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The Fascination of Dragons

The Fascination of Dragons

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The Flight of Dragons DVD-smallI don’t remember when I learned about dragons, but I do remember the first time they took my breath away.

I was ten years old, helping to restack the shelves in my school library while a younger class watched a movie in the next room: a cartoon I’d never seen before, but which I eventually learned was called The Flight of Dragons. As it played in the background, I gleaned that there was a princess called Melisande and some sort of dark sorcerer trying to take over the land — and then, just as the bell was ringing, I saw the dragons: a sleeping field full of them, multicolored and wise, taking flight as the evil magic was lifted.

That image struck some chord within me I hadn’t known was there. Before then, with the saccharine exception of the colorfully coiffed dragons of Lady Lovely Locks, the only dragons I’d seen in stories were evil: the monster slain by St George, Disney villains Maleficent and Madame Mim in dragon form, the fearsome mountain dragon in Emily Rodda’s Rowan of Rin.

But with this single portrayal, I suddenly realized they could be more than that: that dragons could be awe-inspiring, noble, beautiful.

Soon after, I stumbled on Graeme Base’s newly released The Discovery of Dragons, a singularly gorgeous book that only affirmed my fascination; so much so that, nearly twenty years later, I still have my original copy, dust jacket and all. Then came Falcor, the beloved luck dragon of The NeverEnding Story.

But what really sealed the deal for me was a game: the original Spyro the Dragon. Despite the fact that I didn’t have a console, I played video games compulsively whenever I visited friends who did. Thus it was that, during one fateful trip to a neighbor’s house, I discovered the demo version of Spyro and became obsessed. I’d wanted a console before, but now, the idea of not having one — of not being able to play the full game — was intolerable.

I must have been pretty persistent, because sure enough, come Christmas morning, my parents revealed that they’d been paying attention: I received both a PS1 and Spyro and spent the rest of the day playing it. As, indeed, I still sometimes do, along with the first two sequels, Spyro: Gateway to Glimmer and Spyro: Year of the Dragon — not just for the nostalgia value, but because, despite the now woefully outdated graphics, they’re still good games, full of clever puzzles and fun environments, many of which had a similarly fundamental impact on how I envisage fantasy landscapes.

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io9 Looks at the Megadungeon

io9 Looks at the Megadungeon

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The Temple of Elemental EvilOver at io9, Ed Grabianowski has posted a thoughtful survey of that underappreciated RPG stable, the megadungeon.

He covers many of the essentials — including The Temple of Elemental Evil, Undermountain, and Castle Greyhawk — and throws in a few clever suggestions I hadn’t thought of (such as the Death Star and Minecraft.) He here is on the modern classic Blackreach:

Blackreach is a signature location in Elder Scrolls: Skyrim. It’s semi-abandoned underground city filled with eerily beautiful glowing mushrooms, strange ruins, rare plants and other oddities. The first time you delve into Blackreach, you can’t help but be a bit awestruck. The silence down there is intense, creating a tension and wonder I’ve rarely experienced in video games. Blackreach itself is massive, but to get to it you actually have to work your way down through another dungeon, a Dwemer ruin. And Blackreach is actually connected to three of these dungeons, so there’s no doubt it’s worthy of the “mega” appellation.

As thorough as he is, there’s plenty left over for folks in the comments section to add, including the epic Rappan Athuk, Dragon Mountain, Judges Guild’s early classic Tegel Manor, Arduin Dungeon, Ultima Underworld, and many others.

I’m disappointed that so far no one has mentioned a few of my favorites, including Monte Cook’s massive (and now extremely hard to find) Ptolus, Gygax’s Castle Zagyg modules, AEG’s ridiculously oversized World’s Largest Dungeon, and Goodman Games’ massive Castle Whiterock. Ah well. Who would have thought the market would be crowded with megadungeons?

You can read Ed’s complete io9 article here.

OMG! Immortal Immodesty (Deities and Demigods, Part 3)

OMG! Immortal Immodesty (Deities and Demigods, Part 3)

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Whoops! The Goddess of Pain has had a wardrobe malfunction!
Whoops! The Maiden of Pain has had a wardrobe malfunction!

In my ongoing exploration of TSR’s first edition Deities and Demigods (1980), I must now confront the mammary in the room.

Did you ever notice there’s a fair amount of nudity in those first generation ADD books? I’m just, um, wondering if you guys did. I mean, I didn’t. I just noticed. Someone pointed it out to me — yeah! That’s the ticket! When I was twelve years old, I was much too pious to have had any impure thoughts toward Loviatar, aka Goddess of Hurt aka “Maiden of Pain.”

