The Articles of Dragon: "Preventing Complacency in Traveller Gaming"

As I explained last week, the Ares Section of Dragon was an absolute favorite of mine during the period when I subscribed to the magazine. Consequently, many of the articles I remember most vividly from those years appeared within it. That should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, since science fiction is my true love and, until the advent of the Ares Section, sci-fi articles in Dragon were comparatively rare. Now, I had several of them every month and I couldn't have been happier.

Issue #85 (May 1984) contained a good example of the kind of article that stuck with me for years afterward. Entitled "Preventing Complacency in Traveller Gaming," it was written by Roger E. Moore. Though only two full pages long, it packs a lot of great ideas and advice into it. Moore's premise is that it's easy, after years of playing Traveller, to start seeing the universe it depicts solely through the lens of its world generation tables. For seasoned players, the shorthand of the Universal World Profile (UWP) is both strangely comforting and something of a straitjacket. 

That's why Moore issued a friendly but firm warning in this article to veteran referees and players alike: don’t let those numbers lull you into a false sense of understanding. The UWP might provide a useful framework, but the real work of building compelling science fiction locales lies in what you do with that framework. In fact, he argues, the surface-level rigidity of Traveller’s world generation system presents a terrific springboard for the imagination, if you’re willing to embrace ambiguity, interpretation, and the joys of contradiction.

The article is thus something of a manifesto for imaginative refereeing. Moore gleefully dismantles the idea that a world with a size code of 0 must be "just an asteroid colony," instead proposing alternate interpretations. Perhaps, he suggests, it’s a massive orbital station or a rogue moon or even a city-sized relic orbiting a dead star. A tainted atmosphere might not just mean smog; it could signal hallucinogenic pollen, post-volcanic ash clouds, or trace gases that cause skin to fluoresce. Hydrographics might imply steaming oceans or acidic lakes or frozen continents skated across by iceships. His point is not to throw away the UWP, but to complicate it and to turn it into a prompt rather than a constraint.

What Moore suggests here is, of course, accepted wisdom among longtime Traveller referees nowadays, but, at the time, I don't recall its being so. Consequently, I found the article almost revelatory in the clever way it reminded the reader that the numbers of the UWP are just the beginning. The real act of world building comes from asking, “What else could this mean?” A participatory democracy on a low-tech world? Maybe it’s a direct voting system controlled by a sentient AI with its own motives. A law level of 9? That could mean total disarmament – or an arms-free society hiding behind widespread telepathic enforcement or ritualized violence. The possibilities are endless.

Perhaps Moore’s greatest gift in the article is his encouragement to take nothing for granted. He delights in the idea that official UWP data could be wrong, misleading, or faked. He points out that tech level is a poor predictor of what’s available, let alone what’s culturally important. He reminds us that a government can call itself one thing and behave like another. He also notes that rapid change, chaos, and revolution are just as true to a science fiction setting as any neat planetary entry in a subsector catalog.

What I found especially useful when I read the article forty(!) years ago is that Moore doesn’t reject the UWP system or advocate abandoning this distinctive aspect of Traveller. Rather, he shows how to deepen and expand it. His is not a call for gonzo chaos or narrative fiat, but for interpretive richness and contextual layering. This is particularly useful in slower-paced campaigns, where the referee has time to imbue each world with history, nuance, and surprise. A jump-2 merchant route then becomes a journey through half a dozen genuinely unique cultures, each shaped as much by what's not revealed by the UWP as by what is.

What makes “Preventing Complacency in Traveller Gaming” still worth reading decades after its publication is not just the soundness of Moore’s advice, but the spirit in which it’s offered. As he so often is, Moore is playful, generous, and imaginative. He invites Traveller referees to breathe life into the game by treating each world as an adventure waiting to be discovered rather than a string of stats to be decoded. As a teenaged fan of Traveller, Moore’s article gave me permission to push beyond the rules as written and encouraged me to make the Traveller universe feel as strange as I could imagine it to be. This why this article has stayed with me all these years and why it still deserves to be remembered.

