Something horrible has happened to me. Something strange and terrifying. A powerful, atavistic urge that I can feel throbbing through the marrow of my bones and pulsating in the root of my brain-stem has taken control of my psyche; it is a deep primal need that knows only one way to be quenched. Yes, I want to re-read the Dragonlance books.
I put it down to being a sucker for a good quest. Part of being a fantasy literature snob is that I am no longer supposed to have any time for anything so prosaic, but at the core of all fantasy literature snobs is an adolescent dreamer trying to get out - and occasionally I have to let mine out to revel in some good old fashioned questing. This time, I'm going to let him feast on the 'goodness' (ahem) that is Tanis and co's jaunt across Krynn.
One shouldn't underestimate the weird power that Dragonlance exerted over fantasy roleplaying games in general and D&D in particular, especially when I first started playing. Everybody in the gaming groups I was involved in had read both 'canon' trilogies, and were intimately familiar with their characters and plots. We created poor carbon copies of Tanis, Cameron, Raistlin and Tas for our games. We fantasised about everliving and everyouthful elven maidens with delicate features and plunging cleavages. We envisaged huge armies of dragonriders clashing in the sky. And we desperately wanted to emulate such things in our games.
More than that, we wanted to emulate the sweeping, world-changing plot arc. For us, killing things and taking their stuff just didn't cut it; nor did tomb-plundering and exploration. No - what we wanted was meaning. We wanted to trek across continents on a grand mission to resurrect forgotten gods. We wanted to smite evil and restore balance to the universe. We wanted to bring back magic to the world. Of course this desire sprung from deeper wells than just Dragonlance, but Weiss and Hickman have to take the lion's share of the blame.
The thing was, in the final analysis what we were never able to introduce into our games was a sensible plot. Although grand questing was what we wanted, our gaming pretty much always devolved into murder, looting and mayhem of the bleakest kind - purposeless death and killing, and the hoarding of vast wealth for no reason other than pure avarice. It was all deeply unsatisfactory when compared to the wonderful purity of vision which the Dragonlance Chronicles afforded; the series was like the Platonic ideal form of what a D&D adventuring party and a D&D campaign should be, impossible to attain but always just within reach - tempting us.
I've grown up now of course, and think I prefer the down and dirty misery of proper D&D. But the adolescent dreamer still has to get his time out in the exercise yard every now and again. There's no conclusion to this rather rambling entry other than that.
So that break was longer than it was supposed to be. As my friend recently put it, after a long haul flight you get really bad 'bone ache' (I'm not sure if that's a technical term) that makes your whole body feel as if it's been hit several times with a padded mallet. It's drained my will to blog.
But it got me thinking: jet lag is something that human beings simply weren't built to cope with. Sudden changes of time zone are beyond our ken in biological terms - at no point in our evolutionary history did we ever encounter them or anything like them. So now that we do come across them, they throw our bodies out of joint. (This is similar, of course, to the tendency that evolutionary psychologists often remark upon for human beings to behave in ways that make no sense in our current environment, but on reflection are well suited to small bands of hunter gatherer simian beasts.)
This has me thinking about the kind of tropes that we find in fantasy rpgs. Teleportation is the obvious line of comparison. But what about the other magical phenomena we come across: healing, resurrection, flight and telekinesis? Would these have psycho-physiological effects above and beyond their actual ones?
I won't be posting much this week, as I'm leaving to start my new international jet-setter lifestyle tomorrow. But it's really about time I gave a big plug to Jonathan at The Core Mechanic, who for some time now has been singing from the rooftops about his 'Best of 2008' RPG Blog Anthology. I think it's a great idea, which might go some way to spreading the word to the RPG community at large, and ideally haul in lots more readers for everybody. (God knows why anybody would want to read the dreadful tripe I write, but hey, apparently some do.)
So go ye forth and nominate your favourite entries from other people's blogs. I haven't made one yet because I'm still trying to decide - and I don't want to spam-bomb the entire process with about 50 nominations. The deadline is December the 1st, though, so you still have time.
A while ago on rpg.net, there was a thread about something.
Amazing, I know.
Anyway, whenever it was and whatever the thread was about, at some point somebody (who I think may have been Brian, of Trollsmyth fame), brought up the idea of a Quintessential Campaign for each edition of D&D. It would contain all that was best and all that was special about that particular iteration of the most popular rpg, and would span all the experience levels available.
