Monty Haul Zero Issue now available!

For those of you were on the fence about whether or not to back my recent Kickstarter campaign, you can now take a look at what I was driving at: Monty Haul #0 is now digitally available.

Monty Haul #0 is a Proof-of-Concept issue, full of assorted optional rules, backgrounds for characters, and more! Featuring a new take on familiars, two new cleric domains, a simple and not-so-deadly critical hit system, the Divine Archeologist archetype for rogues, and several new backgrounds including an expanded trio of options for the noble: dilettante, disgraced noble, and knight errant! Also included is a Noble Family House generator to quickly design interesting families to plague your nobles.

It's a cornucopia of usable options, written in a light and conversational style and grounded in the gaming days of yore. If by "yore" we're talking about the early 1980's. Monty Haul is suitable for discerning DMs and players of the fifth edition of the world's most popular fantasy rpg.

You can get it here, on DriveThruRPG's website.

Introducing my 'Zine Quest 2 Project: Monty Haul!

Last year, Kickstarter surprised everyone with a cool little event called Zine Quest, a celebration of the early days of Role-Playing Games and the 'zines that jump-started (and for a while, sustained) the hobby.

Their intention was simple: don't think, just do. Make a 'zine, old school, with folding and stapling and drawing and paste-up and so forth. Take two weeks to raise money for it. Then print it and move on to the next issue, or whatever your jam is.

It was very cool, and it produced some really interesting projects. I'm not the only one who thought so, either. In a stunning move that surprised absolutely no one, they are doing it again. And this time, I'm doing a 'Zine of my own. Meet Monty.

RPGaDay 2019: 8 Obscure

As a first generation gamer, I didn’t know how good I had it. Especially since I didn’t have ready access to Lake Geneva, WI, or GenCon, or even the means to do that if I were so inclined. Later, in my late teens, I finally went to a convention by just, you know, going. But in the early 1980s, there wasn’t a map for me to follow. There were two areas of the gaming world; over there, where all of the good stuff was happening; and right here, in Abilene, Texas, which was the middle of By God Nowhere.

AND YET…

There was something weird about Abilene. I don’t know what it was; there were three colleges and an air force base, so some things make sense, like having several hobby shops in a town of 100k (more on this later). But in a cow town in West Texas, hours away from Austin and the Metroplex, I got a hell of a pop cultural education, the likes of which I didn’t grasp until I was an adult.

A quick example: back in the 1970s, there were three channels on your TV: ABC, CBS, and NBC, all broadcast from local TV station (sometimes paired with a radio station, thanks to Ladybird Johnson). If you lived in a large metropolitan area like Houston or Dallas, you got access to a PBS station, as well. There was also some broadcasting found on the UHF channel, but only if your local stations had a transformer.

Abilene didn’t have a transformer. What it DID have was this: we got the three stations in town, ABC, CBS, and NBC, but we ALSO got WFAA, an ABC affiliate out of Dallas. We also got KTVT, channel 11, out of DFW and channel 13, KERA from the metroplex as well.  I had seven channels to choose from as a kid—and while the two ABC channels had the same prime time content, the afternoon and weekend fare on WFAA was ten times better. They played Going Ape week in the summer; All five Planet of the Apes movies, in order. And channel 11 showed all of the Universal monster movies, and the Harryhausen films, and late night horror and SF movies on the weekends. On Sunday night, I could watch Star Trek in syndication and then change over to Dr. Who late night on KERA.

Better than average artwork!
Pinch me, I'm dreaming!

I told you that to tell you this: I had three full-fledged sources for my D&D materials and an underground fourth that still has me shaking my head to this day. We had a Waldonbooks and a B.Daltons in the Mall of Abilene, located at opposite ends of the mall. I got a lot of exercise going between the two. There was also a hobby shop in the other, old people mall, called The Hobby Shop. It was one of three, the other two being a train and a plane store, respectively. This shop was a catch-all, and its wares included plastic models (which I was into, of course), like the Star Wars space ships, and the reason I mention this at all: A whole magazine rack dedicated to all things D&D.

