Reconsiderations: Death and Resurrection

Needless to say, I've been very remiss in writing new posts for this blog, even within the context of the less rigorous schedule I proposed two months ago. I wish I had a better excuse beyond "I'm busy revising Thousand Suns for a second edition," except that's the truth. In fact. I've been so busy with that that I haven't even been posting as often at Grognardia Games Direct as I have been. On the plus side, the first draft of the second edition is nearly done, so I at least having something to show for my lack of attention here. With any luck, the first draft will be completed before September and external playtesting can begin in earnest.

Today, though, I want to return to my Reconsiderations series, since the first entry in it was very well received and generated a lot of good comments. My apologies for not responding to most of them, but, well, I've already explained that my attention was – and remains – elsewhere. 

Longtime readers may recall that the Dwimmermount campaign was predicated on several things, the most important of which was that it explicitly megadungeon-centric. At the time, which is to say the early days of the Old School Renaissance, there was a widespread belief that Dungeons & Dragons was born in the megadungeon – or the "campaign dungeon," as some preferred to call it – and that any attempt to play, let alone understand, old school D&D, as we were all attempting to do, required that you run a megadungeon campaign. And so I did, because I hoped that doing so would help me better understand aspects of D&D's history and design that had eluded me when I was a callow youth.

Another important foundation of the Dwimmermount campaign – and indeed my entire philosophy of coming to grips with OD&D – was the principle that "D&D is always right." By that, I simply meant that, despite the claims of its detractors over the decades, D&D's design was not haphazard but intentional. What's there in its rulebooks is there for a reason and we'd do well to understand this before tinkering with them unduly. This is not the same thing as saying that everything that's in D&D's rules always works to our satisfaction (or even the satisfaction of its designers), only that, before casting aside something about the game you don't like, consider for a moment the possibility that that something might, in fact, be a load-bearing wall.

That's why, during that campaign, I permitted the use of the spell raise dead, even though I was philosophically opposed to it. When I say "philosophically opposed," I mean that I initially accepted the idea, common in the early OSR, that old school Dungeons & Dragons was inherently and unalterably high lethality, with characters dying left and right. "Fantasy fucking Vietnam" was how it was sometimes described. Likewise, the renewed emphasis on pulp fantasy – strongly championed on this blog – was seen as requiring a style of play in which death was both omnipresent and permanent. 

Consequently, I wanted to embrace this ethos in the Dwimmermount campaign, but doing so contradicted "D&D is always right," so I, with some reluctance, allowed the use of raise dead. I vividly remember that there was some disappointment, among my readers that I'd "caved" on this point, since I'd previously written about my discomfort with the spell and how I felt it ran counter to the "mood" I was trying to bring to the Dwimmermount campaign. Even so, I permitted it, because the rules did and, as I already said repeatedly, I wanted wrestle with OD&D on its own terms – and, from the beginning, Dungeons & Dragons has had a spell that enabled the restoration of characters to life.

I adopted a similar mindsight when I refereeing my decade-plus Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, House of Worms. Because its underlying rules so closely mirror those of OD&D, EPT also includes several means to bring back the dead, including a spell accessible to player characters. During the course of the campaign, only one player character ever died – Aíthfo hiZnáyu – but he did so twice, which is certainly an unusual distinction! I permitted it, because the rules allowed it and also because the other players, knowing this, chose to make an effort to resurrect Aíthfo, in the process creating some very memorable adventures in Tékumel.

Still, I remained somewhat sheepish about all of this. My innate sense of consistency ensured I'd try to play by the principle ("D&D is always right") I'd laid down at the start of the Dwimmermount campaign, but I did so through gritted teeth. On some level, I shared the disappointment of readers who felt I'd "wimped out" by allowing the use of raise dead. Dwimmermount was, as I've noted, born out of my love of pulp fantasy of a particular kind that did not include easy resurrection in this fashion. Was I betraying its inspirations by being so casual about its use? At the time, I thought so. Even a few years ago, I groused about my decision.

Recently, though, I've come to accept my decision without any reservations. I've come to realize that I did the right thing in both cases by allowing the resurrections. My feeling increasingly is that there's altogether too much whining about how, on the one hand, "save-or-die is unfair" or "level drain is cruel" and, on the other hand, "healing is too commonplace" and "life restoration should be harder, if not impossible." My way of thinking nowadays is that these two extremes – which, to be fair, most players don't espouse – are mirror images of one another, each being founded in not taking Dungeons & Dragons as it is and has been from the beginning and instead substituting a different game in its place. 

