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We're coming up on three weeks since I've written anything, and I wanted to put up a brief post explaining why. Personal reasons, mostly. The majority of them health related. But I've also been hard at work on an upcoming fiction project, and I wanted to share a little news about that, as well.
Incidentally, if that upcoming release is all you want to know about, skip to the bottom, below the boldface header. I promise I won't be offended. First off, the good personal stuff: I got to take a road trip two weeks ago to visit an old buddy from my Marine Corps days. He finally fulfilled his lifelong dream of becoming a municipal police officer, after years of slaving away in private security and DoD Police jobs. He's more cut out to be a cop than anyone I know, and it was a privilege to be there celebrating his academy graduation. I'm keeping his name out of print by request, because he's always been a humble guy who doesn't seek attention. That said, this is my digital space, and I get use it to tell the world how fucking proud I am of my blood brother. And to that brother, I just want to say this: Semper Fi, man. It's been a long time coming. Wear that badge as proudly as you wore the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor. Of course, I managed to pick up some new and interesting germs on said road trip, and I've been sick as a bastard since getting back. I'm mostly over it now, but I spent a solid week hacking up phlegm and alternating between medicine hangovers and NyQuil-induced comas. Incidentally, my mother-in-law is a saint for making me her famous, fresh chicken soup while I felt like crap. I tell you, that stuff is the nectar of the gods. I've also been having my usual round-and-round with the Department of Veterans Affairs, which has been about as much fun as an enema of live fire ants. Bottom line, I've been running on fumes when it comes to mental energy these days. And what little I have been able to muster has been going into the new fiction project. New Fiction Project In recent weeks, I mentioned D&D's fiction line and Pink Slime fantasy. The latter was one of the two most popular posts this blog has ever had, with something in the neighborhood of four thousand unique hits. Those two subjects aren't entirely unrelated in my mind. The rise of D&D's fiction publishing arm was one of the major driving forces in the overall homogenization of the fantasy genre, and the defining of what "vanilla" or "typical" fantasy looked like. By contrast, the D&D game itself looked markedly different in the earliest days, when it was cobbled together from such odd literary influences as Jack Vance's The Dying Earth and Margaret St. Clair's The Shadow People. As a result, I've lately found myself wondering what D&D fiction would have looked like if it actually drew from those Appendix N sources, instead of leading that homogenization trend. What if—instead of generating more vanilla fantasy "lore" for TSR's branded settings—it was allowed to get as weird and pulpy as the suggested setting in the AD&D Player's Handbook and Dungeon Master's Guide? In that spirit, I'm currently working on a post apocalyptic, science fantasy dungeon crawler; something equal parts Sign of the Labrys and Swords Against Death, with some hefty helpings of Poul Anderson and Jack Vance in the mix. Call it OSR fiction, for lack of a better term. Watch this space for more updates. Or, if you want to be notified as soon as it's available for pre-order, you can click here to sign up for my mailing list. As for the immediate future of the blog, I'm planning to put up some more gaming related content, including some more deep-dive stuff into the old AD&D rules. I also plan to continue my ongoing series of post apocalyptic reviews, which has earned itself at least a few die hard readers. And I'm finally adding books to the review series, starting with Adam Lane Smith's upcoming release Gideon Ira: Knight of the Blood Cross. So stick around, folks. There's plenty more to come.
