Boot Hill Credits

I've been re-reading the second edition of Boot Hill recently. There's a lot in it that I'd forgotten and that I think worthy of comment, but I'll save that for an upcoming post. For now, I simply want to draw attention to the game's credits. In addition to crediting the game's designers, editors, and artists, it also lists the names of its playtesters, along with the characters they played. For anyone interested in the history of the hobby, it's fascinating stuff:

Jim "Gatling Gun" Ward (Julio Diego Garcia)
Mike "Hellfire & Brimstone" Carr (Dwayne De Truthe, and the Douglas Gang)
Rob "Shoot 'Em Up" Kuntz (The Moonwaltz Kid)
"Dastardly Dave" Megarry (Dastardly Dave Slade)
Dave Arneson (Ben Cartwheel of The Ponderous Ranch)
Gary "I Own It All" Gygax (Mr. G)
Terry "Hotshot" Kuntz (Mason Dix)
Tim "Elect Me!" Kask (Tim McCall)
Ernie "Scatter Gun" Gygax (Ernie Sloan)
Brian "Buckshot" Blume (The Referee)

The list is a veritable who's who of the early days of TSR Hobbies, which I suppose shouldn't really be a surprise, since this edition was released in 1979. The player nicknames are quite amusing and I suspect they relate to events from the campaign. 

Appendix D of Boot Hill includes a list of fictional non-player characters, many of whose names match those listed in parentheses above, suggesting they're the names of player characters. This list includes not only these characters' names but also their game statistics and profession. For example, Mr. G, Gary Gygax's character, is described as a "rancher." That probably explains the "I Own It All" nickname above. Meanwhile, Mike Carr's character, Dwayne De Truthe, is a preacher and Tim Kask's Tim McCall is a saloon keeper and gamber (and presumably a would-be politician).

I absolutely adore lists like this. Frankly, I wish we knew more about the play of early RPG campaigns by people who'd eventually go on to make an impact on the hobby. I wish, for example, that I had a similar list for the Traveller campaigns played by the GDW crew. Perhaps I'll have to press Marc Miller about this when I see him at Gamehole Con this October.

Polyhedron: Issue #1

Polyhedron was the newsletter of the Role Playing Game Association (RPGA), TSR's official "club" for players of its various RPG offerings. When the first issue appeared during the summer of 1981, it wasn't called Polyhedron yet but rather the much more banal "RPGA News." A contest to give it a proper name is mentioned, but it will be several more issues before the winner is announced. Darlene provided an original illustration for the cover, one of several provided in issue #1 by her and other early TSR artists, like Greg Bell, Jeff Dee, Dave LaForce, and Erol Otus. 

Polyhedron is notable for, among other things, providing Frank Mentzer with a regular soapbox from which to preach, since he was Polyhedron's inaugural editor. Mentzer was later responsible for the revision of the Dungeons & Dragons line, starting in 1983. That version of the game, consisting of the Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, and Immortals boxed sets, was reputedly the best-selling one of its first quarter-century, and remains much beloved by generations of players. However, it was through his association with the RPGA and Polyhedron that Mentzer first made a name for himself.

The newsletter's first issue opens with a "letters page," an odd choice since, as Mentzer admits, "there were no letters to the editor" yet. Instead, he presents "a few incomplete comments plus one letter from the DRAGON™ files." Most of these "incomplete comments" are mere ephemera, but one of them is longer and worth discussing. Its unnamed author (known only as "DB" from Montgomery, Alabama) offers up a house rule from his home AD&D campaign. Mentzer reply is as follows:

Concern about AD&D rules variants started to become commonplace in official TSR circles around this time, with "international tournament stability" (or similar things) being offered as an explanation of the company's skepticism toward them. This stance would harden as the years wore on, with Gary Gygax taking up the cause through his own soapbox in the pages of Dragon.

"Dispel Confusion" was Polyhedron's version of "Sage Advice," offering official answers to rules queries about TSR's RPGs. Initially, this column differed from "Sage Advice" in that there was no single author. Instead, Polyhedron tapped multiple TSR designers for answers. In this issue, the designers are Lawrence Schick, David Cook, and Harold Johnson, but I suspect future issues will see different ones included in the roster.

The issue devotes four pages to a lengthy and genuinely interesting interview with Gary Gygax. The interview is wide ranging, so it'd be impossible to do it justice with a short summary. Previously, I've covered a couple of portions of it on this blog, so I'd recommend talking a look at those posts for a glimpse into the kinds of things Gygax says. I'll probably return to the interview again in the future to highlight other sections of note. Suffice it to say that, as with all Gygax interviews, it's a mix of truths, half-truths, and dissimulations – absolutely fascinating stuff but it must be approached with some degree of suspicion.

"The Fastest Guns That Never Lived" by Brian Blume, with Allen Hammack, Gary Gygax, and Tim Kask is an article for Boot Hill. Its title riffs off a section in the game's rulebook, "Fastest Guns That Ever Lived Chart," which provides statistics for historical gunfighters from the Old West. By contrast, the article provides stats for fictional characters from Western media, like the Lone Ranger, Bret Maverick, and Ben Cartwright, as well as composite stats for actors who portrayed a number of different characters. It's a fun little article and the kind of thing that aficionados of Westerns can argue about. In case anyone cares, Clint Eastwood's characters have the highest Gun Accuracy rating (+22), closely followed by those of Lee Van Cleef (+21). 

