Reconsiderations: Death and Resurrection

Needless to say, I've been very remiss in writing new posts for this blog, even within the context of the less rigorous schedule I proposed two months ago. I wish I had a better excuse beyond "I'm busy revising Thousand Suns for a second edition," except that's the truth. In fact. I've been so busy with that that I haven't even been posting as often at Grognardia Games Direct as I have been. On the plus side, the first draft of the second edition is nearly done, so I at least having something to show for my lack of attention here. With any luck, the first draft will be completed before September and external playtesting can begin in earnest.

Today, though, I want to return to my Reconsiderations series, since the first entry in it was very well received and generated a lot of good comments. My apologies for not responding to most of them, but, well, I've already explained that my attention was – and remains – elsewhere. 

Longtime readers may recall that the Dwimmermount campaign was predicated on several things, the most important of which was that it explicitly megadungeon-centric. At the time, which is to say the early days of the Old School Renaissance, there was a widespread belief that Dungeons & Dragons was born in the megadungeon – or the "campaign dungeon," as some preferred to call it – and that any attempt to play, let alone understand, old school D&D, as we were all attempting to do, required that you run a megadungeon campaign. And so I did, because I hoped that doing so would help me better understand aspects of D&D's history and design that had eluded me when I was a callow youth.

Another important foundation of the Dwimmermount campaign – and indeed my entire philosophy of coming to grips with OD&D – was the principle that "D&D is always right." By that, I simply meant that, despite the claims of its detractors over the decades, D&D's design was not haphazard but intentional. What's there in its rulebooks is there for a reason and we'd do well to understand this before tinkering with them unduly. This is not the same thing as saying that everything that's in D&D's rules always works to our satisfaction (or even the satisfaction of its designers), only that, before casting aside something about the game you don't like, consider for a moment the possibility that that something might, in fact, be a load-bearing wall.

That's why, during that campaign, I permitted the use of the spell raise dead, even though I was philosophically opposed to it. When I say "philosophically opposed," I mean that I initially accepted the idea, common in the early OSR, that old school Dungeons & Dragons was inherently and unalterably high lethality, with characters dying left and right. "Fantasy fucking Vietnam" was how it was sometimes described. Likewise, the renewed emphasis on pulp fantasy – strongly championed on this blog – was seen as requiring a style of play in which death was both omnipresent and permanent. 

Consequently, I wanted to embrace this ethos in the Dwimmermount campaign, but doing so contradicted "D&D is always right," so I, with some reluctance, allowed the use of raise dead. I vividly remember that there was some disappointment, among my readers that I'd "caved" on this point, since I'd previously written about my discomfort with the spell and how I felt it ran counter to the "mood" I was trying to bring to the Dwimmermount campaign. Even so, I permitted it, because the rules did and, as I already said repeatedly, I wanted wrestle with OD&D on its own terms – and, from the beginning, Dungeons & Dragons has had a spell that enabled the restoration of characters to life.

I adopted a similar mindsight when I refereeing my decade-plus Empire of the Petal Throne campaign, House of Worms. Because its underlying rules so closely mirror those of OD&D, EPT also includes several means to bring back the dead, including a spell accessible to player characters. During the course of the campaign, only one player character ever died – Aíthfo hiZnáyu – but he did so twice, which is certainly an unusual distinction! I permitted it, because the rules allowed it and also because the other players, knowing this, chose to make an effort to resurrect Aíthfo, in the process creating some very memorable adventures in Tékumel.

Still, I remained somewhat sheepish about all of this. My innate sense of consistency ensured I'd try to play by the principle ("D&D is always right") I'd laid down at the start of the Dwimmermount campaign, but I did so through gritted teeth. On some level, I shared the disappointment of readers who felt I'd "wimped out" by allowing the use of raise dead. Dwimmermount was, as I've noted, born out of my love of pulp fantasy of a particular kind that did not include easy resurrection in this fashion. Was I betraying its inspirations by being so casual about its use? At the time, I thought so. Even a few years ago, I groused about my decision.

Recently, though, I've come to accept my decision without any reservations. I've come to realize that I did the right thing in both cases by allowing the resurrections. My feeling increasingly is that there's altogether too much whining about how, on the one hand, "save-or-die is unfair" or "level drain is cruel" and, on the other hand, "healing is too commonplace" and "life restoration should be harder, if not impossible." My way of thinking nowadays is that these two extremes – which, to be fair, most players don't espouse – are mirror images of one another, each being founded in not taking Dungeons & Dragons as it is and has been from the beginning and instead substituting a different game in its place. 

That's not a unique sin; I'm as guilty of it as anyone. However, with the benefit of some distance, I've come to realize that many common complaints about D&D (or any roleplaying game) come from a failure in looking at the game design as a whole and instead fixating on only some of its parts. Is save-or-die really unfair? In a game where there are innumerable means of returning a character to life, I don't think so. In most cases, death in Dungeons & Dragons is just a setback and the rules provide a myriad of means by which to overcome it. Why not accept that?

That's more or less where I am right now on the question of death and resurrection in D&D and its derivatives and descendants.

Retrospective: Mage: The Ascension

I know that, for some readers, White Wolf's World of Darkness games represent a definitive break with the early days of the hobby and, therefore, aren't a fit topic for discussion on this blog. I won't argue the larger point, even though I think White Wolf's RPGs represent less a revolution than an evolution of trends begun many years before. What I will say is that these games played an important role in helping me to better understand what I liked and what I didn't in roleplaying games and, for that reason, I cannot simply dismiss them. 

Even so, I was never a big fan of Vampire: The Masquerade. For a variety of reasons, it never quite clicked with me and its immediate successor, Werewolf: The Apocalypse held even less appeal. Mage: The Ascension was a different matter entirely. Released in 1993, it was the World of Darkness game that made me finally take serious notice of the line. Like its predecessors, Mage presented a contemporary setting shot through with supernatural elements and an emphasis on mood, theme, and personal struggle. Unlike them, however, Mage was not content merely to reframe familiar folkloric monsters. Instead, it aimed at something more ambitious: the reimagining of Reality itself as a mutable construct, shaped and constrained by human belief.

This is the beating heart of Mage: The Ascension. As presented in the game, Reality is not fixed, but rather the product of consensus. What humanity collectively accepts as possible becomes so; what it rejects becomes difficult or even impossible to achieve. The titular mages are those rare individuals who have awakened to this truth and, through force of will, can impose their own understanding of Reality upon the world. It's an absolutely terrific premise and one that works well within a modern-day setting. It allows for a conception of magic – or magick, the rulebook rather portentously calls it – limited only by imagination. At the same time, this conception also includes the risk of paradox, the backlash that occurs when a mage’s actions too flagrantly contradict the already established consensus of the world.

