Dungeon!s and Dragons

I doubt it’s news to anyone reading this blog that Wizards of the Coast is reprinting the classic TSR board game Dungeon!

For those not familiar with the game, which first came out at the dawn of D&D in ’75, it’s a straightforward old American-style boardgame just dripping with old-school flavor. Players send colorful pawns representing various Chainmail-type characters (an elf, wizard, hero and superhero — note how we’ve got PCs of different experience levels adventuring together!) into the depths of a dungeon full of traps and secret doors. There they draw cards representing monsters encountered, roll dice to defeat them and draw treasure cards. Magic item cards help your PC win fights or explore more efficiently, but it’s monetary treasure which helps you win — you need treasures of a high enough GP value, and you need to escape with them alive!

It’s amazing how well the gameplay lines up with the OSR playstyle. Killing monsters is fun, but taking their wealth is the only thing that really matters. And while the PCs don’t form a party — you’re in competition with the other players — dealing with other PCs is reminiscent of dealing with rival adventuring parties or active dungeon factions in old-school Caves of Chaos-type play, where you watch NPCs fight each other and hope to swoop in on the weakened victor to make an easy score.

What really appeals to me about the WotC re-release is the price. Whereas other companies’ recent re-releases of classic 70s and 80s games, like Steve Jackson’s OGRE and Games Workshop’s Talisman, had hefty three-digit price tags, the new Dungeon! reprint is listed as a cool $19.99. This looks like a serious effort to market the game for a new generation of kids, rather than as a cash-grab from nostalgic fortysomethings. I hope this works; Dungeon! can’t compete with today’s best Euro-style boardgames for quality of play, but it’s head and shoulders above its “classic” American competitors like Monopoly or Sorry! or what-have-you. It’d be nice to buy a few copies for my various nephews… maybe it’d encourage them to play D&D with their uncles when they’re older.

I’m a Third Level Gen Con Industry Insider Guest of Honor

I am proud to make two announcements concerning yesterday’s events:

• My Glantri character, Gael Ur-Boss, reached third level – the greatest such achievement of any PC I’ve played in Quendalon’s campaign!
• I was announced as one of the Industry Insider Guests of Honor for Gen Con ’12.

Particular reasons I care about these announcements:

• Playing Glantri is fun. Having a character who is more capable will make it more fun (although it is to be noted that third level is nowhere near making Gael a force to be reckoned with in any Glantrian party these days).
• Doing panels and workshops is fun. Having a larger audience resulting from the extra publicity from these being on the Industry Insider track will make it more fun (although it is likely that the bulk of this audience will be attracted by those GoHs more illustrious than myself: Wolgang Baur, Stan!, Dennis Detwiller, James Ernest, Matt Forbeck, Jess Hartley, Kenneth Hite, Steve Kenson, T.S. Luikart, Michelle Lyons, Ryan Macklin, Dominic McDowall-Thomas, Jason Morningstar, Susan Morris , Mark Rein-Hagen, Elizabeth Shoemaker-Sampat, Gareth-Michael Skarka, Christina Stiles, George Strayton, Richard Thomas, Rodney Thompson, and James Wyatt).

It’s a truism that no one wants to hear about your character. I’m deliberately drawing a parallel by talking about my beloved Gael (did I tell you that s/he got a +1 to Constitution just from becoming a six-year-old orc instead of a five-year-old one, even before s/he leveled up?) in the same breath as my Gen Con appearances. These are games you can play within the world of roleplaying. If you invest enough time and effort, you’ll get a recognition which is meaningful to the other players in your group.  But even should you make it to name level, it’s still a game that’s pretty uninteresting to anyone not intimately involved.

That said, here are some reasons you might care about these announcements nonetheless:

• You will be adventuring in Glantri and need a comrade with not zero, not one, but two whole first-level cleric spells!
• You will be at Gen Con this summer and might be interested in stuff I’ll talk about at the panels and workshops I’ll be on.

Panels etc. are yet to be determined, but here are the ones I said I “would feel comfortable hosting” in the application to be an Insider GoH:

Fund Your Game Project with Kickstarter (panel)             

From publishing your RPG or boardgame to opening a gaming café, learn how crowdfunding can help you achieve your dream from those who have succeeded (and failed) with Kickstarter.

Raising Money for Charity with Gaming Events (workshop)

Learn how you can use your gaming skills to help a good cause by studying previous examples, getting practical advice, and participating in a celebrity roleplaying event to raise money for a gaming-related charity.

Record and Share Your Roleplaying Sessions (workshop)

Podcasts and actual play videos are increasingly popular as ways to share the excitement of your games and help bring new players into the hobby. Learn how to get started!

Teaching Games (panel)

Educators, parents, and kids share their experiences with programs that introduce kids to gaming, from school curricula to homeschooling to summer camps, and pass on advice and inspiration.

Getting Paid to GM (panel)

A survey of professional opportunities for roleplaying gamemasters and advice on how to get started.

Lunch hour being over, I should get back to the business of Getting Paid to Have a Day Job, but will perhaps come back to this topic (or ones raised in comments) in future.

Everything I Need To Know About Business I Learned from D&D

I am a firm believer that the heist caper is a basic model for old-school RPG play, and ACKS encourages playing out other more legitimate kinds of enterprise (running a mercantile trading outfit, building a fortified village) as well as the established criminality of managing a thieves’ guild.

None of my real-life business dealings would make for interesting roleplaying even by the standards of Papers and Paychecks*, but they have given me the experience of trying to work with both gamers and non-gamers to set up a collaboration and get something done.

Role-playing gamers tend to have two fundamental skills. I take it for granted that we apply these skills to all areas of our life, so it is bizarre and alienating when I am in a meeting with non-gamers who don’t follow suit:

• We are all part of the same party, working for a common goal. D&D teaches us not to let personal agendas or enmities get in the way of looting the treasure and splitting it up fairly.
• When the dice have been rolled, you have to accept what they say. RPGs teach us to accept facts that are not what we would have wished**, and look for ways around them instead of hoping the facts will change if we complain or barging along despite all evidence to the contrary.

Folks who’ve been exposed to my conversation for any length of time are likely to have heard me say this before (unless they took sensible precautions like listening to their iPods throughout), but Tim Hutchings seemed to think this was deep and essential at breakfast during the ACA/PCA conference so I’ve posted it here. Note that it may be interesting to think about gamers who share these virtues (like you, dear reader) but not to speculate on the folks who don’t that I’m referencing here: trust me, that’s deadly dry Papers & Paychecks territory of the kind you’d venture into only in order to get paid.

*P.S. This is a worthy Papers & Paychecks scenario:

**RPGs which violate the “no backsies” design principle  advocated by Invincible Overlord are thus demonstrably morally pernicious.

Manifesto of the Hickman Revolution

A common theme in the old-school renaissance is that there was a “Hickman revolution” that ruined everything in the development of D&D. There is no doubt that the TSR modules Tracy and Laura Hickman helped create sold like crazy because they met a demand that hadn’t previously been satisfied, that this commercial success helped set the publishing priorities for the expansion of the RPG industry, and that we are still experiencing the consequences.

However,  neither the way that their work was marketed nor received can really speak to the Hickmans’ original creative intent. Thanks to the generosity of Scribe from the Tome of Treasures who let me take some pictures of the works in his collection, and Tim Hutchings who took me along to be awestruck by said collection, I was able to get some insights into the values that Tracy and Laura created Daystar West Media to pursue. From the introduction to their version of Pharoah, which was intended to be the first in a series of NIGHTVENTURE products:

The first two of the four requirements that NIGHTVENTURE endeavored to meet – a player objective more worthwhile than simply pillaging and killing; an intriguing story that is intricately woven into the play itself – certainly can be seen as containing the seeds of what we now know as the “Hickman Revolution”.

