วีดีโอ

If no one has corrected you; In regard to the XP for defeating a dragon, the Rules Cyclopedia lists two XP values: one for just the dragon and one immediately below for 'XP with spells'. Great video, BTW.🙂

Could you organize your Solo AP so the order is in first to latest. Easier to watch start to end.

Great video!

Great review of these wonderful creatures! BECMI has a few more dragons. There's the Night Dragons in Dragon Magazine #163, and the dragon spirits from #158 with the information on the "draconic cluster" of realms of the dragon rulers you mentioned in the Master and Immortal set. Unpublished before TSR went under but released for free on the Vaults of Pandius with permission from TSR is the awesome Orc's Head Peninsula book with the Vermillion Dragon Pyre. And the Champions of Mystara box gave us Synn the shadow dragon. Finally the AC 10 bestiary of giants and dragons has terrible art making all the dragons wyverns, but expanded rules for dragon spells with a (unique to my knowledge) very cool physical spell generator tool for dragons. Of them all the Dragon Spirits that guard the afterlife are the most terrifying as their breathweapon deals stat damage. So you at most have 18 points until death.

Great video! IMO, AD&D 2nd Edition does the best job with dragons of all the different versions. But BECMI is no slouch!

Great review! I only ever had the first three box sets, so I either forgot or didn't know about the gem dragons until I was playing 2e. I certainly don't remember the Dragon Lords. I ran a two year (real time) campaign during COVID running through the Rise of Tiamat adventures in 5e. Very good fun trapping the party in a cottage, and when they open the door to see what the noise outside might be, a big Red blasts them with fiery breath. That put them on their back foot. Thanks for all of the work you put into these!

I had Basic back in 1981....might want to think about that.

There was a kid who used dragons a lot when he DMed. His parents threw out a lot of his game stuff once and he replaced Moldvey for Mentzer. He took stuff like Silver Princess to heart so we'd get busted up by dragon riding studs every other game. Chased by half a dozen red dragons? Every other session that we weren't getting beat up by dragon rider studs. I was a bit more spare with their use. I also played T&T with a couple kids in the apartment complex across the way, so I was fond of venomous dragons that weren't color coded. Unlike becmi, I used drakes to make up for the seeming lack of full dragons. The D/C comic "Warlord" and the "Dewbacks" from Star Wars were big influences so large reptile mounts and the tamed drakes were familiar to players before they encountered a dragon. Between the companion material and Greenwood's modification of them, I think there is a better range for them to be the rip snorting terrors of legend. Anyway, thanks for the fine video man.

Here There Be Dragons

Awesome video! Thank you!

When fighting a dragon, winning initiative (or gaining a surprise round) becomes a huge deal, because of the HP-dependence of its breath weapon damage.

I am okay for there to be only a few, or even only one large dragon of each color in the whole world, they should be rare and virtually unstoppable but then rarely concrrned with human affairs or sleeping or maybe just legends to chase!

If you haven't, you should read the story by J.R.R. Tolkien: Farmer Giles of Ham. It is always what I think about when it comes to Subduing a dragon. Plus, it's a great, short story.

Great video! Thanks, B!

Great review. You did not include the danger of dragons as wondering monsters or the possibility of encountering multiple dragons. I had the pleasure of playing in a b/x campaign just as it transitioned to BECMI and we were doing outdoor travel on a small ship. That we had collectively purchased and had employed crew which we had equipped with the leftover magic items we had amassed, such as +1 swords and various potions. For some reason (probably due to the ease of the encounters up to that point and the ahips crew support which we used to our advantage) the DM decided that the next encounters would be triple in number appearing. That was great until he rolled up an encounter with blue dragons. He rolled 3 appearing, so we were presented with a flock of 9 blue dragons flying over to check out our wee ship. Everyone was freaking out and said that it was game over. I had my character climb up to the top of the mast and attempt friendly Conversation. The other players decided that my character was an idiot. I did not see the point in trying to fight. Flattered flock/flight leader with admiration and offered current life savings for my "lifelong wish" to be given a flight on the back of the dragon. Also offered any treasure that we get in the next adventure. Dice were rolled. Long story short the dragon was quite a noble and decent fellow and my character got to do a daylight flyover of the border of his homeland and the gnoll and orc lands, escorted by 8 other blue dragons. My character honored his bargain, and the blue dragons were a recurring thing in the campaign. For some reason the orcs and gnolls stopped their constant raids of my character's homeland.

Another great video. I’m more partial to 2e Dragons myself, but I remember having a good deal of fun with these before I switched over.

