What If the Satanic Panic Had Never Happened?

I was recently reminded by a reader of the assertion that, rather than harming the sales or long-term fortunes of Dungeons & Dragons, the furor surrounding the game during the so-called “Satanic Panic” of the 1980s ultimately proved beneficial. According to this view, the controversies gave the game a level of publicity it might otherwise never have achieved, helping to propel it toward broader cultural visibility. This was certainly the position taken by TSR Hobbies and many of its employees in the years that followed and there is some evidence that lends this interpretation a degree of plausibility.

At the same time, others have suggested that this narrative is too neat and reassuring, as well as too dependent on outcomes that were visible only in retrospect. The difficulty, of course, is that the question itself resists a definitive resolution. There is no way to measure what would have happened had the moral panic not occurred. Indeed, any attempt to do so quickly runs into the limits of counterfactual history, where causes and effects cannot be isolated or tested.

The problem, as my reader put it, closely resembles survivorship bias. I think we've all seen the illustration of the battle-damaged aircraft from the Second World War. If not, I've included it at the top of this post. During the war, military analysts initially studied the bullet holes on planes that returned from combat, assuming the holes marked the most vulnerable areas. What they eventually came to realize is that the opposite was true: the planes that did not return had likely been hit in the places where the surviving aircraft were unmarked. The most important evidence was not what could be seen, but what was missing.

A similar bias may shape how we remember the Satanic Panic’s impact on the history of Dungeons & Dragons. The people who became lifelong gamers in the 1980s and 1990s were, by definition, those who passed through that period of censorship, stigma, and negative publicity. They are the aircraft that returned. Their presence is visible and their stories are often told, sometimes with pride, as proof that the panic failed or even that it backfired.

What is far harder to see are the players who never made it that far. The children whose parents forbade the game. The schools and libraries that quietly removed it from their shelves. The local groups that never formed because the social cost of participation seemed too high. These absent players leave no testimonies, no fond memories, and, of course, no sales figures. They are the aircraft that never returned and their absence subtly shapes the conclusions we draw about the era.

This does not mean that the claim that the Satanic Panic helped Dungeons & Dragons is false. It may be true or partly true or true in some contexts and not in others. Nor does it mean that the opposite claim, that the panic caused lasting harm, can be demonstrated with any greater certainty. The counterfactual remains unprovable. What it does suggest is that confidence in either position should be tempered by an awareness of what cannot be measured.

For readers who lived through that period, I'm curious about your own experiences. At the time you first encountered the game, was easy it to access or was contested or even forbidden? Did you know people who were interested in D&D but discouraged from playing or who drifted away under social pressure? I ask all this not merely out of curiosity, but because, as I'm sure I've mentioned before, I barely knew that the Satanic Panic was a thing with which anyone had to contend. I was aware of its existence, of course, but I never intersected with it in the slightest, nor did any of my friends. Without exception, our parents and extended families were supportive of our newfound obsession and, in fact, encouraged it, especially in my case. My own perspective is thus not very helpful in assessing this question.

In any case, I don't expect to come to any unassailable conclusions by raising this question. The Satanic Panic, after all, was an amorphous thing, neither a simple obstacle to the hobby's growth nor an obvious catalyst to it. It was a cultural pressure that some people resisted, some endured, and others, like myself, never encountered. That said, I think there is strength to the suggestion that any account of it that focuses only on those who remained risks mistaking survival for inevitability and resilience for proof that nothing was lost. That's why I'm curious to hear from others and their experiences of it.

The Dwellers in the Mirage

I'm presently finishing work on a long essay about ten works of "forgotten fantasy" – stories I consider to have been influential or otherwise important to the subsequent development of fantasy but that have largely been forgotten or otherwise overlooked by later generations. Included among those ten works is Abraham Merritt's 1932 novel, The Dwellers in the Mirage. Though barely known today, the novel was quite popular in its day and may have played a role in inspiring Robert E. Howard to create his character of Conan the Cimmerian.

