The Articles of Dragon: "Old Dwarvish is Still New to Scholars of Language Lore"

I promise this is the final article from issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982) that I'll talk about! However, since I'd already posted about the others devoted to languages in Dungeons & Dragons, I felt I'd be remiss not to do so for this one as well. 

"Old Dwarvish is Still New to Scholars of Language Lore" by Clyde Heaton is short in length and unusual in its approach. The piece purports to be the notes of "that illustrious pursuer of knowledge," Boru O'Bonker concerning the ancient language of Old Dwarvish. The language is no longer spoken regularly by dwarves, but exists as their ceremonial and traditional language. It survives mostly in poetry and religious rites and occasionally in old expressions and colloquialisms. The framing device of the article suggests that knowledge of the language is kept from outsiders, which is why O'Bonker is now on the run from "very short, heavily armed gentlemen" who had "a professional interest in him."

What then follows is a brief discussion of the phonology, grammar, and vocabulary of Old Dwarvish. When I say "brief," I'm not kidding. For example, here's the entirety of the vocabulary presented with the article. 

The grammar presented is similarly limited, presenting only the basic structure of Old Dwarvish sentences and the structural relationships between nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Within the context of the framing device, this is because O'Bonker is focused on unraveling the mystery of this ancient tongue. He doesn't yet have all the pieces, so his notes are, therefore, incomplete. That's a clever explanation, but one is then left with a question: Why? What's the purpose of this article, if not to provide the reader with a reasonably complete Old Dwarvish language to use in his adventures and campaign?

I have long suspected that the purpose of this article was, in fact, to show how little of a language a referee needed to create in order to make use of it in an adventure as a puzzle to be solved. In my youth, it was not at all uncommon for an important clue or piece of information in a dungeon to be hidden through the use of a cypher or an alphabet the referee made up. The players had to figure out a way to understand it and doing so was vital to moving forward. Most often, these cyphers used substitution or a similarly obvious method of hiding its information. More industrious referees would employ more elaborate methods. That's what I think Heaton is doing here, but I really can't say for certain.

Regardless of the author's actual intention, I was inspired by it to create my own partial languages for use in my Emaindor setting. I created fragments of Elvish (two varieties), Almerian (a Latin analog), Emânic, Tulikese, and more. I was no linguist, just a kid with an interest in foreign languages and a lot of time on his hands. So, I did my best to try to choose distinct sounds for each language and then a basic structure for sentences and enough vocabulary to name places and characters, as well as to, occasionally, make use of little phrases for color. I still have most of them in a binder my mother gave to me years ago, just before she sold my childhood home. They're nothing special but they were among my earliest attempts to create a coherent, "realistic" fantasy setting, so I retain an affection for them, which is why this article, despite its limitations, is one I look back on with similar affection.

Flighty Elves and Bearded Dwarven Ladies

The astute among my readers might have noticed that the Boot Hill advertisement I shared earlier today appeared in the August 1979 issue of Dragon, the same month that the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was released. To mark this occasion, issue #28 includes an article in which TSR employees who had even a small hand in the completion of the DMG offer their opinions on the finished product. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the article, some of which might make good fodder for a future post. For the moment, though, I want to draw your attention to the comments offered by Jean Wells:

The section to which Wells refers is actually entitled "Player Character Racial Tendencies" and begins at the bottom of page 15 and continues on to page 16. Here's the section about elves that she so disliked:

It's pretty innocuous stuff in my opinion. Gygax explicitly calls his descriptions "guidelines" Moreover, he points out that many other factors, such as alignment, will have an impact on a character's personality. For myself, this description of elves is perfectly fine, if somewhat different than the one that was probably already common in 1979. The same holds for his description of dwarves:

The question of whether female dwarves have beards in Dungeons & Dragons is much an ancient one, as evidenced by the last sentence of Wells's comments. In truth, I have no strong feelings about it myself, but I do find it fascinating the strong emotions, pro and con, that this rather esoteric dispute elicits in some corners of the hobby. 

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "A Special Section: Dwarves"

For issue #58 (February 1982) of Dragon, I'm going to cheat a little – well, a lot – by focusing on not just one but four different articles. I think it's justified, though, because the articles cover closely related topics and three of them were written by a single author, the inestimable Roger E. Moore, in those days when he was not yet the editor-in-chief of Dragon. "A Special Section: Dwarves" is also an important collection of articles, one that, in my opinion, marks a turning point in the history of D&D. Indeed, it's a collection that makes me wonder if perhaps the Silver Age didn't begin sooner than I have suggested in the past, for these articles were extremely influential and ushered in not just explicit follow-ups by Moore himself, but also a growing codification of not just D&D's non-human races but many other aspects of its fictional milieu.