"Notes for the Dungeon Master" is a collection of eleven short descriptions of "really good, relatively unknown trick[s] or trap[s]" for use with Dungeons & Dragons. As with all such articles, how much one enjoys it depends heavily on one's tastes and experience. For me, the descriptions are all fine but not phenomenal. "The Fight in the Skies Game" by Mike Carr is a brief overview of the World War I aerial combat game that would soon be revised as Dawn Patrol. "An Open Letter to Frank Mentzer" by Merle Rasmussen is similar, if much shorter, in that it's mostly a plug for Top Secret and its continuing support by TSR.

"Gen Con® South Report" is, as its title suggests, a report of events at TSR's convention in Jacksonville, Florida earlier in 1981. I sometimes forget that, once upon a time, there are a number of reginal Gen Cons, though none of them survived past the '80s so far as I know. The article focuses primarily on the results of tournaments at the con. However, it does include a photo of the top winner, Matthew Rupp and his fellow gamers, which I found very charming.

The last article is "Gamma World Science Fantasy – A Role Playing Game with a Difference" by James A. [sic] Ward. Like the previous articles on Dawn Patrol and Top Secret, this one is simply a plug for Gamma World and its upcoming support by TSR. It's fine, but then I have an inordinate fondness for Gamma World (and the decades-long, unfulfilled promises of a revision of Metamorphosis Alpha compatible with it). Closing out the issue is a full-page comic by Tom Wham called "Rocksnoz in the Land of Nidd." If you're a fan of Mr Wham's work, you'll likely enjoy this one too. I'd never seen it before, so it was definitely a treat for me.

There you have it: issue #1 of Polyhedron and the start of a new series of retrospectives on a gaming periodical of yore. I suspect this series will not run as long as my previous one on White Dwarf, because I have access to fewer issues and because (due to its not being monthly until very late in its run) there are simply fewer issues to review. Nevertheless, I'm looking forward to this one, if only as a dose of nostalgia for my days as a TSR fanboy. 

"No Game is Worth Dying For ..."

The disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III on August 15, 1979 plays an important role in both the history of Dungeons & Dragons and in my own personal history of involvement in the hobby of roleplaying. The media hoopla surrounding what became known as the "steam tunnels incident" brought D&D to the attention of the American public for the first time and, with it, fears that the game was somehow "dangerous" to those who played it. 

For that reason, it's unsurprising that Tim Kask, editor of Dragon at the time, would pen a lengthy editorial in issue #30 (October 1979), in which he talks about recent events and D&D's purported role in them. Kask is clearheaded and direct: the involvement of D&D in Egbert's disappearance is a mere speculation based on minimal evidence. As we would later learn, D&D played no significant role in this incident and all of the wild tales told about the game and its supposedly baleful effects upon its players were hogwash.

I've reproduced the entirety of Kask's editorial below. It's certainly held up better than the yellow journalism of 60 Minutes, which credulously accepted the unsubstantiated claims of Patricia Pulling. While I personally never experienced any disapproval from family or friends regarding D&D – quite the contrary, in fact – I know many people did. That's why I think it's still important to set the record straight about the events of August 1979 more than four decades later. 

"Abandonment of D&D"

The publication of the Dungeon Masters Guide in 1979 completed the rules for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This event was heralded in the pages of Dragon by numerous articles and essays by people associated with the project, most importantly Gary Gygax, its chief designer. If the letters to the editor that appeared in the following months are any indication, not every Dungeons & Dragons player greeted this news with pleasure. Indeed, there seems to have been some anxiety on the part of some D&D players, who felt that Gygax was not simply "abandoning" his first RPG, but also belittling its players. From the vantage point of the present, these concerns remind me a bit of those voiced by players of other editions of D&D upon learning of a new edition of the game on the horizon. I guess some things never change! 

In the case of AD&D's arrival, it's clear that Gygax's use of "non-game" and similar terms to describe OD&D raised some hackles, as evidenced by letters to the editor in the pages of Dragon. In one case (issue #30, October 1979), such a letter prompted the following response from one of the editors of Dragon (either Tim Kask or Gary Jaquet). The response is fascinating, not just because of its obvious intent assuage concerns about AD&D, but also what it says about the state of the hobby at the time.

Different Worlds: Issue #7

Issue #7 of Different Worlds (April/May 1980) features a cover by Cora L. Healy, an artist known for her work on science fiction periodicals throughout the 1970s and early '80s. The issue proper begins with an installment of the "Beginner's Brew" column that lists "all the more popular role-playing games (RPGs) and magazines available." The games and magazines are divided up by publisher, sixteen for RPGs and fourteen for magazines. There are also fifteen miniatures manufacturers listed. The list are interesting, most especially for the "forthcoming" games mentioned, such as Chaosium's Dark Worlds and Elric RuneQuest and Heritage USA's Heroes of Middle Earth. 

