I’m excited to share that my tabletop gaming books are now available on Amazon!

About My Work

I specialize in creating old-school gaming materials that celebrate and preserve the history of tabletop roleplaying and miniature wargaming. My work focuses on authentic recreations and clones of early gaming systems from the 1970s.

My published titles include:

• Dragons Beyond - A faithful clone of the 1973 draft rules for Original D&D
• Men in Metal - A clone of the original Wargames Research Group (WRG) v1 & v2 medieval miniatures rules
• Midwest Fantasy Wargame: The Primeval RPG - A recreation of the Twin Cities gaming style from 1972
• Trouble Aboard Station Brown - A Braunstein-style science fiction game with three factions: Earthlings, Martians, and Uranians (name your own price on itch.io)
• The Mage’s Companion and other supplements for old-school gaming

Find My Books on Amazon

You can browse all my published works on my Amazon Author Page.

Is Blackmoor on Janus VI? Is Greyhawk?

For many of us in the know, there’s an auction underway on eBay wherein greed is on full display. The Collector’s Trove is auctioning off some graph paper pages, pencil scribblings, and drawings that were the seed for the original dungeon beneath Castle Greyhawk. Hoping to make $350K minimum (per the email advertising this auction), the 9 bidders have reached $60K and seem to have paused to reconsider their options.

Continuing the Dundermoose /Jeffro Johnson Challenge

NOTE TO GRADER / READER

This is continuing the Dunder Moose and Jeffro Johnson megadungeon creation challenge. I’ve decided to put in an entry for level 2. Although I started this before getting feedback, I did want to just do one off the top of my head. The initial dungeon was drafted in 2 hours with time to draw a map. I did draw the map within an hour. However, converting my chicken scratch into something intelligible to other DMs took a bit longer. I could have run this after 3 hours prep from my scribblings, but the text below probably took another 90 minutes to polish up. The dungeon is heavily inspired by TSR classic module B1: In Search of the Unknown and does make a head nod to Kenzer’s B1 parody (find the embroidered ‘M’). I ran a mash up of both of these for my OSE campaign way back in the day. Anyway, I think you should be able to run this gonzo dungeon with one read through. Enjoy.

Step-by-step recreation of how I did it

Problem Statement

Gary Gygax left us plenty of procedures, but he never - to my recollection - walked through exactly how he created his iconic dungeon adventures: B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands, the Giant + Underdark series (G1-G2-G3-D1-D2), S1 - Tomb of Horrors, S4 - The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, T1 - The Village of Hamlet.

Likewise, although Tom Moldvay gave us a simple procedure in the back of his edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, he did not let us in on how he created (or co-created) several classic adventures: X1 - Isle of Dread, X2 - Castle Amber, B4 - The Lost City, A2 - Secret of the Slaver’s Stockade.

Alternate title: The Dangling Jewels

Oh - you wanted a map with that? That’s gonna wait until tomorrow (Saturday night). Section 4 is the level 2 portion of the dungeon. I would consider it outside the scope of the Dunder Moose / Jeffro Johnson challenge.

NOTE TO DM

This adventure is designed for four to six 1st level adventurers and compatible with 1st edition AD&D. The call to adventure should be given to the player whose character has the most 1) experience, 2) an alignment that is more or less Neutral, 3) or the least gold (after equipping and provisioning).

With Jeffro Johnson, the bombast is real. But so is the legacy. Let’s unpack it.

If Jeffro Johnson died today his detractors would celebrate. But really, if he died today (and I certainly hope he does not), then he will have left behind a gaming legacy that is hard to undo. I’ve spent the morning looking at many of his past blog posts. There was a frenzy of activity that began in 2021 and seemed to culminate in 2024.

Dave Arneson tried to show us the right way to play the game

On Chainmail and Braunstein

If you follow certain Dodos on X and in certain forums, you’ll get a very mistaken view on the origins of Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor Campaign. So, it’s best to hear from the man himself. In Different Worlds, “My Life and Role-Playing 3,” Issue 3, Chaosium, Albany, California, June/July 1979, pp. 6-8 [not available online any longer] we get several straightforward quotes:

From 8 December 2025

PART 3 OF 3

Picking up where we left off, interviewee Bob Meyer (BM) is about to describe his memory of the combat system used in Blackmoor to interviewer Rod Hampton (RH).

