HOW I DISCOVERED D&D

I was lucky enough to play in a spontaneous LRPG when I was a kid in second grade. It was pretend on steroids. We would either climb under the table and pretend that it was the bridge of a starship, or, we would run around with toy pistols and pretend to be spies and officers in WW1.

Here is the thing - it was an RPG without a GM, or rather the group consensus was the GM. The game started out with each player introducing their character. Say, I am a German counter intelligence officer. See the nice Luger (pistol, toy) I got? I execute spies with it - like this. A mock execution of the imaginary enemy. OK, cool. Everyone would do a round of introductions. Then you build on it by adding more stories about the character. Basically we would walk around pretending to be characters talking about themselves as they walk. Sometimes there would be spontaneous interchanges in character. Two cardinal rules were (and this is where this went into the LRPG territory) was that 1) you did not copy another's story or try to one up another tale and (2) you can not contradict what you claimed about your character previously. The game usually involved someone throwing out a crisis, and the rest trying to solve it. The starship is flying into Yellow Fog! If a ship goes into Yellow Fog, everyone on the ship dies!

I first encountered D&D when we moved to New York City and I was going to the seventh grade. I went to the IS 145 Joseph Pulitzer Intermediary School, and it had a temporary classroom building abutting the playground. The year was 1979, and the wall facing the playground was decorated with a mural depicting dragons. There was a Green Dragon, a Red Dragon, a Blue Dragon, and a Black Dragon running the corrugated metal wall for the entire length of the temporary classroom building. There were mountains, lakes, and pine forests in the background, and a gray silhouette of a castle in the background. The image was evocative. It captured awe, mystery, and the unknown in my soul. On one corner it simply said: Dungeons and Dragons.

I stumbled upon a hobby shop a little while later. There was an article in the paper about D&D being possibly involved in a man’s suicide. I went in the shop and asked about the game. There was a grizzly bearded man and a skinny kid with a pockmarked face working in the store. The kid showed me Moldway’s red and blue boxed sets, the basic and the expert sets of the game. Sometime later I saved my allowances, bought the red box set, and brought it home. It took me an hour and a half to roll up my first character. I rolled 3d6 in order and it was a Magic User. I didn’t understand most of the book. It took me two years and advice from a kid in High School to figure out how to use the percentile dice and how to figure out weapon damage. He also showed me the hard cover books of the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons fist edition, and I was hooked for life.

MAPPING THE ADVENTURE TERRAIN

Before the US Army came up with the concept of the Social Terrain, David Cook and Harold Johnson at TSR designed a board game in 1981, called Escape From New York. It was based on an awesome John Carpenter film of the same name. The game was fast paced, exceptionally well designed, and featured a revolutionary board design. The genius of the game was that all game play and game mechanic folded into telling a story. The weakness of the game was that the story mirrored the movie, and did not go beyond it. In other words, no event was possible other than what happened in the film. Survival was difficult, movie outcome hard to achieve. Too bad, same design was not applied to any other game, this was a one-shot deal, and a classic, the way the first edition of the Dungeon! was.

But the revolutionary part of interest to us was the way the game board was mapped. The board was Manhattan, New York, but it was represented in an original way, using the four-color scheme reminiscent of the Four Color Theorem in Mathematics, but having nothing to do with it. The color of the space on which the playing piece landed on the game board, denoted the type of the environment that went beyond mere geography or topography. There were Red, Green, White, and Orange spaces. Red spaces were urban jungle, Green and White were urban Open Spaces (Green being parks and White, open lots), and Orange were the Cultural Centers, the only places where the players can uncover vital clues. What you encountered, also depended on what color space you landed, the Red being the home of the most dangerous encounters. Similar kind of color coding was used in the early Sim City PC game, where the Industrial Zones were Yellow, Commercial Zones were Blue, and Residential Zones were Green.

