two unrelated items

I pretty only read the Paizo e-newsletter when the subject line catches my eye. The most recent edition mentioned Gygax in the title. I'm not in a big hurry to read Gygax's fiction, but in the body of the email I found out that Reaper has rolled out some sweet new prepainted plastic. I'm not really into figures right now, except for paper stuff like Sparks, but I like what Reaper is doing.

I'm not a strict medievalist, but I do like some knights in my D&D.

Aw, yeah! Nothing says 'D&D' quite like a titanic lavender earthworm swallowing PCs whole.

The green dress on this Mind Flayer, er, "Bathalian" looks uninteresting, but I'm thinking most of the mind flayers in the D&D lines are rather pricey in comparison to this fellow. And dig that collar!

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Recently I've purchased copies of Monsters! Monsters! (which I've wanted ever since buying the excellent Judges Guild module Rat on a Stick so many years ago) and the Tunnels & Trolls anniversary edition. Doctor Rotwang! put me over the top on buying the latter and he did not steer me wrong. I owned an earlier editions in the late eighties but it just didn't take back then. Sometimes it takes me a long time to 'get' a game.

Anyway, in the intro to this incarnation of T&T author Ken St. Andre notes that he runs a fansite for the game called Trollhalla. Since I spend something like 99% of my internet time goofing around on RPG sites, I decided to check the place out. I was astonished to find that it was a pay site. Certainly Mr. St. Andre can run his affairs as it pleases him, but this just strikes me as dumb.

There are plenty of ways you make some money off of the fans. Put ads on the site with Google or any of the other ad vendors. Sell T-shirts and crap with Cafe Press. Put out old or new material via PDF with YourGamesNow or in print with Lulu. Those ideas are all off the top of my head, there have got to be others. Instead, St. Andre is basically saying to newly minted enthusiasts like me "Hey, kid, glad you T&T. Now give me twenty more bucks for the privilege of being my fan."

Still, the games themselves are golden. I might blog about them more. Because I can't shut up about games I like. Which you probably already know.

WTF? Theatre proudly presents...

...Batman and a cowboy discussing Scooby-Doo.

I'm racking my brain to figure out a way to use this panel as evidence that the old Scooby Doo/Batman & Robin crossovers are in continuity. Considering everyone that the Mystery Inc. gang has encountered over the years, that would be mind-bogglingly awesome.

Miller Park Memories

Yesterday I chaperoned my daughter's class on a field trip to Miller Park Zoo in Bloomington, Illinois. Despite the rain, we had a great time. We brown-bagged lunch at the Miller Park Pavilion, an august edifice undoubtedly erected during the grand period of civic construction in Illinois, circa 1900 to 1910. The Pavilion has a special place in my heart, as I attended my first game convention there.

The first con I attempted to attend was Wil-Con in Wilmington, Illinois. I talked my parents into driving my crew and I the considerable distance to Wilmington only to find a handwritten sign taped to the venue door: "Wil-Con is canceled." That's it. I never found out any more about what happened. Fortunately, Bloomington is much closer and the nearest place to my home to go for serious shopping. Otherwise, I doubt my parents would have tried this weird "con" thing again.

Anyhoo, the con in Bloomington was called Frontier Wars. It was 15 years or more later that I made the connection between the con name and the Frontier Wars of Traveller canon. If GDW was an official sponsor of the con, they were extremely laid back about it. We couldn't tell and I still don't know. Walking through the con during the mid to late eighties, you would have thought that FASA was the big dog in town, because BattleTech was the game to play.

My group discovered BattleTech at our first Frontier War. In the dealer area on the main floor one table had a Chessex hexmap (IIRC), some mode railroad terrain, and these little painted robots. My whole gang fell in love with the little painted robots. I immediately bought the boxed set (That'd be the 2nd edition, the one that came out after Lucas's lawyer told them that the original name of the game, BattleDroids, was not going to work.) I didn't have the money to get any robots, because earlier that weekend I had already bought the 3rd edition Call of Cthulhu boxed set.

