The Articles of Dragon: "Thieves' Cant: A Primer"

A great weakness of mine is constructed languages. While I can't say for certain – there's always the possibility that something else is to blame – I think it's quite likely that Appendices E and F of The Lord of the Rings planted the seeds of this lifelong fascination. I spent an inordinate amount of time reading those sections at the back of The Return of the King, especially the pages that displayed the Tengwar and the Angerthas. Likewise, when I got hold of The Silmarillion, I paid special attention to its appendix about Quenya and Sindarin names. Along with an old Random House Dictionary of the English Language, whose inside covers had diagrams of the evolution of Latin script, these books pretty much ensured I'd be a conlang nerd for the rest of my life. 

Consequently, I always took great interest in language-related articles in Dragon or other RPG periodicals. Issue #66 (October 1982) featured several of these, all of which left a lasting impression on me. The first, which I'll discuss in this post, was ""Thieves' Cant: A primer for the language of larceny" by Aurelio Locsin. It's a fairly short article that is presented as a document from a fantasy setting detailing the grammar and vocabulary of Thieves' Cant, the secret language of thieves from Dungeons & Dragons. 

Now, Thieves' Cant had, prior to this point, never, so far as I know, been described at any length in any D&D product. The AD&D Players Handbook merely calls it thieves' "own language" and says nothing more about it. I suspect it was on this basis that Locsin formed his ideas about how to approach creating a Thieves' Cant language for use with the game. He wanted to come up with something that had all the features of a "real" language – nouns, pronouns, modifiers, verbs and tenses, etc. – while still being simple enough that it didn't require a degree in linguistics to understand, let alone make use of it.

Of course, that's the crux of it: how were you supposed to use Thieves' Cant? What was its purpose? The article itself, as I said, is short and is presented in a detached, quasi-academic way, as if written by a scholar or linguist from within a fantasy setting, who's now sharing this secret language with the reader. There's, therefore, not even a sidebar or bit of boxed text hinting at how players or Dungeon Masters might make use of this constructed language in their adventures or campaigns. Instead, it's simply described, complete with a section in the center of the magazine that's supposed to be removed and then cut and folded to produce a 32-page two-way pocket dictionary of the language.

Another equally frustrating issue with the article is its very basis. Locsin's vision of Thieves' Cant is of an actual language, with its own distinct grammar and vocabulary, just as Elvish or Orcish would have their own distinct elements. This seems completely wrongheaded to me. Historically, thieves, criminals, and other outcasts have had their own unique ways of communicating with one another – you know, a cant or jargon that's known primarily by other members of group in question. There are innumerable examples of this in the real world and very few of them were created from the ground up by inventing a new grammar and vocabulary. It seems highly unlikely that Thieves' Cant would be an exception.

As I recall, the reaction to this article, both in the letters column of future issues and in later articles about languages in D&D, was not positive. I can't say that I disagree with those reactions. Re-reading the article in preparation for writing this post reminded me of just how weird and ultimately useless it is. I hate saying that, because it's clear Locsin put some effort into inventing the grammar and vocabulary, but I'm still left wondering why? What did he think would be done with the language? Heck, what did he do with the language in his own campaigns? Had he written about that, even a little, it might well have improved the article's utility. As it is, "Thieves' Cant: A primer for the language of larceny" is just an oddity and nothing more.

Fortunately, I have better things to say about this issue's other articles about language.

White Dwarf: Issue #79

With issue #79 of White Dwarf (July 1986), I reach the penultimate issue I'll cover in this series. Though I'm glad to have done it – and I hope it's been profitable for those of you reading along – I can't deny that my enthusiasm has been waning for some time now. Sadly, this issue did little to make me regret my decision to end the series with #80, though there are a couple of bright spots – like John Blanche's cover illustration ("Amazonia Gothique"), which I like for reasons I can't fully articulate.

This issue marks the first one featuring Paul Cockburn as editor. His inaugural editorial mentions that there will be still more changes in store for the magazine, though these will "come in bit by bit." Cockburn also notes that Citadel Miniatures would, from this point on, include "a small warning, intended to prevent figures being sold to that part of the public who might actually be harmed by lead content." He elaborates that there had recently been a Citadel ad in a magazine "aimed at a very young audience," which necessitated this warning. Maybe I'm just old and contrarian, but I felt a slight pang of sadness upon reading this. By 1986, the Old Days (and Old Ways) were already fading ...