Mechanically, Mage divides magic into "spheres," which are broad domains such as Forces, Mind, and Time. In principle, the system grants players remarkable freedom to devise magical effects on the fly, constrained only by their characters’ knowledge of the relevant Spheres and their own imaginations. In practice, however, this freedom comes at cost. The system demands a degree of negotiation and interpretation that can prove taxing, particularly for referees accustomed to clearer guidelines. Where most roleplaying games offered more concrete procedures for adjudicating actions, Mage often substituted a framework that must be continually interpreted and, at times, reinvented every time a character attempted to employ magic.

That's not necessarily a criticism, since Mage attempted to incorporate some of this tension into its setting as well. The conflict between boundless possibility and practical playability is mirrored in the conflict between the various Traditions to which characters belong and the agents of a rationalized, scientific consensus known as the Technocracy. The Technocracy is both a terrific adversary and brilliant bit of worldbuilding. Not entirely villainous, its agents are committed to the preservation of a stable and predictable Reality, one in which even "sleepers" (i.e. non-mages) can enjoy the fruits of magic in the form of technology. Consequently, the central struggle of Mage is not a simple battle between good and evil, but a more nuanced contest between competing visions of how the world ought to function. It's this philosophical battle that drew me in all those years ago and still compels me even now.

Despite – or perhaps because of – this, Mage is not an easy game to run or to play. Its rules, while evocative, are often vague, leaving much to the discretion of the referee. This can result in a lack of consistency, as similar situations may be adjudicated differently from one session (or one group) to another. Moreover, the demands placed upon both players and referee are considerable. To make effective use of the system requires not only a firm grasp of its mechanics but also a willingness to engage with the underlying assumptions of its worldview. Even then, if my experiences with the game are any indication, it was often tough going. 

That's why, in the end, I judge Mage: The Ascension as a flawed masterpiece that's very much of its time. Its themes of subjectivity, relativism, and the limits of objective truth remain compelling, of course, especially to the more philosophically inclined segment of the gaming population. Likewise, I can't help but admire its boldness in attempting to expand the scope of what roleplaying games might address, both mechanically and thematically. However, I think it's fair to say that its reach exceeded its grasp – but at least it was reaching for something genuinely new and imaginative. When I first read the game back in the '90s, I thought that was worth celebrating and I still do.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Hold That Person!"

Issue #90 (October 1984) of Dragon contained a short installment of Gary Gygax's increasingly irregular "From the Sorceror's [sic] Scroll" column entitled "Hold That Person!" The article's subtitle explains its purpose. According to Gygax, "the vast array of new monsters" found in books like the Fiend Folio and Monster Manual II have left players and DMs alike wondering which humanoids are affected by the spells charm person and hold person. Was that the case?

I ask because I distinctly recall that my feeling upon reading the article nearly 30 years ago was one of bemusement. I mean, I was, back then, very much enthralled by nearly everything Gary wrote. He was, after all, the creator of AD&D and his word on the subject was Law. But a list -- a definitive list, no less -- of what creatures qualified as "persons" for the purposes of certain spells? Why was this necessary? Did anyone really wonder whether a swanmay could be charmed or an ogrillon held? Was this even an issue at all? Maybe it was needed in tournaments, I don't know, but it was never an issue that came up in my gaming groups.

Just as interesting as the list Gygax provides are his closing comments in this article. He says the following:

If you, as a player, are grateful to have this expanded list, your gratitude is certainly appreciated but keep in mind that it is a mixed blessing. Players must attempt to remember the list of creatures affected by charm person and hold person, for when it comes time to cast a spell, the DM must never allow them to consult their reference works except for the Players Handbook. On the other hand, the DM can use any reference source at his disposal (including articles like this one) to check for desired information.

Now, there's nothing beyond the pale in what Gygax says here. In my experience, it was pretty much standard operating procedure amongst the groups with which I had contact. However, this is the first time I can recall its ever being stated outright as the Gospel of Gary. Again, I don't disagree with it, as it's identical to my own practice, but it is nonetheless interesting to see it stated so plainly.

Spellbooks

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the occult and esoteric roots of early science fiction and fantasy. The response to that post was enthusiastic, which got me thinking that perhaps it’s time I returned to writing more regularly about fantasy literature. Not long after, I happened to watch an old television episode in which a character mused that a writer’s deepest desire is to affect others with his words. That line stuck with me. Something about it lodged in my thoughts and, when paired with my recent reflections, stirred up an old connection I’ve often found fascinating: that the word grimoire, meaning a book of spells, as every D&D player knows, is merely a corrupted form of the word grammar. This, perhaps inevitably, led me to think of Alan Moore.

Now, Alan Moore has long had a reputation for being, let us say, an eccentric. From his decision to worship an obscure Roman snake god to his renunciation of the comic industry that made him famous, Moore has never shied away from holding – and expressing – unusual opinions. Among his more intriguing ones is the notion that writing is a form of magic. This is not a metaphor, at least not entirely. Moore has argued, quite seriously, that the act of writing, of using symbols to influence the thoughts and emotions of others across time and space, is indistinguishable from what the Ancients understood as sorcery.

Strange though it is, I must admit there’s something compelling about this idea. Even if one doesn’t share Moore’s larger worldview, as I do not, it’s hard to deny that writing can have a powerful effect on the human mind. Through the arrangement of words alone, a writer can make his readers laugh, weep, tremble, or dream. He can transport us to faraway lands, real or imagined, and introduce us to people we’ve never met but whose lives we come to care about deeply. In a very real sense, writing is a kind of conjuring, one that requires no candles or pentagrams, only ink and paper (or a keyboard and computer nowadays).

Consider, for example, the word spell. In modern English, it refers not only to an act of magic but also to the construction of words. To spell something is to put its letters in the correct order. Both meanings trace back to the same Old English root, spellian, meaning to speak or to tell a story. Similarly, as I alluded to above, the word grimoire originally refereed in Old French to a book of Latin grammar and only later came to mean a book of magic, in part because of its obscurity to later generations who no longer studied or understood Latin. Similarly, during the Middle Ages, the word grammar (or gramarye) was used as a synonym for occult knowledge. To be “learned in grammar,” meaning to be a sorcerer, is found in both Spenser and Tennyson, to cite two famous literary examples.  

My mind continued to dwell on these and related thoughts. Like many gamers my age, my first experiences with the hobby were less like reading an instruction manual and more like poring over an ancient tome whose true meaning was just out of reach. For example, Gary Gygax's AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide is notorious for its impenetrability in places. It's dense, baroque, and often bafflingly arranged – but it's also weirdly compelling. When I first encountered it, sometime in 1980, it felt charged in a way I could scarcely articulate at the time. Its pages were filled with the promise of discovery and, yes, even power, if only I could fully unlock its secrets.