The first of the four articles is "The Dwarven Point of View," which presented a psychology of the dwarves, explaining aspects of their thoughts process and, by extension, the society and culture that arose from them. "Bazaar of the Bizarre" featured two new (and forgettable) dwarven magic items, while "Sage Advice" answers a battery of increasingly nitpicky questions about dwarves. "The Gods of the Dwarves" is probably the most well-known of the four dwarf articles in issue #58, if only because it was officially canonized by Gary Gygax, who included it in his 1985 Unearthed Arcana expansion to AD&D. I'll also never forget "The Gods of the Dwarves" because it included an illustration depicting Berronar, the dwarven goddess of safety, truth, and home, with a beard:

I've long had a fondness for this piece of artwork, both because I relentlessly used it in my youth to bludgeon those who denied that female dwarves had beards (in contradiction of both Tolkien and Gygax – so you know it had to be true!) and to emphasize that dwarves aren't just short, stocky humans. They are, effectively, an alien race and to expect them to conform to human ways is absurd, not to mention demonstrating a severe lack of imagination.

When this quartet of articles was released, I adored them and made every effort to incorporate as much of them into my ongoing campaign as I could. Nowadays, I have much more mixed feelings about them, chiefly because they, almost certainly unintentionally, became the fount from which subsequent discussion of dwarves flowed. That is, later writers – and even TSR itself – treated Moore's ideas as normative, the result being that, as the '80s wore on, the portrayal of dwarves in AD&D became less diverse. At the time, I didn't care; indeed, I was very happy with "official" information on dwarves and all the demihuman races, because I wanted my campaign to conform to the conceptions of my betters in the hobby. In retrospect, though, I feel less happy with these articles and wish their influence had been more limited.

(The original version of this article and its comments can be found here.)

Polyhedron: Issue #27

Issue #27 of Polyhedron (January 1986) features yet another cover by Roger Raupp, this time depicting a clan of dwarves. Raupp was a very prominent artist in the pages of both Polyhedron and Dragon during the second half of the 1980s – so prominent that, for me at least, his illustrations strongly define the look of that era. I also remember Raupp's work on many of the later Avalon Hill RuneQuest books, which, as I understand it, are very well regarded among Glorantha fans. 

Leaving aside the forgettable "Notes from HQ," the issue properly kicks off with "Dominion" by Jon Pickens, which introduces a new type of spell for use by AD&D magic-users. Unlike previous collections of new spells by Pickens, this one looks not to magic items for inspiration but rather psionics. All of the dominion spells concern "controlling the victim's voluntary muscles and sensory linkages." This is not mind control but rather bodily control of another being (with the senses being considered part of the body). It's an interesting approach and ultimately, I think, a better one than AD&D's psionics system, which, in addition to being mechanically dubious, didn't really mesh with the overall feel of the game.

"The Thorinson Clan" by Skip Olsen presents five dwarves, related by blood and marriage, from his Norse mythology-inspired AD&D campaign. These are the characters Roger Raupp portrayed on the cover. They're an interesting bunch and I must confess I appreciate the fact that Olsen's campaign is multi-generational, a style of play I think is under-appreciated (and one of the reasons I think so highly of Pendragon). Almost certainly coincidentally, this issue's installment of Errol Farstad's "The Critical Hit" offers a very positive review of Pendragon, which he calls "the stuff of which legends are made." Needless to say, I agree with his assessment.

Next up is "She-Rampage" by Susan Lawson and Tom Robertson, a scenario for use with Marvel Super Heroes. As you might guess based on its title, the scenario involved She-Hulk but also a number of other female Marvel characters, like Valkyrie, Spider-Woman, Thundra, and Tigra. There's also an original character, Lucky Penny, who's based on the Polyhedron's editor, Penny Petticord. The background to the adventure is rather convoluted and involves alternate Earths where one sex dominates the others. The male-dominated Earth, Machus, has learned of the existence of our Earth and sees the existence of super-powered women as a potential threat to be eliminated. This they attempt to do by traveling to our world and then – I am not making this up – releasing doctored photos and scurrilous stories in the pages of "a girlie magazine known as Pander." Naturally, the superheroines take exception to this and it's clobberin' time. I have no words.

Michael Przytarski's "Fletcher's Corner" looks at "problem players." More specifically, he's interested in two different types of players who can cause problems for the referee. The first is the "Sierra Club Player," who's memorized all the rulebooks and uses his knowledge to overcome every obstacle the referee sets before him. The second is the "Multi-Class Player," whose experience is so wide that he tells other players the best way to play their class. In each case, Pryztarski offers some advice on how best to handle these players. Like most articles of this sort, it's hard to judge how good his advice would have been at the time, because most of what he says is now commonsense and has been for a long time. 

