#david j ritchie

[oldschoolfrp]

Star Trader, the game of interstellar exploitation and piracy -- Tim Truman cover art for Ares 12, SPI, January 1982, which included the complete sci-fi board game designed by Nick Karp. David J Ritchie contributed the article "Adventures in Albion, Role-Playing in the Land of Faerie," exploring how to build an RPG campaign for DragonQuest in the setting of his board game Albion from the previous issue.

[oldschoolfrp]

The Galactic Survey Bureau is a tiny part of the vast governing bureaucracy of the Galactic Federation.  The GSB deploys hundreds of ships to catalog unknown planets far across the galaxy.  Five years ago the survey ship Beagle suffered a drive pod failure and crash-landed in a dry sea bed on the sole inhabited world in an uncharted minor system.  The local dominant species calls the surrounding area “Blackmoor.”  (Jim Holloway, from D&D module DA3: City of the Gods by Dave Arneson and David J Ritchie, TSR, 1987)  Every classic D&D campaign has a crashed spaceship in the wilderness, often functioning as a high-tech dungeon.

[oldschoolfrp]

The Wreck of the BSM Pandora (Joe Barney cover for Ares 2, SPI, May 1980, featuring game by James Dunnigan with Redmond A Simonsen and David J Ritchie)  “Wreck” was published first, with obvious inspiration from Alien, followed by the prequel “Voyage” in issue 6 which had Star Trek-like away teams visiting different planets to explore.  Pandora was a Biological Survey Mission ship specially equipped to transport live specimens, but the ship name on the cover is mislabeled “BMS”.

[oldschoolfrp]

On Dave Arneson Day -- the creator of the dungeon crawl was born Oct 1, 1947:

The Temple of the Frog in the Great Dismal Swamp, adapted from Dave Arneson’s home game and from the first D&D adventure ever published (Mark Nelson illus from D&D module DA2: Temple of the Frog by Dave Arneson and David Ritchie, TSR, 1986)  Arneson apparently borrowed a large ceramic frog from his mother’s garden to represent the temple on his table.

Maps and descriptions of The Temple of the Frog first appeared in Arneson’s 1975 Supplement II: Blackmoor for OD&D, making it the earliest published RPG adventure.  That first version was packed with hundreds of defenders, apparently assuming adventurers would bring their own army of NPC fighters for a direct assault as part of an ongoing wargame campaign.

Module DA2 (1986) scaled down the temple encounters to make a playable adventure for a typical party size, and further clarified the high tech extraterrestrial origins of the temple’s masters.

[oldschoolfrp]

A juggernaut rolls through opposing armies with a roar of steam and flame.  Sci-fi and steampunk elements abound in Blackmoor, from great machines to crashed spaceships.  (Jeff Easley cover for D&D module DA1: Adventures in Blackmoor by Dave Arneson and David Ritchie, TSR, 1986)  Caveat:  After 2 rereadings, I’m pretty sure there actually is no juggernaut in this particular module.