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Author: James Maliszewski

Four Modules

Four Modules

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B1 In Search of the Unknown-smallOne of the many interesting divides among devotees of “old school” roleplaying games, particularly those who favor Dungeons & Dragons, concerns the place of the adventure module. An adventure module is a product detailing a locale to be explored or a situation to be resolved. By many reckonings, the first such module appeared in 1976, written by Pete and Judy Kerestan. Entitled Palace of the Vampire Queen, it described the five-level dungeon inhabited by undead – including the Vampire Queen herself – and other unpleasant things. Held captive within the dungeon is the daughter of a dwarf king, providing a motivation for the characters to become involved beyond glory and gold. While it isn’t notably clever in its conceptions, the module was groundbreaking in that it showed there was market for prefabricated, portable adventures rather than relying solely on the referee’s own efforts. It’s little wonder, then, that modules quickly became a staple of TSR’s catalog, as well as those of other publishers.

The issue some old schoolers take with adventure modules is that they, to borrow Gygax’s famous phrase from Volume 3 of the 1974 edition of D&D, “do … your imagining for you.” More importantly, modules unconsciously establish not only a notion of what an adventure is and ought to be, but they also establish the outlines of a fantasy setting rather than leaving all of these up to each referee to decide for himself and his own campaign. I’m somewhat sympathetic to this point of view, since I know well how powerful an influence TSR’s modules exercised over my own youthful imagination. At the same time, many of these modules served as helpful models to me as I started creating my own dungeons, adventures, and settings. Likewise, they provided a point of commonality between myself and other players, regardless of where they lived or with whom they played. When I met others at local games meets or conventions (or, nowadays, online), we can reminisce about our shared experiences fighting through the Caves of Chaos or the wonders we saw when we first beheld dark fairyland of the Vault of the Drow.

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Rogues Gallery

Rogues Gallery

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gamestoreThe first roleplaying game product I bought for myself – using money given to me by my grandmother for Christmas 1979 – was the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. I ordered it through the Sears catalog, because, to my 10 year-old mind, that’s what you did when you wanted to buy something “unusual” (which D&D was to me at that time). The thought never occurred to me to look for the book anywhere else, since I didn’t recall ever seeing any RPG products on the shelves of the shops and stores I usually visited.

As convenient as the Sears catalog was, its selection was limited, as I learned after admiring the collection of D&D materials owned by the high school-age older brother of a good friend. This older brother was one of my mentors in the hobby, who initiated me into its mysteries at an impressionable age. He’d acquired his books, adventure modules, and magazines from hobby and comic book shops throughout suburban Baltimore and spoke enticingly about the many other treasures they held. Needless to say, I wanted to visit some of these shops myself.

By the summer of 1980, there were quite a few places selling roleplaying games in my neck of the woods, including chain bookstores (like Walden and B. Dalton) and even greeting card stores. The number of dedicated game stores, though, was quite small. It’d still be a few more years before they started to become, if not commonplace, at least easier to find. Consequently, I became a very loyal customer to those I did find, often hanging out at these places with my friends. And why wouldn’t I? Not only did they have shelves of D&D and other RPGs I’d never heard of, but they also had dice and fanzines and miniature figures. Several of them even had a space or room where people could sit down and play. In many ways, those public gaming spaces held even more appeal to me than everything else, because they gave me a chance to see roleplayers “in the wild” – and what a cast of characters they were!

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Hope Among the Ruins

Hope Among the Ruins

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Gamma World First EditionAs I creep closer to the half-century mark, I find myself reflecting ever more often on my childhood. Though born at the tail end of the 1960s, I consider myself a child of the ’70s, since it was the images and obsessions of that decade that left the strongest impressions on my young imagination. I’ve mentioned before that popular culture in the 1970s was awash with the weird, the occult, and the apocalyptic. The latter saw its expression in the flowering of the “disaster movie” genre, which attained a kind of Golden Age in those days. Nowadays, the disaster films people most recall are fairly conventional ones, like Airport (1970), The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and The Towering Inferno (1974) – all of which I watched on network television after their theatrical releases – but the ones that had the greatest impact on me were those with a more global scope, like The Andromeda Strain (1971), The Omega Man (1971), and Meteor (1979). These were the motion pictures that fed my lifelong fascination with The End of the World as We Know It.

