Remembering the dungeons of yesteryear

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This weekend I had a chance to do some old-school, first-edition, dungeon-crawling, goblin-hacking RPGing. The stuff of which the first RPGs were made back in the 70s, before games got angsty and introspective and narrative and all that.

I was actually a bit nervous about running an old-fashioned site-based dungeon crawl. The game we were playing (Castles and Crusades) is a great little system for doing old-school gaming, so I wasn’t too worried about that. But “dungeons” have never really been my forte as a GM. I appreciate the idea behind them, and I like the just-have-fun-and-don’t-ask-questions aspect of most dungeons. But as hard as I try, I have never really been able to silence the voice in the back of my mind that asks those nagging questions like “Why does this random dungeon exist out here in the countryside? What do the goblins eat and do during the 99% of the time when there aren’t adventurers hacking their way through the dungeon? How does it make sense that there’s a beholder in this room, and there’s a green slime in the next room over, and a room full of giant ants across the hall?”

But I did my best to ignore those pesky questions of “realism” and just ran the adventure as written (the module we played was “Dark Chateau” by Troll Lord Games). And it was a blast! Driving home after the game, I was so excited that our dungeon crawl had gone well that I started reminiscing about other dungeons that I’ve enjoyed over the course of my gaming career. I came up with four dungeons that stand out in my memory as being particularly fun and entertaining:

  • The ruined castle of Herubar Gular in the Trollshaws. This was from the sample adventure in the MERP rulebook, and I’ve run this adventure for just about every gaming group I’ve ever played with. This was a multi-level dungeon beneath a ruined castle–nothing too spectacular-sounding, but the real fun of this adventure was infiltrating the ruined castle to get to the dungeon. The castle layout allowed for some truly interesting tactical possibilities, and each of the groups I ran through this adventure came up with a different scheme (some successful, some not) for getting inside. As far as dungeons go, this one was pretty “realistic,” although there were some quirky monsters to encounter (a golem, a kraken, a few others) in addition to the usual orc patrols.
  • Undermountain: The Lost Level. (Incidentally, one of the inspirations for this blog’s name.) This was a single-level dungeon crawl designed to be fit into the Undermountain uber-dungeon, but I just ran it as a standalone dungeon. Fun layout, great monsters (including a pack of animated severed skeletal hands–creepy!); this dungeon had nothing truly innovative in it, but all the pieces just seemed to come together. Also, you know how most dungeons have one or two super-poweful magic items hidden away so securely that the party could only ever find them with the GM’s blatant help? Well, this was the one such dungeon where the party stumbled across the Awesome Magic Treasure on accident, and without any help whatsoever from me, the GM. Cool!
  • Nightmare Keep. Hoo boy, was this one ever epic. By far the highest-level adventure of any kind I’ve ever run (I think it was recommended for a party of 17th-20th level PCs), this 2nd-edition D&D mega-dungeon just about had it all. Because it was so high level, it featured all those insanely powerful monsters that you usually just read about in the Monster Manual but can’t actually use in your game due to their power level. I remember few details of this dungeon (and I’m sure I mangled reworked it heavily to fit my gaming group), but I recall something about an undead dragon turtle and a demi-lich. Good stuff, good stuff.
  • Forge of Fury. This was a lower-level dungeon published back when 3rd edition D&D was just coming out and they were trying to support it with a line of short adventure modules. We had a lot of fun with this dungeon, which involved a good mix of fighting and non-combat challenges–I remember an entertaining bit of diplomacy as the party tried to talk its way past a roper (a bizarre monster that was more powerful than the PCs). The final battle was against a young dragon, and was a tough fight for low-level adventurers; the PCs planned out their battle strategy very carefully beforehand, and it paid off when they were victorious. (I do recall that somebody failed a Dexterity roll and fell into a lake while wearing plate armor, though–I don’t remember how that worked out for them.)

Ah, nostalgia. I can’t say that these four dungeons were the best-designed or most brilliantly written ones available, but they stand out as some of the most fun old-school dungeon exploring I’ve ever run in an RPG. If you should happen upon one of them, pick it up, give it a run through and let me know if you had as much fun as I did. And watch out for the giant centipedes lurking in the room just down the hall–if you pass the gelatinous cube, you’ve gone too far.

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Back from Origins

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Well, I’m safely back from my road trip out to the Origins convention in Columbus. Much fun was had, much gaming was done, and much money was spent. I’ll post a few photos in a bit.

