Lowlife

Back in the far-off days of the early Old School Renaissance, when Labyrinth Lord was everyone's go-to B/X Dungeons & Dragons retro-clone, Goblinoid Games published two supplements to it that I really liked: the Advanced Edition Companion and Realms of Crawling Chaos. Among the many admirable qualities they shared were illustrations by Sean Äaberg. As I say in my linked reviews, it took me a little while to warm up to Sean's punk, underground comix-inflected artwork – I am, after all, a stodgy traditionalist about many things – but its anarchic energy eventually won me over. His illustrations remind me a bit of Erol Otus's early work mixed with some of the stuff I saw in White Dwarf and other British fantasy from the '80s but with its own unique sensibility. I love it and think it's a great evocation of the DIY spirit of the early hobby.

That's why, when I found out a couple of weeks ago, that Sean has been working on a tabletop RPG called Lowlife based on his previously published co-op boardgame of "swords, sausages, and sorcery," Dungeon Degenerates, it caught my attention. Though I'd never played the boardgame, I knew of it and liked its garish colors and funky artwork. Likewise, the reviews of the game I found online were all very positive, praising both its mechanics and the world if presented, which piqued my interest. Plus, as I mentioned, Sean has a long history of involvement in the OSR, so I knew I wanted to give his new project a shout-out.

If you follow the link above, you can find out more about Lowlife and Sean's plans for it. There's even a preview primer of it that'll give you a bit more information, along with sample layouts of the rulebook. Elsewhere, Sean talks about the game and its inspirations – a blend of "classic fantasy tropes, the scenes you’d find airbrushed on the sides of vans, the scenes of metal record sleeves, black light posters, the grit of Oldhammer with the fun & unexpected twists of the classic Japanese Role-Playing Video Games." It's precisely the kind of gleeful goulash of elements and influences that have always characterized the best old school RPGs and I look forward to see what comes of it. 

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Dragonchess"

Issue #100 of Dragon (August 1985) was a milestone for the periodical, as well as for me. For the magazine, it was a portentous number to use as an occasion for celebration. For me, though I didn't know it at the time, it represented the end of an era. The same month that this was released was the last time I attended a "games day" hosted by a public library. It may have even been the last such gathering my local public libraries sponsored, since I don't ever recall hearing of others. Even if it wasn't, I remember well that my last one was a rather underwhelming affair, with far fewer participants than previous ones and most of those who did attend were much younger than I. There weren't nearly as many teenagers, let alone college students or adults, and that disappointed me.

From my perspective, it seemed as if the demographics of the hobby had changed over night and I didn't like the change, especially now that I was one of the "older kids" I looked up to when I was younger. In retrospect, it's obvious to me how hypocritical I was back then, wanting to distance myself from the 10 year-olds clutching their Elmore-covered Basic Sets the way I had done with Sutherland-covered one a mere six years before. But six years is a long time in the life of a child and, as a teenager, I wanted no reminders of my younger self. Thanks goodness that the teenagers of my younger years did not feel the same way!

There was more to it than adolescent snobbery, though. The hobby really did seem to be changing by late 1985 and, while I was still as keenly interested in it as ever, it became much harder to find people with whom to play and, for the most part, the new RPGs coming out held much less appeal to me than those published in the years before. Issue #100 wasn't my last issue of Dragon, but I did let me subscription lapse not long thereafter; it would never again play as central a role in my connection to and understanding of the hobby after that.

The funny thing is that, for all the fanfare surrounding issue #100, it wasn't a particularly memorable issue. The only things I still remember about it are the adventure set in 20th century London and Gary Gygax's article (and accompanying Greyhawk short story) about a chess variant called "dragonchess." Dragonchess is a three-dimensional version of chess, with boards representing the sky, the land, and the underworld. I'd known about 3D chess variants ever since I'd watched Star Trek in reruns in the mid-70s, but this was, I think, the first time I'd ever seen the rules for such a game – and by Gary Gygax no less! Needless to say I fell completely in love with the idea of playing dragonchess.

There were, of course, two problems with this. First, and perhaps most importantly, I am a terrible chess player. I can barely hold my own in a regular game; learning and mastering a variant that uses three boards at once was almost certainly going to be beyond me. Second, to play dragonchess, one must assemble the boards for oneself and that, too, requires skills I did not possess. This didn't stop me from trying, of course, but I utterly failed to do so. Ultimately, I gave up the idea of having three boards stacked on top of one another and instead opted for having three boards placed side by side. This required me – and the poor souls I goaded into playing with me – to keep track of which squares on one board were "over" or "under" others. That was hardly insurmountable but it was nevertheless trying, particularly when one considers how many other aspects of standard chess Gygax changed in his variant.

Dragonchess had a much larger number of pieces – 42 per side, consisting of 15 different types. Likewise, many of these pieces had unique moves unlike those in standard chess. Furthermore, some pieces behaved differently depending on which board they were currently situated, while others were bound to a single board. The object of dragonchess is the same as regular chess, so that is at least familiar. However, the larger number of pieces and types, not to mention the presence of three dimensions, made it much more difficult to grasp. That's not a criticism of the game itself, which looked like it'd be a lot of fun when played by two opponents who are both skilled at standard chess and well acquainted with the unusual aspects of dragonchess.

Alas, I was neither of those things and, while enthusiastic for the game, I was not very good at teaching its rules to others. Add to it that I didn't have a "proper" board and it's little wonder I never got the chance to play many games of dragonchess. Nowadays, I look back on my efforts with more than a little embarrassment – the follies of youth! One of several that this issue of Dragon brings to memory.