"Open Box" takes a look at two related Palladium products, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness and its post-apocalyptic supplement, After the Bomb. Both products are positively reviewed, but the reviewer, Marcus L. Rowland, expresses a preference for the "present day setting of the original game," which he feels offers "more opportunities for plot development and diversity." Also reviewed is Secret Wars II for Marvel Super Heroes, which is judged "an awful lot better than Secret Wars I." Never having seen the original, it's not clear to me whether this is faint praise or not. Two Chaosium releases, Black Sword (for Stormbringer) and Terror from the Stars (for Call of Cthulhu) get positive reviews, as does West End's Ghostbusters. Acute Paranoia, a supplement for (naturally) Paranoia earns a more middling appraisal, largely due to its "disappointing" mini-scenarios.

"Where and Back Again" by Graham Staplehurst is one of the aforementioned bright spots of this issue. Dedicated to "Starting a Middle-earth Campaign," the article lays out all the decisions a referee looking to run a RPG campaign set in Tolkien's world must make. Staplehurst covers subjects like "style" (i.e. campaign frame), rules, and even source material. He also raises the question of how closely one might wish to hew to Middle-earth as described by the good professor and the consequences for choosing to deviate from that particular vision. It's a solid, thoughtful article on a topic that has long interested – and vexed – me. 

Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" has only rarely been something I've enjoyed and this issue's installment does little to change my mind. More enjoyable (to me anyway) is his second contribution to the issue, an odd little article entitled "Play It Again, Frodo." Ostensibly, Langford's assignment is to demonstrate "how closely role-playing and literature are entwined" in order to help readers convince their "serious" friends that gaming isn't a silly hobby. He attempts to do this through a series of vignettes based around famous books or movies – Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Conan, The Lord of the Rings, etc. – where he postulates that events go other (and humorously) than how they do in the originals. The idea here is that roleplaying allows to do things "your way" rather than being bound by the dictates of an omnipotent author. 

"20-20 Vision" by Alex Stewart reviews science fiction and fantasy movies. The bulk of this issue's column is devoted to the film, Highlander, in which "a medieval Scottish warrior with a French accent" is befriended by "Sean Connery's Glaswegian conquistador." Stewart calls the movie "a stylish, raucous and utterly preposterous D&D scenario transplanted bodily into contemporary New York." That's probably the most succinct (and amusing) way I've heard Highlander described and it does a good job, I think, of capturing the essence of its cheesy glory.

"All in the Mind" by Steven Palmer offers an alternate psionics system for use for AD&D. Palmer's system interests me for its relative simplicity – the article is only four pages long, as well as for its more flavorful elements. For example, there's a discussion of the heritability of psionic powers, as well as the inherent connection between twins. Neither of these elements plays a major role in his system, but the fact that they're mentioned at all is in stark contrast to the dreary, tedious treatment of psionics in the Players Handbook. 

"Ghost Jackal Kill" by Graeme Davis is a Call of Cthulhu scenario that's presented as a prequel to The Statue of the Sorcerer, a Games Workshop CoC adventure. The scenario is set in San Francisco and involves not only the Hounds of Tindalos, one my favorite type of Mythos entities. It also features real-world historical figures, specifically the actress Theda Bara and writer Dashiell Hammett. Normally, I tend to be leery of the inclusion of such people in RPG adventures, but, in this case, I think it works, particularly Hammett, who did actually work as a detective for the Pinkertons and drew on those experiences for his fiction. In any case, it's a good, short scenario and another of the issue's stand-outs in my opinion.

"Think About It" by Phil Masters examines the purpose and use of the Intelligence score (or its equivalent) in roleplaying games. Because it's an overview of a large topic, it's necessarily brief in its examination, but it does a good job, I think, of presenting different options and approaches to handling Intelligence in RPGs. "'Eavy Metal" provides tips on converting miniature figures, along with some nice color photographs. 

"Psi-Judges" by Carl Sargent – a name that would feature prominently on the covers of many RPG products throughout the late '80s and into the 1990s – is an expansion of Judge Dredd: The Roleplaying Game focused on, of course, psi-judges. Interestingly, it's equal parts a rules expansion and a roleplaying expansion. There's information on how to play a psi-judge in the game, alongside discussions of game balance and other matters. "Gobbledigook" and "Thrud the Barbarian" are still here, but I can't deny that I miss the presence of "The Travellers." The comic's absence really hits home to me just how much White Dwarf has changed from the days when I read (and enjoyed) it regularly.

One more week!

My Top 10 Favorite Imaginary Settings (Part I)

My recent retrospectives of both Dragonlance Adventures and Greyhawk Adventures got me thinking about my favorite settings for roleplaying games, which, in turn, got me to thinking about my favorite imaginary settings in general. Before long, I realized that I had the makings of a couple of posts in which I listed, in order, my favorite imaginary settings, along with some thoughts on how I first encountered them and why I still like them. Like all my previous lists of this sort, this one is intentionally personal. It's not intended to pass judgment on these or any other imaginary settings in any absolute sense. If your favorite isn't to be found here, that only means that you and I have different tastes, nothing. I doubt there will be many surprises here for long-time readers, except perhaps the order in which I rank the various settings I've chosen. 

