Full Circle

Yesterday, Maceo (another elvish assassin) was able to rejoin our campaign for a four-hour session (one more backpack to fill with loot!)...surprisingly, we were able to get him to join rather plausibly by simply having him follow the trail of bodies and destruction through the castle (we said his character had slept till noon and hadn't got up to the place till 2) all the way to the belfry/treasure chamber. Even more surprisingly, they decided to continue their explorations, eventually defeating three harpies (elvish blood), a flock of blood hawks, a nest of 37ish giant rats, a 5th level illusionist (color spray!), and a mother-f'ing banshee. The clock has just struck 5pm, there is four hours of daylight left, and the party keeps trudging up to tower roofs in their search for the Countess, figuring a vampire must be sleeping upside down somewhere like a giant bat.

*sigh* This is what comes from children not being allowed to watch vampire movies anymore. At least both Mace and Diego leveled up (4th and 5th respectively). Everyone is still alive, but the ranger was driven hopelessly insane following his perusal of a libram of ineffable evil. So it goes.

A couple folks (most recently Stacktrace) have brought up the the subject of my transition from being one of the "leading proponents" of the B/X system of D&D to now being chest-deep in AD&D. Since I've got a couple-four hours to spare, I figured I'd take the time to chronicle my personal history (as best I can) for readers interested in "the Evolution of JB." Not sure that's really enough time, but here goes:

Circa 1981 (age 8, 2nd grade): while at a Fred Meyer store, I see the Dungeon! board game on display and plead with my mother to buy it, citing the fact that it says its for children of 8+ years and I am old enough. Surprisingly, she does so (a fact that surprises me to this day: my mother was never one to cave to a begging/pleading child back in the day). I am somewhat disappointed by what I find inside...I had intended to purchase Dungeons & Dragons having already learned of this game from the playground at my school (and being, by this time, familiar with the terms "class," "fighter," "magic-user," "assassin," "magic missile," "Demogorgon," and "Blackrazor"). Still, the game provides an education into the very rudiments of D&D concepts (dungeons, monsters, treasure, secret doors, expendable spells, green slime, etc.). It contains a pair of green, plastic D6s with numbers etched on them (instead of dots)...the first I've ever seen. I still own this game today...my children have played it extensively.

Circa 1982 (age 8 or 9, 3rd grade): I discover the Moldvay edited Basic D&D box set at J.C. Penny in the toy section, and (again) talk my mother into acquiring it, perhaps explaining that this was the game I originally sought out. Again (surprisingly) this works, though this may have been in November and the idea was that this would be a birthday present for Yours Truly. I have detailed my delight and discovery of the wonders of this set in other blog posts. I read it cover-to-cover, struggle with the module, and instead create my own "dungeon" (a castle map, no doubt based on B2's Keep, that players must besiege).

Shortly Thereafter: my parents host a caucus at our house for local Democrats. I am upstairs in my room running my adventure for my younger brother. One Dem has brought her daughter, Jocelyn (a year older than myself) to the caucus, and my mother asks if she can join our game. I give her a halfling to play. When it is time for her to finally leave, my brother has been killed two or three times, and Jocelyn has infiltrated the castle, avoided all guards and is making for the castle treasury/armory. This is my introduction to a girl who will become my best friend, later co-DM.

3rd grade: I play D&D mainly with my brother and my best friend, Jason. Jason runs a thief named Sneakshadow. Jason is good friends with Scott (they both have single parents...moms...so they share time with each other). Jason's mom is our soccer coach.

Summer of 1983: I meet Matt during the summer during Little League baseball.

1983 (4th Grade): Matt has joined our school; we become friends. Circa November, I receive the Cook/Marsh Expert set, probably as a birthday gift. At a sleepover at Matt's house (I can pinpoint this to December, as I remember watching the Eurythmics video "Here Comes the Rain Again" on MTV), we make him a high level cleric to try the Expert set rules (giving him fanatic followers and sending him into the desert on a quest to find a blue dragon). Matt owns the Dark Tower board game, which I play long into the night after everyone else has gone to sleep. He also has a vinyl album with Conan the Barbarian stories. In later years, we will dive deep into his older brother's stack of Heavy Metal magazines and share a love of Thieves World books.