REPOST: Retrospective: Metamorphosis Alpha

(Because I've started refereeing a Metamorphosis Alpha campaign this week, I have a number of posts planned in which I share my thoughts about the game and its oddities. Before doing that, though, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit my original Retrospective post about it from July 7, 2010. I stand by everything I wrote in that original post, but I have more to say now that I'm in the midst of planning a campaign using MA, as you'll see in the coming days. –JDM)

Although Gamma World was (I think) the first RPG I played after Dungeons & Dragons, it was with its predecessor game, Metamorphosis Alpha, that I was obsessed for much of the early 1980s. Written by James Ward and first published in 1976, making it, depending on one's definitions, the first science fiction roleplaying game ever published, Metamorphosis Alpha is set aboard a vast generation ship (called the Warden in a typical example of early hobby self-referential hubris/humor). En route to another solar system far from Earth, the Warden passes through a radiation cloud that damages its systems, kills its crew, and mutates most of its surviving passengers, as well as the Terran flora and fauna traveling with them, into monstrous forms.

Over several generations, the descendants of the original passengers forget they're aboard a starship (which still functions, more or less, under the control of automated systems) and new societies arise on its various decks, which are kilometers-long in size and include many areas designed to mimic terrestrial environments for the benefit of the passengers who were supposed to live and work aboard the Warden while traveling for decades to another world. Player characters assume the role of un-mutated humans, humanoid mutants, and mutant animals, as they explore the Warden, ignorant that it's actually a starship. It's a very compelling premise, one that it shares with Robert Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky and Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (sometimes titled Starship in certain editions). In many ways, it's a much more interesting, if somewhat more limited, premise than that of Gamma World.

My own obsession with the game stemmed from the fact, sometime after I acquired Gamma World, I also acquired the first The Best of Dragon compilation, which included articles about Metamorphosis Alpha in it. These articles were strangely inspirational to me, all the moreso because they were for a game that I'd never heard of, let alone seen, but that clearly bore a lot of resemblance in basic premise and rules to my beloved Gamma World. Thus began my quest to find a copy of the game, a quest that ended in vain. I asked the guys down at my favorite game store about Metamorphosis Alpha, but they told me it was long out of print and my best bet was to go to a convention and win it at an auction. The old grognards who hung out there added that MA "wasn't very good anyway" and that I was better off just using Gamma World and making up the rest.

And so I did. I pulled out my huge graph paper sheets and set to work to mapping out my version of the starship Warden. It was a long and tedious undertaking, filled with lots of missteps and heartache, because I never felt I could get it "right." This vessel was supposed to be 80 kilometers long or so, which meant that even a big map would have to use a very large scale. Moreover, what would a vast generation ship even look like? The only starships I'd ever seen were from movies and TV shows and none of them were generation ships designed to house a huge number of colonists, animals, plants, and machinery for decades of travel across many light years. Eventually, all these worries and concerns got the better of me and I abandoned my maps, something I regret now, even as I fully understand why my younger self admitted defeat.

Over the years, I retained a high degree of interest in Metamorphosis Alpha and kept hoping that, one day, a new edition would be released that'd give me everything I'd hoped for back in the days before I could even take a look at this mythical game. As it turns out, new editions have been published over the years, but each one has been a terrible disappointment to me, utterly lacking in the aura of mystery and possibility that surrounded the original. To be fair, some of that isn't the fault of the new editions -- though some of it is, as nearly all the new editions have been conceptually flawed in significant ways -- as much of the mystique about this game for me is that I could never find a copy.

I've since been able to read it and I'd say that, while it's definitely a very early game in terms of its mechanics and production values, it's nevertheless excellently inspirational. At 32 pages, it contains just enough information to get the referee going but not so much as to prevent him from putting his own stamp on it. I still don't own a copy myself; I keep an eye out for them but they're generally ludicrously expensive and I can't justify spending that kind of money nowadays. In truth, I should probably pick up where my younger self left off and just create my own starship maps and use Mutant Future for the rules. Heck, I have this crazy idea of a supplement for MF called Generation Ship, which would basically be Metamorphosis Alpha with the serial numbers filed off and better production values. Maybe that's something worth considering ...

Retrospective: The Whispering Vault

For a long time, my Retrospective posts have focused on games and products from the so-called Golden and Silver Ages of Dungeons & Dragons, which is to say, the first fifteen or so years of the hobby. It was an arbitrary boundary, sure, but it also matched my own introduction to RPGs and, judging by reader comments, it often matched theirs too.

Alas, time moves on and here we are in 2025. Even the mid-1990s are now three decades in the past, which makes it worth looking back at some of the games from that era that have been overlooked. These titles might not feel “old school” in the classic sense and that’s okay. Grognardia has never been solely about old school gaming; it’s also about my memories of my own early days – and that sometimes means revisiting games that came later, but which still left a mark.

One of those games is The Whispering Vault, a small-press horror RPG that feels like a strange, almost forgotten cousin to the more well-known Vampire: The Masquerade. Written by Mike Nystul (of Nystul's magic aura fame) and published in 1994, The Whispering Vault focuses on Stalkers, immortal beings who carry out their cosmic hunt in a weird, unsettling universe. The game's approach to horror is quite distinctive, especially when compared to other horror games before or during its initial release, being at once heroic, moral, and surreal. 