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Welcome back, Wastelanders! This week, we're taking our first dive into the venerable (and batshit-bonkers) pastapocalypse genre. In case you've never heard the term, pastapocalypse films were low-budget Italian b-movies, specifically aimed to cash in on the runaway international success of Mad Max. Studios churned them out by the dozen, often mixing in elements of other popular genre films. Sometimes the results were surprisingly good, as with Enzo G. Castellari's Escape From the Bronx or the half-genuinely-awesome Raiders of Atlantis. Today's entry is not one of those films. Wastelanders, I owe you all a preliminary apology for this one. Welcome to Bruno Mattei's 1984 scholck-stravaganza, Rats: Night of Terror. Spoilers ahead. The Story: The movie opens with a text crawl and voice over, along with grainy stock footage of a desert. And right away we're off to a bang-up start, as the movie manages to turn less than a minute of exposition into a painful slog. I'm quoting it here in its entirety, gratuitous ellipses and all: "In the Christian Year, 2015, the insensitivity of man finally triumphs and hundreds of atomic bombs devastate all five continents... Terrified by the slaughter and destruction the few survivors of the disaster seek refuge under the ground... From that moment begins an era that will come to be called "After the bomb," the period of the second human race... A century later several men, dissatisfied with the system imposed on them by the new humanity, choose to revolt and live on the surface of the Earth as their ancestors did... So, yet another race begins, that of the new primitives... The two communities have no contact for a long period. The people still living below ground are sophisticated and despise the primitives, regarding them as savages... This story begins on the surface of the Earth in the Year 225 A.B. (After the bomb)..." Leaving aside the fact that two whole continents appear to have been obliterated before the 2015 atomic war, the stage is now set. We can jump right into a rip-roaring, nail-biting, edge of the seat-- Umm, credit sequence? An upbeat synth-rock score kicks in as our heroes, a gang of truck and motorcycle-mounted "new primitives," casually joyride across the wasteland. Scary, jagged-edged letters flash across the screen, offering the only reassurance this isn't a movie about a team of plucky, down-on-their-luck dune racers. The music winds down just as our heroes come to an abandoned village. They cut the engines, dismount, and select a random building to explore. 
That building turns out to be a bar, one containing a nest of rats and a large store of food. As the bikers are celebrating their discovery, one of the women wanders to a nearby bed. The large, human-shaped lump underneath cover—which no one else apparently noticed at all—is moving. She pulls back the covers to reveal a swarm of rats chewing on a bloody corpse. She then proceeds to respond exactly the way a tough, hardened survivor of the post atomic wasteland would respond. 
Her scream brings the others over. The women naturally join in on the screaming, and the men stand there looking like the director forgot to give them any guidance whatsoever. After a good twenty seconds of uninterrupted screaming—I'm not exaggerating, I went back and fucking timed it—their leader, Kurt, yells at everyone to stop it. Assessing the corpse, he comes to the conclusion that someone came here before the bikers, fought for control of the supplies, and was murdered. A genius observation undercut only by the massive pile of untouched supplies less than ten feet away. The bikers then decide to explore the rest of the building, finding more rats, a few more corpses, and a basement grow house with a functioning water purifier. They also find what appears to be a master control panel and computer, although they don't know what it is or what it's for. The gang's resident "genius," Video, manages to turn it on mostly by accident. Causing the words TOTAL ELIMINATION GROUP to flash on screen. Rather than taking this an an ominous warning, the bikers decide it's just referring to the dead bodies they already found. After all, what further danger could there possibly be in a corpse-strewn hideout loaded with suspiciously untouched supplies? Hauling the bodes outside, Kurt torches them with a flamethrower. The bikers then settle in for a night in the communal sleeping area. Everyone has a bed except Lucifer and Lilith, who are loudly and passionately sharing a sleeping bag. Kurt eventually gets annoyed enough to send them out to the building's disused kitchen. Once there, Lucifer and Lilith finish their tryst, but Lucifer storms off angrily when Lilith refuses him a second go-round. While Lucifer drinks in the bar, Lilith zips herself back up in the sleeping bag. At the same time, another of the bikers, Noah, is studying the grow room in the basement. He realizes the rats are getting into the water purifier. He tries to get them out before they can infect the clean water. Just then, a literal rain of rats drops onto him from above. He screams his head off, but either nobody hears him or nobody cares. Meanwhile, Lucifer ends up drunk and stumbling around in the street. He falls part-way through an open manhole cover while chasing his dropped liquor bottle, but manages to catch himself against the ladder. But before he can climb out, a literal rain of rats hits Lucifer in the stomach, pouring off of what I presume must be the second floor of the nearest building. No indication is given for how they leaped all the way to the middle of the street, mind you, but fuck it. Rain of rats it is. Lucifer falls the rest of the way down into the manhole, and gets eaten. Back inside, a sole, solitary rat chews its way into the sleeping bag alongside Lilith. She feels the teeth chewing on her, and frantically tries to escape the confines of the bag. But the zipper is stuck. Yes, Wastelanders. You read that right. "Trapped in an already ripped sleeping bag" is actually a plot point in this movie. Springing from their beds at the sound of Lilith's screams—because fuck Noah, apparently—the bikers grab their weapons and dash to the next room. But by the time they get there, it's too late. Lilith is dead, and that single rat from her sleeping bag is now crawling out of her open mouth. Sadly, the shock barely has time to register over the sounds of the women-bikers' screams. Noah stumbles out of the darkness, covered in rats and bleeding profusely. Kurt responds by blasting him with the flamethrower. Why? Because sometimes, leadership means torching an injured and terrified friend in front of all his buddies, damn it! 
