#1974 d&d

[trivia-polls-daily]

No cheating, please! Answer the trivia question to the best of your ability, then check below the cut! Please do not give away answers in comments or tags!

Answer below:

In the original Dungeons & Dragons boxed set, there were only three main classes: the Cleric, the Fighting man, and the Magic-User.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons_(1974)

[casualist-tendency]

[wolfmanclown]

Billy once again :3

[gomzdrawfr]

⭐️ Oh~ to kiss under the stars ⭐️

Based on SeaofSoba's NikPrice Carnival story on twitter! ZOOM!

also a silly lil comic on when Nik mentioned how Sheepie can take Price's position as the captain, and the boys just going along with it

[teletextart]

Ceefax and Dragons by Andy Jenkinson

Artwork from the #Teletext50 #teletext art exhibition which exhibited in Cambridge and on Finland's Yle Text, October and November 2024. https://teletextart.co.uk/teletext50-art-exhibition-on-yle-text-in-finland-7-october-11-november-2024

[bugsinshoes]

the kind of vibe i bring to the function:

[othernaut]

Character Creation Challenge 2025, Day 1: Dungeons & Dragons (1974)

Name: Heradre, War Priestess (Acolyte)

Class: Cleric

Alignment: Neutrality

Strength: 15, Intelligence: 10, Wisdom: 12, Constitution: 9, Dexterity: 10, Charisma: 11

Hit Dice: 1 (6 Hit Points)

Armor Class: 6 (Leather & Shield)

Gold Pieces: 18

Experience: Nil

Spells: -

Relative: Ynnwen, Sword-Sister

Equipment: Mace, Shield, Draft Horse (w/ saddle and saddle bags), Leather Armor, Helm, 50 ft. Hempen Rope, Large Sack, Wineskin, 6 Torches, Wooden Cross, 2 Weeks Standard Rations

Heradre is a journeyman priestess of the god of war, brought into service at a young age to serve in the retinue of an aging warlord and learn the rites of conflict. Now that her patron is dead, Heradre is released from service. She seeks to make her name on the battlefield, gathering into her retinue both powerful warriors and young, displaced neophytes to both teach and learn. She hopes to eventually gather a nest of harpies into her service.

Possible NPC interactions with Heradre:

1 - The players discover Heradre in the town square of a small farming community, attempting to rile the peasants to pursue bloody justice for a recent infraction. It becomes clear that Heradre does not care one way or another about the "justice" aspect - she wants these people to shed blood for what they believe in, in accordance with her faith.

2 - The players meet Heradre in a small hut on the edge of a bloody battlefield. She has been tasked with sanctifying the area and giving last rites to the war dead - and turning any undead soldier who decides to get back up.

3 - While taking shelter in a city besieged by undead, the players find Heradre in a temple within the city walls. As a traveling priest, her faith of war is heterodox to the peaceable clerics that administrate the temple, and she's having a difficult time rousing them to action in defense of the city.

*****

I like artifacts in role-playing games.

I don't mean the in-game items. I don't mean the be-the-magic-sword solo journaling RPG, Artefact (though it is pretty damn great). I mean the bits and pieces that hint at a specific place and time: the filled-in character sheets in secondhand sourcebooks, the monster manuals filled with underlines and hit tallies, the cracked spines that open automatically to one oft-referred page. I enjoy seeing where other people have played, the last drifting dreams of stories that lived entirely in the minds of their players, almost.

I also enjoy when the systems themselves are artifacts. I enjoy scrolling through equipment lists in a book written in 1998 and finding stats for futuristic wrist computers with a mind-bending, unbelievable 500 MB of available memory. I enjoy finding timelines for after-the-apocalypse post-modern games where the world burned in arcane fire in the far-future year of 2015. These little glimpses of what people thought would be important, would be noteworthy, would be fantastical - this is what outsider art is and does, and this is what's lost with too much polish and mass appeal.

D&D, 1974, is an artifact through and through. It evokes a place, a time, a people - and it evokes what they dreamed about. It summons the whirling ghosts of medieval battles, footmen in formation bracing their spears for the mounted charge - a memory of a dream, the least real thing there could possibly be, and yet it mattered so much to the people moving those little painted figures and rolling those dice.

The language and culture of tabletop RPGs has changed so much in fifty years - I only knew to parse D&D (1974)'s idea of "campaign" play as to be in reference to a wargaming campaign because of my stable of 40k buddies - but I could so easily imagine the place, the people, the time where it was played. Making my bad cleric (3d6 in order!), I could so easily imagine rocking up to a wood-paneled basement, wielding a character sheet word-processed and dot-matrix printed, carrying a Robin Hood miniature with an inexpertly-molded modeling putty skirt and hood, and playing this damn thing on a sand table with 50 other excited nerds with bad haircuts and heads full of leaded diesel fumes.

This was a good exercise, a good place to start. Oh god, the next one will be worse.

[crabbypalsart]

💕Billy only has eyes for you!!💕

[veryspecificnostalgia]

magna doodle

original release: 1974

[aranazo]

Mary Barnes by Mary Barnes and Joseph Berke

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

Betty Joan Burr - Outer Limits of the Mind - ‎ Xerox Educational - 1974 (illustrated by Richard D. Maccabe)

[stanford-photography]

Portrait of Jimmy D Street kid, aged 14, blinded in one eye by his father when he was 5. From my series "Asbury Park, New Jersey". I worked on the boardwalk the summers of 1974 and 76. By Jeff Stanford, 2023

Buy prints at: https://jeff-stanford.pixels.com/

[gracie-bird]

Prince Rainier III of Monaco, Princess Grace, and their children arrive at L'Elysee Palace, in Paris, for lunch with President Giscard d'Estaing and his family on June 8, 1974.

[wolfmanclown]

billy booooy

[misforgotten2]

My favorite book title of all time.

A book you very likely don’t have on your shelf #534 & 535

Covers by Jeff Jones & Armand Weston -- 1968 & 1974

[intrapanelreturns]

OMAC #2 1974, DC Comics Jack Kirby story and art, D. Bruce Berry inks, Mike Royer letters.