Art Contest Prize Announcement

A few months ago I launched an art competition, the requirement for which was to draw a colour picture of Laren Dar, a PC from my weekly game, described as:

An Etruscan fighting man wielding a magical Thracian axe and shield, wearing a wooden helmet shaped like a soldier-ant's head, a wooden breastplate decorated with soldier ant pictographs, a red silk surcoat covered in strange Etruscan lettering in gold, and a cloak made out of falcon feathers.  

It had been my intention to announce a winner, but I find it very hard to pick between these two, so I have decided they are joint winners. Both will get a copy of the first level of the 'megadungeon inside a giant tree' game I am running (as soon as I've got it typed up and vaguely usable!). 

The first is by Alexander Dzuricky (https://knightattheopera.blogspot.com/):

And the second is by Marc Caldwell (@scavengine on instagram):

I was really impressed with the quality of these pics. I was expecting stick-men at best. Thanks to everybody who took part, and congratulations to the winners!

As a bittersweet postscript, Laren Dar was killed by a jumping-spider elf just a few short weeks after the competition was launched. He now resides in a sarcophagus in the PCs' ever-growing cemetery at the back of their garden. 

Recommend Things to Review and Read

People have said that they enjoyed the recent spate of reviews that I did. So I thought I would ask the erudite and educated readers of my blog for some further recommendations of things to read and review. Preferably OSR or 'OSR adjacent'.

I also thought that since I am asking, I would ask for some other reading recommendations, as I am finally coming to the end of a huge backlog of books bought during lockdown. I am looking for:

• A good, detailed, readable, narrative account of the American Civil War (preferably a big fat tome or series of tomes)
• Political biographies
• Narrative histories in general
• Good non-Amber Zelazny novels
• The Best of Vance (but not what I have read: i.e. the Dying Earth/Cugel, Lyonesse, Planet of Adventure, Cadwal, Demon Princes)
• Forgotten high-quality 1970s-1990s SF in the vein of CJ Cherryh and and Lois McMaster Bujold

The Phenomenology of Missing in Melee Combat

In old school D&D there is a great deal of missing. A 1st level character of any class battling almost any enemy will land a hit comfortably less than half of the time. It is not unusual indeed for a character to go through 5 or 6 rounds of combat just rolling dice and missing. 

Despite what we know about 1 minute combat rounds, and despite the fact that we know that a failure 'to hit' doesn't necessarily mean an actual failure to hit but a failure to score a damaging hit (which is why I once half-jokingly suggested that the 'to hit' roll should be called the 'to attrit' roll instead), in my experience we still at the table tend to imagine in our minds' eyes that when a character 'misses' they have taken a swing at the enemy and physically missed. And that is how we tend to describe events, too: 'You swing at the orc and miss.'

I've sometimes toyed with a minor house rule to try to nudge me away from thinking in those terms: if a character 'misses' by more than 5 then you describe him as having hit but failed to penetrate the enemy's armour or shield. But that still links the dice roll too closely to concrete events in combat, when it is  something much more abstract than that; the result is really an aggregate of everything that the PC does in the course of a minute. That could be many 'hits', or none.

How do you describe 'missing' during combat?

The Gallery of 3 Mile Tree Art

Telling somebody about your campaign is like telling somebody about a dream. With the best will in the world, their interest will at best be polite. Is showing them art from your campaign any different? Perhaps not...but it's my blog, god damn it, and I'll do what I want with it.

Laren Dar's robe (now worn by Pupli Agnli, himself recently deceased). It was stolen from an Etruscan magic-user who was slain by a magic missile. Note magic missile-sized hole. The Etruscan writing is genuine.

Another iteration of the above.

A portrait of Laren Dar, sent by the excellent Grand Commodore. Note soldier-ant wooden helmet and falcon-feather cloak.

The original Etruscan garment, which will, it seems likely, be adopted as a mantle by successive maru of the worshipers of the Etruscan god Nortia. 

A headdress which permits the reading of any language. It has peacock feathers. Its origin is unknown.

A jade short-sword given by the methusulan faerie Thuac-Ten to the party on the occasion of his death, to help them in defeating the evil lord Djem-Thut.

