42nd-Level Demigod

When I was in the seventh grade, I won first prize at my school's science fair and so was sent, along with a classmate, who'd won second prize, to compete in the state science fair. I was understandably very excited about this, but also a bit nervous, too. I thought my project – a Newton car – good. However, I didn't think it stood much of a chance of winning an award at the state level. I wasn't completely right about that. I won an honorable mention, which is only a couple of steps up from a participation trophy, or so I thought at the time. Meanwhile, my classmate, who was also my best friend, won an actual award. I was happy for him, of course, but also a bit jealous. 

During the state science fair, my classmate and I spent most of our time in a large auditorium, waiting with our projects so that we could talk to the judges that roamed the place throughout the day. For reasons I've never understood, he and I were not placed near one another, so we couldn't talk. Fortunately, I'd brought some books to read while I waited, one of them being the AD&D Monster Manual. I spent much of my time perusing its pages to pass the time, as there were often large gaps between when I spoke to one judge and when I'd speak to the next one.

The kid whose science project was next to mine – it had something to do with plants and photosynthesis, the details of which elude me – took notice of my Monster Manual and recognized it. Turns out he was also a Dungeons & Dragons player. This perked me up quite a bit, since, if I couldn't talk to my friend and classmate about D&D, at least I could talk to someone about my favorite pastime. I sometimes look back with envy with how easily my younger self could carry on enthusiastic conversations with total strangers simply on the thin basis of a shared interest. Nowadays, I can scarcely imagine doing such a thing.

During the course of the conversation, this kid let slip that his current character was "a 42nd-level demigod." I asked him to explain what he meant by that. He then launched into a lengthy accounting of the events of his campaign, in which his character had done all manner of over-the-top things, including slaying a significant number of the deities in Deities & Demigods. His character, as a consequence, had risen not only rise to the lofty level of 42, but had also stolen a portion of his vanquished foes' divine power and ascended to the level of demigod, gaining the standard divine abilities listed in that book (among other things, like many of the artifacts and relics in the Dungeon Masters Guide).

I did my best not to be rude or roll my eyes at this, but it was difficult. I asked lots of probing questions about his campaign and why his Dungeon Master had allowed this. I suppose it's good that the kid had zero self-awareness. He didn't pick up on my concealed tone of disdain. Instead, he answered all my questions and recounted, in some detail, not just the epic battles in which his demigod character had fought, but also the fact that his DM had been restrained in rewarding him, since, despite all his victories, his character "still only a demigod." How does on respond to that?

I was reminded of this memory yesterday, when I read some of the comments to my post about Dolmenwood. I was genuinely pleased – and a little surprised – that people enjoy reading about the characters and events of the various campaigns I'm refereeing. "Let me tell you about my character" has long been a phrase to send shivers down one's spine. I recall that, at the one and only GenCon I attended, the employees of a game company (White Wolf?) were all wearing shirts mocking this, for example. Consequently, I've long been somewhat reluctant to post too much about what I'm doing in my games. As fun as RPG campaigns are for the people actually involved in them, they're frequently both impenetrable and a little boring for those on the outside.

However, now that I've seen that people are, in fact, interested in them, I plan to talk about them a bit more. I probably won't go on about them at any length – I don't want to overwhelm you like the kid with the 42nd-level demigod – but I will make a more concerted effort to write posts about them. I might do a weekly or biweekly "campaign update" in which I keep everyone appraised about how things are unfolding. If there's a character or event deserving of more detail, they might warrant a separate post, especially if I think doing so has a wider applicability. I've done this in the past on a couple of occasions in recent years, so it's probably a worthy consideration for the future.

So, look forward to more discussions of House of Worms, Barrett's Raiders, and Dolmenwood in the weeks and months to come.

The Articles of Dragon: "A New Name? It's Elementary!"

Since I was just writing about the use of foreign languages in roleplaying games, it seems only right that this week's installment of "The Articles of Dragon" should be Jay Treat's "A New Name? It's Elementary," which originally appeared in issue #72 (April 1983). Though it's a comparatively short article – just three pages and none of them are full pages – it's one of those articles that nevertheless had a profound influence on me. 

Treat begins by noting that "an appropriate and authentic name can add flair to any character's persona." He explains what he means by this by way of illustration. The Old English language has, to the ears of speakers of modern English, "the air of the exotic and archaic." Despite this, most of its sounds are familiar to us even now, making it relatively easy to pronounce. For that reason, Treat recommends using Old English names for fantasy RPG characters, since such names will sound plausibly foreign, while still being something the average gamer can say without much difficulty.

Even more than that, Old English names were typically made up of two or three elements, each of which had its own meaning. Provided one knows the meaning of these elements, one can construct a name that itself conveys something about the character so named. For example, he suggests that the name Windbearn, meaning "child of the wind," might make a suitable name for the King of Good Dragons, Bahamut, while traveling the Material Plane in human form. Windbearn is fine as a name in its own right, but it also reveals something – in this case a secret – about the person who bears the name. 

The article includes two random tables of elements, so you can easily create new names with the roll of some dice. Here's part of one of them to give you an idea of what they were like:

When I first read this article, I was thirteen years old and in the eighth grade. Though I, of course, already knew that all names had meaning, this was perhaps the first time I'd ever seen that fact made clear to me. To call it "revelatory" is perhaps too strong a word, but I can think of no other. In the months that followed, I took the lessons of this article to heart. As I began to lay the foundations for the Emaindor setting, for example, I specifically created a kingdom – Rathwynn – that took inspiration from pre-Norman England and I used this article and other sources to help me come up with appropriate names for the people and places there. This would eventually lead to my doing similar things for the other cultures of the setting.