The parallels with magic are not hard to see. A rulebook, especially one from those bygone days, isn’t just a guide to playing a game. It’s a grimoire, a book of hidden knowledge that, when properly understood, allows one to reshape the world. In the case of an RPG, that world is imaginary but no less real in the moment of play. The referee becomes a kind of conjurer, invoking the words of the text and combining them with his own imagination to create something new. Dice are his ritual tools. The rulebook is his spellbook. A well-loved module might as well be a scroll, its battered pages whispering of dungeons never fully explored and treasures never claimed.

I can still remember the first time I cracked open the D&D Basic Rulebook edited by J. Eric Holmes. I had just turned ten years-old a couple of months prior and, try as I might, I didn’t entirely understand what I was looking at. Nevertheless, the effect was immediate. The words, the terse descriptions and evocative names, the crude dungeon map at the back, all hinted at something larger, something just beyond my grasp. It was like standing at the edge of a forest and seeing strange lights flicker between the trees. I didn’t need to know everything to feel the pull. The rulebook was already working its magic.

That’s the heart of it, I think. The magic doesn’t reside solely in the words themselves, but in what they evoke and the spaces they open in the reader’s mind. A good RPG rulebook doesn’t just tell you how to play; it helps you see something, to imagine people and places and situations that didn’t exist before. It grants you the ability to summon worlds. That’s no small thing. When I look back on the early designers of RPGs, there's a real sense in which the word "magician" is apt to describe them. Their words conjured entire settings, systems, and styles of play that still persist decades later. Through their books, they reached into the minds of people across the world and sparked curiosity, wonder, and creativity. They transmitted dreams, wrapped in game mechanics and monster stats.

To this day, when I pick up an old TSR module or GDW product, I feel a flicker of that same enchantment. By today's standards, their production values may be modest and the prose often obscure, but their spells still work. That probably explains why I've never left this hobby behind, as so many of my childhood friends did. There’s something undeniably magical about it, something that goes beyond nostalgia. These books are more than just artifacts of a bygone era. They’re vessels of imaginative power and those who wrote them were, knowingly or not, practitioners of the oldest art of all.

The art of making something from nothing.

The art of words.

The art of magic.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Living in a Material World"

Issue #81 (January 1984) of Dragon included an article by Michael Dobson (whom I presume is the same Michael Dobson employed by TSR as an editor and writer between 1984 and 1987) entitled "Living in a Material World." As its subtitle makes clear, this article is intended to provide a system for dealing with the various material components spellcasters were expected to carry in order to work their magic. Likewise, Dobson notes that "material spell components add to the romance and realism of magic use, and somewhat restrict the power of spell casters." By my lights, this makes "Living in a Material World" about as paradigmatic an example of a Silver Age Dragon article as almost any I can imagine.

As to the content of the article itself, I can't deny that it's rather well done. Dobson is to be admired for his intestinal fortitude in providing a comprehensive accounting of all of AD&D's material spell components, including their costs, where they might be obtained, and their rarity. He then uses this information to provide the referee with the likelihood that various locales might have the components for which one is searching. There's a base chance, modified by rarity, the size of the locale in which one is searching, and other factors. It's actually a fairly easy system to use if you have the article handy, but one wonders why anyone would bother – at least I do (and did).

I want to be clear here: I don't begrudge anyone who finds dealing with such minutiae to be fun in their campaigns. Everyone has a slightly different notion of how much detail is "too much" and how much is "not enough." There's no single path to Verisimilitude. And I think, ultimately, that's my biggest beef with articles like this. They're part of a trend that D&D – and RPGs generally – adopted in the mid-80s that equated more detail with "better gaming." I don't deny that I've often indulged in more detail when I happened to like the topic in question, but material components have never been one of those topics.

They still aren't.

Retrospective: Ars Magica

The period leading up to the release of the Second Edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons is an interesting one. Though TSR’s flagship remained the proverbial 800-lb. gorilla of the hobby – still popular and selling well – the larger landscape of roleplaying was beginning to shift. Starting in the mid-1980s and continuing into the early ’90s, a number of new and, dare I say, experimental RPGs began to appear. Many of these games deviated sharply in both design and intended playstyle from the template laid down by D&D in 1974.

Of these, the one that immediately stands out in my memory is Ars Magica, released in 1987 by Lion Rampant, a small outfit co-founded by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein-Hagen, two designers who would later leave a lasting mark on the hobby. Even though the original edition was a modest affair, as one might expect from a fledgling company in the days before desktop publishing and professional layout, Ars Magica was an impressive work of imagination and clarity of purpose. What it lacked in visual polish, it made up for with a bold vision of what a roleplaying game could be: a tightly focused setting, a flexible and evocative magic system, and a novel approach to campaign structure that encouraged long-term play and shared refereeing responsibilities.

Despite all this, Ars Magica didn’t receive widespread recognition at the time, at least not in the gaming circles I moved in. I don’t recall it being especially celebrated, let alone commonly played. My first encounter with it came by chance, through a friend whose cousin lived in Minnesota, where Lion Rampant was based. What struck me most was how different it felt from any RPG I’d seen before. Even then, though, it remained something of a curiosity – admired more for its ideas than embraced at the table. It wasn’t until the third edition’s release in 1992, now under the White Wolf banner, that Ars Magica gained broader visibility. By then, Rein-Hagen had already launched Vampire: The Masquerade and that connection lent the game a cachet it had previously lacked. But the seeds had been planted back in 1987, in that humble, ambitious little book that imagined a different kind of fantasy roleplaying, rooted not in treasure and combat, but in magic and myth.

At its core, Ars Magica is a game about wizards: not the fireball-slinging adventurers of Dungeons & Dragons, but practitioners of a consistent magical tradition grounded in a pseudo-medieval European world. The magic system, based on a combination of techniques (Creo, Intellego, Muto, Perdo, Rego) and forms (Animal, Aquam, Auram, Corpus, Herbam, Ignem, Imaginem, Mentem, Terram, Vim), was unlike anything I’d encountered. It encouraged creativity and system mastery in equal measure, rewarding players who approached spellcasting not as a list of pre-defined effects but as a kind of magical engineering.

That alone would have made Ars Magica noteworthy, but its concept of troupe-style play made it all the more remarkable. Players were encouraged to share the duties of the referee (the “storyguide”) and to control not only a primary character (a magus) but also companion characters and "grogs," which were lower-powered retainers and guards respectively. This structure fostered a sense of shared "ownership" of the campaign that stood in stark contrast to the more referee-centric campaigns I was used to. I hadn’t seen anything like it before and I remember reading Ars Magica for the first time and being struck by how different it seemed to be.

The game’s setting, "Mythic Europe," was equally striking. Rather than creating a wholly fictional world, Tweet and Rein-Hagen placed their game in a version of historical Europe where the content of folklore and legends were real. Monasteries, faeries, noble courts, and demons all existed side by side, filtered through the lens of Hermetic magic. It was a world where the mundane and the magical existed in an uneasy equilibrium and the player characters stood firmly on the side of the uncanny.

