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.

Peace Finally Comes

I've mentioned a couple of times previously that I'm currently playing in a Traveller campaign refereed by an old friend of mine. I first met this particular friend around 1990 through a Traveller fan organization known as the History of the Imperium Working Group (HIWG – pronounced Hi-Wig). HIWG's original purpose was to assist GDW in developing the Third Imperium setting during the MegaTraveller era, when the Imperium was in the throes of a succession crisis/civil war inexplicably known as the Rebellion. 

HIWG had a fanzine called Tiffany Star that was released more or less bimonthly, starting in January 1988. Its first issue included a map of the warring factions of the fragmented Third Imperium as they were five years after the start of the Rebellion, which I've reproduced below.

The map originated with Marc Miller at GDW and bears the title "Peace Finally Comes." The original idea behind it was that this map would represent the end state of the Rebellion, after its factions had become exhausted by years of open warfare between one another. What was interesting about it is that there were a couple of missing factions, which is to say, factions from the early phases of the Rebellion that had seemingly disappeared, leading to much speculation about the circumstances under which they were defeated or subsumed into other factions Likewise, many of the remaining factions had grown or contracted in their astrographic extent. 

Figuring out how this had all happened was part of HIWG's original remit. Certain members of the organization were "sector analysts," whose job it was to create and collate material pertaining to one of the sectors of the Imperium or surrounding space. In theory, this material would then be used by GDW in creating future MegaTraveller products. I was the sector analyst for Antares sector, while my friend was the sector analyst for Lishun sector to spinward. We became friends because we started exchanging letters – remember, this was in that benighted time just before the advent of the consumer Internet – and sharing information of mutual interest. Later, when I went to graduate school, it just so happened that I moved to the same city as my HIWG pen pal and we've been friends ever since. 

When I again saw the Peace Map, as we called it, for the first time in many years, I felt a huge rush of nostalgia, not just for MegaTraveller, warts and all, but for one of my earliest and most serious brushes with organized RPG fandom. Remember, as I said, that this was before the Internet was in widespread use. Almost none of us had email addresses, let alone a regular means of real time chat. Instead, we exchanged photocopied (or dot matrix printed) materials by post, occasionally meeting at conventions if they were geographically convenient. It was slow, inefficient, and occasionally frustrating, but also a great deal of fun. I made a lot of friends through HIWG, several of whom are still in contact with me.

Beyond that, the Peace Map represents a path not taken for Traveller. The whole point of the Rebellion was to shake up the staid status quo of the Third Imperium by creating multiple successor states suspicious of one another. This created many more opportunities for adventure, intrigue, and outright warfare. This greatly appealed to me and my preference for smaller settings. I was quite excited by the possibilities, especially for my beloved League of Antares faction. Alas, it was not to be. Instead, GDW opted to descend the Imperium – and, later, most of charted space – into a new dark age with almost no interstellar states and most worlds regressing both technologically and socially. What a waste!

I still have dreams of one day revisiting my own vision of a post-Rebellion Third Imperium setting, one where the fragments of the shattered Imperium survived and pursued their own destinies. I don't know that I'll ever get around to refereeing such a campaign, but a man can dream ...

Stuck in the Past

As I've no doubt explained previously, I was never much of a comics reader as a kid – or, more precisely, I was never much of a superhero comics reader as a kid. With the exception of Doctor Strange, Master of the Mystic Arts, which I picked up intermittently, the two comics I followed with any devotion were both science fiction titles, Star Wars (about which I've written many times before) and Micronauts (about which I don't believe I have). 

Nevertheless, like all American boys growing up in the 1970s, I was still very much aware of superheroes, thanks in no small part to their TV and movie adaptations, including cartoons. Perhaps because he was Marvel's most popular – and merchandised – character at the time, I had a special fondness for Spider-Man. I loved the terrible 1960s cartoon, which I saw in reruns, as well as the equally awful 1977 live action series, starring Nicholas Hammond of The Sound of Music Fame. I also remember watching the Adam West Batman series, various incarnations of Super Friends, the 1978 Superman movie, and probably others I've long forgotten.

As I got older, I retained a vague affection for the idea of superheroes, especially after I started playing RPGs. I can still vividly recall some of the adventures my friends and I had playing, first, Champions, and, later, Marvel Super Heroes. I remember, too, when we started to see big budget Hollywood movies featuring various costumed characters, starting with Tim Burton's Batman. The release of that movie in 1989 was a major cultural event and its success not only spawned three sequels but also paved the way for yet more superhero movies, a trend that has continued to the present day.

Despite not calling myself a fan of superheroes, I've seen more than my fair share of the superhero movies released in the last three decades, enjoying some more than others. One of the things that's always bugged me about these movies (and other adaptations) is how many of them continue to tread the same ground that their original source material did decades ago. There may indeed be nothing new under the sun, but did we really need to see another version of "The Dark Phoenix Saga?" For that matter, have there been any new superheroes or superhero stories produced in the last couple of decades with any staying power? Why are the biggest pop cultural characters all products of the 1980s or earlier?

I think about this often, most recently during a recent trip with my family. While perusing some weird snacks and candies in a store, I spied a tall, thin, red can featuring what looked to me like Larry Elmore's iconic cover painting for the Frank Mentzer-edited Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set (1984). Drawing closer, it turned that, yes, it was Elmore's artwork on a D&D-branded energy drink calling itself a "Hero's Potion of Power." Intrigued, I bought the thing, but I didn't have the courage to try it. That job fell to my daughter, who declared it "alright, but nothing special." 