December 1983: Jocelyn gets me the AD&D Monster Manual as a Christmas gift. It is incorporated into our games, though a lot of it is difficult to parse as we are still using B/X as our rule base.

1984: We play D&D. Sometime in this year, Jocelyn discovers a copy of the DMG at the bottom of chest of old stuff belonging to her youngest brother Lacey (11 years her senior). I am allowed to borrow it on occasion...much of it is difficult to parse or completely alien. However, we begin to use the combat matrices (which seem to line up with the MM) and incorporate the expansive magic item list, especially the artifacts and relics. Some of the effects are waaay over my head (satyriasis? nymphomania?) but sex-change magic is always good for a laugh when your players include both boys and girls. Jocelyn's character, Bladehawk, has become the premier fighter of the campaign and is legendary for escaping death traps. At Jocelyn's home I run a game for four(?) players including my brother, Jocelyn, Jason (I think) and Jocelyn's friend Brian Hackett. Brian has a high level cleric with the blade barrier spell (also a hammer of thunderbolts) which, because we cannot find it in my rulebooks, I disallow. Years later, I will encounter Brian in high school (he was a junior when I was a freshman) and he will remember me respectfully as "The Dungeon Master."

Fall of 1984 (age 10, 5th grade): at soccer practice, Matt brings me a copy of N1: Against the Cult of the Reptile God, asking if I can run it for our group. While at first I am put off by the low-level of the adventure (our B/X characters have reached lofty heights), I begin to notice various strains of weirdness in the adventure: single class elves, "longswords," "ring mail," etc. Reading the cover ("for ADVANCED D&D game") and seeing the level range (1st to 3rd) it finally dawns on me that "Advanced" does not equate to "Expert" and that the MM and DMG must be for this other, mystery game. The key turns in the lock, the veil falls from our eyes, and all is revealed.

The start of 
my AD&D career.

November 1984 (age 11, 5th grade): I receive a copy of the AD&D Players Handbook for my birthday, the only thing I wanted. Now, with my copy of the MM and Jocelyn's copy of the DMG, we can begin playing proper AD&D. I make a high level magic-user character for my (now) friend Scott, both to make use of the new rules (intelligence factor! new spells!) and to put him on par with other long-running PCs Bladehawk, Sneakshadow, and Sunstarr (Matt's cleric). His wizard is named Lucky Drake after a character in a Choose Your Own Adventure book. This will be the core of our group for the next several years.

[EDIT: I now believe that the PHB was a Christmas gift, not a birthday  gift. I still believe I received my first DMG slightly later]

December 1984/Winter 1985: my aunt's boyfriend, a DragonQuest player, gifts me with my very own AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. No longer forced to borrow Jocelyn's (as she doesn't attend the same school as the rest of us, I don't see her often enough), I can delve the thing and really learn the rules.

Winter 1985: Matt picks up a copy of AD&D Deities & Demigods (cleric guy, remember?) and we immediately incorporate it into our game. Sneakshadow fights Thor and kills him.

Spring of 1985: I discover the appendices in the back of the PHB after trying to figure out references to the psionics and bards in the DMG combat tables (previously I hadn't finished reading my PHB as I assumed it was just "all spells" after the mid-point). I immediately make my own character: a half-elf bard with psionics named Landon Weiguard. I show him to Jocelyn. Jocelyn expresses interest in doing some DMing.

Circa Fall of 1985 (age 11, 6th grade): Jason leaves our school. In addition, his family become Born Again Christians and his mother no longer allows him to play D&D. I see him only a handful of times after this. Jocelyn and I decide to blow up our original campaign and re-start the whole thing (all 1st level characters!) as strictly AD&D. She and I alternate as Dungeon Masters. 

