Retrospective: The Spinward Marches

When I think of my "perfect" SF RPG setting, GDW's Third Imperium setting for Traveller almost always comes immediately to mind. There's a good reason for that. Despite the immense amount of detail that it eventually spawned, its core conception -- an interstellar empire so large that authority remains distant, thereby creating the necessity for individual action -- is eminently gameable. Indeed, it's probably the best way to create an interstellar sandbox setting ripe with opportunities for the player characters to seek their fortunes in whatever fashion they see fit.

And it all began modestly in a little 42-page supplement called The Spinward Marches and first published in 1979. (This isn't technically true, as details of the Third Imperium setting had appeared before the release of this supplement, but this was many Traveller players' first introduction to it -- no surprise given that it had over 40,000 copies over 14 print runs) This product describes the 16 subsectors of the Spinward Marches sector, consisting of over 400 worlds, more than half of which are Imperial worlds, the rest being divided amongst the Imperium's main rival, the Zhodani Consulate, various smaller states, and independent worlds.

Each subsector gets a two-page write-up, with one page providing a brief overview of the subsector and a list of its worlds and their game statistics, and another page presenting a map of the subsector and the express boat routes between them. It's an incredibly bare bones approach, leaving lots of room for individual referees to flesh out the Spinward Marches as they see fit, within the bounds of the basic data provided. Of course, Traveller's world descriptions are famously vague, with lots of leeway for individual interpretation of, for example, government types and other similar information. What The Spinward Marches is then is a largely blank canvas on which a referee can paint his own picture. Some elements of that picture have already been drawn in outline, but the specific shades and hues, as well as the fine details, are left entirely up to the referee to decide.

As a gaming product, The Spinward Marches has few peers in the realm of setting design. It's an incredibly open-ended, flexible supplement that can be used in a wide variety of ways. Moreover, it contains so many worlds that one could, quite literally, use it for many years without ever exhausting all of its possibilities. That was certainly true of my old Traveller campaigns, which generally took place over only three or four subsectors -- barely a quarter of its contents. If The Spinward Marches has a flaw, I'm not sure what it is, beyond that fact that several world names get repeated among its 439 planets. Certainly there's not a lot of detail here, but that's by design. Part of the fun for the Traveller referee has always been finding new and devious ways to interpret the alphanumeric world descriptions in ways to make the characters' lives "interesting" (in the Chinese curse sense) and this supplement removes a great amount of the tedium of having to randomly generate those descriptions oneself, since, in 1979, almost no one had a home computer to generate them automatically.

Though I'm no longer as obsessive about Traveller as I once was, I still retain much fondness for the game and products like The Spinward Marches are a big part of why. Its supplements were, by and large, truly optional and intended as aids to creativity rather than replacements for them. Likewise, the default setting of the game was remarkably broad and demanded that it be individualized by each referee in order to be fully usable. I can't help but love that, which probably explains why I'm reflexively skeptical of settings that provide lots of detail. The Spinward Marches proved you didn't need a lot of details to make good use of it -- in fact, it was better that way.

REVIEW: A Trick on the Tain

I'm not, as most of you probably know, a player of Troll Lord Games's Castles & Crusades, but I retain a fondness for it, as it was the vehicle through which I began my return to old school gaming back in 2007. My issues with C&C, though, haven't blinded me to the fact that there have been a number of excellent adventures and support products published for it, most of which are easily translatable to other old school rules systems.

A good case in point is Keith Hackwood's adventure, A Trick on the Tain, released by Brave Halfling Publishing. Retailing for $9.95 in print, this module is 22 pages in length and includes art by Andy Taylor. It's a wilderness-based adventure written for 4-6 characters of levels 1-3 (a Challenge Level of 1-5 for those familiar with C&C's jargon), which I think makes it unusual. Most wilderness adventures are geared toward much higher-level characters, including Jim Raggi's Weird New World (which I'll review shortly). The practice of treating adventures of this sort as primarily the domain of higher-level PCs goes back to at least the days of the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition of D&D, but I don't think it was ever intended to have been treated as firm a "rule" as it has been over the years.

