Dungeons & Diplomacy

In light of my theorizing in my earlier post about the influence of Diplomacy on the development of Dungeons & Dragons, there's this paragraph from Jon Peterson's magisterial Playing at the World:

By the end of the 1960s, both Gygax and Arneson had long histories with Diplomacy; some of their exploits receive consideration in the later sections of this chapter. The influence of Diplomacy on Dungeons & Dragons is subtle, but not insignificant. In something of the same matter as Diplomacy, Dungeons & Dragons stipulates the existence of coalitions of players – that is, parties – but without in any way defining how players might ally and cooperate in a party.

Anyone interested in a more thorough examination of this topic should probably check out Peterson's book, which goes into far more detail than I ever could. Still, I think it's worth remembering that Gygax, Arneson, and their contemporaries were playing a wide variety of different wargames in the years leading up to the creation of D&D and all of them probably contributed in some way, often unconsciously, to the game that would ultimately be published in 1974. 

Boot Hill: Campaigns (Part II)

Boot Hill's section on campaigns continues with a brief aside about the maps included with the boxed set. Because I don't see anything especially worthy of comment in this section, I'm going to pass over it and move on to the much more relevant section devoted to "Campaign Time."

At the referee's discretion, campaign turns can be weekly or monthly or of any specified duration. Each turn, the players relate to the referee what their character's actions and undertakings will be, and the referee moderates the resultant occurrences. The gamemaster takes all actions into account, and relates the appropriate information on various happenings to the players as seen through the eyes of their characters.

When characters' actions are appropriate for moving the action to the tabletop, the time frame changes to the lower level, and the larger campaign's goings-on are suspended until the tabletop action is resolved. Once that is done, the rest of the whole moves on, with the results of the tabletop action reflected in the ongoing and ever-changing situation.

The mention of a "campaign turn" immediately caught my attention. From context, it would seem that the actions of such a turn are "high level" actions distinct from those capable of being adjudicated on the tabletop, like combat or movement. Unfortunately, there's no explicit discussion of the precise nature of these campaign actions, though one can somewhat intuit their nature from other discussions in this section. For example,

The roles and objectives assigned to the participants should be commensurate with the scope of the campaign. Thus, if the map covers a large area and the duration is expected to be several game years, players would represent major characters: large ranchers, outlaw leaders, sheriffs, Indian chiefs, cavalry commanders, and so on – each with many figures to operate or command. Objectives would likewise be broad. On the other hand, a campaign taking place in a small county with but a town or two would have participants cast in less grandiose roles and with smaller objectives – i.e., an outlaw's objectives might be to lead a gang of desperadoes into town, rob the bank, escape to a hideout, and lay low for a month before pulling another job.

Again, there are few specifics here and the specifics that are offered belong to the "small county" campaign and, even then, they strike me as the kind of thing that would be more likely to be played out on the tabletop than through a "campaign turn." 

The referee should keep copies of all starting statistics and changes made by all pertinent characters in the campaign, with special care taken for the player characters (who may also want to keep suitable records of their own). For example, the referee may inform each player at the start of the game as to his characters' cash on hand, equipment, animals, and possessions owned, hirelings/associates/friends, and so on. Thus, rancher Longhoop starts with $671 and a herd of 600 head of longhorns. During the course of the first couple of game months he hires three extra hands, makes a cattle drive which mysteriously picks up several hundred additional doggies along the way, and sells off the lot. At that point he could then have $9,004 and 325 head of cattle.

Orders for the actions of characters in each campaign turn can be given orally, but referees may wish to consider requiring written orders from each player to have a record of all desired undertakings.

I am absolutely awful when it comes to campaign record keeping. I frequently rely on my players to remind me of many details, which is why I think the idea of keeping written records of campaign actions is probably a good idea. I'm reminded once again of Diplomacy, whose play demands written orders from all the players each turn. Indeed, I continue to suspect that, for all the talk of the importance of Braunstein and its derivatives, Diplomacy may well be an equally important (and overlooked) component in understanding how early RPG campaigns were played. 

David A. Trampier and David C. Sutherland III Memorial Art Contest

Boot Hill: Campaigns (Part I)

Boot Hill devotes several pages in the middle of its 32-page rulebook to campaigns.

The full flavor and scope of BOOT HILL comes out in campaign play, with numerous players vying, through the use of their game characters, for a wide assortment of goals and objectives. The interplay of personalities (on both sides of the law) can be fascinating and fun, and a well-run campaign with a competent gamemaster and a good assortment of players will be a satisfying endeavor for all. Campaigns should be tailored to suit the preferences of the players, but some general guidelines are here. All campaigns require an impartial referee. 

