Friday, November 8, 2024

The Ship of Ishtar Centennial Edition

Long time readers of this blog will know that I consider Abraham Merritt a foundational author in the creation of the genre we now call "fantasy" – an opinion shared by none other than Gary Gygax, who listed him among the authors of Appendix N. In the past, I've called Merritt fantasy's "forgotten father" in the past and I stand by that assessment. His "poetic and imaginative prose," to borrow Clark Ashton Smith's description of it is unique, as is his wild and occasionally feverish creativity.

Sadly, many of Merritt's best stories are no longer in print. If they are available, they're in a cheap, unattractive format that doesn't do them justice. That's why I am so pleased that DMR Books, one of the best small press publishers of what I call "pulp fantasy" is commemorating the 100th anniversary of the publication of The Ship of Ishtar with the publication of a new edition of the novel.

This new edition features Merritt's preferred version of the book's text, as well as an introduction by pulp expert Doug Ellis and an afterword by author and critic Deuce Richardson. Ellis has also assembled a collection of Ishtar-related ephemera in order to give a fuller picture of the novel and its significance. Just as important is the inclusion of nearly two dozen vintage illustrations by Virgil Finlay, one of the most celebrated illustrators of the Pulp Era.
It's a terrific edition of an important early work of pulp fantasy and I couldn't be happier that it's being released by DMR Books, many of whose previous releases now sit proudly on my shelves. DMR has led the way in making the works of lesser-known authors like Clifford Ball, Nictzin Dyahlis, A.B. Higginson, and Arthur D. Howden Smith, among others. available once again. That's an invaluable service and one for which those of us who appreciate older works of fantasy should be grateful.

If you're at all interested in Merritt or the foundational works of fantasy, I urge to take a look at the Centennial Edition of The Ship of Ishtar or indeed any of DMR's catalog of pulp authors. I say this not as someone with any involvement with DMR Books beyond being an admirer and well wisher. Like Merritt himself, they ought to be better known and appreciated for all that they do.

REPOST: Pulp Fantasy Library: The Ship of Ishtar

(Pulp Fantasy Library was, for years, one of the signature features of this blog and, even though I haven't posted a new entry in it in more than a year, it nevertheless remains the largest series of posts I've written. Today marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Abraham Merritt's The Ship of Ishtar, which was serialized in the pages of Argosy All-Story Weekly. To mark the occasion of its centennial, I'm reposting and updating my original entry on it from nearly fifteen years ago.)

Nearly all of the authors whose works I highlight in this space each week are those whose fame was once greater than it is today. There are exceptions, of course -- Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft being two good examples -- but contemporary fame often brings with it misunderstanding, with the author's stories and ideas reduced to mere caricatures. For good or for ill, Abraham Merritt has avoided that fate, his works largely unknown today, despite the fact that he was arguably the most popular fantasy and science fiction writer before World War II.

Dying suddenly of a heart attack in 1943 probably didn't help Merritt's career, but it's still almost inexplicable to imagine how the author of Seven Footprints to Satan, Dwellers in the Mirage, and The Moon Pool, never mind The Ship of Ishtar could be so obscure today. The Ship of Ishtar alone ought to merit (pun intended) its author more than throwaway mentions here and there, usually in reference to more well known authors whom he influenced, such as Jack Williamson, Walter Shaver, and H.P. Lovecraft. Clark Ashton Smith, whose birthday I commemorated just last week, was very taken with The Ship of Ishtar, explaining:
I enjoyed the rare and original fantasy of this tale, and have kept it longer than I should otherwise, for the sake of re-reading certain passages that were highly poetic and imaginative. Merritt has an authentic magic, as well as an inexhaustible imagination.
High praise indeed.

The Ship of Ishtar was originally released as a six-part serial novel over the course of November and December 1924 in Argosy All-Story Weekly. These parts were then collected into a hardcover in 1926, but in abridged form, excising some chapters and rearranging the text. It's this incomplete version of the story that's been reprinted again and again over the decades, with only (I believe) a single 1949 edition including the full text of the novel. The new centennial edition of DMR Books follows Merritt's preferred version of the text, as well as including vintage illustrations.

The Ship of Ishtar is the tale of Jack Kenton, a modern man who receives a package from an old archeologist friend. The package contains an ancient stone, inside of which Kenton finds a remarkable model of a ship. The ship is a magical creation and draws Kenton into it, pulling him backward in time to Babylonian times and into the midst of a struggle between the followers of the goddess Ishtar and followers of the god Nergal – the cursed inflicted because a priestess of Ishtar and a priest of Nergal dared fall in love with one another against the wishes of their respective deities. Now, the lieutenants of the priestess and priest, both of whom, for their own reasons, aided their superiors, are trapped on a ship divided between light and darkness and from which there can be no escape.

Kenton, not being a man of this time and not laboring under the curse of the gods, can move freely back and forth between the two sides of the ship. Having fallen in love with the beautiful Sharane, priestess of Ishtar, he offers to go to Klaneth, priest of Nergal, and attempt to find a means by which to end the conflict on the ship. In this respect, The Ship of Ishtar resembles many pulp fantasies of its time and after: a modern man, thrown into an unusual locale/time, finds himself able to go places and do things that those native to it cannot. What differentiates Merritt's novel, though, is its gorgeous prose and deep characterizations. Merritt is an author who takes his time in telling a story, presenting little details and nuances that other authors would rush past in an effort to get to the action.

This may be why Merritt fell out of favor in the years after the Second World War: he's not a "breezy" author. That's not to say his prose is slow going, because it's not. Indeed, I find Merritt much easier to read than, say, Lovecraft or even Smith, both of whose prose is every bit as adjective-laden and evocative. Yet, Merritt dwells on details, particularly the beauty or ugliness of characters, and it's possible that, for some, these details get in the way of their enjoyment. I think that's a pity, because, as I said, Merritt's text is not plodding and his descriptions and dialog are every bit as appealing as his action, but perhaps he is an acquired taste.

Regardless, Abraham Merritt is an important early fantasy author, one mentioned by Gygax in Appendix N, and The Ship of Ishtar may well be his masterpiece. Many thanks to DMR Books for making it available again. With luck, Merritt may soon gain the wider admiration he so richly deserves.

Thursday, November 7, 2024

Tyo-tomat

Yet more glorious Secrets of sha-Arthan art from Zhu Bajiee, this time a Ga'andrin tyo-tomat (or "elixir master"), a kind of sorcerer who supplements his natural magic talents by the regular ingestion of mutagenic chemicals. 

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Fantasy ... Taken to the Edge

One of the earliest advertisements for Planescape I remember seeing was this one, which appeared in issue #203 of Dragon (March 1994). Depicting the ruler(?) of Sigil, the Lady of Pain, it certainly piqued my interest. Even now, I think it's a pretty intriguing and evocative advertisement.

