Serious Fun: An Ode to GDW's RPGs

As I've said innumerable times since I started this blog, I was never a wargamer.

I didn’t have shelves stocked with hex maps or spend my weekends calculating armor penetration on the Eastern Front. I wasn’t part of that sacred brotherhood that spoke in acronyms and argued over the effective range of a Panther’s 75mm gun. Yet somehow, whether by accident or by fate, I fell in love with a company born from that world: Game Designers’ Workshop, better known as GDW.

GDW got its start in 1973 as a publisher of serious, detail-oriented, historical wargames. While I didn’t know almost any of this when I first encountered their roleplaying games, I nevertheless felt it. Even as a teenager, I could tell there was something different about the games GDW made. Where TSR gave us magic missiles and gelatinous cubes, GDW gave us vector movement, speculative trade tables, and the quiet horror of running out of fuel in central Poland.

Like a lot of roleplayers, Traveller was the game that first introduced me to GDW. I came across it several years after playing Dungeons & Dragons, and the contrast was immediate. Traveller didn’t just offer you a character; it offered you a life. Character generation gave you a person with a backstory in the form of a career and an odd collection of skills and equipment. Of course, if your rolls were unlucky, all you got was an early grave before the campaign even began. This was the kind of game where you might end up as a grizzled ex-Merchant with a gambling habit and no pension instead of a mighty-thewed barbarian.

Traveller’s vision of the far future wasn’t shiny or triumphant. It was bureaucratic, complicated, and often rather gray. There was something fascinating about how it treated space travel not as an exciting novelty but as a job, equal parts dangerous, expensive, and frequently boring. It was, I later realized, a very wargamer approach to science fiction: not about wish fulfillment, but about systems, trade-offs, and consequences. Even though I’d never played Drang Nach Osten! or Pearl Harbor, I could still intuit that GDW’s RPGs were built by people who thought about conflict, logistics, and uncertainty in a fundamentally different way.

That sensibility was especially evident in Twilight: 2000. T2K was a game that asked, “What if the Cold War ended in fire and now you’re out of gas in a broken-down Humvee, trying to negotiate with a Polish farmer for potatoes?” It was bleak, but it was real. Every decision mattered. Ammo wasn’t just an abstraction; it was the difference between life and death. Characters had to eat, find shelter, manage morale. There were no magical solutions, just the grim satisfaction of surviving one more day.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think Twilight: 2000 taught me something about roleplaying that's stuck with me to this day: adventure doesn’t have to come from epic quests. Sometimes, it comes from the struggle to get by in the face of all sorts of obstacles, both big and small. Fixing a broken axle under sniper fire, bartering for antibiotics with a suspicious local, or just figuring out where the next meal is coming from. That was the adventure.

Later, I picked up Traveller: 2300 (later rebranded 2300 AD), which built on the ashes of Twilight: 2000's world to envision a future shaped not by utopian ideals, but by historical inertia. Nations rebuilt and space was colonized by corporations and governments with agendas rather than by high-minded dreamers. It wasn’t heroic, but it was plausible. It had an internal consistency that made it feel like a real place, even if that place was cold, indifferent, and occasionally French.

Then there was Space: 1889, GDW’s pioneering foray into what we'd now call "steampunk," complete with ether flyers, Martians, and an entire solar system shaped by European colonialism. Space: 1889 had a slightly lighter tone than its siblings, but it nevertheless bore the hallmark GDW seriousness. There was surprisingly detailed setting material, a respect for history, and a commitment to internal consistency that made its outlandish premise feel oddly plausible. Even in a world where Queen Victoria reigns over Venusian swamps, GDW still asked you to think like a colonial officer, an inventor, or an explorer navigating the realpolitik of empire.

Finally, there was Dark Conspiracy, a game that asked what would happen if you took the economic anxiety of the late '80s, mixed in extra-dimensional horror, and then handed the whole mess to a security contractor. As I mentioned in my recent Retrospective, Dark Conspiracy failed to live up to its full potential, but even so, it was strangely compelling. Beneath the neon-soaked dystopia and monstrous invaders, you could still feel GDW’s trademark seriousness at work: the emphasis on gear, tactics, and systems that made survival feel earned rather than assumed.

What bound all these games together wasn’t genre; it was approach. GDW brought a wargamer’s eye to RPGs. They cared about detail, about systems that worked even when they weren’t elegant (though I continue to maintain that Traveller is one of the most mechanically elegant roleplaying games ever designed). GDW wasn't afraid to make things difficult or even bleak, because they believed that challenge and immersion went hand in hand. As a player and a referee, I must confess that I didn’t always understand every rule. I sometimes made do with what I thought they meant, but I nevertheless respected the intent. GDW’s RPGs weren’t about wish fulfillment. They assumed you were already smart enough to navigate their worlds and tough enough to handle the consequences. 