In short order, the surviving gang members realize the tires on their motorcycles have been chewed through, trapping them in the village. Kurt then decides the best thing is to go back into the building where two of their number have already been killed.
At this point Duke, another of the bikers, challenges Kurt's leadership. No one agrees to follow him, which is a shame, since he's the only one with the sense to realize that barricading themselves inside the rat infested building is a stupid idea. Turns out it doesn't matter, though, since the bikers actually forget to barricade a fucking window. And as you might guess, a literal rain of rats spills through it to swarm over one of the women. The rest of the bikers manage to get them off her and escape into the sleeping room, but she's covered in bites. They realize they'll need to clean them or she'll get infected. Kurt decides they need to get to the water reservoir in the basement. He also decides to leave Duke—the only member of the gang who's openly challenged his authority—to guard the women while the rest try to retrieve the water. This goes about as well as you can imagine. Long story short, the water is polluted and useless, the rats swarm the bikers and take one of them down, and the survivors are forced to run for their lives. Naturally, Duke betrays them, refusing to open the locked door, and they're only saved by the quick thinking of Chocolate, one of the women that stayed behind with Duke. She actually manages to weaponize another female biker's reflexive, hysterical screaming by yelling "Look out, Myrna! A rat!" I swear, folks. I've seen snuff films that hate women less than this movie does. Anyway, Myrna's hysterical flailing and panicked screams manage to knock Duke out of the way, and Chocolate unlocks the door to save everyone. Myrna pleads with Kurt to spare Duke's life, which he does, despite the fact that Duke just attempted to murder half of the gang. A short while after this bad decision, they hear a man's scream. They think it's Taurus, the man who didn't make it back from the failed water expedition. Kurt and the others go out in search of him, but find the adjacent room filled wall to wall with rats. They also see no sign of Taurus. Kurt begins to wonder if the rats are smart enough to try and trick them out into the open. They decide to walk into the trap anyway, leaving Diana—the injured, feverish biker woman— behind. Kurt says she'll be safer alone, a statement in no way backed up by their experiences so far. The rats let them get out to the main bar area, where the bikers find Taurus standing with his back facing them. Kurt spins him around, exposing Taurus' dead, bloody face. The women (of course) scream. Taurus falls over, and his body begins to bulge and swell. Then rats literally explode out of him, flying at the bikers through the air. At this point, Myrna and Duke make a break for it, running for one of the trucks, which everyone suddenly remembers they have. At the sound of the engine cranking, the rest of the bikers give chase. A brief shootout erupts, and then a standoff, in which Duke holds Myrna and the truck hostage with a live grenade. It ends when the rats show up, causing Duke to drop the grenade, destroying the truck and blowing them both to pieces. 
The survivors make their way back to the control room from earlier in the movie. On the way, they discover Diana, the girl who'd been rendered delirious by the rat bites. She'd regained enough of her lucidity to slit her own wrists. They don't have time to mourn her, though, because a literal rain of rats pours down the chimney. Inside the control room, the bikers find Lilith's body, still wrapped up in her sleeping bag. The rats apparently dragged her in there, in a bid at psychological warfare. Note that this also suggests the room is neither secure nor safe, but that fact doesn't seem to occur to any of the surviving bikers. As they drag Lilith's corpse out of the room and lock the door, Chocolate finds a recording device they didn't see last time. They get it to play, and listen to the last recording of a scientist engaged in something called "Operation Return to Light. According to the scientist, the entire expedition is dead, wiped out by the rats. He says the rats were once underground dwellers, pushed to the surface as men migrated underground to escape the nuclear war. The rats survived on the Earth's surface, mutating, growing stronger and more intelligent, eventually taking mankind's place. The scientist warns anyone who finds the recording that their only hope is to stay in the control room, and wait for the rescue team from someplace called Delta 2. The bikers realize there are still other people like them under the Earth, and that there just might be some hope left. 