 None of this is new. The game's introduction already covered a lot of the same ground. Nevertheless, I personally find it gratifying to see yet another suggestion that roleplaying reaches its zenith in campaign play – and by "campaign play," the author means an open-ended and player-directed series of sessions with a shared continuity, overseen by "an impartial referee." There's no mention here of "story" or "plot," just "players vying ... for a wide assortment of goals and objectives." 

The person taking the role of gamemaster is a pivotal figure, for it is her or she that will shoulder the principal responsibility for all aspects of play. The referee should thus be a person who has a good working knowledge of the rules.

This is just common sense.

A referee should be impartial, and should moderate the action without interfering in the course if might take. The referee will be in charge of processing and revealing all information as the campaign goes on, and this "limited intelligence" aspect will greatly add interest, since not every character will be aware of all that is happening. 

This conception of the referee is clearly derived from miniatures wargaming, which only makes sense, as the entire hobby of roleplaying arose out of it. More interesting to me is the statement that the referee's primary job is not to direct the action of the campaign – that's the purview of the players – but to "moderate the action without interfering in the course it might take." That's very different than the way a referee, game master, or Dungeon Master is generally conceived of nowadays (and, if I'm honest, most of the time that I've been playing RPGs).

The gamemaster provides background for the players, and the scope of the campaign will be determined by the referee's judgment. The referee's decisions will be important in many instances, and the players must accept the judgments accordingly. 

The referee, then, establishes the status quo ante for the campaign, including its locale, major NPCs, conflicts, etc. Much of the rest is left to the players.

Two campaign scenarios are included in this booklet – one which is quasi-historical, and another which is completely fictional. These can provide the beginnings of a campaign in themselves, or an independent campaign can be started "from scratch," if desired. In any event, players can make up their own roles in such settings by rolling the dice to determine their character's abilities and then choosing a personal role or occupation. The objectives of each character can then be outlined by the referee, and these are the goals each will seek as the campaign goes on. 

The two campaign scenarios referenced above both take place in the fictional Promise City at different periods in history (1876 and 1890). The earlier of the two scenarios is "quasi-historical" in that it involves a gambling competition that attracts famous historical gamblers to the town, like Johnny Ringo and Bat Masterson. Otherwise, however, it's entirely fictional in nature, as is the later 1890 scenario. Notably, this paragraph seems to suggest that it's the referee rather than the players, who decides the objectives of each character. I suppose this might only apply in circumstances where the referee is working from a pre-generated scenario, such as those in the Boot Hill rules, but it's a bit unclear. Ultimately, though, what's most important is that campaign play proceeds according to the principle that characters have "goals" that they will seek and the bulk of the campaign's action derives from their attempting to do so.

Retrospective: Ultima

Regular readers will recall that, growing up, I did not have a personal computer. That's why I spent so much time at the homes of friends who did. Indeed, it was only because of those friends that I was able to play such foundational computer roleplaying games as Telengard, Wizardry, and Temple of Apshai. Even in college, I didn't own a computer, so I continued the practice of using others' computers until the dawn of the 1990s, when I finally entered the modern world and at last got one of my own. 

During my college years, there were two CRPGs I remember playing with great enthusiasm: Pool of Radiance and Ultima – or Ultima I as it had been rebranded in 1986. Ultima first came out in 1981, but I don't believe I was aware of it at the time. In any case, I never had the chance to play it until several years later, well after it had spawned a series of sequels. Consequently, everything I'll say in this post pertains to the 1986 version, published by Origin Systems. If there are any significant differences between it and the earlier version(s) of the game, please let me know in the comments.

Like so many early computer games, Ultima had an interesting instruction manual with some impressive artwork. The manual laid out the premise of the game as well as the parameters under which it operates. It does so almost entirely as if it were a document being read by the player's character. Consequently, the information contained within (mostly) lacks any reference to game mechanics or things that the character would not know. Some of it is even written as if an unnamed person is speaking directly to the character, who is addressed as "Noble One" and assumed to be the hero who will save the realm of Sosaria from the depredations of necromancer, Mondain.

Like most computer RPGs, then or now, Ultima owes a lot to Dungeons & Dragons in its overall conception and gameplay. However, unlike, say, Wizardry, it does not include the possibility of controlling an entire party of adventurers, which is something that was added in its sequels. Instead, the player controls a single character, whom he creates before starting his adventure. A character has six attributes that are nearly identical to those in D&D. Likewise, the races available are familiar ones – human, elf, dwarf, and bobbit (halfling). The same is true for the professions, consisting of fighter, cleric, wizard, and thief. In short, it's all pretty standard stuff and nothing that someone who'd been playing pen-and-paper RPGs would have found the slightest bit unusual.

