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.

Retrospective: Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures

I'm a sucker for historical fantasy – or even just fantasy that's heavily inspired by a particular historical period, society, or culture. That's one of the reasons I so eagerly awaited the release of Oriental Adventures in 1985: I saw it as an opportunity for Dungeons & Dragons (or AD&D) to finally present monks and ninjas and samurai within a more suitable context than the riotous goulash in which the game has existed since its inception. In my experience, most (A)D&D players never cared about this as much as I did, even back in the day, but such concerns grew increasingly important to me, especially during my teen years.

Consequently, when TSR announced that it'd be giving the Oriental Adventures treatment to the myths, legends, and folklore of the Middle East, I was pretty excited. Though Bulfinch's Mythology didn't include a section on these tales, I was nevertheless quite familiar with the stories of A Thousand and One Nights, not to mention the charming films featuring Sinbad the Sailor I'd seen as a child. And course D&D had long included monsters like the djinn, efreet, ghoul, and roc, in addition to the flying carpet and ring of wishes, all of which have their origin in Middle Eastern mythology.

Entitled Al-Qadim: Arabian Adventures, this 158-page softcover was written by Jeff Grubb with the assistance of Andria Hayday. Grubb was a powerhouse designer at TSR at this time, having previously created Marvel Super Heroes, shepherded the Forgotten Realms Campaign Set to publication, and conceived Spelljammer, among many other influential projects. He brings the same imagination and enthusiasm for Al-Qadim that he did for its predecessors, resulting in a book of which I remain very fond, despite certain shortcomings. 

In the book's introduction, Grubb acknowledges that Arabian Adventures takes inspirations from three different versions of Arabia. The first is the Arabia of history, whose people, culture, and history spread from the Atlantic Ocean to India as a result of the Islamic conquests starting in the 7th century. The second is the Arabia of myth and legend. Finally, there is the Arabia of Hollywood, like the aforementioned Sinbad movies. Of the three, the second and third are the most important to Al-Qadim, which is not intended to be historically or culturally accurate but is, echoing the foreword to OD&D, "strictly fantasy."

Like Oriental Adventures before it, Arabian Adventures is not a stand-alone game but rather a supplement to AD&D, then in its second edition. Its purpose is to provide new and alternative rules for use with 2e rather than being complete in itself. Thus, for example, we get a variety of new character kits, as well as new equipment, nonweapon proficiencies, and spells. All of these are intended to differentiate the inhabitants of Zakhara, the Land of Fate, from those coming from more Western European-inspired locales, just as OA had done for the peoples of Kara-Tur. Al-Qadim is decidedly not generic in its presentation, but instead places everything within a very specific cultural and social context derived from the three sources Grubb mentioned in his introduction.

By and large, the end result is excellent, better in some ways than Oriental Adventures in my opinion. The character kits – a concept that didn't exist at the time OA was published – do a very good job of tailoring AD&D's existing character classes for an Arabian-inspired setting. While most of them are interesting and flavorful, the ones I most liked were those that covered roles uncommon or unknown in other settings, like the barber, beggar-thief, and merchant-rogue. Likewise, the new spells and proficiencies went a long way toward making a Zakharan character feel distinct from his counterparts in other realms.

Where Al-Qadim falls down is its being branded with and tied to the Forgotten Realms campaign setting. This is not the fault of Grubb or Hayday, nor does it strongly weaken the quality of their work. In the early 1990s, TSR was very keen on tying all of its AD&D products to one or more of its existing settings. Since the Realms were TSR's "go-to" AD&D setting, the company plugged almost everything into it, including Zakhara (just as had previously been done with Kara-Tur). It's a pity, because I think Zakhara would have been much more interesting had it simply been its own thing, divorced from the rest of TSR's AD&D settings of the time.

One way that this impacts Arabian Adventures in a negative way is that we don't get any unique demihuman or nonhuman playable races. All the standard AD&D races, like dwarves, elves, and halflings, are present in Zakhara and, aside from the usual game mechanics associated with them (ability bonuses, special abilities, etc.), they're really little different from Zakharan humans, sharing the same customs, beliefs, and so on. There's nothing strictly wrong with this approach, but Oriental Adventures gave us several new nonhuman races to play and I think doing so went a long way toward making Kara-Tur feel distinct. I would have liked to have seen the same for Al-Qadim.

The other "flaw" in Al-Qadim is that it's pretty clearly meant to be an alternate Players Handbook. Unlike Oriental Adventures, there's not much in the way of referee material included in this book. There are no new monsters or magic items, for example, and while both those omissions would eventually be dealt with in follow-up products – several, in fact! – their lack in this book was something I felt pretty keenly at the time. I would have preferred something a bit more expansive in its content, but, as I said at the beginning of this post, Arabian Adventures isn't a stand-alone product and, given TSR's approach to publishing AD&D at the time, there was probably little to no chance it would have included such material when it could more profitably be sold in later releases.

All that said, I really like Al-Qadim and regret that, like so many other AD&D products with which TSR flooded the market in the '90s, I never got the chance to make much use of it. One of my friends was a big fan of the line and purchased a lot of the later material, including the Land of Fate boxed set. From what I could tell, all of the setting's support material was of a very high quality – imaginative and fun, with plenty of great ideas to aid the Dungeon Master in refereeing his very own version of A Thousand and One Nights. It's one Second Edition's better supplements and deserves more love than it generally gets.

Retrospective: Planescape Campaign Setting

When I first acquired the AD&D Players Handbook – this was sometime in early 1980 – one of my favorite sections was Apprendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence. Taking up only a couple of pages, this appendix was the first time I'd ever encountered Gary Gygax's bizarre, mysterious, and wonderfully baroque ideas about the multiverse of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. What made Gygax's vision so weird compelling was its obsessive orderliness, which didn't simply tie the Outer Planes to each of the game's nine alignments, but to every conceivable shade in between. That's why, for example, the Seven Heavens are described as being "of absolute lawful good," while the planes of Elysium are "of neutral good lawfuls." 

Objectively, this is bonkers stuff, but I adored it and spent a lot of time thinking about the Outer (and other) Planes, aided no doubt by my fascination with the demons and devils of the Monster Manual. Despite Gygax's precise distinctions between the alignments of the Planes, AD&D didn't have a lot to say about them for a long time, aside from the occasional article in Dragon, like the ones about the Astral Plane (by Roger E. Moore) and the Nine Hells (by Ed Greenwood). And, of course, we later got Gygax's own developed thoughts about the Inner Planes, which were every bit as eccentric and persnickety as what he wrote in Appendix IV of the PHB all those years ago.

