Gelatinous Icosahedron

 I've always been a Classic D&D guy. It probably has a lot to do with the fact that my first exposure to any form of the game was the Moldvay Basic set. I wasn't aware AD&D was its own separate thing until I got a copy of the Player's Handbook. Since that day, I've harbored a deep fascination for the game, with all its baroque design, its dense and often unnecessarily verbose prose, its inelegant asymmetry, and its plethora of heavily footnoted charts and tables, but I've played in maybe one or two sessions and have never run the game myself.  I know many gamers see AD&D 1e as the pinnacle of D&D, sometimes with a corresponding disdain for the classic Moldvay and Mentzer iterations ("kiddie D&D" is the term used by those who have no interest in veiling their elitism). One prominent blogger in particular, who was once the foremost champion of B/X, now only extolls the perfect virtues of AD&D 1e. Much of this change of heart seems to

 Here's a monster that seems to be the product of a mashup between two very similar mythical creatures: the harpy. Mythological harpies are hybrids of women and birds who were traditionally associated with storm winds. Some early incarnations describe their human aspects as attractive, but mostly they were held to be quite repugnant. So far, it matches pretty closely with the D&D harpy. What it's missing is a song that can charm humans. That ability is traditionally associated with another mythical being, the siren. While sirens in later years are usually thought of as mermaid-like creatures with the lower bodies of fish, in their earlier incarnations they were described as having the faces of women, and the bodies, feet, and wings of birds. The D&D harpy is described more specifically than either, having the lower body of a giant eagle and the upper body and head of a hideous woman.  Stats-wise, harpies are pretty formidable opponents for Basic-level parties. Their AC

 We've finished off the Gs, so let's start the Hs, with another PC-as-monster entry: the halfling. These entries in the B/X bestiary tend to be brief, and the halfling is no exception to that trend, weighing in at a mere four sentences plus the obligatory stat block. By the stats, halflings are not very threatening, having a mediocre AC of 7 (Is it leather? Is it a shield and a +1 Dex bonus? Who knows?), 1-1 HD, 90' (30') movement, damage by weapon, and Morale of 7. It's interesting to note they have by far the highest dungeon Number Appearing of any PC-as-monster type, at 3-18, well ahead of Veteran at 2-8, and are tied for wilderness Number Appearing with dwarves at 5-40. It is also noteworthy that their wilderness "lair" (i.e. village) explicitly disregards the standard rule of thumb of five times the listed number appearing (25-200 in this case) with an alternate number of 30-300. A village will have a leader of level 2-7 and a village guard of 5-20 in

 A character's spells are an important resource, both for the individual and the party. As such, a big part of the game's challenge comes from managing them well, and different schemes offer different incentives in play. Below, I compare and contrast the differences between some common spell casting systems, with special attention to their effects on resource management and player decision-making. Prepare and forget : The by-the-book method for most older editions of D&D and their modern clones and simulacra. Choose spells for your caster to prepare or memorize each day. Those are the spells you get, and when you cast one, it disappears from the caster's mind until prepared again after a full rest. You can choose to prepare multiple instances of the same spell, if you want to be able to cast it more than once.  In theory, this is Hard Mode resource management: your spells are limited  and  you have to choose them in advance, with imperfect to nearly nonexistent foreknow

 Crawling up out of the slime and taking to the skies! The griffon is next on our alphabetical exploration of the monster lists. Griffons have a pretty extensive pedigree in real-world mythology, having roots all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. The monster is usually depicted as having the body, tail, and hind legs of a lion and the head, forelegs, and sometimes wings of an eagle. (Wings, of course, are a vital feature of the D&D iteration of the beast.) At least one scholar wrote of griffons that they are "enemies of horses", a tidbit enthusiastically seized upon by D&D's authors. The D&D griffon is a pretty formidable creature. The rulebook entry describes it as a voracious predator, and it has the stats to fill that role quite admirably. Its AC is a medium-tough 5 and its 7 Hit Dice make it bigger and tougher than the lion from which it derives (pardon the word play) the lion's share of its physical form. It can dish out an impressive amount of dam

 Being able to assess the risk of adventure locations is a vitally important aspect of old school play, especially the sandbox style. In dungeons, this is a relatively simple matter: the danger increases as you descend deeper into the dungeon. Dungeon levels are typically numbered, starting with 1 for the first level, typically the most easily accessible, and progression to higher numbers with each level farther from the main entrance. Monsters found on a given level will tend to have the same number of Hit Dice as th e dungeon level (e.g. on the third level of the dungeon, 3 HD monsters are most common) and more loosely, traps and other hazards become more deadly. The amount and value of treasure also tends to increase with dungeon level. There are some twists on this formula; some dungeons may have additional entrances that lead directly to deeper levels, and some dungeons may be "layered" horizontally rather than vertically, but the overall principle is that players will b