THE ONGOING CAMPAIGN There's a lot to dig into, in this section, which encompasses only about 2.5 pages of text, but is crammed with information. It begins with a discussion of how to keep excitement in your game when it becomes rote. This is something, I think, most long-term DMs can empathize with. There comes a point where you realize you're recycling ideas and there are only so many city murder mysteries, political intrigue stories, and standard dungeon crawls your characters can handle, and you want to kick it up a notch. The section discusses the delicate balance of keeping the game challenging and dangerous, but not so deadly as to be un-survivable. It notes that there always has to be a balance between gain, loss, and risk, and that in a long campaign there needs to be an overarching story--what in modern terms is called a "big bad." It says that this big bad doesn't have to feature in every game, and indeed probably shouldn't feature until the mid...

I had a request over at the OD&D forums to put up an index of sorts to my "Reading Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" threads, as it was hard to read them in sequence, the poster said, using the tag search.  So here it is--all the posts in sequence.  I didn't take the time to list the contents of each one, as the more time I take on this is more time taken away from new AD&D blogs, and nobody wants that.  These are, however, in sequence as they appear in the AD&D DMG, each blog covering a couple of sections, with "sections" defined as those bits of text that fall beneath headers that are in bolded caps in the book...hopefully that makes sense. So, here you go.  I'll try to keep this a living index as I add new sections to the series, so if you keep this post bookmarked you should always have the most up-to-date listing. Oh, also, these will not open in a new window, so you may want to right click and "open in new window/tab/whatever....