Taps

By now, many of you will have noticed that I haven’t posted any updates about the Barrett’s Raiders Twilight: 2000 campaign I’ve been refereeing since December 2021 – almost four years ago. The reason is simple: the campaign has, alas, come to an end. By “end,” I don’t mean “conclusion.” This is nothing like the tidy finale of the House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign last month. In this case, the end wasn’t planned, though, if I’m honest, it wasn’t entirely unexpected either.

Before getting into a proper postmortem of Barrett’s Raiders, let me explain what brought things to a close. There’s nothing dramatic here, nor did anyone grow dissatisfied with the game. Two players had real life commitments that would keep them away for an extended period, long enough that I decided to put the campaign on “pause” and let another player run a short game of his own – Fringeworthy – while we waited for their return. We’d taken short breaks like this before, so I didn’t anticipate any problems.

This time, though, the pause became an opportunity for another player to decide it was time to bow out. I don’t blame him at all. He’d been with the group almost continuously since the days of my Riphaeus Sector Traveller campaign, which began around 2017. That’s a long commitment. As I told my House of Worms players before we began The Dark Between the Stars Fading Suns campaign (as I've taken to calling it), no one is ever obligated to keep playing, especially after giving years of their time. Interests shift; life happens.

Soon after, I learned that one of the two players already on hiatus would, in fact, be unavailable even longer – effectively out of commission well into 2026. I took that as the universe’s gentle nudge that it was time to put Barrett’s Raiders to bed. We were now down two players and, truth be told, I had already been contemplating wrapping things up within the next few months anyway.

My own reasons were different. I was still very happy with the direction of the campaign. The characters’ return to the shattered USA intrigued me more than their time in Poland. I was eager to see them navigate the murky waters of the low-intensity, slow-motion civil war between USMEA, the civilian government, and New America. I’d been waiting to run this part of the campaign since I was a teenager and had no shortage of plans for where it might go.

What held me back, frankly, were the rules. While I’ve used the Year Zero Engine to good effect in other games – Forbidden Lands in particular – the Twilight: 2000 iteration had to wrestle with elements like modern automatic weapons and vehicles that simply don’t arise in Forbidden Lands. Their inclusion felt clunky to me or at least out of step with my own preferences and I regularly found myself fumbling with them more than I liked. As a result, I often avoided combat, which isn’t ideal in a military RPG.

So, while I’m disappointed that Barrett’s Raiders won’t reach the proper conclusion I had hoped for, I’m not too disappointed. The campaign lasted just shy of four years – no small feat – and we had a great deal of fun along the way. I doubt Barrett’s Raiders will be remembered in the same breath as House of Worms, but that’s a very high bar, one I may never clear again. Such is life.

Instead of dwelling on what might have been, I’m already thinking about the future: what game might this group tackle next, and where might it take us? More on that when I finally have an answer to those questions.

Retrospective: Kafer Sourcebook

For reasons I'll explain in an upcoming series of posts, I've been thinking a lot about GDW's other science fiction roleplaying game, 2300AD (né Traveller: 2300). As I've no doubt explained on several occasions, I was, for a time, a huge fan of the game and – especially – its setting. Truth be told, I still am a fan, even though I've not played the game in almost forty years. One of the things I've always admired about the game was its commitment to a plausible and "realistic" approach to the building blocks of its setting, whether scientific, technological, or political. Unfortunately, that same commitment has also probably contributed to my inability to ever sustain a 2300AD campaign.

Emblematic of the problems I've always had with the game is, ironically, one of its best supplements, the Kafer Sourcebook. Published in 1988 and written primarily by William H. Keith, Jr, it's a deep dive into the society, culture, history, and, above all, biology of the alien Kafers, humanity's only serious interstellar rival. It is a 96-page softcover, though it feels longer, due to the sheer amount of terrific science fictional speculation packed into its chapters. Even within a product line celebrated for its world-building rigor, this book stands out for its imagination and ambition.

