Campaign Map

This is the current version of the map for my Dwimmermount campaign. Each hex is 5 miles across. As you can see, not a lot of it has been fleshed out just yet, since, aside from the fortress of Muntburg, nearby Dwimmermount, and the City-State of Adamas to the south, the PCs haven't ventured very far into the wider world. As you can see, even geographical features don't have any names yet. I'd been very tempted to name them, but I've thus far resisted, since I decided that it was unnecessary information until such time as the PCs had reason to know the names.

I keep a list of words -- some real, some imaginary -- with me, so that I can create names on the fly as needed, either randomly determining them or choosing one that seems appropriate given the way the campaign is evolving. So far no one has complained about the "lack of detail" and I'm glad of that, since it makes it much easier for me to focus on what's important for actual play rather than world building flights of fancy.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with world building. I simply know, based on the past, that I can get very obsessive about such things if I let myself do so. For a long time, world building for its own sake was a major pastime for myself and I now realize that, in some cases, it probably prevented me from actually playing. I don't want to repeat such mistakes, so I've kept the world simple for the time being and don't really think much about what it's like outside of our weekly sessions. I'm sure that will inevitably change as time goes on and the campaign expands beyond Dwimmermount itself, but that time hasn't come just yet.

And, yes, the map is based on a section of the Outdoor Survival map. Shock and surprise, I know.

Dwimmermount (Session 4)

Last weekend, my group and I played the fourth session of the Dwimmermount campaign. Unfortunately, I have no photos this week, since there wasn't anything to show off that I haven't already shown off in previously installments. I hope to have some new things to show for the fifth session, because at least some of my Otherworld miniatures should finally be painted and I fully intend to use them. Owing to scheduling conflicts, there will be no session this weekend, which is the first time we'll have missed a week since the campaign's start. I'll be very curious to see if the break has any deleterious effects on play, since it's my growing belief that one of the salient features of old school play is that it not episodic in nature. Consequently, regular play that picks up (more or less) precisely where the last session left off is key. To date, it's worked very well, so I'm hoping that we can continue the same way despite the weekend off.

Session 4 was significant for a number of reasons. First, by the end, all the characters present (Brother Candor, Dordagdonar, and Pike) had reached level 2. I'm pretty happy with the pace of advancement overall, as it's ensured that the exploration of Level 1 of the dungeon remains challenging -- and dangerous -- which brings me to the second significant event: the near-death of Brother Candor. This wasn't the first time that a PC nearly died (that happened in the very first session), but it was the first time that one of the more cautious PCs nearly did so. The party ran afoul of a chamber containing a number of Ranine and he bore the brunt of their assault, thanks to some lucky rolls on my part. In the end, he didn't die and, as his hit points inched slowly downwards, I have to confess that I considered fudging my dice rolls to keep him alive. I'm rather fond of the character, who's amusingly portrayed and I like the irony of a cleric devoted to the goddess of Chance being the primary most moral force among the PCs. But I made a commitment early on to roll my dice in the open and to stand by the results regardless, so Lady Luck favored Brother Candor in the end that night.

One of the great things about a properly designed megadungeon is that it's big. After four sessions of rather extensive exploration, using a map that helped them intuit the likely locations of secret doors, hidden passages, and other such obstacles, they still haven't explored its entirety. Partly, this is by choice. Early on they encountered some rather nasty kobolds who seem to live in some natural warrens that honeycomb the first level. The PCs have diligently avoided going anywhere they suspect more kobolds might be found, since their early encounter with them nearly resulted in a total party kill. Likewise, they've come across at least one room whose set-up is seemingly treacherous enough that they're unwilling to enter it, for fear of activating some trap that could spell their doom. So, they've been traveling around certain areas and still have plenty of explore. Megadungeons need to have lots of options and alternatives so that the players never feel forced to go somewhere they don't want to go. Giving the players a wide capacity for risk management is vital in my opinion, given that so many of the dangers they face will be utterly outside their control. They must at least be able to choose when they're willing to proceed and under what circumstances or else the whole things risks collapsing into something resembling the fable "killer dungeon" of old.

I also had a couple of combat-related insights. I noticed that, if you keep combat bonuses to a minimum, having a good armor class (5 and below) is really useful. Having a bunch of orcs kitted out in chainmail and carrying shields makes the encounter a lot tougher than if they had less impressive armor; I was rather pleased to note this. The other thing I found was that, if you don't want to check combat charts in play, you can just roll a D20, add the attacker's base hit bonus (or Hit Dice in the case of monsters), the target's AC, and any modifiers. If the result is 20 or higher, you've scored a hit that deals damage. The nice thing about it is that it gives a mechanical rationale to "lower is better" when it comes to Armor Class -- not that I needed one but hey :)

All in all, another good session and one that provided me with plenty of food for thought as I work my way through the hidden implications of old school megadungeon play.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

As one might expect, my new hard drive was delivered yesterday while I was out of the house. Since said replacement drive was delivered by UPS, who doesn't deliver on the weekends in Canada, I have to wait till Monday till I'm back up and running at full speed. Needless to say, I am not happy.

Nevertheless, I do have some posts I'll be making later today and tomorrow. I have access to my old computer (obviously) and, though it now feels odd to use it -- the keyboard is not quite "right" -- it's still functional and should allow me to post at a slightly reduced rate. In the meantime, my apologies if I'm slow to respond to emails or to comments on any of my recent posts. As with posting, I find it more difficult to do such things on my old computer than on my new one, so they tend to get pushed aside in my priorities.

Anyway, more soon.

Yet Another Update

Even if my computer were fixed, which it's not, I'll probably not get the chance to post much, if anything, today. I'm off to a conference this afternoon (my wife is dragging me to a library conference to talk about RPGs and computer games), so I won't be back till later. I should have a few posts this weekend, regardless of whether my computer gets repaired, but they likely won't appear till Saturday and/or Sunday.

Till then.

Retrospective: Dark Tower

Along with Tegel Manor (by Bob Bledsaw) and his earlier Caverns of Thracia, Paul Jaquays' Dark Tower is probably one of the most famous and well loved adventure modules ever produced by Judges Guild. So great is its reputation that it even made Dungeon's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time," the sole non-TSR/WotC product to appear on a list that, by my lights, was filled with lots of self-congratulatory nods to modules of little lasting import.

As I said in commenting on the Dungeon list, I think 1979's Dark Tower certainly deserves to be on Top 30 list, as, like most of Jaquays' work, it's masterfully done. I personally don't consider it his best -- I prefer Caverns of Thracia -- but there's no arguing that it's a brilliant piece of work. It's also noteworthy because it's an AD&D module rather than a OD&D one, which only makes sense given its late date. At this point in time, Judges Guild still held a license from TSR to produce official support products for their games and AD&D was the "rising star" in TSR's stable. Mechanically, though, this makes little difference, because, with a few small exceptions here and there, it's perfectly usable with OD&D and I suspect many people used it in such a fashion.

The module itself concerns the town of Mitra's Fist, formerly the hermitage of its namesake before he achieved apotheosis as one of the greatest gods of Law and Goodness. During his mortal existence, Mitra opposed the serpent-demon Set, who himself achieved divine status and sought revenge on his rival by creating a dark tower in Mitra's Fist, out of which poured his minions, who destroyed the town, its inhabitants, and, most importantly, the priesthood of Mitra who tended to the shrine of their deity's ascension here. Of course, over time, treasure seekers returned to Mitra's Fist, under the watchful eye of the clerics of Mitra, hoping to uncover some of the lost treasures buried in the rubble of the town. Unfortunately, in doing so, they have awakened the ancient evil of Set's dark tower and, unless someone acts to defeat it, history may repeat itself.

The dungeons consist of four levels that represent the buried ruins of Mitra's Fist, plus the eponymous Dark Tower and the Tower of Mitra, both of which were also buried when Set's minions destroyed the town. These areas contain a good mix of encounters, tricks, traps, and oddities. In addition, as one might expect from a Jaquays module, there are various antagonistic factions with which the PCs must interact, the results of which affect their progress in exploring the dungeons. Fascinatingly, the possibility of evil PCs aligned with Set is noted and there are even rules for the bonuses clerics of that god get while in areas dedicated to their deity (the same is true for clerics of Mitra).

Dark Tower has a lot to recommend it, chiefly its open-endedness. While not as large a complex as Caverns of Thracia, there's plenty to do here and, beyond the basic background that gives context to the whole place, there's no plot or purpose to get in the way of some good old fashioned dungeon crawling. The module is tough and unforgiving. It assumes a party of 6-10 characters of level 7-11; anything less than that I expect it could easily turn into a bloodbath in a few places. I understand this module was re-released under the 3e rules, but I've never seen a copy. If anyone has any experience with it, I'd love to know what it's like.

Excellent Gygax Quote

Shortly before the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide was published, Gary Gygax wrote an article in The Dragon in which he discussed the differences in approach and presentation between the now-complete AD&D system and OD&D (which Gary simply calls "D&D"). As a historical document, it's a very intriguing article, because it suggests a relationship between the two games that clearly never came to pass, with OD&D eventually morphing into something very different than what is described in this quote:

The D&D game will always be with us, and that is a good thing. The D&D system allows the highly talented, individualistic, and imaginative hobbyist a vehicle for devising an adventure game form which is tailored to him or her and his or her group. One can take great liberties with the game and not be questioned.

There are many reasons why the version of D&D described in the quote ceased to exist, at least as far as TSR was concerned, but it's a shame nonetheless. I suppose there was simply an insufficiently large market for this vision of OD&D. Had there been more demand for such a beast, I don't doubt TSR would have supported and promoted it. What an alternate universe that would have been!

Computer Update

Looks like my hard drive is dead. Fortunately, I'm under warranty, so I can get a new one, but it may take as long as February 5 before I have it in my hands. Until then, I'll be using my old computer, whose sole virtue is that it's functional. I'll try to stay on top of things until my main computer is operational again, but I expect my productivity will be much lower until then. My apologies for that in advance.

Computer Troubles

My main computer is experiencing some ... issues, so I'll likely be spending much of the day dealing with them, which means my output will be limited or non-existent until the problems are resolved.

This is why I hate technology. Or maybe I just hate my dependence on them.

Bah.

No Game for Young Men

If you're an old Traveller hand, the fellow above needs no introduction; you know exactly who he is. Heck, you might even be able to rattle off his UPP -- 779C99 --and tell me how many tours he did with the merchant service before being forced out.

Drawn by the incomparable David R. Dietrick, this illustration of Captain Alexander Lascelles Jamison is for me one of the iconic images of Traveller. Gamers not familiar with this classic SF RPG might not understand the power this image holds. After all, Captain Jamison is just some jowly, middle aged guy who's grown his hair a bit too long to compensate for his rapidly receding hairline. What's so special about that?

It's hard to explain, but part of the appeal of Traveller for me is that it's always been a game about "real life." Yes, yes, I know that's absurd, but that's how it looked to me as a kid. I mean, how many games assume your character has a mortgage, let alone a mortgage on his starship? Traveller characters go on adventures not gain XP -- they don't improve through play -- but to make enough money to meet their next mortgage payment. Combine that with the fact that most Traveller PCs were in the 40s or 50s, collected a pension, and had already had a career before they took to traveling Charted Space and it's a recipe for a game unlike any other I'd ever played.

It certainly was utterly unlike what I expected from science fiction, this being the era of Star Wars and its many imitators. Playing an old ex-military guy who undertook missions to make ends meet probably isn't anyone's vision of what a SF RPG should be about -- unless they've played Traveller for years. Now, it's hard to shake that vision out of my head. It's become my default assumption of what an old school SF RPG campaign should be like. Anything more "glamorous" somehow doesn't seem right, as if it's somehow a violation of some deep principles. It's not, of course, but such is the power of Traveller for me, a game that had the benefit of not only being the first significant SF RPG (spare me the corrections; I'm aware of the other contenders) but also one with a unique vision that defied expectations.

That, right there, is why Traveller endures, despite a mountain of bad design decisions by its creators over the years: it's a SF RPG that defies expectations. It's a relic from an age when books were the main engine of speculative fiction and before the success of Star Wars had fully taken hold. Like OD&D, it's a game that, to many people, probably seems very odd, because it's not at all in line with popular conceptions of what a game of its genre ought to be. I think that's all to the good, especially as I find myself and my gaming group looking more like Alexander Jamison every day.

Castle of the Mad Archmage

Joseph, the Greyhawk Grognard, has released a free PDF that includes his vision of Level 2 of the legendary Castle Greyhawk. It's over 20 pages of material, including new monsters, magic items, hand-drawn maps, and descriptions of nearly 200 rooms -- quite an impressive piece of work!

Best of all in my opinion is the "bare bones" approach Joseph takes in detailing the level. The minimum of mechanics means that the module will easily work with any D&D-derived old school game. Likewise, the spartan descriptions enable each referee to make the place his own, which is exactly what a good module should do.

Good stuff. Keep up the excellent work, Joseph!

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Carnelian Cube

As further evidence for my thesis that L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt are important keys to understanding Gary Gygax's vision for Dungeons & Dragons, there's their 1948 collaboration, The Carnelian Cube. Like many of the titles listed in Appendix N, this novel is a story of alternate realities and of a modern man transported between them. This is a such a common theme in Gygax's list of "inspirational and educational reading" that I can't help but wonder why no published D&D product, either during his time at TSR or subsequently, dealt with it, except very obliquely. The notion of a person from contemporary society flung into another world has a long pedigree and contains rich veins of adventure to mine. One wonders why it never seems to have had been an appreciable impact on the development of D&D, despite Gary's repeated references to books dealing with precisely this theme.