Retrospective: Planescape Campaign Setting

When I first acquired the AD&D Players Handbook – this was sometime in early 1980 – one of my favorite sections was Apprendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence. Taking up only a couple of pages, this appendix was the first time I'd ever encountered Gary Gygax's bizarre, mysterious, and wonderfully baroque ideas about the multiverse of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. What made Gygax's vision so weird compelling was its obsessive orderliness, which didn't simply tie the Outer Planes to each of the game's nine alignments, but to every conceivable shade in between. That's why, for example, the Seven Heavens are described as being "of absolute lawful good," while the planes of Elysium are "of neutral good lawfuls." 

Objectively, this is bonkers stuff, but I adored it and spent a lot of time thinking about the Outer (and other) Planes, aided no doubt by my fascination with the demons and devils of the Monster Manual. Despite Gygax's precise distinctions between the alignments of the Planes, AD&D didn't have a lot to say about them for a long time, aside from the occasional article in Dragon, like the ones about the Astral Plane (by Roger E. Moore) and the Nine Hells (by Ed Greenwood). And, of course, we later got Gygax's own developed thoughts about the Inner Planes, which were every bit as eccentric and persnickety as what he wrote in Appendix IV of the PHB all those years ago.

What I always wanted was a better sense of the Planes as a place and, more than that, as an adventuring locale. What sorts of adventures could AD&D characters have among the Planes? What made the Outer Planes different from the Prime Material Plane and how would this impact the kinds of adventures to be had there? The better Dragon articles, like those of Greenwood, did this well, or at least better than did Gygax, whose own ideas, while fascinating, remained largely in the realm of the theoretical. I wanted something more "down to earth," if you'll forgive the phrase. Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes was a good first step in that direction, but I wanted more.

As it turned out, I'd have to wait until 1994 to get that, in the form of the Planescape Campaign Setting – and it was not at all what I had expected. As imagined by David "Zeb" Cook and brought to visual life by Tony DiTerlizzi, the Outer Planes were indeed weird, though quite different from how they'd been previously portrayed. Instead of being presented as primarily the dwelling places of gods and demons, the Planes were instead a battleground between various factions of "philosophers with clubs," each of which hopes to remake reality according to their own idiosyncratic perspective. These factions, each associated (in some cases loosely) with an alignment or Outer Plane, were the driving force behind Cook's vision for Planescape. More than that, they provided an easy buy-in for player characters looking to involve themselves in the cosmic struggles of the setting.

"The setting." That's important. One of the clever things Cook did with Planescape was that he made the Planes a setting. They weren't just a place you could visit for a brief time; they were a place you could stay. Further, they were a place where even novice characters could stay, not merely high-level ones with access to potent magic. Further still, they were a place with its own native inhabitants and players could easily take up the role of one of them. Planescape gave AD&D's Planes a life of their own, divorced from the Prime Material Plane where most campaigns were set. Planescape made it possible to play entire campaigns where characters never once set foot on the World of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or any other "normal" campaign world. 

This was a bold approach and not at all what I or, I imagine, most AD&D players at the time were expecting. Not everyone warmed to Planescape's vision of the Planes. Indeed, I recall quite a few old hands who scoffed at it as taking too many cues from White Wolf's World of Darkness RPGs, which were very popular at the time. I can certainly appreciate the shock and surprise they probably felt upon reading Planescape and seeing DiTerlizzi's Dr Seuss-like depictions of the denizens of the Planes. This was not Gygax's Planes; it wasn't even Grubb's. It was something quite unique, filled with the strange, the odd, and the occasionally silly, and suffused with a punkish vibe that came through most strongly in its use of Planar Cant drawn from the criminal slang of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Many people, even fans of the setting, loathed the Cant, but there's no denying that it helped give Planescape a distinct flavor of its own.

Me, I enjoyed Planescape. It was not at all what I expected, but I enjoyed it for what it was: a strange, whimsical, wondrous take on world-hopping fantasy, with "worlds" in this case being other Planes of Existence, each with its own individual rules and style. And then there's Sigil, the City of Doors, located at the very center of the multiverse – if a series of infinite planes can truly be said to have a center. Home to the various planar factions and serving as a crossroads of the Planes, Sigil could serve as the basis for an entire campaign in itself, but it was also the perfect "home base" for planar characters whose adventures took them across the realms of the Great Wheel and beyond. Like Planescape itself, I really enjoyed Sigil and had a lot of fun with it.

I have lots of thoughts I could share about Planescape, both positive and negative, but my overall feeling for it is one of affection. I first made use of the setting as an adjunct to an ongoing Forgotten Realms campaign I ran in the mid-1990s. Later, I ran a "native" campaign among the Planes in the early days of Third Edition. Both were very well received by my players. Indeed, we still occasionally talk about some of the adventures they had in the setting. That's my usual measure of whether a gaming product succeeds – did I have fun with it? – and by that standard, Planescape is one of the greats.  

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

The Articles of Dragon: "Old Dwarvish is Still New to Scholars of Language Lore"

I promise this is the final article from issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982) that I'll talk about! However, since I'd already posted about the others devoted to languages in Dungeons & Dragons, I felt I'd be remiss not to do so for this one as well. 

"Old Dwarvish is Still New to Scholars of Language Lore" by Clyde Heaton is short in length and unusual in its approach. The piece purports to be the notes of "that illustrious pursuer of knowledge," Boru O'Bonker concerning the ancient language of Old Dwarvish. The language is no longer spoken regularly by dwarves, but exists as their ceremonial and traditional language. It survives mostly in poetry and religious rites and occasionally in old expressions and colloquialisms. The framing device of the article suggests that knowledge of the language is kept from outsiders, which is why O'Bonker is now on the run from "very short, heavily armed gentlemen" who had "a professional interest in him."

What then follows is a brief discussion of the phonology, grammar, and vocabulary of Old Dwarvish. When I say "brief," I'm not kidding. For example, here's the entirety of the vocabulary presented with the article. 
The grammar presented is similarly limited, presenting only the basic structure of Old Dwarvish sentences and the structural relationships between nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Within the context of the framing device, this is because O'Bonker is focused on unraveling the mystery of this ancient tongue. He doesn't yet have all the pieces, so his notes are, therefore, incomplete. That's a clever explanation, but one is then left with a question: Why? What's the purpose of this article, if not to provide the reader with a reasonably complete Old Dwarvish language to use in his adventures and campaign?

I have long suspected that the purpose of this article was, in fact, to show how little of a language a referee needed to create in order to make use of it in an adventure as a puzzle to be solved. In my youth, it was not at all uncommon for an important clue or piece of information in a dungeon to be hidden through the use of a cypher or an alphabet the referee made up. The players had to figure out a way to understand it and doing so was vital to moving forward. Most often, these cyphers used substitution or a similarly obvious method of hiding its information. More industrious referees would employ more elaborate methods. That's what I think Heaton is doing here, but I really can't say for certain.

