Of Manifestos and Magnificent Garbage

I've been re-reading Andre Breton's Manifesto of Surrealism which you can find online here, here, here, here, or learn more about via Wikipedia here.  Surrealism is very much integral to Riskail and the other settings/campaigns that we're developing via Netherwerks.  We have several posts/articles concerning various aspects of Surrealism in-progress for the blogs and elsewhere and so I decided to make some time to go back and re-read Monsieur Breton's Manifesto(s) while I was waiting for our new chair to get delivered.  In the course of re-reading this document I found myself wondering about a gamer manifesto.  Gamers are a nerdly lot, and such a thing would undoubtedly appeal to numerous egos flapping about in the various niches and market segments of gaming. 

A quick search led me back to something that I had all but forgotten--a real gamer manifesto.  In fact, my favorite Gamer Manifesto of all time.  It's the Rolpunk Manifesto from Uncle Bear.  This is an excellent one-page rantifesto and I agree with the sentiment a great deal, which shouldn't come as any surprise, what with the word 'Heretic' prominently featured up above on the masthead like a textual Jolly Roger.  I don't give a poop as to what edition anyone else plays--and I stay off of most forums precisely because I'm not inclined to waste time squabbling over silly crap like editions or styles, or what have you.  That gossipy timewastage is for nattering old hens with no teeth and less sense.  Play your games.  Play your way.  What more needs to be said?  Polemics and commentary takes time away form actually playing, thus it ought to be avoided.

If ever there was a manifesto for the grognards...aside from the above-mentioned Rolpunk one...it might resemble this piece by Lin Carter which was extracted from his introduction to the Beyond the Gate of Dreams anthology.  Every generation has their grognards yelling at the kids to get off of their lawn while simultaneously extolling the virtues of the childhood they fondly remember--when they were the kids getting yelled at by the creepy old guys who were far too encyclopedic in their knowledge of Theda Bara, Clara Bow, or Betty Page for anyone's good.  Just swap-out 1944 for 1954, 1964, 1974, 1984 and re-read Carter's rant-roduction.  It could easily get re-posted as a fresh new thing ... and someone may well already have done just that.

Carter's rant just goes to show you that Toynbee was right, this stuff we like to call history is all cyclical and it's probably best not to take it all too seriously. Far from pitying anyone deprived of the dubious wonders that we grew up with, it better serves us all to explore together the new opportunities available to us all here and now.  Living in the past not only makes your butt look big, it leaves you smelling like rancid cat-piss, stale Kool-Aid and moldy baloney sandwiches.

Nostalgia is best as a precursor to inspiration, not an end in itself.  We could use a few less creepy old guys yelling at kids and more of the sort of fresh, fun stuff that we all remember discovering when we were kids--and it's great good fun to see people like Scott, McKinney, Raggi, Mr. Stater and others do just that.  The wheel fire rpg has been invented already; what interests me is what can we do with it.

System Versus Setting (Plus Scope 1.5)

Once again the erudite and insightful Mister Maliszewski at Grognardia has given me a lot to think about in his latest post which you can find here.  I have never gotten to actually play Jorune, but I am one of those kids who saw the ads in Dragon way, way back and wondered what the heck it was all about.  I even got a chance to look over some of the materials published for the game, but never could quite make myself buy into it, either monetarily or gaming-wise.  Don't get me wrong, it is an incredible setting and I absolutely admire Jorune as an exotic setting, but not as a gaming system.  I managed to include it in my quick and incomplete listing of cool Old School RPG Settings in a previous post on Scope where I failed to include the excellent and very much Old School (in all the right ways) Sword-and-Sorcery setting that is Athanor.  Thanks to Blair from Planet Algol for pointing out my unintentional faux pas. Athanor is a wonderful setting and it does an excellent job of capturing the feel of the old-time martians-and-magic pulps like Burroughs, Kline and Leigh Brackett.  Fun stuff.

Reading Maliiszewski's Grognardia blog today was a moment of incredibly fortuitous synchronicity for me.  I have been wrangling and hammering away on my own set of rules for Riskail and Maliszewski drops his analysis of Jorune on my head like a ten ton anvil straight out of a vintage Bugs Bunny cartoon (gotta keep things appropriately old school after all...).  To quote his review of Jorune; "...an exotic, imaginative setting that employed a few too many made-up words to describe itself mated to an uninspired, clunky rules system -- a story all too common in the annals of the hobby."  Ouch.  It'd be difficult to be more blunt, or more on the money.  I agree completely.  It seems that you can have either an exotic setting or complicated rules, but rarely both at the same time, at least not in a game that you expect anyone else to ever actually play or spend money on.

Simplicity in your rules in many respects reminds me of the old saw about brevity being the soul of wit.  Rules-crafting is technical writing, not creative writing.  It's a copywriting process, not poetry.  That is why I split my efforts into two parallel blogs.  This one is for working out matters of systems, numbers, details, theories, tables and all that Behind the Curtain sort of stuff that makes the other shiny and phantasmagorical nonsense intrinsic to the setting actually work as more than just fiction.  The other blog is a place for all that weird prose to evolve into fiction, unique setting details, and all the fun trivia and crap that makes building worlds and developing setting fun.