As someone who entered the hobby on the more fantastical side represented by D&D and Gamma World, that was both refreshing and bracing. GDW showed me that roleplaying could be serious, by which I don't mean dour, but serious in the best possible way. Roleplaying games could provoke you to think, to plan, and to inhabit a world that didn’t care about your character sheet unless you used it wisely.

So, as I said at the beginning of this post, I was never a wargamer, but I was – and remain – a GDW fanboy. Their RPGs showed me a different way to play, a way shaped by history, consequence, and thought. Almost thirty years after the demise of the company, that kind of grounded imagination still feels like something worth celebrating, hence today's ode to the amazing roleplaying games of Game Designers' Workshop. What an incredible company, what an incredible library of games.

Retrospective: Merc: 2000

The last six months of 1989 marked the beginning of the end of Communism in Eastern Europe and, with it, the Cold War. Between June, when Solidarity won Poland's first semi-free elections in decades and the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu in late December – not to mention the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9 – the world that had existed since 1945 unraveled in real time. These momentous events ushered in what U.S. president George H.W. Bush optimistically dubbed the “new world order.” For a time, many breathed a sigh of relief.

At Game Designers’ Workshop in Bloomington, Illinois, though, the end of the Cold War created a creative dilemma. Their military RPG Twilight: 2000 was built on a dark, alternate history premise: détente had failed, nuclear war had erupted, and civilization lay in ruins. Now that reality had taken a different path, that premise was suddenly obsolete. Line developer Loren Wiseman didn’t throw in the towel but instead adapted.

Merc: 2000, released in 1990, was his answer.

Rather than pivot away from military adventure, Merc: 2000 reimagined a world where the Cold War ends more or less peacefully, as it had in reality, but the peace is shallow. The Soviet Union lingers in a diminished state, the Third World seethes with brushfire wars, and the major powers, unwilling to commit their own troops, outsource dirty work to deniable assets. Enter the player characters as mercenaries for hire, plying their trade in a world where “peace” is just another illusion and every war is someone's business opportunity.

In hindsight, Merc: 2000 reads as much as a nervous exhalation from a culture suddenly unsure of who the enemy is as a RPG supplement. To varying degrees, it captures the jittery uncertainty of the early ’90s, when ideology faded but the machinery of conflict kept humming. If Twilight: 2000 was a fever dream of what might have been, Merc: 2000 was a grim-eyed projection of what was coming.

And it wasn’t wrong.

The setting anticipates the rise of private military contractors, the shadow wars of the post-9/11 era, and the morally murky interventions of the ’90s, such as Somalia, the Balkans, and the Persian Gulf, among too many others. It imagines a world of porous borders, covert missions, and soldiers who work for paychecks, not flags. Its tone of weary professionalism, competence without cause, sets it apart from the more operatic tone of Twilight: 2000. In some ways, I'd go so far as to say it's aged better.

That said, Merc: 2000 isn't a standalone game. It builds directly on Twilight: 2000's second edition, also released in 1990, and inherits both its strengths and its spiky complexity: crunchy mechanics, detailed equipment lists, and an emphasis on logistics, firearms, and realism. If you liked T2K’s obsessive attention to detail, you’ll find plenty to enjoy here. If not, Merc probably won’t change your mind.

What distinguishes it is scope. Where Twilight: 2000 offered survival in a wrecked Europe (and, later, America), Merc: 2000 gives you the world. Campaigns can explore corporate espionage, peacekeeping gone wrong, proxy wars, failed states, and morally ambiguous black ops. It opens the door to adventures that blend military action with politics, ideology, and personal cost, offering a sandbox of plausible deniability and ethical compromise.

From today’s perspective, what stands out most is how little Merc: 2000 glamorizes its subject. There are no grand causes, just contracts. No crusades, only jobs. In that, it feels oddly prophetic. It foresaw a world where war became a business and soldiers became freelancers in the global gig economy of violence.

Unlike Twilight: 2000, which I played quite a bit, I never had the chance to run Merc: 2000 back in the day. By the time it came out, I’d already drifted away from T2K, thinking the real world had outpaced it. Ironically, as my Barrett’s Raiders campaign heads back to the USA, I realize how much of Merc: 2000 has seeped into my imagination after all, particularly in the types of missions, the tone, and the sense of purpose frayed by compromise that now animate that campaign. 

Thirty-five years on, I think more highly of Merc: 2000 than I probably did upon its publication, not because, like Twilight: 2000, it depicted a world that never was, but rather because it depicted one we hadn’t yet admitted we were already living in.

