News — TSR

Today I’m going to give a little ‘love’ to Gamma World 2nd Edition. Although you’d be hard pressed to find a player out there to calls 2nd Edition their favorite iteration of the game, it still has some cool work done for it so I’ll take a look at the art of The Cleansing War of Garik Blackhand [which BTW wins the TSR award for longest title of a product]This is a strange little bit of work as there are two credited artists in it, Jim Holloway and David ‘Deisel’ LaForce. As the first printing was in 1983, this seems...

The TSR module B9, released in 1985 proves that during the final days of Gygax’s reign over TSR that there was still a sense of humor around. That is something important to understand, that while Gary himself could be a tough DM, he was always having a joke.So comes this rather forgettable module by Harry W. Nuckols [yeah, I’m not thinking that’s real], and entitled Castle Caldwell and Beyond [which of course is a reference to cover artist Clyde Caldwell]. In all, it is a small series of adventures for character levels 1-3, five to be exact, and all look...

Dragon Magazine #112 shows some great promise with an incredible Daniel Horne cover, but there is an absence inside that the editors were not really ready to fill. Now remember, this issue is from August 1986, a full year after Gygax was ousted from TSR, and I think the magazine is feeling those ‘growing pains’, or more correctly, the evidence of shrinking sales and budget cuts looming overhead like storm clouds.As stated, Daniel Horne [‘saving the best for last’ October #126] is a paragon of Dragon artwork, and it would be hard to compose a Top 10 list of...

During the course of my gaming life I’ve run and been run in G-1-2-3 four times, and you know what, I want to do it again. To say I love these modules is an extreme understatement. They are the perfect blend of crawl, epic journey, experience points, and treasure. There is truly a perfect balance of all those things that make everything about them SO worth it. In fact, I’ve dedicated an area of the Nameless Realms to the location of these modules just so my Fleetwood family can continue to go back every few generations when the giants...

The 1981 release of the Tom Moldvay edition of D&D Basic was before my time. I was 10 when this book was published by TSR for the final time, and I wouldn’t enter the hobby until the Red Box two years later.Still, the nostalgia content for the Moldvay box still resonates heavily in the OSR today, the bulk of players remembering it fondly right alongside the Trampier PHB and the Sutherland MM and DMG. When taking a look at it today, I’m moved by the interior artistic content since it captures a perfect era in the TSR evolution, something...