OSRIC Players Reference Available

As impressive as the current release of OSRIC is -- especially in its Black Blade Publishing version -- it's probably a little too impressive to be used as a player's reference book. At nearly 400 pages, OSRIC includes a lot of material intended for use by the referee rather than by players. That's where the OSRIC Players Reference comes in. It strips OSRIC down to the 140 pages that players require to generate characters and to play the game at the table.

You can get the PDF version of the book for free at the link above. Alternately, you can get a print version from Lulu.com in either a regular or pocket size. Both are inexpensively priced and for use with the current version of the hobby's first retro-clone. If you're using OSRIC at your table, the Players Reference is definitely worth taking a look at.

The Ads of Dragon: Sandman

Issue #99 (July 1985) of Dragon had an advertisement for a game that I will long remember:

Sandman may not be the strangest game ever published in the annals of the hobby, but it's probably the strangest game I ever purchased. As you might guess based on the ad's description of Sandman as a "game of dramatic entertainment," Sandman presented itself as something different from the average roleplaying game. Each player took on the role of an amnesiac traveler in a surreal world with which they weren't familiar, so there was no need for character generation or world information, which theoretically made it suitable for complete novices. The idea was that the players would learn about the game's weird setting and their characters through play over the course of many adventures, four of which were included in the initial Map of Halaal boxed set.

Had the game line continued, there'd have been several more boxed sets, each of which provided more clues about the nature of the characters, the setting, and the titular Sandman, a mysterious being who seems to know who the characters are and may or may not be responsible for their presence in the game's bizarre world. Discovering the identity of the Sandman was also the goal of a contest offering a $10,000 prize to the winner. So far as I know, no one ever won the prize, but that might have more to do with the fact that Pacesetter went out of business sometime in 1986 or thereabouts.

As I said, I owned Sandman and was very intrigued by its basic premise, but I never actually played it. Part of it was that I found the adventures very railroad-y, a flaw that I fear was inherent in the nature of the game, given its premise. Likewise, there was no way a referee could create his own adventures, since he knew almost as little as the players about the setting, the characters, or the Sandman. This meant continued play depended on buying future Sandman boxed sets, a notion that didn't sit well with me, even before I discovered that no more boxed sets would be forthcoming. In the end, Sandman had the germs of some good ideas, but its execution left much to be desired and so it remains a curiosity of the hobby rather than a well-loved classic.

Pulp Fantasy Library: A Martian Odyssey

One of the intriguingly unexplored areas of D&D's prehistory is the extent to which science fiction ideas influenced the imaginations of both Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax. Certainly we can all point to the presence of spaceships in Blackmoor and Greyhawk as evidence that SF had an influence, but were there any specific stories or authors whose influence is noteworthy. In the case of Gary Gygax, one such author was undoubtedly Stanley Weinbaum.

Gygax includes Weinbaum in Appendix N (and its equivalent in Mythus) and regularly mentioned him in the various Q&A threads as an author "very key to my thinking." That's probably because of Weinbaum's posthumously published novel, The Black Flame, which mixed science and magic in a post-apocalyptic setting. But Weinbaum made his name with his short story, "A Martian Odyssey," which first appeared in the July 1934 issue of Wonder Stories. The story was incredibly influential and often anthologized, so it seems likely that Gary would have read it. Even if he didn't, I suspect another founding father of the hobby did, as I shall discuss shortly.

"A Martian Odyssey" tells the story of a chemist by the name of Dick Jarvis, who, in the 21st century is one of four crew members aboard a rocket ship called the Ares. The vessel is, as its moniker suggests, sent to explore Mars, landing in the Mare Cimmerium (I can't help but wonder if the selection of this locale was a nod to Robert E. Howard or merely coincidental). Alone, Jarvis uses an auxiliary rocket to explore the region to the south of the landing site. When his rocket suffers a malfunction, Jarvis crash lands and decides to hike his way back to the Ares rather than wait for rescue. While on his trek northward, he encounters a strange bird-like creature being attacked by another tentacled beast:

"I wasn't going to interfere, naturally; if both creatures were dangerous, I'd have one less to worry about. 

"But the bird-like thing was putting up a good battle, dealing vicious blows with an eighteen-inch beak, between screeches. And besides, I caught a glimpse or two of what was on the end of those arms!" Jarvis shuddered. "But the clincher was when I noticed a little black bag or case hung about the neck of the bird-thing! It was intelligent! That or tame, I assumed. Anyway, it clinched my decision. I pulled out my automatic and fired into what I could see of its antagonist.

"There was a flurry of tentacles and a spurt of black corruption, and then the thing, with a disgusting sucking noise, pulled itself and its arms into a hole in the ground. The other let out a series of clacks, staggered around on legs about as thick as golf sticks, and turned suddenly to face me. I held my weapon ready, and the two of us stared at each other.

