M. J. Young's Dungeons & Dragons Materials

Salutations!
...and Welcome to M. J. Young's Dungeons & Dragons Materials.
Thanks to many of you, this has become one of the more popular and most respected RPG sites on the Internet, and now part of M. J. Young Net--and so I extend my thanks to you! I keep adding things as I think of them, or find them, from my years as a DM (dating back to 1980) and player of what is still the most popular role playing game. But I decided that I should redesign this home page, to make it easier to find the stuff that's here.
Your contribution via Patreon or PayPal Me keeps this site and its author alive.
Thank you.

Also, take a moment to check out my published works.

Back in about 1980, in the fall, we read about Dungeons & Dragons in an issue of Psychology Today. We were game players--everything from Canasta and Pinochle to Chess and Backgammon to Risk and Monopoly to Atari and Intellivision (the original Nintendo and Sega systems, for those of you too young to remember) to Bookcase Games to Pinball. The sketchy details of this game reminded us of some of our favorite books--The Lord of the Rings chief among these (although we had the Bookcase version of that one)--and we thought it would be worth investigating. We bought what we could find. I started with a Basic Dungeons & Dragons (first edition) boxed set, bought some dice, picked up one or two Chainmail supplements (that's going back a way), and, as I refereed for our favorite players, the first three hardcover books made their way into my library. I've been a Dungeon Master ever since, and have accumulated quite a few bits and pieces of useful material--BASIC programs, rules adjustments, support materials. I've always made these available to others as much as possible, and it is now possible for me to make at least some of these available through this bit of a web site which America Online has provided. So follow the links to whatever catches your eye.

Read Game Ideas Unlimited at Gaming Outpost

This page is part of a fairly large collection of AD&D materials; but it's a small part of all that I've put on the web. Before I give you the contents of this site, let me introduce you to a few other important web sites.
The Multiverser Information Center is exactly what it says-information about the great new role playing game unlike anything else (and although I wrote much of it, critics are saying much the same thing). I'm glad Valdron Inc has published it, and hope you'll take a moment to look at it.

Character Creation for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st Edition is an offshoot of this site. My players were always nagging me to finish my character creation document and print a copy for them (and it was past a hundred pages some years ago); with the success of this site, it seemed reasonable to offer the same materials to you. Everything I use to have to look up in every book when creating a character is together in one well-organized web site--classes, races, weapons, proficiencies, equipment, deities, spells, and so much more--along with the time-tested sequence I've used to make sure that you know everything you need to know before you need to know it.
Martial Arts in Role Playing Games is an offshoot of the Character Creation site. I've been running Oriental characters for--well, almost from the beginning, if you count the monk. Over the years, I've digested the martial arts rules, and created (with the help of many players) a number of styles which we've used in our games. You are offered the benefit of these materials. The site also includes information on the Multiverser system's approach to martial arts, so there's a lot there.
There's an Index of all my work--stuff on time travel, sub-space radios, logic errors, law, politics, theology, song lyrics, and much more--but with more RPG stuff than anything else. If I've missed anything here, you'll find it listed there. If you're a Gaming Outpost subscriber, you've probably already enjoyed my Game Ideas Unlimited series (and if not, shame on you); or perhaps you've seen the Faith and Gaming series in the Chaplain's corner of The Christian Gamers Guild.

O.K., let's move on to what's on this site....

Dungeon Master's Reference Materials is drawn from my own book of useful charts and tables which I created over the years just so I would have answers to the questions players always ask. This page is a links page, and the connected links are described so that the DM can quickly find something useful.

Special Rules is another links page collecting resources of rules which I created to answer specific or anticipated needs in my campaign, from how much can you really cram into a backpack to who gets to be the leader of the party to how much money can a Ranger really save to what can an herbalist do for an injured party member, and much more. The contents page explains the various linked documents briefly.

Cults of the Past is the name I gave to a collection of "secret societies" for use in my campaign as background, window dressing, and even as the occasional hook to create adventures. I've uploaded the collection--originally written from the perspective of a character, a sage named Hargin of Selna--and invited all of you to expand my collection by creating the papers to which it refers and swapping links between your pages and mine.

The Frontier: Milieu Integration in First Edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons gives some ideas about how to mix characters from the original rules with those from the Oriental and Krynn rules, as well as the Viking and Psionicist materials from Second Edition. I've been mixing milieus since they started coming out, adding Oriental characters to the ongoing campaign, and ultimately including all of those (plus my own Alchemist and Attorney classes).

BASIC Programs for AD&D Gamers is a collection of a few programs I've written over the years to help create and run games more quickly. Many times I've thrown together a program for a particular application, such as cranking out the hit points, pocket money, and weapons of three hundred kobolds without spending all afternoon rolling dice. Some of those which I have used often enough to refine somewhat and keep around are downloadable for those of you who still have some version of BASIC (such as the QBASIC every version of MS-DOS once contained) to run them.

The Alignment Quiz is here. This little ten-question quiz was designed to help players understand exactly what their alignment meant to me as Dungeon Master. Gary Gygax liked it, and wanted to know how well it worked--so we've created a little mailto questionaire. It's linked from my copy of the quiz; if you take the quiz, and then send the form, I'll see to it that Gary gets the results. I regret that here it is not an interactive questionaire, but it seemed the most useful format for the largest number of browsers would be to put it up as web page. I recommend copying it to a file, and then pasting it into your word processing program to print copies for players--but for yourself, just jot your answers on a scrap of paper, and see how close your character's alignment is to what you say it is. Although Wei-Hwa Huang's wonderful interactive "CGI" version is no longer on his web page, there is now a CGI version in German based on his work (I have no idea whether the translation is any good, but the guy who did it, Lorenz, writes English well). And we now have an interactive self-scoring version here that runs on JavaScript, thanks to Charles Ford, so if you've got a JavaScript-enabled browser you can use that.

What is an RPG? is actually an excerpt from my Multiverser work, but explains the role playing game concept in a way which is both clear to the uninitiated and enlightening to long-term gamers. There's a rumor abroad that some of the first Dungeons & Dragons people have complimented it, but as yet not directly to me.

Confessions of a Dungeons & Dragons Addict may well be the article which brought most of you here. When I first started playing D&D, I was in Christian Broadcasting, and found myself on the minority side of a debate about Christianity and role playing games. This article is the culmination of my position, presenting the flaws in the arguments leveled against RPG's and D&D in particular, and arguing that Christians not only can but should be involved in such games. As a bonus, it was written to draw the opposition into it, to present itself as if it were going to support the opposing view, so you might find it easier to present to any religious friends or family who are giving you a hard time about gaming.

I'll continue to expand these materials as I am able; watch for more in the days ahead. Check back--

I've got a page of Links, some to my sites, some to sites of friends. Some are RPG sites, but there are quite a few things there. Check them out--oh, yes, and drop me a note if you get a chance, have questions, or just wanted to see more of something like what's already here. If I don't have it, I might be able to point you to it.

M. J. Young Net