I am starting a project on this blog: to read the original, 1974 version of Dungeons & Dragons page by page, and see what insights emerge from the text itself.The project will unfold in two kinds of posts:First, “page reads,” which follow t…
Back in 2020, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, one of the major works of Brazilian literature, was released in the United States under the Penguin Classics label, in a dazzling new translation by Flora Thomson-DeVeaux. In that year, Th…
The history of how the origin of alignments can be traced to fantasy armies suggested for a wargame can be found in Part 1 of this series on OD&D alignments. In Part 2 we looked at the problems of the alignment system as written in the 1974…
The history of how the origin of alignments can be traced to fantasy armies suggested for a wargame can be found in Part 1 of this series on OD&D alignments. In this second part, we will look at the issues the created by alignment system as…
You're probably familiar with the nine-box-style alignment system found in modern versions of Dungeons & Dragons. Widely (and rightly) criticized for various reasons, that system is a perennial source of in-game awkwardness and has become i…
A game of Duongeons & Dragons (and its many variations) typically requires six types of dice: Any set of polyhedral dice available for purchase should contain all of the above. Throughout this blog, dice rolls are notated as XdY, where X de…
- If you roll an 8 for the first part and a 12 for the second, you get: Grentz (sounds like an evil cleric to me) - If you roll a 6 and a 3, you get: Eg or Egory (I would probably go with Egory, but both could work depending on the characte…