Last weekend we had played, and I got to tell you, I really didn’t want to. It had been a hard week, we had a very expected death in the family and between family functions and my job, my life was pretty hard! I hadn’t even thought about D&D, not once! I had a major section on my map to figure out, and I wanted to add some more random encounters, but I didn’t do it. Come Saturday, my friends came over and expected a game, so I bucked up and after a while, I actually started to feel better. I started the game in a foul mood, mentally occupied, and unfocused. I figured that the game would suck, but at least I could say that I had tried.

It took a bit to get into the groove of things, I hadn’t even looked at my notes since last month, so I had to take some time to do that, but since we were all friends, the players have no problem with talking to each other while they wait for me to figure out what is going on.

As a group, we were in huge trouble! I had designed the mine with a wizard in mind, but our player who played the mage had quit, so it makes the game that more difficult. I was also down 2 players, and they had reached the working sections of the mine. Our wizard had quit months ago, so it wasn’t a surprise that they would have to solve some problems creatively, I had hid some potions of Water Breathing, but they didn’t find them. Thankfully the Cleric put two and two together and had access to the spell! The conditions of the mine are horrid, most of the corridors and shafts are filled with water, in order to have a chance to move around undetected, they had to stay hidden. Hundreds of thousands of orcs and slaves worked in this thing; it is the major base of operations for the orcish invasion. This mine is a fortress!

This game turned out to be very satisfying, we only had one combat encounter and the rest was being sneaky, taking some calculated risks, and a whole lot of problem solving! My notes that I had made supplied all of the information that I really needed to run the scenario. I had a few hiccups, I missed some details that I had to correct here and there, and I had miscalculated the attack range of one of my monsters, which accidently made the one combat encounter too easy, though I did adjust the amount of attacks to their full potential, giving each orc at least 2 attacks per round, and it worked fine.

What I would really like to talk about this session is Murder Hoboing, in a word, I hate it. It is an easy way out, and like many DM’s, I offer it as an option, but I reward you for not taking that route.  To be more specific, the thing that makes the mine desirable for the orcs, namely the water which allows work to be done faster and gives them the ability to move the arms to the war front quickly, is also a fatal flaw to the mine. The party had been able to talk to a dwarf who knew the history of the place. The mine was originally worked by his people; however tragedy struck when the miners accidently broke into a huge underground lake. The miners and the mine was dead for centuries until the Illithids discovered it, and through powerful magic, were able to partially stop up the hole, however now that the mindflayers are dead, all slain by the orcs, their magic is ignored, and this spot, deep in the mine, if broken, will destroy the mine and everything in it. If the party wished, or if they underestimated the power being held at bay by a simple rune of power, they could sacrifice themselves and the countless lives of the slaves to quickly destroy this place.

My players, like many, tend to travel with a wake of destruction and mayhem. It is fun to blow off some steam from time to time! But, as far as story goes, one can get a richer and more fulfilling experience from ignoring those tendencies.  This time they chose not to blow the mine to hell. They have plans to free the men, women, and children enslaved in this hellish place. They successfully broke into the mine and did intelligence. They found enough information to know exactly what was going on in the place, discovered a fatal weakness that can be exploited if they had to, and recognized this place as a heart of the orcish invasion which can be exploited, but not at the expense of the lives subjugated by it.

It was a very productive game! They got what they wanted, and they found a way to get out without being detected. Besides mining, an elevator system had been constructed by the orcs which led up to the surface where they harvested trees to build boxes to ship the materials out.  They were able to pose as members of the Black Network, who are currently allied with the orcs, that were there just doing inspections. They were able to fool the stupid orc in charge of the elevator, which was just enough to get them outside.

The dice gods cooperated with them too. They had no idea where they were once they escaped, and got turned around in the thick forests of the Thunderpeaks, and accidently discovered the highly fortified fortress that was the true opening to the mine. Fate had also allowed them to sneak into the mine by an opening that was not known to the orcs.

