One of the earliest advertisements for Planescape I remember seeing was this one, which appeared in issue #203 of Dragon (March 1994). Depicting the ruler(?) of Sigil, the Lady of Pain, it certainly piqued my interest. Even now, I think it's a pretty intriguing and evocative advertisement.
Objectively, this is bonkers stuff, but I adored it and spent a lot of time thinking about the Outer (and other) Planes, aided no doubt by my fascination with the demons and devils of the Monster Manual. Despite Gygax's precise distinctions between the alignments of the Planes, AD&D didn't have a lot to say about them for a long time, aside from the occasional article in Dragon, like the ones about the Astral Plane (by Roger E. Moore) and the Nine Hells (by Ed Greenwood). And, of course, we later got Gygax's own developed thoughts about the Inner Planes, which were every bit as eccentric and persnickety as what he wrote in Appendix IV of the PHB all those years ago.
What I always wanted was a better sense of the Planes as a place and, more than that, as an adventuring locale. What sorts of adventures could AD&D characters have among the Planes? What made the Outer Planes different from the Prime Material Plane and how would this impact the kinds of adventures to be had there? The better Dragon articles, like those of Greenwood, did this well, or at least better than did Gygax, whose own ideas, while fascinating, remained largely in the realm of the theoretical. I wanted something more "down to earth," if you'll forgive the phrase. Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes was a good first step in that direction, but I wanted more.
As it turned out, I'd have to wait until 1994 to get that, in the form of the Planescape Campaign Setting – and it was not at all what I had expected. As imagined by David "Zeb" Cook and brought to visual life by Tony DiTerlizzi, the Outer Planes were indeed weird, though quite different from how they'd been previously portrayed. Instead of being presented as primarily the dwelling places of gods and demons, the Planes were instead a battleground between various factions of "philosophers with clubs," each of which hopes to remake reality according to their own idiosyncratic perspective. These factions, each associated (in some cases loosely) with an alignment or Outer Plane, were the driving force behind Cook's vision for Planescape. More than that, they provided an easy buy-in for player characters looking to involve themselves in the cosmic struggles of the setting.
"The setting." That's important. One of the clever things Cook did with Planescape was that he made the Planes a setting. They weren't just a place you could visit for a brief time; they were a place you could stay. Further, they were a place where even novice characters could stay, not merely high-level ones with access to potent magic. Further still, they were a place with its own native inhabitants and players could easily take up the role of one of them. Planescape gave AD&D's Planes a life of their own, divorced from the Prime Material Plane where most campaigns were set. Planescape made it possible to play entire campaigns where characters never once set foot on the World of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or any other "normal" campaign world.
This was a bold approach and not at all what I or, I imagine, most AD&D players at the time were expecting. Not everyone warmed to Planescape's vision of the Planes. Indeed, I recall quite a few old hands who scoffed at it as taking too many cues from White Wolf's World of Darkness RPGs, which were very popular at the time. I can certainly appreciate the shock and surprise they probably felt upon reading Planescape and seeing DiTerlizzi's Dr Seuss-like depictions of the denizens of the Planes. This was not Gygax's Planes; it wasn't even Grubb's. It was something quite unique, filled with the strange, the odd, and the occasionally silly, and suffused with a punkish vibe that came through most strongly in its use of Planar Cant drawn from the criminal slang of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Many people, even fans of the setting, loathed the Cant, but there's no denying that it helped give Planescape a distinct flavor of its own.
Me, I enjoyed Planescape. It was not at all what I expected, but I enjoyed it for what it was: a strange, whimsical, wondrous take on world-hopping fantasy, with "worlds" in this case being other Planes of Existence, each with its own individual rules and style. And then there's Sigil, the City of Doors, located at the very center of the multiverse – if a series of infinite planes can truly be said to have a center. Home to the various planar factions and serving as a crossroads of the Planes, Sigil could serve as the basis for an entire campaign in itself, but it was also the perfect "home base" for planar characters whose adventures took them across the realms of the Great Wheel and beyond. Like Planescape itself, I really enjoyed Sigil and had a lot of fun with it.