In addition to being a foul necromancer, the aforementioned Mondain is also invulnerable to attack, thanks to his possession of a powerful artifact, the Gem of Immortality. Finding a way to circumvent the effects of the gem is thus the character's main quest throughout Ultima. To succeed in this quest, the character must travel throughout the realm, interact with NPCs, and explore dungeons and other locales. In the process, the character will acquire wealth, better gear, and experience points, allowing him to become more powerful. Again, it's all pretty standard stuff that we've seen many times before.

The "standard" nature of all this was simultaneously an asset and a drawback to Ultima, at least from my perspective at the time. I appreciated that it was pretty easy to pick up and play. Having played D&D for some time beforehand, there was very little in Ultima that surprised me. On the other hand, there weren't really any elements of the game that wowed me. I might have thought differently, if I had encountered it upon its original release in 1981. By the time I discovered it, in 1988, I'd already seen a number of other games that did what it did, often better. For example, Pool of Radiance seemed to me to be a much better implementation of the core concepts of tabletop RPGs in digital form – and it used the official AD&D rules to boot!

Of course, I still played Ultima and enjoyed myself. Even in the midst of my college studies, I still had a lot of spare time to waste on computer games. Consequently, I don't rate Ultima quite as highly as it probably deserves. Certainly, the game went on to become a very successful and influential CRPG series. To this day, I still know lots of people with very fond memories of the game and its sequels. Meanwhile, its spin-off, Ultima Online, released in 1997, was one of the first truly successful massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (or MMORPGs – a term coined by Richard "Lord British" Garriott, the creator of Ultima). For that reason alone, its place in the history of computer RPGs is assured.

The Articles of Dragon: "Robots – Mechanical Sidekicks for Traveller Players"

Stop me if you've heard this one: Traveller is probably my favorite roleplaying game. Although I've played it far less often than I've played Dungeons & Dragons, GDW's game of science fiction adventure in the far future remains my true love (and I say this even after having taken a stab at having created my own SF RPG). 

There are many reasons why this is the case and I could go on at some length enumerating them. Rather than do that here, I'll simply say that Traveller's main virtue is that, in its classic form, it's a versatile, easy to use set of rules that gives a referee nearly everything he needs to create his own planet-hopping sci-fi setting and keep it going for years. When I called 1982's The Traveller Book "the perfect RPG book" a few years ago, I meant it.

Even so, Traveller's approach to science fiction is quirky at times. There are numerous lacunae in its rules, such as, for example, the lack of laser pistols. While that particular omission never bothered me – I had Star Frontiers for that flavor of sci-fi – there was one area where I did feel as if Traveller had dropped the ball: robots. Until the release of Book 8: Robots in 1986, Traveller had no official rules for robots. Indeed, outside of the warbots employed by the Zhodani, there was scarcely a mention of robots at all within the canon of the game.

I felt the lack of robots in Traveller very keenly. At the time, I felt robots were an important, if not essential, aspect of spacefaring science fiction. Consequently, I was very happy to see Jon Mattson's article in issue #64 of Dragon (August 1982), "Robots – Mechanical Sidekicks for Traveller Players." In just six pages, Mattson provides fairly complete rules for designing and using robots in Traveller. His rules take inspiration from similar design sub-systems in Traveller, such as the starship construction system. This works to their advantage, since players of the game should already be familiar with the general framework on which he's riffing.

Obviously, a six-page set of rules cannot cover every possibility. There are plenty of areas that probably deserve expanded treatment (like the use of robots as player characters) or additional options beyond those Mattson includes. However, that's a minor criticism. The genius of the article is not that it's comprehensive, but that it provides a structure from which a referee could work in his own campaign. Because there was nothing comparable in GDW's materials, this was a godsend, which is why the articles remains a standout for me in this issue of Dragon.

So useful did I find this article that it achieved a status reserved only for a handful of others: I photocopied it and included it in my GM's binder. Like a lot of gamers in those days, I had this large binder in which I kept my notes, hand drawn maps, character sheets, and other papers I felt important enough to carry around with me, like Xeroxed copies of articles from Dragon and other gaming magazines. I regret that I no longer have that binder, if only to see what articles and other bits of ephemera I deemed valuable enough to keep inside it.

Another reason "Robots" looms large in my memory is the full-page artwork that accompanied it – by Larry Elmore, no less! I think the illustration supports my contention that Elmore was better suited to science fiction than to fantasy. (It's also an inadvertently ironic piece in that it depicts large numbers of human workers involved in the manufacturing of robots, which fitting, given Traveller's own occasionally quaint notions of technological development.)