Since the best thing about 2e was the settings, it was decided, the Quintessential 2e Campaign would involve an attempt to find and assemble each piece of the Rod of Seven Parts, with every segment found in a different campaign world. Thus the first might be found somewhere in Greyhawk, the second in Waterdeep, the third in Zakhara, the fourth in Oerth, the fifth in Krynn (shudder) and so on. Once the rod had been assembled there would be some kind of final mission, preferably involving spelljammer ships and the outer planes.
I thought that was a capital idea, even if I disagree that the best thing about 2e was the settings. (They were one of the great things about it, but not the best thing.) It quickly became one of those Campaigns That Must Be Run in my mind, but the sheer epic scale of the thing is pretty galling and eventually I put it to the back of my mind and forgot about it.
Well, it resurfaced yesterday while I was flipping through a pdf of an Al Qadim sourcebook. God, 2e had some great settings. As a general rule I'm the type of person who wants to create their own worlds than play in somebody else's sandbox, but who can resist the magic and mystery of an Al Qadim, a Dark Sun, or a Spelljammer? (Let's forget about Dragonlance for a moment.) The sheer force and potency of creativity in those settings is heady stuff, and the creators are never given enough credit.
I doubt I'll ever have time to run the Grand Rod of Seven Parts Campaign, much less the interested players. It's another one for the grimoire, I suppose. But that doesn't stop me thinking about it.
I'd start with Al Qadim, and Zakhari characters. The contrariness of that, rather than going for Greyhawk, or Forgotten Realms, or Dragonlance, has a certain appeal. The campaign would have to encompass Dark Sun, of course, preferably when the PCs were at a lower level - seeing how they dealt with the sheer meanness of the place would be an interesting adventure in and of itself. Then the action could swing through Oerth and Ravenloft, before progressing to Greyhawk and then, to the phlogiston, and the Abyss... Ah, the possibilities, unable to be realised. Life is so unfair sometimes.
An occasional series which stats-out and re-imagines the creatures found on Fighting Fantasy book covers.
Gehurt the Green
In a rickety old mansion deep in the woods outside Tannenberg lives Gehurt the Green, so named for his unusual sea green skin. Nobody knows where he gained this strange affliction, though the most common rumour is that he was cursed by the Gods for his foul congress with the many beasts of the forest. Most of the stories surrounding him regard alleged sexual deviancies, but they vary from village to village and it is impossible to know if they have any credence. That Gehurt has the role of a bogey man in the folklore of the Tannenberg villages - "Eat your oats, or Gehurt the Green will come and eat them for you!" - has served to shroud the reality in even greater mystery.
Gehurt is almost never seen. He is an expert at camouflage, and when he is out wandering in the forests he blends almost perfectly with his surroundings. He can move as silently as a halfling and as smoothly as an elf, and he uses these abilities to steal up on his victims from out of the shadows. His favourite targets are small children out wandering or playing in the woods, but he will attack anybody or anything to assuage his bloodthirst.
He is often accompanied by two allies - malignant and nameless spirits from the darkest and most ancient parts of the forest. These spirits have the ability to possess trees and other plant life, which they can then manipulate to attack their enemies.
Gehurt the Green
Gehurt has all the standard abilities and statistics of a Vampire. In addition, when in woodland areas he has a 95% chance of being undetectable by sight or sound. He loses this advantage once he makes an attack.
Nameless Spirits
The Nameless Spirits have the standard abilities and statistics of a Spectre. In addition, they have the ability to possess a tree. This process takes one round, and occurs automatically without the need for a dice roll. Once it has been achieved, the Nameless Spirit can animate its host, controlling it from within. This gives it the combat statistics of the least powerful form of Treant. The spirit can only be driven out of its host by a dispel magic spell, or by combat - reducing the host to 10% of its hit points. Either of these events causes the Nameless Spirit 50% damage, and it cannot possess another tree for 1 turn.
Random selections from noisms' Great Book of Game Ideas Which Will Never Take Off:
Catalogue 34c, book III, chapter 87, subsection IX, no. 679: A story-games.com style game based on the Harlan Ellison short story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream. Four to six players are trapped inside a planet sized Artifical Intelligence whose only motivation is its pitiless hatred of them. Over the course of the campaign they are tortured and brutalised in ever more inventive ways, the only stipulation being that AM (the AI) cannot allow them to die. There is no GM - the players each take turns 'being' AM, with the challenge being to trump the previous guy.