Remember that, when 2300AD debuted in 1986, it was pitched as the “hard science” alternative to the looser, Golden Age-inspired SF of Traveller. 2300AD's other supplements focused on Earthly politics, interstellar cartography, and the starships, among other more "grounded" topics. For all its detail, however, the line lacked a unifying extraterrestrial element, something distinctive that would shape humanity’s place in the larger galaxy. The Kafer Sourcebook was the first supplement to supply that missing anchor. It thus introduced not merely an opponent but an entire framework for understanding alien intelligence within the setting.

At a glance, the superficially insectoid Kafers fill the recognizable role of an expansionist, technologically capable adversary, the kind of civilization that might form the backbone of a future interstellar war. But the Sourcebook's treatment of the species elevates them above cliché. Their defining trait is an evolutionary system in which intelligence surges only under stress, which feels both biologically plausible and conceptually daring. In their calm state, Kafers possess little more than animal cunning. Faced with fear, danger, or uncertainty, their mental capacities accelerate rapidly, granting them the clarity and ingenuity needed to confront threats. The result is a species whose history, culture, and institutions have arisen to support continual conflict, since it's only under such stress that the Kafers' intelligence continues to increase.

This evolutionary need for conflict becomes the core organizing principle for the book. Keith uses it to explain Kafer rituals of testing and challenge, their competitive clan structure, their tendency toward authoritarian politics, and the peculiar way they approach science and technology. The chapters on physiology and psychology are particularly strong, dense with speculative xenobiology that is nevertheless readable, even compelling. The cultural chapters, meanwhile, succeed in painting the Kafers not as a hive of faceless antagonists but as a coherent civilization with internal debates, eccentricities, and historical traumas. One comes away with the sense of a genuinely alien species whose motives can be understood but never comfortably predicted.

For all its strengths, however, the Kafer Sourcebook also highlights the central challenge of the species it so creatively presents. The Kafers are genuinely difficult to use in a typical 2300AD campaign. Their hostility isn’t ideological, political, or territorial in any human sense; it is biological. Once threatened, they are almost compelled to escalate conflict, their intelligence and aggression rising in tandem. This leaves little room for negotiation, espionage, manipulation, or the many shades of diplomacy that fuel most science fiction RPG adventures. A referee who wishes to portray the Kafers accurately must accept that they are not suited to casual interaction. They are best deployed as a looming existential threat or as the fulcrum of a military campaign, rather than as participants in the varied social and exploratory scenarios that populate the rest of the setting.

That is what makes the Kafer Sourcebook and, by extension, 2300AD’s use of the Kafers so frustrating. The supplement is filled with wonderfully imaginative speculation that makes these aliens excellent antagonists, yet it offers little sense of how they might function in any capacity other than that of an implacable foe. Keith’s efforts to avoid making the Kafers one-dimensional “bad guys” by rooting their behavior in evolutionary psychology paradoxically reinforces that very one-dimensionality. A species that becomes intelligent only when threatened cannot be negotiated with, reasoned with, or engaged meaningfully outside the context of conflict. In a game line otherwise rich in politics, exploration, and cultural interplay, the Kafers remain locked into a very narrow role. The result is an alien species that is brilliantly conceived on the page but difficult to integrate into the broader possibilities the 2300AD setting seems to contain.

Mind you, this is my eternal complaint about 2300AD. It’s an extraordinarily imaginative and beautifully presented setting, one that feels right in all the ways hard science fiction should, yet it somehow ends up feeling strangely dull. Unlike Traveller, I could never quite get a handle on what GDW expected players to do with the game. Its “realism,” whether technological, cultural, or political, always seemed to work against the very things that make adventure possible. Instead of opening doors, its grounded assumptions often closed them, leaving referees to do the heavy lifting of carving out reasons for danger, mystery, or wonder.

I think hat’s the tragedy of 2300AD: a setting bursting with potential, yet one that never quite shows you how to tap into it. It’s a toolbox full of fascinating parts, but without a clear sense of what you’re meant to build.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Clerics Live by Other Rules"

Over the years, I've given the thief a lot of flak, but it's actually the cleric who fits in least well with the literary origins of D&D. The cleric looks not to pulp fantasies for its inspiration but to medieval Catholicism by way of Hammer horror films and, while I have a great fondness for the class, there's no question that it isn't a perfect fit for the world D&D implicitly describes. I'm not alone in thinking this, which is why the cleric is probably the class that gets reinvented the most (though the thief might be a close second).

