Thanks to Jeff and the Grand Grognard

"In future, I plan to be a lot more circumspect, perhaps even going so far as to adopt Jeff Rients's suggestion (a link to which I can no longer find) that each magic item in the D&D rulebook is unique -- if you find a sword +1, you find the sword +1 and no one else will ever possess one unless they pry it out of your cold, dead hands."

There's a reason I grabbed the 2E Monstrous Manual

"I meant OD&D where I said 0e. When they compiled the 1e Monster Manual they imported a lot of OD&D stats without increasing their power level to accomodate the increased power of PCs from "0e" to 1e. A lot of iconic d&d monsters are less powerful than they should be as a result, in my opinion. I think that 2e dragons were more in line with where they should be relative to PC power levels."

Collected AD&D 2.01 Documents

The formatting in yesterday's post was such a mess, so I've just linked to the google docs folder that will hold all the current drafts. I'd love to have these in two-column pdf format, but at the moment that means spending a whole lot more time on layout than writing and editing.

Fantasy Heartbreaker Blog

Good stuff.

Less Random Wandering Monsters

Here's a cool post at Mule Abides discussing a sub-system for Wandering Monsters by which the character's actions generate "Friction Points" which influence the appearance and strength of wandering monsters. I like this idea a lot.

http://muleabides.wordpress.com/2010/04/14/friction-wandering-monster/

AD&D 2.1 Paladin Inspiration

Something like this.

My Visions of xD&D

As the "Usually Tuesday Night Landsquid Group" delved back into AD&D I had my usual series of system crunching modifications swirl in my mind. I wasted too much time reading "old school" blogs, cataloging old Dragon magazines, and bitching about the inconsistencies of OSRIC with my pretty AD&D books. I kept thinking about the good and bad of my brief dalliances with 3.0, 3.5, and 4th edition and the player's weekly complaints about the quirks, inconsistencies and organization of 1st edition. Oh, yeah, and why battle mats are better than beer. Here are my many plans:

A. Edited Version of 1.0 (Gygax) Dungeon Master's Guide

B. AD&D 1.75: Considering Unearthed Arcana as v1.5, this is my clean-up and streamlining of the 1st edition rules. Keep the guts, but make it a little more palatable to the unfamiliar and take advantages of word processing.

C. AD&D 2.01: What AD&D 2nd (and 3rd) edition should have been in my eyes. Keep races, classes, hit points, and d20 rolls to hit, but mess with all the details.

D. AD&D 5th Edition: 4th edition did a few things write, and on occasion I like a wargame or match of chess. If I can fix AD&D, I can fix this too.

E. Barbarians of Gygaxia: Dungeon crawling, treasure looting, and resource management - done rules-light and a little narrative. Taking the system of Barbarians of Lemuria and ideas from Houses of the Blooded.

For a peak on my progress, here's my Table of Contents for AD&D 2.01.