I have lots of thoughts I could share about Planescape, both positive and negative, but my overall feeling for it is one of affection. I first made use of the setting as an adjunct to an ongoing Forgotten Realms campaign I ran in the mid-1990s. Later, I ran a "native" campaign among the Planes in the early days of Third Edition. Both were very well received by my players. Indeed, we still occasionally talk about some of the adventures they had in the setting. That's my usual measure of whether a gaming product succeeds – did I have fun with it? – and by that standard, Planescape is one of the greats.
Something I remember very vividly about growing up is that I'd sometimes find evidence of a popular culture I'd never encountered. Take, for example, Judge Dredd.
When I attended Gamehole Con this year, I decided I wouldn't referee any games, but would instead play in several. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I'm usually the referee, so having the opportunity to play is a treat (even though I'm actually quite bad at it). Second, I intend to run some sessions at future Gamehole Cons – and perhaps some other cons, too, if I can decide on others to attend – and wanted to do some "field research" on what these games are typically like. Though I'm a pretty experienced and, if my players are to be believed, good referee, I'm nevertheless quite self-conscious about my abilities. Seeing how others handle the referee's duties at a con thus provided me with some very useful information.
The very first game I played at the con was Hyperborea. I've been a fan of the game since its original edition, released more than a decade ago. It's a delightfully game, inspired by the greats of pulp fantasy, like Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith. Rules-wise, it's pretty much a rationalized and house ruled version of AD&D and, like AD&D, Hyperborea is baroque and idiosyncratic. To tell the truth, that's a big part of why I like the game so much. I appreciate it when a designer imbues his game with himself – his likes and dislikes, his philosophy and worldview – that's just what Jeff Talanian did with Hyperborea. That's a welcome break from recent attempts to sand down the rough edges of our popular culture to make it appeal to everyone, in the process making it appeal to no one in particular.
Like most con games, this one had a four-hour time slot and featured six players. Entitled "A Tale of Crows and Shadow," it was, so far as I know, an original adventure by our referee. Before we began, he passed out a stack of pregenerated characters from which to choose. I selected a warlock – a fighter/magic-user, more or less – named Amalaric the Ill-Tempered. After everyone had chosen their characters, the referee then asked if we all had dice. Embarrassingly, I did not. I was sitting next to the referee and, as I explained that I had no dice, he turned, looked at me, and asked, "Are you sure you're in the right place?" He meant it humorously, of course, but I can't deny feeling a little sheepish at his words. Fortunately, a player seated across from me tossed me a bag of dice and told me to keep them. "I always carry extras for times like this."
The adventure began with all of the characters awakening aboard a slave galley headed out to sea. Our food and drink had been drugged after a night's debauchery in the metropolis of Khromarium. Below decks and chained to our oars, we first had to find a way to escape. The first half of the scenario involved us plotting to free ourselves and then take control of the vessel. After many extraordinary feats of Strength (and Dexterity) and much combat, we were successful. Now in command of the ship, we had to pilot it back to land without quite knowing where we were. Once there, we trekked through the wilderness at night, while someone (or something) was following us. Eventually, we discovered that our stalker was a vampire – and a child vampire at that. Dealing with her was creepy, unnerving, and surprisingly difficult, but we eventually prevailed.
I had a lot of fun playing this adventure, which felt very picaresque in its structure. This wasn't a scenario in which everything that happened in it was directly connected. Instead, one thing happened after another, each being a kind of mini-scenario of its own. It was a bit like a series of pulp fantasy vignettes, all sharing the same cast of characters, but not having any overarching plot or theme. I was quite fine with that. Not only did it suit Hyperborea, but it also gave the session a "light" feeling. We weren't following some grand storyline or trying to achieve anything beyond saving our skins and escaping the latest danger we stumbled upon.