And back then, that meant a bunch—as in, a cornucopia—of small press offerings. This hobby shop is long gone now, but they got a lot of my money back in the day; I bought my first set of dice from that place, and I bought nearly all of my Dragon magazines there. The store stocked TSR products, of course, but they also carried modules and accessories by other publishers; Judges Guild, Gamelords, Flying Buffalo, and the like. There was also a trio of books from Bard Games: The Compleat Spell Caster, The Compleat Adventurer, and The Compleat Alchemist.

Yeah, I never heard of them, either. They DID advertise in Dragon, but I’d already committed by the time I saw their ads. There was something about The Compleat Alchemist that spoke to me. Not sure why. But I had to have it when I saw it, so home it went with me. This was my first time off the reservation, if you catch my drift. I’d never bought a Non-TSR product before.  It felt kinda like I was cheating, but at the same time, there was a real sense of freedom in knowing I wasn’t bound to just one company’s creative output.

This book was one of the first things that really opened my mind up to the possibilities inherent in the game; using some of the things in The Compleat Alchemist made my game a little more unique, a little different. And it made me sort of say, “What else can I do to make my game more interesting?”

I also bought The Compleat Adventurer, but it wasn’t as interesting to me. It was a slew of new character classes, many of whom I’d seen a version of here or there in Dragon or elsewhere. But The Compleat Alchemist was gonzo. It used every single element of historical alchemy and then some. If I’d implemented this as a character class, it would have been the most powerful thing in the game. Seriously. Player character alchemists could make golems and clockwork monsters, as well as craft potions, poisons, powders, and other compounds that did all kinds of wacky things.

Despite my lack of use, the Bard Games books were pretty inspirational to me. They were eventually reworked into a D&D clone set in Atlantis. But those original books were game-changers for me. However, there was another influence on my D&D game that was even closer to home: Dragon Tree Press.

If you know them at all, you probably know them through their association with David Hargrave and his infamous Arduin campaign setting. But when they weren’t publishing those every versions of Arduin, they had their own modest line of system neutral spells, traps and tricks, artifacts, etc. These little thought experiments were statted out in general terms and they were lethal, interesting, dangerous, and strange, in that order. The publishers of Dragon Tree Press, Ben and Mary Ezzell, published their home-grown chapbooks and sold them at the used bookstore they also ran—in Abilene, Texas.

Their bookstore, Kingston Paperback Exchange, was one of my favorite haunts as a young man. It’s where I bought the first Thieves’ World anthology, where I bought my first Tarzan paperback, and where I bought my first silver age collector’s comic. They also had a spinner rack at the front counter that was their entire game line.

I remember Ben; he was an engineer of some kind, or at least, he dressed like one, with short button down shirts, pocket protector, you get the idea. He also had shoulder-length black hair and a full beard and mustache, neatly unkempt under black horn-rimmed glasses. He knew stuff; he had a computer at the book store that he played Starfleet Battle simulations on, along with Sargon Chess, of course. He also had good book recommendations. But I never quite put it together that he was the guy who published and wrote all of that other cool stuff.

The Movies of Dungeons and Dragons, Part 5: The End of an Era

Sword and Sorcery became an exploitation genre, rife with quickie production schedules, recycled sets, props and costumes, and written-on-the-fly scripts that checked boxes for mandatory story elements. The only bronze-thewed barbarian that managed to escape such a fate was, inexplicably, Beastmaster, which made not one, but two sequels and then morphed into a syndicated television series that lasted more than one season. Unbelievable. 

Meanwhile, over at the first-run theaters, where the floors were slightly less sticky, an attempt was being made to both cash in on the epic fantasy genre and also elevate it somewhat. The results were decidedly mixed, to say the least. That’s not to say that these movies weren’t good, or that they weren’t an integral part of growing up in the 1980s, but these movie swing far and away from the Robert E. Howardian gothic horror sensibility that informed Conan (and E. Gary Gygax), and the Vancian magic of the Dying Earth stories, and even the darker corners of Tolkien’s Middle Earth. We’re now in some version of the real world, more fairy tale—but not fey—than Epic Fantasy or High Fantasy.

