Rudy Kraft Responds

The response to my two-part interview with Rudy Kraft at the start of the month was very well received, generating a lot of comments and emails. A recurring elements of them was a desire for Rudy to expand upon or clarify his answers to my interview questions. Fortunately for readers of Grognardia, Rudy was paying attention to the comments and sent along a collection of responses to some of the questions put to him, along with some further thoughts and reflections on matters of interest.

Because there are a lot of replies and because some of them are lengthy, I'm going to place them behind the jump break below.

Interview: Rudy Kraft (Part II)

4. Were you ever formally an employee of Chaosium or were you simply a freelance writer and designer for the company?

I was never an employee of Chaosium. All the work I did for them was as a freelance writer and designer. I was, for four months, an employee of Judges Guild. I was never an employee of any other game company although I was flown to Las Vegas to interview with Coleco for a job as a game designer in Connecticut. I was recommended for this job by Jennell Jaquays, with whom I had worked on several projects. I ended up turning the job down because at that time, Coleco only had a handheld gaming device with which I was not impressed. To be fair, I have never used a handheld gaming device or controller other than for the original Pong. All my electronic gaming has been on computers, so my judgment in this area might have been flawed.

Also, the pay being offered by Coleco was not significantly above what I was making as a combination freelance game designer, book seller, and legal secretary for my mother. And after spending four winters in Ithaca, New York and one winter in Decatur, Illinois, I preferred to live in the Bay Area to avoid snow. Other than my four months with Judges Guild, I was never a formal employee of a game company. Even my work as editor of Gryphon was done as a freelancer where I got paid a certain amount of money for gathering the articles and editing them for each issue of the magazine.  

5. You also wrote a number of products published by Judges Guild. How did that come about and what do you recall about it?

My involvement with Judges Guild came about when Greg decided to exclude the Broken Tree content from Snake Pipe Hollow.  As best I can tell, he did so for reasons of space not quality. Greg told me that they had signed an agreement with Judges Guild to produce licensed RuneQuest products. He suggested that I expand the material and submit it to them. I did so. I do not have any detailed memories of my work on that project, but it did lead to a job offer. Unlike the job offer from Coleco, which occurred several years later, I accepted this job offer and moved to Decatur, Illinois in January 1980. I remained there for 4 months during which time I designed and worked on several projects for the Judges Guild.  

I attended the Origins game conventions in Philadelphia in June of 1979 and again in 1980. I wanted to make contacts and look for work in the gaming industry. The job with Judges Guild partially arose out of the 1979 trip. My work on Frontiers of Alusia with SPI arose out of the 1980 trip.

I remember many things about my involvement with Judges Guild quite clearly and some not at all.  While I was Judges Guild, I injured my back moving heavy boxes. Prior to that time, I had no problems with my back. Since that time, I have had intermittent chronic back pain which requires precautions to avoid ongoing pain. I think it’s likely I would have eventually had back problems anyway, but I didn’t need it to trigger at age 22.  

I left Judges Guild because the owner, Bob Bledsaw, became concerned because there was a burglary in a building somewhat near the Judges Guild offices. He decided to address the burglary by buying a gun and leaving it in the office so whoever was there could protect themselves. This probably seemed like a perfectly sensible plan from the perspective of someone living in downstate Illinois, but it seemed crazy to me as a 22-year-old from Palo Alto, California. As a result, I left the Judges Guild and went home.

However, this was not a hostile breakup. I continued to produce projects for Judges Guild for several years thereafter. I began to represent Judges Guild at San Francisco Bay area game conventions by running a booth in the dealer hall. I don’t remember the specific financial arrangements, but it was financially profitable, albeit not greatly so, for both Judges Guild and myself.  

The RPGGeek website shows that I had been involved in 26 projects as a designer. Some of them are duplicate entries or things where I only contributed a short element. However, 10 of them were separate Judges Guild products. 