Catalogue 11a, book LXII, chapter 18, subsection XXV, no. 81: A Cyberpunk 2020 game set in Equatorial Guinea, where vast oil resources are the focus for clandestine warfare between megacorporations, the government, other African governments, power-crazed mercenary bosses turned warlords, and shining path style maoist rebels. Like the Wild West except on the equator. In Africa. In the Jungle. With railguns.
Catalogue 42j, book X, chapter 119, subsection I, no. 70: A hybrid of Spelljammer and Star Trek: Voyager using Risus. A spelljammer ship becomes stranded hundreds of years away from home by some vagary in the phlogiston, surrounded by weird alien races and desparate for coffee. No Janeway, though.
Catalogue 87d, book V, chapter 1, subsection IIX, no. 6: A MERP game set in the early Third Age of Middle Earth. A group of adventurers set off from Rivendell into the East, in search of the 'blue wizards'. They encounter a corrupt magocracy in the vast, sparsely populated barren wastelands and mountains, and must fight an unrecognised and thankless battle against it in tandem with greater events back West.
Catalogue 14p, book I, chapter 73, subsection XXVII, no. 33: A Risus game set in the Mesopotamia of the Book of Judges, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and ancient Sumer. The players are demigods with stats like "Donkey-Jaw-Bone-Wielding Genocidaire 4" or "Shagger of Thousands of Other Men's Wives 2", and they battle against mountain-sized giants and other legendary monsters.
Catalogue 48x, book LI, chapter 9, subsection IV, no. 189: A campaign set in a mystical version of Kofun-era Japan. The players are a group of rational and well educated Chinese diplomats who are trying to find the Queen of Yamato's court, in an archipelago full of mountains, forests, barbaric tribesmen, dragons, oni, tengu and river ghosts.
I never was a big fan of D&D 3.x. But there were some gems (well hidden) in and amongst its sourcebooks. Here's one, kitted out for use with BECMI:
Yak Folk
In the high plateaus of Bhauta live the Yak Folk, a race of nomadic slave-owners whose utter indifference to other forms of life is easily mistaken for malice. They move around their mountain realm in clan groups numbering in the several dozen, herding both their yaks (who they view as their children) and their humans (who are seen as equal in status to all non-yak animals). Twice a year - once in spring when the snows begin to thaw, and again in autumn before the heavy snowfalls - they perform elaborate rituals before setting off to raid the valleys and foothills for more slaves. Life as one of their chattels is brutally tough, but the Yak Folk are generally sensible enough not to allow their slaves to die unnecessarily.
Yak Folk adults stand considerably larger than a man (6-7' for a female, up to 8' for a male), and they are covered in shaggy black fur. They are extremely vain, and enjoy elaborate, decorous clothing, especially dyed in yellows, reds and purples, and they usually adorn their horns with expensive silk tassels and scarves. The materials for clothing are often stolen on slave raids, where the Yak Folk take great care to select only the very best and most expensive looking goods.
Yak Folk are equally powerful in magic and combat. In a fight they wield short, heavy scimitars and kukri knives, and can also gore with their horns (although they view this vulgarity as a last resort). They prefer illusory spells which confuse and befuddle their opposition, and often employ such tactics to subdue an enemy; opponents are usually worth more alive as slaves than they are dead.
Armour Class: 3
Hit Dice: 5
Move: 120' (40')
Attacks: 2 scimitar/1 horns or 2 kukri/1 horns
Damage: d8+4/d8+4/2d6 or d4+4/d4+4/2d6
No. App: 3d4 (raid), 6d6 (clan group)
Save As: Cleric 8
Morale: 10
Treasure Type: E
Intelligence: 14
Alignment: Chaotic
Special Abilities:
Each Yak Folk encountered also functions as a magic user (Wokan) of level 4, except for one of their number, who will be a level 6 Wokan.
Once per day, three Yak Folk can perform a ritual to call 2d4 Lesser Djinni to their aid. The ritual takes two rounds, during which the Yak Folk cannot be disturbed. Any summoned Djinni serve for the length of the combat before returning to the elemental plane of air.
