The Articles of Dragon: "Pysbots and Battle Mechs"

For good or for ill, my interest in the history of the hobby of roleplaying is intertwined with my interest in the history of the industry to which it gave birth. In particular, I find the history of The House That D&D Built – TSR Hobbies – to be endlessly fascinating, especially how dysfunctional it seems to have been as a business for most of its existence. To be fair, very few RPG companies have much to crow about in this regard, but TSR seems to be a prime example of a company succeeding in spite of itself. The more I learn about TSR's history, the more surprised I am that it managed to survive for nearly a quarter of a century.

I was reminded of this as I looked through the Ares Section of issue #99 of Dragon magazine (July 1985) and came across Mike Breault's article "Psybots and Battle Mechs." The article in question was intended as a preview of a then-upcoming science fiction roleplaying game, entitled Proton Fire. By "preview," I don't mean of the game's rules but mostly of its background, though there are a few snippets about the mechanics (characters can be warriors, rangers, or engineers and there are "talents"). 

Background-wise, it's pretty thin gruel. The humans of the Matri system descend from colonists who long ago arrived from Earth and settled on Coreworld, the fourth planet of the system. In the colony’s early centuries, power gradually fell into the hands of the Corporation and its ruling council, the Quintad. Originally five elected officials, over time they became increasingly authoritarian. Their corruption deepened after the developments in cybernetics allowed them to transform themselves into immortal cyborgs and rule indefinitely through violence and intimidation. 

The dominance of the Quintad collapsed when a laboratory accident released a devastating virus that killed 90% of Coreworld’s population and shattered the Corporation’s control. In the aftermath, the University, an academic colony hidden within a moon of the fifth planet, declared independence and began searching for a new home for the surviving humans of Matri. The central conflict of Proton Fire now pits the University and its agents, who explore and defend humanity’s future, against the Corporation and the immortal Quintad, who seek to restore their former domination using ruthless operatives known as Eliminators.

Characters can be humans, cyborgs, or psybots. Humans are similar to their ancestors on Earth and protect themselves through the use of armored battle suits called mechs. Cyborgs are more or less what you'd expect. Psybots, meanwhile, are advanced robots that possess emotions and experience pain, but lack the empathy and insight of human beings. The article suggests that the characters devote themselves to exploration of new star systems and foiling the plans of the Quintad, though they never really explain what those plans are now that most of humanity is dead.

Despite all this, I was very intrigued by Proton Fire and looked forward to its release. I was and am a science fiction guy at heart and was genuinely curious to see if the actual game was more fully realized and expansive than this article suggested. Alas, that was not to be. A couple of issues later, TSR posted a retraction, in which they explained that there "wasn't a big market for a stand-alone robot game," so it would be repackaged as a supplement to Star Frontiers. That never happened either and all we have to go on regarding the game's final fate is what Steve Winter posted in a comment to this blog back in 2011.

I suspect this kind of thing happens more often than we realize. Goodness knows that my own track record when it comes to unfinished projects is far from stellar, so I shouldn't point fingers. Still, I'm just one guy, not a multi-million dollar game publisher like TSR was at the time. One day, I'd love to know more about Proton Fire and its origins. I suspect, though, it'll probably be one of those mysteries that I'll never see solved to my satisfaction. Oh, well.

Interstellar Commerce in the Thousand Suns

Interstellar Commerce in the Thousand Suns by James Maliszewski

Or, Everyone Loves Space Pirates.

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Rudy Kraft Responds

The response to my two-part interview with Rudy Kraft at the start of the month was very well received, generating a lot of comments and emails. A recurring elements of them was a desire for Rudy to expand upon or clarify his answers to my interview questions. Fortunately for readers of Grognardia, Rudy was paying attention to the comments and sent along a collection of responses to some of the questions put to him, along with some further thoughts and reflections on matters of interest.

Because there are a lot of replies and because some of them are lengthy, I'm going to place them behind the jump break below.

Pulp Science Fantasy Library: Empire of the East

Having enjoyed revisiting Hiero's Journey in last week’s installment of Pulp (Science) Fantasy Library, I thought I would continue along a similar path this week with 1979's Empire of the East. Before turning to the book itself, however, a bit of context is helpful.

Empire of the East is not a wholly new novel but an omnibus edition that gathers together three earlier works by Fred Saberhagen, The Broken Lands, The Black Mountains, and Changeling Earth. In preparing the omnibus edition, Saberhagen revised portions of the original texts so that they would read more smoothly as a single, unified narrative rather than three loosely connected installments. The result is a work that functions much more clearly as an epic novel than the original publications did.

