In the foreword to the Lorebook of the Void, one of the two volumes included in the original Spelljammer boxed set, Jeff Grubb talks about a bit about its creative origins. One paragraph of that foreword has long stuck with me.
Friday, May 17, 2024
The Flammarion Engraving
The Path to Adventure
I've commented in several previous posts that the period between 1982 and 1984 is a fascinating one for both TSR and its most famous product, Dungeons & Dragons. This period, I believe, represents the peak of game's faddish popularity, when the company was so flush with cash – and keen to ensure its continued flow – that it slapped the D&D logo on almost everything, from woodburning and needlepoint sets to toys and beach towels, to name just a few. Of course, this same period also saw the publication of the Frank Mentzer edited D&D Basic Set, the best-selling version of that venerable product that TSR ever released, whose sales no doubt contributed greatly to the company's bottom line.
Right smack in the middle of this same period is the premier of the CBS animated television series for which Gary Gygax is credited as a co-producer. The series, which ran for three seasons between 1983 and 1985 and a total of 27 episodes, was part of an effort to increase the pop cultural footprint of D&D beyond the realm of RPGs. So far as I know, the cartoon was the only fruit of that effort, despite Gygax's frequent reports that a Dungeons & Dragons movie of some sort was in the works. Readers more knowledgeable than I can correct me if I am mistaken in this judgment.
Because I was too old for its intended target audience, I never paid close attention to the D&D cartoon during its initial run. Consequently, I took even less note of the various cartoon-branded products released in conjunction with it. I could probably write several posts about this topic and perhaps I eventually will, but, for the moment, what most interests me are the six "Pick a Path to Adventure" books published in 1985 by TSR. As you might expect, these books are all very similar to the Endless Quest series (themselves modeled on the earlier and more well known "Choose Your Own Adventure" books), but drawing on characters and elements of the cartoon.
As I said, I was completely unaware of the existence of these books until comparatively recently. I certainly never saw them at the time of their original publication. Even if I had, there's zero chance I'd have read them, given my superior attitude toward the series and its perceived kiddification of my beloved D&D. Now, I find myself somewhat curious about them, if only because some of them apparently introduce new characters (like Eric the Cavalier's younger brother) and concepts unseen in the series. In addition, each of the six books uses a different member of the ensemble cast as its viewpoint character, which is actually not a bad idea. (Take note as well that first book in the series was written by Margaret Weis of Dragonlance fame).
Looking into these books online revealed that, contemporaneous with the Endless Quest books (and a few years before the cartoon-branded books), TSR produced another series of "Pick a Path to Adventure" books under the Fantasy Forest brand. From what I can tell, they appear to have been geared towards a younger audience than the Endless Quest books. Likewise, these books don't carry the D&D logo anywhere, though some of them, like The Ring, the Sword, and the Unicorn, proclaim "From TSR, Inc., the producers of the DUNGEONS & DRAGONS cartoon show."Once again, these are books of which I was completely unaware at the time and that I've not seen, let alone read, in the years since. If anyone among my readers has read them, I'd like to know a bit more about them, specifically whether they contain anything that connects them to Dungeons & Dragons. I would assume that they do, because what other purpose would TSR have had in publishing them beyond creating a potential new audience for its games? However, judging solely on the basis of the books' covers, they all look fairly generic. Their connection to D&D, if any, would seem to be limited.
TSR produced another series of "Pick a Path to Adventure" books – or should I say "Pick a Path to Romance and Adventure?" – the (in)famous HeartQuest series of fantasy romance novels. Unlike the other two series, I did know about these. I have a vague recollection of first seeing mention of them in the pages of Dragon, but, despite all my best efforts, I can find no evidence of this. In any case, I saw these in either Waldenbooks or B. Dalton sometimes in 1983 or '84 and had a strongly negative reaction to their existence. Their covers, reminiscent of the Harlequin romance books from the same time, certainly did nothing to endear them to me.Like the Fantasy Forest series, HeartQuest does not seem to have been explicitly connected to Dungeons & Dragons, at least as far as branding goes. From what I've gathered, they're not actually bad books for what they are, though nothing special. I would imagine that they were another prong in TSR's attempts to expand the audience of their products (and thus their sales). Given that, unlike the Endless Quest books, which had several dozen titles, HeartQuest only had six, suggesting that, whatever its quality, they failed to achieve the goals TSR had set for them.
