My friend John has been trying to get me to run an Exalted campaign for years.
So far, he hasn't been successful. Although over time, he's slowly managed to push me closer and closer to doing so.
Behold the cover of an upcoming Exalted book called "Scroll of Exalts".
This may finally push me over the edge.
My Warhammer game is … quirky.
In a good way, though.
The players in my Warhammer game are folks with whom I’ve been gaming for a very, very long time - in cases, twenty years or more. We know each other’s gaming tendencies very, very well. The current game is investigation-heavy and combat-light because that’s the style they – and I – happen to like. Though I still seem to get caught off-guard at least once a game by the actions they take during a given adventure, I can generally guess what they’ll like in an adventure, what they won’t like, and what general direction each adventure will go.
But sometimes, it’s just fun to throw things out there to see what happens.
So far, the game has prominently featured the mysterious goings-on at an opera house, and the nefarious activities of the rat-like skaven in the sewers beneath the city. I’ve plotted out both of these aspects of the campaign in fairly rigid detail. Not quite as rigid as an adventure written for publication, but I have the details of these particular storylines mapped out, along with timelines as to how and when certain things will happen, depending on the actions (or inactions) of the characters.
It’s worked well so far, but I’ve noticed that too much familiarity hurts the game sometime. The players know my tendencies. They know that I know theirs. And after a lot of years of gaming together, it can get a little too easy sometimes to predict what someone will or won’t do. So while the specifics of the game can still be surprising to the players, the general tendencies of it … well, sometimes, they aren’t.
So to combat this, I just tossed in two random elements into the game.
I don’t have any preconceived notions for these two elements. I don’t know what the players will do with these elements. For that matter, I don’t know what I’ll do with them. But rather than taking the lead with them, I’ve just thrown them into the game and watched how the players reacted to them. Their reactions have dictated how they’ll fit into the game. This means I don’t have to adjust anything to fit what the characters plan to do; I just see what they choose to do and react accordingly.
One of these elements involved dwarves involved in purchasing large amounts of guns from a shoddy gunsmith in the merchant’s district of Kislev. For those unfamiliar with the Warhammer campaign setting, dwarves are the premier weaponsmiths – and gunsmiths – of the world. The thought of them ever buying weapons from humans is pretty odd on its own, but from a human gunsmith who isn’t even very good … very, very weird.
The actual reason why the dwarves are buying lousy guns from a human gunsmith? Beats me. I don’t know. I just tossed that tidbit out there to see how the players would react to it.
And the theories they’ve come up with while sitting around the table are far better than anything I ever would’ve dreamed up on my own.
The other … well, I’ll keep quiet about that one for a little while longer, in case any of them happen to drop in and read this post.
I wouldn’t recommend running every aspect of every adventure with random, unplanned elements like this, but if you want your game to head in some interesting directions … well, odds are that you’ve got some pretty creative and talented folks sitting at your gaming table. I’d gotten very used to writing rigid adventures as a result of my freelancing. Sometimes it’s good to remember that home games can take advantage of being more fluid and flexible.
Let the players take the lead every once in a while.
I’ve spent some time in recent weeks reading over the various Player’s Handbooks for four editions of AD&D and D&D. There hasn’t been any grand purpose for doing so. I’ve just come to realize that I like certain things about certain editions of the game, and often I can't quite put my finger on the reasons why. I’m also someone who likes knowing the history of things, and how things evolve. I think you get a much better understanding for how and why the way things are by knowing how they used to be.
So I present to you my random musings on the various editions. Have I really reached any conclusions? Not really. Or – at least – not yet. Suffice it to say there’s things I like and dislike about each version of the game, and I’m actually happy to run or play any of the four editions. If I ran another AD&D/D&D campaign on a regular basis, the version I would run would be …
… well, let’s take a look through them all first.
First Edition:
The 1E Players’ Handbook represents all the original ideas for a game called Dungeons & Dragons, as laid out by Gygax, Arneson, and a host of others. These ideas started with Chainmail, made their way into the White Box set of D&D … and then finally crept into the Player’s Handbook.
The main thing that’s evident with 1E is its reliance on subsystems. It’s clear that the game as a whole was not designed all at once. Rather, it started with core elements from the aforementioned Chainmail and White Box D&D, and whenever someone got a new idea, it was tacked onto the game. And that new idea often had nothing to do with the ideas that came before it.
During this early stage of the game’s existence, I’m pretty sure that there was no thought of a unifying mechanic for the rules. Just because something worked a certain way didn’t mean that something else similar should work the same way. So, the game wound up with rules where things were resolved at times by rolling percentile dice, or by rolling a six-sided dice, or by rolling a twenty-sided die and wanting a low result, or a high result … you get the idea. Also, many times, the needed result by rolling any die needed to be compared to a chart or result matrix, and the game had dozens of those. (And sometimes, the “mechanic” was easy – “Touch this and die”.)
