Dungeons & Dreamscapes

I’ve often said I feel fortunate to have discovered Dungeons & Dragons when I did, before the dead hand of brandification settled over the game and drained it of the wild, untamed esthetic that once made it so visually compelling and culturally strange. In the years before D&D became a polished entertainment “property,” its visual identity was a chaotic collage of influences drawn from unexpected sources: psychedelic counterculture, turn-of-the-century Art Nouveau, underground comix, pulp magazines, and outsider art. Monsters leered with extra eyes and boneless limbs, while dungeons sprawled like fever dreams. There was a visual lawlessness to early D&D (and to roleplaying games more broadly) that mirrored the creative freedom of its rules. That freedom invited players to imagine fantasy worlds that were not simply adventurous, but also surreal, grotesque, and deeply personal.

These thoughts came back to me recently while flipping through some of the Dungeons & Dragons materials I encountered shortly after I took my first tentative steps into the hobby. Looking at them now, decades later, I’m struck not just by their content, but also by their form. Much of the art did not resemble anything I had seen before. It was crude at times, even amateurish by the standards of commercial illustration. Yet, it was also evocative in a way that transcended technique. These images did not so much depict a fantasy world as suggest one, obliquely, symbolically, even irrationally. Many felt like fragments from dreams or relics from some lost visionary tradition and, on some level, they were.

That tradition was a subterranean one, largely outside the orbit of mainstream fantasy art. Psychedelic poster designers, Symbolist painters, and zinesters working on the margins of the counterculture all contributed, consciously or not, to the strange visual DNA of early roleplaying games. Before branding demanded consistency and legibility, Dungeons & Dragons was porous enough to absorb all of it. The result was an esthetic that was both wildly eclectic and, paradoxically, cohesive in its weirdness. It didn’t feel like a mainstream product; it felt like artifacts from another world.

Today, it’s common to point to Tolkien as the primary visual and thematic influence on early D&D. His mark is real and unmistakable (despite what Gary Gygax wanted us to believe). However, when you examine the actual artwork that filled TSR’s products in the late 1970s and early ’80s – the era when I entered the hobby – you find yourself far from Middle-earth. Instead of noble elves and stoic rangers, you see grotesque creatures, warped anatomy, anatomical impossibilities, and alien geometries rendered in flat inks and, later, garish colors. This wasn’t the Shire. This was something older, more primal, and far stranger.

Where did this esthetic come from?

As I’ve already suggested, part of the answer lies in the psychedelic explosion of the 1960s. This was a cultural moment that sought to dissolve the boundaries between consciousness and art. Psychedelic artists like Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso developed a visual language rooted in abstraction, distortion, and saturated color, a kind of sensory mysticism meant to evoke altered states. Concert posters and album covers became portals to other dimensions. Meanwhile, underground comix, like those of Robert Crumb or Vaughn Bodē, combined sex, satire, fantasy, and absurdism into worlds that gleefully rejected the conventions of good taste or coherent storytelling.

While Gygax and Arneson were not themselves products of this milieu, the audience they attracted often was – college students, sci-fi fans, and other oddballs shaped by the psychedelic visual environment of the late ’60s and early ’70s. I was younger than that cohort, a child in fact, not a teen or adult, but even I absorbed some of its esthetic currents. They filtered into my world through album covers, comics, cartoons, toys, and the hazy, low-fi look of the decade itself. I didn’t yet know what most of these things meant, but I nevertheless felt their strangeness. They stuck with me, shaping my imagination in ways I only later came to understand.

TSR, for its part, didn’t initially reflect these influences. Much of the earliest D&D art was traditional or utilitarian, inherited from the wargaming scene. As the game’s popularity exploded in 1979, TSR began to draw on a new crop of young illustrators, many of them influenced, directly or indirectly, by underground comix, countercultural poster art, and the lingering weirdness of the 1970s. Their work didn’t smooth out the chaos from which early D&D was born – it amplified it.

No one embodied this more than Erol Otus. His illustrations for the Basic and Expert boxed sets are among the most iconic in the history of the hobby, as well as some of the strangest. Otus’s monsters don’t just look dangerous; they look wrong, like something glimpsed in a fever or half-remembered from a dream. His color palettes are lurid, his anatomy grotesquely playful, his compositions uncanny and theatrical. His esthetic doesn’t belong to heroic fantasy. It belongs to a blacklight poster, hung next to a velvet mushroom print and a battered copy of The Teachings of Don Juan.

Otus, whether intentionally or not, brought the visual grammar of psychedelia into the core of D&D. In doing so, he captured something essential about the game: that it wasn’t just a fantastic medieval wargame; it was a tool for exploring the irrational, the liminal, the transformed. Other artists took up different parts of this same sensibility. Dave Trampier’s work, for example, especially his iconic AD&D Players Handbook cover, radiates a stillness and mystery more akin to myth or ritual than heroic adventure. Other similarly restrained pieces of early D&D likewise seem caught between worlds.

The same spirit is evident in third-party publications. Judges Guild modules are packed with crude, surreal illustrations that throb with symbolic weirdness. David Hargrave’s Arduin Grimoire goes even further. It's a deranged collage of cybernetic demons, magical diagrams, flying sharks, and bizarre maps that reads like D&D filtered through Zardoz. It’s no coincidence that Hargrave gave Otus his first professional credit. They were kindred spirits, working not within a genre, but along the outermost fringes of it.

Beyond psychedelia, another artistic thread ran through the background: the ornate, esoteric elegance of Art Nouveau. The flowing lines of Aubrey Beardsley, the sacred geometry of Alphonse Mucha, and the decadent mysticism of Gustav Klimt all haunt the margins of early RPG art. Beardsley’s illustrations for Salome or Le Morte d’Arthur look, at times, like direct ancestors to early D&D's depictions of witches, sorcerers, and demons. These fin de siècle influences were rediscovered during the 1960s counterculture and found their way, through posters, tarot decks, and zines, into the strange visual stew of early roleplaying games.

Even the dungeon itself is shaped by this visionary impulse. Early dungeons aren’t realistic structures. They’re mythic underworlds. They don’t obey architectural logic but symbolic logic, filled with teleporters, talking statues, secret doors, and fountains of infinite snakes. They’re not places so much as thresholds. To descend into a dungeon is to cross into a space where transformation of one kind or another is not only possible but expected.

That’s why so many early modules have such power decades later. Quasqueton, Castle Amber, White Plume Mountain, The Ghost Tower of Inverness – they’re not just combat arenas. They’re almost spiritual landscapes, mythic spaces presented as keyed maps. The artwork used to depict them conjures a mood, a worldview, a sense of mystery, inviting players to see fantasy not as genre convention, but almost as a moment of altered perception.

However, as D&D became a brand, this strangeness was steadily scrubbed away. Style guides were introduced. Idiosyncratic artists gave way to professionals. The game’s visuals became cleaner, more representational, more standardized. With that polish came a flattening of the imagination. D&D no longer looked like a vision; it looked like product.

