Biblyon the Great

This is the semi-birthday of Dungeons & Dragons, to the extent that we can even know when the birthday was. It’s over fifty years old now, and we have already lost many of the pioneers of the game. Every year that goes by, we lose more pioneers and more players. With them go what in business we’d call the “institutional knowledge” they carried. That knowledge isn’t just about rules and rulesets, but about why these rules and rulesets were created. It’s not about a particular game but about the whole milieu in which the game was created.

I wrote about how the way that fans and readers interacted influenced early games in On a Cult of Gygax. But just as important is how and why the entrepreneurs did what they did. Take the best of today’s creators, your-favorite-osr-creator-here, and even if they never created their product they’d still be able to game. They could still play Dungeons & Dragons, or Traveller, or Tunnels & Trolls, or Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, or Villains & Vigilantes… the list goes on, and what each of those games have in common is that if their creators had never created those games, their creators would never have been able to play.

Dave Arneson, Gary Gygax, Mark Millar, and even Ken St. Andre, were creating games not to market them but because they couldn’t play that kind of game without creating the game first. They were players before they were businessmen—and it showed in everything from how they marketed the game (marketing often came after playing) and in how they talked about the game.

It’s very strange to me, having grown up soaking in the free-form rules style of AD&D play, how attached some players are to a Cult of the Cult of Gygax™; and to complaining about a supposed hardline by TSR against house rules. My memory of that period, at least through the late eighties, is one of “make it your own”, advice straight from the rule books and from outlets such as The Dragon.

We always knew that Gygax and other TSR luminaries used different rules. And it made sense for them to do so even outside of a “make it your own” mentality: where could we expect new rules to come from, if not from the campaigns of the author and other employees at TSR? We assumed, and it appears to be true, that the people at TSR were gamers, that they played the game, too.

Which makes questions and answers like this one from Polyhedron far more understandable to me than to adherents of the Cult of the Cult of Gygax™.

I can remember seeing the Flashing Blades ad in Dragon back in the day and being fascinated by it. Two fencers angrily crossing swords in 17th century dress, it was such a cool illustration, especially for a Three Musketeers fan. But I never bought mail order at the time, and never ran across the game in person. I was reminded of Flashing Blades recently while visiting the Fantasy Games Unlimited web site for Daredevils information, which they also publish, and decided to try it out.

It’s the same price it was in 1984, albeit no longer as a boxed set.

I ended up running a session of it at the North Texas RPG Con, and it turned out to be even more fun than I expected it to be. I ran The Grand Theater from Parisian Adventure pretty much straight. While there is technically a reason for the characters to be there and a thing for them to find, it’s all really an excuse to get into duels with each other. It’s a great adventure for a convention one-shot.

Because it also contains some new items, a more detailed guide to Paris, and ideas for a sandbox campaign, I recommend Parisian Adventure as an essential supplement to Flashing Blades.

The hardest part of both times I’ve run The Grand Theater is that modern players don’t like to attack each other. They weren’t initially willing to get into duels with fellow players, despite that being upfront in the description of the session. Once one person broke the ice, however, it became a lot easier for others to join in the fun.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written a gaming food post. Since I just published A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book a month ago, this seems like a perfect time to remedy that and pimp my book at the same time. The kinds of dishes that are good for making while traveling turn out to be a lot like the kinds of dishes that are good for making to bring to a game.

We alternate between two houses, and we precede each game with dinner. The person who hosts the game usually makes the main dish, and everyone else brings the salad, or the vegetable, or the sweet, or a drink, or the plastic and paper tableware. It’s basically a pot-luck. And so traditional pot-luck dishes are a great choice for game night.

Today, I’m going to present a great bean salad/baked bean hybrid, a slow cooked rice and ground beef, Texas-style cola spare ribs, and a hearty rosemary soda bread that would go well with any of them.

Along the way, I’m going to highlight recipes that are both in the book and that I have brought to game night. I won’t reproduce those recipes here because the PDF and ePub versions of A Traveling Man’s Cookery Book are free to download. Only the print version costs money, and not much.

Besides our general game-night meals, we usually celebrate themed meals four times a year: Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and St. Patrick’s Day. Other holidays might get thrown in if game night literally coincides with it, but those are the Big Four holidays we’ve done every year so far.