I've sometimes jokingly called 1982–1984 the period when TSR was throwing a lot of spaghetti against the wall in the vain hope that some of it might stick. The company certainly tried many different approaches to expanding its customer base to what appears to have been limited success. On the other hand, these book series may well have played a role in helping to build up the company's publishing division. That division would eventually prove very successful – so successful, in fact, that, by the 1990s, it would become the cart pulling the horse of TSR's fortunes. That's a story for a different day (and probably a different writer, since I don't know enough about its fine details). Still, it's always fascinating to look into the forgotten corners of the hobby's history like the "Pick a Path to Adventure" books.
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
Retrospective: Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space
Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space is a guilty pleasure of mine. Written and conceived by Jeff Grubb, this overstuffed boxed set was first released in 1989, just as I was transferring between two colleges. For a lot of reasons, this was a very tumultuous time in my life and, as a result, my memories of it are very vivid, even thirty-five years later – memories that include purchasing Spelljammer from a Waldenbooks in a suburban mall and then poring over its contents for some time afterwards.
As its subtitle suggests, Spelljammer took AD&D 2e into "space," though not in the traditional scientific (or even science fictional) sense of the word. Rather, Grubb took inspiration from ancient and medieval conceptions of the cosmos, in which the stars and planets are embedded within celestial spheres made of ether. Rather than multiple nested spheres containing all the celestial bodies of a single solar system, as the ancients conceived, Grubb imagined each sphere as encompassing an entire solar system or, more to the point, an entire campaign setting, with all the spheres floating within a "sea" of flammable material called phlogiston.
Through the use of flying vessels equipped with magical "helms," it was possible for the inhabitants of worlds within one sphere to journey to worlds within another. This was the high concept of Spelljammer: the ability to travel between TSR's various campaign settings by means of magical "space" ships. It's a very clever conceit, one reminiscent not just of ancient cosmology but also of Jack Vance's Rhialto the Marvelous. In addition to facilitating transit between existing settings, Spelljammer also opened up the development of a "bridge" setting between them, namely, the larger cosmos of races, organizations, and even worlds that make regular use of space travel.
In some respects, Spelljammer is the forerunner of both Ravenloft: Realm of Terror (1990) and Planescape (1994), two other TSR boxed campaign settings whose conceptual frameworks allowed characters from Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, Krynn, and elsewhere to adventure side by side while also exploring entirely new locales created to flesh out the bridge setting. In the case of Spelljammer, that bridge setting includes a mix of the good, the bad, and the downright weird. There's the pompous Elven Navy attempting to keep the peace, xenophobic beholders at war with themselves and everyone else, mysterious mind flayers with their nautilus ships, the spider-like neogi, and mercantile arcane, just to name a few. As presented in Spelljammer, the cosmos was positively filled with all manner of space-faring peoples – and an equally large number of space-based locales and mysteries.
Chief among these mysteries is the titular Spelljammer, an ancient – and gigantic – manta ray-shaped space vessel with an equally gigantic citadel on its back. The origins and true nature of the Spelljammer are unknown, making it the subject of many legends. It's also the destination of many a spacefaring adventurer, as the citadel on its back is reputed to hold untold magic and wealth for those bold enough to venture within. The Spelljammer is thus equal parts the Flying Dutchman of space and an old school megadungeon, which is itself a pretty good high concept.
Of course, Spelljammer was replete with high concepts – and that's part of the problem. In an effort to be expansive and easy to use to use with any existing AD&D campaign setting, Spelljammer is something of a curate's egg. I suspect that this was due less to Jeff Grubb's own preferences and more to directives from TSR regarding the boxed set's place within their larger publishing scheme. This prevents the bridge setting from having a strong flavor of its own, which is too bad, because it contains a lot of elements that I wish had been better (or differently) developed. Instead, the whole thing has a kind of underdone quality that fails to do full justice something I still consider to be a great idea to this day.
Spelljammer straddles the line between the end of the Silver Age and the beginning of the Bronze Age of Dungeons & Dragons, which, I think, explains a lot. Like the products of the Silver Age, Spelljammer is an exemplar of the era's "fantastic realism," itself a metastasis of Gygaxian Naturalism. At the same time, Spelljammer heralds the start of AD&D's "boxed set era," when TSR cranked out new boxed campaign settings (and expansions thereof) almost on a monthly basis – a seemingly never-ending parade of good ideas not given sufficient time to germinate. There's reason why so many gamers of a certain age have such affection for this period of AD&D's development. For all of the flaws in their output, almost all of these boxed sets contained good, imaginative ideas that inspired a lot of us, Spelljammer included.Tuesday, May 14, 2024
Polyhedron: Issue #26
Monday, May 13, 2024
Secrets of sha-Arthan: Tomb Robber
A tomb robber by Zhu Bajie |
Tomb Robber
Alertness
Skills
- Dead Languages: Because of his familiarity with inscriptions in ancient ruins, the tomb robber does not suffer the usual –3 penalty for attempting to read dead languages.
