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

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

Boot Hill Introduction (Part I)

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

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

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

The introduction continues:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boot Hill Credits

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was time to act.

The Bishop Returns

Another piece of Will McLean's Wizardry artwork featuring the bishop (and the Lord).

Hidden Details

In a comment to my earlier post about level titles beyond Dungeons & Dragons, Tamás Illés pointed out that the later installments of the computer game Wizardry included level titles (as did EverQuest). Not being well versed in the history of the Wizardry, this comment naturally piqued my interest. I spent some time yesterday looking into the matter by seeking out scans of the original manuals online. In doing so, I not only confirmed the truth of the comment – more on that in a future post – but also stumbled across something equally interesting.

I never owned Wizardry myself. When I played it, I did so on a friend's computer after having watched him play it. Consequently, I don't think I ever saw the game's manual or, if I did, I have no recollection of doing so. That's too bad, because the manual contains notable artwork, like this one, depicting the four basic character classes:

Then, there's this illustration, depicting the four elite character classes:

Leaving aside the very odd illustration of the samurai – he looks more like a soldier in Cromwell's New Model Army than a Japanese warrior to me – what immediately caught my eye was the bishop on the far right. He reminded me of this famous illustration from the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide:

I initially assumed that the Wizardry illustration was an allusion or homage to the DMG piece, since it seemed unlikely that the distinct appearance of the bishop's "miter" was an independent creation (unless perhaps they were both referencing a third source). However, the question was very quick resolved when I finally noticed the artist's signature – McLean. This was clearly Will McLean, the very same artist who provided all those humorous little cartoons scattered throughout the Dungeon Masters Guide (though he is erroneously credited in the Wizardry manual as "Will Mclain."

This discovery made me happy, because I've been a fan of Will McLean's cartoons for years. I'll post some additional examples of them in an upcoming post.

Retrospective: Sabre River

Despite my generally negative feelings toward Frank Mentzer's 1983–1986 revision of the Dungeons & Dragons rules, I have a special place in my heart for the Companion Rules. Indeed, I still consider it one of the best things ever produced for any edition of D&D, largely because it made a serious attempt to provide answers to the question of just what characters do when they reach the lofty heights of level 15 and beyond. While the Companion Rules themselves were only partially successful in this regard, TSR also intended to provide additional ideas and guidance for campaigns at this level of play in the form of the CM-series of adventure modules, of which there were ultimately nine.

Of course, as I mentioned in my Retrospective post about one of the modules in this series, this intention wasn't as easy to fulfill as TSR might have wished. Nearly all of the CM modules were flawed in one way or another, especially when it comes to providing a model for campaigns in which many, if not all, of the player characters have risen to rule their own domains. Despite that, many of them nevertheless include clever ideas and interesting concepts that could, if reworked, be useful to the harried Dungeon Master of a Companion-level campaign.

Take, for example, Sabre River, co-written by Douglas Niles and Bruce Nesmith and released in 1984. The module begins with the following:

Have all of your characters settled down and started dominions? Have you wondered if they'll ever get the chance to fight their way through an old-fashioned dungeon again? Yes, they will! 

The premise of Sabre River is that a group of four to six characters of levels 18–22 must venture into the Tower of Terror, a dungeon within a volcano, in order to deal with a curse that's been laid upon the land. The land in question is the domain of either an NPC ruler or – preferably – that of one of the player characters. In this respect at least, Sabre River is already an improvement over its immediate predecessor, Death's Ride, which more or less rejected the very idea that a player character's domain should be subjected to the undead invasion depicted in that module. 

The idea of a dungeon capable of challenging a party of 18th–22nd-level characters is intriguing. In the D&D circles with which I was familiar at the time, it was generally assumed that, as a character achieved double-digit levels, he would find his challenges in domain rulership and all that that entailed, like mass combats, power politics, and faction play. I suspect that explain why I so rarely saw anyone continue to play a D&D character at such exalted levels: the implied style of play wasn't very appealing to most players and indeed seemed to be a break from what Dungeons & Dragons was assumed to be about. What most players of my acquaintance wanted instead was more of the same, albeit at a great degree of challenge and, in principle, that's what Sabre River provided.

The Tower of Terror is indeed challenging. It's populated by powerful and deadly monsters, like a red dragon, elementals of various types, a beholder, and swarms or flocks of lesser creatures. There's also a commensurate level of treasure, some of it truly staggering, like a roomful of gold ingots worth 800,000gp in total. That only makes sense, of course, since high-level characters need huge amounts of experience points to advance and treasure is the surest source of such XP. Still, I was quite shocked to see these numbers as I re-read the module. For me, these astronomical sums have long been an impediment to my enjoyment of a D&D campaign of this level. Others may feel differently, of course.