The Carnelian Cube itself tells the tale of an archeologist named Arthur Finch who confiscates a weird stone -- the eponymous carnelian cube -- from one of the workers at his dig in Turkey. The stone, it turns out, belonged to the Pythagorean philosopher Apollonius of Tyana, to whom later generations attributed various occult powers. When Finch places the stone under his pillow and goes to sleep dreaming of a more perfect, "rational" world, he awakens to find himself in a parallel Earth, where everything is done on a solely rational basis, resulting in the elevation of self-interest above all else. Finch wishes to escape but, unfortunately, the carnelian cube does not make its way with him and he must seek out the parallel version of the worker from whom he confiscated the stone so he can return home. Regain the cube he does, but with unintended effects, for each time he steals it and dreams, he finds himself transported into yet another parallel world that isn't quite what he wanted.

The Carnelian Cube may not have had any specific influence over D&D, but I can see its influence over the World of Greyawk, as Oerth is one of a series of parallel worlds, each one containing versions of the same people and places but subtly different, owing to the unique nature of each parallel. Likewise, if you look at Gary Gygax's work as a whole, you can see plenty of examples where he treated the topic of alternate worlds and realities and the possibilities for adventure therein. One might be able to argue that D&D's portrayal of the multiverse owes something to Gary's enjoyment of alternate world tales. Like most things in the game, the application of its inspirations is often quirky and not immediately obvious. That probably is the case here too, but I am nevertheless left wondering what Dungeons & Dragons -- and the wider hobby -- might be like today if stories like The Carnelian Cube had exercised a more clear influence.

Hex Maps

I seem to recall coming across a really simple-to-use -- and free -- program that used tiles to create a wilderness hex map. I can't find it any longer and would dearly love to do so, because I may have need of it for this weekend's session of the Dwimmermount campaign.

Anyone have any idea what I might have found all those months ago?

Dwimmermount: The Product

So, I've been toying with the idea of releasing an old school product derived from my Dwimmermount campaign. In practice, it'd a supplement to Swords & Wizardry, but I probably won't use the S&W Compatibility-Statement License, because I'm not super-keen about the ascending AC system and prefer the standard D&D system. Mind you, all the pre-WotC editions of D&D are close enough mechanically that, with a few little wrinkles here and there, products written for one are all eminently usable with the others, so the system under which it's ostensibly written doesn't really matter.

There are a couple of reasons why I'm thinking of doing this. Firstly, I've created some nifty house rules, monsters, spells, magic items, and other such things that I'd like to share in a format more "solid" than this blog. Second, I have some ideas I'd like to try out regarding the "ideal" way to present supplementary material for RPGs. While I take a lot of inspiration from the "grab bag" approach used in the original OD&D supplements, it's not quite the approach I want to take. Likewise, I regard most modern supplements to be unhappily systematic in their approach, favoring clarity and comprehensiveness over suggestiveness and brevity.

(Much as I love the nostalgia value of seeing new books done in the style of OD&D's little brown books, that's not a style I have any interest in adopting as my own either.)

As I conceive it now, this theoretical product would consist of two parts. The first would have all the "goodies" that are the staple of such supplements, with an emphasis not so much on new rules as one new ideas/examples that work with the existing rules. I'm actually coming round to the notion that, except in the case of entirely new systems without any coverage in the core rules -- such as mass combat in the case of S&W, for example -- there's no good reason to include new rules that could just as easily be created through play on an ad hoc basis.

The second part would be campaign-oriented stuff. I'd give some slices of what my Dwimmermount campaign is like without going overboard. So, there might be a map of the starting campaign area, used as a literal example of how to create one's own. Likewise, I'm thinking I might well include several levels of Dwimmermount's dungeons itself, presented in abbreviated form thanks to the wonderful one-page templates that Sham, Chgowiz, and Mike originated and developed. The more I interact with people, the more I realize that, even among old schoolers of long years, the megadungeon and sandbox concepts aren't well understood. What's needed is more than mere philosophizing about the finer points of these foundational concepts and more practical examples and advice on how to use them to good effect.

Like a lot of my theoretical projects, this one may never come to pass, but I hope it does. The campaign is going very well, despite the obstacles and I feel like I've gleaned a lot of useful insights through refereeing it. Plus, in all honesty: there's never been a better time to produce and publish your own old school books and I want to get in on that action.

One of Those Days

You ever have one of those days when you suddenly realize, "There are a lot of really crazy people in this hobby?"

Then the creeping realization dawns on you: "Could I be one of them?"

S&W: White Box Now Available ...

... in print.

Get thee to Mythmere Games' Lulu.com storefront and buy a copy. It's cheap, has an amazing cover, and is a great example of how wonderfully flexible Swords & Wizardry is.

Get moving!

Libations for Two-Gun Bob

On this day, 103 years ago, Robert Ervin Howard was born in Peaster, Texas. Though he tragically took his own life at the age of 30, his boundless imagination, as exemplified by his greatest creation, Conan the Cimmerian, lives on. Indeed, if one were to take into account how widely-known the name of Conan has become, it wouldn't be much of an exaggeration to claim that Howard was one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Quibbles on that score aside, there's no question that REH's writings are one primary of the wellsprings of the genre we now call "fantasy," making him a spiritual ancestor of the hobby of roleplaying. Howard is one of only a handful of writers mentioned by name in both OD&D and Empire of the Petal Throne as an inspiration for their creation; countless more gamers and game designers alike have looked to the stories of Conan, Kull, and Solomon Kane for the same.

For myself, Howard has long been a writer I admire. Like Lovecraft, his worldview is rather different than my own, but that has never prevented me from gleaning genuine insights from his writings. It's a shame that many people still dismiss REH as a hack pulp writer, never realizing how much they're missing by doing so. Howard has his flaws and falls too easily into a certain repetitiveness from time to time, but about what great writer could we not say the same, particularly ones whose writings formed the template for an entire genre?

If by some chance you read this blog and you haven't read a Robert E. Howard story lately, I urge you to do so; you won't be sorry. In the meantime, I raise my glass to the memory of the Last Celt.

Now That's Hardcore

Flipping through my Traveller books, I came across a section I'd forgotten about: the experience "rules." One of the really interesting things about this game is that, unlike in OD&D, characters don't start out as inexperienced youths looking to make a name for themselves. No, they start out as experienced middle-aged guys looking to make a name for themselves. The average Traveller character, in my experience, is between 38 and 50 years of age and starts play after 20+ years of service in one or more military careers. Compared to a level 1 OD&D character, he's pretty bad-ass -- "bad-ass" being a relative term, since high tech weapons make it easy to eliminate most Traveller characters if they're not careful.

So how do these characters improve over time? Here's what the game itself says on the matter:

The experience which is gained as the individual character travels and adventures is, in a very real sense, an increased ability to play the role which he has assumed.

What that means is that characters don't improve in Traveller but players do. How old school is that? To be fair, there are rules for taking courses, including by correspondence, to slowly improve one's skills, but this avenue takes years of game time, costs money, and isn't guaranteed. As in real life, it's quite possible to take a course and come away with no meaningful benefit for one's efforts.

What's funny is that, as a younger guy playing Traveller, we never even noticed the lack of experience rules. I can tell you for a fact that not a single one of my players ever asked to have his character attend the local technical university to improve his Computer or Electronic skills. Even though level advancement was deeply ingrained in us through regular play of D&D (and, to a lesser extent, Gamma World, whose advancement system is a bit peculiar), we just took it as given that characters who were in the mid-40s probably didn't get much "better" over time, although they did become richer, more influential, and more knowledgeable about the universe around them -- and we were OK with that.

Makes me wonder what RPGs might have been like if OD&D had been built on similar presumptions about experience and learning as Traveller ...

Time Waster

If you ever want to know why, despite it all, I still retain a great fondness for both Traveller and the Third Imperium setting, take a look at this. Really, what's not to love?

Thanks to Rob Conley for the link.

An Ancient Scourge

One might ask whether it is possible for players of "Dungeons and Dragons" (and other games of the genre) to enter into such an intensely personal creation. More to the point, can anyone besides myself referee adventures in Tékumel?

The above is a quote from the introduction to M.A.R. Barker's 1975 roleplaying game, Empire of the Petal Throne. I quote it because it's an oft-asked question with regards to Tékumel, one that's frequently given as an explanation for why gamers would rather read about this remarkable campaign world rather than play in it.

On one level, I think it's a fair question, but that's because I often think that every campaign setting should be an intensely personal creation, unique to the people who play in it regularly and almost unintelligible to outsiders. Now don't get me wrong: I love to read about other people's campaign worlds, but I don't think reading is a substitute for creating. To my mind, the biggest problem with most "pre-fab" campaign settings is that they tend to encourage the former far more than the latter, a situation aided and abetted by the production of ever more source material written on the (correct) assumption that many gamers will buy setting books they never intend to use. I think it ironic that many of the gamers who'd call Empire of the Petal Throne unplayable because of its six pages of history wouldn't bat an eye at buying, say, a Forgotten Realms book with ten times that information. Again, make no mistake: I love well-detailed campaign settings too and take a lot of pleasure in reading them. However, nothing I read, no matter how well conceived and presented, can compare to what I create and detail through play with my friends. It's in this activity that I think the heart and soul of our hobby lies.

I don't think pre-fab campaign settings need to be impediments to creation through play. Indeed, in some cases, they can be great spurs to creativity. I do think, though, that there's a danger inherent in such settings and that's the false perception that there's a "right" way to play in Tékumel or Greyhawk or Glorantha. Once this pernicious idea takes hold, you close yourself off to many terrific possibilities and contribute to the reduction of roleplaying games to an activity of passive consumption rather than active engagement no different than watching movies or television. This is the reason why analogies with those media tend to raise my hackles. It's not that I think there's anything wrong with wanting one's campaign to be as exciting and "alive" as the best movies or TV shows; it's that I don't think that worthy goal can be achieved by looking to those media as models rather than inspirations for good gaming.

This isn't a new problem for the hobby. As the quote above shows, it's been with us since the beginning. And, if the past is any guide, it'll be with us for a long time to come.

Retrospective: Empire of the Petal Throne

Empire of the Petal Throne is my favorite game I've never played. Oh, I've played in Tékumel before, but I never used the original 1975 TSR-published rules. I think that's a great shame, because, as OD&D rules variants go -- and that's more or less what EPT is -- it's hard to beat this game. For old schoolers looking for some intriguing alternatives to the way OD&D handles things, it's well worth reading.

Of course, very few gamers love Tékumel for its rules. It's the fabulous pulp fantasy world that makes this game stand head and shoulders above its contemporaries, not to mention the lavishness of the game's components. In addition to including a 114-page spiral-bound book, the box also contains three large and terrifically sturdy maps of the starting campaign area and a large port city. This made the game very expensive -- $25 in 1975 -- which may have inadvertently contributed to its inaccessibility to many hobbyists. By the time I started gaming in 1979, EPT was legendary for being "the most expensive RPG ever made." I don't know if that was literally true at that time, but it's how the game was remembered among the older crowd who initiated me into the hobby.

I say "remembered" for a very good reason: no one played EPT. I never ever saw a copy of the original rules until the late 90s. I knew of the setting, naturally, at least in broad outline -- a colony world in the far future gets mysteriously shunted into its own pocket dimension where magic works. That the setting's creator, M.A.R. Barker, was a professor of linguistics with firsthand experience of India and Pakistan, as well as a lifelong love for the pulp greats, Egyptology, and ancient American civilizations pretty much ensure that it'd be like nothing anyone had ever seen -- and it is.

In his effusive introduction to the game, Gary Gygax compares Barker to Tolkien, with the caveat that, while Barker's creation possesses the same depth and breadth as Middle-earth, it was revealed to the world as a game. I think this is an important point. I'm on record as stating that I don't think Middle-earth is very gameable, because it's too tightly wound up, both thematically and dramatically, in things that don't easily lend themselves to good roleplaying. Tékumel, on the other hand, is eminently gameable and it's frankly a pity that more people haven't had the chance to sample its unique pleasures.

To be fair, some of Tékumel's troubles are self-inflicted. Because Barker was an academic, his writings carry an air of "realism" to them that intimidated some potential players, even though the author specifically counsels against this fear in his own prefatory remarks to the game. Worse still, to my mind, is the tendency of Tékumel fans, then and now, to obsess over minute details and seek out ever ever more exhaustive descriptions of this alien world and its inhabitants. Sadly, the history of the game is less about people playing games set in Tékumel and more about people talking about Tékumel, a history aided and abetted by a dearth of adventures for the game and a surfeit of products describing the setting in anthropological detail.

This saddens me, because Tékumel is amazingly cool: a brilliant cross between a sword-and-planet and dying earth setting that evokes writers like Burroughs, Howard, Smith, and Vance without being a pastiche of any one of them. Far moreso than OD&D, Empire of the Petal Throne is a game that wears its pulp fantasy roots on its sleeve, provided you're willing to look beneath its baroque surface. Like many things about Tékumel, its literary origins are hidden, sometimes in plain sight. It's also the only game I've ever encountered that includes culturally sophisticated rationales for dungeon crawling that enables expeditions into the Underworld to serve as the axis around which a larger campaign could be structured. But then this is an old school RPG of the first rank, so this should come as no surprise.

I'm too busy with Dwimmermount these days to even consider starting up an EPT campaign, but I'd dearly love to do so. It's a game that I don't think ever really got its due and I'd love to play a small role in rectifying that.

Attention, Seattle Area Old Schoolers

If you're a gamer involved in the old school renaissance living in the Seattle area and are open to being interviewed for a possible article about our little corner of the hobby, shoot me a quick email at the address to the right.

Thanks.

Traveller and D&D

Just a quick note of something I may return to later: the underlying ethos of Traveller is almost the twin of that of OD&D.

Both games assume the characters are ne'er-do-wells on the make. The classic format of a Traveller adventure involves the characters undertaking illicit activities in order to make large sums of cash, this way of life being made possible because they're outsiders -- travellers -- unconnected to the local planetary social structure. The larger social context of the game is a lawless (or nearly so) frontier where legitimate authority is distant, corrupt, or both. In short, it's another example of Western tropes being applied to a different genre, just like D&D.

