REVIEW: Maxolt's Magical Menagerie #1

Maxolt's Magical Menagerie #1 by Bret Boyd is a 6-page PDF from Tricky Owlbear Publishing, detailing 12 new magical items for use with Swords & Wizardry, although they should be perfectly usable with any retro-clone or old school fantasy RPG.
The PDF is laid out simply, using two columns of text per page and without any artwork beyond the cover image. The text is free of any noticeable editorial problems, although there were occasions when I found it somewhat unclear due to its slightly "stream of consciousness" feel, as if the author were committing his thoughts to paper rather than presenting them for a more general audience. It's not a damning criticism, but it does contribute to the "ripped from an old school blog" feel the product has, about which I'll say more later.

The format of magical items -- 8 miscellaneous items and 4 pieces of magical ammunition (arrows and bolts) -- is simple and straightforward, with game mechanics described upfront, followed by "commentary" from Maxolt Alberiim, a gold dragon who's adopted a human guise as a means of disseminating magical knowledge throughout the world. The commentary varies is interest, with some of being fairly banal and others more inspirational. Much the same could be said of the magical items themselves, several of which, such as the boots of tremors and the necklace of skulls, to name but two, are quite clever and may well find a home in my Dwimmermount campaign, while others are variations on items we've all seen in dozens of places over the years. That said, most of the items do exhibit solid old school sensibilities, being low key and/or situational powerful. The author is to be commended on that score.

Maxolt's Magical Menagerie #1 is nevertheless a very mixed bag. At only $1, it's probably worth it for referees looking for a quick bit of inspiration, but even its cleverest items don't stand out as anything you couldn't find for free on almost any of the old school blogs that we all read every day. And that's where I think products like this are in a bit of a bind. A couple of years ago, a collection of magic items written with old school rules and sensibilities in mind would be unusual. Nowadays, though, with literally dozens of blogs and forums dedicated to these games and more springing up every week, a product needs more than that to compete for your patronage.

To illustrate my point, let's briefly consider Jeff Rients's Miscellaneum of Cinder, which is little more than a collection of random tables and whose production volumes are most assuredly at the "hobbyist" end of the spectrum. This too is a product that has a strong "ripped from an old school blog" feel to it, as Jeff would readily admit, but, because of its nature -- random tables -- it has a lot of long-term utility, which is why I keep a copy of it handy when refereeing my Dwimmermount campaign. Miscellaneum of Cinder is a great example of how one need not have slick graphics or tons of mechanical crunch in order to create an invaluable old school product and I hope it serves as a model for writers and publishers looking into the old school scene these days.

I bring all this up not to knock Maxolt's Magical Menagerie #1, which is a worthy first foray into this niche market, but to point out that, with so many bloggers, forum-goers, and other sundry Internet denizens literally giving away reams of material as good, if not better, than what TSR produced in almost any given year of its existence, you need to provide potential buyers with something they cannot get elsewhere. I'm not sure I can say that about Maxolt's Magical Menagerie #1, which, as individually good as some of its contents are, lacks that ineffable something that distinguishes great products from the merely good.

This isn't a problem unique to this product by a long shot -- lots of old school efforts suffer from the same malady -- but I'd strongly recommend that, if Tricky Owlbear intends to publish further installments in this series, they find something to make it stand out more, something that makes it more than just another collection of magic items. Most of us already have more magic items than we could ever use over the course of many campaigns. We don't have enough of are collections of magic items that demand they be used. That is something I'd like to see and I'm sure I'm not alone.

Presentation: 6 out of 10
Creativity: 5 out of 10
Utility: 4 out of 10

Get This If: You don't mind spending a little money for a handful of magic items that might inspire you.
Don't Get This If: You've already got enough disposable magic items to toss into your campaign.

Pulp Fantasy Library: The Tale of Satampra Zeiros

The cover to the left is of the November 1931 issue of Weird Tales in which Clark Ashton Smith's "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" first appeared. As you can see from the cover, CAS did not get the cover image (neither did Robert E. Howard or Otis Adelbert Kline, for that matter), with that honor going to Kirk Washburn, whose story, "Placide's Wife," is all but forgotten today, along with its author. To be fair, REH himself was impressed by Washburn, telling his friend Tevis Clyde Smith that he was "a damned good writer" in a letter from 1932.

That said, "The Tale of Satampra Zeiros" is a superb story, the first of Smith's Hyperborean tales and a terrific spin on the emerging genre of swords-and-sorcery. The short story is a first person account by the titular thief, who recounts his attempted theft from the temple of Tsathoggua in the ruins of an ancient city:

I, Satampra Zeiros of Uzuldaroum, shall write with my left hand, since I have no longer any other, the tale of everything that befell Tirouv Ompallios and myself in the shrine of the god Tsathoggua, which lies neglected by the worship of man in the jungle-taken suburbs of Commoriom, that long-deserted capital of the Hyperborean rulers. I shall write it with the violet juice of the suvana-palm, which turns to a blood-red rubric with the passage of years, on a strong vellum that is made from the skin of the mastodon, as a warning to all good thieves and adventurers who may hear some lying legend of the lost treasures of Commoriom and be tempted thereby.