Part of the map of level 1 of the inside of the tree trunk. This was about 5 sessions ago. They've revealed quite a bit more since.

Yoon-Suin 2nd Edition Art Update

Work on the 2nd edition of Yoon-Suin continues apace. Matt Adams is doing the (all new) art:

And Tom Fitzgerald is doing the maps:

The Story is the Campaign, Not the PCs - Or, is D&D a Soap Opera?

Today, a charming and interesting PC, who had taken on an unlikely leadership role in my weekly game and had literally just reached 2nd level after a heroic sequence of events, died meaninglessly in a random encounter with earwigmen. 

My game is rich in senseless PC death. By my count we have lost 8 or 9 PCs so far, in something over 20 sessions. Some of these had reached level 3 or 4. None of them really died in grand circumstances - and a high proportion were killed by wandering monsters. 

The deaths have been deflating. At times, old school D&D can seem nihilistic. Just as things seem to be going in one direction, a roll of the dice (I do almost all the dice rolling in the open) sends everything careering sideways - and sometimes seemingly backwards. 

I am usually relatively sanguine about this, because deflation is a valid emotion too, and I remain convinced that the realistic possibility of PC death raises the stakes and makes the game feel more real. But I am also human, and I was gutted when that earwigman rolled maximum damage and did away with poor Pupli. 

At times like this, it helps to remind oneself that, while it is an OSR mantra that the 'story' emerges through play and not by design, it is probably more accurate to say that story operates at a different level of abstraction to modern RPGs. Ever since the 'silver age' of RPGs, the idea has been that the story is about what happens to the individual PCs. In an old school game, by contrast, the story is really the campaign. Individual PCs come and go, but they are not the focus - the narrative is about the events that take place (in which the PCs, of course, play a role). Pupli the Etruscan 'Maru' of Nortia died today, but his player slipped into the role of one of the disciples that he had gathered, and events will take their course next week in the aftermath of his death.

This, in my view, ultimately instantiates a much richer understanding of story than that which is advocated in the mainstream. A PC dies and ceases to be of interest directly, but we become interested in his death and what it signifies, and this adds fresh layers. What will Pupli's followers do now that he has gone? Will his comrades try to avenge him? Suddenly there is more going on in the campaign than there was before, and this is what matters, because - to reiterate - the campaign is the story, and the story is the campaign.

Another way of putting this is that D&D is a bit like a soap opera, but with orcs. Individual characters arrive, and we might like them and grow to care about them, but they'll all go away again in the end (even  Ken Barlow). The story is not about any particular one of them, and it survives their deaths, comas, accidents, etc. It's Neighbours that we watch, not "The Adventures of Felicity Scully". You would be hard pressed to argue that Neighbours or Coronation Street are not in themselves stories - Neverending Stories perhaps - merely because they have no clearly delineated beginnings, middles or ends, or permanent characters. Indeed, the fact that no character is bigger than the capital-S Story is a large part of the appeal. 

[Reviews] Dark Streets & Darker Secrets, Hypertellurians, Pariah, Vagabonds of Dyfed

A cluster of skerries on the very outskirts of the OSRchipelago are glimpsed on the horizon. In low wind and bright sunshine, we guide our sloop, HMS Review, to the leeward and scan the shores with our telescopes for signs of life.

Dark Streets & Darker Secrets

Written in a month for NaGaDeMon (National Game Design Month), this is a stylish, nicely illustrated mash-up of Unknown Armies, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk 2020, and its ilk - you could probably also run World of Darkness style games with it, too. It is redolent of the mood and 'edgy' qualities which were de rigueur in the 1990s, though with self-consciously old school elements (random 'characteristics' of the Dark World, some of which are better than others; random adventure generators; disclaimers encouraging the DM to avoid the need to balance encounters and make things artificially fair). For something written in a month, it is an impressive feat. 

