Filling in Some Gaps - Bard's Gate

When we were playing 3rd edition I was not a huge fan of most of the published WOTC adventures but I did find some greatness in 3 places: Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics adventures, Sword and Sorcery's own Scarred Lands setting, and Necromancer Games' adventures. For coming from three different companies and lots of individual authors I found they fit together really well. For my Scarred Lands campaign the backbone was DCC's shorter adventures + Necromancer's longer adventures and material of my own. I doubt I was the only one, and I was very happy with the way it worked out.

While the DCC adventures were purposefully independent from one another the Necromancer material as produced as if it was all part of the same setting and there were notes in many of the individual adventures on how they fit into this shared world in relation to one another. This was a lot like the early D&D adventures with their notes on where they were set in Greyhawk. SOme of the major pieces were:

• The Wizard's Amulet + Crucible of Freya which was one of the early 3E starter adventures and is great. My players had a really good time with it and it was our starting adventure for the campaign.
• Vault of Larin Karr which was an area the campaign could have gone to but ended up not using in that game.
• Demons and Devils which is a collection of short adventures involving those creatures. I was going to use one of them as the end of the paladin's quest for a holy sword but we didn't quite get there. 
•  Hall of the Rainbow Mage was another adventure where I dropped some hints and connections and we ended up not using it. 
• Lost City of Barakus - also hinted and rumored in the game but never actually used. 
• Rappan Athuk which I did not use after playing through part of it. It could always have come up later if I needed to abuse my player characters.
• Tomb of Abysthor which we spent around a year playing and had a lot of fun in the dungeon and back in the city they used as a base for exploring the dungeon.

I think that's how a lot of campaigns go - there's a lot of material gathered/prepped/written that never gets used but you can't know that until your players wander somewhere else. This is just the Necromancer stuff too - there were 4 or 5 DCC adventures and a couple of the Scarred Lands adventures in there too. 

So how does Bard's Gate fit into all of this? Well it's the city that is mentioned in all of these things, a reference point, and a possible home base while playing through some of them. I didn't own the book so I used my own city ideas while we played through Abysthor but I always wanted to pick it up and find a place to add it in to the campaign. Once that game ended the priority dropped quite a bit but it's been in the back of my mind in the "one of these days" file for years. I finally picked it up and I am not disappointed. 

One of the best parts of a campaign I have run

The short version: It's a guide to a D&D style fantasy city. The signature 'thing" about the place is that it's home to a Bardic College so there are a lot of those types in the city and a player who wants to run one has a ton of hooks readily available. You could drop it into almost any campaign anywhere you need a city on a river and it would fit just fine. Each chapter in the book covers a district of the city in some, though not ridiculous, detail. You won't find stats for every bartender and patron or notes on every single structure in each area - it's mainly the high points and notable locations in each one with a general sense of the district. There's a sidebar for each that covers character, Businesses, prices, gold piece limits, building type, and note on the guards (number, timing, and size of patrols). It looks very usable for the DM - practical stuff like that goes a long way with me. There are roughly 15 chapters like this covering the city. It also comes with a roughly 3'x2' poster map of the city which is a nice touch.

Towards the back are some additional sections:

• One covers the area around the city and notes various adventure locations
• In the local area is a gnoll fortress and an abbey, boith of which receive their own chapters
• There's a chapter on new magic, one on NPCs, and one on new monsters - these are all fairly 3E-specific and so not super uiseful 
• There is also a chapter on the gods of the setting and they are somewhat different from the usual generic deities. It's a mix of Norse, Celtic, and some D&D demons along with some new - or renamed at least - non-human powers. This fleshes out some of the names mentioned in other adventures by Necromancer and is a nice touch. It would not be terribly hard to ignore this if you were dropping it into another setting. 

Downside? Well, there really are not many that I can see at this point. It's from 2006 and it's black and white so it's not as pretty as a lot of the books that we get today. Compared to something like Ptolus it's definitely a step down in presentation but that aside it's a completely usable fantasy city supplement. There was a Kickstarter last year to redo the book for 5E and Pathfinder in full color so there are updated and nicely presented versions out there but at $100 for a print copy I abstained from that one. I paid a tenth of that for my older version and I think it does what I want it to do just fine. There are PDFs of the original version available as well. 

When will I use it? I'm not sure. It's one of the major missing pieces of that Necromancer series so I would probably drop them in to a game as a whole set.  I liked the way they fit into the Scarred lands and wit hthat being redone for 5th Edition D&D I'd say there's some chance we go there again if we ever do a real 5E campaign. Pathfinder is an easy fit as well. Regardless of the system I will be happy when I finally do get to return to these adventures again.

