I Live!

Yes, I am in fact still here.  After six years I finally decided it was time to resurrect this project, as I still very much want to see it through to completion.  It's just easy to lose momentum on a project of this size when life gets in the way.  When I made my last post in 2019 we were just about to move to a new house, which is obviously a major life disruption.  Our daughter was still a baby at that point, so it took a while for life to settle back down, which it finally did...just in time for 2020.  After surviving that dumpster fire of a year, life laid on the smackdown even harder in 2021, which was without a doubt the hardest, most traumatizing year of our lives.  After taking 2022 to recover, we then started the process of adoption, which can be rather all-consuming and occupied the last couple of years.  We finally completed that journey in July.

tl;dr - life has been hard the last few years.

When I have had free time the last several years I've mostly devoted it to my YouTube channel (right here, if you're interested).  But lately the siren song of D&D has been welling up from my memories, and I decided at last to dive back in.

Now I'll be upfront, it's going to be a bit before I start regularly posting again.  I feel I need to manage expectations for all those people who've been keeping me in their subscription feed for the last half-dozen years, anxiously waiting for me to return.  That's sarcasm of course, and this is mostly just for recording my own thoughts.  I'd like to think I'm not completely shouting into the void though.

Anyway, it's been so long that I feel I need to re-read the products I've already been through to reabsorb that late-70s D&D zeitgeist before I dive into new products.  It shouldn't take terribly long - I know what I can skim and skip to speed things up.  I'm also restarting my efforts to finish my collector's spreadsheet, and my actual collection of PDFs, which is also taking some of my time.  But hopefully I'll start making new posts here in the next month or so.

And if there actually is someone out there who has followed this blog after all this time, I don't know what else to say but thank you for your incredible patience.  For everyone else, I hope you'll join me on this journey as I pick it back up again.

The Dragon #20, November 1978

So they decided to do a Halloween issue...in November...and the explanation is, um, November sucks apparently, so it needed something interesting?  Sounds more like someone couldn't get their material together in time for the holiday, but whatever.  40 years after the fact it's not like I actually care.

• <Sigh>, people are just dead set on adding every single mythos in the world as a Gods, Demigods, & Heroes supplement.  This month it's the Polynesian mythos.  Are we done now?  Can we be done?  I don't know if people actually liked this material or if it was just low hanging fruit as a way to get published in the magazine.
• Fitting the Halloween theme, there's a new article on a witch class (another appeared in an earlier edition), although these witches are a little more along the lines of historical druid-like witches vs the Satanic witches of the middle ages.  It's a pretty decent write-up for an amateur submission.  Of course, D&D would always take the official position that a witch was just a particular kind of wizard and didn't need their own class, but that obviously didn't stop people from trying.  In 2nd edition it would get the "kit" treatment at least once that I know of to placate fans.
• There's a terrific article on demon (or devil) summoning.  I always have been disappointed that D&D's summoning system...well, basically didn't exist.  There are so many interesting possibilities in building a detailed summoning system - researching the true names of summoned beings, the elements of summoning rituals, bargaining with summoned beings, etc.  But most summoning spells work just like any other spell.  The Cacodemon spell has a few elements thrown in, but it's still pretty meager.  This article goes into detail on rituals, the bargaining process, and the like.  It makes me wish for a more detailed magic system where it really pays off to specialize in schools of magic - whereas a fire wizard might become more powerful by learning more powerful fire spells (Burning Hands -> FireBall -> etc.), a summoner wizard would grow more powerful over time by gaining more and more powerful summoned creatures who served him (whether by force or by bargaining).
• There's a short but enlightening article by a DM who started keeping statistics on character death in his campaigns.  It ends up being a highly insightful look into the nature of the game at this point.  He recorded deaths only of player characters and their followers (not mercenaries or other NPCs), and recorded 600 in a 2-3 year period!  Can you imagine?  His tone indicates that most DMs still see their role as the adversary of the party, seeking to do them by any means necessary.  Obviously players under such a paradigm have to get used to rolling up characters one after another, as each previous one meets a new grisly end.  The statistics themselves aren't that interesting, with goblin-kin taking the top spot on the list of killers - not because they are the most dangerous foe, obviously, but because they are the most commonly encountered, and because they are often encountered in significant numbers.  I've said it before, but I'll be most interested to see the transition of the game from a hack and slash meat grinder that chews through player characters and enemies alike to more modern roleplaying sensibilities.
• Finally we get an article on demonic possession, something that never really made it into official material on demons and devils.  I don't know, maybe even Gary had his limits.  It's not very interesting - basically a demon possesses a party member who then most likely just attacks the rest of the party.  Still, like the article on summoning demons, I appreciate fans trying to add these aspects into the game.  I also wonder to what extent content like this came back to bite TSR when they had to start dealing with the Satanic panic of the 80s.  I guess we'll see in time.