"Ten Days in the Arena of Khazan" by Ken St. Andre is a seven-page outline of a campaign for use with Tunnels & Trolls. More than that, though, it's an overview of a portion of the game's setting of Trollworld, with lots of interesting tidbits about its history and peoples. I really enjoyed this article, because it gave me some insight into what it's like to play in St. Andre's home campaign, a topic that never ceases to interest me. 

I find it hard to disagree with Richard L. Snider's effusive review of Cults of Prax, one of the truly great RPG supplements of all time. He rightly deems it "the best extant cosmology designed for use with any FRP" – which was probably true in 1980 and, even today, it stands head and shoulders above most other treatments of similar topics. "Gloranthan Birthday Tables" by Morgan O. Woodward III is a series of random tables to determine when a Gloranthan character is born, with special attention given to those during Sacred Time (and the special abilities that might come from such an auspicious birth). 

Part two of the "Vardy Combat System" by John T. Sapienza appears in this issue. A variant combat system for use with Dungeons & Dragons, this article provides expanded rules and tables for handling parries, shields, hit points, and more. What I appreciate about the system is that it strives to be genuinely compatible with D&D's existing combat system rather than simply replacing it. The article even offers a further option that uses D20 rolls rather than percentile ones, for even further compatibility. As I said previously, I have not tested this system and have no idea how well it works in practice, but, from reading it, I think it might be worthy testing out in play.

"Foundchild Cult" by Sandy Petersen is a cult for use with RuneQuest and its setting of Glorantha. Meanwhile. Steve Perrin reviews In the Labyrinth by Steve Jackson. Perrin thinks very highly of the game, his main complaint being that, like Tunnels & Trolls before it, allows characteristics to increase as a character gains experience, something that he thinks inevitably leads to an "incredibly strong, lightning fast, cosmically intelligent character who seems to have stepped directly from the pages of Marvel or DC Comics." I think that's a fair criticism and one of the reasons I prefer the more grounded approach taken by many older RPGs. 

James M. Ward offers "Power Groups and Player Characters in RPGs," in which he talks specifically about the importance of factions in a campaign. He then provides examples from his home Metamorphosis Alpha campaign, showing how the characters became involved with them and how this involvement affected the development of the campaign. It's a solid, though short, article, covering a topic that is increasingly near and dear to my heart. "Two from Grenadier" by John T. Sapienza is a lengthy, five-page article that reviews in detail two AD&D boxed sets from Grenadier Models, Woodland Adventurers and Tomb of Spells. His review is quite positive overall and a nice bit of nostalgia for me, since I once owned both of the boxed sets in question.

"System Snobbery" by Larry DiTillio is an early entry in the now well-worn genre of "there are no bad RPGs, just bad GMs" articles. It's fine for what it is; its main interest to me was DiTillio's recounting of his experience with various GMs over the years. Gigi D'Arn's gossip column this month mentions the departure of Tim Kask from the editorship of Dragon and eludes to "dubious circumstances." There's further mention of a D&D movie, as well as a reference to something called the "AD&D Companion," a collection of variants for use with D&D and AD&D. I suspect this is either simply untrue or a garbled rumor of something like the Best of Dragon anthology, the first of which did appear in 1980. Concluding the issue is "Oriental Weapons for RuneQuest" by Sean Summers, with additional material by Steve Perrin. It's pretty much what you'd expect for this type of article, a staple of the '70s and '80s, when all things Asian were the rage in RPG circles.

Yet More Gygax Magazine News

In the wake of yesterday's news about a new company laying claim to the TSR name and a new gaming magazine called Gygax, Mr Gygax's widow, Gail, has weighed in via ENWorld:

Please respect my wished to change the caption of this thread to:

Gygax Magazine? {UPDATE -, does not have the support of the "Gygax Family Estate" }

I wish to clear up any confusion I am the proper owner of the use of the name of my late husband, E. Gary Gygax. And furthermore would ask respect from his public and children from his first marriage, who are fully aware I own all rights to the use of his name and likeness, and all intellectual properties.

We have previously informed Jason Elliot of my ownership rights.

I can understand the enthusiasm for this project and will remain neutral in regard to its merits however, not at the expense of the Gary Gygax Estate, which represents his wishes.

My most immediate thought is that it's sad that Mrs Gygax and the "children from his first marriage" seem to be at odds over Gary's legacy. That's something that would be sad in any family, but it's especially troubling in this case, because Gary's life's work means a great deal to millions of people beyond his family. I also fear this tussle might further divide opinion regard the merits of this new TSR, which would be a shame.

Once again, thanks to everyone who made me aware of this news.

Comments on this post can be made here.

More News on Gygax Magazine

Several people have pointed me towards the Gamers & Grognards blog, which includes the following bit of updated information from Tim Kask regarding Gygax Magazine:

Here's a snippet from our ad prospectus.....so now you all the official word there is at this time.

Gygax is a gaming magazine for new and old players alike.

We are looking forward to the games of tomorrow and today, while preserving the traditions and history that got us where we are now.

Our articles and features cover current independent and major publisher games such as Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, The One Ring, Shadowrun, Godlike, Labyrinth Lord, Marvel Heroic Roleplaying, Warhammer 40k Roleplay, Traveller, and others, as well as classic out-of-print games with a modern following, like AD&D, Top Secret, and Gamma World.