Call of Cthulu - Back on the Shelf

I have an unusual relationship with Call of Cthulhu. I think it's an important game, but I haven't played it or run it very much and I don't really feel driven to do much more of either. I don't hate it but it's a different style of play to what I usually do and that probably explains the whole thing.

I think it's important because it was roughly the first game to push character advancement to the side - it's not particularly critical to the typical game, and odds are it's not going to matter in a few sessions anyway. Besides the initial rush of fantasy games after D&D we had some Sci-Fi games that were still mostly about breaking and entering and combat, and we had superheroes, but CoC was the first "investigation" type RPG and the first one where the expectation was that characters were not on a path to greater power - survival with enough sanity left to function was a major goal.

I've played a few games, a long time ago. It was interesting, and I would probably play if someone I knew decided they wanted to run a game. I don't particularly want to run it. Maybe one adventure for the Apprentices and some friends just so we could say we've played it and to expose them to that other style of play.

I think my biggest issue with it is that you're not likely to hear about that epic CoC campaign that's been running for 20 years and a lot of the current PC's are the kids and grandkids of the original PC's expanding their kingdom, etc. The very nature of the game cuts off that kind of long term saga. It's more like a typical horror movie series - the common thread isn't the protagonist of each movie - it's the  bad guy, like Jason from the Friday 13th movies. CoC isn't about building a legacy, it's about thwarting the Mythos over and over and the cast is likely to be significantly different for each "movie". I'm all about the "doomed hero" when it comes to a book or a movie, but I am less interested in playing that hero in a game.

That said my favorite Cthulhu story (one I consider to be a great adventure story regardless of the Mythos connections) is At the Mountains of Madness. I know they turned it into an epic adventure for CoC and one day I will own it. It's the one CoC book I know I could turn into an awesome campaign and the one that would be worth setting aside the time to play. I'm a sucker for the Lost City adventure anyway and this is yet another example of that. Other than a short one off adventure to try things out with my current players this is what is most likely to get me to play. Heck I could turn that into an epic D&D adventure, but I'd like to run it in it's native game if possible.

The reason for the post is that I finally picked up a copy of the game again this month. I had a copy for years but since we never played it I got rid of it prior to the last move a few years back. Sliding over towards 'collector" once again I decided I needed a copy on the shelf. Not 3 copies, not one of each edition, just one that  I could reference if it came up in conversation and one I could run if someone came over and said "I think we should play that." No, it's not tough to justify these things at all. It's one of my projects for this year - filling in a few gaps in the library, mainly games in the "why don't I have that?" class. This is one more checked off the list.

Experiments in RPG: Wrath of the Righteous 4E?

It's been a few months since We called the Wrath of the Righteous campaign. Some of it was the system as Maximum Pathfinder is something I find myself a little less interested in these days. A lot of it was the campaign itself as it really gets tangled up in itself in the latter half of the campaign. I think it's a downside to having multiple authors writing each of the six adventures as they get locked in on something they think is cool even when it doesn't really fit with the rest of the campaign. The single biggest example of this problem is that at a certain point the party pretty much has to work out a deal with one demon lord to help them against another demon lord and I mean it is assumed for the rest of the path that this is how things are. To me this is a ridiculous assumption for a few reasons:

• Chaotic Evil - They're demons! You can't trust them to keep their word by their very nature as the embodiment of chaotic evil in D&D (and Pathfinder)! Devils, sure, that's one of their signature things, that you can make a deal with them because they are Lawful Evil. This assumes/requires that the players are stupid or it assumes demons have a different nature than I see them having based on every prior portrayal of them in D&D.
• The Prior Campaign - It's all about killing demons! Not negotiating, not making accommodations, not mutual neutrality, but raising an army and destroying their major foothold on the world! Now suddenly we're going to the Abyss and making deals with them?
• Lawful Good - This whole adventure path was touted as the one for the paladins and clerics and anyone else that wanted to be on the side of Right. It was an AP that would let your LG's unleash their full potential. Paladins don't make deals with demons in my eyes. Neither does a cleric of the lawful good fighting god. Making that a key point in the AP means that either someone didn't get the memo and the editors didn't catch the lapse or that everyone thought it was a good idea - it was not. 

