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The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Gary Gygax’s Role Playing Mastery

The Public Life of Sherlock Holmes: Gary Gygax’s Role Playing Mastery

Gygax_RPMcoverMy 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’ve been reading 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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Going Home

Going Home

PHBI’ve lived away from the house where I grew up since I went off to college at the age of 17. That was only a couple of years shy of three decades ago (yikes!). Since then, I’ve lived in three different cities, including one in another country. By any reasonable measure, I’ve spent more years living somewhere other than that house than I ever did under its roof. Yet, no matter how long it’s been since I last lived there, no matter how long it’s been since I last visited it, whenever I return, I’m home. Indeed, when I talk about my parents’ house and the city where it’s located, I reflexively use the term “home” for both, this despite the fact that I’ve now lived with my wife as long as I ever lived with my parents.

It’s a strange habit of mind, one I doubt is unique to me and that manifests itself in other ways. Since high school, for example, I’ve studied four different foreign languages. Just last week, I started learning a new one. Even though I attained a reasonable degree of literacy in all of them, I never gained significant verbal fluency, in large part because I never learned to think in another language. I am always thinking in English and mentally translating from it to whatever other language I am attempting to speak. In short, I continue to be an English speaker, even when I am trying to speak French or German.

Though Dungeons & Dragons was my first roleplaying game and a staple of my hobby for more than a decade, by the mid-90s, I’d largely stopped playing it. The reasons for my doing so are several and not very important. Shortly before Wizards of the Coast released its new edition – Third Edition or 3e – I was working as a writer at a games magazine and was given early access to the forthcoming rulebooks as background for an article I was tasked to write. I did not expect to like the new edition, let alone like it enough that I’d come back to D&D after a prolonged absence, but I did. I owe Wizards of the Coast a big debt of thanks for having helped me to fall in love with Dungeons & Dragons again.

Over the next six years or so, I played Third Edition intensely. I got to know the game and its rules very well, so well, in fact, that I started to find them ponderous to the point where they were getting in the way of the kind of tabletop experience I wanted. This led me to start to think seriously about what I liked in RPGs and how I could best get it. Ultimately, that thinking led me back, ironically, to the games I’d played in my youth, including the earliest editions of Dungeons & Dragons.

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Little Blue Squares

Little Blue Squares

zenopus-smallAs a kid, Dungeons & Dragons introduced me to a lot of things, from fantasy books and authors I might otherwise not have encountered to obscure medieval weapons (like the voulge-guisarme) to equally obscure vocabulary (such as dweomer or weal). Reading my D&D books and modules was literally an educational experience and I am not ashamed to admit that many of my adult interests have their origins in things I first discovered through the game.

D&D also introduced me to the idea of using graph paper to make dungeon maps. Pictured to the left is the first dungeon map I ever saw (unless one counts the board to Dungeon!, which I don’t). The map appeared near the end of the blue rulebook included in my Basic Set and depicts one level beneath the ruined tower of the sorcerer Zenopus. As you can see, the map includes a square grid, with each square representing a 10 × 10 area, as was traditional in all the TSR Hobbies versions of the game. My Basic Set also included an adventure module, In Search of the Unknown, about which I talked before and its two-level dungeon exercised an equally strong influence over my young imagination.

I was, of course, familiar with graph paper, having used it in school during math classes, but I’d never seen it used for any other purpose. Consequently, I was a bit surprised to discover that D&D players bought it in large quantities, both referees in creating their own dungeons and players to keep track of their characters’ explorations of said labyrinths, lest they become lost and unable to find their way out again. I may have thought it odd at first, but I dutifully paid a visit to the local office supply store and bought myself a pad of paper so that I could get down to the business of laying out subterranean mazes of peril to inflict on my friends (or their characters at any rate).

