Retrospective: Call of Cthulhu

"Didn't James already do a Retrospective on Call of Cthulhu?" After four hundred posts in this series – this one is, in fact, the four hundredth – you would understandably think that, but it's not true. As I've discovered in the process of choosing the contents of my Grognardia anthologies, I didn't start writing Retrospective posts until September 17, 2008 and, even then, those posts didn't become consistent, weekly features of the blog for a while longer. 

Now, I did write a post – my first one on the subject – about Call of Cthulhu on October 31, 2008 that definitely has something of a Retrospective vibe about it. Indeed, I regularly link to that post as a kind of substitute for the fact that, even after all these years, I'd still never written a Retrospective on CoC, despite my immense affection for the game, which I consider among the greatest and most influential games and game designs in the history of the hobby.

Since I'm now nearly halfway through my The Shadow over August series honoring the memory of H.P. Lovecraft, I thought now might be the perfect time to rectify this very old oversight on my part. However, since my original post from 2008, "A Game for Grown-Ups," already covers much of the ground I'd usually cover in a Retrospective post, I've decided that this one will instead focus on a different aspect of Call of Cthulhu, namely, its place in the history of the hobby.

When the game first appeared in 1981, it was unlike anything that had come before it. Published by Chaosium and designed by Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, it was the first fully realized horror role-playing game. There had, of course, been fantasy games with horrific elements before it. Dungeons & Dragons, for instance, had more than its share of shambling undead and sanity-blasting monsters, but Call of Cthulhu was the first to make horror not merely an atmospheric seasoning but the whole meal. In doing so, it did more than simply introduce a new genre to the RPG marketplace; it reframed what a role-playing game could be.

The significance of being first is hard to overstate. By 1981, science fiction, post-apocalypse, superheroes, and espionage each had their own dedicated RPGs, often more than one. Horror, however, remained conspicuously absent, perhaps because many assumed its central emotion, fear, couldn’t be easily conjured at the table. Petersen’s ingenious solution was not to frighten the players directly, but to have them role-play fear. Dread emerged from the slow unravelling of an investigator’s mind, the accumulation of forbidden knowledge, and the grim realization that the forces at work could never be overcome in the usual, heroic way.

This approach has since become the template for almost all horror games, even when they are self-consciously attempting to distance themselves from it. Just Alfred North Whitehead famously called Western philosophy a series of footnotes to Plato, the same can be said of Call of Cthulhu's place in the realm of horror RPGs. The sanity mechanic, the emphasis on investigation over combat, and the focus on player knowledge versus character fragility all flowed from Petersen’s design choices in Call of Cthulhu. Nearly every horror RPG since has grappled with or responded to this foundation.

For Chaosium, Call of Cthulhu was similarly transformative. Before 1981, the company was best known for RuneQuest and its Glorantha setting, along with Basic Role-Playing, the streamlined system that powered it. These were critical successes but niche compared to the behemoth that was TSR. Call of Cthulhu changed the equation, thanks to its much wider appeal. By the mid-1980s, Call of Cthulhu was outselling everything else Chaosium produced and it became the company’s flagship line for decades. In many respects, Call of Cthulhu was Chaosium in the public mind and arguably is still the game most closely associated with the company.

It’s telling that Chaosium survived rough patches in its history largely because Call of Cthulhu never went out of print. Where other RPGs waxed and waned in popularity, CoC had a steady, international audience. Indeed, its scenarios and campaigns became not just supplements but cultural touchstones in RPG history. Many are considered landmarks whose influence extends far beyond their original audience, much like Call of Cthulhu itself. Looking back, the game’s influence is visible everywhere. Here are just a few that occur to me:

Dungeons & Dragons modules before 1981 were largely site-based adventures. By contrast, CoC’s scenarios pioneered investigation-driven play, where clues, interviews, and research were central. This structure seeped back into other genres, shaping how adventures were written.

Though frequently imitated, few mechanics have been as thematically perfect as CoC’s sanity rules, which track not just the erosion of mental stability but the cost of knowing too much. It’s become almost impossible to design a horror RPG without addressing the question: what’s your version of this mechanic?

Translations of CoC played a huge role in spreading RPGs worldwide, especially in countries where Lovecraft’s stories already had a foothold. In France, Japan, and elsewhere, it rather than, say, Dungeons & Dragons was often the gateway RPG.