That's why, even though "A New Name? That's Elementary!" is a very brief, probably forgotten article in the annals of Dragon, it's always been special to me. It's an article that further reinforced my growing feeling that language and names are important topics worthy of consideration in roleplaying, not mere afterthoughts. (It's also the forerunner of a series of other languages articles that appeared later this year in the magazine, many of which also captivated me as a kid, about which I'll have more to say in the coming weeks.)

Emperor of Dreams

On January 13 of this year, I commemorated, as I always do, the birthday of Clark Ashton Smith, whose most famous poem, "The Hashish-Eater" famously begins with the line, "Bow down: I am the emperor of dreams." I've long felt that it was an eminently fitting declaration to appear in a poem by CAS, as his literary work, whether poetry or prose, is indeed oneiric, filled with fantastic beings and vistas and eliciting feelings that are at once strange and familiar. Smith understood the language of dreams well and he used that language to remarkable effect. That's a skill I decidedly lack in my own writing and of which I've always been envious, which probably explains why I hold him in such high esteem.

One week later, January 20, would have been the 79th birthday of another master of the language of dreams, filmmaker David Lynch, who died on the 15th. I know the date of his birth only because of a very peculiar incident that happened to me in 2018. One morning, I woke up after a dream I'd had about meeting David Lynch, who was apparently waiting for me on a street corner. "Where are my suits?" he asked me. "Did you bring them to me?" When I told a friend I'd had this dream, he replied, "You know, today is Lynch's birthday."

Prior to my friend's informing me of this, I'm almost certain I didn't know this information, so it seemed oddly coincidental that I just happened to dream of Lynch on the morning of his birthday. I suspect I had this dream because I'd come across a story about him from the year before, when he'd set himself up in a director's chair at the side of the road on Hollywood Boulevard to campaign for Laura Dern to receive an Oscar. And he had a cow with him, because of course he did. In my dream, he didn't have a cow or a director's chair, but he was at a street corner. I feel like the connection is pretty obvious – at least that's what I told myself, since the alternative is to believe that there was some mystical significance to my dreaming of the man on the day of his birth.

I think the first David Lynch movie I ever saw was his 1984 adaptation of Dune, which I've always adored for its esthetics, if not necessarily anything else. Lynch hated every released version of the movie and even replaced his name with that of Alan Smithee on a couple of them. In college, I met some guys who were big film geeks who loved Lynch's work and, through them, saw Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man, and Eraserhead. I found Eraserhead particularly arresting and have never watched it again, but I found the other two well made and compelling. Though I didn't realize it at the time, all of them, to varying degrees, possess dream-like (or nightmarish) qualities that set them apart from the more straightforward movies to which I was accustomed up till that point.

I don't think it was until Twin Peaks appeared on TV in 1990 that I encountered many other people familiar with Lynch's work. The show was, for a brief moment, a "water cooler show," as they used to say – everyone was watching it and talking about, both because it was so lovingly made and because it contained all sorts of elements that made people question exactly what they were actually watching. Because of network interference, Lynch couldn't make good on his vision for the show (and wouldn't until Twin Peaks: The Return in 2017), but he did release a movie prequel in 1992 that is both very good and very scary – and another movie I've never dared watch a second time. Unsurprisingly, Twin Peaks in all its forms gives pride of place to dreams and their importance.

I haven't seen all of Lynch's films, so I'm not sure I'd call myself a true devotee of the man and his works. That said, I found him fascinating. Every interview with him I've ever read or seen is remarkable. Odd though he was, there was a sincerity, an earnestness to him that I couldn't help but find admirable. There was nothing pretentious about him; what you saw was genuine. Everything he said and did was an authentic reflection of who he was and what he believed. It's hard not to like a guy like that, even if, as I said, a lot of what he actually said and did and believed was downright peculiar at times. 

Ultimately, though, the thing I loved about Lynch was that he clearly understood the language of dreams. I use the word "language" purposefully. Lynch's creative efforts, like dreams, are more deliberate than they seem. There's an underlying logic to them that, while not apparent at first, can eventually be deciphered, at least somewhat. To do that, though, you have to be willing to listen. You have to be patient and learn the vocabulary and the grammar and the syntax of the language of dreams. Do that and you might come to understand what he's talking about. 

Or, just like dreams, you might not. Sometimes, you have to be comfortable with not knowing, with mystery. Lynch never elaborated on his own work, no matter how often interviewers tried to get him to do so. He trusted his viewers to do their own work and figure it out for themselves, probably because, in many cases, he might not have fully figured it out himself. Great art, like dreams, sometimes comes without an easy explanation: it just is and that's OK. Not everything has to be easily explicable or reducible to a series of rational propositions. In fact, it's better that way.

For someone like me, who's always lived too much inside his own head, who's much too analytical and deductive, I need to be regularly reminded of this. That's likely why artists like Clark Ashton Smith and David Lynch so appeal to me: I recognize in them remedies to my own deficiencies. Their ready understanding of the language of dreams makes me at once envious and grateful – while the news of Lynch's death just makes me sad. 

Wherever you are, Mr Lynch, Godspeed.

"We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives the dream."

The Art of the Cavalier

The first appearance of the cavalier character class in issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983) is something I remember very acutely, in large part because I loved the idea of a knightly AD&D character class. For that reason, I can also remember the three illustrations, all by Keith Parkinson, that accompanied it. Here's the first one, which has a blue background for some reason. Perhaps Dragon was experimenting with color interiors at the time?  

