Cleaning House

I periodically go through moments when I feel that I need to clear out my gaming collection of books and boxed sets I'll never use. I'm in the midst of one right now, but I've so far managed to keep it in check because of three things. First, I remember all too well having disposed of almost all of my Traveller stuff in high school (in the idiotic belief that Traveller: 2300 had "superseded" it) and I don't want to find myself re-purchasing stuff later that I thought I'd never need/want again. Second, deciding just what constitutes a gaming product I'll never want again for any purpose is a tough question. I mean, I'm pretty darn sure I'll never play Unknown Armies (to cite an obvious example), but will I never want to read it again for any reason? Finally, assuming I can overcome the first two hurdles, how do I get rid of all this stuff? Selling it seems the obvious solution, but I'm a fundamentally lazy person and dealing with the hassle of packaging stuff up and shipping it to various buyers may be more trouble than just leaving it all in boxes in my garage.

So, anyone out there have any experience with this sort of "problem?" If so, what did you do about it? How did you handle the various pitfalls I've discussed above? I ask because, truly, I'd like to pare down my gaming collection considerably, but the logistics of doing so in a way I won't later regret elude me.

Mad Aspiration

Though both Boston (where he was born) and Virginia (where he spent a good portion of his life) probably have a greater claim to him, as a Baltimorean, I've always had an attachment to Edgar Allan Poe, who was born on this day 203 years ago. Poe's last days were in my home town and he's interred there at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, which is now owned by and part of the University of Maryland School of Law. For sixty years, Poe's grave was visited by a mysterious individual known as locally as the "Poe Toaster," who placed three roses and a partially consumed bottle of French cognac on his grave every January 19th. This tradition is one I remember well from my own childhood, though it appears to have ended in 2009, as the Toaster has not appeared since then, including this year.

Poe is not listed in Gary Gygax's Appendix N as an influence on AD&D, which is hardly surprising. Nevertheless, Poe had a profound influence on H.P. Lovecraft, whose works Gygax does cite as among the most influential on the game. In this way, Poe might be deemed a "great-grandfather" of our beloved fantasy game. Lovecraft adored Poe and wrote highly of him in his 1927 essay Supernatural Horror in Literature:

It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's fame has been subject to curious undulations, and it is now a fashion amongst the "advanced intelligentsia" to minimize his importance both as an artist and as an influence; but it would be hard for any mature and reflective critic to deny the tremendous value of his work and the persuasive potency of his mind as an opener of artistic vistas. True, his type of outlook may have been anticipated; but it was he who first realized its possibilities and gave it supreme form and systematic expression. True also, that subsequent writers may have produced greater single tales than his; but again we must comprehend that it was only he who taught them by example and precept the art which they, having the way cleared for them and given an explicit guide, were perhaps able to carry to greater lengths. Whatever his limitations, Poe did that which no one else ever did or could have done; and to him we owe the modern horror-story in its final and perfected state.  

High praise indeed, especially from a man who himself has probably contributed more to modern conceptions of horror than almost anyone else. HPL goes on to explain why Poe is so important:

Before Poe the bulk of weird writers had worked largely in the dark; without an understanding of the psychological basis of the horror appeal, and hampered by more or legs of conformity to certain empty literary conventions such as the happy ending, virtue rewarded, and in general a hollow moral didacticism, acceptance of popular standards and values, and striving of the author to obtrude his own emotions into the story and take sides with the partisans of the majority's artificial ideas. Poe, on the other hand, perceived the essential impersonality of the real artist; and knew that the function of creative fiction is merely to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of how they tend or what they prove -- good or evil, attractive or repulsive, stimulating or depressing, with the author always acting as a vivid and detached chronicler rather than as a teacher, sympathizer, or vendor of opinion. He saw clearly that all phases of life and thought are equally eligible as a subject matter for the artist, and being inclined by temperament to strangeness and gloom, decided to be the interpreter of those powerful feelings and frequent happenings which attend pain rather than pleasure, decay rather than growth, terror rather than tranquility, and which are fundamentally either adverse or indifferent to the tastes and traditional outward sentiments of mankind, and to the health, sanity, and normal expansive welfare of the species.  

