#adnd

[theshunbun]

I forgot, I am playing in a Greyhawk game, got a Barbarian Drow named Rhaez’Varyntha (Rayz-VAH-rin-thah) "Wrath Weaver" of Selvetarm 🖤🖤🖤

[anim-ttrpgs]

Your post detailing a story in ad&d of a band of warriors delving into a dungeon filled with large lads and undead inspired me to look into ad&d 2e myself and so far I have found myself enjoying the mechanics greatly. So thank you for that do you have any advice for those just getting into ad&d?

Thank you! I love AD&D and am happy to help get more people into it, or any other rpg that has similar pre-WotC dungeon crawling gameplay.

Here’s a few rapid fire tips off the top of my head for those trying to get into AD&D2e and similar games:

Everybody Reads Both Rulebooks

Really this is my stance for basically any TTRPG, but I think that everybody should read the Player’s Handbook and the DM Guide. A session of any game will always go smoother if everybody has read the rules instead of one guy being tasked with remembering them all.

Check the Wiki

There’s a very useful wiki for AD&D you can use.

While I still recommend you read the rulebooks themselves to get a full understanding of the game you’re playing, the wiki is way better than a crusty old PDF or questionably formatted and nearly-falling-apart-by-now physical copy for quickly checking rules mid-session, and for waking you through character creation.

Start Small

Even before WotC brought the D&D brand and made it the overwhelming monopoly it is today, D&D was a juggernaught if the industry, and, even though I think from reading them that TSR-era D&D was very much written with more passion than just trying to soullessly sell products, TSR still had the dollar signs in their eyes and released like a million supplement and all that crap.

My suggestion: Stick with the DM’s Guide and Player’s Handbook at first. There’s just too much shit otherwise, and a lot of the later additions and supplements have a lot of very questionable content that will not really improve your experience. For instance, why did they introduce a fucking proficiency for eating and drinking?!

Use Even Older Adventure Modules

AD&D2e is retroactively compatible with the adventure modules made for previous editions, and I suggest you use these instead. While I think AD&D2e is the best ruleset to come out of TSR D&D, the adventure modules saw a pretty sharp decline around that time. This is when adventure modules started to be more like scripted stories rather than the dungeon crawling sandboxes they previously were.

Some suggestions that should get you started and keep you going for many many sessions are:

In Search of the Unknown

The Sinister Secret or Saltmarsh

Keep on the Borderlands (get the later version not the original version.)

Village of Hommlet

Throw Everything You Know from D&D3e Onwards Out the Window

If you aren’t sure how to handle something mechanically, do not default to assuming you do it the way it works in later editions. For instance, there are no skill checks in dialogue. You might roll Charisma once at the start of a conversation to determine if the other group trusts the PC or not, but that’s it. Everything else it just talked out.

Also, encounter balance? Throw it out. PCs will have to negotiate, sneak past, run away from, or use clever tactics to survive encounters. It being unbalanced is the whole point. You should be playing this like you would play an old survival-horror game like Resident Evil or Silent Hill, not like an action game. The PCs are fragile and will die easily if they just try to take everything head on.

This is another reason that everyone should read both rulebooks. If you don’t, then you’ll default to playing I like WotC D&D, which is a totally and completely different game.

Run it as a Challenge Game

These games only work if you run them as “challenge games,” which means they are scenarios meant to challenge both the PC and the player. No one should ever fudge dice, adjust HP values of monsters, change the solution to a puzzle just to be what the players thing is right, etc. It’s a dangerous gauntlet and you see if they live or die based on their own decisions and your descriptions. If the GM bends reality to ensure the party’s success (or ensure their failure, but everyone already knows that’s bad) then the whole game and whole story is invalidated. There will be a story, but it cannot be preplanned, it will emerge from seeing what these PCs do and who they turn out to be when they encounter these challenging scenarios. That has to include the possibility of unceremonious death.

Run a Troupe Campaign and Play Multiple Characters on Large Parties

A “troupe campaign” is one where instead of a small party, there are dozens of PCs which form a pool or roster to select from. Like you read in that post, we do ours as a mercenary free company. They get hired to do this stuff.

This makes it so that, in a highly lethal game like AD&D, the “story” doesn’t end as soon as a PC dies, which also means you’re less inclined to cheat to keep them alive when they shouldn’t be. That was just one of dozens of main characters.

