RPG a Day 2019 Post-Mortem

To quote Bill Murray from the movie Stripes, "Well, that was interesting."

I'd never done something like this before. And I didn't know what to expect, but I was surprised by a few things. The entry that generated the most conversation was Evolution (y'all have thoughts about other editions of D&D. I see that now.) The least amount of participation was, of course, Suspense. Again, I'd like to apologize to any Texas Aggies who may have read the entry and thought I was stealing their joke. I meant no offense.

Everything else in between was about the same, but I did see an uptick in the days where I gave out some delicious home brew for my game. Those posts were quietly and fervently consumed with very little drag.

My biggest regrets were the 11's, the ones where I dipped back into RPGaDay's Past to build a blog entry because I didn't have anything for the prompt. Now, having said that, I told you that to tell you this: I'm a pretty clever guy, and I dug deep for some of these entries, which is why the blog jumped around like it did. If I couldn't come up with something based on your prompt, it was probably a little too broad. No disrespect to David Chapman, who has been spearheading this for six years. Lots of questions, lots of prompts (186, to be exact). I get it. I am just saying I would not mind more specific cues going forward.

I'll most likely do this again next year. But having now read a month of my meanderings, I have a few questions for the handful of you who made it through the month unscathed. What would you like to see, going forward, on this blog? More posts about me blathering about the good old days? More war stories? (I have a number of entries I could write about my time at Chessex). More campaign notes and homebrew stuff? I got a lot of that, too. Is there something else I could be talking about that I am not?

Any comments or direction would be great. I've got some of you, and I'd like to keep you around, so here's your chance. Tell me what you want, please.

Here's the full list of topics on each day, all in one place for your clickity-click-convenience.

First
Unique
Engage
Share 
Space
Ancient
Familiar
Obscure
Critical
Focus
Examine
Friendship
Mystery
Guide
Door
Dream
One
Plenty
Scary
Noble
Vast
Lost
Surprise
Triumph
Calamity
Idea
Suspense
Love 
Evolve
Connection
Last

RPGaDay 2019: 5 Space

…the Final Frontier…

I can’t help it; anytime I see the word in print, It’s William Shatner’s voice-over I hear in my head, every single time.

I grew up watching Star Trek…and didn't we all? During my Formative Gaming Years (or, if you will, the “FoGy”) I was interested in the Star Trek Role-Playing Game more than somewhat, especially coming off of Star Frontiers. After all, the potential of a game based on a group of fascinating and dynamic characters going off on space adventures seemed like a no-brainer…until you started taking the episodes apart.

You quickly realized that, as a player, if you weren’t Kirk, Spock, or McCoy, you were support staff, or God Forbid, cannon fodder. The solution was to create your own crew, and ship, and go have different adventures, but this was before The Next Generation, before all of the spin-offs, and the other games, and so on and so forth. All we had for a point of reference was Classic Trek. Hell, we didn’t even call it “classic.” It was just Star Trek. That’s old.

And it made the RPG something of a cipher. No one would agree to play Scottie because everyone wanted to play Kirk, but rolling up your own bridge crew and ship was, well, not nearly as cool. I think that has changed in the wake of a half-dozen Star Trek shows, each one a different flavor, and some great movies and more comics and a lot more examples of what the Federation means in the future. More stuff to hang your hat on, for sure.

The best thing about the FASA game was that they had access to the series bibles and put a lot of the information about the world (lots of stuff that wasn’t in any of the shows) into the game to help fill out the environment for the GM. If you were a Trekkie (or Trekker, or Trekkite) then you loved this game for all of the sneak peeks behind the curtain it gave you.

This was a dense game, folks. It incorporated (like FASA’s other games) the ability to beam down to the planet, get into a firefight, beam up to the ship, and then slug it out in space with photon torpedoes and submarine style warfare. The boxed set came with ship schematics. Schematics.

Grape Nuts aren’t as crunchy as the Star Trek RPG. And I discovered, as did so many others, that as much as I liked Star Trek, I didn’t need to like it quite THAT much. The only game I ever played was an introductory scenario that my friend Larry ran to demonstrate the game for me. I liked it, but I could see that there was a whole other world I could have been pulled into if I committed to the game, and so I remain fascinated by the FASA game and slightly repulsed, as well.

RPGaDay 2019: 2 Unique

Weird Tales Magazine called itself “The Unique Magazine” and it wasn’t an idle boast, either. Widely considered one of the greatest pulp magazines of all time, it premiered in 1922 as a ghost and supernatural pulp and quickly went into debt, as it was unable to find its audience. When a Shakespearean scholar named Farnsworth Wright took the editorial reins in late 1924 (himself installed by the magazine’s new owners), he heralded the Golden Age of Weird Tales by introducing the small but dedicated readers to some of the most important fantasy writers of the twentieth century.

