Feelings About Games
This is Part 7 of my Thursdays in Thracia B/X Dungeons & Dragons Campaign, an actual play of Jennell Jaquays’ The Caverns of Thracia. For more context, start from Part 0.
Continuing from Part 6, after the party encountered Lizardmen for the first time and dispatched them with the Sleep spell.
The Thief in old school editions of Dungeons & Dragons has been picked apart and written about at length elsewhere, but because I have been running B/X D&D with the intent of hewing as close to the rules as written as possible, I’ve been thinking about thieves a lot lately. So I’m throwing my hat into the ring with this Thief post, as much to solidify my understanding of the class as anything else. It might be impossible to reach definitive conclusions about anything in early D&D, mostly because the attitude around the game was very much “do what you want with it,” but as someone interested in rules and game systems, I think it is worth digging into the nitty gritty. This is less an essay or a statement about how I think the Thief should be run, and more of an exploration of my current interpretation.
Note: Apologies to anyone looking forward to a new Thursdays in Thracia this week. Unfortunately we had to cancel our last session, so this week and next I’ll be posting other stuff. We’ll be getting back to it after that!
Originally released in 2011, Kevin Crawford’s Role Playing Game, Stars Without Number, has earned a reputation as a great toolkit for sandbox style science fiction gaming. Anywhere someone asks for sci-fi game recommendations online, Stars Without Number is mentioned quickly and frequently in the responses.
This year, after a successful Kickstarter, Crawford released a revised edition of the game, making a variety of changes and updates, big and small. I can’t say much about the original, as I’ve never played it, but I’m six sessions into my Revised Edition campaign, and can’t wait to run it again.
Continue reading “RPG Review – Stars Without Number Revised Edition”
This is Part 6 of my Thursdays in Thracia B/X Dungeons & Dragons Campaign, an actual play of Jennell Jaquays’ The Caverns of Thracia. For more context, start from Part 0.
Continuing from Part 5, after the party descended into the largest entrance to the caverns, a wide stone stairway .
This is Part 5 of my Thursdays in Thracia B/X Dungeons & Dragons Campaign, an actual play of Jennell Jaquays’ The Caverns of Thracia. For more context, start from Part 0.
This is Part 4 of my Thursdays in Thracia B/X Dungeons & Dragons Campaign, an actual play of Jennell Jaquays’ The Caverns of Thracia. For more context, start from Part 0.
This is Part 3 of my Thursdays in Thracia B/X Dungeons & Dragons Campaign, an actual play of Jennell Jaquays’ The Caverns of Thracia. For more context, start from Part 0.
Continuing from Part 2, after the party had suffered a casualty from a terrible statue.
Standing amidst the rubble of the animate statue, the party realized that while they had lost a member, they had also gained two new ones. Skubble the Dwarf and Toba the Cleric, both of whom were just reorienting themselves, after having spent some time paralyzed by the gaze of the other statue, the one with yellow gemstone eyes that freeze all who gaze upon it.
This is Part 1 of my Thursdays in Thracia B/X Dungeons & Dragons Campaign. For more context, check out Part 0.
I ran the first session of The Caverns of Thracia last week, and it was, by and large, a success. I ended up with only three players, which would be a dangerously small number of PC’s in a B/X game, so I had each player create two characters. With a couple of hirelings in tow, a party of eight set out into the jungle in search of the famed lost city of Thracia, where vast riches and/or ignoble death await!
Here is a report of half of that session, followed by my relevant observations about B/X D&D so far.
Inspired largely by this post by Luke Crane, designer of The Burning Wheel, and this series of streams by Adam Koebel, co-designer of Dungeon World, I have decided to run some B/X Dungeons & Dragons, as close to rules as written as possible. I’m going to be documenting the experience here.