In Defense of Bob

His name wasn’t really Bob, but I’m calling him that for the purposes of this post, on the extremely unlikely chance that he’s still out there somewhere. It’s been decades and I doubt he’d even remember me. Still, I don’t want to be cruel; there's already plenty of that online. Moreover, that's not my purpose here.

Bob was a teenager I’d see from time to time at hobby stores and at game days at the local libraries in the early 1980s. Like many of us back then, Bob was awkward, intense, and very passionate about the things he loved. For him, one of those things was World War II.

In those days, this was hardly unusual. I’m not sure people younger than a certain age realize just how omnipresent World War II still was in the cultural imagination of the time, even though it had ended more than three decades beforehand. This was especially so in the years after Vietnam, when America seemed unsure of what to make of its recent history, World War II stood apart. According to its conventional presentation, it was “the Good War,” the one where we knew who the bad guys were. Toy aisles were filled with green army men and gray tanks. TV reruns still showed Combat! and Rat Patrol. There were countless paperbacks, comics, movies, documentaries, and model kits. Nearly everyone had at least one older relative or neighbor who’d been “over there.”

So, Bob’s obsession wasn’t strange, not in context. What was unusual, even among kids interested in World War II, was the depth of his knowledge. Bob didn’t just know the basics. He could name operations and battles most people had never heard of. He knew the names of generals and details about their lives. He could tell you how a Panther tank compared to a Sherman and why Rommel’s tactics in North Africa were studied in military academies around the world. He was, for a teenager, astonishingly well-informed. 

Bob was also socially tone-deaf. He didn’t always know when to stop talking, particularly when the subject was German armor or the Eastern Front. Even back then, people would roll their eyes when Bob launched into another lecture about Stalingrad. Mostly, though, we just let him do his thing. He was weird and so were we. More importantly, he played RPGs. That was enough.

Nowadays, I'm sure Bob would be viewed differently. People might hear him talk about German tanks or Guderian’s campaigns and jump to conclusions. They might assume he was some kind of Nazi sympathizer or apologist. That’s not how I remember him at all. Now, I didn’t know Bob well. I didn't have a window into his soul, but I never once got the impression he admired Hitler or fascism or anything like that. He was just a very nerdy teenager who’d gotten fixated on a complex and highly documented period of history. He liked the minutiae. If anything, he treated World War II the way other kids treated baseball, obsessively reciting rosters and statistics no one else cared about.

Bob was not a threat. He wasn’t trying to smuggle dangerous ideas into the games he played. He was just Bob – one of us. He was weird, annoying, and even brilliant in his own narrow way. I feel like it's important to point this out, not to excuse anyone, but to defend the idea that not every interest held by socially awkward people should be a moral test. Likewise, not every off-note conversation from forty years ago is a sign of hidden malice. We were all a little odd in those days; that’s probably what brought us together.

I bring all this up in light of last week's post about my recollections of how odd people of all stripes seem to get along in the hobby of my youth. Back then, the hobby felt – to me anyway – like a patchwork of eccentrics, whether they were metalheads, stoners, bookworms, would-be game designers, history buffs, or, yes, kids like Bob. We didn’t all get along. We didn’t all like the same things. Yet, we shared a love of imaginative play and we didn't care about much of anything else.

Was that everyone's experience back in the day? I highly doubt it, but I also doubt that the worst examples someone could dredge up from those times was typical either. I suspect the truth, as it so often is, lies somewhere in the middle. Judging from the arguments in the comments to last week's post, I suppose I was naive in thinking we could get back to just having fun with RPGs the way I used to as a kid.

I don’t know where Bob is now or what he became. Wherever he is, I hope he has a group of friends with whom he can roll some dice without being judged too harshly for his idiosyncrasies. He deserves that much.

So do we all.

Architect of the Modern Imagination

E. Gary Gygax died on March 4, 2008, at the age of 69. Just over three weeks later, this blog published its first post. That was no coincidence.

Though I’d begun reflecting seriously on old school Dungeons & Dragons in late 2007, shortly before I joined the ODD74 forums, it was Gygax’s death that galvanized me. His demise marked the end of an era and, for me, the beginning of a personal project to explore, celebrate, and better understand the legacy of the game he helped bring into the world.

Today would have been his eighty-seventh birthday. In light of that, I want to pause and remember the life of a man who, though I never met him, profoundly shaped my own. More than that, he shaped the lives of millions, often in ways so pervasive we no longer recognize their origin.

Volumes have been written about Gygax's career, his eccentricities, his talents, and his failings. Seventeen years later and more than half a century since the release of Dungeons & Dragons, it’s time to say something both bold and, I believe, undeniably true: Gary Gygax was one of the most consequential cultural figures of the 20th century.

That may sound hyperbolic, even to readers of this blog. Gygax didn’t lead a nation, win a war, or cure a disease. What he did do was co-create a game that fundamentally reshaped the imaginative landscape of the modern world. Just as significantly, he popularized it. Through passion, persistence, and a gift for theatrical self-promotion, he took a niche idea, half rooted in wargaming, half in pulp fantasy, and gave it structure, rules, and language. He turned it into something accessible, repeatable, and endlessly expandable. He turned it into Dungeons & Dragons.

In this, Gygax's closest analog is probably Walt Disney. Neither man invented his medium. Animated film predates Disney, just fantasy games predate D&D. However, both men synthesized their influences into a new form and then made it a fixture of mainstream culture. Disney did it with cartoons. Gygax did it with dungeons, dragons, and rulebooks put together in his kitchen.