What I always wanted was a better sense of the Planes as a place and, more than that, as an adventuring locale. What sorts of adventures could AD&D characters have among the Planes? What made the Outer Planes different from the Prime Material Plane and how would this impact the kinds of adventures to be had there? The better Dragon articles, like those of Greenwood, did this well, or at least better than did Gygax, whose own ideas, while fascinating, remained largely in the realm of the theoretical. I wanted something more "down to earth," if you'll forgive the phrase. Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes was a good first step in that direction, but I wanted more.

As it turned out, I'd have to wait until 1994 to get that, in the form of the Planescape Campaign Setting – and it was not at all what I had expected. As imagined by David "Zeb" Cook and brought to visual life by Tony DiTerlizzi, the Outer Planes were indeed weird, though quite different from how they'd been previously portrayed. Instead of being presented as primarily the dwelling places of gods and demons, the Planes were instead a battleground between various factions of "philosophers with clubs," each of which hopes to remake reality according to their own idiosyncratic perspective. These factions, each associated (in some cases loosely) with an alignment or Outer Plane, were the driving force behind Cook's vision for Planescape. More than that, they provided an easy buy-in for player characters looking to involve themselves in the cosmic struggles of the setting.

"The setting." That's important. One of the clever things Cook did with Planescape was that he made the Planes a setting. They weren't just a place you could visit for a brief time; they were a place you could stay. Further, they were a place where even novice characters could stay, not merely high-level ones with access to potent magic. Further still, they were a place with its own native inhabitants and players could easily take up the role of one of them. Planescape gave AD&D's Planes a life of their own, divorced from the Prime Material Plane where most campaigns were set. Planescape made it possible to play entire campaigns where characters never once set foot on the World of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or any other "normal" campaign world. 

This was a bold approach and not at all what I or, I imagine, most AD&D players at the time were expecting. Not everyone warmed to Planescape's vision of the Planes. Indeed, I recall quite a few old hands who scoffed at it as taking too many cues from White Wolf's World of Darkness RPGs, which were very popular at the time. I can certainly appreciate the shock and surprise they probably felt upon reading Planescape and seeing DiTerlizzi's Dr Seuss-like depictions of the denizens of the Planes. This was not Gygax's Planes; it wasn't even Grubb's. It was something quite unique, filled with the strange, the odd, and the occasionally silly, and suffused with a punkish vibe that came through most strongly in its use of Planar Cant drawn from the criminal slang of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Many people, even fans of the setting, loathed the Cant, but there's no denying that it helped give Planescape a distinct flavor of its own.

Me, I enjoyed Planescape. It was not at all what I expected, but I enjoyed it for what it was: a strange, whimsical, wondrous take on world-hopping fantasy, with "worlds" in this case being other Planes of Existence, each with its own individual rules and style. And then there's Sigil, the City of Doors, located at the very center of the multiverse – if a series of infinite planes can truly be said to have a center. Home to the various planar factions and serving as a crossroads of the Planes, Sigil could serve as the basis for an entire campaign in itself, but it was also the perfect "home base" for planar characters whose adventures took them across the realms of the Great Wheel and beyond. Like Planescape itself, I really enjoyed Sigil and had a lot of fun with it.

I have lots of thoughts I could share about Planescape, both positive and negative, but my overall feeling for it is one of affection. I first made use of the setting as an adjunct to an ongoing Forgotten Realms campaign I ran in the mid-1990s. Later, I ran a "native" campaign among the Planes in the early days of Third Edition. Both were very well received by my players. Indeed, we still occasionally talk about some of the adventures they had in the setting. That's my usual measure of whether a gaming product succeeds – did I have fun with it? – and by that standard, Planescape is one of the greats.  

Polyhedron: Issue #30

With issue #30 of Polyhedron (July 1986), we reach the final issue I ever owned or read. My subscription ended that summer and, with my final year of high school approaching, I was so preoccupied with other matters that I elected not to continue reading. To be fair, I let my subscription to Dragon lapse around the same time, but I'd still pick up stray copies of the magazine to keep abreast of the latest news about D&D and other RPGs. Consequently, this will be last post in which I do a recap of Polyhedron's contents. I'll do a summation of my feelings about the RPGA newszine next week before moving on to a new regular feature the following week.

As has often been the case, this month's cover is drawn by Roger Raupp. It depicts the six characters from Christopher S. Jones's "Nienna & Friends," the first installment in "The New Rogues Gallery," which is "a continuing feature ... through which members may share their most interesting characters and NPCs." In truth, this is just an outgrowth of the "Encounters" column that began all the way back in issue #8, which had already morphed into something akin to this. In any case, "Nienna & Friends" presents write-ups (including AD&D stats) for the half-Drow fighter/magic-user Nienna, her human cleric mother, Rhodara Larith, and their protector, the Grey Elf magic-user Zered Camaron. Zered's son, Elerion, along with Nienna's evil Drow father, Tray-Dor, and his drider companion, Day-Ron, complete the group. In general, I like articles like this, if only because they give me some sense of what happens in other people's campaigns. I know "let me tell you about my character" is supposed to be cringeworthy, but I genuinely do enjoy this sort of thing (and occasionally indulge in it myself).

"In Search of the 12th Level Mage" by Roger E. Moore is a good article on the much-vexed question of demographics in Dungeons & Dragons. Moore takes a look at the population information provided in the revised World of Greyhawk boxed set and plugs it into the information found in the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide regarding the makeup of NPC adventuring parties to arrive at a possible answer. His conclusion is that high level characters of any class are quite rare, especially so for magic-users, who number only about 200 out of every 1000 people (who are themselves only one-tenth of every 10,000 people). Of those 200, only 1 is 8th-level, meaning that the mage of the title would be a special NPC created and placed by the referee. Of course, the question of how many NPCs have classes/levels is itself an interesting one without a definitive answer. Even so, speculations like this are fun and an important part of worldbuilding in my opinion.

Brian Leikam's "In Defense of the Lowly Fighter" is, as its title suggests, a look at the fighter class in Dungeons & Dragons and how to make it more appealing to players. I wrote a post about this article three and a half years ago, so I won't say much more here. However, I largely agree with Leikam that fighters should be more common and better appreciated in D&D, especially nowadays, where the human fighter has more or less become synonymous with "boring." 

"Ravager" is the first part of an AD&D adventure by Jeff Grubb. Though it doesn't mention it anywhere, I assume this was a RPGA tournament scenario at some point, since most of the adventures that appear in Polyhedron began life that way. Its premise is that a bandit-king, the eponymous Ravager, has arisen and, thanks to ancient magic, has made himself effectively immortal. The goal of the characters is to raid a tomb in the Grey Desert that might contain information on how to reverse this magic and render the Ravager mortal again. The tomb is small and filled with traps, tricks, and puzzles, in addition to monsters. I expect it would be a challenge to navigate it successfully. Included with the adventure are six pregenerated PCs whose names could well be Asterix characters: Necromantix, Logistix, Goldbrix, etc.