On the same trip, we went to a bookstore not far from where I grew up. I hadn't found anything to purchase, so I stood out near the lobby of the store while my daughter paid for a book. When I looked over at the checkout counter, I saw a display filled with little boxes sporting an immediately recognizable color scheme. I did an almost comical double take, because I was sure that my aging eyes must have erred in some way, because I couldn't conceive that I was seeing what I, in fact, was seeing – the familiar blue and brown palette of the AD&D Monster Manual.

Sure enough, that's exactly what it was. Apparently, the boxes contain one of a series of randomized plastic monster figurines based on the illustrations of the original Monster Manual. This, frankly, befuddled me almost as much as the Hero's Potion of Power, but then I've never really understood the appeal of these expensive, randomized "loot boxes." Beyond that, why were the figurines based on the artwork of Dave Trampier and Dave Sutherland rather than more contemporary designs? Did it have something to do with D&D's 50th anniversary? I'm honestly not sure of the answer. For all I know, there may be similar loot boxes available for the monsters of later D&D editions, but my gut tells me that's unlikely to be the case. (If I'm mistaken about this, feel free to correct me in the comments).

Of course, this past Christmas, my wife bought me a Dungeons & Dragons T-shirt that she unexpectedly came across while shopping. She knows I'm normally not a wearer of such things – I abhor the brandification of the game – but the fact that the shirt featured the Erol Otus cover painting of Tom Moldvay's Basic Set was sufficiently unusual that she decided to take a chance. She was right to do so, because I was positively tickled by the gift and often wear it as a sleep shirt (I'd never wear it while out and about – I'm too old for that sort of thing).

I can't help but wonder why it is that, in the pop cultural sphere, so much of what is being presented and sold to us are the products of earlier generations of creative minds. Is this simply the result of a lack of imagination or is it because, on some level, we know that we'll never be able to come up with anything better than our predecessors? If I were to travel back in time to tell my younger self that, decades from now, there'd still be new Star Trek shows and Star Wars movies – or that I couldn't care less about any of them – I doubt he'd believe me and yet here we are. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, but what does it mean when popular culture spends decades luxuriating in it? 

I'm as happy as anyone to see Erol Otus art on a T-shirt (even if he's unlikely to have profited from it in any way). At the same time, I think there's something not just decadent but even stagnant about endlessly recycling the pop culture of the 50s, 60, 70s, and 80s only even more vapid and rampantly consumerist than before. Have we simply run out of new ideas? Or do the new ideas simply lack the appeal of the older ones? What's really going on here and what does it mean?

B.A.D.D. Arguments

My own introduction to Dungeons & Dragons and the wider hobby of roleplaying occurred in late 1979, a few months after the disappearance of James Dallas Egbert III in August of that same year. In a very real sense, the media frenzy surrounding the Egbert investigation and the supposed (but false) role that D&D played in it set off a chain of events that would eventually lead to my cracking open the copy of the Holmes Basic Set my mother had bought for my father. She mistook his interest in the news story for interest in D&D itself, an error that would result in the game being passed on to me. I imagine this wasn't a completely unusual experience. In fact, Moira Johnston's article quotes Gary Gygax as admitting that the media uproar "was immeasurably helpful to us in terms of name recognition. We ran out of stock!" 

Despite this, I experienced almost no significant opposition to my involvement in roleplaying, nor did any of my neighborhood friends. If anything, we were encouraged to play D&D and RPGs, in the belief that it was a thoughtful, creative hobby that fostered good habits like reading, writing, and social engagement. That's why it was something of a shock to me when I learned, through news stories, that, in some places, there were serious – or at least seriously held – questions about the game and its purported effects on young people.

Though I was aware of Patricia Pulling and her organization, Bothered About Dungeons & Dragons (B.A.D.D.), I never gave either much thought until I saw that infamous 60 Minutes segment from 1985 that interviewed her and others who were attempting to lay the blame for teenage suicides on the game. Even after that, I never saw any of the literature B.A.D.D. produced to advance their cause until comparatively recently. When I did, I was (mostly) terribly disappointed. The little booklet depicted above is little more than a collection of quotes and excerpts taken out of context in an effort to paint D&D as dangerous, immoral, and unhealthy. It's riddled with spelling errors and possesses a layout that makes the Little Brown Books of OD&D look professional. Worse yet, they're not even fun to read in the way that Jack Chick's Dark Dungeons is.

Having said that, there's a part of the booklet I find rather interesting. Here's the relevant page:

The text argues that D&D is bad because it "teaches occult forms of religion," specifically witchcraft. According to the booklet, the state of California has recognized covens of witches as "bonified [sic] religions and …[has] given [them] tax exempt status as churches," facts that prepare us for the absolutely amazing bit of rhetorical jiu-jitsu that's to come. The argument goes like this:

1. Dungeons & Dragons teaches witchcraft.
2. California recognizes witchcraft as a religion.
3. The "Supreme Court has ruled that religion is not to be taught in schools." 
4. Therefore, D&D should not be allowed in schools.

I can't help but admire the chutzpah on display here. The argument is as specious and disingenuous as it is bold. Claiming that D&D is religious in nature and, therefore, disallowed in public schools is patently absurd, but, as a line of argument, it's imaginative. Unfortunately for B.A.D.D., I don't think anyone not already convinced of D&D's supposed danger could possibly have been swayed by it. 

Appendix O

One of the final sections of Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game is entitled "Appendix O: OSR Resources," whose last paragraph says the following:

To the many and varied OSR publishers, I offer one comment. As Grognardia marks its fourth anniversary in 2012, the OSR has re-published a plethora of variants on the core D&D concepts. The target customer is offered no shortage of retro-clones, adventures centered on goblin raiders, excursions into the underdeep, and genre-based campaign settings. I started work on the volume you hold in your hand because I believe the time has come to break the chains of D&D convention and step back one era further, to the original inspiration of Appendix N, beyond the confines of genre assumptions. DCC RPG offers a free license to third party publishers who wish to publish compatible material. Even if you choose not to take advantage of this license, I ask you to consider moving past the boundaries of “TSR mimicry.” The time has come to offer our shared customer something both new and old-school.