"Orcs, goblins & trolls prefer Grenadier figures ..."

Another memorable Grenadier Models advertisement, this one appearing at the back of issue #64 of Dragon (August 1982).

REVIEW: A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633

A True Revelation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633 (hereafter Disastrum) by Ezra Claverie may well be the definitive product for Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I say "may," because my assessment depends heavily on just you want out of an LotFP product. If what you're hoping for is a clever and, in the best sense of the word, modular adventure scenario you can easily drop into an ongoing old school fantasy campaign, Disastrum is probably not for you. If, on the other hand, you're looking for looking for an imaginative and well-presented event-based scenario/hexcrawl set in 17th century Virginia, then Disastrum is exactly what you need.

Consisting of three clothbound A5-sized hardcover volumes, Disastrum gives an LotFP referee almost everything he – or should I say she, in keeping with the game line's style guide? – needs to run a lengthy and challenging scenario set in and around the Virginia Colony in the midst of an immense spatiotemporal accident caused by castaways from the Fifth Dimension. This accident has deformed both space and time, warping the landscape and its inhabitants, as well as creating portals to alternate times and realities. 

Anyone with prior experience of LotFP will immediately recognize a trio of familiar elements in Disastrum: a 17th century locale (Virginia in 1633), an incursion by nonhuman "aliens" (the Fifth Dimensional castaways), and the unnatural consequences of their presence (the Warp). Taken together, these elements are the foundation of many (though by no means all) of LotFP's best-known adventures, so much so that I think it's become something of a joke among LotFP fans: "Oh, no! Yet another invasion of historical Earth by beings from another dimension and whose very presence poisons our world and fills me with dread!" I bring this up, because, while true to some extent, these elements can nevertheless can still be used to great effect and so they are in Disastrum. 

Volume I is entitled Jamestown and Environs. At 96 pages, it provides useful information needed by the referee to begin the adventure, including an overview of the events that led to the Disastrum and a timeline of the Virginia Colony, from its founding in 1607 to 1633, when the scenario begins. What sets this volume apart from others of its kind is how practical it all is. For example, five pages are devoted reasons why the characters may have come to Virginia, each of which offers a different frame for subsequent events. There's also an overview of Jamestown, its buildings, and inhabitants, along with random tables for generating colonists, news/rumors, Scriptural citations, plantations, native villages, and more.

Random tables play an important role in Disastrum, as one might well expect, since a large part of the scenario involves traveling through the wilderness of Virginia. Volume I describes the terrain of the region, both natural and unnatural. The latter includes the Warp, where the effects of the Fifth Dimensional Incursion are strongest. For each region, there are keyed encounters, described in Volume II, as well as "omens and oddities" of various sorts – strange objects in the sky, objects falling from the sky, and "disastrumous hazards," which is to say, bizarre phenomena resulting from the Warp, such as gravity bubbles or time speeding up or slowing down. 

Volume II, Lo! New Lands, is the biggest of the three books at 192 tables, describing all twenty keyed encounters in Virginia and twelve alternate worlds or realities accessible through the Eye of the Warp. The keyed encounters vary in both length and strangeness. Some, like the Escapees' Camp, consisting of indentured servants and slaves who've used the Disastrum as an opportunity to flee their masters, are relative simple and normal. Others, like the Speaking Swamp or Factory Fungus, are given great detail and are exceedingly weird – products of five-dimensional beings attempting to interact with a three-dimensional world and only partially succeeding. All of the encounters are compelling, whether simply by presenting the players with an aspect of 17th century colonial life or by challenging their wits against a consequence of the Warp.

Descriptions of the twelve alternate realities, called "spacetimes," take up about half of Volume II. Like the keyed locations, they vary in length and strangeness, though all are fairly strange. For example, there is the Post-Ant Empire, a spacetime ruled by biomechanical ants that displaced the dinosaurs. There's also the City of the Crawling Blood, an alternate London overrun with a strange sickness and the Wilder Wilderness, an alternate Virginia populated with megafauna, among many more. All but one of these is a side trek, a place of interest and danger but without any larger significance to the scenario. However, the Corpse City of the Western Gate, located in 18th century China, is ground zero for the cosmic event whose repercussions are felt more than a century earlier and a hemisphere away in Virginia. It's here that the scenario climaxes, one way or the other, as the character contend with extradimensional beings whose activities have the potential to doom the Earth and everyone on it.