This was an amazing concept to me, when I figured it out, and when I built my post-apocalyptic fantasy world setting for the Aftermath! rules, there was a vacuum, and I picked up on the concept. A brief digression here. TSR under Gygax came up with a number of pencil and paper role-playing games to cover all movie and literary genres with role playing rule sets. They published Boot Hill for the Wild West, Top Secret for espionage, Star Frontiers for space, to compete with Traveler, and Gamma World, for the post nuclear apocalypse. The biggest problem with the TSR brand was that game play was patterned on the D&D model. This may have worked for medieval fantasy setting, but it strained credibility, when applied to modern world. In Top Secret, you had your Thief, your Hit Man, and your Investigator, complete with advancement levels. The game was released at the height of the Cold War, but the authors were woefully ignorant of the real world politics and history to come up with something remotely useful for modeling the cold war. Boot Hill was an awesome game, but it suffered from lack of support and did not have a sourcebook to make the game playable beyond combat. Combat rules were accurate in terms of mortality and chances of survival, if you got hit, but the game was too lethal and characters did not survive long, when it was played as a war game. Traveler was too abstract, but Star Frontiers was just too corny for me, and I never picked it up. By far, Gamma World was TSR's most unique and original offering beside D&D.

I liked Gamma World a lot, but then discovered the Aftermath! and Twilight 2000, when they first came out. These games offered a vision, drastically different from TSR. The Aftermath! let create a post apocalyptic world, like something out of the Dawn of the Dead or Warday! novel of the DefCon4 movie, which I am guessing is the iconic Aftermath! movie the way Sword and the Sorcerer is a truly iconic D&D film, since it features a Lich and a workable concept of an underground labyrinth. Anyway, Aftermath! came out in 1981, and its play foreshadowed the moods of the Walking Dead 30 years before it was released.

And so, I was into Aftermath! Two things that the game forced me to look at were geography and urban design, because I was fascinated by ruins and urban decay, and I needed to be able to read the urban landscape, before I can create a post-apocalyptic sandbox for the players. Escape From New York! fascinated me for the same reasons, and I stumbled on color coding the adventure terrain. My post apocalyptic world had everything and the kitchen sink thrown into it. There was a nuclear war, there was a major pandemic (turned out not far fetched at all, as they were planning to use germ warfare in conjunction with nuking), there was a religious movement, that sparked a post-nuke religious war. On top of it, there was a contact with aliens, alien technological artifacts, and a zombie like apocalypse in the big cities. It was a hell of a place, where humanity was holding on to dear life by the skin of its teeth. My sandbox had seven colors: GREEN was traditional wilderness. WHITE was deserted suburban areas; Roads, motels, convenience stores, suburban developments. RED was urban decay. Ruins of big cities, with tall buildings and multi-story residential houses. ORANGE was cultural centers, communities where survivors lived, traded, etc. YELLOW were uninhabitable areas contaminated with radiation, germs, and chemical weapons. Stuff that could kill you and which required protective clothing. BLUE was water. Some survivors used it as a barrier and lived on large ships and small islands. BLACK were areas of alien contamination. Not so much gamma world style mutants, though there were fields of mutant grass, but the hazards of truly alien technology and pollution, that can both kill, and can be extremely valuable to the military and other scientists. Alien technology mostly smooth, indestructible, and inert, but if activated, extremely dangerous due to things like emitted radiation and gravitational field distortion.

ON LITERARY EVENTS ON EVERYDAY LIFE

Once upon a time there was a great forest fire. The year was 1949 and the place was Mann Gulch, Montana. There were a bunch of Smokejumpers, or airborne forest firefighters trapped by a conflagration enveloping them. They were trying to outrun it, but the fire was curving around them. One old man lit clumps of dead grass to start the grass-fire up a hill-side overgrown with tall yellow grass and dry scrub. Follow me, men! He yelled as he fanned the flames and followed the wall of the burning grass up the hillside, that he set on fire. Behind him was natural leader and a former paratrooper, who jumped in Normandy, France, in 1944, and lived to tell about it. He looked at the old man and said, This is nuts! I am getting out of here! And ran on out of the canyon. The rest of the smokejumpers followed him. None of them made it. The old man survived alone. He knew what he was doing. He lit an escape fire. He was dying of cancer and had less than a month to live.