Best Introductory Scenario(s)

Let’s keep this short and sweet: what do you think is the best introductory scenario ever written for a roleplaying game and why?

At the end of last month, I posed a similar question focused on Call of Cthulhu. This time, I’m widening the scope to include any RPG published from 1974 to the present. I already have a few favorites of my own, which I’ll be sharing in some upcoming posts, so I won’t give away my picks just yet.

What I am eager to hear are your choices, especially the reasons behind them. As I’ll explain later, it’s the why that really interests me. What makes a scenario a great introduction to a game or even the hobby as a whole? What stuck with you? What worked for your group?

If a Game Falls in the Forest

In discussing the possibility of roleplaying games being invented in another era, I soon found myself thinking more and more about the actual history of the hobby, particularly its beginnings. That’s because every so often, someone unearths an obscure set of notes or recalls the private campaign of a long-forgotten hobbyist and claims that roleplaying games were created before Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes long before. According to these accounts, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson merely popularized the form, while others were its “true” inventors.

I understand the impulse. Recorded history often overlooks lesser-known figures and it's right to acknowledge the contributions of pioneers who laid the groundwork for later developments. That said, I have difficulty crediting anyone as the “father” of a hobby unless he shared his creation in a way that made it accessible, intelligible, and, most importantly, replicable by people outside his immediate circle.

This may seem a narrow definition of invention, but I believe it’s essential, especially in the case of roleplaying games. A private amusement, even if it includes characters, rules, and imaginative scenarios, does not a new hobby make. Countless clever diversions have lived and died in obscurity, forgotten or never known at all. If no one beyond its creators can play, understand, or build upon it, then its significance is limited at best. To put it bluntly, if a roleplaying game existed in, say, 1958 but was never published, never disseminated, and never expanded beyond its original group, it may as well have never existed.

To put it somewhat flippantly, this is the creative equivalent of the old philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?" Did a roleplaying game “exist” in any meaningful way before D&D if no one else could participate in or reproduce it? My answer is: not really.

To invent something isn’t simply to stumble upon a novel idea. It’s to realize that idea in such a way that others can use, learn from, and transform it. That’s the true achievement of Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax, an achievement no one else can claim. They didn’t just play a new kind of game. They wrote down its rules, organized them, and, however clumsily at first, published them so that others could do the same. No one else had done that before. Here, I think we must be honest: it was Gygax who did the lion’s share of this work. Arneson brought his imaginative brilliance and the experience of his Blackmoor campaign, without which roleplaying games as we now know them would have been impossible, but it was Gygax who hammered the concept into something others could use and got it into print.

With Gygax's efforts in this respect, Dungeons & Dragons would probably never have been published. Instead, we might still be sifting through the remnants of the Twin Cities wargaming scene, piecing together anecdotes about some curious experiment in fantasy miniatures Arneson and his friends played in the early '70s. Because of Gygax, we got three little brown books that any reasonably curious teenager could pick up, read, and use as a blueprint to build worlds of his own. That’s invention in the fullest sense.

None of this is to diminish the role of earlier innovators like Dave Wesely, creator of Braunstein, or others whose names have been lost to time. They’re worthy of celebration. Each, in his own way, added ideas to a growing stew of influences out of which roleplaying coalesced. However, none of these predecessors synthesized those ideas into a coherent, replicable form, let alone shared them widely. They didn’t transmit the concept.

I think that's a distinction that matters. Creativity is common; invention is rare.

The history of games is full of apocrypha and alternate claimants. Perhaps someone did play something like D&D in the 1940s. Maybe there’s a letter buried in an archive describing a fantasy parlor game with a referee and evolving characters. If so, that’s fascinating, but it’s not the same as creating the roleplaying game as we know it today.

Invention isn’t about who got there first. It’s about who made it possible for others to follow.