The fine men over at DMR Books recently released a new edition of the novel that restores Merritt's preferred ending. It's a great edition, well worth picking up, if, like me, you're a fan of Merritt. I highly recommend it.

Initial Thoughts on Combat in Metamorphosis Alpha

Three sessions into my new Metamorphosis Alpha campaign – which I've dubbed "Habitat" – my players and I have now had the chance to use the game's combat system several times, most recently when their characters encountered some hostile wolfoids inside the Environmental Control Center of Habitat Level 2 of the starship Warden. My initial instincts about the game have thus far been proven correct. Though published two years after OD&D, MA is still a very early game design, filled with a lot of rough edges, infelicities, and general wonkiness. This is especially the case with the combat.

On the surface, combat in Metamorphosis Alpha isn't that much different from combat in OD&D. Players roll 1d20, with the aim of rolling equal to or higher than a target number. This roll is modified by certain factors, like a high Strength score or mutations. Weapons in MA each have a weapon class, ranging from 1 for bows and blowguns to 8 for protein disruptor pistols. In general, the higher the weapon class, the lower the target number needed versus an opponent's armor class (also rated from 1 to 8). 

There are some wrinkles in this, though, since weapon class is something of a stand-in for the weapon versus AC tables of Chainmail, Greyhawk, and AD&D. Some weapons are better against lower armor classes than they are against higher ones, for example, along with other peculiarities, like the metal disruptor pistol having no effect against armor classes above 3. Longtime players of Gamma World will, of course, recognize this system, since that descendant of Metamorphosis Alpha uses a similar system.

Damage varies by weapon type, as in Supplement I to OD&D. Each weapon's damage also varies by target type, with "humanoid beings," "mutated creatures," and "true humans" each being a separate category. It's unclear from the text whether mutated animals that have humanoid shapes count as a  the first or second category. When confronted with this on the fly, I elected to treat mutant animals as the middle category, but now I am second guessing myself, since it often means that mutant animals take less damage from common weapons like swords than do their mutant human counterparts. 

For reasons unknown to me, the game includes a second system for resolving bow combat – just bow combat – that seems to be derived from Chainmail. Instead of the difficulty to hit being based on armor class, it's based on distance. Furthermore, 2d6 are rolled against a target number rather than 1d20. When we first noticed that there were two systems for bow combat, I offered using the alternative one as an option, but none of the players were in favor of that, so we use the standard d20 system for all combat.

The possibility of surprise is handled much as in OD&D, with a d6 roll. Initiative, however, is determined by Dexterity score, with higher scores acting before lower ones. Ties are resolved with a die roll. There's a suggestion, never fully articulated, that, if a character or creature has a Dexterity score of twice that of his opponent, he can attack twice against that target. This hasn't come up in play as of yet, so I'm not certain whether I'll adopt the rule or not.

Character hit points are determined by a roll of 1d6 per point of Constitution. Since there are no experience rules in Metamorphosis Alpha, it is thus unlikely a character will ever gain any more hit points than what is rolled at the start of play. "Normal" weapons, which is to say, the sorts starting characters typically possess – swords, spears, bows, etc. – do damage comparable to their OD&D counterparts, meaning that most starting MA characters are more robust than those in OD&D, capable of sustaining more hits before expiring. 

The matter of damage is complicated by both mutations and high-tech weapons. Many mutations, like heightened precision and heightened strength, increase the number of dice a normal weapon does. Characters with these mutations can dish out quite a lot of damage, using even a sword or mace. High-tech weapons are even more dangerous. A laser pistol, for example, deals 5, 10, or 15d6 damage, depending on the type of armor worn by the target. Then there are other mutations, both physical and mental, that deal poison or radiation damage or target the mind of an enemy rather than his body. These, too, can deal devastating damage. One of the characters in the campaign has poison claws with strength 11 poison that's capable of killing any creature with a Constitution score of 11 or less on a single strike.