Growing up, I was possessed of the sense that life wasn’t necessarily as stable or as safe as it seemed to be on the surface. Real world events during the 1970s only made this point more forcefully. From the Energy Crisis to stagflation and fears of overpopulation and social unrest, life appeared awfully precarious in those days. And, of course, the ups and downs of relations between “the Free World” and the Soviet Bloc did little to suggest otherwise. Being a child, even a precocious one, I didn’t completely understand the full implications of a global thermonuclear war. I only knew that World War III (as my friends and I conceived it back then) was a virtual certainty, a belief reinforced by all manner of adults, from political commentators who publicly fretted about the implications of Ronald Reagan’s possible election in 1980 to my childhood idol, Carl Sagan, who regularly voiced his opinion that mankind was far more likely to destroy itself than to travel to other worlds.

Despite this, I can’t say that I was frightened by the prospects of the world’s end. Sure, I didn’t look forward to it, but I was just a kid and and I knew that, regardless of my feelings, there was nothing I could do to stave off Armageddon, so why worry? I’d read enough history by this point to realize that no world truly ends. Wars, plagues, and other sundry catastrophes were frequently devastating, marking the end of one era, but something almost always came afterwards. At my young age, I found it hard to countenance the possibility that even a nuclear war would spell the end of everything (despite that being the very reason why so many people lived in utter terror of it). I’d also read enough fantasy and science fiction to conclude that the End of the World might be adventuresome.

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The Dungeon Dozen

The Dungeon Dozen

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DDcoverNext copyThe first roleplaying game I owned was the 1977 Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set edited by J. Eric Holmes, as you’re all probably tired of hearing by now. Among the many memorable features of that boxed set was that some of its printings (including my own) did not include dice. Instead, these sets included a sheet of laminated paper chits printed in groups that mimicked the ranges of polyhedral dice (1–4, 1–6, 1–8, 1–10, 1–12, and 1–20).  The purchaser of the game was instructed to cut them apart and “place each different type in a small container (perhaps a small paper cup), and each time a number generation is called for, draw a chit at random from the appropriate container.”

This I dutifully did, taking several small Dixie Cups from my upstairs bathroom for the purpose. Leaving aside the disbelief-suspending flower print of the cups, this method of random number generation was awkward and decidedly un-fun. Consequently, I set out to find a proper set of dice with which to play D&D, a quest that took me to a local toy store, which had them hidden away behind the counter. I bought that set – made of terrible, low impact plastic – and rushed home to use them. I wanted to be a “real” Dungeons & Dragons player. For all their faults, those dice were, in many ways, what sealed my fate as a lifelong roleplayer. There was something downright magical about those little, weirdly shaped objects that captured my imagination almost as much as the game itself.

I am fascinated not just by dice, but also by randomness. I’ve come to believe that one of the real, perhaps fundamental distinction between “old school” roleplaying games and their latter day descendants is the extent to which randomness informs game play. As a younger person, I went through a period when I intensely disliked randomness and used it as a bludgeon against games, including D&D, that I decided I disliked. Older, if not wiser, I no longer think that way. Indeed, I celebrate randomness as a vital part of what makes a RPG enjoyable for me. Randomness is frequently a godsend, providing me with a steady stream of ideas and inspiration when I find myself at a loss for either (which is often). Randomness also enables me to be surprised, even when I’m the referee, which is no small feat after more than three decades behind the screen. In short, I love randomness.

Therefore, I suppose I’m predisposed to love a book like The Dungeon Dozen by Jason Sholtis. This 222-page book is a compilation of the many “flavor-rich yet detail-free” random tables available on Sholtis’s eponymously named blog, accompanied by a great deal of black and white art provided by Chris Brandt, John Larrey, Stefan Poag, and Sholtis himself.