"The Treasure Chest" returns in limited form, offering just back issues of Polyhedron and four RPGA adventures written by Frank Mentzer, like To the Aid of Falx. There's also a similarly abbreviated "Fletcher's Corner" by Michael Przytarski, in which he muses about crossbreeds among the various D&D races, another much-vexed topic in gaming circles. Przytarski offers no new insights or answers here. Slightly more useful is Jeffrey A, Martin's "Beware the New Golems," which offers up four new golem types: copper, oak, brass, and shadow. The last one is notable, because it's a golem that can only be made by illusionists, something you don't see very often in AD&D, where the illusionist was, in my opinion, and underused and under-appreciated class.

Preston Shah's "Little Miss Sure Shot" was unexpected. It's not just a Boot Hill article, but a history lesson as well, providing historical details and game information on using Annie Oakley in your games. I like articles of this sort, but then I'm also a fan of historical gaming, so I'm probably not a good gauge of how well received articles like this would have been received. "New and Old" by James M. Ward is a one-page preview of some aspects of the upcoming new (third) edition of Gamma World. He also reiterates the oft-repeated promise that TSR planned to do a new edition of Metamorphosis Alpha to tie into it as well. That didn't happen, of course, but I don't doubt that it was planned. 

"Dispel Confusion" is reduced to one page and tackles only AD&D questions, nearly all of which are highly technical in nature. With hindsight, this is one of those aspects of the TSR era of D&D that seems baffling. At the time, though, a fair number of gamers, myself included, really did care about "official" answers to rules questions. Finally, there's Errol Farstad's review of Timemaster, which he thought had "potential to be very enjoyable," even though it still had a few "rough spots." That's a fair assessment, I think.

And that's all folks – the end of my re-reads of Polyhedron. Next week, as I stated at the beginning of this post, I'll share some final thoughts about the more than 20 issues I read during my time as a subscriber. There's frankly a lot to say on the subject and I think it's deserving of its own post.

The Flammarion Engraving

In the foreword to the Lorebook of the Void, one of the two volumes included in the original Spelljammer boxed set, Jeff Grubb talks about a bit about its creative origins. One paragraph of that foreword has long stuck with me.

When I first read this, I thought it was very cool, because, even at the time, I thought D&D could do with a little more genuinely medieval influence on its fantasy. Even if, in the end, the cosmos presented by Spelljammer bore only the most superficial resemblance to the conceptions of medieval thinkers, it was still (in my youthful eyes anyway) a step in the right direction. 

I spent some time in the early '90s trying to find these "medieval woodcuts" to no avail. This was before Internet search engines were very good, so I wasn't completely surprised that I might not find a good example of what he might have been referring to. However, some years later I did come across one image that looked like it might have been the kind of thing Grubb had seen.

This is the so-called "Flammarion engraving," which first appeared in the 1888 book, L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire, by Camille Flammarion. Apparently, its artist is unknown, but it became very popular in the 1960s as an illustration of psychedelic experiences, the opening of the human mind to new realities. Regardless of its original intent, it's a very striking and evocative image, so I can understand why it is that Grubb might have been inspired by it, if indeed this is the "medieval woodcut" that David Cook showed him all those years ago.

Looking around online, I discovered a blog post by Grubb from more than a decade ago in which he talks a bit about the creation of Spelljammer. It's a very interesting post, filled with plenty of details I didn't know. Among those details is Grubb's admission that, yes, the above image was indeed the one that inspired him, though he connects it to Daniel Boorstin's 1983 book, The Discoverers, rather than Flammarion. I'm glad to know that my guess was correct. Anyway, read the whole blog post if you'd like to know more about the prehistory of Spelljammer.

Retrospective: Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space

Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space is a guilty pleasure of mine. Written and conceived by Jeff Grubb, this overstuffed boxed set was first released in 1989, just as I was transferring between two colleges. For a lot of reasons, this was a very tumultuous time in my life and, as a result, my memories of it are very vivid, even thirty-five years later – memories that include purchasing Spelljammer from a Waldenbooks in a suburban mall and then poring over its contents for some time afterwards.

As its subtitle suggests, Spelljammer took AD&D 2e into "space," though not in the traditional scientific (or even science fictional) sense of the word. Rather, Grubb took inspiration from ancient and medieval conceptions of the cosmos, in which the stars and planets are embedded within celestial spheres made of ether. Rather than multiple nested spheres containing all the celestial bodies of a single solar system, as the ancients conceived, Grubb imagined each sphere as encompassing an entire solar system or, more to the point, an entire campaign setting, with all the spheres floating within a "sea" of flammable material called phlogiston.

Through the use of flying vessels equipped with magical "helms," it was possible for the inhabitants of worlds within one sphere to journey to worlds within another. This was the high concept of Spelljammer: the ability to travel between TSR's various campaign settings by means of magical "space" ships. It's a very clever conceit, one reminiscent not just of ancient cosmology but also of Jack Vance's Rhialto the Marvelous. In addition to facilitating transit between existing settings, Spelljammer also opened up the development of a "bridge" setting between them, namely, the larger cosmos of races, organizations, and even worlds that make regular use of space travel. 

In some respects, Spelljammer is the forerunner of both Ravenloft: Realm of Terror (1990) and Planescape (1994), two other TSR boxed campaign settings whose conceptual frameworks allowed characters from Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, Krynn, and elsewhere to adventure side by side while also exploring entirely new locales created to flesh out the bridge setting. In the case of Spelljammer, that bridge setting includes a mix of the good, the bad, and the downright weird. There's the pompous Elven Navy attempting to keep the peace, xenophobic beholders at war with themselves and everyone else, mysterious mind flayers with their nautilus ships, the spider-like neogi, and mercantile arcane, just to name a few. As presented in Spelljammer, the cosmos was positively filled with all manner of space-faring peoples – and an equally large number of space-based locales and mysteries.

Chief among these mysteries is the titular Spelljammer, an ancient – and gigantic – manta ray-shaped space vessel with an equally gigantic citadel on its back. The origins and true nature of the Spelljammer are unknown, making it the subject of many legends. It's also the destination of many a spacefaring adventurer, as the citadel on its back is reputed to hold untold magic and wealth for those bold enough to venture within. The Spelljammer is thus equal parts the Flying Dutchman of space and an old school megadungeon, which is itself a pretty good high concept.  

Of course, Spelljammer was replete with high concepts – and that's part of the problem. In an effort to be expansive and easy to use to use with any existing AD&D campaign setting, Spelljammer is something of a curate's egg. I suspect that this was due less to Jeff Grubb's own preferences and more to directives from TSR regarding the boxed set's place within their larger publishing scheme. This prevents the bridge setting from having a strong flavor of its own, which is too bad, because it contains a lot of elements that I wish had been better (or differently) developed. Instead, the whole thing has a kind of underdone quality that fails to do full justice something I still consider to be a great idea to this day.

