Retrospective: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari)

Though I've generally kept these Retrospective posts to looking back at roleplaying and boardgames that I thought worthy of discussion, I have occasionally turned the spotlight onto computer and video games as well. In the '80s, I never owned a "home computer," as we used to call them in those ancient days, but I did own the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), later dubbed the Atari 2600. I also had an enviable collection of game cartridges for it, two of which I think merit a post: Adventure, about which I've previously written, and Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

Released in 1982, Raiders of the Lost Ark was (obviously) a tie-in product for the action-adventure film of the same name released the year before. Historically, tie-in products like this tend to be mediocre at best, with most being little more than vehicles for making a quick buck by association with a popular book, TV show, or movie. By all rights, that's what one might reasonably expect of this game cartridge too – except that it's actually one of the more complex, imaginative, and enjoyably frustrating games Atari ever made for its first game console. 

It's that enjoyable frustration that's the main reason I still have such affection for the game. Strange though it might be for some to imagine, I actually enjoyed video and computer games whose difficulty – or at least perplexity – made me want to tear my hair out. Indeed, their difficulty was a big part of their appeal, because it suggested that, if I managed to beat them, I'd actually achieved something. It's similar to why, as kids, my friends and I enjoyed testing our wits against a Killer DM. Sure, it was tough and often downright unfair, but to win against such odds felt like an accomplishment and we cherished those moments way more than easy wins.

Raiders of the Lost Ark was not an easy win. Completing it successfully took a lot of thought and patience, not to mention above average hand-eye coordination, owing to its unusual control set-up and the finicky nature of said controls. In very broad strokes, the game recreated Indy's adventures in search of the Map Room that will lead him to the resting place of the fabled Lost Ark of the Covenant. The resting place of the Ark is randomly determined with each game reset, meaning that, should you fail, you can't necessarily carry over anything you've learned in your previous attempts to a new one. In addition, Indy requires the aid of certain items he can find hidden in various locations and these, too, are not always in the same location. 

This randomness is only one part of what made the game so frustrating to play. Another is that it required both joysticks to play. One was used in the expected way, allowing the player to control Indy's movement and actions on-screen. The other was used to control inventory. Unlike Adventure, which only allowed the player to possess a single item at a time, Raiders of the Lost Ark let you possess several, as if Indy had a backpack filled with gear. By moving a cursor among the items you possessed, the player could the one he wished Indy to use at any given time. This was very cool and quite innovative at the time, but it could also be demanding in play, especially if you had to quickly switch between items.

However, the main reason the game was so frustrating was the sparseness of its manual, which didn't tell the player much about how the goals of the game could be achieved. Instead, you were largely left to your own devices to figure out how all of the game's elements worked toward a successful conclusion. The manual includes descriptions of most of the locations and items found in the game, but not all of them. Likewise, it does include "helpful hints," but, again, these don't answer every question a player might have. "After all, what's an adventure game without surprises?" the manual asks. Consequently, even if you read the manual cover to cover, there are still very important aspects of play that you can only discover through play.

This is what made the game so enjoyably frustrating to me. To this day, more than forty years later, I can still recall the joy I felt when I first stumbled across an item not listed in the manual the possession of which was essential to finding the location of the Ark. Similarly, I remember when, in the midst of foolishly falling off a cliff to my doom – I wasn't quick enough in making use of the parachute in my inventory – I noticed something for the first time that I would later use to solve another mystery in the game. Neither of these discoveries were in the manual; I could only learn of them through trial and (much) error. 

By the standards of today, Raiders of the Lost Ark is unbelievably primitive. Heck, by the standards of games released just a year or two later, it's primitive. Yet, for all that, it remains one of my favorite video games of all time, because it challenged me just enough that I couldn't rack up an easy win but without so dispiriting me that I gave up completely. Not coincidentally, this is my ideal when it comes to dungeon design, too, so perhaps I was the perfect target audience for this game. This is a foundational game design for me and I suspect I've been chasing the high of enjoyable frustration I gave me ever since. 

Indy notices something as he falls to his pixelated doom

How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kirktá?

First, thank you to everyone who took the time to make comments or send me emails regarding yesterday's post about upcoming events in my House of Worms campaign. I've gotten a number of excellent suggestions and I now have a better handle on how I'll likely proceed, though I'd be happy to continue receiving more suggestions. After the Kólumejàlim, as the Choosing of the Emperors is known in Tsolyáni, has taken place, I'll write a post or two about it, because I am sure that, no matter how it turns out, it will be of interest to my readers. That likely won't occur until sometime this summer, as the campaign is currently focused on other matters at the moment and I'm not ready to shift gears quite yet.

Aside from my already stated reasons for wanting to adjudicate the Kólumejàlim in this way, there's also another: one of the player characters is secretly an heir to the Petal Throne. Years ago, when a new player joined the campaign, he asked if he could base his character on one from the original Tékumel campaign in Minneapolis. Named Kirktá, he was a priest NPC whom the characters in the Twin Cities campaign later discovered was one of the emperor's secret heirs, whose true identity was hidden, unknown to almost anyone, including himself. I had no objection to the new player basing his character on Kirktá, largely because I never expected it to amount to anything.

And it didn't. For many years, there was never a hint that Kirktá – my Kirktá  – was anything other than he appeared to be, namely, a young and naive priest of Durritlámish, the Black Angel of the Putrescent Hand. He served as protégé and amanuensis to Keléno, one of the four remaining original player characters of the campaign, without complaint. Indeed, Kirktá had something of a reputation as being incapable of making decisions for himself, deferring instead to the wisdom and experience of his master (and any other PC who cared to offer an opinion on what Kirktá ought to do). It's a fun dynamic and soon became one of the hallmarks of the campaign.

Then, a little more than a year ago, the characters reunited with an old antagonist of theirs, an Undying Wizard known as Getúkmetèk. Like a lot of Undying Wizards, Getúkmetèk existed outside of normal time. Consequently, when the characters encountered him, there was no telling exactly where the wizard was on his own personal timeline. On this occasion, Getúkmetèk was quite young, early in his own career and not yet an Undying Wizard. In fact, it became increasingly clear that it was due to their interactions with him early in his life (but late in that of the characters, relatively speaking – non-linear time is weird) that he would eventually become antagonistic toward them. 

When this younger Getúkmetèk met the characters, he greeted them pleasantly, since, from his perspective, he hadn't yet met any of them – or, at least, most of them. Somehow, he already knew Kirktá and addressed him differently than the others, using a formal Tsolyáni second person pronoun reserved only for the emperor, "you of supernal omnipotence," that is probably unknown to most characters, given its exceedingly uncommon usage. One of the characters, Nebússa, comes from a very high clan involved heavily in imperial service. He recognized the pronoun and quickly put two and two together, realizing for the first time in the campaign that Kirktá was likely a hidden heir to the Petal Throne. 

