News — TSR

In 1986, the market for TSR products was cooling. The company was in a spiritual tailspin after the dismissal of Gary Gygax, and shifting technology was a barbarian at the gate with Nintendo’s release of their NES that propelled Super Mario Brothers to the bestselling video game of all time.It was also a period when the bread and butter modules of the early 1980s were slipping, either to players having ‘grown up’ into DMs that preferred to run their own homebrews or just market share loss taking its inevitable toll. That said, TSR was still producing modules in their now...

Good old Merle M. Rasmussen did manage a few very inspired modules in the 1980s, and X6: Quagmire! absolutely makes that list. This adventure, for characters 4-10, is a nice little romp through exotic climbs to a mythic ‘spiral city’.  Its purpose seems to be to expand on the D&D Expert set and show exactly how to run a true wilderness adventure.  To this end, it does a great job, and the mass of charts and encounters in the back will help any DM if they are looking to flesh out the travel aspect of a D&D campaign. The artwork,...

Dragon Magazine 108 truly fails to impress me on almost every level.  To me, this is an almost throw away issue, but nonetheless I’ll review it today for what little content inspires and also the lackluster artwork inside. Produced in April 1986, and unabashedly claiming to be an ‘April Fools’ on all those who don’t like April Fools this issue is truly a joke.  I mean nothing against Len Lakofka and his ‘Lemond’s Tiny Hut’ articles, but if you’ve got to lead with one, then you know the issue is in trouble.  Really, other than the Gamma World 3rd Edition...

Beginning in 1991, TSR really started to push a new wave of boxed set campaign worlds for their AD&D 2nd Edition, and one of these was Dark Sun. The brainchild of Troy Denning & Timothy B. Brown it was the anti-Greyhawk, a world of hard lines, wastelands, and finite resources.  Athas, the world that hosted the Dark Sun universe, was a dying world, a closed sphere [for all you Spelljammer folks out there] and players got to take part in a gritty setting where survival was the end result of adventuring, not treasure and magical items. I played this game...

There was a time when I fell in love with D&D… well, perhaps that’s not entirely true.  There were actually a dozen times I fell in love with D&D, but the time I fell in love with Aleena was the first time I fell romantically in love with D&D. For all you Grognards out there who remember the Red Box, I have to wonder if you fell in love with Aleena too, and if a part of you died with here in that first intro adventure penned by Frank Mentzer [curse you Frank, and curse you Larry Elmore for creating...