Howling Tower

No, not the Arduin adventure -- the blog of long-time TSR and WotC employee Steve Winter. If you haven't been reading it, you really ought to do so. This week, Mr Winter began a series of posts about his thoughts and experiences of the various revisions to D&D over the years. His post today, entitled "Dysfunctional and Co-Dependent," is of particular interest to those of us in the old school world, since it mirrors a lot of what we've been saying over the last few years, such as:

In short, the types of things that players want are bad for the game. They'd be fine if published in moderation, but moderation is a luxury only small companies can afford. Big companies have big monthly bills. The types of supplements that would be healthy for the game, players won't buy in sufficient quantity to keep the company or the game alive at the corporate level. To keep the engine running, the company must publish what customers want, and thereby cut its own throat.

That's as true a statement about D&D thirty years ago as it is today.

Anyway, head on over to his blog and take a look at what he's got to say. Having been involved with D&D as long as he has, I think he's got quite a few insights to share. I interviewed Mr Winter back in 2009, in case you're keen to learn a little more about the man and his involvement in both the hobby and the industry.

Retrospective: Warriors of Mars

It's oft been noted that the LBBs contain more references to the Barsoom novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs than to any other fantasy tales and with good reason. Though largely unknown today -- to the point where the ignorant have suggested that the movie John Carter is ripping off the innumerable films inspired by Burroughs -- the Barsoom novels were hugely influential for decades. They are, in many respects, the wellspring from which contemporary fantasy and science fiction flow, even if the debt both genres owe to these seminal books is often unacknowledged.

Gary Gygax, though, was not shy in acknowledging the debt he owed to Burroughs. He mentioned his name in both OD&D and in Appendix N of his AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide and the Greyhawk campaign included at least one expedition to the red sands of Barsoom. Given this, it should probably come as no surprise that, in the same year that OD&D appeared, TSR released a 56-page miniatures wargame entitled Warriors of Mars. Written by Gygax and Brian Blume, this small book provides rules for adjudicating battles, both on the land and in the air, between the various antagonistic cultures of Mars, as envisioned by Burroughs.

If you've never heard of Warriors of Mars, let alone seen a copy, there's a good reason for that. There was, so far as I know, only one print run of the book before the Edgar Rice Burroughs estate contacted TSR about possible infringement of their rights. Rather than risk legal action, the book was never reprinted, making it today one of the rarest -- and most expensive -- TSR products. I've tried in vain to obtain a copy for myself at a reasonable (i.e. not multi-hundred dollar) price for several years now but to no avail. Fortunately, I have known several people who own copies that they've been willing to lend me, so I've at least had the chance to read the book.

Warriors of Mars is not explicitly a roleplaying game; it's a miniatures wargame. However, it wouldn't be difficult to use it as the basis for an RPG, since there are rules for "personalities," like John Carter or Tars Tarkas. Likewise, the rules cover several scales, including 1:1, along with things like experience points, levels, and advice on how to design "personal adventures." Like the Greg Bell artwork used to illustrate it, Warriors of Mars makes for a very crude RPG -- far cruder than even OD&D -- but one could do it, especially if one is prepared to wing it when it came to anything other than combat. Where Warriors of Mars does excel, though, is as an introduction to Barsoom and its various characters, cultures, life forms, and locations. It's no substitute for the novels, of course, but Gygax and Blume cover enough foundational material to get one started if one has no previous knowledge of the works of Burroughs.

Barsoom remains, in my opinion, a great source of inspiration for fantasy roleplaying games. The Red Planet of my Dwimmermount campaign, Areon, owes a lot to Burroughs's conception of Mars (just as my Kythirea, owes a lot to his Amtor). It's my hope that, whatever the virtues or flaws of the Disney movie (I have still yet to see it), it will at least pique some interest in the source material on which it draws. Barsoom is every bit as much the birthplace of D&D -- and the hobby -- as the Hyborian Age or Middle-earth and it deserves to be better known.

G+ Dwimmermount This Week

This Friday, March 16, I'll be running another Dwimmermount session via Google+ for backers of the Kickstarter. The session will run from 9pm to 12am EST, but will be for 2nd-level Labyrinth Lord characters, since they'll be exploring Level 2A (The Laboratory), which I've been transferring from my mess of notes into a more intelligible form.

If you're a backer who's interested, can make the times, and has access to G+, make a comment below and I'll randomly determine several of you to fill the available slots. I'll let everyone know the results of the random rolls by Thursday evening, which will give us plenty of time to make changes, in case something comes up for anyone between then and the time of the game. Last week, things were a little chaotic and I had to scramble to choose some new players in time to get moving by 9pm.

Thanks!