Our features include comics by Phil Foglio (What’s New With Phil and Dixie), Jim Wampler (Marvin the Mage), and Rich Burlew (Order of the Stick). Contributors include Jim Ward, Cory Doctorow, James Carpio, Ethan Gilsdorf, Dennis Sustare, and many more.

Publishing quarterly in print as well as PDF and iPad editions, we hope each issue of Gygax will be an anticipated and treasured addition to any gamer’s library.

I'm going to continue to take a cautious, wait-and-see attitude toward this, since, honestly, I'm not sure what to think of all this. No matter how it turns out in the end, I don't think anyone can claim that the new TSR Games lacks for ambition.

Comments on this post can be made here.

TSR Returns?

Or something. If you follow this link, you'll find TSR Games. If you follow this one, you'll find Gygax Magazine. Details are still sketchy as to what this exactly means, but this post over at ENWorld reveals a few snippets of information:

Hi guys, this is Jayson. I'm the editor for Gygax Magazine.

Gygax Magazine is myself, Ernie Gygax, Luke Gygax, Tim Kask, James Carpio, and Jim Wampler. Our first issue is out in December; since it's not finished yet, we've been pretty quiet about things until it's ready.

Just to address some of the questions, I thought it was best that I leave a reply. We do own the trademark for TSR, and have since December of 2011. We are a new company, not the old TSR, as they were purchased by Wizards in the '90s. The trademark was abandoned about nine years ago, and we registered it in 2011. 

We decided the best thing to release first as TSR was a gaming magazine, because we wanted a way to bridge the traditions of the old guard with the awesome new games that are out today.

"Jayson" is apparently Jayson Elliot, a name unknown to me, but I'm sure someone out there must know who he is and what his connection to the old school community might be. Since we know so little, I have no real thoughts on this announcement, though it is interesting, especially since this is the second time in the last couple of years that Tim Kask has been attached to an attempt to "get the old band back together," so to speak. Time will tell what this means.

Thanks to everyone who emailed me about this announcement. I probably wouldn't have seen it otherwise.

UPDATE: According to this post, James M. Ward, Len Lakofka, and Phil Foglio are also involved in some fashion. The plot thickens.

Comments on this post can be made here.

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?

Another Kask Video Inteview

Here's another GenCon video interview with Tim Kask, where he talks about his initiation into the hobby, as well as the forgotten endgame of Dungeons & Dragons. Good stuff.

Tim Kask Video Interview

Markus Siebler was kind enough to pass along a link to this video interview with Tim Kask by Fear the Boot. It's a very interesting, if brief, interview that includes a mention of the company that he, Jim Ward, and Frank Mentzer are in the midst of founding. From my perspective, I found the fact that he was running an adventure for a proper old school party of 12+ participants. I remember fondly the days when my friends and I, along with guys we barely knew, used to plunge headlong into dungeons. Half the fun of those days was getting the party to work well together. Sometimes I can't help but feel that the ever-shrinking number of participants in most campaigns is another contributing factor to the death of the Old Ways.

Back to the Future

Jim at Lamentations of the Flame Princess passes along more specific information about a game company being formed by Frank Mentzer, Jim Ward, and Tim Kask. I'd been hearing rumors about this from various sources ever since GenCon, but I discounted them as typically garbled gamer nonsense. Looks like I was wrong to think that, since, as the link above shows, Mr Mentzer himself has now revealed some details, such as the scope of this new endeavor:

We want to publish new and innovative OGL products with an Old School approach (defined for the moment as rules-light, very dependent on DM quality, heavy on innovation & enjoyment), addressing many different OGL-based game systems, including BFRP, Savage Worlds (Pinnacle), Hackmaster (Kenzer), Castles & Crusades (Troll Lords), and Pathfinder (Paizo).

We would like to include OSRIC (Ronin Arts), Labyrinth Lord (Goblinoid) and RuneQuest (Mongoose) but haven't talked with them yet about permissions. The first two are very probable; we'll see about Mongoose.

If you wanted to alleviate my concerns about the wisdom of "getting the band back together," this is precisely the way not to do it. I realize that Mr Mentzer's post was, essentially, speaking off the cuff and so shouldn't be expected to be flawless, but attributing OSRIC to Ronin Arts suggests a lack of awareness about even the most basic history of the old school revival. Similarly, the scattershot approach -- "addressing many different OGL-based game systems" -- is, if handled poorly, a recipe for disaster, especially since many of the games cited are very different from one another, both mechanically and esthetically (not to mention the fact that several of them aren't in fact "OGL-based" at all). Any definition of "Old School approach" that encompasses both Savage Worlds and Pathfinder is, I fear, so broad as to be meaningless.

Mr Mentzer is also looking for investors, stating that "Realistically we'll need at least a quarter mil" to get this company off the ground. That's a lot of money and it reminds me of an old joke about the RPG biz: "What the best way to get a million dollars by founding a RPG company? Start with two million." Far be it from me to criticize anyone for wanting to build a well-capitalized new company dedicated to producing old school materials, but, when you consider how much the old school renaissance has achieved over the last few years, and on nothing more than a shoestring budget, one wonders what Mr Mentzer has in mind here. Obviously, he and his partners have high hopes for creating something long-lasting and influential and, if he can raise $250K for a venture like this, I'll be most impressed. That suggests that this little revival has stronger legs than most of us realize.