"Alignment Theory" by Robert B. DesJardins is yet another attempt to make sense of AD&D's alignment. Like all such attempts, it's fine to the extent that you're willing to accept its premises. DesJardins argues that "law versus chaos" is a question of politics, while "good versus evil" is a question of heart (or morality). He makes this distinction in order to fight against the supposed notion that some players believe Lawful Good is more good than Chaotic Good – in short equating "law" with "good" and "chaos" with "evil." Was this a common belief then or now? I suppose it's possible players who entered the hobby through Dungeons & Dragons might have carried with them echoes of its threefold alignment system, but, even so, how common was it? I guess I long ago tired of alignment discussion, so it's difficult for me to care much about articles like this.

This month, "Dispel Confusion" focuses solely on rules and other questions about Star Frontiers, which surprised me. Meanwhile, "Gamma Mars: The Attack" by James M. Ward offers up a dozen new mutants to be used in conjunction with the "Gamma Mars" article from last issue. Most of these mutants are mutated Earth insects, but one represents the original Martian race, whose members have been lying beneath the planet's surface in wait for the right moment to strike against human colonists to the Red Planet. I find it notable that Ward was long interested in introducing extra-terrestrial beings into his post-apocalyptic settings, whether Gamma World or Metamorphosis Alpha. I wonder why it was an idea to which he returned so often?

As you can probably tell by this post, my enthusiasm for re-reading Polyhedron is waning. I'm very close to the end of the issues I owned in my youth, so I may simply be anticipating the conclusion of this series. On the other hand, I also think there's a certain tiredness to the newszine itself. The content has never been as uniformly good as that of Dragon and it's become even more variable as it has depended more and more on submissions by RPGA members, few of which are as polished or imaginative as those to be found elsewhere. The end result is a 'zine that's sometimes a bit of a chore to read, never mind comment about intelligently. 

Ah well. I'll soldier on.

"The Last Word on Dwarven Women's Beards"

The issue of whether or not female dwarves have beards is a longstanding one in the hobby. It has its roots in Appendix A of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, which says of dwarf women that "They are in voice and appearance, and in garb if they must go on a journey, so like to the dwarf-men that the eyes and ears of other peoples cannot tell them apart." Some readers assert this statement is ambiguous, though it seems pretty clear to me.

Of course, whether or not dwarf women have beards in Middle-earth doesn't have much bearing on whether or not they do in Dungeons & Dragons – just ask Gary Gygax. In issue #41 of Dragon (September 1980), in response to a letter to the editor, Gygax said the following:

I don't claim to be an expert in Teutonic and Norse mythology, but, based on my reading, I'm hard pressed to recall a single instance of a female dwarf, bearded or otherwise. Consequently, I can't help but feel that Gygax is being disingenuous when he claims that D&D's bearded female dwarves are derived solely from mythology – and I say this as someone who's generally sympathetic to his claims elsewhere that D&D and The Lord of the Rings don't mix well. Am I missing something? Is there, in fact, a mythological basis for bearded dwarf women or Gygax simply trying to obfuscate the matter?

Random Roll: DMG, p. 59

The ability of several demihuman races to see in the dark is firmly established in Dungeons & Dragons. My first encounter with the game was through the Holmes-edited Basic Set and its rulebook calls this ability "infravision" without any explanation. The AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, though, goes to some length explaining the nature of infravision.

As explained in PLAYERS HANDBOOK, infravision is the ability to see light waves in the infrared spectrum.

To say that I have disliked this definition for decades is an understatement. While I am on record as not being opposed in principle to the mixing of science fiction and fantasy, Gygax's explanation of infravision leans a little too heavily, in my opinion, on real world science, with infelicitous consequences, as we shall see.

Gygax elaborates with the following:

Characters and various creatures with infravisual capability out to 60' (standard) are basically picking up radiation from their surroundings. Therefore, they note differences in thermal radiation, hot or cold. They do not "see" things which are the same temperature as their surroundings. Thus, a room in a dungeon might look completely blank, as walls, floor, ceiling, and possibly even some wooden furniture are all of the same temperature. Openings in the walls should show up rather plainly, as space anywhere else will, and if you are generous, you can allow different substances to radiate differently even if at the same temperature, i.e. the wood in the example above would be discernible if care was used in scanning the room infravisually.

Leaving aside the not insignificant matter of what this does to the "magic" of D&D, the conception of infravision Gygax advances here seems intended to limit its utility. If an elf's ability to see in the dark is akin to 1970s era IR goggles, it's a rather narrow ability, almost to the point of uselessness. I imagine that's the point, though. He continues:

Except where very warm or very cold objects are concerned, vision of this sort is roughly equivalent to human norm on a dark or cloudy night at best. Note also that monsters of a very cold or very warm sort (such as a human) can be tracked infravisually by their footprints. Such tracking must occur within two rounds of their passing, or the temperature difference where they had trodden will dissipate. 

The ability to track via infravision is certainly handy, though, as one might expect, Gygax places limitations on it, which given his explanation of how the ability works, is not unrealistic. Of course, what he gives with one hand, he takes with the other.

Light sources which give off heat also absolutely prevent infravision from functioning within their sphere of illumination. (Explain this as the effect of trying to see into the dark when the observer is in a brightly lot area.) It requires not less than two segments to accustom the eyes to infravision after use of normal vision. 

