I've fallen in love with Cleverbot, which is totally awesome! Let's play D&D with it!

You are in a 10' wide corridor. It stinks of mildew and rot, there is a flickering light up ahead. What do you do?

How does mathematics know when I'm about to begin experiencing flickering random noise?

Eh, don't worry about the math, I'll do most of the rolling. What character class are you playing, anyway?

For one glorious summer (2002? I think?) I ran Rappan Athuk: the Dungeon of Graves for a bunch of my gaming buddies up in Oakland. I had moved down to Los Angeles and it was sort of a "last gasp", and I invited everyone to come to the table with their most game-breaking character concepts - at least three of them - to run them through the grist of what is arguably the world's deadliest dungeon.

I was going through some gaming stuff and came across the back of the module where I had written down all the glorious deaths that had occurred, and in the interests of archiving and entertaining, I now present them to you, with a slight warning of minor spoilers:

So I've raved a little about Red Box Hack on here before, but I've been lucky enough now (the DM of our current 4e campaign is on temporary hiatus) to actually run a session or two of this fun little system.

Red Box Hack is a sort of "reimagining" of Original D&D, only with some story-game elements and set in a more wuxia asian-themed world. Like OD&D it has levels, hit points, and classes (seven: four human and three non-human), and XP is gained through killing monsters and getting treasure. It's simplified quite a bit (the entire game is only 23 pages), and is extremely and entertainingly pick-up-and-playable.

It's also free and open to tweakery. I've been working on a Red Box Hack "hack" for most of the summer now, but I figured I should probably actually playtest the thing some if I was so damned excited about it.

The adventure started off with a bang aboard a sandship skimming over the surface of a broad desert on its way to the town of Brokenfalls, known as "the town on the edge of forever", as it was being hijacked by desert bandits riding giant wasps. Once we got a feel for the combat system and the use of Awesome Tokens, things seemed to flow quite nicely.