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Black Hat

Black Hat

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bblumeAs I’ve mentioned a couple of times before, I entered the tabletop roleplaying world in late 1979 at the ripe old age of 10. By that point, Dungeons & Dragons – and, by extension, the hobby it spawned – were already five years old. Consequently, I can’t be numbered amongst the earliest adopters of this new form of entertainment. Even by that date, there was a lot of water under the bridge of which I was very much unaware. Moreover, unlike many of my elders in the hobby, I wasn’t a wargamer (either miniatures or hex-and-chit) and I wasn’t all that well read in the fantasy literature that inspired D&D. I was most definitely a Johnny-come-lately, loath though I would have been to admit it. In fact, it rankled me a bit. I didn’t want to be one of “the kids,” as my friends and I were often called by the teenagers and college students who frequented the hobby shops. Besides, I reasoned, how could I be a kid when my beloved Holmes boxed set proclaimed that D&D was “the original adult fantasy role-playing game?”

I eventually got my own turn to look down my nose at D&D players younger than myself when the multi-colored boxed editions written and edited by Frank Mentzer started to appear in 1983. I loudly proclaimed those “kiddie Dungeons & Dragons” and didn’t want anything to do with them – except for the Companion Rules released in 1984. I had expected the Companion Rules since 1981, when they were mentioned in David Cook’s original Expert Rulebook. Despite my disdain for these new editions, with their Larry Elmore covers and Bowdlerized presentation of D&D, I nevertheless furtively bought a copy of the Companion Rules, hoping it would live up to my expectations. It didn’t–I’m not sure there’s any way it could have – but I liked it anyway. I liked it enough that I still have my copy of it to this day and frequently pull it off the shelf to read. 

I did this the other day and read its preface for the first time in many years. In it, Mentzer says the following:

This game is like a huge tree, grown from the seeds planted in 1972 and even earlier. But as a plant needs water and sun, so does a game need proper “backing” – a company to make it. As the saying goes, “for want of a nail, the war was lost”; and for want of a company, the D&D game might have been lost amidst the lean and turbulent years of the last decade. This set is therefore dedicated to an oft-neglected leader of TSR, Inc; who, with Gary Gygax, founded this company and made it grow. The D&D Companion Set is dedicated to

BRIAN BLUME

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40 Years of Adventure

40 Years of Adventure

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woodgrain

ONCE UPON A TIME, long, long ago, there was a little group known as the Castle and Crusade Society. Their fantasy rules were published, and to this writer’s knowledge, brought about much of the current interest in fantasy wargaming. For a time the group grew and prospered, and Dave Arneson decided to begin a medieval fantasy campaign game for his active Twin Cities club. From the map of the “land” of the “Great Kingdom” and environs — the territory of the C & C Society — Dave located a nice bog wherein to nest the weird enclave of “Blackmoor”, a spot between the “Great Kingdom” and the fearsome “Egg of Coot”. From the CHAINMAIL fantasy rules he drew ideas for a far more complex and exciting game, and thus began a campaign which still thrives as of this writing! In due course the news reached my ears, and the result is what you have in your hands at this moment. While the C & C Society is no longer, its spirit lives on, and we believe that all wargamers who are interested in the medieval period, not just fantasy buffs, will enjoy playing DUNGEONS and DRAGONS. Its possibilities go far beyond any previous offerings anywhere!

So began Gary Gygax’s foreword (charmingly misspelled as “forward”) to the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons. That foreword is dated November 1, 1973, but it would still be a couple of months before D&D was “formally” released. I put the adverb in scare quotes, because, at the time, Tactical Studies Rules was a tiny shoestring operation, consisting of only three people: Gary Gygax (editor), Don Kaye (president), and Brian Blume (vice-president). It was more like a game club than a business; it was certainly a much more modest venture than what it would later become.

