This week in random fun things I found out on the internet: The Newsletter of the Lincoln Middle School D&D Club.
If you recall my somewhat recent post about my history with D&D (if not, you can read it here), I got my first books when I was in middle school. Unlike the kids at Lincoln Middle, I didn't have a club to play with so until I got to high school, it was just me and these arcane rulebooks making up characters, studying the spell section like it was an actual spellbook, and using random tables to have solo dungeon crawls.
It looks like the club is mostly playing "original" Basic D&D, the same system I cut my teeth on way back when! The first newsletter does say they play other games and mentions Labyrinth Lord by name. LL is what they call a retro-clone or OSR (Old School Revival). There's quite a few systems out there now that emulate the OG D&D rules with some minor tweaks. While I pretty much understood the rules back then, if I were introducing middle schoolers to role-playing, I'd probably start with something a little less rules intensive.
I found these newsletters particularly interesting because they're a snapshot in time and, at the same time, timeless. If not for the dates listed on them, they could almost be from any time after 2007 when Labyrinth Lord was published. It seems like they're intended for GameMasters and players alike but there's also stuff in there that seems to be exclusively for GM eyes only. This also makes me curious about who ran the games. Were they teachers, students, a mix of the two?
Another curious thing is in issue 5, the author says "Despite the distance bewteen us, we are united by our passion for polyhedra, graph paper and minatures." which is making me wonder how the club is setup if they aren't all meeting at the school. Based on the club's mailing address, I'm guessing this is the Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, CA because they're only about a 15 minute drive apart.
Each issue is just two pages with an intro by the club president and then game related articles often with NPC, creature, or item stat blocks to be used in game.
A couple of standout things for me (issue number):
Character sheets being ripped up on death (2 & 3)
Stats for the Murdercorn which had to be made more kid friendly (3)
The mail-in GM certification test (4)
Mention of the rival Madison Middle School RPG Club (6)
The cache I stumbled into online only had the first six issues.
Were there more published? I'll probably never know.
If you were part of the Lincoln Middle School D&D Club and happened to find this blog post while searching the web for some fond memories, please contact me, I'd love to chat about it!
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