Once I made the decision to step out of the box on D&D
and see other RPGs, I was something of a “loose” GM, if you know what I mean
and I think you do. I figured out pretty quick that some games were better at
simulating specific genres than others. I eventually amassed a shelf full of RPGs
in boxes and books, and also plastic Ziploc bags and paper envelopes, and
clamshell boxes…it got out of hand. I would venture to say that about one-third
of the games that I owned I never played, because they were stupid and
horrible. We didn’t have the word “crunchy” to describe “lots of rules, many of
which are largely not needed” in the 1980s, but we made do with the more
elegant, “This sucks.” Others on my shelf were games that people wanted to
play, but I didn’t necessarily care about. I ran them, with mixed results, and
then never went back to them. Here’s a few of the games I spent a modest amount
of table time running for others:
Thursday, August 30, 2018
Tuesday, August 28, 2018
Artisanal Craft Dice Part 5: Grading the Dice
I know, I know. I think about stuff waaaay too much sometimes.
Over the years, having gone from one extreme to the other on this whole thing, and having been involved at every level of dice manufacturing save actually pouring plastic into the molds, I’ve got a clear and concise system for rating all of these newfangled dice and dice-shaped objects that vie constantly for my attention and my dollars. I’m at a point of saturation that I really don’t have any need for any more dice in my life…unless, you know, they’re really cool, or something. And here’s how I grade them to determine if they end up in my seemingly-endless pile.
Thursday, August 23, 2018
Playing Games Part 5: Brand Loyalty
Gangbusters ad from the back of Dragon Magazine. What could possibly go wrong? |
We tried every one of the TSR major releases, up to and
including the board games, each time thinking, “It’s going to be different!
This time, it won’t be bad!” And, like a latchkey kid whose deadbeat father promises to pick him
up for the weekend and then never shows, we trudged back inside the house at the end of the
evening, our hopes dashed, but ever-willing to forgive and maybe even forget, and try once more. Here’s what we played, or tried to play, and what I thought
of them.
Tuesday, August 21, 2018
Artisanal Craft Dice Part 4: The Dice, They Are A-Changin'
A lot of things happened in the twenty years since I was
role-playing with any grace or consistency. It was all part of that larger emergent
Geek Culture we heard so much about. The
World of Darkness games went away. We got three Lord of the Rings movies. Print-on-Demand and PDF markets suddenly
became a thing. The Big Bang Theory happened. Marvel movies suddenly became a
thing. DC movies stopped being a thing. The Board Game market exploded. The OSR
movement happened. Every neckbeard in an ill-fitting game convention T-shirt
started a blog. The height-weight proportionate ones started a YouTube channel.
Dungeons & Dragons turned 40. Celebrities, and also Vin Diesel, came out (sorta) as lifelong gamers.
Seemingly overnight, everyone was gaming
again, this time propped up by these tastemakers and outliers from the Maker
and DIY culture.
Thursday, August 16, 2018
Playing Games Part 4: Call of Cthulhu
My first HPL book; is that the most metal Lovecraft cover ever or what? |
But there was a whole game devoted to Lovecraft! I was slow to answer the Call of Cthulhu, not because I didn’t want to play it; I did. Badly. Desperately. It’s just that, no one else read the same weird shit that I read. Even in my high school, I was an outlier when it came to Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft. Everyone else who read those guys were either already my friends, and/or not into gaming. It was a rural suburb of Waco, Texas, in the 1980s. What did you expect?
Tuesday, August 14, 2018
Artisanal Craft Dice Part 3: Dealing With Danish Dice Gnomes
Not only did I get to sell dice to retailers, I ended up
helping to make them when I was transferred to Chessex Manufacturing in
1995. I have told this story elsewhere but I wanted to add as well as clarify a few things from my "in the trenches" side of things.
You find out how cheap (or expensive) things are; you have to think about stuff
that you never considered as a consumer, such as packaging—those AMAC cubes,
for example, and those tiny slips of paper that served as the label all cost
money, as well. There were frustrations, like dealing with upper management who
had one idea—and maybe not a very good one—and trying to navigate a way to say
that without getting fired. I drank a lot in Berkeley, California. For medical
reasons.
