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Lawrence Schick Expands on the Origins of TSR’s The Known World

Lawrence Schick Expands on the Origins of TSR’s The Known World

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Gods Demi-Gods & Heroes-small“The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History,” Lawrence Schick’s fascinating look behind the scenes at the home-grown adventure world that eventually became TSR’s famed Known World campaign setting, one of the earliest published settings for Dungeons and Dragons, was our most popular article last month, read by thousands of old school gamers.

Interest in the piece continues to be high and last week James Mishler, who painstakingly produced color versions of Lawrence’s original hand-drawn maps, conducted a detailed Q&A with Lawrence on his blog, Adventures in Gaming V2. The questions range from how much inspiration Tom Moldvay and Lawrence drew from the original D&D supplement Gods, Demigods & Heroes for their pantheon, to the influence of Lin Carter and Michael Moorcock. Here’s a snippet.

You mentioned an “ancient, pre-human civilization.” Do you recall any details about this? Related, do you recall if Tom Moldvay’s creation, the Carnifex of M3: Twilight Calling, were based on the Dragon Kings from Lin Carter’s Thongor series?

The pre-human civilizations were misty, with contradictory legends about them. Tom’s Carnifex were not based on Carter’s Dragon Kings, IIRC. (Neither of us thought very highly of the Thongor novels, though we admired Carter’s work as an editor.)

The influences from Howard, Lovecraft, and Smith are fairly obvious. But what, if any influence of Moorcock can be found in the Original Known World? Were the alignments of the OKW strongly in the Moorcock tradition?

We weren’t all that big on alignment, actually — it seemed to us, even then, to be an oversimplification that was more restrictive than it was useful. Moorcock’s real influence on us was the example of his anti-heroes, which freed us up to put moral choices in the hands of the players, rather than hard-wiring the world into good vs. evil.

Read the complete Q&A here.

Future Treasures: Accretion Disk for the Ashen Stars RPG

Future Treasures: Accretion Disk for the Ashen Stars RPG

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Ashen Stars Accretion Disk-smallI’ve covered a great many role playing games here over the past few years. But I think it’s safe to say that none of them has captured my imagination the way Pelgrane Press’s Ashen Stars has.

A space opera set in a war-ravaged perimeter where civilization retains only the most tenuous hold, players take the roles of licensed mercs who make a living as as freelance law enforcement on a rough-and-tumble frontier called “the Bleed,” where humans and half a dozen alien races peacefully co-exist…. usually. The Mohilar War that very nearly destroyed the governing Combine is over, and the Combine is in no shape to govern the Bleed. Instead it is forced to depend on on loosely-authorized bands like the players to maintain peace, keep a lid on crime, and investigate odd distress signals from strange corners of space.

Pelgrane Press continues to support the game with regular PDF releases, and so far had published two thick adventure compilations in print: The Justice Trade and Dead Rock Seven, both of which were excellent. Later this year they plan to release the first rules supplement, Accretion Disk, packed with new character options, six new playable species, new options abilities (like zero-g martial arts), new weapons, and equipment, new contracts for your players, and twelve new hostile aliens.

An Accretion Disk forms around massive bodies in space. Gravity drags in random objects and debris, spinning them around and bringing them in closer and closer, faster and faster, hotter and hotter, until something explodes.

It holds true for stars and black holes – and for politics and crime, too. And let’s face it –- you’re the ones who are going to be standing in the path of that explosive release. Better get ready.

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Great Pathfinder Discounts at Paizo’s GM Day Sale

Great Pathfinder Discounts at Paizo’s GM Day Sale

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Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign
Pathfinder Ultimate Campaign

Game Masters are getting a lot of appreciation these days. According to Wizards of the Coast, all of February was Dungeon Master Appreciation Month, a fact that they celebrated with a hilarious series of videos of a “Dungeon Master Support Group.” These are clearly intended to promote the recent 5th edition Dungeon Master’s Guide, but I’m a sucker for a brilliant viral promotional campaign. If you you’ve ever played a tabletop RPG, definitely check them out.

That being said, I’m not sure that the work we do as as Dungeon Masters (or Game Masters) quite warrants a full month. Turns out that we also have a day, which seems a bit more proportional!

March 4 was the “official” GM day, to celebrate Gamemasters everywhere. Some digging shows that this sacred gaming holiday dates back to 2002, when it was proposed on the EN World forums.

Paizo LLC, the makers of the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, are celebrating the event by having a massive GM’s Day sale that runs through March 10. It’s a great time to buy the Core Rulebook, Bestiaries, GameMastery Guide, and other books to begin playing Pathfinder, but for those who already play Pathfinder RPG, here’s my tip of the top 5 books may not yet have but definitely want.

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Geek Parenting: D6 Thoughts for Tabletop Gamer Parents

Geek Parenting: D6 Thoughts for Tabletop Gamer Parents

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2kg of Halo Megablocs. It's hundreds of pounds worth of plastic, but we'll only get a few quid for it because the sets are all jumbled.
2kg of Halo Megablocs… hundreds of pounds worth of plastic, but we’ll only get a few quid for it because the sets are all jumbled.

