The Articles of Dragon: "Giants in the Earth" (Issue #36)

"Giants in the Earth" was an irregular series of articles that appeared in Dragon between issues #26 (June 1979) and #61 (May 1982). Co-written by Lawrence Schick and Tom Moldvay, its purpose was to present notable characters from literature in (A)D&D terms. During its run, more than 40 characters made an appearance, running the gamut from John Carter of Mars to Maal Dweb to Reepicheep and more. While certain authors, like Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber, and their creations receive lots of attention, others show up more infrequently.

Despite his foundational importance to the literature that inspired the hobby, a character from the works of H.P. Lovecraft appears only once in "Giants in the Earth" and the choice is an odd one, at least in my opinion. The column from issue #36 (April 1980) features Richard Upton Pickman, here styled the "King of the Ghouls." Here are the game stats that accompany his description, along with a portrait that looks to me as if it was drawn by Jeff Dee (there is no credit accompanying either the article or the illustration):

There are certainly a number of things one could discuss about this write-up – feel free to do so in the comments – but, for me, what's more interesting is the accompanying description of Pickman. For example, the text states that he "wears +3 plate armor (no shield) and carries a +1 sword which is +4 versus ghoul enemies (most living creatures)." What a bizarre detail! I say that, because Pickman is presented in the article just as he is in "Pickman's Model." He's a Boston artist whose work is shunned by respectable galleries for its disturbing subject matter. Though he is now himself a ghoul, he's nevertheless a man of the 20th century, not some medieval fantasy characters. It's very odd.

Beyond that, the text presents six examples of Pickman's paintings. Each one is given a title and a magical effect if viewed. 

The first three paintings listed – "The Lesson," "Ghoul Feeding," and "Subway Accident" – are all lifted straight from "Pickman's Model," while the last three are references, either direct or indirect, to famous Lovecraft stories. I find the inclusion of "The Silver Key" notable, since protagonist of the story with which it shares a name, Randolph Carter, eventually meets Pickman in The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath. The article also notes that each of these paintings has a saving throw versus fire of 10, suggesting that it's quite likely someone might seek to burn them in order to stop their deleterious effects.

More than halfway through The Shadow over August, it's been a bit of a struggle to find Dragon magazine articles that connect directly – or even indirectly – to H.P. Lovecraft and his legacy. I would have thought there'd be more examples of this kind of thing, especially from the period prior to 1980. As it turns out, that's not the case and I find myself wondering why ...

The Articles of Dragon: "The Cthulhu Mythos Revisited" and "A Rebuttal to 'The Cthulhu Mythos Revisited'"

Having already broken the original intent of this series by highlighting Dragon magazine articles I never read during their initial publication simply because of their Lovecraftian content, I'm going to do so again, this time by discussing two articles in a single post. In this case, I think it can be more than justified for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the "articles" in question are actually letters to the editor and, therefore, comparatively short. Secondly, the two letters are in dialog with one another, as well as with the "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column I discussed last week. Discussing both of them here thus makes a great deal of sense.

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.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons"

In honor of The Shadow over August, I thought I'd do something a little different with my weekly "The Articles of Dragon" series. Instead of continuing to highlight articles that I remember or that made a strong impression on me – good or bad – from my youth, I'm instead going to spend this month focusing on Dragon articles that touch upon H.P. Lovecraft, his Cthulhu Mythos, or related topics. Interestingly, nearly all these articles come from before I was even involved in the hobby, let alone reading Dragon regularly. While I can't say for certain why that might be, I have a theory that I'll discuss later in this post.

The "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column is nowadays associated with Gary Gygax, but its first three appearances (starting with issue #11 in December 1977) were penned by Rob Kuntz. Furthermore, the second of these initial columns, entitled "The Lovecraftian Mythos in Dungeons & Dragons," is, in fact, largely the work of J. Eric Holmes with additions by Kuntz. In his brief introduction to the article, Kuntz explains that the material is intended to be "compatible with Dungeons & Dragons Supplement IV 'Gods, Demigods & Heroes'." It's also meant to satisfy both "Lovecraft enthusiasts" and those "not familiar with the Cthulhu cycle."

From the beginning, it's immediately clear that, despite its title, much of what follows in the article is not authentically Lovecraftian but owes more to August Derleth's idiosyncratic interpretation of HPL's work. For example:

The Great Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos are completely evil and often times chaotic. They were banished or sealed away by the Elder Gods.  

Now is not the time to relitigate the case of Lovecraft v. Derleth, which is a much more complex and nuanced discussion than many people, myself included, have often made it out to be. However, I bring this up simply to provide context for what follows. In February 1978, when issue #12 of Dragon appeared, Lovecraft scholarship was, much like that of Robert E. Howard, still in very much in its infancy, with the popular conceptions of both writers and their literary output still very much in the thrall of pasticheurs like Derleth, L. Sprague de Camp, Lin Carter, etc. With that in mind, we can look at the article itself.

Holmes describes "only Lovecraft's major gods," namely, Azathoth, Cthulhu, Hastur, Nyarlathotep, Shub-Niggurath, Cthugha, Ithaqua, Yig, and Yog-Sothoth. These selections clearly show the influence of Derleth, who was very keen on Hastur, Ithaqua, and Cthugha, the last two of which were his own inventions. Each god is given an armor class, move, and hit points, along with magic, fighter, and psionic ability. I find these statistics really fascinating, as they're somewhat unimpressive by the standards of later editions of D&D, but were considered exceptionally powerful by the standards of OD&D, for which they were written. Cthulhu, for example, has only AC 2 and 200hp and fights like a 15th-level fighter.