Every edition of D&D has put its own stamp on the cleric, in the process rendering the class more incoherent than it was to start. Gary Gygax contributed further to this mess in his article "Clerics Live by Other Rules," which appeared in issue #92 (December 1984) of Dragon. To be fair, Gary's article is actually pretty good, but it laid the seeds for much mischief later. His intention was to suggest that individual referees, for the purposes of fleshing out their campaign settings, could change the rules under which clerics (and, by extension, druids) operate, either restricting their opportunities or expanding them (or, preferably, both).

In the article, Gygax gives an example of a sect worshiping the woodland deity Ehlonna, from his Greyhawk campaign setting. Owing to tragic events in the past, this sect operates differently than others of its kind, having a unique selection of spells, armor, and weapons, in addition to having certain ritual taboos placed upon them. Thus, for example, they're not allowed to use fire-based spells of any kind, but clerics, after proving themselves – gaining levels – can wield broadswords and druids can wear elfin chain.

Normally, I loathe this kind of stuff, in large part because I think it contributes further to the dilution of what the cleric class is – and it's already pretty diluted as it is. What makes Gygax's approach work, though, is that a) it's solidly grounded in the setting and b) he's limiting these changes to a particular sect, not establishing it as a baseline. That's how I think things like this ought to be done. Unfortunately, players (and later designers) didn't care for these nuances, instead using them as a template for "fixing" the cleric class. This led, in my opinion, to a variety of changes over the years that have rendered the cleric one of the least coherent classes, both mechanically and as an archetype. But I'm pretty sure I'm in the minority in feeling this way.

Interestingly, Gygax himself warns against taking what he wrote in this article as an official, universal change. In his concluding paragraph, he says some very sensible things:

Now when you hear someone, DM or player, mentioning something about "unknown" cleric spells or similar difficulties, don't panic. It could well be a cleverly planned campaign where difference and the unexpected are desirable -- and who can fault that?! Perhaps you might wish to try it in your own campaign, too. A cautionary word is necessary, however, for there is a problem with such variations. Unless the full and complete details of the differences are known to other DMs, they might well not wish to have clerics or druids of such nature participating in their games. This is their right, and skepticism on their part is justified. Players of these clerics and druids must be forewarned that such characters might be "one-campaign-only" adventurers who are not welcome elsewhere

It's good advice, but it's also, I think, advice rooted in an older style of play that was already on its way to dying out by the time this article was published. Campaign hopping of the sort Gary envisions was already rare in the early '80s when I was most deeply immersed in the hobby and I have a hard time imagining that it was any more widespread on the cusp of 1985. Ironically, the advent of the Net and online play make well lead to a resurgence of the Old Ways in this regard, in which case Gary's advice might well prove useful again.

REH vs CAS

At the end of last week, I asked readers whether they’d prefer that I devote this coming January to Robert E. Howard or Clark Ashton Smith, in the same way that I dedicated this past August to H.P. Lovecraft.

So far, the “contest” is remarkably close. At the moment, the Bard of Auburn holds a very narrow lead over Two-Gun Bob, but not by enough to declare the matter settled. Honestly, I’m not surprised. Both Howard and Smith are more than worthy of a full month’s attention on this blog and each brings something distinct and compelling to the table. I’d be delighted to spend January exploring either one of them and, judging from the comments and emails I’ve received so far, many of you feel the same way.

Because the vote remains so tight, I may need to turn to another method of choosing. One option I’m considering is putting the final decision to my patrons. Their support of Grognardia is direct and it seems only fair to let them weigh in when a topic inspires this much enthusiasm. If nothing else, it would be a fitting way to break the tie and ensure that the choice reflects the people who help make these month-long deep dives possible.

In the meantime, I encourage everyone who hasn’t yet commented or sent me an email to do so. Whichever way this goes, January is shaping up to be another enjoyable excursion into the history of early fantasy literature.