I hope I can be forgiven for being somewhat skeptical about all of this, though. Much as I respect the contributions Mentzer, Ward, and Kask have made to the hobby over the years, I'm not sure how much they really understand the current resurgence in interest in old school gaming. That's not to say they can't be brought up to speed fairly quickly, but Mr Mentzer's initial post, which lumps together a whole bunch of games under a very broad rubric, doesn't immediately inspire confidence in me. Likewise, "reunion tours" in this hobby are often disastrous, as anyone who remembers various post-TSR projects by its ex-employees can attest.

My attitude might change as more substantial information is released. I certainly want something like this to succeed, as it'd be a good indication that the old school movement is more than just a fad amongst a small sub-set of weirdos on the Internet. Right now, though, I'm greeting this simply as "interesting." Whether it'll be change-the-hobby interesting or car-crash interesting is something we'll have to wait some time to discover.

My Least Favorite OD&D Supplement

This volume is something else, also: our last attempt to reach the "Monty Hall" DM's. Perhaps now some of the 'giveaway' campaigns will look as foolish as they truly are. This is our last attempt to delineate the absurdity of 40+ level characters. When Odin, the All-Father has only(?) 300 hit points, who can take a 44th level Lord seriously?

It is without a doubt ironic that in the same foreword in which TSR Publications editor Timothy J. Kask extols the virtues of "winging it" and notes that OD&D's rules are "not even true 'rules'," he also expresses the sentiment in text quoted above. I'm no fan of Monty Hall campaigns myself and having once met a guy who boasted of his character being a "42nd-level demigod," I have a longstanding, visceral dislike of that style of play. But, at the end of the day, if OD&D was "meant to be a free-wheeling game, only loosely bound by the parameters of the rules," as Kask states in the foreword to Eldritch Wizardry, why all this fretting about those guys who are playing it wrong?

The same foreword calls Gods, Demigods & Heroes "the last D&D supplement," which is technically true. Unless one counts Chainmail's "grandson," Swords & Spells, there were no other official OD&D supplements after the publication of Supplement IV. Of course, even as this foreword was being written, Gary Gygax was hard at work creating Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, which owes its origin at least in part to the desire to ensure that everyone who played the game did it right. Even though, by today's standards, AD&D remains a free-wheeling game of the sort Kask rightly praises, there's no question that it set a not-entirely positive precedent for the way RPGs should be designed and presented. In hindsight, the lunacy of it all becomes apparent in a way that it probably wasn't in 1976.

There's the additional irony that Supplement IV tried to mock Monty Hallism by providing stats for the gods it describes. Speaking from personal experience with its successor volume, Deities & Demigods, providing stats for, say, Zeus is not going to shame power gamers into giving up their munchkiny ways -- quite the opposite. Once gods have hit points and armor classes, they just become big bags of experience points waiting to be looted by those 44th-level fighters Kask lambastes in his foreword. My own feeling is that, if one looks at OD&D as written, the gods are distant and mysterious, with spells like commune and contact other plane being vague and unreliable means to know their minds. This strikes me as being far more consonant with the humanistic thrust of pulp fantasy than giving statistics to Crom or Arioch or Odin. None of this is to say there's anything wrong with slaying gods and taking their stuff, if that's how one enjoys playing D&D (though I don't), but, given what the foreword to Supplement IV says about one of its goals, I can't help but feel it chose the wrong approach to meeting those goals.

In the final analysis, Gods, Demigods & Heroes is the one OD&D supplement I could have lived without. It's far weaker and less useful than the regularly-reviled Blackmoor (which, I agree, is less than it should have been) and, worse than that, it's the only OD&D book that exemplifies an attitude so at odds with the way the game was designed and played. I've stated before that I'm not a huge fan of Arduin, but I am glad Arduin exists. I am glad that referees like Dave Hargrave decided to put their dirty hands all over OD&D and reshape it into something they and their players enjoyed. That's what this hobby is all about.

My Brush with "Fame"

My interview with Tim Kask is cited as a reference in this Wikipedia entry.

Weird.

Interview: Tim Kask (Part III)

If you could dispel one common misapprehension that gamers today have about the early days of the hobby, what would it be?

I don’t know. What are the perceptions of those “good old days?" To be honest, I seldom paid attention to any of that after our little birthing process; I was far too busy with TSR Periodicals and the magazines.

Oh, I know one. No, it is not true that none of us understood personal hygiene. Many didn’t, but most of us did remember to bathe or shower frequently enough so as to not offend too many people around us. But some of those old cons could get ripe enough. I guess it is from that old perception that the term for a group of gamers, like a murder of crows, a sleuth of bears or a bevy of quail, would be stink; how elegant-a stink of gamers.

Is there anything you miss about the early days of the hobby?

The diversity of products published. BITD, anyone with a little money could put out their own games or rules sets. We had a lot more diversity before the days of the Hasborg.