Regardless of the author's actual intention, I was inspired by it to create my own partial languages for use in my Emaindor setting. I created fragments of Elvish (two varieties), Almerian (a Latin analog), Emânic, Tulikese, and more. I was no linguist, just a kid with an interest in foreign languages and a lot of time on his hands. So, I did my best to try to choose distinct sounds for each language and then a basic structure for sentences and enough vocabulary to name places and characters, as well as to, occasionally, make use of little phrases for color. I still have most of them in a binder my mother gave to me years ago, just before she sold my childhood home. They're nothing special but they were among my earliest attempts to create a coherent, "realistic" fantasy setting, so I retain an affection for them, which is why this article, despite its limitations, is one I look back on with similar affection.

Monday, November 4, 2024

Bafflement and Intrigue

Something I remember very vividly about growing up is that I'd sometimes find evidence of a popular culture I'd never encountered. Take, for example, Judge Dredd. 

Until I started reading White Dwarf, I don't think I had any real understanding of who Judge Dredd was. I certainly had never read any comic book in which he appeared and, even if I had, I'm not sure if I'd have understood and appreciated the cultural context out of which the character arose. Consequently, whenever I did brush up against Dredd, I was left feeling both baffled and intrigued – baffled, because what little I had gleaned about him made little sense to me and intrigued, for precisely the same reason. I wanted to know more, if only to make sense of all the fleeting references to him on this side of the Atlantic, but it wasn't easy.

Perhaps it's just a consequence of getting older, but I miss the days when I would feel baffled and intrigued by an artifact of some far-off sub-culture. That almost never happens anymore, thanks to the Internet. Assuming I even find something weird from a foreign land – an increasing rarity in the global village in which we're all now imprisoned – it doesn't take much time to find an explanation online. Long gone are the days when I'd be forced to puzzle out who some comic book character I'd never heard of was. Enlightenment is almost instantaneously within reach.

You'd think I'd be happy about that. My younger self would probably have loved to have had access to the Internet. Back then, I didn't enjoy being in the dark. I wanted to know everything about everything, especially when it came to nerdy matters, like science fiction or fantasy. Now, though, I find myself looking back wistfully at the days of my youth, before the emergence of the pop cultural beige slurry seeping into every nook and cranny of our wired world. I miss the days when not everywhere felt the same and I could luxuriate – and occasionally be frustrated by – the differences wrought by distance. 

The past is a foreign country that I'll never again get to visit.

Amalaric the Ill-Tempered

When I attended Gamehole Con this year, I decided I wouldn't referee any games, but would instead play in several. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, I'm usually the referee, so having the opportunity to play is a treat (even though I'm actually quite bad at it). Second, I intend to run some sessions at future Gamehole Cons – and perhaps some other cons, too, if I can decide on others to attend – and wanted to do some "field research" on what these games are typically like. Though I'm a pretty experienced and, if my players are to be believed, good referee, I'm nevertheless quite self-conscious about my abilities. Seeing how others handle the referee's duties at a con thus provided me with some very useful information. 

The very first game I played at the con was Hyperborea. I've been a fan of the game since its original edition, released more than a decade ago. It's a delightfully game, inspired by the greats of pulp fantasy, like Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith. Rules-wise, it's pretty much a rationalized and house ruled version of AD&D and, like AD&D, Hyperborea is baroque and idiosyncratic. To tell the truth, that's a big part of why I like the game so much. I appreciate it when a designer imbues his game with himself – his likes and dislikes, his philosophy and worldview – that's just what Jeff Talanian did with Hyperborea. That's a welcome break from recent attempts to sand down the rough edges of our popular culture to make it appeal to everyone, in the process making it appeal to no one in particular.

Like most con games, this one had a four-hour time slot and featured six players. Entitled "A Tale of Crows and Shadow," it was, so far as I know, an original adventure by our referee. Before we began, he passed out a stack of pregenerated characters from which to choose. I selected a warlock – a fighter/magic-user, more or less – named Amalaric the Ill-Tempered. After everyone had chosen their characters, the referee then asked if we all had dice. Embarrassingly, I did not. I was sitting next to the referee and, as I explained that I had no dice, he turned, looked at me, and asked, "Are you sure you're in the right place?" He meant it humorously, of course, but I can't deny feeling a little sheepish at his words. Fortunately, a player seated across from me tossed me a bag of dice and told me to keep them. "I always carry extras for times like this."

The adventure began with all of the characters awakening aboard a slave galley headed out to sea. Our food and drink had been drugged after a night's debauchery in the metropolis of Khromarium. Below decks and chained to our oars, we first had to find a way to escape. The first half of the scenario involved us plotting to free ourselves and then take control of the vessel. After many extraordinary feats of Strength (and Dexterity) and much combat, we were successful. Now in command of the ship, we had to pilot it back to land without quite knowing where we were. Once there, we trekked through the wilderness at night, while someone (or something) was following us. Eventually, we discovered that our stalker was a vampire – and a child vampire at that. Dealing with her was creepy, unnerving, and surprisingly difficult, but we eventually prevailed.

I had a lot of fun playing this adventure, which felt very picaresque in its structure. This wasn't a scenario in which everything that happened in it was directly connected. Instead, one thing happened after another, each being a kind of mini-scenario of its own. It was a bit like a series of pulp fantasy vignettes, all sharing the same cast of characters, but not having any overarching plot or theme. I was quite fine with that. Not only did it suit Hyperborea, but it also gave the session a "light" feeling. We weren't following some grand storyline or trying to achieve anything beyond saving our skins and escaping the latest danger we stumbled upon. 

Not being a veteran of con games, I'm not sure how typical my experience was. One of the most notable things about it, to my mind anyway, is that the players were frequently willing to take chances on harebrained schemes and reckless gambits. That might be a function of the fact that everyone knew this was a one-shot. Our natural self-preservation instincts were blunted. If our character died while trying to bowl over a group of guards, Captain Kirk style, so what? We were having good, pulpy fun and that's all that mattered. As I think about the possibility running my own games at a future con, I'll bear this in mind. I think a good convention adventure is probably its own thing, distinct from the kind of adventure that works well in a campaign situation.

Anyway, Hyperborea's a fun game. I should play it more (and so should you).

High Adventure and Low Comedy

Free League publishes not one, not two, but three different fantasy roleplaying games at the moment – Forbidden Lands, Symbaroum, and now Dragonbane. Each one is quite distinct from one another, not just in terms of rules but also in tone. For example, Dragonbane, the latest iteration of the venerable Swedish RPG, Drakar och Demoner, sets itself apart from the other Free League fantasy RPGs by its willingness to embrace lighter, even sillier moments, as designer Tomas Häremstam points out in his preface:

Though a toolbox for allowing you to tell fantasy stories of all kinds, Dragonbane is a game with room for laughs at the table and even a pinch of silliness at times – while at the same time offering brutal challenges for the adventurers. We call this playstyle mirth and mayhem roleplaying – great for long campaigns but also perfect for a one-shot if you just want to have some quick fun at your table for the night. 