Freedom Friday

Despite having refereed roleplaying games for more than four decades, I still suffer from what can only be described as stage fright. It’s not a new affliction. In fact, if I’m honest, I think I’ve felt it for most of my life as a referee and it hasn’t diminished much with time or experience. At the moment, I’m running three separate campaigns: House of Worms, Barrett's Raiders, and Dolmenwood. The first has lasted more than a decade, the second is entering its middle years, and the third is still in its relatively early stages. Yet, with each of them, without fail, I feel a familiar anxiety in the hours (and sometimes days) before every session.

My fear isn’t so much that I’ll “do it wrong” in some technical sense. It’s more that I’ll let my players down – that I’ll fail to be imaginative, that I won’t keep the game engaging, or that I’ll be caught flatfooted, like a deer in the headlights, with no idea what to do next. Mind you, my players aren’t strangers. In most cases, I’ve known my players for years, sometimes decades. They’re friends and long-time collaborators in this shared hobby of ours. Despite this, the fear persists: that I’m wasting their time, that the spell will break, and the game will sputter out.

The irony is that this fear tends to fade during the session itself. Once the game begins, once I see the players reacting, asking questions, scheming, laughing, I usually – usually – find myself caught up in the moment. The game world takes over and real-world anxieties fade into the background. But before the session (and sometimes afterward)? That’s when the doubt creeps in.

Fridays, for example, are often my most relaxed days of the week, not because of anything inherent to Friday, but because they’re farthest from my next scheduled session. I run games on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursdays, which means that, by Saturday, an internal countdown has already begun. The butterflies stir. I start second-guessing myself. Do I have any idea how I’m going to handle what may happen next?

To some extent, this isn’t really about preparation, at least not in the usual sense. I’ve long admitted that I’m a lazy referee. I don’t spend hours poring over notes or crafting detailed plans. Most of my prep consists of a few scribbled bullet points, some half-formed ideas, and a handful of hopeful notions about what might happen. I suspect that’s partly a defense mechanism. Too much planning stresses me out and tends to make me rigid at the table. I’ve learned that, for me, the best sessions are the ones where I stay loose and follow the players’ lead. Improvisation keeps me responsive. It keeps things alive.

Improvisation also leaves me exposed. When you haven’t mapped out every possibility, it’s easy to feel unready or worse, like you’ve been caught bluffing. Maybe that’s the root of the stage fright. It's the sense that I’ll be found wanting, that I’ll freeze up, that I’ll have nothing of value to offer when it matters most. I sometimes think there’s an unspoken belief that veteran referees, especially those with a lot of campaigns under their belt, must always feel confident in their role. To some degree, I do. I’ve run a lot of sessions that my players have told me they enjoyed. I’ve done this for a long time. I know I can do it.

Of course, knowing and believing in the moment are two very different things.

I'm sure I’m not alone in feeling this way. I suspect many long-time referees harbor similar doubts but rarely speak them aloud. In a sense, we’re all performers. Our "stage" is small, our "scripts" unwritten, and our "audience" made up of fellow performers who are just as invested as we are. Like all performers, we fear falling short, letting others down, not being good enough.

I’ve reluctantly come to accept this fear as just part of the process. I can’t say I enjoy it, but I’ve learned to live with it. If nothing else, it’s a reminder that what we do at the table matters. It matters to our players, certainly, but it matters just as much to us. We care. We want to do a good job, because the shared world we build with our friends is worth the effort and, yes, even the worry.

That’s why I love Fridays. I let myself enjoy that brief moment of calm before the tide of self-doubt rolls back in. I also remind myself that fear isn’t failure, but evidence that I still care a great deal about these games I play with my friends each week.

From the Brontës to Braunstein

The history of roleplaying games is, by now, well known, at least in broad outline. In the early 1970s, a handful of imaginative wargamers, drawing on a variety of inspirations, both literary and ludic – I hate jargon like that but I can think of no better word – devised a new kind of game. What began as an offshoot of miniatures wargaming blossomed into something wholly novel: Dungeons & Dragons, the first roleplaying game and the start of an entirely new hobby. What’s less often asked is whether something like D&D could have arisen earlier. Could roleplaying games have been invented, not merely in embryonic form, but recognizably so, decades before their actual debut?

