In Praise of Mentzer

I'm often rather harsh about the D&D rules written in the mid-80s by Frank Mentzer. Part of it is because they're products of a decadent era at TSR, when Sutherland and Trampier gave way to Elmore and Parkinson and when mass market appeal drove most design decisions. And the Mentzer rules are nothing if not mass market. Even moreso than Moldvay/Cook, the Mentzer rules were written for people unfamiliar not just with roleplaying games but also with the entire culture out of which D&D sprang. They're the first truly "post-D&D D&D" and it's very hard for me to look beyond that much of the time.

That's a shame, because, for all their concessions to mainstream acceptance, there's some good stuff to be found in these boxed sets, particularly Set 3 -- the Companion Rules -- from which I stole lots of ideas for my AD&D campaigns. For me, Set 3 was the fufillment of a promise on which D&D had never quite managed to make good -- to provide rules and guidelines for the endgame of a character's adventuring career. The Conpanion Rules gave us not only domain management rules, but also a mass combat system. Together, these two systems addressed issues D&D had had ever since 1974: what do characters do when the reach high levels of experience?

The domain management and mass combat systems in the Companion Rules are simple, straightforward, and abstract. They depend very heavily on referee adjudication and there's a high degree of randomness to both of them that might offend some sensibilities. Quibbles aside, they're both quite old school in their approach and I like that. I played the heck out of both of them back in the day and eventually generalized the domain management system to cover random campaign events and the fate of entire nations rather than the single-hex baronies for which they were originally written. I also used the mass combat rules to wage wars between nations in my fantasy setting. Together, they gave that setting a healthy dose of unpredictability that gave it an air of "realism" it might otherwise have lacked. For example, a civil war broke out in the major good nation of the world and that sparked innumerable adventures, not to mention far-reaching consequences that I doubt I'd have chosen had I instead plotted out its future history myself. This is excellent stuff.

Another aspect of the Companion Rules that I liked a lot, even though I never incorporated them into my AD&D game, was the way Mentzer introduced paladins, druids, and other such classes into the game. They were kind of proto-prestige classes but far more elegantly implemented and far more grounded in the history of D&D. For example, I see in the druid an echo of the notion that OD&D clerics must side either for Law or Chaos once they reach 7th level or they cannot advance any further. Likewise, the paladin offers up a viable interpretation of the line that Lawful fighting men "may opt to become paladins." I've often considered reworking many AD&D sub-classes into a similar kind of scheme and may yet do so one day.

I'll admit that I'm not at all fond of the Master Rules, let alone Immortals, both of which strike me as huge missteps compared to the Companion Rules. Those final two boxed sets are the result of a corporate completist mentality rather than as answers to questions most D&D players had at the time. It certainly doesn't help that I think those sets also highlight the limits of D&D and not in a positive way. There is only so far that the game can go before it loses its identity and the heights of power detailed in the Master and Immortals rules are several steps too far in my opinion.

I'll continue to quibble about the Mentzer rules, because there's much to quibble about, but it's quibbling "within the family," so to speak. Frank's old school credentials are not in doubt nor is his grasp of the history of the game. I am, as I hope this post reveals, very fond of his Companion Rules set and believe it's the only real treatment of D&D's original endgame ever written. I'm not blind to the virtues of later rules sets, but I do have very specific criteria for what I like and what I'll consider using. That means I can be convinced that I'm off base when it comes to my criticisms of this or that. In the case of the Companion set, I need no convincing.

The D&D Family Tree

James Mishler has created the latest iteration of a "family tree" describing the descent of pre-3e version of Dungeons & Dragons. It's a very informative bit of history in graphical form and I hope others will find it useful.