I was naturally well disposed to like A Trick on the Tain before I'd even had a chance to read it, as I don't think low-level characters should be dissuaded from undertaking wilderness adventures, even if they do tend to be potentially more risky than dungeon adventures. This module takes place in a northern tundra known as the Tain, a sparsely settled region that's home to two human kingdoms, slowly declining Rigerland and brutal Doggerland. Also present in the Tain are the nomadic, tribal Shum people. I can't say that I am too fond of the naming conventions adopted in this module. They're certainly not the worst I've ever seen, but they seemed both uninspired and likely to elicit chuckles at the gaming table. That's not a substantive criticism by any means, but I do think it might hamper some gamers from taking the module seriously and that'd be a shame, because it's a good one.

Though there is an overarching frame for the entire module, A Trick on the Tain is, in most respects, a location-based adventure that provides the referee with a map of the Tain region, random encounters, keyed locales, new monsters and magic items, as well as rules for cold weather effects. Taken together, it's a solid collection of ideas, some of them quite clever (such as the magical chaos arrow whose effects are random). There's nothing revolutionary about A Trick on the Tain; no one is going to be blown away by anything within its pages. It is, however, well written and engaging and, as I noted earlier, unusual in being a wilderness adventure aimed at low-level parties, thus making it helpful to referees interested in that sort of adventure for their campaigns.

It's also a good example of the old school design philosophy, leaving many aspects of the adventure open to referee interpretation rather than providing a definitive answer to every question that's likely to arise. I appreciate that and think it only adds to the module's utility, although some will no doubt disagree, expecting a published module to be completely self-explanatory. Consequently, I don't think A Trick on the Tain will have wide appeal, even to those who play Castles & Crusades. That shouldn't be seen a a knock against the module; if anything, it means that its author had a clear idea how he wanted to present this adventure and he followed it through. That's exactly what I'd like to see more of from old school products.

Presentation: 7 out of 10
Creativity: 7 out of 10
Utility: 5 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a low-level location-based wilderness adventure and don't mind doing a little work to flesh out the details.
Don't Buy This If: You don't like wilderness adventures or would rather that adventure modules come completely ready-to-play.

Too Many Monsters

One of the things that might have become apparent in reading my Dwimmermount posts is that, in any given session, there are comparatively few combats and indeed many sessions have no combats in them whatsoever. This isn't because I dislike combat or think that combat is somehow antithetical to playing D&D. Rather, it's a necessary consequence of Volume 3 of OD&D's monster distribution rules, which I've used when creating the dungeon. According to those rules, on average two-thirds of all dungeon rooms will be empty of any kind of monsters. Now, those "empty" rooms may contain treasure, tricks, traps, puzzles, or clues, but they won't (generally) have anything the characters can fight.

Over the last year and a half, I've found that this approach has had several salutary effects on the campaign. First, with fewer monsters to fight, there is less XP to be distributed, and thus character advancement is slow. As my players will tell you, it's not uncommon to go several sessions over which the characters gain no experience points. They may gain knowledge and insights, however, which is often far more valuable. Second, the focus of adventuring shifts to exploration, with combat being the spice that keeps such exploration interesting. Finally, the dungeon feels more "mysterious" -- more like an abandoned ruin than a shopping mall, which is exactly the kind of feeling I wish to evoke.

When I was younger, I don't think I ever paid much attention to the dungeon stocking rules in Moldvay, as I already "knew" how to stock a dungeon by looking to published modules as guides. The problem, unfortunately, is that a lot of published modules have more monsters than they ought to by OD&D standards. That's not to say there aren't occasions when having more than one-third of a complex's rooms be occupied isn't warranted -- a fortress, for example -- but dungeons, in the sense of being a "huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses," ought to have far fewer monsters than empty rooms, at least that's the conclusion to which I've come after creating and using Dwimmermount all this time.

