I was asked in the comments to my earlier thread to describe the player characters in the Dwimmermount campaign. At present, there are five PCs. They are:
Brother Candor (Cleric 3)
Str 13 Dex 9 Con 15 Int 12 Wis 15 Cha 16
As you can see from his rather impressive ability scores, Brother Candor was blessed by Lady Luck from birth. He's the de facto leader of the party of adventurers. He's the adopted son of an itinerant cleric of Tyche, who followed in his father's footsteps after he died. Candor recently formally joined the hierarchy of the Lady's church. His only magic item are a pair of boots of levitation.
Dordagdonar (Elven Adventurer 3)
Str 11 Dex 15 Con 9 Int 12 Wis 6 Cha 15
Dordagdonar claims not to have a lot of use for "ephemerals," as he calls mortal races, but he spends all his time with them. He's implied that he's older and more knowledgeable than he appears, but no one else believes him. They keep him around because he's a good shot with a bow, but his use of magic is much less certain (he cast sleep on Pike, while he was engaged in combat). His magic items consist of chainmail +1 and a wand of paralyzation.
Pike (Fighting Man 2)
Str 16 Dex 9 Con 14 Int 7 Wis 9 Cha 10
Pike was once a grave digger and took up adventuring as a way to make more money than he earned in his former profession. He still carries the shovel he used in those days. Semi-literate with a weakness for gambling, Pike is nevertheless no fool. He distrusts Dordagdonar and is wary of any plans that involve his entering a room alone without a visible means of escape. His magic items consist of a longsword +1 and a hand axe +1.
Iriadessa (Magic-User 2)
Str 8 Dex 13 Con 14 Int 14 Wis 10 Cha 8
Iriadessa is a 12 year-old girl who claims she's actually 15. She joined the party so that she could escape the wizard to whom her parents had sold her in exchange for a small amount of gold. Rather than wait to see what the wizard had in store for her, she swiped his spellbook and fled, teaching herself the rudiments of magic. She's cowardly and wary of anything remotely dangerous, which makes her decision to explore Dwimmermount somewhat nonsensical but her command of sleep and charm person spells means she's occasionally proven her worth. She currently possesses no magic items.
Vladimir (Dwarven Warrior 1)
Str 13 Dex 11 Con 14 Int 8 Wis 9 Cha 9
Dour and greedy, as you'd expect from a dwarf, Vladimir remains a bit of a cipher compared to his fellow party members. He spends most of his free time -- and all of his wealth -- carving a son for himself, in accordance with dwarven custom. He's fond of bad jokes and puns and speaks Common with a peculiar accent. He also doesn't like goblins, which is why Brakk often disappears whenever Vladimir decides to rejon the party. He currently possesses no magic items.
Monday, April 6, 2009
Dwimmermount, Session 9
The ninth session of my Dwimmermount campaign was, once again, given over mostly to exploration. As I've mentioned before, the party has been keeping rather detailed maps of the levels into which they've ventured. This has proven a boon for them, since these maps have given them a better sense of where secret doors might lie, for example, as well as how features on each level interrelate. I'm positively tickled by this, since it means that the players are paying attention to the environment I've created rather than just treating it as scenery in a succession of fight scenes.
What the players have noticed is that the level they're currently on seems rather small compared to Level 1. The first level contained many staircases and other forms of descent that seem not to connect to the portion of Level 2 they've explored so far. Indeed, Level 2 appears to have only one direct connection to the level above it. Unless they've missed some secret doors or other means of lateral movement, they've concluded that "Level 2" is in fact a small sub-level rather than something as extensive as Level 1. Without revealing whether they're correct or not -- my players read this blog -- I will say that this line of thinking pleases me, if only because it means they're thinking of the dungeon as something more than a succession of neatly stacked levels, one on top of the other.
The players also concluded that the only way down from "Level 2" is via the passages leading to the pool of black oil. Brother Candor did some investigation into this and determined that the oil is pooled in a large cavern with several connecting passages, some of which also contain oil and some of which contain dry rock. He could see no inhabitants in the oil cavern but he spent minimal time exploring it. He did collect even more of the oil for analysis. In large quantities, the party noticed that the oil isn't just black but has a sheen to it not unlike quicksilver. When the characters returned to Adamas (which I'll describe in a moment), they wanted to hire an alchemist to help them identify it. Unfortunately, alchemists are very expensive (250 gp/week) and the characters are cash-poor at the moment.
Their explorations of "Level 2" involved a fight with some more beast-men and a giant spider. There were also some fatalities. A poison gas trap claimed the lives of Erik, Ethil, and Hrothgar. It also nearly killed Brother Candor and Iriadessa, both of whom made their saves by the thinnest of margins. The loss of not one but three of their front-line fighting men was a serious blow to the party. They decided they couldn't continue without first replacing their hirelings (since both Pike and Vladimir were absent this session), so they knew they'd have to ride back to Adamas to do so. They did dispose of all three northern warriors outside of Muntburg, on an alcohol-soaked funeral bier set aflame.