As I mentioned earlier, the first edition rulebook really was a humble production: a softcover with a stark black-and-white cover depicting a wizard at his desk. The layout was clean, if plain, and the text dense with ideas. It lacked the polish of later editions or the visual flair that White Wolf would later bring to the game, but it had a seriousness of tone and clarity of vision that made me take notice. Looking back, I think Ars Magica represents one of the more intellectually ambitious RPGs of the pre-1990s era. Its design anticipated many later developments like freeform magic systems, troupe-style "storytelling," and campaigns centered on a fixed locale (the covenant). That the game’s fifth edition, released in 2004, remains in print is, I think, a testament to the enduring strength of its foundational ideas.

For all its virtues, the original edition nevertheless had its rough edges. The rules were sometimes vague or overly ambitious and the troupe model required a level of buy-in and trust that wasn’t always easy to find in groups accustomed to more traditional GM/player dynamics. But these were small complaints in a game that dared to be different and in doing so, helped shape the future of the hobby in subtle but lasting ways. Though I was never a regular player, I was an admirer – and still am. In fact, I’d count Ars Magica among the few roleplaying games to which I’d gladly devote some of my dwindling time. That’s about as high a compliment as I can offer any game.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Seven Swords"

Like his "Pages from the Mages," Ed Greenwood's "Seven Swords" from issue #74 of Dragon (June 1983) is an article I remember reading for the first time very vividly. Not only was I keen for more information about Greenwood's then-mysterious Forgotten Realms setting, but I had come recognize the man as one of the more clever and imaginative writers to appear in Dragon's pages. A big part of Greenwood's appeal is the way that he could make something as seemingly banal as sword +1 and make it interesting – and he did it without having to introduce a host of new powers or abilities into the game.

What "Seven Swords" does is present seven different magical weapons, none of which is more potent than a sword +3. Each of these swords gets an extensive description of both its physical and magical properties. Amusingly, it's often the physical description that really sets these swords apart from the pack. Whether it's the huge cabochon-cut black sapphire in the grip of Adjatha, the six matched bloodstones set in the bronze blade of Ilbratha, or the rearing serpents who make the guard of Shazzellim, Greenwood makes each of these weapons unique in appearance as well as abilities. This is a small detail that many referees overlook, concentrating instead on game mechanical effects. Greenwood doesn't skimp on these either, but they're only one facet of what makes the titular swords special.

Each weapon also includes a "lore" section, detailing the history of the blade, from its forging to the present day. It's this section that I really ate up as a younger man. Re-reading them in preparation for this post, I can completely understand why that was the case. The lore Greenwood presents isn't extensive – no more than four or five short paragraphs in most cases – but it's evocative. It's suggestive of adventures and, better still, it gives even a lowly sword +1 an air of antiquity and individuality that makes it a weapon worth holding on to even when better weapons come along. That was probably the biggest lesson "Seven Swords" taught me: game mechanics aren't always what make a magic item special. It's a lesson I've kept with me all these years and one I'd like to see adopted more broadly.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Pages from the Mages"

Ed Greenwood catches a lot of grief among a certain segment of the old school community, usually for things for which he was not himself responsible. Perhaps these old schoolers associate his Forgotten Realms campaign setting with 2e and 2e with the regime that ousted Gygax or ... something. It's always been rather unclear to me what crimes against gaming Greenwood was supposed to have committed, especially when my earliest memories of his name are indelibly connected to articles like "Pages from the Mages," which appeared in issue #62 (June 1982).

The article presents four "long-lost magical manuals" – the tomes of powerful and famous magic-users, each of which is unique in some way. All four books are given a name, a description, and a history in addition to a list of their contents. Every one of these entries made these librams much more interesting than just a simple catalog of, say, the spells they contained or the magical effect they conferred upon their reader. Thus, we learn that the eponymous author of Mhzentul's Runes was slain at the Battle of the River Rising and that Nchaser's Eiyromancia contains not one but two heretofore unknown spells.

Greenwood's articles always impressed me with their feigned depth. That is, they seemed to be part of a rich and complex setting, whose every little nook and cranny had been detailed beforehand so that he could just pluck them from his mind and present them whenever required to do so. As I learned later, this is a parlor trick, one that I learned to perform in time, too, but it doesn't make me any less fond of "Pages from the Mages" or its later sequels. In the span of comparatively little space, Greenwood provided readers with not only some new magical items to insert into their own games but models for how to make almost any magic item a locus of information about a campaign setting and, by extension, an inspiration for adventure.

The Articles of Dragon: "Cantrips: Minor Magics for Would-Be Wizards"

You would think I'd remember issue #59 of Dragon (March 1982) for its 20+ pages of science fiction content, but, at the time I first read it, I was much more interested in Gary Gygax's latest "From the Sorceror's Scroll" column. Entitled "Cantrips: Minor Magics for Would-Be Wizards," this column is what first introduced 0-level spells into Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Gygax offers these up as the first preview of the AD&D "expansion volume" he was working on at the time and that he hoped would be released "next year" (i.e. 1983). He explains that this volume "will be for both players and DMs, with several new character classes, new weapons, scores of new spells, new magic items, etc." 

Needless to say, this was irresistible to my youthful, Gygax-loving, TSR fanboy self. I'd been playing AD&D – or, at least, using AD&D books to play a game we called "AD&D" – since sometime in 1980 and had, during that time, had dutifully acquired all its available volumes. The prospect of a new volume and one penned by Gygax himself filled us with excitement. That he was now sharing monthly glimpses into what this volume might contain in the pages of Dragon more or less assure that I'd be paying careful attention to the magazine from now on.

Of course, this first article in the series of previews didn't really interest me all that much. For whatever reason, my friends and I weren't all that keen on magic-users. It's not that we never played magic-users – well, I didn't, but that's another story – but that our favorite classes tended to be fighters, thieves, and clerics. With one exception, I can't recall a single player character who was a single-classed MU. All of the magic-users amongst our characters were multi-classed elves and even these were pretty uncommon. Consequently, I couldn't get too excited about cantrips, since I knew they wouldn't see much use at our table.

And I was correct in thinking this. Early on, shortly after the article was published, I suggested that we give these new minor spells a whirl to see if they'd actually be useful. As Gygax presents them, a magic-user can memorize four cantrips for every first-level spell he's willing to forgo. At that very favorable exchange rate, a couple of players thought it worth a try, selecting cantrips like exterminate, knot, tangle, and wilt in place of a single detect magic or light. The consensus, as I recall, was that some cantrips had value in certain limited situations, but that, by and large, few magic-users would ever willingly give up a spell slot for them. After that, I don't think we ever thought much about cantrips.