It makes sense to me, and allows me to focus on both aspects of the process without unnecessarily muddying the setting with the system and vice versa.  In fact my original concept for Riskail was to develop a setting that was independent of any system, much as Freeport has developed into a setting ported to several different systems, or how the old Judges Guild products had a Universal System that made them (somewhat) easy to convert to any other system.  I am very much inclined to focus more on the Setting and let the System be a choice on the part of the DM/GM...perhaps.  It is a tempting thought, but only so long as I don't really think about it.  Settings without dedicated rules-systems don't seem to work, at least I cannot recall a setting that is currently active and economically viable that has no dedicated or at least adapted system backing it up.  Hellfire.  That's exactly James Raggi's point in developing his Lamentations of the Flame Princess system.  Selling modules or adventures or supplements is de facto fleshing out a setting, either implied or specified.  By default you develop a setting in the course of writing out a module/adventure. 
 
Around and round it goes.  Making my own system or adopting/adapting an established one is a question that has to be answered eventually.  Sure, I could just quote Blake and go off and do my own thing, but I end up in the same dead-end ghetto ninety-percent of RPG stuff winds up in; if you don't write for the current edition of the currently popular game, you are fighting for pennies, or as Ken Hite once told me "You might as well fish quarters out of the men's room urinals."  Speaking of Captain Esoteric, Mister Hite has a truly interesting post on Setting that I found particularly relevant to my current System/Setting deliberations.
 
Jeff Rients likewise has some very cogent words of wisdom in regards to Systems that I have gone back and re-re-read yet again.  Rob Conley also is someone whose work I admire greatly, and his setting tour de force Majestic Wilderlands is a damn good example of how to make it all work and work well.  Between Hite, Rients and Conley, something of a solution is presenting itself to me. 
 
Looks like I'm going back to the roots one more time.  For me that's making it all about the Setting more than the System.  I am by nature passionate about Setting and fairly agnostic about System, though I truly value the glorious mess of OD&D and as a rule of thumb to guide my efforts, I want Riskail to be a setting that can accomodate any system someone wants to run it with, and do my best to aid and abet the effort of DMs/GMs to convert the setting into their system of preference whether that is OD&D, EPT, Swords & Wizardry, Labyrinth Lord or D&D4E--I honestly don't care.  That's their decision.  They're the ones who are running the game, not me.  Like Jeff Berry always used to say: "I just work here," and ultimately I work for those DMs/GMs who are interested in adapting my work to fit into their games.  It doesn't get more personal than that.  It also doesn't get more Old School than that.  Start simple, with something small and build what you need as you need it.  Like Gygax said in Men & Magic, page 4:

"We advise, however, that a campaign be begun slowly, following the steps outlined herein, so as to avoid becoming too bogged down with unfamiliar details at first.  That way your campaign will build naturally, at the pace best suited to the referee and players, smoothing the way for all concerned.  New details can be added and old 'Laws' altered so as to provide continually new and different situations.  In addition, the players themselves will interact in such a way as to make the campaign variable and unique, and this is quite desirable."
 
Quite desirable indeed!

Down on the Corner of Rue Morgue Avenue and Fascination Street

Dungeons and Dragons, Volume One: Men & Magic, page 4 Introduction (Continued):

"...the fascination of the game will tend to make participants find more and more time.  We advise, however, that a campaign be begun slowly, following the steps outlined herein, so as to avoid becoming too bogged down with unfamiliar details at first.  That way your camapign will build naturally, at the pace best suited to the referee and players, smoothing the way for all concerned.  New details can be added and old "laws" altered so as to provide continually new and different situations.  In addition, the players themselves will interact in such a way as to make the campaign variable and unique, and this is quite desirable."

The Cure are playing in the background, Fascination Street from the Disintegration CD.  Feels very appropriate.  Fascination is the right and proper word, unless you prefer to swap it out for Obsession, which equally describes the effect of the 'game' that was set forth in those Little Brown Books that in many ways are a modern parallel to Pandoras' Box on so many levels.

Starting out a campaign slowly is good advice.  There are a lot of things to get sorted out before a campaign can really start and it can be a lot of work.  Starting out small and adding bits and pieces as things progress is one of the best ways to do things, I have found.  Allowing a setting to develop and evolve naturally and organically from the (inter)actions and choices of the player characters can be a lot of fun and an open-ended sandbox style setting can really take off with the right players, or it can fizzle into inertia and frustration for all concerned.  Communication is essential.  Some ground rules are a good thing to have in place so everyone knows what is expected of them, what they expect from each other, what the DM is setting out to provide in terms of the setting in general (scope, style of play, etc.), and how the player characters will fit into the setting.  