The fourth – an attainable and honorable end within one or two sessions playing time – speaks to one of the creative tensions that emerged with the Dragonlance series. Many gamers wanted and still want to strive toward an end that will provide a satisfying dramatic resolution to the events being played out. At the same time, as genre fans, we always want more of the same. Our desire to have the adventure continue on and ever onwards led as surely to the trend of sequelitis which Dragonlance came to exemplify as did TSR’s commercial motivations in feeding that desire. It is interesting to consider whether an independent Daystar West Media would have maintained the goal of having an end never more than a few sessions away, and whether a Hickman revolution and OSR-style counter-revolution would still have occurred if so.

The goal I found most striking when examining the original Pharoah , however, is the third – dungeons with some sort of architectural sense. Scribe told me that Tracy had been trained as an architect, and each section of the module begins with a beautiful cross-section illustrating which area of the pyramid is being described:

Some of this architectural sense is visible in later Hickman modules like Ravenloft, but the layout, cartography, and visual presentation in Daystar West’s version of Pharoah is, to my mind, far superior to that in its later TSR release. I think that this idea of complex, fantastic architecture is the virtue that the old-school renaissance is most ready to celebrate – it’s certainly one of the things that I admire so much in Paul Jaquays’ work.

Might there have been a different kind of Hickman revolution if more people had been exposed to this virtue of architectural sense, both by having it stated directly and elegantly displayed?

mighty marvel reward systems

Last week we played some Marvel Super Heroes—the old FASERIP game, not the new one which I hope to talk about soon—and I decided to muck with the reward system a little bit.

In Marvel Super Heroes, your character doesn’t “level up” and seldom improves over time.  Instead, heroic behavior earns you Karma points, which you can then spend to alter dice rolls.  This represents peak performance, good luck, or the moral arc of the comic book universe, and helps to explain why a comparatively ordinary guy like Captain America can take on the Hulk on equal terms: Captain America may be weaker, but a lifetime of heroism lets him save the day.

Like hit points in D&D, Karma measures whether you’re a protagonist of the campaign.  If you’ve got a ton of Karma saved up, it’s because you’ve attended lots of sessions, you’ve overcome many villains, solved many crimes, or found time to manage the obligations of your secret identity.  And with great Karma comes great performance.

Yet Karma isn’t easy to acquire, especially in the advanced rules.  Most Karma awards are in the neighborhood of 10-30 points, and it’s pretty easy for the GM to place you in a Hobson’s choice: sure you arrested the cat burglar (+5) but you had to blow off Grandma’s birthday party without a good excuse (-20) for a net loss of 15 Karma points.*   And of course, if your super “hero” chooses to go on a one-man crime wave, that’s going to carry a heavy Karma cost as well.

There’s also the issue that Marvel Super Heroes doesn’t have strong ways to distinguish characters’ personalities.  There’s a +10 Karma award for good role-playing, but in my view this doesn’t always capture the luchador soap opera that is Marvel Comics.

Supers of Yesterday

At the top of my list of favorite fantasy games I really should get around to playing sits The Shadow of Yesterday, by Clinton R. Nixon.  Shadow of Yesterday uses a customizable XP system called Keys.  Each character chooses a few of these Keys, which read like this:

Key of Unrequited Love
Your character has a love for someone who does not return this love.  Gain 1 XP whenever your character has to make a decision that is influenced by them. Gain 2 XP every time your character attempts to win their affection.  Gain 5 XP every time your character puts herself in harm’s way or makes a sacrifice for them.  Buyoff: Abandon your pursuit of this person or win their love.

You get a few XP for something pretty minor and easy to arrange; you get additional XP for something that carries serious repercussions or is otherwise difficult to deal with.  The “buyoff” means that any time you betray the key, you have the option to permanently cash it in for 10 XP, which in Shadow of Yesterday is like leveling up twice, but you can never take this particular key again.  In other words, if you choose to lead your character toward a moment of cataclysmic personal growth, you can reap massive rewards.  (And no, I don’t know what’s up with the key metaphor, which seems hopelessly mixed.)  You can use some of those XP to buy a new key if you’re so inclined.

Method of emphasizing your character’s role as a protagonist in the story?  Method to reliably garner more Karma?  Method to off-set Karma losses for certain kinds of character-appropriate bad behavior?  Method to emphasize silly soap opera elements of super hero comics?  Yes to all four.  As an added bonus, if you’ve got a player who’s like, “Uh, who is ‘Wonder Man’?  What’s this guy like?” you can then point to the Key of Being a Douche.

Some Stuff From Our Game

I haven’t figured out how much it costs to purchase a new Key—I’m figuring 100 Karma, and you can only have three at a time, but that’s just provisional for now, since we’re in the process of testing it out.

Can you match these Keys to the respected ranks of the Avengers?

Key of the Bad Relationship.  Gain 10 Karma when you’re in a scene with this person.  Gain 20 Karma when you try to win this person’s respect or make him or her jealous.  Gain 50 Karma when you suffer or make a sacrifice because of this person.  Cash-Out: 100 Karma if you walk out or otherwise end the relationship.

Key of the Bronco.  Gain 10 Karma for mouthin’ off to super-guys.  Gain 20 Karma when you show ‘em up by deeds.  Gain 50 Karma by saving the day through lone-wolf grandstanding.  Buy-Off: Gain 100 Karma by submitting to a wise leader.

Key of the Crying Android.  Gain 10 Karma for discovering a new question (supposedly philosophical, but almost always continuity-obsessive) while brooding over the mystery of your origins.  Gain 30 Karma for risking harm in search of an answer.  Cash-Out: Gain 100 Karma for answering the question.

Key of Hedonism.  Gain 10 Karma every time you indulge prodigiously in wine, women, and song.  Gain 30 Karma every time this upsets uptight people or overcomes your responsibilities.  Cash-Out: Gain 100 Karma points when you swear, this time you’re going to settle down and grow up.

Key of Homo superior.  Gain 10 Karma points when you defeat a human.  Gain 30 Karma when you defeat Sentinel robots, government super-agents, or assimilationist mutants.  Buy-Off: Gain 100 Karma by taking orders from a human.

Key of the Loser.  Gain 10 Karma points every time you mope over your shortcomings.  Gain 20 Karma every time you are defeated or give up.  Gain 50 Karma if that failing endangers innocent third-parties.  Buy-Off: Gain 100 Karma by thwarting a national or global conspiracy.

Great minds

Turns out that the new Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game has an XP system called milestones that resembles keys greatly.  Here’s an example of a milestone.

MUTANTS SANS FRONTIÈRES
Created by Warren Worthington III, this international relief agency offers mutants support they can’t get anywhere else. Will it inspire Beast?
1 XP when you use your Medical Expert to help a mutant recover stress.
3 XP when you choose not to engage in a confrontation in order to rescue or support noncombatant mutants.
10 XP when you either allow a mutant to die or give up your status or reputation to save them.

Note that the massive XP rewards combines the fulfillment of the key (sacrificing your professionalism to save a mutant) with as the option to betray it (letting a mutant die), which in Shadow of Yesterday would be broken out separately, with more points given if you choose to renounce your values.

