Monster Manual Foreword

For a number of reasons, I've been spending a lot of my spare time recently re-reading sections of the first three AD&D books, particularly the Monster Manual. The MM is a fascinating book if you're interested in the early development of AD&D, since it actually retains a great deal more from its OD&D heritage than one might think. Equally fascinating is Mike Carr's foreword to the Monster Manual, dated September 27, 1977. He begins by saying:

It is with a certain amount of pride that we at TSR bring you this second part of the new DUNGEONS & DRAGONS releases, the long-awaited MONSTER MANUAL for ADVANCED D & D. We are doubly proud of the format of this book -- i.e., its special hard cover, a "first" in the gaming world and another step in our continuing quest for top quality products.

It's remarkable to remember that, not only were the AD&D rulebooks, starting with the Monster Manual, the first hardcover gaming products I ever saw, they were, for a very long time, the only hardcover gaming products I ever saw. Nearly every other RPG product I bought either came in a box or were softcovers -- including other D&D products. In fact, I'm honestly not sure what the first non-AD&D hardcover RPG book I ever saw was. The Traveller Book perhaps?

Carr goes on in his foreword to take a few shots at other RPGs.

The success of DUNGEONS & DRAGONS has spawned a considerable number of imitations and spin-off products, perhaps inevitably. Some of these have merit; many, however, do not -- and although we may concede their right to exist (however dependent they may be on D & D's audience), we caution the prospective buyer to consider their true value and not to be confused with those items which bear the DUNGEOND & DRAGONS or ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS name and constitute the official D & D family of products. As for value, let the others be measured against the standard of quality we have striven for -- a hardbound encyclopedia of monsters, for instance, as opposed to a low quality collection which is poorly assembled and bound.

Now, I can't say there's anything surprising in the paragraph above. It's boilerplate TSR denigration of its competition, but what is surprising is that it wasn't Gary Gygax who was writing this and that it occurred so early in the hobby's history. People more knowledgeable in the early days of the hobby than I will no doubt be able to provide some context for Carr's comments. Was this around the time of the disputes with Dave Hargrave over his "vacuous grimoire?" Or was there some other controversy that spurred this on?

For the Love of Dice

One of my favorite blogs is Zenopus Archives, because, as its subtitle indicates, it's dedicated to "exploring the underworld of Holmes Basic." Since September of last year, its author has produced a lot of excellent posts about the version of D&D I started with back in the Fall of 1979, including examinations of the Blue Book's many rules oddities. Recently, he made a post that attempts to reconcile Holmes's notorious rule that all weapons deal 1d6 damage but that "light" weapons, like daggers, strike twice per round, while "heavy" weapons strike only once every other round.

It's a terrific post, well presented and argued, and one that in my opinion does a good job of making sense of this rule without outright abandoning it -- so terrific, in fact, that I thought "Wow, I'd love to use this interpretation in my own games." The problem is that, when I first started the Dwimmermount campaign, I began by playing LBB-only OD&D "by the book," to the extent that that's possible. That meant using 1d6 for all weapons. While this did have some nice side effects -- daggers were capable of killing even 1st-level fighting men with relative reliability -- it had a big drawback. No, I'm not talking about the pointlessness of using a two-handed sword; I'm talking about the lack of variety in the dice we got to roll.

Silly as it sounds, this mattered to us at the table. Just rolling d20 and d6 didn't feel right. Some of that sense of "wrongness" was no doubt conditioned by decades of using all the polyhedrals. My players and I strongly associated playing D&D with using five or six different types of dice in play. So, OD&D's focus on just two of the dice seemed somehow anemic and it wasn't long before we adopted Greyhawk's variable hit dice and damage rules. Once we did that, things felt "right" again and, even though we had thrown out many other bits of accumulated D&D lore in an effort to go back to the roots of the game, having only a limited selection of dice was a bridge too far, even in pursuit of that goal.

I like rolling dice and, when playing D&D, I like rolling lots of different kinds of dice. I have to admit that, while there's definitely something very primal to games like Traveller, which only use d6, I nevertheless miss the variety of shapes. Maybe that's why I still prefer Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu over other horror RPGs or why I see the use of all the weird Zocchi dice by Goodman Games's Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game as a point in its favor. I realize the irony in my saying this, since my own Thousand Suns uses only one type of dice, though, in my defense, it's d12 that it uses! (Mind you, I sometimes get the notion to design another SF RPG that uses all the classic polyhedrals, but then I recognize how silly that'd be).