Do you see new technology, like print-on-demand, making it possible to recreate the good old days when anyone with an idea might publish their own games or rules sets? If not, what's changed to make this less likely?

Who said they were good? Some of the stuff that was self-published was self-published for a good reason; it was dreck. You sent your money and took your chances.

Some few pearls did exist out there, but they were few and far between. One of the best boardgames I ever saw (for a variety of reasons) never got beyond a basement operation that published maybe a couple of thousand copies. The fatal flaw that denied it wider acceptance at the time was the recordkeeping. Today, if it was on PC and did all the recording automatically, it would be a singular game, in my opinion. But it was lost in the sea of dreck.

Having said that much, let me contradict myself a little. I am sure that there are a few designers out there, primarily of campaigns/scenarios/modules/adventures (whatever you wish to call them) that could make a few bucks doing P-O-D. But, as good as they have proven themselves to be, why should they when the established companies are more than willing to publish them and they will make more? I might be able to write a campaign adventure and perhaps sell a few hundred at $5 or even $10 apiece to download PDFs. I might make a thousand or two; if I sold it to one of the established companies with a distribution network, they might sell 20K copies from which I might get $1 each. Of course, I am making the assumption that anyone might buy because I wrote it.

Do you still have the chance to play D&D these days?

The first time I played D&D in over twenty years was for the Tower of Gygax event at GenCon 2008. I am assuming that playing is both DMing and adventuring, I haven't played a PC since the days of playtesting modules at TSR. One of my long-time PCs ended up as an NPC in the Hommlet module. I gave up playing as a PC when I became my group's DM in '74.

Now, if the ToG is repeated next year, I will do it. I have committed to run two, four hour adventures at next year's Lake Geneva Game Convention in June, as part of the "Gary's Virtual Porch" memorial thing they are doing.

Many thanks to Mr Kask for graciously consenting to this interview. I hope that his reminiscences and insights have been useful and interesting -- I know they were for me -- and I'll make every effort to line up some additional interviews to post here in the near future.

Interview: Tim Kask (Part II)

Your foreword calls Supplement IV "the last D&D supplement." In a certain sense, you were correct in saying this as there were no more OD&D -- back then, just D&D -- supplements in the offing, but it wasn't the end of "official" game material from TSR. What happened between the time you wrote this in 1976 and the appearance of the Monster Manual a year later?

Since meeting, and becoming fast friends with, Frank Mentzer, I have come to see that he and I shared a position at TSR that was unique; that of Gary’s sounding board, idea-bouncer, collaborator, consultant and friendly goad. We talked D&D nearly every day; bouncing ideas off of each other and examining the rules system as it existed at that time.

From the time we were working on Eldritch Wizardry, and preparing for Gods, Demi-Gods & Heroes, we knew that we were no longer just adding new stuff but also refining old stuff and changing things a little bit here and there. It was getting pretty confusing, and we had to do something about it. We also had other concerns, chief of which was how to conduct fair tournaments. Before the term came into vogue, we were marketing TSR virally; I was a perfect example. I played the game at a con, bought one and took it back to my group and infected them.

As the nature of the game dictated, it was meant to be only loosely bound by the rules as printed; they were originally meant as suggestions and guidelines. Finding 30 DMs to run a tourney for us was a big task in and of itself; finding 30 that played the game the same was impossible as each one ran his own campaigns as he saw fit.

Gary Gygax thanks you in both the AD&D Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide. What role did you play in the development of these two books or indeed the entire AD&D project?

Continuing in the same vein as the answer to the previous question, we constantly bounced ideas off of each other. There came a time when we started to list all of the revisions and contradictions.

We had other problems to address: level and gold piece inflation being two of them, as well as a too-steep learning curve. In the early days, we sold our game to college age buyers, bright high schoolers and the occasional socially challenged older gamer. As bright as they were in general, many of them had complained of the steep learning curve and seeming contradictions in subsequent supplements. No matter how much I tried to drum home the idea that these were suggestions, examples and guidelines in the Forewords that I wrote in each, people wanted to see them as new rules. And, we were starting to hear from parents that had bought the game as a result of their child’s cajolery, badgering or whining, only to find that it was too complex for their precious darlings to jump right in. On that point, I can certainly testify; had I not confidently announced that my club was going to have a go at this new game I was so enraptured with, I might not have spent three weeks trying to grasp enough of it to begin. And I had the benefit of having played it twice. All of these things Gary and I talked about, and more. It was decided to consult with someone with some background in child psych, and J. Eric Holmes came into the picture.

So Holmes was brought in because of his background in child psychology? What was the rationale behind this?

I can only say this, and it is all secondhand, what Gary told me, what I picked up, etc., as I was NOT part of this. Holmes was brought in to try to enable us to get a handle on a number of different things. Since I got my M. Ed., I understand much more of the rationale behind it. We needed to know such things as : What's too scary for young (9 to 14) kids to handle? We didn't want to cause nightmares. How complex can the rules be for that age to enjoy playing? How do we write "how-to-play" rules for players that young? We were dealing with the problem of the present rules being pretty complex and mystifying to kids a lot older. What kinds of magic were too complex for younger players, or less experienced.