(And FWIW, I have issues with Moldvay's dungeon stocking rules anyway but that's a topic for another post)

The Prehistory of Call of Cthulhu

It's pretty well known, I think, that Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis's roleplaying masterpiece, Call of Cthulhu, was in fact the second Lovecraftian RPG Chaosium attempted but the first one to be completed and actually published. If you read articles or interviews with Petersen or Willis, you'll see oblique references to this unpublished earlier game. For example, in the February 1982 issue of Different Worlds, Petersen tells the tale of how he approached Chaosium about producing a Lovecraft-based RPG:

A year and a half ago, I wrote to Chaosium, offering my services in writing up a RuneQuest variant based on a fantasy world derivative of H.P. Lovecraft's dreamlands cycle, as best exemplified by the short novel, The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. Greg Stafford replied that they were working on a variant game called Dark Worlds which was to cover H.P. Lovecraft's novels in a modern sense.

In the same issue, Lynn Willis adds some additional details:

Originally, Call of Cthulhu was not about Cthulhu at all ... Nor was Sandy Petersen the designer. The springboard for Cthulhu was a proposal from a free-lance designer about a gothic fantasy role-playing game, and he wanted some incidental use of Lovecraft's descriptions. His proposal was interesting. I negotiated the rights for the Cthulhu mythos from Arkham House, but after many months delay the manuscript of the game was unsatisfactory, and had to be (with bad feelings and confusion) turned down.

Thanks to Victor Raymond, who kindly sent me a large collection of old Judges Guild materials, I uncovered another piece of Call of Cthulhu's prehistory. In the May/June 1980 issue of The Dungeoneer, there's an extensive interview with Greg Stafford, where he talks about "a new introductory role-playing system based on the works of H.P. Lovecraft." Since the Different Worlds quotes above are from 1982 and Sandy Petersen notes that he'd contacted Chaosium "a year and a half ago," one can assume that what Stafford says in The Dungeoneer refers to the earlier version of the game-that-became-Call of Cthulhu.

Anyway, here's what Stafford says:

It's called Dark Shadows. It's being authored by Kurt Lortz and we'll have the usual amount of Chaosium support material to add local flavor so that the game will be easier for the Judge and the players to get into. By local flavor I mean that it will include items such as timetables for getting around the world in the late 19th century (which is where much of the Lovecraft material takes place). Like most Chaosium books, we want to make it entertaining to read or browse.

So, the game originally had a different title than the Dark Worlds Petersen specifies and its original designer was Kurt Lortz, brother of Steve Lortz, whom I believe is the same Steve Lortz who was a player in Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign, though it's possible he's a different person entirely. In any event, it's fascinating to consider that Call of Cthulhu began its existence as a Gothic fantasy RPG set in the 19th century rather than as a straightforward evocation of Lovecraft's cosmic horror.

Dwimmermount, Session 48

When last we left Fortune's Fools, they were puzzling out the meaning of a magical device that seemed to hold the key to their passage forward. The device in question was a metallic skull placed on a pillar inside of whose open mouth they found a large sapphire. The sapphire radiated magic under a detect magic spell, but was otherwise an ordinary, if extremely valuable, gem. Gaztea, Brother Candor's henchmen and an accomplished fence, guessed that it might be worth close to 10,000 gp to the right seller and she practically begged the party to take it with them back to Admas to sell, figuring they could find another way into the House of Portals level of the dungeon. Neither Brother Candor nor Dordagdonar thought much of this plan, unfortunately for her. The only way out of the room with the skull was a large metal door that had no handle or knob and would not budge under normal attempts to do so. It too radiated magic but it was immune to knock.

I should note here that this room and the ones immediately before it were lifted in outline from Michael Curtis's excellent Stonhell Dungeon, which has been the source of some inspiration for me as I've fleshed out Dwimmermount. Because of my rather seat-of-the-pants style of refereeing, I often scramble to keep just ahead of the players in terms of populating the dungeon. When ideas of mine just aren't flowing as quickly as they need to, I unashamedly swipe good stuff from various sources, like Stonhell, Castle of the Mad Archmage, The Darkness Beneath, and other similarly sprawling megadungeons. This is actually useful in many respects, because it helps make Dwimmermount feel weirder and less predictable, as, like all referees, have tend to have standard approaches that I might otherwise overuse if I didn't borrow elements from other sources. Call me lazy, if you will, but I've found this approach both minimizes my prep time and keeps the campaign fresh.

