Awe-ful

There is a particular kind of emotion that, in my experience, is easily forgotten in our world of algorithms and explanations but that once held a central place in human experience. I’m speaking of awe, not merely in its diluted modern sense, but in its original meaning: a mixture of wonder and fear in the face of something vast, strange, and beyond human comprehension. It’s a feeling that borders on the religious and it is the lifeblood of the weird and the uncanny.

H.P. Lovecraft understood this, perhaps better than most writers of the last hundred years. Through his work, he attempted to refine the weird tale it into a kind of secular mysticism, in which the cosmos itself becomes the site of both revelation and terror. In Supernatural Horror in Literature, he famously wrote that 

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” 

However, Lovecraft’s best stories do more than simply terrify. They evoke awe in its fullest sense, what he elsewhere calls a “certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces.” When he describes beings whose very geometry defies human perception or ancient truths that shatter the minds of those who grasp them, he is evoking something far deeper than mere fright. He is pointing toward the sublime.

Sigmund Freud distinguished between the "uncanny" and the "familiar," noting how the former is not simply the unknown, but the strangely known, the familiar made alien. Lovecraft seized on this psychological dissonance and expanded it to include the entire cosmos. His monsters are not just unknowable; they are that which we once knew in some long-buried dream of pre-human memory. The sense of uncanny recognition is part of the horror. It is this effect, more than mere violence or gore, that marks the best weird fiction.

Of course, horror is only part of the equation. What often goes unspoken is how beautiful the weird can be. The shimmering city of the Elder Things beneath the ice of Antarctica; the dream-haunted vistas of Kadath; the mind-transcending journey of Randolph Carter through the stars. These are not scenes of mere terror. They are awe-inspiring in the truest sense – sublime and strange, but also profoundly glorious. Lovecraft understood that what we call horror and what we call wonder are not always distinct categories. The numinous is a threshold. The emotion it provokes may be colored by fear, reverence, or ecstasy or some combination of the three.

Naturally, this brings me to roleplaying games.

When I think back to my earliest experiences with RPGs, what strikes me most is how often they trafficked in awe. I'm not talking about desperate combats or puzzles to be solved, but fleeting and fragile moments when the game evoked something stranger and deeper. A mysterious door that could not be opened. A statue with eyes that seemed to follow you. A creature whose motives and nature eluded simple categorization. In those moments, even the purple prose of boxed text or the improvisations of a teenaged Dungeon Master could occasionally brush up against the ineffable. 

This is, I think, one of the great potentials of the roleplaying medium: its ability to resurrect feelings that modern life has largely anesthetized, like wonder before the uncanny. These feelings are not mere tropes to be mined, but modes of perception, ways of seeing the world as something deeper and more alive with meaning and strangeness.

Lovecraft feared the loss of these feelings in modernity. It's ironic that he is most famous for his fiction, because Supernatural Horror in Literature, an essay of literary criticism, is undeniably one of his greatest works. There, he laments the triumph of the merely rational in fiction and calls for a return to cosmic awe, a feeling that transcends individual psychology and touches something vast and impersonal. He believed that the weird tale could restore "the stimulation of wonder and fancy." It's no surprise, then, that his own work (and the many games it inspired) have done exactly that for generations of readers and players.

Perhaps that is the true function of the weird tale (or the weird game): to break through the crust of the mundane and let in something ancient, fearful, and magnificent. Weird tales remind us that the universe is, to paraphrase J.B.S. Haldane, not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine and that, in the face of that strangeness, we are still capable of awe.

Among the Weirdos

Something I find myself reflecting on more and more as I grow older is just how odd so many of the people I gamed with in my youth were. I mean that in the best possible sense. Back in the late '70s and early '80s, there weren't as many organized outlets for people with niche interests as there are nowadays. If you were into, say, The Lord of the Rings or Star Trek – or if you liked history or mythology or miniature soldiers or even if you read books no one else in your school had heard of, there just weren’t many places you could go to find like-minded souls.

Because of that, my early memories of entering the hobby are filled with eccentrics and enthusiasts, each one weird in his own particular way. I remember, for example, a guy who constantly insisted that "there was no such thing as a 'broadsword' during the Middle Ages." I already told you about Bob. And then there was me, who spent his spare time obsessing over ancient alphabets and cobbling together imaginary languages for the fun of it. Somehow, we all got along – or at least, we all put up with each other long enough to play D&D or Traveller or whatever.

It’s hard to overstate how formative that was for me. For example, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard by older roleplayers I met at Strategy & Fantasy World. I would listen to people talk about chanbara films, Napoleonic tactics, and Norse mythology, all while hanging out in game stores and at library games days. I was introduced to a lot of different things simply because the then-new hobby of roleplaying attracted a very wide group of players with varied interests and everyone congregated in the same places.

As I've said repeatedly over the last couple of weeks, we didn’t always get along. In fact, we argued and, sometimes, we seemed to barely speak the same language. However, in those days, I often had no choice but to associate with people outside my immediate circle of comfort and taste and, because of that, I learned things. More than that, I grew.

Phil Dutré recently summed this up perfectly:

It’s also telling that gaming-at-large has become largely siloed and compartmentalized. In the 70s/80s/even 90s wargaming/roleplaying/boardgaming was still considered one big hobby (with a lot of crossovers), and one naturally came into contact with all sorts of people interested in various angles.

These days roleplayers and wargamers and board gamers almost seem to be different breeds, barely knowing of each other’s hobbies, let alone spending time with one another. My point is that, by having nowhere else to go, the early hobby brought together a lot of us weirdos and we learned stuff from each other. As I explained above, I was introduced to Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard through these people, just as I shared my love of ancient alphabets and languages, while others shared their love of history, mythology, philosophy, etc. I am literally the man I am today because I had no choice but to hang out with people I might otherwise not have. Today, I feel as if too many gamers self-select for people just like themselves in the narrowest senses. That's a shame, because having to learn to get along with people very different is a great way to improve oneself.

I wonder if part of the magic of the early hobby as I experienced it was precisely this unexpected mixing of oddballs. Even in the early 1980s, there simply wasn’t enough critical mass to allow subgroups to splinter off and form their own tightly curated communities. You couldn’t just find “your people” and ignore everyone else. You had to sit down with whoever showed up. The result was often volatile but also suffused with creative ferment. It was a fertile space where ideas, interests, and personalities collided, bearing strange fruit.

Don’t misunderstand. I’m not advocating for forced conviviality. The hobby is broader now and that’s a probably good thing in some respects. However, I do think something was lost when we all retreated to our own silos. When roleplayers stopped hanging out with wargamers and video gamers forgot that tabletop roleplaying even existed and when people began treating the games they play as lifestyle brands rather than as shared endeavors. 

When we stopped being weird together.

In Defense of Bob

His name wasn’t really Bob, but I’m calling him that for the purposes of this post, on the extremely unlikely chance that he’s still out there somewhere. It’s been decades and I doubt he’d even remember me. Still, I don’t want to be cruel; there's already plenty of that online. Moreover, that's not my purpose here.

Bob was a teenager I’d see from time to time at hobby stores and at game days at the local libraries in the early 1980s. Like many of us back then, Bob was awkward, intense, and very passionate about the things he loved. For him, one of those things was World War II.

In those days, this was hardly unusual. I’m not sure people younger than a certain age realize just how omnipresent World War II still was in the cultural imagination of the time, even though it had ended more than three decades beforehand. This was especially so in the years after Vietnam, when America seemed unsure of what to make of its recent history, World War II stood apart. According to its conventional presentation, it was “the Good War,” the one where we knew who the bad guys were. Toy aisles were filled with green army men and gray tanks. TV reruns still showed Combat! and Rat Patrol. There were countless paperbacks, comics, movies, documentaries, and model kits. Nearly everyone had at least one older relative or neighbor who’d been “over there.”