Saturday, August 11, 2018
Classic Mark Finn: Old School Gaming and the New Shiny
Note: this is a reprint of an old Finn's Wake article from Three Years Ago, But It's Still Prescient Today.
My rebuilding of my old campaign continues apace. I'm doing it in fits and starts, as I can grab a half an hour or so to myself. I am vacillating back and forth between dusting off old components and bringing them up to new 5th edition rules, and fleshing out 5th edition to meet my campaign's specific needs. For example, in my world, there are five city-states that wield considerable economic and political power. And one of the themes for this new/old campaign is territory expansion, along with warmongering. Because of the emphasis on this environment over say, a Middle Ages King and court, I wrote a background for Bureaucrat. It's a good background. I may post it later. I am working on a background for an exterminator, as well. Another necessary function of city government that could yield an advantage in a dungeon party.
The prettiest goblins ever.
Whilst I was looking over my old notes, drawings, and books, I couldn't help but notice the artwork in the original first edition AD&D books. I know that we consider the early stuff to be crude and unrefined, especially in the wake of what came after. I mean, by any criteria you care to apply, this is a beautiful piece of artwork.
It's well composed, makes good use of light and shadow, employs intelligent color choices, and is well painted and nicely rendered. It's a great piece of artwork. Really nice. And the fifth edition game is literally festooned--gloriously festooned--with hundreds of color plates. We live in an age of bountiful riches, we do.
And yet...as nice as the artwork is, and I don't want to hear any dissent from the lot of you, for it IS nice, I can't help at the same time feeling that the goblins are...what? Informed by popular culture? Maybe they feel like guys in suits? I don't know, exactly, but there's something in this realistic treatment that settles in on my brain rather than opens it up.
Which brings me back to the first edition artwork, and specifically, those artists who contributed so much to the three core books. Diss it all you want, sure, there may have been some pieces that were rough around the edges, but there was something also evocative to the work that I found stimulating rather than limiting. I did then, and I do today.
Here's just a few of my favorite pieces from the books. Granted, these aren't very big; back then, they didn't have to be, the way we pored over every square inch of those pages like they were actual magical tomes.
I came late to the party where Erol Otus was concerned. His work had a slickness and a stiffness that I didn't understand at the time. Now I look at it and I think he was a genius. This is the standard troll from the monster manual, but drawn in scale with humans and in a setting that would make him infinitely more terrifying. Note the use of texture on the loincloth, the armor, and the hair. Otus was a master at that stuff.
Speaking of texture, this is a frontispiece by Jim Rosloff. He did a lot of the illustrations in the Deities and Demigods books. Remember that amazing picture of Thor fighting the Midgard Serpent? Rosloff. I love this pen and ink treatment here, and the dragon head is also really nice and stylized without being definitive. I mean, we don't really know what color dragon this is. Could be red. Could be gold. It's a mystery. But that's what makes this so cool.
Jeff Dee, along with Bill Willingham, came right after the initial clutch of hardcovers, and they brought a super hero sensibility to their artwork that really resonated with me. I won't post any of Bill's old work because he hates it when I do that, but Jeff is actively trying to recreate his stuff, so good on him.
This piece was unsigned in the Player's handbook, but this is exhibit A when someone says there was no good artwork in the early days of TSR. This is a beautiful penciled piece with dwarven adventurers encountering a magic mouth spell in the dungeon. First of all, look at the cool hallways. Now check out the dwarves. Or are they gnomes? A halfling? I dunno, but it doesn't look like anything I'd seen prior to discovering Dungeons and Dragons.
The new crop of halflings in the 5th edition book look a lot like these fellows. That's probably not an accident.
UPDATE: It was Trampier! See below.
