Twisty Little Passages

My earliest exposure to adventure gaming was not actually D&D but the interactive fiction software produced by companies like Infocom in the 80s, which I played on my trusty Atari 800. In particular, it would probably be hard for me to overestimate the influence the Zork games had on my young imagination. So naturally, as soon as I discovered the existence of Twisty Little Passages by Nick Montfort, which purported to be a kind of history of interactive fiction, I had to buy and read it immediately. I was not disappointed.

According to Montfort, the first work of interactive fiction, Adventure, was inspired as much by its author's Dungeons & Dragons campaign as his caving and spelunking activities; and indeed the book contains a lot of material that I think anyone interested in the history of RPGs in general and fantasy adventure gaming in particular would find fascinating. Chapter three even contains a sort of sub-chapter exclusively devoted to Dungeons & Dragons, complete with quotes from Gary Gygax and Dragon magazine. I'm not going to lie: this book is definitely not for everyone; it's a rather dry, academic exploration of a relatively obscure subject. But for the right reader (me), this is gold.

I'm good enough, I'm smart enough, and doggone it, people like me.

Or my adventure, at least. Some feedback here, here, here and here.

Easy Half-Elves for B/X

Either their elven side is dominant, in which case they're mechanically identical to elves and visually pretty much indistinguishable from other elves (think Elrond); or their human side is dominant, in which case they're mechanically identical to humans and resemble humans unless you look really closely (think Tanis). Why bother? Because I love half-elves and I hate unnecessary rules.

Ingredients

Inspired by this post over at Jeff's Gameblog. I drew inspiration for Shadowbrook Manor from here, here, here, here, here and here - and probably some other places but that's all I can think of right now. If I think of more, I'll do another post. Oh, and the books in the library are "fictional books," with the exception of a few I made up myself and a couple real ones.

Swag!

Received my complimentary hard-copy of Shadowbrook today and it is a thousand times more awesome in person than in pdf, if I may say so myself. I am inordinately proud of this thing; even if everyone else in the world decides it sucks I'll still love it. Because they'd be wrong. But seriously, the important thing is this: from tentative emails to free author's copy, Daniel Proctor, founder/owner of Goblinoid Games, has been awesome in every possible way. Patient, honest, professional, accommodating - everything most people hope for in an editor/publisher but seldom find. Here's to you, Dan - may you live for a thousand years! (In like a forever young way that doesn't suck.)

Simple Old School House-rule for Swimming in Armor

Characters in danger of drowning must roll their unmodified ac or less on a d10 each round or drown. Strong swimmers may add their strength bonus to the target number.

First Post

This will be a run on sentence: Hello I'm a bookseller and I'm kind of this huge nerd and my hobbies include reading, writing metrical poetry and playing Dungeons & Dragons and I wrote this adventure for a so-called retro-clone of the 1981 rule-set of that game called Labyrinth Lord and that's all I have to say at this time and I'm really just trying this blog thing out for a lark and I'll probably never post again thanks for stopping by.