This, I think, is what so many of us in the early days of the Old School Renaissance were reaching for, even if we couldn’t name it at the time. We were looking for the weirdness again, for the ecstatic, chaotic, sometimes unsettling energy that marked those early years. We remembered when fantasy didn’t have to be safe or heroic or respectable. We remembered when D&D looked like a door to Somewhere Else.

That's because fantasy, properly understood, is not an esthetic. It is a vision of the world tilted just enough to let the impossible shine through. Like the pioneers of science fiction and fantasy, the early artists of Dungeons & Dragons understood this. Otus understood it. Trampier understood it. So did Beardsley, Griffin, and countless anonymous illustrators working on mimeographed zines and early rulebooks in the 1970s. They weren’t just drawing monsters or dungeons. They weren’t just illustrating rules. They were revealing other worlds.

Arduin Map Collection

Dave Hargrave's The Arduin Grimoire (1977) and its two immediate sequels, Welcome to Skull Tower and The Runes of Doom (1978), are important artifacts from the first few years of the hobby of roleplaying and thus of great interest to all fans of old school gaming. These three books, often known collectively as The Arduin Trilogy, were not just mere flights of fancy by their creator, but outgrowths of Hargrave's home-brewed fantasy roleplaying game campaign, among whose hundreds of players was none other than Greg Stafford of RuneQuest fame. The Trilogy not only delighted many roleplayers during the '70s, but also included some of the earliest published artwork of Erol Otus.

Emperor's Choice Games, the current publisher and rights holder of Arduin, has big plans for Dave Hargrave's legacy, starting with the release of a large collection of maps based on those he made for his RPG campaign almost a half-century ago. These maps include not only the titular County of Arduin (an earlier version of which I positively reviewed fifteen years ago), but also maps of the continent of Khaora in which it is situated and the country of Chorynth as well. The new County of Arduin map is gorgeous and filled with lots of interesting and useful details.

If you're a fan of Arduin or just a lover of fantasy maps, please take a look.

Tired of "Travelling?"

From issue #56 of Dragon (December 1981) comes this advertisement for Star Rovers, a science fiction RPG from Archive Miniatures & Game Systems. Nowadays, the game is mostly notable for the fact that Dave Hargrave of Arduin fame was one of its designers. I never saw it back in the day, so I can't comment on its contents or quality. However, the ad below suggests it was interesting ...

White Dwarf: Issue #12

Issue #12 of White Dwarf (April/May 1979) features a cover by Eddie Jones, who had previously done the cover for issue #10. According to Ian Livingstone's editorial, Jones was the favorite cover artist in the poll he commissioned in the previous issue. For myself, I am regularly struck by how commonly 1970s fantasy art include spaceships and other elements we might today consider science fictional. It's a reminder of just how fluid those two categories were once upon a time. 

Livingstone also comments on a couple of other interesting topics. First, he notes that, thanks to the increase in its readership, White Dwarf is expanding to 32 pages from 28. By my lights, though, it doesn't seem as if those extra four pages are being used for content but rather for more advertising. Second, and relatedly, he notes that "the hobby industry" is not "mass market" and its prices will be accordingly higher. Livingstone then takes aim at "photocopier fanatics" who make copies of rules or magazines rather than buying them. He encourages his readers to give such miscreants "a bad time" and to support game companies by buying their properly printed products. 

"The Fiend Factory" presents eight more monsters for use with Dungeons & Dragons. Five of these are creatures I recall from the Fiend Folio, including the githyanki. Notable too is the fact that many feature illustrations by the inimitable Russ Nichsolson. Indeed, some of the illustrations look identical to those that would later appear in the Fiend Folio itself, though it's possible that my aged memory is simply playing tricks on me again. Lew Pulsipher's "Useful Dungeon Equipment" is a short article presenting a collection of pieces of specialized equipment he feels would be of use in dungeon exploration, such as a crowbar, an eyepatch, and noseplugs. I remember reading many articles like this over the years and have a strange fondness for them. They reflect, I think, a real culture of play, in which players regularly came up with inventive solutions to equally inventive obstacles created by referees. Articles like this speak to D&D "as she was played" back in the day and they're every bit as important to understanding the history of the hobby as the ins and outs of designers and companies.

"Open Box" presents five reviews, only two of which are of products with which I am familiar. The unfamiliar products are FGU's Rapier & Dagger (rated 6), Conflict Interaction Associates' Pellic Quest (rated 7), and Gametime Games's Spellmaker (rated 6). The last review is interesting, because the game's creator, Eric Solomon, is given a small space in which to reply to the review's criticisms. The two familiar reviews treat Chaosium's All the World's Monsters (rated 5) and The Arduin Grimoire, Volumes I, II, and III (rated 4). The review of the Arduin books ends with the following comment:

All this issue's reviews are by Don Turnbull, who, in my estimation, tends to be quite harsh in his judgments on non-TSR products. As I've commented before, I can't help but wonder if the combination of his obvious industry – he is one of early White Dwarf's workhorses – and his largely uncritical promotion of TSR played a role in his being made head of TSR UK in 1980.

"Pool of the Standing Stones" by Bill Howard is a "mini-dungeon" for 5th and 6th-level characters. Like so many dungeons of the past, it's an odd mixture of elements. There's a druid who's interested in maintaining the balance between Law and Chaos, bandits, martial artists, mad scientists, and more. There are a few genuinely imaginative elements, like the talking entrance doors, but it's mostly a bizarre mishmash that, while not bad, is still far from good. The best I can say is that it's certainly no worse than many dungeons I created in my youth, though that's very faint praise indeed. 

Part five of Rowland Flynn's "Valley of the Four Winds" appears in this issue, though, as with the previous installments, I can't say much about it, as I lost interest in it several issues ago. "Treasure Chest" offers up a large number of new magic items, a few of which are decent, if not necessarily inspired. Brian Asbury also offers some modifications to the barbarian class that appeared in issue #4, in light of the publication of the Players Handbook. On that very front, Don Turnbull's "A Dip into the Players Handbook" is a two-page examination of certain aspects of the AD&D Players Handbook from the perspective of its innovations over OD&D. I found the article strangely enjoyable. It's a piece of history and provides some insight on how the piecemeal publication of AD&D was received by the existing players of D&D. Turnbull, as one might expect, is a fan of most AD&D's changes, but, even so, his comments are useful bits of data for anyone with an interest in the hobby's history.

Greg Espinoza's Arduin Memories

To long-time admirers of the late Dave Hargrave's Arduin books, artist Greg Espinoza needs no introduction. He contributed many iconic illustrations to those early RPG tomes, some of which proved quite popular and influential on a later generation of artists. Recently, Greg shared recollection of his days working in the gaming industry, which he has very kindly allowed me to repost here.

