The Petal Throne Has Thorns

Recently, I sent a message to the players on our House of Worms campaign Discord server. It was, in essence, a warning.

This is not meant to frighten anyone.

Now that I've succeeded in frightening everyone, here it is: From this point on in the campaign, the gloves are off. 

By that I mean, we're nearing the End and that means anything can happen, including characters dying. Obviously, there are means to bring them back cough, *cough, cough Aíthfo* but there's no guarantee of that, especially given how things are going. I bring this up only because I'm committed to the campaign's conclusion being a tense and uncertain one in every way. Though I've never held back in letting the dice fall where they may *cough, cough, Aíthfo*, things may nevertheless get even nastier than they ever have before and I feel an obligation to remind everyone that no one has Plot Armor.

Have a nice day. 😊

It’s a bit tongue-in-cheek, but the underlying message is serious: after more than a decade of weekly play, the House of Worms campaign is approaching its conclusion. The characters, most of whom have been in play for years, are not guaranteed a happy ending, let alone a heroic one. They can fail. They can die. They might even die pointlessly, offhandedly, from a bad roll at the wrong moment.

That’s all par for the course in a proper old school RPG campaign, of course, but I felt compelled to remind the players. As I’ve likely said many times over the years, House of Worms is light on dice rolls outside of combat and combat itself is rare outside the underworld. Most sessions consist almost entirely of roleplaying in one form or another and the players are very good at it. More often than not, they resolve their problems through conversation, manipulation, and clever schemes rather than through swordplay or spellcraft. Much as I love that – and I do, given my longstanding dislike of combat – I sometimes worry it’s made them a little too comfortable. A little too safe.

From what I read online and have sometimes even observed "in the wild," there's a tacit expectation in a lot of contemporary gaming circles that player characters are protagonists will, therefore, reach the end of a campaign. They might suffer, they might be scarred, but they'll get there. There's an implicit contract between referee and player that, so long as you show up and play your character, you'll at least survive to the final scene. Old school play usually doesn't work out that way and, at least in my interpretation of it, Tékumel especially doesn’t work that way.

Tékumel is a setting where the gods are real, inscrutable, and often indifferent. It's a place of Byzantine scheming, hidden pacts, and ancient horrors. A misplaced word or an ill-advised alliance can unravel everything you've worked toward – and that’s glorious. As I conceive it, a Tékumel campaign should end the way it began: full of mystery, danger, and unpredictability. There's n script; there’s no "true ending." There's only what the players do and what the dice say about it.

I've always tried to referee the House of Worms campaign in a way that respects the players' choices – as well as the consequences of those choices. That doesn’t mean I'm out to kill their characters for shock value or for sport. However, it does mean that no character is safe just because they’re "important." If anything, being important only puts a larger target on a character's back. Indeed, that's been the pattern of this campaign since its inception in March 2015: each time the characters succeed, there's been an escalation in the stakes and the strength of the opposition. Where once they contended with local matters of small moment, now they're at the very heart of an imperial succession crisis, one that involves not just earthly power politics but the machinations of gods and demons. 

In playing House of Worms, what I’ve come to appreciate most about it and, by extension old school RPG campaigns more generally, is their fragility. There’s no safety net, no rewind button. The stakes are real and when the players realize that, when they know the character they've played for literally years could disappear into the void at any moment, the impact on play is considerable. That’s when the game transcends mere mechanics and becomes something else: a shared experience of genuine risk and reward.

So yes, the gloves are off, but they were never really on to begin with.

Have a nice day. 😊

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Special Skills, Special Thrills"

Of all the iconic classes of D&D, the cleric is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb. Whereas the fighting man, the magic-user, and even the thief are all pretty broad archetypes easily -- and non-mechanically -- re-imagined in a variety of different ways, the cleric is a very specific type of character. With his heavy armor, non-edged weapons, Biblical magic, and power over the undead, the cleric is not a generic class, recalling a crusading knight by way of Van Helsing. There's thus a distinctly Christian air to the cleric class, an air that increasingly seemed at odds with the game itself, which, as time went on, distanced itself from its earlier implicit Christianity and embraced an ahistorical form of polytheism instead.

For that reason, there were growing cries among some gamers to "fix" the cleric. In this context "fix" means change to make it less tied to a particular religion, in this case a particular religion the game itself had eschewed. The first time I recall seeing an "official" answer to these cries was in Deities & Demigods, where it's noted that the clerics of certain deities had different armor and/or weapon restrictions than "standard" clerics. A few even got special abilities reflective of their divine patron. This idea was later expanded upon by Gary Gygax himself in his "Deities & Demigods of The World of Greyhawk" series of articles, which I credit with giving widespread attention to this idea. I know that, after those articles appeared, lots of my fellow gamers wanted to follow Gary's lead and tailor their cleric characters to the deities they served, an idea that AD&D more formally adopted with 2e in 1989.

In issue #85 (May 1984) of Dragon, Roger E. Moore wrote an article entitled "Special Skills, Special Thrills" that also addressed this topic. Moore specifically cites Gary's articles as his inspiration and sets about providing unique abilities for clerics of several major pantheons. These pantheons are Egyptian, Elven, Norse, Ogrish, and Orcish – a rather strange mix! Of course, Moore intends these to be used only as examples to inspire individual referees. Likewise, he leaves open the question of just how to balance these additional abilities with a cleric's default ones. He notes that Gygax assessed a 5-15% XP penalty to such clerics, but does not wholeheartedly endorse that method himself, suggesting that other more roleplaying-oriented solutions (ritual demands, quests, etc.) might work just as well.

Like a lot of gamers at the time, I was very enamored of the idea of granting unique abilities to clerics based on their patron deity. Nowadays, I'm not so keen on the idea, in part because I think the desire for such only underlines the "odd man out" quality of the cleric class. Moreover, nearly every example of a "specialty cleric" (or priest, as D&D II called them) still retains too much of the baseline cleric to be coherent. Why, for example, would a god of war be able to turn the undead? Why should almost any cleric wear heavy armor and be the second-best combatant of all the classes? The cleric class, even with tweaks, is so tied to a medieval Christian society and worldview that it seems bizarre to me to use it as the basis for a "generic" priest class. Far better, I think, would be to have individual classes for priests of each religion or, in keeping with swords-and-sorcery, jettison the class entirely.

War!

As you can probably tell from both of my earlier posts today, there are soon going to be some large, pitched battles in my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign. This isn't something I'd imagined some months ago, when we began entering the final stages of the campaign, but here we are. This turn of events makes sense, of course, given the way events are unfolding. However, I can't deny that this prospect fills me with a bit of apprehension. As I've said on many occasions over the years, I've never been a wargamer of any kind, despite my fascination with and some knowledge of military matters. I say this with some regret, both because this lacuna in my game education has no doubt skewed my perspective on certain things and because it leaves me somewhat at loss in knowing how to handle occasions of mass combat within a RPG.

That's why I'm turning to you, my readers, for thoughts and suggestions on how you have handled wars and large-scale battles in your roleplaying game campaigns. What rules or approaches did you use and how well did they work? Did they mesh well with the RPG you were playing? I'm honestly curious about every aspect of this question, since I have such limited experience with it in my own campaigns and would appreciate learning from those of you who've successfully incorporated mass combat into yours. 

