#gary gygax

[unbfacts]

[oldschoolfrp]

Zargon awaits beneath The Lost City -- Kevin Glint updates the look of a classic encounter from module B4, first drawn by Jim Holloway:

Quests from the Infinite Staircase (July 16, 2024) will include 5e conversions of 6 D&D/AD&D adventures from the 1980s:

B4: The Lost City by Tom Moldvay (1982, originally for Moldvay's version of Basic D&D)

UK4: When a Star Falls by Graeme Morris (1984, originally for AD&D)

UK1: Beyond the Crystal Cave by Dave J Brown, Tom Kirby, and Graeme Morris (1983, AD&D)

I3: Pharaoh by Tracy and Laura Hickman (1982, AD&D)

S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth by Gary Gygax (1982, AD&D)

S3: Expedition to the Barrier Peaks by Gary Gygax (1980, AD&D)

[vintagerpg]

Supermodule week! The format — a perfect bound softcover, often with a folder in the back containing a large foldout map or a booklet of maps — was introduced with Lankhmar, but was frequently used by TSR from the mid-‘80s to the early ‘90s, particularly in reprinting older adventure material. As much as I love the Lankhmar book, I begrudgingly acknowledge that The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985) is probably the real star publication using the format.

Temple was supposed to be a couple of more traditional modules by Gary Gygax, starting with T1: The Village of Hommlet (1979), but he never got around to finishing the writing. Aside of Hommlet and some notes, the rest of this book is Frank Mentzer’s work. It’s OK! I like Hommlet a lot — a starter module with a seemingly friendly town (like the village in Jennell Jaquays’ Dark Tower, this is a facade) where 1st level characters can square off with a memorable villain (Lareth the Beautiful) in a ruined moathouse. They then move along to the seedy town of Nulb, where more agents of the Temple are gathering, before proceeding into the Temple itself. I like Nulb too. I’m a little mixed on the Temple.

It’s a megadungeon (though one on the smallish side), and I generally like those, but Temple doesn’t make sense to me, really. I mean, dungeons never do, but Temple particularly so, as it is both a staging ground for the forces of evil and a prison built by the forces of good. I also think “Elemental Evil” is a silly concept, but I do like the big twist at the end, the fact that the big bad is the demon queen of fungus, of all things. I also like that Zuggtmoy looks like a weird ET knock-off. I think the problem for me is that the towns are dynamic and full of potential, but the encounters in the temple feel very samey. It’s fine, its just no Barrier Peaks, you know? Nice Parkinson cover, though.

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Gary Gygax & Brian Blume - Dungeons & Dragons, Supplement III: Eldritch Wizardry - TSR Rules - 1979

[dndhistory]

376. Various Authors - Polyhedron #22 (March 1985)

Rounding out March 1985, we get the 22nd issue of the RPGA newsletter which, this month, sports a cover allusive of the Star Frontiers game, the leading SciFi TTRPG published by TSR at the time. Fortunately, for our purposes there is plenty of D&D content inside the cover.

D&D content includes the usual centerpiece module, this time In the Black Hours by David Cook, first used in Gen Con South 1984 and now reprinted here for all those who like their D&D competitive. Gygax contributes some new monsters in an article rectifying some omissions from Monster Manual II and clarifying the Marlgoyle. Gygax shows up again in the official Judge and Players rankings for 1984, being the highest ranking game judge at level 10. 

Other articles include some new, but unofficial, Cleric spells and a catalog for ordering some RPGA swag. If you were smart you would have been snagging as many of those R-Series modules as you possibly could for $4.00 and keeping them for a rainy day as each of them would be worth in excess of $1k today. Talk about inflation. 

[weirdwisconsin]

The grave of Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax in Lake Geneva, WI

MORE: D&D things to see in Lake Geneva

[rpgsandbox]

When is Dungeons & Dragons’ birthday? We don’t really know. RPG Historian par excellence Jon Peterson has investigated the issue a few times and come up with the answer that the game was almost certainly printed in January 1974 (though there’s disagreement even on that) and that it almost certainly wasn’t available to most people until February. The copyright registration was made on January 30, 1974 while a few years after the fact, in 1977, TSR claimed that the trademark “Dungeons & Dragons” was used in commerce starting on January 15 of that year. Peterson eventually settled on the last Sunday of January as an appropriate birthday for Dungeons & Dragons, because of Gygax inviting people over to his house to try out D&D on Sundays. This year, the year of the 50th anniversary, that’s January 28th. So happy birthday to Dungeons & Dragons. [continues]

[swornsword]

[theoutcastrogue]

"The second edition of AD&D was finally released in early 1989. Many of the changes turned out to be cosmetic. One of the biggest was that the sizes of the Player’s Handbook (1989) and Dungeon Master’s Guide (1989) were reversed. Back in 1978 Gygax had decided that it was best if the players did not know the rules, and so the original Player’s Handbook was a skeleton that didn’t even detail combat. Now the entire roleplaying industry had accepted the fact that players and gamemasters were united in games — not adversaries — and the new rules reflected this. [...]

