The Articles of Dragon: "The Nine Hells (Part II)"

I was a huge fan of Part I of Ed Greenwood’s “The Nine Hells,” so it was almost inevitable that I’d be just as taken with Part II. Published in issue #76 of Dragon (August 1983), the second half of this magisterial tour of the planes of ultimate Lawful Evil is every bit the equal of the first, perhaps better. It’s longer, for one thing, and delves into the “deepest” layers of the Hells, including Nessus, the domain of Asmodeus. I probably spent even more hours poring over this article than its predecessor – and that’s saying something.

Part II explores the "bottom" four planes of Hell – Malbolge, Maladomini, Caina, and Nessus – ruled by the three most powerful archdevils: Baalzebul, Mephistopheles, and Asmodeus. As the Monster Manual tells us, Baalzebul commands both the sixth and seventh layers, a rare distinction that underscores his power. He rules the seventh directly, while the sixth is governed by his viceroy, Moloch, an archdevil in name, but one who holds power only at Baalzebul's pleasure. I've always wondered why Gary Gygax granted Baalzebul two layers when every other archdevil rules just one. Greenwood’s article doesn’t address this, though I suspect later AD&D material (perhaps Planescape?) might.

Each of the four planes receives a detailed write-up, highlighting notable locations like the capital cities of their ruling archdevils. This is a big part of what made this article and its predecessor so compelling. Greenwood gave each plane a rough geography, filled with distinct locales that made them feel like actual places where adventures could happen. Before these articles, the planes all seemed like vague, featureless expanses that were hard to visualize, let alone use in play. Now, there were cities, fortresses, lakes, places a referee could actually work with. That might seem like a small thing, but it’s not. Believe me.

Each plane also got write-ups for the unique devils who dwelled there, often in service to its archdevil. These included the so-called "dukes of hell," but also the "princesses of hell," the consorts of the archdevils. Even more than the dukes, this was a new concept in AD&D conception of devils, though not an unreasonable one, given their depiction as a court of ever-scheming infernal aristocrats. It also opened up new possibilities for gaming, as the dukes, princesses, and archdevils all had their own agendas, each looking to gain advantage over the others. Characters could easily become enmeshed in such gambits, whether willingly or not.

What truly set Part II apart, however, was its six-page appendix detailing how the Nine Hells distort spells, magic items, and even class abilities. Greenwood didn’t invent this approach, but he uses it to great effect, emphasizing how alien and hostile the Hells are compared to the Prime Material. This matters, especially for high-level play, where such distinctions are needed to pose real challenges. I suspect this is why Gygax became so invested in planar adventures later in his TSR career: the planes offered a new frontier to test powerful characters and keep long-running campaigns exciting.

Taken together, these two articles transformed the Nine Hells from vague backdrops into vivid, dangerous realms ripe for adventure. Greenwood’s work gave referees the tools to turn them into meaningful, playable settings, not just abstract concepts. For high-level campaigns looking for their next stage, the Nine Hells suddenly made a lot more sense. I adored these articles in my youth and still think highly of them today. They're also reminders of just how good Dragon was in the early to mid-1980s. What a time to be a subscriber!

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "The Nine Hells (Part I)"

(The original post appeared here.)

And so we come, once again, to an excellent article written by Ed Greenwood – "The Nine Hells, Part I," which appeared in issue #75 (July 1983) of Dragon. In retrospect, it's easy to see why Greenwood would enjoy such success; he was not only prolific but also imaginative. Plus, his articles were memorable. Even now, nearly three decades later, I clearly remember the first time I read this issue of Dragon, filled as it was with information about the lower planes, thanks to both Gary Gygax's extensive preview of new devils from the upcoming Monster Manual II and the first part of Ed Greenwood's tour of the first five layers of AD&D's version of Hell. I was absolutely blown away by what I read, much to the chagrin of my players at the time, several of whom found themselves on unexpected visits to the domains of one or more arch-devils.

Like Roger E. Moore's "The Astral Plane," "The Nine Hells, Part I" is a work of remarkable scholarship, mining the entirety of the AD&D corpus available at the time for hints as to what the planes of Hell might be like. Also like "The Astral Plane," this article wasn't content to simply regurgitate what we already knew. Rather, it expanded on that information in clever and sometimes surprising ways, painting a picture of the Nine Hells that was both true to its gaming source material but also evocative of other works of fantasy and myth. Greenwood doesn't present his Nine Hells as canonical for anything other than his own Forgotten Realms campaign, but it wasn't long before it received Gygax's blessing, which gave it a status it enjoyed until comparatively recently, where books as recent as 2006's Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells continued to make use of ideas laid down in 1983. That's a degree of influence that few articles (or authors) can match.

In addition to giving names to each of the Nine Hells and discussing their locales and points of interest, Greenwood also devotes a fair bit of space to their inhabitants, in particular unique devils. Prior to this issue of Dragon, the arch-devils were the only unique devils described in AD&D. Now, both Gygax and Greenwood provided a coterie of such personalities, which, as a referee, I found a terrific boon. Unique devils gave me the opportunity to pit the PCs against powerful devils that weren't rulers of entire planes. This not only gave the PCs a fighting chance to defeat them but, in the event that the PCs did defeat them, the multiverse wouldn't resound with their victory the way it might if they bested Dispater or Geryon. Greenwood also found a way to work Astaroth from "The Politics of Hell" (from issue #28) into his depiction of the Nine Hells, which I know endeared him to many older gamers of my acquaintance who adored Alex von Thorn's article from way back when.

"The Nine Hells, Part I" (and its sequel, which I may well wind up discussing next time) are in a rare class of Dragon article: ones I actually used. Ever since I started playing AD&D, I desperately wanted to run adventures in the Outer Planes, but I rarely did, in large part because the game gave so little information on them. That's why articles like this and "The Astral Plane" were so useful and inspiring to me. And, unlike "The Astral Plane," Greenwood's Nine Hells articles were remarkably concrete, describing people and places one could encounter in addition to providing rules for how magic worked differently in this plane of ultimate Lawful Evil. I liked that a lot; I still do.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: The Inner Planes

I've commented before that, while I'm no fan of Unearthed Arcana as eventually published, I was conversely a big fan of much of the material Gygax was creating in preparation for his never-written second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This material appeared in the pages of Dragon over the course of several years, presenting new classes (like the barbarian, cavalier, and thief-acrobat), weapons and armor, spells, and monsters, along with expanded conceptions of other aspects of the game. At the time, I liked these articles simply because they provided me with more stuff to use in my AD&D campaign (and use them I did). Now, though, what I like about them is the way they seem to represent a maturing of Gygax's fantasy conceptions, the fruit of years of thought and play, not to mention the need for AD&D to find new frontiers of adventure.