My contributions to the Book of Treasure Maps II, Book of Treasure Maps III, Legendary Duck Tower, Duck Pond, and Portals of Torsh were done as a Judges Guild employee. Treasure Maps II involved me completing work that someone else had already started. I started Treasure Maps III but Edward Mortimer completed it after I left. Legendary Duck Tower had been started by Jaquays while she was a Judges Guild employee. I finished it while I was working there. Its title was a pun on her Dark Tower D&D adventure. Obviously, Duck Pond took the punning title sequence one step further.

The other five products were items that I designed freelance after I left Judges Guild. Wondrous Relics was inspired by my RuneQuest product, Plunder. I thought it would be fun to make a bunch of new magic items for Dungeons & Dragons. I should pull out a copy and see if there is anything worth using in my current campaign.

The three portal products were designed to create an interconnected series of worlds where each product would provide a background for a world which Dungeon Masters could add to their campaign, if they wanted to have multi-planet campaign.  

I don’t remember much about design process of each of these items except that in September of 1980, I bought an Apple 2+ computer. From that point on I was typing my work, and my mother’s legal work, on that computer. At the time, there wasn’t any standardized word processing program, so I still submitted everything on paper, and it had to be retyped by the game publisher. I don’t remember the specific word processing program I used, but it was nowhere near as user friendly as the current ones.  So, for example, if I accidentally deleted something, there was no control Z to bring it right back. I had to retype it. Thus, there were number of occasions where work was lost because of accidental deletions or a failure to save combined with a computer crash, which also occurred much more often than it does now. In addition, there was no internal hard drive, so everything had to be saved onto a separate floppy disk.

I stopped representing Judges Guild at Bay area conventions in 1983 or 1984 after I got a part-time job at a local bookstore which became a full-time job that lasted until 1985 when I left to go to law school. 

Snowed Under

I'm still rather busy, so posting will continue to be uncharacteristically light for the next little while, though I do hope to get in some reviews soon, if nothing else. In the meantime, enjoy this little gem I found in issue 14 of Judges Guild's The Dungeoneer (November/December 1979), in which Paul Jaquays provides RQ stats for everyone's favorite barbarian aardvark.

Open Friday: Three Castles Award

As some of you may be aware, Rob Kuntz conceived of a new award, the Three Castles Award (so named after Castles Blackmoor, Greyhawk, and El Raja Key -- yeah, I too think it's a bit much to insert one's own creation into such a pantheon too, even when, as in this case, there's certainly merit to the cause for doing so), which is intended to honor "designers of the highest merit for outstanding work in the industry of Role Playing Game design." You can read more specific details about the award here, including its submission guidelines.

According to those guidelines, gaming products -- meaning "RPG rules, settings, adventures, sourcebooks and/or combinations of these" -- published between October 1, 2009 and October 1, 2010 are eligible for consideration for the 2011 award. The submission window is between October 1 and December 31, 2010, meaning that we're just at the start of it now.

I'll admit that I personally find the scope of the award a bit too broad, since, theoretically, any RPG product could be submitted and win, but I also think that alternatives to awards like the Origins and ENnie Awards are a good thing. For today's question, though, I thought I'd ask: what products published within the aforementioned dates do you think are worthy of recognition by this award? If you had the ability to do so, which products would you submit for consideration?

Retrospective: Griffin Mountain

Originally published in 1981, Griffin Mountain has been called -- not unreasonably -- one of the best RPG products ever produced for any game. Subtitled "A Complete Wilderness Campaign for RuneQuest," it was written by Rudy Kraft and Paul Jaquays, with additional material by Greg Stafford and details the Gloranthan region of Balazar, which is to the northwest of Prax, where so many early RuneQuest products were set.

And the subtitle is no joke: Griffin Mountain really is a complete campaign in a single 200-page book. Within its pages, you'll find information not just on the history and geography of Balazar, which are pretty standard for sourcebooks of this kind, but also information about the peoples, beliefs, and locations of the place. So, each settlement gets a write-up, along with its leaders and inhabitants, as do various citadels, caravans, and points of interest. There are weather tables and dozens of rumors, in addition to reaction and encounter tables, maps galore, and of course plenty of scenarios. In short, it's the perfect toolkit for a Gloranthan sandbox campaign.