More than four decades later, Call of Cthulhu is not merely Chaosium’s flagship; it is "the Dungeons & Dragons of horror gaming." It has become the lingua franca of the genre, the common framework through which players, Keepers, and designers alike approach tales of the uncanny and the unknown. It remains the benchmark for how to adapt a literary source faithfully without becoming a prisoner to it, preserving the essence of Lovecraft’s cosmic dread while evolving into a style of play all its own.

Like D&D, it has been endlessly imitated, parodied, expanded upon, and reimagined, yet the original endures – still recognizably itself and still drawing new players into its orbit. For many, it is not simply a horror RPG; it is the horror RPG, the game against which all others are measured. As long as players gather to face ancient secrets and watch their fragile investigators descend into madness, Call of Cthulhu will remain the universal tongue of tabletop terror.

Retrospective: Prince Valiant: The Story Telling Game

When I was kid, I always looked forward to the Sunday edition of the local newspaper, because it had this enormous color comics section. Truly, there were dozens upon dozens of these strips – everything from Peanuts to Garfield to Hagar the Horrible and more. Also present were a number of "old" comics, like Mark Trail, Apartment 3-G, and Mary Worth, whose continued presence baffled me. Who read these comics? Certainly not I, nor any of my childhood friends. 

However, there was one "old" comic that I often did read: Prince Valiant. I did so partly because of the comic's subject matter, Prince Valiant was set, as its subtitle proclaimed, "in the days of King Arthur" and I had long been a devoted fan of Arthurian legendry. Furthermore, Prince Valiant was beautifully drawn and had a very – to me – strange presentation. There were no speech balloons or visual onomatopoeia, just lots of text arranged like storybook. 

I was never a consistent reader of Prince Valiant, but, when I did take the time to do so, I almost always enjoyed it. There was a sincerity to the comic that I appreciated as a youngster, as well as an infectious love of heroism and romance (in all senses of the term). I wouldn't say that Prince Valiant played a huge role in my subsequent fondness for tales of fantastic adventure, but there's no doubt that it played some role, hence why I took an interest in Greg Stafford's 1989 roleplaying game adaptation when it was released.

Stafford is probably best known as the man behind Glorantha, the setting of RuneQuest. For me, though, Pendragon will always be his magnum opus – and one of the few RPGs I consider "perfect." Consequently, when I eventually learned of the existence of this game, I was intensely interested. How would it differ from Pendragon? What specifically did it bring to the table that justified its existence as a separate game rather than, say, a supplement to Pendragon? These are questions whose answers I wouldn't learn for quite some time. 1989 was something of a tumultuous year for me; I was busy with other things, and it'd only be sometime in the mid-1990s that I would finally lay eyes upon Prince Valiant.

The most obvious way that Prince Valiant differs from Pendragon is revealed in its subtitle: "The Story-Telling Game." Now, some might immediately think that, in this instance, "storytelling" is simply a synonym for "roleplaying" and you'd be (mostly) right – sorta. The important thing to bear in mind is that Prince Valiant is intended as an introductory game for newcomers to this hobby of ours. Consequently, Stafford tries to use common sense words and concepts that aren't rooted in pre-1974 miniatures wargaming culture. Hence, he talks about "storytelling" rather than "roleplaying" and "episodes" rather than "adventures" or "scenarios" and so forth. The result is a game that's written in a simpler, less jargon-laden way than was typical of RPGs at the time (or even today).

At the same time, Stafford's use of the term "storytelling" isn't simply a matter of avoiding cant. Prince Valiant is, compared to most other similar games, intentionally very simple in its rules structure, so that players can focus on the cooperative building of a compelling narrative set in Hal Foster's Arthurian world. Additionally, the game provides the option of allowing even players to take over the story-telling role within an episode, setting a new scene or introducing a new character or challenge. The chief storyteller, which is to say, the referee in traditional RPGs, is encouraged not to ignore these player-inserted story elements but instead to run with them, using them as a way to introduce unexpected twists and turns within the larger unfolding narrative. 

The other clear way that Prince Valiant differs from Pendragon is its rules, which can fit on a single page. This makes them easy to learn and remember, as well as to use. Unlike more traditional RPGs with their assortment of funny-shaped dice, Stafford opted in Prince Valiant to use only coins. For any action where the result is not foregone, a number of coins are flipped, with heads representing successes. The more heads flipped, the better the success. In cases where a character competes against another character, such as combat, successes are compared, with the character achieving the most successes emerging victorious – simplicity itself! 

Last but certainly not least, Prince Valiant differs from Pendragon because of the pages upon pages of beautiful artwork derived from the comic. Not only does this give the game its own distinctive look, it also highlights its adventuresome, Saturday matinee serial tone in contrast to the heavier, occasionally darker tone of Pendragon and the myth cycles on which it drew. That's not to say Prince Valiant is unserious or "for kids," only that it's a fair bit "lighter" than its "big brother" and thus probably more suitable for younger and/or less experienced players. In that respect, it makes an excellent first RPG.

