Thac0 with Advantage 66. Capturing Your Imagination

Welcome to THAC0 . . . with Advantage! We’re two friends that have been playing D&D a long time. While we both love lots of other RPGs, but D&D is having us execute Episode 66.

Have you ever had the perfect idea for your campaign, but by the time you made it to a notebook or a computer, you completely forgot what it was? Where do ideas for campaigns come from, and how do we capture them? How do we put the ideas we have into game terms and make them sing for our players? We’re going to look at that today on THAC0 with Advantage.

From the Bardic College

The 2024 Dungeon Master’s Guide has a plethora of game related material, but the current edition wasn’t the first one to be in love with worksheets. In 1988, one year before the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 2e, the Dungeon Master’s Design Kit by RPG industry legend Aaron Allston was released. This was comprised of three booklets, and the Adventure Design, the Forms Book, and the Adventure Cookbook. These included random charts that would direct the reader to parts of the Adventure Cookbook, broadly describing things like villain plots and thematic encounters, and worksheets for planning out flowcharts for adventure developments. There was very little in the book that was mechanically specific, meaning it retained its usefulness as the new edition came out, and arguably, still retains that usability. If you utilized the copier at your first job in 1991 to make a ridiculous number of copies of each of the forms in this book, the statute of limitations for office supply theft should be up now, not that I would know anything about that.