Also described in the article are Byakhee, Deep Ones, the Great Race, the Old Ones, Mi-Go, and Shaggoths [sic]. They're described in the same way as the gods, using the same game statsistics. What I found interesting here is that Holmes suggests the Byakhee are more potent opponents than the Shoggoths, something my post-Call of Cthulhu brain wouldn't have concluded. From the vantage point of the present, that's what makes this article so fascinating: it's an artifact from a time before Chaosium's RPG was published and helped to popularize not just Lovecraft's creations but a particular interpretation of them. This article is an alternate presentation of those creations and, even if I disagree with parts of it, I appreciate its uniqueness.

Obviously, this article was published before 1980's Deities & Demigods, whose early printings included a different presentation of the Cthulhu Mythos. As a kid, my copy of the book was one of the later printings that didn't include this chapter (or that of Moorcock's Melnibonéan Mythos) and indeed I didn't even notice its absence until I was in college. My roommate had a copy of one of the early printings and I was flabbergasted when I saw its extra chapters. The saga of the inclusion and removal of the Cthulhu and Melnibonéan material from the DDG is well known, I think, so I won't repeat it here. However, I wonder if it left a sufficiently bad taste in TSR's mouth that Dragon would thereafter include almost no Lovecraft-related material in its pages for years after the event.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: Physics and Falling Damage

And so we return to falling damage once again.

Issue #88 (August 1984) presents a lengthy article by Arn Ashleigh Parker that uses physics -- complete with equations! – to argue that neither the as-published AD&D rules nor the purportedly Gygaxian revisions to same from issue #70 adequately reflects "the real world." Here's a scan of some of the equations Mr Parker uses in his article:

I'm sure it says something about my intellectual sloth that my eyes just glaze over when I see stuff like this in a roleplaying game. The very idea of having to understand acceleration, terminal velocity, and the like to arrive at a "realistic" representation of falling damage is bizarre enough. To do so as part of an argument against earlier rules is even more baffling. D&D's hit point system doesn't really stand up to extensive scrutiny if "realism" is your watchword. In my opinion, devoting so much effort to "prove" that terminal velocity is reached not at 200 feet as in the Players Handbook system or at 60 feet as in the revision but at 260 feet is a waste of time better spent on making a new monster or a new magic items – things that actually contribute meaningfully to fun at the game table. But I'm weird that way.

Amusingly, issue #88 also includes a very short rebuttal to the above article by Steve Winter. Entitled "Kinetic Energy is the Key," Mr Winter argues that, if one considers the kinetic energy resulting from a fall, you'll find that its increase is linear, thus making the original system a surprisingly close fit to the "reality." He makes this argument in about half a page, using only a single table (albeit one that draws on the earlier equations). While I agree with Winter that the original system is just fine for my purposes, it's nevertheless interesting that the author also makes his case on the basis of physics, as if the important point is that AD&D's rules map to facts about our world. It's a point of view I briefly held as a teen and then soon abandoned, for all the obvious reasons. Back in 1984, though, this was the height of fashion and many a Dragon article proceeded from the premise that the real world has a lot to teach us about how rules for a fantasy roleplaying game ought to be constructed ...

The Articles of Dragon: "Presenting the Suel Pantheon"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Articles of Dragon: "Luna: A Traveller's Guide"

 I subscribed to Dragon from issue #68 (December 1982) till #127 (November 1987). During that five-year period, my favorite section of the magazine – by far – was the Ares Section, which appeared in its pages each month from issue #84 (April 1984) until issue #111 (July 1986). That's because the Ares Section, as its name suggests, was devoted entirely to science fiction roleplaying games and, being even more of a sci-fi nerd than I am a fantasy one, this held a great deal of appeal for me. As you'll know doubt learn over the course of the coming weeks, many of my favorite and most beloved articles of Dragon appeared in the Ares Section and left a lasting impact on both my memories of the magazine as a whole and one my youthful imagination.

One of the interesting things the section's editors occasionally did was run series in which a topic was given an article devoted to showing how that topic was handled in a particular science fiction RPG. One of the first one (and one of the best) concerned Earth's satellite, the Moon. Over the course of five articles, the Ares Section treated readers to depictions of the Moon in Gamma World, Star Trek, Space Opera, Other Suns, and, finally, Traveller, the last of which is the subject of today's post. I found all these articles incredibly interesting, though, as you'd expect, the one for Traveller, appearing in issue #87 (July 1984), is the one most dear to my heart.

To begin with, the article in question was penned by none other than the creator of Traveller, himself, Marc W. Miller. That immediately lent it a high degree of importance in my young eyes. Miller was to Traveller as Gary Gygax was to Dungeons & Dragons: the final authority. Consequently, when his byline appeared on an article – which was rare, much rarer than Gygax – I took it very seriously. I took "Luna: A Traveller's Guide" as absolutely official and duly incorporated the information contained in it into my Traveller adventures and campaigns. 