Though I've never been the biggest fan of Parkinson's art, I do like this piece, especially the weird combination of a barbute helmet with the brush like that worn by a Roman legate or military tribune. I also appreciate that the horse looks sturdy enough to carry a man in that kit.

Here's the second illustration, featuring what appears to be the same cavalier, possibly fighting kobolds. I say "appears," because the cavalier in this piece holds his sword in his right hand, whereas the one above holds it in his left. At first, I thought that maybe one or the other images had been reversed by accident – this happens a lot in publications – but Parkinson's signature looks correct in both of them, so I'm not sure what's going on. Maybe the cavalier is ambidextrous?

Finally, we get this depiction of a female elven cavalier astride a unicorn. One of the cavalier's abilities is horsemanship. As he levels, the cavalier gains greater skill with his mount, as well as a wider range of possible beasts he can ride. In the case of female elves, unicorns become a mount option for them starting at 4th level, which is cool, I suppose. On the other hand, I'm an obnoxious purist about unicorns. To my mind, they're not just white horse with horns but hybrid creatures with aspects of horses, deer, goats, and lions, so I'm not especially keen about this particular unicorn, but whatever. I still remember this piece more than four decades later, so I guess that's what counts.
 

Traveller and I

Since I'll be devoting more posts to classic Traveller over the next little while, I thought it might be useful to talk a bit about my own history with the game, if only to help readers understand where I'm coming from. Very little of what follows is probably new – I'm pretty sure I've touched on this before – but I'm not certain I've ever collected it all in one place. Even if I have, a refresher for the benefit of those who don't want to trawl through the 4000+ posts in the blog's archive is probably valuable.

Since I was a small child, I've always been more of a science fiction than a fantasy guy. Some of that no doubt is a consequence of my growing up in the 1970s, when the Apollo Program still loomed large and the promise of manned spaceflight and the eventual colonization of the solar system were not yet dreams too big to imagine being fulfilled in my lifetime. And, of course, there was Star Trek, whose Original Series was during this time well on its way to becoming a worldwide pop cultural phenomenon, thanks to the success of its syndication. Under the tutelage of my aunt, who was a teenager when Star Trek first aired in the late '60s, I became a huge fan of Captain Kirk, Mr Spock, Dr McCoy, and the crew of the starship Enterprise and, because of that, a huge fan of sci-fi in general.

During the '70s, I watched every science fiction movie or TV show I could, no matter how bad – and many of them were very bad indeed. I also read as much SF literature as I could, aided by the spinner racks at my local public library, some of which featured the works of authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, among many more. In combination, these fed my sense of what science fiction was and could be, so much so that, even today, nearly a half-century later, they continue to shape my imagination on an almost instinctual level. I suppose it's little wonder, then, my conception of sci-fi is general somewhat "old fashioned," born out of works created in the '50s, '60s, and '70s rather than more contemporary visions of the future.

I first encountered Dungeons & Dragons in late 1979, a discovery that would change my life forever. From that point on, roleplaying, in one form or another, would become my primary pastime and creative outlet. Initially, my focus was, naturally, on fantasy roleplaying games, but it didn't take long before I'd learn of the existence of Gamma World, a post-apocalyptic RPG that included a fair number of science fictional trappings, like laser weapons and robots. Unsurprisingly, I was a very enthusiastic Gamma World fan, which whetted my appetite for the possibility of a "real" sci-fi RPG, something that I wouldn't have the chance to play for a few more years yet. In the meantime, I'd have to content myself with brief forays into the genre, like Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. 

Unlike my discovery of D&D, which I can recall vividly, my discovery of Traveller is a bit hazier. I tend to associate it with 1982's The Traveller Book, because that's the first Traveller product I ever owned. However, I'm almost certain I started playing the game before I owned a copy of the rules, probably with a childhood friend's older brother, from whom I learned a lot in the first few years after I started roleplaying. Likewise, I had already been playing Traveller for some time before the release of FASA's Star Trek RPG, which also came out in '82. So, if I had to guess, I probably began playing Traveller in 1981 or very early 1982, but, as I said, my memories are hazy and I can't swear that.

Regardless, Traveller quickly rose in my affections, easily displacing D&D, even if I still played it far less than Dungeons & Dragons. That's more a function of the interests of my friends than of any lack of devotion on my part. They, like most roleplayers I've known over the decades, preferred fantasy to science fiction, so, if I wanted to game, that meant playing a fantasy RPG rather than a sci-fi one. That was fine – I didn't (and don't) dislike fantasy – though, if given the chance, I'll always choose science fiction. Whenever I could, I ran Traveller or Star Frontiers or Star Trek instead of D&D, though those opportunities weren't as great as I would have liked.

Even so, I was quite thoroughly devoted to Traveller, dutifully picking up as many supplements and adventures for it as I could find. I read them all voraciously and committed the details of the evolving Third Imperium to my memory to the point where I now consider it my favorite fictional setting, beating out even Tékumel, in which I've been refereeing a campaign for just shy of a decade now. When I went away to college, I had slightly better luck with enticing people to play Traveller, which made me happy, as did my discovery of Traveller's fan scene through The Travellers' Digest and, later, the History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG), a fan organization dedicated to fleshing out aspects of MegaTraveller's Rebellion. 

