…who had to see to believe:
But then again, that is a suspiciously blurry photo. The seeds of conspiracy have been planted!
by 
For Ed…
2 Replies
by by Master of Roles, Revised
Hey, look! A new version of the vintage Rolemaster RPG is out, and they’ve released public playtest documents for the teeming masses to try out.
I’d say Rolemaster has certainly earned a new edition—the last serious rules upgrade was in the mid-90s (the Rolemaster Standard System); there was technically a further revised edition around the turn of the century, but it was mostly a re-organization of the rules, with no major rules changes. All of my Rolemaster gaming used the older 2nd edition; I picked up a few RMSS books but then 3rd edition D&D came out, boasting a heavy Rolemaster influence with a simpler and faster system, and that’s when I officially jumped off the Rolemaster train.
I haven’t kept up with Rolemaster much lately because, alas, there hasn’t been that much to keep up with—new releases have been scarce over the last five or more years and the Rolemaster community doesn’t have a large online presence these days. I’m very happy to see a new version in the works and have already downloaded the playtest files. That said, my interest is mostly fueled by nostalgia at this point; unless the complexity has been dialed down a good bit, Rolemaster would be a pretty hard sell for me and my current game group except as an occasional side game. (And dialing down the complexity might take the spark of life out of Rolemaster, so I don’t know if I really want that.) But you never know.
(And it’s no fault of Rolemaster itself, but without the late Angus McBride‘s glorious illustrations, it just doesn’t feel quite the same.)
by An Illustrated Compendium of Monsters (for Four-Year-Olds)
Like every father of a four-year-old daughter, I’m called upon nightly to tell her bedtime stories. My daughter Thessaly insists that each night’s story be something she hasn’t heard before, so for years now I’ve been scrambling to come up with interesting tales.
The 1st edition AD&D Monster Manual.
I realized early on that it was the villain of each story that really enchanted Thessaly. Whenever a bad guy would appear in the story, she wanted to know all about it: what did it look like, where did it live, what powers did it have, why was it acting so villainous. And at some point I realized that I could tap my Dungeons & Dragons obsession to make these stories more fun. So for the last few months, I’ve been using creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual as the foes in these nightly stories.
It’s worked out well, because the Monster Manual is full of bizarre and imaginative beasts. Here are some that have appeared in the nightly stories, with notes on how my daughter reacted:
Tarrasque: One night Thessaly insisted that the story’s villain be the biggest, strongest, scariest monster available, and in D&D, there’s one monster that truly meets that description: the tarrasque, a gargantuan apocalyptic terror. Despite its fearsomeness, Thessaly the Hero regularly exploits its lack of dexterity to defeat it. For whatever reason, the tarrasque is one of her favorites, and I regularly have to invent ways to bring it back for repeat appearances.
Yes, it’s the owlbear.
Gelatinous Cube: This mobile block of slime is an iconic D&D monster, and Thessaly loved it. She was so taken by the gelatinous cube, in fact, that she recruited it as a friend and it has made several guest appearances now as Thessaly the Hero’s sidekick.
Cockatrice: I don’t even remember what this one is, except that it’s, like, a rooster combined with some other type of creature. My lack of enthusiasm for this unfortunate beast was obvious and it hasn’t been missed since Thessaly the Hero jailed it a month or so ago.
Behold!
Blackbeard: OK, Blackbeard’s not a D&D monster, but he should be. He’s a definite Thessaly favorite and has escaped from prison nearly as many times as the tarrasque has. Blackbeard’s appearance on the scene has allowed me to expand the scope of the nightly stories to include oceanic scenarios.
Leviathan: I’m not sure if there’s a leviathan in D&D lore, but I needed an aquatic monster to follow up on the popularity of Blackbeard, and so was born the leviathan, watery sibling of the tarrasque. Frequently teams up with the tarrasque to menace society.
Yes, I know Acererak is technically a demi-lich, not a lich. I’m trying to keep things simple for my daughter until the day she grows up and learns the differences between types of undead wizard.
Cribbing bad guys from the Monster Manual has made me realize anew just how creative and entertaining many of the Monster Manual entries are; watching my daughter smile at the mental picture of a beholder or an umber hulk reminds me of what it was like to first flip through the pages of the AD&D Monster Manual as a kid.