Not being a veteran of con games, I'm not sure how typical my experience was. One of the most notable things about it, to my mind anyway, is that the players were frequently willing to take chances on harebrained schemes and reckless gambits. That might be a function of the fact that everyone knew this was a one-shot. Our natural self-preservation instincts were blunted. If our character died while trying to bowl over a group of guards, Captain Kirk style, so what? We were having good, pulpy fun and that's all that mattered. As I think about the possibility running my own games at a future con, I'll bear this in mind. I think a good convention adventure is probably its own thing, distinct from the kind of adventure that works well in a campaign situation.
Anyway, Hyperborea's a fun game. I should play it more (and so should you).
Though a toolbox for allowing you to tell fantasy stories of all kinds, Dragonbane is a game with room for laughs at the table and even a pinch of silliness at times – while at the same time offering brutal challenges for the adventurers. We call this playstyle mirth and mayhem roleplaying – great for long campaigns but also perfect for a one-shot if you just want to have some quick fun at your table for the night.
Dragonbane is quite an interesting RPG for a number of reasons and I hope to get around to discussing it at some point, but there are several other games and gaming products ahead of it in my review queue. However, the "mirth and mayhem" tagline really caught my attention, in part because it reminds of a phrase my friends and I have used for years – high adventure and low comedy.
I can't quite recall precisely when we coined this phrase, but we did so as a way to capture what the experience of playing most RPGs was actually like at the table – not what its designers wanted to be like, which is quite a different thing. This is an important distinction. With a handful of exceptions, like Paranoia or Toon, whose stated intention is to be humorous, most roleplaying games are written and meant to be played seriously. "Serious" doesn't mean utter devoid of humor, of course, but the humor is accidental, a natural consequence of the unpredictability of playing any game, especially one where player choice and dice rolls contend with one another.
What my friends and I call "high adventure and low comedy" is thus very often (though not exclusively) the result of exactly this: dice with a mind of their own. One of my most popular posts touches on this very topic, though from a slightly different angle. However, the point remains the same, namely, that it's well nigh impossible to avoid moments of unexpected levity when so many of a character's actions are determined by the roll of dice. There's simply no way to ensure that even a high-level and competent character will always succeed at the right moment. Instead of making his save against dragon breath, he might fail and be burnt to a crisp. The reverse is also possible and the all-powerful Dark Lord might, metaphorically speaking, slip on a banana peel as he attempts to menace the heroes who've dared to confront him in his lair.
Over the years, I've experienced many examples of this. In my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, the character Aíthfo hiZnáyu has fallen prey to bad dice rolls on several notable occasions. And while I used those unintended mishaps as an opportunity to introduce new elements to the campaign, there's no denying that they were also funny – so much so that the players continue to chuckle about them years later. House of Worms has never been a deliberately funny campaign. Tékumel, with its detailed history, ancient mysteries, and constructed languages is perhaps the very definition of serious business when it comes to RPGs and yet there's no way to prevent unexpected silliness from creeping in from time to time – nor would we want to do so!
Dice rolls that go awry aren't the only source of humor. Players are every bit as unpredictable as dice. Sometimes, a player might just be in a whimsical mood and decide that his character does something goofy. Other times, he might be bored and want to shake things up by choosing to act in a way that's, in his opinion, more entertaining. Or maybe someone misspeaks, calling a character by the wrong name or accidentally – or, worse, intentionally – making a pun that causes everyone to erupt into laughter. There are simply so many ways that a roleplaying game session can descend into unintentional humor that there's no point in worrying about it. Instead, it's best to embrace it these moments of levity and enjoy them for what they are.