The Problem with Starships

The Problem with Starships by James Maliszewski

In which I once again think out loud by a vexing part of Second Edition

Read on Substack

Pulp Fantasy Library: Nyarlathotep

Like many of the early H.P. Lovecraft pieces I’ve been examining since September, “Nyarlathotep” occupies a remarkably strange position within his larger canon. First circulated in late 1920 in the November issue of The United Amateur, this brief work resists simple classification. It is neither straightforward narrative nor pure prose-poem, neither a true Dreamlands excursion nor an unambiguous exercise in cosmic horror. Instead, it unfolds like a lucid nightmare rendered with almost journalistic precision, a stark vision of societal unraveling and uncanny intrusion that foreshadows many of the motifs Lovecraft would later explore more fully.

Lovecraft himself explained that “Nyarlathotep” arose from a dream. In a letter to Rheinhart Kleiner, he claimed he wrote the opening paragraph “before I fully waked,” suggesting the piece emerged almost directly from the dream-state. If we take him at his word, then the text was composed under a kind of incantatory compulsion, shaped only lightly by later revision, if at all. This immediacy distinguishes it from much of his mature fiction, which he often reworked extensively, and helps explain the breathless, uncanny atmosphere that permeates the piece.

As in many of his early works, Lovecraft was writing under the sway of powerful intellectual influences. After 1919, he immersed himself in the writings of Lord Dunsany and the Dunsanian imprint is unmistakable – the rhythmic prose, the dream-logic, the anxiety over cultural decay. At the same time, the story reflects his long-standing interests in astronomy, Egyptian antiquity, and fin-de-siècle pessimism. “Nyarlathotep” thus emerges from a convergence of impulses, from the mystical to the scientific, from the decadent to the apocalyptic, producing a work that is difficult to categorize but impossible to forget.

The piece itself presents Nyarlathotep as a wandering figure from Egypt who arrives with strange devices and demonstrations that unsettle the modern world. Crowds gather; the narrator, already alienated and uneasy, joins them. Soon the lights fail, machinery breaks down, and people drift into the streets in trances, marching into the darkness as a cosmic doom descends. This is less a story than a sensory and psychological descent. The narrative slips quietly from urban disquiet into full eschatological collapse, mirroring the disintegration of both society and the narrator’s consciousness.

Two elements in particular deserve emphasis. First, this version of Nyarlathotep is far more grounded than his later incarnation as the messenger of the Outer Gods. Here he appears almost human, a darkly charismatic prophet with a pharaonic air, demonstrating marvels that blur the line between science and sorcery. The implication is that modernity’s own tools – technology, rationality, scientific wonder – can serve as gateways to madness. Second, the masses drifting silently through the darkened city prefigure the collective irrationalities found in Lovecraft’s later fiction. More importantly, the collapse is not local but cosmic. Dreams, astronomy, machinery – all fail simultaneously. The universe itself seems to sicken.

Although “Nyarlathotep” predates Lovecraft’s fully developed Dreamlands tales, it marks a crucial step in their evolution. The action takes place in the modern world rather than in dream geography, yet nearly every aspect of it connects to his emerging dream-lore. The narrative is not a record of waking experience but a nightmare revelation, a dream so potent it bursts into daylight and overwhelms the ordinary world. This reversal is central: whereas the later Dream Cycle sends dreamers into symbolic, mythic realms, in “Nyarlathotep” it is the dream that invades the waking world, overriding reason, technology, and even cosmic order.

Stylistically, the story stands at a crossroads. Lovecraft was still under Dunsany’s spell and the imagery unmistakably reflects it. Yet, the creeping cosmic menace anticipates the hybrid mode he would perfect in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, where Dunsanian fantasy interlocks with cosmic horror. Nyarlathotep himself is the clearest bridge between the modes. In Dream-Quest, he returns as a mercurial, godlike being who toys with dreamers and bends fates. The 1920 piece presents his prototype as a wandering prophet of cosmic truth whose presence signals doom. What makes the character unique in Lovecraft’s tales is precisely this dual existence. He moves freely between the Dreamlands and waking reality, linking the two in a way no other entity quite manages. “Nyarlathotep” is the moment that connection first takes shape.