There were some arbitrary decisions made for the game as well. For example, clerics wound up with the curious trait of not being able to use edged weapons because Gary Gygax had read stories of the Archbishop Turpin. The good Archbishop wielded a mace in combat because he didn't want to shed blood, as he believed firmly in the motto "who lives by the sword dies by the sword". The same went for the magic system, which was based mostly on the works of Jack Vance, which Gary Gygax happened to like. The rules were chosen more because the designers found such things interesting or fun, not due to balance.
It all led to a slew of fractured systems and subsystems. On their own, most of them worked; it just left a lot to be desired in terms of consistency.
(And for those who complain about the “lack of balance” in 1E … sometimes it helps to remember that the designers were going where no one had gone before. Yes, parts of it are certainly unbalanced … but it helps to keep perspective sometimes. We get to talk about stuff like balance because of their early forays into design.)
Second Edition:
This is the last version of the game that I consider a true revision. When 2E came out, AD&D was enjoying great popularity, and most gamers really liked the game. So 2E didn’t change things a hell of a lot. The game got streamlined quite a bit – we got THAC0, for example, rather than half a dozen “to-hit” charts for the various character classes – but not much got hideously altered from 1E. Gamers were still left with a lot of systems and subsystems. The biggest change I can think of for 2E didn’t really come in the Player’s Handbook, but in the various “Complete” books, which introduced the idea of non-weapon proficiencies – which were the early versions of skill systems, for all practical purposes. TSR’s goal with 2E seemed to be “let’s clean up the game”, not “let’s change the game”. A lot of people liked 1E, so I’m guessing they had no desire to mess around too much with the core mechanics.
The up side? The clean-up. The bad side? Stuff like the "Complete" books added in a ridiculous amount of unbalanced bloat. If you stuck to just the rules in the Player's Handbook and the Dungeon Master's Guide, your game was probably fine. If you went beyond that, though, the game moved badly out of whack.
(And let's not talk of the Monstrous Compendium and its crappy binder system.)
Third Edition:
3.0 and 3.5 blew up a lot of what First Edition and Second Edition had done, and started over from scratch. Classes and most of the core concepts of the game remained the same, but the big goal was the introduction of a unifying mechanic to the rules – the d20. Roll a d20, beat a target number. That’s essentially how every rule in the game works, whether trying to smack a dragon with a sword, or looking for a secret door. Everything else is a modifier to those rolls. Skills and feats let you either do something, or improve your odds of doing something.
The other goal presented by 3.0 and 3.5 was explaining how everything worked … and I mean everything. A lot of 1E and 2E was dictated by the handwave, or DM fiat. How do you create a sword like Excalibur? In 1E or 2E, the answer is either “you don’t”, or “you need to forge a blade like this in the fires of lava beneath Mount Wyvern, during a full moon when the stars are aligned right” … in other words, whatever the DM decreed. Houseruling was pretty much expected in 1E and 2E.
In 3.0 or 3.5, the answer is “if you have a wizard of this level, with these spells, this amount of gold, and these feats, roll a d20. If you beat the target number, you succeed.” The design philosophy went more along the lines of the DM shouldn’t have to houserule anything. The rules should be your reference for anything and everything imaginable.
Explaining everything, I found, was always a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s good to know everything. Want to create a monster? Easy. Follow the rules. Want to leap off a balcony, swing from a chandelier, and do a backflip onto a raving lizard creature? Follow the rules. The rules cover anything you want to do, or can be adapted to do so.
On the other hand, too many rules bog things down. In 1E and 2E, it was always easy to create an orc chieftain. Bump his hit points, give him a slightly better “to-hit” roll, hand him a +1 longsword, and away you go. In 3.5? Making a properly-statted 5th-level orc fighter was a nuisance, especially figuring out his skills and feats (and half of which wouldn't even come into play before the characters killed him!). I also found that things would get bogged down in 3.5 because you knew there was a rule for what you wanted to do somewhere in the Player's Handbook … so you spent a half-hour poring through books looking for that obscure rule, rather than just houseruling and moving on.
The complexity of the rules could also detract from trying to do cool stuff at times. If you wanted to do the aforementioned leap from a balcony, you knew you needed a lot of ranks in skills like Jump, Tumble, and the like to try such a thing. So while it was nice to know exactly how such things could be accomplished, the rules also defined limitations much more clearly.
But despite its differences from its predecessors, I think 3.0 and 3.5 had its strong points. I don’t consider it a better version of the game, though … just different. I personally like the more unified rules (even though it got rid of little grognard things like “negative AC = awesome”, which I always loved), but the fiddly explanations for how everything worked had its bad points as well.
Fourth Edition:
I don’t look at 4E as an evolution of 3.5. Rather, I think the designers went back to 1E and 2E … and then designed a new version of the game, as if 3.0 and 3.5 never existed.