That said, I should make a few things clear about my own preferences as a referee. Between my dislike of combat as an activity in itself and my feeling that most RPGs have too many rules, I have a natural aversion to any kind of mass combat system that plays out like a wargame. If I wanted to play a wargame, I'd play a wargame. What I want – and this may be impossible – is a solution that doesn't require me or the players to learn a whole new set of rules to simulate their characters' involvement in a big battle. Additionally, I'd like for what the characters do to have an effect on the outcome of the battle, even if they're not directly involved in everything that happens. I realize this is likely asking a lot, but I have lots of smart and knowledgeable readers, so maybe one of you can point me in the right direction.

To date, the only RPG I've ever played that had a decent set of mass combat rules was Pendragon and, even there, I wasn't wholly satisfied with the results. The main virtue of Pendragon was that the participation of the player characters still used the standard combat rules and the results of their individual battles had some impact on the final outcome of a larger fight. I didn't have to keep track of lots of wargame-y rules to adjudicate the battle satisfactorily. That's more or less what I want here, though, as I said, I may be asking for too much. 

Your thoughts on this matter are thus greatly appreciated. 

The Battle of Béy Sü

From an address by Prince Eselné Tlakotáni to his legions on the steps of the Palace of War just prior to commencing their assault on the Temple of Sárku (13 Fésru 2360 A.S.): 

 "I will not lie to you. This path I have chosen leads into fire. There will be war. Blood in the streets. Temples razed, banners burned, clans shattered. I do not deny it: I expect it."

"But we must walk it anyway."

"For too long, we have whispered that Tsolyánu is 'eternal,' not because she is strong, but because we fear what will happen if she changes. We call her 'timeless' when what we really mean is stagnant. We call her 'harmonious' when what we really mean is choked. We call her 'pious' while we let the temples devour her from within."

"We have smoothed over every fracture with ritual. Buried every danger beneath scrolls. We’ve let the high clans rot behind lacquered gates and the bureaucrats nest like syúsyu-lizards in the rafters of the Golden Tower. And when the choosing of an emperor becomes not a moment of clarity, but a pageant of manipulation, then we are no longer ruled by 'tradition.' We are ruled by cowardice dressed in antique finery."

"I am not a reformer. I am not a philosopher. I am a soldier. I know what war looks like — and still I choose it."

"Béy Sü is nearly four hundred years overdue for Ditlána. Every brick in this city knows it. But perhaps it is not just Béy Sü that must be razed and reborn. Perhaps the whole Empire must be broken, so it can live again."

"If that is madness, then better a madman with clean hands than another schemer who calls ruin peace."

Campaign Updates: Two for the Road

That "real life" thing that I'm sure everyone has heard of does indeed exist and it's been keeping me busy over the last few weeks. It's apparently been doing the same thing to a lot of my players, too, hence my current campaigns have convened fewer times than I had hoped. Nevertheless, we did play several sessions of both Barrett's Raiders and House of Worms. Dolmenwood, alas, remains in a brief stasis; with luck, it will resume this week. In the meantime, here's the latest news from both Fort Lee, Virginia and Béy Sü, Tsolyánu:

Barrett's Raiders

Armed with Specialist Huxley's confession, Major Hunter decided that now was the time to approach both Lt. Nolan Bennett in logistics, along with his superior, Captain Reginald Tolen. She started with Bennett, who attempted to obfuscate the issues at hand, claiming that any irregularities could be chalked up to simple "clerical error" and the stress of trying to operate a military base "under difficult conditions." Hunter then confronted him with what Huxley told her, which cause Bennett to take a different tack. He admitted that Tolen probably had a hand in what's happening, but assured her that it's because "the captain's a good guy" who's "just trying to help people anyway he can." There's nothing sinister in it and it'd be a mistake to expose Tolen, since it'd probably land him in the stockade.

Hunter suspected this still wasn't the whole truth. She used other evidence she'd collected from paperwork and reports to demonstrate that Bennett himself must have been involved too. Bennett made a few more attempts to weasel out of these accusations before admitting that, yes, he'd used both Tolen and Huxley for his own betterment. He'd been contacted by a New America adherent who made him an offer: funnel war materiel from Fort Lee to him and he'd ensure that, when the time came, Bennett would be given a meal ticket and a position of safety "out west." Bennett claimed he didn't care about New America's ideology, only that he had a future. "Look around. Open your eyes. USMEA doesn't have what it takes to put this country back together again. I decided to back the winner."

When confronted with these facts, Captain Tolen was appalled. He openly admitted that, yes, he had made arrangements, through Bennett, to send "extra" supplies to civilian communities in need of them – but he swore he did not authorize the sending of war materiel to anyone, let alone New America. He felt betrayed, though he made no bones about the fact that he was ultimately to blame for this situation. Tolen took full responsibility and offered to turn himself in to the Provost Marshal, Colonel Kearns. Major Hunter said that she would speak to Kearns first, but, in the meantime, he and Bennett would be placed under guard.

Kearns was not surprised to learn that Tolen was involved. He said that the captain was a "naive bleeding heart" but not a bad a man. Fort Lee owed a lot to his work to keep it together, but that did not excuse his "reckless" behavior. Ultimately, though, the fault lay with General Summers, the base commander, who "cared more about looking good for Norfolk than doing his job." Summers, he explained, was a desk general, who had never seen combat and now, with all the soldiers returning from Europe, was worried he might be replaced "by someone with actual military experience." Summers always preferred to paper over problems rather than deal with them.

Hunter confirmed some of what Kearns claimed when she and Lt. Col. Orlowski presented MLG-7's report directly to Summers. The general praised them for getting to the bottom of the problem and that they had done so quietly. Summers then said that they were probably keen to leave Fort Lee and continue on their journey. He asked several times when they planned to leave and if there were anything his office could do to speed them on their way. This suggested that Col. Kearns had been correct in his assessment of the general: he wanted to be sure no one in Norfolk got wind of this serious breach of security that had happened under his watch.

Hunter and Orlowski explained they'd be leaving tomorrow, which pleased Summers. He thanked them again and sent them on their way. Of course, Spc. Huxley was scheduled to make another supply run the next day, too. Now that he had been found out, New America would realize something had happened and they might change up their local operations. That didn't sit well with Hunter and Orlowski, who decided that, as part of the departure the next day, MLG-7 would look into this dangling thread personally.

House of Worms

The characters made their way to a safe location known to him through Nebússa's contacts in the Omnipotent Azure Legion. There, they took stock of the artifacts Míru had left for Kirktá and opened the chest of the topaz god to remove the priest of the One Other they'd place in stasis there. Normally, a living being struck by the beam of an excellent ruby eye is held in suspended animation unharmed until he is struck again. This time, though, that did not seem to be the case. When Míru was released, he appeared lifeless – not dead exactly but certainly not alive either. It immediately occurred to Kirktá that, having lived a double life within the Temple of Belkhánu for so long, Míru had undoubtedly learned one or more spells that would enable him to transfer his consciousness from one body to another. He had probably done so moments before he was struck by the excellent ruby eye. If so, he was still alive and working toward his own purposes.

This was unfortunate as Míru knew not only more about Kirktá's early life and purpose but also about the seven items he'd gathered for him to use. The items consisted of: a small, uncut piece of onyx; a small wooden statue of Halúb, "the Knower of Hidden Truths," an obscure aspect of Belkhánu; a polished disc of gray metal framed in bone; a thin leather scroll, warm to the touch and slight pulsating; a mummified finger; a funerary mask with a single eye slot in the brow; and a golden statuette of an ancient ruler whose face has been erased by time. Using the spell seeing other planes, Kirktá determined that the onyx, the disc, and the mask all showed strong connections to the Planes Beyond, while the others were much less potent.

