Learning to See Again

Who knew that getting a new pair of glasses -- bifocals, admittedly -- would necessitate training your brain to see again?

Life is ever a discovery.

Retrospective: Pavis

Of all the things I missed out on because of my youthful prejudice against RuneQuest, I think it's "dungeoncrawling Glorantha" that I feel most acutely these days. "Dungeoncrawling Glorantha" is my shorthand for the Chaosium presentation of the setting, back when most published scenarios and setting packs focused at least in part (if not wholly) on exploring ruins and caves, beating up their inhabitants, and taking their stuff to fund your quest for power. Like a lot of gamers in days of yore, I uncritically accepted the notion that RuneQuest was fundamentally different from D&D and thus largely inaccessible to anyone not already initiated into its alien mysteries. So I missed out not just on a really great game during the heyday of its popularity and creativity but also on some truly excellent RPG products, such 1983's Pavis: Threshold to Danger.

This boxed set, written by Greg Stafford and Steve Perrin, consisted of three books (a player's book, a referee's book, and a scenario book), along two large maps. The set describes, as its name suggests, the city of Pavis -- or rather the city of New Pavis, for old Pavis is now an extensive ruin known simply as "the Rubble," on the outskirts of which New Pavis has been built. Armed with that information alone, I'd have found Pavis an intriguing product. The re-casting of the megadungeon concept as an entire ruined city is a terrific one that, strangely, hasn't been used very often, to my disappointment. And if one still wishes to argue that RuneQuest is fundamentally different than Dungeons & Dragons, Pavis might be a good place to make that argument, for, while it's true that the Rubble is essentially an above ground megadungeon, its context is unlike that of a traditional megadungeon. Indeed, it's this context that I think makes Pavis such a great product.

Pavis, both old and New, is located in the region known as Prax, which is currently under military occupation by the Lunar Empire. Consequently, New Pavis, though filled with all manner of rogues and ne'er-do-wells (aka the player characters) isn't just some lawless frontier town. The Lunars are attempting to bring some semblance of order to this barbarian settlement and thus provide excellent villains (or at least antagonists) in a Pavis-based campaign. Likewise, New Pavis is near the ruins of the old and that history, too, plays a part, as cultures and cults maneuver in the background to gain advantage over one another and against the Lunar occupiers. The result is, I think, an entertaining mix of factions and influences, any one of which could easily serve as the basis for many adventures without even taking into account unique aspects of the area, such as the River of Cradles, so named for the cradles of baby giants that have been known to float down its length toward the sea and whose appearance is the occasion for great tumult.

New Pavis itself is fleshed out in considerable detail. Each of the city's seven neighborhoods is given its own treatment, complete with buildings, encounters, and NPCs. This makes it easier to use New Pavis as the "home base" for the PCs as they explore the surrounding region, including the Rubble. As with many RuneQuest supplements, the amount of information presented is considerable, which more or less demands that the referee spend considerable time beforehand reading and re-reading the contents of the boxed set to get a good handle on it. Fortunately, New Pavis isn't so bizarre a locale that a talented referee couldn't "wing it" when necessary and, for all its detail, there's still plenty of room for individualizing the city with one's own locales and NPCs.

I like Pavis a lot. It's a well-presented city that could easily serve as the basis for a campaign on its own, never mind as the springboard for something greater. My main criticism of it is that there are often times when I felt that it included too much detail, or at least far more than I wanted. There is, for example, a lot of history to digest, not to mention cultural and religious information. It can certainly be argued that all of this provides context useful to the referee in giving his adventures more depth and "reality." I don't dispute that, but I do think that, for some referees, it may prove off-putting enough that they'll ignore many of the better ideas included in Pavis, which would be a shame, because there's a lot of goodness to be found within its pages. In that respect, Pavis is emblematic of so much of Glorantha -- excellent ideas presented in a way that might turn away many of the gamers who'd most enjoy them.