Nevertheless, this remains a memorable and important article for me even now – because it was the first article that suggested to me that the AD&D game's rules might change or evolve in any significant way. You must remember that, by the time I started playing, all three of AD&D's rulebooks had already been released. While both Deities & Demigods and the Fiend Folio came out after my introduction to the hobby, I didn't pay either of them much heed and indeed made comparatively little use of either of them. More to the point, neither one changed much of anything about the AD&D rules, so they could be safely ignored. However, this Gygax column from issue #59 heralded the dawn of a new era, one in which AD&D would, at last, change through the introduction of new character classes, spells, magic items, etc. That was a very big deal to me at the time, hence why I can recall reading this article for the first time, even more than forty years later.

Dousing the Fireball

With the possible exception of magic missile – which, ironically, didn't appear until a year after the original game's release – I can think of no more iconic spell in Dungeons & Dragons than fireball. As most of you will no doubt already know, fireball (or fire ball, as it's rendered in OD&D and the 1981 and '83 D&D Expert Sets) first appeared in Chainmail, where it's one of two types of missiles a wizard can throw, the other being lightning bolt. In Chainmail, a wizard can seemingly throw a fireball at will and its function is as a form of battlefield artillery that immediately destroys any target within its area of effect weaker than a Hero. Even if you've never played Chainmail, I hope my brief summary makes clear just how potent a fireball is – and that's the problem. 

When the abilities and spells of Chainmail's wizards were translated into the terms of OD&D, there were inevitably going to changes and alterations, big and small. In the case of fireball, these changes included a slightly larger burst radius and damage that increases with the level of its caster or, as Men & Magic explains it, "A 6th level Magic-User throws a 6-die missile, a 7th a 7-die missile, and so on." These changes explain, I suspect, why fireball became the iconic D&D spell and the one that nearly every magic-user hoped to learn as soon as they were of sufficient level to do so. Taken together, the fireball of OD&D and all subsequent TSR versions of the game is one of only a handful of spells whose damage-dealing potential has no upper limit. Coupled with its large area of effect and easy reach for most characters – a magic-user only needs to be 5th-level (20,000 XP) to potentially acquire it – fireball is a must-have spell when it comes to damage-dealing.

Spend enough time in online D&D circles and the subject of the relative power of fighters versus magic-users will inevitably come up. This is one of those perennial topics that simply will not die, because, unlike many such topics, I think there's some substance to it. Fighters, even when equipped with potent magic weaponry, can never dish out as much damage as can even a fairly low-level magic-user. Over the years, various solutions have been proposed, such as weapon specialization in AD&D, but none of them has met with universal acceptance – quite the opposite, in fact. 

That's why I've lately been thinking about either eliminating or modifying spells whose damage-dealing effects increase with the level of their caster. If you look at the original spell list from Volume 1 of OD&D, both fireball and lightning bolt are odd men out, mechanically speaking. Most of the game's "offensive" spells, like sleep, cloudkill, or disintegrate do not become more effective as the caster rises in level. Any variability they have in terms of damage or overall effectiveness is usually independent of level (there are exceptions). That feels right to me somehow and offers a better model to emulate in rethinking spells in OD&D and similar games.

On the other hand, simply removing fireball, lightning bolt, and comparable spells might be simpler. This is what Lamentations of the Flame Princess did long ago. Many of that retroclone's deviations from OD&D were introduced specifically to strengthen the fighter's role as the most potent combatant and damage-dealer, which is a worthy goal. Furthermore, by eliminating and/or weakening the number and scope of magical damage dealing, this approach carves out a different role for the magic-user, that of a seeker after knowledge and controller of the environment. It's a far cry from the role people now tend to associate with D&D magic-users, but is that necessarily a bad thing? It's closer to the pulp fantasy conception of sorcerers and wizards than to the cartoonish, video game-y vision of them flinging fireballs and hurling lightning bolts.

I don't know. I'm still thinking about this, especially in light of my evolving thinking about magic in Secrets of sha-Arthan. I'd love to hear readers' thoughts on the subject, especially from those of you have regularly play fighters and/or magic-users. How do you perceive their relative strengths when it comes to damage-dealing or do you make changes to rebalance things?

Polyhedron: Issue #29

Issue #29 of Polyhedron is another April Fool's Day issue, though it actually appeared in May of 1986. The issue features a cover by Tom Wham, which is always a delight. I wish the same could be said of its content. I readily admit that I'm not an ideal audience for issues like this, but that's not because I lack a sense of humor. Rather, I simply dislike forced humor and this issue is full of it. Needless to say, I didn't enjoy re-reading this one. Apologies in advance if my frustration gets the better of me.

"Notes from HQ" is typically ephemeral and focused on RPGA matters. The only genuinely interesting thing in it is the announcement of the Gamers' Choice Awards. "Unlike other gaming industry awards, for which the winners are chosen by manufacturers and special panels, these awards are given to those companies whose products are judged the best by the most qualified judges of all – the gamers themselves." I must be old, because I don't recall ever hearing of these awards before. On the other hand, I was never much of a con goer, so that might explain my ignorance. 

Skip Williams gives us "The Lighter Side of Encounters II," a sequel to his article in the previous year's April Fool's Day issue. Like its predecessor, what makes the article interesting is not so much its content as the origin of the content, namely AD&D campaigns run by the Lake Geneva staff of TSR, in this case Williams himself and Frank Mentzer. Williams presents two different encounters, one involving a mad dash through a dungeon and another about trying to prevent a pit fiend from regenerating, that aren't exactly humorous in context, but that seem so when presented in isolation. They're the kinds of things that happen in any RPG campaign played with friends and I love them for that reason. This article is probably the best in the issue and it's because it's the most "serious."

"The Camel's Nose" by Mike Selinker is an AD&D adventure that takes up 16 pages – half of the issue. It's a humorous scenario for six pregenerated player characters, all of whom are valley elves with ridiculous names like "Tattieboggle Spauldrocky" or "Arglebargle Collieshangle." These characters are tasked with protecting a talking camel (a cleric of the Camel Lord, Camelopardus), on his journey across the Burning Desert to a shrine of his deity. He brings with him a sacred rock called the Camel's Nose and ... well, I think you can probably guess where this is going. The adventure is filled with puns and humorous allusions and general silliness, like the Camels Oasis shopping center. I'm sure someone might find it funny, but that someone is not me.

Selinker returns with "The Ecology of Tiamat," which is a rambling dialog between Feargall the All-Noxious and Greenhorn the dim as they "humorously" discuss Feargall's many encounters with Tiamat. It's strange, self-referential, and fourth wall-breaking and, again, I just found it tedious. Your mileage may vary. "Fractured Spells" by Rick Reid is a collection of goofy spells for all magic-using classes, from neutralize person to detect chum to continual lice and more. As you can see, they're all based on puns or misreadings of pre-existing spells. I'll give the author points for cleverness, but not much else.

