Western Gunfighter

Grenadier Models produced a line of historical miniatures under the name "Western Gunfighter" that were approved for use with TSR's Boot Hill. 

I'm not certain when these miniatures were first released. I can find evidence online that they were at least advertised by Grenadier in 1978. Whether they were released in that year (or earlier), I can't say with any certainty. Even so, 1978 is prior to the release of Boot Hill's second edition in 1979, which is interesting. In addition to this large boxed set, there were also a number of smaller blister packs. 

I've never seen any of them in the flesh, only photographs, so there's not much more I can say about them. Did anyone reading this own or see them? 

Boot Hill Introduction (Part III)

The introduction to Boot Hill continues. 

A campaign could be run with as few as 4 players and a referee, although a referee is not strictly necessary in smaller games, since players as a group can decide any questionable situations and together can put a check on any actions which tend to disrupt the smooth flow of a game (shooting anything which moves, for instance, quickly brings the wrath of the other players and the law down upon the head of the offender). 

Once again, we see the distinction between a "game" and a "campaign." Equally interesting in my opinion is the suggestion that the players can not only handle certain aspects of play themselves without the need for a referee, but they can also be self-regulating in the sense of preventing one another from going against the spirit of the game. Nevertheless –

A referee is always preferable in any size campaign, and is a must for larger undertakings (which could easily encompass as many as 20 different roles). When the referee moderates the action, there is a secrecy aspect which the platers can work to advantage and which can greatly add to the interest of the campaign. Thus, the referee can relate information individually to each player depending upon the actions and position of his own character, and each character will have his own outlook on the game situation, since there will often be developments "behind the scenes" which will not be common knowledge to all. Likewise, secret plans can be made and related to the referee without the other players knowing of what transpires.

I've talked before about the need for large groups of players in our RPG campaigns, so I'm pleased to see that Boot Hill is yet another game that explicitly supports this kind of play. The discussion of secrecy is good, too. In my youth, I ran a short Top Secret campaign in which each of the three players was working for a different agency and all of them were tasked with adversarial goals. I also did something similar in my youthful Gangbusters campaign and that worked pretty well.

In a campaign situation, each player character will have his own identity and abilities (these are determined by dice rolling, with a slight advantage to allow player characters to be above the norm). If this character is killed, the player will have to take on another persona in the campaign (sometimes starting "from scratch" again in a similar character, or in a position which is completely unrelated to the former).

The idea that a player character should have "a slight advantage" so that he is "above the norm" is notable. Many post-D&D TSR roleplaying games included ability score generation schemes that were skewed in player character's favor. 

Note, however, that in a large game, a player could conceivably take on the role of two different characters if carefully arranged and monitored by the referee. In such an instance, the two roles would have to be completely independent and not subject to conflict or possible cooperation. For instance, a player could have one role as a major rancher who is seeking to expand his holdings and another character who is an outlaw specializing in stagecoach robberies. Obviously, these two characters would have little cause to cooperate or conflict with each other, so such an arrangement would provide two characters for the campaign (assuming the referee was agreeable) rather than only one. 

When I started playing RPGs, it was a widely accepted truth that no player should play more than one character in a session. However, most players had more than one character in the campaign and would often swap between them, based on interest and the context of the scenario on offer. That approach seems very similar to what's been suggested here.

Campaigns can be as small or as expansive as desired, centering on a single town or a large geographical area. Preparation can be minimal or as extensive as desired. While it is possible to structure rigid scenarios, free-form play will usually be more interesting and challenging. It is easy to set up a town, give a few background details, and allow the participants free rein thereafter. In no time at all lawmen will arrest troublemakers, gunfights will take place, and Wells Fargo will lose yet another payroll to masked outlaws. This game isn't named BOOT HILL without reason!

He makes it sound so easy!  

Fortunately, there's an entire section of the rulebook dedicated to the creation and running of a Boot Hill campaign. I'll be taking a closer look at it in another series of upcoming posts.

Travel(ler) Times

Back in the halcyon days of Google Plus – the only social media platform I've ever really liked – I floated the idea of starting up an open-ended, multi-group Traveller sandbox campaign set in a single subsector of space. For those unfamiliar with a subsector, here's an example:

Each hex represents a week's travel time in a starship outfitted with a Jump-1 drive. So, to travel from Regina (hex 0310) to Forboldn (hex 0206) would take two weeks – one to jump into either Ruie (hex 0209) or Hefry (hex 0309) and another to jump into Forboldn itself. Of course, Jump-1 is the least powerful form of jump drive, with others rated as high as Jump-6, the number being how many hexes it can travel in a single week. In my example, a starship equipped with a Jump-2 drive could thus reach Forboldn from Regina in a single week. And so on.