REH's Conan was one of the most
popular series in the magazine.

Of singular note are the Three Musketeers of Weird Tales: H. P. Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, and Robert E. Howard; Other less distinguished but no less important authors included: C.L. Moore, Ray Bradbury, Robert Bloch, Seabury Quinn, Frank Belknap Long, August Derleth, A. Merritt, Fritz Lieber, Manly Wade Wellman, and so many others, just to name a few.

Why should you care? Well, if you are an Appendix N Junkie (or Appendix E for you fifth edition folks), or maybe you’re merely interested in the history and development of the game, then Weird Tales Magazine is the Dead Sea Scrolls of D&D. You probably already recognized those names above as a significant who’s who for the original Appendix N.

Reading is not only fundamental, it’s required to play Dungeons & Dragons, and the experience of play was always intended to be akin to, if not adjacent to, a literary experience. Modern movies and television and increasingly-sophisticated video games tend to blur and conflate the chain of custody between gaming and literature, to our detriment, I think. Case in point; my current players relate all of their commentary in meta-game to playing Skyrim.

Sahuagin! No, Kuo Toa! Wait a minute...

This has an advantage in that you can play off of those expectations; my thieves’ guild is so much more vast, intricate, and interesting than the little gang of ne’er-do-wells in Skyrim that it blew the players’ minds when they discovered it, and just how vast and sprawling it really was. But that’s not hard to do. I mean, as cool as Skyrim is (I guess), nothing beats me at the table, doing my thing, and creating worlds that these guys live in.

Now, I told you that to tell you this: at least half, if not more, of my long-running campaign world is admiringly appropriated from much better writers than me. That was one of the dirty little secrets of the Old School Renaissance; players and DMs would gleefully steal any idea not nailed down, and even then, some of them brought a crowbar, just in case. I mentioned this previously when talking about the movie Beastmaster.

But the real stuff, the books and stories from Weird Tales magazine? Those decorated authors? That’s uncut, high end, mainline good shit, right there. What makes this so ironic is that, over time, Dungeons and Dragons had drifted—some would say by necessity, and others would say by design—away from being derivative of Conan, Elric, Lord of the Rings, etc. and into its own world that is ultimately unique unto itself…but also, and this is strictly my opinion here, very vanilla. D&D has, over forty years, become a kind of default setting catch-all fantasy world that is not bad, not at all, but it’s lacking some of the bumps and scrapes and dents and dings that first edition D&D had. Scars are sexy, and the early D&D was a Frankenstein’s monster that wore all of its influences on its sleeves…and its arms…and its face…and its body…

The most immediate influences upon AD&D were probably de Camp & Pratt, R. E. Howard, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, H. P. Lovecraft, and A. Merritt; but all of the above authors, as well as many not listed, certainly helped to shape the form of the game. For this reason, and for the hours of  reading enjoyment, I heartily recommend the works of these fine authors to you.
 - E. Gary Gygax, from the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide

RPGaDay 2019: 1 First

I’ve written before about the blue box Dungeons & Dragons game; I now know it to be the fourth printing of the Holmes rewrite, which included a copy of BI—In Search of the Unknown, and a set of chits that completely and utterly failed to capture the excitement of rolling platonic solids.

My step-father bought the game for us, no doubt intrigued by the concept; he was a sword and planet fan and one of the first things we bonded over in our nascent relationship was fantasy and sci fi books. I remember our first game: we had been handed character sheets, and in front of us was several Dixie cups full of chits (I know, sexy, right?) and he began narrating the adventure. We were at a door. It opened into a dark hallway…and then he said, “hold on a second,” and started flipping through the rule book.

We waited patiently. Where were we going to go? Mom was dealing with the other two kids, who were five and seven years my junior. I asked if I could see one of the books that came in the box. I was told no, because he needed both of them to run the game.

This was intriguing. I watched as Paul flipped through the rule book, and then consulted the module, and back and forth for several minutes. Then he got up, lit a cigarette, and took the rule book with him, saying, “Just a minute. I think I forgot to do something…” and he walked into the other room, muttering.

And that was my first Dungeons & Dragons game.

Two weeks later, I casually migrated the box into my room and began my examination of the rules. It was fascinating in the extreme—I had never seen a rule book laid out in that particular style or typeface. It looked different. It felt different. The artwork was a little messy, but also evocative.

