The Articles of Dragon: "Greyhawk's World"

In my younger days, I was a big fan of The World of Greyhawk setting, for reasons I've discussed in other posts on this blog. Sometime during 1982, probably starting with the appearance of "The Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk" series, there was a significant uptick in the amount of Greyhawk material in the pages of Dragon. I loved this, of course, as I was eager to learn more not just about Greyhawk but also perhaps the direction Gary Gygax was planning to take AD&D, as rumors of an expansion first began to circulate. Just as each new character class or collection of spells provided hints about where AD&D might be headed, so too did his elaborations on the Greyhawk setting (or so I thought anyway).

Consequently, when issue #71 (March 1983) came out, I was pleased to see that it included multiple articles penned by Gygax, two of which specifically dealt with Greyhawk. While one was simply another installment of deities and demigods, another presented something adjacent but nevertheless slightly different. Entitled "Greyhawk's World," the article presented three "quasi-deities" and one "hero-deity" – entirely new concepts for AD&D, as Gygax himself explains at the start of the article.

Gygax defines a "quasi-deity" as "above the status of important characters, by and large, but not quite demigods." Included in this class are "personages" such as Daern, Heward, Johydee, Keoghtom, Murlynd, Nolzur, and Quaal, all of whose names should be familiar to anyone who's read the Dungeon Masters Guide, because they're associated with various magic items and artifacts (Heward mystical organ, Keoghtom's ointment, etc.). Some of these characters were once player characters and are now retired from adventuring in the usual sense. For the most part, "their exalted status moves them in other realms," but they may occasionally become involved in more mundane matters, hence Gygax's description of three of them in this issue: Heward, Keoghtom, and Murlynd.

Heward is a high-level bard named for Hugh Burdick, Gygax's cousin. Whether Burdick ever actually played Heward or D&D, I don't know, but I am sure my better informed readers can provide that information. Keoghtom possesses high levels in multiple classes – cleric, magic-user, illusionist, monk, bard – and is an homage to Gygax's deceased childhood friend, Tom Keogh. Murlynd is the former character of another deceased of Gygax, Don Kaye, who was also one of the original founders of Tactical Studies Rules. Of the three, Murlynd was the one who most interested me, because, in addition to having levels as a paladin, magic-user, and illusionist, he was also "typically clad in garments of another time and world, that of 'the Old West'." Murlynd also carried a pair of six-shooters that nevertheless worked in the Greyhawk setting, despite their otherworldly technological nature.

In addition to the three aforementioned characters, Gygax presents a fourth, Kelanen "the Prince of Swords," whom he calls a "hero-deity." A hero-deity would seem to be a step closer to true demigod-hood, given that "some who live by the sword pay him homage." Like the quasi-deities, Kelanen possesses high levels in multiple classes, in addition to having a number of unique magic items and special abilities that set him apart from mere mortals. Unlike the three quasi-deities, Kelanen is more reclusive and singularly devoted to his narrow interests. He's also neutral in alignment – the others are all good – and dedicated to "balance."

When I first read this article, I was instantly taken with it, primarily because it provided some additional details about the high-level NPCs of the World of Greyhawk. I, of course, recognized the names of Heward and Keoghtom right away, while Murlynd and Kelanen were unknown to me. Of the two, Murlynd caught my attention, because of his cowboy-like appearance and his use of firearms, something that, up to that point, was quite uncommon in AD&D, outside of oddities like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. I found Murlynd simultaneously appealing and repellant – appealing because who doesn't find the idea of a magic-using cowboy cool and repellant because I was a terrible stick in the mud generally opposed to genre bending. I preferred to color within the lines, even in my fantasy.

The other aspect of the article that I found compelling was one that Gygax didn't much develop. He mentions offhandedly that 

Using these three as guidelines, it should not prove too difficult for the DM to act to bring very special "retired" player characters, and possibly some of your most successful NPCs too, into the realm of the quasi-deity. By means of dual-class work, special situations, successful quests, and the completion of defined tasks, the former PCs can be elevated to the new status. 

Gygax provides no details of precisely how to handle this, leaving up to each Dungeon Master to adjudicate, which strikes me as wise and probably a better approach then what we got in the Immortals Rules. Though I never took this up in any of my own campaigns, I was intrigued by the idea, as well as by the implication that perhaps, in the future, AD&D might carve out more space for high-level characters. High-level play is one of those things that's always existed in theory, but it's never, in my experience anyway, been all that satisfying – just more levels, more hit points, more spells, etc. without any real purpose beyond it. Maybe that's an inherent flaw in the structure of D&D itself, I don't know. From time to time, though, I caught glimmers of something more than that in Gygax's Dragon columns. I'll be sure to point out what I'm talking about in future "The Articles of Dragon" posts.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Falling Damage"

And so it begins.

Issue #70 of Dragon (February 1983) saw the appearance of "Falling Damage" by Frank Mentzer, the first of what would turn into several articles discussing this strangely contentious subject. I say strangely contentious because, until this article appeared, I don't think the "right" way to adjudicate falling damage was ever a topic of serious conversation, at least not among the gamers I knew. The LBBs provide rules for falling damage hidden away in the section on aerial combat in Volume 3, where it's stated simply that

for every 1" of height a rider must throw one six-sided die for damage occurring from the crash, i.e. a crash from 12" means twelve dice must be rolled and their total scored as points of damage

That passage is the basis for what was the standard interpretation of falling damage in every form of D&D -- 1d6 damage per 10' fallen. That is, until this article, where Mentzer claims that the rules in AD&D were hastily written by Gary Gygax and were, as such, unclear as to his actual intent. Instead of 1d6 damage per 10' fallen, the claim is advanced that Gary actually meant 1d6 damage per 10', with the dice being cumulative in effect. That is,

1d6 for the first 10' feet, 2d6 for the second 10' (total 3d6 for a 20' fall), 3d6 for the third 10', and so on, cumulative. The falling body reaches that 20d6 maximum shortly before passing the 60' mark.

According to Mentzer, this new system -- which in fact Gygax had "always used" -- is "definitely more realistic." (emphasis mine) There's that dreaded word, the hallmark of the Silver Age. It's something that, at the time, meant a lot to me, but that, as the years have worn on, I find myself caring less and less about. In a game where people can throw balls of fire from their hands and adventurers become tougher to kill as the result of slaying monsters and looting treasure, fretting over whether a 60' fall or a 200' fall deals 20d6 damage seems bizarre. More to the point, after nearly a decade of "doing it wrong" (Mentzer's words), did the difference matter enough to make the change?

