I am Haunted by Dungeons

NOT QUITE thirty-five years ago I received a copy of the Dungeons and Dragons Basic set, the glorious Moldvay red box with the trippy Erol Otus cover. The game was a birthday present, and it changed everything.

I had devoured the Hobbit, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy, and Lloyd Alexander's Prydain Chronicles. At some point I had read a Dynamite article about this crazy D&D game, complete with pictures of little toy figures exploring a maze, with monster lurking around the corners. It looked like the coolest thing ever.

I asked for a copy for Christmas, but instead got a copy of the Dungeon! boardgame, which turned out to be a lot of fun to play, but like a killer appetizer, only whetted my appetite for the main course . . . which arrived a few months later.

I think I took a copy of the game to school, stealing peeks during recess and in between classes. In the weeks and months that followed I spent a lot of time with those exotic dice, graph paper, and notebooks.

While I enjoy a bunch of different games like Traveller or Call of Cthulhu, D&D and its variants have been my mainstay over the years. I am a big fan of the retroclones and the OSR. For the last seven or eight years I have shuttled back and forth between 3.5e, Swords and Wizardry, and Pathfinder. Just recently have started playing around with 5e.

What I want to do with this blog is to try and show how I've using old school elements in my new school game, and how I pull new school elements into my old school game.