Lovecraft was particularly awed by "The Fall of the House of Usher," Poe's 1839 masterpiece, which is famous for both its descriptive details and its psychological complexity. It is the story of an unnamed narrator's time with Roderick Usher and his twin sister Madeline, who inhabit a decaying and crumbling mansion which Roderick believes to be "alive." Lovecraft was quite taken with this tale (as were many others):

These bizarre conceptions, so awkward in unskillful hands, become under Poe's spell living and convincing terrors to haunt our nights; and all because the author understood so perfectly the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness -- the essential details to emphasise, the precise incongruities and conceits to select as preliminaries or concomitants to horror, the exact incidents and allusions to throw out innocently in advance as symbols or prefigurings of each major step toward the hideous dénouement to come, the nice adjustments of cumulative force and the unerring accuracy in linkage of parts which make for faultless unity throughout and thunderous effectiveness at the climactic moment, the delicate nuances of scenic and landscape value to select in establishing and sustaining the desired mood and vitalising the desired illusion -- principles of this kind, and dozens of obscurer ones too elusive to be described or even fully comprehended by any ordinary commentator. Melodrama and unsophistication there may be -- we are told of one fastidious Frenchman who could not bear to read Poe except in Baudelaire's urbane and Gallically modulated translation -- but all traces of such things are wholly overshadowed by a potent and inborn sense of the spectral, the morbid, and the horrible which gushed forth from every cell of the artist's creative mentality and stamped his macabre work with the ineffaceable mark of supreme genius. Poe's weird tales are alive in a manner that few others can ever hope to be.  

This is no mere fanboy-ish gushing on Lovecraft's part; Poe's best stories -- of which Usher is a fine example -- do indeed possess this quality of being "alive" and that is a huge part of his continued appeal. Of course, another element of Poe's power is how much of himself can be found in his works. In the words of Lovecraft, Poe "certainly possessed much of the depression, sensitiveness, mad aspiration, loneliness, and extravagant freakishness which he attributes to his haughty and solitary victims of Fate." I think, at one time or another, most of us possess (or imagine ourselves to possess) at least some of these attributes, which is likely another key to understanding why Poe has proven so inspirational to so many for so long.

So, while the tradition of the Poe Toaster may have ended, I'm inaugurating a new one here: to commemorate Edgar Allan Poe's birthday each year on this blog. I doubt I'll still be doing this when I'm 102, or even when I'm 52, but he's an author worth remembering and I intend to do my part.

Speaking of Reprints

James M. Ward has made the 1st edition of Metamorphosis Alpha available as a print-on-demand book through Lulu.com. Needless to say, I've ordered a copy for myself. How could I not? This is the first out-of-print RPG book I remember actively seeking out when I was a kid and it frustrated me beyond all measure that I couldn't find. Nowadays, of course, you can find it, but, thanks to absurd speculation, the cost of acquiring it is more than I'm willing to pay.

Here's the thing: I want old RPG materials like this so I can use them. I don't care about their value as collectibles. The value of games is in being played. I simply do not understand the point of owning a game and then hermetically sealing it away from the elements. As my players can tell, I use my LBBs and other OD&D materials at my game table. That means they'll eventually fall apart, but that's the nature of well-loved games.

Thanks to Jim Ward for making Metamorphosis Alpha available again for a new generation. Now, if only WotC would do the same with some of their back catalog, I'll be even more impressed with them than I already am.

NOTE: I am well aware of the AD&D reprints, since I just wrote a post about it. When I say "back catalog," I am talking about WotC's other old school D&D products, in particular the adventure modules.

Go Figure

By now, many of you have no doubt heard the latest word from Wizards of the Coast: they're reprinting the original three AD&D hardcover books this April. They're a limited release, it's true, and they're going to have new covers, but otherwise the books will be unadulterated reprints of the classic books from 1977, 1978, and 1979. That's frankly pretty incredible -- and unexpected.