Travel(l)ing Man

I've never been able to kick Traveller to the curb, though I've tried many times. I've successfully gone for years without having anything to do with the game, but I always come back to it. Even now, after I've written my own homage to this classic of the hobby, it's hard not to feel that those three little black books -- the other LBBs -- aren't the most perfect roleplaying books ever written.

Certainly there have been many fine SF RPGs written over the years, some of them taking far "science fiction" far more seriously than did Traveller. But then Traveller was never just a science fiction game. As its subtitle proclaims, it's a game of "science-fiction adventure in the far future." I'm not quibbling when I note this, because I think it's key to understanding Traveller's lasting appeal, not just for me, but for many older gamers, who fell in love with this masterpiece of rules elegance and concision.

What Marc Miller understood, as had Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson before him, was that roleplaying games are, first and foremost, about adventures. Adventures, by their very nature, are risky and uncertain experiences and they don't necessarily have any meaning beyond what we invest in them. That's why Traveller's three little black books provide little or no context for the dozens of mechanical sub-systems they present. Each and every one of them, from trading to combat to animal encounters to world generation and, yes, even character creation is an opportunity for adventure and a call to invest them with meaning -- or not. That's part of the point really: not everything has a meaning beyond bare facts and that's especially true in the case of adventures, where what matters is not a grand narrative so much as thrilling escapism.

Taken purely as a vehicle for scientific speculation, Traveller could best be described as "quaint." Even in 1977, its science was outdated and its esthetics old-fashioned. Like OD&D, the game drew inspiration from the literature of an earlier era rather than what was current at the time. That never bothered me as a kid, child of Star Wars though I was, because, then as now, Traveller screamed "Adventure!" and the rest was mostly secondary. That's not to say that the game is incapable of supporting "deep" scientific speculation as the impetus for adventure, but the focus remains squarely on adventure. It's perhaps a simple, even banal, thing to say about Traveller and yet it contains, in my opinion, the secret of the game's lasting appeal.

Indeed, Game Designers Workshop produced a great many adventures during the run of "classic" Traveller -- 13 plus 6 double adventures and every issue of the Journal of the Travellers Aid Society included at least one adventure, plus patron encounters and other "adventurous" bits from which to build one's own adventures. The beauty of the original three little black books is that they consist almost entirely of rules and all of those rules exist to create and/or adjudicate the basic needs of any starfaring campaign. Some, like the economically dubious trade system remain, in my view, among the greatest game mechancis ever created for any RPG. They're literally adventure-generators disguised as simple algorithms. They may not make sense if taken out of their context, but why would anyone want to do that?

Sadly, Traveller very quickly came to be dominated, both at GDW and among its fanbase, by folks who wanted to do just that: make sense of it all. Thus did we get ever more elaborate and "realistic" improvements to the rules of the three LBBs. It was no longer enough to know one's Marine served five terms before mustering out; now you had to know precisely what he did during each of these 20 years in the service. It was no longer enough to know that a world had a "thick" atmosphere; now you had to calculate its albedo to three decimal places. And, worst of all, GDW's example setting, the Third Imperium, ceased to be an example and become what Traveller was all about.

Talk to almost any fan of Traveller and chances are they'll eventually start blathering on about the minutiae of the Third Imperium setting. I say this not out of malice or superiority, because I was once an addict of this kind as well. By the late 80s, I remained a Traveller fan out of my love for the Third Imperium, but I could not be called by any reasonable definition a Traveller player any longer. At some point or other, I stopped treating the game as, well, a game and instead fixated on its every detail, as if this were what drew me to the game in the first place. Gone was the focus on science fiction adventure, replaced by obsession with the details of a setting created by someone else and in which I'd barely ever played. Back in the day, I created my own setting for my Traveller campaigns and, to my mind, that's how Traveller ought to be played; that's where the heart and soul of Marc Miller's brilliant creation lie.

I've read Mongoose's recent edition of Traveller and think it's pretty good -- certainly better than anything we've had in years. Rules-wise, it's a bit too clearly a descendant of late classic Traveller, after supplementitis had set in, and there are a few more attempts to "update" its assumptions than I like, but it looks decent enough. There also doesn't (yet) appear to be much of a fixation on the Third Imperium and that's all to the good. I love the Third Imperium to pieces, but, in the end, it helped kill Traveller.

As for me, I just snagged myself a mint copy of the first edition boxed set from 1977 for a reasonable price. Once I have it, I intend to set aside some time and read all three books from cover to cover. The classics only improve with each reading and it's been a while since I spent time with this one.

OSR Publishing Group

Dan Proctor, the mind behind Labyrinth Lord and Mutant Future, has created a publishing group on Lulu.com -- the Old-School Renaissance Publishing Group -- that brings several retro-clone publishers under a single virtual "roof." At the moment, the group includes Dan's own Goblinoid Games, Matt Finch's Mythmere Games, John Adams's Brave Halfling Publishing, and Fight On! magazine.

My hat's off to Dan for getting this moving. This is a terrific idea and it's something I hope more old school publishers get behind it and work together to raise the visibility of all their products.

Dwimmermount (Session 3)

Session 3 of my Dwimmermount campaign occurred yesterday, despite the absence of two of the players. This left only Brother Candor, cleric of Tyche, and Dordagdonar the elf, along with their hirelings to return to Level 1. Because their explorations last time stalled owing to the discovery of a large chamber they believed to be occupied by a great number of orcs, they hired an additional hireling -- an archer named Sam -- for additional muscle, given the fact that both Pike and Vladimir weren't present.

Their explorations led them to encounter primarily orcs, who seem to have taken up residence in this area of the dungeon. They even discovered yet another hidden entrance from the outside -- a mountainside cave -- that they presumed the orcs used to enter in the first place. These orcs seemed to have a penchant for using wolves as guards and companions. Unfortunately, I didn't have any wolf miniatures.

Along the way, they made great strides in mapping out more of the first level, discovering several more sets of stairs they assumed led to a lower level, although they have yet to test that theory. They also circumvented a few traps -- they're getting better at detecting them -- and stumbled across a few unexplained oddities whose purpose they haven't yet determined to any degree of satisfaction. This was the first session without any deaths in the adventuring party, so, by that metric, it was a great success.

I continue to find the unfolding of the campaign enjoyable and enlightening. I won't go so far as to say I'm watching history recapitulate itself, but there is a sense in which I am seeing my players go through a similar process as many early gamers did in coming to grips with what a megadungeon campaign is and how best to proceed within it. I take particular pleasure in the way that the map has been used. They've been able to intuit the likely location of secret doors, traps, and other obstacles simply by looking at the map and that makes me very happy. Dungeon mapping really is a lost art and I genuinely believe a lot is lost by its having fallen by the wayside over the years. Likewise, the lack of a thief class had been a boon to my players, who've developed very good instincts about when, where, and how to look for traps, as well as ways to overcome them.

I'm alslo enjoying watching the characters slowly take on distinct personalities. Brother Candor, for example, is genuinely concerned about the fates of his hirelings, whereas Dordagdonar treats non-elves as "ephemerals," as he calls them, and shows a certain nonchalance about their fates that's at once disturbing and strangely endearing. Brak, the goblin torch bearer, has proven his worth on more than one occasion. He's also become a source of comic relief, which I think is important. In my experience, most roleplaying campaigns need moments of light-heartedness and the secret to preventing their becoming too "jokey" is to find a good in-game "safety valve" for such humor. Brak is it in the Dwimmermount campaign and it's helped keep our sessions fun without descending into utter silliness.

Once again, a good session. Of course, we had brownies and ice cream, so of course it was a good session.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Star Man's Son

Yes, I know this cover bears a different title than the one in the header of this post. There's two reasons for that, one practical and one historical. The practical reason is that I simply couldn't find a good image of the original 1952 hardcover release of this Andre Norton novel. The historical reason is that, in the 1954 Ace Double edition (which it shared with Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore's Beyond Earth's Gates) bearing the title Daybreak - 2250 A.D., the novel went on to sell over 1 million copies, thereby ensuring that a large number of sci-fi and fantasy fans would read its story, including Gary Gygax, who cites it in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, and James Ward, who considered it a seminal influence on his own Gamma World.

Star Man's Son tells the story of a silver-haired mutant named Fors, who lives in a post-apocalyptic North America some centuries in the future. Because of his genetic background, he is distrusted and feared by the Puma clan of which he is a part. He is tolerated primarily because his father, Langdon, is a star man -- a scout and explorer who aids his people by traveling widely in search of knowledge and ancient technology. Fors dreams of one day following in his father's footsteps, a dream made even more urgent when his father disappears in the lands of the Beast Things, mutants who may or may not be degenerate humans. Eventually, Fors realizes that the other star men will never accept him as one of their number and so sets off, in the company of a mutant wildcat with whom he can communicate telepathically, in search of a lost city that was supposedly left intact amidst the devastation that destroyed human civilization.

Star Man's Son is a fun and inspiring novel, one of my favorites by Norton. There's no question in my mind why it exerted such an influence over not only Gygax and Ward, but a host of science fiction and fantasy writers since it was first published. The story -- an outcast on a quest to prove his worth, both to others and to himself -- is an old one, but it's one with which most people, espcially young men, can empathize. Add to that the terror and mystery of a world destroyed by man's own folly and you have the recipe for a classic adventure tale. If you haven't read it, I heartily recommend you do so, if only to see the wellspring of what would eventually become science fantasy clichés. But Andre Norton wrote these things first and, in my opinion, best and deserves to be given her due.

Review Suggestions

I'm reaching the bottom of my review pile. I currently have two more products from Adventure Games Publishing to review and three more from Brave Halfling Publishing. Most of these products are fairly short and I'll probably finish them up this coming week.

With that in mind, does anyone have any suggestions for future products they'd like to see reviewed here?

Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Talk Wargames

Here's an amusing bit from issue 1 of The Dragon: an article by Fritz Leiber in which he engages in a brief discussion about wargames with his creations.

I tried to explain to Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser about wargamers and the game of Lankhmar.

“You mean they’re using our territory to fight in?” the Mouser demanded. “We ought to charge ‘em toll or tariff, ambushing those who refuse to pay.”

I tried some more.

“Oh, so they fight only with their minds?” Fafhrd said.

“That sounds sick to me. I keep my mind solely for enshrining the images of beautiful women.”

“A sort of penny peep-show, eh?” the Mouser observed to him. “Frix and her tricks, et cetera.”

“Say rather a temple,” Fafhrd replied decorously, with admirable self-control.

“But about these wargamers or mind-fighters,” the Mouser said, turning back to me. “I’ll wager some of ‘em aren’t above using a real knife under the table, especially if the games goes against ‘em.”

“A man could keep on playing a table game, though hamstrung,” Fafhrd put in.

“Still, it would probably upset his judgment, don’t you think?” the Mouser pointed out to him.

Pretty insightful fellows for fictional characters.

Quick Hits

Mythmere Games has released the free PDF version of Swords & Wizardry: White Box, which is a version of the S&W rules that more closely approximates the content of the three little brown books of OD&D without any material from the supplements. It's really a nice piece of work, both in terms of its content and its presentation. A print version of White Box should be available early next week.

Richard at Otherworld Miniatures is suffering from unexpected (and painful) health problems and could really use our support during this difficult time. This turn of events is going to delay the scheduled January releases in his phenomenal old school miniatures line a bit, so he's offering a nice little promotion to anyone who places orders of at least £25.00 between now and February 1. If you've ever considered buying some pig-faced orcs or that hill giant who looks like Abe Lincoln, now's the time to do it.

REVIEW: A Tale of Two Monks

Or a monk and a martial artist anyway.

This review is the first time I've ever directly compared two similar products. As a rule, I don't like the notion of comparing and contrasting RPG products, because I think that even ostensibly similar products can have very different goals and intended audiences. I remember an article in an old issue of Dragon that was ostensibly a review of TSR's SF game, Star Frontiers. While the review was quite thorough, what I remember most about it was that the reviewer frequently compared it unfavorably to GDW's Traveller. Now, as everyone knows, I'm a Traveller geek and make no bones about that. I rank the original 1977 boxed set up there with OD&D in terms of being one of the greatest works of imagination ever produced by this hobby. That said, even at the time, I thought Star Frontiers deserved to be taken on its own merits and reviewed solely on that basis.

Consequently, this review isn't so much a comparison of Adventure Games Publishing's Martial Artist Class and Brave Halfling Publishing's Delving Deeper - Monk as a discussion of how two two different writers writing for two different games can draw on the same source material and spin it in different ways. One of the joys of the old school revival is watching how a wide variety of people take the same inspirations and present them in so many unique ways. What's even better is that, because old school games have such simple mechanics, it's very easy for me to buy a product intended for, say, OSRIC and adapt it to my Swords & Wizardry game. If anything about 2009 reminds me of 1979 it's this glorious smorgasbord of product offerings from which to swipe cool ideas and not have to worry about whether they'll "work" in my home game.

Let's start with AGP's Martial Artist Class. Written for Castles & Crusades and selling for $1.00, this 7-page PDF follows the same basic format of other recent electronic products by James Mishler. Although completely lacking in art, the product more than makes up for it by the density of its two-column text, which presents an alternative to C&C's monk class. Using Strength as its Prime (rather than Constitution, as the standard monk does), the martial artist is focused primarily on combat, both unarmed and armed. That's not to say that it's lacking in other class abilities, but it's clear that, as its name suggests, the martial artist is intended for players who want to play characters who've devoted themselves, bodily and spiritually, to becoming living weapons. In this respect, the martial artist is a broader archetype than the monk, since the class lends itself to a variety of character types that break the "militant ascetic" mold. Rounding out the PDF is a collection of descriptions of exotic and mundane weapons and how they might be used by martial artists.