Volume III, Prodigies, Monsters, and Index, is 128 pages long and, as its title suggests, focuses on the strange and unusual effects of the Disastrum. Thus we get more than 60 new monsters, most of them unique (as Raggi intended). Many can be encountered in and around the Virginia Colony, but others are the inhabitants of the various spacetimes to which the characters may travel. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Volume III presents random tables to enable the referee to create his own "new people," the name used to describe the fabricated three-dimensional bodies of five-dimensional beings and whose appearances and properties are quite surprising. It's all wildly imaginative and, as I said above, practical. With these three volumes, the referee has nearly everything he needs to run a memorable and demanding weird fantasy adventure.

Disastrum is exceptionally well done. It's the Masks of Nyarlathotep of Lamentations of the Flame Princess, in that it takes all the usual ingredients of a LotFP adventure and sharpens and heightens them to such a high degree that, after playing this long, open-ended scenario, you'll feel as if you've done LotFP. There will undoubtedly be excellent LotFP adventures in the future, but Disastrum has, for me. crystallized the game's essence and unique take on fantasy in a way that will be hard to top. Thats not say it's perfect. The scenario has a lot of moving parts that put a lot of weight on the referee's shoulders, even with all the random tables and examples provided. In addition, the standard edition lacks the foldout hex maps included with the deluxe slipcase edition. The hex maps aren't absolutely necessary, but I imagine most referee's would find them useful. Likewise, all editions (with the exception of the PDF version) are pricey, which might be an impediment to some prospective purchasers.

In the end, none of these mild criticisms should be held against A True Relation of the Great Virginia Disastrum, 1633, which is as close to a definitive LotFP product as you're likely to get. It's imaginative, well-written, and well-made and, despite its length, I found myself reading it almost compulsively. The combination of a nicely realized historical setting and fantastically weird encounters and situations seemed, to me, to be a near-perfect fulfillment of what Lamentations of the Flame Princess has, in recent years, striven to be. It's truly excellent. My only regret is that I don't presently have a place in my gaming schedule to run this adventure. I hope others who buy and read it will be more fortunate than I.

Western Gunfighter

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

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

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

Boot Hill Introduction (Part III)

The introduction to Boot Hill continues. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He makes it sound so easy!  

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

Travel(ler) Times

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retrospective: Alien Module 2: K'Kree

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ElfQuest Returns

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Things That Go Bump in the Night

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

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

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

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

Rutskarn's Gambit

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

Boot Hill Introduction (Part II)

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

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

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

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

I very much agree with this, of course. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

25 Years Ago Today ...

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

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

Retrospective: Ballots & Bullets

Since Boot Hill has unexpectedly caught my interest this month, I thought it might be interesting to take a look at one of its better adventure modules, Ballots & Bullets. Written by David James Ritchie – whose name I most strongly associate with the second edition of Gamma World, as well as some of the Blackmoor modules for D&D – this "special campaign module" first appeared in 1982, just as TSR was transitioning between one era in its history and another. That makes Ballots & Bullets notable on multiple levels and, therefore, a worthy subject of examination.

Like most TSR modules of its era, this one consists of a 32-page staple-bound booklet wrapped inside a cardstock cover. The inside of that cover contains a map of Promise City, Arizona in the year 1882. The map is designed to be used in conjunction with the foldout map included in the Boot Hill boxed set, which forms the central "hub" of Promise City. There are over 200 locales on the combined map and each is described in at least a couple of sentences in the module's booklet. 

Though he's not mentioned in the credits, Jim Holloway provides all the art for Ballots & Bullets, including its front and back covers. Though there aren't as many individual pieces in this module as there might be in most TSR modules of the era, what art there is plays to Holloway's strengths as an illustrator of dubious, unscrupulous, and faintly ridiculous roughnecks. In many ways, Holloway is the perfect artist to depict the Old West, especially as depicted in a roleplaying game. I feel compelled to point out that many of the characters in Holloway's pieces are based on TSR employees at the time, including Holloway himself. I suspect that's also true of rustler Mongo Bailly, who features on the module's back cover, but, if so, I'm not sure which staffer he's based upon. If anyone knows his identity, I'd be grateful.

Making off with the ballot box ...

Slightly more than half of the module – 18 pages – consists of the "Guide to Promise City" and "The People of Promise City." I alluded to the former earlier: it describes every locale on the map, from the Great Western Boarding House and Cafe to the County Assay Office to the Silverbell Mining Company and more. Some locales are detailed more extensively than others, but all provide information not just on the locale itself but also on the NPCs found there. "The People of Promise City" is an alphabetical listing of nearly all 250+ people who live there, along with their Boot Hill game statistics. Also listed is each person's associated faction within the town, how committed he is to that faction, and whether or not he is a registered voter (or candidate).

