The Articles of Dragon: "Update from the Chief"

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that, for all the fanfare that accompanied the publication of issue #100 of Dragon (August 1985), it nevertheless felt like the end of an era – at least to me. At the time, I couldn't have meaningfully articulated precisely why it felt this way, but I felt it nonetheless. Something intangible had shifted and I don't think I was alone in sensing it, even if its ultimate source remained nebulous.

I was reminded of this fact as I cracked open issue #101 (September 1985) and read it for the first time in decades. The very first article in the issue is "Update from the Chief" by Gary Gygax himself. Subtitled "About the past, the present, and a bit of the future," it's a very interesting snapshot of the state of TSR during the period between Gygax's return from California in late 1984 and his loss of control of the company in late October 1985. 

Take note of those dates, particularly the second one. This article appeared less than two months before Lorraine Williams snatched TSR from Gygax's grasp, doing so just as he had begun to right the company's finances after years of mismanagement by the Blume brothers. TSR wasn't out of the woods yet. There were still plenty of problems to be addressed and it's far from a certainty that, had Gygax remained in charge of TSR, they would have been. That's precisely why I find this article so notable: it's the last gasp of the pre-Lorraine Williams TSR, for good and for bad, and, in retrospect, I find it fascinating that it somehow aligns with my own adolescent sense that the wheels were indeed coming off the wagon in 1985, even though there is no way I had any inkling of what was happening in the boardroom at Lake Geneva.

The article begins with Gygax continuing to report on the possibility of a D&D movie, something he'd been pursuing while during his exile in California. From what he says here, the project was, by this time, still not very far along. He mentions that there is still no finished script, nor any actors or director attached to it. I've never really understood the point of a D&D movie. However, it's clear that getting one made was personally important to Gygax and he beat that particular drum right up until he departed TSR for good before the end of the next year.

Next up, Gygax crows about how well Unearthed Arcana sold – and rightly so. For all my grousing about the book's shortcomings, I know it was very popular at the time of its release. For many months, it was indeed a very hot property and often difficult to find. Gygax mentions that it outsold TSR's expectations. Those purchases, along with the release of Oriental Adventures no doubt played a big role in helping to fill the company's coffers. Say what you will but Gygax understood well what would appeal to the AD&D audience at the time. He also announces the upcoming release of Temple of Elemental Evil. While I don't personally think much of this "supermodule," like UA, it sold well. After all, AD&D fans had been waiting for the conclusion to The Village of Hommlet for more than five years by this point. Pent-up demand probably served it well. 

Though focused more on matters at TSR Hobbies itself, Gygax was still shepherding other D&D-related entertainment projects beyond the aforementioned movie. He notes that the D&D cartoon had been renewed for another season and expressed hope that it would be renewed again after that. Obviously, that didn't come to pass. Beyond that, there is talk of Amazing Stories and his own Greyhawk novels featuring Gord and Chert. 

More interesting to me is mention of "a game and companion book series based on modern-day action adventures." The game, about which few details are given, was to be written by Gygax and his son, Ernie, with assistance from Jim Ward, and Paul Yih (whoever that is). He calls the game "different" and "family-oriented." If anyone has any idea what this game might have been or if any work on it had ever begun, I'd love to know more. Could it, perhaps, have been an early version of Cyborg Commando or something in that general vein? 

Finally, Gygax takes a moment to once again excoriate "unscrupulous attacks and baseless accusations pertaining to role-playing games in general and D&D in particular." I certainly can't blame him for his distemper. There was a lot of nonsense circulating about Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-1980s and, while I personally never ran afoul of it, I've met enough people over the years who have that I can understand why Gygax was so angry about it all. The mendacity of these attacks is galling. I'm all the more grateful that my introduction to the hobby, just a few years prior, was free of this sort of thing.

"Update from the Chief" isn't really an article in the usual sense. Rather, it's just a collection of news items and musings from the time right before Gygax was booted from his own company. It's thus a remarkable historical document in its own small way. It's also a window on a period in my own personal involvement with the hobby when I began to sense a change in the wind.

The Articles of Dragon: "The City Beyond the Gate"

Though I haven't devoted many posts to the subject, Dragon magazine published quite a few adventures in its pages over the years. Most of these were, of course, for Dungeons & Dragons or its "big brother," AD&D, though there were also a handful for other RPGs, like Gamma World, Traveller, and Top Secret. I used some of them from time to time, but, if I'm honest, almost none of them made much of a lasting impression on me, hence why I've never (so far as I can recall) had much to say about them on this blog. That's not necessarily a comment on their quality, since, as I said, I remember using a few of them, but simply a statement on how little I remember them.

Perhaps the only exception to this is Robert Schroeck's "The City Beyond the Gate," which appeared in issue #100 of Dragon (August 1985). There are a number of reasons why this is the case, as I'll explain, but I suspect the most likely is the image accompanying this post (by Roger Raupp). Take a good look at it and you'll immediately understand what I mean. Yes, that's a bunch of AD&D fighters tussling with a punch of punks and Bobbies, including several in riot gear. Just what the heck is going on?

The adventure, intended for use with high-level characters, is, at base, an elaborate fetch quest, with the characters tasked to find and bring back the legendary relic, the Mace of St. Cuthbert. What sets it apart – and why I still remember this adventure at all – is a bit of cleverness on Schroeck's part. Rather than, as one might expect, state that the relic is hidden away in the treasury of some powerful villain from whom it must be rescued, he instead places it on 20th-century Earth. More specifically, he places it in a historical display within the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, England!

The characters still have to locate and abscond with the Mace, of course, but now they must do so while contending with the realities of the real world – or at least a RPG facsimile of it. Most obviously, they must contend with the fact that, for the most part, the real world is not a magical one, which means many of their spells and items will have limited utility. Just as importantly, their appearance – wearing armor and strange robes, not to say anything of the presence of demihumans – will raise more than a few eyebrows. To even begin to succeed in their mission, they'll need to keep a low profile or find a way to blend in with the locals, whose customs and technological society will be utterly alien to them.

It's a great set-up for an adventure and one I enjoyed greatly in my youth. Morgan Just, a character about whom I've written in the past, was among the characters who stepped through the gate into 1985 London and he did a very poor job of disguising himself to my amusement (and that of the other players). Most of the fun comes not from fighting deadly foes but from contending with the completely bizarre (to an AD&D character) nature of the real world. Nearly everything will be unfamiliar to them and even interacting with potentially helpful NPCs becomes fraught, since the characters' ability to explain who they are and what they want will raise lots of questions, not to mention opposition.

That said, the adventure is not without certain flaws, chief among them being its treatment of the "real world." As depicted in the adventure, London is something of a cartoon version of itself. For example, its encounter charts include street urchins out of Dickens, as well as beer wagons and the aforementioned punks. Tom Baker's Doctor also makes an appearance too, but I'm more than willing to forgive that, since it actually seems much more plausible than the Artful Dodger. I'm probably being unfair about this, since the spirit of the scenario is already somewhat campy and I doubt most players, even London natives, will care too much about how realistically it depicts the city.

That's why I still look back fondly on "The City Beyond the Gate." The situation it depicts has a lot of potential for great gaming. There's an overall "rollicking" quality to the thing that's charming, even with its off-kilter version of London. Plenty of fantasy stories were about people from our world crossing over into a fantasy world, but comparatively fewer are about the opposite. That alone makes the adventure unique and memorable, but I also find the overall concept to be quite compelling in its own right. I'm a big fan of the adventure, warts and all.

