GROGNARDIA

Retrospective: Dragon Dice

2012-02-01T09:30:00.000-05:00

The first polyhedral gaming dice I ever owned were a set of multi-colored, low impact ones I bought in a Kay-Bee Toys. I bought them because my printing of the Holmes Basic Set came with chits and a voucher for dice from TSR, apparently because such dice were still in short supply at the time. Though my friends and I tried using the chits -- we separated them into little bathroom Dixie cups -- we quickly found them unwieldy and, frankly, not very fun. Rolling dice is an enjoyable experience, whereas picking little pieces of laminated cardboard out of a cup is not.

So, I sought out a set of dice and found them wherever I could. As it turns out, the dice I bought were identical to the ones some people got in their Holmes sets. I later acquired a duplicate set in my copy of Gamma World. When I got those dice, I thought they were the coolest things in the world, not knowing any better. I used them for a couple of years, since I hadn't yet succumbed to dice fetishism and saw no need to buy more, even though the D20 was rapidly losing its edges and becoming spherical through continued use.

After that initial set of dice, the next set I acquired came in the Moldvay-edited Basic Set. They were blue, like the ones pictured above (those in my Expert Set were yellow), and they also exerted a strange fascination for me. For one, they came with a little black crayon to color in the numbers. This struck me as peculiar, since my original dice came pre-inked. Also of interest was that the D20 was actually numbered 1-20 as opposed to 0-9 twice, a fact that TSR proudly proclaims in its advertisement. I honestly don't know if the ad is correct in its claim, but, if so, it wasn't until 1981 that the hobby saw a "true" D20. I can't speak to the truth of it one way or the other, only that I personally never saw one numbered 1-20 until 1981.

Over time, I acquired several more sets of "Dragon Dice," as TSR called them. For some reason, I really liked them, even though they weren't of the greatest quality. Over time, they too started to show signs of wear, losing their edges through regular use. But they were smaller than my original dice and were of uniform colors, two qualities my younger self found very appealing. Indeed, Dragon Dice were my gateway to the wider world of matched dice sets. When I started playing, I never saw anyone with matched dice sets, only hodgepodge collections of them. Once I acquired my Dragon Dice, though, I found it harder and harder to use "mismatched" dice and slowly started acquiring a sizable collection of dice sets.

Eventually, I stopped using my Dragon Dice, moving on to dice produced by Gamescience or The Armory, both of which were much, much better made and available in a wider variety of colors and materials. But I still have a certain fondness for these TSR dice, as they introduced me to one of the weirder aspects of our hobby (at least to outsiders): its fascination with dice.

The Articles of Dragon: "A Field Guide to Lunar Mutants"

2012-01-31T09:30:00.000-05:00

As I've noted before, I adored "The Ares Section" of Dragon, often finding its contents far more interesting and inspirational to me than the rest of the magazine. That's probably because, deep down, I'm more of a sci-fi gamer than a fantasy one. Nevertheless, I'm not very strict about my definition of "science fiction" and include lots of stuff, like Star Wars for example, that more purist fans would undoubtedly place in the fantasy pile. Consequently, I've always loved Gamma World and have long felt that it's often treated by more "serious" gamers as if it were a joke, an opinion that's sometimes been reinforced by the game's own publishers, which emphasized its "wackiness" over its other elements. Now, there's no denying that Gamma World has a lot of wacky elements, but that's not all the game offers and I think a large number of gamers have come to dismiss Gamma World unduly because all they see -- and all its publishers have promoted -- are giant anthropomorphic rabbits.

"The Ares Section" included a lot of Gamma World articles, many by its creator, James M. Ward. One of my favorites was a follow-up piece to a description of the Moon in the game's setting. Published in issue #87 (July 1984), "A Field Guide to Lunar Mutants" described the weird creatures that inhabited Tycho Center base in Gamma World's 25th century. As detailed by Ward in his earlier article, Tycho Center is devoid of humanoid and animal life. Its inhabitants consist entirely of mutated plants and "macrobes" -- giant single-celled organisms -- that acquired strange abilities and sentience due to scientific experiments allowed to continue unchecked in the absence of human oversight. Two mutually hostile species vie for Tycho Center and any PCs who visit will find themselves thrown into the middle of a warzone.

What I liked most about this article and its predecessor was not just its descriptions of weird mutants, but rather its suggestion -- a suggestion found throughout Gamma World -- that end of human civilization ushered in a new age, an age where potential successors to mankind have risen up and now seek to lay claim to the Earth as their own. It's a setting that's ripe for moody heroism (and bathos), provided the referee is willing to play up the "weird" aspects of the post-apocalyptic world humanity has inadvertently created in its hubris. "A Field Guide to Lunar Mutants," with its coordinating eye macrobes and tech-wielding rosoids really helped bring that home to me as a teenager, which is why I have a particular fondness for this article. One of these days, I need to start up a Gamma World (or Mutant Future!) campaign and see in what ways I'd do things differently as a middle-aged man that I didn't as a younger one.

RIP Jean Wells (1955-2012)

2012-01-30T18:48:00.001-05:00

TSR alumnus Steve Sullivan is reporting that Jean Wells, who was the original "Sage" of Dragon's "Sage Advice" column, as well as the author of Palace of the Silver Princess, has died at the age of 56. This is very sad news, as we've lost another individual associated with the early days of the hobby far too soon.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Metal Monster

2012-01-30T09:37:00.001-05:00

I've talked recently about how the name Abraham Merritt is not as well known among fantasy enthusiast as it ought to be and I stand by that assertion. In the early part of the 20th century, Merritt, along with Edgar Rice Burroughs, was fantasy. His stories were widely read and influential, none moreso than his The Moon Pool, which was a particular favorite of Gary Gygax. The Moon Pool had a sequel of sorts called The Metal Monster, which first appeared in the pages of Argosy All-Story Weekly in serial form during the weeks of August 7 to September 25, 1920. H.P. Lovecraft thought very highly of the story, remarking in a letter written in 1934 that

the book contains the most remarkable presentation of the utterly alien and non-human that I have ever seen. I don’t wonder that Merrittt calls it his “best and worst” production. The human characters are commonplace and wooden — just pulp hokum — but the scenes and phaenomena… oh, boy!

I think that's a fair assessment, not just of The Metal Monster but of Merritt's work in general. His characters are rarely noteworthy but his ideas are often top-notch and inspiring. This is certainly the case in The Metal Monster, which concerns an expedition by Dr. Walter Goodwin of the International Association of Science to Himalayas in search of rare plants. Goodwin also makes an appearance in The Moon Pool, which is why I call The Metal Monster "a sequel of sorts" to the former book, even though The Metal Monster stands perfectly well on its own.

The story is framed, as was The Moon Pool, as a real account of an adventure that Dr. Goodwin related to Merritt. In this respect, it's very much in keeping with the conventions of Burroughs, who does the same in his Barsoom tales. Where Merritt differs is in the ominousness with which he infuses his novel. Before he sets off on his expedition, Dr. Goodwin has an extended soliloquy that espouses a Lovecraftian worldview before the fact.

In this great crucible of life we call the world—in the vaster one we call the universe—the mysteries lie close packed, uncountable as grains of sand on ocean's shores. They thread gigantic, the star-flung spaces; they creep, atomic, beneath the microscope's peering eye. They walk beside us, unseen and unheard, calling out to us, asking why we are deaf to their crying, blind to their wonder.

Sometimes the veils drop from a man's eyes, and he sees—and speaks of his vision. Then those who have not seen pass him by with the lifted brows of disbelief, or they mock him, or if his vision has been great enough they fall upon and destroy him.

For the greater the mystery, the more bitterly is its verity assailed; upon what seem the lesser a man may give testimony and at least gain for himself a hearing.

There is reason for this. Life is a ferment, and upon and about it, shifting and changing, adding to or taking away, beat over legions of forces, seen and unseen, known and unknown. And man, an atom in the ferment, clings desperately to what to him seems stable; nor greets with joy him who hazards that what he grips may be but a broken staff, and, so saying, fails to hold forth a sturdier one.

Earth is a ship, plowing her way through uncharted oceans of space wherein are strange currents, hidden shoals and reefs, and where blow the unknown winds of Cosmos.

If to the voyagers, painfully plotting their course, comes one who cries that their charts must be remade, nor can tell WHY they must be—that man is not welcome—no!

Therefore it is that men have grown chary of giving testimony upon mysteries. Yet knowing each in his own heart the truth of that vision he has himself beheld, lo, it is that in whose reality he most believes.

This speech is intended to prepare the reader for the many oddities that Merritt describes once Dr. Goodwin reaches the Himalayas. There, the protagonist quickly makes the acquaintances of several other researchers and explorers -- Dick Drake and the brother and sister team of Martin and Ruth Ventnor -- who join him in his activities. As they press onward, they see strange lights, what appears to be a giant set of footprints, and a civilization of vicious men who look to their eyes to be ancient Persians unchanged since the time of Darius and Xerxes. These Persians pose a grave threat to Goodwin and his compatriots, until they are rescued by a mysterious woman who appears from nowhere.

Within the black background of the fissure stood a shape, an apparition, a woman—beautiful, awesome, incredible!

She was tall, standing there swathed from chin to feet in clinging veils of pale amber, she seemed taller even than tall Drake. Yet it was not her height that sent through me the thrill of awe, of half incredulous terror which, relaxing my grip, let my smoking rifle drop to earth; nor was it that about her proud head a cloud of shining tresses swirled and pennoned like a misty banner of woven copper flames—no, nor that through her veils her body gleamed faint radiance.

It was her eyes—her great, wide eyes whose clear depths were like pools of living star fires. They shone from her white face—not phosphorescent, not merely lucent and light reflecting, but as though they themselves were SOURCES of the cold white flames of far stars—and as calm as those stars themselves.

And in that face, although as yet I could distinguish nothing but the eyes, I sensed something unearthly.

The woman reveals herself as Norhala and commands remarkable powers in her battle against the Persians.

"To the crevice," I shouted to Drake. He paid no heed to me, nor did Ruth—their gaze fastened upon the swathed woman.

Ventnor's hand shot out, gripped my shoulder, halted me. She had thrown up her head. The cloudy METALLIC hair billowed as though wind had blown it.
From the lifted throat came a low, a vibrant cry; harmonious, weirdly disquieting, golden and sweet—and laden with the eery, minor wailings of the blue valley's night, the dragoned chamber.

Before the cry had ceased there poured with incredible swiftness out of the crevice score upon score of the metal things. The fissures vomited them!

Globes and cubes and pyramids—not small like those of the ruins, but shapes all of four feet high, dully lustrous, and deep within that luster the myriads of tiny points of light like unwinking, staring eyes.

They swirled, eddied and formed a barricade between us and the armored men.

Down upon them poured a shower of arrows from the soldiers. I heard the shouts of their captains; they rushed. They had courage—those men—yes!

Again came the woman's cry—golden, peremptory.

Sphere and block and pyramid ran together, seemed to seethe. I had again that sense of a quicksilver melting. Up from them thrust a thick rectangular column. Eight feet in width and twenty feet high, it shaped itself. Out from its left side, from right side, sprang arms—fearful arms that grew and grew as globe and cube and angle raced up the column's side and clicked into place each upon, each after, the other. With magical quickness the arms lengthened.

Before us stood a monstrous shape; a geometric prodigy. A shining angled pillar that, though rigid, immobile, seemed to crouch, be instinct with living force striving to be unleashed.

Two great globes surmounted it—like the heads of some two-faced Janus of an alien world.

At the left and right the knobbed arms, now fully fifty feet in length, writhed, twisted, straightened; flexing themselves in grotesque imitation of a boxer. And at the end of each of the six arms the spheres were clustered thick, studded with the pyramids—again in gigantic, awful, parody of the spiked gloves of those ancient gladiators who fought for imperial Nero.

For an instant it stood here, preening, testing itself like an athlete—a chimera, amorphous yet weirdly symmetric—under the darkening sky, in the green of the hollow, the armored hosts frozen before it—
And then—it struck!

This is the metal monster of the title and its origins and purpose, along with the origins of all the other mysteries the protagonists encounter, most especially Norhala, form the bulk of the story. The Metal Monster is a great deal of fun if you can get past Merritt's somewhat archaic diction and thin characterization. As I said before, it's his ideas that are so compelling and are what made him such a popular and influential author in his day. Despite the weaknesses of his prose, I think him worth reading for his ideas alone; he's the wellspring of so many of the concepts that would eventually become commonplace, even trite, in later pulp fantasies. Anyone with even the slightest interest in the history of genre literature should seek this one out and read it.

AD&D Reprint Covers?

2012-01-28T16:55:00.000-05:00

Over at his blog, scottsz has posted an image of what may be the covers of the upcoming AD&D reprints.

Now, there's no confirmation that these are indeed what the "new" covers to the Players Handbook, Dungeon Masters Guide, and Monster Manual will look like. Indeed, it seems quite likely that they're just mockups, since the actual covers aren't ready to be shown yet. On the other hand, I can certainly imagine covers like this being used, since they very explicitly recall the originals while also being noticeably distinct. If they were the actual covers being used, I'd be quite content.

Open Friday: AD&D Reprints

2012-01-27T08:40:00.001-05:00

The recent announcement that Wizards of the Coast would be reprinting the original three Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks this April caused quite a stir in the old school community, with lots of us who hadn't bought a WotC product in years expressing great interest in picking these up. With that in mind, I thought I'd do a little poll this week for those of you who intend to purchase copies of the reprints. So, if you're not going to buy copies, this poll isn't for you.

Here's the question: Do you intend to run an AD&D campaign and/or adventure once you've acquired your copies of the reprints? Feel free to elaborate on your response in the comments below, especially if your answer is "I'd like to, but ..."

How Many?

2012-01-26T08:14:00.000-05:00

Receiving my POD copy of Metamorphosis Alpha this week got me to wonder: how many old school RPGs are currently available in unadulterated print form? By that I mean original editions that haven't had been altered from when they first appeared. Most of the Fantasy Games Unlimited catalog (the primary exception being Chivalry & Sorcery) is available, as are Starships & Spacemen and Timemaster (both from Goblinoid Games).

Are there any others?

This is How You Do It

2012-01-25T16:02:00.001-05:00

I mentioned the other day that James M. Ward recently made a reprint of Metamorphosis Alpha available through Lulu.com for the very reasonable price of $14.99. Well, I went ahead and ordered a copy, which I received yesterday -- talk about fast! -- and thought I'd share some brief thoughts about it. Here's a photograph of the cover of the book, which is a staple-bound 36-page booklet:

As you can see, it's a nice, bright cover that very faithfully reproduces the one that appeared on the original 1976 RPG. The interior looks just as good, as you'll see. Here's the inside cover:

There's a very small amount of pixelation in some of the artwork, but it's only really noticeable if you're looking hard for it and it's not present in all of the illustrations. The text, meanwhile, is quite clean and easy to read.

Having read a copy of the original, I'd say that the reprint is probably easier on the eyes (at least my aging ones) and a lot sturdier. Plus, it's cheap, so it can actually be used at the game table without fear that you're damaging some priceless heirloom.

The book contains everything from the 1976 edition, along with two pages of errata and a short campaign outline by creator James M. Ward himself. It's a really nice little package and well worth acquiring if you're interested in the early days of the hobby. It's also, in my opinion, a model for what more game companies should be doing. There's frankly no good reason why more old RPGs shouldn't be made available in print-on-demand form for folks uninterested in paying exorbitant prices just to be able to read these early games. That this version of Metamorphosis Alpha is inexpensive and attractive is another plus and a far cry from some of the PDF versions of older game materials we've seen in the past.

Seriously, why aren't more companies doing what Jim Ward is doing?

Retrospective: The Solomani Rim

2012-01-25T09:29:00.000-05:00

In the very '80s, when I first started playing Traveller, there were two broad classifications of players: those who created their own settings and those who used GDW's official Third Imperium setting. I didn't have a lot of experience with the former group, since they were vanishingly small in number by the time I picked up the game. Of the latter, there were several sub-divisions, the two biggest being those who used the Spinward Marches as their campaign's home sector and those who used the Solomani Rim, first published in 1982. I was a Spinward Marches man myself, in part because that's the sector GDW used in most of their earliest adventures and because that's the sector the older guys I knew also used. Even so, I found the Solomani Rim intriguing, especially as I became more and more enmeshed in the official Third Imperium setting.

For those of you unfamiliar with Traveller, the official setting postulates that humanity -- or "humaniti," as GDW spelled it -- originated on Earth (or Terra) and that 300,000 years in the past a mysterious race of aliens known only as the Ancients took members of the species to the stars as servants. Some of these other human races died out but some survived and prospered, three of whom discovered the ability to travel faster than light independently, one of which were the Terrans. In time, these humans came to be known as the Solomani, a coinage whose origin is never definitively explained, though most assumed it means "men of Sol." In any event, The Solomani Rim is a 48-page book written by John Harshman that details the sector of space dominated by the Solomani.

Like its predecessor, The Spinward Marches, The Solomani Rim describes all sixteen subsectors of the Solomani Rim sector using a two-page spread. On the left side are strings of alphanumeric entries that describe all the worlds of each subsector. I continue to be amazed both at my ability to remember just what these strings mean and how elegantly Marc Miller managed to condense so much information into so few characters. It remains one of the great hallmarks of Traveller that no other science fiction RPG has ever managed to provide so much information about a planet so succinctly. On the right side of the spread is a hex map that provides much of the same information graphically. Again, it's absolutely amazing that, back in 1977, Traveller did so much right that other roleplaying games continue to struggle with.

One of the things that separates The Solomani Rim from The Spinward Marches is a much clearer sense of place. By that, I mean that the Solomani Rim sector has a consistency and logic to it in terms of, for example, its naming conventions that suggests it's a real place with a real history. While the Marches has meaningless, "science fiction-y" world names like Rhylanor and Zamine and Roup, the Solomani Rim is filled with names like Barsoom and Krypton and Oz. It feels much more like a place that men from Earth had explored and colonized and that lends it a distinct appeal. Of course, The Solomani Rim also includes a lot more specific details about the history and culture of the sector than does The Spinward Marches.

By today's standards, these details aren't onerous -- maybe 6 pages of the whole -- but it's enough that, looking back, one can see that Traveller had changed a bit since the publication of The Spinward Marches in 1979. I don't remember thinking much of it at the time, since I was using the official Third Imperium setting anyway. Now, though, it becomes clear that, by 1982, Traveller had begun its inexorable shift away from being a generic sci-fi game of which the Third Imperium was but one sample setting to a sci-fi game about the Third Imperium. This is a shift that culminated in the publication of Traveller's second edition, the goofily named MegaTraveller in 1987, which "hardcoded" the Third Imperium into the rules in a way that the 1977 edition had not. It was perhaps an inevitable shift but it was a shift nonetheless and one that, I think, ultimately weakened the appeal of Traveller and contributed to its decline.

The Articles of Dragon: "Familiars with a Special Use"

2012-01-24T09:31:00.000-05:00

One of the dangers of introducing a logical scheme into anything is that it often takes on a life of its own. The original Law versus Chaos alignment system of OD&D, for example, was originally little more than a way to represent an "us versus them" mindset. Over time, though, the concept evolved, first to the five-point alignment system we see in the Holmes-edited Basic Set (which first appeared in The Strategic Review) and later to the nine-point system we see in AD&D. In each case, the expansion made some sense and came about to address a perceived issue, but, in doing so, the expansion opened up avenues for further expansion. In time, alignment wound up being something very different than it was at its inception, though I would argue that its final form in AD&D made perfect sense if you look at its evolution over the course of several years. Of course, I'd also argue that alignment's final form, while logical, was much less useful and interesting than OD&D's very vague scheme.

I mention this because, in issue #86 of Dragon (June 1984), the article "Familiars with a Special Use" appears. Written by Stephen Inniss, its basic premise is in "fixing" the find familiar spell, which the author says "suffers from a lack of completeness, resulting in an unbalanced (if not unfair) game." He makes his judgment based on the fact that

The alignment of a special familiar does not always match the alignment of its master. The creatures differ in origin and strength,and evil magic-users seem favored with the most powerful familiars. True, the evil M-U stands to lose more if his familiar is destroyed, but his animal's superior hit points and special powers (especially regeneration) give it a much stronger grip on life, compared to its good-aligned cousins.

Inniss brings up several issues here, but many are rooted, at least in part, on alignment. For instance, he takes issue with the fact that, as written, there are no specifically Chaotic Neutral or Neutral Evil familiars. Likewise, the good-aligned "special" familiars are weaker than the evil ones. From my perspective, these aren't problems in need of solution, but that's probably because I don't see them as lapses in the logic of AD&D. That evil special familiars are more powerful seems only right to me, since a big part of those familiar's job is in ensuring that their masters remain permanently under the sway of Evil à la Doctor Faustus. The rewards of evil in mortal existence should be great; otherwise, why would anyone choose evil over good?

However, Stephen Inniss doesn't even consider the possibility that find familiar isn't broken. His solution is to introduce a large number of new familiar types, divided according to alignment and to make them all roughly comparable in terms in power. Thus, we get the Galadur (good-aligned cherub-like beings), the Lomendur (neutral-aligned animal spirits), and the Burzugdur (evil-aligned monsters of which imps and quasits are but two examples). Inniss also adds several new "natural" familiars to round out the alignment list. The result is a thorough overhaul of find familiar that follows reasonably from a certain set of premises, but it feels, to me, too schematized and lifeless. As I've said since the start of this blog, I like "rough edges" and no longer see their existence as an opportunity for me to "fix" the game. Instead, I accept them as they are and use them as springboards for my imaginations. To my mind, pounding smooth those rough edges is a process D&D has been undergoing since 1974 and it's almost always resulted in a less appealing -- less mythic -- kind of fantasy.

Robert E. Howard (January 22, 1906 - June 11, 1936)

2012-01-22T09:08:00.000-05:00

I remember
The dark woods, masking slopes of sombre hills;
The grey clouds’ leaden everlasting arch;
The dusky streams that flowed without a sound,
And the lone winds that whispered down the passes.

Vista upon vista marching, hills on hills,
Slope beyond slope, each dark with sullen trees,
Our gaunt land lay. So when a man climbed up
A rugged peak and gazed, his shaded eye
Saw but the endless vista -- hill on hill,
Slope beyond slope, each hooded like its brothers.

It was gloomy land that seemed to hold
All winds and clouds and dreams that shun the sun,
With bare boughs rattling in the lonesome winds,
And the dark woodlands brooding over all,
Not even lightened by the rare dim sun
Which made squat shadows out of men; they called it
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and deep Night.

It was so long ago and far away
I have forgotten the very name men called me.
The axe and flint-tipped spear are like a dream,
And hunts and wars are shadows. I recall
Only the stillness of that sombre land;
The clouds that piled forever on the hills,
The dimness of the everlasting woods.
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Oh, soul of mine, born out of shadowed hills,
To clouds and winds and ghosts that shun the sun,
How many deaths shall serve to break at last
This heritage which wraps me in the grey
Apparel of ghosts? I search my heart and find
Cimmeria, land of Darkness and the Night.

Open Friday: Forgotten Authors

2012-01-20T09:07:00.001-05:00

Today is the 128th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Merritt, the early 20th century pulp writer admired by both H.P. Lovecraft and Gary Gygax. I've written about Merritt on the occasion of his birth twice before on this date, in addition to numerous other posts about his life and works. In re-reading those earlier posts, what I immediately noticed (aside from the fact that I keep quoting from Lovecraft's letter to R. H. Barlow concerning his meeting with the man) is that their theme is almost always the obscurity of Merritt in contemporary culture. During his lifetime, he was a highly successful and well-paid journalist and editor and several of his stories (Seven Footsteps to Satan and Burn Witch Burn!) were made into motion pictures. Nowadays, though, his name is barely known, let alone lauded, which is frankly a pity, as Merritt's best work is indeed worthy.

So, for today's Open Friday question, I offer the following: what one writer do you believe deserves greater recognition as a source inspiration for fantasy, horror, or science fiction RPGs? Merritt is my answer to this question. Who is yours?