Of Goblins and Pig-Faced Orcs

One of the things that has always bugged me about Dungeons & Dragons is the proliferation of humanoid monsters. I simply don't see the point in having so many variations on the same basic idea. I understand why there are so many -- the referee wants to keep his game from getting "stale" -- but it strains credibility to suppose that there could be so many different types of humanoid creatures in a single campaign setting. I've come out of the closet as a Gygaxian Naturalist, so I prefer that the worlds I create make sense, even if that sense is predicated on magic or some other nonsense.

That's where the Eld come in. Being very ancient, intensely chaotic, and amazingly adept at magic, the Eld are my catch-all explanation for many of the monsters in my campaign setting (the other being the Thulians). In addition, I decided early on to limit myself only to the humanoids that appear in OD&D and to use their descriptions as the basis for my own, with a couple of exceptions. Reading Monsters & Treasure, it's clear that there's a "continuum" of humanoid creatures, beginning with goblin/kobolds and working upwards by Hit Dice. I decided I'd take that idea and find a way to make sense of it. What I came up with was this:

• OD&D implies that goblins and kobolds are the same creatures, the only difference being that kobolds are weaker physically. I'd already decided that goblins are one of the few genuinely aboriginal races of my setting; kobolds will be the degenerate mine-dwelling versions thereof. While I like the scaly dog-men versions of kobolds a great deal, Gary often said that that version was, like so many other D&D monsters, based on a miscommunication between himself and the illustrator, Dave Sutherland. Gary originally envisaged kobolds as evil wizened, gnome-like creatures, as in German folklore. So, I'm going with that, albeit one that complements the "little green men" version of goblins I'm using.
• Goblins are, in their natural state, not very nice from a human perspective: greedy, selfish, and with a penchant for cruelty. But they're not willing servants of Chaos. That's where hobgoblins came in. They were magically created by the Eld as taskmasters and "drill sergeants" to keep ordinary goblins pressed into Eldritch service in line. They're now "independent operators" but still enjoy lording it over goblins when they get the chance.
• Bugbears are another magical mutant of goblins, created by the Eld as shock troops. I can't make up my mind as to whether I'll go with the Monster Manual appearance of these guys or stick with Greg Bell's wacky pumpkin-headed version.

This brings me to pig-faced orcs. Again, Gary claimed that the pig-faced version was the result of another miscommunication with his artists -- this seems to have happened a lot -- but I have a great fondness for them nonetheless. Plus, I already have a bunch of Otherworld minis to use, so I figure why not do so? I've decided that orcs were also magical creations of the Eld -- boars given humanoid form and sentience to be used as easily replaceable cannon fodder. By the same logic, gnolls, rather than being a gnome-troll hybrid as OD&D suggests, are uplifted hyenas.

That about covers the basics. I'm still pondering what to do about giants and trolls, but I've already decided that ogres are human beings cursed for having indulged in cannibalism and have now become monstrously ravenous eating machines.

Scrappy-Doo and the Hickman Revolution

It's pretty much a given, among people of a certain age, to treat the appearance of Scooby-Doo's overly exuberant young nephew in 1979 as the beginning of the end for that venerable Hanna-Barbera cartoon. For many, Scrappy represents a betrayal of the original vision of the show, which, while light hearted, was rarely outright comedic. Scrappy's arrival changed that and forever earned the ire of Scooby-Doo's legions of devoted fans.

What many such fans don't realize is that Scrappy-Doo saved Scooby-Doo, a series that was on the verge of cancellation by ABC in 1979. Scrappy's creator, famed cartoon wordsmith Mark Evanier -- one the brains behind the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon a few years later -- has related the tale of the little Great Dane's birth in a series of four articles. Reading them is very enlightening on many levels, not least of which being the context it provides for how and why Scrappy-Doo came to be and the impact his arrival had on the Scooby-Doo franchise. Far from being as unpopular as he might seem in retrospect, Scrappy-Doo was in fact immensely popular and played a major role in keeping Scooby-Doo alive and on the air throughout the 1980s. It's not an exaggeration to say that, without Scrappy-Doo, Scooby-Doo would have gone the way of many other cartoons and been mostly unknown to a generation of children.

