Ode to a Classic

One of the things I miss about the early days of the Old School Renaissance is how many blogs there were and how interconnected they all were. There was a lot of discussion back and forth between this blog and that one. Someone would make an interesting – or controversial – post and the next thing you knew, there were lots more posts commenting on it. This created a really dynamic ecosystem of personalities and ideas that gave those early days a distinct vibe that I just don't feel anymore, but I'm old, so that might just be me.

Sadly, I don't read as many other blogs as I used to do in those heady days. Consequently, I often miss really excellent posts, like this one, which was pointed out to me by Geoffrey McKinney, a longtime reader of this blog, as well as an accomplished old school game writer. The post, over at the A Knight at the Opera blog, talks at length about "the best RPG cover of all time," namely that of the 1977 Traveller boxed set. It's an excellent post with which I completely agree and I'm grateful to Geoffrey for pointing out to me. 

Since I've been talking a lot about Traveller here lately, I thought it'd be worth sharing more widely. Head on over to A Knight at the Opera and give it a read. Be sure to leave a comment, too, if you like it. I'm sure the author would appreciate knowing that something he's written is being enjoyed. I know I always do.

The Best Map Ever (Take 2)

Long ago, at the dawn of this blog, I declared Darlene's exquisite map of The World of Greyhawk to be "the best map ever." To be fair, in the linked post, I qualified my hyperbole somewhat, saying that no "map for a fantasy RPG setting has ever captivated me the way" this one had – and I stand by that. Darlene's map of the Flanaess is one of the greatest maps ever made for use with a fantasy roleplaying game. It's beautiful simply as a work of art, eminently usable, and, for me at least, almost as iconic as Dave Trampier's AD&D Players Handbook cover.

However, there is another map of which I am equally fond. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's this one:

I apologize for its small size. The original is quite large and the width of a blog post is inadequate to show its true glory. The map depicts the portion of Charted Space in which the Third Imperium and its interstellar neighbors exist, along with a couple of important astrographic features, like the Great and Lesser Rifts. Each of the rectangles represents a single sector, an area of space equal to 32 × 40 parsecs. Some of the sectors are named, like the Solomani Rim, the Beyond, and the Spinward Marches, but many of them are not. 

The map was, I believe, originally produced by GDW as a freebie to give away at conventions and to mail order recipients. I received mine in a large envelope after I'd written to the company to request their latest catalog. I was ecstatic to get it, because I'd previously seen a black and white reproduction of the map in a British book about RPGs whose title escapes me now (a No Prize to anyone who can tell me which one it was in the comments). I liked the map so much that I hung it on my bedroom wall, belong the Darlene Greyhawk map and there it stayed for years, even after I'd gone away to college. Unfortunately, the map was lost when I removed it from the wall some years later. 

Unlike the Greyhawk map, this one is simple in its presentation and lacking in detail. Nevertheless, I'd still say it's quite beautiful. There's an elegance to it that I have always found incredibly appealing, an elegance that's very much of a piece with the elegance of Traveller itself. It uses only three colors – black, white, and red – just like the original Traveller boxed set, which I think contributes to rather than detracts from its attractiveness. In science fiction, minimalism is often a very solid esthetic choice and it's one that classic Traveller embraced from the very beginning (more on that particular topic in a future post).

The map's not without a couple of problems, the first of which being that it's a flat, two-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional space. That's an issue Traveller has always had and there's no easy way around it, though some fans have tried over the years. I've never been much bothered by it myself, since properly 3D star maps tend to be very complex and difficult to use in play. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that most sectors of Charted Space are claimed by one or more large interstellar empires, which makes it feel fairly cramped rather than wide open. For many types of sci-fi campaigns, this is fine. If you're looking for one in which exploration is a central activity, it's less ideal, though there are some ways to fix this.

Even so, this remains one of my favorite RPG maps and one to which I regularly return for inspiration.

Solitaire

On page 2 of Book 1: Characters and Combat of the original 1977 edition of Traveller, there's a section entitled "Playing the Game." This section discusses the "three basic configurations" in which the game may be played. Two of them are obvious and should be familiar to most people who play RPGs today – the scenario and the campaign. The first of these is a simple "one-time affair" that "ends when the evening of play is over or the goal is achieved." The second is a series of "continuing, linked adventures in a consistent universe." While the scenario "is like a science fiction novel, the campaign is like a continuing S-F series." As I said, there's nothing here that wouldn't be familiar to most contemporary gamers.

The third "configuration" of Traveller is solitaire and is described in this way:

One player undertakes some journey or adventure alone. He handles the effects of the rules himself. Solitaire is ideal for the player who is alone due to situation or geography.

I started playing Traveller in 1983, around the time that The Traveller Book was released – more than four decades ago now. In all the years I've played the game, I've never known anyone to play the game solitaire as described here. In fact, until the last few years, I don't think I recalled that solitaire was even mentioned as a possible way to play the game. That's not to say that Traveller isn't suitable for some degree of solitaire "play." The Traveller Book, in its section on "Basic Traveller Activities," notes that "many of the subordinate game systems lend themselves to solitaire ... play." This is absolutely true in my experience. 

Traveller's character generation system is, in my opinion, one of the best ever devised, beautifully blending randomness with choice while also evoking the thrill of gambling. The system is so good that it's probably worthy of several posts about it, but, for now, what's important is that generating characters in Traveller is fun. You never quite know what you're going to wind up with, thanks to the unpredictability of the dice rolls. But no matter how things unfold, you (generally) wind up with a character who has a rough history of what he was doing between the age of 18 and when he enters the campaign after some period of time in service to one or another interstellar career, usually military.

Indeed, character generation is so fun that, to this day, I sometimes still generate a character or two as a way to pass the time. I used to have a nice little computer program that helped with this. It was called "TravGen" or something similar, but I lost it when I got a new computer and have never been able to find a functional version of it on the Internet since. Even without the program to speed things up, generating characters for Traveller is enjoyable as an activity in its own right – the kind of solitaire play I associate with the game.

Another form of solitaire play in which I still regularly engage is generating subsectors. This is a bit more involved than generating characters, but it's still a lot of fun. The last time I did this in earnest, I wound up creating an entire sector and starting up a non-Third Imperium Traveller campaign that I refereed for three years. That's the "danger" of generating subsectors: after a while, ideas about the various worlds you create, their inhabitants, and their relationships to one another start to percolate and the next thing you know, you're imagining an entire setting for a campaign. None of this is bad, of course – far from it! – but it is dangerous, in the sense that it can very easily feed gamer attention deficit disorder, something to which I was once very prone.

A third potential source of solitaire play within Traveller is trade and commerce. Choose a starship, pick a starting world in a subsector (whether published or one of your own creation), get some cargo and/or passengers, and then set off to try and turn a profit as you direct your ship from world to world. This is a great way to learn the speculative trade system in Traveller, as well as to better understand the economic ties that connect the worlds of one region of space. I have a vague recollection that GDW itself released a computer program in the 1980s that handled trade and commerce, but perhaps my aged brain imagined it. Regardless, trade is another fun way to play Traveller by oneself.