As I noted at the start of this post, we've only just started playing Metamorphosis Alpha. We're still finding our footing and I am sure there will be many missteps along the way. The combat system is, so far, the most confusing part of the game to get right, mostly because it's just enough like OD&D that we sometimes forget the ways that it differs. Likewise, I suspect that we may all be too complacent about damage. Other than a single, limited use slug thrower, the characters do not yet have access to any high-tech weaponry, nor have they faced opponents who do. When that changes, I expect we'll all be in for a surprise!

I'll no doubt have more to say about all of this, once we've had the chance to play the game more. 

H.P. Lovecraft's The Dunwich Horror and Other Stories

Despite his profound influence over the subsequent development of fantasy, science fiction, and, of course, horror, adaptations of H.P. Lovecraft's works into film or television don't have a great track record. Most of them deviate considerably from their source material, often because it's clear that the creators don't really understand – or want to understand – HPL and his esthetic and philosophical worldview. Consequently, the number of Lovecraft adaptations I consider genuinely worthy are few and far between. Even so, I'm always on the lookout for new ones, in the hope that I might come across a rare gem.

The other day, while doing some research for Dream-Quest, I stumbled upon references to a 46-minute claymation film released in 2007 by the Japanese multimedia company, Toei. Written and directed by Ryo Shinagawa, it adapts three of Lovecraft's stories – "The Picture in the House," "The Dunwich Horror," and "The Festival" – and does so reasonably faithfully within the limited context of its chosen medium. I particularly like the adaptation of "The Festival," but then I am inordinately fond of that tale already. In any case, I thought this film might be of interest to fellow Lovecraft fans and so bring it to your attention.

Retrospective: Bermuda Triangle

Recently, I came across a couple of “news” stories about the Bermuda Triangle, a topic I hadn’t thought about in years. Growing up in the 1970s, however, the Bermuda Triangle seemed to be everywhere. I vividly remember Charles Berlitz’s 1974 book on the subject – yes, that Charles Berlitz – as well as the steady stream of television documentaries solemnly recounting the mysterious disappearances of ships and airplanes. The 1970s really were a wild time, a period when the Unexplained was treated less as fringe nonsense than as a challenge to modern rationality. UFOs, ESP, ancient astronauts, haunted houses, and Atlantis all enjoyed a curious semi-respectability. The world, it seemed, was stranger than we had been led to believe and I, of course, ate it up.

Thinking about this cultural moment reminded me of a boardgame from the same period that I adored as a child, Bermuda Triangle. Published by Milton Bradley in 1975, it is not a particularly well-known game today, but I suspect that those of us who remember it at all do so largely because of a single plastic component central to its play, the Mystery Cloud. Ships caught beneath it might be removed from the board entirely, creating a physical absence that felt far more consequential to my friends and me than simply flipping a cardboard counter or sliding a token backward. Watching one’s ship laden with cargo and hard-won progress vanish into the Cloud’s plastic depths was a small but unforgettable drama.

Mechanically, Bermuda Triangle is a straightforward enough game. Two to four players each control a fleet of four merchant ships, attempting to move them from port to port to collect goods and return them safely to their home port. The first player to amass $350,000 in goods wins. Achieving this requires a mix of luck, timing, and a modest amount of tactical awareness. Ship movement is governed by dice rolls, with vessels advancing along established sea lanes. Crowding matters, because landing on an occupied space displaces the other ship, pushing it backward, and ports themselves can hold only four ships at a time. This creates opportunities for deliberate obstruction, allowing players to slow one another’s progress through careful positioning.

Beyond the roll of the dice, though, looms the game’s defining feature, the aforementioned Mystery Cloud. At the end of each turn, after each player has moved, a spinner determines the Cloud’s direction of movement across the board. Over time, it will inevitably drift into the sea lanes, crossing paths with the merchant vessels. Each ship token contains a small magnet, as does the Cloud itself. Depending on the Cloud’s orientation and direction of travel, it may “suck up” a ship it passes over, removing it from play entirely.

