Larina Nix for Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition

 While working on my post for earlier today on Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition, I can't help but think about the lost opportunities that game had. I read through the books and they are barely used compared to my 1st and 5th Edition books. Though if you scratch the surface of 5e you will find some 4e DNA.

It is too bad, really, since 4e had a lot going for it. Or maybe I had invested a lot in some of the ideas that came out at the same time as 4e. I mean, if I am honest, there isn't anything I can do in 4e that I also couldn't do in 5e or BECMI, really. In any case, while going over my 4e materials, I did uncover all sorts of neat ideas. After all, this edition gave birth to my warlock character Taryn. 

But I am not here to talk about Taryn. I am here to talk about her mother, my witch Larina.

Witches in D&D 4e

4e is notable for giving us a proper witch class in Heroes of the Feywild. Well...it is a type of Wizard, but one that learned in the Feywild, aka D&D's Land of Faerie. Honestly, that works for me. I mean, I know Larina spent a long time in the Feywild, met the Faerie Lord Scáthaithe, and gave birth to Taryn. So doing all my D&D 4 playing in the Feywild would work, it would explain why magic is different in this edition.

So that all works. I know I am going to get a warlock out of the process with Taryn, but what else? I spent some time here stating up some characters for 4e and 4e Essentials, but character building by hand with this game, especially a high-level character, is a long process. It was a fun process, don't get me wrong, but long. I just forgot how many character options there are for later 4e characters. 

Here are some of the characters I did when 4e was still active. There are few witches here along with some classics.

• Aleena, the Cleric from D&D Basic (Mentzer)
• Morgan Ironwolf, the Fighter from D&D Basic (Moldvay)
• Hex, the Dark Elf witch from Skylanders
• Skylla, the "Evil Magic-user" from the D&D toy line.
• Eireann, a "proto-Sinéad" concept who now has a life of her own.

While these each took some time, each one was a really fun build. So much, really, that I could see myself running some sort of one-shot for 4e set in Feywild.  I will get to doing stats for Sinéad and Taryn for 4e when I discuss the 4e Forgotten Realms.

Larina Nix for 4e

Larina is, as always, a test-bed character for me. In 3e when I first started I tried her out as an "out of the box" sorcerer. When 4e came out I tried her as a Warlock. But Larina is no sorcerer and certainly not a warlock. I know these differences are largely academic, but I am the academic who cares about them.

Thankfully my 4e experiments could move on with Taryn who IS a warlock. Eventually, the Heroes of the Feywild book came out and solved my problems.

For this build, I am going to use the following books.

• Player Handbook 4th Edition
• Arcane Power
• Player's Option: Heroes of the Feywild 

Heroes of the Feywild is the main book, but I am also taking powers, feats, and ideas from the others. There are other books I could have used, but I wanted to limit myself to these. There is a third-party witch book, World of the Witch, that is quite good, but I wanted to stick to the official WotC books this time.

For this build, I went all out. This is Larina as a 30th-level Queen of Witches (the Epic Destiny in the book). I figured...what the hell, go fo it.

Given that in 4e, newer powers replace older ones, I just built the character backward. So, I started at what she gets as the 30th level and worked my way down. I didn't have to do a lot because while going through all my notes and character sheets, I found character sheets for her at 1st (several of these), 7th, 13th, and 25th levels. Differences exist between all of these, but all in all, I got a pretty good picture of what I wanted to do.  

Larina Nix, Witch Queen

30th-level Female Human Witch (Wizard)

Unaligned (Lawful Neutral)
Class: Witch (Full Moon Coven)
Paragon Path: Legendary Witch
Epic Destiny: Witch Queen

Abilities
Strength: 12 +1
Constitution: 16 +3
Dexterity: 16 +3
Intelligence: 22 +6
Wisdom: 22 +6
Charisma: 20 +5

Combat
Initiative: +18
Speed: 6 (30ft)
Hit Points: 155
Bloodied 77
Healing surges: 38hp

Defenses
AC: 36
Fortitude: 33
Reflex: 36
Will: 38

Vision: Normal
Passive Insight: 31
Passive Perception: 31

Skills
Acrobatics +18, Arcana +29, Athletics +16, Bluff +23, Diplomacy +24, Dungeoneering +21, Endurance +18, Heal +28, History +26, Insight +21, Intimidate +25, Nature +21, Perception +21, Religion +26, Stealth +18, Streetwise +20, Thievery +18