I think that's why, when I came across the passage I quoted above, I was so taken by it. Over the years, I've read a lot of roleplaying games. Very few of them acknowledge that low comedy is very often the inescapable companion of high adventure. You can't really have one without the other, not without clamping down so hard on anything that deviates in even the slightest way from the Truth Path that, in the process, you've also sucked all the fun out of roleplaying. These are games, after all and they're meant to be fun. They're also exercises in human creativity and interaction, both of which often take us to unexpected places.
Isn't that why we play these games in the first place?
One of the many downsides of our increasingly disembodied, virtual existence is the ease with which everything disappears into Orwell's memory hole. Anything produced online, especially on a platform you don't own – like this blog, for instance – could go away tomorrow if someone in an office somewhere decides it should be so. Those of us who can still recall the existence of Google Plus know all too well what I am talking about. Now, it's true that nothing lasts forever in the sublunary world, but I can't help but feel this is especially so when it comes to Internet scribblings.
I thought about this yesterday, as I tried to locate something I remember reading online back in (I think) the 1990s. Yes, I know: in Internet terms, the '90s might as well have been 300 years ago, not merely 30. Furthermore, the thing I want to find had been posted to one of the many Usenet newsgroups dedicated to roleplaying games, like rec.games.frp, so the odds of my finding it were never great to begin with. Still, I held out hope that, with enough perseverance, I might succeed. Since I was unsuccessful on my own, I thought I'd turn to my readers, many of whom possess far greater skills than I when it comes to locating obscure information.
I recall reading a narrative from the perspective of a Call of Cthulhu investigator. Unlike his colleagues, this investigator didn't go out into the field. Instead, he stayed safely at his home in Arkham or wherever and communicated with his comrades via telephone. In his phone conversations, he made certain that his interlocutor never told him too much about what he had seen or done, lest he have to make a SAN roll – "Don't tell me what you read in the book. Don't even tell me the title of the book," "No, I don't want to know what the creature looked like," etc. The whole thing was a meta-commentary on the way to "win" at Call of Cthulhu. I remember finding it quite amusing when I first read it.
Now, it's probably gone and I have only my increasingly hazy memories of it. Does this ring any bells with anyone else? Might anyone be able to suggest how I might find it again? I don't hold out much hope of ever reading it again, but I figured that, if anyone could aid me, it might be my readers.
Thanks!
(This month, I'd intended to write a longer post about the domestication of horror and frightening things in our popular media, including RPGs, but, as so often happens, time slipped away and here we are on Halloween and I never wrote that post. I still intend to write it; I just can't be sure when. In the meantime, enjoy this old post that touches on the topic. –JDM)Human-bodied and goat-headed, [they] ... are tied irrevocably with the Rune of chaos. They are given to atrocities and foul practices, and carry numerous loathsome diseases.Broos have the ability to procreate with any species, intelligent or otherwise, with the resulting offspring taking characteristics from both its Broo and non-Broo parent. Most Broos in the Dragon Pass area (the area of Glorantha originally most detailed in RQ's early materials) have the heads of goats and other herd animals, hence their nickname, but Broos come in a variety of types, depending on their parentage.
While Dungeons & Dragons, by virtue of its being the first and most popular roleplaying game, had a very enthusiastic fanzine culture, it was not the only RPG that did so. Those slightly older and better connected than I could probably speak at great length about the vibrancy of the 'zines devoted to, say, Tunnels & Trolls or RuneQuest, two games that I know had fanzines devoted to them. Not having been a player of either of those games in my youth, I don't have much to say on that front – or indeed about the 'zines written by fans of most other roleplaying games. The main exception is, of course, Traveller, a game I've played and adored since I first encountered it sometime in 1982.