What Joseph Goodman says above is a sentiment I regularly hear in various quarters. I don't exactly disagree with what he says, but I do think, based on experience, that it's a little naive. Firstly, here's an awful truth RPG designers don't want to hear: a significant majority of gamers only care about D&D. It was the first RPG and, nearly 40 years later, it's still the most popular (I consider Pathfinder to be D&D for the purposes of this discussion). Whether they play LBB-only OD&D or multi-splatbook, computer-assisted 4e, D&D -- and, more importantly, its broad conventions -- is what people think of when they think of "roleplaying games." Heck, that's as true of video games as it is of tabletop ones, so I don't expect there's a huge demand for games that challenge the prevailing paradigm. That's not to say no one wants something different; I simply don't think there's anything wrong with sticking with and preferring an approach that's deeply, deeply ingrained in the hobby.

Secondly, I think people misunderstand nostalgia. These people throw the term around dismissively -- "Oh, you only like that out of nostalgia." Now, even if that criticism were true, so what? People can and do like things for all kinds of reasons. Ultimately, all that matters is that they like them. If someone likes D&D and its conventions (or anything else) because it reminds him of early days in the hobby, what's so wrong with that? Underlying the critique of nostalgia is the notion that we should only like things for "serious" reasons, which is to say, reasons that others can not only understand but agree with. It's an odd criticism in my opinion, since I suspect most of us like all sorts of things for no reason other than that we like them. When I say I like the taste of a certain food or the way a certain piece of music makes me feel, I have no expectation that anyone else will agree with me. At the same time, I'm not deluded in using words such as "like" or "feel" to describe what I'm experiencing.

Thirdly, and lastly, I think the word "new" gets overused, mostly by the jaded. By that I mean that the cry for "the new" is often a function of what one has experienced. Sure, for many gamers who've been playing for three decades, "goblin raiders" or "excursions into the underdeep" may be old hat, but not everyone has been playing for that long. For a lot of younger and/or less experienced folks, The Keep on the Borderlands or The Village of Hommlet is new. And, for us older and more experienced players, seeing a new spin on these old adventures can be just as fun. This isn't intended as a rebuke to anyone seeking something different, but I do think the cult of the new is frequently selfish and myopic.

I suspect this post has gotten a bit away from me. I really appreciate what Joseph Goodman did with DCC RPG. I think it's a fantastic game and a big part of its fantastic-ness is that he made a game that appealed to him. That's why I find the paragraph I quoted above a little grating. I'm sure there are some folks involved in the OSR who've written stuff not out of personal interest but because they thought it's what others wanted them to write, but their numbers are probably very, very small. There's not enough fame or fortune in this to not follow your heart and do what it commands of you. My advice to anyone who feels that there's "too much" of X and "too little" of Y in the OSR is to go ahead and make it themselves. That's why Joseph Goodman did, to great success, and that's what nearly everyone else in this corner of the hobby is doing, so why not you too?

Rebound

I don't have any deep insights into the upcoming new edition of Dungeons & Dragons or why Wizards of the Coast is going ahead with it. Truth be told, I don't care all that much about D&D any more, insofar as "D&D" means whatever game is currently available on store shelves and carries that name. I was a very enthusiastic player and referee of D&D III for about six years before I had enough and got off that particular merry-go-round. I flirted briefly with Castles & Crusades before diving into OD&D, which eventually led me to the crazy world of the old school renaissance and the retro-clones. By and large, I'm happy here and have been since 2007, before WotC announced the previous new edition of D&D.

But I think a lot of the gamers who decided to take a walk on the old school side of things did so out of frustration with D&D IV. They were disappointed in and angry with WotC, a company that, for many gamers, "saved" D&D back in 2000. They felt betrayed and, in feeling that, they looked for someplace, anyplace with which to align themselves. The bulk of them went to Paizo, I expect, and with good reason. Paizo not only makes great products; those products used a rules set very similar to D&D III. Indeed, Pathfinder's whole raison d'être is backward compatibility with the previous iteration of D&D, preserved for all time thanks to the SRD and OGL. 

A few of those disaffected gamers, though, sought out the old school renaissance and picked up games like OSRIC and Labyrinth Lord and Swords & Wizardry and Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Suddenly, "old school" was a buzzword to be found on many a gaming forum and blog. While there's no question that the ranks of our little community remained small, they did swell in size. Moreover, old school gaming punched way above its weight class when it came to influence over the hobby, with lots of designers, including those at WotC, suddenly touting their old school credentials and expressing admiration for the designs of yore. In 2008, it was "this ain't your father's D&D," but, by 2011, it was suddenly cool to be old school. In short, "old school" had become a fad (much like gaming itself).

Which brings us to 2012 and WotC's announcement of a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons. Unlike the 4e roll-out, which was condescending and tone deaf, this time around WotC is saying all the right things. They're talking about "uniting" fans of every edition and going back to the "core" elements of D&D. I'm glad to hear that, if only because it means they've learned from their mistakes. What's more interesting, though, is the reaction in our little corner of the Net. From what I have seen, a lot of old school gamers have expressed enthusiasm and even hope that WotC will "get it right" this time. I have to admit I've been taken aback by this love-in -- not because I want a repeat of the acrimony that greeted D&D IV, but because I'm surprised that, after all this time, old school fans give a damn about "D&D." But they do.

