Arduin Musings

I think I've mentioned before that my introduction to gaming was through a childhood friend's older brother. He was a metalhead teenager and he was my first Dungeon Master. Consequently, a lot of my early gaming prejudices and idiosyncrasies were inherited from him and his circle of friends. One of those prejudices was a dismissal of David Hargrave's Arduin Grimoire series as being beneath the "serious" gamer.

At that time, the Arduin series consisted of three volumes (the Arduin Trilogy, as they've become known) that were the same size, color, and general format as the three little brown books of OD&D. This was not a coincidence. Starting with the first volume in 1977, it's clear that the Arduin books were Hargrave's hacks to OD&D, a fact not lost on TSR, which issued a cease and desist order because the books used D&D-related trademarks without permission (or so I am led to understand).

Bear in mind that, at the time, I was young and not at all plugged in to the wider gaming community. I never knew exactly why Arduin and Hargrave were treated by some as the Second Coming and by others as the Antichrist. I saw ads for the Arduin books in Dragon and other gaming publications. I saw references to the books and heard my elders in the hobby speak of them in somewhat hushed tones. However, I never actually saw the books myself. When I inquired about them, I was informed by my friend's brother that they weren't worth my time. They were "silly" and "unbalanced" and "Monty Haul" and this judgment was enough for me to cease my delving into Things Man Was Not Meant to Know.

I'd honestly forgotten about the Arduin Trilogy into fairly recently, when my love affair with OD&D was reignited. What I discovered was that a great many people whose opinions I'd come to respect, such as Jeff Rients, for example, thought very highly of the books, going so far as to declare them among the best old school gaming products ever written. At the same time, there were naysayers. I could hear the voice of my friend's brother whispering in my ears, reminding me not to walk the path of the Dark Side. But I'd learned that many of the things I'd taken to be true from my youth weren't necessarily so, at least as far as gaming goes. So I screwed up my courage and ordered copies of the original Arduin Trilogy. They arrived two weeks ago and I've been reading them ever since.

What I found was a bit of a disappointment, on numerous levels. There was nothing "subversive" about the books at all. Indeed, I found myself bored at times. The books were certainly old school: no concerns about balance, verisimilitude, or even logic, amateurishly produced (though some of the art was quite good, far better than anything in OD&D), and positively in love with random tables of all sorts. None of it clicked with me, though. There were individual bits and pieces I found intriguing (the experience rules, for example) and some that made me reconsider long-held opinions (on the mixing of genres, for instance), but most of it generated a resounding "meh" from me.

I realize that, on some level, the impact of Arduin can't really be judged adequately thirty years after the fact. At the time these books were published, the ideas contained within their covers were new and original and a little bit subversive. Why else would so many people back then have made a point of dismissing them? Now, though, Hargrave's best ideas seem pedestrian while his wilder stuff strikes me as silly. I'm reminded of my experience seeing reruns of the TV show "Laugh-In" for first time. My parents had always spoken of how funny the show was and, more importantly, how "naughty." So I expected it to be this uproarious, boundary-pushing comedy extravaganza -- and it wasn't. It was boring and often just plain stupid. But I was watching it in the 1980s, decades after comedy had changed, in no small part due to the influence of "Laugh-In" and so it was impossible for me to view the show with the eyes of my parents, who grew up in a pre-"Laugh-In" world of comedy.

In much the same way, I entered gaming in a post-Arduin world and so its impact is very hard for me to see and appreciate. I started playing in late 1979, by which point Arduin had already made its big splash. Many of its better ideas were readily accepted and incorporated into gaming, while its more outlandish and/or outré ones became those that became "quintessentially Arduin." Its those things that my friend's older brother objected to and that formed a significant portion of the opposition to Arduin.

Reading it in 2008, even those outlandish things strike me as banal. We've had 30 years of people trying their damnedest to push the boundaries of gaming, some of them even successfully. Consequently, it's nearly impossible to read the Arduin Trilogy now and see any of its ideas as original as they once were. I feel bad about that, because I'm constitutionally predisposed to giving people their proper due. Whatever else he was, David Hargrave was a very imaginative guy and, by all accounts, an amazingly agile referee. That he's not more well known is a shame, because he certainly influenced the development of the hobby in numerous ways, probably more than even I realize.