- Improvisation: If specific equipment is normally required to use a skill he possesses, a tomb robber does not require it. If he does possess the equipment, he gets a +1 bonus to his roll.
Trap Avoidance
Friday, May 10, 2024
Speaking of Miniatures ...
Behold! Qualos – guardian of the Duck Temple. This is an official RuneQuest miniature produced by Infinity-Engine. Whether you use miniatures in your games or not, it's hard to deny that this one is pretty amazing.
What's Behind That Door?
It is, of course, well established that roleplaying games as we know them today grew out of the hobby of miniatures wargaming. I suspect that's why 25mm miniature figures continued to be made and sold for use with RPGs, even though, in my personal experience, very few people had much use for them at the table. That was certainly the case for me. Despite this, lots of games continued to recommend the use of miniature figures as an aid to play, including some rather unexpected ones, like Call of Cthulhu.
Call of Cthulhu quickly became one of my favorite roleplaying games and I acquired all of the support products for it that I could both find and afford – like the miniatures sold by Grenadier Models. After losing the AD&D license in 1982, Grenadier tried to maintain its presence in the RPG world by picking up licenses to produce figures for other popular roleplaying games, like Traveller and Call of Cthulhu. They also tried their hand at publishing adventures for both games, with very mixed results.
I owned the two boxed sets of Call of Cthulhu miniatures, the first of which was dedicated to adventurers (though the box says "adventures," which I assume was an error). Here's the cover, showing Indiana Jones, Al Capone, and Professor Plum preparing to burst into the room behind a closed door.
The second boxed set depicts a night gaunt, a deep one, and a ghoul, who lie in wait behind the very same door the adventurers are about to open. Taken together, they form a fun little diptych that, to my shame, I don't think I even recognized until several years after I'd bought them.I'm a Terrible Player
Almost from the moment I discovered roleplaying games, I've primarily been a referee. To some degree, I was thrust into this role by necessity, since few of my friends were all that interested in sitting behind the screen themselves. Fortunately for them, I liked being the referee. I enjoyed making maps and creating adventure locales and thinking up new ways to challenge my players. Despite my perpetual stage fright – I still struggle with this before nearly every session I run – I also enjoy describing situations to my players, roleplaying NPCs, and thinking on my feet in response to their harebrained schemes. In short, refereeing is fun, which probably explains why I've got three different campaigns on the go at the present moment.
Of course, I've been a player, too. Right now, for instance, I'm playing in a dear friend's Traveller campaign set in the Crucis Margin sector and am really enjoying it. Nevertheless, there's no denying that, by most standards, I'm a terrible player. I don't say this lightly; this isn't studied self-effacement. I really do think I'm a pretty mediocre player, especially when I compare myself to the dozens of people whom I've refereed over the years – certainly when compared to the players of my House of Worms Empire of the Petal Throne campaign.
What do I mean when I say "terrible player?" Firstly, I mean that I rarely immerse myself in the world of any game I play. Instead, I retain varying degrees of detachment, sometimes to the point of treating my character as something akin to a token in a boardgame, which is to say, an abstract playing piece with little distinctiveness or personality. That might not seem like much of a sin, particularly if, like Gygax, you don't equate roleplaying with amateur thespianism. That's not quite what I mean here. Rather, I mean that I don't make much effort to play my character as something distinct from the rules he brings to bear on a session – abilities, skills, spells, gear, etc. He's not a fictional avatar but mostly a game construct.
Secondly, and perhaps more damningly, I get bored easily and don't pay attention to what's going on during a session when my character's not directly involved. To some extent, this is a consequence of my detachment. Since I view my characters mostly as vehicles for game mechanics, it's uncommon for them to engage in other activities that don't directly relate to them. Combat, for example, always catches my attention, as it directly involves all the characters present. On the other hand, lengthy discussions of in-game problems or details often leave me cold and I have to work hard to keep myself focused on the game. This second sin is an odd one. When I'm refereeing, I absolutely adore listening to the players spend long stretches of time discussing and debating new pieces of information their characters have just obtained or planning the strategy for their next endeavor. Indeed, those are among my favorite things about roleplaying. Perhaps I find them so appealing precisely because these are the kinds of in-game activities of which I don't seem to be capable.