I’d been thinking about some of my earliest work recently, some of my gaming illustrations from the late 70s. Specifically my work for David A. Hargrave on his Arduin Grimoire books and the various game modules, and to a lesser degree, a game I did called Star Rovers for a company called Archive Miniatures. This is work I did roughly 43 years ago, but I’ve found over the years that people still remember the Arduin game books and modules fondly. I look in on the occasional gaming blog, and recently discovered a number of YouTube videos talking about the history of Hargrave’s books and his legacy. I am rather elated Arduin is still going strong.

I'm a little fuzzy on exactly when I met David A. Hargrave, who originally created the Arduin Grimoire as a self-published supplement to Dungeon & Dragons, which displeased D&D creator Gary Gygax, to no end. I think, roughly, sometime in 1978, a friend of mine had heard through channels that Dave Hargrave was looking for an artist for a project. I went to visit him at a gaming shop in Concord, CA., where he was based at that time. I found Hargrave to be interesting guy, enthusiastic and very opinionated. I showed him what could charitably be called my portfolio at the time. He liked what he saw. The first thing he’d hired me to do was draw illustrations for his third book, The Arduin Grimoire III: The Runes Of Doom. I worked directly with Hargrave. I met him in person periodically to discuss illustrations, with a lot of communication by telephone. This was pre-Internet, so I couldn’t send him a scan or take a picture on my phone to get approval. We talked it through, and he liked what I did. I only ever had to make an alteration at least once. At the time. I was still in High School and living with my parents in Napa, CA. I’d played Dungeons & Dragons with a group friends in High School when I lived in Napa (As I remember, some of us incorporated Arduin rules into some of our games).

I was a lifelong comics fan, cutting my teeth on Silver age Marvel Comics. Yeah, I was a huge Jim Steranko and Paul Gulacy (who had a strong Steranko influence) fan. I was also a big Jim Starlin fan, and obviously, Jack Kirby. I soaked up lots of influences as a kid; Harryhausen movies, Star Trek, Star Wars, The Outer Limits, Gerry Anderson shows. 1950s sci-fi movies, ect. You name it, I was probably watching it. A lot of what I absorbed up to that point can be seen in in my Arduin art. Dave wasn’t hard to work with. He had his strong ideas of what he wanted, but he gave me the latitude to come up with stuff. I was around 18 years-old, still working out my techniques. I think I was inking with Rapidograph pens, then. Still trying to get the hang of Crowquill pens, and still didn’t know how to use a brush. Didn’t know the right paper to use. Other than some fan art published by my friend Steven R. Johnson, this was my very first paying art gig. Being rather isolated locally, I never met any like-minded artists who did what I did, and didn't meet any until the mid-80s at a Creation Con in San Francisco, which would be Ken Hooper, Edward Luena, and Shepherd Hendrix. That would prove to be my gateway into the comics industry.

The Runes Of Doom experience went well, I did the covers and a dozen interior illustrations. Dave later had me do a new set of covers for his first book, The Arduin Grimoire, Volume One. My covers for this book replaced the covers done by the previous artist, Erol Otus, who would go on to greater fame creating art for TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons books. I later did the cover art for three Arduin dungeon modules: Caliban, The Howling Tower, and The Citadel Of Thunder. There were no interior illustrations by me for the books, except, I think Citadel had two interior pieces. Each module included a sheet of die-cut monster and artifact cards. Dave used two other artists who did some great work on Arduin, Brad Schenck (A.K.A. Morno) and Michio Okamura, but I did the majority of illustrations. Hargrave sold his company to publisher Jim Mathis at Grimoire Games, who later produced a box set called The Arduin Adventure. I did a couple of interior illustrations for the booklet, but I also painted the box art, which at the time, I was rather proud of. When I finally saw the published set, I was rather dismayed to find my cover art reworked, with a lot of airbrushing added by someone named Anthony Delgado. I’m being honest when I state I wasn’t happy with it, and felt blindsided. Mathis also repackaged all three original Arduin books into a box set, and repurposed a Wizard illustration from The Arduin Adventure game book for the box art. I believe that was the last thing I did for them. In 2008 I found out that a company called Emperor’s Choice had acquired the rights to all things Arduin and I contacted them about doing some new Arduin-based work. My timing was good, as they were about to repackage the original Arduin Trilogy and George De Rosa hired me to create two new sequel covers based on my original Arduin Grimoire, Vol. I covers. I also created a logo for the book that EmpCho has repurposed for their Arduin Eternal book.

I created overall, roughly 98 (give or take) pieces of art for Arduin. I got paid roughly $5 dollars per illustration by Dave for the interiors on Runes Of Doom, $100. for the cover. later on, I got a slightly better rate for larger illustrations. I seem to remember I got paid $200 for The Arduin Adventure box art.

Dave treated me pretty well, but our relationship was strictly professional. We never socialized and I never gamed with him. I was lucky I was able to get what little facetime I could with him as I didn’t have a car to get me from Napa to Concord regularly. I seem to remember I talked my Mom into driving me there a few times. David A. Hargrave passed in 1988, and was informed of this by one of his friends at a show where I was exhibiting.

Looking back on my art then, it's some of my earliest work, and to say it's unrefined is charitable. There are some things I’m still somewhat happy with, some of it I find cringe-worthy. You have to start somewhere. I have no idea who owns all the original Arduin art, or where it is (Emperor’s Choice?). I do know that probably a lot of hardcore, old-school Arduin fans might be willing to pay for a piece of that history.

Regarding my work on Star Rovers, I seem to remember meeting Archive Miniatures publisher Nevile Stocken at a gaming convention, possibly a DundraCon. I had a table and was doing character sketches, he bought some of them. Dave Hargrave had started work on a game for Archive called Star Rovers, a science fiction-based role-playing game, but left the project. I think he may have recommended me? Stocken and I met at his store in Burlingame and he cherry-picked some pre-existing art from my portfolio, which included some panels from early, and very crude ‘zine work. I created a number of new illustrations (41 total), front and back covers for the game book, and the box art. I was asked to keep the proportions of the illustrated characters close to the proportions of the miniatures, so the some of the character look like they are escapees from the movie, Time Bandits. Once I turned in the art and later received my copy of the game, I was disappointed to find some of the pencil pieces he bought from me, he used, but hired another artist to ink them…badly. He also had the box art reworked and colored. I think the nail in the coffin for me doing any further work was a discussion we had over the phone regarding me getting my art back. He flat out told me he was keeping the art. We had no discussion about that prior, and I don’t remember it being in a contract, and I sure don’t have a copy of that contract anymore. Fledgling artists take note: one of my first hard lessons learned in working freelance, state any questions or concerns upfront, otherwise it’s your own fault. It was still quite a few years away before I’d learn the term “work-for-hire.” I don’t think I talked to Stocken after that. Maybe once? I never played Star Rovers. I still have my comp copy of the game and some of the miniatures.