Cleaning House

2012-01-19T15:55:00.000-05:00

I periodically go through moments when I feel that I need to clear out my gaming collection of books and boxed sets I'll never use. I'm in the midst of one right now, but I've so far managed to keep it in check because of three things. First, I remember all too well having disposed of almost all of my Traveller stuff in high school (in the idiotic belief that Traveller: 2300 had "superseded" it) and I don't want to find myself re-purchasing stuff later that I thought I'd never need/want again. Second, deciding just what constitutes a gaming product I'll never want again for any purpose is a tough question. I mean, I'm pretty darn sure I'll never play Unknown Armies (to cite an obvious example), but will I never want to read it again for any reason? Finally, assuming I can overcome the first two hurdles, how do I get rid of all this stuff? Selling it seems the obvious solution, but I'm a fundamentally lazy person and dealing with the hassle of packaging stuff up and shipping it to various buyers may be more trouble than just leaving it all in boxes in my garage.

So, anyone out there have any experience with this sort of "problem?" If so, what did you do about it? How did you handle the various pitfalls I've discussed above? I ask because, truly, I'd like to pare down my gaming collection considerably, but the logistics of doing so in a way I won't later regret elude me.

Mad Aspiration

2012-01-19T09:48:00.002-05:00

Though both Boston (where he was born) and Virginia (where he spent a good portion of his life) probably have a greater claim to him, as a Baltimorean, I've always had an attachment to Edgar Allan Poe, who was born on this day 203 years ago. Poe's last days were in my home town and he's interred there at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, which is now owned by and part of the University of Maryland School of Law. For sixty years, Poe's grave was visited by a mysterious individual known as locally as the "Poe Toaster," who placed three roses and a partially consumed bottle of French cognac on his grave every January 19th. This tradition is one I remember well from my own childhood, though it appears to have ended in 2009, as the Toaster has not appeared since then, including this year.

Poe is not listed in Gary Gygax's Appendix N as an influence on AD&D, which is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, Poe had a profound influence on H.P. Lovecraft, whose works Gygax does cite as among the most influential on the game. In this way, Poe might be deemed a "great-grandfather" of our beloved fantasy game. Lovecraft adored Poe and wrote highly of him in his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.

High praise indeed, especially from a man who himself has probably contributed more to modern conceptions of horror than almost anyone else. HPL goes on to explain why Poe is so important:

Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or legs of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove -- good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.

Lovecraft was particularly awed by "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe's 1839 masterpiece, which is famous for both its descriptive details and its psychological complexity. It is the story of an unnamed narrator's time with Roderick Usher and his twin sister Madeline, who inhabit a decaying and crumbling mansion which Roderick believes to be "alive." Lovecraft was quite taken with this tale (as were many others):

These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness -- the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous dénouement to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired illusion -- principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be -- we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically modulated translation -- but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.

This is no mere fanboy-ish gushing on Lovecraft's part; Poe's best stories -- of which Usher is a fine example -- do indeed possess this quality of being "alive" and that is a huge part of his continued appeal. Of course, another element of Poe's power is how much of himself can be found in his works. In the words of Lovecraft, Poe "certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate." I think, at one time or another, most of us possess (or imagine ourselves to possess) at least some of these attributes, which is likely another key to understanding why Poe has proven so inspirational to so many for so long.

So, while the tradition of the Poe Toaster may have ended, I'm inaugurating a new one here: to commemorate Edgar Allan Poe's birthday each year on this blog. I doubt I'll still be doing this when I'm 102, or even when I'm 52, but he's an author worth remembering and I intend to do my part.

Speaking of Reprints

2012-01-19T08:25:00.001-05:00

James M. Ward has made the 1st edition of Metamorphosis Alpha available as a print-on-demand book through Lulu.com. Needless to say, I've ordered a copy for myself. How could I not? This is the first out-of-print RPG book I remember actively seeking out when I was a kid and it frustrated me beyond all measure that I couldn't find. Nowadays, of course, you can find it, but, thanks to absurd speculation, the cost of acquiring it is more than I'm willing to pay.

Here's the thing: I want old RPG materials like this so I can use them. I don't care about their value as collectibles. The value of games is in being played. I simply do not understand the point of owning a game and then hermetically sealing it away from the elements. As my players can tell, I use my LBBs and other OD&D materials at my game table. That means they'll eventually fall apart, but that's the nature of well-loved games.

Thanks to Jim Ward for making Metamorphosis Alpha available again for a new generation. Now, if only WotC would do the same with some of their back catalog, I'll be even more impressed with them than I already am.

NOTE: I am well aware of the AD&D reprints, since I just wrote a post about it. When I say "back catalog," I am talking about WotC's other old school D&D products, in particular the adventure modules.

Go Figure

2012-01-19T08:16:00.000-05:00

By now, many of you have no doubt heard the latest word from Wizards of the Coast: they're reprinting the original three AD&D hardcover books this April. They're a limited release, it's true, and they're going to have new covers, but otherwise the books will be unadulterated reprints of the classic books from 1977, 1978, and 1979. That's frankly pretty incredible -- and unexpected.

Even though my AD&D books, which I've had since 1980, are all in near-perfect condition, I'll be buying a set of these new books, making them the first things I've bought from WotC since 2007. So, on that score, I've got to give the company a lot of credit. In addition, some portion of the money earned from these sales goes to the Gygax Memorial Fund, which shows is nice.

As I said, these are a limited release (and, unfortunately, available only in North America through hobby stores). However, I consider it a victory for the Old Ways that WotC even contemplated releasing these books, let alone that they actually will do so. Plus, if sales are very good -- and I expect them to be -- it'll provide solid sales data on the strength of old school gaming. From my perspective, that's a terrific thing all around.

Kudos, WotC! You managed to surprise me (and in a positive way).

Retrospective: Dark Folk

2012-01-18T10:12:00.000-05:00

When I think about the most unfortunately named line of RPG products ever, Mayfair's "Role Aids" immediately comes to mind. Child of the '70s that I am, the name "Role Aids" reminds me of antacids called Rolaids, which were well known at the time, thanks to a series of TV advertisements ("How do you spell 'relief'?" "R-O-L-A-I-D-S.") Consequently, when I first encountered Role Aids in the early 1980s, the name gave me another reason to dismiss them. The other, of course, was that they marketed themselves as "Suitable for Use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," but they weren't produced by TSR. Back in this days, I was reflexively contemptuous of any non-TSR product that claimed compatibility with D&D. With few exceptions, if I didn't see the TSR logo on the book somewhere, I turned my nose up at it.

Eventually, though, I heard enough good things about various Role Aids products that I decided to take a chance and buy one for myself. The first one I purchased with Dark Folk, which was published in 1983. The book was edited by Paul Karczag, with material by several authors (Irwin Goldstein, Les Kay, Arthur Miller, Alan Nudelman, Steve Morrison, Susan Khas) I'd never heard of and by Robert Asprin of Thieves' World fame. Its subjects, as its name would suggest, were the evil humanoid races -- orcs, trolls, goblins, gnolls, and kobolds. Each race was got its own chapter, complete with overviews of history, culture, physiology, religion, magic items, and so on. Capping off each chapter was an adventure written to take advantage of the new material presented in the book.

As you might expect from a book with multiple authors, Dark Folk is something of a mixed bag. There are some clever and interesting sections and some not-so-clever and interesting ones. In general, the material about the various races is pretty standard stuff, its primary "uniqueness" being that it doesn't always comport with the standard presentation of these races in D&D. Thus, if your image of trolls is primarily informed by the Monster Manual, you're likely to find Dark Folk's take on them original. I remember, for example, that the presentation of kobolds felt odd to me. Dark Folk claims, years in advance of this becoming a common assumption, that they were reptiles (which makes some sense considering that even the MM notes that they're oviparous). But it was the adventures that were where Dark Folk shined brightest. Again, not all of the adventures were perfect -- which are? -- but several were well done and used the information in the book to make each one feel different. In this way, an orc lair wasn't the same as a goblin lair or a kobold one. It's a small thing, sure, but, at the time, it was a revelation to me.

I never became a huge buyer of Role Aids products, despite my fondness for Dark Folk (and, later, Dwarves). Mostly, it was because TSR and other companies were producing enough RPG material that I'd instinctively buy that I already had more material than I could ever use. And there was also a part of me that continued to recoil at the notion of "unofficial" supplements to D&D, no matter how good they were. That's a habit that took many years to break. It seems silly now, but, back in those days, there was a "cultural" divide between those of us who cared about "official" products and those of us who couldn't care less about them. It's a divide that's still very much alive and even relevant given recent events.

A Portrait of the Wargamer as a Young Man

2012-01-17T18:22:00.003-05:00

Reader Peter Byrne pointed me towards an excellent blog entitled Vintage Wargaming, which recently had a post about wargaming in the Twin Cities in 1966. The post included the following scan, which is from April 17, 1966 issue of the picture supplement to The Minneapolis Tribune:

If you blow up the image above, you'll be able to read the caption, which identifies the participants in this Napoleonics battle, two of whose names regular readers of this blog will definitely recognize.

The Articles of Dragon: "Special Skills, Special Thrills"

2012-01-17T09:30:00.000-05:00

Of all the iconic classes of D&D, the cleric is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb. Whereas the fighting man, the magic-user, and even the thief are all pretty broad archetypes easily -- and non-mechanically -- re-imagined in a variety of different ways, the cleric is a very specific type of character. With his heavy armor, non-edged weapons, Biblical magic, and power over the undead, the cleric is not a generic class, recalling a crusading knight by way of Van Helsing. There's thus a distinctly Christian air to the cleric class, an air that increasingly seemed at odds with the game itself, which, as time went on, distanced itself from its earlier implicit Christianity and embraced an ahistorical form of polytheism instead.

For that reason, there were growing cries among some gamers to "fix" the cleric. In this context "fix" means change to make it less tied to a particular religion, in this case a particular religion the game itself had eschewed. The first time I recall seeing an "official" answer to these cries was in Deities & Demigods, where it's noted that the clerics of certain deities had different armor and/or weapon restrictions than "standard" clerics. A few even got special abilities reflective of their divine patron. This idea was later expanded upon by Gary Gygax himself in his "Deities & Demigods of The World of Greyhawk" series of articles, which I credit with giving widespread attention to this idea. I know that, after those articles appeared, lots of my fellow gamers wanted to follow Gary's lead and tailor their cleric characters to the deities they served, an idea that AD&D more formally adopted with 2e in 1989.

In issue #85 (May 1984) of Dragon, Roger E. Moore wrote an article entitled "Special Skills, Special Thrills" that also addressed this topic. Moore specifically cites Gary's articles as his inspiration and sets about providing unique abilities for clerics of several major pantheons. These pantheons are Egyptian, Elven, Norse, Ogrish, and Orcish -- a rather strange mix! Of course, Moore intends these to be used only as examples to inspire individual referees. Likewise, he leaves open the question of just how to balance these additional abilities with a cleric's default ones. He notes that Gygax assessed a 5-15% XP penalty to such clerics, but does not wholeheartedly endorse that method himself, suggesting that other more roleplaying-oriented solutions (ritual demands, quests, etc.) might work just as well.

Like a lot of gamers at the time, I was very enamored of the idea of granting unique abilities to clerics based on their patron deity. Nowadays, I'm not so keen on the idea, in part because I think the desire for such only underlines the "odd man out" quality of the cleric class. Moreover, nearly every example of a "specialty cleric" (or priest, as D&D II called them) still retains too much of the baseline cleric to be coherent. Why, for example, would a god of war be able to turn the undead? Why should almost any cleric wear heavy armor and be the second-best combatant of all the classes? The cleric class, even with tweaks, is so tied to a medieval Christian society and worldview that it seems bizarre to me to use it as the basis for a "generic" priest class. Far better, I think, would be to have individual classes for priests of each religion or, in keeping with swords-and-sorcery, jettison the class entirely.

REVIEW: Isle of the Unknown

2012-01-16T13:18:00.001-05:00

I find Geoffrey McKinney's Isle of the Unknown an extremely frustrating book. Published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess and available either as a 128 page full-color hardcover book or as a PDF of the same, it's without a doubt one of the most nicely made RPG books I've seen in quite some time, old school or otherwise. By "nicely made," I mean both in terms of its purely physical qualities -- a sturdy cover and excellent binding -- as well as its appearance and organization. At the same time, I think Isle of the Unknown overuses color to the point of garishness at times. The book is so colorful and vibrant that, at first, one can't help but be awed by it. After a while, though, one's initial visual euphoria dissipates, and one begins to wonder how much of one's positive feelings for it are elicited by its substance and how much by its style.

I say that with some regret as this is a book I very much wanted to like without qualification. While nowhere in the text is Clark Ashton Smith's name mentioned, I recall that Isle of the Unknown began as an attempt by Geoffrey McKinney to produce a supplement that evoked Smith's weird tales, particularly those of Averoigne. CAS is a favorite author of mine, as I never tire of mentioning on this blog, and his Averoigne stories have long exercised a powerful hold over my imagination. Consequently, I was very keen to see an old school RPG book that drew on those pulp fantasies. Now, I knew from past experience with Carcosa (whose revised and expanded edition I'll be reviewing later this week) that McKinney's take on Smith would undoubtedly differ from my own, so I expected there to be parts of Isle of the Unknown that didn't sit well with me.

However, that's not quite what happened. Isle of the Unknown still clearly draws some inspiration from the Averoigne tales. The fact that its titular locale is described as having "societies, flora, and fauna ... [that] resemble those of the French territory of Auvergne circa A.D. 1311" is a dead giveaway. Beyond that, though, the CAS influence is thin in my opinion. For that reason, Isle of the Unknown simply comes across as weird, with nearly every one of its over 300 86-square mile hexes home to some oddity or monstrosity, almost all of which are lavishly illustrated in full color by Amos Orion Stearns or Jason Rainville. Of course, that's what you'd probably expect from a book like this. Isle of the Unknown is a gazetteer of 35,000-square mile island that can be dropped into any campaign and, if it didn't provide material of this sort, most readers would be disappointed. That every hex on the island is given an entry -- many of them quite extensive -- is a credit to McKinney and his imagination.

In books of this kind, the problem is most often that the hex descriptions are boringly mundane. Isle of the Unknown has the opposite problem: nearly every hex description includes a magical statue, a quirky spellcaster, or a teratological monster. This is by design, as the introduction to the referee states that "only the weird, fantastical, and magical is described herein." This decision is presented as a boon to the referee, who can thus more easily describe the mundane world based on the realities of his own campaign, but I find this an inadequate justification. It's on par with refraining from describing the "empty" rooms in a dungeon, because all that really matters are the rooms with monsters and treasure in them. Moreover, by describing only the weird, fantastical, and magical, Isle of the Unknown gives the impression of overusing them all. Rather than being spices to improve the flavor of the dish, they become the meal itself.

I find this most troubling with regards to the many monsters described in Isle of the Unknown. Forget Gygaxian naturalism, this is an island populated by over 100 unique monsters: a 14' tall bipedal pearlscale angelfish, limbless serpentine beavers, a 300 lb. koala with suction cups on its limbs, a four-legged pigeon the size of an apatosaurus, and more. Any one of these creatures would be strange enough and might well inspire curiosity but the effect is lost after pages upon pages of them -- and that's without commenting on the frankly ludicrous nature of some of these beasties. Yes, I know there are people who've managed to make good use of "silly" monsters and I also recognize that many hallowed mythological monsters, when looked at with fresh eyes, are pretty ridiculous themselves. But if D&D or Greco-Roman myth consisted only of 22' tall emaciated pandas or four-legged flying kangaroos, I think many of us would be forced to admit that something odd was going on.

Granted, "something odd" going on may be one of the points of Isle of the Unknown. I don't think it's a coincidence that Lamentations of the Flame Princess chose to publish this particular product, as it rather powerfully evinces Jim Raggi's longstanding dislike of "standard" monsters and monster races. There's certainly merit to Raggi's complaint; it's often useful to shake things up a bit by introducing totally bizarre and unexpected monsters from time to time. However, like color or spices, these, too, can be overused. In fact, I only think such monsters work against a backdrop of familiarity and even mundanity, two things that Isle of the Unknown eschews in its presentation, leaving us only with a passel of freaks devoid of any context to give them heft. Instead, they feel, well, random and not always in a good way.

Despite this, I still like Isle of the Unknown. If approached as a smörgåsbord of ideas, it's probably quite useful. I simply cannot imagine using it as a single setting, but I might drop a statue or a monster or an NPC from the book into another locale or adventure in order to introduce a note of inexplicable weirdness into it. What I would not do, though, is use the entirety of the Isle itself; it's simply too much. My feeling remains that fantasy, especially weird fantasy, works best when it can play off well-drawn mundanity and that it's just as much a failure of the imagination not to present that mundanity as it is to stick to haggard fantasy races and monsters without any thought. Frankly, that's what anything drawing inspiration from Clark Ashton Smith ought to do: present us first with a believably grounded "real world" and then, by bits, turn the expectations of that real world upside down. Isle of the Unknown only gives us half of that equation, which is why I find it a frustrating book.

Presentation: 8 out of 10
Creativity: 6 out of 10
Utility: 5 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a collection of ideas to loot for your own adventures or you like really weird fantasy.
Don't Buy This If: You prefer your setting supplements a bit more "ready to use" or prefer your fantasy a bit more on the staid side of things.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Black Stranger

2012-01-16T09:14:00.000-05:00

If ever you wonder why the name of L. Sprague de Camp is so often held in contempt by fans of Robert E. Howard, you need look no further than "The Black Stranger," a Conan yarn that did not see print in its original form until 1987, making it one of the "most recent" Howard stories to see print. I don't believe that anyone knows precisely when "The Black Stranger" was written (more knowledgeable Howardists can correct me) or whether it was ever submitted to Weird Tales. We do know that REH rewrote the story for another character, the Caribbean pirate Black Vulmea, though that version of the story didn't see print until the 1970s. De Camp published a heavily altered version of the story in the March 1953 issue of Fantasy Magazine. Later, in the 1967 collection, Conan the Usurper, De Camp changed the title to "The Treasure of Tranicos" and it's probably under that title that a great many readers first encountered the story.

The 1987 version of "The Black Stranger" was published in anthology called Echoes of Valor, edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Wagner plays an important role in the history of Howard scholarship, because of his efforts to restore the texts of Howard (and several other pulp fantasy authors) to their original form. In doing so, "The Black Stranger" is freed from De Camp's imaginary chronology of Conan's exploits and allowed simply to be. There's no overarching significance to the events it describes. Indeed, "The Black Stranger" has a somewhat odd feeling to it, since it's essentially a pirate story rather than a swords-and-sorcery one, though the definition of the latter is of course broad enough to include tales such as this. Still, I think the story is better served by being presented in this fashion rather than, as De Camp would have it, as a significant step on the road to Conan's becoming king of Aquilonia. "The Black Stranger" is too slight a tale to bear such narrative weight and, more to the point, there's absolutely no evidence that Howard himself conceived of it as anything more than another episode in Conan's many, many adventures.

In its original form, "The Black Stranger" tells the tale of Conan's discovery, in the Pictish wilderness, of a hidden cave filled with the treasure of the pirate Tranicos. When he attempts to claim the treasure for himself, a demon of mist forms and attempts to kill him. Conan escapes the cave with his life and not long thereafter discovers that others seek the treasure he's just inadvertently discovered. These others consist of two feuding buccaneers, Black Zarona and Strombanni. When Conan meets them at the stronghold of an exiled Zingaran nobleman, he offers to join forces with them to loot the treasure and share its spoils equally. Of course, Conan's real plan is to use his erstwhile allies to draw out the demon while he makes off with the fabled treasure. Of course, the pirates themselves are far from trustworthy and have their own plans ...

As I said, "The Black Stranger" is a slight story, far from Howard's best. I like it well enough, but there's very little about it that screams "Conan!" to me. That may be why, when De Camp published it in the '50s, he felt the need to spice it up and give it some greater meaning beyond being another example where Conan outsmarts some fellow criminals to make himself (temporarily) rich. Unfortunately, I don't think "The Black Stranger" can bear that kind of narrative weight and De Camp's attempt to make it do so come across as hamfisted and tone-deaf -- like so much of what he did to Howard's corpus.

The Emperor of Dreams

2012-01-13T07:56:00.001-05:00

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams:
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite fantasists and writers, Clark Ashton Smith, born in 1893 in Long Valley, California. In lieu of of my usual Open Friday question, I'm instead making this post to remind everyone of the occasion and to encourage you to read something by the Bard of Auburn to celebrate it. I'll be re-reading "The Empire of the Necromancers," as has become my tradition over these last few years.

The Articles of Dragon: Ares

2012-01-12T09:32:00.000-05:00

I'm going to cheat for today's installment of this series. Rather than focusing on a single article from issue #84 of Dragon (April 1984), I'm instead going to talk about Ares, the magazine's new science fiction gaming section. First, a bit of background. Between 1980 and 1982, SPI published a gaming magazine entitled Ares. The magazine included a complete game in every issue (as was once typical of wargaming magazines), along with articles and reviews. Though not limited to sci-fi by any means, Ares did have a slightly science fictional bent to its content. There were eleven issues of Ares before TSR acquired SPI in 1982, followed by five more issues after the acquisition. The last stand-alone issue of Ares was published in "Winter 1983." TSR never really knew what to do with SPI's properties and wound up frittering them away over the course of the next few years, in the process alienating the company's considerable fanbase, many of whom (quite rightly) felt that TSR had handled the situation very badly. Though TSR tried to make some use of SPI's name and products, only the Ares name survived for long -- and even then, "long" is a relative term.

From issue #84 to issue #111 (July 1986), Ares was one of my favorite sections of Dragon, since I've always been more of a SF fan than a fantasy one. The section featured articles on games like Traveller and Star Trek and Space Opera, as well as Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and a host of superhero games, especially Marvel Super Heroes. Because sci-fi has always played second (or third) banana to fantasy, you'd have expected that the pool of articles would have been pretty shallow in Ares but that wasn't the case. In my opinion, the quality of the articles in this section was consistently high, higher even than that of the rest of Dragon (which is saying something). However, its appeal was definitely more limited, which is why I suspect it was eventually killed. Why devote some many pages of each issue to genres that are also-rans compared to fantasy, especially D&D's brand of fantasy?

To this day, though, when I look back on the years when I subscribed to Dragon, the Ares articles are among those that stick out most prominently in my mind. Its coverage of Gamma World, for example, was truly excellent and I used a number of its Traveller rules variants over the years. And of course Jeff Grubb's regular "The Marvel-Phile" column was invaluable if you were running a Marvel Super Heroes campaign (or even if you weren't and were just a fan of the comics). I've always thought it a pity that a non-fantasy-centric gaming mag never really gained any degree of prominence. GDW's Challenge, where my first published writings appeared, was a decent stab at such a thing, but it eventually folded, too, much to my disappointment. Like Ares, Challenge filled a hole in the hobby that needed filling. In my opinion, it still does.

Old Hobbit Cartoon

2012-01-11T16:36:00.000-05:00

No, not the Rankin-Bass version -- the Gene Deitch version from the 1950s. Apparently, the video below is a test for a proposed full-length version of The Hobbit. The video's been making the rounds at a number of sites, so my apologies if you've seen it before. I hadn't and I honestly can say that, after having watched it, I find myself with newfound respect for the fidelity of the Peter Jackson movies. Seriously, "taking liberties with the text" is too kind a way to describe what this cartoon does.

If you've got 12 minutes to spare and a strong stomach, take a look:

Rebound

2012-01-11T12:44:00.000-05:00

I don't have any deep insights into the upcoming new edition of Dungeons & Dragons or why Wizards of the Coast is going ahead with it. Truth be told, I don't care all that much about D&D any more, insofar as "D&D" means whatever game is currently available on store shelves and carries that name. I was a very enthusiastic player and referee of D&D III for about six years before I had enough and got off that particular merry-go-round. I flirted briefly with Castles & Crusades before diving into OD&D, which eventually led me to the crazy world of the old school renaissance and the retro-clones. By and large, I'm happy here and have been since 2007, before WotC announced the previous new edition of D&D.

But I think a lot of the gamers who decided to take a walk on the old school side of things did so out of frustration with D&D IV. They were disappointed in and angry with WotC, a company that, for many gamers, "saved" D&D back in 2000. They felt betrayed and, in feeling that, they looked for someplace, anyplace with which to align themselves. The bulk of them went to Paizo, I expect, and with good reason. Paizo not only makes great products; those products used a rules set very similar to D&D III. Indeed, Pathfinder's whole raison d'être is backward compatibility with the previous iteration of D&D, preserved for all time thanks to the SRD and OGL.

