Adventures Dark and Deep (ADAD) is an excellent game. If you want an authentic AD&D-like experience, but with a few more character options, this is the way to go. The presentation is fantastic, the new stuff is excellent, and it feels like a strange, alternate-universe version of AD&D 1st Edition, but taken into the future.
It is like the Satanic Panic never happened.
AD&D 2nd Edition and its censorship never happened.
The game never evolved into support material for the 1990s fantasy novels and their insufferable collection of GMNPCs and author Mary Sues.
We stayed with everything that made the original modules great, kept the dark and deadly nature of the game, and celebrated the baseball-stat-like character sheet you needed to understand to run a character. It is complicated, but every secondary value has a use. Things are not overly streamlined into a universal game mechanic. We did not unify the core rules or bring in expert designers to ruin everything.
First edition feels like a well-lived-in house where everything is the way you want it. And then Wizards comes in and hires a Feng Shui expert for their versions of the game to mess up your entire way of life, the whole house is different and too streamlined, and now you can't find anything. You are perpetually unhappy, having your "it just works best this way" routine disrupted.
I can play an authentic Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms campaign in these rules and still have the game feel deadly and serious. This is before everyone became Marvel Superheroes in today's games, and a 10th-level wizard that took months to get there could fail a death save and system shock roll, and it was game over. Roll up a new character.
The first edition had built-in GMNPC and Mary Sue protection just due to the natural character kill rate.
And the game is very "survival oriented" since the wilderness is a hugely dangerous place, you need to spend gold to hire retainers, and that gold needs to go into a stronghold to hold the rest of the gold you will be getting your hands on. There are no banks or lines of credit here. Grab 100,000 gold from a dragon's hoard, and good luck keeping that in an inn room back at town.
And yes, you are doing a lot of bookkeeping and referencing charts and strange modifiers to specific actions, so write those down! A character should have a bit of arcane "rules crunch" to them to help them feel authentic.
All this thinking can be applied to the OSRIC game, too, which is a worthy first-edition option as well. It is the same game as ADAD, except with fewer options and fewer rule expansions.
Want a still authentic-feeling but easier version of this game? Then play Swords & Wizardry. You keep the deadly and old-school feeling while losing the complex character sheets and table references. You get ascending AC. The game is smaller and much faster. This is a mix of first- and zero-edition gaming, such as the missing 0.5E we never saw.
Want a more modern version of the first edition, like the 2.5E that was never created? Play Castles & Crusades, and enjoy a more modern unified core system. C&C is the best modern implementation of the old-school game, and it feels like the first edition while modernizing the mechanics. C&C is also highly hackable, and you can play anything from deadly first edition play to 5E-style superheroes.
ADAD replaces Dungeon Crawl Classics for me, since instead of a game that emulates the old-school experience, this is the old-school experience. Yes, you are missing the Appendix N-inspired rules zaniness, but this is the real thing. DCC is an excellent "tribute band" to the original works, but for those of us who were there, having the original rules again, and the experience they deliver, can not be replaced or emulated.
I still like and play DCC, it has a charm of its own. This is a game that has survived being put in storage many times, and each time I missed it and retrieved it. It is impossible to quit this game, as it captures the elements of fun, absurdity, and dark humor that many OSR games often overlook. Where games like Shadowdark tend to be overly deadly and grim, and even Daggerheart can be high drama, what game appreciates fun and humor?
The original Forgotten Realms was a first-edition world. The world was not like the video game, with science fiction starships flying all over, and too many fantastical NPCs wandering about like some MMO hub city full of 101 silly Unreal Engine player models out of Fortnite. There was no "adventurer class" of people. This was an everyday fantasy world, primarily human, low magic, and fearful of the gods. Towns were suspicious of outsiders. People worked and toiled hard to make a living in this dangerous world, and kingdoms raised armies to protect their people from the monsters. Magic was mainly strange and unknown, along with most of the lands outside cities, which were full of lost empires, ruins, and mysteries from ancient times. Evil gods and demons slowly corrupted the land and took souls, laughing as civilizations fell to their wickedness.
Forgetting water and rations could kill you as easily as wandering out of the town gate and getting hit by a goblin arrow. You could get lost in the wilderness and die. A random wilderness encounter could be far too deadly for you to fight, and you will be avoiding or running away - if you can. If you can't get away, you will die. Dungeons are nasty places full of deadly wandering monsters, traps, and tricks designed to keep you down there forever so the dungeon can finish you off. The corpses of "previous adventuring parties" will be found everywhere, and some of them will have been raised into undead protectors of these tombs and crypts.
The first edition captures that feeling.
Every other edition fails.