So, Bob’s obsession wasn’t strange, not in context. What was unusual, even among kids interested in World War II, was the depth of his knowledge. Bob didn’t just know the basics. He could name operations and battles most people had never heard of. He knew the names of generals and details about their lives. He could tell you how a Panther tank compared to a Sherman and why Rommel’s tactics in North Africa were studied in military academies around the world. He was, for a teenager, astonishingly well-informed. 

Bob was also socially tone-deaf. He didn’t always know when to stop talking, particularly when the subject was German armor or the Eastern Front. Even back then, people would roll their eyes when Bob launched into another lecture about Stalingrad. Mostly, though, we just let him do his thing. He was weird and so were we. More importantly, he played RPGs. That was enough.

Nowadays, I'm sure Bob would be viewed differently. People might hear him talk about German tanks or Guderian’s campaigns and jump to conclusions. They might assume he was some kind of Nazi sympathizer or apologist. That’s not how I remember him at all. Now, I didn’t know Bob well. I didn't have a window into his soul, but I never once got the impression he admired Hitler or fascism or anything like that. He was just a very nerdy teenager who’d gotten fixated on a complex and highly documented period of history. He liked the minutiae. If anything, he treated World War II the way other kids treated baseball, obsessively reciting rosters and statistics no one else cared about.

Bob was not a threat. He wasn’t trying to smuggle dangerous ideas into the games he played. He was just Bob – one of us. He was weird, annoying, and even brilliant in his own narrow way. I feel like it's important to point this out, not to excuse anyone, but to defend the idea that not every interest held by socially awkward people should be a moral test. Likewise, not every off-note conversation from forty years ago is a sign of hidden malice. We were all a little odd in those days; that’s probably what brought us together.

I bring all this up in light of last week's post about my recollections of how odd people of all stripes seem to get along in the hobby of my youth. Back then, the hobby felt – to me anyway – like a patchwork of eccentrics, whether they were metalheads, stoners, bookworms, would-be game designers, history buffs, or, yes, kids like Bob. We didn’t all get along. We didn’t all like the same things. Yet, we shared a love of imaginative play and we didn't care about much of anything else.

Was that everyone's experience back in the day? I highly doubt it, but I also doubt that the worst examples someone could dredge up from those times was typical either. I suspect the truth, as it so often is, lies somewhere in the middle. Judging from the arguments in the comments to last week's post, I suppose I was naive in thinking we could get back to just having fun with RPGs the way I used to as a kid.

I don’t know where Bob is now or what he became. Wherever he is, I hope he has a group of friends with whom he can roll some dice without being judged too harshly for his idiosyncrasies. He deserves that much.

So do we all.

[Alas, comments must now be closed on this post too. —JDM]

Kumbaya

As you’ve probably guessed from the kinds of posts I’ve been writing lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about how the hobby has changed, not just since I was young, but in more recent years, too.

In my younger days, what bound us together wasn’t ideology or identity or even agreement. It was something much simpler and, I think, more powerful: a shared love of fantasy, science fiction, horror, and roleplaying games. We didn’t always see eye to eye. We didn’t always get along, but we read the same dog-eared books (gaming and otherwise), argued about alignment and racial level limits, and gathered around the same tables to roll dice. That was enough.

We were a ragtag lot, diverse not so much in the narrow, contemporary demographic sense (though that too, to a degree), but in personality, taste, and temperament. There were the older, bearded guys who got their start with Tactics; the teenagers who smelled like patchouli and wore jackets covered in band patches; the metalheads, the comic book obsessives, the Tolkien scholars-in-training, the stoners, the would-be novelists, and that one guy who knew way too much about the Wehrmacht’s order of battle in 1944 and wouldn’t stop bringing it up. Somehow, we all managed to coexist – or at least we played together and that, I think, is its own kind of getting along.

What I find disheartening now is how often that spirit seems absent. There’s a growing impulse, coming from multiple directions, to draw hard lines about what’s acceptable to play, read, like, or even talk about without a disclaimer. I’m not talking about politics, at least not primarily. I mean the way taste itself is increasingly treated as a moral signal. “You still play Empire of the Petal Throne? What’s wrong with you?” Or: “You’re using Mörk Borg? That’s not real old school.” I’ve heard both this year, more than once, along with others, just as silly.

There’s nothing wrong with preferences. No one should be shamed or pressured into liking what they don’t like. That was true in 1982 and it’s true now. Back then, plenty of people I knew scoffed at Arduin or rolled their eyes at RuneQuest. I’m not going to pretend we didn’t argue fiercely about whether, for example, spell slots or spell points were “better.” That kind of good-natured rivalry was part of the fun. Even now, I enjoy lobbing the occasional jab in the direction of certain games or game mechanics. I’m not claiming the moral high ground.

However, I think there’s a difference between ribbing your friend for liking Rolemaster and declaring that certain games, creators, or communities are beyond the pale and that merely engaging with them puts you under suspicion. That’s not rivalry. That’s excommunication. It's coming from all sides. Depending on who's speaking, the OSR is either a toxic boys' club of crypto-fascists or a co-opted safe space for woke poseurs who don’t really “get” old games. Try saying that not every game choice is a political act and that maybe you just like what you like and you’ll find yourself viewed with suspicion by both camps.

It's exhausting and, frankly, it's absurd.

When I was a kid, the fact that someone played Chivalry & Sorcery instead of AD&D might earn a few barbs, but no one was exiled. No one cared whether you thought the best sci-fi RPG was Traveller, Space Opera, or Universe (even though it's obviously Traveller). If you were into Tunnels & Trolls, sure, we might’ve thought you were a little weird, but you were our kind of weird. You were one of us. You knew where the lavatories were on the USS Enterprise. You could quote Monty Python and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy from memory. You subscribed to Dragon and read every page, even the fiction. You liked pretending to be a wizard or a starship captain or a mutant with a laser rifle. That was enough.

I miss that.

I’m not arguing that we all need to agree. We never did and, honestly, that was part of the joy – the clashes, the rivalries, the heated debates about initiative systems and critical hits. There’s a difference in my opinion between spirited disagreement and gatekeeping disguised as virtue. The hobby is big, messy, and contradictory. It always has been; that’s part of what makes it beautiful.

We could all stand to be a little more charitable, a little less quick to sort people into boxes, a little more willing to extend the benefit of the doubt. Curiosity, not conformity, is what brought most of us here in the first place.

When you strip away the noise, we’re all still what we’ve always been – Weirdos.

[Comments are now closed. Don't worry: there will be several new posts coming in the days to come that I am sure were generate just as many arguments. —JDM]

Ruins

Blogs were the tinder from which the fire of the Old School Renaissance was sparked. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, there was a genuine explosion of creativity across the RPG blogosphere, fueled by enthusiasm for old school Dungeons & Dragons and its many descendants, both literal and spiritual. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of blogs appeared, written by referees, players, professional designers, and amateur theorists eager to share ideas, reminiscences, house rules, and reflections on what made the earlier, pre-3e versions of D&D so compelling.

Grognardia was one of them and, like many others, it eventually went quiet. Real life has a way of asserting itself and even the most passionately pursued hobbies often yield before it. I was away from this blog for nearly eight years before returning and, somewhat to my surprise, the years since are more numerous than those before my hiatus, even if I no longer post at the same manic pace that nearly destroyed me. Unfortunately, many other wonderful blogs from that era haven’t returned. Most still exist in some fashion. You can find them if you look, but they are, for all practical purposes, ruins: silent, abandoned, and sometimes crumbling under the slow decay of broken image links and expired widgets.

That saddens me.

