Question Authority—Especially if that Authority is Me

I’ve noticed something about my own players and several others that I’ve shared a table with over the last two years, a phenomenon that I’ve not been able to deduce the whys and wherefores of. It might be a strictly local trend, one that doesn’t occur elsewhere, but it could also be indicative of the way the game has changed after the release of the 3rd edition. Maybe you’ve seen this happen too.

My players don’t ask a lot of questions in-game. This is completely alien to me because that’s all I ever do when I’m playing. Maybe it’s because I’m a referee or a designer or simply because I play these games to temporarily lose myself in the fantasy we create and becoming invested in the shared world makes it easier to do so. Most of my players, however, and others that I’ve gamed with are seemingly content to lay back and assume a completely submissive role in the play experience. Unfortunately, this can be fatal to their characters.

Here’s a recent example: I was running a quick filler game using the material I created for my Out of the Box campaign. It got off to a good start with the players going to the tavern and one making an inquiry about any recent goings on in the area. The barkeep revealed that some settlers had been attacked on the road recently, and had been kidnapped by forces unknown. I was happy. The guys were interacting with the campaign world at large, which was a big step forward for some of them. But then old habits kicked in.

They learned that the local temple couldn’t provide any healing potions, but heard a rumor that a witch in the woods might be able to. Rather than ask any more questions, they figured they’d just stumble around in the woods for a while and run into her. Things got worse after they decided to leave the safety of the keep and go dungeon-crawling. There were three options on a map that a local had, all of which were merely names on a paper. The party picked one at random and headed for it, not even pausing to see if anyone knew anything about the site they had chosen. As it turned out, the dungeon they picked was scaled for 3rd level characters and the expedition resulted in a massacre.

The same tendency occurs during the actual adventure. In my Stonehell game, the PCs occasionally encountered phenomenon or items that they didn’t recognize. Occasionally a player might ask something like, “Does my magic-user know anything about this?” or “As a dwarf do I recognize that?” When I answer “No,” they seem to take that as “No and you never will.” The thought of seeking out an NPC expert doesn’t even occur to them.

Compare this to my approach in the Labyrinth Lord game I’m participating it. We were running through the Village of Hommlet and the party, after learning of the Moathouse, decided to head out there and loot it. Immediately. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I cried. “Let’s see if we can’t learn a thing or two before we go out there.” My magic-user asked around town and learned of the backstory behind the Battle of the Moathouse and talked to a few soldiers who had been there that day. In doing so, he got a rough sketch of the exterior and learned that there was a single known dungeon level underneath the fort. He also got Rufus to kick in some troops and offer up a bounty for exploring the place. Sometimes knowing these little facts and whether you’re bound to run into goblins instead of orcs can save lives, especially fragile, 1st level lives.

After a bad run in with the frogs, my magic-user consulted with the local druid, thinking that if anyone could offer some advice about giant frogs, he’d be the guy. This lead to us getting a magic orb that created a cloud of monstrous flies and helped draw off some of the big batrachians in our path.

Maybe I’m just an exemplary player or perhaps reading all those “advice to the players” articles in Dragon back in the day stuck in my brain. Whatever the case, I’m just not seeing this trend in the gamers I’ve been playing with and I’m wondering why. Is it merely because they are “poor” players or is this symptomatic of a larger cause? Have video games that feed the players tidbits of information at predetermined points made gamers more passive? Did including a “Gather Information” skill make players think that the only way to get important information was to make a skill check and when that skill is missing from their plate of options they believe that information is unavailable? Am I a sucky referee who runs a game that provides no impetus for the players to peer beyond the surface? I really don’t know.

This had been on my mind a lot lately, mostly because I’m re-examining what types of games I enjoy running and because of some changes in my regular group. I look at Jeff Rient’s Twenty Questions and part of me wonders if it’s even worth answering them if nobody’s going to make those inquiries in the first place. This also explains my request that folks interested in play testing not “lay back and think of England” but get excited and get involved. A great deal of my lack of enthusiasm for continuing to run Labyrinth Lord comes from this absence of investment in the shared world we’re supposed to be creating around the table.

I’m not trying to be harsh or rude to my players, but it’s something that I have noticed in the year and a half we’ve been together. Not from all of them, but enough that it affects me and my own interest in running a game. And with my plan to introduce a new setting/game that I consider to be my most personal and immersive campaign ever, these concerns make me think that this is not the right time or group to do so.

Am I alone in noticing this trend in gamers, especially younger ones? Is this a singular phenomenon or has this affected your own games as well? I’d really like to diagnose this affliction and see what might be done to address it.

The Society will now come to order.

Yes, it’s May and the month-long A-Z meme has come to an end. At last, I feel free to emerge from my cave, blink the bright spring sunshine out of my eyes, and eat a hiker. For those of you who participated, I’m glad you all had fun. It wasn’t to my liking because I thought it was too forced and too long a meme (I thought the same about “Hot Elf Chicks” but that was only a single day so I grinned and endured it). Happily, I get to have my own opinions without caring what everyone else thinks or needing to justify them just like you do. I nevertheless hope this turns out to be a one-time experiment.

While everyone was alphabetizing themselves, I decided that it was a perfect excuse to dodge out of the blogosphere and attend to other business—and I got a hell of a lot done. I didn’t miss composing posts at all, leaving me even more certain that my decision to draw things to a close here on the Society of Torch, Pole and Rope is the right one. It’s definitely getting to be time to move on to the next thing for me. What that is, I’m uncertain, but this is the final year of the Society for sure.

April saw the near completion of the two projects that stand between me and committing myself full time to the Stonehell sequel. There likely remains a little cleanup work to be done on those, but I anticipate that in the next few weeks, Stonehell 2 will be my main concern. It’s time to finish that once and for all. More details on the mystery projects will be forthcoming when I’m allowed to speak openly about them.

Somehow I managed to fit in a sci-fi and fantasy convention during the 90k words I was writing, and I spent three days annoying the hell out of Frank Mentzer and the rest of the gaming guests at ICON 30. Having first attended ICON 7 or 8 and sporadically returning throughout the years, this was the first time I felt that I was on the other side of the wall. I was not attending as a fan, but as someone with a vested interest in the state of gaming. In the past, I’d be doing the celebrity Q & A thing. This time, I was attending workshops on the future of RPGs or how to sustain your interest and finish a freelance writing project in order to keep yourself and your publishers happy. The last one was responsible for one of those “Holy shit, I’m actually a writer” moments. Ending the convention by playing OD&D with Frank Mentzer was a nice way to bring the weekend to a close, although it didn’t really end then. I left the con to run my Labyrinth Lord game and promptly killed the entire party when negotiations with a young red dragon broke down.

Between the TPK and breaking for Easter, I think the year-long campaign has started to lose momentum, something which can be terminal for a game if not corrected. Today’s game had to end early because I was in too much pain from an old back injury to keep things going until our normal stop time. Plus, we lost 3 of the 6 replacement PCs on the first level of Stonehell (exploding flame toad & two potions of poison) so it was time to call it a night. With Mother’s Day next weekend and a playtest of something else the week afterwards, it won’t be back to Labyrinth Lord until May 22nd. That’s a long break and I hope we can recover.

A lot of my uncertainty about the future of the campaign can be blamed on the fact that it’s now spring. My long-time friends know that as soon as the weather changes, I get spring fever and go a little flaky. The last thing I want to do is sit inside and pretend to be outdoors when there are woods to be walked, beaches to be visited, and friends to see. But I can’t pretend this is the sole reason. I’ve been running hot and cold on vanilla fantasy for a while now and it might be time to do something very different. I’ll have to see how things play out in the next couple of weeks.

On the “News of the Highly Implausible” front, due to some strong suggestions by unnamed individuals, I finally broke down and got on Facebook. Some of you have already discovered this and sought me out. I’m pretty open about befriending fans and contemporaries, but don’t expect exciting insights into the mind of Mike and whatever I’m working on. I did join the Stonehell fan group though, and I might release advance looks at the dungeon through that page a week before I post them here. We’ll see.