That's the truth of it. For a lot of gamers, OSRIC or Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry will never be D&D. They'll play it, sure; they'll even have fun doing so. In their heart of hearts, however, saying "I'm playing Swords & Wizardry" will never make them as happy as saying "I'm playing Dungeons & Dragons." I understand this mentality very well, because it's one I've shared at various times (mostly about Traveller). There's something about "D&D" that cannot be replaced. The ardor for that game, which was, let's face it, likely the first most of us ever played, is intense and not easily forgotten. There's thus an emotional attachment to D&D that there isn't for any of the retro-clones, no matter how much more true any of them are to the intent and spirit of the original games.

So, there are some interesting times ahead. If WotC does their job right -- doesn't alienate anyone by their marketing, produces a game that truly draws on the best of the past, etc. -- I suspect we'll see the old school community contract once more. As I said, I suspect a goodly portion of the gamers who've latched on to this particular bandwagon did so out of frustration and anger, but they weren't really ready to give up their true love for a simulacrum, no matter how good a simulacrum it is. Now that WotC is saying the right things and even obliquely admitting to their errors, all will be forgiven. That's not to say that there aren't potential speed bumps on the road ahead, but my gut tells me that a great many disaffected D&D players, many old schoolers chief among them, are ready to love again.

Me, I'm just a bitter old prune.

A Kindred Spirit

By now, some of you have no doubt heard that a fellow by the name of Ben Solovey has found the workprint of the 1966 movie, Manos: The Hands of Fate, and is making a project of digitally restoring it for release on Blu-Ray. For those of you who don't know, Manos is generally regarded as one of the worst films ever made, right up there with Plan 9 from Outer Space. The film achieved its present notoriety thanks to its appearance on an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000 back in 1993. But, in a post on his blog, Solovey makes the case, rather convincingly in my opinion, that Manos is not a actually a bad movie so much as an amateurish one, made by people with little or no experience of film making. Likewise, the poor quality of all the existing prints only adds to the perception that it's a movie without any redeeming features:

A common refrain I’ve heard is that without Joel and the Bots, the movie is “unwatchable”, but I suspect a big part of that is the bad visual presentation that the movie has always had. When you divest Manos of its grimy, unpleasant patina, you are still left with a weirdly dubbed, strangely edited, small town, outsider horror film. But with a clearer view of the production design (paintings, metalwork, and stone sculptures by Tom Neyman, a local artist who played The Master), the off kilter handmade world the film presents, and the shaggy but poppy Ektachrome photography by Robert Guidry, 45 years later Manos assumes a different identity as a fascinating bit of 1966 ephemera.

This is a big part of why Solovey wants to restore the film, but it's not the only one.

Here is a truly independent horror film from the 60′s, a contemporary of 1962′s Carnival of Souls and 1968′s Night of the Living Dead. The main difference being, of course, that those movies came from career filmmakers Herk Harvey and George Romero, who had already made commercials and industrials and knew how a set should be run. Hal Warren, director of Manos, did not have that sort of experience and the deck was truly stacked against him. Although he had not yet infamously sold fertilizer- that would come later- he was a good salesman and was able to rustle up a reported budget of $19,000 (over $132,000 in today’s money) to get his script made.

If you yourself have ever been involved in an independent movie, Manos becomes somewhat poignant as you see evidence of the problems that have arisen and have been worked around or willfully ignored. Actors dropping in and out of the production, a broken leg that stranded two in a car for their entire screen time…

A lack of reliable electricity, which creates a murky, crudely lit effect at night…

Animals that were unwisely written into the movie and refuse to cooperate…

It’s all very relatable stuff. And because this is a movie where the artifices of filmmaking are constantly crumbling and being rebuilt, a little shakier every time, it holds a certain fascination to film buffs that places it above worse and more boring films (which there are no shortage of, then or now). Simply put, it’s memorable. If you’ve seen it you’ll remember Torgo and the Master. You’ll remember the interminable driving that opens the movie, the weird squabbling of the Wives, the loungey soundtrack, the unconvincing dubbing, the Scorpio Rising-esque invocation of Manos, God Of Primal Darkness. All this in a film that’s only 70 minutes and change.

So rather than have Manos fade away as a footnote with only a cruddy video transfer to remember it by, I’ve resolved to make it a personal project to restore it.

I don't know about you, but I can't help but applaud Solovey's efforts, perhaps because I detect in him a kindred spirit to a lot of us in the old school community, someone who's willing to ignore conventional wisdom about the quality of a work and try to appreciate it for the virtues it might possess beneath the patina it's accumulated over the years. That's an attitude worthy of respect and so I'll be paying close attention to this project in the weeks and months to come.

Oooh-EEE-ooooh!

Growing up as I did in the ancient days before either home video or cable TV were ubiquitous, my first encounters with cinematic sci-fi was watching old films on Saturday afternoons. A lot of these films weren't particularly good, but many of them, like The Day the Earth Stood Still and Forbidden Planet to mention just two, were and they played an incalculable role in forming my imagination. Even now, more than three decades later, the influence of those SF movies remains powerful, such as my fondness for the theremin.

The theremin, in case you've never heard the word before, is an electronic musical instrument invented in 1928 by the Russian inventor Lev Termen, known in the West as Léon Theremin, after whom the instrument is named. Here's a video of the man himself demonstrating its use:

During the 1950s, the theremin was used a great deal -- some would say overused -- in science fiction films, which is why I so strongly associate its distinctive sound with the genre. It definitely has an otherworldly quality to it that conjures up alien vistas for me. I understand that to many other people, the theremin sound represents cheesy sci-fi and so they abominate its use. I can understand that. Watch enough Ed Wood-level schlock and there's a good chance you'll hate the theremin, too. Not me, though. In fact, I'd like to hear it used more often.