Finally, a little Arduin trivia: Shardra the Castrator was originally a sketchbook piece. Dave bought it, and named the character on the spot. Black Wind was inspired by an Outer Limits monster from the episode, The Man With The Power. The Brain Eater was inspired by the B-movie, The Brain From Planet Arous. I’m reading in a few place that Dave had based a character on the Arduin covers on Clint Eastwood. I seem to remember I just drew the character like Clint on the Runes of Doom cover and he liked it. He did want me to go back to that design when I drew the new covers for Arduin, Vol.1. The one time he wanted a major change was to draw a top on the bare-breasted female warrior on the back cover of Arduin Grimoire, Vol. 1. I can’t remember if there were actual complaints about the nudity, or he was trying to head them off. I have no idea where the heck Attack Of The Kill Kittens came from. I think that was all Dave. and a piece of art people still remember. And finally, one of my artist pals, Ken Hooper told me a few years ago Hargrave had talked to him about working on Arduin before me.

As I mentioned at the outset, It’s gratifying to see the various YouTubers talking about Arduin. It’s mind-boggling that the out-of-print Arduin books are going for hundreds of dollars. And also surprised to see all the piracy with my Arduin art on t-shirts, mugs, hoodies, etch. I even found some of my old monster cards badly redrawn in a knock-off Arduin monster card set

So, there you have it. Since those halcyon days of gaming art, I’ve freelanced in comics and animation for close to 40 years. I did one more game project: designing some guns (five illustrations) for a game book called Worlds Beyond for Other Worlds Games in 1989. I’ve worked for Eclipse comics, TSR (their comics line), Tundra/Kitchen Sink Press, Image Comics, did art for a Wizard Of Oz Tarot deck for Illogical Associates, Printed In Blood’s 30th Anniversary The Thing Art Book, among many other projects.

Greg Espinoza (8/14/21)

The original post appeared on Greg's Facebook here. You can also keep in touch with him and his art through his Instagram.

Retrospective: The Asylum & Other Tales

The news that Chaosium is reprinting many of its earliest Call of Cthulhu products in celebration of the game's 40th anniversary this year, I found myself thinking back wistfully on my early experiences with the game. Even though Shadows of Yog-Sothoth looms very large in my memories, I also think fondly of other products from around the same time, like 1983's The Asylum & Other Tales. Whereas Shadows of Yog-Sothoth was a collection of seven adventures forming "a global campaign to save mankind," The Asylum was merely seven individual adventures with nothing linking them to one another. Perhaps I shouldn't say "merely," because, despite the tendency to associate long, involved campaign-centric products with Call of Cthulhu, adventure anthologies like this one have long existed and provided much needed support to many a Keeper of Arcane Lore. 

In brief, The Asylum's seven scenarios are as follows:  

• The Auction by Randy McCall, which involves the investigators traveling to Vienna, Austria to participate in an auction of occult books and artifacts on behalf of a patron. There, they become embroiled in a murder investigation.
• The Madman by Mark Harmon, takes the investigators to upstate New York to look into the disappearances of livestock and people.
• Black Devil Mountain by Dave Hargrave (of Arduin Grimoire fame), which takes place in rural Maine, where the investigators explore Howl Mound, an Indian burial mound filled with all manner of monsters.
• The Asylum by Randy McCall is an interesting scenario in that it takes place inside the Greenwood Asylum for the Deranged to which one or more investigators have been committed. Naturally, not all is well within the asylum's walls.
• The Mauretania by M.B. Willner takes place aboard a luxury liner crossing the Atlantic and filled with many interesting passengers, including a White Russian count – and a murderer.
• Gate from the Past by John Scott Clegg concerns the investigation of weird, ghostly phenomena near Arkham, Massachusetts.
• Westchester House by Elizabeth Wolcott presents us with the eponymous house, reputed to be haunted.

As you can see, the seven adventures of The Asylum are a varied lot, though quite a few of them involve a murder investigation, which is simultaneously understandable and unfortunate. According to the book's introduction, each scenario is intended to deal with a common aspect of a Call of Cthulhu campaign, whether it be insanity ("The Asylum"), sea travel ("The Mauretania"), or a hoax ("Westchester House"). It's an excellent approach for an anthology and it's why I have such fond memories of The Asylum: it's very useful.

That said, not all of the included scenarios are top notch. Dave Hargrave's "Black Devil Mountain" is probably the worst of the lot, being pretty much a dungeon transposed into Call of Cthulhu and not a particularly imaginative one at that. On the other hand, "The Asylum" is solid and "The Auction" contains seeds for many subsequent adventures. I'm also fond of "Westchester House," because there's absolutely nothing supernatural or Mythos-related happening in it; perfectly mundane human criminals are behind the strange happenings at the house. It's a great change of pace and one I recall having great fun with, especially after a campaign has gone on long enough for players to start seeing Lovecraftian entities behind every curtain.

Considering its early release date, The Asylum & Other Tales is quite a remarkable product, filled with lots of modular material for use by a harried Keeper. I learned a great deal about crafting good – and not so good – Call of Cthulhu adventures from it. In fact, thinking back on the book and its scenarios makes me wish I were refereeing a Call of Cthulhu campaign right now. 

Different Worlds: Issue #13

Issue #13 of Different Worlds (August 1981) opens with an article entitled "The Land of Faerie" by Scott R. Turner. It's an odd piece, in that it contains no game statistics whatsoever. Instead, it's an overview of a variety of  myths and legends about fairies – mostly from the British Isles – strung together as a semi-coherent whole. There's even a bestiary of sorts, which provides brief descriptions of many fairy creatures. Articles like these baffle me somewhat. They're usually too short to present information that most players of fantasy RPGs don't already know. Likewise, the lack of game-specific information limits their utility.

Strangely enough, Iain Delaney's "The Travellers' Aid Society" follows a similar pattern, being both very short and almost entirely lacking in game statistics. Rather, what Delaney offers is a limited and particular interpretation of the iconic organization from GDW's Traveller game. Even more so than "The Land of Faerie," it's too short to present anything a Traveller fan didn't already know, as well as lacking in game rules that might otherwise make it useful.

 The oddly titled "Role-Playing in the Land of Xanth" by Leonard Kanterman is, for the most part, a book review of first three volumes of Piers Anthony's series of fantasy novels. The review also provides cursory suggestions on how to use Xanth as a setting for a RPG campaign. At the risk of repeating myself, I found the article mostly useless, owing to its short length and lack of game rules. but I suppose it's possible that it might serve as an introduction to the setting to the uninitiated (assuming one considers that a good thing).

Jane Woodward's "The Cult of Erlin the Harper" is a gateway cult for RuneQuest. It's a very welcome counterpoint to the previous three articles, in that it contains a great deal of game-specific information that's useful even in RQ campaigns set on Glorantha. There are not only new music-based rune spells but also details of musical instruments and how they can used in the game. Steven Marsh's "Samurai Swords" follows a similar path, offering lots of details on the schools of Japanese sword-making and the weapons they made. Rather than simply being historical in nature, the article also provides rules for each type of sword, including possible magical powers associated with the weapons. It's more detailed than I expect most people need, but I couldn't help but appreciate the detail nonetheless.