Spelljammer straddles the line between the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age of Dungeons & Dragons, which, I think, explains a lot. Like the products of the Silver Age, Spelljammer is an exemplar of the era's "fantastic realism," itself a metastasis of Gygaxian Naturalism. At the same time, Spelljammer heralds the start of AD&D's "boxed set era," when TSR cranked out new boxed campaign settings (and expansions thereof) almost on a monthly basis – a seemingly never-ending parade of good ideas not given sufficient time to germinate. There's reason why so many gamers of a certain age have such affection for this period of AD&D's development. For all of the flaws in their output, almost all of these boxed sets contained good, imaginative ideas that inspired a lot of us, Spelljammer included.  

Retrospective: The Book of Wondrous Inventions

I have a complicated relationship with humor in roleplaying games. I unreservedly celebrate games like Paranoia and Toon that are explicitly humorous in tone and content, having had a lot of fun with them in the past. Likewise, I know very well that even the most "serious" RPG campaigns are likely to include moments of unexpected levity and goofiness and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. After all, even Shakespeare included moments of comic relief in his most harrowing tragedies.

At the same time, I wince at most puns and have a particular dislike of forced attempts humor in roleplaying games. Over the years, I've seen enough well-meaning but ultimately disastrous attempts to "lighten the mood" that my natural inclination is to be suspicious of humor in RPGs. That's not to say I hate it unreservedly, only that I recognize how easy it is for this sort of thing to go badly wrong.

With all that in mind, I hope I can be forgiven for having very mixed feelings about The Book of Wondrous Inventions. Compiled by Bruce Heard from nearly fifty contributions by a wide variety of authors (more on that in a bit) and published in 1987, The Book of Wondrous Inventions is clearly intended to be a companion volume to The Book of Marvelous Magic, right down to its title. But whereas the content of The Book of Marvelous Magic was largely serious in tone – or at least no less serious than the standard lists of (A)D&D magic items – this new book was intentionally written with humor in mind. In his introduction, Bruce Heard writes the following:

These inventions should be viewed with humor. They provide fun and an uncommon change of pace whenever they appear in the game.

There's nothing inherently wrong with this approach, especially if one is sparing in their use within a given campaign. Almost since its inception, D&D has included its fair share of magic items that could well be viewed as silly. The apparatus of Kwalish, anyone? The difference here, I think, is that previous goofy magic items were spice, those included here are the main course – or, at least, they give the impression of being so, because there are so many of them under a single cover. That's not really their fault, but I can't deny that it bugged me a bit in the past and still bugs me a bit even today.

The magic items detailed in this book are all unique and highly idiosyncratic, the products of singular individuals intent on creating something truly unusual. There's Aldryk's Fire Quencher (a magical water sprinkler), Brandon's Bard-in-a-Box (a portable music system), Kruze's Magnificent Missile (self-explanatory), Volospin's Dragonfly of Doom (a magical attack helicopter for hunting dragons), and so on. As you can see, nearly all of the items described reproduce the effects of a post-medieval – and likely modern-day or futuristic – technological device within the idiom of vanilla fantasy. There's not much cleverness on display here. Instead, the entries are all "What would a magical vacuum cleaner be like?" or "Wouldn't a magical pinball machine be funny?" 

The combination of the fundamentally technological framing of these items and their banality results in a very sub-par book, even given Heard's stated intention that they "provide fun" and a "change of pace." It's particularly baffling, because many of the entries are written by talented and imaginative people, like Ed Greenwood, Jeff Grubb, and even Sandy Petersen. I can only assume that they were all specifically instructed to come up with stuff that would feel appropriate in Wile E. Coyote's Acme Catalog – or perhaps from the minds of Dragonlance's tinker gnomes. The end result is not, in my opinion, either useful as a source of ideas for an ongoing D&D campaign or even of mirth. It's dull, predictable, and, above all, forced, which is a great shame, because I admire many of the book's contributors.

Sadly, the book is done no favors by its accompanying illustrations. Much as I adore the work of Jim Holloway, one of the few artists who really understood the humor inherent in typical RPG situations, his artwork here is simply so goofy that it makes it impossible to imagine using any of its inventions with a straight face. Maybe that's the point. Maybe you're not supposed to be able to do so. Maybe I'm just a killjoy lacking in a funny bone. Ultimately, that's not for me to judge. I can only say that, when I bought this back in 1987, I instantly regretted and have never used it, except as a cautionary tale of what happens when you try to inject "humor" into a campaign rather than allowing it to arise organically through play. 

Oh, the pain ... the pain!

Polyhedron: Issue #18

Serendipity is a funny thing. No sooner did I mention my childhood affection for Spider-Man than I find that issue #18 of Polyhedron (July 1984) features everyone's favorite web-slinger facing off against the Scorpion on its cover. This only makes sense, of course, since TSR's Marvel Super Heroes debuted around this time and was a big hit for the company. In fairly short order, it seemed as if there were nearly as many adventures being released for MSH as there were for Dungeons & Dragons, though my memory might well be faulty.

Spidey and the Scorpion form the basis for this issue's "Encounters" article, written by none other than Jeff Grubb, the designer of Marvel Super Heroes. Like all previous "Encounters" articles, this one is brief, but Grubb nevertheless makes the most of the limited space, presenting a scenario in which Spider-Man must rescue J. Jonah Jameson from a subway car that's been commandeered by Scorpion. It's straightforward and simple but does a good job, I think, of presenting the kind of situation in which the Web-head often found himself.

James M. Ward's "Cryptic Alliance of the Bi-Month" focuses on the mutant mirror image of the Knights of Genetic Purity, the Iron Society. Also known as the Mutationists, the Iron Society seeks to rid the post-apocalyptic Earth of all non-mutated life, with pure strain humans being the primary target of their ire. Needless to say, this makes the Society an object of fear in Gamma World and I always felt that they'd be used primarily as antagonists in most campaigns. Compared to the Knights, who might excellent villains in my opinion, the Iron Society somehow feels a bit more one-note and the article does little to change my mind on this, alas.

"Remarkable, Incredible, Amazing" by Steve Winter. As you might guess from its title, it's an overview of the then-newly released Marvel Super Heroes RPG. It's basically an advertisement intended to entice gamers into buying TSR's latest product and, in that respect, it does a fair job. Much more interesting is Roger E. Moore's "Kobolds and Robots and Mutants with Wings." Over the course of three pages. Moore talks first about the joys of "hybrid" games that mix and match rules and setting elements, something that even the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide discusses briefly. He then moves on to talk about various hybrid games he's run, such as when AD&D adventurers made use of a well of many worlds to travel to the universe of Bunnies & Burrows to fight rats in thrall with agents of the Cthulhu Mythos. Finally, he presents a lengthy discussion of kobalts – kobolds who traveled to Gamma World's setting, were mutated by radiation, and then bred true as a distinct species. Moore stats them up for both GW and AD&D and presents lots of information on how they could be used in both games. As I said, it's a very interesting article and a reminder of just how imaginative a writer Moore was.