(As an aside, it's worth mentioning that the soundtrack to Forbidden Planet did not make use of the theremin. Instead, composers Louis and Bebe Barron made that movie's music completely electronically, which is to say, without the use any instruments beyond electronic circuits, whose noises they then manipulated by playing them backward and forward and otherwise modulating them to produce the desired sounds. Considering that they did this nearly a decade before the invention of the first synthesizer, it's a pretty impressive accomplishment.)

One Man's Nostalgia

By now, I'm pretty sure everyone in the old school community is very much aware of Goodman Games's upcoming Dungeon Crawl Classics Role Playing Game, which is currently in open playtest and is on schedule for a February 2012 release. I haven't paying as close attention to the playtest as I'd intended to, in part because I've got my own projects to work on. But another part of my inattention is that, while there's a lot I do like about the DCC RPG, there's also a lot I don't and, perhaps more importantly, I'm not really in the market for another fantasy roleplaying game right now. So, I keep half an eye on DCC RPG's development, checking in every now and again to see how things are unfolding.

One of the more intriguing aspects of the game line's development are the upcoming adventure modules to support it. Take a look at the covers of a couple of them:

Those are both really awesome, right? They scream pulp fantasy in a way that adventure module covers haven't since I first entered the hobby. That they're reminiscent of the covers of both Weird Tales magazines and 1970s paperback novels, without being apes of either, is also a point in their favor. For me, they hit that sweet spot between nostalgic evocation and unique vision.

On the other hand, this does nothing for me. Indeed, it almost looks like a parody cover.

It looks like a crossover between Luke Cage, Hero for Hire and Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser -- and while that's probably awesome in some people's eyes, I find it silly. Of course, even sillier in my opinion is another DCC adventure module:

Now, winged apes are cool and, of course, Michael Curtis is even cooler, but basing an adventure off Tramp's iconic DMG illustration? That's not so cool. I find myself uncomfortably reminded of some of those HackMaster adventures of old, the ones that turned me off them to such a degree that I never bothered to give the game a fair shake. That's what Emirikol Was Framed! does for to me: it turns me off DCC RPG and it's not even out yet.

I'm just one guy, of course. I'm sure many other old schoolers looked at those second two covers and pumped their fists in enthusiasm. They looked at them and found them as delightfully evocative as I found the first two. Nostalgia, just like esthetics, is a funny thing; one man's "delightfully evocative" is another man's "Hell, no!" I bring this up not as a criticism of DCC RPG at all. Despite my own qualms, I'm actually glad that Goodman Games has decided to forge ahead with a game that looks like it's the product of a clear and idiosyncratic vision of fantasy. It's hard not to applaud that, even when it's not wholly something I would have done -- but then, that's part of the point.

AH Artifacts

The campaign map I've been busy producing with Hexographer is, as I'm sure most people know, based on the map from Avalon Hill's Outdoor Survival game. Over the course of play, I've changed details from the original to suit the direction of the campaign, but its basic appearance is still recognizably that of Outdoor Survival.

Anyway, when I cracked open my ancient copy of Outdoor Survival, I found a copy of interesting Avalon Hill artifacts: a fold-up order form and a registration card. Both are actually quite fascinating windows on both the world and the hobby of 30 years ago.

This first one is just purely nostalgia for me. Though I was never much of a wargamer and though I only ever owned a handful of AH games, I still get a charge out of seeing that address. When I was a younger man, I found it inordinately gratifying that one of the major companies of my hobby was located in my hometown. Looking back, I kick myself that I didn't better avail myself of this fact.

This is the other side of the registration card. It's mostly pretty boring, but what I find fascinating is section 4, where it asks where you purchased the game you're registering. Just look at some of those options: Department Store, Stationery Store, Gift/Card Store. Back in the old days, you really could go to many card stores and expect to see RPGs and boxed wargames on the shelves. Growing up, I remember going to a large card/bookstore called Greetings & Readings (then located in Towson, Maryland) and getting a lot of RPG stuff there that I couldn't find anywhere else, like the Grenadier Gamma World miniatures. Also of interest is the reference to "Military Outlet." As I've said before, we can't underestimate the huge role military personnel played on the early hobby.

The front portion of the order form is interesting primarily as a time capsule from the world before the Internet. Also of interest is the "Elite Club," a lifetime 10% discount on mail order purchases if you spent $120 or more on a single order.

The backside has a similar time capsule feel to it. Unlike the registration card, which is from a later time, after the foundation of Victory Games, this form uses AH's formal name, The Avalon Hill Game Company. I've always thought the use of the definite article lent a certain dignity to it.

Ah, memories!

The Ads of Dragon: Grenadier Models

Here's an ad from issue #59 (March 1982), though it -- and others in the same series -- appeared for many more issues to come.

From 1979 to 1982, Grenadier Models was the official manufacturer of Advanced D&D miniatures, as well as miniatures for use with Gamma World and, bizarrely, Snit's Revenge. I owned quite a large collection of Grenadier minis back in the day and, in fact, I still have them, though most of them remain unpainted, a situation that's sadly unlikely to change anytime soon. And while by today's standards many of Grenadier's minis aren't particularly good, I retain a nostalgic fondness for them, since I connect them very strongly with characters and adventures my friends and I played way back when. For example, the paladin figure from the "Specialists" boxed set was one I used for my paladin, Sir James, and I can't look at that figure and not recall my earliest days in the hobby.

After they lost the AD&D license, Grenadier produced minis for several others games I played a lot in my younger days: Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and FASA's Star Trek. I know I owned boxed sets for the first two, but I never even saw the Trek minis that I can remember. Unlike the AD&D miniatures, I didn't actually use the Cthulhu or Traveller minis; I bought them primarily as "toys" that I could look at and stick on my bookshelf as knickknacks. That seems a bit odd in retrospect, but those were odd times, as future installments in this series will make even clearer.