The piece continues to resonate because it feels like a transmission from the edge of consciousness. It's brief, opaque, and deeply unsettling. As a document of Lovecraft’s artistic evolution, it is both important and often underappreciated. It captures the last intensity of his Dunsanian phase even as it gestures toward the cosmic immensities of the later Mythos. That tension between dream and nightmare, fantasy and cosmic dread, gives “Nyarlathotep” its lasting power. It remains one of Lovecraft’s most haunting works, not despite its ambiguity, but because of it.

January Approacheth

Back in August, I devoted the entire month on this blog to discussing H.P. Lovecraft and his legacy, under the banner of The Shadow over August. What began as an experiment turned out to be one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve undertaken on Grognardia in some time. Not only was it fun to revisit Lovecraft’s writings and influences in a focused way, but the response from readers was far more enthusiastic than I had expected. It reminded me of the value of spending a sustained period delving into a single creator whose work has shaped the hobby in so many ways.

With that in mind, I’ve been thinking about doing something similar in January. Two of the other great figures associated with Weird Tales, Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith, were both born in that month. Each is, in his own way, a towering influence on fantasy, horror, and roleplaying games. Consequently, I would very much like to give one of them the same kind of month-long attention I gave to Lovecraft in August.

Notice I said one. For practical reasons, I can only manage one such project right at a time, however much I'd like to do both. That leaves me with a choice and, rather than make it myself, I thought it would be more fitting (and fun) to put it to you, the readers.

I’ve come up with titles that mirror the spirit of The Shadow over August and capture something of each author’s tone:

• For Robert E. Howard: The Savage Sword of January
• For Clark Ashton Smith: The Ensorcellment of January

Both possibilities appeal to me for different reasons and I would enjoy devoting a month to either writer. So, I’m asking for your help in deciding which one I should pursue. If you have a preference – Howard or Smith – please let me know in the comments. I’ll tally the responses and announce the outcome before the end of the year, as I can begin preparing for whichever choice wins out. It's a difficult choice, to be sure, and I don't think there's a wrong option. Plus, I can always devote January 2027 to whichever of the two isn't chosen for 2026.

As always, thank you for reading and for your continued enthusiasm. August’s experiment succeeded in large part because of your engagement and I’m looking forward to seeing where January takes us.

Sir Yamashiro Li Halan

I often comically lament that I spent my personal character points on the wrong abilities and skills, choosing writing over much more sought after – and profitable – skills like mapmaking or art. Dyson Logos can do both of the latter, which is why I told him that, if he weren't my friend, I'd hate him. Yesterday, while playing in the fourth session of our new Fading Suns campaign, he drew his character, Sir Yamashiro Li Halan. It's a lovely piece of art and one that does a great job of visually bringing to life this drug-addicted rake of a nobleman. 

I suggested to Dyson he give the same treatment to the other characters in the campaign, but I was only half-serious, since I know it'd be a lot of work. Still, it's amazing how helpful it can be to have portraits of characters in a campaign. The make them real in a way that mere words frequently cannot. That's why I commissioned Zhu Bajiee to produce a commemorative portrait of all the important player and non-player characters of the recently completed House of Worms campaign. It'll not only be a great memento of the campaign itself – the longest I have ever refereed – but it will also help me to recall the characters, who are really what helped keep the game going for as long as it did. 

Inquiry

Another public post over at my Patreon, one that's specifically directed at those who are already members but that might be of general interest to other regular readers (at least I hope so). 

Retrospective: The Complete Priest's Handbook

When the second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons appeared in 1989, one of its implicit goals was to make the game’s classes more flexible and setting-driven. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the treatment of clerics. First Edition AD&D more or less followed the template laid down by OD&D, where the cleric was an odd hybrid of Templar, exorcist, and battlefield medic. This was a pragmatic invention designed to plug holes in early play (someone had to turn undead and heal wounds). The cleric class was thus foundational to the game, but rarely inspiring. If my experience is anything to go by, few players aspired to be a cleric and would only acquiesce to doing so because the party needed healing.