A lot of the 4E game is great. I think the 4E design team found a happy medium between the need for houseruling in 1E/2E and the massive complexity of 3.0/3.5. The rules are unified. They explain pretty much everything that you need to run a game smoothly, and they do so quite easily. It’s something that's *very* noticeable from the DM side of the screen. In terms of running a game as a DM, 4E is by far my favorite version of D&D.
I also like the synergies between the character classes. The player character roles, which I thought would suck, are great. In earlier versions of D&D, there wasn’t an intentional effort to have characters work as a team in combat. There certainly were things characters could do together that would improve their chances of success (such as spell buffs), but I don’t think this was part of the initial design process prior to 4E. The ability to mark enemies in combat, manipulate terrain for tactical advantage, and the like shine much more in 4E than any other version of the game.
On the down side …
The game is very combat-intensive, even in comparison to other earlier editions of the game. Enough so that I consider 4E to be a miniatures game that features some roleplaying elements, rather than a roleplaying game that strongly uses miniatures (3.0/3.5), or just uses miniatures if that’s what you want (1E/2E). Utility skills and spells are present in 4E, but they’ve been very much pushed to the backburner.
I happen to like games that are roleplaying-intensive and feature lots of investigation, in addition to the combat. Without those utility skills and spells … well, I can run a 4E game that’s an investigative game, but the rules aren’t suited well – in my opinion – to run a game like that. It’s kind of like running a dungeon crawl for a White Wolf game like Vampire; you can do it, but there’s probably a whole bunch of other game systems better suited to do what you want.
Also, in many ways, the game is the least flexible of all the versions of AD&D/D&D. Everything has a clearly defined role, or a niche, or a slot. If you want to have the player characters fight sahuagin, you can’t just chuck sahuagin at them. To optimize the combat, you ideally need some of sort sahuagin controller, some skirmishers, perhaps a brute or a lurker as well … granted, it’s not too hard to do, but there’s something a bit off to me about making sure everything fits a formula. 3.0/3.5 did this to a certain extent, but I thought those versions of the game had a little more leeway. 4E, while streamlined, often limits options a bit much for my tastes. It makes me miss the days of 1E/2E where as a DM, I could send a group of sahuagin at the players characters, and I could determine the sahuagin's tactics and roles … rather than having the game dictate those tactics and roles to be in the rules by how the monsters were constructed.
The bottom line?
I like all four versions of the game.
I think they’re all flawed, but in all versions, the good they offer far outweighs the bad.
I probably like 1E and 2E best of all, but that’s probably just my inner nostalgic grognard speaking.
And if I were to run another AD&D/D&D campaign on a regular basis, the version I would run would be whatever the hell best suited the tastes of the gamers at my table.
Several years ago, I got the opportunity to write a book called "The Complete Guide to Liches" for Goodman Games. It was the first complete book that I ever wrote that got published. I have fond memories of writing it, despite the difficulties I found working on it.
Writing a full-length game book is a weird animal. It has to make sense, rules-wise, as well as be mechanically useful to a game. But write too much crunch, and it's boring.
Fiction needs to play a strong hand in these books as well. But the fiction can't be self-absorbed. It needs to have many, many ideas that are both interesting to read but easily ported into anyone's game. Make the ideas a little too esoteric, and you've killed a huge number of potential readers. Make it too generic, though, and it's boring. And make the book too much fiction ... well, it's interesting to read, but it can't be used in a game without some crunch to back it up.
"Liches" turned out okay - not great, just okay, but it's one of those books I'd love to take another crack at someday. I wasn't all that familiar with the d20 rules at that point, and I think it shows. It also shows the inexperience of a new writer putting words to paper. At some point - in some form - I'll try my hand at another monster book, only I'll do it better.
In the meantime ... I have this gem as my new standard.
Monstercology: Orcs is a great new 4E sourcebook by Rick Maffei. If you don't know Rick's work, you should ... and you will. Rick's one of the great unsung gaming writers I know. His adventure "The Scaly God" is one of the best DCCs ever published; he's written some of the best and most fiendish encounters for the various Dungeon Crawl Classic tournament adventures; and his most recent DCC, "Thrones of Punjar", is a must-have if you're playing a 4E game.
Monstercology: Orcs balances fluff with crunch effortlessly. Better still, it gets ideas for games flowing as you read it, and flowing easily. I picked it up this morning - and although I'm only about halfway through its pages, I've already gotten ideas for a great 4E campaign just by reading this book. I can't really say the same for many other 4E sourcebooks ... so kudos to you, Rick, for a job very, very well-done.
Although it's perfect for 4E, I think it's a good sourcebook for any sort of fantasy game. I know I'll be importing some of its concepts into my Warhammer game.
Rick's one of those writers whose stuff I love to read, and who always makes me want to be a better writer myself. He always makes me shake my head and go "... man, I wish I'd thought of that." And for a writer, I don't have any higher compliment than that.