It’s a question I was recently asked by a reader via email, though, as I told him in my reply, it's also one I've mulled over many times myself. On the one hand, it seems completely plausible. Human beings have always told stories, assumed roles, and imagined themselves as other people. On the other hand, roleplaying games, as we understand them today, require more than just imagination. They require rules, structure, and a framework for shared storytelling that’s open-ended but repeatable, not to mention playable by groups of people. That’s a tall order and one, I suspect, that might not have been fulfillable much earlier than it actually was.

Even so, I think it's a question worth exploring, as I told my correspondent. That's why I decided to devote this post to the topic, including some brief speculation about just what a roleplaying game produced prior to 1974, had it been created, could have looked like.

Before doing that, though, I wanted to offer a rough definition of what I mean by a "roleplaying game." To my mind, a roleplaying game is not just a game with characters or a narrative, but one in which players assume the roles of imaginary personas within a shared, evolving, fictional world. There must also be open-ended interaction with that world, adjudicated by a set of rules or by a human referee (probably both). In other words, the game must provide a mechanism for ongoing collaborative storytelling that can generate new situations, rather than merely following a pre-written script.

We can quibble about my definition and, truth be told, I'm not entirely happy with it, but I think it's good enough for my present purposes. Given the parameters, then, under what conditions could such a thing even arise?

To start, there must be a culture of play – not just childhood play, but adult leisure time devoted to structured, often abstract, pastimes. This criterion, I think, narrows the field considerably. While games of all kinds are ancient, hobby gaming of the kind that leads to things like miniatures battles, science fiction conventions, or fanzine communities is a fairly recent phenomenon. Prior to the mid-20th century, hobbies tended to be solitary (e.g. collecting stamps, building model trains) or social but formal (e.g. cards, chess, sports). The idea of imaginative, improvisational group play as a serious adult pursuit was likely a bridge too far for most societies until not all that long ago.

Then there is the economic component. RPGs are, by their nature, complex. They typically involve rulebooks, paper, dice, pencils, maybe miniatures, and a steady stream of new materials to read and incorporate. All of this presupposes access to affordable printing, widespread literacy, and sufficient disposable income to indulge in what is, quite frankly, a non-essential pastime.

Add to this the influence of fantasy literature, particularly the kind that fosters immersion in imaginary worlds. While such literature absolutely existed prior to the 20th century – my Pulp Fantasy Library series includes multiple examples of what I'm talking about – the genre had not yet reached the critical mass needed to inspire a broader movement of readers-turned-creators. That wouldn't come until the rise of the pulps and, later, the mass popularity of J.R.R. Tolkien.

All of which is to say: I don’t believe roleplaying games were inevitable. Nor do I believe they could have arisen all that much earlier than they did. Nevertheless, there are a few intriguing possibilities worth considering.

Of all the earlier eras that might have given rise to something resembling a roleplaying game, the Victorian period is perhaps the most plausible. The Victorians were inveterate hobbyists, fond of catalogs, elaborate parlor games, and gentlemanly pastimes pursued with a zeal that often bordered on the obsessive. More significantly, they were among the first to develop formal wargames, none more famous than H.G. Wells’s Little Wars, published in 1913 (technically, post-Victorian, but I'm OK with that).

While Little Wars lacks the improvisational openness and character-centered focus of a true roleplaying game, it nevertheless offers tantalizing glimpses of the path not taken. For example, it encourages the invention of fictional armies and, by implication, fictional countries to support them. Wells himself recounts some of his battles in narrative terms, portraying himself and his opponents as imaginary generals leading imaginary forces, complete with strategic dilemmas and dramatic turns of fate. In this, one can detect the germ of roleplaying. With a slight cultural shift and a bit more emphasis on character over campaign, one can almost imagine Little Wars evolving into something more like a roleplaying game.

