Dangerous Journeys Commercial

Once again, reader Marc Sonnenberger has pointed me toward a video worth sharing: a TV spot advertising Dangerous Journeys. I'd never seen this before, so it's quite the find.

Breakthrough, Evolution, Alliance

From issue #57 of GDW's Challenge, a teaser advertisement for Mythus before it had been formally announced by the company.

Issue #58 featured a similar ad:

Issue #59 ran a third variation on the ad:

Finally, issue #60 spilled the beans (note the Dangerous Dimensions) title:

Gygax on "Psionics"

It's pretty well known among old school gamers that Gary Gygax long regretted the inclusion of psionics in AD&D. As I recall, he was considering dropping it entirely from his never-realized Second Edition of the game. Consequently, when he created his Dangerous Journeys multi-genre RPG, Gygax opposed "magickal casting," which were powered by Heka and "psychogenic powers," which were fueled by Vril and noted that users of one who traveled to a universe where the other held sway would find their native abilities translated to the appropriate type. There's some food for thought there.

More amusingly, though, is this passage in Mythus Magick, where Gygax discusses psionics:

The term "Psionics" should be followed by "(sic)" in most works dealing with roleplaying game rules, for it is typically misused. (A good indicator of how well the authors have researched their work, and how little the publisher knows about it, too!). Psionics means "electronically enhanced psychic, or psychogenic, ability." It is as simple as that.

As it turns out, Gary was correct on the term "psionics," the coinage often being attributed to the famed science fiction pioneer John W. Campbell and meaning just what Gygax says it does. However, this passage makes me laugh because, of course, D&D probably played as big a role in spreading this misuse as anything else (first appearing in a book Gygax co-write and being adopted in another for which he has the sole byline). It's also funny because Mythus Magick was published by GDW, a company whose own signature game line, Traveller, though based on classic sci-fi, nevertheless uses "psionics" to mean psychic powers.

Spying on Gygax

Colin McComb, who worked at TSR in the 1990s, relates a fascinating -- and sad -- bit of gaming history over at Kobold Quarterly. He briefly tells of being sent by executives at TSR to spy on Gary Gygax at GenCon in 1992, when Gary was releasing Mythus, the first game in the unfinished Dangerous Journeys line.

I'm very grateful to Mr McComb for telling this story, as it reveals yet another example of the absurd vendetta that Lorraine Williams-era TSR pursued against its own founder and one of the founders of the very hobby that provided the company with its profits. It's of a piece with some of the slanders and rumors that were circulated about Gygax in various quarters in the wake of his departure, as others can attest.

What a shame.

Appendix N 2.0

Appendix N gets a lot of play round here, as I consider it an important key to understanding Gary Gygax's vision of Dungeons & Dragons. Recently, I've been reading Gary's Mythus RPG, with special attention given to volume 2 of that game, Mythus Magick (possession of which I owe to Norman Harman -- thank you). In the end of that weighty tome, Gygax included a section of the bibliography entitled "General Fantasy Fiction Reading by Author," which lists the "author's favorite authors or inspirational sources."

This list is slightly different than the one included in the Dungeon Masters Guide, being somewhat more extensive. It's also noteworthy in that Gygax includes one or more asterisks after several authors' names, An asterisk denotes "a particularly high recommendation," with more asterisks indicating greater fondness than those with fewer (or no) asterisks. Let's take a look at the authors included in the Mythus Magick list (which dates from 1992, thirteen years after the publication of the DMG). Bolded entries indicate authors not found in the DMG list. Asterisks are as presented in Mythus Magick.

