|
Last week, I mentioned the idea of running a "fantasy Vietnam" campaign: treating the adventurers as mostly unwilling draftees, gathered up from disparate villages across the kingdom, and trundling them off to hot-spots on the borderland to serve in a rapidly-escalating war agains orcs, goblins, and other inhuman creatures. A dungeon-crawling dirty war, conducted with fire magic and bloody steel. As a brief side note, a fellow gamer on the OSR Facebook group politely informed me the proper term for the trope is actually "Fantasy Fucking Vietnam." And that the first use of the term might actually be on this Dragonsfoot board from 2005. He also shared a ton of useful links that I'm still pursuing, which means this idle little thought experiment of mine might expand in scope as I keep working on it. Anyway, there isn't really a "perfect" edition of D&D to do this with, which means I'll be kitbashing one together, stealing rules from various editions and other OSR systems as I go. That said, there is a method to the madness, something I'm hoping will become clearer in this post. As I previously mentioned, one of the guiding principles I'm exploring in this blog series is that the game's rules should imply something about the setting. As such, all of the tweaks and twists I'm making should create a specific effect, either evoking the tropes found in Vietnam war movies, striving to re-create something found on the historical battlefield, or some mixture of both. One quick admin note before I roll onward. Up until now, I've been working with various B/X retro clones. Some of them are fantastic, particularly James Raggi IV's Lamentations of the Flame Princess. I've talked about how much I love that system before, and I'll stand by that statement. In fact, expect to see more than a few of his ideas of make an appearance in this kitbash. But from here on out, I'll be using the D&D Rules Cyclopedia as my base document. I just ordered a POD copy from DrivethruRPG. In my not-so-humble opinion, the Rules Cyclopedia is the best edition of D&D ever produced, and arguably the single best product TSR ever made. If you want to follow along, but don't feel like buying a copy, Dark Dungeons is a available as a free, "close-as-you-can-get-it" retro clone.  MASH on the Borderland It's been three weeks, and four missions down in the tunnels. That smiling little swordsman from Dragonfall was the first to die. A rusty gobbo spear through the gut, then swarmed and hacked to death by a dozen of the little devils. He died crying for his momma. Bastards didn't even leave enough of him to box up and send back to her. You still haven't written home. You aren't sure what you can say. The borderland isn't anything like your old militia service back home. Twice-yearly pike drills in the village square didn't do anything to prepare you for this. How could it? Last mission, you ended up separated from the party. A gobbo caught you and tried to pin you with one of those poison-tipped knives. You wrestled with him, staring into those hateful red eyes, smelling that rank breath. You only lived because you became more animal than he was. You sank your teeth into his neck, biting until you tasted his black, oily blood. "Dear Mom" your unfinished letter reads. You haven't gotten any farther. Easing yourself out of the bed in the adventurers' barracks, you decide to go down to the infirmary. Stitches pull tight beneath blood-crusted bandages, bringing a wince of pain. Some of the newer wounds rip open again. The older ones hold tight, thank the gods. Three of you made it out of that last tunnel. The healers took good care of you, as always. They even found a bed for Kruppa, the party thief. Kruppa... He was in bad shape when you got back. Almost didn't make it. The healers managed to stabilize him, but that was about it. Rumors said he stopped breathing last night, and one of the Sisters of Mercy had to perform their sacred "Kiss of Life" to revive him. Fact was, Kruppa probably didn't have much time. And while forming attachments wasn't smart on the borderland—your first trip into the tunnels taught you that—you found yourself liking him. You see the gathered crowd from halfway across the courtyard. Off duty kingsmen, civilians, tradesmen... everyone not otherwise engaged in their duties is crowded outside the infirmary building. You spy Bregan the dwarf, standing on a barrel and cursing to himself, trying to see over the crush. You approach and ask what gives. "They brought in one of the healing Clerics," the dwarf says. A healing Cleric? Gods... You've heard them. Holy beings, so the stories go. Mortals so touched with the divine they could call on miraculous healing powers. You only half believed they were real. You only half believed they'd be here, in this gods-forsaken hellhole. All at once, a ghostly hush goes over the crowd. Something's happening. You try catch a glimpse through the infirmary's stone archway. What you see is something that looks so out of place you still aren't sure your mind didn't make it up. The woman is saintly-looking, with platinum hair and perfect features. There isn't a speck of dirt on her. For the briefest second, she locks eyes with you. They're the deepest blue you've ever seen. Like the sky itself... She lays a hand on