Initially, Nebússa kept this secret to himself, not even telling Kirktá. However, events eventually required that he reveal it, to the surprise and incredulity of his clan mates. There was a lot of debate about what the characters should do with this information, as well as the realization that, if Nebússa figured it out based on very limited information, there were probably others within Tsolyánu who also knew it and might seek to take advantage of it. That's partly why the characters elected to undertake a lengthy, months-long journey outside the Imperium: to keep Kirktá safe. However, once the Kólumejàlim is declared, events may overtake them. What happens next is anyone's guess, hence my desire to establish a means to handle the Choosing of the Emperors, just in case Kirktá decides to participate ...

Polyhedron: Issue #25

Issue #25 of Polyhedron (September 1985) features eye-catching artwork by the Marvel Bullpen, depicting the Hulk and long-time foe, the Abomination, bursting through the cover. Both characters appear in the issue's Marvel Super Heroes article – a first for the newszine. At the time, I was quite pleased by this expansion of Polyhedron's coverage, because I was a big fan of MSH and was always on the look-out for new material (particularly write-ups of Marvel characters that hadn't yet appeared elsewhere).

Normally, "Notes from HQ" is filled with RPGA-related ephemera and thus doesn't command my attention for long. This time, though, part of it is of greater interest, specifically the call for Dungeon Masters to submit "a store, tavern, house, city block, NPC, street encounter, guild" for inclusion in a fantasy setting to be used by the RPGA as a "home base" and possible locale for adventures. Robert Asprin's Thieves' World is referenced as an inspiration and it's stated that Gary Gygax has agreed to allow this city to be placed in his World of Greyhawk setting. If any of this sounds familiar, that's because I suspect the project was eventually retooled for use with the Forgotten Realms, becoming Ravens Bluff, the Living City, an RPGA staple for years to come.

Jon Pickens offers up a second part of his "Unofficial Magic-User Spells" series, again looking to existing magic items as source of new spells (like the ring of spell turning and ring of x-ray vision). It's fine, if a bit unimaginative, though I cannot forgive the consistent misspelling of "absorption" as "absorbtion" throughout, especially when the magic item that inspired it, the rod of absorption, spells it correctly. The "RPGA Network Player and Judge Standings" is hardly worth mentioning, since it's little more than three pages' worth of names. Looking through them, I spotted the usual assortment of TSR employees and freelancers, along with a few others whose names I recognized from Dragon and elsewhere. I wonder if any readers of this blog had earned enough tournament XP to make it onto the list?

Part II of Frank Mentzer's AD&D adventure, Needle, also appears in this issue. Having found the titular needle – a magical obelisk – in Part I, the characters are now tasked with removing it for transport back to their homeland while dealing with hostile bullywugs and pirates. The adventure is quite fascinating, in that it's mostly a matter of resource management and logistics. The characters command a team of workers and mercenaries over the course of the several weeks needed to achieve their goal. How well they manage their resources, as well as how they respond to various threats, determine whether or not their mission is successful. I have no idea how it would be to play, the idea behind this scenario sounds compelling.

Michael Przytarski's "Fletcher's Corner" returns, talking about high-level adventures this time. That's a topic of great interest to me, since there aren't a lot of good examples of them in my opinion and I'd love to read some good advice on how to create my own. Sadly, there's not much meat to this article. It's mostly brief nuggets ("Try not to be bring the gods into it") intended to keep things somewhat grounded and avoiding boredom ("Three red dragons are fun, but they can become tiresome"). Perhaps the article's brevity (one page) prevents Przytarski from getting into the weeds of this topic, I don't know. Regardless, I didn't find what I was looking for here, which is a shame. My quest continues.

"Rampage" by Roger E. Moore is a straightforward Marvel Super Heroes scenario, in which four different super-strong characters – the Hulk, Hercules, the Abomination, and Titania – in the streets of New York. It's not deep, but it's fun. I also appreciate the way that Moore presents different Karma award charts for each character as a way to highlight their differences. That's something I always liked about Marvel Super Heroes and that's harder to implement in a game where the characters are all original creations of the players rather than established personalities. 

With apologies to Rembert N. Parker, I'm going to pass over his "How to Succeed at Judging an RPGA Network Event," because it's of minimal interest to me. "Dispel Confusion" consists of two full pages of AD&D questions, with no other RPGs represented. By and large, the questions this issue concern ambiguities in the rules and, as such, aren't that interesting to discuss here. The most notable question concerned psionics and its use, with the answer noting that psionics will be revised "in the future." Rounding out the issue is a positive review of Paranoia, an old fave of mine, though it's been years since I've attempted to play it. Maybe I should change that.

As always, Polyhedron is so much more of a mixed bag than is Dragon and it's frustrating. Most issues contain good material, but very few are consistently good. That probably explains why I eventually stopped reading it, while I continued with Dragon well into the 1990s. I suspect this is because Polyhedron always had a much more "amateur" quality, which limited both its audience and its submissions. It's a real pity.

Looking for Ideas

This concerns a topic about which I've written before, but which is likely to become more important in my ongoing House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, namely, the death of the emperor of Tsolyánu and the choosing of his successor. There is no primogeniture in Tsolyánu. Instead, all the children of the emperor, who are given "the Gold" (a specially engraved circular plaque) upon their births, are eligible to compete for the right to ascend the Petal Throne as his successor. To provide some additional context, here's what the Tékumel Source Book has to say about this competition:

As soon as an old monarch has died and the great sarcophagus sealed away in the black vaults below Avanthár all of those who possess the Gold (plus any remaining undeclared heirs or heiresses who must be hurriedly produced by their patrons) are summoned to Béy Sü for the Choosing of the Emperors. There they undergo a traditional roster of tests which cover every facet of character thought by the Tsolyáni to be needful for a ruler: bravery, endurance, cunning, physical prowess, judgment, knowledge of history and the arts, competence in "magic," and a dozen other fields. A candidate has the right to name champions to represent him or her in any three of these categories but must compete in person in all the others. Each event is carefully judged, and the strongest contenders are taken at last within the sacred precincts of the Temple of Hná'lla where the Holy Adepts of all the temples and the High Princeps of the Omnipotent Azure Legion make the final selection according to ancient and secret ritual methods. The winner is then declared and conveyed to Avanthár. The losers are given over to the Temple of Karakán for sacrifice.

I've decided that I'd like to play out the Choosing of the Emperors in in my campaign, with each of my eight players taking the role of one of the candidates for the throne. The problem I am having – and the reason why I'm turning to my readers for ideas – is that there is very little information about the competition in any published Tékumel materials. The section I've quoted above is close to all we know about the competition and its trials and, as you can see, it's quite vague.

In the original Space Gamer article linked to at the start of this post, there is a lengthy description of how one referee (Robert L. Large, Jr.) handled the Choosing in his campaign. He made use of only three tests – a series of arena battles, a series of magical duels, and a puzzle chamber. The account is very interesting, because Large made use of other games, like FGU's Gladiator, TSR's War of Wizards, as adjuncts to Empire of the Petal Throne itself. I'm very open to this sort of approach, but the bigger issue for me is: what sorts of contests are employed? 