At the moment, Kurtzhau and I are trying to flog off 2kg of Halo Megablocs. It’s hundreds of pounds worth of plastic, but we’ll only get a few quid for it because the sets are all jumbled. Worse, he only got 18 months play out of the lot, less out of recent acquisitions. He’s 11 now and Bolt Action and Warhammer 40K have swept away all his toys.

So, this set me thinking about things I wished I known when I started parenting.

1. Your old games are rubbish

Seriously, your old edition of AD&D is unplayable — too many subsystems, too much obscurantism for anybody growing up a digital native. This is also true of those older boardgames that tried to emulate some aspects of role playing, but without the verbal problem solving and character stuff that make RPG worthwhile. In terms of making interesting decisions, Talisman, for example, is not really much better than Snakes and Ladders.

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Future Treasures: Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game

Future Treasures: Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game

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Temple of Elemental Evil Board Game-smallThe Temple of Elemental Evil, written by Gary Gygax and Frank Metzner and published by TSR in 1985, is considered one of the greatest RPG adventures ever created. When Dungeon magazine ranked them in 2004, on the 30th anniversary of the Dungeons & Dragons game, The Temple of Elemental Evil was voted the 4th greatest D&D adventure of all time. In his 1991 history of role-playing games, Heroic Worlds, Lawrence Schick wrote “If you like huge classic dungeon crawls, this is probably the best of the lot.”

It has seen several incarnations since its original release, including a Fourth Edition re-release of the first chapter, The Village of Hommlet, and a popular computer game version, developed by Troika Games and published by Atari. It remains the only computer game ever released set in Greyhawk.

Now Wizards of the Coast is converting this grandaddy of all dungeons crawls into a board game, to be released in April of this year. Here’s the description from the WotC website:

In the Temple of Elemental Evil board game, you play as a heroic adventurer. With amazing abilities, spells and magic weapons, you must explore the dungeons beneath the Sword Coast where you will fight monsters, overcome hazards and find treasure. Are you ready for adventure?

The Temple of Elemental Evil board game features multiple scenarios, challenging quests and cooperative game play designed for 1-5 players. The contents can also be combined with other D&D Adventure System Cooperative play board games, including The Legend of Drizzt and Castle Ravenloft.

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The Art Of Retreat, a.k.a. “Run Away, Run Away!”

The Art Of Retreat, a.k.a. “Run Away, Run Away!”

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Run MemeOver the last thirty-five years, I’ve enjoyed gaming (mostly D&D and its ilk) with something like ten different role-playing groups. Other than the blindingly obvious traits that all such gatherings share, such as a love of good company or having a pulse, the most salient characteristic exhibited by each band of gamers was a stunning inability to retreat in the face of bad situations or superior foes.

I find this mind-boggling. Fascinating, too.

Let me provide a couple of classic examples. Once upon a time, my friends Nick and Suzanne, playing a barbarian and a cleric, respectively, “went on ahead” of the rest of the group, which is to say, the rest of us couldn’t make it that week. They came upon a lonely cave inhabited by creatures we later came to call graylocks. I don’t recall the source or where the referee culled them, but that doesn’t matter: they were mean and tough. Think ogres with spells.

Nick and Suzanne pressed the fight, even though they were outnumbered; they pressed the fight even though their opponents were winning; they pressed the fight even when it was hopeless. In short, they behaved as if they could not possibly lose. It took hours of painstaking work over the ensuing weeks to rescue them.

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Who You Gonna Play? – Ghostbusters: The Board Game on Kickstarter

Who You Gonna Play? – Ghostbusters: The Board Game on Kickstarter

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Box - StandardOne of the earliest films that I have a distinct memory of anticipating is the original Ghostbusters. I would have been 8 years old, but I remember the commercials for it, a mix of humor and horror that I eagerly wanted to dive into. I wasn’t really allowed to watch scary movies, but this, this was one that I’d be allowed to see. In the theater!

Over the following years I watched the cartoon series (both the bizarre Filmation Ghostbusters cartoon series, which had no connection with the film continuity at all, and the later The Real Ghostbusters, which most definitely did) and of course the sequel, Ghostbusters 2. Though I never felt that any of these quite captured the greatness of the original film, over the years I came to realize that’s what tends to happen with many of the things we loved in our childhood. We want them to never change, but they do.

While I haven’t maintained a strong Ghostbusters fanaticism over the recent years, I’ve never fully lost it. There’s usually at least one Ghostbuster walking the halls of GenCon, even after all of these years, and seeing that jumpsuit always makes me smile. Every time I’m in our local comic book store, I notice that there are ongoing adventures in the comic book realm, including a recent cross-over with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The recent announcement of an all-female reboot of the franchise has caused some turmoil, to be sure, but it guarantees that there is interest. For my part, I tried to argue for a different direction in the new series, still largely female but no reboot, but I guess they didn’t take me up on it. And for Christmas, I did get this LEGO Ecto-1 kit from my mother. (Last year she bought me the Back to the Future DeLorean LEGO kit, so this is apparently becoming our thing.)