"The Martian wasn't a bird, really. It wasn't even bird-like, except just at first glance. It had a beak all right, and a few feathery appendages, but the beak wasn't really a beak. It was somewhat flexible; I could see the tip bend slowly from side to side; it was almost like a cross between a beak and a trunk. It had four-toed feet, and four fingered things—hands, you'd have to call them, and a little roundish body, and a long neck ending in a tiny head—and that beak. It stood an inch or so taller than I, and—well, Putz saw it!"

The engineer nodded. "Ja! I saw!"

Jarvis continued. "So—we stared at each other. Finally the creature went into a series of clackings and twitterings and held out its hands toward me, empty. I took that as a gesture of friendship."

"Perhaps," suggested Harrison, "it looked at that nose of yours and thought you were its brother!"

As Jarvis soon discovered, the bird-like creature is in fact an intelligent being named Tweel -- "At least, Tweel is as near as I can pronounce it without sputtering. He called it something like 'Trrrweerrlll.'" Tweel chooses to accompany Jarvis on his journey toward the Ares, along the way picking up just enough English to converse:

"Then, for variety, Tweel would display his smattering of English words. He'd point to an outcropping and say 'rock,' and point to a pebble and say it again; or he'd touch my arm and say 'Tick,' and then repeat it. He seemed terrifically amused that the same word meant the same thing twice in succession, or that the same word could apply to two different objects. It set me wondering if perhaps his language wasn't like the primitive speech of some earth people—you know, Captain, like the Negritoes, for instance, who haven't any generic words. No word for food or water or man—words for good food and bad food, or rain water and sea water, or strong man and weak man—but no names for general classes. They're too primitive to understand that rain water and sea water are just different aspects of the same thing. But that wasn't the case with Tweel; it was just that we were somehow mysteriously different—our minds were alien to each other. And yet—we liked each other!"

"Looney, that's all," remarked Harrison. "That's why you two were so fond of each other."

"Well, I like you!" countered Jarvis wickedly. "Anyway," he resumed, "don't get the idea that there was anything screwy about Tweel. In fact, I'm not so sure but that he couldn't teach our highly praised human intelligence a trick or two. Oh, he wasn't an intellectual superman, I guess; but don't overlook the point that he managed to understand a little of my mental workings, and I never even got a glimmering of his."

Part of Weinbaum's appeal, then and now, was that his aliens were both, well, alien and sympathetic. They're weren't just bug-eyed monsters lusting after our women. They were intelligent, thoughtful, and peculiar in their thought processes. In this respect, they were more real than most of their contemporaries or predecessors and, while such depth is commonplace nowadays, it wasn't in 1934. In short, Weinbaum was a pioneer in creating believable, unusual alien beings.

The remainder of "A Martian Odyssey" consists of the journeys of Jarvis and Tweel and the friendship that is forged between these inhabitants of two worlds. I won't say any more about what happens to them or what they encounter, because it'd spoil a good story well told. However, I will mention that, at one point in their journeys, the duo encounter another set of alien beings described thusly:

"Man, talk about fantastic beings! It looked rather like a barrel trotting along on four legs with four other arms or tentacles. It had no head, just body and members and a row of eyes completely around it. The top end of the barrel-body was a diaphragm stretched as tight as a drum head, and that was all.

Does that not sound more than a little like the Ahoggyá of Tékumel? Perhaps I am reading too much into this description; if so, it wouldn't be the first time. But given how heavily involved Professor Barker was in early SF fandom (publishing a fanzine in 1950, for example), I don't think it's a stretch to think that he might have been influenced by a classic of the genre when it came time to imagine one of the weirder alien beings of his own SF setting. Regardless, "A Martian Odyssey" is a fun read and well worth tracking down if you've never read it before.

In Case You're Wondering ...

... yes, posting and correspondence have both been a lot lighter this month than is usual and for that I apologize. The reason for that is that the revised rulebook for Thousand Suns is in final layout and I've been going over it very carefully so that it's as close to perfect as possible. I know that the moment the book is printed and in my hands, I'll turn to a random page and find a typo or a dropped word or some rules error, but I'm still making every effort to ensure that's not the case.

With luck, it'll only be another week or so before this project is put to bed and I can return to my usual schedule. In the meantime, enjoy this piece of artwork from the revised rulebook:

©2011 Mike Vilardi

If You Want to Feel Really Old ...

... consider the fact that today is Mark Hamill's 60th birthday.