Regardless, the claim that Gygax had "always used a geometrically increasing system for damage in AD&D games" strikes me as somewhat suspect. I suppose it's possible that, sometime after the LBBs were published, Gary changed the way he dealt with falling damage in his home campaign. But, if so, I find it surprising that he never noticed that in every other D&D product published after 1974, the 1d6 per 10' rule is the norm. Indeed, I'd hazard a guess that, if one were to look through the various modules and articles Gygax penned between 1974 and 1983, we'd find instances where the 1d6 damage per 10' rule was in fact used. There's a fun project for an enterprising soul out there!

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Charting the Classes"

One of the characteristics of what I call the Silver Age of D&D is an obsession with mathematics, using it for a wide variety of purposes, from determining the best way to model falling damage to proving if one's dice "be ill-wrought." In issue #69 (January 1983) of Dragon, Roger E. Moore offered up yet another new field for mathematical analysis: class "balance." Many old school gamers think worrying about such matters is a peculiarly modern notion, but it's not. For almost as long as I've played the game, I've known players who fretted over whether this class or that class was "overpowered" or "underpowered" compared to the others. It's a concern I've never really worried about myself, partially because I think all but the most egregious mechanical differences take a backseat to what actually happens at the table. Nitpicker and hair splitter I may be about many topics relating to D&D but this isn't one of them.

However, I'm hardly representative of anyone but myself and I expect that, when Moore wrote this article he was speaking on behalf a sizable number of gamers who had a sneaking suspicion that some AD&D character classes were better (or worse) than others -- and he was going to prove it. Moore's analysis hinges on comparing the classes according to accumulated experience points, not level. His thesis is that, by examining the relative strengths and weaknesses of each class at certain XP benchmarks, he might get a sense of which classes are more (or less) potent than others. In doing this, Moore discovers that, for the most part, AD&D's classes are reasonably balanced against one another, with two significant exceptions, along with a third point of discussion.

The first anomaly concerns druids, which Moore says are unusually tough compared to other classes. Compared to clerics, they advance very quickly and, more importantly, they continue to gain full hit dice all the way to 14th level, which also nets them more Constitution bonuses as well. Druids thus wind up being comparable to fighters at mid-levels and even surpassing them at higher levels. Consequently, he recommends increasing the druid's XP requirements to compensate. The second anomaly concerns monks, which Moore says are too weak in terms of hit points for a class that is supposed to fight hand-to-hand. He recommends that they have D6 hit points. Finally, Moore says -- along with nearly every AD&D player I knew back in the day -- that bard, as presented in the Players Handbook, needs to go. He recommends Jeff Goelz's bard as a replacement.

In the end, "Charting the Classes" is actually a very modest and limited analysis of AD&D's character classes and Moore's suggestions are all quite reasonable. I believe I even adopted his recommendation regarding druids, as I know from experience that they were more potent than they had any right to be. Still, I largely find the idea of "balance" between the classes a Quixotic obsession that's played a lot of mischief with D&D in its later incarnations. But it is, unfortunately, a long and deeply held concern of many gamers and I don't expect it to ever go away.

The Articles of Dragon: "A Split Class for Nimble Characters: the Thief-Acrobat"

Issue #69 of Dragon (January 1983) is another one about whose articles I have very strong memories. The strength of my memories is bolstered, no doubt, by the issue's remarkable cover by Clyde Caldwell. Caldwell's an artist about whom my feelings are generally mixed, but I've nevertheless got a fondness for this particular piece, which, in some ways, encapsulates the vibe of the dying days of D&D's Golden Age. Consequently, I'll be returning to this issue several times in the coming weeks. 

This week, though, I want to look at Gary Gygax's "From the Sorceror's [sic] Scroll" column, in which he provides full details on the thief-acrobat "split class" that he first mentioned in a previous column. A split class is a specialization path for an existing class, in this case the thief. Provided he has the appropriate ability scores requirements (STR 15, DEX 16), a thief can, upon attaining 6th level, choose to devote himself to acrobatics as an outgrowth of his thievery – in effect, becoming a cat burglar or second story man in criminal parlance.

At the time of this article's publication, this was a comparatively unique concept, one that Gygax claims "has not been expressed before" and for which there is "nothing similar" in AD&D. I'm not entirely sure this is true. As I mentioned previously, the thief-acrobat reminds me a bit of the original concept for the paladin class, as found in Supplement I to OD&D. Likewise, the AD&D version of the bard, in which a character must first attain levels in fighter and thief before becoming a bard, is in the same ballpark in my opinion. Even so, the precise arrangement Gygax presents for the thief-acrobat isn't one we'd seen before.

I liked the idea of the thief-acrobat more in principle than in fact and my friends held similar views. Only one of them ever chose to pursue this split class and the player soon grew bored of playing him. That was probably the biggest problem with the thief-acrobat: it was very specialized and thus of limited utility. This is the kind of class that I could see thriving in, say, an urban, all thief campaign, where each character needs to distinguish himself from his fellow thieves. In a more traditional dungeon-based campaign, I think the thief-acrobat hold much less or appeal – or at least that's how my friends and I viewed it.

When it comes to the question of designing character classes, there are a couple of common approaches, neither of which is without its problems. Dungeons & Dragons began with only a few broad, archetypal classes, like the cleric, fighting man, and magic-user, but soon added many more, each one devoted to a narrower but nevertheless real archetype. AD&D opted for a larger list of available classes, while the D&D line kept to something closer to the original, narrower list. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages and I can easily defend them both.

Had Gygax remained at the helm of AD&D, we would certainly have seen more classes added to its roster, some of which, like the thief-acrobat, would have been quite narrow in their utility. That's not necessarily a problem, but it can add a lot of unnecessary complexity to the game, not to mention diluting the game's flavor. On the other hand, a goodly selection of classes can, if presented properly, increase the game's flavor, with each one revealing more about its explicit or implied setting and the sorts of activities characters are expected to undertake within it.

Whether the thief-acrobat succeeds in doing any of these things is an open question, hence my own ambivalence toward it. Even so, this article sticks in my mind, because, like others written by Gygax at the time, it offered a sneak peek into his evolving vision of AD&D. It was a really interesting time to be a fan of the game and I'm glad to have been around for it.

"A Relaxation of the Rule"

There was an editor's note inserted into "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures" that I thought worthy of its own separate post. The article's author, Arthur Collins, describes the rules tweaks he recommends for each of the standard AD&D races in order to better reflect the Pleistocene Epoch. When he gets to elves, he says the following:

Elves would be +1 with spear and sling (instead of bow and sword, neither having been invented). While all races would have discovered ritual fermented or narcotic potations, to the elves would belong the specialty of making wine from wild grapes. Also, only wood elves would be around in Ice Age times.

Take special note of that last sentence: "Also, only wood elves would be around in Ice Age times." Appearing in italics immediately after it is the editor's note I mentioned above. It reads:

Since the Players Handbook says all player character elves are considered to be high elves, abiding by this stipulation would make it impossible for player-character elves to exist in this environment. If the issue must be resolved, DMs will have to either ignore the author’s recommendation or choose to allow a relaxation of the rule.