A few of those disaffected gamers, though, sought out the old school renaissance and picked up games like OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Suddenly, "old school" was a buzzword to be found on many a gaming forum and blog. While there's no question that the ranks of our little community remained small, they did swell in size. Moreover, old school gaming punched way above its weight class when it came to influence over the hobby, with lots of designers, including those at WotC, suddenly touting their old school credentials and expressing admiration for the designs of yore. In 2008, it was "this ain't your father's D&D," but, by 2011, it was suddenly cool to be old school. In short, "old school" had become a fad (much like gaming itself).

Which brings us to 2012 and WotC's announcement of a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike the 4e roll-out, which was condescending and tone deaf, this time around WotC is saying all the right things. They're talking about "uniting" fans of every edition and going back to the "core" elements of D&D. I'm glad to hear that, if only because it means they've learned from their mistakes. What's more interesting, though, is the reaction in our little corner of the Net. From what I have seen, a lot of old school gamers have expressed enthusiasm and even hope that WotC will "get it right" this time. I have to admit I've been taken aback by this love-in -- not because I want a repeat of the acrimony that greeted D&D IV, but because I'm surprised that, after all this time, old school fans give a damn about "D&D." But they do.

That's the truth of it. For a lot of gamers, OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry will never be D&D. They'll play it, sure; they'll even have fun doing so. In their heart of hearts, however, saying "I'm playing Swords & Wizardry" will never make them as happy as saying "I'm playing Dungeons & Dragons." I understand this mentality very well, because it's one I've shared at various times (mostly about Traveller). There's something about "D&D" that cannot be replaced. The ardor for that game, which was, let's face it, likely the first most of us ever played, is intense and not easily forgotten. There's thus an emotional attachment to D&D that there isn't for any of the retro-clones, no matter how much more true any of them are to the intent and spirit of the original games.

So, there are some interesting times ahead. If WotC does their job right -- doesn't alienate anyone by their marketing, produces a game that truly draws on the best of the past, etc. -- I suspect we'll see the old school community contract once more. As I said, I suspect a goodly portion of the gamers who've latched on to this particular bandwagon did so out of frustration and anger, but they weren't really ready to give up their true love for a simulacrum, no matter how good a simulacrum it is. Now that WotC is saying the right things and even obliquely admitting to their errors, all will be forgiven. That's not to say that there aren't potential speed bumps on the road ahead, but my gut tells me that a great many disaffected D&D players, many old schoolers chief among them, are ready to love again.

Me, I'm just a bitter old prune.

Retrospective: Lost Worlds

2012-01-11T09:35:00.000-05:00

When I look back on the history of the hobby, it's hard not to feel that it came to be and flourished during an Indian Summer. For those of you unfamiliar with this American term, it refers to a period of abnormally high temperatures after the first frost -- generally occurring sometime between late September and early November. During an Indian Summer, the expected cold weather is abated for a time and, for all intents and purposes, it feels not like Fall but like Summer has returned. Of course, the leaves are still turning colors and falling and there's a strange haziness in the air at times, so you know, deep down, that this isn't truly Summer returned at all but something else entirely. Indian Summers are brief, too, lasting no more than a month, often much less, but, when they do come, you're grateful for them nonetheless.

When I remember things like Alfred Leonardi's Lost World game books, first published by Nova Game Designs in 1983, I'm reminded of Indian Summers. Lost Worlds was descended from an earlier game, Ace of Aces (also by Leonardi) and published a few years earlier. Ace of Aces was a wargame about aerial combat during World War I. What made the game so memorable was that it included a couple of flip books filled with illustrations depicting what the pilot of a fighter plane saw as he was dogfighting. Each player flipped back and forth based on the maneuvers of his opponent and the books helped to adjudicate combat. It was really a brilliant little game and I wish I owned a copy.

Lost Worlds applied the same basic design to fantasy combat. Each book included a single opponent, so two books were needed to play. The ones I remember most vividly were "Man in Chainmail with Sword and Shield" and "Skeleton with Scimitar and Shield," since these were the ones Nova Game Design included in their advertisements most often. There were other entries in the series, though, including "Giant Goblin with Mace and Shield," "Woman in Scale with Sword and Shield," and "Dwarf in Chainmail with Two-Handed Ax." Over time, many, many were added to the line, often by later publishers. As I understand it, Lost Worlds has been through an extremely large number of publishers over the years and, while largely compatible, each new publisher added wrinkles to the original system that make books by earlier publishers less usable than one might wish.

The reason Lost Worlds reminds me of Indian Summer is that I have a hard time imagining books like this being written, let alone selling well, in an age of cheap and reliable computer games. Back in 1983, video games existed, certainly, but they were primitive and expensive and most people into fantasy gaming I knew scoffed at the notion of playing them as anything other curiosities. At the very least, no one seriously felt that computer gaming was the mass market future of the hobby. For us, there was nothing at all odd about sitting down with a couple of books and calling out page numbers to one another as we simulated a combat between a dwarf and a goblin. Flipping back and forth to look at illustrations and making our decisions based on what we saw was the most natural thing in the world back then. Nowadays? I don't know.

Regardless, for their time, Lost Worlds were pretty impressive products. They gave some of us a sense that combat could be more than rolling dice and tallying the results. More importantly, they reminded us of how important visualizing combat can be. Unfortunately, in doing so, I fear that they may have also readied a lot of gamers for the notion that aids to visualization are essential to the hobby, a road that would eventually lead to its increasing ghettoization as the preserve of old weirdos like me. As a friend of mine once said, "Why would I play D&D when [video game X] has better graphics than my imagination?" He regrets that comment now, of course, and rightly so, but I suspect a lot of gamers think similarly, at least some of the time.

The Articles of Dragon: "How to Finish Fights Faster"

2012-01-10T09:05:00.000-05:00

Along with falling damage, psionics, and alignment, articles about unarmed combat were a commonplace in the pages of Dragon during the years when I subscribed to that venerable gaming magazine. There's probably a reason for that: unarmed combat in AD&D was, in my experience, pretty much universally admitted to be unusable as written, a fact even Gary Gygax acknowledged on more than one occasion. Despite that, no single alternative system ever really took root, with most referees employing a welter of different approaches, some based on the official system, some based on earlier articles from Dragon, and some created whole cloth. That's what playing D&D was like during my formative years in the hobby -- a crazy mix of stuff all drawing inspiration from the same base and then running off in whatever direction one deemed most fun. Consequently, I can't help but chuckle at all the folks decrying the existence of "so many retro-clones," since, to my way of thinking, what we have now is pretty much what we've always had. The only difference is that, nowadays, it's easy to print up, prettify, and sell your interpretation of D&D to others, whereas, in the past, each referee had a photocopies and stapled collection of house rules he shared with anyone willing to listen.

Perhaps because no single alternative to AD&D's execrable rules emerged, it was inevitable that the redoubtable Roger E. Moore would eventually offer his own unarmed combat system. His article, "How to Finish Fights Faster," appeared in issue #83 (March 1984) and takes up only four pages, one of them being a humorous illustration of four rotund halflings attempting to bring down an eyepatch-wearing humanoid, who looks more annoyed than inconvenienced by his diminutive opponents. Moore divides unarmed combat up into three modes: pummeling, kicking, and grappling. Pummeling is straight up fisticuffs, with or without the use of aids, like dagger pommels or metal gauntlets. Kicking is, well, kicking and grappling is attacking to subdue. All three modes are fairly simple to use, working more or less like the normal AD&D combat system but with certain modifiers and special cases unique to them. This is particularly true of grappling, which has a number of different moves detailed, each of which has further modifiers and effects.

I never used Moore's system, so I can't comment on how well it plays in practice. I suspect it probably works better than AD&D's official system, but not as well as others. I say that, because it includes a lot of specificity in certain areas (grappling, for example) that necessitates either a good memory or referring to the article to adjudicate. That's not a bad thing in itself; there are lots of rules in D&D that require reference to a rulebook to handle. However, I'll admit that I find it baffling that unarmed combat rules so often wind up being much more complicated than armed combat. Why is it that we can accept that all it takes to adjudicate an armored fighting man's attack against an opponent is a 1D20 roll compared to a chart, followed by a damage roll if successful but we demand saving throws and percentage chances and so forth if he wants to throw a punch or wrestle someone to the ground?

Pulp Fantasy Library: A Voyage to Sfanomoë

2012-01-09T09:40:00.000-05:00

In addition to his more well-known tales of Hyperborea, Averoigne, and Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith also wrote a number of short stories set in the last vestige of Atlantis. Known as Poseidonis, Smith wrote only four tales set in this civilization teetering on the brink of (literal) collapse, the second of which, "A Voyage to Sfanomoë," appeared in the July 1931 issue of Weird Tales. I'll admit that neither Poseidonis nor this particular story are among my favorites in Smith's canon. However, I have a fondness for "A Voyage to Sfanomoë" in large part due to its mixing of fantasy and science fiction. That's a common enough element of many pulp fantasies, but it seems particularly appropriate to a story dealing with Atlantis, whose legend, going back to Plato at least, has included the suggestion that the Atlanteans had access to science and technology unlike that of any human civilization before or since.

Favorite of mine or note, "A Voyage to Sfanomoë" nevertheless opens in a typically Smithian fashion:

There are many marvellous tales, untold, unwritten, never to be recorded or remembered, lost beyond all divining and all imagining, that sleep in the double silence of far-recessive time and space. The chronicles of Saturn, the archives of the moon in its prime, the legends of Antillia and Moaria—these are full of an unsurmised or forgotten wonder. And strange are the multitudinous tales withheld by the light-years of Polaris and the Galaxy. But none is stranger, none more marvellous, than the tale of Hotar and Evidon and their voyage to the planet Sfanomoë, from the last isle of foundering Atlantis. Harken, for I alone shall tell the story, who came in a dream to the changeless center where the past and future are always contemporary with the present; and saw the veritable happening thereof; and, waking, gave it words:

Hotar and Evidon were brothers in science as well as by consanguinity. They were the last representatives of a long line of illustrious inventors and investigators, all of whom had contributed more or less to the knowledge, wisdom, and scientific resources of a lofty civilization matured through cycles. One by one they and their fellow-savants had learned the arcanic secrets of geology, of chemistry, of biology, of astronomy; they had subverted the elements, had constrained the sea, the sun, the air, and the force of gravitation, compelling them to serve the uses of man; and lastly they had found a way to release the typhonic power of the atom, to destroy, transmute, and reconstruct the molecules of matter at will.

However, by that irony which attends all the triumphs and achievements of man, the progress of this mastering of natural law was coincidental with the profound geologic changes and upheavals which caused the gradual sinking of Atlantis. Age by age, aeon by aeon, the process had gone on: huge peninsulas, whole sea-boards, high mountain-ranges, citied plains and plateaus, all went down in turn beneath the diluvial waves. With the advance of science, the time and location of future cataclysms was more accurately predictable; but nothing could be done to avert them.

These three paragraphs set the scene rather nicely, in addition to preparing readers for what is to come. Brothers Hotar and Evidon decide that neither magic nor science can ultimately save Poseidonis and so resolve that, rather than try, they will instead escape it by traveling to another world -- the Sfanomoë of the title. I don't think I'm giving anything away by revealing that, this being a Smith tale, there can be no escaping the inevitability of oblivion, though Hotar and Evidon's efforts to do so possess a charmingly melancholy appeal. Perhaps it speaks to my advancing age that I find stories such as this so attractive to me, I don't know, but I genuinely like "A Voyage to Sfanomoë" and recommend it if only for its science fantasy portrayal of Atlantis (though it holds other appeals as well).

Quelle Surprise

2012-01-09T09:13:00.000-05:00

Looks like D&D V is now officially on the way.

I may have some thoughts about this later, but, for the moment, allow me a momentary guffaw at the notion that Humpty Dumpty can ever be put back together again. I don't doubt for a minute WotC's sincerity in wanting to hear what D&D fans have to say about the future of the game, but I also think it's a recipe for disaster, especially given how fragmented the fanbase is these days. But I've been wrong before, so who knows?

Open Friday: Christmas Gaming Gifts

2012-01-06T08:41:00.000-05:00

Today is the feast of the Epiphany, marking the end of the Christmas season. I'm still busy and distracted by activities relating to Christmas, as you no doubt have noticed, so I'm going to make this week's Open Friday question a quick and somewhat vapid one: what gaming gifts did you receive for Christmas this year? For myself, I received only boardgames, as I've already discussed, the rest of my gifts having nothing to do with the hobby -- and that's fine by me. I already have way more games than I know what to do with.

The Articles of Dragon: "Living in a Material World"

2012-01-03T12:40:00.000-05:00

Issue #81 (January 1984) of Dragon included an article by Michael Dobson (whom I presume is the same Michael Dobson employed by TSR as an editor and writer between 1984 and 1987) entitled "Living in a Material World." As its subtitle makes clear, this article is intended to provide a system for dealing with the various material components spellcasters were expected to carry in order to work their magic. Likewise, Dobson notes that "material spell components add to the romance and realism of magic use, and somewhat restrict the power of spell casters." By my lights, this makes "Living in a Material World" about as paradigmatic an example of a Silver Age Dragon article as almost any I can imagine.

As to the content of the article itself, I can't deny that it's rather well done. Dobson is to be admired for his intestinal fortitude in providing a comprehensive accounting of all of AD&D's material spell components, including their costs, where they might be obtained, and their rarity. He then uses this information to provide the referee with the likelihood that various locales might have the components for which one is searching. There's a base chance, modified by rarity, the size of the locale in which one is searching, and other factors. It's actually a fairly easy system to use if you have the article handy, but one wonders why anyone would bother -- at least I do (and did).

I want to be clear here: I don't begrudge anyone who finds dealing with such minutiae to be fun in their campaigns. Everyone has a slightly different notion of how much detail is "too much" and how much is "not enough." There's no single path to Verisimilitude. And I think, ultimately, that's my biggest beef with articles like this. They're part of a trend that D&D -- and RPGs generally -- adopted in the mid-80s that equated more detail with "better gaming." I don't deny that I've often indulged in more detail when I happened to like the topic in question, but material components have never been one of those topics.

They still aren't.

Twelvety

2012-01-03T09:52:00.001-05:00

I've often observed that the surest sign one has "made it" is not the fact that everyone is imitating you but rather that everyone is going out of their way to ostentatiously be different than you. By that standard, J.R.R. Tolkien, the 120th anniversary of whose birth is today, has most assuredly made it. This is somewhat ironic, given that 2012 also marks the year when another cinematic rendition of one of Tolkien's works will appear on movie screens across the world. Yet, if one looks around at the field of fantasy literature (or even fantasy RPGs), it's not at all uncommon to see authors being touted specifically for their un-Tolkienian traits, a practice that only confirms just how large a shadow the good professor still casts over the field nearly 40 years after his death.

Like teenagers desperate to prove their independence, rebelling against Tolkien seems to a rite of passage for many fantasy writers and it's not hard to see why. The odds that any work of fantasy is ever going to become as well known or influential decades after its publication is slim, New York Times bestseller lists to the contrary. A far more attainable goal, therefore, is to generate controversy centered on Tolkien and then to bask in the fleeting notoriety. The simple fact is that most of the popular understanding of "fantasy" is Tolkien-derived: orcs and hobbits and elves and dwarves -- indeed the very fact that lots of people think "dwarves" is a proper English plural for the word "dwarf." Likewise, the idea that fantasy must involve an Epic Quest™ against a Dark Lord™ who can only be defeated by destroying the Ancient Maguffin™ is pervasive, thanks in no small part to the success of Tolkien's works. For a lot of people, that is what fantasy is all about.

Now, I can fully understand wanting to get out from under the influence of Tolkien, the desire to do something -- anything -- different in fantasy. Heck, that's been a constant refrain of this blog from the start. But I think there's a difference between wanting to do something different and denigrating one's forefathers in the genre. That is, one can be different without being anti-Tolkien. Gene Wolfe, to cite an example that comes immediately to mind, is very different from Tolkien but he's not anti-Tolkien. To put it somewhat more crudely: Gene Wolfe is pro-Wolfe. He holds no adolescent grudges against Tolkien; he is not vexed that Bilbo Baggins is orders of magnitude more well-known than Severian. In short, Wolfe isn't trying to knock Tolkien down a peg and his fantasies are better for that.

For myself, I plan to spend this 120th anniversary year of Tolkien's birth continuing to read The Lord of the Rings to my daughter. There's a reason this novel has proven so enduring, no matter how much some may wish otherwise.

On the Other Hand

2012-01-02T18:57:00.000-05:00

Lest you think all my recent boardgame experiences have been less than ideal, I should note that, for Christmas, my lovely wife got two new boardgames for me: the long-desired Arkham Horror and Pandemic. I've wanted to own and play Arkham Horror for years, so this gift was very well received. I've heard good things about Pandemic, but have never played it. What's interesting is that both of these games are cooperative rather than competitive. It's a style of game I have no experience with. If anyone out there has played either of these games (or similar ones), I'd very curious to hear your thoughts on them.

How I Spent New Year's Day

2012-01-02T17:53:00.001-05:00

Having wasted my New Year's Eve playing LEGO Heroica with my family on New Year's Eve, I decided to follow it up by wasting New Year's Day playing a different boardgame with friends and family. This time, it was the zombie survival game Last Night on Earth, which a friend of mine bought at a local game store during their after Christmas sale. I saw Last Night on Earth played back in November, when I got together with some people to spend the afternoon and evening playing boardgames. However, I never actually had the chance to play it myself until yesterday.

I'll be honest: the game didn't quite live up to my expectations. Some of that is undoubtedly due to the fact that this was my first time playing and so I didn't quite grok the mechanics and thus played in a sub-optimal fashion. Some of my disappointment might also have to do with the fact the introductory scenario -- kill 15 zombies in 15 turns -- isn't ideal for someone still grappling with the fine points of the rules. But that's not all that bugged me about the game, as I'll explain.

The game uses a randomly generated map map up of five cardboard pieces depicting buildings and terrain. Half the players take the roles of "heroes" and half take the roles of zombies. The heroes all have names and special abilities and are chosen randomly from a collection of cards. Each hero also has a plastic miniature that represents them on the game board. In our game, there were four heroes: Johnny, the high school jock; Jenny, the farmer's daughter; Becky, the nurse; and Jake, the drifter. The zombies also had minis, too, but no personalities or special abilities.

Zombies can only move one space per turn, but they are unimpeded by terrain (including walls), whereas heroes move 1d6 spaces each. When a zombie and a hero are in the same space, combat ensues. Zombies roll 1d6 and heroes 2d6, with the highest dice roll (not sum -- the dice are treated individually) winning. If a zombie wins, the hero takes 1 wound. Adult heroes can take 3 wounds before dying and teenage heroes 2 wounds. If the hero wins the roll, he successfully "fends off" the zombie, unless he has a weapon that can deal damage. If the hero rolls doubles, he deals 1 wound of damage, which kills most zombies.

Weapons and other equipment can only be found by giving up a movement phase and spending it "searching" in a building. Searching is represented by a random draw from a deck of cards. The result might be a piece of gear, but, more than likely, it's an event card that gives your hero some situational benefit (like "Just a Scratch" that negates a wound by a zombie). There are a large number of cards and only a few weapons, so, unless you spend a lot of time searching or get very lucky, odds are you're going to spend most of the game running away from zombies into various buildings and hoping you get a useful weapon.

Even leaving aside the odds against finding a weapon, one of my beefs with the game is that most of the weapons aren't very effective. A baseball bat, for example, allows the wielder to roll 3d6 for damage against a zombie, but, unless doubles are rolled, no damage is dealt. And a fire axe deals no damage at all. This annoyed me. A lot. My drifter, Jake, got a fire axe, waded into combat with some zombies and I discovered the axe was utterly useless against the undead. That broke my suspension of disbelief and sapped my enthusiasm. Looking through the deck later, I discovered that only firearms had much chance to kill zombies with any reliability, but they also had the chance of running out of ammo and becoming useless.

The chainsaw is the only truly good melee weapon and it's, in my opinion, too good. The game was winding down to the last few turns and the heroes had lost half their number. Things looked terrible for them -- until Becky got lucky and scored the chainsaw. In short order, it was all over for the zombies. I actually felt bad for the zombie players, because they'd played much better than the heroes and a single card turned the tide quickly and decisively. That struck me as unfair and an opposite manifestation of the problem I had with the other weapons.

To be clear, the advanced rules introduce many more complications and I'd like to give them a whirl sometime. I get that the game is -- and should be -- slanted in favor of the zombies, at least initially, but, from what I experienced yesterday, I think the success of the heroes relies too heavily on the luck of the draw. Now, obviously, I don't mind randomness, but I think Last Night on Earth is too random, to the point where it's impossible to form an effective strategy against the zombies. That, plus the fact that most weapons aren't particularly effective, hampered my ability to enjoy the game as much as I'd hoped I might. But, as I said, I intend to play the game a few more times before I render a final verdict.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Maker of Gargoyles

2012-01-02T11:44:00.000-05:00

January is upon us and so I bid farewell to Pulp Science Fiction Library (though it may return in the future). For the first installment of Pulp Fantasy Library of 2012, it seems only fitting to turn to my favorite pulp fantasist, Clark Ashton Smith, and my favorite of his recurring settings, Averoigne. This time, the story in question is "The Maker of Gargoyles," which appeared in the August 1932 issue of Weird Tales. The short story walked a difficult road to publication, having been rejected multiple times by both Weird Tales and its competitor, Strange Tales. It was only after several revisions, the most significant of which was suggested to Smith by August Derleth that it was at last accepted for publication.

As its name suggests, "The Maker of Gargoyles" is about a stone-carver named Blaise Reynard who had been commissioned by the archbishop of Vyônes to carve a pair of gargoyles for the city's new cathedral. Smith describes the circumstances of Reynard's employment, as well as the popular reaction to both his work and his person in the opening of the story:

Among the many gargoyles that frowned or leered from the roof of the new-built cathedral of Vyônes, two were pre-eminent above the rest by virtue of their fine workmanship and their supreme grotesquery. These two had been wrought by the stone-carver Blaise Reynard, a native of Vyônes, who had lately returned from a long sojourn in the cities of Provence, and had secured employment on the cathedral when the three years' task of its construction and ornamentation was well-nigh completed. In view of the wonderful artistry shown by Reynard, it was regretted by Ambrosius, the archbishop, that it had not been possible to commit the execution of all the gargoyles to this delicate and accomplished workman; but other people, with less liberal tastes than Ambrosius, were heard to express a different opinion.

This opinion, perhaps, was tinged by the personal dislike that had been generally felt toward Reynard in Vyônes even from his boyhood; and which had been revived with some virulence on his return. Whether rightly or unjustly, his very physiognomy had always marked him out for public disfavor: he was inordinately dark, with hair and beard of a preternatural bluish-black, and slanting, ill-matched eyes that gave him a sinister and cunning air. His taciturn and saturnine ways were such as a superstitious people would identify with necromantic knowledge or complicity; and there were those who covertly accused him of being in league with Satan; though the accusations were little more than vague, anonymous rumors, even to the end, through lack of veritable evidence.

However, the people who suspected Reynard of diabolic affiliations were wont for awhile to instance the two gargoyles as sufficient proof. No man, they contended, who was so inspired by the Arch-Enemy, could have carven anything so sheerly evil and malignant, could have embodied so consummately in mere stone the living lineaments of the most demoniacal of all the deadly Sins.

The two gargoyles were perched on opposite corners of a high tower of the cathedral. One was a snarling, murderous, cat-headed monster, with retracted lips revealing formidable fangs, and eyes that glared intolerable hatred from beneath ferine brows. This creature had the claws and wings of a griffin, and seemed as if it were poised in readiness to swoop down on the city of Vyônes, like a harpy on its prey. Its companion was a horned satyr, with the vans of some great bat such as might roam the nether caverns, with sharp, clenching talons, and a look of Satanically brooding lust, as if it were gloating above the helpless object of its unclean desire. Both figures were complete, even to the hindquarters, and were not mere conventional adjuncts of the roof. One would have expected them to start at any moment from the stone in which they were mortised.

Ambrosius, a lover of art, had been openly delighted with these creations, because of their high technical merit and their verisimilitude as works of sculpture. But others, including many humbler dignitaries of the Church, were more or less scandalized, and said that the workman had informed these figures with the visible likeness of his own vices, to the glory of Belial rather than of God, and had thus perpetrated a sort of blasphemy. Of course, they admitted, a certain amount of grotesquery was requisite in gargoyles; but in this case the allowable bounds had been egregiously overpassed.

