BALDURS GATE REVISITED

I love D&D. I love D&D world building, adventure writing, running the game, recruiting the players. The whole thing! For the longest time I could not find the game to join or the players to run my own game. Then again, having spent 19 years in a career field, what is having discovered the game at 13, having first false starts and spurts at 14, and 15, and having found the first game 8 years later and being done with it the first time around 4 years hence in 1992? CRPG's were my first real introduction to fantasy role playing. Remember the Pool of Radiance era and Wasteland Gold Box text-based RPG games? I skipped over the Bard's Tale, Ultima, and Diablo.

How time flies. I got my very busy real job and then in 1998 I went to Comp USA (remember those?) asked around, and walked out with the copy of the Baldur's Gate I spend about $90.00 on. Five years later, having played through Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Icewind Dale and its expansion, Arcanum, I strated reading Gary Gygax's Players Handbook again, this time very carefully and from cover to cover, sitting on a park bench and watching Manhattan in the rays of the setting Sun from some overgrown dunes. Three years later I started playing D&D again.

Now the tide has ebbed and I am getting ready to start a new game. It just so happened that I went out and bought the complete compilation of those early games - BG 1 + 2 and its expansions, Icewind Dale 1 + 2, Planescape: Torment, and Temple of Elemental Evil, the real reason I got that boxed set. I have grown addicted to BG1, and now am in better control of my passions.

Seeing BG1 with the jaundiced eye of experience, I am amazed at the quality of the game! When I played for the first time, I had no internet, no spoilers, and I muddled my way through and later completed the Tales of the Sword Coast, after I defeated Sarevok, and screwed up part of that story two by not saving a critical junction in the game, not retrieving a critical piece of equipment, and hence leaving one of the four quests permanently locked. Same reason I did not finish the Planescape: Torment - I found a weakness to exploit, and then the game punished me by not letting me finish the quest.

Playing the game again, I was able to make a better sense of its cultural influences. There are two major commercial settings for D&D - Gary Gygax's World of Greyhawk, and the post- Gygaxian TSR's Forgotten Realms. These are two very different settings. Both are a hodge-podge of the real world's cultures in the D&D's funhouse mirror. Gygax's Greyhawk reflected the cold was and the 1970's, and featured a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. Apparently inspired by the medieval continental Europe and the Low Countries, it featured Elfin and Aryan Sueli, who unleashed a plague on their arch-enemies - the generic Asian and Middle-Eastern Bakluni, who retaliated with the rain of colourles fire, very much like a massive thermonuclear strike, that left behind a Sea of Dust. That world also featured the red-skinned Flanae indigenous people, who seemed most like Native Americans. The Forgotten Realms setting, by comparison, seem to have been inspired by the post-cold war Balkans, with the miniature enclaves of the various peoples and real world cultures. Baldur's Gate is set in Forgotten Realms, and to me it had the exotic feel of the Baltics, from that opening movie with the tower, and the knight in a Teutonic helmet, and the main story of the protagonist trying to kill off all of his half-siblings so that he may be the only heir to the throne. The game has definite East European overtones, with the Berserker Minsc of the Roshemon and with half-Elven Jaheira speaking with a Slavic accent and being an émigré daughter of a land-owner driven off his land by revolting peasants.

Having done some additional research, I discovered that there really is a Baldur's Gate, in the Baltics! In a place called Kaliningrad, formerly Konigsberg (King's Castle). It is a decaying Russian enclave surrounded by the thriving Baltic States. During WW2 it was an SS fortress based on a medieval castle. While occupying the Russian royal family's summer retreat in Pushkin, the Nazis ripped off all of its artwork, that was not evacuated by the Soviets, including the entire contents of the "Amber Chamber". It was a room all finished in genuine amber. Nazis ripped all the valuable stone panels off, literally, 180 square feet and 6 tons of amber and precious stones worth 142 Million in today's dollars, boxed it, and shipped it all under guard to Konigsberg, from where it disappeared. Rumors had it that the SS hid the crates in the catacombs under Konigsberg castle, and before they fled, they flooded the catacombs with the Baltic seawater, sealing them forever and killing off the forced laborers and prisoners that they kept in the dungeons under the castle. An investigation by a British journalist conducted in 2004, claims that the amber room either burned after a bombing raid or burned after the looting Russians set the museum on fire, which is highly unlikely, since Stalin and the Soviet intelligence knew about the location and wanted the amber room.

So, a bit of a historical mystery and a bit of a historical conspiracy and the awesome, wonderful CRPG Baldur's Gate, that is based on the same location, and I love it how all of the identified magical items in the game include their provenance, like the expensive art and antiques in our own real world.