The Articles of Dragon: "The Making of a Milieu"

When I think of under-appreciated writers from the hobby, one of the names that comes immediately to mind is Arthur Collins. Collins wrote a number of articles in Dragon that I adored, because they seemed to provide the kind of detail and immersion that the Silver Age craved while still being firmly rooted in Golden Age obsessions. They offered a kind of media via between the two eras of D&D and, as such, greatly appealed to me during my teen years, when I wasn't ready to abandon the kinds of games I played as a younger person, but still hoped for something "deeper" than "mere" dungeon crawls. Plus, Collins was a good writer: clear and easy to understand but not simplistic, either in style or content. He wasn't a hugely prolific author -- perhaps two dozen articles or fewer -- but his stuff was almost always of great interest to me.

Of all the articles Collins wrote, the one that most affected me was "The Making of a Milieu," which appeared in issue #93 (January 1985). Its subtitle was "How to start a world and keep it turning." The article is basically a lengthy discussion of how to build not just a campaign setting but a campaign itself, which is to say, how to kick things off in such a way as to ensure that play continues for months or years afterward. Nowadays, a lot of what Collins wrote might be considered old hat, but, back in 1985, it was nothing short of revelatory, at least to me.

Up until that point, I'd largely run my campaigns either in my beloved World of Greyhawk setting or else in some nebulous, vaguely defined setting. In neither case did I give much thought to "the Big Picture." And by "the Big Picture," I don't mean a plan or a script for the players to follow in their adventures. Rather, I mean only some notion of how all the various pieces of the setting interrelate and how they might be used to serve my purposes as a referee. Prior to reading this article, my campaigns were just random collections of "stuff that happened" somewhere and that was usually good enough.

By 1985, though, I started to think it wasn't good enough. I'd become so thoroughly immersed in fantasy literature, especially of the Interminable Series of Ponderous Tomes variety and I wanted my campaigns and settings to mirror that. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 1985 also marked the beginning of the period during which I actually played less and less. I went to a different high school than all my neighborhood friends and I became distracted by other things. But I was still as interested in D&D as ever and devoting my time to world building seemed an adequate substitute for actually playing the game.

Collins gave me lots of food for thought about how to build a setting, stuff that kept me thinking and creating for years to come. For example, he suggested creating several maps of the campaign area, each one depicting the area at a different point in history. In this way, names and settlements can be altered to reflect the rise and fall of empires, the migrations of people, and other such events. So I spent a lot of time at the library making photocopies of a blank map of my new, original campaign setting -- the first I'd ever come up with -- and then adding details to it, so that I eventually amassed a lot of information in pictorial form about how the setting evolved over the centuries. It was a fairly simple thing but quite effective and it gave me a lot of pleasure as a teenager.

These days, I'd never go to even the meager lengths Collins suggested in planning out a campaign or its setting. I'm much more of a seat-of-the-pants kind of guy; indeed, I embrace it as the best way to play the game. At the same time, I retain a great deal of fondness for this article, in large part because it broke me of certain other bad habits, namely my dependence on published material for ideas. As Collins so aptly put it at the conclusion of his article:

When I began playing the AD&D game six years ago, there were very few playing aids on the market of the type that are now so abundant. There was no WORLD OF GREYHAWK Fantasy Setting, no Harn, and very few canned modules in print. Very nearly all of our adventuring had to come out of our own heads. And I still think that's fantasy gaming at its best. I now meet players, especially young ones, who think that, in order to play the AD&D game or some other such activity, they must invest megabucks in someone else's ideas. It shocks many of them when I suggest that it's more fun to make it up yourself.

Alas for them! No canned module, no playing aid, no set of rules, no list of NPCs can quite become your very own. As enjoyable and thought-provoking as all the published material may be, it is a poor substitute for creating your own campaign milieu, designing your own castles, and exercising your own brain. Creativity is what the game is about. It would be a shame if the success of fantasy gaming contributed to the stifling of creativity in its own enthusiastic adherents.

I was one of those young players about whom Collins speaks, at least to some degree, which is why I owe the man a debt of thanks. I may no longer build a campaign the way he suggests in this article. However, that I build my own at all is in large part a result of what he says in it.

Delta's Dwimmermount Adventure

Over at his D&D Hotspot, there's a really nice post in which Delta recounts his experiences adventuring on the first level of Dwimmermount, with Tavis Allison as the referee. His post made me really happy for a number of reasons, not least of them being that it's terrific to see others enjoying something that I've created. I was also gratified to read the following:

In my short play experience, it seems that James Maliszewski's Dwimmermount is a whole lot freakier than I expected -- and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. Of course, we were dealing with things like orcs, kobolds, and skeletons -- but no element appeared that wasn't corrupted in some deep and disturbing way. Not even the dungeon doors escaped being of bizarre function and construct. It looks like a very memorable place to adventure.