Hobbit Birthdays

Quite a few people emailed me today to remind me that today, September 22, is the date Tolkien chose for the birthdays of both Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. Since I'm still in the midst of reading The Lord of the Rings aloud to my daughter -- we're just about to be introduced to Théoden -- and enjoying it immensely, I appreciate being reminded of this. My thanks to all who did so.

(As an aside, I thought I'd mention that, as is my wont, I like to include illustrations to accompany my posts, especially short, insubstantial ones like this one. Unfortunately, it's exceedingly difficult these days to find illustrations of Bilbo and/or Frodo -- never mind both of them together -- that don't come from Peter Jackson's movies. Talk about colonizing the imagination!)

The Ads of Dragon: Music for Adventure Gaming

I am not, I readily admit, a very musical person, which no doubt explains my bafflement at the ubiquity of digital audio players in the world outside my home. Unsurprisingly, I've also never quite understood talk about "gaming music," as if what every RPG session was more noise to distract people from what was happening at the table. But, as is often the case, I must be in the minority here, because, for almost as long as I can remember, many of my fellow gamers have been searching for "background music" to play during their adventures. Someone obviously recognized this desire and so produced this advertisement in issue #98 (June 1985) of Dragon:

There are many interesting things about this ad, perhaps most notably that Lotus Records thought Dragon might be a good place to sell belly dancing music. That's right: Ramal LaMarr is (or was -- I'm not sure if he's still alive) a composer of "Middle Eastern" music frequently used by belly dancers, both professional and amateur. Here's the original cover of "Album I" referenced in the ad:

As you can see, the guy in the horned headgear from the ad also appears on the cover of the album. I haven't been able to track down the cover of the second album, but if anyone can do so, I'd be very interested in seeing it.

As much as the Toys "R" Us ad from a couple of days ago, this ad says a lot, I think, about how big a market RPGs still represented in the mid-1980s. Why else would a record company attempt to pass off belly dancing music as "music for adventure gaming" and in the pages of Dragon no less? They must have figured they'd get enough sales from gullible gamers that it'd justify the money spent on the ad. Regardless, it's a very strange advertisement, certainly one of the odder ones I remember from Dragon, even if it is from close to the end of the days when I still subscribed to the magazine (a topic to which I'll return next week).

Retrospective: Inferno

I've talked about my love of Dante in the past, which is why it's odd that I hadn't yet done a retrospective on the 1980 Judges Guild module Inferno. Written by Geoffrey O. Dale, the module is, in the author's own words, "based primarily upon the poem 'Inferno' by Dante" and offers up the first four of Hell's nine circles for use as a location for D&D adventures. The fifth circle was recently published in the pages of Fight On! magazine and there has been talk of the other circles appearing in the future, thereby completing a project begun more than three decades ago.

Inferno is most definitely a location-based module, as there is no "plot" or "story" laid out in its pages. Instead, Dale presents Hell as a place to characters who read cursed scrolls or who are victims geas or quest spells cast by irritated high-level NPCs. He also offers it as a "power base to the evil immortals in the campaign." Hell is thus a powerfully malign "wilderness" to explore, filled with foes, treasures, and even "dungeons" -- after all, what is Hell but Creation's most famous dungeon?

For what it is, Inferno is actually pretty well done. It hews closely to Dante in many places, even when this contradicts the conception of devils already in place in AD&D by 1980. At the same time, it's also odd when Dale decides to throw parts of D&D's own mythology into the mix, such as Tiamat's having a lair on the first level of Hell. The result is a strange melange that's neither truly Dante nor wholly compatible with "standard" AD&D (unlike, say, Ed Greenwood's articles on the same subject in the pages of Dragon). It's quite compelling nonetheless and I find it easy to be drawn in by Dale's presentation of Hell as a playground for D&D adventurers, even if part of me recoils at the liberties this module takes with its literary source material in places.

Ultimately, though, what sits least well with me about Inferno is that, like so much of Dungeons & Dragons -- and indeed fantasy generally -- it "steals a lot of bases" in its cosmology. That is, Inferno presents us a gaming version of an elaborate medieval imagination of Hell and yet does so without reference to the single most important source of this imagination: Christianity. Now, I understand why this is the case, but it doesn't make it any less problematic. D&D has long suffered as a result of Gygax and Arneson's personal scruples regarding the depiction of Christianity in the game. Much of the time, this isn't a huge problem and can easily be handwaved away. That's just not the case when you're dealing with Dante's Inferno, a work of art that simply doesn't make much sense if it's ripped from its proper context, as it is here. Consequently, Inferno feels very odd to me, like a modern production of a medieval passion play where great effort was made to downplay anything specifically religious and instead focusing primarily on the fantastic and -- especially -- the grotesque.