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D&D Announces A Tyranny of Dragons

D&D Announces A Tyranny of Dragons

D&D Next core books-smallSetting the stage for the release of the newest set of Dungeons & Dragons rules, Wizards of the Coast today announced that August 2014 would mark the start of their Tyranny of Dragons campaign. In addition to the core manuals for the Dungeons & Dragons game system, the campaign will feature adventures within the Dungeons & Dragons setting, both in printed books for tabletop play and also as a new game module released for their Neverwinter game. The adventure begins on August 14 and winds its way through a number of key releases that are looking to modernize the game.

The D&D Player’s Handbook is slated for release on August 19, 2014. The revised D&D Monster Manual will be available in September. The D&D Dungeon Master’s Guide releases on November 18, 2014. All three books will have a retail price of $49.95 ($57 Canadian).

Tabletop fans will be able to join in on the Tyranny of Dragons adventuring action (also released on Aug. 19) with the adventure supplement Hoard of the Dragon Queen, for $29.95 ($35 Canadian):

In an audacious bid for power the Cult of the Dragon, along with its dragon allies and the Red Wizards of Thay, seek to bring Tiamat from her prison in the Nine Hells to Faerun. To this end, they are sweeping from town to town, laying waste to all those who oppose them and gathering a hoard of riches for their dread queen. The threat of annihilation has become so dire that groups as disparate as the Harpers and Zhentarim are banding together in the fight against the cult. Never before has the need for heroes been so desperate.

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Loaded!

Loaded!

dice Of all the mysteries and temptations packed inside that wondrous cardboard sarcophagus known as the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, none was more hypnotic than that lumpy, ill-made set of five polyhedron dice.

Six-sided diced I knew, of course, but twelve? Eight? To say nothing of that canary-yellow four-sider. How did one even use it? What seemed perfectly obvious by the age of thirteen was a serious stumper at twelve.

And then there was the twenty-sider, a multi-faceted orb the color of sun-bleached PVC pipe (and not all pink, like the one depicted here), its numerical sequence uselessly repeated, 1-10, 1-10. Or, depending on how one read it, 0-9. Either way, how did it function as a twenty?

I believe it was a friend, and not the Basic Set rules, that told me how to solve this twenty-sided conundrum. “Color the die,” that was the advice I got. So I chose red — red for blood, I suppose — and I swiped my mother’s biggest, fattest felt-tip El Marko, and I colored that die, carefully, thoroughly, beginning with the zero that happened to be facing the top at the time. Voila! My first twenty-sided die.

My choice of which side to color proved unexpectedly fortuitous. My die, you see, was loaded.

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Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: Choice of the Deathless by Max Gladstone

Spotlight on Interactive Fiction: Choice of the Deathless by Max Gladstone

Between keeping up with my usual webcomics, Marvel: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and several writing projects (one of them my own current work for Choice of Games), I haven’t had as much time to play games (or review them) as I’d like. But back in my December 20 post, I promised an upcoming review of Choice of the Deathless by Max Gladstone. Max is a writer friend of mine and I’m not shy about proclaiming my love for his Craft Sequence — of which Choice of the Deathless is a corollary. Since Max is currently a John W. Campbell nominee, and his Three Parts Dead just made Reddit’s list of under-read fantasy, I thought now would be a great time to spend some time on Choice of the Deathless — and mention his novels as well.

Choice of the Deathless, art by Ron Chan
Choice of the Deathless, art by Ron Chan

The world of the Craft Sequence is one in which human wizards — usually necromancers, most of whom wear pin striped suits and run corporations called Concerns — rose up against the gods in a huge war and won, leaving most of the gods dead. Lest you think this means the conceit of the world is all about the virtues of Progress over Faith, I assure you I don’t read the stories at all that way. Progress has its own failings, Faith has its strengths, and the stories told in Max’s books and game strike me as being about characters who try to find a way to reconcile the two to make the world a better place. Also: necromancers who are, effectively, lawyers, and fantasy novels that are also legal thrillers. Sometimes about ecoterrorism, corporate espionage, or just trying to find a good cup of coffee. What’s not to love?