The OSR blogosphere was, in many ways, the intellectual and creative heart of a movement none of us fully understood while it was happening. Before social media transformed everything into a fast-scrolling feed of ephemeral opinions and algorithmic noise, blogs allowed for longer, more thoughtful engagement. There was conversation between blogs, even, perhaps especially, when we disagreed, as we frequently and passionately did. Posts would spark responses, build on shared ideas, or spin off in wild new directions. Someone would post a new take on alignment or a character class, and within days, if not hours, half a dozen other blogs would riff on the idea in a cascade of strange and wonderful interpretations. That kind of idea-driven collaboration was a joy to witness and to be part of.

Every so often, I revisit some of my old bookmarks: Sham’s Grog & Blog, Planet Algol, The Nine and Thirty Kingdoms, Beyond the Black Gate, The Society of Torch, Pole, and Rope, Malevolent & Benign, The Mule Abides, A Paladin in Citadel, Dreams of Mythic Fantasy, and many more whose names, sadly, I can no longer recall. Some blogs ended with a fond farewell. Far more simply stopped. A few sputter back to life from time to time, like torches catching momentarily in the damp before going out again.

I don’t blame anyone for moving on. We all have our seasons and many of those who once blogged now create elsewhere or simply play games without publicly sharing their thoughts. I did the same for a long while and there’s definitely something to be said for it. Still, I miss that earlier era, not just the quantity of content, but the spirit behind it. I miss the curiosity, the delight in obscure mechanics and half-forgotten rules, and, above all, the reckless, unfiltered creativity. I think a lot of us needed that back then. I know I did.

Much of that creative energy has since shifted to platforms like Discord, Reddit, Substack, or YouTube. Each has its own strengths, but none really replicates what the old blogs offered. Blogs were open and long-form. They rewarded thoughtfulness over immediacy. They were searchable and, maybe most importantly, linkable. You could stumble across a blogroll and find yourself falling into a rabbit hole of interconnected creativity that might last hours. That’s much harder to do now, where so much is hidden behind logins or paywalls or simply submerges into the stream of slop.

We can’t go back to 2009. I know that. Still, it’s worth remembering what was lost or at least what was left behind. Maybe, if a few more of us keep our torches lit, something like it can grow again – not a recreation but a continuation of the same spirit.

As any D&D player knows, ruins are places where treasure is found.

Memories of Game Stores Past (Part III)

I'm old, old enough to remember a time when the local game store was not merely a place to buy things. It was a crossroads, a hub for roleplayers, wargamers, and fans of genre fiction of all stripes. In those days, game stores felt weird in the best possible way: crammed with strange titles, eccentric proprietors, and regulars who treated the place like a second home. They were cluttered, often a bit dingy, and absolutely magical.

I spent countless hours in such stores. I remember walking through their doors and being hit by the smell of old cardboard and newsprint and the sight of wooden shelves bowed under the weight of too many Avalon Hill and SPI boxed wargames. You could browse freely, picking up games you’d never heard of, flipping through rulebooks that transported you to strange new worlds. If you were lucky, someone might be running a game in the back room – and if you hung around long enough, you might even get asked to join.

That’s how I discovered many of the games that shaped my tastes and interests. This was long before carefully curated social media feeds or electronic publisher newsletters, when sheer chance might introduce you to a captivating cover, a staff recommendation, or a game in progress that caught your attention. The old game store was a vehicle for discovery. It introduced me to lots of games I might never have found otherwise.

That kind of store, the kind I knew in my youth, is largely gone.

Certainly, there are still game stores out there, some of them excellent in their own way – but they’re not the same. Most of them survive today by focusing on collectible card games, miniatures wargaming like Warhammer, and modern boardgames. Roleplaying games, if present at all, are often confined to a few shelves of familiar titles from major publishers. The walls of obscure and idiosyncratic RPGs I once browsed for hours have mostly vanished.

The reasons aren’t mysterious. The Internet changed everything. Online retailers offer discounts and immediate availability that physical stores can’t hope to match. Digital publishing has displaced print in many cases. Perhaps most significantly, online play, something I myself participate in weekly, has made many of the accessories that once sustained game stores obsolete. Why buy dice, for example, when a VTT takes care of it?

None of this is inherently bad. In fact, I think it's great that it’s never been easier to find people with whom to play, no matter where you live. As regular readers know, I referee or play in several weekly online campaigns with friends scattered across the world. Likewise, the indie RPG scene is thriving in ways that would been nigh impossible back in the 1980s. Yet, despite all this richness, I can’t shake the feeling that something important has been lost.

Serendipity. That’s what’s missing.

In my experience, the Internet is great at showing us more of what we already like. It’s less good at surprising us. In the absence of physical spaces where different genres, systems, and subcultures once collided, the RPG hobby has become more siloed. It’s entirely possible now to spend years playing RPGs and never stray beyond a handful of familiar games. That wasn’t the case when every trip to the store might reveal something you’d never seen before.

Back then, I had a much more eclectic gaming diet and not just because I was young and had more free time, though that’s certainly part of it. No, the environment encouraged it. Game stores were chaos. They were cluttered with possibilities and they invited you to take risks, to try something new. They were social, too, places where you talked with strangers, traded recommendations, maybe even rolled some dice together.

Today, many of the stores that still exist feel lonelier, at least to me. They’re quieter, more sterile, less open to chance. They sell games, but they rarely feel like places to do anything else.

I don’t say this to complain about change for its own sake. Much as I dislike it, change is inevitable and not all of it is unwelcome. However, I do think we’ve lost something intangible but important. The video rental store analogy fits here. It's true that streaming services offer more movies than any Blockbuster ever did, but no algorithm has ever replicated the joy of stumbling across something unexpected on the shelf or the spontaneous conversation with a fellow customer that convinced you to give it a try.

I miss that. I suspect I’m not alone in doing so. We may well be richer in options than ever before, but in some that I think matter, we are also poorer.

Retrospective: Shadowrun

One of the things that's easy to forget in our hyper-connected age is how we used to discover new roleplaying games in the days before the Internet. Back then, the most reliable way to learn about an upcoming release was through an advertisement in the pages of whatever gaming magazine happened to be on hand. In 1989, I wasn't reading any of those magazines with regularity and the few I did pick up were mostly issues of Challenge, published by GDW.

I can’t recall exactly which issue it was, but one from late 1989 (or perhaps early 1990) featured a full-color ad on what I think was the inside back cover. It was promoting an adventure titled DNA/DOA for a game I’d never heard of before: Shadowrun. The only reason I paid it any attention or indeed remember it now, nearly four decades later is that the ad prominently noted the adventure had been written by none other than Dave Arneson, co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons. That odd little detail stuck with me, not only because of Arneson’s name but because it hinted that this Shadowrun might be more than just another entry in the growing library of cyberpunk RPGs.

That was my first encounter with FASA’s Shadowrun, a game that seemed unusual from the outset.

Released in 1989, Shadowrun appeared just a year after R. Talsorian’s eponymous Cyberpunk had helped define the genre’s tabletop presence. With its street samurai, megacorps, and jacked-in netrunners, Cyberpunk set the tone for what most people came to expect from a game inspired by the dystopian futures of Gibson, Sterling, and their peers. And yet, more than 35 years later, it’s Shadowrun that has endured. With multiple editions, a series of novels, video game adaptations, and a fiercely loyal fanbase, it remains a living game line, unlike most of its "pure" cyberpunk contemporaries, which have faded into semi-obscurity or niche reverence.

Why?

The most obvious reason for Shadowrun’s enduring success is the same one that raised eyebrows back in 1989: it isn’t just cyberpunk. It’s cyberpunk with elves. And orcs (or orks, if you prefer). And dragons who run multinational corporations. In Shadowrun’s timeline, magic returns to the world in 2011(!), mutating humanity and transforming a familiar dystopian near-future into something far stranger (and, from a publishing standpoint at least, much more resilient) than the genre that inspired it.