The blog roll will be returning slowly starting tonight. I’ll undoubtedly overlook some folks, so please don’t take it as a slight if I do. There’s just so much more out there now and I can’t (and don’t) follow everyone’s work. There are more comprehensive lists than my own.

And there we go. I hope we have some fun again together before I turn off the lights and lock the door.

I am a Meta-Gaming Referee

When WotC announced that they’re introducing the new Fortune Card marketing gimmick, some folks took it to be the final nail in the coffin of a game they once loved. Others saw it as the long-delayed inevitable step and wondered why it took this long to happen. I read about it on the blogs, shrugged my shoulders and went back to what I was working one.

I did this for two reasons. The first is because, other than the re-issue of Gamma World, nothing WotC does anymore affects my game playing or purchasing habits. As such, I’m no longer involved in any customer-publisher relationship with them, and outside of making the older editions available in PDF format again, I’ve no opinion on what Hasbro and the Wizards do with their products, money, and time. I do wish they displayed greater employer loyalty to their designers though.

The second reason was that I beat them to the punch by almost a year.

I’ve made note that I will sometimes award players with a certificate of commendation for reaching certain milestones or displaying exceptional growth in play. What I didn’t mention is that these award letters are accompanied by a chit or card good for use in game. All of these cards affect the mechanics of the game in some manner and they do so in a meta-gaming manner. It is the player who steps in the apply these award cards, much like using a “Get Out of Jail Free” card to avoid an unfortunate dice roll in Monopoly.

I make no apologies for this behavior. I find them enjoyable and the players love having this additional resource at their disposal when things start going incredibly wrong for them. Such an obvious “gamist” element might not meet with everyone’s approval, but if you are the kind of referee who likes giving the players another factor to consider when deciding their actions, you can download a PDF copy of the chits I use in my Labyrinth Lord campaign here.

“Egads, there are a lot of you!”

The Watchfires & Thrones group has developed a glandular condition and grown to an unnatural size. Last Sunday’s game saw me staring out at a sea of faces crowded around a single kitchen table. With the return of one player who had been away for two months on personal business and the addition of a new player, our formally tiny little band is now nine people (eight players plus me behind the screen). This tread seems to be continuing, too. Next Sunday, we’re going to have a guest player (a gamer who’s up visiting and will be playing the dwarf hireling) and possibly introduce another regular player to the group. It seem like just a few weeks ago it was me and one other player meeting up at the FLGS to try and drum up interest. We we’re looking for two more players to start with because, as I said back then, if we could get three, we could get more. My oracular powers are truly astounding.

But it’s an often-repeated fact that while size does not matter, being entertaining does (case in point: the 1998 version of Godzilla). This has been my number one concern since our group first began to show signs of growing robust. This campaign has been my first true refereeing gig since my brief turn behind the screen to playtest Stonehell—a session that revealed to me exactly how out of practice I had become during my time away from the hobby—and I’ve been anxious not to screw it up. Yet, from all indications, my players are seemingly having the time of their lives. The phrase “best campaign I’ve ever been in” has been used within my earshot on at least two occasions so I must be doing something right (either that or my players have suffered through a long string of completely abominable games before meeting me).

I’m continuing to fine tune the game as we go, allowing it to develop organically through play and by where the PCs’ interests take them. Some house rules continue to be modified (we had a change in critical hit protocol last session) and others wait in the wings to be unleashed (counterspelling is going in the first time the adventurers meet up with spell-throwing enemies). I’ve planted the very first seeds to get people thinking about the D&D endgame now and to start casting their eye towards the frontier.

The biggest issue I’m wrestling with is when and if to say, “No more.” There is part of me (a very big part) that says, “Keep ‘em coming. I can take on all challenges,” and see if Watchfires & Thrones ever reaches the mythic numbers of Eld that required a Caller to keep things running smooth. I can’t lie: having a huge group of people playing old school D&D would be amazingly cool, especially since there’s plans underway to greatly increase our FLGS’s available gaming space so that it could accommodate a large group playing a single RPG. However, I’m not so self-deluded that I fail to see that my own ego is largely behind this desire.

Another option would be to investigate the feasibility of splitting the group into two separate parties that meet at different times and/or days. I’m not certain everyone would agree to this because the camaraderie of the players is one of the reasons to attend each week. Having to divide the players would impact the social aspect of the game now that we’ve gotten comfortable with one another over the last eighteen sessions.

The last course is to firmly set our limit and to turn away any newcomers. That number should be one lower than the amount of players I feel I can't comfortably handle. Unfortunately, I won’t know that number until I reach it. Back in college, I ran a very short-lived World of Cockamamie Darkness game that had either ten or eleven players running all types of critters from WoD titles. I’ve organized LARP games with thirty-plus players, but that sort of controlled chaos doesn’t really compare to sitting everyone around a table and keeping things flowing. The number of players I can handle in a Labyrinth Lord game remains an unknown. However, the fact that I spent all of last Sunday’s game literally on my toes (refereeing standing up) suggests that we might be getting close to that magic number.

All this brings me to the Number One Lesson I have learned since February of this year. It’s a pretty harsh-sounding one and some people might misinterpret my tough love for simply being a dick, but here it goes:

With very few exceptions, if you’re not playing the game you want to play, it because you’ve made the choice not to.

That’s a solid truth, people. If you want to play a certain title, go out there and make it happen. Don’t stop trying until you find the absolute minimum number of people you need and then start playing. If that group falls apart, find another one. Just keep at it. You might have to make some compromises (play online rather than face-to-face, letting the complete stranger who hangs out at the game store sit in on a game, coming out of the gamer closet and asking some non-gamer acquaintances if they want to try, or meeting once a month rather than once a week), but you will be playing the game you want to. To give up before you reach your goal is a choice on your part and you only have yourself to blame for it.

Jim Raggi’s got some excellent advice on how to go about drumming up a group. I’ll admit that I thought he was being abrasive in his presentation when I read the piece a long time back, but, after being out there and playing the game I want to play, I’m now in complete agreement with him. You’re the reason for your predicament, pal. Take this as your wake-up call and do something about it.

I no longer expect to ever be not playing the game I want. Should I find myself in a position where I’m not playing the game I wish I was, I’ll take steps to rectify that situation, and should I fail to do so, I’ll know that that is because I either consciously or unconsciously made the decision to. In some cases, that decision might be the correct one (like in the case of having a newborn baby or having to meet financial necessities), but it is still a choice I made.

A Classically Good Game

Today’s session of Watchfires & Thrones saw three of the characters deciding to foray into Stonehell to earn cash and experience while everyone else trained for next level. What was intended to be a simple sweep of the gatehouse turned into them getting dragged into the middle of the great Orc-Goblin War of Stonehell Dungeon.

The three 1st level characters (a fighter, magic-user, and fighter/cleric) led an attack into the orc lair, urging their war band of seven goblins (including their newfound friend “Schnot” from the gatehouse) and a mangy wolf against the orcs’ superior numbers. The result was fourteen dead orcs, six dead goblins (including their newfound friend “Schnot” from the gatehouse), one dead wolf, and one PC reduced to zero hit points. The orcs won the battle, resulting in the two mobile characters dragging their unconscious friend towards the exit of the dungeon. When one last wandering monster turned up SOMETHING coming their way, the PCs dodged into a side room where they are currently praying that whoever’s coming down the hall passes them by.

We’ll pick up with them next week to see if they escape the dungeon and meet up with the returning players’ alternate characters, or if they too will be rolling up new characters to play. Their reward for the brashness: 100+ silver pieces and slightly more than 500 experience points each. Two of them made second level due to their brashness—provided they make it out alive.

This was one of those classic sessions where I had no idea what to expect going into it and I was just as surprised and entertained as players while we watched the day’s events unfold before us. And it all hinged on a single reaction roll and the fact that the dice determined that one of the goblins spoke Hobgoblin, allowing the PCs and monsters to communicate. This session was one the best we’ve had so far. It had humor, suspense, PC-NPC interaction, funny voices, a big fight, and not a single railroad track in sight.