This was the Moses Parting the Sea sort of a moment. Follow me, he said and walked behind the wall of fire. It was also a rare incident from reality, where life imitates great works of art, satire among them. You can read the whole story in Norman Maclean's non-fiction book, Young Men and Fire. Great D&D play should be on the same scale, but it almost never is. I only know of one session, where something similar went on. Most of it hangs on the DM being able to write it up and then present it for players. There is a definite distinction between just fiction, genre fiction, fantasy fiction, and Literature, or great literature. Part of it is class and social snobbery to be sure, but there is a distinction between Literary Fiction and mere Sci-Fi and Fantasy. It all started for me, when my professor teaching the Science Fiction literature class, stated that he did not consider Ray Bradbury and Harlan Ellison to be Science Fiction writers. I asked him why not, and he said that Bradbury wrote something haunting and beautiful, and called it Science Fiction, while Ellison wrote something vaguely terrible, and called that, Science Fiction, when in fact neither wrote Sci-Fi, just literature. By the same token, Tolkien's Lord of The Rings is not considered serious literature, because it did not offer serious treatment of people coming to terms with their own broken hearts or mortality.

I happen to agree with that view. I think that Literature stands above pulp and genre fiction, and professionally published mainstream fiction is superior to fan fiction, and fan fiction is on the level or above most of the homebrew D&D stuff, but any home-grown D&D stands above the randomly generated adventure. There is a fiction promoted in the D&D gaming world (among many other such fictions), that you can roll up a random dungeon and that it will be just as good as the commercially published adventure module.

On the other end of that spectrum is literary quality writing, and I always thought that it was made, when a talented individual wrote about reality. Not until I read Young Men and Fire, did it occur to me, that the real world can cook up dramatic events worthy of great literature.

ON COMPILING

If I was a Lich sitting up in my ivory tower, I would spend all my time compiling D&D minutia. I started playing with the Moldway Red Box set. There were 69 Monster types and a total of twenty spells at first level. The rules were elegant in their simplicity. Too much reliance on luck and AC for me from almost get go, but, you knew all of the monsters and with the few stats and no skills, game stats were a minimal burden during the writing phase, and NPC character generation was quick.

Today, we have 350 monster type in Monster Manual alone, but we also have MM2 and the Fiend Folio, as well as the Oriental Adventure and the exotic and interesting skills and game mechanics are scattered 12 AD&D 1st Edition books and 32 supplements. That's were compiling the data and the unified theory of D&D comes in. I have decided to compile all skills, spells, and monsters for easier access during my adventure design. One of the perks of where I am working, is that I can buy the latest edition of the MS Office Professional edition for less than the price of a movie ticket these days. One of the side projects I am working on is building the Access database for the spells and monsters available in the AD&D. The spells are grouped in schools of magic, and it is tied to locations in the game setting, where the players must go to learn these spells. The Monsters are indexed by the terrain type, level, and creature type. So, when I am considering a desert adventure on the sea of grassland that burned out a long time ago, when considering what humanoid, predator, and an giant insect to use, I just input the information into my database, and get a list of the creatures and the location of the source text for that creature.  My campaign has about 350 skills, grouped by the culture, class, and social background of the characters, who have access to learn those particular skills. None of the players ever seen the big picture, and the Big Picture, as far as the Non-Weapon Proficiencies go, only rates a mere Spreadsheet.

ON CHOOSING ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS - INITIAL EDITION

There were no retro-clones, when I started playing D&D again as an adult. I wanted to start playing a fantasy role playing game, and had a setting in mind for it, but I wasn't sure, which version of the rules to go with. That it would have to be Dungeons and Dragons, of that there was no doubt. Reason being the multitude of monsters, treasures, magical items and spells. I knew that from previous experience. Gygax rolled over the hobby like an avalanche, and then succumbed to his own flaws and excesses. Left in his wake were other systems for playing fantasy adventures that had to be smaller and carve out niches for themselves. It was a meager existence. Consider the golden age of computer role playing games such as Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, and Planescape Torment, who had license from the D&D franchise to use D&D intellectual property, the Arcanum (of Steamworks and Magicka Obscura), that did not. Essentially it was the fantasy version of the Fallout game dressed as Steampunk. Except that they couldn't introduce a lowly Orc or a Goblin, nor a Magick Missile, nor Fireball spell. The deficit was painful, the dungeons bare and stocked with predictable Wolves. A few game mechanics foreshadowing Farmville making the gameplay addictive, and they had a few good ideas and story twists, a few truly terrifying and tragic concepts, as well as one concept that did not work too well, that foreshadowed the bottom levels of the Legend of Grimrock, but that game was decidedly a wanting experience.

