Retrospective: Shadowlord!

My post last Friday about Dragonmaster elicited some commentary that reminded me of another fantasy-themed game I used to enjoy as a younger man: Shadowlord! Shadowlord! was a Parker Brothers boardgame published in 1983 intended for 2-4 players. It was took place in a weird fantasy/sci-fi amalgam setting once ruled over by the benevolent Starmaster, whose power to move planets and create starships from dust was contained within a mystical Power Stone. The Starmaster hoped, upon his death, that one of his four children, the Masters of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water, would take up his mantle and use the Power Stone to continue to rule the universe wisely. Unfortunately, when the Starmaster finally did die, it was not one of his children but the evil Shadowlord who seized the Power Stone, which he used to rule as a nigh-omnipotent tyrant.

It's an interesting set-up for a game, in which each of the players takes the role of one of the four Element Masters and attempts to wrest the Power Stone from the Shadowlord and hold it long enough to win the game. As they attempt to do so, players recruit followers -- warriors, merchants, diplomats -- each of which has not only a special ability based on their class but also a card with a name and illustration. Again, it's easy to see why I had such a fondness for this game: it had a lot of great components, including the first use of non-standard dice outside of an RPG that I can recall. Shadowlord! used d8s for its resolution mechanics.

Ultimately, though, what I remember most about Shadowlord! is the way that it unabashedly mixed wizards and spaceships with reckless abandon. Back in 1983, this was a novel concept to me. Back then, people often used the term "science fantasy" or "space fantasy," but that was usually in reference to something like Star Wars, which was for all intents and purposes science fiction, merely of a very non-rigorous sort. Seeing characters dressed like wizards or elves and flying around in spaceships was something else entirely. Or at least it was to me, but then it was long ago established that I have a limited imagination.

It's been years since I looked at Shadowlord! let alone played it. I played it a lot back when I first got my copy and enjoyed it. It'd be interesting to play it again someday and see if it still holds up after all these years.

Book Lust ... Rising

It's not for nothing that S.T. Joshi's H.P. Lovecraft: A Life is lauded as a great biography of the Old Gent. I've read the thing from cover to cover several times (this summer being the most recent time) and I always find something new and insightful in its pages. I really can't say enough good things about it. So, when I discovered that Joshi had written a second biography of HPL -- and a two-volume one at that -- I was dumbstruck.

I Am Providence was apparently published last year and I had no idea. That's probably a good thing, since I would have been awfully tempted to buy it. Still, at $100, it's a bit pricey for me, especially when I already have his earlier biography. On the other hand, biblio- and Lovecraft-ophile that I am, it's so very enticing. And my birthday is coming up too ... Damn.

Naming Your Campaign

I was chatting with Victor Raymond the other night and he noted how common it used to be to name one's campaign. You didn't ask your friends, "Hey, you want to go over to Bob's place and play D&D tonight?",  you said, "Hey, you want to go over to Bob's place and play in his Everwhen campaign tonight?" When I was younger, I remember the older guys used to talk this way and so it was something I consciously imitated. It made sense, too, since I'd always read about Gary Gygax's "Greyhawk campaign" and, much later, Ed Greenwood used to speak of "Forgotten Realms campaign" in the pages of Dragon. Plus, gamers were always saying stuff like, "In my Emaindor campaign, I don't allow Neutral-aligned clerics" or "In my Dark Realms campaign, I allow half-elves to take up any class."

Until Victor reminded me of this, I'd forgotten about this phenomenon, even thought I've actually talked about it before, if only obliquely. My gut instinct is that naming one's campaign is a way of clearly establishing it as its own unique thing. Sure, the referee may use the D&D rules, but those rules are subservient to the campaign itself, as imagined by the referee. So, if the referee doesn't like demihuman level limits or wants to introduce level 10 spells for magic-users, he does so and no one gives it much thought, because this is his campaign. I'm always gladdened when I see this tradition of old continued today. It's a small thing perhaps, but I like the practice of naming one's campaign and all that it implies.