That said I hate leaving a campaign unfinished. I have done some work re-figuring how the campaign ought to go to be more to my liking. Then I had an idea - if I am going to have to rework the whole thing anyway before I would even consider finishing it, why not fix the mechanical issues to? This kind of epic level play is exactly what 4th Edition D&D was made for! I looked at some potential encounters and how it might work and it looked completely do-able.

So I asked my players how they felt about it and they were not instantly opposed to it. We talked through some points and I'd say there is a chance this will actually happen some day. I'm not stopping my Deadlands game or my M&M game for it, but it may find a home on the schedule down the road. The characters translate fairly well and would be about 11 - 13th level. The one glaring issue is the Cavalier as there is not really a class in 4E that is all about mounted combat. That's the one part that does not yet have an easy answer but I suspect we could find something he would be happy playing that's still a big tough guy in heavy armor. 

So that's how that's going. More when it actually becomes a game. 

Surprise! A New Twilight 2000 Supplement!

So this came thru over the weekend:

NEW For Twilight: 2000.

The East Africa Sourcebook. On DriveThruRPG.

From the deserts of Somalia to the Serengeti of northern Tanzania, the waters of the Indian Ocean to the jungles of the Congo, the East African/Kenya Sourcebook, the first new canon work for Twilight 2000 since 1995, shines a light on an area hinted at in previous works but never before detailed, where what is left of civilization in Africa struggles against the Somali Islamists, the PARA, the LRA and desperate pirates whose only mission is to take what they can from what still stands.

The Sourcebook contains a detailed order of battle for the American, French and Rwandan forces in the area as well as for their foes. A timeline is provided that shows how WWIII came to Africa, including the nuclear strikes that devastated much of the refinery production in Africa, leaving the refinery in Mombasa as the only hope for the Americans to provide the fuel the that keeps CENTCOM supplied in their continuing fight with the Soviets in Iran. The continuing struggle of the French to build a new Empire from the ruins of Africa come alive in the Sourcebook,  detailing their triumphs and missteps, including how they assisted the LRA to power in Uganda.

For those looking for new challenges and new adventures, the East African/Kenya Sourcebook provides them in spades offering everything from fighting a military campaign against the PARA and the Somalis, to convoy escort duty against pirates, to deep patrols trying to destroy terrorist bases or to find useable aircraft and supplies to keep AFRICOM going now that no more will be forthcoming from the United States.  For those who wish to be mercenaries, either in the employ of others or building their own “kingdoms” in the ruins of Africa, there are opportunities a plenty. 

Here's a link to the DTRPG page.

"... the first new canon work for Twilight 2000 since 1995 ..."

Well, it has been a while. How many people still care enough to make this worth doing. There are multiple comments on the page above so clearly at least a few people are paying attention. I have to wonder though - how many T2K campaigns are happening right now around the world? Say meeting once a month or more? Ten? For all editions together I suspect it's a really small number.

I don't say that as a slam. Twilight was one of my favorite games of the late 80's and I have almost all of the books for both 1st and 2nd edition. That said it's a hard sell these days - not many players are interested in a realistic retro take on a war that never actually happened. If you look up "simulationist" in the gamer dictionary this might be exhibit A and those do not seem to be anywhere close to popular today. Neither do "crunchy" as in rules nor "alternate history" other than steampunk or modern + magic type settings. Twilight doesn't do magic, unless it's the magic of letting your M214 portable minigun saw through a humvee and all of the raiders inside in a single combat round. 

If I was trying to get a game going today I'd probably pitch it as "like The Walking Dead but without zombies". It might sound odd but it's the closest thing I've ever seen to a T2K campaign and covers a lot of the same scenarios and situations. 

I don't know if I will ever run (or play in for that matter) a sustained T2K campaign. Finding enough players to do it right now is damn near impossible and I don't see how the passage of time will make that any better. Maybe at some point the retrogaming thing will sweep these kinds of games up into a popular movement once again but I suspect it won't be anytime soon.

Regardless, I admire GDW for keeping some of the non-Traveller stuff alive. In a world where there's Yet Another Version of tiny-booklets D&D every month I am glad some of the other classic RPG's are still available in some way.

Star Trek: Vanguard - 5 Years After

Here's a blog post by one of the authors on what is easily my favorite set of Star Trek books so far. It's a nice little read even if you haven't read the books as a lot of it is about what they are not going to do. Vanguard is a series that covers the characters and happenings around a new starbase in a new sector of space around the time of the original series. The authors position is that story is done - there will be no direct sequels and no follow-ups on the major characters in particular. Now some of the lesser characters do show up in other books, particularly the "Seekers" series but the Vanguard story is complete and will not be opened up again.