Those are words to warm the cockles of even the most curmudgeonly referee's heart.

Do take a look at Delta's post, if only to see the photos he's included of the Dwarven Forge dungeon tiles they used to represent Dwimmermount. Good stuff!

Pulp Fantasy Library: Out of the Aeons

As I've noted before, I have a strange weakness for many of the stories H.P. Lovecraft "revised" (i.e. ghostwrote) for other authors. I'm not entirely sure why that is, because, when viewed objectively, these stories usually aren't as well-constructed as HPL's own tales. Some are downright shlocky, even by the fairly low standards of the pulps. Yet, there's still something compelling about them that brings me back to them time and again.

A good case in point is "Out of the Aeons," published in the April 1935 issue of Weird Tales under the byline of Hazel Heald, an amateur writer with whom Lovecraft collaborated on five stories. "Out of the Aeons" is presented in the form of a first person account "found among the effects of the late Richard H. Johnson, Ph.D., curator of the Cabot Museum of Archaeology, Boston, Mass." The account primarily concerns

a hellish mummy, the antique and terrible rumours vaguely linked with it, the morbid wave of interest and cult activities of 1932, and the frightful fate of the two intruders on December 1st of that year

One has to admit that's a pretty good opening to a story! It's certainly lurid, much like the story that follows, but it does nicely set the scene and draw one in. Dr. Johnson explains that, in 1878, a freighter from New Zealand "sighted a new island unmarked on any chart and evidently of volcanic origin." A landing party under its captain discovered "prehistoric Cyclopean masonry" on the island, including a massive stone crypt. Inside the crypt, the party found the aforementioned mummy, on whose body was found a cylinder of unknown metal containing a scroll of similarly unknown material on which was written some kind of unrecognizable script.

The mummy was that of a medium-sized man of unknown race, and was cast in a peculiar crouching posture. The face, half shielded by claw-like hands, had its under jaw thrust far forward, while the shrivelled features bore an expression of fright so hideous that few spectators could view them unmoved. The eyes were closed, with lids clamped down tightly over eyeballs apparently bulging and prominent. Bits of hair and beard remained, and the colour of the whole was a sort of dull neutral grey. In texture the thing was half leathery and half stony, forming an insoluble enigma to those experts who sought to ascertain how it was embalmed. In places bits of its substance were eaten away by time and decay. Rags of some peculiar fabric, with suggestions of unknown designs, still clung to the object.

Just what made it so infinitely horrible and repulsive one could hardly say. For one thing, there was a subtle, indefinable sense of limitless antiquity and utter alienage which affected one like a view from the brink of a monstrous abyss of unplumbed blackness—but mostly it was the expression of crazed fear on the puckered, prognathous, half-shielded face. Such a symbol of infinite, inhuman, cosmic fright could not help communicating the emotion to the beholder amidst a disquieting cloud of mystery and vain conjecture.

The true nature of this mummy and how it came to be form the bulk of the story, as Dr. Johnson deals with a steady stream of strange characters coming to the Cabot Museum to inquire about it. These dealings lead Johnson to seek out forbidden books, such as Von Junzt's Nameless Cults, where he slowly pieces together disparate bits clues to attain what he thinks might be the truth -- a truth that is all but confirmed by the conclusion of the story.

"Out of the Aeons" is not a good story. It's mostly exposition and much of its feels recycled if you're already deeply immersed in Yog-Sothothery. As he so often did in his revisions, Lovecraft borrowed heavily from his own prior stories, blending some of their details with the bare bones provided by his revision clients. The result is never great literature, but it is often enjoyable, as is the case with "Out of the Aeons." To this day, I will never forget the first time I read the story in high school and the strange feeling that came over me as I kept one step ahead of Dr. Johnson in figuring out the history of the "hellish mummy" in the Cabot Museum. And while that history is absurd, even laughable in some respects, there's nevertheless an element of genuine horror in it that has stuck with me all these years and continues to haunt my imagination.

Actual Play Notes

I absolutely adore seeing documents generated through actual play, like maps, character sheets, and collections of notes. That's why I was very pleased to see this photo of what Jason Azze wrote down while participating in Friday's Dwimmermount G+ session:

Also depicted in the photo are Jason's amazing dice, which regularly provided just the right results the PCs needed. I may have to get myself a set!

Dwimmermount After Action Report

Last night was my second foray into the world of gaming via Google+ and it went very well indeed. My players this week consisted of Jason Azze, Ryan Browning (who filled in for someone who couldn't show), Robert Conley, and Michael Curtis (who also filled in at the last minute for someone who couldn't show). As you might have guessed from my parentheticals, the roster for the 3-hour session didn't finalize until close to start time, as several people I'd tapped to play had something pop up that prevented their participation. I blame myself for this; I didn't plan very well in advance and that likely contributed to the chaos. For future sessions, I'll try to do a better job of assembling players and alternates several days beforehand.