[BM] Originally, with [the] Fighting-Man, say we have a party of three. Let’s make it simple. We have three Fighting-Men. They’re in the first level of the dungeon. They run into a party of orcs. Say there’s ten orcs. Well, that made it real simple because three Fighting-Men could fit side by side in a normal dungeon corridor — [which is] where we are [for this example], so only three orcs in front of us. Now, when we started out on the expedition, David would require us to say what we had because as we adventured, we would get more weapons. Either we would find treasure so we could buy weapons or quite often what we’d do is we would just take whatever we found ([for example,] off of some orcs [that] were armed with weapons). We would take those, or we’d find a sword — which in the beginning that was a big treasure for us — in a chest. But we were operating out of Blackmoor village, and that had a blacksmith and a weapons maker, so we could go there and buy what weapons we wanted. So we had lots of weapons, but we weren’t allowed to take all of them with us. So we would take our favorite weapons with [us]; [the] ones that we thought would work best for us. And of course everyone carried a sword and a dagger. And then people would acquire shields or better armor and some people would like to use a mace or, you know, spears were real common, bows and arrows, that kind of thing. And when we’d run into a party. Quite often by then we’d go with sword in hand knowing that, well, we’re there looking for danger, we will find danger kind of thing.

From 8 December 2025

Continuing our conversation, I am using RH to represent me (Rod Hampton - interviewer) and BM to represent Bob Meyer, the interviewee.

[BM] One thing that I should warn you about… I love to talk. I mean, that’s obvious, but my memory is really going bad. And as a matter of fact, I’ve basically given up playing games because my memory is bad enough now and I’m not as sharp as I used to be. I don’t want to be one of these guys that plays the games when people groan and say, “Oh, Meyer is here again” because I’m good. um, at least I have been good. I usually win games. I have played so many games in my lifetime. I started gaming when I was around five when I learned chess. And I’ve played so many games. I’ve probably won more games than you’ve played. Here’s the way I put it: I’ve probably lost more games than you’ve played.

From 8 December 2025

[RH] This is Rod Hampton.
[BM] Yeah. Rod’s the way you prefer to be called, right?
[RH] Correct. Yes. And you prefer Bob?
[BM] Yeah. I… I normally go by Bob.
[RH]Fantastic. Just to give you some background on me, I started really taking a deep dive into the early history of war gaming and especially the early history of D&D back in around 2022, and I wrote a retro clone based on the Beyond This Point Be Dragons draft set of rules that came out of the Twin Cities. I’ve also tried to look at what Strategos could be done man-to-man because I bought into a line of baloney that people fed me and I think that’s non-productive, and I‘d like to talk to a few people that were there at the beginning and get more at the truth of what actually the play style was.
[BM] Well, why is it that you think it’s baloney?
[RH] Strategos uses a bunch of ratios in the Advance Game, and Strategos N, which I’ve happened to have a look at now, and Valley Forge, also by Dave Wesley. All of those have a very complex system for morale, tracking morale, for calculating ratios, whether you can accomplish things on the battlefield or not, and I’ve never — in any of the many podcasts or interviews with the early bunch of people — heard them talk about, you know, we multiplied ratios and then we did dice roll-offs like in Don’t Give Up the Ship.
[BM] Okay, well, then a brief history on Strategos. Uh, you do know that what happened is that Wesley stumbled upon a book by an American army officer named Totten.
[RH] Yep.
[BM] And do you know the history of Totten?
[RH] I do. I’ve actually played the Basic Game out of Strategos RAW (rules as written) on the table and I’ve read the Advance Game and been with it for a bit now.
[BM] So I do not know what Totten wrote originally, so I can’t be sure about that. But all I’ve been told is Wesley adopted or adapted the Totten rules, because Totten wrote for a period later than the Napoleonics. And what the guys were interested in was Napoleonics. I guess they already had lots of these figures because they were available, and Civil War figures, I guess, were not as available. And so I do not know what came from Totten and what came from Wesley’s imagination. I do know that there was a problem when they first started playing Napoleonics, because they used Napoleonic tactics and the same thing happened for them that happened in the Civil War. Their troops were all being mowed down until someone realized that — you know — these rules need to be adapted a little more because we’re playing Napoleonics with muskets, not Civil War with rifled muskets that used those special bullets.