The interesting thing about Traveller fanzines is that some of them were, in fact, officially licensed and associated with a third-party game company producing material for use with Traveller. For example, FASA, which would later publish Star Trek the Roleplaying Game and BattleTech (né Battledroids), began its existence as a Traveller licensee. During those days, FASA produced not one but two 'zines, Far Traveller and High Passage. One might argue that these periodicals aren't actually "fanzines" at all, but closer to prozines and I'd be willing to concede the point if it weren't for the fact that these periodicals were still very amateurish, produced on a shoe-string budget and written by and for fans. And, of course, one might counter by saying the entire RPG hobby, including the companies that service it, have never really stopped being amateurish, so it's a distinction with only a very small difference.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that, before the Internet, Traveller had a number of well-done and influential fanzines that straddled the line between purely amateur and truly professional, often involving writers and artists who worked on both sides of the line, like the Keith Brothers. I read a number of them on and off, but I never became a regular reader of any of them until the appearance of The Travellers' Digest in 1985. Published by Digest Group Publications, the (theoretically) quarterly periodical was clearly modeled on GDW's own The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, though, to be fair, most fanzines for Traveller looked to JTAS for inspiration.
What distinguished The Travellers' Digest (hereafter TD) was not its format but its content. Each issue presented an adventure scenario that was part of a looser, large narrative – the so-called "Grand Tour," in which a quartet of characters, including a highly advanced sentient robot, traveled across the Imperium and reported on their experience to the eponymous The Travellers' Digest, which is presented as an in-universe magazine. Each adventure highlighted a different region of the Third Imperium, providing players and referees alike with information they could incorporate into their campaigns, even if they didn't make use of the Grand Tour meta-narrative.
I could have cared less for the Grand Tour, especially since the adventure presupposed the use of four pregenerated characters, none of whom, not even the robot, held much interest for me. However, I loved all the additional details the writers provided about the Imperium, its worlds, cultures, and history through the vehicle of the Grand Tour scenarios. I talked recently about "jump dimming," for instance, and that's a good example of the kinds of things TD did often: present clever new details about the Imperium so that it started to feel like a real place, with its own unique societies and cultures.
GDW had already provided plenty of details about the Third Imperium in its own publications, but TD did so in a way that felt very organic and, above all, playable. The magazine (mostly) didn't just present high-level lore dumps without consequence to the characters. Instead, the information played a part in a scenario and the characters' encounters with it made sense. Thus, if a scenario were set on Capital, the Imperium's seat of government, the workings of the Moot aren't just chrome but significant to the adventure in some way. DGP managed to pack a lot of great information into their adventures, occasionally even stuff that was truly setting-changing (like the revelation about how the alien Aslan came to possess jump drive).
The Travellers' Digest ran from 1985 until 1990, producing 21 issues in total before morphing into The MegaTraveller Journal, which lasted only three issues before the company folded – a victim of, among other things, the changing fortunes of GDW and indeed Traveller itself. I have a special affection for TD, because it was being produced around the time that I first started to take an interest in writing professionally. Though I never wrote for TD itself, I did write for The MegaTraveller Journal and, through it, made many friends with whom I am still in contact today.
Traveller is the only RPG fandom in which I've ever been deeply immersed and 'zines, whether fan or pro, were a big part of how I've interacted with that fandom and its members. Consequently, I have strongly positive feelings about these periodicals, so much so that, five or six years ago, I briefly considered producing my own Traveller fanzine. I never followed through with it for various reasons, but the thought still crosses my mind from time to time. Who knows? Maybe one day I'll do it.
Today is my birthday, so I'm mostly taking it easy. However, my definition of "taking it easy" includes working on the current manuscript for Secrets of sha-Arthan. In this latest iteration, I've eliminated race-as-class, in large part because I wanted to open up greater possibilities for players of nonhuman characters, like the Ga'andrin.
Originally, I'd imagined that the Ga'andrin as eschewing sorcery entirely, Then, I thought about relegating their sorcerers to the realm of NPCs. However, after seeing Zhu Bajiee's latest artwork for me, I knew I couldn't deprive players of the opportunity to play one of these guys. As usual, he did a great job of bringing my vague ideas to life. I can't wait to finish the rulebook and share it with the world.