How are they going to free the slaves? I have no idea. Discovering that is what makes this particular scenario so much fun! I think that that is what makes a good game that is fun for everybody; the DM decides ahead of time exactly what the enemies had done in the past, what they are doing now, and if left unchecked, what they will do in the future, and then let the players have at it while everybody, including the DM tries to figure out what is going on and how to stop it.

For a game that I really didn’t feel like playing, we had a really great time! I did a lot of healing, just by participating; I got to really stretch my DMing muscles, jumping from style to style on the fly. Why do we play Dungeons & Dragons? I think that it is because the more that we give to it, the more that it gives back to us in return.

Thanks for reading!

The World of Greyhawk, the world created by the originators through play. The world of the true pioneers of our hobby! You know it already. It is the world designed for very advanced users of the game. The nay-sayers like to say that TSR kept Greyhawk from Gygax when he left the company, just to bury it. The world of Oerth never got the amount of support shown to the other settings, but that is why it is so favorable! You buy the box set, read the little pamphlets and look at the map, and you start writing! Much of the support that was given to Greyhawk was ignored. It is a world that supports the imagination, each table running the box completely different from one another. Today this setting is a huge cult hit: You want to go back to the roots of D&D; you roll up some Greyhawk characters and see what happens!

By 1989, the thought of discontinuing the setting was nixed. While the company was slowly and carefully establishing Forgotten Realms to be as marketable as possible, they needed to keep some income flowing, thus the Greyhawk Adventures product line was kept as a grindhouse-like money maker. Modules for the setting paid the bills, and they suffered from a lack of quality.

I thought that it was Dragonlance that first entered the 2e era, but I had totally forgotten about Product 2023: Greyhawk Adventures, written by James Ward and published in August of 1988. It isn’t a true 2e book: it is a hardcover with the compatibility starburst, that attempted to introduce the world to 2^nd Edition, but they didn’t have much information to work with! The quality of the material inside is extremely high, and not found in any other book out there. Ward credits it as a fan created project:  he solicited the D&D community to give him feedback, and feedback he got! What this book reads like is a huge, hardcover issue of Dragon Magazine, focused completely on the world of Greyhawk, and it is awesome!

There are very few 2e mechanics in the book, namely THAC0 and the spheres & schools of magic system was hinted to. While this hardcover wasn’t as functional as Forgotten Realms Adventures was, it is still a really really great book! As far as Greyhawk goes, it was marketed to advanced users of the game; users that could competently make their own conversions, so the designers could get away with just addressing the barest minimum to the setting.

While Greyhawk Adventures addressed what was added, it was up to a mega-module called WG8 Fate of Istus to address what was to be taken away. Again, this module does not run as a 2e product, it is intended for established 1^st Edition player characters, but by the end of it, it says that all of the characters will be 2e compatible.

The module itself has four different authors, and it is written in a very grindhouse style so there really is no way to actually run this product smoothly, not logically anyway. It is a collection of ten mini adventures in which each 1^st edition PC class is tested and their fates are decided. I personally don’t think that this product is all that necessary, however it does have a few positive points worthy of noting, namely the fact that there is a lot of stuff that a DM can lift from this booklet! NPCs, maps, descriptions, items; as a whole, the product isn’t very strong, however, cut up, it’s basic parts are desirable to a DM who is strapped for time filling in sections of his world that don’t really require his attention; but the best reason is actually one of the books greatest failures, it is a chance to compare the writings of 4 very talented men; specifically, this book features one of the few times that you can actually read the work of the legendary Robert J. Kuntz. That alone is worth the price of admission!

