Pirate adventures and pirate codes

Piracy is as popular in RPGs as it is in the rest of mass-media - perhaps even more so.  A semi-criminal or outright criminal band primarily loyal to one another and devoted to acquiring wealth could describe a pirate crew about as well as it does a Gygaxian adventuring party.  The wealth-sharing agreements of most adventuring parties, where the principal figures (the Player Characters) receive a greater take than their subordinates has a parallel in the pirate's code as well.

Winning Dungeons and Dragons

It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game.

There's a long-standing view that role-playing games are not things that can be won or lost.  There's always more of the game to play, and in any case the players are mainly collaborating with one another so it doesn't make sense to talk about competition.  To make sense of this, let's consider a group of players - for simplicity's sake, we'll call them FCB.

FCB are a group with different ages and backgrounds, but they're united by their enjoyment of the game.  Every year, they'll be off to different locations, running the risk of defeat and injury in the hopes of winning fame and prizes.  Due to conflicting interests, schedules - not to mention the difficulty of wrangling a large group - many of the group won't be at a particular game.  In addition, some of their players are more skilled and more active, and these elite players tend to get the lion's share of the rewards.  On the other hand, the less skilled members of FCB often learn a great deal from the better players.

Review: "The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu" by Kevin Crawford

The Smoking Pillar of Lan Yu is a free OSR module for low-level adventurers from Kevin Crawford of Sine Nomine Publishing.  However, it is primarily intended as a design example for designers interested in the visual design of early 80s modules - hence the "EX" code - and includes a detailed commentary for that audience.  Crawford has made it pretty clear that he doesn't consider the scenario to be "particularly compelling", but he does say that the Smoking Pillar is "complete and playable".  As my target audience is the DM who feels short on time or experience, I just want to address the worth of the module as a play aid in this post.

Please stop telling me that I'm allowed to improvise

My current "pet gripe" when reading modules is being told that I'm allowed to make changes or fill in details.

Boxed text in modules

I should be honest.  Shortly before writing my review of Hasken's Manor, I skimmed the blog headlines and read Courtney's post "On the Definitive Inadequacy of Boxed Text".  That partly explains why I took Brocius and Jindra to task for their lousy use of the device, but I might have done so anyway.