The Tékumel Source Book references "a traditional roster of tests" that includes more than a dozen areas of competence, not merely the three that Large used for his EPT campaign back in 1976. I suppose it could be argued that he was simplifying the Choosing of the Emperors for the sake of play. Certainly, I don't want the process of choosing a new emperor in my campaign to take up months of weekly play, especially if the roster of candidates is large. But what to do? What's the best – and most fun – way to pit the various heirs against one another so that the end result is unpredictable, even by me?

One of my players long ago suggested that the Choosing of the Emperors was probably akin to a competitive dungeoncrawl. This is an intriguing notion, if only because one of the features of Tékumel as a setting is that most cities have an "underworld" beneath it, representing the ruins of earlier settlements upon which they've been built. Avanthár, the ancient citadel of the emperors, is very ancient place, with all manner of passages and tunnels and ancient technology hidden beneath it, so I can easily imagine trials being conducted in such an environment. When discussing this with my players at our last session, we half-joked that a trap and puzzle filled maze like The Tomb of Horrors would be ideal for this purpose, if most of us weren't already intimately familiar with it.

So, that's where things stand at the moment. I very much want to play out the Choosing of the Emperors, but I have only a few ideas of how best to simulate them. I'd like the experience to be memorable and fun, as well as unique, but I must confess to having few ideas how best to achieve this without going to the trouble of creating an entirely new game for this purpose. Ideally, I'd be able to use Empire of the Petal Throne as the foundation, statting up all the heirs as characters and then subjecting them all to various trials. However, I'm not sure that's necessarily the best approach, which is why I'd love to hear the thoughts of others. If you have any ideas, thoughts, or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.

Thanks in advance!

50 years in the Dungeon

A very interesting interview with David "Zeb" Cook about his time at TSR Hobbies, in which he talks about the D&D Expert Set, Oriental Adventures, and Second Edition, among other topics. 

Landfall!

Never having been a huge reader of comics, I keep forgetting that, during the late '80s and early 1990s, DC Comics published a number of titles based (mostly) on Dungeons & Dragons settings. One of them was set in Krynn, the world of Dragonlance. From what I understand, the Dragonlance comics were prequels that took place before the events of the first novel, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, and consequently introduced a number of original characters to serve as its protagonists alongside more familiar names.

Since I haven't had the chance to read these comics, I don't have much more to say about them specifically. However, I am fascinated to discover that, starting with issue #22 (August 1990), the series had a fair number of issues whose stories took place on the continent of Taladas, the setting of the Time of the Dragon boxed set for which I retain a fondness. I suppose this makes sense. If the comic writers had to keep away from the more familiar War of the Lance storyline, looking to a new and mostly undeveloped part of the larger Dragonlance world is a good choice. 

Did anyone read these or any of the other TSR comics published by DC? Were any of them any good?

Scary Enough

I'm a big fan of the horror genre, whether books, movies, or roleplaying games. As a kid growing up in the 1970s, horror and the occult were in the air, so it was difficult not be exposed to it. Consequently, when I saw the first advertisements for Call of Cthulhu in 1981, I knew I had to get a copy. CoC quickly became one of my favorite games, joining Dungeons & Dragons and Traveller to form the Holy Trinity of RPGs from my youth. In the years since, I haven't played Call of Cthulhu as much as I've used to, but I still regard it very highly and hope one day to have the chance to play it again.

One of the interesting things about horror RPGs is that almost no one who plays them is ever really frightened. Someone might play his character as if he were frightened, but I don't think I've ever seen anything in a game genuinely scare a player, at least not deliberately. That never really bothered me, because, let's face it, it's not that easy to induce fear while sitting around a table in a well-lit room with a bunch of your friends. Plus, would it even be fun to play a game where you're routinely frightened in the way you might be watching a movie or reading a book? 

Even so, there's always been part of me that, as a referee, has wondered about the question of why we play horror RPGs and what we hope to get out of them. That's why I was so taken with a section in the Warden's Operations Manual for the new edition of the sci-fi horror game Mothership that addresses this very issue:

Actually scaring your players, like they might get scared watching a horror film or playing a video game is an incredibly rare thing. It is not a measure of a successful game night. Most of the time, your players simply want to have fun in a horror setting. This means they want to play characters who feel afraid, while they the players sit back eating chips and rolling dice. Sometimes you have players who love to be scared and really get into it. If that's the case, enjoy it! But don't feel bad if it doesn't happen every week. Instead focus on keeping the tension escalating.

I think this is quite close to the truth of it, at least as I've experienced the play of horror RPGs over the years. The horror present in your typical Call of Cthulhu scenario, for example, is largely intellectual rather than emotional. Very few players will ever feel frightened or disgusted by events in the game, even if they understand that their characters, being ordinary people, would probably feel those things within the context of the game world. This makes for a better roleplaying experience in at least two respects. First, it doesn't set the bar so high for the referee that he'll never achieve "success." Second, it helps maintain a little distance between the players and the often horrific things with which their characters must deal.

That said, even highly intellectualized fear, horror, and revulsion are all useful tools for the referee in presenting an engaging setting and/or scenario. After all, fantasy can be frightening and confronting frightening things in a fictional context can be very appealing to a lot of people, especially those among us who are normally not very brave. In that respect, it's not much different than the more general experience of fictional danger found in many common RPG activities, like combat or exploration. It's fun for our characters to do or to endure things that we'd never be able to or indeed want to, isn't it? 

Fake Nerd Holidays

Apparently, because today is May 1 – May Day in many European countries – someone has decided that it's also the made-up "holiday" of Traveller Day, for obvious reasons. 

I must tell you: I don't like this. I absolutely loathe Star Wars Day and its nonsensical date (May 4). I feel similarly about Alien Day (April 26), which, like Traveller Day, I had never even heard of until this year. Much like forced humor, forced holidays grate on my nerves, perhaps because they're usually created by companies looking for new ways to squeeze money out of one of their customers rather than the holidays being organic bottom-up expressions of respect and affection. 

I don't know who came up with Traveller Day or the intentions behind it. Maybe it really does represent something genuinely spontaneous and fan-driven. If so, then why not choose a more suitable date for commemoration, like the date of its original publication? Wouldn't that make more sense? May 1 feels like a marketing stunt rather than something real, but what do I know?

Bah, humbug.

Which Is It?

The first RPG I ever owned was the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, whose cover looked like this:

If you look in the bottom righthand corner, you'll see that it calls itself "the original adult fantasy role-playing game." Take note of the italicized word and its spelling, particularly its use of a hyphen between "role" and "playing." 