Just then, the rats begin to break through. Kurt tells Chocolate and Video to barricade themselves behind the computer console. He and Deus, the other surviving biker, will try and hold the door. At the same time, a group of silent, mysterious men in yellow contamination suits emerge from the sewer tunnels. They begin methodically sweeping the streets and spraying poison gas. Back at the control room, the door finally gives way. A literal rain of rats falls on Deus and Kurt, and as Chocolate and Video watch, both men are devoured. Chocolate begs Video to kill her. Before he can do it, the rats begin to leave. Video realizes there is gas coming in through the door. He quickly puts two and two together, realizing the men from Delta 2 must have arrived to rescue the dead scientists. They make their way to the street, passing out from the fumes, but rapidly coming to with the men in the contamination suits surrounding them. As Video and Chocolate are thanking them, the one in the lead removes his mask, revealing the face of a giant, mutated rat. 
The Vitals: Violence - It's an Italian horror film. Even money says they spent more of the budget on gore effects than they did on things like "safety rigging" and "standby medical personnel" for the stunt sequences. Plenty of rat-chewed corpses get graphic close-ups, and there are two sequences involving rats ripping their way out of dead bodies—once with explosive results. On that note, a special call-out has to be made here. While nothing as graphic as Cannibal Holocaust's infamous "tortoise scene" occurs here, some of the shots will leave animal lovers unsettled. Mattei wasn't shy about throwing live rats at his screaming, thrashing actors, or keeping them near his flaming stuntmen. I didn't pick out any obvious injuries or deaths among the film's furry costars. But consider yourselves forewarned. Man's Civilization Cast in Ruins - For a micro-budget pastapocalypse movie, Rats: Night of Terror actually makes a respectable showing here. Yeah, the abandoned village is in suspiciously good shape. But it's suitably moody and atmospheric. Mattei manages to make it feel abandoned. Credit where it's due. In a movie that does so much wrong, the set design stands out as something it manages to get right. Dystopian Survivor Society - None in evidence. In fact, the recording from the dead Delta 2 scientist is the only evidence of any kind of society, dystopian or otherwise. Of the film's many weaknesses, this might be the biggest. Without any rival groups of humans to fight, there's frustratingly little for our mostly interchangeable bikers to struggle against. The movie is trapped into trying to paint the rats as a formidable and fearsome threat. Unfortunately, this has the side-effect of making the bikers look like complete idiots. I suppose some drama could have been milked from showcasing their struggle to find supplies, but that ship sails in the second or third sequence, when they find a giant stash of food, a functioning greenhouse, and a nearly-endless supply of purified water. 
Futuristic Bloodsports - None, but I can't really say the film suffers for it. It's a simple survival tale, with a tight focus on a single gang of rovers. Sports, bloody or otherwise, would have made the story meander worse than it already does. On the other hand, maybe a little athletic activity would have helped these guys, considering one of them died of "not being able to open a sleeping bag." Barbarian Hordes - The main characters, at least according to the lore the film shovels onto us in the opening crawl. If so, then good news! The apocalypse of Rats: Night of Terror must not be so bad. Any atomic wasteland these guys could survive has to be pretty much devoid of any real dangers. Kurt's biker gang is the sorriest bunch of barbarians to ever pillage a wasteland. Their juvenile banter and vapid characterization makes them come across more like a roving band of detention hall middle schoolers than a group of hardened survivors. They display all the survival instincts of a Hell-bound snowball, splitting up and wandering off alone at regular intervals, leaving their transportation and weapons out in the street, and not bothering to post any sentries while the rest of them sleep. Also, they manage to get outwitted and overpowered by a pack of semi-intelligent rats. Badass Warrior Women - You'd think a movie featuring four punked-out post apocalyptic nomad women would have at least one tough enough to earn a nod here. Wastelanders, you'd be wrong. All of the women in this movie spend their time screaming at the sight of the rats, freezing in panic, and waiting for the barely-competent men to save them. It might not be so jarring if I didn't just watch The Blood of Heroes. But man... Kidda and Big Cimber would break these girls in half. 