Some sample ground-rules we've used in the past1. Never assume anything; things are rarely what they seem and your asking questions, even what you think might be dumb questions, can make a big difference in what happens and how it happens (and to whom it happens).
2. Anything that a grubby bunch of low-level adventurers can manage to do can and will be used against them by monsters smart enough to learn and the bad guys are always on the look-out for new and effective ways of getting things done, so if you come up with a great gimmick, you can expect it to get copied by others.
3. The game is not just about your character.  Take turns, share your toys, try to cooperate amongst yourselves, it can make a big difference.
4. Things happen.  Your character may die or they might lose all their possessions.  Deal with it.  As long as we're still playing and the dice are rolling, anything can happen.  Consider obstacles and set-backs experienced by your character challenges to be overcome just like traps in a dungeon.  No one ever figured out a maze by sitting on their butt whining.  There are consequences and repercussions to every act and choice--that is part and parcel of how the game works--but remember; it rarely stops there.  You always get to react to a reaction, whether for good or for bad, things can go back and forth for as long as you're willing and able to continue making the effort required...just keep in mind that there are some things that can lead to escalation and you can only push some things so far before drastic retaliation or dire consequences erupt.
5. Get involved.  Play the game.  Don't be just another observer.  Your characters are the moving parts that get things happening, the catalysts that start chain reactions, and the irritants that cause things to change.  If you remain passive and uncommunicative, there is no game.
6. Leave the workaday BS at the door, and likewise, leave the game BS in the game.  If you are having trouble distinguishing between the game and waking reality seek help immediately.
7. Write it down.  If you don't have a written record of it, it never happened and you do not have it.  No debate, no discussion.  It is the player's responsibility to keep their own records.

Ground rules are useful.  Spelling out expectations up front is generally far less stressful than trying to sort it all out after something snaps.  Another Old School blogger I follow, Chgowiz over at The Old Guy's RPG Blog, recently had a less than wonderful experience where people's expectations didn't quite mesh resulting in some frustration that he and his players had to work through--and did so quite admirably.  The post I'm referring to can be found here.  It's well worth reading as a Lesson Learned kind of thing.  I hope that Chgowiz makes an article out of this experience, as we all run into this situation sooner or later. 

Back when I was running my Bazra campaign I had a bunch of regular players who were committed to always going anywhere that it looked like I was not prepared and would do everything they could to get away from anything that was mapped-out, detailed, or prepared in any way.  They took perverse pleasure in trying to run the game into that notorious zone of endless, flat white expanses crisscrossed at regular intervals by intersecting black lines beneath an ambiguously gray sky.  You know the place.  Its the meta-plane that all DMs dread to tread, the empty place where there are no pre-planned words, no pre-packaged scenarios, no myths/lore/legends...the spots with no ink and no real thought invested in them.  Or so they thought.  They were all AD&D-players who had not started with OD&D as I had.  They were used to modules, magazines, that sort of stuff.  I started out with ruled tablets, graph paper and my own bad self.  They were welcome to challenge me and I thrived on the improvisational aspect of the campaign.  It forced me to develop things in response to player actions/inquiries and to develop a flexible, adaptable and organic approach to the setting that worked really well.  We were able to go anywhere, have the most off-the-wall adventures, and explore things that even I did not realize where there or set up in that particular configuration--the campaign took on a life of its own and it began to play itself.  I stopped being the referee and became a fellow conspirator and mutual player.  The world practically ran itself and on more than one memorable occasion one of the other players would chastise someone for overlooking some aspect of a particular House's modus operandi, or reminded us all about the weird sigils we discovered in that tomb sixteen layers down the Well of Saomris out on the Plains of Ancient Kings.  Strange items that were discovered three months back all of a sudden made sense to someone who figured out that they belonged to so-and-so from the such-and-such group, and so it went. 

But even with that group in that setting, we ran into the occasional snag or bump in the road.  We had a player who 'liked to watch' more than participate and that annoyed the others to no end.  When the players got all passive and timid, things ground to a halt.  When they started hunting each other and became their own worst enemies...that wore thin fairly quickly as well.  So I started to add new random tables to the game based on each previous session or specific players or player-characters.  One table dealt with destructive effects of what can go wrong when smashing one gate into another or otherwise demolishing gates.  Very messy and quite spectacular, and once we had the table they went out of their way to find a way to get it used...that was quite an adventure.  Another table was 1001 things that could be found in someone's pocket.  One player liked to really push the envelope as far as possible and had a voracious hunger for details about the background and how things got to be the way they were--this was an ostensibly medium-far future setting--and his endless questions, feed-back and deviously clever tendencies of really messing with things based upon his understanding of the setting made for a very interesting form of duelling imaginations that a lot of fun.  He inspired several tables, including the random background table that kept growing and morphing until it became a section of the three-ring binder unto itself.  That was how his mighty kobold warrior Lacton acquired a vintage WWII-era luger with a box of ammuntiion.   His great grandsire had stolen it from a museum during a period of civil unrest around the time of the last gatewar.  So this 18(00) STR kobold, the very Conan of kobolds as it were, strode forth into the lands of the taller folk carrying a rusty battle axe and a luger and became notorious, greatly feared and a legend unto himself.  To this day, Lacton remains one of the all-time most fun characters I have ever had the pleasure of having to cope with in one of my settings and campaigns.  He (and his creator) challenged me more than any others before or since.  And that was, and is, a very good thing.