My first impression of the Marvel Heroic Roleplaying game is cautious enthusiasm: it looks like a complex fighting game that handles “power stunts” a lot better than my old beloved Marvel Super Heroes did, but I’m a little suspicious that fights will begin to look the same after a while, and the scenario creation rules look . . . problematic.  But I look forward to getting experience with this thing pretty quickly.  Either way, I’m pleased that we hit on these reward systems independently: it’s a sign I’m on to something.

=====

* = Contrast: if you had allowed the thief to go free (-5) in order to make it to Grandma’s party (+10), you’d have a get gain of 5 Karma points.  Going to Grandma’s house is therefore more important than catching mere thieves, but less important than catching murderers–it’s about as important as catching an arsonist or mad bomber.  Obviously, after an exhausting day on the U.S. Court of Appeals, Judge Richard Posner puts on a strange costume and becomes . . .  Milton-Fried-Man, who is Pareto superior to ordinary mortals!

The God of Abortion

Last night I arrived late to the evening session of the Jean Wells memorial and everyone was worn out from having run games for kids all day. So instead of playing Silver Princess as planned, I ran the draft of the first level of Dwimmermount I was carrying around to measure its map dimensions against the Brooklyn Strategist’s Sultan table as part of planning the backer rewards for the mega-dungeon’s Kickstarter.

I’d visited Dwimmermount before as a player in James’ PbP but was otherwise approaching the text pretty much cold, leaving the world beyond the basic elements I knew (a dungeon entrance, a nearby fortress town) to be filled in through play in the way I first learned how to do by reading Grognardia and using it as a guide to engage with OD&D.

The players, who I’ll call Adam and Ben, rolled up their guys using 3d6 in order, with much groaning at the resultant suckitude. They chose to start at third level, I said they could then roll up two first level henchmen. Adam and Ben hit on the happy inspiration of making the henchmen all the same class as their higher-level PC, so that their roleplaying of this trio was united by each character being a different perspective on the same archetype. This was important because they chose two very provocative classes – cleric raising the issue “what is the nature of religion?”, and elf posing the question “no one has ever seen a member of your species, what can we learn from these examples?”

Because we were short for time, and because playing with ACKS mechanics like the breakdown of living expenses and expected income by level has taught me a good sense for purchasing power, I treated the roll of 3d6 for starting gold as a wealth score. And based on half-understood stuff I heard Chip Delany say about how sword and sorcery is based on the moment when currency overthrows feudalism, I decided that this starting wealth came in 10 gp, 1 lb coins that awed all who saw them.

I told the players “you’re in the Fortress of Muntsburg, there really isn’t a market but you can try to use this gold to get the soldiers here to part with any equipment you want.” We did a one move per PC stocking procedure at a level of granularity where a strong success on hiring thieves meant that we later assumed they had equipped every member of the expedition with all kinds of mountaineering equipment so of course you had ropes and grapples and spikes and hammers.

Adam asked “can I get a staff for my cleric?” I was like well, you’re a third level character, you can get any kind of mundane equipment. They do have two special kinds of staff, one that has a torch holder-mace fixture where you can hit people and still carry a light, the other being a slot where you can put in vials of holy water or oil to shatter on contact.

Adam’s priest wanted both of these, but his roll against Wealth (3d6, how much did you make it under?) was in the Apocalypse World hard-bargain range so I said “They have some of those but the guy who owned them last died in a way that was unhallowed, they won’t bury him in the graveyard and his staffs might be haunted.” Adam didn’t want them that bad.

Next Adam’s acolyte wanted holy water, so I had that roll against Wisdom because the local church cared more about piety. He failed badly, so I said “You can make one vial using your own supplies” – he still had the gold his Wealth score represented, I wasn’t going to say no altogether – “but you can’t use the temple’s fount due to a doctrinal disagreement. What issue caused the falling out between you and the church in Muntberg?”

“We’re pro-abortion,” Adam said tentatively. Building steam: “We believe in the God of Abortion.”

Wow, what am I going to do with that? I figure the church in the fortress is Lawful but we moved fast through char-gen so I haven’t asked about the PC’s alignment and where does this issue fall anyway? Dropping into gruff roleplaying voice to do a local church elder: “We believe that rape is the lawful right of conquest. It is proper for us to sire children on those we defeat, so that the seed of the righteous will spread and our forces will grow. It is a sin for subjugated women to take the lives of our progeny.”

We all reflect on this for a second and then I move on to the rest of the equipping; we’re all eager to get to the dungeon, no one seems to want to get distracted by tangling with these rape apologist priests in town. Later we hear some other epithets for the deity the PC clerics worship – he’s also the God of Peace, and of Healing the Hacked-Up Upon – but when the hireling thieves want to convert after seeing Adam’s clerics perform miracles of healing, it’s the God of Abortion they are invited to serve. And when Ben’s elves are wanting their wounds to be noticed and healed, they mention that their pantheon also includes a God of Reproductive Rights.

Thoughts here:

1. As spontaneous material created in play, this was totally awesome. Adam said later “You put me on the spot, I didn’t know anything about my god! So I just decided that they believed in something I really do believe in.” It worked amazingly well that he’d chosen an issue orthagonal to law/neutrality/chaos, but equally capable of dividing people into camps of pro-choice/neutral/pro-life, and I can’t wait to play to find out more about this.
2. I believe this material could only work in inverse proportion to the degree it appears in the text. If Dwimmermount had anything more than the lightest dusting of stuff we might use as improvisational seeds for exploring the God of Abortion – the whole pulp D&D heritage of half-orcs and maidens bound to altars and references to Macbeth – I will stub my toe against the question “what does James Maliszewski think about abortion?” and that moment is going to be a trainwreck for however long it lasts.

Writing stuff into the adventure is the wrong tool to use to explore controversial issues in roleplaying games, because it creates an intrusion of authorial presence when the author isn’t there to talk to.

I’ve been friends with Adam and Ben for years, we’re all New Yorkers, the shared cultural currents mean that we can hook a live wriggling fish like abortion and be pretty sure we won’t be pulled off course. Exploring this issue by watching it come up in play teaches me things about the players and the world we’re creating together. The process of play is creating strands that lead from the negotiated understanding among the players, which has lots of background to draw on, to the story we’re discovering through our characters. Controversies that pull on these threads just create useful tension for this process, which is interpersonal first and intertextual second.

Even if I’d been running this session for strangers, as long as we were at the table together I would have asked “what’s the doctrinal disagreement?” and I would have been comfortable negotiating “abortion” as the answer. I’m a reasonable adult, decades of roleplaying and years of therapy have taught me plenty about how to make sure the good time I’m looking to have in a game isn’t derailed. I’m confident that whatever comes up in play can be dealt with on a social level so that we can keep creating the lens that lets us experience the other world of the game together.

But I have absolutely no confidence that I could talk about abortion with someone who isn’t physically present. I avoid any kind of forum where controversial issues get talked about, and I curate my Facebook and G+ streams to focus on interests where I know I have common ground. I don’t know what James believes about abortion, and if he was using Grognardia to talk about that I’d filter my reading of his posts to try to keep it that way.

I believe the bandwith of Internet communication is just too narrow to make a conversation about abortion worthwhile. The exchanges that get past my filter look to me like hostility or choir-preaching at worst, talking-past at best. Given that the communication between author and audience is even more limited than the Internet, I don’t expect that putting material about abortion into the written text of an adventure would yield any better results.