Pictured: Literally half the fucking movie
Watch Thou For the Mutant - The "regular" rats are the example with the most screen time, being the product of nuclear radiation. But the prize here goes the ridiculous, giant human/rat-things from the ending scene. I don't normally like to repeat myself with screencaps, but seriously... Just look at this fuckin' thing: 
The Commentary: What can I even say about this movie? It almost feels like a cheat to say Rats: Night of Terror defies analysis, but damn if I'm not tempted. George A. Romero is as obvious an influence here as George Miller. Rats could almost be seen as Mad Max meets Night of the Living Dead, featuring the least intimidating bikers culled from Dawn of the Dead's b-roll footage. As far as antagonists go, the rats just aren't intimidating. This is doubly true of the Mutant Rat Man at the end. Rather than a snarling, terrifying monster, it looks like the lovable host of a PBS children's show. When your big monster reveal would be more at home on Reading Time With Randy Rat than in an atomic wasteland, you messed up big. On that note, the "twist" ending makes no sense. Moments before the big reveal, Video asks the Mutant Rat Men if they're from Delta 2. The lead Mutant Rat Man nods his head. The implication is that the scientist on the recording was also a Mutant Rat Man. That more or less squares up with the opening crawl, which indicates there are two races of man, now. And the Mutant Rat Man scientists being attacked and devoured by the "regular" rats also makes sense, given the movie goes through great pains to remind us over and over again how territorial rats are. Repeated hints are dropped that rats can smell when an "outsider" rat enters their territory, and the scientist on the recording mentions the rats only started attacking them when they removed their environmental protection suits. 
But if that's the case, who the hell came in and poisoned the Mutant Rat Man scientists? The last lines on the recording are clearly "They're here! Their poison! Ah..." So were the scientists on the recording supposed to be humans, then? Was the Mutant Rat Man just being an asshole when he indicated they came from Delta 2? Whatever the intention, I'm pretty sure I'm giving this more thought than the writer or director did. The Rad Rating:
Rats: Night of Terror just barely avoids the lowest possible rating. Some creepy atmosphere and set design are the film's only major saving graces. The action always moves, which is probably another point in its corner, all things considered. But the action is nonsensical at best, and highlights just how incompetent and useless the "heroes" are.
As such, stakes and tension are nonexistent. The only real tension you can milk out of this one is wondering if any of the rats were injured or killed in real life. And that's frankly the kind of "thrill" most viewers can do without. Myself included. Bottom line, if you're in the mood for Italian b-movie awesomeness, there are plenty of other pastapocalypse films out there. Nearly all of them are more deserving of your time and attention than Rats: Night of Terror. Give this one a miss, Wastelanders. Until next time. This little nugget came across my Twitter feed earlier today:  I don't know M.T. Black, but a quick look at his Dungeon Master's Guild page shows about 70-odd publications. You can follow this hyperlink (or the image link) to see the thread his post generated. Suffice to say, there's a lot of support for the idea. Before seeing this tweet, I actually had no idea the D&D novel line had been discontinued. A little googling reveals it was killed off quietly, with Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro making no official announcements and enforcing NDAs against the writers involved. Anyway, Black has a good point in regards the potential benefit of a program like this, at least from the WotC/Hasbro perspective. If the reason for shutting down the novels was financial, this would serve as an alternative with no production cost, funneling money into a revived fiction publishing arm. They could use that to fund the bigger "official" releases. Not to mention the ability to use the platform as a sort of "farm team" to scout for new talent. And he's right that thousands of writers would benefit from having such a big, name-brand platform to showcase their work. But let's be real. What Black is suggesting here is that Hasbro give "official" recognition to D&D fan fiction, in