That's not a unique sin; I'm as guilty of it as anyone. However, with the benefit of some distance, I've come to realize that many common complaints about D&D (or any roleplaying game) come from a failure in looking at the game design as a whole and instead fixating on only some of its parts. Is save-or-die really unfair? In a game where there are innumerable means of returning a character to life, I don't think so. In most cases, death in Dungeons & Dragons is just a setback and the rules provide a myriad of means by which to overcome it. Why not accept that?

That's more or less where I am right now on the question of death and resurrection in D&D and its derivatives and descendants.

Where I Am

More reconsiderations posts are in the offing, probably next week, but, as has been the case since the end of April, I remain hard at work on completing the first draft of the upcoming second edition of my science fiction roleplaying game, Thousand Suns. My goal was to complete the entire draft by the end of June and, while I'll fall somewhat short of that, I'm still very confident that all of the player-focused chapters and quite a bit more will be done by that date. I've been sharing these drafts with my patrons and a few internal playtesters in advance of a larger playtest that probably will occur later this year, once the drafts are even more polished.

Needless to say, my focus on getting Thousand Suns done continues to occupy most of my writing time. However, I am posting more regular over at Grognardia Games Direct (and at Patreon too), so, if you're impatient for new writing from me, those are the places to visit. That said, there will be new posts coming here in the future, though their schedule is harder to predict. Grognardia may be winding down, but we're still a long way from anything truly final. I'll try to keep everyone up to date as things become more clear.

Thanks!

Reconsiderations: Old School

Believe it or not, at the very dawn of what came to be called the Old School Renaissance, there was a lot of handwringing, both within its ranks and outside them, over just what was meant by the term "old school." 

Now, I don't recall when I first heard the term applied either to Dungeons & Dragons specifically or to roleplaying games more generally, nor can I pinpoint its precise origin. I have a vague recollection that it was one of those things that was spontaneously generated on the pre-social media Internet in the late '90s or early 2000s, but, as I said, I can't be certain. Regardless, I am pretty sure that the term predated the OSR by some years and generally meant something roughly equivalent to "D&D/RPG from the 70's and/or '80s," with some degree of fuzziness around the edges, both temporally and conceptually.

A lot of people assume that the Old School Renaissance was simply a reaction to the excesses of late 3e and I think there's much truth in this. In my own case, unhappiness with the state of Third Edition played a big role, which is ironic, since 3e had brought me back to Dungeons & Dragons in the first place after having largely abandoned the game several years prior. However, I suspect the roots of the OSR go back even farther, into the dying days of TSR, when AD&D Second Edition was itself a bloated and incoherent mess of a game. Some might stretch things even farther back, looking at the rise of "narrative" and "storytelling" games in the '90s as important data points.

I mention all of this simply as background to what will be my first reconsiderations post. Given the wide range of topics that I'll likely be covering as I write this series, I thought it useful to begin with something very basic and indeed foundational. I also thought it an important subject, because, in the eighteen years since I started this blog, my perspective on this matter have become clearer, if not necessarily different from what I have previously written. In the past, I might have been more circumspect in how I defined "old school" and what I understood it to mean, now I feel as if I have a more solid sense of things.

For me, "old school" is, paradoxically, a modern term. It's obviously not a term anyone "back in the day" would have used to describe D&D or any other RPG, for the simple reason that "old school" is a comparative term, one that depends on time having passed and there being multiple iterations of a game to compare to one another. "Old school" is, therefore, a retrospective category, one invented after the fact to identify certain common features, assumptions, and practices associated with the hobby's earlier years. Like all such categories, it is necessarily imperfect. The people who created and played these games in the 1970s and '80s did not think of themselves as participating in an "old school" style of play; they were simply playing roleplaying games as they understood them.