Initially, the three-book boxed set was sold through the mail, the first advertisements for which appeared sometime in the Spring of 1974. Of course, copies of D&D had undoubtedly been released “into the wild” of the miniatures wargaming scene before that. Just how soon before that is anyone’s guess, which makes determining a precise “birthday” for the world’s first published fantasy roleplaying game hard to establish. Nevertheless, gaming historian Jon Peterson, who’s done more research on this and related topics than anyone, advocates January 26, 1974 as a likely candidate. Barring further evidence to the contrary, it’s as good a day as any other, meaning that D&D celebrated the Big 4-0 just two days before I penned this entry.

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At the Intersection of Merritt and Howard

At the Intersection of Merritt and Howard

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merrittI’m a big proponent of taking note of literary anniversaries, particularly of the birthdays of authors of whom I am fond. January is chock full of such birthdays – J.R.R. Tolkien on January 3; Clark Ashton Smith on January 13; Edgar Allan Poe on January 19. Had my weekly blog slot fallen on one of those dates, I almost certainly would have taken the time to commemorate their births, since they’ve all exercised an unshakeable influence over my imagination.

As it happened, though, my slot this week didn’t fall on the birthdays of any writer of my acquaintance. Instead, it fell between the birthdays of two scribes whose memories I hold dear. Yesterday was the birthday of Abraham Merritt and tomorrow is that of Robert E. Howard. Over the years, I’ve written multiple celebrations of these men and their contributions, both to the world of letters and to my own life. I think this only just, given how much enjoyment Merritt and Howard have offered to me, despite being decades in the grave before my own birth (indeed, both died before the births of my parents). And so I shall continue my practice this year.

The difficulty, though, is in finding something new to say about these men that I have not said before. That’s a tall order and, whenever this time of year rolls around, I worry that I’ll simply repeat things I’ve said many times before. Perhaps that’s not an unworthy anxiety, especially since truths does not become less true if they are repeated often.  The truth is that Merritt and Howard have each, in their way, made me the man I am today and it’s difficult to conceive of a version of myself that had not discovered and devoured their works.

Just as true, though, is the fact that I first made their acquaintance thanks to Dungeons & Dragons – and it’s on this foundation that I shall build this year’s commemoration of these two titans of fantasy.

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Ol’ Standbys

Ol’ Standbys

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holmesI first encountered roleplaying games in late 1979, which means that, by year’s end, I’ll have been rolling polyhedral dice and pretending to be an elf for 35 years. The mind boggles when I ponder this, since it attests to the fact that, with a few notable exceptions, like breathing and eating, I’ve spent more time playing RPGs than I have almost any other activity in my earthly existence.

As I make my way through mid-life, I find myself thinking back to my early days of gaming often. One of the things that strikes me is how focused my friends and I were on a handful of games, which we played with incredible gusto. It must be remembered that, even back in those days, there were an incredible number of RPGs available – not as many as today, certainly, but more than even a group of tweens and teens as gung-ho for roleplaying games could play. That’s not to say we didn’t dip our toes into a lot of pools, so to speak; I’d venture to guess that, between 1979 and 1984, the period during which our mania was at its zenith, we tried many dozens of games (you find a fairly complete list of all the RPGs published, by year, between 1974 and the present here – there are a lot of them).

Despite that, we had our favorites, the ones to which we’d return again and again, after the shine had worn off the latest boxed set to appear on the hobby shop’s shelves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these games were all among the earliest ones to which we’d been introduced by the older kids and adults who acted as our “mentors” as we learned the ropes of this strange pastime. But what is surprising, I think – at least to me – is that, for the most part, these same RPGs are the ones that still hold my attention today. Granted, I’m not a neophile; I don’t instinctively seek out new games as soon as they’re released, as many of my fellow gamers do. Even so, I must confess to being a little shocked to discover that, if I look back on the gaming I’ve done over the last decade or so, it was almost entirely devoted to the same three games I’ve enjoyed since I was a kid.