Also, get used to playing multiple PCs at once. Make everyone create 3-5 PCs at the start of the campaign, and everyone bring at least 2 of them per adventure. This may take some getting used to but it is really not that hard, especially if you learn to play in third-person like Eureka tells you to.

Get used to party sizes between 6 and 15 PCs. Despite ironically being less focused exclusively on combat than WotC D&D, AD&D doesn’t pretend it’s not descended from wargames.

Ignore Alignment

Yeah alignment still mostly ranged between being pointless and being bad back then too. It meant something back in the very earliest editions of the game, but by the point of AD&D2e it was already mostly a vestigial system that you can and should ignore for most classes. You can keep it for, like, Clerics and Paladins if you want, that’s what we do.

But generally you should give up on the idea that your PCs will even be good guys at all, they’re amoral mercenaries and/or treasure hunters. This doesn’t mean they’re necessarily “bad guys” either, it’s more complex than that.

(art by @chaospyromancy)

Sir Ferdinand, one of my PCs and Captain of the White Company, is a scoundrel who overcharges his employers whenever he can get away with it; does dirty mercenary jobs like raiding, robbery, and extortion as much as he does heroic jobs like rescuing kidnapped children and protecting towns from raids, sometimes even at the same time. Recently he calmly and politely told a village of lizardmen they had better swear fealty to the local lord while subtly implying that something terrible could happen to their home if they don’t. In an adventure before, while overcharging a town for protection due to a threat that the White Company knew was not credible, once the company stumbled upon a secret smuggling and slavery operation that had been kidnapping people from the town and nearby village, he put every effort towards rooting it out despite it not being their job and even later being ordered by their current employer to stop sticking their noses in it. As he said before engaging an extremely dangerous and magic-wielding man in full plate armor while he himself had only maille at the time, he could not call himself a Christian in good standing if he turned a blind eye to slave running.

What alignment is Sir Ferdinand? None of them. He doesn’t have alignment, he has values.

[magikkbeann]

Playing a 2e ADND campaign as a silly mushroom girl in the Underdark! Her name is Truffle, other than being a cleric she likes to skip around the party and nap on the ground a lot <3

[victorzhuzhakin]

[vexwerewolf]

Tag yourself I'm expensive doxy

[dndhistory]

511. Various Authors - Dragon #117 (January 1987)

Welcome to 1987! An important year for D&D and TSR in general as it leans heavily into two things, the creation of new universes, which had been so successful with Dragonlance in 1984, and the related expansion of TSR as a publisher of novels. This year we get more Dragonlance novels, more Greyhawk novels (through TSR by Rose Estes and from outside TSR by Gary Gygax) as well as new worlds as Mystara gets more solidly established as the world of BECMI D&D through the publications of Gazeteers, and the official appearance of what would, in the long run, be the most successful of D&D universes: The Forgotten Realms, through modules, campaign guides and novels!

Of course none of this is present right here in the January issue of Dragon, but by the end of 1987 D&D will look a bit different indeed. In this first issue for the year we get the usual mix of articles exploring several aspects of the game form Greenwood's usual Forgotten Realms tidbits (at this time still only his homebrewed campaign) with By Magic Masked, the Ecology of the Ankheg, guides to shopping, to using the Intelligence stat better in games, also a whole article on weird dogs for the githyanki, the githzerai and the drow. 

The back end of the magazine consists of articles on other games, and the usual columns and comics. All in all a pretty good issue to start off the year! 

[losttrailsmaps]

Jungle Temple

Deep within the tangled heart of the jungle, an ancient temple looms, its stone walls choked by vines and carved with the leering faces of forgotten gods. The air is thick with the scent of damp earth and something else—something watching—while unseen predators and whispering spirits lurk in the shadows, waiting for the next fool to trespass.

Welcome to the Jungle Temple! This map pack was inspired by my recent Indiana Jones binge. It includes 9 total jungle temple maps, including grand entrances, ruins, pools, and much more.

View the entire map pack here.

[maen7]

Nav Rayan Dyrr from Menzoberranzan and his riding lizard. The moment of tenderness after the fight. Based on our D&D campaign and 2th edition of AD&D.

[silvercompassmaps]

52 Modular Tiles to build your own dungeon with!

These tiles are aligned to the x and y-axis, allowing you to rotate and place the tiles however you see fit. They are designed to be used on a Virtual Tabletop (VTT), like Roll20 or Foundry.

You could also configure these tiles in a program like photoshop to build and print out your own dungeon.