The section I read more than any other in the book was the example of play. That, I thought, was where our game went off the rails. I didn’t know what to say, and Paul didn’t know what to do. I tried to match up the cross-section of the sample dungeon with the sample layout and of course, none of it was supposed to match anyway, but it kept me from playing that much longer until I did.

That summer, my other step-brother, from my father’s re-marriage, came back from Boy Scout Camp with all kinds of life wisdom and a new thing: he’d been playing Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Not the basic stuff; that was for kids, Jack. For hard-core gamers only. It only took a couple of weekends before I was hounding my mother to buy me a Player’s Handbook.

I can still hear it in my head, like a voice over an old-fashioned telephone… “It’s HOW MUCH?...for a book…? What’s this…that game you never played? I know, Paul bought it, but…and this is for what, again…Mark, we’ve got dice at the house…I don’t know…Okay, but you’re paying me back for this…”

My copy of the Player’s Handbook was $18.00, from B.Dalton  Booksellers in the mall. By Christmas, I’d acquired copies of the Monster Manual and the Dungeon Master’s Guide ($24.00, NOT on sale), and bought a set of Armory gem dice. Mom said, as we were picking up Christmas paper wrapping, “I hope you play the hell out of that game, because that’s all the money I’m going to spend on it.”

The next day, I conned a ride to the mall, where the hobby shop was located. I bought the most recent issue of Dragon Magazine with Christmas money, and I bought a module, too: The Tomb of Horrors.  I was hooked. There was no going back.

Lankhmar: An Appreciation

I mentioned this before in my litany of stuff I used to play, but I wanted to drill down on this because I'm going to be talking about campaigns and how I run them and why I run them the way I do. It's mostly because of Lankhmar: City of Adventure.

Back in the 1980s I was a good li'l consumer of TSR's stuff. I kept up with new releases, back when you actually HAD - TO -  KEEP - UP with stuff; there was no button to click, no page to "like." You had to remember to call the hobby shop or the bookstore once a month. You had to read magazines and actually look at the ads. You had to look on the backs of modules for lists of other products. You had to talk to human beings in meat-space. You had to beg rides to the mall (or gas money, when you could borrow the car).

There is a reason, terribly misguided, why some older neckbeards feel a predatory sense of ownership and do that Gatekeeper thingie; it's because they are resentful that they had to do everything that I just rattled off and modern day gamers simply watch YouTube and get much better intel on what's new, and what's coming out.

I am not saying I agree with Gatekeeping tactics, because I don't...but looking back over that list, I understand where some of the ire comes from. Still, it was the 1980s. We barely had cable. There was no internet. Our brains could handle the strain of thinking about stuff we liked, I assure you. So their anger isn't really at new fans, or girls. It's at step-father Jeff who used to call them "fairies" for reading J.R.R. Tolkien and for not taking them to the mall when he clearly wasn't doing anything but sitting around eating Fritos and drinking Busch beer all day..."private contractor," my ass...

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.

The Movies of Dungeons & Dragons, Part 4: The Best of the Rest

There were, in the middle of all this epic swordplay, a handful of near misses and one-offs, as well as a couple of Science-Fantasy “epics” that seemed more like an attempt to pander to the Star Wars crowd as well as offer up mediocre swordplay and derring-do (or bad jump kicks). Hollywood wasn’t interested in making the next fantasy blockbuster; they were obsessed with remaking that last fantasy blockbuster, only much cheaper than before. We ended up renting these at the video stores because, come on, no one saw this in the theater. How on Earth could we have? They were rated R for nudity, and/or they were shown at the drive-in (we had no car at the time), and so we had to wait until they made it to VHS or HBO. Or both.

Thankfully, my parents owned and operated a video rental store throughout my high school years, which was great for me, since I was allowed to advise as to the movies we stocked in the horror and science fiction sections. This made me the go-to guy for staying caught up on the latest nerd-films, from cult classics like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai to the magnum opuses listed below. What they provided for us gamers, more than anything, was laughs—hoots of derision or just knowing, rueful chuckles. After all, we had seen better films, hadn’t we? Maybe we weren’t the most discerning of audiences, but we did have some taste, right?

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.

The Movies of Dungeons & Dragons – The Ray Harryhausen Playbook

While the current crop of fantasy and sword and sorcery films were hit and miss in the early 1980’s, there was at least one library of cinematic wonder we could all reference for both style and substance. For many members of the Dungeons and Dragons crowd, their first exposure to the magic of Ray Harryhausen was Clash of the Titans (1981), which turned out to be his last movie. Side note: they had planned a follow-up to Clash which was to be all about the Norse myths: Thor, his chariot pulled by goats, ravens, the Midgard Serpent, Fenris Wolf, the giants…I can’t even fathom how cool that would have been. I just can’t.

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).