From that small seed, a global phenomenon grew.

If that seems overstated, consider where we are in 2025. Playing Dungeons & Dragons is no longer a fringe entertainment. It is a cornerstone of pop culture. It’s referenced in popular films and prestige television. It inspires bestselling novels, hit video games, and streaming series. Its influence is everywhere, from the language of "hit points" and "levels" to the way we talk about our personalities in the shorthand of alignment. "I'm a chaotic good introvert," someone might say, without either irony or the need for explanation.

None of that was inevitable. Without Gygax, it’s possible that some form of roleplaying game would have come into being, but would it have appeared in 1974? Would it have spread as quickly or inspired so many imitators? Would the worlds of gaming and fantasy fiction look anything like they do today?

Gary Gygax’s true legacy is more than a single game. It’s a mode of thinking, a grammar of imagination. It’s the idea that you don't have to be content with simply reading about fantasy adventures; you can go on one yourself. He gave us the tools to build our own worlds, to share them with friends, and to lose ourselves in collective acts of creativity.

That’s not a footnote to cultural history. That is cultural history.

So yes, Gary Gygax deserves to be remembered and indeed celebrated as a visionary, a pioneer, and one of the key figures in shaping how we imagine and play in the modern age.

Happy birthday, Gary. You didn’t just help us imagine new worlds. You showed us how to make them.

An Amusement

Last night, a friend shared with me his "rebuttal" to my recent assertion that Traveller was "obviously" the best science fiction roleplaying game. 

I should add that, despite my devotion to Traveller — and, of course, Thousand Suns — I actually have genuine affection for Universe and would happily play in a game using its rules. It's an odd game, to be sure, but, much like its sibling, DragonQuest, it's got some interesting ideas buried within its complex rules, hence my continued fascination with it after all these years.

Initial Assessment of Unidentified Cereal Crop Pathogen

TOP SECRET//SCI//NOFORN

UNITED STATES MILITARY EMERGENCY ADMINISTRATION

OFFICE OF CONTINUITY INTELLIGENCE AND SECURITY (OCIS)

JOINT FORCES COMMAND EAST (JFCE)

INTELLIGENCE ASSESSMENT REPORT

FILE NUMBER: BIO-INT-00-12D

DATE: 24 NOVEMBER 2000

PRECEDENCE: IMMEDIATE // RESPONSE REQUIRED WITHIN 24 HRS

SUBJECT: Initial Assessment of Unidentified Cereal Crop Pathogen (GR-93) in Virginia Agricultural Zones

DISTRIBUTION: TOP SECRET//SENSITIVE COMPARTMENTED INFORMATION//NO FOREIGN DISSEMINATION

ACCESS RESTRICTED TO AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL WITH TS/SCI CLEARANCE AND NEED-TO-KNOW

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

1.1. A novel fungal pathogen, provisionally designated GR-93, has been identified in cereal crops across multiple agricultural zones in Virginia’s southern Piedmont and Southside regions. The pathogen exhibits abnormal resilience, extended latency, and resistance to standard fungicidal treatments, raising concerns of possible artificial engineering.

1.2. This incident occurs amidst national recovery efforts following the 1997–1998 limited nuclear exchange, with international trade routes degraded and traditional defense alliances fragmented or non-functional. The United States remains heavily reliant on domestic crop production. GR-93 poses a critical threat to national food security and public stability.

Three Models of Character Advancement

One of the aspects of Secrets of sha-Arthan that's been bedeviling me lately is character advancement. I've been trying to find an approach that both makes sense mechanically and feels appropriate to the setting’s tone and structure. I believe I’ve finally managed to thread that particular needle (something I’ll be talking about in more detail on Grognardia Games Direct next week). In the course of wrestling with the issue, though, I found myself reflecting more broadly on how roleplaying games have historically handled advancement and how those choices shape the experience of play.

After all, one of the more foundational elements of any RPG is its system for character advancement. How characters improve over time has a profound impact on gameplay. It shapes player incentives and directs the focus not just of individual sessions but of entire campaigns. While there are countless variations and hybrid models, I think most systems fall into three broad categories, each exemplifying a particular design philosophy. These categories are neither mutually exclusive nor exhaustive, but they are, in my experience, among the most common approaches used in games both old and new.

Objective Advancement: The Dungeons & Dragons Model

The traditional Dungeons & Dragons approach to advancement is probably the one most familiar to readers of this blog. Characters gain experience points (XP) for doing certain things, primarily defeating monsters and acquiring treasure. In OD&D and its descendants, including AD&D 1e, treasure was by far the more significant contributor to XP, sometimes by a significant factor over combat.

This approach to advancement is appealing in part because of its objectivity. The rules are clear about what earns XP and how much doing so nets them. Players know what kinds of activities will lead to advancement and this transparency encourages a particular style of play. Exploration, clever planning, risk management, and even negotiation (to avoid unnecessary fights) all emerge naturally when the primary goal is treasure not combat.

That said, this system is also clearly an artifact of game design rather than a simulation of anything. Despite attempts to explain it retroactively, there’s no in-world explanation for why recovering a chest of gold coins makes a thief better at climbing walls or a cleric suddenly able to cast a new level of spell. Advancement in D&D is largely a mechanical abstraction, divorced from the diegetic logic of the game world. Some players find this lack of in-setting justification jarring. Others, myself included, regard it as an acceptable (and often productive) mechanical contrivance.

