Opens May 22nd. Here’s the trailer:
http://movies.yahoo.com/feature/indianajones.html?showVideo=1
How much more “Old-School Adventure” can you get?
Game Style Quiz Results
This quiz is actually fairly accurate for me — at least with respect to what I’m not as interested in in RPGs (combat and getting the most powerful character possible). However, I would not describe what I am interested in quite a strongly as it is described here. I want a campaign to feel like I the characters were in a novel instead of a video game, but I don’t expect the campaign to move like it is being scripted by the gamemaster.
| Law’s Game Style created with QuizFarm.com |
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| You scored as Storyteller
You’re more inclined toward the role playing side of the equation and less interested in numbers or experience points. You’re quick to compromise if you can help move the story forward, and get bored when the game slows down for a long planning session. You want to play out a story that moves like it’s orchestrated by a skilled novelist or film director.
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Tunnels & Trolls Goodness
A member of one of the non-gaming message boards I hang out on saw this blog and sent me some Tunnels and Trolls links — including lots of freebies! Thanks to Oaksworn for this information.
Randall,
I didn’t see an option to leave comments on your RetroRoleplaying blog without creating an account so I thought I’d pass along a couple of links via PM here. Don’t worry, I won’t make it a habit.One game that always intrigued me, primarily because of the number of solo adventures and my difficulty of finding a group to game with, has been Tunnels and Trolls. I’ve found a few links that I thought I’d pass along to you:
Flying Buffalo Publishing main page:
http://www.flyingbuffalo.com/tandt.htmFree Dungeons for Tunnels and Trolls:
http://www.freedungeons.com/Gristlegrim’s free resources for Tunnels and Trolls:
http://www.gristlegrim.com/Trollgod’s Trollhalla:
http://www.trollhalla.com/Anyways, I just thought you might be interested in another retro game that is still being produced.
Tunnels and Trolls is an interesting little game. It’s a bit too humor-oriented for me, but I’ll admit to having great fun with T&T solo adventures back in the day. It will probably get a section of its own of RetroRoleplaying.com site someday.
FAST — A Simple Universal RPG
In the 1990s, I spent a lot of my spare time trying to design a very simple, universal roleplaying game. I was attempting to recapture the spirit of the games I started playing in the mid-1970s. I finally decided that the best way to recapture that feeling wasn’t to create an entire new game, but to just play the old games like really liked. FAST (Flexible Adventure System, Task-oriented) was one of my most successful attempts at a playable, very simple game. I’ve put it up on RetroRoleplaying just in case anyone finds it useful.
Old GEnie SFRT3 Story Engines Now On RetroRoleplaying
While I was an assistant sysop on GEnie Science Fiction Fandom RoundTable (SFRT3), we developed a number of games designed to be played in our RoundTable’s chat rooms. We couldn’t call them games, however, as that would have made the gaming RoundTables mad. So we called them “Story Engines” because they were designed around the various collaborative stories fans were writing in sections of our RoundTables.
I’ve put copies of this rules up in a new “Miscellaneous” section on RetroRoleplaying.com today. These games aren’t really roleplaying games, but they could be easily be used as rules modules for rpgs. However, they are fun to play and needed a home. The chief designer, Glenn Overby II, had them up on his website in 2001. Unfortunately, his site disappeared a few years ago. They deserve to be available again — and now they are.
In this simple game, you are a hacker duelling other hackers in the cyberspace where style is everything. The rules for this game are quite simple and two people can play a complete game in few minutes.
In An Cath, you are a mighty warrior in Caladonia in the lands of the Fallen Empire. There are four sides, two human, one elfin, and one goblin. Defend your homelands with your sword.
Become a powerful elemental wizard in the Fallen Empire and duel other mages in ArchMage. Your ArchMage character can also be used in the Astral Warriors game.