Within the intellectual and aesthetic domains where Grognardia proves good Internet communication can take place, I am interested in learning James’ opinion whether or not it agrees with my own. I do think he and I agree that analyzing an author’s personal views is not a fruitful approach to finding the gold in a written text. Putting any kind of material into the text of an adventure that makes me think about the author’s stance on an issue thus seems to me to make it less artistically successful, not more.

originally posted at story-games, where it echoes a related conversation about orc babies in Keep on the Borderlands 

time of the dragon

Warning: wordy and nostalgic, but there’s a TPK at the end.

Among the Old-Timey D&D Nostalgia & Rehabilitation Crew, people will often talk fondly about the weird, evocative settings of the 2e era–Dark Sun, Planescape, Al Qadim, Spelljammer (okay, maybe not always fondly for Spelljammer)–but hardly anyone ever mentions Time of the Dragon.  Sometimes I feel like I’m the only person who remembers it existed.

what the heck are you talking about?

Time of the Dragon was an extremely non-Tolkien campaign setting box set, written by Zeb Cook and published in 1990.

Time of the Dragon was ostensibly set in the Dragonlance world, but on an entirely separate continent.  Though there were a few scattered references to the regular Dragonlance setting, the connections aren’t very deep.  The Acaeum suggests this started out as a new campaign world very late in the 1e era, and got retooled for 2e.  It’s possible that someone said, “Hey, remember Zeb’s big project?  We’ve sunk a lot of cost into producing that thing, and then retooling it for 2e.  Dragonlance is pretty hot right now, let’s just slap a logo on this thing, sprinkle some references for the fans, and ship it.”  Time of the Dragon got comparatively little support over the next year or two and then sank out of sight, which makes me wonder if its budget got cut midway through the design cycle.  The fact that the boxed set’s cover was swiped from an issue of Dragon magazine hints that there may have been problems.

what’s in it?

Time of the Dragon presents the continent of Taladas, via 96 pages of fluff for a dozen or so cultures, 32 pages of new rules, a couple of huge maps, and 24 cardstock illustrations.

The backstory is pretty standard: Golden Age + Enormous Space Rock = Catastrophe, and now there are a zillion little groups running around in the aftershocks.  Lately four gods have taken an interest in mortal affairs and have recently restored priestly spells to their most devoted followers, throwing some societies into confusion.

Here is what you won’t find in Time of the Dragon:

• Comic Relief Kender
• Comic Relief Gully Dwarves
• Comic Relief Tinker Gnomes
• Knights of Solamnia
• Towers of High Sorcery
• Draconians (well, one prototype version)
• Dragonlances
• Complicated, millennia-long histories
• Railroads or meta-plot
• Tie-in novels (well, not until like 15 years after the line sank)

By those standards, it’s hardly Dragonlance at all.

map made by fans

The rule book contains rules for Lizard Man, Ogre, Goblin, and Minotaurs as 2e player races as well as a new school of magic (but no unique spells for it), but the bulk of the rule book is taken up with “kits,” combinations of skills and equipment that help to differentiate the broad classes of 2e.  I’m ambivalent about the proliferation of kits in the early days of 2e: I haven’t especially missed kits in the OSR generally.  But some part of me likes the idea that my pseudo-Mongolian cattle rustler is going to look a little bit different mechanically from your pseudo-Polynesian islander, even though we’re both Fighters.

what do you like about it?

At the most basic level, I like that Taladas doesn’t feel like a mainstream fantasy setting.  Personal faves:

• Roman-style Minotaurs, overseeing an empire of human plebians, locked in a border war with a nation of priestly necromancers.
• The Uigan nomads (Mongolians manque) feuding with the Elf Clans and other ancestral rivals on the high steppes of the Tamire amid the scattered ruins of a bygone age, as the Minotaurs gradually steal their territory.
• Beetle-armored, self-flagellating swordsmen sailing a Sea of Glass on ice-boats, between agoraphobic “deep dwarves” and Gnomes who are holding back the armies of Hell with steampunk.

Time of the Dragon came out after several of the late-80′s culture-heavy setting books: Kara-Tur, FR5 The Savage Frontier, and the several of the Gazetteers from the BECMI line.  I had a few of these, but they often felt padded or boring, filled with calendars and holidays and stuff I never really gave a shit about.  Mainly I remember these awful in-character introductory paragraphs for each chapter.  Cook thankfully omits these, and the cultural write-ups manage to give me enough inspiration that I can come up with fun material, without bogging down in minutiae. This is admittedly a matter of taste: I want enough detail to be evocative, but not so much that I suffocate.  It feels a bit like if an issue of National Geographic was published with eye for Sword & Sorcery adventure locales, except mostly text and no boobs.  (Not the best analogy, I’ll admit.)

Also, I really liked the pantheon, though this is mainly due to spendingway too much time thinking about it during college.  Taladas supposedly shares the same gods as the regular Dragonlance continent, but Cook selects the four gods he cares about and throws the rest away.  Maybe the most influential of the remaining gods is Hith, the god of damnation–he who gives you everything you ever wanted, but it’s hollow on the inside.  And Erestem, the goddess of savage destruction–but is necessary to clear away the old to make room for the new.  I spent an embarrassingly large part of my junior year of college concocting various myths about and theological correspondences between these deities, Philip K. Dick, and all the other wacky stuff people think about in college.  Yet the idea of Hith has some personal relevance to me even today, and although if that’s because I put in a huge amount of work fleshing out this pantheon in my own mind, Cook did supply a pretty fertile patch of soil.

what sucks about it?

Well: 96 pages is rather gabby for a culture book, at least to my taste.  I don’t need to be told that pseudo-Eskimos herd reindeer, for example–but I can see the argument that, in the days before the Internet, it would have been handy to have a one-page summary of Eskimo-type stuff written for teenagers.

I’ve heard that some people don’t dig the interior art, though I rather like it: there’s a . . . silent quality to it, somehow, that really works for me.  And the attempt to fix the Tinker class didn’t really go far enough–that class is just hopelessly bad (and you still need the Dragonlance Adventures book to play it, though that’s not the case with the rest of this setting).  The kits could probably stand to be a bit leaner, maybe with a more radical design.

More importantly, paging through this thing at age 35, I have a pretty good sense of how to run something like this.  Zero in on a particular region, highlight and complicate the conflicts going on there, and then just see where people go, sandbox style.  Time of the Dragon isn’t especially dungeon-centric, so you’d need some good hex-crawling procedures, some skills at running soap opera/political intrigue type games, and maybe some workable rules for mass combat.  (Time of the Dragon includes army stats for the then-current version of Battle System, but those seem way too involved for my purposes.)

my very first t.p.k.

In Ninth Grade we had been playing for just over a year in a Dragonlance campaign run by my friend Adam.  (I played a Minotaur Ranger who, via cheese in the Complete Fighter’s Handbook, could dual-wield Two-Handed Swords.)  I’d gotten Time of the Dragon the previous Christmas, loaned it to Adam enthusiastically, and he agreed to run a game where our guys took a world cruise.

Here is my recollection of the adventure, admittedly it was like 21 years ago:

GM: So you’re sailing in your boat, because you’ve heard rumors of another continent…

RED WIZARD: Wait, we have a boat?

GM: How else are you going to get to the other continent?

KNIGHT OF SOLAMNIA: Other continent?!

ME: Shut up guys, it’s gonna be awesome!

GM: …When your boat is approached by a Minotaur vessel.  The captain of the Minotaur ship bellows out, “Furl sail and prepare to be boarded in the name of the Minotaur Empire!  Your vessel may be carrying contraband!  Come about and do not resist!”