"The Gods of the Gamma World Game" by James M. Ward is a very strange article. Ward presents five larger-than-life characters from the setting of Gamma World, each of which represents "a different ideal." For example, Ren – there's that name again – is the archetypal scientist, while Tobor the Unstoppable is the archetypal robot. If I squint, I can sort of see what Ward's getting at with these characters. They're more akin to "tall tales" like Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill than "gods" in the usual sense. That's kind of interesting. However, Ward saddles them all with absurd Gamma World game stats akin to what you'd find in Deities & Demigods and serendipitously provide additional insight for my recent post about that very book and the drawbacks of its presentation.

The issue ends with Roger E. Moore's "Savage Sword of Lugnut the Barbarian," another "humorous" story, this time about a mighty-thewed barbarian and his quest to save a princess from Skuzzdrool the Ultra-Necromancer. It's not very funny, even as a parody of Conan, but's thankfully short, which is more than can be said of "The Camel's Nose." I still cannot understand why half the issue was devoted to that adventure ...

Oh well. One more issue to go before this series ends, which is probably for the best. My patience is wearing thin, especially after this issue.

Aranalar

Aranalar by Luigi Castellani

Aranalar ("Indomitable") is a sword +1, +2 vs the Unmade forged from alchemical steel. Its blade is single sided, forward curving, and, like all Kulvuan osuna, intended to be wielded from the back of a teteku, The blade itself is approximately two feet in length and bears a maker’s mark (not visible in the illustration) that identifies it as a product of the famed Bejanakoru workshop of lost Onoritash, though it is unlikely that its enchantment took place there. The grip is wrapped in ridzor-leather, while its pommel bears an early example of a nasha-charm that would later become commonplace on Kulvuan imperial weaponry.

Aranalar possesses a single magical ability, from which it receives its name. So long as the sword is held, its wielder is completely immune to the melee attacks of any Unmade of equal or lesser level than himself. This immunity does not apply to either ranged or magical attacks, however. The ability has no duration and is usable at will, so long as the sword is held. Sheathed, Aranalar no longer provides this immunity. Likewise, this immunity extends only to the current wielder of the sword and to no one else.

The precise date of Aranalar’s forging is unknown. However, its magical ability suggests that it was created for use during either the Consolidation of Light (1:1–4) or the Daybreak Wars (1:15–25). The third book of Samakan’s Lesser Chronicle of Dawn makes mention of the warrior Besu Tankuli, who, during the Siege of Itixtar, emerged seemingly unscathed after facing off against “an Unmade host the likes of which none have seen since the Epoch of Shadows.” Samakan notes that Besu wielded “a mighty blade, whose enchantment protected him against the twisted creations of the Unmakers on that day.” General Daljan Chayusi (1:301–2:5) unambiguously wielded Aranalar during his career, most famously at the Battle of Uchiran (1: 344). Upon his retirement, he gave the sword to his son, Dalen (1:326–2:3), who was murdered by persons unknown, possibly for his role in the Second Archontic Succession Crisis (1:358).  Aranalar was then stolen and disappeared from history, though rumors of its location or current wielder continue to this day.

Polyhedron: Issue #28

Issue #28 of Polyhedron (March 1986) features yet another cover by Roger Raupp, who, as I've remarked previously, seems to have been TSR's go-to guy for on-demand artwork in the mid to late 1980s. I never minded, because I liked his style, which I felt struck a nice balance between the cleanliness of Larry Elmore and the grubbiness of Jim Holloway while still remaining firmly within the realm of "fantastic realism." Given how often his illustrations appear during this period, I suspect Raupp must have worked quickly – a great virtue for an artist employed in the gaming industry.

"Notes from HQ" contains an update on "the City Project" first announced in issue #25. Editor Penny Petticord mentions that "the legal aspects of the project have not yet been completely resolved," but does not elaborate on precisely what this means. She might be alluding to the assignment of copyrights, given that this project will include submissions from many outside sources, though there are other possible explanations. Interestingly, Petticord makes no mention of the placement of the setting within the World of Greyhawk or any other setting. Gary Gygax's imminent departure from TSR might explain this omission. In any event, the project would eventually be shifted to the Forgotten Realms when Ed Greenwood's campaign setting became the default setting of AD&D in 1987.

"Adventure Among the Clouds" by Jeff Martin is an AD&D article that tackles the subject of cloud islands – floating "land" masses that can serve as adventure locales. The existence of such islands was first confirmed in the Monster Manual's description of cloud giants and elaborated upon further in module UK7, Dark Clouds Gather. In this article, Martin describes the origin, composition, and inhabitants of cloud islands, along with notes on how these magical places affect spells and magic items. His overall approach reminds me a lot of a condensed version of what Roger E. Moore pioneered with his "The Astral Plane" article in Dragon #67 (November 1982), though, sadly, less interesting. Cloud islands are potentially fascinating places and very much in keeping with AD&D-style fantasy, but Martin, in my opinion, treats them in a rather mundane way. It's a shame.

Back in the day, Frank Mentzer was a machine when it came to penning RPGA AD&D tournament adventures. This issue includes another one, "The Great Bugbear Hunt," intended for characters of levels 5–7. The set-up is that, while out in the wilderness, a passing band of bugbears slew the horses of a party of adventurers and stole all the items in the saddlebags. Among them is a magic-user's spellbook. Naturally horrified by this turn of events, he enlists the aid of others to venture back into the wilderness in an attempt to find the bugbears and retrieve it. The scenario is, in effect, a scavenger hunt in a wilderness filled with monsters and other obstacles. This one looks like a lot of fun, with plenty of varied and challenging encounters.

"The Specialist Mage" by Jon Pickens introduces a new idea for use in AD&D games: the specialist mage. Bear in mind, this is 1986, three years before the release of Second Edition, which formalized specialist mages as an option for player character magic-users. Here, the idea is presented as being for NPCs only – a common dodge employed in the pages of Dragon to justify its articles on new classes without running afoul of TSR dicta about "no new character classes." Pickens's version of the specialist mage receives XP bonuses if he employs more spells of his chosen specialty, in addition to having access to unique spells unavailable to non-specialists. In this issue, he presents numerous new necromancy spells, though they were intended only for use by "an NPC villain." Where have I heard that before?

Michael Przytarski's "Fletcher's Corner" is focused on the creation and judging of tournament scenarios, a topic that I must confess holds little interest for me. That he is given three pages to elucidate his thoughts on the topic makes it even less compelling somehow. Of course, this is the official newszine of the Role Playing Game Association, which sponsored innumerable tournaments at GenCon and elsewhere, so this is exactly the kind of content that should be here. That it holds no interest for me says more about my weirdness than it does about the article. Alas, I'm the one writing this post.