Even though my AD&D books, which I've had since 1980, are all in near-perfect condition, I'll be buying a set of these new books, making them the first things I've bought from WotC since 2007. So, on that score, I've got to give the company a lot of credit. In addition, some portion of the money earned from these sales goes to the Gygax Memorial Fund, which shows is nice.

As I said, these are a limited release (and, unfortunately, available only in North America through hobby stores). However, I consider it a victory for the Old Ways that WotC even contemplated releasing these books, let alone that they actually will do so. Plus, if sales are very good -- and I expect them to be -- it'll provide solid sales data on the strength of old school gaming. From my perspective, that's a terrific thing all around.

Kudos, WotC! You managed to surprise me (and in a positive way).

Retrospective: Dark Folk

When I think about the most unfortunately named line of RPG products ever, Mayfair's "Role Aids" immediately comes to mind. Child of the '70s that I am, the name "Role Aids" reminds me of antacids called Rolaids, which were well known at the time, thanks to a series of TV advertisements ("How do you spell 'relief'?" "R-O-L-A-I-D-S.") Consequently, when I first encountered Role Aids in the early 1980s, the name gave me another reason to dismiss them. The other, of course, was that they marketed themselves as "Suitable for Use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons," but they weren't produced by TSR. Back in this days, I was reflexively contemptuous of any non-TSR product that claimed compatibility with D&D. With few exceptions, if I didn't see the TSR logo on the book somewhere, I turned my nose up at it.

Eventually, though, I heard enough good things about various Role Aids products that I decided to take a chance and buy one for myself. The first one I purchased with Dark Folk, which was published in 1983. The book was edited by Paul Karczag, with material by several authors (Irwin Goldstein, Les Kay, Arthur Miller, Alan Nudelman, Steve Morrison, Susan Khas) I'd never heard of and by Robert Asprin of Thieves' World fame. Its subjects, as its name would suggest, were the evil humanoid races -- orcs, trolls, goblins, gnolls, and kobolds. Each race was got its own chapter, complete with overviews of history, culture, physiology, religion, magic items, and so on. Capping off each chapter was an adventure written to take advantage of the new material presented in the book.

As you might expect from a book with multiple authors, Dark Folk is something of a mixed bag. There are some clever and interesting sections and some not-so-clever and interesting ones. In general, the material about the various races is pretty standard stuff, its primary "uniqueness" being that it doesn't always comport with the standard presentation of these races in D&D. Thus, if your image of trolls is primarily informed by the Monster Manual, you're likely to find Dark Folk's take on them original. I remember, for example, that the presentation of kobolds felt odd to me. Dark Folk claims, years in advance of this becoming a common assumption, that they were reptiles (which makes some sense considering that even the MM notes that they're oviparous). But it was the adventures that were where Dark Folk shined brightest. Again, not all of the adventures were perfect -- which are? -- but several were well done and used the information in the book to make each one feel different. In this way, an orc lair wasn't the same as a goblin lair or a kobold one. It's a small thing, sure, but, at the time, it was a revelation to me.

I never became a huge buyer of Role Aids products, despite my fondness for Dark Folk (and, later, Dwarves). Mostly, it was because TSR and other companies were producing enough RPG material that I'd instinctively buy that I already had more material than I could ever use. And there was also a part of me that continued to recoil at the notion of "unofficial" supplements to D&D, no matter how good they were. That's a habit that took many years to break. It seems silly now, but, back in those days, there was a "cultural" divide between those of us who cared about "official" products and those of us who couldn't care less about them. It's a divide that's still very much alive and even relevant given recent events.

A Portrait of the Wargamer as a Young Man

Reader Peter Byrne pointed me towards an excellent blog entitled Vintage Wargaming, which recently had a post about wargaming in the Twin Cities in 1966. The post included the following scan, which is from April 17, 1966 issue of the picture supplement to The Minneapolis Tribune:

If you blow up the image above, you'll be able to read the caption, which identifies the participants in this Napoleonics battle, two of whose names regular readers of this blog will definitely recognize.