This wasn’t just a gimmick. By blending fantasy tropes with cyberpunk conventions, Shadowrun did something genuinely clever: it created a setting with depth and layers. On the surface, players could engage with the game as street-level mercenaries wielding neural implants and SMGs. But beneath that were shamans communing with spirits, dragons manipulating global markets, and ancient conspiracies stretching back to the Fourth World. Players who might have bounced off the bleak, tech-saturated grit of Cyberpunk could instead be drawn in by magical lodges, the emergence of metahumanity, or the social and spiritual upheaval that followed the Awakening.

In short, Shadowrun broadened its appeal and, in doing so, expanded the possibilities for adventures and campaigns. 

It’s also important to recognize how this hybrid design has helped Shadowrun weather the passage of time. Cyberpunk as a genre hasn’t aged gracefully. Its once-speculative technologies – cyberlimbs, virtual reality, hacking over phone lines – often feel more quaint than futuristic today. However, Shadowrun’s fantasy elements aren't so bounded by the decades. Magic, dragons, and spirits don’t become obsolete; they remain today much as they were decades ago. Ironically, Shadowrun has proven more adaptable than its “straight” cyberpunk peers precisely because it was never just a game about a decaying high-tech future. It had a mythic layer that lifted it beyond the limitations of its moment.

That elasticity of focus has undoubtedly contributed to the game’s remarkable longevity. Each new edition – I've lost track of how many there have been – has updated the rules and revised its vision of future tech. Yet, the game's setting has remained fundamentally intact: a strange, compelling fusion of chrome and sorcery, where megacorps rub shoulders with magical traditions and the shadows are always alive with danger.

Another reason for Shadowrun’s staying power is its strong esthetic identity. The original game’s art direction and tone were memorable, with neon-lit sprawls, chrome-and-leather runners, magical glyphs scrawled on alley walls. The world felt lived in and visually distinct. The idea of a troll shaman arguing with a street samurai while a decker jacked into a corporate node in the background was somehow evocative in a way that pure cyberpunk rarely matched. Just as important, Shadowrun encouraged a specific kind of play, consisting of caper-style runs against megacorporations, betrayal, shifting alliances, and messy consequences. It was heist movies, urban fantasy, and cyberpunk noir rolled into one big, messy ball.

In hindsight, FASA’s gamble proved remarkably wise. In a market soon crowded with gritty cyberpunk dystopias, Shadowrun chose to be weird. It paid off. The game is still here. Cyberpunk is fondly remembered, but it needed a video game revival a few years ago to reach a new generation. Shadowrun, meanwhile, kept chugging along through decades of changes. While I never really got into the game, despite have friends who were huge fans, I always respected it for what it was: a bold, imaginative departure from the RPG norms of its time. It dared to be strange, to blend genres in ways that shouldn’t have worked but somehow did. That willingness to be more than just another cyberpunk clone gave it a vitality that few of its contemporaries could match. Even now, decades later, Shadowrun remains a fixture in the hobby, not because it played it safe, but because it embraced the chaos of magic and machine and built a world unlike any other.

Things That Go Bump in the Decade

This being the only Friday the 13th of 2025, I couldn't pass up the opportunity to muse a little about the spooky stuff I grew up with during my childhood in the 1970s, things that no doubt informed my continued fascination with the uncanny even today.

Back then, the world still seemed full of mysteries – or at least it was easy to imagine that it was. Stories of haunted houses, UFOs, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and all manner of cryptids and bizarre phenomena were staples of popular culture. They filled the pages of supermarket tabloids, popped up in solemnly narrated TV specials, and circulated in schoolyard whispers. Even if few people truly believed in them, almost everyone enjoyed talking about them. The possibility alone was enough.

Looking back, it’s striking how pervasive the weird was in everyday life. I vividly recall garish paperbacks detailing “true” encounters with the unknown, cartoons and comics riffing on paranormal themes, and, of course, the ever-present influence of movies and television shows like In Search Of..., Project U.F.O., Kolchak: The Night Stalker, and The Amityville Horror, among many, many more. These stories occupied a curious space in the cultural imagination – not quite believed, not quite disbelieved either, and all the more compelling for it. They invited speculation, encouraged imagination, and cultivated a sense of wonder tinged with dread.

Even as a kid, I never bought into most of it. I didn’t spend my nights scanning the skies for flying saucers or lurking in the woods hoping to glimpse Sasquatch. But I wanted to believe, at least a little. The world felt more interesting, more alive, with those possibilities lurking just beyond the edges of certainty. What if there was something out there? That question alone was enough to fire my imagination.

And fire it did. By the time I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and, through it, other roleplaying games, I was already primed for them. After all, I’d spent years immersed in tales of mysterious creatures, unexplained lights, and restless spirits. RPGs gave me a new framework to explore those ideas, one where I wasn’t just reading or hearing the stories but helping to create them. I could conjure new monsters, new haunted places, new eerie events, and imagine how I or others might respond if the strange and uncanny ever crossed into our reality.

Today, that world of half-believed wonder seems distant, if not entirely gone. The Internet, with its unblinking capacity to record, debunk, and explain, has driven much of the weird to the cultural margins. Cell phone cameras are everywhere and the lack of blurry, ambiguous evidence speaks louder than all the old rumors ever did. Of course, being middle-aged hasn’t helped my credulity either. I’m more skeptical now, more prone to roll my eyes than widen them, but I still feel a twinge of wistfulness. There was a magic in those stories – the giddy unease, the delighted fear, the sense that the world might be stranger than it appeared and that something astonishing might be hiding in plain sight.

I don’t miss the bad haircuts or the shag carpeting, but I do miss that feeling, that delicious tension between belief and disbelief, the sense of possibility that once seemed to shimmer in the air. Maybe that’s why, even after more than forty years, I’m still rolling dice and spinning yarns of my own. I’m chasing that feeling, the thrill of stepping into the unknown, of turning the corner and finding that the world is bigger, weirder, and more mysterious than we’d dared to imagine.

On a superstitious day like today, I try to remember what it felt like to believe – not entirely, but just enough to wonder.

Smoke Rings and Sorcery: An Ode to Wormy

Among the many delights of flipping through issues of Dragon magazine from my youth is getting the chance to see Dave Trampier's Wormy comic strip once again. Long before I was conscious of the names of any of the artists who appeared in my favorite RPG products, I knew Wormy. Even among the clutter of rules variants, advertisements, fiction, and the occasionally bombastic editorials that defined Dragon during the years when I most avidly read it, Wormy stood out, in large part because it was so strange. It was a peculiar, beautiful little world unto itself, filled with pool-playing dragons, cigar-chomping ogres, and an imp who spoke with the laid-back confidence of a veteran hustler. It was, in short, utterly unlike anything else in the pages of Dragon and it fascinated me – in large part because I didn't fully understand it or its continuing storyline, having picked it up many issues after it first began.

Wormy's debut (in issue #9, September 1977) occurred when Dragon was still very much in its formative years. Indeed, the hobby of roleplaying itself was barely out of its own infancy and TSR’s flagship magazine was still trying to figure out what kind of publication it wanted to be. Early issues mixed game material with essays, fiction, and humor. Comics became a regular feature before long, with J.D. Webster's Finieous Fingers being one of the more well-known of the bunch, even though it ended its run about a year before I started reading Dragon. But Wormy stood out as something different. It was never simply an in-joke for gamers nor a gag strip loosely inspired by fantasy tropes. Instead, it presented a fully realized fantasy world rendered in lush color and with a distinct artistic sensibility.

