The Sandbox of Doom

What Zak said

2012-01-31T15:10:00.002-06:00

Over at Playing D&D with Porn Stars, Zak is exploring some of the same issues I've experienced attempting to talk with Forge adherents about what, exactly, gaming is and is supposed to accomplish. I pointed out Glenn Blacow's excellent article about different kinds of gamers, which is itself an exploration of the different expectations that people bring to the gaming table.

So what's my point? Simple: the process of negotiating the kind of role-playing game you want to play takes place between players as a part of gameplay as a social activity. Whatever you conclude becomes the basis for your social contract to continue - but there's no requirement that this be codified in the rules of the game. I would go further and argue that to codify such requirements into the rules places limits on role-playing within gameplay. Whether or not you want those limits is collectively up for negotiation.

A modest accomplishment

2012-01-24T00:23:00.000-06:00

I have completed three character "sheets" for three different games: Original D&D, Empire of the Petal Throne, and Mutant Future. They are all 3x5 card sized, as they should be. I'm feeling accomplished. :)

The Peasants Are REVOLTING!

2012-01-20T09:07:00.002-06:00

Well, maybe they had a good reason - at least insofar as Terry Jones can tell:

What's interesting about this is pretty straightforward. In a quick half-hour show, Terry provides a glimpse of medieval life for peasants and that's pretty useful for the aspiring RPG referee. Past that, some of what Terry talks about gets even more interesting if you start to mix in magic and its place in a D&D society. Unfortunately, not many campaigns actually explore or reflect how magic is itself a kind of technology.

If you think about it, a D&D world might have some pretty sophisticated approaches to health care, farming, town planning - you name it. Some of this analysis was done in early issues of The Wild Hunt - unfortunately, I don't think I own most of those. Something to dig up out of the past!

Feeling unmoved

2012-01-19T11:19:00.000-06:00

Wizards has recently made two announcements. First, about the development of 5th Edition D&D, and then about the release of 1st Edition reprints (with new covers). I think the idea of reprints to benefit the Gygax Memorial Fund is a great idea, so I'm all for that. But as for a new edition of the game, I'm...unmoved.

To begin with, let's get something clear: Wizards is probably making the right move to move smartly along from 4th Edition, and from a business perspective, a new edition possibly makes sense. But the entire reaction to the announcement of 5th Edition strikes me as similar to the reaction from the fan community when TSR announced 2nd Edition, or when Wizards announced 3rd Edition. But "new" is not necessarily "better." From an individual gamer perspective, I do not need a "new" edition to improve my game. In fact, if I have added enough of my own imagination to my existing game, a new version may not be as good as the one I've got. This gets back to a post on Facebook by Jeff Dee, where he observes that the gaming hobby and the gaming industry are two different things -and while I wish Wizards the best, I'm not at all sure that the genie can be put back in the bottle.

Past the initial hype, a particular reaction which has spread like wildfire has been the notion of a version of D&D "for everybody." As someone put it on Facebook about 1st vs. 4th Edition, "One side is rules light and DM dependent while the other is rules heavy and player empowered. Where's the middle ground or the modular to get us all to the same place[?]" I'm pretty sure I don't agree with that analysis, and I am very sure I don't need a "middle ground."

Don't get me wrong; I'm not an "old school purist" - I simply doubt that it is necessary (or even possible) for there to be a "one big tent" version of D&D. James Maliszewski expresses surprise that there are a noticeable number of old school gamers that seem to want a new edition, and I'm with him in that surprise. What worries me more is that there may be a lot of gamers who will ardently get behind 5th Edition, only to be disappointed when it doesn't deliver.

Regardless of what Wizards intends, however, let's hope it doesn't turn out like THIS.

The Best Laid Plans....

2011-10-26T02:08:00.003-05:00

"Rise, Farashu, and hear the edict of the Ever-Lasting Guardian of the Gods. Whereas you are said to be the last survivor of the Legion of the Sun-Bright Disk, and whereas that legion was known to all to have died to the last soldier in Katalal in the terrible War of 2020 A.S., and whereas you have but lately become known to the Temple of Thumis on our city of Bey Su, apparently having traversed through both time and space....Here is the Divine Will revealed!

"You are to travel hence without delay to our city of Katalal, presenting yourself within one month's time to the Clan of the Sun-Bright Disk, along with this Writ of Imperial Will that your membership and station within that clan be restored to you, in all ways that are seemly and pleasing to the Petal Throne. You are to be accompanied by those companions who were with you when you arrived here in our city of Bey Su the Beauteous. From Katalal, you are to travel to our city of Purdimal and present yourself within one month afterwards to the Kerdukoi of the Legion of Lord Ga'enish of Katalal. While the Legion of the Sun-Bright Disk has perished, the Legion of Lord Ga'enish proudly maintains its traditions and glories, much as a son dignifies his father. Therefore it it right and proper that you present the standard of the Legion of the Sun-Bright Disk unto the Legion of Lord Ga'enish, and thus celebrate the virtues of that historical relationship. In this matter, pay heed to the advisements made unto you by the elders of the Clan of the Sun-Bright Disk.

"Go forth, in the name of the Emperor, Hirkane Tlakotani, and be mighty!"

...or so the adventure began.

Shortly after this, on a caravanserai platform near the Sakbe Road between Bey Su and Hauma, the party of adventurers bedded down for the evening, slightly apart from the caravan with whom they were traveling. Inside a large pavilion, the humans settled down in various spaces appropriate to their statuses. As night progressed, black-clad assassins of the Black Y Society made their way past the Shen guard, and into the tent where Farashu and his companions lay asleep.

Yes, there was a fight - no real surprise, right? The assassins misjudged Farashu's companions, and after they failed in their apparent attempt to kill him, they made their escape. But that is where things went downhill, quite literally. Despite a lack of coordinated response, despite knowing that there were several assassins involved, and despite not knowing what the lay of the land was around the caravanserai....Farashu charged out after the assassins, waving his sword, calling out, "To me!" He jumped off the platform and ran into the surrounding darkness.

The assassins must have felt victory being snatched from the jaws of defeat. Farashu did not even realize what had hit him when the assassins struck again, leaving only his steel sword for his companions to find later. Two other assassins fought a rear-guard action against the Shen warrior who had attempted to rescue Farashu, neatly dispatching him with a lucky blow. The party returned to Bey Su, using Farashu's steel sword to finance the spell of Revivification for the unlucky Shen. Poor Farashu was missing and presumed dead - his body was never found.

Moral of the story: You can set up the conditions for a marvelous adventure, but never underestimate the power of player-characters to go off and do something truly stupendously nutbar in character.

When "different" meant "interesting"

2011-10-18T10:04:00.000-05:00

James Maliszewski and I were talking the other night about the practice of naming campaigns. I got my start in gaming back in 1975, and after reading The Strategic Review, it was pretty clear to me that naming your campaign was a way to signify that it was your own interpretation of the game. This wasn't just a matter of coming up with your own dungeon (or "mega-dungeon" in current parlance), but also - as James and I discussed - an opportunity to come up with your own rules and rules interpretations. At the time, it meant that each campaign was different, and going from campaign to campaign meant that you needed to check in with the referee about how things worked. It led to some interesting discussions about how people thought about D&D, as well as a lot of arguments about what was "fair," etc.

Over time, particularly after the emergence of AD&D, there was a shift towards "by-the-book" game-play. It seems to me that what this led to was the notion that "different" was bad, whereas during the early era of role-playing (roughly 1974-77), "different" meant "interesting" - the value judgment would come after you played in someone else's campaign, as you decided if it was to your own taste or not.

The Shrine of the Azure Goddess

2011-09-07T21:59:00.001-05:00

From my Tuesday Night Group (playing Tekumel, of course)....

Tsechelnu Flats swamp,
not far from Jakalla

...It was James, Dave, Tristan and myself, so we picked up with Tristan's original character, Shemek. Shemek has found a patron in the Temple of Karakan, Lady Visaya, a member of Prince Rereshqala's court. The noble lady had originally wanted to go on an Underworld expedition, and had hired Shemek for that purpose. However, a new mission arose: protect a recently discovered shrine to Lady Avanthe in the ruined city of Ngala. The lady sent along two bearer-slaves and two native guides, and Dave and James generated two new characters: a merchant-adventurer human from Mmatugual, and a Pygmy Folk sorcerer (Odd! But also the sort you might find at Rereshqala's court hoping for some mission or opportunity). The Temple of Sarku was sending a mission to "investigate" the new shrine, and that simply would not do.

Ngala city wall section

They set off on the 9th of Shapru (about 5-6 weeks behind the party in Bey Sy), taking two boats once they reached the far side of the Mssuma River estuary. Rowing through the hot, steamy mangrove swamps, the guides used a local plant to ward off predators and insects, by burning leaves in a smudgepot fire. They told Shemek that it was "good" to chew, and Shemek accepted some. After chewing it for awhile, he began to experience a deep sense of serenity and peace. Over time, this built into a seeming connection with all surrounding life. The female guide, Onne, sensing a kind of psychic change in Shemek, offered herself to him - but Shemek felt that that would not be appropriate right then.

Ngala clanhouse courtyard

By the third day, the boats had reached a village centered around an old Engsvanyali watchtower, which was slowly sinking into the swamp. The guides went ashore with some gold to obtain information and safe passage. Shemek sensed there were 63 people in the village, and 2 of them were pregnant. Even though the surrounding jungle and swamp were teeming with life, the Pygmy Folk and Mmatuguali human noticed none of it was attacking their boats.

The misty - almost steamy - morning of the fifth day brought them closer to the ruins of Ngala. By this time, Shemek was sitting in a full lotus position in the boat, wearing little except a string of beads and his new, finely decorated steel sword over his back. As the boats were rowed cautiously through the swamp channels, the edges of old Bednalljan canal banks emerged. The faint sounds of axes thudding into wood reached the ears of the Pygmy Folk, while Shemek became aware of harm being done to the Life of the Swamp. Avoiding the troops clearing away jungle growth, the party reached the southwestern edge of the city, near to where they needed to be. The party chose a nearby half-ruined watchtower as their base of operations, as it afforded a view of the recently revealed entrance to the shrine, next to the original Bednalljan fortress. A large pack of Chnelh nearly 150 strong made it clear that they regarded the fortress and temple as their turf, and the Pygmy Folk used a spell of Calm to have them leave the party alone.

Ngala ruined temple entrance

That evening, during Shemek's watch, an elder of the Chnelh appeared out of the darkness, escorted by another four younger specimens, descending from the half-ruined roof of the tower. Speaking in accented but clear Tsolyani, the elder communicated with Shemek - they, too, served the Azure Lady, and would follow Shemek's lead (even if he was human).We left it there.

Next week? We shall see how things develop....

Engsvanyali bas-relief

(photos courtesy of Google search; their use here is purely for non-commercial purposes)

The Bag of (Sometimes) Holding

2011-08-26T14:16:00.000-05:00

Writing up new magic items is fun; using them is a completely different story. This one came out of a whimsical conversation with my significant others:

The Bag of (Sometimes) Holding: This magical item appears identical to the usual Bag of Holding. However, it's qualities are somewhat different - while it can hold at least as much as a Bag of Holding (it is apparently possible to put in even more), the Bag of (Sometimes) Holding is uncertain in its ability to keep everything inside. Rather than rupturing, however, the Bag will simply open and the contents will erupt into whatever area the owner of the Bag is currently occupying. Why this happens is unclear, though some careful research would reveal that items placed willy-nilly into the Bag, or overloading the Bag, tend to exacerbate the problem. Referees should determine a percentage chance of the Bag letting loose, based on the quantity and variety of what's inside. Then roll 1d12 to see how many turns before the eruption takes place. In the meantime, you may wish to provide clue of the upcoming event.

For referees: the Bag may be played as a straight-up magic item of uncertain character, but it is suggested that you allow the bag to demonstrate signs of "indigestion" - occasional loud burps, the exterior of the Bag churning every now and again, minor rumbling sounds from within. For full effect, you can have the Bag emit a contented belch after disgorging its contents, followed by a slight sigh. Everything inside should be perfectly fine and unhurt. Do not let player characters use rope or other means of attempting to keep gear separated within the bag - imagine what it might feel like to the Bag!

Fall Gaming Hoopla events

2011-08-18T11:49:00.001-05:00

So I'm not able to attend Geek.kon 2011, which is something of a shame, but I am also pleased to report that my colleague Nix will be running some events there. However, I will be at the Fall Gaming Hoopla in Janesville, on September 23rd-25th, running the following games:

RUNNING OUT OF AIR

SATURDAY, 10 am - 2 pm

You're on a lifeboat. The ship you were on was shot up by pirates. They seemed to come out of nowhere; was it an inside job? Worse, you've just discovered you are venting atmosphere, there's no sign of rescue, and the nearest planet is across the star system. Can you survive? (Classic Traveller rules)

A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS

SATURDAY, 2 pm - 6 pm

Traveling with a merchant caravan in a faraway mountain kingdom, you hear rumors of a new discovery in a high mountain fastness, of strange items of the Ancients, gold coins with the faces of long-dead kings, and voices in the darkness. But there are also legends of terrible guardians who can slay with a single strike; remember the old saying: "Sweet is the harbor - but Death is the ferryman." (Empire of the Petal Throne rules)

BACK INTO THE DUNGEON!

SUNDAY, 10 am - 4 pm

Grab that 10 foot pole and 50 feet of rope! Have you got your weapons and armor? Do you know where your spellbook is? It's time to go back into the depths of the dungeon, kill things, and take their stuff. This is a classic "dungeon crawl" using the Original D&D rules.

Leaving a Sense of Mystery...

2011-08-15T19:26:00.001-05:00

One of the aspects of adventure gaming that I really enjoy is the sense of exploration and sometimes revelation you get when you discover something neat about the background setting. It's probably one of the reasons I have been so deeply immersed in Tekumel, a world so complex and detailed that it is "...a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma: but perhaps there is a key." (Okay, so this might also explain my fascination with Russia, but I maintain that's separate.)

I've been having fun with this as I've been working through a guide to Empire of the Petal Throne, over on the ODD74 Discussion Board. But in the midst of all of this, I've been struck at how much some gamers want definitive answers to How Things Work. I know I've shied away from this kind of thinking, as it often seems like a precursor to certain kinds of min-maxing and meta-gaming. Yet I also understand how much it matters - that sense of discovery. So there's a tension there. From a refereeing perspective, how much do you reveal, and when? weighed against how many plot coupons do your players have to turn in to get to the end of the quest, right?

One aspect of Prof. Barker's genius in his creation of Tekumel is just how multi-layered the "truth" actually is, how much an answer to one mystery immediately begets another puzzle. I know it drives some players nuts, but it's something I actually look for in a game - a world so intriguing that there is always something more, something unknown. I don't pretend to have an answer (that would subvert the entire point of this post, right?), but I do think that the search for the "truth" is chimerical at best - I mean, what would you do if you discovered it all?

The Seal Emperor wants YOU!

2011-08-11T18:27:00.000-05:00

I'm getting into the groove of making Tekumel better known. I'm interested in doing something with ConstantCon 2011 - more details on that as it develops. There is more room in my text-based game, which I am just re-starting on the ODD74 Discussion Board. Drop me a note if you might be interested in either of these.

An Appeal to the Internet Fount of Wisdom

2011-08-11T08:03:00.000-05:00

Back in the late '70's and into the '80's there was a series of D&D ads that appeared in comic books and elsewhere. I never paid much attention to them, but I know they were part of what got people into the hobby. Now, however, I find myself curious about the ads and the characters depicted - for some reason, I associated them with Holmes and possibly Moldvay Basic - but I've been unable to find them on a quick Google-search, which is frustrating. I know about the ads with Grimblade, Saren, Indel and Valerius, but I clearly remember a different set of characters in a different set of ads. Can the internet Fount of Wisdom help me out here?

An embarrassment of riches

2011-08-10T16:30:00.000-05:00

Between now and the end of the year, I have the following opportunities to introduce Old School Goodness to people - just in Wiscowsin or nearby:

Geek.kon - September 9th-11th
Fall Gaming Hoopla - September 23rd-25th
Oshkon 2011 - October 15th-16th
Rock-Con 2011 - November 4th-6th

And that's not counting the monthly Madison Traditional Gaming get-togethers on the 3rd Saturday of each month. I think I ought to take it easy on myself when putting together the one-shot adventures for these cons - it's going to get busy!

You CAN run Empire of the Petal Throne!

2011-08-03T22:55:00.000-05:00

I've started a fairly in-depth analysis of how to approach running Tekumel, using the original Empire of the Petal Throne rules. It's over on the OD&D Discussion Board. The idea to do this was originally thought of back at GaryCon in March, and recent discussions about Tekumel have simply added to my desire to write some of this down for people. I'm also attempting to apply some of the principles in my own game here in Madison.

I'm working on the Tips for Beginning Referees; I'd like to have that as a download to share with people when it is done. Comments on that or running EPT are always welcome!

Female armor sucks

2011-07-31T19:18:00.001-05:00

I wasn't going to post anything today, but when I ran across this, I figured it was good to share. Personally, there are a lot of artists who have done work for game companies in the past that have a LOT to answer for, as far as I can tell - and this video makes that all very, very plain to see...or something....

Tip of the Day

2011-07-30T07:51:00.001-05:00

A quick tip of the day before heading off for some time in the Great Outdoors...

If you need names for NPCs in a modern or science fiction game, look no further than your spam filter. After some judicious culling, the names you will find are (a) often quite multi-cultural, (b) ones you would never think of, and (c) sometimes suggest interesting quirks based on the original spam.

Just sayin'....

Interesting contrast

2011-07-29T10:09:00.001-05:00

On another forum someone recently asked the question: "I'm one of those old schoolers who hasn't played since AD&D was still fairly new. What's the best way to jump back in?" The first recommendation he got was to start playing D&D Encounters, and I chimed in with the recommendation to consider Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry. All of which got me thinking...

The game that is currently produced as "Dungeons & Dragons" doesn't bear that much resemblance to the game I started playing 36 years ago.
The games that actually do bear a significant resemblance have names that aren't "Dungeons & Dragons."

So in the first case we have the label but not the substance, and in the second we have the substance but not the label. Ah, well....