Kruppa's forehead. She whispers something you can't hear. Then there's a flash. A white light like nothing you've ever seen. It will be weeks before you can even describe the feeling of warmth and love you feel in that moment. For a time, the memory of it almost makes the Hell of the borderlands seem tolerable. Almost. "Kruppa's going to be okay," Bregan says. The crowd's beginning to break up now. You hardly even noticed. The dwarf nudges you. "Come on," he says. "Patrol's headed north in an hour. Some FNG's out of Hooktooth. Told them we'd tag along. Should be an easy day's work. Earn earn enough for a bed and another meal." A bed. Another meal. Gods. You remember when life meant more. Don't you? "An hour," you say absently. Your voice sounds hollow to your own ears. You're tired. Your wounds ache. You know you need at least a week to recover. But you don't have it. Right now, you have about forty five minutes. And you need all of it to sharpen your knives, pack your kit, and tie everything down so it doesn't make a sound when you walk. Because right now, you have to go down into the earth and collect goblin ears. One of the things I believe a "Fantasy Fucking Vietnam" campaign needs to do is portray the gradual degradation of the PCs from fresh-faced, raw recruits into haggard, bone-weary short-timers. But BECMI simply isn't built that way. Like all editions of D&D, it's built around the idea that your PCs will start out as weak 1st level characters, and get progressively stronger and more powerful through their adventures. So the first change I'd make is to the way starting Hit Points are generated. The method is one I'm cribbing from Goblinoid Games' awesome Mutant Future, by Daniel Proctor and Ryan Denison.  After rolling 3d6 in order to determine stats—no cheating here—use the player's CON score to determine the number of hit dice the player rolls. Fighters and Dwarves use a d6. All others use a d4. So for example, a Fighter with with a 13 CON rolls 13d6, coming up with 46 HP. An Elf with with a 15 CON rolls 15d4, coming up with 38 HP. A Thief with 10 CON rolls 10d4 coming up with 27 HP, etc. Those hit points are all the hit points the character will ever have. Or rather, they're the character's permanent max. No more hit points are gained from leveling up. It's also important to note that when rolling, you shouldn't apply ability score adjustments for high or low CON scores to the die rolls. Those bonuses and penalties will come into play later, but not at character generation, and not for determining total hit points. Other benefits to leveling up, such as THAC0 (or Base Attack Bonus if you're kitbashing with a different system), spells, skills, and saving throws, are all still in play. But in Fantasy Fucking Vietnam, characters start with all the HP they'll ever be able to accrue. The next major change I'd make is that I'd remove Clerics as a player character option. In fact, I'd remove healing magic from the field altogether, except for at rear-echelon, MASH-type units. It would only be available in limited supply, and reserved for the gravest extreme. Most of the time, PCs would simply have to do without. This gets back to a point I made in the introduction, about how rules—and rules changes—should imply something about the setting. By striking Clerics from the list of available classes, I'm not just removing a bunch of player options. I'm saying something about the way the world around the PCs works. Clerics themselves could be rare individuals, to the point where no one would ever risk sending them out into the field on a combat operation. There may only be a few dozen of them in the theater of operations, and twice that in the entire world. They'd be highly protected, with 24 hour security details wherever they went. The death just of one would be a crippling blow to the war effort. If one ever fell into enemy hands, a rescue mission would be the area commander's top priority. And if a long range recon mission happened to learn of the existence of Druids—another class I would disallow for the players—it would have far-reaching consequences. More healing magic, and potentially limitless ability to strike at he goblins on their own turf? Area commanders would undoubtedly hire the PCs to escort them deep into Druid territory, in an effort to negotiate an alliance with the Neutral Druids, hoping to gain a powerful ally in the war against the Chaotic goblins. Of course, the Druids might not be too happy to see the intrusive humans from the borderland keep, with their unchecked logging and hunting practices. The Druids may see them no differently than they do the goblins. So what does this mean for healing, then, if magic is effectively cut out of the equation? The way I see it, they have two options. The first is the Healing skill, detailed on page 83 of the Rules Cyclopedia. In short, a trained character can render first aid and heal 1d3 points of damage on one set of wounds, usually defined as Hit Points lost in one combat situation or encounter. The second option is recovering hit points through rest. Swiping a bit from Lamentations of the Flame Princess, the characters recover 1d3 HP per full day of rest. But to put a house-ruled spin on it, this rest applies only when not in field conditions. Characters must be in a relatively sanitary and safe location, with the ability to keep their wounds clean and protected.  