Of these three component books, only Changeling Earth appears in Gary Gygax's Appendix N. The absence of the earlier volumes is somewhat curious, since they are integral parts of the same story. One possible explanation is that Gygax regarded Changeling Earth as representative of the trilogy as a whole, but this is only speculation. Regardless, the series as a whole exemplifies the kind of exuberant science fantasy that almost certainly helped inspire many early role-playing campaigns and adventures.

One of the central conceits of Empire of the East is that sufficiently advanced technology might appear indistinguishable from magic. By the 1950s and 1960s, the concept (immortalized as Clarke's Third Law) had already appeared in numerous science fiction stories. Saberhagen, however, approached the notion from a different direction. Rather than presenting magic as misunderstood technology, he imagined a catastrophe in which technology itself had literally been transformed into magic. It is an intriguing inversion of a familiar idea and one that gives the setting much of its distinctive flavor.

In Saberhagen’s imagined past, mankind fought a devastating war using immensely powerful computers capable of manipulating the laws of physics to achieve specific military ends. At the height of that conflict, these systems inadvertently triggered a phenomenon known as the Change. The Change permanently altered the behavior of the physical universe, rendering advanced technology unreliable or entirely inoperable. In its place arose a new set of forces that later generations would understand as magic. Over time, as knowledge of the pre-Change world faded, people came to regard magic not as a transformation of technology but simply as the natural order of things.

Within this transformed world stands the titular Empire of the East, a tyranny that dominates vast territories through a combination of sorcery and alliances with demonic powers. (The Change, it turns out, did more than reshape machines: it also gave rise to supernatural beings, including a powerful demon named Orcus, a name that will sound familiar to fans of Dungeons & Dragons.) Against this empire stands a loose resistance movement known as the Free Folk.

The story begins with Rolf, a young man whose life is shattered when imperial forces destroy his village and carry off his family. Escaping captivity, he joins the Free Folk and soon begins receiving mysterious visions from an unseen entity called Ardneh. These visions guide him on a path that gradually reveals the deeper mysteries of his world. During his adventures, Rolf discovers an “Elephant,” an ancient armored vehicle from before the Change. To the people of his era, it appears to be a kind of legendary mechanical beast, but in truth it is a relic of the lost technological age. In a world where such artifacts are almost unknown, the Elephant becomes both a symbol of hope and a tangible advantage against the Empire.

As Rolf’s role within the resistance grows, the truth about Ardneh gradually comes to light. Ardneh is not a spirit or a wizard but a surviving artificial intelligence created before the Change. Long ago, it intervened to prevent global nuclear destruction. In doing so, however, it inadvertently helped trigger the very transformation that reshaped the world into its current magical form. The Empire, aided by the demon Orcus, seeks to destroy Ardneh and thereby secure its domination forever.

The narrative ultimately builds toward a large-scale confrontation between the Free Folk, guided by Ardneh, and the armies and supernatural forces of the Empire. It should surprise no one that the forces of resistance prevail in the end, though the victory comes only after the underlying truth about the world is revealed and some of the consequences of the Change are reversed.

I confess that I do not have a clear sense of how influential Empire of the East was when it first appeared, whether in its original installments or in its omnibus form. Apart from Gygax’s reference to Changeling Earth in Appendix N, I rarely encountered discussion of it during the years when I was first exploring fantasy literature. More often, the trilogy seems to arise in conversation as background to Saberhagen’s later The First Book of Swords and its sequels. Those novels appear to have achieved greater visibility, perhaps simply because they formed a longer and more widely published series.

Nevertheless, I think Empire of the East stands as an appealing example of a once-common strain of science fantasy featuring a magical world that is, in fact, the distant future of our own Earth. During my youth, such settings were remarkably popular, blending the wonder of fantasy with the speculative imagination of science fiction. Saberhagen’s trilogy embraces that hybrid approach wholeheartedly. By transforming the relics of advanced technology into the foundations of a magical world, he created a setting that feels at once ancient and futuristic, which, being a fan of "secret sci-fi," continues to hold great appeal for me.

Interstellar Currency and Banking

Interstellar Currency and Banking by James Maliszewski

Another Thousand Suns Rabbit Hole

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Nova Kalendario

Nova Kalendario by James Maliszewski

Timekeeping in the Thousand Suns

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Retrospective: Death Station

GDW's Traveller is justifably lauded for the wealth of tools it provided the referee in generating his own adventures, such as procedures for generating worlds, handling trade, and creating encounters, among many others. However, the company also published a large number of ready-made adventures, too, starting with The Kinunir in 1979 and I think they deserve to be better appreciated for how much they contributed to the success of the game. Though not all every Traveller adventure is a winner, many are classics.