Okay, I may have noticed in passing that there was less modesty in those ‘70s and early ‘80s realms of fantasy, whereas with second edition on there is nary a nipple to be noticed. The cleaning up happened before the Wizards of the Coast buy-out and seems to track pretty closely with the culture in general (note many PG movies from the same era — say, the original Clash of the Titans — that couldn’t be shown on basic cable these days without heavy editing to assure that preteens aren’t sullied by viewing bare human breasts and buttocks, which they have never seen because who ever heard of the Internet?).

The interior illustrations are gorgeous. This is old-school RPG, so it’s all black-and-white line art by the likes of Erol Otus, David S. LaForce, Jim Roslof, and David C. Sutherland III.

To undress, er, address the tempestuous topic of topless deities in the temples, I must confess that, as an adolescent, I did appreciate the fact that goddesses by and large disdained mortal-kind’s prudery when it came to attire. It’s stunning, really, how many goddesses not only do not cover up their breastesses, but wear outfits that positively accentuate them.

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Roleplaying Game Review: Fate and Fate Diaspora

Roleplaying Game Review: Fate and Fate Diaspora

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Diaspora Game-smallThis weekend, I shall be attending Conpulsion, the massive yearly gaming convention held in Edinburgh, Scotland. Mostly, I’ll be teaching a plotting and outlining workshop and demonstrating Historical European Martial Arts. If you’re attending, keep an eye open for me! (I’m the tired dad with the swords.)

FATE is basically the Linux of the gaming world. Its core system is a product in its own right, but people are also free to base their own systems on it, a classic example being the award-winning Hard SF Diaspora.

Articulate, sometimes witty, always enthusiastic, both these roleplaying games appear to have been written by grown-ups who like roleplaying more than they like rules, but still want their roleplaying to be an actual game.

It helps that the core FATE system abstracts everything to four basic actions — Overcome, Create an Advantage, Attack, and Defend — and five categories of parameters — Aspects, Skills, Stunts, Stress Tracks, and Consequences.

This means that, instead of yesteryear’s lovingly created baroque edifices of subsystems, FATE games are as recursive and intuitive as a modern software package. For example, characters, weapons, ships, and space ships all have the five kinds of parameters and can be involved in the four actions.

FATE Core lends itself easily to pick up games. Last weekend, armed with a one-page dungeon adventure and some hastily created “Fudge Dice,” I GM’d my son Kurtzhau and DeeM (both 10) and Morgenstern, my daughter (6!).  The character generation was a hoot (much like my experience with Diaspora) and gave us respectively a disillusioned veteran mercenary, a thief masquerading as a squire, and an axe-wielding barbarian princess. The resulting Aspects, especially “Can’t abide an unfair fight,” “Nobody runs from my crossbow,” and “I like shiny things,” generated drama and dilemmas without much effort on my part. In truth, the party got nowhere near the dungeon, but did have to flee a warlord after the thief stole his magic gem.

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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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Don’t Just Buy on Faith: Finding Your Own Deities & Demigods

Don’t Just Buy on Faith: Finding Your Own Deities & Demigods

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OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAny collector of older RPG material will tell you that one of the “Holy Grails” is a first edition Deities & Demigods (DDG) from 1980. It is of interest not only to Dungeons & Dragons aficionados, but also to fans of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Michael Moorcock’s Melnibonean Mythos (not to mention Fritz Leiber’s World Nehwon, home of the greatest sword-wielding duo of all time: Fafhrd & the Gray Mouser). This is because the first edition (actually, the first printing of the first edition) featured gods and characters from all three of those pantheons. Later editions dropped the first two for legal reasons.

A first edition of this coveted tome just went for $56.98 (plus 5.95 shipping) on eBay after 17 bids. The winning bidder was probably ecstatic, because I’ve seen them go for a lot more (I paid more for one myself).

But if you start scouring the listings, you’ll soon notice many first editions being offered for as low as twenty bucks. What gives?

As with the gods themselves, when it comes to DDG, not all first editions are created equal. The Cthulhu and Melnibonean pantheons were pulled midway through the print run of the “first edition” (which throws the normal meaning of first edition right in the shredder, but never mind).

The best tip-off is the number of pages. The one you want has 144 pages; later printings have 128. Some sellers will advertise that they have a bona fide “Cthulhu” edition or that it contains the “Chaosium thank you,” but these are not indicators of veracity.