It is a simple mechanic, but a remarkably effective one. There is no certainty that a ship will be lost even when the Cloud passes directly overhead – the magnets were quite finicky, as I recall – and that unpredictability only heightened the tension. Would the ship survive or would it "vanish?" That moment of suspense, repeated again and again, gave the game a sense of menace wholly out of proportion to its rules complexity. I am convinced that this single feature carried the game for us, encouraging repeated play of what might otherwise have been dismissed as a fairly ordinary, even dull, roll-and-move affair.

Seen in retrospect, Bermuda Triangle feels like a perfect expression of its era. Its mechanics are serviceable, its strategy modest, but its theme and, crucially, its physical embodiment of that theme tapped directly into a cultural fascination with mystery and unseen forces. The game didn’t explain the Bermuda Triangle, but simply assumed its reality and invited us to suffer its consequences. In doing so, it captured something about those days as I remember them, namely, that the world was unstable, unpredictable, and perhaps unknowable. 

The game left a lasting impression on me in a way that Monopoly or Sorry! never did, since, on many levels, it's no better of a game design than either of those staples of childhood. The combination of the Mystery Cloud and its ostensible subject matter, though, was enough to elevate Bermuda Triangle in my imagination. Until I started thinking about this again, I hadn't realized how much I liked this game – or how much of a role it may have played in feeding the earliest embers of my lifelong fascination with the Unexplained. Not bad for an old boardgame!

A Commemoration of the House of Worms

My longstanding Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, House of Worms, ended in early October of this year, after ten and a half years of more or less weekly play. It is, to date, the longest sustained RPG campaign I've ever refereed or indeed been involved in. Its conclusion was therefore an event of real significance, one I felt deserved to be marked in some lasting way.

I chose to commemorate the campaign by commissioning a group portrait depicting all the player characters and major non-player characters who played an important role over its long history. For this, I turned once again to the artist Zhu Bajiee, who has produced so much excellent work for me over the years. The complete portrait is quite large, and I’ve decided to share it in full only with my patrons. That said, I also wanted to give other readers a sense of it, so I’m presenting selected portions of the image here.

More information about many of these characters, along with earlier depictions of them, can be found in this post from late last year. All of the illustrations here show the characters at the time of the conclusion of the campaign.

This is Huné hiNokór, a scholar priest of Hrü'ü, the Supreme Principle of Change within Tsolyánu's pantheon of gods. He is not a member of the House of Worms clan but joined them on their adventures after encountering them in the underworld beneath the city of Sa'á Alliqiyár. 

From left to right: Keléno hiNokór, Mírsha hiGirén, Jangáiva hiTlélsu, and Ssúri hiNokór. Keléno is a scholar priest of Sárku, the Tsolyáni god of death, while Mírsha, his third wife, is a lay priestess (sorceress) of Ksárul, god of secrets. Jangáiva is a temple guard, shown here with her demonic hammer, Ikh Tèn ("Little Sister"). Ssúri is a ritual priestess and dancer for Sárku's temple. 

Toneshkéthu Vokrón is a fourth stage student at the College at the End of Time, where Sinustragán Dzáshu is her master. She's also the youngest daughter of the Engsvanyáli priestking Girándu XV, who died more than 10,000 years prior to the start of the campaign. 

From left to right: Znayáshu hiNokór, Tu'ásha hiNarkóda, and Chiyé hiZhunrán. Znayáshu is a lay priest of Durritlámish, as well as an astrologer and a seller of protective charms and trinkets. Tu'ásha is his wife – as well as undead. She hides her hideous countenance behind a jade mask. Chiyé is a priest of Sárku who has a particular interest in the magic of the Ancients, like the "eye" that he holding.