With Astral Warriors, you can quickly create a powerful mage and battle other mages for control of the astral plane. This game is set in the Fallen Empire, a world specially created for online games and interactive fiction by Randall Stukey
Enter a land of swords and psionics: a land of fantasy where the knights have a bit of “magic” to help them in their battles. You can quickly create a character and fight other PsiKnights on foot, on horseback, and in war. This simple game system includes long-term campaign rules.
With StarPilot, you can quickly create a hotshot star fighter pilot and battle other pilots for glory in the depths of space. This game, set in Ann Wilson’s Terran Empire, is the most complex and the most popular of the many science fiction and fantasy chat games we created on GEnie.
Judges Guild Magazines Bring Back Memories
As most of the commercial adventures designed for Original D&D were published by Judges Guild, I knew I was going to have to dig out my Judges Guild stuff sooner or later so I could list the better D&D adventures on RetroRoleplaying.com. After reading that Bob Bledsaw has terminal cancer on Dragonsfoot, I decided to do so sooner — as in yesterday.
Naturally, when I pulled out the box of Judges Guild stuff, the first things I looked at were the older magazines: The Dungeoneer and Judges Guild Journal. I remembered them being a very mixed bag and my memory was correct. There were some excellent rules ideas and mini-adventures, but there were also issues full of awful, boring “contest winner” dungeons. I’ve just started to go through these issues for the first time in years, so I can’t yet comment on which issues are worth trying to find if you don’t have copies.
You see, I got side-tracked. I had forgotten how many mini-adventures by Paul Jaquays were published in later issues of The Dungeoneer. They generally weren’t as long as his adventures in the early issues (those before Judges Guild took over publication), but they were still excellent.
Morkendaine Dungeon in The Dungeoneer #9 brought back a number of memories. This adventure centered around an old manor that had originally been built a Paladin on the site of a ruined temple of a lawful good deity. His descendants did not maintain the place and eventually lost the manor because they couldn’t pay the taxes. A mage finally bought the place and started building dungeons for this experiments under it. It was great sixteen page example of Paul’s great adventure designs.
Back in the day, I had dropped this adventure in the middle of the Park of Obscene Statues in the City-State of the Invincible Overlord. My version of the park was much larger than the version in the published city-state. What’s the use of having magic if some long lost great magic can’t make something bigger than the space it fits in?
From my description of the Park of Obscene Statues:
When the Park of Obscene Statues is measured from the outside it seems to be about 450 feet by 560 feet. However, when measured from inside the park is much larger, about 3840 feet by 4480 feet. According to legend, this is due to a great magical ritual cast by a great mage whose name has been carefully scratched off of early records.
For many years (roughly from 3078-4133 BCCC) the park was used as a worship area for the Temple of Red Desire. However, when the Great Fire destroyed the temple quarter of the city in 4132, the priests of the Temple of Red Desire were forced to sell the land to raise the money needed to rebuild their temple. The land was sold to Lord Morken, Earl of Morkendaine, for a huge sum. He built Morkendaine Manor (see a on the map) on the hilltop. The Mordendaine line died out in 4342 and the Overlord confiscated the manor for back taxes in 4360. It was sold the same year to a mage named Hostephris. It went to his son in 4397, but he came to a bad end in Flipping Frog Tavern in 4404. His son never appeared to claim the manor. It was confiscated by the present Overlord’s father 7 days before he died (in 4411) for back taxes. As the present Overlord did not enjoy wide popular support when he ascended to the throne, one of his first official acts was to make the land a public park.
Unfortunately, Hostephris’ son was a scumbag. He had bought all sorts of monsters in to occupy a dungeon laboratory he was constructing under the manor. With his death, the creatures had settled in wherever they wanted in the park. The Overlord found out how bad it actually was after he had publicly declared the land a park — which did not help his popularity.
You can see how I blended the material from Paul’s module into my version of the City-State. The manor was well-hidden and a dangerous place for low level adventures. Heck, just getting to the manor was dangerous — and a lot of fun. Ahh, memories.