So, I was going to stick with D&D for its infrastructure. The question was, which version? D&D includes a number of distinct product lines, which play differently. TSR was a monopoly and in its quest to be the Standard Oil of fantasy role playing games, it tried to be all things to all people and it ventured outside the scope of fantasy genre to create versions of basic D&D for the other genres with various degrees of success. Of these, the most notable one was the Gamma World. It was a unique game with unique game mechanics and a unique setting, and all of the elements worked I harmony to create a whole that was greater than its parts. First edition was a relatively dry sci-fi adventure game. The colorful second edition was more of a fantasy war-game with an established world, to the first edition's ruined universe waiting to be explored. I preferred the survivalist-oriented tactics based Aftermath! at the time. As with all things TSR, the subsequent editions of the Gamma World, up to version 5, went in the direction of ridiculous, where players can give themselves desired superpowers by means of cyber potions and injections. Second noteworthy game from TSR was the Wild West themed Boot Hill. The rules were ground-breaking, because at Boot Hill came out at the time of the White Box D&D Edition, and its rules were advanced and elegant when compared with White Box set. Problem was, rules dealt largely with gunplay and they never really developed it as a role-playing game, maybe there was weak public interest. Since then, there are two excellent indie games dealing with the same topic - Dust Devils and Dogs in the Vineyard. Top Secret was the D&D set in the world of espionage, and it was the worst game of the bunch. It has two useful game mechanics one can adopt to any game - random site table for encounters and fields of background knowledge. Basically, a list of wide fields of knowledge, that a Player Character is aware of, and has a good chance to know the background information in the story pertaining to those fields of knowledge. Say a PC knows Architecture, s/he can tell something about the temple the player characters are about to enter. Star Frontiers was the TSR's poor cousin to GDW's Traveler, and that's about it.

With regards to the fantasy role playing games that competed with the D&D, there were many, Rune Quest, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery, Man, Myth and Magic. This was in the days before the internet, where the people behind the game were mysterious entities you entice to write back with an SASE (Self Addressed Stamped Envelope). I could never get the Chivalry and Sorcery, I may not have had money at the time. The game was complex, and from what I read about it, dealt with the historical realities of the Middle Ages and only introduced dungeon crawl after it lost to D&D in popularity. You had to travel around the countryside, joust, etc. I was impressed with its magic, it not like D&D, spells took rituals and long time to complete, one, for instance, turned a pool of water into as crystal ball under the moonlight, and required an entire afternoon. Not the Fireballs and Magic Missiles. Rune Quest offered an extremely elegant skill system I had to adapt for my version of Dungeons and Dragons. Tunnels and Trolls did not offer anything, except a magnificent list of exotic and unusual weapons. Six versions of a spear, anyone? Well, yes, that would be me! In an effort to make Midlands attractive to all thinking players, I had to make it as challenging to Fighters as it is to Magic Users and Thieves, which means that the Fighter's choice of weapon (skill) and armor had a consequence on their fighting style, or more correctly, if a player behind the fighter character has a brain and knows something of medieval weaponry, s/he can decide on a fighting equipment to match their tactics in battle, and gain a significant advantage over a player who just rolls to hit. That called for the use of the Gygax's infamous Weapon vs Armor table, and I also added a few other dynamics to surprise, movement, and initiative, to make the melee worthy of a thinking player, where a critical hit can take any opponent out of the fight (but not necessarily kill them!). Of course, Monsters get the same rules and I have had player characters killed with a well placed blow. Spear, being primarily a hunting weapon, a certain type of spear will give a bonus in a certain situation.