November 1985 (age 12): my brother gives me the Unearthed Arcana for my 12th birthday. Jocelyn already has her copy (and incorporated comeliness and all the rest into our new campaign). I believe I receive my copy of Legends & Lore in December, perhaps as a Christmas gift. This will be the bulk of our "canon" going forward, only occasionally adding bits here-and-there from Dragon magazine or the Mentzer Companion set (which Jocelyn owned). 

1985 to 1988: we play AD&D. DMing duty is split between Jocelyn and myself. When I run, I tend to run AD&D adventure modules, rather than original material. Jocelyn runs a couple pre-packaged adventures including (Ravenloft...though I wasn't present for that) and Castle Greyhawk. At some point we re-boot the campaign a second time (we now distinguish "eras" of play by campaign: the Original Campaign, the First (AD&D) Campaign, and the New Campaign), again beginning characters at 1st level. When we do this, we use the World of Greyhawk map, but add our own material (factions, politics, etc.). We have some DragonLance modules (we are fans of the novels) but only use them for the maps, judging the adventures themselves to be "terrible." As time goes on, Jocelyn does more of the heavy lifting of campaign management...I am (mostly) content to just play. We also venture into other RPGs: we play Marvel extensively, BattleTech, some Star Frontiers. We dabble in James Bond and Twilight 2000; get our first taste of Warhammer 40,000 (the book...none of us acquire minis). AD&D remains our main game, however.

Spring/Summer 1988 (age 14): Jocelyn and I have a falling out. Kids fall out with each other: that's a part of life. Often times, over the years, Jason or Scott or Matt would be "on the outs" with the group, but we would always (eventually, somehow) bring 'em back into the fold. As we were transitioning to high school (the boys...Jocelyn at 15 and already in high school) I was the one that got kicked...and the group never recovered. We all ended up at different high schools, going separate ways.

1988-1991 (high school): I make new friends, some of whom play AD&D. I do not play AD&D with them...instead I play Palladium games (Heroes Unlimited, TMNT, Rifts), Stormbringer, or (later) Vampire the Masquerade. I still collect old AD&D modules when I find them, including White Plume Mountain and Against the Giants. For about a year, I run my brother and his best friend Brandon in an AD&D campaign, up till about level 12. I do this mostly to try modules I've never previously run (including the Desert of Desolation series I3, I4, and I5) and to try re-capturing the magic of my earlier campaigns. It doesn't work and I quit playing AD&D.

1991-1995 (university): I do some gaming, mostly White Wolf stuff (Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, Ars Magica 3E). Towards the end of university, one of my buddies (Joel) suggests we start up an AD&D campaign; I agree only on the condition that it is 1st edition, none of this crap 2E stuff. While he consents, nothing ever comes of the conversation (no chargen, nothing).

1996 (after graduation): while living with a non-gamer girlfriend, I get heavy into WH40K. Fact is, our relationship was heading south (it would be very up-and-down for another year, up through 10/1997) and getting into some kind of gaming felt necessary for my sanity. A game shop close to our apartment ran 40K tournaments. We would break up (and I moved out) before she moved to New Mexico for grad school.

1997-1999: no real gaming, though I meet some guys (Kris, James, Alex) who played D&D in their youth. In 1998 I will run an aborted session or two, and play in James's (single session) attempt to start a 2E game. All of these ended in disaster. The weed probably didn't help.

March 1998: I meet my wife. Having grown up in Mexico, she has never heard of D&D before meeting me.

2000-2002: 3E is released. I acquire copies and run some games, mainly for my friend Kris and a couple randoms whose names escape me. By 2002, I am done. I am still collecting BECMI edition D&D (the Mentzer sets, the Mystara Gazetteers, the Rules Cyclopedia, Wrath of the Immortals) feeling it is the most "complete" version of D&D. I do a lot of solo stuff with it. In 2007 some stuff I wrote about the Greek Gods will get uploaded to Vault of Pandius. Mostly, I end up finding the BECMI edition to be (both) too staid and too childish for my tastes.

