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Post by geneweigel on Jun 22, 2016 14:01:20 GMT -5
I think in honor of Dave Arneson (which is something that I rarely do ) you have to look at it like dragon subdual is not for the light player. This is Arneson country. You're going in and you're going in deep. Youre not just building a stronghold youre building an outer perimeter of strongholds, you're not killing the demon you're having him sign a contract, you're not getting an orc sidekick you're conscripting the tribe and regimenting them in barracks, and youre not just going to slay the dragon, been there done that, youre going to release him back to where he belongs in a newly constructed environment deep underground.... For a nice sum of course
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Post by Scott on Jun 22, 2016 23:26:32 GMT -5
What about good characters and dragons? Can you see good PCs with dragons? Tenser got rid of his dragons when he converted. Ive considered scanarios where a PC performs some kind of service for a dragon and gets something in return, but I've never developed it in play.
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 23, 2016 10:40:13 GMT -5
I think that frowning on subdual is an offshoot from DRAGONLANCE. This is from DRAGONLANCE ADVENTURES (1987), which was still a 1st edition AD&D book that refers to subdual:
In 2E PHB,DMG and the dragon entries in MC1 MONSTROUS COMPENDIUM there is no reference for subdual except a brief mention of frost giants subduing white dragons under the white dragon and frost giant entries:
As for alignment questions about "taming" (READ: beating) a good intelligent animal the D&D 3 book (1974) says:
VAGUE
The 1977 Basic (edited by Holmes) says:
THE WORD SUBDUE IS ACTUALLY USED
The MM (1977) says:
THE WORD TAME IS USED SO THERE HAS TO BE RESTRAINT AND FORCE.
The 1981 Steve Marsh/Zeb Cook edited one says:
WE'RE RIGHT BACK TO VAGUE
The 1983 Mentzer edited EXPERT book says:
SAME BUT LOSES ITS FIERCENESS
And the 1989 MONSTROUS COMPENDIUM Zeb Cook rubber stamp on all 1990's TSR products said:
THIS LOSES ALL D&D REALITY IN EXCHANGE FOR AN EFFORTLESS FREE LUNCH
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 23, 2016 13:37:42 GMT -5
Here is a quote from DL1 DRAGONS OF DESPAIR (1984) on an encounter with what the players might perceive as a unicorn: Forestmaster for sale! Step right up!
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foster1941
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Post by foster1941 on Jun 23, 2016 15:29:30 GMT -5
Ugh, reading that Unicorn Grove encounter makes me want to gouge my eyes out. How did we go from The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth to THAT in less than 2 years?!
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 23, 2016 16:14:03 GMT -5
Ugh, reading that Unicorn Grove encounter makes me want to gouge my eyes out. How did we go from The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth to THAT in less than 2 years?! In the Summer of 83 I moved in with my godmother who was wealthy and she used to go to malls a lot. It was a natural growth to meet a demand of this dragon-hugging niche market that was already there. Crystals weren't popular yet but the same market that crystals thrived in was there with romantic dragon paraphenalia. I recall going into this mall in Florida and her saying there was too many unicorns to choose from and there were! It was a bizarre time. The toy store was neck deep in dragon shit that they didn't even have that much of the prior year. They had all these fantasy army men, that were cheap looking but I would buy them now in a heart beat, and the toy stores were pretty "butch" fantasy-wise. But as soon as you walked down to a gift shop with statues or a bookstore you'd see all this "mount and girl" type stuff involving gentle dragons.
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foster1941
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Post by foster1941 on Jun 23, 2016 17:17:11 GMT -5
Given TSR's commercial aspirations c. 1983-84, "D&D For Girls" is an idea that made sense. It's just weird to me that its style and tone were allowed to pretty much completely swallow up the game as it existed prior to 1983.
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Post by GRWelsh on Jun 23, 2016 18:27:09 GMT -5
Circa 1982, EGG went to California and Hickman was hired. In 1983, Weis was hired.
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foster1941
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Post by foster1941 on Jun 23, 2016 19:49:48 GMT -5
I guess it's the natural endpoint of the fact that from 1980-81 on the design and development departments at TSR reported up the chain to Brian Blume and had little-if-anything to do with Gary: even those products he continued to write in that era were developed and produced by his own separate team (Frank Mentzer, Francois Froideval, Eric Shook, etc.). AD&D was clearly on two parallel stylistic tracks when you compare S4, WG4, EX1-2, WG5, T1-4, and WG6 on the one hand with stuff like the N series, I series, the later entries in the B & X series, and of course the DL series on the other (or even three tracks, when you include TSR-UK's output).
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 23, 2016 21:06:48 GMT -5
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Post by GRWelsh on Jun 24, 2016 8:17:44 GMT -5
I never read any of the Pern books, which is strange, because I was getting into fantasy/sci-fi novels in the early 80's at the same time those Pern displays were ubiquitous in places like B. Dalton's Bookseller or Waldenbooks. They just never appealed to me, and I never gave them a chance. Did you guys read any of them? Do they have any dragon ideas worthwhile for D&D?