So pick up Monstercology: Orcs, and get familiar with Rick's work.
I get the feeling that you'll be seeing his name on more and more books in the weeks and months to come.
Which is fantastic indeed.
You’ll notice that I post a lot of old-school gaming artwork on the site.
Part of it’s because the artwork – at times – reflects the sort of projects I’m working on. I might not be able to “officially” talk about the sorts I’ve projects I’m writing at times, but the artwork might provide a hint or two.
Part of it’s because the artwork reflects the subject or the tone of a given post.
But mostly, it’s because I dig the art.
I think I got as much into D&D way back in the day as much because of the cover art as because of the game itself. I still remember my sister Laura coming home with the D&D Basic set many, many moons ago, and looking at that crazy Erol Otus cover.
That made me want to play the game nearly as much as the idea of playing a wizard or an elf. Erol’s art isn’t necessarily the best stuff on the planet, but I love it. It evokes a feel for the game – a sense of something both wondrous and strange – and stamps a personality upon the game that’s unmistakable.
In the pages of the Basic rulebook, I started to become familiar with other artists who would become legends of D&D and AD&D. Jeff Dee. Jim Roslof. David C. Sutherland III. Bill Willingham. David Trampier. Tom Wham. Jim Holloway. And others I’m sure that I’m forgetting.
All gave the game wonderful visuals to the words of Gygax and company, and I think it’s safe to say that the game wouldn’t have nearly have become as popular as it did back in the day without their talented works.
I bought L1: The Secret of Bone Hill strictly because of the cover art. I love this cover. You have no idea what the adventure’s about based on the cover, but dammit, it screams adventure to me. I can’t tell you how many adventure modules I bought strictly based on the cover art, not knowing or caring what the actual module might be about. Turned out that the adventure (and its sequel, "The Assassin's Knot") turned out to be preety damn amazing as well.
I always loved the back cover of White Plume Mountain. It wasn’t until years later that I realized that “Blackrazor” was actually Stormbringer, and that the whitehaired warrior was none other than an uncredited Elric of Melnibone.
Of interest (to me, anyway) are the unfinished parts of this drawing, which recently came to light. Given TSR’s later kibosh of demons and devils in order to become “family friendly”, I’m not surprised that the complete drawing went unfinished.
I got into “Villains and Vigilantes” strictly because of the art. I can remember old advertisements in Dragon Magazine, featuring a hero called Magnetor. Much like the D&D modules, I saw this ad and immediately wanted to play the game. Didn’t know what the rules were, and didn’t care.
I just wanted to play a character as cool as Magnetor.
Dragon Magazine had its share of awe-inspiring artists as well. I remember that Jim Holloway usually did most of the art for the “Ares” section. I got introduced to the art of Larry Elmore and Clyde Caldwell through their great covers as well. Though Elmore and Caldwell usually veered a little too close to cheesecake-chainmail-bikini for my tastes, I still loved their work.
The recent “Master Dungeons” series by Goodman Games has recycled a bit of the cover art from those old magazines. If I ever got a crack at writing something for that series, I’d love to use the Elmore piece above. At least for me, there’s an adventure lurking in that painting that’s just waiting to be told. (Just where does that path lead?)
RIFTS introduced me to the works of Keith Parkinson and Brom.
These two covers, both done by Keith Parkinson, kickstarted a pretty damn good RIFTS campaign that I ran for many years. And Brom’s stuff always had a surreal, sinister edge to it that I always admired. (Brom’s stuff is what stoked my interest in the Dark Sun campaign setting for AD&D as well.)
I’ve always thought that covers are just as important for a game book as the content inside. A good cover won’t necessarily make up for lousy content … but you want people to pick the book off the shelf in the first place. A great cover is a great way to do that. Also, a great cover gets gamers fired up to run something vivid and imaginative. I don’t think I would ever have been nearly as inspired to run my old RIFTS campaign if the book covers had been boring and bland. With Keith Parkinson’s covers, I got a sense of a truly strange, alien menace, and I could take that sense and develop it into something I could call my own.
As a writer, I’ve been lucky enough to have had some great covers on the things I’ve written. My favorite is still the cover for “Curse of the Emerald Cobra”, which Mike Wilson knocked out of the park.
And this guy named Jeff Dee did not one, but two of the covers for my adventures.
I still can’t quite wrap my head around that, but I love it.
Here’s to the artists who inspire us!
My writing tends to be feast or famine. While I strive to write new something every day – I think I’ve stated before that I aim for just 300 words a day, no matter what – what I actually write in terms of word count on any given day is a little or a lot. There’s very few in-between days. Often times, it’s 300 words or 10,000. And while I’m getting a better handle on why that happens, that doesn’t change the fact that it does happen, and that I don’t have much control over it. Some days, writing is like squeezing blood from a stone. Others … the words just pour out, and they don’t stop. I don’t sleep, I don’t eat. I just put words to a page, one at a time.