Compared to OD&D, which was released just three years prior, Traveller is a design of considerable elegance. All of its rules systems work well with one another and support and encourage its intended gameplay styles. Many of these systems, like the three I mentioned above, are enjoyable in themselves as separate "min-games" that can be "played" between sessions and that generate additional content for use in an ongoing campaign. It's absolutely brilliant design work and a big reason why I keep coming back to Traveller.

The Lord Weird Slough Feg

No discussion of Traveller is complete without mentioning the 2003 album of the same name by the heavy metal album band, The Lord Weird Slough Feg. 

I'm no aficionado of metal (or indeed any other kind of popular music), but I own a copy of this and enjoy it. The album's especially fun for all the references to aspects of the Third Imperium setting. 

If you visit the band's website, you'll see what looks like an announcement of their next music endeavor, to be released in 2025:

Retrospective: Leviathan

When I first shifted the focus of my Retrospective posts toward classic Traveller, I hadn't consciously decided to look at those adventures included in my Top 10 Classic Traveller Adventures about which I'd not previously written separate posts, but, after last week's post on Duneraiders, I realized that's exactly what I'd been doing. Rather than fight it, I've decided to lean into it, which is why I'm turning my gaze to Adventure 4: Leviathan, which I placed at the lofty rank of number 2 out of 10.

Leviathan is a very unusual adventure for a number of reasons. First published in 1980, it was written by Bob McWilliams a name many of you might recognize from the pages of White Dwarf, where McWilliams had a regular column called "Starbase" devoted to Traveller. "Starbase" was a favorite – or should I say favourite? – feature of mine and one of the primary reasons I read White Dwarf in my youth. Unlike Dragon, where Traveller (and science fiction more generally) was mostly an afterthought until the advent of the Ares Section in April 1984, White Dwarf gave pride of place to Traveller, making it very appealing to a young sci-fi nerd like myself. 

In many ways, Leviathan is as much a product of Games Workshop as it is of Game Designers' Workshop (GDW). In addition to McWilliams, the adventure credits Albie Fiore (another WD stalwart), Ian Livingstone (nuff said), and Andy Slack (ditto) as having edited it. Furthermore, the book includes illustrations by Fiore and the incomparable Russ Nicholson. Strengthening the overall Britishness of Leviathan is its use of UK spellings throughout the text, which is perhaps unintentionally appropriate, given the game's use of the double-l orthography for Traveller (whose origin, Marc Miller told me at Gamehole Con, lies with E.C. Tubb's Dumarest of Terra series). 

Traveller's default playstyle could probably be described as a "hexcrawl in space," quite literally, given what the game's interstellar star charts look like. Leviathan takes this a step further, with the characters hired by the large multi-system trading cartel, Baraccai Technum, to participate in the exploration of a region of space known as the Outrim Void. The Void lies to rimward of the Spinward Marches sector and gets its name not from its emptiness but from its relative lack of civilization, at least compared to the Imperium. The terms of the characters' contract require them to sign on as crew for the exploratory merchant ship Leviathan on a voyage of about six months.

This is a very interesting and unusual set-up for a Traveller adventure, one that's been relatively rarely used in the game's history. One would think, given the history of popular science fiction, that interstellar exploration of an unknown area of space would be a fairly common subject for scenarios. That's generally not been the case with Traveller, at least not within the official Third Imperium setting. A big reason for that, as that setting evolved over the years, it's been extensively – even exhaustively – mapped, with literally thousands of worlds placed, named, provided with stats, and often more. That's been a blessing and a curse for referees over the decades and remains so today. 

But, at the time Leviathan was written, that wasn't the case. The Third Imperium was then a very loose framework individual referees could shape to their own preferences and needs and the presentation of the Outrim Void demonstrates this. The worlds of the region are only briefly described and precisely what the characters will find as they explore them is largely left to the referee to fill in. Much like the Imperium itself, the Void is a loose framework for adventure, making it usable for all manner of encounters and scenarios. That's a big part of its appeal: it's a great tool for referees who want to do their own thing without having to invent an entire universe from whole cloth. 

Interestingly, Leviathan spends almost half of its 44 pages to information on the titular 1800-ton Leviathan-class merchant cruiser. We get not only keyed deckplans, but also game stats for the ship and its entire 56-man crew (not counting the player characters). Equally useful are 26 rumo(u)rs about the Outrim Void to entice the characters, as they explore. The five pages of library data serve a similar purpose. This is not an "adventure module" in the sense players of Dungeons & Dragons or other RPGs would recognize. Instead, it's a collection of aids to the referee to aid him in building a wide variety of situations that might arise as the characters travel from world to world throughout the Outtim Void. 

Leviathan is thus a reminder of an earlier period of the hobby, before gamers expected companies, in the words of OD&D's afterward, to do the imagining for them. Like The World of Greyhawk, Adventure 4 provides referees with an outline to which they are expected to add whatever details they needed or desired. And those details could vary widely from referee to referee and campaign to campaign rather than being bound up in a rigid canon, a concept that was, if not completely unknown, at least highly unusual in those days. By today's standards, then, Leviathan is something of a throwback and why I rate it so highly. 

Done with Dungeons & Dragons?

As I alluded to yesterday, I increasingly feel as if I don't have anything interesting left to say about Dungeons & Dragons. On some level, that's understandable. There are nearly 4500 posts on this blog and, though I haven't done an inventory of just how many of them are specifically about D&D, I think it's safe to wager that more than half of them – that's over 2000 posts – pertain to the game in some fashion. With that much virtual ink spilled over a single roleplaying game, even if it is the single most popular and successful one, what more is there for me to say?

Part of the problem, though a small one, is that it's been some time since I actually played any version of Dungeons & Dragons. I kicked the then-current edition of D&D to the curb in 2007, right before I began my OD&D journey and started this blog. I never played either 4e or 5e, as I was perfectly happy, when I wanted to play Dungeons & Dragons, to make use of one of the TSR editions of the game, whether the Little Brown Books, AD&D, or B/X – except that I rarely did so. It's ironic that this should be the case, since Grognardia began in large part as an exploration of the history of D&D and, by extension, the larger RPG hobby. 

Of course, one might reasonably ask, "But weren't you playing Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry and Lamentations of the Flame Princess and [insert your favorite retro-clone here]? Aren't they just D&D with the serial numbers filed off? Indeed, wasn't that the whole point in their creation?" Similarly, "Haven't spent the last decade playing Empire of the Petal Throne, whose rules are basically OD&D with some changes added?" For that matter, "Isn't Secrets of sha-Arthan, your personal science fantasy game, just like EPT, another variant on good ol' D&D? How can you say you haven't been playing Dungeons & Dragons?" 

These are all fair questions, but, as I noted, my not playing D&D is only a small part of the problem. A much bigger one is simply that, for whatever reason, I don't think I've had any genuinely original insights into the game in a very long time. Sure, I can – and do – mine old Dragon articles or TSR era products for little tidbits of trivia, but it's rare that any of this is insightful. They're mostly exercises in pure nostalgia, exactly the kind of thing detractors of the Old School Renaissance have been criticizing for years. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong in indulging in nostalgia from time to time, especially when your readership is made up overwhelmingly of middle-aged men who remember the glory days of our hobby. However, I don't want that to be the only thing this blog is known for.