Retrospective: Against the Giants

As I've said many times before, I entered the hobby in late 1979 with a copy of the Holmes Basic Set originally intended for my father. This was a weird time to enter the hobby, because it's sort of on the cusp of a transition between the "first generation" made up of folks who'd been wargamers beforehand and the "second generation" like me who went straight into roleplaying because it was becoming a big fad. So, while I mostly played with kids my age, I had a lot of contact with older guys and (especially) teenagers who'd "been there at the start of it all." That time was also weird because TSR itself was transitioning between being a much more "hobbyist" company into something much more "professional" and you can see that in how its modules and rulebooks changed between 1979 and 1981.

Because I started playing in this period of transition between generations, I often don't feel I belong to either one. I wasn't a wargamer nor was I old enough to hang out with the high schoolers, but I was enough old enough to look down my nose at the "kiddies" whose first exposure to RPGs with either the Moldvay or (worse) Mentzer boxed sets (even though I owned and adored the former -- and still do). And while the Holmes Blue Book does get a lot of love in the old school world these days, that's a comparatively new development. For the most of my time in the hobby, the Holmes edit was the "forgotten" edition of D&D, particularly once the hobby expanded greatly as the Moldvay and Mentzer devotees entered it.

I mention all of this because, for me, the 1981 compilation module G1-2-3, Against the Giants, encapsulates a lot of the weirdness of my early days in the hobby. I never owned any of the pastel-covered modules on which this one is based, but they were still kicking around hobby and bookstores. Indeed, I did own some pastel-covered modules, since I bought them in 1980 before they were redone. So, my friends and I had a mishmash of stuff published from before we started playing, as well as contemporary stuff published later. There's more to the weirdness than that, though. For the most part, we played RPGs amongst ourselves, but, every so often, a friend's father and older brother would run stuff for us. Even more rarely, the older brother and his friends would run us through a module. Such was the case with Against the Giants.

I can still very clearly remember that summer day back in 1981, because we were playing outside, sitting in the backyard or at a picnic table. Because none of us had any characters of the requisite levels (8-12), we had to make use of the pregenerated PCs from the back of the book. I wound up with the terrifically named Cloyer Bulse the Magsman, who was a thief, a class I never played (I've always been a fighter or cleric kind of guy). One of my friends played Fonkin Hoddypeak and another Redmod Dumple. The fact that I can still, three decades later, remember these character's names and who played them says a lot about how much I enjoyed that summer's day.

We never managed to get very far into the module, because the first part, Steading of the Hill Giant Chief, is a real slog -- and my friend's teenage brother was a ruthless referee. I don't believe any of us actually died at his hands, but we were hurting. The Steading is just packed with hill giants and their servants and our referee was very good at using them. To our credit, we managed to outsmart him on quite a few occasions, among being to stir up dissent amongst the hill giant's orcish slaves so as to create a useful distraction for our own activities. We had a lot of fun, partly because we got to play high-level characters, something we'd never done before, and partly because we were playing with "the cool kids," or at least what we assumed were cool kids, since we had so little experience of coolness ourselves.

Later on, I'd referee Against the Giants for friends and I can recount many a tale of their exploits, such as an opportune use of creeping doom against a roomful of hill giants and inter-party strife after the discovery of a ring of three wishes in the Glacial Rift. If a module's goodness is to be judged solely on the fun had while playing it, I think Against the Giants has to be one of the most fun of all. I'll always hold it in special regard, because it symbolizes that weird time when I was initiated into the hobby that I'd have for the rest of my life.

Dungeon Restocking and Rival Adventuring Parties

It was Dave "Sham" Bowman who first introduced me to random dungeon restocking -- the idea that, when characters return to the dungeon after having left it to rest and re-supply, there is a chance that formerly cleared-out rooms might again be occupied. Both Stonhell and Barrowmaze make use of a table that Sham presented for use with his Dismal Depths megadungeon. The table looks like this:

Roll 1d6
1 Monster
2 Monster and Treasure
3-6 Empty (1 in 6 chance of concealed treasure)

I really like this table because it mechanizes the process of keeping a megadungeon "alive," which is, I think, a key feature that distinguishes it from smaller, "lair" type dungeons. When I started work on Dwimmermount, I decided that, in addition to this table, I needed another one. The reason was that, while Sham's table is great for determining whether or not a room that once held six orcs whom the PCs slew has been re-occupied in the interim, it says nothing about the occupied rooms the characters haven't yet explored.