Brave Halfling's Delving Deeper - Monk is also a 7-page PDF, written by Luke Fleeman and selling for $0.75. Of those seven pages, one is taken up by the cover, another by the Open Game License, and a third by a piece of short fiction. In addition, the product includes a couple of pieces of black and white line art by Brian Thomas. As a result, Delving Deeper - Monk isn't nearly as textually dense of Martial Artist Class, but that's to be expected in a PDF supporting Labyrinth Lord, which is far simpler mechanically than Castles & Crusades. The monk presented here is much closer in concept and presentation to the monk of OD&D/AD&D, being a more "generalist" class with abilities beyond those focused primarily on combat. The monk is thus the class for people who wish to play characters that cleave closely to "inscrutable mystic warrior" archetype -- equally adept at conversing with animals as kicking ass. The product also helpfully includes some advice on integrating monks into a campaign, either as PCs or NPCs.

I like both these products. They're both a terrific value and have the benefit of including lots of simple mechanics that can be lifted for use in almost any old school game. In addition, their differences highlight the fact that there's no "right" way to present anything in an old school game except what works for the referee and his players. Despite having already offered up my own version of the monk some months ago, I still found lots of food for thought in these two PDFs. Of the two, I give Deliving Deeper - Monk a slight edge, because it's closer to the monk of Blackmoor and thus closer to the kind of class I'd use in my own campaign. Mind you, the martial artist isn't intended to be a replacement for the monk class of C&C, nor does it occupy exactly the same mental space. It's closely related, to be sure, but there are subtle differences and, in some campaigns, the monk and the martial artist could reasonably exist side-by-side without any contradiction. I still prefer the monk for its closer connection to tradition, but I can easily imagine that others might feel the martial artist is a broader and thus "better" class.

Chacun à son goût.

Final Score: 4 out of 5 polearms for one, 4½ out of 5 polearms for the other -- You decide.

Science Fantasy D&D

My copy of issue 3 of Fight On! arrived the other day. Since I was too much of a slacker to submit anything to it (though I remain hopeful I can finish up something for issue 4 and my level of "The Darkness Beneath" collaborative megadungeon is shaping up nicely -- surprise, surprise, it borrows elements from my own Dwimmermount megadungeon), I had the rare pleasure of being able to read its contents with virgin eyes. Dedicated to the memory of Bob Bledsaw, it's another tour de force of old school gaming goodness and my favorite issue so far, providing just the right mix of contents. It's really an amazing thing watching this magazine blossom before my eyes; it's like giving me the chance to see The Dragon come into being a second time, which is great, since, old though I may be, I'm not quite old enough to have seen it the first time.

One of the articles that really grabbed me in issue 3 was Melan's "Fomalhaut," which gives a brief overview of his campaign setting of the same name. Reading it I was reminded of M.A.R. Barker's Tékumel, not so much for the specific details, which are quite different, but for the general idea of it: a fantasy world set far in the future after the collapse of high-tech interstellar civilization. It's an idea that lurks beneath the surface of OD&D and you can certainly see it in Gygax's selections for Appendix N. The RPG Jorune has a similar premise and, by all accounts, began as a wacky Metamorphosis Alpha campaign, which is pretty old school. For that matter, the introduction to the first edition of Gamma World offered the possibility of mixing magic and mutants, a possibility that the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide even provided rules for.

It's an idea I keep toying with. For whatever reason, I'm generally reluctant simply to import sci-fi stuff into my fantasy campaigns without some underlying rationale for it. On the other hand, I find it much easier to accept a science fiction setting where technology is so advanced as to appear like -- and thus effectively to be -- magic. That certainly explains why I spend so much time working out the hows and whys of magic and how it relates to the underlying metaphysics of the setting. I keep trying to hit on a rationale that would allow me to create a really fun science fantasy setting for use with OD&D, because I'm convinced that it's a neglected part of the game's heritage. The closest TSR ever came to paying homage to it (besides Empire of the Petal Throne, of course) was 2e's Dark Sun, which I actually liked in spite of its many flaws, but I think we can do better than that.

A few years ago, I had this idea of a campaign set on Earth in the very far future, after the collapse of technological civilization due to some catastrophe or other. Science had advanced to the point where genetic engineering was routine and where nanotechnology was similarly commonplace. Magic-users would be individuals who'd been taught how to use "free" nanites to create various effects. Clerics would be similar, except that they tapped into the power of various "oracles," which were artificial intelligences worshipped as -- and in some cases believed themselves to be -- gods and who likewise had the ability to manipulate nanites. From the perspective of the characters, this setting would be just a typical fantasy world with all the requisite tropes. Over time, though, they'd encounter stuff that "wouldn't fit" into the world they thought they inhabited but that made perfect sense within the context I'd established behind the scenes. Plus, how hard is it to recast most of D&D into something pseudo-scientific? A few moments thought and it's pretty easy to imagine wands as high-tech tools/weapons, golems as robots, and orcs as uplifted animals used as soldiers.

I didn't go this route with my Dwimmermount campaign, preferring instead to adopt a more "expansive" notion of fantasy, with other planets being little different than other dimensions/planes, for example. But I'm still very interested in a truly science fantasy campaign. It's something that has powerful literary antecedents and it's something we've never seen much of in canonical D&D, particularly after the early-to-middle Golden Age. And that's a shame.

Grognard's Grimoire: The Ranine

Much as I like Swords & Wizardry, it's distinctly lacking in malevolent frog-men carrying out the will of Tsathoggua. I now shall rectify this oversight.

Players in my Dwimmermount campaign should not, of course, interpret this post as indicative of anything they may or may not encounter in the bowels of that mystic mountain. Really.

RANINE
Armor Class: 4 [15]
Hit Dice: 2
Attacks: 2 claws (1d6), 1 bite (1d4) or 1 weapon (1d8)
Saving Throw: 16
Special: Breathe Water, Hop, Paralyzing Bite
Move: 9 (swim 12)
Challenge Level/XP: 4/120 XP

Ranine are degenerate, subterranean creatures who serve the foul frog-demon Tsathoggua. Like their master, the Ranine are of broadly batrachian appearance but possess small bat-like ears in addition to vicious fangs and, in many cases, small horns. They are drawn to underground locations suffused with Chaotic energies, so many also possess chaotic traits of both the major and minor varieties.

Ranine shy away from sunlight and suffer a -1 penalty to their attack rolls and saving throws when they operate aboveground. If given sufficient room in combat, these creatures can hop at enemies, which gives them a +1 bonus to attack and damage rolls. When fighting at close quarters, they try to bite opponents in order to inject them with a paralyzing poison. Failure to save against it results in paralysis for 3D6 turns. Ranine in groups larger than six typically include a leader, who can cast clerical spells as if it were a cleric of the same level as his hit dice.

Precisely how the Ranine reproduce is a mystery, as they appear to be completely asexual. Given that these beings prefer to take opponents prisoner rather than slay them outright, some sages have postulated that the Ranine somehow "convert" their prey into new frog-men to swell their ranks. If true, these creatures pose an even more terrible threat to civilization than is commonly supposed.

A Rising Tide

Over the course of the nearly-ten months I've been writing this blog, its readership has been steadily increasing. By the Fall of 2008, though, it had stabilized to about 700-ish daily readers, if my web stats are to be believed. That seemed about right to me, given my estimation of the number of old schoolers active on the Internet nowadays.

Over the last three months, though, my readership has been steadily climbing and I typically get over 1000 daily readers. I've also noticed a big jump in the number of referrals to the blog from other gaming sites not associated with the old school revival. That's not completely beyond the pale, since it would happen from time to time in the past, but the frequency has been increasing.

I have heard from a couple of others that what I'm experiencing isn't unique to me. That leads me to believe that there's, if nothing else, a lot more curiosity about the old school community than there was in December 2007, when I first joined Original D&D Discussion and started down this crazy path I walk today. I have some theories as to why this might be the case, but they're only theories; I have no evidence to support them beyond anecdotes and gut impressions. Still, it is interesting and I can't help but think this is only the tip of the iceberg.

REVIEW: Wayfarers

I hate the term "fantasy heartbreaker," not so much for its original purpose -- though I do have serious issues with it even in that form -- but for the way it's become shorthand in some quarters for simply dismissing a fantasy game without the need for rational discussion of its merits or flaws. Like "nerd rage," it's used as a substitute for both thought and empathy and I loathe it. That's why, when I was asked by Jimmy Swill of Ye Olde Gaming Companye (YOGC) to read its new fantasy roleplaying game, Wayfarers, I agreed to do so. Though I already have D&D in various forms for my gaming needs, that doesn't mean I can't potentially learn a thing or two from other RPGs, particularly ones that explicitly tout their "old-school feel."

Physically, Wayfarers is an impressive tome, particularly when you consider that it's not the product of a big gaming company but rather "a group of RPG enthusiasts that have been gaming in one form or another for nearly 30 years," as explained on the website of YOGC. At 436 pages in length, it's also somewhat intimidating. Of course, one must consider that the book includes everything needed to play in a single volume, including nearly 100 pages of information on the game's setting, Twylos. It's thus a truly complete game, which I appreciate, particularly in this age of interminable supplements.

Wayfarers uses a clean two-column layout. It's not beautiful but it's very serviceable, which is important since the text density is quite high. I sometimes found myself wishing YOGC had used a serifed font, because, in some places, the text is harder to read than I'd have liked, but that probably says more about my failing eyesight than it does about the book itself. For the most part, the text is easy to understand, being written in a straightforward, almost academic fashion. It's also well edited and proofread -- rarities even in professional products! Wayfarers is filled with artwork, a lot of it reminiscent of the kind of art we saw during the Golden Age of D&D, though there are some notable exceptions, including the cover art by Leo Lingas, which recalls the Silver and Bronze Ages of the game. All in all, it's a very impressive package and serves as a reminder of how much technology has advanced since 1974.

Wayfarers isn't Dungeons & Dragons, but it's clearly derived from D&D, as attested to by its use of the Open Game License. Even without that clue, its lineage is obvious. Though many things are renamed or altered and there are no character classes or levels, Wayfarers is quite obviously a descendant of D&D. Indeed, the game feels very much like an example of the time-honored genre of "D&D done right." Beginning with Arduin in 1977 and RuneQuest in 1978, there have long been games that seek to "correct" the perceived flaws of D&D. The best of them manage to transcend this origin and become solid games in their own right. In my opinion, RuneQuest achieve such an apotheosis, while Arduin never really managed it. Not having had the opportunity to play Wayfarers, it's hard to tell whether it is more like RuneQuest or Arduin in this regard.

How does Wayfarers differ from D&D mechanically? As noted, it's class-less, relying instead on two types of skills -- proficiencies and disciplines -- to handle most character abilities. Proficiencies are tied to character attributes (Agility, Endurance, Intellect, Presence, and Strength -- no Wisdom equivalent, as you can see) and are most like what gamers think of when they hear the word "skills." Disciplines, on the other hand, are very much like the feats of 3e. Indeed, many disciplines are in fact 3e feats renamed or slightly altered. Characters don't gain experience points through play but rather skill points, which are awarded by the Game Master based on how well the characters achieve their goals and also how well they are played, which shows that it's a game more in tune with later conceptions of what an RPG is. Once characters acquire enough skill points, they reach a new "skill level" that grants additional points they can then use to improve their existing proficiencies or disciplines or buy new ones. They also gain additional health points as their skill level increases. If this sounds a bit confusing, it is. I think it would have been far easier to have simply called skill points experience points and skill level experience level. This is a case where the game's penchant for renaming trips it up needlessly.

There are no halflings in Wayfarers, but its other races are all familiar, including full-blooded orcs. Racial abilities are all balanced against one another, which is consistent with the game's overall point-buy philosophy. In this respect, Wayfarers is more like Third Edition than any other edition of D&D. There's fortunately no need for prestige classes, since any ability is potentially learnable by any character if a player is willing to spend the requisite skill points necessary to do so. This includes magic, which is broken up into hermetic, hedge, faith, and ritual types, each with extensive spell lists, divided into "circles" that gauge their relative power and complexity. Both hermetic and hedge magic function similarly to D&D's "Vancian" system, while faith magic is more like 3e's sorcery and ritual magic a hybrid of the two approaches.

Combat is similar in broad outline to D&D, using a dodge score as a target number rather than armor class, since armor is ablative (although randomly so). Characters begin the game with more health points than a typical D&D character has hit points, but gain additional health points at a slower rate, so combat is likely less deadly at low levels but moreso at high ones. Interestingly, the game explicitly notes that characters can and will die and that death ought to be accepted as part of the game, even calling it "essential." I have to admit that, having read that, I was much more well-disposed toward Wayfarers than I had been previously.

As I said, Wayfarers is complete. It includes extensive information of monsters, magic items (and how to make them), along with plenty of advice and suggestions for the Game Master. The game's default setting of Twylos is detailed extensively -- a bit too extensively for my tastes. On the plus side, the details feel "lived in," which is to say, they're the kinds of things one might expect to find in a campaign world that's been used over the course of many years (as Twylos apparently was). There's little evidence of auctorial indulgence so much as a genuine enthusiasm for a campaign setting that was the site of many cool adventures in the past. The Twylos section of Wayfarers comes across as much more vibrant and "alive" than the rest of the book, which is a pity, because it's the section that was of least interest to me personally -- not because it was poorly written but because it represents a Silver Age approach to setting design that's rather alien to my mindset nowadays.

Indeed, Wayfarers comes across as a latter day product of the Silver Age. Its mechanics are very much concerned with "improving" upon the basic D&D template, by providing greater detail and flexibility, but the basic template is still that of the Golden Age. And Twylos, for all its detail, is utterly lacking in the grand plots and uber-NPCs I associate with the Bronze Age. Sandbox play is still possible and, while I wouldn't call the game pulp fantasy by any means, it's much more amenable to that style than were most products of the Bronze and Dark Ages of D&D.