What immediately set Wormy apart was, of course, Trampier’s art. Nowadays, we all celebrate Trampier from his iconic work on the AD&D Player’s Handbook and the Dungeon Master’s Screen. His style is clean, expressive and rich in texture and character. Wormy carried those same qualities into serialized comic form, but with an added flourish of visual wit and playfulness. The strip was never slapdash or haphazard. Trampier’s panels were packed with detail, his character designs expressive, his linework confident. Each page was a feast for the eyes and even when the plot meandered a bit (as it regularly did), the visuals carried the reader along to such an extent that he didn't care. I know I didn't, even though, as I said, it wasn't always clear to my younger self just what was happening in many installments.

The tone of the strip is one of its greatest charms. Wormy is unquestionably fantasy, but it’s fantasy as seen through a haze of cigar smoke and the low hum of a barroom pool table. Its characters speak in a colloquial American idiom that lends the strip a grounded, personable quality. One never gets the sense that Wormy or Ace or the ogres and trolls with whom he shares his world are interested in epic quests or noble deeds. They’re more likely to be plotting a scam, hustling a demon, or arguing about who’s buying the next round. This sense of the fantastical-as-everyday-life gives Wormy much of its charm and humor, not to mention its distinctiveness from the other comics that appeared alongside it in Dragon. 

In this, Wormy mirrors the culture of early roleplaying itself. The early hobby, as reflected in the pages of Dragon, was a strange admixture of wargamers, fantasy and science fiction fans, history buffs, and countercultural weirdos. This was a time before fantasy had hardened into genre orthodoxy, when anything could happen and often did. The world Trampier presented in Wormy feels like a campaign gone delightfully off the rails: a sandbox setting where the players long ago stopped caring about the dungeon and are now embroiled in a decades-long tavern brawl. For me, that was a big part of what I found so compelling about Wormy. It was so unlike my then-narrow conception of "fantasy" that I couldn't help but keep reading.

Over time, Trampier introduced a larger story into the strip. There were plots and schemes in motion and strange characters lurking just out of frame. Readers were teased with glimpses of the larger world beyond Wormy’s abode and the smoky dens of the trolls. Then, just as suddenly as it had begun, Wormy vanished. Trampier’s final installment appeared in Dragon #132 (April 1988), ending mid-story. He never offered a public explanation. Other than the following, which appeared in issue #136 (August 1988), TSR never provided an explanation for what had happened:

Wormy, along with its creator, David Trampier, vanished without a trace.

This abrupt disappearance only deepened the comic strip’s allure. In the years that followed, fans spun wild theories: Was Trampier dead? Had he severed all ties with the gaming world? Or was it something darker? For decades, the mystery endured, unanswered. Then, in 2002, word emerged that Trampier was alive, living a quiet life in southern Illinois as a taxi driver. He had steadfastly declined all invitations to return to art or gaming until 2014, when he agreed to showcase some of his original artwork at a local Illinois game convention. Tragically, just three weeks before the event, he died suddenly at age 59.

In hindsight, Wormy feels like a microcosm of an entire era in fantasy gaming, a time that was raw, personal, and unapologetically chaotic. The strip was a labor of love, brimming with anarchic energy, improvisational flair, and unfiltered creativity. Like the Dragon magazine of its heyday, Wormy was gloriously messy, fiercely idiosyncratic, and utterly brilliant in its refusal to conform or explain itself.

As the hobby grows ever more polished and commercialized, Wormy stands as a vibrant reminder of its roots, a time when oddballs and iconoclasts like Trampier defined its spirit. More than a relic, Wormy embodies the untamed passion and fearless imagination of those who dared to be unapologetically strange. It captures a moment when the heart of gaming pulsed with individuality, free from the gloss of corporate agendas.

Whenever I leaf through old issues of Dragon, I find myself missing Wormy – not just the comic, but what it stood for: the spirit of unfiltered creativity, the joy of irreverence, and the beautiful imperfections of a world made by and for dreamers. In remembering Wormy, we remember that the true magic of roleplaying lies not in polished production values or grand designs, but in the bold, eccentric, and often messy adventures we undertake with one another .

The Paradox of Popularity

A family member recently returned from an extended trip abroad and our conversation about her experiences got me thinking about the strange (and, in fact, melancholy) fate of popular tourist destinations. Travelers seek these places out because they're unusual, striking, even mysterious. They promise something rare or difficult to find elsewhere. However, the act of going there, especially in large numbers, begins to erode the very qualities that made them appealing in the first place. A scenic, secluded village becomes a commercialized maze of souvenir shops. A beautiful natural site is hemmed in by railings, signage, and crowds. A place that once felt secret or sacred now feels almost contrived, curated, or even artificial.

Whether we like it or not, popularity changes things.

This paradox – the destruction of uniqueness through attention – is not limited to travel. Grumpy old man that I am, I’ve long wondered if the same thing hasn’t happened to our shared hobby of roleplaying, especially in recent years.

When I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons over the Christmas break of 1979, the game was still pretty obscure, though it had become a little less so in the aftermath of the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August of that same year. The blue rulebook I rescued from the hall linen closet had almost the air of a grimoire. What advice it offered me as a newcomer was sparse and scattered across its 48 pages, requiring careful study and a lot of inference. Most people I knew at the time had never heard of a "roleplaying game" and, thanks to the aforementioned "steam tunnels incident," those who had regarded it with a combination of confusion and mild suspicion. Because of this, there was a strong feeling among my friends and I that we were discovering something odd and special. Gathering in one another's basements, we did our best to piece together an understanding of this new hobby from obscure rulebooks, rumors, and the occasional older kid who claimed to know how it all worked. The end result was messy, anarchic – and thrilling.

Over the decades, especially in the last few years, RPGs seem to have become much more mainstream. Celebrities openly talk about playing them. Big box stores carry them. There’s an abundance of support material, both official and unofficial. Rules are more clearly presented. The art is slick. Everyone seems to have a better idea of what a roleplaying game is. Dungeons & Dragons is now a brand name in every sense. On the whole, this is a good thing: more people are playing, and that means a larger pool from which to draw new players. But I’d be lying if I said the hobby still feels quite the same as it did before it achieved its current level of popularity.

What was once a secret door into another world is now a well-lit, signposted thoroughfare. The sense of personal discovery, the need to make rather than simply consume, feels less urgent. Much of the weirdness, the danger, the raw possibility that drew me in has been sanded down in exchange for broader appeal. It's easier than ever to play, but in some ways harder to find that old spark that made it feel so alive.

I don’t mean this simply as a condemnation, but rather as a recognition of the very real cost of popularity. Something rare becomes common; something personal becomes cultural property. There’s nothing sinister in this, only inevitable change. The same pattern plays out again and again, whether in travel, music, or games. Once you’ve found something wonderful, it’s only a matter of time before others find it too and the thing begins to change, often to the point that it's no longer the thing you fell in love with in the first place.

For those of us who remember the early days (or who simply seek to emulate them), it can feel like returning to a once-sleepy village only to find it transformed into a bustling tourist trap. The outlines are familiar, but the mood has shifted. The magic isn’t gone entirely, of course, but it’s harder to reach, buried beneath the noise and polish.

Still, it can be found. In a quiet moment around the table. In a forgotten module pulled from a forgotten shelf. In the laughter of friends lost in a world of their own making. The secret may no longer be hidden, but the joy of discovery remains – for those willing to look past the railings and the signage.

Playable Realism

Apologies in advance for the poor quality of this image, but it was the best I could find. It's the second page of a two-page advertisement (the first page is almost identical to the one I posted yesterday) for GDW's then-upcoming science fiction RPG, Traveller: 2300, which appeared in issue #115 (November 1986) of Dragon. 