The Articles of Dragon: "New Denizens of Devildom"

I'm sure it'll come as no surprise that issue #75 of Dragon (July 1983) is among my favorites, one I both remember very well (and for which I, therefore, have a great deal of nostalgia) and one whose content was of very high quality. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that the run of issues between, say, issue #65 (September 1982) and issue #100 (August 1985) may well have been the magazine's best ever. I'm biased, of course, since this run not coincidentally coincides with when I subscribed to Dragon, but I really do think that, from a reasonably objective perspective, that three-year period was exceptional, filled with some of the most interesting and inspiring articles ever to grace Dragon's pages.

Issue #75 is probably best remembered for the first part of Ed Greenwood's superb treatment of the Nine Hells and rightly so. What people sometimes forget is that the issue also included a partial preview of the upcoming Monster Manual II in Gary Gygax's regular "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column. In fact, I believe it was precisely because of the planned appearance of this preview that Greenwood was given the go-ahead – with Gygax's blessing – to develop the Nine Hells as an adventuring locale suitable for use with AD&D. 

Over the course of six pages, Gygax provides game statistics for a plethora of new devils, both generic and specific. The generic ones are notable, in that they run the gamut of hit dice, from the 3 HD spined devils to 8 HD black abishai. While AD&D had always included weaker devils and demons as opponents, I know that, as a younger person, I appreciated the addition of more at the lower end of the diabolic spectrum. Devils, as envisaged by Gygax, have always been compelling enemies to me, but they were mostly the enemies for higher-level characters, given their hit dice and powers. By including more options at the low end, Gygax made it easier for me to use them with a wider range of character levels.

Of course, the true stars of this article (and the Monster Manual II) were the specific, named devils, including several new archdevils. This pleased me greatly back in the day. The original Monster Manual was the very first AD&D book I ever owned. I bought it at a Sears catalog store in early 1980, using money I'd got for Christmas and I spent an inordinate amount of time poring over its pages. One of the things that I soon noticed was that Gygax hadn't provided entries for all the archdevils ruling over Hell's nine planes. Who ruled over the third and fourth layers? And what about the eighth, the one closest to the domain of Asmodeus? This article finally answered some of these questions.

Beyond new archdevils, "New Denizens of Devildom" also gave us "dukes of hell" – singular named devils with unique statistics that were beneath the arch-devils in both authority and power. That last part was especially important, because it meant that there was now space for powerful, named devil opponents who weren't as potent as the rulers of Hell's layers. This was a terrific boon to me and my campaign, though my players back then might have disagreed! Another great aspect of these additions was that they could be defeated and even slain by player characters without worrying about how this might upset the cosmic balance of the Outer Planes.

This is one of those articles that is probably hard to appreciate decades after its initial publication. Nowadays, almost nothing within its six pages is all that notable, its information having long since passed into general Dungeons & Dragons lore. But, during the summer of 1983, several months before the Monster Manual II would be available for purchase, an article like this captivated me immensely. I was seized by the possibilities it presented and the directions it suggested Gygax was planning to take AD&D in future. Consequently, it remains an affectionate favorite of mine, even if it's unlikely to make most people's Top 10 – or Top 50! – lists of Dragon's greatest articles. 

Esoterica

My apologies to anyone not particularly interested in the Tékumel setting, which is the backdrop for my long-running House of Worms campaign. As this campaign races toward its conclusion after more than a decade of play, the stakes are rising. The characters are now uncovering some of the setting’s deeper mysteries—those that are either well hidden or not addressed at all in published materials. Fortunately, I’m both deeply familiar with Tékumel’s arcana and quite willing to deviate from it when doing so enhances the fun. That’s why I’m hopeful that the campaign’s final denouement will be a satisfying one.

In my most recent campaign update, I referenced several elements that may not be immediately clear or that deserve further explanation. Let’s begin with the Tsolyáni conception of the soul, which is largely inherited from the earlier Engsvanyáli civilization. According to this worldview, the soul is composed of five distinct parts:

1. Bákte: the physical body, which is born, lives, grows, dies, and returns to dust.
2. Chusétl: the "shadow self," the sleeping counterpart of the waking person, which exists in dreams.
3. Hlákme: the conscious mind, encompassing both intellect and ego: the “I-ness” of a person.
4. Pedhétl: the bundle of raw instincts, lusts, fears, and desires, as well as the source of psychic power.
5. Báletl: the spirit-soul, which travels after death to the Isles of the Excellent Dead before eventually being reborn.

Different gods and religious sects in Tsolyánu emphasize certain aspects of the soul over others. In the case of the Temple of Sárku, the Change deity of death, only the body and the intellect truly matter. Everything else is considered irrelevant. For Sárku’s worshipers, the intellect (or ego) is the essence of individuality, that which separates one person from another. Normally, this aspect ceases to exist upon death. The only part of the soul that survives is the Báletl, the spirit-soul, which is not truly individuated and is eventually reborn in someone else, without any memory of its previous existence. To a devotee of Sárku, this outcome is abhorrent. Thus, they embrace a sorcerous union of the body and intellect after death by becoming undead.