These deaths hit home a bit more than had previous ones, partly because Erik and Ethil were jovial, goofy NPCs who talked like Arnie and had quirky personalities. As it turns out, a pair of women's boots Erik found -- and wore -- were magical boots of levitation. These were removed from his body and replaced with a different pair of women's boots before his body was consigned to the flames. "At least he died with his boots on" was a source of several jokes this session. Brother Candor wears the boots now, but claims his plate mail greaves hide their appearance to anyone who doesn't spend a lot of time looking at his feet.
The characters spent time in Adamas hiring new mercenaries. Brother Candor now employs Wulfhere and Dordagdonar employs Brandis. Both are mighty fighting men and cost a fair bit more to hire than did their deceased comrades. Dordagdonar also "upgraded" Henga the Shield-Maiden to the status of henchman. She is now the longest serving NPC in the party, having been used continuously in every session since she first appeared (unlike Brakk, who was absent in two sessions). While in Adamas, the party spellcasters also learned new spells and Brother Candor formally joined the Church of Tyche's hierarchy. He's now expected to give over 10% of his loot to the high priest in the City-State in exchange for access to the temple libraries and reduced rates on spells, such as raise dead and the like. I'm not sure he's convinced it was a good deal in the end, but it's still too early to tell.
Once again, a good session and one that helped further develop the characters and better establish their place in the world.
What the players have noticed is that the level they're currently on seems rather small compared to Level 1. The first level contained many staircases and other forms of descent that seem not to connect to the portion of Level 2 they've explored so far. Indeed, Level 2 appears to have only one direct connection to the level above it. Unless they've missed some secret doors or other means of lateral movement, they've concluded that "Level 2" is in fact a small sub-level rather than something as extensive as Level 1. Without revealing whether they're correct or not -- my players read this blog -- I will say that this line of thinking pleases me, if only because it means they're thinking of the dungeon as something more than a succession of neatly stacked levels, one on top of the other.
The players also concluded that the only way down from "Level 2" is via the passages leading to the pool of black oil. Brother Candor did some investigation into this and determined that the oil is pooled in a large cavern with several connecting passages, some of which also contain oil and some of which contain dry rock. He could see no inhabitants in the oil cavern but he spent minimal time exploring it. He did collect even more of the oil for analysis. In large quantities, the party noticed that the oil isn't just black but has a sheen to it not unlike quicksilver. When the characters returned to Adamas (which I'll describe in a moment), they wanted to hire an alchemist to help them identify it. Unfortunately, alchemists are very expensive (250 gp/week) and the characters are cash-poor at the moment.
Their explorations of "Level 2" involved a fight with some more beast-men and a giant spider. There were also some fatalities. A poison gas trap claimed the lives of Erik, Ethil, and Hrothgar. It also nearly killed Brother Candor and Iriadessa, both of whom made their saves by the thinnest of margins. The loss of not one but three of their front-line fighting men was a serious blow to the party. They decided they couldn't continue without first replacing their hirelings (since both Pike and Vladimir were absent this session), so they knew they'd have to ride back to Adamas to do so. They did dispose of all three northern warriors outside of Muntburg, on an alcohol-soaked funeral bier set aflame.
These deaths hit home a bit more than had previous ones, partly because Erik and Ethil were jovial, goofy NPCs who talked like Arnie and had quirky personalities. As it turns out, a pair of women's boots Erik found -- and wore -- were magical boots of levitation. These were removed from his body and replaced with a different pair of women's boots before his body was consigned to the flames. "At least he died with his boots on" was a source of several jokes this session. Brother Candor wears the boots now, but claims his plate mail greaves hide their appearance to anyone who doesn't spend a lot of time looking at his feet.
The characters spent time in Adamas hiring new mercenaries. Brother Candor now employs Wulfhere and Dordagdonar employs Brandis. Both are mighty fighting men and cost a fair bit more to hire than did their deceased comrades. Dordagdonar also "upgraded" Henga the Shield-Maiden to the status of henchman. She is now the longest serving NPC in the party, having been used continuously in every session since she first appeared (unlike Brakk, who was absent in two sessions). While in Adamas, the party spellcasters also learned new spells and Brother Candor formally joined the Church of Tyche's hierarchy. He's now expected to give over 10% of his loot to the high priest in the City-State in exchange for access to the temple libraries and reduced rates on spells, such as raise dead and the like. I'm not sure he's convinced it was a good deal in the end, but it's still too early to tell.
Once again, a good session and one that helped further develop the characters and better establish their place in the world.