Feats
Human: Linguist, Toughness, Implement Focus, Fey Bond, Combat Medic, Armor Proficiency: Leather, Skill Focus: Arcana, Improved Defences, Familar Utility, Enlarge Spell, Arcane Resources, Ritual Caster, Arcane Mastery, Irresistible Flame, Arcane Fire, Pact Initiate: Warlock (Fey), Spell Accuracy, Nightmare Wizardry, Arcane Ritualist

Features
Familiar, Witch Cantrips (3), Bonus Skill: Healing, Full Moon Coven, Favor of the Moon, Move Coven Action, Witch Apotheosis, Witch Queen Presence, Pact Initiate (Fey Pact Warlock)

Languages
Common, Goblin, Elven, Draconis, Primordial, Sylvan

Powers (Spells)
Cantrips
Light, Mage Hand, Prestidigitation

At-will
Bonus: Ray of Frost, +6 vs Fortitude, 2d6+6 cold damage
Breath of Night, +6 vs Fortitude, 2d10+6 damage
Witch Bolt, +6 vs Reflex, 2d10+6 damage

Encounter
Warlock: Eye Bite, +5 vs Will, 2d6+5 psychic damage
Madness of the Full Moon, +6 vs Will, 2d10+6 psychic damage
Night Tempest, +6 vs Fortitude, 2d8+6 cold damage, knocked back 5 squares
Chain Lightning, +6 vs Reflex, 4d6+6, 2d6+5, 1d6+6 lightning damage
Supreme Glorious Presence, +6 vs Will, 4d6+6 damage, target knocked back, Allies heal

Daily
Acid Wave, +6 vs Reflex, 5d6+6 acid damage, 10 ongoing
Unicorn Form, Polymorph, secondary 5d8+6, push 1 square
Prismatic Wall
Herbal Healing
Evanesce
Witch Thorns
Moonlight Mischief, teleport 6 squares
Ride the Night Wind, Fly 8, +2 to Reflex
Umbral Stride, phase, move 10 squares
True Prophecy, +2 to all rolls

Rituals
Arcane Barrier, Comprehend Language, Consult Mystic Sages, Consult Oracle, Enchant Magic Item, Eye of Warning, Guards and Wards, Hand of Fate, Magic Circle, Magic Map, Object Reading, Remove Affliction, Telepathic Bond, Wizard's Sight

Equipment
Staff, books, dagger, shoulder bag, leather armor +6, Bracers of Defense, Ring of Wizardry, Cloak of Feywild Escape, Broom of Flying, Elven Boots

--

So I really like this build. If I were still playing 4e I might house rule that some of the other witch spells from other games could be rituals. That is the easiest way to bring them in. 

She has a lot of feats, just the reality of 4e. But I was able to do some interesting things with them that have great in-universe and in-character explanations.  Linguist and Toughness are the ones she always takes. She is the party translator and "face." Because of that she is usually in front where the action is, so she needs to survive long enough to be powerful enough on her own. Feats to make her magic more potent, to be more fiery, and things like that.

But two in particular are really fun. Fey Bond and Pact Intitate. I had plans to do a Feywild-centric set of adventures for some time. The more I work on 4e versions of Larina, Taryn, and Sinéad, the more I want to do it, and do it with 4e. These two feats then represent her time in the Feywild and her bond with Faerie Lord Scáthaithe, who would become the father of her daughter Taryn and Taryn's Warlock Patron.  I know I said above that Larina was a lot of things, but no warlock. Well... a lot of her earlier sheets were warlocks. The way 4e does multi-classing is very different than the other versions of D&D, so it's not like she is a true Warlock, just a dabbler.

Scáthaithe the Knight of Swords and a young Larina

I look forward to digging up my 4e sheets on Taryn and making some new ones for Sinéad.

Maybe I should get that Feywild 4e game going sometime. That sounds like a lot of fun.

#AtoZChallenge2024: Sunday Special, D&D 4th Edition

This Sunday A to Z special we are talking about the most controversial version of D&D put out. That would be 2008's Fourth Edition Dungeons & Dragons.

Dungeons & Dragons, 4th Edition

Again, lets set the stage. It is 2007, and Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition, now in its 3.5 edition, has been going on for 7 years. There are hundreds of D&D 3e books out there, and if you count the ones released by 3rd party publishers, then there are thousands.