His article, "The Inner Planes," which appeared in issue #73 of Dragon (May 1983), demonstrates this maturation process quite clearly, I think. In it, Gygax offers "a new way to look at the AD&D world." This new way was necessary because, as the game's cosmology evolved, there was a need to reconcile new conceptions to earlier presentations. The para-elemental planes, for example, arose out of wondering about what happens at the point where two elemental planes met. Gygax obviously liked the idea, but soon realized that the thought process that led to them was incomplete. After all, there were other Inner Planes, like the Positive and Negative Material Planes, the Ethereal Plane, and the Plane of Shadow (the latter itself a recent addition to the cosmology). How did they interact with the Elemental Planes and what was the effect of all this interaction?

The result is a cubic representation of the Inner Planes, as depicted in this cut-out included on page 13 of this issue:

"What a mess!" you might reasonably say and it is a mess – an ugly, convoluted, and probably unnecessary one at that, but I love it all the same. There are a couple of things I like about this, starting with the fact that it's clearly an attempt by Gygax to think about AD&D's cosmology in rational way. If para-elemental planes arise due to the meeting of two elemental planes, what happens when an elemental plane meets the Positive or Negative Material Plane? What about a para-elemental plane? The result is baroque, almost to the point of absurdity, but it makes sense. One might argue that this is little different than debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and I'm somewhat sympathetic to that point of view. At the same time, given what Gygax had already established about the game's metaphysics and the interactions of those metaphysical forces, this oddly colored cube is a natural, even inevitable, evolution of it all.

That's the second thing I like about this new presentation of the Inner Planes: it's evolutionary. What I mean by that is that it demonstrates that AD&D and the fantasy world it presented was growing and changing, not in a way that, strictly speaking, repudiated anything about its earlier self but rather in a way that added to and expanded upon what had come before. None of this was needed by players or referees solely interested in dungeon crawls or wilderness exploration or all the usual activities of fantasy roleplaying. However, players and referees interested in going beyond that would find it invaluable. Gygax was taking a lot more interest in the other planes of existence, seeing them as the next logical step in exploring the possibilities implied by AD&D's setting. To do that properly, he'd need to think about them more carefully, teasing out the implications and taking stock of all they could offer. Whether one likes the direction he was headed or not, I hope one can nevertheless appreciate the effort.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "The Astral Plane"

A Dragon article written by Roger E. Moore and with an introduction by E. Gary Gygax, where he states that "[this] is about as 'official' as is possible at this time?" For my 13 year-old self, this was as good as an article could get. Appearing in issue #67 (November 1982), "The Astral Plane" was a massive effort on the part of Moore to provide comprehensive rules for adventuring on the Astral Plane. It included discussions of astral encounters, astral travel, the Psychic Wind, movement, combat, and alterations to spells and magic items. There was also an accompanying adventure called "Fedifensor" (written by Allen Rogers) intended to be used in conjunction with Moore's rules. Taken together, it was very impressive package that solidified my sense that, aside from Gary Gygax, Roger E. Moore was one of a handful of Dragon writers whose stuff I could safely assume would be good.

We didn't do a lot of plane hopping in my old AD&D campaigns. I do recall a few visits to the Nine Hells and the Abyss and I suspect the characters did so by means of the Astral Plane on at least one occasion, but, if so, these trips weren't particularly memorable. Ultimately, that's the main problem with "The Astral Plane" – even with all the clever rules modifications that Moore came up with, the place is still deadly dull. That's not Moore's fault, because he was trying to work within the parameters laid down by AD&D up till that point and those parameters paint a rather uninspiring picture. Sure, the Githyanki hang out on the Astral Plane, but, other than that, what else makes this place cool? Why would anyone want to go there for any length of time? "The Astral Plane" doesn't answer that question and nothing in the AD&D books at the time provided a better answer.

That said, I did like the fact that Moore postulates that other planes will operate according to different laws than those of the Prime Material. That's something I strong advocate and think is essential to the feeling of "We're not in Kansas anymore" other planes should evoke. I also think, as was true in Queen of the Demonweb Pits, that "The Astral Plane" goes overboard in the level of specificity about how character abilities, spells, and magic items operate differently, but that's a criticism of implementation not of concept. So, in retrospect, I still like this article a great deal, even if I wouldn't use it as written in any game I am running now. It's still a great idea mine and a useful foundation for an approach to handling weird otherworlds in your D&D campaign.

Retrospective: Planescape Campaign Setting

When I first acquired the AD&D Players Handbook – this was sometime in early 1980 – one of my favorite sections was Apprendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence. Taking up only a couple of pages, this appendix was the first time I'd ever encountered Gary Gygax's bizarre, mysterious, and wonderfully baroque ideas about the multiverse of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. What made Gygax's vision so weird compelling was its obsessive orderliness, which didn't simply tie the Outer Planes to each of the game's nine alignments, but to every conceivable shade in between. That's why, for example, the Seven Heavens are described as being "of absolute lawful good," while the planes of Elysium are "of neutral good lawfuls." 

Objectively, this is bonkers stuff, but I adored it and spent a lot of time thinking about the Outer (and other) Planes, aided no doubt by my fascination with the demons and devils of the Monster Manual. Despite Gygax's precise distinctions between the alignments of the Planes, AD&D didn't have a lot to say about them for a long time, aside from the occasional article in Dragon, like the ones about the Astral Plane (by Roger E. Moore) and the Nine Hells (by Ed Greenwood). And, of course, we later got Gygax's own developed thoughts about the Inner Planes, which were every bit as eccentric and persnickety as what he wrote in Appendix IV of the PHB all those years ago.

What I always wanted was a better sense of the Planes as a place and, more than that, as an adventuring locale. What sorts of adventures could AD&D characters have among the Planes? What made the Outer Planes different from the Prime Material Plane and how would this impact the kinds of adventures to be had there? The better Dragon articles, like those of Greenwood, did this well, or at least better than did Gygax, whose own ideas, while fascinating, remained largely in the realm of the theoretical. I wanted something more "down to earth," if you'll forgive the phrase. Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes was a good first step in that direction, but I wanted more.

As it turned out, I'd have to wait until 1994 to get that, in the form of the Planescape Campaign Setting – and it was not at all what I had expected. As imagined by David "Zeb" Cook and brought to visual life by Tony DiTerlizzi, the Outer Planes were indeed weird, though quite different from how they'd been previously portrayed. Instead of being presented as primarily the dwelling places of gods and demons, the Planes were instead a battleground between various factions of "philosophers with clubs," each of which hopes to remake reality according to their own idiosyncratic perspective. These factions, each associated (in some cases loosely) with an alignment or Outer Plane, were the driving force behind Cook's vision for Planescape. More than that, they provided an easy buy-in for player characters looking to involve themselves in the cosmic struggles of the setting.