2024 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of Dungeons & Dragons. My intention was to devote a lot of time to looking at OD&D and its rules and history. Here we are, almost at the end of the year, and I've done very little of that. I've started and deleted more posts about OD&D and D&D generally than I have about any other game or topic. In almost every case, I either discovered I'd already written about the topic before or that what I wanted to say was rather trite. In a moment supreme irony, even the topic of this post is one I broached only a couple of months ago. It really does seem as if, when it comes to D&D at least, I've done it all – or at least all that I find interesting enough to devote the time to write about.

This is why I'm now looking to spend more time writing about Traveller in the new year. It's a game I've played almost as long as Dungeons & Dragons and about which I am still very passionate. More than that, it's a game about which there's still a lot more I could say. The well of Traveller commentary is far from dry, whether I'm writing about its rules, its history, the Third Imperium setting, or my own involvement in the game's fandom or publications. I feel as if I could write about Traveller for a very long time and not repeat myself than I often do with D&D.

As always, I wrestle with the issue of just how interesting non-D&D topics are with many readers. My most popular posts continue to be those that touch on Dungeons & Dragons in some way, while those that stray farthest from it aren't nearly as well liked. It's a frustrating conundrum. Ultimately, though, I've concluded that, if I'm to continue writing the blog, I need to write primarily for myself, which probably means I'm going to dial down the number of D&D-centric posts – not eliminate, mind you, just reduce. To a very great extent, Dungeons & Dragons is the hobby, so there's no way I could remove coverage of the game entirely, even if I wanted to do so (which I don't). However, I do want to get back into writing insightfully about older games that interest me, hence the increase in Traveller content.

I assure you: I'll write about more than Traveller. As much as I adore the game, I don't think I could make it the subject of every post. Plus, Grognardia began as and remains a broader blog than any one game. The shift I'm making now and into next year is simply a rebalancing of focus rather than the wholesale rejection or closing off of other options. 2025 will certainly bring changes around here, but being "done with Dungeons & Dragons" in a definitive way is not one of them.

Crypt of the Undead

Did anyone own this game? I ask, because I very vividly remember the advertisements for it, like this one that appeared in issue #69 of Dragon (January 1983). Epyx was a very prolific publisher of early computer games, some of which I did actually played, but Crypt of the Undead was not one of them. From what I've been able to gather from online sources, it wasn't all that good. If so, that's disappointing, given how evocative this ad is. I'd much rather learn that it's a forgotten gem, so, if you owned or played it, I'd like to know more.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Charting the Classes"

One of the characteristics of what I call the Silver Age of D&D is an obsession with mathematics, using it for a wide variety of purposes, from determining the best way to model falling damage to proving if one's dice "be ill-wrought." In issue #69 (January 1983) of Dragon, Roger E. Moore offered up yet another new field for mathematical analysis: class "balance." Many old school gamers think worrying about such matters is a peculiarly modern notion, but it's not. For almost as long as I've played the game, I've known players who fretted over whether this class or that class was "overpowered" or "underpowered" compared to the others. It's a concern I've never really worried about myself, partially because I think all but the most egregious mechanical differences take a backseat to what actually happens at the table. Nitpicker and hair splitter I may be about many topics relating to D&D but this isn't one of them.

However, I'm hardly representative of anyone but myself and I expect that, when Moore wrote this article he was speaking on behalf a sizable number of gamers who had a sneaking suspicion that some AD&D character classes were better (or worse) than others -- and he was going to prove it. Moore's analysis hinges on comparing the classes according to accumulated experience points, not level. His thesis is that, by examining the relative strengths and weaknesses of each class at certain XP benchmarks, he might get a sense of which classes are more (or less) potent than others. In doing this, Moore discovers that, for the most part, AD&D's classes are reasonably balanced against one another, with two significant exceptions, along with a third point of discussion.

The first anomaly concerns druids, which Moore says are unusually tough compared to other classes. Compared to clerics, they advance very quickly and, more importantly, they continue to gain full hit dice all the way to 14th level, which also nets them more Constitution bonuses as well. Druids thus wind up being comparable to fighters at mid-levels and even surpassing them at higher levels. Consequently, he recommends increasing the druid's XP requirements to compensate. The second anomaly concerns monks, which Moore says are too weak in terms of hit points for a class that is supposed to fight hand-to-hand. He recommends that they have D6 hit points. Finally, Moore says -- along with nearly every AD&D player I knew back in the day -- that bard, as presented in the Players Handbook, needs to go. He recommends Jeff Goelz's bard as a replacement.

In the end, "Charting the Classes" is actually a very modest and limited analysis of AD&D's character classes and Moore's suggestions are all quite reasonable. I believe I even adopted his recommendation regarding druids, as I know from experience that they were more potent than they had any right to be. Still, I largely find the idea of "balance" between the classes a Quixotic obsession that's played a lot of mischief with D&D in its later incarnations. But it is, unfortunately, a long and deeply held concern of many gamers and I don't expect it to ever go away.

A Random Demon

Being a big fan of the humorous illustrations of Wil McLean, I thought I'd share this fun little comic from issue #20 of Dragon (November 1978). 

Starting with Classic Traveller

Toward the end of last month, I mentioned that Mongoose Publishing, the new owners of Traveller, had released a few 72-page Starter Pack for the game in PDF form. It's a good introduction to the current version of Traveller, giving newcomers a taste of both the rules and the kinds of adventure scenarios with which they can be used. 

However, not everyone's interested in Mongoose's edition of Traveller. Many people would prefer their introduction to the venerable science fiction roleplaying game be through the "classic" version published by Games Designers' Workshop between 1977 and 1986. In fact, since I got back from Gamehole Con, I've received several emails from people asking me my opinion about the best introduction to Traveller, specifically which edition of the rules and what supplements and adventures I'd recommend. Since this is a common question I'm asked, I thought it might be useful to write a post devoted to this topic.

My standard response to this question is to direct people toward The Traveller Book, which I've previously called the perfect RPG book. I stand by that assessment for all the reasons I mentioned in my original post, but one of the biggest is that it's still in print and available for only $20 from DriveThruRPG. For a 160-page hardcover book, that's an incredible bargain, all the more so, because it includes everything you'd ever need to play Traveller under one cover – rules, encounters, patrons, adventures, and an overview of the Third Imperium and the Spinward Marches sector. Truly, this is still probably the best way to familiarize yourself with Traveller.

That said, there are another couple of options worth considering. The first is Starter Traveller, originally released as a boxed set in 1983. This version of the game includes the same rules as The Traveller Book, but formatted as a 64-page book, The reason it's shorter is that all of the relevant charts relating to gameplay have been removed and placed in their own separate 24-page book. Also included with the set are two adventures, Mission on Mithril and Shadows, both of which had been previously released. 