I'm glad I bought and finally read the Arduin books. I feel as if a hole in my gaming education has been filled. I can't honestly say I'm ever likely to use anything from these books, nor can I say that I find them inspirational in the way that I find, say, many early Judges Guild products. Arduin feels very dated to me; these are not timeless books. They're important historically but only historically. Bits and pieces of Arduin have certainly had their influence (D&D's thri-kreen are almost certainly knock-offs of the phraints) and Encounter Critical strikes me as a loving homage to gonzo silliness of Arduin (being first "published" in the same year), but I'm hesitant to say Arduin is "important" without qualification.

Arduin represents a part of the old school heritage that I have a hard time connecting to, so perhaps I am biased in my estimation of its virtues. I know that many people see it as a gleeful, glorious romp filled with boundless imagination, whereas I find most of it ridiculous. That said, I certainly don't think Arduin should be kicked from the clubhouse. However, you can be sure I myself won't be inviting it over to dinner anytime soon. Fortunately, Arduin has enough admirers among us grognards that it won't starve for affection nor will it pine away for lack of mine.

Hail, Hyboria!

In between all the other things I'm reading -- or should be doing instead -- I've been immersed in my various collections of Conan stories. In reading them, I've come to the conclusion that the Hyborian Age is about as perfect an example of a fantasy roleplaying game setting as you can get. It has the feel of history without the necessity for knowing any history at all. And of course, by "history" I mean "cool history." The world of Conan is like all the cool places in which you'd want to adventure mashed together cheek by jowl. Not only does this mean that your high chivalric knight can go exploring the Tomb of the Lost Pharaoh, it also means that his companions can be a Viking skald, a Mongol raider, and a priestess of Aphrodite. What's better than that?

When I was a younger man, I used to get hung up on making things as historically accurate as I could. So, if my campaign setting was a high medieval one in character, I didn't even allow Vikings, because they were from an earlier period of history. Likewise, my Egypt analog wouldn't be peopled by bald hieroglyphics-carving worshipers of Ra but by more "plausible" Arab stand-ins. Nowadays, though, I can't help but think I missed out on a lot of fun, as Two-Gun Bob understood very well. What's fun about the Conan stories is how the Cimmerian is able to wander across history, metaphorically, as he wanders across Hyboria. One story he's in what amounts to classical Greece, in another he's in medieval France, and in a third he's among a bunch of Aztecs slapped into the middle of a faux Africa. That gave Howard an opportunity to tell a wide variety of stories that drew on a vast number of pulp fantasy tropes -- and keep them fresh. No, much of it doesn't make any sociological sense, but to worry about that is to kind of miss the point, as my younger self no doubt would have.

The trick to pulling this off is twofold. First, make sure your analogs are analogs. Stygia, for example, isn't Egypt. It's a lot like Egypt, but it's not identical to the historical Egypt of any single era. Instead, it's a mishmash of many different eras, combined with stuff that Howard just thought worked in the context of the stories he wanted to tell involved Stygia or Stygians. Second, and in some ways, most important of all, the mishmash can't just be a mishmash. That is, it has to have a coherence of its own.

One of the reasons the Hyborian Age feels "right" is that Howard did a good job of giving the whole thing solidity, a sense that it held together without reference to the real world. He does this in a lot of different ways, from small details to off-hand references to imaginary histories he almost certainly never worked out in detail, but the combined effect is to make (to use my earlier example) Stygia simultaneously Egypt and more than Egypt. Stygia isn't just Egypt with the serial numbers filed off but rather an imaginary place that is immediately intelligible because it's enough like the pulp conception of Egypt to hook us, but also dissimilar enough to feel as it's not merely an unimaginative knock-off.

This is my ideal for a pulp fantasy setting. You see similar principles to those Howard used at work in both the Wilderlands of High Fantasy and in the early World of Greyhawk. I could also argue that Paizo's Golarion setting employs the same principles and that's one of the reasons their Pathfinder RPG project continues to interest me, even if I think the end result might wind up being more complex and detail-heavy than I prefer.

Some purists do not like to introduce any character types or monsters into their game world unless they have a medieval or "Tolkienian" flavor or base. This really limits their play possibilities as far as I am concerned, for what better world to accept aliens than ones that already have a myriad of other strange and weird creatures as residents? Sure, it would be hard for a town like Peoria or Indianapolis to accept strange alien creatures, but would it be so hard for people that probably have elves, dwarves, hobbits, and the like living down the street from them? I think not, for what is stranger, the alien with the blaster or the multi-tonned dragon that breathes fire? Think about it, and I think you'll find that logic supports the use of aliens in fantasy games, and that playability supports their inclusion as well. They are fun, challenging, and very novel as characters and as monsters. I can still visualize the pair of Vegan space travelers trying to figure out how a wand of fireballs worked after they had traded their stunner for it. They ran every test imaginable, and their computer kept telling them: "This item does not compute!" Still, it worked when that funny looking guy with the purple robes sold it to them ...