Tekumel Foundation News

2011-07-28T00:22:00.002-05:00

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

July 27, 2011

Minneapolis, MN

THE WORLD OF TÉKUMEL AND OTHER MATERIALS SECURED

The Tékumel Foundation is proud to announce that on Saturday, June 11th, 2011 Professor Barker's Tékumel materials and wargaming supplies were moved from his home to secure, climate-controlled storage. This project was long and carefully planned and carried out with the blessing and encouragement of Professor Barker and his wife Ambereen and the assistance of dedicated volunteers, some of whom flew in from out of state.

The Tékumel Foundation is dedicated to preserving the legacy of Professor M.A.R. Barker and building an archive of Tékumel memorabilia and documents. Foundation members assisted by Lady Anka’a and various Tékumel fans catalogued, photographed, carefully boxed and transported these materials to a secure climate-controlled storage area in less than 10 hours. Items secured include Professor Barker’s globe of Tékumel, the scale model Temple of Vimúhla first displayed at GenCon IX in 1976, private maps, papers and other interesting and diverse items including unpublished material – exactly how much or what is still to be determined.

There is still much work to be done. Paper items need to be digitally scanned to secure storage; items may need to be repaired and/or restored. Items not directly connected to Tékumel must be organized, including wargaming materials, fanzines of the 1950’s, and games that at various times had been sent to Professor Barker for review. Fortunately, the Tékumel Foundation has people with the necessary skills to assist with this enormous project. It is hoped Professor Barker’s papers will yield new material for Tékumel, and we are optimistic that there is “good new stuff” to be published.

For more information, please contact the Tékumel Foundation – www.tekumelfoundation.org.

###

Gary's Birthday

2011-07-27T22:06:00.000-05:00

Victor Raymond took the Hardest Gary Gygax Quiz in the World and got 70%!

You are a Gary Gygax Champion. If knowledge of the minutiae of Gary Gygax's life translated to political power, you would be the satrap of a continent-sized province, owing allegiance to no one (except maybe that Grognardia guy).

Paladin Code: You completed this quiz without using Google.

Hey, I'm in good company!

In addition to the above quiz, which was quick and a lot of fun, I also want to mention the Gygax Memorial Fund, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, which means that it is a public charity and you can make tax-deductible donations to it. Gary Gygax accomplished a great deal, and we are all in his debt. Pay it forward, please.

It's really BIG

2011-07-27T15:39:00.001-05:00

I just ran my Tekumel campaign last night, using Empire of the Petal Throne with some mods and changes. My players are getting used to characters and the world and that's all good. But there's this issue of scale...

See, on Tekumel, the "underworlds" are equivalent to dungeons, roughly speaking. Over the past few years, I've been running Prof. Barker's original Jakallan underworld at UCon and elsewhere, and it is definitely a "mega-dungeon" in modern parlance. Even so, it's still a very "D&D" oriented depiction of what lies under the City Half As Old As The World. And if each hex is roughly 50-100 yards across (the measure cited by Prof. Barker in the past has varied a little), then that means that a single sheet of graph paper covers about one to two hexes on the city map....

So I'm left with a design question - if I want to make the Underworld of Jakallan more "real" to Tekumel, then that's a lot of graph paper. Another way to deal with this is to map out the "good bits" and make each descent start from someplace not too far away. A third way is to let the players start above ground and let then explore until they find something "significant."

I'm still thinking about this....

Advice for new referees, Part One

2011-07-22T11:24:00.000-05:00

I'm writing a short essay for people who are new to Old School gaming, but who are considering running an Old School campaign. There's lots of good advice out there about doing that directly, but not as much about how to think about it - Matt Finch's excellent Quick Primer is good, and if there are other examples, I would like to know about it.

What follows is a sample from what I've written so far - constructive comments welcome!

Some Advice for New Referees

By Victor J Raymond PhD

This short essay is not about how to set up your campaign but rather some principles and reminders about how to think about what you are doing as a referee.

There are no “Edition Police”, except in your head. Occasionally, I’ve heard gamers with less experience than myself say things like “why would you want to play an older edition? That’s so – backward!” Sometimes, referees new to Old School gaming will have this misconception, as well. It is a fallacy to think that successive editions of the game have been wholly agreed-upon improvements on previous versions – or that paid game designers automatically know better than you what you should be playing. It may come as a surprise, but Wizards or Paizo do not have patrols going around issuing citations for playing older versions of D&D – except possibly in the peer pressure you might experience from other gamers who want to justify their ongoing 3.x or 4e spending habit. It’s probably more accurate to say that each edition of D&D represents a different style of gameplay, which may be why there are people still playing every edition of D&D ever produced. At last count, there were retro-clones (a game which reproduces the mechanics of an older role-playing game) for all editions of D&D ever produced. The important point, though, is that new doesn’t always equal better. What you’re playing isn’t outdated – it’s different.

Take the game and its rules on their own terms. This is mostly a matter of unlearning things you’ve picked up from the games you’ve played already. From an outsider perspective, most versions of Original D&D have fewer defined features, a much more abstract combat system, and a lot of things that “everybody knows” don’t work. But like so many things of this sort, what “everybody knows” isn’t necessarily true – and this is particularly the case when it comes to roleplaying games. The relatively “bare bones” approach of many Old School games isn’t a lack of definition or “crunch” (a term I dislike, along with “fluff”); it represents an opportunity for you to add in your own ideas and make the game your own. For that to happen, you need to play the game figuring it out as you go, setting aside your preconceptions of what works and what doesn’t. Rather than immediately house-ruling everything to make it closer to what you are used to, start off playing the game as it is written, and see where that takes you.

Random dice rolling is not a flaw – it’s a design feature. Random character generation is often singled out as one of the “bad” things about Original D&D – particularly the idea of “roll 3D6 and write ‘em down in order.” It supposedly short-circuits the creative process. Nothing could be further from the truth. Consider: how often have you observed another player generating the same “sneaky assassin Dark Elf” or “aloof, stand-offish mage” or “mighty-thewed barbarian” over and over again? That’s the “creative process” supposedly being subverted? I think not. To be fair, sometimes people do have interesting and worthwhile character conceptions – but not all the time. What random dice rolling does is give your imagination a chance to try something different – to come up with something you might not have thought of in the first place. Sometimes people object that their rolls were “too low” – which really means that they think they can’t do well with that character, conceding defeat before starting game play. Sometimes people simply don’t like what they have rolled. In either case, there’s nothing saying someone cannot roll again – but don’t blame the dice; blame player preconceptions of what they are “supposed to” get.

(more to follow)

One month

2011-07-05T10:43:00.000-05:00

During the past month, I've had the following things happen to me:

Coming back from the 2011 North Texas RPG Con, I survived an emergency landing at Milwaukee's Billy Mitchell Field, when the right landing gear did not descend, and we had to crash land with the nose and left landing gear - and the right wingtip. Good thing we didn't cartwheel or ground loop (the photo is from a couple of minutes after evacuating the plane).
Had a good friend, Joel Rosenberg, pass away from an unexpected heart attack. I was able to attend his wake, immediately after the 4th Street Fantasy Convention.
Provided support to my partner, Lynn, when her father passed away after suffering a head injury and subsequent stroke.

I'm hoping to get back on track with that gaming stuff once life stops being so "exciting."

Joel Rosenberg's passing

2011-06-03T08:58:00.000-05:00

Joel Rosenberg, author of the Guardians of the Flame series, passed away Wednesday evening in Minneapolis. Despite what might have been suggested by the series, Joel wasn't a role-player - he would rather write. I'm at North Texas RPG Con, so I will write a longer remembrance later. But if you enjoyed Joel's writing, or ever had a chance to talk with him, raise a glass in his memory.

Ups and Downs

2011-06-02T21:16:00.000-05:00

The positive: have arrived at North Texas RPG Con.
The negative: am fighting off a migraine.

Lots of sleep tonight and I should be able to run some Empire of the Petal Throne tomorrow.

I'm puzzled - how about you?

2011-05-18T11:34:00.000-05:00

Wizards of the Coast recently announced its new "Lair Assault" program:

"D&D Lair Assault is a new Wizards Play Network in-store program that pits tactically-minded players against a super challenge where the difference between victory and defeat is dependent upon your game knowledge, ability to adapt, and a little bit of luck. You’ll pit your wits against some of the most difficult encounters you’ve ever played. Each challenge is a mega-encounter that plays in just a few hours, but many will need to make more than one run at it in pursuit of victory. D&D Lair Assault challenges are available for a few months, and stores can schedule their sessions at any time during that period."

I'm not objecting to what they are proposing. In fact, it sounds like a savvy way to make sure that game stores are tied into game play, through the publisher of the game. I am also not objecting to publishers and game stores making an honest gold piece by the sweat of their brows, either.

What just seems so odd to me is how far we've come from the idea that the game was about referees designing their own worlds, encounters, and challenges - that the game fostered imagination, rather than some sort of min-maxed, completely defined and operationally presented "product." There's a deeper philosophical divide revealed here, and it bears more examination and discussion.

Roll a D6

2011-05-04T18:43:00.000-05:00

I know Jamie Mal might say we're just in a Silver Age of renewed interest, but what follows is more proof that in the culture wars gaming has won, so to speak (even if it's 4th Edition that shows up):

Roll a D6 from Connor Anderson on Vimeo.

22 Adventurers

2011-04-20T18:24:00.003-05:00

Twenty-two. That was the number we had for the last Madison Traditional Gaming meetup, running from 10am to 5pm, on Saturday April 16th. Generally speaking, we've averaged somewhere between 8-15 people at previous meetups, but this time things seemed to work just right. One of the players in my Tuesday night D&D campaign, Nix, ran a game of Brave New World, James K. ran Labyrinth Lord, while I ran a game of Empire of the Petal Throne.

I started Madison Traditional Gaming just over a year-and-a-half ago, meeting once a month primarily at public library branches around Madison. We met twice at UW's Memorial Union, but the combination of expensive parking on-campus and difficulty securing a regular location resulted in a return to library meeting rooms. I've been using Meetup.com and Facebook as the primary means of letting people know what's scheduled, and that has worked out quite well. Once a month is great for one-shot adventures, but not really suited to on-going campaigns.

We were fairly lucky in getting a sizable contingent up from UW-Platteville's Platteville Gaming Association, the good people who put on Plattecon very year. Erin U., the chair of the most recent Plattecon, was able to persuade a bunch of them to come up for the meetup, which was just amazing. I am hoping to arrange for a full track of role-playing events for next year's Plattecon, and between now and then recruit some more referees to run Old School RPG campaigns around Madison and Wisconsin.

Many thanks to Mark S. from the Milwaukee Traditional Gaming meetup, Clint P. and everybody else who showed up and played games. I really think we have something good going on here.

30mm Historicals - but different

2011-04-04T22:51:00.001-05:00

From English Russia - what does someone do when they really want historical miniatures? Well, they make them from plasticine. Cheap Soviet-era plasticine. Go check it out.

The Garden of Weeping Snows at Gary Con

2011-04-03T23:38:00.001-05:00

Adventuring in the Jakallan Underworld at Gary Con

The Metamorphosis: Alpha game ended with Alpha, the AI in charge of the station, doing in the entire party because we had decided that the alien menace was, well, too menacing. I was able to get Jim Ward to sign my character sheet, which was very gracious on his part. However, it was too late to start another game, so I retreated to my hotel room and ordered in pizza.

The next morning, I got breakfast in Lake Geneva - there were several cafes and restaurants doing what seemed like a land office business. I got back to the convention fairly quickly, and went in search of other Tekumel fans. I was able to talk to Jeff Dee for awhile, showing him the Tekumel materials I had brought with me - he was sufficiently fascinated to take time away from his V&V game to chat. He encouraged me to go to North Texas Gaming Con in early June; I am hoping to go.

By noon, I had a number of players assembled and we went off in search of an open table. The Tekumel maps are a quick draw for potential players and kibitzers, so I quickly set up the materials and began the game. The objective was simple: take a letter from Prince Rereshqala to the Undying Wizard Nyelmu, ensconced deep under the city of Jakalla in the Garden of the Weeping Snows. This was really an excuse to get into the nitty-gritty of the third level of the Jakallan Underworld, using Empire of the Petal Throne (and some house rules). Within about 20 minutes, characters were generated and we were off.

Running EPT is not hard; the mechanics are not that different from Original D&D, and much better explained. But the background for Tekumel is often daunting for players and referees alike. To make things more complicated, the Jakallan Underworld as originally written by Prof. Barker is very much like a D&D "dungeon" - very "old school" and very much an abbreviated version of the vast depths I've explored only tiny sections of as a player in Prof. Barker's Thursday Night Group. It's taken me several years to appreciate just how much of the "actual" Jakallan underworld Prof. Barker crammed onto several large sheets of graph paper. So when I run a game, I work very hard to convey as much Tekumel "flavor" as I can in each gaming session - and I think in this case I succeeded:

"Fascinating! You can run Empire of the Petal Throne and you don't have to be M.A.R. Barker..." said one of my players, after experiencing some of the game.

You don't have to be Prof. Barker to run Tekumel. What people get hung up on is making their game as identical as possible to Prof. Barker's game and that's a mistake. There's more than enough material in the original EPT rules to make a campaign work, and if you add more material from other sources, it becomes even easier. Don't be afraid of creating another "branch on the Tree of Time," as Prof. Barker would say.

In the end, the characters survived their trip through the Underworld, eventually being granted an audience with Nyelmu - who promptly opened a Nexus Point and sent them through. (The outcome of that will be determined at the next Gary Con.) Allan Grohe was kind enough to stop by and take a couple of pictures (see above). After the game was brought to its exciting close, I packed up my gear and drove home to Madison - happy and tired, all at the same time.

I was caught metagaming by James Ward!

2011-03-29T00:08:00.001-05:00

Okay, so I went to Gary Con this past weekend. My trip there was somewhat eventful: I had a tire go flat on my way there, which meant that I missed the morning round of events on Saturday. However, I was back by Noon to the Lodge at Geneva Ridge, and decided to take a look around.

I saw a number of old Tekumel hands almost immediately, including Mark Eggert and Bill Hoyer. Since I had brought the Jakallan Underworld with me (as I have for previous UCons), we immediately started talking about running some Empire of the Petal Throne during the weekend.
I also spent some time talking to Jon Hershberger of Black Blade Publishing about a modest idea I had for making more Old School games and products available at game conventions here in Wisconsin. I also picked up a copy of OSRIC for $26 (!!!) - a complete steal at that price in hardcover.
I ran into Jeff Rients and showed him some of the dungeon maps my players had drawn of Xylarthen's Tower - he was very pleased to see just how much fun they obviously had had.

I was invited into a game of Moldvay D&D with one of the fine crew from Kenzer and Company, running The Isle of Dread, which I had played a LONG time ago, but could not remember to save my life. It was a relatively quick adventure, since we never really pulled together as a group and figured out how to cover for one another. I had a 4th level magic-user, properly done up on notebook filler paper, and the rest of the party was mystified why I spent a great deal of time avoiding combat.

We ended up in a nearly endless combat with zombies, with some of the party trying to attack the ones that our cleric had turned - I tried telling them that was a bad idea, but.... In the end, we lost half the party, went back above ground to the nearby village, and were unable to finish the adventure. You might think I didn't have much fun, but it was fascinating to see how another referee ran the game, and how other players I had never gamed with actually played. I had a great time.

Somewhere in there, I got into a grand discussion of maps and mapping with Ramsey Dow of Sickly Purple Death Ray. His maps are totally amazing - and look for an interesting series of adventures he is working on and should be releasing soon. Ramsey got me into the 6pm game of Metamorphosis: Alpha with James Ward - was I going to miss a chance to game with James Ward? Heck, no! The rest of the party was a really good group, including (among others) Jon Pickens. Our characters were very simple to generate, and aside from weapons and goodies, we had "luck points" that could be used to modify rolls.

We were a bunch of expendable soldiers sent from the Starship Worden to figure out why Outpost Alpha, above one of the planets of Alpha Centauri, wasn't responding. In our scout ship, we went to the base and discovered that the atmospheric integrity of the dome has been compromised by a weird black alien flying saucer. The AI in charge of the station had been compromised, since it did not believe there was a flying saucer. Nevertheless, we went into the station, and immediately got into trouble with the AI (named "Alpha" and don't you dare call her "Computer") for minor damage to the station. Eventually we discovered the weird alien fungus and strange alien darkness that was taking over the station. After strangely getting ourselves put in charge of the station, we tried fixing things using lots of alcohol and attempting to get the fungicide in storage. However, our plans went awry, and before we could set off the self-destruct on the station, Alpha decided to do us in to prevent that from happening. End of our merry adventure - there was a lot of laughing as we bumbled through it. (I hesitate to say it, but there was an almost Paranoia-esque quality to our mission.)

As the referee, Jim stayed firmly in control of the flow of the game, and did not hesitate to guide the emerging narrative to suit his whim. That might sound like he was arbitrary, but in sheer point of fact, he knew exactly what he was doing by keeping player initiative on a very short leash. This resulted in players having to think on their feet, and having to pay very close attention to what was going on. For quite awhile, nobody used luck points, and as we slowly got ourselves deeper and deeper in trouble, I ended up blurting out "but you could use a Luck Point to make it work!" just before another player made a crucial roll.

Uh-oh.

I found myself being sternly rebuked by our referee, who informed me that BAD THINGS would happen if I was caught metagaming again. I did admit me my fault, and meekly allowed that I would refrain from doing it again. The rest of the party was highly amused.

The rest of the adventure was very cool, but it did mean that we had to postpone Empire of the Petal Throne until Sunday, which we did. More on that in another post.

Binding Wounds

2011-02-18T22:26:00.000-06:00

"He's almost dead!" (i.e. a PC is somewhere between 0 and -something hit points)
"Quick, bind his wounds!" (i.e. what you do when you have no cleric in the party)

One of the things I've done in Aldwyr has been to allow for "binding wounds" - this involves post-combat action to bind up physical wounds so that someone does not bleed to death. I've done this several different ways in the past, including 1d4 and 1d3 hit points regained. But for some time now, I've been using 1d4-1, giving a range from 0-3. Binding wounds prevents a character below zero hit points from getting any worse, but it might not result in them regaining consciousness. I understand that Swords & Wizardry White Box has a similar "Binding of Wounds" rule. I used to think there was a rule in either OD&D or AD&D that was the original inspiration. There apparently isn't such a rule, which only served to underscore my deepening unease about this practice.