If Griffin Mountain has a flaw, it's that it may be too comprehensive and getting a handle on all of its details is difficult, even for an experienced referee. After all, it describes a nearly 800-kilometer wide area of wilderness, inhabited by thousands of barbaric humans and as many non-humans. Besides Griffin Mountain itself, there's the River of the Damned, Dragonnewt Plinth, Firshala's Prison, and many more significant locales, each of which gets a full description, including maps in many cases. There's also the fact that, set as it is in Glorantha, there are additional details to consider, those quirky bits of lore and context that make Glorantha the remarkable fantasy setting that it is.

But it can be overwhelming and to take full advantage of Griffin Mountain, one would need to spend a great deal of time reading it, taking notes, and preparing in advance. This is not a product that can be picked up and used without preparation, even if the book does handle some of the tedious tasks of refereeing RuneQuest, such as providing stats for all the humans and monsters the characters are likely to encounter. Griffin Mountain is thus very much a product of its time, which is to say that, despite its wealth of information and prepared scenarios, it's still not fully usable "out of the box." It demands that the referee pore over its pages and make it his own, a process that takes time, effort, and no small amount of creativity to do right.

Of course, the result is well worth the effort, as Griffin Mountain is a true masterpiece of the early days of gaming. It's a great example of a sandbox, filled with people, places, and adventure hooks to keep a party of characters busy for innumerable nights of adventure. Best of all, none of it feels heavy-handed or pre-scripted. Instead, what you get is a large canvas on which to create stories of one's own against the backdrop of one region of the world of Glorantha. It's hard to do justice to it in a few words and, even if I described its entire contents exhaustively, it still wouldn't convey just what it is that makes Griffin Mountain so remarkable. It's a pity that it's long out of print and difficult to obtain nowadays, because I'd wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what sandbox gaming is all about. For that matter, I think some publishers could do worse than to emulate it. Nearly 30 years later, it still has few competitors.

Interview: Paul Jaquays (Part II)

6. You produced material for SPI's DragonQuest, one of the lesser known fantasy RPGs of the 80s, such the adventure "The Enchanted Wood," which I understand you consider one of your best designs. What is it about this adventure that you regard so highly after all these years?

It's the last game adventure that I wrote as a freelance adventure designer (the first time around). It's a setting where I was totally in control of the world and its contents and not share-cropping in others' worlds (as with RuneQuest or later D&D and AD&D adventures I created). The entire adventure is "soft-keyed" meaning that in a sense, even the "fixed" locations in the map are more or less random encounters which can also be placed as needed by the GM to develop the players' story. It's chock full of memorable characters and situations (i.e.; Jhingleshod the Iron Axeman, The Knight of Horns, and the wizard Amelior Amanitas). Of course some of this could be nostalgia driven by the fact that very few people have seen this adventure (other than collectors) due to the relative lack of popularity of DragonQuest and the demise of SPI not long after its publication.

7. Speaking from personal experience, I know that your Central Casting books are among the most popular you've ever written. I know gamers who, to this day, religiously use Central Casting when creating new characters. What was the origin of this product and what do you think is the secret of its appeal?

Role play gamers are on the whole, a very creative sub-set of humanity. But everyone's imagination benefits from inspiration or random input. And the Central Casting books, being driven by a series of dice rolls are all about inspiring with randomness. It was about getting players to enrich their role playing experience by creating characters that moved beyond the twin limitations of stereo-typing and min-max power gaming.

Central Casting started while I was in college in the late 70s with some simple social status tables inspired by articles in early (as in single digit issue number early) copies of The Dragon magazine; which over the course of a few months developed into a series of tables that outlined a previous history that included social status, parental employment, and personal quirks (published in an early The Dungeoneer). I tested this on my gaming group, who liked it, but thought too many characters were orphaned when their villages were destroyed. Somehow this project became a part of classwork for my creative writing class and actually was taken into consideration for the humanities honor awards I received at graduation. This work eventually appeared in The Dungeoneer issue #9 as "The Fantasy Role-Playing Previous History System" (Catchy title!).