John T. Sapienza reviews "Samurai Figures," focusing on those available from Ral Partha, Archive, and Stan Johansen. The accompanying photographs are quite nice. Lee Gold's Land of the Rising Sun and Dave Hargrave's Arduin Adventure are both reviewed positively, though with a few caveats in the case of the Arduin Adventure. Larry DiTillio's "Sword of Hollywood" looks at two movies, one I've heard of and one I have not. The first is Dragonslayer, which DiTillio liked a great deal. The second is The Archer: Fugitive from the Empire, which he also liked – indeed, he liked it well enough that he wants it to become a weekly television series. Gigi D'Arn's column talks a fair bit about a supposed scramble by various publishers to secure the righs to Conan the Barbarian-related game products, as well as hints of trouble at SPI. 

All in all, issue #13 is something of a disappointment to me. My guess is that the shift from bimonthly to monthly left Chaosium with less quality material to choose from for each issue and it shows. I hope that, as 1981 wears on, things will improve.

California Gamin' (Part 2)

 As one might expect, there's a section of Moira Johnston's article in New West that touches on the importance of California in the growing popularity of roleplaying games.

I've touched on the topic of California and its gaming scene before, but I especially like this paragraph for its quotes from Gygax and Stafford. Gygax's comment that "the East was slow at first" intrigues me, since, by the time I'd entered the hobby, it was pretty well entrenched in the region. The Baltimore/DC/Northern Virginia area seemed to be positively crawling with gamers, which makes sense, with its preponderance of universities and military bases, two breeding grounds for the hobby. Still, there's no denying the foundational role that California (and the West Coast more generally) played in not just embracing Dungeons & Dragons but in creating early alternatives to it.   

The Perils and Pleasures of Dungeons and Dragons

I tell this story often, so, if you're a regular reader of this blog, you've probably heard it before: I first learned about the existence of Dungeons & Dragons due the media hoopla surrounding the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August 1979. My father was quite intrigued by the story and read everything he could about it in newspapers and magazines. I remember his asking me if I knew anything about D&D and, at the time, I hadn't. His interest is what prompted my mother to buy him a copy of the Holmes Basic Set, which I later "inherited" when it turned out he had no real interest in the game itself, only the story of Egbert's disappearance. 

A consequence of this is that, once I did start playing RPGs, I would instinctively clip out any articles I came across that talked about the hobby and put them into a huge binder. I left the binder at my parents' home when I went away to college and, over the years, it disappeared. I regret that, because it contained a large number of interesting articles from various early 1980s sources, articles I've been unable to find again, even in library archives. 

Once I started taking a more serious interest in the history of roleplaying games, I again started collecting contemporary articles that talked about them. An excellent early article is "It's Only A Game – Or Is It?" by Moira Johnston, which appeared in the August 25, 1980 issue of New West. New West, for those who don't know, was a sister periodical to New York magazine, focusing on the life and culture of the American southwest (which generally meant California, though not always). It's on this basis that Johnston's article appears, since it opens with a recounting of the time she and her thirteen year-old son played RuneQuest at the Berkeley home of its creator, Greg Stafford. "It's a bit like being invited to play piano with Mozart," she explains.

Despite its somewhat sensationalistic title, which I assume was a copy editor's idea, the eight-page article is evenhanded and surprisingly full of factual information. Unlike so many articles about roleplaying, whether written then or now, Johnston took time to get the details right. For example, in recounting her adventure in Glorantha, she talks about "the Lunars, the despotic empire to the north" and Snakepipe Hollow, "one of the worst stinkpots of chaos in the whole of Dragon Pass." This might seem like a small thing, but it's not. Johnston not only played a session of RuneQuest, she seems to have understood what was happening in the session and retained it, which is more than many journalists assigned a story about roleplaying back in the day did. 

Johnston also gets kudos from me for interviewing lots of people and listening to them talk about the games they played and why they enjoyed them. In addition to Stafford, she talked to Gary Gygax, Lee Gold, Dave Hargrave, Clint Bigglestone, Steve Perrin, and numerous players of the game, most notably a young woman named Deanna Sue White, whose campaign setting of Mistigar gets quite a few paragraphs devoted to it. The article is not a hit piece but rather a sober examination of the phenomenon of roleplaying games from a variety of perspectives, most of which quite positive, even celebratory, about the fundamental goodness of this new hobby. 

All that said, Johnston also gives space to criticisms of roleplaying and its supposed dangers, particularly from a psychological/psychiatric point of view. Mention is made, too, of Heber City, Utah, whose school board banned the playing of D&D as part of after-school clubs (mentioned in an issue of Different Worlds), but it's quickly followed up by criticism of its own. Likewise, though the disappearance and later suicide of Egbert is also mentioned, but it's neither dwelt upon nor is it implied to be indicative of any inherent danger in roleplaying. If anything, the article suggests that roleplaying – or FRP, in the parlance of the time – is a "blessed sanctuary for the fragile egos of the shy, sensitive, and cerebral." Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin are both quoted as agreeing with this assessment.

If I have a complaint about the article, it's that Johnston occasionally come across as dismissive of the people involved in creating RPG materials for publication. For instance, she introduces Gygax to her readers as "a former shoe-repairman, insurance underwriter, unpublished novelist, and unemployed gaming enthusiast," while she describes Dave Hargrave as "a shuffling, black-bearded bear of a man whose 250-pound body is archetype of the physically passive fantasy gamer." It's hard to say whether Johnston was genuinely disdainful or if it was simply a way to flatter her readers with the assurance that the middle-aged men who like this kind of thing are weirdos unlike themselves. Whatever her motivation, I find it mars what is largely a decent examination of the nascent hobby from the point of view of an interested outsider.

Early on in the article, Johnston describes roleplaying thusly:

There's an intriguing mishmash of ideas there and many of them get explored throughout the article, particularly those of a psychological bent, as I mentioned earlier. This seems to have been a common theme in early articles about RPGs. It's a reminder, I think, of just how innovative the concept of roleplaying as a form of entertainment was – so innovative that many people at the time genuinely had a difficult time viewing it as anything but evidence of mental instability. The story of James Dallas Egbert simultaneously birthed and fed off of these ideas, creating a lasting impression of roleplayers that survived well into the 21st century. 

The criticisms and negative comments Johnston reports from various sources are counter-balanced by those with positive experiences and perceptions of RPGs. That's why I generally look on the article as balanced, especially when compared to other articles published around the same time. That said, I understand that, when it was published, opinion of it was quite divided within the roleplaying world, with some seeing it as painting the hobby in a bad light. Perhaps my admiration for Johnston's willingness to play RuneQuest and talk to a diverse group of people is blinding me to the shortcomings of her article, I don't know. If nothing else, this is probably the longest article on the subject from the time period I've ever read and that alone made it worthwhile.