D&D is supposed to be deadly. Yet, rules such as "poisons do damage, rather than just kill" and "you can bind someone's wounds" and "zero hit points isn't dead, -9 or -10 is dead" make for a less deadly game. Indeed, I wonder to what extent they subtly encourage players to get overly invested in their characters. One could argue that there ought to be really deadly poisons, and really massive amounts of damage, just to counter-balance this trend. But the "escalation of power" doesn't always make for a better game.

I'm still thinking about this.

Now It Can Be Told...

2011-01-22T16:21:00.001-06:00

For just over a year, I've been running an OD&D game on a weekly basis. We've moved from one game store to another, gone from just one player to a group of six to nine players, and their characters have advanced to nearly fifth level. We've had several characters die, some in some very dramatic ways, others in more prosaic fashion, e.g. "oh, so that trap was poisoned? I roll a 4. Oops." Magic items started off with a magic sword - now in a somewhat dysfunctional relationship with the halfling thief in the party. Now there is another magic sword, a magic spear, a net of underwater something (no, they haven't figured it out), and one or two minor items.

The impetus for the campaign was simple: I wanted to play D&D, and I did not want to spend a lot of time on setting up a huge homebrewed setting, for fear that (a) the players wouldn't like it, and (b) it would become its own thing, rather than a backdrop for adventure. I also wasn't sure just what I wanted to do with modifying the rules for D&D, since that seemed inevitable for me. I decided on using Goblinoid Games dependable Labyrinth Lord; it seemed more easily amenable to modification than either Swords & Wizardry or BFRPG.

Taking a page from Ars Ludi's The West Marches campaign concept, I set things at the edge of a great-but-largely-offstage Grand Kingdom, in the modest frontier village of Kingsbridge. Right nearby could be found the ruins of a wizard's tower, now long abandoned. With that, I had the basics covered - dungeon and refuge of sorts.

In detailing Kingsbridge, I found myself liberally borrowing from a variety of sources. The local tavern was Falgrave's - mentioned in The Dragon #8, "The Development of Towns in D&D" and I kept the Aryan-Transpacific pantheon from my earlier Southlands campaign. The one place where I began adding in my own creativity was in the realm of NPCs:

Sieglinde, the lieutenant in the Royal Army and commander of the local militia. Sieglinde had a positive dislike for adventurers, but despite that ended up with a fondness for Kyle, the aforementioned hobbit thief. (It was a series of really positive reaction rolls, and I went with it)
Father Xylos, the local village priest. Very elderly and somewhat frail, Father Xylos became something of a confidant of the party - usually as a result of having to patch a wounded player-character up.
Evpraksia, the local soothsayer and alchemist. Clever, secretive, and more than capable of driving a hard bargain.

Relatively shortly after they began delving deeper into Xylarthen's Tower, I realized that there was a need for more variety. So I added The Ruined Monastery, roughly two days journey to the south from Kingsbridge. This prompted me to put together a map of the local area; I added several features, including another town and several dungeons from back issues of White Dwarf.

At the end of a year of adventuring, I found that my bricolage approach towards campaign construction had worked fairly well. What was missing was a "larger view" of the campaign, or so it seemed to me. There wasn't much I could do to add to the campaign on a larger scale without breaking out of the purely local framework I had started with. With that in mind, I decided to shift the party from this setting to something intentionally built on a larger scale: my new campaign, named Aldwyr.

More to follow....

Pluses and Minuses

2010-08-06T11:24:00.001-05:00

Life's been something of a roller-coaster. On the plus side:

Madison Traditional Gaming has gotten rather successful. We will be celebrating our one year anniversary in September, with a special Meetup. There might even be door prizes!
My Tuesday Night OD&D game is going well; I have six regular players and that seems to be about the right size. The Big Switch to Aldwyr is planned for later in September.
Work on the Tekumel Foundation continues apace, with some interesting projects in the works.
And besides gaming, an offer of work at Madison College this fall. Adjunct, but that's okay.

On the minus side, however:

Could not afford to go to Gen Con. Too many auto repairs and unforeseen living expenses.
TARGA remains inactive. Simply have not had time to focus on it, and with a lack of enthusiasm on the part of others, it's likely to stay as it is for now.
Haven't had time to get to various creative projects, including but not limited to: The Wilderness Architect, Microlite Post-Apocalypse, Wanderer, a supplement for X-plorers, and an OD&D-kinda-sorta parallel for spies and modern adventure.
Besides gaming, have had a very close friend in hospital for the past week, who needed my support. Fortunately, he's getting out today.

Think I'm busy. Oh, right! I have a blog, too! ;)

A Miscellany of Events

2010-06-03T23:56:00.000-05:00

There have been a miscellany of events taking place, in-game and out-of-game, that are worth mentioning:

My Tuesday night Original D&D group expanded ever-so-briefly after WisCon 34 to a total of EIGHT players: Gene, Dave, Nix, Noelle, Clint, Tristan, and a cameo appearance by my friends Chris and Penny who had come from the UK for the convention and had some time afterwards. Chris had not played D&D in about 25 years, and Penny had never played at all. But they did well enough, playing two first level fighters. More to follow there.
Albion, my Chivalry & Sorcery game set in late 12th Century England and Europe, has been on hiatus for awhile. I hope to pick that back up soon.
Plans continue to move forward on a reboot of the UW Dungeon Masters Association. We'll see how that goes.
The next Meetup of the Madison Traditional Gaming group is June 19th. That should be LOTS of fun!

Busy? No, not me. Why do you ask? ;)

In Memoriam

2010-04-07T08:12:00.000-05:00

I remember having dinner with Dave in Florida, a few years ago. I was there for an academic conference, and he had taken me to a decent restaurant in Orlando. We discussed various projects he was involved in, and reminisced about adventures with the Thursday Night Group. He had mentioned just how much he enjoyed being at Full Sail, and regaled me with stories - some of which I had heard already - about the vagaries of teaching students about how to design games, and not just write computer code for pretty CGI.

It's been a year since he passed away. Yes, I miss him - and Mike Ford, too, for that matter.

Starter Edition of Classic Traveller FREE

2010-04-06T23:30:00.000-05:00

The Starter Edition of Classic Traveller is now available FREE. Go get it and you will have Classic Traveller goodness to keep you adventuring for a long, long time. One small amount of advice: there are three (3) downloads - the main rules, the charts, and the adventures. You have to get them from the "My Account" section of either RPGNow or DriveThruRPG (with a tip o' the hat to Joseph Bloch for pointing this out). I also spotted some additional material worth checking out:

Guide to Classic Traveller
Guide to Paranoia Press Traveller products
Guide to FASA Traveller
Guide to Gamelords Traveller
...or the whole thing as a bundle, with lots of info on other GDW products included.

If you aren't sure if this is really what you want, go read Jeff Rients' commentary about Starter Traveller - he's dead-on in his advice, and I agree with him whole-heartedly.

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Animal Encounters

2010-04-06T22:54:00.001-05:00

Animals in any ecological system interact with each other, forming food chains, obeying instincts, defending territory, and generally living out their lives. When men enter such an ecological system, they will encounter the animals of the system, prompting natural reactions, such as attack or flight....Although the precise nature of animals may change, and they may prove quite alien to ordinary experience, most will conform to the broad classifications given below. A referee may choose to establish his own ecological system on a specific world, ignoring the encounter system outlined here. This system, however, is intended to allow broad latitude in both animal types and attack/defense mechanisms, while remaining essentially logical and reasonable.

Worlds and Adventures, pg. 24

Traveller, 1977 Edition

What's unfortunate about the original Traveller Animal Encounters section was that we ignored it so thoroughly back in 1977. This is incredibly unfortunate, since it is in this section that there were some amazing opportunities for world-building, all too often treated as "wandering monster" checks. But that's not what the Animal Encounters section is about - it is actually a fairly streamlined system for devising creatures and developing their places in an ecology, without going into so much depth as to bog things down.

I do not recall in 1977 or 1978 any major attempt among Traveller players in the Twin Cities to come up with ecologies and creatures for their campaigns (I freely admit I might be misremembering). We were so busy trying to replicate the Dorsai, or the Polesotechnic League, or some other space opera, that we simply didn't appreciate what was there in the rules. And here is the crux of the problem: just how much imagination do most referees have, when they need to create difference ecologies, world after world after world? Most of the referees I knew simply didn't get into this level of detail, and so we avoided it altogether. Looking at them now, not only do I find myself wanting to engage in world-building, but to take some time and really work out some of the creatures that might be encountered once player-characters make landfall.

Possibly one of the most interesting aspects of the animal encounter generation system is how easily it could be adapted to generating aliens. Humans are originally omnivorous brachiating hunter stock, roughly 60-75 kilos. It would be fascinating as a creative exercise to generate the precursors of alien races and see what you come up with, especially if combined with the extended star system generation system from Book 6, Scouts. What this illustrates is just how easy it is to add depth to the entire Traveller "mechanic" framework - this is true throughout the various sub-systems of the rules: character generation, ship design, star systems, etc. But it also illustrates the enormity of the tasks involved in creating a truly in-depth universe. The original admonition to generate a sub-sector and see what that gives you is almost precisely the same as admonitions in AD&D to start small when building your own world - a barony, with some nearby places of adventure, for example.

Next time is the last section of the 1977 Edition Traveller rules: Psionics. After that, I intend to look at some of the early supplements and additional material, and how they changed the game. What I am hoping to do is see what Traveller was like, pre-Third Imperium. There was a tremendous opportunity available at the time to come up with multiple settings for the game, rather than the focus on that single campaign world, magnificent and yet flawed at the same time. Judging by the TML debates about Aslan females wearing comfortable shoes while serving aboard pirate vessels that are tracking near-C rocks being flung at planets, there's been a tremendous amount of energy expended on the Third Imperium - and too much of it woolgathering.

Selling Stuff on Ebay

2010-04-04T00:12:00.000-05:00

Just a bit of a heads-up: I am beginning to sell a number of older gaming items in order to help finance my travels around the country this summer. The current items listed are:

AD&D 1st Ed. Unearthed Arcana
AD&D 1st Ed. Dungeoneer's Survival Guide
AD&D 1st Ed. Wilderness Survival Guide
AD&D 1st Ed. Oriental Adventures

Later auctions will include:

Adventurers Club #1-6 for Champions/HERO System
Back issues of Judges Guild Journal
Basic D&D - (Moldvay)

...and more, as time progresses.

5 Classic Traveller links

2010-04-01T18:54:00.002-05:00

As something of a follow-on to my Traveller Tuesday series, here are five links for Classic Traveller that were inspired by a recent email request:

Sites I like for CT:

Rob Conley's excellent post on setting up a Traveller sandbox.
Freelance Traveller, and particularly it's Other Roads (see also extending Book 2) section.
The Citizens of the Imperium has a decent Classic Traveller section.
Traveller Downport is something of a clearinghouse of info.
The Missouri Archive was one of the first major websites for Traveller; there's a lot of good material there.

In addition, I've been asked to put together an annotated bibliography for Classic Traveller, of relevant science fiction. If people have suggestions, please leave them here! Thanks!

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Encounters

2010-03-30T17:07:00.001-05:00

It helped, being a scion of a baronial house in the Grand Duchy of Hermes, Falkayn reflected. To be sure, he was a younger son; and he'd left at an early age, after kicking too hard against the traces that aristocrats were supposed to carry; and he hadn't visited his home planet since. But some of that harsh training had alloyed with the metal of him... (pg. 6)

The machine said, "Further study will be required. For example, it will be needful to know whether the entire cryosphere is going to become fluid. Indeed, the very orbit must be ascertained with more precision than now exists. Nevertheless, it does appear that this planet may afford a site of unprecedented value to industry. That did not occur to the Lemminkainenites, whose culture lacks a dynamic expansionism. But a correlation has just been made here with the fact that, while heavy isotopes are much in demand, their production has been severely limited because of the heat energy and lethal waste entailed. Presumably this is a good place to which to build such facilities."

The idea hit Falkayn in the belly, then soared to his head like champagne bubbles. The money involved wasn't what brought him to his feet shouting. Money was always pleasant to have; but he could get enough for his needs and greeds with less effort. Sheer instinct roused him. He was abruptly a Pleistocene hunter again, on the track of a mammoth. "Judas!" he yelled. "Yes!" (pp. 23-24)

Satan's World

Poul Anderson (1969)

In the 1977 edition of Classic Traveller, it was envisioned that there were going to be three kinds of encounters: routine, random, and patron. Routine encounters were simply those encounters which did not need a great deal of attention, while random encounters were an attempt to provide a variety of unexpected encounters, friendly or unfriendly. In a sense, random encounters in Traveller were a kind of "wandering monster" although the parallel is not exact.

Patron encounters were seen as a means of providing adventuring opportunities for the players, should they not have enough ideas on their own. What's interesting as a difference between the 1977 and the 1981 editions is that the 1977 edition phrases the relationship between patrol and player-characters somewhat differently.

1977: "One specific, recurring goal for adventurers is to find a patron who will assist them in the pursuit of fortune and power."

1982: "The key to adventure in Traveller is the patron. When a band of adventurers meets an appropriate patron, they have a person who can give them direction in their activities, and who can reward them for success. The patron is the single most important NPC there can be."

There's a subtle but important difference between the two introductory passages. The 1977 version leaves the relationship more undefined, and the focus is left on the player-characters. By 1981, however, patrons are viewed as a sort of "story-controller" which shifts the focus from the players' intentions to those of the referee. While some might say I'm splitting hairs, I think in retrospect it is difficult to not recognize the difference, and the effect it probably had on people learning the game.

In addition to the differences in how patrons were viewed, there is a section in the 1977 edition on nobility. This section was shifted in the 1981 edition to Book One: Characters and Combat, but putting it by encounters in the 1977 edition was a clear suggestion that nobles were seen as being potential patrons:

At the discretion of the referee, noble persons (especially those of social standing 13 or higher) may have ancestral lands or fiefs, or they may have actual ruling power....Ranking above duke/duchess are two levels not reflected in social standing: prince/princess or king/queen are titles used by actual rulers of worlds. The title emperor/empress is used by the ruler of an empire of several worlds. (pg. 22, Worlds and Adventures)

In the 1981 edition, the mention of ancestral lands and actual ruling power is muted by the modifier "some ancestral lands or fiefs, and may actually have some ruling power..." [emphasis added] So this is another suggestion of the openness of the 1977 edition, which gets more constrained by the 1981 edition. The entire idea of scale in interstellar relations was left open for the referee to determine, with just the suggestion of "empires" as comprising "several worlds." That's far different from the Third Imperium. (Some of this gets cleared up in an article by Marc Miller published in 1979 - but I'll get back to that.)

Thus "encounters" in the 1977 edition were left to the referee to use as they saw fit, but in a more "sandbox-y" way than the 1981 edition. From game play, I recall that considerable time was spent attempting to find patrons, though the resulting adventures were as much about the players' intentions, if not more so.

Next time: Animal Encounters

Distracted just a little

2010-03-25T23:38:00.000-05:00

Sorry about missing a Traveller Tuesday; I've been dealing with some of the fallout from the Great TARGA Porn Debacle. It's mostly been dealt with, though there will be a lot of interesting and potentially productive results from all that.

Meanwhile, I have my players' map of their delving into Xylarthen's Tower to share with all of you, once I have a chance to scan it in.

GaryCon!

2010-03-21T11:31:00.002-05:00

Just got back from GaryCon - and it's not even over!

Due to a perfect storm of multiple events scheduled on the same weekend, I was only able to spend some time yesterday at GaryCon. But what a time it was - I had a chance to see various lions of the hobby: Frank Mentzer, Bill Hoyer, Tom Wham, Tim Kask, Mike Carr, and many others. What made GaryCon so amazing for me was the feeling of being with over 200 other people who were all interested in the OSR.

I acquired a back issue of Judges Guild Journal I was lacking from my collection, and I talked for some time with Allan Grohe. I also had a chance to talk with the great guys at Dead Games Society - they are doing some very cool things; look for a possible exciting announcement from them shortly. And I got the opportunity to present a check to Luke Gygax from TARGA for $350.00 as a donation to the Gygax Family Memorial Fund. How cool is that?

p.s. I am definitely going back next year. This con is awesome. :)

Being An Arbiter of Taste

2010-03-21T01:33:00.002-05:00

I personally find it bizarre that some corners of the OSR think we should be spending our time debating how ethical it is to have mentions of sex and adult intimacy in reference to a game which has been semi-humorously summarized as being all about "killing things and taking their stuff."

Of course, I could be wrong.

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Tech Levels, Part 3 of 3

2010-03-17T12:16:00.001-05:00

Technological index may vary from 0 to 18, more commonly ranging from 4 through about 10. Higher numbers indicate greater capacity....The technological index is used in conjunction with the technological level table to determine the general quality and capability of local industry. The tables indicate the general types or categories of goods in general use on the world. In most cases, such goods are the best which may be produced locally, although better goods may be imported by local organizations or businesses when a specific need is felt. In most case, the local citizenry will not be armed with weapons of a type which cannot be produced locally, although police or military units may be armed with weapons up to several levels above local technology. Technological level also indicates the general ability of local technology to repair or maintain items which have failed or malfunctioned....The technological level tables have several spaces or holes, and such gaps should be filled in by the referee or the players when they discover items or devices of interest.

Worlds and Adventures, pp. 9-11
Traveller, 1977 Edition

Terse. That's about the best way to describe this section of the original Traveller rules. What did we get? A sense of general technological development, the use of local conditions as a context for technological capacity, and a specific suggestion to "fill in the blanks." It's also quite clear that this entire section is written with the referee as the intended audience. Just three short paragraphs and a couple of charts - it might as well have been labeled, "not to be left unfinished."

I recall quite distinctly several debates about how easy it would be to get ships repaired on planets with tech levels of 7 or under. Generally speaking, tech level was used as a limiting factor - while there was considerable variety between tech levels of different planets, most of the time, tech level wasn't thought of as the basis for suggestion, but rather as the end of discussion. "I want to get my ship repaired." "Yeah, well, the planet is tech level 8." "They have spaceships, right?" "Your jump drive is tech level 10 - too bad."