One such classic is Death Station, one of two adventures published in 1981 as Double Adventure 3 (the other being Argon Gambit, about which I'll talk next week). Designed by Marc Miller, Death Station exemplifies many of the sensibilities of early roleplaying adventures by being compact and largely concerned with providing a referee with a location, a problem, and a handful of dangers with which to challenge the player characters rather than much in the way of background detail. 

The scenario's premise is simple. The characters are hired by Lysani Laboratories to investigate a lab ship orbiting the world of Gadden after communication with it has been lost. Upon arrival, they discover that most of its crew is dead, while the station itself shows signs of damage. Further investigation reveals scattered clues pointing to psychochemical experiments intended to produce a new type of combat drug that heightened personal strength, dexterity, and endurance. The experiments were successful to a degree, but sabotage by a rival company resulted in the entire crew being exposed to an early version of the combat drugs that enhanced their physical abilities at the cost of their sanity. Now deranged, they pose a threat to anyone who boards the lab ship.

In a sense, Death Station offers what might be called a science fictional "dungeon,” complete with "monsters" in the form of the deranged crew. The lab ship is mapped and divided into keyed areas through which the player characters must move cautiously, examining laboratories, storage areas, and crew quarters. As in a fantasy dungeon, each location aboard ship offers the possibility of discovery, danger, or both. Logs, notes, and physical evidence gradually reveal what happened, while the deranged survivors and similarly deranged lab animals ensure that exploration is never safe.

The influence of movies like 1979's Alien is clear, I think, but, rather than resorting to an unknown extraterrestrial threat, Death Station opts instead for reckless science running afoul of corporate espionage, which fits well within Traveller's more sober approach to SF. Even so, the adventure has great atmosphere, which is a big part of why I count it among my Top 10 Classic Traveller adventures. The scenario relies less on direct exposition than on the gradual accumulation of clues. Some of that is a direct consequence of its sparseness of its descriptions and room keys, which is as much intentional as it is driven by the shortness of the page count.  

Even so, Miller includes four pages of referee's notes that help provide not only a brief overview of what happened aboard the lab ship and why but also guidelines for how to run encounters with the deranged crew and experimental animals. This is useful, since part of the fun of Death Station is navigating its cramped rooms and corridors while its inhabitants also move about and stalk the characters. Also included in the notes is a discussion of the effects of the experimental combat drug, which is also helpful in handling encounters involving the crew who are affected by it. 

My own experience with Death Station is that it’s both straightforward to run and surprisingly tense in play. The confined environment of the lab ship, combined with the unpredictable behavior of the drug-crazed crew, creates a constant sense of unease. The situation is made more tense due to the fact that, once the characters understand what's going on, they likely won't want to kill the surviving crew but instead seek a way to subdue and possibly cure them – at least, that's what has happened when I've made use of the scenario in the past.

From chatting with other Traveller fans, I've come to realize I'm not alone in regarding Death Station so highly. Its premise is immediately understandable, its structure is easy for a referee to grasp at a glance, and its atmosphere remains effective. Like many of GDW’s adventures, it provides just enough detail to establish the situation while leaving ample room for the referee to elaborate as needed. That balance between guidance and openness is a plus in my opinion and it’s certainly why Death Station has a lot of replay value, even after more than four decades since its publication.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "History of a Game That Failed"

Issue #99 of Dragon (July 1985) featured an article by David F. Godwin entitled "History of a Game That Failed." I don't ever recall reading it, though I'm sure I must have, when I first got the issue in the mail if not at some time later. Re-reading it in preparation for this post was an enlightening experience, both for what the article might have said about gaming culture at the time of its publication and how I react to its contents now.

The article contains Godwin's reflections on being "soft-hearted enough to want to see the PCs survive and do well" to the point that he "was no longer playing the AD&D game. [He] was shooting fish in a barrel." I must confess that I was very surprised to see an article like this appear in an issue of Dragon published in 1985, since my recollection of that time was of an era when being "soft-hearted enough to want to see the PCs survive and do well" was not just increasingly commonplace but de rigeur.

Intriguingly, the first "tip" Godwin passes along as a result of his past failure is "Feel free to fudge." Though he introduces this tip with a story of how he pretended to roll low on an attack that would have killed a PC, he is quick to point out that fudging rolls "doesn't have to be in favor of the players." He adds that it is the referee who is the final arbiter of what is and is not true in his own campaign. Never let an errant dice roll or players quoting chapter and verse from a rulebook lead you to think otherwise.