ENCOUNTERS WITH D&D GAMES

I got my first D&D rule set in 1982, when I was 14, and I been into pencil and paper fantasy role playing games ever since. That doesn't mean I played, since then, of course, finding other players was the hardest part. Creating worlds was easy by comparison. I started playing almost immediately, rolled my first character as soon as I brought the books home. I took me an hour and a half and it was a Magic User. I played my first game with my dad and my brother within that month. It was a disaster, I didn't get a number of game mechanics and managed to turn off both of them to the game. There were two games I played in while at high school. First lasted 15 minutes at the high school library, when a librarian threw me out during my lunch period. It was one of the small feats of petty axxholedness on part of a teachers assistant that have greater repercussions down the road - that game was nipped in the bud. I played with another fellow, a future prominent poet and a songwriter, it was one on one, I played in his world, he played in mine.

I started playing in the days before the internet and the whole D&D thing was mysterious. The people behind the books in hobby shops, obscure game supplements, hard cover books and game modules that I couldn't afford, the game designers, like mysterious overlords. I played by all the rules, inquiring at the local library and at the hobby shop about games, and eventually found two games. I was in college by then. I didn't last very long in either game. In one, I was a bit older than other kids and we got another player, a construction guy who was, like 35 to my, maybe 21 years to other's 15 and 18 years of age. The game got rid of us, no doubt thanks to the influence of the parents. The other game was humongous affair held at the local public library that involved sixteen players and had a middle aged mad philosopher of a DM, who thought that Catholicism was a Lawful Good religion with evil tendencies. That game was an exercise in boredom: We sat around a huge conference table, and waited 20-30 minutes until our turn came to see what we were doing, which was mostly waiting. Everyone created their own back story and a character, which didn't really matter, for we all were standing in line in front of the dungeon entrance and it took us 3 hours of real time enter the dungeon, advance thirty or fifty feet down the corridor, and find the mysterious writing on the wall that nobody could read. The game was a failure, but it served as a meeting ground for several small groups to start their own games. The game was like a committee of inquest, but in reverse: In a matter of seconds, an accident occurs, that takes some lives, and forever changes others. In the aftermath, boards of inquiry and committees sit in long meetings recreating the tragic events in excruciating detail. Ina large D&D game the reverse happens: A group of players led by DM sits in a long sessions, hammering out what actually happens in a few minutes of intense combat and exploration. That aspect of D&D is also reminiscent of one other dynamic. In post WW2 military adventures and before arrival of the ubiquitous choppers in Vietnam, patrols were done by large and long columns and convoys of vehicles. The front of the column of the side might be ambushed and attacked by the enemy, and that sector would be involved in combat, while the rest of the column would spend hours just smoking and waiting for the vehicles to start moving again.

Some in D&D gaming is a predictable cliché of D&D as a psychological coping mechanism. Here I was, a large dude, driving a truck to pay for college, boxing and playing war-games with real weapons in my national guard unit, having my D&D character pistol whipped by barbarian giant, played by a tiny little 13 year old from a broken home hiding behind thick specks. Less predictably, I got thrown out of a game, after my thief was attacked by another player character, thief drew knife and managed to kill the attacker with a natural 20. I was not invited to that game again, because I fight with and I kill other PC's. True to form, the douche bag of that DM didn't know that I knew and carried on as if he was my friend. There were two  ore interesting things that clued me in, that there was more going on in the game, than just D&D. I ran a brief game, where players filled out their character sheets with the biographic details of their alter egos. Fifteen years later, these biographic details became real, for most part, contrary to their own and their families' expectations. Much later, I was sitting in a patrol car with a grizzled police sergeant close to retirement and I explained D&D to him. And he exclaimed: Those guys are playing an armed robbery! Open the door, kill the monster, take the treasure! Force your way in, shoot the victim, take the money!

GAME ENDED

The game is on hiatus. Season ONE is done and Season TWO is in Production. It did not have to ground to a halt, but it did for all the typical reasons. I was running the game with about a session every two or three weeks while working 50-60 hours per week. I took vacation days to prep for play, fell asleep while DMing once or twice, but I managed. Then the love of my life moved in with me and I got a promotion, that put a dent. One of my players quit because of added job pressures and family obligations eating more of his time. Typical so far. I ran the same dungeon previously and came to the point of completion and a new adventure needing to be written. No time to write/writer's block. The end of the dungeon had a last game sessions, the reception of the heroes by the grateful Baron and the political intrigue that set up the next adventure. It went wonderfully the first time, but fizzled and I had to stop during the second time around, because there was a very different group dynamic among the player characters and NPC's, and I had to stop to rethink the events and conflicts of the final sessions. At the time I wrote it, I forgot how rooted it was in the interpersonal dynamics of the players at the time and I needed to rewrite it.