I really like that stance - "here is a complete work, it needs nothing further" is a rare thing these days where the brand and the franchise are king.

As a final take, if you're ever thinking about running a Star Trek RPG campaign, the series is worth a look just from that angle. Set it in a particular area of space with a recurring cast of ships, characters, enemies, colonies, and mysteries that they can get to know in detail. The traditional Trek campaign tends to be episodic and not very connected session to session but there are other ways to approach it and this series is a good example of what that looks like.

40k Friday - Iron Warriors Chaos Spawn

The last piece of this current round of Iron Warrior additions is my "Chaos Spawn".  The GW chaos spawn mini is basically a mass of tentacles or insect parts with legs. It's fine for general "chaos" but it seems out of place for this particular legion. The IW's are builders and make quite a few of the Daemon Engines that show up in chaos armies. While they have the chaos mindset, they do not have a ton of the physical chaos expressions. Why not take a theme of "spawn" as minor daemon engines? It sounded more interesting to me and that's how I ended up here. Those are Pathfinder miniatures Gorgons. They come already painted silver and washed in black (and have tiny red eyes!) so all I did was add the IW contrast colors of copper/brass - in a different pattern for each one - do the snow bases, then clearcoat the finished beastie.

In the game spawn are a cheap and expendable unit that is fast, tough, unpredictable, and fairly dangerous if they get into close combat. I think raging metal demon-bulls fit that perfectly. I like the rules and the look of these guys enough I may build another unit or two - a whole herd to unleash!

Technical Note: Current GW spawn base size is a 50mm round base for 40K. These bases are 50.1 mm. In my world that means "perfect match". In a tournament someone might complain, but I've rarely found a bigger base to be an issue - usually people whine about old mini's on smaller bases if things go that way. Regardless, I'll be darned if I'm going to grind down a circular base by .1mm!

Quick, easy, inexpensive, and looks good. Plus they can still be gorgons in a D&D game if needed!

The next unit on the table for the Iron Warriors is (finally!) the chaos biker squad! originally intended for my Death Guard army, I changed my mind as I was reviewing both forces and decided they were a better fit for the silver guys. They are gathered, partly built, and basecoated black at the moment so I may be able to show them off next week! That will finish out the Fast Attack element of the army so I am looking forward to that milestone.

40K Friday - Thursday Edition - Havocs!

Another entry in the 'Finishing up the Iron Warriors" list - a squad of havocs with autocannons. These are the old 3rd edition metal guys but I like the shoulder-mounted look just fine. For most battles they will be parked in a ruin somewhere dumping Str 7 death onto the enemy from 48" away. That's the plan at least. Autocannon havocs are one of the best heavy support options for a Chaos Marine army and one of the few options that the loyalists do not have so I am pretty happy to have them finished.

The paint here is another round of my quick and dirty IW scheme: black basecoat, drybrush silver, pick out details in bronze/brass/copper, then do the snow base and wrap it all up with a clear coat spray.  It's not going to win big tournament painting contests but it's consistent across the army, looks how it's supposed to look, and is pretty quick to execute. This squad came out a little grungier than some but I'm OK with it.

I added a piece of hazard stripe decal to the squad leader as that's another Iron Warriors thing. I think when it comes to that look that less is more so here only the squad leader is getting that kind of extra detail. They did all get the IW "skull" decal but considering that it's silver and on a silver background it's hard to spot unless your fairly close to them.

The squad leader is giving a "come at me bro/kung fu challenge" type wave. It gives him a tiny bit more character and fits considering that a) he's almost always going to be the first guy in the squad to buy the farm and b) if he doesn't this is still a long-ranged squad and the path to ascension involves beating people in melee challenges so if he's not dead by the end of then fight he's damn frustrated.

While putting this squad together I picked up the Traitor Legions book and discovered the IW havoc squads get some nice bonuses. I had one missile launcher in a regular CSM squad (which I was going to swap for a plasma gun anyway) and one more in a box. Why not pick up another pair and make a missile-havoc squad? So that's the next project.

Campaign Concept: Rogue Trader as Guardians of the Galaxy. Also: Starfinder

A few weeks back I described my inspiration for a Rogue Trader campaign driven by Black Sails, Starz amazing pirate series. Over the weekend we watched Guardians of the Galaxy for the first time in a long time and I think I have found the inspiration for the opposite of that other campaign concept.