Retrospective: The Ruins of Myth Drannor

I know that, for many fans of old-school Dungeons & Dragons, Ed Greenwood’s Forgotten Realms represents a decisive (and unwelcome) break from the game’s early days, both in content and especially in presentation. I don’t agree with that assessment, though this isn’t the place to rehearse that entire argument. What I will say is that revisiting TSR’s Forgotten Realms products from the late 1980s through the 1990s, I find a body of work that is not the betrayal its detractors claim, but is instead a mixed bag – occasionally frustrating, frequently ambitious, and at times genuinely impressive.

A good case in point is The Ruins of Myth Drannor, a 1993 boxed set detailing the fabled elven “City of Song.” Myth Drannor had long loomed large in the background of the setting. For years prior to this set’s release, Greenwood referenced it repeatedly as a shining example of magical harmony undone by hubris and catastrophe. Consequently, when the boxed set finally appeared, I eagerly snapped it up.

From the first time I read about it, I imagined Myth Drannor as one of the great fallen cities of the Realms. Its destruction defined much of the Forgotten Realms’ melancholy grandeur. The Realms, at least as I understood them, were not a setting on the ascent but a world in decline, a place of fading glories and lingering ruins, closer in spirit to pulp fantasy than to high heroic triumphalism. Myth Drannor is where this comes into sharp focus. 

Transforming such a mythic ruin into a playable location was no doubt a challenge. Myth Drannor is not a megadungeon in the traditional sense. Rather, it is a shattered metropolis sprawled across the forest of Cormanthyr. Its districts, academies, towers, temples, vaults, and magical zones warped by a magic effect that once protected the city. TSR had previously attempted little else on this scale. One might point to Dwellers of the Forbidden City as an early precursor, though the comparison only goes so far. In spirit, its closest analog may be Chaosium’s Big Rubble for RuneQuest, which is still, in my opinion, the gold standard for “ruin crawl” locales.

In many respects, The Ruins of Myth Drannor succeeds admirably in its goals. Greenwood presents the city as an environment. It is effectively a mini-sandbox, a vast urban wilderness suitable for exploration, salvage, factional conflict, and long-term campaigns built around survival amid arcane devastation. The conceptual foundation is solid. The boxed set offers history, factions, current inhabitants, and numerous adventure hooks. This is all good stuff. Where it falters is in execution.

The set does not consistently provide the Dungeon Master with the tools necessary to bring so large a space to life in play. The maps are expansive and the descriptions evocative, but there is surprisingly little in the way of random encounter tables, stocking guidelines, event generators, or even name lists to help a referee improvise within such a vast environment. Instead, we are given several more fully fleshed-out adventures and a handful of small, somewhat uninspired mini-dungeons that can be dropped in as needed. Those adventures are serviceable, but they do not quite match the promise implied by the scale of the city itself. 

This absence of these kinds of referee tools is all the more striking because the physical presentation of the boxed set is impressive. The poster maps are sweeping, delineating districts and geography. They convey scale beautifully. One can easily imagine months of play wandering the overgrown avenues and shattered towers. Yet, that same scale exposes a weakness. Much of the city is described in broad strokes. The maps suggest more than the text delivers or indeed could deliver.

The background material is quintessentially Greenwoodian, dense with names, lineages, magic, and history. For readers invested in the Realms as a setting, this lore is rich and rewarding. For referees seeking immediately usable material, however, it can feel overwhelming. Even as someone who once delighted in “Realmslore,” I occasionally found myself wishing that some of the word count devoted to ancient history had instead gone toward practical game tools.

One element the boxed set gets absolutely right is its intended level range. The Ruins of Myth Drannor is not for novice characters. The ruins teem with formidable threats, like elven and mind flayer liches, demons, devils, magical constructs, and strange, magic-eating abominations. These are adversaries suited to mid and high-level characters. For referees who enjoy high-level play – and who know how difficult it can be to challenge powerful characters – Myth Drannor fills a genuine need. It offers a compelling and dangerous playground for experienced adventurers.

In the end, I think The Ruins of Myth Drannor exemplifies much of TSR’s output during this period. It is ambitious, atmospheric, and lavishly presented. It's also frustrating. It gestures toward an open-ended and exploratory style of play that strongly matches old school sensibilities, but it stops short of fully embracing the procedural support such play demands.

Even so, I still very much like this boxed set. When it was released, I used it and mined it for material to use in my campaign. Its flaws required work on my part as referee, of course, but the raw material was there, waiting to be shaped. Perhaps that is the most old-school aspect of it after all: not a perfectly engineered product, but a rich, uneven trove of ideas demanding engagement.

Myth Drannor, both as a fictional city and as a boxed set, stands as a monument to a fallen age – within the Realms and within TSR itself. Imperfect, excessive, occasionally exasperating, yet grand in conception, it reminds us that decline and greatness are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes they are, in fact, the same thing viewed from different angles.

The Articles of Dragon: "Deities and Their Faithful"

I'm on record as disliking the general approach to religion and gods Dungeons & Dragons has taken since the beginning. I've always found it weirdly reductive and, for lack of a better word, "game-y." Certainly, I can understand that a more nuanced and complex approach probably wouldn't have sold many books, but I still can't help but think D&D deserved better than what we got in Deities & Demigods. I suspect this is a minority opinion, but it's not one without precedent in the annals of the hobby.

With this as background, I think you can easily guess my reaction to Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column from issue #97 of Dragon (March 1985). Entitled "Deities and Their Faithful," it's very close to the Platonic ideal of what I don't want in a discussion of the gods in the context of fantasy roleplaying games. In it, Gygax introduces a new set of game mechanics intended to quantify a deity's power on a particular plane of existence, as well as provide some (very rough) guidelines on divine favor and disfavor. Even taken as an example of Gygax "thinking out loud," the article is a mess.

Gygax begins by stating gods' power "comes from those who believe in them." He suggests this idea is not a new one, having been "put forth often by others, whether seriously or as a device for literature." I cannot be certain this is the first time this idea appears in connection with D&D, but, even if it's not, having Gygax's name associated with it lends it a great deal of weight. I do know that, by the time the Planescape campaign setting was released almost a decade later, this line of thinking was uncontroversial, even commonplace. I think it's fine in certain contexts, though it's still a weirdly rationalist approach to the subject of belief.

In any case, Gygax proposes that a god's hit points derive from the number of his believers at a ratio of 1:1000. That is, for every 1000 believers, the god has 1hp on a certain plane. Thus, a god with 400hp must have 400,000 believers. Further, a god's "power points" – a new concept for "the stuff from which all deities of the same alignment draw to use their spell-like powers, issue and enforce commands, and perform other abilities they may have" – has the same ratio but only for believers of the same alignment. Thus, a Lawful Neutral believer of a Lawful Good god contributes only to the god's hit points, not his power points. Gygax adds that level/hit dice also plays a role here. A believer of 2nd level is worth twice as much as one of only 1st level, while one of 3rd level is worth three times as much, and so on. Clerics (and only clerics) are worth twice as much on top of everything else, so, for example, a 15th-level cleric is worth 30 points.

The article doesn't go into any detail about the nature of power points, so it's a very abstract way of quantifying a given deity's power. However, Gygax does note that, since gods derive power from believers of the same alignment, this is the reason alignment is so important – and why the gods look with disfavor on those who change alignment, since it literally takes power away from them. I can see how this sort of metaphysical set-up might have interesting consequences in certain kinds of settings, but I'm not sure it's a good model for most, where the relationship between gods and mortals isn't so nakedly mechanistic.

Speaking of disfavor, Gygax also offers, at the end of the article, some ideas for minor and major banes and boons that might be conferred by the gods to those especially devoted to them. These range from extra hit points to bonuses to attacks/saving throws to magic resistance. He provides no clear thresholds or conditions for when a believer earns favor/disfavor, but that's not surprising. The whole article feels very much like Gygax is tossing some ideas out there to see what people think about them. 