Furthermore, the article described the Moon – or Luna, as it's called here – within the context of GDW's Third Imperium setting. For those unfamiliar with the intricacies of that setting, Earth (or Terra) is the homeworld of the Solomani, the "original" human race that evolved naturally on that planet. All other human races, like the Vilani and the Zhodani, descended from Terran humans transplanted to other worlds by the mysterious Ancients, a technologically advanced alien race that once roamed the galaxy 300,000 years ago. Terra and Luna are currently under military occupation by the Third Imperium, a consequence of losing the Solomani Rim War more than a century ago, when the Solomani attempted to secede from the Imperium.

It's against this backdrop that Miller presents his vision of Luna as a lightly populated scientific colony in orbit around the homeworld of humaniti (as Traveller spells the name of the human race taken as a whole). Miller provides information on the population and demographics of the Moon, its settlements and transportion, its politics, and, of course, its history. The latter is especially interesting, as it helps to provide additional details about the deep background of the Third Imperium setting, such as the Solomani discovery of jump drive and its role in the Interstellar Wars against the Vilani First Imperium. As a teenager, this was catnip to me, both as a Traveller fan and as someone who'd grown up in the afterglow of the 1969 Moon landing.

I loved it all, of course, but, re-reading the article now, I do wonder what people not as immersed in the Third Imperium setting would have thought of it. For example, there are lots of adventure seeds throughout the article, but almost all of them tie into some aspect of imperial history or some other unique aspect of the Third Imperium. That's not a unique "problem" to this article; the other treatments of the Moon are similar in this regard. However, it's something I noticed now and started to think about: how does one present an adventure locale that simultaneously leverages its connection to a particular setting while also providing something of interest/use to people who don't use or know much about that setting? This is a question I still struggle with to some degree and I suspect I'm not the only RPG writer who does so.

But, as I said, I didn't even notice it at the time. I was simply excited to learn more about the Moon in one of my favorite imaginary settings. From that perspective, "Luna: A Traveller's Guide" gave me everything I wanted and more. 

REPOST: Plants vs. Macrobes

I hope no one misunderstands me: I think Gamma World is plenty weird. I also think there's a great deal of scope within that weirdness for humor, even of a very low sort. In that respect, I firmly believe that it's no different than Dungeons & Dragons, which I have long characterized as being a "pulp fantasy roleplaying game of high adventure and low comedy." What I have grown to greatly dislike, though, is the deliberate emphasis on and encouragement of low comedy in Gamma World to the detriment (or even exclusion) of its potential for high adventure. Mind you, I think the reverse is also an error in judgment too, but then I feel the same way about D&D.

I was thinking about this topic in reference to another couple of articles I loved from Dragon back in the day. Issues 86 and 87 (June and July 1984, respectively) described the Moon in Gamma World, as part of an excellent ongoing series detailing Earth's only natural satellite in a variety of SF RPGs. The Gamma World articles were written by James Ward and thus carried an imprimatur of official-dom about them. Even if I hadn't loved what they described – which I did – my teenage self would have dutifully accepted their contents regardless, since they came from the pen of the Creator.

As detailed in that pair of articles, the Moon of the 25th century was utterly devoid of human life, which was wiped out by a plague not long after the destruction of civilization on Earth. In the absence of humans, Tycho Base's cybernetic installation kept it running as before, right down to allowing existing experiments to proceed unhindered – such as the genetic manipulation and irradiation of plants and single-celled organisms. Left unchecked, both experiments eventually resulted in various mutant strains, some of them intelligent, which before long initiated a war on the other to gain full control of the cybernetic installation and, with it, Tycho Base. Thus, the Moon of Gamma World consists of a base once large enough to support 50,000 human beings but now inhabited by colonies of mutant plants and huge microbes locked in a death struggle against each other. A world gone mad indeed!

I really like the idea of a Moon base filled with warring mutant plants and giant microbes, because it's unexpectedly alien. But, let's face it, the idea is pretty ridiculous taken out of context. Even in context it's peculiar. That's OK in my book, though, since this situation isn't unique to Gamma World but in fact a facet of all but the most self-serious RPGs. If I am belaboring this point, I apologize. It galls me that Gamma World has for so long been relegated to the "joke RPG" category, all the moreso when I read these articles about the Moon and realize that, rather than dispelling such notions, they'll probably only confirm them in the minds of many gamers.

So, yeah, I admit that I've probably been thinking too much about this topic, but that's what I do: think too much about roleplaying games. After Easter [this was originally posted in April 2011], I'll have some more to say about this, I am certain. It's my hope that, even if I start to sound like a broken record, I'll at least play an interesting tune.

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.

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.

Smoke Rings and Sorcery: An Ode to Wormy

Among the many delights of flipping through issues of Dragon magazine from my youth is getting the chance to see Dave Trampier's Wormy comic strip once again. Long before I was conscious of the names of any of the artists who appeared in my favorite RPG products, I knew Wormy. Even among the clutter of rules variants, advertisements, fiction, and the occasionally bombastic editorials that defined Dragon during the years when I most avidly read it, Wormy stood out, in large part because it was so strange. It was a peculiar, beautiful little world unto itself, filled with pool-playing dragons, cigar-chomping ogres, and an imp who spoke with the laid-back confidence of a veteran hustler. It was, in short, utterly unlike anything else in the pages of Dragon and it fascinated me – in large part because I didn't fully understand it or its continuing storyline, having picked it up many issues after it first began.