Black Sails is serious, gritty, full of scheming, betrayals, and violence.

Guardians is far less serious, not nearly as gritty, does have some betrayals, and does have violence. The movie does involve dealing with powerful artifacts and overly powerful opponents so it's a better fit than I thought at first glance.

Rogue traders do have less chance of being put in jail ...

So there are some common elements, enough to make a good game for sure, but the tone would be completely different. I think "grim and serious pirate" Rogue Trader would be significantly different from "comic book movie" Rogue Trader, to the point they might not even feel like the same game.

It's OK Captain Flint, let's talk through this.

Key elements of a GotG Rogue Trader campaign in my mind:

• Characters are in slightly over their heads, despite being basically competent. Maybe they just recently fell into their positions and the campaign starts on "Day 1" of this new life.
• Less concern about details, technology, and "realism", looser style
• Action over plotting and scheming
• Focus on organizations
• name
• goal
• leader as recognizable NPC
• one or two lower level members as recognizable NPC's to put a face on things
  (example of what this means: Guardians RT would probably be more "that's Zolo's ship!" than "that's the Red Fury!" when identifying a new arrival)
• More emphasis on "doing the right thing", even reluctantly and less on "personal gain", comparatively
• Humor - this would be accepted and encouraged as part of the feel of the game. The closes "other thing" to this kind of feel is probably Firefly - there are serious consequences to actions of the PC's but that's no reason we can't be funny in getting to them.

Organization + recognizable member NPC

There are some differences in the scenarios. A Rogue Trader has a massive crew - they would probably have to stay mostly in the background. It's a massive ship but it's still smaller than serious warships so there are still things you will need to run from. Just think if the Black Sails crew was put in charge of the Enterprise or a Battlestar vs. the Guardians crew - how would those two stories be different? 

Also as I started to think through this I wonder if GotG might be better 'adapted" to a Starfinder campaign. We don't know much about the game yet but a lot of Pathfinder and D&D games start with "out for gold" and end up "doing the right thing" not far into the campaign. 

Yep, that looks about right for a "First Contact" for a lot of my games ...

So I may have talked myself into thinking through a Rogue Trader-like campaign that may end up using Starfinder instead of RT rules to help keep the right tone. I suppose we will just have to see how they fit together when the rules come out.

Skill Checks, Degrees of Success, and Savage Worlds

Since skill systems became a near-universal thing in RPG's, most of them have been pass/fail. From Runequest, Star Trek,  and Hero through GURPS on into the d20 games, most games are only concerned with whether you succeeded or not. Some have a critical success or failure element, but most of the time that's tied more to combat than typical skill checks. A lot of the time, that's enough.

There are outliers.

• The One-Roll engine covers both the "height" and "width" of each roll and those mean different things depending on the circumstances.  
• FFG's Star Wars game adds various other factors in with their own dice so that interpreting a dice pool for that game is something of an art all on its own. The knock on it is that it's sometimes more information than you need on the routine stuff.  
• Dice pool games form White Wolf to Shadowrun often include rules for multiple successes that indicate relative success or failure. This is definitely something to build on.
• The old TSR Marvel Super Heroes had one of the cleanest systems: One roll gave you a white (failure) green, yellow, or red to indicate increasing levels of success. 

My interest in this springs from my current immersion in getting the Deadlands game off of the ground. Savage Worlds task rolls are dice vs. a target number of 4, and for every increment of 4 over that it's a "raise".  Now this most directly applies in combat but the mechanic is the same for everything.  In reading through the published adventures though there are a lot of handy notes like "on a success the characters find X, with a raise they also find Y".  

Given that you have, effectively, 3 levels of result from a skill or stat check: Failure, Success, Raise. Because of this I've been trying to think of results in terms of these three levels. Some typical examples where this comes in:

• Perception Checks - probably the most overused skill in every game I've played, most of the time it's "you see the bad guys" or "you don't see the bad guys/trap/etc."   So what does a raise or an extra success get me here? 
• Maybe a normal success is "you hear something" while a raise is "you see something". Especially in a night encounter or inside a dark cave. Maybe some kind of nightvision makes that "see" result possible with just a normal success.
• Maybe a normal is "you see 5-6 guys standing around the campfire" while a raise is "let me put their miniatures out on the map in their exact positions. 
• A lot of times these are opposed rolls vs. someone else's Stealth type skill so sometimes a higher result is its own reward. 
• If the idea is to make it more interesting maybe a success is "you see these guys" while a raise is "you hear them talking about x". It might give your players a reason to listen a little longer before the inevitable gunfire or charge.
• My 3 degrees here go like this (typical sneaking up on a camp scenario)
• Failure = smells a campfire and that they're cooking something, maybe hear some voices
• Success = There are several guys around the fire talking about how bad the food is and how they can't wait to get back to a real town
• Raise = There are 4 guys around the fire, all wearing gunbelts and a 5th guy standing over by the horses with a shotgun