Tracy Hickman made his TSR debut in 1982 with module I3, Pharaoh, the first part of the "Desert of Desolation" trilogy and the first of many popular and influential D&D modules he'd pen, often with his wife, Laura. All of Hickman's work shares a common emphasis on providing a coherent story as a backdrop for the adventure. While many of his early modules, including Ravenloft, reveal an old school heritage with their trick and trap-filled "dungeons," what made those modules a popular success was the way they went beyond the thin backgrounds of earlier adventures -- "Some giants are attacking civilized lands. Go and find out why or you'll get the axe." -- by spinning epic tales of love lost and won, baleful curses, ancient prophecies, and, most importantly, memorable NPCs with hopes, dreams, and fears of their own.

Back in 1982, what Hickman was doing was nothing short of revolutionary, at least in the context of TSR's official support for D&D. The gaming public responded very positively and enthusiastically, particularly to Ravenloft and the Dragonlance modules, both of which seem to have been the "gateway" for a significant portion of the "third generation" of gamers who entered the hobby in the mid-80s. Despite the financial distress TSR suffered -- $1.5 million debt in 1984 -- D&D's fortunes were buoyant, due in no small part to the change Hickman's modules effected on the way gamers viewed D&D and what they expected from it. Dragonlance was the greatest -- and most profitable -- fruit of the "Hickman Revolution" and its success set a pattern for D&D that dominated the next 10+ years, right up until Wizards of the Coast acquired the company in 1997.

Given the financial mismanagement of TSR under the Blumes and D&D's loss of its faddishness in the mid-80s, I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that the Hickman Revolution played a key role in keeping TSR, D&D, and by extension the hobby vibrant and vigorous well into the 1990s, when "storytelling games" came into their own. A lot of us older gamers look at this stuff and think about it the same way many Scooby-Doo fans look at Scrappy-Doo: isn't this the worst thing that could have happened to our beloved? I know, for myself, that I often feel that D&D would have been better off in the long run if had not embraced "story" as central to its self-identity.

But would I still care about D&D -- or even roleplaying -- today if my preferred alternate history had come to pass? Did the Hickman Revolution safeguard the future of D&D by transforming it into something other than its origins? That's an impossible question to answer. I offer it up because I think it's all too easy to see each and every deviation from pristine Gygaxianism as another cobblestone on the road to hell. So they are in a certain context, but it's also true that these deviations are what enable D&D to continue to have relevance to gamers decades after the original game -- and the culture that spawned it -- have passed from the scene.

This is the only sense in which I accept the term "evolution" as being a valid one to describe the development of RPGs and I obviously don't think all such evolution is positive, except in the sense that it can sometimes better enable a game to survive changes in popular tastes. In such cases, though, what you wind up with is not a "better" game so much as a different one entirely. I'm inclined to think that the lasting effect of the Hickman Revolution has been to permanently splinter D&D into several distinct "species," some of which bear more genetic resemblance to one another than do others.

Let me reiterate that I don't think Tracy Hickman is the Devil nor do I think he set out to change the face of Dungeons & Dragons forever. That his work met with such popular acclaim -- and still does, in many quarters, even after 25 years -- is pretty good evidence that he gave gamers something they very much wanted. "Story" wasn't imposed on D&D so much as happily embraced by many younger gamers who felt the Gygaxian template for the game was too narrow and not at all like the books, comics, and movies that inspired them. I don't think there's any question that the Gygaxian template itself would have changed over time -- it already was changing in 1982 -- but would it have changed enough to keep D&D at once vital and in keeping with its origins? Or was the Hickman Revolution the only path to continued success? There's no clear answer to this beyond the obvious one that the Hickman Revolution, like Scrappy-Doo, succeeded and succeeded brilliantly. We still live in the world it helped to usher into existence.