Sabre River's challenges also include a handful of tricks, traps, and unusual tactical situations intended to test the players' skills in combat. There's also the central mystery of the curse, how it can be lifted, and what the characters must do to achieve that. It's all very serviceable but far from outstanding – certainly nothing on par with adventures like White Plume Mountain or The Ghost Tower of Inverness when it comes to imagination (and frustration). Mostly, Sabre River is about everything being BIG, from monsters (and their hit point totals) to treasures, which is a little disappointing, especially because I know that Doug Niles is a good designer who's penned some enjoyable stuff over the years.

Sabre River is not a terrible module; it simply doesn't stand out as anything special. Its worst sin, in my opinion, is that it doesn't deviate too much from the mediocre track record of the CM-series, almost none of which take full advantage of the new opportunities and vistas that the Companion Rules opened up to player characters of levels 15 to 25. A shame!

Limited Edition

Authentic Dungeon Masters Prefer ...

During the period between 1979 and 1982 when Grenadier Models held the license to produce official Advanced Dungeons & Dragons miniatures, the company ran lots of advertisements in the pages of Dragon magazine and elsewhere. Because they frequently made use of people dressed up in fantasy garb, I've always found them quite memorable (and silly – but in a good kind of way). Here's one I came across from issue #61 (May 1982) while preparing my earlier post from today.

The Articles of Dragon: "Call of Cthulhu is a Challenge"

"Dragon's Augury" was the name given to Dragon magazine's recurring review section. At the time I first encountered it, "Dragon's Augury" had no single, dedicated reviewer. A different contributor reviewed each featured gaming product, though there were often contributors whose names I'd see quite regularly, such as Tony Watson and Ken Rolston. 

Sometimes, though, there'd be a review from a notable figure within TSR, like Gary Gygax, and these naturally caught my attention. A good example of this occurred in issue #61 (May 1982), in which David Cook, author of one of my favorite AD&D modules, wrote a review of the newly released Chaosium RPG, Call of Cthulhu. By the time this review appeared, I already owned a copy and was a great fan of it. Nevertheless, I was very curious to hear what Cook might have to say about it.

Though Cook had a lot of positive things to say about Call of Cthulhu, the overall tenor of his review could probably be called "mixed." After providing a nice overview of both the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the intended playstyle of CoC, he launches into his dissection of the game's flaws. For example, he points out that, while short, Basic Role-Playing, is not very complete, with many ambiguous rules. The same is true of the Call of Cthulhu rulebook itself, which, in addition to ambiguity, includes editorial errors that further contribute to its lack of clarity. In particular, Cook notes that the game's combat system lacks, among other things, "rules for how to deal with cover, movement, surprise, or other situations" that might come up in a fight. 

Cook singles out A Sourcebook for the 1920's as "the weakest part" of the boxed set. Its contents, he believes, appear to be little more than "notes and unfinished design work." He finds the alternate character generation rules – one of my favorite parts of the book – to be "inadequately explained" and a source of confusion. Another bone of contention is the game's lack of rules for generating and handling human NPCs, whom Cook imagines will play important roles in any Lovecraft-inspired adventure. Speaking of which, Cook speaks highly of the sample scenarios included in the rulebook.

The review is fairly lengthy and detailed, but it generally goes on in this direction. I get the impression that Cook, as a fan of Lovecraft, may have had high, or at least very specific, hopes for what Call of Cthulhu should have been like and those hopes were not fully met. Even so, he acknowledges that "when played, it's fun." He does caution that, because of its rules gaps, it demands a lot of the referee. Consequently, Call of Cthulhu "is a good game for experienced role-playing gamers and ambitious judges, especially if they like Lovecraft's type of story." 

As I mentioned, I already owned a copy of Call of Cthulhu by the time I read this review and was slightly baffled by it. My friends and I had been enjoying it without noticing any of the problems Cook pointed out in his review. That's probably because, as young people – I would have been twelve at the time – our grasp of the rules as written was not always the best and so we frequently made things up when we needed to do so. By contrast, Cook was already an accomplished game designer with a lot of experience both as a writer and a player of both wargames and RPGs. This undoubtedly colored the way he wrote his review, something I didn't appreciate at the time.

I also couldn't fathom why Cook had so many critical things to say about the game, despite his admission that he had found Call of Cthulhu fun in play. If he enjoyed the game, I thought, why point out its flaws? For that matter, how had he even noticed them in the first place? I thought about these and other related questions for some time afterward, which is precisely why I still remember this review more than four decades later. David Cook challenged my own assumptions and blind spots. He'd dared to say critical things about a new game my friends and I had enjoyed. In retrospect, I realize I learned a lot from his approach, even if, in 1982, it made little sense to me.