Rumor has it that the Powers that Be at Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro saw all that money these publishers had made and also saw that they were getting none of it.  So they had the D&D team design a new version of D&D. Now, seven years is not a bad run for a set of core rules; a little light, yes, but not bad. But it was not the normal dropping off of sales that prompted this change; rather, it was a desire to reign back in the OGL and SRD.  Thus, 4th edition was born. Or so the story goes.

Now I have heard these tales for a long time. While I can certainly see where they could be true I have never seen a smoking gun or anything like that to confirm it. I do know that out of all the editions 4th is the least compatible with all the others. I also know that the license used to support 4e products was restrictive and slow to come out. 

Pathfinder, as I mentioned on P day came out and took over the market from 3e, and many other gamers saw the new 4e rules and went back even further still to older games.  

Much like the hydra of old the problem only got bigger.

This is too bad, really, because there is nothing really wrong with 4e.

I loved the art and the attention to detail in the game's design. Was it D&D? I can't answer that for you. For me, it was "near D&D," just like Pathfinder was/is. In some ways, Pathfinder was more D&D 4 than D&D 4 was. They were cousins, born at the same time, whose grandparents had trouble telling apart as their favorite.

DrivethruRPG has a sizable collection now of Fourth Edition PDFs.  A few I have already bought. I could simply unload a few of those books, not sure how or where, and then rebuy them on PDF.

I love that 4e was very modular in layout.  I very easily could cut up all the books and reshuffle them to have all the classes in one place and all the skills and feats in another. All the monsters, mostly alphabetical in yet another.   The organization appeals to my innate sense of order and collection (or is that OCD?).

The real question is, is it worth it?  Obviously, if I played the game more then yes.  But I only dabble. Here and there now. I like the fluff.  I have talked about 4e in terms of sunk cost fallacy and how I would later go on to adapt the materials for my 5e games. But I still feel it never really got a fair shake.

Maybe I'll come back to it someday.

--

Tomorrow is back at it with S Day, and I'll talk about a topic very close to the heart of many Dungeons & Dragons players in the 1980s, the Satanic Panic!

#AtoZChallenge2024: R is for Ravenloft

 This has been a favorite feature of my A to Z posts over the years, with two of my earliest A to Z posts covering the same topic.

• 2011: R is for Ravenloft
• 2012: R is for Ravenloft: Masque of the Red Death

One would think I didn't have any more to say, but those are just two of 56 posts I have here about Ravenloft (soon to be 57). But yet here I am with more to say.

What is Ravenloft?

Ravenloft was originally an adventure for First Edition AD&D, released back in 1983, and written by Tracy and Laura Hickman's husband and wife team. It was part of the "I" or intermediate series of adventures. Most of these were not linked and only shared that they were higher level than beginning adventures. Ravenloft, given the code I6, was for character levels 5 to 7. 

Ravenloft was a huge change from many of the adventures TSR had published to that date. For starters the adventure featured an antagonist, Count Strahd von Zarovich, who was no mere monster. Yes he was an AD&D Vampire, but he was meant to be run as an intelligent Non-player Character.  Prior to this the vampires have been the unnamed Vampire Queen of the Palace of the Vampire Queen, Drelnza the vampire daughter of Iggwilv in The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, and Belgos the Drow Vampire in Vault of the Drow. By 1983 the amount written on all three of these vampires would not even be as long as this post will be. Strahd was different.

Strahd had a backstory, he had motivation, and he was intelligent and ruthless. Destroying him was the goal and that was not an easy feat by any stretch of the imagination.

The adventure also introduced some new elements as well. The dungeon crawl was gone, replaced by a huge gothic castle and a nearby village. The adventure could be replayed ab unique given the "Fortunes of Ravenloft" mechanic that allows key items, people, and motives to change based on a fortune card reading.

And there were the iso-morphic, 3D looking maps, that helped give perspective to many levels of Castle Ravenloft. 

The adventure was an immediate and resounding hit. This adventure, along with the Dragonlance Adventures also by Tracy Hickman (and Margaret Weis) led to something many old-school gamers call "The Hickman Revolution" and claim it marks the time between the Golden Age and Silver Age of AD&D, with the Silver age coming after 1983. While yes there was a change, a lot of it was for the better.

For me, it was a dream come true. Vampires had always been my favorite creatures to fight in D&D, and I was an avid Dracula fan. I bought this adventure and then threw it at my DM, saying, "Run this!" 