Tip two is "Just because it's in a module doesn't mean it's so." In particular, he's talking about the strength of opponents and the amount of treasure and magic items. I must admit I find this tip odd, because, even in my worst letter-of-the-law days of gaming, I never felt that the contents of a module was sacrosanct. However, Godwin claims that he did think they were and it took him some time to realize that it was acceptable to alter what was written in adventure to suit his own campaign.

Tip three is "Be exceedingly stingy in handing out magic items." This tip is apparently near and dear to Godwin's heart, because he discusses it at length, providing lots of examples of magic items he feels are exceedingly powerful, or at least problematic if the referee is not careful. To be fair, he's not opposed to placing powerful magic items in the hands of PCs; he simply thinks the referee needs to conscious of the potential for mischief such items bring with them. This is a fair point and many an inexperienced referee commits this mistake.

Tip four is "Don't let your players have a continuous commune spell." By this he means that the players should be kept in the dark as often as possible, since knowledge is what gives the referee his edge -- including the properties of magic items. Godwin stresses the limits even of spells like identify and encourages the referee to take full advantage of it.

Tip five is "Do not allow a character to become more powerful than a chugging locomotive." Here he's talking specifically about ability score inflation, both through magic items and spells.

Tip six is "If they wish for the moon, don't let them have it." I'm actually surprised that, in 1985, there was still a need to talk about all the delightful ways wishes can be used to turn the tables on the players, but apparently there was.

Tip seven is "No, you can polymorph your henchman into Odin." You know, I had no idea until very recently that polymorph was apparently such a troublesome spell for a lot of D&D gamers. I honestly don't recall a single time it's ever given me grief as a referee, since the spell description I remember is pretty clear about its limitations.

Tip eight is "Be careful playing with fireballs." Sure.

Tip nine is "Be reasonable in awarding experience points." Godwin here encourages referees to use the "equivalent hit dice" system from the Dungeon Masters Guide, which is an oft-forgotten element of AD&D. It basically compares the value of the characters' levels against the hit dice of the monsters they defeat and then adjusts the value of the XP gained up or down accordingly. The system is intended, like its rough equivalent in OD&D, to put the breaks on gaining easy experience points through killing much weaker foes in large numbers. Again, this has never been a problem for me personally, but I fully support slowing the rate of character advancement.

Tip ten is "Go easy on the poor deities." That this needed to be said at all is sad.

Tip eleven is "Beware the many-headed hydra." Here Godwin is discouraging allowing one player to play more than one character in an adventure at the same time. That's just common sense.

Tip twelve is "Avoid an adversary relationship with your players." Godwin notes that it's inevitable that referees and players will be at odds, since players are always trying to pull fast ones on their referees:

It would be a wonderful world if players were so conscientious and so willing to risk their characters for the sake of a good time that they never looked at the Dungeon Masters Guide, the modules, or even "Dungeon Master advice" articles (such as this one) in magazines. It would even be nicer if they did not look up monsters in the Monster Manual, FIEND FOLIO Tome, and Monster Manual II whenever they confronted them. Maybe you can forbid this sort of activity during the playing of an adventure, but you can't control what players do on their own time. And never underestimate the ingenuity of players. I once had a player justify looking in the Monster Manual during play by saying that his character carried around a bestiary in his backpack!

Despite this, try and make it clear to your players that your iron-fisted rule is all in the name of fun, to ensure that the game remains challenging for all.

That's a lot to digest, but I think it provides a fascinating snapshot into at least one slice of the hobby back in 1985. Some of it comports well with my own recollections, while other parts of it feel like the author is describing a game in an alternate reality. I suspect this reaction will be true for a lot of my readers as well.

Pulp Science Fantasy Library: Hiero's Journey

Today, I'm being doubly cheeky. First and most obviously, I've decided to dub today's post an entry in the previously non-existent Pulp Science Fantasy Library series. In the past, I've occasionally run posts under the Pulp Science Fiction Library title, so this isn't wholly without precedent. In the case of Hiero's Journey, though, I think it's a reasonable modification, since it's definitely not a fantasy book in the usual Tolkien/Howard sense most people understand the term, but neither is it a "proper" science fiction tale of the sort that could have appeared in Gernsback's Amazing Stories.