Dragonbane is quite an interesting RPG for a number of reasons and I hope to get around to discussing it at some point, but there are several other games and gaming products ahead of it in my review queue. However, the "mirth and mayhem" tagline really caught my attention, in part because it reminds of a phrase my friends and I have used for years – high adventure and low comedy.

I can't quite recall precisely when we coined this phrase, but we did so as a way to capture what the experience of playing most RPGs was actually like at the table – not what its designers wanted to be like, which is quite a different thing. This is an important distinction. With a handful of exceptions, like Paranoia or Toon, whose stated intention is to be humorous, most roleplaying games are written and meant to be played seriously. "Serious" doesn't mean utter devoid of humor, of course, but the humor is accidental, a natural consequence of the unpredictability of playing any game, especially one where player choice and dice rolls contend with one another.

What my friends and I call "high adventure and low comedy" is thus very often (though not exclusively) the result of exactly this: dice with a mind of their own. One of my most popular posts touches on this very topic, though from a slightly different angle. However, the point remains the same, namely, that it's well nigh impossible to avoid moments of unexpected levity when so many of a character's actions are determined by the roll of dice. There's simply no way to ensure that even a high-level and competent character will always succeed at the right moment. Instead of making his save against dragon breath, he might fail and be burnt to a crisp. The reverse is also possible and the all-powerful Dark Lord might, metaphorically speaking, slip on a banana peel as he attempts to menace the heroes who've dared to confront him in his lair.

Over the years, I've experienced many examples of this. In my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, the character Aíthfo hiZnáyu has fallen prey to bad dice rolls on several notable occasions. And while I used those unintended mishaps as an opportunity to introduce new elements to the campaign, there's no denying that they were also funny – so much so that the players continue to chuckle about them years later. House of Worms has never been a deliberately funny campaign. Tékumel, with its detailed history, ancient mysteries, and constructed languages is perhaps the very definition of serious business when it comes to RPGs and yet there's no way to prevent unexpected silliness from creeping in from time to time – nor would we want to do so!

Dice rolls that go awry aren't the only source of humor. Players are every bit as unpredictable as dice. Sometimes, a player might just be in a whimsical mood and decide that his character does something goofy. Other times, he might be bored and want to shake things up by choosing to act in a way that's, in his opinion, more entertaining. Or maybe someone misspeaks, calling a character by the wrong name or accidentally – or, worse, intentionally – making a pun that causes everyone to erupt into laughter. There are simply so many ways that a roleplaying game session can descend into unintentional humor that there's no point in worrying about it. Instead, it's best to embrace it these moments of levity and enjoy them for what they are.

I think that's why, when I came across the passage I quoted above, I was so taken by it. Over the years, I've read a lot of roleplaying games. Very few of them acknowledge that low comedy is very often the inescapable companion of high adventure. You can't really have one without the other, not without clamping down so hard on anything that deviates in even the slightest way from the Truth Path that, in the process, you've also sucked all the fun out of roleplaying. These are games, after all and they're meant to be fun. They're also exercises in human creativity and interaction, both of which often take us to unexpected places. 

Isn't that why we play these games in the first place?

Friday, November 1, 2024

Vague Recollections

One of the many downsides of our increasingly disembodied, virtual existence is the ease with which everything disappears into Orwell's memory hole. Anything produced online, especially on a platform you don't own – like this blog, for instance – could go away tomorrow if someone in an office somewhere decides it should be so. Those of us who can still recall the existence of Google Plus know all too well what I am talking about. Now, it's true that nothing lasts forever in the sublunary world, but I can't help but feel this is especially so when it comes to Internet scribblings.

I thought about this yesterday, as I tried to locate something I remember reading online back in (I think) the 1990s. Yes, I know: in Internet terms, the '90s might as well have been 300 years ago, not merely 30. Furthermore, the thing I want to find had been posted to one of the many Usenet newsgroups dedicated to roleplaying games, like rec.games.frp, so the odds of my finding it were never great to begin with. Still, I held out hope that, with enough perseverance, I might succeed. Since I was unsuccessful on my own, I thought I'd turn to my readers, many of whom possess far greater skills than I when it comes to locating obscure information.

I recall reading a narrative from the perspective of a Call of Cthulhu investigator. Unlike his colleagues, this investigator didn't go out into the field. Instead, he stayed safely at his home in Arkham or wherever and communicated with his comrades via telephone. In his phone conversations, he made certain that his interlocutor never told him too much about what he had seen or done, lest he have to make a SAN roll – "Don't tell me what you read in the book. Don't even tell me the title of the book," "No, I don't want to know what the creature looked like," etc. The whole thing was a meta-commentary on the way to "win" at Call of Cthulhu. I remember finding it quite amusing when I first read it.

Now, it's probably gone and I have only my increasingly hazy memories of it. Does this ring any bells with anyone else? Might anyone be able to suggest how I might find it again? I don't hold out much hope of ever reading it again, but I figured that, if anyone could aid me, it might be my readers.

Thanks!

Thursday, October 31, 2024

REPOST: Fantasy is Frightening

(This month, I'd intended to write a longer post about the domestication of horror and frightening things in our popular media, including RPGs, but, as so often happens, time slipped away and here we are on Halloween and I never wrote that post. I still intend to write it; I just can't be sure when. In the meantime, enjoy this old post that touches on the topic. –JDM)

In RuneQuest, there is a race of beings known as Broos or goatkin. In my second edition rulebook, they're described as
Human-bodied and goat-headed, [they] ... are tied irrevocably with the Rune of chaos. They are given to atrocities and foul practices, and carry numerous loathsome diseases.
Broos have the ability to procreate with any species, intelligent or otherwise, with the resulting offspring taking characteristics from both its Broo and non-Broo parent. Most Broos in the Dragon Pass area (the area of Glorantha originally most detailed in RQ's early materials) have the heads of goats and other herd animals, hence their nickname, but Broos come in a variety of types, depending on their parentage.

Anyway, during the RuneQuest Renaissance of the '90s, a product was put out for RQ3 called Dorastor: Land of Doom, which detailed a Chaos-tainted land to the south of the Lunar Empire. As I've stated several times before, I never played much RuneQuest at any time, but I was often interested in it. Just before Avalon Hill was purchased by Hasbro in 1998, the company was selling off its stock of RuneQuest materials in very cheap -- and hefty -- bundles. I bought them out of curiosity and it was then that I first read Dorastor. The supplement included a NPC known as Ralzakark, leader of Dorastor and king of the Broos.