The Articles of Dragon: "Special Skills, Special Thrills"

Of all the iconic classes of D&D, the cleric is the one that sticks out like a sore thumb. Whereas the fighting man, the magic-user, and even the thief are all pretty broad archetypes easily -- and non-mechanically -- re-imagined in a variety of different ways, the cleric is a very specific type of character. With his heavy armor, non-edged weapons, Biblical magic, and power over the undead, the cleric is not a generic class, recalling a crusading knight by way of Van Helsing. There's thus a distinctly Christian air to the cleric class, an air that increasingly seemed at odds with the game itself, which, as time went on, distanced itself from its earlier implicit Christianity and embraced an ahistorical form of polytheism instead.

For that reason, there were growing cries among some gamers to "fix" the cleric. In this context "fix" means change to make it less tied to a particular religion, in this case a particular religion the game itself had eschewed. The first time I recall seeing an "official" answer to these cries was in Deities & Demigods, where it's noted that the clerics of certain deities had different armor and/or weapon restrictions than "standard" clerics. A few even got special abilities reflective of their divine patron. This idea was later expanded upon by Gary Gygax himself in his "Deities & Demigods of The World of Greyhawk" series of articles, which I credit with giving widespread attention to this idea. I know that, after those articles appeared, lots of my fellow gamers wanted to follow Gary's lead and tailor their cleric characters to the deities they served, an idea that AD&D more formally adopted with 2e in 1989.

In issue #85 (May 1984) of Dragon, Roger E. Moore wrote an article entitled "Special Skills, Special Thrills" that also addressed this topic. Moore specifically cites Gary's articles as his inspiration and sets about providing unique abilities for clerics of several major pantheons. These pantheons are Egyptian, Elven, Norse, Ogrish, and Orcish -- a rather strange mix! Of course, Moore intends these to be used only as examples to inspire individual referees. Likewise, he leaves open the question of just how to balance these additional abilities with a cleric's default ones. He notes that Gygax assessed a 5-15% XP penalty to such clerics, but does not wholeheartedly endorse that method himself, suggesting that other more roleplaying-oriented solutions (ritual demands, quests, etc.) might work just as well.

Like a lot of gamers at the time, I was very enamored of the idea of granting unique abilities to clerics based on their patron deity. Nowadays, I'm not so keen on the idea, in part because I think the desire for such only underlines the "odd man out" quality of the cleric class. Moreover, nearly every example of a "specialty cleric" (or priest, as D&D II called them) still retains too much of the baseline cleric to be coherent. Why, for example, would a god of war be able to turn the undead? Why should almost any cleric wear heavy armor and be the second-best combatant of all the classes? The cleric class, even with tweaks, is so tied to a medieval Christian society and worldview that it seems bizarre to me to use it as the basis for a "generic" priest class. Far better, I think, would be to have individual classes for priests of each religion or, in keeping with swords-and-sorcery, jettison the class entirely.

REVIEW: Isle of the Unknown

I find Geoffrey McKinney's Isle of the Unknown an extremely frustrating book. Published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess and available either as a 128 page full-color hardcover book or as a PDF of the same, it's without a doubt one of the most nicely made RPG books I've seen in quite some time, old school or otherwise. By "nicely made," I mean both in terms of its purely physical qualities -- a sturdy cover and excellent binding -- as well as its appearance and organization. At the same time, I think Isle of the Unknown overuses color to the point of garishness at times. The book is so colorful and vibrant that, at first, one can't help but be awed by it. After a while, though, one's initial visual euphoria dissipates, and one begins to wonder how much of one's positive feelings for it are elicited by its substance and how much by its style.

I say that with some regret as this is a book I very much wanted to like without qualification. While nowhere in the text is Clark Ashton Smith's name mentioned, I recall that Isle of the Unknown began as an attempt by Geoffrey McKinney to produce a supplement that evoked Smith's weird tales, particularly those of Averoigne. CAS is a favorite author of mine, as I never tire of mentioning on this blog, and his Averoigne stories have long exercised a powerful hold over my imagination. Consequently, I was very keen to see an old school RPG book that drew on those pulp fantasies. Now, I knew from past experience with Carcosa (whose revised and expanded edition I'll be reviewing later this week) that McKinney's take on Smith would undoubtedly differ from my own, so I expected there to be parts of Isle of the Unknown that didn't sit well with me.