Of course, when I’m riding that wave of creativity, and writing a lot of words … it doesn’t mean that those words are any good. They tend to come out in an unfocused barrage. If I don’t have a clear idea of what I want to write, or where I’m going, what comes out is page of page of awful dreck.
So I’ve resorted to two ways of harnessing that energy, and trying to keep focused. That way, when that creative burst of inspiration finally shows up, I can take advantage of it and keep the writing productive, rather than writing a sprawling disaster.
The first way is something I call the Chaos Outline. It’s not a formal outline per se – rather, it’s just a collection of random thoughts and ideas. I keep a notebook with me all the time. When I think of an idea – a place for an adventure, perhaps, or a line of dialogue that I think might be good for a villain in a novel – I write it down. Immediately. I may have no idea what to do with it at the time, but when I’m in a mood to write profusely, and I don’t have a clear idea of what I want to write … I go to the Chaos Outline. And it’s usually got something I can use when I'm stuck for an idea.
The other way is a more traditional outline, known as a Real Outline, which I use on anything I can call a “project” – an article, or an adventure, or a short story, or whatever. I used to just start writing something and then see where the words would lead me … problem is, I’ve learned that I have a short attention span. If I don’t plot out carefully where I’m going with my writing, I find that where I wind up bears little resemblance to where I started. A lot of times, I get midway through writing something, get an epiphany, come up with a cool idea that I hadn’t considered before I started writing – but the new idea completely alters everything I’ve written before. The end result is a rambling, incoherent mess that lurches from one topic to another.
“Devil in the Mists”, which was an adventure that I wrote a few years ago, unfortunately suffers from that, and I think it shows. I had a decent idea for an adventure when I started, got an idea for something very different halfway through writing it, and instead of shelving the new idea, I tried to merge it with the original concept. The end result works okay, but not really as well as it should.
So I’ve taken to using Real Outlines. They’re never set in stone, but I use them as mile markers – I know where the writing is going, and if I start moving too far off course, I can either use the outline to rein myself in, or adjust the outline to accommodate new ideas. They don’t keep me completely focused on a given subject, but they keep me pointed in the right direction.
Last weekend, one of those creative bursts came along. I had the energy, I had the time, and I had a Real Outline for a project. It was a rare occurrence, like a planetary conjunction, and it was good indeed.
End result? 17,000 words written in a day-and-a-half.
I’m doing some editing at the moment to see if any of those words are any good … but so far, so good. I can't complain. I just hope the editors feel the same way, when they finally get a chance to peruse it.
Just more tools for the writing arsenal.
Somebody wise once said that with every word you or I write, we become better writers. Part of that means, well, writing. A lot. And part of that means understanding the whys and hows of what we write.
I feel like I’m finally starting to understand the latter. Not master it, mind you, but at least understand it.
And now, if you’ll excuse me … I need to see how long I can hold onto this wave, and see where it takes me. More stuff to write, and more outlines to follow.
Well, I went to my local Borders at lunch to pick up the new Monster Manual 2. I bought it partly out of necessity (a project I’m writing heavily ties into some of the creatures contained within its pages), but partly out of genuine interest. I like a lot of the critters that are in the book, and wanted to see how the 4E version of those critters turned out.
Turns out the cashier at the register is a gamer.
“So, 4E …” he says, as he puts the book in a bag, “what do you think?”
It’s a question I’ve avoided answering for a while, at least on this site - namely, what I think about 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. A few people know my feelings on the game, but it's not really something I've shared up to now.
Guess it's time to share.
I may be in the minority, but I genuinely like First Edition AD&D. I also like Second Edition AD&D. I also like 3.0, and 3.5. And I also like 4E. That being said, I think the various iterations of D&D and AD&D are very different from one another (with the possible exceptions of First and Second Edition), and I consider them all to be different games that share a common name. The various editions of the game support a variety of playing styles, some better than others, others … well, not better.
Part of the problem with the edition wars, so to speak, is that the game always has the same name. It’s almost impossible to look at one version of the game without comparing it to another. It’s hard to judge one version of the game without thinking “well, this version does such-and-such way better”. Objectivity goes straight out the window.
Put another way … well, many years ago, when Metallica put out their “Load” and “ReLoad” albums, I hated them. But I didn’t hate them because they were terrible. I hated them because they represented change. Metallica had gotten bored with playing thrash metal, and moved more towards playing hard blues-based rock. If some band – “Not Metallica” – had released “Load” and “ReLoad”, I probably would’ve been raving about those albums, and about the great new rock band that had made them.
But because Metallica released them, and because I wanted albums and songs more like their older material, I didn’t like them. It was impossible for me to listen to “Load” without thinking I’d rather be listening to “Master of Puppets” or "Ride the Lightning" instead.
