone else its a "classic". Yet a different adventure that came out at the same time that you didn't buy DOES feel like an antique. Sometimes its not the product, but the memories you have attached to it.

A while back, there was a super cheap sale on all the Dungeoncrawl Classics pdfs right before they converted to 4E (I think end of 2005). You could get the megadungeon Castle Whiterock (783 pages) for just $5. I picked up the ones I didn't have, and I was lucky enough to grab the Dragon mag archive when it came out on disk before it was pulled for breaking the rules. Having 250 issues on CDs makes it a lot easier than pulling out a bunch of mags to look for the article I want. I picked up a bunch of the 1E and 2E pdfs when they 1st went online too, but have no idea which company I downloaded them from.

Like the OP though, its still nice to have the actual copy of a module or corebook in your hand. I still use the boxed Castle Whiterock, the corebooks, and though I'll probably never use them again, taking out something like the copy of "D1 Descent into the Earth" that I bought and ran when it came out brings out some good memories.

For a table, a lot of times a laptop actual works better than a tablet in some ways, as it can sit on the table, easy to see, leaves hands free,and the back of the monitor can act as a screen. If you make copies of a pdf in other directories, you can have multiple copies of the same pdf open at the same time, go to different pages in each, and just click the tab on the bottom of the screen to go to the each one quickly. I found this makes it easy to have the map on one tab and the box text on another. Bookmarks also work of course. If theres a picture you want the players to see, just turn the laptop for them to see it.

105. Because its pictionary night at the tavern.

106. Because the next part of the Adventure Path hasn't arrived yet.

I started with 1st edition using a sheet of graph paper to map and some dice. When we tried minis, all there were back then were the lead figs that you had to paint and had to spend long hours and big bucks to get enough to use for battles that we still mainly kept with just verbal descriptions. It was a lot of fun and we rarely worried about fireballs hitting our own party or lightning bolts bouncing back. Some of the handouts in the early days helped a lot though, like the ones in Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. When I went to PC gaming, the Infocom IF games with no graphics always seemed more enjoyable that the other games that had pictures - but then the Infocom games were some of the best there were.

I would say now though, after playing the old goldbox games like Pool of Radiance and countless other computer games, and with things like the virtual tabletops and Neverwinter to help, that I've grown spoiled with seeing what's going on and it would be hard to play without visual aids. Sad in a way, as I can still remember some of the early dungeons and battles I played and pictured in my head, better than I can remember the ones with graphics, minis or aids.

For the internet side of things "not being that hard to find these days" I've got to disagree once again. Everybody at home always seems to forget about the large amount of military out there that can't get the net if they're at sea or at station. When Half-Life 2 came out and required steam, with all the problems on launch day, I saw a lot of disappointed people in uniform that weren't able to play.

I know that it seems that the internet is available to most normal people, but there are still many out there for whom it's not.