This is what makes Prince Dhich’uné’s plan, as described in the linked update, comprehensible. He seeks to ascend the Petal Throne, become emperor, and then offer his spirit-soul as a sacrifice to the pariah deity known as the One Other, because he sees no value in that part of his soul. Instead, he intends to preserve his body and mind as an undying emperor. This “exquisite gift” to the One Other, he believes, will secure for Tsolyánu a state of perpetual stability, allowing it to avoid the fate of all previous empires, including the ever-glorious Engsvanyáli Imperium.

Why does he believe this? Dhich’uné claims to have uncovered a dark secret: that the founder of the Tsolyáni Empire was a cultist of the One Other. The name of the first emperor is unrecorded; he is known only as “the Tlakotáni.” This name eventually became the clan name of the imperial line. However, anyone familiar with Engsvanyáli, the language from which Tsolyáni descends, knows that tlakotané means “brother,” but not in the familial sense. Rather, it denotes brotherhood in a priesthood or secret society. So, to which secret society did the first emperor belong? According to Dhich’uné: a cult of the One Other.

What evidence Dhich’uné has for this claim is not yet clear. However, the mystery surrounding the identity and nature of the first emperor is certainly suggestive. Moreover, although the worship of the One Other. like that of all pariah gods. is officially banned in Tsolyánu, his priests operate in secret within the Temple of Belkhánu. Even more curiously, they play a formal role in the emperor’s internment rites. Why, then, the public disavowal of the One Other, while simultaneously granting his priests a hidden role at the heart of imperial ritual? Dhich’uné believes he knows the answer: the empire was founded and sustained by a covenant with the pariah god, one that is continually renewed through the sacrifice of the spirit-souls of those who lose the Kólumejàlim (the Choosing of the Emperors).

Dhich’uné now believes he can reshape that covenant. Instead of the traditional sacrifice of defeated princes, he proposes to offer the spirit-soul of an emperor. He believes this will vastly strengthen the stabilizing influence of the One Other, making it eternal. He also believes that by becoming undead, he can survive the loss of his spirit-soul. Of course, no one can know whether this gambit will succeed, but Dhich’uné is convinced it will. He believes he has the knowledge and the will to deceive a pariah god into giving him what he desires.

Whether he’s right forms the central question of the campaign’s next (and likely final) phase.

Mongoose Acquires Dark Conspiracy

Serendipity is a real thing. When I decided last week to write a Retrospective post about GDW's 1991 horror RPG, Dark Conspiracy, I had no advanced knowledge of today's announcement that Mongoose Publishing has acquired all the rights to it. This isn't exactly surprising. Once it was announced last summer that the company now owned the rights to Traveller (along with Twilight: 2000), I thought it inevitable that they'd also grab the rights to other former GDW properties. Still, it's nevertheless an odd little coincidence that I started thinking again about DarkCon after all these years.

According to the limited information available, Mongoose's re-release of the game won't be until next year. There's no official word on its rules, but I'd be amazed if it didn't use some version of the Mongoose Traveller rules, which are rapidly becoming the house system of the company. I'm fine with that, honestly. For all my complaints about the most recent iteration of the Mongoose rules, it's still a solid system and much better than Dark Conspiracy's original rules, which I never much liked. 

When I hear more, I'll be sure to share that information here. 

I Hate Combat

Here’s a confession that might get me kicked out of the old school clubhouse: I hate combat in roleplaying games.

There: I said it. 

Now, I’m – obviously – not saying combat never has a place at the table. I've refereed sessions where battles were tense, dramatic, and even thrilling, with cunning ambushes, panicked melees in cramped spaces, last-stand battles with high stakes for all those involved. If you want, I can recount plenty of examples of fun, memorable combats from almost any campaign I've run in recent years (and some from well before that). However, those are the exceptions, the golden flecks in the gravel.

Most of the time, combat is the broccoli on my RPG dinner plate, something I chew through dutifully because I’m told it’s good for me. This is especially true when I'm refereeing games like Dungeons & Dragons and its descendants, which tend to highlight combat. From what I can tell, other people seem to genuinely like combat. After all, it’s in every rulebook and often takes up its longest chapter. Combat's part of a balanced adventuring diet, isn’t it?

And yet I regularly find it tedious. 

