Today I received a hardcover copy of “Dragonslayer” by Greg Gillespie. It’s a big chunky book, much akin to his earlier megadungeon works, and it purports to be Greg’s home version of the classic game: a blend of B/X and AD&D 1e. The question in my mind as I unwrapped the book was, “Why the heck did I buy this?”
I’ve been playing D&D Basic (1983) recently and, to be honest, it was a lot of fun. It was also pretty, well… basic. As with every other time I have delved back into D&D-type games, I find myself disappointed by the flavour of fantasy and the way the game plays. It’s all ok for a few sessions but then I get bored.
I think this time I held out the hope I so often have when it comes to people’s ‘retroclones’ and D&D variants: this one will provide the right mix of elements and playability to do something genuinely interesting with the TSR-era game. In fairness, I haven’t read the book yet and thus hope springs forth… but I am not holding my breath.
Here’s the crux: I want to like D&D the way other people do. I want to enjoy the thrill of exploration in the megadungeons and realms of classic fantasy. I want to find a cleaned up and well-defined set of TSR-era-inspired rules that includes how to run these epic megadungeons and offers modifications that make it feel as cool as AD&D2e did in 1989.
But the dark truth is that I lost faith in D&D around 2006 and, for all of the efforts of the OSR, I have never truly recovered it. Every now and then a product is released that tempts me to look again. Dragonslayer is one such product and, like Mulder, I want to believe. My fear is, like Mulder, I will find it’s once again just phantoms in the dark. I hope I am wrong.
Game on!
Roleplay Rescue’s Blog 
I hope you do find it to your liking. My D&D, way back in the bad old days, was Holmes/AD&D1e. I had the LBB version but never really figured it out.
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Part of that wonder and awe is dependent on our age: we started playing when young, and the games were all new. I played a lot more of a gonzo style where we threw everything in the kitchen pot. It did not have to make sense, just be fun. And I think as we play more and more, we lose that sense of wonder and pure enjoyment as we pay more attention to the rules, and start comparing things across games and systems. It becomes more of the same-old same-old.
Just as in your previous posts, being able to let go of the rules for a bit and let your mind wander across the fertile fields of our imaginations unbounded by the mechanics of the game can be liberating.
It also seems somewhat endemic to our hobby: I’ve got too many games, and my game group keeps getting more games. Though I’ve pretty much stopped getting new ones as I’ll never play a lot I have, I am trying to focus on three or four so that I can relax when running them and not worry about the rules and all that.
I hope Dragonslayer scratches your itch.
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Ignore my ‘d’ post…fat fingers!😁
True, most retroclones do the same kind of thing, but I still hold that system doesn’t matter; you can create any game you want with any set of rules…You can play a a low level, low magic, low fantasy game with pretty much any system..it might just need a little tweaking.
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