Where Vampire (and the rest of White Wolf's "World of Darkness" games) explored personal horror and moral ambiguity, The Whispering Vault offered something equally unusual: a horror game in which the characters are empowered, not paralyzed, by the supernatural. Its Stalkers are once-mortal agents of the Primal Powers who move between the Realm of Flesh and the Realm of Essence to hunt the Unbidden, alien intruders whose presence corrupts reality. Each Stalker inhabits a personal Domain in the Realm of Essence and manifests in the mortal world through a Vessel, a form that conceals his inhuman nature while retaining traces of his former self. 

Mechanically, the game is fairly simple, using dice pools, attribute checks, and the judicious use of Disciplines and Servitors allow for a kind of "cinematic," narrative-driven play without bogging down in minutiae. While the system is easy to grasp, the game’s appeal lay more in its structure and tone. The Hunts on which the Stalkers went provided a clear goal, while the Stalkers’ moral and metaphysical responsibilities gave their work weight. Horror came not from helplessness, but from obligation, from the consequences of failing to protect the Realm of Flesh, and from confronting entities whose motives are alien and inscrutable.

The result is a game that feels both very much of its time and ahead of it. Its publisher, Pariah Press, was small and didn't have great reach. Likewise, the game's dense, sometimes opaque terminology kept it from reaching a broad audience. However, those who did find a copy found it strangely intriguing, helped no doubt by its excellent and evocative art. The Whispering Vault was nothing like older horror RPGs, like Call of Cthulhu, nor did it bare more than a superficial resemblance to White Wolf's stable. Instead, it offered a distinct, almost heroic take on horror. 

As I mentioned previously, the Stalkers’ role is to mend the damage caused by the Unbidden, restore balance, and act as moral agents in a world most people cannot perceive. The game supports this through mechanics such as the Five Keys, objects that anchor a Stalker’s identity and powers, and through the structure of their Hunts. Hunts are self-contained scenarios, intended for use as pick-up games, which is another way that The Whispering Vault sets itself apart from other horror games. Though campaign play is, of course, possible and supported, it's not the only way to approach the game, nor was it what it was originally designed for.

For years, I only ever heard about The Whispering Vault without seeing it in stores. When I finally obtained a copy, nearly a decade after its release, it was easy to miss the sense of novelty that had made the game so appealing in the ’90s. Many of its ideas had already filtered into other games by then, diluting its impact on me. Even so, it’s worth remembering what made the game unique. It occupies a fascinating space between horror, myth, and metaphysical speculation. Its focus on heroism, moral responsibility, and imaginative interpretations of supernatural threats makes it a game that I think sets it apart even now. I've still never had the chance to play it, but one day I'd like to.

The Articles of Dragon: "Luna, The Empire and the Stars"

Heads-up: over the coming weeks and months, you'll be seeing a lot of posts about articles that appeared in the Ares Section of Dragon. To some extent, that's just a function of my own personal preference for science fiction over other genres. However, it's also a function of just how good so many of the articles that appeared in that section were or at least how strong my memory of reading them still is decades later.

A good – but also peculiar – example of what I'm talking about appeared in issue #89 (September 1984). The article in question is "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" by Niall C. Shapero. As its title suggests, it's another entry in the series detailing the state of Earth's Moon in various SF RPGs, such as Gamma World and Traveller. I was a big fan of these articles, all of which were intriguing in one way or another. This one was no different.

However, what did separate "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" from the others in the series is that it was about a science fiction roleplaying game that I had never read, let alone played – Other Suns. I knew of the game, of course. Its publisher, Fantasy Games Unlimited, ran regular advertisements for it in the pages of Dragon throughout 1983 and into 1984. Based on the fact that FGU had already published Space Opera, a kitchen sink SF RPG with a notoriously incomprehensible ruleset, I assumed that Other Suns would be more of the same.

While this assumption on my part would ultimately prove to be wildly incorrect, I plead that this article – by the game's designer no less! – played a huge role in leading me astray. "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" describes the future history of the Moon, starting with the establishment of Colony One near Copernicus Crater in in 51 AE (1996). The use of the Atomic Era dating system from H. Beam Piper's stories was the first of many things that gave me a false impression about Other Suns. Piper proposed an alternative dating system that used the detonation of the first atomic bomb in 1945 as its starting point. It's a little silly in some respects, but, from the perspective of a sci-fi author writing in the aftermath of the Second World War, it's somewhat understandable, given all the popular talk of "the Atomic Age" and the like.

Besides being wildly optimistic about the prospects of a manned lunar colony just a dozen years in the future of when the article was published, Shapero postulates many other equally implausible things, though, to be fair to him, he wasn't the only person to assume the Soviet Union would survive beyond the 20th century. The article likewise buys into speculations about the rise of Japan as a Great Power that were commonplace in the 1980s, especially in SF literature. However, in Shapero's vision, Japan's rise is quickly countered by the USA, forcing the Japanese to form an alliance with Communist China. Worsening relations between the Sino-Japanese alliance and America eventually lead to World War III, resulting in the deaths of two-thirds of Earth's population.

Fortunately, the American and Soviet lunar colonies are unaffected by the devastation and agree to work together to rebuild Earth in the aftermath of the war. Through their efforts, some semblance of normalcy returns to the planet, though life is still difficult. The newly-established world government is weak and corrupt, leading the military to launch a coup that eventually replaces it with a hereditary monarchy. The First Terran Empire is born. If you think this all sounds vaguely reminiscent of the CoDominium of Jerry Pournelle, you're not alone. That's what I thought too, when I first read the article and yet another reason why I assumed that Other Suns was a hard-edged military SF game.