St. Patrick’s Day is my favorite, and it’s not just because of the green-tinted mashed potatoes our Dungeon Master always brings! One of my favorite quick breads is Irish soda bread. I’ve made several variations. The basic Irish soda bread in the book is probably still my favorite, but some of the others are a tasty variations.

UFO magazines from the seventies and very early eighties are a treasure trove of Kolchak adventure ideas. This isn’t surprising, since Kolchak is set in the mid-seventies and Kolchak’s peculiar logic is very similar to the peculiar logic of paranormal “researchers” of the era. It’s very often conclusion first, data second.

The idea for The Wrong Goodbye (PDF File, 2.3 MB) came from an article in the April, 1980 issue of Beyond Reality about Russian psychic research.

Top Soviet scientists maintain they are well on their way to telepathic communication with cosmonauts in deep space. They warned that if their country masters that art of direct mind-to-mind communication, they could use it for military purposes. Soviet scientific researchers carried out top secret experiments for a two-year period between 1975 and 1977 in which electrodes were placed on the brains of freshly killed rats. The rodents’ brain activity was then recorded. This activity was stimulated when a psychic projected thoughts at the dead animals.

I don’t see how you can read that second paragraph and assume it’s about the first paragraph. If Soviet psychics were stimulating the brains of dead rats that’s a lot more sinister than talking to orbiting astronauts.

Given its already strange implications, I used the article mostly verbatim. All I did was drop the years by two to make the events fit the 1976 year of the adventure. I’m running these annual adventures sequentially so that the repeat characters in the game can reference previous adventures. I’m running them a year or so after the events of the series so that players can reference the series.

I ran this adventure at the 2023 North Texas RPG Convention. It’s mostly a skeleton, but a detailed one. This is the first Daredevils adventure that I made from scratch. The others came from Fantasy Game Unlimited’s adventure compilations. I used the first one, The Body Vanishes almost verbatim, with only a minor reskin to move it to Chicago, update it to 1976, and replace the NPCs with Kolchak’s contacts. The second, The Powers of Dr. Remoux I heavily modified, to the point where all I was using was the basic idea and framework. That basic idea was further influenced by an article in another UFO magazine, and also from 1980!

This is the sort of focused, almost zoned-out, look that Golden Servants often have when performing even a self-set task.

A Golden Servant is a summonable creature, something that sorcerors will summon to perform specific tasks. It’s also a new species alternative for Gods & Monsters players who choose the Species specialty for their character. The Golden Servant is perfect for sporadic players: when the player doesn’t show up, it means the character has been summoned away by some far-away sorceror.

The Golden Servant is much like most such summoned creatures: it tends to be literal, it tends to want to discharge its task with the least amount of work possible, and it tends, paradoxically-but-not-really, to be focused on that task to the point of ignoring any ancillary events happening around it.

While the Golden Servant has free will in how it discharges the task, it rarely takes into account morality; that simply never occurs to it. Unlike all other character species, the default for the Golden Servant is to have no moral code. Where for most player characters realizing that moral codes mean something important in the universe is part of the long-term adventure of Gods & Monsters, it is gaining a moral code that might be part of the long-term arc of a Golden Servant player character.

Like androids in television shows—going at least all the way back to Pinocchio and most commonly known today, probably, via Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation—the arc of the Golden Servant is about becoming human first. Recognizing that there is a morality beyond expedience comes later.

Golden Servants are physically elite, which is part of why they’re in demand as summoned servants. Golden Servants have a +1 to Strength, Agility, Endurance, Charisma, and Intelligence. They have a penalty of 2 to Wisdom.

Golden Servants have as their preferred archetypes the Warrior, Sorceror, Thief, and Monk. That is, they can pretty much move in and out of every archetype except Prophet.

Size is medium—Golden Servants look human, which is another reason they’re in demand. Golden Servants can blend into human gatherings without arousing suspicion. They get their name from their physical perfection, not from their skin color, which is as varied as the human race. Part of their physical perfection is, however, a slight bronzing of the skin, as if perfectly suntanned at the beach. If a Golden Servant were tasked with the completion of some task on a California beach in the fifties, no one would be able to tell them apart from a stereotypical surfer from a beach movie.

I’ve been scanning a lot of old cookbooks lately; while I’ve written a script to help streamline the process, the scanning itself is limited to the time it takes the scanner to draw in each page, page by page… by page… by page. This leaves me bored for very short periods during every scan.