The project sat dormant for several years. While home sick from work for a few days in the early 80s, I started making notes about how to expand the previous history system, blocking out much of the structure of the final book, but taking it no further.

In the late 80s, while working freelance and looking for large projects, I'm fairly certain it was Rick Loomis who nudged me in the direction of Task Force Games as a publisher. I met with Alan Eldridge at GenCon in the summer of 1987 and they signed me to a deal for the first book. I produced the entire first book on a turn-key basis; doing all the writing, the art, the page setting and the final pre-press set up.

I think Central Casting continues to appeal for several reasons. The books are genre specific, but not game specific. A history made with Heroes of Legend can fit into nearly any fantasy campaign or rule system, from OD&D to 4th Edition D&D, from RuneQuest to Warhammer. The generated history events often have a weird synchronicity to them that makes players want to draw the cause and effect lines between them. They inspire players to get outside the typical characters they often create.

8. Like a number of other tabletop RPG writers, you eventually made the leap to the video game industry, first starting with Coleco. Did you find the transition between the two industries difficult?

When I "leaped" into the video game industry the first time, I wasn't looking for a full time position. Coleco was simply a client at first. I needed a client that paid well (something the RPG industry circa 1980 was definitely not doing) and Coleco needed someone to help them make a fantasy game for a piece of prototype electronic game hardware. Video games actually came a couple years later, after I had been working for the company a while. I think it helped quite a great deal that I was not just a writer, but also worked as an artist. Much of what I did at Coleco was actually balanced between art and writing tasks.

When the video game bubble finally burst at Coleco in 1985, I eventually "leaped" back into RPG design and illustration and worked as a freelancer designing adventures and computer games and doing art for a lot of clients, mostly in the RPG field. I did that freelance (and then eventually as a TSR staff artist) for over 10 years.

When I "leaped" back into video games again full time in 1997 as a level designer at id, it was a mix of my reputation as an adventure designer and my traditional art skills that secured the job. Without either set of skills, I would not have succeeded at that time in the industry's history. Which is probably why for the next few years, traditional adventure designers rarely transitioned into computer games. Until story content heavy MMO games brought about a need for designers who could write (as opposed to construct in 3D), there just wasn't a real need for a lot of full time writers in video games.

9. Were there any particular skills you possessed as an artist and writer that have helped you in the computer games field?

Two things come to mind. The ability to simply communicate ideas being perhaps the key skill for the would-be digital game maker. The best designers are those who can convey ideas with both words and images, regardless of whether they are designing systems, writing content, or building 3D game levels. Throughout my career, I was either the artist who could write (both adventures and technical docs), or the writer/designer who could draw and construct in virtual 3D. This made me versatile and allowed me to choose to work on projects that didn't always require the same skill sets.

Over a career that has spanned three decades and is working on a fourth, the need for some of my specific services or skill focuses has dried up (e.g.; paste-up artists, full time RPG adventure designers, staff and free lance illustrators just to name a few), or in some cases the tasks I was doing became repetitive and boring. In at least one case I made a decision to stop writing RPG adventures because I found that I was starting to imitate my own previous work rather than being original. Being able to move between job descriptions (artist, writer, editor, level designer, content designer, etc.) over my career has allowed me to reinvent myself as needed and stay long term and full time in a field that can burn out or use up creative talent in a matter of a few years.

10. Are there any lessons you've learned from working in the computer game field that you think ought to be applied to tabletop RPG design?

Provide more than one solution to encounters, if only to be willing to accept the other solutions that your players devise.

Take into consideration your players' (not their characters') skills and ability to understand 3D space when creating or choosing adventures. Don't throw new players into complex 3D settings. Mapping and understanding one's position inside 3D space can be challenging even for skilled players. Start "flat" and work them up to spaces with more complicated vertical relationships.