Now, here's the cover of the 1981 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set:

If you look at its bottom righthand corner, you'll see that the hyphen has disappeared – "role playing" is presented as two separate words. The 1984 D&D Basic Set restores the hyphen, which brings it in line with the general usage of the AD&D hardcover volumes. However, TSR was quite inconsistent on this point over the years. If you look at the covers of its RPGs throughout the '70s and '80s, you'll see both "role-playing" and "role playing." For example, Gamma World calls itself a "role-playing game," while Star Frontiers is a "role playing game." So, which is it?

Looking over my collection of games, at least those from before 1990, both usages seem quite commonplace, though I detect a slight preference for the hyphenated form. No publisher is completely consistent on this point, though there are some (like GDW) that do a better job at it than others. Sometime in the mid-1980s, a third variant – roleplaying, as a compound word – starts to appear. The earliest game I own that makes use of it is Pendragon (1985), but it's possible I've missed an even earlier instance of this. Nowadays, I see "roleplaying" quite a lot, though the hyphenated version persists.

Do you have a preference? Looking at my own writing, I see that I tend to favor the compound word over the two earlier versions. I'm not quite sure why that is. I wonder if "roleplaying" arose for typographical or graphic design reasons or something equally mundane. Given the general lack of consistency even within a single publisher's products, I doubt that there was a conscious effort to move from one form to another. More than likely, the shift is for other, less obvious reasons. Still, I find myself wondering about the shift and my own preference for one form over the others. I'd be very curious to hear the thoughts of readers on the matter.

Now Under Construction

Because I did a Retrospective post on Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms last week, I was reminded of how excited I was by the announcement that the long-awaited Asian expansion to AD&D, Oriental Adventures. OA was a long percolating project about which Gary Gygax had talked for years beforehand, in part because he felt the monk class didn't belong in "standard" AD&D, given its inspiration in the legends of the Far East. Despite this, there didn't seem to be any evidence that such a project was likely to happen anytime soon and I largely put it out of mind.

Then, without warning, in issue #102 of Dragon (October 1985), this advertisement appeared:

Now, we'd finally get official game rules for samurai and ninja and martial arts and everything else we fans of Kurosawa and Kung Fu Theatre had long thought should be brought into AD&D. To say that Oriental Adventures was greatly anticipated, at least among my friends and myself, is something of an understatement and this ad, featuring a washed out, black and white version of Jeff Easley's cover painting, is a big part of the reason why. Though my feelings about OA are now a bit more mixed, I still have many fond memories of it – and the long October I spent waiting for November 1985 to roll around so that I could finally lay my hands on it.

Retrospective: The Book of Wondrous Inventions

I have a complicated relationship with humor in roleplaying games. I unreservedly celebrate games like Paranoia and Toon that are explicitly humorous in tone and content, having had a lot of fun with them in the past. Likewise, I know very well that even the most "serious" RPG campaigns are likely to include moments of unexpected levity and goofiness and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, even Shakespeare included moments of comic relief in his most harrowing tragedies.

At the same time, I wince at most puns and have a particular dislike of forced attempts humor in roleplaying games. Over the years, I've seen enough well-meaning but ultimately disastrous attempts to "lighten the mood" that my natural inclination is to be suspicious of humor in RPGs. That's not to say I hate it unreservedly, only that I recognize how easy it is for this sort of thing to go badly wrong.

With all that in mind, I hope I can be forgiven for having very mixed feelings about The Book of Wondrous Inventions. Compiled by Bruce Heard from nearly fifty contributions by a wide variety of authors (more on that in a bit) and published in 1987, The Book of Wondrous Inventions is clearly intended to be a companion volume to The Book of Marvelous Magic, right down to its title. But whereas the content of The Book of Marvelous Magic was largely serious in tone – or at least no less serious than the standard lists of (A)D&D magic items – this new book was intentionally written with humor in mind. In his introduction, Bruce Heard writes the following:

These inventions should be viewed with humor. They provide fun and an uncommon change of pace whenever they appear in the game.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, especially if one is sparing in their use within a given campaign. Almost since its inception, D&D has included its fair share of magic items that could well be viewed as silly. The apparatus of Kwalish, anyone? The difference here, I think, is that previous goofy magic items were spice, those included here are the main course – or, at least, they give the impression of being so, because there are so many of them under a single cover. That's not really their fault, but I can't deny that it bugged me a bit in the past and still bugs me a bit even today.

The magic items detailed in this book are all unique and highly idiosyncratic, the products of singular individuals intent on creating something truly unusual. There's Aldryk's Fire Quencher (a magical water sprinkler), Brandon's Bard-in-a-Box (a portable music system), Kruze's Magnificent Missile (self-explanatory), Volospin's Dragonfly of Doom (a magical attack helicopter for hunting dragons), and so on. As you can see, nearly all of the items described reproduce the effects of a post-medieval – and likely modern-day or futuristic – technological device within the idiom of vanilla fantasy. There's not much cleverness on display here. Instead, the entries are all "What would a magical vacuum cleaner be like?" or "Wouldn't a magical pinball machine be funny?" 

The combination of the fundamentally technological framing of these items and their banality results in a very sub-par book, even given Heard's stated intention that they "provide fun" and a "change of pace." It's particularly baffling, because many of the entries are written by talented and imaginative people, like Ed Greenwood, Jeff Grubb, and even Sandy Petersen. I can only assume that they were all specifically instructed to come up with stuff that would feel appropriate in Wile E. Coyote's Acme Catalog – or perhaps from the minds of Dragonlance's tinker gnomes. The end result is not, in my opinion, either useful as a source of ideas for an ongoing D&D campaign or even of mirth. It's dull, predictable, and, above all, forced, which is a great shame, because I admire many of the book's contributors.

Sadly, the book is done no favors by its accompanying illustrations. Much as I adore the work of Jim Holloway, one of the few artists who really understood the humor inherent in typical RPG situations, his artwork here is simply so goofy that it makes it impossible to imagine using any of its inventions with a straight face. Maybe that's the point. Maybe you're not supposed to be able to do so. Maybe I'm just a killjoy lacking in a funny bone. Ultimately, that's not for me to judge. I can only say that, when I bought this back in 1987, I instantly regretted and have never used it, except as a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to inject "humor" into a campaign rather than allowing it to arise organically through play. 

Oh, the pain ... the pain!

Polyhedron: Issue #24

Issue #24 of Polyhedron (July 1985), with its cover illustration by Roger Raupp, is another one I remember very clearly from my youth – and the cover is a big part of the reason why. When I first saw this odd collection of characters, I honestly had no idea what I was looking at. Were they supposed to be orcs or half-orcs or something else entirely? As I turned out, my guess wasn't far from the truth, but that initial perplexity compelled me to read the issue with great interest. Nearly forty years later, I still remember it.