This is one reason why I have always thought the "R" in OSR stood for "renaissance." A renaissance is not a simple return to the past. It's an attempt to recover something from the past that is believed to possess enduring value, even though the very act of recovery inevitably reshapes it. The artists and scholars of the Renaissance did not recreate the art and ideals of Classical Antiquity they so admired. Neither did the Protestant Reformers did not restore the primitive Christianity they felt had become obscured under centuries of accretions. Both were instances of later generations looking backward for inspiration while simultaneously creating something new, whether they intended to do so or not.

That's also true of the OSR. Whatever else it may have been, the Old School Renaissance was never merely an exercise in preservation. Certainly, there were those whose chief concern was keeping older games alive and accessible. Without their efforts, many important texts and traditions might well have disappeared. Yet, from its earliest days, the OSR was also a creative movement. The proliferation of retro-clones, house rules, and entirely new games inspired by older ones quite quickly made that abundantly clear. Even when its devotees claimed to be "returning" to the roots of the hobby, they were doing so from a historical vantage point that could not help but influence – and, occasionally, distort – their understanding of those roots.

That's why I would argue that the category of "old school" only emerged because the hobby had changed. Certain features of earlier roleplaying games and styles of play came to be seen as distinctive precisely because they were no longer taken for granted. I think this helps explain why debates over the meaning of "old school" were (and remain) so contentious. The term refers neither to a specific type of rules nor to a particular historical period. Rather, it points toward a collection of loosely related ideas, assumptions, and practices drawn from the hobby's formative decades. Different people naturally emphasize different elements of that inheritance. Some focus on rules, while others focus on adventure design, campaign structure, referee authority, player agency, or any number of other factors. None of these perspectives is wholly wrong, because "old school" is itself a modern effort to make sense of a diverse and often contradictory past.

That's why nowadays, when I speak of "old school," I do not mean a museum piece or a slavish recreation of how roleplaying games were played in 1977, 1982, or any other year. Neither do I mean a particular game, edition, or collection of mechanics. Rather, I mean a tradition of play, one that took shape during the hobby's formative decades and whose characteristic assumptions can still be discerned beneath the considerable diversity of the games now associated with it.

Those assumptions are precisely what I mean by "old school." They have less to do with descending armor class, race-as-class, or any other rules idiosyncrasy than with a particular understanding of the relationship between players, referees, characters, and settings. They concern what roleplaying games are for, how they are meant to be played, and what kinds of experiences they are best suited to provide. The details will necessarily vary from game to game and table to table, but I think there is nevertheless a coherent thread running through them. It is that thread, rather than any single rules system or historical period, that I now understand to have been the true subject of the Old School Renaissance (and, by extension, this blog).

Reconsiderations

Toward the end of his life, St Augustine began a project called in Latin the Retractationes. Often mistranslated as "retractions," the title actually is closer in meaning to "reconsiderations" or "revisions," because, in its two parts, Augustine looks back on his extensive writings and comments on the ways in which he'd erred, was unclear, or had otherwise failed to get his point across to the reader. Often, this was due to his excessive use of rhetoric in the heat of a theological dispute, of which he had taken part in many. Consequently, the Retractationes is an important document in better understanding what Augustine actually thought rather than what others mistakenly understood him to be thinking.

I was reminded of the Retractationes during my recent trip. Eight and a half hours in a plane each way gives a man a lot of time to kill and I did so by rereading Peter Brown's 1967 biography of Augustine. While Brown doesn't devote many pages to the Retractationes, his discussion of them nevertheless sparked a thought in my own head: what if, as I wind down Grognardia as a regularly updated blog, I revisit some of my own posts with an eye toward better explaining myself? Like Augustine, many of my most widely read and discussed posts, are tinged with overheated rhetoric that gives a false – or at least skewed – impression of what I actually think about a number of topic important to roleplaying games and their history.

In some cases, even my original posts had elements of self-explanation, because I've always been keenly aware of just how fraught conversation by blog can be. The written word is obviously great. However, it often lacks the nuance provided by verbal intonation, facial expressions, and other aspects of embodied speech, any one of which can help make meaning more obvious. A lot of times, my posts include elements of sarcasm and hyperbole that I know is present, but that doesn't always come through in bare text, distorting my points. I remember well that I was often deemed a "fundamentalist" in the early days of the Old School Renaissance for my strong stances about this or that and that always baffled me.  I realize now that some of that misunderstanding was a result of imprecision in my original posts.

