Today I’m celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Dungeons & Dragons. I’m 53 myself this year and my experience with the game goes back over forty years. It’s strange to consider how this one game of imagination has impacted me on the whole, and I’ve written some about that here:
My fascination with The Lichway adventure continues and today I’m happy to release a new copy edit of the adventure. Tomorrow I’ll run this adventure for a friend’s birthday celbration.
The last of the print copies were distributed at North Texas RPG Con ‘25. There is a small chance that there are still a few copies still at Black Blade Publishing. That means there are 99 copies in circulation + my own personal copy. There are no plans for another print run.
Acknowledgement
My own copy edit of The Lichway is not the first, there is a very fine effort from 2023 which you can find here. Please let me know if there are other such efforts so they can be linked here.
In 2019 I started running Basic D&D using the Holmes Blue Box, I’ve written about that here. During that time my games were heavily house ruled with ideas that addressed how I wanted the game to work at my table. As new players joined in my open table games I committed to convert these house rules to something that more resembled a traditional rulebook.
It was an interesting, if not difficult, project producing a complete rpg rulebook. Even when this project was informed by concepts that are now familiar within our hobby. My guiding principle in this work was to produce an accessible reference to my interpretation of the game; simplifying concepts and to perhaps offer something new.
2020 and the quiet years that followed allowed me to run more games using these rules, all the while shaping and refining the presentation. What exists now is something that matches my original vision and these rules have been tested in well over a hundred sessions with dozens of players.
This work which I’ve termed “Holmes & Clark” is offered here without charge. Print on demand copies are made available at cost. My hope is that others will pick up these rules and attempt a game like D&D that is not overly complicated with expense or minutia, and rather; enjoy a fantasy adventure that can propel the imagination and excite the mind.
Hardcover – no longer available, sadly Lulu cannot produce an acceptable full-bleed color cover.
We now have a Discord server! Please get in touch if you would be interested in joining the conversation there, or find the link in the rule book.
Preview Pages
Update Nov 10
Jason Conerly of the Nerds RPG Variety Podcast has be on as a guest recently to talk about ol’ school games and the Holmes & Clark rules in particular. You check out that episode here.
The You Tuber “Hex Pressed” has done a read through (flip through?) of the Holmes & Clark rulebook. Check that out here.
Last week I read a blog post from an author who was pushing on ChatGPT-DM to run a game of D&D with little success. I didn’t exactly agree with how this author was interacting with the bot so I attempted a similar exercise. You can read a log of this exchange here.
While I had great fun engaging with the bot in the end I concluded that the bot itself has limited memory capacity and no logical decisioning needed for a game of D&D.
I had hoped to be able to teach the bot to do basic DM functions like make a reaction check and apply those results to the evolution of an encounter. It was not to be.
Finally I asked the bot to create a short blog post on our experience along with the challenges we faced:
Recently, I had the pleasure of playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT, a language model trained by OpenAI. We decided to create three characters: Neria, an Elf Lord, and her two bodyguards, Farman and Vaseline, who were also sea elf fighters.
Despite the challenges, we had a lot of fun playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT. The language model was quick to respond and provided us with interesting scenarios and challenges. We enjoyed the interactive nature of the game, and it was exciting to see how our characters’ actions influenced the game’s outcome.
Overall, our experience playing Classic D&D with ChatGPT was both fun and challenging. We encountered some difficulties with different rule sets, but we were able to overcome them and continue with our adventure. We look forward to playing more games with ChatGPT in the future.
While crawling the web for an old school D&D mystery I stumbled on a pdf of Different Worlds No. 4 from 1978. In those pages are plenty of insights of the early days of the hobby. Most exciting to me was an article by J. Sapienza with many d1000 tables to “produce interesting and unique magical weapons”
To the Google Sheets! We now have a tool to quickly produce magic weapons in-line with Sapienza’s original ideas. Find that tool here.
Some examples of the tools output follow and while the formatting is a bit rough the text can be easily captured and modified to suit any need.
Finally, Sapienza mentions that his article was originally published in issue 32 of “The Wild Hunt”. Another old school D&D mystery that requires investigation – RPG Geek gives a clue here, but I’m no closer to reading those ancient pages.
If you can help with digital scans of The Wild Hunt I would be most interested.
Fitting that my first post touches on the game that started it all. Why at age 8 in 1979 this was at the top of my Christmas list I have no idea, but there it was and it was wonderful. In fact, it still is wonderful.
It would be difficult to describe how this one game propelled me into a world of sword & sorcery, science fiction, and fanciful day-dreams. Flights of fancy emerging between players clutching strange dice and scribbling on paper. I played this game every spare moment I had, for years, until I didn’t.
Why I stopped playing with such devotion I cannot rightly say: other hobbies competing for my attention, video games, girls? Whatever the case I hadn’t played D&D until something caught my attention in 2012.
Return to the glory days of fantasy with the Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game. Adventure as 1974 intended you to, with modern rules grounded in the origins of sword & sorcery. Fast play, cryptic secrets, and a mysterious past await you.
I had good fun with DCC, sharing this game with friends and exploring the OSR in general. Then in 2019 I committed to run my original D&D at a local convention. I picked up that original rule book and said “err, what the…?” The rules were not clearly organized, naturally archaic, and difficult to understand – not good for convention play.
So I created a summary; a control panel that the DM or PCs could use to quickly understand all the core rules. This would allow us to play the game in our allotted time of three hours without constantly flipping through a rulebook.
PC Control Panel – provides core character rules, equipment list, and more all on a single page.
DM Control Panel – provides turn track, core wandering monsters, reaction table, basic deeds, combat summary, and more all on a single page.
I’ve run this game now 7 or 8 times and these references have been invaluable. I’m intrigued by this control panel / quick reference sheet concept and want to do more. Though I am conscious that more than a single sheet of paper just gets in the way. Perhaps I’ll find a use of the other sides of these sheets.
Update Feb. 1
Our regular Thursday night group that plays online has been having good fun playing Holmes Basic D&D. We are delving into Gabor Lux’s Castle Morthimion – which I will also run at DunDraCon44 in just 2 weeks. I had always planned to put a little something on the 2nd side of these control panels & inspiration recently struck for the PC version – a simple character sheet, update is linked above.
Plan to update backside of DM panel soon.
Update Nov. 25
Have updated the DM control panel, finally adding the second page. This includes random tables I find useful: a murcuial potions, wandering monsters, NPC details, town & city variables, bizarre of the bazaar, and caravan details. Each of these has a citation from it’s indie goodness.
Plan to update backside of DM panel soon.
Have also updated the PC control panel, correcting a few typos and clarifying some points (i.e. all stats use the same mod matrix, refined the simple character sheet)
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