This attitude was reflected in the reviews of the time. Here's Don Turnbull in White Dwarf # 6:

Tech. Index: 5. They have developed gunpowder (they have SMGs) but don't know how to make chain armour; they have simple computers and radio, but no television, and despite the fact that there is quite a lot of water about they haven't invented the submersible. They have fixed-wing aircraft but no nuclear fission. Altogether this is a pretty improbable world. Interesting to know, for instance, how those fixed-wing aircraft fly in what is virtually a vacuum, and what do the bureaucrats breathe?

Or Tom Wham's more positive review in The Dragon #18:

Technology: 14 (very high) Non-industrial world...As you can see, “Grendal” nearly created herself. The small population, high technology and government type seemed to dictate to me that Grendal is some sort of research base on a fairly inhospitable little world. And so she shall be when any adventurers land upon her.

So, technological level was seen as a suggestion to the referee about what could be expected from place to place. The idea that technological levels might be shared from one star system to another, or that tech levels might get improved over time, were not easily grasped (though some referees did do both of these things). Even so, within those three paragraphs was a lot of implications to act as a guide for the aspiring referee:

Tech levels range from 4 (roughly c. 1900 AD) to 10 (beginning interstellar flight). That meant that a lot of planets were of not high enough tech level to produce their own starships. This in turn meant that a few planets of high enough tech level (and population) probably would dominate interstellar relations.
Local planetary conditions would shape how technology was used - Marc Miller would later refer to Fritz Leiber's short story "A Pail of Air" to show how even a low tech level could be plausible on an (seemingly) airless world. This particular aspect of "fleshing things out" was something generally observed in the breach by most referees in 1977.
Higher tech level stuff might be available on a planet, but would likely cost more, due to importation and scarcity. This in turn would provide a trade opportunity, for those ready to see it.
Tech level would shape and limit the technology in use in interstellar relations. If you had a really high tech item, you'd have to be prepared to either take it back to its planet of origin to get fixed, or be ready to make the repair yourself.

There were some limitations and lacunae in the technological index scheme. "Star Trek" tech - matter transport, artificial intelligence, anti-matter power sources - were all off the chart, so to speak. Any sense of how aliens might develop technology was missing - referees were to assume that alien races would develop like humans - or not. (In fact, there were no rules for the development of aliens, at all - I'll come back to that in another post.) The effect of law level on technology and availability was also left to the referee to determine. The relative terseness of the technological index system seems ideal from an "old school" perspective. Fill in those blanks, make up your own stuff, and don't look back.

Looking at the technological level table today, I'm struck by those empty spots in various columns. Blasters, particle beam weapons, and yes, light sabers, all suggest themselves in the personal weapons column. There are other possibilities: combat armor of different sorts; larger shipboard weapons, tightbeam communications, neural nets, cloning, medical advances, different kinds of water, land, and air transport.

But its the second-order derivatives that seem even more interesting today. What tech level would be assumed to be the interstellar standard? What choices would be made regarding tech level and availability, that would then shape the products available? How would people notice tech level differences? Might there be two or more tech levels in common use? Some thought given to this before the start of a campaign could make a lot of difference in how the world feels to the players.

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Tech Levels, Part 2

2010-03-09T23:59:00.000-06:00

The next morning, he and Harkaman took an aircar and went to look at the city at the forks of the river. It was completely new, in the sense that it had been built since the collapse of Federation civilization and the loss of civilized technologies. It was huddled on a long, irregularly triangular mound, evidently to raise it above flood-level. Generations of labor must have gone into it. To the eyes of a civilization using contragravity and powered equipment it wasn't at all impressive. Fifty to a hundred men with adequate equipment could have gotten the thing up in a summer. It was only by forcing himself to think in terms of spadeful after spadeful of earth, cartload after cartload creaking behind straining beasts, timber after timber cut with axes and dressed with adzes, stone after stone and brick after brick, that he could appreciate it. They even had it walled, with a palisade of tree-trunks behind which earth and rocks had been banked, and along the river were docks, at which boats were moored. The locals simply called it Tradetown.

- Space Viking, 1963

H. Beam Piper

Okay, so I lied. I was going to talk about encounters this week, until I noticed just how much there is to say about tech levels in Classic Traveller. There are some interesting assumptions in Book Three, not the least of which is that interstellar travel and contra-gravity become possible in what should be the near future for Earth (despite the assessment of a tech level of 5 in Book Two). While this might seem somewhat incongruous, it becomes even more curious when you realize that the world generation system results in wildly disparate tech levels for different star systems, right next to one another. A lot of ink has been spilled over this since 1977, most of it trying to point out how "it ought not work that way."

However, the relatively imminent development of interstellar travel combined with worlds with different tech levels matches Space Viking to a "t" - and also the Demon Prince series by Jack Vance, or King David's Spaceship by Jerry Pournelle, and even the Polesotechnic League stories of Poul Anderson. The concept of fallen star empires slowly rebuilding, with humans striving for something more, is a powerful theme. So powerful, in fact, that a lot of campaigns were built around this back in 1977.

What makes this more interesting is incorporating the OSR idea that it is okay to leave descriptions relatively sparse so as to allow for later inspiration or improvisation - the UPP system for stars and planets fits this very nicely. Combined with different tech levels, and the referee can find a myriad different reasons why things are the way they are. Between 1977 and now, the biggest mistake seems to have been to assume that the Traveller rules and background setting can be used for "reverse-engineering" how things actually work. Unfortunately, this has mostly led to debacles over money, credits, trading, and whether or not markets could or should get regulated in the future. This was and is boring.

Cold Hard Facts

2010-03-08T08:57:00.000-06:00

Original D&D cost $10. That's a fact. Using any of a number of online inflation calculators (I used this one), we can see that what cost $10 in 1974 would cost approximately $43 in today's money. In 1974, the minimum wage was approximately $2/hour, which would be worth a little over $8/hour in today's money. However, the current minimum wage is just over $7/hour.

So the meaning of this is simple: since wages have not kept pace with inflation, the average income buys less than it did back in the 1970's. For your average middle-class teenager, there are more demands on even part-time wages than in the past. My own experience teaching college students is that they are more reliant on their parents' incomes than in the past. So a game that costs more than $40 in today's money represents a higher threshold of entry into the hobby than D&D did back in 1974. While one might argue that all that a player needs these days is just the 4e Players Handbook, that's not a complete game. The entire set of 4e hardcovers is over $100.

What I am trying to point out is that nobody should be surprised that sales figures for 4e D&D don't match WoW subscription rates - it's that high threshold of entry that makes it harder for new players to get involved in our favorite hobby. (This is something of an argument for a decent $10 or even $20 RPG, but that's for a different post.)

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Tech levels

2010-03-03T00:00:00.007-06:00

Tech levels in Classic Traveller have always been a subject of debate. Back in 1977, what was interesting was seeing the range of tech levels, and what they meant. Because of the relatively "gritty" feel of the original game - firearms and cutlasses on the ground, lasers and missiles in space - there was a lot of room for experimentation and creativity in the higher tech levels. It was clear to most of us that Traveller was not a game for Star Trek simulation, since matter transport and anti-matter were "off the chart", essentially - TL 16 and 17, respectively. However, that left a lot of room for referees to work in, and I recall people taking advantage of that. But the play of the game tended to revolve around more easily grasped tech levels; TL 12 and under, mostly.

What emerged from re-reading the 1977 edition of the rules is shown above. It shows the one example planet in the entire game: Earth. Earth has an E class starport, 8000 miles in diameter, a clean standard atmosphere, 70% hydrographics, roughly a billion inhabitants, a balkanized government structure, a law level of two - and a tech level of five. Now maybe that's a typo; in the 1981 edition, the tech level is eight, so perhaps this is just off. However, what this suggests is that, overall, Earth's technological capabilities are not simply the highest level possible, but more what can be commonly produced. (Remember, this is all conjecture.) What does TL 5 represent? Firearms for personal weapons, cloth armor, sandcasters and mortars (but not rockets), the very earliest computers, radio and television, ground cars, fixed wing aircraft, and oil as a major fuel. Roughly 1940's level of technology - which is okay, if you accept that this was a planet-wide average - and that the entire system of tech levels itself was at best an approximation.

Needless to say, getting the highest quality high tech stuff was important - but the scale of tech levels themselves made game play more interesting, as we tried finding the "sweet spot" between different tech levels, available gear and trade goods, and how to take advantage of that, whether trading or raiding. What I recall most clearly was that most "star empires" operated around tech level 12 or so - that being seen as the "upper edge" of what was easily developed. There were a lot of star systems with much lower tech levels, making them interesting places to visit (and potentially sign up for lucrative trading deals, or consider for raiding purposes). Since books like Space Viking and The Mote in God's Eye and Trader to the Stars were our inspiration, we were all trying the tramp freighter route, trying to get enough credits to buy a Type C mercenary cruiser, and then go raid planets for their wealth.

I recall quite distinctly rolling up a character who was a Navy Admiral, who then got several boosts to his social standing as he mustered out. I presented this character to my friend Rick, who was running a Traveller campaign - could this fellow be a planetary ruler? Rick grudgingly allowed this; my admiral ended up with a planet with a relatively lower tech level - 7 or 8, if I recall correctly. There was some discussion of what the admiral's planetary government could build up, without me having a really good grasp of what was possible. It ended somewhat abruptly with the arrival of pirates/Space Vikings of a sort, and the discovery that I had made some poor decisions as the planetary ruler, building trading ships without having planetary defenses. In the end, the lower tech level of the planet made it difficult if not impossible to actually get what I wanted - rather unfortunate to the teenager I was back then! I've often wondered what it would be like to play this scenario out again, knowing what I know now. With a Classic Traveller revival, that might be possible - I can only hope!

Next Tuesday: 1977 Edition Encounters
Previous Tuesday: 1977 Edition Worlds, Part Two

This looks like fun! Read an RPG Book in Public!

2010-02-27T10:52:00.001-06:00

So I read over on the Escapist about "Read an RPG Book in Public Week" - I think this is a grand idea. I've been known to be reluctant to read my role-playing games in public, but that was because of unfinished-dissertation-guilt more than anything else. I'm going to have to think about it, but I bet I will have lots of opportunities to try this out!

Race as Class

2010-02-26T09:50:00.000-06:00

I'm having an epiphany of sorts.

For a very long time, I thought that the idea of "race as class" was just plain weird. Why couldn't a dwarf be a fighter? Why can't a hobbit be a thief? It seemed very strange to me, reading about this in Moldvay/Mentzer Basic D&D. "It's about the focus of the game" people would say to me. Still, I couldn't quite wrap my brain around it.

When I got Advanced Edition Companion, I found myself thinking quite happily about all the different classes and races I wanted to have available for play in my new campaign. I began to realize that - far from being an "either/or" choice - multi-classing and "race-as-class" were both acceptable, and depending on what I wanted, highly appropriate for my campaign.

I'm going through some of my thinking about this over on the ODD74 message board. Feel free to stop over and add a comment or two.

The "New" Campaign: Trouble on Second Level

2010-02-25T00:26:00.002-06:00

So in the latest session, our band of hardy adventurers had gotten split up:

Eric - a human cleric of Styphon the Healer-god
Reacher - a human "locksmith"
Fram - a human priest of Galzar Wolfhead

...had all gone through a teleportal that caused them to appear about 20 feet above ground level, near the entrance to the dungeon. Meanwhile, the rest of the party:

Grollan - the dwarven fighter
Kyle - the halfling "locksmith"
Garric - the wildly courageous magic-user

...had all gone through the same teleportal, but using a different command word, were transported deeper into the dungeon.

Group A went back to Kingsbridge, the nearby village, and recruited help. With two warriors and a bard, they went back into the dungeon in search of their friends. Going through the teleportal, they were reunited with their comrades, and began to make their way out.

On the way out, they found themselves on the second level of the dungeon. In a particular portion of said level, they had encountered a guard post manned by hobgoblins. In previous expeditions, they had tried to take out the hobgoblins, to little effect. The hobgoblins had initially asked for a toll of a silver piece per party member, but this was refused by stingy player-characters ("what, put money back into the dungeon? What are you thinking??"). Each expedition had seen an escalation in tactics: caltrops, molotov cocktails, tripwires, combined arms tactics etc. So on their way out, the player-characters decided it would be a good idea to take out the hobgoblins once and for all - BUT! The doors leading to the guard post had been spiked shut, leaving one long corridor leading to the actual guard room.

As the player-characters peered cautiously around the corner to see what was there, I told them, "it's hard to see all the way to the guardroom, as the corridor has been keep purposely dark - there are some darker shapes in the shadows though, and something is clearly moving. All you can hear from down the corridor is an ominous krick-krick-krick-KRICK sound (not unlike the pawl on a rachet). Oh, and right there, hanging on the wall around the corner is a wooden plaque."

The players, being properly curious, asked, "what does the plaque say?"

So I handed them this:

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Worlds, Part Two

2010-02-23T10:58:00.008-06:00

Alternate World Forms: Several alternatives to the traditional spherical world form are possible. Most occur when a civilization wishes to trap and use energy from its central star, and needs great land surface to do so. In addition, population pressure (especially on a civilization unable to develop interstellar travel on a large scale) may be a contributing factor. Alternate world forms are not included in the world creation sequence, but may be provided on a sparing basis by the referee. They are ideal for large population worlds, but may also be populated by smaller numbers, as in degenerate or decimated worlds.

Worlds and Adventures, pp. 8-9

Traveller, 1977 Edition

The above paragraph is an example of something found in the 1977 edition that doesn't show up in the later, revised edition of the game. The different kinds of alternative world form were mentioned, but the rationale for including them was not. This may seem like a minor editorial decision, but it indicates in a subtle way how much more open the 1977 edition was to different ideas and ways of doing things.

Not unlike the idea of a "Saturday Night Special" from Empire of the Petal Throne, alternate world forms were intended to be rare. Not too surprisingly, such "rarities" became significant points of interest in campaigns developed and played in the Twin Cities in 1977 onwards. A Dyson Sphere (see left) was part of several adventures in several campaigns.

Another interesting omission from the later editions of the game was the Jump Route Determination Table. This table existed to help the referee map out "the charted space lanes, which mark the regular routes travelled by commercial starships." It might be possible to think of the resulting "space lanes" as corridors connecting the different "rooms" as represented by the star systems - I don't want to overextend the dungeon metaphor, but it was the prevalent way of thinking back in the mid-70's. The 1982 edition included a much more vague section, sans table, which assumed that the referee had already figured out the larger political picture. Again, perhaps a subtle distinction, but one which I believe reflects changes in thinking between 1977 and 1982. I recall there being some debate about the utility of the table at the time, but looking at it now, it provides a straightforward way of determining a lot about the relationships between star systems without making assumptions about a larger "Imperium." In a fairly real way, a thoughtful referee could randomly generate a sub-sector or two, and then figure out what the larger interstellar community looked like.

Something missing from the 1977 edition is the concept of "travel zones" - the now-familiar Amber and Red Zones. I was surprised by this - I could've sworn they were there, but they apparently were added in either the first issue of the Journal of the Travellers Aid Society or possibly Adventure 1: The Kinunir. I remember that there were other in-game systems for dealing with "restricted worlds" but I don't recall any specifics - save that there were usually well-armed interdiction satellites that referees would put in place to deter trespassing player-characters. It would be interesting to come up with an alternative interdiction system, but I must admit that the entire idea of Amber and Red Zones is now a part of what I think of as "Traveller" so I suspect I will continue to use them.

It's difficult to convey just how much of a difference these seemingly minor subtractions and additions actually made in world creation, but it was significant. It also shows how the various assumptions and details of the GDW-in-house campaign, the Third Imperium, emerged rather slowly, allowing for nearly two years of campaign play in a myriad different universes.

Previous: 1977 Edition Worlds, Part One
Previous: 1977 Edition Experience
Previous: 1977 Edition Starships
Previous: 1977 Edition Combat
Previous: 1977 Edition Characters
Previous: Our original inspiration
Previous: The influence of OD&D
Previous: The other "three little booklets"

Update on the "new" campaign

2010-02-18T12:37:00.010-06:00

In the three weeks and two sessions since I last reported on my "new" D&D campaign, we've added not just one player, but two - I'm up to three players at my local FLGS, and other gamers are beginning to notice. It's fun, but I must admit I'm continuing to run into some issues in running Somebody Else's Dungeon aka Xylarthen's Tower, courtesy of Jeff Rients. The biggest issue is that I've discovered that designing a "mega-dungeon" is an intensely personal creative effort. Don't get me wrong, there's some awesome goodness (badness?) in Jeff's design - but I have a growing sense of I want to draw my own dungeon, dammit.

Besides that creative itch waiting to be scratched, I'm finding some more minor issues that keep cropping up that I will eventually want to house-rule:

The d6 roll for opening doors - does everybody get a chance? Once for the entire party? What about multiple people helping out? I'm finding I might want to have some sort of door resistance amount, and then add or subtract that to the roll. We'll see.
What about chopping down doors? This also implicitly asks, what are dungeon doors made of? I'm not necessarily into various different types of doors, with different hit points - that way lies a particular kind of minutiae-laden madness.
Tactics. My background with miniatures has led me to think more about the tactics usable during melee. Don't want 3e levels of unnecessary detail, but I also don't like having to remind players that their characters might know something about how to fight.
Wandering monsters. Designing ever-longer lists of monsters and encounter tables to match sounded tiresome and neverending. However, there is a solution! Taking a page from James Ward's article "The Wandering Monster" in The Dragon #15, I've started to use 3x5 cards for each wandering monster encounter. This ought to be interesting.

What's good about all of this is that I'm having a grand time re-learning how to properly run a campaign. At some point, I am likely to either modify this one into what I really want, or start over from scratch (sound like any fixer-upper home to anybody?).

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Worlds, Part One

2010-02-16T23:58:00.004-06:00

The referee has the responsibility for mapping the universe before actual game play begins. The entire universe is not necessary immediately, however, as only a small portion can be used at any one time. In unsupervised play, one of the players can generate worlds and perform mapping on a turn by turn or adventure by adventure basis....