The advertisement is significant for a couple reasons. First, the section under the heading "history" suggests a connection to Twilight: 2000, though it's not explicit. That was the first indication my younger self had to the fact that this wasn't, despite its title, a prequel game to Traveller. My younger self was also confused by the reference to the "Second French Empire," since, being very keen on history, I remembered the period between 1852 and 1870, when Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte reigned as Napoleon III. It was a rare misstep by GDW, a company that usually gets its history right, and was soon corrected in subsequent ads and in the text of Traveller: 2300 itself, but I still remember the error to this day.

The second notable thing about the advertisement is its emphasis on "playable realism," both in its game mechanics and in its scientific speculations. Rules-wise, Traveller: 2300 isn't anything special, even for its time. In fact, there were enough problems with its original rules that I suspect it's the reason why GDW went ahead with a revision of the entire game less than two years later (under the title, 2300AD, by which its usually known). 

However, on the science end of things, Traveller: 2300 was definitely a step up from Traveller's broader, slightly more space opera take on these matters – or so it appeared in 1986. Science, especially astronomy and astrophysics, is a constantly evolving body of knowledge, so I can't blame the designers at GDW were not being up on the latest data and theories. Remember, this was before the Internet made it much easier to keep up to date. Given what they had to work with, I think GDW did a creditable job of creating a plausible, grounded vision of human interstellar civilization three centuries hence.

I certainly liked it – so much so that I largely abandoned my true love, Traveller proper, for a number of years in favor of its little brother. And, despite its many flaws, I still love the idea of Traveller: 2300, hence my desire to one day follow up Barrett's Raiders with a science fiction campaign depicting Earth and its interstellar colonies several centuries after the wreck of the Twilight War.

State-of-the-Art Science-Fiction Role-Playing

That's a lot of hyphens! This advertisement, which appeared in issue #114 of Dragon (October 1986) was the first time I'd heard that GDW was preparing to release another science fiction roleplaying game. Based on its title, I assumed – falsely, as it turned out – that it was some kind of prequel to Traveller. Of course, being the Traveller fan I was, the date included in the title struck me as even more intriguing. Why 2300? In the history of the Third Imperium setting, 2300 AD is just a handful of years before the Terran defeat of the Vilani (First) Imperium and the establishment of the Rule of Man (aka the Second Imperium). That really excited me, as I often thought the Rule of Man would be a great alternate setting for Traveller. My assumption proved mistaken, however, and Traveller: 2300 proved to be a very different game than I was initially expecting.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "How Many Coins in a Coffer?"

Another preview of the Silver Age appears in issue #80 (December 1983) of Dragon, in the article "How Many Coins in a Coffer?" by David F. Godwin. The article's premise is that the way AD&D abstracts encumbrance with regards to coins makes no sense, since the Players Handbook states that all coins are relatively the same size and weight (one-tenth of a pound or 1.6 ounces). After quibbling over the meaning of "relatively," the author points out that, for example, platinum weighs 2.5 times as much as copper. Given that, how can these two types of coins be the same weight or the same size? He goes on to note that this problem isn't unique to AD&D. RuneQuest doesn't talk about the size of its coinage, but it does talk about its weight and does so in a way that Godwin believes is nonsensical (he points out that silver does not weigh twice as much as copper). Tunnels & Trolls also includes coins that weigh one-tenth of a pound each but without any reference to size.

Having presented that prolog, the author explains why this matter concerns him:

The easiest way out is to reiterate that it's only a game and isn't supposed to be totally realistic. What's realistic about fire-breathing dragons or alignment languages? How does that accord with the laws of biology and physics? There are quite a few of us out here in the boondocks who feel perfectly comfortable with basilisks, fireballs, illusions, the fact that a spell called "continual light" produces continuous light with nothing intermittent about it, and even the rule that clerics can't use edged weapons, but who balk at the idea of a world where platinum, gold, electrum, silver and copper all weigh precisely the same for a given volume. And if we do say that all coin metals weigh the same, we are still faced with the volume question.

The bulk of the article that follows then concerns not so much the weight of individual coins, which Godwin admits would give the referee a nervous breakdown to track, but with the size of coins. His interest in this question is in how many of a given coin will fit into a given container. So, if a chest is 18" x 30" x 18" in dimension, how many gold coins can it contain? How many silver? What about a mix of gold and silver? By recourse to formulae involving the specific gravities of each metal, Godwin is able to offer a small table that gives the weight, volume, and thickness of typical coins of precious metal in AD&D. Armed with this table and the size of any container, the referee can, with comparative ease, determine how many coins of any type can fit within it.

As these kinds of articles go, "How Many Coins in a Coffer?" isn't very math-heavy. Godwin kindly saves most of the math for himself, but, even so, the idea of having to spend much time calculating how many silver pieces actually fit into an adventurer's saddlebags seems a needless complication. Working the other way – figuring out many and how large the containers holding a given volume of treasure must be – is not better in my opinion. But then I prefer to keep most things in Dungeons & Dragons fairly abstract, from hit points to experience points to encumbrance. Worrying about such things has never been an obsession of mine (I'd prefer to obsess about other things), but, back in 1983 and beyond, such obsessions became commoner in the pages of Dragon. The drive toward "realism," whether in encumbrance, weather, linguistics, population density, or some other area, was the tenor of the day and Dragon's content reflected that.

Retrospective: Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game

Between early exposure to televised coverage of NASA launches and constant reruns of Star Trek, it was almost inevitable that I would become a science fiction fan. It helped, too, that my father’s only sister, who was barely twenty years my senior, shared that passion and actively encouraged my fascination with all things related to space travel, robots, and laser guns. So, when George Lucas’s space opera Star Wars premiered in the late spring of 1977, my aunt and I wasted no time in seeing it. Like countless other children of my generation, the experience marked a turning point in the development of my imagination.

As I’ve written elsewhere, Star Wars dominated the mental landscape of my childhood from 1977 to 1979, a reign challenged only by my discovery of Dungeons & Dragons and, through it, the wider world of roleplaying games. Even so, my enthusiasm for Star Wars didn’t vanish. I vividly remember the thrill I felt at the first rumors of "Star Wars II" (the film’s actual title wouldn’t be revealed until late 1979, as I recall). While D&D redirected some of my imaginative energy, it never fully replaced my love for Lucas’s galaxy. That said, there’s no denying that the fervor of my early affection dimmed somewhat in the face of newer, competing obsessions.

By the mid-1980s, that dimming had become a common experience. Star Wars itself seemed to be fading into the past. In 1987, the franchise appeared adrift. Four years had passed since Return of the Jedi had concluded the original trilogy and no new movies were on the horizon. For many fans, the galaxy far, far away was becoming a relic of childhood. The Kenner toy line was winding down, Marvel’s comic book series had ended, and while fan interest endured, it was increasingly nostalgic in character. There were occasional whispers of more to come, but nothing concrete. To be a Star Wars fan in the late ’80s was to dwell in the long shadow of what had been, clinging to worn VHS tapes, dog-eared storybooks, and well-loved action figures.

Meanwhile, the tabletop roleplaying game hobby was entering a new phase. TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons still loomed large, but the landscape was shifting. A host of new games had appeared, offering players fresh ways to explore favorite genres. Yet the RPG industry had not yet figured out how to handle licensed properties particularly well. With a few notable exceptions, like Star Trek or Marvel Super Heroes, most licensed RPGs of the era felt to me like clumsy grafts, existing more as marketing tie-ins than true adaptations. Then, in 1987, West End Games released Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan.

What West End delivered was more than just a faithful adaptation of a beloved movie trilogy: it was a revelatory act of worldbuilding. The game employed a streamlined D6 system, originally developed for Ghostbusters, that emphasized speed, flexibility, and cinematic flair over rules complexity. It was a system that matched the tone and pacing of Star Wars perfectly. Characters weren’t defined by a tangle of subsystems but by evocative archetypes: the Brash Pilot, the Young Senatorial, the Quixotic Jedi. Combat was fast and improvisational, encouraging swashbuckling heroics rather than tactical micromanagement. It felt, in a word, right.