"The setting." That's important. One of the clever things Cook did with Planescape was that he made the Planes a setting. They weren't just a place you could visit for a brief time; they were a place you could stay. Further, they were a place where even novice characters could stay, not merely high-level ones with access to potent magic. Further still, they were a place with its own native inhabitants and players could easily take up the role of one of them. Planescape gave AD&D's Planes a life of their own, divorced from the Prime Material Plane where most campaigns were set. Planescape made it possible to play entire campaigns where characters never once set foot on the World of Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, or any other "normal" campaign world. 

This was a bold approach and not at all what I or, I imagine, most AD&D players at the time were expecting. Not everyone warmed to Planescape's vision of the Planes. Indeed, I recall quite a few old hands who scoffed at it as taking too many cues from White Wolf's World of Darkness RPGs, which were very popular at the time. I can certainly appreciate the shock and surprise they probably felt upon reading Planescape and seeing DiTerlizzi's Dr Seuss-like depictions of the denizens of the Planes. This was not Gygax's Planes; it wasn't even Grubb's. It was something quite unique, filled with the strange, the odd, and the occasionally silly, and suffused with a punkish vibe that came through most strongly in its use of Planar Cant drawn from the criminal slang of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Many people, even fans of the setting, loathed the Cant, but there's no denying that it helped give Planescape a distinct flavor of its own.

Me, I enjoyed Planescape. It was not at all what I expected, but I enjoyed it for what it was: a strange, whimsical, wondrous take on world-hopping fantasy, with "worlds" in this case being other Planes of Existence, each with its own individual rules and style. And then there's Sigil, the City of Doors, located at the very center of the multiverse – if a series of infinite planes can truly be said to have a center. Home to the various planar factions and serving as a crossroads of the Planes, Sigil could serve as the basis for an entire campaign in itself, but it was also the perfect "home base" for planar characters whose adventures took them across the realms of the Great Wheel and beyond. Like Planescape itself, I really enjoyed Sigil and had a lot of fun with it.

I have lots of thoughts I could share about Planescape, both positive and negative, but my overall feeling for it is one of affection. I first made use of the setting as an adjunct to an ongoing Forgotten Realms campaign I ran in the mid-1990s. Later, I ran a "native" campaign among the Planes in the early days of Third Edition. Both were very well received by my players. Indeed, we still occasionally talk about some of the adventures they had in the setting. That's my usual measure of whether a gaming product succeeds – did I have fun with it? – and by that standard, Planescape is one of the greats.  

White Dwarf: Issue #56

Issue #56 of White Dwarf (August 1984) features a cover by Chris Achilleos, who's probably most well-known for his contributions to Heavy Metal magazine. This particular illustration doesn't do much for me personally, but it's very much in keeping with the brash tone of the magazine during this time. In his editorial, Ian Livingstone sees a possible silver lining in the troubles of US game companies like TSR, namely, the emergence of "a thriving British RPG industry." Games Workshop certainly benefited from the decline of TSR in the mid-1980s; whether any other UK companies did so is an interesting question.

Speaking of the mid-1980s, what could be more appropriate than an article about ninjas? "Night's Dark Agents" by Chris Elliott and Richard Edwards is fairly typical of this surprisingly resilient genre of article. Rather than focus on how to include ninjas into any specific RPG, the authors instead talk about the reputed training, skills, weapons, and attire of ninjas in history and legend. It's fairly well done for what it is, but it's hardly groundbreaking in an era when nearly every gaming periodical published multiple periodicals of this sort.

"Open Box" reviews Games Workshop's "Battlebikes," giving it 7 out of 10. This game piqued my imagination at the time, but I never saw it in stores, let alone owned it. Also reviewed is "Turbofire" from Auto Ventures, a product and a company of which I've never heard. The product, which is given 8 out of 10, is apparently a multi-system adventure/campaign scenario designed for use with Car Wars, Battlecars, and Highway 2000 – how strange! Hârn, Cities of Hârn, and three installments of the Encyclopedia Hârnica are all reviewed together, collectively scoring 8 out of 10. The reviewer (Simon Farrell) speaks well of all the products; his main critique seems to be that, because they are presented in a system-neutral fashion, the referee will have to do a lot of work creating game stats for NPCs, monsters, etc. Finally, there's a review of Mayfair's The Forever War game, which garners a 7 out of 10.

For a change, Dave Langford's "Critical Mass" includes discussions of books I've actually read, like Donald Kingsbury's Geta (released in the USA under the title Courtship Rite, which is how I know it). It's a strange work of imaginary socio-anthropology about a colony of humans who survive on a hostile planet where only a handful of Earth plants can grow and whose diet must be supplemented by cannibalism. The book is better than it sounds! Langford also reviews Jack Vance's Lyonesse, which he likes less than The Dying Earth and its sequels, an opinion I share. Later in the column, Langford offers his opinions on the best, worst, most pretentious, and most sexist SF authors.

It's an idiosyncratic list to be sure.

Since we're on the subject of bad writers, the next article is devoted to translating the fantasy novels of David Eddings into Dungeons & Dragons. Predictably entitled "The Belgariad," the article by Peter Ransome is thankfully short. Much more worthy of one's time is "The Last Log," a science fiction Call of Cthulhu adventure by Jon Sutherland, Steve Williams, and Tim Hall. Set in the early 23rd century, the scenario involves checking in with a corporate mining planet whose colonists haven't delivered any reports in over seven months. Naturally, something eldritch is afoot and it's up to the player characters to deal with it. I liked this adventure so much that I used a version of it in my college Traveller: 2300 with great success. Even now, I consider it one of the most original things ever published in the pages of White Dwarf.

"Mortal Combat" by Dave Morris is a collection of rules alterations and additions to the RuneQuest combat system. While I have no doubt that articles of this sort were of great interest to RQ fans, it was precisely this obsession with adding complexity to an already complex combat system that has long prevented my wholly embracing the game, which is a pity. Part 1 of "The Sunfire's Hart" by P.G. Emery is an excellent kick-off to an extended AD&D scenario for low-level characters. The initial premise is that the PCs are hired by the Guild of Sages to travel by boat a series of volcanic islands to find out why contact was lost with the last group to travel there – a common theme in many RPG scenarios, it would seem! The islands were once ruled by the defunct Solarian Empire, which maintained power through the use of an artifact called the Sunfire's Heart. The scenario involves not only discovering what happened to other inhabitants of the island but also the secret history of the Solarian Empire. It's far from a perfect adventure, particularly in terms of its presentation, but I am a sucker for adventures where ancient history plays a role.

"Plying the Spacelanes" by Paul Vernon is an alternate take on random starship encounters in Traveller. Vernon does a good job, I think, of expanding on and rationalizing the original tables without complicating them unnecessarily. The next time I referee a Traveller campaign, I might well make use of these. "To Boldly Go" by Joe Dever and Gary Chalk takes a look at sci-fi miniatures, including those produced by Grenadier for Traveller. "High Planes Drifters" is a collection of four D&D monsters from the planes beyond the Prime Material. As you'd expect, they're a mixed bag, with none of them really standing out as must-use additions to the game.