The Ads of Dragon: Toys "R" Us

Issue #97 (May 1985) contained an advertisement that, as is often the case, nicely illustrates a difference between the hobby of a quarter-century ago and the present:

I've remarked many times before that, in my youth, RPGs could be found just about everywhere, including department stores. Toy stores, like Toys "R" Us, not only carried roleplaying games but also hex-and-chit wargames, as well as miniatures and paints. Even as late as 1985, by which point the hobby was probably already declining, it wasn't unusual to see ads like this one -- and not just in the pages of Dragon either. I distinctly recall seeing this ad (or one very like it) in a local newspaper. Also of interest are the prices listed. The Mentzer-edited Basic Set sold for $8.96, which is less than $20 in today's money. That's a pretty good deal; I can't think of the last time a non-crippleware RPG cost so little.

Pulp Fantasy Library: Shambleau

Pulp fantasies are often criticized for, among other things, their purple prose and, while it's true that more than a few of them are overwrought in this area, I can't help but think that this quality sometimes lends them a certain power. Take, for example, the beginning to C.L. Moore's debut story, "Shambleau," which first appeared in the November 1933 issue of Weird Tales:

Man has conquered Space before. You may be sure of that. Somewhere beyond the Egyptians, in that dimness out of which comes echoes of half-mythical names -- Atlantis, Mu -- somewhere back of history's first beginnings there must have been an age when mankind, like us today, built cities of steel to house its star-roving ships and knew the names of the planets in their own native tongues -- heard Venus's people call their wet world "Sha-ardol" in that soft, sweet, slurring speech and mimicked Mars's guttural "Lakkdiz" from the harsh tongues of Mars's dryland dwellers. You may be sure of it. Man has conquered Space before, and out of that conquest faint, faint echoes run still through a world that has forgotten the very fact of a civilization which must have been as mighty as our own. There have been too many myths and legends for us to doubt it.

That's probably one of my favorite openings of any pulp fantasy and certainly one of Moore's best. It not only sets the stage for this terrific and frightful tale but it's simply evocative in its own right. Moore's future world was conceived more than three decades before Man has stepped foot on the Moon, so it's not surprising that her conception of an inhabitable -- and inhabited -- solar system might seem quaint to 21st century readers. And, yet, for all their scientific implausibility, there's something very compelling in her sci-fi yarns, something mythic, as stated in the excerpt quoted above.

Of course, Moore's SF stories, "Shambleau" not least among them, are helped by her protagonist, Northwest Smith, who, I am convinced, is one of the principal inspirations for Han Solo. Smith is a dark-haired smuggler who travels the solar system in his seemingly unremarkable but surprisingly fast spaceship, the Maid, accompanied by a Venusian named Yarol. Like Solo, Smith is a cynical and self-serving rogue, yet he's got a good heart and usually ends up doing the right thing in spite of his natural inclinations. He's a fun character and makes it easy to overlook the implausibilities of Moore's fictional future history.

The presents story takes place on Mars, where Smith comes across a mob about to violently vent its anger on a "sweetly made" girl whom they taunt with the mysterious name of "Shambleau." The smuggler, "though he had not the reputation of a chivalrous man," decides to intervene, stepping in front of them, drawing an arc in the slag pavement with his heatgun, and daring anyone to cross it. Smith is baffled by the mob's behavior.

"What do you want with her?" he demanded.

"She's Shambleau, I tell you! Damn your hide, man, we never let those things live! Kick her out here!"

The repeated name had no meaning to him, but Smith's innate stubbornness rose defiantly as the crowd surged forward to the very edge of the arc, their clamor growing louder. "Shambleau! Kick her out here! Give us Shambleau! Shambleau!"

Smith dropped his indolent pose like a cloak and planted his feet wide, swinging up his gun threateningly. "Keep back!" he yelled. "She's mine! Keep back!"

These words seem to get a reaction out of the mob, who were at once puzzled and disdainful at Smith's declaration.

"It's -- his!" and the pressed melted away, gone silent, too, and the look of contempt spread from face to face. 

The ex-Patrolman spat on the slag-paved street and turned his back indifferently. "Keep her, then," he advised briefly over one shoulder. "But don't let her out again in this town."

I do not think I am spoiling the short story by revealing here that the woman whom Smith saved is not all that she appears to be. Indeed, Smith soon finds himself in unexpected danger thanks to his defense of the object of the mob's ire. Beyond that, I won't say any more, because it'd spoil a suspenseful, strangely sensual, pulp adventure. If you've never read "Shambleau" before, you ought to do so. It's one of Moore's best tales and is a fine introduction both to her as a writer and to Northwest Smith and the universe he inhabits. The first time I read it I was hooked and quickly devoured the dozen or so other stories in which Smith appears. I'd be amazed if other weren't similarly entranced.