Open Friday: Homages

On one of the levels of Dwimmermount, there's the following:

44. Blue RoomDevoid of almost any contents, this room is completely tiled -- walls, floor, and ceiling -- in dark blue. In one corner can be found a small scarab-shaped brooch. The brooch is non-magical but does have some strange, curving symbols written on it that utterly elude even spells like read languages to decipher. The brooch might fetch 100 gp to a dedicated collector of the arcane.

I wrote that as a small and (I hope) unobtrusive homage, one of several scattered throughout the dungeon to people and games I like and admire. This practice is a long pedigree, with many old school products doing similar things.

So today's Open Friday question is a little more open-ended than usual: Do you like such homages in your gaming materials? If not, why not? Do you use them yourself in things you're writing or running? What are some examples of which you're particularly proud?

Retrospective: The Mystic Wood

Perhaps because I grew up in Maryland, Avalon Hill loomed large in my early days in the large. You could find its "bookshelf games" nearly anywhere you went, from toy stores to department stores to greeting card stores and even weirder places. AH's large boxed games were everywhere in the late 70s and early 80s, at least in my neck of the woods.

However, I first became acquainted with them long before I started gaming myself because my friend's father and his older brother owned a bunch of them and I remember staring in wonder at them as I looked up at them on the shelf. To a child's eyes, Avalon Hill games looked important and serious, an impression that was probably helped by the fact that so many of them seemed to be based on history, particularly the Civil War and World War II.

Consequently, when I grew older and started playing RPGs, I retained a strange fondness for Avalon Hill games, even though I never really caught the wargaming bug. Still, I bought quite a few of these games, in part, I think, because I saw owning them as a sign that I was now "part of the brotherhood." In retrospect, this mindset looks more than a little foolish, but I was an awkward, bookish teenager without much experience of the wider world, so I hope I can be forgiven my desire to belong to something I perceived not only to exist but to be worth belonging to.

Now, as I said, I was never much of a wargamer; I don't have the patience for it and neither strategy nor tactics come to me naturally. So, when I decided to purchase an Avalon Hill game as a token of my having "leveled up," I inclined toward its fantasy offerings, such as 1982's The Mystic Wood, designed by Terence Peter Donnelly. As I understand it, the Avalon Hill edition was in fact the second edition of the game, the first having been published by a small outfit called Ariel Productions, but I didn't know this at the time. What I did know was that The Mystic Wood was a game about knights going on quests in an enchanted forest and that was good enough to pique my interest.

The two is designed for two to four players, each of whom selects one of five knight characters to play. These knights, one of whom is a woman -- Britomart from Spenser's The Faerie Queene -- each have a quest associated with them, which constitutes their victory condition. So, for example, the knight George needs (obviously) to find and slay the dragon, while Perceval needs to find and leave the forest in possession of the Holy Grail.

The game's "board" consisted of nearly 50 tiles, about half of which represented the titular mystic wood, while the other half represented the "earthly" wood, gates, and a tower. The tiles were placed face down and only revealed as players moved their knights across them. Depending on the type of tile revealed in play, certain things could happen, determined by a draw from a deck of random events. These events include the discovery of useful items, potential companions, and enemies. Items and companions aid you in your quest, while enemies must be defeated. If a knight is himself defeated, he is stripped of all his items (he keeps his companions) and is imprisoned within the Tower tile until he can roll high enough to escape, kind of like the Jail space in Monopoly.

The it's a fairly simple game, The Mystic Wood was actually a lot of fun, so much so that I regret having given away my copy years ago. I suspect my children would enjoy playing it, since it has the right mix of randomness and strategy, combined with an evocative fantasy theme. I fear, though, like most of those long-gone Avalon Hill games, finding an intact copy at a reasonable price will be a worthy quest in itself.

Ares Magazine: Issue #8

Issue #8 of Ares made its debut in May 1981, featuring another cover by John Pierard, this one featuring a depiction of Odin, Thor, and Vidar as they prepare to do battle on the Plain of Vigrid. It's not a particularly good illustration in my opinion, looking more than a little stiff and goofy, but perhaps I'm insufficiently appreciative of its virtues. Much better, I think, is Pierard's interior art accompanying the first article, "Ragnarok, The Mythic Story of the Twilight of the Gods" by Susan Schwartz, which provides "historical background" for this issue's integral wargame. Also by Schwartz is another installment of "Facts for Fantasy," along with more of John Boardman's "Science for Science Fiction."