What a bizarre editor's note. Dragon was regularly filled with rules options and variants that ran counter to what was written in the Players Handbook and elsewhere and I can't recall seeing a note like this. Why here in particular? More to the point, it's a relatively minor detail in an article that is explicitly intended to alter the standard rules of AD&D to accommodate an unusual time period. I'm genuinely baffled that anyone would care that, yes, technically, by the book, wood elves are not allowed for use as player characters in 1982 (a rule that would be overturned in Unearthed Arcana just a few years later). 

There's a reason TSR and AD&D were viewed negatively in a lot of gaming circles back then. 

The Articles of Dragon: "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures"

 

Quite often, the articles from Dragon magazine that I most remember are not those I ever made use of in my own games, but those that I didn't. There are probably many reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that, even in my youth, when I led a life relatively free of responsibility, I still had limited time. There were only so many games I could play at any given time and, inevitably, there'd be lots of ideas I'd have loved to make use of but didn't simply because I lacked the time to do so. To be fair, that's still a problem for me, even today. Consequently, these articles occupy by the same space as "the one that got away" does in the minds of fishermen – a might have been that continues to play on the imagination even years later.

That's certainly how I feel about "Thrills and Chills: Ice Age Adventures," which appeared in issue #68 (December 1982). Written by Arthur Collins, whom I consider one of the great unsung contributors to Dragon during the early to mid-1980s, this lengthy article offers ideas and rules modifications for playing AD&D during the Pleistocene era. Collins explains that he was inspired by Jean M. Auel's The Clan of the Cave Bear, but, for me, the touchstone for Ice Age tales will always be Manly Wade Wellman's Hok the Mighty, which I first encountered in old copies of Fantastic my local library kept alongside issues of other SF and fantasy magazines.

For years, I'm not certain I could have explained exactly why I found the idea of Ice Age adventuring so compelling. Rereading the article in preparation for writing this post, though, I now think I understand it. For lack of a better word, the Ice Age is post-apocalyptic setting – not in the sense as it's usually meant, of course, but it's nevertheless a setting in which humanity (and other intelligent races) must struggle to survive in a very hostile world. Perhaps because I've never really lacked for anything in my life, I have a powerful fascination for settings in which characters have to worry about where their next meal is coming from or how they'll shelter themselves against merciless Mother Nature.

Collins spends a lot of time discussing the challenges of living during the Pleistocene, particularly when it comes to food. For example, he offers calculations on just how much game and grains a small tribe of Ice Age would need to gather during the course of a single year to stave off malnutrition. He even goes so far as to translate the meat into hit dice in order to quantify it in a way that makes sense within the context of AD&D. I have no idea how well his calculations would hold up to rigorous scrutiny, but they serve a very useful, practical purpose for referees and players alike, which is honestly what I want in an article like this. 

Collins also includes information on braving the weather of this period of history, though he doesn't go into quite as much detail as did David Axler in his "Weather in the World of Greyhawk." He devotes far more space to imagining what the standard AD&D races and monsters would be like in the Pleistocene world, which makes sense, I think. The key to articles like this is in providing enough new and variant rules to make the setting/time period feel distinct but not so many that employing them in play seems daunting. I feel Collins struck the right balance overall, though I do wish he'd take the opportunity to write a bit more about just what Ice Age adventures and campaigns might be like rather than just how they differ from more conventional AD&D play.

I'll conclude by saying that another aspect of this article that likely appealed to me as a young man was that it dared to stray even a little from the default faux medieval setting of Dungeons & Dragons (and indeed of fantasy more generally). While I was and remain a fan of using the Middle Ages as inspiration, I do find myself wishing gamers would occasionally try something else occasionally, whether based on a real world historical period or something completely imaginary. Fantasy need not be so cramped in its vision.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Weather in the World of Greyhawk"

Issue #68 (December 1982) of Dragon was the first issue I ever received as part of my subscription to the magazine, though I'd read it nigh-religiously for some time beforehand. Due to an error on the TSR periodicals department, I received two copies of every issue for the next twelve months, one addressed to me at my actual address in Baltimore, Maryland and the other addressed to me in Baltimore, Mississippi, though the zip codes were the same for each (which is why they both arrived in my mailbox). Having two copies was quite useful to me, since it gave me the freedom to chop up and otherwise disassemble one copy while keeping the other pristine for my collection.

In any event, issue #68 included an article by a writer called David Axler entitled "Weather in the World of Greyhawk." Though presented as an unofficial supplement to The World of Greyhawk, the article was eventually canonized by being included in the 1983 boxed set version of the setting. Axler's article was a well-done early example of what would become a staple of Silver Age Dragon articles: a system for introducing "realism" into one's campaign. In this case, it was weather that got the "realistic" treatment, with tables for determining temperature, precipitation, and cloudiness, in addition to discussions of lunar phases, high winds, and "special weather phenomena," such as wind storms and tsunamis.

In truth, Axler's rules are pretty simple to use and presented intelligibly so that even my 13 year-old self could use them with relative ease. And use them I did. Back in 1982, I was all about adding doses of "realism" into my AD&D campaign where I could and, since this article had done all the hard work for me, why wouldn't I use it? Eventually, though, I stopped doing so, because, easy though it might have been to use, I rarely found that knowing just how much rain had fallen or the effects of high humidity added much to my adventures. The extra "realism" serve no purpose other than satisfying my adolescent sense that a good DM should know these sorts of things about his campaign setting. I abandoned that way of thinking a long time ago and I don't think my campaigns have suffered for it.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "The Astral Plane"

A Dragon article written by Roger E. Moore and with an introduction by E. Gary Gygax, where he states that "[this] is about as 'official' as is possible at this time?" For my 13 year-old self, this was as good as an article could get. Appearing in issue #67 (November 1982), "The Astral Plane" was a massive effort on the part of Moore to provide comprehensive rules for adventuring on the Astral Plane. It included discussions of astral encounters, astral travel, the Psychic Wind, movement, combat, and alterations to spells and magic items. There was also an accompanying adventure called "Fedifensor" (written by Allen Rogers) intended to be used in conjunction with Moore's rules. Taken together, it was very impressive package that solidified my sense that, aside from Gary Gygax, Roger E. Moore was one of a handful of Dragon writers whose stuff I could safely assume would be good.

