So last night my husband used his regular every-other-week D&D campaign slot to run a one-shot First Edition adventure, in honor of Gary Gygax, who passed away recently.

The tone of the evening was set when, realizing there were only four gamers present, gkp79 asked, "What would we have done in 6th grade?" The answer, of course, was "Play two characters each." So that is what they did.


This is FIRST edition, a game of dizzying silliness, rules-wise. There are charts for everything. THAC0, which I thought was complex enough in 2nd edition, would have been too simple for first edition. (And yes, I know what THAC0 stands for. I think it would be an awesome name for a cat.)

Chris was perplexed that one of his characters, a dwarf, came with only a single magic dagger for his weaponry. During the first combat -- against a "Lurker from Above" -- gkp79 urged him to pummel the creature with the butt of his dagger. It turns out that if you roll halfway decently on a "pummeling" attack, you not only inflict lots of damage, but you then get another free attack, ad infinitum. So having only a dagger, and consistently pummeling with it, is not a terrible strategy in First Edition D&D. Now you know.

Polytrypos was proud of himself for adhering faithfully to the rules. There were a couple of places where, he realized later, he should have modified attack rolls based on the opposing armor, or something like that. But overall he stayed faithful to the spirit of First Edition, even making the players map on graph paper and select a "party caller" to collect everyone's actions and relay them to the GM. The silly grins on everyone's faces were tribute to how many good memories this was bringing back for them all.

I wasn't paying scrupulous attention, but apparently the intrepid adventurers managed to eventually defeat the evil Witch Queen with the silly name. A rousing good time was had by all.

Quotes from the evening:

"What the -- everyone has a ten-foot pole!" (tatterdamelion)
"Get this, Nathan -- my halfling is carrying a six-foot pole!" (gkp79)

"This is like actuarial tables made by madmen" (tatterdamelion)

Links links links!

Classical School Blog: "Near-daily classical education blog with resources, links, and lesson plans- including all aspects of the Trivium - Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric, Latin and a little Greek, Ancient and Modern History, Great Books and Philosophy, Bible and Theology, and Classical math and Science. "

Fascinating article in strategic TechNotes (summarized from a longer piece in the Faculty Research paper series at Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government), on why computers should be "set to forget." Thanks to my parents-in-law for the link!

Hindu Gods & Goddesses, just because. And many more gods can be found at GodChecker.com (although their tone is a bit too flippant for me! Let's not mock the god of lightning here, 'k?).

Heraldry ClipArt. Almost impossible to browse, but I spent one time going through and saving down images that caught my eye, and now I am well stocked with black and white woodcut-style clip art for all my medievally needs.

The Pathology Guy has more stuff written up on his site than I could ever hope to rival. Not all of it is about pathology (a subject which kind of grosses me out, to be honest). I found the site because of his D&D 3.5 Character Generator, but some of his articles are very interesting, notably the page on the XYY Karyotype.