It's worth noting, too, that the bulk of Prince Valiant's 128-page rulebook is made up not of game mechanics but of advice and tools for players and storytellers alike. Stafford quite obviously distilled the lessons he learned from his many years of playing and refereeing roleplaying games, presenting them in a conversational, easy-to-understand way. Indeed, I've met many people over the years who've claimed that Prince Valiant's true value is not so much as a game in its own right, despite their affection for it, but as an introduction to roleplaying. True though this is, it's also undeniably an excellent game that I'd love to play some day.

That's right: I have never played Prince Valiant and am not sure I ever will. The copy I read years ago was owned by someone else and I've never found a used copy at a reasonable price. I recall that there was an updated or revised version published a few years ago. It doesn't appear to be available through the Chaosium website, alas. Mind you, I certainly don't lack for good RPGs to play; it'd just be great to give this classic one a whirl one day.

Retrospective: Ghostbusters

Roleplaying games based on officially licensed properties started appearing quite early in the history of the hobby. FGU's Flash Gordon & the Warriors of Mongo is the first that I can recall, unless you wish to count TSR's Warriors of Mars, which is, in my opinion, something of an edge case – and it wasn't officially licensed at any rate). Others soon followed, like Heritage's Star Trek (and FASA's too!), SPI's Dallas, Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and Stormbringer, ICE's Middle-earth Role Playing, and many, many more. 

I mention all of this because I think it's sometimes easy to forget, especially on the old school side of the hobby, that gamers have long been quite keen on playing around in fictional worlds originally created for mass media. Much as I valorize the inventive and often idiosyncratic settings unique to RPGs, I'm also a big fan of a couple of games that make use of licensed settings and think the hobby would be diminished without them. If nothing else, licensed roleplaying games can serve as a useful entrée to newcomers.

Though I suspect that Star Wars: The Roleplaying Game, released by West End Games in 1987, is the most well-known (and successful?) licensed RPG ever, at least some of its success depends on another West End RPG, released the year before: Ghostbusters. Subtitled, "A Frightfully Cheerful Roleplaying Game," Ghostbusters is an unexpectedly good game, boasting not just a good sense of humor, as you'd expect, but also a solid and easy to use set of rules. Looking at its designers – Sandy Petersen, Greg Stafford, and Lynn Willis – this should come as little surprise. What still surprises me, though, even after all these years, is that it was Ghostbusters that gave the world not just the core of the system later used to excellent effect in the aforementioned Star Wars RPG, but also gave it the now-ubiquitous dice pool method of resolving in-game actions.

Characters in Ghostbusters have four ability scores, called traits – Brains, Muscle, Moves, and Cool – that are each given a numerical rating representing the number of six-sided dice rolled when making use of that trait. Players can associate a talent with each trait. Talents are more or less skills, like brawl, convince, or parapsychology. When a character makes use of a talent, he gets an additional three dice to add to those already provided by his trait. Other things, like equipment, can add to the pool of dice a player rolls as well. The sum of any roll is then compared to a target number assigned by the referee (called the Ghostmaster), based on its difficulty, success equated with meeting or exceeding the assigned target number.

If you understood the foregoing description of Ghostbusters' game mechanics without any trouble, that's because they're now well-established and commonplace, but that wasn't the case in 1986, when the idea of dice pool was somewhat exotic, at least in the circles in which I moved. As I already mentioned, Star Wars borrowed and further developed this system, which is no surprise, given that the two games were both West End products. What's more remarkable, I think, is that games like Ars Magica, Vampire: The Masquerade (and its sequels), and Shadowrun all evince the direct or indirect influence of Ghostbusters, making its mechanics, along with those of Dungeons & Dragons and Basic Role-Playing, among the most enduring in the history of the hobby.

Ghostbusters included or popularized several other mechanical innovations, such as the use of "brownie points" with which a player could influence the result of dice rolls, potentially blunting some of their negative consequences. "Hero points" of this sort were nothing new by this point. However, Ghostbusters enabled a player to gain more brownie points for his character through good roleplaying and achieving his character's stated goals. I can't say for certain that nothing like this had ever been done before – I'm pretty sure it had been – but, at the time, I found it revelatory. At the opposite end of the scale, the game included the "ghost die," a special six-sider where the 6 was replaced with the Ghostbusters logo. The ghost die is used in every roll and any roll showing the logo indicates a negative consequence of some sort, even if the roll is otherwise successful. Again, it's old hat now; in 1986, though, this was genuinely innovative.

