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Gary Gygax’s 17 Steps to Role-Playing Mastery (Steps 6 to 10)

Gary Gygax’s 17 Steps to Role-Playing Mastery (Steps 6 to 10)

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So, if you are reading this post right now (and you’d have to be, to see these words), this is Part Two of a look at Gary Gygax’ 17 Steps to Role-Playing Mastery. It would make sense to go read Part One, before reading this. Like, a LOT of sense. But if you’re here and you’re determined to plow ahead, below is the first part of the intro to last week’s post, so you understand the deal. Then you can move right on to Step Six.

Though you really should go back and read Part One afterwards. There’s more to come next week.

My Dungeons and Dragon s roots don’t go back to the very beginning, but I didn’t miss it by much. I remember going to our Friendly Local Gaming Store with my buddy. He would buy a shiny TSR module and I would get a cool Judges Guild supplement.

And I remember how D&D was the center of the RPG world in those pre-PC/video game playing days. And Gary Gygax was IT. It all centered around him. So, I read with interest a book that he put out in 1987, less than twelve months after he had severed all ties with TSR.

Role Playing Mastery is his very serious look at RPGing. He included the 17 steps he identified to becoming a Role Playing Master.

If you’re reading this post, you probably know that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson co-created Dungeons and Dragons circa 1973-1974. Unfortunately, it was not a long-lasting partnership and lawsuits would ensue. While both were instrumental in creating D&D, it is Gygax who is remembered as the Father of Role Playing.

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G.W. Thomas on Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers

G.W. Thomas on Fred Saberhagen’s Berserkers

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Three collections in Fred Saberhagen’s Berserker Saga: Berserker, Brother Assassin, and The Ultimate Enemy
(Ace Books, September 1978, December 1978, and September 1979). Covers: Boris Vallejo and Michael Whelan

Ace SF blogger G.W. Thomas, working atop a demon-haunted tower in Alberta, has been digging deep into a lot of my favorite old SF paperbacks, including C. L. Moore & Henry Kuttner’s Earth’s Last Citadel, Murray Leinster’s Get Off My World!, and Space Operas You May Have Missed.

But I think my favorite recent piece was his two-part series on a writer who’s largely forgotten today: Fred Saberhagen, author of The Book of Swords, Empire of the East, and The Dracula Tape, and his most enduring creation: the galaxy-roving Berserkers. which appeared in some seventeen volumes.

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Robert Adams was a Master of Narrative Drive

Robert Adams was a Master of Narrative Drive

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The first ten novels in the Horseclans series by Robert Adams (Signet/
New American Library editions, 1979-1983). Cover art by Ken Kelly

Franklin Robert Adams (1933 – 1990) only used his middle and last name on his books. He wrote twenty-six of them, in three different series, and edited nearly a dozen more.

His first and most famous series is called Horseclans. It’s set on a post-apocalyptic Earth, after a nuclear war, and begins on America’s great plains with tribal groups organized along Native American lines. Later, it moves toward a more feudal society with city states and knights in armor. There’s a fairly elaborate back story about how the modern societies were built from the remnants of American survivors and some of the invaders.

The first book was called The Coming of the Horseclans and published in 1975. The last one published was #18, The Clan of the Cats, and it appeared in 1988, two years before Adams’ death. The series may be post-apocalyptic, but it’s long after Earth’s recovery has begun so it really feels more like standard Sword & Sorcery. There is some magic with undying heroes, telepathy, and “Witch” men. It’s definitely not Sword & Planet but most folks who like S&P like these pretty well.

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Gary Gygax’s 17 Steps to Role-Playing Mastery (Steps 1 to 5)

Gary Gygax’s 17 Steps to Role-Playing Mastery (Steps 1 to 5)

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Role Playing Mastery by Gary Gygax (Perigee Trade, August 3, 1987)

My Dungeons and Dragons roots don’t go back to the very beginning, but I didn’t miss it by much. I remember going to our Friendly Local Gaming Store with my buddy. He would buy a shiny TSR module and I would get a cool Judges Guild supplement.

And I remember how D&D was the center of the RPG world in those pre-PC/video game playing days. And Gary Gygax was IT. It all centered around him. So, I read with interest a book that he put out in 1987, less than twelve months after he had severed all ties with TSR.

Role Playing Mastery is his very serious look at RPGing. He included the 17 steps he identified to becoming a Role Playing Master.

If you’re reading this post, you probably know that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson co-created Dungeons and Dragons circa 1973-1974. Unfortunately, it was not a long-lasting partnership and lawsuits would ensue. While both were instrumental in creating D&D, it is Gygax who is remembered as the Father of Role Playing.

In 1987, Gary Gygax put out a book entitled Role-Playing Mastery, which gave guidelines on how to excel as a player in role-playing games. At that time, there were essentially two versions of Dungeons and Dragons. The Original, or ‘Basic’ game, had evolved under Tom Moldvay’s rules development.

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Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

Folk Horror edited by Paul Kane & Marie O’Reagan

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Folk Horror (Flame Tree Publishing, August 27, 2024)

Folk Horror is one of those terms that’s never quite fashionable or unfashionable.

To me there’s only either good or bad horror fiction, and that’s what really matters to the readers.

This anthology — part of the Beyond & Within series from Flame Tree Publishing — fortunately is very good, regardless of labels. So kudos to the editors (excellent horror writers themselves) for assembling such an amount of creepy and entertaining material.