As the story begins, Vyônes is being terrorized by a series of terrible murders of reputable and respectable citizens, including members of the clergy. In time, these murders are joined by a series of attacks upon the young women of the city, leading many to believe that demons are at work. This, in turn, inspires equal parts superstitious fear and blasphemous abandon in Vyônes, as some of its inhabitants look to God for salvation while others see recent events as evidence that Satan holds sway over their home.

In the midst of this tumult, Blaise Reynard spends his time in a tavern, where he lustily eyes the serving girl, Nicolette. For her part, Nicolette shows little interest in Reynard, which only inflames his passion for her:

There were few people in the tavern that evening. The girl Nicolette was serving wine to a mercer's assistant, one Raoul Coupain, a personable youth and a newcomer in the neighborhood, and she was laughing with what Reynard considered unseemly gayety at the broad jests and amorous sallies of this Raoul. Jean Villom was discussing in a low voice the latest enormities and was drinking fully as much liquor as his customers.

Glowering with jealousy at the presence of Raoul Coupain, whom he suspected of being a favored rival, Reynard seated himself in silence and stared malignly at the flirtatious couple. No one seemed to have noticed his entrance; for Villom went on talking to his cronies without pause or interruption, and Nicolette and her companion were equally oblivious. To his jealous rage, Reynard soon added the resentment of one who feels that he is being deliberately ignored. He began to pound on the table with his heavy fists, to attract attention.

Villom, who had been sitting all the while his back turned, now called out to Nicolette without even troubling to face around on his stool, telling her to serve Reynard. Giving a backward smile at Coupain, she came slowly and with open reluctance to the stone-carver's table.

She was small and buxom, with reddish-gold hair that curled luxuriantly above the short, delicious oval of her face; and she was gowned in a tight-fitting dress of apple-green that revealed the firm, seductive outlines of her hips and bosom. Her air was disdainful and a little cold, for she did not like Reynard and had taken small pains at any time to conceal her aversion. But to Reynard she was lovelier and more desirable than ever, and he felt a savage impulse to seize her in his arms and carry her bodily away from the tavern before the eyes of Raoul Coupain and her father.

I don't think I'm giving anything away when I say that the resolution of Reynard's unfulfilled desire and the horrific events in Vyônes are connected. Neither do I think the nature of connection will come as a surprise to anyone. Despite that, "The Maker of Gargoyles" is nevertheless an enjoyable tale well told. As ever, Smith is a master of prose poetry and his descriptions of both people and events are terrifically suggestive without ever lapsing into luridness. Just as important is Smith's portrait of the psychology of Reynard, for the success of the whole story depends heavily on it. Some might find it unsatisfying, but I think, in a tale as brief as this one, one can only reasonably expect a certain amount of depth. Even given that criticism, Reynard is a quite well realized character and a solid foundation on which to build this tale of obsession in a fantastical medieval France.

How I Spent New Year's Eve

2012-01-01T08:59:00.001-05:00

My apologies for the relative paucity of posts over the last week or so. Christmas is a very busy time for me, as it is for anyone with children and visiting relatives. Things are still fairly hectic and likely will remain so for a little bit longer. And truth be told, I could use the break. Getting Thousand Suns out the door at long last was a big (and slightly stressful) effort and I expect a similar experience with both my Dwimmermount releases and Petty Gods, which can now finally get my undivided attention and, I hope, see completion in January.

But enough of that! Last night, while waiting for the clock to strike twelve, I sat around my dining room table with my family playing LEGO Heroica. I mentioned this game earlier in the year. Ever since my son got it for Christmas, I was itching to play it, and New Year's Eve provided a good opportunity to do so. Heroica is basically a simple dungeoncrawl boardgame, a bit like TSR's Dungeon! but far simpler and with much more attractive components.

The basic game comes with enough pieces for three different "missions," which is what they call scenarios. A mission determines both the layout of the dungeon and its ultimate goal. The missions included in this set are, in order of ease, the recovery of a magic scroll, the recovery of the Helm of Protection, and the defeat of the goblin king. Each player can choose one of four characters -- a barbarian, a druid, a knight, and a wizard -- each of which has a special ability. Play proceeds by rolling a die to determine how far you can move in a turn. If you land adjacent to a monster or monsters, you must engage in combat, which is resolved simply with another die roll. Results of combat can be defeating the monster, being wounded by the monster (and thus subtracting one or more health points from your total), or defeating the monster and being wounded. Being wounded results in your character's also being pushed back one space on the map. If your character loses all his health, you lose one or more turns while you heal. How much you can heal is, again, based on a die roll and no defeated character can return to play until he's fully healed.

In addition to monsters, there are also various treasures in the game, such as chests, gold, and potions. What's in a chest is determined by a die roll, with many chests being trapped and dealing damage. Potions have various effects, from increased speed to healing, and can be kept in reserve until you choose to use them. Gold can be accumulated to buy better weapons that aid you in your mission. Movement through the dungeon is simple; diagonal movement is not allowed. You'll notice there are doors on the dungeon map. These are all locked and can only be opened by finding a key. Once unlocked, a door stays that way, so anyone can pass through it. Alternately, if you don't have a key, you can take a chance and try to find a secret door into a room by rolling a die. There's only a one in six chance of success, but it's better than nothing, if you lack a key.

Each of the characters has a unique melee or ranged ability. This ability is activated when you roll a shield icon on the die -- another one in six chance. The wizard, for example, can use his magic to slay a creature up to four spaces distant, even around corners. The druid can heal himself to full health. The knight can charge, slay a monster, and keep moving. The barbarian can slay all creatures adjacent to him and keep moving. These abilities give each character a distinct feeling, though the randomness of their activation meant they didn't get used very often. That's probably more the result of the small starting map, though. I think, with one or more expansions (there are three currently available), the abilities would come into play more often.

What I found fascinating was how quickly my wife and daughter named and even "roleplayed" their characters. The barbarian, for example, became known as Hudge and my wife even adopted a funny, pseudo-Russian accent and diction on her turns. My daughter called her druid Greylon and I called my knight Sir James, in memory of my first D&D character. My son didn't name his wizard, leading us to alternately call him Tim or Talroc, though he insisted he was called "Just 'The Wizard.'" So, later, I started referring to him as "The Unknown Wizard." And while he didn't have a name, he did have a personality. In three games over an hour and half -- the game plays very quickly -- he forsook the stated goals of the missions and instead sought out gold and treasure chests. Apparently, he needed funds for his alchemical experiments.

Heroica includes the option of what is effectively campaign play, allowing characters to retain items they've acquired in previous missions. There's also an option allowing one player to take on the role of the monsters. Further, the rules (which are only about three pages long) encourage you to make your own missions and create your own rules, which my children almost immediately started suggesting. For that alone, I judge Heroica a huge success and I imagine I'll be buying the various expansions in the weeks and months to come (if only to add new monsters and characters). As I remarked to a friend of mine, who plays in my Dwimmermount and Thousand Suns campaigns, "Heroica is a better D&D Starter Set than the D&D Starter Set. Why the heck isn't WotC producing something like this?"

Retrospective: Space Marines

2011-12-28T10:15:00.000-05:00

I've talked about Space Opera and its kitchen sink setting in several posts previously, but what I don't think I've ever talked about (much) is the game that laid the groundwork for both, 1977's Space Marines by A. Mark Ratner. To be honest, I've never seen the 1977 edition of Space Marines, which was self-published by Ratner under the FanTac Games label. Sometime after its publication, the game was sold to Fantasy Games Unlimited, which led to a second edition, published in 1980. That's the only edition I've ever seen, so I cannot comment on whatever differences there might be between the two versions, but I welcome details in the comments by anyone who has seen both.

Space Marines is a science fiction miniatures wargame that uses a scale of 25 meters to the inch and twenty-second turns. The rules are quite comprehensive, covering wide range of topics -- unit integrity, suppression fire, bombing from air and orbit, electronic warfare, morale, and so on. However, the rules aren't particularly lengthy, especially when compared to other SF miniatures games with which I'm familiar, such as Striker. The relative shortness of the rules is at least partially a consequence of the fact that some topics are treated only sketchily. Orbital and sub-orbital bombardment and combat, for example, are largely left up to the referee to adjudicate, with only some very basic guidelines provided in the text. That's not to say that Space Marines is a simple game. It is, however, a lot more clearly written and intelligible than the game it spawned, Space Opera, which, despite my fondness for it, is far from a paragon of clarity.

About a third of Space Marines is devoted to background material. It was this material that Ed Simbalist drew on when creating Space Opera's setting. Indeed, I don't think I ever really understood the full scope of Space Opera's setting, until I'd actually seen a copy of Space Marines. Races and governments to which the RPG only alludes are given write-ups in the wargame. Granted, those write-ups mostly focus on military matters, such as organization, tactics, even uniforms, but at least they exist. Without the benefit of Space Marines, I'd never really know who the Mekpurrs were, let alone even more obscure races like the Rauwoofs or the Whistlers. Ultimately, that's the main reason I still find Space Marines interesting. It works very well as a supplement to Space Opera, filling in some blanks that the RPG's author didn't think needed to be filled lest precious page space be taken away from more important topics like ranged combat status modifiers.

The Articles of Dragon: "How Many Coins in a Coffer?"

2011-12-27T09:07:00.000-05:00

Another preview of the Silver Age appears in issue #80 (December 1983) of Dragon, in the article "How Many Coins in a Coffer?" by David F. Godwin. The article's premise is that the way AD&D abstracts encumbrance with regards to coins makes no sense, since the Players Handbook states that all coins are relatively the same size and weight (one-tenth of a pound or 1.6 ounces). After quibbling over the meaning of "relatively," the author points out that, for example, platinum weighs 2.5 times as much as copper. Given that, how can these two types of coins be the same weight or the same size? He goes on to note that this problem isn't unique to AD&D. RuneQuest doesn't talk about the size of its coinage, but it does talk about its weight and does so in a way that Godwin believes is nonsensical (he points out that silver does not weigh twice as much as copper). Tunnels & Trolls also includes coins that weigh one-tenth of a pound each but without any reference to size.

Having presented that prolog, the author explains why this matter concerns him:

The easiest way out is to reiterate that it's only a game and isn't supposed to be totally realistic. What's realistic about fire-breathing dragons or alignment languages? How does that accord with the laws of biology and physics? There are quite a few of us out here in the boondocks who feel perfectly comfortable with basilisks, fireballs, illusions, the fact that a spell called "continual light" produces continuous light with nothing intermittent about it, and even the rule that clerics can't use edged weapons, but who balk at the idea of a world where platinum, gold, electrum, silver and copper all weigh precisely the same for a given volume. And if we do say that all coin metals weigh the same, we are still faced with the volume question.

The bulk of the article that follows then concerns not so much the weight of individual coins, which Godwin admits would give the referee a nervous breakdown to track, but with the size of coins. His interest in this question is in how many of a given coin will fit into a given container. So, if a chest is 18" x 30" x 18" in dimension, how many gold coins can it contain? How many silver? What about a mix of gold and silver? By recourse to formulae involving the specific gravities of each metal, Godwin is able to offer a small table that gives the weight, volume, and thickness of typical coins of precious metal in AD&D. Armed with this table and the size of any container, the referee can, with comparative ease, determine how many coins of any type can fit within it.

As these kinds of articles go, "How Many Coins in a Coffer?" isn't very math-heavy. Godwin kindly saves most of the math for himself, but, even so, the idea of having to spend much time calculating how many silver pieces actually fit into an adventurer's saddlebags seems a needless complication. Working the other way -- figuring out many and how large the containers holding a given volume of treasure must be -- is not better in my opinion. But then I prefer to keep most things in Dungeons & Dragons fairly abstract, from hit points to experience points to encumbrance. Worrying about such things has never been an obsession of mine (I'd prefer to obsess about other things), but, back in 1983 and beyond, such obsessions became commoner in the pages of Dragon. The drive toward "realism," whether in encumbrance, weather, linguistics, population density, or some other area, was the tenor of the day and Dragon's content reflected that.

Pulp Science Fiction Library: The Winds of Gath

2011-12-26T16:19:00.000-05:00

If A. Bertram Chandler qualifies as an "influential but not well known author," how do we describe E.C. Tubb, whose multi-volume Dumarest saga is even less familiar to sci-fi fans and gamers alike? Tubb, who died a little over a year ago, was, if nothing else, a major inspiration to Marc Miller's Traveller, as will quickly become obvious to anyone who reads even one novel in the series. Beginning with 1967's The Winds of Gath, Tubb recounted the adventures of Earl Dumarest as he wandered throughout our galaxy in the far future, seeking fame and fortune. Dumarest is, by occupation, a "traveler," a sort of interstellar vagabond who travels in cold sleep while crossing the vast distances between worlds. He's also a native of Earth, having made his way into space as a stowaway in childhood:

"I stowed away on such a ship. I was young, alone, more than
a little desperate. I was more than lucky. The captain should
have evicted me but he had a kind heart. He was old and had no
son." He paused. "That was a long time ago. I was ten at the
time."

He shook himself as if shedding unpleasant memories, been
traveling ever since, deeper and deeper into the inhabited worlds. "That's all there is to it, My Lady. Just an ordinary story of a runaway boy who had more luck than he deserved or thought existed. But Earth is very real."

"Then why haven't I heard of it? Why does everyone think of it as a planet that does not exist?" She stooped and picked up a handful of dirt. "Earth! This is earth! Every planet, in a way, is earth."

"But one planet was the original." He saw the look of shocked realization followed immediately by forceful negation. "You do not believe me—I cannot blame you for that, but think about it for a moment. Earth, my Earth, is far from the edge of the inhabited worlds. No one now, aside from a few, has any reason to go there. But assume for a moment that what I claim is true. Men would venture from that planet in which direction? To the stars closest to home, naturally. And from there? To other, close stars. And so on until the center of civilization had moved deeper into the galaxy and Earth became less than a legend." He paused. "No, My Lady, I can't blame you for not knowing of Earth. But I do."

As I noted above, travelers journey between the stars naked in

coffin-like boxes with their sterilizing glow. Here was where the livestock rode, doped,
frozen, ninety per cent dead. Here was the steerage for travelers willing to gamble against the fifteen per cent mortality rate.

Such travel was cheap—its sole virtue.

Later books in the series establish more details about the nature of space travel, including lotteries based on the likelihood of a given passenger's surviving the trip in cold storage. Other details developed in later books include the Cyclan, an organization devoted to pure logic, the Universal Brotherhood, an interstellar religion, and the network of Free Traders. All of these make an appearance, if only briefly, in The Winds of Gath, which takes place on the inhospitable world of Gath, whose violent storm winds are among its only attractions to outsiders and whose secrets kick off this series in grand style.

Over the course of more than 30 sequels, published between 1967 and 2009, Earl Dumarest's travels are presented in all their pulpy glory, as he goes from world to world, running afoul of all manner of antagonists and threats, and continuing his quest to find his "mythical" homeworld of Earth. The Dumarest tales aren't great literature, but they're fun and inspiring. You can easily see why Marc Miller liked them so much and incorporated so many elements from them into Traveller. This seems only fair, as Tubb himself seems to have swiped ideas from numerous other sci-fi authors, from Asimov to Brackett to Herbert, in creating these stories of interstellar adventure. In that respect, Tubb's great reading for referees looking to find creative ways to incorporate ideas form other sources into his campaign. So, if you can find a copy of The Winds of Gath or any of its follow-ups, do so.

Merry Christmas

2011-12-25T00:01:00.003-05:00

Hodie Christus natus est:

Hodie Salvator apparuit:
Hodie in terra canunt Angeli,
laetantur Archangeli
Hodie exsultant justi, dicentes:
Gloria in excelsis Deo.
Alleluia.

Open Friday: Christmas Gaming Memories

2011-12-23T09:09:00.000-05:00

Though I do want to talk about the results of last week's poll, since it's so close to Christmas, I thought I'd make this week's Open Friday post about gaming memories associated with the holiday. For me, I strongly associate gaming and Christmas, since it was a Christmas gift to a friend of mine -- TSR's Dungeon! -- that got me to dig out the Holmes boxed set sitting in the linen closet of my home and try to make sense of it for the first time. Subsequent Christmases often featured RPG-related gifts, but no Christmas will ever quite beat the one in 1979 when I was made first furtive steps into a hobby that's been with me for more than three decades. That's a memory I'll never forget.

How about you?

The Articles of Dragon: "Setting Saintly Standards"

2011-12-22T09:38:00.000-05:00

"Setting Saintly Standards" from issue #79 (November 1983) exemplifies two of the worst aspects of D&D: a mania for quantifying everything combined with forgetfulness about the game's origins. Written by Scott Bennie, the article to provide a system "for defining sainthood [and] classifying the precise abilities or capabilities of a saint." Saints, Bennie notes, are mentioned several times in passing in the Dungeon Masters Guide (the Mace of St. Cuthbert being the most notable), but what saints are and what purpose they serve is never explained. Bennie is correct so far as he goes. What he forgets (or is unaware of) is that Gary Gygax provided some good evidence as to the nature of saints back in an issue of The Strategic Review where he talks about alignment. There, saints are exemplars of Lawful Goodness, just as devils are exemplars of Lawful Evilness and demons exemplars of Chaotic Evilness. While AD&D provided lots of information on devils and demons, saints get no similar treatment (neither do "godlings," but no one seems to care about them for some reason).

That's where "Setting Saintly Standards" steps in. Bennie proposes that saints are special servants of the gods who've achieved immortality and some measure of divine power. He makes them on par with Greyhawk's "quasi-deities" like Murlynd or Keoghtom, but explicitly tied to a specific deity, whom they serve and whose cause they promote. The article lays out their spell-like abilities and offers four examples of saints from his own campaign to give the referee some idea of how to create saints of his own. He likewise suggests that some saints -- "patron saints" -- may have shrines dedicated to them and, over time, achieve sufficient power to become demigods in their own right. Exactly what this means for relations between the saint, his followers, and the deity he ostensibly serves is never discussed.

I'm on record as intensely disliking the reduction of gods and semi-divine beings to game stats. It's not for nothing that I dislike both Gods, Demigods & Heroes and Deities & Demigods. One of D&D's worst failings is its reductionism, its voracious appetite to turn everything into either a monster to be killed or a piece of magical technology to be wielded. Saints, as Bennie imagines them, are just big monsters -- or little gods -- to be confronted rather than anything more sublime. Maybe I'd be less bothered by this if he'd have adopted another term for what he's presenting; I don't think the idea of fighting gods is necessarily out of bounds. For certain styles of fantasy, it's even highly appropriate. But saint has a very specific meaning and Gygax's mention of them is almost certainly tied up in the implicit Christianity of early gaming.

Late 1983, though, was a long distance away from 1974, though, and the culture of the hobby had changed. What to Gygax had seemed obvious was now in need of explication and not just explication but expansion. That's why Bennie broadens the use of the term "saint" to include the servants of any god, not just Lawful Good ones. Thus we have St. Kargoth, a fallen paladin, among the four examples he provides us. To say that the idea of an "anti-saint" or "dark saint" is bizarre to me is an understatement. Mind you, I find the idea of non-Lawful Good paladins similarly bizarre, so clearly I'm out of step with a lot of gamers, no that this is any surprise.

In Case You Somehow Haven't Seen It ...

2011-12-21T10:59:00.000-05:00

... here's the teaser trailer for next year's The Hobbit movie (or Part I anyway).

I'll be honest: it's a very good trailer. Martin Freeman is a perfect Bilbo and hearing the dwarves sing "Over the Misty Mountains Cold" is a pleasure. On the other hand, I still don't like the look of the dwarves, especially Thorin, and, maybe I'm just looking for things to complain about, but the brief scene between Gandalf and Galadriel didn't sit well with me at all.

In short, I expect The Hobbit movies will be much like The Lord of the Rings movies -- feasts for the eyes that are at their best when they hew closely to Tolkien than when they deviate from him. I also expect that most gamers, like most moviegoers, will care not a whit about textual fidelity.

Retrospective: Traveller: 2300

2011-12-21T09:50:00.000-05:00

In my long history of doing stupid things, selling all my Traveller books and boxed sets in 1986 because I believed that GDW's new SF RPG, Traveller: 2300, had "superseded it" is surely one of the stupidest. I say this not because Traveller: 2300 was a bad game (though it did have its problems) but because it was a very different game than its predecessor and namesake. Back then, though, my teenaged self was still, as most teenagers are, a believer in Progress. Newer didn't just mean better; it also meant wholesale rejection of the old. And so it was that, upon getting my copy of Traveller: 2300, I deemed it the greatest science fiction roleplaying game ever, a declaration I punctuated by selling off everything I owned for the game I'd previous declared the best science fiction roleplaying game ever. Ah, the follies of youth.

Now, as I said, Traveller: 2300 is a good game. As its name suggests, it takes place not in the "far future" of Traveller but on the cusp of the 24th century, three centuries after the disastrous Third World War (chronicled in GDW's Twilight: 2000) laid waste to Earth and its people. Traveller: 2300's future history assumes that, after several decades of rebuilding, mankind recovers from the war, the trauma of which engenders a newfound desire to explore and, eventually, colonize other worlds. World War III played havoc with the political situation on Earth, ultimately resulting in a much diminished United States, an ascendant Manchuria, and an Africanized Third French Empire as the dominant powers. Though the future history is very dated now, written as it was before the collapse of Communism, it's nevertheless very interesting. Part of that is because it contains a lot of surprises and oddities rather than being a typical sci-fi future history whose final outcome is a vindication of its creator's ideology with a few ironic counter-examples to suggest breadth. Instead, Traveller: 2300's future was the result of a loose political-economic-military simulation run by GDW's staff that took the post bellum and then played out the next 300 years. It was not the creation of a single person so much as the result of many people playing a wargame that included random factors.

I won't argue that the resulting history is at all plausible, but it was unique and fascinating to me at the time and felt much more grounded than classic Traveller's space operatic approach to history. It was that "groundedness" that was a big part of the game's appeal to me. 1986, after all, was solidly within the Silver Age, when "realism" became the watchword for a lot of game design. Traveller: 2300 certainly took realism to heart. Its combat rules, for example, included concepts like penetration and hit locations, while even character generation distinguished between various body types (ectomorph, endomorph, etc.). Though this gave the game a great feel, in practice it proved quite unwieldy and indeed, as written, the combat system didn't even work properly (it'd take errata to fix it). But I didn't care back then. What I wanted was a SF game that looked and felt "real" and Traveller: 2300 delivered that to my satisfaction. It certainly didn't hurt that the game clearly took a lot of inspiration from Aliens, a hot new movie at the time and one that I still like a great deal.

Traveller: 2300 suffered to some extent because, like many RPGs, the intentions of its designers and its fanbase were often at odds. The game's tagline -- "Mankind Discovers the Stars" -- suggested that the designers intended it to be a "serious" SF game about exploring other worlds and interacting with strange aliens. The game did include a number of truly wonderful alien species, several of them alien indeed. These weren't guys in suits but beings with wholly inhuman biologies and, best of all, psychologies. This, of course, made them unplayable as PCs, which I suspect wasn't met with much pleasure by many gamers. Early adventures focused very heavily on exploration and solving alien enigmas, which, again, probably wasn't what gamers were expecting from a game that devoted so much verbiage to differentiating between various types of, say, laser pistols. When a new edition of the game was released a couple of years later, the redubbed 2300 AD now carried a new tagline -- "Mankind's Battle for the Stars." Quite the difference, isn't it?

Despite it all, I remained a Traveller: 2300 true believer for several years, before returning to classic Traveller and slowly (and expensively) re-acquiring all the books I so foolishly sold. I retain a great fondness for Traveller: 2300. It was a flawed game, no doubt, but it was also an ambitious and imaginative one. The game taught me a lot about how to present a science fiction setting, particularly when it came to alien races. The sample aliens in Thousand Suns owe more than a little to those in Traveller: 2300. Unfortunately, many of the things that made the game seem to realistic to me back in the late '80s now repel me. Likewise, so much of its setting depends on a future history that has been rendered impossible that, much as I appreciate it, I could never again use it. Far moreso than Traveller's 57th century, the 24th century presented in Traveller: 2300 strains at credibility, so rooted is it in the contemporary world in which it was made. That's another lesson I learned from the game: if you're going to make a futuristic setting, it's best not to talk too much about anything in the very near future. Doing so is only going to date your setting quickly, no matter how clever it is.