"The Magic-User" by James M. Ward presents yet another "archetypical" [sic] example of a Dungeons & Dragons class, including her personality, skills, possessions, and holdings. In this case, that's Delsenora, an older woman who uses potions of longevity to retain her youth, who has a particular hatred for powerful undead, like vampires and liches. She also has a passion for flying through the use of magic. Consequently, she's built her castle high in the mountains, in a place otherwise inaccessible to those without flight. Appended to the end of Delsenora's description are two more magic-users, one by Ward (named Lidabmob – Bombadil spelled backwards) and another by Susan Lawson, presumably a RPGA member.

"Two Cents" by Joseph Wichman is a rambling opinion piece in which the author, another RPGA member, covers a number of vaguely related topics under the header of "roleplaying." He begins by arguing, contra the "Two Cents" column in issue #14, that roleplaying is not the same as acting and that any referee who expects his players to immerse themselves deeply in their roles is being unreasonable. He also touches on "troublesome" players, evil characters, and player vs character knowledge – all perennial topics in the gaming magazines of my youth. While I don't disagree with anything the author writes here, the article is somewhat frustrating to read, since it bounces around from one subject to the next.

"Layover at Lossend" by Russ Horn, yet another RPGA member, is a short Star Frontiers scenario set on the titular planet of Lossend. The format of the single-page scenario reminds me a bit of the "Encounters" feature, in that it includes of player characters to be used in conjunction with it. The adventure itself isn't particularly worthy of comment, since it's very short and sketchy, leaving most details to the referee to work out. What is interesting is that Horn refers to the referee – the official term for the Game Master in the game – as "the DM."  This is obviously just a small slip-up, both on the part of the writer and the Polyhedron editorial staff. However, I think points to the extent to which the terminology of Dungeons & Dragons had become the defaults in RPG discussions, even discussions about other games.

"Money Makes the World Go Round" by Art Dutra – again, an RPGA member – is a thoughtful little piece about the role of money and treasure in an ongoing D&D campaign. Dutra's focus is primarily from the side of the referee, highlighting the ways that money can be used to both motivate and impede player characters. He points out all the costs that PCs can incur during a campaign, especially those that are overlooked, like training and converting gems into coins, among many others. Dutra is absolutely correct, in my opinion, that referees often fail to take into account the, if you'll forgive the pun, value of money as a driver of a campaign. My only criticism is that focusing on taxes, exchanges rates, hidden costs, and other expenses can very quickly become tedious, or at least that's been my experience. Finding a way to keep money in mind without degenerating into an exercise in bookkeeping would be truly worthwhile topic for an article or essay.

Speaking of tedious, this issue's "Dispel Confusion" is largely filled with very persnickety rules questions of the sort that bore to tears. Whether because of laziness or a lack of intelligence, I've always been much more of a rulings guy rather than a rules guy, so this stuff frequently baffles me. I'm especially baffled by questions that begin "Can I ...?" as if the sender felt he needed TSR's permission to introduce something into his own campaign. I suppose these are the inevitable fruits of the company's attempts to maintain tight control over all of its games and to discourage its customers from buying or making use of "inferior" supplementary materials.

Issue #18 of Polyhedron shows the continued evolution of the 'zine. Perhaps the biggest change is the inclusion of many more articles submitted by RPGA members. That's a welcome change, though the quality of those submissions seems to vary quite a bit. Over time, I suspect that, too, will change, but, for the moment, it gives the issue a much more uneven feel than some of its immediate predecessors. Nevertheless, I look forward to seeing what future issues have in store. 

Retrospective: Unearthed Arcana

Believe it or not, I've never done a formal Retrospective of 1985's Unearthed Arcana. Like me, you might have thought I'd done so, but what you're remembering is an early, rather hyperbolic post entitled "Why Unearthed Arcana Sucked." Since I'm already in the midst of writing several posts that revisit topics I've covered before on this blog, I thought it might be worthwhile to begin by tackling UA, since it's an important book for both the history of AD&D and for the OSR. 

Re-reading my original 2008 post in preparation for this one, I couldn't help but wince a little. It's not so much that I have changed my mind on most of the topics I addressed in it, but rather that I wouldn't phrase my objections so intemperately. The original post and comments are nevertheless worth reading. They're a useful window into the mindset of the early OSR and the diversity of opinion that existed within it on a whole host of topics. Valuable though that 2008 post is as a historical text, it doesn't represent my considered evaluation of Unearthed Arcana and its place in the history of Dungeons & Dragons (and the hobby more generally). 

Before proceeding into the meat of the matter, some background. I was an avid reader and subscriber of Dragon for a five-year period starting in 1982. During that time, one of my favorite recurring columns was Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll." In those columns, Gygax would often share previews of new rules additions to AD&D, many of which he said would be formally added into the game with the publication of its eventual second edition. I often introduced some of these additions into my ongoing campaign and found I liked some more than others – I generally disliked the new character classes, but I mostly approved of the new spells, for example. This was fine, because none of the options were yet "official" and I could pick and choose which ones to use.

Owing to a number of real world factors – primarily, TSR's financial troubles and Gygax's attempts to save it – plans changed. The additions Gygax originally intended for a new edition of AD&D were all bundled together, along with some additional material, to fill out a new 128-page book called Unearthed Arcana. The book was announced with great fanfare in the pages of Dragon and, of course, I snapped it up as soon as I found a copy at my local B. Dalton. I then spent untold hours poring over it so that I could incorporate its "new discoveries ... [and] a wealth of just uncovered secrets" into my own campaign.

Unfortunately, the book I took home and read that day in 1985 was nowhere near as good as I imagined it would be. To be fair, I'm not sure that it could have ever lived up to my expectations and I suspect that my disappointments then have forever colored my feelings about Unearthed Arcana. Even so, the book presents numerous problems that I do think are worthy of discussion. The most immediate of these is that, as printed, it's riddled with typos, omissions, and outright errors, probably due to the haste with which the book was put together. I still keep a two-page list of additions and corrections to UA that appeared in the November 1985 issue of Dragon inside the front cover of my copy. These problems made using a lot of its contents frustrating and led to numerous misunderstandings.

A much bigger problem is that Unearthed Arcana represents a clear and significant shift in the power level of AD&D characters. Both the barbarian and cavalier classes, for example, are very potent, with a wide range of abilities. Many of the new demihuman races are similarly more powerful, particularly in light of the wider range of classes available and levels attainable by non-human characters. Combined with weapons specialization (for fighters and rangers), mightier magic items, and greater flexibility for spellcasters (thanks to cantrips and new spells), the overall effect of Unearthed Arcana is to push AD&D in a direction that's generally higher-powered.