turn for split profits/monetization. I'm not against fan fiction in principal. I think any SF/F writer with a shred of honesty will admit to writing it in one form or another. Hell, one of my very first "serious" attempts at fiction was a Castlevania/Ravenloft mashup, based on a weekend campaign I ran for my brother and his friends. What rubs me the wrong way about this is the conciliatory, "mother, may I?" dynamic it encourages between the fan writers, and the corporate overlords in charge of the IP. In this model, writers aren't encouraged to break out and build their own sandboxes. They're encouraged to keep playing in the one owned by the multi-billion dollar entertainment company, in hopes of getting some kind of official seal of approval at the end. That kind of closed feedback loop is the enemy of long-term creativity. If you write D&D fanfic, and you want other people to see it, there are plenty of sites and boards available. One of them even won a major industry award, if you're after a little name-brand prestige. But if you want to earn money for your D&D fanfic, then you're better off doing it the old fashioned way: by taking the storytelling skills you've learned, and using them to build something new. Last week, I talked a little about the corporate same-y-ness that overtook later editions of D&D, and how it differed from the kitchen sink, anything goes weirdness of 1st Edition AD&D. That post was written largely in response to a recent episode of Geek Gab, in which guests P. Alexander and Jeffro Johnson discuss some of the stranger, more overlooked aspects of the game. Once again, I recommend checking it out. The discussion is fascinating, lively, and in-depth. One of the meatier subjects they breach is the idea that AD&D's implied setting is inherently post apocalyptic. I had to spend a little time chewing that over, largely because I'm fairly new to the 1st Edition ruleset. I never had much exposure to it as a teen, aside from one group I played with after High School. Even then, it was just a handful of optional rules cribbed from Unearthed Arcana and Oriental Adventures, bolted onto a 2nd Edition chassis. In a nutshell, the argument is that—independent of campaign setting—the rules of AD&D imply the game takes place in the wake of some unspecified, civilization-ending cataclysm.  Credit: Photo Artistry By Melinda For what it's worth, classic sword and sorcery fiction tends to make this same assumption. Conan's Hyborian Age is perhaps the most famous, taking place thousands of years after "the oceans drank Atlantis." Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique tales are more properly classified as Dying Earth stories, but the effect is the same: the last vestiges of humanity cling to superstition and sorcery on the Earth's last remaining continent. Not to mention The Dying Earth itself, where technology and magic are both remnants of long dead empires, and are completely indistinguishable from one another. Simply put, without the collapse of some ancient civilization (or several), the landscape wouldn't be littered with ruins for the characters to go dungeon-diving in. But that assumption can hardly be called unique to AD&D. Later editions still feature plenty of ruined temples, lost cities, and dungeon delves, even if they are significantly less lethal than the old school variety. So what was unique to AD&D that made it inherently apocalyptic? What was missing from the later editions that pointed to a post-cataclysmic world? According to Geek Gab host Daddy Warpig, the answer is domain level play. For those of you weaned on newer editions, a quick definition: "Domain" was a word that had nothing to do with the Cleric class back in the day. Rather, it referred to the fact that at 9th level or so, characters would begin to attract loyal followers and build a base of operations. Furthermore, these weren't just optional rules, buried in an Appendix of the Dungeon Master's Guide. These were class features, listed in the Player's Handbook under each character class' description. At first glance, that might not seem too apocalyptic. But the rules for Territory Development by Player Characters (found on page 93 of the DMG) are written assuming a vast, sparsely-populated wilderness as the default setting. A wilderness controlled by monsters, and littered with the ruins of countless, long-dead civilizations. According to these rules, characters building a fortress go through considerable time