"Don't Touch That Dial!" by Phil Hine is an odd little article, in that it's ostensibly about the introduction of high technology into a D&D but is in reality simply about the introduction of two specific types of high technology: gunpowder and mechanical flight via ornithopters. The former is a perennial topic of interest to fantasy gamers, while the latter seems to stem largely from Moorcock's Runestaff series and Herbert's Dune. It's a mostly forgettable article, much like "The Psytron!" by Carol Hutchins, which reviews a 48K Spectrum game of the same name. I say that not because the game in question is a bad one – the reviewer gives it 9 out of 10 – but because it doesn't seem to have been a particularly successful or influential product. I'd much rather read the latest installments of "Thrud the Barbarian," "The Travellers," and "Gobbledigook," all of which I enjoyed more.

White Dwarf continues to trudge along solidly. At this point in its run, most issues were decent enough to hold my attention without much complaint and would often include one or two articles that I still remember even now. This is one of those issues, largely because of "The Last Log," which is a genuinely clever take on Call of Cthulhu. I look forward to seeing more like it in the issues to come.

Random Roll: DMG, pp. 57–58

At the bottom of page 57 of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, there's a section entitled "Travel in the Known Planes of Existence." The section continues onto page 58, but, even so, it's relatively brief, occupying only five paragraphs in total. Nevertheless, it's Gary Gygax's lengthiest discussion of this topic in the DMG and is thus worthy of some attention.

He begins:

The Known Planes of Existence, as depicted in APPENDIX IV of the PLAYERS HANDBOOK, offer nearly endless possibilities for AD&D play, although some of these new realms will no longer be fantasy as found in swords & sorcery or myth but verge on that of science fiction, horror, or just about anything else desired.

Gygax says something here I'd like to comment upon. Significantly, I think, he notes that the Planes "offer nearly endless possibilities for AD&D play." Over the course of his time overseeing AD&D, he regularly said similar things, often adding that he saw the Planes as the next logical step in the progression of a campaign beyond domain-level play. Yet – much like domain-level play, actually – Gygaxian AD&D provided almost no real guidance on how to run adventures in these otherworldly realms. Nearly everything written about the Planes in 1e was penned by someone else, starting with 1980's Queen of the Demonweb Pits, the first AD&D adventure set beyond the Prime Material Plane.  

Now, I understand the historical reasons why Gygax likely did not do so. The demands of running TSR during the height of the D&D fad, not to mention his later sojourn to California, no doubt distracted him. Even so, I can't help but feel that if, as he repeatedly said, he considered the Planes to be the locales of D&D's ultimate adventures, he should have prioritized discussion of the matter. It's especially puzzling that he didn't given that we know that he refereed adventures of this sort in his own Greyhawk campaign. It's a pity we don't know more about them, as they'd probably have given us some insight into his view of high-level campaigns and scenarios.

The known planes are a part of the "multiverse". In the Prime Material Plane are countless suns, planets, galaxies, universes. So too there are endless parallel worlds. What then of the Outer Planes? Certainly, they can be differently populated if not substantially different in form.

As a younger person, I found it quite fascinating the Prime Material Plane, as conceived by Gygax, is so vast in scope. If it is so then surely the Outer Planes are similarly vast.

Spells, magic devices, artifacts, and relics are known ways to travel to the planes. You can add machines or creatures which will also allow such travel. As far as the universe around your campaign world goes, who is to say that it is not possible to mount a roc and fly to the moon(s)? or perhaps to another planet? Again, are the stars actually suns at a distance? or are they the tiny lights of some vast dome? The hows and wherefores are yours to handle, but more important is what is on the other end of the route?

Re-reading this paragraph still inspires wonder in me. The idea of mounting a giant bird and flying into space, for example, is delightful and in keeping with very expansive notion of fantasy that once reigned supreme, before the crabbed demands of marketing contracted it. 

For those of you who haven't really thought about it, the so-called planes are your ticket to creativity, and I mean that with a capital C! Everything can be absolutely different, save for those common denominators necessary to the existence of the player characters coming to the plane. Movement and scale can be different; so can combat and morale. Creatures can have more or different attributes. As long as the player characters can somehow relate to it all, then it will work.

Have we ever seen a conception of the planes like this in any version of Dungeons & Dragons? If so, I cannot recall it. For example, Roger E. Moore's article on the Astral Plane, which appeared in the pages of Dragon, could have and indeed should have been a step in this direction, but instead it was interminably dull, saved only by the accompanying adventure, Fedifensor by Robert Allen, which takes some advantage of the weird "geography" of the place. It's a pity, because, as Gygax rightly notes, the planes are indeed the referee's ticket to creativity.

This is not to say that you are expected to actually make each and every plane a totally new experience – an impossibly tall order. It does mean that you can put your imagination to work on devising a single extraordinary plane. For the rest, simply use AD&D with minor quirks, petty differences, and so forth. 

While I am sympathetic to Gygax's larger point, I nevertheless feel that he did referees a disservice by not exhorting them to greater heights of creativity and providing examples of how he did this in his own campaign. I can't help but imagine that the subsequent history not just of D&D but of the pop cultural fantasy descended from or influenced by it might have been different if he had – a less earthbound and more fantastical "vanilla" fantasy perhaps!

If your players wish to spend most of their time visiting other planes (and this could come to pass after a year or more of play) then you will be hard pressed unless you rely upon other game systems to fill the gaps. Herein I have recommended that BOOT HILL and GAMMA WORLD be used in campaigns. There is also METAMORPHOSIS ALPHA, TRACTICS, and all sorts of other offerings which can be converted to man-to-man role-playing scenarios. While as of this particular writing there are no commercially available "other planes" modules, I am certain that there will be soon – it is simply too big an opportunity to pass up, and the need is great.

Would that there had been more such modules! Regardless, I do find Gygax's suggestions regarding to use other RPG rules compelling, as they go some way toward demonstrating just how different another plane might be. Instead, most commercially available treatments of the planes have reduced them to, say, modifying how magic spells work rather than something much more ambitious and genuinely wondrous.

Astral and ethereal travel are not difficult, as the systems for encounters and the chance for the hazards of the psychic wind and ether cyclone are but brief sections of APPENDIX C: RANDOM MONSTERS ENCOUNTERS, easily and quickly handled. Other forms of travel, the risks and hazards thereof, you must handle as you see fit. For instance, suppose that you decide that there is a breathable atmosphere that extends from the earth to the moon, and that any winged steed capable of flying fast and far can carry its rider to that orb. Furthermore, once beyond the normal limits of earth's atmosphere, gravity and resistance are such that speed increases dramatically, and the whole journey will take but a few days. You must then decide what will be encountered during the course of the trip – perhaps a few new creatures in addition to the standard ones which you deem likely to be between earth and moon. 