The Articles of Dragon: "A Special Section: Dwarves"

For issue #58 (February 1982) of Dragon, I'm going to cheat a little -- well, a lot -- by focusing on not just one but four different articles. I think it's justified, though, because the articles cover closely related topics and three of them were written by a single author, the inestimable Roger E. Moore, in those days not yet the editor-in-chief of Dragon. "A Special Section: Dwarves" is also an important collection of articles, one that, in my opinion, marks a turning point in the history of D&D. Indeed, it's a collection that makes me wonder if perhaps the Silver Age didn't begin sooner than I have suggested in the past, for these articles were extremely influential and ushered in not just explicit follow-ups by Moore himself, but also a growing codification of not just D&D's non-human races but many other aspects of its fictional milieu.

The first of the four articles is "The Dwarven Point of View," which presented a psychology of the dwarves, explaining aspects of their thoughts process and, by extension, the society and culture that arose from them. "Bazaar of the Bizarre" featured two new (and forgettable) dwarven magic items, while "Sage Advice" answers a battery of increasingly nitpicky questions about dwarves. "The Gods of the Dwarves" is probably the most well-known of the four dwarf articles in issue #58, if only because it was officially canonized by Gary Gygax, who included it in his 1985 Unearthed Arcana expansion to AD&D. I'll also never forget "The Gods of the Dwarves" because it included an illustration depicting Berronar, the dwarven goddess of safety, truth, and home, with a beard:

I've long had a fondness for this piece of artwork, both because I relentlessly used it to bludgeon those who denied that female dwarves had beards (in contravention of both Tolkien and Gygax -- so you know it had to be true!) and to emphasize that dwarves weren't just short, stocky humans. They were, effectively, an alien race and to expect them to conform to human ways was absurd, not to mention demonstrating a severe lack of imagination.

When this quartet of articles was released, I adored them and made every effort to incorporate as much of them into my ongoing campaign as I could. Nowadays, I have much more mixed feelings about them, chiefly because they, almost certainly unintentionally, became the fount from which subsequent discussion of dwarves flowed. That is, later writers -- and even TSR itself -- treated Moore's ideas as normative, the result being that, as the '80s wore on, the portrayal of dwarves in D&D became less diverse. At the time, I didn't care; indeed, I was very happy with "official" information on dwarves and all the demihuman races, because I wanted my campaign to conform to the conceptions of my betters in the hobby. In retrospect, though, I feel less happy with these articles and wish their influence had been more limited.

Pulp Fantasy Library: City of the Chasch

Reflecting on the primary literary inspirations of Dungeons & Dragons, one does not often hear Jack Vance's "Planet of Adventure" series mentioned. This is odd, as Gary Gygax frequently made mention of these stories in his recollections of his Greyhawk campaign. Indeed, he makes explicit reference to the stories in the Dungeon Masters Guide and notes that they could be used as models for adventures by the enterprising referee in his own campaign. The series began in 1968 with the novel, City of the Chasch, and continued through three more books published between '68 and 1970.

City of the Chasch tells the tale of two scouts sent from Earth to investigate a mysterious signal sent from a world some 200 light years away. When the scouts arrive at their destination, their spacecraft is attacked by a torpedo from the planet's surface. The scouts, named Adam Reith and Paul Waunder, escape the destruction of their craft in a smaller vessel, which is itself damaged in the attack. Nevertheless, they manage to eject from the smaller vessel and land in a forest on the world below.

To their surprise, Reith and Waunder discover that the planet is inhabited by humans of a primitive sort, some of whom are attracted to the crash site. While stuck in a tree and unable to get down, Reith watches these humans arrive and kill Waunder, as well as the arrival of not one but two other groups of human, both of which seem to be slaves of different alien races, the blue-skinned Chasch and the tall, thin Dirdir. The wreckage of his ship hauled away by the Chasch and their "Chaschmen" slaves, Reith is eventually "rescued" by Onmale Traz, whose own tribe of humans makes him a slave.