Pulp Fantasy Library: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
You know me; I love to stretch definitions to the breaking point. In this case, though, I won't even attempt to argue that L. Frank Baum's 1900 tale, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is a pulp fantasy book, because even I'm not addled enough to make that claim. That said, I do think this children's novel is an important one for our hobby, for reasons I'll now elucidate.I often say that one of the reasons Dungeons & Dragons has been misunderstood by many gamers (and designers) is because they misunderstand its cultural roots. In the late 60s and early 70s, fantasy and science fiction weren't as diverse as they are today. Fans of those genres -- which were generally considered the same genre rather than distinct ones -- all read the same books and authors, creating the common literary culture out of which D&D arose. That's not to say that there wasn't a lot of variation from fan to fan and from place to place, but the underlying foundations for those fandoms showed a high degree of commonality. Thus, allusions to certain characters, situations, and authors were all broadly
understood rather than being opaque or outright impenetrable. The death of that common culture has, in my opinion, led to the distancing of D&D from its roots to the point of unrecognizability.
The story of Baum's novel is another example of a common culture. I suspect most people in the English-speaking world -- certainly in the United States at any rate -- know the story and characters of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. When I was a child, in the benighted days before VCRs and cable television, watching the 1939 Victor Fleming movie was an annual ritual, broadcast each year as a network TV special. People could and still do reference this story with the expectation that just about everyone knows what they mean when they do so. That's what many fantasy and SF stories were like at the dawn of this hobby and it was that kind of ready familiarity that allowed the ideas contained in those three little brown books to catch fire and spread so easily.
There's a catch, of course. When I say that everyone "knows" the story and characters of Baum's novel, that's not entirely truthful. The reality is that the 1939 film changes many elements of the original, just as earlier dramatic productions of the story did, often with Baum's blessing, who regularly wrought his own changes through sequels to the initial book. In Oz fandom -- yes, such a thing does exist -- there are discussions and debates every bit as vociferous as those in this hobby regarding the merits of such changes, not to mention continuations and re-interpretations by later authors. The Oz books are all in the public domain and have been for some time, allowing the original ideas to be picked up and developed further by any author who wishes to do so, leading to a wide variety of non-Baum Oz tales, some of which stray very far from the original intent -- not unlike D&D itself.
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is, if nothing else, a powerful example of fantasy world building. The Land of Oz and its inhabitants have no doubt exercised a powerful influence over the imaginations of many a participant in this hobby, including some of its earliest writers. Oz is a "pure" fantasy world -- a dreamland (though not literally so in the novels, where it's clearly a real place) that obeys its own laws and confounds expectations. It's thus about as far from a naturalistic world as you can get and yet it's drawn so colorfully that one forgets its inherent unreality and simply accepts it for what it is. This approach to fantasy was much more common in the hobby's early days, as anyone who reads the 'zines of the period will know. That's probably why you can find lots of references to Oz-inspired adventures, items, and monsters in their pages. A full treatment of the Land of Oz as a D&D campaign setting was, in fact, promised in the pages of Dragon for many years but never saw print so far as I am aware.
I don't think there's any hiding the fact that I miss the days when the hobby had a stronger common culture -- when one could allude to "The Tower of the Elephant" or "Ill Met in Lankhmar" and not be met with blank stares, when we could cite Manly Wade Wellman or Henry Kuttner and people would not only know to whom you referred but had actually read their fiction. To the extent that such a common culture exists anymore, it comes from the ouroboros of D&D itself, a substitute for the books and authors that once formed the Common Tongue by which gamers conversed. I'm not sure such days can ever return -- the hobby is simply too diverse now -- but I long for it just the same.
Friday, April 3, 2009
The Purpose of Dwimmermount
In thinking about and commenting on other blog posts, I realized that I might never have adequately explained why I'm running Dwimmermount the way that I am: minimal rules and megadungeon-focused. Dwimmermount is explicitly an experiment in seeing how both rules and campaigns develop organically through play. One of my contentions is that the history of D&D is not one of natural evolution at all but of forced evolution, starting with AD&D and continuing down to the present day.
Dwimmermount starts with an approximation of OD&D -- Swords & Wizardry -- that uses minimal material from the supplements. I've purposefully avoided creating lots of new rules for use with the game, because I want new rules to evolve from a pressing need in the game rather than by "designer fiat." For example, we're using straight D6 for all weapon damage. We decided, though, that wielders of two-handed weapon roll 2D6 and take the highest result. When Iriadessa joined the campaign, she started using darts to throw at enemies. What damage should they do? On the fly, I decided she'd roll 2D6 and take the lowest result, because they were small weapons. It was a nice, simple, straightforward solution to a real need in play.
We've made a bunch of other little rules changes here and there, but almost none of them were decided by me in advance of actual play. Dwimmermount is thus partially about seeing how Swords & Wizardry will naturally evolve as a result of the situations that occur in weekly gaming sessions. Already, our game is diverging from the rules as written, but those divergences are not based on theory but on practice. We are in the process of creating our own game, unique from everyone else who plays, and it's the embrace of this process that I see as at the heart of the old school. We don't play in tournaments and so see no need to deform the rules on an a priori basis to accommodate convention play. Neither do we care if gamers outside our group do things differently in their own sessions. Uniformity of rules is not an ideal I hold.
