Welcome to Elf Water

The next step in the campaign prep stage was establishing the PCs’ “home base.” This was a much easier phase than settling on a region in which to set the campaign—largely, because I cheated.

I’ve always enjoyed and appreciated maps, even before I discovered RPGs. One might even argue that my fascination for this hobby stems from that love. I still recall a map from the interior of some children’s book I owned that showed the protagonist’s journey through a forest, diagramed in dotted line fashion like a “Family Circus” cartoon. For me, the attraction wasn’t what adventures were documented, but what possible events might occur in the areas unvisited by the hero. Maps still have that effect on me.

The “cartographilia” has manifested in a peculiar habit of mine. I find it incredibly relaxing to sketch maps of small towns and sylvan areas, rending such landscapes in either regular or colored pencil. My mind wanders during the process, pondering who lives in these imaginary places and what life must be like for them. It’s a wonderful way to de-stress when something’s bothering me. As a result, I have a number of little maps tucked away in various stages of completion. When it’s time to introduce a new community into a game, I check this collection first to see if anything fits the bill. In this case, I had the perfect map.

Coming up with a name for the community was a quick chore. I imagined that the settlement was situated on a place where the elves and humans first came into contact, a place to trade and negotiate the accord that ultimately led to the human settlement of the outskirts of Southwood. Picturing a forest glen along a riverbank, a place where elves once danced graceful waltzes underneath a summer moon, the name “Elf Water” sprung to mind as an appropriate human-given name for that place and the community that arose on that site would share that moniker.

In the past, I’ve gone to great lengths to detail most of my home bases before play begins. The pages accompanying my old Ashabenford map is a good representation of how much effort I’d expend before the game started. But this time, going along with the “this is supposed to be fun” mantra, I whipped up just two pages of notes documenting a few important NPCs and buildings to guide me. I plan to flesh Elf Water out as future play dictates. I know who’s in charge, what temples are in town, who has their fingers in quasi-legal (or outright illegal) pies, the major wizards, and a few other colorful individuals. That’s all I needed to get things rolling.

The final step was to scan my village map and key the important buildings for the players to consult as needed. A quick trip through Photoshop and—viola!—Elf Water was ready for PC inhabitation. With plenty of space to add new material, I can get a lot of use out of this community, now and in the future.

Yes, I know what "festhall" really means.

That’s it for this week. There’ll be a post on Elf Water’s outskirts and some actual play reports next week as I continue to ramble on about the Realms. 

"I don't always run Call of Cthulhu, but when I do..."

This is what I think about.

Sure, everyone has their own iconic fantasy illo for D&D (often with the name Trampier, Otus, or Elmore attached), but so few people talk about what they picture when other RPGs come to mind. I first saw "Ward 13" in the 4th edition of CoC and I've never been able to shake it. For me, its appeal is that this is one of those pictures that begs the questions of the viewer, "What the holy hell is going on here and how did it come to BE?!" I found a few Call of Cthulhu illustrations over the years that have the same effect, but this is my first. And you never forget your first.

The Search for Plastic Toys from Our Youth

There seems to be something in the air of late. Old gamers are casting about for clues regarding the plastic fantasy toys they played with or heard about in their youth. Dan Proctors is looking for some and A Field Guide to Doomsday has had a childhood memory identified. It seems I’m no different, because I’ve had an itch that refuses to be scratched for some days now and I’m appealing to you for help.

Back in the 1980s, I had a playset of plastic figures roughly equal to scale in army men. I think they might have come with a vinyl play-mat, but I cannot be certain. The set was a mix of different fantasy creatures, with each cast in a single color. Now, from what I can recall, one of the figures was the spitting image of a shambling mound, complete with carrot nose. There was also a “magma man” figure that seemed to be living fire and molded in appropriately red plastic. There may or may not have been a dragon figure and other plastic landscaping pieces such as trees and rocks and perhaps a dragon’s den. I certain that this isn’t some fever dream remembered as truth and that I did in fact own this and perhaps other sets of the same ilk.

Does this strike anyone as familiar at all?

EDIT: Whoops! After looking for days and posting this, I stumbled upon a clue. I guess it was the lava man who looked like the shambling mound!

EDIT AGAIN: Nevermind. Answered my own question.

'Ware the Chaos Giant!