Diegetic Advancement: The RuneQuest/BRP Model

A very different approach is found in games like RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu, and other members of the Basic Role-Playing (BRP) family. Here, advancement is tied directly to what the character actually does during play. If a character successfully uses a skill, such as 1H Sword or Library Use, there’s a chance that skill will improve. The logic is intuitive: you get better at things by doing them.

This system is intensely diegetic. Improvement follows in-world logic and feels grounded in the character’s actual experiences. It avoids the abstraction of XP and provides a satisfying sense of verisimilitude. There's also something engaging about watching a character slowly improve in the areas he focuses on. Some characters become jacks-of-all-trades and others become specialists.

However, this comes at the cost of bookkeeping. Every skill use must be tracked and players must remember to mark those skills for later improvement rolls. In long-term play, this can become fiddly, particularly when characters have a large number of skills. It also risks encouraging behavior where players deliberately use low-probability skills just to have a chance at improving them, regardless of context.

Despite these quirks, BRP’s approach has had lasting influence, especially on games that prioritize character immersion and realism over abstract mechanics.

Narrative Advancement: The Milestone Model

The third common approach is often called “milestone” advancement. There are no experience points to tally nor skills to track. Instead, characters improve whenever the referee (or game system) deems that a “major” event has occurred, such as defeating a key antagonist, completing a quest, finishing an adventure, and so on.

This approach is most common in contemporary games, like Mörk Borg and its various spin-offs, though a versions of it exist even in current editions of D&D and Pathfinder. Its appeal lies in its flexibility and ease of use. It removes the need for careful tracking of treasure hoards or skill rolls and aligns character advancement with the narrative arc of a campaign.

However, it also introduces a great deal of subjectivity. What counts as a "milestone?" How long should characters go between them? Without clear guidance, milestone advancement can feel arbitrary and dependent more on the referee's whims than player action. It also risks undermining the sense of accomplishment that comes from overcoming difficult challenges. If advancement is inevitable, tied to narrative beats rather than earned through in-game actions, some players may feel less invested in their characters’ growth.

Moreover, milestone systems often flatten the pacing of advancement. In classic XP-based systems, players can level up at unpredictable times, sometimes quickly after a particularly lucrative dungeon crawl and, at other times, slowly, as they scrounge for minor treasures. That unevenness contributes to a feeling of dynamic progress. Milestone systems, by contrast, tend to regularize advancement, which some may appreciate but others may find dull.

Each of these advancement models brings with it certain strengths and certain limitations. The classic D&D approach encourages player choice and strategic planning at the cost of diegetic coherence. The BRP model is immersive and logical, but mechanically heavy. Milestone advancement is smooth and flexible but often lacks clarity and player-driven incentives. Designers and referees must both consider the kind of play they want to foster. Do they want a game that rewards careful play and tangible goals? One that simulates the experience of a character’s development? Or one that supports a tightly woven narrative with minimal overhead?

There are, of course, many other variations and hybrid approaches. Games like Pendragon offer their own takes on advancement, blending elements of these three models in novel ways. Other games, like classic Traveller, all but eschew mechanical advancement altogether. Nevertheless, these three remain, I think, the primary modes by which roleplaying games have handled the question of character growth.

As always, I am probably forgetting one (or more!) obvious examples of alternate approaches to advancement. If you know of a system that doesn’t fall easily into any of these categories or otherwise deviates from the scheme I've laid out here, I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

A Plan Takes Shape

Elsewhere, I take a bit more about the Grognardia anthologies I've been pondering. If this is something that interests you, consider following the link below to share your thoughts. I'd appreciate that.

A Plan Takes Shape by James Maliszewski

Where Things Stand with the Grognardia Anthologies

Read on Substack

Retrospective: The Gauntlet

Released in 1984, module UK4, The Gauntlet concludes the two-part series begun in The Sentinel. Like much of TSR UK’s output, it blends folklore, moral nuance, and grounded fantasy with a strong sense of pacing and player choice. Written by Graeme Morris, The Gauntlet stands out for its attempt to transform the traditional gameplay of Dungeons & Dragons into something more focused on infiltration, diplomacy, and layered conflict than on brute-force dungeon crawling. By and large, it's successful.

At the heart of the adventure is the conflict between two ancient magical gloves: the Sentinel and the Gauntlet. Both were created long ago during a struggle for control over the Keep of Adlerweg, a key fortress in the contested region. The evil Gauntlet was forged to destroy the keep, prompting its defenders to create the Sentinel in opposition. Over time, both artifacts were lost and forgotten.

Recently, the Gauntlet has resurfaced, discovered by an ogrillon – the Fiend Folio strikes again! – who becomes enslaved to its malevolent will. Under its influence, he has taken control of Adlerweg and begun building a base of power. As part of a larger plan, the Gauntlet seeks to transfer itself to a more powerful wielder and has kidnapped the daughter of a local fire giant to that end.

The player characters enter the adventure as the bearers of the Sentinel, obtained either in the previous module (or through an alternate means in the event The Sentinel was not played). Drawn to Adlerweg to oppose the growing evil, the characters begin their journey with a detour to a village recently destroyed by gnolls. Though unconnected to the main storyline, the encounter emphasizes the region’s growing instability. A wounded gnoll chieftain offers incomplete and possibly misleading information about events at the keep.