Dwimmermount is focused on the dungeon because the dungeon is a good "training ground" for a new campaign -- it's geographically constrained and able to be developed in manageable chunks. I don't think dungeons are the be-all and end-all of old school play but they are certainly one of the pillars on which old school play is based. I treat the world outside the dungeon much as I treat rules: it develops through play in response to a pressing need. I've done the world building thing many times before and, while I love it, I see no need to build more than I need for each session. That often means making stuff up on the fly when the players go somewhere unexpected or ask questions for which I have no pat answers. But that's what players are supposed to do and being able to come up with answers is what referees are supposed to do.
I leave lots of clues and pointers and tidbits for the players to take up, but I don't push them to do so. If they're uninterested or more focused on other matters, so be it. That's their prerogative, after all. That's what sandbox play means: make of the setting what you will. Again, it's organic, not forced. The key is to be able to think on your toes when suddenly a player wants to journey "off the map" into somewhere you've given no thought to or when he wants to learn more about a hireling who'd previously just been a generic spear-carrier from Central Casting. The setting, like the rules, are living things and they grow best in response to stimulus, not by being force fed.
So that's what Dwimmermount is all about. It's an ongoing experiment and, so far, a very successful one. It's where I put my theories into practice and see if I have any idea what I'm talking about or if, as some have opined, I'm "full of it."It's not intended as a blueprint for anyone else's campaign nor do I think the approach I've taken should be deemed normative. That said, I do think it's valuable for gamers of all stripes to understand there are many paths D&D could have taken in its development and the ones it did take had more to do with business plans than with campaign plans. I'm done being forced to adapt to someone else's vision of how D&D should develop and am embracing my own vision without apology. If that's at all controversial, it sure says a lot about the current state of this hobby.
Dwimmermount starts with an approximation of OD&D -- Swords & Wizardry -- that uses minimal material from the supplements. I've purposefully avoided creating lots of new rules for use with the game, because I want new rules to evolve from a pressing need in the game rather than by "designer fiat." For example, we're using straight D6 for all weapon damage. We decided, though, that wielders of two-handed weapon roll 2D6 and take the highest result. When Iriadessa joined the campaign, she started using darts to throw at enemies. What damage should they do? On the fly, I decided she'd roll 2D6 and take the lowest result, because they were small weapons. It was a nice, simple, straightforward solution to a real need in play.
We've made a bunch of other little rules changes here and there, but almost none of them were decided by me in advance of actual play. Dwimmermount is thus partially about seeing how Swords & Wizardry will naturally evolve as a result of the situations that occur in weekly gaming sessions. Already, our game is diverging from the rules as written, but those divergences are not based on theory but on practice. We are in the process of creating our own game, unique from everyone else who plays, and it's the embrace of this process that I see as at the heart of the old school. We don't play in tournaments and so see no need to deform the rules on an a priori basis to accommodate convention play. Neither do we care if gamers outside our group do things differently in their own sessions. Uniformity of rules is not an ideal I hold.
Dwimmermount is focused on the dungeon because the dungeon is a good "training ground" for a new campaign -- it's geographically constrained and able to be developed in manageable chunks. I don't think dungeons are the be-all and end-all of old school play but they are certainly one of the pillars on which old school play is based. I treat the world outside the dungeon much as I treat rules: it develops through play in response to a pressing need. I've done the world building thing many times before and, while I love it, I see no need to build more than I need for each session. That often means making stuff up on the fly when the players go somewhere unexpected or ask questions for which I have no pat answers. But that's what players are supposed to do and being able to come up with answers is what referees are supposed to do.
I leave lots of clues and pointers and tidbits for the players to take up, but I don't push them to do so. If they're uninterested or more focused on other matters, so be it. That's their prerogative, after all. That's what sandbox play means: make of the setting what you will. Again, it's organic, not forced. The key is to be able to think on your toes when suddenly a player wants to journey "off the map" into somewhere you've given no thought to or when he wants to learn more about a hireling who'd previously just been a generic spear-carrier from Central Casting. The setting, like the rules, are living things and they grow best in response to stimulus, not by being force fed.
So that's what Dwimmermount is all about. It's an ongoing experiment and, so far, a very successful one. It's where I put my theories into practice and see if I have any idea what I'm talking about or if, as some have opined, I'm "full of it."It's not intended as a blueprint for anyone else's campaign nor do I think the approach I've taken should be deemed normative. That said, I do think it's valuable for gamers of all stripes to understand there are many paths D&D could have taken in its development and the ones it did take had more to do with business plans than with campaign plans. I'm done being forced to adapt to someone else's vision of how D&D should develop and am embracing my own vision without apology. If that's at all controversial, it sure says a lot about the current state of this hobby.
My Personal Gaming History
Serendipity is a real phenomenon, especially in a tight-knit community like the old school blogging one. Lately, I've gotten a number of emails and comments asking me about my personal gaming history. Brunomac over at Temple of Demogorgon even wrote a blog entry in which he expresses curiosity about it. I write so much on this blog that I sometimes assume I've covered certain topics when, in fact, I haven't. I guess my gaming history is one such lacuna and I'm starting to wonder if it's been the source of some misunderstandings about me and my perspective on this hobby.