The Ads of Dragon: Twilight: 2000

Issue #93 (January 1985) featured a multi-page advertisement that included the following:

I've written before about Twilight: 2000 and the weird place it occupies in my memories and imagination. I'll add that this advertisement, along with others like it, was very effective in grabbing my attention. For all the faults one can find with it (and the game itself), it did a superb job of capturing the Zeitgeist in a way that few RPGs prior to this time did. Again, I don't want to unduly praise Twilight: 2000 as a timeless classic of the hobby. Indeed, it's just the opposite of that, since it's very much rooted in its time. Yet, there remains, for me anyway, something strangely compelling about it and advertisements like this played a big role in fostering that feeling.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Dreams in the Witch House

Among the many ideas that H.P. Lovecraft popularized in the field of pulp fantasy is the notion that "magic" is nothing more than supremely advanced science as seen from the perspective of one who does not understand its workings. He returns to this idea again and again in his works, perhaps nowhere more explicitly -- and effectively -- than in "The Dreams in the Witch House," first published in the July 1933 issue of Weird Tales. The story takes its title from the disturbing dreams experienced by a mathematics student at Miskatonic University named Walter Gilman. Gilman has taken up residence in the former haunt of Keziah Mason, a woman reputed to have been a witch in the 17th century and who supposedly escaped capture by means of her black magic. The Witch House has an evil reputation and, over the course of the centuries since Mason's disappearance, its inhabitants have died under mysterious circumstances.

It's precisely for this reason that Gilman decides to rent a room in the Witch House.

Gilman believed strange things about Keziah, and had felt a queer thrill on learning that her dwelling was still standing after more than 235 years. When he heard the hushed Arkham whispers about Keziah's persistent presence in the old house and the narrow streets, about the irregular human tooth-marks left on certain sleepers in that and other houses, about the childish cries heard near May-Eve, and Hallowmass, about the stench often noted in the old house's attic just after those dreaded seasons, and about the small, furry, sharp-toothed thing which haunted the mouldering structure and the town and nuzzled people curiously in the black hours before dawn, he resolved to live in the place at any cost.

As it turns out, lodging at the Witch House is unpopular, owing to the dark legends associated with it, and he finds it easy to obtain a room there. Gilman's interest in Keziah Mason is at least partly "professional," for he had come "to connect his mathematics with the fantastic legends of elder magic" and to believe that "a mediocre old woman of the seventeenth century [had] an insight into mathematical depths perhaps beyond the utmost modern delvings of Planck, Heisenberg, Einstein, and de Sitter."

The story's titular dreams are bizarre and frightful, filled with images and feelings Gilman cannot quite explain. Others seem almost real and feature not just the reputed witch Keziah Mason but also her grotesque familiar, Brown Jenkin, a huge rat with human hands and feet. While these dreams disturbed Gilman, they also seemed to have aided him in unexpected ways:

He was getting an intuitive knack for solving Riemannian equations, and astonished Professor Upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored all the rest of the class. One afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the trans-galactic gulfs between themselves -- or even as fabulously remote as the tentatively conceivable cosmic units beyond the whole Einsteinian space-time continuum. Gilman's handling of them filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity.

As his dreams take on an ever more nightmarish turn, Gilman discovers signs that he is sleepwalking and that, seemingly, Keziah Mason is urging him to join her in her dark activities, leading Gilman to question his sanity. "The Dreams in the Witch House" continues on in this vein, leading to a conclusion that is far from satisfying as a piece of fiction, even if it does further advance Lovecraft's thesis that magic is nothing more than misunderstood advanced science.

I've always been fond of "The Dreams in the Witch House" myself, but it's generally held to be one of HPL's weaker efforts, particularly among recent critics who (mistakenly in my view) see Lovecraft primarily as a cosmic "philosopher" rather than a pulp fantasist who used cosmicism to embellish his tales. For them, "Dreams in the Witch House" is too lurid and conventional in places -- a crucifix, given to Gilman by a Catholic priest, fends off Keziah Mason at one point -- to be a "true" Lovecraft story. Leaving that aside, there's no question that the story's plot is weak and characterizations thin, but, even so, its central ideas are compelling, compelling enough that I can find pleasure in it nonetheless. Is it one of Lovecraft's best? Certainly not but it's still an intriguing bit of fiction that I continue to find enormously inspiring.

