| Jerry Wright 307 |
Does anybody remember the old school modules? The one I'm specifically thinking of is Verbosh, Judge's Guild #108, but the Wilderlands series was pretty good. (And I cribbed a lot from it back in the day!)
I bought my copy of Verbosh back in 1981. It was the core of my AD&D campaign in the day, and very recently, I resurrected it to be the core of my 3.5 game, along with a bunch of odds and ends from WotC's 3.5 download page and the G-series modules from TSR.
It's a lot of fun running modern players through the old world. Most of them weren't even born when Verbosh was printed. At first, they seemed to have some trouble with the punny names and comedic twists to the descriptions, but after an edge-of-their-seats run through the ancient temple in the mysterious dead city of Haygaras, they've gained a little respect for old-school gaming.
It's brought my campaign back to life, and given me a renewed sense of what real gaming is all about, after more than a decade of the-rules-control-everything gaming that started in our group with 3.0.
I feel like a real DM again.
| Jerry Wright 307 |
I dug around in my closet.... You know, the one you open slowly because there might be an avalanche.... And I found my box of 1E campaign stuff.
I thought Verbosh gave me that nostalgic feeling. This stuff is gold.
I had The Book, a sheaf of blank pages for house rules, where every ruling I made while running the game got jotted down, so there'd be a way to refer back. Except I don't remember referring back to it very much. Maybe it was just enough to have the record handy.
There's a rule there for luck as an additional stat; it's generated the same way as the other abilities were, on 4d6best3, and it had a bonus/penalty similar to the Dex bonus/penalty to AC. Every three points of luck gave the character a re-roll chance once per game session, and the bonus/penalty would be added to the re-roll. Sometimes, if your roll was bad enough, you'd go ahead and take the penalty on the re-roll because, well, sometimes it can't get any worse.
I also had rules for creating halfbreeds; combining any human or demi-human type with any other humanoid race (excepting, of course, half-elves and half-orcs, which were already half-breeds). The half-gnolls were good enough I added them to later games, long after The Book got packed away.
And my short-lived attempt to create a different sort of magic system is there; the one where there was only one list of spells for everybody, and different casters used different stats to cast spells, and that stat was used to determine bonus spells and chance for spell failure. It sounds very familiar: and this was written back in 1989-1990.
Of course, it never occurred to me to use Charisma as a magic stat; I had Intelligence for the arcane types, and Wisdom for the divine types, and Dexterity for the bard types--the idea being that a bard would use his music to cast spells.
I even had a magical thief type, sort of based on the Grey Mouser, who could dabble in spells if his Intelligence was high enough; he only got whatever bonus spells his Int gave him.
It's bringing back more than memories. I think I'll try adapting these things to 3.5 and see how they fly in my game.
| Jerry Wright 307 |
I understand that most people aren't really interested in the older gaming supplements, but I use them in my 3.5 game. One of the wonderful things about D&D is its adaptability. A monster from 1E is just as viable as a monster from PF. The same thing applies to traps. And many of my players weren't even born when the modules I'm looking through were shelved. An old gamer, if he can still remember, might recognize part or all of the old stuff, but I never run things as written, anyway. What's the fun in that?
| Hitdice |
Most of my 1E "encyclopedia generica" type supplements have been loved to death at this point, but man does this thread bring back the memories :)
| Jerry Wright 307 |
I like to take a page from Knights of the Dinner Table. There was a storyline about the designers at Hard Eight being on the verge of getting axed because they weren't meeting the "15% quarterly growth projection". (Sound vaguely familiar?)
They had about two weeks left, so they decided to create the "Biggest D@%# Dungeon in the World" supplement by photoshopping old maps from other modules and throwing every magic item and monster in the books into one dungeon. (The monsters were even arranged alphabetically to save time.) The price tag was $200.
Anyway, the idea of using rooms, traps and enounters from multiple modules came to me, and I began putting together my own encounter areas using bits and pieces. It does, indeed, save time, and my campaign world has grown by leaps and bounds.