Kirktá set about examining the statue of Halúb first, soon discovering that it was actually a reliquary inside of which was a scroll wrapped in silk. The scroll was made of a sturdy, thin material that was completely black. When viewed in darkness, however, the blackness "fell away," revealing dense text written in Classical Tsolyáni. The text turned out to be the terms of the pact entered into by the First Tlakotáni with the One Other. According to those terms, the emperor-to-be offered the souls of his line to the One Other in exchange for the eternal protection of the fortress of Avanthár against all external threats. So long as the Tlakotáni continued to offer the souls of princes defeated in the Kólumejálim, the One Other would ensure Avanthár never fell.

As an expert demonologist, Keléno scoffed at the pact, calling it "sloppy." He explained that, among other things, there were too many loopholes in the text, specifically that it did not spell out the consequences if one party breaches it. He said he would never enter into such a contract with a demon, let alone a pariah god. Clearly, there must be some details that were missing, because it's difficult to imagine that the pact would have held up for more than 2000 years without either side failing to live up to it. That's when Nebússa began to wonder whether or not it was already in a state of breach, which might explain why Dhich'uné was so keen to establish new terms for it.

Speaking of Dhich'uné, because he had offered protection to many priests of Belkhánu fleeing the razing of their temple, Eselné turned his sights onto the Temple of Sárku. He had ordered his legions, including the cohort led by Grujúng into position to attack it. This concerned the other characters, who worried that such an attack might well play into Dhich'uné's hands. They rushed to the Palace of War, seeking an audience with General Kéttukal to bring their worries to him. As it turned out, Kéttukal had been looking for them. He explained that Dhich'uné had made a formal request for a parley and asked that Kirktá be the one to receive it.

Kirktá, along with Keléno and Nebússa, made their way to meet the Worm Prince. There, he delivered his ultimatum: call off the attack or else he would raise an army of the undead to defend him and turn the capital into a tomb. Additionally, he tempted Kirktá to join him so that he might finally learn the truth of who he is and why that truth was hidden for so long. Kirktá did not give in, despite his intense curiosity. Instead, he and the others returned to Eselné and Kéttukal to prepare for all-out war.

Stuck

If you’d told my younger self that, by middle age, Star Wars, Star Trek, Dungeons & Dragons – all the things I loved as a boy – would not only still exist but would be huge entertainment "brands," I doubt I’d have believed you. I certainly wouldn’t have believed I’d no longer care about them. Worse, I never would have imagined I’d feel repulsed by what they’ve become.

And yet, here we are.

Plenty of commentators have observed a phenomenon sometimes called “stuck culture” and I think that captures part of my malaise. Contemporary pop culture seems either unable or unwilling to move on from the past. Instead, it recycles, reboots, and repackages the same "intellectual properties" – a phrase I feel unclean even typing – over and over again, as though what we truly need is just one more sequel, one more origin story, one more “gritty reimagining” of a once-beloved character or setting.

This cultural stagnation is especially glaring in the realm of the nerds, where hobbies were once defined by originality and creativity. Now? They're more often defined by compulsive repetition and the embalmed echoes of past glories.

Don’t misunderstand me: there’s nothing wrong with nostalgia. Remembering the things that once brought us joy is natural, even humanizing. However, there’s a difference, in my opinion, between nostalgia and necromancy. So much of popular culture today, particularly nerd culture, feels like it’s reanimating corpses. Bigger budgets, flashier effects, and algorithmic polish don’t bring these creations back to life. They only parade them around, lifeless and hollow, like mummified icons. The result isn’t a return to something vital or real. Instead, it’s a grotesque simulacrum, stripped of its original context, meaning, and soul.

In the age of content algorithms, our past preferences become templates for future production. Innovation is replaced by optimization – and what’s being optimized isn’t storytelling or artistry, but you. Or rather, your predictable patterns of engagement. If you once loved, say, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, they'll feed you a dozen pale imitations, each more toothless, more risk-averse, and more emotionally flat than the last. If you liked elves and dungeons in 1982, the machine will churn out endless corporate flavors of the same, carefully drained of the strangeness and wonder that once made them sing.

This is apparent even in roleplaying games. There was a time when RPGs were gloriously, sometimes chaotically, diverse. Every few months brought some new idea, some strange world, some half-baked but fascinating mechanic. Some of it was brilliant, some of it was garbage, but all of it felt alive. Today? Most major RPG products are variations on a narrow set of tropes established decades ago. Even the Old School Renaissance, of which I count myself a part, often falls prey to the same trap: remaking, rehashing, repeating.

So when did creativity give way to caretaking? When did our hobby stop being about imagining new worlds and become a museum of preserved brands?

It wasn’t always this way. Nerd subcultures were once genuinely weird – offputting, insular, and proudly obscure. They were difficult to access and defiantly uncool and that very inaccessibility acted as a crucible, forging originality and independence. But the rise of the Internet, and especially social media. has flattened all subcultures. Everything is now accessible, marketable, and smoothed out for mass consumption. Because nerds were among the earliest adopters of these technologies, nerd culture may have suffered the most from this transformation.

The result is a creeping homogenization. “Fantasy” now means elves and dragons. “Sci-fi” means space wizards. Every new game must have a "brand identity," a "product roadmap," a social media presence. Anything that doesn’t fit the mold is quietly ignored, regardless of how original or inspired it might be.

What we’re losing in this cycle of endless recycling isn’t just novelty but meaning. The worlds we once explored, whether in a galaxy far, far away or deep beneath a ruined castle, mattered because they were new. They challenged our imaginations. They opened doors we didn’t even know were there. When everything becomes a remix of a remix, that sense of discovery is lost. That may be the real tragedy – not simply that nerd culture has changed, but that it has ceased to move on. It no longer dares to venture into the unknown. It circles the same drain, hoping that the next familiar logo will somehow rekindle the old spark.

But it won’t. It can’t.

The antidote to stuck culture isn’t rage and it isn’t despair. It’s refusal. Refusal to let our cultural memory be mined for spare parts. Refusal to accept brand management in place of imagination. Refusal to mistake familiarity for worth.

There are still creators out there doing strange, beautiful, uncompromising work. There are still games being written, books being published, ’zines being assembled that don’t give a damn about algorithms or intellectual property portfolios. Seek them out. Support them. Better yet, make your own.

Let the past be the past, not a franchise.

"I Am Prepared to Teach Him the Proper Rites."

©2011–2025 Jeff Dee

“Ah, Kirktá. Sit. Not as adversaries, but as brothers, as sons of the emperor – as men who remember what peace feels like.”

“Peace. That is all I wish, though Eselné does not believe me. But is it not a good ambition for one who dwells among the dead. Who better to know the true meaning of peace?”

“Everything I have done — the cloistered councils, the careful alliances, the sheltering of those who now flee from Eselné’s wrath — I have done to preserve the Empire, not to destroy it. It is Eselné who fans the flames. Eselné who tears at the old ways. Tell me, Kirktá: who breaks the Concordat? Who has sent his legions to desecrate one temple in his blind pursuit of dominion and now threatens another?”

“Not I.”

“You know he cannot win, not without destroying all that Tsolyánu is. But you still stand at the crossroads. I know who you are. I know what you are. I know where you came from. I know why you were hidden.”

“Only by walking beside me will your skein at last be made whole. Only I can draw the threads together – the frayed, the hidden, the ones others tried to cut. Let me show you the pattern behind your life. Don’t you wish to know why you were woven at all?"

“But if you decline, if you cling to Eselné’s banner, then I have no choice but to act and to act swiftly." 

"You know, of course, that Eselné is not the only prince with legions in Béy Sü.”