This is also where the bonus ability score adjustment for high or low CON score comes into play. Apply this modifier to each d3 roll as the PCs are recovering, but only when resting in the rear. For example, let's say you have a thief who lost a total of 22 HP on his last mission. First aid in the field helped him recover 3, so now he's only down 19. Back at the infirmary, the Healers clean and bind his wounds more throughly and put him on bed rest, aka "three hots and a cot." On his first day, he rolls a 2 on his 1d3. But his CON score of 14 gives him a +1 bonus, bringing that up to a 3. So by the end of day one, he's only down 16 HP. On the other end of things, the thief's wizard companion lost a total of 12 HP. Back at the Infirmary, the Healers again do their best, binding and cleaning his wounds and putting him on bed rest. But the wizard's CON score of 5 applies a -2 penalty to all rest and recovery rolls. Rolling a 1d3 for his first night, the player comes up with a 1. Applying the -2 penalty, the result is that the wizard's wound festers, and he actually takes an additional point of damage overnight. Taking all of these rules changes together—high HP at character generation, rare or nonexistent healing magic, and slow natural recovery times—what happens is that a very different sort of play style emerges. You have PC's who gradually get better at fighting, even as they're being physically ground down by the grueling operational tempo. To help maintain the effect, I'd be careful not to allow too many R&R days in between missions. The idea is after that first mission into the tunnels, at least half of the adventuring party would begin every dungeon crawl as "walking wounded," sometimes missing as much as 10 HP or more. The other idea is that for a grievously wounded character—one who's been denied magical healing—it can take up to a month to fully recover from injuries. And characters with a low CON score may just fester and die in the hospital altogether. Admittedly, the changes made in this segment of my kitbash experiment are big ones, but that's because they're intended to produce big effects. The PC's in a Fantasy Fucking Vietnam campaign shouldn't be eager adventurers looking for increased fame and fortune. They should be wary survivors facing mounting exhaustion and eroding ideals. I still have more rules changes to talk about in the coming weeks, most of them smaller and far less dramatic than this one. I have some thoughts on using simplified crit tables in conjunction with exploding damage die, for example. And I'm still noodling around with how to mess with skills and proficiencies. Anyway, I think you've all earned some R&R. Go ahead and kick back, drink a cold beer, and blast some Hendrix tapes. Do your best to forget the world outside the wire. Also, be careful who you let into your hooch tonight. Scuttlebutt says the gobbos caught and tortured an illusionist last week. Patrol found his body just north of the Ogre's Fist. What was left of it, anyway. But they didn't find his spell book. Consider yourselves forewarned.
4 Comments
So against all odds, my regular D&D group will apparently be meeting up for a session this weekend. On an entirely unrelated note: at this time, I will not be answering any questions regarding my whereabouts during the recent Blood Moon. Nor will I discuss the fiendish and ululant cries heard from the ancient monoliths in the shunned circle by the Old Whatley farm. Jokes aside, adult life just has a way of making it difficult to keep up with a game sometimes. Responsibilities and obligations come up, couples travel, people get sick, and sometimes it all happens at once. Bottom line, we haven't had the chance to sit around the table and throw some dice together in about four months, and I'm looking forward to it. We've been running through a heavily house-ruled version of Curse of Strahd, and we're within spitting distance of the endgame. That said, one side effect of all that down-time in between sessions is that I've been wondering what I'd do next time I had the chance to run a game. As much as I've been enjoying running Curse of Strahd, part of me just wants to dial it back to something simpler. In particular, a couple comments on Twitter got me thinking about what my "perfect" D&D would look like:   As I mentioned in this post a couple of months back, I've always played the game by cobbling rules together from various editions. But I'm going to give Demilich Jim a big hat-tip here for borrowing the perfect term for it from the model-building community. Demilich Jim also wrote an awesome thread about a month ago, one that's well worth a read for anyone with plans to do some D&D kitbashing. The meat of Jim's argument is that the rules of the game imply a great deal about the setting, whether you're using a published setting or not. I made a similar point around the same time, when I argued the implied setting of the AD&D core rulebooks was inherently post apocalyptic. So with Jon Mollison's "Fantasy Vietnam" as an implied setting, and the B/X ruleset a jumping off point, lets get bashing! WELCOME TO HELL My first assumption about a "Fantasy Vietnam" would be that it's