I will be commemorating the occasion with the selfsame victuals that gave us nourishment during our campaigns: Taco flavored Doritos (the only flavor back in the day) and a flagon of Pepsi, or, as we called that libation, Vorpal Blood.
P.S. All hail Satan!
Ah yes. From Middle-Earth to Middle Age.
Wow. I started playing 6 years after it came out. I should dig out the old rule books for an anniversary adventure!
Have a favorite adventure? For a quick one we used to do what we called the “Tower of Orks”. You find yourself at a tower that’s filled with orks. Kill your way to the top. End.
The Village of Homlet has a special place in my heart. Someone gave it to me and I read that thing Front to back to front again and again. Never got to play it. Just read it.
gets out of rocking chair Hey you kids, get off my lawn or I’ll lob a Magic Missile at you!
I feel old now.
I would have been first to reply to this thread, but I lost on the Roll For Initiative.
I remember sitting at the kitchen table, my family waiting patiently as I rolled up characters for each of them.
And then they all hated it and we never played it again.
Here’s the craziest thing you ever heard, at my elementary school the kids who stayed inside during recess and played D&D were the cool kids! That did not last into middle school.
In my heart too. 
It was one of the first modules I ran for my adult group (N.B. we’re still playing 1st Edition after 35 years together 
), and I also ran it at regular intervals for my School groups (with new players every few years.)
Hommlet is featured in the computer game ‘Temple of Elemental Evil’.
(If you can find it and run it, it’s a good game.)
: rolls dice : 1 hp damage? Ha! : smites magic user with +2 longsword : :
June 1977 is when I bought the initial white box set. Couldn’t figure out weapon damage for the life of us and went back a couple of weeks later for the first supplement.
I remember actually trying to follow the AD&D weapons vs armor types modifier tables once. I saw all of these exotic unknown weapons which had to be the coolest fantastic unimaginable cool epic things ever.
Glaives, Guisarmes, Voulges, Fauchards (and Hook-Fauchards!). Ranseurs, Bec de Corbins, Bardiches, and the mysterious Lochaber Axe and Lucerne Hammer! Who were Lochaber and Lucerne? I didn’t know, but I bet they could kick Conan’s and Elric’s asses.
I think it was Freud who said, “Sometimes a polearm is just a polearm”
Yeah, we looked over the weapons modifiers and the ‘speed’ charts and went…NAH!
Like pretty much everyone else
One of the members of my former D&D group has an 11yr old son who has a regular gaming group with 3 of his friends and who spent 1 week in an AD&D summer camp last year.
It’s nice to see the next generation falling into line 
[geek]A magic missile does 2 - 5 damage - it’s incapable of doing only 1.[/geek]
Moved MPSIMS --> the Game Room.
I’m pretty sure they refer to place.
But very manly places.
Lucerne was the brand name of the milk I drank growing up. Consequently, I always imagined the Lucerne hammer as a milk carton with a pommel attached to it.
Been playing for 32 out of the 40 years of the game. I’ll have to do some sort of play on Sunday, just to commemorate the anniversary. Maybe I’ll break out “Keep on the Borderlands”, and run a couple of caves worth of kobolds.
BTW, Jon Peterson, the scholar linked to by the OP, has written an amazingly great book about the history of D&D. (If your definition of “amazingly great” encompasses “containing insane levels of detail”).
His book, Playing at the World is 720 pages long! In it he exhaustively details the various strands that came together to produce Dungeons & Dragons, covering both the history of wargaming and the history of fantasy literature. What’s wonderful about it is that he just doesn’t say, “this happened, then this happened, then this happened”. He’s reconstructed a history of influences, using original sources (zines, letters, private notes) to show where different elements of D&D originated and how Gygax, Arneson and the rest came into contact with them.
For example, the origin of the thief class can be traced to homebrew rules developed in spring of 1974 by a group playing at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica. The idea was passed along in a phone call from the owner of Aero Hobbies to Gygax. Gygax wrote up initially released the thief rules in a small low-circulation zine before rolling them into Greyhawk, the first supplement. Peterson goes step by step through all the surviving documentation of this chain. It’s totally insane and really fascinating.
Well, I happen to have a game of HackMaster coming up on Sunday. Looks like I’ll have to bring cupcakes, at least.