A lot of interesting stuff here. For one, it wasn't supposed that a flying creature could stop mid-flight, use all of its attacks at one creature then fly off again? Two, back in part of 2e dragons had more than a bite and claw attack? Why is it for the last ten years we've been having to home brew those in 5e?

Great Content, thanks for the research and curation. Cheers!

Run away!

Have you ever read the Dungeon Magazines with "Flame the red dragon"? #1 and, 23 I think is his return. Those are some fun examples of cool dragon encounters. There is another one with a smaller green dragon that runs a sort of pirate and bandit ring. Good stuff.

Basic unarmed stun effect is one round, Pg 111 RC. Not sure how to apply it to a dragon though!

Another outstanding video. The addition in the companion rules of large and huge dragons was a game changer, I remember us debating ways to avoid the breath weapon because it could literally one shot the party! Majestic indeed!

I didn't use dragons in BECMI, since I would probably have wiped out any party with just one of them. My problem is that I tend to use intelligent foes in an intelligent way, so there would have been no chance that a flying boss would fight land bound creatures on the ground instead than from the air. It only really needs to land to eat the fallen. I used a bunch of them in AD&D 2nd Edition, though. They were even tougher than those in any other edition, with spells, powers, immunities, magic resistance, and so on. It was not the kind of creature you casually fight when you are not fully prepared for. And it could end pretty bad even if you were prepared. Had some other fights with dragons in later editions, but they were kinda underwhelming when compared to the 2nd Edition ones.

The funny thing is that the small fry dragons that were included from day one were obviously meant to ensure that dragon encounters could be part of the game fairly early on. What I can only dub "dragon fanboys" then lobbied for them to be made more and more absurdly godlike in later editions, until it became self-defeating. In order to stand a chance against a dragon, you pretty much needed to be of a higher level than most campaigns ever progressed. Before "Dragflation" set in, they were mostly mid-level threats that could be skewed lower as needed.

Great video, it makes me really want to give becmi a try.

I did like the power increase in 2nd edition, along with the giants.

Wait a minute... You mean to tell me there are Dungeons AND Dragons in this game? Get out of Town!

The first dragin I ran as a DM was in B5 Horror on the Hill. (Thanks for that video, by the way.) It went okay, except I might have fudged a dice roll or two. Fairly balanced, on the whole, since that dragon was a bit nerfed. Years later, I ran a homwbrew adventure to start a campaign in D&D 4.0 - not first-level, but still low-level - wih a young green dragon being the end-boss. And boy, that was HARD. We were so close to TPK several times. Honestly, I had to fudge tons of rolls to avoid that - and hastily decided the dragon was severely wounded (which did fit the story, but...). Dragons were made such tough monsters in the inbetween. After BECMI I feel that they were only ment to be endbosses of campaigns, not for a single adventure, CR's be damned.

Dragons were almost unusable in a way, in the sense that the chance to one-shot characters was very high! When I started playing AD&D 2e, I was shocked to see the breath weapon changed to a dX damage one.

Didn’t the black box boxed set come out at the same time for introductory play?

About time! This video gets a hearty AMEN from Reverend Dungeon Master.

And maybe to take the finality of the sting down a notch - assuming that the magnitude of negative levels do not equate to death by draining, I would impose significant loss too. the surviving character can regain experience at a higher rate than normal and regain level faster than usual, Due to relearning and recovery as opposed to learning and improving techniques without ever knowing those tricks previously. Upon reaching the original level in XP, the final negative level penalties are removed, and the character starts progressing with XP at the normal rate even though the character is likely ar a lower level of XP than when they were initially level drained. There are specific adjustments to decide on with the negative energy levels, but that is my current thinking in order to water down the impact in a way to still make the fear factor relevant, but the recovery process is hopefully easier to accept by the players. Additionally, if the character personally manages to slay the specific undead that caused the energy drain, maybe there is a way that could mitigate some of the level loss somehow. And maybe that potential could make for the party to take further risky actions or follow up encounter attempts in order to help their fellow adventurer defeat the energy/life drainer and reclaim some or all of what was taken by the undead being.

I love this module just because it has the D&D rules for what us Lord of the Rings fans call "Lembas bread". lol

And as a curiosity, in the original Spanish translation of the Red Box, Aleena survives if you make the saving throw.

Aleena surviving was my first hombrew ever. I refused to let her die.

Dungeon Mains be pleased.

How to becmi foundry?