From left to right: Nebússa hiTéshku, Srüna hiVázhu, Kirktá hiNokór, and Nye'étha hiSsáivra. Nebússa is a scion of the mighty Golden Bough clan and an agent of the Omnipotent Azure Legion. He is clan-cousin to Keléno's first wife, Hmásu. Srüna is Nebússa's wife, a member of the Iron Helm clan and a potent lay priestess of Ksárul. Kirktá is a scholar priest of Durritlámish, the protégé of Keléno, and a secret heir to the Petal Throne (his claim since renounced). His wife, Nye'étha, is a lay priestess of Ksárul, and another clan-cousin to Nebússa.

Left to right: Qurén hiQolyélmu, Grujúng hiZnáyu, and Aíthfo hiZnáyu. Qurén is a member of the Jade Diadem clan and a scholar of the Mihálli originally in the employ of Prince Rereshqála. Grujúng is a former legionnaire and the uncle of Aíthfo, who was once governor of the Tsolyáni colony of Linyaró.

Though I remain somewhat sad that House of Worms is now done, I am nevertheless glad that we brought it to a satisfying conclusion, something that, I am told, happens relatively rarely for RPG campaigns. That's why I'm especially pleased to have this portrait of the characters and NPCs who played important roles in it over the decade and a bit that we gathered each Thursday afternoon. Zhu Bajiee did a terrific job with all these depictions. They really capture the essence of the characters and serve as a tribute to them and the players who portrayed them.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games"

I strongly considered not writing a post about this particular article from issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), since I know it’s likely to stir up strong feelings and perhaps understandably so. At the same time, the guiding principle behind my revival of the Articles of Dragon series has been to focus on pieces that had a particular impact on me when I first read them, and this one – “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games” – most certainly did. Of course, if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, that should come as no surprise.

The question of Tolkien’s influence on the creation and later development of Dungeons & Dragons is a topic to which Gary Gygax regularly returned. From nearly the moment the game appeared, Gygax denied that Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings, held any special place of honor among the many fantasy works that inspired him. He never denied having read and enjoyed The Hobbit, nor that he had borrowed certain monsters and creatures, such as orcs and halflings, from Tolkien. What he seems to have rejected was the idea that this borrowing meant D&D was primarily inspired by Tolkien, rather than being a mishmash of many different influences.

I say "seems," because I really don't know why this particular question so vexed Gygax. That he kept writing articles like this more than a decade after the first appearance of the game suggests that it somehow mattered to him. I suppose the easy explanation is ego – he simply couldn't countenance the idea that someone might think D&D's success was owed, in whole or in part, to the popularity of Tolkien's work rather than his own imagination and ingenuity. But is that what was going on? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure anyone else does either.

"The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games" is a strange article. For one, Gygax begins it by admitting – in the very first paragraph – that "the popularity of Professor Tolkien's fantasy works did encourage me to develop my own." This is undeniable, since the Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail directly references J.R.R. Tolkien and includes not just hobbits but orcs, balrogs, and ents among its bestiary (all of which appeared in OD&D, at least in its earliest printings). Gygax continues that "there are bits and pieces of his works reflected hazily in mine," before stating that "I believe his influence, as a whole, is minimal" [italics mine].

Gygax then recalls the many, many fantasy books and authors he read, beginning in childhood. He points particularly to Robert E. Howard's only Conan novel, Conan the Conqueror (more accurately The Hour of the Dragon) as being his first exposure to sword-and-sorcery literature. He then goes on to cite L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Abraham Merritt, and H.P. Lovecraft as also being important to developing his sense of fantasy. None of those names should come as surprise, since he highlights all of them in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. (Of more interest to me is why Jack Vance is not mentioned at all, despite Gygax's regular praise of him and his works and his role in inspiring the D&D magic system.)

With that out of the way, Gygax says he "thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit" but found The Lord of the Rings a "tedious ... allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil." Tolkien would, of course, object strenuously to that characterization of The Lord of the Rings, but we must take Gygax at his word. He claims to have found the novel's action to be slow, its magic unimpressive, and its resolution disappointing. Moreover, Tolkien drops his favorite character, Tom Bombadil, soon after introducing him, which contributed to the slowness with which he finished it (three weeks).

