News — Douglas Niles

I mean seriously, of all the TSR adventures from the 1980s, does any have a title better than Against the Cult of the Reptile God?  I really think author Douglas Niles must have stolen this title from a lost Robert E. Howard Conan manuscript because it is really that cool. Niles, a personal favorite TSR author, spins a tale of the ‘dying’ village of Orlane located near Greyhawk’s Gran March.  Once thriving, now only a maze of locked doors and frightened faces, Orlane needs a band of brave adventurers to help free it from whatever evil plagues the settlement.  Well,...

Back in the mid-1980s my DM, Mark, and I had a kind of gaming arms race going on.  Unfortunately for me, our remote location in rural northern Indiana didn’t give me access to a gaming store that wasn’t more than an hour away, and his older brother Greg, already in college, always managed to get him info and product well before I could lay hands on it.  This was the case with most everything pertaining to AD&D until at last, in 1986, I managed to get my first hardcover TSR book before him.   That book, Dungeoneer’s Survival Guide. Unfortunately for...

I’m not completely sure what I can say about TSR’s 1985 release of Battle System.  For one thing, I don’t own it, although it has been in my possession since 1988.  It officially belongs to my longtime gaming compatriot ‘Murphy’ who often says that it is on permanent loan, like an exhibit at the Smithsonian.  Whatever the case, I have dragged this boxed set with me from north to south, then east, and finally west.  In all that time I’ve never played it, as there has never seemed to be a reason.  Inherently, I’m not a miniatures player, and as...