Guest posting by Tim Brannan Today, August 20, would have been H. P. Lovecraft's 136th birthday. Lovecraft has been part of my gaming DNA for almost as long as D&D has. Maybe not quite as long, but close enough that it is hard for me to separate the two anymore. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, August Derleth, all that wonderful old weird fiction eventually found its way into my games. You can see that in my other blog, The Other Side. You can see it in the kinds of games I talk about. And, of course, there is Call of Cthulhu . I have played Call of Cthulhu on and off for decades. It is one of the great horror RPGs, full stop. If I want the classic experience of investigators slowly uncovering truths humanity was never meant to know, watching their sanity fray while something impossibly old stirs beneath the earth, it remains an obvious choice. But sometimes I want something slightly different. Sometimes I want the Mythos, but I also want witches (ok. I always ...

I don't care what anyone says, Disney's Adventures of the Gummi Bears was a damn great fantasy cartoon back in the day, and it deserves a D&D treatment. If you've never heard of it, here it is on YouTube for free, or you can watch it in a less clumsy format on Disney+ www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLcdHhJ83WveO5S9AeAeDKD-qQrsfB4dpw Also, the theme song is one of the catchiest cartoon themes ever. Okay, so...   Source:  https://www.deviantart.com/tomarmstrong20/art/Adventures-of-the-Gummi-Bears-1985-1991-566374688 GUMMI BEARS (Stats for Original, Basic, Advanced and most OSR games) No. Appearing: 1-8 Hit Dice: 1-5 Armor Class: 7 (2 with gummi berry juice) / 13/18 high AC Attack: By weapon or bounce slam (1d6) Special: Gummi Berry Juice, Stealth Move: 12 (18 with gummi berry juice) / 30ft/45ft Modern games Size: Small % in Lair: 60% Alignment: Lawful Treasure: C XP: Varies by hit dice Primes (for Castles & Crusades): P,M Description...

So for many years, the Arduin books have been on the periphery of my awareness. I knew they were out there, knew they comprised significant expansion and modification to the OD&D rules, knew they eventually became their own system of sorts, and knew that there was some controversy regarding Dave Hargrave, but that was about it. I've seen more and more discussion about them recently, so finally I decided that I would take the plunge. I acquired copies of the "Trilogy" on eBay. My copy of The Arduin Grimoire Volume 1 is a 4th printing; the Volume 2 and Volume 3 books are first printings. Replica box I made to store the trilogy in.   So I guess I'll start a running commentary here as I work through. Again, bear with me as I don't read fast to begin with, and combined with the piles of writing work on my desk and the fact that I can only read a few pages of this tiny text without getting a splitting headache and, well...it's going to take awhile...

If you read this blog, you're probably well aware that over the past decade-plus, fifteen years or so, there's been a wealth of scholarship surrounding the original 1974 D&D rules. I was recently reading over...let's just say, an early printing of these rules, and a few things jumped out at me. There are definitely assumptions we make about OD&D that are based on later developments. Things that were written in AD&D, B/X, even some of the later supplements have colored our idea of "how things are supposed to be." With that in mind, I'd like to go back and interpret OD&D through the lens of someone who had just picked it up in 1974, without the benefit of everything that came later, without actually having gamed with Gary and Dave, and see what comes out in the wash. This is nothing more than a thought experiement--I'm not necessarily trying to challenge common wisdom about how these things work, but the way they are presented and worded at...