Finally, no discussion of the early AD&D artwork is complete without mentioning Dave Trampier. This guy was a machine, and he contributed so much to the books that you can't really comprehend it all. Small pieces of art, flavor pieces, you name it--oh, and only three fourths of the Monster Manual. Tramp did it all, Jack. And this piece, in the middle of the Dungeon Master's Guide, is a favorite of just about everyone. We join our adventurers in mid-scene, with this guy just riding through town, setting people on fire. What the hell? This guy is a dick! But hey, when you name yourself "Emirikol the Chaotic," you have to maintain a certain standard for yourself.
Apart from that, this piece gives us a lot of contextual clues to help us build a dungeons and dragons town. Brick buildings, flagstones, thatched roofs, covered archway, etc. This town setting that Emirikol is hell-bent of messing up became the basis for the city of Greyhawk, and later, my own towns. I used the Green Griffin as a go-to tavern name so much, they were like a Starbucks franchise in my kingdom.
There was something fun, something evocative, about this rough-around-the-edges first edition artwork. A kind of rustic charm, like woodcuts, that gave you enough information to allow you to understand what you were looking at, but not so much that it supplanted your own imagination.
We're a different world, now, and the production values. Kids these days, with their fancy new roller skates and their Jazz records, have different needs than us old timers. And so, we go for full-color, painted dreamscapes and why not? Now the company can afford to produce such a product. I'll never complain about the upgrades, but for my money, in my secret heart, I still prefer Rosloff's goblins to the new guys.
The prettiest goblins ever. |
It's well composed, makes good use of light and shadow, employs intelligent color choices, and is well painted and nicely rendered. It's a great piece of artwork. Really nice. And the fifth edition game is literally festooned--gloriously festooned--with hundreds of color plates. We live in an age of bountiful riches, we do.
And yet...as nice as the artwork is, and I don't want to hear any dissent from the lot of you, for it IS nice, I can't help at the same time feeling that the goblins are...what? Informed by popular culture? Maybe they feel like guys in suits? I don't know, exactly, but there's something in this realistic treatment that settles in on my brain rather than opens it up.
Which brings me back to the first edition artwork, and specifically, those artists who contributed so much to the three core books. Diss it all you want, sure, there may have been some pieces that were rough around the edges, but there was something also evocative to the work that I found stimulating rather than limiting. I did then, and I do today.
Here's just a few of my favorite pieces from the books. Granted, these aren't very big; back then, they didn't have to be, the way we pored over every square inch of those pages like they were actual magical tomes.
Speaking of texture, this is a frontispiece by Jim Rosloff. He did a lot of the illustrations in the Deities and Demigods books. Remember that amazing picture of Thor fighting the Midgard Serpent? Rosloff. I love this pen and ink treatment here, and the dragon head is also really nice and stylized without being definitive. I mean, we don't really know what color dragon this is. Could be red. Could be gold. It's a mystery. But that's what makes this so cool.
Jeff Dee, along with Bill Willingham, came right after the initial clutch of hardcovers, and they brought a super hero sensibility to their artwork that really resonated with me. I won't post any of Bill's old work because he hates it when I do that, but Jeff is actively trying to recreate his stuff, so good on him.
This piece was unsigned in the Player's handbook, but this is exhibit A when someone says there was no good artwork in the early days of TSR. This is a beautiful penciled piece with dwarven adventurers encountering a magic mouth spell in the dungeon. First of all, look at the cool hallways. Now check out the dwarves. Or are they gnomes? A halfling? I dunno, but it doesn't look like anything I'd seen prior to discovering Dungeons and Dragons.
The new crop of halflings in the 5th edition book look a lot like these fellows. That's probably not an accident.
UPDATE: It was Trampier! See below.
Finally, no discussion of the early AD&D artwork is complete without mentioning Dave Trampier. This guy was a machine, and he contributed so much to the books that you can't really comprehend it all. Small pieces of art, flavor pieces, you name it--oh, and only three fourths of the Monster Manual. Tramp did it all, Jack. And this piece, in the middle of the Dungeon Master's Guide, is a favorite of just about everyone. We join our adventurers in mid-scene, with this guy just riding through town, setting people on fire. What the hell? This guy is a dick! But hey, when you name yourself "Emirikol the Chaotic," you have to maintain a certain standard for yourself.