We didn't do a lot of plane hopping in my old AD&D campaigns. I do recall a few visits to the Nine Hells and the Abyss and I suspect the characters did so by means of the Astral Plane on at least one occasion, but, if so, these trips weren't particularly memorable. Ultimately, that's the main problem with "The Astral Plane" – even with all the clever rules modifications that Moore came up with, the place is still deadly dull. That's not Moore's fault, because he was trying to work within the parameters laid down by AD&D up till that point and those parameters paint a rather uninspiring picture. Sure, the Githyanki hang out on the Astral Plane, but, other than that, what else makes this place cool? Why would anyone want to go there for any length of time? "The Astral Plane" doesn't answer that question and nothing in the AD&D books at the time provided a better answer.

That said, I did like the fact that Moore postulates that other planes will operate according to different laws than those of the Prime Material. That's something I strong advocate and think is essential to the feeling of "We're not in Kansas anymore" other planes should evoke. I also think, as was true in Queen of the Demonweb Pits, that "The Astral Plane" goes overboard in the level of specificity about how character abilities, spells, and magic items operate differently, but that's a criticism of implementation not of concept. So, in retrospect, I still like this article a great deal, even if I wouldn't use it as written in any game I am running now. It's still a great idea mine and a useful foundation for an approach to handling weird otherworlds in your D&D campaign.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk"

Issue #67 of Dragon (November 1982) is another one featuring more than one article that made a lasting impression on me. The first of these is Gary Gygax's "The Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk." Now, given my rather mixed to negative feelings about Deities & Demigods itself, you'd think I'd feel similarly about this article (and its follow-ups in subsequent issues) as well. However, you'd be mistaken in that assumption and the reason why is, I think, worth discussing.

I have a lot of criticisms of Deities & Demigods, but one I haven't talked about as often as I should is how dull it is. The book presents more than a dozen pantheons for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, but the bulk of that presentation is given over to game statistics of the gods rather than information about the beliefs, practices, and role of those gods' worship. That's the kind of thing I wanted out of the book, not Monster Manual-style write-ups of Zeus or Odin. Making the Greek and Norse gods boring is quite the feat, especially for someone like myself, who adored their myths and legends and yet, somehow, Deities & Demigods managed to do it.

"The Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk," unfortunately, still devotes too much space to game statistics. On the other hand, Gygax provides more than that, peppering his descriptions of the four featured gods – Heironeous, Hextor, Iuz, and St. Cuthbert – with information on their worshipers, temples, and place in society, not to mention tidbits of Greyhawk-specific mythology in which they appear. In these descriptions, he's fleshing out the World of Greyhawk setting in a way he never did in its original folio release. That was a big part of the appeal of this article for me: learning more about the details of what had previously been a very bare bones setting, including its myths and folklore. 

It didn't hurt that the gods Gygax chose to highlight in this first article were genuinely interesting ones. In the case of St. Cuthbert, he had finally answered questions I'd had ever since I first opened my copy of the Dungeon Masters Guide and read the artifacts section where he discusses the Mace of St. Cuthbert. Likewise, Iuz was one of the few divine (or demonic) beings mentioned by name in The World of Greyhawk, where he is simply called "Lord of Evil." Nothing else is said about him, so I was largely left to imagine who Iuz might be until this article appeared. Heironeous and Hextor, on the other hand, were completely new to me, having never come across any references to them beforehand. These quarreling half-brothers, one good and one evil, made quite the pair and the divine rivalry had consequences for Greyhawk and its inhabitants.

As I said, Gygax still wastes far too much verbiage on game statistics – statistics that, in my experience, are almost never used in actual play. I don't really understand why AD&D went to the trouble of codifying the armor class, hit points, attacks, etc. of the gods. I can only assume that, by the time this article appeared, doing so was already well enough established that Gygax didn't consider another approach, one that focuses less on game stats and more on the role the gods played within the imaginary setting of Greyhawk. That's a shame, because I think it's a more fruitful approach – or at least one I would have enjoyed more.

Even so, "The Deities & Demigods of the World of Greyhawk" manages to pack a fair bit of setting-specific information in its entries, which I enjoyed. This article and the ones that followed were among my favorites in the pages of Dragon during the early 1980s. They gave the World of Greyhawk some much needed details about its gods and religions, a topic I've long enjoyed. But it was this first article that I remember most vividly, hence its inclusion in this series.

The Articles of Dragon: "Old Dwarvish is Still New to Scholars of Language Lore"

I promise this is the final article from issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982) that I'll talk about! However, since I'd already posted about the others devoted to languages in Dungeons & Dragons, I felt I'd be remiss not to do so for this one as well. 

"Old Dwarvish is Still New to Scholars of Language Lore" by Clyde Heaton is short in length and unusual in its approach. The piece purports to be the notes of "that illustrious pursuer of knowledge," Boru O'Bonker concerning the ancient language of Old Dwarvish. The language is no longer spoken regularly by dwarves, but exists as their ceremonial and traditional language. It survives mostly in poetry and religious rites and occasionally in old expressions and colloquialisms. The framing device of the article suggests that knowledge of the language is kept from outsiders, which is why O'Bonker is now on the run from "very short, heavily armed gentlemen" who had "a professional interest in him."

What then follows is a brief discussion of the phonology, grammar, and vocabulary of Old Dwarvish. When I say "brief," I'm not kidding. For example, here's the entirety of the vocabulary presented with the article. 

The grammar presented is similarly limited, presenting only the basic structure of Old Dwarvish sentences and the structural relationships between nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Within the context of the framing device, this is because O'Bonker is focused on unraveling the mystery of this ancient tongue. He doesn't yet have all the pieces, so his notes are, therefore, incomplete. That's a clever explanation, but one is then left with a question: Why? What's the purpose of this article, if not to provide the reader with a reasonably complete Old Dwarvish language to use in his adventures and campaign?

I have long suspected that the purpose of this article was, in fact, to show how little of a language a referee needed to create in order to make use of it in an adventure as a puzzle to be solved. In my youth, it was not at all uncommon for an important clue or piece of information in a dungeon to be hidden through the use of a cypher or an alphabet the referee made up. The players had to figure out a way to understand it and doing so was vital to moving forward. Most often, these cyphers used substitution or a similarly obvious method of hiding its information. More industrious referees would employ more elaborate methods. That's what I think Heaton is doing here, but I really can't say for certain.

Regardless of the author's actual intention, I was inspired by it to create my own partial languages for use in my Emaindor setting. I created fragments of Elvish (two varieties), Almerian (a Latin analog), Emânic, Tulikese, and more. I was no linguist, just a kid with an interest in foreign languages and a lot of time on his hands. So, I did my best to try to choose distinct sounds for each language and then a basic structure for sentences and enough vocabulary to name places and characters, as well as to, occasionally, make use of little phrases for color. I still have most of them in a binder my mother gave to me years ago, just before she sold my childhood home. They're nothing special but they were among my earliest attempts to create a coherent, "realistic" fantasy setting, so I retain an affection for them, which is why this article, despite its limitations, is one I look back on with similar affection.