I love it when the dice know what they’re doing.

Friday Flashback

With apologies to Sham for stealing his bit.

Referee, Entertain Thyself

There is a central mystery in the Watchfires & Thrones campaign: A secret whose origins lie in the long-forgotten past and, if revealed, could answer some of the big questions that humanity and the other races ask about themselves. If the answer to the mystery was to become publically known, existence itself might change forever. However, unlike many other campaigns I’ve both ran and played in over the years, it doesn’t make a lick of difference if the players choose to never so much as glance at the clues strewn in their path. They’re simply there to amuse myself.

With our tenth game session on the horizon and the first major chapter of the campaign completed, I’ve taken the time to look back on what has occurred so far in order to judge what worked and what didn’t, to see where I can improve my referee style, and consider what kookiness I might want to try next. The result of all this navel gazing is that I’ve realized that this is the most fun I’ve had running a game in years.

As some of you might remember, I literally threw my former campaign setting and a year’s plus worth of prep work out the window at the 11th hour to run a pulp sword & sorcery-style campaign. I went from my plan to allow more than a dozen classes as player choices to restricting them to a mere five. As I mentioned just last week, even the list of monsters that will appear in the campaign has been stripped down to a specific list with albeit vague membership requirements.

The result of all this self-imposed limitation is that I’ve never felt like I’ve had more choices and the gaping holes in the rule material have led me down creative paths I would have never considered travelling if I was still trying to run the same sort of “typical” D&D campaign I’ve been running on and off for almost thirty years. I’ve come to realize that I owe a much greater debt of gratitude to the OSR community than I ever imagined. Had I not spent the last two years being exposed to the creations of almost everyone involved in whatever the hell it is we’re trying to do here, I might never have realized that the definition of “what is D&D?” and what can be shoehorned in under its auspices is so mutable that it need not be a game based around a pseudo-medieval/Tolkien-influenced worldview. In retrospect, I realize that I have no one to blame for this preconception but myself, but I’d point to TSR’s attempts to market the game and establish a brand as being very responsible for encouraging this preconception. But that’s all blood under the bridge of bone, so let’s not dwell upon it. I’ve since been rehabilitated,

To get back to my original point, all this jettisoning of expectations has put me in the position to try out some crazy schemes to see if they’re even possible to do in the context of fantasy role-playing. It’s too early to tell if they will work or not, but the mere fact that I’ve been able to play with them in an unorthodox setting has given me great joy. This enjoyment has naturally led to me maintaining a high interest in both the campaign setting and our weekly meetings. I’ve also discovered that, by letting the players call the tune, I’m usually only dancing a session or two ahead of them, which means there’s a lot of thinking on my feet and conjuring on the fly to be done—both of which really push my Wahoo! button. In short: I’m having a blast.

I’m really blessed to have the players I do at this time. They’ve been willing to go along with my harebrained scheme and to give my offbeat rule additions a try. They’ve persevered under a crushing number of PC deaths (not all of which are completely my fault) and slightly slowed level advancement to start becoming “real” characters in a world that’s still cooking on my intellectual stovetop. As a friend of mine mentioned last week, I got incredibly lucky with this lot considering it was a pickup group of people who’ve mostly never played together before—and that’s somewhat difficult to achieve in this hobby sometimes, as anyone with a “let’s recruit down at the hobby shop” horror story might tell you. I forget which blog I read it on, but someone put forward the advice to simply be the type of gamer you want to attract. So far, that’s worked out well for me. I can only hope everyone is as lucky and is having as much fun out there as I am.

Liftoff Has Been Scrubbed

Despite having a perfectly good opportunity to dive through a strange glowing portal in pursuit of an unknown squid-faced assailant, the party demonstrated remarkable restraint and chose to let the creature flee.

Damn it.

Had they not done so, the campaign would have taken to the stars as the adventurers found themselves on the surface of the lesser moon, Nihil. And oh what fun that would have been…

Instead, it looks as if the party is headed out beyond the Dune Sea to investigate the legendary dungeon complex know as the Black Gut—which will be fun in its own right for I have some interesting plans for that megadungeon.

But still, a trip to the moon would have been legendary.

Signs of Life

Somehow, it got to be Thursday and I never finished all those posts I was working on for this week. Uff da. So, for want of more complex and well-thought out material, I’ll leave you with these recent moments of satori:

1) Roleplaying gamers are probably unique in their irrational tendency to argue that the rules of their games are not sufficiently” realistic” (and I include wargamers and other fans of simulation games amongst the roleplayers in this case). Imagine how many of the hoary old chestnuts of debate (alignment, wizards with swords) would no longer be fodder for arguments if gamers simply remembered that they are playing games, and that games, by their very nature, have artificial rules and limitations imposed upon them. I very much doubt that, over on the Monopoly forums, there are debates raging about how “I should be able to move farther on my turn because my piece is the guy on the horse. That horse has got to move faster than the iron!” or “I’m the car. Why can’t I just run over the dog and take Bill out of the game completely? That’s not very realistic!”

2) One of the unforeseen benefits of running a campaign that draws primarily on pulp sword & sorcery tales as inspiration is the ease of stocking dungeons and creating wilderness encounter tables. No longer do I find myself having to choose between kobolds, goblins, xvarts, or jermlaine. Instead, I just try to picture Elric, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Conan fighting a certain creature. If I can, that beastie makes the cut. If I can picture Conan as depicted by John Buscema & Ernie Chan fighting it, I know for certain it’s the right monster to use. There’s not going to be a lot of pegasi or chimeras lurking in the Watchfires & Thrones campaign.

Speaking of Watchfires & Thrones, for those of you interested in such things, the recap of last Sunday’s game is live over at the Archive of the Rotted Moon. I may squeeze in real post on the SoTPR before the weekend depending on what I accomplish today. If not, please enjoy yourselves, friends, and happy gaming!

Mad Props

It started simply enough. After the deaths of last week, the end of the game session saw the party wisely deciding to return to Rhuun to resupply and recruit new bodies. This was a move I wasn’t expecting. The town part of the campaign still remains a nebulous place as I try to create all the little nuances that a settlement needs before it can become a living, breathing place in the minds of the players. I’ve had a tendancy to gloss over town time in order to get back to the dungeon. However, this is one of the things in my “Needs to be improved on” category on my mental referee’s checklist. One way or another, I vowed, this trip to town would be different. But how?

On Wednesday, I took a trip down to the FLGS to see if they had anything in the used D&D section that might help jumpstart the creative process. In the box of old modules, I came across a complete copy of B6 – The Veiled Society by Dave Cook. By complete, I mean that all the paper models and cardstock miniatures were present. Remembering that the module was one of the first “city adventures” for D&D, I bought it on the off-chance that parts of it were adaptable/salvageable for my own campaign.

As much as I hate to say it (which is a lot considering the author was kind enough to write the foreword to my book), the module doesn’t age well and the mystery it contains is a little thin. This is not surprising since this was one of those “Basic D&D” modules aimed at a younger demographic from back when TSR really started focusing on the tween market. Since then, town-based adventures have come a long way and B6 unfortunately gets left in the dust.

However, there was an encounter in the module that introduces the basic premise of the adventure—rival families at one another’s throats as they contend for power—which served my purposes well and I decided to adapt it and put a little spin on it to make it my own. But it was the paper models that were included in the module that really got my mind going.

Like the module itself, paper and cardstock models, miniatures, and terrain have greatly improved since 1984. A sizeable portion of RPGNow.com’s catalogue is dedicated to these products, and companies like Fat Dragon Games makes PDF versions of models that blow the doors off of the easily-destroyed cutout buildings of yesteryear. And since I live in an age where such things are easily downloadable, I decided to be true to the module’s original intentions—give the players some eye candy to gawk at—and include some cardstock buildings of my own.

When the players arrived on Sunday, the most commonly asked question was: “Are we playing a new game?” An understandable question, considering this is what they found waiting for them on our big blue table.