Another possibility is the Classic Traveller Facsimile Edition, which presents the three little black books of classic Traveller as a single digest-size 160-page book. Like The Traveller Book, the Facsimile Edition is available in print from DriveThruRPG and it's even less expensive – $9! This version has the advantage of preserving the original layout of the 1981 edition, while the other two options have been updated and improved in various ways. This is the edition you'll want to buy if your interest in primarily in getting a sense of what the game like in its early days. (To clarify: this is not the original 1977 version, though it's very close).

Each of the three options above has its advantages and disadvantages, depending on what you're looking for. Overall, I continue to favor The Traveller Book as the best all-around intro to the classic game, but I have an affection for Starter Traveller, because it was the first edition I owned. And, as I've already said, the Facsimile Edition is best for those hoping to get a sense of what the game was like in its earliest stages, before the Third Imperium setting had begun to take over the line and become not merely an example of a setting but the setting for the game.

On the question of what to buy after obtaining the rules, I'd recommend avoiding any of the volumes with "Book" in the title, like Book 4: Mercenary or Book 5: High Guard – not because they're bad supplements but because they're very specific and unnecessary to all but the most dedicated players. Newcomers have no need of them. Instead, I'd recommend focusing on adventures, especially those I've included on my Top 10 lists of the same. All of them are still available in PDF form through DriveThruRPG and are good options if you want to get a sense of what classic Traveller is all about.

As I've noted several now in recent weeks, I'll be talking a lot more about Traveller here, since it's a game and a topic about which I remain quite passionate and about which I feel I still have interesting things to say – unlike Dungeons & Dragons, but that's a topic for an upcoming post ...

Questions and Answers

With the end of my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign in sight after nearly a decade of regular play, I've started thinking about not just its conclusion but what happens after the conclusion. Since nearly all of the players have agreed they'd like me to referee a new game, it's clear that our little circle of gamers will continue to meet each week after the final curtain falls on this particular campaign. And while the question of precisely what game we'll play next is an interesting one – I may post about that later – what I want to talk about now is something quite different.

House of Worms began in early March 2015. When I started it, I simply wanted to give Empire of the Petal Throne another whirl. I'd refereed the game a couple of time prior, but neither of those campaigns lasted very long. Considering how rich and compelling the world of Tékumel is, I felt I owed it to myself to give EPT another shot. I was quite fortunate that, this time, in the words of Col. John "Hannibal" Smith, it all came together and remarkably so. We're now just shy of the ten-year mark, which makes House of Worms the single longest continuous RPG campaign I've ever refereed by a wide margin.

At the start, though, I had no idea how long the campaign would last. Based on my past experiences with Tékumel, I had no expectation that House of Worms would last even a single year, let alone ten. As a result, I didn't plan too far ahead. I had some basic ideas of how to kick off the campaign and where it might go after that, but most of my ideas were pretty sketchy and that's being generous. I relied pretty heavily on player decisions to guide where the campaign went and what I developed for it. I tried to stay a few steps ahead of the players at all times, but, even then, I regularly created and discarded ideas at a fairly quick pace, responding in equal parts to what the players did and my own changing interests.

In my campaigns, I try to give the impression that the end results are what I'd had in mind all along. Of course, it's a parlor trick, misdirection in which I get the players to focus on what worked rather than what didn't. In the past, I've described my campaigns as being a lot like that scene in the movie Ghostbusters, where Bill Murray's Peter Venkman attempts to pull the tablecloth out from under the place settings on a table in the dining room. He fails utterly but is undeterred, boasting, "And the flowers are still standing!" even as everything else falls to the floor. That's what I do much of the time.

Despite that, I still do have ideas I purposefully introduce into the campaign and that prove important. It's not entirely an illusion. Some of these ideas bear fruit and some do not, while others morph into something I'd not originally intended. I imagine that's not a phenomenon unique to me. Any long running campaign is likely to include plenty examples of all of the above. In fact, I have a hard time imagining how a roleplaying campaign could go for more than a few weeks before it starts to diverge from what any of its participants consciously had in mind. That's one of the main joys of this form of entertainment: you never know where's going to wind up.

So, when House of Worms finally does end, I'm going to devote the next session to a wrap-up in which I'll encourage the players to ask my anything about the campaign and how it developed. What ideas did I originally have and how did they change? What was going on with some character or plot that was left dangling at the end? How much did their choices to zig when I expected them to zag derail what I might have had in mind? And so on. I greatly value transparency in most things, including RPGs. Letting the players see "behind the curtain," so to speak, is important, especially in a campaign as long-running as House of Worms. 

Needless to say, I'll do a post or two about the players' questions and my answers to them. I feel the process of refereeing is often too opaque and writing about what I did and why over the course of the last decade will undoubtedly be useful to other referees (and probably players as well). The end of House of Worms is a major event for all involved. Expect to see quite a few posts devoted to it in the weeks and months to come.

Retrospective: Duneraiders

My look at classic Traveller adventures and supplements continues this week with 1984's Duneraiders, a scenario I ranked as number 8 on my list of the top 10 scenarios published for the game. Like last week's Nomads of the World-Ocean, Duneraiders was written and illustrated by the Keith Brothers (with William H. Keith credited as its primary creator) for Gamelords. That's not the only similarity between the two adventures, as I'll soon explain. 

Before getting to that, I'd like to take a moment to talk briefly about Gamelords and its place in the history of both roleplaying and the hobby. Headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland (a suburb of Washington, DC), the company is probably best known today for Thieves' Guild fantasy products. For me, though, it was their many excellent Traveller releases that most captured my attention. 

Along with pre-Battletech, pre-Shadowrun FASA, Gamelords was a GDW-approved licensee, given a region of the Third Imperium setting to develop through their scenarios. This region included the Reavers' Deep sector, a frontier bounded by the Imperium, the Aslan Hierate, and the Solomani Confederation. The Deep features mostly independent worlds, some of them joined together into about a half-dozen small interstellar states that contend with one another and the aforementioned larger powers. It's a great setting for Traveller campaign, especially the particular style of Traveller campaign in which the player characters work primarily as mercenaries and agents provocateur.

In the case of Duneraiders, the characters find themselves on the backwater world of Tashrakaar, a desert planet in the Drexilthar subsector. While hanging out at its primitive, class-D starport, they witness a firefight on the loading dock. Duneraiders – human inhabitants of the open desert – are attacking a massive orecrawler with the obvious intention of destroying or at least severely damaging it. This is noted by bystanders as unusual behavior. Though the Duneraiders have no love for the mining companies that extract minerals from "the Flats" region of Tashrakaar for sale offworld, nearly all of their attacks are against the companies' operations, not permanent settlements. 

The adventure assumes the characters will inevitably intervene against the Duneraiders. In doing so, they also rescue a young woman, Arlana Jeric, whose father, Gill, is the owner and operator of Jericorp Mining, a small resource extraction business. It doesn't take long to realize that the "Duneraiders" are, in fact, goons in the employ of Jericorp's bigger and better capitalized rival, Dakaar Minerals, who are attempting to mask their involvement by disguising themselves as the desert dwellers. Unfortunately, the goons are successful in damaging the orecrawler, which was one of several owned by Jericorp. Without it operating, Jericorp may be unable to prove its claim on a stretch of the Flats believed to hold a motherlode of minerals.