In any case, the pedestal on which the skull sat was inscribed with magical runes that read, under read magic, "The soul is the font of all great Art." Now, the characters immediately surmised that "Art" in this instance refereed to magic, which is why Brother Candor assumed that the gem was some kind of magic jar or similar device. What neither he nor anyone else in the party could decide was whether the gem already contained a soul that needed to be released from it in order to remove the power from the device that kept the door closed or if the gem needed a soul to inhabit it in order to power the device that opened the door. In the end, the characters came to two possible avenues of approach: somehow destroy the gem or somehow place someone's soul within the gem. The problem was that the former approach, if incorrect, would bar their way forward on a presumably permanent basis, so they did not want to use until they'd exhausted other possibilities.

Puzzling out the gem and the ramifications of various approaches took up a very large part of the session (as did non-game-related side discussions, but that's another matter). I was actually surprised by how much time was taken up by this, but, in retrospect, I shouldn't have been, as the clues I presented were limited and ambiguous and I'd contrived to put the party in a situation in which certain avenues of investigation, while potentially correct, could also be sufficiently disastrously long that they were reluctant to try them. I don't regret doing this, though I doubt I'll do it again anytime soon, as it slowed down further exploration of the dungeon more than I wanted it to do.

Eventually, Dordgadonar concluded that, if the gem were a receptacle for a soul, then perhaps someone could cast magic jar on themselves, inhabit the gem, thereby powering it and opening the door, and the rest of the party could move forward, presumably finding some way to get the trapped soul back into the caster's body. Since he didn't know anything specific about the mechanics of soul jar, it being a couple of levels higher than his highest level spells, he suggested that the party travel to Yethlyreom to seek out more detailed information. The party could have done this in Adamas, but they reckoned it had the potential to create trouble, especially if anyone in the churches of Typhon or Tyche found out that they were messing with such dark magic.

The party booked passage on a riverboat and made their way to Yethlyreom. The City of the Necromancers, you might recall, bans the entrance of all clerics, both out of philosophical disdain for the gods and because the potential havoc a cleric's turning ability could wreak among the city's main undead. So, Brother Candor opted to disguise himself before entering Yethlyreom rather than waiting outside the city's skeleton and zombie-guarded walls. Once inside, they took in the sights, finding that, if you ignore the fact that there were a lot of mindless undead and their human handlers wandering about the city, doing menial tasks, it wasn't that much different a place than Adamas. Yethlyreom is a bit less labyrinthine in its layout, meaning that it was actually less gloomy than Adams, though, again, the presence of so many undead tended to detract from this fact.

The eventually learned that the best place to find the information they sought was at the shop of a necromancer named Callett, who specialized in such things. They entered his large place of business, which was packed with weird and disgusting merchandise, and were immediately met by a young apprentice who welcomed them and asked what they sought. Dordagdonar rather straightfacedly admitted that they sought some information about the workings of the magic jar spell, as well as potentially of a scroll of the same. The apprentice explained that magic jar was "a very popular spell" in Yethlyreom and he was sure they had several such scrolls in stock, though the price would be high -- 1500 gold pieces.

Dordagdonar wasn't put off by the price, as he had in fact assumed the price would be higher. He did want to know a few more answers about its working, such as its range and if the caster whose soul was now in the magic jar could cease its operations at will. When he learned that the spell had a sizable range and that the caster could in fact choose to end its effects whenever he wished, he was satisfied that this was indeed the spell he needed. The apprentice then asked a few questions of the party, such as where they came from and what they intended to do with the spell. They were as truthful as they could be, but nevertheless guarded, since they didn't want to alert anyone else to where they were exploring.

This coyness led to their being asked to speak with Callett himself before the scroll could be sold to them. Callett was a distinguished older gentleman who spoke with a commanding but un-sinister voice quite different than what they'd expected based on his occupation. His questions mostly echoed those of his apprentice, but he also tried harder to get the PCs to admit just what they were doing and why, "out of professional curiosity, you understand." When they stayed tight-lipped, he simply smiled and sent them on their way. Dordagdonar purchased the scroll and, in the process, discovered that Callett's shop had most of the supplies he needed to complete his flesh golem, except the cadavers, which, by law, cannot be sold in Yethlyreom, all corpses becoming property of the city's ruling council for animation into undead servitors.