For reasons I can't fully articulate, I found Ralzakark quite frightening. Perhaps it was because he had the head of a unicorn, a creature normally associated with purity and goodness. Perhaps it was because he was an urbane, sophisticated creature unlike his subjects. Whatever it was, Ralzakark frightened me. I don't mean scared in that ooga-booga-monster-in-closet sort of way; I mean in some psychological/emotional way. Ralzakark was a disturbing NPC -- and fascinating too. For all I know, I may be the only person who finds the Unicorn Emperor of the Broos unnerving, but I suspect not. I know of many people who find the Broos more than a little creepy and Ralzakark's inversion of many of the known facts about these creatures probably does unsettle people besides myself.

This got me to thinking about how the best fantasies, the ones that really stick with me, are frightening on some level. Shelob, in The Lord of the Rings, frightens me and so does Gollum, come to think of it. They both touch on things within my psyche that I'd rather not think about and force me to confront them. Most of us, I imagine, need to do this from time to time, which is why I think it's healthy for children's stories to include frightening elements. It's the same reason I think RPGs shouldn't shy away from being frightful. That's not all they should be, of course. Still, I think they're a lesser entertainment than they can be if they neglect to include things to unnerve us from time to time.

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

Retrospective: The Travellers' Digest

Fanzines have a long history in fandoms of all kinds, going back at least as far as the 1920s, when science fiction and fantasy increased their reach (and popularity) through pulp magazines like Weird Tales and Amazing Stories. Unsurprisingly, the hobby of roleplaying – and, by extension, its fandom – followed a similar trajectory, building on the already existing traditions of 'zine making. Just as many of the people who created the first RPGs had previously contributed to wargames fanzines, so too would many of the contributors to the emerging scene for roleplaying 'zines go on to create or contribute to later RPGs. Fanzines thus served as a kind of "training ground" for new and often, though not exclusively, young writers hoping to make a name for themselves.

While Dungeons & Dragons, by virtue of its being the first and most popular roleplaying game, had a very enthusiastic fanzine culture, it was not the only RPG that did so. Those slightly older and better connected than I could probably speak at great length about the vibrancy of the 'zines devoted to, say, Tunnels & Trolls or RuneQuest, two games that I know had fanzines devoted to them. Not having been a player of either of those games in my youth, I don't have much to say on that front – or indeed about the 'zines written by fans of most other roleplaying games. The main exception is, of course, Traveller, a game I've played and adored since I first encountered it sometime in 1982.

The interesting thing about Traveller fanzines is that some of them were, in fact, officially licensed and associated with a third-party game company producing material for use with Traveller. For example, FASA, which would later publish Star Trek the Roleplaying Game and BattleTech (Battledroids), began its existence as a Traveller licensee. During those days, FASA produced not one but two 'zines, Far Traveller and High Passage. One might argue that these periodicals aren't actually "fanzines" at all, but closer to prozines and I'd be willing to concede the point if it weren't for the fact that these periodicals were still very amateurish, produced on a shoe-string budget and written by and for fans. And, of course, one might counter by saying the entire RPG hobby, including the companies that service it, have never really stopped being amateurish, so it's a distinction with only a very small difference.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that, before the Internet, Traveller had a number of well-done and influential fanzines that straddled the line between purely amateur and truly professional, often involving writers and artists who worked on both sides of the line, like the Keith Brothers. I read a number of them on and off, but I never became a regular reader of any of them until the appearance of The Travellers' Digest in 1985. Published by Digest Group Publications, the (theoretically) quarterly periodical was clearly modeled on GDW's own The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, though, to be fair, most fanzines for Traveller looked to JTAS for inspiration. 

What distinguished The Travellers' Digest (hereafter TD) was not its format but its content. Each issue presented an adventure scenario that was part of a looser, large narrative – the so-called "Grand Tour," in which a quartet of characters, including a highly advanced sentient robot, traveled across the Imperium and reported on their experience to the eponymous The Travellers' Digest, which is presented as an in-universe magazine. Each adventure highlighted a different region of the Third Imperium, providing players and referees alike with information they could incorporate into their campaigns, even if they didn't make use of the Grand Tour meta-narrative. 

I could have cared less for the Grand Tour, especially since the adventure presupposed the use of four pregenerated characters, none of whom, not even the robot, held much interest for me. However, I loved all the additional details the writers provided about the Imperium, its worlds, cultures, and history through the vehicle of the Grand Tour scenarios. I talked recently about "jump dimming," for instance, and that's a good example of the kinds of things TD did often: present clever new details about the Imperium so that it started to feel like a real place, with its own unique societies and cultures. 

GDW had already provided plenty of details about the Third Imperium in its own publications, but TD did so in a way that felt very organic and, above all, playable. The magazine (mostly) didn't just present high-level lore dumps without consequence to the characters. Instead, the information played a part in a scenario and the characters' encounters with it made sense. Thus, if a scenario were set on Capital, the Imperium's seat of government, the workings of the Moot aren't just chrome but significant to the adventure in some way. DGP managed to pack a lot of great information into their adventures, occasionally even stuff that was truly setting-changing (like the revelation about how the alien Aslan came to possess jump drive).

The Travellers' Digest ran from 1985 until 1990, producing 21 issues in total before morphing into The MegaTraveller Journal, which lasted only three issues before the company folded – a victim of, among other things, the changing fortunes of GDW and indeed Traveller itself. I have a special affection for TD, because it was being produced around the time that I first started to take an interest in writing professionally. Though I never wrote for TD itself, I did write for The MegaTraveller Journal and, through it, made many friends with whom I am still in contact today. 

Traveller is the only RPG fandom in which I've ever been deeply immersed and 'zines, whether fan or pro, were a big part of how I've interacted with that fandom and its members. Consequently, I have strongly positive feelings about these periodicals, so much so that, five or six years ago, I briefly considered producing my own Traveller fanzine. I never followed through with it for various reasons, but the thought still crosses my mind from time to time. Who knows? Maybe one day I'll do it.

Tuesday, October 29, 2024

A Birthday Gift

Today is my birthday, so I'm mostly taking it easy. However, my definition of "taking it easy" includes working on the current manuscript for Secrets of sha-Arthan. In this latest iteration, I've eliminated race-as-class, in large part because I wanted to open up greater possibilities for players of nonhuman characters, like the Ga'andrin

Originally, I'd imagined that the Ga'andrin as eschewing sorcery entirely, Then, I thought about relegating their sorcerers to the realm of NPCs. However, after seeing Zhu Bajiee's latest artwork for me, I knew I couldn't deprive players of the opportunity to play one of these guys. As usual, he did a great job of bringing my vague ideas to life. I can't wait to finish the rulebook and share it with the world.

The Articles of Dragon: "Fantasy Philology: Playing the Fluency Percentages"

Clearly, issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982) was a memorable one for me, because I'm – once again – devoting a post to one of its articles. To be fair, both of the previous two posts concerning this issue were also about a favorite topic of mine, languages, so it was probably inevitable I'd write about them. Even so, I'd hazard a guess that there will be comparatively few issues to which I'll return multiple times in this series, which probably says more about my own tastes than the quality of individual Dragon issues.