Worlds and Adventures, page 1

Traveller, 1977 Edition

One of the daunting tasks faced by the creators of Traveller was how to deal with mapping out space. Being good wargamers, they realized that attempting to map out space in three dimensions was going to be difficult (though not impossible) for the average wargamer/roleplayer. So they settled on an abstract representation which was referred to as a subsector. The map of the subsector represented an 8x10 section of space, with each hex being one parsec across. For anybody familiar with astronomy, this two-dimensional representation was completely artificial and unrealistic, but that was unimportant from a role-playing perspective. I've included a scan of the original subsector map from page 3 of Worlds and Adventure; the only thing that could've improved the original game would have been a sample planet and a sample subsector. However, those would've taken up more space than GDW apparently felt was available for the game. For whatever reason, the subsector hex grid was left as a tabula rasa upon which referees were invited to create their own settings. Not everyone thought this mapping paradigm worked the best, however.

Over to the right, you can see one of the variations on mapping for Traveller that was devised back in 1977. The idea was to take a sheet of hex paper, draw in a larger grid of hexagons, and then enter the Universal Planetary Profile. Starting in the center hex, write in starport type, and then clockwise around from the hex immediately above, planetary diameter, atmosphere, hydrographics, population and law level. Tech level went to the bottom left; presence of gas giant to the bottom right. Notation of naval base and scout base in upper left and right, respectively. The two side hexes may have been used for additional stats, but the memory has faded over time. However, the systems shown here are as follows:

The planet listed in the upper left is the one generated (and left unnamed) by Don Turnbull in his review in White Dwarf #6, from 1978. The UPP is 0201 C81378B-5 S G.
The planet on the lower right is "Grendal" from The Dragon #18, September 1978. The UPP is 0303 A212221-E G.
The planet further to the right and a little up is one I generated for this post. The UPP is 0402 A656462-9 G.

Star system creation therefore was not terribly "realistic" at all. However, what it did do was provide a template to follow for mapping out adventure, in much the same way as dungeon and wilderness maps did for Original D&D. This was, I think, a significant part of the success of Traveller when it initially appeared - the maps did not need to be hard science for the game to work; a structure suggesting a science fiction setting was sufficient and relatively elegant to implement.

But mapping was not the only set of assumptions embedded in the rules for stellar mapping and world generation. In a follow-on post, I will take some time to examine some of the social assumptions in the original game involving world building, and what they meant for referees at the time.

Previous: 1977 Edition Experience
Previous: 1977 Edition Starships
Previous: 1977 Edition Combat
Previous: 1977 Edition Characters
Previous: Our original inspiration
Previous: The influence of OD&D
Previous: The other "three little booklets"

Advanced Edition Companion: Initial Review and Reflection

2010-02-15T00:01:00.000-06:00

I just got my copy of Advanced Edition Companion in the mail from Lulu. Man oh man oh man....I've only had the briefest chance to look through it, but it looks really, really good. Did I mention really good? I think Dan's got my number with this product - almost like he was reading my mind.

James Maliszewski had provided an excellent review of Advanced Edition Companion on Grognardia, so I was very much looking forward to getting my own copy. I think what I've really appreciated about Advanced Edition Companion in my initial perusal is that the entire book is essentially optional rules, rather than an "approved way to play." I've mentioned before that I've never gone along with the idea that OD&D with all its supplements is the same as AD&D, primarily because of this fundamental difference in philosophy. OD&D resonates with the Afterword of Volume Three, in which Gary advises "...the best way is to decide how you would like it to be, and then make it just that way!" while AD&D ended up being the TSR "official set" - which meant that every referee and every campaign had to align themselves a greater or lesser distance from the Pattern of Lake Geneva.

Advanced Edition Companion avoids this by bringing lots of crunchiness from AD&D or OD&D with everything, and doing so in a way that makes it easier - not harder - for referees to use. And it seems that Jamie Mal likes this, too.

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Experience

2010-02-09T23:45:00.002-06:00

"As characters travel through the universe, they already know their basic physical and mental parameters: their basic education and physical development have already occurred, and further improvement can happen only by dedicated endeavor. The experience which is gained as the individual character travels and adventures is, in a very real sense, an increased ability to play the role which he has assumed..."

Starships, page 40

Traveller, 1977 Edition

This section, much-maligned since Traveller's first appearance, is perhaps the biggest difference between Traveller and Original D&D. My original title for this post was "Experience - the Anti-D&D" simply to illustrate this very real divide. Instead of the bildungsroman aspect of D&D, in which player-characters are completely inexperienced and then develop over time, Traveller's designers assumed that characters would be capable and competent before the start of play. It's a natural result of the character creation system, but we did not fully understand that back in 1977, and judging by commentary on various Traveller-related forums and mailing list, still not properly understood to this day. Kenneth Bearden, however, has done some excellent work exploring this issue on the Citizens of the Imperium message boards.

Conceptually, it is fairly simple. The life-course development model, using terms of service, was an elegant way of encouraging players to roll up characters who were not too young and not too old. Too young and they would lack the skills necessary to adventure and travel. Too old, and they would be infirm and too fragile to adventure. But the deeper implication was that in-game development of skills and ability was very limited - and coming from D&D, that seemed a little strange to many Traveller players. However, there were options for improving Education as a stat, weapons expertise, skill improvement, and physical fitness.

I recall some attempts to use the Traveller experience system back in the late '70's, but most of the time it was taken as a cross between "on-the-job training" and "I wanna better character." I think this ended up skewing our understanding of the assumptions underlying Traveller, and made it more difficult to see how the system worked. In other words, the deeper assumptions implicit in the rules were more of a control than any stated background (e.g. educational institutions in the Third Imperium).

The above is the only ordinary method of self-improvement available to characters. Highly scientific or esoteric methods of improving personal skills and characteristics are logically, provided the characters search hard enough for them. Such methods could include RNA intelligence or education implants, surgical alteration, military or mercenary training, and other systems. Alternatives to the above methods must be administered by the referee.

Starships, page 41

Traveller, 1977 Edition

This quote from the end of the Experience section, taken with the one above, reveal just how different Traveller was in the beginning from what has developed since then. The idea that experience developed during game play improves player ability runs in parallel with more recent ideas about Old School game play. Additionally, the absence of a defined background setting for Traveller meant that referees had to come up with their own settings and universes - and the experience rules actually suggest ways in which a referee might develop something different. In this sense, Classic Traveller provided a blank canvas - and encouraged referees to make it their own - and the experience rules were no different than the rest of the game.

Next Tuesday: Worlds

Previous: 1977 Edition Starships
Previous: 1977 Edition Combat
Previous: 1977 Edition Characters
Previous: Our original inspiration
Previous: The influence of OD&D
Previous: The other "three little booklets"

Editorial note: something odd happened with my attempt to post this last night. It obviously wasn't there or went away. I've restored it, but let me know if you actually see this post - comments, as usual, are always welcome.

Auction Announcements

2010-02-06T08:21:00.004-06:00

As I've mentioned before...now with items up for auction!

TARGA Announces Pledge-An-Auction Drive

TARGA is organizing the 2010 Pledge-An-Auction drive in support of GaryCon 2 and the Gygax Family Fund for use in funding a memorial statue in honor of Gary. Come join our virtual auction and help us to present a great donation to Luke Gygax at GaryCon 2 this year! Starts on January 25th!
***
So I've put up a copy of The Dungeoneer #2 for auction, and that will be followed by a copy of the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. More after that, I am sure - so keep your eyes open for interesting stuff to bid on!

Digging Around...

2010-02-04T21:25:00.000-06:00

So it turns out that I have a bunch of back issues of Great Plains Game Player and its successor, Gamelog, both of them published by Jim Lurvey. Jim's a great guy - I can say that, having known him off and on for nearly 30 years now.

It just so happens that in an early issue of GP2, there's an article by one Gary Gygax, about the relationship between strength and weapons damage and other abilities. Looks like the prototype for the strength tables in Greyhawk. (I understand from a conversation with Jim a couple of years ago that GP2 was where the Thief character class first appeared, too.)

And then there's The Ryth Chronicle - John Van De Graaf's 'zine of campaigns along the Ryth River, "published as a public service by the Yggrdasill papermill" with the first issue appearing in the 4th week of March, 1975, if I've got it correctly. Interesting thing about John's campaign is that he started keeping records from the 3rd week in November of 1974, so his campaign started with the original three booklets sans Greyhawk. As a historical record, this is an amazing snapshot of what gaming was like Way Back Then.

Details to follow.... :)

Five links to make refereeing easier

2010-02-03T14:56:00.001-06:00

Something I like about technology is that it helps us do things that would otherwise be a lot more work. Without further ado, here are five different online tools that ought to make refereeing a bunch easier:

Brad's excellent Labyrinth Lord character generator page.
Peccable Productions Moldvay D&D adventure generator.
An interesting and quirky random village generator.
A Swords & Wizardry NPC generator.
An OD&D random dungeon generator, based on the one appearing in The Strategic Review #1.

If anybody knows more about the origin and provenance of these links, I'd love to know. Thanks!

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Starships

2010-02-02T09:09:00.000-06:00

"Worlds orbiting the same star are accessible by inteplanetary travel, including by scheduled liners and by ship's boats, pinnaces, cutters and even by lifeboats. Generally, however, interplanetary travel takes long periods of time. Since most stellar systems have only one major world, interplanetary travel is infrequently used....Worlds orbiting different stars are reached by interstellar travel, which uses the jump drive. Once a starship moves to more than 100 planetary diameters from all worlds, it may activate its jump drive and move to another star system. Jump drives transfer ships from one star system to another in about one week per jump."

Starships, page 1

Traveller, 1977 Edition

It was in Book Two: Starships that Traveller departed the most from Original D&D in its formatting. That was understandable, since spaceships and interstellar travel were the thematic core of the rules. But here, GDW took advantage of not only existing science fiction literature, but also its own previously published spaceship rules, Triplanetary. Published in 1973, Triplanetary was notable for Newtonian mechanics, grease pencils, and being a lot of fun to play. Designed by Marc Miller, it had a set of ships including Corvettes, Corsairs, Frigates, Dreadnaughts (see cover of the rules booklet), Torches, and Orbital Bases. Non-combat ships included Transports, Packets (armed transport), Tankers (fuel carrier), and Liners. These would provided inspiration for the sorts of ships that appeared later in Traveller - the "dreadnaught" would morph into the Broadsword-class mercenary cruiser.

As far as any of us could tell, back in 1977, the science fiction inspirations for Traveller clearly included Space Viking by H. Beam Piper, as well as Trader to the Stars by Poul Anderson, and others. But one author - E.C. Tubb - whose work I had not read at the time, had also provided a great deal of direct inspiration for Traveller's designers. High, Middle, and Low Passage, Fast and Slow drug, all came from the Dumarest of Terra series, along with the seemingly-odd emphasis on blades and blade combat. Keep in mind - we didn't have a dedicated background setting, merely assumptions about how interstellar travel worked and its various hazards, including hijacking, skipping, and piracy. I've always found it strange just how much effort has been put to interpret Traveller's rules as an internally consistent worldview, when it was clear to us back in 1977 that the game was inspired by many sources and encompassed many different possibilities.

And so it was with Starship Economics that we found lots of assumptions about how things worked, naturally enough, but curiously very little embedded background (at least by today's standards). A quick comparison between Mongoose's Traveller Pocket Rulebook and the original edition reveals a great deal of the Official Traveller Universe in the later version. In both the Starship Economics and Starship Construction section, there are two "mini-games" that attracted attention. In the former, finding cargo, passengers, paying fees, maintenance costs, and crew salaries - combined with the Trade and Commerce rules at the end of Book Two - formed the basis for a trading game that could probably have been ported right back into Original D&D. In the latter, starship construction was the game itself.

After generating characters, starship construction was something of an obsession back in 1977. Trying to figure out the best combination of weapons, drives, interior spaces, cargo and everything else was something that consumed hours of time. Making modifications to the rules was also something of a cottage industry:

Halving fuel consumption from 10% of ship's mass per jump number to 5% became a "club standard" at the Golden Brigade.
Various kinds of defensive energy screens were attempted. These were somewhat controversial, since they smacked of "handwavium" and Star Trek.
ECM, counter-missiles, and other augmentations to the ordinance section were also attempted. These were rooted in the wargaming interests of many gamers at the time - but playing Fletcher Pratt's Naval Wargame in space was also something more than most of us wanted to do.
Building bigger ships was also a major area of endeavor. Since Star Wars had just come out there was naturally interest in building really BIG ships (like Star Destroyer or Death Star-sized). But Traveller's ships topped out at 5000 tons, so devising rules for bigger ships was hotly debated.

As for starship combat, I don't recall a lot of games where the actual combat was run as a miniatures game, as suggested in second half of Book Two. We tended to run ship combat as an abstracted game, with descriptions of distances and hazards substituting for actually moving counters around on a game table. (I have to admit to wanting to try out the ship combat rules again, if only for their own sake, and to see how they would've worked. That may form the basis for another Traveller Tuesday.)

Next Tuesday: Experience - the Anti-D&D

Previous: 1977 Edition Combat
Previous: 1977 Edition Characters
Previous: Our original inspiration
Previous: The influence of OD&D
Previous: The other "three little booklets"
Next Tuesday:

I think I'm busy

2010-02-01T11:33:00.000-06:00

Doing some data analysis today, related to a query on this post on Grognardia. I am currently...

Running a weekly OD&D game, using Labyrinth Lord as a base set with variants, missing one Tuesday a month
Running a twice a month Chivalry & Sorcery (1st Ed.) game
Participating in a monthly gaming meetup, usually running something like Classic Traveller, Empire of the Petal Throne, or maybe Mutant Future.
Playing in a monthly C&S (4th Ed.) game.

...which works out to gaming about 1.5 to 2 times a week. Adding another regular game at this point is unlikely. How much do you game?

"New" OD&D campaign

2010-01-31T22:41:00.000-06:00

Over the past three months, I've been running a weekly Original D&D game at my FLGS, Misty Mountain Games. Like my previous attempt in Ames, I started with just one player, Gene. Gene had showed up to one of the Madison Traditional Gaming meetups, and had a sufficiently good time that he was interested in a regular game. I was initially worried about having only one player, but Gene seemed to be ready to take on the challenge, so off we went.

Rather than the Southlands setting I had used before, I went with a very simple set-up: "Here's the dungeon - the Tower of Xylarthen - and nearby is the village of Kingsbridge. It's tiny and on the edge of everything. Go kill some monsters and get their loot." Gene rolled up two characters: Kyle, a halfling thief, and Grollan, a dwarven fighter. I rounded out the party with Garric, an apparently fearless (or foolhardy) human magic-user with 1HP.

Some of my inspiration for this came from a series of posts on Ars Ludi about the West Marches campaign. I figured that my weekly open game would lend itself to that kind of set-up, and I hoped that having a relatively simple game would be less work for me as a referee (which turned out to be true). I also made a point of shamelessly swiping stuff from my collection of gaming magazines and materials, and then filing off the serial numbers to fit them into the campaign. A lot of this was done simply to re-familiarize myself with the rules of Our Favorite Game, and to avoid me making a big creative investment in the world (an old mistake of mine).

Adventuring with just one player has been fascinating. I've ended up re-sizing encounters to make it possible for an adventuring party of 3-4 characters to survive, though I haven't completely fudged everything. I've also encountered real questions dealing with all sorts of stuff:

Combat: should initiative be just a d6 roll, including or not including a Dexterity bonus? What about weapon length?
Base mechanics: who gets to roll for what? Do I roll for opening doors? How many chances do characters get?
Experience points: awarded for killing monsters, check. What about monsters defeated or thwarted? What about experience points for gold? What about taking character level and dungeon level into account?

We've now gamed about a dozen times, and have added a player, Dave. Now that we've doubled the size of the player group, we'll see how things evolve

The Wilderness Architect

2010-01-28T10:25:00.001-06:00

One of the first things I encountered when I ventured into the online world of the Old School Renaissance was something of an obsession with dungeon design. What made it worse was the assertion that wilderness adventuring was "broken" and there was no real rhyme or reason to how to design a wilderness campaign.

This got me into a lot of arguments.

Remembering a series of articles from White Dwarf entitled the Dungeon Architect, I decided to go back to Vol. 3 of OD&D, and really "get under the hood." This gave rise to a series of posts on the ODD74 forum entitled, "The Wilderness Architect." This was expanded upon and published as a series of articles in Fight On!.

I'm now planning on releasing this as a relatively inexpensive POD book and PDF file, with some rather cool additional material. I could go with Lulu, and do it as a 6x9 perfect bound book, or do it as a digest-sized comic (5 x 7.5) from Ka-Blam, which might be cheaper. What I would like to do is produce it as a 5.5 x 8.5 digest sized booklet, saddle-stitched. If anyone has suggestions on this, either on the format or on where to get it done, please let me know. Thanks!

Raised by wild wargamers

2010-01-27T14:55:00.002-06:00

One of the distinct differences I've noticed between gamers who started gaming after D&D became really popular (c. 1983 or 1984) is that they aren't as curious as those who started before that, in my experience. Particularly those who started gaming before D&D actually appeared, playing board wargames and/or historical miniatures. I got my start with games such as Avalon/Hill's Afrika Korps (see map up above), a fun introductory boardgame. I think I still have my copies of Panzerblitz and Panzer Leader buried deep in the collection.

Playing these games - or playing miniatures - often involved fairly extensive supplemental research about the battles and wars being played out on the table. Did Rommel make a mistake in laying siege to Tobruk? Probably. How effective were pikes in stopping cavalry charges? Most of the time - especially when used by the Swiss. Was Charles the Bold's Burgundian Army something different than what had been done before? Yes. And so on and so forth. Looking up obscure references in university libraries was seen as part of the fun. The lasting effect of this has been that I carry this research curiosity into role-playing games. What did Tolkien have to say about the origin of orcs? What was Star Fleet's General Order 7? Was there a specific location for Miskatonic University, according to Lovecraft?

I might have encountered a skewed sample of newer gamers, but I think this habit isn't one being taught to newer gamers. And I think that's unfortunate.

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Combat

2010-01-26T23:59:00.004-06:00

While technology will certainly progress in the centuries to come, it will also remain a fact that one of the surest ways to injure or kill an adversary will be to subject him to a large dose of kinetic energy, and a simple easy way to administer that energy is by bullet impacts...Some weapons, such as the laser rifle and carbine are not currently available weapons. Referees may feel free to create other weapons to suit the needs and desires of traveller society [note the lower-case "t"]. For example, laser pistols (very expensive, and perhaps unreliable), pneumatic guns functioning on compressed gas, and relatively silent, or light machineguns (heavier and of greater effectiveness than the automatic rifle).