I had a great time. One of my main objectives (born of a trip to Gencon a few years back) was to spend less time wandering around gawking at stuff and more time playing games, and I feel that I succeeded. The vast majority of my time at Origins was spent in the “war room” playing Advanced Squad Leader. A few random thoughts on the Origins experience:

  • Say what you want about their unkempt appearance, fanatic devotion to trivial topics, and their tendency to dress up in skimpy costumes clearly designed for much different body types than their own, but I find that gamers tend to be a friendly and enthusiastic bunch. I’m not the most socially-outgoing person in the world, but I forced myself to interact a bit more with people at Origins, and almost without exception the people I talked to and gamed with were fun and interesting people.
  • I learned that when you play a single game for more than ten hours straight, you experience an emotional rollercoaster ride in which you alternate between wanting to never stop playing, and wanting to never even look at the game again. Sometimes you experience this addiction and revulsion at the same time.
  • The convention center at which Origins took place is very large. The “war room” in which I spent most of my time was geographically about as distant as possible from the parking garage where my car (and game equipment) were stored. That meant that every time I needed something from my car (more dice, the ASL rules, Mt. Dew) I had to make an epic hike across endless halls filled with gamers, up and down stairwells, through twisty winding passages to get there. (On the plus side, maybe that helped to burn off a few of those Mt. Dews.)
  • It was glorious to see people playing “monster wargames”–games so large that they require multiple tables to hold just the playing boards. I think the physically largest wargames I saw being played were a Europa match and some sort of massive Barbarossa campaign, the map for which occupied at least four tables.
  • That said, there were fewer wargamers at Origins than I expected. The ASL crowd there was a bit on the small side–that made for a fun day-long tournament, but if you came looking for some all-weekend-long ASL action, it was up to you to organize it yourself once the tournament ended. (Personally, I enjoyed the smaller crowd since it gave the event a more informal and personal feel.)
  • I’d originally planned to play as much Star Fleet Battles as ASL, but I ended up not even breaking out my SFB rulebook once. After the ASL tournament ended, I decided that my fragile mind simply couldn’t handle switching gears for a day of SFB.
  • Only once did I nearly fail my saving throw and plunge my family into bankruptcy with frivolous game purchases, and that was when I was briefly seized by a desire to purchase lots and lots of Warmachine miniatures. I snapped out of it a few minutes later, but it was a close call. I played a demo game of Warmachine with one of the company reps, then started thinking about how cool it would be to own dozens, hundreds, thousands of miniatures, enough to make my own invincible army… but that way lies madness. I fled the temptation.

There’s more to be said, but I suspect I’ve bored you enough for one afternoon. To sum things up, Origins was a lot of fun, and worth attending if you’re in the area. Certainly not as big an event as Gencon, but if you’re having fun playing games, that shouldn’t really matter much. And next year, if you should spot me at Origins huddled in a corner surrounded by boxes of newly-purchased miniatures, go ahead and put me out of my misery.

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Of MerpCon, and Middle-Earth memories

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Brace yourself for MerpCon! That’s right, a convention devoted to roleplaying in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth (largely, but not exclusively, through Iron Crown’s vintage Middle Earth Role Playing game). This will be the second such convention, and this year it looks like Michael Martinez (a familiar name if you follow any Tolkien newsgroups or discussion forums) will be the guest of honor.

I won’t be going this year, but it’s nice to see that the convention is apparently enjoying some success. Things are pretty bleak these days as far as roleplaying in Middle-Earth goes–Decipher’s Lord of the Rings is on life support, Iron Crown has long since lost the Tolkien license, and most of the fan-created Tolkien games out there currently seem to be either outright abandoned or are lingering in perpetual half-finished limbo. Nevertheless there are some good fan-driven Tolkien gaming sites out there at which the faithful still gather.

Iron Crown’s MERP game holds a special place in my heart, for it was one of the first RPGs I played regularly; I got many years of enjoyable gaming out of that thin red rulebook. Critics today tend to scorn it for its complexity and the rather non-Tolkien-ish elements that crept into it from its roots in the Rolemaster game system, but I can say that no such critique ever even occured to me when I was playing and running regular games using it.

Well, I take that back. I probably did realize on some level that the humorous and extremely gruesome critical hit tables in MERP (and there were many, many such tables) did not exactly line up with Tolkien’s grand vision for Middle-Earth, but I was having too much fun to worry about it. So what if, in the novels, Aragorn never had to worry about getting his jawbone driven into his brain by a lucky orc flail to the face, or about the risk of permanent paralysis from a crushing blow to his spine? Let me tell you, it sure made for some mighty fine gaming…

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Spam of Warcraft

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I suppose it was inevitable. I checked my character’s mail in World of Warcraft this evening to find a few of these messages awaiting me:

Warcraft Spam

Wow! What a great deal. When an offer is this fantastic, it’s certainly understandable that one’s desire to share it with others would overwhelm one’s concern for their privacy.

(More seriously, I hope Blizzard puts a stop to these in-game spammers as quickly as possible.)