Apart from that, this piece gives us a lot of contextual clues to help us build a dungeons and dragons town. Brick buildings, flagstones, thatched roofs, covered archway, etc. This town setting that Emirikol is hell-bent of messing up became the basis for the city of Greyhawk, and later, my own towns. I used the Green Griffin as a go-to tavern name so much, they were like a Starbucks franchise in my kingdom.
There was something fun, something evocative, about this rough-around-the-edges first edition artwork. A kind of rustic charm, like woodcuts, that gave you enough information to allow you to understand what you were looking at, but not so much that it supplanted your own imagination.
We're a different world, now, and the production values. Kids these days, with their fancy new roller skates and their Jazz records, have different needs than us old timers. And so, we go for full-color, painted dreamscapes and why not? Now the company can afford to produce such a product. I'll never complain about the upgrades, but for my money, in my secret heart, I still prefer Rosloff's goblins to the new guys.
Thursday, August 9, 2018
Playing Games Part 3: Villains and Vigilantes
Jeff Dee, Post-TSR, crushing it on the game he co-created with Jack Herman. |
There has been, over the years, an incredible debate over which super hero game is the best. It’s a Ford versus Chevy, Coke versus Pepsi kind of thing. I think it boils down to whichever game you were first exposed to is the best one. That is to say, in the end. In the beginning, all you had to do was look at the art for the two major games, Villains and Vigilantes and Champions. Jeff Dee drew giant rings around Mark Williams. V&V looked like a comic book you wanted to read. Champions looked like drawings from the loose-leaf notebook of your really talented artist-friend.
Villains and Vigilantes came into my life thanks to Dragon magazine (the most important magazine in the world, for a while) and the great ad that ran dutifully in every issue for, like, years, with great evocative artwork by Jeff Dee. Now, I recognized both Jeff’s style and his signature as being one of my two favorite artists from TSR. His stuff had a super-heroic-comic-booky style about it anyway, and now here he was, drawing super heroes in a game he co-created. That was all I needed, to be honest. But then I found out Bill Willingham was involved, and that sealed the deal for me. By this time, Willingham had left TSR and was writing and drawing The Elementals for Comico, and it was an indy comics darling. This gave V&V a kind of legitimacy that Champions never had for me and my friends.
Tuesday, August 7, 2018
Artisanal Craft Dice Part 2: "You Can Never Have Enough Dice!"
Dice Porn! |
Saturday, August 4, 2018
Classsic Mark Finn: A Few Thoughts About Role-Playing Games
Note: this is a reprint of an old Finn's Wake article. It's because of this that I started this blog. You're welcome.
Dice! Glorious, beautiful dice! The most heavily-fetishized object at the gaming table by a huge margin. |
Thursday, August 2, 2018
Playing Games Part 2: Tabletop Gaming Saved My Life
Okay, that’s a great and terrible exaggeration, but it also
kinda isn’t. It’s certainly fair to say that had I not found D&D I would
not be the person I am today. Certainly not creatively or professionally. I wouldn't have discovered the Three Musketeers of Weird Tales at the time that I did, for instance. I may not have found my way to Lieber and Moorcock. I had these ideas about wanting to be creative, but I didn't have a focus or a direction. D&D gave me a structure to explore everything: improvisation, mimicry, writing, reading an audience, thinking logically and even critically, and so much more. Role-playing really unlocked my creative potential.
Here’s my Top 5 things that role-playing games did for me, in order:
Here’s my Top 5 things that role-playing games did for me, in order:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
New Digs, Patreon, and More
Hey folks, This blog is going to remain up, but I won't be adding to it any more. I never quite got it off the ground and did everythi...
-
Hey folks, This blog is going to remain up, but I won't be adding to it any more. I never quite got it off the ground and did everythi...
-
The artisanal craft dice market continues to expand and contract like the big bang model of the universe in its own teapot tempest of a co...
-
Dice Porn! I was twenty four when I found myself working at Chessex Southwest, at the time when the company was growing like Audrey 2 in...