REVIEW: Song of the Beast-Gods

As regular readers of this blog ought to know, I haven't counted myself a fan, let alone a player, of D&D III for many years now. Indeed, it was my dissatisfaction with that game that brought me back to the games I played in my youth and that I'm playing today. Consequently, I haven't been keeping a close eye on events in the D20 world; it's generally only when someone brings one of its products to my attention that I take notice. It's rare still that I find myself enjoying a D20 product enough that I wish there were some way I could work it into my OD&D campaign -- but that's exactly how I felt after I read Morten Braten's adventure, Song of the Beast-Gods.

This should come as no surprise, since I'd already read and enjoyed Braten's previous adventure The Spider-God's Bride, which, like the present one, is written for the D20 system and set in a fantasy world called Xoth. Xoth is a fascinating setting, calling to mind both Howard's Hyborian Age and Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, suffused with hints of eldritch horror. It's almost tailor-made for the kinds of pulp fantasy adventures I most enjoy. This fact probably goes a long way toward explaining why I found it easy to overlook the D20 stat blocks and related mechanics and see Song of the Beast-Gods for what it is: a fun sword-and-sorcery adventure for characters of 2nd to 3rd levels.

Before discussing the contents of this adventure, allow me to briefly discuss its appearance and presentation. Like its predecessor, Song of the Beast-Gods uses a two-column layout for its dense text. I occasionally found it slightly hard to read, but that probably says more about my aging eyes than the layout itself. Maps, important details, and notes to the referee are highlighted through the use of boxes. Titles and headers use evocative -- but legible -- fonts that contribute greatly to the pulp fantasy feel of the adventure, as does the artwork, which is a mix of original pieces and public domain engravings. All in all, Song of the Beast-Gods is attractive and well put together, something I find particularly impressive because it's the product of a one-man operation, with Braten acting as writer, cartographer, and graphic designer.

The adventure itself concerns events in the city of Khadis, where, until two decades ago, the Great Red Sphinx "was placated every year with offerings of treasure and blood." That all changed, when the High King of Yar-Ammon instituted a religious revolution that overthrew the old gods, such as the Great Red Sphinx, and replaced them with a previously unknown deity, the First One. To cement this reformation, the petty king of Khadis sacrificed his eldest daughter, who was being groomed as a priestess in the old faith, to the First One, an act that reverberates even unto the present day, when the player characters make their appearance ...

It's difficult to say more about the adventure without spoiling its secrets. Suffice it to say that events two decades ago did not go quite the way that history records them. This provides an opening for the PCs to become enmeshed in several plots within the city of Khadis that have far-ranging repercussions. What I most liked about Song of the Beast-Gods was that it is, at its heart, a location-based adventure. Certainly, there are plots, but these plots are the plans of various people seeking to take advantage of the situation in Khadis rather than a foreordained sequence of events the referee is expected to follow. Thus, there are no pre-arranged "scenes" or lengthy sections of boxed text to be read as long-winded NPCs try to involve the PCs in their schemes. Instead, what we get are situations, along with detailed descriptions of adventuring locales -- the city, the royal palace, dungeons -- and it's up to the players and referee to use those things to craft an adventure of their own.

For this reason, I think it'd be quite easy to ignore even the situations described in the adventure and simply use its maps, locales, and new monsters on their own. Of course, doing so would deprive one of what I think is a terrific scenario filled with both exuberant sword-and-sorcery excitement and the potential for further developing the fallout from the events the PCs set in motion. Song of the Beast-Gods is the kind of adventure that could easily kick off an entire campaign and a pretty interesting one at that. That alone makes it worth the $5 cost of the PDF ($12 for print). My only real qualm in recommending this adventure is that it's not specifically written for older versions of D&D and thus using it will require a certain amount of conversion but nothing too onerous. In the end, it's Morten Braten's ideas that are this product's main selling point and they're very compelling if, like me, you prefer your fantasy with a healthy dose of pulp.

