Moving Forward To Now

Well now, I notice it's been a few days since I last posted here.  That's what happens when "Real Life" decides to take over for awhile.

What's been going on in "My World" since the last post?  hmmm, let's see...

I'm writing a dandy of a game, written with "The Exorcist" somewhere in the back of my mind.  It's part demon confrontation, part possession encounter and part "whodunnit".  It's coming together slowly but surely.  We don't want to rush a good thing.

I've been reading a lot of forum posts at DF and from all the nice rpg/AD&D folks  I have circled on Google Plus.

It's interesting to see how much thought and time we put into our games.   The question I have is how much is it escapism and how much is it that we are just getting lost in our imaginations?

One thing I found very interesting came out of a poll/question in the DragonsFoot forums in regard of how to "De-Tolkien-ize" AD&D 1E.

Someone put into words almost my exact thoughts on that and all I could do was agree.

There really is no need to "de-anything" because if you start from a blank world, as I have, and you homebrew pretty much everything or edit to your own liking that which you didn't write, as I do, then it's more a matter of, what do you choose to put into your world from among the many and varied things possible to choose from in the AD&D 1E books?

To put it more succinctly, it's more about adding in rather than taking out.

If a DM/GM doesn't want certain races in the game such as elves or dwarves or halflings and only wants humans, then by golly, the DM/GM just houserules that all PC's can only be human.

To me, that's the beauty of AD&D 1E (I refer to it specifically because it's the only edition I have ever played and know).  For me, it's like a huge box of LEGOS with no directions.   I can build anything I want with them using just this bottomless box of bricks and my imagination.  Things are added into the formerly blank playfield, not taken out.

I have finally acquired the Monster Manual and Monster Manual 2.  Now I have the 1E DM Guide, Player Handbook and the MM and MM2.  It's all I want or need.  It's my bottomless box of LEGOS.  As I write the next game, I can pick and choose from what is available in the books to build my adventure.

What's even better, if it's not already in one of those four books,  I will use the information provided in them as a template and create something entirely new.  I did exactly this when starting to write the exorcism adventure I mentioned at the beginning of this.  

I needed a demon more to what I imagined.  The MM2 has an entry for "Pazuzu" who was the villain in the "Exorcist" movie, but I felt that MM2 just turned him into a comic, jester version of the evil and nastiness of what that demon is really capable of.  So, I created another "Version of Pazuzu using his Sumerian name instead.

This also became my answer for another question in the DF forums asking why people thought 1E is the "Best" version of AD&D. (to be fair, it was asked in the 1E sub-forum inquiring why those who already hold it to be so, do so.)

Until next time, good adventure.