“Though I suppose it would be more honest to say that I have legions under Béy Sü – beneath its stones, its vaults, its ancient crypts. There are soldiers sleeping there in the dust who swore undying oaths to the Petal Throne before Eselné’s name was ever spoken. If he wishes to turn this city into a tomb, I am prepared to teach him the proper rites.”

“Tell him that. Or don’t. He will learn soon enough. But you still have a choice: stand where your true fate calls you. Stand beside me.”

"Now, go."

Dragonlance at the End of the World

One of many things that doesn't always come through in my campaign update posts are the little moments of roleplaying and character development that are, for me anyway, why I continue to participate in this hobby after so many decades. Reading those posts and the supplementary ones that draw attention to larger developments within them, one might well think the Big Stuff is all that matters to me. Of course, the Big Stuff does matter to me, especially in my House of Worms and Barrett's Raiders campaigns, where political, social, and religious struggles are important drivers of the action. Even so, it's the characters who matter most to me. They are, after all, the means by which my wonderful players interact with the situations I set before them and I appreciate the added texture they can add to the game world.

An amusing case in point is Corporal Wayne "Rocketman" Schweyk. Rocketman was originally a back-up character, introduced during the unit's time in the Free City of Kraków. All the players had a back-up character, both to fill out the unit's complement, but also as insurance in case one of the "main" characters died in combat or through some other means. Rocketman, as his name suggests, had been part of a Multiple Launch Rocket System crew during the earlier stages of the Twilight War. He eventually found his way to the Free City and became part of a group of displaced American soldiers there, some of whom joined the Raiders when they fled Kraków and its Machiavellian politics. 

As a character, Rocketman has several defining characteristics. Most obviously, he likes rockets, missiles, grenade launchers, mortars, and similar weaponry. Second, he is a good driver and always volunteers to drive one of the unit's vehicles. Finally, he's an avid reader of Dragonlance novels and makes an effort to seek out new sources of them whenever it's practical. Now that the Raiders are back in the USA, this is a fair bit easier than it was in Poland. Recently, Rocketman has begun to branch out. He's expressed an interest in Forgotten Realms novels, too, a few of which he was able to obtain in trade from soldiers stationed at Fort Lee.

On the one hand, this bit of characterization is a joke, making fun of just how many of these novels TSR published throughout the '80s and '90s – and there were a lot of them. We looked into the matter and, assuming that, in the timeline of Barrett's Raiders, TSR stopped producing new Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms novels at the end of 1997, shortly after the first Soviet nuclear strikes against America, there'd still be just shy of 100 Dragonlance novels and a little less than 80 Forgotten Realms novels. As I said, there really were a lot of these novels, but, from what I understand, they sold very, very well, outshining even the gaming material on which they were based. Talk about brandification!

On the other hand, little details like help a character to come alive. They help set him apart from his comrades and often serve as motivations for what the character does. In the case of Rocketman, he really does spend time talking to other soldiers, learning if any of them shares his interest in fantasy novels and whether there's library or other potential source for more of them. Further, his interest helps ground the campaign in its time and place. Barrett's Raiders is presently set in December 2000 in an alternate timeline that diverged at least as far back as 1985, if not earlier. Seeing as we're a quarter century removed from its chronological date and in a different reality altogether, these small reminders have proven useful.

From time to time, I should probably devote more posts to stuff like this. I've repeatedly said that the success and longevity of my various campaigns is, in large part, due to my players, who have created some really fun and memorable characters. They're one of the things that keep me engaged week after week. Shining the spotlight on some of them might prove helpful or at least interesting to readers as well.

Retrospective: Gamma World (Third Edition)

A couple of years ago, I broke with tradition and penned a Retrospective post on the second edition of Gamma World, despite having already written one on the original. I justified the decision by pointing to just how different second edition was, both in tone and presentation, from its predecessor. It stood as a vivid example of how Gamma World – and roleplaying games more broadly – were evolving in the early 1980s. By that same logic, the third edition of Gamma World, released in 1986, surely warrants a post of its own, as the differences it introduced were even more pronounced.

Since its debut in 1978, Gamma World has always seemed uncertain whether it wanted to be a madcap romp through a world of radioactive mutants or a more serious science fantasy game exploring its post-apocalyptic setting. That tension runs through every edition, but third edition feels like the first time it was intentional. I remember seeing ads for it in Dragon magazine at the time, and the cover, featuring Keith Parkinson’s vivid illustration, made a strong impression. It hinted at a bold new direction for the game, though I was struck less by its novelty than by its familiarity, having already seen the same image on a TSR calendar the year before.

If the first and second editions of Gamma World were clumsy but endearing offshoots of early D&D design – random, deadly, but bursting with imaginative potential – then the third edition marks a dramatic, and often jarring, departure. Released during a period when TSR was busy retooling many of its games in the wake of Marvel Super Heroes' success, third edition followed the lead of Star Frontiers and embraced the concept of a universal resolution system and its color-coded Action Table (ACT), column shifts, and result factors. While elegant in their original context, the ACT always felt awkward and ill-suited when retrofitted onto existing games. In Gamma World, it comes across less as a refinement and more as a mismatch – neat in theory, but clumsy in practice.

Third edition attempted to marry this new mechanical chassis to the conflicted sensibilities of earlier editions, but, in my view, the result was less than satisfactory. Combat resolution and mutation use now hinged on interpreting results from a chart – an abstraction that sapped much of the immediacy from play. Firing a Mark V Blaster was no longer a simple matter of “roll to hit, roll damage.” Instead, it became a multi-step procedure: find the appropriate ACT column, look at the result, then consult a separate chart to determine the weapon’s actual effect. One might argue this wasn’t dramatically more complex than previous systems, but for those of us who’d long ago internalized the old mechanics, it was anything but intuitive. At best, it felt like change for its own sake; at worst, a solution in search of a problem.

What also stood out – and not in a flattering way – was the presentation. The rulebook was stark and utilitarian in its layout, almost entirely bereft of artwork. What little art it did contain was mostly recycled from earlier editions, along with some lifted from Star Frontiers. A few original illustrations were scattered throughout, but they were the exception rather than the rule. Even the foldout map of Pitz Burke, a centerpiece of second edition, was repurposed here with minimal alteration. Worse still, key rules were split between the main rulebook and a separate “rules supplement” tucked into the box, fragmenting the material and giving the whole package a slapdash feel. It lacked the cohesion one expects from a fully realized edition, and instead felt cobbled together, more like a rushed repackaging than a thoughtfully constructed evolution.

Just as its mechanics felt awkwardly imposed, third edition’s treatment of the Gamma World setting also seemed diminished. Much of the evocative, if sketchy, setting material found in earlier editions was either stripped away or given only the most cursory attention. Take the cryptic alliances, for example: while they’re mentioned, their role in the world feels vague and perfunctory. Gone is the sense, so evident in second edition, that these shadowy factions were vital to understanding the post-apocalyptic landscape. The same could be said for many other aspects of Gamma World’s implied setting. It’s not that these elements are entirely absent, but that their inclusion feels scattershot and half-hearted. There’s a perfunctory, almost apathetic quality to the world-building in third edition, as if the designers were merely checking boxes rather than engaging with the material in a meaningful way. The result is a game that lacks the weird, half-glimpsed coherence that gave earlier editions their charm. It feels like a product made to fill a slot in the release schedule, not one born of creative enthusiasm.