Hypertellurians

A 'science fantasy adventure role playing game', Hypertellurians gets the Buck Rogers/Flash Gordon/John Carter/Barbarella/Original Series Trek tone exactly right in its art and mood. I forgive it its forgisms ("be a fan of the players and their characters"; "fail forward", "say yes", "don't hide the adventure"); I almost can't forgive the extensive deployment of the term "raypunk". I can't imagine ever playing a game in the kind of universe depicted here, just because I have other cups of tea available, but if I did, this is where I would turn. It has a fresh and exciting feel, and I applaud it.

Pariah

This describes itself as 'old school roleplaying when the world was young' - that's right, it is a stone age RPG, though one that is very carefully thought-out and (it seems to me at least) well-informed. Not so much 1 Million Years BC, or Stig of the Dump - more Lavondyss, the middle story of Fifth Head of Cerberus, Helliconia Spring, those novels about neanderthals whose name I forget. The PCs are exiles from their tribe(s); it has spirit realms and rituals; extensive rules for psychobotanicals; a random wilderness generation method; images of waif-like girls covered in face-paint and tattoos. I very much like it and would run it: this is high praise, because as a general rule I don't run anything written by anybody else.

Vagabonds of Dyfed

This is one of (many) attempts to use PbtA rules to run games in a sword & sorcery setting, with OSR sensibilities. That I think this may be a quixotic effort (which is why I have never dabbled in Dungeon World) doesn't stop me admiring those who try. This one is perhaps most notable for being very "inside baseball" and folded-in; the first three or four pages, before we even get to rules or introductions, is an extensive apologia/justification for old school play which I can imagine being useful for somebody steeped in story games but totally baffling for somebody new to RPGs. Have we more or less abandoned the notion that anybody coming to our products nowadays will be a neophyte? This seems realistic, but I can't help but feel it presents us as being akin to one of those beleaguered religious communities who no longer evangelise but gradually grow old together and die. 

Behind Gently Smiling Jaws: Inspirational Art

What is a lazy bank holiday evening for, if not for putting up blog posts about obscure projects long-ago teased about and still only glimpsed on distant horizons when seen at all?

After five years of gestation, the form which Behind Gently Smiling Jaws will take is now firm in my mind. Here are some pictures to tease further:

Of Krynn and Urth: Shared vs Singular Settings

Comments on recent entries suggest that there is a need to clear something up about fantasy settings.

Look at the following spectrum:

Urth <------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------>Krynn

Any fantasy setting can be placed somewhere on that spectrum. Across one dimension it serves, of course, as a proxy for quality. Urth is a powerfully rich, unique and dense setting and the books Gene Wolfe set there are wonderful. Krynn is derivative and the Dragonlance books are not very good. 

But that is not the dimension that interests me. What I'd like to emphasise instead is that Urth is a very singular setting - unique, indeed, to the brain of Gene Wolfe and probably unreplicable (except in weak, uninteresting pastiche) by anybody else. Krynn, on the other hand, is a shared one. Yes, I suppose Maragaret Weis and Tracy Hickman came up with it. But it is founded on conventions that anybody who has read a fantasy book will recognise and which are, to a large extent, common property to fantasy fans. (And this is indeed why so many people have contributed to the Dragonlance series' over the decades without really changing the books' mood or character appreciably; Volume 51 of Kender, Gully Dwarves and Trolls is basically the same thing as Dragons of Autumn Twilight - different varieties of cheddar cheese.)

When it comes to novels, I want everything clustered to the left hand side of that spectrum. This is probably also true of those RPG settings which I know I will never play.

But when it comes to actual gaming, it is important that settings lean towards the right. Not all the way, by any means. But at least part of the way there. This is because RPGs and novels are fundamentally different things. Reading a novel is all about becoming involved in the singularity of the author's vision - or, at best, co-creating that vision in one's own mind and imagination. There, distinctiveness is what really matters, and singular settings are therefore best.

Playing an RPG, though, is about running a successful game. It's not chess, football or boxing, but ultimately it is still about communal fun. Sitting down at the table, the players are not simply engaging in exploring the DM's beautiful and unique creative product, but actively contributing. This requires them to have a certain footing on the same ground - to be deploying certain assets of shared property. The setting they are inhabiting does not have to be as derivative and bland as Krynn, but it has to take at least certain assumptions for granted in order for there to be long-term success. 

