News — TSR

Again, I bring you my weekly Dragon review, this time with number 101.  The issue in question is one of those magazines I actually owned first-hand as a teen, and so I know it rather well, even if it doesn’t resonate with me.First, let me go a bit into content, but it came out in September 1985 and had an editorial note from Gary Gygax that has some incredibly interesting things in it.  Gary speaks first about a D&D movie that would come from DDEC, the entertainment arm of TSR that he’d been spearheading in Hollywood for a couple of...

I’m going to be honest here, I’ve never played any of the A series of modules, and for that I feel horrible.  I've owned these modules for twenty-two years, and begged my DM Mark to run them on several occasion, but since he doesn't own them, it just never happened.Truly, I feel sick over that, especially when digging through A1: Slave Pits of the Undercity this week for AotG.  I mean, just start out with the title, ‘Slave Pits of the Undercity’!  It is yet another example of a Robert E. Howard theft, or perhaps Fritz Leiber.  I’m seriously freaking...

I have a love of Gamma World that can be traced back to my Cold War infatuation with nuclear oblivion, so make no mistake that I take a good deal of pride in my collection of post-apocalyptic RPGs, as well as my own creations Future Warrior and my After the Apocalypse card game.That said, I’d have to admit that my favorite edition of Gamma World would be the 3rd Edition, and today I’m going to talk a bit about Kim Eastland’s Alpha Factor.Written in 1986, this module is 38 pages of introductory procedure that sets new characters in the Gamma...

When you go back this far, back to September 1982, it is nearly impossible as a lifelong gamer not to review the entire magazine and just stick to the artwork.  In this case, I’m going to have to give some more detail on the issue, because it is absolutely too good to pass up. It begins with an incredible article tag on the front cover called ‘Fantasy Football’!  I kid you not, 1982 and someone at TSR had trademarked the name before it spilled from the lips of every beer swilling NFL fan or bored office staffer in America.  But...

Back in 1975, Gary Gygax’s partner at Tactical Studies Rules was the notorious Brian ‘Buckshot’ Blume, a twenty-five year old gamer who had helped Gygax fund TSR with his father’s money.  Many are the twisted tales of the ‘Brother’s Blume’, Lorraiene Williams, and the fall of TSR, but well before any of that took place, Brian Blume designed a great little boxed set known as Boot Hill. This western inspired game wasn’t exactly an RPG, not in the sense of Dungeons & Dragons, but it did carry over some man-to-man scale warfare in the old west and could be adapted...