Perhaps most surprisingly, the rules were once again presented as “guidelines” — a reversal from Gygax’s original goal for the AD&D lines. Finally, the character classes were indeed cleaned up, with Arneson’s assassin and monk eliminated.

Though Cook had said that assassins were removed due to problems of party unity, their excision has always been seen by the public as part of TSR’s well-documented attempt to make AD&D more public friendly — TSR’s only allowance to the religious hysteria that had shadowed the game throughout the 1980s. Half-orcs were similarly removed as player characters, and demons and devils were eliminated entirely.

James M. Ward, who had instituted the removal of demons and devils, explained in Dragon #154 (February 1990) that “[a]voiding the Angry Mother Syndrome has become a good, basic guideline for all of the designers and editors at TSR, Inc.” Apparently, TSR had received one letter a week complaining about the demons and devils since the original Monster Manual was printed, and those 624 letters, or what Ward called “a lot of letters,” had been the reason he’d removed the infernal races.

The readers were not amused, and to his credit Ward printed many of their replies in Dragon #158 (June 1990). One reader stated that the decision “becomes censorship when an outside group dictates to you … what you should print.” The release of the Outer Planes Appendix (1991) for the Monstrous Compendium assuaged some of the anger because it restored demons as “tanar’ri” and devils as “baatezu,” but some fans left D&D entirely as a result of this decision."

— Shannon Appelcline, Designers & Dragons: The ’70s

[junethehellenicpagan]

So in a dungeon and dragon podcast. They have a character on trial. And they enter into evidence the dungeon master’s rule book by Gary Gygax. Fucking awesome

[sam-seer]

Hot off the press: old school dungeon ideas inspired by S2: White Plume Mountain.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Sagard the Barbarian - art by Richard Corben (1985)

[oldschoolfrp]

"A berserk clay golem lurks in the small alcove in the northeast." (Jeff Easley, AD&D module S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, by Gary Gygax, TSR, 1982)

[vintagerpg]

Hello friends! We're running remastered repeats for the holidays. I thought the Coloring Album would, in some way, speak to warm memories of childhood Christmas gifts. Whether or not that's apt, we hope your holidays are rad!

Original notes: This week on the Vintage RPG Podcast, we flip through the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Coloring Album (1979), written by Gary Gygax and illustrated by underground comic artist Greg Irons. Not only is this a gorgeous coloring book (with some content of questionable suitability for kids) but it also comes with a rules lite dungeon crawl game baked in, penned by Gygax himself [Note: Stu has since learned that Gygax wrote the storybook portion of the album, but Lawrence "White Plume Mountain" Schick designed the game]. We hadn’t ever heard of this until a few months ago, but it instantly became one of our favorite Dungeons & Dragons books of all time. 

Bonus Fact: The map for the game portion is a modified version of the Tower of Zenopus dungeon from John Eric Holmes D&D Basic Set (1979). 

[goshyesvintageads]

TSR Hobbies Inc, 1982

[dndhistory]

408. Gary Gygax and Frank Mentzer - T1-4: The Temple of Elemental Evil (1985)

A true classic which spawned remakes up until our days and even a computer game, this is by far the longest adventure published in one go up until this time. Looking at the code T1-4 you might think that this is a compilation of reprints into one volume (as in the later GDQ1-7 module reprints that compose Queen of the Spiders) but you'd be wrong. 

See, there was indeed a T1, The Village of Hommlet, and that does compose the opening bit of this adventure, but there is no T2, T3 or independent T4, those are all new to this edition and T2 to T4 is just the Temple of Elemental Evil, after a short trip to Nulb. The temple itself is one of the most classic of dungeon crawls, a sprawling place dedicated to cults of the four elements and then another deeper evil, the now infamous Zuggtmoy the Demon Queen of Fungi... remember that next time you have a mushroom pizza.

If you had bought T1 back in 1979 you were left with a starting area with a promising setting and nowhere to go after a short adventure in a moathouse, and then you were left with a six year wait for this massive piece while Gygax got a bit distracted with the growth of TSR and Hollywood, which is only natural. When this finally came out you could throw T1, as it was reprinted here, but also you had a great time in store for you and your player with nearly 140 pages of adventure at your fingertips.