September 1, 2008

Advanced Dungeons and Dragons Module Cover Art

Sometimes I just miss the simple straight forward approach of the 'modules' from days long gone (read: 'adventures' to all you younglings). Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was the heyday of the game - where most players did not even use miniatures, the supplemental 'splat books' were lightwieght, and the adventures were loose. Everything seemed so homegrown; even the official products. Remember all the cartoony B&W line art? It was like Gygax was the artist...

So, here's my tribute - to the adventures I remember well, 20 years later. Enjoy them... and let me know if seeing these lost covers strikes a chord with you (as it did with me).

(click on the thumbs for big)

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3 comments:

  1. AnonymousSeptember 1, 2008 at 7:04 PM

    I'll let you in on a little secret... whenever I see some of the old AD&D stuff, I get this urge to read through it all and find out if I can make a decent story out of it.

    I don't get that out of the current line of products...

    Don't get me wrong, I've read some quirky stuff that you wouldn't want to use anywhere. But I've also read some interesting stuff, and -believe it or not- I can mostly understand the scant stats even though I've not played the game much.

    I've also heard a lot of people talk wonders about some of the settings, you should do a "memory lane" post on those as well, if you care and have the time.

    Fred

    ReplyDelete
  2. Jonathan JacobsSeptember 1, 2008 at 8:46 PM

    @ Fred : Welcome! The thing to keep in mind about the old school D&D stuff was that the adventures were intentionally lightweight - have you ever seen the original Steading of the Hill Giant Chief? it was only fricken 8 pages... yeah. super light... basically just a room list with monsters and a map. Having "grown up" in this era of rpg's - we often had to make up the stories to fit the adventures we were running more so then than now. I think it made me a better DM actually. And as for the newer published adventures/modules - i read them to get ideas, but I honestly rarely use them because the story.fluff is so thick that its too cumbersome to adapt the adventure to my existing campaign. Like for 4E - you can either run the H1 series as is, or fight like hell to try to adapt it to your game setting. I choose neither, and just skipped it altogether; choosing instead to run my own custom adventures and campaign.

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  3. AnonymousJanuary 24, 2018 at 11:51 AM

    all your images are broken

    ReplyDelete

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