The Articles of Dragon: "Fantasy Philology: Playing the Fluency Percentages"

Clearly, issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982) was a memorable one for me, because I'm – once again – devoting a post to one of its articles. To be fair, both of the previous two posts concerning this issue were also about a favorite topic of mine, languages, so it was probably inevitable I'd write about them. Even so, I'd hazard a guess that there will be comparatively few issues to which I'll return multiple times in this series, which probably says more about my own tastes than the quality of individual Dragon issues.

"Fantasy Philology: Playing the Fluency Percentages" by Arthur Collins (an author I hold in particularly high regard) is among a handful of articles I remember quite vividly, right down to being able to quote portions of the following dialog, which kicks it off:

Collins uses this dialog to illustrate what he thinks D&D sessions "ought to sound like (sort of)" but rarely do. His point isn't so much that he expects every player, let alone the referee, to make use of "accents and characteristic speech patterns." However, Collins does believe that "language differences can add a lot to a campaign, especially in terms of the challenge of communicating with people (and monsters) who speak other tongues and dialects." The dialog above is intended to show that these differences might extend even to members of common character classes and races. 

Collins then goes on to propose that each Dungeon Master get a handle on all the major languages in his campaign and how they relate to one another. Like A.D. Rogan, Collins is a fan of using language trees to aid in understanding the relationships between languages. However, unlike those in Rogan's article, which are mostly just ornamental, Collins's trees serve a purpose in the new language rules he proposes. These rules are the real meat of his article and why I was so taken with them back when I first read them more than four decades ago.

Under the standard rules of (A)D&D, a character either speaks and understands a language or he does not. Whether he does so is a function of his Intelligence score, his class, and his race. For most people, I suspect that's fine, but it's not what I wanted for my games. By this time, I'd been playing Call of Cthulhu for some time already and I liked its language rules. I wanted something similar in my D&D games and this article provides that. In fact, it provides more than that since, as I said, it takes into account how closely related on language is to another to determine a character's ability to understand and be understood. 

I make it sound more complicated than it actually is. Collins gives each character a fluency percentage in each language he knows, based on his Intelligence score, his level, and a few other factors. These establish how well he can make himself understood to speakers of the same language. These percentages are modified when trying to speak to someone fluent in a related language, depending on how closely related it is. The more distantly related it is, the harder it is to make oneself understood. It's a very straightforward set of rules – simple really, but still more complex than anything in any edition of Dungeons & Dragons with which I'm familiar.

One of the conclusions to which I've come, after decades of playing RPGs, is that we all use the rules we think are most important to the kind of play we want and tend to downplay or even outright ignore the rest. I've never cared a lot about combat, so I prefer simple, uncomplicated systems. On the other hand, I like dealing with languages and communication, so I appreciate attempts like this article to model better the nature of learning, speaking, and understanding different languages. Based on my own experiences, most gamers don't feel the same way, which is probably why I tend to remember articles like this one when they appear. 

The Articles of Dragon: "Languages Rules Leave Lots of Room"

Issue #66 of Dragon (October 1982) includes several different articles related to fantasy languages and their use in Dungeons & Dragons adventures and campaigns. While not all of them are good, several are – or at least are interesting enough that I still remember them after all these years, which is why I'll be devoting a few more posts to them, including today's. The first of these interesting language articles is A.D. Rogan's "Language Rules Leave Lots of Room for Creativity in Your Campaign." It's not the most inspired title by any means, nor does it really convey much about its content. Nevertheless, it does, in my opinion, raise some good questions about languages in (A)D&D and provides some intriguing answers to them.

The first thing one needs to know about this article is it's primarily concerned with linguistics, specifically the connections between languages, their degree of mutual intelligibility, and what sort of information a given language is capable of conveying. That probably sounds hopelessly nerdy, even within the context of RPGs, and it probably is. For a kid like me, who was deeply interested in foreign languages and their development, this was catnip. Add in that Rogan's article includes language trees showing how he imagines some of the demihuman, humanoid, and monster languages relate to one another (and, in some cases, to human languages), I found it really enjoyable.

Consider this language tree, which I hope is at least somewhat legible:

Here, Rogan makes connections between Middle Elfin and the languages of elven subspecies, woodland and fairy creatures, and even the secret language of the Druids. As I said above, it's hopelessly nerdy stuff, but simply looking at this language tree tells me a lot about the author's own fantasy setting. Ultimately, that's what makes the article so remarkable: it illustrates how something as specific as languages and their interrelationships can help to define a fantasy setting. 

Of course, Rogan doesn't limit himself to examining language trees, cool as I found that as a kid. He also devotes quite a lot of time to looking at what the AD&D rules say or imply about languages, literacy, and similar questions. As it turns out, the rules say quite a lot about these topics, though rarely in a cohesive way. That makes sense, since most of the comments are scattered across multiple books, written over the course of several years. Further, these comments are usually, like so much in Dungeons & Dragons, ad hoc rules put together to deal with specific problems, like how many languages can a character speak and so forth. Rogan attempts to make sense of them all, or at least raise questions for each referee to consider as he makes his own fantasy setting.

Naturally, I don't agree with all of Rogan's answers. For example, he assumes that members of the monk class must be illiterate, because they are unable to make use of scrolls and lack the thief's read languages ability. That's a defensible, if odd, extrapolation of the AD&D rules and one I don't share. However, it is, in my view, a good illustration of the kinds of things a referee might want to consider as he tackles the question of languages and literacy in his campaign setting, especially if that setting is an original one of his own creation. This article is, therefore, a useful one with a lot of recommend it. As I've said a couple of times already, I thought pretty highly of it in my youth and found, in re-reading it, that it still holds up reasonably well.

The Articles of Dragon: "Thieves' Cant: A Primer"

A great weakness of mine is constructed languages. While I can't say for certain – there's always the possibility that something else is to blame – I think it's quite likely that Appendices E and F of The Lord of the Rings planted the seeds of this lifelong fascination. I spent an inordinate amount of time reading those sections at the back of The Return of the King, especially the pages that displayed the Tengwar and the Angerthas. Likewise, when I got hold of The Silmarillion, I paid special attention to its appendix about Quenya and Sindarin names. Along with an old Random House Dictionary of the English Language, whose inside covers had diagrams of the evolution of Latin script, these books pretty much ensured I'd be a conlang nerd for the rest of my life. 

Consequently, I always took great interest in language-related articles in Dragon or other RPG periodicals. Issue #66 (October 1982) featured several of these, all of which left a lasting impression on me. The first, which I'll discuss in this post, was ""Thieves' Cant: A primer for the language of larceny" by Aurelio Locsin. It's a fairly short article that is presented as a document from a fantasy setting detailing the grammar and vocabulary of Thieves' Cant, the secret language of thieves from Dungeons & Dragons. 