Create spaces that could work in the real world. Walls have thickness. Large open interior spaces have to be supported by columns to be believable. As a fantasy illustrator, I learned to engage the viewer's suspension of disbelief by creating realistic, believable environments which would in turn lend their reality and believability to the fantasy elements found within. Designers need to do the same thing ... engage the players' suspension of disbelief just long enough to convince them that game situations are grounded in things that could happen.

Give your players "save spots" in your gaming sessions, natural breaks in the adventure where they can pull back, regroup, return to base, etc.

Finally, don't overwork the game's backstory. Less can be more, so write as little as you can to convey it. I emphasize this to the content designers on my own project teams. Your players will appreciate that you are creating plot and character links, but could probably care less about detailed ancestries, hidden motivations, or involved descriptions of locations and events that they will never encounter. They just want to hit things and move on. Don't make success in your game depend on reading multiple paragraphs of stilted description or dialogue.

11. Do you still play tabletop roleplaying games? If so, which ones?

The short answer some where between "not really" and "no."

I pretty much moved on from the playing side of role play games in the late 80s. I've never been big on doing for fun what I do for my day job. My last active role play gaming group involvement was in the mid-80s while working at Coleco. Our group was mostly designers from Coleco and in some cases, their wives. Notable were Lawrence Schick (author of White Plume Mountain and our main AD&D DM), Kevin Hendryx (also formerly of TSR), and B. Dennis Sustare (who created the druid class for D&D and co-authored the Bunnies & Burrows RPG). After Coleco shut down, the game group eventually dispersed and between being a young parent and a full time freelancer, I was never able to find time for another regular game group.

After moving to Dallas in 1997, I occasionally played in some of Sandy Petersen's games, but even that sort of trickled to not playing fairly quickly.

In past year or so, I've only played at the North Texas Roleplay Game convention in a few retro gaming events. Last year was the first time I'd actually played AD&D in possibly 22 years.

Interview: Paul Jaquays (Part I)

To long-time roleplayers, Paul Jaquays needs no introduction. One of the earliest and most prolific freelancers of the hobby, Mr Jaquays has written, edited, and illustrated many of its most well regarded products, including landmark adventures such as Caverns of Thracia, Griffin Mountain, and "Night of the Walking Wet." He kindly consented to an interview, the first part of which is presented below and covers his entry into the world of gaming, both as a player and as a writer/editor/illustrator. Part II, which will appear tomorrow includes additional insights into his RPG career, as well as his his professional activities in the years since.

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

I found RPGs by way of my younger brother's subscription to The General magazine. In the fall of 1975, I was working an evening shift at my college's radio station. The station played a lot of pre-recorded content, so I had nothing much to do between program changes. So when my younger brother Bruce called and told me about a sample magazine copy he had received called The Space Gamer (issue #2) I had time to listen. He proceeded to read me two reviews of a new game called Dungeons & Dragons. In looking back at one's life, one can usually find significant events that change the direction your life will take thereafter. This was one of those moments.

Hearing the game described, I knew I had come across something that I had been looking for since childhood ... a way to play out adventure fantasies like those in Conan, The Lord of the Rings and the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. I immediately ordered the rule sets and as many expansions as they had available. (Greyhawk, and maybe Blackmoor). I also dashed off some quick illustrative sketches for the magazine, my first submissions to a game publication of any kind. Greyhawk (and, I think, Chainmail) arrived in time for us to pore over them at the Thanksgiving break, but the rules didn't arrive until January of 1976 when I was out of the country on a school trip (I arrived home to discover that my brother and my buddies had gotten started without me). Within six months we were not only playing OD&D regularly with several DMs, but had also begun publishing our own game fan magazine, The Dungeoneer.

2. You mention The Dungeoneer, which is notable for not only being one of the earliest fanzine for D&D but also for having published some of the earliest adventures for the game. Looking back on it now, what contributions to it make you the most proud?

It's the adventures that stand out, and not simply because no one else was doing mini-adventures in 1976. When I read comments about the magazine or talk to fans (old and new), no one talks about the monsters, or the art, or the magic items and rules variants. It's always the adventures. I'm both flattered and honored when I read that gamers are constructing full campaigns around settings like "Night of the Walking Wet."