I began gaming in late 1979, over the Christmas break. A good friend of mine had received a copy of Dungeon! We played it over and over again in several marathon sessions and playing it reminded me of "a weird game" my mother had bought for my father some months earlier. That game was the Holmes basic set and it was unopened, because although my father had been talking a lot about D&D in the months after James Dallas Egbert III had vanished, he wasn't actually interested in reading the game itself, let alone playing it. So there it sat in my hallway linen closet, next to some washcloths and bars of soap. I opened up the game and tried to make sense of it, using Dungeon! as a way to fill in the gaps in my understanding of the text. I then took it with me to my friend's house and "taught" him and the rest of my cohort how to play D&D.
Naturally, I had no idea what I was doing and those early "Dungeons & Dragons" sessions bore little resemblance to the game as written -- but we had fun and kept playing it. My friend's older brother, a surly teenager into metal, saw what we were doing and roundly mocked us. He played D&D with his friends and promptly told us everything we were doing wrong. We accepted what he told us at face value -- he was a teenager, after all -- and started playing D&D the "right" way. This led to our playing D&D every opportunity we could throughout 1980, often with my friend's older brother and father, who was a wargamer, acting as co-referees for our games. When they weren't available, which was often, I was usually the referee, as it was agreed by everyone that I "made the best adventures."
We devoured every D&D product we could get our hands on, beginning with the Monster Manual, which we freely used with Holmes. The Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide soon followed. The following year, we added Moldvay/Cook/Marsh to the list, just as we added Mentzer in 1983 and beyond. Our approach to D&D was extremely "ecumenical." We didn't pay a lot of heed to the fine differences between the various editions. We mixed and matched with abandon, using those rules we liked and discarding those we didn't. Given how similar all the existing rules sets were, this was easy and no one ever once felt that we were doing it "wrong," since everyone we knew or met at local hobby shops was doing the exact same thing.
We also devoured pretty much every RPG that came out during the period between 1980 and 1984 or so, with a few exceptions. We played a lot of Traveller back then and it remains one of my favorite games of all time. But we also played Gamma World, Top Secret, Gangbusters, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Boot Hill, and many more. We also played a number of Avalon Hill games. Our interests were quite diverse and, because we spent almost all of our free time playing these games, it wasn't unusual for us to have multiple campaigns running at the same time. Indeed, campaigns would stop and start regularly, sometimes after months-long breaks. D&D and Traveller were our two constants -- they were ongoing almost all the time -- but even they occasionally went "on hiatus," to be replaced by whatever new game caught our fancy.
I happily adopted Second Edition when it was released in 1989 and ran a brief campaign with it when I was in college. But it was very brief and my gaming in general started to decline considerably during the late 80s and early 90s. The only game I kept up with was Traveller, mostly because I loved its Third Imperium setting. In fact, I became involved with a fan organization associated with Traveller called the History of the Imperium Working Group. This led to my first professional publications, in GDW's Challenge magazine, as well as in some official Traveller products. But it's worth noting that, during this time, I wasn't actually playing RPGs much at all. I didn't have the time and I lacked a group, even at college, where roleplayers seemed oddly scarce. Instead, "gaming" had become mostly an intellectual exercise of worldbuilding and an outlet for my pent-up desire to be a writer of fiction.
When I attended grad school, it just happened that one of my contacts in the History of the Imperium Working Group lived in the same city. He had a group of regular players and I joined it. We played a lot of games together over the course of several years, including 2e, TORG, Star Trek, Star Wars, GURPS, and Call of Cthulhu. I had a lot of fun, more fun than I'd had in some time. This reignited the my love of roleplaying, leading me to check out lots more games, some of which I never managed to play with this group. Chief among these were the various White Wolf games, which I initially resisted, seeing them as too "pretentious" for my tastes. I was eventually won over by the cleverness of the central concept of Mage: The Ascension and then later by Wraith: The Oblivion, which appealed to me for more reasons than I can say.
Around the same time, my new group had fallen apart and I'd grown disenchanted with 2e, leading to several years during which I didn't play D&D at all. I played in several long-ish but irregular campaigns. What characterized most of them was that they were very "story-oriented." That is, the referee had worked out lots of details, including scenes, well in advance of our getting to them through play. Back then, this approach to gaming was a revelation to me and one I readily embraced, emulating it in my own failed attempts to start up new campaigns. (This period was characterized by lots of abortive campaigns, all ended because they didn't "catch fire" with my players immediately) I also started writing professionally in earnest at this time, working for many companies, including White Wolf.
I remained a strong advocate of a story-based approach to gaming during this time, never once fazed by the fact that I'd never actually managed to get the approach to work in practice. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized where the flaw lay in the approach. In two cases, campaigns had ended before reaching their "conclusion." So the referee later told us, in very precise detail, what would have happened in the campaign had they continued. These were, I cannot deny, great stories. We loved hearing them told to us and we all regretted that we'd never had the chance to play them. The problem is, we'd never have gotten a chance to play them, because, even had the campaigns continued, their direction was largely foreordained. Rather than being organic developments that grew through the interaction of referee and players, they were novels in spoken form. What we provided was mostly dialog and some minor plotting but the arrangement of scenes and arc of the plot were wholly outside our control. And yet we ate it up.