However, the core of the module is the infiltration of the keep itself. A frontal assault is nigh impossible, but the Sentinel reveals a forgotten passage inside, now inhabited by giant ants and laced with traps. This portion of the module is open-ended and rewards stealth, planning, and creativity. The upper levels are occupied by gnolls, an ogre, and the aforementioned ogrillon. Morris provides strong guidance on enemy behavior and the keep’s defenses, making this portion of the scenario quite compelling. It's a nice change of pace from the usual dungeon delving.

Eventually, the keep is besieged, not by the Gauntlet’s forces, but by the furious fire giant and his army, seeking vengeance for his kidnapped daughter. The ogrillon, meanwhile, has hidden himself and the Gauntlet within a magical prison. The players must organize the keep’s defenses, rally any surviving allies, and survive the assault long enough to broker an uneasy peace. Though the attackers number nearly 200, this isn’t a battle meant to be won through force of arms. Instead, it’s a test of timing, survival, and negotiation. The climax involves penetrating the magical prison to confront the ogrillon and release the fire giant’s daughter. It's good stuff, especially for a module written in 1984.

The module's illustrations, once again by Peter Young, are not very good. They're slightly better than those in The Sentinel, but still amateurish in my opinion. Paul Ruiz's maps, however, are attractive and quite usable. Because of its layered structure and multiple factions, the adventure demands a confident and experienced DM, capable of managing them all. This isn’t a flaw so much as a barrier to entry. Like many of TSR UK's modules, The Gauntlet favors subtlety over spectacle. It possesses a quiet confidence and clarity of vision that sets it apart. In fact, I'd go so far as to say it's probably the best TSR UK adventure and a fine example of how AD&D can support narrative depth without sacrificing challenge or player freedom.

Barrows & Borderlands

A reader recently pointed me toward Barrows & Borderlands, a charming OD&D-inspired game that began life over a decade ago as a high school 5e campaign. Since then, it’s evolved into something truly unique. I highly recommend following the link above to learn more, but I especially encourage you to watch the short video below featuring the game’s creator, Matthew Tapp. In it, he shares the story of how B&B came to be.

What makes the video particularly heartening (especially for old-timers like me) is that Matthew and his group are young players who discovered the pleasures of old-school play entirely on their own. I was also delighted to see the video was filmed at the Green Dragon, a game store in Charleston, South Carolina that I visited in my youth, where I bought my copy of the D&D Companion set (though it now seems to be in a different location).

If you’ve got a few minutes, give it a watch. It’s well worth your time.

The Articles of Dragon: "Presenting the Suel Pantheon"

No one should mistake my many misgivings about Deities & Demigods for a disdain for its subject matter. On the contrary, I've long been fascinated by the treatment of gods and religion in roleplaying games. In fact, it's precisely because of that deep interest that I find Deities & Demigods so lacking. It simply isn't a very compelling or thoughtful exploration of these topics, especially when compared to works like Cults of Prax or Cults of Terror.

That said, I was nonetheless an avid reader of Gary Gygax’s “Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk” series in the pages of Dragon magazine. My appreciation for it was twofold. First, I enjoyed learning more about Gygax’s setting than was revealed in the original folio edition. Second and more importantly, the series made a greater effort than Deities & Demigods to describe the beliefs and practices of the worshipers of these divine beings. It wasn’t perfect, of course; these weren’t theological treatises. Still, they went farther than most in offering a sense of the gods’ societal roles within the Flanaess, rather than simply listing their hit points and powers.

Gygax's "Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk" ran for only five installments, the last appearing in issue #71 (March 1983). At the time, I had the impression that there were many more gods yet to be detailed, but that Gygax was simply too busy with other projects to continue the series himself. That’s why, when issue #86 (June 1984) introduced a new series of Greyhawk-related deities, I was pleased. This time, the articles were penned not by Gygax but by Lenard "Len" Lakofka, and they focused exclusively on the gods of a single human ethnic group in the setting: the Suel (or Suloise). The first installment covered just two gods, Lendor and Norebo.

There was much to admire in this second series. Lakofka had a distinct voice, quite different from Gygax’s, and that difference came through clearly in his descriptions of the Suel deities. One of the things I appreciated most was his greater inclusion of snippets of mythology, like hints at familial and other relationships among the gods. That gave the pantheon a sense of internal coherence and realism often missing from Gygax’s portrayals (a few notable exceptions notwithstanding). Instead of presenting the gods as a collection of isolated and artificially constructed figures, Lakofka tied them together, both to each other and to the world they inhabited. They felt more like a genuine pantheon than anything in the original Gygaxian series.

Another strength of the series was the way it framed these deities as being venerated by a particular culture and ethnic group. That felt more authentic to me. Historically, religions are usually deeply rooted in specific peoples and regions rather than being universally applicable or interchangeable, a tendency too often seen in fantasy settings. Of course, there are many historical examples of syncretism and interpretatio graeca – phenomena I both admire and have incorporated into my Secrets of sha-Arthan setting – but these are rarely explored in RPGs, where religion is typically presented in a dull, mechanical fashion. Lakofka’s articles didn’t completely avoid those pitfalls, but they were a marked improvement over most of their contemporaries. That’s why I still hold them in high regard today.

Simple Starships

Though the two are separate things with their own distinct focuses, there are times when I think readers of this blog will be interested in what I'm doing over at Grognardia Games Direct. Today's post is one of them, especially since I'm soliciting feedback on a proposed revision to the rules of Thousand Suns. 

Simple Starships by James Maliszewski

Work on Thousand Suns, Second Edition Begins

Read on Substack

Kumbaya

As you’ve probably guessed from the kinds of posts I’ve been writing lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the hobby has changed, not just since I was young, but in more recent years, too.