The relative slowness of interstellar travel is an important part of what makes Traveller the game that it is, regardless of whether the setting is GDW's Charted Space or a homebrew one. Since there is no faster means of communicating between star systems, information travels at the speed of the fastest ship available, much as did during the Age of Sail on Earth. This means that interstellar governments either have to delegate authority to local worlds or risk making decisions based on intelligence that may be weeks or even months out of date. This set-up creates a fun dynamic that's very conducive to adventure.

It also presents a bit of a problem for the kind of campaign I proposed on Google Plus. My idea was that I'd have several different groups of player characters operating within the same subsector, each starting on a different world. Their actions would be independent of one another and, unless they were significant in some way, they'd probably never even know about what the others were up to. However, I had hopes that, over time, each group would have sufficient impact on the worlds of the subsector that there'd be reverberations that could be felt elsewhere.

The difficulty was timing. If, for example, one group of characters, acting as mercenaries, helped overthrow the planetary government of Roup (hex 0407), word of that would travel slowly throughout the subsector. Depending on where the other groups of characters were, it might be some time before they heard of it. Furthermore, suppose one of those groups was adventuring on a single planet for weeks of real time, but only a few days of game time. They'd very quickly fall out of sync with the others, creating a timekeeping headache for me as the referee, since, as we all know, YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT. 

It's not an insurmountable problem, to be sure. Gary Gygax does provide some genuinely helpful advice on how to manage groups engaged in different activities at different times within the same campaign in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Nevertheless, it's still a lot to juggle in a way that allows regular play to proceed without interruption. If all the character groups spent no more than a single session on each world, this would be easier to manage, but that's unlikely to be the case. I don't want to enforce an artificial limit like "You must complete your mission on this world in four hours of play or else you must leave" to achieve the kind of campaign I want to run, but that seems to be the simplest way to achieve it and that's disappointing.

Am I missing something obvious? Is there a good way to referee an open-ended sandbox campaign with multiple character groups acting independently of one another without either artificial time limits or having to coordinate several out of sync timelines? If so, I'd love to hear about it.

Retrospective: Alien Module 2: K'Kree

Traveller's Charted Space setting, home to the Third Imperium and its interstellar neighbors, is one I know very well. It's also one that I rank as my favorite imaginary setting – a testament to its near-perfect blend of originality and pastiche. Charted Space is a setting that's expansive enough to contain almost anything you can imagine in a space opera while still feeling distinctive. That's a more impressive feat than one might imagine, especially when one considers how often others have failed in the attempt. 

One of the many ways by which Game Designers' Workshop achieved this was by subverting expectations. I mean that as a genuine compliment, not as a bit of nonsensical marketing speak. Very often, GDW would take a commonplace element of science fiction and ring a change or two on it so as to give it a different complexion, one unique to Traveller. Though they employed this technique throughout the game's product line, I feel as if they put it to best effect in their series of Alien Modules, beginning with Aslan in 1984. 

Aslan is a solid reworking of the "proud warrior race" trope, but I don't think anyone who reads it is going to be blown away by its content. That's not a knock against by any means, just an acknowledgment that it treads ground familiar to anyone who's a longtime sci-fi aficionado. From the Dorsai to the Klingons and Kzinti, the genre is replete with such races and cultures. Though I happen to think the Aslan are an interesting and well-done example of a proud warrior race, proud warrior races are a dime a dozen in both SF and fantasy. If you really want to impress me, you need to do something genuinely different.

That's exactly what GDW did with its second alien module, devoted to the "enigmatic centaurs" known as the K'Kree. Written by J. Andrew Keith and Loren Wiseman, this 40-page book was published the same year as its predecessor, but it's much more interesting. As you might notice from the cover image above (provided by the ever-awesome David Dietrick), the K'Kree are six-limbed beings, hence their nickname of "centaurs." That alone sets them apart, not just from humans or Aslan but from most alien races presented in science fiction. Of course, that's not the only thing that makes them unique, as I'll explain.