Presentation: 8 out of 10
Creativity: 8 out of 10
Utility: 8 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a well-done, low-level sword-and-sorcery adventure and don't mind doing a little conversion work.
Don't Buy This If: You either have no interest in sword-and-sorcery or are unwilling to convert D20 mechanics to your preferred system.

Whither Dwimmermount?

As  most of you know, the Dwimmermount campaign went on hiatus when one of its key players moved away while he hoped he'd still be able to make it into the city on a semi-regular basis to get together, that hasn't happened. Now, to be fair to the player in question, the way things developed in campaign is entirely my fault. When I began the campaign way back at the beginning of 2009, I'd hoped that, with enough players and with a megadungeon at the center of things, I could avoid just what happened. I had hoped that, as in the earliest days of the hobby, individual characters wouldn't become the focus of the campaign, that role being taken by Dwimmermount itself.

Unfortunately, as players dropped out of the campaign or showed up ever more regularly, I failed to replace them and so, inevitably, the campaign did become focused on a handful of characters, the loss of any one of which made it ever more difficult to continue playing. Had I done what I'd originally intended to do, I should have been recruiting more players all along, with the understanding that only some of them would continue to play with any devotion, while many, if not most, of them would be drop-ins who showed up more rarely. Had I done that, I think the campaign could have weathered the loss of a single player. Indeed, the very idea of a "key player" is antithetical to the kind of campaign I was hoping I'd actually run. I guess old habits die very hard.

Of course, a few weeks ago, I got the chance to run a couple of levels of Dwimmermount with a group of total strangers at OSRCon and it was a blast. The rekindled in me thoughts of my original goal for the campaign: a "rotating cast" of players all of whom explored the same megadungeon. That idea would work, I think, if I had ready access to a site other than my home at which to meet. I say that because, while I have had very large numbers of players in my house at any one time, it can get crowded and less conducive to the kind of play I prefer these days. Likewise, given that, under my original conception of things, I might not know who is going to show up in advance, I think I'd find it easier to manage at some "neutral" locale -- like the "games day" meet-ups or gaming clubs I remember from my youth.

The obvious solution, of course, is to turn to Google+ and the other online tools that are fueling ConstantCon and I will admit the thought is an attractive one. The biggest issues for me are twofold. First, finding a time when I can do this without distraction. During most days, I am not alone in my house, which means that I'm primarily restricted to the evenings, after my family has gone to sleep. That's fine, but I need to sleep, too, so this would likely mean a fairly small sliver of time in the late evenings -- say, between 10 PM and 12 AM EST -- and I'm not sure that's enough time, especially if I only do this once or twice a week. Second, Google+, as I understand it, works best with four players and a referee, which, again, is fine, but that means I'm either going to have to severely limit the number of players who join the campaign or I'm going to have a largely different crew every session, which rather undermines the notion of a campaign. I say "severely limit," because, based on the emails I have received, a very large number of people want in on any online Dwimmermount campaign I might theoretically start. Even if I am picky in whom I choose, we're still talking a lot more possible players than I've ever had access to locally -- an embarrassment of riches indeed!

Meanwhile, one of the remaining players of the Dwimmermount campaign has kindly offered to run a low-key Labyrinth Lord + AEC campaign set in the world of Red Tide for my wife, my daughter, and I. My wife's not really a roleplayer. She enjoys the idea of it and is obliquely interested in fantasy (though not necessarily "D&D fantasy") and decided to give it a try. My daughter, of course, is very interested in both roleplaying and fantasy. She was drawn to this idea because Red Tide includes several Asian-derived cultures and, these days, she's quite fascinated by all things Japanese. Me, I'm just happy to be able to play once in a while rather than referee, which is my usual role. We've only had one session so far, but it was enjoyable and I look forward to more. As the campaign progresses, I'm sure I'll have things to share about it here.

