Introductions

[calstaff]

Hello all. My name is Chris but I am known as Calstaff on social media sites (sometimes Calstaff the Gold if Calstaff was already taken).
I've been an aficionado of D&D since '79 when I was introduced to the "Holmes" blue book set by a friend from school at the time and I have been a player and then DM ever since.
I mostly play 1e AD&D now, never played 5e or 4e and only played a couple of games of 3.5; I actually DMed two campaigns of 3.0 when it was released but when 3.5 started rolling out I bailed and returned to my roots.
My campaign setting of choice is pre-Wars Greyhawk although I have participated as a player in Lankhmar, Forgotten Realms (2e), and homebrewed settings as well.
I have also played Traveller, RuneQuest, Palladium Fantasy, and other non-TSR games, plus a wide variety of board and strategy games such as Diplomacy, Squad Leader, Axis & Allies, Civilization, and others too numerous to count or mention.
In short, I'm an old school nerd that learned most of my socialization skills on the game table.

Thank you for accepting me among you here.

[Deleted]

Hello, I'm a recovering retroclone addict. Started playing AD&D1, Traveller, Dragonquest and Maelstrom in the 80s, played everything but D&D in the 90s, then returned returned to old schoolgames on the 00s. Having played using a plethora of retroclones/variant clones/neoclones my two gaming groups have settled down after a decade of bandwagon-jumping and incessant dabbling in shiny new takes on ye auld game. I am currently reveling in the lonely joys of megadungeon construction.

[rredmond]

Happy New Year new avatars!

[Bastet1002]

Hello everyone! My name is Tim Fox, and it's great to be able to join odd74. I'm originally from Kingston, Ontario, Canada, but I've lived in several places in Canada, and New York City was my home for 10 years as a high school teacher. I've now been in Japan for about 12 years as an English teacher at a high school in Kirishima, Kagoshima, Japan. I live here with my wife and son. My D&D experience began for me in the late 70s with basic and expert D&D with my older brother. Later we both got into AD&D and a little bit of Traveller. I remember also trying 1e Tunnels and Trolls, Gamma Worlds, and Space Opera with him. But, AD&D was the main stay for us up until about high school. However, I started a new school in high school and got worried about being seen as a geek and regrettably quit. At university, a friend introduced me to Vampire LARP. It was a great community with an equal number of men and women playing at our weekly games. I tried a few one off TTRPGs then as well. The community inspired me to write my undergrad thesis in anthropology on the benefits of gaming communities (I was trying to debunk claims of Satanism in our games - and remind the world - quite correctly - that it was just a game). After university, I hung up my hat as a gamer for several years, and satisfied myself with game books such as ones by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingston (ex. The Warlock on Firetop Mountain etc). In Japan, I felt was missing something in my life and I stumbled upon DriveThru RPG. During COVID, collected and avidly read games and read forums. With a huge gap in time, I could not relate to D&D 5e, and was drawn to various versions of Swords & Wizardry, Basic Fantasy, Iron Falcon, and the absolute gem of a game - Pits & Perils. I soon became a Facebook site admin for a then fledging pamphlet game Micro RPG, and proofread the latest PDF (not in print yet) version of Iron Falcon on the Basic Fantasy website. Though I never started with OD&D (I started with B/X), I became very interested in the OD&D for its charm and simplicity (though with rulings over rules - OD&D is deceptively complex as a game!).

[Deleted]

Hi everyone! I am William Dowie AKA "The Great Khan" from the Ramblings of a Great Khan blog. I started playing D&D with Holmes Basic in early 1981, and moved on to AD&D almost immediately. I still run a weekly AD&D game in a homebrew setting, Covid, weather and adult lives and responsibilities permitting. I own a lot of retroclones and I have a strong interest in OD&D and B/X mostly dating to the dawn of the OSR movement. I finally made an account here because people keep linking to this site and I got sick of not being able to see stuff.

[ochrejelly]

Hi, thanks for letting me in, finally all those links to this forum won’t be dead ends! I started playing in the mid 90s with AD&D 2e, played a bit of 1e at the time as well, then stopped playing for a long while around when 3e came out. I picked up b/x when I started playing again, and also really got into classic traveller around that time. I was intrigued by OD&D, and once I read the 3LBBs I was hooked! Recently picked up a 5th printing of the white box and hoping to play soon! Looking forward to soaking in some great info here.

[rredmond]

Feb 21, 2022 21:33:12 GMT -6 ochrejelly said:

Hi, thanks for letting me in, finally all those links to this forum won’t be dead ends!

Yup being a member means you get a bonus to those secret door checks
Welcome!

[talassa]

Hello Everyone,

I am João Talassa, from Portugal.