But the real genius of the Star Wars RPG wasn’t its rules; it was its tone and presentation. The game didn’t merely borrow the setting of Star Wars; it inhabited it. The rulebook and its indispensable companion, The Star Wars Sourcebook, were filled with film stills, in-universe schematics, detailed planetary entries, and short snippets of fiction. These books didn’t feel like products about the galaxy far, far away; they felt like artifacts from within it. For fans starved for new material, the RPG was a lifeline, offering a way not just to revisit Star Wars, but almost to live in it.

It’s hard to overstate the influence these books would go on to have. Much of what we now take for granted about the Star Wars universe, like species names, background details about the Empire and the Rebellion, classifications of ships and vehicles, and descriptions of distant planets, originated not in the films, but in the pages of these RPG books. Lucasfilm itself came to rely on West End’s material. When Timothy Zahn was hired to write Heir to the Empire in 1991, he was handed a stack of WEG books to use as reference. In many ways, West End Games defined the Star Wars expanded universe before it officially existed.

Within the RPG hobby, Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game was also a harbinger of things to come. Unlike many earlier games, it emphasized genre emulation and collaborative adventure over simulationist detail. Its influence can be seen in the rise of narrative-focused design philosophies that would emerge in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It welcomed new players with familiar characters and easy-to-grasp mechanics, helping to expand the hobby beyond its traditional fantasy roots and making it more accessible to newcomers.

As I mentioned earlier, there were other successful licensed RPGs during this period, each with its own merits. But, in my opinion, none matched the totality of West End’s vision. The Star Wars RPG wasn’t just a game; it was a doorway into a living, breathing world, one that players could explore, shape, and make their own. Today, with Star Wars a global media brand, it’s worth remembering the quiet, crucial role this game played. It expanded the setting beyond what we saw on screen. It kept the flame alive during a fallow period. And it reminded us all that, with a few friends, a handful of dice, and the right kind of scenario, we too could journey to that galaxy far, far away.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "A New Game with a Familiar Name"

If the results of my poll back in October are any indication, nearly two-thirds of my regular readership entered the hobby within the first ten years of its existence, with a sizable portion of them doing so between the years 1980 and 1984. During that five year span, two different Basic Sets appeared, the first in 1981 and the second in 1983. Being a Holmes man who'd "upgraded" to AD&D sometime in 1980, I had no need for either of the Basic Sets released subsequently, but, TSR fan boy that I was, I nevertheless dutifully purchased both when they were released. That, of the two, I still have Tom Moldvay's 1981 version still sitting on my shelf today probably tells you all you need to know about my opinions of them.

But, back in issue #77 (September 1983) of Dragon, the reviser of the 1983 version, Frank Mentzer, made his case for why we needed a new Basic Set. It's a really fascinating article, both because it suggests that TSR obviously felt some need to justify the release of yet another Basic Set and because of the things that Mentzer says in his piece. It is, I think, a fascinating snapshot of the end of the Golden Age, making it well worth a read if you're at all interested in the history of this hobby and how it changed over the years.

The very first thing Mentzer mentions in his criticism of previous editions is that "you had to find someone to show you how to play." He notes that, in fact, learning from others who had figured out how to play on their own was the norm previously. That's because the game had "a devoted following, people who taught newcomers the ways of roleplaying." Mentzer is absolutely correct about this, as I've noted before. In those bygone days, you entered the hobby by initiation, aided by someone who'd done so before you. In my case, it was via a friend's teenaged brother; I, in turn, taught others how to play. That was the order of things in the late '70s and very early '80s. The 1983 edition is thus an attempt to correct this "flaw" of expecting that you'd learn to play from others.

Mentzer then notes that

the previous editions were not revisions. They were new attempts at using the same methods of organization applied to the original data plus evolution. They were not "revised," merely "reorganized." This one is different.

That's an interesting statement. I regularly point out that Holmes isn't really an introduction to AD&D at all, despite the claims inserted clumsily by TSR, but rather a new edition of OD&D that retains much of the original text of the LBBs. Moldvay is, I think, more of a revision than Mentzer gives it credit for. That said, it's also largely consonant with the LBBs, again retaining verbiage to be found in the 1974 game. The 1983, on the other hand, is even more than a revision; it's a rewriting of the game, using new language to express many of the same ideas. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but the language is very simple and clearly geared toward children, which wasn't the case with the Blue Book I first encountered in 1979. Consequently, I recoiled upon reading it and it only further solidified my notion that the D&D line was for kids.

The 1983 set's focus on self-teaching and simple language probably made sense from a marketing standpoint. Given how well the set supposedly sold, I can't really fault TSR for going in this direction. At the same time, though, there was clearly a shift happening, away from adults and teenagers as the target audience and away from initiation as the means of entering the hobby. Likewise, the adoption of a unified esthetic (all Elmore and Easley artwork) that, while attractive, seemed to narrow rather than broaden the scope of the game. In short, the 1983 Basic Set marked a definite change from what had gone before.

I'll be honest: I was somewhat reluctant to write this particular post. I've gotten a surprisingly large number of requests from readers asking me to touch on the issue of the differences in philosophy between the 1981 and 1983 Basic Sets. But I also know the fondness with which many remember the Red Box and the profound influence it had on them as younger people. So, I hope no one takes this as a knock against the '83 boxed set, even if it's not to my cup of tea. I'm sure there were guys who started with the LBBs who looked at the Holmes set with disappointment, too; that's the way these things go. At the same time, I don't think it can be denied that 1983 marks another change in the history of both D&D and the hobby.

Serious Fun: An Ode to GDW's RPGs

As I've said innumerable times since I started this blog, I was never a wargamer.

I didn’t have shelves stocked with hex maps or spend my weekends calculating armor penetration on the Eastern Front. I wasn’t part of that sacred brotherhood that spoke in acronyms and argued over the effective range of a Panther’s 75mm gun. Yet somehow, whether by accident or by fate, I fell in love with a company born from that world: Game Designers’ Workshop, better known as GDW.

GDW got its start in 1973 as a publisher of serious, detail-oriented, historical wargames. While I didn’t know almost any of this when I first encountered their roleplaying games, I nevertheless felt it. Even as a teenager, I could tell there was something different about the games GDW made. Where TSR gave us magic missiles and gelatinous cubes, GDW gave us vector movement, speculative trade tables, and the quiet horror of running out of fuel in central Poland.

Like a lot of roleplayers, Traveller was the game that first introduced me to GDW. I came across it several years after playing Dungeons & Dragons, and the contrast was immediate. Traveller didn’t just offer you a character; it offered you a life. Character generation gave you a person with a backstory in the form of a career and an odd collection of skills and equipment. Of course, if your rolls were unlucky, all you got was an early grave before the campaign even began. This was the kind of game where you might end up as a grizzled ex-Merchant with a gambling habit and no pension instead of a mighty-thewed barbarian.

Traveller’s vision of the far future wasn’t shiny or triumphant. It was bureaucratic, complicated, and often rather gray. There was something fascinating about how it treated space travel not as an exciting novelty but as a job, equal parts dangerous, expensive, and frequently boring. It was, I later realized, a very wargamer approach to science fiction: not about wish fulfillment, but about systems, trade-offs, and consequences. Even though I’d never played Drang Nach Osten! or Pearl Harbor, I could still intuit that GDW’s RPGs were built by people who thought about conflict, logistics, and uncertainty in a fundamentally different way.