With the variety of creatures in the Monster Manual—and the sheer number of monster books published over the years—I’m hoping this will last me until Thessaly tires of the format. And at this rate, I can tell several years’ worth of stories before I have to resort to incorporating the flumph….
by A powerful Navy we have always regarded
Like every other boy who ever lived, I really really wanted the U.S.S. Flagg, the six-foot-long G.I. Joe aircraft carrier.
My parents were generous with the G.I. Joes and Transformers, but this was a line even they would not cross. I vividly remember the day I was informed in no uncertain terms that I would never be receiving a six-foot-long toy aircraft carrier for Christmas, no matter how good I was.
Which is one reason I had to make it out to the local Geek Garage Sale today; I had heard rumors that this rare artifact would be there. Perhaps after all these years, my dream could come true?
Sure enough, there it was, its grand fo’c’s’le towering majestically over the parking lot of Apparitions Comics, cutting its way across the surface of the asphalt sea with all the power its plastic nuclear reactor engines could muster:
Back when I really really wanted this, this was probably a good foot longer than I was lying down.
Having seen it in person, I can now check off one of the remaining items on my Geek To-Do List. And I can reflect on the karmic irony that my reaction to seeing it in person was precisely that of my parents, when I showed it to them in the pages of a Sears catalog:
- It costs how much?
- It wouldn’t even fit in our house!
Sail on, U.S.S. Flagg. May destiny steer you through the storms of life into the safe port of some other lucky nerd’s basement.
by The dungeon mapper’s lament
In the olden days, mapping a dungeon meant breaking out a stack of graph paper and painstakingly documenting each 10×10′ block. This was true both for paper-and-pencil Dungeons and Dragons games and for early computer RPGs—today most computer games provide in-game maps that track your exploration progress, but back in the First Age you had to play Bard’s Tale with a mapping pencil in hand.
Enter Legend of Grimrock, a throwback computer RPG released this year. Reproducing as it does the gameplay of early computer dungeon crawls, it gives you the option of an “old school” game mode, in which the automatic mapper is disabled and you’re forced to map out your progress on your own.
I couldn’t resist. I’m old-school, right? I’m hardcore. I broke out the graph paper. And I started mapping.
Now, as any old-timer knows, choosing where on the page to start your map is important and tricky. You don’t know which direction the dungeon’s going to extend. So, because my first glimpse of Dungeon Level 1 suggested that it seemed to be oriented in a northerly direction, I started my map in the bottom-center of my sheet of graph paper.
It went well for a few minutes. Then, what’s this? Dangit, the dungeon’s turned east and is headed straight toward the edge of the graph paper sheet.
The star in the large chamber is my starting location.
Sigh. OK, I can deal with this. I’m a seasoned veteran. If the dungeon’s headed east, I’ll skip over to the west side of the page and continue my map from there. It’s not like the dungeon is going to… going to turn back around and head west. NOOOOOOO!
Exactly five squares into this new map section, I got a bad feeling about it.
Now there’s only one place on the page to which I can move the map, since I’ve used the bottom third of the page for notes. Ladies and gentlemen, may I present to you the worst dungeon map ever created?
At least this should get me out of party mapping duty in all future D&D games.
I’ve got to believe that level 2 is going to go better than this.
by This is Free Trader Beowulf, calling anyone…
Also, your character could die during character generation. Or so I am told.
…the support group really was pretty dandy. It was something special. It was founded by a woman who’d worked successively at Apple, and then Microsoft, and then Google…. before she rolled neurochemical snake eyes and a bout of clinical depression knocked her out of the sky…. So she retired early and started Free Trader Beowulf.
Free Trader Beowulf—you had to be at least forty and a recovering pen-and-paper role-playing-gamer to get the reference, but it was apt. Google it.
It would’ve been even better if Grossman had not let on that it was an RPG reference, so that people like me could feel all superior for noticing it. It’s a shout-out to Traveller, a classic sci-fi RPG first published in the 70s. (It’s still around.)
If D&D references have become commonplace, then a Traveller reference is at least kicking it up a notch. Mark my words, next year it’s going to be Tékumel and Tunnels and Trolls references. You read it here first!
by Why Are Gary Gygax’s D&D Modules Still Unavailable?
The cover of "Keep on the Borderlands," perhaps the most famous and influential roleplaying adventure ever published.
I’m really glad they’re bringing back, even if just for a limited print run, some vintage D&D books. But as cool as that is, it also reminds me how crazy it is that almost all of Gary Gygax’s most famous and influential work is out of print. Long out of print.