Second, it's that we were able to publish as many issues as we did back in a time when we (my gaming group) were all going to school full time, working at least part time, and trying to actually fit in gaming time. I know it's "get off my lawn" type talk, but I had to assemble the pre-press for every one of those magazines with rubber cement from typewriter-created galleys, PMTs (photo-mechanical-transfers of art), and sometimes the original art pieces themselves, and of course, press-on type for headlines.

Finally, it was something that I could do with my friends. I was the only member of that group to go on to a full time creative career, but my friends like J. Mark Hendricks, Merle Davenport, and artist Aaron Arocho still have their names memorialized in the hearts of Old School Gamers.

3. When did you decide you were interested in working professionally in the RPG field?

Almost immediately, I recognized that the RPG industry needed artists desperately and that this was a way to get my art published. Even before I started playing RPGs, I submitted sketches to The Space Gamer for publication. By the time I graduated from college, I had illustrated two microgames for Metagaming, been published in the first issue of Dragon magazine and numerous The Space Gamer issues, and was publishing my own D&D fan magazine.

In the spring of 1978, a couple months before graduation, I flew from Michigan to Texas to interview with Metagaming Concepts. They were considering bringing me on staff as an artist. After I returned to school, they let me know that they were going to hire a secretary instead (or perhaps another secretary as I remember several pretty young blonde girls being associated with the Metagaming offices). There were also some apologetic comments about them being atheists and me attending a Christian college. Not something you can say regarding a job interview these days, that's for sure.

After graduation, I tried to a pursue a more traditional commercial art career, ending up as a full time layout and paste-up artist for a quick-printer that had been my part-time employer during school. That job was brief. The city had blocked off the street on which the printer was located, eliminating all but foot traffic ... and soon my job with it. I no longer remember the specifics, but Chuck Anshell, who had purchased The Dungeoneer from from me and then taken it Judges Guild, arranged for me to come down and interview. I drove from Jackson, Michigan to Decatur, Illinois. I accepted the offered job (and the minimum wage paycheck it entailed), but only if I could continue to work out of my apartment in Michigan.

4. You're probably most famous in D&D circles for your Judges Guild work, particularly Dark Tower and the Caverns of Thracia. Do you have any particular memories about creating those two adventures?

I remember beginning to plan out bits of the adventure for Dark Tower while on the day long drive back from that first trip to Decatur, Illinois. Later, when I was home, I scrounged through my own game dungeons to cull the best "special" encounters for Dark Tower (other encounters ended up going into Morkendaine Manor, which I wrote for The Dungeoneer that fall). The whole Set vs. Mitra theme was greatly inspired by Conan the Barbarian fiction. I think the Conan story, "Red Nails," may have had some influence on the theme also, with it's rival bands warring within an ancient, enclosed space. I've always been fascinated by archaeology and the idea of excavating ancient ruins and finding them nearly intact. So I extrapolated that to a pair of opposing towers dedicated to opposing gods and then buried by some catastrophe.

Later, adherents of both faiths would excavate the buried towers and renew the battle. While many of the bits in Dark Tower came from my imagination, at least one was inspired by an encounter that designer Kerry Lloyd (of Thieves Guild fame) described during a visit to my home. He talked about a ring-shaped hall filled by a giant moving ball (think of the rolling stone ball in Raiders of the Lost Ark - which this predated by two years). The tomb of Racox in the dungeon is a tribute to my college buddy and fellow gamer (and room mate at the time), Randy Cox. And no, he didn't die.

During the development of Dark Tower, I had a meeting with Gary Gygax at a Metro Detroit Gamers convention. Gary had reviewed my manuscript and noted where my use of potions (and I think scrolls) had deviated from AD&D canon. For my house rules, I allowed multi-use potions and then spiced up their descriptions using tables based on some found in the Alarums & Excursions APAzine. My potions had color, flavor, and consistency. Some were pills. Others powders. Those non-canonical details were excised from Dark Tower. I think I may have actually used random dice rolls to fill some of the spaces in the underground areas ... though I did my best to try and inter-relate encounters and spice them up beyond simple random monster and treasure sets.

