Introductions

[tdenmark]

Jan 25, 2024 9:22:40 GMT -6 methuslah said:

Hail and Well Met!

My name's Richard, and a few of you might remember me from the pre-history of the OSR when I ran a little magazine called OD&DITIES. I've been gaming since '93, but a combination of circumstances meant that I pretty much stopped for the best part of a decade. Last year I got a campaign going again online (B/X, running the Keep on the Borderlands, just ended) and let's just say I'm back with a vengeance - I'm currently preparing a campaign based around the dungeons from Dungeoneer 1-6, in a setting I'm calling 'Septuaginta Septem'. (Yes, 77, indicating the cut-off point for material I'm using, I've spent the afternoon flipping through Best of Dragon I...)

I have all the issues of OD&DITIES, great to have you here! Welcome.

[methuslah]

It's good to be here; I hope to be at least reasonably active in the near future. One of my New Year's resolutions was to give myself more time, and that hopefully means getting a couple of new campaigns going in the very near future.

[richard]

Hi y'all. My name's Richard, from Plano, TX. I started playing ttrpgs about ten years ago, using an ancient copy of RuneQuest that my dad loaned me, and in the years since I've become very interested in ttrpg history and other older systems - especially old D&D editions. Unfortunately I haven't gotten a chance to play or run OD&D yet, but hopefully I can get an adventure or two in once my group wraps up our 5e campaign.

[zornhau]

Thanks for the add!

My name is Brooks and I’ve been slowly gathering all of my creative work under the banner of Zornhau Studios. I started in playing RPGs in the late 90s, with a second hand copy of the AD&D DMG — we didn’t even have the PHB, so from the start we were hacking the game just to make it playable — and I’ve been running, playing, hacking, and writing about RPGs ever since.

My taste in games bounces between two equally specific, narrow fields. On the one hand, I found myself drawn to very particular styles of character-driven play exemplified by games like The Riddle of Steel and The Burning Wheel. My current long-term project, Sword & Scoundrel is a refinement of and love letter to those games and that style of play. I’m actually quite close to a major update to all of the play-testing materials that have been floating around for a couple years and these will hopefully represent the version of that game that I will, eventually endeavor to kickstarter. Having spent a decade redrafting and revising the thing, I’d like to bring the project to completion and a close. 

At the other end of the spectrum, I’ve been increasingly drawn to OSR in general and early D&D in particular. As my earliest exposures to the hobby came from what amounted to AD&DIY, a lot of the OSR felt like a kind of coming home. Amusingly, the more philosophical arguments of the OSR movement in terms specificity of play-style (See: any given writing proclaiming to be an OSR primer, intro to the OSR style, etc) is in a lot of ways an attempt to address the exact same issues in the hobby as my other favored style of play, with a surprising amount of overlap between the two. 

A great deal of my writings — particularly on my older blog — were on OSR topics, particularly by way of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Of these, I had a couple picked up by Knock! Magazine and published in its first issue. I have a couple more pieces that will feature in future issues. Some of that will make its way to my Substack as well, where I write about TTRPG things including both of the above.

In the last few years, I’ve been increasingly drawn to OD&D in particular. I’m the kind of nerd who finds rpg design itself interesting, so my interest initially began as a kind of role-play archeology. Over time, I’ve been increasingly impressed the system itself — particularly when combined with chainmail or the different materials from early Dragon magazine articles. As my last few projects have involved tinkering with the OD&D formula, I thought it about time I sought out folks who knew the game better than I probably ever will. And thus, here I am.

Look forward to getting to know you all!
 

[gristlebottom]

Hi All,

My name is Pete and I'm from Nova Scotia, Canada, but I am currently living in Vanocouver.

I have been an enthusiastic lurker in the Old School online scene since the glory days of the OSR blogosphere, and recently I have decided to step out of the shadows and start communicating and contributing the scene which has given me so much entertainment and inspiration over the years.