Funny thing about CoC, I bought it several years before reading any H.P. Lovecraft. I got into CoC based upon the Dragon review alone. I couldn't find a Lovecraft book in my neck of the woods until 1988 or so. Now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I discovered both Wil-Con and Frontier Wars in the Convention Calendar section of Dragon. And I learned about the existence of a game store in Bloomington by going to Frontier Wars. So basically you can draw a straight line from Dragon magazine to all my other participation with the rest of the hobby. The fact that Dragon could be found on the magazine rack of ordinary bookstores is pretty much why I'm blogging about stupid games a quarter century or so later. D&D got me into gaming, but it was a regular dose of Dragon that sustained my interest.

(But I'm sure Wizards of the Coast knew what they were doing when they pulled the plug on Dragon. It's not like they were killing an institution of the hobby. And it's not like video games have their own print magazines or anything, right? And since everybody buys music online these days, Rolling Stone has gone to an all-digital format.)

In addition to getting my group into BattleTech and, to a lesser extent, Call of Cthulhu, some of the events at the various Frontier Wars served as important negative examples. Some of the D&D games I played there were pretty effin' weak, which only spurred me to run my own con games and to do it better than those events. Not all the D&D at Frontier War was lame, but the average quality was so low that one year we decided that we'd be better off just breaking out my buddy Dave's campaign materials in the open gaming area. And then there was the Traveller game that put me off that system for almost two decades.

But we also played some great games at Frontier Wars. Foremost in my mind is a little adventure that was called "Fun on Skull Island". I recall my magic-user climbing to the top of the "smoking mountain", expecting for some reason to find the entrance to a lava dungeon. Instead I found an open Eversmoking Bottle set at the peak of an ordinary mountain. Then I got the bright idea that there might be a clue inside the bottle, so I attempt to peer inside despite the smoke. I nearly asphyxiated. Later we found a door that could only be opened by solving one of these puzzles:

After each real minute of manipulation of the puzzle you got zapped for an ever-increasing amount of electrical damage. My guy got fried pretty badly.

I won a competitive AD&D at Frontier War one year. It was called "Run, Hobbit, Run!" even though it had no hobbits in it whatsoever. I think the guy running it just liked the name. It was an every man for himself dungeon crawl, where the only monsters were the other players. Something like 20 people participated. The pregens were designed to be balanced, but not identical. I wound up with a fourth level fighter, one of the lowest level characters at the table, but I was armed with a sword +4 and a displacer cloak. All movement was pre-plotted and simultaneous, until two characters encountered one another, then normal AD&D combat was used. The last man standing was the winner.

Some of the older players were upset that a stupid kid won the event, but this stupid kid spent 3 and a half hours avoiding every fight he could. I ended up only having to fight just one foe to the death, a Lord whose hitpoints had been whittled down by several previous encounters. When I finally dropped him my crew cheered and patted me on the back. The prize for winning the event was a copy of this module:


My dad took one look at the cover and said something along the lines of "Huh. I think I'm starting to see the appeal of this Dungeons & Dragons stuff."

A Calvalcade of Characters Sheets, part 2

In my youth Jim was the older, wiser AD&D guru all us dumb kids looked up to. We were still in high school and he had a house and a wife, so even though he wasn't really that much older than us, we pretty much hailed him as our hero. That's why we put up with so much crap from him. He killed A LOT of our characters. We carpooled to his house and on the drive over we would talk about the cool replacement characters we had made. I usually brought two or three new PCs every session, under the assumption that my current dude and at least one replacement would die during the next few hours. Below are all my characters that lasted more than one session. Behold, the victims of Jim.