The core inspirations for Caverns of Thracia were threefold. The first was to ally the various "beast" races of AD&D as a unified force. The second was to build encounters that took place in multiple levels of a cave, where the open upper areas were situated above open lower areas. The final inspiration (that I remember) was the rather primitive, but unique plate armor used by Mycenaean soldiers. These became the human guards of the upper reaches of the Caverns.

At some point, Caverns of Thracia was changed from an AD&D project to a D&D project. I remember the biggest problem from this was that at least one of my beast men (the Jackalwere) was an AD&D creature. Thus, I had to create the Dog Brothers to fill that same role.

5. You were also involved in the creation of Griffin Mountain for RuneQuest, which is generally considered one of the best products ever published for that game. Did you enjoy writing for RuneQuest? Did you find it a different experience from writing for Judges Guild or TSR? Or were there a lot of similarities in how you approached these various projects?

I had discovered RuneQuest the summer before joining Judges Guild at Origins in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It quickly became the favorite RPG of my brother, my room mate and me. We played in other games in our gaming group, but when we ran games, it was RuneQuest. At some point, a good share of the adventures I wrote for other game systems (AD&D, D&D and even DragonQuest) were converted to work with RQ rules for my personal campaigns.

RuneQuest was perhaps my favorite system for which to create adventures. I found the game's Bronze Age time-of-myths type setting more appealing that the pseudo medieval setting of D&D. The biggest challenge for writing RQ adventures was creating monsters and NPCs with appropriate and balanced skills and stats. Monsters had to be detailed out almost to the same degree as player characters, which was ultimately time-consuming and even tedious. Stats for high level NPCs were even more challenging ... because my campaigns never had high level characters. My co-author on Griffin Mountain, Rudy Kraft, was excellent at setting up stats, so we had complementary skills as a team.

Writing for Judges Guild and TSR came at different times in my career. For Judges Guild, I could pretty much write whatever I wanted, how I wanted, and as much as I wanted. I mostly just wrote adventures that I conceptualized. The first Book of Treasure Maps was one of two products that were purely Judges Guild assignments, not original concepts. Writing for TSR was a whole different animal and came about in the late 80s. The industry had changed in the intervening years and become a bit more professional. TSR had writing style guides, word limits, design formats, a need to adhere to game world canon (not just rules canon) and ... deadlines.

For TSR, I was always writing and or editing to fill a predetermined product niche ... whether it was short pieces for collections, or full blown adventures. For at least a couple, the design description was so loose that I could do almost anything I wanted so long as it loosely fit the catalog copy (Talons of Night and The Shattered Statue). I actually did more editing for TSR than I did original design or authoring.

A Shield-Brother for Donald?

Hat's Off

Allen Varney manages, over at The Escapist, something I have thus far been unable to do: an interview with Paul Jaquays. I've been after him for months to do the same, but, obviously, Allen has some magic I lack. My congratulations to him on both an excellent article and his ability to land one of the greats of this hobby.

Retrospective: Dark Tower

Along with Tegel Manor (by Bob Bledsaw) and his earlier Caverns of Thracia, Paul Jaquays' Dark Tower is probably one of the most famous and well loved adventure modules ever produced by Judges Guild. So great is its reputation that it even made Dungeon's "30 Greatest D&D Adventures of All Time," the sole non-TSR/WotC product to appear on a list that, by my lights, was filled with lots of self-congratulatory nods to modules of little lasting import.

As I said in commenting on the Dungeon list, I think 1979's Dark Tower certainly deserves to be on Top 30 list, as, like most of Jaquays' work, it's masterfully done. I personally don't consider it his best -- I prefer Caverns of Thracia -- but there's no arguing that it's a brilliant piece of work. It's also noteworthy because it's an AD&D module rather than a OD&D one, which only makes sense given its late date. At this point in time, Judges Guild still held a license from TSR to produce official support products for their games and AD&D was the "rising star" in TSR's stable. Mechanically, though, this makes little difference, because, with a few small exceptions here and there, it's perfectly usable with OD&D and I suspect many people used it in such a fashion.