When I was just eleven, in the early 80s, a friend passed me photocopies of DragonQuest to read, together with some loose pages of Chivalry & Sorcery. Reading those texts I was fascinated by the possibilities and was chosen to run DragonQuest for my friends who become the group, was soon playing D&D (mostly Mentzer, and also Moldvay) and then quickly graduated to be the dungeon master of an homebrew AD&D campaign, which went from 1st edition through 2nd editions. We had a lot of free time back in the day and played a lot of many other different games, but that AD&D campaign was the most long lived though my teens and as a young adult. Then there was a time I went to university (Law school) and my gaming days were put on a hiatus.

Then when 3rd edition D&D arrived we mustered the old group back together and were playing again, but that did not last long. By then I thought my days with the hobby were over. Looking back I still have the fondest memories of 1st edition.

Later when 2nd edition WFRP came we reconvened the group again and played a campaign that lasted more than a few years, and by then I was looking at new games that have since appearing both in the OSR and indie scenes. I have since been active on the Lisbon gaming scene.

I have been running and playing many different games at public meetings, from Traveller (1977) to Apocalypse World. Since COVID I have been hosting sessions through Discord and Roll20.

It was only very recently that I have found and am currently fascinated by OD&D (1974), in particular the 1974 boxed set (3 LBB) and the implied Chainmail roots. As of this moment I am preparing to run some kind of OD&D game online on Discord. Interested in exploring Xyntillan or Morthimion Castles.

But I am also very interested in exploring the paths not taken and discussing some of the various possibilities for expansion contained within the text. Some of those ideias I have come with are already being addressed on these boards, and I am eager to discuss them with you.

[Deleted]

Welcome. Roll Initiative lol

[oldskolgmr]

Welcome to calstaff, Bastet1002, @geordieracer, @swjagatai, ochrejelly, and talassa!
(Finally, you will get to see what all the fuss is about!)

[Flintlock]

Hi there,

I'm Sam. I started RPGs with B/X back in 1982, a very welcome Christmas present from my gran. (Who was also my first ever GM. The main thing I remember about her dungeon was that there were lots and lots of wererats).

Since then I've been playing RPGs at least semi regularly (lots of different ones from Paranoia to Unknown Armies). The only real rival for my gaming attentions was LRP at certain times although I also wargame.

I pretty much come to here through an increasing interest in the early days of RPGs; caused by a combination of Peterson's The Elusive Shift and reading early White Dwarf.

I don't actually know that much about OD&D as it plays at the table, so I'll mostly be observing and learning there. But you'll find I can wax lyrical about other early RPGs etc.

[oldskolgmr]

Welcome Flintlock, that's part of what drew me in. Have fun!

[nizrad]

Hello my name is Jason and I've been a D&D addict since 1996. I have lurked on here and similar sites (DF and K&KA) since late 2008. I'm really hooked on drawing maps, both wilderness and dungeons but am prone to discarding them and starting over. I'm afraid I will never complete my Dungeon of Xid (so many levels lost to madness), and I want to work on being social again, figured this would be a good place.

[rredmond]

Welcome Jason. I think I've seen your dungeon posted somewhere? Blog maybe? It had a time travel component, yes?
Again welcome, can't wait to see what you share!

[djeryv]

Hello all! This is Djeryv, and I decided to join the board to further my research into the various versions and spinoffs of OD&D...as well as the base game. Some non-TSR things that interest me are things like Planet Eris, the Warlock rules, and the Arduin Grimoire. I used to run the Wizardawn site years ago...until it aged out and suffered from some tech issues. I did make some tools for games like OD&D and AD&D at osricrpg.com/tools/.

[tkdco2]

A very belated welcome to all our new members!

[Jenx]

Hello everyone! I'm Kalin, though Jenx is usually the name you'll find me under in most online spaces.

Unlike, I suspect, most people on this forum, I actually have zero nostalgia, fond memories or really interaction with any old version of D&D. I'm Bulgarian and not old enough to have been exposed to the games, with my first interactions with D&D being the form of the Baldur's Gate 2 and Icewind Dale video games, which were 2E AD&D, then once I did eventually get into tabletop roleplaying the edition of D&D I ran into was 3E and that made me go "Hm, I don't really like this."

With that said though, I've been in the roleplaying hobby for over 20 years now, and I've played all kinds of things over that period. I've also worked in the tabletop RPG industry for close to 9 of those years now, as an artist and art director for RuneQuest, HeroQuest, bit of Call of Cthulhu in there as well, and some Pendragon (I worked for Chaosium, in short). 

About 3-4 years ago I got interested in the OSR scene, first through Dungeon Crawl Classics and later the various retroclones like Labyrinth Lord and OSE. It seemed like the games being played offered something that I had been wanting to do in tabletop RPGs for years, but nobody around me ever had any interest in - a dungeon crawling focused game of navigating a very difficult environment. I'm a big fan of roguelikes, I've played more NetHack, Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup and others than I can really recommend anyone ever playing, and so I've had a fascination of replicating that back on the tabletop, and the OSR seemed like the people most likely to do it. 