and expense, selecting a construction site, clearing the area, paying and staffing a garrison, and conducting regular patrols to sweep for monsters. Once construction is complete, these strongholds attract settlers looking for safety and security. In Warpig's opinion, this doesn't just represent a post apocalyptic style of play. It represents a specific kind of post apocalyptic play. The AD&D apocalypse isn't Mad Max, Warpig says, with humanity dropping into savagery and barbarism. Rather, it's at the point where humanity is climbing out of savagery, retaking and reestablishing civilization in a monster-infested wilderness. Interestingly enough, I made a nearly identical point a few weeks back in my review of Rutger Hauer's The Blood of Heroes. In fact, a new DM trying to figure out domain play could do much worse than to look at that movie as a blueprint. The sparsely populated desert wastelands. The clumps of agrarian survivors gathered in Dog Towns. The powerful, governing elite clustered in the Nine Cities, demanding tribute and loyalty. The Juggers traveling around, engaging in ritual combat, and scouting new recruits. Add some roving monsters and some dungeon-diving, and you've got a pretty good representation of what the world looks like according to domain play rules. Domain play was still around in 2nd Edition, though I vaguely remember the rules for it being a bit more generic and simplified. I can't speak for 3rd, 3.X, or 4th Editions, having never played them. But in 5th Edition, it's entirely gone. Which means in terms of game mechanics, a 9th level character doesn't have any more responsibilities to his community than a 1st level one. In that sense, it's easy to see Warpig's point. 5th Edition doesn't presume the characters need to establish safe areas, because it assumes there are already enough safe areas. Whatever near-extinction event caused all those ruins the PCs are exploring, 5th Edition's rules imply it's far enough in the past that humanity's overall survival is no longer in question. But the argument for an "apocalyptic AD&D" doesn't stop there. The Geek Gab folks also spend a good amount of time on Vancian magic. I've written about the subject before, so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice to say, the Vancian Magic system might be the single strongest argument for an apocalyptic D&D setting. But not in the sense of "fire and forget" spells. In AD&D, the only way for a Magic-user to learn more spells is to find them, typically by recovering old scrolls or spell books from dungeons. Even then, there's a chance the character will completely fail to understand any spells they do manage to find. In other words, AD&D Magic-users are a cargo cult, parroting scraps of mostly forgotten spells they barely comprehend, and risking life and limb in the ruins of lost civilizations to find more. Granted, the "classic" Magic-user still exists in 5th Edition, as the Wizard class. But it exists alongside Warlocks and Sorcerers. And therein lies the difference. Vancian Magic implies a lot about the setting, but only if it's used in isolation. If an accident of birth or a demon sugar-daddy can grant the same powers as those lost scraps of magic, how lost were they? How fantastical and rare are they now? In the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide, Gary Gygax spends several paragraphs stressing the the scarcity of magic spells, and how difficult it is for the Magic-user to obtain them. NPC spell casters should be reluctant to divulge their secrets, demanding exorbitant fees, rare magic items, and quests in exchange. It's advice that makes sense, but only if magic is a forgotten art from a lost golden age. And that's the thing. That lost and forgotten nature was a base assumption about magic in 1st Edition. Taken along with domain play, the sparsely populated wilderness, and the sheer number of ruins players were expected to encounter, it's obvious the core rules had an apocalyptic setting in mind. It's interesting reading through the AD&D rulebooks now. Like I mentioned last week, I don't have any personal nostalgia for this edition. So it's not like I'm viewing it though rose-colored glasses. Even so, it's hard not to come away with a feeling that something incredibly cool was lost in the transition to the slicker, more polished game I grew up on. Thank God for reprints and second hand stores...
I was introduced to D&D in 1994, during my freshman year of high school.