That's exactly what I'd have liked to see more of!

Then comes what conditions will be like upon Luna, and what will be found there, why, and so on. Perhaps here is where you place the gateways to yet other worlds. In short, you devise the whole schema just as you did the campaign, beginning from the dungeon and environs outward into the broad world – in this case the universe, and then the multiverse. 

This is excellent. I only wish he had teased this out just a little bit more – not to mention produced a fuller example of such a setting.

You need do no more than your participants desire, however. If your players are quite satisfied with the normal campaign setting, with occasional side trips to the Layers of the Abyss or whatever, then there is no need to do more than make sketchy plans for the eventuality that their interests will expand. In short, the planes are there to offer whatever is needed in the campaign. Use them as you will. 

I am perhaps greedy (and ungrateful) in wanting a much longer section devoted to this and related topics from the pen of Gygax. It is clear he had ideas for the planes that he was prevented from ever publishing and I would very much like to have seen what he had in mind. If this small section of the Dungeon Masters Guide is any indication, I think his conceptions of the planes would have been quite inspiring and very different from what other authors would produce later.

Breaking Free

When I was a younger person, Dave Trampier's Dragon magazine comic, Wormy, regularly confused me. This was partly a consequence of the fact that, by the time I first encountered it, there have been more than fifty previous installments. Another source of my confusion were the multiple narratives, not just with different groups of characters, but also with different settings. I can't quite recall how long it took me to understand that Wormy and his cylcops pal, Ace, were giants and, therefore, much bigger than, say, the ogres or trolls – or indeed the wizard Grimorly and Solomoriah.

Speaking of which: I was always most fond of the strips that featured the wizard and the shadow cat. Grimorly was single-minded in pursuit of his goals and compellingly sinister. He was also the primary window through which readers got to learn about the nature of magic in the world of Wormy. Or should I say worlds? Throughout the comic's run, there were hints from time to time of a bigger, more cosmic picture, one that was never fully explored. 

An example of this can be seen in issue #70 of Dragon (February 1983), when Solomoriah, in order to escape from a battle with Wormy, breaks through the skin of reality into a weird, otherworldly dimension filled with floating spheres. The unstated implication is that each of these spheres is another world, but Trampier never elaborated upon this. There are other strips that touch on these topics and I loved them all, because they presented, albeit in a highly mysterious fashion, a view of other dimensions/worlds/planes that continues to appeal to me to this day.

Gygax's Inner Planes

I've commented before that, while I'm no fan of Unearthed Arcana as eventually published, I was conversely a big fan of much of the material Gygax was creating in preparation for his never-written second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. This material appeared in the pages of Dragon over the course of several years, presenting new classes (like the barbarian, cavalier, and thief-acrobat), weapons and armor, spells, and monsters, along with expanded conceptions of other aspects of the game. At the time, I liked these articles simply because they provided me with more stuff to use in my AD&D campaign (and use them I did). Now, though, what I like about them is the way they seem to represent a maturing of Gygax's fantasy conceptions, the fruit of years of thought and play, not to mention the need for AD&D to find new frontiers of adventure.

His article, "The Inner Planes," which appeared in issue #73 of Dragon (May 1983), demonstrates this maturation process quite clearly, I think. In it, Gygax offers "a new way to look at the AD&D world." This new way was necessary because, as the game's cosmology evolved, there was a need to reconcile new conceptions to earlier presentations. The para-elemental planes, for example, arose out of wondering about what happens at the point where two elemental planes met. Gygax obviously liked the idea, but soon realized that the thought process that led to them was incomplete. After all, there were other Inner Planes, like the Positive and Negative Material Planes, the Ethereal Plane, and the Plane of Shadow (the latter itself a recent addition to the cosmology). How did they interact with the Elemental Planes and what was the effect of all this interaction?

The result is a cubic representation of the Inner Planes, as depicted in this cut-out included on page 13 of this issue:

"What a mess!" you might reasonably say and it is a mess – an ugly, convoluted, and probably unnecessary one at that, but I love it all the same. There are a couple of things I like about this, starting with the fact that it's clearly an attempt by Gygax to think about AD&D's cosmology in rational way. If para-elemental planes arise due to the meeting of two elemental planes, what happens when an elemental plane meets the Positive or Negative Material Plane? What about a para-elemental plane? The result is baroque, almost to the point of absurdity, but it makes sense. One might argue that this is little different than debating how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and I'm somewhat sympathetic to that point of view. At the same time, given what Gygax had already established about the game's metaphysics and the interactions of those metaphysical forces, this oddly colored cube is a natural, even inevitable, evolution of it all.

That's the second thing I like about this new presentation of the Inner Planes: it's evolutionary. What I mean by that is that it demonstrates that AD&D and the fantasy world it presented was growing and changing, not in a way that, strictly speaking, repudiated anything about its earlier self but rather in a way that added to and expanded upon what had come before. None of this was needed by players or referees solely interested in dungeon crawls or wilderness exploration or all the usual activities of fantasy roleplaying. However, players and referees interested in going beyond that would find it invaluable. Gygax was taking a lot more interest in the other planes of existence, seeing them as the next logical step in exploring the possibilities implied by AD&D's setting. To do that properly, he'd need to think about them more carefully, teasing out the implications and taking stock of all they could offer. Whether one likes the direction he was headed or not, I hope one can nevertheless appreciate the effort.

Retrospective: Manual of the Planes

One of my favorite parts of the AD&D Players Handbook has always been Appendix IV: The Known Planes of Existence. Though it provides very little information – it's mostly just a listing of the twenty-five inner and outer planes – I spent untold hours reading and re-reading it as a young person, not to mention staring with awe at Figure 1, which offered a visual representation of the interrelations of all these weird places. To say I was "enraptured" might be a bit strong, but there's no question that Gary Gygax's glorious-mad vision, which married AD&D's alignment system to a cosmology straight out of de Camp and Pratt. Heady stuff to an eleven year-old!

As the years wore on, AD&D's planes acquired a little more solidity, starting with 1980's Queen of the Demonweb Pits, which gave us a glimpse into what a layer of the Abyss might be like (answer: a lot weirder than I expected it would be). Then came Roger E. Moore's magisterial article on the Astral Plane in Dragon #67 (November 1982), followed by an equally impressive one about Gladsheim in issue #90 (October 1984) a couple of years later. In between these, Gygax got in on the act, penning an article in issue #73 (May 1983) that tackled the Inner Planes, including the previously-unknown quasi-elemental planes (and came with a nifty multi-colored cut-out cube intended to represent the relationships between them). And who can forget Ed Greenwood's two-part treatement of the Nine Hells in issues #75 (July 1983) and #76 (August 1983)?