In Defense of Bad Movies Part 2: FLAAAASSSHH!

Check out the muscles
on Blonde Conan!

In Part 1 of  In Defense of Bad Movies, I outlined the disconnect between film critics and the general public. If you want to read it, you can certainly do that. Now that I have made this particular bed, I’m going to lie in it by taking a pipe wrench to the skull of a film most beloved and personal to the Geek Nation. Let’s all watch some people’s heads explode. Fun!

Since I mentioned Flash Gordon (1980) in Part 1 as an example of a bad movie, I thought it would be worthwhile to explain why I think this is so. Before you start typing your hate mail, there's some objective criteria below that you ought to look at. I put pictures in the post, so you wouldn't have to just take my word for it. If you make it all the way to the end and still feel triggered, just follow this link over to my Facebook page and let fly with your invective. I'm bracing myself for impact. Okay, enough of that; let's go tip some sacred cows!

In Defense of Bad Movies Part 1: Somewhere Between High Art and Cult Classic

I’m writing a lot about old movies at the moment on both of my current blogs. Finn’s Top 5 is happening over at the Finn’s Wake blog, and my biased look back at the fantasy films of the 1980s that informed our Dungeons and Dragons games is happening over at Confessions of a Reformed RPGer. I like writing about film; I have been a professional reviewer and critic for many years now, and I’ve been named one of the top movie reviewers in Texas by the Associated Press Managing Editors several times. You may also know that I am co-owner of a movie theater in North Texas that plays first-run movies on two screens, which is kind of like a unicorn in today’s market.

The Movies of Dungeons & Dragons, Part 3: Secondary Sources

As the 1980s trundled on, fueled by Miami Vice, swatches, and Duran Duran videos, the fantasy films should have gotten better, but they didn’t. After such a promising start, the rush to make more of the same spawned a host of shittier and shitter sword and sorcery movies, each one worse that the last. The genre had split into two tracks: cheap-o boob-grab exploitation nonsense, or big budget ham-fisted embarrassments, and both of these new movie styles served to give Sword and Sorcery a bad name.

Granted, we still watched them, because we were young and our tastes had yet to fully develop, and also because even the mediocre movies had cool swords, sometimes pretty cool effects, and maybe a neat battle sequence or some wizardly shenanigans or a monster. At least, that's what we hoped. We were quickly getting used to disappointment.

Girls! In Our Games?!

I have to confess that I have no idea whatsoever where this whole “Girls aren’t real gamers” bullshit is coming from. I have theories, and I have suppositions, which I may well share at the end of this, but for now, I just want to offer up a corrective against the small but strident natterings of some of these chuckleheads online who love to speak in Trollish and yearn for the downfall of society so that John Norman’s vision of the planet Gor can finally come to pass. Side note to the chuckleheads: all of those multitude of fantasy paperbacks from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, you pick those books to inform your sub-culture? Part of your problem right there is that you have no taste.

Dragon Magazine Was Our Internet

It’s difficult to get teenagers, or even twenty year olds, to care about things that happened four decades ago. I get it. Forty years in the modern world might as well be a hundred, and the speed with which we develop continues to its inevitable terminal velocity. Talking about anything more nuanced and complicated than the music of the 1980s will send most Millennials screaming from the room.

But it’s interesting to me because—and this is a micro-example of the larger questions being posed to mass media today—our sources of information were extremely limited. We had three or four channels, if we were lucky: ABC, NBC, and CBS. There was also PBS, in case you needed help with your reading. And you probably did, because there was a lot more of it. Magazines and newspapers were still everywhere. What’s worse, you had to BUY them. With MONEY.

The Movies of Dungeons & Dragons – Primary Sources

In the 1980s we had an embarrassment of riches when it came to printed material; everything from stacks of paperback books, comics, Frazetta posters and print books (and other artists, as well, but c’mon…FRAZETTA), and even maps that we could hang on our walls for inspiration.

