Actual Play: The Craft Dungeon of Reynaldo Lazendry (part 1)

One of my regular players wanted to cut down to fortnightly games while the others were up for staying on weekly.  So rather than develop more material I turned to the stack of reviewed modules.  As we're playing AD&D First Edition, Jeremy Reaban's "The Craft Dungeon of Reynaldo Lazendry" was an easy choice - it's an engaging and rewarding beginning scenario.  If you just want a review, take that link out of here because I'm about to drop some heavy spoilers!

Review: "March of the Sane" by Owen K. C. Stephens

Welcome back to the Original Adventures review series.  The Original Adventures were free monthly adventures released by Wizards of the Coast to support their D&D 3.0 and 3.5 line (though they should be playable under Pathfinder with minimal conversion).  Owen K. C. Stephens' March of the Sane, released in August 2004, was the 14th of the series.  It's an event-based adventure for a party of four 5th-level adventurers. 

Review: "The Cliff-Lair of Heeter" by Corey Ryan Walden

Corey Ryan Walden's The Cliff-Lair of Heeter is a small adventure site for 4-10 adventurers of levels 1-3, to be played under the Original D&D rules and clones of the same.  Due to the simplicity of those rules, it would be fairly easy to adapt the work for play with other TSR-era D&Ds or their OSR equivalents.  It's not free, unlike a lot of what I review, but it's modestly priced at $1.99.

Exporting the effect of AD&D ability scores: Strength

Last time, I talked about a rationale for ability scores as potential rather than realised ability.  I wanted to expand on that idea by discussing how one might export the functions of AD&D 1e's ability scores to character class and level.  (Briefly: the idea here is to keep the game more focused on these latter qualities because of verisimilitude and fairness.  It makes sense that skill is decisive and reducing the impact of random factors in character creation has long had an appeal.)  I've chosen Strength to start the discussion because it's the first in the book, but also because its AD&D functions are highly diverse.

A necessary simplification in pursuit of realism

This is something of a follow-up to my musings on Concreteness, Inquiry, and Rationalisation.  It's not necessary to go back and read the prior post, but it might help to understand the outlook here.

This post's wordy title alludes to a commonplace view that in order to get at "realism" in games, one must add more complicated rules.  Of course, to state this view is to dispel it, as everyone knows of games that are nowhere near realistic while still being overly complicated.  Rather than bore the reader to death with a purely abstract discussion, I'm going to address the ability scores.