I'd not be surprised to learn that the creators of Wayfarers entered the hobby sometime after about 1983 and played D&D a lot in the years between 1985 and 1989. Wayfarers reads like a well-written, edited, and illustrated collection of house rules for someone's awesome Silver Age Dungeons & Dragons rules variant. I think that's terrific, but it's definitely not for me. That's not a knock against the game by any stretch. I actually think there's a lot to commend in Wayfarers, particularly if the Silver Age is your personal Golden Age of gaming.

There's a gloriously "professional amateur" quality to this game that I think speaks well of it and its creators. Though well presented, it isn't a soulless installment in a trademarked corporate brand; it's an idiosyncratic product of years of play by some guys whose tastes in fantasy roleplaying are just a bit to the left of my own. Does that mean it's not old school? That only matters if you want to align your gaming 100% to my own tastes and, honestly, why would you want to do that? As I said, there are many things in Wayfarers that I wouldn't do in my own games, but that's no crime. Rather, I find the willingness to do things differently because it works for the authors to be quite refreshing. And I admire their chutzpah in putting the fruits of their labors out there for an opinionated curmudgeon like me to review. That right there is what makes this hobby such a wonderful thing and they get extra points in my book just for that.

Final Score: 3½* out of 5 polearms

*If I was a Silver Age kind of guy, I'd easily give it a 4, so take that as you will.

Conversation with My Daughter

My nearly-nine year-old daughter (her birthday is Friday) and I have many fascinating conversations. Today, before she went off to school, the topic turned to Tarzan. She asked me if Tarzan had a son named "Boy." I told her, no, he didn't; he had a son but his English name was Jack and his Ape name was Korak. My daughter then asked me where Boy came from and I explained that he was invented for a series of movies back in the 1930s. This led to the further question of why Boy "didn't have a real name." My reply was that, in those old movies, Tarzan wasn't portrayed the way he was in the original stories. He was a grunting brute who barely spoke English and so "Boy" was the kind of name they figured he's give his adoptive son. "Why do they always have to ruin books when they make movies?" She asked.

That's my girl.

Retrospective: Pharaoh

Module I3, Pharaoh, was a minor revelation to me in 1982, when it was released. I don't know that it was in fact the first module TSR published after it had changed AD&D's logo and trade dress -- I suspect it wasn't -- but it's the one "new look" module whose appearance is forever seared in my memory. I'm generally very ambivalent about Jim Holloway's art. He definitely has a flair of the "extraordinary ordinary," but he also has a tendency to veer too wildly into Three Stooges territory, with illustrations lacking either in the whimsy of Tom Wham or the quirkiness of Will McLean. But the cover of Pharaoh is moody, evocative piece of work and it really won me over at the time. Of course, it helps that I'm a big fan of ancient Egypt, but that shouldn't minimize the power of Holloway's artwork or how it signaled to me that the times they were a-changin' for D&D.

Pharaoh is, in some respects, more and less an example of the Hickman Revolution than is the later Ravenloft. It's less, because, even moreso than Ravenloft, it's a first class old school dungeon crawl. The Pyramid of Amun-Re, though small in size, packs a lot of punch in terms of its fiendish inventiveness. It's chock full of great puzzles and well-conceived traps, some of which are sufficiently elaborate to require diagrams to explain properly. That's something you don't see much nowadays. The maps of the Pyramid's various levels are very nice too. They're rendered in 2-D without the need for the over-hyped isometric cartography of Ravenloft, since a simple cross-section drawing of the Pyramid achieves the same effect without any fuss. The levels themselves adhere to a number of old school design principles too, allowing lots of lateral movement and offering plenty of choices about how to proceed. One level is made up of a large maze that causes magical confusion and disorientation, demanding that the players keep their wits about them if they ever hope to find their way out.

On the other hand, Pharaoh is explicitly billed as "The 1st module in the DESERT OF DESOLATION series." While it is eminently playable in its own right, its sequels, Oasis of the White Palm and Lost Tomb of Martek are much less stand-alone. Likewise, even within Pharaoh, there's a powerful undercurrent of a larger story above and beyond the characters' stumbling upon a cursed pyramid while wandering in the desert. A lot of the module is given over to providing background and in-game "texts" intended to advance this story along. Within Pharaoh alone, this can be ignored without too much difficulty, but, once a referee has committed himself to the module's sequels, there's no escaping it. In this respect, I3 is far more committed to the project of remaking the concept of an "adventure module" than is I6, which, for all its melodramatic excesses, is but a single -- and fairly simple -- story, not the kick-off to an epic story of prophecies and legends in the making.

I still like Pharaoh a great deal; it's proof that, for all the changes his work wrought on D&D, Tracy Hickman knew how to craft a very fine dungeon crawl. As a younger man, I played the heck out of this series and loved every minute of it. Pharaoh is definitely a product strongly grounded in the old school but you can see that it's trying fitfully to break free from its conventions. In its day, that was seen as a very good thing; goodness knows I loved it. Now, I feel a lot more ambivalent about its approach.

The Extraordinary Ordinary

No matter how old I get, I think this illustration by Dave Sutherland will always be the closest anyone has ever come to encapsulating Dungeons & Dragons in a single image. That's in large part because it adorns the inside cover of the rules edited by J. Eric Holmes, which was the first D&D product I ever owned. So, it's invested with a hefty dose of nostalgia. Of course, I also happen to like the image: two fighting men with historical armor and weapons holding back a veritable horde of pig-faced orcs, also with historical armor and weapons, while the magic-user -- complete with a bestarred conical cap -- stands behind them casting a spell.

That's pretty much my mind's eye view of the game, then and now. It's a particular conception of the game, I'll grant. Even in 1977, when this image first appeared, it wasn't the only approach to it, but it was certainly the one I had the most contact with. Looking back on it, what I found appealing was its "groundedness." The armor and weapons in the picture are all based on real armor and weapons from the Middle Ages. Though a mishmash of periods and styles, they're not at all fantastical in origin, which nicely contrasts with the orcs. The magic-user is an interesting case, because, while not "real" in any sense, he's so archetypal that I somehow don't put him in the same category of unreality as the orcs.

One of the interesting things about this illustration is that you can see in it the seeds that would blossom into the fantastic realism of the Silver Age. In a certain sense, guys like Larry Elmore and Keith Parkinson are very much in the same tradition as this early work. In another sense, though, there's a clear difference. Sutherland's men aren't buffed action heroes and his women -- what few of them there are -- don't look like supermodels. This helps reinforce the notion that D&D adventurers are ordinary people, albeit extraordinarily courageous (or foolhardy) ones.

I think it's an important difference and it almost certainly explains both my mild distaste for the Silver Age generally and the continued appeal of the Holmes rulebook. The book includes several other examples of very ordinary looking fighters engage in battle against monstrous opponents. None of these fighters look like Schwarzenegger and that's important to me. The issues I have with post-Golden Age D&D art are not technical in nature but conceptual: the abandonment first of anatomical verisimilitude, reflecting the growing focus on the character as the "star" of his own story, and then of physical verisimilitude, reflecting the shift away from groundedness more generally -- oversized weapons, impractical armor, gravity-defying poses, etc.

All these things seem a break with the past and that saddens me. D&D needs more extraordinary ordinariness in my opinion. Not only would it be a return to the game's esthetic roots but it'd also help distinguish the game better from its bastard descendants, most of which abandoned verisimilitude long before D&D art directors decided aping them was the way to go. Instead of dancing to someone else's tune, wouldn't it be nice to see D&D calling its own once again?

Very Good News

Some superb news on the John Carter movie front. I mentioned back in October that I was a little worried that the approach director Andrew Stanton of Pixar implied he was taking was not one I thought would do justice to the classic stories. Having just read some excerpts from an interview with SciFi Wire, I feel a lot less concerned than I was a few months. As always, the proof is in the pudding and I reserve the right to be disappointed later, but Stanton is now saying things that please me.

For one, the film is not going to be a Pixar animated film at all, but rather a live-action Disney movie that makes extensive use of CGI to realize it. Likewise, Stanton wants the film to look "very authentic" within the constraints of the fact that, because Burroughs inspired lots of imitators, some of his ideas now seem clichéd, even though they in fact the originals. He also indicated that "if you do the story right, there's no way you couldn't" rate it PG-13. "This story of John Carter is not going to be an all-ages film."

Now that's more like it.

Happy Birthday, CAS

Today marks the 116th anniversary of the birth of the Bard of Auburn, Clark Ashton Smith. Of the "Big Three" who wrote in Weird Tales during the 1920s and 1930s, he's the only one to have lived long enough to have died of old age and yet he's also probably the least understood and celebrated. That's a great pity, not just because he's probably my favorite of the Big Three, but also because his works are quite unlike any other fantasy or science fiction writer before or since. Jack Vance probably comes the closest to conjuring up the shade of Smith, but there are lots of subtle differences between the two authors that make such a comparison facile.

For one, Smith considered himself primarily a poet rather than a writer of fiction. Even his most banal prose pieces possess a poetic character to them that transcends his florid vocabulary and indulgence in archaisms. There's an underlying rhythm to his writing that almost demands it be read aloud; I frequently find myself doing just that when I read a Smith story. It's a very strange and powerful thing. Rarely have I encountered a writer whose written words cried out to be spoken. And when you do so, the experience is like few others in literature. Smith's writing is exceedingly sensual, appealing to all our senses, including the mind's eye, that part of our imaginations that doesn't just conceive of people and things and places that have never existed but that strains at the edges of infinity. I find myself at a loss to describe precisely what I mean, but then that's part of my point. Smith's work often gives voice to the ineffable in ways that are both exhilarating and terrifying. Few others writers can do that.

Smith's influence over D&D is mostly marginal. Gygax included him in Appendix N, of course, and various figures in the hobby, such as Rob Kuntz and Tom Moldvay, both show clear debts to his writing. Kieran Forest over The Eiglophian Press recently announced his plan to create an OD&D product inspired by Smith's Zothique cycle and I look forward to seeing it. Yet, Smith is very difficult to translate into gaming materials, in large part because the brilliance of his writings come through not so much in his characters or plots or locations but in the moods he evokes. Smith's writing focuses more often than not on decadence and decline, ennui, and the inevitability and pain of loss, all shot through with a sardonic humor that somehow manages to avoid either the bleakness of Lovecraft or the brutality of Howard. Smith comes across to me as the most "human" of the Big Three, the one whose thought processes and obsessions are closest to my own. Despite that, his genius is elusive and not easily imitated without descending into parody, which is probably why he remains less well known than a writer of his talent ought to be.

Here's hoping that one day, like H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard before him, Clark Ashton Smith will receive the attention he deserves.

Well Said

Mike, over at the ever-excellent Society of Torch, Pole and Rope has posted a nice quote by Paul Crabaugh from issue 109 of Dragon. I'm going to re-post the quote here, because I think it rather nicely encapsulates a foundational principle of the ongoing old school renaissance:

In the Good Old Days, the days of the original three books of the Dungeons & Dragons game, the number of variants on the rules was roughly equal to X, where X was the number of players in the game.

Alas, we all get older and more conservative, and with the publication of the more detailed, more structured D&D Basic Set, variant rules tended to become one with history.

There’s no reason why that has to be so. The D&D game, by virtue of its inherent simplicity, is an excellent platform for experimental rules…

Indeed.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Who Fears the Devil?

Manly Wade Wellman is one of the authors whom Gary Gygax lists in Appendix N without indicating the title of a single book that inspired him in his creation of Dungeons & Dragons. If I had to hazard a guess, I'd suggest it was the short stories of Silver John of which Gygax was thinking. Originally appearing separately in magazine form during the 1950s and 1960s, they were collected under a single cover by Arkham House in 1963, with new linking material written by Wellman especially for the occasion. The collection gave these stories a somewhat greater currency than they'd had previously and it's possibly in this form that Gygax encountered them, although I have absolutely no evidence of this.

Silver John, so called because he carries a guitar with silver strings, is a mysterious wandering balladeer, who possesses a remarkable knowledge of the supernatural. He travels from place to place in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina, where he uses his knowledge, courage, and wit to do battle with occult enemies of various sorts, many drawn from the folk tales and legends of the region he knew so well. John is a picture perfect example of a "wise fool," a simple, unassuming man whom others underestimate despite the fact that he clearly possesses a keen insight others lack.

The Silver John stories are folksy picaresque tales with a strong moral undercurrent that I imagine would have appealed to Gary. As I said, I have no idea if he ever read them, let alone took anything from them as he was co-creating D&D, but I think there's much here to recommend. They're a great example of how to take real superstitions and folk beliefs as a foundation and a model for spinning some of one's own creation. Wellman's ability to seamlessly intertwine his own creations with those of backwoods Appalachia is remarkable to read and ought to be an inspiration to referees everywhere, whether or not they were to Gary Gygax.

Dwimmermount (Session 2)

Dwimmermount continued yesterday, although with a slightly different roster of players. One player (whose character was Vladimir the dwarf) couldn't attend and a player who couldn't make it the previous week (whose character was Pike the gravedigger-turned-fighting man -- he used a shovel as his weapon initially) was able to attend. It'll be nice if the group ever manages to reach full strength or, better yet, get additional players beyond four, but, for now, I'm just content with consistent play, since, as I noted before, I think it's a key both to success generally and specifically in the case of old school play.

In session 2, the players took the map they created the previous week and started to examine it for routes they'd not yet explored, as well as the likely locations of secret doors or other hidden features. I was very pleased about this, because it showed the utility of actual map making, which is something of a lost art in the hobby. I also liked how the presence of a map allowed the players to plan their return to the dungeon. They were more knowledgeable about the level's contents and, by looking at the map, they could make good surmises as to what they might encounter elsewhere within it and prepared themselves accordingly. Excellent.