That's when Arlana suggests that perhaps the characters would be willing to hire on as freelance troubleshooters for Jericorp, providing security for another orecrawler as its crew desperately attempts to locate the rich veins of ore they suspect are there. If the characters agree, this is where the adventure proper truly begins. The bulk of Duneraiders' 60 pages are devoted to describing the Orecrawler (with deckplans) and its 12-man crew, Tashrakaar and its ecology, and, of course, the titular Duneraiders and their culture. It's a very impressive package, providing the referee with everything he needs to run many sessions on this single planet of the Reavers' Deep sector.

If this sounds familiar, it is, because, in broad outlines, Duneraiders is another example of a very common classic Traveller scenario: the characters involve themselves in coprorate shenanigans on a backwater planet whose environment and native inhabitants are equal parts challenges and assets – just as we saw in Nomads of the World-Ocean. There's nothing wrong with this; it's a very fun set-up for an extended adventure. Furthermore, the Keith Brothers are very imaginative and each of the worlds presented in their work is genuinely unique. However, I suspect that a Traveller referee would be wise to avoid using too many of these scenarios in his campaign, lest they seem overdone. 

Duneraiders is a very good adventure about which I have fond memories playing rather than refereeing. That partly explains why I think so highly of it. The other is that there's something inherently compelling about the characters fighting against an exploitative corporation, aided by locals who better understand the hostile environment in which the battle must be fought. Unsurprisingly, Frank Herbert's Dune series was probably a major inspiration for this adventure, but I also expect the 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia also influenced the Keiths in imagining Tashrakaar and its inhabitants. Though not quite as good as Nomads of the World-Ocean, Duneraiders is a fine example of classic Traveller adventure design and well worth a look.

Oldies but Goodies!

One of the most vexing aspects of middle age is looking back on the past with hindsight and thinking, "If only I knew then what I know now." That's precisely the thought that entered my head when I saw this advertisement from the Armory in issue #69 (January 1983). 

Marvel at how inexpensive all these early TSR products were! Had I but known and been interested in this stuff, I could have really cleaned up, since the prices, even adjusted for inflation, are all quite reasonable, especially for the OD&D supplements. Now, as it turns out, I would eventually acquire a complete set of everything produced for OD&D for similarly low prices at the end of the '80s, so I can't complain too much. Still, ads like this make me wish I had access to a time machine.

The Articles of Dragon: "A Split Class for Nimble Characters: the Thief-Acrobat"

Issue #69 of Dragon (January 1983) is another one about whose articles I have very strong memories. The strength of my memories is bolstered, no doubt, by the issue's remarkable cover by Clyde Caldwell. Caldwell's an artist about whom my feelings are generally mixed, but I've nevertheless got a fondness for this particular piece, which, in some ways, encapsulates the vibe of the dying days of D&D's Golden Age. Consequently, I'll be returning to this issue several times in the coming weeks. 

This week, though, I want to look at Gary Gygax's "From the Sorceror's [sic] Scroll" column, in which he provides full details on the thief-acrobat "split class" that he first mentioned in a previous column. A split class is a specialization path for an existing class, in this case the thief. Provided he has the appropriate ability scores requirements (STR 15, DEX 16), a thief can, upon attaining 6th level, choose to devote himself to acrobatics as an outgrowth of his thievery – in effect, becoming a cat burglar or second story man in criminal parlance.

At the time of this article's publication, this was a comparatively unique concept, one that Gygax claims "has not been expressed before" and for which there is "nothing similar" in AD&D. I'm not entirely sure this is true. As I mentioned previously, the thief-acrobat reminds me a bit of the original concept for the paladin class, as found in Supplement I to OD&D. Likewise, the AD&D version of the bard, in which a character must first attain levels in fighter and thief before becoming a bard, is in the same ballpark in my opinion. Even so, the precise arrangement Gygax presents for the thief-acrobat isn't one we'd seen before.

I liked the idea of the thief-acrobat more in principle than in fact and my friends held similar views. Only one of them ever chose to pursue this split class and the player soon grew bored of playing him. That was probably the biggest problem with the thief-acrobat: it was very specialized and thus of limited utility. This is the kind of class that I could see thriving in, say, an urban, all thief campaign, where each character needs to distinguish himself from his fellow thieves. In a more traditional dungeon-based campaign, I think the thief-acrobat hold much less or appeal – or at least that's how my friends and I viewed it.

When it comes to the question of designing character classes, there are a couple of common approaches, neither of which is without its problems. Dungeons & Dragons began with only a few broad, archetypal classes, like the cleric, fighting man, and magic-user, but soon added many more, each one devoted to a narrower but nevertheless real archetype. AD&D opted for a larger list of available classes, while the D&D line kept to something closer to the original, narrower list. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages and I can easily defend them both.

Had Gygax remained at the helm of AD&D, we would certainly have seen more classes added to its roster, some of which, like the thief-acrobat, would have been quite narrow in their utility. That's not necessarily a problem, but it can add a lot of unnecessary complexity to the game, not to mention diluting the game's flavor. On the other hand, a goodly selection of classes can, if presented properly, increase the game's flavor, with each one revealing more about its explicit or implied setting and the sorts of activities characters are expected to undertake within it.

Whether the thief-acrobat succeeds in doing any of these things is an open question, hence my own ambivalence toward it. Even so, this article sticks in my mind, because, like others written by Gygax at the time, it offered a sneak peek into his evolving vision of AD&D. It was a really interesting time to be a fan of the game and I'm glad to have been around for it.

What the @!¢%*# is GURPS?

Though I was a fan of Ogre and Car Wars, both designed by the American Steve Jackson (not the British one), I didn't pay close attention to the other games his company was publishing. Consequently, when GURPS arrived on the scene in 1986, I largely paid it no heed, aside from the very peculiar advertisements I remember seeing in the pages of Dragon and elsewhere, like this one.

What's most immediately striking to me about this ad – aside from the painful lack of a question mark – is that nowhere does it explain what GURPS actually stands for. That's probably intentional, since the oddity of the game's title is memorable and might serve to pique interest in it. By the time I first played GURPS in the early '90s, it was already common knowledge that this was the Generic Universal Role Playing System, so it never really bothered me. But to a contemporary reader of Dragon? I wonder what he'd have thought.

Fantasy Lives!

I've written about Powers & Perils before, so I won't repeat myself here. I will, however, share this advertisement for it that I remember seeing in several gaming magazines in the mid-80s.

Going Home

I've now been refereeing my Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign for three years in real-world time, covering considerably less time within the game world – only about two and a half months. During that time, the character's unit, consisting primarily of American personnel trapped behind Warsaw Pact lines after the disastrous Battle of Kalisz, has attempted to find its way back to NATO-controlled territory. In the course of doing so, they've visited the Free City of Kraków, traveled partway down the Vistula by boat, tangled with marauders, the GRU, and rogue elements of the Red Army, not to mention Polish nationalist groups seeking to rebuild their country independent of both sides in the Cold-War-turned-hot. Consequently, the characters' journey hasn't always followed a straight line.