In terms of the number of articles, issue #28 has among the fewest in some time. That's probably due to the fact that "The Great Bugbear Hunt" adventure takes up half of the issue's 32 pages. Likewise, all the remaining articles, with the exception of "Notes from HQ," are at least three pages long. I probably wouldn't have even commented on this if any of them had any of them stood out as notable in some way. Instead, they're mostly fine if unexceptional, so I took greater note of how few there were than I otherwise might have.

Sadly, the next issue is the April Fool's Day issue, so I don't think it'll prove much better ...

The Cost of Power

One of the many ways that fantasy roleplaying games differ from their pulp fantasy inspirations concerns the use of magic. With comparatively few exceptions, pulp fantasy depicts magic as, at best, wild and unpredictable and, at worst, as outright diabolical. RPGs, meanwhile, treat magic almost as a form of technology, an instrument that is neither inherently good nor bad and that, if used with appropriate training, rarely if ever presents any danger to its user. 

The most obvious exceptions that come to my mind are Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, both of which explicitly caution against the use of magic by characters, precisely because of its inherent danger. A more recent exception is Goodman Games' Dungeon Crawl Classics Role-Playing Game. Of course, two of the aforementioned RPGs are based directly on foundational works of pulp fantasy, while the other self-avowedly looks to pulp literature for its inspiration. There may be a few other contrary examples here and there, but, for the most part, fantasy roleplaying games have followed the lead of Dungeons & Dragons in treating magic purely instrumentally – differing from safe, reliable technology only in esthetics.

Back in Dragon #65 (September 1982), Phil Foglio lampooned this to good effect in his What's New with Phil & Dixie. In this particular strip, Phil claims that the differences between medieval and science fiction RPGs can be summed up in one word: none. When Dixie objects, he then provides her with a series of examples to prove his point that, while tendentious, nevertheless contain a ring of truth. The comic even invokes Clarke's Third Law for additional support.

If you look at the history of the hobby over the last half-century, the paradigm of magic-as-technology has clearly been the most common. Whether that's because D&D set the pattern by adopting it or because it's just a simpler and perhaps even more fun way to handle magic, I can't say. Still, as a fan of dangerous magic, it's hard not to be a little saddened by how rarely it's been employed in RPGs over the decades. Perhaps it's time for a change ...

Polyhedron: Issue #27

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ah well. I'll soldier on.

Polyhedron: Issue #26

Issue #26 of Polyhedron (November 1985) is another one that I recall very vividly, almost entirely because of its Roger Raupp cover, depicting a reptilian alien superimposed over what looks to be photograph from one of the Viking landers sent to Mars in the mid-70s. The cover was inspired by Roger E. Moore's article, "Gamma Mars," on which I've briefly commented before. I have lots to say about it but will hold off on doing so until later in this post. 

"Notes from HQ" is, as usual, mostly filled with RPGA ephemera of minimal lasting value. There is, however, a brief section worthy of mention. The "City Project" announced in the previous issue is moving forward, though Penny Petticord asks RPGA members to "hold your actual submissions until specific procedures are announced next issue." Furthermore, she explains HQ "will be finalizing details with Gary Gygax" regarding the placement of the city within the World of Greyhawk setting. Of course, Gygax would depart TSR less than a year later and the City Project would, in turn, head in a different direction.

Next up is "Squeaky Wheels," a guest editorial by Frank Mentzer, in which he tackles criticisms of roleplaying games in the mass media. Mentzer isn't talking solely about the religiously-inflected Satanic Panic – though he does have rebuttals to offer on that score – but also to more general worries about RPGs, such as the suggestion that playing these games inclines one to suicide. I must admit that, despite having lived through these times, I encountered almost no resistance to my involvement in roleplaying. If anything, my parents and the parents of my friends were incredibly supportive of our hobby. Perhaps we were just lucky, I don't know. In any case, I'll never cease to be baffled when I come across articles like this one. They're yet more evidence that the past really is a foreign country.

"Con-Fusion" by Fas Eddie Carmien is a brief collection of thank yous to the volunteers at GenCon 18 – nothing special. "Where Chaos Reigns" by Sonny Scott is more amusing, being a fictionalized account of his time working telephone assistance on behalf of the RPGA at GenCon. Though hardly an article for the ages, it's fun and, as someone who's worked at a phone bank a few times over the course of my life, the inanity of the calls Scott recounts seems very true to life. Michael D. Selinker's "A View of GenCon 18 Game Fair from RPGA Network HQ" is a day-by-day recounting of the con from the perspective of someone involved in its operation. I've never been involved in running a con, so I found this article more interesting than I expected. It's helped by the fact that Selinker can spin a good yarn and has a decent sense of humor.

The third and final part of Frank Mentzer's AD&D tournament adventure, Needle, appears in this issue. Part I focused on the location of the titular obelisk, while Part II was about the process of retrieving it for transport it across the sea. Part III concerns what happens after it's been installed in the palace square of the king who wanted it in the first place. In case you're wondering: a magical door to the Moon opens in its base and the characters must journey through it to see its wonders. As premises for an adventure go, it's not a bad one and Mentzer does a solid job of presenting intriguing and challenging encounters. 

"Dispel Confusion" is short this month, tackling only AD&D and Gamma World questions, none of which are especially memorable. For me, what's most fascinating is how increasingly truncated this column has become. In early issues of Polyhedron, "Dispel Confusion" covered two or three pages and covered all of TSR's RPGs. As time went on, its page length shortened and its focus contracted, with only AD&D and Gamma World being consistently covered. The former is understandably, as it was always TSR's most popular and best selling game. Gamma World's continued presence strikes me as stranger, as I never got the impression it was very successful, despite its having no fewer than four editions during TSR's time. 

Speaking of Gamma World, we come at last to Roger E. Moore's "Gamma Mars," which, as its title suggests, presents information on the state of the planet Mars in the post-apocalyptic 25th century of the game. In this timeline, Mars was first visited by human beings in 2002, with a stable colony growing there over the course of the 21st century. By 2076, the colony became independent of Earth. The colonists would eventually discover evidence of alien habitation on the planet – the reptilian Luntarians – but these beings are not natives to Mars but visitors from another planet outside our solar system. A small number of Luntarians placed themselves into suspended animation in the past and were subsequently revived just in time for the Social Wars to engulf Earth and cut Mars off from the mother planet.

I was a big fan of the articles from Dragon that described the state of the Moon in Gamma World, so I was understandably excited to learn more about the wider solar system of the game's setting. As described by Moore, Mars has only been partially terraformed. Its atmosphere, for example, remains too thin for humans to breathe unaided. In addition, pure strain humans predominate, since Mars largely sat out the conflict that devastated Earth. The result is a very different take on Gamma World, one where rival cities jockey with one another for power and rumors of alien ruins and technology form the basis for adventure. At the time, I found it compelling stuff; even now, I think there's something remarkable about it.