In the absence of the thief class, Vladimir the dwarf had functioned as the party's trap finder. Since Vladimir's player was unable to attend, Brother Candor decided to take on a second hireling (in addition to Lorne the lantern-bearer, brother of the ill-fated Lars) who was similarly skilled. This resulted in the employment of Brak, a goblin, who worked quite cheaply but whose ultimate loyalty was somewhat more malleable than his dwarven counterpart. Henga the shield maiden remained in the service of Dordagdonar the elf, having proved useful as a moveable barrier around which he could shoot arrows.

The session involved a lot more exploration than did the previous one. Part of it was because the players had a better sense of the general layout of the first level and could thus use their time more efficiently. Part of it was that they were simply more bold. They have quickly internalized the notion that, since looted treasure is more valuable in terms of XP, it's in their best interests to find as much of the shiny stuff as they can. Of course, this also resulted in more encounters with dungeon denizens too, but they showed a good command of tactics to give them an upper hand. They also demonstrated an understanding of discretion being the better part of valor, since they avoided entering a large room filled with what they believe is a large contingent of orcs, complete with a leader type, all decked out in ancient Thulian armor. I was similarly pleased at the way they handled traps, even going so far as to haul in logs lumbered from a copse of trees on the face of Dwimmermount to prevent a portcullis trap from activating and trapping them in a room.

Poor Lorne joined his brother in death, which required another trip back to Muntburg to bury him -- can't be too sure in a dungeon. The players worried that, after two men in their employ had died, they might start to get a reputation that'd make it hard to hire more men in the future. So they took several days to travel to the City-State of Adamas to look for alternative sources of labor. In the end, after having bought new and better gear and stocking up on supplies unavailable at Muntburg, they decided against hiring any "city folk," figuring they were more likely to betray them or at least prove unreliable. Of course, the same could be said of Brak, but no one seemed to care, probably because he quickly developed a quirky sketch of a personality that made him endearing. Should he ever die, I expect there will be much mourning.

I was very pleased with how the session unfolded. We created a new house rule regarding the use of small and improvised weapons (roll 2D6 and take the lowest for damage) and the groundwork has been laid for the further fleshing out of the world beyond the dungeon. Although the players only visited Adamas briefly, it will loom largely in the future, as will Muntburg, though I intend to keep the focus on Dwimmermount primarily for a while longer. They just discovered one likely set of stairs leading to the second level, but they're far from clearing level one, so there may be other options.

As a referee, I'm finding this a very satisfying experience. It's much more laid-back than the more "story-heavy" games I've run in the past and, despite my more on-the-fly approach to it, the whole thing hangs together nicely. Characterization is starting to emerge among both the PCs and NPCs, but it's still inchoate, much like the sense of the wider world. I also find it great to watch the recapitulation of history at my table, as the players find themselves coming to similar conclusions as early players about how best to deal with certain things in the game. I'm learning a great deal from the experience and expect to learn much more as we play more.

Both my children (ages six and nearly-nine) hovered around the table at various points, taking a keen interest in the proceedings. I've played a simple version of D&D with my daughter in the past and I think she wants to get in on the action again. My son was more impressed with the dungeon blocks, from which he constructed his own underground lair. That's his creation in the picture above. As distracting as their presence occasionally was -- and I'm grateful for the indulgence of my players as I catered to the kids' questions and comments -- it's also great to see them enraptured by what we were doing. I remember well reading articles during the 1979-1981 period that showed photographs of the elaborate dungeon set-ups of groups that used handmade blocks and terrain to complement their painted minis and being awestruck. I was already playing the game, of course, but those articles had a powerful effect on my young imagination and almost certainly played a role in cementing my lifelong love of this game. We'll see if my games have a similar effect on my children. If the minis and blocks don't inspire them, perhaps my cool mask will instead ...

The Ages of D&D

In a recent post, I inadvertently coined a couple of terms that seem to have struck chords with a couple of my fellow bloggers: the Silver Age and fantastic realism. At the time, I intended both to be throw-away terms that would let me distinguish between the era of D&D under discussion -- that of the mid-80s -- and the preceding one. Looking back on it, though, I think there's a lot to be said for establishing a lexicon for describing the various "ages" of the game, if only because it'll save me a lot of time in future. Even if people don't agree with the precise way I characterize a given age (or its extent), they'll at least know what I mean by it.

Prehistory (1811-1973): In general, this period doesn't get a lot of discussion on this blog, because, though I have played wargames and enjoyed them, I'd never call myself a wargamer and it's wargames of various stripes that inhabit this era. Nonetheless, the period is very important, as it produced several games besides Chainmail that had powerful influences on the development of D&D.

Golden Age (1974-1983): This is the era of D&D's ascendancy and, for me, its perfection. The argument could be reasonably made that the "pure" Golden Age ends somewhere between 1979 and 1981, depending on whether one considers the completion of AD&D or the mass marketing of the game through the Moldvay Basic Rules to have struck a heavier blow to the culture of early D&D. If one wants to make such fine distinctions, the period between 1979/1981 and 1985 (or thereabouts) is the Electrum Age, which straddles the tail end of the Golden Age and the beginning of the Silver. The Golden Age is one of "gonzo pulp fantasy," with a hodgepodge of influences, particularly Howard, Vance, Leiber, de Camp, and Pratt. The dungeon remains the linchpin of adventure design and the sandbox is the assumed role for a campaign setting.

Silver Age (1984-1989): The Silver Age is a transitional age that marries a sophisticated (some might say "decadent") interpretation of Gygaxian naturalism with a growing concern for "dramatic" coherence. The Silver Age is one of "fantastic realism" and the construction of believable worlds and stories is its great concern. It's also the age where the Great Wyrm begins to eat its own tail, being influenced not just by epic fantasy generally but more specifically by second or third order epic fantasies that were themselves influenced by D&D. The Silver Age is when the mass marketing of the game begun in the late Golden Age reaches its fullest flower.

Bronze Age (1990-1995): The Bronze Age is the age of the boxed campaign set. Whereas the Silver Age generally retained a Golden Age sensibility about the necessity of building one's own world (even if the principles behind that construction were quite different), the Bronze Age is characterized by world consumption. During this period, TSR published no fewer than seven new campaign settings for AD&D, in addition to supporting -- and considerably expanding -- holdovers from previous ages. Most are exhaustively detailed through many products, some of them impressively so. D&D came increasingly to be seen as a generic vehicle for the publication of a wide variety of "fantasy" settings, almost none of which bore much resemblance to the game's literary roots in the Golden Age. This age encompasses not only of the apotheosis of the gaming novel but also when such novels become the primary drivers of product development.

Dark Age (1996-1999): The Dark Age is one of decline and fall. D&D products during this era vacillate wildly between recapitulations of works from earlier eras and bold, if often eccentric, experimentation intended to find an elixir vitae that might sustain the slowly dying beast for a few more years. The acquisition of TSR by WotC in 1997 resulted in an attempt to roll back the worst excesses of the Bronze Age by discontinuing most of D&D's campaign settings and to focus on the "core" elements of the game. Ultimately, this proved unsuccessful, resulting in the perceived need for a new edition of the game.

Whether what followed was in fact a rebirth of Dungeons & Dragons -- a new Golden Age -- or its replacement by something else is beyond the scope of this brief post. I will say, though, that my own growing feeling is that it's probably most constructive to sidestep the entire "D&D/not D&D" debate entirely by making a distinction between "TSR D&D" and "WotC D&D." Even if WotC D&D shares certain bits of TSR D&D's genetic material, both mechanical and thematic, its origins are sufficiently different that it ought to be judged on its own terms rather than as a continuation of the Gygaxo-Arneson lineage. In any case, post-2000 versions of D&D are mostly outside my area of interest in this blog and I intend to avoid discussion of them in the future, except in cases where it has direct bearing on the topic at hand.

Aur Onnad Meren!

I'm usually pretty good at remembering important dates of interest to the hobby. So it's with some sheepishness that I admit to having forgotten what would have been the 117th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien on January 3. I suppose some will no doubt see this as further evidence of my "war" against acknowledging the professor's influence over the creation of Dungeons & Dragons. Like my reservations about the thief or my low opinion of Dragonlance, my willingness to take Gary Gygax at his word when he repeatedly stated that Tolkien was but a minor influence on the game he co-created has become the stuff of humor in certain quarters. The really funny thing is that my opinion on the matter is not born out of dislike of Tolkien or Middle-earth, but rather the opposite. It's precisely because, in my later years, I've become such an admirer of Tolkien's work that I find it hard to credit much commonality between his writings and D&D -- or indeed any fantasy roleplaying game, including those that were in fact set in Middle-earth.

When I was a child, I of course read The Hobbit and, later, The Lord of the Rings. I liked both well enough, but, beyond taking certain visual cues from them, I can't honestly say that they had much impact on my playing of D&D. Indeed, I found much of The Lord of the Rings deadly dull. There was too much poetry and song and a lot of it read more like a travelogue than an epic fantasy. I know for a fact that I used to despise the "The Scouring of the Shire," part 8 of Book VI of The Return of the King, seeing it as anticlimactic in the extreme, whereas now I am convinced that it is in fact the true climax of the entire novel. If one is so inclined, feel free take this all as yet further evidence of my dislike of Tolkien and use it to explain away my blindness as to his "obvious" influence on Gygax.

One of the reasons I have grown to admire Tolkien as I grow older is that I see more clearly now that, despite caricatures to the contrary, The Lord of the Rings is not in fact about the triumph of good over evil. That may be the theme of Tolkien's impersonators, from Terry Brooks on down to Peter Jackson, but Tolkien himself would have laughed at the notion that the history of this world was anything more than a "long defeat," as he so eloquently described it through the voice of Galadriel in The Fellowship of the Ring. For Tolkien, we may in this life experience glimpses of what the final victory over evil might be like, but they are fleeting and even the greatest of our victories always brings with it terrible loss. As others have noted, The Lord of the Rings is not an epic but an elegy and creeping senescence makes me appreciate elegy ever more.

I find it hard to imagine how one could argue that D&D, whether in its Golden or Silver Age forms (or later), is an elegaic game. It's always been a vehicle for escapism and while Tolkien acknowledged the salutary effects of escapism, The Lord of the Rings is not a work of escapism. To read it that way, to treat it that way, is to misunderstand it on just about every level. More to the point, as an example of escapism, it's woefully boring. That's what I thought as a kid and that's how Gygax described it on more than one occasion. That's why D&D is full of orcs and balrogs and halflings and treants: they're the things a shallow reading of the novel remembers about it. They're cool and shiny and easily given stats for use in your next dungeon crawl. But meditations on the inevitability of loss in a fallen world aren't quite so compelling for gaming, which is why no edition of the game has ever encouraged or supported that kind of play.

And I don't think that's a bad thing. Much as I admire and agree with Tolkien, I'm not sure I'd enjoy playing a game about the themes of his own works. I have real life if I want to experience the long defeat. When I game, I want an escape from that, if only for a little while, and D&D, based as it is on escapist pulp fantasy, has done a fine job of providing that. For myself, the two are not contradictory but complementary, which is why I raise a belated toast to Professor Tolkien on the memorial of his birth. He wrote a tale that has immeasurably enriched me and will no doubt continue to do so as I read it again and again. I can't say that of very many authors, which is why, despite my heretical beliefs regarding his influence over my hobby, I hold him in the highest regard.

Excelsior!

This illustration is from the front page of the D1-2 module compilation and is drawn by Bill Willingham. Like most of Willingham's work, it's obviously influenced by comics art from the time. Indeed, if you look carefully at this piece, you'll see it's more than influenced by comics art. Regular readers of the Acaeum probably already know this one, but there are three mighty Marvel Easter eggs hidden within this picture, which are really obvious once you know they're there, but I admit I never noticed them for years.

Dwimmermount Begins

Last Sunday I began my Dwimmermount campaign. I'd intended to begin it before the new year, but a big snowstorm prevented that and it had to be postponed. Unfortunately, the postponement made it impossible for one of my players to make the first session, so I had to make do with only three characters to start, which wasn't my preference, particularly since two of the three were demihumans. That said, I vowed that I'd run Dwimmermount every Sunday like clockwork provided I had at least two players. One of my growing beliefs is that, for old school gaming to work, you need to play not only consistently but also regularly. I'd venture to guess that one of the big reasons why old school play isn't as popular as it once was is because gamers meet a lot less often than they used to and because they don't stick with a single campaign -- or game! -- long enough to let it find its feet and properly establish itself. With very few exceptions, the best campaigns I've ever participated in, either back in the day or more recently, were ones where we played weekly (as close to it) without fail. Anything less and you quickly lose the "thread" from which an old school campaign is spun and you might as well be playing a board or video game.

The three characters who began the campaign consisted of a cleric of Tyche named Brother Candor, a dwarf named Vladimir, and an elf named Dordagdonar. I decided to keep background to a minimum, preferring to let evolve through play. I made one exception: I stated that Brother Candor's now-deceased master had spoken to him of a "hidden" entrance to Dwimmermount beneath some Thulian ruins on the slopes of the peak. I did this for the simple reason that I wanted to vaguely plausible explanation as to why the first few levels of a renowned megadungeon located a day's walk from an outpost of civilization (Muntburg Keep) hadn't been picked thoroughly keen by throngs of adventurers. It's a bit of "poetic license" on my part, but I don't regret it.

We were using Swords & Wizardry as our baseline rules, with quite a few tweaks. I was, for example, using Greyhawk's weapon vs. AC tables. I also used the morale rules from Moldvay, because they remain the best treatment of the topic in any edition of D&D in my opinion and because I think D&D combat only makes sense if you assume the use of morale. Other house rules will evolve through play and I very much look forward to that. One of the joys of using a simple rules set isn't just the ease of house ruling but the necessity of doing so. This is how the game stays fresh over months and years of continued play. It also ensures that we never treat the game as a mere consumer product, prefabricated and "ready to eat." To me, that's anathema and it's frankly that attitude, far moreso than things like thieves or demihumans or even story, that separates the old school from its wayward descendants.

