One Page Dungeon: Antonius Abducted

The richest place in my formative years was the lending library in my well-funded, open-minded suburban hometown. It was there I laid hands on the Arkham House Lovecraft volumes, everything Tolkien and post-Tolkien, science fiction novels I wasn't even close to understanding but enjoyed anyway, the Holmes edition of D&D, the Monster Manual.

Of these weird materials, some promised a regulation or explanation of the fantastic world - D&D, of course, laying down the rules of fantasy in a way that the heroes of Pratt and DeCamp's Compleat Enchanter series did, with arcane mathematics. The world of Shannara proved nothing more than a post-apocalypse, and Larry Niven's fantasy world was physics by another name.

But I also read Lovecraft, Borges' book of imaginary beings, Dunsany, Brian Froud -- fantasists who made no excuses or explanations. Tying them all together with a visual language of strangeness were the great coffee-table volumes of art where I became acquainted with Hieronymus Bosch. His devils drew from Church iconography, but there was the fantastic and even science-fictional in his ceramic-like architectures, his mutant creatures, flying farragos and garish colors. In my imagination he was as much an illustrator of weird tales as Sidney Sime or Lee Brown Coye. What matter that those tales were not written -- not yet?

Which brings me to my undying fascination with the central panel of Bosch's Temptation of Saint Anthony. Here it is (it gets really big when you click it, and click again).

It hasn't got the symmetries and tapestry-like coverage of the Garden of Earthly Delights, or either of his Last Judgments. There is dynamism, scene, progression, the varied freaks converging on a parody of a Mass laid on a dicing table. Others join the haphazard choir underfoot, or flit overhead. There is that bizarre ruin with its mess of perspective; the disasters in the background -- fire, war, demons -- while nonchalant or dazed washerwomen go down to the filthy water.

Weird symbolism abounds and, as with Bosch's other works, has prompted all sorts of theories about his hidden message: alchemical is it? more broadly esoteric? or politico-religious? nationalist? If his figures illustrate proverbs and expressions that have faded with time, perhaps this is just another form of random generation to create compelling monsters, like the tree-archer with his gauntlets and brace of armored hounds.

Me, I see an adventure here. The first stirrings of this in my gamemastering career happened a couple of years ago when I populated one level of my custom upper works for Castle of the Mad Archmage with a collection of Bosch's creatures, mostly from the Temptation, and somewhat differently imagined than presented here. The Muleteers have had several run-ins with them, all terrifying but none decisive.

As this year's One Page Dungeon Contest approached its Walpurgisnacht deadline, I started to consider adapting this level, which uses a standard maze of rooms and passages. But after thinking I ended up favoring the original outdoors setting with its bulbous ruin, its convergence of monsters, its holy man looking serenely if a little desperately out of the frame, as if to say "Look! These are no figments of my fast, no color trails from ergot-laced crusts! You see them too!"

I set the action a few minutes before the scene in the painting. A tactical problem, asking for the various approaching demon-groups to be defeated in detail or confronted as they appear in the main action. Antony needs his crucifix to be of any use, so that's an action task to retrieve it on the scene. There wasn't really space on the page for a random table with all the skulking lizards, birds, demonlings and flying menaces you see in the art, but the water holds a few such perils.

Well, there you have it, with a little help from my long-dead friend. It'snot strictly one page but I am toying with the idea of taking the other panels of the triptych and expanding them into a GM's screen idea ...

Who Mourns for HyperCard?

I thought I'd contribute my own gaming-and-Macintosh reminiscence on this sad occasion.

In my early years of graduate school, though I had no regular gaming group, I was still coming up with all sorts of things for gaming. One of those - lost, alas, in the mists of floppy disk breakdown and software obsolescence - was a random dungeon level generator using HyperCard.

If you never had the chance to use it, HyperCard was an incredible application for the Mac, with aspirations to be a kind of object-oriented operating system within an operating system. It let you program hypertext, create databases, and much more, using a very simple, intuitive language. HyperCard was quickly picked up to create such point-and-click adventure games as Cosmic Osmo (pictured), by the Miller brothers, who would go on to create Myst. I used HyperCard to create an academic article database and keep addresses in, but also screwed around with creating games (where the "pieces" were buttons that moved around and could be clicked on) and the dungeon generator.