Gygax then goes on, rather unconvincingly in my view, to say that many of the common elements of Middle-earth and Dungeons & Dragons have common sources, like Norse mythology for dwarves, and that therefore no one should assume the game he created owed much to Tolkien. In fairness, he also admits once again that there were some things he borrowed with the intention of "capitalizing on the then-current 'craze' for Tolkien's literature." He did this in a "superficial manner," believing that, once he'd attracted these Tolkien fiends to D&D, they'd soon realize that there was only "a minute trace of the Professor's work" therein.

As I said, I really don't know what to make of all of this. On the one hand, I generally agree with Gygax that D&D's similarities to Tolkien's creations are skin-deep at best and probably included solely for the purposes of enticing Middle-earth aficionados to the game. On the other hand, the fact that Gygax kept beating this particular drum makes me wonder if he actually believed the lines he was saying. Furthermore, Gygax was never shy about admitting the debt he owed REH or Vance or Leiber, so why did the charge he was borrowed Tolkien rankle him so? It's frankly baffling to me.

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Pulp Fantasy Library: Azathoth

Written sometime in June 1922 and never published during H. P. Lovecraft’s lifetime, “Azathoth” is little more than a fragment. Comprising just three paragraphs and fewer than 500 words, it might seem insubstantial at first glance. Yet, it remains a revealing artifact from a pivotal transitional moment in Lovecraft’s development, poised between the dreamlike, Dunsanian mode of his early work and the colder, more unsettling cosmic horror for which he is now best known. Precisely because of its brevity and ambiguity, “Azathoth” resists easy classification. It is often grouped with the Dunsanian tales when it is mentioned at all, but doing so obscures its real significance. "Azathoth" is not merely a relic of an earlier phase, but as a sketch of what Lovecraft was in the process of becoming.

By Lovecraft’s own account, “Azathoth” was at least partly inspired by his reading of William Beckford’s Vathek the previous year. An eighteenth-century Orientalist fantasy, Vathek centers on an immoral caliph whose accumulated sins drive him into a descent through the underworld, where he endures a succession of grotesque and fitting torments. Lovecraft, who had been fascinated by Middle Eastern lore since childhood – Abdul Alhazred itself began as a youthful pseudonym – was deeply struck by Beckford’s novel. So much so, in fact, that he resolved to write a weird novel in a similar spirit.

That ambition, however, quickly foundered. Lovecraft never advanced beyond a tentative beginning, and the fragment now known as “Azathoth” is all that survives of the project. For years it remained virtually unknown, surfacing only in 1938, when it was finally published in Robert Barlow's amateur journal Leaves. Since then, it's frequently been included in many anthologies of HPL's works, including the very first one I ever read. 

Despite its brevity, “Azathoth” repays attention, particularly for readers interested in the evolution of Lovecraft’s Dreamlands stories – or, more accurately, the evolution of his own thinking about dreams, creativity, and nostalgia. Its opening paragraph sets the tone unmistakably:

When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.

Rereading it, I was very much reminded of "The Silver Key," with its portrait of Randolph Carter’s attempt to reclaim the sense of wonder that adulthood has stolen from him. The loss of enchantment and the longing to recover it through imagination or dreams is a potent theme for literary meditation and one that resonates powerfully, perhaps increasingly so, with readers who feel themselves estranged from the world they inhabit.

The issue becomes more complex, however, when one considers The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, written only a few years later, in 1926 (though not published until 1943). That work could plausibly be read as Lovecraft’s belated fulfillment of his earlier ambition to write a weird novel in the spirit of Vathek. In Dream-Quest, Randolph Carter quite literally “travels out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled,” echoing the aim of the unnamed protagonist of “Azathoth.” Yet, the conclusions of the two works diverge in an important way. Carter’s journey in Dream-Quest does not end in a permanent withdrawal into dream, but rather in an acceptance of the flawed, limited, but irreplaceable value of the real world into which he was born and in which he has no choice but to live.