Different Worlds: Issue #8

Issue #8 of Different Worlds (June/July 1980) features a cover by Steve Oliff and opens with an article by Robert Harder entitled "Teaching Role-Playing," another entry in the continuing "Better Game Mastering" series. Despite its title, the article is not about how to teach someone to play a RPG but rather about the process of becoming and developing one's skills as a Game Master. I have a fondness for these kinds of articles, especially older ones, since they sometimes offer unique perspectives on the art of refereeing. Harder has a number of worthy insights to share, including his emphasis a gaming session as a "social gathering" and his belief that a session "should not exceed three hours." The latter point is one I feel very keenly these, though I would never have accepted it in my youth, when four to six hours – or longer – was a more common length.

John T. Sapienza has written D&D variant article called "Sleep vs. Mixed Parties." Sapienza's concern is that, as written, the sleep spell is difficult to adjudicate against enemies with mixed hit dice. Consequently, he proposes rewriting the spell to be both clearer and somewhat less powerful, while also leaving the door open to higher-level versions of the spell. I don't have much to say about Sapienza's specific point, but I will say that I generally appreciate seeing articles like this, since they reflect a culture of play and reveal the idiosyncrasies of individual referees. To my mind, this is where roleplaying lives and it ought to be applauded.

"Alien and Starships & Spacemen" by Leonard Kanterman is a both a review of the 1979 science fiction film, Alien, and a scenario inspired by it for use with the aforementioned RPG. It's fine for what it is, though it's very grim for a game inspired by the original series of Star Trek. John T. Sapienza re-appears with another article, "Talent Tables," intended as a follow-up to his "Developing a Character's Appearance" piece in issue #5. This article is in a similar vein, providing a D1000 table that confers minor (+1 or +2) bonuses in a wide variety of situations to characters. For my tastes, it's a lot of unnecessary work for very little mechanical benefit, but, again, I think articles like this arose out of the play of individual campaigns and, for that reason alone, I have a certain affection for them nonetheless. Sapienza also penned a review of four RPG products from a company called Bearhug Game Accessories. The products are a series of counters for keeping track of equipment and treasure – an idea I've seen in other contexts and that definitely has something to recommend it.

Lewis Pulsipher's "Defining the Campaign: Game Master Styles" is an overview of the kinds of decisions a referee must make in describing his campaign, such its degrees of believability, risk, reward, the extent to which the referee is truly impartial, and so on. Pulsipher does a good job, I think, of outlining many of the big questions. Simon Magister's "Composite Bows" is a historical article about the development and use of these weapons and interesting if you're into this kind of thing. There's a review of Heritage's Dungeon Dwellers line of miniatures by – guess who? – John T. Sapienza. I didn't own many of this line, but I enjoy retrospectives on old school minis like this; they're a terrific blast of nostalgia.

Anders Swenson provides a very positive review of the D&D module The Keep on the Borderlands. Ron Weaver's "Zelan the Beast" is a Gloranthan cult for RuneQuest. Dave Arneson and Steve Perrin review the two volumes of Walter William's Tradition of Victory Age of Fighting Sale wargame and RPG. Perrin also reviews Advanced Melee and Wizard by Steve Jackson, both of which he highly praises. Lee Gold, meanwhile, describes "How I Designed Land of the Rising Sun," her RPG of feudal Japan. This is a fine article, since Gold talks not just about how she designed the game's rules but also the process of research, writing, and rewriting that led to the game's final form – very fascinating stuff! "Alignment on Trial" by David R. Dunham is exactly what you'd expect: another entry in the hoary genre of why alignment is too simple/limited/inadequate/just plain dumb. To be fair to Dunham, his perspective is more nuanced than that, though it does at times have the air of a teenager reading philosophy for the first time and suddenly thinking he's thought things no other human has ever thought. 

The issue ends with Gigi D'Arn's column, filled, as ever, with terrific tidbits from gaming's past. For example, it notes that the three volumes of Dave Hargrave's Arduin series have sold 40,000 copies! Not bad. There's also a reference to TSR's ending of its exclusive distribution arrangement with Games Workshop, no doubt a prelude to the establishment of TSR UK. Apropos recent discussions, Gigi notes that the name of SPI's then-upcoming fantasy RPG had run into a trademark snag with Martian Metals, which is not what I was expecting to read. There's also mention that school board of Heber City, Utah has "chucked D&D" (whatever that means in this case) because "townspeople found it un-Christian, communistic, liable to leave players open to Satanic influence, etc." I've said before that I never personally experienced much pushback against RPGs because of their supposed Satanism, but it was apparently a very real thing in some places and this is evidence of that, I guess.

In any case, Different Worlds is clearly growing more confident and interesting. I very much enjoyed this issue and will be curious to see where the magazine goes in future issues.

Arduin for the Masses

Once upon a time, Dave Hargrave's Arduin books were somewhat controversial – and in some RPG circles, they still are. There are many reasons for this, starting with the fact that, as Mike Gunderloy explains in his 1979 article, "Arduin for the Masses," 

The Arduin Trilogy is not D&D, nor is it a second-generation game, but rather it is a rules supplement designed to be used in conjunction with D&D or other FRP games.

Arduin's dependence on Dungeons & Dragons is almost certainly one of the reasons that Gary Gygax famously mocked its first volume through the cursed item, the vacuous grimoire. Beyond that, though, I think there was a snobbery about Arduin and similar products that took D&D – and fantasy roleplaying more generally – in different directions than those that Gary favored. To be honest, I share some of that snobbery myself, despite the best efforts of others to dissuade me of it. Nevertheless, there's no denying the impact that Arduin had on the early hobby, which is why I found Gunderloy's article from issue #5 of Different Worlds worth commenting upon at greater length.  

Gunderloy then dubs Arduin a "hybrid game" that "depends on another set of rules for its basic foundation, but expands and changes almost every facet of the game." He elaborates as follows:

The emphasis on "Dave's style of gaming" is an important one, I think, and a reminder of how often what we judge to be "bad" (or vacuous) says more about our own personal preferences than about the thing being judged. Consider, for example, how many gamers, body today and back in the day, judge Gygaxian D&D to be an awful thing. When it comes to one's entertainments, everyone has their own tastes and preferences and, while I don't think such things are wholly subjective and therefore impervious to reasoned discussion, I also don't think it's possible to reason someone into liking pistachio ice cream, if you get my meaning. The same is true of RPG rules and settings.

Gunderloy notes that The Arduin Trilogy contains "a large number of character classes," some of which are "rewrites of familiar classes" and others that "expansions of ones barely mentioned in the original D&D rules" or "totally new ones." He adds that, although he believes that all of these classes are "well playbalanced [sic]," some of them are not as well explained as they might have been. Nevertheless, Gunderloy believes that this lack of explanation "should serve mainly to encourage some thought on the part of the original GM, rather than slavish use of the rules because they are rules."

I know from experience that some, perhaps many, reading Gunderloy's comments will dismiss them as self-serving, presenting ill-explained or just plain poor rules as somehow intentionally an occasion to exercise thought and creativity. There's some truth behind that dismissal. At the same time, I also genuinely believe that what Gunderloy is saying reflects a primal approach to the activity of gaming that has been, if not completely lost, buried under decades of other approaches intended to limit, if not eliminate, rules ambiguity and – especially – the need for referee judgment. "Rulings, not rules" is not just a slogan but in fact a pillar of what roleplaying is all about. The fact that it's nowadays seen as a facet of "old school" play is, I think, evidence of just how much the hobby has changed over the last half century. 

