I've got a copy of the re-release s4 module of this still in the box of D&D stuff I inherited (kinda just took with me.....) from my dad. 1st edition ad&d with the stacks of hand written custom tables and rules they created over the years is still my favourite way to play, when I can find people who'll play it with me.
I remember as a kid just sitting there going through his d&d collection. He's got so many random things scattered in there. I used to love just reading the dungeon modules and the books looking at the maps and artwork and reading through the books.
I'm kind of disappointed with the way the game went after wizards of the coast bought up d&d. I never really liked the 3rd edition rules and the books, though beautiful and colourful, weren't as appealing to me. There was something about those dark gritty black and white line drawings in those older books that still looks better to me.
As far as I can tell now, it's not even really the same game any more. It looks more like a pen and paper version of an mmorpg than d&d these days from what I can tell by the bit i've looked at the latest rules.
It also seems to focus on being a 'hero simulator' rather than being a sword and sorcery adventure simulator than it was before. I've always prefered low fantasy sword and sorcery stories to the long sprawling wheel of time style epic sagas. Stuff like Conan and Michael Moorcock's books. That's what the game used to be more like.
I was very lucky/fortunate enough to be able to play D&D with the Gygax family on the weekends up in WI during high school.
Gary was letting his sons run the campaign and was just playing himself, but so much of the game's immersion came not from the rules but from how an experienced DM knew when to focus on the rules vs. focus on the story. Players can get in the way of this, but "good" gaming groups generally have a collective sense for when to focus on game play and when to shut up and let the DM develop the story further.
The net result is you actually make substantial progress instead of spending the entire session letting someone who thinks they are clever pick fights with random townsfolk that they want to play out in gory detail and otherwise derail the adventure. Yeah there are ways to deal with people like that, but my point is when you have a group where you don't need to, magic happens.
There are of course times when you want to stress rules because they add to the story. Case in point, I have fond memories of Gary walking me through volumetric calculations to help educate me that "no, the fireball does not only hit the kobolds, you also managed to nuke your entire wounded party."
The 'hero simulator' stuff really came in with AD&D 2e, when the writers started trying to wedge in stuff in a way motivated less by the heritage of D&D and more because D&D was the only tabletop system they knew and they wanted to stick to it even when doing so didn't make much sense.
The trend continued into 3e, which got transformed by pieces into a quasi-generic fantasy system with elaborate rules for all kinds of things that were totally incongruent with the original dungeon-crawling tone, like pointlessly elaborate oversimulation of monsters (who cares that a CE aberration has a +3 Craft modifier?) or entire social debate systems.
4e backtracked on that trend somewhat by throwing away most of the superfluous detail about monsters and the unnecessary minutiae of modeling every aspect of a PC's life, but a lot of fans got pointlessly mad about it using condensed formatting for combat abilities and about how spellcasters no longer got to break the game with 3e's take on high level spells (which had all the remaining limitations and balance points from AD&D 2e stripped out in the name of streamlining rules), so we got 5e, which in a lot of ways uses the guts of 4e with a more bounded math (one of its few improvements) and abilities rewritten to be more wordy, plus spellcasters get 9th-level spells again.
My personal favorite in the field at the moment is actually Pathfinder 2e, which despite originating from a mostly-clone of 3.5 (Pathfinder 1e) actually does a lot of interesting stuff by mixing bounded math and more AD&D 1e-like hard limits on safe casting and magical effects with well-defined mechanics, huge amounts of character customization, and character roles both in and out of combat designed to encourage and require teamwork for the best results.
I would like to point out that there is a movement within tabletop games to create new games that are either refined clones of old-school D&D (particular B/X Moldvay-Cook D&D) or capture the spirit of those older games.
It's called OSR and stands for Old School Revival/Renaissance. Titles include: Old School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Labyrinth Lord, OSRIC, and many others.
It's worth pointing out that Lab Lord and Swords & Wizardry have free PDFs, and emulate the Holmes-era/pre AD&D rules, with optional "advanced" rules. Old School Essentials is reputed to be the best organized restatement of the B/X rules. OSRIC is meant to be a restatement of AD&D 1e.
That was more 4th edition. 5th ed is less MMO-centric but it definitely has elements from newer RPGs like inspiration and mechanics like advantage to minimize the need to track lots of small +1's. There are variants in the core rulebook that make 5th ed much more like 1st ed in terms of lethality.