I think a lot of the hostility about 4E comes from change, and the fact that it’s not 3.5, or whatever version of the game people used to play. The beautiful thing about gaming, though, is that once you have the rules for a game, you can continue to play whatever version you prefer. “Star Frontiers” hasn’t been printed for years, but I still have the boxed set rules. I can play it whenever I want. Same goes for First Edition AD&D.
(How Wizards of the Coast handled the release of 4E certainly factors into this hostility, of course … but that's a topic for another day.)
4E doesn’t supplant the older versions of D&D and AD&D, it just presents new options, and a new way to play the game. And if you hate those options, and how the game is played, you can still play whatever version you liked better.
Grognards who hate 4E aren’t wrong. They’ve just chosen to continue using older versions of the game, which probably fit their gaming styles much, much better.
Gamers that play 4E who hate the earlier versions of AD&D and D&D aren’t wrong, either. They’ve just found a version of the game that fits their gaming styles much better than the older versions of the game.
Different strokes for different folks is all.
But telling someone that they’re wrong for liking a particular version of the game, whether old or new … well, that I’ll never understand. It might be wrong for you, but that doesn’t mean it’s not great for someone else.
So, here’s what I wound up saying to the cashier. It went something like this:
“If you like a miniatures-heavy game that focuses a lot on combat, and provides a lot of really interesting tactical options, it’s great.”
“The dynamics between the character classes is pretty cool as well – the game supports one character setting another up to do something awesome, much more so than earlier editions of the game. And rules-wise, it’s more streamlined than 3.5, particularly on the DM side of the game.”
“If that sounds cool, check it out.”
“If not, keep on playing what you’re playing, as long as you like it.”
Just my opinion, of course. Take this with a huge grain of salt, and keep in mind that of all these many versions of AD&D and D&D – and I haven’t even mentioned B/X D&D or White Box D&D yet, or Pathfinder, or a whole slew of retro-D&D clone, my current game of choice is … Warhammer.
Here’s hoping you like what you’re playing, whatever the edition might be.
At the end of the day, we’re all rolling dice with our friends. And that’s the most important part.
Last night, I tried to figure out how much gaming-related stuff I’ve written over the last decade or so.
The short answer is “a lot.”
A slightly longer answer than that would be “a lot, and most of it was contracted work for various roleplaying game companies.”
A slightly longer answer than that would be “a lot, most of it was contracted work for various roleplaying game companies … and maybe half of it ever got published, and I probably received actual payment for slightly less than that.”
Makes me wonder sometimes why I do this stuff. Albert Einstein once said “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”. I happen to agree with good old Albert, except I think "the definition of insanity" is interchangable with "the art of stupidity".
And there are times when I feel like I've eaten a big bowl of stupid for breakfast when I'm working on a project.
I know where it began, though. It all started with Palladium Books. In high school, I moved on from running AD&D and Warhammer games to a pair of games published by Palladium: RIFTS, and the Palladium Fantasy RPG. Yes, those games feature notoriously broken rules systems (particularly RIFTS). It didn’t matter. I houseruled them both into systems my gaming group liked, and those games (particularly RIFTS) became responsible for many, many hours of happy gaming as a teenager. I thought they were phenomenal. The books for the various Palladium game systems weren’t the best things ever written in terms of game mechanics, but they were always filled with great ideas for adventures, stories, monsters, the whole nine yards. I could pick up virtually any Palladium book, flip through a couple of pages, and find something that made me go … “Hell yeah! There’s my adventure!”
(That’s something I try to emulate in my own writing, even today.)
Somewhere during my freshman year in college, I got this strange but unwavering belief that I was going to work for Palladium Books when I graduated as a staff writer. This belief was based upon zero facts. I’d never met anyone at Palladium, or spoken to anyone who worked there. I’d never been to a gaming convention west of Long Island. I had an appalling lack of understanding of how the gaming industry worked, or how much writers got paid – all I had was a bunch of assumptions that were horribly, horribly wrong. I had no published writing credits.
And yet, I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I wanted to be a writer for Palladium.
I spent many hours of my junior and senior years in college writing two RIFTS books, usually during the wee hours of the morning in a 24-hour campus computer lab. One was called “The Banwok Hunters”, and the other was “Demon Heart Falling”. Both were based on my long-running RIFTS campaign. Both ran about a hundred pages, single-spaced. My friend Eric drew a cover for one of them, and my friend Jon drew a cover for the other. When they were done, I were to the campus print shop, printed up ten copies of each book, and had them spiral-bound. I wrote a cover letter, dumped that and a pair of the books in a large manila envelope (this was well before most people had e-mail), and mailed them to Palladium.
No, I didn’t have any writer’s guidelines. No, I didn’t even know what a non-disclosure agreement was. No, I hadn’t even bothered to contact Palladium to see if they were even accepting unsolicited proposals, let alone unsolicited completed manuscripts. I thought this was how things worked, so that’s what I did.