However, that's not quite what happened. Isle of the Unknown still clearly draws some inspiration from the Averoigne tales. The fact that its titular locale is described as having "societies, flora, and fauna ... [that] resemble those of the French territory of Auvergne circa A.D. 1311" is a dead giveaway. Beyond that, though, the CAS influence is thin in my opinion. For that reason, Isle of the Unknown simply comes across as weird, with nearly every one of its over 300 86-square mile hexes home to some oddity or monstrosity, almost all of which are lavishly illustrated in full color by Amos Orion Stearns or Jason Rainville. Of course, that's what you'd probably expect from a book like this. Isle of the Unknown is a gazetteer of 35,000-square mile island that can be dropped into any campaign and, if it didn't provide material of this sort, most readers would be disappointed. That every hex on the island is given an entry -- many of them quite extensive -- is a credit to McKinney and his imagination.

In books of this kind, the problem is most often that the hex descriptions are boringly mundane. Isle of the Unknown has the opposite problem: nearly every hex description includes a magical statue, a quirky spellcaster, or a teratological monster. This is by design, as the introduction to the referee states that "only the weird, fantastical, and magical is described herein." This decision is presented as a boon to the referee, who can thus more easily describe the mundane world based on the realities of his own campaign, but I find this an inadequate justification. It's on par with refraining from describing the "empty" rooms in a dungeon, because all that really matters are the rooms with monsters and treasure in them. Moreover, by describing only the weird, fantastical, and magical, Isle of the Unknown gives the impression of overusing them all. Rather than being spices to improve the flavor of the dish, they become the meal itself.

I find this most troubling with regards to the many monsters described in Isle of the Unknown. Forget Gygaxian naturalism, this is an island populated by over 100 unique monsters: a 14' tall bipedal pearlscale angelfish, limbless serpentine beavers, a 300 lb. koala with suction cups on its limbs, a four-legged pigeon the size of an apatosaurus, and more. Any one of these creatures would be strange enough and might well inspire curiosity but the effect is lost after pages upon pages of them -- and that's without commenting on the frankly ludicrous nature of some of these beasties. Yes, I know there are people who've managed to make good use of "silly" monsters and I also recognize that many hallowed mythological monsters, when looked at with fresh eyes, are pretty ridiculous themselves. But if D&D or Greco-Roman myth consisted only of 22' tall emaciated pandas or four-legged flying kangaroos, I think many of us would be forced to admit that something odd was going on.

Granted, "something odd" going on may be one of the points of Isle of the Unknown. I don't think it's a coincidence that Lamentations of the Flame Princess chose to publish this particular product, as it rather powerfully evinces Jim Raggi's longstanding dislike of "standard" monsters and monster races. There's certainly merit to Raggi's complaint; it's often useful to shake things up a bit by introducing totally bizarre and unexpected monsters from time to time. However, like color or spices, these, too, can be overused. In fact, I only think such monsters work against a backdrop of familiarity and even mundanity, two things that Isle of the Unknown eschews in its presentation, leaving us only with a passel of freaks devoid of any context to give them heft. Instead, they feel, well, random and not always in a good way.

Despite this, I still like Isle of the Unknown. If approached as a smörgåsbord of ideas, it's probably quite useful. I simply cannot imagine using it as a single setting, but I might drop a statue or a monster or an NPC from the book into another locale or adventure in order to introduce a note of inexplicable weirdness into it. What I would not do, though, is use the entirety of the Isle itself; it's simply too much. My feeling remains that fantasy, especially weird fantasy, works best when it can play off well-drawn mundanity and that it's just as much a failure of the imagination not to present that mundanity as it is to stick to haggard fantasy races and monsters without any thought. Frankly, that's what anything drawing inspiration from Clark Ashton Smith ought to do: present us first with a believably grounded "real world" and then, by bits, turn the expectations of that real world upside down. Isle of the Unknown only gives us half of that equation, which is why I find it a frustrating book.