"Fantasy Philology: Playing the Fluency Percentages" by Arthur Collins (an author I hold in particularly high regard) is among a handful of articles I remember quite vividly, right down to being able to quote portions of the following dialog, which kicks it off:
Collins uses this dialog to illustrate what he thinks D&D sessions "ought to sound like (sort of)" but rarely do. His point isn't so much that he expects every player, let alone the referee, to make use of "accents and characteristic speech patterns." However, Collins does believe that "language differences can add a lot to a campaign, especially in terms of the challenge of communicating with people (and monsters) who speak other tongues and dialects." The dialog above is intended to show that these differences might extend even to members of common character classes and races. 

Collins then goes on to propose that each Dungeon Master get a handle on all the major languages in his campaign and how they relate to one another. Like A.D. Rogan, Collins is a fan of using language trees to aid in understanding the relationships between languages. However, unlike those in Rogan's article, which are mostly just ornamental, Collins's trees serve a purpose in the new language rules he proposes. These rules are the real meat of his article and why I was so taken with them back when I first read them more than four decades ago.

Under the standard rules of (A)D&D, a character either speaks and understands a language or he does not. Whether he does so is a function of his Intelligence score, his class, and his race. For most people, I suspect that's fine, but it's not what I wanted for my games. By this time, I'd been playing Call of Cthulhu for some time already and I liked its language rules. I wanted something similar in my D&D games and this article provides that. In fact, it provides more than that since, as I said, it takes into account how closely related on language is to another to determine a character's ability to understand and be understood. 

I make it sound more complicated than it actually is. Collins gives each character a fluency percentage in each language he knows, based on his Intelligence score, his level, and a few other factors. These establish how well he can make himself understood to speakers of the same language. These percentages are modified when trying to speak to someone fluent in a related language, depending on how closely related it is. The more distantly related it is, the harder it is to make oneself understood. It's a very straightforward set of rules – simple really, but still more complex than anything in any edition of Dungeons & Dragons with which I'm familiar.

One of the conclusions to which I've come, after decades of playing RPGs, is that we all use the rules we think are most important to the kind of play we want and tend to downplay or even outright ignore the rest. I've never cared a lot about combat, so I prefer simple, uncomplicated systems. On the other hand, I like dealing with languages and communication, so I appreciate attempts like this article to model better the nature of learning, speaking, and understanding different languages. Based on my own experiences, most gamers don't feel the same way, which is probably why I tend to remember articles like this one when they appear. 

Monday, October 28, 2024

King and Aces

Marc Miller, creator of Traveller, and one of the three founders of Game Designers' Workshop also attended Gamehole Con this year, as he does most years. I first met Marc many years ago, at the Origins Game Fair in 1991, which was, I believe, the last time the con was held in my hometown of Baltimore. I was a member of a Traveller fan organization called the History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG) and several of us present at the con wanted to pitch some ideas to GDW for (Mega)Traveller adventures and supplements. We wound up going out to dinner with Marc, Chuck Gannon, and the Japanese translators of Traveller. We didn't succeed in our quest, but I did have the chance to meet several wonderful people, including Marc, with whom I've stayed in contact over the years.

Marc held several panels, one of which was devoted to the history of GDW. Every person who arrived in the conference room was given a deck of cards Marc had printed through DriveThruRPG. He's a big fan of specialized decks of cards and often brings them for sale at conventions. The decks he gave us were devoted to the topic of the panel. The face cards all featured important people in the history of the company, like Marc Miller, Loren Wiseman, and Frank Chadwick, while the number cards all featured games it had published, like Traveller, Twilight: 2000, or Space: 1889 (along with lots of wargames, of course). 
During the panel, Marc would go around the room, point to someone and ask them to draw a card randomly from the deck they'd been given. After doing so, the person would then read what was on the card and Marc will talk for a while about the person or game in question. In this way, the cards provided some focus for the discussion rather than relying solely on audience questions. Another benefit is that light was often shed on individuals or games that might otherwise not get discussed, like Chaco, a wargame about the 1932–1936 war between Bolivia and Paraguay. The game is one of Miller's earliest designs and was created, in part, as an educational tool to teach about South American history.

All the panels at Gamehole Con were too short – only an hour. They were all held in the same room, with a new one starting every hour on the hour, all day, every day. That meant that there was often a rush toward the end of each panel that caused a fair bit of disruption, as overzealous gamers tried to enter an ongoing panel before it was actually ended. I would have much preferred fewer, longer panels, so that we could luxuriate a bit in the stories and memories of the guests. 

In the case of Marc Miller, he has so many stories. He's now 77 years old and has been involved in the hobbies of wargaming and roleplaying for more than half a century. Yet, his memory is incredibly sharp and, with age, I think he's acquired a perspective that's refreshing in its humility. He talked a lot about how, as in the case of TSR, no one really knew what they were doing at GDW. They were making it all up as they went, having fun as they explored new ideas and took chances on making them reality. Some ideas were better than others and some approaches worked, but they learned a lot from each project, whether it proved a success or a failure. Marc expressed several times how blessed he'd been to have had the career he had, making games and making people happy. 

Not a bad legacy, eh?

Jump Dimming

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I don't like flying. I'm not afraid of flying; I just don't enjoy almost anything about the experience of it. However, to get to Madison, Wisconsin for Gamehole Con, I needed to take two planes – there are no direct flights from Toronto – and then, to return home, I needed to take two more. All four flights were fairly short (less than an hour), so I didn't spend much time on any of the aircraft. However, during one of the flights, the lights were dimmed just before landing. This is apparently for safety reasons having to do with ensuring the passengers' eyes are acclimated to low light in the event of an emergency at nighttime, or so I recently read.

To show how thoroughly my brain has been colonized by roleplaying games, my immediate thought, upon seeing the lights dimmed, was of Traveller. In the Third Imperium setting, there's a practice known as jump dimming. What happens is that a pilot dims the interior and exterior lights of his starship for about two minutes before entering jumpspace. During the early days of jump travel, a starship needed every joule of energy to power its computers and jump drives in order to create a stable jump field. That's no longer the case – if it ever was, since it's considered a superstition within the setting – but the practice persists among Vilani pilots, even thousands of years later.

I always thought it was a cool bit of setting detail, the kind of thing that helps bring the Third Imperium alive and distinguishes it from other science fiction settings. I especially liked it because it's described as being a superstition and that's the kind of thing that should exist, even in a sci-fi setting, and yet I rarerly see such things. Instead, most science fiction settings are rather dull and antiseptic, completely ignoring the way that human beings (and, presumably, other intelligent species) attempt to make sense of the universe by imposing on it an order and rationality that isn't always in evidence (and may indeed not even exist). So, score another one for Traveller. 