I grew up on a steady stream of Universal Monsters, Hammer Horror, and Dark Shadows. That's my Appendix N. So, an adventure set in pretty much the Hammer Hamlet where I get strange locals and have to fight a vampire? Yeah, that is what D&D was to me.

I find that the people who don't like this adventure don't see what makes it great. This is not Lord of the Rings, Conan, or some other Appendix N pulp fantasy. This is Hammer Horror. Strahd has to be played with a combination of charisma, scene-chewing villainy, and absolute brutality. In other words, it is exactly like Christopher Lee playing Dracula.  Even the nearby village is filled with terrified, but the pitchfork in the ready village is a Hammer Hamlet. 

Original, 25th Anniversary Edition, Print on Demand Edition

I even got my original module from 1983 signed by Tracy Hickman.

This adventure was so popular that it spawned a sequel, Ravenloft House on Gryphon Hill and an entire campaign setting.

Ravenloft: The Setting

I mention that in college, I played AD&D 2nd Edition. The biggest selling point of AD&D 2nd ed was the campaign settings. There were a lot of them. Too many. But my favorite was Ravenloft. They took the events of the 1983 adventure and built an entire world around it with people, magic and lots of horror monsters. It was Gothic horror, to start with, but soon expanded into other realms of horror using the AD&D 2nd Ed rules. Not always a perfect fit, but I made it work.

It even expanded it to Earth in Ravenloft: Masque of the Red Death. 

It has been so popular that it is one of the few settings to see publication across all five major editions of D&D.  4th Edition made some changes, as did 5th Edition. But that is all within the same vein (so to speak) as all Horror movies, and Dracula in particular, get reinterpreted to fit the times better. Horror is always about what people in the here and now are concerned with. Ravenloft follows suit.

Ravenloft has been listed as one of the greatest adventures of all time and Strahd as one of the greatest D&D villains ever. 

I have run this adventure many times under many different rulesets, and it has been a blast every time. 

Even if I am not playing D&D, I return to this adventure and this setting. 

Tomorrow is Sunday, so a break from A to Z, but not my posting. I will cover Dungeons 7 Dragons 4th Edition.

This is also my next entry of the month for the RPG Blog Carnival, hosted by Codex Anathema on Favorite Settings.

Kickstart Your Weekend: Witches and Wizardry

 Ah. Two of my favorite topics. Let's see what this weekend has in store for us on the Kickstarter front.

The Witches of Oz #1 - A Mature Magical Queer Romance

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/comicuno/the-witches-of-oz-1-a-mature-magical-queer-romance?ref=theotherside

The next comic in Kat Calamia and Phil Falco's "Ever After Verse" features two of my all-time favorite witches. The Wicked Witch of the West and Glinda the Good Witch.  I love this "Wicked" inspired cover too. The story should be fun and I am always here for a retelling of the Wizard of Oz story.

If it is half as good as their other entries into this shared universe then it should be a blast.

Can't wait to see it really.

Swords & Wizardry: Expansions, Monsters, and More!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/adventuredesigntome/swords-and-wizardry-expansions-monsters-and-more?ref=theotherside

Swords & Wizardry is back with a brand new edition...wait, I almost Vanilla Iced this. Starting over.  

Swords & Wizard had a great Kickstarter a while back a produced some really attractive books. This expansion set looks every bit as good and hopefully will be a viable option for folks wanting to try new games, other than D&D. 

This is the best version of Swords & Wizardry I have seen so far. I wish the game a lot of success.

#AtoZChallenge2024: Q is for Queens

 I have an inordinate amount of Queens in my games. I am going to talk about two groups in particular, the Vampire Queens and the Witch Queens.

Tea with the Witch Queens by Brian Brinlee

Both groups are near and dear to my heart and make up a lot of my game worlds' backgrounds.

The Vampire Queens

The vampire queens have a special connection to my early days of gaming. They are:

• There is the (unnamed) Vampire Queen of "Palace of the Vampire Queen," one of the earliest published D&D adventures.
• Lady Neeblack of "The Hanging Coffins of the Vampire Queen." 
• Queen Xaltana of The Lost Caverns of Acheron.
• Darlessa, the vampire Queen who killed my first character and antagonist of my #Dungeon23 adventure.
• Human witch stats
• Vampire stats (Labyrinth Lord)
• Vampire stats (Old-school Essentials)
• Vampire stats (Wasted Lands)
  
• As a Ravenloft Darklord

I have been using vampire queens in my adventures for as long as I can remember. I recall reading lurid tales of Erzsébet Báthory and watching movies like "Daughters of Darkness" and "Countess Dracula." I had worked on a very early vampire queen, who was going to be called "Miriam" thanks to "The Hunger" for my Ravenloft games (see tomorrow), but I kept coming up with so many ideas. Miriam is still out there, even if many of her aspects are now part of Darlessa. The non-vampire parts of Miriam survived as my Witch Queen Miriam. 