- Characters and Combat, page 40

Traveller, 1977 edition

The above quote is worthwhile for understanding the perspective of the designers of Traveller, all of whom had considerable experience in historical wargaming, as well as being well-read in science fiction. Thus the choice of weaponry available for a science fiction role-playing game did not include "blasters" or "ray guns" or "phasers" - such weapons were clearly "Buck Rogers" in character, and Traveller was clearly intended to have a "hard SF" feel to it. This somewhat conservative approach has been mistyped as being backward and anachronistic, but I believe that criticism misses how Traveller paid homage to its literary roots. If anything, Traveller was true to those roots in science fiction of the day, particularly that of H. Beam Piper (as I wrote about before):

"Something I found while raiding on Tetragrammaton," he said. "I thought you might like to have it. It was made on Gram." It was an automatic pistol, with a belt and holster. The leather was bisonoid-hide; the buckle of the belt was an oval enameled with a crescent, pale blue on black. The pistol was a plain 10-mm military model with grooved plastic grips; on the receiver it bore the stamp of the House of Hoylbar, the firearms manufacturers of Glaspyth. Evidently it was one of the arms Duke Omfray had provided for Andray Dunnan's original mercenary company. (Space Viking, 1963)

While only a very brief selection, this quote reveals many of the elements that were incorporated into Traveller from the beginning: an emphasis on known and predictable weapons technology, raiding other planets, feudal technocracy, and mercenary companies. (I'll get back to these later.)

The combat system itself is relatively abstract and in retrospect fairly elegant, using a straightforward determination of surprise, initial range between parties, determination of escape or avoidance, and then resolution of combat, including movement and attack. Initial range, in particular, was dealt with abstractly, using a system of "range bands" (short, close, medium, long and very long range) which I'm sure now was designed as an alternative to a more precise (and therefore complicated and fiddly) miniatures-related system. However, I don't recall many of us at the time using the combat system as written. The advantages of the abstract character of combat were something that I think many of us missed at the time, unfortunately.

As in the first half of Book One, there are very few references to background setting in the combat system. Rather, I suspect that the designers at GDW assumed that people interested in a game like Traveller would recognize the sources of their inspiration, and either adopt them or make their own modifications to fit their own campaigns. Some hints of background included the following:

The cutlass: "The cutlass is the standard ship-board blade weapon and is usually kept in brackets on the bulkhead near important locations" - this triggered almost endless debates about the relative utility of blade weapons in spaceships, Valerian space-axes notwithstanding.
The body pistol: "a small, non-metallic semi-automatic pistol designed to evade detection by most weapon detectors." We made much of the exotic technology of being non-metallic in nature, Glocks being a decade at least in the future.
The rifle: " the standard military arm" - oh? we all thought. Why not laser rifles?
Battle Dress - "the ultimate in battle armor, military battle dress consists of a complete vacuum-suit-like array of metal, synthetic and electronic armor....Battle dress is strictly military, and not available to civilians in most circumstances...Vacc suit skill is required before an individual can even think of using battle dress. In the powered mode, battle dress doubles personal strength, and eliminates any endurance requirements or restrictions." Starship Troopers Mobile Infantry were the obvious reference here, and most of us caught that.

Some of the first things to be added to the weapons locker included laser pistols and light sabers, Star Wars having appeared at just about the same time. One of the interesting moments of cognitive dissonance was that George Lucas had insisted on using real guns as the basis for the weaponry in Star Wars - Sterling SMGs as "Imperial blasters" and a Lewis LMG with water jacket as some heavier blaster, all of it capped by Han Solo having a tricked-out Mauser with muzzle flash hider as his personal sidearm. Was it any wonder that people wanted both machine guns and blasters?

Previous: The other "three little booklets"
Previous: The influence of OD&D
Previous: Our original inspiration
Previous: 1977 Edition Characters
Next Tuesday: Starships

Madison Games Day 3

2010-01-23T22:54:00.000-06:00

No pictures this time; I wasn't able to go for the whole thing, due to other commitments. However, I did have the chance to run my Classic Traveller intro adventure, "Losing Air," for a couple of gamers at Madison Games Day 3. "Losing Air" I wrote as an opportunity to introduce various aspects of the game system, as they start off as a bunch of survivors on a lifeboat, with a disabled pirate ship nearby. Do they attempt to storm the pirate ship? Do they try for one of the moons of a "nearby" gas giant? In this case, they tried the former, and almost got killed by the security 'bot left in the Captain's cabin. It was a reasonably good time, and I had a chance to pass out fliers for Madison Traditional Gaming. I didn't get a chance to go to the recently-started Milwaukee Traditional Gaming meetup, so I'm waiting with baited breath to find out how that turned out.

TARGA Announces ITGW 2010 and GaryCon Auction!

2010-01-20T09:36:00.000-06:00

TARGA Announces International Traditional Gaming Week 2010

TARGA is pleased to announce that the International Traditional Gaming Week 2010 will occur on the week of March 21st through March 27th. The week will be kicked off by the fantastic games happening at GaryCon 2 in Lake Geneva and will conclude with a series of games on March 27th, including a Dave Arneson tribute game to be held in New York City. More information on the ITGW 2010 page.

TARGA Announces Pledge-An-Auction Drive

TARGA is organizing the 2010 Pledge-An-Auction drive in support of GaryCon 2 and the Gygax Family Fund for use in funding a memorial statue in honor of Gary. Come join our virtual auction and help us to present a great donation to Luke Gygax at GaryCon 2 this year! Starts on January 25th!

***

That's the official announcement. I'm now thinking about what I want to put up for auction. Man, I think I have a third copy of Chainmail, or my extra of the Rules Cyclopedia, or maybe something even more obscure. I'm going to ponder this for a bit....

Traveller Tuesday: 1977 Edition Characters

2010-01-19T10:05:00.006-06:00

Classic Traveller is iconic. It was the first really successful science fiction role-playing game, preceded by Metamorphosis: Alpha and Space Quest and a number of other largely forgotten games. What made Traveller different was that there was actually a minimum of background provided in the rules - most of the other games has assumed a great deal about the background setting for a game. In providing little background, the designers clearly followed the path of Original D&D, which did not attempt to model any one fantasy setting, but instead drew from many different authors and backgrounds. (Whether or not this was completely intentional isn't clear - we might ask Marc Miller or Loren Wiseman.) But the advantages of this are difficult for people to see today, after 30+ years of accretion in the GDW house campaign of the Third Imperium. My intention in this series of blog posts is to go back to the original 1977 rules set, looking at it from a fresh perspective as informed by the recent Old School Renaissance, over a series of Tuesdays.

Traveller came out in the summer of 1977. If I recall correctly, it made its debut at Origins that year, and by August, copies were beginning to arrive at The Little Tin Soldier Shop in Minneapolis. Almost overnight, people began to try the game out - generating characters, building spaceships, designing settings. One of the secrets of Traveller's success was that each of these elements was itself a kind of mini-game within the framework of the rules. (More on that later.)

Looking at the game, it appeared in a 6x9 box, with a black cover wrap. Inside were three digest-sized booklets, clearly modeled on the Original D&D set: Characters and Combat (Men & Magic), Starships (Monsters & Treasure), and Worlds and Adventures (The Underworld & Wilderness Adventure). So any referee picking up the game would already have a notion of what was in each book. I read all three avidly from cover to cover.

Book 1, Characters and Combat, starts off with a basic assumption about the game: "Traveller covers a unique facet of future society: the concept that expanding technology will enable man to reach the stars, and to populate the worlds which orbit them. Nevertheless, communication will be reduced to the level of the 18th Century, reduced to the speed of transportation. The result will be a large (bordering ultimately on the infinite) universe, ripe for the bold adventurer's travels." This is a fairly important point: while the specific background was left to the referee, the rules made certain general assumptions about how things worked - many of which were immediately altered by gamers buying the game.

Traveller also exclusively relied upon six-sided dice. Most of the gamers I knew already had handfuls of Gamescience polyhedral dice, but in places where such things were rare, this reliance on d6's may have given the game a boost in accessibility. In fact, the game was completely playable out of the box, albeit without any adventures. Then again, the concept of prepackaged adventures was relatively new in role-playing at the time.

Possibly the first hint of embedded background comes on page 4: "Should a player consider his character to be so poor as to be beyond help, he should consider joining the accident-prone Scout Corps, with a subconscious view to suicide." That's it - no "Imperial Scout Service" but the "Scout Corps" - whatever that might be.

The above quote is also important for showing that generating characters was seen as being a game within the game: even if you have a "bad" character, see what you can do with it - and if he dies, roll up a new one. Since 1977, Traveller has acquired an unfortunate "bum rap" from the notion that characters could die during character generation. I believe this misses this mindset of treating character generation as a kind of mini-game with an uncertain outcome - such a notion is almost antithetical to today's emphasis on "character builds" and extensive player design.

The choices of careers were themselves interesting: Navy, Marines, Army, Scouts, Merchants, and Other. None of these were explained in any way, except by reference to actual character generation. Thus "Navy" represented the "space navy" while "Marines" might be anything from "Mobile Infantry" a la Heinlein's Starship Troopers to the Marines in Niven and Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye. "Army" could be Andre Norton's Star Guard to Pournelle's Falkenberg Legion. "Scouts" were less clear, but "Merchants" had several science fiction inspirations, ranging from Andre Norton to Robert Heinlein to Poul Anderson (see below). Lastly, the "Other" occupation was conspicuously opaque in inspiration: were such characters criminals? (Mike Ford thought so) Or possibly spies? (My reading at the time.) In any case, each career provided a range of possibility, and thus invited a player to spend hours generating characters - which everyone I knew at the time sat down and did, almost immediately.

The emphasis on the human race is marked: the first mention of aliens comes on page 15, as an aside about the Streetwise skill: "(This is not to be considered the same as alien contact, although the referee may so allow)." Other hints about background assumptions come with the "air/raft": "The air/raft is the major transportation vehicle of most worlds, and most persons are aware of its basic operation." Mentioned in passing earlier, the mustering out benefit of "Travellers'" is revealed on page 22 as "Travellers' Aid: The Travellers' Aid Society is a private organization which maintains hostels and facilities at all class A and B starports in human space. Such facilities are available (at reasonable cost) to members and their guests." There are also details regarding the benefit of starships: "Free Traders" for merchants, and "scout ship[s] in reserve status" for scouts.

To assist in all of this, GDW wisely included an example of character creation. But the later example of "Alexander Lascelles Jamison" is not to be found here, at all. Who do we have? "Jamison" - a merchant captain, who ends up the owner of a "Type A merchant ship (30 years old) and he owes 10 years (120 months) of payments before he will have clear title." It's telling that the picture provided bears a clear resemblance to Nicholas van Rijn, from Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League stories: "...His several chins quivered under the stiff goatee....He sighed like a minor tornado and scratched the pelt on his chest. In the near tropic temperature which he insisted on maintaining his quarters, he need wrap only a sarong about his huge body." (Trader to the Stars, pp. 8-9)

What is important to note about all of this is how GDW deftly drew on gamers' previous familiarity with both Original D&D and with popular science fiction to provide a sense of comfort with their new game. Not too surprisingly, Traveller players and referees made good use of "space opera" to shape their campaigns, long before the Third Imperium was introduced to them.

Next Tuesday: 1977 Edition Combat

Birthday Stuff

2010-01-16T23:18:00.001-06:00

So - as some of you know - about a week ago, I celebrated another turn of our planet around its primary as measured by my date of birth. I had a grand time - went dancing with the Celtic Dance Society at ISU, out for cake and coffee and soy chai lattes afterwards, and then a really cool time with some friends, getting to bed quite late.

However, after I returned to Madison and made sure that TARGA was properly set up, I found a delivery from Lulu waiting for me when I got home. It included:

For a guy who has been a hardcore Classic Traveller and Bushido (in the 2 booklet edition) fan, Ruins and Ronin and X-plorers both look mighty interesting. Damn - where am I gonna find the time to play all the OSR games I wanna play??

Not a bad birthday, at all. ;)

That's me, Mr. Organizer

2010-01-01T21:05:00.001-06:00

I haven't been posting as much, partly because I've been engaging in bad behavior for a good cause. As some of your know, I spent about 12 years as a community organizer before realizing that I missed school. So after getting my doctorate, what did I do? I went back to community organizing - with a twist.

See, when I moved to Madison last August, I discovered that the fabled UW Dungeon Masters Association had disappeared as a student group, leaving me without a venue for finding other old school-minded gamers. I was a bit disconcerted; I had spent a lot of my youth in university gaming clubs, so the fact that the legendary DMA had up and vanished was a blow to my plans for ~~world domination~~ having fun gaming. I looked around at local game stores, but found that they weren't always welcoming to old school gaming, if only because a lot of the games were out of print.

So what's a community organizer to do? Set up a Meetup group, that's what.

I started things off with a get-together "just to talk" back in September. This was only partly successful, but it was a decent jog to my memory about how to do this sort of thing. So I printed up posters, and put them up around town at different game stores, libraries, and coffeehouses. I also chatted up the staff at the game stores, and asked for some help in steering gamers towards the group. By the end of September, there were about ten members.

I had a stroke of luck with Madison Games Day 2, which turned out to be a real success in building more awareness for Old School Goodness. In November and December, the group met twice at a local branch library - Madison Public Library meeting rooms were (and are) free, and this fitted in with my plans to take advantage of the growing connection between libraries and gaming.

In November, I ran an Empire of the Petal Throne adventure - going into the Jakallan Underworld, while another referee then ran a Chill game.
In December, there was a Harnmaster game, followed by "Losing Air" - an introductory adventure I designed for Classic Traveller.

It's early days yet, but at the end of the year, Madison Traditional Gaming could muster 30 members, and three successful meetups. There's clearly room for growth, as evidenced by the Milwaukee D&D Meetup, which has over 200 members and 51 meetups to its credit. We'll see what 2010 has to bring, but I'm pretty sure it's going to involve more gaming.

In praise of the 3x5 card

2009-11-12T09:57:00.001-06:00

On the OD&D Forum someone once asked, "What should be on a character sheet?" to which I replied, "Lines to write on :)"

Seriously, the only thing that has grown more in size over time than the typical RPG character sheet is the software used to create it. I used to think that extensive multi-page character sheets were the cat's pajamas, but over time they increasingly appeared as cluttered and distracting. I tried introducing a simple, relative spare D&D 3.5 character sheet to my grad school gaming group, but they preferred the "official" ones from WOTC.

When I first started role-playing, the character sheet was a 3x5 index card. The entire time I've played in Prof. Barker's Tekumel campaign all we ever used for character sheets were 3x5 cards. It's possible to scoff at them as being too small, but I think that's their secret: they keep character creation and conception relatively simple. There's only so much that can go onto a 3x5 card, and therefore only so much time to be spent on generating a character to fit on said card. From an "old school" perspective, it's definitely the way to go - and it seems like other people have figured this out already, as seen here, here (okay, it's Savage Worlds), and here (5th post down, if someone gets the link unbroken, please let me know).

I've got my own 3x5 character sheet for D&D, which can be found here; print on cardstock and then cut to size.

What Players Want

2009-11-09T16:21:00.001-06:00

I got together with some friends of mine - both of them experienced gamers - as they wanted to talk to me about possibly playing in my new campaign. We had gotten to a discussion of different styles of play, and what people want to do in a game and what makes a game good. It was one of those conversations where everybody has a lot to say, and were falling over each other saying them. But I was brought up short when one of my friends said, with an air of complete certitude, "Well, yes. Campaigns are supposed to be all about what the players want." (or words close to that)

My eyes apparently narrowed, and I said something close to "Frankly my dear, I don't give a damn." Well, what I said was a bit more pungent than that, and brought both of my friends up short. I quickly apologized, as I realized that one of my buttons had been inadvertently pushed by what my friend said.

Some background: I had mentioned to my friends that I was open to running several different things: a Classic Traveller game; Original D&D using Labyrinth Lord; a Chivalry & Sorcery game; possibly Tekumel. My partner, L., has always been interested in history, so I found myself putting together the C&S game, using Columbia Games' excellent Lionheart campaign setting. I figured I would set up things with a little mystery, a little magic, and maybe some minor changes in history. This sounded good to L., so I set out to recruit some other players, which is how I found myself in a diner in suburban Madison, somewhat embarrassed for swearing like a sailor.

It's a particular philosophical point: is the game all about the players? Where do the needs of the referee come in? It's been my impression based on conversations like this one and others, that there is a strong current in the hobby today that sees the referee as essentially a reactive (and somewhat passive) facilitator for the players and their ego trips. In particular, I've found myself bemused at the suggestion that a referee doesn't really have any rights to shaping the game setting or rules, unless the players agree - as if they are supposed to start the clockwork on the setting and retreat behind the curtain. (I blame this mostly on the emergence of computer games and MMORPGs, actually.)

There's two ways in which this philosophy is problematic: it is actually less of a challenge for players to allow them to determine things completely, and it pushes the interests of the referee out of the picture, unless that interest does not conflict with that of the players. I'll take as stipulated that a game can only work if the players and referee are in collective agreement about the game and the setting, but I think that a referee has a legitimate and real interest in setting the boundaries of the game she wants to run. To be sure, somebody could run a game nobody is interested in, but that's always possible. I'm not suggesting that a referee be unresponsive to his or her players, simply that the players' interests should not determine everything.

Which brings me back to my conversation with my friends. What I determined was a better statement of my belief was: the extent to which a player is interested in my needs as a referee is the extent to which I will be interested in their needs as a player. Put another way, a game is enjoyable if it facilitates a dynamic between the players and referee such that everybody gets their creative needs met, and this definitely includes the referee. Does that make sense?

Madison Games Day 2

2009-10-25T19:42:00.002-05:00

Madison Games Day 2 was a success for TARGA events.

Some logistics to churn: The total turn-out for this one-day free game-a-thon was somewhere around 40-50 people, with no pre-registration and a request from the event organizers asking for referees to submit events. Event listings were just one-line announcements (see blog), so it was a free-for-all to attract players.