Module WG8 seems to be more of a product to be read, than one that should actually be ran. DM’s who had ran parts of it were happy with the results, however many agree that as a whole, it is deeply interesting but something to be ran only if you want to make your players miserable. Is it worth owning? YES! But I would recommend Fate of Istus as a PDF. In regards to Greyhawk Adventures, I rate that product as a B, just because it is so damned fun! I’m not sure how usable the thing really is, but you will still love reading it. It offers unique spell lists from major NPCs that are cool (many names you’ll recognize from the PHB), and written in the style of Ed Greenwood’s Dragon Magazine articles. It also features unique monsters (a few making appearances in the Greyhawk Monster Appendix), and a system for running 0^th level PCs.

OVERVIEW

Greyhawk users are a different breed of player that put self-expression and invention over established canon; as far as I am concerned, Greyhawk as a setting has been completed for a very, very long time! There is still some gold to be mined from published works, but they are far and in between. The lessons of Greyhawk can spill over to the other settings! Even Forgotten Realms works best when most of the supplemental material is completely ignored! A designer’s vision is best established through play, not through memorizing a bookshelf of stuff created by others. Where one user sees an overly generic and incomplete world, what one is really looking at is freedom! 2e didn’t force itself on the setting, if it did then it would had been ruined. Advanced users know that you can still use the 2e system as well as keeping what they really love from the first edition rules and be fine! While Greyhawk was a huge financial failure, as art, I feel that it is far superior to any other product out on the market.

A couple of my blogger buddies had been inspired to reveal their beginnings, which I always find to be interesting. I am not a grognard, I played once in the 70’s and hated it. I didn’t play officially until 1993. When I was a teen, I had enough social problems to deal with without tacking on Dungeons & Dragons.

I’m a country kid, I mean to say that I grew up in the city of Council Bluffs Iowa, but in the early 80’s my folks were able to save up enough money to move out onto a rural route, I spent most of my formative years out there, but until that time I lived across the street from my cousin, who was like a big brother to me. I have been lucky to always live next to woods, and I spent a lot of time out there. Our parents typically kicked us out of the house, and we’d run around the woods until we got hungry. 

We had toys, but if you take toys out into the woods, you usually won’t get them back, so we’d play pretend! Star Wars, Robin Hood, super heroes, this became our favorite game. We especially loved finding branches which we’d clean off and have sword fights, or staff battles. We fancied ourselves to be quite good at our sword fighting!

We did other stuff too, this was before central air conditioning was all that available, so the theatre downtown would host a children’s matinee, offering free pop and popcorn while they played those classic sci-fi, adventure, and monster movies from the 50’s and 60’s to get us out of the heat for a little bit, and we loved them! Those pulpy things were expertly written to attract susceptible young minds in the perfect way! Once the movie was over, we’d go back out in the woods and talk about what we’d seen, and sometimes we’d even pretend to be those characters! Especially with the monster movies, what kid didn’t love them? We’d all be the heroes and invisible monsters would chase us all around! There would be casualties here and there, but after a dramatic and heart-wrenching death scene, you’d be right back into the game. Rules? Who needs rules? Sometimes the game required you to stay dead, but the best one’s never did.

There weren’t hundreds of channels to choose from, if a buddy had cable television then he was popular! But, for the most part, everybody watched the same stuff. V, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, and lets not forget the reruns of Batman & Robin,  Twilight Zone, Star Trek, and Lost in Space! Cartoons only ran on Saturday mornings; most of them were terrible, but there were some shows that were popular, Superfriends, Scooby Doo, Land of the Lost, and such, but our favorite was Dungeons & Dragons! Everybody in my neighborhood watched these programs, and we talked about them! We tried to play D&D, but we weren’t ready for the strict rules, and my cousin was bossy enough without me having to call him Dungeon Master!

That period of time also had MUST SEE movies. Again, this was a shared experience. Everybody went to the theatre, mom and dad needed to get out of the heat too, and there was no VCRs in our part of town, so you either watched it at the movies, or you had some friend tell you every last detail of it. Well, there was MAD Magazine that helped out too, but the big movies, everybody saw. Besides Star Wars, which is a given, there was Flash Gordon, Clash of the Titans, Dragonslayer, and Excalibur. HBO even did a special deal for kids at the time with Excalibur, were they edited out all of the naughty bits. I remember our whole family getting together for this, all of my mom’s brothers and her sister, and all of us kids. We filled up our tiny little living room and watched it, it was a big deal!