• Abbey, Lynn
• Anderson, Poul ****
• Anthony, Piers ****
• Asprin, Robert
• Barker, M.A.R.
• Bellairs, John
• Brackett, Leigh
• Brooks, Terry
• Burroughs, Edgar Rice
• Carter, Lin
• Chalker, Jack L.
• Cherryh, C.J.
• de Camp, L. Sprague
• de Camp, L. Sprague & Pratt, Fletcher ****
• Eddings, David
• Farmer, Phillip J.
• Fox, Gardner
• Gardner, Craig Shaw
• Gygax, Gary
  
• Haggard, H. Rider ***
• Hambly, Barbara
• Hickman, Tracy & Weiss, Margaret
• Howard, Robert E. *****
  
• Lanier, Sterling ***
• Leiber, Fritz ***
• McCaffrey, Anne
• Merritt, A. *****
• Moore, C.L.
• Moorcock, Michael ****
• Offutt, Andrew J.
• Pratchett, Terry
• Saberhagen, Fred ****
• St. Clair, Margaret
• Sims, John
• Springer, Nancy
• Stasheff, Christopher
• Stewart, Mary
• Tolkien, J.R.R.
• Vance, Jack ****
• Wagner, Karl
• Weinbaum, Stanley
• Williamson, Jack
• Weiss, Margaret
• Zelazny, Roger ****

Comparing the two lists is an interesting exercise. The 1992 list includes a great many more -- mostly lesser, in my opinion -- authors but most of those authors seem to have had little influence on Gygax. In the DMG, he claims that "the most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, REH, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, HPL, and A. Merritt." In the new list, de Camp & Pratt (who are always linked), REH, Leiber, Vance, and Merritt all still rank highly in his estimation, while Lovecraft is entirely absent (an oversight perhaps?), along with Frederic Brown, August Derleth, Lord Dunsany, Andre Norton, and Manly Wade Wellman.

On the other hand, Poul Anderson, Piers Anthony, H. Rider Haggard, Sterling Lanier, Michael Moorcock, Fred Saberhagen, and Roger Zelazny have all been elevated to the level of significant influences on him. Some of these names make sense to me. I have always felt that Anderson's influence was overlooked, in part becaue Moorcock's reformulation of his Law vs. Chaos scheme is more widely known among gamers. Likewise, I grow ever more convinced that H. Rider Haggard and other Victorian adventure writers were a seminal and unacknowledged influence on D&D. The others strike me as a bit odd but Gygax has been consistent in naming them as influences, so perhaps I'm merely missing obvious points of contact between their literary output and Gygax's fantasies.

The only name missing from the 1992 list that I expected to be there is Glen Cook, whom Gygax had championed as providing a terrific literary model for D&D since his Black Company appeared in 1984. Like Lovecraft, I suspect this is an oversight rather than a deliberate omission. It's also worth noting that Gygax includes his own name along with those other fantasy authors, which can be interpreted as arrogance, a wry joke, or even a commentary on the extent to which Gygax, like D&D itself, came to be chasing his own tail when it came to creativity.

Tell Me of Lejendary Adventure

Reading through Mythus as I am, I can't help but think of Gary Gygax's other post-TSR fantasy RPG, Lejendary Adventure. I know very little about LA and always sort of assumed that it was Mythus 2.0, albeit a clearer, less complex version of Mythus. Is that a false impression? Is it worth acquiring, if only as inspirational source material?

Please, give me your thoughts.

My Latest Haul

I may not have gotten much done last week, but, fortunately, the postal service was still on the ball. Late last week, I received several packages containing several old school gaming products I'd been hoping to obtain.

Thank you to everyone who helped me to get these items. You should all be receiving the things I sent you in exchange sometime soon. Thanks for your patience while I was snowed under with real life distractions.

Gygaxian Supernaturalism

In preparation for the arrival of some volumes of Gary Gygax's early 90s post-TSR RPG, Mythus -- part of the unfinished multi-genre game called Dangerous Journeys (né Dangerous Dimensions) -- I've been doing some poking around online to find out additional details about the game and its contents. In doing so, I came across this neat little diagram of the multiverse as presented in Mythus Magick (yes, I hate that spelling too).

I have to admit I'm rather taken with this illustration. It has all the hallmarks of the kind of Gygaxian comprehensiveness AD&D had in abundance but moreso -- an awesomely baroque vision of the supernatural world, one that includes a variety of planes and influences. It's complex but evocatively so and reminds me of one of Gygax's greatest gifts, his ability to present a synthesis of a variety of sources and ideas that's somehow more than the sum of its parts. This cosmological diagram is a good example of what I'm talking about and certainly piques my interest about Mythus.