Another aspect of Ghostbusters that I think deserves special praise is its basic premise. Unlike some licensed RPGs, which assume the players will take on the roles of existing characters within the media property, Ghostbusters assumes the players will create their own Ghostbusters, who are franchisees of the original, New York-based Ghostbusters of the 1984 movie. The idea is that the player characters are the local Ghostbusters of their hometown and their adventures should reflect that fact. I think it's a great set-up and, even at the time, I felt that it was a good basis for making more Ghostbusters movies, with each one taking place in a new city with a new cast of characters. 

I really enjoyed playing Ghostbusters when it was first released and still look back fondly on it. Sadly, I no longer have my copy and trying to replace it is prohibitively expensive. It's a very underrated RPG for one that is so well designed, influential, and fun. I wish it were more widely known and appreciated today.

Retrospective: RuneQuest Companion

About a year after the publication of original Dungeons & Dragons, its first supplement appeared. Subtitled Greyhawk, Supplement I offered up a grab bag of "new characters, new abilities, more spells to use, a horde of new monsters, heaps of new magical treasure, and various additions to the suggestions and rules for adventuring above and below the ground," most of which were drawn from Gary Gygax's D&D campaign of the same name. Two more supplements of a similar sort followed (Blackmoor and Eldritch Wizardry), thereby establishing a pattern for the way rules additions and suggestions were published in the hobby.

Chaosium was particularly prolific in producing supplements of this sort, though, rather than calling them "supplements," they called them "companions." Companions were published to support most of their RPGs, from Call of Cthulhu to Stormbringer to Ringworld, among others. Each of these companions presented a selection of rules and setting additions, expansions, options, and corrections. I've always appreciated this approach, since it both obviates the need for a new edition and gave the referee the choice of whether or not to include any of the new material printed in its pages.

The RuneQuest Companion, first published in 1983, is a good example of what I mean. Over the course of 72 pages, the Companion presents nineteen articles by a wide variety of authors, each of which offers new insight into some aspect of RQ and its setting, Glorantha. As explained by Charlie Krank in his introduction to the book, the Companion was published in the wake of the cancelation of Wyrms Footnotesm the semi-regular 'zine that had previously provided RQ fans with more information about Glorantha and its history, cultures, and denizens. (It's interesting to note that Krank's explanation for the demise of Wyrms Footnotes is quite simple: "it costs too much money." As the publisher of a fanzine myself, I am deeply sympathetic with Krank's perspective.) The Companion, then, was intended to fill this particular gap, with the promise – unfulfilled, as it turned out, but then that's nothing new in the history of RuneQuest – of a new volume of the Companion "whenever we have accumulated 64–96 pages of top-notch articles."

The articles are quite varied. There's Sherman Kahn's "An Index to RuneQuest Cults," Alan LaVergne's solo adventure, "The Maze of Shaxry Oborok," and Greg Stafford's "Holy Country" (complete with a remarkable map). Meanwhile, Sandy Petersen presents his "Species Spotlight: Unicorns," which gives a unique Gloranthan spin on the legendary beasts and "More on Trolls," expanding on the information in Trollpak. There's also a fair bit of fiction (and poetry) set in Glorantha and few rules additions. What makes the Companion remarkable, though, is its diversity. Its pages aren't devoted to a single theme or topic. Instead, we're provided with articles and essays on many aspects of the game and its setting, with a particular emphasis on the latter. Indeed, looking back on it now, what really strikes me about the RuneQuest Companion is how few of its pages are devoted to new rules. Chaosium clearly understood the main draw of RQ was its setting of Glorantha. That's probably why I look on this book so favorably even now.

"Is It Fun?"

Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing is a remarkable little pamphlet. Only sixteen pages in length in the version I first encountered it, BRP isn't just a tightly-written little ruleset; it's also a collection of thoughtful musings about roleplaying as an activity and entertainment. Take, for example, this three paragraph section entitled "Is It Fun? – Cooperation and Competition," which starts off with some sentiments with which I heartily agree.

Gaming is social. If you want to use your imagination alone, you could read a book. But be warned: when a number of people get together cooperatively, they can form a communal fantasy far more interesting and imaginative than could any one person, and the joint effort results in an extremely satisfying experience for all involved.