Pictured is the Street of the Cobra during the Festival of Erion. Those Scrabble tiles are celebrants, fire-eaters, dancing girls, acrobats, and musicians. It was a crowded festival—until the draft lizard went berserk and started to run amuck in the street! (I should mention I watched a Godzilla flick this week, which might have also had something to do with my decision to use model buildings and then sett a big lizard loose to run wild amongst them).

Would I do this every time the party goes to town? Absolutely not (sorry you missed it, Rob), but it was a fun way to reinforce the notion that, while I may not be the greatest referee to ever sit behind the screen, I have evolved my own ways of presenting the game world and entertaining my players—ones which I hope are appreciated by anyone who joins me at the table.

Object Lessons and Dead PCs

You’ll notice it’s been a little slow here at the Society this week. Now that I have a regular game of my own to run, I find that I have more of a desire to write for that game than about it, which naturally leads to things quieting down here if I have to divide my time between activities. However, the happenings at last Sunday's session need commenting on and I’d like to get that done before the events of tomorrow’s game move to the forefront of my mind.

Time for a confession: I hate killing characters.

Truth be told, I get attached to the personas that explore my imaginary world and help to breathe life into what would otherwise be a lonely illusion. I root for them as they confront dangerous monsters or try to puzzle out a fiendish trap. After all, if they succeed, they earn experience, advance in level, and gain more power. That means I get to add even more neat stuff to my world and I get to play with new ideas and build more interesting sites for them to explore. Therefore, it’s in my best interests if the adventurers survive.

On the other hand, I’m not a big proponent of the “Everybody gets a trophy” school of thought either. Better minds than mine have argued that when everybody’s a winner, winning means nothing. That’s an attitude which I’m very much in agreement with. I’ve worked damn hard for the things I’m most proud of in life—which is the reason I’m so proud of them in the first place. Our recreational activities should be no different. There is really no point in playing if you’re assured victory because, for me at least, avoiding defeat is half the fun.

I’ve learned to balance these two facets of my personality by simply giving the players enough rope to hang themselves and then waiting to see what happens. This is exactly what happened last Sunday.

If you’ve read the recap, you’ll know that four members of the party died at the hands of fungal zombies when they delved into an undercroft beneath the temple complex. While I can’t say that I planned this, in the interest of full disclosure, I can’t say I’m surprised either. That room was purposely assembled as an object lesson and it did exactly what I hoped it would.

The primary purpose of that encounter was to serve as a litmus test to see how greedy and cocky the players and their characters could get. The answer was too much of both for their own good. Everyone seems to have forgotten the First Rule of Zombies: “They’re no sweat when there’s just a few, but if you let them overwhelm you, you’re screwed.”

The party had no trouble knocking them down when they were popping up in twos and threes. Before long, the entire chamber was crowded with zombie bodies. So many, in fact, that one of the players asked if I wanted him to start removing the knocked over miniatures from the grid map. He should have suspected something when I said, “No,” but that’s all part of getting comfortable with a new group: you have to learn what everyone’s capable of in their roles as players and referee. I bet the players will take notice in the future if I start leaving “dead” miniatures on the board.

When the zombies started springing back to “life”—first one half of them, then the other—the players started cracking jokes about staying down there and “grinding XP ‘til we hit 5th level.” That plan changed once the PC with an armor class of 1 got torn to pieces. Of course, by that time, the way to the single-file ladder that exited the chamber was blocked by a horde of toadstool-sprouting zombies. I hope that my second purpose for this set piece of an encounter was sinking in at that point: “Although boldness pays off in D&D, sometimes it’s best to quit while you’re up in chips—even if it means possibly leaving a bigger pot behind.” More of the PCs could have escaped if they hadn’t been so determined to make sure all the loot had been found.

Although not intended, I think it will be some time before we start splitting up the party again, even if it’s just “We’ll be in the next room.” The fact that half the party was upstairs when the zombies sprang back to life was bad news to those guys still down in the hole. However, this development did teach me a bit about the players and their characters. I learned who was brave enough to risk death (and in one case, find it) by rushing in to help their comrades-in-arms when it would have been easy to stay upstairs where it was safe. I’m always on the lookout for such selflessness and usually reward it on a later date in some manner.

I usually place one or two of these object lessons/set pieces in any dungeon I construct at the start of a campaign. This is especially true when I don’t know the players all that well and would like to learn more about their individual play styles and such, as well as showing them what kind of game they can expect from me as a referee. The fungal zombie room was one such encounter and I hope the players learned something from it. I know I did and I intend to use that knowledge to customize the campaign so that both myself and the players get as much enjoyment out of it as we can. I think such a noble aim is worth a few dead PCs at the start of the campaign. Hopefully everyone else will too.

Despite what some people might think, you don’t need to be playing some "new school" role-playing game that features drama points, constructed narratives, flashbacks, cut scenes, dice pools, etc. to both instruct and learn about the players. Sometimes a big room of fungus-covered zombies and a fistful of twenty-siders works just as well.

An Illustrated Example of the "Make It Your Own" Philosophy of the OSR

I found this in an old, old issue of White Dwarf and it sums up for me what the "Make It Your Own" attitude of the Old School Renaissance is all about. Pictured below are two mind flayers, but they don't look a single thing like the mind flayers that we've all come to know.


The OSR: where having a squid-headed mind flayer running about plagiarizing the cover of Eldritch Wizardry is expected, not frowned upon.

Die-roll Dungeons

Most people in this hobby have a favorite chart. As strange as it might sound to non-gamers, some of us simply enjoy certain little collections of numbers and results such as the Harlot sub-table (“Oh no, it’s a Sly Pimp!”), the Potion Miscibility Table (“DISCOVERY!”), or Rolemaster’s crazy-ass critical tables (“Reduced to a gelatinous pulp. Try a spatula”). I’m no exception.

As cool as the ones quoted above might be, my favorite is a much more pedestrian albeit useful one. It’s the Stock the Dungeon table from Moldvay Basic, a table that I’ve put into use more times than I could count over the last twenty-some years. So often have I employed it that I no longer need to consult the actual table to use it.

The “Stock the Dungeon” table, much like Moldvay’s morale rules, is one of the bits of genius that came out of that rulebook, making referees around the world wonder why it took so long for such a simple and useful tool to make its way into the pages of Dungeons & Dragons. Earlier books gave advice as to how the referee should stock his dungeons with monsters and treasure, but the quality of these suggestions varied. Underworld & Wilderness Adventures gives us the 33% rule of monsters (a 2 in 6 chance of monsters occupying any given dungeon room) as well as determining that treasure is found half the time in room with monsters and 17% of the time in empty rooms. Holmes Basic repeats the 33% rule of monsters but omits any reference to unguarded treasure. The Monster & Treasure Assortment instructs us that “a dungeon level should have monsters in only 20% or so of the available rooms and chambers, about 20% of monsters should have no treasure whatsoever.”

Tom Moldvay, however, assembled all these bits into one comprehensive table and added two missing dungeon features—traps & “specials.” He also provided a simple sub-chart for determining the presence of treasure in each room, guarded or not. The end result was a table that was simple to use and remember, while remaining true to the original philosophy of how often something is found in the dungeon.

I’m a proponent of the randomly stocked dungeon. I follow Gary’s advice to determine where the important monsters and treasures are found, then dice to see what else is down there. For me, this is half of fun of designing the dungeon in the first place. Random determination of contents often gives me results I hadn’t anticipated, challenging me to come up with offbeat solutions or interesting backstory to justify the presence of an object. And, as I’ve stated in the past, the ability to creatively interpret the unforeseen results of a die roll is one of the overlooked skills of a great referee, so it pays to develop and constantly hone this ability.

Still more interesting for me as a referee is that, by using a random method to stock the dungeon, the dungeon itself sometimes informs me of what it wants to become rather than what I had in store for it. My most recent dungeon has done exactly this. I started with the intent to make it a delve suitable for 1st level PCs, but, as a result of several dice rolls, the challenges awaiting the players have made it more suitable for 2nd and even 3rd level characters. And I think it’s a much richer adventuring site because of this. A few of the specials found within it have also added to the history of the campaign world and the background events of the sandbox setting. None of this would have come about if I had gone about deliberately inserting each element into the dungeon and worried about maintain a certain level of difficulty.