ALL PLAYERS: We resist!

(fighting)

ME: Wait a minute, why am I killing other Minotaurs for the sake of humans?  My guy stops fighting.

WIZARD & KNIGHT: wut

ME: I shout out, “Let us parley!  There has been a misunderstanding!”

WIZARD & KNIGHT: Oh great they threw us in jail, good going.

ME: Bah!  They have this gladiatorial justice thing, don’t worry, we’ll kick everyone’s ass and they’ll apologize.

GM: James, your guy has to do a solo combat against this Minotaur gladiator.

ME: Cool!  I’m gonna climb up on the top rope, and do this flying headscissors takedown, where I launch my legs around his head and just force him to the mat.

GM: . . . . You do that to him?  Like, catapulting yourself thighs-first at this guy’s head?

ME:  What?  I saw it on Wrestlemania one time.  I think you were with me when we saw it!

GM: . . . Okay . . . so thighs first at. . . the Minotaur gladiator?

ME: . . . .

WIZARD & KNIGHT: Oh, he totally does that.  Can we roll for the damage?

GM: Okay, for your punishment the court sends you to the ruins of the Aurim Empire, to recover some Dragonlances from shattered civilizations.

(lots of fighting and dungeon exploring; we get pretty banged up)

GM: There is a shrine here to Mishakal, goddess of healing.

KNIGHT: Wow, we really ought to rest and heal up.

ME: What?  Come on, we’re adventurers.  Stopping to rest every five minutes isn’t very heroic.  The Wizard still has most of his spells.

WIZARD: I could use some healing, but I’m fine if we want to press on too.

ME: We don’t rest.  “Fight on, my friends!”

GM: Okay… (rolls dice) You encounter an army of Frankenstein-Draconians.

KNIGHT: Oh man.  We should have rested.

ME: I’m sorry, okay?  Wizard, help us out here.

WIZARD: I cast invisibility.

ME & KNIGHT: wut

WIZARD: And then I fly away.

GM: The monsters attack!

ME: You can’t cast a new spell like fly and still keep your invisibility up!

WIZARD: The flying isn’t a spell.  I’ve been a Draconian passing as human for the whole campaign.  GM, I fly away real fast.

GM: Their archers pop out of cover and are peppering everyone they can see with poisoned arrows.

KNIGHT: You’re not going to help us fight?

WIZARD: The last words you hear from me, as I invisibly soar away on great leathery wings, are nearly lost in the din of battle, but if you strain your ears you can just barely make them out: “Kiss…. my….. ass…………”

ME: Gah, I’m at 0 HP.

GM: James, your Minotaur is unconscious.  Knight, you can see the Draconian soldiers fall back, as their chieftain moves to the fore.

KNIGHT: I bellow out that I will challenge him to single combat and poop on his corpse!

(single combat begins)

GM: …Okay, so with that hit, he knocks you clear across the room, and you land in a pile of rotting human corpses, perhaps previous challengers.  Your sword clatters on the flagstones, about 10 feet away.  Under the corpses, there’s what looks like . . . yes . . . a Dragonlance!

KNIGHT: I’m going for my sword.

ME: What?  No, the Dragonlance!  You inflict your current hit points as a bonus to damage on dragon-dudes.

KNIGHT: I have 3 hit points right now.  I’m specialized in sword, so I have a better chance to hit and would do almost as much bonus damage.

GM: You’ve only got time to grab one weapon.

KNIGHT: Sword.

WIZARD: Seriously, if you let this guy close in melee he’s going to get all those extra attacks again.  You’ve gotta take him out at a distance if you can.

ME: Take the Dragonlance, and throw it at the chieftain.  I saw it in a movie!  Maybe Ladyhawke or Kull?  What was that movie with the tri-blade?

KNIGHT: Throw the Dragonlance?!  That’s stupid.  If I miss, I won’t have any weapons and he’ll be right on top of me.

GM: Okay, come on, what’s it going to be?

KNIGHT: Sigh… Fine, I throw the Dragonlance.

GM: ….And you miss.  Well, I guess you are all killed.  Thanks for playing, guys!

The really sad thing is that my plans haven’t gotten any better over the past twenty years.

you must be this lucky to play (a paladin)

This blog post started out as a puzzler, but then I just sat down and did the work.  I’ve got a provisional answer to this one, but maybe you can beat me using some obscure publication that no one has ever seen.

Rolling 3d6 straight down the line, what is the hardest class for a human to qualify for in TSR-era D&D?

Humans & 3d6 straight because the probabilities are really easy.  I’ll work up how to do the math for 4d6 drop lowest arranged, but not today.  If you are curious about 3d6 Probability Charts, I used this one.

james, wordpress makes your charts look terrible.  can I download some readable copies?

Sure thing, baby!  If I’ve done this right, you can just click to download these as PDF’s…

Class Qualification Charts – 3d6

Qualification Chart for LBB + Greyhawk + Blackmoor

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Cleric	none	Any*	100.00%
Fighting-Man	none	Any	100.00%
Magic-User	None	Any	100.00%
Paladin	Cha 17	Lawful	1.85%
Thief	None	Not Lawful	100.00%
Assassin	Str 12, Int 12, Dex 12	Neutral	5.27%
Monk	Str 12, Wis 15, Dex 15	Any	0.32%

* = The 0e Cleric must align herself with either Law or Chaos upon reaching Level 7.

Check out how out of place the 0e Monk is.  Most classes: 100% entry requirements.  Paladin, ~2%.  That’s crazy.  But the Monk is even crazier: 3 characters out of every 1,000 would qualify.  The fact that these are being offered in 0e–particularly the Monk, which receives a ton of space in Supplement II: Blackmoor yet is almost mythically rare–indicates that cheating on stats, or at least a total indifference to rolling stats, started pretty early in the hobby.  (Understandably, maybe, given that stats are close to meaningless in 0e other than as an XP accelerant.)

Qualification Chart for BECMI (and BX as a subset)

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Cleric	None	Any	100.00%
Fighter	None	Any	100.00%
Magic-User	None	Any	100.00%
Thief	None	Any	100.00%
Dwarf	Con 9	Any	74.07%
Elf	Int 9	Any	74.07%
Halfling	Dex 9, Con 9	Any	54.86%
Avenger	None; Fighter 9	Chaotic	100.00%*
Druid	None; Cleric 9	Neutral	100.00%*
Knight	None; Fighter 9	Neutral	100.00%*
Mystic	Wis 13, Dex 13 **	Any	6.72% **
Paladin	None; Fighter 9	Lawful	100.00%*

* = These classes, introduced in the Companion rules, have no stat requirements beyond reaching Name Level.  This is a crazily high barrier to entry—over 200,000 XP in the case of the Druid, and 240,000 XP for the Fighter-variants.

** = These requirements come from the Rules Compendium; seemingly the Master rules would let anyone play a Mystic.  Since the Monk has been rare across all editions, I chose to go with the Rules Compendium’s requirements.

I love this chart.  I use with some house rules on alignment (Clerics can’t be Neutral, Elves can’t be Lawful, Dwarves can’t be Chaotic) but this version of the game is soooo generous.