Castle Zagyg Review

Allan Grohe offers up a magisterial 15-page review of Castle Zagyg: The Upper Works here. I was planning on offering my own review, but, having now read Allan's work, I'm not sure there's any point. He's done a great job and hit a number of points I'd intended to make as well. Go read it for yourself.

Retrospective: Ravenloft

I give Dragonlance a lot of grief -- deservedly so, I think -- for the role it played in forever changing both Dungeons & Dragons and the way it's been sold, but Dragonlance was merely expanding on ideas first put forward in earlier modules penned by Tracy Hickman, particularly 1983's Ravenloft. Unlike the Dragonlance modules, which, even at the time, I liked more in theory than in practice, I used to love Ravenloft. It's easy to understand why. Module I6 is a very "moody" piece of work, unlike most previous AD&D modules, which achieved their moods much more haphazardly or at least less self-consciously. Ravenloft's evocation of Gothic horror was also unlike most other modules at the time and, given my relative unfamiliarity with that genre of fiction -- I'd not yet read Dracula in 1983 -- I found it all very compelling.

There are other factors too in why my youthful self loved Ravenloft. Strahd von Zarovich, while sporting one of the most ridiculous faux Eastern European names in gaming, seems tailor-made for referees looking for a pet NPC. He's immensely powerful, well nigh indestructible, and fun to roleplay -- an angst-ridden anti-hero before White Wolf made such things a staple of the hobby. That he's the central figure in a story that provides a backdrop to the PCs' actions only made him more attractive. Moreso than most modules published before or at that time, Ravenloft is about its villain. The actions of the PCs are, in many ways, beside the point, because their sole purpose is to help to facilitate a melodrama of lust, betrayal, despair, and love beyond the grave in which NPCs are the primary actors.

And then there were the maps. Dave Sutherland's three-dimensional maps of Castle Ravenloft were amazingly innovative for the time, providing a superb sense of how all the pieces of this vast dungeon -- for dungeon is it was -- fit together. I know I drooled over these maps for many hours as a younger man and, even now, looking at them, I find it hard not to be won over by them. The problem, of course, is that, in play, they're quite unwieldy and sometimes even a little confusing. I'd go so far as to say that they're emblematic of Ravenloft itself: attractive, innovative, and a clear break from the past.

Now, I think it's all too easy to emphasize how much Ravenloft differed from its predecessors. At the same time, as I just noted, this is still, at base, a dungeon crawl and an occasionally non-sensical one at that, given that, for all its Gothic horror trappings, we find sometimes find monsters not at all in keeping with that style of writing. Likewise, there's plenty of low humor, especially puns, to be found in the module. The names on many of the tombs in the castle crypt -- "The Lady Isolde Yunk (Isolde the Incredible). Purveyor of Antiques and Imports," for example -- are outrageously bad and make Gary Gygax's own efforts seem subtle by comparison. These puns wrench one back from the Gothic atmosphere other parts of the module are trying desperately to evoke. The module uses a method of placing important NPCs and magic items based on fortune telling with a deck of playing cards. It's actually a very clever idea and, from my memory of playing the module long ago, it's effective and lends something to the atmosphere. Plus, my icy old school heart melts when random generation is involved in such a significant way.

Effective though it was, the card reading system made me wonder at the time if it was introduced partly to give the module replayability. That is, because certain important NPCs and items were placed in Castle Ravenloft randomly, the system could, in theory, ensure that each playing of Ravenloft would be different. Brilliant! The problem is that no one is going to Ravenloft more than once, because, as it is written, you can't. Dungeon crawl it may be in many ways, but there's no overlooking the fact that Ravenloft tells a story and a heavy-handed one at that. Not only does it have a prescribed conclusion, complete with Harlequin romance level dewy-eyed sentimentality, but, ultimately, what the PCs do just doesn't matter, since everything in the module is designed to support a predetermined conclusion.