Choice of the Deathless gives the player a chance to take part in that world of exciting corporate magic, beginning at the low rung of a Concern’s ladder with hopes of climbing all the way up to Partner. But while student loans, crappy apartments, and a lack of sleep all add flavor to the game, things really start to get interesting when the PC starts dealing with literal demons. In one case, the PC needs to keep demons from finding a contractual loophole that would allow them to gain an unlimited foothold in the human world. In another, an oppressed demon wants out of an abusive contract, without getting sent back to the demon lands. In a third, the PC must decide whether to advise a minor goddess to seek out her own lawyer or take her to court for everything she has. And the larger story arc gives PCs the chance to eventually become a skeletal, undead, master of magic — if they play their cards right.

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Four Modules

Four Modules

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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“I rolled a critical hit against Yog-Sothoth!”: Revisiting AD&D Deities and Demigods (4th and Final Part)

“I rolled a critical hit against Yog-Sothoth!”: Revisiting AD&D Deities and Demigods (4th and Final Part)

cthulhu 3I’ve read dozens of H.P. Lovecraft’s stories, some of them (“The Rats in the Walls”, “The Colour Out of Space”) multiple times. I’ve studied his seminal essay Supernatural Horror in Literature. But I never have felt compelled to categorize all the various Great Old Ones and Outer Gods and work out their relationships in the overall “mythos” — for one thing, such an undertaking seems to undermine the intent of these Lovecraftian horrors, which was to represent the awful unknown.

August Derleth was among the first to go about classifying Lovecraft’s monsters in any systematic way, which tended to morph the work from pure horror into something more like metaphysical science fiction. Some fans have also criticized Derleth for using a Judeo-Christian framework for his classification, creating a dualistic good-versus-evil overlay that would be anathema to Lovecraft’s own worldview. The dissonance of this theme with the source texts threatened to jettison the original intent: conveying the cosmic terror of the mystery of existence and our precarious place in it.

Plugging Lovecraft’s cast of cosmic creeps into a Dungeons & Dragons pantheon and assigning stats to them (hit points, armor class, etc.) — as the 1980 first edition of Deities and Demigods did — seems vulnerable to this criticism to the utmost degree. Here are these totally foreign, otherworldly entities — and here’s how you defeat them! But it’s human nature. We love stats. We have to classify, categorize, label, and collate. It’s an inevitable progression that tends to water down the capacity of classic monsters to frighten (we’ve worked out how you destroy a vampire — stake to the heart, full exposure to sunlight — or put down a werewolf — silver bullet — or stop a zombie — head shot — so exhaustively that we have to come up with new variations and altogether new monsters to keep readers on the edge of their armchairs).

Still, I gotta admit it’s kinda fun to see what the game designers thought Cthulhu’s class levels should be, or how many hit points might be possessed by Nyarlathotep. If you’re going to introduce these beings into the hack ‘n slash realm of D&D, it’s bound to happen.

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Rogues Gallery

Rogues Gallery

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 ManualI 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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Washington Attorney General Files Suit Against Ed Nash for Kickstarter Fraud

Washington Attorney General Files Suit Against Ed Nash for Kickstarter Fraud

Asylum Kickstarter cards-smallIn a surprising move, Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a suit Thursday against Ed Nash and his game company Altius Management for Kickstarter Fraud.

I can’t recall a single instance of a Kickstarter creator being sued for non-delivery of a project, but some in the industry have been forecasting this for months — particularly in the face of recent high-profile Kickstarter failures such as John Campbell’s notorious Sad Pictures for Children and Erik Chevalier’s The Doom That Came To Atlantic City.

Here’s a summary of the suit from GeekWire:

Back in October 2012, Nash raised $25,146 from 810 backers — including at least 31 from Washington — for a playing card game called Asylum designed by a Serbian artist and managed by Nash. The campaign exceeded its funding goal of $15,000, meaning Nash was legally responsible for sending every backer the products they paid for. But as the estimated delivery date of December 2012 passed, customers never received their Asylum product. In the months following, angry backers voiced their frustration on the ongoing Kickstarter page comment thread.

“Almost a year and no updates,” one backer wrote. “Ed Nash is in hiding.”

Read the complete article here.