10. Middle-earth

Growing up in the 1970s, J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth was probably the most well-known example of literary fantasy in popular culture. The Rankin-Bass cartoon of The Hobbit was released in 1977, with Ralph Bakshi's The Lord of the Rings coming out the following year. This is also the decade of the Brothers Hildebrandt Tolkien calendars and the Ballantine paperbacks with covers featuring Tolkien's own artwork. Consequently, it would have been nigh impossible for me not to have been pulled into the orbit of one of greatest fantasy settings of all time. 

Tolkien invested Middle-earth with a richness of detail that has, I think, become a model for every creator who's followed in his wake, even those who explicitly reject his particular take on fantasy. I know that's true in my own case, which is why I include the setting in this list. However, my fondness for Middle-earth is a distant and somewhat cold one – respect might be a better word to describe it. There's much I admire about Tolkien's creation, but very little I've directly emulated in my own (admittedly paltry) efforts, hence why I rank it lower than every other setting I'll discuss.

9. Barsoom

Mars, as envisioned by Edgar Rice Burroughs, is one of the oldest science fiction – or fantasy; take your pick – settings of lasting significance, inspiring innumerable writers (and scientists) to consider what life might be like on planets other than our own. I can't quite recall when I was first exposed to Barsoom, but it's been a setting I've loved for almost as long as I can remember. In my younger days, I simply thrilled to the exploits of John Carter, as he struggled mightily against a wide variety of nefarious antagonists, none of whom possessed an ounce of his courage or honor. Nowadays, I'm much more interested in Burroughs's worldbuilding, which is surprisingly rich and deep.

Barsoom is a great example of an adventuresome setting, by which I mean one where almost every detail exists to provide fodder for tales of derring-do. That undoubtedly limits the scope of Barsoom somewhat, but I can't say that bothers me much. Sometimes, all you want out of an imaginary setting is a fun environment for exciting stories and Barsoom provides that in spades. Considering the importance of the Red Planet to the creation of the hobby, I'm not the only person who thinks so.

8. The Known Worlds of Fading Suns

This is the first (but not the last) roleplaying game setting to appear on this list and with good reason. Since its appearance in 1996, I've enjoyed the 51st century of this "futuristic passion play," both as a referee and as a writer. Much like Barsoom, the Known Worlds are an adventuresome setting, perhaps even more explicitly so, since it was created for use in roleplaying game campaigns. This means that (also like Barsoom), the setting doesn't stand up to close scientific scrutiny, despite the fact that it's supposed to take place thousands of years from now in our world. It's closer to a fantasy setting in many ways and I have found that most objections to one or another aspect of it are best met by explaining that.

On the other hand, the Known Worlds are almost unique among futuristic settings in the pride of place they give to philosophy, religion, and spiritual matters. This is a setting, like Frank Herbert's Dune, that recognizes that mankind will bring religion with him as it travels the stars and, if anything, will only become more influential because of it. That's catnip for people like myself, who take great interest in questions of this kind, especially since the setting isn't interested in providing answers to those questions but rather occasions to ask more of them against a back of interstellar adventure.

7. The Hyborian Age

The 1970s was also the decade in which the works of Robert E. Howard managed to break into popular culture, thanks in no small part to Marvel's Conan the Barbarian comic book series. Though I of course read the comics, I was even more devoted to the short stories and novellas that I found on a spinner rack in my local library. Through them I became acquainted with the prehistoric Hyborian Age in which the Cimmerian lived. A heady mix of real world history and Howard's own flights of fancy, the Hyborian Age was simultaneously familiar and alien to me, which made it all the easier for my youthful self to fall in love with it. 

My appreciation for the setting only grew with age. I read REH's own essay about the Hyborian Age and his thoughts on its creation and immediately understood what I had only dimly grasped previously, namely, that real world history and cultures could be used to create something that nevertheless felt fresh and exciting. There is no need to create entire worlds from whole cloth, nor is there any shame in borrowing from the examples of the past. The trick is in using these raw materials imaginatively, as Howard had done, to present something that was a compelling back drop for adventure.