This is very well said. The emphasis on gaming as a social activity is important, because a big part of why roleplaying works – or doesn't – in any given group comes down to its members' sociability. Just as important is the notion of "communal fantasy." A successful campaign is the result of no single person involved in it, not even the referee, but rather is the fruit of cooperation between everyone involved. As we'll see, though, writers Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis aren't advocating free-form anarchy. 

Players must work together. For instance, a party of adventurers will not survive against a batch of monsters of they are not willing to aid each other, heal each other, and guard each other. This is not to say that you cannot play a back-stabbing thief, only to suggest that if everyone plays that way, there will be no incentive to play together – there must be honor even among thieves, so far as gaming goes. And if all your characters are cut-throats, who will be interested in playing with you?

The matter of evil, untrustworthy, or disreputable characters is a difficult one and I don't know that there's a one-size-fits-all way to deal with it. In my House of Worms campaign, for example, all the characters are generally pulling in the same direction, united as they are by bonds of kindship. Instances of back-stabbing (broadly defined) are largely non-existent and that works for this particularly campaign. In other games I've refereed, on the other hand, there have been more examples of dubious behavior player characters and they made sense in context. 

There are also needs to be cooperation between players and the referee. Though the referee does mastermind the world and does set up and run the details, it's also true that the game remains a game for him as well, and that he likes to have fun playing too.

This is a topic on which I've written before: the referee as player. It makes me very happy to see the writers of Basic Role-Playing also saw it as a worthy topic. 

The player-characters should pit themselves against the world, not the referee. The referee should not be afraid to ask others for their opinions on game matters, and the players should not be afraid of debating rules questions or play opportunities with the referee.

This completely comports with my own experiences (and philosophy) as a referee.

Referee rulings should be final, though, and players must be willing to take losses if the referee is adamant in his thinking. Work out questions by discussion, not fiat, and players and referee should be willing to change their minds if necessary, and occasionally change the game somewhat to adjust to the situation at hand. 

To me, this is common sense. I particularly appreciate the fact that Stafford and Willis do not shy away from stating that "referee rulings should be final." In this, they're not very far off from Gary Gygax's comments in the Dungeon Masters Guide on related matters. 

Simple communication will build an enjoyable and understandable world to play in. The rewards of cooperation are great; hostility and resentment are fatal to play. Remember, the object of all this is to have fun.

This whole section in the BRP pamphlet is very important, but its final sentences quoted above are especially so. Sometimes, when I hear people talk about their experiences playing RPGs, I don't get the sense that they're having much fun doing so and I wonder why that is. If roleplaying games ceased to be fun for me, if all I ever did was complain about the games I'm playing or the people with whom I'm gaming, I would not hesitate to stop playing. 

In any case, I continue to be quite impressed by the original Basic Role-Playing pamphlet. Despite its short length, it contains a great deal of wisdom and is well worth reading if you've never done so. With luck, Chaosium might make it available once again.

Different Worlds: Issue #19

Issue #19 of Different Worlds (February 1982) is filled with tentacles, starting with its cover by Roland Brown. Inside, many of its articles are devoted to Chaosium's then-new horror roleplaying game, Call of Cthulhu, which of course pleases me, as it's one of my all-time favorite RPGs. 

The issue kicks off with two excellent side-by-side articles by Sandy Petersen and Lynn Willis, in which each of them discuss the process of creating Call of Cthulhu from their perspective. These are both excellent articles and I wish I could do them justice with a brief summary. In general, Petersen focuses on the design of the game's rules and setting, while Willis talks about the "nuts and bolts" of making the game as a physical product, though each touches on other aspects as well. I already knew some of what was presented in these pieces, such as the origins of the game, but there was much more I'd never heard before. Good stuff!

"Guns Against Cthulhu" by Dick Wagenet presents variant rules for handling firearms in Call of Cthulhu and other modern Basic Role-Playing games. "Underground Menace" meanwhile is a Call of Cthulhu scenario by Sandy Petersen, set in and around Lake Superior in northern Michigan. Following it is a single page of errata and "second thoughts" on the rules of Call of Cthulhu. Not specifically related to Call of Cthulhu but relating to the 1920s time period is "The Gang Leaders" by Glenn Rahman. It's a collection of biographies and game statistics for famous criminals like John Dillinger and Pretty Boy Floyd for use with FGU's Gangster! I enjoyed reading it, even though I've never played Gangster!, helped no doubt by the terrific contemporary photographs of the gangsters themselves.