D&D's Third Edition drew me back to my old love and I played it enthusiastically for about five years, running one long campaign and playing in another. Both campaigns could be called "epic" and, again, were very story-focused, with many events occurring according to a plan hatched by the referee. Neither was as heavy-handed as those campaigns from the 90s, but they were still far removed from the kind of anything-goes freeform play I remember from the early 80s when I played RPGs most avidly. I continued to write a lot during this period, particularly for D20 publishers. Ironically, I think it was my deeper involvement with game professionally that had killed my interest in 3e as a pastime. I came to see it as overly complex mechanically and increasingly deracinated culturally to hold my interest.
Around 2005, I began to look into alternatives. I still wanted to game but I wanted to play games that were more in tune with my growing desire for simple rules and literary antecedents. This desire initially took me to Castles & Crusades, because I knew Gary Gygax was associated with it and figured that, if it were good enough for Gary, it was good enough for me. C&C is a good game, but it didn't scratch the particular itch I had. I despaired for a while about ever finding the game that would meet my idiosyncratic needs. I spent some time trying to make it for myelf, "rebuilding" 3e according to my understanding of D&D's origins and focus. Bit by bit, though, I realized that I was just reinventing the wheel, which is why, in 2007, I turned my back on D&D in its modern forms and embraced OD&D (and, now, Swords & Wizardry).
My gaming history continues, of course. It remains in a constant state of flux and I think it's important people understand that. The past few years have been very instructive for me, as I've been able to examine what I like and why and have made steps toward ensuring I have more of that in my gaming rather than less. I think the two most salient points are these: the best gaming I ever had was back when I just gamed and let "story" take care of itself and I like simple rules. Taken together, they explain my preference for the Old Ways.
They also explain my dislike for much of what is now called "roleplaying." It's not that I think there's anything wrong with other approaches so much as I don't enjoy those other approaches and don't see much commonality with what I want out of gaming. I've been there and done that already, professionally even, and, most of the appeal of that style is long gone. But make no mistake: I'm not, as some would say, retreating into the past. What I am doing now with my Dwimmermount campaign, for example, is not nostalgia. I'm not trying to relive, let alone recreate, my memories of 1981 or any such thing. I couldn't do such a thing, even if I tried (or wanted to). What I am doing, though, is using what I have learned to have fun with some old games and encouraging others to do the same.
That's what it's all about, isn't it?
I began gaming in late 1979, over the Christmas break. A good friend of mine had received a copy of Dungeon! We played it over and over again in several marathon sessions and playing it reminded me of "a weird game" my mother had bought for my father some months earlier. That game was the Holmes basic set and it was unopened, because although my father had been talking a lot about D&D in the months after James Dallas Egbert III had vanished, he wasn't actually interested in reading the game itself, let alone playing it. So there it sat in my hallway linen closet, next to some washcloths and bars of soap. I opened up the game and tried to make sense of it, using Dungeon! as a way to fill in the gaps in my understanding of the text. I then took it with me to my friend's house and "taught" him and the rest of my cohort how to play D&D.
Naturally, I had no idea what I was doing and those early "Dungeons & Dragons" sessions bore little resemblance to the game as written -- but we had fun and kept playing it. My friend's older brother, a surly teenager into metal, saw what we were doing and roundly mocked us. He played D&D with his friends and promptly told us everything we were doing wrong. We accepted what he told us at face value -- he was a teenager, after all -- and started playing D&D the "right" way. This led to our playing D&D every opportunity we could throughout 1980, often with my friend's older brother and father, who was a wargamer, acting as co-referees for our games. When they weren't available, which was often, I was usually the referee, as it was agreed by everyone that I "made the best adventures."
We devoured every D&D product we could get our hands on, beginning with the Monster Manual, which we freely used with Holmes. The Players Handbook and Dungeon Masters Guide soon followed. The following year, we added Moldvay/Cook/Marsh to the list, just as we added Mentzer in 1983 and beyond. Our approach to D&D was extremely "ecumenical." We didn't pay a lot of heed to the fine differences between the various editions. We mixed and matched with abandon, using those rules we liked and discarding those we didn't. Given how similar all the existing rules sets were, this was easy and no one ever once felt that we were doing it "wrong," since everyone we knew or met at local hobby shops was doing the exact same thing.
We also devoured pretty much every RPG that came out during the period between 1980 and 1984 or so, with a few exceptions. We played a lot of Traveller back then and it remains one of my favorite games of all time. But we also played Gamma World, Top Secret, Gangbusters, Call of Cthulhu, Champions, Boot Hill, and many more. We also played a number of Avalon Hill games. Our interests were quite diverse and, because we spent almost all of our free time playing these games, it wasn't unusual for us to have multiple campaigns running at the same time. Indeed, campaigns would stop and start regularly, sometimes after months-long breaks. D&D and Traveller were our two constants -- they were ongoing almost all the time -- but even they occasionally went "on hiatus," to be replaced by whatever new game caught our fancy.