One might also consider the games of the Brontë children, consisting of invented worlds, described through stories, poems, and letters. Inspired by a set of toy soldiers given to Branwell Brontë in December 1827, the siblings each created an imaginary kingdom, complete with its own geography, history, and cast of recurring characters. These were private amusements rather than games in any formal sense. There were, for instance, no rules or adjudication, but they demonstrate that the impulse for immersive, serialized storytelling existed, even among children raised in relative isolation. The Brontës' creations are reminiscent in some ways to a referee’s campaign setting, continuously expanded and revised over time and in response to changing events within it.

What’s striking about these two examples is how each contains one half of what roleplaying games would eventually become. Wells provided rules and structured play, but his battles lacked characters in the personal, individual sense and unfolded largely without narrative continuity beyond what the players themselves imposed. The Brontës, by contrast, created intricate, evolving worlds filled with characters and stories, but they did so without any formal rules or mechanisms for shared adjudication. In both cases, the essential components were present but disconnected: storytelling without structure and structure without storytelling. What was lacking was a bridge between these imaginative impulses and the domain of systematized, collaborative play, a framework that could make private fantasy into a repeatable, transmissible experience shared by many. The alchemy of open-ended narrative bound to procedure – the heart of roleplaying games in my opinion – had not yet been discovered.

It was not until the interwar period that some of these conditions began to change. The rise of pulp magazines introduced vast new audiences to tales of fantasy, science fiction, and weird horror. These stories, though often formulaic, laid the groundwork for shared genres and tropes. Even more important were the fandoms that grew up around them, through letters columns, conventions, and amateur press associations. Consider, for example, that H.P. Lovecraft met some of his closest friends, many of whom went on to become influential writers of fantasy and science fiction themselves, through APAs to which he belonged.

These fan communities did more than read. They created. They wrote fiction, debated continuity, argued over setting and character details, and occasionally even imagined themselves in the worlds they loved. This tendency only deepened after World War II, as mass printing and distribution became cheaper and more accessible and science fiction and fantasy matured as genres. Early versions of LARPing, the Society for Creative Anachronism, and the first fantasy board games all emerged from this stew of fannish creativity. It is no accident that Gygax and Arneson also came from this world. Without it, Dungeons & Dragons could never have been created or, if it had been created, would never have found a large audience.

Had someone in the 1930s or 1940s attempted to create a roleplaying game, I suspect it would have looked very different from what we know today. Possibly, it might have taken the form of an elaborate correspondence game, with players sending letters in-character to a central referee, who adjudicated events and mailed back results. Alternately, it might have resembled a parlor game with scripted outcomes. In any case, I suspect it would have remained confined to a small circle of friends, passed between them alone and never published. All of these are intriguing counterfactuals, of course, but they also highlight how contingent the birth of the RPG truly was. It required more than creative individuals. It required the right cultural, economic, technological, and especially social context.

Could roleplaying games have been invented earlier than they were?

In theory, yes. In practice, I highly doubt it. Too many of the prerequisites simply weren’t present until the 1960s and early ’70s: the widespread embrace of fantasy fiction, the do-it-yourself ethos of fandom, the democratization of leisure, and a new cultural openness to improvisation and play. It’s tempting to view RPGs as inevitable, as something that had to happen, but history rarely works that way. In another timeline, Gary Gygax might have remained an insurance underwriter and Dave Arneson a gifted but obscure tinkerer with wargames rules. The creation of Dungeons & Dragons was, in many ways, a happy historical accident.

Even so, it's fun to imagine a world in which Edwardian gentlemen gather in a smoky drawing room, taking on the roles of Martian adventurers or subterranean explorers, while a bespectacled referee consults a sheaf of densely typed rules from behind a screen and invokes the power of the d12. Alas, it never happened nor was it likely to have done so.