I like being challenged by my players and their characters.  I thrive on it in fact.  But not every DM/GM does.  Many DMs have grown up with an embarassment of riches when it comes to pre-packaged settings, modules that spell it all out for you, and tons of other people's voices telling them how to do everything so that they never get stuck having to wing it unless somehow it all goes horribly wrong.  It is an alien mindset to me.  Where everything went wrong, the rails ended and the world began...that's exactly where I preferred and still prefer to start things out.  Plots are nice, but they are for fictional characters and serve a role in the functional, dynamic background...they are not things to be forced on the players nor their characters.  I have always hated the narrativist notion that the game was to be structured around the conventions of literature.  That's sheer bullshit.  And it's not fun.  The players deserve to get a shot at taking their turn at bat, as I see it--the DM already has their carefully rendered setting, their chosen NPCs, the history, blah, blah, blah ad nauseum--they've already gotten their turn to play in the sandbox...now it's time to give the players a turn at things as well.  Forcing them to run along a railroading plot someone set-up as a flowchart in Excel is not my idea of giving them a turn, nor is it doing anyone any favors, really.  Anyone with the least imagination or creativity will start asking questions, choosing options or going off the map into places, situations or aspects of the setting/scenario that are not contained in the module, booklet or gazeteer.  Random tables are fun--once in a while and as a novelty item much akin to listening to Sheb Wooley/Ben Colder sing Hello Walls--it gets real old, real fast and cannot replace the real deal and that is DM improvisation, on-the-spot creation, and interactive adaptation.  They used to call it thinking on your feet.  Actors get trained in improvisation, comics learn it the hard way through transmuting nightmarish experiences into other people's laughter, DMs learn it by doing it, making mistakes and getting it wrong, and developing their own support tools and so on until they gain some skill with the practice and a deeper knowledge of their setting than even they imagined possible at first. 

If you go back over the OD&D booklets, you'll find a lot of support for this approach all through the guidelines.  It wasn't until things were crystallized into canonical RuLeS with AD&D that the emphasis upon a more freeform and improvisational approach dried-up and were carefully covered-up and rolled away into the back somewhere next to the carefully preserved notion of Making Your Own Setting and Making The Game Your Own.  Screw rules.  Question authority.  I'd rather play My Game than retread someone else's crapulous screed that has no relationship whatsoever to my campaign other than it might be printed in English and require a few dice rolls here and there.  But that's an Old School attitude, not one that the current crop of anime-fans, MMORPG-addicts and other demographics/marketing categories currently considered significant by the industry can identify with, if they can even understand it since they've probably never had a chance to see it, let alone experience it first-hand in a game the way we play.  Our approach was relegated to the dusty backstage storage areas as soon as the First Edition AD&D Player's Handbook fell out of the sky and obliterated the rough and tumble wild west atmosphere of the free-wheeling good old days.

(And NO, I am not some old fart railing about those damned kids.  They can still get the hell off of my lawn, but I don't blame them that they might not be familiar with the way things used to be back before most of them were born.  It's not their fault that the pursuit of filthy lucre whored OD&D into what it is today.  Nor can they be faulted for thinking that what they get served up to them as McD&D from the nice folks at WOTC is anything other than what it appears to be.  Their ignorance is more our fault than anything--the OSR needs to make itself more visible and demonstrate how things used to be, how things can be again, and give the kids a chance to make up their own minds.  Then if they don't do things our way, we beat them with pointy sticks until they get in line we keep on doing it our way until they either come around or our grandkids do.)

The original guidelines for OD&D have always been a launching pad, not a final destination, and were never meant to be authoritative let alone exhaustive.  They were always intended from the very beginning to facilitate individual creative efforts, to stimulate the imaginations of those who bought into it, and served as a beginning tool-set for DIY setting creation, world-building, and scenario crafting.  Like any creative effort,  passions can run deep and strong and the Old School DMs who have (in some instances) invested decades of the lives personally developing a particular setting will always feel a level of proprietorship that you'll never see in one-offs, delves, or corporate modules.  And that is an Old School mind-set that just might be a major hurdle to deal with in terms of making the OSR more understandable, let alone palatable to those damned kids who're back on the lawn again.  Eventually that lawn will be theirs.  So will those worlds/settings that we've been laboring over for so long.  It'd be sad to see something that wonderful relegated to a cardboard box stuffed into the back part of an attic and forgotten for twenty or more years after we're gone from this world, wouldn't it?  Like Gygax said in the Foreword to Arneson's Blackmoor:

"Handle at your own risk.  Even a brief perusal can infect the reader with the desire to do heroic deeds, cast mighty spells, and seek to wrest treasure from hideous monsters."

We need to make the OSR infectious --and Fascinating-- all over again.

There's Gold In Them Thar Books

From: Dungeons and Dragons, Book One: Men & Magic, page 4, Introduction: "These rules are as complete as possible within the limitations imposed by the space of three booklets.  That is, they cover the major aspects of fantasy campaigns but still remain flexible.  As with any other set of miniatures rules they are guidelines to follow in designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign.  They provide the framework around which you will build a game of simplicity or tremendous complexity -- your time and imagination are about the only limiting factors, and the fact that you have purchased these rules tends to indicate that there is no lack of imagination..."

Complete?  Hardly.  Supplements were getting cranked out almost as quick as the first edition got tossed into the market like a gauntlet hurled into the face of traditional wargaming.  Complete as possible within the self-imposed constraints of the three Little Brown Book format?  Maybe.  There is something just weirdly satisfying about little booklets packaged in a box, probably it is a nostalgia thing.  It surely hasn't hurt the Swords & Wizardry White Box edition which has come out via Brave Halfling.  For better or worse, boxes are making something of a comeback.  Personally, I'd rather that they didn't, but hey it does at least give more artists a shot at getting some exposure (maybe even some cash...), so it isn't a bad thing.  I just don't have a burning need to stack boxes on my shelves, books already take up enough space...