Justin Leites offers up a game variant, "Pandora's Link," which shows how to connect the two games, Voyage of the Pandora with Wreck of the Pandora. Given the similarity of the two games in terms of rules and subject matter, this makes good sense. David Ritchie provides another installment of "DragonNotes" for DragonQuest. Speaking for myself, I find these articles do little to enthuse me about trying to grasp the rules of DQ, as they seem even more persnickety than those of Chivalry & Sorcery, which is saying something. John Butterfield previews SPI's SF RPG, Universe, through another short "Designer's Notes" article. This one includes reference to the game's planetary generation system, which is one of my favorite parts of the game and something I seriously considered swiping for Thousand Suns.

Ragnarok: The Twilight of the Gods is a wargame by Darryl Esakof and Redmond Simonsen (of course!) dealing with the ultimate battle between the Aesir gods and the giants led by the traitorous Loki. Its map represents the Plain of Vigrid, the Norse Megiddo, where the two forces will engage in warfare. Two things stand out about Ragnarok. First, there's the unique powers of the various "heroes" on each side. For example, Thor can throw thunderbolts and his hammer, Mjolnir, has special traits as well. Second, the Aesir are more personally powerful than the giants, but fewer in number. The trick for the giant player is to try to get as many giants into play as quickly as possible. However, giants can enter Asgard only by means of Bifrost, the rainbow bridge, and the more giants brought across it at a time, the greater the chance the bridge will collapse and thus cut off the giants from their fellows.

As is so often the case, just before SPI releases a product of its own, there's a review of its competitors. Since issue #9 will feature Universe's starship combat rules, Steve List gives reviews for eight different starship combat games already on the market. These are: Starfall, Dark Stars, Time Lag, Warp War, Starfire, Starfire II, Starfleet Battles, and Starfleet Battles Expansion #1. Though a lot of the reviews are negative, they seem evenhanded to me rather than snarky hatchet jobs I've come to expect in Ares. Eric Goldberg also reviews Dark Stars as well as Quirks and these reviews are also uncharacteristically positive and sedate. The same can be said of Christopher John's movie reviews of Scanners, Hangar 18, and Starblazers and Greg Costikyan's many book reviews. I can't help but wonder if this seeming shift will last and if it was the result of an editorial mandate based on reader feedback.

Reprints, Reprints

For those few of you who haven't already heard the news via other blogs, here it is: Wizards of the Coast is reprinting not just the Gygaxian AD&D rulebooks next month, they're also reprinting the v.3.5 books in September.

I have no insights into WotC's motivations, so I won't hazard a guess as to why the company is doing this. I'll only say that I'm glad of it, even though I'm not a fan or player of 3.5e. My fond dream would be to see WotC reprint and (at least minimally) support several versions of Dungeons & Dragons. I think that's be the ideal way to pay homage to the game's nearly forty year history. It'd also be an ideal way to regain the trust and interest of gamers who are devoted to an earlier edition. Goodness knows I'd be much more likely to buy reprints of certain older products than I ever would be to buy 5e.

Now, I don't expect that either the 1e or v.3.5 reprints are anything but one-time events, but a guy can dream, can't he?

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Tomb

H.P. Lovecraft is one of those authors I first encountered because some of the older guys I know who played D&D claimed that "the game is based on his stuff" or some variation thereof. So, taking them at their word, I sought a collection of his stories at my local library. What I found was a copy of an old Ballantine anthology called The Tomb and Other Tales, which, as it turns out, contained a lot of Lovecraft's early, less overtly cosmic stories. As a result, my initial impression of HPL was that was a 20th century Poe -- not a bad thing in itself but certainly not what I had been led to believe about him based on the comments of my elders in the hobby. I simply couldn't see much of a connection to D&D and wouldn't until the release of Call of Cthulhu by Chaosium in 1981, when I again return to the Old Gent's works.

Even so, those early stories stuck with me, particularly "The Tomb," which was not only the lead-off story of that collection but the very first example of Lovecraft I ever read. I must have been 10 or 11 years old when I did so and, while perhaps not one of Lovecraft's greatest works, it nevertheless had an effect on me. "The Tomb" was written in 1917, but didn't appear in print until 1922, when it was published in the March issue of a periodical called The Vagrant. The story begins as the first-person narrator introduces himself:

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.

I don't think it's a stretch to suggest there's a bit of autobiography going on here, or at least idealized autobiography, with Dudley a stand-in for Lovecraft. At the same time, the fact that the narrator admits to being committed to an insane asylum calls into question almost everything he says, including the details of his life and personality. In any event, Dudley soon reveals to the reader the extent to which he is unwilling to acknowledge a distinction between the real and unreal by becoming obsessed with a mausoleum he finds in the woods behind his ancestral home.