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Origins or bust

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Well, it’s official: I’m going to the Origins convention later this month. I’m not yet quite sure what I’ll be doing there, but I figure with four days, a bag full of dice, and a 400-page Star Fleet Battles rulebook, I can probably find something with which to occupy myself.

The only other game convention I’ve attended was Gencon in 2003; it was much fun, although I decided afterwards that I’d spent too much time wandering the dealer hall and not enough time actually playing games. I hope to remedy that at Origins this year. Wish me luck!

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Innovation is dead! Long live innovation!

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Gamasutra has an interview with game-design legend Chris Crawford. Lots of interesting ideas in there, but the gist of it can be boiled down to a theme I’ve heard more than once over the last few years: innovation in games is dead, and the industry is living on borrowed time.

I don’t know much about the economics of the game industry, so I can’t comment on the latter point. But I have done a lot of reading and thinking about the first point–that there is no more innovation in game design. Is the age of game innovation–an era of quirky, bizarre and sometimes brilliant gameplay ideas that weren’t pigeonholed into narrowly defined genres–long past us? Has the experimentation of the 1980s been quashed by endless sequels? Have we been reduced to simply re-playing fancier-looking but completely derivative iterations of the same two or three games?

Looking at the game shelf of your local Best Buy, it’s awfully hard to deny this. Lots and lots of sequels; lots and lots of unimaginative games that simply splash a fresh coat of paint over gameplay that’s ten or fifteen years old.

But I’d like to disagree a bit with the doomsayers–partly out of a stubborn desire to play the devil’s advocate, and partly because the gamer in me (who has played many excellent games in the last decade) rebels a bit against the implication that what I’ve been playing lately is utterly lacking in creativity.

One problem I have with these “innovation is dead” arguments is that they tend to be unclear on what innovation actually is. Words like “storytelling” and “narrative” get tossed around, but these terms are maddeningly vague. Nor is it clear that this sort of innovation will make for games that are more fun. I’d like to suggest that innovation does exist today, but rather than taking the form of avant-garde gameplay styles, it consists of taking tried-and-true styles of basic gameplay (of which there are only a finite number, after all) and stretching them in new directions. Consider the following, none of which boast truly unique gameplay styles but which have earned a place in many a gamer’s heart:

  • Starcraft, which introduced wonderfully memorable characters and storylines into the otherwise somewhat dry-and-mechanical strategy game genre
  • Morrowind, which with its open-ended world design lifted many of the gameplay restrictions traditionally placed on players in roleplaying games and left players to pursue their own path through the game
  • Planescape: Torment, which took the framework of a traditional computer RPG and used it to tell a story with real literary and emotional power
  • Quake, Half-life, and Neverwinter Nights, which through their extreme (and intentional) customizability, spawned a thriving culture of community-built game content
  • The Sims, the game that still defies efforts to fit it into an existing genre
  • Guild Wars, which built an interesting fusion of single-player gameplay in a massive-multiplayer game environment

All of these games came out in the “dark ages”–the last decade, in which innovation has supposedly been dead. Yet each left a profound mark on the gaming landscape because they took existing gameplay frameworks and spun them in new directions. That might not be the textbook definition of “innovation,” but if it produces games like these, I’ll take it.

The “innovation is dead” crowd laments the decrease in the variety of gameplay styles available. But I think this is just the natural result of years spent refining gameplay styles that were once new and original: over time, the truly fun gameplay remains, and the not-fun gameplay is dropped. It is unlikely that we’ll see more than a handful of entirely new gameplay styles in the next few years; what falls to game designers now is to stretch the existing library of ideas into unexplored territory. There is art and, yes, innovation in borrowing proven game elements and refining them into something even more fun.

My last game purchase was Galactic Civilizations II, an explore-and-conquer space empire game that consists almost entirely of elements borrowed from games that came before it. I just hit level 37 in World of Warcraft, a game that’s mostly built on all the good ideas from other massively-multiplayer games. And you know what? Both games are really, really fun. I’ll be there to cheer on the new and bizarre when it appears (Spore, I have high hopes for you). And I’ll roll my eyes along with everybody else at the release of the 80th game in the Madden series. But in the meantime, I”ve got some fun, if not strictly innovative, games that need playing.

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I’m the [expletive deleted] Batman!

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I’ve been in a comic-book mood lately, and so have spent the last week or so working on a blog post about Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns, the story that brilliantly redefined the Batman character and had a tremendous impact on the entire superhero-comics industry.
The Dark Knight Returns is an amazing piece of work, and the challenge has been simply trying to sufficiently convey its coolness within the confines of a blog post.
All was going well. My enthusiasm for everybody’s favorite caped vigilante had never been higher. The blog post in praise of DKR was nearing completion. And then… then I saw this [caution: strong language].
I think… I think I’m going to have to shelve that DKR post while I take some time to think about what all this means.

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