The Basic Idea

 I recently got back in to role playing, due to burgeoning interest from my youngest son.  I had been a role player for meany years when I was younger, but eventually left it for 40K,and other miniatures games.

I had toyed with the idea of returning to my roots, but had no real incentive, until my son came home one day, talking about some kids in the park doing live action role playing, and asked if he could give it a try.  I told him that I had a better idea, and that I would teach him, and we could play together. With my interest rekindled, and a reason to play, I just had to find a set of rules.

I researched, and tested a LOT of rules, from freebies on the internet, commercial copies, and old school renaissance clones. I even picked up the original copies of 1st Edition, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, off Amazon, at around $10.00 a copy (a great deal IMO).

After reading, reading, re-reading, and weighing the pros and cons, I finally settled on using Labyrinth Lord (LL), with the Advanced Edition Companion (AEC), with a little bit of Basic Fantasy, and some character mods I picked up off someone elses blog (I will post a link, once I find it).

I found that LL gave me the ease of play, and old school feel I wanted; while being in an updated format - which appealed to me. I have to say that my first choice was Basic Fantasy, which I really liked, but I did not like the fact that all of the supplements were downloadable add-ons.  I thought that I would just keep an extra folder for all of the extras, but then decided that it was too much hassle to keep flipping between printed copies, that were in no particular order. Had the official copy included all of the extras, I would have definitely chosen that over LL.

I bought hardbound copies of both LL & AEC, from LuLu.  I am very impressed with the hardbound books, and like that they fit in size to the original AD&D books.  They look great in the book shelf.

With all of the resources now available, I had to decide on our first adventure. I had found a lot of the old, original modules online, and read through them once again, for the first time in 25 years.  I realized pretty quickly that the old modules just made no sense, from a "real" perspective. I wondered, "How can you cram so many monsters in to a tiny space (1st level dungeon), and none of the monsters hear what is going on in the next room?" A lot of the scenarios seemed a bit short-sighted in that the encounters made no sense, and were just hack sessions.  I mean, really, why is there a dragon in a 10x10 secret room, behind the broom closet?

My nostalgia was satisfied from reading the old modules, but I knew right away that if I wanted something more logical, I would have to either adapt the modules, or create my own.  I decided to do both.  After struggling with ideas, I happened to run across a kids game, which encourages storytelling, and imagination, by using dice, with random pictures, to help build your story.  There are 9 dice, and you decide how many you are going to roll.  Each die has 6 random images, such as a Flame, Star, House, Bee, etc...  Once rolled, you take the dice and arrange them in a certain way, and interpret the images on the die, to tell your story.

I thought "this would be a great way to get the creative juices flowing" and started rolling the dice.  What I came up with was a great little story, surrounding an orchard, a star,  and ..... Well, I shouldn't give the story away just yet.  I am now in the process of fleshing everything out, and working on turning it in to a PDF module, to share with whomever visits my blog.  Once this is available, I will share with everyone.

So, I still have a lot of work to do, but I can say that I am very excited to get back to what is familiar, and friendly from my childhood, and sharing that with my son.  I have to say, spending time with him in this way, even though it might have social stigma attached, is a hell of a lot more enjoyable, than blowing sh*t up on the Xbox.