2003-2007: sometime in this period, I make the acquaintance of The Forge and indie gaming and start studying game design. I get the idea to write the Great American Indie RPG (trademark pending!). This is all crap, but it starts me down the road of taking RPGs (and my love of them) more seriously. I do not play D&D during this period, though I collect and read a LOT of other RPGs. As far as I can recall, I didn't play any RPGs at this time (some light indie stuff...Capes, InSpectres...with my nephews perhaps). Sometime towards the end of this period, a person posts an Actual Play report on The Forge about how they tried playing an old game of Basic D&D "by the book" and it was actually fun.

Circa 2008: While reading an interview with indie-game designer Kenneth Hite, I am made aware of James Maliszewski's Grognardia and fall down the rabbit hole of Old School D&D blogs. This leads me to a number of sites, the most influential of which is Pat Armstrong's Ode to Black Dougal. Having the fires of nostalgia stoked by memories of my first RPG, I decide to go "back to the beginning," where my love for the hobby first started.

June 2009: I write down a quick list of 100 possible blog posts (to make sure I can generate content) and start the B/X Blackrazor blog. 

2009-2011: I play B/X D&D regularly, mostly off-line (face-to-face), sometimes running up to nine or ten players at my local bar. This three year period more-or-less matches the time I spent playing B/X at the beginning of my gaming career (1983-1985). I write (B/X) books during this time that are still selling today.

January 19th, 2011: my son Diego is born.

2012: I start developing other games: Cry Dark Future (2012), Five Ancient Kingdoms (2013), various indie type games and other genre games using the B/X Chassis. At the time, if I'd been asked, I probably would have said I was showing the versatility of the game (or writing my own fantasy heartbreaker with regard to 5AK). However, I now believe I was beginning to run up against the limitations of the B/X system...I was growing bored. And I was becoming tired of writing my own "support" for the system.

2013-2016: I am in Paraguay until August 2016. During this time, I do not play D&D.  I reflect on it, read about it, blog about it, work on a couple different "new" heartbreakers. There was a lot going on for me (mentally, emotionally) and my gaming thoughts were pretty random. A lot of good reading on the subject of D&D care of Alexis's books...but I had difficulty grokking some of the concepts he was trying to communicate.

April 21st, 2014: my daughter Sofia is born.

2016-2018: no gaming. Back from Paraguay but too busy with new children in a new school and transitioning to that "stay-at-home-American-dad-thing." Blog posts from this time are depressing...reading through a couple makes me think of a dude who is in need of help but doesn't know how to cry for help because he is unaware of how helpless he is. The blog was treading water just to assuage the ego with "relevance." Ugh. 

August 2019 (age 45): I hit rock bottom while attending a Dragonflight Convention; a convention at which I had the opportunity to play four Basic (three B/X!) game sessions with four different DMs. I was done with B/X as my "go-to-game-of-choice." It is still...and always will be...a fine teaching tool for learning the basics of Dungeons & Dragons.

Circa August 2019: I discover Anthony Huso's blog.

Circa 2019-2020: I discover (and start tuning into) the rather amusing GrogTalk podcast. Because they moderate their language, I sometimes listen to the podcast with my son (especially when it's just the two of us on long soccer drives). 

October 2019: I decide that the only way I will ever be satisfied with D&D again is to commit myself wholeheartedly to running a campaign, rather than one-off sessions. Just like I hadn't done since the age of 17.

February 2020 (age 46): I run my children through their first B/X adventure.

March 2020: the COVID 19 pandemic hits in full force. Schools (and most everything else) close down.

April 2020: I decide to go back to the LBBs and play OD&D with my kids, feeling I can simply add to the game (from supplements, house rules, etc.) whatever is needed for the campaign. At this point, I still feel "tinkering with rules" is the thing that will get me to the game I wanted. Ridiculous. This lasted a month or so before I shut it down. I play no D&D for the next six months.

November 2020 (age 47): I begin running AD&D for my children, teaching them the Advanced game.