Thousand Suns Available for Sale

2011-12-20T12:12:00.000-05:00

I'm happy to announce that, at long last, the Thousand Suns: Rulebook is available for sale, in both PDF and print forms (either softcover or hardcover). The rulebook is a complete 276-page science fiction roleplaying game consisting of 15 chapters that cover everything from character generation to starship combat to world and alien lifeform design. I wrote Thousand Suns as a straightforward, flexible toolbox game that draws heavily on the "imperial" science fiction literature of the '50s, '60s, and '70s -- authors like Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Bertram Chandler, Gordon Dickson, and H. Beam Piper, among others -- and I'm very pleased with how it turned out. I'm especially proud of the book's presentation, for which I owe a big debt of thanks to my graphic designer, Adam Jury, and to the many artists who contributed to it. This rulebook is a real labor of love and I hope others might enjoy it as much as I do.

The Articles of Dragon: "And Now, The Psionicist"

2011-12-20T09:37:00.000-05:00

Psionics in AD&D is a strangely contentious topic and not just because the rules presented for it in the Players Handbook leave a lot to be desired. For many gamers, psionics belong to the realm of science fiction and are thus inappropriate to a fantasy game like Dungeons & Dragons. I can understand that point of view, but it's not one I share, since D&D is a "fantasy" game in the broadest sense, which is why it can readily incorporate "science fiction" elements without difficulty. That said, I never used psionics much back in my AD&D days nor have I attempted to add it to my Dwimmermount campaign. The reason for this has nothing to do with maintaining the "purity" of my fantasy worlds so much as the fact that, as written, the rules for psionics are a mess.

This unsuitability of the psionics rules was widely acknowledged by nearly every gamer I knew back in the day. Consequently, many of us greeted issue #78 of Dragon (October 1983) with some pleasure, as it was largely devoted to psionics and its problems. Of the articles in that issue my hands-down favorite was "And now, the psionicist" by Arthur Collins. Collins was one of those authors, like Roger E. Moore and Ed Greenwood, whose stuff was always good. He wasn't as prolific as Moore or Greenwood, but he never failed to impress me. Indeed, if I were to be completely honest, I think Arthur Collins was my favorite old school Dragon writer and "And now, the psionicist" reveals part of why I think so.

The article takes the then-bold step of introducing a new character class -- the psionicist of the title -- as a way to make the psionics rules both workable and enjoyable. More than that, though, Collins also does something even more remarkable: he makes the AD&D psionics rules intelligible. He does this through his explanation of the psionicist's class abilities, such as its acquisition of attack and defense modes and psionic disciplines. It's a small thing, really, but it had a profound effect on me as a younger person. For the first time, I began to feel as if I understood how psionics was supposed to work. Likewise, the notion of making psionics the purview of a unique class rather than an add-on to existing classes was a revelation to me. It made so much sense that I couldn't believe no one had thought of it before. (Someone had, of course -- Steve Marsh -- but their version of psionics never made it into OD&D as written).

"And now, the psionicist" is fairly typical of Collins's work. Rather than wholly rewrite AD&D, he instead clarifies and expands upon the rules as written, in the process making the original rules both understandable and stronger. It's a talent all the best Dragon writers had in those days, but Collins, in my opinion, made it into a high art. Moreso than any other writer, he showed me that, strangely organized and presented as it was, AD&D's rules weren't wholly arbitrary; indeed, they often made sense if you actually took the time to look at them objectively and think about the logic behind them. The proper attitude when encountering a rule that seems "broken" is to step back and consider it carefully before deciding to excise it from the game. That's an attitude that has stuck with me after all these years and one I continue to recommend to others.

More John Carter Trailers

2011-12-19T12:20:00.000-05:00

Some TV spots for the upcoming John Carter movie have starting appearing. I like them well enough, though I still find the Tharks skinny and Dejah Thoris comparable. Despite that, it's still recognizably based on Burroughs's classic tale, which is more than anyone can say of any movie made about one of Robert E. Howard's stories (Pigeons from Hell being the exception).

Pulp Science Fiction Library: The Road to the Rim

2011-12-19T09:22:00.000-05:00

Among the lasting accomplishments of the old school renaissance has been a greater knowledge and appreciation for the books that inspired our hobby. Indeed, the phrase "Appendix N" has now become a widely used shorthand for the literary origins of RPGs. I take great pleasure in this, since it's a central contention of this blog that the collective amnesia of our hobby about where it came from has played a role in its decline and deformation. But despite the much larger number of gamers who've now read Jack Vance or Fritz Leiber or even Robert E. Howard, many continue to remain ignorant of other authors who've nevertheless had a significant influence on some of the foundational games of the hobby.

A prime example of an influential but not well known author is A. Bertram Chandler, a British-Australian writer of science fiction who wrote numerous short stories and novels during the '60s, '70s, and early '80s. Many of his works are set within the same universe, the bulk of which have as their protagonist a man named John Grimes. Grimes begins his career as a lowly ensign of the Federation Survey Service but who later becomes a free trader beyond the borders of the Federation, then a spy in the Federation's employ, and finally a commodore in the navy of the Rim Worlds Alliance, an independent coalition of planets who seek freedom outside the confines of the stifling Federation. If any of the foregoing sounds familiar to you, that's probably because you're a Traveller player. Chandler, along with E.C. Tubb -- another Brit -- is one of the great unsung inspirations for Marc Miller's RPG of science fiction adventure in the far future.

The first appearance of John Grimes was in 1967 in the novel The Road to the Rim. The novel tells the story of a newly-commissioned Grimes, who's traveling via a merchant vessel, the Delta Orionis, to his first assignment outside the Solar System. The young Grimes is snobbish and overconfident, dreaming of the brilliant career he is certain he will one day have. He's also certain of the superiority of his native Federation, looking down on the other interstellar states, both human and alien, that border it, just as easily as he looks down on the merchantmen whom he believes lack his education and training. Over the course of his journey, Grimes comes to realize that the situation "out there" is far different than his youthful fancies imagined, such as the nature of politics between the Federation and its neighbors. A Rim Worlder also traveling aboard the Delta Orionis explains it to him thusly:

"Just think about a Pact of Perpetual Amity between an elephant and a tom cat," said Baxter. "A fat an' lazy elephant. A lean, scrawny, vicious tom cat. If the elephant wanted to he could convert that cat into a fur bedside rug just by steppin' on him. But he doesn't want to. He leave the cat alone, just because the cat is useful to him. He does more than just leave him alone. He an' this feline pull out their pens from wherever they keep 'em an' sign their famous Pact.

"In case you haven't worked it out for yourself, the elephant's the Federation, and the tom cat's the Duchy of Waldegren."

"But why?" asked Grimes. "Why?"

"Don't they teach you puppies any interstellar politics? Or are those courses reserved for the top brass? Well, Mr. Grimes, I'll tell you. There's one animal that has the elephant really worried. Believe it or not, he's scared o' mice. An' there're quite a few mice inside the Federation, mice that make the elephant nervous by their rustling an' scurryings an' their squeaky demands for full autonomy. That's where the cat comes in. By his free use of his teeth an' claws, by his very presence, he keeps the mice quiet."

That pretty well describes the situation at the start of Grimes's career, before the Rim Worlds have broken away from the Federation -- and before Grimes has become fully sympathetic to their cause. However, the seeds are planted early and a lot of the action in The Road to the Rim depends on understanding Mr Baxter's metaphor of the elephant, the cat, and the mouse. Of course, the real pleasure of Chandler's stories is watching not just Grimes but the entire galaxy in which he lives evolve over time. This is not a static universe and Grimes is not a static character.

I discovered Chandler fairly late, well after I'd begun playing Traveller and that's a pity. If you have a chance to read this or any of the other books in the series, it's well worth it. Not only are the stories fun space operas wit intriguing characters, they're short. The Road to the Rim is just a little over a hundred pages in length and that's fairly typical of most of the Grimes tales. Chandler has a spare but not spartan style and he's quite good at using "small" stories to share Big Ideas, which I think is one of the key features that separates a lot of the best SF from its competition.

Open Friday: Did You Have a Gaming Mentor?

2011-12-16T08:29:00.001-05:00

For the benefit of those of you who haven't been following recent discussions, here's a more detailed version of the question: How did you learn to play RPGs? Did you simply buy a boxed set or a book, read it, and start playing all on your own, or did you have someone else show you how the game was played (correctly or incorrectly)?

I'm sure there are shades of gray in between the two options, but, for the purposes of this poll, "Yes" indicates that you turned to someone else for assistance at any time, while "No" indicates that you taught yourself without any outside assistance. I mention this because I myself began playing by cracking open a Holmes boxed set and diving in, but it wasn't until a friend's older brother corrected all my misapprehensions that I started playing the game "right." That's why I consider myself to have had a gaming mentor.

If you want to do so, you can use the comments to let me know which game you used to teach yourself the game or, if you had a mentor, who it was that taught you how to play.

Speaking of Kiddie D&D

2011-12-15T11:48:00.001-05:00

The other day I was searching the Web for an image and I stumbled across this one instead:

Any negative thoughts I might have had back in 1983 about Red Box D&D were nothing compared to what I thought about stuff like the Fortress of Fangs Playset. Bad enough that they were making ridiculous action figures with names like Strongheart the Paladin and Warduke the Evil Fighter but that they slapped the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons logo on it was even worse.

The Articles of Dragon: "A New Game with a Familiar Name"

2011-12-15T10:22:00.000-05:00

If the results of my poll back in October are any indication, nearly two-thirds of my regular readership entered the hobby within the first ten years of its existence, with a sizable portion of them doing so between the years 1980 and 1984. During that five year span, two different Basic Sets appeared, the first in 1981 and the second in 1983. Being a Holmes man who'd "upgraded" to AD&D sometime in 1980, I had no need for either of the Basic Sets released subsequently, but, TSR fan boy that I was, I nevertheless dutifully purchased both when they were released. That, of the two, I still have Tom Moldvay's 1981 version still sitting on my shelf today probably tells you all you need to know about my opinions of them.

But, back in issue #77 (September 1983) of Dragon, the reviser of the 1983 version, Frank Mentzer, made his case for why we needed a new Basic Set. It's a really fascinating article, both because it suggests that TSR obviously felt some need to justify the release of yet another Basic Set and because of the things that Mentzer says in his piece. It is, I think, a fascinating snapshot of the end of the Golden Age, making it well worth a read if you're at all interested in the history of this hobby and how it changed over the years.

The very first thing Mentzer mentions in his criticism of previous editions is that "you had to find someone to show you how to play." He notes that, in fact, learning from others who had figured out how to play on their own was the norm previously. That's because the game had "a devoted following, people who taught newcomers the ways of roleplaying." Mentzer is absolutely correct about this, as I've noted before. In those bygone days, you entered the hobby by initiation, aided by someone who'd done so before you. In my case, it was via a friend's teenaged brother; I, in turn, taught others how to play. That was the order of things in the late '70s and very early '80s. The 1983 edition is thus an attempt to correct this "flaw" of expecting that you'd learn to play from others.

Mentzer then notes that

the previous editions were not revisions. They were new attempts at using the same methods of organization applied to the original data plus evolution. They were not "revised," merely "reorganized." This one is different.

That's an interesting statement. I regularly point out that Holmes isn't really an introduction to AD&D at all, despite the claims inserted clumsily by TSR, but rather a new edition of OD&D that retains much of the original text of the LBBs. Moldvay is, I think, more of a revision than Mentzer gives it credit for. That said, it's also largely consonant with the LBBs, again retaining verbiage to be found in the 1974 game. The 1983, on the other hand, is even more than a revision; it's a rewriting of the game, using new language to express many of the same ideas. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but the language is very simple and clearly geared toward children, which wasn't the case with the Blue Book I first encountered in 1979. Consequently, I recoiled upon reading it and it only further solidified my notion that the D&D line was for kids.

The 1983 set's focus on self-teaching and simple language probably made sense from a marketing standpoint. Given how well the set supposedly sold, I can't really fault TSR for going in this direction. At the same time, though, there was clearly a shift happening, away from adults and teenagers as the target audience and away from initiation as the means of entering the hobby. Likewise, the adoption of a unified esthetic (all Elmore and Easley artwork) that, while attractive, seemed to narrow rather than broaden the scope of the game. In short, the 1983 Basic Set marked a definite change from what had gone before.

I'll be honest: I was somewhat reluctant to write this particular post. I've gotten a surprisingly large number of requests from readers asking me to touch on the issue of the differences in philosophy between the 1981 and 1983 Basic Sets. But I also know the fondness with which many remember the Red Box and the profound influence it had on them as younger people. So, I hope no one takes this as a knock against the '83 boxed set, even if it's not to my cup of tea. I'm sure there were guys who started with the LBBs who looked at the Holmes set with disappointment, too; that's the way these things go. At the same time, I don't think it can be denied that 1983 marks another change in the history of both D&D and the hobby.

Retrospective: Striker

2011-12-14T00:01:00.126-05:00

Allow me to begin this week's retrospective by admitting, once more, that I'm not a wargamer and never have been, whether the wargame in question is hex-and-chit or miniatures-based. I've often wished I were. I've made many good faith efforts over the years to become one, but, no matter how hard I try, I can never quite do it. Sure, I can play the games; I can sometimes even do so tolerably well. Yet, I never quite acquire the right mindset to enjoy wargames as anything more than an intellectual exercise -- and I feel bad about that, as if I'm missing out on ever truly understanding the foundations of our hobby.

I bring this up, because, back in 1981, I was already playing GDW's science fiction RPG, Traveller, and loving it. Until a few years, it was my go-to sci-fi game and, even though I don't play it anymore, there's no question that it's shaped my understanding of what a SF RPG is and ought to be like no other. So, when GDW released Striker in that year, I was very keen to buy it and use it, even though it was quite explicitly a set of 15 mm miniatures rules rather than a "proper" supplement to Traveller.

For whatever reason, though, I could never find a copy of the boxed set in any of my local game stores and, in those days, if I couldn't find it in a store, I couldn't buy it. I did see a range of 15 mm miniatures intended for use with Striker and they contributed to my inexplicable lust for it. It'd be a couple of years before I'd actually see a copy of Striker, at a local games day, by which point my ardor had lessened considerably. That's probably just as well, since, as I discovered, Frank Chadwick's rules were dense and complicated, at least to my early teenage self. They took up three 48-page booklets, the first two of which described the basic and advanced rules, while the third presented design sequences for every sort of technology, along with extensive equipment lists.

To this day, I honestly can't tell you whether or not the rules for Striker are as complex in play as they seemed to me even after I got a chance to read them in depth. However, I can tell you that Striker exercised a baleful influence over Traveller as the '80s wore on. The design sequences, originally intended to aid in the creation of new units and equipment for use in miniatures battles, came to be used more broadly. By the time of Traveller's second edition -- the goofily named MegaTraveller -- these sequences were expanded and incorporated into the main game, thereby ensuring that MegaTraveller would be one of the most unnecessarily confusing and heavily erratafied RPGs I've ever owned. Likewise, many aspects of Striker's combat system were also incorporated into MegaTraveller, making it feel far less wild and woolly than the original version of the game I fell in love with in the early '80s.

I don't want to come down too hard on Striker. Firstly, I've never actually played it, even though I've read the rules. Secondly, like a lot of spin-off products from RPGs, Striker was intended as something to run in parallel to Traveller rather than something that would supplant it. Yet, supplant it Striker did, at least in part, because those design sequences, which gave referees and players alike the ability to design a wide variety of technology, were simply too appealing a toolbox not to be used. Traveller already had a lot gearheads among its fans, thanks to earlier supplements like High Guard, but Striker enabled them to become a prominent fixture of the game forever, the effects of which are still felt even today.

Another reason I don't want to criticize Striker unduly is because of a comment it includes on its credits page:

Although this game (as presented in Books 1, 2, and 3) envisions a referee or umpire to supervise play and resolve questions, the publisher is prepared to answer questions or inquiries on Striker provided a stamped, self-addressed envelope accompanies the request.

That's a pretty incredible thing to read, isn't it? Like Loren Wiseman's editorial from issue #2 of The Journal of the Travellers Aid Society, it suggests that GDW's designers only grudgingly felt it was their job to clarify rules rules, since this was properly the purview of one's referee. If that doesn't speak to the question of just how different the hobby was three decades ago, I don't know what does.

The Articles of Dragon: "For NPCs Only: The Death Master"

2011-12-13T09:49:00.000-05:00

Ah, that staple of Dragon from back in the day: the "NPC only" class. One of the oddities of the magazine was that, while there was a voracious demand for new character classes, as a house organ of TSR, it could never offer up a new class for use with D&D without a formal caveat, unless it came from the pen of Gary Gygax himself. Of course, this was done with a nod and a wink, as no referee I knew back in the day ever refrained from allowing his players to use "NPC only" classes if he felt they were well done and fit the spirit of his campaign. I know I never had any problems with it, though, to be fair, I was choosy and, in any event, most of the new classes presented in Dragon were so specialized as to have limited appeal.

Still, the presentation of Len Lakofka's death master class in issue #76 (August 1983) went above and beyond those of most other classes in terms of making it clear that it was intended only for NPCs. You can see the title of the article in which it appeared above. In addition to the "For NPCs Only" phrasing, there's the subtitle that calls the class a "monster" and notes that one shouldn't consider playing as a death master. Even more notably, the article itself begins with an "Introduction/Sermon" where Lakofka opines

The AD&D game should not have assassin player characters. In fact, no player character should be evil at all unless adverse magic affects him.

This is an interesting, though not unusual, point of view, especially as the '80s rolled on. It's also worth noting that assassins were eventually eliminated from AD&D in its second edition, a point of view even Gygax toyed with on occasion, though for different reasons. In any case, Lakofka continues in his introduction to explain that he feels evil is treated too casually in the game. One of his reasons for creating the death master class was to rectify this.

As a way of putting evil in its often without enough of a penalty proper place, here is presented an evil character that makes an assassin look like the boy next door. The death master is meant as a non-player character -- one the player characters and their party have to defeat. Please use the character that way only. If I ever run into a player character death master at a convention, I may turn evil myself. . .

Again, it's an interesting point of view, especially when viewed against the changing culture surrounding D&D at that time. Naturally, Lakofka's concerns had zero effect on me at the time, since there was for a brief time a PC death master in my old campaign -- brief, because he was eventually slain by the other PCs, but I allowed the class nonetheless. The PC in question was a formerly good character turned to evil by possession of the Hand of Vecna and who became obsessed with eliminating his former companions in the belief that they would eventually destroy him. He was right, as it turned out, though, ironically, his destruction was more the result of his repeated attempts to slay the other PCs than their own desire to see his life ended. In any event, I didn't heed Lakofka's warnings and I'd be amazed if I were the only one.

The death master class itself is somewhat interesting. It's basically a necromancer, with many powers over the undead and a collection of new spells. Beginning at 4th level, the class also gains the ability to make a variety of "potions, salves, and pastes" that replicate some of his spells and class abilities. At the time, I found it an impressive addition, since it spelled out a bit more explicitly the crafting of magic items than was seen elsewhere. In retrospect, I'm not sure a new class was needed, when new spells alone could have probably sufficed, but that was the style at the time. Regardless, I'm not at all convinced that the death master did anything to advance the notion that evil should be Evil and never an option for player characters.

Imagination, Research, and Thought

2011-12-12T16:26:00.000-05:00

Over the weekend, among other things, I was re-reading some old issues of GDW's The Journal of the Traveller's Aid Society. JTAS was a magazine devoted to Traveller and ran for 24 issues between 1979 and 1983 before it was subsumed into and superseded by a broader gaming magazine called Challenge. I have very fond memories of both JTAS and Challenge, the latter being where my earliest gaming writing was published.

Anyway, in issue #2 of JTAS, editor Loren Wiseman has a column where he takes exception to a review of Traveller Book 4, Mercenary, which appeared in issue #26 (June 1979) of Dragon. Among the complaints made in the review (by Mark S. Day) is "Laser pistols were missing from hardware." Now, as any old Traveller hand can tell you, laser pistols weren't originally included in the game. I'm not certain I can recall when they finally did appear (MegaTraveller in 1986?), but their absence was a common knock against the game, especially by fans of other SF RPGs.

What's interesting is the way that Wiseman dismisses the reviewer's criticism:

Take, for example, the laser pistol. Although it does not specifically mention them, Traveller provides all the information needed to enable a referee to create them, with a little mental effort. Since, as referee, we are running the world, we declare that a laser pistol should be to a laser carbine as a conventional pistol is to a conventional carbine.

He then goes on at some length showing how he'd extrapolate the game stats of a laser pistol, concluding his efforts with the following:

The above example indicates how the Traveller rules can be used to create something not present in the rules. We don't have room to describe everything. With a little imagination, a little research, and a lot of thought, almost anything can be made compatible with Traveller.

On some level,Wiseman's reply to the review comes across as a little tetchy. On another, though, I find it reminiscent of the afterward [sic] of OD&D, where Gygax and Arneson ask the question "why have us do any more of your imagining for you?" That's a sentiment that makes more and more sense to me as the years wear on, so it delighted me to see it expressed in the pages of JTAS so long ago.

Pulp Science Fiction Library: The Stainless Steel Rat

2011-12-12T08:23:00.000-05:00

Alongside Poul Anderson's Sir Dominic Flandry, one of the longest-running characters from the Golden Age of Science Fiction is James Bolivar diGriz, also known as "Slippery Jim" or "the Stainless Steel Rat." The latter nickname is also the title of the story in which he debuted, published in the December 1957 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. Harrison would, in 1961, also use the title for a novel that contained the original 1957 story, its 1960 sequel (The Misplaced Battleship), alongside completely new material. Over the course of the next five decades, the Rat would appear in a total of twelve novels, the most recent of which was published in 2010.

In the future world in which Slippery Jim diGriz exists, crime is practically non-existent thanks to a combination of genetic screening and social control. The few malcontents who do exist are therefore aberrations, the most talented of which make life extremely interesting for law enforcement officers, who spend most of their time dealing with petty crimes like burglary and shoplifting. DiGriz himself explains the situation -- and himself -- in this way:

That is almost the full extent of crime in our organized, dandified society. Ninety-nine per cent of it, let's say. It is that last and vital one per cent that keeps the police departments in business. That one per cent is me, and a few others like me, a handful of men scattered around the galaxy. Theoretically we can't exist, and if we do exist we can't operate - but we do. We are the rats in the wainscoting of society - we operate outside of their barriers and outside of their rules. Society had more rats when the rules were looser, just as the old wooden buildings had more rats than the concrete buildings that came later. But they still had rats. Now that society is all ferroconcrete and stainless steel there are fewer gaps between the joints, and it takes a smart rat to find them. A stainless steel rat is right at home in this environment.

It is a proud and lonely thing to be a stainless steel rat - and it is the greatest experience in the galaxy if you can get away with it. The sociological experts can't seem to agree why we exist, some even doubt that we do. The most widely accepted theory says that we are victims of delayed psychological disturbance that shows no evidence in child-hood when it can be detected and corrected and only appears later in life. I have naturally given a lot of thought to the topic and I don't hold with that idea at all.

A few years back I wrote a small book on the subject - under a nom de plume of course - that was rather well received. My theory is that the aberration is a philosophical one, not a psychological one. At a certain stage the realisation striked through that one must either live outside of society's bonds or die of absolute boredom. There is no future or freedom in the circumscribed life and the only other life is complete rejection of the rules. There is no longer room for the soldier of fortune or the gentleman adventurer who can live both within and outside of society. Today it is all or nothing. To save my own sanity I chose the nothing.

The Rat is thus a professional criminal in a world where such people are practically non-existent -- but not completely so. As he soon finds out, there are other people like him and the role they play in society is quite different than the one he chose for himself. I won't spoil the story by saying any more, except that Harrison creates a terrific vehicle by which the Rat can continue to have exciting adventures that are more than just endless con games and bank robberies. He also provides himself with plenty of opportunities for satire, social criticism, and philosophy in the best traditions of classic science fiction. I quite often disagree with the points of view Harrison advances in the Stainless Steel Rat stories, but I can't deny that he spins a good tale. Likewise, Jim diGriz makes for a great protagonist, as charming and self-rationalizing as any a lovable rogue in pulp literature. Plus, he's a native speaker of Esperanto, so what's not to love?

Princino de Marso

2011-12-11T22:40:00.000-05:00

As some of you may be aware, in Thousand Suns, I sometimes use words and phrases from the constructed language of Esperanto as stand-ins for the futuristic universal human language of Lingua Terra (a name cribbed from H. Beam Piper). This not only felt "right," since a lot of Golden Age SF uses Esperanto in a similar fashion, but was fun, too, since I've had a strange fascination with Esperanto since I was a teenager.