Roll to hit. Miss. Roll to hit. Miss. Roll damage. Deduct hit points. Wait. Roll to hit. Miss. Consult a chart. Roll to confirm. Miss again. Meanwhile, someone's scrolling through social media. Combat grinds on, a clockwork of attrition that slows down the pace of the session. The usual momentum of exploration, intrigue, or even character banter gives way to a wargame that’s usually just complex enough to bog things down but not complex enough to be tactically interesting.

I know this sounds like sacrilege, especially coming from someone who inhabits the old school part of the hobby, where monsters are there to be slain and treasure to be pried from their still-warm claws. But even when I was a kid, the parts of a session I looked forward to weren’t the whittling down of hit points or the tracking of initiative. They were everything else.

I loved describing sinister rooms filled with strange objects and watching my friends debate whether or not to touch them. I loved watching them argue about the safest way for their characters to cross a rickety rope bridge across a chasm. I loved their paranoid investigations of hidden crawlspaces and their impromptu diplomacy with bullywugs they were trying to convince of their good intentions (I should write about that sometime). I loved the awkward, funny, surprisingly human interactions between characters and the worlds I'd presented to them.

That’s always been the meat of roleplaying games for me: not the fighting, but the playing. Heck, that's why I'm still here after all these years.

To be clear: I love a good fight. In fact, as a player, I really respect a well-run tactical encounter and have nothing but praise for referees capable of this. A few years ago, for example, I played in a great Rolemaster campaign run by a friend who knew the game – and its combat rules – like the back of his hand. I left that campaign with a much greater appreciation for the unique virtues of Rolemaster and its chart-driven approach to combat. It helped, too, that the referee had a good sense of how to make combats fun, a skill in which I am decidedly lacking.

I often include combats because I feel obligated to do so. Of late, I've noticed this most often in my Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign. Since T2K is a military RPG, it would be ridiculous not to have combats, wouldn't it? So, we have them, even though I spend most sessions trying to figure out ways to avoid them. Again, it's not that we haven't had fun and exciting combats in that campaign, because I know we have. However, they're not what interest me and I regularly feel as if combat doesn't play to my strengths as a referee.

Consequently, I sometimes think of combat as a tax I have to pay to get to the good parts of the session, like those unskippable ads on YouTube, except the ads last half an hour and require me to reread the rules on incendiary ammunition. Again.

Now, I understand that some people love combat. For some, it’s what they most enjoy about RPGs. There’s a satisfying clarity in the geometry of battle, the crisp chain of cause and effect, the tactical puzzle. I completely understand that, because, as I said, I've had moments where I felt the same way. So, I salute their enthusiasm. I merely ask that they might forgive me when I can't be bothered to remember the modifier for an attack against a prone target or how much protection a concrete wall provides against weapons fire.

For me, the real excitement comes when players sidestep combat entirely. When they parley, sneak, bribe, confuse, seduce, or otherwise avoid having to resort to swordplay or gunfire. Not only do I cheer those moments for the cleverness they demonstrate, but also because it means I don't have to worry about my own tactical inadequacies. Plus, it's in the unscripted non-combat interactions that the game feels most alive to me. 

So, yes, I hate combat – but only because I love everything else about roleplaying games so much more.

Still, just often enough to make me question everything, a combat shines. The dice align, the stakes are high, the players are desperate, and suddenly we’re not just resolving a skirmish. We’re there, holding our collective breaths, waiting for the next roll. In those moments, I’m reminded why people put up with those incendiary ammunition rules.

But I won’t pretend I’m not secretly hoping someone talks their way out of it instead.

Campaign Updates: Only Two

One of the players in the Dolmenwood campaign is away on a three-week trip, so we've elected to put things on hold until she returns. Until then, another player has offered to referee a short adventure using the Dragonbane rules for us. I was quite excited to do this, both because it's good to take a break from my own refereeing duties and because I've been very curious about how Dragonbane plays. I'll likely write a separate post about that soon. For now, though, here are the updates from my Barrett's Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign and House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign.

Barrett's Raiders

Having accepted Captain Calloway's offer to form Military Liaison Group 7, the members of Barrett's Raiders renewed their oaths of enlistment in the US Army. However, it was quickly noted that, while nearly everything about the oath had remained the same, there was a tiny but significant change to its wording. Instead of swearing to "obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of officers appointed over me," the new oath mentioned obeying only "the lawful orders of the officers appointed over me" without reference to the President, since USMEA does not recognize the authority of John Broward. While this did not sit well with all the characters, they had little choice but to accept it for the time being. 

Resupplied, they headed out along I-64 West, a stretch of highway USMEA patrolled and assured them would be "reasonably secure." They were, however, urged to avoid the area around Richmond, given recent events. Though their ultimate goal was Fort Meade, Maryland, they were instructed to make two stops in Virginia first: Forts Lee and Pickett. Ostensibly, these stops were to check in with the soldiers there for more current intelligence. Lt. Col. Orlowski suspected, though, that doing was, in part, a loyalty test to see if the newly minted MLG-7 was follow orders. For the moment, he had no reason to disobey and so made plans to exit I-64 before reaching Richmond.