In my younger days, what bound us together wasn’t ideology or identity or even agreement. It was something much simpler and, I think, more powerful: a shared love of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and roleplaying games. We didn’t always see eye to eye. We didn’t always get along, but we read the same dog-eared books (gaming and otherwise), argued about alignment and racial level limits, and gathered around the same tables to roll dice. That was enough.

We were a ragtag lot, diverse not so much in the narrow, contemporary demographic sense (though that too, to a degree), but in personality, taste, and temperament. There were the older, bearded guys who got their start with Tactics; the teenagers who smelled like patchouli and wore jackets covered in band patches; the metalheads, the comic book obsessives, the Tolkien scholars-in-training, the stoners, the would-be novelists, and that one guy who knew way too much about the Wehrmacht’s order of battle in 1944 and wouldn’t stop bringing it up. Somehow, we all managed to coexist – or at least we played together and that, I think, is its own kind of getting along.

What I find disheartening now is how often that spirit seems absent. There’s a growing impulse, coming from multiple directions, to draw hard lines about what’s acceptable to play, read, like, or even talk about without a disclaimer. I’m not talking about politics, at least not primarily. I mean the way taste itself is increasingly treated as a moral signal. “You still play Empire of the Petal Throne? What’s wrong with you?” Or: “You’re using Mörk Borg? That’s not real old school.” I’ve heard both this year, more than once, along with others, just as silly.

There’s nothing wrong with preferences. No one should be shamed or pressured into liking what they don’t like. That was true in 1982 and it’s true now. Back then, plenty of people I knew scoffed at Arduin or rolled their eyes at RuneQuest. I’m not going to pretend we didn’t argue fiercely about whether, for example, spell slots or spell points were “better.” That kind of good-natured rivalry was part of the fun. Even now, I enjoy lobbing the occasional jab in the direction of certain games or game mechanics. I’m not claiming the moral high ground.

However, I think there’s a difference between ribbing your friend for liking Rolemaster and declaring that certain games, creators, or communities are beyond the pale and that merely engaging with them puts you under suspicion. That’s not rivalry. That’s excommunication. It's coming from all sides. Depending on who's speaking, the OSR is either a toxic boys' club of crypto-fascists or a co-opted safe space for woke poseurs who don’t really “get” old games. Try saying that not every game choice is a political act and that maybe you just like what you like and you’ll find yourself viewed with suspicion by both camps.

It's exhausting and, frankly, it's absurd.

When I was a kid, the fact that someone played Chivalry & Sorcery instead of AD&D might earn a few barbs, but no one was exiled. No one cared whether you thought the best sci-fi RPG was Traveller, Space Opera, or Universe (even though it's obviously Traveller). If you were into Tunnels & Trolls, sure, we might’ve thought you were a little weird, but you were our kind of weird. You were one of us. You knew where the lavatories were on the USS Enterprise. You could quote Monty Python and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from memory. You subscribed to Dragon and read every page, even the fiction. You liked pretending to be a wizard or a starship captain or a mutant with a laser rifle. That was enough.

I miss that.

I’m not arguing that we all need to agree. We never did and, honestly, that was part of the joy – the clashes, the rivalries, the heated debates about initiative systems and critical hits. There’s a difference in my opinion between spirited disagreement and gatekeeping disguised as virtue. The hobby is big, messy, and contradictory. It always has been; that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

We could all stand to be a little more charitable, a little less quick to sort people into boxes, a little more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. Curiosity, not conformity, is what brought most of us here in the first place.

When you strip away the noise, we’re all still what we’ve always been – Weirdos.

[Comments are now closed. Don't worry: there will be several new posts coming in the days to come that I am sure were generate just as many arguments. —JDM]

Campaign Updates: Ghosts of the Past

All three campaigns have been forging ahead into new areas, most especially House of Worms, which is rapidly nearing its ultimate conclusion after a decade and a half of regular play. Though I can't say for certain when the End will finally come, I feel pretty confident in predicting that things will wrap up by the end of the summer at the absolute latest. 

Barrett's Raiders

Having left Fort Lee after several days there, Military Liaison Group 7 once again took to the highways, heading in the direction of Fort Pickett, their next designated stop. Upon arrival, the comparison between the two USMEA bases couldn't have been starker. Where Fort Lee had multiple blockades and checkpoints, as well as a large refugee zone outside its walls, Fort Pickett had none of this. The characters' vehicles were inspected at the gate and, once Col. Orlowski identified himself and explained they'd been sent by USMEA command in Norfolk, they were directed to the security office. There, they signed in, received their visitor badges, and given further directions to the office of the commanding office, Col. Edward Franks.

The name of the CO was familiar to Lt. Tom Cody. He'd served with Franks in the infantry before the war, though, at that time, he was a captain. Franks was pleased to see Cody, though he was more than a little shocked to see him wearing lieutenant's bars. Cody explained the circumstances of his field promotion and the two caught up on what they'd been doing since they last served together. Franks soon showed himself to be a fairly no-nonsense officer who didn't place much stock in formalities. He also suggested that he'd heard about events at Fort Lee, intimating that he didn't think much of its CO, General Summers, whom he referred to as a "desk general."

Col. Franks then offered to assist MLG-7 in any way that he could. Orlowski explained they were simply passing through before heading north toward their ultimate destination at Fort Meade. Franks laughed at this, saying that only USMEA would send them west so that they could go north. Orlowski did his best not to speak poorly of his superiors in reply. Franks then asked if he could ask a favor of MLG-7. He said that some of his winter grain supplies, sent in from western Virginia, had been spoiling at an unusually quick rate. The same was true of several other USMEA bases. He asked Col. Orlowski if he and his men would keep an eye out for any information about this as they traveled.