6. The Dying Earth

I've often said that science fiction is my natural medium. Despite that, I've spent more time roleplaying in fantasy worlds than in science fiction ones. Given that, I suppose it was inevitable that I'd fall in love with Jack Vance's Dying Earth. Set untold eons in the future, the Dying Earth is a setting in which science has become indistinguishable from magic and has changed the face of the planet – and its inhabitants – forever. In some ways, it's an ideal setting for someone with my conflicting interests and experiences, allowing me to have my cake and eat it too, so to speak. (I'm sure the fact that D&D's magic system is based on that of the setting endeared it to me as well.)

The other thing I adore about the Dying Earth is its overall feel: cynical, exhausted, and mysterious. You never know what you're going to find over the next hill or whether the traveler with an extra-broad smile you meet on the road is a friend or a foe. It's a place that keeps you guessing, sometimes until it's too late to extricate yourself from the trouble in which you've now found yourself. It's the stuff of enjoyable stories and captivating adventures.

Terrifyingly Beautiful

If you were into fantasy during the 1970s, you were almost certainly familiar with the artwork of Greg and Tim Hildebrandt, generally known as the Brothers Hildebrandt. Today, they're probably most remembered for their various Lord of the Rings calendars (the first of which appeared in 1976) and the covers to the Shannara novels of Terry Brooks, but I suspect the first of their paintings I ever saw was this one:

To say the Brothers Hildebrandt were a big deal is thus something of an understatement. That's why I'm not at all surprised that, in 1982 and 1983, TSR released two Dungeons & Dragons calendars featuring paintings by Tim Hildebrandt (I wonder why Greg was not also involved in this project). Here's an ad for the 1984 calendar from Dragon:

Did anyone reading this own one of these calendars? Searches online reveal that the calendar's paintings, while indeed beautiful, are fairly generic in their subject matter. I don't see anything distinctly D&D-ish about this, for example:

Mind you, it's an open question as to what marks any artwork as "Dungeons & Dragons artwork" beyond the fact that it appeared in a D&D product, so perhaps I'm being unfair. More to the point, I imagine TSR didn't worry much about such questions. For them, the union of the D&D name and the artwork of one of the world's premier fantasy artists was likely sufficient justification for the existence of Realms of Wonder.

Retrospective: Middle-earth Role Playing

While working on last week's entry in this series, I realized that I had never written a post about Iron Crown Enterprise's Middle-earth Role Playing, despite the fact that I had, long ago, written one about the notorious The Court of Ardor. This frankly surprised me, because I not only owned the game – having purchased it by mail order – but ran a short but intense campaign set in and around the Trollshaws (as I recall, though my memory is hazy). Having now been made aware of this oversight, I have no choice but to correct it by presenting my thoughts about MERP.

Originally published in 1982, Middle-earth Role Playing is an odd game. As the cover of the first edition proclaims, MERP is "a complete system for adventuring in J.R.R. Tolkien's world," that system being based on Iron Crown's Role Master system, with which I was already somewhat familiar. Had I been asked beforehand, it's not the system I'd have chosen for gaming in Middle-earth, but I doubt I could have explained why at the time. Role Master always struck me as much too complex and finnicky, especially in the area of combat, and this seemed at odds with the overall feel Tolkien's works evoked. Furthermore, it was supposedly set in the middle of the Third Age, some 1500 years before the events of The Lord of the Rings, which is not what I had been expecting. I imagine the period was chosen for maximum freedom, since it's not as well documented as other periods of Middle-earth's history.

The cover image accompanying this post is quite instructive. Depicting a multi-racial adventuring party looting what appears to be a tomb, it looks more like a scene from a D&D game than something one would find in Tolkien. At the time, that didn't bother me very much, because I was much more a fan of Tolkien's world than I was of Tolkien's stories. In that respect, MERP did its job well enough: it provided all the things one would expect to find in Middle-earth – dwarves, elves, hobbits, orcs, etc. – and didn't worry too much about the tone. For example, MERP had extensive rules for magic, as well as allowing characters of every profession, including warriors, to learn spells. As Gary Gygax famously complained, Middle-earth is notably low-key in its magic, but not so MERP. It's a very peculiar decision on the part of the game's designers, if fidelity to Tolkien were one of the game's key principles. On the other hand, if their goal was to use Middle-earth as the backdrop for more typical fantasy RPG activities, it makes perfect sense.

Since my friends and I weren't overly concerned with fidelity to Tolkien's literary works, none of this bothered us in the slightest. Much more important was the fact that we could create hobbits and elves and Dúnadan rangers and visit Mirkwood and Moria and all the other amazing locations described in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. There were orcs and spiders to be fought and great treasures to be won, all against the backdrop of a rich setting for which ICE provided some truly inspiring maps. Sure, our adventures didn't materially differ all that much from what we'd done in our Dungeons & Dragons sessions, but what did it matter? At that point in our roleplaying development, we were simply enamored of being able to use Tolkien's words, names, and locales and any more sophisticated concerns would have to wait.