These factions are important and play a part in "The Election Campaign," which provides the backbone of the module. Promise City is preparing to hold its first election after its town charter was approved by the Territorial Governor of Arizona. The election is three months in the future and two factions face off against each other in the upcoming contest. The first is the Law and Order Faction, supported by merchants and land owners, who want an end to the lawlessness of Promise City. The second is the Cowboy faction, supported by miners and prospectors, who believe the Law and Order faction is just a front for Big Business. The player characters enter Promise City just as things are heating up.

The characters can become involved in a variety of ways, supporting – or undermining – one of the factions for their own purposes. There are discussions and guidelines for handling canvassing the town, putting up campaign posters, running rallies, heckling the opposition, and outright bribery, not to mention spreading rumors and hiring goons to intimidate the voters. The characters can likewise make use of newspapers, churches, and endorsements to advance their chosen cause. At the end of it, there's voting day itself, for which the module also provides rules to adjudicate. Whichever faction wins will impact the subsequent development of Promise City and the fortunes of its inhabitants.

I have never made use of this module, so I can't rightly say how well its contents work in play. I can only say that I found the scenario presented and the information provided to support it quite compelling. In some ways, it reminded me of Trouble Brewing for Gangbusters, a favorite module of mine from my youth and one I used extensively. Despite some surface level similarities, Ballots & Bullets is less a description of Promise City – though it is that – and more of an outline for an entire campaign set during a major event within the city. It's also a great example of the kind of thing that, according to the game's introduction, you're supposed to do with Boot Hill. I found it very compelling and wished I had the time and players to give it a proper whirl.

It's been a long time since I've read a module that made me feel that way. Make of that what you will.

Would you trust this man with the future of Promise City?

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Pages from the Mages"

Ed Greenwood catches a lot of grief among a certain segment of the old school community, usually for things for which he was not himself responsible. Perhaps these old schoolers associate his Forgotten Realms campaign setting with 2e and 2e with the regime that ousted Gygax or ... something. It's always been rather unclear to me what crimes against gaming Greenwood was supposed to have committed, especially when my earliest memories of his name are indelibly connected to articles like "Pages from the Mages," which appeared in issue #62 (June 1982).

The article presents four "long-lost magical manuals" – the tomes of powerful and famous magic-users, each of which is unique in some way. All four books are given a name, a description, and a history in addition to a list of their contents. Every one of these entries made these librams much more interesting than just a simple catalog of, say, the spells they contained or the magical effect they conferred upon their reader. Thus, we learn that the eponymous author of Mhzentul's Runes was slain at the Battle of the River Rising and that Nchaser's Eiyromancia contains not one but two heretofore unknown spells.

Greenwood's articles always impressed me with their feigned depth. That is, they seemed to be part of a rich and complex setting, whose every little nook and cranny had been detailed beforehand so that he could just pluck them from his mind and present them whenever required to do so. As I learned later, this is a parlor trick, one that I learned to perform in time, too, but it doesn't make me any less fond of "Pages from the Mages" or its later sequels. In the span of comparatively little space, Greenwood provided readers with not only some new magical items to insert into their own games but models for how to make almost any magic item a locus of information about a campaign setting and, by extension, an inspiration for adventure.

Flighty Elves and Bearded Dwarven Ladies

The astute among my readers might have noticed that the Boot Hill advertisement I shared earlier today appeared in the August 1979 issue of Dragon, the same month that the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was released. To mark this occasion, issue #28 includes an article in which TSR employees who had even a small hand in the completion of the DMG offer their opinions on the finished product. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the article, some of which might make good fodder for a future post. For the moment, though, I want to draw your attention to the comments offered by Jean Wells:

The section to which Wells refers is actually entitled "Player Character Racial Tendencies" and begins at the bottom of page 15 and continues on to page 16. Here's the section about elves that she so disliked:

It's pretty innocuous stuff in my opinion. Gygax explicitly calls his descriptions "guidelines" Moreover, he points out that many other factors, such as alignment, will have an impact on a character's personality. For myself, this description of elves is perfectly fine, if somewhat different than the one that was probably already common in 1979. The same holds for his description of dwarves:

The question of whether female dwarves have beards in Dungeons & Dragons is much an ancient one, as evidenced by the last sentence of Wells's comments. In truth, I have no strong feelings about it myself, but I do find it fascinating the strong emotions, pro and con, that this rather esoteric dispute elicits in some corners of the hobby. 

Now Available from Your Favorite Game Dealer

Since I'll be looking more closely at Boot Hill over the next couple of weeks, I thought it might be useful to share this advertisement for the game, which appeared in issue #28 of Dragon (August 1979). 