Orlowski agreed to do so and Frank added that he'd put them in touch with some of his medical staff and agronomists. They would brief MLG-7 on the nature of this strange affliction, in the hopes that it might help them in their own investigation. Once Orlowski returned to the others and explained what Franks had told him, Vadim stepped forward and announced, "This looks like the effects of a Soviet bioweapon." Before Orlowski had a chance to respond, Michael stepped forward and said, "I don't think you should be saying any more about this. The Colonel isn't cleared for that." 

Dolmenwood

Father Horsely directed the characters to the Merry Mendicant Inn as a place to stay the night. The characters made their way there and took several rooms for the night, with Falin sharing a room with Emelda, in order to be certain that nothing ill befell her during the night. Unfortunately, that proved insufficient protection. In the morning, Emelda was nowhere to be seen and there was no evidence that she'd left the room either by the front door or the window. 

The characters split up, looking throughout the Woodcutters' Encampment for signs of Emelda. One group interrogated the inn's proprietress, who explained that, during the night, a "strange woman with eyes like saucers" did come into the common room. She said nothing and everyone steered clear of her on account of the "odd feeling" she engendered upon any he looked at her. The woman spent maybe 10 or 15 minutes in the common room, staring at the stairs leading to the sleeping quarters before leaving as mysteriously as she came. Meanwhile, another group questioned the town guard, who did not see Emelda during the night, because they were too busy fending off an attack by "bog corpses" – dead bodies reanimated by black magic that sometimes wander into the Camp.

In combination, this convinced Waldra that something unpleasant had happened while they were asleep. Talking to Father Horsely revealed that the woodcutters have legends about "the Hag," a repulsively ugly old woman who was once a fairy princess, the sister of the Queen of Blackbirds, in fact. For her obsession with meddling in mortal affairs and interest in death and decay, she was cursed to age but never die. Exiled from Fairy, she now dwelt among the mortals that so interested her, where she has since been a source of much mischief. Of course, Father Horsely didn't believe in the existence of the Hag. Waldra, however, wasn't so sure. Indeed, she began to worry that perhaps the Hag was responsible for the disappearance of Emelda, either for her own purposes or to use as a bargaining chip in trying to lift the curse her sister had placed upon her.

House of Worms

Chiyé's summoning of the spirit of the First Tlakotáni, the founder of Tsolyánu more than two millennia ago, worked surprisingly well. This worried Chiyé somewhat, as his sorcery usually could not conjure the spirit of one so long dead. By all rights, their spirit-soul should have passed either to the Isles of Teretané or to one of the various hells of the gods to punish those who'd transgressed their laws. The Tlakotáni explained that Chiyé was indeed correct in his assumption, but that, in his case, his spirit lingered as a consequence of the pact he made with the One Other so long ago. Much like the One Other himself, he was bound to Tékumel. In fact, his fate was linked to that of the One Other. So long as the one remained bound, so too would the other.

That is why he begged the characters to free the One Other. Only by doing so could Tsolyánu be freed from the dire consequences of his arrogance. The First Tlakotáni explained that he had hoped, by using ancient Llyáni rights, to force the One Other to protect Avanthár and, by extension, Tsolyánu from ever falling. His desire to ensure the empire he had founded would never suffer the fate of Engsvanyálu before it had blinded him to the fact that doing so would ossify Tsolyánu forever. His empire would never fall, it's true, but neither would it change or improve. It would be trapped in a kind of living death, one where stability and tradition stifled creativity and growth. The time had come for History to reassert itself, for the One Other to be freed.

Needless to say, this thought concerned the characters, but, after some discussion, they realized that this was a gamble they were willing to take. Better to end the connection between the One Other and Avanthár than to see either Dhich'uné ascend the Petal Throne through trickery or Eselné to do so through violence. They then sought out Prince Táksuru, told him what they had learned, and asked for his aid. Though reluctant at first, he agreed to assist them, calling upon his contacts within the Temple of Ksárul to open a nexus point just outside of Avanthár, one close to a hidden entrance into the ancient fortress. He also provided them with a device that would temporarily suspend its defenses to allow entrance. Once inside, though, they were on their own and would have to find a way past its many guardians to locate the supposed prison of the One Other – if it even existed.

Táksuru bid them farewell. He stated that he did not expect to see them again and prayed that the Weaver of Skeins would smile upon their efforts. What they were attempting was madness, but, given that Tsolyánu was currently waiting to see which of two madmen might become its new emperor, perhaps there was no other way. For his part, Nebússa said that, if they should fail, it was up to Táksuru to carry the day. He felt the young man would make a fine successor to his father, Hirkáne. With that, the characters stepped through the nexus point.

Ruins

Blogs were the tinder from which the fire of the Old School Renaissance was sparked. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was a genuine explosion of creativity across the RPG blogosphere, fueled by enthusiasm for old school Dungeons & Dragons and its many descendants, both literal and spiritual. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of blogs appeared, written by referees, players, professional designers, and amateur theorists eager to share ideas, reminiscences, house rules, and reflections on what made the earlier, pre-3e versions of D&D so compelling.

Grognardia was one of them and, like many others, it eventually went quiet. Real life has a way of asserting itself and even the most passionately pursued hobbies often yield before it. I was away from this blog for nearly eight years before returning and, somewhat to my surprise, the years since are more numerous than those before my hiatus, even if I no longer post at the same manic pace that nearly destroyed me. Unfortunately, many other wonderful blogs from that era haven’t returned. Most still exist in some fashion. You can find them if you look, but they are, for all practical purposes, ruins: silent, abandoned, and sometimes crumbling under the slow decay of broken image links and expired widgets.

That saddens me.

The OSR blogosphere was, in many ways, the intellectual and creative heart of a movement none of us fully understood while it was happening. Before social media transformed everything into a fast-scrolling feed of ephemeral opinions and algorithmic noise, blogs allowed for longer, more thoughtful engagement. There was conversation between blogs, even, perhaps especially, when we disagreed, as we frequently and passionately did. Posts would spark responses, build on shared ideas, or spin off in wild new directions. Someone would post a new take on alignment or a character class, and within days, if not hours, half a dozen other blogs would riff on the idea in a cascade of strange and wonderful interpretations. That kind of idea-driven collaboration was a joy to witness and to be part of.

Every so often, I revisit some of my old bookmarks: Sham’s Grog & Blog, Planet Algol, The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms, Beyond the Black Gate, The Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope, Malevolent & Benign, The Mule Abides, A Paladin in Citadel, Dreams of Mythic Fantasy, and many more whose names, sadly, I can no longer recall. Some blogs ended with a fond farewell. Far more simply stopped. A few sputter back to life from time to time, like torches catching momentarily in the damp before going out again.

I don’t blame anyone for moving on. We all have our seasons and many of those who once blogged now create elsewhere or simply play games without publicly sharing their thoughts. I did the same for a long while and there’s definitely something to be said for it. Still, I miss that earlier era, not just the quantity of content, but the spirit behind it. I miss the curiosity, the delight in obscure mechanics and half-forgotten rules, and, above all, the reckless, unfiltered creativity. I think a lot of us needed that back then. I know I did.

Much of that creative energy has since shifted to platforms like Discord, Reddit, Substack, or YouTube. Each has its own strengths, but none really replicates what the old blogs offered. Blogs were open and long-form. They rewarded thoughtfulness over immediacy. They were searchable and, maybe most importantly, linkable. You could stumble across a blogroll and find yourself falling into a rabbit hole of interconnected creativity that might last hours. That’s much harder to do now, where so much is hidden behind logins or paywalls or simply submerges into the stream of slop.

We can’t go back to 2009. I know that. Still, it’s worth remembering what was lost or at least what was left behind. Maybe, if a few more of us keep our torches lit, something like it can grow again – not a recreation but a continuation of the same spirit.

As any D&D player knows, ruins are places where treasure is found.

Memories of Game Stores Past (Part III)

I'm old, old enough to remember a time when the local game store was not merely a place to buy things. It was a crossroads, a hub for roleplayers, wargamers, and fans of genre fiction of all stripes. In those days, game stores felt weird in the best possible way: crammed with strange titles, eccentric proprietors, and regulars who treated the place like a second home. They were cluttered, often a bit dingy, and absolutely magical.

I spent countless hours in such stores. I remember walking through their doors and being hit by the smell of old cardboard and newsprint and the sight of wooden shelves bowed under the weight of too many Avalon Hill and SPI boxed wargames. You could browse freely, picking up games you’d never heard of, flipping through rulebooks that transported you to strange new worlds. If you were lucky, someone might be running a game in the back room – and if you hung around long enough, you might even get asked to join.

That’s how I discovered many of the games that shaped my tastes and interests. This was long before carefully curated social media feeds or electronic publisher newsletters, when sheer chance might introduce you to a captivating cover, a staff recommendation, or a game in progress that caught your attention. The old game store was a vehicle for discovery. It introduced me to lots of games I might never have found otherwise.

That kind of store, the kind I knew in my youth, is largely gone.

Certainly, there are still game stores out there, some of them excellent in their own way – but they’re not the same. Most of them survive today by focusing on collectible card games, miniatures wargaming like Warhammer, and modern boardgames. Roleplaying games, if present at all, are often confined to a few shelves of familiar titles from major publishers. The walls of obscure and idiosyncratic RPGs I once browsed for hours have mostly vanished.

The reasons aren’t mysterious. The Internet changed everything. Online retailers offer discounts and immediate availability that physical stores can’t hope to match. Digital publishing has displaced print in many cases. Perhaps most significantly, online play, something I myself participate in weekly, has made many of the accessories that once sustained game stores obsolete. Why buy dice, for example, when a VTT takes care of it?

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, I think it's great that it’s never been easier to find people with whom to play, no matter where you live. As regular readers know, I referee or play in several weekly online campaigns with friends scattered across the world. Likewise, the indie RPG scene is thriving in ways that would been nigh impossible back in the 1980s. Yet, despite all this richness, I can’t shake the feeling that something important has been lost.

Serendipity. That’s what’s missing.

In my experience, the Internet is great at showing us more of what we already like. It’s less good at surprising us. In the absence of physical spaces where different genres, systems, and subcultures once collided, the RPG hobby has become more siloed. It’s entirely possible now to spend years playing RPGs and never stray beyond a handful of familiar games. That wasn’t the case when every trip to the store might reveal something you’d never seen before.

Back then, I had a much more eclectic gaming diet and not just because I was young and had more free time, though that’s certainly part of it. No, the environment encouraged it. Game stores were chaos. They were cluttered with possibilities and they invited you to take risks, to try something new. They were social, too, places where you talked with strangers, traded recommendations, maybe even rolled some dice together.

Today, many of the stores that still exist feel lonelier, at least to me. They’re quieter, more sterile, less open to chance. They sell games, but they rarely feel like places to do anything else.

I don’t say this to complain about change for its own sake. Much as I dislike it, change is inevitable and not all of it is unwelcome. However, I do think we’ve lost something intangible but important. The video rental store analogy fits here. It's true that streaming services offer more movies than any Blockbuster ever did, but no algorithm has ever replicated the joy of stumbling across something unexpected on the shelf or the spontaneous conversation with a fellow customer that convinced you to give it a try.

I miss that. I suspect I’m not alone in doing so. We may well be richer in options than ever before, but in some that I think matter, we are also poorer.

Grognardia Plus

Grognardia Plus by James Maliszewski

Some Additional Thoughts about Anthologies

Read on Substack

Retrospective: The Sentinel

Published in 1983, module UK2, The Sentinel, is the first part of a two-module series written by Graeme Morris for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Along with its sequel, which I’ll discuss in this space next week, it stands out as a distinctive offering in TSR’s early ’80s catalog. That’s due in large part to its origin in TSR UK, the British branch of the company, which operated with a surprising degree of independence and a sensibility very much its own.

TSR UK’s adventures have always provoked strong reactions. In my view, they’re a mixed bag, but a fascinating one. Where American modules of the time tended to emphasize dungeon-crawling and large-scale combat, the UK efforts often followed a more eccentric path. They leaned toward investigation over exploration, diplomacy over combat, and mood over spectacle. Instead of clearing rooms of monsters, players were expected to unravel plots, decipher motives, and navigate social situations. This approach didn’t always succeed, but even when it faltered, it offered something offbeat and refreshingly different from the norm.

The Sentinel is a low-level adventure for characters of levels 2–5, centered around the recovery of a magical artifact, the titular Sentinel, a sentient glove created to oppose its darker counterpart, the Gauntlet. The action unfolds around the village of Kusnir, nominally part of the World of Greyhawk, though it feels pretty generic to me. What begins as an investigation into a series of disturbances blamed on a skulk gradually reveals a more complex situation involving half-orcs, xvarts, and a ruined villa that hides a long-buried secret. Eventually, the player characters track down the skulk, who unexpectedly hands over the Sentinel and sets the stage for the events of the module's sequel, The Gauntlet (which I'll discuss in this space next week).

The inclusion of monsters from the Fiend Folio, like the aforementioned skulk and xvarts, deserves comment. TSR UK often seemed eager to showcase that volume’s more obscure entries, and The Sentinel is no exception. Whether these monsters enhance or detract from the module depends on taste, I suppose. For my part, I find many of the Fiend Folio humanoids underwhelming and nothing about the way they're used here really changes my mind. They serve their purpose, but they could easily have been swapped for more familiar creatures without much loss. Of course, your mileage may vary.

Even so, the module has its charms. Chief among them is the Sentinel itself, the magical glove that gives the module its title. Far from a simple item, it acts as a character in its own right, one with an agenda and a role to play in guiding the player characters. This combination of grounded, even mundane rural fantasy with sudden flashes of the mythic or uncanny was a hallmark of TSR UK’s best work. It’s a tricky balance, but when it works, as it sometimes does here, it gives the adventure a distinctive tone that distinguishes it from its contemporary American counterparts.

The larger, underlying plot of the module only emerges through observation, deduction, and careful play. There's a sense that the players are uncovering something hidden rather than being dragged from one set-piece to the next, even though there are several times when UK2 verges on becoming a railroad. Many of the module's encounters hint at something older, deeper, and just a little uncanny. The overall effect borders on folk horror of the kind where the land remembers and the past never quite stays buried. I like that.

Of course, The Sentinel is only half the story. Its sequel, The Gauntlet, continues and ultimately resolves the conflict introduced here. That’s perhaps The Sentinel’s biggest shortcoming as a standalone module: it presents an intriguing premise but offers little in the way of resolution. Earlier AD&D module series, like Against the Giants or the Slavelords series, generally made more of an effort to make each installment satisfying on its own. The Sentinel, by contrast, feels deliberately unfinished, a prolog more than a full scenario. I'll have more to say about this in next week's Retrospective post.

Worthy of mention is the module's presentation. The artwork, by Peter Young, is not particularly strong. The cover and interior art are weirdly stylized and, in my opinion, amateurish. It may not be literally he worst art to ever appear in a Dungeons & Dragons product, but it's a strong contender. By contrast, the cartography by Paul Ruiz is clean, readable, and highly functional. I’ve praised Ruiz’s maps before and those in The Sentinel are up to his usually standard. His maps are among my favorite things in the TSR UK modules.

Looking back on The Sentinel now, I find myself appreciating it more for what it tries to be than for what it actually is. It’s a thoughtful module that respects the intelligence of its players and the subtlety of its world. Compared to more "traditional" approaches to adventure design at the time, The Sentinel hinted at something different – not quite "story"-driven but certainly more consciously aware of a narrative or plot. That has its advantages and disadvantages, of course, which is why I don't like it unreservedly. Instead, I look on it as an experiment with mixed results, especially when taken on its own rather than as the first part of a two-part scenario.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Best Introductory Scenario(s)

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

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

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

If a Game Falls in the Forest

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freedom Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Brontës to Braunstein

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could roleplaying games have been invented earlier than they were?

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

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