"Safe Storage for Figures" by John T. Sapienza reviews several cases and storage containers intended to hold and protect miniature figures, complete with photos. "Thieves of Sparta" by B. Dennis Sustare presents guidelines for adapting Task Force's Heroes of Olympus to the setting of Thieves' World. The article is notable for the fact that Sustare is himself the designer of Heroes of Olympus. This month's reviews include Call of Cthulhu (very favorable), Adventure Class Ships, Volume 1 (for Traveller, also favorable), and Palace of the Silver Princess. The latter review is interesting in that the reviewer, Anders Swenson, comments on its conflation of "player" and "player character," a pet peeve of mine, which Swenson calls "the perennial FRP identity crisis." That said, his overview opinion of the module is positive.

There are also reviews of the notorious roleplaying game, Spawn of Fashan, other reviews of which I recall from my youth. Amusingly, the reviewer, Charles Dale Martin, spends the entirety of his review criticizing various aspects of the game, but still concludes "it may be still worth buying" on the strength of its referee's section. No similar charity is extended to Patrick Amory's review of Deities & Demigods. Amory lambastes it for its overall approach, saying it "contains monsters not religions." While I largely agree with that particular point, he is much harsher than I, concluding that it "is not of the slightest interest to anyone in the FRP market and should be avoided like leprosy." Ouch!

The issue ends with Gigi D'Arn's column. Most of this issue's gossip is filled with ephemera but a few rumors stand out. Among these are Richard Snider's hiring by Avalon Hill, Lawrence Schick's hiring by Coleco, the upcoming D&D video game for Intellivision, and GDW's cease-and-desist order filed against Edu-Ware for computer games illegally derived from Traveller. There's also talk of an upcoming RuneQuest supplement by Ken Kaufer called Dorastor. A product with a similar title would eventually appear, featuring some of Kaufer's work (along with many others), but it would not appear until more than a decade later during the brief RuneQuest Renaissance of the early 1990s masterminded by Ken Rolston.

Being a fan of Call of Cthulhu as I am, I enjoyed this issue a great deal. I hope I'll be similarly impressed with issue #20.

Different Worlds: Issue #17

Issue #18 of Different Worlds (December 1981) begins with an interesting editorial by Tadashi Ehara. He discusses the need for "careful consideration" in choosing a roleplaying game system if one intends for it to become "a lifetime hobby." Ehara seems to be suggesting that a person might – or even must – choose a single system and then devote oneself fully to it. For that reason, he advocates choosing a system that is "lasting and worthwhile," providing "learning experiences that we can use constructively in our daily lives." I don't disagree in general, though I do find it odd that he doesn't consider the possibility of long-term devotion to multiple systems rather than a single "ultimate set of rules." 

The first article is a RuneQuest solo scenario by Sandy Petersen entitled "Ware Hall." Set in Glorantha, it's presented as a series of short boxed texts found at the bottom of most pages of the issue. The scenario itself is nothing special but I was impressed with its presentation, which is quite clever. Ronald Mark Pehr's "Speed in Melee" is a set of variant rules for Dungeons & Dragons focused on an alternative approach to initiative. I find it difficult to judge articles like this, as I've never cared much about these matters, preferring simpler, if "unrealistic," systems rather than more complex ones.

Paul Montgomery Crabaugh's "For Sale" provides three new fighter craft designs for use with GDW's Traveller. Greg Wilson's "Enuk Manamee" is a gateway cult for RuneQuest describing "the fire god of the tundra nomads." Ronald Mark Pehr appears again, this time offering "The Horseclans Player" for use with The Fantasy Trip. It's a short overview of how to set TFT in the universe of Robert Adams's Horseclans novels. As a fan of the source material, I was glad to see this article, even if it's much too brief. "The Log of the Lively Lady" by Gerald Seypura is an adventure for FGU's Skull & Crossbones – a RPG for which I've rarely ever seen articles published anywhere. 

"Questworld" is a lengthy article by Lynn Willis, Sandy Petersen, and Greg Stafford discussing the creation of a non-Gloranthan setting for use with RuneQuest. Ultimately, this setting would be published in the boxed set of the same name. I've long been intrigued by Questworld, which has long seemed to me to have been a path not taken for RQ. Most interesting to me is the article's mentioning of the fact that continents on Questworld had been set aside for Games Workshop and Judges Guild to use in producing their own adventures and support material. So far as I know, neither publisher ever did anything with Questworld, but then neither did Chaosium beyond the initial boxed set.