just going to be stupidly lethal. I'm imagining groups of player characters gathered from their home villages by the local king, each selected on the basis of "general fitness for service to the forces of Law." While not inducted into the army per se, each adventurer would be given a signed warrant, authorizing them to use force against orcs, goblins, and other creatures of Chaos. Then they'd be gathered into groups of four or five, tossed into the back of a wagon, and unceremoniously trundled off to some far off keep on the borderlands, where the local authorities would proceed to treat them like FNG combat replacements. Of course, as the new guys, they'd be given the shittiest details and the worst assignments. The crusty old sergeant in charge of the local garrison would be some guy missing fingers, with one dead eye. He'd offer up only one bit of smirking advice to the new arrivals: the gobbos can see yer body heat down there in the dark. Best to slather up with grease paint before goin' down in the earth. Messes with their vision. The only other thing he'd say before kicking the PCs out of his office would be that one pair of goblin ears per day buys a warm bed in the adventurers' barracks. Another pair of goblin ears gets them a hot meal at morning reveille. Any others they collect, he'll pay a three copper bounty for. Welcome to Hell. Don't worry. Most of you won't be staying long. BUT D.I.D. HE DIE? With the setting briefly sketched out, it's time to think about the rules I'd use to help bring it to life. I have a few in mind I'm planning to detail in the coming weeks, things like critical hit tables, trap result dice, and a setting-specific redesign of skills checks (and the Thief class). Most of it is going to be geared towards making this setting much more lethal, or at least giving the damage results a little more flavor. But what I wanted to talk about today is one of the most important parts of a "fantasy Vietnam" campaign, or of any game dealing heavily with war and warriors: the all-important near miss. To that end, I have a house rule I plan on using for this hypothetical game: the Divine Intervention Die, aka the Final Death Save.  So... real talk for a minute. I'm a veteran. I served a few tours in Iraq. I generally don't spend a lot of time talking about my military experiences, unless I'm around other guys that were there to share them with me. It's nothing personal. It's just the way it is. What I've noticed about guys that have actually "been there" is that most of them tend not to talk about it. This is especially true of most of the Vietnam guys I've met. But wars produce war stories, and a significant number of those stories are bullshit. Vietnam, in particular, seemed to turn stolen valor into a fucking cottage industry for a time. Iraq and Afghanistan would have been on track to follow suit, but social media and the internet have made it easier to call out fakers. Anyway, a huge number of war stories—both real and bullshit—center around some last-minute, million-to-one escape from certain death. The aforementioned near miss. I'm sure you've all heard the old one about the soldier who got shot in the chest, but survived because the Bible he was carrying in his front pocket stopped the bullet. Or maybe you've heard that same story, but with a flask of whiskey in place of the Bible. Personally, I believe both of them are one hundred percent true, and I believe they've both happened more than once. I've personally seen a man survive being shot because the bullet got caught in one of the grenades he was carrying in his web gear. You see that kind of shit, folks, and you start believing anything is possible. Bottom line, I wanted a mechanic to simulate those tiny, last minute turns of fate. After all, when everything else is gone—hit points, spells, and saving throws—what's left but sheer chance and divine intervention?  In game, the mechanic is simple: When the PC is reduced to 0 HP, or when they've failed a death save, the player rolls a d20. They MUST roll a natural 20. No modifiers apply. If a 20 is rolled, the character survives, and the DM narrates how, doing his best to make it something worthy of a good war story at the local tavern. If the result is anything else, the result is failure, and the character is dead. Of course you can use any d20. But for my own table, I picked up these 2001: A Space Odyssey-inspired HAL d20.01s, from Gio Lasar Design. They cost me around $9.00, plus shipping. Honestly, I like the idea of a character's final fate resting on a die covered in mostly blank and meaningless faces. Seems a perfect metaphor for Mollison's fantasy Vietnam. Anyway, I'll have some more on this in the coming weeks. In the mean time, go out and draft a bunch of Fifth Edition players, crank "Fortunate Son" on the boombox, and force them to roll 3d6 in order. When they say they want to play an Tiefling Hexblade Sorcerer, tell them they only rolled good enough to play a Fighter or a Dwarf. And tell them they'd better decide quick. The goblins upriver are getting restless. And the next patrol is starting in an hour. 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. 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
September 2019
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed