Retrospective: Mythus

By the end of 1986, Gary Gygax had completely severed any connection to TSR, the company he'd founded in 1973 with Don Kaye. His departure was not entirely of his own accord, having lost both financial and creative control over TSR a year earlier to his former business manager, Lorraine Williams. This is a well-known story the details of which others know better than I. Suffice it to say that, just before I graduated from high school, Gary Gygax, a man who had been, for good and for ill, the public face of Dungeons & Dragons and, by extension, TSR, was no longer involved with either in any way.

This fact did not, however, mean that Gygax would no longer be involved in the RPG industry. Almost immediately after his departure from TSR, he joined Forrest Baker, a fellow wargamer who'd worked as a consultant at TSR, in forming New Infinities Productions. Nowadays, New Infinities is probably best known for its publication of the science fiction roleplaying game, Cyborg Commando and the later installments of Gygax's "Gord the Rogue" novels.

New Infinities did not last long, ceasing operations barely two years after its founding. Even so, Gygax's projects during this period laid the groundwork for much of what he'd be doing for the remainder of his professional life. For example, he planned to produce "Castle Dunfalcon," a version of his Castle Greyhawk dungeon that would never see the light of day, though it did light the way for the eventual publication of Castle Zagyg in 2008. Likewise, Gygax announced an upcoming game called "Infinite Adventures." To be co-written with Rob Kuntz, "Infinite Adventures" would have been a multi-genre roleplaying game, consisting of different related rulebooks, each one devoted to a different genre (fantasy, horror, science fiction, etc.).

"Infinite Adventures" was never published and I have no idea whether any work was even devoted to its design. However, just a few years later, in 1992, Game Designers' Workshop released Mythus, the first book of a multi-genre roleplaying system written by Gygax, with the assistance of Dave Newton, a name otherwise unknown to me. That multi-genre system was initially announced as Dangerous Dimensions, but TSR threatened a lawsuit, because of a supposed similarity between the initials – DD – and those of Gygx's more famous game (D&D). To avoid the suit, GDW changed the series title to Dangerous Journeys. Unfortunately, this was not to be the last time TSR would legally interfere with GDW, Gygax, and Dangerous Journeys, as I'll discuss later.

Mythus is the fantasy component of Dangerous Journeys, focusing on an alternate world called Aerth where magic – or magick, in Gygax's parlance – and monsters are real. There are no "classes" in Mythus. Instead, there are "vocations," which are collections of skills (properly Knowledge and Skills or K/S). Regardless of vocation, characters – or heroic personas – can learn most skills, but at differing rates and costs, depending on a number of factors, chiefly vocation. It's a very different approach than in D&D and a lot more complicated too, or at least I felt so at the time. The situation isn't helped by Gygax's use of all manner of peculiar terminology and abbreviations that make reading almost any section of rules a challenge. 

The Mythus rulebook is over 400 pages long, divided between basic (or prime) and advanced rules. The prime rules are only about 20 pages long and covers all the foundational elements of the rule, like character creation, actions, combat, magic (or heka – as I said, the book is riddled with idiosyncratic word choices), and advancement. The advanced rules, meanwhile, take up the rest of the book. While extensive, they still don't cover everything you'd need to play Mythus. Magic, for example, is mostly shunted off to a separate book (Mythus Magick); the same is true of monsters (found in Mythus Bestiary). 

It's a shame. Though Mythus is way more complex than I like in my RPGs, there are lots of fascinating details hidden within it. For example, his approach to the planes, which is clearly an outgrowth of thoughts he'd had on the topic during the later years of his time developing AD&D. Indeed, that's the general vibe of Mythus overall: an evolution or development of many of the weirder ideas Gygax was toying with for his never-realized second edition of AD&D. I'm not suggesting that a Gygaxian 2e would have looked anything like Mythus rules-wise, but I do think that many of the game's worldbuilding flourishes, whether it be monsters, the planes, or magic, might have been incorporated into it in some fashion or other. That remains the appeal of the game to me, even though I've never played it: Mythus is a window into the imagination of Gygax more than a decade after he'd created AD&D.

That was also likely its downfall. TSR continued to hound Gygax about Dangerous Journeys, alleging that it derived too much from his prior work on AD&D and that it made use of concepts he'd developed while still employed by TSR. If you're interested, you can read some court documents related to their claims here. A great deal of it seems petty and its allegations so broad that I wonder whether they would have held up to legal scrutiny. In the end, though, it didn't matter, because GDW lacked the resources necessary to put up a protracted fight. After a couple of years, they threw in the towel, selling Mythus and Dangerous Journeys to TSR as a way to end the suit. And that was that.

To this day, I'm not certain I've ever met a person who's actually played Mythus, but I have met many people who, like me, have a strange affection for it nonetheless. That's not an endorsement of the game exactly. As I said, it's much too complicated mechanically and its bizarre nomenclature is an impediment to learning the rules, but I appreciate its Gygaxian oddities – its baroque cosmology, its quirky takes on folkloric monsters, its peculiar alternate Earth setting – and sometimes wonder what might have been had TSR not interfered. We never got to see Unhallowed, the next game in the Dangerous Journeys line, which was supposedly a horror game. What might that have been like? What would a Gygaxian take on sci-fi have been? So many unanswerable questions.