That's all for this issue.  There was a lot of material devoted to other games, and besides the witch article and the two demonology-related articles it really wasn't much of a Halloween issue.  But now we get to an actual product again - the very first Basic D&D module - In Search of the Unknown.  I'll see you there.

The Dragon #19, October 1978

This issue of The Dragon falls right after the most recent GenCon and Origins, so it has a very con-heavy focus, debriefing a lot of what went on.

• There's an interesting article which gives a recap of one of the rounds at the Origins D&D tournament written from the perspective of one of the members of the winning team.  The team managed to complete both G1 and G2 modules and get most of the way through G3 before time was called.  I appreciate this because it gives a little more insight to how the game was played "back in the day".  Not surprisingly it's still a very "kick the door open and kill anything that moves," hack-and-slash kind of game.  Clever roleplaying merely consists of finding more creative and effective ways to hack and slash (and recover as much loot as possible).
• There's another article giving ideas on how to properly score a D&D tournament, which basically boils down to use as many objective (as opposed to subjective) measures as possible.  I'm not interested in the particulars of the article so much as I am just amused by the idea of a D&D tournament to begin with. I know it's always been around and is still around today, but to me personally, "competitive D&D" is an oxymoron.  It's not that I have anything against it really, and I can see the appeal to some people to the kind of game described above (like I've said before, I enjoy a little hack and slash myself every now and then).  It's just that whenever I've finished an adventure in a D&D campaign I've never found myself wondering if my group finished it "better" than another group might have.
• There's an article regarding managing magical wishes - always a sticky point for any DM. The article proposes assigning an alignment and strength level to wishes that come from magical objects in order to help the DM adjudicate the success of the wish, but ultimately I don't find the ideas very compelling.
• There's an article on creating treasures that proposes the radical idea that the treasure retrieved from a foe should have some kind of logical connection to that the foe.  I.e., a defeated thief would probably have thief-related treasure, as opposed to just whatever came up randomly on the tables in the DM's Guide. I wish this kind of sensibility had permeated the game more.
• And yet once more, because apparently players back then just loved this stuff, we get the Australian Aboriginal supplement for Gods, Demigods, and Heroes. Skip.
• There's an interesting article taking on spell caster progression, creating a new system of spell schools and requiring casters to learn spells in order by school. It's a nice way of taking on the inherent problem where a wizard can go his entire career never learning a single summoning spell, then suddenly learn an 8th level summoning spell at high level with no issue.  It also introduces a fatigue system for casting spells in place of normal Vancian rules.  It's a little rough as a system, but honestly just about anything is an improvement on the Vancian rules.

There was a decent amount of Gamma World material in this issue, but that about wraps it up.  I'll end with the beginning - the cover art for this issue.

The cover art for The Dragon has never been exceptional to this point, but...what the heck is that even supposed to be?  It looks vaguely like a dragon head, but made out of plants?? I'm not going to lie, I'm looking forward to the 80s when the artwork starts to become more professional.  Stick with me and we'll eventually get there. 