"Notes from HQ" can be quickly dispensed with, since most of it concerns RPGA matters of little lasting interest. The main thing worth discussing is a note indicating that, in response to pleas from the editor in previous issues, there have been a number of submissions from RPGA members. Indeed, Penny Petticord states that "we have not rejected a single article." She quickly adds, though, that submissions are still very few in number and that "only a fraction of the so-called active membership has contributed." At the time there were supposedly "over 8000" RPGA members worldwide, so I can sympathize with Petticord's lament about the small number of submissions. 

"Letters" is quite interesting this issue. First, there's a letter in which a reader complains about the heavy D&D focus of Polyhedron, as well as the lack of support for Marvel Super Heroes. In response to the first part, the editors explain that Polyhedron can only publish those articles that are submitted to it, so, if anyone wants to see more non-D&D content, they'll need to make it happen themselves. As I think I said before, I wish I'd paid more attention to this sort of stuff when I was a subscriber, because I probably would have had better luck getting published in Polyhedron than I ever did in Dragon. In answer to the second part, the editors point out that, because MSH is a licensed game, Marvel itself must review and approve everything it publishes for the game. This makes it harder for any writer, especially those outside the TSR staff, to produce new articles to support it. Also among the letters published are a couple discussing the bad publicity Dungeons & Dragons is getting in their area, a consequence of the ongoing Satanic Panic. If I hadn't lived through those times, I'd hardly believed such things happened!

"Secrets of Success" by Steve Null offers tips on playing in RPGA tournaments. Never having participated in RPGA events, I must say I only briefly skimmed this article and saw nothing worthy of comment here. "Unofficial New Magic-User Spells" by Jon Pickens continues what he began in issue #22. The selection of new spells continues to focus replicating the effects of AD&D magic items, which is fine, but I'd have liked a little more variety myself. More notable, I feel, is that, like its predecessor, it includes the word "unofficial" in its title – a reminder that nothing that appears in Polyhedron carries the official TSR seal of approval. 

Part I of Frank Mentzer's AD&D adventure, "Needle," appears in this issue. Designed for characters of levels 8–10, this is another tournament adventure offered for the delectation of readers of Polyhedron, like most of the adventures published in its pages previously. The adventure concerns an expedition to locate and examine a powerful magic item – the titular Needle – that is found in a ruined city located in a far-off land. The characters are all members of an adventuring guild called SMART, which stands for Syndicate of Master Adventurers for the Recovery of Treasure. All the pregenerated characters have what I assume (hope?) are merely nicknames, like Slim, Smiley, Blondy, and Blaze. To be honest, I found this nomenclature detracted from my enjoyment of scenario, which is otherwise decent, filled with lots of challenges and puzzles. Maybe it's just me, but I prefer a slightly more serious tone when it comes to things like names.

Errol Farstad's "How Reviews are Done" is an overview of how RPGs and RPG products will be reviewed in Polyhedron, since such reviews are a new future in the newszine. All games are given a Difficulty rating from 1 to 4, with 1 being the easiest to learn for a newcomer and 4 being the hardest. Then, the product is rated on a scale of 1 to 10 in three other categories: Packaging, Rules and Explanations, and Miscellaneous. Taken together, these four ratings contribute to its Overall score, rated from 0 to 4 Stars. With the explanations out of the way, Farstad reviews Star Trek the Role Playing Game, to which he gives an overall rating of 3 Stars out of a possible 4. He had some minor (and frankly nitpicky) complaints about the game, which did not detract from his otherwise very positive opinion of it. Being a big fan of the old FASA game, I could not disagree with his assessment.

"The Grond Family & Friends" by Roger E. Moore is the first installment in a new series called "The New Rogues Gallery." Like the book after which its named, this series is intended to present write-ups and illustrations of characters from people's home campaigns – basically "Let me tell you about my character(s)" in written form. The eponymous John Grond is a half-ogre and it's his friends and family whom Roger Raupp depicted on the cover of this issue. Half-ogres were briefly described as a possible player character race by Gary Gygax in issue #29 of Dragon (September 1979). Moore apparently liked the idea enough to adopt and adapt for his own use. The article presents six characters, ranging from Grond himself (a 16th-level fighter) to his wife (a 4th-level half-ogre cleric) and followers, like Boron the Moron, a full ogre of limited intelligence.

"Fletcher's Corner" by Michael Przytarski – and people say my name is hard to spell – is the start of a new column devoted to "solving the everyday problems faced by anyone who judges role playing games." In short, it's another referee's advice column. Consequently, I expect it'll be filled with lots of good insights and advice that will be genuinely useful to someone who's sitting behind the screen for the first time but rather dull to the veterans among us. That's OK: there are always newcomers in need of advice and that's good for the hobby. For his inaugural column, Przytarski takes up the topic of introducing new characters (and, by extension, new players) to a campaign. It's a good topic and his advice is solid, though nothing I haven't heard before (or come to understand through years of play). It'll be interesting to see what he tackles next and whether I find it useful.

Concluding the issue is "Dispel Confusion," with answers to questions about D&D, AD&D, and Marvel Super Heroes. Sadly, none of the questions piqued my interest, because they were all very banal. Most pertained to discrepancies between two sections of the rules or details that had been inadvertently left out of the text – in short, the kinds of rules questions about which you can't say very much else. Personally, I've always enjoyed questions that afford the responder to pontificate a little about a philosophy of play or game design, but that's just me. Maybe next issue!

REVIEW: How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox

There were two great obsessions at the dawn of the Old School Renaissance: megadungeons and sandboxes. Each was a distinctive element of many of the foundational roleplaying game campaigns of the 1970s, like Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and Tékumel. Their rediscovery and promotion are among the lasting impacts of the OSR – so much so that both massive dungeons and open-ended hexcrawls are now permanent fixtures of the even wider RPG scene. 

Of the two, I'd say that megadungeons are probably the better understood and more commonly used, thanks in no small part to the many examples of them now available in print. Furthermore, a megadungeon is, in many ways, just a scaled-up version of a dungeon and almost everyone who's ever played a fantasy RPG, whether tabletop or electronic, knows what a dungeon is like and how it's constructed. However, sandboxes are, in my experience, both less common and less well understood. There are no doubt many reasons for this, but a big one, I think, is they require more preparation beforehand by the referee and preparation of a less formulaic sort than what's employed when designing a dungeon, regardless of its size.

Fortunately for those of us who enjoy fantasy sandboxes – my ongoing House of Worms campaign, for example, is something of a sandbox – there are resources out there to aid in their creation. The very best of them has long been Rob Conley's twenty-four part series on "How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox," whose first post appeared in the far-off time of September 2009. It's a terrific collection of blog posts, filled with good ideas and wisdom drawn from years of refereeing sandbox campaigns. I long ago bookmarked many of the posts and refer to them often in my own work, such as designing the Eshkom District for Secrets of sha-Arthan. If you've never read these posts before, I highly recommend you do so.