The K'Kree are the descendants of herbivorous grazers – like horses or cattle – that evolved to intelligence and eventually came to dominate their homeworld. The Alien Module explains that the K'Kree were not the only intelligent species to have evolved there. At least one other, known as the G'naak, also did so, against whom the K'Kree fought during ancient wars that also served to accelerate their technological development. The G'naak, unlike the K'Kree, were carnivores and were thus seen as an existential threat that demanded nothing less than genocide. With the G'naak wiped out, the K'Kree continued to develop, both culturally and technologically, until they eventually discovered jump drive and made their way to the stars.

The K'Kree are one of Traveller's so-called Major Races – one of the six species that discovered jump drive independently and established mighty interstellar states. The K'Kree's interstellar state, the Two Thousand Worlds, exists to trailing of the Imperium. Under its Steppelord, the Two Thousand Worlds is a deeply conservative polity dedicated to stability and protecting its people from outsiders, particularly meat-eaters, whose scent reminds the K'Kree of the long-defeated G'naak (who are akin to bogeymen in their culture). Revulsion of carnivores is so great among the K'Kree that, for example, they demand that ambassadors from other species abstain from eating meat for months before they will even receive them, among many other idiosyncratic practices.

Like their ancestors, the K'Kree prefer to travel in large groups. Among them, a desire to be alone – never mind enjoyment of it – is taken as a sign of insanity. They likewise hate enclosed spaces. All K'Kree would, by human standards, be considered claustrophobic, which is why their spacecraft are large and feature wide corridors and high ceilings. Alien Module 2 makes a good effort of explaining the mindset of the K'Kree and how it affects both their everyday behavior and the diplomacy of the Two Thousand Worlds. The K'Kree are a very alien race and rather unlike most of the nonhuman aliens encountered in popular science fiction.

That's a big part of why I hold Alien Module 2 in such high regard. At the same time, there's no denying that the K'Kree aren't really suitable for use as player characters – at least not easily. The module includes rules for doing so, along with an adventure designed to be used with K'Kree player characters. However, in my experience, it's just not practical in the long term, since K'Kree travel in large numbers, saddling a group of PCs with lots of additional servants, followers, family, and hangers-on that can get in the way of ordinary play. 

Of course, that's the price for creating a genuinely alien species, with an unusual society, culture, and psychology. The K'Kree do, however, make for very memorable NPCs and in that role they're among the most interesting beings in Charted Space. The Traveller campaign in which I'm playing is set in a region of space not far from the Two Thousand Worlds and, while we've not yet run into the K'Kree directly, their presence is nevertheless felt. Indeed, the player characters have some trepidation about the possibility that these militant vegetarians might one day take notice of what's happening in our little corner of the universe. Good times!

ElfQuest Returns

I've been an admirer of Chaosium boxed sets for a long time and consider many of them to be among the best RPG products ever released. That's why I was very quick to snap up the 40th anniversary reprint of Call of Cthulhu the company announced in 2021. Building on that success, Chaosium announced another re-release of a classic Basic Role-Playing-derived game, ElfQuest.

The remastered set will come in a 2" box and include not only the 2nd edition ElfQuest rulebook and related materials, but also The ElfQuest Companion, The Sea Elves, and Elf War supplements. Though I don't count myself a fan of ElfQuest, this announcement nevertheless makes me very happy. I love it when old RPGs are faithfully re-released for a new generation of fans to discover and appreciate. Chaosium has a very good track record when it comes to projects like this, so I think anyone who is an ElfQuest fan would do well to take a serious look at this.  

The Articles of Dragon: "The Big, Bad Barbarian"

As I've mentioned on multiple occasions, I looked forward to reading Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" columns in Dragon whenever they appeared. As Gygax himself regularly reminded his readers, his columns were (usually) the only articles in the magazine whose content was 100% official and approved for use with AD&D. Rabid AD&D player and TSR fanboy that I was at the time, this imprimatur thus meant a lot to me, because it ensured that I was permitted to make use of this new material in my campaign without reservation – and use it I did!

Like many (most?) gamers at the time, I'm not certain I ever played AD&D "by the book." Instead, my friends and I played a cobbled-together mishmash of Holmes, Moldvay, AD&D, and random bits of RPG "folklore" we picked up from Crom knows where. We still called what we were playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, of course, because that was the game to play and we all wanted to play it, but whether we actually were playing something Gary Gygax would have recognized as AD&D is an open question. What's important to understand for our present purposes is that we believed ourselves to be playing AD&D, hence why the new material Gygax presented for use with AD&D in Dragon was so important to us. 