That sensibility was especially evident in Twilight: 2000. T2K was a game that asked, “What if the Cold War ended in fire and now you’re out of gas in a broken-down Humvee, trying to negotiate with a Polish farmer for potatoes?” It was bleak, but it was real. Every decision mattered. Ammo wasn’t just an abstraction; it was the difference between life and death. Characters had to eat, find shelter, manage morale. There were no magical solutions, just the grim satisfaction of surviving one more day.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think Twilight: 2000 taught me something about roleplaying that's stuck with me to this day: adventure doesn’t have to come from epic quests. Sometimes, it comes from the struggle to get by in the face of all sorts of obstacles, both big and small. Fixing a broken axle under sniper fire, bartering for antibiotics with a suspicious local, or just figuring out where the next meal is coming from. That was the adventure.

Later, I picked up Traveller: 2300 (later rebranded 2300 AD), which built on the ashes of Twilight: 2000's world to envision a future shaped not by utopian ideals, but by historical inertia. Nations rebuilt and space was colonized by corporations and governments with agendas rather than by high-minded dreamers. It wasn’t heroic, but it was plausible. It had an internal consistency that made it feel like a real place, even if that place was cold, indifferent, and occasionally French.

Then there was Space: 1889, GDW’s pioneering foray into what we'd now call "steampunk," complete with ether flyers, Martians, and an entire solar system shaped by European colonialism. Space: 1889 had a slightly lighter tone than its siblings, but it nevertheless bore the hallmark GDW seriousness. There was surprisingly detailed setting material, a respect for history, and a commitment to internal consistency that made its outlandish premise feel oddly plausible. Even in a world where Queen Victoria reigns over Venusian swamps, GDW still asked you to think like a colonial officer, an inventor, or an explorer navigating the realpolitik of empire.

Finally, there was Dark Conspiracy, a game that asked what would happen if you took the economic anxiety of the late '80s, mixed in extra-dimensional horror, and then handed the whole mess to a security contractor. As I mentioned in my recent Retrospective, Dark Conspiracy failed to live up to its full potential, but even so, it was strangely compelling. Beneath the neon-soaked dystopia and monstrous invaders, you could still feel GDW’s trademark seriousness at work: the emphasis on gear, tactics, and systems that made survival feel earned rather than assumed.

What bound all these games together wasn’t genre; it was approach. GDW brought a wargamer’s eye to RPGs. They cared about detail, about systems that worked even when they weren’t elegant (though I continue to maintain that Traveller is one of the most mechanically elegant roleplaying games ever designed). GDW wasn't afraid to make things difficult or even bleak, because they believed that challenge and immersion went hand in hand. As a player and a referee, I must confess that I didn’t always understand every rule. I sometimes made do with what I thought they meant, but I nevertheless respected the intent. GDW’s RPGs weren’t about wish fulfillment. They assumed you were already smart enough to navigate their worlds and tough enough to handle the consequences. 

As someone who entered the hobby on the more fantastical side represented by D&D and Gamma World, that was both refreshing and bracing. GDW showed me that roleplaying could be serious, by which I don't mean dour, but serious in the best possible way. Roleplaying games could provoke you to think, to plan, and to inhabit a world that didn’t care about your character sheet unless you used it wisely.

So, as I said at the beginning of this post, I was never a wargamer, but I was – and remain – a GDW fanboy. Their RPGs showed me a different way to play, a way shaped by history, consequence, and thought. Almost thirty years after the demise of the company, that kind of grounded imagination still feels like something worth celebrating, hence today's ode to the amazing roleplaying games of Game Designers' Workshop. What an incredible company, what an incredible library of games.

Modules as Touchstones

As a follow-up to yesterday's post about "off shelf" campaign settings, I thought I'd write a bit about a related topic: pre-packaged adventures, often called "modules." Old school RPG lore has it that, at the dawn of the hobby, few people, certainly not the fine folks at TSR Hobbies, thought there'd be any market for pre-packaged adventures. Then as now, referees took pride in crafting their own adventures. Just as worldbuilding is one of the great joys of roleplaying games, so too is the process of developing a scenario tailored to one’s own vision and tastes. Given that, why would anyone turn to a pre-packaged adventure module? Why run The Keep on the Borderlands, Masks of Nyarlathotep, or The Traveller Adventure when one could simply create something original?

The greatest virtue of pre-packaged adventures is the shared experience they foster across the hobby. To put it simply: a great module is a touchstone. It links players and referees across tables, generations, and even continents. There is something remarkable in the fact that so many roleplayers, across decades, have ventured into the Caves of Chaos, uncovered the secrets of Saltmarsh, or braved the alien horrors of the Barrier Peaks. These modules have become part of the collective consciousness of the hobby, a language that players can speak regardless of where or when they first sat down at the table. The mere mention of certain locations, villains, or twists within these adventures can evoke instant recognition, stirring memories of triumph, disaster, and everything in between.

This shared literacy is no small thing. Roleplaying is, by its nature, ephemeral. Each campaign a unique blend of personalities, decisions, and improvisations. Unlike a novel or a film, no two games unfold in exactly the same way. And yet, within that variability, a published module provides a thread of continuity. When two players who have never met before can swap stories about their first run-in with Bargle from the solo adventure in the 1984 D&D Basic Set or how they barely escaped Strahd’s castle, they are engaging in something akin to an oral tradition, passing down tales from table to table, from one generation of gamers to the next. Modules provide the foundation for that tradition, ensuring that, even as campaigns come and go, some stories remain universal touchstones.

This is especially valuable in an era where the roleplaying hobby has expanded dramatically. The old days, where most gaming circles were small and isolated, have given way to online communities and virtual tabletop play. The existence of widely recognized modules gives newcomers a way to connect with veterans. They provide common ground in this expanding landscape. Even for those of us who prefer homebrew adventures, having a few classic modules under one’s belt is a kind of shared literacy that allows one to participate in a conversation that stretches back to the origins of the hobby itself. In a way, running a module is a way of stepping into history, reliving and reshaping the same challenges that earlier players have faced.

Beyond simply fostering camaraderie, shared adventures also provide an entry point for new players. A new referee faced with the daunting prospect of designing a whole scenario from scratch can take comfort in the fact that many have run The Village of Hommlet before him. A new player can look up discussions of Tomb of Horrors and know that he is stepping into something larger than his game – a tradition of play that stretches back decades. Even when a module is adapted, altered, or expanded, it still serves as a bridge between individual tables and the broader history of roleplaying. There is something powerful in knowing that, even as each group makes the adventure their own, they are still participating in the same grand tradition of play.

Consider the sheer number of classic modules that have shaped the way we think about adventure design. The open-ended nature of Keep on the Borderlands, the intricate mysteries of Masks of Nyarlathotep, the faction play of The Enemy Within, each of these has not just provided individual groups with hours of entertainment but has influenced the way the hobby itself has evolved. When someone describes a scenario as "like Keep on the Borderlands but in space" or "like Tomb of Horrors but with political intrigue," they are drawing on a shared vocabulary that allows roleplayers to communicate complex ideas in a few words. In a way, these modules form the grammar of the game, the foundation upon which new ideas are built and communicated.

None of this is to say that referees should rely exclusively on published modules. There is something deeply satisfying about crafting one’s own adventures, tailoring them to the specific interests of a group, and introducing them into a campaign. But, as I said about pre-existing settings, the use of adventure modules is not a lesser choice. It is, rather, an acknowledgment of the rich history and communal nature of the hobby, an embrace of the shared stories that have shaped roleplaying for decades.

There's something deeply satisfying about the shared language adventure modules provide. They can tie your table into the larger tapestry of roleplaying history. They allow players across time and space to say, "Ah, you got your soul sucked by Acererak too?" and know, in that moment, that they are part of something greater. The modules may differ, the details may change, but the experience – the shared adventure – remains. I think that's something worthy of celebration.