The first letter by self-proclaimed "High Priest of the Great Old Ones," Gerald Guinn, appears in issue #14 (July 1978). It's mostly a nitpicky – and inaccurate – criticism of the Kuntz and Holmes presentation of the Mythos in D&D terms. I say "inaccurate," because Mr Guinn, despite being "an avid fan of Lovecraft," seems to have imbibed more than a little of the Derlethian Kool-Aid when it comes to his understanding of HPL's creation (and I say this as someone who unironically appreciates Derleth's contributions). His complaints, by and large, boil down to deviating from Derleth's interpretations of Lovecraft.
For example, Guinn repeats the un-Lovecraftian idea that the Elder Gods "defeated" the Great Old Ones, as well as making dubious genealogical ("Cthulhu, first spawn of Yog-Sothoth") and elemental connections ("Hastur ... is the KING OF AIR !!!!!!!") that have no basis in HPL's own texts. In some cases, I'm not even certain I can pin these errors on Derleth, who, for all his faults, never seemed to have suggested that Nyarlathotep was a Great Old One or an offspring of Azathoth. Neither did Derleth make Ubbo-Sathla "the center of the universe."
This is all very "inside baseball" stuff, but I find it very interesting. If nothing else, it's a reminder of just how obsessive nerds can be about getting the "facts" of fictional settings correct – and how much effort they'll put into demonstrating their superior knowledge of those facts. It's also a reminder of the extent to which not just Derleth but other post-Lovecraftian authors proved influential in fans' understanding of the Mythos. Much like Robert E. Howard's Conan, whose popular conception was largely colored by the pastiches of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter, Lovecraft was similarly misunderstood well into the 1970s. Most of Guinn's objections stem, in my opinion, from such misunderstandings, including his taking issue with the D&D stats of Hastur, Cthugha, and so on.
Rather than dwell on how many hit points a shoggoth should have, I want to turn to the second letter, which appeared in issue #16 (July 1978). Written by J. Eric Holmes, it's intended as an answer to Gerlad Guinn's critique of the original article. Holmes starts, amusing enough, by stating that "When one gets into religious controversy the first thing one discovers is that the scriptures themselves are self-contradictory and subject to varying interpretations." It's a funny line, but also an apt one, as dissecting just what Lovecraft meant or intended is a kind of exegesis. I've often felt that, as the practice of traditional religion has declined, many people have turned to pop culture as a replacement.
Whether my thesis is true or not, Holmes quickly gets to the heart of the issue: the "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column he and Rob Kuntz wrote "draws most heavily from Lovecraft's own works" rather than those of HPL's friends and imitators. This is a perfectly valid rebuttal and no more need be said on the matter. Even leaving aside the errors Guinn makes in his original critiques, which Holmes addresses individually, the larger point still stands, namely, that Kuntz and Holmes wrote their descriptions with Lovecraft in mind and no one else. To continue Holmes's earlier religious analogy, he prefers a textualist reading of the Mythos over any other.
One can, of course, agree or disagree with this approach, but I think it's a defensible one. In general, my own preferences when it comes to this specific question is fairly close to that of Holmes. At the same time, I think it's equally defensible to include a wider range of source material in conceiving of the Mythos. How wide a range is an equally important question. From its first edition, Call of Cthulhu, for example, has included a fairly broad range of sources – just look at the creatures in its bestiary – and that rarely raises any comment from gamers. On the other hand, I don't begrudge anyone who draws the line at one place or another, so long as he can articulate why and to what purpose.
These kinds of debates are fascinating to me. Lovecraft himself hoped his ideas and concepts, his monsters and alien gods would be picked up and used by other writers, each of whom would add his own wrinkles to the growing tapestry of what we now call the Mythos. He did not care that this would introduce contradictions and confusion, because that's the nature of a real mythology. The only thing I suspect he'd have objected to is the claim that there was one and only one "true" version that everyone else must accept. He wasn't founding a dogmatic religion but creating a smorgasbord of elements from which his fellow authors could pick and choose as they wished. In that respect, I think he'd probably be delighted at how broadly disseminated his ideas have since become, even if he might not like some of the specific uses to which they've been put.
I was reading Holmes' Blue Book D&D rules when I first laid eyes on the word Cthulhu. I was 10. I still remember the word struck me as odd and wrong and made me feel weird, like it was something unknown that I wasn't sure I wanted to make known.