When they did so, they saw an overpass spraypainted with a warning – "No Federal Dogs. No JCS. Keep Moving." Not wanting to risk angering the locals, Lt. Col. Orlowski recommended they keep a low profile and do nothing that could be interpreted as aggressive. Around this time, the new radio operator, Birmingham "Bum" Farley, picked up a weak signal just within range. The message was clearly in code, making reference to railroads, even though there were no tracks within the area. Michael, now under cover as Polish national-turned-US citizen Aleksander, recognized the message as CIA in origin. According to him, it meant an operative was in trouble and being actively pursued.

Orlowski was content to let Michael follow up on the message, but he wanted it done quietly. MLG-7 had three new members whom most of the team did not know. At least one and possibly more could have been added to the team by USMEA to spy on them. Since the CIA was aligned with Broward and the (to use USMEA terminology) "unrecognized civilian authority in Omaha," there needed to be insulation between what the soldiers did and what their comrade Michael did. Michael understood and took Radosław (an actual Pole who took up the offer of US citizenship) with him to investigate.

House of Worms

At the end of Kirktá's grand party at the Golden Bough clanhouse, the group met with Princes Táksuru and Rereshqála to discuss their next move. Rereshqála insisted they must do whatever it took to prevent Dhich'uné from winning the Kólumejàlim, even at the cost of their lives. He urged them to unite all rival heirs in this cause, setting aside personal ambitions to stop Dhich'uné from ruling Tsolyánu.

To that end, Kirktá would need to enter the Choosing rather than abstaining. His participation could disrupt Dhich'uné’s plans, as the prince seemed to expect Kirktá not only to renounce his claim but to aid him somehow. Kirktá agreed, but Nebússa pointed out that he lacked the golden disk proving his imperial lineage. Without it, he could not enter the contest, and they had only two weeks to find it.

There was also the matter of Dhich'uné's gift: a large, lacquered black box. To open it safely, Kirktá used the Almanac of Wába to access a remote nexus point – an ancient cavern beneath a desert on some other plane. In the box, he found ritual texts on the pariah god, the One Other, including pacts and heretical writings on the nature of the soul. Among the contents was an amulet for long-distance communication, along with a note from Jayárgo, Dhich'uné's lieutenant: "Contact me when you are ready."

Kirktá did so, and Jayárgo revealed a disturbing truth. Dhich'uné believed he had uncovered the secret of Tsolyánu’s origins: that its first emperor had made a pact with the One Other, sacrificing the immortal souls of defeated heirs to sustain the Empire in exchange for stability. Now, Dhich'uné sought to alter this ancient bargain. Instead of sacrificing defeated princes, he planned to offer his own immortal soul as emperor, securing Tsolyánu’s eternal stability. However, as a worshiper of Sárku, he intended to cheat the One Other, offering up his soul while preserving his body and intellect as an undead being, thereby becoming an eternal ruler over a neverending realm.

Jayárgo feared his master was dangerously mistaken in his suppositions. If Dhich'uné was indeed wrong about the One Other’s intentions, his gambit could unravel the very foundations of the Empire. Unable to openly betray him, Jayárgo begged Kirktá to prevent disaster – for Tsolyánu’s sake, and for Dhich'uné’s as well.

Modules as Touchstones

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about "off shelf" campaign settings, I thought I'd write a bit about a related topic: pre-packaged adventures, often called "modules." Old school RPG lore has it that, at the dawn of the hobby, few people, certainly not the fine folks at TSR Hobbies, thought there'd be any market for pre-packaged adventures. Then as now, referees took pride in crafting their own adventures. Just as worldbuilding is one of the great joys of roleplaying games, so too is the process of developing a scenario tailored to one’s own vision and tastes. Given that, why would anyone turn to a pre-packaged adventure module? Why run The Keep on the Borderlands, Masks of Nyarlathotep, or The Traveller Adventure when one could simply create something original?

The greatest virtue of pre-packaged adventures is the shared experience they foster across the hobby. To put it simply: a great module is a touchstone. It links players and referees across tables, generations, and even continents. There is something remarkable in the fact that so many roleplayers, across decades, have ventured into the Caves of Chaos, uncovered the secrets of Saltmarsh, or braved the alien horrors of the Barrier Peaks. These modules have become part of the collective consciousness of the hobby, a language that players can speak regardless of where or when they first sat down at the table. The mere mention of certain locations, villains, or twists within these adventures can evoke instant recognition, stirring memories of triumph, disaster, and everything in between.