As I said earlier, I think "Deities and Their Faithful" isn't my favorite article. I can see what Gygax was probably intending to do with it, but I'm not sure I see the point. Mind you, I treat religion and the gods differently in most of my RPG campaigns, so perhaps this approach was always going to be a hard sell for me. If you liked this article/approach, I'd love to know more about why and what, if anything, you did with it in your campaigns.

Retrospective: Forgotten Realms Adventures

After spending last week’s Retrospective criticizing Shadowdale, the product intended to help transition the Forgotten Realms AD&D setting into Second Edition, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a more positive look at another release from shortly thereafter: the 1990 hardback Forgotten Realms Adventures. Written by Jeff Grubb and Ed Greenwood, the same duo behind the original 1987 Forgotten Realms boxed set, Forgotten Realms Adventures (or FRA, as my friends and I called it) functioned as a bridge between that First Edition boxed set and the newly released Second Edition rules. Unlike Shadowdale, I have far more positive associations with this book. While it isn’t without flaws, it’s better written and, more importantly, genuinely useful.

At 154 pages long, Forgotten Realms Adventures is shorter than either the Second Edition Player's Handbook or Dungeon Master's Guide, but it still feels much of a piece with them in terms of its layout, art, and graphic design. If you like that sort of presentation, with its cramped three-column text, blue highlights, and Stephen Fabian interior artwork broken up by full-color, full-page illustrations by icons of the Silver Age, like Caldwell, Easley, and Elmore, then you'll in for more of the same. If, like me, you merely tolerate it as an artifact of its era, you'll probably be less happy. (And if you actively dislike it, odds are good you never bought or played any AD&D 2e stuff to begin with.)

Content-wise, the book is, quite literally, a mixed bag. Its first chapter is devoted to updating the Realms to not merely Second Edition but also to the consequences of the Time of Troubles/Avatar Crisis. A whole post (or series of them) could probably be written about the whys and wherefores of TSR's changes to the Forgotten Realms setting (which had already been changed from Greenwood's vision in several ways), but, in the interests of brevity, I'm going to gloss over most of them here. What's most important to understand is that the aforementioned Time of Troubles involved the fall of the gods from their Outer Planar homes to the Realms, thereby throwing the setting into chaos.

That chaos was intended by TSR as cover for introducing changes to the Forgotten Realms. Some of those changes were necessitated by changes in the rules of Second Edition, while others were to make the setting more amenable to the "angry mothers from heck," who'd been plaguing the game almost since its inception. Given that, Forgotten Realms Adventures isn't a completely coherent book. It's written and presented more like one of those annual encyclopedia updates some of us probably remember from our youths. The goal here is to give players and Dungeon Masters involved in Realms campaigns with all the rules and setting information necessary to use it with the newly-released 2e – at least until the release of a natively 2e boxed setting in 1993.

That first chapter is actually pretty good in my opinion, largely delivering on the promise of Second Edition to make AD&D more flexible and receptive to setting-specific changes. So, there's discussion on how, for example, certain classes fit into the Realms and what 2e options for them should be employed. Chapter 2 expands on this approach by focusing on priests, whose powers and abilities depend heavily on the details of the setting. Those first two chapters are nearly forty pages long and, while that might seem like a lot, most of the material is only vital if you're making use of a specific character class in play. That's why I made the comparison with those old encyclopedia updates. Forgotten Realms Adventures is not a book you're meant to read cover to cover but refer to when needed.

As a setting, the Forgotten Realms is known for two things: the prevalence of magic and Ed Greenwood's love of setting detail. The bulk of the book provides both in copious amounts. Chapter 3 offers up many, many new wizard spells, while Chapter 4 describes two dozen settlements, large and small, within the setting. These descriptions include both a high-level map of the location and a key of important places and people within it. These are very useful and something I appreciated at the time, when I was refereeing a Realms campaign. Chapter 5 looks at several important secret societies within the setting and Chapter 6 looks at gems and jewelry, a topic Greenwood had previously covered in issue #72 of Dragon (April 1983).

As I said, FRA is a mixed bag of content. It's not as well presented as, say, Dragonlance Adventures, but neither is it the mess that was Greyhawk Adventures. It's not really a stand-alone book. It's clearly written for people who are already making use of the Forgotten Realms setting and who already know its ins and outs. For those people – and I was one of them – this was a good and useful addition to my AD&D library and I regularly turned to it in play. However, it has minimal to no utility for anyone else. It's completely useless as a primer to the Realms, which is almost assuredly the reason TSR decided a couple of years later to release a new and expanded boxed version of the setting (about which I'll talk next week). Of course, that was never the book's purpose and I think it unfair to judge it on that basis. Viewed as an update to an existing setting, I thought it quite decent and, even after all these years, still have considerable affection for it, warts and all.

The Articles of Dragon: "New Jobs for Demi-humans"

I'm just a few years shy of having played, in one form or another, Dungeons & Dragons for half a century (yes, I am old). In all the years that I've played the game, there have been certain constants, chief among them being complaints about aspects of their rules that some players have found ridiculous. A very well-known example of what I'm talking about is alignment, the vocal dislike of which has been commonplace since at least the mid-1980s and probably longer. Almost as common a target for criticism are class restrictions and level limits for demihuman characters. 

Personally, I've never had a problem with them and still don't, but there's no denying that no edition of the game has ever done a good job of explaining why they were included, let alone necessary. Consequently, like alignment – another poorly explained game concept – I've heard complaints about dwarves not being allowed to be paladins or elves being worse magic-users than humans for decades. I suspect Gary Gygax heard them a lot too, judging from how often these questions came up in his "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column in Dragon magazine. 

For the most part, Gary was pretty adamant in his belief that D&D's implied setting was humanocentric, thereby justifying demihuman class restrictions and level limits. However, as the years wore on, he started to soften his stance, especially in the years prior to the publication of Unearthed Arcana, as he was more seriously pondering the future direction of AD&D – and by "soften," I mean he more or less capitulated on the matter entirely. Unearthed Arcana (and the articles that preceded it) more or less opened the floodgates to demihumans being able to enter most classes and achieve much higher levels in them than had previously been allowed.

The prudence of that can be debated. However, Gygax goes further in his next article on the subject. “New Jobs for Demi-humans” appeared in issue #96 of Dragon (April 1985), in which he loosens level limits for non-humans yet again, this time by tying them to high ability scores. For example, after allowing all demihumans to become clerics, he connects their maximum attainable level to their Wisdom. The higher the score, the higher the level cap. He even provides a chart laying out the precise relationship between Wisdom and maximum level, with the highest score listed as 20.

It’s possible Gygax thought he was being clever here. By reserving the highest levels for characters with extraordinary ability scores, he may have imagined he was preventing the vast majority of demihumans from ever reaching parity with humans. However, if my own experience is anything to go by, all this actually did was subtly encourage ability score inflation, something to which AD&D was already prone, thanks in part to its methods of ability score generation and its profusion of sub-classes with steep ability score requirements.

To me, this is a much worse sin than merely allowing an elf to be a ranger or a halfling to be a druid. Doing so simply expands the range of character concepts. By contrast, tying level limits to high ability scores undermines the logic that supposedly motivated level limits in the first place while simultaneously pushing players toward the very sort of min-maxing behavior that AD&D’s design otherwise tries to discourage. If you tell a player that the only way for his dwarf cleric to reach 11th level is to have an 18 Wisdom, you are no longer meaningfully limiting demihumans so much as ensuring that all dwarf clerics will eventually 18 Wisdom, one way or another.