Then as I started working on the next adventure for the campaign, I realized that I have created a bunch of new game dynamics, and that those needed a review and an integration in to my DMing style. Then there was an issue of the computerized character sheet I use. I developed software so that the character sheet takes on a configuration appropriate to the character class you pick, i.e. it changes its layout based on what you type into it, and I needed to review how I display my information so that I can streamline my heads up display. Finally, I wanted to review and integrate the mass of Dungeon Master's Guides I have from First to the 4th Edition.

Essentially I have a whole Unified Theory of AD&D to work on, and this is a pure labor of love, since there is no potential for any real world application or publication in it.

HALCYON DAYS

The first time I read the words Dungeons and Dragons, it was not on any book that had anything to do with the game. I was in 7th grade going to the Joseph Pulitzer Middle School in Queens, NY. There was a temporary building that housed the 6th grade. The whole side of the building was painted with the motif of four life sized dragons, their scales done in Exquisite detail, I remember the Red Dragon, a Green Dragon, a Blue Dragon, and a Black Dragon against the background of a lake, a rocky shoreline, pine trees, a mountain and a distant castle, silhouetted near the top.

It looked unusual and mysterious, and later someone told me that D&D is a special kind of  a game and about the same time we heard about the suicide of someone, who played D&D. That same year my parents pushed me to play sports and I opted for a karate school, found a Ninja school, and then a kid who took Taw Kwon Do told me that Ninja school wasn't a karate school, but an art that might take a lifetime to master, and wouldn't tell me any more, and so I ended up wearing a black gee and kicking a punching bag at a school that had Gary Busey's brother Robert as its head sensei. The year was 1981, I was 13, none of this signified at the time, and I started on my life-long journey, that led nowhere. Sometime before that, I entered a local hobby shop with trepidation and bought a brand new Moldway Red Box Basic Set.

It took a while after that, before I played my first game, and it paled in comparison with the expectation of the great and magical and the mysterious, which that painting inspired in me. I couldn't get enough and between 1985 and 1990 I collected every role playing game and every Avalon Hill fantasy game that I could get my hands on. I drove a truck to support my habit and to pay for my college. Enlisted to pursue the dream of the man at arms walking along he shore towards the burning city in the distance. Had no time for friends OR D&D between working two jobs, going to school full time and participating in my reserve unit. But I wrote, dictating stories and term papers into my portable tape recorded as I drove on long hauls and I dreamed of D&D. It wasn't the world of the AD&D game modules, none of which I could afford at the time, but my own world, and there was that longing to play.

I played some, in college. It sucked. I tried running my own games set to my own stories having more to do with the subject of the "Escape From New York" the movie, "Dawn of the Dead", and Survivalism. I fascinated two or three players with my stories, told over 2 - 4 hour session as beginning briefings for campaigns that never materialized. I graduated in 1990 and at that time I was lucky enough to have found an engaging and original homebrew D&D campaign. Later I came to realize that all D&D campaigns are homebrew. DM moved away shortly after I got out of college, I gave away all my play things in anticipation of the adult life and in preparation for chasing other goals, what a mistake THAT was. I didn't get back into D&D until 2003, when I decided to make sense of the phenomenon by reading the Players handbook from cover to cover. Three years later I ran my first campaign with players who never been exposed to the game.

MAPS and HEX CRAWLS

I broke through the writer's block. Almost. Went to Florida to see my folks and did some work on Midlands. The actual story is beyond the scope of this blog, since my players read it, BUT, I brainstormed and had an insight. The reason that Dungeon Crawls, those D&D adventures known as "site-based" adventures work so well, is because they combine the story-telling and game structure so well, that they are one and the same - You create a dungeon map with a room key, throw in an wandering monster table, and you have your adventure!