I started playing D&D at the age of 10 with Moldvay in 1988, quickly moving on to AD&D 1st and then 2nd edition, and then on to 3rd before becoming baffled and disenchanted with fourth edition...so, I suppose, I had a fairly typical grog trajectory

Currently, I have a great interest in Chainmail and OD&D. I have four kids, and with the younger two I play Delta's Book of War System, and with my older two I play Chainmail (although my oldest is the real D&D-head of the two).

I am running an Old School Essentials campaign currently, which I am posting on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU1S7GAa8KA7-0bZ31L64RQ), although I look forward to creating OD&D content in the near future.

I have a million questions and ideas that I want to share with you all! 

[hamurai]

Welcome, newcomers!

[arkansan]

Feb 9, 2024 22:21:54 GMT -6 gristlebottom said:

Hi All,

My name is Pete and I'm from Nova Scotia, Canada, but I am currently living in Vanocouver.

I have been an enthusiastic lurker in the Old School online scene since the glory days of the OSR blogosphere, and recently I have decided to step out of the shadows and start communicating and contributing the scene which has given me so much entertainment and inspiration over the years.

I started playing D&D at the age of 10 with Moldvay in 1988, quickly moving on to AD&D 1st and then 2nd edition, and then on to 3rd before becoming baffled and disenchanted with fourth edition...so, I suppose, I had a fairly typical grog trajectory

Currently, I have a great interest in Chainmail and OD&D. I have four kids, and with the younger two I play Delta's Book of War System, and with my older two I play Chainmail (although my oldest is the real D&D-head of the two).

I am running an Old School Essentials campaign currently, which I am posting on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU1S7GAa8KA7-0bZ31L64RQ), although I look forward to creating OD&D content in the near future.

I have a million questions and ideas that I want to share with you all! 

Welcome aboard!

[CeruleanRex]

Greetings All,

My thanks for having me join you all here. I am Johhny King aka Cerulean Rex. Rex .. Wizard-King ... I mean its my name I was going to do something with that. hehe

I am young by some standards and old by others. I started playing D&D in '81. Moldvay. Erol Otus art will just never not be the D&D imagery that gives me this surreal sense of wonder about what this game even really is.

I started playing with my best friend in jr. high. We would alternate being each other's DM each weekend. ALL weekend. We each ran our own party of adventurers. After about two years I had played all the classes up to high teens to 20th level, played with just a ton of the magic items, fooled around with most of the spells. Kinda saw it all and decided to get serious and DM for a group of 6 friends. That turned out to be my place, but then I found my DM metor who was better than I. My college years I finally got to play in one of those big games. It was magic.

I DM'd a lot through the mid 90's. Stretched the Giants through Drow through Lolth series into 3 years of game play. Great fun with those modules. After that I latched back onto super hero games, and D20 Modern for a while. Was part owner in a game store from 02 to 04. I have played all the editions of D&D except 4th. lol I was so adjacent to the game when white boxes were still around. I am surprised I don't have one from back then. That's ok. I have a couple of them now. I got serious about questing for an understanding of the history of the game and understanding its origin 2018 or 2019. I have been gathering knowledge around Original D&D and the TSR era these last few years. I suspect I am not alone when I say its hard to express what drives that ... this need to get my arms around this thing that keeps calling me back through various periods of my life. I have determined that it is not going to leave the forefront of my attention again. I have lost too many years not pursuing ... whatever it is around D&D that I need to work out. I think it is just to be a part be of some value to those who love it in the best ways that I know how.

That's ... a lot, and I don't know if that makes sense to anyone.

I have a reverence for the game itself, its creators, how it started, how it has evolved, and what it is to people today. I am especially interested in the D&D that happens these days using boxes and books that are called something else. There is a renaissance of fantasy roleplaying game design that has not been happening in Renton of late. Magic was happening there 10 years ago imho, but not for a long time now. But as for that renaissance, there is something special in that and it is the echoes of the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva, in games that are not Dungeons & Dragons™, but they are ... D&D. That's something that corporate ownership just can't account for. Long live the game designers!