Chester of the Pointy Hat, page 2
Chester, page 3
Chester, page 4
Chester, page 5

Jim may have been a killer DM but Chester's death was all my fault. The party was trying to locate and slay a black dragon. We figured out where the dragon lived on the dungeon level, but the party couldn't agree as to the right course of action. After much heated debate, I declared in a loud voice "FINE! I DON'T CARE WHAT YOU GUYS DO! I'M GONNA GO THROW MY FIREBALL AND YOU GUYS CAN CLEAN UP AFTERWARDS!" We were only 50 feet or so from the dragon's lair, so of course it heard the whole damn conversation. When I kicked open the door I was promptly melted with acid breath.

Razzak Gristlyguts, page 2
Razzak, page 3

Razzak was once in a really tight spot so he started chanting "Demogorgon, Orcus, Demogorgon, Orcus." This was back when saying a demons name gave a flat 5% chance they would take notice. The dice eventually came up for Demogorgon and he sent a retriever to investigate. The retriever tore through whatever menace we were fighting at the time and then turned its attention to the party. I had to throw myself into a rapid river to escape, nearly drowning. The rest of the party were slaughtered to a man. That was effin' awesome.


Arius Claudius, page 2
Arius, page 3
Arius, page 4

Arius was my PC who entered play as the bondage slave of a troll. Despite this rather inauspicious beginning, I got a lot of good play out of him.

Botonimous Bradelbreek, page 2

I retold this dude's most memorable adventure here. At one point in the campaign he was significantly higher in level, but then he got drained several levels in a wight attack.

Mochimoto Tojo, page 2

Wow, this dude's stats were egregious even beyond the usual level of cheating in that campaign. Not that high stats ever helped us that much.

Beware the Ninny

The Haunted Swords of Cinder tend to acquire more than one name, as they weave their way in and out of history and legend. The Midrealm's most infamous magic blade is called Rekknpychn Inne Møguet by the Adelians, while the Elves know it as Morissё Ninniach. The Common Tongue name for the sword is a corruption of the Elvish moniker. It's just one of the absurd facets of life in Cinder that the deadliest weapon in the land is called Morrisey's Ninny, or just The Ninny.

Several lays have been written about the hero Morrisey (despite never existing) and his Blade of Seven Dooms, another name for the Ninny. One plagiaristic minstrel even took the entire corpus of the Epic of Crugal and clumsily reworked it into the Epic of Morris, ruining some really great alliterative rhymes in the process. But Crugal's popularity as a subject of tales was on the wane, so it was probably a wise move to try to cash in on Morrisey's rising star. But it's unfortunate that the legends of Crugal's blade have become confused with the Ninny corpus. Now no two rhymers can agree on the Seven Dooms, or powers, of the The Ninny. All agree that the blade flashes a different color for each power, but no sage has yet untangled all the threads in the legends to ascertain an original list of powers.

Perhaps it is this ambiguity that fuels the imagination of so many treasure-hunters. In the last quarter-century at least a dozen adventurers have traveled to the Midrealm solely to seek out Morrisey's Ninny. The most recent sword-seeker, a dwarf called Ugrod Rustybeard, disappeared while searching for clues to the location of the Unseen Hermitage, a possible resting place of the Ninny. It is said that he had rented rooms at the Crossroads Inn. Six months ago the proprietor sold off most of Rustybeard's stuff to pay off the missing dwarf's debts. Only a journal, presumably written in Dwarvish, remains unsold.

This dude is great

One of the mags available this Free Comic Day was a sampler of EC Comic reprints. EC had a great range of comics like Weird Science and Tales from the Crypt. The Comic Code that was supposed protect America's youth was basically designed to put EC out of business. Gemstone Publishing has been releasing archive editions of this stuff, with six issues to a volume. I didn't know this until I got this freebie comic. I'm definitely putting some Weird Science on the ol' Amazon wishlist. That stuff is awesome.

Take, for example, this tale from the reprint. A blob from Venus is loose on the Earth, devouring everything in its path. The President calls on his Top Men for a solution to this problem. Enter a guy who looks a bit like Leslie Groves without his mustache:


What I love about this guy is his casual attitude towards unleashing nuclear hellfire on American soil. There he is sitting with his knees crossed, smirking behind his corncob pipe. All of a sudden he has this hum-dinger of an idea. "Gosh gee-whiz, boss! We've got all these gol-durned A-bombs sitting around gathering dust. Maybe we could fire one off and see what happens?"