That's why, over the coming weeks and months, you'll see a series of Reconsiderations posts in which I look back on both individual posts and larger topics I've discussed on this blog in the past, with an eye toward correcting misconceptions about my opinions, as well as, where necessary, indicating how my thoughts may have changed since I first wrote them. I hope this will prove an interesting series and generate some discussion. I also hope it'll be a good capstone to Grognardia as a whole.

My Own Cover Band

First, a couple of brief updates:

I’m still hard at work on the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns and, while it’s going well, it’s not moving quite as quickly as I had originally hoped. I’m still on schedule to complete most of the draft before I head off to Rome, but a few sections of it, including the High Struggle rules, probably won’t be among them. More information on the development of Thousand Suns (and my other writing projects) can be found over at Grognardia Games Direct, while the actual drafts of the second edition are available to my patrons.

Partly because of this, I won’t be returning to regular posting on this blog until after I return from Rome. I’ve got a great deal on my plate over the next three weeks and simply won’t have the time to devote to anything more than intermittent blogging until the second week of June at the earliest.

I say “partly,” because that’s not the whole story behind my break from regular blogging. Certainly, it’s a significant part of the reason – I really am focused on Thousand Suns right now – but it’s not the only one. Another part is that I feel as if I’m running out of things to say.

I realize that sounds rather ominous, even dire, and I don’t mean it to be. Feeling as if I’m running out of things to say is not the same thing as actually running out of things to say. Given my nature, I suspect only death will prevent me from having opinions about roleplaying games and science fiction and fantasy literature. At the same time, I do think it’s true that the way I’ve been writing Grognardia since at least my return in 2020 is unsustainable and that I need to remedy that.

To explain what I mean, what follows is going to be a bit self-reflective and “philosophical,” for lack of a better word, and I apologize for that. I don’t want to bore anyone with the ins and outs of my thought processes, but I can think of no better way to provide context for what I said above. Besides, externalizing my thoughts through writing has always been one of the ways I sort them out and find my way, however haltingly, toward solutions.

Broadly speaking, I have two recurring “problems” when writing this blog and they’re related. The first is one I’ve mentioned before in other contexts. After just shy of 5000 posts since 2008 – 4982 as of now – the odds are good that I’ve already written about almost every remotely old school RPG topic I can easily imagine. That’s obviously not literally true, as evidenced by the fact that I still occasionally strike gold even in well-mined veins of gaming history and discussion, but I’m not exaggerating when I say that I regularly struggle to find a genuinely new topic about which to write.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve begun a post on some subject and, as I search through the archives for a relevant link, realized that I’d already written about the same topic, sometimes even using the same title. That would be frustrating for anyone, I suspect. It’s especially frustrating for me because I used to have no trouble finding things to write about each day. One need only look at the first few years of the blog to see that, during the 2008–2011 period, I was often making two posts every single day. That’s a level of output I haven’t achieved in years and likely never will again.

Thinking back on the beginning of this blog brings me to the second problem with which I’ve been grappling: the increasingly recursive feel of RPG discussions. Grognardia has always included lots of commentary about both gaming history and game design. That was, I think, a big part of its original appeal during the early days of the OSR. After nearly a decade of Third Edition Dungeons & Dragons, a lot of us longed for the freedom and exuberance we remembered from the hobby’s earlier years. The OSR gave voice to a genuine desire to recover the things about roleplaying games that had once so appealed to us and I think it was largely successful in that endeavor.

There was a vital energy and effortless creativity in the early days of Grognardia. The blog was buoyed by the rising tide of enthusiasm for older RPGs and, in turn, offered ideas and commentary that contributed to that tide. It was a virtuous cycle and I’m still very proud to have been part of it. Likewise, whenever I see someone reference “Gygaxian naturalism” or “the oracular power of dice,” it pleases me greatly, because I’m reminded that I did, in however modest a way, contribute something worthwhile to the understanding and appreciation of old school roleplaying.

Nowadays, though, I often feel as if I’m making ever finer distinctions with diminishing returns for everyone involved. Whereas the early OSR was filled with Big Ideas and bold (and occasionally ill-considered) opinions, in recent years I’ve increasingly felt as if I’m repeating things I said better a more than a decade ago. To put it another way, I sometimes worry that I’m becoming my own cover band. A good performer knows when it’s time to leave the stage and I don’t want to become a parody of myself.