Robin Wood's "Conversions in Lead" is another lengthy article, this time discussing how to create non-standard miniatures by modifying existing ones. Like most topics pertaining to miniatures figures, I have a great interest in this one but absolutely no experience with it. Also notable is the article's inclusion of an Ahoggyá figure from the world of Tékumel, which is something you don't see very often. "Devious Magic" by Robert Plamondon is another D&D variant. Plamondon offers a number of new ways to use old spells and magic items in order to breathe new life in them. While I can't say I was blown away by any of his suggestions, I certainly approve of his intentions. 

John T. Sapienza also presents a D&D variant, entitled "Non-human Level Limits," which seeks an alternative approach to slowing the level advancement of demihuman characters. Sapienza's approach isn't what suggests – which is fine – but that he repeatedly notes that "the D&D rules are designed for human characters" and "humanity dominates among the intelligent races." It's a perspective that isn't much held nowadays, but I'm always pleased when I find further evidence that it was commonplace in the hobby prior to the 21st century. Issue #13 also reviews Champions, Assault on the Aerie of the Slave Lords, In the Dungeons of the Slave Lords, and Cults of Terror. 

Gigi D'Arn's column begins by noting that the sales of many RPG companies were poor in 1981 and that many would likely not survive long into 1982. There's no specific support for these claims, however, so I can't speak to their truth. Then there's this story:

Lou Zocchi's ventriloquist dummy, Woody Knotts, was once quite well known in the hobby, so I found this tidbit fascinating. Gigi likewise mentions rumors of a gaming magazine from FGU, Rona Jaffe's upcoming novel, Steve Jackson writing a supplement for Dragonquest, and the first two volumes of the Armies of Tékumel series. 

My exploration of Different Worlds continues. It's an odd magazine, as I've said: when it's good, it's very, very good, but much of the time it's fairly mediocre, or at least of much less interest to me than any random issue of Dragon or White Dwarf. That might say more about me and my tastes than it does about Different Worlds, of course, but there it is.

Retrospective: Basic Role-Playing

When asked to name an old school roleplaying game, most gamers would, I suspect, immediately say, "Dungeons & Dragons," and not without good reason. Being the first and still most successful RPG ever published inevitably brings with it enviable name recognition, even outside the hobby. Readers of this blog, however, could almost certainly name many other early games equally important to the history of the hobby, both in terms of their innovations and influence. A supremely good example of such games is Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing, written by Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis, based on the pioneering work of Steve Perrin, Ray Turney, Steve Henderson, and Warren James, each of whom had contributed to the design of 1978's RuneQuest. 

First published in 1980, Basic Role-Playing is a 16-page distillation and development of the rules found in RQ but shorn of their connection to Glorantha or any other setting. As its subtitle makes clear, BRP was intended as "an introductory guide" to this new form of entertainment 

wherein the players construct characters who live out their lives in a specially made game game-world. The characters need not be anything like the people who play. Indeed, it is often more rewarding and enjoyable to create characters entirely unlike themselves. For instance, the most popular sorts are warriors and magicians – how many knights and wizards do you know in this world?

I like this passage a great deal both for what it says and how it says it. Basic Role-Playing is written in a very engaging style that is clear without being vapid, to the point that it includes a number of genuinely insightful philosophical digressions, such as this one on "life and death," which I reproduce in full, because of how delightful it is.

Danger is a common part of role-playing. There is satisfaction in non-dangerous occupations, and players are urged to have some non-combative characters if time allows. But the sharpest spice is the performance of characters in life-or-death situations. Dying is the one experience we cannot know more than once, and few of us are interested in hurrying-up our chance for the knowledge. Role-playing gives us surrogate danger without the risk.

Even so, you will experience real emotion when your characters gain victories, and undergo real agony when they die. Players and their characters have a very intimate relation, and the longer a player runs his character well, the more likely there will be a sense of loss when death comes and resurrection is not possible. This can be traumatic if you are too close to the characters at hand. For this reason, people are advised to never play themselves in a game. Always maintain a proper mental attitude towards the game, and remember that it is only imagination, no matter how real it seems during play. 

Possibility of loss makes success rewarding. Commit your characters to battle and play without restraint.

There's so much good stuff in these three short paragraphs that I could write an entire post discussing it (and perhaps I will), but I share it here to illustrate the balance, good sense, and even wisdom present in this short staple-bound booklet.

I first encountered Basic Role-Playing in 1981, when I bought the first edition of Call of Cthulhu. The boxed set included a copy of BRP, to which the game's rulebook frequently referred when it came to describing certain rules. Though this was unwieldy, to be sure, it did afford me the opportunity to spend more time with the text of Basic Role-Playing itself. The text presents an easy-to-understand and use percentile-based system for handling combat and skill use, along with probably my favorite experience rules for any RPG. The skill list is small and focused primarily on physical actions and combat is relatively fast and potentially deadly. It's a terrifically compact but sharp set of rules – little wonder then that it's been used in and imitated by so many roleplaying games over the last forty years.