There is a lot of well thought out pages in Gary Gygax's Dungeon Master Guide dedicated to the design of dungeon based adventures. Tom Moldway's red box basic set edition has the best and most concise section of dungeon adventure writing. Once we get into the Wildernes, we are on our own, literally and figuratively. Gygax DMG has a lot of good writing on running a wilderness adventure from the point of travel and encounter, but there is no equivalent writing on DESIGNING a memorable wilderness!  I got everything there was available on wilderness design for D&D, but there was nothing that capture the sight and variety of the terrain I know and love from years of hiking and road trips. There were books that told you how to figure out how long before your player charters staved to death of froze to death, there were books that described the types of terrain and the abstract modifiers for combat - such as modifiers to being hit by enemy missiles and concealment. And still, the forest was a forest and there were fantastic terrain descriptions for the fantasy forest and the haunted forest. Nobody had the magic of the forest though, the old growth forests with room to maneuver for a horseman and no undergrowth to hide in, the thickets, the meadows with the tall cattails to conceal a man, the pine forest and the aspen and the cottonwood tree forests. I saw the incredible variety of the backwoods in the Northeast and the monotony of the terrain in the Mojave Desert. But I saw the Saguaro cacti that looked like running figures as I drove 75 mph. I saw piles of rocks casting shadows and the noon sun made these shadow look like faces you couldn't capture on camera film. I realized that this kind of detail is best transmitted into the game not through game mechanic, but through narrative. and the narrative is not the same as the table top miniatures gaming. I realized that you can describe the wilderness in terms of its terrain features of its sub-terrain, and that each sub-terrain can be populated with encounters, not just combat encounters with monsters or role playing encounters with NPC's, but also EVENT encounters - terrain events (avalanches in the mountains), weather events (sudden summer thunderstorm), exploration encounters - abandoned orchards and hamlets, old hedgerows, Inns and road houses, old camp sites!

Elsewhere, on The Alexandrian blog and others I read about Hex-crawls and Wilderness encounters that consist of lairs and large size encampments. I read Gygax's small section on random wilderness generation. He recommended hexes 40 miles across and to generate the random "Main feature" of the hex. I did not like it. Still, there was nothing to anchor my narrative approach to, the way you can just draw a map and generate a semi-random room key. Then I had my Eureka moment!

I was away from the rainy and cold New York November. I was in the sunny Florida in the quiet of my bedroom bathed in sunshine with the green silk curtains fluttering in the breeze. White marble house, blue swimming pool outside. Temperature just perfect. There was that feeling of the getaway, of leaving my job behind and of having time. A weight was lifted off my shoulders. I was sitting behind my bedroom table and looking at the open notebook I brought for D&D design and the empty pages and the colored pens. I had a new adventure to start writing. It wasn't going to be a dungeon crawl. I have an old game with a beautiful game board and each square with its own evocative name. I loved it. I wanted to set my next adventure there! The board did not have squares, rather irregularly shaped pieces representing territories. Like Risk! but definitely not that game! And my Eureka moment, Use the hex crawl conventions and anchor your wilderness descriptions not on an abstract hex, one of sixty or so, but on each territory on that map on that gameboard!!!!!

AUSPICIOUS ORACLES

DM standing on the edge of the Ocean. Cold wind swirling sand in the air and an occasional shadow dancing among the dust devils. Stylized Mahjongg tiles dancing in the air borne by the wind. They spin and swirl and clank with a weighty plastic sound of the tossing dominoes. DM gazes at the images on the plastic little tiles dancing in the air before him. They flash in the autumnal sun, under the cold cerulean skies. There is the blood red of the Towers and Minarets, and the light blue of the Goblets or Grails striking against the royal purple of the Bastard Swords and forest green of the Great Bascinets that has a tint of yellow to give it that feel of the military camouflage, the helmet itself seeming worn out with use. Then there is the flash of the gold tiles bearing the images of Shields with an unknown, if stereotypical heraldic device and the little Scepters appearing among the spinning tiles and rotating like the planets in their orbits. These have the feel of metal, and they seem impervious to the gusts and the perturbations of the angry wind and stately revolve around themselves and in their unseen orbits, fading in and out of the Oracle. DM is willing for the Scepters to appear and reveal their fates, to give him a good beginning and an entrance into his Midlands world, so that he can prepare the second adventure for his players. He is prepared to stand for the eternity here and wait, just as he walked his entire life along this coast, carrying his spear and sweating under his hauberk, past the burning cities the wrecked ships, knowing that he is always bound to end up walking in the end. With the suddenness of the cleared vision coming into focus, the Sceptres all reveal themselves in an instant. The DM sees even as they explode into miniature puffs and the entire oracle disappears into a cloud of sand. Excellent oracle indeed.

RAMBLER'S CONTENT

If I was a D&D character, I would be worshipping Farlaghan, God of the Road. I love traveling, journeying, and exploring. I have two major passions in life, one is D&D, and the other is going on road trips. I don't have a mortgage, I pay rent and save on property taxes. I don't have a car loan, I drive a beat up old roadster, and save significantly on vehicle maintenance, and have no compunction about jumping into my car and driving cross-country. I have another blog dedicated to that other part of my life, it's called Rambler's Content and you can find it here:

http://ramblerscontent.blogspot.com/

Eventually I will break through the writers' block and post something there.