Presentation: 8 out of 10
Creativity: 6 out of 10
Utility: 5 out of 10

Buy This If: You're looking for a collection of ideas to loot for your own adventures or you like really weird fantasy.
Don't Buy This If: You prefer your setting supplements a bit more "ready to use" or prefer your fantasy a bit more on the staid side of things.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Black Stranger

If ever you wonder why the name of L. Sprague de Camp is so often held in contempt by fans of Robert E. Howard, you need look no further than "The Black Stranger," a Conan yarn that did not see print in its original form until 1987, making it one of the "most recent" Howard stories to see print. I don't believe that anyone knows precisely when "The Black Stranger" was written (more knowledgeable Howardists can correct me) or whether it was ever submitted to Weird Tales. We do know that REH rewrote the story for another character, the Caribbean pirate Black Vulmea, though that version of the story didn't see print until the 1970s. De Camp published a heavily altered version of the story in the March 1953 issue of Fantasy Magazine. Later, in the 1967 collection, Conan the Usurper, De Camp changed the title to "The Treasure of Tranicos" and it's probably under that title that a great many readers first encountered the story.

The 1987 version of "The Black Stranger" was published in anthology called Echoes of Valor, edited by Karl Edward Wagner. Wagner plays an important role in the history of Howard scholarship, because of his efforts to restore the texts of Howard (and several other pulp fantasy authors) to their original form. In doing so, "The Black Stranger" is freed from De Camp's imaginary chronology of Conan's exploits and allowed simply to be. There's no overarching significance to the events it describes. Indeed, "The Black Stranger" has a somewhat odd feeling to it, since it's essentially a pirate story rather than a swords-and-sorcery one, though the definition of the latter is of course broad enough to include tales such as this. Still, I think the story is better served by being presented in this fashion rather than, as De Camp would have it, as a significant step on the road to Conan's becoming king of Aquilonia. "The Black Stranger" is too slight a tale to bear such narrative weight and, more to the point, there's absolutely no evidence that Howard himself conceived of it as anything more than another episode in Conan's many, many adventures.


In its original form, "The Black Stranger" tells the tale of Conan's discovery, in the Pictish wilderness, of a hidden cave filled with the treasure of the pirate Tranicos. When he attempts to claim the treasure for himself, a demon of mist forms and attempts to kill him. Conan escapes the cave with his life and not long thereafter discovers that others seek the treasure he's just inadvertently discovered. These others consist of two feuding buccaneers, Black Zarona and Strombanni. When Conan meets them at the stronghold of an exiled Zingaran nobleman, he offers to join forces with them to loot the treasure and share its spoils equally. Of course, Conan's real plan is to use his erstwhile allies to draw out the demon while he makes off with the fabled treasure. Of course, the pirates themselves are far from trustworthy and have their own plans ...

As I said, "The Black Stranger" is a slight story, far from Howard's best. I like it well enough, but there's very little about it that screams "Conan!" to me. That may be why, when De Camp published it in the '50s, he felt the need to spice it up and give it some greater meaning beyond being another example where Conan outsmarts some fellow criminals to make himself (temporarily) rich. Unfortunately, I don't think "The Black Stranger" can bear that kind of narrative weight and De Camp's attempt to make it do so come across as hamfisted and tone-deaf -- like so much of what he did to Howard's corpus.

The Emperor of Dreams

Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams:
I crown me with the million-colored sun
Of secret worlds incredible, and take
Their trailing skies for vestment, when I soar,
Throned on the mounting zenith, and illume
The spaceward-flown horizons infinite.

Today is the birthday of one of my favorite fantasists and writers, Clark Ashton Smith, born in 1893 in Long Valley, California. In lieu of of my usual Open Friday question, I'm instead making this post to remind everyone of the occasion and to encourage you to read something by the Bard of Auburn to celebrate it. I'll be re-reading "The Empire of the Necromancers," as has become my tradition over these last few years.