My first experience of Gygax's additions had come in issue #59 (March 1982) with his introduction of cantrips. While these minor spells were interesting, they were never widely adopted in our group, unlike those that began to appear a few issues later. A good example of what I am talking about is "The Big, Bad Barbarian," which appeared in issue #63 (July 1982). As its title suggests, this article gave us our first peek at the barbarian character class that would later be included in Unearthed Arcana several years later. Since this was the first new – and official – addition to the line-up of AD&D character classes, I was very excited to see it.

I also perplexed by it. My own sense of what a "barbarian" was had been informed by two sources: ancient history and fantasy literature, particularly Howard's stories of Conan the Cimmerian. The class that Gygax presented in issue #63, with its proficiencies in survival and suspicion of magic, was vaguely reminiscent of both, but still somehow its own distinct thing. I didn't hate the class, but neither did I wholeheartedly embrace it as I would other new Gygaxian classes. I suppose it's fair to say that, in principle, I was attracted to the idea of a barbarian class. I simply wasn't yet sold on the AD&D version.

Part of the reason why I felt this way is that Gygax's barbarian broke a lot of standard AD&D "rules." For example, the barbarian's ability scores were generated according to its own unique methods, unlike even those presented in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Strength is generated by rolling 9D6 and picking the three highest, while Constitution uses 8D6 (Wisdom, interestingly, is generated by rolling 4d4). Furthermore, barbarians get double the benefit for high Dexterity and Constitution scores, both of which they'll almost certainly have, given the way the scores are generated. The class also began play proficient in even more weapons than a fighter, in addition to many other special abilities. Even to my twelve year-old self, it all seemed a bit much.

Nevertheless, I dutifully attempted to make use of the new class. One of my friends asked if he could convert his longtime fighter into a barbarian, since he'd always imagined him as a barbarian. I agreed, since it gave us the perfect opportunity to give the barbarian a whirl, just as Gygax suggested we do. The results were ... mixed. In play, we found the barbarian exceedingly tough in combat and its various abilities useful. However, in its Dragon iteration, the class was utterly forbidden from using magic weapons, which hampered its ability to take on many powerful monsters. I imagine this was intended to be balance out its other strengths, but, in the end, it proved crippling and my friend asked to return his character to being a fighter, which I happily permitted.

My first experience with a new, official class for AD&D ended in disappointment. This made me wary of all future classes Gygax presented in "From the Sorcerer's Scroll, though, as we'll see in future posts in this series, my wariness did not sour me on the idea of new character classes in general. But the barbarian, in either its original version or its "improved" one in UA, never won me over. I retain a fondness for the concept of a barbarian class, as I've explained before. I simply haven't yet found (or created) one that I like well enough to use. One day!

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Back at the end of June, I wrote a post about the representation of bugbears in the various TSR editions of Dungeons & Dragons. My examination of the topic revealed that, by and large, bugbears had a fairly consistent appearance over time, unlike, say, orcs. On some level, that made sense, since bugbears, as a distinct "type" of monster, are unique to D&D. They don't have a clear folkloric origin, leaving to TSR's artists the responsibility of establishing what they look like.

While looking through some old issues of Dragon magazine, I came across an advertisement from Ral Partha that showed off some miniatures sculpted by Tom Meier, including some identified as bugbears. Here's one of them, as shown on the Ral Partha Legacy website.

Seeing this figure awakened some old and forgotten memories. Though I never owned any of Ral Partha's bugbear minis, I saw them in one of the glass display cases at a hobby shop and found them strangely unnerving. There's something about the combination of oversized ears, goggling eyes, large, leering mouth, and spindly, apish body that I find unpleasant on some subconscious level. I'm not really sure I can explain it, except to say that I find these take on the bugbear creepy and nightmarish – maybe I'm easily frightened.

Despite this, I was glad to have been reminded of this miniature. I remain very committed to the idea that good fantasy is and indeed should be frightening. I can't help but feel that fantasy, as a genre, has become increasingly domesticated to the point that it's becoming boring. That needs to change. We need more terrifying monsters and horrific situations in our fantasies – and in fantasy gaming. Perhaps this is a topic worth returning to next month, as Halloween approaches.

Rutskarn's Gambit

Serendipity is a real phenomenon. Just as I'm looking more closely into Boot Hill's discussion of campaigns, Dan and Paul over Wandering DMs interview Adam DeCamp, who refereed a political campaign using those rules several years ago and shared his perspective on the experience. DeCamp's got some genuinely interesting stuff to say and I found the episode was well worth my time.