ReplyDeleteThat word is in the Blue Book? As a kid reading it, that must have gone right past me. Do you know whereabouts it’s located?
DeleteYeah, there's a place where Holmes says characters might "swear by Zeus, Crom, Cthulhu, etc." I seem to remember it's towards the back. I actually dont own a copy of Holmes anymore.
DeleteIn the context of Holmes and that era, hit points for the gods begins to make sense. Though today they are basically a proxy for video game style "life points" or a series of 1ups, they formerly were a translation of wargame-style "thwarting" or "victory" points.
ReplyDeleteIn the old war games, you would surrender or retreat once your "hit points" became sufficiently low enough that defeat was imminent or inevitable, because you wanted to preserve your remnant army. Each hit point roughly represented a squad or minor combatant/pawn (which is also why AC made sense at its origin - it was not designed to illustrate the defenses of an individual adventurer, but of a "class" of combatants: "you attack the flank - a unit of lightly armored spearmen."
So, when translated to individual NPCs and PCs, hit points were sort of originally seen as simulating not-necessarily mortal combat, but a clash of goals. The goal in D&D combat was viewed as "a race against losing," and counting hp down toward zero was the metric of how close one was to having his individual martial or physical objectives thwarted. When a PC or NPC was "low" on hp, he was not necessarily grievously wounded (although he might be, depending on the context), but he WAS close to defeat. Retreat or parlay or unconditional surrender were preferable to total hp annihilation. HP were a resource metric, not for life and death specifically, but for strategic victory and defeat management.
This is why hit points are used in the subduing of dragons: the "hitting with the flat of the sword" is shorthand for overtly demonstrating an intellectual/physical/strategic contest or game with the dragon, one that demonstrates the party is acting out of courage and curiosity, rather than fear or naked greed. They are risking their bodies and lives for the opportunity to earn the dragon's respect.
For the gods, hit points are the same thing (although Mentzer would kind of betray this spirit with the Immortals set, eschewing hp for the most part): thwarting resources. Most of the time, when you reduce Orcus' hit points to zero, you defeat, forestall or somehow outwork/outwit him, you don't kill him.
Lovecraftian shuggoths are horrific, otherworldly, and tough, but not unkillable. Cthulhu, on the other hand would find atomic weapons irrelevant. Should you reduce its hit points to zero, it would indicate that you have unlocked Cthhulhu's unspoken objectives - such as consuming the cultists who summoned it and the entire citadel in which they dwell - and in someway thwarted it, forestalling Cthulhu's full awakening...or whatever.
In the simplest illustration, a PC with 12 hp who takes 10 hp falling damage while trying to scale a wall (reduced to 2 hp) may not be unconscious, brain damaged, or bleeding out, but what they definitely are (no matter how the DM describes the fall) is too jarred physically and psychologically to risk climbing the wall again.
In a mythos-level illustration. when a party reduces Hastur's 400 HP to zero (almost certainly with some form of magic support) they've done enough to contest him to defeat or dissolution.
This is a really valuable post. While I am familiar with victory points in wargames, I started playing those after D&D and the connection never occurred to me. I will definitely employ this if I ever get an EPT game off the ground.
DeleteAt what point did D&D rules start to contradict this interpretation? Was it already in AD&D 1e that characters started to bleed out at 0 HP?
As soon as the game needed to be explained to newcomers, I believe. If you came from wargames, it was intuitive: HP were a resource for managing your character and retainers. Because a minimal-value squad or squad member would "die" (though because there was no real roleplaying or characterization of that repped hit point) at every lost hit point, technically going from 1 hp to zero intuitively meant death. But because Statika the Magic User was an individual who represented a collection of hp, most early players would have been seeking strategic protection once his stats neared zero. Nevertheless, it would have been understood that in most circumstances, 0 HP meant ol' Statika was dead.
DeleteThe other thing that affected this view was, I think, was player attachment. Even if you were a wargamer, the attraction of fantasy adventure play - esp. roleplaying - was the ability to deepen the relationship and creative development of your "unit." After all you may have been fond of your 54th Regiment, and withdrawn it as much as possible to live to fight another day when things went bad...but once you were running Statika and his hirelings, you really didn't want him permanently out.
So changing the verisimilitude and utility of HP from unit based to personal, from the very beginning, was bound to have a host of unintended consequences, one of which was the slow adaptation of "life points" or "hearts".