I had already prepared maps for several levels of the dungeon. One of my design principles was to include lots of lateral movement options, both within a level and between them. One of the problems with most modern dungeon design is that there are too few avenues of exploration and the layouts are too logical. I wanted to avoid that, so I made sure that there were rarely cases where a room had only a single exit. Likewise, though my players didn't pursue them, there needed to be ready access to sub-levels, side-levels, and so forth. Exploring a megadungeon is, on some level, a descent into the Underworld. There's room for other types of dungeons, of course -- the type Trent Foster calls a "lair" -- but a megadungeon is special. As the requisite anchor to an old school campaign, its design must follow slightly different rules and those rules must be reflected in its maps.

Beforehand, I placed a few of what M.A.R. Barker calls, in Empire of the Petal Throne, "Saturday night specials." These are set piece encounters -- weird tricks, devious traps, unusual monsters -- that are meant to be memorable or in some way significant. The contents of the rest of the rooms, though, I rolled up on the fly, using the dungeon stocking rules from OD&D Volume 3 and the Monster & Treasure Assortment. I was a little wary of this method to start with, because I'd never done it before, but, in the end, it worked very well, resulting in a very memorable encounter with some crossbow-armed kobolds who nearly killed the entire party, as well as a poison gas trap that claimed the life of henchman, Lars, whose skill with a sling had saved the bacon of his employers during said kobold encounter. When the PCs returned to Muntburg to rest, they buried Lars to ensure he wouldn't return as a risen ghoul later -- curses! -- and they hired his brother Lorne (along with Henga, the shield maiden) to replace him.

As you can see, we used miniatures -- plastic, prepainted ones, alas -- and dungeon models. They were there mostly for show, but they did help me with my descriptions somewhat, since I often have a hard time describing physical locations without props. The party also employed a mapper, which was nice to see. They quickly learned the benefits of doing so, since it enabled them to ferret out the likely locations of secret doors, pit traps, and visualize how unexplored corridors likely hooked up with one another. As noted, they also quickly understood the importance of retreating. They returned to Muntburg to re-supply and rest for a week between forays, which I found eminently sensible. I then used the dungeon restocking table I saw first on Sham's Grog 'n Blog to determine if a room previously cleared had been repopulated while they were away. While they were in Muntburg, we all agreed to adopt the Dave Arneson-inspired rule that XP is only given for gold that's taken from the dungeon and spent. Everyone agreed it gave the thing a very swords-and-sorcery feel, which is what I wanted.

All in all, it was a good start, but it was only a start. I don't consider a campaign to have "taken" until we play at least three sessions consecutively. Session 2 should be this weekend, barring any problems. I see promise in this game, but I admit I also have some concern it'll be stillborn. Life is pretty hectic for most of my players, so it'd be easy for something to derail this. Likewise, we're all out of practice when it comes to a megadungeon-centered campaign and I think it's going to take some getting used to its nuances. Right now, people are enthusiastic, because it's new and different, but there's a reason why many gamers moved away from dungeon crawling in the first place and those same dynamics will come into play with Dwimmermount as well. I have the benefit of at least being aware of them, which puts me ahead of many referees of old, but I also realize that there are some inherent limits to the megadungeon and the key to running a successful megadungeon-centered campaign is to find clever ways to transcend them.

Can I do that? Time will tell.

Retrospective: Tegel Manor

Tegel Manor vexes me.

First published in 1977 and revised in 1980 (and expanded in 1989) by Judges Guild, Tegel Manor is without a doubt one of Bob Bledsaw's masterpieces. Describing a sprawling 240-room haunted castle, the module is a textbook example of a funhouse dungeon, utterly lacking in anything resembling an ecology and filled with many encounters for which the adjective "whimsical" is charitable at best. The contents and/or inhabitants of each room are random -- in some cases literally -- meaning that, here you might find nothing more threatening than some giant beetles but next door you might find a Type III demon polymorphed as a kindly old beggar.

Now, I've come clean on the fact that I'm not a huge fan of funhouse dungeons, with a few exceptions. At the same time, I recognize their importance in the history of D&D and see them as an important antidote to post-Hickman tendency to treat adventure modules primarily as a vehicle for "story." But, even within that context, Tegel Manor irks me. I'm not entirely sure how to take it. Is it intended as a joke, a Castle Greyhawk before its time? With its random encounter charts containing 100 members of the cursed and unfortunately named Rump family (of whose names start with the letter R) and its goofy encounters ("Four Zombies ... bowing to a Giant White Rat ... in a pink cape and red plumed hat"), it certainly seems that way. It's one thing to sidestep naturalism, but Tegel Manor goes above and beyond the call of duty when it comes to "gonzo."

But the map is a think of beauty. Nothing -- and I mean nothing -- has ever beaten it. You can see a bit of it in the image above, but it doesn't do justice to the thing. It's filled with winding passages, secret doors, mazes, empty rooms, weird features, and more. Best of it, the map is completely legible and usable in play, despite its complexity. I think the quality of Judges Guild's maps is often overlooked. Compared to what others produced at the time, JG's output is often unparalleled. Bill Owen, in his reminsicences about the Guild, commented on the difficulties Bob Bledsaw encountered in fnding printers capable of producing maps of the quality he wanted to include in his modules and I can believe it. Even now, with so many advances in technology, very few gaming maps are as multifaceted yet usable as Judges Guild's best work. It's really a testament to the company that they did so much first and best.

Tegel Manor isn't a module I'd ever run as written. There's too much about it that rankles me and, if it rankles me, you can be sure that it'd get even less warm a reception by today's gamers. Yet, despite that, there's something very compelling about it. Perhaps it is because it's so different from my own tastes that it elicits a frisson in me whenever I read it. Perhaps I can't shake the feeling that I've yet to reach the zen state where, suddenly, the whole thing will make sense to me. Or perhaps it's simply that the maps are so damned cool. Whatever it is, I find it hard to dismiss Tegel Manor outright, even though I want to. It's simply not the kind of module I'd ever run, let alone write, but that may be the point. One of the joys of my exploration into the history of the hobby is encountering stuff that is so different from my own preferences. Even when I don't change my mind, I still come away enriched by the encounter.

Greenwood Replies

As I expected, my post yesterday on Ed Greenwood generated a lot of very divergent responses, with some people agreeing wholeheartedly with my assertion that the spirit that gave birth to the Realms is broadly in tune with old school principles and others disagreeing just as vehemently. For myself, I think it's important to distinguish between what the Realms -- and, to a certain extent, Greenwood's writing itself -- has become under the stewardship of TSR and WotC and where it started.

That's why I think it's important to look at Ed's early articles in Dragon. Greenwood's first published article is in issue 30 (October 1979) -- solidly within the Golden Age -- when the magazine still retained the definite article in its masthead. Even now, people's memories of the content and style of those articles is colored by his later work, after the publication of the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set in 1987. The vast majority of his early work is not in fact written in the voice of Elminster and some of his best don't include Elminster as a character at all. It's true that many of his articles include a brief introduction based on the premise that Elminster frequently visits our world via planar magic, during which time Greenwood wheedles information out of the old sage by plying him with exotic drinks, such as piña coladas and Mountain Dew. But these introductions are generally short and a careful reading of them shows that the original portrayal of Elminster is somewhat different than that of his later works, by which time the popularity of the character grew to the point where, like others before him, he does indeed become a "Mary Sue." I think it also bears mentioning that the entire premise behind these articles and indeed of the Forgotten Realms themselves is one rooted in pulp fantasy: a parallel world with multiple connections to our own reality. Those roots have largely been abandoned over the years, but they're there and I see that as evidence of Greenwood's knowledge and appreciation for the literary sources of our hobby.

None of this excuses the excesses in which the Realms has reveled, but not all of that can be laid at the feet of Greenwood. The amount of control he exerts over the published Realms is, I am certain, overstated. Had he the degree of authority typically imputed to him, the published Realms would be far more risqué and bawdy, for example, something that both TSR and WotC have, to varying degrees, toned down to make it more acceptable to Middle American mores. I personally find the true Greenwoodian Realms a mite more prurient than I like, but, again, I don't think one can reasonably argue that prurience isn't an old school (or pulp fantasy) tradition.

Likewise, the fact that the Realms is not a place that Robert E. Howard or Fritz Leiber would have written is not a knock against its consonance with the old school. I can't imagine REH creating Blackmoor or Tékumel or Arduin either, but every one of those settings meets my criteria for an old school sandbox. The Realms is idiosyncratic and not always in ways I find congenial, but that's exactly why I regard it so highly. In its original conception, it was a work of unique personal vision by a man steeped in pulp fantasy. It's not a world I'd have created but that's to the good.

Certainly Ed has aided and abetted some of the trends I dislike in the hobby, but then so did Gary Gygax. The difference, I think, is that Ed has never really been in the driver's seat. Mostly he's just enjoying the ride, being a perfectly charming passenger ready to assist with directions when asked. That doesn't exculpate him from his participation in much I disdain, but it does provide some much-needed context. I'd much more happily play in an Ed-run Realms campaign than I would in, say, a Keith Baker-run Eberron campaign and it's not just because Ed is a peerless raconteur. It's because Ed gets D&D; he's not out to change it or make it "cool." He also gets pulp fantasy and knows its history. He may not share all my particular obsessions and concerns, but I trust him to understand them.

I'm not arguing that he's a standard bearer of the old school in 2009 by any means. I do think it's disingenuous, though, to claim that the guy who wrote rules for firearms in D&D, gave advice on the use of gates and how to build your own pantheon, and described the denizens of the Nine Hells, among many other wonderful things, didn't graduate from the old school. He may have picked up a few unfortunate affectations as he went to "study abroad," but that happens to the best of us. He's one of the Greats of this hobby and will always have my respect and affection.

Regular Service Resumes

I totally forgot that today was Wednesday and thus didn't write the next installment of my weekly adventure module retrospectives. Silly me.

Expect one to appear tomorrow instead.

In Praise of Ed Greenwood

Whereas I think many of the criticisms directed toward Larry Elmore in old school circles are completely justified, I can't say the same for those directed at another favorite grognard whipping boy, Ed Greenwood. Leaving aside the fact that Ed is one of the most charming, affable, and genuinely charismatic people I've ever had the pleasure to meet -- indeed I don't believe I ever really understood what charisma was until I spoke with Ed one-on-one a few years ago -- I think a lot of the venom directed toward him has more to do with the way TSR and Wizards of the Coast have developed and marketed the fabulously old school Forgotten Realms setting over the years than with anything Ed himself has done or written.

The Forgotten Realms an old school setting? And a fabulous one at that? Surely I must be off my rocker, right? Not at all.

People often forget, buried under two decades of Realms products, that the setting was originally a very minimalistic one, with only two areas -- Waterdeep and the Dales -- having any degree of detail. The rest of the Realms was sketchy at best, being primarily a collection of names used as color for the imaginary histories and lore Ed would spin for the benefit of his players. Those two detailed areas, born out of actual play, are quintessentially old school: a fantasy metropolis conveniently located near a sprawling underground labyrinth and a collection of rural communities beset by enemies on all sides. I will grant that Greenwood's Waterdeep is no Lankhmar or even Greyhawk. I dare say it's a distinctively Canadian fantasy city, where the tension comes not from trying to eke out an existence in a thoroughly corrupt environment but from trying to hold back the forces of corruption against all odds. The Dales, on the other hand, are classically old school, being isolated, parochial, and largely dependent on the self-interest of adventurers for their defense.

But what of all the grand plots and uber-NPCs? Surely they aren't old school. Surely not, but then the Realms as originally conceived wasn't so saturated with either of them. Most of the "Realms shattering events" that people now associate with the setting were the inventions of TSR and WotC, more interested in selling New York Times best-selling novels than gaming products. The "Time of Troubles" that ushered in the Second Edition era, for example, while based in part on an idea Greenwood put forward in an early Dragon article, was in most respects antithetical to his take on the setting, given that he conceives of the gods as largely distant, mysterious, and beyond human ken, communicating through dreams, cryptic statements, and enigmatic oracles rather than bestriding the earth like colossi. If one reads Greenwood's Dragon articles from the Golden (and even Silver) Age, you quickly see that his adventures were local affairs, driven by player choice and more in tune with Gygaxian naturalism than the tenets of the Hickman Revolution. (Which isn't to say that Greenwood doesn't have his own distinctive "voice" by any means) The much-reviled uber-NPCs, such as Elminster, are another example of where Greenwood's original approach has been bypassed by a less subtle one designed to build and support a brand rather than a sandbox style campaign setting.

Ed is a natural storyteller, with the uncanny ability to spin an engaging tale without missing a beat. Much like Professor M.A.R. Barker, creator of Empire of the Petal Throne, does with Tékumel, Greenwood understands the Realms on such an intimate level that he can create new "lore" at the drop of a hat. It's not that he's already worked it all out in advance. Rather, it's that he knows what makes the Realms the Realms and so, when asked to provide information on some obscure person, event, or location, he can do so convincingly. He's frankly a game company's dream come true, particularly when it comes to having to find some way to justify the changes it wants to introduce to sell a new novel series.

I recommend to anyone who doubts Greenwood's old school credentials to read some of his old articles from Dragon. I fell in love with the Realms through those articles and I was ecstatic when TSR published a Forgotten Realms boxed set in 1987, at the tail end of the 1e era. Though the seeds of the setting's eventual bloat were obvious even in that green box, I loved it nonetheless and grow ever more convinced that it was in fact a near-masterpiece of a campaign setting. The success of the Realms novels, starting with The Crystal Shard in 1988, more or less doomed the setting to its current state, but Ed is hardly to blame for that. I dream of a day when he might be able to reclaim the setting and scrape off the carbuncles of brand-building, but, much like imagining a world with a purely Gygaxian World of Greyhawk, it simply isn't to be.