Having decided to zero in on the D&D rules for its great variety of spells, monsters, magical items, and treasure, I needed to decide whether to use the White Box, Basic - Expert, or Advanced D&D. White Box set was too vague. Information was raw and better elaborated on in the AD&D, so I cast it aside. The Holmes Basic Set was a stripped down version of D&D for beginners, but it had two golden paragraphs, one explaining encumbrance, and the other general advice to starting DM's. The Basic - Expert D&D line initiated by Tom Moldway and culminating in the Rules Cyclopedia is a different game bearing the same name. While starting out with the simplified rules and fewer spells and monsters, it took the players in a different direction, that of high level campaigning, waging wars and running kingdoms, and achieving near God-hood. Moldway is a genius at explaining adventure design to novices and his section on adventure design in his basic rulebook is the best written and is a classic. For reasons of complexity, he could not do the same for Wilderness design, and Gygax himself simplified the Wilderness adventure design down to the concept of a hex crawl. I started with the Moldway Red Box, and it took me almost two years to figure out how to use the percentile dice correctly, but I moved on the Advanced D&D, FIRST Edition, on the strength of Gygax's writing and detailed game mechanics of his Dungeon Master's Guide. After Gygax left the TSR, the subsequent editions scrapped his writing on dungeon and adventure design. There was an editorial desicionmade at TSR, and subsequently reinforced at WOTC to reduce the DM from the Gamerunner to the Referee. For reasons of marketing, most products deal with customizing and empowering player characters, appealing to Munchkins. DM's are encouraged to use the pre-written adventures. The target audience has dropped in age from a grad student to an early adolescent. The scope of dungeon adventure design has also shifted from the dark labyrinths of the DM's twisted mind to the pencil and paper version of the Diablo videogame. There is a reason why the concept of the dungeon adventure trook off and spread like wild-fire. A dungeon map also serves as a flowchart to an adventure - a series of encounters connected by proximity lines (corridors) in a schematic.

The first  edition of AD&D was perfect for me. I expanded I into Post-Gygax 1.5 and as far as 2.5 Core Books to see if there was any new writing on adventure design, but there wasn't, only simplification and repackaging of the 1st Edition. I have the entire catalog of the AD&D 2nd Edition rules and supplements, and they are a disappointment. In the Second edition, AD&F tried to be all things to all people, they just dragged the whole of 20th Century life into the game and dressed it up in the fancy robes of Renaissance. I am not a fan or defender of Gary Gygax, but his Dungeon Master's Guide is his best writing and it is superior to the later versions of it. Way back IN 2003, I started re-reading these books as an adult, and having read halfway through the Gygax introduction to the  fist edition Players Handbook, I was taken aback and impressed by the quality of his writing - his sense of history and philosophy behind his rules.

ON DEATH OF A SACRED GROVE

There was a special place I used to go to go for inspiration. There are other places as well. This one I discovered in the Spring of 2003. It's where the Allentown line crosses over NJ Route 206. It's a strip of back woods maybe 200 yards long and of varying width between 30 and 100 or so yards of some tall trees and tangled undergrowth. It is bounded on the South by the railroad tracks and on the North by a bunch of nice middle to upper middle suburbanite houses with large unfenced back yards opening on a field of green grass and the tree line starts in 50-100 yards. The other side of the tracks is zoned for light industrial use, with some light manufacturing and truck yards, and the empty that used to be dominated by a giant steel girder manufacturing shed. I did some aerial photo research, and the last time that place was used for business was in the summer/fall of 1985, thereafter it was abandoned and sat vacant. For a time it was used as an art studio by some wannabe modern sculptor, who was cutting half inch thick steel plate into grotesquely painted giant paper dolls. There was a life-size crucifix with a faceless Savior, and another one standing among the grotesque images of grossly obese people humping each other. I kid you not, there was a demonic feel, if you looked at that studio in the front office section of that hangar sized metal shed with a football-field sized concrete pad to support all the machinery.