Anyway, I recently came across references to a translation of Burroughs's A Princess of Mars into Esperanto, the cover for which I've reproduced below. I'd love to find a copy of it somewhere, though I wouldn't actually be able to read it, since, despite my interest in the language, I'm far from being fluent in it. Still, I thought it was kind of cool.

Telekinetic Shield

2011-12-10T20:22:00.000-05:00

Here's another illustration from Thousand Suns from the chapter on psi powers. If all goes well, the book should available for sale sometime next week.

German Traveller Cover Art

2011-12-10T15:16:00.000-05:00

Foreign translations of English-language RPGs are of great interest to me, in large part because they're often quasi-revisions of the original games -- incorporating material from later supplements and having new layouts and art. Sometimes, these changes make them better than the originals, but, even when the changes are mostly cosmetic, they're nevertheless worthy of examination.

Traveller, so far as I know, was only ever translated into Spanish, German, and Japanese. I've talked about the Japanese translation before and, from what I've gleaned elsewhere, the Spanish language version isn't all that exciting. The German edition, on the other hand, is quite fascinating to me, if only because of its cover art, much of which was done by artist Thomas Kidd. Pictured to the right is the cover of the German rulebook.

Though the original cover of Traveller is a classic, one of the best RPG covers ever in my opinion, I really like this one too. It oozes '60s and '70s sci-fi charm, from the guy's clothes and hairstyle to the space station in the background. The covers of many of the German supplements and adventures are also quite good. You can see them here on the RPGNow website.

In Search of the Unknown

2011-12-10T14:39:00.000-05:00

Last night, before bed, I was reading an essay by S.T. Joshi and was shocked to see reference to a title that's all too familiar to me: In Search of the Unknown. Of course, Joshi wasn't referring to the first D&D module I ever owned, Mike Carr's 1978 classic. Rather, he was talking about a 1904 book by Robert W. Chambers (of The King in Yellow fame) that's long since been in the public domain.

Seeing as I'd never heard of it before, I've never read Chambers's In Search of the Unknown, though I plan to rectify that when I have the time to do so. As I understand it, the book is actually a collection of episodic stories about a man seeking out species of animals believed extinct. This being a Chambers book, he naturally finds more than he expected.

I have no idea if Mike Carr was making a reference to this book when he named module B1. My guess is that the similarity of title is merely a coincidence, but it's intriguing nonetheless.

Open Friday: Good Gaming Covers

2011-12-09T12:24:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, I asked about good gaming art produced in the last five years. This time I'm more specifically interested in good gaming covers -- that is, cover art to RPGs you consider particularly well-done and evocative. I'm going to open this question up to include any tabletop RPG published at any time, since, even when I specify that a timeframe, very few people actually stick to it. However, I am going to ask that commenters limit themselves to primary rulebooks or boxed sets. That means no supplements or adventures, please. Also, because it's already well established that Dave Trampier's Players Handbook illustration is the best cover ever, I'd like to ask that no one nominate it as an example of a good gaming cover. If you can briefly explain why you regard your choice as a good cover, that'd be of interest to me as well.

REVIEW: Darkness Visible

2011-12-08T19:56:00.000-05:00

I'm sure I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of espionage stories and movies. That's probably why so many of my RPG campaigns, even when they're ostensibly about something else, inevitably turn into ersatz spy-based ones. I simply adore everything about the espionage genre, including the factional infighting that sometimes makes one's own side just as much an impediment to success as one's opposition. So, naturally, when I heard about Darkness Visible, the espionage supplement for the excellent Star Without Number, I was very excited.

Darkness Visible is 96 pages long and available as either a PDF (for $9.99) or a printed softcover book (for $19.99). In terms of its appearance, it's very similar to previous releases for Stars Without Number: a no frills two-column layout consisting of dense text and very limited art. This is an unambiguously hobbyist product, conceived, written, and assembled by one person (Kevin Crawford). It's also an extremely well written and imagined product that I found myself re-reading even after I'd finished it, something that sets it apart from all but the best products I review. Make no mistake, though; Darkness Visible is also a very specialized product, far moreso than, say, Skyward Steel or even Polychrome, both of which are more broadly useful even in campaigns not focused on interstellar navies and cyberpunk, respectively.

The supplement consists of six chapters and a short introduction. The first chapter discusses espionage in the days prior to the cataclysmic Scream that is the foundational event of the Stars Without Number setting. It's mostly focused on an organization called the Perimeter, whose primary purpose was as a first line of defense against rogue A.I.s but whose role eventually expanded over time. The second chapter follows this up by discussing the organization and operation of contemporary espionage agencies descended from the pre-Scream Perimiter. Of the two, the second chapter is much more immediately useful to a referee running an espionage campaign, as the first is largely historical and somewhat canon-heavy. That's not to say the first chapter is devoid of interest, but it mostly deals with events that occurred more than 500 years before campaign present, which tends to limit its obvious utility.

The third chapter provides rules constructing espionage agencies and conspiratorial cabals. These rules are similar to those in the Stars Without Number rulebook for handling factions but aren't identical, which could cause some confusion. On the other hand, I like the fact that Crawford didn't try to shoehorn agencies and cabals into the factional system, preferring instead to give them a system reflective of their peculiarities. Consequently, concepts such as infiltration and connections play a big role, along with a host of "elements," which are like factional assets from the main rulebook but geared toward espionage campaigns. So we get assassins, criminal ties, front businesses, and hidden strings, among others, each of which comes with numerous examples and plot seeds. Cabals get their own elements, which function similarly, but have slightly different focuses, primarily forbidden and dangerous technology. This is the chapter where Darkness Visible really shines by providing not merely a simple system for handling actions by espionage agencies and sinister cabals but also by providing lots of ideas on how to use the system to inspire adventures.

Chapter four focuses on three types of cults and cabals -- those devoted to eugenics, those devoted to "unbraked" A.I.s, and those devoted to weapons of mass destruction. In each case, there's a brief overview of these groups, their organizations, and their goals, followed by rules and sample NPCs appropriate to them. There are also 36 new tags to use with the world generation system in the Stars Without Number rulebook, each of which offers plenty of examples and suggestions for their use. Chapter five is referee-oriented and is about creating espionage adventures. In addition to the usual abstract talk about adventure design we see so often in RPG books, we get six pages of random tables to aid the referee in his task. For my money, these few pages are worth a lot more than what precedes them, as they're eminently usable and quickly aid the referee in creating the outline of a scenario. Chapter six is a short one, offering new backgrounds and equipment for espionage campaigns.

Darkness Visible is a compelling, tightly focused supplement for Stars Without Number -- perhaps too tightly focused for some, though, for me, it was a delight to read. If you're planning to include lots of espionage agencies or maltech cults in your campaign in any capacity, it's probably worth picking up. If you're not, it might still be worth getting but, as I noted earlier, I don't think it's as generally useful as earlier supplements. On the other hand, Crawford does a great job of making his subject matter compelling, so much so that I found myself taking a far greater interest in, for example, cabals and cults than I thought I might. As with all previous Stars Without Number products, the rules material of Darkness Visible is simple, unobtrusive, and quite amenable to modification. All in all, it's a nice little package that demonstrates once more why Stars Without Number is one the most interesting RPGs, old school or otherwise, to be released in the last few years.

Presentation: 6 out of 10
Creativity: 9 out of 10
Utility: 5 out of 10

Buy This If: You're playing Stars Without Number or any other SF RPG where espionage and conspiracies play an important role.
Don't Buy This If: You have no interest in extra detail regarding espionage agencies or conspiratorial cabals.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Nine Hells, Part I"

2011-12-08T08:05:00.000-05:00

And so we come, once again, to an excellent article written by Ed Greenwood -- "The Nine Hells, Part I," which appeared in issue #75 (July 1983) of Dragon. In retrospect, it's easy to see why Greenwood would enjoy such success; he was not only prolific but also imaginative. Plus, his articles were memorable. Even now, nearly three decades later, I clearly remember the first time I read this issue of Dragon, filled as it was with information about the lower planes, thanks to both Gary Gygax's extensive preview of new devils from the upcoming Monster Manual II and the first part of Ed Greenwood's tour of the first five levels AD&D's version of Hell. I was absolutely blown away by what I read, much to the chagrin of my players at the time, several of whom found themselves on unexpected visits to the domains of one or more arch-devils.

Like Roger E. Moore's "The Astral Plane," "The Nine Hells, Part I" is a work of remarkable scholarship, mining the entirety of the AD&D corpus available at the time for hints as to what the planes of Hell might be like. Also like "The Astral Plane," this article wasn't content to simply regurgitate what we already knew. Rather, it expanded on that information in clever and sometimes surprising ways, painting a picture of the Nine Hells that was both true to its gaming source material but also evocative of other works of fantasy and myth. Greenwood doesn't present his Nine Hells as canonical for anything other than his own Forgotten Realms campaign, but it wasn't long before it received Gygax's blessing, which gave it a status it enjoyed until comparatively recently, where books as recent as 2006's Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells continued to make use of ideas laid down in 1983. That's a degree of influence that few articles (or authors) can match.

In addition to giving names to each of the Nine Hells and discussing their locales and points of interest, Greenwood also devotes a fair bit of space to their inhabitants, in particular unique devils. Prior to this issue of Dragon, the arch-devils were the only unique devils described in AD&D. Now, both Gygax and Greenwood have provided a coterie of such personalities, which, as a referee, I found a terrific boon. Unique devils gave me the opportunity to pit the PCs against powerful devils that weren't rulers of entire planes. This not only gave the PCs a fighting chance to defeat them but, in the event that the PCs did defeat them, the multiverse wouldn't resound with their victory the way it might if they bested Dispater or Geryon. Greenwood also found a way to work Astaroth from "The Politics of Hell" (from issue #28) into his depiction of the Nine Hells, which I know endeared him to many older gamers of my acquaintance who adored Alex von Thorn's article from way back when.

"The Nine Hells, Part I" (and its sequel, which I may well wind up discussing next time) are in a rare class of Dragon article: ones I actually used. Ever since I started playing AD&D, I desperately wanted to run adventures in the Outer Planes, but I rarely did, in large part because the game gave so little information on them. That's why articles like this and "The Astral Plane" were so useful and inspiring to me. And, unlike "The Astral Plane," Greenwood's Nine Hells articles were remarkably concrete, describing people and places one could encounter in addition to providing rules for how magic worked differently in this plane of ultimate Lawful Evil. I liked that a lot; I still do.

Retrospective: Star Trek II Starship Combat Simulator

2011-12-07T09:26:00.000-05:00

I've spoken glowingly of the starship combat rules in FASA's Star Trek the Roleplaying Game before and there's a reason for that: they remain perhaps the best starship combat rules ever included in any RPG. They're simple enough that even the wargames-challenged such as myself can grasp them, but they also possess enough depth to hold the attention of players adept at strategy and tactics. On top of it all, the rules are an excellent evocation of their source material and integrate well with the Star Trek RPG. Rather than being effectively a separate game used to adjudicate starship combat, these rules work hand in hand with those of the RPG, thereby enabling starship combat to be as much of a roleplaying experience as arguing morality with rock creatures or teaching alien women the meaning of love.

Even so, the starship combat rules could be used independently of the RPG and it was likely this fact, coupled with the possibility of selling metal miniatures to use with it, that led to the publication of the Star Trek II Starship Combat Simulator in 1983. The Starship Combat Simulator (herafter SCS) was designed by Forest Brown, David F. Tepool, and William John Wheeler and, though completely compatible with FASA's Star Trek RPG, effectively became the centerpiece of a separate, though related, game line. This game line featured not only this boxed set but also miniatures, starship construction and recognition manuals, and small sub-games designed to be played quickly by two players. I have no idea how successful the line was for FASA, but it became a favorite in my gaming groups, something Starfleet Battles never achieved.

At the heart of the SCS's appeal was the way that allowed multiple players to run a single starship, each one taking the role of a different member of its crew. Each player had a paper tactical display where they allocated energy to important starship systems and made dice rolls to determine if they could coax a little extra performance out of them. It was a brilliant way to involve everyone and stay true to what we see in Star Trek. Equally brilliant, though, was the way that the system scaled upwards, so that, if the players wanted to simulate a battle between more than two ships, they could do so without bogging things down. In such cases, the specific details of individual systems were abstracted a bit, making larger scale engagements not only possible but relatively painless to run. It was a lot of fun to play, which is a boast no starship combat system except for Knight Hawks can make in my book and even that excellent system pales in comparison to the SCS.

My only real complaint about the Starship Combat Simulator was that it fed the impression that a lot of Star Trek fans somehow viewed the series (and movies) as being military science fiction rather than optimistic action-adventure with occasional forays into military SF. It's a small thing, to be sure, but I can't tell you how often I've met self-professed Star Trek fans whose primary interest is in space battles and technology, two areas that, while certainly present, are far from the core of Star Trek. Granted, when I was a younger man, I loved those things, too, so perhaps it's simply a phase one goes through. Still, when I look back on my youthful experiences roleplaying Star Trek, there were a heck of a lot more space battles played out with the SCS than we ever saw in any of the episodes or films available at that point. I don't blame FASA for my own misapprehensions, but there is a part of me that wonders whether the existence of a separate starship combat-based game line didn't lend credence to my foolishness rather than discourage it.

OSRCon 2012 News

2011-12-06T18:48:00.001-05:00

Last August, Toronto hosted a small local gaming convention devoted to old school RPGs called OSRCon. It was a very big success, attracting not just Torontonians but gamers from as far away as Massachusetts and Virginia. I'm happy to report that OSRCon will return on August 10-11, 2012.

This past year, Ed Greenwood was one of the convention's guests. Next year, organizer Chris Cunnington informs me, we'll be graced by the presence of Ken St. Andre, creator of Tunnels & Trolls and one of the nicest guys in the hobby. I had a blast this year and look forward to the chance to do it again in 2012.

Kepler 22b

2011-12-06T16:56:00.000-05:00

Some of you have no doubt heard the news of the discovery of a "Super-Earth" in a star system some 600 light years away from our solar system. Given the rather uninspiring name of Kepler 22b, the planet is twice the size of Earth and possesses a surface temperature estimated to be approximately 22° Celsius. It orbits a star very similar to our Sun at a distance that makes it plausible candidate for liquid water, as well as, possibly, life. Of course, there's no way to know for certain and there are still plenty of reasons why Kepler 22b may in fact be very different than our own homeworld. Still, it's very fascinating news if you're an astronomy buff or a fan of science fiction.

The Articles of Dragon: "Seven Swords"

2011-12-06T00:01:00.067-05:00

Like his "Pages from the Mages," Ed Greenwood's "Seven Swords" from issue #74 of Dragon (June 1983) is an article I remember reading for the first time very vividly. Not only was I keen for more information about Greenwood's then-mysterious Forgotten Realms setting, but I had come recognize the man as one of the more clever and imaginative writers to appear in Dragon's pages. A big part of Greenwood's appeal is the way that he could make something as seemingly banal as sword +1 and make it interesting -- and he did it without having to introduce a host of new powers or abilities into the game.

What "Seven Swords" does is present seven different magical weapons, none of which is more potent than a sword +3. Each of these swords gets an extensive description of both its physical and magical properties. Amusingly, it's often the physical description that really sets these swords apart from the pack. Whether it's the huge cabochon-cut black sapphire in the grip of Adjatha, the six matched bloodstones set in the bronze blade of Ilbratha, or the rearing serpents who make the guard of Shazzellim, Greenwood makes each of these weapons unique in appearance as well as abilities. This is a small detail that many referees overlook, concentrating instead on game mechanical effects. Greenwood doesn't skimp on these either, but they're only one facet of what makes the titular swords special.

Each weapon also includes a "lore" section, detailing the history of the blade, from its forging to the present day. It's this section that I really ate up as a younger man. Re-reading them in preparation for this post, I can completely understand why that was the case. The lore Greenwood presents isn't extensive -- no more than four or five short paragraphs in most cases -- but it's evocative. It's suggestive of adventures and, better still, it gives even a lowly sword +1 an air of antiquity and individuality that makes it a weapon worth holding on to even when better weapons come along. That was probably the biggest lesson "Seven Swords" taught me: game mechanics aren't always what make a magic item special. It's a lesson I've kept with me all these years and one I'd like to see adopted more broadly.

Pulp Science Fiction Library: Tiger by the Tail

2011-12-05T00:01:00.109-05:00

No, that's not a mistake in the title of this post. For the month of December, Pulp Fantasy Library has become Pulp Science Fiction Library, with a special emphasis on authors who have been particularly influential on me over the years. That's why I inaugurate this special feature with Poul Anderson's 1951 short story "Tiger by the Tail," which marks the first appearance of one of his most memorable characters, Captain Sir Dominic Flandry of the Imperial Naval Intelligence Corps. Flandry is often described as a "science fiction James Bond," which, while apt, is somewhat anachronistic, given that Ian Fleming wouldn't start writing Casino Royale until 1952 and the novel wouldn't appear in print until 1953. Similarly, the plot of "Tiger by the Tail" is sometimes described as "Yojimbo in space," which, again, is apt but anachronistic as Kurosawa's classic film appeared a decade after Anderson's short story.

"Tiger by the Tail" begins with Captain Flandry having been drugged and captured by unknown assailants. As Flandry regains consciousness and contemplates his predicament, he quickly comes to some conclusions about them:

They were barbarians, all right. But no tribe that he knew about.

That wasn’t too surprising, since the Terrestrial Empire and the half-dozen other civilized states in the known Galaxy ruled over several thousands of intelligent races and had some contact with nobody knew how many thousands more. Many of the others were, of course, still planet-bound, but quite a few tribes along the Imperial borders had mastered a lot of human technology without changing their fundamental outlook on things. Which is what comes of hiring barbarian mercenaries.

The peripheral tribes were still raiders, menaces to the border planets and merely nuisances to the Empire as a whole. Periodically they were bought off, or played off against each other—or the Empire might even send a punitive expedition out. But if one day a strong barbarian race under a strong leader should form a reliable coalition—then vae victis!

If the above passage makes Anderson's 31st century setting sound a bit like the late Roman Empire, there's a good reason for that. His stories of Flandry are about the interstellar spy's efforts to stave off "the Long Night," the Dark Age that will inevitably fall across civilized space should the tottering Terran Empire finally fall. Flandry knows he cannot stop the Long Night but he hopes he can delay it another generation or more -- or at least long enough not to have experience it himself. That's the overarching theme of all the tales of Flandry, which SF writer Theodore Cogswell elucidates eloquently in his introduction to a later collection of Anderson's Flandry stories.

The wildest adventures seem to come at two different stages in the life of a civilization. First the adventures come when the civilization is fresh, vigorous, and aggressively expanding. But there is also the time when the civilization is old, when it wants nothing but to be left in peace. Then the ruthless new peoples arise, beyond the imperial borders or even within them. It happened to Egypt, Persia, India, China, Greece, Rome. Someday it may happen to all Earth.

In those eras, someone must man the ramparts. He may be a Roman legionnaire, or he may be an intelligence agent of Terra’s empire among the stars. But he is always a lonely man. Sir Dominic, no grim and humorless professional hero, can crack a joke, hoist a bottle, or kiss a girl with the best of them. But he sees the barbarians pressing inward through the stellar marches. He sees the purpose of the powerful, nonhuman Merseian Empire—to end the uneasy peace with mankind by sweeping mankind aside. And he sees corruption and cowardice at home. If the Long Night is not to come in his own lifetime, if the things he cares about are to be saved, he must do what he can.

In "Tiger by the Tail," Flandry soon learns that his captors are an alien race called the Scothani, who'd somehow acquired sufficient technology to establish a little empire of their own, oppressing other aliens and impinging on the Empire's borders. Believing Flandry to be "another worthless younger son, given a high-paying sinecure so [he] can wear a fancy uniform and play soldier," the Scothani figured him an easy to target for kidnapping. And while they doubt his worth in the grand scheme of things, they still think him likely to know sufficient classified information to be useful and easily intimidated to hand over what he knows. Though on some level insulted by his "hosts'" estimation of his character and ability, Flandry nevertheless plays along. In doing so, he learns a great deal about not only the Scothians' culture, but also their politics, including rivalries within their leadership. It's through the keen understanding of the latter that the main plot of the short story unfolds -- and the comparisons to Yojimbo are made.

Compared to later Flandry stories, "Tiger by the Tail" is exceedingly pulpish. The Scothians, for example, are little more than Celtic/Nordic barbarians in space with a slightly inhuman skin color. They're a far cry from the more complex and believable aliens Anderson would create later in his career. Likewise, the plot, while exuberant, is a little unbelievable in the way that Flandry navigates it, even given his remarkable professional skills and personal talents. Despite that, there's something incredibly compelling about the idea of a man doing his level best to prop up a decadent and dying empire lest darkness fall across the galaxy. It's one I've always found very potent, even moreso as I get older. I guess it's no surprise, then, that most of my SF RPG campaigns over the years have employed it to one degree or another and that Thousand Suns includes it as a major pillar of its meta-setting.

The Underdark Gazette is Moving

2011-12-04T22:58:00.002-05:00

In case you haven't already heard, James of the Underdark Gazette is going to be shutting down his current blog at the start of 2012 and devoting himself instead to a new one, entitled Dreams of Mythic Fantasy. While I fully understand the reasons behind the shift and largely agree with them, I'm still sorry to see the Underdark Gazette go. It's been a pillar of the old school community for several years now and it's long been my one-stop shop for the latest news and information from our little echo chamber, so it's nice to know that James will continue doing what he's been doing so well, even if it's under a new name.

The Whisperer in Darkness Available for Pre-Order

2011-12-04T08:04:00.000-05:00

At long last, the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society's movie adaptation of "The Whisperer in Darkness" is available for pre-order. I absolutely adore the silent movie version of "The Call of Cthulhu," which I purchased years ago and still consider the most faithful direct adaptation of a Lovecraft story ever put to film, so I've been eagerly anticipating The Whisperer in Darkness for a long time now.

Whisperer is a much more ambitious project by the HPLHS, being more than twice as long as its predecessor and being a talkie rather than a silent film. Reviews at the time of its limited release during this year's convention season were mixed. There was a lot of praise for the film's period production values, but some reviewers weren't happy with the pacing (or the CGI mi-go). If you think the pacing issues owe to its being too faithful to HPL, then you'd be wrong, as some reviews have also noted that this movie deviates considerably from the text, particularly in its final act.

This disappoints me a little bit. A big part of the appeal of these fan films is that they hew fairly closely to their source material, but, not having seen the movie, it's hard to know whether or not the deviations are nevertheless in the spirit of Lovecraft. Even if they aren't, I have a hard time imagining that they'll be as deviant as most Hollywood efforts to bring HPL to the silver screen to date. Once my copy arrives -- and I have no idea when that'll be -- I'll post my own review here.

The Inirot

2011-12-03T23:11:00.000-05:00

I'm not a big fan of humanoid alien races, or at least I prefer that, when possible, extraterrestrial beings not share many physical characteristics with human beings. That's why, in Thousand Suns, all the sample alien races look pretty weird, like these guys, the Inirot.

The Game You Think You Know

2011-12-03T19:28:00.000-05:00

It's funny how often you can read a book and still overlook something that's stated very clearly and unambiguously. For example, a lot of players of OD&D fail to notice that the Dexterity bonus to Armor Class applies only to fighting men and to no other class. Of course, the same is true of the bonuses to hit and damage for high Strength. That's something I didn't realize until earlier today when I was re-reading my copy of Greyhawk and saw the following on page 7:

Strength also aids the fighting man in his ability to both score a hit upon an adversary and damage it. This strength must be raw. i.e. not altered by intelligence scores. On the other hand low strength will effect [sic] any character's fighting ability.

If I'd ever read those words before, I don't recall them. It's a perfect example of why it's so important to read OD&D with fresh eyes and to try to forget, to the extent that it's possible, what you think you know about the game based on what was done in later editions.