So… okay, I guess that I’m still something of a fanatic.

Which brings me to the news of the day: Cryptozoic Entertainment has started a Kickstarter for their new Ghostbusters: The Board Game. I was able to ask some questions of the Cryptozoic lead board game designer, Matt Hyra, about the game.

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James Mishler’s Color Maps of TSR’s Known World

James Mishler’s Color Maps of TSR’s Known World

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TSR Known World James Mishler-small

On Saturday Lawrence Schick posted The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History here at Black Gate, a look behind the scenes at the early version of TSR’s Known World, one of the earliest published settings for Dungeons and Dragons. Yesterday Lawrence pointed me to James Mishler’s blog, Adventures in Gaming V2, where he said Mishler had “taken the maps from our article and transformed them into labeled, full-color wonders.” That’s an example of Mishler’s re-worked maps above (click for legible version). Here’s what Mishler said on his blog, in part:

Lawrence Schick, one of the early designers of Dungeons & Dragons at TSR, has revealed some interesting maps that detail the Original Known World that he and Tom Moldvay used in their Kent, Ohio Dungeons & Dragons campaign. If the “Known World” sounds familiar, it is because it is the world that was used in the 1981 edition of Basic/Expert Dungeons & Dragons, revealed in the module X1: The Isle of Dread and detailed further in the Expert Set book… He has posted several maps and note sheets with this article on the Black Gate website…

It is not exactly the same world, but instead is obviously the progenitor of the Known World that eventually evolved into Mystara. When Tom Moldvay, David Cook, and the rest of the development team for B/X needed to use a world, they went back and borrowed from Moldvay and Schick’s Original Known World. Many of the names and ideas survived; you can also see much of the TSR Known World geography owes its design to the Original Known World’s eastern half.

So as usual, when I get excited about mapping stuff, especially when it comes to one of my favorite campaign settings, I kind of took the maps presented and ran with them…

James took Moldvay and Schick’s hand-made Known World maps and knit them together with annotations of location names to create the image above. He also created Hexographer versions of the Western and Eastern Known World, and a jumbo map of both stitched together. See the impressive results on his blog.

Monolith’s Conan Board Game Raises Over $2 Million on Kickstarter

Monolith’s Conan Board Game Raises Over $2 Million on Kickstarter

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Conan Monolith-small

Earlier today the Kickstarter campaign for a new Conan miniatures game from start-up Monolith Board Games surpassed $2 million — more than 25 times the $80,000 goal. Monolith has no track record, but they’ve done a fine job generating excitement. Game components  — including double-sided boards and over 70 plastic miniatures — look excellent, and the art, chiefly by Adrian Smith, is terrific. Here’s the description of the core game:

Conan is a miniature-based board game that pits one player, the overlord, who controls hordes of savage tribesmen, no-good lowlifes and undead minions against 1 to 4 players who incarnate the legendary Conan and his fellow adventurers. The gameplay is asymetric, as the overlord possesses a large selection of models and objectives which are his own, whereas the brave heroes are played from a first person perspective, much like in a role playing game. An adventure can be played out in 1 hour on one of the beautiful game boards as you pit your wits, daring and tactical acumen against your opponent.

Who the heck is Monolith, and why should you be giving them your hard earned money?

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The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History

The “Known World” D&D Setting: A Secret History

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TSR's Known World
TSR’s Known World

Recently some old friends in Akron, Ohio, turned up a few pages of the pre-TSR homebrew Dungeons & Dragons rules created by Tom Moldvay and me in the mid-1970s. I was delighted to see them, as I thought all of our early collaborative work had been lost to history.

I first encountered Tom Moldvay in late 1973 at a meeting of the Kent State University Science Fiction Club. We hit it off right away, and quickly decided we ought to collaborate on something — we just weren’t sure what.

In early ’74 Tom came back from an SF convention with Dungeons & Dragons in its original white box edition. He DMed a session, I DMed a session, and suddenly we knew what we were going to create together: a fantasy world setting for D&D.

We had both read widely in world history and mythology, and enjoyed a lot of the same fantasy fiction; we traded Lin Carter’s Ballantine Adult Fantasy books back and forth until we’d read them all, as well as everything we could find by Howard, Lovecraft, Tolkien, Merritt, Haggard, Harold Lamb, Dunsany, Hodgson, Machen, and Zelazny.

We were both nuts about Clark Ashton Smith, Tom was a Michael Moorcock and Philip José Farmer fanatic, while I could quote chapter and verse from the works of Jack Vance and Fritz Leiber. So we knew what we wanted to create: a single world setting that would enable us to simulate the fictional realities of these, our favorite authors.

It was going to have to be a big world.

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