I'd argue that 4e was closer to 'sword and sorcery' than either 3e or 5e, given how it took away campaign-altering 9th-level spell access, flight abilities as a default assumption of combat at high level, easy access to whole piles of miscellaneous magic abilities, etc, from PCs.
This later, with a good deal of expanding, becomes "S4: The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth". Despite considerably higher production values, the nonsensical core remains - get teleported away from the central room N times for no particularly good reason, then go kill the sexy vampire lady in the middle of the place and get a humunguous pile of game-unbalancing loot. That's our Gary!
Sexy vampire lady in the middle has some connection to the whole tangled pile of Greyhawk intrigue, if I remember correctly, but I don't think the module bothers to disclose any of this.
I always enjoyed the lectures in 1st Edition Dungeon Masters' Guide about balance and stinginess, then you play a Gary Gygax module and your players are staggering out under the weight of all the nifty new artifacts and mountains of treasure.
And don't forget: D&D 1st edition is in general rather brutal and punishing. Fail a saving throw? Dead. Fall to zero HP? Dead. Gold is XP (and vice versa). Your level 1 magic user can be handily murdered in one swipe by an average housecat.
A couple of weeks ago, the 1e group I'm DMing visited a dungeon they are overpowered for, as it's for levels 1-3, and the party is a mix of level 3 and 4.
Except for the Level 2 NPC magic-user. Random wandering monster. Rolled a Giant Weasel - should be no problem, only 18 hit points against an entire party. Combat. Weasel attacks random party member - oops, it's the magic-user. Except, the die fell in a crack right after, so I secretly rerolled. Magic-user again. Oh well. Attack - weasel wins initiative. Attack hits. Scores high damage. And the weasel is clamped on to the magic-user, sucking blood. Argh. Magic-user isn't dead yet. Party's turn - thief hits! Ranger... chooses to fire her bow. Hits, but there's a chance the arrows hit the magic-user. The dice roll favorably, and she hits the weasel. Weasel is still alive. Cleric hits. Our fighter misses, argh. Druid hits, but the weasel is still alive, but just barely. Giant weasel is still sucking blood and doesn't need to roll a to-hit roll next round. Magic-user will automatically go below zero on the next round unless the weasel is killed first. Roll initiative. Simultaneous initiative! Argh! Magic-user falls to -5 HP, weasel dies.
The party healed the comatose magic-user's surface damage to full health, dragged him to the surface, and camped out in the swamp for a week fighting off creepy-crawly swamp creatures while nursing him back to health. Guess they'll explore the dungeon next time!
Wouldn't it be cool if the author could post scans of the material alongside their analysis so you could follow along? Without 1978's copyright extension, they could have! These documents would have become part of the public domain in 2006 (or 2034 if the authors chose to renew in 2006; seems unlikely). Our current state of copyright-length-insanity is actually very new. It didn't have to be this way.
This is super cool, I love seeing the history of modules. I recently published my first module on https://Paper-Minis.com . Its specifically for First Time DM's (or d&d players who want to run a one-shot for the group) It needs zero prep and includes minis, maps, puzzles. My experienced DM friends like not needing to go through hours to run a oneshot, and its great way to bring new groups into the fold. I wondered how many people want to become a DM or run a one-shot but can't break in, and thats why I made this :)
Thanks! Honestly im looking to find a different niche than the standard module by including literally everything. I hope to mke it as fun for the DM to experience on the fly as the players. Does that make sense? Basically for people who dont have alot of XP or Time to be able to run a game for their friends.
I was thinking about this module just last week and had ascribed its terribleness to just being an old dungeon crawl but didn't know it had previously been a tournament module. That makes a lot of sense. The S4 published version has a ton of weird open-ended bits throughout which must have been added after for general publication.
I remember as a kid just sitting there going through his d&d collection. He's got so many random things scattered in there. I used to love just reading the dungeon modules and the books looking at the maps and artwork and reading through the books.
I'm kind of disappointed with the way the game went after wizards of the coast bought up d&d. I never really liked the 3rd edition rules and the books, though beautiful and colourful, weren't as appealing to me. There was something about those dark gritty black and white line drawings in those older books that still looks better to me.
As far as I can tell now, it's not even really the same game any more. It looks more like a pen and paper version of an mmorpg than d&d these days from what I can tell by the bit i've looked at the latest rules.
It also seems to focus on being a 'hero simulator' rather than being a sword and sorcery adventure simulator than it was before. I've always prefered low fantasy sword and sorcery stories to the long sprawling wheel of time style epic sagas. Stuff like Conan and Michael Moorcock's books. That's what the game used to be more like.