HyperCard had an easy, snap-to-grid function  that let you draw rooms and corridors with ease, and I eventually figured out how to randomize the size, shape and position of generated room objects. Over on the side, the program spit out a key with features, monsters, treasures, tricks and traps for each room.

All this, of course, was before the Internet as we know it existed. If I'd been able to post the stack up and share it with the kind of community that visits this blog, it wouldn't have died an obscure death, and I would have had the motivation to make it a lot better than it ended up being.

Look to the right, and see my downloads: "PowerPoint Mapping," "Old School Dungeon Encounters," "Endless Bag of Tricks," "Bag of Problems." Those are just the fragmented and worked-over pieces of that lost HyperCard stack. Where now, indeed, are the bytes of yesteryear? Who will put HyperDumpty together again?

Reminiscences 3: Getting Better

More high school art.

Exiled from the DM chair, I went back to playing my fighter in Dave's campaign, giving him a gritty reboot from "Newt Ralgood" to a Saxon-styled warrior known as Stansceaft (which means "stone spear shaft" - funny that I knew Old English but was ignorant both of psychoanalysis and blaxploitation). I was still writing campaign material in my room, but this time I was also reading published adventures in Dragon magazine and various modules.

And my writing got better. The monsters in each adventure had a theme - no more zoos! The layouts were more spacious, after my library encounter with the Holmes sample dungeon. I didn't get to run those adventures and the notebook where they were is long since gone, but I could still rebuild from memory the abandoned silver mine inhabited by a foul being and its servants, the temple to the Toad God shaped like a colossal toad, the forgotten underground wizard's lair on a volcanic isle. I also created a new campaign world - Antellus - that wasn't based on random terrain and city rolls, and wrote a lot of Greyhawk Gazetteer-inspired entries for it.

As much as people write and read procedural advice for making an adventure or campaign, there is still nothing like a good example. If you are publishing a game, the sample adventure is critically important, and it should be the "practice" for whatever you are trying to "preach" in design. If you are getting started as an adventure creator, then reading other people's material, just to see what works and what doesn't, is better than reading a long-winded essay that can't possibly capture all the important elements.

I'll go even further and point out a further development that so far nobody's taken up yet: the commented adventure, to teach the art of running from notes or a module. This could be a podcast of an actual run through the module. Or, it could be a commentary track or designer notes. The idea is to follow up the example of good design with an example of good play. Without cluttering up the actual reference notes for a play session, the commentary could address some of the things that players typically try to do, ways to turn the pressure up or down at various points, things that came up in playtest, and rationales for your big design decisions. Anyway, it would be something great to offer as supplementary material or premium content.

In the years after high school I kept thinking about gaming and roleplaying off and on, but my actual activity dropped off. I don't think I ever ran or played in a sustained campaign for more than a few sessions, but I was reading a lot more, learned the value of improvisation in one memorable run, and absorbed a lot of ideas. When the Legend of the Five Rings franchise ensnared me, roleplaying was part of that, and I did a little writing that got published in the "Secrets" sourcebooks, a little playing in games here and there, but nothing too sustained.

So this past year, starting the game has been a real renaissance for me, not just of an old-school approach but the exhilaration of preparing, improvising, and being constantly surprised by my players and my world. I think it all turned out okay ...

Reminiscences 2: 11th Grade Campaign Failure

Isle Of The who? A 10th grade creation ...

11th grade and I was ready to go. No more D&D in the science wing lounge under the prying, mocking eyes of the uninitiated. My house was open after school, and the gang was gathering for my campaign twice a week.

I cooked up a new dungeon, a serious dungeon, a ruined castle with a moat and undercrypts and under-undercrypts. Now I had the Fiend Folio, so the place was swarming with annoying jermlaine, bouncing with gorbels, coffer corpses and death dogs, or was it devil dogs? There was a Christian chapel - just one of many religions in the World of Atalona!