Scroll in hand, the party took the riverboat back to Adamas and then journeyed to Muntburg and thence to Dwimmermount. Finding their way back to the room with the skull, Dordagdonar cast magic jar from the scroll, placed his soul inside it the gem, and, as expected, the door opened. However, there was no evidence of a handle or knob on the other side of the now-open door, so Brother Candor expected that the door was one-way. Beyond the door was another circular room in which there was an empty archway that reminded him of other portals they'd seen in Dwimmermount and no other exits, suggesting that this was indeed the entrance to the House of Portals they sought.

After briefly considering other options, all of the party moved into the newly-opened room, bringing Dordagdonar's lifeless body with them. Sensing this, Dordagdonar released the spell, his soul snapping back to his body and, as expected, the door closing behind them, preventing their return back the way they came. Reading the runes inscribed on the portal, the revived Dordagdonar realized the spell required both a fireball and lightning bolt cast in quick succession in order to power it. Doing so, the portal sprang to life and the Fortune's Fools prepared to pass through into whatever lay beyond.

All things considered, a fun session. I was happy to have the opportunity to describe a little more of the world outside of Dwimmermount and lay the groundwork for future developments. I was also pleased with the players' ingenuity in figuring out a course of action, especially given that the inspiration for the skull and sapphire works very differently than the way it worked when dropped into Dwimmermount. I borrow shamelessly from other sources, but it's rare that anything I borrow makes the transition into my game without lots of changes. I may be lazy, but I'm not that lazy.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Armageddon 2419 A.D.

Some will no doubt quibble over my inclusion of Philip Nowlan's 1928 novella, first published in the August issue of Amazing Stories, in this series as a pulp fantasy. To that, I can only say that I use "fantasy" in the broadest possible sense, so that any story that includes characters, locations, or situations that are fanciful or imaginative would qualify. Moreover, I suspect that, 82 years later, this first appearance of the character who'd later be immortalized as Buck Rogers -- he's called Anthony Rogers in this novella -- looks to be more fantasy than science fiction to contemporary eyes and with some justification. After all, Captain Rogers is a Great War veteran "whose normal span of life has been spread over a period of 573 years," the bulk of which he

spent in a state of suspended animation free from the ravages of catabolic processes, and without any apparent effect on [his] physical of mental faculties.

While a superb dramatic device for transporting a then-modern man into the 25th century, one can hardly call the idea of radioactive gas-induced hibernation "science."

Told in the first person, "Armageddon 2419 A.D." relates the story of Rogers's adventures after he awakens nearly 500 years in the future.

I awoke to find the America I knew a total wreck -- to find Americans a hunted race in their own land, hiding in the dense forests that covered the shattered and leveled ruins of their once magnificent cities, desperately preserving, and struggling to develop in their secret retreats, the remnants of their culture and science -- and their independence.

America, and indeed the whole world, has fallen under the domination of the Han Airlords, "Mongolians" from China whose technological superiority over the rest of humanity had made them the undisputed masters of the Earth -- or almost so. For not long after Rogers awakens, he encounters a group of "wild" Americans, including the beautiful young air pilot Wilma Deering, who lived

in anticipation of that "Day of Hope" to which ... [they] had been looking forward for generations, when they would be strong enough to burst from the green chrysalis of the forests, soar into the upper air lanes and destroy the Hans.

Using his experience as a soldier in the Great War, Rogers turns a gang of wild Americans into a potent fighting force and strikes a blow against both the Hans operating out of Nu-Yok City and a traitorous American gang that has sided with the invaders, thereby laying the groundwork for both the novella's sequel (published the following year) and the comic strip (also begun in 1929), the latter of which established one of the most enduring and influential fictional characters of the 20th century, spawning many imitators, including the equally famous Flash Gordon.