To be precise the book includes two little poems and fifteen stories.

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Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

Gothic Noir: The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

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The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin Books, February 1, 2005). Cover by Tal Goretsky

Shadow of the Wind is the English rendering of  La sombra del viento, the 2001 novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón and the first (though a standalone story sans cliffhangers) in his five book Cemetery of Forgotten Books series, translated by Lucia Graves (a serendipitously appropriate last name and, as it happens, the daughter of poet and historical novelist Robert Graves, he of I Claudius and The White Goddess fame). I hope this is a literal translation as Shadow of the Wind perfectly captures the story’s gothic and noirish essence. We can’t actually see wind, nor does wind cast a shadow; rather we feel the wind, detecting by inference the sometimes destructive aftereffects of high winds. Or, to paraphrase as someone else famously put it, the allegory is blowing in the wind.

The titular Cemetery of Forgotten Books is a somewhat fantastical labyrinth repository of rare books. Unlike Julia Alvarez’s Cemetery of Untold Stories, where texts are buried and talk to one another in their afterlife, the Cemetery of Forgotten Books could be some idiosyncratic bookshop with obsessively weird stock accessible only to certain people, which is not that all different from certain kinds of booksellers.

But the touch of fantasy  is when our hero, Daniel Sempere, taken to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books by his bookshop owning father, is tasked to select one volume, and one volume only, he feels drawn to from among a complex maze of shelvings. That book is Shadows of the Wind  by Julian Carax, and, yes, we’re getting metafictional here. What kicks the plot off is that there are no other surviving copies of the work, Carax’s output having been destroyed in a warehouse fire of mysterious origins.

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Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

Taking in the Trash: Paul Cantor’s Pop Culture Trilogy

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Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, November 28, 2001)

Having just finished a very lively and thought-provoking book, I did something I almost never do — I decided to write the author a fan letter. Naturally, I hopped on Google to get his contact information, only to discover that he died almost three years ago, in February of 2022. Why do these things always happen to me?

The book I just finished, Pop Culture and the Dark Side of the American Dream: Con Men, Gangsters, Drug Lords, and Zombies was published in 2019, and is the third book in a loose cultural criticism trilogy written by Paul A. Cantor, a well-known Shakespearian scholar (Shakespeare and Rome: Republic and Empire) who was for many years a professor of English at the University of Virginia. The other volumes in the “trilogy” are Gilligan Unbound: Pop Culture in the Age of Globalization (2001) and The Invisible Hand in Popular Culture: Liberty vs. Authority in American Film and TV (2012).

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A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

A Very Fine YA Novel: Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell

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Impossible Creatures (Knopf Books for Young Readers, September 10, 2024). Cover by Ashley Mackenzie

Katherine Rundell is a British writer who has been publishing YA novels for some time now, though I was unaware of her. Last year she published the first novel of a prospective series in the UK: Impossible Creatures. This became a big hit, and has now been published in the US. The book is quite good, fun to read, clever, also serious and quite moving, with real consequences to the characters.

There are two protagonists, Christopher Forester and Mal Arvorian. They are children of roughly the same age (early adolescence or just on the cusp of it, I think … somewhere between 10 and 13, I suppose.) Christopher lives in London, but has been sent to Scotland to stay with his grandfather, while his father is away on business. (His mother is dead.) Mal lives in an island in the Archipelago, with her great aunt. (Her parents are dead. Dead or absent parents, of course, being one of the most common situations in YA novels.) Both Christopher and Mal are special, of course. Animals of all sorts are attracted to Christopher, to an unusual degree. And Mal — Mal can fly (with the help of a magic cape.)

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Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction, Part III: From Zelazny to Infinity

Chess in Sword & Planet Fiction, Part III: From Zelazny to Infinity

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Pawn to Infinity, edited by Fred Saberhagen with Joan Saberhagen (Ace Books,
June 1982), and Unicorn Variations by Roger Zelazny (Timescape Books,
February 1984). Cover artists: unknown, and Gerry Daly

Pawn to Infinity: Ace Books, 1982, cover artist unknown, though this is a very cool cover. Although not Sword & Planet specifically, this is definitely the greatest collection of fantasy and SF stories to involve chess or a chess like game ever published.

There are many great stories in here, and at least two masterpieces: “The Immortal Game” by Poul Anderson, and “Unicorn Variation” by Roger Zelazny. There are other fine stories by Fritz Leiber, Fred Saberhagen (who also edited the collection) and George R. R. Martin. There’s a great old Ambrose Bierce story in it called “Moxon’s Master.”

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Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

Romancing the Planet: The 23rd Hero by Rebecca Anne Nguyen

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The 23rd Hero (Castle Bridge Media, August 13, 2024)

Hybrids are hardly unknown in the long history of fantasy and science fiction literature. It could easily be argued that the genre itself is a hybrid. In the case of Rebecca Anne Nguyen’s The 23rd Hero, this mixing of literary media is an essential element, baked in from the ground up.

The story begins by wearing its dystopian stripes firmly on its sleeve. The characters we meet in near-future Vancouver, including our hero, Sloane Burrows, live in a world of ecological collapse. Outdoors, everyone wears a filtration mask, and the last working farm in Canada closed just months before when the last of its livestock died from drinking tainted water. The handbaskets of hell, if I may mix a metaphor, have most definitely come home to roost.

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