I have a very recently made a blog named Gorgon Bones on which I've been posting thoughts from my first proper OSR campaign, ran over several months using Old School Essentials. While I am currently on break from it due to real life circumstances, I am getting increasingly interested in OD&D of some flavor as the system for my next campaign. And so we finally come to why I ended up in here, because my journey has been steadily pushing me further and further back in D&D's past, curiously making more more interested in it the further I go. And I've seen this forum a few times, and see it mentioned fairly regularly whenever OD&D is brought up as a topic, so I figured I should just actually join. 

Well, that's about it, I think. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

[Deleted]

The Infinity Engine video games you mentioned are iconic and likely got a ton of new people into D&D. For my part I slightly prefer Planescape: Torment, but Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale are very close in quality!

Welcome to the boards.

[Jenx]

Oh, Planescape: Torment is in many ways the peak of the Infinity Engine games (definitely the peak of what the actual graphics engine could do, that's for sure). Though Baldur's Gate 2 might make a claim just out of sheer grandeur of it's scope.

[Deleted]

Aug 28, 2022 18:24:29 GMT -6 Jenx said:

Oh, Planescape: Torment is in many ways the peak of the Infinity Engine games (definitely the peak of what the actual graphics engine could do, that's for sure). Though Baldur's Gate 2 might make a claim just out of sheer grandeur of it's scope.

You can't really go wrong either way. They both do completely different and unique things with the engine and the D&D license. I think that's the most impressive thing about that entire run of PC games to be honest. They could have went the easy route and had them all follow standard fantasy story tropes, but each one had its own style and quirks. In the case of Planescape it really did pave the way for dialogue heavy, philosophical modern RPGs like Disco: Elysium. 

And where did it all begin, by the way? The idea of adventuring in the Outer Planes? Why, it was mentioned in OD&D! Which brings us back around. I hope you find a lot of interesting things to talk about on these boards. We really do exhaustively cover every conceivable subject about not only OD&D but pop culture and gaming from that time period in general - and beyond! 

[Deleted]

Hey, y'all - Richelle. Played a hodgepodge of early 80's DnD with the older kids/friend's parents until I saved up enough allowance to buy the Red Box set for myself... played/DM'd off and on till getting a regular party in the early '90s that expanded to other RPGs and homebrew. When the bulk of my party moved, I fell into the non-RPG void until a few years ago. For the past 2ish years I've been playing in a zoom/Discord ODND Wilderness campaign.  As mentioned in tetramorph 's very kind recommendation, I'm make maps.   

[barbaribunny]

Hi all, thanks for having me.

I'm from England and started roleplaying with AD&D and BECMI back in the 80's. I'm sure it's a common story, but I dropped away from gaming in the 90's; but have come back to it the last couple of years.

I never actually came across OD&D back when I started playing, but nostalgic memories led me to the OSR; and then it was probably only a matter of time before it drew me in.

[horridgoose]

Glad to be here and to have access to all those juicy juicy links.

Like Jenx above I suspect I'm an odd case in that I have no nostalgia for older editions, and Rules Cyclopedia is older than I am.
Like many others, however, my first experience with old-school D&D was with B2 - Keep on the Borderlands (unlike many - if any - others on this forum though, that was in this very calendar year). That drew me in and drew me in hard.

I don't remember how I came across Initiative One's "The Original D&D Setting" posts, but my heart and mind were immediately captured by the vision of the swamp, teeming with undead and crawling with the tyrants of Earth's prehistory, ruled over by necromancers and evil high priests and black-scaled acid-spewing dragons...that led me to the LBBs and eventually here.
I've had a bear of a time getting IRL groups off the ground, and have yet to experience running OD&D... I plan on starting up a Seven Voyages of Zylarthen campaign in January once I get my footing regarding a career change (and once I get my physical stuff for it in the mail, that'll probably help!).

I also have an interest in DCC, for what that's worth

[Sean Galland]

Hello everyone,

My name is Sean and I am from Utah. Originally from Washington, I started my obsession with Roleplaying and D&D in particular when I was about 8 years old (1988). Since I didn't have money to buy the books myself, I had to hand copy from memory the rules I remembered after game sessions. Now in my 40's, I run games for my kids and their friends and occasionally for coworkers. I spend a lot of time reading historical books and blogs about the history of the hobby, trying to understand what Dave Arneson was thinking when he created his Blackmoor game system and how Gary Gygax modified it into the form we currently have. I look forward to getting to know everyone!