The Complete Priest’s Handbook, published in 1990, represents TSR’s most serious attempt to rethink the cleric, building on what had already been established in the 2e Player's Handbook. Written by Aaron Allston, it stands as one of the most conceptually ambitious entries in the “Complete” series, as well as one I really liked at the time of its release. The supplement's title is significant. Second Edition, you may recall, replaced the term "cleric" with "priest" as the name of the broad class category. “Cleric” became only one example within that category – a type of priest, much as the druid was another. This terminological shift heralded a new approach to divine spellcasters. Where 1e’s cleric was monolithic, 2e’s priest was varied. There could be hundreds of priestly archetypes, each distinct to its faith and overall ethos. Allston’s book took that conceptual flexibility and attempted to make it practical.

At the heart of The Complete Priest’s Handbook lies 2e’s concept of specialty priests as a flexible framework for portraying the servants of specific gods or cosmic powers. Rather than treating every priest as a lightly re-skinned version of the same armored miracle-worker, Allston provided Dungeon Masters with clear guidelines for customizing spell access, weapons, armor, granted powers, and restrictions to reflect each deity’s nature. A priest of a war god might wield swords and command battle magic, while one devoted to a god of secrets could be forbidden to fight openly but gifted with divinations and hidden knowledge. The idea had its roots in Dragonlance Adventures (1987) and the 2e Player’s Handbook, of course, but Allston expanded and refined it in meaningful ways. He demonstrated that the faiths of a campaign world should shape the rules of divine magic, not the other way around.

Much of the supplement reads less like a player’s guide than a campaign design manual. Allston encouraged DMs to think about pantheons, from who the gods are, what their worshippers are like, and how their clergy interact with worldly institutions. He presented religions as social, political, and metaphysical forces, not merely sources of spells. From here, he moves on to designing priesthoods, walking the reader through the process of defining a faith’s beliefs, organization, duties, and other details, with each choice shaping both flavor and play. Allston even made space for philosophical or non-theistic priests, who draw power from devotion to an ideal or cosmic principle. That idea was barely hinted at previously, but, in this supplement, it's offered as an unambiguous possibility (one that I embraced wholeheartedly in my Emaindor campaign from high school).

In many ways, The Complete Priest’s Handbook was TSR’s first real attempt to treat religion as a serious worldbuilding concern rather than an afterthought. The gods and their faiths were no longer just color for the background; they became engines of conflict, patronage, and adventure. The priest was not simply a healer or support character but a representative of a larger belief structure and institution. One can argue that this was always true in AD&D and perhaps it was, but, for many of us, it took books like this to make us think seriously about what that actually meant in play.

Like all entries in the “Complete” line, The Complete Priest’s Handbook included a selection of kits, optional templates meant to add flavor and specialization. Ironically, I never found most of them especially interesting. Too many represented vague social roles, like the Nobleman Priest, the Peasant Priest, and so on, rather than more distinctive archetypes like the Crusader or the Missionary. Arguably, 2e priests didn’t need kits at all. Between their spheres of magic and granted powers, the class already had plenty of built-in flexibility. However, compared to what other classes received in their "Complete" books, this section felt oddly underbaked.

What truly stands out, though, is how The Complete Priest’s Handbook reflects a broader shift in TSR’s design philosophy. Second Edition was increasingly interested in building distinct, coherent settings for AD&D. One could reasonably argue this was motivated by a desire to sell more products, but, even so, it had an intriguing creative side effect: it pushed the rules toward flexibility and world-specific interpretation. Instead of assuming a single “cleric” archetype for every world, 2e encouraged Dungeon Masters to make each campaign’s religions – and thus its priests – unique.

Of course, the book is not without its flaws. Balancing specialty priests was left largely to the DM’s discretion and the examples varied widely in quality. Allston’s approach assumed a polytheistic setting where divine diversity was the norm, leaving monotheistic or dualistic campaigns to do some extra work. Yet, these are minor quibbles compared to the book’s larger accomplishment. The Complete Priest’s Handbook encouraged DMs to shape faith to fit their worlds and, just as importantly, to let their worlds shape faith in return. For a game as rule-bound as AD&D sometimes was, that felt genuinely liberating.

For all my reservations about the "Complete" series as a whole, I still regard The Complete Priest’s Handbook as one of its true high points, a book that took a neglected class and made it central not just to the mechanics of the game but to the presentation of the setting in which it was played.