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Post by Zenopus on Apr 15, 2022 10:52:04 GMT -6
Nice work!
FWIW, I don't think Chris ever envisioned Boinger with a beard; he actually once indicated to me that he was surprised when Roslof drew Boinger with a mustache in Dragon. Chris' vintage (1970s) and modern (Tales of Peril) images of Boinger are all clean-shaven. Likely from that Tolkien conception that Hobbits are largely facial-hair free.
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Post by Zenopus on Apr 9, 2022 10:21:07 GMT -6
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Post by Zenopus on Apr 1, 2022 17:03:48 GMT -6
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 31, 2022 9:29:55 GMT -6
Would you like for me to contact Chris Holmes? He is an artist, and drew new pictures of B&Z for Tales of Peril. If so, what is the time frame for completion?
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 30, 2022 15:38:31 GMT -6
Here's a rundown of my Gary Con XIV gaming highlights: Thursday:---"Tower of Ulission", the first part of an OD&D tournament written by Dave Emigh for Winter War in the 1977, and then later published by Judges Guild, run by paleologos (Demos S, who blogs at the OSR Grimoire). skars played in this as well. Lots of riddles and problem-solving in this one, as well as combat. We finished our mission, but there was an unexpected twist at the end that I've never encountered in a D&D adventure before! ---"Hell's Highway", a Mad Max inspired miniatures racing game using modded matchbox cars. I like to play minis games between RPG sessions for a break. In this scenario we raced between checkpoints to earn fuel for our tribe while battling with the other contestants. ---"Lost Crypts of the Fire Opal", a fleshed out version of the AD&D DMG Sample Dungeon by Paul Stormberg ( stormberg here). Great group, great gameplay and problem-solving despite ending abruptly with a near-TPK caused by use of Unseen Servant! We were too clever for our own good. scottenkainen joined in for part of the game. Friday:---"Expedition to Skull Stack Crater", the first game I reffed this year, and the first time I've run this one in public. paleologos, muddy, and GRWelsh played in this one. Fun group and they successfully recovered the intelligent Spear of Decree just before the time was up! ---The annual game of Don't Give Up the Ship, miniatures rules for ship-to-ship engagements in the Napoleonic era, refereed by co-author Mike Carr in the Legends of Wargaming Hall. I was the captain of a French frigate in a huge engagement agains the British fleet. Over 20 players at once! ---The annual Friday night AD&D Legends of RPG tournament organized by Paul Stormberg. My group's DM was Steve Winter, who I always enjoy playing with. The tournament turned out to be an expanded version of Alan Lucien's Tomb of Ra-hotep, which Paul plans to publish later this year (with permission from Lucien). I was with a clever group of players who ended up 5th out of 13 groups. ---Joining the last hour of a marathon 6-hour Tower of Zenopus game run by Dave W. (of RPG Retro Reviews on YT), taking over an 18 STR halfling (!) for another player who left early. The players essentially cleared out the entire dungeon! I always enjoy seeing how others run this ur-dungeon. Saturday:---"Sword of Hope", the 2nd round of the 1977 Winter War tournament, also run by paleologos. I was the only player continuing over from the first group, and got to play one of the same characters. Lots of riddles to solve again, and we successfully completed the quest. These two adventures by Dave Emigh are seriously underrated. ---Brief stop at the Vendor's Hall, where I met Doug Kovacs, DCC artist, and caught up with grodog at the Black Blade booth. ---A rough cut of the forthcoming Gygax documentary, "Dreams in Gary's Basement", plus Q&A with the director, Pat Kilbane. He started with Holmes Basic and is still a gamer, currently working on his own RPG system. ---"In Search of the Brazen Head of Zenopus", which I ran for the 6th time. As noted above howandwhy99 played in this. I also had two players who were in the game in 2019, having forgotten they played in it before! Once again the evil lurking beneath Portown was defeated by Boinger & Zereth & friends. Sunday:---TSR's Knights of Camelot. I watched paleologos play this game on a custom 7'-long board in the Legends of Wargaming hall. I had to leave before it was over, but he ended up winning the four-player game and received a trophy, a customized miniature. It was great to meet skars, muddy, GRWelsh and howandwhy99 for the first time!
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 30, 2022 15:26:10 GMT -6
You're welcome. That Wandering Monster comes straight from Holmes' Maze of Peril! And they seem even lower in level in that story than in my convention game.
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 30, 2022 15:24:46 GMT -6
Thanks for sharing, Jason. I met some of the Troll Lords for the first time late on Saturday night (or early Sunday morning?) at the bar, via Rich M. (who is in my home group), who has known them for years.
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 29, 2022 18:22:20 GMT -6
I blame that brazen head game I snuck into (which apparently has nothing to do with bald-faced lying) Ah, I didn't realize you were in that game! Did you play Olaf & Haldor?
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 29, 2022 14:55:08 GMT -6
Yes on Hawklord's NPCs - that is the "Knights and Knaves" column. I hope so for Zenopus' dungeon - I very much want that - I have another thing from Zach but I'll check with him about that. Wow, I had forgotten about that. Looks like I indicated I was working on a second level way back in 2012! I do still have my notes from that time, but I never finished it. I'm not sure I could get it done in a short enough time frame.