Ravenloft is, like the "Desert of Desolation" series (also by Hickman -- I see a pattern here), a transitional module. There's still a great deal of old school design in its pages. There are lots of tricks and traps, for example, and Castle Ravenloft itself is a monstrous labyrinth of rooms, corridors, and crypts, making for a very non-linear portion of the game. It's also a very unforgiving module, with death around every corner, particularly if the players are foolhardy enough to try and take on Strahd without adequate preparation. Of course, unlike the later Dragonlance modules, Ravenloft can afford to be a death trap, because -- and I hate to keep harping on this -- the PCs' actions don't really matter. Strahd and his story are the main attraction here and it makes little difference whether a player loses a dozen characters along the way so long as he eventually has some character who's able to be present to witness the melodramatic conclusion the Hickmans have in store for them. That's a pretty big crime in my book and, while new and innovative at the time, it laid the foundation for much mischief later.

I still have a fondness for Ravenloft despite it all, but that fondness is born mostly out of nostalgia and that's fine. I don't think Tracy Hickman is the Devil any more than I think L. Sprague De Camp was. Nevertheless, I don't think it's possible to deny that, in both cases, these men planted seeds that would eventually bear bitter fruit. We're still wrestling with the consequences of design decisions Tracy Hickman made in 1983. The adventure path style of play, for example, is a direct descendant of modules like "The Desert of Desolation" series, Ravenloft, and Dragonlance, which represent an about-face from the more open-ended, sandbox play of the old school. The fetishizing of "super NPCs," whose actions overshadowed those of the PCs, got a nice boost too with the creation of Strahd von Zarovich. Neither of these things necessarily had to become the abominations they would one day be, but the immense popularity of Ravenloft made it hard for them to avoid this destiny. I think, with some work, Ravenloft could be remade into a perfectly acceptable and throughly old school module. That's more than can be said of the Dragonlance modules, so, in the final analysis, I'd have to say that module I6 isn't wholly without virtues, even if they are buried beneath even greater vices.

REVIEW: Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting

I'm going to do something I rarely do and issue a mild retraction of a comment I made in my earlier review of the Pathfinder Chronicles Gazetteer. In that review, which was largely positive, I pointed out two areas where I felt the product violated old school sensibilities: its art and its wealth of detail. I still feel that the art (mostly) runs counter to the Old Ways, but I'm big enough to admit that I was wrong on the question of detail. Yes, it's true that no one needs as much detail as either the Gazetteer or the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting provide, but, presumably, if one is buying a campaign setting rather than making it up for oneself, detail is, to some extent anyway, what one is after.

Granted, there are levels of detail and, for me, the comparative sparseness of the Gazetteer was a blessing rather than a curse. Yet, having thoroughly read the Pathfinder Chronicles Campaign Setting and enjoyed it, I can safely say that it still manages to leave plenty of room for individual referees to insert their own ideas or to take the information this 256-page book provides into directions of their own devising. Whereas the Gazetteer provides only three or four paragraphs of description for each of the major nations and city-states of Golarion, the Campaign Setting offers up two (sometimes three or four) pages for them all, including many not covered in the Gazetteer. It's certainly a lot to take in all at once and I am deeply sympathetic to anyone who feels this is too much, particularly in the area of history. At the same time, I didn't see a lot of self-indulgent fluff in the additional material. Instead, we're given a solid overview of each locale, including their populations, societies, power groups, and major settlements. I think, with this information, it'd be quite easy for the referee to open to the appropriate section of the book, skim it quickly, and get plenty of details, including specific bits of local color, to make the area memorable in the course of play. That's useful, but, again, I am sympathetic to those who find it overkill.