Qualification Chart for 1e

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Cleric	Str 6, Int 6, Wis 9, Con 6, Cha 6	Not True Neutral	61.28%
Druid	Str 6, Int 6, Wis 12, Dex 6, Con 6, Cha 15	True Neutral	2.87%
Fighter	Str 9, Wis 6, Dex 6, Con 7, Cha 6	Any	58.30%
Paladin	Str 12, Int 9, Wis 13, Dex 6, Con 9, Cha 17	Lawful Good	0.10%
Ranger	Str 13, Int 13, Wis 14, Dex 6, Con 14, Cha 6	Any Good	0.16%
Magic-User	Int 9, Wis 6, Dex 6, Con 6, Cha 6	Any	61.28%
Illusionist	Str 6, Int 15, Wis 6, Dex 16, Cha 6	Any	0.37%
Thief	Str 6, Int 6, Dex 9, Con 6, Cha 6	Any Neutral or Evil*	61.28%
Assassin	Str 12, Int 11, Wis 6, Dex 12, Con 6	Any Evil	6.39%
Monk	Str 15, Int 6 Wis 15, Dex 15, Con 11, Cha 6	Any Lawful	0.04%
Bard	Str 15, Int 12, Wis 15, Dex 15, Con 10, Cha 15; Fighter 5, Thief 5	Any Neutral	0.00%**

* = A Thief may rarely be Neutral Good

** = The odds of the 1e Appendix II: Bard is actually 0.0017%.  That is, if you rolled 1 million AD&D 1e characters using 3d6, you could expect to see 17 Bards occurring in nature.  But these characters would have to survive through 5 levels of Fighter and then 5 levels of Thief before beginning Bard training.

(Edited to add: commenter Olivier Fanton helpfully noted that the ability score section of the 1e PHB imposes certain restrictions–i.e., characters of Strength 3-5 can only play Magic-Users–that are not explicitly listed in the class descriptions themselves.)

At commenter Roger’s request: the expected odds to develop psionic powers in 1e would be about 0.22% using 3d6 straight, or about two characters in a thousand.

Man, wha hoppen?!  Four out of ten core classes occur less than one time out of two hundred, and the optional Bard class is statistically impossible with 3d6 in order.  So what’s the deal?  Well, after I made this chart and several others from the 1e era, it turns out the 1e PHB doesn’t even tell you how to roll stats: you’ve gotta look in the DMG for that.

Quoth Gygax:

As AD&D is an ongoing game of fantasy adventuring, it is important to allow participants to generate a vialbe character of the race and profession which he or she desires.  While it is possible to generate some fairly playable characters by rolling 3d6, there is often an extended period of attempts at finding a suitable one due to the quirks of the dice.  Furthermore, these rather marginal characters tend to have short life expectancy–which tends to discourage new players, as does having to make do with some character of a race and/or class which he or she really can’t or won’t identify with.

In other words: mediocre stats bum people out because they can’t play awesome characters with cool classes.  Gygax then lists four methods of rolling stats, of which 4d6 drop lowest arranged to taste is Method I.  Which kind of seems like an odd response to the problem identified above.  If the problem is that people get lame stats and have to settle for a class, why not let folks play whatever they want?  Any of the methods Gygax supplies could still give you some uninspiring stat arrays, and with Method I you still run a ~70% chance of failing to obtain Paladinhood.  I get that sometimes the dice inspire you, and that there’s something to be said for prestige.  But it strikes me as a weird thing.

so if 1e advises against 3d6 straight, why’d I spend my afternoon making charts?

The New York Red Box group seems pretty firmly in the 3d6 straight down the line camp.  We make it a point to roll stats in the open so we can jeer when you wind up with two 5′s.  I started doing it this way because I grew up with Mentzer; I’m not sure why Eric M. continues with it.  (I believe he’s even disallowed the 2-for-1 point swapping, because he finds it gives Halflings a significant advantage in being the tank.)

One of our players loves to whine about stats, and even quips about using loaded dice for character creation.  He simultaneously craves statistically impossible ability scores, and yet if you offer to give them to him outright, he shuns the offer.  It’s like he’s saying, “I want to earn my ability scores through suffering!  But I don’t want to suffer!”  I don’t get it.  At least in B/X and BECMI high stats mean something: a Fighter with Strength 16 is basically attacking as if she were 3 levels higher…

Anyway.  Moral of the story: 1e is apparently not a 3d6-in-order type of game, but that’s always been my benchmark.  I’ll eventually get around to the Method I comparisons, and we’ll see what it looks like then.

Qualification Chart for Unearthed Arcana

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Barbarian	Str 15, (Wis 16), Dex 14, Con 15	Any non-Lawful	0.14%
Cavalier	Str 15, Int 10, Wis 10, Dex 15, Con 15	Any Good	0.03%
UA Paladin	Str 15, Int 10, Wis 13, Dex 15, Con 15, Cha 17	Lawful Good	0.00%**
Thief-Acrobat	Str 15, Dex 16; Thief 5	Any Neutral or Evil*	0.43%

* = As a subset of the 1e Thief, the Thief-Acrobat may rarely be Neutral Good

** = Specifically, 0.0002%.  If you rolled 1 million characters using 3d6 straight, expect to see about 2 of them qualify for UA Paladinhood.

Yep, that’s right: Unearthed Arcana devotes 12 pages to classes which, combined, would account for 0.60% of all characters rolled with 3d6 in order.  I guess it doesn’t matter that the Cavalier class is broken if only 3 guys out of 10,000 would qualify.

Qualification Chart for Dragonlance Adventures

Yeah, I’m doin’ it.  Shut up.  Minotaur Rangers 4eva!

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Knight of the Crown	Str 10, Int 7, Wis 10, Dex 8, Con 10	Any Good*	18.56%
Knight of the Sword	Str 12, Int 9, Wis 13, Dex 9, Con 10; Crown Knight 2	Any Good*	3.33%
Knight of the Rose	Str 15, Int 10, Wis 13, Dex 12, Con 15; Sword Knight 4	Any Good*	0.05%
Tinker Gnome	Gnome only**; Int 10, Dex 12	Any	23.12%

 * = I strongly recollect that all Knights of Solamnia must be of Good alignment, but I cannot find the citation now.

** = If you want to be a Tinker Gnome, you first gotta qualify to be a Krynn Gnome: Strength 6, Constitution 8, Wisdom no higher than 12, and you get a +2 adjustment to Dexterity.  This has all been factored into the “Odds to Qualify” category.  But trust me: you do not want to play a Tinker Gnome.

Qualification Chart for Oriental Adventures

This book is so weird, arbitrary, badly edited, and uncomfortably close to yellowface–yet I really want to run a few sessions with it.

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Barbarian	Str 15, (Wis 16), Dex 14, Con 15	Any non-Lawful	0.14%
Bushi	Str 9, Dex 8, Con 8	Any	52.02%
Kensai	Str 12, Wis 12, Dex 14	Any Lawful	2.28%
Monk	Str 15, Wis 15, Dex 15, Con 11	Any Lawful	0.04%
Ninja-Bushi	Str 9, Int 15, Dex 14, Con 8, Cha 14	Any non-Good	0.15%
Ninja-Sohei	Str 13, Int 15, Wis 12, Dex 14, Con 10, Cha 14	Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil	0.01%
Ninja-Wu Jen	Int 15, Dex 14, Cha 14	Neither Good nor Lawful	0.24%
Ninja-Yakuza	Str 11, Int 15, Dex 15, Cha 16	Lawful Neutral or Lawful Evil	0.02%
Samurai	Str 13, Int 14, Wis 13, Dex 13	Any Lawful	0.28%
Shukenja	Str 9, Wis 12, Con 9	Any Good	20.57%
Sohei	Str 13, Wis 12, Con 10	Any Lawful	6.08%
Wu Jen	Int 13	Any non-Lawful	25.93%
Yakuza	Str 11, Int 15, Dex 15, Cha 16	Any Lawful	0.02%

Yes, that’s right: even with the easiest class to qualify for, the Bushi, you still might flunk out ~50% of the time using 3d6 in order. But again, Oriental Adventures explicitly declares that you should use 4d6 drop lowest arrange to taste.