Second, this is another book I have discussed before, albeit briefly. Like last week's post, this too was part of the Pulp Fantasy Gallery series, an early series that I more or less abandoned after a while (though I have revived a version of it from time to time, many to discuss the different pieces of artwork that have graced the covers of famous fantasy books). In any case, I like Hiero's Journey enough that I thought it would be productive to do a full post on it and its relationship to the history of RPGs.

Though first published in 1973, I didn't read Sterling Lanier's post-apocalyptic tale until almost a decade later, when I chanced upon it in a bookstore at the local mall. Though Gary Gygax listed the book in Appendix N, I am almost certain the first time I ever saw a reference to it was in the foreword to Gamma World, which is why I picked it up. I instantly fell in love with it. If I had to pick a single book that captures my own sense of what Gamma World was meant to be, I'd probably choose Hiero's Journey. Certainly, it's the book that, even now, I still find myself subconsciously influenced by whenever I try to imagine what the game is and should be.

Lanier himself is an interesting fellow. As a writer, he produced only a small number of works, of which Hiero’s Journey is probably the best known (and that's being kind). For a time, he worked as an editor at Chilton Books, where he was involved in bringing Frank Herbert's Dune to publication after having read it in serialized form in Analog magazine. Herbert had had great difficulty in selling his novel elsewhere, but Lanier believed it would sell well. When it didn't, he lost his job at Chilton, which led to his taking up writing more seriously.

Hiero’s Journey is set in North America thousands of years after a catastrophic nuclear war referred to simply as “the Death.” The devastation of that ancient conflict reduced the technological civilization of the past to scattered ruins and reshaped the natural world in unexpected ways. Mutated animals roam the wilderness, some hostile, others capable of domestication, while human societies have reorganized themselves into small states and tribal cultures amid the remnants of the old world.

The novel’s protagonist, Per Hiero Desteen, is a priest-scholar belonging to a monastic order known simply as the Abbey, located within the Republic of Metz, a polity occupying part of what was once Canada. The Abbey preserves fragments of ancient learning and trains individuals with psychic abilities, including telepathy, which have become an important if poorly understood feature of the post-Death world.

At the outset of the novel, Hiero is dispatched on a secret mission by the leaders of the Abbey. Rumors suggest that somewhere to the south lies a cache of ancient knowledge about relics called "computers" that might aid the Republic of Metz in its ongoing struggle against a shadowy group known as the Dark Brotherhood. These enemies, whose influence extends across large portions of the former United States, employ both advanced relic technology of their own and psychic powers in pursuit of domination over the scattered civilizations that survived the Death.

Hiero’s titular journey takes him across a landscape that is at once recognizably North American and yet profoundly altered by millennia of mutation, ecological change, and cultural transformation. Along the way he encounters both allies and enemies, from human societies struggling to survive in the wilderness to intelligent animals capable of communication and monstrous creatures born from the lingering consequences of ancient radiation and experimentation.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the novel in my opinion is the way it blends several types of science fiction. On the one hand, the novel clearly belongs to the lineage of post-nuclear adventure stories that became common during the Cold War, exploring the long shadow cast by nuclear catastrophe. On the other hand, Lanier freely incorporates elements, such as psychic powers, telepathic animals, and quasi-medieval social structures, that give the setting a distinctly fantasy character. The resulting world feels less like a conventional science fiction future and more like a kind of Lost World romance set amid the ruins of modern civilization. That's probably why I so enjoyed the novel when I first read it.

It's also probably why Gary Gygax saw fit to include it in Appendix N to the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. Though set in post-apocalyptic North America, so much of the story's elements feel as if they could be part of an eccentric Dungeons & Dragons campaign, with psychic powers substituting for spells and ancient technology standing in for magic items. Of course, these qualities are also why the novel almost perfectly encapsulates what Gamma World is about, at least for me. The first time I read this book, I felt as if I finally understood Gamma World in a way I hadn't before. It might be an exaggeration to say this is the "key" to the game, but there's no question in my mind that it's helpful in getting into the mood for playing or refereeing it.

Lanier did write a sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero, which came out in 1983, shortly after I read the original. As follow-ups go, it's fine but nowhere near as good as its predecessor. Lanier was working on a third novel in the series but it was never released during his lifetime. Supposedly, it was finished by another author and published in 2024, but I've never read it and have doubts that it's any good. I had bad experiences with the sequel to A Canticle for Leibowitz being released under similar circumstances, so I'm quite wary of these posthumous collaborations. If anyone knows otherwise, I'd love to hear about it.

Art Is Not an Aesthetic

Art Is Not an Aesthetic by James Maliszewski

Or Depiction versus Presentation

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