Jon Pickens provides "Unofficial Illusionist Spells" that are actually fairly interesting, at least when compared to the cleric and magic-user spells from previous issues. I think that's because, in AD&D, there are comparatively few illusionist magic items and thus the spells here don't exist primarily to act as means of explaining how such items exist. Michael Przytarski's "Fletcher's Corner" also deals with magic, in this case magic items, which he first divides into the categories of "mundane, powerful, deadly, and ridiculous" with the goal of suggesting how common each type should be in a good campaign. He also addresses the question of "magic shops," something I get the impression was becoming increasingly common in mid-80s AD&D (based on how often it was criticized in official TSR publications). The issue ends with Errol Farstad's positive review of Twilight: 2000.

Twenty-six issues in, Polyhedron continues to lack a solid, consistent foundation on which to build. As I have repeatedly said in this series, you never know what to expect from an issue, with some having numerous useful and excellent articles and others ... less so. While I completely understand why this was the case, it's disappointing and played a big part in why I'd eventually let my subscription lapse, even as I continued to read Dragon for many more years to come. 

Retrospective: The Book of Wondrous Inventions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, the pain ... the pain!

Polyhedron: Issue #22

Issue #22 of Polyhedron (March 1985) features an interesting piece of artwork by Joseph Pillsbury. I say "interesting" not solely for the subject matter of the piece – a downed spacecraft – but because Pillsbury is an artist I mostly remember for his humorous comics in the "Dragon Mirth" section of Dragon. I can't recall his having done any "serious" artwork before, but it's always possible I've overlooked his wider contributions to the hobby.

Penny Petticord's "News from HQ" has two items worthy of note. The first is an announcement that Polyhedron is actively seeking submissions from readers. Petticord states that "only a few members" have thus far been making submissions and she'd like to change that. I wish I'd paid more attention to this at the time, because I made several submissions to Dragon while I was in high school and all were rejected. I might have had a better shot with Polyhedron, given the dearth of submissions. Secondly, Petticord warns readers that the next issue will a "special April Fool" issue, so "don't believe anything you read" in its pages. Fair enough!

This issue also features a large letters page, with multiple letters written in response to Roger E. Moore's "Women in Role Playing" essay from issue #20, While not all of the letters were critical, many of them were, largely because the readers felt that Moore had "belittled" or otherwise failed to understand female gamers. Though Moore apologizes for any unintended offense, he nevertheless stands by what he wrote, noting that it's an important topic in need of more frank discussion. Some things never change, I guess. 

Gary Gygax returns to this issue, writing yet again about marlgoyles and their reproduction. He provides AD&D stats for every stage of the creature's growth from hatchling to mature. It's baffling to me, but it's definitely in keeping the naturalism that's a hallmark of his worldbuilding. He also provides stats for a "monster" that was somehow left out of Monster Manual II – amazons. Amazons, in Gygax's vision, are a female-dominated society of barbarians, with menfolk in secondary or support roles. Beyond that, he doesn't have much more to say about them, which I found a little disappointing, because they're a great fantasy concept worthy of inclusion in D&D.

Frank Mentzer's "Spelling Bee" focuses on druid spells and abilities. Interestingly, Mentzer concern this time seems more focused on reining in druid abilities (like shapechange) that he thinks can be easily abused rather than on finding new and creative ways to make use of them. "The RPGA Network Tournament Ranking System" article is not especially interesting in itself, at least to me. However, the accompanying ranked list of RPGA judges and players is. Gary Gygax, for example, is the only Level 10 Judge, just as Frank Mentzer is the only Level 9. There are no Level 8 or 7 Judges and only one Level 6 (Bob Blake). The names on both lists include quite a number of people who either were at the time or would later be associated with TSR or the wider RPG world. It's a fascinating window on a particular time in both the hobby and the industry.

"In the Black Hours" is an AD&D adventure for levels 6–9 by David Cook. The scenario is unusual in a couple of ways, starting with its lengthy backstory about a high-level mage who learned the true name of the demon lord Juiblex and, in order to protect himself, was eventually forced to imprison the demon with a magical crown. That crown has now come into the possession of a merchant who wishes to protect it from would-be thieves (employed by Juiblex's demonic underlings who wish to free him). The characters are hired by the crown's present owner to protect it over the course of the night when he believes the thieves will make their attempt. There's a lot going on here and the basic structure of the adventure – mounting a defense against waves of attackers – seems well suited to a tournament set-up. If anyone ever played this scenario (or one like it), I'd be very curious to hear how it went.

"Away with Words" by Frank Mentzer is a 26-word multiple choice quiz that challenges the reader's knowledge of High Gygaxian words. It's a fun enough little diversion, though less hard now, thanks to the ubiquity of online dictionaries. "Unofficial New Spells for Clerics" by Jon Pickens does exactly what it says: offers a dozen new spells for use by clerics. Most of these spells are connected in some way to existing magic items, like the staff of striking or necklace of adaptation, filling in gaps in the spell list that, logically, should exist. While that certainly makes sense, it's also boring and exactly the kind of magic-as-technology approach that I've come to feel kills any sense of wonder in a fantasy setting.

"Dispel Confusion" continues to narrow its scope. This issue we're treated only to questions pertaining to D&D, AD&D, and Star Frontiers. Most of them are the usual collection of nitpicks and niggling details. However, one stood out as noteworthy (and indeed unexpected):

I have to admit that this answer surprised me – not because I didn't already know what it would say, but because I didn't imagine I'd ever read such a thing in a TSR periodical. In the past, these magazines tended to advance a very strong "by the book" line when it came to the rules, as evidenced by the fact that there's an official column for questions and answers. I can't help but wonder if perhaps this represented a change in thinking during the final years of Gygax's time at the company (he'd leave for good October 1986 – about a year and a half into the future).

"Of Great Ships and Captains" by Roger E. Moore is the second part of his "big ships" article for Star Frontiers. Unlike part one from the previous issue, this second part focuses on the fine details of running a campaign aboard a large starship. Moore takes a look at deckplans, crew complement, shipboard positions, and the kinds of adversaries and adventures that work in such a campaign. It's all very good stuff and, as I mentioned in my write-up of issue #21, I found it very inspirational in my younger days. The only real criticism I can muster about the article is that it does not include a set of sample deckplans for a big ship, as promised. Production delays apparently prevented their inclusion and, while Moore states they would appear in a future issue of Polyhedron, I don't believe they ever did. If I'm mistaken about this, I'd love to know.

The issue concludes with the return of "The Treasure Chest," the RPGA catalog of exclusive items that has not been seen in quite some time. The items available for sale are now mostly RPGA tournament modules that were otherwise unavailable at the time, along with some exclusive miniatures and back issues of Polyhedron. I wonder what occasioned the return of the catalog, since I can't imagine that it made enough money for that to have been a serious consideration. In any case, we're inching ever closer toward the end of my time as a subscriber to the newszine, meaning this series will likely conclude before we reach the summer months.