This shared literacy is no small thing. Roleplaying is, by its nature, ephemeral. Each campaign a unique blend of personalities, decisions, and improvisations. Unlike a novel or a film, no two games unfold in exactly the same way. And yet, within that variability, a published module provides a thread of continuity. When two players who have never met before can swap stories about their first run-in with Bargle from the solo adventure in the 1984 D&D Basic Set or how they barely escaped Strahd’s castle, they are engaging in something akin to an oral tradition, passing down tales from table to table, from one generation of gamers to the next. Modules provide the foundation for that tradition, ensuring that, even as campaigns come and go, some stories remain universal touchstones.

This is especially valuable in an era where the roleplaying hobby has expanded dramatically. The old days, where most gaming circles were small and isolated, have given way to online communities and virtual tabletop play. The existence of widely recognized modules gives newcomers a way to connect with veterans. They provide common ground in this expanding landscape. Even for those of us who prefer homebrew adventures, having a few classic modules under one’s belt is a kind of shared literacy that allows one to participate in a conversation that stretches back to the origins of the hobby itself. In a way, running a module is a way of stepping into history, reliving and reshaping the same challenges that earlier players have faced.

Beyond simply fostering camaraderie, shared adventures also provide an entry point for new players. A new referee faced with the daunting prospect of designing a whole scenario from scratch can take comfort in the fact that many have run The Village of Hommlet before him. A new player can look up discussions of Tomb of Horrors and know that he is stepping into something larger than his game – a tradition of play that stretches back decades. Even when a module is adapted, altered, or expanded, it still serves as a bridge between individual tables and the broader history of roleplaying. There is something powerful in knowing that, even as each group makes the adventure their own, they are still participating in the same grand tradition of play.

Consider the sheer number of classic modules that have shaped the way we think about adventure design. The open-ended nature of Keep on the Borderlands, the intricate mysteries of Masks of Nyarlathotep, the faction play of The Enemy Within, each of these has not just provided individual groups with hours of entertainment but has influenced the way the hobby itself has evolved. When someone describes a scenario as "like Keep on the Borderlands but in space" or "like Tomb of Horrors but with political intrigue," they are drawing on a shared vocabulary that allows roleplayers to communicate complex ideas in a few words. In a way, these modules form the grammar of the game, the foundation upon which new ideas are built and communicated.

None of this is to say that referees should rely exclusively on published modules. There is something deeply satisfying about crafting one’s own adventures, tailoring them to the specific interests of a group, and introducing them into a campaign. But, as I said about pre-existing settings, the use of adventure modules is not a lesser choice. It is, rather, an acknowledgment of the rich history and communal nature of the hobby, an embrace of the shared stories that have shaped roleplaying for decades.

There's something deeply satisfying about the shared language adventure modules provide. They can tie your table into the larger tapestry of roleplaying history. They allow players across time and space to say, "Ah, you got your soul sucked by Acererak too?" and know, in that moment, that they are part of something greater. The modules may differ, the details may change, but the experience – the shared adventure – remains. I think that's something worthy of celebration.

Yellow Journalism

Here's another strangely prescient sidebar from that Dark Conspiracy preview insert that appeared in issue #47 of Challenge (December 1990). This is obviously dated from a socio-technological standpoint. In 1991, when the game was released, the consumer Internet barely existed, but the writing was already on the wall by that point, even if most people hadn't realized it yet. 

Off the Shelf

Last week,a reader had some interesting things to say in the comments to my post, "Now Make It YOUR Tékumel" (Part I):

James, I know your Tekumel campaign has been a joy for you and your players, but because there’s this continuous “gap” of not knowing the entire ins and outs of the world, doesn’t it make you just want to go back and run your own campaign worlds you were GM’ing in the past or develop a new one? My own setting may not be as rich as Tekumel, Glorantha, or others, but it is mine and mine alone, and the time I spend developing and learning about it is a far greater satisfaction than using someone else’s secondary world, so to speak.

These are questions that have probably been asked since the appearance of the first published settings for use with roleplaying games and they're very good ones. They're especially relevant in the context of old school gaming, which, by and large, tends to valorize "do it yourself" approaches to most aspects of our hobby. As with some many things, I don't think there's a "right" answer to these questions. However, I can offer my thoughts on the matter.

Without a doubt, one of the greatest joys I've had in this hobby is worldbuilding. I suspect many, if not most, referees first take up that mantle out of a desire to create – to sketch out maps, populate them with grand cities and petty fiefdoms, invent cultures, histories, pantheons, even languages and then watch as players interact with what they've created. The creative impulse is a powerful one and indeed central to why I've kept up this hobby for more than four decades. Given that, why then would anyone ever choose to use a setting created by someone else rather than make his own? Why play in Glorantha, Tékumel, the Third Imperium, or the Forgotten Realms rather than a world of one’s own devising?

