This concerns a topic about which I've written before, but which is likely to become more important in my ongoing House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, namely, the death of the emperor of Tsolyánu and the choosing of his successor. There is no primogeniture in Tsolyánu. Instead, all the children of the emperor, who are given "the Gold" (a specially engraved circular plaque) upon their births, are eligible to compete for the right to ascend the Petal Throne as his successor. To provide some additional context, here's what the Tékumel Source Book has to say about this competit ..read more

A very interesting interview with David "Zeb" Cook about his time at TSR Hobbies, in which he talks about the D&D Expert Set, Oriental Adventures, and Second Edition, among other topics.  ..read more

Never having been a huge reader of comics, I keep forgetting that, during the late '80s and early 1990s, DC Comics published a number of titles based (mostly) on Dungeons & Dragons settings. One of them was set in Krynn, the world of Dragonlance. From what I understand, the Dragonlance comics were prequels that took place before the events of the first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, and consequently introduced a number of original characters to serve as its protagonists alongside more familiar names. Since I haven't had the chance to read these comics, I don't have much more to say abo ..read more

Apparently, because today is May 1 – May Day in many European countries – someone has decided that it's also the made-up "holiday" of Traveller Day, for obvious reasons.  I must tell you: I don't like this. I absolutely loathe Star Wars Day and its nonsensical date (May 4). I feel similarly about Alien Day (April 26), which, like Traveller Day, I had never even heard of until this year. Much like forced humor, forced holidays grate on my nerves, perhaps because they're usually created by companies looking for new ways to squeeze money out of one of their customers rather than the ho ..read more

The first RPG I ever owned was the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, whose cover looked like this: If you look in the bottom righthand corner, you'll see that it calls itself "the original adult fantasy role-playing game." Take note of the italicized word and its spelling, particularly its use of a hyphen between "role" and "playing."  Now, here's the cover of the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set: If you look at its bottom righthand corner, you'll see that the hyphen has disappeared – "role playing" is presented as two separate words. The 1984 D&D Basic Set restores the hy ..read more

Because I did a Retrospective post on Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms last week, I was reminded of how excited I was by the announcement that the long-awaited Asian expansion to AD&D, Oriental Adventures. OA was a long percolating project about which Gary Gygax had talked for years beforehand, in part because he felt the monk class didn't belong in "standard" AD&D, given its inspiration in the legends of the Far East. Despite this, there didn't seem to be any evidence that such a project was likely to happen anytime soon and I largely put it out of mind. Then, without warning, in issue #1 ..read more

I have a complicated relationship with humor in roleplaying games. I unreservedly celebrate games like Paranoia and Toon that are explicitly humorous in tone and content, having had a lot of fun with them in the past. Likewise, I know very well that even the most "serious" RPG campaigns are likely to include moments of unexpected levity and goofiness and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, even Shakespeare included moments of comic relief in his most harrowing tragedies. At the same time, I wince at most puns and have a particular dislike of forced attempts humor in ro ..read more

Issue #24 of Polyhedron (July 1985), with its cover illustration by Roger Raupp, is another one I remember very clearly from my youth – and the cover is a big part of the reason why. When I first saw this odd collection of characters, I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. Were they supposed to be orcs or half-orcs or something else entirely? As I turned out, my guess wasn't far from the truth, but that initial perplexity compelled me to read the issue with great interest. Nearly forty years later, I still remember it. "Notes from HQ" can be quickly dispensed with, since most of i ..read more

There were two great obsessions at the dawn of the Old School Renaissance: megadungeons and sandboxes. Each was a distinctive element of many of the foundational roleplaying game campaigns of the 1970s, like Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and Tékumel. Their rediscovery and promotion are among the lasting impacts of the OSR – so much so that both massive dungeons and open-ended hexcrawls are now permanent fixtures of the even wider RPG scene.  Of the two, I'd say that megadungeons are probably the better understood and more commonly used, thanks in no small part to the many examples of them now ava ..read more

I remember being very excited about the imminent release of the Oriental Adventures in 1985. Aside from the obvious reason – the introduction of playable ninja and samurai into Advanced D&D – I was quite keen to see "the Oriental lands of Oerth," as promised in the "Coming Attractions" section of Dragon #102. However, when OA was released in November of that year, there was no real evidence in that book that Kara-Tur, as its setting was called, had any connection whatsoever to the World of Greyhawk. This fact was further demonstrated when the first adventure module for use with Orien ..read more