An equally good – maybe better – option would be to purchase How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox, 180-page compilation of Conley's blog posts, rewritten and expanded with examples, maps, and artwork, available in PDF, softcover, or hardcover formats. In the book's introduction, Conley provides both a nice overview of what a sandbox campaign is and his own reasons for enjoying them:

One of my favorite things to do with Tabletop RPGs is to create interesting places with interesting situations and then let the players trash the setting in pursuit of adventure.

That certainly encapsulates much of the fun my players and I have had with my House of Worms campaign. He goes on:

My focus is not to create any type of narrative. Rather, I focus on helping my players experience living their characters' lives while adventuring. It's called a sandbox campaign because like in life, the players are free to do anything their characters can do within the campaign setting.

This wide-open world with unlimited choices can be very challenging as a Game Master/Referee. The key to dealing with this challenge is organization. A systematic approach is needed to break down the enormous task of dealing with an entire world. Organized into bite-size chunks that one can do in the time they have for a hobby.

Once again, I think Conley has done a fine job here of distilling the essence and unique pleasures of a sandbox campaign, while also recognizing that creating and maintaining such a campaign is not always easy, hence the need for a guide such as this one. 

With that out of the way, he first describes and then elaborates upon thirty-three distinct steps in the process of designing a fantasy sandbox, from creating the map to placing settlements and lairs to choosing a "home base" for a new campaign. It's all presented clearly and methodically, so that it's easy for even a neophyte to follow. Best of all, Conley includes lots of examples throughout, drawn from his own experience of making fantasy sandboxes. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say that these examples are among my favorite parts of How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox. They not only serve as illustrations of design principles, but they also give some insight into Conley's own gaming past, which I found delightful and inspiring.

Throughout the text, the Isle of Pyade serves as the main example of how to implement the thirty-three steps to creating a fantasy sandbox setting. I found this very useful, because it's eminently practical and concrete rather than merely theoretical. If you follow the steps through, one by one, you'll see Pyade grow out of a blank hex map into a fully-fleshed out and complete location. Whether you're a novice or an old hand at this sort of thing, you'll learn a lot from the example of Pyade.

By the conclusion of How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox, the Isle of Pyade is now ready to use. However, many of its details – maps, NPCs, encounter tables, etc. – are scattered across its 180 pages, making it less suitable for use as a reference. Should you wish to make use of Pyade yourself, a better option might be the separate The Isle of Pyade book (available in electronic, softcover, and hardcover format), which takes all the relevant details and consolidates them in one place for greater coherence and ease of use. There's also some additional content in the form of artwork and color reproductions of the original maps Conley made in the late 1980s. If you're fan of RPG "archeology" as I am, this only adds to the value of The Isle of Pyade.

How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox is a very good book, one I am very happy to own and one I am certain I'll refer to and make use of in the years to come. In addition to all the thoughtful insights and clear instructions Conley provides, he "shows his work," which is to say, he lays bare how he works and why, right down to including very useful appendices of resources, hexmapping guidelines, travel and encounter rules, and information about the process behind creating Blackmarsh, his earlier published sandbox setting. Aside from some minor quibbles about editing, I have only praise to offer about this book. If you have even the slightest interest in creating and refereeing a sandbox campaign, consider picking up a copy. You won't regret it.

Retrospective: Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms

I remember being very excited about the imminent release of the Oriental Adventures in 1985. Aside from the obvious reason – the introduction of playable ninja and samurai into Advanced D&D – I was quite keen to see "the Oriental lands of Oerth," as promised in the "Coming Attractions" section of Dragon #102. However, when OA was released in November of that year, there was no real evidence in that book that Kara-Tur, as its setting was called, had any connection whatsoever to the World of Greyhawk. This fact was further demonstrated when the first adventure module for use with Oriental Adventures, Swords of the Daimyo, came out the next year. Though it included a gazetteer of part of the land of Kozakura, there was once again no evidence that it had any connection to Gary Gygax's campaign setting.

None of this really mattered, of course. Though I was a big fan of the World of Greyhawk, the connection (or not) between it and Kara-Tur had no impact whatsoever on my ability to use the rules of OA or my enjoyment of Kara-Tur. Even so, when TSR finally got around to releasing a boxed dedicated to detailing this vast continent and its peoples, I was more than a little baffled to see it had suddenly – and definitively – been placed in the Forgotten Realms setting. In retrospect, this made sense. In the aftermath of Gygax's ouster from the company, TSR had turned the Realms into the setting for AD&D. Everything that could be (and quite a few things that couldn't) were jammed into Ed Greenwood's brainchild, often to its detriment. 

That didn't stop me from buying it, of course. Even in 1988, I was still very much a fanboy of TSR. Plus, I have always been something of a collector of campaign settings. Consequently, there was pretty much no chance that I wouldn't buy Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms when it was released. Furthermore, it truly was an impressive product, consisting of two 96-page books and four double-sided, color maps of the region, all for $15 (about $40 in today's debased currency) – a steal! In addition, the books were amply illustrated by the late, great Jim Holloway, along with cover art by Jeff Easley. All in all, a terrific package and I'd have been foolish not to have picked it up.

The two integral books are unusual in that they're essentially a single book split into two volumes, right down to sharing page numbers. Volume I covers the lands of Shou Lung and T'u Lung – analogs of China during centralized and Warring States periods respectively – as well as Tabot (Tibet – ugh!), the Plain of Horses (Mongolia), and the Northern Wastes (Siberia). Volume II covers the lands of Wa and Kozakura – analogs of Japan during the Edo and Sengoku periods respectively – along with Koryo (Korea – ugh!), the Jungle Lands (Indochina), and the Island Kingdoms (Indonesia and the Philippines). It's an impressive amount of material, covering nearly every aspect of these lands that you can imagine, from geography and history to religion and politics. In addition, each realm gets NPCs, monsters, adventure ideas, and sometimes even new spells and magic items. 

What's interesting is that Kara-Tur has no single author. Instead, different authors cover different lands, with the whole thing "coordinated" by David Cook, primary author of Oriental Adventures. The authors are a diverse bunch of people, most of whom were not employees of TSR at the time: Jay Batista, Deborah Christian, John Nephew, Michael Pondsmith, and Rick Swan. I'm not sure how common such a practice would have been at the time, but it strikes me as unusual, at least compared to many similar projects, which were usually the work of a single author. Consequently, Kara-Tur has a somewhat uneven feel to it, as if each author had a slightly different vision of what he had in mind while writing. 

This unevenness comes through most clearly when you look at certain lands, whose histories, societies, cultures, and names(!) are lifted almost entirely from the real world, while others are a bit more fantastical. That's probably my biggest problem with Kara-Tur as a setting: it leans to heavily on the real world, particularly when compared to the larger Forgotten Realms, which is largely unmoored from any specific real world inspirations. Some of that, I suspect, has to do with the relative unfamiliarity of Asian history – and fantasy – in late 1980s America. It was probably much easier to look to the real world, file the serial numbers off, add some wizards, and be done with it. Unfortunately, the results are often quite mediocre, not to mention at odds with the overall tenor and feel of the Realms of which Kara-Tur was supposed to be the eastern half. 