Thanks,
Sean

[Deleted]

Hello, my name is Jason and I am returning to RPG gaming after a multi year hiatus caused by a mix of a job that required tons of travel and a bit of burnout. Some of you may know me from Gen Con in the mid 00's where I helped the Troll Lord Games gang run their booth. I even had the privilege of working with Gary Gygax when he was autographing books at the booth in 2007. He was kind enough to sign the booklets from my tatty OD&D white box which is the cornerstone of my gaming room and for which I am eternally grateful. I look forward to hanging out with you all in the forums and occasionally maybe even adding something to the conversation!

[slimemold]

Hi everyone! I've been on a bit of a hiatus from tabletop RPGs, but I recently got bitten by the bug again and so here I am.

My name is David, and I'm from Australia.

I've been playing D&D since around 2016 when I joined my good friends' 5E campaign, but my main interest is in dungeon mastering classic D&D editions. I enjoy the simplicity from a DM perspective, and they have a certain character and charm that I find really captures the imagination.

I've mostly run B/X (original or Old-School Essentials) and Swords & Wizardry Complete. Recently I've been looking at the three LBBs again and casually working on my campaign setting.

Good to meet you all!

[ocasta]

Hey, everyone!

My name is Caleb, and I'm from Kentucky. I first played Dungeons & Dragons in the form of AD&D back in the mid-90s and loved it. (Well, if you want to count it, I technically played the TSR board game Dragon Strike and even made a couple custom dungeon scenarios for it.) Once third edition came out, though, I migrated to it and eventually grew a bit disenchanted with all the splat books, so I didn't migrate to 4th. By that point, I had moved primarily to using other games.

In the last few years, I discovered OSR games like Dungeon Crawl Classics, which has reinvigorated my love of running good ol' dungeon crawls. I now run a weekly-ish DCC game and have played in a few short B/X games. I've got my eyes set on OD&D now, though. The rules have a certain kind of rough charm that I find very appealing. I've read through a few retroclones (the big ones like Iron Falcon, White Box FMAG, and Swords & Wizardry Complete) and will probably take my own stab at interpreting the books before settling on my own house rules.

Anyway, after seeing this forum mentioned over on Trollbridge, I figured I should come here to learn from the real grognards. Thanks for letting me in!

[Deleted]

Hi all, thanks for letting me into the inner sanctum 

I'm Samuel, a New Zealander living in Aus. I first got into D&D through playing some of the infinity engine games (Planescape being my favourite) about 6 years ago and then found my first group playing 5e. It was always something I had known about and wanted to get into, wishing I'd gotten into it sooner.

After some time I found myself curious about other D&D systems, tried Pathfinder/3.5 and fell in love as a player, but as I began stepping up as a game master found it very cumbersome to run, so I began to look forsimpler systems and learned about the OSR with BFRPG, and I've been hooked exploring older systems ever since, with OSE/BX becoming my system of choice due to it's simplicity to run.

Exploring OD&D has been incredibly insightful as to how the game was originally made, what it's various influences are, how malleable it really is and looking to find out how I can drag my players to give it a go. I love going through old documents and blog posts finding how the game came to be, what ideas got shelved or how they moulded over time.
When I'm not running D&D I'm probably playing around with VtM:v20, Call of Cthulhu or some sci-fi game. 

[bubblyhearth]

Hi all! I'm excited to explore this forum

My name is Maeve, I'm in Atlanta!

My tabletop nerddom begin about 13 years ago with Warhammer Fantasy. This progressed on and off into some involvement with The Ninth Age community,

then Warmachine before losing interest.

Around the beginning of covid, I begin a deep dive into D&D, specifically the OSR. Coming from tabletop wargames, I especially loved how much control I had over

the rules. No more corporate power-bloat! No more waiting 5 years for an update! Cue to finding myself nose-deep in forums, blogs and the LBB. I've scraped together

a few sessions with interested parties, but much of the hobby thus far has been writing various systems, currently in the form of my LBB heartbreaker. That said,

I've written something I'm ready to throw down with at the table, and am ready to begin the process of starting an open table campaign using the Gygax '75 challenge!

[miqued]

Hi, I'm miqued (rhymes with liquid). I got started with my dad's old AD&D books in 2010 when I was 12, so even though I'm but a wee baby, that's still where I find my comfort. I once had a 3-ring binder filled with enough notes, maps, dungeons, and artifacts to put the DMG to shame. Unfortunately, in my infinite adolescent wisdom, I threw it away when I went to college, because "I'll never find anyone to play that game with". I'd rather not talk about what happened to the original books I had. I try not to think about it too much...

Anyway, I got TONISBORG from the Fellowship of the Thing kickstarter recently, and I know Griff uses OD&D to play it, plus there's an edition of ZED included with the book. (I actually found this board while looking for more information about ZED, since it is no longer listed on DriveThru RPG.) I'm hoping if I can get comfortable with OD&D/ZED to slowly switch my players over to running our regular game with either of those systems.

Thanks rredmond for letting me in!