We had come to the point that we knew our new market would not be well read in Fantasy, and would be starting out at a disadvantage compared to the earlier adherents of the game. We needed to know how to overcome that.

Returning to your role in the development of AD&D ...

One Thursday, Gary told me to wrap up whatever I had going on at the moment and free up my days starting on the next Monday. Intrigued, I said sure. When I came in on Monday morning, Gary asked me into his office (we were still in the old grey house and had offices next to each other), then told whoever was answering the phone that neither of us was to be disturbed for anything but the direst emergency, or a call from our wives. He had about six sets of the small books and had put up several extra cork bulletin boards in office. For the next eight or nine days, we re-made D&D.

We tinkered with various bits and pieces, changing and tweaking damages from various weapons and spells (Magic Missile comes to mind). At the end of that period of time, we had two files of papers and cut-up booklets; one was Basic, the other AD&D. Much less was left to interpretation; more was spelled out in charts and tables. We were looking at tourneys. We must have rolled several hundred different confrontations while we tinkered with HP and DAM. We cut up those books and stuck stuff all over the walls. From that came Basic D&D and Advanced D&D. I was like the midwife at the birth.

Interview: Tim Kask (Part I)

Tim Kask, TSR's first Publications Editor, has graciously consented to my asking him a few questions about the history of his involvement with the roleplaying hobby and the role he played in the early days of Dungeons & Dragons. Because many of Mr Kask's replies were lengthy, I have broken up his responses into multiple entries that I will post over the course of several days. I hope everyone will enjoy the details and insights these questions bring to light and I'd like to thank Mr Kask once more for his allowing me to interview him.

It's my hope that this interview will be the first of series with individuals associated with the early days of the hobby.

You note in the foreword to Gods, Demigods, & Heroes that your first assignment for TSR was Supplement II: Blackmoor. How did you come to be hired by the company and what was the extent of your duties as its "Publications Editor?"

This is going to be a long answer because you have asked for a lot of background in just a few words.

I first met Gary over the phone in late ’73 or early ’74, when I was a married student with a daughter at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale. This came about because I called Directory Assistance (called Information back then) and asked for his number. I had seen the address of Lake Geneva in the back of the Chainmail rules, which were what I was calling him about. To be perfectly honest, I do not remember exactly what about. In any event, the phone was answered by a perfectly polite and friendly gent that did not seem in the least put out by having a stranger call him at home at night. (It was probably a Friday evening, after 9 PM when weekend discounts on Long Distance applied.) We must have talked for at least an hour, and we seemed to hit it off right away. I called a couple more times during the next several months, mostly talking about miniatures and miniatures rules, but also straying into many other areas, including my recent service in the USN in ‘Nam.

Somewhere during the fall and winter of ’73-’74, Gary first mentioned this new game concept he was first working on, then published. He invited/challenged me to come to his game convention in August in Lake Geneva sometime in late May or early June. I worked it out to go up to the Quad Cities (where my wife and I grew up and had family), drop off my family and head up to LG. I was very naïve about GenCon, figuring I’d just find a motel somewhere not too far away and check it out.

Condensed Version of the First GenCon.

I drove up and we met face-to-face. I entered two miniatures tourneys and won them both. Somebody walked down the hall, at the Horticultural Hall where the con was held, calling out for a few players to come join in an “adventure” in that new game Gary had been talking about. (I am not sure, but I think that it was Rob Kuntz, who was just a kid then, while I was 25.) Remembering what Gary had gone on and on about, I signed up.

I don’t remember a lot of details from the beginning of the adventure. I mostly sat quietly in the back trying to figure out what was going on. Somehow or other we ended up pissing somebody off and getting encased in some sort of clear substance like Lucite that allowed us to continue breathing. Next time I figured out what was going on, we were up in front of “Deus ex Machina” and lasered into little cubes the size of big dice. Well! That was different…

A couple of minutes later, I signed up for another adventure, this time as a dwarf. The condensed version of that was that I rescued a dying dwarf king with no heir, was granted the dwarf kingdom and given the Royal Seal. Then it was time to quit playing!

I bought the old brown box set and a set of dice, talked to Gary a bit more where he told me to stay in touch and keep him informed of how it went with my game club when I introduced them to D&D, and headed back to my family. Gary and I had a private conversation where he told me of his plans to some degree and said that when I graduated next summer, there might well be job he could offer a good editor.

When I got back to my game club, I announced that I had played in this really strange great game, and they were all going to have a chance to play real soon. Real soon stretched into about three weeks; I had no idea reading and understanding those three little books would be so tough. Had I not played, however poorly, I would not have had a clue.

I whipped up some dungeon levels, we rolled some characters up that fateful Sat. morning, and my first campaign was under way. About once a month I would call Gary up and we would talk at length about what my group was doing, had done and how we had done it. We talked about lots of other things as well, and discovered we had even more in common than we had known. We both liked several of the same fantasy authors, had similar tastes in military history and even liked a lot of the same movies.