Players being what they are respond to game mechanical incentives. They seek out every legal method of getting the desired high scores, whether rolling and rerolling until they get what they want, using the aforementioned generous generation methods, using wish spells, magic tomes, or anything else the Dungeon Master permits. The result is not a world in which humans remain the assumed norm, with demihumans as colorful exceptions. Instead, you get a world in which ability scores creep upward across the board, because the game itself makes it clear that high scores are not merely beneficial but necessary to avoid being mechanically shortchanged.

In other words, this approach doesn’t preserve the humanocentric assumptions Gygax continued to claim were his rationale. Instead, it undermines it and encourages players of demihuman characters to look for every loophole possible to achieve their ends. Most importantly, it takes what had originally been a blunt piece of design – demihumans shouldn't outshine humans – and replaces it with something far more corrosive: a system that appears to be about setting and balance, but is instead about gaming the numbers.

Needless to say, I was not a fan of this article or this part of Unearthed Arcana when it was eventually published and I'm not a fan of it now. I understand why Gygax may have felt the need to write it, but that does little to affect my feelings in a positive direction. This wasn't the first time this had happened, of course, nor would it be the last, but, in retrospect, it seems clear that we were probably lucky never to have got a Gygaxian Second Edition. I suspect it might not have liked it as much as I imagined I would have at the time.

Heart and Soul

A few weeks ago, one of my readers sent me a link to an old article from 2017 about the difficulties of playing Dungeons & Dragons behind bars. I can't be certain, but I probably saw this article when it was first published and I'd be surprised if many of you hadn't also seen it. It's an interesting piece of journalism on a number of levels, including its insights into how – and how much – RPGs are played in prisons. I knew this, of course. Back in the '90s, the owners of my local game store regularly sent packages of roleplaying games to a correctional facility that permitted their inmates to play them. If you think about it, this only makes sense. Convicts have a lot of time on their hands and RPGs are a great way to pass that time. In some respects, it's not too different from the amount of gaming that happens on military bases, where off-duty personnel have long stretches of downtime and limited entertainment options. 

The linked article focuses almost exclusively on the difficulties of obtaining and using dice within prisons, for the obvious reason that dice are often used for gambling and similar illicit activities. That's a genuinely fascinating topic in itself and almost worthy of a post on its own (not least because one of the solutions was the use of chits, like those in my beloved Holmes set). However, as I read the article, what struck me was that there was no clear mention of what the prisoners were using for rules. Do they have rulebooks? I assume they must, right? How else could they play D&D?

A common topic of discussion among gamers is their "desert island" RPG book, the one rulebook they'd want to have with them if they were stranded in a remote locale for an extended period of time. (Mine is The Traveller Book, by the way.)  This makes me think about a different but related topic: how necessary rulebooks really are and how I often I actually refer to them while playing. What if, instead of asking what single rulebook you'd want to have with you on a desert island, we instead ask, "What roleplaying game could you play without recourse to any rulebook?" That's a different question, but no less interesting a one. 

For myself and I suspect most people reading this, the answer is probably D&D. I've been playing Dungeons & Dragons in one form or another for more than 45 years. From the ages of 10 till 17, it was probably the activity, aside from going to school, in which I spent the most time. Consequently, the basic rules of D&D, its foundations and superstructure, if you will, are firmly embedded in my brain – so much so, in fact, that I bet I could reproduce many of its tables and charts from memory. Not all of them, of course, but enough of them that I'm not sure anyone would notice or mind. If they did, it's only because they remember the rules even better and I'd happily use their recollections to improve my own.

Again, I'll reiterate that there are many aspects of D&D, like the minute specifics of spells or monster stats, that I probably couldn't cite solely through mental recall. I don't pretend to have a photographic memory and, even if I did, all editions of D&D, even OD&D, have too many little bits and pieces for anyone to remember them all. However, I'm not sure it's necessary to do so. While playing, I think most of us kind of wing it anyway and, so long as our approximations of the rules don't deviate too much from everyone else's own doodle memories of the rules, it's generally good enough. My lifelong experience is that the specifics of the rules matter only when there's a dispute (or when playing with children, real or metaphorical).

The longer a game has been part of your life and the longer you've played it, the more it becomes something like a folk tradition rather than a set of instructions. People start to carry "the rules" around in their heads, even when those rules are "wrong," according to the text of the rulebooks. How often have you or one of your friends been surprised to discover that this or that rule didn't, according to the text, work the way you thought it did? How long were you playing D&D "wrong" in one way or another? I know I could offer many examples of rules I learned as a kid – or thought I had – and continued to do for years before someone more knowledgeable than I pointed out I was mistaken. I can't be the only one for whom this was the case.

I think this is fine. I'm not simply absolving myself for years of being mistaken about how dragon breath works in AD&D, for example. Rather, I'm saying that, at the end of the day, I don't think it matters whether you use all the game's rules and do so correctly, so long as everyone who's playing is satisfied with the results. I have zero interest in policing anyone else's fun, especially since, as I said, I make and no doubt will continue to make all sorts of errors in remembering and adjudicating rules. I don't enjoy that sort of thing and, frankly, have a hard believing that anyone does.

All of which leads me back to that desert island question I mentioned above. It’s one thing to ask what game you’d want to bring with you. However, it’s another one to ask what game you could bring with you in your head. I think that's a much more interesting question, because it speaks to the games you've played the most and that, by playing, have become a part of you. For me, I think the only answer could be Dungeons & Dragons, as it's the only RPG that is both simple enough to remember and that I've played enough over the decades that it has embedded itself deep within my soul. I'd love to have been able to say Traveller, too, but I'm not sure that's the case. 

What about you? What roleplaying game could you run almost entirely from memory without reference to any rulebooks?

Retrospective: Shadowdale

Since I alluded in yesterday’s post to a shift in how TSR approached the Forgotten Realms, it seems worthwhile to examine the point at which that shift became unmistakable: Shadowdale, the 1989 AD&D module by Ed Greenwood. The first of three linked adventures intended to usher the setting into Second Edition, Shadowdale also served to advance the “Time of Troubles” metaplot through which TSR fundamentally reshaped the Realms. Lest anyone think otherwise, let state at the outset that, as an adventure, Shadowdale is deeply flawed. As a historical artifact, however, it is far more compelling, marking a decisive change in how the Forgotten Realms was framed and understood, both by TSR and its audience.

In many respects, Shadowdale is not really an adventure module at all, at least not in the sense that term had traditionally been understood. Rather than presenting a locale to be explored or a problem to be solved, Shadowdale instead serves primarily as a vehicle for presenting unfolding setting events over which the player characters have no control. Certainly, the characters are present during moments of great importance, like the fall of the gods to Toril or the assault on Shadowdale by the Zhentarim, but their role is largely one of observation. Outcomes are predetermined, major NPCs dominate the action, and the larger flow of events proceeds regardless of player choice. The module reads less like an invitation to adventure than as a dramatization of a story someone else has already decided.

This represents a sharp departure from earlier presentations of the Forgotten Realms. In the version of the Realms seen in Greenwood’s many Dragon articles, the 1987 campaign set, and its early supplements, the Realms functioned as a richly detailed backdrop rather than an unfolding narrative. History was largely static, providing a deep reservoir of implications, ruins, and grudges for Dungeon Masters to draw upon. Even powerful NPCs, such as the much-derided Elminster, were framed less as protagonists than as fixtures of the setting. They were figures with their own agendas, but not the only drivers of action within the setting. There was still plenty of scope for the player characters to leave their marks on the world.

Shadowdale signals a shift away from that understanding. With the Time of Troubles, the Realms acquired a timeline with canonical turning points and inevitable outcomes. The fall and return of the gods is more than a bit of background; it's a story to be told and told in a particular way. The module establishes that such events will happen whether or not the players intervene, as well as that future products will assume they have happened exactly as written. In doing so, it subtly but decisively shifts ownership of the setting away from DMs and players and toward the publisher.

