A Short List of Setting Assumptions

From rpg.net:

A short list of setting assumptions that make D&D work:

1) Adventuring is very, very deadly. Most adventurers fall down holes and die.
2) Mages are rare and secretive. They do not integrate into legitimate power structures; rather they hoard their knowledge from rivals and from a fearful world. The world that had mages mass-conjure and mass enchant now lies in ruins. people loot its' remains, usually dying in the process
3) Peasant is not the default origin. It is younger noble with no inheritance.
4)You are not buying and selling at village smithies. You flog to travelling merchants, nobles, wealthy collectors, wizards and barons.

The Future is Awesome

From a Planet Algol session: "The party accepts a commission from the proprietor of the Lamia's Breath Intoxicating Vapour Lounge in Agog city to recover a runaway synthetic prostitute from a do-gooder hero, Gan-ron the silver man.Their reward for returning the synthetic being 250 gold credits value of Gamma Orichalcum, a soft, highly reactive, radioactive metal that is also a potent hallucinogenic stimulant."

Also, the referee in Mutant Future games is called "Mutant Lord". This may be my new dungeon master title.

An old schooler's take on Dragonlance

There is many things I like with DL:
-- An intolerant order of sorcerers who hunt down all MU who don't want to join and obey.
-- The three orders of knighthood.
-- Draconians.
-- The post-apocalyptic fantasy feel.

There is likewise many things I don't like:
-- Ansalon is too small for my taste (but relatively easy to double all distances)
-- I hate Kenders and Tinker gnomes, I really hate them.
-- I dislike minotaurs and would replace them with Greyhawk's Scarlet Brotherhood.
-- I dislike the timeline after the war of the lance (easily discarded)
-- I dislike priests have no spells during the war of the lance. (Nonetheless, also easily houseruled: priests of ancient deities would have been specialty priests ala 2e, but don't exist anymore. However, druids and clerics are available as PCs, though rare as NPCs; clerics would be akin to later 3e DL mystics.)

Last: I would have the half-orc race being hobgoblins instead, and playable as such in the setting.

Enjoy it. I may never laud Dragonlance again.

Draconians > Dragonborn

Mapping Tools

Classic Blue Tile Set

Dungeoncrafter

Crazy Old Men

There are a lot of rules like this in OD&D that are seemingly random and don't make much sense. The problem, I think, is that the majority of D&D gamers don't play the game in the same way that Gary did. The newer players were using D&D to simulate grand fantasy and heroic questing rather than the looting of ancient ruins. So, a lot of rules got lost in translation, because they didn't make sense with what people were doing with D&D. Played closer to Gary's vision, they seem a lot more sensible.

Nathan P. Mahney - Save or Die!

Cutting Corners for Hirelings and Henchmen

LabLord Creator and Record Sheet

We didn't even name our characters until they reached 2nd level.

The DM at the blackboard was Corbin. Take away his glasses and shoes and he looked exactly like the centaur from the cover of the original Monster Manual. Corbin would stand in front of a blackboard like a professor and run enormous dungeon crawls with 15 or 20 players at a time. A few of the players had high-level characters (as in, level 5 or so). The rest of us played 1st- and 2nd-level henchmen -- NPCs, essentially -- and we died like flies. We didn't even name our characters until they reached 2nd level. It was nothing to burn through two or three characters in an afternoon. Your goal was to live long enough to become a real member of the adventuring party and not just another nameless corpse on the heap. The only characters who got respect from the higher-level PCs were clerics. As long as you had a healing spell, you were useful. Otherwise, there was no pity in Corbin's dungeons. Low-level characters were there to open doors, peek around corners, and walk down corridors ahead of the heroes, poking everything within reach with a 10-foot pole.

- Steve Winter, Editor for the AD&D 2nd on his first D&D campaign.

Shields.

FACT: Shields are undervalued.

Differences between 1st & 2nd Edition AD&D

Difference between 1E & 2E