So here’s to Moldvay’s Stock the Dungeon table, a bit of underappreciated genius in the history of our hobby. A table full of possibilities for fun, adventure, danger, and excitement all gathered into a few simple columns. May your Treasure? rolls always come up ones.

Wanting to Say "Why Not?"

Once upon a time, I took role-playing games very seriously. I looked down my nose on anyone who failed to dedicate themselves to creating a level of realism in our shared world, be it through the use of stupid or silly character names (“Boba Fett”) or the desire to play a ninja in a strictly Western European-type culture. How dare they sully the artistic creation that serious role-players like myself were attempting to forge?!

Strangely, as I’ve grown older, I’ve adopted a less tyrannical approach to gaming. Instead of outright snobbery, I now meet such desires with a live-and-let-live attitude—provided the player himself isn’t a complete affront to common courtesy and can play and share well with others. I’m not above such occaisonal flights of fancy myself nowadays. I did create the Octopus character class after all.

This growing acceptance for the semi-serious or “unrealistic” elements of the game has led me down some paths I’d previously be loathed to tread. Without this attitude, I would have never come to accept my mantra of “Stop worrying and love the dungeon,” resulting in a slightly less enjoyable Stonehell and a more staid Dungeon Alphabet. I continue to encourage this open-mindedness in myself at every turn.

It’s a tough fight, though. I keep oscillating between the desire to completely accept the absurd and my previous well-intentioned but straight-laced mindset. I’ve strapped myself to the bungee and made it to edge of the bridge, but I just can’t quite jump.

Some may not see this as a problem. Others might even interpret the desire to open my mind to the outré as the first step toward game degeneracy, convinced that such a path leads only to Arduin-like levels of madness—TIE Fighters strafing wizard’s towers and the like. I can’t fault these folks, for I was once like them.

Now, however, I find myself reading some of the accounts of older games and thinking that we’ve definitely lost a part of this hobby’s rich heritage to the expectations of realism and common sense. One has to look no further than Men & Magic (“There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top”) or “Excerpt from an Interview with a Rust Monster” (The Dragon #14) to realize there once was a very cavalier attitude to role-playing which has nothing to do with armored guys on horseback.

One of the reasons I’ve found solace in the OSR is because that “Devil may care” outlook isn’t completely lost here. As the trend of science-fantasy campaigns demonstrates, the OSR is a lot more accepting of weird ideas tied together with nothing more than some house rules and good intentions. Unfortunately, we’re not completely without prejudice.

I remember reading a thread on one of the boards some months back regarding character classes to be included in a new version of one of the retro-clones. The usual suspects were suggested: illusionist, ranger, paladin, monk. I was disappointed in the lack of vision these suggestions represented. Granted, these are the expected choices and the book wasn’t looking to expand any minds.

Regardless, it seems that we’ve allowed ourselves to dig a pretty deep rut over the last thirty-six years when we can’t easily think beyond the usual handful of classes. As much as I’ve determined that 3rd edition isn’t for me, I’ll give it a nod of respect for attempting to address this issue with prestige classes, despite their flawed (for me) execution.

Some may argue—rightly perhaps—that the game doesn’t need any classes beyond those already in the common parlance. This was 2nd edition’s stance after all: every profession can be portrayed adequately by role-playing one of the existing classes in the proper manner with slight adjustments. New, specialized classes just cluttered the playing field and overwhelmed the player with choices. But this mindset isn’t a benefit if you happen to like having a lot of choices.

With my newfound acceptance for the oddball in the sandbox, this battle of opinions regarding classes has become my biggest hurdle to overcome. I see the logic in staying with the established few, but the wahoo part of my brain wants samurai warriors, cavemen, crash-landed aliens, bounty hunters, goblins, and sentient polar bears represented in the party—so long as the players want them too. I know I have that gear in my head, but, so far, I’m just grinding metal every time I try to engage it. I can’t quite make the leap yet from “How Come?” to “Why Not?”

Not that I’ve given up trying, though. I’m continuing to tinker with the Crabaugh Method from Dragon #109. If I can customize and update that method to something that fits my tastes exactly, I know I’ll have found my personal character class Rosetta Stone. Little discoveries like the dwarven craftsman class from Liaisons Dangereuses inspire and excite me to keep working on a “unified class method” suitable for my own use. While this search remains underway, I’m continuing my own quest to find a personal happy median between the vanilla and the tutti-frutti of role-playing ideas and attitudes.

I may never get to the point where I can take a troll to lunch, but at least I’ve become unbiased enough to meet him for coffee.

When Looking Back, Make Sure Not to Stumble

With less than a week and a half remaining in 2009, I’ve been in a naturally retrospective mood as of late. I’ve reread some of my earliest posts on this blog and have reexamined the resolutions I undertook at this time last year. A week of looking back on those resolutions and gauging my success, as well as anticipating next year, will commence after Christmas.

In rereading my earliest posts, I’m reminded of why this blog came into being and what I hoped to accomplish with it. At the start of this blog, I had experienced a very profound change in my life and I was looking to redirect my energies in a new direction. At the same time that I was casting about for something new to do, I discovered the burgeoning return to the origins of this hobby of ours. These two facets of my life synched together nicely, resulting in "The Society of Torch, Pole and Rope."

What I hoped to accomplish with this blog was straightforward. I wanted to make a modicum of support to the old school movement by contributing a few ideas to the many that were already being tossed around. That was my primary hope for the SoTPR. Secondly, I wanted to document my return to the hobby’s origins by way of the creation of a classic megadungeon. That complex would be my long-overdue gaming dissertation, allowing me to enter the ranks of the old masters with full credentials. And while I never expected anyone but a small group of future players to experience that dungeon firsthand, I impossibly dreamed that perhaps someday whatever creation I came up with would have some small recognition in the hobby at large.

I’m the first to be absolutely surprised when I achieve what I set out to do. Yet, it seems that I’ve done exactly that.

Despite a tendency towards self-deprecation, I can’t deny that I have made a contribution to this “thing of our” with this blog, my articles for both Fight On! and Knockspell, the release of Stonehell Dungeon, and the upcoming Dungeon Alphabet. Perhaps not as big of an impact as some, for there are many other creative souls involved with the OSR whose works renders mine a poor shadow, but one that I hope encourages others to throw their ideas into the communal pool as well.

While it has yet to be finished, Stonehell is developing into my final journeyman’s design project. Hopefully, I will be celebrating its completion at this time next year. And while I dare not image that Stonehell Dungeon has (or ever will have) the name recognition of Castle Greyhawk or Undermountain or Tegel Manor, it does have some product identity in this tiny demographic of ours.

Speaking of small niche demographics, over this past weekend, Stonehell Dungeon: Down Night-Haunted Halls broke the 150 copies sold mark, officially surpassing even my most grandiose dreams of how the book would be received. While 150 copies are only about 10% of a “real” gaming book’s print run, I’m ecstatic that so many of you have had faith in me (or your contemporaries’ reviews) to plunk down cash for your own copies. I think this says more about the integrity of the OSR community than it necessary says about the quality of the book. Nevertheless, I humbly thank you. I will do my best to not disappoint you with the sequel.

After looking back on the blog and my accomplishments since its inception, I’ve come to realization that I can stop now. Having done what I set out to do, I can cease writing these missive and concentrate on more sizable (and perhaps profitable) projects for the hobby without guilt or a lack of closure.

I won’t, however. I would miss having an instantaneous forum for sharing my more oddball ideas and the semi-regular connections this site allows me to maintain with the online role-playing community. I will maintain my lack of a rigid schedule for posting in the future though, as I am finding that certain larger gaming-related projects do occupy my a bigger percentage of my time than they did at the start of this blog. Additionally, I’m experiencing the irrational “publish or perish” fear that many beginning writers go through. I think that if I’m not working on my next supplement, I risk losing any momentum I’ve built in the past year.