This is not simply a matter of railroading, though Shadowdale certainly does that. The deeper issue is one of priority. The module is designed to support novels, sourcebooks, and future adventures rather than to stand on its own as a flexible piece of play material to inspire. The prominence of NPCs makes sense in this context, because they are central to TSR's narrative of the Realms, but their dominance leaves little room for the player characters to matter in any meaningful way. At best, the PCs can assist, but, more often, they will simply, as I said above, observe.

I believe it would be deeply unfair to lay all of this at Ed Greenwood's feet. In retrospect, Shadowdale reads less like an expression of his original conception of the Forgotten Realms than like a compromise between that earlier vision and TSR’s late-80s priorities. Greenwood’s affection for his NPCs and his fondness for intricate lore were always present, but earlier Realms material generally kept these elements in the background. Here, under the pressure to launch Second Edition with a bang and to synchronize the setting with an ever-expanding range of novels, those tendencies are brought to the fore. The result is a Realms that feels less like a setting to be explored and more like a story to be witnessed.

Shadowdale and its sequels offer little opportunity for meaningful choice, improvisation, or emergent play. Encounters are often structured to showcase NPC competence rather than to test player ingenuity. Deviating from the expected course of events is not merely difficult but implicitly discouraged, as doing so threatens the integrity of the metaplot the module exists to establish. This is admittedly not new territory. TSR had been down this path already with Dragonlance, but here it feels even more jarring, at least to me, perhaps because Krynn only ever existed as a vehicle for storytelling whereas the Forgotten Realms was intended as something more open.

For all these shortcomings and more, Shadowdale is nevertheless important. Its influence was profound and long-lasting. It set the template for how the Forgotten Realms would be handled throughout much of the Second Edition era. For players and DMs who enjoyed that approach, the module represented an exciting moment of transformation. For others, especially those of us who valued the older conception of the Realms as a flexible sandbox, it marks the beginning of an estrangement that would only deepen in the years to come.

Seen in retrospect, Shadowdale is, therefore, best understood as a turning point rather than as a mediocre adventure. It is the moment when the Forgotten Realms decisively stopped being merely a place where adventures happened and became, instead, a stage for stories to be told. Whether that change constitutes progress or decline is ultimately a matter of taste. What is beyond dispute is that, after Shadowdale, the Realms would never quite be the same again.

The Articles of Dragon: "Into the Forgotten Realms"

I may be mistaken in this, but I don't believe I've ever featured an adventure in any of my previous entries in The Articles of Dragon series. If I am correct, then that's unfortunate in a certain respect, as Ed Greenwood's "Into the Forgotten Realms," which first appeared in issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), isn't a very good adventure – or, more charitably, it isn't a particularly notable adventure, except in one way: it's the very first published scenario set in the Realms. That alone is why I’ve chosen to write about it today and why I still remember it more than forty years later.

Now, I know that for many fans of old school Dungeons & Dragons, the Realms are every bit as anathema as Krynn and I can't completely fault them for that opinion, though I don't share it. I'm an unrepentant booster of the Realms or at least the Realms as they were in the pages of Dragon and in the days before the Time of Troubles did irreparable damage to Greenwood's original vision. (Yes, yes, I know TSR made lots of changes to the setting from the very beginning, but there's still a clear dividing line between the Realms before 1989 and after.)

I'd been reading about the Forgotten Realms through Greenwood's many articles since "Pages from the Mages" appeared in the very first issue of Dragon I ever owned. I enjoyed them for a number of reasons, but one of the biggest was their feigned depth. Greenwood sprinkled all his articles with the names of rulers and battles, references to gods and monsters, and allusions to historical events without ever explaining them in depth. He gave the impression that his setting was both broad and deep, filled with detail on which he could draw for his engaging articles. Greenwood's occasional references to his home campaign were similarly intriguing and I often found myself wanting to know more about it.

This is why "Into the Forgotten Realms," for all its flaws as an adventure, was so compelling to me. Here, at last. Greenwood was showing us something a bit more practical, if that's the word, something that showed off how he used all this lore he'd accumulated over the years. We got to see a little bit of the ruined School of Wizardry within haunted Myth Drannor, not to mention a glimpse of the politics of the Dalelands. It wasn't a lot, to be sure, but it was enough of a taste that I felt like I'd been given some additional insight into the Realms as an AD&D setting rather than as fodder for magazine articles. This was the Forgotten Realms as she was played, so to speak, and that was no small thing to my fifteen year-old self.

As I said, the adventure itself is nothing amazing. It's basically just a dungeon crawl through a magical ruin filled with monsters and traps – pretty basic stuff, all things considered. Furthermore, the adventure was originally written for an AD&D tournament held at GenCon XVII (August 1984) and so suffers from some of the same sins as many tournament modules, such as limited scope and a contrived starting situation. None of these bothered me at the time, since a great many of TSR's official modules had the same problems and I'd learned how to adapt them easily enough. 

In truth, the appeal of "Into the Forgotten Realms" wasn't its potential use as a scenario anyway; it was what more it told me about Ed Greenwood's setting. In that, it did not disappoint. Though the focus was on room descriptions, there were enough tidbits scattered throughout that I was satisfied. In addition to historical information about Myth Drannor, there are other fascinating details, such as the suggestion, for example, that spells named for characters associated with the Greyhawk setting (e.g. Bigby, Tenser, etc.) don't exist in the Realms. In the grand scheme of things, that's not a huge difference, to be sure, but it's enough of one that I took note of it.

That's why "Into the Forgotten Realms" made an impression on me: it gave some concrete examples of how Ed Greenwood used the setting he created and how he tried to make it feel just a little bit unique. Whether anyone else enjoyed it as much as I did, I can't say for certain. However, TSR did reprint it in the 1987 boxed set under the title "Lashan's Fall," so I can only assume I'm not alone in liking it. Regardless, by the criteria established when I relaunched this series a year and a half ago, it definitely qualifies as worthy of discussion.

Retrospective: Cities of Bone

I've mentioned before my affection for the Al-Qadim line for Second Edition AD&D. Though not without flaws, I thought it did a better job of translating its source material into Dungeons & Dragons terms than did Oriental Adventures (which I also like). One of the reasons I feel this way is that Al-Qadim leaned very heavily into the fantastical rather any attempt at historical Arabia. That was a choice I appreciated then and still do now and one I often wished Oriental Adventures had embraced to the same extent.

This approach is especially evident in the boxed supplement, Cities of Bone. Until I read a comment to last week's Retrospective, I'd almost forgotten about it. Though I owned the original Arabian Adventures book, I wasn't a devoted follower of the line and only picked a select number of its supplements. This was one of them and, though I never made use of it in play, I enjoyed reading it. I hope that's not damning Cities of Bone with faint praise, because that wasn't my intention. Certainly, the only real metric by which to judge a RPG supplement or adventure is how useful it is in play, but there are often products, like this one, that are nevertheless inspirational. 

In this case, that inspiration comes from subject matter very near and dear to my heart: ancient ruins, undead, and necromancy, subject matter that was also of great interest to Clark Ashton Smith. That's the real reason I am looking back on Cities of Bone: there are bits of it that feel like they could easily have been drawn directly from the works of the Bard of Auburn. That's not to say that they were, at least not directly, but I'm inclined to agree with last week's commenters that there's a broadly Smithian vibe to the whole thing. It's fitting, too, since Smith earliest works of fiction, written when he was an adolescent, had Arabian or Orientalist settings. 