In addition to the assorted early edition D&D rulebooks, Gygax authored some of the most influential, fondly-remembered, imaginative adventures and campaigns: The Keep on the Borderlands, Tomb of Horrors, The Temple of Elemental Evil, the “Against the Giants” trilogy, and oh, about a bazillion others.
All of those are gathering figurative dust in Wizards of the Coast’s basement someplace, instead of being available to gamers or civilians who want to delve into the history of the roleplaying hobby. From a gaming perspective, the craziness of keeping the hobby’s greatest hits out of circulation for decades is obvious. And from a non-gaming perspective, it’s odd that, given Gygax’s influence on pop culture and the attention his death received by mainstream news outlets, none of his defining works are available. As anyone who’s read or played those old modules will tell you, Gygax’s voice and writing style are incredibly unique; it was in these adventures and campaign modules that his quirks as a creator and visionary were truly apparent. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that there’s real literary value in keeping his early D&D works available.
More Gygaxian awesomeness in "The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth."
The limited reprint of the AD&D rulebooks is a promising sign, as are the promises that the upcoming 5th edition of D&D will somehow bridge gaps between the various editions of the game. And maybe if the AD&D reprints sell well, we’ll see an anthology of Gygax’s greatest adventure modules follow. With the rising popularity of ebooks and the maturation of print-on-demand technology, there are many ways a creative publisher (I’m assuming it’s Wizards of the Coast, but Gygax Games might or might not have some say in the matter) could make Gygax’s work available to modern readers without a massive financial commitment. Here’s hoping.
by The voice behind the filing cabinet
Here’s a fascinating series of posts documenting the experience of playing D&D with Mike Mornard, AKA “Old Geezer,” who himself once played at Gary Gygax’s game table in the earliest days of D&D. There are all sorts of interesting anecdotes about how Gygax played D&D. For example, here’s a story that sounds almost too awesome to be true:
Mike gave a fascinating account of a typical early D&D game, with a peculiar detail that I’d never heard before. Gary never used maps or minis: maps and minis were Dave Arneson’s thing. Gary ran games in his office, which was provided with chairs, a couch, and file cabinets. While playing, Gary would open the drawers of the file cabinet and sit behind them so that the players COULD NOT SEE HIM. They only experienced the Dungeon Master as a disembodied voice.
It’s too perfect—the idea of playing D&D while the gamemaster hunches unseen behind a filing cabinet making his pronouncements like a low-budget Wizard of Oz. The account goes on to describe such experiences as tense and almost fearful for the players:
During games, cross-talk was discouraged: the party caller did most of the talking, and other players only talked if they had something to contribute. If the players chattered too much, they’d miss what the Disembodied Voice was saying, and that would be, as Mike put it, “suicide”. “You could feel the tension in the room,” he added.
When Wizards of the Coast reprints the original AD&D rulebooks this April, I’m hoping to run an old-school game or two to celebrate. But I don’t think I’m willing to haul the filing cabinet into the gameroom just so I can hide behind it while GMing, as tempting as it is.
by Jerry built a what?
I mess up these idioms often. Well, as often as I attempt to use them. Which is occasionally.
In short, it’s “jury-rigged” and “jerry-built,” and it is a crime against reason to mix and match elements of those two terms.
(Via Slacktivist.)
by That’s impossible! Oh, wait, never mind.
There must be a specialized term (hopefully a ten-syllable German one) to refer to this phenomenon of video gaming:
You spend hours trying in vain to get past a difficult spot in a video game, dying and reloading countless times, and finally quit in frustration—swearing by the Implementors that the game is simply impossible and the game’s creators are sadists.
Then, a few days or months later, you fire up the game again and get past the difficult spot on your first try.
This used to happen to me all the time with Infocom games back in The Day. It happened so frequently that, upon encountering an excruciatingly difficult spot in a game, I’d purposely take a week/month off, knowing that when I did return, the solution would seem trivially easy.
And it doesn’t just happen with insanely difficult Infocom games. Just this week, playing an action shooty game, I got stuck in a battle of such ludicrous difficulty that I actually wondered if it was mathematically possible for the player to survive. I died at least a dozen times before calling it quits. And the next day, I fired it up and breezed through it instantly, easily, on the first try.
I know it’s happened to you too.
So, what do we call it when that happens?
P.S. You want to know one gaming puzzle for which this did not happen? That abominable Royal Puzzle maze in Zork 3. Somebody’s going to burn in the afterlife for that one.
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