I just took delivery of my latest ebay score. I now have the Dungeon Master Guide for AD&D 2nd edition revised from 1995.
Note the lack of “S” on the end of master. So this one is neither plural “masters” or possessive “master’s.” Thank fuck they sorted this out from 3rd ed onwards.
The first thing I noticed glancing through this after looking through the 1st ed DMG is te text size is bigger and the layout is much easier to skim. All in all much easier on the eyes. There’s some great full page art pieces in here, all with a definite consistent style which is nice. Sadly my beloved weird little guy table from 1st ed doesn’t seem to return, ah well.
I’ll get a full write up of this done at some point, but I have been thinking about the ordering of the Pick Up Pile Pondering posts. I’ve decided to concentrate on newer books first, as they are what people are more likely to be looking for reviews of, then covering older stuff like this when there’s a gap in the newer stuff.
Crap, I just realised the header image I took earlier today is already out of date.
Welcome to the first post in a new series, The Pick Up Pile. I’ve been looking for something to do with this blog as it’s been sitting idle apart from the January Character Creation Challenges, especially with my solo Twilight: 2000 game being on hiatus as it’s a bit depressing to play in light of current world events.
Also it keeps my little grey cells bubbling away and it kinda justifies my game collection whilst I don’t have a game group.
So whats in the Pick Up Pile? Well, as the name suggests it’s going to be about games and game related stuff I’ve recently picked up. I got a few game books for Christmas and have picked up a bunch of things on Ebay and elsewhere recently.
Christmas gifts were the Paranoia core cook, Fallout: The Role Playing Game core book, Righteous Blood Ruthless Blades, Tales from the Loop, and The Deck of Many things.
Initial thoughts on each of these;
Paranoia is a slim hardcover, with substantial glossy pages. The writing is quite large and well laid out making it easy to read. Art is interspersed throughout and is of a decent quality, showing characters, scenarios, equipment and organisation logos
Fallout has a ribbon bookmark, more books should have ribbon bookmarks. (I have a thing for ribbon bookmarks!) It’s a hefty book, that looks well laid out and separated into clear sections. Lots of really nice art that I think is concept art from the videogames.
Righteous Blood, Ruthless Blades is a nice convenient smaller size hardback, with 260+ pages. The art is great, thematic and consistent all the way through. The text is clearly laid out in, full page width and of a easily readable size.
Tales From the Loop has some THICK paper, 192 pages in a book thicker than some 300+ page ones I have. As expected in a game derived from an artist’s work, the art is fantastic. From what I’ve read this really gets what the 80s were really like, more than a lot of properties do. I’d bet on it having been written by people that actually lived through the decade.
The Deck of Many Things box set is striking. The books and cards are really nice looking pieces. The Book of Many things appears to be a good DM targeted expansion, items, creatures, idea prompts etc. The cards themselves feel nice and the companion book details a few ways of using them.
Purchases were all D&D related, I got the 4th edition PHB, the 3rd edition DMG MM and PHB, and the 1st edition DMG.
Initial thoughts on these;
I like the cover art on the 4th Edition PHB having spot gloss effects highlighting the logo and the central figures in the art. The interior is clearly laid out and readable. The art in each section has a very distinctive style that seems unique to this edition, everything’s so curvy and pointy at the same time. It’s odd seeing magic items in the PHB, I’m more used to seeing them in the DMG. From an initial skim combat does seem very minis and grid based.
For my tastes 3rd Edition has the best spine artwork, that old mage’s tome look. The text looks a little cramped and the sketchy lines around it make it a little less immediately readable to me. The sections seem laid out as you’d expect from 5e. The Monster Manual has a bunch of critters in it that don’t appear to have been updated to 5e, that’s something I might look into doing. Finally it is nice to see the tables listed in the contents page at the start of each book, so if you know what table you are looking for you can jump straight to it, this needs to return.
The 1st Edition DMG shows people in the 70s had better eyesight, the text is tiny. It’s a solid book, from what I can tell my copy is 44 years old, and even missing its spine the text block is holding together. There’s a lot of detailed stuff in here and it will take me a while to work though. As shown in the Character Creation Challenge I really like the funny little guy generator in Appendix D.
I intend posts for this to be split into two categories. “Pickups” where I post about something new I got in, maybe a photo or two and a couple of thoughts after a brief skim through (I guess this counts as the first “Pickup”) , and “Ponderings” where I’ll put up a larger entry for each book as I work through them. I’ll give and overview of the physical appearance of the book, and a few thoughts for each chapter highlighting things that stand out to me.
I’ll also add new purchases to the pile as I pick them up, putting them in the queue to be covered. They won’t necessarily be covered in the order that I got them, more likely when they excite my “Ooh shiny!” impulse.
If I ever get to the end of the queue then I’ll pick something older out of my collection and cover that until I get something new and shiny.
No plans for a schedule yet, as that depends on how long it takes me to get through a book and how much I have to say.
Day 30. I was a bit stuck for something for today as I’d finished my Paranoia characters, but then my Ebay habit came to the rescue. I recently picked up the AD&D 1e DMG and it has an appendix for generating Creatures from the Lower Planes. Why just those planes and no others? I dunno, but there ya go.
So I decided to roll up a monster from that, and then using the D&D 5e DMG and Monster Manual, a few conversion guides I found online and a healthy dose of just guessing, I converted it to a D&D 5e creature/NPC.
As you can see it looks really, really weird. A snake head with one eye and a trunk, an apes body with bird wings and four arms. Yeah, the kind of monster description than makes me I wish I could draw. Though I see the trunk as more of an enlarged elephant seal nose, so it doesn’t get in the way of the insect mandible concealed in the mouth.
For conversion to 5e I say that it had 7 attacks originally and this is more than I can be bothered to roll for a single creature in a round. So I broke it up into a mutliattack with a bite and either hands or feet, or a missile based AOE as he launches spines from his back.
AC was simple as a one guide suggested just subtracting 1e AC from 19 to get a score for 5e. So 19-1= the new AC of 18
Ability drain and life drain reminded me of the Shadow’s Strength Drain. I decided to add this to the bite to represent the poison, but allow a saving throw as this is already a damaging part of a multiattack.
I reverse engineered the Proficiency modifier from strength, where the guidance is to leave 18str as it is), and attack modifier which is 1e Hit Dice halved +2, so 10/2=5 then +2 to get +7 to attack.
An 18 strength would give a bonus of +4, so the remaining 3 of the attack score must be the proficiency modifier.
Acid immunity remained the same with nothing to convert. Magic resistance is a very different system between editions, so I used the version seen on many 5e stat blocks of Advantage on saves against magic or spell attacks.
Comparing what I now had to several existing stats and creature building guides I saw we were at the CR5-6 level and the advice there is to hit around 28-35 points of outgoing damage a round. So each of the possible attack groupings were given dice ranges that average in this area.
Following this the rest was filed in by comparing to existing monsters and adding equivalent scores, and a fair bit of guesswork.
This gave us Abbwaloesh, Demon Soldier of the Acid Pits.
Oh, and his name well it’s Ape Bodied Bird Winged And Legged One Eyed Snake Headed, so I just took the first letter of each word in that.
Tomorrow we have the last Deadland’s character and the last character for this year’s challenge, “Doc” Emmet Green, a Mad Scientist.
Three Kobolds With A Trench Gun 