Red Box Dungeons & Dragons

First up, we talk about Mixtape Massacre, a fun little independently produced horror board game that riffs on classic slasher movies and 80s pop culture.

Our main course this week is the iconic Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set red box. We talk about its place in popular culture, where it sits in the larger history of D&D, touch on the other BECMI boxes, talk cartography, the importance of indexes and more. The Isle of Dread inevitably comes up, as does the Goodman Games reissue.

Finally, Stu is excited about his great mail day and walks us through some of the cool stuff he picked up from Exalted Funeral. They sell very cool indie TTRPG stuff and occult books.

Couple cool Kickstarters to hip you to, as well. The first, through Exalted Funeral, is The Ultraviolet Grasslands, a psychedelic road trip RPG. The second is Welcome to Tikor, the setting book for the Afropunk Sci-fi/Fantasy RPG Swordsfall. Both campaigns have crushed their goals and we’re sure to be talking about them a lot in the future, so consider getting on board now.

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Join us on the Vintage RPG Patreon for more roleplaying fun and surprises!

If you want to buy any of the stuff we mentioned on the show, there’s a pretty good chance our sponsors at Noble Knight Games have it in stock!

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Intro music by George Collazo.

The Vintage RPG illustration is by Shafer Brown. Follow him on Twitter.

Tune in two weeks from now for the next episode. Until then, may the dice always roll in your favor!

2 thoughts on “Red Box Dungeons & Dragons

  1. Recently found your podcast and I’m really enjoying it. But I do have to take issue with your some of your commentary about red box D&D. First, it was actually a very easy system to play. I was 10 when I got it and played it easily. Second…it did have an index, on the back cover of the DMs book. Finally, you referenced a couple of times that it was a totally separate system, and unplayable with AD&D…but that is not the case. We mixed and matched modules between D&D and AD&D all the time, with only minor adjustments need. Thanks, and keep up the great work!

    1. Glad you dig the show! Let me clarify what I might have said on the show. I don’t think BECMI is hard, but I do think it is poorly organized across several books and boxes, which proved frustrating for my group of 40-year-old players. I stand corrected about the index, though. We still had a devil of a time finding whatever we were looking for, so I guess with time my memory warped from “frustrating index” to “no index.” Lastly, I hope I didn’t say they were incompatible! But they are definitely their own systems with different power levels/balance. I think Gavin Norman’s Advanced Genre Rules for Old-School Essentials throws that into pretty sharp relief. As ever, though, your mileage may vary!

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