I made a punk-style collage homemade DM screen, cut dungeon tiles from manila folders. We'd never had a tactical display last year, but I had my players buy minis for their characters, and used my own small collection augmented with counters from Squad Leader and Citadel of Blood. Every hit in combat I rolled a quick d6 for hit location, just for flavor mind you (that's one habit that's stood the test of time...). I resolved to heed the sage advice of the Great Gygax and play almost entirely by the book. I think my players even rolled chances to have psionics, to no avail, and weapon vs. AC modifiers were definitely a part of play.

Well, eight months later, my players were in revolt, one going so far as to intone the name of Asmodeus repeatedly to see if I would kill the wretched party by rolling the chance for the Devil Lord to appear "by the book." The whole experience left a sour taste on AD&D that explains my current appreciation of the looser spirit of the Basic game I never played.

Who's to blame? Me ... and him. Please turn to page 86 of the Dungeon Master's Guide. There you will find a rule whereby even the character who has played completely true to class and alignment must fork over 1500 gp in training fees to reach second level. Those who are merely "superior" in their adherence must pay 3000 gp and it gets worse from there.

WTF, Gygax? An exemplary thief who has reached 2nd level by earning nothing but treasure has not earned enough treasure to pay the advancement fees. Nor has any merely superior character of whatever class. I think I enforced a flat 1500/level and it still was extremely unpleasant for characters having to take out loans from each other.

It's one thing if you put toxic rules that have clearly not seen playtest, conceived in a fit of hate for "Monty Haul" campaigns, in a book that bills itself as mere guidelines. Another thing entirely if you start and continue the book in the high spirit of ex cathedra pronouncement - this is the One True Ruleset!

Ah, no, I'm not bitter. But I'm also not nostalgic. Good educators eventually come to know that students take everything you say literally and seriously. Yes, the stride made in gaming in the 90's promoted a few cliches that don't necessarily guarantee good fun (see under: heavy-handed board game catch-up mechanisms). But they also brought a huge increase in professionalism to the field, helped along by Magic and its multi-thousand dollar purses resting on arcane interpretations of wording.

Then again, DMG let me roll up this bitchin' random demon.

And my own overenthusiasm and inexperience also doomed the campaign. My dungeon, all three levels, was still a damn monster hotel, with random details obscuring rather than clarifying the sense of discovery. And uh, I think I also bogged down every town visit with random encounters and disease rolls, so help me, and who knows what other foolishness I inflicted on the players. My vague attempt at plotting, involving a Chaotic Neutral conspiracy and a female wizard named Warith Ban who flew around in a cube of force, came too little and too late. Basically, I didn't see that fun was the goal and The Book was not always going to take you there.

I'm just wondering if any of you gentle readers had similarly lousy experiences with by-the-book AD&D. Was I the only insecure 16-year-old with more book larnin' than horse sense out there? And more generally, what have you learned from failed campaigns?

Reminiscences 1: 10th Grade and before

I grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, the New York comedy writer's shorthand for "old money." It was a nice place to raise a kid. In the 70's the place still had touches of bygone New England charm, like the penny candy store on the corner of our street and the wooden floors in the grocery store on Main Street. All that is gone now, devoured by Whole Foods hell, according to reliable sources. Sic transit ...

In junior high school I was into all kinds of wargames but had nobody to play with. I'd spend a Saturday with myself doing both sides of Richthofen's War, Air Assault on Crete, Third Reich, SPI's Arnhem, or even stranger games I played with the counters from those games and an open atlas page. I did play some Metagaming micro-games with my friend Greg, who'd bought into a couple. And between my own collection - Complete Book of Wargames - and the town library's - Comprehensive Guide - I had learned something about role-playing games in passing. The Complete Book in particular had reviews of D&D, Petal Throne, Tunnels & Trolls, and Runequest ("hacking limbs in loving detail"). Between that and an article in Games Magazine I grew intensely curious about D&D but again, knew nobody who played.