Amidst its uneven mechanics and uninspired presentation, third edition nevertheless hinted at something more ambitious. Scattered throughout the rulebook – and more clearly in the adventure modules that followed – were the outlines of a broader campaign arc, one that seemed intended to link Gamma World to its spiritual progenitor, Metamorphosis Alpha. These modules presented ancient installations, buried technologies, and the tantalizing possibility of uncovering the true origins of the post-apocalyptic world. There were even whispers of the derelict starship Warden, as well as references to other planets and moons of the solar system, suggesting a much larger canvas than previous editions had dared to paint. That, more than anything else, remains the lasting appeal of third edition for me, the first edition to really toy with the fact that Gamma World's apocalypse belongs to the 24th century, not the 20th, and hinted at a setting far more expansive than mutant rabbits and ancient ruins.

Unfortunately, this promising thread was never fully developed. The planned module series was left incomplete and, with the arrival of Gamma World’s fourth edition in 1992, the game was rebooted once more. Any connections to Metamorphosis Alpha were quietly abandoned. Whatever larger vision might have existed was lost, leaving third edition as a curious dead end in the game’s evolution.

In the end, Gamma World Third Edition is a strange, transitional fossil, neither wholly broken nor particularly successful. It represents an attempt to modernize a legacy title by grafting onto it the mechanics of Marvel Super Heroes, but it does so without the conceptual clarity or setting depth needed to make that modernization feel purposeful. What was left is a game that is both overcomplicated and underdeveloped: a patchwork of ideas, some intriguing, others ill-suited, held together by a presentation that feels rushed and indifferent. Yet, for all its flaws, there remains a flicker of something more, an unrealized potential that somehow still has the power to capture my imagination, even if only in fragments.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: Ares

I'm going to cheat for today's installment of this series. Rather than focusing on a single article from issue #84 of Dragon (April 1984), I'm instead going to talk about Ares, the magazine's new science fiction gaming section. First, a bit of background. Between 1980 and 1982, SPI published a gaming magazine entitled Ares. The magazine included a complete game in every issue (as was once typical of wargaming magazines), along with articles and reviews. Though not limited to sci-fi by any means, Ares did have a slightly science fictional bent to its content. There were eleven issues of Ares before TSR acquired SPI in 1982, followed by five more issues after the acquisition. The last stand-alone issue of Ares was published in "Winter 1983." TSR never really knew what to do with SPI's properties and wound up frittering them away over the course of the next few years, in the process alienating the company's considerable fanbase, many of whom (quite rightly) felt that TSR had handled the situation very badly. Though TSR tried to make some use of SPI's name and products, only the Ares name survived for long – and even then, "long" is a relative term.

From issue #84 to issue #111 (July 1986), Ares was one of my favorite sections of Dragon, since I've always been more of a SF fan than a fantasy one. The section featured articles on games like Traveller and Star Trek and Space Opera, as well as Gamma World, Star Frontiers, and a host of superhero games, especially Marvel Super Heroes. Because sci-fi has always played second (or third) banana to fantasy, you'd have expected that the pool of articles would have been pretty shallow in Ares but that wasn't the case. In my opinion, the quality of the articles in this section was consistently high, higher even than that of the rest of Dragon (which is saying something). However, its appeal was definitely more limited, which is why I suspect it was eventually killed. Why devote some many pages of each issue to genres that are also-rans compared to fantasy, especially D&D's brand of fantasy?

To this day, though, when I look back on the years when I subscribed to Dragon, the Ares articles are among those that stick out most prominently in my mind. Its coverage of Gamma World, for example, was truly excellent and I used a number of its Traveller rules variants over the years. And of course Jeff Grubb's regular "The Marvel-Phile" column was invaluable if you were running a Marvel Super Heroes campaign (or even if you weren't and were just a fan of the comics). I've always thought it a pity that a non-fantasy-centric gaming mag never really gained any degree of prominence. GDW's Challenge, where my first published writings appeared, was a decent stab at such a thing, but it eventually folded, too, much to my disappointment. Like Ares, Challenge filled a hole in the hobby that needed filling. In my opinion, it still does.

Creep, Shadow! Released

You may remember that, back in 2022, Centipede Press published a new edition of Abraham Merritt's 1932 story, Burn, Witch, Burn! that included an introduction written by yours truly. This year, they followed that up with its sort-of-sequel, Creep, Shadow!, to which I also contributed the introduction. Like its predecessor, it's a beautiful and well-made book, featuring both original dustcover and frontispiece art by Camille Alquier and interior illustrations by the great Virgil Finlay. This new edition is limited to 600 copies, so if you're interested in a copy, you'll probably need to grab one quickly from the Centipede Press website. Burn, Witch, Burn! sold out quickly and, so far as I know, it's never been reprinted. 

Here's the dustcover:

This is the credits page:

The start of a chapter, showing off a bit of Finlay artwork and the bookmark.

Finally, the signature page at the back of the book. I am dwarf among giants.

Tourists and Locals

I'm fairly certain I've previously expressed my general dislike for "one-shots" or "mini-campaigns." To be clear, my dislike isn’t absolute, but I rarely seek them out. When I do participate in them, I often come away slightly unsatisfied. One of the greatest joys of roleplaying games, at least for me, lies in the continuity of a long campaign: the way characters grow, change, and accumulate history over time; how a setting deepens and acquires texture; how throwaway details from early sessions suddenly take on new meaning months (or even years) later. If given the chance, I prefer to settle in, to put down roots, and see what emerges over the long haul. That’s usually my goal when I sit down at the table with friends. I want a campaign, not a fling.

And yet ...

Over the past few years, I've come to appreciate the distinct pleasures of convention games: those four-hour sessions with a group of strangers that begin and end in a single afternoon or evening. I had a great time at last year's Gamehole Con and came away from several sessions feeling energized and inspired. That’s part of the reason I’m looking forward to signing up for more this year. On paper, con games are the antithesis of what I usually look for in roleplaying. They’re self-contained, focused, and impermanent. Once the session is over, it’s over. So why don’t they leave me with the same hollow feeling that a short-lived home campaign often does?

While I’m not above hypocrisy, I think I have a good sense of why I enjoy con games more than I would have expected.

Playing a game at a convention is, for me, a form of tourism. I show up, meet new people, and explore a small slice of a game or setting with which I may not be familiar. It’s a snapshot. There’s no illusion of permanence, no lingering sense of “what might have been.” The characters might be memorable and the play enjoyable, but everyone understands from the outset that this is a limited-time engagement. It’s a visit, not a move.

A home campaign with friends, by contrast, is more like choosing to live somewhere. There’s an implicit commitment. We’re investing in something meant to last. That shared commitment changes everything. When I play with friends, I generally don’t want the game to have an expiration date. I want room to build, to wander, to return to familiar locations, to interact with recurring NPCs, to watch the slow accretion of detail and consequence. A one-off in that context feels like a house without a foundation –furnished, perhaps, for a party, but not built for living in.

There’s also a difference in ambition. A convention game rarely tries to be more than it is. It knows its limits and, when well-run, delivers something satisfying within them. A one-shot at home, on the other hand, often aspires to be a mini-campaign or the seed of something larger, but without the time to grow into either. The result is frequently a sense of missed potential. The game ends just as things are getting interesting. I experienced this recently during a game of Dragonbane that one of my Dolmenwood players refereed for us. It was fun but also a little bit frustrating: a glimpse of something promising that ended too soon.

None of this is meant as a criticism of short-form RPG play. Many people love one-shots and mini-campaigns and probably with good reason. For me, though, the pleasure of roleplaying originates elsewhere. I want to stay, not merely pass through. I want to know the locals, not just see the sights.

But every now and then, it’s good to be a tourist.