I had no idea what to expect going in. The sum total of my exposure to D&D up to that point was vague memories of the old cartoon, half-remembered rumors about the Satanic Panic of the 1980's, and multiple viewings of Charles Band's glorious, b-movie masterpiece, The Dungeonmaster. I knew nothing about the game itself, except for the fact that the DM—a kid from my school named Mark—said it was awesome. Reader, it was. The games Mark ran were a glorious, hot-mess mashup of every fantasy trope you could imagine. Shapeshifting humanoid dragon-kin, cribbed from Breath of Fire. Highlander-style immortals. Dhampir characters inspired by Vampire Hunter D. Anything and everything from the Dragonlance novels, including minotaur player characters. All of it was thrown into a fantasy kitchen sink, stirred together with a +5 Vorpal Sword, and poured over the Forgotten Realms campaign setting, with not one bit of attention given to the published canon. The house rules were a blend of the BECMI Rules Cyclopedia, AD&D 2nd Edition, and "fuck it, we'll just do whatever we want." And rule of cool always trumped rules as written. Anyway, part of the reason I've been thinking about those first games at Mark's house is this recent episode of Geek Gab, featuring Cirsova editor P. Alexander, and Appendix N expert Jeffro Johnson. The entire thing is worth a listen. They touch on several topics, including the gonzo, science fantasy weirdness that was baked into the first edition of AD&D. They also mention the organized "stripping out" of that weirdness, which began with Second Edition. Simply put, there was a gradual separation of science fiction and fantasy elements in the official product line. Things like crashed space ships, energy weapons, and psionics appeared less frequently in published materials, except in certain "designated" campaign settings like Spelljammer and Dark Sun. AD&D became less about the gonzo, "play anything" ethos, and more about supporting TSR's own branded campaign settings, with a heavy emphasis on Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms. In other words, AD&D wasn't a tool kit any more. It was a self-feeding mechanism for pushing homogenized, mass-produced fantasy product to the consumers. 
That homogenized fantasy product has a perfectly descriptive nickname: Pink Slime Fantasy. Quoting the above link: You're a publisher or aspiring author. You've got a market here: a bunch of fantasy nuts who have been so starved of content that they're literally rolling their own, making up these elaborate worlds. You've also got Tolkien as proof of concept: if you can write the perfect book for these people, it'll be an evergreen best seller, ideally three years in a row (because God forbid you write just one novel). Incidentally, I'm not knocking Pink Slime Fantasy. I remember enjoying the hell out of the Belgariad and the Shannara books, not to mention piles and piles of those Forgotten Realms novels. Hell, I even bought a copy of Goblin Slayer Volume 1 based on P. Alexander's observation that it was pure, in a vacuum, D&D fan fiction. What's relevant here isn't the quality. What's relevant is the shift that Pink Slime Fantasy caused in the game's inherent assumptions. While First Edition expected players to mash Jack Vance together with Michel Moorcock and Poul Anderson, Second Edition expected players to re-create and act out the plots of TSR's own in-house fiction line. That assumption is even more explicit in Fifth Edition. The new Player's Handbook has its own version of Appendix N, one including D&D-branded series like The Legend of Drizzt and the Dragonlance Chronicles. In other words, the D&D brand has officially begun to eat itself. Nostalgia aside, that's one of the big reasons I remember those early games at Mark's so fondly. Our bizarre, kitchen-sink approach to fantasy put us in a kind of no-man's land between the pure gonzo of Appendix N, and the corporatized, self-regurgitation of Pink Slime. That said, we didn't entirely escape the Pink Slime influence. Aside from the inclusion of regurgitated fantasy fluff like Dragonlance, Mark's games never really contained any science fiction elements. That artificial split between the genres might as well have been law in our group, and for the longest time, I just assumed that's what D&D was. It wasn't until decades later—when I discovered the OSR and Appendix N—that I realized just how gonzo the game used to be. Incidentally, part of the reason I gravitated towards anime and manga at the time is that as a medium, it largely rejected that artificial split. I found plenty of stories that scratched my science fantasy itch among those Japanese imports, since American publishers wouldn't give them to me. 
Pictured: Pink Slime Weebshit hits Appendix N Science Fantasy Classic with an illegal uppercut.
Listening to that Geek Gab podcast, I think those games at Mark's represent an interesting data point. If there was a transitional period between the inspired weirdness of First Edition, and the self-perpetuating Pink Slime of the later editions, those games captured it. Makes me wonder how many other groups were like mine. Anyway, I want to close this one out on a slightly more personal note: Mark and I drifted our separate ways after high school. We haven't spoken in years. But I'll always thank him for introducing me to a hobby that gave me so many hours of good times with friends. No small thing, for a kid as awkward and socially maladjusted as I was. So if you're out there reading this, man... thanks. Friends were hard for me to come by in those days. You always tried to be a good one. And you introduced me to many more. |
AboutI'm an award-winning science fiction and fantasy writer based out of North Carolina. This is where I scream into the digital void. I like cookies. Archives
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