Like a lot of pulp fantasies, "Armageddon 2419 A.D." will likely be judged by some to be a relic unsuitable for contemporary readers, both in terms of its science and its cultural attitudes. Wilma Deering, though a capable pilot in her own right, nevertheless comes across as primarily a pretty ornament for Rogers to win. Likewise, the Han, though technological superior to the Americans and advanced in many other ways, are clearly "Yellow peril" enemies lacking the nuances found in other Asian villains like Dr. Fu Manchu.

Yet, there's no denying there's something powerfully primal in this story, something compelling even eight decades after its original publication. Anthony Rogers is an excellent stand-in for the reader, a man out of time who must learn about the strange world of the future even as we do in reading his account of his adventures. He is like many other pulp fantasy heroes in this respect and Nowlan's writing is quite deft in places. The future he describes may not be plausible, but it's certainly interesting and it serves as a great backdrop for a swashbuckling tale of derring-do. If you're at all curious about the origins of many of the tropes and elements of 20th century science fiction, you could do worse than reading "Armageddon 2419 A.D."

The Traveller Philosophy

It's been remarked before -- and not without reason -- that Traveller's little black books mimic the little brown books of OD&D in many ways. In the course of re-reading thes other LBBs while away, I noticed that Book 3, Worlds and Adventure, concludes with a section reminiscent of the famed "Fight On!" conclusion to OD&D. It reads:

Traveller is necessarily a framework, describing the barest of essentials for an infinite universe. A group involved in playing a scenario or a campaign can make their adventures more elaborate, more detailed, more interesting with the input of a great deal of imagination.

The greatest burden, of course, falls on the referee, who must create entire worlds and societies through which the player-characters will roam. One very interesting source of assistance for this task is the existing science fiction literature. Virtually anything mentioned in a story or an article can be transferred to the Traveller environment. Orbital cities, nuclear war, alien societies, puzzles, enigmas, anything can occur, with imagination being the only limit.

The players themselves have a burden almost equal to that of the referee; they must move, act, travel, in search of their own goals. The typical methods used in life by 20th century Terrans (thrift, dedication, hard-work) do not work in Traveller; instead travellers must boldly plan and execute daring schemes for the acquisition of wealth and power. Again, the modern science fiction tradition provides many ideas and concepts to be imitated.

Above all, the referee and the players work together. Care must be taken that the referee does not simply lay fortune in the path of the players, but the situation is not primarily an adversary relationship. The referee simply administers rules in situations where the players themselves have an incomplete understanding of the universe. The results should reflect a consistent reality.

Congratulations on your entrance into the universe of Traveller!

There's lots to comment upon there, but two things stand out to me. First, Traveller, like D&D, owes its primary inspirations to literary sources. Second, Traveller assumes that what we nowadays call sandbox play is integral to the success of a campaign.

I mention these points in part because I've begun to realize how much of how I view old school gaming is rooted as much in Traveller as in D&D. Indeed, I suspect, if I were honest about it, I'd probably find that the gaming philosophies implicit in Traveller eclipse those of D&D in terms of their influence on me. D&D may have been my "first love," but Traveller was my "true love" and, even though I don't play it anymore, it's hard to deny the permanent effect that masterpiece of game design has had on me.

Back from the Beach

I'm home again and digging my way through several hundred emails, comments, and other communications. Good to see that the world didn't slow down while I was away. Fortunately, the last few days did afford me the chance to catch up on some reading.

Posts will resume once I've caught up on everything that needs more immediate attention.

Open Friday: Superstitions

This being Friday the 13th, I thought I'd ask about superstitions and taboos in your campaign settings. Do you have them and, if so, do they have any consequences for being flouted?

In my old AD&D games, I took seriously the implications of the Monster Manual and Dungeon Masters Guide about attracting the attention of demons and devils by speaking their names aloud and so the players quickly learned never to refer to them by name (which is why I was intrigued by this old urban legend). In other games, such my old Traveller campaign, ignoring a taboo resulted in negative reactions among the locals (such as dressing in a "mourning color" on one planet).

Did anyone else ever do stuff like this in their campaigns?

Mini-Vacation

I'm away from home till sometime late on Saturday and likely won't have Net access while I'm gone, so there'll be no new posts (except tomorrow's Open Friday one), comments, or emails until I get back.

Have fun, everyone!