I can't say that I loved this article or thought it was particularly innovative, but it intrigued me. In 1984, long before the Internet, I was limited in my knowledge of any games that I didn't see on the shelves of local stores. While it was certainly possible to make use of mail order to buy games I only ever saw advertised, I rarely availed myself of it, because I wanted to see the game and hold it in my hands before I bought it. This was especially true of games like Other Suns, whose advertisements were cryptic at best. That's why articles like "Luna, The Empire and the Stars" were so important to me. In principle, they gave me a sense of what the game was actually like.

But, as I said in my original Retrospective post on Other Suns, this article did a very bad job of that. That probably explains why, even now, it looms so large in my memory. 

Special Delivery

Last month, I mentioned Barrows & Borderlands, a new old school RPG created by Matthew Tapp. A couple of days ago, my copy of the 4-volume boxed set arrived in the mail and I was so impressed with it that I wanted to show it off. Here's the front of the OD&D-inspired woodgrain boxed set.

 Here's the side of the box.

This is a shot of the open box, with all four of its integral volumes: Men & Mutants, Psychics & Sorcerers, Horrors & Treasure, and The Underworlds & Borderlands Adventures. 

I have not yet had a chance to delve deeply into the books yet, but what I have seen so far has really impressed me, all the more so, because, as I mentioned previously, Matthew and the players in his campaign are all much younger than the usual cohort for old school roleplaying games. It's really heartening to see the spirit of the old days is still very much alive, even among people less than half my age. 

I'll have more to say about B&B in the days to come. 

Barrows & Borderlands

A reader recently pointed me toward Barrows & Borderlands, a charming OD&D-inspired game that began life over a decade ago as a high school 5e campaign. Since then, it’s evolved into something truly unique. I highly recommend following the link above to learn more, but I especially encourage you to watch the short video below featuring the game’s creator, Matthew Tapp. In it, he shares the story of how B&B came to be.

What makes the video particularly heartening (especially for old-timers like me) is that Matthew and his group are young players who discovered the pleasures of old-school play entirely on their own. I was also delighted to see the video was filmed at the Green Dragon, a game store in Charleston, South Carolina that I visited in my youth, where I bought my copy of the D&D Companion set (though it now seems to be in a different location).

If you’ve got a few minutes, give it a watch. It’s well worth your time.

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.

Retrospective: Ars Magica

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Retrospective: Top Secret/S.I.

After last week's Retrospective post on the Q Manual for James Bond 007, my thoughts were starting to turn towards espionage RPGs. This inevitably led me back to TSR's Top Secret, which I loved but didn't play as often as I'd have liked. That, in turn, reminded me of the existence of its offspring, Top Secret/S.I., released in 1987, just as I was preparing to go away to college. Consequently, I didn't get a chance to look at the game until a few years later, by which point it was mostly a dead letter, despite receiving a fair bit of support over the course of its five-year run.

It's a shame, because I think TS/S.I. had a fair bit of potential. Designed by Doug Niles and Warren Spector, the game took a somewhat different approach to its subject matter than did its predecessor. Gone was the procedural, often gritty tone of the Merle Rasmussen's 1980 version. In its place was something more colorful, kinetic, and cinematic. TS/S.I. doesn't aspire to be "realistic" so much as an emulation of the larger-than-life globetrotting adventurer-cum-"spies" we saw in the action movies of the time. It was, I think, a good call and probably a better fit for the realities of most roleplaying game campaigns.

Like most TSR RPGs, Top Secret/S.I. was released in a boxed set, packed with goodies. Say what you will about TSR, but one of its great strengths was the physical production of its games. I think they may have outdone themselves in the case of TS/S.I. The company clearly had high hopes for the game. The box contained:

• A Player's Guide (64 pages), clearly written and friendly to newcomers.
• An Administrator’s Guide (32 pages), providing the referee with tools and advice.
• Maps, cardstock character sheets, reference charts, and a sheet of cardboard stand-up figures.
• Dice, of course, because no boxed game would be complete without them.

The packaging alone made it clear that this was a game, not merely a rulebook, but one that presented itself as a fun, playable experience intended to evoke a wide range of modern adventures, not just the high-tech gadgets and dangerous glamour of Cold War espionage fiction. I suspect that TSR hoped that Top Secret/S.I. would do for the present day what Dungeons & Dragons had done for fantasy: provide a flexible, accessible rules framework that could serve as the foundation for a whole genre of modern action roleplaying, from spy thrillers and paramilitary missions to pulp conspiracies and even near-future techno-drama.

In this, the TS.I. boxed set feels like a kind of Rosetta Stone for late-‘80s genre media. The core materials obviously nod to James Bond, Mission: Impossible, and the like, but the open-ended system and grab-bag of equipment, skills, and professions suggest a broader ambition. You could just as easily run an adventure inspired by Miami Vice, Rambo, or even Romancing the Stone. The structure was modular and the tone elastic. The overall design of the game hinted at a future where the spy game might grow to encompass all contemporary genre play.

TSR probably wasn’t just trying to publish a game about spies. Instead, they were trying to stake a claim on the modern era. The original boxed set suggested that they hoped to build outwards from it, creating a game that could handle every kind of adventure that could be found on video store shelves or TV Guide listings circa 1987. At least, that's what it looked like to me when I first read the game's materials during its dying days. If I'm correct, it was a pretty ambitious project to have undertaken, even if the end result didn't prove quite as successful as TSR might have hoped.