The Shadow Over August

August marks the birth month of H.P. Lovecraft, whose peculiar vision has cast a long and often unsettling shadow over the realms of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. In recognition of this, I’ve decided to devote the coming month here at Grognardia to what I’m calling The Shadow Over August, a series of posts exploring the life, legacy, and influence of the Old Gent from Providence.

As I mentioned earlier this week, Pulp Fantasy Library will be returning in August on a trial basis, in part to honor Lovecraft and his contributions to the weird tale. However, I’ve since come to feel that this alone isn’t enough. Lovecraft’s presence deserves to be felt more widely across the blog. In addition to literary retrospectives, I’ll be delving into Call of Cthulhu and other Lovecraft-inspired roleplaying games, considering both their origins and their enduring impact on the hobby. I’ll also be sharing thoughts on Lovecraft’s broader influence on gaming, fantasy, and science fiction, along with outlines for two Call of Cthulhu projects I began many years ago but never finished. With luck, they may yet prove useful (or at least thought-provoking) to others.

This isn’t intended as an exhaustive or scholarly treatment of Lovecraft’s work. Rather, The Shadow Over August is a personal exploration of the ways his idiosyncratic imagination continues to shape the creative pastimes so many of us enjoy, often in ways we scarcely notice. Whether you’re a long-time admirer of Lovecraft or simply curious about his lasting presence in the hobby, I hope you’ll join me in the weeks to come as I shine a light, however briefly, on this strange and enduring figure.

The Shape of the Heavens

Sing, Muse, of the noble dodecahedron, twelve-faced and true, 
So oft neglected in the clattering chorus of polyhedral dice! 
Raise now a hymn to the least loved of gaming’s solids.

Pity the poor d12! Always the bridesmaid, never the bride. The d20, that lumbering golf ball of chance, sees far more use, while even the d4, a caltrop in disguise, is remembered (if only by the soles of our feet). But the d12? Forgotten. Neglected. Dare I say underappreciated?

Yet, what a die it is! Twelve equal pentagonal faces, each meeting at broad angles. Indeed, the dodecahedron is the shape Plato associated with the heavens themselves, the cosmos rendered in acrylic or resin. According to some ancient sources, the gods used d12s when rolling for Fate. Who needs the Pythia when you’ve got precision-milled polyhedra?

Physically, the d12 may be the most satisfying die to hold. Substantial without being bulky. Perfectly symmetrical. It rolls with purpose. It doesn’t skitter like a d4 or overdo it like percentiles. The d12 knows what it’s about. It rolls once and rolls well. There’s something reassuring in that.

But what is it usually asked to do? Calculate long sword damage against large opponents. Serve as the hit die for the barbarian. It's the gaming equivalent of being called in to move a couch. Even the d10, that irregularly-shaped interloper, has muscled its way to the top of the pile, if only for percentile rolls. The d12? Banished to the edge of the table, like some exiled aristocrat.

I've done my part to rectify this injustice in Thousand Suns, where the d12 takes its rightful place at the center of the action. Why? Because it deserved better. Because it felt right. Because when I picture futuristic exploits in a sprawling interstellar empire, I don’t want to roll a pyramid or a cube. I want a Platonic solid whose geometry is touched by the divine. I want the Golden Ratio embedded in plastic.

So, here’s to the d12: noble, overlooked, and elegant. May we find more uses for it at our tables – and more excuses to hear its satisfying clatter. After all, if it's good enough for the heavens, it ought to be good enough for us.

The Best of Grognardia

I promise it's not my intention to constantly steer readers toward my new Substack newsletter. That said, since it’s still a relatively new venture, I want to make sure regular readers of the blog know what’s happening. I’m using the newsletter as a dedicated space for my RPG writing and design content, while this blog will continue as always with its usual fare. Think of the newsletter not as a replacement, but as a companion to Grognardia, another outlet for ideas that might not always fit here.