I think I might just be rambling now. Be careful asking me to talk. I will. Ok that's pretty much me. The broad strokes, at least, of why I love this game and it's history and its people.

Thanks again for allowing me to chat with you folks about it. I hope to add something valuable to the discussion, but for now, I think I should mostly listen to the conversation without worrying about talking so much. Time enough for that once I have a feel for the rhythm of this community.

All The Best,
—CREX

[Zenopus]

Welcome, Johnny. We have met in person at Gary Con - I played in your session of the Legends tournament last year.

Mar 7, 2024 19:49:20 GMT -6 CeruleanRex said:

I started playing with my best friend in jr. high. We would alternate being each other's DM each weekend. ALL weekend. We each ran our own party of adventurers.

That is exactly how I played the majority of the time in middle school. My best friend would only be in our neighborhood every other weekend (divorced parents), and we didn't know any other local kids who played, so we each made our own party and took turns DMing. It's an underrated mode of playing. He actually still runs games for one of his kids that way.

[200orcs]

Hello everyone, I'm 200orcs.

I've been playing D&D since the early 90s. Have ended up playing multiple systems, mainly DMed D&D with a sprinkling of Shadowrun. As I got increasingly frustrated with D&D 4e, I took a hiatus. I was a D&D 5e early tester, and even though it had a lot of potential with the initial rules, I slowly saw it get increasingly more complex and roll-play vs role-playing.

So off I went searching for something like D&D but more focused on role-playing. I read a lot of systems, and it wasn't till I started looking into D&D B/X, did I realize that perhaps instead of looking at the latest games, I should be looking at older games.

That's how the 3 LBBs came into my life. Suddenly all the things I didn't like, the character creation game, the over inflation of modifiers, the must-have skills all went away.

I love reading perspectives, new ways of interpreting old rules, and it's always nice to see how creatively people homebrew things.

Currently, I'm working on my own heartbreaker that's heavily based on OD&D.

...English is my second language, so I do mess up how I say things, but most of the time it's not a problem.

[CeruleanRex]

Mar 8, 2024 12:04:03 GMT -6 Zenopus said:

Welcome, Johnny. We have met in person at Gary Con - I played in your session of the Legends tournament last year.

Mar 7, 2024 19:49:20 GMT -6 CeruleanRex said:

I started playing with my best friend in jr. high. We would alternate being each other's DM each weekend. ALL weekend. We each ran our own party of adventurers.

That is exactly how I played the majority of the time in middle school. My best friend would only be in our neighborhood every other weekend (divorced parents), and we didn't know any other local kids who played, so we each made our own party and took turns DMing. It's an underrated mode of playing. He actually still runs games for one of his kids that way.

Oh this is so cool. I haven't met anyone else who started playing this particular way. I love that he is doing it that way for his kid. It TEACHES you the mechanics like, thoroughly. Do that for a year or so and yeah, you're pretty much primed to DM because you can really see the underpinnings of the game after that.

I thought I had you connected to that game session from last year by the way but I was not sure! So glad to find you here as well! If you are going to be at GC be sure and flag me down. I have something for you related to that tournament session.

[cheshiredinah]

Hello,

I am from the Pacific Northwest of the US. I played mostly Pathfinder society for a bit in college, which was 1 Edition (D&d 3.5).  Recently, I have got into od&d with plans of using it to aid with learning Japanese. I have read all of LLB, and I am currently working on reading "Playing at the World". I have really enjoyed reading into to the history of D&d.

I am looking forward to spending time in this community.

[mouser]

Ya know, I never introduce myself but here at ODD74 I feel like this could actually be a fun thing. I realized over the past few years that I generally like anyone who has played Boot Hill or OD&D, like, yes, sometimes these old-school fellow players can have some character traits that are, shall we say, abrasive occasionally but generally I have an affinity for them.