You get the point, I think, but let me just say one final thing on the subject and we'll go on to other things: The very essence of fantasy gaming is its total lack of limitation on the scope of play, both in its content, and in its appeal to people of all ages, races, occupations or whatever. So don't limit the game by excluding aliens or any other type of character or monster. If they don't fit what you feel is what the game is all about, don't just say, "NO!", whittle on them a bit until they do fit.

--David Hargrave, Welcome to Skull Tower (1978)

The Two D&Ds

First, thanks to everyone who's expressed concern at my illness. I'm on the mend, but I still have bad cough and tire easily. I'm also a bit more melancholy and moody than is usual for me. So, posting will probably still be light till next Monday. I'm hoping the weekend will be enough to help me kick this bug and get back into the saddle again.

That said, while I've been laid up in bed and generally shutting out the world, I was thinking about the history of OD&D and I realized that, within about a year of its release, the game developed a split personality that's not never really healed. The first published edition of OD&D was released in January 1974 and laid the foundation for what would come. The three little brown books thus established the "core personality" of Dungeons & Dragons -- the outline of a game of fantasy adventuring grounded in both the pulp literary tradition and the wargaming scene of the late 60s/early 70s. In 1975, the modestly named Supplement I: Greyhawk appeared. While Greyhawk is self-described as "a supplement to an existing body of rules" rather than a replacement, it nevertheless did replace many elements of OD&D (Hit Dice for classes and monsters, weapon damage by type, etc.). More importantly, Greyhawk also gave the world its first taste of what I will, somewhat inaccurately, "Gygaxian naturalism" -- D&D's second personality and, over time, it's dominant one.

One of the things that should strike anyone who reads the little brown books of "pure" OD&D is how bland they are. They assume the reader has a grounding on wargames and pulp fantasy by their allusions and ellipses, but the text, as written, has very little flavor of its own. In my opinion, that's one of the virtues of OD&D: the reader must engage the texts and actively make sense of them. One simply cannot read them and understand them without effort. Consequently, anyone who sincerely makes a go of playing OD&D will, of necessity, be co-creator with Gygax and Arneson in making his own fantasy adventure game. The early history of the hobby shows lots of people doing just that, which is why roleplaying went off in lots of unusual directions in those days, with individual creators inspired by this or that element and running with them as they saw fit. I think it's hard not to find those bygone days an Age of Giants, by dint of enthusiastic creativity if nothing else.

Greyhawk changed all that. We now had a supplement that not only changed and expanded rules, but that gave us flavor as well. Prior to Supplement I, there were no named magic items, for example. Named spells wouldn't officially appear until AD&D, but many distinctly D&D spells, such as magic missile, would appear here. Likewise, many original-to-RPGs monsters first appear in Greyhawk. Where the three little brown books (largely) contented themselves with concepts and ideas drawn from a common store of pulp fantasy, legendry, and history, Greyhawk begins in earnest the establishment of a common D&D mythology drawn primarily from the Lake Geneva campaign co-DMed by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz. Though it was almost certainly not TSR's intention, the Greyhawk campaign would become the Versailles of D&D, its fashions and eccentricities being taken as normative rather than merely suggestive.

I call OD&D's second personality "Gygaxian naturalism" because, as the develop of AD&D shows, Gary Gygax was quite keen that D&D should be a game that not only had its own distinctives, distinctives largely drawn from his home campaign, but that gave each DM the tools to create a whole world. Whereas OD&D has a strong (but not exclusive) emphasis on dungeon crawling, AD&D casts dungeon crawling as initiatory rites to a wider fantasy adventure experience. That's why stories of the Lake Geneva campaign are filled with tales of characters becoming mover and shakers, with holdings, henchmen, and ambitions beyond mere loot. Such activities demanded that there be a whole world out there to explore. Thus, you get discussions of the planes of existence, stats for mundane creatures, random prostitute tables, and all the rest. These things all arose, I'd wager, as part of an effort to make D&D a game that could describe a world not bounded by treasure and trap-filled catacombs -- just like the Lake Geneva campaign.