At the same time, I still feel a great deal of energy and creativity when it comes to my own projects, like Thousand Suns and Secrets of sha-Arthan. I doubt either of them will ever have the same broad appeal as my best Grognardia posts once did, which is why I’ve largely segregated discussion of them to my Substack. They don’t quite fit on Grognardia in the same way and there’s probably no point in pretending otherwise.

For obvious reasons, I’m deeply attached to Grognardia. I’m not yet at the point where I wish to abandon it for good. At the same time, I am at a point where I question its purpose. This isn’t 2010 and the OSR, to the extent that it can still be said to exist in any coherent sense, is very different from what it was during the blog’s heyday. Grognardia is different too and that's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, not every endeavor can or should remain frozen at the moment of its greatest cultural relevance. Blogs, like people, age and change. These facts by no means invalidate what's come before. If anything, it may simply mean that the role Grognardia once played is no longer the role it needs to play now.

Of course, I don’t yet know exactly what that means in practice. The one thing I do know is that the conditions that originally gave rise to this blog in 2008 cannot be recreated and that trying to do so is a recipe for frustration. If, upon my return, I'm to keep posting here as I have for so long, some things will have to change. To be clear, I don’t view this as a cause for despair. If I feel any frustration, it’s mostly the frustration of recognizing that a thing which once came effortlessly to me now requires more deliberation and care. That’s hardly unique to blogging or even to writing generally, though it's new experience for me.

In any event, I wanted to explain why posting here may continue to be somewhat irregular for the foreseeable future. Grognardia still matters to me. I’m simply trying to determine what shape it ought to take in the months and, I hope, years ahead – and whether I can find a way forward that feels both honest and worthwhile.

In the meantime, thank you all for continuing to read. Your continued support, appreciation, and encouragement have meant the world to me. More soon, I hope!

The Eternal City

I know that I made some of you aware of this earlier, but, as the time draws closer, I thought I'd share the information more widely. Between May 31 and June 7, I will be in Rome, Italy on a brief holiday. 

I also know that I have a number of readers and colleagues in Italy, though I am unsure how many of you live in or near Rome. Assuming it's possible, I'd love to meet some of you, since I can't say when I'll ever be in Europe again. The last time I did so was in the late 1980s, when I was an exchange student in England (and, before that, when I was born in the Netherlands). I'm not much of a world traveler, but I couldn't pass up the chance to see Rome when the opportunity arose.

Naturally, I've already got a number of excursions and visits planned during my trip. However, I also have a few days when I'm also quite free. Those times would be perfect for any meet-ups that might occur.

I realize, of course, I'm sharing this with comparatively little advance warning, so meeting up might present logistical problems. Still, I felt I ought to make everyone aware of this in the event that something could be arranged. I have lots of fun at Gamehole Con each year meeting my fellow roleplayers in North America. I imagine I'd enjoy doing so in Italy as well.

The High Struggle (Part II)

My attention remains on the first draft of Thousand Suns second edition for a while longer. However, for those of you who care about that project, I'd ask you to head over to Grognardia Games Direct, where I provide updates on it, like this one.

The High Struggle (Part II) by James Maliszewski

A Preview of a Preview

Read on Substack

"Your Own Cover Band"

I'm still hard at work finishing up the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns, so I'm not yet ready to return to regular blogging here. However, I recently read something that helped me organize some thoughts I'd been having for a while and I thought they might be worth sharing, especially in light of my advocacy for long RPG campaigns. 

As you know, I'm a big fan of science fiction. Truth be told, I much prefer sci-fi to fantasy, despite the fact that I've probably played more fantasy roleplaying games than science fiction ones over the course of the last 45 years of gaming. That said, I'm very particular about my science fiction. I don't like everything with a spaceship or robot on its cover and, as I get older, I find my tastes are getting ever more picky. Consequently, I tend to be skeptical when someone recommends that I pick up a new SF novel, because I've been burned one too many times in the past. I'd much rather reread an old classic than take a chance on new stuff and be disappointed.