Moreso than the Gazetteer, the Campaign Setting is a D20 book, as there's a fair bit more game mechanics in it, such as spells, equipment, feats, and prestige classes. That means that there's more "wasted" pages for old schoolers than there was in the Gazetter, which is practically mechanics free. Of course, old school gamers are accustomed to overlooking game mechanics if there are good ideas to be found and there are plenty of them here. I very much like a lot of what the authors have done with the traditional D&D races -- including half-orcs -- to give them a spit and polish that makes them at once different and more like themselves than ever. Indeed, one of the great glories of this product is the way that its writers clearly thought long and hard about the archetypes and origins of many D&D staples and then used those things to craft new takes on them that were nevertheless consonant with what had gone before. Despite its failings in other areas, I certainly cannot fault the Paizo design team for not knowing and respecting the history and traditions of Dungeons & Dragons -- but then I'd expect nothing less from the people who brought us Planet Stories.

Golarion, the world of the Pathfinder Chronicles, has a distinctly Hyborian Age feel to it, with its obvious riffs on, allusions to, and outright thefts of real world historical places and cultures. That gives it a familiar air that I find appealing, for reasons I've discussed before. What I also appreciate is the willingness of Paizo to broaden its definition of fantasy to include such things as firearms, robots, printing presses, and many other bits of "advanced" technology that some deem anachronistic and thus inappropriate to the genre. Like it pulp forebears, Golarion is a world in which, literally, anything might be found, provided it offers a good hook for an exciting adventure. Thus, we can find gunslingers in the magic-dead Grand Duchy of Alkenstar and robots patrolling the borders of Numeria. It's a refreshing change of pace from the more "realistic" approaches to fantasy world design we've seen in the last three decades. This is a campaign setting built to support D&D (or, technically, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game), right down to its gonzo keep-'em-guessing logic of adventure design.

The book exudes a pulp-y feel that's hard to miss, but, as I noted previously, that feel is somewhat muted by its art, which is almost uniformly of a piece with the 3e/4e house style of WotC (no surprise given that many of the same artists were used). This leads to a slight "split personality" esthetically, which is foreshadowed in the fact that it includes two "celebrity" introductions: one by Robert J. Kuntz, co-DM of the Greyhawk campaign, and one by R.A. Salvatore, creator of the drow ranger Drizzt Do'Urden. I can barely think of two people whose involvement with and contributions to D&D have been so different -- much like the disconnect I feel between the text of the Campaign Setting and its illustrations. Given that Paizo is hoping to grab a sizable portion of the 3e remnant community that didn't move on to 4e, I can't really blame them for the style of art they chose, as it'd be familiar to 3e players already. Likewise, there's no doubt that Jeff Carlisle and the guys at UDON, for example, are talented. I simply feel that the art they produce exudes a different feel than the one that the Campaign Setting implies.

Golarion is clearly a labor of love by people who adore D&D and have a fondness for pulp fantasy. I've tried not to let these facts cloud my objectivity, though, which is why, despite my generally positive view of the book, I have a couple of pointed caveats. First, there's the price. The book retails for $49.99, which is frankly a lot of money, even for a full-color, glossy book like this. I understand that Paizo is a small(ish) company and thus probably has tighter margins than, say, WotC, but this is an expensive book for what it is. More specifically, it's a lot for a book as shoddily bound as the one I own, which is starting to tear away from its spine after only a few months of my owning it solely as a reference book. I've never used the book in play and I handle all my books with care. It's possible I've just been unlucky and gotten an aberrant copy. Even so, the price is high and I can't in good conscience recommend the book to anyone who's either not a completist or not going to use it in play. It's well written and contains terrific ideas, but I'm not sure that's enough to justify dropping so much money on it.

My second concern is a broader one and it pertains not so much to this book itself as to what appears to be the Paizo business plan for developing and selling Pathfinder products. This plan involves not only monthly installments of several adventure paths but also lots of supplementary material in the form of articles and companion books, each of which further fleshes out some aspect of the setting in great detail -- far greater than anything seen in the Campaign Setting. Now, Golarion is a huge world, so it's quite possible to stay away from the areas Paizo is developing -- or ignore even the stuff they are -- so as to stay clear of the growing mass of canon. However, after a certain point, I have no doubt that this will become harder and harder, if only because many players have a tendency to think that, if it's in a printed product, it's true and the referee must abide by it. That's far from a universal statement, I realize, and I recognize that it's unfair to damn this book for something external to it. Nevertheless, I think there's a very real possibility that Golarion will quite quickly become over-developed after the fashion of many other earlier settings. Anyone buying this book needs to give this due consideration before deciding to take the plunge.

