News — Jim Holloway

I feel like I should be toasting or something as this will be my very first post concerning classic TSR modules.  Sure, this one is a bit remote, being a UK production, but still U1: The Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh has a very special place in my heart. Back in late 1989 I’d gone away to university and decided that I would leave all the trappings of my youth behind.  That meant I was going to completely remake myself in a place where no one knew me.  It might have worked too, except that as I studied one night in...

There are a number of reasons to hold Spelljammer as something ‘special’.  The primary of these should certainly be the originality of the setting, but for a lover of the history of RPGs, there is something much more fundamentally intriguing about this product to me. Produced by TSR in 1989 and written by Jeff Grubb, this is what I would consider the final product of TSR’s ‘Golden Era’.  Some might argue that moniker belongs to the Forgotten Realms, but that is a bit too early, and Dark Sun a bit too late. Spelljammer, however, falls perfectly in the wheelhouse of...

In 1988 I was a junior in high school and if I could lay hands on a Dragon Magazine I was pretty happy about it.  In those days, well before the Internet, you had to get all you advertising info from a magazine, and in the gaming industry that primarily meant Dragon.  It was there that I first saw the cover of Game Designers Workshop’s Space: 1889.  I remember thinking, OMFG, that is one of the coolest things I’d ever seen.  I mean, just the tag line of ‘Science-Fiction Role Playing in a More Civilized Time’ was enough to sell...

For me personally, Battletech was an odd choice of game, since I wasn’t a war-gamer but role-player, and yet I have to say over the course of the late 1980s I did have a great deal of fun with this game.  In fact, to a point, I owned nearly every supplement that FASA brought out for it, and one that stands out to me is Citytech.  That certainly isn’t to say it revolutionized the Battletech system, but it was a fun piece to take the mech-driven combats from the wastelands of the Successor States to more populated industrial centers.  I...