Why would that matter? Well, one of the premises of the Dwimmermount campaign was that the Thulian mountain fortress had been shut off from the world for several hundred years beforehand. The PCs are, for various reasons, the first outsiders to successfully enter Dwimmermount since the fall of the Thulian Empire. However, they wouldn't be the last. Once word got out that the PCs had done the seemingly impossible -- returned alive from the megadungeon and with loot -- it'd only be a matter of time before others followed in their footsteps. Thus was born the Rival Adventuring Parties table.

I roll on the Rival Adventuring Parties table every time the PCs return to town, but, unlike the restocking table, I roll once for every room the PCs didn't visit, modified by +2% -- it's a percentile table -- for every time they left the dungeon to return to "civilization." The table looks like this:

Roll d%
01-80 No Change
81-90 Evidence of other adventurers (e.g. footprints in the dust, used torches, broken weapons, etc.) is found amidst the room's other contents
91-100 One (1-3) or more (4-6) dead adventurers from a rival party is found in the room. If the room is trapped in any way, the dead adventurers' bodies provide clues as to the nature of the trap(s) therein. If not, their deaths can be attributed to the nearest monsters in other rooms/areas.
101-110 As 91-100, except that any monsters in the room have their numbers reduced by one-half.
111-120 As 81-90, except that any monsters in the room have been slain and their treasure (if any) looted.
121+ A rival adventuring party is currently in the room. If there were any monsters in the room previously, there is a 50% chance that they have been slain and their treasure looted, as in 111-120. Otherwise, the rival party is currently engaging them in combat.

Needless to say, I've never been religious in my use of this table, but I do use it. At least three rival adventuring parties were encountered by the Fortune's Fools PC group (two good-aligned and one evil) and their encounters with these rivals led to some interesting developments in the campaign that my players still talk about. Personally, I love rival adventuring parties and think they're an important part of any megadungeon-centric campaign, which is why I've included several already statted up for use in Dwimmermount, along with the tables I use for quickly generating them.

The Articles of Dragon: "Why Is This Mutant Smiling?"

As Dragon slouched toward issue #100, I found the quality of the magazine to be declining, at least as far as I was concerned. Issue #96 (March 1985) was a good example of an issue that, were it not for the Ares Section, would have little interest for me. But then the Ares Section -- and John M. Maxstadt's Gamma World articles in particular -- was frequently the sole bright spot in Dragon. Maxstadt's article in this issue, "Why Is This Mutant Smiling?," presented some variant rules for handling the physical mutation new body parts and it very quickly became one of those articles I photocopied at the library and stuck inside my referee's notebook for use later.

For those who haven't looked at Gamma World in a while, here's what its second edition rulebook (which was current at the time this article was written) has to say about new body parts:

Character has extra appendage or organ not usually found in his species. Examples include: A third eye in the back of his head, light sensitive antennae, arms and hands (for a fish or other species that normally doesn't have limbs), a head or brain for a Plant. The players always design the new parts, but the GM must approve the design.

Now, I appreciate the brevity of this entry and its reference to the GM as the final authority in determining what is an acceptable new body part. However, as Maxstadt notes at the start of his article, "Some players have trouble inventing original mutations which are more than mere variations of the official mutations in the book." Likewise, there's always a tug of war between player and referee in trying to decide just what sort of mutation is "too much."

Back in '85, I'd neither developed a keen enough sense of "balance" to make such decisions with any reliability nor the dispassion I now possess about such concerns. So, when Maxstadt offered up a percentile table containing approximately 40 examples of new body parts, I was glad to see it. My players and I both found it easier -- and less stressful -- to roll on the table and be done with it. Nowadays, I probably wouldn't use such a table, but that's not an indictment of Maxtstadt's offering, which, like nearly everything he wrote for Dragon, was excellent. Rather, it's a testament to how much I've changed as a referee since I was a teenager -- something I hope is true of all of us who are still gaming decades later.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Stolen Sacrifice

The third of Gardner Fox's short stories about Niall of the Far Travels, which appeared in issue #13 (April 1978) of Dragon, is, in my opinion, much more interesting than the two that preceded it. Part of that is simply that, with two stories under his belt, Fox can now refer back to his earlier efforts, which lends some depth and texture to both Niall and the world he inhabits. So, when readers who've been following the series since the beginning see the names "Urgrik" or "Emelkartha," they're invested with some meaning. A bigger part, I think, is simply that Fox has, by this point, developed a better sense of who Niall is and what his world are like in his own mind and that makes for a stronger story. I know well that, when I start developing an idea -- any idea -- there's usually a point when things start to gel for me and that makes my work before that point look crude and inchoate (because they are). It's frankly a testament to Fox's creativity that his Niall stories started to become more than just generic sword-and-sorcery tales as early as his third entry.