Qualification Chart for 2e

Class	Min Stats	Alignment	Odds to Qualify
Fighter	Str 9	Any	74.07%
Paladin	Str 12, Con 9, Wis 13, Cha 17	Lawful Good	0.13%
Ranger	Str 13, Dex 13, Con 14, Wis 14	Any Good	0.18%
Mage	Int 9	Any	74.07%
Hard Specialist	Stat 16 *	Any	4.63%
Easy Specialist	Stat 15 **	Any	9.26%
Cleric	Wis 9	Any	74.07%
Druid	Wis 12, Cha 15	Any Neutral	3.47%
Thief	Dex 9	Not Lawful Good	74.07%
Bard	Dex 12, Int 13, Cha 15	Any Neutral	0.90%

* = The “Hard Specialists” are the Diviner, Enchanter, Illusionist, Invoker, and Necromancer.  By the strict rules as written, these do not have an Intelligence requirement, and I haven’t factored that in.  If you assume they must also have an Intelligence of 9 or greater (because the PHB doesn’t list a chance to learn spells for those with lower Intelligence), the odds to qualify become 3.43%

** = The “Easy Specialists” are the Abjurer, Summoner, and Transmuter.  Again, the rules don’t explicitly call for an Intelligence requirement, though one is probably implied.  If the Intelligence must be 9 or greater, the odds to qualify become 6.86%.

2e brings back 3d6 straight down the line as the default stat rolling method, god bless it.  Note that 2e is far less generous than 0e or BX, yet appears absolutely wild with abandon compared to Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures.

Just for laughs: the odds to qualify for the 2e Psionicist class is 17.36% using 3d6 straight.  The expected odds for human Warrior or Rogue types to develop psionic talents is about 1.21%, and the odds for a human Wizard or Priest type, or any demihuman, would be 1.06%.

Answer to the Puzzle: What’s The Hardest Class to Get Into, Using 3d6 Straight?

Two major contenders: the Unearthed Arcana Paladin (2 characters out of every million) and the 1e Bard (17 characters out of every million).  I’m going to give it to the 1e Bard, because although the stats are over eight times more common, it takes a hell of a long time to accrue 28K points to go to college, especially if you’re earning 10K of those as a Thief.  I think it’s pretty likely that a 1e Bard would get slaughtered, or the campaign would end, before he ever matriculated.

Honorable mention to the Thief-Acrobat (4300 out of every million–common as dirt!, comparatively–but similarly harsh level requirements), the Ninja-Sohei, and the Yakuza, which may be one of the weakest classes ever designed especially given how rare it is.  And especially honorable mention to the BECMI super-prestige classes, where you have to earn over 200,000 XP just to get your foot in the door.  I’m figuring the 1e Bard, though roughly only 10% of the XP requirement, is still vanishingly rare–but that’s mainly because I don’t know how to assess how often people reach Name Level.

Have We Learned Anything?

Well, I can track the entry requirements for certain classes over time:

Class	0e	BECMI	1e	2e
Cleric	100.00%	100.00%	61.28%	74.07%
Fighter	100.00%	100.00%	58.30%	74.07%
Magic-User	100.00%	100.00%	61.28%	74.07%
Thief	100.00%	100.00%	61.28%	74.07%
Assassin	5.27%	*	6.39%
Bard			0.00%	0.90%
Druid		100.00%**	2.87%	3.47%
Illusionist			0.37%	4.63%
Monk	0.32%	6.72%	0.04%
Paladin	1.85%	100.00%**	0.10%	0.13%
Ranger			0.16%	0.18%

* = The Master rules contain rules for Thug NPC’s which are functionally almost identical to Assassins, but no rules for using them as player-characters.  I’m always tempted to do so, just to get some Supplement II: Blackmoor into my BX experience: after all, Mystics can be player-characters…

** = Again, 100% is a ludicrous overstatement, given that you’ve got to hit 200K XP for the Druid and 240K XP for the Paladin.  But I don’t know how to assess those odds.

kirbsday: the orion gang and the deep six!

New Gods #4 opens with the science-god Metron showing the child-god Esak some of the wonders of the universe…

Esak is curious about the difference between the New Gods and mortal men.  “Time to them is not as time to us–is it?  Tell me, Metron!  Are we truly beyond time?–Are we beyond death?“

Nope!

Last time, Orion and his human pets chased down agents of Inter-Gang, getting a timely assist from the bizarre Black Racer. This issue continues that theme, but Orion’s plot opens with his discovery of the murder of his friend Seagrin, who we haven’t seen before and will never see again.  He’s kind of like a hippie Aquaman: “He loved the deeps and all life in it!  It was his element!  Within it, he found harmony in living! . . . Somewhere in these waters he fought and died!”

Orion gives Seagrin a proper Viking New Genesis funeral:

And then, dang it, when Orion goes home after the funeral, the pets keep introducing themselves!  These guys are like parrots.  I understand that, in serialized fiction, you have to constantly reintroduce characters and their plotlines, but surely there’s ways to do that which are more elegant than having the characters repeat their own full names three times in four issues!

New Gods #1:

New Gods #2:

New Gods #4:

Damn it, you guys!  I know Orion found you hooked up to some Apokolips brain-scanning machine, but come on.

Anyway, the plot of this issue is: Seagrin is dead, and Orion’s gonna solve the case with the help of his pets.  The clue is that Seagrin’s Mother Box didn’t activate to save him, so it must have been jammed.  The jammer was likely built by Inter-Gang, Darkseid’s minions in organized crime.  So they must locate the jammer and destroy it.  And they’re going to do this by pretending to be a bunch of Irish mobsters, “The O’Ryan Gang.”

They locate a member of Inter-Gang named Snaky Doyle via Orion’s Mother Box.  (The jammer explicitly doesn’t shield humans from the Mother Box, which if you ask me is a pretty serious design flaw).  Dave Lincoln mugs Snaky with a pipe:

Once they learn of Inter-Gang’s “seashore base,” Claudia “Claudia Shane” Shane poses as a motorist in distress and gasses the guards.

Victor “Victor Lanza” Lanza pretends to be the O’Ryan Gang’s underboss, here to negotiate with Inter-Gang and learn the jammer’s location.  He encounters Country Boy, a mob boss with a fishing gimmick:

Orion locates and vaporizes the jammer, and his henchmen defeat Inter-Gang.  But Orion is captured by Slig and the Deep Six, who prowl the coasts and mutate sea-creatures into creatures of Apokolips.

anything to add?

I’m glad Orion’s friends actually did something useful this issue.  Orion has made a big deal about recruiting them into a secret war; it’s nice to see them actually participate for once.  But it may be too little, too late: we won’t see them again for months, and frankly I won’t miss them too much.

As far as the on-going cosmology: it’s implied in this issue that the New Gods will die if their Mother Box gets deactivated, either because that kills them outright or because it can no longer shield them from harm.

But as far as larger significance in this issue?  I think what we get here is that men can kill gods (albeit indirectly), and gods may disguise themselves as outlaws to move among immoral men.  And that’s about it.