Now, Thieves' Cant had, prior to this point, never, so far as I know, been described at any length in any D&D product. The AD&D Players Handbook merely calls it thieves' "own language" and says nothing more about it. I suspect it was on this basis that Locsin formed his ideas about how to approach creating a Thieves' Cant language for use with the game. He wanted to come up with something that had all the features of a "real" language – nouns, pronouns, modifiers, verbs and tenses, etc. – while still being simple enough that it didn't require a degree in linguistics to understand, let alone make use of it.

Of course, that's the crux of it: how were you supposed to use Thieves' Cant? What was its purpose? The article itself, as I said, is short and is presented in a detached, quasi-academic way, as if written by a scholar or linguist from within a fantasy setting, who's now sharing this secret language with the reader. There's, therefore, not even a sidebar or bit of boxed text hinting at how players or Dungeon Masters might make use of this constructed language in their adventures or campaigns. Instead, it's simply described, complete with a section in the center of the magazine that's supposed to be removed and then cut and folded to produce a 32-page two-way pocket dictionary of the language.

Another equally frustrating issue with the article is its very basis. Locsin's vision of Thieves' Cant is of an actual language, with its own distinct grammar and vocabulary, just as Elvish or Orcish would have their own distinct elements. This seems completely wrongheaded to me. Historically, thieves, criminals, and other outcasts have had their own unique ways of communicating with one another – you know, a cant or jargon that's known primarily by other members of group in question. There are innumerable examples of this in the real world and very few of them were created from the ground up by inventing a new grammar and vocabulary. It seems highly unlikely that Thieves' Cant would be an exception.

As I recall, the reaction to this article, both in the letters column of future issues and in later articles about languages in D&D, was not positive. I can't say that I disagree with those reactions. Re-reading the article in preparation for writing this post reminded me of just how weird and ultimately useless it is. I hate saying that, because it's clear Locsin put some effort into inventing the grammar and vocabulary, but I'm still left wondering why? What did he think would be done with the language? Heck, what did he do with the language in his own campaigns? Had he written about that, even a little, it might well have improved the article's utility. As it is, "Thieves' Cant: A primer for the language of larceny" is just an oddity and nothing more.

Fortunately, I have better things to say about this issue's other articles about language.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Character Classes to Consider"

Issue #65 (September 1982) of Dragon saw yet another "From the Sorceror's [sic] Scroll" column by Gary Gygax that I will long remember. At the time, I was an avid AD&D player, having largely cast aside the D&D line as "for kids" (despite my being only just shy of 13 at the time). So, anything Gygax wrote about an "expansion volume" for the system was of keen interest to me. In the article under examination today, Gary laid out his plans for some new sub-classes, a topic sure to cause me to catch my breath.

According to Gygax, there would be seven new sub-classes, in addition to an additional level for druids beyond 14th. Of these sub-classes, we only ever saw three: barbarian, cavalier, and the thief-acrobat, in addition to the 15th level Grand Druid (and the Hierophant levels), each appearing first in the pages of Dragon and then in Unearthed Arcana. The others never appeared under Gygax's name in any form. They were:

• Mystic: A cleric sub-class "concerned more with prediction and detection than are other sorts of clerics."
• Savant: A magic-user sub-class "specializ[ing] in knowledge, understanding, and arcane subjects." Because of their deep learning, they can even learn some cleric and druid spells and, at high levels, use scrolls of other classes as well.
• Mountebank: A thief sub-class "specializ[ing] in deception, sleight of hand, persuasion, and a bit of illusion." 
• Jester: Whether this was a sub-class or a new class all its own Gygax never explains, though he does reference Roger E. Moore's NPC jester class. Amusingly, he has already worked out the class's level titles in this article and presents them.

At the time, I was salivating at the thought of so many new sub-classes for AD&D, though, in retrospect, the only one I now think was a good idea was the mountebank and it's one of the classes we never saw. Regardless of my present feelings, the article caused quite a stir at the time, leading many to believe that the next volume of AD&D was about to appear imminently. As it turned out, it would be several more years before we saw Unearthed Arcana and that book was not at all what we were expecting.

The article also covered a handful of other topics. First up was about personalizing one's character, a key facet, Gygax claims, in a role-playing game rather than a "roll playing" game. I'm not sure if this is the first ever instance where this pun was used, but it's certainly an early example of it. Of course, for Gary, "personalizing" meant one of a wide variety of adjectives to describe one's character's complexion, skin, hair, and eye color. It's both an odd thing to include in this article and a strangely literal understanding of "personalizing."

Gygax also notes that he is "retir[ing] from the position of 'sole authority' regarding the D&D game system," making way for Frank Mentzer as his colleague. He also notes that he is working closely with Francois Marcela-Froideval on several AD&D-related projects, including two "volumes." One of these is presumably Oriental Adventures but the other could have been any number of things. Finally, Gygax once again inveighs against "cheap imitations" and "knock-off" products, urging his readers to "avoid all such fringe products." I'm not certain which products he specifically had in mind in 1982, but it's unlikely to have been the Arduin series, since they were several years old by that point.

The Articles of Dragon: "Robots – Mechanical Sidekicks for Traveller Players"

Stop me if you've heard this one: Traveller is probably my favorite roleplaying game. Although I've played it far less often than I've played Dungeons & Dragons, GDW's game of science fiction adventure in the far future remains my true love (and I say this even after having taken a stab at having created my own SF RPG). 

There are many reasons why this is the case and I could go on at some length enumerating them. Rather than do that here, I'll simply say that Traveller's main virtue is that, in its classic form, it's a versatile, easy to use set of rules that gives a referee nearly everything he needs to create his own planet-hopping sci-fi setting and keep it going for years. When I called 1982's The Traveller Book "the perfect RPG book" a few years ago, I meant it.

Even so, Traveller's approach to science fiction is quirky at times. There are numerous lacunae in its rules, such as, for example, the lack of laser pistols. While that particular omission never bothered me – I had Star Frontiers for that flavor of sci-fi – there was one area where I did feel as if Traveller had dropped the ball: robots. Until the release of Book 8: Robots in 1986, Traveller had no official rules for robots. Indeed, outside of the warbots employed by the Zhodani, there was scarcely a mention of robots at all within the canon of the game.

I felt the lack of robots in Traveller very keenly. At the time, I felt robots were an important, if not essential, aspect of spacefaring science fiction. Consequently, I was very happy to see Jon Mattson's article in issue #64 of Dragon (August 1982), "Robots – Mechanical Sidekicks for Traveller Players." In just six pages, Mattson provides fairly complete rules for designing and using robots in Traveller. His rules take inspiration from similar design sub-systems in Traveller, such as the starship construction system. This works to their advantage, since players of the game should already be familiar with the general framework on which he's riffing.