February 2021: Taking advantage of a Total Party Kill, I start the AD&D campaign over from scratch using Washington State (and the Pac Northwest generally) as my campaign setting. My world has been in existence for 17 months now...longer than ANY "B/X campaign" I ran back in my Baranof days. 

June 30, 2022 (today, age 48): I've now been running AD&D exclusively for nearly two years; we've only barely begun to scratch the surface of play. The system is so robust...and so deep...that I don't anticipate exhausting its possibilities any time soon. Fact is, unless I get sick of my world (which is hard to see happening, considering its "mine" and I can remake any particle of it, any time I choose), I don't see how the game would ever end. It can only grow larger and more developed with time.

Currently, the AD&D books are available both digitally an in Print-on-Demand form from DriveThruRPG. I recommend every D&D player who doesn't already own a set acquire copies of the PHB, DMG, MM, and Fiend Folio. The MM2, DDG, and UA have useful elements, but are not strictly necessary for play. 

All right, that's all for today. 

Self-Scouting

Consolidating some thoughts.

It was either Bill Willingham or Steve Marsh (recent interviews from the Grogtalk folks) who said something along the lines of: if you've been playing D&D for 30+ years and haven't changed the rules to reflect your own play style, then you're doing it wrong. 

Regardless of who said it (or how), the sentiment behind it has been fluttering around my mind for much of the last month...a sentiment that plenty of other folks have expressed over the years, on their blogs and elsewhere. Previously, it was not a sentiment that I bought into (much). Oh, sure, changes and house rules were fairly inevitable with a game as hodge-podge as D&D is, but I figured you should always strive to follow the rules as best you could...doing otherwise can lead to unforeseen problems and consequences. Tinkering solely for the sake of tinkering (as opposed to patching flaws of design) has been, for most of my gaming life, anathema. Better to just write your own game than say "yeah, I play my own version of Game X." Better, I've felt, to just say I play Game X, but it has these setting specific adjustments...when we're not in the setting, we play the game straight.

Right.

Problem is, this is just willful arrogance on my part. It's just me wanting to hold myself above others, judge them, deride their efforts. Or maybe not...I'm not a complete jerk (only a part-time one). Even so, there's a certain snobbishness I've been able to retain by living this fantasy of "(mostly) by the book" play. It's like I have a fear of losing my "credibility" should I go down the road of willy-nilly rules screwery.

[like when I was rewrote the OD&D books last year...all I did was reformat them in a useable form; my own "campaign house rules" (never finished) were to be in a separate document]

It's all absolutely ridiculous anyway. The only game I ever truly played "straight" was B/X...and look at all the additional rules I wrote to supplement that edition over the years!

Over the last 15 months, I've gone from B/X to OD&D to AD&D, shepherding my kids (and the occasional kid friend or two) through it all. I've written up and destroyed and rewritten multiple worlds and settings; I've run both my own adventures and those designed by others. Dice have been rolled, treasure found (and spent), spells cast, henchmen hired, characters killed. 

D&D y'all. Glorious D&D. The Great Game.

I'm tired of adhering to rules written by other people. I Am Tired Of It. I am tired of being dissatisfied with one section or other of a given edition and feeling that I need to make a Serious Effort to run it the way it was meant to be run. Why? Just to say that I can?

[spoiler: I can]

Nope. Time to end the charade. 

Okay. Nap time (again).

Rome: she is a-burning.

Off the Rails

As I'm sure I've written before, the problem with not posting for a month (or more) is that the brain keeps working and the ideas/concepts keep accumulating and you end up with a bunch of random detritus you want to talk about and no good way to organize it into something manageable.

*sigh*

Ah, well. Guess I'll start with the title.

The AD&D game with my kids continues (sporadically) and they're doing fine and still rather enthusiastic about the game. But (of course there was going to be a but, right?) I'm having...um..."issues." It's not the system, or the complexity, or the rate of advancement, or the game "tone" that's bothering me. Nor is it the attention to detail or the depth of simulation which (despite adhering to the rather abstract AD&D rules) is (still) pretty deep. All that is well and good. 