In any case, the above chunk of text lifted from the Introduction to Men and Magic really packed a punch when I re-read it yet again this morning.  I really like what is promised here: a complete framework that supports and facilitates the major aspects of building my own damn campaign on my own damn terms.  At least that is how I choose to read this passage.  Cool.  That's exactly the sort of game and rules-set that I've always wanted, and it is exactly how I've always approached D&D and it's all Gygax's fault--the idea is implicit right there in the very Introduction to the very first edition of the Original Rules.  The OD&D set was intended, at least at first, to provide a flexible framework and guidelines for people to take this stuff into their hands like so much clay on Prometheus' potters-wheel and to mold, shape and re-shape it into own own image.  The incompleteness is more of an open invitation to develop your own methodology, the ambiguity is more a reflection of the protean nature of the thing more than any failing on the part of its authors.  It is, was and always will be intended to be modified, revised, and further developed by everyone who comes into contact with it...a truly Crowleyean memetic-level center of pestilence indeed.  The rules as presented in OD&D are more like the stakes and trellises used in a garden to support the healthy growth of plants and less like the rigid restrictions of say Chess.  They are there to get you started, point the way and then quietly and unobtrusively hum away merrily in the background like a teacher in Art class letting you find your own solutions as you experiment with materials that have been used professionally by gifted masters and geniuses as well as dabbled with by dilettantes for centuries and millenia.

Every revision, edition or major iteration of these original Core Rules, whether they are Retro-cloned, simulacrum-itized, revised, sanitized or even WOTC-itized are all completely optional supplements and other peoples' takes on the Original.  Every and any musician can attempt to play any and every song, as can be witnessed by the corporate crap that congeals out of the radio internet these days, to paraphrase something Robert Plant once said.  Any schmuck with a guitar thinks that they can play the Blues.  Likewise anyone with a vague grasp of the English language thinks that they can write...and just about every imaginative person who is exposed to OD&D, or any of its myriad insidious and multitudinous spawn, thinks that they can improve upon the game...and as evidenced by the words of the prophet quoted above...that's exactly what they are supposed to be doing, that is precisely what the Original game was all about.  We are supposed to make the game our own, develop it into whatever our own unique ingenium, inspiration and Visionthing guides us, drive us, or drag us kicking and screaming into bringing into existence through our writing, our art, our role-playing interactions.  Fairly radical stuff to be passing out to impressionable young minds.  Thank Hasb the Megacorp for making such a ecstatically inspirational terrifyingly dangerous thing safe for little Timmy who is just so precious and special for having shown up to the table after reading all of three paragraphs from Tolkein before opting to watch the DVDs instead.

The trouble with frameworks, guidelines and open-ended tool-sets is that they can only be put to right, proper and good use by someone with the appropriate mind-set, background, skills and inclination to put them to work.  Designing your own fantastic-medieval campaign is diving into the very same murksome, treacherous and deep waters that Clark Ashton Smith, Robert E. Howard, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkein, C. L. Moore, Fritz Leiber, Leigh Brackett, Mchael Moorcock, Henry Kuttner, H. P. Lovecraft, Andre Norton, Alice Sheldon, H. G. Welles, Jules Verne, Jack Vance, Robert Heinlein, Clive Barker, China Mieville, and a vast host of others have likewise jumped into and fought/found their own way through, each in their own unique and highly idiosyncratic manner.  They, and countless others like them, wrestled with the angels of creation, danced with the Muse, ran roughshod through out-moded shadow-echoes of previous dreamers' visions of faery, and waged their own private war with the demons that conspired to snuff out their voices and blind their vision that we might not share in the treasues of the imagination that they brought back from their respective forays into the unknown and that they shared with the world.  There is poetry and madness, passion and something mythic in this process, this collective endeavour of stealing imaginary fire, of threading our way through the labyrinths of the unconscious and discovering new answers to ancient riddles.

Heady stuff.  Powerful.  Shiny.  Like the gold glittering just below the fast-running waters of the Rhine or the twinkling of loosely scattered gems just at the edge of a guttering toches' rapidly diminishing light in a dim, dusty, ancient place we know not the name of...

Your time and your imagination are about the only limiting factors, (especially now in an era of free pdf downloads of the various retro-clone versions of the various editions of the Core Rules) and when it comes to the persistent and enduring appeal of OD&D (and it's sometimes noisome multitude of half-feral/half-bureaucratic offspring), it still seems to indicate that there is certainly no lack of imagination amongst those drawn to the fantastic, even if it is sometimes hard to discern amidst the hackneyed cliches, clumsy plot-holes, repetitious pastiches, and seemingly endless homages that have proliferated and infested Sword&Sorcery, Fantasy (Medieval, Dark, and otherwise), Weird/Pulp Fiction, Science Fiction, or any other genre, marketing category or commodity-label you prefer.  The imagination is in there.  But imagination alone is not enough.