Still, a friend of mine recently recommended I take a look at "The Captive's War" series by James S.A. Corey, who was also responsible for "The Expanse" (which I've never read). The new series is planned as a trilogy and the second volume just came out, only two years after the first one. Both of these facts piqued my interest, because I have no patience for interminable series or series whose volumes aren't released at regular intervals. I don't want to wait until I have one foot in the grave before I see the end of a story. 

Still, my natural apprehension made me look into these books a bit more before committing to reading them. I figured I owed it to myself to know what I might be getting into if I decided to take the plunge. In the process of doing so, I came across a recent interview with the "author" – really two authors,. Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck, with a shared pen name, but I'm sure most of you already know that – that includes some genuinely interesting and insightful comments about the writing process and ultimate direction of the series. It's these comments that sparked this post and about which I want to write for a bit before returning to the salt mines once again.

Consider, for example, the following:

“We live in a world where every large universe is supposed to be endlessly flogged,” Franck says. “Star Wars is never going to stop. It's told the same story a thousand times at this point. The evil Empire has been defeated over and over and over again. It always comes back. Plucky Rebels have to defeat the new iteration of it over and over and over again. It just endlessly repeats. And Star Trek is the same way. If you have a big universe, it is expected you will just keep dipping in that well over and over until you die, and then somebody else will take over and do it for you. Daniel and I don't enjoy that. We like endings. We like getting to an end: ‘Here's the end, and it's over.’”

I could probably devote several posts to the above alone, but instead I want to focus on what was said immediately after this: 

Franck credits Abraham for coming up with a saying that sums up their feelings about longrunning series: “At some point, if you keep going, you become your own cover band.”

“We never want to do that,” Franck says. “We never want to become our own cover band, where you're just endlessly repeating what you said, and writing a slightly different version of the same story you've written a thousand times before. That would bore the shit out of me.”

These comments really hit home, having just concluded my decade-long House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign last October. Since then, I've been regularly asked what I might do the next time I decide to referee a Tékumel campaign and my answer has always been, "Nothing: I don't plan to run a Tékumel campaign ever again." That's not for lack of love for the setting – quite the contrary, in fact. It's precisely because I do love Tékumel and all that my players and I did with it through the House of Worms campaign that I'll never touch it again. 

This is not a new point of view for me; I've articulated it before. I'm very much of the opinion that it's quite possible – probable even – that you can reach a point where there's nothing left to explore through a particular setting or game. I feel that way about Tékumel for certain and I probably feel that way about a number of other RPG settings I've played extensively over the years. Again, it's not for lack of affection for these settings. My disinterest in returning to, say, the Forgotten Realms says nothing about whether I like the setting, only that I feel I've sucked all the marrow from its bones and now am looking for new sources of nourishment.

When I say this, many people look at my like I've got two heads. Some have even tried to (gently) suggest that maybe I'm lacking in imagination if I think I couldn't run more adventures in this or that setting that they know and love. The truth is I could run more adventures or even whole campaigns in Tékumel or the Realms (or Star Trek or ...) but why would I? There are so many more worlds to explore through roleplaying. Why keep revisiting the same ones over and over again? 

That's what the quoted sections of the interview got me thinking about and I think it's a topic worthy of further discussion. There's a lot of talk these days about living in a "stuck culture" and I definitely think there's something to this. I may be old but that doesn't mean I want to see everything from my youth – never mind the youths of my parents – forever recycled. It's OK to move on. It's OK to seek out new things and new ideas. That I, writing on this blog of all places, am saying this probably means something. Just what I don't can't quite say. Perhaps that'll be another blog post when I find the time to write it.

Underground

I'm not dead, but I am deep in the proverbial salt mines, working hard to complete the first draft of the second edition of Thousand Suns. I'm making excellent progress on this particular project and don't want to slow the momentum, so that means that I'm devoting myself fully to it. That also means – unfortunately – that daily blogging is lower on my priority list and will remain so for a bit longer. How much longer, I can't rightfully guess.

Rest assured: I shall return when I've completed the draft. In the meantime, I may make a few posts at Grognardia Games Direct about the state of the second edition and will continue to share my drafts at Advanced Grognardia during this pause. I may even pop in here with a post or two if an idea gets into my head that I feel compelled to share. However, for the next few weeks, Thousand Suns owns me.

See you soon!

Lingvo Tera

Lingvo Tera by James Maliszewski

Thoughts on Language in Thousand Suns

Read on Substack