I played a lot of Boot Hill, the boxed set, in about 1984-86. I started my D&D gaming about 1982 with a fabulous DM who had a few of the OD&D books and the AD&D DM guide; he was 11 years old, as was I, and to this day I still think he was the best DM I ever had.

I do like the Star Wars forum here--I like the angle where, IIRC, one of the threads envisions how Star Wars could have gone based on how things were looking pre-Empire Strikes Back. I was hugely into the Han Solo books and Splinter of the Mind's Eye, and I devoured any fan speculation that was available around and after the release of Empire, and so I definitely remember how I thought Star Wars was going to go as opposed to how it went.

That being said, Return of the Jedi is my favorite Star Wars film by far.

That's all for now. It's nice to be here.

Edit: I found two threads that were about Star Wars branching off in a different direction based on the expectations set up in the original film:

odd74.proboards.com/thread/6142/star-wars-saga


odd74.proboards.com/thread/6136/star-wars

[chuckleberry]

Howdy, all!

I'm Chuckleberry! There's nothing super unique about my RPG journey, especially amongst fellow appreciators of the Old Ways. But I'll give a little rundown for the sake of self-introduction.

I got started with RPGs in my early teens when I got the 1991 D&D black box. My friends and I made the jump to 2e not long after. Edgy teenage me loved running Ravenloft, but I also ran and played in a number of both published and homebrew campaigns.

My family moved while I was in high school and I never got tied in with a regular group. This was very shortly after 3e came out, and I wasn't too keen on 3e. So the FLGS still had some old stock of editions I was interested in. But every time I'd go there'd be less material I cared to peruse, so it never became a regular haunt for me. So my play for most of the early 2000's consisted almost entirely of sessions at Gen Con and my town's local con, Winter War.

From college onward I've played, sometimes regularly, sometimes sporadically. If I'm organizing and running campaign play, it's probably a TSR-era flavor of D&D. But on the player side, I've enjoyed a pretty wide range of systems and settings.

I had trouble getting into online play during the lockdown years; it just didn't do it for me. And my partner and I moved, so when things started opening back up and people started meeting IRL again, I didn't have any play partners. But last month I attended GameStorm in Portland, OR. There I got tied in with some local folks and got invited to some discord servers and it's led to a real resurgence of gaming for me. In fact, last night, for my first time, I played OD&D using the Chainmail rules. And it was a blast. So here's hoping for a '24 full of '74!

[Mythic Mountains RPG]

Hello! I apologize for my incredibly late response!

I'm Mythic Mountains RPG. I tried to run Star Wars D20 in 2002 for friends and they laughed at me. It took forever to find a table, eventually I found a guy willing to run GURPS. He hated D&D, but it intrigued me, so by 2015 I got my mitts on a PHB. Why would you do an older edition of a thing right? Obviously you want the most RECENT edition?

I ran 5e for about 6 years, and made it work for me. This began to change after the pandemic when I started running online. We did a 5e campaign from levels 1 to 20, multiple different campaigns, and I met hundreds of players.

It sucked.

I began to think maybe this just wasn't the hobby for me. it didn't fit my idea of what D&D was, and no one (in my bubble at the time) seemed interested in it.

At the end of 2020 I discovered the OSR. Within 1.5 years I figured out there were people running and playing what I loved. My hobby is 10x better!

I really love classical D&D, and want to learn more about OD&D and AD&D. I've been running a campaign world (currently using Swords & Wizardry) for about 3.5 years now.

It's nice to meet you all!

[algebraicvariety]

Hi everyone! I'm Algebraicvariety. My first RPG was one I invented by myself in middle school when I had no idea what an RPG was, basing it on a comic strip that actually satirized RPGs. It was mostly played one-on-one, and I got all my friends hooked on it. There were no dice, just imagination and my willingness to go along with my players' power fantasies.

10 years later, I dipped into RPGs again by learning Dungeon World and quickly tossing away everything other than the main resolution mechanic. I used this to ref a couple of one-shots and a mini-campaign.