I gobbled up each of these expansions of Gygax's original scheme from the PHB – and more! – and frankly longed for a definitive treatment of these mysterious otherworldly realms. My wish was finally granted in 1987, when Jeff Grubb's Manual of the Planes first appeared. Unsurprisingly, I bought it as soon as I was able and devoured its contents immediately. This book was exactly what I had wanted, collecting together all the details scattered across multiple books, modules, and articles and adding to them, in order to create a more complete picture of the cosmos of AD&D. 

What I particularly liked was the way that Grubb does his best to make each plane unique, particularly with regard to way that magic works. This is something that Queen of the Demonweb Pits did first and that Moore picked up and developed further in his articles. Yes, it was a little frustrating at times to have to consult a list every time someone cast a spell to see if its effects were in any way changed, but the sense that "we're not in Kansas anymore" gained through its use more than made up for the extra effort, or so I thought. The planes were, from the beginning, intended as stomping grounds only for experienced characters – and players – so it only made sense that the very rules of the game might be changed there.

That said, most of the planar descriptions are short, singling out only a few key locales and only briefly touching on their inhabitants. I know people who were disappointed by this, hoping that the book would provide exhaustive information on each of the planes. Even I, who liked the book a great deal, half-expected that there'd be, if not a map, something akin to one that gave a better sense of how all the various planar landmarks related to one another. Despite that, I was fine with the relatively light level of detail, because it left plenty to the individual referee's imagination. If I had a serious criticism of the book, it's how few new monsters were included in the book, something I would have expected, especially after the wondrous details the Monster Manual II provided us about the inhabitants of the lower planes. I suspect the limits of the 128-page limit are responsible for this, but I was disappointed nonetheless.

Ultimately, I judge the Manual of the Planes a success, one of the better books of post-Gygaxian AD&D and one with a fairly long reach. Many of its planar conceptions were taken up by later authors and expanded upon, especially once the Planescape setting appeared in 1994. Unlike Planescape, which opted for its own rather idiosyncratic tone and style, Manual of the Planes is still broadly within the framework established by Gygax in the 1970s, which might explain my continued fondness for it. No book is perfect, of course, but I still think a pretty good one.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Nine Hells, Part I"

And so we come, once again, to an excellent article written by Ed Greenwood -- "The Nine Hells, Part I," which appeared in issue #75 (July 1983) of Dragon. In retrospect, it's easy to see why Greenwood would enjoy such success; he was not only prolific but also imaginative. Plus, his articles were memorable. Even now, nearly three decades later, I clearly remember the first time I read this issue of Dragon, filled as it was with information about the lower planes, thanks to both Gary Gygax's extensive preview of new devils from the upcoming Monster Manual II and the first part of Ed Greenwood's tour of the first five levels AD&D's version of Hell. I was absolutely blown away by what I read, much to the chagrin of my players at the time, several of whom found themselves on unexpected visits to the domains of one or more arch-devils.

Like Roger E. Moore's "The Astral Plane," "The Nine Hells, Part I" is a work of remarkable scholarship, mining the entirety of the AD&D corpus available at the time for hints as to what the planes of Hell might be like. Also like "The Astral Plane," this article wasn't content to simply regurgitate what we already knew. Rather, it expanded on that information in clever and sometimes surprising ways, painting a picture of the Nine Hells that was both true to its gaming source material but also evocative of other works of fantasy and myth. Greenwood doesn't present his Nine Hells as canonical for anything other than his own Forgotten Realms campaign, but it wasn't long before it received Gygax's blessing, which gave it a status it enjoyed until comparatively recently, where books as recent as 2006's Fiendish Codex II: Tyrants of the Nine Hells continued to make use of ideas laid down in 1983. That's a degree of influence that few articles (or authors) can match.

In addition to giving names to each of the Nine Hells and discussing their locales and points of interest, Greenwood also devotes a fair bit of space to their inhabitants, in particular unique devils. Prior to this issue of Dragon, the arch-devils were the only unique devils described in AD&D. Now, both Gygax and Greenwood have provided a coterie of such personalities, which, as a referee, I found a terrific boon. Unique devils gave me the opportunity to pit the PCs against powerful devils that weren't rulers of entire planes. This not only gave the PCs a fighting chance to defeat them but, in the event that the PCs did defeat them, the multiverse wouldn't resound with their victory the way it might if they bested Dispater or Geryon. Greenwood also found a way to work Astaroth from "The Politics of Hell" (from issue #28) into his depiction of the Nine Hells, which I know endeared him to many older gamers of my acquaintance who adored Alex von Thorn's article from way back when.

"The Nine Hells, Part I" (and its sequel, which I may well wind up discussing next time) are in a rare class of Dragon article: ones I actually used. Ever since I started playing AD&D, I desperately wanted to run adventures in the Outer Planes, but I rarely did, in large part because the game gave so little information on them. That's why articles like this and "The Astral Plane" were so useful and inspiring to me. And, unlike "The Astral Plane," Greenwood's Nine Hells articles were remarkably concrete, describing people and places one could encounter in addition to providing rules for how magic worked differently in this plane of ultimate Lawful Evil. I liked that a lot; I still do.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Astral Plane"

A Dragon article written by Roger E. Moore and with an introduction by E. Gary Gygax, where he states that "it is about as 'official' as is possible at this time?" For my 13 year-old self, this was as good as an article could get. Appearing in issue #67 (November 1982), "The Astral Plane" was a massive effort on the part of Moore to provide comprehensive rules for adventuring on the Astral Plane. It included discussions of astral encounters, astral travel, the Psychic Wind, movement, combat, and alterations to spells and magic items. There was also an accompanying adventure called "Fedifensor" (written by Allen Rogers) intended to be used in conjunction with Moore's rules. Taken together, it was very impressive package that solidified my sense that, aside from Gary Gygax, Roger E. Moore was one of a handful of Dragon writers whose stuff I could safely assume would be good.

We didn't do a lot of plane hopping in my old AD&D campaigns. I do recall a few visits to the Nine Hells and the Abyss and I suspect the characters did so by means of the Astral Plane on at least one occasion, but, if so, these trips weren't particularly memorable. Ultimately, that's the main problem with "The Astral Plane" -- even with all the clever rules modifications that Moore came up with, the place is still deadly dull. That's not Moore's fault, because he was trying to work within the parameters laid down by AD&D up till that point and those parameters paint a rather uninspiring picture. Sure, the Githyanki hang out on the Astral Plane, but, other than that, what else makes this place cool? Why would anyone want to go there for any length of time? "The Astral Plane" doesn't answer that question and nothing in the AD&D books at the time provided a better answer.

That said, I did like the fact that Moore postulates that other planes will operate according to different laws than those of the Prime Material. That's something I strong advocate and think is essential to the feeling of "We're not in Kansas anymore" other planes should evoke. I also think, as was true in Queen of the Demonweb Pits, that "The Astral Plane" goes overboard in the level of specificity about how character abilities, spells, and magic items operate differently, but that's a criticism of implementation not of concept. So, in retrospect, I still like this article a great deal, even if I wouldn't use it as written in any game I am running now. It's still a great idea mine and a useful foundation for an approach to handling weird otherworlds in your D&D campaign.