The module itself concerns the town of Mitra's Fist, formerly the hermitage of its namesake before he achieved apotheosis as one of the greatest gods of Law and Goodness. During his mortal existence, Mitra opposed the serpent-demon Set, who himself achieved divine status and sought revenge on his rival by creating a dark tower in Mitra's Fist, out of which poured his minions, who destroyed the town, its inhabitants, and, most importantly, the priesthood of Mitra who tended to the shrine of their deity's ascension here. Of course, over time, treasure seekers returned to Mitra's Fist, under the watchful eye of the clerics of Mitra, hoping to uncover some of the lost treasures buried in the rubble of the town. Unfortunately, in doing so, they have awakened the ancient evil of Set's dark tower and, unless someone acts to defeat it, history may repeat itself.

The dungeons consist of four levels that represent the buried ruins of Mitra's Fist, plus the eponymous Dark Tower and the Tower of Mitra, both of which were also buried when Set's minions destroyed the town. These areas contain a good mix of encounters, tricks, traps, and oddities. In addition, as one might expect from a Jaquays module, there are various antagonistic factions with which the PCs must interact, the results of which affect their progress in exploring the dungeons. Fascinatingly, the possibility of evil PCs aligned with Set is noted and there are even rules for the bonuses clerics of that god get while in areas dedicated to their deity (the same is true for clerics of Mitra).

Dark Tower has a lot to recommend it, chiefly its open-endedness. While not as large a complex as Caverns of Thracia, there's plenty to do here and, beyond the basic background that gives context to the whole place, there's no plot or purpose to get in the way of some good old fashioned dungeon crawling. The module is tough and unforgiving. It assumes a party of 6-10 characters of level 7-11; anything less than that I expect it could easily turn into a bloodbath in a few places. I understand this module was re-released under the 3e rules, but I've never seen a copy. If anyone has any experience with it, I'd love to know what it's like.

Retrospective: The Caverns of Thracia

The Caverns of Thracia by Paul Jaquays is a good example of why Judges Guild is remembered so fondly by so many of us who started gaming in the 70s. Published in 1979, Thracia is both a large dungeon and a campaign setting in its own right. While perhaps not large enough to be called a true "megadungeon," the four levels of the caverns are nevertheless expansive and filled with a wide variety of humanoid factions -- a few of them mutually antagonistic -- which contributes greatly to the feeling of dynamism the module evokes. This is a "living" environment that puts paid to the notion that old school dungeons are static places with monsters statically side by side without any interactions between them.

Even more significant, from my perspective, is the diversity of environments within this module. Firstly, there is the Lost City of Thracia itself, a surface ruin that is the start of the characters' explorations. Beneath it lie four levels, several of which have sub-levels and special room complexes that are only reachable through certain areas within the larger levels. In addition, there are multiple connections -- shafts, chutes, stairs, and other more exotic means -- that contribute to the maze-like feel of the entire place. The Caverns of Thracia is very non-linear; there is no "right" way to explore its depths and no central "set piece" locations. This is a style of dungeon design that we just don't see anymore and that's a pity, because I think gamers are missing out on the unique pleasures of exploration that can only come when the dungeon environment itself is as much of a challenge as the monsters, tricks, and traps contained within it.

I have a lot of fond memories of The Caverns of Thracia. It was one of the few Judges Guild modules I ever played in my youth. My friend Mike's older brother had a copy and more than a few of our characters died horrible deaths while exploring its labyrinthine levels. But we had fun doing it, because the pseudo-ancient Greek atmosphere of the place, combined with its memorable encounters -- like the cult of Thanatos, the incarnation of Death -- spoke to our dreams of being Indiana Jones. I was eventually inspired enough to create my own Egyptian-flavored version of The Caverns of Thracia and, while that dungeon thankfully hasn't survived, it was an important moment in my education as a budding referee. I have Paul Jaquays and Judges Guild to thank for that; I wish similar lessons might be imparted to today's generation of gamers.