I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

      The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inurned had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call “divine wrath” in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.

It doesn't take a close reading of the text to anticipate that this tomb will play a central role in the plot of the short story, as Dudley becomes more and more obsessed with it, to the point that he sleeps outside in the woods just to be near it. Eventually, as a result of a dream, Dudley seeks out the key to the chains and padlocks that keep the tomb closed. When he finds the key, it's located, strangely, within the attic of his own home, which only makes him wonder more about the tomb and its contents. Naturally, Dudley cannot resist the urge to open the lock and enter, which is when the story really begins.

Re-reading it, I still have a great fondness for "The Tomb," an opinion Lovecraft himself apparently shared, even as he disavowed many of his earliest efforts in later years. It's very effective in its evocation of mood, particularly of loneliness, isolation, and creeping madness. I suspect that's why it's stayed with me all these years. Though clearly influenced by Poe (and, to a lesser extent, by Stevenson), it stands up well in its own right, especially in the way that it plays with questions of materialism and the supernatural, two themes to which HPL will give greater attention in his more mature works.

Oubliette #8 Available -- for Free!

As he usually does, editor Peter Regan has made the PDF of the latest issue of the excellent Labyrinth Lord fanzine, Oubliette, available for free for a limited time. A print version, along with a print compilation of issues 5 through 8 will be available later this month.

For those interested in its contents, issue #8 includes:

• Tales from Hell Cartoon
• Editorial
• The Maslow Dungeon 
• Monster Club #14: The Death Gate
• The Lands of Ara - Special Feature
• Newland Campaign Setting Part III: Factions in the Forest
• Monster Club #15: Newland Bestiary Part II
• Forest Mini-Adventure: The Kobold & Goblin Resistance
• Forest Location: Moot Point
• Forest Mini-adventure: The Bloodbeard Bugbears
• Forest Mini-adventure: The Burnt Tree Clan
• Monster Club #16: Dungeon Random Encounter Tables: Levels 7-8 
• Goblin Quest Cartoon
• Fanzine Frenzy
• Found Familiar: The Cat 
• What's in the Oubliette? Reviews
• Mouse Watch Cartoon
• The Song of Sithakk Part 8 

I'm very fond of Oubliette, which reminds me of the best stuff White Dwarf did back in the day. The artwork by The Marg in every issue is especially delightful and gives Oubliette a style all its own. Check it out if you haven't already done so.

Retrospective: Gamma World Referee's Screen

I've never been a big fan and, therefore, user of referee's screens. Part of this is practical and part of it is philosophical. On the practical side of things, it's rare that I have a space at the gaming table large enough to accommodate a referee's screen, something that's been true most of my gaming career, with the exception of the days when we used some friends' ping-pong table in their basement. Even then, I wasn't particularly fond of the screen because it reminded me too much of the worst kinds of referees I'd seen. These were the confrontational, us-vs-them guys who took pleasure in killing PCs left and right. And while their use of referee's screens was neither a cause nor likely even a symptom of their unpleasant ways, I nevertheless came to associate the two.

Of course, being a kid, I nevertheless bought a lot of referee's screens; I just rarely used them. Mostly, they sat folded amidst my books and notes. Occasionally, I might crack one open to look at a table I hadn't memorized, but that was rare. I bought them out of a combination of obligation and a desire for whatever additional goodies came packaged with them. I say "obligation" because, as a younger person, I took it as my "responsibility" to have a referee's screen, even if I rarely used it. After all, I was the referee. Silly, I know, but there it is.

On the other hand, the goodies makes more sense, especially in the case of the Gamma World Referee's Screen, which was released in 1981. The screen had two things going for it that make it memorable even today. First is the glorious cover art by Erol Otus, which, to my mind, is an iconic image of what Gamma World is all about: a Mohawked techno-barbarian and her mutant sidekick watching a trio of freakish enemies make use of an ancient highway, while a weird creature flies overhead and a ruined installation can be seen in the distance. I've said before that Gamma World suffers a lot in people's imaginations because it was often illustrated in a way that reduced it either to banality or (worse) comedy. Otus's cover didn't do that, instead giving the setting a queer majesty that overflows with possibilities. I adore it.

The second thing that makes this screen memorable is the 6-page "mini-module" included with it. Entitled "The Albuquerque Starport" and written by Paul Reiche III, it's also an example of something  that gives Gamma World its due. One of the things that's often misunderstood is that Gamma World's apocalypse happens in the 24th century, not the 20th. That's why there are blaster pistols, robots, and other examples of space opera tech littering the ruins of North America. That's also why so many of buildings and other structures from the past still exist more than a century later -- they're made from high-tech materials that could withstand both the weapons of the Apocalypse and the effects of time and tide. Consequently, the post-holocaust world Gamma World depicts isn't bizarre, not just to the characters but to the players. I think that adds a lot to the game's appeal and sets it apart from (and above) most other RPGs in the same genre.