I do think there's probably a connection between my long years participating in the hobby primarily as a referee and my terrible skills as a player. As a referee, I am constantly engaged in each and every session. As I mentioned above, I love roleplaying NPCs, describing details, responding to player queries, and so on. Even when I'm not directly involved in what's happening, I nevertheless have to pay attention in order to keep up with the action and determine what happens next. Likewise, after a session ends, I'm frequently thinking about the next session and what might happen during it. I can't tell how many times over the decades I've fallen asleep thinking about some aspect of a campaign I'm currently refereeing, pondering its possibilities.
Could it really be that, because a referee is such a large role, that having to take on the role of a "mere" player feels small and uninteresting? That seems the most obvious explanation, but I'm not sure if it's the right one. The difficulty in assessing this is compounded by the fact that, for all of this, I still enjoy playing. The aforementioned Traveller campaign is remarkable in its scope and imagination. I like the people with whom I'm playing and I look forward to each new session. Yet, for all of that, I still feel as if I'm not a very good player: I'm too distant and uninvolved most of the time and I worry it impacts others negatively.
Does anyone else feel this way?
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
Retrospective: Raiders of the Lost Ark (Atari)
Though I've generally kept these Retrospective posts to looking back at roleplaying and boardgames that I thought worthy of discussion, I have occasionally turned the spotlight onto computer and video games as well. In the '80s, I never owned a "home computer," as we used to call them in those ancient days, but I did own the Atari Video Computer System (VCS), later dubbed the Atari 2600. I also had an enviable collection of game cartridges for it, two of which I think merit a post: Adventure, about which I've previously written, and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Released in 1982, Raiders of the Lost Ark was (obviously) a tie-in product for the action-adventure film of the same name released the year before. Historically, tie-in products like this tend to be mediocre at best, with most being little more than vehicles for making a quick buck by association with a popular book, TV show, or movie. By all rights, that's what one might reasonably expect of this game cartridge too – except that it's actually one of the more complex, imaginative, and enjoyably frustrating games Atari ever made for its first game console.
It's that enjoyable frustration that's the main reason I still have such affection for the game. Strange though it might be for some to imagine, I actually enjoyed video and computer games whose difficulty – or at least perplexity – made me want to tear my hair out. Indeed, their difficulty was a big part of their appeal, because it suggested that, if I managed to beat them, I'd actually achieved something. It's similar to why, as kids, my friends and I enjoyed testing our wits against a Killer DM. Sure, it was tough and often downright unfair, but to win against such odds felt like an accomplishment and we cherished those moments way more than easy wins.
Raiders of the Lost Ark was not an easy win. Completing it successfully took a lot of thought and patience, not to mention above average hand-eye coordination, owing to its unusual control set-up and the finicky nature of said controls. In very broad strokes, the game recreated Indy's adventures in search of the Map Room that will lead him to the resting place of the fabled Lost Ark of the Covenant. The resting place of the Ark is randomly determined with each game reset, meaning that, should you fail, you can't necessarily carry over anything you've learned in your previous attempts to a new one. In addition, Indy requires the aid of certain items he can find hidden in various locations and these, too, are not always in the same location.
This randomness is only one part of what made the game so frustrating to play. Another is that it required both joysticks to play. One was used in the expected way, allowing the player to control Indy's movement and actions on-screen. The other was used to control inventory. Unlike Adventure, which only allowed the player to possess a single item at a time, Raiders of the Lost Ark let you possess several, as if Indy had a backpack filled with gear. By moving a cursor among the items you possessed, the player could the one he wished Indy to use at any given time. This was very cool and quite innovative at the time, but it could also be demanding in play, especially if you had to quickly switch between items.
However, the main reason the game was so frustrating was the sparseness of its manual, which didn't tell the player much about how the goals of the game could be achieved. Instead, you were largely left to your own devices to figure out how all of the game's elements worked toward a successful conclusion. The manual includes descriptions of most of the locations and items found in the game, but not all of them. Likewise, it does include "helpful hints," but, again, these don't answer every question a player might have. "After all, what's an adventure game without surprises?" the manual asks. Consequently, even if you read the manual cover to cover, there are still very important aspects of play that you can only discover through play.