Again, this makes sense, given his conception of infravision, but it's a potentially serious drawback when one notes that it takes two segments to shift between normal and infravision. A lot can happen during those 12 seconds of temporary blindness.

The section ends by noting that creatures with infravision with a range of 90' or more – the sort possessed by "most monsters inhabiting underground areas" – see much more clearly than those with standard infravision. 

Such creatures can easily distinguish floor, ceiling, wall, and other areas, as well as furnishings within the area.

Talk about stacking the deck in the monsters favor!

This whole section makes me unhappy, or at least disappointed. I much prefer granting certain creatures, like dwarves, elves, and many monsters, the magical ability to see in the dark without restriction. This is more or less what's implied in OD&D and the way I've always handled infravision (a term I now reject, owing to the scientific associations Gygax foists on it here). Chainmail, I believe, grants magic-users the power to see in the dark too and it's something I've long considered giving player characters of that class as a basic ability. 

My point, ultimately, is that I think this whole section reeks of an attempt by Gygax to rein in an ability he thought too useful. Since I neither share his likely concern nor like his reframing of infravision as thermal vision, there's not much here I would use. 

The Lowly Fighter

When it comes to delving into history – any history, not just the history of RPGs – I tend to favor documents over memories, especially my own memories. Memories, after all, are tricky things, especially the memories of middle aged and older people. More times than I care to admit, I was sure I remembered something that was later proven, through documentary evidence, to be untrue or at least misconstrued. Documents don't tell the whole story, of course; divorced from context, they can be just as prone to being misconstrued as memories (and that's not even taking into account deliberately false documents). Nevertheless, I tend to think we're on more solid ground in examining history when we have physical evidence, which is why I have such respect for the work of people like Jon Peterson, whose careful examination of early RPG documents have revealed a great deal about the history of the hobby.

To that end, one of current activities is re-reading many of the RPG periodicals, both professional and amateur, I still have from the '70s and '80s. Though TSR's Dragon is quite useful in this regard, I'm finding that the Polyhedron is sometimes much more intriguing. Whereas the articles in Dragon tended to be both more polished and "theoretical," those in Polyhedron were (generally) rougher and more focused on "practical" considerations. In the process of re-reading those issues of Polyhedron I still have, I've come across a number of articles that seem to have arisen out of a referee's attempts to deal with some problem or other in his campaign.

A good example of what I'm talking about is Brian Leikam's "In Defense of the Lowly Fighter," which appears in issue #30 of Polyhedron (July 1986). Leikam was a RPGA tournament winner, as well as a member of the US Air Force, who ran a Dungeons & Dragons campaign at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri (or so says his author bio). It's also noted that he was "pleased with the convenience and playability" of the D&D (as opposed to AD&D) system. The article attempts to grapple with the fact that "no one seems to play fighters anymore" and that D&D campaigns are "overrun with 'rare' demihumans and spellcasters." To that end, Leikam proposes some solutions that have worked for him in his own D&D campaign.

I genuinely enjoy articles of this sort, both for what they tell us about the perception of supposed "problems" in the rules of Dungeons & Dragons and how individual referees dealt with them in their own campaigns. This is the kind of documentary evidence of which I want to see more, if only because it provides a useful counterpoint to the frequent cries of "I never saw that back in the day" or "We did it this way." Again, I don't want to discount memories entirely, but, speaking for myself, my own memories are so often hazy (or rose colored) that I think it's vital to buttress one's memories with additional testimony.

Leikam's assertion that fighters were often rare is, I think, right. That's certainly my recollection, particularly in AD&D, where rangers and paladins were much more commonplace, despite the supposed ability score restrictions. His comments about the prevalence of demihumans likewise comport with my experiences, though I mostly played AD&D rather than D&D. Regardless, Leikam proposes three solutions, only two of which interest me at the moment. Here's one of them:

This solution, as such, doesn't concern me so much as his claim that D&D and AD&D "are generally not compatible." I'm somewhat baffled by this statement. What does he mean by "not compatible?" In the context of demihumans, there might be some truth to it, inasmuch as D&D uses race-as-class and AD&D does not. On the other hand, nearly despite Gygax's regular assertions that the two games were completely different and never, ever, ever to be mixed, they not only were mixed but done so often by nearly everyone who played the games during this era – or so my memories tell me. It's a very peculiar thing to say and wonder what he meant by it.

The other suggestion that interests me is the following one:

This solution mentions that "demi-humans are supposed to be the minority in most worlds." I firmly agree that D&D (and AD&D) imply and sometimes outright state that this is supposed to be the case, but my memories tell me that very few people ever adhered to it. I certainly would have preferred it to be the case, but I think demihumans – dwarves and elves in particular – were simply too popular among players to make this work. In my recent OD&D campaigns, I set a strict limit of no more than a single instance of a demihuman race among the player characters, such that the PC elf was the elf in the campaign rather than being one of several. Most NPCs had never seen an elf before and, to hit that home, I was extremely stingy on including demihuman NPCs as well. Unlike Leikam, my concern had little to do with rules and more to do with tone: I prefer that most characters are human, in keeping with the pulp fantasy sensibilities I prefer.