Wormy's debut (in issue #9, September 1977) occurred when Dragon was still very much in its formative years. Indeed, the hobby of roleplaying itself was barely out of its own infancy and TSR’s flagship magazine was still trying to figure out what kind of publication it wanted to be. Early issues mixed game material with essays, fiction, and humor. Comics became a regular feature before long, with J.D. Webster's Finieous Fingers being one of the more well-known of the bunch, even though it ended its run about a year before I started reading Dragon. But Wormy stood out as something different. It was never simply an in-joke for gamers nor a gag strip loosely inspired by fantasy tropes. Instead, it presented a fully realized fantasy world rendered in lush color and with a distinct artistic sensibility.

What immediately set Wormy apart was, of course, Trampier’s art. Nowadays, we all celebrate Trampier from his iconic work on the AD&D Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Screen. His style is clean, expressive and rich in texture and character. Wormy carried those same qualities into serialized comic form, but with an added flourish of visual wit and playfulness. The strip was never slapdash or haphazard. Trampier’s panels were packed with detail, his character designs expressive, his linework confident. Each page was a feast for the eyes and even when the plot meandered a bit (as it regularly did), the visuals carried the reader along to such an extent that he didn't care. I know I didn't, even though, as I said, it wasn't always clear to my younger self just what was happening in many installments.

The tone of the strip is one of its greatest charms. Wormy is unquestionably fantasy, but it’s fantasy as seen through a haze of cigar smoke and the low hum of a barroom pool table. Its characters speak in a colloquial American idiom that lends the strip a grounded, personable quality. One never gets the sense that Wormy or Ace or the ogres and trolls with whom he shares his world are interested in epic quests or noble deeds. They’re more likely to be plotting a scam, hustling a demon, or arguing about who’s buying the next round. This sense of the fantastical-as-everyday-life gives Wormy much of its charm and humor, not to mention its distinctiveness from the other comics that appeared alongside it in Dragon. 

In this, Wormy mirrors the culture of early roleplaying itself. The early hobby, as reflected in the pages of Dragon, was a strange admixture of wargamers, fantasy and science fiction fans, history buffs, and countercultural weirdos. This was a time before fantasy had hardened into genre orthodoxy, when anything could happen and often did. The world Trampier presented in Wormy feels like a campaign gone delightfully off the rails: a sandbox setting where the players long ago stopped caring about the dungeon and are now embroiled in a decades-long tavern brawl. For me, that was a big part of what I found so compelling about Wormy. It was so unlike my then-narrow conception of "fantasy" that I couldn't help but keep reading.

Over time, Trampier introduced a larger story into the strip. There were plots and schemes in motion and strange characters lurking just out of frame. Readers were teased with glimpses of the larger world beyond Wormy’s abode and the smoky dens of the trolls. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, Wormy vanished. Trampier’s final installment appeared in Dragon #132 (April 1988), ending mid-story. He never offered a public explanation. Other than the following, which appeared in issue #136 (August 1988), TSR never provided an explanation for what had happened:

Wormy, along with its creator, David Trampier, vanished without a trace.

This abrupt disappearance only deepened the comic strip’s allure. In the years that followed, fans spun wild theories: Was Trampier dead? Had he severed all ties with the gaming world? Or was it something darker? For decades, the mystery endured, unanswered. Then, in 2002, word emerged that Trampier was alive, living a quiet life in southern Illinois as a taxi driver. He had steadfastly declined all invitations to return to art or gaming until 2014, when he agreed to showcase some of his original artwork at a local Illinois game convention. Tragically, just three weeks before the event, he died suddenly at age 59.

In hindsight, Wormy feels like a microcosm of an entire era in fantasy gaming, a time that was raw, personal, and unapologetically chaotic. The strip was a labor of love, brimming with anarchic energy, improvisational flair, and unfiltered creativity. Like the Dragon magazine of its heyday, Wormy was gloriously messy, fiercely idiosyncratic, and utterly brilliant in its refusal to conform or explain itself.

As the hobby grows ever more polished and commercialized, Wormy stands as a vibrant reminder of its roots, a time when oddballs and iconoclasts like Trampier defined its spirit. More than a relic, Wormy embodies the untamed passion and fearless imagination of those who dared to be unapologetically strange. It captures a moment when the heart of gaming pulsed with individuality, free from the gloss of corporate agendas.

Whenever I leaf through old issues of Dragon, I find myself missing Wormy – not just the comic, but what it stood for: the spirit of unfiltered creativity, the joy of irreverence, and the beautiful imperfections of a world made by and for dreamers. In remembering Wormy, we remember that the true magic of roleplaying lies not in polished production values or grand designs, but in the bold, eccentric, and often messy adventures we undertake with one another .

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "How to Finish Fights Faster"

Along with falling damage, psionics, and alignment, articles about unarmed combat were a commonplace in the pages of Dragon during the years when I subscribed to that venerable gaming magazine. There's probably a reason for that: unarmed combat in AD&D was, in my experience, pretty much universally admitted to be unusable as written, a fact even Gary Gygax acknowledged on more than one occasion. Despite that, no single alternative system ever really took root, with most referees employing a welter of different approaches, some based on the official system, some based on earlier articles from Dragon, and some created whole cloth. That's what playing D&D was like during my formative years in the hobby -- a crazy mix of stuff all drawing inspiration from the same base and then running off in whatever direction one deemed most fun. Consequently, I can't help but chuckle at all the folks decrying the existence of "so many retro-clones," since, to my way of thinking, what we have now is pretty much what we've always had. The only difference is that, nowadays, it's easy to print up, prettify, and sell your interpretation of D&D to others, whereas, in the past, each referee had a photocopies and stapled collection of house rules he shared with anyone willing to listen.