It takes skill, hard-won through perseverence and honed to a razor-edge through discipline and constantly tested by continually being willing and able to start over again despite any fleeting failures or lingering successes.  What Gygax and Arneson did that is so damned radical and ground-breaking was not delivering unto the unsuspecting world a freakish amalgam of medieval miniatures and out-of-fashion pulp fiction, but rather they produced a hackers' tool-set for dismantling and revising the very fundamental root-level command-line code that handles the connection between imagination and fiction, and they disguised it as a set of game rules.  Granted it was a bit crude at first and the results of their work have been uneven to say the least, but the overall impact has been indelible, unmistakeable and overall quite incredible.

And that is with Sturgeons' Law in full effect.

And that is one more reason I have every hope of seeing a real Renaissance arise from out of the morass of dreck and nonsense that came before and is providing nutritious compost and an educational context for where things go from here.

Scope: More than a mouthwash, it's the underlying premise of an RPG

In Dungeons and Dragons, Book One: Men & Magic by Gygax and Arneson, on page 5, SCOPE:

"...DUNGEONS and DRAGONS will provide a basically complete, nearly endless campaign of all levels of fantastic-medieval wargame play.  Actually, the scope need not be restricted to the medieval; it can stretch from the prehistoric to the imagined future, but such expansion is recommended only at such time as the possibilities in the medieval aspect have been thoroughly explored."

NOTE: Need Not Be Restricted To The Medieval.

The above section was penned by Gygax in 1973.  More than three decades have passed and the overwhelming majority of paper-and-pencil RPGs are still modeled upon a 'fantastic' Medieval Western Europe.  Yawn.  Haven't we pretty-much mined-out the medieval end of things?  Didn't Chivalry & Sorcery drive a period-correct / SCA-approved black iron nail through that particular coffin back in the day?  Or what about Ars Magica? 

Now don't get me wrong; I am still a fan of those two systems, at least in terms of the first edition of both.  I've never bothered to upgrade to the newer versions because the old versions worked fine as far as I was concerned.  But the world really doesn't need yet another 'fantastic medieval' setting/rules-set.  Not really.  I mean, it certainly could be done and done very well...say if the fine folks over at Expeditious Retreat Press were to suddenly take leave of their collective senses and publish a Fantastic Medieval RPG that was anchored, based and evolved from their incredible and amazingly well-researched Magical Society line of sourcebooks...well...I'd probably buy it.  But that's an exception that pretty much proves the rule.  We're drowning, or at least we're up to our knees in 'fantasy medieval' stuff.  Aside from several other failings, the tendency of the so-called Old School Renaissance to crank out more and more generic/uninspired  'fantasy medieval' crap isn't so much getting old, as it was reaching the point of extreme fatigue a long time ago before there even was an OSR movement.  Now it just seems futile and silly, as though people can't stretch their imaginations any farther or maybe it just feels more comfortable to recapitulate, revise and regurgitate the same old stuff that Gygax and Arneson peddled to kids in the Seventies like literary dope. 

Honestly, we have dozens of Gygax-wannabees, Arneson-impersonators and numerous Close Personal Friends of the Great Guy Himself (whichever one you prefer)...but where are the new Barkers, that's what I want to know.  Is Prof. M. A. R. Barker forever doomed to be all on his own out there sipping his tea and watching over the slaves waving the richly embroidered banner of an imaginary realm that transcends the half-digested stereotypes, entrenched complacency and stale ennui of mindlessly repetitive trotting out of the tropes of colonialism and quasi-Victorian complacency?  Whither Arduin?  Sky Realms of Jorune languishes in obscurity, Talislanta may yet rejoin the marketplace of competing ideas, but even so, each of these examples are old settings, old games, mostly defunct, derelict and derailed from various causes both mundane and often unfortunate, despite the incredible work of their respective creators and the conservators who have nursed them through their dark and dismal period off along the margins.  Where are the new exotic, unusual, challenging and exciting settings, games and just plain weird ideas that are fun to explore?

Gabor Lux's Fomalhaut is much lauded and highly praised, however I cannot read Hungarian and Google only translates some of the stuff on the website, and not the booklets, etc.  His recent work that I was able to read was fun, heavily influenced by Barker's Tekumel, but still quite original and his City of Vultures in Knockspell #3 was simply a joy to read for its own weird sake.  I would definitely like to see more of this authors' highly intriguing work getting translated into English.

James Raggi is hard at work on his Lamentations of the Flame Princess Weird Fantasy RPG, but despite having a more ferocious and idisyncratic horror-informed edge to it, his system will still be Elves, Dwarves, (Halflings...) etc.  Not that that is a bad thing, but not that it's terribly new, either.  But it should prove to be fun and who knows where it will go once he gets past the obligatory stuff required in order to keep the game backwards-compatible with his previously published adventures.  The guy is a fellow curmudgeon and since he derives some serious inspiration from Clive Barker's earlier works...I am very interested in seeing how this system turns out.

Carcosa stirred up a right frightful storm of controversy when it appeared, and has since settled into being the touchstone for anyone wishing to provide some semblance of decadence, or to evoke some vestige of gnarly-weird-creepy pseudo-avant garde credibility.  Interesting, depraved, somewhat bent and definitely far more Lovecraftian than most of HPL's own tales...it was a fabulous start and a very real catalyst for several lesser spin-offs and homages and pastiches.  But aside from riffing off of A Voyage to Arcturus, and re-mixing Gamma World apocalyptic fantasy back into the OD&D genepool, and now that the hue and cry has died down over the unexpurgated version...where has this groundbreaking work taken us?  What comes next?