I am deeply interested in how people actually played Dungeons & Dragons and other RPGs in the first decade of the hobby's existence, in particular the kinds of fantasy inspirations they drew upon and how those influences shaped the shared worlds they created. Equally interesting is the interplay between the "official" intent of TSR and the desires of those who picked up the game and made it their own. That's why I'm seeking out as many documents of that era as I can find. They not only make for some excellent reading, they shed light on these and related questions.

Obscenity in Lead

Fantasy Role Playing Games by J. Eric Holmes is a fascinating book. Published in 1981, it's an overview of this then-new hobby, written at least in part to clear up some popular misconceptions about RPGs and the people who play them. It's also a terrific window into the state of things in the late '70s and early very early 1980s from the point of view of someone knowledgeable about the West Coast scene and with connections to many of the movers and shakers of the Midwest region as well. 

Over the past few months, I've been returning to the book and re-reading certain sections of it, focusing on those where Holmes offers interesting or even unusual takes on those times. A good example of what I'm talking about occurs in Chapter 11. Entitled "Little Metal People," it discusses, among other topics, the use of miniatures in roleplaying games. At one point, Holmes notes that

Traditional wargame figures were all male. Minifigs did make castings of a few ladies who might appear on a battlefield – Queen Boadicea, for instance. The wives, sweethearts and camp followers of the armies of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon were not depicted in lead, however. Fantasy gaming has changed all that, since female characters are of major, or central, importance in many fantasy and science fiction stories. Also, for the first time, the game players who used the figures were often female.

The first set of female figures wasn't much to brag about. Minifigs added Amazons to the early Sword and Sorcery line and "Valka Spacewomen" to the first science fiction series. These ladies were either nude or almost so. It was several years before any of the figure companies realized that there was a market for lady adventurers and sorceresses who dressed appropriately to their role and did not look as if they were about to star in the middle of a Las Vegas nightclub chorus line.

I was, at best, an indifferent collector and user of miniature figures in the roleplaying game campaigns of my youth. Nowadays, I don't make use of them at all, though I have made good faith attempts to do so in the recent past. Consequently, I had – and indeed still have – relatively little knowledge of the history of miniature figures. What Holmes says above is not surprising to me, but, until I'd read it, I never gave it much thought. He talks more about this topic and, in doing so, discusses some intriguing bits of history.

The women in the Western, Star Trek and Barsoom figure series are all dressed appropriately. For the Barsoomian ladies this does mean near nudity, but that is true of the male figures also and entirely faithful to the stories. Ral Partha now makes a series of amazonian warriors whose femininity is obvious but whose armor and military equipment look distinctly functional. There are now appropriate figures for a princess, a lady thief or an old witch, although as yet no lady clerics, orc or dwarves. There is a sharp controversy within TSR Hobbies over whether a female dwarf wears a beard. Since Gygax insists she would, perhaps there is no hurry to produce a game-playing figure.

Intriguing, as I said, not least because the matter of female dwarven beards remains a contentious one, even among old schoolers. I sidestep the issue entirely by imagining sexless dwarves, though I nevertheless like to tweak my fellow gamers who hate the idea of bearded female dwarves by sharing this illustration from Dragon (and others like it). I find it equally intriguing that Holmes treats Gygax's opinion on the matter – which I remember his voicing on several occasions – as if it settled the matter. That, too, comports with my memory the oracular status Gary once possessed in certain quarters of the hobby at the time (though just as many, perhaps more, people would have laughed at the suggestion that Gygax's thoughts had any special status).

Holmes continues, bringing us to the section that occasioned this post's title.

This sexual revolution among wargaming figures appears to have taken place without much fanfare. Such is not the case in the hobby of the large military miniatures. I gather there had always ben an "underground" traffic in castings of the female body, but when fantasy figures began selling in the larger sizes as well as the game-playing 25 millimeters, an advertisement for a series of beautiful and sexually exciting nude figures in the British magazine Military Modeling produced several letters of protest. Protest was over the "obscenity" of the figures and their appearance in a hobby magazine that appeals to "innocent" young boys. These letters were followed, of course, by others pointing out the ludicrous nature of a charge of obscenity against the female body, long an accepted challenge for the artist and sculptor, in a hobby devoted to the accurate depiction of men and mechanisms equipped for the killing and maiming of other human beings. Meanwhile, in 25 millimeters, the ladies seem to have entered the field, in various stages of dress and undress, without serious opposition.