In this respect, The Arduin Trilogy, for all its stylistic differences from Gygaxian (or even Arnesonian) Dungeons & Dragons is still very much a reflection of the earliest traditions of the hobby. 

Different Worlds: Issue #5

Different Worlds: Issue #2

Issue #2 of Different Worlds (April 1979) features a cover by William Church (creator of one of my favorite RPG maps) and Steve Oliff. The issue kicks off with another installment of Charlie Krank's "Beginner's Brew," this one subtitled "... and you say that this is a game?" The article is aimed at first-time referees and focuses on the nuts and bolts of designing an adventuring locale. Krank even offers up a sample locale to illustrate his points. Like last issue's article, this is fine as far as it goes and the adventure locale it presents is actually quite intriguing. 

Steve Lortz reviews a game I've never heard of, Legacy, written by David A. Feldt. If Lortz's review is to be believed, Legacy is "a signal work in the expansion of role-play," but it's difficult to tell precisely what the game is about. It appears to be a game about the Neolithic era, but the review says little more. A quick search online reveals that Legacy is quite infamous for its convoluted and unclear rules, something even Lortz alludes to in his otherwise positive review. 

The second part of Mike Gunderloy's "Specialty Mages" is a meaty one indeed, covering six pages and providing details on mages of light, darkness, fire, and ice. While none of this is material I'd personally use in any of my own games, it's nevertheless fascinating to see early D&D variants, particularly those that appeared in publications outside of TSR's orbit. Elaine Normandy and John T. Sapienza Jr have written "Character Name Tables," which are just that: random tables for generating the names of humans, elves, dwarves, and hobbits, as seen in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The next installment of "My Life in Role-Playing" includes articles by both Steve Jackson and David A. Feldt, writer of the aforementioned Legacy. Jackson's piece is very fascinating and includes some interesting anecdotes about his The Fantasy Trip campaign, as well as his thoughts on roleplaying, that I'll share in an upcoming post. Feldt's article article is fascinating too but only because it's so bizarre. In it, he presents a probably tongue in cheek future history in which it's revealed that reality is itself a roleplaying game of sorts overseen by the Game Overall Director. I'm still confused.

"Starships & Spacemen Expansion Kit" by Leonard Kanterman is a collection of new rules and options for his 1977 Star Trek-inspired RPG. "Lord of the Dice" is a humorous set of one-page roleplaying game rules by Greg Costikyan. I share the developer's notes here, since they give you a good sense of the thing's overall flavor.

"Arduin, Bloody Arduin" is Dave Hargrave's overview of his famous game and campaign setting. Accompanies by a hand-drawn map, it's a good article for anyone interested in the setting and Hargrave's own philosophy of gaming. Like the previous installment of this series in issue #1, I enjoyed this one a lot and look forward to seeing more designers talk about their home campaigns. 

Steve Perrin writes about "The Cacodemon Cult" for RuneQuest and Steve Lortz appears again with "Dramatic Structure of RPGs." I must confess to finding the article, which begins by comparing RPGs to movies, quite tedious. It's precisely the kind of unnecessarily abstract philosophizing about gaming that sets my teeth on edge. Much more enjoyable is the very first column by the pseudonym Gigi D'Arn, the roleplaying hobby's famed gossip columnist. I could – and probably should – write an entire post about this first installment, because it's filled with lots of amusement, not to mention genuine gossip, such as 

So far as I know, the identity of Gigi has never been revealed, though I believe the most common theory is that she was not a single person but rather a house name used by editor Tadashi Ehara and anyone else who submitted bits to the published piece. From the vantage point of 2021, though, it's fun to read columns like this, if only to get a sense of what the hobby was like at the end of the 1970s – small but growing and still very clubbish. This is right before I started gaming and, though I never participated in its directly, being just a little too young, echoes of it could still be heard. I'd be lying if I didn't say I miss those days.

Different Worlds: Issue #1

Different Worlds premiered in February 1979 with Tadashi Ehara as its editor, a position he held for the entirety of the magazine's run. Ehara states, in his inaugural editorial, that Chaosium wanted to produce "a magazine to cover all aspects of role-playing, from Dungeons and Dragons to Bunnies and Burrows, from Traveller to En Garde! Even SPI's Commando." Thus, Different Worlds was intended to cover the entirety of the hobby rather than focusing on a specific game or even group of games. In this, Different Worlds was no different than Dragon, White Dwarf, or Imagine, though I have little doubt that its origins on the west coast of the United States colored its content in ways both subtle and obvious.

The issue kicks off with Charlie Krank's "Beginner's Brew," the subtitle of which is "What is all this stuff?" Krank then explains what an RPG is and what its various elements (referee, players, dice, etc.) are and how they all relate to one another. The article is basic, as one might expect, but what interests me most is that such an article was deemed necessary at all. Yes, it was written in early 1979, barely five years after the invention of the hobby, but how many readers of Different Worlds wouldn't know what a roleplaying game was? Of course, Imagine regularly included such articles, too; perhaps it was simply considered a requirement at the time, much like examples of play in RPG rulebooks.

Next up is the first part of Mike Gunderloy's D&D variant, "Specialty Mages." Specialty mages, as opposed to "True Mages," (i.e. OD&D magic-users) are somewhat more robust (d6 hit dice) and have a wider range of weapons (swords and spear) but have a narrower, more focused list of available spells. The first part focuses on the Mages of Earth, providing lists for spell levels 1–10 – yes, 10. This is not explained, simply presented as if it were a fact, which I suspect reflects early house rules of an additional level above 9. I myself remember encountering such things in the early '80s, which suggests it was a widespread notion. I'm curious to see what Gunderloy might do in the second part of the article.

"My Life and Role-Playing" is a collection of articles of varying lengths by notable game designers and writers of the period, in which they talk about their early experiences with the hobby – how they discovered it, what led to their creating a game of their own, etc. – and, in several cases, give us insight into their home campaigns. The range of writers is indeed vast, consisting of (among many others) Ken St. Andre, Marc Miller, Greg Costikyan, Dennis Sustare, Lee Gold, and Dave Hargrave. I could devote a post or more to each of these articles, since nearly all of them contain historical tidbits that were otherwise unknown to me. For example, Marc Miller not only mentions his unpublished fantasy RPG, Companions of the Road but also Frank Chadwick's If I Were King … (which might be an earlier version of Liege Lord). Equally interesting is reading about Dave Hargrave's disappointment with OD&D and how it fueled his desire to come up with his own design. It's terrific stuff and I'm so very glad I read it.

