Kickstart a collection of teen, homebrewed D&D modules from the 80s!

Now here's a crowdfunder for the ages! The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord & Other Adventures is a new kickstarter compling homebrew D&D modules from ye "goode olde days".

The project aims to publish those long-lost adventures of kids from the 80s using their original, hand-drawn illustrations and maps and painstakingly typed text. Here's the gist of it, from the project's creator:

In 1981, 13-year-old Gaius Stern wrote and illustrated The Habitition of the Stone Giant Lord in imitation of TSR’s Dungeons and Dragons adventure modules. The Habitition is a true labor of love, typed and drawn as a DIY addition to the “Against the Giants” series of modules, part time capsule and part outsider art.

As art, its text and image show how a creative teen made his own contribution to the genre of roleplaying adventures, but where most such books were the work of a writer, a crew of play-testers, editors, and a stable of artists, Stern went it alone. As a time capsule, it provides a window on a particular way Dungeons & Dragons was played at a particular time.

PlaGMaDA and The Hutchingsonian Presents are putting together a collection of adventures written by young people in the 1980s. The focus is on game modules written by players, including their carefully made maps and painstaking illustrations, framing the sort of adventures we played back when we were kids. Help us print this full color book, it'll be great!

$10 gets you a PDF of the book, print copies are $30. This ain't no retro clone folks, this is the stuff of nerdly dreams brought back to life with a 21st century resurrection spell!

And YES, they're still looking for material for the book--so go get your Trapper Keeper from 1981 and start scanning those loose-leaf notes!

New trailer for The Hobbit!

This looks really exciting!

Trailer #2

Inspiration: Caves of Nottingham

Boing Boing mentions a post over at BLDGBLOG on the caves of Nottingham, which are being mapped as part of the Nottingham Caves Survey. They are, in many respects, similar to those at Cappadocia (manmade, cut into sandstone bedrock and cliffsides).

The storied history of the caves which inlcudes ties to Robin of Locksley--has long been the spark of tall tales. From the article:

Incredibly, there are more than 450 artificial caves excavated from the sandstone beneath the streets and buildings of Nottingham, England—including, legendarily, the old dungeon that once held Robin Hood—and not all of them are known even today, let alone mapped or studied. The city sits atop a labyrinth of human-carved spaces—some of them huge—and it will quite simply never be certain if archaeologists and historians have found them all.

"Even back in Saxon times, Nottingham was known for its caves," local historian Tony Waltham writes in his helpful guide Sandstone Caves of Nottingham, "though the great majority of those which survive today were cut much more recently." From malt kilns to pub cellars, "gentlemen's lounges" to jails, and wells to cisterns, these caves form an almost entirely privately-owned lacework of voids beneath the city.

Here's a look at the map they've created:

Nice inspiration for the Caves of Chaos, yes?

Images: Nottingham Cave Survey and BLDG BLOG