Obviously, a six-page set of rules cannot cover every possibility. There are plenty of areas that probably deserve expanded treatment (like the use of robots as player characters) or additional options beyond those Mattson includes. However, that's a minor criticism. The genius of the article is not that it's comprehensive, but that it provides a structure from which a referee could work in his own campaign. Because there was nothing comparable in GDW's materials, this was a godsend, which is why the articles remains a standout for me in this issue of Dragon.

So useful did I find this article that it achieved a status reserved only for a handful of others: I photocopied it and included it in my GM's binder. Like a lot of gamers in those days, I had this large binder in which I kept my notes, hand drawn maps, character sheets, and other papers I felt important enough to carry around with me, like Xeroxed copies of articles from Dragon and other gaming magazines. I regret that I no longer have that binder, if only to see what articles and other bits of ephemera I deemed valuable enough to keep inside it.

Another reason "Robots" looms large in my memory is the full-page artwork that accompanied it – by Larry Elmore, no less! I think the illustration supports my contention that Elmore was better suited to science fiction than to fantasy. (It's also an inadvertently ironic piece in that it depicts large numbers of human workers involved in the manufacturing of robots, which fitting, given Traveller's own occasionally quaint notions of technological development.)

The Articles of Dragon: "The Big, Bad Barbarian"

As I've mentioned on multiple occasions, I looked forward to reading Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" columns in Dragon whenever they appeared. As Gygax himself regularly reminded his readers, his columns were (usually) the only articles in the magazine whose content was 100% official and approved for use with AD&D. Rabid AD&D player and TSR fanboy that I was at the time, this imprimatur thus meant a lot to me, because it ensured that I was permitted to make use of this new material in my campaign without reservation – and use it I did!

Like many (most?) gamers at the time, I'm not certain I ever played AD&D "by the book." Instead, my friends and I played a cobbled-together mishmash of Holmes, Moldvay, AD&D, and random bits of RPG "folklore" we picked up from Crom knows where. We still called what we were playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, of course, because that was the game to play and we all wanted to play it, but whether we actually were playing something Gary Gygax would have recognized as AD&D is an open question. What's important to understand for our present purposes is that we believed ourselves to be playing AD&D, hence why the new material Gygax presented for use with AD&D in Dragon was so important to us. 

My first experience of Gygax's additions had come in issue #59 (March 1982) with his introduction of cantrips. While these minor spells were interesting, they were never widely adopted in our group, unlike those that began to appear a few issues later. A good example of what I am talking about is "The Big, Bad Barbarian," which appeared in issue #63 (July 1982). As its title suggests, this article gave us our first peek at the barbarian character class that would later be included in Unearthed Arcana several years later. Since this was the first new – and official – addition to the line-up of AD&D character classes, I was very excited to see it.

I also perplexed by it. My own sense of what a "barbarian" was had been informed by two sources: ancient history and fantasy literature, particularly Howard's stories of Conan the Cimmerian. The class that Gygax presented in issue #63, with its proficiencies in survival and suspicion of magic, was vaguely reminiscent of both, but still somehow its own distinct thing. I didn't hate the class, but neither did I wholeheartedly embrace it as I would other new Gygaxian classes. I suppose it's fair to say that, in principle, I was attracted to the idea of a barbarian class. I simply wasn't yet sold on the AD&D version.

Part of the reason why I felt this way is that Gygax's barbarian broke a lot of standard AD&D "rules." For example, the barbarian's ability scores were generated according to its own unique methods, unlike even those presented in the Dungeon Masters Guide. Strength is generated by rolling 9D6 and picking the three highest, while Constitution uses 8D6 (Wisdom, interestingly, is generated by rolling 4d4). Furthermore, barbarians get double the benefit for high Dexterity and Constitution scores, both of which they'll almost certainly have, given the way the scores are generated. The class also began play proficient in even more weapons than a fighter, in addition to many other special abilities. Even to my twelve year-old self, it all seemed a bit much.

Nevertheless, I dutifully attempted to make use of the new class. One of my friends asked if he could convert his longtime fighter into a barbarian, since he'd always imagined him as a barbarian. I agreed, since it gave us the perfect opportunity to give the barbarian a whirl, just as Gygax suggested we do. The results were ... mixed. In play, we found the barbarian exceedingly tough in combat and its various abilities useful. However, in its Dragon iteration, the class was utterly forbidden from using magic weapons, which hampered its ability to take on many powerful monsters. I imagine this was intended to be balance out its other strengths, but, in the end, it proved crippling and my friend asked to return his character to being a fighter, which I happily permitted.

My first experience with a new, official class for AD&D ended in disappointment. This made me wary of all future classes Gygax presented in "From the Sorcerer's Scroll, though, as we'll see in future posts in this series, my wariness did not sour me on the idea of new character classes in general. But the barbarian, in either its original version or its "improved" one in UA, never won me over. I retain a fondness for the concept of a barbarian class, as I've explained before. I simply haven't yet found (or created) one that I like well enough to use. One day!

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Pages from the Mages"

Ed Greenwood catches a lot of grief among a certain segment of the old school community, usually for things for which he was not himself responsible. Perhaps these old schoolers associate his Forgotten Realms campaign setting with 2e and 2e with the regime that ousted Gygax or ... something. It's always been rather unclear to me what crimes against gaming Greenwood was supposed to have committed, especially when my earliest memories of his name are indelibly connected to articles like "Pages from the Mages," which appeared in issue #62 (June 1982).

The article presents four "long-lost magical manuals" – the tomes of powerful and famous magic-users, each of which is unique in some way. All four books are given a name, a description, and a history in addition to a list of their contents. Every one of these entries made these librams much more interesting than just a simple catalog of, say, the spells they contained or the magical effect they conferred upon their reader. Thus, we learn that the eponymous author of Mhzentul's Runes was slain at the Battle of the River Rising and that Nchaser's Eiyromancia contains not one but two heretofore unknown spells.

Greenwood's articles always impressed me with their feigned depth. That is, they seemed to be part of a rich and complex setting, whose every little nook and cranny had been detailed beforehand so that he could just pluck them from his mind and present them whenever required to do so. As I learned later, this is a parlor trick, one that I learned to perform in time, too, but it doesn't make me any less fond of "Pages from the Mages" or its later sequels. In the span of comparatively little space, Greenwood provided readers with not only some new magical items to insert into their own games but models for how to make almost any magic item a locus of information about a campaign setting and, by extension, an inspiration for adventure.