Open Friday: Beyond D&D

A constant refrain of this blog is that D&D's days as a pop cultural force are long gone, its position usurped by by other entertainments. Despite that, D&D's influence lingers -- so much so, in fact, that one regularly encounters examples of ideas, concepts, and terminology that originated in Dungeons & Dragons even today. For example, just the other day I came across a depiction of an ebon-skinned, white-haired elf whose creator called it a "drow," even though it had nothing to do with the iconic evil demihumans created by Gary Gygax. Indeed, it's quite possible that the image's creator had never played D&D and simply knew that dark elves are called "drow," much in the way he also knows that bestial humanoids are called "orcs" without having read The Lord of the Rings.

So, for today's topic: what's the strangest example you've seen of D&D's pervasive pop cultural influence beyond our little hobby? I'm not talking about specific references to D&D in pop culture, like an episode of a TV show or a movie where some of the characters actually play the game or talk about it. What I'm interested in are times when you've seen or heard something in pop culture that is clearly derived from D&D but is presented without its original D&D context, like calling a generic dark elf a "drow."

I'll be very curious to see what people have to offer.

Distinctively D&D

In running Dwimmermount, I've made use of material from all the OD&D rulebooks, including all the supplements. This is in keeping with my "D&D 0.75" approach to the game -- more complex than a pure White Box campaign but not full bore proto-AD&D either. So, if you play in my Dwimmermount campaign, you'll find magic items, character classes, and spells from sources other than the LBBs, though, in most cases, I use them as "spice" rather than as the "main course," if that makes sense. The one area where I haven't made extensive use of the supplements is monsters. In general, I've stuck primarily to the monsters found in Volume 2 of OD&D, supplemented by beasties of my own creation. The reason for this is simple: I find most of the monsters introduced in the supplements too distinctive for use in my campaign. By that, I mean that most of them feel too strongly associated with D&D.

Now, that probably sounds like crazy talk and perhaps it is. After all, I am playing D&D; why wouldn't I want monsters that are strongly associated with D&D in my campaign? Well, the game rules I'm using may be D&D but I don't think of the world I'm describing through them to be a "D&D world." To me, it's merely a fantasy world -- a fine distinction, maybe, but a real one. To put it in more concrete terms, nothing about the presence of, say, a goblin or even an orc in an adventure suggests anything about the nature of the world outside that adventure. But a beholder? An umber hulk? A sahuagin? Demogorgon and Orcus? Monsters like those carry with them certain larger assumptions, or at least expectations, that I don't want brought into my campaign.

Obviously, there are degrees here and everyone will personally draw their lines on different places in the sand. For example, I don't have any problem with carrion crawlers or displacer beasts in my Dwimmermount campaign, even though both of these creatures are rightly, in the minds of many, seen as "D&D monsters." So, I can imagine someone feeling similarly about beholders or ixitxachitl, while I reject them both as so strongly tied to a certain specific conception of D&D that I don't want to bring to bear in Dwimmermount. If I were playing a Greyhawk-based campaign, though, I wouldn't hesitate to use most of these creature, because, to me, they're part and parcel of Oerth.

At the same time, I want to go on record as disliking the approach adopted most famously by Lamentations of the Flame Princess wherein every monster is unique. To me, that'd be like playing AD&D using Appendix D of the DMG in place of the Monster Manual. Certainly it'd make it harder for players to use their much-hated metagame knowledge to their characters' advantage, but I've come to believe that, the more of D&D's fundamental building blocks one rejects, the less the game feels like something recognizable to anyone outside that campaign -- and monsters are a very important building block. Which ones we use (or don't) can have wide-ranging consequences.