SF Memories

Over at the always excellent blog Space: 1970, Christopher Mills has posted some artwork by Vincent DiFate, including this one, which once graced the cover of a spiral notebook I had in elementary school:

It would be a gross understatement to say that I like SF artwork in this style; the truth is I adore this style of SF artwork. It represents to me what I'd call "pre-Star Wars" sci-fi art, which combined a wide-eyed Golden Age of SF sense of wonder with an Apollo era esthetic. Don't get me wrong: I actually rather like look and feel of Star Wars; that's something even the prequels got right in my opinion. But the Star Wars look is not the only one for SF and this artwork by DiFate is a reminder of at least one other take on the genre -- one I happen to like very much.

(And let me add, before someone chimes in on this: much of DiFate's work, including this piece, postdates Star Wars. To my mind, this makes it all the more remarkable, as it's keeping alive a style that quickly fell out of favor in the wake of George Lucas's masterpiece and has been out of favor ever since.)

The Ads of Dragon: Quirks

(Because there are so many ads to cover, even within a single issue, The Ads of Dragon is going to be a semiweekly series, with installments appearing every Tuesday and Thursday).

Today's advertisement comes from issue #57 (January 1982) and it's not of a RPG but some other type of game. I'm honestly not sure if it was a boardgame or not, since it certainly wasn't clear from the ad. Regardless, Quirks, "the game of un-natural selection," was published by Eon Products, whose most famous game was Cosmic Encounter. Even though I never owned a copy or played it, I knew what Cosmic Encounter was, because it was one of those games that everyone knew about. Plus, you could buy copies of it in hobby stores right next to the Avalon Hill and SPI wargames.

Despite my utter lack of knowledge of what this game was about, I was strangely fascinated by Quirks. Eon ran ads for it in a lot of issues of Dragon and the very fact that the ad said so little about the game other than that it involved "thousands and thousands of monsters" only added to my curiosity. Mind you, this was true of a lot of games I saw advertised in Dragon back in the day. There were all these ads for games I never saw in the stores -- and remember, back then, even "normal" game and toy stores carried lots of RPGs and wargames -- which suggested to me that the hobby really was much bigger and more diverse than the small part of it I knew in suburban Baltimore. That's pretty heady stuff.

As an aside, I also find this advertisement nostalgic, since it references OMNI, which I remember well from those days. If I had to encapsulate the strange Zeitgeist of the late 70s and early 80s in a single periodical, OMNI would definitely be a strong contender for consideration. My father often picked up copies of it and I'd read some of the articles in its pages, as well as some of its fiction. It was a very odd mix of science fact and science fiction, with a good dose of general weirdness. Reminiscing about OMNI is probably a topic for another day ...

Ares #16

Given all the recent discussion of Larry Elmore's artwork hereabouts, I was reminded of the cover he did for the Winter 1983 issue of Ares, which featured this illustration of English knights battling the alien Wersgorix from Poul Anderson's The High Crusade. This was an issue published after TSR had acquired SPI and includes a wargame (by David Cook) that re-enacts the events of Anderson's novel.

Also in the issue is an original short story by Poul Anderson that serves as a sequel to The High Crusade. What a different world 1983 was! When a story an author like Poul Anderson could not only be found in the pages of a gaming magazine but whose story assumed knowledge of a prior one. Mind you, that was not at all uncommon in the gaming magazines of my youth. Dragon regularly had short fiction in its pages, often by authors as distinguished Anderson, though, as I understand it, this practice largely ceased in the years after I stopped reading it, which, if true, is a shame.

For the Love of Counters

Counter Sheet from GDW's Snapshot

When I entered the hobby in late 1979, its connection to wargaming, especially miniatures wargaming, though more tenuous than it once had been, was still not completely severed. One way that this was apparent was that fact that many boxed RPGs included both cardboard counters and maps among their components, with the expectation that they'd be used to adjudicate combat and movement on the tabletop. Four games I distinctly recall taking this approach were TSR's Gangbusters, Star Frontiers, and Boot Hill and GDW's Traveller, by way of its boxed supplement Snapshot.

My friends and I didn't always use the counters and maps when we played these game but we did so frequently enough that, whenever I think of them, my memories include pushing little pieces of cardboard across a poster-sized map. What's interesting is that, to a lot of people involved in the old school renaissance nowadays, this is anathema, much like the use of miniatures and dungeon tiles/floor plans. Back then, though, we never gave it a second thought, since not only was this the way these games were "supposed" to be played -- otherwise, why else did the games include these components? -- but that's how we saw them and, indeed, many other RPGs being played.

Counter Sheet from Star Frontiers

Even more interesting, I think, is that, lately, I've found myself longing for that way of playing RPGs. Some of it is clearly nostalgia, as I associate those games with a particularly great time in the hobby and my involvement in it. But it's more than that, as it so often is. For me, counters and maps represent a time when publishers and players alike still remembered that RPGs are games, right down to having pieces like both wargames and boardgames. The term "tabletop roleplaying" is of a much later vintage, after computer games calling themselves "roleplaying games" had appeared, but the very existence of the term suggests that, to many people, a tabletop was an essential component to the hobby and not just as a surface on which to roll dice.

I bring this up not just as a trip down memory lane, though I won't deny there's some of that at work in this post. I mention it as a mild corrective to the notions many of us have about the place and utility of miniatures and other similar representations in RPGs. I suspect there's some degree of contrariness at work here, since, in recent years, the use of miniatures has come to be associated with the post-TSR editions of Dungeons & Dragons and in a decidedly negative way. I think that's too bad, if only because I think it further divorces current discussions of old school gaming from part of how these games were played in the past.