Recently, though, their travels took on an added level of urgency, thanks to their picking up a radio message announcing Operations Order OMEGA. This order, issued under the extraordinary authority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,  heralded the evacuation of all US personnel in Europe, civilian and military. The schedule of the withdrawal provides for the departure on November 15, 2000 of as many US personnel as possible from Bremerhaven, West Germany to Norfolk, Virginia, USA. Since departure is largely on a "first come, first served" basis, the characters have decided that they must make it to Bremerhaven well before November, since they have no desire to remain in Europe.

The last few weeks of the campaign have been devoted to the characters' determined efforts to head westward into Germany. This has proven difficult, as what remains of organized Warsaw Pact forces are still operating in that area and, needless to say, are vastly more powerful than themselves. Marauders of all kinds are another obstacle with which they must contend. To date, their efforts have been slow and careful, with the goal of avoiding contact with any enemy forces they can – as well as any remaining NATO forces that hope to enmesh them the final, failing stages of their own operations in Eastern Europe. In short, they simply want to go home.

While it'll likely still be many more weeks of play before they succeed in reaching secure NATO lines and make their way safely to Bremerhaven (assuming they do so, of course), I've nevertheless started thinking about what the characters will find once they cross the Atlantic and return to the USA. In the earlier GDW canon of the game, America is in chaos, with authority – where it exists at all – is divided between Joint Chiefs of Staff, who assumed control after the president, vice president, the cabinet, and a large portion of the Congress were killed, and a civilian government reconstituted under unusual and possibly illegal means. The conflict between "MilGov" and "CivGov," as they are colloquially known, plays a major role in the post-war history of the country.

In general, I like this conflict. I think it works well in a game in which the characters are active duty military personnel, who would be torn between their loyalty to the Army and their oaths to the Constitution. Unfortunately, I don't think the way GDW sketched out the conflict was very good, nor do I think they considered its impact on Twilight: 2000 campaigns set in America. So, I've been trying to give these matters a great deal more thought, with a goal of creating something that's both plausible and playable. In particular, I want to present a situation that's a genuine muddle without obvious good guys or bad guys, where the characters will have sort out the question of whom to support and why for themselves.

I'm actually looking forward to this next phase of the campaign a great deal. While in Poland, the characters never settled down for any length of time. Every time a situation arose that threatened to tie them down, they did the best they could to extricate themselves. As their commanding officer, Lt. Col. J.D. Orlowski, regularly reminds them, "We're US soldiers first and foremost." There was never much chance they'd abandon their duties to the Army, so it was only ever a question of when not if they'd make their way homeward. Now that they are, I can start thinking about the bigger picture and how the characters might make a lasting difference in the post-nuclear world. I'm quite excited by the prospect.

Retrospective: Nomads of the World-Ocean

I recently mentioned that I'd be devoting more space on this blog to coverage of Traveller. I thought a good way to start making good on that pledge is using my weekly Retrospective to draw attention to some of my favorite Traveller products, since Game Designers' Workshop published a large number of excellent adventures and supplements for the game. They're not all winners, of course, but I do think that Traveller had a higher ratio of good to bad support material than many of its contemporary RPGs.

A good example of what I'm talking about is 1983's Nomads of the World Ocean, written and illustrated by the incomparable Keith Brothers. I'd previously mentioned this adventure, the ninth published for Traveller, in my list of the Top 10 Classic Traveller Adventures, where it ranked as number 4. I still think that's a fair judgment, because, while very well-done, Nomads of the World-Ocean is also a very specific kind of scenario and, therefore, might not hold a wide appeal.

The adventure takes place on Bellerophon, a world in the Solomani Rim subsector. As its title suggests, Bellerophon is a water world whose only dry land are a few scattered islands and reef-flats exposed at low tide. Despite this, the planet boasts a population of over 2 billion humans, most of whom live on magnificent pylon cities that rise from the ocean shallows, thrusting two or three kilometers into the sky. There are also sea-bottom complexes and free-floating raft cities, as well as a considerable population of the titular nomads, who live aboard large ship-cities that follow herds of marine creatures called daghadasi that provide them with a livelihood.

Like many classic Traveller adventures, the characters come to Bellerophon as agents of an outside organization, sent to investigate the activities of a corporation that operates on the planet. In this case, the corporation, Seaharvester, is culling the population of daghadasi in order to obtain a chemical produced by the animals in their pre-reproductive phase. This chemical has proven to be the basis for an entirely new family of drugs that have the potential to wipe out bacteria, viruses, viroids, and even cancer cells. Unfortunately, a daghadasi carcass weighing a million tons yields only a few grams of the chemical. Worse, only about 10% of all slaughtered daghadasi produce more than trace amounts of it, necessitating massive, indiscriminate slaughter to procure this valuable new chemical.

When evidence of Seaharvester's actions became known, public opinion turned against them and its parent company, SuSAG, one of the Imperium's megacorporations, placed limits on their culling of the daghadasi. However, there's evidence that Seaharvester has been skirting these limits and it's now up to the characters to prove it. The adventure presents two options to involve the characters. One assumes they're working for an environmentalist group, the Pan-Galactic Friends of Life, while the other assumes they're employed by SuSAG itself, looking to save its reputation. 

What makes Nomads of the World-Ocean special isn't this set-up but the world of Bellerophon itself. Everything about it is described in loving detail, with plenty of hooks for interesting encounters, side adventures, and exploration. The Keith Brothers give us information on the pylon cities, Seaharvester's factory ships, the lifecycle and ecology of the daghadasi and, of course, the nomads themselves. As one might expect, the nomads receive the greatest amount of detail, since they hold the key to proving the continued malfeasance of Seaharvester. 

The nomads live on wandering ship-cities of 1000-5000 people. Their society and indeed livelihoods depend on the kilometers-long daghadasi, whom they sustainably hunt to provide not just food but also materials for the manufacture of other items that they trade. The nomads are a highly technological society. Their ship-cities, for example, make use of fusion power, as do the various smaller craft they use in the hunting of the daghadasi. Though they share a common language and culture, the nomads are divided into factions, based in part on their attitudes toward outsiders and the traditional ways of their people, which is now under threat from Seaharvester. A significant portion of the scenario involves the characters having to navigate nomad politics to achieve their own ends.

Nomads of the World-Ocean is a great example of something classic Traveller did very well: present a single world out of the 11,000 that make up the Third Imperium and showing that it alone is more than sufficient to occupy the characters' attention for weeks or even months of gameplay. One of the paradoxes at the heart of Traveller is that, as its name suggests, the characters are assumed to move around a lot from world to world and even sector to sector, never staying in one place for very long. Yet, each and every world they visit is – or can be – a setting in itself. Balancing the characters' ability to travel easily across Charted Space with giving each world its own unique appeal isn't always easy, which is why I so highly regard adventures like this one. Nomads of the World-Ocean is a terrific example of Traveller at its best.

"A Relaxation of the Rule"

There was an editor's note inserted into "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures" that I thought worthy of its own separate post. The article's author, Arthur Collins, describes the rules tweaks he recommends for each of the standard AD&D races in order to better reflect the Pleistocene Epoch. When he gets to elves, he says the following:

Elves would be +1 with spear and sling (instead of bow and sword, neither having been invented). While all races would have discovered ritual fermented or narcotic potations, to the elves would belong the specialty of making wine from wild grapes. Also, only wood elves would be around in Ice Age times.