D3 Vault of the Drow

We finish up the D series with this module, and again, it follows the same format as the previous two:

• There are three detailed minor encounters: a Drow checkpoint, a nest of giant spiders, and most interestingly, a cave in which dwells a succubus and her vampire Drow lover.  A pretty interesting concept roleplaying-wise, but again, the only thing to do here is just kick down the door and kill them.  The giant spider nest has a pretty cool idol of Lolth that gives its possessor the powers of a spider, but makes them completely possessive of the item and gradually turns them into a giant spider.  This is why you never touch the obvious item of evil.
• I haven't touched on it yet in previous modules, but the D series introduced not only the Drow, but also the concept of their adamantite weapons and armor.  This gives all such items a bonus of +1 to +5, even though the items are not actually magical.  The module gives plenty of rules to make sure the party can't benefit from them though (at least outside of these modules).  Adamantite items decay if exposed to sunlight, and they lose their bonus in any case if removed from the Drow homeland for more than a month, as they get their powers from the special "radiation" in the underworld.  It's purely a gimmick by Gary to up the difficulty factor of the modules, since they're designed for characters level 9 and up.  I'm a software developer, and in software there's a concept called "code smell".  If you're looking at some code that works but still doesn't seem right, it is called a code smell and sometimes indicates a deeper problem in the architecture of the system.  Having to artificially create a gimmick like this to increase the difficulty of a module without also giving away the bank and letting characters walk out with an entire armory's worth of magical weapons and armor from defeated enemies is an RPG smell, and indicates a deeper fundamental problem in the rules - namely a flaw in the design of the hit and armor class system progression.
• And so we come to the titular vault, and there's an explanation of how minerals in the roof give a dim illumination to everything.  It's a vaguely scientific explanation, where a mineral called tumkeoite radioactively decays into lacofcite, giving off a ghostly purple glow in doing so.  "Tumkeoite" is actually a play on the name of Tom Keogh (whom you may recognize from the eponymous Keogh's Ointment), while "lacofcite" is a play on Len Lakofka.
• This module takes a similar tack to D2 that I just find a bit puzzling.  If the players have collected the medallions they've found on defeated Drow in previous encounters, then they can present them when they enter the vault and basically have free run of the place.  Just like the shrine, even though this is a place full of villains, they can just wander around.  The modules have made clear that the Drow (and the Kuo-Toa of the previous module, too) hate surface dwellers, but when surface dwellers show up to their respective areas, as long as they have the right tchotchkes, everything's just cool apparently.  I realize that the logical alternative - a city full of Drow who kill surface dwellers on sight - would be untenable, but I still just feel there was a better way.
• At last we arrive at the Drow city of Erelhei-Cinlu.  Gary created the name by using the first syllable of each of his kids' names (Ernie, Elise, Heidi, Cindy, and Luke).  It's a tremendously intriguing place - a dangerous, decadent, and depraved hive of evil, full of every sin and vice imaginable.  Demons, vampires, and more wander the streets (as if the Drow weren't dangerous enough), and the party is warned that they wander the back streets at their peril.  But all that appears in the module is just a few paragraphs slightly more expansive than what I just gave you.  There are no particular locations detailed, no NPCs, just a vague description, and if the party wants to do more than wander the streets aimlessly for random encounters, it's up to the DM to create something to do.  It's just so head-scratching to me, and completely counter to what you would expect to find in a modern adventure.
• FINALLY, six modules into this series (including the three G modules) we actually are told in full what the story is!  Can you believe this?  I mean, I understand that from the players' point of view it's supposed to be an unfolding mystery, but usually you don't want to keep the DM in the dark as well.  So here in full is the story behind these modules: Drow society is made up of multiple noble houses that vie with one another for power.  The most powerful house, Eilservs, has contended that Drow society needs a queen to unify it (which naturally should come from them, being the most powerful).  A coalition of less powerful houses, backed by the priestesses of Lolth, has opposed Eilservs and its own allies.  As a result, Eilservs has forsaken the worship of Lolth and pledged themselves to an Elder Elemental God (whose shrine appeared in G3), and Drow society is now in a sort of cold war over the issue.  Eilservs, led by the priestess Eclavdra, has attempted to gain power by moving to the surface, creating a coalition of giants and other evil creatures, and spreading the worship of their deity.  She had hoped to gain enough power through this plan to install herself as Queen.  This is what was behind the coordinated giant raids on civilized lands, and what the party has been thwarting.  The thing is, this little detail of the story is only given to the DM, almost as a side note in numbered location description of the Eilservs compound.  In no place is the party given any hooks or means of finding this out on their own.  It's like the players have to go hunting for the story, which again is so counter to how adventures should be written.  I try not to get too frustrated over this - I mean, to be fair, Gary is literally inventing the art of writing adventures as he goes, so obviously it will take some time to get the kinks out.
• This module introduces daemons (the *-loth creatures of 2nd edition), specifically the mezzodaemon and nycadaemon.  One thing I'll say about D&D is that I do like it's demonology, from the pact making devils, to the mercenary daemons, to the plain monstrous demons.  There are still some things I would change, but overall it's one of the things I feel D&D did really well monster-wise.
• The party can fight Lolth in this module if desired.  The whole presentation of her is very confusing to me.  It makes it clear that she is a demon lord and resides on a plane in the Abyss, but at the same time it makes it sound like she lives full time in the Drow temple to her.  I guess it's her avatar or something, but considering that 99% of the content of all the G and D series modules consists of just detailing the combat abilities or treasure of things the party can fight, I'm not surprised it's not well explained.