Some time in ninth grade, in the year of our Lord 1981, I also found that the town library, which had battened on the property taxes of the Helmsleys and their ilk, had acquired the AD&D Monster Manual. Wow! I became a monster expert, just in time for the world of geekery to open up for me as I moved on to 10th grade and Greenwich High School.

Principals just gotta play Big Brother, don't they?

It must have been in my first couple of weeks there that I chanced across a bunch of older teens playing Dungeons and Dragons at a table in the student center after school. Eagerly, I sidled up and kibitzed as the DM described a strange encounter.

"Within the magic circle, you see a glowing golden animal. It looks like a shaggy horse, with dragon scales, and a horn growing out of its head..."

"Ooh! Ooh! I know what that is!" Everyone turned to look at me. "A Ki-Rin!"

Undaunted by that DM's twenty-foot restraining order, I soon joined a breakaway faction of the school Chess Club that had moved on from knights and bishops to knights, bishops, magsmen and thaumaturges. The DM was Dave, who actually owned an Apple II and was later to have me over for many late nights of cooperative Infocom adventures, Wizardry and Bard's Tale. The rest of the players made up my steady D&D group through high school and college.

The 10th grade AD&D campaign was fun but kind of vanilla. We were all new to the game. I ran a Neutral Good fighter called Newt Ralgood. I'll never forget the dungeon entrance, which had two carved dragon heads flanking it ... with predictable results (sizzle). Dave ran a pretty standard kind of monster maze for three levels, and we all learned to chant the mantra "Open the door...kill the monsters... take the treasure." Outside the dungeon, there was The Town where we rested, bought and sold stuff, and that was pretty much it.

In the spring Dave started spicing up the game; there was a new dungeon that involved overland travel, Newt acquired his signature flame tongue sword, and I remember an underground lake where sea lions lurked and a climactic fight with a Type I demon that emerged from a fog of darkness. Meanwhile, I had gotten the Players' Handbook for my birthday and the DM Guide for Christmas, and was busy statting up monsters to the tune of about 30 loose-leaf pages - sources ranging from the Bible to John Jakes' Brak novels - and writing dungeons like a fiend. I also got my hands on hex paper which I immediately filled with random terrain from the DMG, using that as the basis for an imaginary world centered on the city of Rhadne in the kingdom of The Hane.

I thought I could do a better job DMing than Dave. I had put more work into my campaign world. My dungeons had cooler stuff and themes. Why, every room had a monster or trap, treasure AND randomly rolled up furnishings and dungeon dressing! There was Drakenhame, the dragon hotel in the desert ("suitable for levels 7 through 9"; one page of notes remains, no map). Yes, high levels meant it was cool to put 67 stirges in one room. And then the lower level dungeon, "Bring Me The Head of Alvereithor Gaharts'yah," (two maps remain, no notes except for NPCs) and the mid-level "Shrine of Techulca" (notes, no map). One room in the Shrine contained this decor rolled up from the deathless Tables of Gygax except for one salient detail:

In the room are 3 beds; a large woolen rug under which is an iron trunk in a recess containing 350 gp, 10 sticks of incense, 200 scruples of rare spice (30 gp) and 2200 s.p.; a stone shrine with two candlesticks and an iron Techulca idol; and Brandamare of Bellocitaunia, a 2nd level female paladin, chained to the wall wearing a torn, revealing dirty white garment, and she is being kept there for sacrifice.

Scans or it didn't happen? All right. But next time.

Dark Images

So, what image stands iconically for D&D? 

Okay, the straight answer for me is the Trampier dungeon master screen. But I didn't use that screen. I made my own out of heavy cardboard, with a strange collage of punk rock art, stuff from Readers Digest and Boys Life, ads for D&D and Time Magazine natural disasters. Half Winston Smith (the punk collage artist), half Max Ernst. And the charts pencilled in on the inside.

Unfortunately that screen was lost to the dust of ages and is no longer available for viewing.


But there's another set of images that I associate with teenage years and the promise of mystery I sought in D&D, though they never appeared in anything by TSR. The illustrations of Sidney Sime.