My encounter with Traveller's fan scene was truly transformative for me. Because of it, I attended Origins for the first (and so far only) time, meeting Marc Miller and some of the folks at Digest Group Publications. I also connected with many Traveller fans across the world, some of whom are now among my oldest and dearest friends. Further, my work in HIWG paved the way for my involvement with Traveller in a professional capacity, penning articles in Challenge that would eventually bring me to the attention of GDW, who asked me to write one of the introductory adventures for Traveller: The New Era (and later GURPS: Traveller).

Despite – or perhaps because of – my intense affection for Traveller as both a player/referee and as a writer, I've fallen in and out of love with it several times over the years, but I always come back to it. I regularly joke that, while D&D is my first love, Traveller is my true love. The reason for this is twofold. First, Traveller was my first "real" science fiction RPG. Second, Traveller's inspirations closely matched many of my own; the game seemed almost perfectly tailored to a kid who'd read the books I had. Taken together, Traveller has imprinted itself on me in ways I can probably never fully shake, nor would I want to, if I'm being honest.

That said, I have tried. I wrote Thousand Suns as an homage to everything I loved about Traveller, while trying to improve upon it where I could. I'll leave it to others to judge whether I succeeded, but I still consider Thousand Suns one of the few things I've created about which my feelings are largely unconflicted. My only real regret is that, as Grognardia grew, I devoted less energy to developing Thousand Suns than I had originally planned. I may have to change that, if time permits, because it's a good game that I think still has unrealized potential. If only I weren't so easily distracted ...

And there you have it: my history with Traveller, albeit in abbreviated form. I hope this will provide some additional context to my upcoming posts about the game and its history. I feel that it's an overlooked and underappreciated roleplaying game, one deserving of much greater attention and appreciation than it typically receives. I hope, as I write more about it, more readers will agree.

Roleplaying Adventure in a Techno-Fantastic Age

Though DGP's The Travellers' Digest was very well regarded among Traveller fans in the late '80s and early '90s, it wasn't especially lucrative for the company. That's why, when GDW announced it would end the MegaTraveller line and proceed with Traveller: The New Era, DGP saw it as an opportunity to forge its own path by publishing an original roleplaying game called A.I. Here's an advertisement for it from issue #59 of Challenge (April 1992). 

A.I. is set on "an alien, future Earth" some 1500 years in the future, after rampant artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology have made it nearly unrecognizable. I adore settings like this, where technology has become indistinguishable from magic – "secret science fiction," I call them. Needless to say, I was very excited to see A.I. and ads like this one only increased my excitement.

Alas, a series of unfortunate events, including a catastrophic hard drive crash, resulted in A.I. becoming RPG vaproware. Soon thereafter, DGP itself was no more. It's a pity, because DGP did great work on Traveller and I would have loved to have seen what they'd imagined for a wholly original science fiction setting. But, even in 1992, there were already more roleplaying games in existence than I could ever play, so I didn't waste too much energy mourning this one. Seeing this again, though, briefly took me back to a time, more than three decades ago now, when I not only looked forward to this game but first began to ponder the possibility of trying to make a living as a RPG writer. Simpler times! 

The Best Map Ever (Take 2)

Long ago, at the dawn of this blog, I declared Darlene's exquisite map of The World of Greyhawk to be "the best map ever." To be fair, in the linked post, I qualified my hyperbole somewhat, saying that no "map for a fantasy RPG setting has ever captivated me the way" this one had – and I stand by that. Darlene's map of the Flanaess is one of the greatest maps ever made for use with a fantasy roleplaying game. It's beautiful simply as a work of art, eminently usable, and, for me at least, almost as iconic as Dave Trampier's AD&D Players Handbook cover.

However, there is another map of which I am equally fond. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's this one:

I apologize for its small size. The original is quite large and the width of a blog post is inadequate to show its true glory. The map depicts the portion of Charted Space in which the Third Imperium and its interstellar neighbors exist, along with a couple of important astrographic features, like the Great and Lesser Rifts. Each of the rectangles represents a single sector, an area of space equal to 32 × 40 parsecs. Some of the sectors are named, like the Solomani Rim, the Beyond, and the Spinward Marches, but many of them are not. 

The map was, I believe, originally produced by GDW as a freebie to give away at conventions and to mail order recipients. I received mine in a large envelope after I'd written to the company to request their latest catalog. I was ecstatic to get it, because I'd previously seen a black and white reproduction of the map in a British book about RPGs whose title escapes me now (a No Prize to anyone who can tell me which one it was in the comments). I liked the map so much that I hung it on my bedroom wall, belong the Darlene Greyhawk map and there it stayed for years, even after I'd gone away to college. Unfortunately, the map was lost when I removed it from the wall some years later. 

Unlike the Greyhawk map, this one is simple in its presentation and lacking in detail. Nevertheless, I'd still say it's quite beautiful. There's an elegance to it that I have always found incredibly appealing, an elegance that's very much of a piece with the elegance of Traveller itself. It uses only three colors – black, white, and red – just like the original Traveller boxed set, which I think contributes to rather than detracts from its attractiveness. In science fiction, minimalism is often a very solid esthetic choice and it's one that classic Traveller embraced from the very beginning (more on that particular topic in a future post).

The map's not without a couple of problems, the first of which being that it's a flat, two-dimensional depiction of three-dimensional space. That's an issue Traveller has always had and there's no easy way around it, though some fans have tried over the years. I've never been much bothered by it myself, since properly 3D star maps tend to be very complex and difficult to use in play. The bigger problem, in my opinion, is that most sectors of Charted Space are claimed by one or more large interstellar empires, which makes it feel fairly cramped rather than wide open. For many types of sci-fi campaigns, this is fine. If you're looking for one in which exploration is a central activity, it's less ideal, though there are some ways to fix this.