"The Albuquerque Starport" provides an example of what I mean. As its name suggests, it takes place at an old starport buried under the New Mexico desert, complete with a working space shuttle. Exploring the starport, players find all sorts of funky stuff that serves as a reminder that the pre-disaster world was not our own. More importantly, there's that space shuttle that can rocket the PCs away to an orbiting space station infested with "plague zombies." These unfortunate creatures are all the remains of the visitors and crew of the station after they contracted the interstellar Canopus Plague and exist only to infect more living beings with their deadly malady.

The space station is thus, for all intents and purposes, a haunted house and I've found it a surprisingly effective locale, especially as the characters likely have no concept of "space," let alone space travel. I also like the way that it expands the Gamma World setting by implying that, before the End, mankind had expanded beyond the Earth to other worlds and encountered who knows what. In my own campaign back in the day, I used this thin suggestion to introduce some surviving interplanetary colonies that were beginning to take an interest in Earth once more, much to the chagrin and delight of the planet's battered inhabitants. This was also totally unexpected by my players, which is as it should be.

Faith without Works

Over the last year, there's been a dearth of posts here about my roleplaying. That's because, for the most part, I haven't been roleplaying with my regular group as much I had in the previous years. There are a lot of reasons for this, most of them quite banal (schedules, players moving, etc.), but that doesn't change the fact that my roleplaying has been much more limited since last summer. Now, I've still been gaming -- mostly boardgaming -- but that's not now and never has been the focus of this blog. And, as I said here long ago, simply talking about RPGs when you're not playing them is pointless.

Fortunately, the 21st century affords us multiple ways to roleplay, one of which is through the magic of the Internet, specifically Google+. I gave G+ gaming a whirl for the first time during the Dwimmermont Kickstarter and I enjoyed it a lot -- so much so that I've been doing it ever since, often as a player. The Dungeon Crawl Classics Roleplaying Game I'm playing in each week is run via Google+ and it's been a blast.  I haven't this much fun playing any RPG in a long time and I look forward to each new session. It's also taught me, I think, that there's not a whole lot of difference between gaming face to face and gaming via video chat. There are differences, of course, but, so far, they're just that, differences, rather than things I'd call better or worse than playing in the traditional way.

I bring this up because, in addition to playing, I've also been refereeing on Google+. I run two campaigns, one set in my Dwimmermount megadungeon and one in M.A.R. Barker's world of Tékumel. Until now, I'd been a little hesitant to talk about these campaigns, because I wasn't sure they'd "take," which is to say, I wasn't sure they'd last. I know enough people are already skeptical of the idea of gaming via video chat as it is that I didn't want to add more fuel for that fire. But things have gone well enough in both campaigns that I'm quite confident that they're going to last. Consequently, I'm going to start sharing the goings-on in these campaigns via session write-ups, like I used to do with my original Dwimmermount campaign. If my players agree, I might even post a video transcript of one or more of our sessions for others to see.

I won't begin regaling you with session details just yet; I'll save that for another post. Instead, I wanted to talk briefly about my Tékumel game, which is using the Empire of the Petal Throne rules published in 1975. I've run a Tékumel game before, back in the mid-90s, but that was using a different rules set (Gardásiyal, if anyone care) and I had a somewhat different mindset toward the setting. For that reason, I was more than a little nervous about starting a new campaign. I was out of practice, had never used EPT before, and was taking on a large number of players, almost all of whom were Tékumel neophytes. What was I thinking?

I was thinking two things, actually. First, I wanted to honor the memory of the recently deceased Professor Barker. I have become ever more convinced that the man was an unheralded genius of our hobby, a founding father deserving of accolades to rival those of any of the hobby's more widely acknowledged leaders. Second, I wanted to show that, far from being "inaccessible" or "too weird," Tékumel isn't any more difficult to get into than Dungeons & Dragons, despite all the unfamiliar names. This is a topic about which Victor Raymond has written at some length elsewhere, but I felt it was time to put my money where my mouth was and that meant running a game for a bunch of people for whom Tsolyáni was not a second language.