1.5 years ago, I discovered the OSR and actually read B/X and OD&D. I was astonished to find that so many references and game concepts from video games, board games, and RPGs like Dungeon World came straight from original D&D. I had played a lot of Nethack and other roguelikes, so I got the appeal of tough, challenge-based gameplay.

So, I gathered a group and started running them through some modules using B/X rules. We did the Tower of Zenopus, B1, and the beginning of B2, then I had to move and the group dissolved. I enjoyed the dungeon-crawling but felt that we were missing something by just stringing together modules.

After moving, I started a proper campaign using the AD&D rules and no modules, just the campaign concept outlined in the DMG with a made-up setting. We're now 15 sessions in and I'm enjoying it a lot. I'm documenting this campaign on my blog algebraicvariety.blogspot.com to keep players updated and for those who are interested.

I'm endlessly fascinated by OD&D, especially the possibility of running a truly domain-first game with it. But I'm also intimidated by the relative lack of rules. Generally I've found it hard to be a referee and a game designer at the same time with good results and in a fair way. So I'm always looking for insights about different interpretations of OD&D, and always happy to share them when they occur.

[rredmond]

Wow. Welcome to you and all the folks introducing themselves in this thread!!

[cavalier973]

Greetings, all, and thank you for including me.

I found this forum after I heard about “the Gygax 75 Challenge”, which led me to “Delving Deeper”, which led me here.

I do have a blog that I post to semi-regularly: greymerryfaire.wordpress.com/
It’s mostly just my cartoony characters arranged in different outfits.

I have another blog in which I recorded a play-through of Baldur’s Gate•
Here is a link to the first post: balanpshaw.wordpress.com/2012/03/27/hello-world/
I could never figure out how to make Wordpress show the earliest posts first.

I also have a published game that I released some years back, called “MAUL”, that sold exactly one copy (someone in Japan purchased it). When the OGL crises happened earlier this year, I shut it down. I think the rules are somewhere on the “Greymerry Faire” blog. It’s basically my home brewed version of microlite, as I recall.

[jbulloug]

Hello everyone, and thank you rredmond for approving my request to join! I'm not a hardcore D&Der, but a slowly returning newbie. At the age of 10/11 I played the Moldvay/Cook Basic and Expert sets and still managed to hang onto the red and blue rule books, although I lost the modules, dice, box and whatever else they came with! I continued to play not knowing there was any meaningful difference between D&D and AD&D through high school and college, then forgot about D&D until the pandemic gave me an excuse to rediscover D&D and wargames with my 12 year old son. At the same time I found myself getting interested in the old campaign worlds of Greyhawk and Blackmoor, which led me to various websites and eventually also here. I recalled seeing a large Greyhawk index spanning all kinds of publications and not seeing one for Blackmoor decided to try to begin one with mentions of people/places/events/etc. in the 'official' Blackmoor publications from TSR, Judges Guild, Zeitgeist... Hope to learn some cool stuff here and look forward to participating!

John (jbulloug)

[lastfighter]

Hello all,

I have been playing roleplaying games on and off since 1980. I started out with basic D&D and soon started playing AD&D which is my most familiar system. In college I played a bit of 2E and started to branch out into other systems like RuneQuest, Rolemaster, Traveller, GURPS, WHFRP, V&V, Earthdawn, SpaceMaster, Champions, Marvel Superhero’s, Star Frontiers and James Bond 007 to name a few. The hobby laid pretty fallow for me except for the occasional convention in the years following.

During the pandemic I started playing a lot of online games and got started in a few online campaigns. It was tremendous fun and now I am working on finding a local in-person group as well. I hope to find fellow travelers here and meet you in person at a convention sometime in the future.

You can find me at a few cons a year. In the past decade I have gone to Gen Con, Origins, GameHole Con, Big Bad Con, DunDra Con, Pacific Con, Kubla Con, NTRPG Con, and Gary Con.