It's just that...mm...the thing lacks "magic."

How to put this...hmm. An idea came into my head a few days ago; an idea that took the form of a couple questions and a couple answers. For the benefit of my readers (and my own sanity), I'll go ahead and type 'em out so they stop rumbling around my noggin:

1. Why did Gygax end up adding so many new spells to (the original) D&D rules, beginning with the Greyhawk booklet ("supplement 1")?
2. Why did Gygax end up adding so many new monsters to the game (see Fiend Folio and the Monster Manual 2 for plentiful examples).

I have come to believe that the answer to both these questions is: because he needed to.

After all the work I've done over the last 11+ years of writing this blog, I consider myself something of an expert on the B/X edition of D&D, and a passingly knowledgable mind when it comes to OD&D as well as other "basic" editions of the game. With regard to AD&D, however, I barely scratch "journeyman" status...yes, I can run the game just fine using the core three books, even down to running an unarmed combat with the system given in the DMG. I can parse out the initiative sequence and make use of speed factors and whatnot, I can locate drowning rules and wilderness travel rates, and have a good head for encumbrance and what constitutes "bulky" armor. I've got a handle on the basics of the game.

But I don't know everything. Not in a truly comprehensive way, not by a long shot. Not in a way that allows me to take in and digest the game as a whole and manufacture something that makes use of its various nuances. 

This became readily apparent to me when I was listening to last week's Grogtalk podcast (their "Valentine Special").  The use of two monsters from the MM2 in their playtest adenture (the "annis hag" and the "stench kow") completely threw me for a loop...despite having owned the book for decades, I had no idea that these creatures were even "a thing," and simply assumed that the monsters in Carlos Lising's game had been specifically created from whole cloth for the module. Not so; Carlos was utilizing the AD&D resources that he's become familiar with over decades of constant AD&D play. Then there was the (frankly hilarious) discussion of various hybrid creatures and PCs that took place over the last 40 minutes or so of the special (interbreeding and "love connections" being part of the Valentine theme)...it raised all sorts of valid questions like: Just why the hell are there half-elves in the game anyway? All issues of disparate cultures aside, the sheer magnitude of longevity difference between the species makes any sort of romantic relationship incredibly unlikely. What elf wants to marry (or dally with) a human whose lifespan isn't even a tenth of her own? What elven parent wants a child that will age and die before she's even reached middle age? 

Kind of crazy...once you consider it. Which I hadn't. Because I'd been too intent just running the game.

And that's the thing. Focusing on the simple nuts and bolts of the system and the game world...things like halberd formations and goblin motivations and market economics has been a "drill down" that sacrifices the forest for the trees. Resulting in a game that has been interesting and (in its way) "logical," but lacking in magic. Not magical items or wizards per se (though both these things have, to date, been rare in the game)...I'm talking about the magic of playing a fantasy game in a fantasy world. Not going gonzo and nonsensical but certainly "off the rails" more than negotiating relations between humanoid tribes and the local human garrison. Jesus, this is a game that contains the Machine of Lum the Mad for goodness sake! Shouldn't it be a bit wilder than the step-and-fetch (or seek-and-destroy) of a 5E scenario?

[wondering what I'm talking about? Check out the 5E "Essentials Kit" for examples. Here's one: take a message to a logging camp. Fight some ankhegs. Return for a reward. Go to an apothecary hermit with a message. Fight a manticore. Return for a reward. That kind of thing...]

It brings me back around to those questions above (and my presumed answers for them). Gygax didn't just add astral projection and gate to the spell list of Greyhawk just because he wanted to fatten the page count, nor did he throw owlbears and beholders into the book just for the sake of creating new intellectual property. Things like probability travel, nightmares and devils, liches and golems, artifacts and relics...these were things that were used...they weren't just added to show "what is possible" or define parameters of the game or "fill in niches" (like aquatic elves or evil dwarves). Rather, these things were practical content, used to enrich the game being played at the table. These things...just like assassins guilds and psionics and level drain and (yes, even) alignment language...these things that seem wily-nilly, half-baked, and off-the-cuff (i.e. poorly thought out) aren't just there for kitchen sink, 31 flavors, pick-and-choose your poison. They ARE the game. 