Shockingly, I received a letter from Kevin Siembieda at Palladium shortly thereafter, saying that he liked the manuscripts, and thought they’d be publishable with “a little work”. That led to two years worth of rewrites, and more rewrites, and still more rewrites … and at the end of all that, I got my infamous letter from Kevin stating “"Mike, I think you have potential but if I were your tenth grade English teacher I'd give you a C- on these manuscripts. I'd feel bad about it, but that's what they would deserve. They will never be publishable."
(I still have this letter. It’s in a frame sitting next to the desk in my computer room.)
At the time, the letter was one of many reasons I bowed out of gaming for a couple of years. But the itch slowly came back. And while I’d learned enough after a few years to realized that my initial assumptions about working in the gaming industry were completely stupid, I still wanted very much to be a writer, and still wanted to write games.
Ironically (or, perhaps more accurately, stupidly), when I decided to try my hand at writing again, my first foray was with Palladium … again. Maybe it wasn’t the smartest idea, but Palladium was still the game system at the time that I knew and loved best, so I thought it would be worth a shot. This time, I got a chance to write for the Heroes Unlimited game – specifically, a sourcebook called Hardware Unlimited – and spent a bit of time working on a proposal, then an outline, then a completed manuscript … and that’s when history repeated itself and the book got cancelled.
This time, however, I was able to use the unpublished “Hardware Unlimited” manuscript for something good. I’d sent a query over to a new publisher called Goodman Games around this time, and this guy named Joseph Goodman wanted to see some of my writing samples. So I sent over an article I’d gotten published in Dragon Magazine, and the Hardware Unlimited manuscript. Based on that, I started getting some writing jobs for Goodman Games … and still do.
Things weren’t all roses from there, though. My first book for Goodman Games was a Broncosaurus Rex sourcebook called “The Ironclad Solution”, which was basically a steampunk mech sourcebook. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s because it never got published, either – Joseph decided that publishing more books for that particular line just wasn’t viable. (Joseph was gracious enough to at least pay a kill fee for that manuscript, though, which is one of many reasons I consider him one of the Good Guys™ of gaming.) Mixed in there during that time was a manuscript for a book called “The Dark Below”, for Fast Forward Entertainment, which again wasnever was published, as well as a few other projects that stalled, sputtered, and for whatever reason simply never saw the light of day, despite lots and lots of hours spent writing.
And that’s something that actually still happens. It’s happened last year, this year … despite however many years I put into writing, it’s something that doesn’t seem to change. The past couple of years have certainly seen far more successes than failures, which is always good, but they’re still lurking out there, and when they happen, they’re still a bitter pill to swallow.
So why keep doing this?
Apart from practicing the art of stupidity?
Well, for one thing, there always seems to be progress, in some weird way. The failure of Hardware Unlimited led (eventually) to success with Goodman Games. Recent problems with one publisher led to some productive discussions and small projects for another … and that’s something I never would’ve pursued if I hadn’t had those problems. If you look at the failures as evolution, and part of a dynamic process, rather than static miseries, you can find the good in them.
Also, plug away at something long enough, and you'll eventually succeed. Maybe there's something to be said for my own stubborn stupidity. If I was smarter, I probably wouldn't have gotten published, and I probably wouldn't have made a lot of the friends I have today.
And the other reason I do this, of course, is because it’s fun.
The business end, to be sure, has its share of headaches. But the actual process of writing – sitting down at the computer, or with a spiral-bound notebook and a pencil, and creating worlds, or characters, or tales of great adventure … that’s always fun. While the path the manuscript may take after it’s written may not exactly be pleasant, the process of creating the manuscript – though it may have its own challenges – invariably is something that I love very much. I’ve always said I would write just as much if there were no publishers; it’s just nice to have some folks willing to pay for the time spent writing, and to be able to share my written words with the rest of the world. It’s been a pleasant surprise over the past year or so to realize that statement isn’t empty – I mean it. And that’s what makes this so worthwhile to me.
Speaking of which …
Back to the joy of writing some new manuscripts.
And with any luck, they’ll find their way to the shelves of gaming stores, too.
I never played anything that could remotely be considered a “campaign” when I first started playing D&D. It was more like module hopping – once a module like “The Final Enemy” was completed, there was just a nod to the character’s downtime – “OK, you guys spend the next couple of weeks training at a nearby city” – before immediately rolling up to the entrance of a place like “The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth”. And that worked fine. The game at the time was all about the dungeon crawl. There was no real thought to what characters did outside the dungeons. As a certain publisher likes to say, those early games were all about adventures that were underground, NPCs were there to be killed, and the finale of every dungeon was the dragon on the 20th level.
It wasn’t until a couple of years later than I got to experience gaming on a different level. I’d just started high school, and my friend Alison asked me if I wanted to join her brother Eric’s new D&D campaign. I didn’t know Eric all that well at the time, but I knew Alison, and I knew my friend John was going to be in the game as well. And besides, it was a D&D game. So I said yes, and showed up the next week.