Boot Hill Introduction (Part II)

The question of whether Boot Hill is actually a roleplaying game is an interesting one, especially since the introduction to the game addresses this:

Playing BOOT HILL is quite simple. Since it is a role-playing game, each player participating takes on the persona of an individual character and controls his actions. In some cases, henchmen or associates will also be under his direction. In any event, the player takes the role of his character for the time that that individual is involved in the game situation (death, for instance, or a long jail term could remove that character from the game). The player makes the same decisions his character would make in the conduct of affairs (either in the heat of a gunfight if such a game is being played out on the tabletop, or the day-to-day activities if it is a campaign situation), and the combined actions of the entire cast of players as a whole (plus actions by non-player characters_ make up an ever-changing game situation which is much like the unfolding story of a novel or movie script – except that no one knows exactly what might result or how the story might ultimately turn out!

While there's a lot to unpack in the quote above, I want to focus on only two portions of it. First, the introduction is quite clear that its author (Gary Gygax and/or Brian Blume) unambiguously sees Boot Hill as a roleplaying game and explains what he means by that. Second, and relatedly, the author seemingly makes a distinction between "tabletop" play and "campaign" play. The former he associates with gunfighting, while the latter he associates with "day-to-day activities," though he doesn't (yet) explain he means by that. I can't recall this distinction ever being made in any other RPG, so this caught my attention.

This unpredictability and open-ended nature is what makes any role-playing game enjoyable, and the often fast and furious action of BOOT HILL gives it an excitement all its own. Players should strive to take on the role of their game character and fully immerse themselves in the very enjoyable fantasy aspect of the game. If they do so, they will enjoy it even more ...

I very much agree with this, of course. 

Pre-arranged scenarios can be used for individual games (two such scenarios, THE GUNFIGHT AT THE OK CORRAL and THE BATTLE OF COFFEYVILLE, are included as appendices in this booklet) – and these games can be historically-based or constructed in any way desired. Setting up a bank robbery scenario, for instance, would be easy – splitting up the players as outlaws, citizens, sheriff, deputy, bank personnel, etc., arranging the location of buildings involved (using the town map provided or one drawn especially for the scenario), and handling any pursuit cross-country by using a hex map (which could be the fictional area map within the game). The abilities and rating of individual players are determined by dice rolling in the manner described in a following section (see SETTING UP GAME CHARACTERS), and once this is done, the starting location of each character is noted, and play begins. It is suggested that the first few games played be unrelated games of this type which (while enjoyable) will basically serve as training sessions.

Here, the author makes it clearer what he might mean by "game," namely a "pre-arranged scenario" with a very specific purpose, like a bank robbery or other gunfight. 

Once players are familiar with the game rules and mechanics, they will find that the most enjoyable games are those that are tied together as part of a larger campaign (see CAMPAIGNS). In such a situation, past events are reflected as closely as possible in successive games, and each player has a stake in the future as well as a place in the status quo. Since platers are in different positions with different objectives (as well as on both sides of the law), there will be enough conflict and contention to provide for plenty of interesting action (which will include the inevitable gunfights and shootouts which can be played as tabletop games). Some typical character roles (depending on the size of the campaign) would be: outlaws, lawmen (sheriff, deputy, Texas ranger, etc.), ranchers (cattlemen or sheep rancher), Indian chiefs, gamblers, bounty hunters, hired guns, drifters, and so on. 

Here, "game" would seem to be a synonym for a "session" of play, in contrast with a "campaign," which is a series of successive games linked by past events. In any case, it's worth noting that a Boot Hill campaign as envisaged here involves, as I pointed out in my earlier post, player conflict, since the interests of the characters will not always align. Furthermore, this conflict is intended to be one of the drivers of "interesting action" within the campaign, leading to, among other things, "inevitable gunfights and shootouts" – in short, a wargame-y "player versus player" frame.

My friends and I never played Boot Hill for very long and thus never had the chance to use it for a campaign. What we did do was run one-off scenarios in which players took on different roles that were often at odds with one another – outlaws versus lawmen, etc. – and played out their battles with the map and counters the boxed set included. We had fun with this, but we treated it not much differently than we did other tabletop battle games rather than as an adjunct to something more, as the introduction suggests.

We'll wrap up our look at the introduction in my next post, but there's still a lot more to examine about Boot Hill beyond that, as subsequent posts will show.

25 Years Ago Today ...

... we lost the Moon in a tragic accident involving nuclear waste and a previous unknown form of magnetic radiation. Along with the Moon, all 311 personnel stationed aboard Moonbase Alpha were also lost.

Thanks to my friend and referee, Aaron, for reminding me of this important date.