The story that follows beautifully -- and somewhat disconcertingly -- blends elements of swords-and-sorcery with mordant wit and mounting horror, as it recounts the misadventure of two vainglorious thieves who mistakenly believe they can "replenish [their] finances at the expense of a few dead kings or gods." It reads almost like an alternate universe version of a Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser tale, in which the characters' greed and self-satisfaction get the better of them, leaving them impotent before the eldritch horror that awaits them.

H.P. Lovecraft was apparently quite impressed with this story, telling CAS in a letter that he had "achieved in its fullest glamour the exact Dunsanian touch which I find it almost impossible to duplicate" and adding that it came "close to being [Smith's] high point in prose fiction to date." So impressed was Lovecraft that he is believed to have pressed Weird Tales editor, Farnsworth Wright, to accept the story after he'd initially rejected it as unsuitable for publication. For myself, I find it a moody, evocative story that shows just how compelling an adventure-gone-wrong can be. I think it's a good object lesson for referees and players alike, who might feel that PCs should never suffer permanent setbacks or reversals in their adventures. "The Tales of Satampra Zeiros" shows that, sometimes, a character is made more interesting by his failures, particularly spectacular ones.

Before the Imperium

I've mentioned many times before that I was -- and am -- a Traveller fan. It remains the gold standard for science fiction RPGs, particularly for those of us whose tastes tend toward "Imperial" style SF of the sort written in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. I recently started to re-read the 1977 edition of Traveller and I was amazed by many things about it, but what most amazed me was the sense that I had never actually read these books before. Now, I know I had; I played Traveller a lot back in my youth and I owned copies of Books 1-3 in their original little black book format. Yet, re-reading made me think otherwise. How could this be?

Then it dawned on me. I didn't start playing Traveller till 1982 or 1983, well after the official Third Imperium setting had been firmly established. Alongside my little black books were later supplements, adventures, and copies of The Journal of the Travellers' Aid Society, each of which contributed bits and pieces of the Imperium setting, forever coloring my sense of what Traveller was and was about.

But there's none of that in the little black books. None. The Imperium is never mentioned. Like OD&D on which it was clearly modeled, Traveller in 1977 has only an implied setting, a goulash of Piper, Anderson, Tubb, Chandler, Niven, and Pournelle, with other bits and pieces ripped from off from SF stories written in the decades before the game was published. It's all very "pre-cinematic," which is to say, there's little to no evidence that science fiction movies or TV shows -- including Star Trek -- exercised much influence over Marc Miller in constructing the implied setting of the game.

So, yes, Traveller has a lot of socio-political-technological axioms in common with a lot of literary science fiction, but it nevertheless had no setting of its own. Indeed, the game frequently reminds its readers that it's the job of the referee to make one up for himself, using the tools included in its three rulebooks. (Ironically, this is a point on which the game is criticized in its review in White Dwarf #6). This absence of the Imperium, even merely as an example, makes a world of difference, believe it or not. The game feels far more wide open and flexible, two traits Traveller has always possessed in abundance but which become even more pronounced in the absence of the Imperium. This absence enables me to read Traveller with new eyes and that's a wonderful thing.

The Nostalgia of Things Unknown

The nostalgia of things unknown, of lands forgotten or unfound, is upon me at times. Often I long for the gleam of yellow suns upon terraces of translucent azure marble, mocking the windless waters of lakes unfathomably calm; for lost, legendary palaces of serpentine, silver and ebony, whose columns are green stalactites; for the pillars of fallen temples, standing in the vast purpureal sunset of a land of lost and marvellous romance. I sigh for the dark-green depths of cedar forests, through whose fantastically woven boughs, one sees at intervals an unknown tropic ocean, like gleams of blue diamond; for isles of palm and coral, that fret an amber morning, somewhere beyond Cathay or Taprobane; for the strange and hidden cities of the desert, with burning brazen domes and slender pinnacles of gold and copper, that pierce a heaven of heated lazuli.

--Clark Ashton Smith

Curses

I hate it when I come across a real find, an old school product I'd love to buy and whose condition pretty much demands that I buy it, but that common sense tells me is far too expensive to justify.

Boo.

Risky Character Generation

The other day I discovered a simple little computer program that lets you generate Traveller characters. It's become my new time waster, much in the way that many people play Solitaire or Minesweeper or those little Facebook apps. I actually find it extraordinarily diverting to roll up a random set of characteristics for a character and then see if I can press my luck by getting him into the service I want, with the skills, rank, and mustering out benefits that I'd like as well.