The good news is that we’re setting up for some good stuff in the next few issues.  The bad news is that The New Gods until this point feels like it’s treading water a little bit.  The Forever People have embarked on a huge quest; Mister Miracle is always dueling the villain of the moth.  But Orion has fought a billboard that makes people afraid, some gangsters (but the lion’s share of the credit belongs to the Black Racer), and a guy who shoots a gun by using a fishing rod.  All of which is wonderfully weird, but kind of marginal.  Thor wouldn’t fight a billboard, although I wouldn’t be surprised if Walt Simonson had tried…

The most interesting stuff in The New Gods so far has been the asides on New Genesis, with Metron and Lightray and the Black Racer, rather than the supposed hero.  Kirby will fix that in time, but it feels like an unnecessary commercial risk.  The audacity of The New Gods as a series is that it’s the repository for all the crazy backstory in The Forever People, Mister Miracle, and the Kirbified Jimmy Olsen–basically, it’s the source and destination for all the odd cosmological stuff referenced in those titles, which means it isn’t always an easy sell.  When it works–when the title is devoted to chasing down loose ends in and explaining them with parable–I think it is really effective, but it’s hard to do that while time-sharing a 22 page story with Orion taking on the Mafia.

wait there is more

There’s a funny splash page of Kalibak here.  We didn’t get to see much of Kalibak in New Gods #1–he’s basically just a bellowing cave man with a techno-club thing–so it’s our first indication that he might be more important.

Dig those Kirby toes!  The Man-Gog from like Thor #156 or something has toes just like that.

trolling for 2e

Illustration from The Boy and the Trolls, by Jon Bauer

Over the weekend we did some impromptu delving with Heron Prior’s Trolls Will Be Trolls, one of the winners of the 2010 One Page Dungeon Contest.  Because the New York Red Box crew doesn’t normally mess around with it, I broke out Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Second Edition and we ran a bit of that.

one-paragraph review of a one-page dungeon

“Trolls Will Be Trolls,”which also appears in Fight On #10, features the lair of Stencheye, a Troll matriarch and witch-doctor, and her seemingly infinite brood of Trolls, Half-Trolls, and Devil Trolls.  There are scant plot hooks, but the map is nicely non-linear.  NPC’s include Stencheye herself (I gave her max hit points and the spells of a 6th level Cleric), a Hill Giant with the head of a pig, a spriggan named Droopteats, and my favorites the Scragglebeard Brothers, “a pair of insane, lecherous Dwarven warriors” who number among the Troll Queen’s lovers.  My one regret about the adventure as presented is that it’s extremely monster-heavy, particularly with Trolls who aren’t the critters you’d immediately associate with a “let’s defuse this confrontation with some RP” strategy.  Otherwise, you can see why it won “Best Lair” in the 2010 contest: it’s a great little dungeon with some pretty ferocious enemies.

what happened in play?

The two players, a 7th level Mage and an 8th level Fighter, recruited nine first-level Fighter hirelings, and decided to raid the lair searching for the fabled Horn of Gwall, a mystic relic of the primordial God-Mammoth.  They did pretty good, overall: the Mage had scored a mirror of life-trapping during random item rolls, and played it pretty hard, and a squad of melee dopes, even first-level melee dopes, kept things moving right along as the main Fighter carved up the harder opponents.  Eventually they ended up getting so interested in setting up an ambush that they got trapped in an ambush themselves, and ended up fighting on three fronts before the Mage used suggestion to get on the Trolls’ good side.  We left them there, about halfway through the dungeon after 3 hours of play…  I think with a full party they probably could have pulled it off, with a few losses.

Incidentally, I ran this using the 2e PHB and DMG, but using B/X for monsters, and never noticed any problems: the Troll write-up, at least, has barely changed.

2e: this step-child loves redheads

I don't care what people say, 2e 2 tha max

Man, I don’t know what the fuss over 2e is all about.  Or rather, I know what it’s all about and I think it’s bollocks.  Limiting yourself to just the Core Books from 1989 or so, it’s a pretty awesome version of Dungeons & Dragons.

Here’s where I agree with the h8t0rz:

The 2e DMG isn’t a compendium of the craziest random crap you can imagine, and Zeb’s writing doesn’t exude personality the way Gygax’s did. (Then again, the personality exuded by Gygax’s writing in 1979 is extraordinarily off-putting.)

And a lot of the 2e art stinks.  2e exchanges the incredibly awesome pseudo-amateur art of 1e for a blander and more professionalized style, and the art in both of the Monstrous Compendiums is downright bad: at first I was like, “Why are all these of monsters in silhouette?” and then I’m like, “Bring the silhouette back, that’s a terrible picture.”  And speaking of monsters, the loss of demons & devils to the SNL Church Lady is an unfortunate marketing misstep, but which may have been the result of TSR’s delusions of mass-marketing this thing to kids again, the way the D&D fad caught on in the late 70′s/early 80′s.

More critically, the game is far too coy about what it’s about: killing things and taking their stuff.  It’s almost the exact same game as 1e and B/X but it’s far less open about what it’s trying to do, pretending to be all things to all readers.  Again, maybe that’s the marketing folks talking: this game is for doing anything!  After marinating in the Old Ways for many years, it’s clear what this thing is good for, but that was a lot less apparent to me when I was 13.

BUT!

These books were edited.  By a sane person.  Who knew how to edit things.  I cannot stress this enough.  I read a sentence in the 2e DMG and I don’t think, “Please Uncle Gary, if you let the girl go I promise I won’t freak out over your compound-complex-super-subjunctive-passive-voice-pluperfect word stylings.”  Instead I think, “Oh, right: that’s the rule, right where I thought it would be.  Okay, back to the game.”

(Please understand: massive Wookiee life-debt to Gygax which I can never repay, yadda yadda, just saying WTF with the style in the 1e DMG.)

Also: the class mechanics are more-or-less streamlined.  I know some people get bugged that the Ranger gets d10′s for hit points instead of d8′s, and that Druids don’t get a 3rd level spell at 3rd level.  But I dig rationality.  The Bard class is interesting, no longer the mangled Frankenstein’s Monster of 1e nor yet the hopelessly music-is-maaaaaaagical of 3e.  And oh man, build-your-own-Thief is a godsend.

The other thing I like about 2e is that it’s pretty easy to customize for a particular setting.  “Okay, in this world, you’ve got the Base Four classes plus Paladins, Illusionists, and Necromancers.  You’ve got some Norse-worshipping Viking priests up north, who have a slightly different spell list, and the Illusionists and Necromancers hate each other and have been waging fraternity-house style pranks on each other for centuries.  And these dudes over here, they’re like fishermen, so if your character comes from that village you know fisherman-related skills.”

(I’m not a big proficiencies guy, and if ran a 2e game I’d just handle this with a handwave, but I do like the effort to reflect culture in the game, however crudely.  Fighters from over here ought to play a little different from Fighters over there.)

Perhaps not surprisingly, this emphasis on easy customization gave rise to a lot of really evocative settings: Time of the Dragon, Spelljammer, Dark Sun, Planescape, Al Qadim, and some great Historical Setting books.   In time, market pressures caused each of these to bloat terribly (well, not Time of the Dragon) but the initial setting books were great stuff.

I’m not vouching for all of the optional rules: morale looks hella-complicated, the build-your-own-class tables are messed up, and individual initiative is a headache.  (I am intrigued by the “Different XP rewards for each class” rules, though.)  But the core 2e rules are very close to my idealized Dungeons & Dragons: the clarity of B/X with the “big boy” monsters & classes.  Throw in some inspiring settings, and I’m in hog heaven.