Except that jump dimming is a contrivance created for an adventure. Back in 1986, in the waning days of classic Traveller, before the publication of MegaTraveller, there was a licensed Traveller fanzine called The Travellers' Digest – more on that later this week – that I started reading in high school. Issue #4 includes an adventure called "The Gold of Zurrian" that take place entirely aboard a starship. During the two-minute period when the ship's lights are dimmed in preparation for jump, one of the passengers aboard is murdered. Solving her murder while in jumpspace forms the bulk of the scenario and the superstition of jump dimming was invented solely to provide cover for the murderer to do his dirty work.

The fact that jump dimming didn't exist prior to the publication of issue #4 of The Travellers' Digest does nothing to lessen my appreciation for this bit of worldbuilding. Indeed, I actually think that knowing its origins increases my appreciation for it. The writers at Digest Group Publications succeeded in creating something that felt completely plausible within the context of the Third Imperium setting, even though its ultimate origin was utilitarian: how to have a murder take place aboard a starship without being seen. In the years since, jump dimming has become an accepted, if minor, part of the Third Imperium setting. I doubt many players even know its origins or care.

I won't go so far as to say that something like jump dimming could only have come about in a roleplaying game, but I do think that RPGs frequently punch well above their weight when it comes to good ideas like this. This is especially true in games that are played regularly. Referees need to create all sorts of things in response to player actions or to set things up for a particular kind of in-game situation. I know I've done it countless times and I doubt I'm alone in this regard. To that end, if you've come up with something through play that then "ascended" to become a fixture of a game setting, I'd love to know about it in the comments. 

Friday, October 25, 2024

The History of TSR

L to R: Mike Mearls, Jeff Grubb, Ed Greenwood, Steve Winter, David Cook
While I was at Gamehole Con, I attended several panels featuring luminaries of the hobby. One of the best dealt with the history of TSR from the late 1970s through its purchase by Wizards of the Coast. Mike Mearls served as its moderator, but the real attraction were the panelists: Jeff Grubb, Ed Greenwood, Steve Winter, and David "Zeb" Cook. They're all depicted in the photograph above, taken by a friend of mine who also attended the panel. Despite my avowed dislike of smart phones, the ability to snap easily photos is something I regret not having. I met so many wonderful people, both famous and otherwise, that I regret I could take photos to commemorate the occasion. As I get older, I suspect that having such mementoes would be helpful in recalling places I'd gone and things I'd done. Oh, well!

The panel was jam-packed with lots of charming anecdotes of the panelists' time working for TSR, either directly, as in the case of Grubb, Winter, and Cook, or as a freelancer, as in the case of Greenwood. Indeed, one interesting story hinges on the fact that Ed Greenwood was never actually employed by TSR, except on a contract basis, even though many people falsely assume that he did (owing to how often his name appeared on TSR products). Ed recalled that he would often spend a week or so after GenCon each year, hanging around the TSR offices so that he could help plan the next year's release of Forgotten Realms products. 

While present in Lake Geneva, Greenwood was often asked by the staff designers and editors to act as their go-between with the dreaded Lorraine Williams, who ran the company after the ouster of Gary Gygax in 1986. According to Ed, Williams would always use the elevator to reach her office rather than the stairs. He would lay in wait near the elevator until she appeared and then get in the elevator with her. Once the elevator's doors had closed, he'd tell her something that needed saying but that none of the salaried employees could dare to say. Williams would listen and then ask Greenwood, "Do you work for me?" He'd emphatically reply, "No," and she'd reply, "I see," the implication being that, if he had been so employed, he no longer would have been. Williams sounds like she was a real piece of work.

Equally interesting was the fact that TSR Hobbies rarely knew what it was doing. The company survived and prospered largely due to just how popular Dungeons & Dragons was. TSR could afford to lurch from one decision to the next without any real plan, because D&D sold very well and TSR's creative staff did a good job of making products that gamers wanted. This lack of planning extended to the company's annual product schedule, many of whose products began simply as titles intended to fill an empty spot rather than anything more detailed. Cook mentioned a couple of humorous examples of this – the Expert-level module, The War Rafts of Kron and the Oriental Adventures scenario, Mad Monkey vs. The Dragon Claw. He came up with both titles, but it fell to the writers ultimately assigned to them to determine exactly what those title meant.

Another topic of discussion was why TSR produced so few products for the World of Greyhawk line. Apparently, it's a popular conspiracy theory among some fans that TSR hated Greyhawk or that there was an intention to slight Gygax's campaign setting. That's not true at all. There were many proposed Greyhawk products over the years that never saw the light of day. What prevented their being developed was Gygax himself. Since he was Greyhawk's creator, he had to sign off on any proposals for the game world. He was often too busy to do so in a timely manner and, as a consequence, these products were among the first to be cut from the schedule (during the annual "St. Valentine's Day Massacre," when, each February, the release schedule was adjusted and certain products were eliminated).

At the other end of the spectrum, the panelists also spoke very fondly of their days working for TSR, as well as the other editors, artists, writers, and designers with whom they worked. Lake Geneva is a small place and, based on the stories they told, very few people in town really understood what TSR Hobbies did, let alone played RPGs. Consequently, the creative staff became more than just colleagues: they were friends, too. I have to say that, more than anything else they said, this fact really touched me. I'm so happy to know that, despite all they had to put up with, they still look back on their days at the company – and at each other – with obvious affection. I've talked before about my own youthful attachment to TSR, so hearing that people who worked felt similarly does my heart good.

Sadly, the panel was only an hour long. I could easily have listened to the panelists talk for two or three times as long about their days at TSR and never gotten bored. Fortunately, Gamehole Con is a small enough con that it was very easy to find and approach these fine gentlemen on my own and chat with them a while about these and related topics. It's one of the best things about GHC – one of many – and I am so happy to have gone this year. I'm already looking forward to October 2025, so I can return.

Thursday, October 24, 2024

Gaming with Allen Hammack

I played in several RPG sessions while at Gamehole Con this year. Though I enjoyed them all – and will eventually discuss each in turn – the one I most immediately want to talk about is The Ghost Tower of Inverness, refereed by its original author, Allen Hammack. The AD&D module was published in 1980, having been used before that as a tournament scenario for Winter Con VIII in late 1979. Like many tournament scenarios, this one is rather contrived in its set-up and features a funhouse dungeon filled with all manner of puzzles, trick, and traps. 

For the purposes of this post, I don't have a lot to say about the scenario itself, since it's old and probably quite well-known to most readers of this blog. Instead, what most interests me and that I think is most worthy of attention is the way Mr Hammack ran it at the table during the con. Bear in mind that Hammack was employed by TSR Hobbies between 1978 and 1982, where he worked as a writer, designer, and editor, primarily on the AD&D. I mention this to provide some context to what follows.