I can't recall a point where it shifted, but I recall vaguely "feeling" something after DMing Mentzer rules about two modules in - I **think** Castle Amber, particularly the early boxing match. (as I've mentioned before, we mashed B/X and AD&D modules and rules together for the most part, often without conversion! But I distinctly remember something about the presentation of the B/X rules in BECMI very subtly "Dragonlancing" the value of characters and therefore the purpose of HP. This is EXTREMELY subjective, I think, because there is nothing Holmes or White Box that explicitly discuss this conversion - because it was assumed the player already understood the concept - but very quickly after Holmes, it appears that gameplay had modded the concept.)
Its hard for me to pin it down personally, because even though I felt the shift, it is kind of an esoteric thing, simply because, like the "double damage" houserule being used widespread to the point that people thought it was in the rulebooks, the concept was never fully codified.
The irony is that there were later debates about the "realism" of personal HP in combat when HP was overtly an abstraction of an abstraction: the physical combat was simulated in the player's adrenaline rush from rolling dice, and the adjudicated nature of the table actions. Wargames had diceless rules and miniatures, such as working catapults and cannons, or clockwork devices (kind of mini-rock-em-sockem-robot things) for melee if you wanted that kind of "realism", but those were never translated over to D&D precisely because realism of that sort would ruin the simulation of the exploration of a fantasy realm.
I should note that in the second issue of Dragon featured, Gary Gygax addressed this concept obliquely in the Sorcerer's Scroll article: Realism vs. Game Logic, where he decried particular player's who accepted the "camel" of working magic and fantasy realms bug gagged on the "gnat" of "unrealistic" combat. But he addressed the issue theoretically, saying that wargames aren't realistic either, without ever once mentioning the crossover of HP and how what it represented might be evolving.
DeleteHmm, entering the RPG hobby in 1977 from the war gaming hobby, I had not encountered hit points prior in war gaming... That said, I did not do any of the "stand of troops" type miniatures gaming, mostly board gaming, but also Little Wars, Tractics, and Donald Featherstone.
DeleteI really don't remember how I viewed hit points in those early days, but pretty sure I saw them as some measure of physical health. Heck, Saturday morning, having been introduced to Holmes the evening before and having stayed up all night absorbing it, I was ready to declare that different weapons should do different damage.
So maybe Greyhawk changed things...
This view of hit points makes standard 1d6 damage more defensible.
Crud, keep forgetting to log in... That was me above...
Delete@Daniel Do you have a website or blog? Your recent comments here have been good food for thought.
DeleteThe Dragon was sure different back then. The featured articles include “Space Marines” and “Robot Players in MA”? And that’s a great cover.
ReplyDeleteWhich would you consider a better treatment of the Lovecraftian mythos? Holmes's interpretation in the Dragon article, or what was presented in the early prints of Deities and Demigods?
ReplyDeleteFor me, that question assumes there is a "better" way to treat an open source project. Lovecraft invited all comers - he, to my knowledge, never claimed/acknowledged copyrights to his own material, for the expressed purpose that his vision for his work was far too expansive and collaborative to waste attention on money. There is no true Lovecraft canon, other than what survives due to its inherent quality or to accident.
DeletePut it another way: which video game is the better treatment of the Greek mythos? God of War or Assassin's Creed Odyssey?
Successors to Lovecraft are not keepers of canon, but explorers in the dark. What they find, they get to keep. If people like it, it endures, side-by-side with other (potentially contradictory) survivors.
I was born too late for the paperback boom, and as a side effect of that my experience with the immediate successors to Lovecraft and Howard are fairly minimal. The Del Rey Lovecraft collections I read didn't have any Derleth stories, and it wasn't until I found a copy of The Survivor and The Mask of Cthulhu many, many years later that I actually read anything by him (he's fine). Similarly, contrasted to people that were introduced to Conan via the Lancer books, I had no experience with the de Camp/Carter additions since my Del Rey Conan collections are as Howard wrote, in order he wrote.
ReplyDeleteI never was too much of a puritan about the Mythos, even if I immediately rejected a lot of the Derlethian approach, I picked up a few collections of Mythos stories over the years, but I do find that my introduction to Conan, and Howard's other works by extension, has left me a bit more stringent about them in literature (though I do quite enjoy the movies, the TV show, and the comics, oddly enough. Never saw either animated series though, I think Tubi has them).