Counter Sheet from Universe

And of course, I also wouldn't mind seeing a revival in the use of cardboard counters and maps in old school gaming. I think their use helps to lend a little tactical complexity to things like combat and it helps remind us that there's more to this hobby than sitting around with friends pretending to be an elf. At the very least, the greater use of counters (or miniatures) and maps might go some way toward reminding us all that there's nothing at all antithetical to roleplaying about their use. Indeed, some might find, as I did as a younger man, that their use can contribute greatly to roleplaying. Plus, sometimes it's just fun to push around a little cardboard square to represent your character's grav car as he chases after space pirates on an alien world. What's not to like?

The Irrelevance of D&D

1983 - When D&D Still Called the Tune

By the time I entered high school in the Fall of 1983, I'd been involved in the roleplaying hobby for more than three years. In that time, I'd played a lot of different games and met a lot of other players -- in my neighborhood, at game stores, and at local game meet-ups. These were the "fad years" of the hobby, when it was next to impossible to meet a young person who wasn't playing Dungeons & Dragons or some other tabletop RPG. It really was that prevalent a pastime, or at least so it seemed to me based on my personal experiences. Yet, when I was in high school, I only ever met one other guy who was as into roleplaying as I was. I'm sure there were other who had played RPGs at some point in the past, but, by 1983, they were either too cool to admit to it or they had ceased gaming some time before and had no interest in taking it up again, despite my failed attempts to generate interest in doing so.

But while I had little luck in finding tabletop roleplayers among my high school classmates, I had no problem in finding fans of computer games like those in the Wizardry series, which clearly -- and unashamedly -- took their cues from Dungeons & Dragons. Looking back on those days, it's fascinating to remember how often my friends would describe Wizardry and similar games as "like Dungeons & Dragons but on the computer." Many of these guys had never played D&D (or so they claimed, at any rate) and yet they regularly described computer games by making reference to it. This only makes sense, given that D&D provided not just the basic premise -- exploration and combat in a monster-filled maze -- but also the very rules terminology -- character classes, hit points, experience points -- on which their electronic imitators depended.

I've argued before that the immense popularity of D&D in the late 70s and early 80s was a fluke never to be replicated again. The more I reflect on it, the more I recognize that D&D appeared during that brief period when interest in both fantasy and interactive entertainments was on the rise but before home computers were both cheap and powerful enough to satisfy these interests. Consequently, the hobby swelled with many people who were became involved in it only because there was no viable alternative yet available. Tabletop roleplaying was the best thing on offer at the time. The advent of games like Wizardry peeled a lot of people away from the hobby and, I suspect, provided a better form of entertainment for many others who might have picked up gaming as a second best choice in a world that had not yet invented something they would have actually preferred.

Even if I'm right, D&D nevertheless retained a powerful hold on the public imagination, with "Dungeons & Dragons" and "D&D" being shorthand for a certain type of fantasy game, regardless of whether it was played on the tabletop with dice and graph paper or (increasingly) on a computer screen. Even into the 1990s, long after the RPG fad had faded and when electronic "roleplaying games" were sophisticated and creative enough that some refer to this decade as the medium's own Golden Age, I could make references to "D&D" as a stand-in for a fantastic adventure game and most people, even those who had no direct experience with the game would know what I meant by it.

That doesn't seem to be the case anymore. I don't hear vide game players talking much about "D&D" anymore, even in a context where doing so would make sense. "World of Warcraft" seems to be the new shorthand for the kind of game that "Dungeons & Dragons" once used to represent. And just as many of D&D's peculiar tropes and interpretations of mythology and legend made their way into the DNA of modern fantasy, so too have WoW's own spins on them become pervasive. Indeed, the same could be said of the vocabulary used in contemporary rules discussion, both within the video game hobby and without it. Once upon a time, D&D called the tune; now, it sits against the wall, with only a member of the chess club to keep it company.

I say all this not as a whine or lament. I genuinely don't care that Dungeons & Dragons -- and tabletop RPGs more generally -- aren't as wildly popular as they were in the days of my youth. I do get the sense, though, that many gamers do care and that they've never quite accepted the fact that, in the wider world, our hobby is largely irrelevant, used primarily as the butt of jokes by middle-aged folks who remember its near-ubiquity in the past. I suspect the name "Dungeons & Dragons" still triggers a moment of recognition for a lot of people, sort of like mentioning the name of some sitcom from the 1980s, but comprehension? I doubt it. As I said, D&D's role as a pop cultural signifier of "fantasy adventure" was long ago usurped by others and that's not going to change.

I rather suspect that many of the trials and tribulations of the D&D "brand" in recent years can be attributed to a perceived gap between how well known and influential it was in the past and how well known and influential it is now. D&D was king of the hill for so long, it's hard for many of us -- including multi-billion dollar corporation -- to square contemporary reality with what we think should be the case based on a recollection of past glories. Like it or not, D&D is no longer the standard bearer of  culture-changing hobby. It's Bridge. It's CB radio. It's slotcar racing. In short, it's irrelevant to most of the wider world -- and I don't give a damn.

An Iconic Cover

Of all the pieces that Jim Roslof created over the course of his career, I'd wager the one most gamers of a certain vintage will remember is this one from the cover of The Keep on the Borderlands. Of course, a lot of us probably didn't realize who the artist was; I know I didn't. But for those of us entered the hobby during the Holmes and Moldvay eras, this image was among a handful indelibly burned into our memories and forever linked with the words "Dungeons & Dragons." This fact alone is enough to place Roslof in the pantheon of the hobby's great illustrators, though, as I'll show in subsequent posts this week, he was responsible for a great many other defining images of the Golden Age of TSR.