Some things never change! Unfortunately, I can find no evidence of the particular advertisement of which Holmes speaks. He provides insufficient detail to determine when this might have occurred or even which company's advertisement it was. If anyone has any insight into this, I'd love to know more. In any case, it's precisely these kinds of stories that Holmes shares regularly in the page of Fantasy Role Playing Games and why I find it such a remarkable book. 

Retrospective: Dwarven Glory

I wrote about the early game company Wee Warriors once before, in a retrospective about their first publication, Palace of the Vampire Queen. One assumes that Palace was sufficiently well received to justify the publication of a second. Entitled Dwarven Glory, its initial release was in 1977 and, like its predecessors, Pete and Judy Kerestan are listed as its authors. 

Also like its predecessor, Dwarven Glory calls itself a "dungeon kit." As you will see, this is an apt description. The product consists of eight hex map sections, each of which can be connected to the others in a variety of different ways (more than sixty, according to the text). This allows the referee to configure the dungeon according to his own wishes (or re-use it). Thus, Dwarven Glory is as much a set of geomorphic maps as it is an "adventure module," as the term is generally understood. 

These maps detail a semi-abandoned dwarven community that is now overrun by the Ten Orc Tribes. Their keys are comparatively brief, but not minimalist. Here's a typical example:

This room contains 4 locked cabinets (each with 6 bottles of Dwarven Ripple Wine), 18 empty bottles (on the floor), and a long table with 8 plain cups (in the corner).

Many entries contain even less detail. However, a few are more elaborate, containing not only specific information but the germs of side adventures.

The door is trapped with a bank of crossbows set to fire 5 hexes across towards Room #4. A Minotaur (HP 21; AC 6) carries a +2 hand axe and 4,000 SP. The room contains a roasting rack with several Human skeletons and 2 bedding areas. There are 4 gems: one is worth 1,000 GP, one is broken with no value, one is a Gem of Giant Strength, and one is a Gem of Sexual Change. The Minotaur puts the party under a geas to find and return his son unharmed. Failure to perform this task invokes a curse upon the party members (loss of 1 intelligence pt per day, unless the geas is resumed; the effects are not reversible). If the geas is fulfilled, the Minotaur will obtain Gauntlets of Ogre Power for each party member.

Judged by the standards of later times, Dwarven Glory seems quite primitive, being little more than a collection of simple maps and sparse keys. That's undeniably true but it's also reductive. To explain what I mean, allow me a lengthy digression.

By the time I had entered the hobby in earnest, in early 1980, Wee Warriors was no longer producing support materials for Dungeons & Dragons. I had never even heard of the company or its products, let alone seen them. That changed one summer – I wish I could nail it down to a specific date, but it was certainly before 1984 – when I attended a "games day" at a local library. 

These were regular events where the library opened up its meeting rooms for six or eight hours to players of RPGs. Referees would claim a table and set up, while players milled about, inquiring as to what games the referees were planning to run. Once enough players joined a table, the referee would begin. 

One of the great things about these events was that they introduced me to games I otherwise wouldn't have known about or had the opportunity to play. This is where I became better acquainted with RuneQuest and The Morrow Project, for example, and it was also where I first set eyes on Dwarven Glory. A referee had set up in the boardroom, a room adjoining the main play area, in which there was a long table and lots of chairs. Somewhere between ten and fifteen players grabbed chairs on the assumption that, given the magnificence of the venue, the adventure scenario would must be just as grand. We weren't mistaken.

Even after four decades, I remember the scenario quite vividly. We had a lot of fun and Dwarven Glory most certainly played a large part in that – not the only part, of course, since, like so many good times I've had while roleplaying, the fun was the result of the inexplicable alchemy of referee, players, source material, and randomness. Nevertheless, the experience left me with fond memories of the little yellow booklet the referee kept hidden behind his screen. I assumed that it had to be one heck of an adventure, because we all enjoyed ourselves so much, which is just about the highest praise I can offer an RPG product of any kind.

Over the years, I would occasionally try to find a copy of Dwarven Glory, but to no avail. Like Metamorphosis Alpha, this booklet became a white whale for me, albeit a minor one. Indeed, I'd pretty much forgotten about until very recently, when I discovered that Precis Intermedia had acquired the rights to the entire Wee Warriors catalog, including Dwarven Glory. Having now had the chance to read the dungeon kit for myself, I was transported back to my youth, remembering weird little details from it, like the underground tavern run by a half-orc and the dwarven police station (yes, really!). I cannot claim that Dwarven Glory is, in itself, a forgotten classic, but it's both an important artifact of the early days of our hobby and a source of personal satisfaction. That's reason enough to celebrate it.