I happily adopted Second Edition when it was released in 1989 and ran a brief campaign with it when I was in college. But it was very brief and my gaming in general started to decline considerably during the late 80s and early 90s. The only game I kept up with was Traveller, mostly because I loved its Third Imperium setting. In fact, I became involved with a fan organization associated with Traveller called the History of the Imperium Working Group. This led to my first professional publications, in GDW's Challenge magazine, as well as in some official Traveller products. But it's worth noting that, during this time, I wasn't actually playing RPGs much at all. I didn't have the time and I lacked a group, even at college, where roleplayers seemed oddly scarce. Instead, "gaming" had become mostly an intellectual exercise of worldbuilding and an outlet for my pent-up desire to be a writer of fiction.
When I attended grad school, it just happened that one of my contacts in the History of the Imperium Working Group lived in the same city. He had a group of regular players and I joined it. We played a lot of games together over the course of several years, including 2e, TORG, Star Trek, Star Wars, GURPS, and Call of Cthulhu. I had a lot of fun, more fun than I'd had in some time. This reignited the my love of roleplaying, leading me to check out lots more games, some of which I never managed to play with this group. Chief among these were the various White Wolf games, which I initially resisted, seeing them as too "pretentious" for my tastes. I was eventually won over by the cleverness of the central concept of Mage: The Ascension and then later by Wraith: The Oblivion, which appealed to me for more reasons than I can say.
Around the same time, my new group had fallen apart and I'd grown disenchanted with 2e, leading to several years during which I didn't play D&D at all. I played in several long-ish but irregular campaigns. What characterized most of them was that they were very "story-oriented." That is, the referee had worked out lots of details, including scenes, well in advance of our getting to them through play. Back then, this approach to gaming was a revelation to me and one I readily embraced, emulating it in my own failed attempts to start up new campaigns. (This period was characterized by lots of abortive campaigns, all ended because they didn't "catch fire" with my players immediately) I also started writing professionally in earnest at this time, working for many companies, including White Wolf.
I remained a strong advocate of a story-based approach to gaming during this time, never once fazed by the fact that I'd never actually managed to get the approach to work in practice. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized where the flaw lay in the approach. In two cases, campaigns had ended before reaching their "conclusion." So the referee later told us, in very precise detail, what would have happened in the campaign had they continued. These were, I cannot deny, great stories. We loved hearing them told to us and we all regretted that we'd never had the chance to play them. The problem is, we'd never have gotten a chance to play them, because, even had the campaigns continued, their direction was largely foreordained. Rather than being organic developments that grew through the interaction of referee and players, they were novels in spoken form. What we provided was mostly dialog and some minor plotting but the arrangement of scenes and arc of the plot were wholly outside our control. And yet we ate it up.
D&D's Third Edition drew me back to my old love and I played it enthusiastically for about five years, running one long campaign and playing in another. Both campaigns could be called "epic" and, again, were very story-focused, with many events occurring according to a plan hatched by the referee. Neither was as heavy-handed as those campaigns from the 90s, but they were still far removed from the kind of anything-goes freeform play I remember from the early 80s when I played RPGs most avidly. I continued to write a lot during this period, particularly for D20 publishers. Ironically, I think it was my deeper involvement with game professionally that had killed my interest in 3e as a pastime. I came to see it as overly complex mechanically and increasingly deracinated culturally to hold my interest.
Around 2005, I began to look into alternatives. I still wanted to game but I wanted to play games that were more in tune with my growing desire for simple rules and literary antecedents. This desire initially took me to Castles & Crusades, because I knew Gary Gygax was associated with it and figured that, if it were good enough for Gary, it was good enough for me. C&C is a good game, but it didn't scratch the particular itch I had. I despaired for a while about ever finding the game that would meet my idiosyncratic needs. I spent some time trying to make it for myelf, "rebuilding" 3e according to my understanding of D&D's origins and focus. Bit by bit, though, I realized that I was just reinventing the wheel, which is why, in 2007, I turned my back on D&D in its modern forms and embraced OD&D (and, now, Swords & Wizardry).
My gaming history continues, of course. It remains in a constant state of flux and I think it's important people understand that. The past few years have been very instructive for me, as I've been able to examine what I like and why and have made steps toward ensuring I have more of that in my gaming rather than less. I think the two most salient points are these: the best gaming I ever had was back when I just gamed and let "story" take care of itself and I like simple rules. Taken together, they explain my preference for the Old Ways.