The end of the year saw me engaged in a little miniatures inventory, refurbishing, and preparations for painting in 2012. As part of this process, I came across the box that once contained my only membership in Grenadier's Dragon Lords Giants Club: The Chaos Giant. Although the giant himself is long gone, I still own the obelisk and the guy about to be smooshed under the Chaos titan's foot.

I almost threw the box away as it's in pretty poor condition, but decided to retain it for nostalgia's sake. On a whim, I pulled up the foam padding at the box's bottom and was astonished to find that the insert that came packaged with the box was under there. Since that's the kind of thing well old schoolers apparently jones for, I've scanned it and posted the images below. Click to embiggen. I think it's pretty safe to assume that there's now going to be a Helwaste somewhere in my campaign world.

Brother, Can You Spare a Shield?

I’m currently sorting through my old minis to determine what needs to be stripped and repainted and what needs to be culled completely. Amongst them, I found one knight who is missing his shield. I’m not sure who produced Sir Aegisless the Exposed, but he obviously hails from the period in the mid 1980s when mini companies decided to mold their figures separately and include plastic shields to attach to a boss on the miniatures’ arms. I’ve looked online to find a replacement, but truth be told, I just need a single shield and not an entire sprue of them. Does anyone have a spare they’d be willing to pop in an envelope and mail my way? I could probably rig a replacement from a washer and some green stuff, but I thought I see if anyone has some extras lying in the bottom of their mini box first.

Here’s Sir Aegisless so you know what I’m talking about:

Three Years and Then Some

On August 21st at 4:05 PM, the Society of Torch, Pole and Rope achieved three years of existence in the blogosphere, which, while not being a Herculean task is nevertheless no small potatoes in longevity when it comes to the intertubes. Other blogs have risen and fell since I started posting these scribblings and I’m proud to have been up and around when things started to really get rolling in the OSR. The question that now stands before me is “What does the future hold?”

I’ve stated that I believe this will be the final year for this blog and my recent hiatus confirms that belief. I simply lack the interest to pursue this project much further. I’ve been blessed with a modicum of success and the things that I would once write about for this blog I now scribe for publication. As reasons to stop a blog go, that’s not a bad one. I’m keenly aware that there hasn’t been a lot of useful material produced by the Society in quite some time and that the signal-to-noise ratio is at the worst its ever been. Could I turn it around? Yes, but I don’t really care to.

As you can gather from the title of this blog, I started it with the intention to chronicle my return to the hobby by means of the classic dungeon crawl. My initial plan was to blog about my creating a megadungeon and getting a regular game going again; a plan that succeeded past my wildest imaginations. But alas, the megadungeon doesn’t have the luster it once had and my thoughts are going to places beyond the old Saturday night dungeon crawl. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not condemning it or the dungeon, but after three years of eating the same meal, one desires to sample other repasts. Add in the fact that most of the paid work I’m doing relates to fantasy and/or the dungeon, and I think you can understand my desire to do other things for recreation.

This doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning Stonehell Dungeon. I’m still working on it (unfortunately as slow as ever) and progress accumulates in between other, shorter projects. I will nevertheless be ecstatic when the second book is complete and I can close the Stonehell chapter of my life for a while. I’ll return to it after a well-deserved rest so long as people are interested.

Once I’ve written the final words for the Society, I plan to leave it up for an unspecified duration. I have no plans to burn the place to the ground as I walk out the door, but neither do I intend for it to remain up for whatever passes as eternity in the ether. At some point it will come down, but with plenty of warning—like a year’s worth—so don’t sweat it.

I remain interested in blogging, but I’m not certain if time and energy will allow for it in the future. Once Stonehell is out of the way and I can concentrate on other pursuits with more focus, we will see how things go. I have some cool stuff coming out and another project being discussed at the moment which might scratch an itch that I’ve been having. I’m cheerful about the future, even if the blog isn’t part of it.

This is not goodbye yet, but it is coming in the months ahead. It’s been fun, challenging, annoying, surprising, and enlightening, and I’m glad you all stuck around for so long. It is greatly appreciated by a guy who considers himself very, very lucky. I hope that even after I leave the Society behind that you’ll follow my efforts and hard work in whatever other forms they next appear.