With luck, you can read the two paragraphs above, because they make no mention of campaign play and indeed suggest that Boot Hill is anything more than a roleplaying game as the term had come to be understood at the time. Even though my friends and I never did much with the game beyond run gunfights and similar mayhem, we nevertheless considered it an RPG little different from others available at the time (except perhaps that its rules were thinner). I doubt we were alone in this.

Boot Hill Introduction (Part I)

One of the (many) fascinating things about Boot Hill is that its presentation is quite different from TSR's other RPGs of similar vintage, like Dungeons & Dragons or Gamma World. Consider what the introduction to the 1979 second edition has to say on the matter:

BOOT HILL is designed to function as a game in two ways – as a set of rules for man-to-man gunfighting action, and as an outline guide for setting up quasi-historical or fictional role-playing campaigns for an ongoing series of events. Although in the first context alone BOOT HILL will provide many hours of exciting action, it is in the latter way that the game fully reveals all its enjoyable possibilities – as player characters pursue their individual goals and interact with each other in a continuing game situation. With a good mix of interesting players and a competent gamemaster/referee there will certainly be no lack of action – as sheep ranchers and cattlemen pursue outlaws and rustlers, unscrupulous businessmen expand their holdings, hostile Indians threaten and much more.

This is an important paragraph. The most immediate statement of note here is that Boot Hill is intended to be used in two ways, first as a traditional RPG focused on a small group of characters and second as a vehicle for campaign play in which characters and groups of characters contend with one another. Equally notable, in my opinion, is the statement that Boot Hill "fully reveals" itself through campaign play, which is a statement I fully endorse. 

The introduction continues:

Players will find that, once learned, the mechanics of play for BOOT HILL will be easily handled. This means that tabletop games can be played with a minimum of trouble and preparation, either with a referee or without.

Pay close attention to that last prepositional clause: either with a referee or without. If one is only familiar with the way RPGs are typically played today, that's got to be something of a shock.

The larger campaign games will require a gamemaster. This individual is not a player himself, but rather functions as a moderator of all the game activity – from devising the details of the setting and campaign situation and the player characters' part within it, to moderating and overseeing all game action (not only that which is to occur on the tabletop, but also the considerable pursuits and intrigues which go on "behind the scenes"). No more than an average knowledge of the "Old West" is needed, since the game is designed to be flexible and can be set up as desired with the information and suggestions given in this booklet. If the game is set up and conducted in a way which will be challenging and enjoyable to the players (as well as interesting to the referee), then it will be a success.

Reading this, I find myself reminded of Diplomacy, a game that was very popular with many early roleplayers, including Gary Gygax. An aspect of what makes Diplomacy unique is that there is a "roleplaying" element to it, in that each player acts as a diplomat for a European nation in the early 20th century and engages in public and secret negotiations with the other player diplomats with the goal of advancing his nation's interests and the expense of the others. Diplomacy is, to use contemporary parlance, a PVP game in which a player can only succeed at the expense of others. 

I won't go so far as to claim that Diplomacy is the hidden key to understanding how many campaigns were played in the early days of the hobby, but I nevertheless do believe that it's an oft-forgotten part of the context out of which roleplaying games evolved. As near as I can tell, early campaigns were freewheeling, chaotic affairs in which players often pitted themselves against one another and campaign events were just as likely to be the results of this player-versus-player struggle as referee-created situations. The early history of Gygax's Greyhawk campaign is instructive here, in which Rob Kuntz's fighter, Robilar, frequently acted in his own self-interest and against those of other player characters in the campaign. 

This seems to be the kind of play that the introduction to Boot Hill is advocating and that the game was designed to facilitate. In my next post, I'll take a closer look at a later section of the introduction, which provides additional detail about how campaign play of this sort was envisaged.

Boot Hill Credits

I've been re-reading the second edition of Boot Hill recently. There's a lot in it that I'd forgotten and that I think worthy of comment, but I'll save that for an upcoming post. For now, I simply want to draw attention to the game's credits. In addition to crediting the game's designers, editors, and artists, it also lists the names of its playtesters, along with the characters they played. For anyone interested in the history of the hobby, it's fascinating stuff:

Jim "Gatling Gun" Ward (Julio Diego Garcia)
Mike "Hellfire & Brimstone" Carr (Dwayne De Truthe, and the Douglas Gang)
Rob "Shoot 'Em Up" Kuntz (The Moonwaltz Kid)
"Dastardly Dave" Megarry (Dastardly Dave Slade)
Dave Arneson (Ben Cartwheel of The Ponderous Ranch)
Gary "I Own It All" Gygax (Mr. G)
Terry "Hotshot" Kuntz (Mason Dix)
Tim "Elect Me!" Kask (Tim McCall)
Ernie "Scatter Gun" Gygax (Ernie Sloan)
Brian "Buckshot" Blume (The Referee)

The list is a veritable who's who of the early days of TSR Hobbies, which I suppose shouldn't really be a surprise, since this edition was released in 1979. The player nicknames are quite amusing and I suspect they relate to events from the campaign. 