Written by Steven Kurtz and released in 1994, during TSR’s final flourish of lavish boxed sets, Cities of Bone appeared after previous supplements had already established Al-Qadim's Zakhara setting as a land of bustling bazaars, glittering genie courts, and swashbuckling adventure. Against that backdrop, Cities of Bone stands out precisely because it turns away from the living world and toward the titular ruins of ancient kingdoms – and those who both dwell within them and would despoil their buried treasures for their own benefit.

Cities of Bone included a 64-page adventure book, a 32-page campaign guide, and an additional 8-page supplement, as well as the usual maps, handouts, and loose accessory sheets that could be found in all TSR's boxed sets of the era. I can't deny that, for all my complaints about this era, the boxed sets it produced were often beautifully presented. There's a strange joy in opening them up and goggling at all the stuff TSR managed to pack inside. That's true here as well, double so, because Al-Qadim products have these faux gilt pages and striking arabesque decorations. 

What I remember most about Cities of Bone was the way it handled the ruins it presents. Rather than being generic dungeon crawls transplanted into the desert, they're rooted in the historical, cultural, and religious context of Zakhara. Likewise, some of the undead encountered within them are tragic figures, bound by oaths, regrets, or unfinished duties rather than simple malevolence. Many scenarios hinge on moral and ethical choices, such as how to treat the dead, how to honor the past, how to balance the lure of wealth with the demands of propriety and faith. It's an unusual approach, one that's subtly at odds with uncritical tomb robbing that D&D implicitly espouses. 

I call Cities of Bone a "supplement," but it's really more of a grab-bag of locations, NPCs, and scenarios intended to be used however the Dungeon Master wants. In a sense, they support – no pun intended – sandbox play, as the characters wander about the Land of Fate and encounter these ruins to explore. Some of the scenarios are short and largely inconsequential, while others are longer. By far, "Court of the Necromancers" is the best of the bunch and clearly seems to be channeling Clark Ashton Smith's "Empire of the Necromancers" – not that that's a bad thing!

All of which is to say that Cities of Bone is far from a must-have supplement, but there’s still enough stuff in it that I was glad to have been reminded I even owned it in the first place. I like ruins; I like the undead. There’s plenty of both here, along with some nice maps and snippets of history that help to give everything an extra overlay of… something. Mood? Atmosphere, maybe? A sense that these places were once alive and important and are now only half-remembered, half-understood, waiting to be misused or disturbed by characters who don’t fully grasp what they’re poking at.

As a whole, Cities of Bone is definitely a product of its time. It's uneven and occasionally frustrating, but also oddly earnest in its ambitions. It’s not polished enough to recommend without reservation, nor is it inspired enough that I'd recommend anyone seek it out. However, referees who enjoy plundering older supplements for ideas, imagery, and the occasional spark of inspiration, would find it has its uses. I myself can easily imagine lifting things from it and then weaving them into something of my own. In that sense, Cities of Bone succeeds in the modest way many such supplements do.

The Original "Dungeon" Delver

Today marks the birthday of Abraham Merritt, an early twentieth-century writer whose work I have long championed on this blog. That advocacy sometimes feels quixotic, since Merritt is far less read today than many of his contemporaries. That’s a shame, because his distinctive contribution to fantasy deserves wider recognition. Merritt helped popularize the idea that the greatest adventures are not across oceans or among the stars, but beneath our feet.

Again and again, Merritt sends his characters downward into hidden worlds. The Moon Pool is perhaps the clearest example. What begins as a scientific expedition soon becomes a descent into a sealed subterranean realm, complete with alien rulers, strange technologies, and layered environments that must be navigated step by step. The story almost reads like a traditional dungeon expedition, with each new chamber revealing fresh dangers and deeper mysteries.

Merritt returned to this idea repeatedly. Dwellers in the Mirage takes explorers beneath the Arctic ice into a buried world populated by ancient races and quasi-divine beings. Even The Metal Monster, though set in a remote valley rather than underground, follows the same logic of a sealed environment ruled by an inhuman intelligence, structured for exploration rather than mere sightseeing. In all of these stories, Merritt treats space itself as the engine of narrative.

Of course, Merritt didn’t invent the idea of subterranean worlds, but he transformed it. Earlier writers often treated hidden realms as philosophical curiosities or lost utopias. Merritt turned them into adventure locales – layered, dangerous, and ruled by inhuman powers. Most importantly, his characters didn’t simply arrive in these places. They descended. Depth meant danger, and discovery always came at a cost.

That model proved enormously influential. You can see echoes of Merritt in later writers such as H.P. Lovecraft and even Richard Shaver. More importantly, for the purposes of this blog, you can see it in Gary Gygax. In Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide, Gygax placed Merritt alongside Robert E. Howard, Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, Jack Vance, L. Sprague de Camp, and Fletcher Pratt as among “the most immediate influences upon AD&D.”

Why would he do that? I can’t say for certain and it’s quite possible Gygax explained his reasoning elsewhere (if so, I’d love to know where). But I can’t help suspect it has something to do with Merritt’s portrayal of underground expeditions. After all, the gameplay of classic Dungeons & Dragons looks something like this:

• Enter a ruin
• Descend level by level
• Encounter strange monsters and factions
• Recover dangerous artifacts
• Retreat to safety

That’s more or less The Moon Pool with dice.

Merritt’s real gift wasn’t tone or character, but structure. He showed how to make a location the driver of adventure. His hidden worlds are layered, ancient, and repurposed, exactly like a good dungeon. They feel inhabited, dangerous, and full of history.

Every time a referee designs a buried city, a sealed vault, or an underground empire, he's working in a tradition Merritt helped popularize. He taught readers (and later gamers) that every cave mouth might be a gateway and every descent a story waiting to happen. Even if almost no one remembers him today, that doesn’t diminish his contribution. Merritt helped shape how we imagine adventure itself. That’s a legacy worth celebrating, especially today, on the 142nd anniversary of his birth.

Retrospective: Mark of Amber

Because I’m focusing this month’s posts on the life, works, and legacy of Clark Ashton Smith, I’ve been trying to find roleplaying game products to discuss in my weekly Retrospective series that connect, even tangentially, to him. I’ve been surprised by how difficult this has proven, a fact that’s probably worthy of a post of its own. Still, while pondering the question, I was reminded that fourteen years after the publication of Castle Amber for the Moldvay/Cook/Marsh edition of Dungeons & Dragons, TSR released a follow-up adventure, albeit a rather unusual one.

Released in 1995, Mark of Amber is a strange product, at once a sequel to 1981’s module X2, an experiment in multimedia presentation, and part of a broader effort by TSR to retrofit its “Known World” setting for use with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. Consequently, this boxed adventure offers a revealing snapshot of TSR in its final years, as it looked backward for inspiration while simultaneously trying out new gimmicks in the hope of reinvigorating sales.

In the abstract, the core idea behind Mark of Amber is a solid one, namely, a return to the old-school weirdness of Castle Amber and expand upon it in interesting ways. Unfortunately, the published adventure is very much a product of its time, the mid-1990s, and all that entails. The tension between the original module’s unrepentant eccentricity and the narrative design impulses then in vogue results in a product that feels caught between two worlds, neither fish nor fowl.

It’s important to remember that, while Castle Amber has many virtues as an adventure, subtlety was never one of them. Tom Moldvay trapped the characters inside a haunted manor populated by eccentrics modeled on figures from Clark Ashton Smith’s fiction. Once ensnared, the PCs were expected to poke around the castle, encountering all manner of bizarre and often dangerous oddities. Castle Amber was thus a classic funhouse dungeon that, despite its literary inspirations, made no great pretensions about itself. It was simply a module where curiosity was its own reward – and frequently its own punishment.