Even so, this remains one of my favorite RPG maps and one to which I regularly return for inspiration.

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.

"Don't Be Another Statistic!"

Since my Retrospective on the video game Pitfall! was so well received, I found myself delving a bit deeper into the history of the game. In doing so, I was reminded of several things related to it that I had long forgotten, starting with this advertisement that appeared in various magazines around the time of the game's release.

As advertisements go, this one is pretty well done. I especially like the depictions of Pitfall Harry submerged in a tar pit and being eaten by a crocodile. 

Speaking of advertisements, the television ads for the game famously feature a young Jack Black in his first acting role:

Pitfall! was successful enough that Pitfall Harry (along with his niece, Rhonda, and pet mountain lion) made an appearance as part of the CBS cartoon, Saturday Supercade, in 1983, alongside other video game celebrities like Mario, Donkey Kong, and Q*bert.

Yes, the 1980s were a weird time.

Bafflement and Intrigue

Something I remember very vividly about growing up is that I'd sometimes find evidence of a popular culture I'd never encountered. Take, for example, Judge Dredd. 

Until I started reading White Dwarf, I don't think I had any real understanding of who Judge Dredd was. I certainly had never read any comic book in which he appeared and, even if I had, I'm not sure if I'd have understood and appreciated the cultural context out of which the character arose. Consequently, whenever I did brush up against Dredd, I was left feeling both baffled and intrigued – baffled, because what little I had gleaned about him made little sense to me and intrigued, for precisely the same reason. I wanted to know more, if only to make sense of all the fleeting references to him on this side of the Atlantic, but it wasn't easy.

Perhaps it's just a consequence of getting older, but I miss the days when I would feel baffled and intrigued by an artifact of some far-off sub-culture. That almost never happens anymore, thanks to the Internet. Assuming I even find something weird from a foreign land – an increasing rarity in the global village in which we're all now imprisoned – it doesn't take much time to find an explanation online. Long gone are the days when I'd be forced to puzzle out who some comic book character I'd never heard of was. Enlightenment is almost instantaneously within reach.

You'd think I'd be happy about that. My younger self would probably have loved to have had access to the Internet. Back then, I didn't enjoy being in the dark. I wanted to know everything about everything, especially when it came to nerdy matters, like science fiction or fantasy. Now, though, I find myself looking back wistfully at the days of my youth, before the emergence of the pop cultural beige slurry seeping into every nook and cranny of our wired world. I miss the days when not everywhere felt the same and I could luxuriate – and occasionally be frustrated by – the differences wrought by distance. 

The past is a foreign country that I'll never again get to visit.

Vague Recollections

One of the many downsides of our increasingly disembodied, virtual existence is the ease with which everything disappears into Orwell's memory hole. Anything produced online, especially on a platform you don't own – like this blog, for instance – could go away tomorrow if someone in an office somewhere decides it should be so. Those of us who can still recall the existence of Google Plus know all too well what I am talking about. Now, it's true that nothing lasts forever in the sublunary world, but I can't help but feel this is especially so when it comes to Internet scribblings.

I thought about this yesterday, as I tried to locate something I remember reading online back in (I think) the 1990s. Yes, I know: in Internet terms, the '90s might as well have been 300 years ago, not merely 30. Furthermore, the thing I want to find had been posted to one of the many Usenet newsgroups dedicated to roleplaying games, like rec.games.frp, so the odds of my finding it were never great to begin with. Still, I held out hope that, with enough perseverance, I might succeed. Since I was unsuccessful on my own, I thought I'd turn to my readers, many of whom possess far greater skills than I when it comes to locating obscure information.

I recall reading a narrative from the perspective of a Call of Cthulhu investigator. Unlike his colleagues, this investigator didn't go out into the field. Instead, he stayed safely at his home in Arkham or wherever and communicated with his comrades via telephone. In his phone conversations, he made certain that his interlocutor never told him too much about what he had seen or done, lest he have to make a SAN roll – "Don't tell me what you read in the book. Don't even tell me the title of the book," "No, I don't want to know what the creature looked like," etc. The whole thing was a meta-commentary on the way to "win" at Call of Cthulhu. I remember finding it quite amusing when I first read it.

Now, it's probably gone and I have only my increasingly hazy memories of it. Does this ring any bells with anyone else? Might anyone be able to suggest how I might find it again? I don't hold out much hope of ever reading it again, but I figured that, if anyone could aid me, it might be my readers.

Thanks!

Retrospective: Ultima

Regular readers will recall that, growing up, I did not have a personal computer. That's why I spent so much time at the homes of friends who did. Indeed, it was only because of those friends that I was able to play such foundational computer roleplaying games as Telengard, Wizardry, and Temple of Apshai. Even in college, I didn't own a computer, so I continued the practice of using others' computers until the dawn of the 1990s, when I finally entered the modern world and at last got one of my own. 

During my college years, there were two CRPGs I remember playing with great enthusiasm: Pool of Radiance and Ultima – or Ultima I as it had been rebranded in 1986. Ultima first came out in 1981, but I don't believe I was aware of it at the time. In any case, I never had the chance to play it until several years later, well after it had spawned a series of sequels. Consequently, everything I'll say in this post pertains to the 1986 version, published by Origin Systems. If there are any significant differences between it and the earlier version(s) of the game, please let me know in the comments.