The Articles of Dragon: "A Special Section: Dwarves"

For issue #58 (February 1982) of Dragon, I'm going to cheat a little -- well, a lot -- by focusing on not just one but four different articles. I think it's justified, though, because the articles cover closely related topics and three of them were written by a single author, the inestimable Roger E. Moore, in those days not yet the editor-in-chief of Dragon. "A Special Section: Dwarves" is also an important collection of articles, one that, in my opinion, marks a turning point in the history of D&D. Indeed, it's a collection that makes me wonder if perhaps the Silver Age didn't begin sooner than I have suggested in the past, for these articles were extremely influential and ushered in not just explicit follow-ups by Moore himself, but also a growing codification of not just D&D's non-human races but many other aspects of its fictional milieu.

The first of the four articles is "The Dwarven Point of View," which presented a psychology of the dwarves, explaining aspects of their thoughts process and, by extension, the society and culture that arose from them. "Bazaar of the Bizarre" featured two new (and forgettable) dwarven magic items, while "Sage Advice" answers a battery of increasingly nitpicky questions about dwarves. "The Gods of the Dwarves" is probably the most well-known of the four dwarf articles in issue #58, if only because it was officially canonized by Gary Gygax, who included it in his 1985 Unearthed Arcana expansion to AD&D. I'll also never forget "The Gods of the Dwarves" because it included an illustration depicting Berronar, the dwarven goddess of safety, truth, and home, with a beard:

I've long had a fondness for this piece of artwork, both because I relentlessly used it to bludgeon those who denied that female dwarves had beards (in contravention of both Tolkien and Gygax -- so you know it had to be true!) and to emphasize that dwarves weren't just short, stocky humans. They were, effectively, an alien race and to expect them to conform to human ways was absurd, not to mention demonstrating a severe lack of imagination.

When this quartet of articles was released, I adored them and made every effort to incorporate as much of them into my ongoing campaign as I could. Nowadays, I have much more mixed feelings about them, chiefly because they, almost certainly unintentionally, became the fount from which subsequent discussion of dwarves flowed. That is, later writers -- and even TSR itself -- treated Moore's ideas as normative, the result being that, as the '80s wore on, the portrayal of dwarves in D&D became less diverse. At the time, I didn't care; indeed, I was very happy with "official" information on dwarves and all the demihuman races, because I wanted my campaign to conform to the conceptions of my betters in the hobby. In retrospect, though, I feel less happy with these articles and wish their influence had been more limited.

Thorin Oakenshield

Here's our first look at Thorin from Peter Jackson's upcoming The Hobbit.

So much for the theory that the King Under the Mountain would be an archetypal Nordic-style dwarf.

Balin and Dwalin

This image was released yesterday, but I was on my Friday sabbatical -- sorry about the lack of an "Open Friday" post as I was busy -- and I didn't see it until today.

These guys aren't too bad, though, again, Dwalin looks to have a very short beard, unless I'm just not seeing something right. That leaves just Thorin to reveal and let's be honest: he's the only dwarf whose appearance means that much in the end. I hope he looks more like Balin and Dwalin than like Fili and Kili.

Dwarven Variation

Here are a few still from the 1977 Rankin/Bass cartoon adaptation of The Hobbit, which illustrate the way some of the dwarves were portrayed.

Fili and Kili

Nori and Ori

Dori and Nori

Oin and Gloin

I am not a booster of this version of The Hobbit, which has many, many flaws, both as an adaptation and as a work in its own right. However, it's interesting to see how the animators dealt with the question of how to differentiate the dwarves visually from one another. I'm not sure they succeeded as well as they ought to have, but I think they did well enough, especially given how little Tolkien himself differentiated between many of them. Of particular note are Fili and Kili at the top of this post, who, I think, nicely convey being younger than their companions while still being recognizably dwarvish. (I also note that, as in the book, they are both blond and have long noses)

Uh ... no

This photo is supposed to depict Fili and Kili from The Hobbit. I say "supposed to" for the obvious reason that, last time I checked, Fili and Kili were dwarves.

I don't know what these guys are, but they're certainly not dwarves.

More Dwarves

Here's a still featuring brothers Óin and Glóin (father of Gimli) from the upcoming The Hobbit films.

Feel free to comment away about your impressions of the costuming, makeup, etc. However, after the nonsense accompanying my last post about The Hobbit movies, I'm going to ruthlessly delete any comments that deride or impute motives to others who have a differing opinion on the matter. You have been warned.

Meet Dori, Nori, and Ori

Here's our first look at three of the Dwarves from the upcoming film version of The Hobbit:

I don't have my copy of the book handy, so I'm not able to comment on how closely these guys match up to whatever description Tolkien provides, if any. My gut reaction, though, is a positive one. These three look a lot more "dwarf-y" to me than Gimli did in The Lord of the Rings and, provided there are no more dwarf-tossing jokes in The Hobbit, go some way toward redressing the wrong done to Durin's folk previously. Mind you, I've never had much of a problem with the way Middle-earth looked in Jackson's movies; it was their tone that annoyed me at times. So, I see this photo as a definite positive, but the proof, as always, will be in the script.

