OrcForge

FOR2 The Drow of the Underdark
by Ed Greenwood
Format: 128 page perfect bound

The Drow of the Underdark

From the very first time I set my eyes upon the Drow, I fell in love with the creatures. Evil, dark elves who live deep beneath the ground, make extensive use of both poison and magic, and have powerful levels of magic resistance...what kind of DM would not love throwing them at their players?

An extreme website makeover!

Well, not really. But do let me know how you like the new green and black look. Fresh and edgy or "GAH! My eyes!"? If it's just too hard to look at, you can always click on 'my account'/'edit'/'theme configuration' and change the look back to the old one.

New collaborative projects

We have two new projects afoot. Both on the brand spanking new orcforge wiki. Head on over and check it out.

The Horror at Jasper Cove is the tentative title of our collaborative dungeon, a plunge into a forgotten lake cave for characters levels 1-3. Contributions and input are welcome from everyone.

The HouseRules Cyclopedia is an effort in conjunction with the Back In Print Project to compile the many 1e and 2e AD&D house rules that players have come up with in one place. Come by and contribute your take on the rules.

Oh yeah, reviews!

Work on reviews lately has been slow but not forgotten.

I'm working my way through FR11, Dwarves Deep right now and have some reviews of C&C material in mind to fill in that nasty little 0 in the Castles and Crusades link.

Forums and editors, oh my!

OrcForge.net now has forums!

The good news: forums for discussion of oldschool rpg materials, games and more are now up! Just follow the link on the right side of the page to OrcForge Forums.

The better news: we've used forums from the old ADnDCampaigns.com site as a base. For those lucky enough to have visited ADDC before, it was the best 1e/2e discussion site on the web! (Really, we did a completely impartial study, it's around here somewhere...)

Signups at orcforge.net will sync right to the forums, and vice versa, so all you have to do is sign up either on the main page or on the forums and you can post comments on articles, or post to topics on the forums.

A nice text editor for comments

We've plugged in a little markup editor for comments on posts, articles and blogs (yeah, we know, there's no blogs yet!). It should be pretty self-explanatory. Hint: use the preview button to see how it will actually looked when posted. Each user also gets a 15 meg quota for uploaded images to include with their posts. Leave a comment if you run into any bugs.

TSR2121, Tome of Magic
by Cook, Findley, Herring, Kubasik, Sargent, Swan (1991)
Format: Hardcover

As many spells and magic items are listed in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide, we know that this isn't the absolute limit of what is available in the AD&D worlds. Of course, the Tome of Magic (ToM) builds more on to this. Magic, too, has new forms of wizard magic in the ToM including elementalists, metamagic, and wild magic. Wild Magic has been built into 2nd Edition Forgotten Realms products, and the Wild Mage is much too unstable for a player to request to play one. The elementalist isn't too much of a stretch from any other specialty wizard, just further nuanced.

A look at free character record sheets for second edition AD&D

In addition to the essential core AD&D handbooks, every group needs a good character sheet. If anything, there are more options in character sheets today than in AD&D's in print days. While a still good supply of the original character record sheets still exists via Amazon or eBay, or downloaded in pdf form, there are countless player made sheets freely available on the net.

Your friendly OrcForge.net crew brought together close to 80 character sheets from across the internet suitable for second edition AD&D gaming. We've presented 7 of them in our review this week.

TSR9354 (FRQ1), The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar
by Ed Greenwood (1992)
Format: 1 32-page books, with tri-fold cover

AD&D 2nd Edition (and late 1st Edition) modules have never been popular as they rarely stand up to the quality of many of the earlier AD&D modules. This is certainly true, and indicitive of TSR trying to put as much content on the sales rack as possible with little regard to creating classics. What point in time that TSR modules fell in quality exactly is a bit distorted, but certainly by the time 2nd Edition AD&D was released, pre-published adventures were not only lower grade, but more rare as well.

I expected The Haunted Halls of Eveningstar to be the same low-grade of module that one might expect from a mid-90's RPGA event. This didn't turn out to be the case as this module was certainly a diamond in the rough.

A big thanks to Zherbus for posting a couple great reviews of classic AD&D material to get the ball rolling on OrcForge.

For those that are curious, the site's name is a play on sourceforge.net, a site dedicated to helping open source computer enthusiasts collaborate to create free software. While they're creating free stuff, and we're reviewing it, (along with published material), the name seemed to fit. And those annoying domain squatters took all the other cool names we came up with.

Registration now open

New users are now free to register and post comments on published articles. Hooray for the internet!

Upcoming features

In addition to better categorization of our growing library of reviews, and just polishing up the look of the site in general,

PHBR3 - The Complete Priests Handbook

I've recently had the chance to sit down and go through this book recently and was impressed. I have a bad taste in my mouth after seeing some of the junk that came out of the most of the 'Complete'; books, most notable the Elves handbook.

Firstly, the Priests Handbook picks up on the priest class where the Players Handbook leaves off in particular with the notion of Priests of a Specific Mythos, or Specialty Priests. Where the Druid was originally listed as a sample of what sort of specialty priest could be, the ideas of how to go about creating Specialty Priests was vague at best in both the Dungeon Masters Guide and the Players Handbook. In the Priests Handbook, they give a wide range of diety portfolios with matches examples, without being specific to any particular settings diety. They ranges from War to Luck and lay out simple and balanced write ups about each Specialty Priest. This is completed by actually providing rules and ideas for creating your own specialty priest in much greater detail than was previously offered.

TSR1031 (AKA FR0), Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting
by Ed Greenwood and Jeff Grubb (1987)
Format: 2 96-page perfect-bound books, 4 fold-out maps, 2 hex grid overlays

After Gary had left TSR, the company had shopped around for a new setting where they could base future adventure modules. According to Ed Greenwood, creator of the original Forgotten Realms, TSR had problems with the "Gary bottleneck" that had so plagued Greyhawk. Gygax was so busy running TSR that he couldn't find the time to write the Greyhawk products he so sorely wanted to write, and had mentioned, and the fans were so (increasingly) impatiently waiting for, as the years passed... and passed..."

The Forgotten Realms existed in Ed Greenwoods mind and short stories since the sixties, but when D&D was created, he made it his campaign world in 1978. He had run a number of his campaigns in that world, which his players helped him shape. In some early issues of Dragon magazine, he had published a few pieces which were set in the Forgotten Realms. Jeff Grubb was charged with contacting Ed and seeing if there was a developed world. There was, so Ed and TSR began working on the campaign setting. Ed would be the go-to guy to make sure future Realms products wouldn't conflict with the overall scheme of the world.

This will be the first post on orcforge.net, a site for highliting up and coming material for classic style role playing game systems, such as AD&D 1st and 2nd edition, and Castles and Crusades. We'll also be doing reviews of finished product both new and old, and bringing together links to make your oldschool gaming experience enjoyable. And finally hosting a few blogs for the outpouring of thoughts of some grognards like myself.

Minstrel
aka Donald Smith