I have only good things to say about BRP; it's a true classic of the hobby, right up there with OD&D, Tunnels & Trolls, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Traveller, as examples of brilliant early rules sets. Correction: I can think of one criticism and that's that the original 16-page version of the game is no longer available. I know that Chaosium has, in the years since, produced a much lengthier version of the game and I'm sure it's fine, but, for me, those additional pages are just gilding the lily. They can't hold a candle to the 1980 version I read all those years ago. It's still one of the best things Chaosium has ever released – a sterling example of old school rules economy to which few can compare.

A Path Not Taken?

I've been re-reading a huge stack of old Different Worlds that Victor Raymond sent to me a few months ago. In issue #17 (December 1981), there's an article entitled "QuestWorld" by Lynn Willis, Greg Stafford, and the Chaosium staff. The article is about the creation of the non-Gloranthan RuneQuest, QuestWorld, which was originally detailed in a collection of nine adventures published in a boxed format in 1982.

Reading through it, I came across several interesting quotes about the whys and wherefores behind QuestWorld.

We have published many detailed of the world of Glorantha for play with RuneQuest, but this setting is too restrictive or too unfamiliar for many writers and gamers, for Glorantha is a closed world, and is intended to stay that.

Elaborating on this point somewhat later, the articles goes on to say

QuestWorld is intended to be an open campaign world for RuneQuest and its variants, and for the constantly-expanding Basic Role-Playing family. Chaosium will minimally direct the development of this planet, intending it to serve as an example of an open world in the same way that Glorantha has been our example of a closed world.

From context, it would seem that the terms "open" and "closed" refer to both the level of detail, with an "open" world being sketchier than a "closed" one, and to the control that Chaosium exerts over the world's published development. This second meaning of the term is noted later in the article.

In making QuestWorld we needed a complete world, since we wanted a continent for our games and scenarios, and continents also for Judges Guild and Games Workshop. Given their own continents, these licensed companies could develop their own RQ- and BRP-related supplements, without the supervision needed for a Gloranthan scenario.

I found this section particularly interesting, as it suggests there was at one time a plan for RuneQuest licensees to get continents of their own to develop, in much the same way that GDW once granted licensees sectors of the the Third Imperium setting to develop in their own materials. So far as I know, this plan, if indeed it was a plan, was never realized, but it's possible there were such licensed products and I just never saw them. The same goes for QuestWorld supplements, something that I've seen reference to but have never actually seen.

In any event, it's fascinating to get some insights into Chaosium's attitudes about Gloranthan versus non-Gloranthan RuneQuest, even if the subsequent history of the game suggests that there wasn't a great deal of interest in the latter. It's also intriguing to consider a history in which QuestWorld took off and various licensees did indeed development different parts of it, as outlined in the article.

In Praise of BRP

When I purchased my first Chaosium RPG -- Call of Cthulhu -- back in 1981, included in that first edition boxed set was a little 16-page pamphlet called Basic Role-Playing (or BRP, as it's become known since). At first, I was rather baffled by its presence, since the box already included a much larger Call of Cthulhu rulebook, which I assumed included all of the rules needed to play. As it turned out, it didn't, or rather, the rules in the larger book built upon concepts introduced in Basic Role-Playing. Thus, to more easily understand Call of Cthulhu's rulebook, one more or less needed to understand BRP.

Young kid that I was, I thought this a rather odd way to present rules, but, in retrospect, the wisdom of Chaosium's approach was borne out. For one, reading and internalizing 16 pages (of which only about half consisted of actual rules) took no time at all, thereby creating a solid foundation on which to add further complexities. For another, it nicely emphasized what rules were the important ones, the ones on which everything else depended. The BRP booklet thus admirably served double duty as both an introduction to all the games derived from it and as a treatise on rules economy.

It's this last aspect of that 16-page booklet that's stuck with me all these years. In an age in which even "light" games are typically many times larger than BRP was in 1980, it's difficult not to admire the way that Greg Stafford and Lynn Willis distilled Steve Perrin's original rules design into its essential components. Re-reading it recently reminded me just how few rules are necessary to run a roleplaying game if those rules are well chosen and presented. There's little question in my mind that BRP is both, which probably explains why it's remained more or less the same in its more than 30 years of existence and has powered some of the most well regarded RPGs in the history of the hobby.

Quite an impressive feat for such a tiny ruleset!