Rich and Creamy

 A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that, after so many years of refereeing Empire of the Petal Throne, I found myself craving a vanilla fantasy setting – something simpler and more straightforward than Tékumel but that was nevertheless very well done. I received a lot of good suggestions in the comments to that post, but one of the best ones came directly from Rob Conley, a fellow blogger who's done some truly excellent work over the years, especially regarding the subject of sandbox settings, both for fantasy and for Traveller. If you're at all interested in sandboxes, I highly recommend you check out those series of posts. In my opinion, they're pretty close to definitive.

Rob has done a lot of other great stuff worthy of your attention, like Blackmarsh, a free hexcrawl setting in the tradition of the Outdoor Survival map OD&D suggested the referee use for adjudicating wilderness travel and exploration. Blackmarsh is one of my favorite things from the first few years of the Old School Renaissance. I made use of it in my Dwimmermount campaign to represent the region immediately to the north of the main campaign area. It's a great example of well-done vanilla fantasy, providing a referee with just enough material to spark his own imagination without limiting his options.

Now, Rob is preparing to release another sandbox, one built on the foundation of Blackmarsh and related projects: Into the Majestic Fantasy Realms: The Northern Marches. As its title suggests, The Northern Marches is connected to Rob's Majestic Fantasy RPG, but is completely usable with your preferred old school fantasy rules. In that respect, it's a lot like Judges Guild's old Wilderlands of High Fantasy material in that it sketches out a huge amount of real estate that can be adopted and adapted as the referee sees fit. Rob has a long history with the Wilderlands setting, so I doubt he'd argue against saying his Majestic Fantasy Realms setting has been inspired by it, even if it's very much its own unique thing.

Rob very kindly shared with me his latest draft of The Northern Marches, which is an immense document of over 100,000 words. Don't be put off by its length. Though there are some high-level discussions of history, geography, politics, and religion, the vast majority of this text is devoted to short but evocative descriptions of the notable hexes of the four regional maps included with the book. Just as useful is the section devoted to traveling within the setting and all that that entails – caravans, ships, exhaustion, rates of travel, and more. This is, after all, a sandbox setting, so these sorts of things are absolutely essential to make full use of it. 

You can see the full table of contents, along with a preview of the setting here. Another overview of the setting and this project can be found in this post on Rob's blog. It's really well done and very much in keeping not just with the excellent material Rob has made before, but also with his work on creating and running sandbox campaigns. I was very impressed by the scope of The Northern Marches, not to mention the obvious work Rob has put into making it accessible and usable. While it's still too early to say how I might eventually decide to sate my craving for vanilla fantasy, I can say there's a very good chance I'll make use of The Northern Marches in one way or another. If that sounds like something you might be interested in, I highly recommend checking it out.

Things That Go Bump in the Decade

This being the only Friday the 13th of 2025, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to muse a little about the spooky stuff I grew up with during my childhood in the 1970s, things that no doubt informed my continued fascination with the uncanny even today.

Back then, the world still seemed full of mysteries – or at least it was easy to imagine that it was. Stories of haunted houses, UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and all manner of cryptids and bizarre phenomena were staples of popular culture. They filled the pages of supermarket tabloids, popped up in solemnly narrated TV specials, and circulated in schoolyard whispers. Even if few people truly believed in them, almost everyone enjoyed talking about them. The possibility alone was enough.

Looking back, it’s striking how pervasive the weird was in everyday life. I vividly recall garish paperbacks detailing “true” encounters with the unknown, cartoons and comics riffing on paranormal themes, and, of course, the ever-present influence of movies and television shows like In Search Of..., Project U.F.O., Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and The Amityville Horror, among many, many more. These stories occupied a curious space in the cultural imagination – not quite believed, not quite disbelieved either, and all the more compelling for it. They invited speculation, encouraged imagination, and cultivated a sense of wonder tinged with dread.

Even as a kid, I never bought into most of it. I didn’t spend my nights scanning the skies for flying saucers or lurking in the woods hoping to glimpse Sasquatch. But I wanted to believe, at least a little. The world felt more interesting, more alive, with those possibilities lurking just beyond the edges of certainty. What if there was something out there? That question alone was enough to fire my imagination.

And fire it did. By the time I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and, through it, other roleplaying games, I was already primed for them. After all, I’d spent years immersed in tales of mysterious creatures, unexplained lights, and restless spirits. RPGs gave me a new framework to explore those ideas, one where I wasn’t just reading or hearing the stories but helping to create them. I could conjure new monsters, new haunted places, new eerie events, and imagine how I or others might respond if the strange and uncanny ever crossed into our reality.

Today, that world of half-believed wonder seems distant, if not entirely gone. The Internet, with its unblinking capacity to record, debunk, and explain, has driven much of the weird to the cultural margins. Cell phone cameras are everywhere and the lack of blurry, ambiguous evidence speaks louder than all the old rumors ever did. Of course, being middle-aged hasn’t helped my credulity either. I’m more skeptical now, more prone to roll my eyes than widen them, but I still feel a twinge of wistfulness. There was a magic in those stories – the giddy unease, the delighted fear, the sense that the world might be stranger than it appeared and that something astonishing might be hiding in plain sight.

I don’t miss the bad haircuts or the shag carpeting, but I do miss that feeling, that delicious tension between belief and disbelief, the sense of possibility that once seemed to shimmer in the air. Maybe that’s why, even after more than forty years, I’m still rolling dice and spinning yarns of my own. I’m chasing that feeling, the thrill of stepping into the unknown, of turning the corner and finding that the world is bigger, weirder, and more mysterious than we’d dared to imagine.

On a superstitious day like today, I try to remember what it felt like to believe – not entirely, but just enough to wonder.

Traveller Distinctives: World Generation

When GDW released Traveller in 1977, it stood apart from other roleplaying games of the time in several important ways. Most notably, it was not a fantasy game. It didn’t rely on the tropes of sword and sorcery or draw inspiration from the likes of Robert E. Howard or J.R.R. Tolkien. Instead, Traveller presented a vast, impersonal universe of interstellar trade, mercenary tickets, and political intrigue. Perhaps even more significant than its subject matter, however, was its approach to setting creation. Traveller’s world generation system, unlike the improvisational or campaign-specific methods typical of Dungeons & Dragons, was systematic, abstract, and procedurally expansive, offering something genuinely new in RPG design.

At a time when most referees were painstakingly handcrafting maps, cities, and dungeons for their games, Traveller provided a straightforward but elegant toolset for generating entire subsectors of space, one hex at a time. As outlined in Book 3 of the original boxed set, aptly titled Worlds and Adventures, each world was reduced to a Universal World Profile (UWP), a concise string of alphanumeric codes representing atmosphere, population, government type, law level, and more. Though cryptic at first glance, these codes become, in practice, powerful spurs to creativity, prompting referees to extrapolate complex social and environmental conditions from simple numeric entries.

Even before the first session began, Traveller encouraged the referee to engage in a kind of solitary, exploratory “play.” Generating worlds, assigning trade classifications, and mapping out political and economic relationships quickly becomes an absorbing exercise in its own right, as any long-time Traveller referee can attest. Indeed, it's a major part of the game's fun. Rather than merely preparing background details, the referee is, in effect, discovering the setting as he rolls the dice. The process became a kind of solo game, one where the rules and randomness combined to yield an emergent and unpredictable sector of space – varied, dynamic, and rich with potential for adventure.

The UWP itself is a marvel of minimalist design. Each digit or letter conveys essential information about a world, but does so in a way that suggests deeper histories, social structures, and gameplay consequences. A high-tech world with a low law level and a major starport hints at a bustling, semi-legal trade hub teeming with intrigue. A planet with a corrosive atmosphere and feudal government might suggest dying aristocracies clinging to power amidst environmental collapse. The referee is handed the bare bones of a world, but the system demands logical extrapolation for understanding, making worldbuilding a disciplined act of imaginative interpretation.