It's for this reason that, while I proudly bought and owned Kara-Tur: The Eastern Realms, I never really liked it. Compared to many of TSR's other campaign settings, this one seemed to me to be lacking in imagination. That's a great shame, because I feel like the cultures of Asia offer great fodder for the fantasy roleplaying games. Maybe that was a goal that was more difficult to realize almost four decades ago than it would be today, I don't know. Regardless, Kara-Tur falls well far of the mark of what I would have liked back in the day and even more so now. Alas!

Coming Retractions ...

Speaking of weird little games, I stumbled across this in issue #101 of Dragon (September 1985):

This appeared at the end of the issue's "Coming Attractions" feature, which announced upcoming TSR game product releases. I've talked about Proton Fire on this blog a couple of times previously. In the first of those two posts, former TSR employee Steve Winter provides some additional context in the comments that's well worth checking out. 

Probably because it was a science fiction RPG and science fiction is my genre of choice, I've long had a mild obsession with Proton Fire, the game that never was. Knowing that it did, in fact, exist in some form, but was never put into publishable form only feeds my desire to know more about it. Alas, I suspect this is a desire that shall never be sated!

Polyhedron: Issue #23

April Fool's issues were a staple of my youth, but they're very difficult to pull off. Partly, that's because humor can be very subjective and, partly, that's because most attempts at humor, especially in writing, are simply not very good. Consequently, I greeted the arrival of issue #23 of Polyhedron (April 1985) with some trepidation, despite its delightful cover by Tom Wham (take note of the bolotomus and snits in the bottom lefthand corner). However, I'm happy to say that this particular April Fool's Day issue is (mostly) pretty good. In fact, there are a couple of articles that I still find rather amusing even now – not laugh-out-loud funny, but intellectually droll, if that distinction means anything.

The issue begins with another installment of "News from HQ" that explains the nature of this issue: 

If this is your first issue of the POLYHEDRON Newszine, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome you to the RPGA Network, and let you in on the gag. Five out of the six issues you will receive with each year of membership will bring you club news, informative articles on your favorite game systems, and a chance to make a serious contribution to the hobby by sharing your ideas with other members. This is not one of those five.

That's the kind of humor I'm talking about. The editorial goes on to explain that this issue was "conceived in madness and dedicated to the proposition that there is room for levity in gaming." I wholeheartedly agree, as anyone who's ever played in one of my campaigns will tell you. Yes, even the ones occasionally featuring unpleasant stuff. Games are supposed to be fun, after all, and it's important not to lose sight of that.

Much less funny is "An Official Policy Statement," whose entire shtick is using $64 words to say silly things about, in this case, "the sex lives of monsters." As I said above, humor writing isn't easy.

Fortunately, Gary Gygax gifts us with "Ultimists," a new character class for AD&D. Described as "fighting wizard-priests," Ultimists combine the abilities of clerics, magic-users, and monks. While their ability scores are rolled using only 3d6, the result of that roll is made by recourse to a chart, with most rolls resulting in scores of 15 or higher. This section of the class description pokes fun, as Gygax makes clear, those "enthusiasts" who objected to his system for rolling up the abilities of the then-new barbarian class. Ultimists also make use of spell points, because "memorizing spells is tedious, and the selection requires reasoning and intelligence applied to the game." Ouch. I can't really blame Gygax for using the article as an opportunity to vent about critics of AD&D. I imagine he was quite fed up with them by this point in his life.

"Why Gargoyles Don't Have Wings (But Should) (An Alternative Viewpoint) by David Collins is an attempt to explain away Gary Gygax's concerns about the illustration of the gargoyle in the Monster Manual through a variety of vaguely humorous means. It's fine for what it is, but nothing special. A bit more interesting is Skip Williams's "The Lighter Side of Encounters" in which he presents a couple of humorous encounters from Frank Mentzer's Aquaria campaign as a way of demonstrating how humor sometimes finds its way into otherwise "serious" RPG campaigns. The encounters are all based on things that actually happened in Menzter's campaign, which is fascinating in its own right. Speaking of Mentzer – or, rather, Knarf Reztnem – his "Punishments to Fit the Crime" offer a pair of humorous stories whose conclusions depend on puns. They're basically Dad jokes in written form. Make of that what you will.

Frank Mentzer reappears with "New Magic Items," which offers up some fun (and funny) magic items from his Aquaria campaign, like the canister of condiments and the sweet tooth. Then, he reappears yet again – the man was a machine back in the day – with "Excerpts from the Book of Mischievous Magic," a spoof of his The Book of Marvelous Magic. This second article many amusing magical items like the awl of the above, cool hand lute, stocking of elf summoning, and practical yoke. It's all very silly, of course, but done with some real cleverness and an understanding that a good joke magic item isn't just a joke, but should also have some potential utility in a game. Mentzer clearly understood this.

Part 2 of David Cook's "In the Black Hours" AD&D adventure (Part 1 appeared in the previous issue) is the sole piece of "serious" material in the entire issue and thus feels very much out of place. Like its predecessor, it looks fun, reminding me a bit of something in which Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser or Conan, while working as a thief, might have become involved. "Dungeonsongs" is back to form, with a trio of humorous, RPG-themed songs set to well-known tunes, like "I'll Be a Wererat in the Morning" and "Green Slime." "Dispel Confusion" answers numerous important questions for D&D, AD&D, and Top Secret, like this one:

Bruce Heard pens "Zee Chef," another new character class for use with AD&D. A chef is designed specifically for NPCs "devoted to the culinary arts and learning more about native delicacies." It's a spellcasting class, with a host of new spells, including my favorite, edible glamour. Concluding the issue is "The Male of the Species" by – you guessed it – Frank Mentzer, which describes "emezons," the male counterparts to the amazons presented by Gary Gygax in issue #22. Some emezons are members of the new chef NPC class, while others are "exceptionally skilled at child raising, interior decorating, and hair styling." Hey, it was a different time.

All in all, not bad. Even someone as humor-impaired as myself chuckled a couple of times, which is quite a feat in itself. I'd still rather have had a "normal" issue of Polyhedron, but I can't deny the staff did a good job with their assignment. Well done!

Witch Hunt

Does anyone else remember this game? And, by "remember," I mean remember its advertisements from Dragon magazine?

I've looked into it and apparently, unlike other games I also saw advertised around the same time, Witch Hunt was actually released in 1983, along with an adventure module for it the following year. I've never seen it, but that's not unique to Witch Hunt. There are quite a lot of RPGs from the 1980s that whose existence I know only through advertisements. 