The most obvious answer is this: pre-existing settings can possess virtues all their own. Chief among these benefits is depth. A well-established setting, particularly one with decades of development, represents an accumulation of creativity far beyond what any individual could achieve alone. Consider Tékumel, which is the fruit of a lifetime of imagining (and play!), from which were born details of multiple societies, cultures, languages, etc. The richness of Tékumel, its sense of authenticity and depth, would be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate without investing a similarly long amount of time into developing a new setting. 

Of course, one might reasonably argue that that's precisely the point of creating one's own setting – to build it up over time through imagination and play. I'm not disputing that and certainly not denigrating the value of it. However, not everyone desires or indeed is even able to devote that much time and effort into building up an imaginary setting in this way. Campaigns, after all, can be fleeting things. Players come and go, life circumstances change, and many referees may not have the luxury of decades to let a world gradually accrete the layers of history, culture, and depth that make a setting feel truly lived-in. There is something to be said for stepping into a world that is already rich with detail, one where the referee doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel every time he needs a new culture, language, or historical event to ground his adventures. With an established setting, that work has already been done, allowing the referee to focus on incorporating the player characters into an existing framework rather than painstakingly constructing it piece by piece.

Additionally, the act of worldbuilding itself is a different skill from running a compelling campaign. Some referees are natural improvisers, capable of crafting intricate scenarios and memorable characters on the fly, but may struggle to construct the background details that give a world texture. Others might excel at creating histories and cultures but find it challenging to translate those into dynamic and engaging play at the table. Pre-existing settings offer a way to balance those strengths and weaknesses, providing a solid foundation of background and depth while still leaving ample room for creativity and interpretation. By using a well-established world, referees can benefit from the hard work of others while still making the game their own, customizing and adapting elements to suit the needs of their campaigns without having to start from scratch.

This depth can translate into greater immersion. Players unfamiliar with a referee’s homebrew world often struggle to grasp its nuances. What’s the dominant religion? Who rules this land? What’s the history between these two nations? A pre-existing setting obviates some of the need for that by providing a shared foundation of understanding. Even if players aren’t deeply familiar with RuneQuest's Glorantha, for example, they can quickly grasp that it’s a Bronze Age-inspired world of myth and heroism, where the gods are real and ever-present. For many, that's a more solid base for engagement than the uncertainties of a homebrew setting.

Another virtue of using an established setting is that it frees the referee from the burden of having to create everything from whole cloth. Worldbuilding is rewarding, yes, but it’s also time-consuming, and many of us have only limited time to devote to the hobby. By using Tékumel or the Third Imperium, a referee can focus on what really matters: developing adventures, presenting engaging scenarios, and bringing the world to life at the table rather than, say, detailing the taxonomy of his world’s flora and fauna or coming up with the names of its deities. This doesn’t mean that one must slavishly adhere to every canonical detail; rather, an established setting provides a sturdy scaffolding upon which a referee can build, altering and expanding as needed without having to start from scratch.

Furthermore, a pre-existing setting has already been tested. The referee knows that Glorantha is a compelling place to explore, that Traveller’s Imperium provides a solid framework for intrigue and adventure, that the Forgotten Realms is filled to the brim with adventuring locales and NPCs. When crafting a homebrew setting, there’s always the risk that it won’t hold together under scrutiny, that it lacks cohesion, or that it simply doesn’t inspire one's players. A well-developed, pre-established setting has already proven itself.

There’s also the communal aspect of a shared setting. When a referee runs a game in Glorantha or Tékumel, he is participating in a wider conversation, connecting with an audience that extends beyond his own table. He can draw on the experiences of others, take inspiration from decades of published material, and contribute to a living world that exists in the collective imagination of thousands of players. This sense of shared history is part of what makes these settings so compelling. When one plays in Glorantha, for example, one walks the same mythic paths as countless other players, building on the stories and legends that came before. (This is also part of the appeal of pre-packaged adventure modules, but perhaps that's a topic for another post.)

As a general rule, I still prefer homebrew settings. There is an undeniable satisfaction in crafting one’s own setting and watching it take shape over time. However, I think it would be a misconception to assume that using a pre-existing world is somehow a lesser choice or that it stifles creativity. On the contrary, it provides a foundation upon which creativity can flourish. That's certainly been the case in my House of Worms campaign, for example. Adopting a well-established setting can enable a referee to gain access to a wealth of material, allowing him to focus on breathing life into the world and creating fun adventures that his players will remember for years to come.

Once again, I think I've rambled on longer than I'd intended. At the very least, I hope I've done a decent job of laying out some of the reasons why a referee might decide to make use of an "off the shelf" campaign setting rather than one he'd created himself.