In contrast to the tendency of Dungeons & Dragons toward medieval pastiche, Traveller offers fewer cultural defaults. The worlds it generates are often strange, uneven, and wildly diverse in terms of tech level, population, and governance, even when separated by only a single parsec. This patchwork character isn’t a flaw. Instead, it suggests a galaxy shaped by ancient collapses, forgotten wars, and the long, staggered climb of civilization across the stars. The system invites referees to consider not just planetary conditions, but also their histories and interrelations.

Crucially, Traveller’s world generation is not mere flavor text. It directly informs core gameplay systems: trade tables, starship design, navigation, and random encounters all hinge, to varying degrees, on the specifics of a world’s UWP. A character’s ability to turn a profit, refuel a ship, or avoid entanglement with the authorities likewise depends on the values generated for each planet. The setting is not simply a backdrop, but a source of friction and consequence. Logistics and environment shape player choices in a more concrete and procedural way than in early Dungeons & Dragons (or arguably in any version of it).

This interdependence gives real weight to the act of, well, traveling from world to world across a subsector hex map. Jumping into a new system is never a formality; it’s a calculated risk. Will there be fuel available? Is the local government welcoming or hostile? Can the party offload its cargo for a profit or will they be detained and searched upon landing? The interconnected nature of the world generation tables feeds into a broader gameplay loop, rewarding both strategic planning and seat-of-your-pants improvisation.

Where early D&D encouraged a bottom-up style of worldbuilding – start with a dungeon, add a nearby village, and let the world expand outward through play – Traveller supports and even rewards a top-down approach. A referee could generate an entire subsector before the players had even rolled up their characters. This inversion suggests a different philosophy of play, one less concerned with "zero to hero" advancement and more focused on navigation (literal and figurative) through a complex and often indifferent universe.

It’s also worth emphasizing that the original 1977 edition of Traveller came with no predefined setting. The now-iconic Third Imperium, with which the game would later become closely associated, didn’t appear until 1979’s The Spinward Marches. Initially, the game offered only methods and tools for generating one’s own interstellar polities, trade routes, and points of conflict. That openness was deliberate. It invited referees to craft their own empires, borderlands, pirate nests, and forgotten colonies. Because of the inherent randomness in the system, even the referee could be surprised by what emerged, lending the process an exploratory thrill that echoed the game’s broader focus.

This is why I consider Traveller’s world generation system not only one of its most distinctive features, but a landmark in early RPG design. With nothing more than a few tables and a handful of dice, a referee could conjure up entire regions of space that are structured, coherent, and teeming with possibility. More than that, the system reflects and reinforces the thematic core of the game itself: a universe not of dungeons and dragons, but of distance, data, and discovery. Nearly fifty years later, it remains unmatched for its combination of utility and elegance.

The Hidden Masters of Pulp Fantasy

One of the regular series for which this blog was once known is Pulp Fantasy Library, in which I highlighted individual fantasy and science fiction stories I felt had been influential, directly or indirectly, on the development of the hobby of roleplaying. The series eventually grew to more than three hundred entries and taught me a great deal in the process of writing it. However, it also required considerable effort and often received little reader engagement, so I brought it to a quiet close in 2023. I sometimes consider reviving it in a modified form, but I’ve yet to find the right approach. Still, I keep thinking about these early works of fantasy, which is what led to this post.

From the vantage point of the first quarter (!) of the twenty-first century, it’s all too easy to forget just how strange fantasy and science fiction once were – not merely in their imaginative content but in the intellectual and spiritual traditions from which they drew. We tend to think of early speculative fiction as arising primarily from a matrix of adventure tales, scientific romances, and classical mythology. However, another powerful and often overlooked influence is the world of Spiritualism, Theosophy, and other esoteric traditions. These weren’t mere fads in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they were serious systems of belief for many, including a surprising number of the authors who helped lay the foundations of what we now call genre fiction.

Even more fascinating is how many once-occult concepts have since become commonplaces of fantasy and science fiction, like astral projection, past lives, lost advanced civilizations, invisible planes of existence, and cosmic cycles of spiritual evolution, to name just a few obvious ones. These weren’t originally the products of scientific or rationalist speculation. They were occult doctrines, often articulated with the structure and certainty of any other religion. Early speculative fiction served as a powerful conduit for these ideas, transmitting them into the cultural imagination.

Take, for instance, astral projection, which recurs throughout pulp fantasy and science fiction. In Theosophy, this is the “etheric body” or “etheric double” leaving the physical body to traverse the astral plane. In fiction, this idea becomes John Carter’s unexplained voyage to Barsoom in A Princess of Mars, where his body remains behind on Earth while his spirit is transported to another world by sheer force of will. Burroughs never offers a scientific explanation for the phenomenon nor did he need to do so. His readers would likely have recognized the trope from already extant popular occult literature.

Similarly, reincarnation and karma, central tenets of Theosophy and many forms of Eastern-influenced Spiritualism, appear in the works of authors like Talbot Mundy, whose protagonists sometimes recall past lives in ancient empires. The same is true of many tales penned by Abraham Merritt. In The Star Rover, Jack London tells the story of a prisoner who escapes his unjust physical confinement by entering trance states that allow him to access a series of former incarnations. This isn’t merely a fictional conceit; it reflects a specific metaphysical worldview in which human identity unfolds across many lifetimes, a view that gained traction during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Even readers who didn’t share this worldview would nevertheless have been familiar with it.

William Hope Hodgson is another fascinating case. He blends arcane science with mystical speculation in his "Carnacki the Ghost-Finder" stories, which feature protective sigils, vibrational zones, and references to the "Outer Circle," a realm inhabited by malevolent entities existing just beyond human perception. All of these ideas draw heavily on contemporary occultism. His novel The Night Land, a work of science fantasy more than horror, is set on a dying Earth haunted by monstrous spiritual forces and saturated with the oppressive weight of cosmic time. It echoes Theosophical doctrines of vast evolutionary cycles and the occult preoccupation with psychic resistance to spiritual evil.

Marie Corelli (born Mary Mackay), once one of the most popular authors in the English-speaking world, is now rarely read. Her novel, A Romance of Two Worlds, for example, blends Spiritualist belief with melodrama and science fictional concepts, such as portraying electricity as a bridge between the material and spiritual realms. She directly influenced writers like H. Rider Haggard and even Arthur Machen, both of whom in turn shaped the subsequent development of fantasy. Even Edward Bulwer-Lytton, now best known for the infamous incipit “It was a dark and stormy night,” was a serious student of esoteric lore. His novel Zanoni depicts an immortal Chaldean adept who achieves transcendence through secret knowledge, an early example of the “hidden masters” who would later become a staple of Theosophy.

Which, of course, brings us to Theosophy itself, which had perhaps the most lasting and far-reaching impact on the development of both esoteric thought and fantasy. Founded in the 1870s by the Russian-born mystic, Helena Blavatsky, Theosophy combined elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Neoplatonism, and esoteric Christianity into a vast occult cosmology. Through books, journals, and lectures, it promoted a view of the universe in which mankind was but one phase in an immense spiritual drama, involving lost continents, ascended masters, and ancient wisdom. These ideas found fertile ground in genre fiction. The controversial “Shaver Mystery” stories published in Amazing Stories in the mid to late 1940s and purportedly based on true events involve ancient subterranean races like the evil Deros (which itself served as an inspiration to Gary Gygax). Shaver's stories read like Theosophy blended with pulp sensationalism.