The module is designed for five pre-generated characters, all human – a fighter, a cleric, a magic-user, a thief, and a monk. I played the cleric, Zinethar the Wise, who was 9th level and, oddly, had slightly more hit points than the fighter. The module assumes that all the characters with the exception of the monk are condemned criminals who are offered the opportunity to escape imprisonment by undertaking a dangerous mission for the Duke of Urnst (in the World of Greyhawk), namely, the recovery of the Soul Gem from the titular Ghost Tower. I knew none of the other four players prior to play, so we had to learn to work together to succeed.

Mr Hammack is an older gentleman. I have no idea his actual age, but I suspect he's probably in his late 60s or early 70s at least. Despite this, his mind is very sharp, especially when it comes to the AD&D rules. More than once during the four hours we were at his table, a player asked a question about how, say, a spell functioned. Before someone could find the appropriate page in the Players Handbook, Hammack recalled the relevant information – and correctly. After a while, we learned to trust his memory over our ability to flip pages quickly. I bring all this up, because it supports my long-held contention that hobbies like roleplaying are good for the health of your brain. 

Given how well he remembered the rules of AD&D, another question that came up was how strict Mr Hammack would be in applying them. He chuckled and said that he was generally quite flexible about doing so, with a couple of exceptions. Going back to spells, Hammack explained that he is often loose with spell durations but he was more rigid about areas of effect. Likewise, he noted that he was loose with encumbrance, unless he felt a player was trying to take advantage of a situation. He then told a terrific story about how he and other AD&D players of his acquaintance would use 3×5 index cards for character sheets, with stats being written on the front and equipment on the back. Anything you could fit on the back of an index card – in legible writing – would probably not bring encumbrance penalties into effect. 

Mr Hammack's overall approach to rules was governed by common sense. He clearly knew the rules and was prepared to apply them when he felt it necessary or appropriate, but he never felt bound by them. Indeed, he could be talked out of applying them by a good argument from a player, as he was on at least one occasion. At the same time, Hammack was also quite clear that his decision was final. Once he'd made a decision and considered any input from the players, there was no further arguing of the point. That he was fair and judicious probably explains why no one argued with his final decisions – that we were all middle-aged men, not children probably helped, too. I found the whole experience quite refreshing, to be honest.

I should note that, despite his extensive knowledge of AD&D rules, Mr Hammack was not above introducing house rules into play. For example, there were many occasions when he asked us to roll under a character's ability score to determine if our characters succeeded at some action or other. Likewise, he made use of a simple critical hit/fumble mechanic that's definitely not something Gary Gygax would ever have approved of. The mechanic worked fine in play and even contributed to a number of fun moments, which was exactly what we all hoped for.

In sum, I had a great time at Allen Hammack's table. He was a charming, knowledgeable, and imaginative Dungeon Master and he made me appreciate how good a module The Ghost Tower of Inverness actually is. I consider myself very lucky to have played with him at Gamehole Con this year.

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Unplugged

I am a Luddite. 

I know it's common for people to joke that they're technophobes, but I'm the real deal. I'm not merely a slow adopter of technology; I'm actively hostile towards many forms of tech, especially those whose function intrudes upon our everyday lives. Consequently, I do not now nor have I ever owned a mobile phone of any kind, including a smart phone, which I unironically believe is one of the most damnable pieces of technology man has ever conceived. 

Once I left my home last week for Gamehole Con in Madison, Wisconsin, I was effectively incommunicado. Without a phone, no one, not even my family, could reach me. I made prior arrangements with friends to meet me at the airport. However, if my flight were delayed or, as it turned out, arrived twenty minutes early, there was no way to inform them of this fact. The likelihood that there'd be some sort of schedule change either going to or coming back from the convention were high, since I had connecting flights both ways. That I encountered no airline problems was something of a minor miracle.

Of course, until about a quarter-century ago, most people didn't own mobile phones at all and they nevertheless traveled across the globe. Our current era of interconnectedness and instant availability is an aberration in historical terms, but most of us have become intensely accustomed to it, to the point that we can't even imagine anything different than our present circumstances. I know that, before the con, at least a couple of acquaintances asked me to hit them up on Discord when I arrived, so we could coordinate a time and a place to meet. Lacking the means to do that, we had to make do with more primitive means of meeting up. Fortunately, Gamehole Con is small enough that finding someone isn't that hard, if you're sufficiently motivated.

Of course, my friends all have smart phones, so I could simply borrow theirs to quickly check my email or Discord messages. In fact, I tried to do so. I say "tried," because, when I made the attempt, Discord noticed I was doing so from a location different from my usual one. To log in, I'd need to enter a code sent to my email address to confirm my identity. Alas, getting into my email proved similarly difficult, as Gmail, too, recognized I was not in my usual location and would only allow me to use it if I sent it a code that it had sent to my backup email address. Guess what happened next? That's right: an endless circle of dual factor authentication I could not circumvent by any means. 

Similarly, when I checked in at the con to collect my badge, I expected I'd also be given physical tickets for my various events, as I had in the past. Nope! I'm not sure when Gamehole Con transitioned to virtual tickets – it must have been sometime after 2018, when I last attended – but, whenever it was, I was now expected to make use of a smart phone to demonstrate my having paid and signed up for my events. I was able to rectify this with the organizers, who took pity upon me and printed out some tickets for me to carry around. However, the fact remains that Gamehole Con, like almost everything these days, simply takes it for granted that I must, of course, have a smart phone.

What's fascinating is that nearly everyone I encountered who learned of my lack of a phone expressed wistful admiration of me. "I wish I could do that!" or some variation of it were common statements. And the truth is that there are many benefits to not having a phone, especially at a convention. For instance, I was never once distracted by calls or notifications, as were too many people, even during games. I was free to focus on the matter at hand. When I was distracted, it was by something happening nearby in the real world, like the hoots and hollers of a nearby table, as a player rolled well (or badly) or as a man dressed as an orc and carrying a large ax walked by. I got to experience Gamehole Con unfiltered, unmediated by anything but my own senses. It was wonderful.

That's why I went to the convention, after all: to be present. I don't want to sound like some New Age guru spouting off platitudes about mindfulness, but I do think we too often miss out on valuable interactions and experiences because we're distracted by the ever-present allure of technology. The number of people I saw at the con sitting down and scrolling through their social media accounts was larger than I'd have liked it to have been (though far less than what I saw in airports or on planes – yikes!). I was in a unique position not to have the option to do this. I had no choice but to be present and aware of everything that was happening around me – and I believe I had a better time because of it.

Additionally, I was completely cut off from the news, whether local, national, international, or even just the news of our shared hobby. I fight against the notion that ignorance is bliss, but I can't that having no knowledge of what was going on in the world beyond what I could see and hear right in front me was a welcome respite, one that enabled me to enjoy myself more fully than I might otherwise have. I was at Gamehole Con to play some RPGs and hang out with friends, both old and new. Focusing on anything else would have been a distraction. Why would I want that?