This is likely to be the only post for the week here. I’m in the final stages of a long-promised article for Knockspell and I’m laying groundwork for another unnamed project. I’d like to spend the holidays doing as little role-playing writing as possible, and concentrate on the opportunity to play during the week ahead. So let me wish a Merry Christmas to those of you celebrating this week and a “I’ll happily see the rest of you next week” to everyone else.

Truthful to Ourselves

Over the weekend, I had a moment that occurs to me every few years or so. I was proofing the Stonehell book, making sure that all the monsters and their loot were accounted for and that the traps were all in place, when the camera suddenly pulled back and gave me a broad glimpse at what I was doing. Immediately, the thought struck me that this is an incredibly goofy hobby we have.

I’m not knocking what we do, but a little self-honesty every now and then helps one keep from getting too wrapped up in this fantastical recreation we share. It also makes us more understanding of our non-gaming friends and loved ones as they try to grapple with this arcane pastime of ours, and struggle to understand what we exactly see in moving little figures around on a grid, rolling weird hunks of plastic, arguing over nonsense, and speaking in funny voices. Bless them, for they are a put upon people.

Lest you think I’m only pummeling our own pastime, I admit that most any recreational activity is pretty strange if you stare at it long enough. We humans spend an awful amount of time and money on our regular attempts at recreation, and very rarely have anything more tangible to show for these pursuits other than lower stress levels and some happy memories, but anything to help us make it through the week, can’t be a bad thing, right?

This satori doesn’t mean I’m planning on putting away the dice for good anytime soon. As I stated, I have this revelation every few years. Once I reintegrate it into my mind set, I keep on with the playing. It does help me keep in mind that, to the average non-gamer, our books and periodicals make about as much sense to them as an issue of Cat Fancy magazine does to me.

Just a little something to keep in mind the next time the hoopla storm front blows through the blogosphere.

What the New Lovecraft Circle can teach the OSR

I’ve just begun reading The New Lovecraft Circle (Del Ray Books, 1996), an anthology of short stories by later writers who indulged in expanding on Lovecraft’s original tales. As I read the introduction by Robert M. Price, it struck me as to how similar the challenges these New Lovecraft Circle writers (Ramsey Campbell, Brian Lumley, Lin Carter, John Glasby, etc.) faced were to those confronting the OSR. In many places, merely replacing “New Lovecraft Circle” with “Old School Renaissance” and “Mythos fiction” with “classic D&D” produced astoundingly good advice. After all, what the New Lovecraft Circle was doing and what we’re engaged in is remarkably the same: expanding on ideas created by a predecessor while attempting to remain true to the source material.

In the post which follows, I’ve taken excerpts from Price’s introduction and presented them here. Each excerpt is followed by commentary from myself regarding how I think that the Old School Renaissance could learn a thing or two by examining the challenges and concerns of the New Lovecraft Circle. It’s a rather lengthy post, especially of a Friday, but one I believe is worthy of consideration as we move forward as a niche within a niche.

In all this, in the stories of the New Lovecraft Circle, one sensed simultaneously the joys both of nostalgia and of fresh creation. Accordingly the reader, if the stories hit him right, experienced a feeling of at-home-ness and the delight of newness. You could almost pretend it was all unfolding for the first time, and this time here you were on the ground floor.

This statement is just as true to the Old School Renaissance as it is to the New Lovecraft Circle. In general, the OSR bucks any accusations of doing what we do because we look at the older editions through rose-colored glasses, a stand which I agree with. However, we do sometimes take this defense too far and proclaim that nostalgia also has nothing to do with our embracing the older versions of the game. I think we do a great disservice to ourselves when we go to this extreme. Nostalgia for the simpler times of our youth most certainly influences our love for the game and there’s nothing patently wrong with this. Nostalgia, like all human emotions, is not a useless feeling; it has its place and purpose. To deny its presence in the OSR is nothing more than whitewashing the matter in hopes to shore up any defensive arguments we might offer. We should acknowledge its role in what we do, learn to accept its presence, and proudly revel in it.

As with the New Lovecraft Circle, one of the draws of the OSR is the opportunity to participate in the developmental stage of a new (old) branch of the hobby. Many of us were either too young or not yet born at the time the game first took flight and we missed the chance to participate in those heady days when there seemed to be no limits in sight. One of the most common reactions I’ve read and heard about the OSR is that it does a fair job of recapturing what it must have been like to be active in this hobby of ours in the early 1970s. Both Fight On! and Knockspell have drawn comparison to the early issues of Dragon and those of us who contribute to those magazines are stepping into the roles of Dragon’s earliest collaborators. Every amateur role-playing supplement published helps guide the movement and suggest new possibilities. In short, we’re engaging in an exercise of alternate history, playing a game of “What If?” to see where the hobby might have gone if the limitations of business had not stepped in. That’s part of the electricity in the air which powers the OSR.

All of which brings me to the question of pastiches, a guilty literary pleasure. Most Cthulhu Mythos fiction is either a pastiche of Lovecraft and Derleth or at the very least formula fiction. Is this a bad thing? Some say it is, and this may have something to do with the unwillingness of many editors to even look at Mythos fiction. They think readers know too well what to expect: a too-familiar story in which certain things will happen, right on schedule, and in which certain code words and book titles will try, unsuccessfully, to substitute for atmosphere and characterization.

There is a thin line between homage and necrophilia. With the first, we acknowledge that which has come before us as a sign of respect to both our heritage and its creators. With the second, we’re merely defiling the dead for our own pleasure, too lazy to take up the challenge of going after livelier quarry. The OSR needs to keep this in mind. Anything produced in the present that smacks of the past is going to be judged by its predecessor, so make sure you’re doing something unique with a theme if you choose to revisit it. Every sci-fi/fantasy mashup will be judged according to Expedition to Barrier Peaks, every deathtrap dungeon compared to the Tomb of Horrors. If we can’t revisit that ground without discovering something new there, perhaps we’d best look for unexplored territory rather than be judged wanting. To engage in homage is fine, but we’ll only stagnate if that’s the best we can do.

But surely not all genre fiction, not all formula fiction, need be a poor example of its type…I believe that we may learn much from the remarks of Lin Carter, made in his book Imaginary Worlds, in reply to the criticisms…against the pulp genre of Swords-&-Sorcery fiction, damning it as “a living fossil with no apparent ability to evolve.” To this Carter replied, “Well, perhaps. But what of it? The stuff is fun to read, and fun to write, and the fossilization of the genre is, I suspect, largely in the eye of the beholder…Must a school of writing evolve? I wonder why. Evolution implies change into something else.”

In other words, this criticism, also aimed frequently at Cthulhu Mythos fiction, is a Catch-22: if the genre doesn’t evolve, it is dead in the water. If it does evolve, it becomes something else. And in either case we are done for.”

This passage strike exceedingly deep if only because we’ve witnessed firsthand what happens when a game “evolves.” I’m in agreement with Carter here. The earlier editions of the game remain fun to read and fun to write, and, most importantly, fun to play. The idea that the original versions of D&D are fossils does lie in the eye of the beholder. If OD&D is a fossil, it’s a particularly lively one, akin to a trilobite that can rip out your throat.

But despite the virility of this “fossilized” form of the game, we still face a similar challenge to that of the New Lovecraft Circle. Unless we’re content to remain in the comfortable confines of D&D circa 1974, we need to explore ways in which we can take the game to new heights (and lows) without mutating it into something completely different. Unless the OSR does this, we’re dead in the water, a mere footnote in the history of the hobby. The possible incarnations the game may take without changing into something completely unrecognizable have already been demonstrated by some. Like it or loathe it, you can’t dismiss the fact that Geoffrey McKinney took the OSR into new and unsettling territory with Carcosa. Gabor Lux has been demonstrating similar unorthodox thinking with his Fomalhaut setting. We need more of this if we want to thrive and challenge ourselves. There’s nothing wrong with games filled with halflings, orcs, and Conan stand-ins, but this doesn’t and shouldn’t have to be the only option.