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 24, 2016 8:39:26 GMT -5
Well, I assign good sword and sorcery yarns to being faded out by the advent of the Nebula Awards in the 60's (DUNE in 1965 was the first winner). Mccaffrey won best Nebula Awards novella in 1968 for DRAGONRIDER a series of ANALOG magazine stories which gave it the edge to be compiled into the first Pern book DRAGONFLIGHT same year. It was followed by DRAGONQUEST (1971) and DRAGONSONG (1976) then all three were combined into DRAGONRIDERS OF PERN Omnibus Edition (1978) published by the Science Fiction Book Club of which I joined in 1979 for my free copy. I didn't even realize it was three books when I read it. All I remember was not liking the science fantasy when I expected fantasy. Psychic links with modified lizards into dragons and destructive air fungus from space.
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 24, 2016 8:43:45 GMT -5
I'd say Ed Greenwood's Appendix N definitely has "Pern".
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 24, 2016 8:47:10 GMT -5
Sorry, the Forgotten Realms has "The Harpers" this is directly from Pern.
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foster1941
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Post by foster1941 on Jun 24, 2016 13:49:13 GMT -5
TSR totally could have had two parallel flavor-lines for D&D. The (presumably court-enfored) split between D&D and AD&D even gave an obvious opportunity for doing so - move all the epic, girl-friendly "romantic fantasy" stuff into the D&D line (which was already targeted at a younger and less-hardcore audience) under the design department, keep the adult-oriented "swords & sorcery" stuff in the AD&D line under Gary. But, for whatever reason (read: Brian Blume's incompetence) that's not the route they went, and instead Dragonlance was released as part of the AD&D line, the D&D revision was apparently given to Gary (since it was done by Frank Mentzer, who AFAIK wasn't part of the regular design department but rather was "Gary's official #2 guy"), the same designers (Cook, Hickman, Douglas Niles, Jeff Grubb, Carl Smith, Merle Rasmussen, TSR-UK, etc.) all wrote pretty-much-indistinguishable stuff across both lines that blurred/erased any ostensible stylistic distinction between them, and once Gary was out of the building the swords & sorcery approach was swallowed up and disappeared completely. Oh well; 20-20 hindsight...
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 24, 2016 18:29:42 GMT -5
I remember getting stuck DMing a lot of official duds mid-80s.
Even what soundsd like it was going to be interesting I9 DAY OF AL'AKBAR (1986) was the epitome of lack of Gygax. Where it clearly was going to be "something. Greyhawk" with all sorts of stuff but its cored out to make something raw and unfinished. This is an extreme example post-Gygax but it was made during Gygaxs time then thrown together as if stuff made with lack of consistency for sale was interesting and worth something. Its bizarre.
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Post by GRWelsh on Jun 26, 2016 13:55:02 GMT -5
Is there anything linking Module I9 to the World of Greyhawk other than the name "Al'Akbar"? Does it have anything to do with the artifact?
I guess I was lucky. By the mid-80's the only games I played in were homebrew/original that didn't rely on published modules. I avoided the whole 'blah-ness' of the late 80's/early 90's TSR.... In that time period, I occasionally picked up a DRAGON magazine, but that was about it. The other exception is that I did buy all the 2nd edition AD&D rule books, that unwieldy Monstrous Compendium binder, and some of the softback books (Campaign Sourcebook & Catacomb Guide, Castle Guide, Complete Fighter's Handbook, Vikings, Charlemagne's Paladins, Celts). I got back into a regular AD&D campaign in 1993 and it had little to no TSR module material in it.
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Post by geneweigel on Jun 26, 2016 15:32:46 GMT -5
Its hard to explain but it obviously looked like it was to be set in Ekbir by Allen Hammack (I'm guessing it was conceived 1984 or 1985) but there is a "developer" in the credits meaning someone to "do the rest" and it looks like Hammack was already gone. Gary cited him to me as "one of the good guys".
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foster1941
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Post by foster1941 on Jun 26, 2016 19:20:35 GMT -5
I never had I9 back in the day and only looked at it for the first time a few months ago. It's not terrible, and I described it recently as "probably the last half-decent thing TSR ever produced." It's got a dungeon and a town that are both pretty reminiscent of Allen Hammack's other AD&D modules (C2 and A3). However, it's also got a really bland and generic wilderness section that's set in "generic world" and involves crossing a totally boring, generic wilderness map and having a string of linear, bland encounters that are reminiscent of the boring middle section of Zeb Cook's module X4, as well as an undercooked "B-plot" that builds on one of those encounters (while the PCs are trying to infiltrate the bandit town/fortress to locate and retrieve the Cup and Talisman of Al'Akbar there's also a "mad prophet" in the desert fomenting an uprising). It hadn't occurred to me when reading the module that that stuff may have been added by the third-party "developer" (Bruce Heard, the guy who later did all the development on Basic D&D's "Known World") as replacements for a Greyhawk setting, but that makes sense. Those parts definitely feel like a different voice and design sensibility than the dungeon parts. It did occur to me when reading it that it had probably been sitting on the shelf at TSR for awhile, and although it was published in 1986, was probably actually written 2 or 3 years earlier (when, among other things, Hammack was still working for TSR).
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Post by geneweigel on Jul 27, 2016 23:23:26 GMT -5
I was going through my Tolkien books and totally forgot Tolkien's FARMER GILES OF HAM (1949) is a tale all about dragon subdual.
Here is a crusty memory, I recall reading it in 1982 and disliking the use of gunpowder in a quasi-medieval setting that was leaning towards the dark ages. Although probably not in those terms it was a feeling that made me dislike the "Moria Guy" writing shit that didn't fit in.
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