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Mashed Up

Mashed Up

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FireflyAs might be expected from the guy who wrote Sword Noir: a Role-Playing Game of Hardboiled Sword & Sorcery and is now Kickstarting Nefertiti Overdrive: Ancient Egyptian Wuxia, I love a good mash-up. I use the term mash-up to refer to a creative work that blends two or more apparently dissimilar genres. The mash-up most genre fans would know would be Firefly, mashing-up space opera and westerns.

Brotherhood of the WolfNow space opera and western are not terribly dissimilar, but Firefly included many of the trappings as well as the tropes of the western. The characters carried six-shooters and lever action rifles, they had costumes that appeared quite close of 19th century American frontier clothing, and pseudo-frontier language dotted their speech – along with Mandarin. While I often hear Firefly referred to as sci-fi with some western aspects, I think it is more fitting to call it a western in space.

That’s kind of splitting hairs.

Firefly melded two genres, but there is a wonderful French movie that mixes at least four – period drama, martial arts, horror, and romance. The Brotherhood of the Wolf is one of my favourite movies and an inexhaustible source of inspiration. It might not be the finest movie of its age, but it was my favorite movie of 2002.

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Ed Greenwood and Tattoos and Geek Inked at Ad Astra in Toronto

Ed Greenwood and Tattoos and Geek Inked at Ad Astra in Toronto

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250px-Elminster_Enraged546987-LI last blogged from the Saturday morning of As Astra, one of Toronto’s premiere fan conventions. While I was there, I had the good fun of running into Ed Greenwood, Ad Astra Special Guest, and one of the early D&D legends.

Ed and I breakfasted and chatted, which seems to be turning into an annual thing because we both get up early. Ed is still super-busy, turning out lots of new game tie-in novels.

Later on, he was interviewed by Geek Inked magazine and spoke on not only his experiences with early D&D, some of his current projects and hints at some of his others, but also tattoos! Geek Inked is an online magazine that obviously specializes in Geeks and Tattoos, so the conversation, as it says in the mandate of Geek Inked, goes interestingly sideways.

I wanted to share these two segments of the interview because the conversation relates back to some of the themes I touched on in my interview with module-writer Geoff Gander, especially about some of the opportunities opening up with crowd-funding.

That interview with Geoof, incidentally, also encouraged me to pull out my old Basic and Expert rules and look at the free common source Basic modules available online and start introducing my son to D&D. It turns out his interest is 100% on the dungeon crawl and 0% on the role playing. 🙂 Check it out here.

Major props to Rob at Geek Inked Magazine for an excellent interview.

Derek Künsken is a writer of science fiction and fantasy in Ottawa, Canada. You can find out more about him at www.derekkunsken.com or @derekkunsken.

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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Alignment Chaotic AWESOME: 1st Edition Deities and Demigods (Part 1)

Alignment Chaotic AWESOME: 1st Edition Deities and Demigods (Part 1)

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Deities_&_Demigods_(front_cover,_first_edition)One of the most fun, crazy, and controversial tomes to come out of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was, without a doubt, Deities and Demigods (1980).

More wide-ranging (and less Eurocentric) than Bullfinch’s Mythology and Hamilton’s Mythology combined, here was a smorgasbord of most of the world’s major (and not-so-major) mythologies, presented as a one-stop shop for your player-character to choose a god or otherworldly entity to pledge fealty to and/r worship.

The vitriol of the religious right aside, Deities and Demigods did have its more thoughtful critics. In game terms, the early editions were kinda silly. Even though they assigned crazy-huge hit points and breathtakingly strong armor classes to the gods, said deities still had stats that could be overcome by powerful enough characters. As one critic observed, the book essentially turned the world’s deities into higher-level “monsters” to defeat — “bosses” for your 20th-level party to challenge. No room here for some metaphysical idea of a being that exists above corporeal, material reality and therefore cannot be “hurt” by a sword with a high-enough bonus modifier.

Later editions of Deities and Demigods (or Legends and Lore, as it was known for a time) ameliorated this “big boss” mentality by introducing the concept that some gods that characters physically encountered were but avatars, “aspects” or physical incarnations of gods who, being immortal and transcendent, could not really be killed.

That’s cool. Still, it is kind of fun — in a juvenile way — to leaf through Deities and Demigods asking such questions as “Who would win in a fight: Zeus or Odin?”

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