This is what made the game so enjoyably frustrating to me. To this day, more than forty years later, I can still recall the joy I felt when I first stumbled across an item not listed in the manual the possession of which was essential to finding the location of the Ark. Similarly, I remember when, in the midst of foolishly falling off a cliff to my doom – I wasn't quick enough in making use of the parachute in my inventory – I noticed something for the first time that I would later use to solve another mystery in the game. Neither of these discoveries were in the manual; I could only learn of them through trial and (much) error.
By the standards of today, Raiders of the Lost Ark is unbelievably primitive. Heck, by the standards of games released just a year or two later, it's primitive. Yet, for all that, it remains one of my favorite video games of all time, because it challenged me just enough that I couldn't rack up an easy win but without so dispiriting me that I gave up completely. Not coincidentally, this is my ideal when it comes to dungeon design, too, so perhaps I was the perfect target audience for this game. This is a foundational game design for me and I suspect I've been chasing the high of enjoyable frustration I gave me ever since.
Indy notices something as he falls to his pixelated doom |
Tuesday, May 7, 2024
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Kirktá?
First, thank you to everyone who took the time to make comments or send me emails regarding yesterday's post about upcoming events in my House of Worms campaign. I've gotten a number of excellent suggestions and I now have a better handle on how I'll likely proceed, though I'd be happy to continue receiving more suggestions. After the Kólumejàlim, as the Choosing of the Emperors is known in Tsolyáni, has taken place, I'll write a post or two about it, because I am sure that, no matter how it turns out, it will be of interest to my readers. That likely won't occur until sometime this summer, as the campaign is currently focused on other matters at the moment and I'm not ready to shift gears quite yet.
Aside from my already stated reasons for wanting to adjudicate the Kólumejàlim in this way, there's also another: one of the player characters is secretly an heir to the Petal Throne. Years ago, when a new player joined the campaign, he asked if he could base his character on one from the original Tékumel campaign in Minneapolis. Named Kirktá, he was a priest NPC whom the characters in the Twin Cities campaign later discovered was one of the emperor's secret heirs, whose true identity was hidden, unknown to almost anyone, including himself. I had no objection to the new player basing his character on Kirktá, largely because I never expected it to amount to anything.
And it didn't. For many years, there was never a hint that Kirktá – my Kirktá – was anything other than he appeared to be, namely, a young and naive priest of Durritlámish, the Black Angel of the Putrescent Hand. He served as protégé and amanuensis to Keléno, one of the four remaining original player characters of the campaign, without complaint. Indeed, Kirktá had something of a reputation as being incapable of making decisions for himself, deferring instead to the wisdom and experience of his master (and any other PC who cared to offer an opinion on what Kirktá ought to do). It's a fun dynamic and soon became one of the hallmarks of the campaign.
Then, a little more than a year ago, the characters reunited with an old antagonist of theirs, an Undying Wizard known as Getúkmetèk. Like a lot of Undying Wizards, Getúkmetèk existed outside of normal time. Consequently, when the characters encountered him, there was no telling exactly where the wizard was on his own personal timeline. On this occasion, Getúkmetèk was quite young, early in his own career and not yet an Undying Wizard. In fact, it became increasingly clear that it was due to their interactions with him early in his life (but late in that of the characters, relatively speaking – non-linear time is weird) that he would eventually become antagonistic toward them.
When this younger Getúkmetèk met the characters, he greeted them pleasantly, since, from his perspective, he hadn't yet met any of them – or, at least, most of them. Somehow, he already knew Kirktá and addressed him differently than the others, using a formal Tsolyáni second person pronoun reserved only for the emperor, "you of supernal omnipotence," that is probably unknown to most characters, given its exceedingly uncommon usage. One of the characters, Nebússa, comes from a very high clan involved heavily in imperial service. He recognized the pronoun and quickly put two and two together, realizing for the first time in the campaign that Kirktá was likely a hidden heir to the Petal Throne.
Initially, Nebússa kept this secret to himself, not even telling Kirktá. However, events eventually required that he reveal it, to the surprise and incredulity of his clan mates. There was a lot of debate about what the characters should do with this information, as well as the realization that, if Nebússa figured it out based on very limited information, there were probably others within Tsolyánu who also knew it and might seek to take advantage of it. That's partly why the characters elected to undertake a lengthy, months-long journey outside the Imperium: to keep Kirktá safe. However, once the Kólumejàlim is declared, events may overtake them. What happens next is anyone's guess, hence my desire to establish a means to handle the Choosing of the Emperors, just in case Kirktá decides to participate ...