Continuing on the old school character class theme (with a particular emphasis on the Moldvay era of D&D B/X and the likes of OSE) is the Cleric. There is a common perception of clerics just being played as ersatz fighters with some healing skills – but this needn’t and shouldn’t be the case. Even the […]
Two of the classic ‘Old School‘ character classes that often get maligned these days are the Magic-User and the Thief. This is partly because the style of more modern D&D versions (primarily from 3e onwards, but more specifically the current 5e D&D rules) provide a completely different type of game and place a lot more […]
Two of the classic ‘Old School‘ character classes that often get maligned these days are the Magic-User and the Thief. This is partly because the style of more modern D&D versions (primarily from 3e onwards, but more specifically the current 5e D&D rules) provide a completely different type of game and place a lot more […]
As part of my ‘return’ to Dungeons & Dragons (see my Old School Dungeons and Dragons post), I’ve been looking at retro-clones of D&D. The two key ones that have got my attention are OSE (Old School Essentials) and OSRIC (Old School Reference and Index Compilation). Both of these are faithful reproductions of different editions […]
You know those moments when you realise you made a stupid mistake sometime ago, and there’s no easy way to undo it, well I had one of those! It was a few weeks ago, which has led to rebuilding my OSR D&D library from scratch as of December 2021. About 10 years ago I sold […]
Absolutely, for me at least… There have many iterations but nothing says Orc like the classic illustrations from the early D&D and AD&D books from the 1970’s (The Holmes Basic D&D book and the various Advanced D&D ‘Manuals’ feature classic illustrations). And I’m not alone. Forget about the bizarre things Peter Jackson created for his […]
Goodman Games have been republishing classic TSR era D&D Adventure modules in a ‘deluxe’ hard cover format marketed as “Original Adventures Reincarnated“. These feature high quality scanned reprints of the original module releases (in some cases including 2 different original versions) that were originally for D&D Basic or AD&D 1e (1st Edition), and a modernised […]
A big lot of kudos to Goodman Games for their work with historic Judges Guild material – and most especially one of my all time favourite modules The Caverns Of Thracia! Goodman Games have run 2 Kickstarter Campaigns recently to produce deluxe oversize hard cover volumes containing some of the most significant and historic Judges […]
Dedicated D&D players will know this, but some others may not; in fact I never knew about this in my time actively playing AD&D (the decade that was the 1980’s); that there were the two B3 modules. And although I came across references to it eventually; I have only really fully read up on it […]
I have got to admit, I’ve been away from Old School Dungeons & Dragons (and any roleplaying games for that matter) for some time. And by that I am referring to classic table-top (or ‘pen & paper’ if you prefer) gaming – not computer game versions. Being also a wargamer and familiar with using figures […]