Like so many early computer games, Ultima had an interesting instruction manual with some impressive artwork. The manual laid out the premise of the game as well as the parameters under which it operates. It does so almost entirely as if it were a document being read by the player's character. Consequently, the information contained within (mostly) lacks any reference to game mechanics or things that the character would not know. Some of it is even written as if an unnamed person is speaking directly to the character, who is addressed as "Noble One" and assumed to be the hero who will save the realm of Sosaria from the depredations of necromancer, Mondain.

Like most computer RPGs, then or now, Ultima owes a lot to Dungeons & Dragons in its overall conception and gameplay. However, unlike, say, Wizardry, it does not include the possibility of controlling an entire party of adventurers, which is something that was added in its sequels. Instead, the player controls a single character, whom he creates before starting his adventure. A character has six attributes that are nearly identical to those in D&D. Likewise, the races available are familiar ones – human, elf, dwarf, and bobbit (halfling). The same is true for the professions, consisting of fighter, cleric, wizard, and thief. In short, it's all pretty standard stuff and nothing that someone who'd been playing pen-and-paper RPGs would have found the slightest bit unusual.

In addition to being a foul necromancer, the aforementioned Mondain is also invulnerable to attack, thanks to his possession of a powerful artifact, the Gem of Immortality. Finding a way to circumvent the effects of the gem is thus the character's main quest throughout Ultima. To succeed in this quest, the character must travel throughout the realm, interact with NPCs, and explore dungeons and other locales. In the process, the character will acquire wealth, better gear, and experience points, allowing him to become more powerful. Again, it's all pretty standard stuff that we've seen many times before.

The "standard" nature of all this was simultaneously an asset and a drawback to Ultima, at least from my perspective at the time. I appreciated that it was pretty easy to pick up and play. Having played D&D for some time beforehand, there was very little in Ultima that surprised me. On the other hand, there weren't really any elements of the game that wowed me. I might have thought differently, if I had encountered it upon its original release in 1981. By the time I discovered it, in 1988, I'd already seen a number of other games that did what it did, often better. For example, Pool of Radiance seemed to me to be a much better implementation of the core concepts of tabletop RPGs in digital form – and it used the official AD&D rules to boot!

Of course, I still played Ultima and enjoyed myself. Even in the midst of my college studies, I still had a lot of spare time to waste on computer games. Consequently, I don't rate Ultima quite as highly as it probably deserves. Certainly, the game went on to become a very successful and influential CRPG series. To this day, I still know lots of people with very fond memories of the game and its sequels. Meanwhile, its spin-off, Ultima Online, released in 1997, was one of the first truly successful massive multiplayer online roleplaying games (or MMORPGs – a term coined by Richard "Lord British" Garriott, the creator of Ultima). For that reason alone, its place in the history of computer RPGs is assured.

Things That Go Bump in the Night

Back at the end of June, I wrote a post about the representation of bugbears in the various TSR editions of Dungeons & Dragons. My examination of the topic revealed that, by and large, bugbears had a fairly consistent appearance over time, unlike, say, orcs. On some level, that made sense, since bugbears, as a distinct "type" of monster, are unique to D&D. They don't have a clear folkloric origin, leaving to TSR's artists the responsibility of establishing what they look like.

While looking through some old issues of Dragon magazine, I came across an advertisement from Ral Partha that showed off some miniatures sculpted by Tom Meier, including some identified as bugbears. Here's one of them, as shown on the Ral Partha Legacy website.

Seeing this figure awakened some old and forgotten memories. Though I never owned any of Ral Partha's bugbear minis, I saw them in one of the glass display cases at a hobby shop and found them strangely unnerving. There's something about the combination of oversized ears, goggling eyes, large, leering mouth, and spindly, apish body that I find unpleasant on some subconscious level. I'm not really sure I can explain it, except to say that I find these take on the bugbear creepy and nightmarish – maybe I'm easily frightened.

Despite this, I was glad to have been reminded of this miniature. I remain very committed to the idea that good fantasy is and indeed should be frightening. I can't help but feel that fantasy, as a genre, has become increasingly domesticated to the point that it's becoming boring. That needs to change. We need more terrifying monsters and horrific situations in our fantasies – and in fantasy gaming. Perhaps this is a topic worth returning to next month, as Halloween approaches.

25 Years Ago Today ...

... we lost the Moon in a tragic accident involving nuclear waste and a previous unknown form of magnetic radiation. Along with the Moon, all 311 personnel stationed aboard Moonbase Alpha were also lost.

Thanks to my friend and referee, Aaron, for reminding me of this important date.

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.

Retrospective: Crossbows and Catapults

My childhood circle of neighborhood friends was quite large and included boys of all ages, some of them much younger than myself. For example, when I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons during the Christmas holidays of 1979, I was in the fifth grade, but my closest friends outside of school were a year or so younger than me. I also had friends who were younger still, often the little brothers of my other buddies. Being preteen boys, age didn't really matter all that much to us, because we all, more or less, enjoyed the same pastimes and it was always better to have more playmates. This was especially so after we started playing D&D and other RPGs.

Even so, my discovery of D&D coincided with – and probably facilitated – my abandonment of toys or anything that to my youthful self smacked of being "kid stuff." Children in those in-between years of 10 to 12 are, in my experience, quite concerned with appearing to be more "grown up" than they were just a few short years before. This concern can manifest in the ostentatious rejection of overt symbols of their childhood, like toys, games, and other entertainment that don't match up with their nebulous conception being older. That's certainly how it was for me.