In that respect, Middle-earth Role Playing gave us just what we wanted at the time, even if, in retrospect, it seems clear to me that MERP wasn't particularly well suited to its source material. I know many gamers of a certain vintage have great fondness for the game, in part, I think, because of the aforementioned maps and the Angus McBride artwork that graced the covers of the second edition of the game (which I never owned). There are worse reasons to have affection for a RPG, honestly, but I can't help but feel that MERP was something of a missed opportunity. Middle-earth holds so much potential as a fantasy roleplaying setting and one day I'd love to play in or referee a campaign set in it. 

Lessons from Tolkien

I've always been very interested in foreign languages and writing systems. My household had a giant Random House dictionary whose inside covers had charts depicting the evolution of the Latin alphabet from its Etruscan, Greek, and Phoenician alphabet. I pored over those charts for untold hours as a kid, copying them, learning the names of the letters, and, in time, using them as the basis for creating my own alphabets (which I originally used as "codes," since I was really into espionage, too, as a kid). When I discovered Tolkien, I was probably more entranced by appendices E and F, which discussed the languages of Middle-earth than by the story of The Lord of the Rings (The Silmarillion was, in this respect, even more impressive). Then came several articles in Dragon that offered advice on the creation of languages for one's campaign setting and I disappeared down a philological rabbit hole from which I never emerged (thanks, in no small part, to learning Latin, French, and Classical Greek in school).

In my mind, creating languages – and alphabets! – are forever intertwined with the creation of a fantasy setting. That probably explains my fondness for Tékumel, which, like Middle-earth, boasts several of its own. It's also why I found this comic so funny: I was reminded of my younger self, who would have agreed with the notion that the first thing a referee must do when beginning his setting is construct an entire language from scratch. Nowadays, I'm both too lazy and too wedded to a "just in time" style of setting design to consider attempting such a thing. I'm still very fond of constructed languages, though, and respect anyone who has the determination and enthusiasm to make them for RPG use. It's a time-tested way to lend depth and texture to a setting, going back at least as far as Edgar Rice Burroughs's Barsoom novels. 

Burroughs and Tolkien; that's certainly a worthy pedigree!

The Covers of The Lord of the Rings

I don't think it's in the least bit controversial to acknowledge the pivotal historical role Ace Books played in releasing their unauthorized editions of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. Briefly, Donald A. Wollheim (who would later go one to found DAW) discovered a loophole in then-current copyright law which enabled Ace to publish a US edition of the three volumes without having to pay royalties to Tolkien. This unauthorized edition was only in print for about a year but it sold enough copies to raise the profile of both Tolkien and fantasy more generally in the United States.

The Ace books featured the artwork above by Jack Gaughan, who'd long done illustrations for Wollheim while he was at Ace. There's no denying that the covers are quite effective. The combination of primary colors plus very simple artwork is powerful, even if one is left wondering exactly what is being depicted. For example, it's clear that The Fellowship of the Ring shows Gandalf, though the identity of his companions is less certain (are they hobbits?). The cover of The Two Towers is much more obvious, portraying a Nazgûl upon the back of a fellbeast. Meanwhile, The Return of the King cover might be symbolic of the conflict between Middle-earth and Sauron, shown as a hooded figure standing over Barad-dûr.

The authorized US editions were published by Ballantine and featured these covers.

Truth be told, these are just as striking as the Ace covers – and just as confounding as to what they exactly depict. Barbara Remington, who died at the start of 2020, painted these covers. Interestingly, she also painted the cover of an edition of E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros, a novel Tolkien himself admired and from which he drew inspiration. 

The covers I first saw were those of the 1973 Ballantine edition. My school library had copies of these and I probably read them sometime in 1980. Consequently, these particular covers exercise a powerful hold over my imagination. Unfortunately, I cannot recall the name of the artist. (Update: it's J.R.R. Tolkien himself. I cannot believe I did not remember this. Thanks to everyone who pointed it out to me in the comments)

Another edition for which I have great fondness is the 1981 version featuring artwork by Darrell K. Sweet.

I received these three books, along with a yellow copy of The Hobbit (also with a Sweet illustration), in a boxed set as a Christmas gift from my parents in 1983 or '84. I kept them all on a bookshelf beside my bed and consulted them frequently, particularly Appendices E and F of Return of the King. I was (and am) deeply fascinated by constructed languages, so those sections were like catnip to me and had a powerful influence on my own efforts at creating imaginary languages for my D&D worlds.  