There was something about those dark, detail-clotted vistas, with tiny human figures skulking and avoiding inky perils - most of the time, without much success. The Lord Dunsany stories they illustrated, when not wonder-tales of imagined orientalist gods, were seedbeds for the larcenous imaginations of Vance and Leiber. The tiny figures were men, good, bad or indifferent, who sought treasure from that which was far beyond them.

At the time, like many teens, I sought mystery, but also its illumination and rationalization - with matrices of encounter tables and saving throws. We have met the Beast and its Hit Dice are 6+6. In a way, to have Sime's illustrations in the D&D books would be to offer a promise the rules could not fulfill - a world more fit for medievalist treasure-seeking using Call of Cthulhu rules, or a set even more deadly and opaque. The clear scenarios of Sutherland and Trampier, horrors front and center, were as Apollonian a monster combat as you could hope for, and even Erol Otus' weird visions made sure to delineate every eyeball and tentacle. A Dunsany terror in D&D rules would be something like "Save each turn vs. death ray or die, otherwise lose 1 level. No stats, can't hit it, can't hurt it."

An out-of-level encounter. A Green Devil Face. No raise, no save, no hope. "It is better not."

See George P. Landow's scans here, in particular the tales of Thangobrind, Nuth and the Gibbelins.

Blue Book Brief Encounter

To join in the reminiscences over the work of Dr. J. Eric Holmes: I learned AD&D as my first system and ran a campaign from the DMG "as written" in high school, taking very seriously everything about the holy standard rules, drawing dungeons that filled up a whole sheet of graph paper, packed with a dazzling variety of monsters, and meticulously detailed with randomly rolled dungeon dressing.

Between that and my strict application of the punitive advancement rules, my campaign did not go down well with my players and I was deposed. Sometime after that, I found that the local library had acquired a copy of the Holmes rules, and I picked it up, curious about this "primitive" form of D&D.

What really opened my mind was the improvisational advice to DMs and the Tower of Zenopus adventure. It was spacious, not packed. It was stocked with focal puzzles, tricks, and features, not useless atmosphere. Its encounters put well-known critters in interesting situations, showing that a good adventure could be had without digging into the Fiend Folio (maybe another reason for the overthrow of my campaign). Most of all, it was described concisely so a large variety of possible situations could be shown.

Just that one example improved my DM craft, and indirectly led to my favoring more improvised scenarios and systems in college - and of course, my fascination with the spirit of original D&D now. So that's my toast to the good Professor.

Digression: What the World Needs Now

Last night I was looking through old stacks of whatever self-written gaming material has survived from my teens and 20's. I realized a few things. For example, what the world needs now (from me, anyway) is not:

* A big, jam-packed dungeon written by a high school sophomore with encounters and dressings seemingly rolled at random from the charts in a certain book. Especially considering that none of the surviving maps have keys and none of the surviving keys have maps. Especially considering that my wife won't stop teasing me about that 2nd level female paladin chained to the wall wearing a "torn, revealing, dirty garment."

* Another hex map for a campaign world.

* Stats for the following "monsters": the whole angelic host of the pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite; Slug-men; the Braintree (hm ... beaten to the punch by Neopets, anyway); the entries in Borges' Book of Imaginary Animals that the Monster Manual missed.

* Arcane ramblings about the genesis of whole hierarchies of made-up gods.

* The role-playing system I used in a number of memorable home-brew improv games, that, as neat as it is, is not really doing anything more or less than its 500 or so competitors.

What the world needs more is material that addresses real needs of gamers. I managed to dig up a few things that I hope to gussy up and present to the world in the coming months:

* The pretty neat d6-based random dungeon generator from my later years of DMing.

* A few good monsters, some of which I'm already including in the nearly done Varlets & Vermin pdf - because what the world really needs is lots more low-level monsters. A few of my adaptations also sparked the idea for another, small monstrous compendium based on the worlds of art.

* Project X - a fairly short and manageable release, based on another realization about what some old-school approaches to gaming in particular assume but don't always provide ...