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 28, 2022 15:45:17 GMT -6
VIX is XIV written for a mirror. You have to decipher the code of these posts! I fixed that in the subject line. Once this thread peters out I'll merge it with the original GC XIV thread.
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 16, 2022 11:59:25 GMT -6
skars Great to hear that! This board has gotten the most affirmative replies out of the various forums where I asked about Gary Con. Just one week until travel/arrival day!
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 13, 2022 13:08:43 GMT -6
Over 20 years ago, Gary Gygax returned once more to the World of Greyhawk for a D&D game, creating "The City on the Edge", a new adventure set in the far west. This is some of the last work that Gygax did developing the World of Greyhawk setting. Here's what we know about this forgotten & unpublished adventure: Gygax's "City on the Edge" Adventure
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 8, 2022 16:50:25 GMT -6
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 6, 2022 12:31:28 GMT -6
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 5, 2022 10:38:21 GMT -6
Paleologos on DF first clued me into Diesel being the source of the maps in B2. I talked to Diesel in person about it at NTRPCon one year, and he said he remembered drawing all of those little trees. Paleologos also talked to him about it in person in 2018, which he posted about here ("...Diesel (ditto, confirming that he did all the cartography for B2, and even added a secret chamber to the gnoll lair)...")
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 4, 2022 18:11:21 GMT -6
krusader74. Welcome back; that's an epic return post!
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 2, 2022 16:31:14 GMT -6
That's a good insight.
Bigfoot was also a memorable character on the hugely popular Six Million Dollar Man, appearing in two different two-part episodes, The Secret of Bigfoot (Feb 76) and The Return of Bigfoot (Sep 76). The former appears to have just before Star Wars started shooting in March '76.
There was also Cha-Ka on the Land of the Lost, starting in 1974, who basically looks like a mini Chewebacca with less facial hair. The first episode of the series is called "Cha-Ka". Come to think of it, the name "Cha-Ka" is not that far off from Chewbacca...
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Post by Zenopus on Mar 1, 2022 12:30:16 GMT -6
That image is just an advance mock-up using recycled art from the July 1984 Amazing Stories magazine cover. During that era, TSR constantly made catalog placeholders for advance products, typically using recycled artwork or rough guides. See a bunch at once from a 1985 catalog in this Acaeum thread, including products both produced and unproduced. The product code, 2020, was later assigned to the Wilderness Survival Guide, which was published November 1986, pretty close to the projected date (October 1986) for the Unearthed Arcana II in the catalog listing. Now, was the Unearthed Arcana II simply an undeveloped placeholder so retailers could place advance orders, or was it an actual in-development project that was shelved in favor of the Survival Guides? Impossible to know without more insider knowledge. Gygax was asked about it a few times, once on Dragonsfoot, and once in an interview, but didn't indicate any familiarity with the concept, stating that it would have been after his time. Of course, it is still possible that it was an idea that originated in his time, and he had just forgotten about it.
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Post by Zenopus on Feb 25, 2022 15:09:17 GMT -6
Since they're so elaborate, I wonder if it wouldn't be a better use of the DM's time to grab one of these maze books off the shelf and start walling off portions to produce rooms and chambers rather than mapping the dungeon corridors from scratch. I'll bet somebody's already thought of that. Offhand, one dungeon that was definitely influenced by mazes was Judges Guild's Nightmare Maze of Jigresh (1981): 
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Post by Zenopus on Feb 23, 2022 13:05:59 GMT -6
I had that Monster Mazes book by 1980 or so; I have a copy here and the copyright date is 1976. That's still a few years after D&D got started, but the product listing in the back has a section of "Gamebooks" that includes a number of earlier mazebooks, including Maze Craze, which may have be Troubadour's first Maze Book. Another maze book from the era - I think I had it before Monster Mazes - that I remember fondly was one that made a maze out of the streets of various cities of the world (London, Paris, etc). I've never been able to trace this one down on the internet. There's a much newer book called "City Mazes" that does the same thing, but it's not the one I remember. [Update: *Finally* found it using World Cat. It's "The Great Round the World Maze Trip" (1978) by Rick & Glory Brightfield - who are mentioned in the article below] Here's a NYT article from 1975 about the '70s Maze fad: www.nytimes.com/1975/07/27/archives/labyrinthian-way.htmlSo the above article is from about a year-and-a-half after D&D was released in Jan 1974, but there are already 30 maze books on the market. Koziakin's first book, Mazes, was published in 1971, which is well before D&D. So the beginning of the "Maze Craze" does predate D&D and may have been part of the milieu in which it was developed.