Interview: Paul Jaquays (Part I)

To long-time roleplayers, Paul Jaquays needs no introduction. One of the earliest and most prolific freelancers of the hobby, Mr Jaquays has written, edited, and illustrated many of its most well regarded products, including landmark adventures such as Caverns of Thracia, Griffin Mountain, and "Night of the Walking Wet." He kindly consented to an interview, the first part of which is presented below and covers his entry into the world of gaming, both as a player and as a writer/editor/illustrator. Part II, which will appear tomorrow includes additional insights into his RPG career, as well as his his professional activities in the years since.

1. How did you become involved in the roleplaying game hobby?

I found RPGs by way of my younger brother's subscription to The General magazine. In the fall of 1975, I was working an evening shift at my college's radio station. The station played a lot of pre-recorded content, so I had nothing much to do between program changes. So when my younger brother Bruce called and told me about a sample magazine copy he had received called The Space Gamer (issue #2) I had time to listen. He proceeded to read me two reviews of a new game called Dungeons & Dragons. In looking back at one's life, one can usually find significant events that change the direction your life will take thereafter. This was one of those moments.

Hearing the game described, I knew I had come across something that I had been looking for since childhood ... a way to play out adventure fantasies like those in Conan, The Lord of the Rings and the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. I immediately ordered the rule sets and as many expansions as they had available. (Greyhawk, and maybe Blackmoor). I also dashed off some quick illustrative sketches for the magazine, my first submissions to a game publication of any kind. Greyhawk (and, I think, Chainmail) arrived in time for us to pore over them at the Thanksgiving break, but the rules didn't arrive until January of 1976 when I was out of the country on a school trip (I arrived home to discover that my brother and my buddies had gotten started without me). Within six months we were not only playing OD&D regularly with several DMs, but had also begun publishing our own game fan magazine, The Dungeoneer.

2. You mention The Dungeoneer, which is notable for not only being one of the earliest fanzine for D&D but also for having published some of the earliest adventures for the game. Looking back on it now, what contributions to it make you the most proud?

It's the adventures that stand out, and not simply because no one else was doing mini-adventures in 1976. When I read comments about the magazine or talk to fans (old and new), no one talks about the monsters, or the art, or the magic items and rules variants. It's always the adventures. I'm both flattered and honored when I read that gamers are constructing full campaigns around settings like "Night of the Walking Wet."

Second, it's that we were able to publish as many issues as we did back in a time when we (my gaming group) were all going to school full time, working at least part time, and trying to actually fit in gaming time. I know it's "get off my lawn" type talk, but I had to assemble the pre-press for every one of those magazines with rubber cement from typewriter-created galleys, PMTs (photo-mechanical-transfers of art), and sometimes the original art pieces themselves, and of course, press-on type for headlines.

Finally, it was something that I could do with my friends. I was the only member of that group to go on to a full time creative career, but my friends like J. Mark Hendricks, Merle Davenport, and artist Aaron Arocho still have their names memorialized in the hearts of Old School Gamers.

3. When did you decide you were interested in working professionally in the RPG field?

Almost immediately, I recognized that the RPG industry needed artists desperately and that this was a way to get my art published. Even before I started playing RPGs, I submitted sketches to The Space Gamer for publication. By the time I graduated from college, I had illustrated two microgames for Metagaming, been published in the first issue of Dragon magazine and numerous The Space Gamer issues, and was publishing my own D&D fan magazine.

In the spring of 1978, a couple months before graduation, I flew from Michigan to Texas to interview with Metagaming Concepts. They were considering bringing me on staff as an artist. After I returned to school, they let me know that they were going to hire a secretary instead (or perhaps another secretary as I remember several pretty young blonde girls being associated with the Metagaming offices). There were also some apologetic comments about them being atheists and me attending a Christian college. Not something you can say regarding a job interview these days, that's for sure.

After graduation, I tried to a pursue a more traditional commercial art career, ending up as a full time layout and paste-up artist for a quick-printer that had been my part-time employer during school. That job was brief. The city had blocked off the street on which the printer was located, eliminating all but foot traffic ... and soon my job with it. I no longer remember the specifics, but Chuck Anshell, who had purchased The Dungeoneer from from me and then taken it Judges Guild, arranged for me to come down and interview. I drove from Jackson, Michigan to Decatur, Illinois. I accepted the offered job (and the minimum wage paycheck it entailed), but only if I could continue to work out of my apartment in Michigan.

4. You're probably most famous in D&D circles for your Judges Guild work, particularly Dark Tower and the Caverns of Thracia. Do you have any particular memories about creating those two adventures?

