Everything Old is New Again

In addition to purusing the blogs and forums dedicated to the earlier versions of the game while trying to shift my mind back into an old school creative design mode, I’ve started looking through some of my old notes left over from games of yore. Amongst them I found the first D&D world that I ever created. This is half of the original world map. The right-hand half of it has been lost to time.

Looking at it, I can certainly see that the influences of the Known World setting from the Moldvay B/X versions of D&D are very apparent. Not necessarily a bad thing, considering. There are a lot of pulp sword & sorcery influences to it. That patch of green all the way to the left is a jungle surrounded by a forbidding wall. Shades of “King Kong” via “The Isle of Dread.” The “Spider Forest” seems to be Mirkwood’s poor cousin. The city on the oasis in the middle of the Dust Desert I believe is a straight lift from the Known World map included in the Expert set.

There are several pages of city maps bound up with the campaign notes. They’re all very orderly street maps laid out on graphs paper, looking exactly like they were created by a 12 year old boy rather than any sort of city planning. I also notice that there seems to be a lot of brothels and taverns…

I’m interested to see how much, if anything is salvageable from those notes. Most likely anything I pulled would need a good polish and a “reimagining” if I was to include it in my current project. It might be an interesting little series of posts to do. Produce the notes verbatim from what I originally wrote and then follow it up with what I did with my own work some quarter of a century later.