I have made a sample dungeon using these tiles and have attached it above. You can make your dungeon as big or as small as you like, and the possibilities are endless!

The maps are broken into three groups, which include 31 base tiles, 14 unfurnished tiles, and 7 large tiles.

The map specifications include:

- Dimensions: 4000x4000 (100 PPI)

- Grid Size: 10x10 and 20x20 for the large tiles

You can download the first 10 tiles for free here.

[gawrkin]

The Arthurian Heroes' Classes and Stats

(From AD&D 1st Edition's Deities and Demigods)(Link, HERE)

(Disclaimer: I am neither a player of nor an expert on D&D/AD&D. Just thought everyone should see this)

(EDIT: Link to a new post covering AD&D's 2nd edition's character stats, HERE)

[wtimetravelgentlemen]

Dwarf idea for a campaign me and my playgroup are startin 🪓

[ff0und]

I'm sure that Eli would not have been able to stand Victor's long stares at him during the lecture

Good that Victor has ADHD

[anim-ttrpgs]

Is it possible to use Eureka in a more traditional fantasy setting, more sword and sorcery? What about a fantastical medieval city from the time period of the rise of universities in Europe?

Very much appreciate all the posts. It's made me think more carefully about table top gaming than I had before.

Well, maybe, but I wouldn’t recommend it.

There’s quite a lot in Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy that sets it very firmly in the tech level and societal structure of the past 200 years. It is designed to be flexible, but I don’t know that it’s flexible enough to handle that without a lot of things starting to break.

A lot of the Skills and Traits would be less applicable to medieval life and culture and so more than just the Driving Skill would need to be swapped out.

Eureka’s combat rules, which are pretty intricate, are focused primarily on firearms that use modern cartridges rather than ramrod muzzle-loading type firearms when it comes to ranged fighting, and on much smaller melee weapons and unarmed fighting when it comes to close range fighting.

We don’t even have bow&arrow rules.

Many of the intricate firearm combat rules would not be applicable to black powder weapons, and if I were to do a version of Eureka set in a medieval setting, I would want to flesh out the melee combat a whole lot more, both because it would be used more often, and because the current melee combat rules are designed specifically to emulate how people fight today.

The average person today, even if they know how to fight, only knows any advanced techniques when it comes to unarmed fighting, and then maybe a few of the basics of using weapons. Back when swords and daggers and stuff were much more commonly used weapons, much more advanced techniques were known by people who fought with them, and I would want to reflect that in the rules.

Plus, there’s the matter of culture. Eureka is an extremely modern game, exploring very modern themes and having rules that guide the characters into acting like real modern people. Any version of Eureka which takes place in a society in or based on the more distant past would have to reflect that in the rules, and, well, that would be a whole lot of research.

If you were to just try to graft some of Eureka’s mystery-solving mechanics onto an existing sword&sorcery TTRPG, that might work better, but you’d still run into problems. The Investigation Point mechanic works the way it does because all the Skills for investigating are on a Eureka PC’s character sheet. These Skills are not part of most sword&sorcery RPGs, so you’d have to homebrew those in too, or the means of getting Investigation Points would be very limited and not flow correctly.

Also, you’re welcome! That’s one of our ultimate goals here, to get people to think of game design as being real enough to actually affect gameplay experience, and a real skill that can be developed and applied with intent.

[eltiron2]

Reddit

Még mindig a legjobb szosölmédia.

12 éve indítottam ott egy AD&D témájú subot, aztán totál elfeledkeztem róla, most véletlenül rátaláltam és 11ezer tagja van, ráadásul aktív :)

A facebookon indított hasonló csopim 70-80 taggal rendelkezik és tök halott :D

Szóval ha van a followerjeim közt olyan, akit érdekel a téma, akkor r/adnd :)

[2dmax]

bday card i made for my GM, who was one of my first 3 GMs ever (if not the first) back in 2017. we mainly play Dungeon Crawl Classics together, and he is in fact running a campaign for us with that system now. it's a horizontal card that folds upwards.

The front of the card was laid out by tracing this image from pose emporium on deviantart, then embellished and exaggerated.

i also traced the script font, which is free for personal use. found on dafont i believe - dont remember the name.

[markuami]

Cecilia Mayflower, Queen of Runix. The Saint of the kingdom— her exposed cavity wheezes between breathe, the finest of dust being able to strike her down, but she continues to hold her heart out.. the glow providing warmth for others as she does not fear death more than she fears others never experiencing life’s beauty.