Thank you all so very much,

Michael

Tales of Dragons and the Shaping of Perceptions and Expectations

In the nearly three-years that I’ve been following and participating in this thing of ours, I have read hundreds if not thousands of blog and forum posts written by people who wanted to muse upon the hobby and the sources that birthed and shaped it. These discussions invariably lead to what gaming products form the core of fantasy roleplaying by virtue of establishing the tropes and atmosphere that we now take for granted almost forty years later.

These posts typically contain the usual suspects list of sources: For fiction, it the great Appendix N and the authors and works listed therein; for game products the titles “Keep on the Borderlands,” “Tomb of Horrors,” “Against the Giants,” “Arduin,” “Wilderlands,” and other appear again and again for good reason. But perceptions and expectations are formed by unique, personal experience, shaped by forces as varied as those affected by them. It is perhaps due to this that I have yet to see anyone speak of the book that had more effect on my nascent understanding and expectations of the game than any other. It is time to put that to rights.

It was Christmas of 1981. My interest in fantasy role-playing was formed the previous holiday season while visiting relatives and I was given a copy of the Moldvay Basic set earlier in that year. As I opened my presents, I found a slim parcel mixed amongst them. It was the right shape and size for an adventure module (something I had undoubtedly asked for), but when I opened it I discovered something else awaiting me. I was now the owner of a special issue of Dragon magazine entitled Dragontales.

This anthology of stories was the first (and to my knowledge, only) collection of fantasy fiction produced under a separate cover by Dragon Publishing. Released in August of 1980 under the editorship of Kim Mohan, the book features ten fantasy short stories written by a collection of authors ranging from the renowned to the unknown—some are even quite surprising.

In the months and years to come, I would pour over this anthology again and again, reading and rereading each story within until I knew them by heart. They covered quite a gamut of style so it was difficult to grow bored with them. Some were pulp sword and sorcery; others, trippy fantasy whose roots grew out of the psychedelic landscape of the previous two decades.

Remember that this was 1981, a time before TSR began churning out game fiction by the truckload and the fantasy genre in general was not as glutted as it stands today. My exposure was swords & sorcery fantasy had so far been limited to the Bass-Rankin productions of The Hobbit and Return of the King and whatever my local library had on its shelves—which was not a lot. To me, Dragontales was a fantastical feast that not only whetted my parched thirst for fantasy but also used the races, classes, monsters, and terms that I had been reading about for the last year in my rulebooks. It was a dream come true.

Somewhere along the line I lost my copy of the book. It was probably discarded after I read the thing to pieces and could recount the tales within by memory. As time went on, the stories began to grow dim and my interests moved on to other things. The market was now flooded with fantasy and straight-out game fiction, so the novelty of these stories was no longer there. It is not surprising that Dragon never produced a second anthology of tales.

Just a few years ago, not long after I started this blog, I discovered that a friend owned a copy of Dragontales and I asked to borrow it so that I could reacquaint myself with its stories and authors once again. I requested this with more than a little trepidation. Would the stories stand up to my memories of them after all these years or would a more mature palette find them lacking and result in another fond childhood reminiscence sullied by an ill-advised revisit to the halcyon days of the early 1980s? To my delight, I found that the stories not only retained their ability to entertain but in some cases were actually improved by a greater understanding of both the genre and its authors.

Looking back on those stories again also made me realize how much they helped shape my attitudes and expectations about D&D. With the exception of Leiber’s Fahfrd and Mouser stories (which I didn’t read until college), no other single source had more of an impact on my fantasy campaigns than these ten stories. Reading them again was not only a passport back to my own youth, but also to a different time in fantasy fiction and the gaming business. It was a rougher, wilder time back then, not sleek and slick as the pages of a splatbook like they are now. Dragontales reflects that time, a snapshot of a place impossible to return to.

This past weekend I asked my friend if I could borrow the book to take that journey once again. In the weeks to come I will be doing a post on each of the tales included in the anthology, talking about how they influenced me and returning the favor by using the stories as inspiration (or outright burglary) for new game material. I’ve started to read the first story today and I can already feel the mixture of nostalgia, expectation, and sheer entertainment rising up within me. In fact, I had to break my resolution regarding the purchase of books this year and order my very own copy of Dragontales to replace the one I lost long again. Until it shows up though, I have the borrowed version to peruse. If you’d like to come along for the trip and are missing a copy of your own, both Noble Knight and Amazon have some for sale. Place your order now or dig out your own copy and meet me back here next week when we take a look at “The Wizards Are Dying” by John L. Jenkins.