Now, many players might not mind this and I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with this approach. However, I think I'm correct in saying that the direction UA heralded was a clear change from the earlier presentation of AD&D. Gygax states in his preface to the book that "the AD&D® game system is dynamic. It grows and changes and expands." That's a fair point. I have no doubt that, for many who had been playing AD&D since its completion in 1979, welcomed the growth and changes Unearthed Arcana brought with it. For me, then and now, it was a step too far, evidence that, after a certain point, you can change a thing too much for it to remain the thing it once was.

In retrospect, it seems odd that I should feel this way about UA. As I explained at the beginning of this post, I loved Gary Gygax's columns in Dragon, even the ones whose content I didn't use in my own campaign. Individually, they possessed a freshness that was very appealing. They suggested that AD&D still had new horizons to cross, new frontiers to explore. When assembled together, all the little additions Gygax had released piecemeal over the years now seemed to lack that freshness that had once appealed to me. They seemed not merely stale but ponderous and even restrictive. It's difficult to explain, but, somehow, the transformation of Gygax's proposals into "official" rules laid down in a hardcover book had robbed them of the fun and vibrancy they once possessed in my mind. 

As I flip through Unearthed Arcana today, I find it difficult to dislike most of its contents. Taken individually, like the original articles in which they appeared, most of them are fine as optional additions or expansions of the AD&D rules. I can easily imagine using many of the spells or magic items, for instance, and I still think the thief-acrobat is a fun addition for certain kinds of campaigns. As a whole, though, UA remains disappointing to me and I'd never use all of its contents. Perhaps if Gygax had had more time to develop them, I might feel differently, but, as it is, Unearthed Arcana is the book that started to shake my confidence in Gygax, TSR, and D&D itself – which goes some way to explain why I've often been so immoderate in expressing my negative opinion of it.

Retrospective: The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game

The history of TSR between 1982 and 1984 is a strange and fascinating one. It's simultaneously when Dungeons & Dragons is at the height of its popularity (and profitability) and when TSR seems to have had no idea how to build on that success. Instead, TSR adopted multiple strategies, such as attempting to turn D&D into a brand name with which to sell non-gaming products to re-imagining the game into something more story-driven and, it was assumed, more accessible to potential customers unfamiliar with either pulp fantasy or its wargames roots. Another strategy was one that's still employed to this day, even by the current producers of D&D: license a hot property – or a not-so-hot one – and hope it'll result in expanded sales.

TSR's history with licensed properties is decidedly mixed. For example, Jeff Grubb's Marvel Superheroes is rightly considered an unqualified success, both as a near-perfect RPG design and as an example of the potential value of the right licensed property. On the other hand, the 2001: A Space Odyssey module for Star Frontiers is a classic example of "what were they thinking?" licensing, only slightly more intelligible than Dungeons & Dragons-branded sunglasses. TSR's AD&D Conan modules and Conan Role-Playing Game are, I think, an example of a middle case, namely a good idea poorly – or at least insufficiently well – executed. Throughout the early to mid-80s, TSR was clearly throwing lots of spaghetti against the wall to see what stuck; the results were, more often than not, a mess.

An infamous case in point is 1984's The Adventures of Indiana Jones Role-Playing Game. Designed by David Cook, the game was, like so many others at the time, a boxed set consisting of a 64-page rulebook, a map of the 1930s world, a referee's screen, a collection of player handouts, and cardboard cut-outs to represent characters, buildings, and vehicles, plus dice. Taken purely on these terms, The Adventures of Indiana Jones is a nice package and I can imagine that it would have seemed quite attractive purely on this basis. Of course, the main reason anyone bought the game – myself included – is because the pulp-inspired action-adventure world of Indiana Jones was very appealing. I have little doubt that every gamer who saw Raiders of the Lost Ark in the summer of 1981 (or even The Temple of Doom three years later) thought, "This would make a great roleplaying campaign."

So, unlike, say, 2001: A Space Odyssey, which still baffles me to this day, I don't wonder why TSR grabbed this license as soon as it was feasible for them to do so. The world of Indiana Jones is definitely the stuff from which a game RPG could be made. Alas, The Adventures of Indiana Jones was not that RPG – and it's not because of its game mechanics. Mechanically, the game was fine, if nothing special. Like many games at the time, Indiana Jones uses another variation on the color-coded results chart that Marvel Super Heroes employed to such great success. There are even small moments of brilliance in its particular take on the chart, with exceptionally good and bad results being called Lucky and Bad Breaks respectively and each having unique effects, depending on the attribute being checked. 

The game's real problem, the one that utterly cripples it is its lack of character creation rules. Instead, there are a total of seven pre-generated characters from which players can choose: Indiana Jones, Marion Ravenwood, Sallah, Willie Scott, Short Round, Jock Lindsey (the pilot from the beginning of Raiders), and Wu Han (Indy's ally at the start of Temple of Doom, who dies). Now, I can understand including these characters as examples and even encouraging people to use them, but not including any rules for creating your own characters? That's a bizarre design choice, especially since the movies themselves imply that the world of Indiana Jones is much bigger than him and his immediate circle, filled with lots of other heroic and dastardly people trekking across the world in pursuit of valuable ancient artifacts. (There are also no experience rules; characters earn "player points" that enable them to reduce the severity of damage – that's it)

It's such a pity, because, as I've said several times now, there's a great deal of potential in the pulpy 1930s the movies presented. Further, the game itself is a decent introductory RPG that provides not only lots of fun little components but also a few interesting little sub-systems like the Chase Flow Chart intended to aid the referee in conjuring up the action of the movies. There's nothing revolutionary here, to be sure, and no one should think otherwise. This is not a forgotten gem of a roleplaying game, unfairly maligned despite its virtues. Rather, The Adventures of Indiana Jones is a textbook example of a missed opportunity – a nigh-perfect setting/world that could have, with a bit more imagination, have been a fun and successful RPG. Alas.

(And before anyone brings it up in the comments, no, TSR did not try to trademark the word "Nazi." TSR and this game can legitimately be criticized for many things; this is not one of them and I wish this particular urban legend would go away for good.)

Jeff Grubb Video Interview

Retrospective: Manual of the Planes

One of my favorite parts of the AD&D Players Handbook has always been Appendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence. Though it provides very little information – it's mostly just a listing of the twenty-five inner and outer planes – I spent untold hours reading and re-reading it as a young person, not to mention staring with awe at Figure 1, which offered a visual representation of the interrelations of all these weird places. To say I was "enraptured" might be a bit strong, but there's no question that Gary Gygax's glorious-mad vision, which married AD&D's alignment system to a cosmology straight out of de Camp and Pratt. Heady stuff to an eleven year-old!

