B/X Barbarians for Basic and Expert D&D

Since my earliest days playing D&D, I've always been a fan of barbarians.  As anyone who reads this blogs knows, about 75% of the miniatures that I paint are barbarians, so it's always been hard for me that the version of D&D that I'm most fond of doesn't have barbarians.  I'm talking of course about the Tom Moldvay's 1981 Basic Dungeons & Dragons which is available these days at dndclassics.com.  Going through some old papers this weekend, I came across my notes for a B/X Barbarian class from 30 years ago and decided to write them up and post them here.

Clark Valentine on FAE “vs” Core

A nice post on the differences between Fate Core and Fate Accelerated Edition.


Clark Valentine on FAE “vs” Core

My 500 Words

So yesterday finished the My 500 Words writing challenge.  I didn't actually sign up for it because I wasn't sure that I would actually complete it, but in the end I did.  I'm actually pretty proud of my self for it too.  I managed to write at least 500 words every day for the past 31 days.  I wrote the first draft of two new short stories, added some new material to an existing story, and started two other stories.  That's pretty productive for me.  The goal of the challenge was to re-establish one's habit as a writer, and I'm really hoping that I can hold onto the momentum.  Here is a small sample of this month's work:

A bitter wind moaned through the high crags, carrying with it the sharp tang of ice.  There would be snow by morning.  Here among the shattered peaks of blackened stone, the mournful tone of the wind was an eerie dirge blown to herald the death of the day and to foretell the birth of the coming night.

Yep, I'm writing crap, but at least I'm writing. :-)  Now on to some editing!

Lobster Fight!

A couple of angry lobsters playing King of the Tank!

Miniatures Monday

A lizardman champion preparing to do battle.  I removed the stone axe that he was wielding and replaced it with a two handed sword because I thought it looked cooler.

Roll20 Test Drive

So tonight, my friend Willie and I took Roll20 for a test drive.  For anyone who doesn't know, Roll20 is a web based virtual tabletop for roleplaying games like Dungeons & Dragons.  It's got some pretty neat features, like voice chat, the ability to easily import maps, tokens for tactical combat that the GM can give control to whomever he or she wants, and 3d dice to make it all feel a bit more like home.  It can also be run through Google Hangouts, which is how we did it.  After a few false starts we got things configured properly, and after that it went pretty smoothly.  We didn't play a game, rather we played with the features of Roll20.  I definitely need to read the documentation a bit better, but I think that it shows a lot of promise and will certainly be nice if we want to get a quick game going on a snowy weekend.  Also, it might be a nice way to get to game with some folks who don't have much time these days.

Atari Checkered Flag

Checkered Flag for the Atari Jaguar was one of those games that I really wanted to love, and I honestly did try to love it.  I played it all the time when it came out, and even after I walked away from it in frustration at the terrible controls,I kept coming back to it.  Every few months I would dust it off, fire up the Jaguar, pick my car, and promptly crash into a wall.  So here we have a video of me actually playing it.  It is not a pretty sight. :-)

Happy Birthday Dungeons & Dragons!

It's been a long strange road.  I hope that people are enjoying D&D today, no matter what version they prefer. :-)

Of Box Art and Imagination

When I was a kid, RPGs were king.  There was nothing quite so much fun as getting together with a bunch of friends, eating pizza, slaying orcs, and getting killed by terrible traps.  My first character was killed by a medusa in the second room of the first dungeon he ever went into.  But RPGs involved coordinating people and rides, so the next best thing was video games.

Back in the late 70s and early 1980s, when video gaming was still in its relative infancy, there was a wonderful dichotomy between the way video game box art represented the games and how those games looked in real life.  The ability to do computer graphics was extremely limited, and nowhere were those limitations felt more than on home systems.  As a kid, I was forever going to places like Sears or Montgomery Ward and staring at the fascinating images that graced the boxes of those games.  

Now some are probably thinking Sears?  Isn't that where people go to buy tools and tires and things?  More still are probably wondering who, or what a Montgomery Ward is.  Well, those were the places we went in those days, long before the Gamestops of the world came into being, but I digress.  

The boxes of those games contained wondrous images that transported my young imagination to lands of seemingly infinite possibilities.  Of course the art for those games had to be good for in many cases it was all that could attract someone to buy one of these games.  Now make no mistake, I loved many of the games of this era, and I still do.  In the end, the gameplay was what really made me love them and kept me playing, but something had to get me to even buy the darned game in the first place, and that thing was the box art.  No matter how crummy the actual game images on the back of the box might look those pictures on the front still gave hope that the game would be awesome.  Here are a few of my favorites, showing what the front of the box tempted me with and what the I actually got.

Let's start with probably my all time favorite game ever, Atari's Adventure.  Behold the mighty dragon in his maze!  look with awe upon the great castle high on the hill!  I played this thing to death.  Again and again, I would play the random setup version of this game.  I would even make up my own versions of the game where I had to kill all of the dragons then get as many of the items into the gold castle as possible before returning the chalice to end the game.  I was obsessed. 

Adventure: The box cover

Adventure: The reality. :-)

Next we have The Quest for the Rings for the Odyssey 2.  Now this game was not only a video game, but a board game too!  Just look at that box with the warrior deflecting the dragon's flames with his sword and the wizard killing, well whatever that thing is.  This game just looks magical.  Admittedly, I didn't play this one all that much because I didn't have an Odyssey and had to go to one of my friend's houses to play, but not being able to play it all the time may have made it seem even better to me.

The Quest for the Rings:  The box cover

The Quest for the Rings: The Reality

And finally, my holy grail from that time period.  Advanced Dungeons & Dragons:  Cloudy Mountain for the Intellivision.  I was a bit of a D&D nut and would buy just about anything with the D&D logo on it.  I only got to play this a handful of times at the home of one of the kids I was in Boy Scouts with, but I wanted this game more than anything.  Of course I would have needed an Intellivision as well, and those things were really expensive.  I never really got to play this game until much, much later, when I got it as part of the Intellivision Lives compilation for my Game Boy Advance.  In the end it remembered better that it played. :-)

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The box cover

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: The reality

Now as I've said, I love each of these games in their own way.  And sometimes, even when I'm running around in the amazing landscapes of Skyrim, I still miss them.  I long for the days when my imagination was the Graphics Processing Unit and those box covers beckoned me with sights that the games themselves could never hope to deliver.

Does anyone have any favorite box covers that really inspired them?

Cavern Dragon

This is a new photograph of one of my favorite miniatures.  A great cavern dragon rearing up as if to strike down some unfortunate delvers.  As I get older, I enjoy painting larger miniatures more and more. ;-)

Miniatures Monday

There are undreamed of horrors in the dark places of the earth.  This slime creature dissolves its most recent victim as it flows through long forgotten caverns.

Miniatures Monday

This week's Miniatures Monday is a reclamation project.  Here we have a barbarian miniature that I painted during my senior year in college.  Since that was 22 years ago, I decided to try to spruce it up a bit this year.

1992

2014

Miniatures Monday

Miniatures Monday returns for 2014 with an elven warrior.  Now this certainly isn't going to win me a Golden Demon, but I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out.  I still haven't decided on whether or not to add grass to the base.  It would certainly make the miniature look better, but tends to make it harder to use in actual play.

Tales of the glory of Christmases long long ago...

Two of the things that I associate the most with Christmas presents from the past are Atari games and Dungeons & Dragons.  Now I can play a lot of those games in a browser.  :-)

I need D&D in a browser too.  Maybe I should look more closely into Roll20.

Merry Christmas (A bit early)

 On this day one hundred and seventy years ago, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol was first published.  17 December 1843.