Take special note of that last sentence: "Also, only wood elves would be around in Ice Age times." Appearing in italics immediately after it is the editor's note I mentioned above. It reads:

Since the Players Handbook says all player character elves are considered to be high elves, abiding by this stipulation would make it impossible for player-character elves to exist in this environment. If the issue must be resolved, DMs will have to either ignore the author’s recommendation or choose to allow a relaxation of the rule.

What a bizarre editor's note. Dragon was regularly filled with rules options and variants that ran counter to what was written in the Players Handbook and elsewhere and I can't recall seeing a note like this. Why here in particular? More to the point, it's a relatively minor detail in an article that is explicitly intended to alter the standard rules of AD&D to accommodate an unusual time period. I'm genuinely baffled that anyone would care that, yes, technically, by the book, wood elves are not allowed for use as player characters in 1982 (a rule that would be overturned in Unearthed Arcana just a few years later). 

There's a reason TSR and AD&D were viewed negatively in a lot of gaming circles back then. 

The Articles of Dragon: "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures"

 

Quite often, the articles from Dragon magazine that I most remember are not those I ever made use of in my own games, but those that I didn't. There are probably many reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that, even in my youth, when I led a life relatively free of responsibility, I still had limited time. There were only so many games I could play at any given time and, inevitably, there'd be lots of ideas I'd have loved to make use of but didn't simply because I lacked the time to do so. To be fair, that's still a problem for me, even today. Consequently, these articles occupy by the same space as "the one that got away" does in the minds of fishermen – a might have been that continues to play on the imagination even years later.

That's certainly how I feel about "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures," which appeared in issue #68 (December 1982). Written by Arthur Collins, whom I consider one of the great unsung contributors to Dragon during the early to mid-1980s, this lengthy article offers ideas and rules modifications for playing AD&D during the Pleistocene era. Collins explains that he was inspired by Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, but, for me, the touchstone for Ice Age tales will always be Manly Wade Wellman's Hok the Mighty, which I first encountered in old copies of Fantastic my local library kept alongside issues of other SF and fantasy magazines.

For years, I'm not certain I could have explained exactly why I found the idea of Ice Age adventuring so compelling. Rereading the article in preparation for writing this post, though, I now think I understand it. For lack of a better word, the Ice Age is post-apocalyptic setting – not in the sense as it's usually meant, of course, but it's nevertheless a setting in which humanity (and other intelligent races) must struggle to survive in a very hostile world. Perhaps because I've never really lacked for anything in my life, I have a powerful fascination for settings in which characters have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or how they'll shelter themselves against merciless Mother Nature.

Collins spends a lot of time discussing the challenges of living during the Pleistocene, particularly when it comes to food. For example, he offers calculations on just how much game and grains a small tribe of Ice Age would need to gather during the course of a single year to stave off malnutrition. He even goes so far as to translate the meat into hit dice in order to quantify it in a way that makes sense within the context of AD&D. I have no idea how well his calculations would hold up to rigorous scrutiny, but they serve a very useful, practical purpose for referees and players alike, which is honestly what I want in an article like this. 

Collins also includes information on braving the weather of this period of history, though he doesn't go into quite as much detail as did David Axler in his "Weather in the World of Greyhawk." He devotes far more space to imagining what the standard AD&D races and monsters would be like in the Pleistocene world, which makes sense, I think. The key to articles like this is in providing enough new and variant rules to make the setting/time period feel distinct but not so many that employing them in play seems daunting. I feel Collins struck the right balance overall, though I do wish he'd take the opportunity to write a bit more about just what Ice Age adventures and campaigns might be like rather than just how they differ from more conventional AD&D play.

I'll conclude by saying that another aspect of this article that likely appealed to me as a young man was that it dared to stray even a little from the default faux medieval setting of Dungeons & Dragons (and indeed of fantasy more generally). While I was and remain a fan of using the Middle Ages as inspiration, I do find myself wishing gamers would occasionally try something else occasionally, whether based on a real world historical period or something completely imaginary. Fantasy need not be so cramped in its vision.

"Roleplaying Games Aren't About Roleplaying"

Some of you are no doubt familiar with Ben Milton's Questing Beast YouTube channel, which is largely devoted to reviewing recent old school(ish) RPG products. Every now and then, though, Ben also posts videos in which he muses about an aspect of roleplaying games that interests him. His newest video belongs to this latter category and somewhat provocatively proposes that "roleplaying games aren't about roleplaying." Here's the video for those of you who haven't seen it. The video's not long and is well worth your time.

For the most part, I agree with Ben's position, in large part because I've observed what he's talking about in various campaigns I've refereed and played in over several decades. Broadly speaking, it's been my experience that there are two approaches to playing a character in an RPG campaign. 

1. The first approach is closest to what I suspect most of us instinctively imagine when we think of "roleplaying" – a kind of acting, in which the player speaks as his character and identifies with him by saying things like "I attack the orc" or "I check the wall for secret doors."
2. The second approach is much more distant, in which the player treats his characters almost as a token or playing piece, as in a boardgame. "My character attacks the orc" or "My character checks the wall for secret doors." 
3. There's also is a middle ground between these two, with the player vacillating between each extreme, depending on the circumstances.

What I find interesting is that, when I'm acting as the referee, I tend to switch between the two approaches as well. For example, in my House of Worms campaign, there are non-player characters I consider important and whom I fully roleplay, speaking in-character and giving them unique mannerisms. Less important NPCs, like Sákbe road guards or shopkeepers, don't warrant this sort of treatment and they're closer to the "token" approach. I switch back and forth between these two approaches freely, often within the same session, and it's never really been a problem. The players understand and accept what I'm doing without any difficulty.

That said, there are occasions when an NPC takes on a life of his own, almost completely against my will. I'll create this character, intending for him to be unimportant or insignificant, and then – somehow – he becomes more than that, right down to having his own unique voice. As a general rule, even when I've got a strong idea of what a non-player character is like, I don't do funny voices. I'm not an actor and, truth be told, I feel self-conscious about engaging in that kind of play. Despite this, sometimes an NPC will simply start speaking through me, funny voice and all. It's not common, but it happens often enough that I thought it worth mentioning.

 All of this is to say that, as a pastime and entertainment, roleplaying is pretty strange. There's no single right way to approach it. Moreover, it's quite possible, probably even, that not all of the people involved in an RPG campaign might be playing it the same way. Indeed, some people might even change how they play it from session to session or even within the same session, shifting between the two approaches I outlined above. For a game, that's downright unusual, since, as Ben points out in his video, most games require that the participants are engaging with it in the same or very similar ways. RPGs are not like that and I think that's fascinating.

(I suspect I'll have more to say about this topic, but I think this is a good starting point to begin the discussion.)