This is a good product and one in which there are lots of good ideas. I think it's a good example of setting that takes pulp sensibilities and uses them to create something intelligible to gamers more used to other fantasy influences. In that respect, it's a great success. Looked at within the context of the plan Paizo seems to be adopting, though, I worry that the openness and freedom offered even in this already-packed volume will evaporate and what we'll be left with is yet another pre-packaged "big story" setting filled to the gills with NPC heroes, villains, and with tons of niggling details. That's by no means a certain future for Golarion, but it's also a very possible one. Here's hoping I'm proved wrong.

Final Score: 4 out of 5 polearms.

Above Ground "Dungeons"

Even as work proceeds on Dwimmermount, I found myself intrigued by another concept: a vast, ancient, and ruined city stretching miles in every direction, now populated by scavengers, tribes of humanoids, and leftover horrors from whatever cataclysm laid waste to the city in the first place. If it all sounds a bit like Gamma World, that's part of the appeal. It's never been surprising to me that Metamorphosis Alpha (set aboard a generation ship fallen into chaos) and Gamma World (set on a post-apocalyptic Earth) were among the earliest RPGs. After all, the very idea of exploring -- and looting -- the ruins of the past is only a slight modification of D&D's basic premise.

The main difficulty of using a vast ruined city as the basis for a "dungeon" is that it's not constrained geographically. That is, players can very easily move around the edges of the ruin to avoid any tricks or traps the referee might have placed in one area. Now, on one level, that's solid old school thinking there and ought to be rewarded. On the other hand, it's perhaps a bit too easy. Consequently, planning a dungeon of this sort takes some forethought. The simplest approach might simply be to use a ring-like structure, with the outer portions of the ruin corresponding to the topmost levels of a traditional dungeon, while the inner portions correspond to the deeper levels.

Even this approach raises issues, particularly once magic starts increasing player mobility. My general rule, when encountering seeming difficulties, is to embrace them as opportunities. Yes, players will eventually gain access to spells like fly and dimension door that might enable them to "skip" certain encounter areas. Rather than fret about that, why not give them something else to do with such spells? In my campaign setting, the Eld and the Thulians are the two primary sources of ancient ruins. Both were masters of magic, so it stands to reason that their once-great cities were built and maintained using magic, magic that lingers still after all these centuries.

So, I'm thinking my ruined city will have several floating islands associated with it -- former wizard towers and research facilities and other such arcane treasure troves. These will be magnets for mid to high-level adventurers who have access to magic and magical items that enable them to move around more quickly and easily. No, this won't prevent PCs from "upsetting the balance" of the surface ruins, but that's fine. Dungeons are made, after all, to be kicked over and looted by adventurers. The trick is to ensure that, no matter what, the process of kicking over and looting is challenging and that requires a referee who can think on his toes and respond appropriately. That's why I'll probably be a bit looser about the inhabitants of the inner ring of the ruins, so I can change them up as needed. I won't leave the area blank entirely -- that's just a recipe for disaster -- but their strength and numbers can be varied, as can their tactics and level of magical support.

I've often wondered why there aren't more examples in D&D of vast surface ruins as outdoor "dungeons." Other than Ed Greenwood's Myth Drannor, I can't think of any off the top of my head. I feel like I'm missing some obvious ones, though. Can anyone think of some I might have forgotten?