Mark of Amber presents itself as a sequel, taking place decades after the events of X2. The d’Ambreville family still looms large, but the tone has shifted considerably. Gone is the open-ended exploration of a cursed mansion. In its place is a more structured mystery involving murders, secret identities, and dreamlike visions tied to the immortal Étienne d’Ambreville. This shift, I think, reflects a broader change in adventure design. Where Castle Amber invited players to wander, experiment, and uncover strangeness at their own pace, Mark of Amber asks them to follow a plot. Events are paced. Clues are arranged. The Dungeon Master is given a clear narrative spine to maintain.

This approach is by no means unique to Mark of Amber and isn’t even necessarily a flaw. Mystery scenarios, for example, often benefit from structure. Still, it does highlight just how different TSR’s adventure design priorities had become by the mid-1990s. If Castle Amber feels like a haunted museum for the characters to explore freely, Mark of Amber feels more like a guided tour. There are still plenty of strange sights to see and unhinged NPCs to interact with, but the route to them is far more constrained.

To the extent that Mark of Amber is remembered today at all, I suspect it’s largely because of its inclusion of an audio CD. TSR intended it to be played during the session, with specific tracks keyed to certain locations and encounters. The disc contains ambient soundscapes, musical stings, and even narrated segments designed to heighten immersion. This wasn’t the first time TSR had experimented with audio accompaniments, but it was, so far as I can recall, the only time I encountered it myself.

As ludicrous as this might seem now, in 1995 it was actually a somewhat ambitious idea. Tabletop RPGs were still overwhelmingly analog experiences. I doubt every group even had a CD player available at the table and, even when they did, cueing tracks mid-session would almost certainly disrupt play. As a result, the CD was probably more trouble than it was worth. For me, it stands as a perfect emblem of TSR’s late-era mindset: occasionally bold and genuinely experimental, but often out of step with how most people actually played their games.

An equally interesting aspect of Mark of Amber is its place within the evolution of the setting that would come to be known as Mystara. In its earliest conception, the Known World belonged firmly to the Basic/Expert line. AD&D already had its own distinct stable of settings, like Greyhawk, the Forgotten Realms, and Krynn, each with different assumptions about character power and campaign focus. Nevertheless, beginning in 1994, TSR began adapting Mystara for AD&D and Mark of Amber is part of that effort.

How well this translation worked overall, I can’t really say, since I didn’t purchase any of the other AD&D Mystara products. Even so, I sense a certain contradiction here. Mystara was built as a sandbox setting, with clear geography and room for emergent play, while many AD&D adventures of that time emphasized plotted narratives. Mark of Amber embodies this mismatch, taking place in a setting born in the freewheeling era of the early 1980s now pressed into service for a much more scripted style of play.

All of this leaves Mark of Amber as an uneven adventure. It boasts strong atmosphere, memorable NPCs, and an ambitious presentation, but it’s probably best remembered today for what it reveals about the state of TSR and, by extension, Dungeons & Dragons, just a few years before the company was acquired by Wizards of the Coast.

Bringing this back to Clark Ashton Smith for a moment, Mark of Amber is a curious artifact. Its connection to CAS is almost entirely inherited rather than organic, filtered through Castle Amber rather than drawing directly from the source. Where Moldvay’s original module gleefully embraced the weirdness and excess of Smith’s fiction, Mark of Amber seems to me to approach that inheritance with a more cautious, narratively controlled hand.

In that sense, the adventure neatly encapsulates TSR’s situation in 1995. It looks backward to a beloved classic, tries to dress it up with new technology, and then situates it within a setting undergoing corporate redefinition. The result is neither a pure revival nor a bold reinvention, but something in between. It's a respectful sequel that never quite recaptures the anarchic spirit that made its predecessor memorable.

Castle Amber remains, in my opinion, a monument to Golden Age D&D’s joyful strangeness. Mark of Amber, by contrast, stands as a reminder of how much the game (and its publishers) had changed. For better or worse, it shows us what happens when old school weirdness is filtered through the sensibilities of the 1990s, becoming more polished, more controlled, and ultimately less surprising.

REPOST: Retrospective: Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Despite the fact that David Cook's 1981 adventure, Dwellers of the Forbidden City, is one of my favorite D&D modules of all time, if not my actual favorite, I've never done a retrospective post on it. I did use the module previously as the centerpiece for my early ruminations of location-based adventures, but I don't think that post did the module full justice. Today's post is thus a partial attempt to make up for that fact.

Though parts of what would become Dwellers of the Forbidden City were used in the official AD&D tournament at Origins 1980, module I1 doesn't include a scoring sheet and referees are halfheartedly encouraged to design their own if they choose to use it in a tournament fashion. The module also conspicuously lacks the tournament "vibe" of other early modules, lacking both a precise, straightforward goal or a high density of combat/trap encounters intended to test the mettle of the players, instead opting for a more open-ended, exploratory style. In that respect, I1 might be an exemplar of the "Electrum Age" that marked a shift in the style and content of adventures from the earlier Golden Age, a shift some cheer and others decry.

Ostensibly, Dwellers of the Forbidden City is about the characters, in the employ of merchant leaders, seeking to put an end to raids on caravans passing through a remote jungle locale. However, once pointed in the right direction, the characters soon discover that there's more going on in the jungle than mere caravan raids, as they stumble across the mysterious Forbidden City, a lost city that recalls Robert E. Howard's Conan yarns – no surprise given David Cook has admitted that the City was inspired by "Red Nails." Though getting to the Forbidden City is an adventure in itself, with multiple means to enter it and lots of potential allies and enemies along the way, it is within the City (a version of whose map is reproduced below) that the real adventure begins.

As can see from the map, the Forbidden City is large and located within a canyon and thus isolated from the rest of the jungle. It is a world unto itself, one that operates according to the whims of its inhabitants, chief of whom are the yuan-ti snake men, who make their debut appearance in this module. In my younger days, I used this module innumerable times with several different groups of people, including some I barely knew. What's interesting is how similar the experience was right up until the point where the characters enter the Forbidden City. From that point on, nearly every group did something different, with quite a few completely forgetting their original mission and focusing instead on exploring the Forbidden City and its strange inhabitants.

Dwellers of the Forbidden City is only 28 pages long, so it's necessarily brief when it comes to describing its titular locale. Yet, that never bothered me. Indeed, I think it's probably one of the great strengths of the module and the reason I was able to use it so often: it was easy to make and remake the City to suit my present needs, whatever they were. My personal preference for modules these days are ones that fire my imagination; they give me the bare bones details I need to get started but they don't weigh me down with extraneous details that either get in the way or easily forget in the heat of play. Far from needing, in the words of James Wyatt, "more detail, more fleshed-out quests, and another hundred pages or so," module I1 is almost exactly the right length. Anything more than what it includes would, I think, have lessened its spartan appeal for me.

Re-reading Dwellers of the Forbidden City in preparation for this post brought back a lot of memories, all happy ones. I could recount many tales of adventures past, but those in the Forbidden City are among the most vibrant nearly 30 years after the fact. I remember well when Morgan Just and his stalwart companions braved this place, doing battle with the yuan-ti, the tasloi, and the bullywugs united under King Groak. I remember too my expansions of the City, using the adventure seeds Cook includes at the end – the under-city warrens filled with ghouls and demons, the vampire orchid-men, the Black Brotherhood, and time travel to the days when the City was at its decadent height. This was a module I literally played to pieces; my original copy of the booklet fell apart from so much use and its maps were smudged and stained from similar service. With the possible exception of The Isle of Dread – another David Cook module – I'm hard pressed to think of a module that more powerfully engaged my imagination and showed me what a powerful game D&D could be.

The Articles of Dragon: "The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games"

I strongly considered not writing a post about this particular article from issue #95 of Dragon (March 1985), since I know it’s likely to stir up strong feelings and perhaps understandably so. At the same time, the guiding principle behind my revival of the Articles of Dragon series has been to focus on pieces that had a particular impact on me when I first read them, and this one – “The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games” – most certainly did. Of course, if you’ve been a longtime reader of this blog, that should come as no surprise.