I had a lot of fun last night, both because I didn't feel as ill at ease with using video chat for gaming as I did the previous week and because I had a really great group of players. Jason played a fighting man named Martin, Ryan played an elf named Felren, Rob was a magic-used called Argyll, and Michael was another fighter named Rake. Once again: no clerics! Because Ryan had played the previous week and because his new character was an elf, I made the assumption that he was an associate of Locfir the Astrologer, Tavis's character from the week before. That assumption gave Ryan the excuse to use any information he recalled from the previous week in last night's session. As it turned out, it didn't matter all that much, since this group went in a different direction, exploring rooms the other party did not.

One thing I really have to give the crew last night was how thorough and cautious they were. They reminded me quite a bit of my home players. They used every trick in the old school playbook -- 10' poles, iron spikes, etc. -- to avoid falling prey to traps and other hazards. As a result, none of them died, which is fairly impressive for 1st-level PCs who spent three hours in Dwimmermount. Of course, as I mentioned before, the first level is filled with lots of empty rooms and oddities, so careful players can avoid many dangers. It also helps that the bulk of the monsters on the level aren't clustered around the early chambers, so you have to delve pretty deep into it before you encounter them. Neither group I've played with on Google+ has yet done that.

Last week, Zak suggested we make use of an online whiteboard called Twiddla to handle mapping. This worked quite well night, as you can see from this screenshot:

Among the highlights of last night's session were:

• A battle with some orcs
• The discovery of the Gallery of Masks
• Hiding from some spiders wandering on the ceiling of a nearby corridor
• Fighting some eldritch bones in a chapel dedicated to Mavors (a similar scene is depicted by Jeff Dee on the Kickstarter page)
• Exploration of the Hall of Memories
• Finding stairs down to Level 2
• And, of course, looting a secret treasury

I had a great deal of fun. It's not quite the same thing as playing face to face, but it's not far off. There are also two other benefits I noticed. First, I have a much larger pool of people with whom to play. Distance is not an impediment. Second, because you have to be sitting at your computer to stay engaged, there's little temptation to get up and wander away, distracted by something you see in the other room. As a result, we got in a very solid three hours worth of play, with very little downtime. That's not to say there weren't occasional, brief, friendly digressions -- I'm not a proponent of 110% deadly serious gaming -- but last night further proved to me that Google+ is a very viable platform for tabletop gaming. I look forward to future sessions with great anticipation and have a feeling that, even after the Kickstarter has ended, I'll continue to use it as a way to play with people with whom I wouldn't otherwise get the chance.

Google+ Dwimmermount Game Tonight

As I mentioned the other day, I'm going to be running another session of my Dwimmermount megadungeon tonight between 9pm and 12am EST on Google+. At present, there are two spots available for interested parties. If you're interested in securing one of those spots, there are a few things you need to do:

1. Be available tonight during the specified time above.

2. Have access to Google+. You don't need to have a webcam, though it is encouraged.

3. Be a backer of the Dwimmermount Kickstarter -- it doesn't matter how much you've pledged.

If you meet all of those requirements, post your interest, along with your Kickstarter ID, to this thread on my G+ stream. Around 6pm EST, I'll randomly determine who gets the available slots (along with several alternates) and contact the people in question. They'll need to confirm their availability with me via email before 9pm EST. Otherwise, I'll offer up the slot to an alternate person.

And that's it. I'll be doing this every week for the foreseeable future, so, if you don't snag a spot this week, there will be plenty more opportunities to do so.

Dwimmermount-Related News

I've got a couple of pieces of Dwimmermount-related news to pass along for those of you who care:

1. A very rough draft of the first level is now available to all backers of the Kickstarter. It's basically a first pass in prettying up the notes I use in my home campaign. As the weeks wear on, it'll be expanded and clarified, but here's the chance to see it at an early stage. Both portions of level 2 (since it's divided into two "halves," each accessible by a different means from level 1) will be made available in a similar state between now and early next week. Additional rough drafts will follow in the weeks between now and the end of the funding period.

2. As I did last week, I'll be running a Google+ session tomorrow evening between 9pm and 12am EST. I have several outstanding invites to this session that I haven't yet heard back from, but I anticipate there will be one or two spaces open to newcomers. I'll know more tomorrow, but, if that's the case, I'd like to choose to fill those spaces with backers, as a thank you for helping to support this project. I'll have more details tomorrow on this, but I wanted to let people know now. I should also add that I'll be doing this every Friday night for the foreseeable future, so, even if tomorrow night isn't possible (or you're not selected -- after all, there are already over 300 backers), there will be further opportunities.

Thanks!