And with that we wrap up both this module and the D series.  I'll leave you with what is without doubt the most awesome part of this module - a drawing of a hypothetical battle with Lolth.  Now in this drawing the wizard is actually supposed to be flying, but the artwork does a poor job of making that clear, so instead he appears to be doing a flying karate kick at Lolth.  He's the man!

D2 Shrine of the Kuo-Toa

The D series adventure continues, and this module uses the exact same format as the last: two minor encounters followed by one major keyed location at the end, with the rest of the action determined by how lost the party wants to get in the maze of surrounding tunnels.

• This module is notable to me for including what I consider to be the very first NPC in any module.  Now technical there were some in previous modules, but usually they were prisoners meant to be freed by the party, like the siren in Tomb of Horrors or the storm giantess in Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl.  To me, a true NPC is a character who has 1) a name, 2) a personality, and 3) an encounter with the party whose outcome depends on how the party roleplays.  Enter Thoopshib, a slightly insane rogue Kuo-Toa who operates a ferry across an underground river that the party must negotiate with.  History should have remembered you better, Thoopshib.
• This module is a little light on content.  After dealing with Thoopshib to get across the river and encountering some deep gnomes who might accompany the party, we jump straight to the titular shrine itself.  The shrine is a bit of a strange place, as the Kuo-Toa are not automatically hostile to the party.  If they wish, the party can sight-see the shrine and just pass through, making it a very short adventure.  The party really has to go looking for trouble in the shrine.  Now that's a nice change of pace from the norm, which usually involves busting down the door of some place where the party expects pretty much everything to be hostile, but it's a little strange for the climax of the module.
• The Kuo-Toa deity Blibdoolpoolp is introduced here, and the party can meet her if they desire, which again just seems strange.  Using her altar that is the focus of the shrine teleports the user to the elemental plane of water in her presence.  Making a sufficient offering to her grants the user a small favor, plus the ability to speak Kuo-Toan, so yeah.
• One thing I haven't commented on before is Gary's writing style.  He is obviously very well read and has an extensive vocabulary which he does not hesitate to use.  Quite often he'll use words far out of the norm. For example, one of the locations in the shrine is referred to as a seraglio.  That's just another word for harem, but darn if I knew that without looking it up.  I can never tell if he does it on purpose to show off or not.

That's all for this module.  We finish up the D series next time with Vault of the Drow.

D1 Descent into the Depths of the Earth

We now begin the D series of modules, sequels to the G series.  Having discovered that the Drow were behind the giants' attacks on civilization in Hall of the Fire Giant King, the party is now following the passage from Snurre's hall that leads into, well, the depths of the earth in order to discover more about the long-forgotten Drow menace.