A Kindred Spirit

2011-12-03T12:09:00.000-05:00

By now, some of you have no doubt heard that a fellow by the name of Ben Solovey has found the workprint of the 1966 movie, Manos: The Hands of Fate, and is making a project of digitally restoring it for release on Blu-Ray. For those of you who don't know, Manos is generally regarded as one of the worst films ever made, right up there with Plan 9 from Outer Space. The film achieved its present notoriety thanks to its appearance on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in 1993. But, in a post on his blog, Solovey makes the case, rather convincingly in my opinion, that Manos is not a actually a bad movie so much as an amateurish one, made by people with little or no experience of film making. Likewise, the poor quality of all the existing prints only adds to the perception that it's a movie without any redeeming features:

A common refrain I’ve heard is that without Joel and the Bots, the movie is “unwatchable”, but I suspect a big part of that is the bad visual presentation that the movie has always had. When you divest Manos of its grimy, unpleasant patina, you are still left with a weirdly dubbed, strangely edited, small town, outsider horror film. But with a clearer view of the production design (paintings, metalwork, and stone sculptures by Tom Neyman, a local artist who played The Master), the off kilter handmade world the film presents, and the shaggy but poppy Ektachrome photography by Robert Guidry, 45 years later Manos assumes a different identity as a fascinating bit of 1966 ephemera.

This is a big part of why Solovey wants to restore the film, but it's not the only one.

Here is a truly independent horror film from the 60′s, a contemporary of 1962′s Carnival of Souls and 1968′s Night of the Living Dead. The main difference being, of course, that those movies came from career filmmakers Herk Harvey and George Romero, who had already made commercials and industrials and knew how a set should be run. Hal Warren, director of Manos, did not have that sort of experience and the deck was truly stacked against him. Although he had not yet infamously sold fertilizer- that would come later- he was a good salesman and was able to rustle up a reported budget of $19,000 (over $132,000 in today’s money) to get his script made.

If you yourself have ever been involved in an independent movie, Manos becomes somewhat poignant as you see evidence of the problems that have arisen and have been worked around or willfully ignored. Actors dropping in and out of the production, a broken leg that stranded two in a car for their entire screen time…

A lack of reliable electricity, which creates a murky, crudely lit effect at night…

Animals that were unwisely written into the movie and refuse to cooperate…

It’s all very relatable stuff. And because this is a movie where the artifices of filmmaking are constantly crumbling and being rebuilt, a little shakier every time, it holds a certain fascination to film buffs that places it above worse and more boring films (which there are no shortage of, then or now). Simply put, it’s memorable. If you’ve seen it you’ll remember Torgo and the Master. You’ll remember the interminable driving that opens the movie, the weird squabbling of the Wives, the loungey soundtrack, the unconvincing dubbing, the Scorpio Rising-esque invocation of Manos, God Of Primal Darkness. All this in a film that’s only 70 minutes and change.

So rather than have Manos fade away as a footnote with only a cruddy video transfer to remember it by, I’ve resolved to make it a personal project to restore it.

I don't know about you, but I can't help but applaud Solovey's efforts, perhaps because I detect in him a kindred spirit to a lot of us in the old school community, someone who's willing to ignore conventional wisdom about the quality of a work and try to appreciate it for the virtues it might possess beneath the patina it's accumulated over the years. That's an attitude worthy of respect and so I'll be paying close attention to this project in the weeks and months to come.

Memories of Gary Gygax

2011-12-03T10:10:00.000-05:00

Quite a number of people emailed me yesterday to point out a post on Jim Shooter's blog about his meeting with Gary Gygax and some "executives" from TSR back in the Fall of 1981. Of particular interest were these paragraphs:

Gary and his troops talked about what they did. Gary struck me as a brilliant, clever and creative guy.

I was also impressed that his top executives, suit-and-tie business people types who wouldn’t look out of place at MetLife, all knew the game and played the game. They clearly loved D&D.

Then it was our turn to talk about what we did. Galton and the licensing people made it clear that they were far too dignified and sophisticated as human beings to ever read a comic book. They joked about not knowing anything about the comics.

I have to believe the TSR people had to be a little insulted. If Marvel’s execs thought that proper adult business people worried only about dollars and deals, that actually reading the books would be somehow embarrassing, then what might they be thinking of TSR’s game-playing execs?

After reading that, I have to wonder who these "executives" at TSR were. While I don't doubt Shooter's recollection that they, like Gygax, "clearly loved D&D," it does fly in the face of the received view of TSR's history that, by the time the Blume brothers were fully in control (and they were in 1981, as I understand it), the company came increasingly to be run by people who didn't know or care about gaming. Now, maybe at this early stage, the culture of TSR hadn't yet changed, I don't know, but it's nevertheless fascinating to read an outsider's perspective on Gygax and the other TSR-ites he met back in 1981.

Thanks to everyone who pointed me toward this story.

Open Friday: Good Gaming Art

2011-12-02T09:04:00.000-05:00

One of the truly frustrating aspects of discussing old school games, both the originals and those inspired by them, is the moving target of what constitutes "good" gaming art. For some, nothing less than homages to art from three decades ago can ever be good; for others, anything that demonstrates even the slightest connection to what has come before will never suffice. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised by this diversity of opinions, since there's never been a consensus on such matters. I mean, even back in the early '80s there were people who didn't like Erol Otus (and still don't).

So, rather than trying to come to any conclusions regarding what makes good gaming art in any universal sense, what I want to know is: what piece of art, produced in the last five years, do you consider a particularly effective piece of gaming art and why? Just stick to that question and nothing else, least of all criticizing someone else's choice of what they consider good. The point of this question is simply to learn what my readership likes and why.

Oubliette #7 Released

2011-12-01T15:48:00.000-05:00

Issue #7 of the ever-awesome Oubliette has just been released and it's free for a limited time. Oubliette is written for Labyrinth Lord, but also ideal for use with any Basic/Expert/Advanced original or clone, with little or no adjustment required.

Here's the Full Contents:

Editorial
Tales from Hell Cartoon
Monster Club #11: The Naughty Step
Miniatures Special: An Interview with Richard Scott of Otherworld Miniatures
Monster Club #12: Dungeon Random Encounter Tables: Levels 4-6
Newland Campaign Setting Part II: Raiders
Monster Club #13: Newland Bestiary Part I
Tomb of the Snake King: A Labyrinth Lord Adventure for 3rd to 5th Level Characters
The 10-Foot Pole
Found Familiar: The Toad
Goblin Quest Cartoon
What's in the Oubliette? Reviews
Mouse Watch Cartoon
The Song of Sithakk Part 7: A Dream of Blossoms

John Carter Trailer

2011-12-01T10:37:00.002-05:00

For the few of you who haven't yet seen it, here it is:

The Articles of Dragon: "Relief for Traveller Nobility"

2011-12-01T09:34:00.000-05:00

In celebration of the imminent release of Thousand Suns, you'll see an increased attention given to science fiction RPGs here in the month of December. To kick things off, let's take a look at an article from issue #73 of Dragon (May 1983), entitled "Relief for Traveller Nobility" by Paul Montgomery Crabaugh. Though Dragon was always very focused on fantasy and (naturally) D&D, the magazine did publish SF RPG articles -- many of them, in fact, starting in 1984, when it added the Ares Section.

For those not familiar with the game, Traveller characters have six randomly determined ability scores, one of which is Social Standing. Scores are generated by rolling 2D6 and results of 11 or 12 for Social Standing indicate the character is of noble birth. Scores can reach as high as 15 a result of events in character generation, with each number above 10 reflective of a different level of nobility (from Knight to Duke). This is all well and good and comports with much of the sci-fi that inspired Traveller, but, other than a title, there is absolutely no difference between a noble character and a non-noble one. One could reasonably argue that it's up to the referee to decide what benefits (and drawbacks) go along with patents of nobility in his campaign, especially given that Traveller presents itself as a generic game without a default setting of its own. However, not a few gamers wanted something more than "make it up yourself" and that's where Crabaugh's article comes in.

"Relief for Traveller Nobility" firstly provides rules for determining what sort of family estate (if any) a noble character possesses, as well as the revenue generated by it. Of course, estates require management and, if a noble does not spend much time on his estate, preferring instead to go traipsing across the galaxy with his old military buddies, there's an ever-increasing chance of a coup or revolt. Of course, estates have expenses, too, and Crabaugh spends some time discussing that aspect of noble life in the article. He also discusses the sorts of personal starships to which a noble might have access, something suggested in various parts of the rules but insufficiently fleshed out to Crabaugh's satisfaction.

In the end, it's actually a very short and sketchy article, but it provides more ideas for dealing with noble characters in Traveller than were ever provided in the rules themselves. One of the things that Crabaugh stresses is that the presence of a noble character who takes running his estate seriously will necessarily change the content and scope of the campaign. Instead of speculative trading and breaking and entering on behalf of shady patrons met in startown bars, the campaign will focus more on power politics and all that that entails. That's certainly my own experience in playing a noble-centric campaign and doing it successfully definitely requires a shift in one's perspective and expectations. On the other hand, it can be a lot of fun, particularly if, like me, you enjoy the ups and downs of political machinations and jockeying for influence.

At Last (or Nearly So)

2011-11-30T16:42:00.001-05:00

Just in time for the end of the month, it looks like the revised Thousand Suns rulebook is finished and ready to go to the printers. I'm doing a last minute eyeballing of the PDF proof, but, barring the discovery of any errors or typos I can detect in the next little while, I can finally scratch this project off my to-do list and get back to work on my many other delayed ones. I fully expect to find some huge and obvious error after the book is actually printed up, but such is life. In the meantime, I'll bask in the conclusion of a year-long obsession that's been brought to a very happy conclusion, thanks in no small part to my indefatigable layout guru, Adam Jury.

Anyway, onwards and upwards -- or pluen kaj supren, as they say in Lingua Terra. More on this once the book is available for sale, which I'm hoping should be sometime within the next few weeks.

Charisma as Divine Favor

2011-11-30T13:45:00.000-05:00

Charisma is probably the most misunderstood and abused of D&D's six ability scores. When I was a younger man, Charima was widely misunderstood to be a synonym for "physical attractiveness," a claim belied by Unearthed Arcana's later introduction of a seventh ability score, Comeliness. To be fair, this misunderstanding was widespread and abetted to varying degrees by various D&D products, such Deities & Demigods, where very high or very low Charisma scores inspired worship and fear respectively, not to mention untold numbers of beautiful or handsome NPCs who possessed concomitantly high Charisma scores. Later, as the importance of henchmen and hirelings was downplayed, Charisma came increasingly to be viewed as a "dump stat" without much mechanical utility in the game.

Charisma is, of course, a transliteration of the Greek word χαρισμα, which means something like "gift of grace." It's an old word sometimes used in pagan contexts but that gained new life and depth of meaning when it was used by the Greek translators of the Hebrew scriptures known to history as the Septuagint. In that context, charisma came to mean "divine favor" and is usually applied to someone whom God has blessed in a unique and powerful way. This meaning was one shared by the writers of the New Testament, who, of course, were familiar with the Septuagint.

This prolog is intended to lay the groundwork for an odd thought I had today. In Greyhawk, paladins have only two requirements: they must be of Lawful alignment and they must have 17 Charisma. There are no other expectations about an OD&D paladin, in contrast to AD&D's much more strenuous ones (five out of the six ability scores have minimums). I'll admit that that sometimes seems odd to me, even though I adopted it in my Dwimmermount campaign. Of all the ability scores to have as an entry requirement, why Charisma? Why not, say, Wisdom? What exactly does Charisma represent that makes it a particularly good determinant of what character qualifies as a paladin?

That's when the notion of Charisma as divine favor struck me as a possible explanation. Now, it's not a perfect explanation by any means. There are lots of problems with it, chief being how divine favor ties into being a good leader of mercenary hirelings. On the other hand, high Charisma does make monsters less likely to attack you on sight, too, and that I can buy as a sign of godly influence. Of course, part of me then starts to wonder about how this divine favor might manifest more generally (or not). What about a character with only 15 Charisma who's not a Lawful fighter? Does he get some benefit, too, and, if so, what is it?

And that's where my train of thought derails and I decide not to think any more about this topic -- even though I know I will.

Absurdity and Wonder

2011-11-30T11:44:00.000-05:00

Nick Bogan kindly reminded me of a post I intended to make yesterday, about an article by Paul Mason in issue 32 of his Imazine online 'zine. In that article, "No Limits," which is an irreverent but nonetheless insightful piece about the history of our hobby, Mason spends some time discussing the growing importance of "ecology" (or "the living dungeon") in the construction of dungeons, starting around 1979 or 1980. I intended to make a post about it, because it touches on yesterday's post about "The Ecology of the Piercer." Here's what Mason has to say on the subject:

In Dungeons & Dragons, you see, there was (is, for all I know) a monster called the Piercer. It would hang from the ceiling of a tunnel, pretending to be a stalactite, preparing to drop on unwary travellers. It was ridiculous. What happens if you apply the principles of the living dungeon to this monster? The answer was a hilarious article by Chris Elliot and Dick Edwards, ‘The Ecology of the Piercer’. Chris and Dick followed it up with other Ecology articles on such monsters as the Catoblepas, and the Land Shark. All were funny, but the biggest joke was yet to come. A copy of DragonLords found its way into the possession of Gary Gygax, and he, enjoying the original article, had it reprinted in The Dragon. But, and this is a big but, everyone took it seriously! It spawned a series that ran in The Dragon for years.

Now many conclusions can be drawn from this. One is about the remarkable absence of a sense of irony to be observed in many role-playing gamers, especially Americans. But that’s neither here nor there. The one I’m interested in is the fact that a series of articles exploring the ecology of monsters (a trait also to be observed in Glorantha, especially with reference to trolls) inevitably removes the sense of the marvellous, the sense of ‘magic’ from the game’s monsters. You end up playing a game about a conflict between species on a planet exhibiting an extreme variety in its biology. Finally it dawns on you that your game is more David Attenborough’s World of Nature than Beowulf, and you wonder why you’re playing these games.

It is ironic that Empire of the Petal Throne, a game which is set on a planet with conflict between a wide variety of strange species, nevertheless has far more sense of mystery and strangeness about its ‘monsters’ and its ‘underworlds’. In fact, I’d say that, although it is by no means limited to this, EPT represents both one of the very earliest games to lend themselves naturally to the living dungeon, and one of the very finest expressions of that approach.

So the living dungeon, which was brought in to reduce the Sense of Absurdity, ended up undermining the Sense of Wonder.

There's a reason why I say that the Silver Age sprang in part from a decadent interpretation of Gygaxian naturalism, one so concerned with building "realistic" fantasy worlds that it inadvertently leeched away much of fantasy's power and appeal. This is a tendency in the hobby of long pedigree and is, in some sense, a logical consequence of the very first time an orc was given game stats or a magic item quantified in terms of its benefits to a player character. It's not, I think, an inevitable consequence, but the excesses of the Silver Age grew organically from roots put down at the very start of the hobby. They were responses to genuine concerns on the part of devoted gamers and, while I decry them in hindsight, my own acceptance of them at the time cannot be denied. As old men sometimes say of outlandish fads from their youths: it was the style at the time.

Retrospective: Murder on Arcturus Station

2011-11-30T09:55:00.000-05:00

Many people attribute Traveller's lasting success to the fact that it was one of the first science fiction roleplaying games published and there may be some truth to that. However, I think it had more to do with the fact that it was supported by many excellent adventures, starting with its first. With very few exceptions, Traveller had a larger selection of excellent adventures than almost any other RPG of which I can think, a terrific example of which is 1983's Murder on Arcturus Station by J. Andrew Keith.

As its title suggests, Murder on Arcturus Station is a murder mystery set on Station Three within the asteroid belt orbiting the star Arcturus. The murder victim is Ringiil Urshukaan, president of Lamarck Minerals, whom the adventure assumes has recently hired the PCs in order to discover the location of a missing ore carrier. The adventure takes as granted that the PCs succeeded in this prior mission, learning that the theft of the ore carrier was part of a plot by disgruntled employees of Urshukaan. As it turns out, there are quite a lot of disgruntled employees at Lamarck Minerals, thus laying the groundwork for the main adventure.

What sets Murder on Arcturus Station apart from other adventures of its kind is that it's actually a toolbox. Beyond the information noted in the previous paragraph, little else is set in the adventure. Instead, each referee is expected to decide for himself who killed Urshukaan, why they did it, and how they accomplished the murder. Consequently, the adventure is a little longer than most those published for Traveller -- 52 pages -- but those extra pages are put to good use, providing the referee with everything he needs to create his own unique murder mystery. Thus, there's a map of the station itself, along with details on 57th century forensic science, background on the victim and all nine suspects. Each of those nine suspects is given background of their own, as well as a possible motive, means, and alibi. This makes it possible for the referee to reuse this adventure many times, each with a different murderer, motive, and means.

Most intriguing of all is the fact that Murder on Arcturus Station allows for a tenth possible murderer, namely one of the player characters. It's an unusual possibility that I never had the opportunity to use back in the day and I regret that now. Naturally, such a possibility depends on planning beforehand between the referee and the player, but that's easily accomplished. The only real issue I have with this possibility is that, if the PCs are all pregenerated ones, the revelation that one of them is in fact a killer won't have very much impact, or at least it'll have far less impact than if it were a long-established PC who's revealed to be the perpetrator. On the other hand, I'll admit that the use of an established PC isn't very likely in my experience, not unless his player has either decided to retire the character in style or the referee intends to make another Traveller adventure, Prison Planet, the new centerpiece of his campaign.

Murder on Arcturus Station is a lot of fun for the referee. It does a lot of the heavy lifting in the creation of a murder mystery adventure while still providing enough options that the referee feels as if he's co-creating the situation he's presenting to his players. In addition, adventures like this are, I think, a big part of why Traveller succeeded so well. I don't mean the toolbox aspect of it, though that is indeed attractive. Rather, I mean that Traveller was never just about dogfights and shoot 'em ups with bug-eyed aliens. There was a depth and variety to its adventures, some of which offered up surprisingly complex issues as fodder for roleplaying. It's something I continue to admire about Traveller and that has continued to influence me as I write my own science fiction adventures.

Amusing Space Opera Quote

2011-11-29T19:57:00.000-05:00

One of the first products released to support FGU's Space Opera was an adventure module entitled Martigan Belt. It was published in 1981 and written by Stephen Kingsley, who, judging by his "Dedication & Thanks" must have lived on Long Island, as he talks about Waterloo Hobbies in Stony Brook (no surprise, since I believe this was Scott Bizar's original game store). In any event, Kingsley's introduction includes a couple of sentences I found amusing:

Welcome to the universe of Space Opera. Space Opera presents a more complex set of rules than average, but also more complete. That's not an apology since life is also complex.

That's probably about as succinct a description of both Space Opera and the philosophy behind its design as any I could find. It's also why, despite my unhealthy fascination about the game, I have zero interest in actually playing it.

Old TSR Ad

2011-11-29T19:16:00.000-05:00

Tim Hutchings recently sent along a scan of an old TSR advertisement from the pages of Asimov's Science Fiction. Some of you have no doubt seen it before, but, even if you have, it's worth looking at again.

What's fascinating to me is that TSR advertised Dungeon! side by side with Dungeons & Dragons, as if they considered the former game to be a lead-in to the latter. That's not an unreasonable idea, especially since that's how I entered the hobby, but I don't know how common my experience was. Back in 1979, the idea of a roleplaying game was a pretty alien one and I doubt my friends and I would have understood it without the intermediary of Dungeon! Seeing this ad again makes me wonder if perhaps TSR was aware of just how unlike previous games D&D was and published Dungeon! in part to be a quasi-intro product to Dungeons & Dragons.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Ecology of the Piercer"

2011-11-29T09:47:00.000-05:00

When issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983) was released, it contained, in addition to the usual assortment of not particularly funny April Fool's articles, a very short article -- one page of text plus a one-page illustration -- called "The Ecology of the Piercer." Written by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards, it had originally appeared in the pages of the UK fanzine Dragonlords. That in itself is pretty remarkable, as I cannot recall another Dragon article that was in fact a reprint of something that had appeared elsewhere (though I'm sure my readers will quickly point out many examples that falsify my memories). More remarkable, I think, is how modest an article "The Ecology of the Piercer" is and, yet, it was the acorn from which a mighty oak would eventually grow.

The idea of monster ecology articles is now so well entrenched in the minds of long-time D&D players that it's almost unnecessary to discuss the actual contents of this seminal article. More to the point, "The Ecology of the Piercer" is, as I just noted, a very short article, written in the form of an address given by the wizard Pyrex to the Wizards Guild of Kabring, where he discusses the physiology and habits of the piercer. There are no game stats included with the article; instead it focuses on trying to make sense of one of the game's more bizarre creations. This the authors do by postulating that the piercer is a mollusk using a stalactite as protective covering/weapon in much the same way that a hermit crab does with seashells. It's a pretty simple idea but a clever one that goes a long way to lending plausibility to what would otherwise be just a goofy monster.

The response to "The Ecology of the Piercer" was very positive, so much so that nearly every issue of Dragon that followed it for many years included an "Ecology of ..." article in its pages. These articles were foundational to the Silver Age, being sophisticated (or decadent, depending on one's point of view) outgrowths of Gygaxian naturalism. I think it worth noting, too, that the origin of this series was in the UK, where RuneQuest rivaled and may have even exceeded Dungeons & Dragons in popularity. Among RQ's many virtues was its dedication to creating and presenting fantastically plausible monsters, with 1982's Trollpak probably being the epitome of the genre. I suspect that Trollpak had an influence on "The Ecology of the Piercer," as evidenced by the illustration that accompanied the article. It showed a dissected piercer that reminded me, even then, of the famous illustration of a troll's innards I've discussed previously.

I liked the early "The Ecology of ..." articles more than the later ones, mostly because they were short and focused more on explaining away goofiness in a reasonable manner than in providing the definitive portrait of a particular monster's nature. They were thus much more easily "plug and play" than what came later, which increasingly seemed to rely on very specific presentations of iconic monsters, often to the point where those portrayals became canonical at the expense of earlier alternatives. But then that was one of the characteristics of the Silver Age and, judging from the popularity of these articles, it fed a real hunger many gamers -- or at least Dragon readers -- had.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Jandar of Callisto

2011-11-28T10:26:00.000-05:00

It's been the tedious refrain of this blog over the last nearly four years that originality is overrated. Given that, it's probably no surprise that, despite his complicity in L. Sprague de Camp's crimes against the Hyborian Age, I still have a fondness for Lin Carter's fiction. Some might surmise that this fondness is in fact a carryover from my appreciation of Carter's editorship of the influential Ballantine Adult Fantasy series launched in May 1969. There may be some truth to that surmise, but the simple fact is I do enjoy Carter's fiction. I make no claim that it's timeless or insightful, never mind original, but it is fun -- fun in the way that only shameless pastiche can be.

And Jandar of Callisto is pretty shameless. Published in 1972, this novel tells the story of Jonathan Dark, who, while exploring the ruined city of Arangkhôr in Cambodia, is transported to Callisto, the moon of Jupiter, known to its inhabitants as Thanator. If this sounds familiar, it should and not just because it mimics Edgar Rice Burroughs's stories of Barsoom. Also in 1972, Carter wrote another novel, Under the Green Star, which tells the story of a different Westerner who travels to the Far East and uncovers the means to travel to another world. Like both Burroughs and Under the Green Star, Jandar of Callisto is told in the first person by its protagonist, supposedly by means of a manuscript that came into Carter's hands and that he has dutifully transcribed and published so that the world may learn of Dark's remarkable adventures beyond the Earth:

That the most far-reaching and momentous historical events often spring from minute and seemingly inconsequential accidents is a fact which I can attest from my own experience.

For the past four months now-insofar as I have been able to measure the passage of time-I have dwelt on an alien world, surrounded by a thousand foes, struggling and battling my way through innumerable perils to win a place beside the most beautiful woman in two worlds.

...

As I sit, painfully and slowly setting down these words with a quill pen and homemade ink on a sheet of rough parchment, I cannot help but wonder at the obscure vanity which prompts me to record the tale of my incredible adventures-a tale which began in a lost city deep in the impenetrable jungles of southeast Asia and which ventures from there across the incredible distance of three hundred and ninety million miles of infinite space to the surface of a weird and alien planet. A tale, furthermore, which I deem it most unlikely any other human eye will ever read.

Yet I write on, driven by some inexplicable urge to set down an account of the marvels and mysteries which I alone of all men ever born on earth have experienced. And when at last this narrative is completed, I will set it within the Gate in the hopes that, being composed entirely of organic matter, paper and ink as well, it may somehow be transported across the immeasurable gulf of interplanetary space to the distant world of my birth, to which I shall never return.

In the night sky, at certain seasons when the Inner Moons are on the other side of our primary and the starry skies are clear, I can (I fancy) see the earth. A remote and insignificant spark of blue fire it seems from this distance; a tiny point of light lost amid the blackness of the infinite void. Can it truly be that I was born and lived my first twenty-four years on that blue spark-or was that life but a dream, and have I spent all of my days upon this weird world of Thanator? It is a question for the philosophers to settle, and I am but a simple warrior.