As the years wore on, AD&D's planes acquired a little more solidity, starting with 1980's Queen of the Demonweb Pits, which gave us a glimpse into what a layer of the Abyss might be like (answer: a lot weirder than I expected it would be). Then came Roger E. Moore's magisterial article on the Astral Plane in Dragon #67 (November 1982), followed by an equally impressive one about Gladsheim in issue #90 (October 1984) a couple of years later. In between these, Gygax got in on the act, penning an article in issue #73 (May 1983) that tackled the Inner Planes, including the previously-unknown quasi-elemental planes (and came with a nifty multi-colored cut-out cube intended to represent the relationships between them). And who can forget Ed Greenwood's two-part treatement of the Nine Hells in issues #75 (July 1983) and #76 (August 1983)?

I gobbled up each of these expansions of Gygax's original scheme from the PHB – and more! – and frankly longed for a definitive treatment of these mysterious otherworldly realms. My wish was finally granted in 1987, when Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes first appeared. Unsurprisingly, I bought it as soon as I was able and devoured its contents immediately. This book was exactly what I had wanted, collecting together all the details scattered across multiple books, modules, and articles and adding to them, in order to create a more complete picture of the cosmos of AD&D. 

What I particularly liked was the way that Grubb does his best to make each plane unique, particularly with regard to way that magic works. This is something that Queen of the Demonweb Pits did first and that Moore picked up and developed further in his articles. Yes, it was a little frustrating at times to have to consult a list every time someone cast a spell to see if its effects were in any way changed, but the sense that "we're not in Kansas anymore" gained through its use more than made up for the extra effort, or so I thought. The planes were, from the beginning, intended as stomping grounds only for experienced characters – and players – so it only made sense that the very rules of the game might be changed there.

That said, most of the planar descriptions are short, singling out only a few key locales and only briefly touching on their inhabitants. I know people who were disappointed by this, hoping that the book would provide exhaustive information on each of the planes. Even I, who liked the book a great deal, half-expected that there'd be, if not a map, something akin to one that gave a better sense of how all the various planar landmarks related to one another. Despite that, I was fine with the relatively light level of detail, because it left plenty to the individual referee's imagination. If I had a serious criticism of the book, it's how few new monsters were included in the book, something I would have expected, especially after the wondrous details the Monster Manual II provided us about the inhabitants of the lower planes. I suspect the limits of the 128-page limit are responsible for this, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

Ultimately, I judge the Manual of the Planes a success, one of the better books of post-Gygaxian AD&D and one with a fairly long reach. Many of its planar conceptions were taken up by later authors and expanded upon, especially once the Planescape setting appeared in 1994. Unlike Planescape, which opted for its own rather idiosyncratic tone and style, Manual of the Planes is still broadly within the framework established by Gygax in the 1970s, which might explain my continued fondness for it. No book is perfect, of course, but I still think a pretty good one.

Interview: Jeff Grubb (Part II)

 6. You were in charge of design and development on the original Forgotten Realms boxed set. What was it like to pore over Ed Greenwood's pages of notes and turn them into a publishable product?

I reached out to Ed, who had previously published articles about the Realms in DRAGON magazine. He started mailing me the material from his campaign is massively-over-wrapped packages (there is a thick Canadian cellophane he used that could duplicate window replacements in strength, and my office-mates would hear me spending five minutes just unwrapping them). Soon we worked out a system using the new FedEx, which made things easier, but otherwise we depending on US and Canadian Post, and the border agents.

Ed’s material was extremely verbose – most of the “Elminister’s notes” in the original Grey Box we pulled directly from his notes. He would type single-space, using infinitely thin margins, and occasionally cut out a section and paste it in another place. This was just as desk-top-publishing was getting started, and part of his initial payment for the Realms was a Macintosh with two floppy disk drives. Later we got him a hard-drive as well. All of this was typewritten, and his typewriter was not always the best, so he hand-drew the “t”s on his page after he finished, so it looked like a little graveyard.

For his maps, he hauled them down to the library where he worked and photocopied them in pieces. The original Realms map was 24 8x11 pieces of paper that I had to reassemble. I colored in the coastlines, forests, and major trade routes with high-lighters and hung in on the wall outside my office. Alex Kammer of GameHole Con has that version now.

7. A number of changes were made both to the map and content of the Forgotten Realms, such as the enlargement of the Moonshae Isles and the inclusion of Vaasa and Damara. Was the decision to do that yours or was suggested by others at TSR? 

Back at the time, we had a number of projects already published or en route while we worked on the FR Grey Box. We wanted the Realms to be a place where you could put just about everything, and I made it a goal to show how we could do it. We changed the maps accordingly. The H-Series had two products out, and we drained part of the Great Glacier for Vaasa and Damara. Doug Niles had a half-written novel for a cancelled project, so we adopted it for the first Realms novel. The Desert of Desolation series found a home after being orphaned for a while, and also Under Illefarn, which made it into the Realms. Oh, and Ten Towns was in the far Northwest, because most of the northern border had other people working in it. For the first couple years, I had the various areas marked as one person or another working in it, and if you went there, you should double-check. Ed, of course, had dibs on the Dales, Cormyr, and Waterdeep.

8. Of course, you're probably most well known for having designed both editions of the Marvel Super Heroes RPG for TSR. How did you land that particular job?

This one has three origin stories:

In college, we had wrapped up a major D&D quest, and rather than starting a new campaign in Toril (the name of my campaign), I suggested a superhero game. From there we started playing with “the Junior Achievers”, the JA branch of the Avengers (the was before the West Coast Avengers and other subsidiary teams). The players were characters like The Beacon, Big Man on Campus, and Super-Pin, the Pro-Bowler of Steel. They fought crime in West Lafayette, Indiana, usually battling against some Marvel Villain on the lam from NYC. I called it Project: Marvel Comics.

When I got to TSR, management asked for “Blue Sky Projects” that we would like to work on. I presented the idea for a very grimdark cyberpunk settings (some parts of that got in the FREELancers setting for Top Secret SI). The proposal may have frightened people, because they came back and said, “What else you got?” And I had Project: Marvel Comics from my college years.

It still may not have happened as a game, but in the GenCon booklet for that year, Mayfair Games announced THEY were doing a Marvel Super Heroes game. Our people saw that and contacted Marvel, who said, no, there was no deal, but was TSR interested? And that is how we got the license. It was great working with Marvel. Mayfair turned around and got the DC license, and also did a Marvel Super Heroes calendar, which reprinted the text from a calendar 11 years previously (which is why the text on the calendar has so many Dick Nixon jokes).

9. How much did Marvel assist you in the creating and supporting the game? Obviously, they provided lots of art resources, but did they offer any other assistance?

