Reviewing Art & Arcana

You have probably seen or heard about this massive tome on The Internets or maybe seen a review on The YouTubes. Art & Arcana is a ginormous, too-big-for-a-coffee-table Coffee Table book that's really a giant victory lap of sorts for the World's Most Popular Role-Playing Game. Not in a bad way.

This product was released in two versions; the one pictured on the left, a whatever Amazon is charging for it these days $50 investment that is equal parts revisionist history and art and marketing survey. For old-timers, there is a lot of "Oh, I remember that!" and "That's my favorite Module Art!" moments, along with company history that manages to be earnest in not quite dishing the dirt, but happily pointing out the quirks. It's big, it's heavy, it's hard to read. But for those of you who want something a little more upscale, read on, McDuff...

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.

Artisanal Craft Dice Part 1: My Torrid and Complicated Relationship With Dice

In 2018, there is no more accessory to table top gaming that is more fetishized and objectified than dice. Not books, not miniatures, not pens and pencils and paper. Dice. Platonic solids. And not just any dice, oh, no, no. What used to be a necessary, somewhat utilitarian contrivance has officially become an obsession for many people. What used to be something we had maybe twelve to fifteen of has mushroomed into a very expensive collecting endeavor that costs upwards of hundreds of dollars. We’ve gone round the bend, us gamers. We don’t just have dice, anymore.

Now we’ve got artisanal craft dice.

Playing Games Part 1: Dungeons and Dragons

These are chits. You had to cut them out yourself.
No wonder old gamers are so angry.

I started playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons with my step-brother at the age of 12. Prior to that, I owned a copy of the Basic Dungeons and Dragons rules (what we now call the “Holmes” rules), including the box with B1, In Search of the Unknown, but no dice. Only chits. And to a new player, trying to puzzle through the rules on my own, there was nothing more perplexing and also deeply unsatisfying as drawing chits from a small paper Dixie cup. There’s no way to make that activity cool. Not in 1980. Not now. Not ever.

Late to the Party

Crime? In my city?

I realize what I am doing here is all the rage, if we were in 2010. Be that as it may, I didn't get pulled back into gaming until 2015 or so, at the end of the fourth edition of D&D, and so I was at ground zero for the launch of 5th edition. I think that managed to kill most of the OSR blogs out there, like a weirdly configured EMP. But there were a few of them that morphed (or mutated, if you prefer a more Gamma World-esque metaphor) into writing about fifth edition content and homebrew rules and converting first edition shenanigans into fifth edition systems.