Carter offered no contrived aesthetic defense for writing new Swords-&-Sorcery…John Jakes, in a passage appreciatively quoted by Carter, sums it up: we don’t like it because we are supposed to like it or obliged to like it by some literary conscience. We like it because we like it. Jakes: “There are just not enough of this kind of stories to go around any more; not enough, anyway, to please me.”

We sometimes forget this. When challenged to explain why we enjoy the early forms of the game, we feel we have to construct air-tight arguments and cunning counter-attacks against the current regime. Deep down inside though, we play this form of the game because we like it, a fact we don’t owe anyone a justification for. And the reason that the OSR exists is not only because we like these versions of the game, but because there’s not enough material to go around to appease those of us who enjoy it.

…To put it in terms drawn from Susan Sontag’s famous essay “Notes on Camp,” Carter, Jakes and the rest of us enjoy this fiction precisely for the excesses that make more “serious” critics turn up their noses. In another essay, Sontag puts down science fiction along with pornography as “sub-literary”…But she has forgotten herself when she makes such sweeping judgments. We latter-day pulpists are not to be despised, for we have acquired the sensibility of “Camp.” Carter knew what qualified as great literature and what didn’t and that both were enjoyable in their ways. And he was unashamed of his nostalgic, campy love for what he himself called “the gloriously fourth-rate.”

This is something that gets overlooked in the rush to be more “Older School Than Thou.” The unwritten rule is that if you show any appreciation for any RPG not considered “old school,” you are in danger of getting your membership card revoked. This is patently absurd.

The new versions of D&D (and all the other “new school” games out there) have something to teach the grognards, even if it’s only what you don’t like in a role-playing game. There’s an old saying in writing that “before you break the rules, you must first learn them.” This applies to RPG as well. If we merely dismiss newer titles out of hand, we’re doing exactly what we accuse the New School of doing with our own preferred version. We don’t need to apologize for loving the “camp” or “gloriously fourth-rate” versions of the game, but there’s no excuse to be so willfully obtuse that we’re unable to admit that even the newest of role-playing games have a place in the hobby, if only because there are people who enjoy them. The biggest challenge for anyone is expose themselves to something they don’t agree with, be it role-playing games or political leanings. Fortunately, there’s no threat of contamination in doing so and it might even strengthen your own beliefs.

But one might persist, doesn’t it get rather stale? Maybe there can be good Mythos fiction, granted, but hasn’t it all been written? Does the plethora of poor Mythos imitations signal that it’s been done to death? Why continue to write them?

…I think Derrida helps us grasp the fact…that when one writes a “Mythos story,” one is in fact simply reading the Mythos story, the one written deep within by all one’s years of reading and enjoying the work of Lovecraft, Derleth, et al. The second half of Derleth’s Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos was a rewriting, and thus a rereading, of the first half. One wishes there were more of these stories, so one writes more of them, not so much for other hungry Lovecraftians to read, but for oneself to read in the very act of writing them.

Why do we persist in writing new supplemental materials for these games? Haven’t all the good ideas already been taken? Hasn’t there been enough claptrap published? What can I possibly have to offer to the OSR? These are all very good questions.

The second paragraph answers these questions not only in regards to Mythos fiction but to old school gaming. We write these materials simply because we need to read them. If you’re currently working on some old school supplement, chances are you’re not doing it because you have intentions of getting rich off of publishing it. You’re writing it because you feel the need to see it exist somewhere other than in your own mind. You need to give it form and substance outside of the scattered notes and ideas that are lodged in your brain. In short, we write these things for ourselves. Although the scarcity (and that’s fading) of newly-written old school supplemental material helps encourage these creations and there is an audience for them, we’re actually engaging in self-gratification. There’s nothing wrong with this, just be sure to wash your hands once you’re done.

“All those terrible fannish Mythos yarns are so bad not because they must be, nor even because their young authors are poor writers, but rather, at the bottom of it, because they are poor readers! They have picked up nothing in Lovecraft but all the tongue-twisting names and the twisting tentacles, merely beasts and bestiaries. Mythos names, we often hear, and rightly, do not a Lovecraftian story make.

…The basic idea of a Mythos tale as I have set forth is an interior skeleton like a mammal’s, a frame on which to grow, not a hard, limiting exo-skeleton like those worn by the insects from Shaggai. It forms the base-line against which the new variations may be measured. It is not denial of flexibility; it is something to be flexible with.

In my judgment we may plot the failure of both insipid fan Mythos fiction and of sophisticated New Wave Mythos fiction…along this axis. The fan fiction tends to stick to the skeleton so closely there is no meat on the bones. Or the meat is old and rank. We’ve heard it all before.

The New Wave stuff, on the other hand, chucks the whole skeleton. It is either like an invertebrate shoggoth or it has simply plugged in a few familiar Mythos names here and there in an unfamiliar structure.”

These final paragraphs take us back to what I feel is the greatest obstacle the OSR faces: how do we grow while remaining true to our roots and avoid mutating into something “not-D&D”? As I pointed out above, we must learn the difference between acknowledging our past and rehashing it. We need to discern what lies at the heart of Old School D&D and use this as the framework from which to hang new ideas. Not the easiest of tasks and one that has many subjective answers. In our attempts to identify the skeleton of D&D, we can’t do so with terms so inflexible that the game and the OSR cannot bend to reach unexplored places. Luckily, the very rules of the game are malleable enough to accommodate the mental calisthenics that the OSR must perform to stay vibrant.

The New Lovecraft Circle has proved that it is possible to build on old ideas and visit new territory while remaining true to the origins of the material. It’s now time for the OSR to do the same. Luckily for us, the New Lovecraft Circle has given us a few pointers as to how to proceed.

Inspirational Passages: Putting the “Fun” Back in Fungi

Fungi creeps me out, which is why I find it hard to resist including it in my games. I even dedicated an entire entry to the stuff in The Dungeon Alphabet. If you’re looking for something truly alien here on Earth, fungi is your best bet for high weirdness and general creepiness.

Unfortunately, D&D craps out in the fungi department as far as I’m concerned. It’s got enough monsters built on a fungus base, but most of them fall short of the mark of truly unnerving. With myconoids, violent fungus, russet mold, ascomoids, and phycomids to choose from, you’d figure at least one would be enough to give you the shudders. Don’t get me started on shriekers, who make an appearance on my Top-10 List of Despised Monsters. Even making yellow mold psionic didn’t help. Zygoms get closest to what I picture a crafty referee should be doing with homebrewed fungi creatures.

When it comes down to it, I’m hanging with Lovecraft on the subject. Fungi should get under your skin (literally) and make you shun mushrooms on your pizza for at least a month after running into the stuff in a game. The best example of role-playing game use of fungi in my mind has to be in H.P. Lovecraft’s Dunwich, one of the 1920’s sourcebooks for Call of Cthulhu. The mental picture of a haggard man opening his mouth to revel the pale white gills of a mushroom clogging his mouth and throat is the sort of image that I’m shooting for whenever I decide to play the fungi card in a game.

Here, far underground, the fungi were stranger even than those on the surface. It was if the House saved its most delicate and cherished outgrowths for this hidden realm. And it was obvious that they needed no light, for many of them glowed with an evil light of their own making.

A broad, dark pool, full of floating scum, had formed where the floor had actually sunk or collapsed near the east wall of the great cave. Water trickled steadily over and down a broad area of slimy rock, for this wall was unfinished, indeed hardly even smoothed down by the craftsmen of long ago. An underground spring must have burst forth in ages past and still flowed into the pool, leaving by some hidden outlet.

Around this sinister tarn, which was many yards in extent, there grew a forest of tall, gently tapering spires of soft, living matter. Several men’s height they were, colored with pallid and crepuscular shades, ugly, faded violets, insipid yellows, and debauched, bleached oranges. On top of some of them glowed round areas of foxfire and dim phosphorescence. This was the light, the priest realized, which he had glimpsed far off when they first entered the cavern.

