"Adventure Games"

Over at Mesmerized by Sirens, the Catacomb Librarian reminds us that significant portions of The Compleat Arduin is available as free PDFs from the Emperor's Choice Games website. The Compleat Arduin (sometimes called "Arduin II") was a compilation, expansion, and -- dare I say it? -- rationalization of the original Arduin books, begun by Dave Hargrave and completed by Mark Schynert after Hargrave's death. The finished product was published in 1992 and is still available from Emperor's Choice. I must confess I've never read it myself, though I'm starting to think I ought to grab a copy sometime and make up for this gap in my gaming publication. I encourage others to do the same.

Until I get the full book itself, I've been perusing the PDF excerpts that Emperor's Choice has placed online. One of the things I found most interesting is a section at the beginning of Chapter One, in which Hargrave says the following:

This game, Arduin, is part of the genre known as Adventure Games. Role-playing is at the heart of all adventure games, though other elements such as conflict, chance and strategy are also important.

Now, let me start upfront that I think it's too late to call the object of our shared hobby anything but "roleplaying games." However inadequate a term that may be, it's the term that we're stuck with and every attempt to alter it that's been attempted thus far has been alternately quixotic and pretentious. That said, the term "roleplaying games" is inadequate, or perhaps more accurately, it's too narrow.

As Hargrave rightly points out, roleplaying is definitely at the heart of our hobby, but there are other important facets to it as well. By adopting the term "roleplaying game" for the kinds of games we enjoy, I think we've unintentionally emphasized one of their facets to the point that it overshadows the others. That's a mistake in my opinion, which is why the description above pleases me. Conflict, chance, and strategy are essential elements of the games I enjoy (more on this in a future post) and their absence -- or at least diminution -- dissatisfies me.

I make no claim that this passage from The Compleat Arduin says anything that others have not said elsewhere, but it says what it does in a way that spoke to me today and I thought it worth sharing with others.

Open Friday: Adventure Use

Today's question is just for people who have actually bought and used adventures for use with tabletop roleplaying games: what is the single adventure you got the most use out of and why? In my own case, there's not a clear-cut answer, though I'd probably guess that one of the classic low-level D&D modules like In Search of the Unknown, The Keep on the Borderlands, or The Village of Hommlet probably gets the prize, because they're very easy to just drop into a new campaign as a starting point and flexible enough that I can change their details to suit whatever kind of campaign I want to run.

I'm interested in this question, since adventure modules were once a staple of the hobby. The product lines of games like D&D and Traveller back in the day consisted of a lot of adventures. Today, that seems less common (Pathfinder being a notable exception) and I'm curious as to why that might be. My hope is that, by finding out which adventures people have used repeatedly, I might get an inkling of why adventure modules ceased to be as common as they once were.

OD&D and Science Fantasy

Among the many remarkable things about the revival of interest in old school gaming over the last few years is the revival of interest in the 1974 edition of Dungeons & Dragons. To my mind, that's an amazing thing, given that, when I entered the hobby -- a mere five years after the publication of OD&D -- hardly anyone played it anymore. The older guys talked about, of course, but they didn't play it, at least not that I ever saw. Most of them had "moved on" to AD&D or other games. That's why it'd be many years before I had the chance to peruse those little brown books for myself and see the seeds from which this hobby grew.

If, as lots of gamers have been doing recently, you take a look at OD&D, there are lots of little oddities -- no pun intended -- that you'll notice. One of the most intriguing is the influence science fantasy had over the early game. Gary Gygax's "forward" [sic] to the game specifically puts the Martian stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs on the same footing as Howard's Conan and Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser. I think only Tolkien rivals Burroughs in terms of the number of references in the text to his specific creations (and, of course, those references to Tolkien were eventually eliminated in later printings). Heck, there's a several optional encounter sub-tables that are intended to replicate Barsoom.

I'm not alone in noticing this. In fact, I'd say that one of the biggest fruits of the recent study of OD&D has been a wide embrace of science fantasy as being every bit as influential over the early hobby as fantasy. You need only look around the blogs, forums, and even OSR publishers to see the truth of this. From my own perspective, I'm deeply grateful for this myself, since, as a younger player, I had a very narrow definition of "fantasy" and would have been appalled by OD&D's mention of robots and androids as potential "monsters," never mind Supplement II's full-throated acceptance of alien visitors from another world.