At the moment, the barriers to creating and selling a new roleplaying game on some niche subject are lower than they've ever been. Back in 1983, putting together and selling even a slapdash RPG involved a significant outlay of time, effort, and money. That's why there were so comparatively few in number and nearly everyone I knew in my youth all played games selected from a fairly small constellation of games. It's also why I find myself strangely fascinated by the few weird little games like Witch Hunt that somehow made it to print and sale. Clearly, it didn't do very well or else we'd all likely remember it from more than its advertising, but I nevertheless have respect for its creators for having been willing to take a chance on bringing their dream project to fruition. 

What is Roleplaying? (Part II)

During the Grognardia drinking game, I suspect my readers have thrown back a few whenever the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set edited by J. Eric Holmes is mentioned. Because it was my introduction to the hobby, I still have a special affection for it over all the other D&D products I've bought over the years. Looking back on it now, one of the more notable things about its rulebook is that it doesn't include an explicit section in which Holmes explains the nature of a roleplaying game. In fact, the word "roleplaying" (or "role playing") only appears in its text three times, one of them being on the title page. 

To some extent, this is understandable, since the Holmes rulebook hews very closely to the text of the original 1974 little brown books, where the word "roleplaying" does not (I think) appear at all. Aside from the aforementioned title page, the two other places where the word appears are the preface (by an unknown author) and the introduction (presumably by Holmes). Here's the relevant section of the preface:

That's pretty simple and straightforward. It also makes sense, given that, even in 1977, when this rulebook was first published, the concept of a roleplaying game was still a very new one, especially outside those already involved in the hobby. For a basic rulebook, one might well expect it to "introduc[e] the reader to the concepts of fantasy role playing." The introduction, meanwhile, simply calls Dungeons & Dragons as "a fantastic, exciting and imaginative game of role playing" before launching into an extended description of its play:

It's not a bad description, but it's all a bit abstract in my opinion, particularly if you have no prior knowledge of what the actual play of the game might look like. I know that my friends and I were initially quite baffled by the nature of roleplaying, taking it to be closer to a strange new type of boardgame. Remember that we came to Dungeons & Dragons through Dungeon!, so I hope we can be forgiven our misapprehension. Furthermore, the title page of the Basic rulebook contains the following subtitle, which recalls the subtitle of the Little Brown Books: "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Role Playing Adventure Game Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures."

The section of the Holmes rulebook entitled "Dungeon Mastering as a Fine Art" does include an example of play that features a dialog between the referee and the party's caller. This goes some way toward elucidating the practical details of roleplaying, but it's still not very explicit about the subject. The AD&D Players Handbook is even less helpful in this regard, lacking even an example of play (though a very lengthy one does appear in the Dungeon Masters Guide). The 1981 version of Basic D&D, written by Tom Moldvay, contains what is probably the most famous example of play in the history of D&D, but its treatment of roleplaying as an activity is still quite vague in my opinion and, in any case, we started playing before that version of the game was published.

When my friends and I eventually came to understand what roleplaying was, it was no thanks to any rulebook we had read. Instead, our knowledge was imparted to us by a friend's older brother, who'd been playing D&D for a couple of years beforehand. Once we finally got it, it was very easy to look back at Holmes and see what he was attempting to explain, however unclearly. I suspect our experience was not unique. Unlike, say, the 1983 Frank Mentzer-penned version of the Basic Rulebook, which does an excellent job, in my opinion, of explaining the nature of a roleplaying game, I find it almost impossible to imagine anyone picking up Holmes and then being able to start playing without any confusion or need for clarification from someone who already knew how to roleplay. I say this as someone with great affection for the Holmes Basic Set.

Nowadays, I think it's much more common for RPGs to include explicit "what is roleplaying?" sections and examples of play. Even so, I can't help but wonder whether they're any more useful to people than were the sections with which my friends and I had to contend in our youth. Of course, the concept of roleplaying is now much more widely understood, with many popular computer and video games making use of the concept. This fact might make such sections almost superfluous in the 21st century. Nevertheless, I find myself wondering about it as I continue to work on Secrets of sha-Arthan. Is there still a need for a lengthy description of roleplaying in a contemporary RPG or is the need for it a thing of the past? This is something I've wondered about before, but enough time has passed since then that I'd curious to hear what readers have to think about the topic in 2024.

Small is Beautiful

Like a lot of gamers, I've long had a bad case of cartophilia. Truth be told, my love of maps predates my involvement in the hobby of roleplaying. From a very young age, I would pluck atlases off the shelves and then spend hours staring at the maps within. I was especially fond of historical atlases, since I enjoyed seeing the way borders changed and countries grew and shrank according to the fortunes of war and other events. 

Once I became a player of Dungeons & Dragons, I naturally gravitated toward paying even closer attention to maps of the Middle Ages. What I noticed is that, during many periods of medieval history, many parts of Europe were divided into a crazy quilt of petty kingdoms and principalities. This isn't news to anyone with even a little knowledge of history, but it was positively revelatory to me at the age of ten. Growing up in a world of superpowers and large nation-states, this was contrary to my own sense of what the world was like or indeed could be.

In recent years, I've found myself thinking more about those maps of the Middle Ages, especially as I further develop the setting of Secrets of sha-Arthan. For example, the Empire of Inba Iro is actually made up of twenty districts, each of which is ruled by its own king, who, in turns, swears fealty to the King-Emperor of da-Imer. I've taken one of these districts, the Eshkom District, and fleshed it out for use as the starting area for new campaigns. The district is actually quite small – about 60 miles east to west and 45 miles north to south – because I think that's more than large enough to contain more than enough opportunities for adventure without overwhelming a referee new to the setting.

Over the years, I've drawn a lot of setting maps and I've fallen prey to the urge to "go big." I suppose that comes from having looked with awe at the maps of Middle-earth one too many times as a kid. There's something undeniably appealing about a huge map covered in evocative and mysterious names. Such maps seem ripe with possibilities. However, as I've gotten older, I've come to feel that, lovely though they are to look at, big maps rarely get used to their full potential. More often than not, they wind up being akin to those world maps in the Indiana Jones movies, marking only a handful of places the characters pass through on their way to the site of their next adventure. 

Nowadays, I'd much rather the characters spend more time in a smaller area, getting to know it better than they ever could if they were constantly flitting about from one end of a big map to the other. My Twilight: 2000 campaign, for example, has spent the last two and a half years of play within a fairly small part of Poland. Likewise, the Traveller campaign in which I'm playing has taken place entirely within a couple of subsectors in the Crucis Margin sector. This has helped to give it a "cozy" feel that I've come to enjoy. Rather than simply being a huge swath of Charted Space comprised of hundreds of planets, each one indistinguishable from the last, Crucis Margin feels like a distinct place, with its own unique feel. I think that can be important to the success of a campaign.

What's your experience with smaller campaign areas? Do you like them? How do they compare to larger areas in terms of contributing to player attachment to a setting? I'm quite curious about this, because, looking at the RPG settings that have been sold over the years, most of them seem to lean more toward the large and I wonder whether this has influenced the preferences of gamers. Let me know what you think.