Retrospective: Mythus

By the end of 1986, Gary Gygax had completely severed any connection to TSR, the company he'd founded in 1973 with Don Kaye. His departure was not entirely of his own accord, having lost both financial and creative control over TSR a year earlier to his former business manager, Lorraine Williams. This is a well-known story the details of which others know better than I. Suffice it to say that, just before I graduated from high school, Gary Gygax, a man who had been, for good and for ill, the public face of Dungeons & Dragons and, by extension, TSR, was no longer involved with either in any way.

This fact did not, however, mean that Gygax would no longer be involved in the RPG industry. Almost immediately after his departure from TSR, he joined Forrest Baker, a fellow wargamer who'd worked as a consultant at TSR, in forming New Infinities Productions. Nowadays, New Infinities is probably best known for its publication of the science fiction roleplaying game, Cyborg Commando and the later installments of Gygax's "Gord the Rogue" novels.

New Infinities did not last long, ceasing operations barely two years after its founding. Even so, Gygax's projects during this period laid the groundwork for much of what he'd be doing for the remainder of his professional life. For example, he planned to produce "Castle Dunfalcon," a version of his Castle Greyhawk dungeon that would never see the light of day, though it did light the way for the eventual publication of Castle Zagyg in 2008. Likewise, Gygax announced an upcoming game called "Infinite Adventures." To be co-written with Rob Kuntz, "Infinite Adventures" would have been a multi-genre roleplaying game, consisting of different related rulebooks, each one devoted to a different genre (fantasy, horror, science fiction, etc.).

"Infinite Adventures" was never published and I have no idea whether any work was even devoted to its design. However, just a few years later, in 1992, Game Designers' Workshop released Mythus, the first book of a multi-genre roleplaying system written by Gygax, with the assistance of Dave Newton, a name otherwise unknown to me. That multi-genre system was initially announced as Dangerous Dimensions, but TSR threatened a lawsuit, because of a supposed similarity between the initials – DD – and those of Gygx's more famous game (D&D). To avoid the suit, GDW changed the series title to Dangerous Journeys. Unfortunately, this was not to be the last time TSR would legally interfere with GDW, Gygax, and Dangerous Journeys, as I'll discuss later.

Mythus is the fantasy component of Dangerous Journeys, focusing on an alternate world called Aerth where magic – or magick, in Gygax's parlance – and monsters are real. There are no "classes" in Mythus. Instead, there are "vocations," which are collections of skills (properly Knowledge and Skills or K/S). Regardless of vocation, characters – or heroic personas – can learn most skills, but at differing rates and costs, depending on a number of factors, chiefly vocation. It's a very different approach than in D&D and a lot more complicated too, or at least I felt so at the time. The situation isn't helped by Gygax's use of all manner of peculiar terminology and abbreviations that make reading almost any section of rules a challenge. 

The Mythus rulebook is over 400 pages long, divided between basic (or prime) and advanced rules. The prime rules are only about 20 pages long and covers all the foundational elements of the rule, like character creation, actions, combat, magic (or heka – as I said, the book is riddled with idiosyncratic word choices), and advancement. The advanced rules, meanwhile, take up the rest of the book. While extensive, they still don't cover everything you'd need to play Mythus. Magic, for example, is mostly shunted off to a separate book (Mythus Magick); the same is true of monsters (found in Mythus Bestiary). 

It's a shame. Though Mythus is way more complex than I like in my RPGs, there are lots of fascinating details hidden within it. For example, his approach to the planes, which is clearly an outgrowth of thoughts he'd had on the topic during the later years of his time developing AD&D. Indeed, that's the general vibe of Mythus overall: an evolution or development of many of the weirder ideas Gygax was toying with for his never-realized second edition of AD&D. I'm not suggesting that a Gygaxian 2e would have looked anything like Mythus rules-wise, but I do think that many of the game's worldbuilding flourishes, whether it be monsters, the planes, or magic, might have been incorporated into it in some fashion or other. That remains the appeal of the game to me, even though I've never played it: Mythus is a window into the imagination of Gygax more than a decade after he'd created AD&D.

That was also likely its downfall. TSR continued to hound Gygax about Dangerous Journeys, alleging that it derived too much from his prior work on AD&D and that it made use of concepts he'd developed while still employed by TSR. If you're interested, you can read some court documents related to their claims here. A great deal of it seems petty and its allegations so broad that I wonder whether they would have held up to legal scrutiny. In the end, though, it didn't matter, because GDW lacked the resources necessary to put up a protracted fight. After a couple of years, they threw in the towel, selling Mythus and Dangerous Journeys to TSR as a way to end the suit. And that was that.

To this day, I'm not certain I've ever met a person who's actually played Mythus, but I have met many people who, like me, have a strange affection for it nonetheless. That's not an endorsement of the game exactly. As I said, it's much too complicated mechanically and its bizarre nomenclature is an impediment to learning the rules, but I appreciate its Gygaxian oddities – its baroque cosmology, its quirky takes on folkloric monsters, its peculiar alternate Earth setting – and sometimes wonder what might have been had TSR not interfered. We never got to see Unhallowed, the next game in the Dangerous Journeys line, which was supposedly a horror game. What might that have been like? What would a Gygaxian take on sci-fi have been? So many unanswerable questions.