Ed Simbalist, one of the creators of Chivalry & Sorcery and Space Opera, presents "Archaeron," his home fantasy campaign setting, along with a hand drawn map of its main area. What's most appealing about the article is not so much its content, which, if I am honest, isn't all that remarkable, but Simbalist's own comments on why he designed the setting in the way he did. I adore articles of this sort and wish more game designers – or indeed just gamers – would do something like this. Greg Stafford provides "The Cult of Geo," a new cult for use with RuneQuest, the first bit of content in the issue specifically geared toward a Chaosium game. 

Steve Lortz's "What is a Role-Playing Game?" is an odd article, not quite in the same genre of Charlie Krank's earlier piece from the same issue. Rather than being a discussion of RPGs from the perspective of a neophyte, it is rather an examination "rule organization," with a focus on things like time, scale, and sequences, among related topics. He demonstrates his point of view more fully by outlining the rules structure of an imaginary game, Cannibals and Castaways, in which the player characters attempt to survive on a desert island inhabited by cannibals. There's even an example of play, followed by yet more analysis of RPG rules, this time with an eye on "move structure in RPGs," "move" here being a synonym for "action." As I said, it's an odd article and I must confess I found it tedious and generally uninteresting to me (but my disinterest in rules discussion is legendary). The issue concludes with an article by P.E.I. Bonewits and Larry Press to support Authentic Thaumaturgy. 

My overall impression of Different Worlds is immensely positive after only a single issue. Unlike Imagine, which seemed to take a while to find its footing, it's pretty clear that Different Worlds already has a good sense of what it's about. Since I only ever read a single issue of the magazine back in the day and one fairly late in its run – I can't recall the issue number but I will remember it when I get to re-reading it – this is all new to me. I anticipate that there will be many moments of discovery and pleasure along the way; I cannot wait to read more.

Warlocks of the Dark Star

Here's an advertisement from the back of Book of the Dragons, written by D.H. Casciano and M. Fisher and appearing in 1977. Warlocks of the Dark Star did eventually appear in 1979 and was apparently a hex and chit style wargame in which one player takes the role of the magic-using Warlocks and the other takes the role of the scientific Technoids. The theme of science/technology vs magic remains a staple of fantasy even today, but it seems to have been enjoyed a high point during the 1970s, with Ralph Bakshi's Wizards being a noteworthy example of it. 

Regardless, this advertisement – and the book from which it came – is a reminder that the history of the hobby is replete with dark alleyways and forgotten lore of the sort that Jon Peterson has been busy chronicling for some time now. How many of us have ever heard of the Attack International Wargaming Association, for example? There are many more companies like it, producing original RPG material with very limited budgets and small print runs. Their products, though perhaps not as well known or influential as, say, Dave Hargrave's Arduin books, are another reminder of the reckless ferment that characterized the first five years of the hobby

The Other Howling Tower

After yesterday's post, I was reminded that The Howling Tower is also the name of Arduin Dungeon #2, published in 1979 by Grimoire Games. So far as I can tell, there's no connection of any sort between this dungeon and Leiber's short story, but I have not looked at it closely in some time (but may do so for a future retrospective). So far as I can recall, the main attraction to the module is the inclusion of some artwork by a young Erol Otus before he was employed by TSR (though this is hardly unique to The Howling Tower).

A Shout-Out to Dave Hargrave

It's no secret that, when it comes to RPGs, I have a fairly narrow range of interests. In my younger days, the Holy Trinity consisted of AD&D, Traveller, and Call of Cthulhu (in that order). I played other games, of course, but I played very few of them with the same level of frequency and enthusiasm as I played these three. During the late '80s and throughout much of the '90s, I expanded my interests somewhat, partially because I was trying my hand at professional RPG writing and it only made sense to cast my net as widely as possible, but those years were unusual.

Consequently, I haven't been paying much attention to the development of a fantasy RPG called 13th Age, written by Jonathan Tweet and Rob Heinsoo and published by Pelgrane Press. From what I had gathered, 13th Age is a kinda-sorta clone of D&D IV. Since I wasn't interested in 4e the first time around, I certainly had no interest in its clone version.

The reason I mention 13th Age at all is because of a blog post by Jonathan Tweet, pointed out to me by reader Greg Oakes. In it, Tweet heaps praises upon Dave Hargrave of Arduin Grimoire fame and notes the degree to which his latest game owes to him. It's really gratifying to see this, as I think Hargrave is under-appreciated outside the OSR. Heck, even within the OSR, I think there's less appreciation of him than there ought to be (says the man guilty of this very thing for years). 13th Age doesn't really sound like my kind of game, but knowing that its designers took a page or two from Dave Hargrave -- and aren't shy about saying so -- made me smile nonetheless.

A Hargravian Coincedence

I'm not a regular reader of RPGnet, but I do read Shannon Appelcline's "Designers & Dragons" column from time to time, since he's often done some terrific work presenting the early history of the personalities and companies of the hobby. His latest column discussed the pre-history of Grimoire Games, which published Arduin. In it, he briefly mentions a fact about the life of Dave Hargrave, creator of Arduin:

Dave Hargrave got into RPGs through a variety of different paths. He first heard of roleplaying in 1968 at the Military Intelligence School at Fort Holabird, Maryland — prior to his work with the Defense Intelligence Agency.

What's interesting to me is that Hargrave was stationed at Fort Holabird in 1968. Among other things, Fort Holabird was -- it no longer exists -- was home to the Army Intelligence School, where my father was sent upon entering the military. The year? 1968.

Now, I realize that a lot of soldiers were stationed at Fort Holabird, especially since it was also home to an Armed Forces Examining and Entrance Station and this was during a period of escalation in the Vietnam War. The odds of my father and Hargrave knowing one another, even though they were both stationed at the same post and were enrolled in the Military Intelligence School at the same time, is small. Still, it's an amusing thought.

The Vacuous Grimoire

From page 155 of the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Masters Guide (1979) by Gary Gygax:

A book of this sort is totally impossible to tell from a normal one, although if a detect magic spell is cast, there will be a magical aura noted. Any character who opens the work and reads so much as a single glyph therein must make 2 saving throws versus magic. The first is to determine if 1 point of intelligence is lost, the second is to find if 2 points of wisdom are lost. Once opened and read, the vacuous grimoire remains, and it must be burned to be rid of it after first casting a remove curse spell. If the tome is placed with other books, its appearance will instantly alter to conform to one of the other works it is amongst.

If I ever publish a fanzine, I'm calling dibs on The Vacuous Grimoire as its title.

My Arduin Education

As I admitted years ago, I long held an unthinking prejudice against Dave Hargrave's Arduin books, a prejudice I still haven't wholly overcome, even if I've made great strides in that regard. Even if, ultimately, Arduin "isn't for me," I have started to appreciate it in its own right and have found that, despite the stolidity of my imagination, little bits of Hargravian has seeped in over the last couple of years.

I own the first three volumes of the Arduin Grimoire series and nothing more. What I'd like to hear -- from fans of Arduin, not its detractors -- is whether there are any subsequent volumes or related products that you think might be helpful to me as I continue my education. Are volumes IV-IX worth owning? What about Hargrave's dungeons? The modern Arduin books by later authors? Let me know what you think.

Thanks!