Chad Thorson and myself showed up at Noon, and right away appropriated a table. We began generating characters for an OD&D session using Labyrinth Lord, with a quick dive into Under Xylarthen's Tower. At first it was just Chad and one other player, but we soon acquired several more players. I had initially generated a couple of henchmen - 1st level fighters named Fred and Charley - but with the addition of two more players to round out the party to six, they were ready to go into the dungeon. Coming down the narrow stairs, they moved straight ahead and were about to enter a room when a couple of fire beetles came on them from behind. But they were satisfactorily dispatched, and their gooey glowing bits used for lighting, rather than the oil lantern wielded by Alvin the Magnificent. The next two encounters were with a giant snake and then two giant weasels. In both cases, magic-users stated they were going to cast spells (Sleep and Web, respectively), but the rest of the party went charging in, resulting in some sleepy comrades, and then some glued to the floor party members. The party then avoided a nasty undead, and found a shaft leading to the 4th level and a bunch of white apes. The cleric in the party attempted a Speak With Animals, and the conversation with the two apes went something like this:

The cleric: "Hellooo!"

Ape: "Ah! Lunch!"

Cleric: "What do you mean?"

Ape: "You are here! Come down! We will have lunch!"

(Cleric to his compatriots: "well, that sounds sorta friendly..." Compatriots: "What sort of 'lunch' do they mean?")

Cleric: "What will we have for lunch?"

Ape: "You! Come down! You look tasty!"

And it went downhill from there....well, it descended into a melee, with the apes knocking down two party members. I had to invoke the -10 HP rule, though I probably ought to have been more hard-hearted and simply let the apes kill the two characters. However, about it was about three hours in, so we ended the session after dispatching the white apes, and the acquisition of a magic sword.

After a break for pizza, we resumed with the same group of players for a session of Empire of the Petal Throne. The Band of Heroes was sent off to discover more about ancient devices under Fort Pu'er and ended up on a Tubeway Car jaunt across Tekumel. Ice temples, Ssu, and King Griggatsetsa were all encountered, before ending up in Avanthar.

Things broke up around 9pm, as the organizers shut things down about then.

Some lessons learned:

1) Having a referee and at least one player makes recruiting more players easier. Having Chad ready to play broke the ice for the rest of the players, so I was really happy we had coordinated things.

2) Running several different games is more work than it might seem. I had originally planned on running Classic Traveller in addition to OD&D and EPT, and I ended up with four book bags of gaming material - all of which were heavy. It would've been much easier to run the same game three times and leave the other stuff at home.

3) Having flyers and swag to hand out is a Good Thing. I had a table display and a bunch of flyers, several copies of Microlite 74 v.1.1 in booklet form as swag, and One Page Old School Primers. They ate it up. The next Madison Games Day 2 will be sometime in January; we might have two sets of events to run there.

Here's hoping you roll a "20" on your next saving throw!

Half Year Mark

2009-10-07T16:56:00.001-05:00

It was Dave Arneson's birthday about a week ago. Unfortunately, Dave wasn't here to celebrate it; he passed away earlier this year. In the midst of everything else, I took a moment to think about Dave and what he brought into the world with his marvelous creation of fantasy role-playing. It reminded me that I had done the right thing six months ago.

Man, I miss him.

"Mistakes were made, Senator...."

2009-10-06T22:50:00.000-05:00

One of the more difficult things to admit as a referee is when you make a mistake. We like to think that mistakes are mostly of the "oops, didn't quite mean it that way" variety, but sometimes mistakes can be much bigger than that.

Probably my earliest big mistake came when I was running a Chivalry & Sorcery adventure for a bunch of players at my local game club. They had encountered a barrow wight, and I ran through the entire encounter without taking into account the serious "fear" ability that the undead creature had. The party went away with a bunch of loot, and I felt bad about it. So when I went back to read up for the next adventure, I came across the rule about inflicting fear - and decided to re-run the entire encounter at the next club meeting. There were howls of protest, but some of them actually went along with it. Looking back on it 30 years later, I still recall this as a moment that I'm not at all proud of. Re-running an encounter? My older self says, "suck it up and learn from it for next time."

Somewhat more recently, I ran a D&D 3rd Edition campaign, with players who were...casual, shall we say, about in-game consequences of their actions. It all came to a head when the paladin in the party started to bargain with the rogue in the party about how to quietly steal from (and possibly murder) a third player-character. The player of the paladin seemed shocked that her deity just might have ideas about such dishonorable and ignoble behavior - and the rest of the party seemed as shocked as she was. That group fell apart for that reason, amongst others. It made me think carefully before starting a long-term campaign with people whose gaming style I was unfamiliar with.

Not that long ago, I ended up running an espionage game that was supposed to transition into an Infinite Worlds campaign. We had all gone to see The Bourne Identity, and my players were really pumped up about running spies and doing covert operations. What I hadn't counted on was the complete disinterest on the part of the players to do any real world research about the organizations their characters worked for (CIA, MI5, the Mossad, etc.). The mistake I made was then in providing them with NPCs who would feed them information. Then practically every adventure session started with, "I call home; what do I find out?"

I'd love to be able to say that I've learned enough from all of these experiences (and many others) to have a coherent idea of What It All Means, and How To Improve Your Game in Three Easy Lessons, but it would not be true. The reality is that I find myself having learned from some of these mistakes and doing a bit better - but that's about it. Since I just moved, I don't have a regular gaming group right now, so I know I'm a little rusty....

...which means I'm likely to make a mistake or two in the future. Here's to not rolling a 1 on my next saving throw!

Proof of a Conspiracy

2009-09-23T01:02:00.000-05:00

Yes, this photo - taken at a Starbucks in south Minneapolis - reveals the sinister dark underside of the Old School Renaissance. Gathered for nefarious purposes are (from left to right): Aaron Kesher, of Sandbox Empire (AKA Kesher on the Original D&D Discussion Board), then myself, and then Tom Juntunen, one of the contributors to the furtherance of all things Tekumel.

This was the first time I met Aaron, and it was a blast to meet someone else from the discussion boards and blogs. Turns out that Tom is a nearby neighbor of his, and since Tom and I go way back, it seemed appropriate to get together and catch up with one another. We had a grand time talking about everything from Warriors of Mars to Microlite 74 to The Source Comics & Games - and got Tom to consider running Classic Traveller again. As Elizabeth Bear would say, "WIKTORY!"

The staff at the Starbucks were courteous enough, and put up with our raucous reminiscing until quite some time after closing. Then, not unlike some taverns in games I've played in, they unceremoniously tossed us out onto the street. And then we stood out under the streetlamps, talking some more, until Aaron had to head home, ditto Tom and myself. It was a very fine evening.

It's not Dr. Pepper, but it looks tasty

2009-09-20T10:09:00.000-05:00

Jones Soda has developed a new limited edition of soda pop geared for D&D players. And while this news has probably bounced off the far boundaries of the internet a couple of times already, I've just heard about it. It reminds me of the very early days of gaming, when a potions of healing were found in six-packs, if you were lucky....

Campaigns and Living OD&D

2009-09-14T14:48:00.002-05:00

Rob Conley has some interesting ideas about a kind of Living OD&D that might be something TARGA might eventually run. (Is that enough "might"s? It's very exploratory in nature, or so it would seem to me.)

What I find fascinating about this is that in matches what people did oh-so-long-ago, where characters and campaigns were not necessarily tied to one another so tightly. Jeff Rients talked about this awhile ago, and his discussion is still spot on. What's a little disheartening is how quickly people want to add some sort of tracking mechanism, when one of the beauties of the OSR is that it recognizes the primacy of the referee in their own game. Even so, it's an interesting discussion.

Table Fees

2009-09-13T19:12:00.000-05:00

"Five dollars an hour."

"For a table?"

"Yep."

"...And that's if the game is out of print or unavailable from your distributor?"

"Yep."

I stood, slightly dumbfounded. The gaming tables were in a next-door store front, at that moment completely empty of gamers. The Not-So-FLGS manager smiled that "I'm with a customer but I don't really mean it" smile. I must've let on that I was taken a little aback, when he continued, "Hey, if you game for four or five hours with a few friends, that's just a five from each of you. Cheap!"

"But it's free if you can get the game from your distributor."

"Yeah."

I can understand that game stores need to sell games to stay open, but this kind of table fee is clearly aimed at moving current product, rather than the long tail of gaming. It also has encouraged me to look at other game stores in the area to run games at - simply because they don't have such fees. Economics can cut both ways.

Dan Proctor interview

2009-09-10T13:06:00.001-05:00

Dan Proctor, author of Labyrinth Lord, gets interviewed over on RPG Blog II. It's an interesting interview, since I chose Labyrinth Lord over Swords & Wizardry for OD&D simulation.

I found myself curious about it and the Advanced Edition Companion - since much of what I wanted to add to my game was somewhere in-between OD&D and AD&D 1st Edition. (OSRIC is too close to AD&D for me to really find it workable, largely because of slavish attitudes towards the rules rather than the rules themselves)

One of the reasons why I didn't go with Swords & Wizardry was frankly the lack of art in the original release. Now I find myself interested in putting the new versions of it and Labyrinth Lord side-by-side and seeing which one I like better. (I suspect I will stick with Labyrinth Lord, however.)

Need some help

2009-09-07T11:29:00.000-05:00

I'm working on a project that might be rather interesting when it's done. What I need is this: a global project of the Earth with the poles in different locations - the South Pole somewhere around the Black Sea, and the North Pole somewhere in the South Pacific. Some more glaciation would be cool, too. In particular, I'm interested in the actual geography and terrain of Antarctica underneath all of that ice. I have no idea what's actually there, aside from a mountain range that cuts across the continent.

If there is somebody out there with the requisite chops to help me out with this, or even some directions in how to do it for myself, that would be neat.

Player-characters are....

2009-09-06T09:35:00.002-05:00

"I'm a loafer with a dead-end job in real life; why can't I play a hero in a fantasy game?" I've heard comments like this fairly frequently from gamers with whom I've played, over the years. Aside from the self-esteem issues implicit in the comparison, there's a fairly good reason why not every player-character is going to be a hero.

Heroes have to beat something. Overcome some sort of challenge. You know, win.

But for that win to have any meaning, there's gotta be uncertainty. The chance of losing. Which is why I've always said that player-characters in D&D (and frankly, any RPG) are not heroes when they are created. They have the chance of becoming heroes.

I was reminded of this when I read Dan of Earth's Simple Comparison. Nicely put, Dan!

What are these "modules" of which you speak?

2009-09-05T16:52:00.004-05:00

When I first started roleplaying, back in 1975, there were no modules. Instead, people spoke of "dungeons" - as in, "Say, we're going to play in Steve's dungeon on Saturday - want to join us?" The idea of going on an adventure was firmly inside the frame of a larger campaign. Some people had elaborate set-ups, with kingdoms, history, background - even different races to play. Others were focused on the site of adventure; everything else was superfluous. If players came and went, so did their characters.

So when I picked up a copy of Keep on the Borderlands just the other day at Frugal Muse Books, I found myself remembering some of the reaction of "old-timers" to the idea of stand-alone adventures: "why would you want that? I mean, it's not even written for your campaign." Up until 1977 or so, almost all of the material produced for D&D had been published in The Strategic Review, The Dragon, or Judges Guild material (the latter being more recent). Which resulted in lots of interesting monsters, magic items, elaborations on the rules, and all of it got picked apart and then kitbashed by referees for their own games. What this meant for the players was that the narrative of adventure emerged from play, and wasn't predetermined by a series of modular pre-fabricated interactions.

So it seems to me that the period of 1974 to 1977 could be marked as being fundamentally different from roleplaying after 1977. It's that kind of gameplay I want to see explored further in the Old School Renaissance. Put another way, think about this - how would you design an adventure to share with others that didn't have a "greased rail" approach, like so many adventures written at the time?

Open-Ended Campaigns

2009-07-22T22:22:00.003-05:00

One of the more interesting aspects of the early days of role-playing games was the assumption that campaigns were something that lasted some time. Certainly Greyhawk and Blackmoor lasted a very long time - but in the first decade of gaming, there did not seem to be any sort of assumption that a campaign would end. Reading articles from early issues of The Dragon, it's quite clear that campaigns did not die (but they might fade away).

I know this era of long-lasting campaigns didn't last. In fact, one good reason for them not lasting for regular play was simply the appearance of new role-playing games. If you wanted to play a different game, and your group met once a week, well, something would have to give. "D&D or Bushido? It's your call!" "How about Boot Hill?"

Now, it seems that campaigns are envisioned as something to start and then end. Case in point: a friend of mine ran a 3rd Edition D&D game set in the Forgotten Realms, and while I enjoyed it, I found that he had plotted a specific "story arc" to end at a particular point in the campaign, and then it was done. I had mentally prepared my Tiefling paladin (not angsty, just different) for a longer period of play, so the end of the adventure was something of an abrupt stop for me.

But in the present Old School Renaissance, we've got the chance to figure some of this out in advance. I think there is something qualitatively different to an open-ended campaign, in comparison with those with pre-set ending points. I'm not saying that a campaign must be played constantly and forever, but more a difference in viewpoint about beginnings and endings. Put somewhat more philosophically, I think that the duration of a campaign is just as much a part of the "sandbox," so to speak, as the geography of a campaign.

Moving and various issues

2009-07-19T11:45:00.004-05:00

I'm moving to Madison, Wiscowsin at the end of the month. Not too surprisingly, I've decided to invest in a lot of standard-size boxes to make the move go more easily. A quick check of Uline revealed that they had 12x10x10 boxes (that's 30.5cm by 25.4cm by 25.4cm for metric folks), for 51 cents in any quantity. They've been working quite well, though I am still searching for the best all around size of cardboard box, i.e. one that will handle games, magazines and books with decent fit for all categories. I think I've moved too many times in my past.

But there are a LOT of games to move. This has led me to rediscover some old chestnuts as I've been packing: Rivets, Lords & Wizards, and Daredevils. Quite a walk down Memory Lane! Rivets was great - I converted the designs for "boppers" into stats for a set of science fiction miniatures rules, and there's a Morrow Project adventure lurking around there someplace, too. Lords & Wizards I must have bought but never played; the counters were unpunched. And Daredevils - man, crazy busy set of rules, but fun and we had several referees who really were into pulp adventure. Good times.

But - for now - into the boxes and onto the truck. If anybody knows of other members of the Old School Movement in Madison, keep me posted!

Aaron Allston needs your help

2009-07-15T09:17:00.001-05:00

As it turns out, Aaron Allston has had an emergency bypass operation. Aaron's a science fiction writer, and in the past contributed significantly to The Space Gamer and other SJG projects. Details on how to contribute money for Aaron's recovery can be found here.

This isn't the first time someone in our community has needed help. For several years, John M. Ford went from being on dialysis to getting a new kidney, and the astronomical costs were defrayed (somewhat) by donations made by his friends. So give some money. It will make a difference.

De gustibus non est disputandem...and all that

2009-07-14T21:40:00.002-05:00

I ended up recently having an online conversation with Jonathan Tweet about his recent experience with Old School gaming. He seemed to mildly enjoy it, but had this to say about the rules:

The problem with such games is that there's a lot of bad stuff that people are nostalgic for. For every bad rule that you might want to strip out, there are people who won't think your OD&D is original enough if you don't have it. Swords & Wizardry even has two AC systems that it uses side-by-side: the old-fashioned 9-down system that they have to include for tradition's sake and the 10+ system that they have to include because it's just clearly better....The 'bad stuff' I'm referring to is stuff like: too much arithmetic (5% XP bonus, copper pieces, etc.), wonky XP progression per class, too-random character creation, and poor class balance. It also has the problem that didn't get fixed until 4e: all spells are daily, which makes spellcasters play too differently from the fighters.

I suggested he might like Microlite 74, and he thought it looked "pretty cute" - a compliment I would say. :)

But what I find interesting here is how he jumps to the conclusion that it is nostalgia that drives interest in the Old School movement. Oh, sure - there is some element of fond remembrance for some of us - but not all of us, and it certainly isn't the main or even significant driving factor. I was also rather surprised, actually, to discover how quick he was to label some rules as "bad" and various "problems" with the game that were "fixed" in 4th Edition. In truth, I am still curious about how he came to these conclusions, but I think it is telling that someone of Jonathan's creativity has reached such definite conclusions.

Beyond that, I also noticed that he implied that "bad rules" were retained by Old School gamers as a kind of authenticity test. I noted in my comments to him that such an attitude was not considered appropriate by Old School gamers; "doing it right" means doing it the way you want to. I'm still bothered by his implied criticism, though. Who are these "people" he's referring to? It can't be only Old School gamers - lots of games have fans who want to play "by the book." My suspicion is that he's half-remembering gamers who wanted everything to be settled by the "Sage Advice" column in The Dragon more so than gamers who were playing between 1974 and roughly 1978. (I could be wrong about this, but I do wonder....)

Three really little books

2009-06-26T20:00:00.003-05:00

Sometime in the past decade - probably about seven or eight years ago - WOTC decided to bring out miniature versions of various AD&D and D&D books. I picked up the three core books for AD&D 1st Edition. I kept them in my desk in grad school, apparently hoping for the spontaneous lunch session game with my fellow grad students (didn't happen).

They languished as I stopped gaming altogether during my dissertation writing period, and eventually sat in a box, altogether forgotten. Then, just the other day, I ran across them again as I was searching for something else. Despite the micro-miniature font size (a magnifying plastic ruler took care of that), I found myself thinking "hey, if you needed gaming supplies for a bug-out bag, these would be great!" Sanity slowly returned, and I got to thinking about them, and an internet search revealed this (scroll down to see the entire set).

I'm Back

2009-06-01T10:02:00.002-05:00

Something of an unintended vacation took place over the past month. Between end-of-semester grading and then going to WisCon, I found myself for little time for the Old School Movement. It didn't help matters that my weekly game on Monday afternoons had to shut down due to schedule changes for my players. But it's June, and I am picking things back up.

I hate gaming at home

2009-05-04T22:18:00.003-05:00

"Hate" might be too strong a word here, but I have a difficult time seeing the appeal of gaming in someone's - anyone's - home. Before everybody goes bonkers over this, lemme explain.

In an earlier post, I reminisced about different gaming clubs of my youth. One important fact about all of them was that they were in public places - a student union at university, and a police station community room. Since that time, I've spent a lot of time gaming in people's homes, and with one notable exception, they've all struck me as distinct second choices, compared with public spaces as gaming locales. I am pretty sure this is because I see as disadvantages the very things that might appeal to others.

