Chebucto Regional Softball Club

Nice work!

There are several pre-modern cities with populations as little as 10,000 in history. When I consider that I used to live in this town:  Well, that's a town of about 3500 people. A third of a "city". I could bike from end to end of it in minutes, and over the three years I lived there I probably got to know well over half the population by face. So if "Underdark City" is a pre-modern city with a population in this range, I could easily see this map as being a (smallish) neighbourhood of the city.

What I *did* in an old C&S campaign was purloined lettered the Hell out of the lab. The PCs invaded the wizard's keep. They quickly searched the grounds, kicking down doors and making sure all the guards were subdued before hitting the main tower. There they fought their way up the tower to where the most defended room in the keep was. After disabling most (not all!) of the traps, magickal and physical both on the entrance way, and taking their lumps for the traps they missed, they broke into the proper lab, all filled with glassware and books and components and braziers and whatnot. Only to have it turn out that everything in there was common and useless stuff glamoured up to seem important until you touched it. In the mean time, while the PCs were being kept busy in the keep's tower, the wizard came out of the basement crudely hidden under straw in the stables with all his most valuable stuff packed and carried out of the grounds to a safe distance before he triggered the final trap that turned the tower into a towering inferno. The fools hadn't even rolled to check for anything in the stables; I mean it was just the place where the horses were kept, right…?

I'd read a few issues back in the day (borrowed from an ardent participant) and I'm still gob-smacked how lively and active game designers were back in the early '80s. And how well they knew each other, all because of the pages of this little APA.

It's the most influential publication on RPG designers that you never heard of. Most of the game design innovations that were made in the '70s, '80s, **and** '90s came from the pages of A&E in their embryonic form, and it still held quite a bit of impact in the '00s.