This morning as I write this, I used that time to search on some of the related vintage cooking topics that interest me: Eddie Doucette, and quiet ovens. But having exhausted that, and because I’d just finished putting The Cult of Gygax to bed, I typed “Gary Gygax” into newspaper.com’s search field.

It is apparently an uncommon name. Almost all of the hits were for the Gary Gygax we’re familiar with. I was surprised, however, to see hits from 1969. It turns out to be a fascinating wire article¹ that appeared over the 1969-1970 holiday season, predating Dungeons and Dragons. All of the hits were for that one article; it’s the only hit on his name pre-Dungeons and Dragons.

Newspapers.com doesn’t archive every newspaper, and their OCR is often incorrect, so it probably appeared in others as well. For example, two of the newspapers above didn’t come up in my initial search for Gygax, but only when I did a search on the author of the piece, Jim Crossley, to see if he’d written other articles on gaming. Which he appears to have not.

“You can’t go around tampering with dragons. They’re sacred!” (From Knights of the Dinner Table #1, By the Book)

I recently re-read the Dungeon Masters Guide and was struck by how much it treated the reader as an equal. Gygax not only expected great things from his reader, he expected that his reader was inclined to greatness. When you expect strong opinions from readers, you can safely express strong opinions yourself. You don’t have to hold back out of fear of being taken too dogmatically.¹

Reading the DMG again made me wonder about the legendary “Cult of Gygax” that supposedly permeated D&D fandom during Gygax’s tenure at TSR. The cult is exaggerated to great effect in Jolly Blackburn’s hilarious Knights of the Dinner Table, with the fictional Gary Jackson even returning from the dead at one point!

I’ve been haphazardly discussing the cult and Gygax’s alleged dogmatism in Alarums & Excursions, but what got me thinking about the cult—or the idea of the cult—in a way that allowed me to get my thoughts down (somewhat) more clearly was a recent blog post by James Maliszewski on Grognardia:

Also notable is the way that Mentzer, who provided this issue’s answers, mentions that he agrees with “Gary” on this point—another example of the Cult of Gygax that was popularized in the pages of TSR periodicals.

Mentzer was writing a rules clarification column, and what he wrote was in response to a reader wondering about a particular interpretation of an AD&D rule:

Wondrous Weapons, by Joseph Weingand, is a collection of weird and often unusable weapons for fantasy games. It’s also a fascinating glimpse into old-school treasure and old-school play styles.

Wes Crum’s front cover is very reminiscent of Dave Trampier’s treasure illustration in the AD&D Players Handbook, in that there are a variety of emotions expressed on the character faces. It is less technically adept than the back cover (and far less than even the worst of Trampier’s illustrations) but also more fun than the back cover. Neither are up to the level of Trampier, of course.

The entries use the Judges Guild universal system to present the stats of the weapons, but without the one-or-two page explanation that usually accompanies it. And you really do need the explanation to decipher the stats. What is an INT of 184? An ALN of NEX or NGC?

These were not easy to decipher without the conversion summary. An INT—or intelligence—of 184 means an intelligence of 18, which can be used four times a day “without checking for stress damage”. The ALN is the alignment, and it’s vaguely Freudian. The first two letters indicate the alignment that most AD&D players would recognize. The third letter “indicates only a suppressed desire”. So, NEX is Neutral Evil with no suppressed alignment, while NGC is Neutral Good with a suppressed desire to be Chaotic.

The proliferation of universal systems was a fascinating byproduct of the times. They were rarely universal. They were meant solely to make it easier to convert to AD&D without saying AD&D. You can see that in Wondrous Weapons, where the stat numbers—mostly intelligence—tend to be in the 3 to 18 range. And, of course, the use of an alignment system of Chaotic/Neutral/Lawful and Good/Neutral/Evil.

The need for a universal system that really only applies to one game, when publishing supplemental material, appears to have been based on either a poor understanding of copyright law or a very good understanding of the litigious nature of the gaming industry. If you’re a small company, after all—and Judges Guild was very small—knowing you’re right doesn’t matter if you have neither the money nor the inclination to defend yourself.

Most early gaming companies were gamers first, companies second. A letter from a corporate lawyer, especially in pre-Internet days, was a very frightening and demoralizing experience.