dungeons and dragons

How “Dungeons” Changed The World

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I suspect that many of my readers — like me — "wasted" their teenage years playing Dungeons and Dragons. But it turns out that it wasn’t a waste. The D&Ders of the late 1970s and 1980s now are driving much of mainstream culture.  In the Boston Globe, Peter Berbegal has written an op-ed about this. A sample:

Dungeons and Dragons was a not a way out of the mainstream, as some parents feared and other kids suspected, but a way back into the realm of story-telling. This was what my friends and I were doing: creating narratives to make sense of feeling socially marginal. We were writing stories, grand in scope, with heroes, villains, and the entire zoology of mythical creatures.

Super Eight Footage Of A 1980s D&D Session

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For the sake of pure nostalga, here’s a (silent) Super 8 film of a Dungeons and Dragons session from the 1980s. It looks a lot like the sessions I remember.

Microlite ’81 Tablet Edition

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Microlite ’81 is now available in a tablet-friendly edition. The author writes;

The Microlite81 rules are based on the two boxed sets (Basic and Expert) published in 1981, often referred to as B/X. The rules are not intended to be a clone of the B/X rules, but rather a conversion of them to a rules-lite D20-based system that encourages old-school play without strictly old-school rules. Microlite81 is based on the third edition of the original Microlite74 rules.

Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome 0e D&D House Rules

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Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is a set of house rules for the 1974 edition of Dungeons and Dragons. The author writes:

Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is a set of house rules for the original 1974 (0e) version of the world’s most popular tabletop fantasy roleplaying game (and modern clones, like Swords & Wizardry). These house rules are modern renditions of the house rules the author used with his original edition games in the 1970s.
Some of house rules included:

  • A simple “skills” system based on class and background instead of lists of skills
  • A Hit Point/Body Point system where Hit Points represent fatigue and Body Points represent actual wounds.
  • Ritual Magic
  • An alternate alignment system
  • Critical Hits and Critical misses
  • A class based weapon damage system that ends class weapon restrictions.
  • An optional Armor system that ends class restrictions on wearing armor
  • An optional class: the Mnemonic Mage
  • Optional Divine Intervention rules

This digest-sized edition of Tarnhelm’s Terrible Tome is designed to be printed double-sided using the booklet-printing feature of Adobe Acrobat, the pages can be folded and stapled to create a “0e” style digest-sized booklet.

Microlite 74 RPG Tablet Friendly Edition

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Microlite 74 is a set of free role playing rules that emulates the original edition of a certain world famous role playing game.