Marvel was incredibly supportive both from a standpoint of approvals and getting us art. They had a warehouse across the river with all of the original art, and every month or so, they would send someone over to get us photostats of what we needed. We also got original art by John Byrne for some of our modules. On the back of one page, he sketched out alternate TSR Logos. I don't have that piece, alas.

Marvel was very accommodating about letting us know what they had in the works as well, trusting we would not spill the beans. And they double-checked everything - there was an issue of Marvel Age, their fan magazine, in which they mentioned an editor looking for the Russian translation of "Crimson Dynamo" for us.

One interesting thing: we did the Gamer's Handbook of the Marvel Universe (we called them the phone books, since they were the same size as the Lake Geneva Yellow Pages), with the idea we could just get all their text off their computers. As it turned out, none of the text from the original Official Handbooks of the Marvel Universe had been saved, so we input all the text, then shared the files back to Marvel.

10. Is there a product or products for Marvel Super Heroes that you're particularly proud of?

I hate choosing a favorite child, but I really liked how Murderworld! turned out - pitting Arcade versus the Fantastic Four. I always likes Arcade as a baddie: "Instant androids, Love 'em!"

11. The last time we chatted, you were employed by Amazon Game Studio as Senior Narrative Designer. What does that job entail and are you working on any projects you can share with us? 

I have been the Senior Narrative Designer on the recently-released Crucible project. In that role, I have overseen the text and voice-over for the game. I have to write, or at least review, all the words on the screen and the characters speak. I have been aided by our other talented narrative designers, and together we create a backstory for the world and the personal history of the hunters you play. We help select the voices you hear and oversee the recording. I am still world-building, but now it on a much bigger screen.

12. Do you still play RPGs these days and, if so, which ones?

I am still playing twice a week (now over Discord as we are all living in solitude), and have a band of usual suspects. We usually run Call of Cthulhu with a rotating Keeper – right now I am running Masks of Nyarlathotep, and they just finished the Nairobi chapter. Veteran editor Steve Winter, who worked on MSH with me all those years ago, runs a D&D 5E game of Forbidden Caverns of Archaia on Monday nights. I still read RPGs voraciously, and have had the chance to learn Blades in the Dark from a co-worker at Amazon.

Interview: Jeff Grubb (Part I)

Jeff Grubb worked at TSR Hobbies from 1982 to 1994. During that time he served as the design consultant on Gary Gygax's Monster Manual II and Unearthed Arcana, joined the team behind Dragonlance, developed the Forgotten Realms, and designed the Marvel Super Heroes roleplaying game, among many other projects. He very kindly agreed to answer a few questions about his time at TSR as well as his current projects. The second part of this interview will appear tomorrow.

1. How did you first become involved in the hobby of roleplaying?

I played Risk as a child and was into wargaming in high school (Avalon Hill, SPI, had a subscription to S&T [Strategy & Tactics – JM]). My first week at college, I went to the Purdue Wargamers Club, and there was a table of people talking and yelling, without a board or miniatures. I walked up, and someone handed me three six-sided dice and said, “Here, we need a cleric.” It was all downhill from there.

2. How did you become employed by TSR?

In college I started running D&D Open tournaments at GenCon in Kenosha, overseen by Bob Blake. One year, a friend mouthed off about the quality of that year’s presentation within Bob’s earshot. He spun on his heel and said “congratulations! You’re designing next year’s tournament!” Soon afterwards, I was laid off from my job (Civil Engineer, designing air pollution equipment), and had the time to oversee the product. As I result, I designed the bulk of the adventures for that year’s open (“Quest for the King” – not a great title), and on the strength of that (and calling every week), was hired by TSR.

3. One of your earliest credits is the Boot Hill module, Burned Bush Wells. Do you remember anything about the experience of working on that project? Were you a fan of the game or of Westerns.

Burned Bush Wells (great Larry Elmore cover) was presented to me as an assignment, with a town that Allen Hammack designed and a random encounter table from Brian Blume (or perhaps vice versa). I was supposed to make them work together. I had played Boot Hill in college, along with an Avalon Hill game called Gunslinger, but I was not a huge fan of Westerns – I think my favorite as a kid was The War Wagon with John Wayne and Kirk Douglas.

4. In his dedication to Unearthed Arcana, Gary Gygax wrote that you "belabored me with so many pages of questions and suggested qualifications that I'll never forgive him." Can you elaborate on what he meant by that?

I had worked previously with/for Gary on Monster Manual II, and was charged with putting together all of the material for UA, which included previously published articles, new spells that appeared elsewhere, and other concepts. I did not meet with Gary directly, as he had other things to deal with. Instead, using Frank Mentzer as an intermediary, I passed all manner of questions to him on computer print-outs. He would mark them up long-hand, and I would incorporate his comments. As I started bringing all the disparate notes and articles together, I asked a lot of questions about the design philosophy behind the new spells. I would ask “why” a certain spell would function this way, and how it would affect other spells, and Gary would reply “It’s magic!” in a marginal note.

One thing that Gary was not responsible for was the inclusion of his infamous pole arm article in the book. That was my bright idea, and he was not sure about it. I take the blame for that one. I also reached out to Roger Moore and incorporated his non-human divinity articles as well.

Ed’s material was extremely verbose – most of the “Elminister’s notes” in the original Grey Box we pulled directly from his notes. He would type single-space, using infinitely thin margins, and occasionally cut out a section and paste it in another place. This was just as desk-top-publishing was getting started, and part of his initial payment for the Realms was a Macintosh with two floppy disk drives. Later we got him a hard-drive as well. All of this was typewritten, and his typewriter was not always the best, so he hand-drew the “t”s on his page after he finished, so it looked like a little graveyard.

5. So you're responsible for the polearms appendix? Do you recall why you wanted to include it? (I ask this as someone who's glad it's there, because, as a younger person, I wasn't as knowledgeable on the fine gradations of polearms as my older peers.)

I had similar reasons for reaching for the older article. Back when the Players Handbook was new, we had this full listing of all manner of pole arms, with no explanation what they looked like. Researching, I found there were different names in different sources, and the article pulled it all together in an "official" version. So now we have an idea of what a Bohemian Ear Spoon looked like. I regret nothing. 

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.

The Ads of Dragon: Marvel Super Heroes

1984 was a big year for TSR, with several big RPG products premiering, one of which was advertised in issue #84 (April 1984):

I've written of my fondness for Marvel Super Heroes before, but that post does little to convey just how excited I was upon seeing this ad. Back then -- heck, even now -- I wouldn't have considered myself a huge fan of superheroes in a broad sense, but I was a fan of several specific superheroes, like Spider-Man and Dr. Strange. Having a game that let me play these characters was, at the time, something I looked forward to with great anticipation. That I never needed a licensed game to do that was beside the point at the time and ads like this one ensured I was going to buy this RPG as soon as I saw (which I, in fact, did).