I know his cavalier attitude towards launching atomics can be partially blamed on this comic's origin in the fifties. In any later era he'd be standing up, hunched over the sitting President, his clenched fists slamming the desk. "With all due respect, Sir, nuclear weapons are our only option." Instead, this guy's almost jolly about it.

answering Mike Carr

Before I pick on Mike Carr I should take some time to sing his praises. Mr. Carr is one of the less-remembered greats of the hobby. If you catch me in an ornery enough mood I will argue, perhaps at length, that his Fight in the Skies (a.k.a. Dawn Patrol) was the first published RPG and not that johnny-come-lately Dungeons & Dragons. He wrote module B1 In Search of the Unknown, a classic of the Whisky Tango Foxtrot school of dungeon design and an excellent tool for getting new DM's up and running. He also edited a crapload of early AD&D material.

So why am I picking on him today? Late last week I re-read his foreward to the first edition Dungeon Master's Guide. I read the DMG cover-to-cover about once a year or so, because I'm loony that way. As a dumb kid in 1983 I thought the opening to Mike Carr's foreward was like, deep, man.

Is Dungeon Mastering an art or a science? An interesting question!

Back in the day I was too young and naive to see the way Mike pats himself on the back almost immediately. I was too busy feeling all puffed up because as a fledgling DM I was apparently some sort of superdude: half artiste, half Man of Science. At least that's how it sounds as Mike goes on to explain:

If you consider the pure creative aspect of starting from scratch, the "personal touch" of individual flair that goes into preparing and running a unique campaign, or the particular style of moderating a game adventure, then Dungeon Mastering may indeed be thought of as an art.

If you consider the aspect of experimentation, the painstaking effort of preparation and attention to detail, and the continuing search for new ideas and approaches, then Dungeon Mastering is perhaps more like a science--not always exacting in a literal sense, but exacting in terms of what is required to do the job well.

Last week as I re-read this passage for maybe the 25th time in as many years, I was finally struck by how much pure government-certified grade 'A' bullshit Carr was shoveling in this passage. Again, I've got nothing but love in my heart for Mike Carr, but here he's so far gone he's not in left field, he's complete out of the friggin' ballpark. Let me explain.

First of all, Dungeons & Dragons, this silly little thing we do, has as much to do with science as intelligent design does. Yeah, I went there. I don't normally get political or religious in this here blog, but there it is. My point is that there's a staggering difference between one of the foundations of modern civilization and whether or not I keep better track of how long the PC's torches have been burning.

More importantly, I get from this passage that Mike Carr circa 1979 had no idea how art really works. His criteria for 'scientific' dungeomastering, the need for "experimentation, the painstaking effort of preparation and attention to detail, and the continuing search for new ideas and approaches" describes good artistry to a 'T'. A painter doesn't just throw some pigments on a canvas and call it art. Well, a good painter who knows what they're doing probably doesn't do it that way. Similarly, I can write ten lines of doggerel and pretend I'm a poet, but I'm not.

Good artists spend years honing their craft, practicing techniques, and seeking out new materials and methods. Which is why I'm coming around to the idea that calling what roleplayers do an artform maybe isn't as pretentious as I once thought. It isn't about being a wordsmith or a master thespian or whatever. Roleplaying is its own artform with its own body of rules and techniques.

What's really exciting is that this artform is still in its infancy. Like Doc Rotwang! has said on several occasions, a big reason to still do vanilla fantasy is because you're not done speaking with that voice. Other artists have moved on, the same way some folks abandoned painting with oils on canvas for acrylics on formica, or whatever. But the artist smearing motor oil on tarpaulin probably doesn't assume that no one can ever say anything new with water colors on paper. Similarly, I think little ol' OD&D still holds the promise of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, just like pretty much every other RPG.