P is for Planes of Existence

No one except sages speaks of "planes of existence," but few deny that there are "worlds," "realms," or "spaces" beyond the material world. The nature and number of these other worlds is, as with so many things, debated by pedants, but the most commonly acknowledge planes of existence are the following:

• The four Elemental Planes: These realms are completely inhospitable to non-elemental life without the aid of powerful magic, which is why so little is known about them. Nevertheless, magicians and druids alike attest to their existence, as do powerful elemental beings summoned from them.
• The Astral Plane: This space exists between the material and other worlds, such as Areon and Kythirea. Suffused with ether, it can be traversed either by magic or by means of flying vessels, though the craft of constructing them is now rare. The Astral Plane is also home to numerous creatures, both malevolent and benign.
• The Ethereal Plane: Also called the Dreamlands or the Ghostlands, the Ethereal Plane exists between the spaces of material things and is accessible through magic. Some mystics claim that the Ethereal Plane is also accessible in sleep, while others, whose theological opinions are decidedly heterodox, state that the spirits of the dead are somehow "trapped" within the Ethereal Plane. There may be creatures native to this plane, but evidence of their existence is scanty.
• The Abyss: Also called the Great Void, the Abyss is said to exist outside -- outside where depends on the cosmological model one accepts for the cosmos. Regardless, the Abyss is the abode of demons and, as such, is wholly inimical to Man. Naturally occurring portals to the Abyss are a common source of the Chaotic radiation that is slowly corrupting the material world and its inhabitants.

In addition, many of the gods are said to have extra-planar realms that serve as their abodes and the abodes of the honored dead who serve them in the afterlife.

Ditko Draws the Planes

I know it's fashionable these days to express undying love for Jack Kirby and rightly so, as he was brilliant. But, to the extent that I have a favorite comic book illustrator from the Silver Age of Comics, I must throw my lot in with Steve Ditko, whose work on Dr. Strange -- one of the few comics I ever read when I was younger -- is nothing short of amazing, as this piece from Strange Tales #138 (November 1965) shows:

In thinking about new ways to conceive of the planes in D&D, I find myself ever more drawn to Ditko's illustrations of Dr. Strange's forays into mystical landscapes like this one. Given that it's already well established that early D&D illustrations were based on panels from comics featuring the Sorcerer Supreme, it somehow feels right to borrow ideas from Ditko in imagining otherworldly realms, at least to me. When the time comes for Brother Candor and the other Fortune's Fools to journey into the planes, I know what I'll be using as inspiration.

Planes as Planets

Having spent more time thinking about "outer space" in my Dwimmermount campaign, I've made a few tentative decisions on how I'm going to handle things. Chief among my decisions is to re-imagine most of "the planes" in D&D as planets elsewhere in the universe rather than as universes in their own right. In early D&D, planes are nebulous things and the term seems to be shorthand for "another world," without any codified notion of what does and does not constitute a plane. Generally, if it's somewhere other than the world in which the campaign is set, it's a plane. There are a few canonical exceptions to this -- such as Mars -- but, by and large, the term "plane" is used very loosely to describe somewhere else.

Much as I love AD&D's "Great Wheel" cosmology, its conception of the planes isn't one I want to import into Dwimmermount. I really like the esthetics of "other worlds" being, literally, other worlds. I've already established that, in the past, there was much greater communication and travel between the campaign world and Areon and Kythirea and portals to those places still exist -- and operate -- in ancient ruins and the like. Similarly, certain high level spells allow easy transit between worlds, but such magic is rare and little understood nowadays. In this set-up, summoning "extraplanar" beings like elementals is in fact summoning beings from another planet. Again, I like the esthetics of this, because it helps me to shake off the residue of other planar cosmologies by re-imagining extraplanar entities as "aliens" in the pulp sense of the term.

I think the planes-as-planets approach is useful because it doesn't (to me anyway) make the planes feel so abstract. One of the problems I've always had with AD&D's planes is that they were too closely tied to alignments and the gods. Now, there's nothing wrong with that and I think much can be done with that notion. But if what one has in mind is something more in line with The Dying Earth, for example, it's much easier to conceive of all these other worlds as, literally, other worlds. That makes it simpler for me to imagine them and (I hope) simpler for the players to do the same. As a younger person, I was always more intrigued by what AD&D called "Alternate Prime Material Planes" and, as a fan of the Harold Shea stories, I want to include more of that kind of thing in my campaign.

Ideas are still percolating but some of them are definitely starting to solidify.

Godlings

Shortly before Christmas, I posted an image from an old issue of The Strategic Review that associated the then-new fivefold alignment system with an early version of the planar arrangement canonized in the AD&D Players Handbook. One of the most interesting features of that image was the inclusion of the names of four different types of beings, each one connected to one of the "corners" of the alignment/planar schema: "saint" in the Lawful Good corner, "devil" in the Lawful Evil corner, "demon" in the Chaotic Evil corner, and "godling" in the Chaotic Good corner.

Devils and demons are very well established in D&D lore, saints less so, but they have been mentioned from time to time (there was even an article in Dragon that dealt with the topic in greater detail). Godlings, on the other hand, are mostly a mystery. From context, I suspect Gygax's original intention was that they were immortal-human hybrids -- demigods in the usual use of the term -- of the sort encountered regularly in Greek mythology. Herakles would be an example of a godling on this understanding.

Obviously, D&D never really picked up on this idea (or, if it did, I missed it), so I've been pondering it a bit in the context of my own idiosyncratic take on alignment. As I have it, the gods are from Elsewhere and define Law by their ordering of Nature to serve their own ends. Saints are beings raised up in their service, while devils are former servants who have fallen. Demons are a "byproduct" of the gods' ordering of Nature -- the cosmic equivalent of radioactive waste given malevolent intelligence. Great believer in symmetry that I am, the question arises: what of those byproducts that aren't malevolent? Is such a thing possible?

I say yes and so godlings are a kind of non-evil "demon." That is, they're Chaotically-aligned supernatural beings created as an unintended consequence of the gods' meddling with Nature. This is the origin for all the "little gods" I drop into my campaign, as well as oddities like the Horse Lords the steppe nomads accept as their aristocracy or the Amazons that threaten the lands of civilized men. Godlings are thus a catch-all for any kind of aberrations, freaks, and weirdos that don't have any other obvious origin or connection in the world. Being Chaotic, they are generally destructive and unpredictable, but they needn't be malicious, since demons already have that niche covered. Of course, godlings can be quite unpleasant and many of them are, but it's more because of their whimsical self-absorption than malice.