The rules of TS/S.I. were straightforward, modular, and forgiving. Characters were generated with six attributes (rated 1–100), a profession (which granted skill access), and a suite of percentile-based skills. It was a clean system, a sort of midway point between the crunch of, say, Twilight: 2000 and the elegance of James Bond 007. Combat, though potentially lethal, was far more forgiving than was the original Top Secret. Weapons and gear were detailed, but not exhaustively. The goal seems to have been clarity and momentum rather than obsessive realism. This was a game that wanted you to just dive in and play, not calculate cover modifiers for twenty minutes.

The default setting concerned the struggle between ORION (a kind of freelance intelligence agency) and WEB (a global criminal conspiracy) and was both its strength and its weakness. On one hand, it gave the game immediate stakes, a Bond-like clarity: good versus evil, gadgets versus goons. It let players jump into the world without pages of history or faction briefings. On the other hand, it lacked subtlety. There was little room for ambiguity, betrayal, or the slow-burn paranoia that often defines great espionage fiction. But for players raised on reruns of Mission: Impossible or The A-Team, this clarity was probably a feature, not a bug. There’s also an undeniable charm in how Top Secret/S.I. embraces the genre’s clichés. For example, some of the stand-up cardboard figures are depicted with trench coats and sunglasses and it’s hard not to smile at the earnest theatricality of it all. TS/S.I. doesn’t wink at its inspirations; it celebrates them without irony. Like a well-worn VHS tape of Octopussy or Delta Force, it’s content to revel in genre tropes, trusting that players will fill in the gaps with imagination and energy.

That attitude might partly explain why the game, despite its potential, never quite caught on the way its creators hoped. By 1987, the Cold War was already beginning to lose its pop culture dominance. The Berlin Wall would fall just two years later. Espionage itself was becoming murkier, more bureaucratic, and less suited to clean narratives. Furthermore, TSR was already showing signs of overstretch and its dominance in the RPG market no longer unchallenged. Top Secret/S.I. was well-supported, with modules, expansions, and genre-bending supplements like F.R.E.E.Lancers, but it never seemed to take off. As I said, I never even saw a copy until well into its run and I never owned it myself.

Despite all this, I think there's real merit in what the game tried to do. The original boxed set is well done, a terrific artifact of TSR at its peak as a producer of tactile, inviting RPG products. Likewise, the rules hold up better than one might expect, especially for pick-up play or shorter campaigns. The setting might be broad-stroke and somewhat Saturday morning in tone, but it’s also an ideal launchpad for more creative groups to riff, remix, and reframe. You could run hardboiled noir, techno-thrillers, or even supernatural conspiracy stories with only a few tweaks, just as TSR seems to have hoped to do.

In the end, Top Secret/S.I. stands as a kind of forgotten experiment: TSR’s attempt to bring modern action-adventure under the same umbrella as elves and dragons. It didn’t succeed, but it did leave behind a beautifully made game full of obvious enthusiasm and potential. For those of us who like to celebrate messier, less polished relics of the RPG past, maybe that’s enough.

Retrospective: Q Manual

After seeing that advertisement for the James Bond 007 RPG, I found myself thinking about it, something I hadn't done in quite some time. I've been a fan of the espionage genre since I was quite young, influenced at least in part by my affection for the early James Bond films. Consequently, when the roleplaying game was released in 1983, I was an early adopter and had a great deal of fun with it.

One of the things that really set James Bond 007 apart from its competition, like Top Secret. was its remarkably elegant and thematically consistent design. Much of that is probably owed to the efforts of its lead designer, Gerard Christopher Klug, who seems to have had a rare talent for mechanical innovation in service to genre emulation. I adored James Bond 007 for its action resolution and chase systems, as well as its emphasis on style as well as substance. It was a really tight, inspiring design.

Since I've already written a Retrospective post about the game itself, I thought a good way to return to discussing James Bond 007 would be through the Q Manual, published the same year as the core rules. Subtitled The Illustrated Guide to the World's Finest Armory (not a misspelling; the 007 RPG used American spellings throughout), the book conjured images of white-coated technicians, deadly attaché cases, and Roger Moore raising an eyebrow as Desmond Llewelyn stammers his way through the latest miracle of British engineering. That’s exactly what the Q Manual delivers: an in-universe catalog of gadgets, vehicles, and weapons straight from the MI6 labs, lovingly detailed and immaculately presented.

The book takes the form of a “field guide” issued to agents of the British Secret Service, complete with an introduction by Q himself and dossiers on the equipment available to operatives in the field. That this fiction is maintained throughout the book is no small achievement. One of the many things that sets James Bond 007 apart from other spy RPG is the importance given to tone and presentation. The Q Manual, written Greg Gorden, leans hard into this, turning what could have been a dry list of gear into a flavorful extension of the world of the game. 

One of the most striking things about the supplement is its production values. Victory Games, being a subsidiary of Avalon Hill, inherited that company's penchant for clean layouts and effective use of art and typography. The illustrations in The Q Manual are clear, reminiscent of technical drawings, which only enhances the feeling that one is paging through a genuine intelligence dossier rather than a gaming supplement. Even the typefaces and formatting choices reinforce the conceit, giving it a restrained, professional look that stands apart from the appearance of most other RPG books of that era.

Mechanically, the Q Manual provides complete game statistics for each item, compatible with the system presented in the basic game rulebook. Everything from the iconic Walther PPK to rocket-firing cigarettes is detailed with both practical and, at times, tongue-in-cheek commentary. In this way, the book acts as both a mechanical expansion and a setting book, grounding its fantastical gadgets in a consistent rules framework while reinforcing the tone and flavor of the Bond universe. It’s a great example of rules and presentation working hand in glove.