As I'll readily admit, there's scarcely an original idea in Jandar of Callisto. Yet, as you read the above passage, I hope you got some sense of the gusto with which Carter spins his tale. There's an adolescent seriousness to it that creeps up to but never quite crosses the line into parody that I find charming. Others might reasonably disagree and I won't attempt to argue the point, since, at earlier times in my own life, I too might have felt Jandar of Callisto risible rather than delightful. But if you're looking for some light reading (the book is just a little over 200 pages long) that recalls Burroughs and his better imitators, you could do far worse than this novel. If nothing else, Carter ably demonstrates how to do pastiche well and, as such, Jandar of Callisto makes a great study for referees everywhere.

Truth

2011-11-26T09:24:00.000-05:00

Apropos of our recent discussions about the terms "hobbyist" and "professional," Zak has some excellent advice over at his blog. Do take the time to read what he has to say.

Open Friday: Hobbyist vs. Professional?

2011-11-25T09:22:00.000-05:00

To say that there are differences of opinion in the old school community is to state a truism. Yet, sometimes, it's worth looking at some of those differences to see what insight might be gleaned from them. A good case in point is what I've come to see as the "hobbyist vs. professional" debate. You see, a lot of us -- correctly, I think -- believe that, somewhere along the line, the industry part of the roleplaying world went off the rails, to the detriment of the hobby part. There are naturally many divergent points of view on precisely when this derailing occurred, but, regardless, I don't think this perspective is controversial among the vast majority of us promoting old school gaming these days.

Where the controversy often appears concerns the question of professionalism and indeed the very idea of "the industry" itself. Understandably, there are some gamers who feel that the industry that grew out of the hobby lost its way when it "went professional." They equate the amateurish look of those great early games and adventures with the term "hobbyist" and see the move away from that look toward a more "professional" one as the source of the derailing they decry. I think there's some truth in this, but I'm not sure the derailing had anything to do with production values or "professionalism."

For me, "hobbyist" refers not esthetics so much as origin. That is, whence did game X or module Y come? Was it created to fill a slot in a production schedule or did it arise out of play? That's the big difference between, say, Gygax's Giants-Drow series and the Dragonlance modules. The former were professional write-ups of adventures based in actual play, whereas Dragonlance was conceived from start to finish as an effort to sell modules. Certainly Dragonlance borrowed elements from adventures and campaigns that were actually played (like Jeff Grubb's deities), but there was no such thing as a Dragonlance campaign prior to its being written up for sale, unlike nearly adventure Gary Gygax wrote during his time at TSR.

I won't go so far as to say production values or esthetics are irrelevant to this question. However, I will say they're of secondary importance to me the origin of the content being sold. If someone is selling a rules set or an adventure or a campaign setting, I always think it better if it has some connection to actually having been played rather than merely being an ivory tower brainchild of a writer or designer looking for something to sell. So, I don't see hobbyist and professional as necessarily opposite qualities. I can imagine lots of very slick, professionally-made hobbyist products. That doesn't bother me and, given the tools technology have given us over the last few years, it's easier than ever to make hobbyist products that look every bit as good as something made by "professionals." What I don't want, though, are products made solely as consumer goods. When that started happening in the RPG industry, that's where things started to go off the rails.

This is a more rambling and open-ended question than usual, but I'm curious to hear people's thoughts on this. What does "hobbyist" mean to you and do you see it as antithetical to "professional?" Do you care if a RPG product is just someone's thought experiment and has little or no connection to actual play or is that not an issue for you? As ever, try to remain polite and respectful in the comments. This could be a potentially contentious topic, but there's no need for it to be acrimonious.

The Articles of Dragon: "Who Gets the First Swing?"

2011-11-24T09:49:00.000-05:00

There's that word again -- "realism." As I've noted before, it (and variations on it) were a commonplace of Dragon articles after 1983 or thereabouts. This instance of it appears as part of the subtitle to the article "Who Gets the First Swing?" which appeared in issue #71 (March 1983). The article, by Ronald Hall, is an attempt to produce a "simple yet realistic" alternative to the convoluted and much misunderstood initiative system presented in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. I think almost anyone who ever attempted to run combat in AD&D by the book would have been sympathetic to Hall's intention.

Initiative in AD&D, particularly when combined with the equally obscure rules regarding surprise, was one of those areas where, in my experience, most players back in the day simply ignored the official rules and adopted a variety of house rules. I know I did. My system was a variation on rolling 1d6 per side with modifiers and a dash of common sense. D&D's combat has always been pretty abstract, so it never made much sense to me to fixate on making one of its aspects more "realistic." Unfortunately, in this period of D&D's history, that opinion wasn't held by all, least of all those who wrote articles for Dragon. "Realism" was all the rage.

Hall introduces an attack priority system that makes good use of weapon speed factors -- another aspect of AD&D many gamers dropped -- in order to model advantage such "faster" weapons have in combat. His system is an individual initiative system rather than a group initiative one, which, right there, means it's going to be much more complex than the commonest house rules used at the time. Add to this that there many, many modifiers to a character's attack priority, such as weapon length, dexterity, size, hit dice, among others, and you have a recipe for a system that, despite its claims does require "more work." The other issue is that, like many such systems, Hall distinguishes between manufactured and natural weapons, which necessitates that there be seven pages of supplementary stats to cover the modifiers for all the creatures in the Monster Manual. What one is to do with the Fiend Folio monsters is never addressed.

Articles like this were no doubt extremely well-intentioned, but, even at my most obsessive, I never felt the desire to use them. I understood the logic that leads to creating an individualized initiative system with lots of modifiers and special cases, but, at the end of the day, the result always seems like more work than is necessary for a combat system as abstract as D&D's. I'll readily grant that AD&D is a mess when it comes to initiative and the other complexities it bolted on to OD&D's "alternative combat system." However, articles like this strike me as cures worse than the disease.

Prometheus

2011-11-23T14:49:00.000-05:00

The new issue of Entertainment Weekly includes an article about the upcoming Alien prequel (or whatever the heck it is) Prometheus. I have to admit that, despite my better judgment, I'm actually very interested in this film. Ridley Scott is a very hit or miss director in my opinion, which is why I was wary when I started hearing rumors a few years ago that he was, in one way or another, returning to the universe of his 1979 sci-fi class, Alien, about which I've gushed on innumerable occasions on this blog.

I'm still wary. I have come to loathe prequels, reboots, and re-imaginings, especially when they are made decades after the originals. But I'd dearly love to see something good done with or in the style of the original Alien. This still, along with others, gives me hope that it'll at least be esthetically pleasing, if nothing else. There's definitely a '70s sci-fi vibe to this image and I like that. (The actors are still too obviously attractive, though, but that's Hollywood for you). Even if the movie stinks, it might have some nice visuals I can use as inspiration for Thousand Suns.

Pathfinder Online

2011-11-23T13:32:00.000-05:00

I've gotten quite a large number of emails from folks asking me my opinion about the recent announcement that Paizo had licensed its Pathfinder Roleplaying Game setting, Golarion, to a new company, Goblin Works, for the creation of a massive, multiplayer, online game. Truth be told, I don't know what to think. Aside from the fact that I don't play Pathfinder, I'm not particularly knowledgeable about the world of video games, let alone MMOs, I've played a few MMOs over the years -- I was once quite an avid World of Warcraft player -- but so are a lot of gamers out there. So, take anything I say here with a huge grain of salt.

Firstly and most obviously, there's the current state of the MMO genre. Everywhere I look, MMOs are going free-to-play, which suggests that it's getting harder and harder to convince gamers to shell out $15 a month for a subscription. World of Warcraft seems to be the only major MMO that hasn't gone completely free-to-play and even it has a rather open-ended free trial (to level 20). Now, it may well be that many of these free-to-play MMOs are still profitable. Indeed, I suppose they'd have to be on some level or else they'd have shut down by now. Even so, could a new MMO based on Pathfinder's setting turn enough profit in a crowded marketplace to be viable?

This brings me to my second thought: Pathfinder and Golarion. From what little that has been said so far, it would appear that, despite its name, one of the big selling points of this MMO will be its setting. In part that's probably because the OGL does not cover video games, meaning that Paizo can't use many (most?) aspects of its D20-derive ruleset in a video game. Or at least that's my understanding. I suppose it's possible that there's some way around this or that I've misunderstood the OGL all these years, but I don't think so. That means that Pathfinder Online won't be using the Pathfinder RPG system but something else, whatever that may be. Now I like Golarion as well as the next guy. It's a very well-done "generic but flavorful" fantasy setting that includes tons of terrific nods both to the hobby's past and to its pulp forebears. But is it interesting enough in itself to drive interest in this game?

So what is special about this MMO? According to Lisa Stevens:

It's going to focus around the characters you create, in a world that will grow out of your interactions, developing the way you choose to develop it. It takes place in the River Kingdoms of Golarion, with our own Kingmaker Adventure Path providing some of the inspiration. There will be an overarching storyline, and dungeons aplenty to explore, but where Pathfinder Online is going to thrive is in the ability of each of you to leave your mark on the world. Do you want to build a castle that you own and control? Go for it. Want to start a town and rally folks to your banner? Do that. Do you want to ally with the neighboring villages to form a new nation—or perhaps wage war on them instead? The choice is yours. Want to become the most feared bandit in the River Kingdoms? The path is available. Want to become the greatest armorer that Golarion has ever seen? All it takes is hard work. If you can imagine doing something in the world of Golarion, we want you to be able to do that in Pathfinder Online.

That makes it sound to be me as if Pathfinder Online is going to be somewhat sandbox-y but with a big dash of EVE Online's "fun with economics" model thrown in. No one should be surprised by this possibility, since Ryan Dancey is attached to Pathfinder Online and he worked for EVE's publisher, CCP, for the last few years. Could it be that Dancey thinks he's found a way to translate EVE's inexplicable popularity into a fantasy setting?

Finally, the fact that Pathfinder Online is being produced by a new company, Goblinworks, ought to give anyone pause. Creating a new MMO (or indeed any video game) isn't easy, so there's always a worry when you see a startup company taking on a big project like this. It's true that Dancey has experience at CCP, as does Mark Kalmes, who's also involved. But you need a talented and experienced team of people to launch an MMO and I wonder if Goblinworks will be able to assemble one.

Those are my initial thoughts based on very little information. As ever, I wish the Paizo crew all the best and hope this proves a worthwhile avenue for them, but I have my doubts.

RIP Anne McCaffrey (1926-2011)

2011-11-23T11:31:00.001-05:00

Distracted though I may be with the final tweaks to Thousand Suns, but I am not so distracted to have failed to notice news of the death of science fiction writer Anne McCaffrey, who died on Monday at the age of 85. McCaffrey began writing in the early 1950s, but almost everyone who knows her name knows it because of her long-running "Dragonriders of Pern" series. That series got its start in the October 1967 issue of Analog with the novella "Weyr Search." Over the course of the next 40 years, she would write 22 novels and numerous short stories set in the world of Pern, along with many more written singly or as parts of other series. McCaffrey was widely recognized for her talents, winning both the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 1968, the first woman to win the first and the first to win both in the same year.

I can't count myself among McCaffrey's legions of fans, but I know and respect enough people who can that I thought it worth taking a moment to remark on her death. Entering the hobby in the late '70s as I did, it was nigh impossible to go to a bookstore and not see Pern novels on display, both in the science fiction section but also toward the front of the store. Along with Terry Brooks, McCaffrey's name was ubiquitous in those bygone days when I regularly visited bookstores looking for the latest issue of Dragon or new products from my favorite RPG publishers. In a weird way, even though I wasn't a reader of her books, she was still an inspiration to me, because it showed me that it was possible not only to be a successful writer of "genre" books but that it was possible to make it onto the New York Times bestseller list to boot (they used to post those lists in the stores in those days, too). I am sure I'm not the only one who was similarly inspired.

Rest in peace, Ms McCaffrey.

Retrospective: The Volturnus Trilogy

2011-11-23T09:27:00.000-05:00

This week, I'm going to deviate from my usual practice of writing posts on each adventure module in a series, in part because I'm impatient and in part because I don't think it's fair to evaluate the 1982 Volturnus modules for TSR's Star Frontiers individually. Moreso than most modules in a series, Crash on Volturnus (by Mark Acres and Tom Moldvay, with Doug Niles), Volturnus, Planet of Mystery (Acres and Moldvay) and Starspawn of Volturnus (also Acres and Moldvay) don't stand up very well on their own. Taken together, they represent a single epic adventure that draws great inspiration from classic tales of pulp science fiction. To anyone familiar with Tom Moldvay's prior works, this should come as no surprise, as he clearly drank deeply from the well of pulp literature. It's precisely for this reason that I think the Volturnus trilogy has often been judge so harshly in some quarters. Acres and Moldvay weren't trying to present a plausible, hard SF scenario but rather a rollicking pulp romp -- and they succeeded brilliantly in my opinion.

The first module in the series, Crash on Volturnus, was included with the boxed set of Star Frontiers itself. I didn't post a cover image of it here, since it consisted of a two-sided map -- one a hex map of the titular planet and another the bridge of the Serena Dawn, a starliner on which the PCs are traveling to the newly-discovered world of Volturnus. The PCs are in the employ of a nearby planetary government to determine what happened to a prior expedition sent to the unexplored planet. Shortly after arriving in the Volturnus system, the starliner carrying the PCs is attacked by space pirates, forcing them to escape in a lifeboat and crash land on the planet below. They find the planet largely inhospitable, full of deadly creatures and hazardous terrain. Eventually, they make contact with intelligent beings -- the octopoid Ul-Mor -- who will aid them only if they complete a dangerous manhood ritual that will initiate them into their tribe.

The second module, Volturnus, Planet of Mystery, picks up where the previous one left off, with the PCs now members of the Ul-Mor tribe. The PCs learn from their hosts that others like themselves have been seen in the company of another intelligent race, a tree-dwelling one called the Kurabanda. The Ul-Mor guide the PCs to the Kurabanda lands and wish them luck in their quest. As they get closer, they discover a raging battle between the monkey-like Kurabanda and space pirates, perhaps the same space pirates who marooned them on this planet. If the PCs gain the Kurabandas trust, they learn that the prior expedition had been captured by the "demons from the sky" (i.e. space pirates) two weeks previously and were taken back to their base. A raid on the base reveals the existence of yet another intelligent race, the weird Edestekai, many of whom have been enslaved by the pirates as workers in their mines. In the process of rescuing the Edestekai, the PCs find the commander of the lost expedition, who was apparently saved by a "servant of the gods," according to the superstitious Edestekai. These servants live in an underground complex far away. Should the PCs investigate -- and why wouldn't they? -- they find a place with highly advanced technology, including robots. If successful, they learn that the place was built by one more intelligent species, the Eorna, who were the original inhabitants of Volturnus and are now nearly extinct. Unfortunately, their actions causes a signal to be transmitted that alerts the vilainous Sathar (who, it seems, warred with the Eorna in the past) of events on Volturnus, thereby setting up a final showdown in the next module.

That next module, Starspawn of Volturnus, concerns efforts by the PCs to unite the Ul-Mor, Kurabanda, and the Edestekai into an alliance to fight against the Sathar invasion fleet, which is determined to wipe out all intelligent life on Volturnus (Why? That's just what bad guys do). The PCs learn from some of the surviving Eorna that they raised these three races to sentience as a possible counter against the return of the Sathar. Unfortunately, the races proved mutually hostile to one another and slow to adopt the technology of their benefactors. Now that the Sathar are on their way -- far sooner than the Eorna expected -- Volturnus' doomsday is upon it. Each race has a test the PCs must undertake to win their assistance. Failure makes the final confrontation all the harder. Along the way, they also discover that some of the Eorna's robot servitors have attained sentience, too, and this fourth faction might also be swayed to fight against the Sathar.

What follows is a massive, multi-front melee brawl involving up to a dozen individuals and vehicles per side per combat. As you may recall, the Star Frontiers boxed set came with lots of cardboard counters and maps. Starspawn of Volturnus finally gives you the chance to not only use them (that was possible in prior modules, too), but to use a lot of them at once. It's hard to describe what joy this brought me as a younger person. Sure, "realists" can kvetch about the fact that there are so few units in each engagement and thus hardly reflective of a true planetary invasion, but I could have cared less. The battles were fun and they felt appropriately like snapshots in a much larger conflict.

Is the Volturnus trilogy silly? Perhaps -- but only if you're expecting something other than pulp sci-fi from these modules, which you shouldn't be. Star Frontiers was never a "serious" SF RPG, "serious" in this case meaning a deep and insightful exploration of, well, anything. It was, however, a very enjoyable game of space opera adventure that took a lot of cues from Saturday matinee serials of the '40s and '50s. That's not to say you couldn't do more with Star Frontiers than that, but I think it more than a little unfair to expect 2001: A Space Odyssey (insert obvious joke here) when the game wasn't written with "cerebral" SF in mind. Star Frontiers was inspired by the same books and movies as was Star Wars and ought to be judged on that basis rather than any other. To my mind, when Star Frontiers was good, it could be very good and the Volturnus trilogy is very good indeed.

Nearly There

2011-11-22T16:18:00.001-05:00

Over the last few weeks, my attention has often been elsewhere, as I worked to get the revised Thousand Suns rulebook ready for the printer. My layout guy sent me this photo to show me where things stand right now:

With luck, it'll all be done very soon and I can get back to work on my long-overdue Dwimmermount and Petty Gods projects. But Thousand Suns has priority, since I've been working on it for over a year now and seeing it finally released with the clarity and presentation I've always wanted will be a dream come true.

The Articles of Dragon: "Falling Damage"

2011-11-22T07:02:00.001-05:00

And so it begins.

Issue #70 of Dragon (February 1983) saw the appearance of "Falling Damage" by Frank Mentzer, the first of what would turn into several articles discussing this strangely contentious subject. I say strangely contentious because, until this article appeared, I don't think the "right" way to adjudicate falling damage was ever a topic of serious conversation, at least not among the gamers I knew. The LBBs provide rules for falling damage hidden away in the section on aerial combat in Volume 3, where it's stated simply that

for every 1" of height a rider must throw one six-sided die for damage occurring from the crash, i.e. a crash from 12" means twelve dice must be rolled and their total scored as points of damage

That passage is the basis for what was the standard interpretation of falling damage in every form of D&D -- 1d6 damage per 10' fallen. That is, until this article, where Mentzer claims that the rules in AD&D were hastily written by Gary Gygax and were, as such, unclear as to his actual intent. Instead of 1d6 damage per 10' fallen, the claim is advanced that Gary actually meant 1d6 damage per 10', with the dice being cumulative in effect. That is,

1d6 for the first 10' feet, 2d6 for the second 10' (total 3d6 for a 20' fall), 3d6 for the third 10', and so on, cumulative. The falling body reaches that 20d6 maximum shortly before passing the 60' mark.

According to Mentzer, this new system -- which in fact Gygax had "always used" -- is "definitely more realistic." (emphasis mine) There's that dreaded word, the hallmark of the Silver Age. It's something that, at the time, meant a lot to me, but that, as the years have worn on, I find myself caring less and less about. In a game where people can throw balls of fire from their hands and adventurers become tougher to kill as the result of slaying monsters and looting treasure, fretting over whether a 60' fall or a 200' fall deals 20d6 damage seems bizarre. More to the point, after nearly a decade of "doing it wrong" (Mentzer's words), did the difference matter enough to make the change?

Regardless, the claim that Gygax had "always used a geometrically increasing system for damage in AD&D games" strikes me as somewhat suspect. I suppose it's possible that, sometime after the LBBs were published, Gary changed the way he dealt with falling damage in his home campaign. But, if so, I find it surprising that he never noticed that in every other D&D product published after 1974, the 1d6 per 10' rule is the norm. Indeed, I'd hazard a guess that, if one were to look through the various modules and articles Gygax penned between 1974 and 1983, we'd find instances where the 1d6 damage per 10' rule was in fact used. There's a fun project for an enterprising soul out there!

REVIEW: Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest

2011-11-21T19:44:00.002-05:00

If there's a recent old school game that I feel hasn't gotten the attention it deserves, it's Mutant Future from Goblinoid Games. I personally think that's a shame, because, while it is a very good retro-clone for playing Gamma World, it's actually much more expansive than that. The combination of its compatibility with Labyrinth Lord and its lack of a specific setting makes Mutant Future a good foundation on which to build a variety of gonzo science fantasy campaigns. Ironically, those two qualities may also partly explain why the game hasn't received the love I think it ought to have received, which is why I've thought for a while now that what Mutant Future needed was a solid campaign supplement to show off its possibilities.

Apparently, Charles Rice had similar thoughts and decided to do something about it by producing Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest, the first installment in a gonzo post-apocalyptic setting that takes its esthetic cues from Westerns, but whose content shows a mix of influences, including UFOlogy. I'll admit that I was quite prepared to dislike Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest. Being a big fan of Westerns, I tend to be more than a little snobby about the way the genre is so often misused and caricatured, especially in crossovers with other genres. And while a post-apocalyptic setting is a very good fit for Western themes and esthetics, I was nevertheless apprehensive. I've seen too many poorly executed Western-influenced creations not to assume the worst.

For the most part, my apprehension was baseless. Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest is a well done little setting, described in a 24-page PDF and selling for $1.99. One of its best qualities is that it takes itself seriously without being self-serious. That is, this isn't a silly setting, with mutant horses acting as lawmen or anything like that, but it's also not a setting that's so straitlaced that a funky mutant animal or plant character is an impossibility. Silliness is a big danger in post-apocalyptic settings, especially those that adopt a 50s B-movie approach to mutation as Mutant Future (and Gamma World) does. On the other hand, a big part of the fun of games like Mutant Future are the wildly improbable mutants. There's thus a fine line between inadvertently straying into parody and bleeding all the fun out a post-apocalyptic RPG setting -- a line that I think Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest walks pretty well.

This supplement details an area of indeterminate size situated in the southwest of the former United States. I say "indeterminate" because its single map doesn't include a scale, though any familiar with the region should quickly recognize its major locales: Rhino (Reno), Salt Lick (Salt Lake City), Tusk (Tucson), Vega (Las Vegas), etc. The lack of a scale isn't a deal-breaker by any means, especially when one can easily consult a real world map to determine how far Reno is from Salt Lake City, but it is an annoyance. Fortunately, there's a lot of clever and inspiring ideas in Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest to make up for this oversight, chief among them being the implication that extraterrestrials from Groom Lake/Area 51 are present in the post-apocalyptic world, now freed from the oversight of the defunct US government and engaged in mysterious activities throughout the Southwest.

Of course, the aliens present only one possible source of conflict in the setting. In addition to the struggles between various settlements, there's the rising power of New Aztekia, led by the Lord of the Sun, not to mention several power groups independent of any settlement. There's Hell's Heart, a coalition of criminal gangs; the Nightgliders, who seek the power of man-made flight; the 88th, a collection of human and android soldiers seeking to rebuild America; the Marshals, itinerant self-appointed keepers of law and order; and Uforia, which seeks contact with the aforementioned aliens. Throughout Rice peppers the supplement with adventure hooks and off-handed references to people, places, and events intended to serve as inspiration to the referee in making the Southwest his own setting.

Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest is written in clear, occasionally evocative language, though not without typos and editorial errors. It includes both black and white and color art throughout. I could have done without the colored backgrounds on each page, since they sometimes made the text harder to read. Much like Blackmarsh, Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest is more of a sketch of a setting than something more complete. Whether one views that as is a virtue or a flaw depends on what one expects out of a setting supplement. I myself was largely happy with its level of detail, though I will admit that I was disappointed that some aspects of the implied setting -- New Aztekia, for example -- get very little detail. Likewise, this product is almost entirely stat-less, which no doubt broadens its utility to players of other post-apocalyptic games, but it does somewhat call into question its being touted as a Mutant Future supplement.

In the end, I like Nuclear Sunset: The Southwest; there's the germ of a fun setting in here. I just wanted more, even if, at $1.99, it's actually quite a bargain. Perhaps Charles Rice will return to the Nuclear Sunset setting and produce additional products that offer some of the details I wished had been included in this one.

Presentation: 6 out of 10
Creativity: 7 out of 10
Utility: 6 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a sketch of a setting to use as the basis for your own post-apocalyptic roleplaying game campaign.
Don't Buy This If: You have no interest either in post-apocalyptic settings or using someone else's setting for your own campaign.