Perhaps because no single alternative to AD&D's execrable rules emerged, it was inevitable that the redoubtable Roger E. Moore would eventually offer his own unarmed combat system. His article, "How to Finish Fights Faster," appeared in issue #83 (March 1984) and takes up only four pages, one of them being a humorous illustration of four rotund halflings attempting to bring down an eyepatch-wearing humanoid, who looks more annoyed than inconvenienced by his diminutive opponents. Moore divides unarmed combat up into three modes: pummeling, kicking, and grappling. Pummeling is straight up fisticuffs, with or without the use of aids, like dagger pommels or metal gauntlets. Kicking is, well, kicking and grappling is attacking to subdue. All three modes are fairly simple to use, working more or less like the normal AD&D combat system but with certain modifiers and special cases unique to them. This is particularly true of grappling, which has a number of different moves detailed, each of which has further modifiers and effects.

I never used Moore's system, so I can't comment on how well it plays in practice. I suspect it probably works better than AD&D's official system, but not as well as others. I say that, because it includes a lot of specificity in certain areas (grappling, for example) that necessitates either a good memory or referring to the article to adjudicate. That's not a bad thing in itself; there are lots of rules in D&D that require reference to a rulebook to handle. However, I'll admit that I find it baffling that unarmed combat rules so often wind up being much more complicated than armed combat. Why is it that we can accept that all it takes to adjudicate an armored fighting man's attack against an opponent is a 1D20 roll compared to a chart, followed by a damage roll if successful but we demand saving throws and percentage chances and so forth if he wants to throw a punch or wrestle someone to the ground?

The Articles of Dragon: "Taking the Sting Out of Poison"

One of the characteristics of the Silver Age of Dungeons & Dragons (1983–1989) is its concern with "realism," both in its worldbuilding and in the game rules intended to facilitate them. You can clearly see this in the kinds of articles Dragon magazine published during the mid to late 1980s, a great many of which I still remember to this day. "Living in a Material World," about which I posted last week, is a good example of what I'm talking about, but it's far from the only one.

Another excellent example is Chris Landsea's "Taking the Sting Out of Poison," which appeared in issue #81 (January 1984). At the start of his article, Landsea notes that his piece is, after a fashion, a response to two previous articles on poison that appeared in earlier issues of Dragon. The first is Charles Sagui's "Poison: From AA to XX" from issue #32 (December 1979) and the second is Larry DiTillio's "Poison: The Toxins of Cerilon" from issue #50 (March 1982). Landsea praises both articles for certain aspects of their treatment of poisons but he also has criticisms that he hopes to address in his own discussion of the topic.

The article is a long one – about ten pages, though not all the pages are full ones. Even so, it's an extensive examination of many aspects of poisons and poison use in AD&D, intended to be the definitive guide. In that respect, there's little question that the article does its job, albeit with a great deal more detail than I would care about today. There's nevertheless something strangely admirable about Landsea's thoroughness. He covers all the bases, from the different types of poisons (ingestive, insinuative, contact, poison gas, monster venom) to their relative strengths, how easy they are to detect, how long before they take effect, not to mention much more obvious matters like damage dealt on a successful or failed save. Landsea has probably thought more about poisons in AD&D than anyone else ever has and it shows.

Whether this is good or bad is, of course, a matter of personal preference. At the time "Taking the Sting Out of Poison" was released in early 1984, I was keen on it, if not necessarily enthusiastic. Like a lot of things, such as material components, I was very much in favor of these kinds of hyper-specific, hype-detailed rules additions – in principle. They appealed to my youthful sense of order and the desire to have an answer to any rules question that might come up in play. But did I ever use them in play? I don't think so. If I did, I can't recall it, which tells you everything you need to know about the utility of this kind of article.

Now, it's quite possible that I'm the odd one out here and that thousands of AD&D players were clamoring for an article like this in order to improve their adventures and campaigns. If so, I suspect they would be very happy with "Taking the Sting Out of Poison." It's an exhaustive and very well done examination of its chosen topic. I mean that without a hint of sarcasm. It's really good and, as I said, my youthful self respected all the hard work Chris Landsea clearly had done in writing it, even as I never made use of it. There's a whole genre of Dragon articles like this, consisting of well-written and researched treatments of narrow topics that probably never saw much use at anyone's table, but, to quote Grandpa Simpson, it was the style at the time.

Speaking of the style of the time, another thing the article does is mention again and again AD&D's official stance on the use of poison by player characters who are not members of the assassin class. Even though Dragon depended on a huge number of rules variants for its monthly content, the editorial policy at the time was to remind readers that nothing within its pages was official unless it came from the pen of Gary Gygax or someone to whom he had given his imprimatur. Landsea clearly knew this, which might explain why he seems at pains to emphasize his fidelity to AD&D whenever possible. This has no impact on the quality of the article itself; it's simply a peculiar artifact from another era.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Living in a Material World"

Issue #81 (January 1984) of Dragon included an article by Michael Dobson (whom I presume is the same Michael Dobson employed by TSR as an editor and writer between 1984 and 1987) entitled "Living in a Material World." As its subtitle makes clear, this article is intended to provide a system for dealing with the various material components spellcasters were expected to carry in order to work their magic. Likewise, Dobson notes that "material spell components add to the romance and realism of magic use, and somewhat restrict the power of spell casters." By my lights, this makes "Living in a Material World" about as paradigmatic an example of a Silver Age Dragon article as almost any I can imagine.