And it literally changed my life. My continued interest in gaming, my adventures in freelance writing, trips to GenCon and other gaming conventions … I owe them all to Eric’s game.
Eric’s campaign world was a homebrewed setting called Tunnelworld. I still remember seeing the map of that strange land from the first time – a sprawling, crazy place drawn out in careful detail on a giant piece of posterboard. As Eric said not too long ago, it was sort of like Piers Anthony’s Xanth – it was a hodgepodge of all sorts of wondrous places thrown into a creative blender and mixed together thoroughly. There were exotic lands based on real places (the Kingdom of Haigyptia), locations grounded in that Gygaxian whimsy (the Keep on the Borderlines), and places drenched in mystery and mythos (Kültan Isle). Just looking at the map would instantly spark a player’s imagination, and when you started playing in the games, you were immersed in them.
Eric’s campaigns were the first sort of games I played where true roleplaying – as opposed to straight hack ‘n’ slash dungeon crawling – was encouraged. Just as much time was given to what characters did outside the dungeons and various adventures as they did within them. They had memorable, recurring villains such as the vicious warrior known only as the Ankh, and the enigmatic Malian. The campaigns certainly had their fair share of grandiose battles. I can remember setting up giant battlefields on a huge ping-pong table in Eric’s garage, for insanely complex battles where we literally played for nearly a day straight. But there were many situations where investigation played a far more important part than fighting, and using pure roleplaying – not mechanical stuff like Bluff and Intimidate checks, but the honest-to-God old fashioned method of playing your character – would prove to be a better solution to a problem than drawing a sword, or casting a spell.
Part of this focus on roleplaying was made possible by the vivid adventures and campaign ideas that Eric infused in his game. It’s easier for a player to give a character personality and motivation when there’s a solid character concept, and when there’s a vibrant world in which that character can exist. The first responsibility falls upon the player, but the latter goes to the gamemaster or DM … and in the Tunnelworld game, Eric did a phenomenal job of doing that.
When you’re trying to make the details of an adventure seem real to the players, if they can easily imagine themselves in the world where that adventure takes place, then selling the details of the adventure is easy. If there’s no concept for where the adventure takes place, then making an adventure vivid and memorable – well, it’s not impossible, but it’s much more difficult.
Eric always made it look easy to me.
I think one of the reasons my recent D&D campaign ended so poorly was because there was never a concept for the campaign. It hearkened back more to the dungeon crawling epics of my early gaming experiences, where players wandered from dungeon to dungeon, and there was no strong background material to frame the world behind the adventures. That works for some players … but the players for this game were veterans of the Tunnelworld game and my own older campaigns that had stronger campaign settings, and it just didn’t fit their playing style. When I switched to a Warhammer campaign, where adventures took place in the frozen, gritty city of Kislev, and where a vivid world could come to life, things changed dramatically, and for the better.
I’m working on two projects at the moment. One includes – in part – the development of the history of a long-forgotten city, while other is detailing the inner workings of a small but ambitious kingdom. In both cases, I have the lessons of Tunnelworld in mind. I want both to provide the detail for a vivid, memorable setting for adventures to take place. I want to provide a gamemaster with enough material to focus on the adventures he or she wants to run, and not worry about creating the worlds behind them as well. If I can do that (and, to be more accurate, if my co-author and I can do that for one of those projects), then everything will be grand indeed.
Fingers crossed on that.
Sadly, nothing really survives of Tunnelworld. The map is long gone, and all that’s really left of it is a few scattered notes. But who knows? I’d like to collaborate with Eric on a new world someday, and with any luck, we’ll get that chance.
In the meantime … enjoy the worlds where your games take place, wherever they may be.
Songs by Slayer. Suicidal Tendencies. The Misfits. The Cro-Mags. Sepultura. Madball. Black Flag. Metallica. Sick Of It All. D.R.I. (Dirty Rotten Imbeciles, for the uninitiated).
Makes me feel like I'm in high school again, listening to a hissing, sputtering mix tape on my battered Walkman.
But no. It's For The Lions, the new album by Hatebreed. It's raw, powerful, and utterly brilliant. If it had songs by S.O.D., the Crumbsuckers, and Minor Threat, it'd be perfect.
Back in the day, I was a scrawny skateboarding punk with a shaved head who frequented the local hardcore punk scene. I went to shows in northern New Jersey featuring bands like Gorilla Biscuits, Knuckle Sandwich, and the aforementioned Sick Of It All, where I usually got pummelled and bruised in the pit, a ringing in my ears that would last for days ... and a smile on my face that would last even longer.
This album brings me back to all that. Funny times, sad times, but most importantly, good times, though they didn't always seem that way at the time.
Minus the Doc Marten imprints on the ribcage and spinal cord, of course.