Reading was a kin to some mysterious art, once our teacher started to let us into that secret world, I took right too it. I eagerly wanted to learn! My mother was a big fan of true ghost stories, monsters, and ancient secrets, but she wouldn’t read these to me. I was stuck with Sesame Street books and all of that kids crap because she said that those books were too scary, so I had to learn to read! And she was right. Those books were really scary!

I always loved reading after that; my favorite books were those “Choose Your Own Adventure” books! Again, this was a shared experience, once the library got a new one, there was a LONG waiting list to get your hands on a copy. The neighborhood I lived in was really poor, but we had the RIF Program which I was always thankful for and still support. Once a year they would come to our school and fill up the gym with tables and tables of books and you could choose one to have, and we always went after the “Choose Your Own Adventure” titles!  I loved my mom’s scary books too, but I had to sneak a lot of them, much like I had to sneak up late at night to watch Creature Feature with Dr. Sanguinary, so horror stuff was kind of like being naughty! I became a story teller from them; my friend’s parents didn’t like them watching that kind of stuff either, so I would tell them all about this secret world and they’d just eat it up!

Once we moved out into the country, my social influences stopped. I love the country! That is where I spent the majority of my youth, and it was a tradeoff. Yes, I was extremely isolated, all social influences outside of my relatives stopped, but I would spend most of my time not spent doing chores out in the woods which were even bigger than my old stomping ground in Council Bluffs, out there I found discovery. I love the outdoors; I had a creek and miles of wilderness to play in. My yard was huge! I played alone most of the time, which really builds up the imagination. I had a couple of friends out there, but none of them were all that interested in fantasy stuff. I suppose that the other kids thought that I was into what they saw as “kids’ stuff” but I really enjoyed it, and I still do!

It was out in the country where I started playing video games, and I loved games like Haunted House, and Adventure! My cousins and I would create a makeshift space ship and play Star Raiders. ATARI games were great, they still required that element of imagination, but you could also actually role play while you were playing them! ATARI games still fascinate me, they could do so much with so little it just boggles the mind! This post uses up more disk space then what they had. Many of the games were really well designed, and better thought out that the stuff that one plays today. The Nintendo was another love affair with me, particularly Legend of Zelda. I really sucked at video games, but I could play me some Zelda, now! What Nintendo lacked in the imagination and role playing department, it made up for in size. Legend of Zelda was a HUGE game, and it rewarded you for exploring. Exploration games: that is what I loved more than anything, but Zelda also offered a challenge, and you couldn’t play it by yourself. While others thought that I enjoyed kids’ stuff, Nintendo wasn’t kids’ stuff. I found lots of secrets but Zelda brought kids together because everybody would find different things. It took a long time to first beat the game. Years later, when I cracked the game I found stuff in there that I had never seen before! It was really a magnificent program and one that I still enjoy playing.

Living in the country, I would read a lot. I didn’t fit in anymore, at school I was a poor country kid who the other country kids couldn’t stand because I talked nonsense to them, so I stayed by myself and I’d read. I discovered the occult and ate it up! Archeology and history was a love of mine, but it was scattered. I had no sense of direction; I just absorbed what I could. I learned way more outside of school than I ever learned in it. I didn’t find like-minded friends until after I graduated, and it was them that got me into D&D.

It wasn’t really all of these things that inspired me, it was my cousin who was my first best friend and brother, it was my uncles who ate that stuff up! It was my mother whose love of things that go bump in the night possessed me. And it was my father, whose love of Westerns and rural history is firmly embedded into my very being as well. It was the woods, infested with monsters and filled with discovery! These things made me what I am. Imagination is such an important part of my growing up, and I kind of feel that the kids of today may have been given the short end of the stick. My favorite toy was a stick! In my hands it was always more than just a simple stick, it was a thing of almost endless possibilities.