Flighty Elves and Bearded Dwarven Ladies

The astute among my readers might have noticed that the Boot Hill advertisement I shared earlier today appeared in the August 1979 issue of Dragon, the same month that the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide was released. To mark this occasion, issue #28 includes an article in which TSR employees who had even a small hand in the completion of the DMG offer their opinions on the finished product. There's a lot of interesting stuff in the article, some of which might make good fodder for a future post. For the moment, though, I want to draw your attention to the comments offered by Jean Wells:

The section to which Wells refers is actually entitled "Player Character Racial Tendencies" and begins at the bottom of page 15 and continues on to page 16. Here's the section about elves that she so disliked:

It's pretty innocuous stuff in my opinion. Gygax explicitly calls his descriptions "guidelines" Moreover, he points out that many other factors, such as alignment, will have an impact on a character's personality. For myself, this description of elves is perfectly fine, if somewhat different than the one that was probably already common in 1979. The same holds for his description of dwarves:

The question of whether female dwarves have beards in Dungeons & Dragons is much an ancient one, as evidenced by the last sentence of Wells's comments. In truth, I have no strong feelings about it myself, but I do find it fascinating the strong emotions, pro and con, that this rather esoteric dispute elicits in some corners of the hobby. 

The Articles of Dragon: "Call of Cthulhu is a Challenge"

"Dragon's Augury" was the name given to Dragon magazine's recurring review section. At the time I first encountered it, "Dragon's Augury" had no single, dedicated reviewer. A different contributor reviewed each featured gaming product, though there were often contributors whose names I'd see quite regularly, such as Tony Watson and Ken Rolston. 

Sometimes, though, there'd be a review from a notable figure within TSR, like Gary Gygax, and these naturally caught my attention. A good example of this occurred in issue #61 (May 1982), in which David Cook, author of one of my favorite AD&D modules, wrote a review of the newly released Chaosium RPG, Call of Cthulhu. By the time this review appeared, I already owned a copy and was a great fan of it. Nevertheless, I was very curious to hear what Cook might have to say about it.

Though Cook had a lot of positive things to say about Call of Cthulhu, the overall tenor of his review could probably be called "mixed." After providing a nice overview of both the works of H.P. Lovecraft and the intended playstyle of CoC, he launches into his dissection of the game's flaws. For example, he points out that, while short, Basic Role-Playing, is not very complete, with many ambiguous rules. The same is true of the Call of Cthulhu rulebook itself, which, in addition to ambiguity, includes editorial errors that further contribute to its lack of clarity. In particular, Cook notes that the game's combat system lacks, among other things, "rules for how to deal with cover, movement, surprise, or other situations" that might come up in a fight. 

Cook singles out A Sourcebook for the 1920's as "the weakest part" of the boxed set. Its contents, he believes, appear to be little more than "notes and unfinished design work." He finds the alternate character generation rules – one of my favorite parts of the book – to be "inadequately explained" and a source of confusion. Another bone of contention is the game's lack of rules for generating and handling human NPCs, whom Cook imagines will play important roles in any Lovecraft-inspired adventure. Speaking of which, Cook speaks highly of the sample scenarios included in the rulebook.

The review is fairly lengthy and detailed, but it generally goes on in this direction. I get the impression that Cook, as a fan of Lovecraft, may have had high, or at least very specific, hopes for what Call of Cthulhu should have been like and those hopes were not fully met. Even so, he acknowledges that "when played, it's fun." He does caution that, because of its rules gaps, it demands a lot of the referee. Consequently, Call of Cthulhu "is a good game for experienced role-playing gamers and ambitious judges, especially if they like Lovecraft's type of story." 

As I mentioned, I already owned a copy of Call of Cthulhu by the time I read this review and was slightly baffled by it. My friends and I had been enjoying it without noticing any of the problems Cook pointed out in his review. That's probably because, as young people – I would have been twelve at the time – our grasp of the rules as written was not always the best and so we frequently made things up when we needed to do so. By contrast, Cook was already an accomplished game designer with a lot of experience both as a writer and a player of both wargames and RPGs. This undoubtedly colored the way he wrote his review, something I didn't appreciate at the time.

I also couldn't fathom why Cook had so many critical things to say about the game, despite his admission that he had found Call of Cthulhu fun in play. If he enjoyed the game, I thought, why point out its flaws? For that matter, how had he even noticed them in the first place? I thought about these and other related questions for some time afterward, which is precisely why I still remember this review more than four decades later. David Cook challenged my own assumptions and blind spots. He'd dared to say critical things about a new game my friends and I had enjoyed. In retrospect, I realize I learned a lot from his approach, even if, in 1982, it made little sense to me. 

The Articles of Dragon: "It's That Time of Year Again ..."

I'm sure this will come as a great surprise to longtime readers of this blog that, as a young man, I was fairly serious and earnest. Shocking, I know! Of all the things about which I was serious – and there were many – Dungeons & Dragons was near the top of the list. It's no exaggeration to say that, in the first few years after I discovered the game, D&D was an important part not merely of my life but also of my self-conception. I was a D&D player and I was sincerely proud of this fact in a way that I doubt I've ever been since.

Consequently, when I first came across issue #60 of Dragon (April 1982) and read its contents, I was taken aback. Sure, the article contained a further installment of Roger E. Moore's magisterial demihuman "Point of View" series (focusing on elves this time), along with more cantrips from Gary Gygax and other interesting stuff, but what really caught my eye were a pair of articles that played off longstanding Dragon columns, specifically "Giants in the Earth" and "Dragon's Bestiary." I say "played off," because neither installment in this issue was quite right, as I'll explain.

"Giants in the Earth" was replaced by "Midgets in the Earth" and, rather than presenting D&D stats for characters from classic fantasy and science fiction literature, what we got instead were write-ups for goofy original characters, like the kobold dictator Idi "Little Daddy" Snitmin, Morc the Orc, and master halfling thief Eubeen Hadd. Written by Roger E. Moore and accompanied by artwork that looks like it could have been drawn by Jim Holloway, "Midgets in the Earth" was clearly intended as nothing more than silly fun in honor of April Fool's Day. Please bear in mind that I read this article long before I'd come across the regular April Fool's issues of Polyhedron, so the concept was still somewhat new to me at the time.

The issue's "Dragon's Bestiary" was in a similar vein. Instead of the usual assortment of dangerous and unusual new monsters for use with D&D, we were given entries inspired by various pop culture "monsters," like Donald Duck or Marvin the Martian or the Bad News Bugbears. Like "Midgets in the Earth," these were clearly intended to be silly, but I found them irritating – all the more so because they were written by designers like Tom Moldvay and David Cook, who could have been writing really useful stuff. Why were they wasting effort on such nonsense, I thought? I'd much rather have had more serious content that I could drop into my ongoing AD&D campaign.

Yeah, I was a little tightly wound in those days. Go figure! In time, I came to be a bit more accepting of such silliness, but it took some time – and more April Fool's issues of Dragon to do it. I never fully embraced it, but I did become less uptight about it and the way I enjoyed my hobby. Or at least that's what I keep telling myself ...