• An amusing tidbit on the cover reveals that TSR clearly didn't have publication down to a rigorous science just yet.  I have a copy of the first printing of D1, and on the cover it talks about using this module in conjunction with the rest of the D series, the G series, and module Q1, which it calls "soon to be released".  Q1 was, in fact, not released for two more years.  Keep in mind that at this point in the timeline we're still also waiting for the Dungeon Master's Guide, which will not be released for another year.  Of course this is all just a symptom of Gary trying to write everything himself.
• This module takes a slightly different tack than the G series in its presentation.  All three G modules were simply keyed locations the party systematically cleared.  Here, though, the DM is presented with a hex map covering several dozen miles in both directions with vague drawings of underground connections between locations.  Only three encounter areas are detailed, the final of which is a large keyed area much in the vein of the G series, but the rest of the action is left to exploration by the party and the random encounters it would naturally generate.  It feels like Gary was trying to experiment with a different module type, which is nice, as the keyed location concept was already wearing thin after just three modules.  I will say though, the presentation is incredibly confusing.  Maybe I'm missing something, but I have no idea where the final detailed encounter is supposed to be located on the area hex map.
• Mind flayers make their first module appearance and are given the name "illithid" for the first time, this apparently being their Drow name.  Jermlaine are also introduced in this module for the first time.
• An oddity I noticed is that in the various encounters players can recover items from the Drow inscribed with their house names, but Gary doesn't bother to explain (even to the DM) that that's what they are or their significance.  I don't know if this is an oversight on his part, or just an attempt to maintain an air of mystery for the other two modules.
• This module pulls no punches in difficulty.  In exploring the final encounter location the party can run into both a purple worm and a 20th level lich, because why not?  The use of the lich is to me another indication of the primitive state of the game.  Personally I feel that liches are so powerful and the possibilities for them so great that they shouldn't just be thrown around like other monsters.  If you need a simple, high level encounter for a high level party, sure, give them a purple worm - it's basically just a very large and dangerous animal.  But a lich should be a unique creature with a unique story and a unique place in the game world.  Just having them be another entry in a keyed location that the party stumbles into and has to deal with demeans what they can be.  Tomb of Horrors was much better in this regard.  True, we didn't learn a ton about Acererak, but the fact that he had surrounded himself with a lair of devious and deadly traps was much more in the spirit of how liches should be handled - unlike here, where a lich is also a possibility for a random encounter if the players get off into the side passages.  A lich should never be a random encounter, period.

That's about all there is to say for this module.  It feels a bit purposeless, as by the end of the module the players haven't really accomplished anything besides exploring the underworld and dealing with a few encounters.  Granted, it is meant to set up the remaining two D modules, which is were we will pick up next time.

The Dragon #18, September 1978

The Dragon marches on with another issue:

• The issue starts with a detailed article on the Traveller roleplaying game.  I know nothing about the game at all, but still found it a fascinating read due to superb writing by the author (a real rarity in these early issues of the magazine).  The point of his article can be summed up by saying that the success of a character is far more related to how they are played than by the random stats they are generated with.  I've mentioned this topic before, and it's something we no longer even think about really given that randomly generated character stats have largely gone the way of the dinosaur in modern RPGs (tabletop or video game).  In days of yore, some players (*cough*munchkins*cough*) would whine when they rolled up a character who they felt didn't have good enough stats, and that became their excuse when the character failed.  Nowadays when you roll up a human paladin in World of Warcraft you know he is exactly the same as every other human paladin that ever has or ever will be rolled up, which eliminates that particular excuse.  Sadly though, now our excuses have shifted to whining about balance problems between races or classes.
• There's quite a few game reviews in this issue, from the Traveller game already mentioned (and yes, they do intentionally spell it with two 'l's), to some board and miniature games, to my favorite board game of all time (which I've talked about previously), Cosmic Encounter.  Alas for the lack of time to be able to experience all these different games...
• We get a couple of articles on magic for D&D.  One is a list of new spells researched by players in the author's campaign.  They're a little on the powerful side, and I don't believe any of them ultimately caught on.  The other in an article discussing the theory of magic - elements like the Law of Similarity and the Law of Contagion, etc.  It's interesting, but really only useful if you're going to be creating your own magic system to replace the existing one.
• There are a few short articles that demonstrate how not to write an article.  First is an article on weapons for monks based on traditional Japanese weapons, but the author bizarrely forgets to include actual stats for any of the weapons.  Second is an article on poison that I don't even understand.  Finally there is an article on NPC stats for shop owners that shows that most people just don't know how to design rules that are simple and mesh well with the existing system.  Good writing is definitely at a premium at this point, mainly because the magazine is still relying heavily on fan submissions.  It will be a while before it transitions to professional staff writers.

Some articles for other games (Boot Hill, Metamorphosis Alpha, Gamma World) round things out, including this month's Sorcerer's Scroll.  We get back to products now with the D series of modules.