Of course, having a friend group that included lots of younger boys provided a convenient excuse to transgress these arbitrary new boundaries between "kid" and "grown up" from time to time. My youngest friend was another's brother and he was about four years younger than me. Though he played D&D with us (and did so very well) he still unapologetically kept one foot in childhood, playing with those little G.I. Joe action figures – everyone knows the "real" G.I. Joe is 12 inches tall! – and other early '80s toys that the rest of us publicly eschewed. Our looking at and admiring his toys was no sin against our newfound maturity, since we weren't playing with them, you see. Such fine distinctions were very important to us and we did our Pharisaical best to maintain them.

Even so, there were egregious exceptions and Crossbows and Catapults was one of the bigger ones I can remember. Released in 1983, when I had just started high school, Crossbows and Catapults was simultaneously the kind of "family game" that I'd never have bought for myself, but was secretly happy had been given as a Christmas gift to my friend's kid brother. As we often did, my friends and I spent the Christmas break visiting one another's homes and passing judgment on our holiday hauls. We'd also use it as an opportunity to try out anything we deemed worthy of our time.

Crossbows and Catapults had rules, but I honestly cannot recall them. Even if I could, I'm fairly certain we never made much use of them, preferring to do our own thing with it. The game is supposed to be played by two players, but it was very easy to change this to two sides, which is what we did. Each side – Vikings or Barbarians – is given a number of little figurines, plastic blocks and structures, and a rubber band-powered ballista ("crossbow") and catapult that fired chunky discs that reminded me of checkers. To be played at all, you need a large, open area with a fairly flat surface, preferably an uncarpeted floor. We used to play on my friends' basement floor or on the ping-pong table we also used for Car Wars.  

As I said, Crossbows and Catapults had rules, but we preferred simply to build up walls and castles from the plastic bricks, place the figures, and then take turns shooting at them with our ballistas and catapults. We'd done this before with army men when we were younger and had great fun with it. Now, thanks to the cool little plastic siege engines included with the game, we could unleash a more potent – and accurate – kind of destruction upon the world. It was childish, of course, but that's probably why we had such fun with it. At that particular stage in our lives, on the cusp of or just entering our teen years, we thought were ready to leave our childhoods behind, even though, on some level, we clearly were not. Crossbows and Catapults afforded us the chance to be kids again without feeling self-conscious about it, which is why, to this day, I still have fond memories of this stupid game.

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 ...

Lament for a Lost Age

One of my most popular posts is "The Ages of D&D," which I wrote more than fifteen(!) years ago, on January 11, 2009. In it, I attempted to sort the history of Dungeons & Dragons into a series of "ages" – Golden, Silver, Bronze, etc. I was still fairly new to the blogging game when I wrote that post and, while I largely stand behind its conclusions, I now concede that I relied more on hazy memories and intuitions than on anything approaching "research." Perhaps one day I'll offer a more considered discussion of the Ages of D&D, complete with evidence to support my assertions, but, for the purposes of the present post, I'm going to go with the categories and timeframes I established back in 2009.

In the original post, I assert that the Golden Age of D&D lasted almost a decade, from 1974 until 1983. In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why I chose 1983 as the end point of the Golden Age. My guess is that it I saw the arrival of Dragonlance in 1984 as marking a definitive break with the way the game had previously been marketed and played. Even so, if you read my original post, you'll see that I allow for the possibility that the Golden Age actually ended somewhere 1979 and 1981, with either the completion of AD&D or the publication of Moldvay's Basic Set being important milestones, albeit for different reasons. Even then, I think I recognized that the game had already changed by the time I first encountered it in late 1979 and indeed that I might never have encountered it at all had it not been for those changes.

I've previously discussed the foundational role played by David C. Sutherland III in giving birth to the esthetics of Dungeons & Dragons. Sutherland's grounded, vaguely historical illustrations were, for several years, the face of D&D. During the three-year period between 1975 and 1978, Sutherland and Dave Trampier were together responsible for nearly all the art that appeared in TSR products, not just Dungeons & Dragons but other games, too, like Gamma World and Boot Hill. Not bad for a couple of "talented amateurs." is it?

By now, you can probably guess where I'm going with this: the end of the Golden Age is marked by a shift in the game's esthetics away from the extraordinary ordinary artwork of Sutherland and Trampier and toward something else – just what is a different question. Nevertheless, consider that, in 1979, TSR began to expand its stable of artists, hiring Erol Otus (whose TSR artwork debuted in later printings of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide) and David "Diesel" LaForce (ditto). The next year, in 1980, TSR added Jeff Dee, Jim Roslof, and Bill Willingham as well. The cumulative effect of their artistic talents is unmistakable.

The change in the look of Dungeons & Dragons products in the aftermath of hiring these five artists cannot be denied. Pick up almost any D&D book or module published between 1979 and 1981 and compare it to its predecessors. Earlier products have a stiff, staid, "serious" look to them that, to my eyes at least, shows some continuity with the look and feel of the historical wargames out of which the hobby grew. By contrast, the D&D books and modules from the '79 to '81 period are bright, bold, and dynamic. They are clearly the work of different artists with very different esthetic sensibilities.

These sensibilities ranged from the comic book inflected art of Dee and Willingham to the more restrained heroic action of Roslof and the underground comix stylings of Otus. Whether this shift was "better" or "worse" than what preceded it is immaterial. What matters is that it happened and it denotes the beginning of a new phase in the history of Dungeons & Dragons – the mass marketing of the game to an audience beyond college age and older wargamers whose points of reference were the pulp fantasy authors and stories that I've attempted to draw attention to over the years.