Kobolds

Over at Blood of Prokopius, Fr Dave has been producing an excellent series of posts about amalgamating "the two Blue Books" -- Holmes's Basic Set and Cook's Expert Rules. Recently, he pointed out a passage in Holmes whose implications never really occurred to me till now. Holmes's description of kobolds notes that they are "evil dwarf-like creatures." For some reason, I'd always taken this simply to mean that kobolds were short in stature rather than, literally, much like dwarves in appearance.

Thinking on it, I rather like the idea, both because it presents a different take on kobolds than either the little dog men of the Monster Manual or the little dragon men of later editions and because it ties in nicely with the knockers of the Dwimmermount setting, about which I've been thinking about lately. It's funny that I'd read that passage in the Blue Book more times than I can count and it was only now, after Fr Dave pointed out an obvious conclusion, that I had an "aha!" moment about these puniest of dungeon monsters.

Funny how that can happen.

Tolkien's Influence in Pictures

If the Internet is to be believed, I am not only the guy who hates thieves but also the guy who believes J.R.R. Tolkien exercised no influence over the conception and development of Dungeons & Dragons. That's why I've decided to commemorate the Professor's 119th birthday by looking briefly at the ways that Tolkien's conceptions have forever altered our notions of fantasy, not just within the narrow confines of the hobby but in the world outside it. And even though I continue to hold that, thematically, Tolkien's world has very little in common with D&D, there's also no question in my mind that D&D as it exists today would have been impossible without the prior existence of Middle-earth.

Rather than blather on at length about this topic, I thought a few pictures might make my point far better than anything I could write here.

Before The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, these fine fellows were probably the most popular conception of dwarves in a fantasy context. Heck, before Tolkien, the plural "dwarves" wasn't generally used in English, as witnessed by title Disney chose for his film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Opera aficionados might well have been familiar with Nordic dwarves through Wagner but they're nearly all portrayed as evil, grasping semi-monsters rather than serious and honorable (if still avaricious) craftsmen that D&D and wider fantasy have adopted as their own.

Even more dramatic a shift is clear when you look at popular conceptions of elves. Before Tolkien, elves were generally portrayed as diminutive and vaguely comical (or, more rarely, sinister). The tall, noble firstborn of the world have their roots in Norse legend, but, until Tolkien, that conception was definitely a minority one. Now, outside of Santa's workshop, it's nearly impossible to find an "elf" who doesn't look like one of Legolas's kin.

And, of course, these fellows didn't exist at all until Tolkien. They -- and their knock-offs -- are now everywhere.

Certainly, there were lots of "goblins" lurking in the popular imagination before Tolkien, but "orcs" did not. Likewise, the notion of their being a vast horde forged in service to a Dark Lord is nowadays a staple of fantasy literature (and gaming), but it's of relatively recent vintage and, once more, Tolkien is perhaps its most influential source.

I could go on and on illustrating how many fantasy tropes have their origins in Middle-earth, but I hope my point is made simply by selecting four relatively straightforward examples. It might be an exaggeration to say that J.R.R. Tolkien singlehandedly invented modern fantasy, but he is certainly one of its main progenitors, particularly when it comes to the "furniture" of the genre. Tolkien's peoples and creatures have had a profound impact on the imaginations of nearly everyone who's worked in fantasy since the 1960s. It's safe to say that, without him, fantasy would have been a very different thing than what it became. In that sense, we're all in Tolkien's debt and ought to lift a glass in his honor on this day of his birth.

Father and Son

A little artistic sneak peak of the Dwimmermount-related dwarf PDF I'm working on, courtesy of Steve Zieser.

OD&D Psionic Limitations

In Eldritch Wizardry, not every character may possess psionic ability. It's started early on that "All player-characters with psionic ability ... must be of human origin." Interestingly, in the AD&D Players Handbook, it's stated that dwarves and halflings may "possibly" have psionics. In both cases, though, elves are seemingly excluded from being psionic (or "psychic," as Supplement III calls characters with psionic ability). Personally, I like the limitation of psionics to only certain races, although I'd probably vary which races can be psychic from campaign to campaign.

It's also noted (in bold text, no less) that

Monks & Druids do not have psychic potential, they are therefore prohibited from becoming psychics.

Again, I can see limiting psionics to certain classes but a universal prohibition does raise questions. For example, of all the classes available in OD&D, the monk strikes me as the one that's most compatible with the notion of psionics. Indeed, many of the class's abilities strike me as conceivably psionic in nature. So why the prohibition? And why are druids unable to be psionic while clerics can? It's an oddly specific ruling. No mention is made of paladins (who, presumably, count as fighting men) or assassins, nor of classes from The Strategic Review, even though rangers at least are referenced elsewhere in Eldritch Wizardry.

Needless to say, OD&D psionics are a lot more "quirky" than even their AD&D counterparts, which is saying something. Right now, I'm trying to figure out if there's any discernible logic behind these quirks or if they're just things that are. Regardless, I'm having a lot of fun plowing through this stuff.