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Post by Zenopus on Feb 23, 2022 0:32:57 GMT -6
I do. Look up the various 3D Maze books illustrated by Larry Evans. His 3D Monster Maze book was a particular favorite of mine prior to discovering D&D:  
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 29, 2022 10:31:56 GMT -6
Trying to put myself in that 1977 head space: Human cloning was a major bioethics issue in the 1970s! For example James D. Watson's famous 1971 article in The Atlantic, titled "Moving Toward The Clonal Man"I betcha George Lucas read Watson's article in the Atlantic during the time he was writing Star Wars. Yes, cloning was very much in the popular culture in the 1970s. Widespread enough that we got a Clone spell in Greyhawk in 1975. Dune was obviously a huge influence on the first Star Wars movie with its desert planet setting and mention of spice, and Dune has its own version of a clone, a ghola, which first featured in 1969's Dune Messiah. Several years before Star Wars there was even a 1973 sci-fi movie called The Clones. Just after Star Wars, in 1978, we have an episode of the live action Spider-Man show called Night of the Clones where he battles his own evil clone (I remember watching this), and the Boys from Brazil, with a plot revolving around cloning. The very 1970s plot twist of having Luke battle his own clone was used by Zahn in the Thrawn trilogy.
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 29, 2022 10:18:47 GMT -6
I trained as a biologist, work in an adjacent field.
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 25, 2022 14:55:58 GMT -6
The thoul has two lines of invention: the name, which is known to be created by a typo; and the interpretation of what the monster actually was, which as far as I know is still not fully discovered and could have been anyone's invention. If you see my notes above about the Mangroll, it looks like Moldvay used characteristics from the Mangroll from their campaign in creating the version of the thoul for B/X. This would suggest that there wasn't a standard version in play at TSR at the time; or at least Gygax hadn't shared his version (if it existed) with them. James Mishler noted in the Piazza thread that that item and several others (Hawk Helm, Ring of Ruthlessness) are copied almost word-for-word from the Arduin Grimoire Vol 1. It appears the handwritten material was written out by Bill Wilkerson rather than Moldvay or Schick.
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 22, 2022 17:49:30 GMT -6
Interestingly, the Mangroll in the Moldvay/Schick/Wilkerson notes (page 34 of the compilation) shares several characteristics with the Thoul of Moldvay Basic. Notably, they are composed of three monsters, "part troll, part human, part ghoul"; two of these are the same as the thoul (troll and ghoul). They also paralyze and regenerate like thouls can do. A big difference is the Mangrolls have tentacle arms, whereas Thouls instead resemble hobgoblins. Page 55 of the compilation also has "Thoulls" on the Fourth Level table, but there doesn't seem to be a further description of them, perhaps because it was just taken from the OD&D tables.
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 22, 2022 16:57:02 GMT -6
Look at the wild "Wandering Dungeon Parties" (page 62 of the compiled doc assembled by Shannon Appelcline)
A few examples:
1st Level = Minotaur Fighter, Bugbear MU/T, Goblin Fighter, 5 Fighters
4th level = Hobbit MU, Lizard-Man Cleric, 6 fighters, 2 clerics, 2 MUs
5th level = Turtle-Man F/MU, 2 Dwarf fighters, 6 fighters, 3 MUs.
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 21, 2022 15:19:59 GMT -6
Holy Thyatis, Batman!
Thanks for the heads up, Falc.
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Post by Zenopus on Jan 19, 2022 18:34:47 GMT -6
Much as Sauron was Morgoth's lieutenant, and stepped in to fill the power vacuum once he was gone, you could have a lieutenant of Sauron's attempting to take over his remaining forces/assets after he is gone.
Possibilities: -Mouth of Sauron, Lieutenant of Barad-Dur (or another Black Numenorean) -Gothmog, Lieutenant of Morgul (only briefly mentioned once in LOTR) -A Balrog that Sauron unearthed from beneath the Mountains of Mordor -Blue Wizard(s) -An Uruk Hai or Olog Hai Chieftain -Some kind of military mastermind from afar (the East in LOTR) like Thrawn in the SW Expanded Universe.
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Post by Zenopus on Oct 23, 2021 15:59:04 GMT -6
In the Sources and Acknowledgements, Jon lists at least 25 people who helped make the book possible through "interviews and conversations", and these are all people who were there at the time (Ward, Schick, Cook, Ernie Gygax, etc).
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Post by Zenopus on Oct 23, 2021 15:44:33 GMT -6
I can still remember when my dad came home from the library with an early hardcover copy of the "Third Planet from Altair":  I think this was around 3rd grade, and before I had discovered D&D, so it was as significant life event for me from a "gaming" perspective. I loved it, and soon after read others in the series, mostly paperbacks from the library. I later enjoyed the Time Machine and Interplanetary Spy series, the latter of which had a lot of puzzles to solve as part of the story. Around the time I was getting into D&D, I also discovered the Endless Quest books, although I only really remember the first four, and one or two of the Super Endless Quest books I later had (where you had a character). I only every found one Fighting Fantasy book (City of Thieves), at our local library, so I never really got into those, but I loved the long-running Lone Wolf/Magnakai series. I think I played through most of the original 12 books. But best of all were the Tolkien Quest/Middle-Earth Quest gamebooks, some of which were the pinnacle '80s gamebook design, with hex maps to explore, events based on tracked time, a character you could bring from book-to-book, and essentially an entire simple 2d6-based RPG system. I played through 5 of 6 of those (I could never find the 6th) with a dwarf named Fori I; I still have his character sheet around here somewhere.
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