As to the content of the article itself, I can't deny that it's rather well done. Dobson is to be admired for his intestinal fortitude in providing a comprehensive accounting of all of AD&D's material spell components, including their costs, where they might be obtained, and their rarity. He then uses this information to provide the referee with the likelihood that various locales might have the components for which one is searching. There's a base chance, modified by rarity, the size of the locale in which one is searching, and other factors. It's actually a fairly easy system to use if you have the article handy, but one wonders why anyone would bother – at least I do (and did).

I want to be clear here: I don't begrudge anyone who finds dealing with such minutiae to be fun in their campaigns. Everyone has a slightly different notion of how much detail is "too much" and how much is "not enough." There's no single path to Verisimilitude. And I think, ultimately, that's my biggest beef with articles like this. They're part of a trend that D&D – and RPGs generally – adopted in the mid-80s that equated more detail with "better gaming." I don't deny that I've often indulged in more detail when I happened to like the topic in question, but material components have never been one of those topics.

They still aren't.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "How Many Coins in a Coffer?"

Another preview of the Silver Age appears in issue #80 (December 1983) of Dragon, in the article "How Many Coins in a Coffer?" by David F. Godwin. The article's premise is that the way AD&D abstracts encumbrance with regards to coins makes no sense, since the Players Handbook states that all coins are relatively the same size and weight (one-tenth of a pound or 1.6 ounces). After quibbling over the meaning of "relatively," the author points out that, for example, platinum weighs 2.5 times as much as copper. Given that, how can these two types of coins be the same weight or the same size? He goes on to note that this problem isn't unique to AD&D. RuneQuest doesn't talk about the size of its coinage, but it does talk about its weight and does so in a way that Godwin believes is nonsensical (he points out that silver does not weigh twice as much as copper). Tunnels & Trolls also includes coins that weigh one-tenth of a pound each but without any reference to size.

Having presented that prolog, the author explains why this matter concerns him:

The easiest way out is to reiterate that it's only a game and isn't supposed to be totally realistic. What's realistic about fire-breathing dragons or alignment languages? How does that accord with the laws of biology and physics? There are quite a few of us out here in the boondocks who feel perfectly comfortable with basilisks, fireballs, illusions, the fact that a spell called "continual light" produces continuous light with nothing intermittent about it, and even the rule that clerics can't use edged weapons, but who balk at the idea of a world where platinum, gold, electrum, silver and copper all weigh precisely the same for a given volume. And if we do say that all coin metals weigh the same, we are still faced with the volume question.

The bulk of the article that follows then concerns not so much the weight of individual coins, which Godwin admits would give the referee a nervous breakdown to track, but with the size of coins. His interest in this question is in how many of a given coin will fit into a given container. So, if a chest is 18" x 30" x 18" in dimension, how many gold coins can it contain? How many silver? What about a mix of gold and silver? By recourse to formulae involving the specific gravities of each metal, Godwin is able to offer a small table that gives the weight, volume, and thickness of typical coins of precious metal in AD&D. Armed with this table and the size of any container, the referee can, with comparative ease, determine how many coins of any type can fit within it.

As these kinds of articles go, "How Many Coins in a Coffer?" isn't very math-heavy. Godwin kindly saves most of the math for himself, but, even so, the idea of having to spend much time calculating how many silver pieces actually fit into an adventurer's saddlebags seems a needless complication. Working the other way – figuring out many and how large the containers holding a given volume of treasure must be – is not better in my opinion. But then I prefer to keep most things in Dungeons & Dragons fairly abstract, from hit points to experience points to encumbrance. Worrying about such things has never been an obsession of mine (I'd prefer to obsess about other things), but, back in 1983 and beyond, such obsessions became commoner in the pages of Dragon. The drive toward "realism," whether in encumbrance, weather, linguistics, population density, or some other area, was the tenor of the day and Dragon's content reflected that.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Setting Saintly Standards"

"Setting Saintly Standards" from issue #79 (November 1983) exemplifies two of the worst aspects of D&D: a mania for quantifying everything combined with forgetfulness about the game's origins. Written by Scott Bennie, the article to provide a system "for defining sainthood [and] classifying the precise abilities or capabilities of a saint." Saints, Bennie notes, are mentioned several times in passing in the Dungeon Masters Guide (the Mace of St. Cuthbert being the most notable), but what saints are and what purpose they serve is never explained. Bennie is correct so far as he goes. What he forgets (or is unaware of) is that Gary Gygax provided some good evidence as to the nature of saints back in an issue of The Strategic Review where he talks about alignment. There, saints are exemplars of Lawful Goodness, just as devils are exemplars of Lawful Evilness and demons exemplars of Chaotic Evilness. While AD&D provided lots of information on devils and demons, saints get no similar treatment (neither do "godlings," but no one seems to care about them for some reason).

That's where "Setting Saintly Standards" steps in. Bennie proposes that saints are special servants of the gods who've achieved immortality and some measure of divine power. He makes them on par with Greyhawk's "quasi-deities" like Murlynd or Keoghtom, but explicitly tied to a specific deity, whom they serve and whose cause they promote. The article lays out their spell-like abilities and offers four examples of saints from his own campaign to give the referee some idea of how to create saints of his own. He likewise suggests that some saints -- "patron saints" -- may have shrines dedicated to them and, over time, achieve sufficient power to become demigods in their own right. Exactly what this means for relations between the saint, his followers, and the deity he ostensibly serves is never discussed.