Seen in this light, “Azathoth” marks a moment before that reconciliation was possible for Lovecraft. It captures a stage at which escape into dream still seemed not only tempting but necessary, before he had fully worked through the implications of such a retreat. As a fragment, it does not offer resolution, but as a document of transition it is invaluable. “Azathoth” shows Lovecraft standing at a crossroads, still mourning a lost world of wonder, yet already groping toward the darker, more complex vision that would define his mature work.

Feigning Ignorance

Though we're only two sessions into the Metamorphosis Alpha campaign, everyone seems to be enjoying themselves, including me. Prior to this, I don't believe any of the players involved had ever had the chance to play MA before or, if they had, did so for very long. All of them were, of course, familiar with the game in broad terms, including its central premise. While I'm sure there have been many players over the decades who weren't aware that their characters were actually aboard a generation ship gone mad after a chance encounter with a radiation cloud, that's definitely not the case in my campaign. Everyone playing the game already knows the score.

I bring this up, because one of several things about the campaign that I've enjoying as the referee is watching the players pretend, via their characters, that they have no inkling of the Big Picture. The characters began the campaign as inhabitants of the village of Habitat, located on the shores of Lake Refuge within Wolf Forest. So far as the characters know, their ancestors journeyed here from the Barren Hills of Warden after having been cast out of the First Garden by the Builder. This is the world as the characters know it and the players have been operating within that frame.

In reality, though, the characters live on Habitat Level 2 of the starship Warden, one of two levels constructed to look like natural, terrestrial environments – in this case a forest – with an appropriate "climate" maintained by artificial means. Though there are a couple of features to this environment that reveal its true origins, like the Sky Columns (elevators) that can be seen reaching upwards, none of this is known to the characters, who have a fairly simple, even primitive worldview.

Consequently, when we had our first session a couple of weeks ago, I presented the current situation in Habitat in accordance with that worldview. The weather had suddenly gotten inexplicably colder, harming the crops, killing off game animals, and threatening to do the same to the old and infirm among the villagers. The elders did not know the cause and so sent the characters off into the wilds to seek a solution or, barring that, the location of the places where their ancestors first dwelled when they came to Warden. If nothing else, they could retreat there and escape the encroaching cold.

The elders have them all supplies, including a "wrath stick," an ancient Gift, to be wielded by the party's leader (a pure human, since mutants bear the curse of the Builder). To him, they taught the prayers necessary to use it – the Prayer of Loading, the Mantra of Targeting, and the Prayer of Humble Jam-Clearing. Then, they set off to ascertain what was happening and, if possible, to correct it, so that the people of Habitat might once again resume their toil in hopes of securing the Builder's favor, so that they might one enter the promised New Garden.

Again, to be clear, the players understood a lot of things I described to their characters under veiled words. For example, they recognized the "wrath stick" as a firearm, but their characters viewed it as a holy artifact and treated it with appropriate reverence. When the party's leader prepared to fire it for the first time, he recited the necessary prayers beforehand and several of the characters added, "Praise the Builder!" at the end of it, which I appreciated. The prayers do nothing, but the characters believe they do, which is why they recite them whenever the wrath stick is employed.

For whatever reason, I absolutely love this. I think it's the proper spirit in which to enter playing a game like Metamorphosis Alpha, whose Big Secret was revealed almost half a century ago. There is simply no way to preserve it at this late a date and I'm hard pressed to imagine ways to "subvert" it that don't do extreme violence to the game's central premise. That's why I think the approach my players have taken – leaning into their characters' ignorance of the true situation – is probably the best way to enjoy MA in 2025. As I've said before, I have no idea how sustainable this is over the long term, but I plan to have fun with it for however long it lasts.