They also explain my dislike for much of what is now called "roleplaying." It's not that I think there's anything wrong with other approaches so much as I don't enjoy those other approaches and don't see much commonality with what I want out of gaming. I've been there and done that already, professionally even, and, most of the appeal of that style is long gone. But make no mistake: I'm not, as some would say, retreating into the past. What I am doing now with my Dwimmermount campaign, for example, is not nostalgia. I'm not trying to relive, let alone recreate, my memories of 1981 or any such thing. I couldn't do such a thing, even if I tried (or wanted to). What I am doing, though, is using what I have learned to have fun with some old games and encouraging others to do the same.
That's what it's all about, isn't it?
Thursday, April 2, 2009
Witnesses for the Prosecution
Here are a couple of selected bits of text from Castle Greyhawk I missed the other day while skimming through the module to re-acquaint myself with it.
On the door leading to this chamber is a sign reading “PRIVATE KEEP OUT.” From here Mordenkainen carries on all of his day-to-day operations. The office features a large ivory desk (worth 750 gp), a collection of file cabinets stuffed full of old papers, and the fabled hot tub of relaxation. Mordenkainen himself will be in the hot tub with Fiona, his very special friend, when the PCs enter.and
* Paper #2: The first page of the fantasy movie script:I think it's hard to argue that these two selections aren't direct references to Gary Gygax and indeed, as pointed out in the comments, the entire level from which they come seems to be a send-up of Gary's time in California as part of the Dungeons & Dragons Entertainment Corporation. Regardless of whether one sees these references as "gentle" ribbing or not, I think it speaks volumes about the post-Gygax corporate culture of TSR that such things were allowed to be published in the first place.
“FANTASY THE MOVIE
A Screenplay by Edgar Gordon Galaxy
We Need More Erol Otus
If anyone ever asks you about the enduring appeal of Erol Otus, show him this illustration from 1981's Expert Rulebook. It remains, hands down, one of the best depictions of any undead creature in any edition of Dungeons & Dragons.
Seriously.
Seriously.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Retrospective: Castle Greyhawk
Worst. Module. Ever.I try very hard not to be hyperbolic on this blog; I know I often don't succeed. But I am hard pressed to think of any module published under the Dungeons & Dragons banner that was worse than 1988's Castle Greyhawk. Consider: Gary Gygax's legendary Castle Greyhawk had never seen publication except in snippets (such as Dungeonland, Land Beyond the Magic Mirror, and Isle of the Ape). There were occasional -- unrealized -- intimations by Gary that TSR might one day published this megadungeon in a more complete form. When module WG7 was released, as part of the World of Greyhawk brand, no less, I am sure many expected it to be the fulfillment of a long-held dream. I know I did.
Unfortunately, Castle Greyhawk is more nightmare than dream -- a puerile, unfunny collection of shlock. "The common theme of this dungeon is that no joke is so old, no pun is so bad, and no schtick is so obvious that it can’t be used to confuse and trip up PCs!" That sums it up pretty well in my opinion and, if it hadn't been for the fact that the module was released in the wake of Gygax's ouster from TSR -- an event that shook the industry and the hobby -- I probably wouldn't regard this module with such bile. As it is, the entire thing comes off as a sophomoric attempt to belittle one of the co-creator's of the game and to destroy the game world he created for it.
Now, I'm not sure that it was in fact such a thing. Given that its twelve levels were written by a variety of freelancers, some of them extremely talented and well regarded (Paul Jaquays and Steve Perrin being stand-outs), it's quite possible that the whole thing wasn't so much a concerted attack on Gygax as a project that got out of control and took on a ridiculous life of its own. On the other hand, as many on this blog can attest, the late 80s were a time when many at TSR did make a real effort to besmirch Gary's reputation (This is when the ludicrous "Gary was a cokehead" rumor was started, after all). Likewise, Castle Greyhawk's ham-handed use of puns and pop cultural references (to Star Trek, for example) could quite plausibly be interpreted as pointed at Gygax, who both enjoyed humor and often included allusions and outright borrowings from pop culture in his home campaign.
My own sympathies lie with those who see WG7 as anti-Gygax, but I can't be certain there's any truth to it. Another possibility might have been that, while its origin wasn't defamation, the fact that it could be read that way tickled some of the higher ups at TSR, knowing they could hide behind plausible deniability should anyone confront them on the matter. Interestingly, this module's implicit criticism of Gary lives on at the Wizards of the Coast website, where an article by John Rateliff blames Gygax himself for laying the groundwork for this terrible module: "the parody element [of Dungeonland and Land Beyond the Magic Mirror] opened the door for the later WG7, Castle Greyhawk (1988)."
Since the article contains numerous factual and interpretive errors about the history of the hobby (such as not knowing who Eric Shook was, for example), it's easy to dismiss as errant nonsense, but it speaks volumes about the long shadow Gary casts over this hobby. He was a colossus and it's perhaps unsurprising that so many people wanted to "expose" him as having feet of clay. It's regrettable that Castle Greyhawk was ever published. Whether or not it was intended as a jibe against Gary, few can say, but I think it's certain that this module was ill-conceived, badly done, and a slap in the face of Greyhawk fans, who'd been hoping to see more of the real Castle Greyhawk, a dream that remains unfulfilled over 20 years after the release of this module.
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