Open Friday: Anyone Remember This?

That's a piece of artwork associated with a rather obscure bit of D&D-related merchandise from the early 1980s, about which I'll probably talk more in the days to come. As I recall, this piece, along with several others by the same illustrator, were sold as posters through one of the catalog stores (Sears?). Does anyone else remember this?

The Past is a Foreign Country (Take Two)

When not regaling my children with tales of airbrushed van murals, I sometimes tell them of these strange things known as "catalog stores." Growing up at the dawn of the 21st century, it's hard for them to imagine the idea of going into a store much of whose stock isn't on display and some of which has to be special ordered to purchase (and will arrive in your hands only days or even weeks later). The best analogy I've been able to offer them is that catalog stores were "like Amazon, except you had to go to a store to place your order and you often didn't get what you ordered immediately." You could also order by phone too, as I remember my mother sometimes doing in the months before Christmas.

When I got into the hobby in late 1979/early 1980, you could buy RPGs almost everywhere, including through catalog stores, like Sears. My first AD&D book, the Monster Manual was purchased this way (from Sears, I think). After reading this post over on Al's blog, I spent a short time poking around the web to find some scans of Christmas catalogs from around the time I started gaming. So far, I only found scans from a little later than the period I'm talking about, but it's nonetheless fascinating to see. Here's one from a 1981 Montgomery Ward catalog:

As you can see, D&D is only present in its late, unlamented electronic boardgame form. I never owned that game myself, but I knew someone who did and it was awful, especially considering it retailed for $44.88. More interesting are those three games -- Merlin, Knights of King Arthur, and Crypt of the Sorcerer -- which were, if I remember, produced by Heritage USA, a miniatures company. The games all include minis and paints, along with maps and simple rules. Again, I never owned them, but I do remember them. Wizard's Quest from Avalon Hill is there too, along with a Ouija board, because, you know, it all makes sense, right? Let's not forget Dark Tower, a much better electronic boardgame than the D&D one.

Here are two pages from a 1983 Sears catalog and are even more interesting:

Here we find not only D&D and AD&D -- with miniatures! -- but also Star Frontiers, Traveller, and Starfleet Battles. If ever anyone needed proof that, even in 1983, tabletop "gaming" broadly defined was way more popular and mainstream than it is today, simply consider the notion of Starfleet Battles being readily available through the Sears Wishbook.

But it gets better:

FASA's Star Trek Roleplaying Game and Space Opera, along with several Avalon Hill bookcase games, including Squad Leader -- all displayed on the same page as games like Risk and Trivial Pursuit. It's as if, back then, no one treated these games as if they were any different than any other kind of game.

That, to me anyway, is the biggest way that the hobby has changed from when I was a young person. In those days, sure, roleplaying was new and a little weird, but it hadn't yet been ghettoized. Kids (and adults) of all sorts played RPGs; it wasn't just a "nerd thing." I've noted before that playing D&D was one of the few activities I ever participated in where I got to hang out with guys who otherwise wouldn't have had much to do with a shy, bookish kid like me. I never forged any deep and abiding friendships with, say, the metalheads or jocks I played D&D with at library meet-ups and other such gatherings, but the fact that I interacted with them at all says a lot about how widespread a fad these games were back in the late 70s and early 80s -- so widespread, in fact, that you could buy them through Sears or Montgomery Ward.

(I'm going to keep looking for more catalog scans from the same time period. If anyone else finds some, please leave a note in the comments. I'd love to see them.)

Exploring the Dungeon

Last month, as you may recall, I was reminded of the 1981 art book, Down in the Dungeon, that a childhood friend's older brother owned and so inspired us kids back then. As I said in my original, I never owned a copy of the thing myself, something I set out to rectify through the wonders of eBay. Today, I received the treasured volume in the mail and have been looking it over with great enjoyment; it's a nostalgia rush the likes of which I've not had in a very long time.

Anyway, I was particularly struck by the book's introduction, an image of which appears below:

I hope the text is legible to most readers' eyes. In case it isn't, the part that struck me was the last paragraph, which reads:

We stumbled upon Zarakan's Dungeon quite by accident while on a camping trip in the Southwestern United States. The following are some friends, enemies and situations we encountered while briefly exploring a small section of Zarakan's lair.

Maybe I've completed my transformation into a silly old man, I don't know, but that paragraph really hit home with me. The way it's written, as if Don Greer and Rob Stern had actually discovered Zarakan's Dungeon while on a camping trip rang true for me, because, as a kid, I felt the same way about Quasqueton, Twilight's Peak, R'lyeh and many other places. Sure, my friends and I never physically explored those places, but we explored them just the same and our explorations of them affected me as strongly as my explorations of many real world locales.

For a lot of non-gamers, what I just wrote is simply crazy-talk. I certainly hope that anyone who's here and reading this entry understands what I'm saying, though. Imagined places may not exist, they may not be real in the common sense usage of the term, but that doesn't mean our experiences of them are mere fancy without any value. We may instinctively laugh at the guy who claims, "I didn't spend all those years playing Dungeons & Dragons and not learn a little something about courage" and yet, there is a sense in which that guy speaks the truth. I wouldn't hesitate to admit that I'm a better person for having spent a large part of my youth imagining myself to be one of many characters in several imaginary worlds.

Roleplaying has taught me a lot over the years, just as I am sure it's taught others. I see no reason why anyone should be ashamed to admit this. Indeed, I might go so far as to say that, as roleplayers, we do our hobby a disservice by not emphasizing this point about ourselves and the games we play. Indeed, I think it's this aspect of tabletop gaming that so strongly differentiates it from its electronic by-blows. We need to do a better job of promoting this fact.