I remember beginning to plan out bits of the adventure for Dark Tower while on the day long drive back from that first trip to Decatur, Illinois. Later, when I was home, I scrounged through my own game dungeons to cull the best "special" encounters for Dark Tower (other encounters ended up going into Morkendaine Manor, which I wrote for The Dungeoneer that fall). The whole Set vs. Mitra theme was greatly inspired by Conan the Barbarian fiction. I think the Conan story, "Red Nails," may have had some influence on the theme also, with it's rival bands warring within an ancient, enclosed space. I've always been fascinated by archaeology and the idea of excavating ancient ruins and finding them nearly intact. So I extrapolated that to a pair of opposing towers dedicated to opposing gods and then buried by some catastrophe.

Later, adherents of both faiths would excavate the buried towers and renew the battle. While many of the bits in Dark Tower came from my imagination, at least one was inspired by an encounter that designer Kerry Lloyd (of Thieves Guild fame) described during a visit to my home. He talked about a ring-shaped hall filled by a giant moving ball (think of the rolling stone ball in Raiders of the Lost Ark - which this predated by two years). The tomb of Racox in the dungeon is a tribute to my college buddy and fellow gamer (and room mate at the time), Randy Cox. And no, he didn't die.

During the development of Dark Tower, I had a meeting with Gary Gygax at a Metro Detroit Gamers convention. Gary had reviewed my manuscript and noted where my use of potions (and I think scrolls) had deviated from AD&D canon. For my house rules, I allowed multi-use potions and then spiced up their descriptions using tables based on some found in the Alarums & Excursions APAzine. My potions had color, flavor, and consistency. Some were pills. Others powders. Those non-canonical details were excised from Dark Tower. I think I may have actually used random dice rolls to fill some of the spaces in the underground areas ... though I did my best to try and inter-relate encounters and spice them up beyond simple random monster and treasure sets.

The core inspirations for Caverns of Thracia were threefold. The first was to ally the various "beast" races of AD&D as a unified force. The second was to build encounters that took place in multiple levels of a cave, where the open upper areas were situated above open lower areas. The final inspiration (that I remember) was the rather primitive, but unique plate armor used by Mycenaean soldiers. These became the human guards of the upper reaches of the Caverns.

At some point, Caverns of Thracia was changed from an AD&D project to a D&D project. I remember the biggest problem from this was that at least one of my beast men (the Jackalwere) was an AD&D creature. Thus, I had to create the Dog Brothers to fill that same role.

5. You were also involved in the creation of Griffin Mountain for RuneQuest, which is generally considered one of the best products ever published for that game. Did you enjoy writing for RuneQuest? Did you find it a different experience from writing for Judges Guild or TSR? Or were there a lot of similarities in how you approached these various projects?

I had discovered RuneQuest the summer before joining Judges Guild at Origins in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It quickly became the favorite RPG of my brother, my room mate and me. We played in other games in our gaming group, but when we ran games, it was RuneQuest. At some point, a good share of the adventures I wrote for other game systems (AD&D, D&D and even DragonQuest) were converted to work with RQ rules for my personal campaigns.

RuneQuest was perhaps my favorite system for which to create adventures. I found the game's Bronze Age time-of-myths type setting more appealing that the pseudo medieval setting of D&D. The biggest challenge for writing RQ adventures was creating monsters and NPCs with appropriate and balanced skills and stats. Monsters had to be detailed out almost to the same degree as player characters, which was ultimately time-consuming and even tedious. Stats for high level NPCs were even more challenging ... because my campaigns never had high level characters. My co-author on Griffin Mountain, Rudy Kraft, was excellent at setting up stats, so we had complementary skills as a team.

Writing for Judges Guild and TSR came at different times in my career. For Judges Guild, I could pretty much write whatever I wanted, how I wanted, and as much as I wanted. I mostly just wrote adventures that I conceptualized. The first Book of Treasure Maps was one of two products that were purely Judges Guild assignments, not original concepts. Writing for TSR was a whole different animal and came about in the late 80s. The industry had changed in the intervening years and become a bit more professional. TSR had writing style guides, word limits, design formats, a need to adhere to game world canon (not just rules canon) and ... deadlines.

For TSR, I was always writing and or editing to fill a predetermined product niche ... whether it was short pieces for collections, or full blown adventures. For at least a couple, the design description was so loose that I could do almost anything I wanted so long as it loosely fit the catalog copy (Talons of Night and The Shattered Statue). I actually did more editing for TSR than I did original design or authoring.