None of this is to say that dungeon delving wasn't important in Greyhawk, because it was, nor is it to imply that other campaigns, such as Blackmoor, didn't have a significant "political" component, because they did. However, I think it's significant that, for example, what we know of the Blackmoor setting from Dave Arneson's First Fantasy Campaign and later products is far smaller, both in terms of geographic and topical scope, than the Greyhawk campaign. And I know from conversations with Gary before his death that there were plans to describe all the lands of Oerth after the fashion of the 1983 boxed set. His vision was a wide one, anchored in the belief that DMs needed such a breadth of information, because the player characters might wander far from the dungeon and hunt wild boars for food drink too much in a tavern and suffer the ill effects of intoxication. Even fantasy worlds need verisimilitude, at least to a degree, and Supplement I began the process of providing rules for it.

All of this is a roundabout way of saying that I think there are two D&Ds, each one rooted in a different phase of OD&D. The first is a game of pure adventure, with comparatively few concerns about the wider world in which those adventures take place. The second is a game of fantasy world building, so as to establish the boundary conditions inside of which adventures can take place. The second approach is the one that was canonized with AD&D and thus became the default one most gamers of a certain age associate with the game. Indeed, I could argue quite forcefully that, for all the claims that 2e had betrayed the Gygaxian vision, it was in fact simply an extension of Gary's own world building emphasis. The "pure adventure" line of descent survived in the Moldvay/Cook version of the game and lingered even in the Mentzer/Compendium rules (thought not supplements, which became increasingly AD&D-like over time), but it was overshadowed by the Greyhawk approach, to such an extent that "dungeon crawling" is usually a term of opprobrium among gamers, with the implication that it's a "lesser" form of D&D.

I'll admit that, despite my own mechanical preference for OD&D, I am rather more in line with Gygaxian naturalism than I am with pure adventure. That said, I think a better balance between the two approaches needs to be struck, since unchecked Gygaxian naturalism was the seedbed for Dragonlance and other later developments that, in my opinion, did violence to the original presentation of the game.

And now I must rest. I'll try to keep up with comments, but I can't guarantee it. I'm still very stiff and achy and have a nasty headache. But feel free to discuss things in my absence.

Genre Bending

Nowadays, if you're not happy with the direction Dungeons & Dragons has taken and you're struggling to find a nice, succinct curse word to describe your disgust, "anime" seems as good as any. Of course, "anime" means lots of different things to different people. Some will be pedantic and point out that "anime," like "pulp" isn't really a genre so much as a medium. Others will instead fixate on stylistic matters, equating blue hair -- "You gotta have blue hair" -- and robot boots with "anime." Still others will focus on common tropes and even (more rarely) content, as if the choices made in any single series were definitional.

I tend toward pedantry myself, so I have a lot of sympathy for the notion that anime should be viewed more as a medium than as a genre. At the same time, I also realize that a medium can nevertheless become so strongly associated with particular styles, elements, or concepts that it becomes a "quasi-genre." That's why we can in fact meaningfully talk about "pulp" in ways that are reminiscent of discussions of genre. (The same goes for "noir" in my opinion) So, while "anime" may primarily describe the medium of Japanese animation, that medium has, over the years, become so strongly associated with the content expressed through that medium that it's not completely illegitimate to use the term "anime" in a genre-like fashion.

My purpose here isn't to lend credence to many of the most outrageous complaints about D&D's having become "too anime" over the years. I don't in fact think that's generally true at all, especially esthetically. In many ways, I think D&D has, over the years, become less like anime than it used to be. What do I mean by that? For me, one of the strongest -- and indeed most compelling -- aspects of anime is its willingness to break the staid conventions of genre. That's why, in nominally "fantasy" anime, you'll see weird "technological" items, anachronistic clothing, and even situations that supposedly don't "fit" into fantasy. And of course most anime, even the most deadly serious ones, include plenty of humor, often of the slapstick variety, as a way to break the tension (in the fine Shakespearean tradition).

D&D used to be like this and, as the years have gone on, it's become less so. I know it shocks people when they first read OD&D and see references to John Carter of Mars alongside those from Middle Earth. The same reaction happens when you first learn of Blackmoor and the Temple of the Frog. The prehistory of the Wilderlands setting is just too much for many to bear. I can't count the number of times I've heard gamers complain about the "silliness" of Murlynd and his six-shooters. Even the supposedly stodgy setting of Tékumel has a hobbit in a zoological park and interdimensional forays to Mexico at the time of Pancho Villa. And then there's Arduin, a game so gonzo that it makes Encounter Critical look almost conventional.