I am also LastFighter on TableTop if you want to friend me there.

Steven (LastFighter)

[rredmond]

Welcome Steven and enjoy!

[Punkrabbitt]

Hi lastfighter. I hope you enjoy your time here.

[pajeje]

Hey guys, Greetings to all of you!. And my Thanks to Falconer  for let me in.



I've been lurking around for years to get snippets of goodness of your interpretation and great content regarding the excellent Original rules.

I mainly use discord for gaming, but after I've seen some of you guys in there giving excellent advice, I got interested in joining your forums at last.



I play DnD since early 2000's but I'm fairly new to the oldschool gaming myself (I started circa 2017). But there's no going back for me. The original rules (it's supplements and some of it's retroclones) are very excellent and everyday I get something new from it for my games. The discussions I see online always gives me some new insights and I keep returning back to the books, and it's great.



During the pandemic my games was always online, but now I'm getting my real world friends together from time to time and presenting them this excellent game that they think they knew all about but had no idea how impressive it could be. Thanks again and Cheers!

[aesping]

Hello, I am aesping. I'm from Sweden. I am 43 years old. I did a slight recap in my application presentation so if anyone is interested you can have a look over there. Right now I am participating in a Shadowdark campaign (online via Discord), I run a campaign for my two kids using Holmes Basic (I am thinking of perhaps moving it over to Delving Deeper when they have reached lvl 3), I am also in planning for a short campaign for a friend of mine, and hopefully some other people, using Shadowdark. Me and my friend have played lots of RPGs over the years but we don't live near each other anymore and other duties and chores take up most of the time. The two primary reasons on why I joined here is that I want to learn from and hear about players/DMs experiences from the early years of D&D, and I would like to help out with Delving Deeper (proofreading and whatnot). What else, yes I have been looking like crazy for D20s 0-9 twice, but there doesn't seem to be any here in Sweden, or Europe as far as I can tell. So I ordered a blank Chessex (ivory) set and used Sharpies to mark them up. I also made my own hexmap for the kids campaign, I like the DIY-aspect of it. I was just browsing through the Wightbox which seems to have some nice interpretations and ideas taken from Chainmail.

[greycloak]

Greetings, all, and thank you rredmond for including me! This place breathes with rich history, as do the rules it is dedicated to. OD&D amazed me with its astonishing world far from generic fantasy and unique gameplay of mighty warlords, gathering vassals, that started as a small crew, ravaging ruins. The journey was pleasant, thanks to Delving Deeper; it’s my favorite retroclone.

Great materials on this forum inspire me to move forward, to use original with Chainmail combat only, prep stuff for it now. Wargames are my hobby too (Toofatlardies, Turnip28), and OD&D offers a precious blend between styles.

I write modules for OD&D and it’s retroclones, and draw things. You can visit teutonic-press.itch.io/ Modules are free, and one was released a day ago.

[idledoodler]

Hello all

Thanks to rredmond for the entry.

Came to RPGs through miniature gaming in 2016 on the 5e wave, then burnt out a few years later on fantasy a bit too high for my tastes. Found my way to the OSR while searching for more grounded alternatives. Ran a Barrowmaze campaign using a homebrewed version of WB:FMAG. Recently passed a hundred sessions of an open-table OSE campaign (with Attronarch currently the most-capped player). 

I have a blog chronicling that campaign along with various other hobby musings. Otherwise most RPG interaction has been through Discord and Reddit, but you can't beat a good forum.

[leopold]

Greetings and Well Met to all those on this olde but great forum. I may have interacted with some of you over the last 20+ years being on the various forums and boards for RPG's. As someone who has been involved since the Red Box days finding this site and Fight On! magazine has been a welcome joy. I look forward to contributing in some small way to the success of that fantastic product and to hope I can spread the joy that is Shadowdark and the renassiance that is the OSR.

[rredmond]

Welcome!

[hamurai]

Greetings, newcomers!