(This makes me wonder if perhaps the Eld are godlings in origin, who have become more demon-like as time has gone on. Hmmm.)

Retrospective: Queen of the Demonweb Pits

So far as I know, 1980's Queen of the Demonweb Pits is artist David C. Sutherland III's only published example of game/adventure design. It's also (again, so far as I know) the first official example of planar adventuring for Dungeons & Dragons. Both these facts are important when looking back on this module and its impact.

Dave Sutherland is known primarily for his illustrations, particularly during late OD&D and early AD&D. His artwork laid the foundation for many of the artists who followed by establishing the look of iconic monsters, such as demons, orcs, and mind flayers. As any reader of this blog knows by now, I am huge fan of Sutherland and, while I readily concede the technical flaws in a lot of his pieces, I also see a lot of joyful exuberance in them that contrasts powerfully with the more sterile perfection of later D&D art.

But apparently Sutherland had ambitions outside of illustration. He certainly wasn't the first artist hoping to try his hand at writing and, unlike many, Gary Gygax gave Sutherland a chance. (It's worth noting that Dave Trampier also wished to break into game design, writing a game of monster battles called Titan, eventually published by Avalon Hill after TSR expressed no interest in it) According to the preface to this module, Gygax had trouble coming up with a proper capstone to the Giants-Drow series of modules. All his ideas were too similar to ones he was considering for the Temple of Elemental Evil, so he rejected them. After Dave Sutherland showed him a twisting, intertwined dungeon he'd created based on the design of a placemat, Gygax suggested he write the module, using the dungeon as the home plane of Lolth, demon queen of spiders.

The end result was a very uneven module, equal parts gold and dross. The central premise of the module -- confronting Lolth on her home plane -- remains a powerful and attractive one. Likewise, the design of the Demonweb itself is extraordinarily clever. It is certainly one of the more unusual dungeon designs I encountered back in the day and, even now, I think it holds up pretty well. This is a good case for allowing individuals with artistic sensibilities to draw maps in my opinion, because the Demonweb seems like an idea that only an artist would conceive.

The module's encounters are quite a diverse lot, which I think is a good thing, overall. Oddly, very few of them seem to include either demons or drow, which you would expect to find on the Abyssal plane that's home to the demonic ruler of the dark elves. Instead, you get lots of chaotic and evil creatures -- dragons, trolls, lycanthropes, undead -- that don't quite "fit" with the assumed theme of the place. I remember as a kid finding the inhabitants of the Demonweb to be not quite what I was expecting, so I replaced many of them with demons and horrid spider-things and similar nasty stuff. Somehow, I didn't find a black dragon to be appropriately "Lolth-y," if you know what I mean.

Of course, there's something to be said for defying expectations. I've always been a fan of "pulling back the curtain" to show that the world as seen through the eyes of adventurers isn't the whole story. So, for example, Lolth's having a giant, steam-powered, mechanical spider ship never bothered me the way it bothered many people. To me, it's exactly the kind of bizarre turn that seems right when dealing with otherplanar beings, even demons (perhaps especially demons). There shouldn't be anything ordinary or predictable about their natures or behaviors. Similarly, I really liked the inclusion of gateways to other Prime Material Planes, including one cribbed from Poul Anderson's Three Hearts and Three Lions. A key to portraying planar travel effectively is grandeur -- the sense that one's home world is just a tiny speck floating on a giant ocean and you've only just begun to plumb its unknown depths. Module Q1 actually does a decent job on this score and so set future planar adventures down the right path.

On the other hand, I'm not a huge fan of the module's many pages describing how differently spells and magic items operate in the Demonweb. This smacks of overkill to me. Don't misunderstand me: I see the logic behind it and I endorse it in principle. I simply found the specific implementation of it in Q1 to be more persnickety and detailed than suited me. Nothing slows down play than having to fumble through a module to see how a certain spell or item functions in the chaos of an Abyssal layer. Something along the lines of generalized guidelines would have served me better back in the day; goodness knows that's what I would do if I ran the module now.

One of the most praiseworthy things about Queen of the Demonweb Pits is that it's open-ended, allowing the referee to use it however he wishes. The presumption is that the PCs intend to confront -- and slay -- Lolth on her home plane, but the module supports more than just that one approach. It could be used as a springboard for plane-hopping to other layers of the Abyss, alternate Prime Material Planes, and similar dimensional jaunts. That alone endears it to me. I also appreciate that, while the battles will be unforgiving, it is possible to destroy Lolth forever. I find that refreshing, even if I know that the likelihood of its ever happening to be slim. I rather strongly favor the possibility of slaying demons, devils, even gods, in D&D so long as doing so represents a genuine challenge to the players' skill. Why include stats for them at all if they can't be defeated?

Q1 catches a lot more flak than it deserves, simply because it wasn't written by Gygax. Sutherland probably wasn't the greatest adventure designer, but he's far from the worst and, as I've shown, there's a lot to like here. I see it as a diamond in the rough rather than a jewel in the crown of the Golden Age. Sometimes, I prefer things a little rough around the edges; it gives me an excuse to roll up my sleeves and make it shine.

The OD&D Planes

Serendipity seems to strike a lot in the blogging world, with lots of people riffing off the same basic themes and making many similar posts. Over at Demons & Dragons, Jarl Frå Oslo posted an image I'd just seen yesterday as I was re-reading early issues of The Strategic Review. It's from an article by Gary Gygax in issue 6 called "The Meaning of Law and Chaos in Dungeons & Dragons and their Relationships to Good and Evil." It's a very fascinating article, because it's a glimpse into Gary's mind as he's expanding the threefold alignment structure of OD&D into the fivefold structure we see in Holmes.

Even more interesting, from a historical point of view if no other, is the aforementioned image, which doubles as an alignment graph and a map of the planes as Gary then conceived of them.

Notice the names: Heaven (not "Seven Heavens"), Paradise (not "Twin Paradises"), Elysium, Limbo, the Abyss, Hades, Hell (not "Nine Hells"), and Nirvana. There is also no plane associated with Neutrality, which is telling, I think. Notice too the beings listed as exemplars of the four cardinal alignments: Saint, Godling, Demon, and Devil. (What exactly a "godling" is I do not know, but I have some guesses)

I hope I'm not alone in thinking that this simplified structure, reminiscent of the more convoluted version we get in AD&D, is just keen. Like many aspects of OD&D + Supplements, I find that the end result is a kind of proto-AD&D or "AD&D Lite," and that's exactly the vibe I want in my games. In looking at this illustration, I was reminded of the planar structure Paizo adopted for its Golarion setting, which is eerily similar. Knowing Erik Mona's love for the old school, I'd not be the least bit surprised if this article was an inspiration when he and his crew were designing Golarion, but I have no proof of that. Even if it wasn't, I'm tickled to see some commonality between a 30 year-old article and contemporary game design. That doesn't happen everyday, alas.