Of course, all of this is just another way the Q Manual reinforces what makes the James Bond 007 RPG so special: its commitment to genre fidelity. Like the best RPG supplements, it doesn’t merely tack on new rules or equipment. Instead, it deepens the player’s immersion in the world of the game, reminding him that this is a game about style, daring, and cool-headed efficiency in the face of over-the-top supervillainy. Every gadget and vehicle included serves not just a mechanical purpose, but an esthetic one, enabling players to act (and feel) like true agents of Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

Re-reading it now, more than forty years later, I was struck by the book’s clarity of purpose and sincerity. It does not wink at the audience nor lapse into self-parody, as even the later Bond films would sometimes do. Instead, it treats the world of Bond as one worthy of exploration and emulation, not as camp, but as aspirational fantasy. I think that's a key to why both this supplement and the entire James Bond 007 game line were favorites of mine. 

No supplement is perfect. Like the game itself, the Q Manual assumes a particular flavor of "espionage" – clean, glamorous, and British to its core. There is little room here for the messy realities of the Cold War or the moral ambiguities of Le Carré. But this is James Bond, not Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. The Q Manual knows what it is and does it exceptionally well. Honestly, that's what I love about it, even now. It captures a particular fantasy of espionage and invites you to step into it, martini in hand and mission dossier at the ready. It's refreshing to revisit something so joyfully committed to the escapism it's offering.

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.

Roleplaying Adventure in a Techno-Fantastic Age

Though DGP's The Travellers' Digest was very well regarded among Traveller fans in the late '80s and early '90s, it wasn't especially lucrative for the company. That's why, when GDW announced it would end the MegaTraveller line and proceed with Traveller: The New Era, DGP saw it as an opportunity to forge its own path by publishing an original roleplaying game called A.I. Here's an advertisement for it from issue #59 of Challenge (April 1992). 

A.I. is set on "an alien, future Earth" some 1500 years in the future, after rampant artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology have made it nearly unrecognizable. I adore settings like this, where technology has become indistinguishable from magic – "secret science fiction," I call them. Needless to say, I was very excited to see A.I. and ads like this one only increased my excitement.

Alas, a series of unfortunate events, including a catastrophic hard drive crash, resulted in A.I. becoming RPG vaproware. Soon thereafter, DGP itself was no more. It's a pity, because DGP did great work on Traveller and I would have loved to have seen what they'd imagined for a wholly original science fiction setting. But, even in 1992, there were already more roleplaying games in existence than I could ever play, so I didn't waste too much energy mourning this one. Seeing this again, though, briefly took me back to a time, more than three decades ago now, when I not only looked forward to this game but first began to ponder the possibility of trying to make a living as a RPG writer. Simpler times! 

REVIEW: Wulfwald

A common early complaint about Dungeons & Dragons was that the game's three little brown books failed to provide much in the way of a cultural or social context for its "fantastic medieval wargames campaigns." Correcting this perceived shortcoming was part of the impetus behind the creation and publication of several early RPGs that appeared in OD&D's wake, most notably Empire of the Petal Throne, Chivalry & Sorcery, and even RuneQuest to some extent. All of these games (and others) place much greater emphasis on the ways that culture and society not only intersect with but can offer a justification for adventuring than Dungeons & Dragons did at the time or, in fact, has ever done. 

I was reminded of this when I started reading Wulfwald, Lee Reynoldson's superb roleplaying game set in a world inspired by the folklore and legends of pagan Anglo-Saxon England. I say "inspired by," because, as Reynoldson explains, "Wulfwald is not set on our Earth," but rather is set on "another world," where "the myth and magic that was superstition in Earth's history is a real, if rare, force." As a game, Wulfwald should be almost immediately familiar to anyone who's played D&D or one of its descendants – not merely in terms of its rules but also in terms of its play. All the usual activities you expect in Dungeons & Dragons, whether they be delving in the dark, fighting monsters, or looting treasure, are supported in Wulfwald, but are given a new and compelling context.

Before proceeding further, I'd like to elaborate briefly on Wulfwald's relationship with D&D and its rules. Wulfwald is not "complete" game in the sense of including all the rules you need to play yet another retro-clone of Dungeons & Dragons. Reynoldson assumes you already know what hit points, armor class, and saving throws are, for example. When these and other familiar concepts come up in the text, there's no explanation of them or how they work, except when Wulfwald offers a new take on them that deviates from the way anyone who's played D&D generally understands them. I don't see this as a problem, but it might be surprising or even off-putting to those used to the approach adopted by most other old school D&D-derived games. 

With that out of the way, let's move on to Wulfwald itself. The game comes in a thin, sturdy box, inside of which are five staplebound A5 booklets and a cloth(!) map depicting the land of Wulfwald, as drawn by the late, great Russ Nicholson. The booklets have a clean, simple layout that's easy on the eyes. The covers of each booklet features artwork by Katie Wakelin, while the interior art is done by Stefano Accordi. I like the cover art much better than the interior art, but all the illustrations evoke the dark, early medieval period in which the game is rooted. Nicholson's cartography, of course, is gorgeous and a joy simply to look at and wonder at its details.