In truth I kind of use them all interchangeably, with some emphasis on Darlessa. As they have all evolved in my games, I am slowly sifting out which traits belong to which queen. 

Interestingly enough, both Darlessa and Xaltana are also both Witch Queens. Xaltana combines Iggwilv (a witch queen) and Drelzna her vampire daughter.  

The Witch Queens

While the Vampire Queens are here to challenge the characters as adversaries, the Witch Queens play a much different and far more wide-reaching role. 

This began as an idea of me finding and then stating up every witch ever mentioned in the pages of a D&D or related game. The premise here was that every 13 years the witches of these worlds would meet in one place to discuss what they are up to in their worlds and plan to generally stay out of each other's way. The gathering, known as the Tredecim, became a big part of my games. At the Tredecim, the 13 ruling witches then choose a new High Witch Queen to serve over the next 13 years.  In my campaign, War of the Witch Queens, the then-current High Witch Queen is murdered before a new one can be chosen. This sends the witches into war against each other, but due to their pacts with Baba Yaga, they can't outright fight each other. So, all their worlds get dragged into the conflict.  This includes the characters.

The characters learn first that a once-in-a-century storm has destroyed their home, and they are refugees helping move their fellow town folk to a new home in East Haven. While their first obvious goal is to stop all the weird happenings going on in their own world, they discover these events are playing out across the worlds. To stop it, they need to stop the all-powerful Witch Queens, but to do that, they will need to discover who murdered the High Queen, how, and why.

Since I started working on this and developing it more and more, I have gone over 13 Witch Queens and my planned 13 Adventures. I am using Basic B/X D&D as my rules of choice here, which limits the levels characters can achieve to 14. 

I am running it with my family now, but I'd also like to run it for a dedicated group someday.  I think for that I would take all the adventures I am using for it and edit them all a bit. 

If I keep the levels 1-14 then the obvious choice is D&D Basic B/X.  If I expand it all to level 20 then my choice will be Castles & Crusades.

Either way, I have a lot to look forward to!

Tomorrow is R Day, and I am going with the campaign setting I ran for all of the AD&D 2nd Edition era, Ravenloft.

OH? Like the art of my Witch Queens up there? The artist is Brian Brinlee and he has a Kickstarter of his new art book going on now! Check it out.

#AtoZChallenge2024: P is for Pathfinder (and Paizo)

 A bit of a divergence today for, well, a bit of divergence.  Let me set the stage a bit. It is 2007, and Wizards of the Coast has decided to end the publication of the wildly successful Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition line and will now produce Dungeons & Dragons 4th edition.  D&D 3e was the edition that brought many back to the game. It was the edition that rekindled my enjoyment of the game after so many years. The idea that this would end only after 7 years (10 years per edition had been the average) seemed a bit odd.

In any case, 4th edition was released, and ... well, I'll talk about that on Sunday. But people were not ready to give up their 3rd Edition rules. Enter Paizo and Pathfinder!

Back when 3rd Edition was popular, Wizards of the Coast had licensed out the RPG Hobby's flagship gaming Magazines, Dragon and Dungeon, to Paizo, Inc. Here they helmed both magazines for many years and built a few 3rd Edition compatible products thanks to the Open Gaming Licence. In 2007 Wizards of the Coast announced 4th edition they did not renew the contract with Paizo to produce material. So Paizo went on to produce their own Pathfinder periodical, a set of publications similar to the Dungeon magazine. 

In 2008 D&D 4e started out with good sales, but soon they began to fall. Fall faster than expected. Paizo saw there was still a market for 3rd-edition compatible material, but they also wanted to make some changes. Thus, in 2009 the Pathfinder RPG rules were born.

So in 2009, we both did D&D 4e, which was not compatible with D&D 3x or any other D&D rules set. And Pathfinder, which was 95% compatible with D&D 3.x.  That last 5% is for the differences in the D&D 3 and 3.5 rules and the extras Pathfinder added in. But honestly, you could take your D&D 3.0 characters, fight D&D 3.5 monsters while the Game Master ran Pathfinder rules, and everyone would be fine.