"But we can get together in the comfort of our own home and game as long as we like." While it is true that time and space are nominally more under your control in your own home, the fact of the matter is that this doesn't always work in practice. Homes have to be maintained and kept clean, and while gaming all night long might seem attractive, I rarely see decisions made at 4am that stand the test of next-day thinking (don't get me started on jobs and getting up in the morning). What other people see as freedom I see as heaping responsibility on the person living there.

"We can really focus on the game when we're at home." Really? Most gamers' households are one big distraction when it comes to gaming. Game, book and media collections, just to start with - and then there are other distractions that only arise in your own home: telemarketers, non-gaming roommates or family members, you name it.

There are other reasons, but you get the idea. I think the framework of public spaces used for gaming actually makes gaming better:

Conference and meeting rooms have tables and chairs - and that's pretty much it. That's all anybody needs. Anything more than that - couches to snooze on, etc. - will probably get in the way of gaming.
Clubs have set times for meetings: for example Tuesdays, start at 7pm, out by midnight - everybody knows when the game is going to start and end, and what day is set for the game. Saves lots of time trying to mesh schedules, starting and ending times, etc. Which results in more time gaming.
Public spaces are also neutral territory. If Homeowner Harry has a falling out with the gaming group, you need to find another place to game, post haste. But with a public locale, you don't have these kinds of conflicts - you might get different conflicts, but not these.
Clean-up is a shared responsibility. Rather than assuming that Fred and his roomies will throw out the pizza boxes, everybody gets to pitch in for clean-up at the end of the session. That also usually makes it go faster (see above comment about scheduling, i.e. more time gaming).

In the end, public spaces such as gaming clubs do something else that gaming at home can never do: it makes our hobby more visible. Seeing how much people complain about "the death of gaming" it seems to me that the benefits of having a bright, friendly atmosphere of a game club outweigh the (supposed) advantages of gaming at home. To be sure, game clubs can fall victim to their own organizational faults and foibles, but in the end, I still think they come out on top.

Missing Out - Grr!

2009-04-27T09:27:00.006-05:00

It's a safe assumption that most gamers have heard of Wil Wheaton - you know, Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation? And you might have heard that he's been running a D&D game, yes?

In the crush of end-of-semester grading, combined with the passing of Dave Arneson, I managed to miss this (see right): Wil's design for a t-shirt, available through shirt.woot. Now I'm not much for t-shirts anymore, ever since I stopped running science fiction conventions, but this one grabbed my attention.

Imagine my disappointment when Wil found out that it was no longer available. I know the internet has an attention span of a gerbil hopped up on caffeine (or cocaine), but this is just plain silly. I'd be overjoyed if the shirt became available again - if you agree with me, let Wil know!

Gaming Clubs

2009-04-26T22:58:00.003-05:00

When I was much younger (like in my teens), I was an avid wargamer and role-player. One of the things that made this much easier for me was the existence of three different gaming clubs: the Conflict Simulation Association (CSA), the Fantasy Role-Playing Game Association (FRPGA - pronounced "ferp-gah"), and the 6th Precinct Wargaming Club.

CSA met on Tuesday nights at Coffman Memorial Union, since it was a student organization at the University of Minnesota. Oddly enough, we wouldn't game all the time. Sometimes we would just sit around and talk about gaming - or Monty Python, or comic books, or Star Trek, or medieval history. But throughout the school year, Tuesdays from 7pm until 11pm were spent on the third floor of Coffman, now thoroughly remodelled and completely unrecognizable.
FRPGA met on Saturdays, also at Coffman Memorial Union. It, too, was a student organization. From roughly noon until midnight, gaming would go on - or not, as different groups and campaigns took over different meeting rooms on the third floor.
The 6th Precinct club met on Friday nights, in the community room of the Police Department's 6th Precinct. Located at 26th and Nicollet in south Minneapolis, the 6th Precinct was a forerunner of what would later be known as "community policing." We never saw the cops; the community room had it's own entrance, and from 7pm until late into the evening (and morning), gaming would go on in this one long, narrow room. Complete with lots of folding tables and chairs, shag carpeting and woodgrain paneling, it was busy with gamers rolling dice, no matter the weather outside.

So now I've come to discover that both the CSA and FRPGA are no longer to be found at the University of Minnesota. The 6th Precinct was eliminated long ago in city budget cuts. While it is the case that the Guild of Wargamers and Roleplayers is alive and well at my new alma mater, Iowa State University, I began wondering if gaming clubs are still viable as places to find like-minded gamers. It paralleled the dismal news frequently heard about the disappearance of the Friendly Local Game Shop (FLGS). It's not that hard to form a student group or a club - it seems to me that there ought to be opportunities to do this - is it just that people don't think this way anymore about gaming as a social activity?

Fortunately, a review of the list of student organizations at the University of Minnesota revealed several successors to my old favorites. The Campus Crusade for Cthulhu, the Campus Wargamers, and the Society for the History of Naval Warfare all seem to be carrying the flag for gaming on campus. Even so, there doesn't seem to be a club for tabletop role-playing games (as we now refer to them) - room for growth, methinks!

Remembering dead PCs

2009-04-23T16:35:00.002-05:00

Having just gotten back from Dave Arneson's visitation and funeral, I hope you will forgive me if my mind wanders just a little. It was a decent funeral, and I was glad for having Michael and Jean Mornard there, as well as connecting with all sorts of old friends and making a few new ones.

I started to think about how we honor our fallen, and then that got me thinking about dead PCs in role-playing games (I warned you my mind was wandering). I mean, in Boot Hill, fallen gunslingers have a place and even a little ritual to go along with the exchange of lead in the middle of the street. But what about in D&D? Did or does your party have ways to deal with their dead? Maybe it is just me, but I have a hard time remembering any sort of ritual or practice of giving the dead a decent burial ("Out of the boat/And into the dark/Goodbye, Jenkins/Hello, shark"), except perhaps after they had achieved some sort of rank or recognition - and maybe this lacunae says something about the games I have played in.

How do you honor your slain party-members? ("Looting the body" is not quite what I was thinking of, okay?)

Castle by David Macaulay

2009-04-19T21:59:00.002-05:00

Castleby David Macaulay is supposedly for kids - but pretty much every gamer of any age I have ever known has a copy on their shelves. It's a grand book full of marvelous illustrations, and what it does best is explain how and why castles were built the way they were. From the perspective of gamers and gaming, this book is a treasure trove of little design details that can be added to castles and dungeons and fortifications, to add background detail and a few little mysteries, e.g. why are there holes tracing a shallow angle along the castle wall? To provide anchor points for posts for a ramp to transport rocks.

There's a larger question of why would castles in a fantasy setting with flying monsters and destructive magic be built in any way similar to that of our ordinary Middle Ages. It's up to the referee to determine the answer to that question. If you want a decent base to work from in castle design, however, this is a good book. You can get it here.

Beginnings and Endings

2009-04-18T00:31:00.002-05:00

I'm currently in Madison, Wisconsin for the weekend, and am getting ready to go to Minneapolis-St. Paul for Dave Arneson's memorial on Monday. It's pretty obvious to me now that Dave's passing had a much bigger effect on me than I was initially willing to admit. That having been said, there have been a few gaming-related ideas chasing through my mind. In no particular order:

Alchemy and alchemists: there's been some interest lately in the idea of alchemists in D&D. Combined with the idea of spell components, one person pointed out that this means magic-users get lots more "screen-time" if this is done. Not necessarily - I can see magic-users hiring druids, rangers and the like to gather spell and alchemy components. Moreover, groups of adventurers would be likely choices to get the more-difficult-to-find stuff.
Traveller Tuesday: one of the more interesting things I did recently was to find my old Traveller set from 1977 - and you know what? It reads quite differently from the 1981 revision. (Surprise, surprise). And there is also the different mapping scheme, and other recollections from the past. Now that I have a decent all-in-one printer, I can scan in some old stuff to share with all of you.
Old fanzines: a side-effect of digging out the old Traveller stuff was finding a bunch of old fanzines, including a fairly complete run of Ryth Chronicle, edited by John Van De Graaf (John, you out there?). Ryth Chronicle got a mention in an early Strategic Review, so it is notable for being one of the earlier non-APA RPG gaming 'zines. One of the more interesting finds in Ryth Chronicle was a chart showing characters in the campaign, both dead and alive, along with XP, number of sessions, etc. I plan on doing something with that and the other fanzines I found.
Magic-User - completely new interpretation. This one is a bit more of a project; I wanted to come up with a magic system more like that of Chivalry & Sorcery, but clearly still rooted in D&D. Some time ago I updated my notes for this to 3rd Edition; now I get to strip a lot of that out and go back to my original thoughts on the subject.

...and then there's more besides all of that.

Easter, Ostara, and Holidays

2009-04-12T18:40:00.004-05:00

There's a side of world-building that comes up whenever you have clerics - so what sorts of holidays does their religion actually have? If you go about it fairly blithely, you end up with something that looks like a mix between the medieval Catholic list of Saints' days and the solstice/equinox set-up from modern paganism. And as far as it goes, that's not bad - familiar without being too familiar. But it also has a "been there, done that" feel to it for me.

What holidays represent in game terms are a tension between referee and player creativity, or so it seems to me. Because holidays represent significant moments in time, it is very easy for referees to engage in some deep world-building regarding them - but that's not necessarily a good thing. If you build a deeply detailed religion with holidays, tenets and doctrine, you have to work to provide players with a means of adding to them or in some way creatively engaging with what you've presented. By contrast, one of the things that I actually like about OD&D's Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes is how unfinished it is - you get stats on the deities, some information on the pantheon of which they are a member, and sometimes a little about their followers and worship. There's a lot of room for a referee and players to work in developing something for their own game. Each version of this that has followed - Deities and Demi-Gods, Legends and Lore, etc., have gotten more and more detailed about the religions. Unfortunately, that means that - like with stat blocks for monsters - it's easy to get buried under "doctrine" and "structure of belief." It's a lot of "rich background detail" - but how much do you or your players really want?

I used to want a LOT of background detail; even today, what I consider a bare-bones outline is more than some referees are probably willing to do. But now I find myself wanting to leave the background a little more mysterious - open to being left undefined or created out of game-play. So when it comes to holidays (and in-game religion), I'm come full-circle from when I was much younger - I'm willing to do some work, but I think I'd rather let a player playing a cleric help me figure out when they are. It'll be more fun that way.

Dave Arneson and Tekumel

2009-04-11T08:20:00.003-05:00

I was asked on another forum to provide some thoughts about Dave Arneson and his participation in Prof. M.A.R. Barker's world of Tekumel. I've decided to share those here, as well:

Dave played irregularly with the Thursday Night Group, sometimes for a longer stretch when he lived in the Twin Cities, then for the occasional visit when he was in the Bay Area or Florida. Dave's primary character, Captain Harchar, was clearly one of those "original EPT" characters in Tekumel. Harchar was a weird mix of "D&D character" and "upstanding member of the Blazoned Sail clan." I suspect some of this was due to Prof. Barker always keeping in mind that it was Dave at the gaming table, but Dave managed to always act in a "proper Tekumelani" fashion while making it very clear that ol' Harchar was in it for himself and the gold and nobody else, in about that order. Harchar always had two assistants/bodyguards/helpers with him, Swordslinger and Staffswinger - those were nicknames, but the NPCs were tough and made sure Harchar was unmolested. You might think that Prof. Barker was providing a kind of special assistance to Dave, but such was not the case.

Harchar repeatedly got himself into and out of rather sticky and/or tough situations - up to and including getting his ship transported from the Chanayaga Deeps to Lake Parunal, where the locals had never seen anything larger than their fishing boats and small single-rower galleys before. He set himself up as the incoming governor of Mihallu, and had everybody convinced of this fact, and the actual ruling clique in Ninue ended up working feverishly to discredit him (they eventually succeeded before he reached Mihallu - read some of the related story in Prof. Barker's novel Flamesong). Eventually Harchar and his ship were returned to the waters off the city of Jakalla.

Dave was also responsible for some of the development of the concept known as the "Tree of Time" in Tekumel, wherein all of the different strands of possibility were represented in a kind of metaphysical conceptualization as a ever-branching (and reconnecting) set of tree branches. He was playing a different character, but I recall quite distinctly how we ended up traversing
the Many Planes looking for things, and Dave's character (not Harchar this time) finding evidence that signified to him how the Tree was manifest, operated, etc. - it became a kind of religious revelation that Dave's character shared with others - usually to Dave's advantage.

Dave Arneson

2009-04-09T07:54:00.003-05:00

As has been reported by many sources, Dave Arneson has passed away. It's been just over a month since the anniversary of Gary's death, and now both of them are no longer with us. I hope people will take the time to appreciate these two men, who changed the world with their modest creation. Whether that is through gaming, or raising a toast, or a simple prayer, they deserve to be honored in our memories.

Being thankful

2009-04-08T14:41:00.002-05:00

For those of you who do not know, Dave Arneson is in hospice, dealing with late-stage cancer. I've known Dave now for many years - not as close as some, but we're friends. I also happen to know Michael Mornard ("Old Geezer" on many forums), and a couple of weeks ago, I had the chance to get the two of them together for the first time in many years. We sat in the dining room of the home of Malia, Dave's daughter, and talked and reminisced for a couple of hours - rather, I listened as the two of them went over fond memories of days past, and compared notes about the present day. They both were very happy to have the chance to see one another, and what with the current news about Dave's condition, I am glad I did it.

The Wyrm Biting Its Tail

2009-03-29T23:20:00.004-05:00

Over the past week, I've been migrating from my laptop, a Dell Inspiron 700m, to a new desktop machine. I had been using my laptop as a substitute for my old desktop machine, which had a significant "blue screen of death" system failure two days after I turned in my dissertation. But the laptop was clearly a second choice for all around use, despite the fact that it has served me well through a bunch of grad school. So I've been somewhat delayed in catching up with blogs and all of you.

If that were the only reason for my delay, I wouldn't feel so conflicted. As a reward for finishing grad school, I've been delving into playing Oblivion. And I've been enjoying it a fair bit, especially since my friend Andrew had tweaked the game significantly with various mods - mostly to get it to feel more like Morrowind.* I had gotten turned on to playing the latter game by my friend Mike, who once invited me over to his place to watch over his shoulder while playing because "you really have to see how they rendered the water." He was right - the visual impact of the game was amazing. Morrowind was the first game where I watched a sunset, just because it was so spectacular (for those of you who might be curious, it was looking across the small bay to the west of Seyda Neen).

That's what made Morrowind a really interesting game for me and for Mike (we shared similar attitudes towards game play - he originally got me turned on to playing Darklands from Microprose oh so long ago). Morrowind was about the closest you could get to a "sandbox" campaign in a CRPG, or so it seemed to us. The actual main quest was interesting for the first half or so; once you figured out your character's True Mission in Life, it was go-here-do-that, lather, rinse, repeat. Okay, that's a bit harsh - but the sheer variety of other things you could do was fascinating. I guess I should not have been surprised by how much I liked Morrowind; turns out that the lead designer on the game was Ken Rolston.** Ken's been in gaming forever; he taught the first seminar I went to at Origins 82, and he helped design Paranoia and material for Runequest.

So I ended up putting off Oblivion until I was done with grad school. (Don't touch that line.) Getting a new desktop machine meant I had to wait a little longer. Was it worth the wait? Mostly. The biggest surprise for me personally has been an even stronger dislike of embedded plotlines - even though that's what makes a computer role-playing game what it is. I haven't gotten a long way into the game - though I know a lot about it already from having watched Mike and Andrew play. Even so, some of the most fun I've had so far has been beachcombing for Nirnroot, and fighting the occasional bunch of goblins or highwaymen. Fortunately, the main quest doesn't require lots of on-going immediate attention, which is a good thing - I'm just not a fan of greased rails for the plotline, and I figure I can deal with "closing shut the gates of Oblivion" in my own good time.

How does this relate back to tabletop roleplaying games and the "Old School?" Easy - despite the impressive graphics, the tremendous amount of background development and scripting, computer RPGs and tabletop gaming are still two different things. What Oblivion has done has been to increase the pressure on referees to have appealing and complex worlds; the fact that Oblivion itself is a descendent of earlier tabletop games makes its a dragon biting its own tail.

In the end, though, I kept thinking of all of the labor that clearly went into creating Oblivion, and wondered what might have happened if it was applied to tabletop campaigns. But that's what distinguishes the computer game industry from our own corner of a much smaller hobby. Bethesda is clearly making money - and that's good. But even better is the exercise of our own imaginations in our own games. To be sure, Oblivion and its ilk scratch a sufficiently similar niche to make them very appealing to tabletop gamers, but the unpredictability of a plot when a bunch of people are gaming together still far exceeds what can be done within a computer game.

* One of the major objections we all had to how Oblivion was originally designed was that the monster encounters "leveled" with you, i.e. you kept running into things about as tough as your character. This meant that as you get higher level, you might start running into bandits with extraordinary enchanted armor - how's that again?
** Trivia time: when your character arrives at Morrowind at the beginning of the game, the first person to interact with is Socucius Ergalla, the Customs and Excise Agent - and who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ken. Don't believe me? See for yourself. Past that, the dialogue your character might have with the Telvanni wizard, Divayth Fyr, sounds entirely too much like Ken running a table-top adventure. But that's another story.

Fight On! #4 released

2009-03-19T15:27:00.002-05:00

Just a note to let people know that Fight On! #4 has been released. Fight On! has been the flagship 'zine of the Old School movement, and has moved to quarterly publishing via Lulu. While I don't have anything in #4, I am expecting to submit some material for #5.

Here's the info on it from Lulu:

"The Fight On! fanzine returns for another fantastic foray! Dedicated to Dave Hargrave and his legendary Arduin campaign, this issue features no fewer than 8 adventures, plus spells, magic items, new classes, races, and rules to take your FRP passion to the next level! Our contributors include Steve Zieser, Kevin Mayle, Steve Marsh, James Maliszewski, Monty & Josephine St. John, Gabor Lux, Jeff Rients, Geoffrey O. Dale, Baz Blatt, David Bowman, Calithena, Kesher, Douglas Cox, James Raggi, Matthew Riedel, Geoffrey McKinney, Alex Schroeder, Lee Barber, Vincent Baker, Patrick Farley, Kelvin Green, Fu Fu Frauenwahl, and many more! Let your imagination know no limit – Fight On!"

So I'll be buying a copy shortly, along with a copy of Knockspell #1. I encourage everyone to do the same.