After a couple of months of playing, about Christmas break, I announced that when they all came back after the holiday we would be generating new characters (using an average die for starting levels to recognize the fact that they were not complete greenhorns) and playing in a new campaign setting. I had gotten a copy of Greyhawk by then and wanted to incorporate some of it Thus was born my Ruins of Kwalishar campaign.[That name ought to sound familiar! -JM] I wrote out an elaborate basis for the campaign, and we never looked back until I graduated in Aug. of ’75. My monthly chats with Gary continued and I started tinkering with things as per Gary’s instructions and letting him know how it had worked out, what my players thought, etc. (It was only later that I realized that we had been play-testing for Gary.) I then went to GenCon ’75, met Brian Blume and made plans to move there in a month, which my family and I did. I was hired by Tactical Studies Rules, which a few weeks later was supplanted by TSR Hobbies, Inc.; I was the first full-time employee of both.

First, and foremost, I was hired to be Gary’s editor. Anyone who has read any of Gary’s earliest writings knows that he loved the English language and more than that, loved to challenge his readers. Gary had cut his reading teeth on authors like Sir Walter Scott and Charles Lamb. Those guys could really craft a sentence, but took some reading to get comfortable with. They could not have written for USA Today or People Magazine; they were too tough to read for the casual or less schooled reader. Some of Gary’s writing was like that, almost Victorian in nature. My job was to take his stuff and boil it down a little for the rest of the world, without lessening the craft he put into it. I like to think I did that pretty well. (At Lake Geneva Game Convention III in 2007, Gary told me that of all the editors he had had, he most missed having me edit his writing. I felt honored and touched by that comment.)

As for the rest of what I did, I edited the rest of the stuff we did. I took over The Strategic Review with issue #5, and our plans to eventually produce a real magazine began to take shape. I edited game manuscripts. But where I really began to learn my craft was with Blackmoor, the second D&D supplement.

One day, after I had been there a couple of months, Gary and Brian were waiting for me that morning when I got to Gary’s house (we worked out of his basement) with what looked to be a bushel basket of scrap papers, like someone had cleaned out their desk, and sly smiles on their faces. I should have known something was up by those smiles…

Dropping the basket at my feet, they announced that it contained the next supplement and that I should pitch right in. After stirring it a bit, I asked if they were serious, and they assured me that they were. It took the better part of two days to sort it out, and another day or two to try to make some sense of it. When I reported back about a week later that what I had found was contradictory, confusing, incomplete, partially incomprehensible, lacking huge bits and pieces and mostly gibberish, they laughed and said they knew that. Both of them had already come to the same conclusion that if I was to be the editor, here was my acid test, and that neither one of them certainly wanted to do it. So over the next several weeks, I sorted, filled in, added and deleted. What came out was about 60% my work, 30% Dave Arneson’s and the remainder came from Gary and Rob Kuntz. I was reminded by Gary that the day I brought the finished manuscript in to him and Brian that I threatened to quit if ever I was given another “project” (read “basket case”) such as this one. For the next couple of years that what I did; edit the supplements, edit TSR, edit The Dragon and Little Wars after we spun them off out of TSR, proofread virtually everything we did, continue to be Gary’s editor, and all of my other TSR duties as well.

A Tease

I'm in the midst of putting together an interview with Tim Kask, former TSR Publications Editor, and, in doing so, I have learned more than a few things I'd never anywhere else. One of them relates to just why J. Eric Holmes was selected to edit the Basic Rules that are now so indelibly associated with his name.

With luck, the answer to that question and some additional insights into the early days of the hobby will be revealed in the next day or so. Stay tuned!

Meanwhile, Over at Dragonsfoot ...

... former TSR Publications Editor, Tim Kask, drops what James Raggi rightly calls a "bombshell" in response first to this comment by Greg Ellis:

As someone who was introduced to RPG's via AD&D, for years I had the impression that the old three-booklet D&D game was much simpler, more primative and considerably less detailed.

That is, until I went back and read it.

With Greyhawk and the other supplements, it's essentially the same game as AD&D...
Sure, there are some differences... but all of the building blocks are there.

Kask explains,

You couldn't have made my point better if I had paid you to read script I wrote...

OD&D must be considered as the three boxed books and all four of the supplements; AD&D was, in part, a tidying-up of the contradictions.

Now this isn't news to old schoolers; we've known this for years and have been trying, often unsuccessfully, to make plain the true history of D&D.

Ellis then goes on by stating further (in the original thread):

One could argue that the extra detail baked into AD&D maybe isn't such a good thing; it seems to have encouraged a generation of players who enjoy fussing over the wording of the rulebook instead of deferring to their DM's judgement.

This is where things get interesting, because Kask's reply is not only one with which I agree, but one that I don't believe I've ever personally heard uttered by anyone associated with TSR in the days of the transition between OD&D and AD&D.

You win the prized Periapt of Perspicacity Award! Congratulations.

We shot ourselves, altogether unknowingly, in the foot. We had no idea that we were corrupting the original players into a flock of nit-pickers and rules lawyers. It was our own fault, although I don't think any of us could have seen that far into the future and foreseen it.

This is heavy stuff. Good stuff. Valuable stuff. Heck, Kask is providing us with lots of valuable insights and perspective in that whole thread on Dragonsfoot. Anyone at all interested in the history of the hobby and how and why it evolved as it did, often for the worse, sometimes for the better, would do well to wade through all 70+ pages of the thing. It's a gold mine of information.