A pity, because it could have been glorious.

An Old School Urban Legend

The fellow to the right is, of course, Yeenoghu, demon prince of gnolls and lord of ghouls, as illustrated by David C. Sutherland III in the AD&D Monster Manual. I used to find the illustration rather creepy as a younger man. There's something mildly unnerving about the stiffness of its pose that, far from a source of derision for me, as it is for many who don't like Sutherland's work, actually heightened its effectiveness. Yeenoghu does look mildly goofy, but in a way that reminds me he's not just another monster but something wholly "unnatural."

In any case, I once heard a story about the creation of Yeenoghu by Gary Gygax. The story goes that players in the Greyhawk campaign, having run afoul of one too many demon lords and archdevils whom they accidentally summoned by speaking their names aloud, got into the practice of using circumlocutions to avoid repeating past mistakes. One such circumlocution was "You-Know-Who." After a while of doing this, Gary sprang Yeenoghu on his players, on the assumption that his name sounded enough like the phrase that he might answer by traveling to the Prime Material Plane.

I always thought the story sounded plausible, since Gary loved puns and wordplay and was never one to give a sucker an even break. Eventually, I remembered the story and asked Gary about him and he told me it had no basis in fact, but was merely an urban legend. A pity, I thought.

(More posts later as time permits. Been busy the last couple of days and will likely be so for a little while longer)

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Fallible Fiend

(Given that, over the months since I began it, this series has become less about the art of pulp fantasy stories and more about the stories that influenced the development of early D&D, I have renamed it accordingly. I'll be going back and editing previous installments to match the new nomenclature in due course.)

I am always hesitant to claim that any single book provides the key to understanding Dungeons & Dragons. Even if I weren't, the 1973 L. Sprague de Camp novel The Fallible Fiend certainly isn't such a key. Nevertheless, I think it qualifies as a key, at least if you're interested in the specifically Gygaxian origins of the game, as I am. Reading it, one is hard pressed not to see why Gary singled it out by title from among all the tales set in the world of Novaria, a parallel world whose culture is a melange of classical and medieval influences and for which our Earth is its afterlife. Though clearly a pulp fantasy, The Fallible Fiend is also a satire, particularly of politics, both generally and of America. Consequently, like a lot of early fantasy that influenced the game, this novel remains connected to our world even when it's describing very otherworldly things.

The novel's plot concerns the picaresque travels of Zdim, the eponymous demon from the Twelfth Plane who is summoned to the Prime Plane to fulfill a contract with a human sorcerer by the name of Dr. Maldivius. Zdim not only has no interest in leaving his demonic realm for servitude, he's also very bad at being a servant, as he is literal-minded to a disturbing degree. After this flaw results in the death of Maldivius' apprentice, his contract is sold to a succession of new masters, each of whom finds Zdim's willingness to give them exactly what they ask for to be more trouble than its worth. As his contract is passed on, Zdim visits different lands and interacts with new people, allowing de Camp the opportunity to show off his wit and comment on the human condition. I wouldn't claim that any of the commentary is deeply insightful or original, but some of it still has bite, in part because it's not solely about the real world but also about the fictitious one of Novaria.

The Fallible Fiend is an important book in understanding the kind of world Gygax saw as a typical one for D&D. Novaria is a parallel Earth in that there are lots of obvious historical and cultural similarities, but they're echoes rather than mirror images, even twisted ones. Consequently, the geography is different, as are the nations. The flora and fauna are similar, but, again, not identical, with extinct species, not to mention fantastical ones, mixed in with the more mundane ones of our world. Magic exists and follows clear rules. There are gods who interact with human beings, just as there are demon planes from which such fiends may be summoned and bound into servitude. I found myself thinking of Greyhawk when I recall Novaria and I don't think that's an accident.

In all the discussions and arguments about which books and authors were most influential on D&D -- short answer: not Tolkien -- it's fascinating to me how often L. Sprague de Camp (and Fletcher Pratt) get overlooked. I grow ever more convinced that his stories played a very important role in the development of Gygax's conception of the game and his assumptions about how it would be played. De Camp was, after all, active as a writer over a long period of time, from Gary's youth all the way into the days of the pulp fantasy revival. I don't think it's a stretch to imagine that Gary retained a fondness for de Camp's work born in his younger days. Indeed, the evidence from things like Appendix N and early issues of The Dragon makes it very clear to me that he did hold de Camp in high regard and was strongly influenced by his ideas. Even from the brief summary of The Fallible Fiend I've given in this entry, I should think the connection is apparent.

I'm not yet ready to argue that de Camp's work is a Rosetta Stone for decrypting Gygaxian D&D. For one, as important as it is, I don't believe any single author held that place among Gary's influences. However, I think de Camp bears closer reading with an eye toward the question of what may have been an influence over the development of the game. I suspect we'll be surprised to find more there than has previously been supposed.

In Praise of Larry Elmore

This wasn't the first issue of Dragon I owned (that honor goes to issue 56, I think), but it's one I remember buying very clearly and part of it is because of this cover by Larry Elmore. Looking at it now, 27 years later, I still like it a lot, even as I can clearly see within it the seeds of everything I'd eventually come to dislike about Elmore's art specifically and Silver Age D&D art in particular.

But that's not the purpose of this post. I'm writing this to give credit where it's due. Larry Elmore catches a lot of flak on this blog, some of it unjustly. I know I tend to forget that he started his tenure at TSR during the Golden Age and that there's a reason he was so highly regarded back in the day: he's a very a talented artist.

I was perusing back issues of Dragon from 1982 to 1984 and Elmore makes his appearance in many of them. His work back then shows a clarity and precision that was unique and nicely embodied the esthetic of the Silver Age, when "fantastic realism" was the style of the day. His figures looked real, as did the clothing they wore, the weapons they carried, and the environments they inhabited. He evoked an impression of "groundedness" that contrasted powerfully with the fever dream phantasmagoria of Otus and the dark density of Trampier, both of whom were examplars of an age that was passing, while Elmore was the spirit of the transition between Gold and Silver.

I don't think it's fair to blame Elmore for the subject matter he was asked to illustrate as a staff artist. Though I forever associate him with Dragonlance, it's not as if he created that series or was responsible for the direction it took. Likewise, I can hardly blame the man for producing more of the kind of art that gamers so clearly enjoyed. Much like Wayne Reynolds, another artist regularly singled out for the failings of his art directors, Elmore has often produced memorable and evocative pieces that really capture the spirit of this game we all love. I have no doubt his artwork, even the pieces I don't much like, did a lot to bring plenty of people into the hobby. Frankly, that's something worth praising and I need to do more of that.

Silver Age Obsessions

Issue 88 of Dragon was released in August 1984, which puts it outside what I generally consider the Golden Age. The cover art, as you can see, is by Jim Holloway. I'll admit to having an inexplicable soft spot for his work -- probably having to do with fond memories of Paranoia -- but I think it's fair to say that that the presence of his artwork is a pretty good indicator that you're looking at an artifact from a period outside the period I regard as the hobby's apex, but perhaps only barely. Call it the Silver Age.

One of the fascinating things about the Silver Age -- indeed of many Silver Ages -- is that it was heavily focused on commenting upon and embellishing the works of the Golden Age. This is very evident in the pages of Dragon from the period, which, if looked at today, would no doubt seem unduly obsessed with minutiae, such as a "realistic" method of calculating a character's height and weight based on his ability scores or determining how far a character could jump up or across based on the same. "Realism" was a watchword of the Silver Age. Indeed, I recall an exhaustive review of the then-new Rolemaster series which reviewed the game primarily on the basis of how realistic it was.

This concern about realism is why issue 88 could, for example, boast not one but two different articles on the physics of falling damage (and a further article on the subject by Gygax himself a few issues later). To some, arguing over whether falling 40 feet causes 4d6 damage or 10d6 damage might seem like needless nitpicking and, on some level, it is. What it really is, in my opinion, is two things. First, it's a consequence of the maturity of D&D. The game had been out for 10 years by this point and was so firmly established in its essentials that all that was left to do was gild the lily, so to speak. In short, there's a hint of decadence even amidst the enormous creativity of the Silver Age (and there was a lot of creativity, as I'll discuss in a future post).

The second thing that the obsession with realism indicates is how unquestioned Gygaxian naturalism had become in the game. Most gamers at the time simply accepted that the rules of the game were intended to simulate a reality, albeit a fantastic one. Consequently, the more closely the rules modeled that reality, the "better" they were, which is why you see lots of arguing back and forth over the best way to do so. There were, to my recollection anyway, comparatively few voices arguing that D&D shouldn't be as realistic as possible within the constraints of the magical world it portrays. This is something even the Hickman Revolution didn't seek to overthrow, as it was a largely unquestioned pillar of what D&D -- what a roleplaying game -- was supposed to be (superhero games are something of an exception and, I think, one of the primary gateways through which non-simulationist approaches gained greater popularity).

Naturalism thus reached its height during the Silver Age and, on reflection, I realize that, coming to the hobby as I did during the late Golden Age, I didn't see the transition between the two ages as clearly as I do now. Moreover, the dominance of naturalism was not a foregone conclusion during the Golden Age. One need only look at things like Arduin or even Blackmoor to find plenty of examples of non-naturalistic approaches to gaming during the early days. But naturalism is what Gygax, through TSR, raised to the level of dogma and it's what informed my own contnued conception of what D&D is and how it ought to be played. It's clearer to me now that this approach wasn't the only one, even within D&D, prior to the end of the Silver Age. However, it was the favored one and, for good or for ill, it's (until recently anyway) been a core part of the way the game has been played and published. It's certainly my preferred style, which probably explains my general dislike for more "wahoo" approaches.

I'll be returning to this and related topics in future posts. There's a lot of history to mine here and I would like more time to do so.

Pulpier Magic

A few years ago, I was working on an abortive campaign setting I called "Second Creation." It was a high medieval "pre-apocalyptic" setting, which is to say that it was set about 20 years before what people in the setting widely believed would be the end of the world, according to the dominant interpretation of sacred scriptures. Events in the world seemed to bear out this interpretation, with evil on the rise, corruption rampant -- even within Mother Church -- and ominous signs and portents.

The whole setting was more an exercise in world building than anything else; I wanted to create an unambiguously monotheistic D&D setting, following through the implications of that metaphysics to its logical conclusions. One of the tweaks I made to magic was the notion that no created being, which is to say anyone but Father God, could bring something into existence from nothing. Neither could they create true life. Surprisingly, it didn't take a lot of effort to change D&D's spells into something that could accommodate these notions and the result was something fairly flavorful while still being recognizable as D&D.

In thinking about it recently, I realized that, by adopting the same principles, I could make D&D's magic system something more like the magic seen in pulp fantasy stories. To do that, you just need to get rid of some of the "whiz-bang" effects of magic and/or "rationalize" the way spells work. Take magic missile, for example. Suppose that, instead of conjuring missiles from thin air, the magic-user had to carry with him a supply of arrows or darts (or even daggers) that he tossed in the air as he cast the spell. The spell would still work as before, but it no requires "ammunition" to work. Certainly this makes it less handy than currently, but the addition of an ammo requirement isn't unduly onerous, given that the missiles strike unerringly for a decent amount of damage. The end result of this approach wouldn't change magic greatly, either mechanically or in terms of its effects, but it'd add a thin layer of chrome that'd keep spells grounded in "reality" and prevent them from being treated as super-powers.

Here are a few more ideas I had:

• Knock: Requires the use of a large blunt instrument, such as a cudgel or staff, which the magic-user then swings to open sealed doors, portals, etc.
  
• Light: Needs an existing flame or light source to draw upon in order to operate, but infuses it with magical potency that enables that flame or light to have the same effects as the spell.
• Shield: Requires a physical shield or shield-like item to function, which it temporally transforms into magical barrier as described in the spell.

Anyone else have some good ideas on how to extend this idea?

The Old Days

As I get older, my appreciation for In Search of the Unknown has been growing ever stronger. It was the first module I ever played -- it came packaged with my Holmes Basic set -- and I played the heck out of it with my friends. I've been re-reading it yet again (the second time since September, which shows how highly I regard it) and, in the midst of all the other thoughts and feelings it conjured up, I couldn't help but marvel at its illustrations. They're all by the late Dave Sutherland. I know it's commonplace to consider Sutherland vastly inferior to Dave Trampier and perhaps he is, but, for whatever reason, I find it hard not to like Sutherland's work. It has a clean, unpretentious quality to it that appeals to me. I consider DCS III and Tramp to be the twin esthetic pillars of the Golden Age.

One of the illustrations from module B1 that I just love is this one:

In many ways, it perfectly captures the nuances of old school D&D. Look at the scenery. There are fairy tale leprechauns around, as well as a valiant knight astride his steed as he charges past Cinderella's castle in the distance. Into the midst of this bucolic scene march a bunch of adventurers and their hirelings -- single file, no less! -- carrying bags, backpacks, and even a 10-foot pole. When did you last see a 10-foot pole in a RPG illustration? The magic-user is recognizable by his conical cap, complete with stars and moons, and the elf too has his requisite headgear.

This illustration is pure Sutherland: not high art but fun art and highly evocative of a time when adventurers looked like the excavation team that they were and didn't bat an eye at the lack of gender parity in their merry band. These guys look like characters from my old campaigns and, even now, this is how I envisage a bunch of D&D adventurers. Like Sutherland, they may not be cool, but they get the job done -- the ones who live anyway. We all know the guy up front and the elf are marked for death.

Happy New Year!

2009 marks the 35th anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons and the first year without the presence of its co-creator, Gary Gygax. Let's make it a year worth remembering.