Appendix D of Boot Hill includes a list of fictional non-player characters, many of whose names match those listed in parentheses above, suggesting they're the names of player characters. This list includes not only these characters' names but also their game statistics and profession. For example, Mr. G, Gary Gygax's character, is described as a "rancher." That probably explains the "I Own It All" nickname above. Meanwhile, Mike Carr's character, Dwayne De Truthe, is a preacher and Tim Kask's Tim McCall is a saloon keeper and gamber (and presumably a would-be politician).

I absolutely adore lists like this. Frankly, I wish we knew more about the play of early RPG campaigns by people who'd eventually go on to make an impact on the hobby. I wish, for example, that I had a similar list for the Traveller campaigns played by the GDW crew. Perhaps I'll have to press Marc Miller about this when I see him at Gamehole Con this October.

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kirktá? (Part IV)

While the House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign may be winding down, it's still far from over. As discussed in three previous posts, the player characters have stopped in the city of Koylugá on their way across the kingdom of Salarvyá on their way to explore Mihálli ruins to the northeast. While in Koylugá, one of the characters, Kirktá, has found himself engaged to be married to Chygár, niece of the city's ruling prince, Kúrek. The engagement is a stratagem intended to force the characters to act as his agents as part of his bid to secure the Ebon Throne, when the current – and insane – king vacates it in death. Neither he nor his niece has any real intention of seeing this marriage take place. It's part of a typically Salarvyáni scheme to achieve a much greater end.

The characters do not like being used as pawns in someone else's game. This turn of events has stiffened their spines and so they have decided to use it as a way to advance their interests. Rather than simply acquiescing to the terms of the marriage dictated to them by Kúrek, they have fought hard for their terms. Nebússa's wife, Srüna, a formidable woman in her own right, has acted as their negotiator and pushed for a number of things Kúrek seems opposed to. Chief among these is that the marriage happen before their departure from Koylugá and that Chgyár should accompany her husband when they do so.

Kúrek was reluctant to accept these terms. He preferred that the marriage only happen after the characters had headed to the lands of the Gürüshyúgga clan to which he was sending them. Further, he was quite adamant that Chgyár should remain in Koylugá until then. These facts led the characters to suspect that they were being lied to about the Kúrek's true plans, but they had insufficient evidence to determine his true motives. So, they simply instructed Srüna to push even harder for an earlier wedding date and having Chgyár join their expedition once it was completed. Surprisingly, Kúrek eventually agreed.

Not long after this happened, Chgyár asked to speak with Kirktá. She begged him not to go through with the wedding – at least not until after his journey. Kirktá saw no reason to agree and told her so. This made her increasingly angry, to the point of panic. Once it became clear that Kirktá had made up his mind to marry her, despite her protestations that she had no interest in doing so, she finally sent him away in exasperation, saying, "I have grown tired of you and these endless conversations. If dying with you is the only way to end them, I am resigned to that fact. Begone."

It took a while before Kirktá understood what she had just said. Nebússa was now worried. Chgyár's use of the phrase "dying with you" suggested that, as they suspected, Kúrek had something more in mind than a simple marital alliance. Srüna was then dispatched to speak with Chgyár, in the hope that she might clarify matters. While she would not answer certain questions directly, she did explain that Kirktá was being sent to the Gürüshyúgga clan not merely as an emissary of her uncle but as a sacrifice. More significantly, the word she used was a very specific, technical term in the Salarvyáni language for a kingly sacrifice of the kind that occurs when the ruler of Salarvyá is judged too infirm to sit upon the Ebon Throne any longer. He is then impaled as a sacrificial offering to Shiringgáyi, their supreme goddess.

This put a very different spin on things! It also explained Chgyár's extreme reluctance to marry and accompany Kirktá eastward, since she likely believes that she, too, will be sacrificed. While none of the characters yet knew precisely with Prince Kúrek had planned or why, it didn't matter: he was plotting to have them killed under the cover of employing them as his agents. That was enough for the characters to decide that they needed to escape Koylugá as quickly and quietly as possible. The longer they waited, the more likely they were to be captured and sent to the Gürüshyúgga under armed guard. 

It was time to act.