The premise of Wulfwald is that all the characters are "wolfsheads," who are outsiders and outlaws who exist outside the law's protection. Their status means that anyone can harm or kill them without fear of retribution. To avoid this fate, the game assumes the characters have banded together in the service of a Thegn or warrior-lord and act as his service. In exchange for such service, the wolfsheads can expect gifts of beauty and value that reflect their newfound honor and status within the setting. This set-up is a clever way to recontextualize adventurers, making them simultaneously rough outsiders but also having a place, albeit an unusual one, in society. 

Unlike "normal" D&D, Wulfwald has only three levels, corresponding (more or less) to the veteran, hero, and superhero levels from Dave Arneson's Blackmoor campaign. However, there is a rules appendix that provides for a greater number of levels for those referees and players who prefer them. Characters belong to one of four kindreds: Eorðwerod (Men), Ælfcynn (Elves), Dweorgas (Dwarves), and Réðealingas (Outlanders). Each kindred has three unique classes, each belonging to one of three archetypes: warrior, skirmisher, and wizard. For example, Men have the Scildmægden (warrior), Sperebróga (skirmisher), and Scinnlæca (wizard), while Elves have the Wuduheald (warrior), Scytta (skirmisher), and Gealdor Sangere (wizard). All classes have their own advancement tables, as well as unique results for criticals and fumbles. Warriors also have an ability called "heroic effort," an unusual feat of arms that can be employed once an adventure.

An aspect of Wulfwald that could, I imagine, discourage some potential buyers is its regular use of Old English, complete with odd letters like æ or ð. Speaking as an old Tékumel hand, I know that a lot of people don't like words that require the use of a pronunciation guide to say properly. I can only say that Old English, once you know the rules, isn't all that difficult to pronounce. Moreover, its use in Wulfwald goes a long way toward investing the setting with a distinct flavor. In many cases, the text does provide alternate, contemporary words to use instead of the Old English ones for those who find the others a bit too flavorful, but I much prefer the Old English ones. Your mileage may vary.

Flavor is a big part of what separates Wulfwald from "standard" D&D, even if it makes use of all the expected elements of the game, like magic, monsters, and treasure. I've already noted that each of the character classes is distinctive. The same holds for the systems of magic some of them use. Wulfwald includes four different systems, from runic fateweaving and spell singing to the Forbidden Path and wicce cræft. Likewise, magic items are all unique items, each with its own history and powers. Monsters, too, include a fair number of unique beings, like the draca (dragons) and eotenas (giants).

"Unique" is a word I've used a lot in this review and with good reason. What sets Wulfwald apart from many old school fantasy products is that it's very specific in not just its inspirations but also in the way it's chosen to make use of them. While I'm on record for saying there's nothing wrong with vanilla fantasy, there's also, in my opinion, a distinct pleasure that comes from roleplaying according to the culture, customs, and beliefs of a particular society, whether real or imaginary. That's why my House of Worms campaign has been so enjoyable: the players get to be, if only for a little while, people who inhabit another world with its own rules and ways of looking at things. This is something Wulfwald does very well, too.

The game's five books cover character generation, magic (including magic items and religion), the setting of Wulfwald (including a sample scenario and skirmish battles), monsters, NPCs, and more. Taken together, they provide enough for the referee to kick off a campaign while still leaving lots of room for individual creativity. Wulfwald isn't Tékumel or Glorantha; there isn't an encyclopedia's worth of information to digest. Rather, the game's five books do a good job of painting a compelling big picture with plenty of room to add detail here or a splash of color there. It strikes a nice balance between too much and too little. In short, it inspires, which is exactly what I want out of a product like this.

If you're looking for a well presented new setting for your favorite D&D-alike that draws on real world folklore and history in a fun way, I'd highly recommend yout take a look at Wulfwald. It's one of the best things I've bought this year.

Kings and Aces

Marc Miller, creator of Traveller, and one of the three founders of Game Designers' Workshop also attended Gamehole Con this year, as he does most years. I first met Marc many years ago, at the Origins Game Fair in 1991, which was, I believe, the last time the con was held in my hometown of Baltimore. I was a member of a Traveller fan organization called the History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG) and several of us present at the con wanted to pitch some ideas to GDW for (Mega)Traveller adventures and supplements. We wound up going out to dinner with Marc, Chuck Gannon, and the Japanese translators of Traveller. We didn't succeed in our quest, but I did have the chance to meet several wonderful people, including Marc, with whom I've stayed in contact over the years.

Marc held several panels, one of which was devoted to the history of GDW. Every person who arrived in the conference room was given a deck of cards Marc had printed through DriveThruRPG. He's a big fan of specialized decks of cards and often brings them for sale at conventions. The decks he gave us were devoted to the topic of the panel. The face cards all featured important people in the history of the company, like Marc Miller, Loren Wiseman, and Frank Chadwick, while the number cards all featured games it had published, like Traveller, Twilight: 2000, or Space: 1889 (along with lots of wargames, of course). 

During the panel, Marc would go around the room, point to someone and ask them to draw a card randomly from the deck they'd been given. After doing so, the person would then read what was on the card and Marc will talk for a while about the person or game in question. In this way, the cards provided some focus for the discussion rather than relying solely on audience questions. Another benefit is that light was often shed on individuals or games that might otherwise not get discussed, like Chaco, a wargame about the 1932–1936 war between Bolivia and Paraguay. The game is one of Miller's earliest designs and was created, in part, as an educational tool to teach about South American history.