Welcome to the RetroRoleplaying Blog
Hi. I’m Randall. I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1975 when I was a freshman in college. It wasn’t long before I was dungeonmastering. I ran roleplaying games almost every week from 1976 to 1992 or so — mostly some form of Dungeons & Dragons carefully tailored with lots of house rules to fit my own campaign world in the early years. In later years when the real world of 40+ hour a week jobs intruded on my roleplaying time, I learned the joys of classic D&D (the Mentzer Basic, Expert, Companion, and Masters sets) and its Known World setting.
With Classic D&D and the Known World setting, I could run a campaign with relatively few house rules — well, few compared to the large books of house rules I used for my own world in Original D&D and First Edition Advanced D&D. This let me spend my much more limited time creating interesting adventures for my players instead of spending time creating house rules and my own campaign world. The streamlined, fast play of Classic D&D also meant we could get a lot of adventuring in a single 4 or 5 hour game session — probably as much as we used to get in those early 12 hour session.
After 1992, it started getting harder and harder to get the group together. We were all older and busier. Instead of weekly sessions, we were lucky to get two sessions in a month. By late 1994, it was over. No one had any time and we just quite playing.
When I heard that Wizards of the Coast had bought TSR and was bringing out a third edition of D&D, I was excited. I pre–ordered the three new core rulebooks from Amazon and read them as they came in. Sadly, I was very disappointed. D&D 3.0 was a rules heavy monster that made character building and tactical miniatures combat so detailed and important that I figured these aspects would overwhelm the game. Instead of feeling like a good fantasy novel, third edition reminded me most of a computer role-playing game — only one where the players and gamemaster had to all the number-crunching that the computer would normally do behind the scenes.
That wasn’t anything I was interested in playing. I put the books on the shelf and went on with my no roleplaying life. I picked up the 3.0 Forgotten Realms setting book because I had always like the setting and enjoyed many of the novels. A friend gave me a copy of the Epic Level Handbook hoping that would get me interested again. It didn’t. (The only published version of D&D that seemed top get high level play right, IMHO, was Mentzer’s Classic D&D.)
Before I knew it, WotC had published version 3.5 of D&D. From flipping through copies at the bookstore coffee shop, I saw that everything I did not like about third edition D&D had become even more important in 3.5. I never bought a copy of any 3.5 product as 3.5 was barely anything like the D&D I knew and loved.
Late last summer, someone on one of the religion/philosophy message boards I hang out on mentioned that WotC was bringing out D&D 4.0 in 2008. He was upset as he had a couple of thousand dollars in D&d 3.5 books and supposedly 4.0 was going to be so major a change that it would make them all useless. I read some of the material on fourth edition on the WotC site and on EN World. As far as I can tell, 4th edition will be a completely different game being sold under the D&D name because people know the D&D name. From what I’ve seen, it isn’t anything I’d be interested in.
However, while investigating the upcoming version of D&D, I made a wonderful discovery. There were people out there like me who enjoyed the older versions of D&D. I discovered Labyrinth Lord, a modern day “remake” of Basic/Expert Set Classical D&D by Goblinoid Games — made possible by the Open Gaming License WotC started using with D&D 3.0. I downloaded the free pdf of Labyrinth Lord, printed it and read it. Actually, devoured it might be a more accurate description. I was very impressed — for all practical purposes, Labyrinth Lord was Basic/Expert D&D.
From reading the Goblinoid Games forum, I discovered web sites like Dragonsfoot and the Knights-n-Knaves Alehouse where a number of gamers from my era hung out and discussed old role-playing games. Best of all, I discovered that while the old versions of D&D were out of print, WotC had made them available in PDF format for extremely reasonable prices. As the games were still available, they did not have to die off. I’ve started RetroRoleplaying.com to be a portal to older pre-D20 RPGs. A place where people can see what they were like and find out how people have played them and are still playing them. This is a huge job that may take years to complete, but it’s a way I can contribute something to a hobby that has given me a great deal of pleasure over the years.