Sadly, Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro has a very bad habit of firing people. The good news here though is that some of those people would go on to be hired by Paizo to work on Pathfinder. I mentioned before that Pathfinder is often thought of as being "Dungeons & Dragons 3.75" and there is a lot of truth to that. There is a lot here that feels like D&D 3.x perfected. They certainly had the advantage of 9 more years of playing and writing to help them out. 

Pathfinder then did the impossible, it dethroned D&D as the best selling Fantasy RPG. They beat D&D at their own game. If the OGL was one of the reasons 4e got made, it was 4e's failures that got 5e made. In the meantime, Pathfinder just kept moving along and doing its thing.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition came along in 2019. It was different. While the rules were still very much tied to the OGL and the system first created for D&D 3, these rules had more divergence. The Pathfinder 2nd Edition rules were created to go after the D&D 5th edition, which by this time had reclaimed its market superiority. 

This would change again in 2023 when Wizards announced they were going to "revoke" the OGL (something they actually could not do legally). Pathfinder relied on the safe harbor of the OGL (as do many publishers) so in April of 2023 they announced their Pathfinder 2e Remastered. This would be their 2e ruleset, rewritten to avoid using the OGL and instead their own ORC license. While this did not deal the blow to D&D 5e that Pathfinder did to 4e, it was enough to have some people (myself included) move from D&D 5e to Pathfinder 2eR. 

Pathfinder 2e and 2eR. I am still a sucker for a ribbon in my book.

I can find no significant differences between the Pathfinder 2e rules and the Pathfinder 2eR ones. I know Paizo is no longer selling the 2e rules in favor of the 2eR, which is as it should be. Pathfinder 2e is a fine game in its own right, and I like it better as long as I am not trying to compare it to either D&D 3e or 5e. And then only because they can all do the same sorts of games, just in different ways.

Tomorrow is Q Day, and I am going with a tried and true one. I will talk about the various Queens of Dungeons & Dragons.

#AtoZChallenge2024: O is for Original Dungeons & Dragons

 I can't properly celebrate 50 years of Dungeons & Dragons and not talk about where the game started. So let's go back to 1974 and the Original edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

This is the original 3-Volume set of Dungeons & Dragons, plus the Chainmail rules for fantasy minatures.

The rules...are arcane to say the least. These rules assumed that the player and the Referee (what would later be named Dungeon Master) already had a background in wargames or had access to those who did. Some have even gone as far as call the rules indecipherable, but I think that is obviously not the case. These rules say several reprints into the 1980s, with the 6th reprint being the most common. Mine is a mix of 3rd and 4th printings. You can still buy copies of it on DriveThruRPG if you are curious (it sells for the same price as it did back then), OR if you are super serious about it, score one of the collectible editions Wizards of the Coast did 10 years back. 

I will warn you, they are going for a lot of money now. But they are still cheaper than the OD&D rules from the 1970s.  Even the relatively common 6th printing goes for thousands of dollars now. I hate to think what 3rd printing would sell for.

There were only three character classes back then: Fighting Men, Magic Users, and Clerics. Races were humans, dwarves, hobbits/halflings, and elves, who had to decide whether to begin their day as Fighting Men or Magic Users.

Even the rolling of a d20 (twenty-sided die) was the "optional" rule for combat.

I did not start with this one. However, in 1987, I played a summer session with these rules. It was an educational experience, and I am certainly happy I did. I don't know if I will repeat it like that; I would add in more of the later supplements that made it into the game I know now. But it is something every gamer, especially every D&D player, needs to try at least once. 

These rules, though, were the absolute standard for gaming from 1974 to 1977, when TSR launched the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons line. Even other game companies mimicked TSR's approach.

A prime example is Traveller, the premier science fiction RPG, which began as a same-sized box with three books. If the D&D game books were called "The Three Little Brown Books, " the Traveller books were  "The Three Little Black Books." 

These little books are a very humble start to what would become a worldwide phenomenon. As the game grew and progressed, so did its players. We are now at a point where there is truly a game out there for everyone's needs and wants. And if the game you are playing doesn't do that, well there are thousands of choices. 

I still love reading these little books. They never get old to me. 

Tomorrow is P Day, and I'll talk about Pathfinder, the divergence of Dungeons & Dragons.