Retrospective: Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures

I'm a sucker for historical fantasy – or even just fantasy that's heavily inspired by a particular historical period, society, or culture. That's one of the reasons I so eagerly awaited the release of Oriental Adventures in 1985: I saw it as an opportunity for Dungeons & Dragons (or AD&D) to finally present monks and ninjas and samurai within a more suitable context than the riotous goulash in which the game has existed since its inception. In my experience, most (A)D&D players never cared about this as much as I did, even back in the day, but such concerns grew increasingly important to me, especially during my teen years.

Consequently, when TSR announced that it'd be giving the Oriental Adventures treatment to the myths, legends, and folklore of the Middle East, I was pretty excited. Though Bulfinch's Mythology didn't include a section on these tales, I was nevertheless quite familiar with the stories of A Thousand and One Nights, not to mention the charming films featuring Sinbad the Sailor I'd seen as a child. And course D&D had long included monsters like the djinn, efreet, ghoul, and roc, in addition to the flying carpet and ring of wishes, all of which have their origin in Middle Eastern mythology.

Entitled Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures, this 158-page softcover was written by Jeff Grubb with the assistance of Andria Hayday. Grubb was a powerhouse designer at TSR at this time, having previously created Marvel Super Heroes, shepherded the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set to publication, and conceived Spelljammer, among many other influential projects. He brings the same imagination and enthusiasm for Al-Qadim that he did for its predecessors, resulting in a book of which I remain very fond, despite certain shortcomings. 

In the book's introduction, Grubb acknowledges that Arabian Adventures takes inspirations from three different versions of Arabia. The first is the Arabia of history, whose people, culture, and history spread from the Atlantic Ocean to India as a result of the Islamic conquests starting in the 7th century. The second is the Arabia of myth and legend. Finally, there is the Arabia of Hollywood, like the aforementioned Sinbad movies. Of the three, the second and third are the most important to Al-Qadim, which is not intended to be historically or culturally accurate but is, echoing the foreword to OD&D, "strictly fantasy."

Like Oriental Adventures before it, Arabian Adventures is not a stand-alone game but rather a supplement to AD&D, then in its second edition. Its purpose is to provide new and alternative rules for use with 2e rather than being complete in itself. Thus, for example, we get a variety of new character kits, as well as new equipment, nonweapon proficiencies, and spells. All of these are intended to differentiate the inhabitants of Zakhara, the Land of Fate, from those coming from more Western European-inspired locales, just as OA had done for the peoples of Kara-Tur. Al-Qadim is decidedly not generic in its presentation, but instead places everything within a very specific cultural and social context derived from the three sources Grubb mentioned in his introduction.

By and large, the end result is excellent, better in some ways than Oriental Adventures in my opinion. The character kits – a concept that didn't exist at the time OA was published – do a very good job of tailoring AD&D's existing character classes for an Arabian-inspired setting. While most of them are interesting and flavorful, the ones I most liked were those that covered roles uncommon or unknown in other settings, like the barber, beggar-thief, and merchant-rogue. Likewise, the new spells and proficiencies went a long way toward making a Zakharan character feel distinct from his counterparts in other realms.

Where Al-Qadim falls down is its being branded with and tied to the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. This is not the fault of Grubb or Hayday, nor does it strongly weaken the quality of their work. In the early 1990s, TSR was very keen on tying all of its AD&D products to one or more of its existing settings. Since the Realms were TSR's "go-to" AD&D setting, the company plugged almost everything into it, including Zakhara (just as had previously been done with Kara-Tur). It's a pity, because I think Zakhara would have been much more interesting had it simply been its own thing, divorced from the rest of TSR's AD&D settings of the time.

One way that this impacts Arabian Adventures in a negative way is that we don't get any unique demihuman or nonhuman playable races. All the standard AD&D races, like dwarves, elves, and halflings, are present in Zakhara and, aside from the usual game mechanics associated with them (ability bonuses, special abilities, etc.), they're really little different from Zakharan humans, sharing the same customs, beliefs, and so on. There's nothing strictly wrong with this approach, but Oriental Adventures gave us several new nonhuman races to play and I think doing so went a long way toward making Kara-Tur feel distinct. I would have liked to have seen the same for Al-Qadim.

The other "flaw" in Al-Qadim is that it's pretty clearly meant to be an alternate Players Handbook. Unlike Oriental Adventures, there's not much in the way of referee material included in this book. There are no new monsters or magic items, for example, and while both those omissions would eventually be dealt with in follow-up products – several, in fact! – their lack in this book was something I felt pretty keenly at the time. I would have preferred something a bit more expansive in its content, but, as I said at the beginning of this post, Arabian Adventures isn't a stand-alone product and, given TSR's approach to publishing AD&D at the time, there was probably little to no chance it would have included such material when it could more profitably be sold in later releases.

All that said, I really like Al-Qadim and regret that, like so many other AD&D products with which TSR flooded the market in the '90s, I never got the chance to make much use of it. One of my friends was a big fan of the line and purchased a lot of the later material, including the Land of Fate boxed set. From what I could tell, all of the setting's support material was of a very high quality – imaginative and fun, with plenty of great ideas to aid the Dungeon Master in refereeing his very own version of A Thousand and One Nights. It's one Second Edition's better supplements and deserves more love than it generally gets.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Weather in the World of Greyhawk"

Issue #68 (December 1982) of Dragon was the first issue I ever received as part of my subscription to the magazine, though I'd read it nigh-religiously for some time beforehand. Due to an error on the TSR periodicals department, I received two copies of every issue for the next twelve months, one addressed to me at my actual address in Baltimore, Maryland and the other addressed to me in Baltimore, Mississippi, though the zip codes were the same for each (which is why they both arrived in my mailbox). Having two copies was quite useful to me, since it gave me the freedom to chop up and otherwise disassemble one copy while keeping the other pristine for my collection.

In any event, issue #68 included an article by a writer called David Axler entitled "Weather in the World of Greyhawk." Though presented as an unofficial supplement to The World of Greyhawk, the article was eventually canonized by being included in the 1983 boxed set version of the setting. Axler's article was a well-done early example of what would become a staple of Silver Age Dragon articles: a system for introducing "realism" into one's campaign. In this case, it was weather that got the "realistic" treatment, with tables for determining temperature, precipitation, and cloudiness, in addition to discussions of lunar phases, high winds, and "special weather phenomena," such as wind storms and tsunamis.

In truth, Axler's rules are pretty simple to use and presented intelligibly so that even my 13 year-old self could use them with relative ease. And use them I did. Back in 1982, I was all about adding doses of "realism" into my AD&D campaign where I could and, since this article had done all the hard work for me, why wouldn't I use it? Eventually, though, I stopped doing so, because, easy though it might have been to use, I rarely found that knowing just how much rain had fallen or the effects of high humidity added much to my adventures. The extra "realism" serve no purpose other than satisfying my adolescent sense that a good DM should know these sorts of things about his campaign setting. I abandoned that way of thinking a long time ago and I don't think my campaigns have suffered for it.

Naked Sword

I saw this advertisement in issue #89 of Dragon (September 1984):

Since I can find no evidence of its existence, I assume that it never came out. Is that correct? Does anyone by chance know anything about this? From the scant information here, I can only assume that it was a warrior-centric counterpart to Thieves' Guild, but it's hard to say for sure.