I entered the hobby right smack in the middle of this period of D&D history. After my initial exposure to Dungeons & Dragons through the Holmes Basic Set and In Search of the Unknown, many of my earliest memories of the game are filtered through the artwork of Dee, Otus, Willingham, and the other newcomers to TSR. While only a few of my Top 10 Illustrations of the Golden Age – bear in mind I wrote those posts before I started to re-evaluate my thoughts on the matter – are the work of these artists, that does nothing to diminish the impact they had not just on me but on D&D's presentation to the wider world. For a large cohort of new players, the 1979–1980 hires defined Dungeons & Dragons in much the same way that Sutherland and Trampier did before them.

But, like all such periods of roiling creativity, it did not last long. By 1982, many of these artists no longer worked at TSR and those that remained, like LaForce, shifted over to cartography, doing illustrations only sporadically. New artists, like Larry Elmore and Jeff Easley, appeared on the scene around the same time, lending their considerable talents to depicting the fantastic realism of the dawning Silver Age. Lots of readers slightly younger than me no doubt have similar feelings of affection toward this next group of artists, as they should, but, for me, many of my fondest memories of Dungeons & Dragons will be forever intertwined with that first "new" generation of artists whose arrival on the scene coincided with my own.

Retrospective: Temple of Apshai

When I was in the seventh grade, a new kid joined my class and he soon became my best friend. He was also an early adopter of personal computers, owning a TRS-80. I didn't own a computer of any kind – and wouldn't until the early '90s – so I spent a lot of time over his house. admiring this wonder of the dawning Information Age. We played a lot of games on that "Trash-80," most of them not very good or memorable. However, a handful do stick out in my mind as being both, chief among them being Temple of Apshai.

Temple of Apshai is one of the earliest computer dungeoncrawlers, not to mention one of the first have graphics, albeit very primitive graphics. For many computer aficionados at the time, I suspect that was one of the biggest draws about the game. For me, though, the mere existence of a computer RPG at all was more than enough to attract my attention. That I'd also seen advertisements for Temple of Apshai in the pages of Dragon probably played a role, too. In those days, I was easily captivated by ads and those Dragon magazine ads, showing an adventurer fighting some antmen, intrigued me.

Temple of Apshai was developed and published by Epyx, the company that also produced Crush, Crumble & Chomp (another game I'd first seen advertised in Dragon). Its earliest version appeared in 1979 and, from what I understand, came on a cassette type, a format that prevented player progress from being saved. My friend and I were playing on a later version that included 5¼-inch floppy disks, thank goodness. Temple of Apshai was already difficult enough as it is. I can't imagine trying to play it without the ability to save.

The game's premise is simple: enter and explore the ruined Temple of Apshai, the insect god, in the hopes of finding treasure and magic items. The instruction manual does provide some cursory background information about the founding of the temple and its relationship to the Temple of Geb, the god of earth. But the play of the game doesn't really make use of, let alone depend upon, this information, which is mostly about exploring – and surviving – a four-level dungeon consisting of more than 200 rooms and inhabited by two dozen different types of monsters, most of which are (appropriately) giant insects, along with a handful of slimes and undead.

As I said above, the game's graphics were quite primitive, not much better than Atari's Adventure, which appeared only a little later. Even so, I was quite impressed with being able to see the layout of the dungeon rooms and corridors, in contrast to games like Zork, which relied entirely on text to present their in-game environments. The limitations of technology at the time being what they were, your character and the dangers he faces appear as simple pixelated shapes rather than as something genuinely representational. Later versions of the game improved upon this, but that occurred long after my friend and I played the game.

Like all early computer games, Temple of Apshai clearly shows inspiration from Dungeons & Dragons, but it has a number of features that remind me a bit of RuneQuest. A character had six ability scores – Strength, Constitution, Dexterity, Intelligence, Intuition, and Ego – whose scores ranged from 3 to 18, just as in D&D. However, unlike D&D, there are no character classes. All characters are effectively fighters, since, aside from magic items, no magic powers or spells exist in the game. Further, combat and other actions can fatigue a character, who must rest in order to regain his energy. Armor lessens damage suffered, while shields make a character harder to hit. None of this is remarkable to old RPG hands, but, for a computer game of this, it's pretty sophisticated stuff.

Because of its graphical limitations, Temple of Apshai could not visually distinguish the contents of one room from another. Instead, each room, trap, and treasure have an entry in the game's instruction manual to which the player must refer in order to get a more detailed description of what his character is presumably encountering. For example, the first room of the dungeon is described as follows:

The smooth stonework of the passageway floor shows that advanced methods were used in its creation. A skeleton sprawls on the floor just inside the door, a bony hand still clutching a rusty dagger, outstretched toward the door to safety. A faint roaring sound can be heard from the far end of the passage.

This is very much like a "real" dungeon, which is to say, one a referee might create beforehand, with keyed room descriptions to which he'd refer in play. I don't think I appreciated this at the time, but, in retrospect, I find it fascinating. I recall reading somewhere that Temple of Apshai's designer, Jon Freeman, was inspired to create the game after he'd spent several years trying to find ways to use computers to aid referees in running D&D campaigns. If true, it's yet another reminder of just how important and influential Dungeons & Dragons has been on the growth and development of computer games and, by extension, computer technology itself. 

Like so many early computer RPGs, I don't think I could play Temple of Apshai today. That's no knock against the game itself or its deserved place of honor in the history of computer games. Rather, it's because you can't go home again, however much you might want to do so. What enthralled and amazed my friend and I in 1982 is not something that would do so today – but it was an amazing game in its day and I'm glad to have had the chance to play it.