I won't go so far as to say that science fantasy is alien -- there I go inadvertently punning again -- to AD&D, but I do think it's fair to say that OD&D is so loose and open-ended that it's much more amenable to it. AD&D had Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, of course, but I'm not sure that module defines AD&D in the same way that The Temple of the Frog defined OD&D, for good and for bad. One might reasonably argue that AD&D is simply a particular implementation/interpretation of OD&D and, if so, I'd agree. But, being such, it carries with it a lot of assumptions, one of which being that science fantasy elements, if present at all, are deviations from the norm. OD&D has no such assumptions, because it barely has any assumptions at all, leaving it to each referee to decide what "works" or does not for his campaign.

Regardless of whether you agree with that last paragraph or not, I'm very happy to see the return of science fantasy to the fold of "correct" influences on one's D&D campaign. My own campaign has been improved by my own embrace of science fantasy; I know I am not the only one.

Think of the Children

When I was walking my kids to school this morning, my 11 year-old daughter and I were having a rambling conversation about a variety of topics as we so often do and we somehow came to the subject of superheroes. After a short while, she turned to me and asked, "Why don't they make superhero movies that kids can go see in the theaters? All the ones they make are for teenagers and adults." It's a good question and one that's vexed me for a while. A few years ago, my son was a huge Spider-Man fan, but there was no way I could show him any of the live action Spider-Man movies, which were simply too violent and intense for a boy his age in my opinion. The same goes double for the latest Batman movies. I think maybe last summer's Captain America could qualify as appropriate for kids, but, if so, it's a rare exception to a longstanding trend.

It's funny, because, as I remember it, back in the 70s and early 80s, comic books and superhero movies were routinely dismissed by the teenagers I knew as "kid stuff." When I was in high school, I hung out with a lot of nerdy guys -- shocking, I know -- and I don't think any of them was still into comic books at that age. They'd all moved on to computers and wargames and jazz music, leaving their childhood superheroes far behind. I myself was never much of a comic reader anyway, though I always liked the idea of superheroes, which is why I enjoyed my fair share of superhero RPGs over the years. But, as geeky interests go, superheroes were always way, way down the list for me after I reached adolescence.

Nowadays, superheroes are everywhere. They're a staple of our movie theaters and the release of video games based on them is big news. Unlike my own youth, superheroes nowadays seem to be aimed at an older audience. Broadly speaking, I don't have a problem with making superhero comics or movies or games something teenagers and adults can enjoy unironically. How could I? I'm a guy who spends an inordinate amount of time thinking and writing about, never mind playing, games where I pretend to be an elf. Reflecting on my daughter's question, though, I have to wonder why things are so strongly skewed toward the more "mature" -- and I use that word loosely -- end of things these days. Why must every superhero movie be dark and gritty?

Mind you, I could ask the same thing about roleplaying games ...

The Articles of Dragon: "Charting the Classes"

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

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

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

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

A Beautiful Map

Like most gamers, I'm a sucker for maps of almost any kind, but I'm especially fond of attractively-drawn maps of fantasy settings, like this one from the upcoming boxed set for the old school Spanish language RPG, Aventuras en la Marca del Este:

The map really is eye catching and, best of all, suggestive. I'm not fluent in Spanish by any means, but I can read enough to be intrigued by the names of places like The Tundra of the Ancients and the Coast of Bones.

A Poll

One of the many great things about this blog is its large readership, which makes it useful to me when I'm asking for outside opinions on some matter about which I've not yet made up my mind. As the publication of Thousand Suns draws near (at last!), I've been spending some time thinking about a couple of the follow-up books I want to write for it over the next year or so. One of them is a compendium of aliens, both intelligent and otherwise. I want a simple one-word title to follow the line name -- like Thousand Suns: Starships or Thousand Suns: Technology -- but I'm torn, because of the plethora of words used in sci-fi to describe the study of alien lifeforms.

So, I've set up a little poll to the left. If you have any opinion on the matter, take the time to vote for your preferred term. If you have a better term than those I put forward in the poll, feel free to make a comment about it below and let me know what term you prefer and why. Likewise, while I recognize that the three terms in the poll all have slightly different technical meanings, I'm treating them more or less interchangeably for present purposes. On the other hand, if you feel strongly that one or more of those terms is somehow inappropriate, feel free to comment about that, too.

Thanks in advance.

Retrospective: The Traveller Adventure

When I think about the great RPGs of the past, one of the things that immediately comes to my mind are the great adventures released for use with them. If you think carefully about the top rung of old school roleplaying games, in terms of popularity and influence, you'll see that they almost all have an adventure (or several) that stands out as a kind of exemplar of that game and how its designers expected it to be played. D&D has many such iconic adventures, but I think most of us would agree that The Keep on the Borderlands (or perhaps The Village of Hommlet) exemplifies low-level play, while the Giants-Drow modules exemplify high-level play. Likewise, Call of Cthulhu has Masks of Nyarlathotep and RuneQuest has Griffin Mountain.