You know what? It's succeeded brilliantly, far moreso than I'd ever hoped. Most campaigns in which I've played usually take several sessions before they find their feet. With EPT, it happened almost immediately, much to everyone's pleasure. I opted for the default barbarians-off-the-boat-from-the-southern-continent approach. Thus, there's good reason for the characters to be largely ignorant about the intricacies of Tsolyáni society and culture. This gives me the opportunity to slowly initiate the players -- and myself -- into these complexities bit by bit. No one is expected from the get-go to know much of anything really, which has made our sessions both revelatory and fun. Far from confirming the absurd caricature that the uninformed make about Tékumel gaming, we've shown it for the fraud it is.

So, in the days and weeks to come, expect both session recaps and new gaming material spawned by these two campaigns. I've missed being able to write posts of those sorts; to me, they're the fruits of what this hobby is all about: playing.

Ares Magazine: Issue #7

Issue #7 (March 1981) of Ares features a cover by John W. Pierard, depicting a scene from Rescue from the Hive, the integral game included in this issue. Pierard created art for a number of sci-fi magazines, including Asimov's, so he's in keeping with the trend in Ares to employ non-gaming artists to do the magazine's covers. I don't know if that says anything about Ares or SPI, but it certainly lends a very different esthetic quality to the magazine, especially when compared to the Dragon issues I remember reading as a kid.

Speaking of art, issue #7 marked the debut of a "Gallery" feature in which a science fiction or fantasy artist shows off a single piece of text-free color artwork. The idea behind the new feature was that it simultaneously provided an illustration to inspire gamers and served as an advertisement for up and coming artists. In this issue, the artist in question is Tom Kidd, whose name is unknown to me in any other context.

Issue #7 also saw an increase in coverage of DragonQuest. In addition to David Ritchie's "DragonNotes" column (which answered rules questions and provided errata), he, along with Redmond Simonsen, provide a complete adventure, entitled "The Housse of Kurin." The adventure is described as a "capsule adventure," meaning its fairly short and limited in scope. Its focus is on an attempt to rescue some prisoners from the stronghold of a bandit named Kurin, making it very combat-heavy. Still, its maps are terrific (like all DQ maps in my experience) and there was clearly a lot of thought put into the tactics of the bandits and their allies, which would probably make it exciting to play (assuming, unlike me, you could actually your head around DragonQuest combat).

There's more "Facts for Fantasy" and "Science for Science Fiction." I appreciate the intention behind these regular features, but, for the most part, I don't find them especially inspiring. As mentioned earlier, this issue's wargame is Rescue from the Hive by Nick Karp and Redmond Simonsen (seriously, did this man do everything related to Ares?). The game focuses on an attempt to free two Terran hostages being held by a radical faction of the insectoid Znon race. The most intriguing aspect of the game is that Znon queens are telepathic and control their minions remotely, which gives them certain options and advantages in play. In addition, the queens can attempt to mind control Terran rescue units, throwing the Terran player's plans into chaos. Also, Znon units are placed on the map face down to simulate the fact that, initially, the Terrans have no idea what they'll be facing or where. Henrik Nordlie provides some fiction to accompany the game.

John Butterfield has a short article providing some designer's notes to the upcoming RPG, Universe. Meanwhile, Eric Goldberg offers two positive reviews(!) of Japanese themed RPGs, Bushido and Land of the Rising Sun. Naturally, there's a negative review, too, this time of a game I've never heard of before -- The Complete Fantasist. Goldberg writes:

Every once in a while a reviewer will come across a product so truly awful that he has no qualms about savaging it in print. It is an even rarer occasion when he will reconsider a stinging attack, because he is afraid people will think less of him for admitting that he read and/or played the product in full. I resolved for the New Year to be courageous and tell of my suffering through The Complete Fantasist, in hopes that unsuspecting gamers would not accidentally subject themselves to such inhumane treatment of their sensibilities.  

Never having read The Complete Fantasist, I can't say whether Goldberg's introduction above is warranted, but it's amusing to read nonetheless. 

Free RPG Day Haul

I never had much use for Free RPG Day in the past. I didn't have anything against it, but the start of the promotion coincided almost exactly with the beginning of my disinterest in what "mainstream" publishers were producing, so I never had any reason to give it any heed. This year was different, though, because I knew Goodman Games was producing a 16-page booklet containing two adventures for Dungeon Crawl Classic Roleplaying Game and I wanted to snag it.

So, I set off to a couple of local game stores and succeeded in my quest. I also grabbed a copy of Columbia Games's map of Hârn (which, to be fair, I already owned, but I can never get enough maps), as well as some funky dice from Q-Workshop. I didn't find  anything else that was of interest to me, but I'm very happy to have gotten the map and the DCC RPG module.