Disclosures, requirements & admonitions.

So, before we jump into the good stuff, I thought I'd go through some basic concepts and assumptions.  First off, the contents of this blog assume that you have access to and a working understanding of the following (all 1e unless otherwise noted):

Hard Cover Books

Monster Manual

Player's Handbook

Dungeon Master Guide

Fiend Folio

Monster Manual II

Modules

B1 - In Search of the Unknown (modified for 1e)

B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands (modified for 1e)

T1-4 - The Temple of Elemental Evil

S1 - The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth

WG4 - Forgotten Temple of Tharizun

G1 - Steading of the Hill Giant Chief

G2 - Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl

G3 - Hall of the Fire Giant King

D1 - Decent into the Depths of the Earth

D2 - Shrine of the Kuo-Toa

D3 - Vault of the Drow

Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits

Accessories

DM Screen

Pencils and Art Gum Erasers

Notebook, graph and scratch paper

Ruler

1 set of dice per player/DM (2d4, 2d6, 1d8, 2d10 (different colors), 1d12 & 1 d20).  Each player should have their own color dice (except the d10s).  I was amazed how much time 8-10 year old's will spend arguing over dice.

Optional - Miniatures.  When I started this endeavor I still had over 2 dozen original miniatures from the 70's.  In the last few months I have picked up another 3 dozen or more original TSR, Ral Parthra & Citadel miniatures.  I was surprised how easy they were to find online.  My kid and his friends love the addition of miniatures to the game and I find that they help with visualizing the scene for newbies (Oh, that's why the cleric cannot heal the fighter that is on the other side of a 30 ft. chamber).

And before you beat me with the Mace of St. Cuthbert, yes, I know that B1 was written by Mike Carr, not EGG.  I am simply using it as the Cave of the Unknown, as countless others have before me.

Original versions of most of the hard cover books and modules (well played but still serviceable) can all be found for reasonable prices on Amazon or E-Bay.  The exception is The Temple of Elemental Evil, which as of this writing is hard to find for under $75.00.  You can also pick up reprints of all of these in .pdf versions (and some in soft cover versions, including TTEE) for reasonable prices at the Dungeon Masters Guild (www.dmsguild.com), which also has outstanding reprints of the Hard Cover Books available.

For each module, I plan to create a companion "cheat sheet" that will list the main stats (HP, AC, Dam & EXP) of all monsters along with treasure for each room.  Each of these will also include a "Notes for the DM" section that will detail how my additions to the story element deviate from the original modules.  I have already done this for The Keep, Quasqueton and The Caves of Chaos.  Next up, The Temple of Elemental Evil.  And now we have a problem.

As you probably know (seeing that you are still reading), as written TTEE does not fit into this grand adventure.  When T1 - The Village of Hommlet was released in 1979, it was Gary's intent to follow it up in short order with the Temple of Elemental Evil (says so right there on the front cover).  But a funny thing happened on the way to the Temple.  As D&D grew in popularity, Gary found himself going from Game Designer to Company Admin.  As a result, he had to put TTEE on the shelf where it would sit for six long years, until he finally turned his reams of notes on the project over to Frank Mentzer to finish up.  Unfortunately, by that time the Big Bad of the adventure (the Demon Queen Lolth) had already been used in a previous module (Q1 - Queen of the Demonweb Pits).  So, in his home games where he play-tested the material he replaced her with a giant blotchy demon mushroom (?!?), which ended up in the version he turned over to Frank.  Well, not in my world.  (By the way, if you are interested in how this all played out back in the day at TSR, you could spend days going through the multitudes of multi-page threads over at En World and Dragonsfoot on the subject.  At least I did.)

Which brings us to one of the main goals for my grand adventure project, which is to return as much as possible of EGG's original intent to the Temple, staring with returning Lolth as the main big bad.  I have the general outline of how I plan to do this.  Now, for the grunt work.  Hopefully I'll be finished before the boys confront Lolth's evil cleric at the end of Cave K, which at the rate they are chewing up the Caves, will be in just a few weeks.

The other main goal of this project (the "pay if forward" part) is to ease the burden of anyone who wants to use some or all of this in their own 1e campaign.  Over 24 months of research preceded this endeavor.  During this process, on more occasions than I care to remember I would discover promising insights and references to useful information, only to be cut off by dead links or defunct web sites and blogs.  Where the resources did still exist, often they would be spread over half a dozen or more of unrelated web sites.  This resulted in countless wasted hours that could have been better spent on prepping the actual campaign.

To address this, I will be doing a number of things with this blog.  First, if still active I will be including direct links to all sources and materials used in the project with each post.  Second, there will be a separate reference page that includes all (working) links to materials used, organized by Module.  Don't want to waste your time with my ramblings?  Fine, go right to the source.  Finally, I will be keeping a Google Drive archive at: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1rimHzxRhObQEv8sX-og5GxZbIsm20y5M which will contain all of the documents that I used on this project (except the original Modules, of course), as a backup in case the original links ever go down.  This will include all 3rd party material as well as everything I have created.  If any of the original authors out there have a problem with this, just ping me and I'll happily remove your work from the archive.