Let me tell you about the first time I played a fully fledged role playing game. (I had messed around with Advanced Fighting Fantasy a bit before that.)It was the Red Box Basic D&D set, and I was about 11 or 12. My friend Adam's big brother had a copy of the game (secondhand all the same - I think he'd got hold of it at some bring-and-buy sale somewhere) and was keen on playing. As he didn't have many friends, we ended up being his guinea pigs, and agreed to roll up characters. We knew at least what that meant, because we'd already been playing Fighting Fantasy adventure game books for some years at that point. My character was a halfling. I don't believe he had a name. For some reason I think I wrote 'Halfling Thief' on the character sheet, which must mean that at that stage we were unaccepting of the advanced concept of race-as-class. (One thing I've noticed about Classic D&D is that the wisdom and coolness of race-as-class is something you learn many years after you start playing; when you were a kid, you thought it was stupid and that the AD&D system made much more sense. Youth is wasted on the young.) The halfling thief was rather like Tasselhoff from the Dragonlance series in my mind; I have to admit I loved the original Dragonlance trilogy and borrowed it from the local library several times to re-read. My halfling thief had a topknot and was utterly fearless. He also had a DEX of 16 - that's the only stat that I can recall. (Funnily enough I can even recall that roll - the dice, face up on my friend's brother's desk, showing 6, 6, and 4.)I believe Adam played a dwarf. There was also somebody else present, but I don't remember who they were or what character they had. Whoever it was died within the first ten minutes - more on that shortly. There were some NPCs too, to beef up the numbers: a wizard, another dwarf, and I think an elf. For some reason my friend's brother also decided to give us one magic item to help us on our way: a ring of invisibility. We set off into a cave network and were immediately set upon by a carrion crawler. There ensued a furious melee in which the nameless, faceless stranger saw his character die with horrible speed. My halfling thief got in a solid blow with his handaxe, dealing the full 6 points of damage. A few rounds later and the carrion crawler was dead. Our first victory! We descended a stone staircase and entered a large chamber.This large chamber was full of gold and other treasures. But before we could get our hands on it, we realised that at the far end there was a red dragon. Behind the monster was a tunnel - the obvious only way forward! But how to get to it? The red dragon immediately noticed us, and warned us not to move any closer, nor further away, lest we be burned to a crisp. So we spent at least an hour (in my memory anyway - in reality it could have been as little as five minutes) in parley with the thing. Gradually we realised that we were at stalemate. We couldn't convince the dragon to let us past into the dungeon proper, but nor could we convince it to let us go back to the surface. And yet it wouldn't kill us, either. Words can't express how frustrating the whole thing was. My friend's brother was a terrible DM. A few hours prior I hadn't even known what a DM was, and even I could tell. It was suddenly very clear. And yet what could we do? He was the only one with rulebooks and dice. So we gamely played along. Finally I hit on an idea. I convinced the NPC dwarf to put on the ring of invisibility. He could then try to sneak around behind the dragon. My plan was that the dragon would notice (all dragons can detect invisibility, duh, don't you know anything?), burn the dwarf to a crisp, and in the meantime the rest of us would leg it. It seemed a capital idea.The NPC dwarf gladly obliged. As planned, before he'd got half way towards the dragon, the monster had noticed him and was demanding for us to give him a reason why he shouldn't fry us to a crisp. I vividly remember offering the NPC dwarf up as an unwilling sacrifice, telling the dragon that he should go ahead and feast on the bugger because "Dwarf tastes of chicken", but my plea was ignored and sure enough we were fried to a crisp. My friend's brother made sure we rolled for saving throws, and then made a big show of calculating the damage from the dragon's breath - as if it mattered when my nameless halfing thief had 5 hit points. And so my first tryst with D&D ended.There's a moral in there somewhere, I'm sure, although I don't know what. Looking back now I think it's a miracle I'm still at all interested in this hobby, but I suppose there's a lot to be said for the fact that it allowed me to pretend to be a halfling thief confronting a dragon. I know of no other hobby which can claim to allow somebody to do such imaginitive things, and I suppose that's what's kept me at it.
Thanks to the Godzilla Gaming Podcast, my new obsession is tracking down fans of 2300 AD. Any players of the game out there amongst my readership?
My other new obsession, ever since I wrote this post, is the War Machine (the mass battle rules) from the Companion set for Classic D&D. I'll be putting up a hack for the system some time soon.
In other news, the excellent Primer for Old School Gaming has been discovered by the good people over at story-games.com. I was more than a little surprised to see that thread, and even more surprised to see it get the thumbs up from most.