Tekumel is perhaps the classic example of an edge case. It is a unique setting, for sure, but it perhaps has enough of the shared furniture of D&D - the quest for gold and XP, the basic system, the core conceit of exploration/dungeoneering/questing - to make it gameable. With Yoon-Suin I suppose I was aiming for something slightly to the right of that. 

Another reason for preferring game settings to be on the shared end of the spectrum (rather than the singular) is simply that what happens in a game tends to do extreme violence - literal and figurative - to the setting, and the DM's tolerance for that happening if his game is set in an environment like Gene Wolfe's Urth is probably much lower than if it is set in a place like Krynn. In this respect, a setting like Krynn, the Forgotten Realms, and so on is a bit like an ABBA song - even if Piers Brosnan is singing a cover version in a crappy movie, it still kind of works on its own terms because those melodies are almost part of our cultural heritage at this point. But nobody wants to hear him singing Captain Beefheart. 

[Review] Troika!

Most RPG settings, adventures, modules and indeed systems are destined to go unplayed. This, we all of us accept. But despite the unrealised ambition of these forlorn also-rans, they can nonetheless entertain and inspire enough to make them worth the purchase. Troika! sits firmly within this camp.

I have my misgivings. Is Troika! beautifully written? Yes. Does it exude creative brilliance from every pore? Certainly. Is it the work of an auteur of considerable imaginative power? Without question. Does it stand out as utterly singular in a landscape of bland and samey grimdark S&S OSR bleakness? Undoubtedly. 

But can I see myself playing it? I cannot - except perhaps as a palate-cleansing one-shot. Its strangeness and weird beauty is admirable. But I do not find it really lovable. It strays too far into the realm of whimsy, fancy, eccentricity - the point at which imaginative endeavours become untethered from consequence and begin to feel as though they are just diverting amusements. The concept of playing as an Ardent Giant of Corda, a Befouler of Ponds, a Gremlin Catcher or a Member of Miss Kinsey's Dining Club makes me smile, and the marriage of art and text in all cases is sublime. But can I envisage playing a long-running, open-ended campaign as one of these characters? Would getting your hands on a 'pocket barometer' or 'tea set' feel as good as plundering thousands of gold coins from a dungeon after many tough fights and dangerous endeavours? The idea of a hotel called The Blancmange & Thistle, with a silent mandrill concierge and an old lady who feeds it red bonbons, is a beautiful vignette. But would events taking place within that environment feel as though they really mattered - rather than simply being riffs on a charming idea? 

Troika! bills itself as providing a science fantasy universe in the spirit of The Dying Earth, Viriconium and The Book of the New Sun. But I wonder if that may be the source of my problem with it. I love all of those books - but I do not think that any of them is in particular a good inspiration for an RPG campaign. They are too distinctive, too dense with allegory and metaphor, too much tied to the creative intelligence of their authors. Let loose at a gaming table with a group of five nerds, some beer and pretzels, and the intensity, beauty and intrigue of such a setting would quickly evaporate. There needs to be something more solid, prosaic and quotidian to hang regular play on - something with a feeling of familiarity in which the fantasy can be rooted. What reading Troika! in fact reminds me most of is the experience of reading the Jerry Cornelius series as a twentysomething and thinking: yes, this is all very well, but do I feel the viscerality that I feel when reading Tolkien, Gemmell, Goodkind, Martin? Does this seem like it is a book about real people, or just fancy concepts?

And yet there is a lot about Troika! to love. The system - a well thought-through advancement of the Advanced Fighting Fantasy rules - is just the right amount of lite. The art is perfectly judged: eerie, discomforting, surreal. There is more substance to it than what I would think of as its closest competitor and also closest cousin, Into the Odd (another work which I appreciate without really wanting to ever run); at times it almost hints at achieving that union of dream and reality at which surreal art is always aimed. The implied setting is compelling. And the writing - so preciously rare a quality - is, heavens, actually good. 

I will never play Troika! But I am glad that it exists. 

4 out of 5 becs des corbins

[Troika!, published by Melsonian Arts Council and written by Daniel Sell, cost me US$18 in PDF - about £12.50 in real money - and has 116 pages.]