Urutsk sounds very interesting and I have only recently downloaded the public beta manual(s), and from a cursory examination, this setting looks like a lot of fun.  It feels like Tekumel meets Gamma World meets OD&D in all the right ways and I am looking forward to how this setting and rules-set develop.  It is wonderful to see a NON-OGL / Non-Clone Fresh New RPG-system coming out from the Old School Renaissance and I wish the author all the best in making this happen.  I believe that there are novels already out there derived from this setting and hopefully I'll be able to track one down shortly.

Quantique feels odd in all the right ways, and may prove, in time to be a truly unique setting that goes beyond the all too pervasive tendency of lesser creators to cobble-together three obscure pulp references or simply ripping off someone elses' non-open source intellectual properties and calling it your own.  There is something special and unique in this setting, it reeks with originality in the most wonderfully noisome manner, and I hope that the author continues to let it evolve, grow and assume frightening proportions and potentially become another touchstone radiating a malevolent green radiance that exerts as malign and weird an influence upon others as Carcosa, Lovecraft or Borges all do.

Planet Algol is fun, free-wheeling and far more troubling in oh so very many ways.  The personal creativity of the author/creator/mix-master supreme is ferocious, eclectic and inspiring...but...and there is a huge reservation on my part in respect to this setting...there is a lot of derivative stuff caught-up in the giddy mix, bits and pieces that are just fine to throw into your home-brew game...stuff that it is fine to mess around with as long as it remains a personal, non-commercial project.  I have no idea where Planet Algol is headed, and I intend to keep an eye on its wild and preternatural progress...but it makes me uneasy for the same reason I tend to not care for most rap music: too much re-mixing of other peoples' stuff detracts from the creativity that I admire and tends to get in the way of my enjoyment of the work.  Planet Algol deftly avoids this particular pitfall, but it does skirt the edge just a little too close for comfort, from my perspective.

Generally, I dislike and discount re-mixers and patchwork hacks who lift from others and repackage it as though it were their own work.  Sure, it can be fun, and everyone does something like that when they are starting out...I've heard all the rationalizations about Gygax including Barsoominan Apes and other such things lifted from various authors...remember Dungeonland anyone?...but I still feel that it is a childish sort of thing and not true creativity.  Or at least it is not nearly equivalent to the sort of creativity that I admire.  Mixing the Dukes of Hazard with Gammaworld and basing your characters on old WWE superstars is not in the same league as Arduin, Talislanta or Tekumel.  And that is one more point where I diverge drastically from the majority, I think.  Gamers are notorious for their flaunting of copyright, thumbing their noses at trademark law, and generally another more piratically-inclined group of consumers you would be hard-pressed to point out.  But I'm not interested in piracy, and all that goes with it right now.  I'm focusing on creativity, imagination and bringing something unique and fresh and new to the table, not just re-hashing what has gone before.  There has been too much Cloning and not enough Retro-ing in the whole Retro-clone and simulacrum-gaming movement.

I could give a crap what Gygax did, or what Arneson said, or what all they put into their games, or who they ripped-off or imitated--aside from wanting to read the source materials from which they derived inspiration perhaps.  I'm not interested in hand-me-down / second-hand imagination, nor in being restricted to the well-worn paths of consciousness set down by those who came before.  I prefer to see what has gone before as preliminaries, rehearsals, and a body of expectations and context that is there to be played with, not thoughtlessly aped or imitated, but twisted back upon itself, modified, re-interpreted, much like how Moorcock spun Howard's base assumptions regarding Conan head over heels to come up with Elric.  But Elric has been done.  It is time for something new, some Fresh Fever to sieze upon, some new approach that reveals a hitherto unforeseen twist, or offers up a new perspective that manages to respect what has gone before but not rip it off. 

To me placing Barker's Hlyss (for example) in an OD&D dungeon level isn't all that interesting nor particularly clever in and of itself. Out of context, the Ssu, Hlyss, even the mighty and noble Shen become just another silly monster for the players to terrorize, maim, rob or kill--acts that could potentially be unthinkable or that would carry serious consequences (and opportunities) within their native setting. But by taking these critters out of their setting, they loose a lot of what makes them so special in the first place. If you like the critters enough to use them, consider the setting from which they came, or at least develop your own version that has the serial numbers filed-off, especially if you're going to use stuff that is not open-source. Or better yet invent your own monsters. But that's a whole other issue.

The distinction between what is okay in a homebrew campaign and what a project that might ultimately go commercial needs to be paid attention to, and respected by creators.  Plagiarism is not just a crime, it is a testament to the laziness, ignorance, disrespect and lack of imagination on the part of the person who is ripping off dead (or still-living) authors and passing it off as their own work.  Personally, I prefer music -- and fiction, games, settings ---  that are original, the actual work of the person involved, something new and exciting and unique that could only come into being by the agency of that specific creator or artist.  To me, that is at the very heart and soul of what it means to play in an Old School mode, and it is the path towards a Renaissance and not just a lot of mindlessly repetitive repackaging and regurgitation.