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Life Underground

Life Underground

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manfrommarsI suppose it’s only natural that I’d consider the decade of my formative years – the 1970s – to have been the “perfect” one in which to grow up. I have little doubt that those whose childhoods encompassed the ’80s or even (Merritt forfend!) the ’90s may feel the same way. They’re wrong, of course, at least if you were the kind of kid who enjoyed hearing tales of the weird, the strange, and the occult. The 1970s were alive with such nonsense, from Bigfoot to ancient astronauts to the Loch Ness Monster, not to mention The Exorcist, In Search Of, and The Night Stalker. And let us not forget that the decade also saw the popularization, through books and movies and television, of the watered-down Theosophy of the New Age movement. In retrospect, it all makes sense if you look at the ’70s as a ten-year hangover in the aftermath of the various counterculture movements that spread like wildfire during the 1960s.

For a lot of adults living at the time, it probably wasn’t pretty, but, for me, as a child with a sense that there was more to the universe than what we saw everyday, it sure was fun. Though far more skeptical today, I still retain a keen interest in such oddities, as well as the sense – or is it merely the hope? – that I was not wrong in my youthful intuition that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Like Fox Mulder, “I want to believe,” even if I find it increasingly hard to summon up the credulity necessary to do so. Perhaps that’s why, even as I scoff, I nevertheless retain a more-than-grudging admiration for men and women who do believe, often in the face not merely of seemingly contradictory facts, but also of social ridicule, ostracism, and abuse.

That probably explains why I’ve long been intrigued by “the Shaver Mystery,” which first burst upon the world in the form of the story “I Remember Lemuria,” published in the March 1945 issue of Amazing Stories. The story purports to be an ancient, first-person account (preserved in “thought records”) of an advanced subterranean civilization that once existed on Earth and whose remnants continue to have intermittent – and often unpleasant – contact with the surface.

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Prologomenon to Fantasy

Prologomenon to Fantasy

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bullfinchOne of the things that I frequently blather about is that, when I was growing up in the 1970s, “fantasy,” as it’s understood today didn’t really exist, at least not as a mainstream, popular genre.

Don’t get me wrong: the ’70s were a decade of fantasy par excellence, especially literary fantasy, from reprintings of earlier works, such as the Lancer Books Conan series (begun in 1966) and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (begun in 1969), to the Tolkien imitators, like Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara (1977) and Stephen R. Donaldson’s Lord Foul’s Bane (1977) – not to mention Tolkien’s own The Silmarillion (1977 once again!) – to modern classics like Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness (guess what year?). The ’70s also saw fantasy rise to prominence in other media, like comic books, where Roy Thomas’s Savage Sword of Conan cultivated an entire generation of artists, and movies, where special effects artists continued to acquire the skills and technology to bring fantasy to life on the silver screen. And, of course, the decade also saw the appearance and flourishing of fantasy roleplaying games, beginning with Dungeons & Dragons in 1974.

Despite these strides, spearheaded by the faddish popularity of D&D and its imitators, I’d argue that fantasy didn’t really come into its own as a pop cultural phenomenon until much later. Consequently, when I first encountered Dungeons & Dragons very late in 1979, I had almost no direct experience of what we’d nowadays call fantasy. Indeed, I wouldn’t read a word of The Lord of the Rings or the tales of Conan until after I’d begun rolling polyhedral dice. For that matter, I don’t think I’d even heard of J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard until I encountered both their names in the pages of the J. Eric Holmes-edited D&D rulebook that was my introduction to the game. The same goes for Lovecraft, come to think of it, and most of the other authors whom we typically regard as the “founders” of fantasy. In that respect, my youth is very different than that of 21st century fantasy aficionados, almost all of whom I’d bet didn’t make it to the age of 10 without at least being familiar with the characters and ideas these authors birthed.

However, this isn’t to say I had no experience with fantasy before I discovered Dungeons & Dragons, only that my introduction to it was of a different sort, one I expect I shared with many kids of my generation.

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