While GDW's Traveller was blessed with many great adventures over the course of its existence, for me 1983's simply-titled The Traveller Adventure will always stand taller than any of the others. Written by Marc Miller, with assistance from many other GDW staffers and freelancers, The Traveller Adventure isn't a single adventure so much as the skeleton of an entire campaign, with lots of ligaments and musculature provided for the referee as he fleshes it out for use at his own table. Consequently, it's an open-ended, providing a sandbox-like environment in the form of the Aramis subsector of the Spinward Marches. Because of the nature of interstellar travel in Traveller, there are limits to where and how quickly the characters can travel and this provides Miller and his co-writers with the perfect means to drop rumors and hints and that might encourage the PCs to head in certain directions without resorting to more heavy-handed approaches. It's a good compromise between aimless wandering and railroading in my view and one I've often emulated in my own campaigns.

The Traveller Adventure does make a few assumptions at its start. In addition to its location within a backwater subsector, the adventure expects the PCs to be the crew of a subsidized merchant vessel assigned to a particular cluster of worlds all easily reachable by a jump-1 drive. For those unfamiliar with Traveller's conventions, jump-1 drives can travel a single parsec over a week-long journey through jumpspace. At the start of The Traveller Adventure, the PCs are "trapped" within a cluster of worlds all reachable by jump-1 but worlds located farther away (2 parsecs or more) require a ship with a better jump drive. Initially, there's no pressing need to acquire a better drive, but, as the adventure unfolds, that situation changes and the PCs must somehow acquire the funds needed to get a better drive, thereby providing them with a reason to take advantage of certain opportunities that come their way.

The central conflict of The Traveller Adventure concerns the efforts of a high-level megacorporate officer to get rich by illegal means. The PCs inadvertently become thorns in his side when they make the acquaintance of a Vargr (a wolf-like alien species) who himself has run afoul of agents of the same megacorporation. Should the characters help the Vargr -- if they don't, the campaign ends before it begins -- they'll slowly become enmeshed in a conspiracy that spans many worlds of the subsector and involves them in both megacorporate and political maneuverings they never suspected. Along the way, they'll visit many unique planets, interact with dozens of NPCs, and generally explore a small corner of the Third Imperium in great detail.

The Traveller Adventure is not flawless. Often the main thread of the adventure requires that the PCs go in a certain direction to continue and, while Miller and company are to be commended for not forcing particular actions through railroad-y situations, there is a danger that, in the hands of an inexperienced referee, the whole structure could collapse in on itself. On the other hand, The Traveller Adventure is a very fun adventure that rather nicely illustrates what Traveller is all about. The antagonist of the adventure is no black-hatted villain, but rather a venal executive chasing absurd profit and damn the consequences. Certainly innocents will die if his plan succeeds, but that's mere collateral damage rather than his actual goal. Likewise, failure by the PCs doesn't mean the end of the Imperium or anything so grandiose. In short, it's an adventure about people acting like, well, people, even if they live in the 57th century. I like that a lot, which is probably why The Traveller Adventure will always be the quintessential Traveller adventure for me.

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

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

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

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

A Traveller Crew

©1979 Twentieth Century Fox. All Rights Reserved.

For reasons that will become obvious fairly soon, my attention over the last few days has temporarily shifted away from fantasy to science fiction. As I've no doubt stated on this blog ad nauseam, science fiction is actually my preferred genre of literature, cinema, and roleplaying. I write so much about fantasy because I've played so much more of it. Fantasy is the lingua franca of our hobby and always has been. Plus, as a genre, fantasy is so much more expansive than sci-fi, so it can scratch a lot of different itches simultaneously, whereas SF has splintered into dozens of hermetically sealed sub-genres that make it a more difficult sell in the abstract than fantasy.

Whenever I think of science fiction, I inevitably think of Alien, which, despite being a Lovecraftian thriller, is, for me, one of the quintessential science fiction movies of the last quarter of the 20th century. One of the more prosaic reasons I believe this is because I associate the film so strongly with Marc Miller's Traveller RPG. Take a look at that publicity still at the top of this post. I defy anyone to find a group of cinematic characters who look more like they could have been generated using the rules in the 1977 little black books. The bulk of the cast are in their late 30s or older and they all have the looks of people who've been around the block a few times -- and not on heroic adventures in pursuit of a noble cause. Whenever I think of a crew of Traveller PCs, I think of these guys.