Questioning Assumptions and Where We're Headed

I recently finished re-re-reading those three Little Brown Books from the Original D&D set with a pen and paper close at hand to take notes as I read along.  My stack of notes is now quick a bit thicker and has more of an overall word/page-count than the books being commented upon.  I suspect that this is not in and of itself unique by any means.  In fact I know of one other person who has done the very same thing and posted his efforts on his blog--Sham's Grog and Blog and the Cover to Cover series of posts which you can find here.  In the next few days, schedule permitting, I will attempt to go over Shams' Cover To Cover posts and compare his insights with my own, if in fact I can find something worth sharing and that isn't a load of Me-Too crap or pointless nit-picking.  The real point to my own analysis of the LBBs has not been to uncover the thinking or intent of the masters, but rather to go back to the very roots of this game and to challenge those underlying assumptions I have identified and to build my own system up from the very bedrock of where it all began.  I do not feel that we should be restricted or constrained to hold the original system to be a religious icon of perfection--it is far from perfect, nor should we slavishy become custodians of a museum-piece that preserves the genius of some dead guy who wrote about a game he once played back in the old days.  Screw that.  It is the very imperfections of the OD&D system that I think give it relevance and meaning and power--acting out against these flaws, rejecting and replacing those sections we detest the most, tweaking the core rules with our own 'House Rules' is intrinsically part of the very heart and soul of the game and an intrinsic part of the over-all D&D gaming Weltanschauung.

The glorious mess presented in those three LBBs remains a persistent, insistent center of pestilence and inspiration that continues to infect peoples' imaginations with all manner of notions for how to tinker with this rule, revise that section, rework how these things get handled, etc., etc.  It is almost as much a game in and of itself to re-edit the rules and to revamp them to suit your own unique vision and ingenium.  And that is a major reason why the OD&D booklets continue to exert such an influence upon peoples' psyches. 

It is the very vagueness and incompleteness, the broken and irritating parts of those rules that inspire and drive otherwise sane and sensible individuals to spend hours upon hours ranting and raving and researching and writing about ways to model the effect of antique gunpowder weapons on various forms of armor, how much of a load can a typical peasant/footman carry on their back, how much actual coins from Byzantine times (or other time periods) weigh or what the limitations on spell-casters ought to be based upon whether they are using a runic approach, classical grimoiric-style conjurations, upper-class Hermetic magick or something more shamanic in character.  Everything was wide open and available for personal interpretation.  Back in the earliest days of the game literally anything could happen.  Wellesian Martian war machines could pop up just as easily as Barsoomian White Apes or something completely new and just whipped-up by the DM only moments before.  Imagination was king and spontaneous improvisation was the rule, aided and abetted with tons of random tables, a DIY ethic that gleefully ripped-off appropriately and respectfully made use of Copyrighted and Trademarked properties, and so on.  So much was left to the imagination, unlike now.

My favorite supplement of all time is The Fantasy Gamer's Compendium from Gamescience (1983).  It combined the previous smaller booklets of Mystery, Monsters, Demons, Sorcery, Shamans and Treasures into one collected supplement.  The cover art is still cheesier than all get out, the type is tiny, there are hardly any interior illustrations but you could use the thing with any edition of any fantastic/medieval RPG out there with a minimum of fiddling around with it. 

And that brings me to the point of this particular enterprise.  Like many another kid ensnared in Gygax and Arneson's literary snare at an early age (it was the Seventies), I became enamoured with the notion of developing my own rules for my own settings and running my own games and I've been doing so, off and on, more or less for most of my life, in-between brief periods of lucidity, social activity, and so forth.  I've been Old School as far as D&D goes for quite some time, and after re-locating my set of the OD&D booklets,  re-reading them and realizing that no matter which books I bought or what setting I wrote, I was still using a variation on the rules I first learned way back when.  Tinkering with the rules, developing settings, cobbling together Sandbox campaigns, intertwining my fiction and home-brewed mythos into the game and distilling it back out again...those things are very much part and parcel of the Old School Renaissance and my goal with this blog is to map out my personal efforts in peeling back the accreted gunk and get down to the roots of the system, challenge the lingering assumptions and maybe sacrifice up a few sacred cows to the process of developing a stripped-down core system that might or might not go anyplace or ever get used...but the process will be fun and in the course of things I expect to develop a few spin-offs such as Settings, mini-settings, alternative magic systems, new spells, new monsters (we most definitely DO plan to create a stand-alone S&W/LL/OSRIC compatible Bestiary!), and more.

This blog will focus on the mechanics, the discussions surrounding things like the role of alignment and how to convert it into a numbered attribute and/or stuff like that.  The companion blog will flesh out a setting, be more fiction-oriented, and deliver on the new spells, new monsters, new items, etc.  It will also flesh-out the notes on how to incorporate attributes to chakras, ley-lines and planes, alternative demonologies (driven by alternative cosmologies), the spectrum of consciousness as it applies to spirits/elementals/constructs, and more. (Yes, 101 Homunculi, Hybrids and Horrors will be among the things offered)  Anyone who has participated in our old Italbar/Talibarr, Bazra, Xembor games--either from the old groups or from our various events at the local Cons--can tell you that what we are bringing to the table is definitely not more of the same old crap, not by a long shot.  The companion blog will be ready to go in another couple of days, as we're in the midst of some other projects that are demanding a lot of attention.

So, hang on, things are about to get crazy-fun and you haven't seen anything yet.