James, our ShackledCity Dungeon Master is unavailable this Sunday. I proposed to play some old skool D&D in honor of Gary Gygax.
I’ve decided to pick up an old version of the D&D rules. Check out the Editions of Dungeons & Dragons and look for “Red Box” and the “Rules Cyclopedia”. We’re going to use the Labyrinth Lord rules, which reimplement those rules. When I bought the Rules Cyclopedia PDF, it turned out that the quality of the PDF was not too exciting. That’s why I’m picking this OGL (en) reimplementation. It can be printed without problems.
Editions of Dungeons & Dragons
But back to the Red Box.
I fondly remember my astonishment back then. A Canadian friend called Jason Burford introduced us to AD&D and that was our system. A while later a guy called Igor Simonides invited us to a game of D&D using the Red Box rules. There was no distinction between race and class! There was just 3d6, in order! It was weird. We didn’t want to play it. But now I really want to take another look.
The irony is that Gary Gygax wrote the AD&D rules where as the Red Box was a revision by Frank Mentzer of a revision by Tom Moldvay of a revision by John Eric Holmes of the original rules by Gygax and Arneson...
So we’re only indirectly using the rules of Gary Gygax. Then again, Labyrinth Lord is dedicated to Tom Moldvay, so take a look at Robert Fisher’s D&D ID overview to figure out where we stand. 🙂
And we’re going to play Palace of the Silver Princess. In fact, we’re going to play the original, orange-cover edition of that adventure by Jean Wells. I’ll have to check it for playability, though.
I’m going to prepare a few spellbooks, some standard equipment, a few options, and a few sets of arms and armor to make character creation quick and easy.
This is going to be fun! 😀
→ 2008-04-20 Palace of the Silver Princess
2008-04-20 Palace of the Silver Princess
#RPG
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Basic D&D (and the whole BECMI series, by Frank Mentzer) is the D&D I cut my teeth on, when I first started playing in the summer before my first year of middle school (1989). My first character was a fighter named Redhammer. I quickly moved on to AD&D 1st edition, somehow snagging the early printings with the extremely old skool covers; I played my half-elf thief, Slyeth Foxfingers, and his life-drinking intelligent short sword, Leech. Two years later I was playing AD&D 2nd edition (which had been out almost since I started playing D&D) as Garric, human fighter with 18/00 (ogre!) strength. But BECMI D&D was where it all started for me. I even DMed for the first time in Basic D&D, for solo campaigns involving an elf, and Redhammer’s younger brother, Redsword (gawd my names were awful back then).
– Adrian 2008-04-17 20:36 UTC
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Oh, there’s an online Labyrinth Lord character creator!
online Labyrinth Lord character creator
– Alex Schroeder 2008-04-17 22:27 UTC
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I absolutely loved red box D&D; It was by far my favorite.
I played 2nd Ed. AD&D as well, but it always seemed more complicated; I found myself spending more time reading & trying to figure out the rules, whereas with Red Box, I focused more time on making creative dungeons.
So my favor definitely went to red box & Mystara.
– LionKimbro 2008-04-22 07:10 UTC