The question of Tolkien’s influence on the creation and later development of Dungeons & Dragons is a topic to which Gary Gygax regularly returned. From nearly the moment the game appeared, Gygax denied that Tolkien’s tales of Middle-earth, especially The Lord of the Rings, held any special place of honor among the many fantasy works that inspired him. He never denied having read and enjoyed The Hobbit, nor that he had borrowed certain monsters and creatures, such as orcs and halflings, from Tolkien. What he seems to have rejected was the idea that this borrowing meant D&D was primarily inspired by Tolkien, rather than being a mishmash of many different influences.

I say "seems," because I really don't know why this particular question so vexed Gygax. That he kept writing articles like this more than a decade after the first appearance of the game suggests that it somehow mattered to him. I suppose the easy explanation is ego – he simply couldn't countenance the idea that someone might think D&D's success was owed, in whole or in part, to the popularity of Tolkien's work rather than his own imagination and ingenuity. But is that what was going on? Honestly, I don't know and I'm not sure anyone else does either.

"The Influence of J.R.R. Tolkien on the D&D and AD&D Games" is a strange article. For one, Gygax begins it by admitting – in the very first paragraph – that "the popularity of Professor Tolkien's fantasy works did encourage me to develop my own." This is undeniable, since the Fantasy Supplement to Chainmail directly references J.R.R. Tolkien and includes not just hobbits but orcs, balrogs, and ents among its bestiary (all of which appeared in OD&D, at least in its earliest printings). Gygax continues that "there are bits and pieces of his works reflected hazily in mine," before stating that "I believe his influence, as a whole, is minimal" [italics mine].

Gygax then recalls the many, many fantasy books and authors he read, beginning in childhood. He points particularly to Robert E. Howard's only Conan novel, Conan the Conqueror (more accurately The Hour of the Dragon) as being his first exposure to sword-and-sorcery literature. He then goes on to cite L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, Fritz Leiber, Poul Anderson, Abraham Merritt, and H.P. Lovecraft as also being important to developing his sense of fantasy. None of those names should come as surprise, since he highlights all of them in Appendix N of the AD&D Dungeon Masters Guide. (Of more interest to me is why Jack Vance is not mentioned at all, despite Gygax's regular praise of him and his works and his role in inspiring the D&D magic system.)

With that out of the way, Gygax says he "thoroughly enjoyed The Hobbit" but found The Lord of the Rings a "tedious ... allegory of the struggle of the little common working folk of England against the threat of Hitler's Nazi evil." Tolkien would, of course, object strenuously to that characterization of The Lord of the Rings, but we must take Gygax at his word. He claims to have found the novel's action to be slow, its magic unimpressive, and its resolution disappointing. Moreover, Tolkien drops his favorite character, Tom Bombadil, soon after introducing him, which contributed to the slowness with which he finished it (three weeks).

Gygax then goes on, rather unconvincingly in my view, to say that many of the common elements of Middle-earth and Dungeons & Dragons have common sources, like Norse mythology for dwarves, and that therefore no one should assume the game he created owed much to Tolkien. In fairness, he also admits once again that there were some things he borrowed with the intention of "capitalizing on the then-current 'craze' for Tolkien's literature." He did this in a "superficial manner," believing that, once he'd attracted these Tolkien fiends to D&D, they'd soon realize that there was only "a minute trace of the Professor's work" therein.

As I said, I really don't know what to make of all of this. On the one hand, I generally agree with Gygax that D&D's similarities to Tolkien's creations are skin-deep at best and probably included solely for the purposes of enticing Middle-earth aficionados to the game. On the other hand, the fact that Gygax kept beating this particular drum makes me wonder if he actually believed the lines he was saying. Furthermore, Gygax was never shy about admitting the debt he owed REH or Vance or Leiber, so why did the charge he was borrowed Tolkien rankle him so? It's frankly baffling to me.

REPOST: The Articles of Dragon: "Demi-humans Get a Lift"

For a lot of old school AD&D players, the appearance of Unearthed Arcana in 1985 marked the end of an era. Filled with a wide variety of new options for players, it fundamentally upped the power level of characters in a way that forever changed the game. What's interesting is that is that, at the time, some people were critical of UA because they felt it "didn't contain anything new." In a sense, that was true. The book consisted primarily of material reprinted from several years' worth of Gary Gygax's "From the Sorcerer's Scroll" column in Dragon. Very little of the book's contents should have surprised anyone who was regularly reading Dragon, as I was.

And yet, somehow, by compiling all that material under one cover, it became more than the sum of its parts. I knew lots of gamers, myself included, who'd allowed this class or that spell from Gygax's columns into their AD&D campaigns without so much as a second thought. In aggregate, though, they all took on a different character. Things that never bothered me before suddenly did, when placed side by side with other options I hadn't allowed (or didn't like). The result was that Unearthed Arcana was the book that "broke" AD&D for me. It was a bridge too far and it contributed to my growing disillusionment with the game in the mid-80s.

One of the last of Gygax's columns previewing material that would eventually appear in UA was "Demi-Humans Get a Lift," which appeared in issue #95 (March 1985). In his characteristic way, he explains the purpose of his article thusly:

 After long contemplation of the plight of dead-ended demi-human characters, and considerable badgering from players with same, it seemed a good plan to work up some new maximum levels for those demihumans with super-normal statistics -- and in a couple of cases just reward those with high stats across the board. Demi-humans were limited in the first place (in the original rules) because I conceived of a basically human-dominated world. Considering their other abilities, if most demi-humans were put on a par with humans in terms of levels they could attain, then there isn't much question who would be saying "Sir!" to whom. With that in mind, let's move along to the matter at hand.

Once again, Gary makes it clear that, in his mind, demi-humans were always supposed to play second fiddle to humans, which is why he included level limits. One may argue that such limits do a poor job of discouraging the play of demi-humans, but there can be no question that that was the intention behind it.

Despite that, Gygax decides here to give in to "considerable badgering" from players of demi-human PCs and provide the means for demi-humans to reach higher levels of experience. He does this in two ways. First, he allows single-classed demi-humans to exceed the standard level cap by two. Multiclassed demi-humans must abide by the usual limits. Second, he allows demi-humans with exceptional ability scores, whether single or multiclassed, to achieve even higher levels. While I think the first change is reasonable, if unnecessary, the second more or less ensured that every demi-human PC from then on would have absurdly high ability scores. In my opinion, AD&D already had a problem with ability score inflation; these changes only further encouraged such bad behavior. The article also opened up for play several new demi-human races, such as deep gnomes and drow, both of which, in my opinion, are too powerful for use in an "ordinary" campaign.

Throughout the article, Gary makes a couple of asides that suggests that he himself doesn't much care for these rules changes but is allowing them because "the gamers have spoken." It's very odd and makes one wonder why, if he really was so opposed to these changes, he nevertheless went ahead and presented in them. The tone throughout is strange and he ends the piece by not only saying that these are the final, ultimate, never-to-be-changed-again, for-real-this-time alterations to demi-human level limits but also by suggesting demands for further power escalation are inevitable:

To put a cap on things, let us get something straight. Any statistics beyond those shown, for levels and ability scores alike, are virtually impossible. Spells and magic, even artifacts and relics, will not increase statistics beyond what is shown, and no further word is necessary. If some deity likes a character so much as to grant a higher statistic, then that deity should also like the character sufficiently to carry him or her off to another plane. (Rules for quasideities will, I suppose, now be in demand . . . sigh!)

Even more than a quarter-century later, I find Gary's tone odd.