With that in mind, I’ve just posted a sort of follow-up to last week’s Preserving Grognardia, where I share more of my current thoughts and early plans for a possible Grognardia anthology (or even a series of them). If that sounds intriguing, you can check it out via the link below.

The Best of Grognardia by James Maliszewski

What Are You Favorite Posts?

Read on Substack

Retrospective: Hall of the Fire Giant King

Like its predecessors, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and The Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl, Hall of the Fire Giant King (AD&D module G3) casts the player characters in the role of elite agents tasked with stopping a wave of giant-led attacks against civilized lands. At first glance, G3 seems to follow the familiar pattern established by the earlier modules: a dangerous foray into the stronghold of a powerful giant chieftain, bristling with guards, traps, and treasure. However, Hall of the Fire Giant King subtly but significantly shifts the tone and scope of the series. In the volcanic fortress of King Snurre Ironbelly, the stakes begin to change. The fire giants are stronger, more disciplined, and clearly part of a larger, more organized force. Most crucially, they are not acting alone. Hidden deep within their halls are strange and powerful allies – the drow.

The appearance of the drow, mysterious and only briefly described here, marks a pivotal moment not just in the G-series but in the history of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons itself. This is their first true introduction into the game, beyond a cursory reference in the Monster Manual, and it opens the door to something far more expansive. In retrospect, the drow are the most significant legacy of this module and G3 is the seed from which they (and the subterranean realm from which they come) would grow. The drow would, of course, go on to take center stage in the celebrated D-series (Descent into the Depths of the Earth, Shrine of the Kuo-Toa, and Vault of the Drow) and in Queen of the Demonweb Pits. While those later adventures are better known and more ambitious, it is here, in Hall of the Fire Giant King, that the broader arc first begins to unfold. Gary Gygax’s decision to place these enigmatic figures behind the scenes of the giants’ uprising was a masterstroke, one that quietly expanded the narrative scope of what a D&D adventure could be.

In terms of presentation, Hall of the Fire Giant King also reflects the transitional state of adventure design in 1978. Like its predecessors, it was originally created for tournament play, which explains both its high level of difficulty and its emphasis on tactical combat. There is little in the way of exposition or character development. The fire giants certainly have motivations, but Gygax rarely dwells on them. Instead, they exist primarily as obstacles to be overcome. Much of the module consists of populated chambers, heavily guarded halls, and defensible choke points, all spaces presented for intense, deadly conflict. Success demands planning, coordination, and no small amount of caution. This is adventure design in its raw, uncompromising form, rewarding player skill and punishing incaution.

Yet even within this sparse and utilitarian framework, there are hints of something more. Secret doors lead to hidden levels. Mysterious altars and magical portals suggest the influence of otherworldly forces. Cryptic symbols and strange alliances point to deeper mysteries. Gygax may not linger on these details, but their presence invites speculation and discovery, encouraging referees to build upon them. In this way, G3 foreshadows the more expansive and narrative-driven modules to come, not only the D-series, but later experiments in long-form storytelling such as Dragonlance in the 1980s and the “adventure path” format popularized by Dungeon magazine in the early 2000s. Hall of the Fire Giant King doesn't tell a story in that modern sense, but it gestures toward one and that gesture proved enormously influential.

From the vantage point of the present, G3 may seem narrower in scope or rougher in execution than the adventures it leads into. I actually think that's part of its importance. As both the climax of the "Against the Giants" trilogy and the prelude to the D-series, it bridges two different modes of adventure design: the brutal, self-contained dungeon crawl and the broader, interconnected campaign. Without Hall of the Fire Giant King, the drow might never have become one of the game’s signature antagonists. More broadly, the ambition and structure of later adventures might have taken a very different form without this model to follow.

In the end, I feel Hall of the Fire Giant King is best appreciated not just as the finale of the G-series but as a threshold. It marks a turning point where the possibilities of adventure design began to expand, where dungeon crawls started evolving into epics. With its hidden depths, emergent story, and quiet worldbuilding, Gygax showed that even a tournament module could hint at vast, subterranean empires and the demon-goddess who ruled them. Its influence is subtle but foundational and its legacy lives on in the continuity it helped establish across TSR’s early adventures and the ambitions it inspired in generations of designers to follow.