While among this tribe, Reith learns a little more about this strange planet, which is called Tschai. Tschai is home to several alien species, each of which uses humans as slaves in their seemingly-eternal war against one another for dominance. Reith becomes convinced that these humans had been kidnapped from Earth some time in the distant past and, therefore, the aliens pose a threat to his home. Fortunately for him, Traz comes to like and trust him and aids him in escaping the tribe before its magician-leaders castrate him as punishment for his lack of docility.

Once free, Reith and Traz join a caravan that is traveling across Tschai, going from city to city. This enables the pair to visit many strange locales and meet many people, thereby pushing the story forward, as Reith attempts to find his stolen ship, repair it, and escape from Tschai. Of course, things are not quite so simple, as Reith soon learns, and it will in fact take several more books his adventures are resolved. Of course, like most Jack Vance stories, City of the Chasch is a picaresque; the journey is more important than the destination. And also like most Jack Vance stories, the tale is told engagingly, filled with exotic vista, bizarre situations, and fascinatingly quirky characters. It's a very fun read that reminiscent of many earlier sword-and-planet stories and yet still possessed of its own unique flavor. I heartily recommend it and its sequels if you've never had the chance to read them.

Getting There

The layout is getting better, I think. There are still a lot of rough spots to tweak, but it's shaping up quite nicely. Here's a nice two-page spread, complete with illustrations and revamped tables.

Capital Ship

Some more Thousand Suns artwork, because ... why not?

©2011 David Dietrick

October is shaping up to be another busy month for me; fortunately, it's also looking to be a productive one. I make no promises about anything (except Thousand Suns, since it's being laid out right now), but it looks like a number of long-delayed projects are breaking free from the logjam and that makes me very happy indeed. With luck, it'll be an emotion shared by others. More details on this soon.

Open Friday: Other Games

Though initially RPGs and RPG campaigns were heavily inspired by literature, it didn't take long before other media made their influence felt -- including other games. This was true even of myself, who generally tried to avoid mixing one game with another back in the day. But, for my 12th birthday in 1981, I was given a card game called Dragonmaster and I fell in love with its beautifully illustrated deck, whose suits depicted four contending noble families. In fairly short order, I found myself using the cards to represent NPCs in my campaign, a practice I continued for a very long time.

Though I no longer have the game -- though I wish I did -- I think back fondly on how I used it in conjunction with D&D. So, my question for today is: did anyone else do something similar with a non-RPG? If so, what non-RPG game did you incorporate into your roleplaying campaign and how?

Progress

I'm continuing to get a handle on the basics of laying a book out with a word processor, but progress is definitely being made. Again, it's nothing fancy, but it's legible and, more importantly, it's getting done, which isn't something I could have said a little while ago.

Ever onward.

The Articles of Dragon: "Modern Monsters"

When I was a kid, the idea of mixing magic and technology was (largely) blasphemous. For some reason, it offended my youthful sensibilities, which insisted that fantasy and science fiction were two separate genres of literature, the division between which was impermeable. It took my purchase of Expedition to the Barrier Peaks (and, later, Blackmoor) to soften my stance on this question, but, even then, I was still instinctively opposed to the notion, despite ample evidence that the older generation of gamers, to whom I looked up, had no such qualms about it.

Consequently, I was equally baffled by both the sections of the Dungeon Masters Guide that included guidelines for converting Gamma World and Boot Hill characters to AD&D (and vice versa) and by articles like "Modern Monsters" in issue #57 (January 1982) of Dragon. I can't be certain, but I think this was the first article I ever read written by Ed Greenwood and I didn't think much of it at the time. Stats for cars and bazookas? Advice and guidelines regarding the functioning of magic in modern, technological worlds? Why? What was the point?

Now, there was no question that Greenwood's article was well presented and made ready use of ideas and suggestions from earlier articles (like James Ward's "Monty and the German High Command," for example). Heck, the article even had footnotes, citing not just previous Dragon material but a host of classic fantasy and SF literature where magic and technology contended. But none of that moved me and I found myself unable -- or unwilling -- to shake off the staid notion that six-guns and sorcery should never appear side by side. It's only been in recent years that I've abandoned my adolescent scruples regarding genre mixing and happily included robots and laser pistols in my fantasy without regret. Live and learn!