Introductions

You might say that I am an "early adapter" of D&D, having thrown my first 3d6 to hit an orc back in 1976 (we didn't have d20's back in the day, just the three little brown books).  By 1979 my group of friends and I were veterans of D&D, and shunned the Basic BX version of the game (that was for kids & newcomers), jumping right into the "expert" version of 1e AD&D as soon as each of the original hardback books came out.  Amazingly, a couple of us kept the dice rolling throughout the 80's, by which time my original Elvish Magic User had astonishingly made it to 16th level (yeah, we had a few homebrew house rules).  Sadly, the start of the 90's saw the end of my adventuring days.  But I kept my dice.  And the books.

Fast forward to 2015.  That's when I first started noticing that the rest of the world seemed to have re-discovered this great game I originally played over 35 years ago.  Apparently, a few people had been playing it all along, through at least 4 1/2 official versions and countless variants.  But now, it was exploding back into the mainstream.  Everyone wanted to roll dice like it was 1979.

This in turn sparked my interest to revisit the game I loved.  I had no interest in this new-fangled version of the game but was more curious to see if anyone else out there had a soft spot for the good old days of Save or Die, where dungeons were meant for crawling.  Was I in for a pleasant surprise.  Over a long weekend of web surfing, I discovered that there was an entire community out there of Grognards and OSR enthusiasts that had been keeping the spirit of the game alive while I had been off going to Law School and starting a family.  And boy, had they been busy.

During the last couple of years, I have spent a fair amount of my free time devouring what is out there, from the excellent forums at ENWorld and Dragonsfoot, to the multitude of blogs dedicated to keeping the spirit of Gary & Dave's creation alive.  This allowed me to rediscover the roots of the game, going all the way back to that first meeting between Gary and Dave, and to relive those epic adventures of my little wizard and his group of merry NPCs and henchmen, including a legendary battle against a certain group of giants that were terrorizing the countryside.  To all the players and contributors out there that have kept the faith all these years, you have my undying gratitude.

This, in turn, got me thinking.  Why couldn't my son and his friends experience the same wonder and excitement that I had tossing funny looking dice and loping the heads off evil creatures?  Sure, they were a little young at the time, but this would give me plenty of time to prepare some epic adventures for them.  And out of this idea was born my grand plan to create the perfect homage to the early years of the game, to link the original Gygax Modules into one grand, career spanning campaign by combing B2, TTEE, S4, WG4, G1-3, D1-3 & Q1.  How hard could it be?

Well, in the coming posts I plan to tell you.  And at the same time, hopefully give back a little to the faithful community and pay forward the efforts of those that have come before.  To go with this blog I will be setting up a separate Google Docs page where I will store all of the 3rd party and original source material that I used for this project.  If you have made it this far, thanks for reading, and please check back often.  You see, my 3 and a half year project has finally born fruit, and my (now 10 year old) son and his friends have started their own epic adventure, heading out from the Keep and into the mysteries of Quasqueston & the Caves of Chaos (revised and updated for 1e).  For those suffering from insomnia, I may even post a game play log or two.