All the panels at Gamehole Con were too short – only an hour. They were all held in the same room, with a new one starting every hour on the hour, all day, every day. That meant that there was often a rush toward the end of each panel that caused a fair bit of disruption, as overzealous gamers tried to enter an ongoing panel before it was actually ended. I would have much preferred fewer, longer panels, so that we could luxuriate a bit in the stories and memories of the guests. 

In the case of Marc Miller, he has so many stories. He's now 77 years old and has been involved in the hobbies of wargaming and roleplaying for more than half a century. Yet, his memory is incredibly sharp and, with age, I think he's acquired a perspective that's refreshing in its humility. He talked a lot about how, as in the case of TSR, no one really knew what they were doing at GDW. They were making it all up as they went, having fun as they explored new ideas and took chances on making them reality. Some ideas were better than others and some approaches worked, but they learned a lot from each project, whether it proved a success or a failure. Marc expressed several times how blessed he'd been to have had the career he had, making games and making people happy. 

Not a bad legacy, eh?

Wulfwald Bundle of Holding

Most people who read this blog are probably already familiar with the Bundle of Holding, which offers limited-time sales of tabletop RPGs in PDF form at bargain prices, with a portion of the revenue going to various charities. It's a great way to take a chance on a game or game line that interests you without having to blow a huge amount of money to do so. I've made use of it a few times myself and have never regretted it.

That's why I wanted to draw your attention to a new one that I think many readers will appreciate: Wulfwald. It's a low-fantasy, old school RPG inspired by Anglo-Saxon myths and legends. I bought a print copy of the game a couple of weeks ago and love it. I'm in the midst of writing a review for it, which I hope to have finished before I leave for Gamehole Con next week. However, the sale only runs until October 17 and I wanted to alert everyone to it now, in the event I don't complete that review before I depart.

For only $5.95, you get all five rulebooks in PDF form, along with an electronic black-and-white regional map of the game world drawn by the late, great Russ Nicholson. At that price, I think it's more than worth it and I highly recommend it to anyone fascinated by early medieval Britain.

800-lb. Gorilla

Last week's post, Pretenders to the Throne, was occasioned by my frustration about the fact that, in general, posts about Dungeons & Dragons tend to get more views and generate more comments than those about any other RPG. Now, on one level, that's just common sense. Not only is D&D the first and most well-known roleplaying game, but it's also been the most popular one for a half century now. No matter how many players of other games might despair of this fact, it's true. Dungeons & Dragons is and always has been the only roleplaying game whose name is recognizable outside our little hobby – or indeed inside some segments of it. In my experience, there are far more gamers who play only D&D than there are gamers who play a wide variety of them.

As commenter Rick noted the other day, that's the power of branding. By getting to publication first and by having a title that's both evocative and easy to say, Dungeons & Dragons has a number of advantages that make it uniquely well placed to be the leader of the pack. I remember some years ago, back when Hasbro first bought Wizards of the Coast, reading an article in some business magazine that the name Dungeons & Dragons was one of best known in the world, alongside things like Coca-Cola and Kleenex. While most people had no real sense of what D&D actually was – most, I think, believed it to be some kind of video game – they nevertheless had at least heard of D&D, something that could not be said about any other RPG, no matter how successful or celebrated it was within the hobby.

Being the most well-known is not, of course, an indication of quality, a point frequently made by partisans of different, less-known brands, both within and without our hobby. Anyone who prefers Pepsi to Coke or Burger King to McDonald's, to cite just two rather prosaic examples, probably feels this way. Believe me, I'm sympathetic to this point of view. As a fan of Traveller, for example, I wish the game were better known, appreciated, and played than it is at present, but, as the old saying goes, if wishes were credits, beggars wouldn't need to travel by low passage. I make this joke to illustrate my point about just how obscure RPGs other than D&D are, even within the hobby. How many of you reading this post knew what I was talking about? (There's no need to answer that.)

I love lots of roleplaying games. Last year, I did a two-part post about my ten favorites – and I have many more besides. But I know only too well that, if I were to write lots of posts to discussing, say, Pendragon or Gamma World, they'd be among my least read posts and certainly the least commented upon. As you all know, I've been refereeing an Empire of the Petal Throne campaign for the last nine and a half years and, despite that, my posts about that campaign and its setting of Tékumel don't receive a lot of attention or comment. Don't misunderstand me: I completely understand why that is the case. Neither Empire of the Petal Throne nor Tékumel are widely known even within the hobby, so why would I expect posts about them to generate much attention?

And that's really my point. I write so much about Dungeons & Dragons and its history here, because D&D is the single most widely known and played roleplaying game, even in 2024. Those of us who enjoy more than just D&D are very apt to claim that we're presently living in a Golden Age of Roleplaying, with more games and more variety of games than ever before. That might well be true by some metrics, but, on one significant metric – popularity – nothing much has changed. Dungeons & Dragons remains the game most people are playing and that most people, even those of you reading this blog, are interested in reading about. It's not for nothing that I use a version of Trampier's iconic demon idol in my masthead.

What does this all mean? Honestly, I'm not sure. Though it's not my favorite RPG, I still very much like D&D, so I don't think there's any chance I'll stop writing posts about the game and its history. However, my frustration with the fact that it's those posts, with a few exceptions, that tend to generate the most interest is very real. I don't like writing stuff that garners little or no interest. Who, after all, likes to feel as if he's shouting into the void? At the same time, I cannot expect most readers are going to be familiar with all the same obscure things that I am or that they'll share my interest in the same. To some extent, if one is going to write for public consumption, one must write what will attract the most readers and, in my case, that means posts about Dungeons & Dragons. 

C'est la vie.