- Hiero’s Journey by Sterling E. Lanier

Roll To Hit the Dead Horse

This is the only time I will ever address the second-most popular dead horse to flog in gaming: Ascending vs. Descending Armor Class. It must be summer, because that topic has come around again.

It is my heartfelt belief that one person- and one person only- need concern themselves with armor class – the referee. Every player knows after their first five minutes of gaming that rolling high is a good thing, and that the higher they roll, the better chance they have of ultimately making the monster fall down dead. The referee will tell them if they rolled high enough on a case-by-case basis.

The referee should use whatever method works for them, whether it be Ascending, Descending, Letters, Astrological Symbols, kanji, ex-girlfriends’ phone numbers, etc. as long as they can give the result of an attack immediately after the die is rolled. No method is intrinsically superior to another so long as this sole stipulation is adhered to.

To quote Mr. Dave Arneson: "Don't ask me what you need to hit. Just roll the die and I will let you know!"

Shadebyrne: A Settlement on the Grow

Over the past several months, most of the preparations that I’ve made for the B/X and/or Labyrinth Lord game have revolved around the dungeon, as suggested by the LBBs. With five levels of Stonehell completed and a rough wilderness map prepared, I felt that I had assembled most of the needed material to run a game if the opportunity presented itself. The largest omission from this preparatory work was the characters’ home base.

Although I assumed that the one-short game from two weeks ago would revolve completely around the dungeon, I wanted to be prepared for the possibility that the party might retreat back to “civilization” to recoup before making another foray into the halls of Stonehell. It was past time to start thinking about the home base.

I had a few vague ideas for what I wanted to do with the local settlement based on how I perceived this area of the game world. The settlement would be a “last chance” town situated on the very edge of the kingdom’s territory. The river that ran along the edge of the settlement would represent the political border between the civilized lands of Men and the unsettled wilderness beyond. A trade road passed through the settlement and into the wilderness, where it would wind its way over mountains, through deep forests, and past murky swamps before connecting with one or two distant human lands. In the uncivilized realm that served as a bumper between these kingdoms, a handful of racial holdings and free city-states have been carved from the wilderness and serve as commercial stations along the trade road, but the land is more wild than settled - a perfect place for characters to later lay claim to land and form their own political demesnes.

I decided to begin the home base design process with a map. In my youth, I would have insisted that I create something from scratch, possibly after looking at diagrams or surviving maps of typical medieval settlements to get an idea. I’ve grown more open to using pre-created gaming supplements to cut down on design time since my return to the hobby, however, and decided to paw though some of the old Judges Guild supplements for ideas to steal or build upon. The maps in Village Book I left me a little cold, as most were too small for my needs. I did find something that sparked my imagination in Castle Book I though (p. 54 for those of you who own a copy). This “castle” (it’s more of a walled settlement) had enough buildings to give me a decent cross-section of residences and business, plus it featured a defensive enclosure around the settlement (something any border town would require).

As I didn’t have much predetermined in my mind and I believe that the mark of any good referee is the ability to interpret random dice rolls in a manner that creates a seamless tapestry of world building, I next broke out the dice and consulted the tables in Village Book I to learn more about the settlement. Thanks to the pioneers of at Judges Guild, I learned that the settlement was surrounded by a wooden palisade (5’ thick, 20’ high) that was defended by a catapult, taboo symbols, and watch creatures. The taboo symbols were an interesting result. I see the weather-beaten wood stockade covered with whorls of azure, green, yellow, and brown repainted each spring in arcane patterns. I’m uncertain at the moment of what these symbols mean. I’ve considered that they may be meaningless decoration used to deter the superstitious Goblinoid tribes who inhabit the wilderness across the river, but the possibility that they represent that fact that the town is under the aegis of protection of a nearby barbarian tribe (the Tribe of the Moose) is also tempting. Since it’s unimportant at this stage, I made a note of it and moved on. The watch creatures are another bit of miscellanea about the town that bears expanding on. Watch dogs are the most likely candidate at the moment, but I haven’t put aside the idea of animals of a more unusual nature completely. Perhaps it’s well-trained boars with serrated blade caps on their tusks and studded leather barding on their shoulders and heads that protect the town?

The fact that the town sports a wooden palisade and not one of stone led to me to consider another bit of background for the settlement. As the town is not a recent community and has existed on the border for centuries, why haven’t the walls been upgraded to more resilient stone? An ample supply of it exists in the mountains across the river after all. This led to ideas about bureaucratic corruption and I decided that the former administrators of the settlement were more interested in filling their own coffers than improving the place. The position of the town’s administrator was not a prestigious one. Being forced to govern a small town on the outskirts of the kingdom was either a punishment detail or one taken by officials at the end of their career who sought to extract as much of a retirement fund from the town tax coffers as possible. Thus, the wooden walls remain long after stone ones should have been erected.

A few more dice rolls informed me of the settlement’s population and commercial establishments. There are 310 residents in the town. I took this to mean that 310 people live and work with the walls of the community. Doubtless there are outlying farmers and agricultural workers who come into town for trade and there’s a sizeable transient population in the form of adventurers, traders, and other mobile professions that pass through the town on a regular basis.

The rolls for business created some interesting results. In total, the town supports a messenger service, a fighter’s school, a scribe, a tavern, a silversmith, a brewer, a leather armorer, and an undertaker. I couldn’t imagine better results for a border town situated next to a large dungeon. As the final settlement on the kingdom’s border, a messenger service would keep the town in the know about events and developments closer to the country’s heartlands. It’d also be used by trade caravans and other transients coming and going from the place. A fighter’s school would ensure that the town’s garrison is trained well enough to protect the community against hostile monsters and tribes, as well as provide a place for adventurers with loose coin pried from Stonehell to pick up a few pointers. The silversmith and leather armorer, although those being their primary professions, would serve as places to unload plundered treasure (the silversmith trades in jewelry and gems) and to upgrade and repair equipment (the leather armorer does some chain mail work on the side).

Although I had predetermined that an inn would exist in town, the tavern result gave me the idea that the inn serves mostly trade and adventuring clientele, while the tavern is a “townie” joint visited by locals only to escape from the braggadocio of would-be heroes. The brewer provides product to both the inn and tavern, as well as buying some of the local farmers’ annual yield. The existence of an undertaker was surprising. Thinking on it, however, one makes perfect sense in a town just outside of Stonehell. I’m sure he/she does brisk business when adventurers limp back to town laden with coin and corpses. An undertaker will also give me the opportunity to explore some of the bizarre funereal rites of the various races and religions of the world. Perhaps he has a supply of varnishes and shellacs to meet the needs of certain beliefs and tenets?

With most of the important facets of the settlement determined, all I lacked was a name for the community. The random tables in Village Book I failed me in this regard, the results being fine for places the adventurers might pass through, never to return again, but ill-suited for a home base. My reputation for being overly-strict on myself when developing names precedes me (as any long-time reader who remembers the Dungeon Not Yet Named™ incident can attest). Luckily, I was able to settle on one rather quick in this case.

Picturing the town built near the banks of a river and in the eaves of a large forest brought to mind a breezy, shaded place. Liking “shade” as a starting point, I cast around for a suitable suffix. In other communities in R’Nis, I’ve utilized a common suffix for cities (-var), which means “city or large town.” Thus, there’s Xultvar, the City Resilient (“city on the River Xult”) and the Tvar v Tvarax (“city of cities” – the old empire’s capital). Wanting to do something similar with smaller communities, the word “-byrne” came to mind. Although Gaelic for “raven,” it’s similar enough to “burg” (“castle or walled town”), which is a common enough town suffix even today. It has the additional benefit of being a homophone for “burn” and I like the dichotomy between “shade” (a cool, comfortable setting) and heat connotations which “burn” suggests. And thus, “Shadebyrne” was born.

Despite having a good idea about the newly-minted home base for future adventures, there still remained a few important blank spaces to fill in. I still needed more information on the inn, the identity of the local government official, and a custom map that took all these little bits of detail into consideration. As this post has grown to a much longer length than I original foresaw, I’ll tackle those topics in our next installment.