I'm on record as intensely disliking the reduction of gods and semi-divine beings to game stats. It's not for nothing that I dislike both Gods, Demigods & Heroes and Deities & Demigods. One of D&D's worst failings is its reductionism, its voracious appetite to turn everything into either a monster to be killed or a piece of magical technology to be wielded. Saints, as Bennie imagines them, are just big monsters -- or little gods -- to be confronted rather than anything more sublime. Maybe I'd be less bothered by this if he'd have adopted another term for what he's presenting; I don't think the idea of fighting gods is necessarily out of bounds. For certain styles of fantasy, it's even highly appropriate. But saint has a very specific meaning and Gygax's mention of them is almost certainly tied up in the implicit Christianity of early gaming.

Late 1983, though, was a long distance away from 1974, though, and the culture of the hobby had changed. What to Gygax had seemed obvious was now in need of explication and not just explication but expansion. That's why Bennie broadens the use of the term "saint" to include the servants of any god, not just Lawful Good ones. Thus we have St. Kargoth, a fallen paladin, among the four examples he provides us. To say that the idea of an "anti-saint" or "dark saint" is bizarre to me is an understatement. Mind you, I find the idea of non-Lawful Good paladins similarly bizarre, so clearly I'm out of step with a lot of gamers, no that this is any surprise.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "And now, the Psionicist"

Psionics in AD&D is a strangely contentious topic and not just because the rules presented for it in the Players Handbook leave a lot to be desired. For many gamers, psionics belong to the realm of science fiction and are thus inappropriate to a fantasy game like Dungeons & Dragons. I can understand that point of view, but it's not one I share, since D&D is a "fantasy" game in the broadest sense, which is why it can readily incorporate "science fiction" elements without difficulty. That said, I never used psionics much back in my AD&D days nor have I attempted to add it to my Dwimmermount campaign. The reason for this has nothing to do with maintaining the "purity" of my fantasy worlds so much as the fact that, as written, the rules for psionics are a mess.

This unsuitability of the psionics rules was widely acknowledged by nearly every gamer I knew back in the day. Consequently, many of us greeted issue #78 of Dragon (October 1983) with some pleasure, as it was largely devoted to psionics and its problems. Of the articles in that issue my hands-down favorite was "And now, the psionicist" by Arthur Collins. Collins was one of those authors, like Roger E. Moore and Ed Greenwood, whose stuff was always good. He wasn't as prolific as Moore or Greenwood, but he never failed to impress me. Indeed, if I were to be completely honest, I think Arthur Collins was my favorite old school Dragon writer and "And now, the psionicist" reveals part of why I think so.

The article takes the then-bold step of introducing a new character class -- the psionicist of the title -- as a way to make the psionics rules both workable and enjoyable. More than that, though, Collins also does something even more remarkable: he makes the AD&D psionics rules intelligible. He does this through his explanation of the psionicist's class abilities, such as its acquisition of attack and defense modes and psionic disciplines. It's a small thing, really, but it had a profound effect on me as a younger person. For the first time, I began to feel as if I understood how psionics was supposed to work. Likewise, the notion of making psionics the purview of a unique class rather than an add-on to existing classes was a revelation to me. It made so much sense that I couldn't believe no one had thought of it before. (Someone had, of course -- Steve Marsh -- but their version of psionics never made it into OD&D as written).

"And now, the psionicist" is fairly typical of Collins's work. Rather than wholly rewrite AD&D, he instead clarifies and expands upon the rules as written, in the process making the original rules both understandable and stronger. It's a talent all the best Dragon writers had in those days, but Collins, in my opinion, made it into a high art. Moreso than any other writer, he showed me that, strangely organized and presented as it was, AD&D's rules weren't wholly arbitrary; indeed, they often made sense if you actually took the time to look at them objectively and think about the logic behind them. The proper attitude when encountering a rule that seems "broken" is to step back and consider it carefully before deciding to excise it from the game. That's an attitude that has stuck with me after all these years and one I continue to recommend to others.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "A New Game with a Familiar Name"

If the results of my poll back in October are any indication, nearly two-thirds of my regular readership entered the hobby within the first ten years of its existence, with a sizable portion of them doing so between the years 1980 and 1984. During that five year span, two different Basic Sets appeared, the first in 1981 and the second in 1983. Being a Holmes man who'd "upgraded" to AD&D sometime in 1980, I had no need for either of the Basic Sets released subsequently, but, TSR fan boy that I was, I nevertheless dutifully purchased both when they were released. That, of the two, I still have Tom Moldvay's 1981 version still sitting on my shelf today probably tells you all you need to know about my opinions of them.

But, back in issue #77 (September 1983) of Dragon, the reviser of the 1983 version, Frank Mentzer, made his case for why we needed a new Basic Set. It's a really fascinating article, both because it suggests that TSR obviously felt some need to justify the release of yet another Basic Set and because of the things that Mentzer says in his piece. It is, I think, a fascinating snapshot of the end of the Golden Age, making it well worth a read if you're at all interested in the history of this hobby and how it changed over the years.