If one is using a computer program, which cannot fudge its results, this process is a lot harder than one might think. There's always a chance that the random rolls will turn against you and your "perfect" character will be killed in action, requiring you to start over. There's also the chance that you won't wind up with the character you intended to create but with someone just as, if not more, interesting. Like a lot of gamers I have certain "types" of characters that, if given the chance, I like to play. In Traveller, I've long aimed to create Naval/Marine doctors -- no idea why -- but often the character generation rules have other ideas. More than a few truly memorable characters were created because of the way Traveller generates PCs. It's why I continue to believe it's probably the best character generation system ever created for a tabletop RPG.

As I think more on it, I realize that I like the "gambling" aspect of character generation a great deal. The kind of risk assessment that comes with creating a Traveller character is something I enjoy and I find myself wishing that more games included character generation as "risky" as Traveller's. Gamma World certainly qualifies as risky, as do Empire of the Petal Throne, early RuneQuest, Stormbringer, and perhaps a few others, but, by and large, RPGs seem to have minimized or move away from such things entirely. That's neither good nor bad in any absolute sense, of course. However, I find my interest in games that lack at least some degree of "gambling" in character creation to be less interesting than those that do -- which probably explains why so few modern games hold my attention for very long.

More Marvel Memories

For those who missed it, over on his own blog, Jeff Grubb presents thirty facts about the "secret origins" of the Marvel Super Heroes game, including why the original boxed set included such rudimentary character creation rules.

This is great stuff and I hope more game designers involved in the first decade of the hobby will take time to make posts like this.

It's Interesting

For some reason, I can always remember that, in AD&D, unarmored characters have an AC of 10, as opposed to 9 in OD&D, but I can never remember that leather armor, which is AC 7 in OD&D, is AC 8 in AD&D. In fact, I'm pretty sure that, back when I played AD&D regularly, I typically treated leather armor as AC 7, even though it wasn't.

I wonder why that is.

Virgil Finlay is Awesome

Yag-Kosha and Dwimmermount

"I am very old, oh man of the waste countries; long and long ago I came to this planet with others of my world, from the green planet Yag, which circles for ever in the outer fringes of this universe ... We saw men grow from the ape and build the shining cities of Valusia, Kamelia, Commoria, and their sisters. We saw them reel before the thrusts of the heathen Atlanteans and Picts and Lemurians. We saw the oceans rise and engulf Atlantis and Lemuria, and the isles of the Picts, and the shining cities of civilization ... All this we saw ..."

After reading the recounting of the last session of my Dwimmermount campaign, a perspicacious reader wondered if the wounded space traveler Xaranes, worshiped as the Iron God while he convalesced in an otherworldly pocket dimension, was inspired by Robert E. Howard's character of Yag-Kosha from the 1933 story "The Tower of the Elephant." I am not ashamed to admit that the answer is a resounding yes.

"The Tower of the Elephant" is one of my favorite Conan tales, precisely because it defies so many expectations about both the character of Conan and the Hyborian Age. Before Terry Brooks proved that aping Tolkien was the secret to mainstream success, fantasy literature had no compunction about freely adding "science fiction" concepts to "fantasy" stories. Indeed, such a distinction didn't even exist, as evidenced by the fact that, for example, Fritz Leiber's "Ill Met in Lankhmar" won both the 1970 Nebula Award for best novella and the 1971 Hugo Award for the same, competing against other stories that would today be considered "science fiction" without qualification. This sort of elision between what are now considered two distinct genres is something that was very much in evidence in the early days of the hobby, if you consider Dave Arneson's Blackmoor, Dave Hargrave's Arduin, Barker's Tékumel, and Bledsaw and Owen's Wilderlands, among many others.

It was to these settings that I looked for inspiration when I started thinking about Dwimmermount. I wanted a setting where a space traveler mistakenly worshiped as a god would seem perfectly natural and so that's what I created. From the beginning, I made "extraterrestrial" contact a fact, with the Red Elves -- the Eld -- being ancient conquerors from another world. With that established, it's no great leap to then imagine other alien beings traversing the ether in like fashion. I was reminded too of Smith's Zothique, which he described in February 1931 as being

more subject to incursions of "outsideness" than any former terrene realm; and more liable to the visitations of beings from galaxies not yet visible; also, to shifting admixtures and interchanges with other dimensions or planes of entity.

Smith's description could easily be used for Dwimmermount as I conceive it and as the setting is slowly beginning to reveal itself to the players. As I've noted before, Dungeons & Dragons is primarily a game of exploration, which is why it's essential that there always be new places to explore. I wanted to be sure I never ran out of unique realms to visit and so I unhesitatingly penciled in a vast campaign universe, of which Dwimmermount itself is a focal point and lightning rod, for reasons the characters have only just now begun to uncover.

So don't be surprised if future Dwimmermount sessions see the characters journeying to other worlds, interacting with alien beings, or plumbing the hidden depths of the wider universe. This is exactly what I'd always intended to do with the game and it's perfectly in keeping with its -- and D&D's -- inspirations.