The Articles of Dragon: "Luna: A Traveller's Guide"

 I subscribed to Dragon from issue #68 (December 1982) till #127 (November 1987). During that five-year period, my favorite section of the magazine – by far – was the Ares Section, which appeared in its pages each month from issue #84 (April 1984) until issue #111 (July 1986). That's because the Ares Section, as its name suggests, was devoted entirely to science fiction roleplaying games and, being even more of a sci-fi nerd than I am a fantasy one, this held a great deal of appeal for me. As you'll know doubt learn over the course of the coming weeks, many of my favorite and most beloved articles of Dragon appeared in the Ares Section and left a lasting impact on both my memories of the magazine as a whole and one my youthful imagination.

One of the interesting things the section's editors occasionally did was run series in which a topic was given an article devoted to showing how that topic was handled in a particular science fiction RPG. One of the first one (and one of the best) concerned Earth's satellite, the Moon. Over the course of five articles, the Ares Section treated readers to depictions of the Moon in Gamma World, Star Trek, Space Opera, Other Suns, and, finally, Traveller, the last of which is the subject of today's post. I found all these articles incredibly interesting, though, as you'd expect, the one for Traveller, appearing in issue #87 (July 1984), is the one most dear to my heart.

To begin with, the article in question was penned by none other than the creator of Traveller, himself, Marc W. Miller. That immediately lent it a high degree of importance in my young eyes. Miller was to Traveller as Gary Gygax was to Dungeons & Dragons: the final authority. Consequently, when his byline appeared on an article – which was rare, much rarer than Gygax – I took it very seriously. I took "Luna: A Traveller's Guide" as absolutely official and duly incorporated the information contained in it into my Traveller adventures and campaigns. 

Furthermore, the article described the Moon – or Luna, as it's called here – within the context of GDW's Third Imperium setting. For those unfamiliar with the intricacies of that setting, Earth (or Terra) is the homeworld of the Solomani, the "original" human race that evolved naturally on that planet. All other human races, like the Vilani and the Zhodani, descended from Terran humans transplanted to other worlds by the mysterious Ancients, a technologically advanced alien race that once roamed the galaxy 300,000 years ago. Terra and Luna are currently under military occupation by the Third Imperium, a consequence of losing the Solomani Rim War more than a century ago, when the Solomani attempted to secede from the Imperium.

It's against this backdrop that Miller presents his vision of Luna as a lightly populated scientific colony in orbit around the homeworld of humaniti (as Traveller spells the name of the human race taken as a whole). Miller provides information on the population and demographics of the Moon, its settlements and transportion, its politics, and, of course, its history. The latter is especially interesting, as it helps to provide additional details about the deep background of the Third Imperium setting, such as the Solomani discovery of jump drive and its role in the Interstellar Wars against the Vilani First Imperium. As a teenager, this was catnip to me, both as a Traveller fan and as someone who'd grown up in the afterglow of the 1969 Moon landing.

I loved it all, of course, but, re-reading the article now, I do wonder what people not as immersed in the Third Imperium setting would have thought of it. For example, there are lots of adventure seeds throughout the article, but almost all of them tie into some aspect of imperial history or some other unique aspect of the Third Imperium. That's not a unique "problem" to this article; the other treatments of the Moon are similar in this regard. However, it's something I noticed now and started to think about: how does one present an adventure locale that simultaneously leverages its connection to a particular setting while also providing something of interest/use to people who don't use or know much about that setting? This is a question I still struggle with to some degree and I suspect I'm not the only RPG writer who does so.

But, as I said, I didn't even notice it at the time. I was simply excited to learn more about the Moon in one of my favorite imaginary settings. From that perspective, "Luna: A Traveller's Guide" gave me everything I wanted and more.