The first 2e product of the year, wasn’t the PHB, but a module . . . this module, Product 9243, or DLE1 In Search of Dragons written by Rick Swan for the Dragonlance Champaign Setting.

The first modules for 2e are pretty easy to spot; they have a starburst on the cover that says that they are compatible with both first and second edition, however, this is the only module that was published with no 2e rules to support it, but that doesn’t matter because DLE1 provided everything that you needed to play it, all you needed was the original DMG and a 1e PHB. Once the new PHB came out, you could use it too, but it was completely independent from the Dragonlance boxset as all of the background history was in the module itself.

Why Dragonlance? Forgotten Realms was chosen to be THE world to host 2^nd Edition; that was supposed to be the intention anyway. No other company had ever changed the rules on its users before, and the folks at TSR knew that there would be deaths as some classes were being cut to appease Mom. It also wasn’t known how far Dave Cook would push the new rules, but it was decided by management that all of the campaign settings would all, in theory, have to be rebooted. They didn’t know if 1e users would buy into the new system, they made it as attractive as they could by cutting down on the books needed to play, but if the 1ers did buy in, would they update their characters or simply start new ones? That really wasn’t up to TSR to decide, but they did try to help with some products which would ease tables into the 2e era.

I’ve talked about the 2e module style, which is story heavy. Today we’ve gone back to the original Gygax methods, but the Gygax method doesn’t make money. TSR’s new head, Lorraine Williams knew that table top gamers were also readers, so she expanded the TSR line beyond just modules and gaming guides, and began to publish novels, and the Modules either supported or tied into the novels.

Today you see people putting down the story style of play, a cooperative story telling game isn’t role-playing, they say. Well, they are wrong. You can play any way that you want to, and at the time players enjoyed this style of play. 2e supported it, and from a marketing standpoint, TSR made a lot more money! People who didn’t play Dungeons & Dragons saw the Dragonlance novels, and they bought them. The modules allowed the players to play as the characters in the books, which was a concept that is rather unique to Dragonlance.

The story style first appeared in 1983 with a little module written by Laura and Tracy Hickman called Ravenloft, maybe you’ve heard of it? It was this husband and wife team who transformed the abstract and incomplete module form into a real working interactive story. Ravenloft’s success was a huge deal! So it was no wonder that Laura and Tracy were contracted to create a story driven setting, this setting being Dragonlance.

This formula was the basis of what 2e was meant to be. For better or for worse! It wasn’t Forgotten Realms that was the true spearhead, but Dragonlance!  And, it was Dragonlance that was already prepped and ready for 2e, the “War of the Lance” was over! A new age had dawned.

In Search of Dragons was the first of a three module series. The only thing that made this 2e was a brief explanation about movement, as the system had slightly changed and labels had been added to tell the DM if a different form of movement was used. Today we know that 2e added more than it took away, and one can always pull from 1^st edition if they really want to, but TSR had to first prove itself. In a way, this module was kind of a gift. Imagine! A module that didn’t try to enforce the use of additional source material!  It didn’t care if you used 1^st or 2^nd edition, it was functional all by itself, which is cool.

I, myself, had never been formally introduced to Dragonlance. I’ve never played a game, nor have I read any of the books. Dragonlance was not my cup of tea, but it still important to the hobby. I do have a few modules that I had inherited from here or there, and while I love a good story, I to have adopted a more old-school style of play. I still have story elements in there! But instead of the players trying to survive the story, I like them to seek it out, and I definitely try to keep them the main characters!

DLE1 is intriguing, and I love how it is self-contained. Maybe if I’m ever strapped for ideas and someone wants to play a game, I’d run it, but I’m not really a module guy. I love it for its historic value. The first use of that beautiful blue and white 2^nd Edition logo! I have no idea how to grade it, but some things don’t need to be judged, do they.