• Knowledge checks - this is where I've seen some effort made in a lot of different games. 
• Pathfinder sometimes has a little table: DC10 = some minimal knowledge about a topic, DC15=  more, and DC20 = all that plus more even more details. That's a toally playable system. 
• This is an area where even failure should probably yield some knowledge. If nothing else I like to give the party a name of someone or something that could help. It's kind of a sideways local knowledge check too - "no, you can't recall anything in particular but you do recall there's a local mage/ranger/dog groomer who's supposed to know all about elven magic swords/the red eye orcs/ dire poodles. it's more interesting than a dead end and might give other characters a chance to contribute too. This could also be an organization or a location (like a temple) or an object, say a book.
• My 3 degrees here go like this: 
• Failure = don't know myself but I know how we can find out
• Success = know enough to be useful, could go ask someone else given time and enough concern
• Raise = know all that's useful or relevant to our situation, all someone else is going to do is confirm what we already know. 

• Crafting checks - this doesn't come up as often as the others but when it does it's relatively easy to adjudicate
• Failure = you're not done yet - needs more time. Critical failure  = you are done, you just broke it/ruined it/have to start over
• Success = you made the bare minimum quality and/or amount that is supposed to come from the check. 
• Raise/additional successes = it took less time or you made more of it than expected (or it has more charges if that's how it works)
• Another option: A lot of computer games use quality levels for gear, typically something like White for basic, then Green, then Blue, then Purple, then Gold for increasing levels of quality. That's fairly simple to incorporate if you think it's worth the trouble. For something like a D&D potion, maybe it lasts one additional round for each quality level, or bumps the die type up for say a healing potion. Permanent gear gets a little trickier but there's usually some way to account for a really good roll. 

• Physical checks - Sometimes these are the hardest to judge as far as extra success. "I want to leap from this balcony to that chandelier" is a fairly straightforward task.
• Failure - A simple "you fell" on a failure isn't all that exciting. For a game like Savage Worlds I'd say this means you do it but you're hanging on by one arm, dangling in space and off balance. A critical failure or botch type result  = "you fell and looked clumsy doing it". 
• Success = you made it, looked like you knew what you were doing, and it only took your normal move - what else are you doing this round?
• Raise - you made it and swung it just enough to be in reach of the object you want to handle in a single impressive move. That might be a stab, a grab, or a drop to a slab.

Now I did not do nearly enough of this with Pathfinder, so I feel good that the new game is spurring me to pay more attention to this. I also am a big believer in that not everything needs a roll, and one roll should be enough. You shouldn't need a perception check to see non-invisible creatures moving around a well-lit area, and I don't care what the movement rules say you don't need 5 stealth checks to sneak up on the guards at the front door. Make one roll and get on with it!

Wrapping up - as a DM it's good to have something in mind/up your sleeve/in your notes beyond simple success or failure. I tend to prefer the "failure  = partial success" option, with a critical failure meaning no success and a negative impact as well, to the traditional pass/fail result. I'll try to point out some more examples as we play our way through The Flood. 

Something New (-ish) for Monday: Old D&D Adventures from Goodman Games and WOTC

I'm a little surprised they're being this direct. Goodman Games is going to be doing "collector's edition" reprints of B1 and B2 (at least) with all of the original material plus 5E stats and some other additional material.

I'm ... impressed.

I thought we would be seeing more of the "re-interpretation" we've been seeing with their campaigns so far. It's an approach that covers both the nostalgia angle while still being "new" to a large degree. Handing it off to Goodman Games, the "retro" publisher (they print Dungeon Crawl Classics, among other games) means that WOTC isn't "wasting" their limited resources recycling old material. They're allowing and encouraging the kind of stuff some of us wanted for a long time.  It's remarkable how far we've come.

Yes, I will probably end up getting some or all of these. I've converted some of the old adventures for every single D&D campaign I've ever run and I think you could run a perfectly fine 5E campaign using nothing but converted AD&D modules.

This is a really cool development.