Another thing happened in the 1980s and that was this: special effects took a quantum leap forward. Now it was possible to put stuff on screen that would have required Ray Harryhausen to pull off. This was entirely because of the astronomical success of movies by George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, and given that back then it took four to five years to make a major motion picture, 1977 plus 5 equals…1982. Prime Zeitgeist Real Estate for giant fantasy films and also the perfect sweet spot for wooing a horde of eager D&D players to the movies. Sword, knights, barbarians, magic, monsters…we were there, man. Even if we had to sneak in (or wait until HBO picked it up and ran it into the ground).

Playing Games Part 7: Games I Wanted to Play (But Never Did)

How cool is the artwork in this ad?

At my most geekiest, most gamiest, there wasn't a game I wouldn't try at least once. And I did, too: BattleTech, Dr. Who, Star Trek, Space: 1889 (the birth of SteamPunk gaming, kids),  Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes, Rolemaster (AKA "Chartmaster") and so many others got a afternoon's delight from me and then I was off in search of new thrills. And like any thrill-seeker, I had targets in mind. Oh, yes, there were games I wanted to play so very badly. But that was the problem with RPGs back in the day: they were a team sport. I personally think it's a big part of the reason why computer gaming was able to compete for the tabletop gaming dollar so successfully: you play by yourself, and go online to find others like you.

Not back then, of course. Computer games used to suck. And if you wanted to play them, well, you'd better learn the rudiments of how to make friends, or you'd be at home, cheating your way through a stack of Choose Your Own Adventure books. Thankfully, I had players, and occasionally, got to play. Here are a few games I wanted to play and never got to.

Playing Games Part 6: Going Off the Reservation

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:

Playing Games Part 5: Brand Loyalty

Gangbusters ad from the back of Dragon
Magazine. What could possibly go wrong?

We tried to be good consumers, us GenX-Latchkey kids. We really did. It stood to reason that, since Dungeons & Dragons was this really cool thing that we were all into, it stood to reason that the other games in the TSR line would be equally awesome, right? I mean, a couple of these games were mentioned in the Dungeon Masters Guide as possible crossover fodder. Like in a Marvel or DC comic book. Okay, TSR, you had our attention. What do you have for us...what’s that? Boot Hill? Are y’all high or something?

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.

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. 

Playing Games Part 4: Call of Cthulhu

My first HPL book;
is that the most metal
Lovecraft cover ever
or what?

There were three names that leaped out at me from Appendix N, and you can probably say them with me: Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft. I had heard of these guys from other sources and now that they were intersecting with Dungeons and Dragons, it was time to run them down. I had read a couple of Lovecraft stories in various horror anthologies along the way, so it was a natural for me to dive right into Arkham and Innsmouth and Dunwich. I've spoken at length about Robert E. Howard. And while I read most of my Clark Ashton Smith in a brief flurry, he never really stuck with me like Howard and Lovecraft.

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?

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.

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.

Watching the third Hobbit movie got me jonesing to play Dungeons and Dragons again. I know a lot of Tolkien purists hate the films, but I don't, because I'm not. Oh, there's stuff I don't like about the movies; don't get me wrong. It's just that I happen to really like the way they've played fast and loose with Tolkien (two adjectives I'd never use to describe his work, which is why I'm not a fan, per se). Never mind the "video game sequence" that seems to be in every movie. Watch the PCs--excuse me, main characters--fight the wandering monst--I mean, the orc patrols--makes me want to roll to hit in the worst possible way.

Classic Mark Finn: Roll to Hit, D&D turns Forty!

Note: this is a reprint of an old Finn's Wake article. Please don't tell me this happened four years ago. I was there. I remember.

 Dungeons & Dragons is celebrating its 40^th year of existence. Wow.

To commemorate the occasion, I had hoped to do an influence chart similar to the one I created for Raidersof the Lost Ark, but there is no time. And besides, it’s less interesting than just posting the list from Appendix N in the back of the Dungeon Master’s Guide.