Pondering Conan the Barbarian

What to make of John Milius' 1982 film, Conan the Barbarian, which made a star of the largely unknown Arnold Schwarzenegger? That's a question with no easy answer, even though I've spent more time than I care to admit trying to disentangle my own very conflicted feelings about it. Conflicted feelings seem to be par for the course from what I can tell, with even professional Howardists (is that a word?) divided, sometimes bitterly, over its relative merits. That said, there are at least two points on which everyone agrees:

1. The film's soundtrack, by the late Basil Poledouris, is pretty much perfect in every way.
2. The film's 1984 sequel, Conan the Destroyer, was abominable.

Unfortunately, that's the extent of the common ground between the lovers and the haters of this film. I was 13 when this film was released, but, due to its R rating, I didn't see the film until it was released on video sometime afterwards. At that point, my exposure to the character of Conan was limited primarily to a handful of Lancer paperbacks I'd picked up here and there, almost none of which contained any actual stories by REH. 

Consequently, I wasn't much bothered by most of the divergences from the Howardian canon, because, quite frankly, I was utterly unaware of them. Having only read (I think) parts of Conan the Avenger and Conan of Aquilonia, my sense of the both the character of the Cimmerian and of the Hyborian Age was lacking. I'd also seen the covers of many a Marvel comic featuring Conan, though I'd never read one. Given this background, the story and character we got in the film matched my own expectations reasonably well. 

Indeed, if one takes Conan the Barbarian simply on its own terms, as a swords-and-sorcery tale vaguely inspired by some names found in Robert E. Howard stories, I think it still holds up quite well, though it reeks of pastiche. Untutored though I was in the mysteries of pure Howard back then, I could still sense that it was a strange, cobbled together Frankenstein of a movie, unapologetically borrowing elements from a wide variety of sources. I don't consider "pastiche" a term of opprobrium. Dungeons & Dragons wouldn't exist if not for the gleeful pastiche-making of Gygax and Arneson and, as readers of this blog know, I actually believe D&D is at its best when referees and players alike adopt a similar approach in their own games. 

Yet, there's little question in my mind that Conan the Barbarian can't really be called "Howardian" except in a tenuous analogical sense. Yes, there are characters, themes, and even scenes that appear in the film that are broadly consonant with Howard's own work. However, I can't recall a single line of dialog in the film that comes from a REH story (someone can correct me if I'm wrong) and there are a few places where I feel the film actually undermines Howardian themes, replacing them with its own. Again, I don't mean this in a negative sense. Much like D&D, I think there's virtue to be found in creating one's own story by looting the parts of other stories one likes. So long as one doesn't mistake this for "being true to the spirit" of authors and stories one loots, you won't hear a peep of criticism from me. 

As I got older, though, I read more unadulterated Howard and came to appreciate his work considerably more than I ever had as a youth. It's hard now, with the knowledge of and love for those stories that I now possess, to view Conan the Barbarian as much more than a typical example of Hollywood grave robbing, albeit a riotously fun example of it. As I said before, if this movie had been about some other northern barbarian seeking revenge against the slayer of his parents and people, I could continue to extol its virtues without qualification, because I think Conan the Barbarian may well be the best swords-and-sorcery movie ever made. Admittedly, that's as much an indictment of Hollywood's woeful treatment of the genre as it is praise for the film, but I mean it positively. 

Conan the Barbarian is a fun, occasionally insightful, feast for the eyes and I enjoy it on that level. I think, though, that it's also an exercise in brandification, playing off the fame of the name "Conan" to tell a very different story than any Robert E. Howard would have told. For many people, Schwarzenegger's portrayal of Conan in this film is the only exposure to the character they will ever have and that's a shame -- not because I think Schwarzenegger's portrayal is bad (I don't) but because his portrayal has very little to do with Howard's Cimmerian. 

Now, for many, this isn't an issue, in much the same way that they can shrug off the brandification of D&D over the years. If one has no particular knowledge of or liking for the real Conan, this criticism likely rings hollow. And of course many people who possess both still don't see it as a fatal flaw to what I cannot deny is a well-made fantasy action film. 

So where does that leave me? I still don't know. Part of me just wants to sit back and revel in the spectacle of it all, for the film has many terrific moments that I absolutely adore. Another part of me recoils, though, at the hash made of Conan, the Hyborian Age, and the auctorial voice of Robert E. Howard. Even more than the Peter Jackson The Lord of the Rings films, Conan the Barbarian misrepresents its ostensible inspiration to audiences who might otherwise not be familiar with them. Traditionalist that I am, I can't help but be bugged by that. Is that enough to make me stop watching the film every now and again? No, it's not, which makes me wonder why. Do I continue to enjoy it in spite of the things I dislike about it or do I perhaps sense some hidden depth to the film that I'm not yet consciously aware of? Or is it that I just hope that there's something of substance beneath the spectacle? I wish I knew.