Even Clark Ashton Smith, whom regular readers will know is my favorite of the Weird Tales trio, drew on esoteric themes. Ideas like cyclical time, forgotten civilizations, and arcane knowledge recur throughout his work. His Zothique cycle, set on the last continent of a dying Earth, reflects the Theosophical notion of a future “seventh root race” and the eventual exhaustion of history.

Against this background, H.P. Lovecraft stands out, not because he rejected religion in general (though he did), but because he specifically targeted Spiritualism and occultism. He was deeply familiar with the claims of mediums, astrologers, and Theosophists and dismissed them with open contempt. In his correspondence, he regularly mocks the “credulous” who place faith in séances, reincarnation, and similar beliefs. At the behest of Harry Houdini, Lovecraft even collaborated on a book titled The Cancer of Superstition, intended as a wholesale debunking of Spiritualist claims. The book was never completed due to Houdini’s sudden death in 1926.

Despite this, Lovecraft’s stories are filled with forbidden books, lost knowledge, and ancient alien races whose truths are too terrible for the human mind to bear. In this way, Lovecraft doesn’t discard the tropes of occult literature – he inverts them. Where Theosophy promised spiritual enlightenment and cosmic unity, Lovecraft offers only madness, degeneration, and a universe that is not merely indifferent but actively hostile to notions of human significance. His “gods” are not hidden masters but incomprehensible and uncaring forces. Structurally, however, he preserves much of the occult worldview: a hidden reality lurks behind the surface of things, accessible only to initiates – scholars, madmen, and cultists. Lovecraft didn’t reject that structure; he twisted it and filled it with dread.

All of this makes it remarkable just how thoroughly modern fantasy and science fiction still bear the imprint of these early occult influences. Astral travel, alternate planes, soul transference, hidden masters, and cosmic cycles remain staples of the genres. They’re treated today as neutral, even secular, tropes of worldbuilding, even though their origins are anything but secular. They are spiritual, mystical, and often explicitly religious in intent.

My purpose in this post isn't to diminish these genres or to reduce their works to a list of influences. Nor am I offering an invitation to embrace the esoteric as literal truth. Instead, I'm reminding everyone of just how permeable the boundary between belief and imagination has always been and how fantasy, in particular, has long served as a vessel for metaphysical speculation, even when dressed in the garb of swords and sorcery or rocket ships and ray guns. Perhaps this is one of the reasons these genres endure: they don’t merely entertain; they echo the ancient human desire to find meaning in a world that so often seems devoid of it.

Retrospective: Alien Module 7: Hivers

By the time Alien Module 7: Hivers was published in 1986, the Traveller role-playing game was approaching its tenth anniversary. Game Designers’ Workshop (GDW) already had a great deal of experience in producing sourcebooks to the major alien races of the Third Imperium, producing some of the line’s most inventive and distinctive supplements. The Hivers, among the most enigmatic of Traveller’s aliens were a natural fit for this deep-dive treatment. Their inscrutable nature and radical departure from humanoid norms demanded a module that could capture their alien essence while expanding the possibilities of the game itself.

Unlike the Vargr, with their wolf-pack dynamics dressed in science-fictional trappings, or the Aslan, who embodied the archetype of the "proud warrior race," the Hivers defied easy categorization. They were, in a word, strange – non-humanoid, non-violent, intellectually aloof, and relentlessly meddlesome. Their radial, starfish-like physiology and their communication through color changes and body posture evoked a biology more akin to deep-sea creatures than traditional sci-fi aliens. Their penchant for subtle, centuries-long manipulation of other species felt like something drawn from the cosmic visions of Olaf Stapledon or the surreal imaginings of Cordwainer Smith (even though the book openly admits the debt owed to Larry Niven’s Pierson’s Puppeteers and Outsiders). Despite this, the Hivers were a wholly unique creation, their oddity amplified by a psychology that prioritized intricate social engineering over direct action.

The success of Alien Module 7: Hivers in giving shape and substance to such an unconventional species is a testament to the talents of its principal authors: William H. Keith, J. Andrew Keith, Loren Wiseman, and Traveller creator Marc Miller. Structured like its predecessors, the module is divided into sections covering history, physiology, psychology, society, technology, along with rules for generating Hiver characters. Yet what immediately sets it apart is how bizarre its subject matter is. The Hivers are not “rubber suit” aliens defined by a single cultural quirk. Their biology is profoundly non-human: they reproduce almost accidentally without pair bonding or even emotional investment, communicate via mechanisms no human could intuitively grasp, and perceive the universe through a lens shaped by their intense curiosity. Their society, too, defies familiar models. Rather than being organized around governments or hierarchies, Hiver civilization is a loose tapestry of individuals pursuing esoteric, often opaque "topics" – long-term investigations that might span centuries and often involve subtly steering entire civilizations toward particular ends. One cannot help but draw comparisons to the Bene Gesserit of Dune, with their millennia-spanning schemes or even Lovecraft’s Elder Things, with whom the Hivers share a faint physical resemblance, though without the malice or cosmic horror.

What further distinguishes Hivers from earlier Alien Modules is its refusal to reduce its subject to easily digestible tropes. The Hivers are not warriors, traders, or pirates; they are manipulators, schemers, and architects of destiny. Their commitment to nonviolence is not a weakness but a cornerstone of their civilization, shaping their every interaction. They are not pacifists in the conventional sense but they are deeply opposed to overt conflict, preferring to neutralize threats through careful, almost surgical social redesign. The module provides a vivid example of this approach in their centuries-long maneuvering against the K’kree, their militant, herbivorous neighbors, a species almost as alien to human eyes as themselves. 

As presented, a campaign involving the Hivers is unlikely to revolve around the familiar beats of firefights, starship chases, or planetary exploration. Instead, it gestures toward something slower and subtler: espionage, cultural subversion, and interstellar diplomacy of a particularly insidious kind. However, this is also where the module falters. While it does provide broad advice on running Hiver-centric adventures, it rarely offers the kinds of concrete examples that would help a referee bring these high-concept scenarios to life at the table. The included adventure, “Something Stinks!,” is brief and unmemorable, more a sketch than a scenario and one that never quite demonstrates how to make the Hivers’ unique qualities matter in play. This is a common flaw in the Alien Module series: strong ideas paired with underdeveloped tools for implementation.

That said, one of the book's more subtle successes lies in how it situates its subject within the wider Traveller setting without dulling their strangeness. The Hivers’ influence on the Imperium is indirect but pervasive, shaping events from the shadows through trade agreements, cultural shifts, and strategic nudges – at least, that’s what they’d like you to believe. This ambiguity is where the module’s potential becomes most intriguing. The Hivers are not just another species; they are potentially a vehicle for a different kind of science fiction roleplaying, one that rewards speculation, inference, and even conspiracy-minded thinking. The fact that they remain difficult to grasp even after 48 pages of focused attention feels less like a failure and more like a feature, though one that may frustrate as often as it inspires.

In the end, Alien Module 7: Hivers is an ambitious but uneven entry in the Traveller canon. It introduces a compellingly alien species with a richly imagined culture and worldview, yet it struggles to translate that material into content easily usable in play. The ideas are strong and the writing imaginative, but too often the referee is left to do the heavy lifting. Still, for those intrigued by the prospect of a campaign built around manipulation, subtlety, and long-term consequences, the module offers a tantalizing foundation. Like the Hivers themselves, it prefers to hint and suggest rather than declare outright. Whether that is a strength or a weakness will depend on the kind of game you wish to run.