The very first thing Mentzer mentions in his criticism of previous editions is that "you had to find someone to show you how to play." He notes that, in fact, learning from others who had figured out how to play on their own was the norm previously. That's because the game had "a devoted following, people who taught newcomers the ways of roleplaying." Mentzer is absolutely correct about this, as I've noted before. In those bygone days, you entered the hobby by initiation, aided by someone who'd done so before you. In my case, it was via a friend's teenaged brother; I, in turn, taught others how to play. That was the order of things in the late '70s and very early '80s. The 1983 edition is thus an attempt to correct this "flaw" of expecting that you'd learn to play from others.

Mentzer then notes that

the previous editions were not revisions. They were new attempts at using the same methods of organization applied to the original data plus evolution. They were not "revised," merely "reorganized." This one is different.

That's an interesting statement. I regularly point out that Holmes isn't really an introduction to AD&D at all, despite the claims inserted clumsily by TSR, but rather a new edition of OD&D that retains much of the original text of the LBBs. Moldvay is, I think, more of a revision than Mentzer gives it credit for. That said, it's also largely consonant with the LBBs, again retaining verbiage to be found in the 1974 game. The 1983, on the other hand, is even more than a revision; it's a rewriting of the game, using new language to express many of the same ideas. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but the language is very simple and clearly geared toward children, which wasn't the case with the Blue Book I first encountered in 1979. Consequently, I recoiled upon reading it and it only further solidified my notion that the D&D line was for kids.

The 1983 set's focus on self-teaching and simple language probably made sense from a marketing standpoint. Given how well the set supposedly sold, I can't really fault TSR for going in this direction. At the same time, though, there was clearly a shift happening, away from adults and teenagers as the target audience and away from initiation as the means of entering the hobby. Likewise, the adoption of a unified esthetic (all Elmore and Easley artwork) that, while attractive, seemed to narrow rather than broaden the scope of the game. In short, the 1983 Basic Set marked a definite change from what had gone before.

I'll be honest: I was somewhat reluctant to write this particular post. I've gotten a surprisingly large number of requests from readers asking me to touch on the issue of the differences in philosophy between the 1981 and 1983 Basic Sets. But I also know the fondness with which many remember the Red Box and the profound influence it had on them as younger people. So, I hope no one takes this as a knock against the '83 boxed set, even if it's not to my cup of tea. I'm sure there were guys who started with the LBBs who looked at the Holmes set with disappointment, too; that's the way these things go. At the same time, I don't think it can be denied that 1983 marks another change in the history of both D&D and the hobby.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Nine Hells (Part II)"

I was a huge fan of Part I of Ed Greenwood’s “The Nine Hells,” so it was almost inevitable that I’d be just as taken with Part II. Published in issue #76 of Dragon (August 1983), the second half of this magisterial tour of the planes of ultimate Lawful Evil is every bit the equal of the first, perhaps better. It’s longer, for one thing, and delves into the “deepest” layers of the Hells, including Nessus, the domain of Asmodeus. I probably spent even more hours poring over this article than its predecessor – and that’s saying something.

Part II explores the "bottom" four planes of Hell – Malbolge, Maladomini, Caina, and Nessus – ruled by the three most powerful archdevils: Baalzebul, Mephistopheles, and Asmodeus. As the Monster Manual tells us, Baalzebul commands both the sixth and seventh layers, a rare distinction that underscores his power. He rules the seventh directly, while the sixth is governed by his viceroy, Moloch, an archdevil in name, but one who holds power only at Baalzebul's pleasure. I've always wondered why Gary Gygax granted Baalzebul two layers when every other archdevil rules just one. Greenwood’s article doesn’t address this, though I suspect later AD&D material (perhaps Planescape?) might.

Each of the four planes receives a detailed write-up, highlighting notable locations like the capital cities of their ruling archdevils. This is a big part of what made this article and its predecessor so compelling. Greenwood gave each plane a rough geography, filled with distinct locales that made them feel like actual places where adventures could happen. Before these articles, the planes all seemed like vague, featureless expanses that were hard to visualize, let alone use in play. Now, there were cities, fortresses, lakes, places a referee could actually work with. That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. Believe me.

Each plane also got write-ups for the unique devils who dwelled there, often in service to its archdevil. These included the so-called "dukes of hell," but also the "princesses of hell," the consorts of the archdevils. Even more than the dukes, this was a new concept in AD&D conception of devils, though not an unreasonable one, given their depiction as a court of ever-scheming infernal aristocrats. It also opened up new possibilities for gaming, as the dukes, princesses, and archdevils all had their own agendas, each looking to gain advantage over the others. Characters could easily become enmeshed in such gambits, whether willingly or not.

What truly set Part II apart, however, was its six-page appendix detailing how the Nine Hells distort spells, magic items, and even class abilities. Greenwood didn’t invent this approach, but he uses it to great effect, emphasizing how alien and hostile the Hells are compared to the Prime Material. This matters, especially for high-level play, where such distinctions are needed to pose real challenges. I suspect this is why Gygax became so invested in planar adventures later in his TSR career: the planes offered a new frontier to test powerful characters and keep long-running campaigns exciting.

Taken together, these two articles transformed the Nine Hells from vague backdrops into vivid, dangerous realms ripe for adventure. Greenwood’s work gave referees the tools to turn them into meaningful, playable settings, not just abstract concepts. For high-level campaigns looking for their next stage, the Nine Hells suddenly made a lot more sense. I adored these articles in my youth and still think highly of them today. They're also reminders of just how good Dragon was in the early to mid-1980s. What a time to be a subscriber!