I am enjoying listening to your perspective. The law and chaos axis is all that is technically different between the nature of devils and demons. But I think it is fair to label some beings as inherently evil and others as inherently good. The one aspect of this subject that I was hoping you would give your thoughts on is how this relates to the detect evil spell. And how that is applied in practice. Is there a detect good variant, and if so, what is its useful application.

Solo play is especially risky.

Your comparison with 5E rules 5.0? Was a valuable section within this video. Thank you, this was very helpful to my own mix and match intentions.

Very succinctly matched my thoughts. I like how you articulated importance of natural adversity challenges and their adding to the realism and value of achievement perception to successful outdoor exploration. The becoming an addition to the permafrost imagery was excellent.

100% truth

Great review. I enjoyed this game much more than I thought I would from reading it. It is broken into several 'chapters' each with their own character. So it doesn't get stale while it all hangs together. I actually liked the twisted maze underneath the monastery. You could argue that the eco-system isn't logical, but I've noticed that these older games have a more 'fairytale' logic to them. Look at Castle Mistamere with its cursed beds. I completely agree that the overland map is really just a dungeon format set outdoors - but that is its strength. It moves faster than if it were a grid crawl. And you can describe, or imagine, wet ferns and low branches hitting the party as they make their way along these single file tracks. And any number of giant lizards breaking out of the bushes to attack. Some of the most powerful of the magic items you listed were, admittedly, on the 2 sisters and therefore not really ever going to be treasure! I would recommend this one. PS: to beat the dragon: have a level 4 cleric cast Resist Fire, use a ring of fire protection - this will give your main fighter +14 fire damage reduction (2 x the dragon's level 7) - so 22 fire breath becomes 8. This can become 4 with a saving throw. Add a potion of speed and a potion of growth and that young lizard is dead. PPS: Make a drawing or a map of Guido's Fort. Add the inn, a blacksmith, a temple and a garrison. Bring it to life.

This was going to be the next module our DM ran for this campaign setting. Unfortunately I moved out of state. I'm sure the our DM had some modifications for this beast of a robot as well as the villains who took it over.

This one goes on my list. When I look for modules, this fits the bill. Exploration, caves, dungeons, ecology, traps, it's got it all. AND its a not 150 pages.

Very nice video. Btw what was that sound at the end of the video? :D

I like how the 'monster' encounters are properly spread out for the DM and players. Overall, I think a smart party would have a lot of fun with this and probably not suffer too much strategic frustration given a little creativity. You want new players to enjoy the encounters and feel excited about the more difficult boss fights. Keep on the Borderland has always suffered from easy TPK due to the extremely large concentration of humanoids in such a small spaces. If I were to run it, I would make their caves bigger. The caves in Warriors of Eternal Sun give some great examples of 'chaos caves' one might expect for first and second level adventurers. Getting swarmed at low levels with poor armor is a recipe for disaster.

Death at 0 HP does also fail the realism test though. Think about how often in stories (histories or fiction) where someone gets taken out of a fight but survives, often to die of their wounds later. This is something that games like Aces and Eights do well, but more widely known games like Call of Cthulhu do better than D&D. If you want the higher lethality, without losing the fine grained details, replacing death saves is the way to go. Borrowing from CoC, I'd go back to negative HP, but with a con save per round against death. The save is rolled whenever going negative, and once a round while negative. There is no automatic stabilization, and the medicine check to stabilize someone is 10 - HP (so minimum 11). This means in your example of a character at 1 HP taking 20 damage, they get to *immediately* make a DC 19 Constitution save, or die. And then repeat the save each round. Someone trying to stabilize them without magical healing will need a total of 29 on their medicine check, with correct tools. And they need at least 18 - ConSave worth of magical healing to no longer be at risk of death. Going this route, _most_ characters who go negative promptly die, or die within a round or two. But the character who has 100 HP and has accumulated 101 damage is likely to live (at least until the zombie eats their face off). To borrow further from CoC, you can also include a "grevious wound" mechanic, where the above only comes into play if the character took X% of their HP in a single hit. Given the relative HP bloat in 5e, I worry that bit would lead to unkillable characters, but it's probably fine if you set the threshold somewhere in the 10-20% range.

I'm running a Westmarches Bar game with a simplified 5e system. I'm considering having this be an area just beyond the normal exploration area for 5+ level characters to play. Thanks for doing these reviews!

The hobgoblins will tell a heroic tale to their kin of the last stand of the Caves of Chaos, where their superior tactics confounded the mighty Fleetwood. At least they would if there were any left alive....... Looking forward to more Fleetwood vs the Caves of Chaos, lets get some nat 20's for the monsters!