Setting limitations and toning down the weirdness is a bit of a disservice. 

That's why, I think (maybe), my recent experiences have seemed to lack "magic;" the scenarios created in UK2 The Sentinel and UK3 The Gauntlet and B2 The Keep on the Borderlands are far too reasonable; it is far too easy to assign real world analogies, motivations, and "naturalism" to them. These adventures are dealing with banditry and sieges and diaspora and treachery and colonialism...dammit, that's all just too "normal" for the campaign to feel like a D&D game. Where are the giant magic statues? Where are the subdued dragons being used as mounts? Where are the sentient blobs and oozes looking to melt your face off?

There's not enough "dungeon" in my Dungeons & Dragons game...and I'm not talking about some sort of absurd, dozen level mega-dungeon. Been watching a lot of History Channel this last year with the Search for Yamashita's Gold and the Curse of Oak Island and all that jazz: finding subterranean treasure chamber's in our real world is hard, dangerous work and it should be even more so (with suitably bumped up rewards) in a fantasy adventure game. In D&D, Howard Carter would have had to deal with actual magic curses (and probably undead monsters) before he could recover King Tut's treasure because that's the game. I haven't been giving that part of the campaign enough attention. 

I realize there are those people who, upon reading this post, will reflect that my issues relate to the pre-fabricated source material I've been using for my campaign, and that's a fair point to bring up. While the main reason for using these adventures has been a matter of convenience (my time for producing adventure material is pretty scarce) and familiarity, I suppose I could be choosing different modules...except that many end up in the same category of mundanity when scrutinized. Certainly I'd throw the Slaver series (especially A1 and A2) into the same pot, the Giant series (though giants are neat, they're still just big humanoids), and even Dwellers of the Forbidden City (not enough snake-folk to make the thing truly strange). The Special series (S1-S4) clearly fits the bill of what I'm looking for, but those adventures are all designed for higher level characters than what my players have...all the low-level stuff is uncovering cultists and rooting out bandits and fighting goblins. 

Ugh. Simply not good enough. And maybe I'M not good enough (or not familiar enough) with AD&D to design myself out of this funk that I seem to be digging for myself.

[if you think THIS post is ranty, you should have seen the one on the draft board that was never posted. This is my attempt at being "thoughtful"]

Anyhoo, that's where my head's at (with regard to gaming) at the moment. Just to be clear, I'm not of the opinion that "all hope is lost;" the campaign is still in its early stages and I think there's plenty of time/space to inject some "magic" into the thing, but it'll probably require me taking my eye and focus off the mundane aspects of the campaign/system, and instead shift to the strange(r) aspects inherent in the game. Heck, I'm even considering bringing back cosmic (capital-E) Evil...despite all the handwringing over alignment, it does provide some shape to the cosmology of the game.

[perhaps in a later post I'll talk about how that lack of "shape" ends up requiring a lot of rewriting of system when one starts needing to justify souls and spirits and raise dead with regard to different game species (like elves)...systems that provide balance and necessary checks to the game. Pull one thread and the whole thing starts to unravel...]

Too bad there're no gnomes in the party; would really love to introduce some talking squirrels or woodchucks into the mix. What ancient secrets could they reveal!   ; )

All right, that's enough for now. We're still on mid-winter break in the JB household, and while the snow from "Snowmageddon 2021" distracted us for a couple-three days (building forts and snowmen and having snowball fights) things have warmed up enough to slush-ify most of it. As such, our gaming has moved indoors, and I'm nearly certain we'll have a chance for some more campaign crawling once the kids are up and breakfasted. Maybe. We still have a pretty solid game of Axis & Allies (& Zombies) going on from last night. More info to follow.

Later Gators.