The Ads of Dragon: Paranoia

Appropriately enough, the final issue of the year 1984 (#92) saw the appearance of this ad:

Paranoia is a game about which I've written before. It's also a game for which I have many fond memories, despite some of my misgivings about what its appearance heralded for the hobby. On that point, I think it interesting that it appeared when it did. While I'm pretty sure that the 1984 release date was, in part, an attempt to play off its pop cultural associations to Orwell, I can't help but wonder if Paranoia is the kind of RPG that could only have been written a decade after the public dawn of the hobby. By that I mean that Paranoia is clearly the product of a mature/decadent and inward-focused hobby and would thus have been impossible to imagine much prior to this point in history.

That's why I can't shake the feeling that 1984 really does mark an important year for the hobby -- the high tide of its mass market faddishness, when designers and publishers alike began to realize that the future, such as it was, lay in selling more, different games to a shrinking market of hardcore devotees. Or maybe I'm just overthinking this, as I so often do ...

Retrospective: Wilderlands of High Fantasy

I think it's fair to say that two of the lasting effects of the old school renaissance are the popularization of the term "sandbox" to refer to an open-ended campaign setting and the holding up of Judges Guild's The Wilderlands of High Fantasy as the premier example of a sandbox setting. The term "sandbox" is one I'd never heard, let alone used, in a tabletop RPG context until a few years ago, being, ironically, borrowed from the world of video games. And, while I knew of The Wilderlands of High Fantasy and even used it (briefly) back in the day, I never held it up as a model I wanted other campaign settings to emulate. How things change!

Originally released in 1977, The Wilderlands of High Fantasy is one of oldest published settings for use with Dungeons & Dragons. Nowadays, the release of a new campaign setting is often met with disinterest and even eye rolls, in part, I suspect, because campaign settings have become a very common product in the years since this was released. In 1977, though, this wasn't the case and one sometimes gets the impression that there was some skepticism among even their creators that gamers would have any interest in such a thing. Consider, for example, that the credits to The Wilderlands includes the following disclaimer:

All within are merely inspiration for the active and pontifical judges of the guild. Please alter, illuminate, expand, modify, extrapolate, interpolate, shrink, and further manipulate all contained to suit the tenor of your campaign.

I really like that quote and it nicely highlights one of the continually fascinating things about the Wilderlands setting: it's very flexible, even protean. Every time I have ever encountered or heard of a referee using it for their home campaign, I've been struck by just how different his home campaign is, not only from the "official" Wilderlands as published by Judges Guild but also from every other Wilderlands campaign run by other referees.

A big part of why this is the case is that The Wilderlands of High Fantasy, despite focusing on five of the sixteen regions of the overall Wilderlands setting, nevertheless devotes a lot of its 32 pages to collections of random tables and new rules. Thus, there are tables for ruins, caves, and lairs, in addition to rules for hirelings, prospecting, and income, among other topics. These tables and rules are clearly designed to facilitate campaigns where the characters wander about the world, exploring it hex by 1056-foot hex, in search of fame and fortune according to their own lights rather than any overarching plan concocted by the referee beforehand.

Another big part of why Wilderlands campaigns differ so much from one another is the sketchy nature of the setting information The Wilderlands of High Fantasy presents. A typical settlement is given a name, a population, a racial "type," general alignment, the name and characteristics of its ruler, and its primary resource. Hexes containing features of interest get a single line of description, such as "The crystallized skeleton of a dragon turtle is buried on the sandy beach. The skull houses a giant leech." There are no game stats or explanation here, just a very basic idea for the referee to read and, it is hoped, to be inspired by.

As a younger person, the Wilderlands didn't thrill me much and the presentation of the setting in products like The Wilderlands of High Fantasy was the main reason why. From my youthful perspective, I felt that authors Bob Bledsaw and Bill Owen hadn't done "enough work" for me. Sure there were maps, including player's maps that didn't have complete information about settlements and geographic features, but what I really wanted was a lengthy historical overview of the setting and more detailed information about its peoples and locales. The Wilderlands of High Fantasy gave me none of that, instead expecting that I'd fill in those blanks myself, using the vague details, random tables, and new rules as raw materials from which to craft my own setting. After all, that's what being a referee is all about, isn't it?