 

 

Outside that grotesque workshop was a totally different story. It was a vacant lot overgrown with tall grass and dwarf pine trees. The ground was red clay and it was a beautiful stage for sunsets. The lot was bounded to the east by a large automotive junk yard, and the woods on the other side of the tracks had both, nice footpaths, fallen trees to sit on, and Poison Ivy. I would avoid the grotesque sculptures and walk around the area deep in contemplation. Towards the 206 was the backyards for a garden shop nursery, and late in the summer evenings I can sit and hide in the back of the green-houses, and nobody would know I was there. I sat there with a bottle of wine and fell asleep, waking up early in the morning to a humid night chill, and drove the one hour back home in the city to beat the morning  traffic. Things changed, as they inevitably must. The greenhouse and the garden center went first. They built a vacant parking lot instead. No biggie. Then they laid the pipeline and the drainage for some real estate development on the western edge of the back woods, but nothing became of it. I did some research on the vacant lot, couldn't find anything, other than that the junk yard wanted to expand there, and they got the go ahead in 2007, but they had to meet the safety requirement for the fire marshal. I found that out in 2010. In 2014, they finally expanded and cordoned off the entire lot south of the railroad tracks with an electric fence. What do you expect from a salvage yard for the late model car wrecks useful for expensive parts?

And here is the surprise. For a long time I have worked on the problem of presenting a wilderness adventure for D&D play. There is a reason, why there is plenty written about dungeon adventure design, but little of comparable elegance regarding the wilderness exploration. There is a lot written on the so-called Hex-Crawls - 43 square mile hexes, enter one per day, roll for a monster and a possible dungeon encounter. This is an abstract overlay of a dungeon grid over the outdoors adventure. I spent a lifetime hiking in the outdoors, and I am fully aware, that colorful depth, variety and beauty of the outdoor environment is lost in a typical D&D game. Do you draw a detailed map showing every nook and crevice or do you pencil in the area and then have the players walk through the generic "forest" while rolling for encounters? I came upon an elegant solution for vivid outdoors adventures. One of the concepts for wilderness representation is the interplay between the open and closed topography. An open topography is the predominant terrain with uniform descriptive features, across which the players move. The closed topography is delineated by boundaries and concealment, forming enclosed areas. More densely forested areas, thickets; areas bisected by mountains, rivers, highways, bodies of water, islands, have closed topography, similar to rooms in the underground dungeon.

 

 

With regards to this sacred growth, before they tore down the structure and enclosed the area, there were footpaths through it, with people going North and South, the back woods were open to human traffic. Once the lot was fenced in, the human traffic stopped, and the area became closed, a dead end back woods with no visitors. The surprise came, when I expected the dead end woods to become more overgrown and wild, for nature to take hold and bloom, but the opposite has happened. Having lost the human traffic (or was it the demonic sculpture shop?) the woods have lost their atmosphere of mystery. Before, there was a sense of the surreal, like you were standing before a painting, near a gateway, and all you had to do was turn the key, and enter it. Once upon a time, I was sitting on the edge of the embankment, concealed by a tree and smoking, waiting for the freight train to go by. There was rain, and all of a sudden there was a lightning strike. There was an echoing boom, like from the artillery. And there was another lightning strike, and another and another, maybe five in all, and they were all hitting that metal structure. Get it? Big metal structure... Lightning hitting it... But the feel was as if something weird was happening, like the artillery barrage from heavens!

Once the area became closed off, just the opposite happened. The atmosphere of the mysterious has left the place. The forest did not blossom either. Maybe it was the winter storm, that uprooted a lot of trees, but the place became more dead and decaying. The dead tree trunks were moist and slick with decay. There are spider webs and thorny brambles everywhere. These back woods have the dead feel of nothingness to them devoid of mystery, and you don't feel like going there. I still do, to walk along the railroad tracks, and the place is still a sea of tranquility, but it's not the same and there are other places that have the mysterious feel to them.

IN WITH THE NEW 2015

It will be great fun getting the game off the ground again! I am looking forward to recruiting new players once again! Before that, I am looking forward to typing the new adventure. I have my own word format for that! And before that, I got to sit down with my D&D notebook and start writing random stuff up. A lot of lightening seeds, and I remember most of them. Overall feel for the campaign setting. Looking forward to gaming at my place with the G/F present. She doesn't like playing all the weird fantasy stuff, but she just loves the attention. I am daunted, because she knows history and literature as well as I do and she can see through the bullshit of my invention. Then there ids the review of the D&D literature I got and I am stopping at AD&D second edition. It will be great fun if I can focus and get my timing together to get some writing done in spite of all the other things in my life competing for attention.