Memories of Game Stores Past II

It's easy to forget how faddish roleplaying games were even into the early 80s. Back in those heady days, you could buy RPGs -- and not just D&D -- from a wide variety of stores. One of the places I used to go to was called Games & Gadgets. Ostensibly, it sold video games -- also a faddish item at the time -- so you could buy game cartridges for the Atari 2600, Intellivision, and Colecovision, as well as other electronic games. But they also sold RPGs in great quantities, including miniatures and paints.

I distinctly recall that Games & Gadgets was the only place where I'd ever seen Grenadier Models blister packs. Prior to that, I'd only ever seen the boxed sets of Grenadier minis, so it was quite a revelation to me to stumble across these small packages of 3-6 miniatures in a clear plastic bubble that actually let me see them directly. I bought quite a few of them, including the kobold sets, because you can never have enough kobolds. I also bought a set called "Rakshasas" that contained two weird-looking creatures, one of which was a lizard guy and the other of which looked like a humanoid elephant. It was then that I concluded that rakshasas could look like any sort of animal, not just tigers, and I've long had a hard time adapting to the New Order introduced in 3e on this particular point.

In retrospect, I know now that it was momentary faddishness that allowed tabletop RPGs and video games to co-exist peaceably in the same store without explicitly catering to a "geek culture." That's only natural, I suppose, because there was no self-awareness of such a thing in the early 80s. There were geeky things, to be sure -- being a D&D player may have been faddish then but it still wasn't "cool" -- but buying them wasn't an explicit lifestyle choice. There were no paraphernalia or tchotchkes associated with gaming for sale in Games & Gadgets, just games and accessories used in actually playing them.

RPGs are no longer faddish; it's increasingly hard to find games other than D&D outside of very specialized stores these days. Interestingly, though, the mainstreaming of geekery continued apace and is now bigger than ever. As I've noted previously, this bugs me quite a bit, not merely because I think a lot of this stuff is tacky (though I do), but because the rise of geek culture has coincided with the decline of those aspects of the old culture I so enjoyed. In both gaming and literature, there's a definite trend away from the older styles and influences and that saddens me. There may not be a direct correlation between the two phenomena, but it's interesting to note nonetheless.

Games & Gadgets was eventually renamed The Electronics Boutique and stopped selling RPGs entirely. The rest is history.

Pulp Fantasy Gallery: Giant of World's End

First published in 1969, Giant of World's End kicks off a series of books describing the adventures of Ganelon Silvermane, an artificially created hero awakened prematurely to save the far future world of Gondwane -- Earth after all the continents have again positioned themselves into a super-mass -- from a variety of threats. These books clearly belong to the "Dying Earth" sub-genre and the influence of Vance is quite clear, which perhaps explains their appeal to Gary Gygax. Though published first, Giant of World's End takes place last in the series and there are some incongruities between its depiction of Ganelon and Gondwane and those of the later books. Still, it's an interesting read and another example of a type of fantasy that was once commonplace and now a curiosity.

I feel compelled, as an aside, to speak briefly about Lin Carter, who frequently catches a lot of flak because of his involvement in posthumous "collaborations" with pulp authors, most notably Robert E. Howard. For these, I do think he deserves criticism and fairly harsh criticism at that. Like August Derleth before him, these efforts of Carter are almost universally amateurish and of limited literary merit. Along with L. Sprague De Camp, Carter did much violence to the Conan saga and many readers of a certain age have a distorted view of the Cimmerian's adventures -- and REH's writing -- because of his work. At the same time, Carter was the driving force behind much of the pulp revival of the late 60s and early 70s, when he promoted numerous formerly-forgotten writers to the general public once more. He was the first editor of Ballantine Books' "Adult Fantsy" series and it was this series that brought authors like Lord Dunsany, Clark Ashton Smith, William Morris, James Branch Cabell, and many others to view again. In a sense, he was a spiritual godfather of Dungeons & Dragons, because Carter's editorial work enabled many to read fantasy tales they otherwise wouldn't have, many of which were very influential on Gary Gygax. Consequently, for all his faults, I still retain a fondness for Lin Carter that I don't for De Camp.