Retrospective: Cyborg Commando

Catching lightning in a bottle is a wildly improbable thing to do once, so I don't think reflects poorly on a creator not to be able to do it a second time. Consequently, I find it difficult to judge the post-TSR career of Gary Gygax as harshly as some, even though his achievements after his October 1986 departure from the company he founded more than a decade prior could, at best, be described as uneven. Still, there's something genuinely admirable about the naive optimism Gygax must have possessed in thinking that his new business venture, New Infinities Productions, had a snowball's chance of lasting longer than the barely three years it actually did. 

Of course, the company's likelihood of success might have been greater had its inaugural first (and only) original roleplaying game hadn't been Cyborg Commando. Published in 1987, Cyborg Commando is a near-future science fiction RPG written by Gygax, Frank Mentzer, and Kim Mohan. Its premise is that, in the year 2035, Earth is invaded by extraterrestrial beings called Xenoborgs. In order to combat them, mankind turns to the nascent technology of cybernetics to create the titular cyborg commandos – human brains placed inside advanced robotic bodies arrayed with the most advanced weaponry available. Players assume the roles of these commandos as they attempt to rid Earth of the Xenoborgs and drive them back into space. (Since the initial boxed set is subtitled "Set 1: The Battle for Earth," I can only assume there were plans to expand the game's scope beyond this planet.)

Cyborg Commando consisted of a 48-page player's book (CCF Manual), a 64-page referee's book (Campaign Book), a 16-page booklet of introductory scenarios, and ten-sided dice in a box. This arrangement closely mimics TSR's own products at the time, but that should come as no surprise since New Infinities seems to have been staffed almost entirely by ex-TSR employees. That said, the game materials are noticeably less attractive and professionally done than those of TSR of the same era, particularly when it comes to the artwork. I wouldn't describe anything as awful, only a bit less "slick," no doubt due to the smaller production budget of the company.

The CCF Manual provides a brief overview of the game's setting and history, as well as the purpose of the Cyborg Commando Force to which all the player characters belong. The bulk of the book is devoted to the game's rules, which are a bit of a mess. The game uses ten-sided dice in a variety of ways: simple (1d10), added (1d10 + 1d10), and multiplied (1d10 × 1d10). The last use is particularly interesting to me, because I would have expected the game to use a straight percentile roll, but, perhaps in an attempt to "innovate," the designers opted to go another route. Helpfully(?), the CCF Manual includes several probability graphs to show the likelihood of results of each type of die roll. Though I am sure some players would find information of this sort useful, the inclusion of these tables is sadly representative of the game as a whole: too much detail about some things and not enough about others.

Character generation and combat both come in "basic" and "advanced" versions, with the latter building on the former. In principle, Cyborg Commando is completely playable using either version of the rules. However, much of the game's text and presentation seems to favor the advanced version, if only because of the additional detail it offers. A good example of this can be seen in the skill lists, where the advanced rules included many, many more skills than the basic version. Of course, the advanced version includes such skills as "general creativity," "domestic arts I," "domestic arts II," "obstetrics & gynecology," and "error avoidance," so I'm not entirely sure much of value would be lost by sticking to the basic versions. I mention all of this not mock Cyborg Commando. Rather, I hope it gives you some sense of the game system's strange obsession with minutiae that I can hardly imagine would ever come up in play at the table.

Of course, this obsession is not limited merely to the rules. The Campaign Book abounds in this level of useless detail as well. For example, nearly half of that volume consists of information on the populations of the countries of the world, along with their latitude and longitude coordinates, major cities, and CCF bases. Yet, for all that, this information consists of little more than tables and maps. It's a lot of heat but not much light for the referee hoping to get a sense of what the Earth of 2035 is actually like for the purposes of running adventures and campaigns in Cyborg Commando. 

The other half of the Campaign Book is more genuinely useful. It details the Xenoborgs, including their biology, society, and culture. In addition, this section delves more deeply into the aliens' polymorphism, revealing that their leaders, the so-called Masters, are a type of Xenoborg not yet seen on Earth. The Masters are directing the invasion of the planet for its resources, hoping to make use of them to further the expansion of its star-spanning empire, which consists of hundreds of worlds across the galaxy. There are also sections about the FTL Q-drive the Xenoborgs use, which, as I noted earlier, seems to suggest that New Infinities hoped that Cyborg Commando would eventually expand beyond Earth.

That was not to be and it's not hard to see why. Cyborg Commando contains a handful of genuinely interesting ideas but the vast majority of it is muddled, half-baked, or silly. Judged even by the standards of 1987, it's not a good game and I suspect that even the folks at New Infinities knew this. The game received a small amount of support in the form of three adventure modules and some novels, but, by 1988, the company seems to have pinned its hopes on doing knock-off D&D support material – the Fantasy Master line – that might garner attention due to the names attached to them (Gygax, Mentzer, etc.). When that didn't happen, the company, along with Cyborg Commando, was largely forgotten. I wish I could say that was a shame.