"The Stolen Sacrifice" begins with Niall in the great city of Urgrik, about which we've heard mention since "Shadow of a Demon." When the story opens, Niall has seemingly been in the city for some time, in the employ of its king, Lurlyr Manakor. Of his prior service, we learn a little over the course of this story but much remains left to the imagination of the reader -- a tried-and-true device of many pulp fantasies and one of which I'm particularly fond. I'm firmly of the opinion that we don't need stories covering every second of a fictional protagonist's life, especially not his "origin." I much prefer that there be blank spots in his history; somehow, this seems more believable and compelling to me.

The man moved silently through the shadows, keeping always to the darkest places. He moved as an animal might, his body poised for instant action, a big hand on the hilt of the longsword by his side. His eyes darted from a doorway to the far corner, where the wind blew a length of scarlet silk hanging from the wall. Caution was in his great body, for he knew that should he be seen this night, death would be his reward.

Niall of the Far Travels was not afraid, though he knew that he would be killed, and in no pleasant way, should anyone discover him, or guess where he went — and why.

For fair Amyrilla of the golden hair had been condemned to die by order of Thyra, queen in Urgrik where Lurlyr Manakor was king. Amyrilla was the favorite concubine of Lurlyr Manakor, and Thyra was jealous of her barbaric beauty. And so Thyra had prevailed upon Lurlyr Manakor to offer her up to the grim god Korvassor in his splendid temple in Urgrik.

Amyrilla was not yet dead. Her death would come in hours, when the priests of Korvassor gathered in the temple to summon up their god. There would be no eyes to see that death, other than those of the priests of Korvassor. Amyrilla would be dragged screaming into the maw of the grim god, to be devoured, and only Lurlyr Manakor would grieve for her.

Well, that was not quite true. Niall would grieve as well, for in the weeks that he had been here in Urgrik, serving under Lurlyr Manakor, Niall had come to know pretty Amyrilla, and had loved her for her gentle ways. Yet now she was to die, abandoned by all save Niall himself.

That's a very solid beginning, providing the reader with everything he needs to know to enjoy what follows. As that opening (and the story's title) suggest, Niall intends to rescue Amyrilla from the priests of the god Korvassor -- and he does. But the real story begins after the barbarian sellsword has achieved his initial aim. After all, it's one thing to rescue a concubine from immediate harm; it's another thing entirely to spirit her away to complete safety. "The Stolen Sacrifice" deals with that very question, along the way taking unexpected turns that see not only the return of a major figure from a previous story but also the suggestion of a greater destiny for Niall that's quite different than the one he'd have chosen for himself.

"The Stolen Sacrifice" is a very fun read, certainly my favorite of the series so far and a pulp fantasy that's simultaneously in the same vein as Howard's Conan yarns and one that is bold enough to go in its own direction. It's well worth reading, if you can find a copy.

Found in a Pile of Old Papers

FYI Re: Comments

I'm playing around with a new comments application in place of the default Blogger one. For that reason, all the old comments have been temporarily removed. They should reappear sometime over the next day or so. I'm also playing around with different settings for the commenting app, so bear with me if things are a little chaotic in the meantime. It's my hope everything will be back to normal soon.

Words of Wisdom, Part II

Over at Blood of Prokopius, the ever-insightful Fr Dave has a really terrific post in which he rather cogently puts forward his thoughts regarding 5e. His concluding paragraph is pure gold:

To my mind, if WotC is interested in bringing our hobby together in one big happy family, then the best way to do that is to make every edition of the game official and make every edition available either through reprints or POD. This game has been successful in every iteration because so many of us have had fun with them — 0e all the way through 4e. Don’t fix what isn’t broken — give us all the freedom to officially play the version that best suits us and purchase those supporting materials that help us play that version.

I think, at this stage, it's probably too late for Fr Dave's recommendation to come to pass, which is a pity. The AD&D reprints are the first things published by WotC I'll have purchased in, literally, years. If they made B/X or some older modules available too, even if only through a POD service, I'd plunk down serious cash to snag them. I suspect I wouldn't be alone in that regard.

OSRCon 2012

Chris Cunnington, the organizer of last year's delightful OSRCon here in Toronto, has asked me to pass along that registration for this year's convention will open up sometime tomorrow, April 1. The con will be held on the 10th and 11th of this coming August. I'll be there running Dwimmermount sessions, as I was last year. Ed Greenwood is also returning as a guest and Ken St. Andre, creator of Tunnels & Trolls, and all-around nice guy will be there as well.

I'll post additional updates about the con and its events as I learn them.