At some point, probably after the release of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, D&D started to take itself too seriously and ceased to be "anime" in the sense I'm using the term. Many people will make the claim that "D&D is its own genre" and that's true -- now. Back in the wild west days when the hobby began, that wasn't the case. D&D was never about itself; it wasn't self-referential. Instead, it was a heady brew founded in pulp fantasy, but, like the pulp fantasies themselves, was quite willing to beg, borrow, and steal ideas from any source that was handy if doing so made the game more compelling to the referee and players. You have to remember too that "fantasy," as a distinct genre, only really got off the ground after the publication of OD&D. Prior to that, "fantasy" was regularly lumped together with science fiction in a way many geeks would today find unpalatable. Such hard distinctions were unknown and likely unwanted.

In this respect, the original sensibilities of D&D share a great deal in common with those of anime. The willingness to accept that "fantasy" means "anything unreal" is something that was commoner in the early days of the hobby than it is now. Oftentimes, when people wish to claim that such-and-such "doesn't belong" in D&D (or even "isn't D&D"), it's said out of a sense that D&D has an internal coherence that only evolved years after it began. This is why I feel OD&D offers an important corrective to lots of misunderstandings about the games that descended from it. It's hard to read OD&D with unbiased eyes and not see that the people who created it and certainly the people who played it had a very different conception of "fantasy" than do many people who play the game today. I won't go so far as to say they had a better one, because that's a wholly subjective judgment. But there's no denying that, in this respect, D&D today is very different than its origins.

By my lights, Dungeons & Dragons used to have more in common with anime than it does now and that's a shame.

Creative Anachronisms

For me, one of the characteristics of old school gaming is its gleeful embrace of anachronisms. This is in keeping with its pulp literary roots. Howard's Hyborian Age, for example, was a pastiche of several different historical periods, all existing side by side because it allowed Two-Gun Bob to spin more interesting yarns that way. Leiber's Nehwon is much the same, with Lankhmar being at once an ancient, a medieval, and a modern city -- New York seen through pulp fantasy eyes. And of course Vance's Dying Earth is explicitly set in a time after time, perhaps making the very idea of anachronism devoid of meaning.

Early gaming walked the same path. The assumption in those days was that, since it was all fantasy anyway, why worry about historical accuracy? Sure, D&D borrows most heavily from the medieval period -- OD&D even bills itself "Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns" -- but that's not the only period from which it borrows. Anyone who knows the details of the Greyhawk or Blackmoor campaigns will quickly see that neither was simply an imaginary medieval Europe with monsters and magic. What would be the fun in that? Gary and Dave saw inspirations in a lot of different sources and incorporated them into their home campaigns without any concern about whether it was "realistic" or not.

The only concern that matter was fun and so those early campaign settings are filled with lots of oddities and strangements, at least to modern gamer eyes. My feeling is that such things add to the charm of those settings and help establish that you're playing in a fantasy world whose rules , such as they are, do not necessarily mirror those of our own world. That's sometimes forgotten, which is throwing some anachronism into your adventures can often serve a useful purpose.

Of course, not everyone has the same sense of how much anachronism is too much. As referees, we must each draw our own lines in the sand. I tend to be pretty lenient, drawing the line primarily at anything "jokey," which is to say, at anything whose presence makes my players laugh (unless laughter is my explicit goal). By way of example, here are a handful of anachronisms I don't mind in my fantasy worlds and in fact often include:

• Tobacco: Why invent "pipeweed" or some other replacement when you can have the real thing? Every fantasy world needs tobacco for wizards' pipes, if nothing else, and cigars were made for the Guildmaster of Thieves or corpulent merchant princes to wave around dramatically.
• Eyeglasses: Yes, these did exist in the late Middle Ages, but they weren't widespread or as effective as modern lenses. More importantly, there were no sunglasses and I have no problem with them in my fantasy worlds. Heck, there's already precedent for magical glasses in D&D anyway, so why not mundane ones? I also seem to recall the Gray Mouser wore shades on occasion, though I may have imagined that.
• Powdered Wigs: Nothing says pompous official or effete nobleman like a powdered wig.
  
• Eating Utensils: How can you have a proper bar fight if someone can't grab a fork off the table and try to stab some half-orc ruffian with it?
• Gender Equality: Believe it or not, there weren't female warriors in the Middle Ages or indeed pretty much anytime in history. Funny that.
  

I could go on, but I hope my point has been made. I don't mind if my fantasy worlds include lots of anachronistic details, big or small, so long as their inclusion doesn't hinder the fun. More to the point, I'm very much in favor of their inclusion if they help promote fun in some way or other. These are as close to cardinal principles of old school setting design as I can imagine. Everything else pales in importance.